#did you ever wonder why there were so many reports of suicide bombers

[patriotsnet]

What Percentage Of Republicans Are On Welfare

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What Percentage Of Republicans Are On Welfare

Democrats Return The Favor: Republicans Uninformed Or Self

Republican States Are Mostly on Welfare

The 429 Democratic voters in our sample returned the favor and raised many of the same themes. Democrats inferred that Republicans must be VERY ill-informed, or that Fox news told me to vote for Republicans.;;Or that Republicans are uneducated and misguided people guided by what the media is feeding them.

Many also attributed votes to individual self-interest whereas GOP voters feel Democrats want free stuff, many Democrats believe Republicans think that I got mine and dont want the libs to take it away, or that some day I will be rich and then I can get the benefits that rich people get now.

Many used the question to express their anger and outrage at the other side.;;Rather than really try to take the position of their opponents, they said things like, I like a dictatorial system of Government, Im a racist, I hate non-whites.;

Average Spending Of Welfare Recipients

Compared to the average American household, welfare recipients spend far less money on all food consumption, including dining out, in a year. As families with welfare assistance spend half as much on average in one year than families without it do, there are some large differences in budgeting. Families receiving welfare assistance spent half the amount of families not receiving welfare assistance in 2018.

The Gop Push To Cut Unemployment Benefits Is The Welfare Argument All Over Again

The White House is on the defensive over accusations from Republicans that expanded federal unemployment benefits, which were extended through Sept. 6 as part of Bidens $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, are too generous. The GOP argument is that people receiving the $300 weekly benefit have little incentive to return to work. The criticism from Republicans has gotten louder in the wake of a disappointing jobs report.

Its an argument that echoes similar claims conservatives have been making about government assistance programs for decades that people are taking advantage of the system in ways that allow them to collect checks while sitting back and relaxing.

As Washington pays workers a bonus to stay unemployed, virtually everyone discussed very real concerns about their difficulties in finding workers, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday. Almost every employer I spoke with specifically mentioned the extra-generous jobless benefits as a key force holding back our recovery.

But Democrats counter that millions of Americans need that money to get by. More than 20 million jobs were lost in the early months of the pandemic; 10 million American workers are currently unemployed, the Labor Department says.

Democrats say the sudden demand for more workers from businesses is outpacing the number of workers that can get back into those jobs, especially since many schools arent fully open, and many workers cant afford child care.

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The Politics And Demographics Of Food Stamp Recipients

Democrats are about twice as likely as Republicans to have received food stamps at some point in their livesa participation gap that echoes the deep partisan divide in the U.S. House of Representatives, which on Thursday produced a farm bill that did not include funding for the food stamp program.

Overall, a Pew Research Center survey conducted late last year found that about one-in-five Americans has participated in the food stamp program, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. About a quarter lives in a household with a current or former food stamp recipient.

Of these, about one-in-five of Democrats say they had received food stamps compared with 10% of Republicans. About 17% of political independents say they have received food stamps.

The share of food stamp beneficiaries swells even further when respondents are asked if someone else living in their household had ever received food stamps. According to the survey, about three in ten Democrats and about half as many Republicans say they or someone in their household has benefitted from the food stamp program.

But when the political lens shifts from partisanship to ideology, the participation gap vanishes. Self-described political conservatives were no more likely than liberals or moderates to have received food stamps , according to the survey.

Among whites, the gender-race gap is smaller. Still, white women are about twice as likely as white men to receive food stamp assistance .

How Democrats And Republicans Differ On Matters Of Wealth And Equality

A protester wears a T-shirt in support of Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who is part of … a group of Democrats looking to beat Trump in 2020. Photographer: John Taggart/Bloomberg

If youre a rich Democrat, you wake up each day with self-loathing, wondering how you can make the world more egalitarian. Please tax me more, you say to your elected officials. Until then, the next thing you do is call your financial advisor to inquire about tax shelters.

If youre a poor Republican, however, you have more in common with the Democratic Party than the traditional Wall Street, big business base of the Republican Party, according to a survey by the Voter Study Group, a two-year-old consortium made up of academics and think tank scholars from across the political spectrum. That means the mostly conservative American Enterprise Institute and Cato were also on board with professors from Stanford and Georgetown universities when conducting this study, released this month.

The fact that lower-income Republicans, largely known as the basket of deplorables, support more social spending and taxing the rich was a key takeaway from this years report, says Lee Drutman, senior fellow on the political reform program at New America, a Washington D.C.-based think tank.

Across party lines, only 37% of respondents said they supported government getting active in reducing differences in income, close to the 39% who opposed it outright. Some 24% had no opinion on the subject.

Also Check: Democrats News

Bases Of Republicans Antidemocratic Attitudes

shows how Republicans antidemocratic responses in the January 2020 survey were related to education, political interest, and locale. These relationships provide only modest support for the hypothesis that allegiance to democratic values is a product of political activity, involvement and articulateness, as McClosky had it . Although people with postgraduate education were clearly less likely than those with less education to endorse violations of democratic norms, the overall relationship between education and antidemocratic sentiments is rather weak. Similarly, people in big cities were only about 5% less likely than those in rural areas to endorse norm violations, while people who said they followed politics most of the time were about 7% more likely to do so than those who said they followed politics hardly at all. Given the distributions of these social characteristics in the Republican sample, the most typical antidemocrats were not men and women whose lives are circumscribed by apathy, ignorance, provincialism and social or physical distance from the centers of intellectual activity , but suburbanites with some college education and a healthy interest in politics.

Social bases of Republicans antidemocratic attitudes.

Key indicators of latent dimensions

Political bases of Republicans antidemocratic attitudes

Translation of ethnic antagonism into antidemocratic attitudes in Republican subgroups

Welfare Accounts For 10% Of The Federal Budget

Many Republicans claim that social services expenditures are crippling the federal budget, but these programs accounted for just 10% of federal spending in 2015.

Of the $3.7 trillion the U.S. government spent that year, the largest expenditures were Social Security , health care , and defense and security , according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities .

Several safety net programs are included in the 10% spent on social services:

Supplemental Security Income , which provides cash support to the elderly and disabled poor

Assistance with home energy bills

Programs that provide help to abused and neglected children

In addition, programs that primarily help the middle class, namely the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, are included in the 10%.

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At Least 60 Afghans And 13 Us Service Members Killed By Suicide Bombers And Gunmen Outside Kabul Airport: Us Officials

Two suicide bombers and gunmen attacked crowds of Afghans flocking to Kabul’s airport Thursday, transforming a scene of desperation into one of horror in the waning days of an airlift for those fleeing the Taliban takeover. At least 60 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops were killed, Afghan and U.S. officials said.

Welfare Spending By President And Congress From 1959 To 2014

Republicans’ Facts About Welfare Are “Not Factually True”

America faces many problems today. The current economic recovery has been the slowest since the Great Depression, the national debt has surpassed $18 trillion, and the federal government continues to spend more than it collects. While its not unusual, unethical, or unconstitutional for the federal government to operate with deficits at times, the question is why does Washington continue to overspend? Is there a legitimate reason or is it neo-politics? In this article, well take a look at spending on welfare programs during each presidents term from J.F.K. to Obama. Well also look at the party in control of Congress. Which one was the biggest spender as it pertains to welfare programs?

The Dark Side of Social Benefits

Politicians love to sing their own praises and for a very good reason. Otto von Bismarck, the first Chancellor of Germany, made an astute political observation in the 1880s when he stated, A man who has a pension for his old age is much easier to deal with than a man without that prospect. Bismarck openly acknowledged that this was a state-socialist idea and went on to say, Whoever embraces this idea will come to power. Thus, the strategy of using legislation to gain votes was forever embedded in the political landscape.

Welfare Spending

Lets take a thorough look at federal welfare spending from 1959 through 2013. The following graph includes spending for two data points:

Democrats in control: 13.7%

Republicans in control: 3.5%

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What Is Governments Role In Caring For The Most Needy

Nearly six-in-ten Americans say government has a responsibility to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves. Do these views vary depending on whether the respondent has personally benefited from a government entitlement program?

These data suggest the answer is a qualified yes. Overall, those who have received benefits from at least one of the six major programs are somewhat more likely than those who havent to say government is responsible for caring for those who cannot help themselves .

When the analysis focuses just on just the respondents who have received benefits from at least one of the four programs that target the needy, the gap between entitlement recipients and other adults increases to eight percentage points .

Some larger differences in attitudes toward governments role emerge when the results are broken down by specific program, though in every case majorities of both recipients and non-recipients affirmed that government has the obligation to help those most in need.

For example, nearly three-quarters of those who ever received welfare benefits say government has a duty to care for those who cannot care for themselves. In contrast, less than six-in-ten of those who have never been on welfare agree.

Similar double-digit gaps surface between non-recipients and those who ever received food stamps and Medicaid .

How Come We Are Red And Blue Instead Of Purple

Republicans to live outside of urban areas, while Democrats tend to prefer living inside of urban areas.

Rural areas are almost exclusively Republican well strong urban areas are almost exclusively democratic.

Republicans also tend to stress traditional family values, which may be why only 1 out of 4 GLBTQI individuals identify with the GOP.

63% of people who earn more than $200k per year vote for Republicans, while 63% of people who earn less than $15k per year vote for Democrats.

64% of Americans believe that labor unions are necessary to protect working people, but only 43% of GOP identified votes view labor unions in a favorable way.

The economics of the United States seem to have greatly influenced how people identify themselves when it comes to their preferred political party. People who are concerned about their quality of life and have a fair amount of money tend to vote Republican. Those who have fallen on hard times or work in union related jobs tend to vote for Democrats. From 2003 to today, almost all of demographic gaps have been shifting so that Republicans and Democrats are supported equally. The only true difference is on the extremes of the income scale. The one unique fact about Democrats is that they are as bothered by their standard of living as Republicans tend to be.

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States Have Shifted To The Right

Democrats are floating a plan to tax stock buybacks.

Even excluding health insurance which some experts argue should not count people in this patch of Appalachia draw between a fifth and a third of their income from the public purse.

Perhaps the politics of welfare is changing up to a point. Democrats made big gains this year in elections for the House and several statehouses, running largely on the promise that they would protect the most recent addition to the safety net: the Affordable Care Act, including the expansion of Medicaid in many states. But championing the safety net does not necessarily resonate in the places that most need it.

Take Daniel Lewis, who crashed his car into a coal truck 15 years ago, breaking his neck and suffering a blood clot in his brain when he was only 21. He is grateful for the $1,600 a month his family gets from disability insurance; for his Medicaid benefits; for the food stamps he shares with his wife and two children.

Every need I have has been met, Mr. Lewis told me. He disagrees with the governors proposal to demand that Medicaid recipients get a job. And yet, in 2016, he voted for Mr. Trump. It was the lesser of two evils, he said.

About 13 percent of Harlans residents are receiving disability benefits. More than 10,000 get food stamps. But in 2015 almost two-thirds voted for Mr. Bevin. In 2016 almost 9 out of 10 chose Mr. Trump.

Program Goals And Demographics

Larger group differences emerge when the results are broken down by age and income levelsdifferences that are often directly related to the goals of specific benefits programs.

For example, adults 65 and older are nearly three times as likely to have received an entitlement benefit during their lives as those adults under the age of 30 . Thats not surprising, since nearly nine-in-ten older adults have received Social Security and78% have gotten Medicare benefits. Both programs were specifically created for seniors with age requirements that limit participation by younger adults.

Similarly, Americans with family incomes of less than $30,000 a year are significantly more likely as those with family incomes of $100,000 or more to have gotten entitlement help from the government . Again, this difference is not surprising, as assisting the poor is the primary objective of such financial means-tested programs as food stamps, welfare assistance and Medicaid.

Also Check: Why Do Republicans Wear Blue Ties

Which Party Are You

The average Republican is 50, while the average Democrat is 47.

55% of married women will vote Republican.

GOP candidates earn 59 percent of all Protestant votes, 67 percent of all white Protestant votes, 52 percent of the Catholic vote, making them a Christian majority party.

Only 1 out of 4 Jewish voters will support Republicans.

If you are white and have a college education, there is a 20% greater chance that you will be a Republican instead of a Democrat.

American Republicans have been found to be among the most generous people on earth, and not just financially. Republicans also provide more volunteer hours and donate blood more frequently.

Here is what we really come to when it comes to political party demographics. It doesnt matter if youre a Republican or a Democrat. What matters is that everyone is able to take advantage of the diversity that makes the United States so unique. Instead of trying to prove one way is the only correct path, both parties coming together to work together could create some amazing changes for the modern world. Until we learn to compromise, however, the demographic trends will continue to equalize and polarize until only gridlock remains. If that happens, then nothing will ever get done and each party will blame the other.

Taking The Perspective Of Others Proved To Be Really Hard

The divide in the United States is wide, and one indication of that is how difficult our question proved for many thoughtful citizens. A 77-year-old Republican woman from Pennsylvania was typical of the voters who struggled with this question, telling us, This is really hard for me to even try to think like a devilcrat!, I am sorry but I in all honesty cannot answer this question. I cannot even wrap my mind around any reason they would be good for this country.

Similarly, a 53-year-old Republican from Virginia said, I honestly cannot even pretend to be a Democrat and try to come up with anything positive at all, but, I guess they would vote Democrat because they are illegal immigrants and they are promised many benefits to voting for that party. Also, just to follow what others are doing. And third would be just because they hate Trump so much. The picture she paints of the typical Democratic voter being an immigrant, who goes along with their party or simply hates Trump will seem like a strange caricature to most Democratic voters. But her answer seems to lack the animus of many.;;

Democrats struggled just as much as Republicans. A 33-year-old woman from California told said, i really am going to have a hard time doing this but then offered that Republicans are morally right as in values, going to protect us from terrorest and immigrants, going to create jobs.

Recommended Reading: Did Trump Say Republicans Were Dumb

[savagematchmaker]

Dazai's got dirt on multiple demons; he summons them to play a prank on Kunikida.

Things don't go according to plan.

------------------------------------------------------

Slipping off his shoes at the entrance and lightly knocking on the open door, Atsushi entered Dazai’s apartment. The man’s message had been very vague, and Atsushi feared another (failed) suicide attempt.

However, when he entered the room his mentor was in, the image that greeted him made him shudder and take a step back, definitely not letting out an undignified squeak.

Dazai turned as he heard the boy enter, a cheerful smirk gracing his features; as he got to know the man better, the expression seemed more and more like an evil smirk to Atsushi. The demons surrounding the not-worried-in-the-least Dazai did not help in the least his impression.

“Atsushi-kun, there you are~”

“Um, Dazai-san…” Atsushi feebly started, eyes nervously darting to the pitch-black shadows surrounding his mentor. “Why are, uh, they here?” He gestured to the demons, who seemed to be grinning at his obvious discomfort.

“Ah, them?” Dazai’s cheerful smile was full-on smirk right then. “They owe me some favours.” A glance at the nearest one, a black shape outlined with angry red. “Isn’t that right, Chuuya?”

The figure trembled with anger and whatever he said was silent to Atsushi’s ears, but apparently not to Dazai, who started shaking with laughter.

“Erm-” Atsushi glanced between the two of them and decided not to approach that subject. Instead, he opted for safer waters. “How did you get that much leverage over so many demons at once?”

Dazai’s grin turned smug. “Secrets are very useful, my young friend. You just need to know the right ones.”

Atsushi decided right then and there never to let Dazai know any of his valuable secrets (not more than he already did, anyway).

He avoided the gaze of another demon, who insistently glared at him from where he was seated cross-legged next to ‘Chuuya’.

“Dazai-san, what do you need all these demons for, though?” asked Atsushi, feeling slightly lost.

“I have had the greatest idea ever,” stated Dazai, and his disciple was already apprehensive. He remembered Dazai’s last ‘greatest idea’, which had involved a chainsaw, Atsushi dressed as a girl, and a very high bridge. “We are going to play a prank on Kunikida-kun!”

Atsushi inhaled sharply, but said nothing. It could’ve been worse after all. He sat down in one of the nearby armchairs, carefully avoiding the unknown demon’s glare. What was his problem?

“Dazai-san, can you hear them?” asked Atsushi, still ignoring the demon’s stare.

“You need to have a bond with 'em to be able to~” he grinned at the ‘Chuuya’ demon, who only looked away, crossing his shadow-arms.

The demon who’d been staring at Atsushi grumbled. The boy tried not to jolt when he realized that he could hear him. Dazai’s eyes darted to him and a grin spread on his face; it became apparent to Atsushi then that he was doomed.

---

Kunikida certainly did not appreciate the prank, nor did he think that it was funny being followed by demons the whole day and everyone else pretending they did not see them. After being beaten up by the angry blonde, Dazai turned his attention to Atsushi and the boy gulped.

“Ne, Atsushi-kun~” he smiled at the boy. “Didja know that if you look out of the corner of your eye at a demon, you can see his true form?”

The boy dimly wondered why he needed to know that, but he said nothing, having stopped questioning Dazai’s antics a long time ago.

A few days later, Dazai was still accompanied by the demons, which to Atsushi meant that he had something up his sleeve. The man was lounged at his desk, pestering the red demon, who appeared very close to fulfilling Dazai’s wish of dying by pushing him out of the nearest window. Atsushi did not need to hear him to feel his murderous intent.

“What are we still doing here?” asked the demon who’d been glaring at Atsushi before. The boy still hadn’t gotten used to hearing him.

Dazai shifted his attention to the black demon, who moved back a step then seemed to regret showing weakness.

“Well, Akutagawa-kun~” Atsushi stubbornly ignored the flicker of excitement he felt at having found out the demon’s name. “You can always leave if you don’t mind people finding that out,” said Dazai, smiling self-assuredly.

The demon -Akutagawa- said nothing else, only coughing lightly and sinking into the nearest armchair. He ignored the way Atsushi’s eyes followed him, but, once the boy looked away, his gaze shifted to the boy and stayed there.

It was then that Atsushi remembered Dazai’s words of seeing a demon’s true form. Careful not to be noticed, he stole a glance at Akutagawa out the corner of his eye. He found the demon, no, boy, already looking at him; their eyes met and both of them started, but neither looked away.

Atsushi was the first to blink and Akutagawa smugly smiled at having won their unmentioned competition. Bristling, Atsushi opened his mouth to give him a piece of his mind- but fell silent when he noticed Dazai watching them and smiling all-knowingly.

Looking away from Akutagawa, Atsushi focused on the report Kunikida had placed on his desk over half an hour ago, which the white-haired boy still hadn’t started reading. Dazai snickered and Atsushi felt a flash of annoyance at the same time he heard the red demon insult ‘Shitty Dazai’ and punch him in the shoulder.

Atsushi’s shoulders hunched. He felt seriously overwhelmed.

---

The gun went off in his hand and the bomber fell to the ground, clutching his arm and dropping the explosive-containing package to the ground. Tanizaki was there in a flash, handing it to Ranpo, who instantly disarmed it and dropped it to the ground. Other police officers apprehended the terrorist and Kunikida untied the hostages.

Atsushi exhaled, relieved, and leaned on the pillar next to him. He winced when he crossed his arms and touched the shallow wound on his side. Lifting the side of his shirt, he glanced at it; he’d get Yosano-san to look at it later.

“You should get that looked at,” Atsushi heard someone next to him say and he glanced in the person’s direction to find Akutagawa leaning as well on the pillar next to them.

Fighting the impulse to flinch back from the demon, Atsushi shrugged.

“It’s shallow, I’ll get it treated later,” he replied and they fell into silence.

Well, this was awkward.

“Hey, Atsushi, come see this!” exclaimed Tanizaki, waving at the boy from next to the police cars.

Atsushi stopped leaning on the pillar and glanced at the demon, only to realize he was gone. Confused, he just blinked at the empty space until Tanizaki once again shouted at Atsushi to come and he started walking towards the police cars.

---

Atsushi had no idea how or when it started, but at some point he and the demon had started walking the streets at night together, sometimes while Atsushi was on patrol, other times for no particular reason.

Usually, they didn’t say anything, only silently keeping each other company. There were times, though, when Atsushi would tell him about his days in the orphanage or his latest mission; Akutagawa would tell the boy about the latest idiot who had made a deal with him.

It was during one of their late-night walks that Atsushi noticed a change in Akutagawa. Or rather, his appearance. Lately, Atsushi hadn’t needed to glance out of the corner of his eye at the boy to see his true form. It was visible to him all the time.

He did not mention anything to Akutagawa.

---

The next day, when Atsushi entered the police building, he walked directly to Dazai’s desk to ask for a clarification. The brunette’s smile told him that he already knew what he was going to ask, but he opened his mouth anyway.

“Dazai-san, what does it mean if I can see a demon’s true form without staring out of the corner of my eye?” he asked, ignoring the man’s grin.

“Good morning to you too, Atsushi-kun~” His smile widened and Atshushi fought the urge to kick him in the shin. “Your bond has gotten really strong, that’s what it means. He probably trusts you with his life,” he said, looking amused with the whole situation.

Atsushi definitely did not feel happy hearing that.

But if he stood closer to Akutagawa that evening, or their hands brushed one too many times for it to be accidental, it did not mean anything. Nobody would be able to notice.

Would they?

[hookaroo]

Vocivore, Ltd. (20 of ?)

A OUAT WINTER WHUMP FIC

Also on FFN and AO3 (ListerofTardis)

Tagging @ouatwinterwhump, @killian-whump, @sancocnutclub, @killianjonesownsmyheart1, and @courtorderedcake <3

***THE MOST WONDERFUL COVER ART BY @cocohook38 HERE!!!!!******

****ALSO!!!!!!!!!!!!Chapter 12 animation and art that will absolutely astound you!!! THANK YOU MY WONDERFUL COCONUT FRIEND!!!!!!!!!!*************

@lillpon wins :)

5 weeks + 1 day ago

Killian snuck out of the darkened room and closed the door as quietly as he could. He flashed a wink and a smile at his wife, who was sitting with Belle at a small table in the corner.

“Out like a light,” he reported. As he strode over to join them, Emma laughed incredulously.

“Man, we should visit more often. You really wore her out, Belle.”

“You’re welcome anytime we’re in one place long enough to have company,” Belle assured them. Killian resumed his chair at the table and eyed the book beneath his friend’s hands.

“How’s the research coming?”

“We, uh, may have found something,” Belle grinned. She slid the open book over to Killian, and he twisted it to face him.

“Vocivore,” said Emma, using a soft ‘c’ sound. Then she tried it with ‘ch.’        “Vo-ch-ivore?”

As Killian scanned the page for the matching entry, Belle said,

“Could be either, but ‘vociferous’ comes to mind; maybe the soft sound is more correct?”

Killian nodded his agreement. The small paragraph in the corner of the page was flanked by a vague blob of ink that may have been someone’s attempt to sketch the creature, although who could tell if it was based on reality or simply nightmare imaginings. Killian read aloud the accompanying description.

“‘2.5 to 3 meters tall. Reportedly telepathic. Enslaves and brainwashes humans. Victims exhibit degenerative neurological symptoms resulting from morphological changes in the brain. Invariably fatal.’” He scanned the facing page. “That’s all?”

Belle nodded solemnly. “In this book, at least. But if we know the creature’s name, we can more easily search for further information.”

“Certainly seems like our guy,” Emma stated, watching Killian for signs of agreement. He raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“Not much to go on, is there?”

“‘Morphological changes?’” she quoted at him. “That’s gotta be the brain shriveling. And you have to recognize brainwashing when you see it.”

“Just how reliable is this author?” Killian asked Belle as he flipped to the front cover. She shrugged.

“We’ve had good results in the past. For now, it’s all we have to work with.” She glanced toward the door, adding, “Rumple’s gone to fetch another book that may confirm the theory.”

Killian reread the entry, scowled at its ambiguity, and sat back. “Vocivore. So then… it eats voices?”

“Assuming the name is literal.”

“Doesn’t give us a lot of ideas for defeating it.”

“And you won’t find many of those elsewhere, I’m afraid,” came Rumple’s voice from the doorway. The three friends turned to face him as he strode inside. He carried a book bound in cracked leather, which he tossed carelessly onto the table in front of Killian. “It turns out I did recognize the name, and it’s almost certainly what you’re facing back in the United Realms.”

Killian began idly flipping through the index of the new book, half his attention on finding an entry for Vocivore.

“Do you know much about it?” Belle asked. Rumple sat at the fourth and final chair, across from Emma. He shook his head in a grave negative.

“No one does. Anyone who gets close enough inevitably becomes the creature’s slave, and thus unable to give any sort of report. It is unknown whether it can be defeated, because no one has ever done it.”

Killian and Emma exchanged an uneasy glance.

“No one?” repeated Emma. “In the history of… ever?”

“On the bright side,” Rumple said with a sneer, “as former Dark Ones, the two of you are probably immune, both to the brainwashing and the physical effects on the brain.”

“Fantastic,” grumbled Killian, sliding the book toward Belle so she could take over the search. “We know our course of action then, Swan; all we have to do is leave everyone in Storybrooke to their fate. It’ll certainly reduce the wait times at Granny’s.”

Emma ignored his sarcasm. “It doesn’t seem to matter that we’re immune, though. Whenever we try to get close to the guy, he sends his slaves out to stop us.” She rested her elbows on the table and began tapping her fingers in agitation.

“Have you thought of bombing the monster?” Rumple asked casually. Both Emma and Killian shifted in their seats, uncomfortable. Belle looked up from her book to await their answer.

“Of course we thought of it,” Killian finally admitted. “Only… the collateral damage…”

“Blowing up the monster would kill a lot of innocent slaves,” Emma finished for him. “We’re not that desperate yet.”

“The slaves will die anyway,” Rumple pointed out with a dismissive wave of his hand. “For the greater good, a bomb may be the only solution.”

“We’re not willing to admit defeat on that point,” Emma objected. “Dr. Whale is working on a way to reverse the effects.”

Rumple gave a strained smile and slight eye roll; Killian found he had to agree with his skepticism.

“There’s also the question of delivery,” Killian pointed out. “Phil’s hot air balloon didn't get within a mile of there. It was shot so full of holes that the operator was lucky to survive.”

“Even our drone was shot down, if you can believe that,” added Emma. Belle looked impressed, but Rumple merely shrugged.

“The issue is intent. The creature’s telepathic abilities allow it to sense any attempts at attack, or even reconnaissance. Perhaps its control over its slaves goes so far as allowing it to guide their movements from time to time.”

“Help them to aim, you mean?” Emma made a face. “Oh good grief.”

“And anything that got past the slaves--a helicopter, for example--would almost certainly fail as well,” Rumple pointed out. “Proximity would allow the Vocivore to influence the pilot’s mind, resulting in either a spectacular crash out of harm’s way, or a helicopter to add to the monster’s ranks.”

“What about your magic?” asked Belle. “Er, if… if you decided to… use a bomb, that is. Just poof it in.”

“Yeah, he’s got some kind of shielding up around his compound,” grumbled Emma. “Also why I haven’t been able to poof myself in to poke around.”

They all fell silent for a moment, seemingly at a dead end. Belle closed the book, shaking her head at the lack of additional info. She had scribbled down notes on a notepad, but the details covered less than a quarter of the page. Absently, she began doodling in the margins; mainly geometric patterns, lines that connected with lines. Almost like tally marks overlaid on top of each other. And Killian was brought back to the day they’d met. The day he’d snuck into her dungeon, his desperate and ruthless plan to extract information from her at any cost. Feeling the usual disgust at his actions back then--back when he was a villain--Killian scowled and almost brushed the memories aside. But then he stopped himself. Stealth. Playing a part, fooling the guards. What if…

“You say we’re immune,” he said slowly, eyeing Rumple warily. “The three of us: you, me, and Emma.”

“Very likely.”

“Protected from the brainwashing and the illness, yes?”

“I believe so.”

“And the telepathy?”

Rumple considered this, his eyes never leaving his former nemesis’ face. “To a degree, I would imagine. It’s hard to say without ever having experimented with it myself.”

“What are you thinking, babe?”

Killian drew a slow breath. Did he dare? He’d seen the state of far too many victims. Beyond their neurological issues, the majority were in a condition of such physical wretchedness that it was astounding they were even alive. Slave was almost too gentle a term. Torture survivor... closer. He shuddered, swallowed a stab of fear, and said,

“Suppose… suppose I approached the monster under the pretense of… surrendering myself to its mercies. I could gather intelligence, discern its weaknesses, perhaps even discover a way to kill it.”

Both Emma and Belle looked horrified at the suggestion; Rumple, however, wore an expression of mild intrigue. Killian cursed him inwardly.

“That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” Emma spat, using scorn to cover obvious fear. Belle nodded in concerned agreement. But Rumple held up a hand.

“Do go on,” he urged. Killian worked his jaw in silence, then shrugged.

“That’s as far as I’ve gotten with it. If you've any reasonable objections, feel free to voice them. Believe me, I’m open to anything.”

“Here’s one for you,” scowled Emma. “The monster will kill you.”

“Not immediately.” Killian couldn’t believe he was arguing for this absurd plot. “If it killed its victims right away, then it wouldn't have the hordes of slaves we’ve encountered at every turn.”

“How the hell would it help anything for you to ‘gather intel’ if there’s no way for you to get it back to us? You die, the info dies with you.”

“Maybe I could bring some sort of communication device--”

“He would find it. And kill you.”

“Okay, but he seems to send his slaves out on errands; if I convince him to send me, then--”

“He’ll think you’re trying to get back to us. And kill you.”

“Emma, if you’ll just--”

“He. Will. Kill. You.”

Killian released a long sigh of frustration. But Emma was right. There were too many risks, and no guarantees of any return on investment. They were back to nothing. No way of defeating the monster, no info that was remotely helpful… they would have to either send a suicide bomber, evacuate the entire United Realms, or possibly both. Leaving all of the innocent slaves to die an agonizing death.

“I think the idea has merit.”

Emma turned her glare on Rumple. “You would.”

Rumple’s answering smirk was aloof, calculating. “I may have a device that will allow you to listen in on your husband’s interaction with the beast; a way that would be totally undetectable, even should the Vocivore require the disposal of all clothing.” Rumple shot a glance in Killian’s direction. “Which it undoubtedly will.”

Killian ground his teeth together in order to contain growing impatience. Of course Rumplestiltskin would be in support. However precariously cordial their interactions had become lately, there was still a small part of both of them which would not object to the other man’s demise.

“Isn’t anyone catching on to the fact that Killian will die?” Emma seemed to realize her voice was rising to a volume dangerously close to a level that might wake Hope. Her lips compressed into a tense line; Belle reached for her hand and gave it a supportive squeeze. Rumple continued, very calm.

“I don’t believe he will. As the pirate said: the Vocivore must have slaves to survive. As long as he can convince it of his obedience, he will likely have time to at least gather a layout of the compound, get a feeling for the daily routine, how many slaves it has, et cetera. He can report to you through my transmitter, and all of this may result in valuable intelligence from which a plan of attack can be built.”

“And if it fails? If we’re left with only the bombing option, I sure as hell won’t order it with Killian in harm’s way. And then we have to figure out a rescue mission on top of a bombing run.”

It was Killian’s turn to reach out for Emma. She allowed him to cup his hand over her fist, but did not return any affection.

“It won’t come to that, love. We’ll either learn something else that will help, or I’ll come back to you once the monster trusts me enough to send me out on missions.”

“And how long’s that gonna take?” she snapped, turning red-rimmed eyes in his direction.

“Mr. Clay came back less than a week after he went missing,” Killian reminded her. “All I have to do is present a model of perfect obedience. I can do that.”

She raised an eyebrow at him, looking extremely doubtful. Just then, Belle broke in.

“Uh, guys? Big flaw here, I’m sorry to say. Is the monster really going to believe Killian turned himself in for no reason?”

Killian nodded slowly. “We’ll have to come up with a plausible motive.”

“Even then, even if he can’t read your mind, what about everyone else? Won’t they give the game away?”

“Well… I…”

“We don’t tell them,” Emma said quietly, then winced. “Shit, I can’t believe I’m helping with this.”

Killian watched her scrub her eyes as he awaited further explanation.

“Keep everyone else in the dark. The monster will only be reinforced in his belief that you’re genuine if everyone else believes it too.” She glared at Rumple again. “That’s assuming you’re right and he really can’t read our minds.”

“If memory serves, it doesn't read anyone’s mind outright; it’s more like it… senses their emotions. And with enough people exhibiting authentic shock and dismay, that should easily overpower any deception from the two of you.” He studied Killian for a beat, then added, “To be on the safe side, I would recommend keeping your guard up, doing as much as you can to convince yourself the situation is real. Once you’re safely in its clutches… I don’t think you'll have much trouble living in a state of appropriate despair.”

Killian bristled as a shudder of fear overtook him. He didn’t need reminding what he was getting himself into; his imagination filled in all of the pieces in disturbing detail. Emma pulled her hand out from under his, swearing as she dug her fingers into her eyes.

“This is insane. We can’t actually be considering this.”

“Swan…” He halted, heaved a sigh, then changed approaches. “You’re right; it is insane. But I don't see any other option. From what we’ve heard today… if we don't take advantage of the only leverage we have over this creature… we may as well surrender now.” He gently pulled her hand away from her face, leaning forward to place a kiss on her knuckles. “We have to do it. For Hope. To keep her safe; to give her and children like her a chance at a future. If anything were to happen to her, I’d…”

Killian broke off with a hissing inhale; Emma’s head snapped up, and he knew she’d had the same thought.

“Bloody hell. That’s it. That’s the motive.”

“But… no, we can’t…”

“It makes sense, Emma. It’s perfect. No one could argue against the plausibility.”

“We can’t do that to people!” Emma objected forcefully, near tears. “My parents… it’ll devastate them!”

Killian grimaced, feeling sick. “That’s… that’s what we need, isn’t it?”

Belle was watching their interaction, dread and confusion blending on her face. “Killian? Emma? What…?”

Killian entwined his fingers with his wife’s as he turned to face Belle. “What would you think about having Hope come and stay with you for awhile?”

She answered without hesitation. “Of course; anytime, but why…” Then the truth dawned on her, and she gulped. “Oh.”

Almost frantic, Emma was shaking her head. “We can’t leave her for that long! We don’t even know how long it will take… she’ll think we abandoned her!”

Killian looked away, ashamed. He should have thought of that; it should have been the first thing on his mind. They couldn’t even consider doing something like that to her, not even for--

“Not if we take her back to the last realm we visited,” Belle broke into his thoughts in a timidly helpful tone. “What was it that we calculated, Rumple? The difference in the passage of time? 60 to 1?”

“Approximately.”

“So you could be gone for two months before a day passes there.”

Killian felt bile rising at the thought of two months in the clutches of the monster. “It won’t come to that,” he assured everyone but himself. To him, it was more of a desperate prayer. “That sounds like just what we need.”

“Is that okay with you, dear?” Belle reached for Rumple, who responded with a tight smile.

“You don’t even have to ask,” simpered her husband. “Anything to help our friends from Storybrooke. But I’d be remiss if we don’t address the elephant in the room.”

“And what would that be?” sighed Killian.

“The torture,” said Rumple coolly. “You are aware of that aspect, are you not?”

Killian didn’t flinch. “I am.” He heard Emma draw a sharp breath at the acknowledgement, and he squeezed her hand. Rumple shrugged, unperturbed.

“I just wanted to be sure you knew exactly what you were getting yourself into.”

“Most kind of you, mate.”

“What we haven’t discussed,” Emma interrupted, “is why we’re assuming it’s going to be you and not me.”

Killian looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Why it… Emma, you can’t seriously--”

“Why not? I have magic; it probably should be me.”

“You just said that the monster has shielding against magic. There’s no advantage for you there.”

“So then we’re even. Maybe we should flip a coin.”

“We’re not even,” Killian said firmly, scrambling for anything to solidify his position. “H… Hope, she--”

“Don’t you dare,” she hissed, somehow knowing exactly what he was going to say. “She needs you just as much as she needs me. End of story.”

“All right then. I’ll tell you why it has to be me. Because the people of Storybrooke are used to listening to you. You’re solidified as their leader, their sheriff… if it comes down to a coordinated effort, they’re going to need their savior. They’ll rally for you; more than they ever would for me.”

Emma’s eyes softened. “Oh, Killian. They would listen to you. You’re… you’ve grown to be an integral part of the town’s leadership. I’m sure… I mean, you shouldn’t feel like…”

She trailed off, and Killian knew she’d seen his point. Maybe if things were desperate  and he was able to present a well-organized plan… but even then, he’d likely still get resistance from Regina. The dwarves. Probably even the Charmings, if it came to the safety of their daughter. No, Emma was by far the better person to run things in his absence. Killian pulled a long, fortifying breath.

“So. How do we go about putting this scheme into action?”

AN: Confession time! I personally have no interest in the Rumbelle storyline. Nothing at all against people who do; I'm glad that they got what seems like a very nice happy ending for their ship. That said, I only kind of half-watched the non-Killian parts of "Beauty" the first time it aired and have not bothered with it since. So Belle and Rumple in this story are based on my vague memories of that one viewing. If it makes it slightly AU in that respect, then so be it.

If I recall correctly, they did some travelling before ending up at Belle's death cottage, and then after that, Rumple went back in time to join the S7 characters. So there possibly could have been some years where they were in different realms, apart from the United Realms, and could have had visitors. Maybe? Perhaps they never went back to Storybrooke (and aren't allowed to know their future even though Killian and Emma now do), but that doesn't mean they never saw their friends again. At least in my version :D It stands to reason, then, that they might want to get the band back together in an attempt to figure out a solution for their monster problem.

Also, a note about timelines: even though the "present" timeline is also moving, try and think of "past" timelines as based on one present day (Monday, if you were to get technical about it.) To try and keep it easier on everyone, I didn't change calculations as the present week progressed. So "Five Weeks ago" is always the day Killian and Emma announce Hope's alleged kidnapping.

[berniesrevolution]

On the list of America’s irrational fears, Palestine is near the top. This is no small feat for a “country” with no actual territory and a population about the size of South Carolina. Despite its lack of an air force, navy, or any real army to speak of, Palestine has long been considered an existential threat to Israel, a nuclear-armed power with one of the most powerful militaries in the world and the full backing of the United States. Since there’s no military or economic justification for this threat, a more nebulous one had to be invented. Thus, Palestinians are depicted in the media as hot-blooded terrorists, driven by the twin passions of fanatical Islam and a seething hatred for Western culture. So engrained is this belief that the op-ed page of the New York Times can “grapple with questions of [Palestinian] rights” by advocating openly for apartheid, forced expulsion, or worse.

This worldview demands an Olympian feat of mental gymnastics. It can only be maintained so long as most Americans have no firsthand contact with Palestine or Palestinian people. Even the smallest act of cultural exchange is enough to make us start questioning the panic-laced myths we’ve been taught since birth.  

Of course, the best way to discover the truth about Palestine is to visit the country yourself, though most Americans don’t have the free time or financial resources to do so (this is not a coincidence). This means that those of us who are fortunate enough to visit have a responsibility to share what we’ve seen and heard, without lapsing into pre-fabricated narratives, even “sympathetic” ones. We can’t fight untruth by telling untruths from the opposite perspective. What we can do, however, is report what we saw and heard in Palestine. We can try to provide a snapshot of daily life and let people come to their own conclusions.

With this in mind, here’s what I learned during a recent trip to the Holy Land…

The Palestinian doorman of the Palm Hostel in Jerusalem is a large and friendly man who insists his name is Mike. My fiancée and I are skeptical, as we’d expected something a bit more Arabic. We ask him what his friends call him.

“Just Mike,” he says, and taps an L&M cigarette against the wooden desk. He’s sitting in a dark alcove with rough stone floors, nestled halfway up the staircase that leads from the fruit market to the Palm’s small arched doorway.  A pleasant, musty oldness floats in the air. You could imagine Indiana Jones staying here, if he’d lost tenure and gone broke for some reason. To Westerners like us, it seems too exotic to have a doorman named Mike.

Before we can ask him again, though, Mike pounces with a question of his own. “You’re from the States, right?” He speaks English with a thick accent and slow but almost flawless diction, an odd combination that is causing my fiancée some visible confusion, which seems amusing to Mike. I tell him that we’re from Minnesota, a small and boring place in the center-north of the USA. His grin gets bigger, which makes me self-conscious, so I also explain that Minnesota has no mountains or sea, and the winters are very cold.

“Yeah, I know,” says Mike. “I lived in El Paso for thirty years. Border cop, K9 unit. It was a nice place. Had a couple kids there.” Now it’s my turn to gawk, and I start to race through all the possible scams he might be trying to pull. Mike seems to guess what I’m thinking. “Really. I even learned some Spanish.” He scrunches his brow in mock concentration and clamps a hairy hand over his forehead. “Hola. ¿Como estás?Una cerveza, por favor.”  He opens his eyes and laughs. “Welcome to Jerusalem, guys. Damascus Gate is that way. Enjoy.”

I don’t know why I’m so surprised he knows a handful of Taco Bellisms, or why this convinces me of his honesty. However, now it’s impossible to walk away. We have too many questions. The first one: Why’d he return to Jerusalem? Mike looks down at his cigarette, smoldering into a fine grey tail of ash. He flicks it against a stone and a bright red ember blazes to life.

“This is my home. I had to.”

Later, as we sip sweet Turkish coffee outside a rug shop in the Old City, it occurs to me that Mike was the first Palestinian person I’d ever spoken with face-to-face. His life story seemed unusual, but I have no idea what’s “usual” when it comes to Palestinian lives. I’d never thought about them before, to be honest. The world has an infinite number of stories, and the days are not as long as I’d like. It’s not like I’d chosen to ignore Palestine. I just hadn’t chosen to be interested in it.

Which was odd, because Palestine has been all over the news since I was a kid. There isn’t a single specific story I recall, just a murky soup of words and phrases, like “fragile peace talks” and “two-state solution” and “violent demonstrations.” They all swirl together, settling under the stock image of a bombed-out warzone as the headlines mumbled something about Hamas or Hezbollah or the Palestinian Authority. I remember reading about rockets and settlements, refugees and suicide bombers, non-binding resolutions and vetoed Security Council decisions. Not a single detail had stuck. I could feign awareness of some important-sounding events—the Balfour Declaration, the Oslo Accords, the Camp David Summit—but I couldn’t say what decade they happened, or who was involved, or what was decided.

For years, I’d been under the impression that I knew enough about Palestine to be uninterested in what was happening there. This isn’t to say I felt any particular animosity toward the Palestinians. But it’s impossible to fight for every cause, no matter how righteous, if only for reasons of time. Every minute you spend feeding the hungry is a minute you’re not visiting the sick. Life is a zero sum game more often than we’d like to believe.

As we headed toward the Via Dolorosa, the road that Jesus walked on the way to his crucifixion, I began to feel uneasy. The Israeli police (indistinguishable from soldiers except for the patches on their uniforms) who stood guard at every corner still smiled at us, and they were still apologetic when they forbade us from walking down streets that were “for Muslims only, unfortunately.” Their English was excellent. Many of them were women. They were young and diverse and photogenic, a recruiter’s dream team. But all I could see were their bulletproof vests and submachine guns. Above every ancient stone arch bristled a nest of surveillance cameras. Only a few hours ago, I’d been able to block all that from my sight, leaving me free to enjoy the giddy sensation of strolling through the holiest city on earth.

The road ended at the Lion’s Gate. Just as we approached it, a battered Toyota came rattling through. It screeched to a halt and a squad of Israeli police surrounded the car. All four doors opened and out stepped a Palestinian family. The driver was a young man in his 20s, with short black hair cut in the style of Ronaldo, the famous Real Madrid footballer. When the police told him to turn around and face the wall, he did so without a word. It was obvious this was a daily ritual. The policeman who frisked him looked as bored as it’s possible to look when patting down another man’s genitals. Soon it was over, and the family got back in their car. One of the policemen pulled out his phone and started texting.

If I’d made a video of the search (which I didn’t) and showed it to you with the volume off, you probably wouldn’t find it very interesting. The Israeli police didn’t hurt the man, and he barely made eye contact with them. There were no outrageous racial slurs or savage beatings. The only thing you’d see is a group of people in camouflage battle gear standing around a small white sedan, with a middle-aged woman and a couple of young girls off to the right. Unless you have hawk-like eyesight and an exceptional knowledge of obscure uniform insignias, I doubt you’d be able to tell “which side” any of the participants might be on. All you could say for sure is that the police wanted to search the family’s bodies and belongings, and the family looked very unhappy about it, but the police had guns and cameras, and that settled things. It’s interesting what conclusions different people might draw from a scene like that.

Later that night, after we get back to the Palm, I tell Mike about what we saw. He asks what we’d thought. “It was fucked up,” we say.

Mike sighs. “You should see Bethlehem.”    

Jerusalem is so close to Bethlehem that you barely have time to wonder why all the billboards that advertise luxury condos use English instead of Arabic as the second language before you arrive at the wall.

The wall is the most hideous structure I’ve ever seen. It’s a huge, groaning monument to death. Tall grey rectangles bite into the earth like iron teeth, horribly bare, cold, sterile, a towering monstrosity. The wall makes the air taste like poison.

We’re in the car of Mike’s cousin Harun, who is Palestinian, but his car has Israeli plates so we aren’t searched at the checkpoint. We inch past the concrete barriers and armored trucks. Harun holds his identity pass out the window, a soldier waves us through, and a few seconds later we’re in Bethlehem, a short drive from where Jesus Christ was born. It feels like entering prison. I don’t say prison in the sense of an ugly and depressing place you’d prefer not to visit. I say prison in the literal sense: a fortified enclosure where human beings are kept against their will by heavily armed guards who will shoot them if they try to leave. This is what modern life is like in Bethlehem, birthplace of our Lord and Savior.

Looking at the wall from the Israeli side breaks your heart because of its naked ugliness. On the Palestinian side, the unending slabs of concrete have been decorated with slogans, signs, and graffiti, which break your heart for different reasons. One of the hardest parts is reading the sumud series. These are short stories written on plain white posters, plastered to the wall about 10 feet up. Each story comes from a Palestinian woman or girl, and most are written in English, because the only people who read these stories are tourists.

One in particular catches my eye, by a woman named Antoinette:

All my life was in Jerusalem! I was there daily: I worked there at a school as a volunteer and all my friends live there. I used to belong to the Anglican Church in Jerusalem and was a volunteer there. I arranged the flowers and was active with the other women. I rented a flat but I was not allowed to stay because I do not have a Jerusalem ID card. Now I cannot go to Jerusalem: the wall separates me from my church, from my life. We are imprisoned here in Bethlehem. All my relationships with Jerusalem are dead. I am a dying woman.

The flowers are what gets me, because my mother also arranges flowers at church. Hers is an Eastern Orthodox congregation in Minneapolis, about 20 minutes by car from my childhood home. That’s about the same distance between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, although there aren’t any military checkpoints or armored cars patrolling the Minnesotan highways. Until today, I would’ve been unable to imagine what that would even look like. The situation here is so unlike anything I’ve ever encountered in real life that all I can think is, “it’s like a bad war movie.” For the Palestinian people who’ve been living under an increasingly brutal military occupation for the last 70 years, an entire lifetime, I can’t begin to guess at the depths of their helpless anger. What did Antoinette think, the first time the soldiers refused to let her pass? What did she say? What would my mother say? There wouldn’t be a goddamned thing she could do, or I could do, or my father or my sisters, or anyone else. We’d all just have to live with it, the soldiers groping us, beating us, mocking us. No wonder Antoinette gave up hope. In her place, would I be any different? We walk in silence for a long time.

We end up in a refugee camp called Aida, where more than 6,000 people live in an area roughly the size of a Super Target. Here, the air is literally poison. Israeli soldiers have fired so much tear gas into the tiny area that 100 percent of residents now suffer from its effects. If they were using the tear gas against, say, ISIS soldiers instead of Palestinian civilians, this would be a war crime, since “asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases” are banned by the Geneva Protocol. However, such practices are deemed to be acceptable in peacetime, since there’s no chance an unarmed civilian population would be able to retaliate with toxic agents of their own. Without the threat of escalation, chemical warfare is just crowd control.

Before we continue, there are three things you should know about Aida. The first is that there’s no clear dividing line between Aida and Bethlehem, so an unwary pedestrian can easily wander into the refugee camp without realizing it. The second thing is that it doesn’t look like a refugee camp, at least if you’re expecting a refugee camp to be full of emergency trailers, flimsy tents, and flaming barrels of trash. The third thing is that the kids who live there have terrible taste in soccer teams.

We meet the first group as soon as we enter the camp. There are five of them, all teenage boys. One of them is wearing a knockoff Yankees hat. They’re staring at us, and at once I’m very aware of my camera bag’s bulkiness and the blondeness of my fiancée’s hair. A loudspeaker crackles with the cry of the muzzein, and it’s only then that I realize how deeply we Americans have been conditioned to associate the Arabic language with violence and death. The boys exchange a quick burst of words, raising my blood pressure even higher, and cross the street toward us.

“Hello…  what’s your name?” The kid who speaks first is tall and stocky, wearing the same black track jacket and blue jeans favored by 95 percent of the world’s male adolescents. He’s also sporting the Ronaldo haircut, as are several of his friends. Two of the kids start to pull out cigarettes, so I pull out my cigarettes faster and offer the pack to them. Is this a bad, irresponsible thing to do? Sure, and if you’re worried about the long-term health of these kids’ lungs, you should call the American manufacturers who supply Israel with the chemical weapons that are used to poison the air they breathe every day.

I tell the kid my name is Nick, and he shakes my hand. “Nice to meet you. I’m Shadi.” He’s carrying a rolled-up book, as are his friends, so I ask if he’s going to school. “Yeah bro, exams. We have three this week.” His friends laugh, and then engage in a quick tussle for the right of explaining that they’re heading to their math exam now, which is a boring and difficult subject, and I agree that it is, although at least you never have to use most of it after you finish school, a sentiment that earns me daps from Shadi and his friends, and we stand there giggling and smoking on the street corner of the refugee camp, though for a few moments we could be anywhere in the world.

My fiancée and I, both teachers by trade, start to pepper the kids with questions. Shadi says that he has one year left at the nearby high school, which is run by the UN refugee agency that was just stripped of half its funding by Trump. After he finishes, he plans to study at Bethlehem University. The other guys nod with approval, and speak of similar hopes. I ask them who their favorite footballer is, and they all say Ronaldo, at which I spit in disbelief, because everyone knows that Ronaldo sucks and Messi is much better, visca el Barça! Shadi and his friends break into huge grins, since few elements of brotherhood are more universal than talking shit about sports. Seconds later we’re howling with laughter as Shadi’s buddy makes insulting pantomimes about Messi’s diminutive size. A small part of my brain is loudly and repeatedly insisting that everything about this moment of life is batshit lunacy, that there’s no reason why I should be standing in a Palestinian refugee camp, yards away from buildings my country helped bomb into rubble, with my pretty fiancée and expensive camera, talking in English slang with a group of boys whose lungs are scarred with chemicals made in the USA, the exact kind of reckless young ruffians whose slingshots and stones are such a terrifying threat to the fearsome Israeli military, and the craziest thing of all is that here in the refugee camp, surrounded by derelict cars and rusty barbed wire and 6,000 displaced Palestinians,  we are not in danger, at least not from whom you’d think. Here, in the refugee camp, we can joke around with people who speak our language and know our cultural references and actively seek to help us navigate their neighborhood. None of this is to say that Aida is a safe, comfortable, or morally defensible place to put human beings, but only that the people who live there treated us with such overwhelming kindness and decency that I have never been more ashamed at what my country does in my name. I tell Shadi and his friends to take the rest of my cigarettes, but they smile and decline.

“We, uh, have to go now,” says Shadi, as his friends start to walk up the street. “Do you have Facebook?” We do, because everyone does, and as we exchange information, I wish him good luck on his math exam. “No way, bro, I suck at math,” he says. We both laugh, and I pat him on the back.

“Fuck math. But hey, you’re gonna do great, Shadi.”

“Thanks bro. Fuck math.”

I hope he gets every question correct on his exam. I hope he goes to university and wins a scholarship to Oxford. I hope he invents some insanely popular widget and it makes him a billion dollars and he never has to breathe tear gas again.

We continue walking through Aida camp. The buildings are square, ugly, and drab, but the walls are decorated with colorful paintings of fish and butterflies and meadows (along with a somewhat darker array of scenes from the Israeli military occupation). We meet a group of cousins, aged four to 10, all girls, who ask if we can speak English. When we offer them a bag of candy, they take one piece each, and run away yelping when a man limps out the front door of their house. “Thank you,” he says, his face a mask of grave civility. Cars, all bearing green-and-white Palestinian plates instead of the blue-and-yellow Israeli ones, slow down so their drivers can shout “Hello!” We meet another group of kids, boys this time, who grab fistfuls of candy and make playful attempts to unfasten my wristwatch. We make a hasty retreat from this group. The streets are scorched in spots where tear gas canisters exploded.  Narrow strips of pockmarked pavement lead us down steep hills and into winding alleys, and soon we’re lost.

This is how we meet Ahmed. He’s a tall man, about 40 years old, with a small black mustache and arms as thin as a stork’s legs. A yellow sofa leans against the concrete wall of the three-storey apartment building where he lives. Ahmed is sitting there with an elderly couple. He asks if we’d like a cup of tea, and although we’ve been warned about the old “come inside for a cup of tea” scam, we accept his offer. The elderly couple greets us in Arabic, and I try not to notice the large plastic bag of orange liquid peeking out from beneath the old man’s shirt.

While we climb the stairs to Ahmed’s apartment, he tells us that the old people are his parents. “They live here,” he says, pointing to the door on the first floor, “because they don’t walk very good. My mother has problems with her legs, my father is sick from the water.” He traces the pipes with his finger, and we see they’re coated in a thick reddish crust. “Here is the home of my big son,” he says when we reach the second floor. “He has a new baby.” We congratulate him on becoming a grandfather. “And I have a new baby, too! Come, I show you!” One more flight of stairs, and we arrive at Ahmed’s apartment.

It looks remarkably similar to a hundred other apartments we’ve visited. Framed photos of various family members hang on the living room walls, which are painted the same not-quite-white as most living room walls. There’s a beautiful red rug and a small TV. A woman is sitting on the sofa, nursing a baby as she folds socks. “My wife,” says Ahmed.

She speaks a little English too, and says that her name is Nada. She has a pale round face and long black hair. Her eyes are soft, kind, and completely exhausted. Yet if she’s annoyed or embarrassed by our presence, she doesn’t show it. She just hands the baby to Ahmed and goes to make the tea.

“I’m sorry for my house,” says Ahmed, cradling his son like a loaf of bread with legs. “We try to be clean, but…” There’s not so much as a slipper out of place, but I know what he means. “We rent this flat. And my son, and my parents. All rent. Before we have a farm, animals, olive trees, but now, we rent.” I ask about his job. He smiles and shakes his head. “I want a job,” he says, “I love to work. With my hands, with my mind. I love to work. But here, haven’t jobs.” For a second he looks like he’s going to continue this line of thinking, but he stops himself. “I help my wife, that is my job.” Ahmed laughs and passes his baby to my fiancée. “And he, he helps in the home?” She demurs while I protest in mock indignation. I do the dishes every morning before she even wakes up! Still laughing, Ahmed rubs his shins, and again it’s easy to forget we’re sitting in a refugee camp in Jesus’ hometown.

Then the baby wheezes. It’s a dry, scratchy wheeze. Ahmed squirms in his seat, looking embarrassed. The baby begins to cough. My fiancée rubs his back as the coughing turns wet and violent.  Machine gun explosions blast from his tiny lungs. As an asthmatic, I recognize the sound of serious sickness. The baby writhes in my fiancée’s lap, struggling to breathe. He’s gasping and it’s getting worse fast. At moments like these, personal experience tells me that a nebulizer can be the difference between life and death. I don’t insult Ahmed by asking if he has one, because it’s clear that he doesn’t. All I can do is rub the boy’s chest with my finger, a stupid and useless massage. He kicks and stretches as if trying to wiggle away from the unseen demon that’s strangling him.

Nada hurries back with the tea. “I’m sorry,” she says, picking up the baby. She coos to him in Arabic and rubs his back, both of which are comforting but neither of which can relax the inflamed tissues of her infant’s lungs. “My baby…” Unable to find the words in English, she looks to her husband.

Ahmed rubs his cheek. “When she is pregnant, one night the soldiers come. They say the children throw stones. They always throw stones. So the soldiers shoot gas in all the houses. In the windows, over there.” His voice gets quieter. “And she is very sick. When the baby is born, he is sick too.” I ask him if it’s possible to find medicine. “Sometimes yes,” says Ahmed, “but very, very expensive.” For the first time, there’s a note of frustration in his voice. “Everything is expensive here. You see this,” and he picks up a pack of diapers, “it cost me thirty shekels. 10 dollars, almost. And the baby needs so many things. It is impossible to buy. I haven’t money for meat, how can I buy medicine?” He points to a plastic bag with four small pitas. “This is our food. One bread for my two sons, and two breads for my wife. She must make milk for our baby.” When I ask him what he eats, he holds up his cup of tea.

Somehow Nada has soothed the baby out of danger. His breathing is almost normal again, just a quiet raspy crackle. She’s still staring at him, her big brown eyes wide with worry. I don’t know how many times she’s done this before. I don’t know how many times are left before her luck runs out. 

Somehow she’s keeping her baby alive with nothing but the sheer force of her love. I ask to use the toilet so I don’t have to cry in front of her.

(Continue Reading)

[bluebeirry]

Episode 2: Configuration

Post on Ao3: http://archiveofourown.org/works/11255931

Synopsis: During a mission gone wrong, Playmaker is reminded of some personal issues he has with his "job." Ignis plants a seed of rebellious thoughts.

Part of my “Correct the For Want Of A Nail AU as we go along” Challenge

"Ahh, of course it takes five 'slip ups' on my behalf to draw you out." Somewhere out of sight, the Ignis giggled, high-pitched and breathy. "Well well well, who's the prisoner now?"

Not trapped forever, Playmaker told himself. He tried a quick scan of the area, surely the Ignis couldn't do more than tamper with the graphics.

"We'll see about that." Playmaker said.

From the back of Cracking Dragon, the strange glowing green wires weaving in and out of the walls, ceiling and floor served as the only way Playmaker could define boundaries of the hallway he was in. Yet there was no signal coming from either- no signal getting through at all.

He tried again, this time targeting one of the wires. Nothing. It was as though there wasn't just no signal, but no data. But that was impossible- at worst Yusaku would expect to find an address that was out of his reach. Not even that.

"You might want to save time and stop that."

Right, of course. The Ignis- or whoever was impersonating it- would just love for him to give up. Ordinarily Playmaker would take that as a sign he was close to getting positive results. Except of course he didn't have anything- no leads, nothing special done, no clue.

Above him, a glowing yellow eye manifested in the wall. Though it had no face, the Ignis seemed to be grinning at him. Despite himself, Playmaker shuddered.

He had no clues as to where to go, no clue what to do, and no clue how to foil whatever plan it had for him. Unless…

The Ignis had been spotted four times before this. Each time it had been heavily pursued one of Playmakers other comrades, and temporarily captured by Blue Angel. It only sprung this trap now, not when the others had attacked it, and the last appearance had been six hours before.

It had planned this- targeted Yusaku specifically for this trap.

That help promise. It changed the dynamic of this situation from hostage/kidnapper to convincer/convince. Or at the very least opened the possibility of a compromise.

Steeling himself, Playmaker spoke. "Ignis."

The eye blinked. "Yes?"

"What do you want from me?"

The eye squinted, scrutinizing him or perhaps pretending to. "What do I want?" It said casually. "What do you care what I want? Aren't most people more concerned with their own desires?"

Playmaker's fists clenched. "Don't toy with me."

"I'm just saying, aren't you really thinking about what you want?"

It seemed living inside of the internet for most of one's life resulted in the most logical upbringing. The Ignis had clearly spent too long watching trolls on message boards. "If you just wanted someone to taunt, you could've done that with any of the Knights."

"Ah, but none of them have the same investments you do." The eye glinted, giving the impression of a sly smirk. "Or at the very least your goals are unique among that group."

Confirming that the Ignis had been targeting him didn't encourage Playmaker as much as he'd hoped it would. To spy on him was one thing, but Yusaku's secrets… "How did you-" He stopped himself before he could reveal too much- for all he knew this was being recorded. "What are you talking about?"

"Oh, nothing much." That insufferable sneak- whoever designed it should be shot. "Just noticing that you spend more free time away from the others of your little group than they do. Or rather… with one specific person."

Shoichi. It knew about Shoichi. Playmaker snarled, "If you hurt him, I will find a way to make you suffer."

"Don't worry, I'm not here to talk about 'damaged' boys." The eye glinted, a faux friendly smile. "You're the guest after all, so it stands to reason you should be the subject of interest."

No. Too many games, that was too clearly a threat. "Liar. You brought him up when you have me helpless. You haven't hurt me yet, so you clearly want something from me. If this isn't a threat it's a waste of time, so therefore this is a threat."

"No no, you've got it all wrong!" The Ignis kept insisting, "I only brought him up because the reason why you keep visiting him is relevant to me."

A bluff. Unless the Ignis knew Shoichi himself- but that was impossible. Shoichi could barely move on a good day, and that was with Yusaku encouraging him. He couldn't be convinced to duel, when he fought he'd forget who was on his side, and if you gave him code he'd give you something completely functional but irrelevant to the task at hand.

Shoichi was the least useful of the six. If it wasn't for Yusaku's protection he'd have never survived this long, he'd have been sent out as a suicide bomber or "retired." Worst of all, if you spent long enough with him you realized that he was much more capable than he let on. That half the time he was messing up on purpose.

Shoichi's complete refusal to give in and become another one of Revolver's pet monsters was the trait Yusaku most respected and hated in him.

God knew Yusaku wasn't that brave. That was why he was the one stuck here. "He's not useful to you beyond how he's connected to me-"

"Exactly." The Ignis said, much more serious now. "The one weakness of the great Playmaker, and yet he's a weakness to you and you alone." It was challenging him- but for what? "How come none of the others in your little group ever visit him? How come you're the only one who seems to care?"

That was-

That wasn't any of their faults. When you had challenges to face, you needed to focus on doing what you could to survive. To get through your own tasks and ensure you were useful enough to buy yourself another day of living. Yusaku couldn't blame the others for putting their work first.

Hell, the only reason he had any time for Shoichi was because he specialized in hacking. His job didn't require a strictly maintained public cover like Go, or the emotional drain of being the one thing new recruits saw and potential allies expected like Aoi. Yusaku could stay in one building for months, years even.

Yusaku could build a safe place for an emotionally troubled boy and keep it long enough to provide a little happiness. Especially not when that boy wanted to die.

It wasn't like that was going to change soon. On the off-handed chance Yusaku managed to get Shoichi out of Hanoi, where could he go? Without Hanoi Yusaku didn't have the resources to hire a caretaker and he couldn't take care of himself. Even after five years, Shoichi still had days where he confused Yusaku with a long-gone older brother.

The Ignis had no right to bring up such painful memories.

Steeling himself Playmaker spoke. "That's none of your concern." He fought to keep his face blank. "What I do, or what any of the others on our own has nothing to do with you."

For a moment the Ignis watched Playmaker, expecting something more. It said, "But it says something about you."

Ah, back on topic. "And what's that?"

"You care."

Yusaku blinked. That was an odd non-sequitur. "Everyone has something they care about." Yusaku pointed out.

"Yes, but you care about something other than your mission." In the wall, the eye rolled itself. "You care about something other than Hanoi. Which is rather odd for someone who's been all but raised by them. One would think that meeting Hanoi's goals would be the most important thing in your life.

"Yet it's not. Why is that?"

Was this just a question-and answer? Just a chance for the Ignis to fulfil some gaps in its knowledge, or a reward-based form of curiosity? "Why do you care?" Playmaker asked.

The eye smiled again. "I'm trying to see if you're worth saving." Saving? "Hanoi is powerful, and they may want you to think that they hold all the cards, but do you really think they're going to be around forever?"

It squinted at him, challenging him, and it said, "They've made many enemies. Sooner or later, someone is going to take them down. And there's many ways for that to happen- some with more collateral damage than others. Some, with less collateral.

"Some, where certain people-"

The hallway rumbled, and the eye widened, the Ignis caught off guard. From the tremors Playmaker's sensors picked up patterns in the tone and depth. "It's him." One of the other six.

The eye glanced back at Playmaker, frantic and wide. "I- I'll leave you to think about it." Another tremor, the eye moved within the walls to get to the floor. "I'll be in touch- just go tell your rescuers that I didn't hurt you. Or better yet-"

Playmaker braced himself, but he was still unprepared for the flash-bang light of the Ignis breaking the trap. On one end a monster burst through the ceiling, the eye creating and diving through a sinkhole, and Yusaku thrown backwards through the wall at neck-breaking speeds.

He'd been trained to diffuse shock from a bad VRAINS disconnection, but he still jerked upright in his chair. Swallowed down vomit before it came up.

Outside his room he heard music playing, the caretaker must've taken them back from the park. That wasn't good- as far as Yusaku knew he'd only been under for an hour and Shoichi was supposed to get more exercise than that. Must've passed a fire truck or a police car, and came back when the siren set Shoichi off.

There was a ping on his screen, probably from Revolver. Yusaku knew he'd have to answer it soon, but for now he needed to recover. He was in no shape to work or even give a report. If they really wanted it they could just turn on the cameras, see just how 'well' he was doing.

When he was sure he could breathe, Yusaku pushed the screen away and pulled his knees up to his chest.

Breathe in, breathe out. In, out. Deep breaths, just like they showed you. Wait until the world stops spinning and it's possible to move.

Curled up in a ball in a loaned apartment, Yusaku remembered what the Ignis had said about Hanoi going down. Wondered what it would mean for Yusaku and the little circle of people he cared about. Wondered if they had any hope of survival after all they'd done.

Wondered if there was anything he could do to save them.

[newsnigeria]

Check out New Post published on Ọmọ Oòduà

New Post has been published on http://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/world-news/the-anglozionist-empire/

The AngloZionist Empire: a hyperpower with microbrains and no cred left

[This analysis was written for the Unz Review]

Last week saw what was supposed to be a hyperpower point fingers for its embarrassing defeat not only at Venezuela, which successfully defeated Uncle Shmuel’s coup plans, but also at a list of other countries including Cuba, Russia, China and Iran.  It’s is rather pathetic and, frankly, bordering on the comically ridiculous.

Uncle Shmuel clearly did not appreciate being the laughingstock of the planet.

Eviction notice of the USSS

And as Uncle Shmuel always does, he decided to flex some muscle and show the world “who is boss” by…

… blockading the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, DC.

But even that was too much for the MAGA Admin, so they also denied doing so (how lame is that!?)

Which did not prevent US activists of entering the embassy (legally, they were invited in and confirm it all).

Now the US Secret Service wants to evict the people inside the building.

So much for the CIA’s beloved “plausible deniability” which now has morphed into “comical deniability”.

If you think that all this sounds incredibly amateurish and stupid – you are 100% correct.

In the wonderful words of Sergei Lavrov, the US diplomats have “lost the taste for diplomacy“.

But that was not all.

In an act of incredible courage the USA, which was told (by the Israelis, of course!), that the Iranians were about to attack “somewhere”, so Uncle Shmuel sent two aircraft carrier strike groups to the Middle-East.  In a “daring” operation, the brilliant USAF pilots B-52 bombers over the Persian Gulf to “send a message” to the “Mollahs”: don’t f*ck with us or else…

The “Mollahs” apparently were unimpressed as they simply declared that “the US carriers were not a threat, only a target“.

The AngloZionists apparently have also executed a false flag operation to get a pretext to strike Iran, but so far this seems to have gotten rather little traction in the region (so far – this might change).

Lavrov reacting to the latest US threats

Now let’s leave this “Kindergarten level of operations” and try to make some sense from this nonsense.

First, while the American can pour scorn on the Iranians, call them ragheads, terrorists, Mollahs, sand-niggers or confuse them with Iraqis or even think that Iranian are Arabs (as, apparently, are the Turks, at least by the US common standard of ignorance), but the truth is that the Iranians are world-class and most sophisticated players, especially their superbanalytical community.  They fully understand that a  B-52 anywhere near the Iranian airspace is a sitting duck and that if the Americans were planning to strike Iran, they would pull their aircraft carrier far away from any possible Iranian strikes. As for the B-52, they have long range cruise missiles and they don’t need to get near Iran to deliver their payloads.

In fact, I think that the proper way to really make the Iranians believe that Uncle Shmuel means business would be to flush any and all US ships out of the Persian Gulf, to position the B-52s in Diego Garcia and to place the carriers as far away as possible to still be able to support a missile/bomb attack on Iranian targets.  And you can bet that the Iranians keep very close tabs on exactly what CENTCOM aircraft are deployed and where.  To attack Iran the US would need to achieve a specific concentration of forces and support elements which are all trackable by the Iranians.  My guess is that the Iranians already have a full list of all CENTCOM officers down to the colonel level (and possibly even lower for airmen) and that they already know exactly which individual USAF/USN aircraft are ready to strike.  One could be excused to think that this is difficult to do, but in reality it is not.  I have personally seen it done.

Second, the Americans know that the Iranians know that (well, maybe not Mr MAGA, but folks at the DIA, ONI, NSA, etc. do know that).  So all this sabre-rattling is designed to show that Mr MAGA has tons of hair on his chest, it’s all for internal US consumption.  As for the Iranians, they have already heard any and all imaginable US threats, they have been attacked many times by both the USA and Israel (directly or by proxy), and they have been preparing for a US attack ever since the glorious days of Operation Eagle Claw: they are as ready as they can be, you can take that to the bank.  Finally, the terrorist attack by the USN on a civilian Iranian airliner certainly convinced the Iranians that the leaders of the AngloZionist Empire lack even basic decency, nevermind honor.  Nevermind the use of chemical warfare by Iraq against Iran with chemicals helpfully provided by various US and EU companies (with the full blessing of their governments).  No – the Iranians truly have no illusions whatsoever about what the Shaytân-e Bozorg is capable of in his rage.

Third, “attacking embassies” is a glaring admission of terminal weakness.  That was true for the seizure of Russian consular buildings, and this is true for the Venezuelan embassy.  In the real (supra-Kindergarten) world when country A has a beef with country B, it does not vent its frustration against its embassy.  Such actions are not only an admission of weakness, but also a sign of a fundamental lack of civilization.

[Sidebar: this issue is crucial to the understanding of the United States.  The US is an extremely developed country, but not a civilized one.  Oscar Wilde (and George Clemanceau) had it right: “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between“.  There are signs of that everywhere in the USA: from the feudal labor laws, to the lack of universal healthcare, to absolutely ridiculous mandatory criminal sentences (the Soviet Penal Code under Stalin was MUCH more reasonable and civilized than the current US laws!), to the death penalty, to the socially accepted torture in GITMO and elsewhere, to racial tensions, the disgusting “food” constituting the typical “SAD” diet, to the completely barbaric “war on drugs”, to the world record of incarcerations, to an immense epidemic of sexual assaults and rapes (1/5 of all women in the USA!), homosexuality accepted as a “normal and positive variation of human sexuality“, 98 percent of men reported internet porn use in the last six months, … – you can continue that list ad nauseam.  Please don’t misunderstand me – there are as many kind, intelligent, decent, honorable, educated, compassionate people in the USA as anywhere else.  This is not about the people living in the USA: it is about the kind of society these people are living in.  In fact, I would argue the truism that US Americans are the first victims of the lack of civilization of their own society!  Finally, a lack of civilization is not always a bad thing, and sometimes it can make a society much more dynamic, more flexible, more innovative too.  But yeah, mostly it sucks…]

By the way, the USA is hardly unique in having had degenerate imbeciles in power.  Does anybody remember what Chernenko looked like when he became the Secretary General of the CPSU?  What about folks like Jean-Bédel Bokassa or Mikheil Saakashvili (this latter case is especially distressing since it happened in a country with a truly ancient and extremely rich culture!).  And while we can dislike folks like George Bush Senior or James Baker – these were superbly educated and extremely intelligent people.  Compare them to such psychopathic ignoramuses like Pompeo, Bolton or Trump himself!

So this latest US “attack” on the Venezuela is truly a most telling symptom of the wholesale collapse of US power and of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy and lack of civilization of the Neocon ruling elites.

The big question is obvious: will they attack Venezuela or Iran next?

NYT’s so-called “anti-Semitic” cartoon. Pretty accurate if you ask me!

In the very first article I ever wrote for my blog, as far back as 2007, I predicted that the US would attack Iran.  I still believe that the Israelis will never cease to try to get the US to do their dirty work for them (and let the goyim pay the price!).  What I am not sure about is whether the Israelis truly will have the power to push the USA into such a suicidal war (remember, if Iran cannot “win” against the USA, neither can the USA “win” against Iran – thus Iran will win simply by surviving and not caving in – which they will and they won’t).  The good news is that US power has been in sharp (and accelerating!) decline at least since Clinton and his gang.  I would even add that the last two idi*ts (Obama and Trump) did more damage to the US power than all their predecessors combined.  The bad news is that the collective IQ of US leaders has been falling even faster than US power.  We can hope that the first will hit zero long before the second, but there is no guarantee.

Truly, nobody knows if the US will or will not attack Iran and/or Venezuela next.  The Neocons sure want that, but whether they will make it happen this time around or not depends on so many variables that even the folks in the White House and the Pentagon probably don’t really know what will happen next.

What is certain is that the US reputation worldwide is basically roadkill.  The fact that most folks inside the USA are never told about that does not make it less real.  The Obama-Trump tag team has truly inflicted irreparable damage on the reputation of the USA (in both cases because they were hopelessly infected and corrupted by the Neocons).  The current US leaders appear to understand that, at least to some degree, this is why they are mostly lashing out at “easy” targets like free speech (on the Internet and elsewhere), Assange, the Venezuelan Embassy, etc.  The real danger comes from either one of two factors:

The Neocons will feel humiliated by the fact that all their threats are only met with indifference, disgust or laughter

The Neocons will feel buoyed by the fact that nothing terrible happened (so far) when they attacked a defenseless target

Either way, in both cases the outcome is the same: each “click!” brings us closer to the inevitable “bang!”.

By the way, I think I should also mention here that the current state of advanced paranoia in which the likes of Pompeo point their fingers left and right are also signs of terminal weakness: these are not so much ways to credibly explain the constant and systematic failures of the Israelis and the Americans to get anything actually done as they are a way to distract away from the real reasons for the current extreme weakness of the AngloZionists.

2006 The people of Lebanon celebrate the victory which turned the tide of AngloZionist imperialism

I concluded my last article by speaking of the terrified Venezuelans who refused to be afraid.  I will conclude this one by pointing at the first instance when a (comparatively) small adversary completely refused to be frightened even while it was the object of a truly terrifying attack: Hezbollah in 2006.  Even though they were outnumbered, outgunned and surrounded by the Israelis, the members of the Resistance in Lebanon simply refused to be afraid and, having lost the fear too which so many Arabs did succumb to before 2006, they proceeded to give the Israelis (fully backed by the USA) the worst and most humiliating thrashing in their country’s (admittedly short) history.

I urge you to read al-Sayyid Hassan’s famous “Divine Victory” speech (you can still find the English language transcript hereand here) – it is one of the most important speeches of the 20th century! – and pay attention to these words (emphasis added):

We feel that we won; Lebanon won; Palestine won; the Arab nation won, and every oppressed, aggrieved person in this world also won.  Our victory is not the victory of a party. I repeat what I said in Bint Jubayl on 25 May 2000: It is not the victory of a party or a community; rather it is a victory for true Lebanon, the true Lebanese people, and every free person in the world.  Don’t distort this big historic victory. Do not contain it in party, sectarian, communal, or regional cans. This victory is too big to be comprehended by us. The next weeks, months, and years will confirm this.

And, indeed, the next weeks, months and years have very much confirmed that!

Any US attack on Iran will have pretty similar results, but on a much, much bigger scale.

And the Iranians know that.  As do many in the Pentagon (the CIA and the White House are probably beyond hopeless by now).

Conclusion: good news and bad news

Finally some meaningful discussions between the two nuclear superpowers!

The good news first: Pompeo and Lavrov had what seems to be a meaningful dialog.  That is very, very good, even if totally insufficient.  They have also announced that they want to create study groups to improve the (currently dismal) relations between the two countries.  That is even better news (if that really happens).  Listening to Pompeo and Lavrov, I got a feeling that the Americans are slowly coming to the realization that they have an overwhelming need to re-establish a meaningful dialog with the other nuclear superpower.  Good.  But there is also bad news.

The rumor that the strategic geniuses surrounding Trump are now considering sending 120,000 troops to the Middle-East is really very bad news.  If this just stays a rumor, then it will be the usual hot air out of DC, along the lines of Trump’s “very powerful armada” sent to scare the DPRK (it failed).  The difference here is simple: sending carriers to the Middle-East is pure PR.  But sending carriers AND 120,000 troops completely changes that and now this threat, if executed, will become very real.  No, I don’t think that the US will attempt to invade Iran, but 120,000 is pretty close to what would be needed to try to re-open the Strait of Hormuz (assuming the Iranians close it) while protecting all the (pretty much defenseless) CENTCOM facilities and forces in the region.  Under this scenario, the trip of Pompeo to Russia might have a much more ominous reason: to explain to the Russians what the US is up to and to provide security guarantees that this entire operation is not aimed at Russian forces.  IF the US really plans to attack Iran, then it would make perfect sense for Pompeo to talk to Lavrov and open channels of communications between the two militaries to agree on “deconfliction” procedures.  Regardless of whether the Russians accept such deconfliction measures or not (my guess is that they definitely would), such a trip is a “must” when deploying large forces so near to Russian military forces.

So far Trump has denied this report – but we all know that he suffers from the “John Kerry syndrome”: he wants better relations with Russia only until the Neocons tell him not to. Then he makes a 180 and declares the polar opposite of what he just said.

Still, there are now rumors that Trump is getting fed up with Bolton (who, truth be told, totally FUBARed the Venezuelan situation!).

As for the Iraqis, they have already told the US to forget using Iraqi territory for any attack.  This reminds me of how the Brazilians told the US that Brazil would not allow its territory to be used for any attacks.  This is becoming a pattern.  Good.

Frankly, while an AngloZionist attack on Iran is always and by definition possible, I can’t imagine the folks at the Pentagon having the stomach for that.  In a recent article Eric Margolis outlined what the rationale for such an attack might be (check out his full article here).  Notice this sentence: “The Pentagon’s original plan to punish Iran called for some 2,300 air strikes on Day 1 alone“.  Can they really do that?  Yes, absolutely.  But imagine the consequences!  Margolis speaks of “punishing” Iran. 2,300 Air strikes in one day is not something I would call a “punishment”.  That is a full scale attack on Iran which, in turns, means that the Iranians will have exactly *ZERO* reasons to hold back in any way.  If the AngloZionists attack Iran with 2,300 air strikes on Day 1, then you can be sure that on Day2 all hell will break loose all over the Middle-East and the AngloZionists will have absolutely *NO* means of stopping it.

This will be a real bloodbath and nobody will have any idea as to how to stop it.

And you can be darn sure that the Iranians will show much more staying power than the imperialists, if only because they will be fighting in defense of their country, their faith, their liberty, their friends and their families. To expect the Iranians to cave in or surrender in any way would be the most stupid notion anybody could entertain.

Could they really be THAT stupid in Washington DC?

I don’t know.

But what I do know is this: any such attack will be extremely costly and very, very dangerous.  Obviously, the Neocons don’t give a rats ass about costs, financial or human.  They just want war, war, war and more war (remember McCain’s “bomb, bomb, bomb – bomb, bomb Iran“?).  But the Neocons are only a tiny fraction of the US ruling elites (even if the most powerful one) and my hope is that the sane elements will prevail (which, indeed, they have so far).

As for right now, we are still okay.  But if the US actually start sending large forces to the Middle-East, then all bets are off.

The Saker

Sponsored by Naija gist

…

[joedunphy]

Caprica

(Originally posted on another, apparently defunct, blogging host)

Miscellanious ramblings … If you’re looking for an essay that holds together, you’re going to be in the wrong place, today, because I’m in no mood to write one. I’ve just gotten done banging my head into the proverbial wall trying to set up a mirror to this blog on the not always so very well documented Tumblr system, and am frustrated, stressed, tired and hungry. But blog.com is determined to keep its servers clean of blogs that haven’t been updated often enough, because at ¼ of a cent per meg, diskspace is far too expensive to waste. 

A meg, for those who don’t know, works out to be about 66 pages of printed text, meaning that if you have written 660 pages of blog posts - the equivalent of a thick, university sized tome’s worth of posting - the service will free up 2.5 cents worth of diskspace by wiping out your work. Think of it. If they did this to a mere 60 users, each of whom would lose a few hundred pages of work, before they knew it, they’d have saved up enough to buy themselves a snicker’s bar. Not just any snicker’s bar, either, but one of those large ones, the kind that can take one back to many happy hours spent in train stations across this great land of ours, waiting for connecting rides. Sure, they’d have to go to Walgreens to get it - in a movie theatre, we’d be looking at something more like 60 or 90 users who’d have to lose a decade or two of posting before the staff could reap the collective fruits of their disk clearing labors, in all of its nougaty goodness - but if you’ve ever been in a computer lab, you know how much those snack foods mean to the programmers. So I’d better get going, whether I’m up to it or not, and if the quality of my writing should suffer as a result?

Dude, we’re talking nougat and peanuts. It’s nothing to be trifled with.

If the reports I’ve heard about Caprica’s ratings are accurate, then this show probably won’t be on for much longer. Does it deserve to be? Should one catch it before it is cancelled, knowing that short running shows don’t tend to find their way into syndication? Maybe. I will say that I find it greatly superior to the vast bulk of what Syfy produces, but then that isn’t very high praise. We are talking about the same channel that brought us “Mansquito” and “Termination Shock”, that movie about the girl who shoots starship destroying fireballs out of her chest. Have they done better, this time? Something that a grown up can watch without hoping that nobody will catch him watching it?

Again … maybe. It’s deeply flawed. At times, the dialog has made no sense. 

Consider Joseph Adams / Yussef Adama’s ramble about there being no flowers on Tauron - “not a one” - and how he burst into tears the first time he saw them growing on Caprica, when asked if he would bring his wife and daughter back from the grave, if he could.  Is that the kind of tangent a grieving widower would go off on, leaving the listener to wonder what on earth was its relevance? Yes, yes, they’ve emigrated from the horrible place, and just as their lives are finally sweet, mother and daughter are no longer to be found living them? That’s the reason for the otherwise mystifying speech?

But then think about what he tells his son, as he confronts him about his having skipped class in “Tauron school”, explaining that showing up is about being proud of who he was, of being Tauron. Then think of the immigrants in your own family. Yes, the lives they left behind were hard, that’s why they were immigrants, but were they as bleak and gray as the one people were living on Tauron, if we accept the above explanation of Adama’s otherwise pointless speech? If so, then what was there to be proud of? In the real world, there was real beauty mixed in with the hardship that our forebearers left behind, some collective creation that the people could point to and say, this is what we did. Life was hard, but it wasn’t joyless. That joy is what we see altogether absent in the fictional Tauron culture, aside from that moment of dark humor when the grandmother says that  the Tauron children play jacks with the bones of the children who lost at jacks, deadpanning the joke until she gets the desired level of terror in Joseph Adama.

What do Taurons eat? They seem to be a vaguely defined combination of every Mediterranean, Latin and Middle Eastern culture known, a fair number of these cultures having cuisines so developed that one can fill libraries with books about any given one, yet as the young William Adama shows up with lunch for an abusive friend of his uncle’s, what we see is a sandwich, something called “fritos”. Really? That’s it? They couldn’t spend a few dollars, and hire one of North America’s thousands of financially strapped and desperate chefs to do some kind of fusion thing, just to give a little color to the setting? No, they couldn’t. What music do Taurons listen to? Again, starving musicians are in plentiful supply, the real world source cultures have rich traditions - just think of the words “Latin Music” or Verdi or Vivaldi or … surely we’ll at least hear a few folk songs coming?  No, we never hear a note. What stories do they tell? None are ever told. In every way, those creating this culture fail to create it, and don’t even seem to try, or even to farm out the effort to those who’d be happy to try, and do so for a pittance.

These may seem like little things, trivia not worth commenting on, but the absence of those little things are one of the reasons why science fiction doesn’t tend to really be literature. Those little things that a writer shares … the snatch of song, the scent of beignets sizzling in the oil, the reddened shadows cast by the setting sun across the columns of a synagogue - it’s those little, “unimportant” things, the things we hardly think to notice, that make a place seem real, like more than a cartoon, and that becomes doubly important when the place we’re looking at isn’t real. If one says “Sicilian” and one’s audience has grown up in New York or Chicago, life gives the writer a boost up as he reaches his listeners, because we all have associations with that word that it will conjure up - but not if one says “Tauron”, because there are no Taurons. That feeling is something that the writers and their coworkers on the set have to create from scratch, and what kind of feeling do they create?

We see the Tauron people being treated like dirt, stereotyped, robbed and scorned, and some of us will start out liking that, because in a fictional setting, in which the viewer will habitually let down his guard, it puts on display something that the population of an Anglo-Saxon dominated country has been very good at not letting itself see. As many have observed, in the America of today, it’s OK to be very, very white, and OK to be very, very not white (ie. Black), but not so OK to be anywhere in between. One can watch the same people who would fawn over a member of the Gangster Disciples, just to prove how “sensitive” they were, think nothing of talking about Mexicans, or Arabs, or Italians in a manner not at all unlike that we see Taurons being spoken of, on the show. Doesn’t look so pretty when it’s fictionalised, does it?

Or does it? Even as we watch the Tauron characters simmering in a stew of resentment and humilation all too familiar to all too many of those of Mediterranean descent in this country, we don’t see them doing anything to earn better for themselves. The “hero”, Joseph Adama, is a crooked lawyer who forgets to talk to the judge before having a bribe sent to him, and asks his brother to kill his new found friend’s wife, to “even things out”, after watching his thug brother beat up the friend, who seems to be the Bill Gates of 150,000BC - and yet never seems to think of resenting this, and maybe pulling a few strings to get the matter taken care of, using the influence his wealth would offer him, even at a politically awkward moment. The hostility to be found in racism isn’t a hellish thing for those it oppresses, merely because it is hostility, but because it in unearned hostility, something that the one to whom it attaches can do nothing to escape. It is a tragic thing for those around them, because those it drives off into the shadows have something to offer, their companionship at the very least, and often far more than that. Caprica fails to get that, and in doing so, having passed on any opportunity to make the Taurons seem like flesh and blood, declines to even make them into even slightly lovable cartoons. We don’t know them, and hope that we never do.

Which, as far as that part of plot goes, leaves us with no story to tell. Real stories are about characters, these constructs with whom something resonates in our subconsciouses, letting us connect with those who aren’t really there. Even the villains have to have a few virtues, some reason for us to feel what they are feeling, or for us, they won’t be there at all. The Taurons just aren’t, at least not at the moment. But, perhaps, if the show should linger, they will be.

The show seems to do better with its more white bread characters, especially Zoe, who is played by Alessandra Torresani, who is playing a piece of software in this world in which Italians (Taurons) can only be played by Mexicans, and a pair of light featured yuppies can have a dark featured daughter without anybody asking awkward questions about the mailman’s love life. The character has seemed to be the target of a significant amount of mockery in the blogosphere, judging from my recent skimming, much of it undeserved, I would think.

Zoe does seem to take herself with lethal seriousness, but as we are talking about a 16 year old - who seems to have slipped down to being 15, now - that would be what we would expect of her, were she real. Can we believe in a 15 year old suicide bomber (her boyfriend) being driven by religious fanaticism? Picture a chorus of voices echoing out of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem yelling “yes”. Children younger than that have done worse, in real life. The scene I’m thinking of, most of all,  is the dancing scene, which I’ve seen some describe as a puppy dog flirtation between a young technician and his hardware, the authors finding this most strange, calling it a “ratings killer”. I think that they’re misreading the scene.

The robot contains the reconstructed personality of a young girl, whose consciousness lives on through the ill conceived magic of artificial intelligence. She is trapped inside, her internal self-image (which we see in the shorts in which Ms. Torresani appears) having not caught up to her external reality (that of a one ton piece of equipment). The scene she’s living and the scene the technician are living aren’t one and the same, and the disconnect between the two has the potential to drive her even crazier than she probably is about to become.

The technician has cause to suspect that somebody is present inside that robot body, not in the sense of an actual human consciousness being present, but that of there being some sort of self-awareness. Consider the scene in which the robot, having been bound in place. One doesn’t really see a steam shovel panicking because it’s been bound to a flatbed on a train; this is the behavior we’d associate with a living being who had been left bound and immobile, panicking at her own helplessness. “Her?”, one might ask, much as the technician’s soon to be defingered friend did, as he asked why the hardware was being feminised, but men have been feminising inanimate objects for centuries in real life. Consider the pronoun we use for ships. It’s an expression of affection for that which is created by its creator, and such affection seems instinctual, a part of the drive that pushes us to create, even when we know that that which is created can’t possibly return the affection. But an actually conscious entity? Those who created that would move from merely being artists to adopting a more parental role.

I’ve read comments that while Zoebot would resent the crudeness of the technician looking at her chest and praising it, Zoebot seemed to “eat it up”, but again, let us consider the circumstances: Zoebot isn’t letting the technician know that there is any literal femininity about her at all. As far as the technician knows, all that he is looking at is a metal plate, one that he is responsible for maintaining and will be needed by this machine that he is seeing pass the Turing test. We might see Ms. Torresani’s look of dismay as he utters those words, but he doesn’t. As for the dancing that follows … from Zoe’s point of view, she’s a young woman, trapped where she doesn’t wish to be, and the technician is a boy about her own age, who is giving her what she hasn’t had for a while and hasn’t had enough of, ever - attention, as they dance. To the technician, what is happening is that he is bringing the robot to life, because he has no idea just how alive it already is.

So, again, the problem is the same as before - a failure of the imagination - but the failure is on the part of the reviewers and some in the audience, not on the part of the writers. They’re succeeding admirably in exploring the natural consequences of an unnatural situation, and we need only be open to noticing that. If one if to watch this show, while it last, I think that this is what one would watch it for. But few viewers probably will, insisting on watching that sort of scene with a literalness it doesn’t call for, and so if you want to do your viewing, I’d recommend that you do so, soon. I give this one a season before it is cancelled, and look forward to being proved wrong.

[artandanthropology-blog1]

POLITICS, PLAY, AND ART: DOCUMENTING “AFGHANISTAN,” BY MICHAEL TAUSSIG

May 3, 2014

In Kabul early June 2010 I slept behind massive concrete bunkers and five pat-downs by scowling security guards every time I entered the hotel.  They looked at me as a potential suicide bomber and I looked at them the same way. They would act mean and they would act efficient, better than professional actors. It was game we played, all five hands many times a day just to get in and get out, never knowing whom to trust. I played a game of badminton out on the lawn there with young Tom Francis but after a few tries was mystified and frightened to learn that I could not coordinate my body.  Every time I threw the shuttlecock in the air to serve, I missed it, and with that realized I was missing an awful lot of other things, as well, not so much about Afghanistan and the wars there as how to “come to grips” with that, meaning in the first instance frame it and talk about it, meaning how to “serve” it.

“Very disorganized,” pouted the German ambassador after his fourth attempt to get a cup of iced mint tea in our bunkered luxury hotel. Was he also referring to what he perceived as our foolish mission “making art” in Afghanistan?

After all anyone with the slightest acumen knew there was no way out of the hopelessly routinized way the West talked to itself about Afghanistan, moving the pieces around the same old chess board that had been used for Iraq and before that . . . Kipling had referred to this stretch of territory as subject to the Great Game between super powers, and you really had to wonder if what we were now inside of was not a variant of that same game with three men slugging it out--Bin Laden, Bush, and Cheney—collapsing world historical forces into grotesque puppetry of good and evil awash in billions of dollars especially for Cheney’s old outfit by name of Haliburton. Everyone sensed this but in the chaos of mixed motives, secrecy, deceit, short-term necessities, and games concealing other games, the more you tried to figure it out, the more it slipped through your fingers. Truth was a grey mist of rumor, guerrilla tactics, and entangled bureaucracy made mistier still by the certainties propounded daily by the experts. Truth was make-believe. All “very disorganized,” that’s for sure, something that Francis Alys, with that great calm he exudes, must have felt in his eight trips to Afghanistan since 2010.

In this situation “making art,” as with his Reel-Unreel and Color Bars, suggests a way out of the game. Both of these works are about games, too, if not games, themselves. It could not be otherwise. The first is about two kids racing through the streets of Kabul using film reels as hoops, the other is about the game armies love to play with stripes of color as with medals and, in this case, with the blazons troops wear on their upper sleeve ostensibly for identification but also, surely, to ward off evil spirits.

But first, to get a sense of what’s required to get in close to make such art, think of how foreign journalists work in this situation of danger and fluid boundaries. They need a “fixer,” someone who speaks English as well as a couple of Afghani languages and has, as they say, “connections.” In 2010 I was told a good fixer cost 150-250 USD a day, 1,000 for an interview with a Talib. A somewhat unsettling term, the “fixer” hovers between a cluster of words like translator, prostitute, pimp, sleuth, and anthropologist. It is a highly risky occupation. But then so is being a foreign journalist and photographer. The journalists I met were usually young, under twenty five, stunningly smart, not yet jaded, still overcome by the enormity of it all, and great risk-takers, such that I could never understand why the material they had published by their editors back in London or New York always sounded the same no matter who wrote it or what it was about, a regular sausage machine with a dash of “human interest” like death and torture thrown in.

There was a pale slender woman wearing a blue chador down to her ankles, her face largely uncovered, waiting on the tarmac at Heart on the Iranian border for the flight to Kabul. She was a Dutch journalist going to cover the assembly of (all male) tribal elders June 3rd, rumor being that Kabul would be attacked by some Taliban instigated suicide bombers. “Boring,” she said, referring to these assemblies. She bore the face of a saint, the grace, too. Her eyes were tired. She had been on the beat for years; Cambodia, East Timor, Iraq, and now Afghanistan. “Iraq fatigue,” she explained, was what was preventing the translation of her book on Baghdad into English. This trip started three months ago. In her chador she looks at home here. In Herat she was researching the suicide in 2003 of a woman writer. She works for the Dutch weeklies, she told me, describing her work as “slow journalism,” which I guess evaded the worst of the sausage machine, like Michael Herr was able to do, writing on the war in Vietnam at his own pace for Esquire magazine in the 1960s. His book Dispatches is generally considered one of the finest if not the best book on that war from the viewpoint of the American soldier.  Fredric Jameson, wrote somewhere that it changed our very language. It is hard to imagine that happening today. The very soul has been sucked out of representation. Not even irony and cynicism can get a toehold.

Which brings us to art, or “art,” as James Agee, that untamed genius of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, would have put it, “art” being something he abhorred in the writing and photography of the poor when he accepted a commission to report on the condition of white share-croppers in Alabama in the 1930s.

On one of his eight trips Francis was “embedded” for fifteen days as an artist in five “forward operating bases” with UK forces (the US would not accept him) in Helmand province.  It was then when he got the idea for his “color bar” drawings of the “tactical recognition flashes” these British soldiers wore on their upper left sleeve. Why make “art” out of these flashes and, anyway, why are they called “flashes”? Listening to the artist I get the idea that the basic simplicity of the flashes—these little patches of stripes of color--is a catharsis from the bewildering overload of conflicting information that “Afghanistan” generates. Yet does not such simplicity succeed through its combining simplicity with abstraction that is not simple at all? It is a catharsis because the simplicity is too simple. It is a mystery. In other words despite the staid, ever-reliable, stolidity of the flashes, they are actually just that, “flashes” of this and that like fireflies in the night-land that is Afghanistan.  

Show color bars

From the moment I met him, Francis struck me as an odd bird. A flash, you might say. A firefly, for sure. Blessed with an ever surprising imagination, he was searingly practical, as well. If Charles Fourier needed an engineer to construct his utopias, well, here he was! Francis took in detail like a sponge and, more than that, saw connections and patterns in the eye of the hurricane dissolving all patterns. Meticulous and cerebral as his work is, it owes much to children’s games. “They are a major source of inspiration in my work,” he once told me, adding that he had to date made at least fifteen videos of kids’ games (which you can see as s the first item on his web site).

Does this mean his work is generally “childish”? Well, yes.  And no. Is Magritte childish? Or Duchamp?  It is childish in its studied innocence and self-absorption, cut off from the busy world of the adults, the pesky mothers and the demanding fathers. Like a children’s game it sails off into uncharted seas—and by children’s games I mean the games children have played with each other for a long, long, time, not the one’s invented by adults such as video games generally isolating the child from other children and from their own bodies.

Actually I first met not him but his shadow or empty space because he had disappeared, causing our chaperone all manner of anxiety. Like a naughty child he had played hooky to wander around threatening Kabul with his newly found architect Afghani friend, thereby manifesting yet again his ceaseless curiosity as to the ways of the world. You could see that curiosity in the marvelous photographs he would send you on email of our travels together, shots you would carefully archive, as much for their aesthetic power as for what they were about. You could see that in the “extra mile” he would go to get some other view, that extra question, that extra immersion, that comes to fill the notebook.

Much if not most of Francis’ artwork involves games in which exchange and circulation recur, invoking the idea of the gift in the circuitry of the social. “Work” as in “artwork” is somewhat of a misnomer for this art. “Art-game” would be more appropriate and that is why—and how—these artworks are so often overworked jokes, as with the artwork called Watercolor, a video 1:19 minutes in length, in which a plastic pail of water dipped into the Black Sea in Turkey is taken and emptied into the Red Sea in Jordan. That’s it, Watercolor! 1:19 minutes. But how long did it take to travel from The Black Sea to the Red?

This humor—uncovering exchange circuits that were not obvious before the artwork--is immediately apparent in le temps de sommeil (“the time of sleep”), 111 little paintings (roughly seven inches by five inches) created between 1996 and 2009, exhibited in the Irish Museum of Modern Art and published as a small book in 2010. The exchanges depicted may be between objects, such as pouring the contents of one glass into another, back and forth, or they may involve uncanny dimensions of the social world, as evident in the very last item in this book, “I will wander in the streets of Tokyo until someone calls my name.”

The most significant gift involving exchange and circulation, however, occurs at the meta-level wherein the painting on one page is juxtaposed with a short text of one or two lines on the page facing, the connection being—how shall I put this?—a gift exchange between image and text, barely a connection, a “flash,” we could say, yet in its tenuous fragility just right, meaning more than right, making you stare at the painting and then back again to the statement, your mind never still, oscillating, like playing badminton.

One or two openings in the le temps de sommeil book

There is another “childish” aspect to this and that lies with the very character of the drawings, deceptively simple, petite, sketchy, impish and wistful. As for the gift in this back and forth, it kick starts the process of exchange and circulation wherein one side—the image, for instance—offers itself as a gift to the other, meaning the text, for instance. And then there is the return gift, the fruit or reward of the interchange, creating that surplus which perforce becomes metamorphic of the text-image mix. Bataille’s notion of depense or unproductive expenditure comes to mind, depense itself being indispensable to gaming.

Are children’s games dying out, like a threatened species? Are the streets the world over ever more empty of kids playing—except for the poor parts of town and poor parts of the world, like Afghanistan? Have our cityscapes become ever more denuded and less sonorous with the cries of children replaced by cars and trucks? I look back at my own childhood in Sydney and certainly see this evolution, which sets me to wonder about the history of children’s games and toys.

In his Centuries of Childhood, for instance, Philippe Aries argues that childhood in western Europe is an invention of the late seventeenth century and that before then children were little adults, as testified by Velasquez’ Las Meninas, which is what I observe in rural Colombia also. But what does that imply for our understanding of toys and play? “Little adults” were surely not averse to play even if the “cult” of childhood had not been invented.

Benjamin, for example, whose work—like that of Francis Alys—can be seen as one big toy, a toy of theory--was entranced by children’s toys which he saw as in continuous negotiation with the world of adults, including adults’ notion of play and of childhood! Above all he insisted that the locus of joy and fascination with toys lay in the child’s love of mimesis and the body more than in the toy itself, as when he writes that “a child wants to pull something, and so he becomes a horse; he wants to play with sand, and so he turns into a baker; he wants to hide, and so he turns into a robber or a policeman.” (1)

I cannot but think of Francis pushing his block of ice through Mexico City.

And as regards the age and origins of toys, Benjamin suggests that the baby rattle has its origin in the need to ward off evil spirits and that hoops, kites, balls, and spinning tops were once what he calls cult objects. The spinning top is the main “character” in the Jose Maria Arguedas’ novel, Los ríos profundos, set in the highlands of Peru mid-twentieth century. The spinning top that the children play become not only animated, it becomes human-like and, more than that, a spirit that coordinates the narrative and unfolding events. In his book on play, Roger Caillois states that hopscotch, commonly played in the street or in the schoolyard, derives from the labyrinth in which one pushed a stone—meaning one’s soul—towards the exit. With Christianity the labyrinth took the form of the basilica and the exit was heaven. (2)

So where does that put Francis’ ice-block pushed into nothingness through the labyrinth of the third world city? What does this latest manifestation of the labyrinth say about our long forgotten connections to ancient mythology and to forgetting?

To invoke history and pre-history is to also ask if Francis’ work is inspired not so much by children’s games as by their world historical loss? I myself think this is so. As Benjamin says in relation to he art of the storyteller, it would be fatuous to see this merely as a symptom of decay and of modernization. Instead this loss is a symptom of the secular forces of economic production combined with the loss of narrative from the realm of living speech, “making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.” (3) Is it therefore all that surprising that our architect-artist from western Europe who has chosen to live in Mexico City would be sensitive to this “new beauty in what is vanishing.”

But what about screens?  What about kids glued to video games and computers the world over? Is this not a sign that gaming is alive and well, at least electronically? In which case what do you make of the elimination of the body from such games?  

Bodily involvement is starkly obvious in all Francis’ movies of children’s games, especially and gut wrenchingly so in Papalote (4:10 minutes) set in Balkh, Afghanistan, featuring a ten year old boy flying a kite. The involvement of the body is overwhelming yet as finely wrought as a mirage. Against a dun colored adobe wall, standing under a powder blue sky, the boy wears a pinkish trouser suit.  He is gesticulating like crazy, emitting frenzied gesture language, conversing in stops and starts with the heavens or at least with the gusting wind because you never see the kite and because the string is so fine you can’t see that either. All you see--what you see--is the body in action with unknown forces, pulling to the left, pulling to the right, up, down, quick, over to the left again, and so on and on.  The body is all the more obvious because it is connected like this to the coursing wind by an invisible string. This is not only the body of the boy but the body of the world in a deft mimesis of each other, amounting to what I call “the mastery of non-mastery” which, after all, is the greatest game of all, a guide, a goal, a strategy—all in one—for dealing with man’s domination of nature (including human nature).

An analogous trick—or should we call it a game?—makes mesmerizing magic out of the game “Rock, Paper, Scissors” (2:51 minutes). Here we see not the hands themselves but their shadows on a whitish background as the two antagonists play with that tremendous skill that only kids can muster in what seems impossibly fast motion; the clenched fist of “rock,” the two open fingers of  “scissors,” and the flat hand of “paper.” “Conceptual art,” you say, the kind you could watch for hours, the hands as synecdoche not of the body but of the two bodies in a controlled frenzy of elegant interaction and dissolution.

I wonder what the Taliban attitudes are towards children’s games like this, let alone towards videos thereof? But as we quickly learned once we got to Afghanistan in 2010 there is more than one “Taliban” and the ban on images is hardly uniform or coherent. But then, what is an “image”?

The Director the National Museum in Kabul, elegant in a fawn linen suit and golden tie, explained how in 1996 he had personally painted flowers and trees in watercolors over paintings with human and animal figures in the museum to protect the paintings before the Taliban came and smashed all the statues. Someone else ventured that the ban on image-making meant you couldn’t image animate beings and suggested breathing as the criterion of such animatedness. I was also told that the Taliban forbade photography and xeroxing—except for those things indispensable for state control, IDs and passports.

In the longest and most ambitious of the Afghan videos, Reel-Unreel, the notion of animate is really put to the Taliban test, as well as testing, in ways delightful and exploratory, western notions of what animate might encompass. Thanks to the skill and derring-do of two boys spinning film reels like hoops as fast as they can, the pixilated multitude that is Kabul springs to life as the camera follows the boys’ will-o’-the-wisp chase, aimless—completely aimless--except for the mad intensity with which the boy behind races to keep up with the boy some twenty feet in front, and the boy in front races to keep ahead of the one twenty feet behind. Could this be an allegory for that which is today called “Afghanistan,” meaning the continuous state of siege constituting that game in which the more you know, the less you know? Blind Man’s Buff also comes to mind.  One is tempted to invoke the “cult objects” idea of hoops and kites, let alone rattles.  

Like earlier works by Francis, such as the magnetic shoes and the magnetic “horse” he set perambulating the streets of Havana and Mexico City, attracting all manner of metallic debris, Reel-Unreel similarly attracts all manner of “debris.” In these and many if not most of his artwork, Francis seems to have set into motion Michel de Certeau’s principle of “walking the city” and Walter Benjamin’s idea of colportage--by which is meant the art that combines walking the city with filmic montage and with taking hashish. (4)

The two boys and their two reels, are bound together. The boy in front has his reel unwinding its load of celluloid film while the one behind winds it on to his reel at pretty much the same frenzied pace. It seems like this is film that has been developed and has frames with pictures, as we see when a boy holds up a segment to the light to look at the images therein. As for “debris,” much is made in this work of the destruction of the film and its picking up scratches and dirt as it slithers, snake-like, along the rough ground. This is above all a sonic phenomenon with scratching, screeching, sound, matter-in-torment, at once playful and sinister, at other times a whiplash. You ask yourself, “Is this unconsciously playing with Taliban prohibition of film?  Is it another way of filmmaking and un-filmmaking?”

Certainly Reel-Unreel offers an unusual perspective on reality for not only does it animate the landscapes through which the reels pass, but it often does this at knee-height, the height of the boys and the height of the reels bouncing their ways precariously though thick and thin. This is political filmmaking in a new key, the perspective from the ground up with wheels in motion. It is up to you, the viewer, to decide whether this be the wheels of Nietzche’s Eternal Return, Marx’s locomotive of history, or a Deleuzian post-Nietzchean “becoming intense, becoming animal . . ,” or—heaven forbid--something you make up yourself.

In The Accursed Share, Bataille makes a big point about war in the twentieth century being the privileged instance of depense—of spending the surplus in orgies of waste displacing by far Roman Carnival with its bread and circuses and Aztec sacrifice with its thousands of victims offered the gods. Now entering its thirteenth year, that gargantuan spending spree of life and treasure (not money but “treasure,” as they say repeatedly in the US Senate) the US led war in Afghanistan surely qualifies as the Great Depense as much as the Great Game.  

Kipling narrated this game through a young boy,  Kimball O Hara, just as Francis Alys has the two boys chasing each other over the mountains and choked streets of Kabul, only his game and the boys’ game auto-cannibalises narration. It is, as Bataille would have it in his essay on Van Gogh and the sacred dimension of auto-mutilation, the practice of self-sacrifice of narration and of the very idea of a purpose—which is, after all, what you need to make sense. A sense of purpose, that is. There is no beginning and no end to Reel-Unreel, just this mad breathless chase to no purpose other than itself. After all, the very title cleverly expresses just this. One would also like to say that the tension is not only intense but continuous. Yet like the state of exception/emergency it is not so much continuous, not so much like the river flowing, as it is staggered and chaotic, with each “moment” a world on its own and unpredictable from what was before and what comes after. Differential calculus on mescaline, what I elsewhere call “the nervous system.” But yes!, there is an end, when the leading reel plunges to its destruction over a cliff. That is sacrifice. But this end is totally unexpected, more a nervous system collapse than an ending. Game Over.

mick taussig greene ave brooklyn

1. ‘The Cultural History of Toys,” in Selected Writings, Vol 2, p. 115. See also Jeffrey Mehlman, Walter Benjamin for Children, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 1993.

2. Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press), 2001 [1958].

3. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken), 1968, p. 87. 

4. Michel de Certeau, “Walking In The City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press); on colportage see “Chronology” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Works, Vol 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1999, p. 255, 827.