#fulda city life

[marquisevonobst]

Top 5 towns!

Thank you for the ask!

I have not been abroad that often, which is why it centres on German towns/cities I have visited :'D

5. Weimar (miss you, miss my thuringian dudes and friends, @mutantenfisch, @adores-many-cats, @artistichound), honourable mention: Gotha, visit Schloss Friedenstein!

4. Dresden/Leipzig/Tangermünde/Apeldoorn (chaotic combination, but dear to my heart. One is not like the others, I'm sorry, lovely dutch neighbours)

3. Potsdam (new stage in life, new academic path and so much better. Lots of love to my friends, you know who you are)

2. Bamberg (Aesthetically stunning! Spent two wonderful days there!)

Munich (I knooow it's posh, it's overdramatic, has a shitty airport and a shitty administration, but every day I spent there has been pure bliss!)

honourable mentions: Cologne, Hamburg, Erfurt, Düüüren City, Hoenderloo, Fulda, Ottobeuren, Naumburg, Merseburg, Rudolstadt, Brandenburg an der Havel, Rheinsberg, Flensburg

[dwellordream]

“…There is a real belief on behalf of a not insignificant subset of society that the medieval Church was a shadowy organisation dedicated solely to suppressing knowledge and scientific advancement. This is not true.

The Church was in all actuality the medieval period’s largest benefactor of scholars of all stripes. Initially, in the early medieval period much learning was focused in monastaries in particular. Because monks took a vow to eschew idleness, they were always looking for new ways to work for the greater glory of God, or whatever. Sometimes this took the form of doing manual labour to feed themselves, but as monasteries such as Cluny rose to prominence they did more and more work in libraries as well.

Monks copied and embellished manuscripts and kept impressive libraries. Sometimes this work took place inside what we call “scriptoria” where more than one scribe is working at a time. They saw themselves as charged with transmitting knowledge. A lot of that knowledge was, of course, pagan, because they were extremely into classical thinkers. They were also reading this work of course, and writing their own commentaries on it. Many of them took the medical texts and used them to set up hospitals within their monasteries, as we have talked about before.

Lest you think this is all one big sausage fest, women were also very much about that book life within nunneries. They also had their own scriptoria and were busy scribbling away, reading, writing, and thinking. If you wanted a life where you strove for new scholarly heights, odds were that in the early medieval period you did that inside a monastery on nunnery.

As the medieval period moved on, scholarship eventually moved out of the cloister and into cities when the medieval university was established. The first degree awarding institution to call itself a university was the University of Bologna established around 1088, though teaching had been going on there previously and students had been going to Bologna from at least the late tenth century. Second was the University of Paris, which was established in 1150. Again teaching had been happening there from much earlier, and at least 1045.

Medieval universities weren’t like universities now, in that they didn’t have established campuses or anything like that. They were, more or less, a loose affiliation of scholars who would provide lessons to interested students. The University of Paris, for example, described itself as “a guild of teachers and scholars” (universitas magistrorum et scholarium).

In Paris there were four faculties: Arts, Medicine, Law, and Theology. Everyone had to attend the Arts school first where they would be asked to learn the trivium, which was comprised of rhetoric, logic, and grammar. Basically that meant all undergrads spent their time learning to argue, which is how the whole Abelard thing comes about. Then if they wanted more they could go do medicine, law, or theology. Theology was considered the really crazy good stuff, as medieval theologians were sorta held up in the way we worship astrophysicists like Neil de Grasse Tyson (ugh) or Stephen Hawking now. But if you wanna be a dick and super modern about it and think that nothing is more important than science, you will note that medicine is there and actively pursued.

So what, what does all of this have to do with the Church not being suppressive? Well literally everyone, both scholars and students in a medieval university was a member of the clergy. That’s right. Are you a Christian and you wanna learn about medicine? Well you need to take holy orders first. So every single scientific advancement that came out of a medieval university (and there were plenty) was made by a man of the cloth.

The quick among you might have spotted that the thing about unis is that they were just for dudes though, and that is lamentably true. Women weren’t able to take the same orders as men, which means they were excluded from university training. Plenty of them got tutored if they were rich. (See poor Heloise who just had Abelard, like, do himself at her.) Otherwise there was plenty of sweet stuff going on in nunneries still and always, as the visionary natural biologist Hildegard of Bingen can attest. Monasteries were also still producing good stuff as Thomas Aquinas would be happy to let you know from the comfort of his Dominican order.

Given that all of this is the case, it’s hard to square that circle of “the Church is intentionally suppressing knowledge!” with the fact that everyone actively working on acquiring and furthering knowledge was a member of it and all. The Church was a welcoming home to scholars because it was a place where you got the time needed to contemplate subjects for a long time. If you have your corporeal needs taken care of, then you can go on to think about stuff. The Church offered that.

Having said all of this, there were, of course, plenty of Jewish and Muslim scholars at work in medieval Europe as well. The thriving Jewish communities of the medieval period had their own complex theological discussions about the Talmud, and produced their own truly delightful sexual and scientific theory that I will never tire of reading.

I’ve also talked at length about how Islamic medical advances were very much taken on board by medieval Christians in Europe. The fact that the Christians in holy orders beavering away at the medical faculties of universities across Europe were very much looking to a Muslim guy called Ibn Sinna for medical knowledge makes it hard to see the Church as an oppressive hater of all things non-Catholic. I’m just saying.

What else is at play here? Meh, society writ large. A lot of us in the English as a first language speaking world, and in northern Europe more generally have been raised in a Protestant context even if we ourselves are not Protestant. The thing about that is Protestants, famously, is that they are not huge fans of the Church. Big news, I know. In the Early Modern period this could get kinda wild, with things like the Great Fire of London being blamed on a nefarious “Papish plot”, for example, becoming a nice early example of a conspiracy theory. (That conspiracy theory was still written in Latin at the based of The Monument built to commemorate the fire until 1830 when the Catholics were officially emancipated in Britain. LOL.)

When the whole Enlightenment thing went down, generalised distrust of Catholics was then later compounded by the fact that “serious” thinkers aka Voltaire’s ridiculously basic self began to categorise the accumulation of knowledge specifically in opposition to religious thought. This is the old “Age of Reason” which we currently allegedly reside in, versus the “Age of Faith” idea. The Church as an overarching institution from the age of faith was therefore thought of as necessarily regressive, and it became assumed that it has always been actively attempting to thwart advantage for vaguely sinister reasons that are never fully articulated.

…Now, plenty of people were killed for witchcraft because they were doing medicine. The witch trials were a very real thing, and you know when and where they happened? In the modern period, and usually with a greater regularity in Protestant places. Witchcraft trials peak in general from about 1560-1630 which is the modern period. The most famous trials with the biggest kill count took place in Trier, Fulda, Basque, Wurtzburg, Bamberg, North Berwick, Torsåker and Salem. You know what was going on in most of the places? The Reformation. Witch trials sort of reflected various confessions of Christianity’s ability to effectively protect their flocks from evil. Did Catholics kill “witches” oh you bet your sweet ass they did. So did Protestants, and it was all fucking ugly.

What is important to note is that in countries where Catholicism was static witch trials were largely unheard of. Ireland, the Iberian Peninsula, and Italy, for example, just didn’t go in for them even though they were theoretically in the clutches of a nefarious Church bent on destroying all medical knowledge or something.

Now, none of this is to excuse the multifarious sins of the institutional Church over the years. In many ways my entire career as a medieval historian is a product of the fact that I was frustrated with the Church after 16 years of Catholic school. If you had to go to a High School named after the prosecutor in the Galileo trial, you might also end up devoting yourself to picking intricate theological fights with the Church, OK? (Yes, this is my origin story.)

And that brings us to the crux of the matter: if you make up a bunch of stuff that the Church did not do it makes it harder to critique them of the manifold things they actually did do and are doing right fucking now. We need to be critiquing the Magdalene Laundries; the international cover up of pedophile priests; signing an actual concordant with Nazi Germany; the regressive attitudes towards abortion and contraception that happen still, now, and endanger the lives of countless women. All of this is real, and calls for the strongest possible condemnation.”

- Eleanor Janega, “JFC, calm down about the medieval Church.”

[kathasworld]

Picture from WIkimedia - this coat of arms of Steinau is a 1956 design , presenting St. Catherine, patron saint of the city - but older Steinau Coat of Arms too had a wheel and a  sword. From Thuringia- this story gives an explanation of a design on the Coat of Arms of a noble family in Steinau This is a story of one Abbot’s being subject to hostility by subordinates that happened in CE 1271. The Abbot Berold of Fulda fell prey of own subjects who conspired to take his life. One day when he was reading at the St. Jacobs CapelleMesse, the rulers of Steinau and Eberstein as well as Albrecht von Brandau, Ebert von Spala, and Ritter Conrad entered there together, attacked and killed him. The attackers were thirty in number. Soon these assassins with their twenty horses were captured at Hasselstein for committing the robbery and crime in the church. They were executed by swords and their homes destroyed. For this reason, the ruling family of Steinau had to inscribe three wheels with three hatchets in their coat of arms to memorize the event. The site where they formed the alliance to plan the assassination of the Abbot is in Steinau at a street in Hanau. Though the location is beside a fountain on a lawn, the space became barren revealing the sin of the killing. No vegetation grows there till date. #folktale #belief #steinau #germany🇩🇪 #german #sagen #grimms #medieval #legend #thuringia #abbot #assassination #powerstruggle uggle #christianity #sin https://www.instagram.com/p/CczMI0JLXCo/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[fd-citylife-blog]

Pflanzenfresser und Besseresser

Was macht eigentlich gute Ernährung aus?

Das Angebot im Supermarkt ist so reich wie nie, doch zugleich häufen sich Lebensmittelskandale. Das sorgt für Verunsicherung: Was kann man eigentlich noch essen? Was darf man essen? Und was ist gesund für mich? Während die Mehrheit der Deutschen ihren Speiseplan noch ohne Einschränkungen gestaltet, ernähren sich immer mehr Menschen nach besonderen Regeln. Neben persönlichen Vorlieben oder der eigenen Gesundheit ist zunehmend auch der Tier- und Umweltschutzgedanke entscheidend.

Das gilt zum Beispiel für die Vegetarier: Weil kein Tier für sie sterben soll, essen sie weder Fleisch noch Fisch. Milch, Eier und Honig sind aber erlaubt. Veganer verzichten sogar ganz auf tierische Produkte, nicht nur beim Essen. Auch Wolle, Leder oder Daunen sind tabu, ebenso Kosmetik, die tierische Bestandteile enthält oder an Tieren getestet wurde. Noch weiter gehen Frutarier: Damit weder Tiere noch Pflanzen leiden müssen, ernähren sie sich nur von pflanzlichen Lebensmitteln, bei deren Ernte die Mutterpflanze nicht beschädigt wird. Das sind zum Beispiel Fallobst, Nüsse oder Tomaten. Im Alltag verzichten Frutarier auf alles, was von Tieren oder Pflanzen stammt, sogar auf Möbel und Gegenstände aus pflanzlichem Material. Einer der berühmtesten Frutarier war Apple-Gründer Steve Jobs. Der berühmte Apfel im Logo und der Firmenname sind eine Hommage an die Apfelsorte McIntosh. Jobs‘ Leibspeise, rohe Karotten, sind allerdings für Frutarier nicht erlaubt.

Gelebte Kritik an der Lebensmittelverschwendung betreiben Freeganer. Sie essen ausschließlich Nahrungsmittel aus nicht-kommerziellem Handel, schränken sich aber ansonsten nicht ein. Das Essen wird selbst angebaut, getauscht oder man greift auf weggeworfene Produkte zurück, um gegen die Lebensmittelindustrie zu protestieren. Wer mehr hat, als er braucht, verschenkt den Überschuss in Foodsharing-Gruppen weiter.

Anhänger der Slow-Food-Bewegung dagegen nutzen ihre Macht als Konsumenten direkt vor Ort: Nach dem Grundsatz „gesund, sauber, fair“ achten sie beim Einkauf auf hochwertige Lebensmittel und legen großen Wert auf regionalen Anbau.

Dann gibt es noch die Flexitarier oder „Teilzeitvegetarier“. Bei ihnen gilt: Lieber selten Fleisch und Fisch, aber dafür hochwertig. Flexitarier ernähren sich sehr bewusst und ausgewogen und gewinnen daher besonders im Hinblick auf Lebensmittelskandale immer mehr an Zulauf. Sie gelten als der Ernährungstyp der Zukunft.

Besonders gesundheitsbewusst sind auch die Anhänger der Rohkostbewegung. Um Vitamine und Enzyme in der Nahrung zu erhalten, dürfen Lebensmittel nicht über 45 Grad erhitzt werden. Auf ganz ursprüngliche Weise beantwortet die Paleo-Lehre die Frage nach der gesündesten Ernährung: Erlaubt sind nur Lebensmittel, die unsere Vorfahren vor 10.000 Jahren schon kannten, zum Beispiel Nüsse, Gemüse, Früchte, Eier, Fisch und natürlich Fleisch. Auf Kartoffeln, Getreide und Milchprodukte wird verzichtet.

Über Geschmack lässt sich bekanntlich nicht streiten. Jedoch können die einzelnen Gruppen viel voneinander lernen und einander inspirieren. Dazu braucht es nur Offenheit, Neugier, ein bisschen Toleranz – und Hunger.

[kontextmaschine]

On President Trump’s desire for a major military parade

The one point that jumps out at me is contrary to the most common takes going around I’m not sure it would actually represent a net increase in military pageantry for domestic consumption.

In recent years that stuff’s been piggybacked on to the NFL as an exclusive-to-but-universal-within American institution and seasonal cycle, but that’s falling from its perch and becoming pillarized.

Before that though, as recently as the mid-‘90s I have the sense of *more* military parades, small town parades on Independence and Memorial Day, that would include veterans but also current military personnel and equipment (and high school marching bands, and the Shriners in their fezzes and micro-cars).

Maybe that hasn’t declined it’s just that since my age hit double digits I’m not the kind of person that gets taken to see these things at 10AM on a day off. But I don’t see as many secondhand depictions of them as I remember, either.

Maybe no one is that kind of person anymore, like the decline of church attendance, a lot of it is that in a world where the height of electronic connectivity was cable TV (or maybe a huge satellite dish in the yard) and multiple phone lines in your house, it was more appealing to get up and haul out early in the morning for the sake of doing/witnessing something interesting in the presence of others.

Maybe it’s shifts in the military structure, that in going from draftee to recruit and then shrinking at the close of the Cold War, with far-flung bases closed and consolidated, any random town was less likely to have a critical mass of military equipment and military-identifying people around. Maybe I’m too close to the coastal cities and if I moved nearer to a base or to the inland places I hear veterans tend to settle it’d be different.

Maybe it’s the Vietnam veterans’ disillusionment from their military identities that left a gap that was only partly patched by Gulf War I enthusiasm, and the parade-organizing entities they avoided – American Legion, VFW – faltered. Maybe as the infantry mechanized and marches got replaced with highway commutes, parades just don’t speak to veterans’ nostalgic experience.

(Recently I’m realizing what Gulf War I really meant in the American national narrative, a kind of way to dissipate the emotional pressures of a Cold War that we won without doing anything in particular, without a climactic battle or conquest. I remember all the yellow ribbons tied around trees to performatively worry for the sake of Our Boys Overseas in what was in retrospect a farcical turkey shoot.

I remember the way Boomer liberals mellowed by age kind of used it to reconcile with the military, and thru it the “real��� America, that was still kind of understood as a generation gap with religious overtones, and not fully yet the red/blue tribalism as we take it today. That would go on to be the theme of Bill Clinton’s campaign and presidency, really.

Everyone who had gutted it out through the military’s unpopular “bottom of the barrel” years in the post-Vietnam ‘70s and ‘80s got to be called up from reserves for a quick victory and fete as returning heroes. Our flag officers - Schwarzkopf, Powell - got capstone achievements to their careers, all our Fulda Gap toys - the M1 Abrams, the F-117 and B-2 stealth planes, the A-10, the Patriot theater ballistic interceptors – got a live-fire demo…)

BUT ANYWAY, in that regards I’m inclined to see a big national parade as holding the rate of military pageantry in American life steady in the face of shifts, and not as increasing it to an obscene level as some critics. And thus as a fairly anodyne innovation in symbolic Presidential ritual like turkey-pardoning or the National Prayer Breakfast, and not a terrifying totalitarian specter.

[agermanbetweenscots]

Summer 2019 Part II

The summer post-interview and pre-acceptance was spent in three countries, and in a constant state of sweat.

I went to the fair with my oldest friend Michaela and her parents. Her dad kept asking me why I would wanna study medicine in Vilnius, her mum kept offering me drinks and Michaela and me kept riding the Kraken. My stomach told me off afterwards and reminded me that I got too old – because after riding the Kraken twice, I was so nauseous. But this is tradition. The fair, the Michaela and the Kraken.

After a couple days in Goslar and buying new summer dresses, I travelled to Sacramento for the first time. This was the time where Chris had decided to grow out his beard (terrible decision, if you ask me). So, most of our Sacramento pictures are me in my wonderful, newly bought dresses and him in a questionable long beard. I am clearly the more fashionable in this relationship haha.

Sacramento is a wonderful city, very green, very hipster, very capital.

Unfortunately, it is also very American in the sense that walking around is hardly do-able. What it is with America and highways in the middle of the city. (They are probably not highways, and it is probably also not the middle of the city – but still. How am I supposed to discover a city if you cannot walk around?) Sometimes thinking back on this (it has also already annoyed me in OK) I wonder how Chris sticks around – the European girlfriend makes him park so much out his way just so she can walk around at 35°C, along pavements in little shade to get to the capitol building. By the way – did you know that a capitol building gets to have a golden roof if it produced a president? Inside the capitol there were different windows, showing what the different counties of California are famous for. I loved seeing that from Hollywood to farming, to wood production. I also tried to learn about the politics (we were in the capitol after all and once again I was reminded at the fact that Chris is very unpolitical. I quizzed him on his current senators. And he did not know. Tsk, tsk, tsk.

In case I told you (and you remember) I had signed up for my first half marathon while writing my bachelor thesis (and roped Jon into it). So, on a random evening, we drove to Davis to attempt a 13.2 mile run. And even though it was an evening run (I think it started around 6PM) it was so HOT. But we made it and I succeeded. Succeeded in running faster than Jon (goal #1) and succeeded in finishing (goal #2).

Downton Sacramento is so cute – they refurbished it to look like the old settler town, so you are constantly looking over your shoulder to not get shot by rogue cowboys or in a standoff between sheriff and thieves. It made me wanna see more of these Western Towns.

The highlight of my trip, however was and is still our trip to San Francisco. I managed to get Chris to see his first Musical: Hamilton! And it was great. Even though I must have spent so much money – first I bought the tickets on some weird reseller website (and paid 150$ each) and then I wanted to treat Chris to a beer and some M&S and paid another 40$. But the music, the vibe, the stage. I love theatre. And that play is just awesome. If you get a chance and have not seen it yet – go! The Disney+ version does not even come close.

The highlight of my life however also seemed to happen on that trip: I got an email from Adam. Who is Adam, I hear you asking? Adam, my lovelies is the guy telling me that I freaking got accepted to Kassel! I remember it being the early morning, Chris more or less gently snoring next to me, when I saw the email on my home screen of my phone. I opened it. Read it. Opened it again and then tried to call my parents. I forgot about the time difference however, so no one answered my call. I tried to wake up Chris. He woke up, squinted at me, mumbled something along the lines of congratulations and turned back around. Those were my celebrations.

(He did wake up a tiny bit later, gave me a kiss and was very happy for me. Plus this was very much reminiscing of the time when I got accepted to Vilnius)

After 12 days my time came to a close (for now) as I had to jet set to another country – me and my parents where planning on hiking through the Tatra for a week. My sister did not come with us for some reason that probably was very plausible when she told me, but I do not remember what it was. But it did mean one on one time with my parents. I am not complaining. The week in the Tatra was great, lots of wonderful hikes, nice hotels, good food. The Tatra was very green, difficult to hike up (one hike was literally 70° up, I was almost worried for mum and dad climbing up) but the closer we were to the polish site, the busier it got. The people hiking up the hills confused us a lot, few people looked prepared, most wore sandals, and all ages were present (babies, grandmas and people who looked like they never hiked before.

28th August Chris came to visit me (I did not have to go long without him this summer) and we should him the Harz and went swimming in the Kuttelbacher Teich. Chris was moaning about not having an AC and we had to make do with open windows and an old fashion fan, gently moving the hot air back and forth in the room. I introduced Chris to most of my family when my cousin celebrated his birthday and put on a garden party. He was even asked to put a colourful handprint on a blank canvas ‘like leaves on a tree’, so he is now put on there forever and cannot leave anymore. Most of my cousins spoke to him (thankfully most speak really good English) and even my oldest Uncle got out his school English and managed to get Chris involved in a monologue about his choir concert coming up. (We actually went as Chris promised him *rolls eyes*)

On the first of September, I had another half marathon in Eichstätt in Bavaria while visiting Biggy. It was less hot but instead it was two 11k loops and of course that is way harder on the mind. I would always run one loop of 20 k then running 20K in multiple smaller loops.

Chris absolutely loved Bavaria, he loved the beer, the meat, the people. We went to visit Thea in Munich and Chris loved the Beer Garden Culture.

One the way back from the deep, deep Bavaria in the sturdy Volvo, the front wheel of the car just exploded near Fulda. I drove to the side of the motor way and the conversation went something like this:

C: Don’t you worry. I am a man and from Oklahoma so I can change a wheel for you, my lady in distress.

H: *doubts but in German* but opens the boot anyways. There is no wheel.

C: Why is there no wheel? What backwards country is this? What is Europe? How do Europeans survive?

I called ADAC, called Volvo on Call (should have only covered the latter – but dad told me to call both) and we were picked up from a lovely chap that tried to sell me an ADAC membership but also tried to make smalltalk with Chris. In German.

So I had to multitask speaking about cars (I have no clue), trying to not get sold a membership with lots of fine print (and I cannot say No) while simultaneously trying to make Chris feel like I still translate for him (something I can actually do).

After a couple of hours we were back on the road – but I continued sneaking along the motorway terrified of the new wheel exploding on me to.

For the 9th of September, I had to back in Kassel for an induction day – where I got to see who made it through. Guess who made it. Guess…

PAULINE! (and Suveni and Nora)

While I was getting a tour through the hospital and got to know people on my course – I remember speaking to Thalia on the hallway, speaking to Nico on the lunch break (he had no hobbies and was wearing a suit – strange dude. Over time he got less strange and way cooler.) and chatting to Martha in the tram, Chris was at home. Mum and Dad wanted to do things with him – or at least they had offered, instead they both said they hardly seen him. He must have just hidden in my room. Awkward boy. But then I guess I would have done the same. As part of our induction day, we had to line up based on the towns we are from, based on our birthdays and last names. Basem was always in the front – last name starts with A, from Hamburg and born in early January. The older years came and said hi, told us to get bikes to get around (and an helmet for Dale Road) and told us how to best study. Which I do not remember. They also told us not to get a British phone number or bank account – I had both already. (Which would come back to bite me in the behind, more to that later)

Back in Goslar we climbed up the Broken in the morning to see the sunrise, Hanna joined us. It was cold and early in the morning and Chris never hated me more.

On the 18th of September, Chris was leaving Europe from Berlin, so me and him spent a night in Berlin and I invited him for a dinner in the Film Tower with the rotating restaurant. And it made me dizzy. Also, fancy restaurants just feel weird. They feel weird for students. And I am too much of a picky eater. And broke. I am grateful for the experience but let’s wait another 10 years for that, shall we?

After a tearful goodbye Chris got into the plane towards Sweden, while I remained behind.

I always wonder how the heart can actually feel like its breaking and the more I learn about the human body – the more I want to know: Is it anxiety? What physiological mechanism underlies the heartbreak – that does feel like that.

On 19th September, me and my parents flew to Southampton. We flew from Düsseldorf to Southampton directly with an airline that quickly stopped this connection and then went broke (probably missing out on all these students flying back and forth).

We stayed in the Jury’s Inn, walked around and mostly were surprised at how much it is a shithole if compared to Edinburgh and constantly tried to find a place to drink a coffee at. Sometimes we got lucky, sometimes we did not. Mum and I went to see the Downton Abbey Film in the cinema and were positively surprised by the reclining seats – both of us used to the Cineplex back home had never really seen something like this before. Dad stayed in the pub. He stayed in the pub when we went to see the castle of Southampton (It is a ruin. Not an actual castle). But he left the pub to go to Argos to pick up a clothes drying rack that I ordered. And then he promptly returned to my bed in Romero Halls and had a nap. Weekend well spent.

[wolfdogandme]

Golden Days 🌞⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 🐾⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ The summer colours everything in the most diverse shades of gold 🌄. I love it so much to watch 🧐 the changing nature and discover something new 🤗 every day. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 🐾⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Living in the countryside 🌾 has also given me a whole new awareness 🧘 of these things. When I was still living in the city 🌆 I was very often surprised when "suddenly" 😲 the trees 🌳 in the park or at the roadside changed their colour completely. But I simply did not notice it 😣, because something else always caught my attention. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 🐾⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ I do not want to judge 😇 what is fundamentally better now: Of course life in the city 🌆 has its advantages and also offers many exciting impressions 😍. It just strikes me again and again how differently I now perceive everyday things and have perceived them in the past and also how much I prefer country life ❤️️🌳❤️️.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 🐾⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ How do you feel about that? Have you ever felt the same way?⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 🐾⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 🐾⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 🐾⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ #wolfdogs #lieblingshund #wolfstagram #hundefotos #wolf #wolfmix #wolfdogcommunity #dogoftheday #beautifuldog #wolfshund #realwolfdog #czechoslovakianwolfdog #Fujixseries #ilovemydog #chienloup #dusk #canelupo #canelupocecoslovacco #wolfhybrid #wolves #hund #czechwolfdog #dogphotography #lupocecoslovacco #wolfdog #ceskoslovenskyvlcak #perrolobochecoslovaco #dog #instawolf #hundeliebe (hier: Fulda, Germany) https://www.instagram.com/p/CEKEOPcH2YW/?igshid=v5k4497nxqm0

[cutsliceddiced]

New top story from Time: East Germans Were Welcomed to the West with Free Money. Here’s What They Bought After the Berlin Wall Fell

Peter Keup can still remember how it felt to hold deutsche marks in his hand.

“It was special to even touch this money,” he recalls. “It felt solid. The East German mark was thinner, flimsier.” As a boy growing up in East Germany, he was sometimes sent West German currency by his grandparents on the other side of the border, be it as a birthday gift or a reward for good school grades. Keup pored obsessively over the notes, minted with the mysterious–sounding titles and images of unknown cities and historical figures. “Names from behind the Iron Curtain, an invisible world,” he reflects. Their worth to him was far more than simply financial.

In any case, there was only so much the 16 million citizens of the communist German Democratic Republic (G.D.R.) could buy in a sealed-off country of scarcity, shortages and joyless austerity. Tantalizing tastes of Western consumer goods could be obtained on the black market and at state-run “Intershops,” which only accepted hard currency, like dollars or deutsche marks. Cigarettes, coffee, chocolate and pop records were on offer to those who could afford them. Others had to find their pleasures where they could. “I loved the smell of Persil and Ariel detergent in the clothes,” reminisces Nicole Hartmann, of receiving packages of hand-me-downs from relatives in the West as a young girl. “I always wanted to keep them unwashed.”

When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, followed by the inner German border that ran from Czechoslovakia to the Baltic Sea, the gates to the West were opened to all, and the bounties and temptations that lay beyond. By foot and by row upon row of Trabant and Wartburg cars, the “Ossis” (as East Germans were known) began to pour across what had been one of the most secure borders in the world. Were that not all reason enough to feel euphoric, there was more awaiting them on the other side: free money.

Nanna Heitmann—Magnum Photos for TIMEA 100 Deutsche Mark bill.

Since 1970, East Germans arriving to the Federal Republic of Germany by whatever means were paid a grant, initially of 30 deutsche marks (DM) twice a year, later rising to 100 DM once a year, under a program known as Begrüßungsgeld or “welcome money.” Under Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik policy of peaceful rapprochement, the measure was intended to help the few people who did manage to depart the G.D.R., legally or otherwise, to pay for food or travel. The amount is equivalent to about $100 in today’s money.

After the abrupt and entirely unforeseen rupture of the Berlin Wall, demand for welcome money surged—and the West German authorities stuck to their promise. As word spread like wildfire among arriving Ossis, long queues began to form outside banks and building societies. The state-sanctioned handout triggered a colossal spending spree across Berlin’s River Spree. It was a commercial revolution, and a moment of mass transactional transference from socialism into capitalism and the material world. Considered a gift by some and a bribe by others, it helped set the tone for full and swift reunification by October 1990, firmly on West German terms.

No official statistics exist as to exactly how much was claimed in all, but by the time payments were halted on Dec. 29, 1989, replaced by a foreign currency fund that both German states contributed to, it’s estimated that at least 4 billion DM had been paid out in a matter of just seven weeks. “I think over 95% [of East Germans] got this money,” speculates Sören Marotz, historian at the DDR Museum of East Germany’s history. “Some people found ways to claim the money more than once.”

On West Berlin’s glittering technicolor shopping boulevard, the Kurfürstendamm, the famous KaDeWe department store was a first port of call for many—to spend or simply to stare in awe at its luxurious abundance. In supermarkets in the borderlands of West Germany, witnesses remember seeing shelves stripped bare. Almost everyone claimed their 100 DM, from the current Chancellor Angela Merkel, then a 35-year-old physicist living in East Berlin, to sports stars, doctors, artists, political dissidents, musicians, families, pensioners and Stasi agents. Even babies were eligible for a payout.

Cash injections to the former G.D.R. have in some ways never ceased. Since 1991, Germans have paid a so-called solidarity surcharge, a fee on income, capital gains and corporate taxes currently set at 5.5%, in order to help the former communist east. Yet despite receiving €243 billion in “Soli” taxes since 1995, the economy in the country’s East continues to lag far behind the West’s. Unemployment is higher, wages are lower, and the population of the former G.D.R.’s territory has dropped to its lowest level in 114 years. It has given rise among some to what is known as “Ostalgia,” a longing for the simplicity and cradle-to-grave comforts of life in the G.D.R. Political disaffection has seen parts of the former East become a heartland for populist parties; in the eastern state of Thuringia on Oct. 27, the far-right anti–migrant Alternative for Germany party finished ahead of Merkel’s -center-right party in local elections.

What East Germans decided to buy when the Wall fell says a lot about that moment in our history, 30 years ago—about the true value of money, about competing economic systems, and about the hopes, freedoms and tensions of reunifying a country. Each purchase tells its own story. Here are 10 of them:

The All-American Doll

Nanna Heitmann—Magnum Photos for TIMESusan Penquitt and her daughter Nora play with the Barbie she bought in 1989.

“There was a long row of cars in the middle of the night,” Susan Penquitt remembers vividly, despite being just 8 years old when her family drove across the border into West Germany for the first time. The road led to the city of Fulda in Hesse, about 65 miles east of Frankfurt, and the toy section of a department store, a sight the little girl had barely dreamed of. “When I saw the Barbie on the shelf, you know, that was it. I don’t remember any other toy in that shop.”Lovingly looked after for three decades, the iconic American doll today belongs to Penquitt’s eldest daughter Nora, 8, in their home outside of Leipzig. It’s a happy token of what was not always a happy time. Like millions of East Germans working in largely state-owned industries, both of Penquitt’s parents lost their jobs following reunification. “They never had so many sorrows really,” she says.

A Grand Scheme for a Piano

Nanna Heitmann—Magnum Photos for TIMEElse Gabriel, left, and Ulf Wrede with their Bösendorfer piano.

The bohemian East Berlin performance artists Else Gabriel and Ulf Wrede celebrated their first days and nights in the West like many Germans did: together in a beer-soaked haze. “We gave pieces of the Wall to people in bars and they gave us drinks,” 57-year-old Gabriel recalls. “Everyone was so out of control. It felt like you could do anything, there was two systems just collapsing into each other.” By ripping out pages from their passports to remove collection stamps, they say they claimed their Begrüßungsgeld multiple times between them. “I spent 27 years of my life in f-cking East Germany,” Gabriel says. “There was no guilt about [taking] a few hundred deutsche marks.”

Gabriel had been permitted to leave the G.D.R. just days before the Wall fell, and had earned some deutsche marks there already. The couple combined their funds left over after the revelries and changed it all back to Eastern currency, taking advantage of a black market exchange rate to convert around 2,000 DM into around 10,000 Eastern marks. After smuggling it back into East Germany in Wrede’s socks (“It stank when we pulled the money out,” Gabriel laughs), the pair used their haul to pay off a loan on a Bösendorfer grand piano. In his Neukölln studio apartment today, Wrede, 51, still plays the dusty black keyboard, now worth many times the price he paid for it 30 years ago. “Best deal ever,” Gabriel grins proudly.

Black Adidas, White Stripes

At the time the Wall fell, Andreas Thom was already living a privileged life. At 24, he had played 51 matches for the East German national soccer team, and won the G.D.R. Premier League five times with Dynamo Berlin. Surely Thom had no need for his Begrüßungsgeld? “Of course I got the money,” he says. “Everybody got the money!” On a shopping trip to the KaDeWe, he purchased a pair of soccer shoes: “Adidas Samba Spezial, black with white stripes.” Just 37 days after reunification, Thom made history as the first East German player to sign for a West German club, when he moved to Bayern Leverkusen for a fee of 2.5 million DM. He thinks back to his debut game in February 1990 vs. FC Homburg. “Everybody was watching [as if] I had four arms, two heads, four legs,” he says. “But I scored, and everything was O.K.”

An Exotic Feast of Rare Foods

A dissident photographer, Harald Hauswald’s evocative black-and-white street scenes from behind the Wall were published in West German magazines as well as in a controversial book, making him a person of interest to the hated state security police. Hauswald escaped serious imprisonment only because of his connections to influential Western journalists, who would help him smuggle his film reels out. Shooting sometimes literally from the hip, he wielded his camera like a weapon. “I felt so trapped by the Wall,” says the 65-year-old. “Taking photographs was the work I did to fight against that feeling.” Hauswald and his friends bought a victory feast of foods unavailable in the East with their welcome money. “Kiwi and radicchio, that kind of stuff,” he says. “Today I know my way around exotic fruits better than many Westerners. And I still love to cook.”

A Pen Unlike All the Others

Nanna Heitmann—Magnum Photos for TIMETasso with an Edding marker pen like the one he bought in 1989.

Jens Müller, a.k.a. graffiti artist Tasso, owns many black Edding 850 marker pens today, but he is pretty sure that jumbled somewhere among them in his warehouse studio in Meerane is the one that changed his life. “For me it was the first time I had seen graffiti tags, on every corner in every place,” he says, of driving with friends around Kreuzberg in West Berlin as a 23-year-old. “I was wondering, ‘How have they done this?’ And then I see it must be a pen, a marker, and so I said, ‘I want to have this marker.’” He found one in a Karstadt department store that cost 10 of his 100 DM. “That was a lot. My friends thought I was crazy.” He worked in construction following reunification, eventually becoming a freelance artist. Today his tag is recognized around the world. He has visited 32 different countries to make, exhibit and promote his work.

Reading Material for the Runway

On a gray day in November 1988, 23-year-old fashion model and designer Grit Seymour was given four hours to leave the G.D.R. Her exit-visa application had been unexpectedly approved. “I had to speed pack,” she says. “My mother walked me to say goodbye. Of course we shed a lot of tears.” She stepped penniless into West Berlin, but remembers feeling instantly liberated. “It was like this huge block of concrete had fallen off my body.” With her Begrüßungsgeld she bought a copy of fashion magazine Vogue Italia, a window into a glamorous new world. On the night the Wall fell, Seymour was already modeling for Gianni Versace in Milan. She returned as fast as she could to Berlin to be reunited with family and friends. “It was like a dream coming true,” she says.

A Bouquet of Flowers for Grandma

“It set me free,” says Peter Keup, of how ballroom dancing made him feel while growing up in Dresden. He excelled at it competitively in partnership with his sister Uta, and in 1981 they were offered the chance to represent the G.D.R. internationally—but only if their family first withdrew a long-standing exit-visa application. They refused. “That’s when I took the decision to escape,” he says. In 1981, aged just 19, Keup set out for Czechoslovakia with a plan to swim across the River Danube from Hungary into Austria. He had 80 DM from his grandparents hidden in the seam of his jeans, which he hoped would pay his way to freedom. Instead he was caught on a train to Bratislava, arrested for currency smuggling and returned to the G.D.R. After a confession extracted under brutal interrogation, he was jailed by the Stasi for 10 months, spending long periods in solitary confinement. Keup’s grandparents’ lawyer helped convince the West German government to pay a $55,000 ransom, and suddenly he really was free. “For the first time it made me feel like an independent human being,” he says, of receiving his Begrüßungsgeld. The yellows and violets of the bouquet of freesia flowers he bought for his grandmother Anna remain bright in his mind. Keup boarded a train for the West German city of Essen and a new life. Years later, the Wall fell, and he and his sister danced together again.

Nothing: “I Was Not a Beggar”

Bernd Roth, a former major in the feared Stasi, is adamant he never claimed his Begrüßungsgeld. “I was not a beggar,” he says. Today Roth, 68, rejects the system that he served, yet is unapologetic about his own actions, which led to the known arrests of 14 people, including a CIA spy. “Why should we be pressured to have a bad [conscience]?” he asks. “We didn’t build concentration camps.” His love of music helped him preserve his individuality, he says. He thought nothing of singing along to “Born in the U.S.A.” at a Bruce Springsteen concert in East Berlin in 1988. “It was just music!” he laughs. Roth still lives in the same town in Thuringia where he grew up. The West has never held any appeal for him, he says. “I found it overwhelming and oppressive. I think oversaturated consumption is harmful.” Was there really nothing that he wanted there? “I might have bought myself some Grundig speakers,” he admits. “That was really just about being able to enjoy a better sound.”

Legos, a Radio and a Trip

Cornelia Guenther first entered the West at Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie, the infamous Cold War crossing point. Then 29, and a single mother working as a translator, she gingerly stepped across the border in late-November 1989. “I looked at my foot,” she says, as she crossed the military checkpoint that she had overlooked every day from her office window. “I thought, ‘Now I’m walking on West Berlin soil; how amazing is this?’” Having collected their 200 DM, she and her son Christian, 6, bought carefully selected spoils at the KaDeWe: a backpack, some Legos, a radio for the kitchen. The rest of the cash they put toward a trip to England a few months later. “Buying experience was much more important to me than material things,” says Guenther.

A Computer, and a Future

When the Wall fell, Gordon van Godin was a 19-year-old newly discharged from national service in the East German army. He put his welcome money toward an Amiga computer so he could play Tetris and Formula 1 games. Today, he is director of Berlin’s DDR Museum of East German history, and qualified to bust some popular myths about Begrüßungsgeld. Is it true, for instance, that many people bought… bananas? “This is really a cliché, 100%,” he replies. “Because bananas we knew. We didn’t know, for example, kiwi fruit.” He believes the money helped establish a lasting hierarchy between West and East in a reunited Germany that still endures today. “I learned in school that in capitalism, nothing is for free,” Von Godin says. “You have to pay for everything sooner or later.”

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

[theravencroft]

Towards A Less Sexy Apocalypse Or, Do 70 Million People Shit In The Woods?

I harbor a love of post-apocalyptic writing that dates back to The Cold War, because I came of age when dad books about Soviet tanks charging through The Fulda Gap were all the rage. The current wave of post-apocalyptic books inspire a sort of rough romance amidst the fantasy of prepping, imagining riding around in your modified dune buggy with an AK gunning down the zombie hordes or the undead or whatever other monsters are out there.

But where, dear friend, do you poop? 

Even Immortan Joe and his coterie of wives had to poop somewhere, and this is something we don’t often see portrayed in the literature. The truth of the matter is a lot less sexy: you’re less likely to die from the killer walking corpses than anything else out there. Millions of walking corpses shambling around and millions of dead corpses rotting create all matter of disease-ridden filth. 

One good rain shower washes all that into the rivers. 

You drink from the river downstream.

You die, eventually, shooting liquid from every orifice because you got cholera.

I am going to say “shit” a lot in the post, by the way. 

One of the most important--but decidedly unsexy--parts of modern civilization is readily available, clean, drinkable, fluoridated water, and we do take it for granted. 

A very general guideline can be 3-4 liters of water per day to stay alive, more if you’re, say, tilling the fields of your subsistence farm to try and carve out a living now that modern civilization has been destroyed by The Bomb. And consider all the other things we use water for. There’s all the cooking, the laundry, and the hygiene. 

Let’s talk about hygiene for a moment: Washing your hands is a very modern idea. In fact, it was in the late 1840s that the idea occurred to doctors that hey, maybe we should wash all this blood and stuff off our hands, and it took substantially longer to catch on. 

If you’ve been on a camping trip and don’t have access to a stream, you know you tend to get a little funky by the end. If you’re drinking from cantines and rainwater traps, you’re probably disinclined to waste water that could be saving your life or getting yourself through a post-apocalyptic wasteland on washing your hands, especially when they just get dirty anyway. 

Ah, but perhaps your raiders will just pillage the local supermarket and get all the bottled water there.

One of the problems I have with the theory of the supermarket as survival cache is supermarkets don’t actually have that much food in them. It seems like a lot when you’re doing your weekly shopping, but you’re actually at the end of a very long chain of suppliers. Most businesses today operate using a “just in time” chain of production, where they forecast demand and then get in what they think they’ll need, then put it out where it sells so they don’t have to keep it for long.

This is where I break some bad news to you: That’s why they never seem to have it “in the back” when you ask. There’s usually not much “in the back” unless they’ve just gotten a pallet in. Usually it’s a nice excuse to hang out and make fun of you with whoever else got sent back there. Sorry. 

As a child that grew up in the South, I can tell you that any weather stronger than a thunderstorm is preceded with dire warnings to BUY BREAD AND MILK. I never knew why. I don’t think anyone knows why. But you go into the supermarket and all the bread and milk is gone. Likewise, when a natural disaster like a hurricane or big storm is coming, the shelves are gone of anything tasty or even useful. Hope you like radioactive beets or those weird mixed vegetables we used to get in a grade school cafeteria.

To say nothing of the simple fact that literally everyone else is going to have the same idea of heading to the grocery store. And that’s without taking into account all the rotting perishables, themselves additional vectors of disease. If you haven’t smelled rotting chicken and spoiled milk together, I suggest you don’t. The linoleum floors are likely to be covered with the vomit of those that tried before. 

And that’s not even bringing up the biggest issue of all. 

Let’s talk about shitting: Where are you going to shit?

Imagine trying to find a public bathroom in any major city. A former work colleague and I used to play a game in the morning when we went to San Francisco. The game is “How far can we get before we see a pile of human shit on the sidewalk?” 3 blocks was the record.

Until recently, the public sewer was “the street when it rains” and if you lived in a modern utopia, they may have bothered to cut a ditch in the roadside so you weren’t knee deep in human filth. It’s still like that in many cities of the world and even if you have a pretense of a sewer system, the fallback if the sewer system backs up is just dumping it into the nearest body of water.

Imagine a rainstorm in a post-apocalyptic city with knee or waist-high water filled with dead bodies and all the effluences and leavings of human civilization. We already know what that looks like. It’s called Hurricane Katrina. And that’s with a FEMA and local effort to clean up the debris and chaos. What if it just hangs around? 

To say nothing of finding toilet paper or, like I said above, washing your hands. And you’re not going to use precious potable water cleaning out your butthole. C’mon now. We’re among friends here. 

Ah, but you’ll take to the woods, you say. Just bury it in a hole in the backyard. Perhaps you even have dreams of composting toilets in your tiny post-apocalyptic house. We can entertain that idea, certainly, and that may be a suitable solution for a small family in a remote area where a hole in the ground. But the estimated population of Europe in 1340 was close to 70 million. Can they all, dear reader, shit in the woods?

That’s not really a solution that scales. A few people can use an outhouse. But get yourself a proper raiding gang or even the beginnings of a post-apocalyptic cult, and that outhouse is going to start filling up fast. Even nutritionally deprived apocalypse survivors poop a lot, and that’s assuming you can dig a hole and bury it without hitting the water table you’re drinking from. And just a little bit of the wrong bacteria or virus in the wrong water going into your mouth means you spend what’s left of your life praying for the sweet release of death, because there’s something else we aren’t going to have.

Medicines.

It’s a New Age fantasy that all those herbs are waiting out there in the woods to be discovered and, even if they are, are you suddenly going to become an expert on herbal lore. The truth of the matter is you depend on antibiotics. Even if you’re not taking them yourself, they’re what keep that guy in the next cube that insists on coming in from coughing infectious bacteria into your face when he starts bragging about how he’s never missed a day.

Let’s not even mention vaccines because good god that is the stupidest debate of all time and isn’t even a debate.

But we can mention them for the sake of this: You step on a rusty nail in The Wasteland and you’re not getting a tetanus shot. 

Okay, and we can mention them for the sake of this: All those dogs and cats that survive us (my cats hide under the bed just for the sake of doing so, they’ll survive When The Nukes Drop) won’t be getting rabies shots anymore. Or any shots, really. So add tetanus and rabies to measles, mumps, whooping cough, and everything else coming back because Kale Smoothie Junior couldn’t get a stick in his precious arm.

And then there’s the less urgent drugs: Raise your hand if there’s a drug you take every day to survive. Think of mundane things beyond even antibiotics. Heart pills. Insulin injections. Vitamin supplements. Mood stabilizers. Imagine the entire drug supply chain has gone away. Grandpa doesn’t get his heart pills, you don’t get your insulin, there’s no blood transfusions, and if a limb gets infected you get a leather strap to bite and a shot of whiskey before a carpenter cuts your leg off with a saw.

Moving beyond the obvious medical issues, let’s discuss the one addiction pretty much everyone on the planet has: Caffeine. Imagine everyone that has soda, tea, and coffee going through withdrawals at once. Sure, if you’re lucky enough to live in Kenya or Colombia, you’ll be rolling in the stuff but it’s not like any of us know what a coca leaf looks like or how to synthesize caffeine. It’s not going to be the zombies that get you. It’s going to be the red-eyed zombie that didn’t get twelve lattes yesterday and is really trigger happy as a result. 

Let’s not even discuss smoking, good lord. Every smoker in the world suddenly going cold turkey. Think how pissy they are in our world. Imagine how pissy they’ll be in the Wasteland.

Now that’s the real horror show. 

[julieinfulda]

16.7.17

Holy moly today was a good but long day (as per usual)! I don’t know what it is about travelling, but it really takes it all out of you. This morning I got to sleep in (!!) for like the first time this trip... and sleeping in here is about 8am! My body woke me up at 6:30 and it was so nice to be able to fall back asleep until 8. 

So I woke up, had a little breakfast, and packed my backpack before calling a taxi to take me to the train station. The bus on Sunday doesn’t run until about 10 so I had to call a cab and it was typical! I got in, told her where I wanted to go, she took me, and I paid an outrageous price for the Sunday morning ride! But, it got me where I needed to be at the right time, so I really can’t complain. I waited on the platform for my train and got on the 9:48 train to Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof (main train station)! It all went really smooth until I got to the main train station. There were so many people, no real common seating area, and my texts to McKenna weren’t going through. BUT I got a drink at Starbucks, sat at a little bench, and waited for McKenna to get there (once my texts did go through, she was on her way to meet me). I waited all of 2 minutes before spotting a girl from my program, Connie, walking by! I called out to her and just was saying hi when about that time McKenna saw us and came over. When Connie heard that we were going to watch some quidditch she was game so we all went together! McKenna traveled from Ireland this morning and Connie was passing through from Amsterdam-- they’re such cool people honestly. 

We had some time before the matches started (at 1:30 and it was 11 at this point) and McKenna was starved so we went to a Mexican place down from the train station. It was amazing! I had nachos, McKenna had tacos, and Connie wasn’t hungry so she got a beer. We stayed there until about 12:45 when we then made our way back to the train station, bought city tickets for it, and rode it outside of the city a little bit to where the quidditch tournament was being held. It was a 25 minute walk from that station to the fields, so we got our steps in! The quidditch tournament we went to was a fantasy one, meaning that the teams consisted of players that didn’t necessarily play together on a regular basis, and anyone could sign up to play. If I had realized that sooner, I would have gone to participate, but the timing was bad! So we just watched. It was really fun to watch McKenna get a grasp for the sport and Connie napped so it was a good time by all! It really just made me excited for the fall when I get back to Morgantown and can start building up a team again! I was a little burned out at the end of spring semester but now I’m ready to get at it! 

We made our way back to the small train station outside the city after the last game of the tournement (so we watched 2 long games in total) and then to the main train station. From there, we bought tickets back to Fulda on a regional train, not like the long-distance (faster) trains like I’ve ridden on before. Luckily, we were 30 minutes out from the last regional train going to Fulda so it worked out perfect! We got on the train and it took so many stops, but it got us to Fulda at about 7:00pm. We took a taxi back to avoid waiting for the bus and that ended my long journey for the day! 

Vita and I decided to work a little more on our projects today, so I rode my bike down to her dorm at about 9 and stayed an hour and a half or so and biked back. Honestly it’s just been a long day of travel and work. So much for a relaxing day off! Our presentation for that class is on Wednesday so that will be my focus for the next couple days, and then my German class presentation on John Henry is sometime this week as well. Busy third week of the program! I can’t believe 2 whole weeks have already passed here, I’ve had the best time so far! The people here are great and I’m more thankful every day for the opportunity to be here. What a life! 

[alexa-helmich]

» Thoughts went missing in Garden Eden. Please return to ***** « _______________________ #dermedicus #medicus #doctor #city #beautiful #nature #life #tourist #choir #love #photography #photo #photograph #artist #art #artwork #photos #photographer #photooftheday #photoofday #floral #flowers #holy #heaven #garden #eden #spring (hier: Fulda, Germany)

[nothingman]

By Danny Sjursen | (Tomdispatch.com) | – –

The United States has already lost — its war for the Middle East, that is. Having taken my own crack at combat soldiering in both Iraq and Afghanistan, that couldn’t be clearer to me. Unfortunately, it’s evidently still not clear in Washington. Bush’s neo-imperial triumphalism failed. Obama’s quiet shift to drones, Special Forces, and clandestine executive actions didn’t turn the tide either. For all President Trump’s bluster, boasting, and threats, rest assured that, at best, he’ll barely move the needle and, at worst… but why even go there? 

At this point, it’s at least reasonable to look back and ask yet again: Why the failure? Explanations abound, of course. Perhaps Americans were simply never tough enough and still need to take off the kid gloves. Maybe there just weren’t ever enough troops. (Bring back the draft!) Maybe all those hundreds of thousands of bombs and missiles just came up short. (So how about lots more of them, maybe even a nuke?) 

Lead from the front. Lead from behind. Surge yet again… The list goes on — and on and on. 

And by now all of it, including Donald Trump’s recent tough talk, represents such a familiar set of tunes. But what if the problem is far deeper and more fundamental than any of that? 

Here our nation stands, 15-plus years after 9/11, engaged militarily in half a dozen countries across the Greater Middle East, with no end in sight. Perhaps a more critical, factual reading of our recent past would illuminate the futility of America’s tragic, ongoing project to somehow “destroy” terrorism in the Muslim world.

The standard triumphalist version of the last 100 or so years of our history might go something like this: in the twentieth century, the United States repeatedly intervened, just in the nick of time, to save the feeble Old World from militarism, fascism, and then, in the Cold War, communism.  It did indeed save the day in three global wars and might have lived happily ever after as the world’s “sole superpower” if not for the sudden emergence of a new menace.  Seemingly out of nowhere, “Islamo-fascists” shattered American complacence with a sneak attack reminiscent of Pearl Harbor.  Collectively the people asked: Why do they hate us?  Of course, there was no time to really reflect, so the government simply got to work, taking the fight to our new “medieval” enemies on their own turf.  It’s admittedly been a long, hard slog, but what choice did our leaders have?  Better, after all, to fight them in Baghdad than Brooklyn.

What if, however, this foundational narrative is not just flawed but little short of delusional? Alternative accounts lead to wholly divergent conclusions and are more likely to inform prudent policy in the Middle East. 

Let’s reconsider just two key years for the United States in that region: 1979 and 2003.  America’s leadership learned all the wrong “lessons” from those pivotal moments and has intervened there ever since on the basis of some perverse version of them with results that have been little short of disastrous.  A more honest narrative of those moments would lead to a far more modest, minimalist approach to a messy and tragic region.  The problem is that there seems to be something inherently un-American about entertaining such thoughts.

1979 Revisited

Through the first half of the Cold War, the Middle East remained a sideshow.  In 1979, however, all that changed radically.  First, rising protests against the brutal police state of the American-backed Shah of Iran led to regime collapse, the return of dissident ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the declaration of an Islamic Republic. Then Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding 52 hostages for more than 400 days.  Of course, by then few Americans remembered the CIA-instigated coup of 1953 that had toppled a democratically elected Iranian prime minister, preserved Western oil interests in that country, and started both lands on this path (though Iranians clearly hadn’t forgotten).  The shock and duration of the hostage crisis undoubtedly ensured that Jimmy Carter would be a one-term president and — to make matters worse — Soviet troops intervened in Afghanistan to shore up a communist government there. It was quite a year.

The alarmist conventional narrative of these events went like this: the radical mullahs running Iran were irrational zealots with an inexplicable loathing for the American way of life.  As if in a preview of 9/11, hearing those chants against “the Great Satan,” Americans promptly began asking with true puzzlement: Why do they hate us?  The hostage crisis challenged world peace.  Carter had to do something. Worse yet, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan represented blatant conquest and spotlighted the possibility of Red Army hordes pushing through to Iran en route to the Persian Gulf’s vast oil reserves.  It might prove the opening act of the long awaited Soviet scheme for world domination or a possible path to World War III.

Misinformed by such a tale that they repeatedly told themselves, Washington officials then made terrible choices in the Middle East.  Let’s start with Iran.  They mistook a nationalist revolution and subsequent civil war within Islam for a singular attack on the U.S.A.  With little consideration of genuine Iranian gripes about the brutal U.S.-backed dynasty of the Shah or the slightest appreciation for the complexity of that country’s internal dynamics, they created a simple-minded but convenient narrative in which the Iranians posed an existential threat to this country.  Little has changed in almost four decades.

Then, though few Americans could locate Afghanistan on a map, most accepted that it was indeed a country of vital strategic interest.  Of course, with the opening of their archives, it’s clear enough now that the Soviets never sought the worldwide empire we imagined for them, especially not by 1979. The Soviet leadership was, in fact, divided over the Afghan affair and intervened in Kabul in a spirit more defensive than aggressive. Their desire or even ability to drive towards the Persian Gulf was, at best, a fanciful American notion.

Nonetheless, the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were combined into a tale of horror that would lead to the permanent militarization of U.S. policy in the Middle East.  Remembered today as a dove-in-chief, in his 1980 State of the Union address President Carter announced a decidedly hawkish new doctrine that would come to bear his name.  From then on, he said, the U.S. would consider any threat to Persian Gulf oil supplies a direct threat to this country and American troops would, if necessary, unilaterally intervene to secure the region.

The results will seem painfully familiar today: almost immediately, Washington policymakers began to seek military solutions to virtually every problem in the Middle East.  Within a year, the administration of President Ronald Reagan would, for instance, support Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s ruthless invasion of Iran, ignoring his more vicious antics and his proclivity for gassing his own people.

Soon after, in 1983, the military created the United States Central Command (headquarters: Tampa, Florida) with specific responsibility for the Greater Middle East. Its early war plans demonstrated just how wildly out of touch with reality American planners already were by then. Operational blueprints, for instance, focused on defeating Soviet armies in Iran before they could reach the Persian Gulf.  Planners imagined U.S. Army divisions crossing Iran, itself in the midst of a major war with Iraq, to face off against a Soviet armored juggernaut (just like the one that was always expected to burst through Europe’s Fulda Gap).  That such an assault was never coming, or that the fiercely proud Iranians might object to the militaries of either superpower crossing their territories, figured little in such early plans that were monuments to American arrogance and naïveté.

From there, it was but a few short steps to the permanent “defensive” basing of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain or later the stationing of U.S. troops near the holy cities of Mecca and Medina to protect Saudi Arabia from Iraqi attack.  Few asked how such forces in the heart of the Middle East would play on the Arab street or corroborate Islamist narratives of “crusader” imperialism.

Worse yet, in those same years the CIA armed and financed a grab bag of Afghan insurgent groups, most of them extreme Islamists. Eager to turn Afghanistan into a Soviet “Vietnam,” no one in Washington bothered to ask whether such guerrilla outfits conformed to our purported principles or what the rebels would do if they won. Of course, the victorious guerrillas contained foreign fighters and various Arab supporters, including one Osama bin Laden.  Eventually, the excesses of the well-armed but morally bankrupt insurgents and warlords in Afghanistan triggered the formation and ascension of the Taliban there, and from one of those guerrilla outfits came a new organization that called itself al-Qaeda. The rest, as they say, is history, and thanks to Chalmers Johnson’s appropriation of a classic CIA term of spy craft, we now know it as blowback.

That was a major turning point for the U.S. military.  Before 1979, few of its troops had served in the region.  In the ensuing decades, America bombed, invaded, raided, sent its drones to kill in, or attacked Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq again (and again), Somalia (again and again), Libya again, Iraq once more, and now Syria as well.  Before 1979, few — if any — American military personnel died in the Greater Middle East.  Few have died anywhere else since.

2003 and After: Fantasies and Reality

Who wouldn’t agree that the 2003 invasion of Iraq signified a major turning point both in the history of the Greater Middle East and in our own?  Nonetheless, its legacy remains highly contested. The standard narrative goes like this: as the sole remaining superpower on the planet after the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, our invincible military organized a swift and convincing defeat of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the first Gulf War.  After 9/11, that same military launched an inventive, swift, and triumphant campaign in Afghanistan.  Osama bin Laden escaped, of course, but his al-Qaeda network was shattered and the Taliban all but destroyed. 

Naturally, the threat of Islamic terror was never limited to the Hindu Kush, so Washington “had” to take its fight against terror global.  Admittedly, the subsequent conquest of Iraq didn’t exactly turn out as planned and perhaps the Arabs weren’t quite ready for American-style democracy anyway.  Still, the U.S. was committed, had shed blood, and had to stay the course, rather than cede momentum to the terrorists.  Anything less would have dishonored the venerated dead.  Luckily, President George W. Bush found an enlightened new commander, General David Petraeus, who, with his famed “surge,” snatched victory, or at least stability, from the jaws of defeat in Iraq.  He had the insurgency all but whipped.  Then, just a few years later, “spineless” Barack Obama prematurely pulled American forces out of that country, an act of weakness that led directly to the rise of ISIS and the current nightmare in the region.  Only a strong, assertive successor to Obama could right such gross errors.

It’s a riveting tale, of course, even if it is misguided in nearly every way imaginable.  At each turn, Washington learned the wrong lessons and drew perilous conclusions.  At least the first Gulf War — to George H.W. Bush’s credit — involved a large multinational coalition and checked actual Iraqi aggression.  Instead of cheering Bush the Elder’s limited, prudent strategy, however, surging neoconservatives demanded to know why he had stopped short of taking the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.  In these years (and for this we can certainly thank Bush, among others), Americans — Republicans and Democrats alike — became enamored with military force and came to believe that it could solve just about any problem in that region, if not the world. 

This would prove a grotesque misunderstanding of what had happened.  The Gulf War had been an anomaly.  Triumphalist conclusions about it rested on the shakiest of foundations.  Only if an enemy fought exactly as the U.S. military preferred it to do, as indeed Saddam’s forces did in 1991 — conventionally, in open desert, with outdated Soviet equipment — could the U.S. expect such success.  Americans drew another conclusion entirely: that their military was unstoppable.

The same faulty assumptions flowed from Afghanistan in 2001.  Information technology, Special Forces, CIA dollars (to Afghan warlords), and smart bombs triggered victory with few conventional foot soldiers needed.  It seemed a forever formula and influenced both the hasty decision to invade Iraq, and the irresponsibly undersized force structure deployed (not to speak of the complete lack of serious preparation for actually occupying that country).  So powerful was the optimism and jingoism of invasion proponents that skeptics were painted as unpatriotic  turncoats. 

Then things turned ugly fast.  This time around, Saddam’s army simply melted away, state institutions broke down, looting was rampant, and the three major communities of Iraq — Sunni, Shia, and Kurd — began to battle for power.  The invaders never received the jubilant welcome predicted for them by Bush administration officials and supportive neocons.  What began as a Sunni-based insurgency to regain power morphed into a nationalist rebellion and then into an Islamist struggle against Westerners. 

Nearly a century earlier, Britain had formed Iraq from three separate Ottoman imperial provinces — Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul.  The 2003 invasion blew up that synthetic state, held together first by British overlords and then by Saddam’s brutal dictatorship.  American policymakers seemed genuinely surprised by all this. 

Those in Washington never adequately understood the essential conundrum of forced regime change in Iraq.  “Democracy” there would inevitably result in Shia majority dominance of an artificial state.  Empowering the Shia drove the Sunni minority — long accustomed to power — into the embrace of armed, motivated Islamists.  When societies fracture as Iraq’s did, often enough the worst among us rise to the occasion.  As the poet William Butler Yeats so famously put it, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed… The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” 

Furthermore, the invasion played directly into Osama bin Laden’s hands, fueling his narrative of an American “war on Islam.”  In the process, the U.S. also destabilized Iraq’s neighbors and the region, spreading extremists to Syria and elsewhere.

That David Petraeus’s surge “worked” is perhaps the greatest myth of all.  It was true that the steps he took resulted in a decrease in violence after 2007, largely because he paid off the Sunni tribes, not because of the modest U.S. troop increase ordered from Washington.  By then, the Shia had already won the sectarian civil war for Baghdad, intensifying Sunni-Shia residential segregation there and so temporarily lessening the capacity for carnage. 

That post-surge “calm” was, however, no more than a tactical pause in an ongoing regional sectarian war.  No fundamental problems had been resolved in post-Saddam Iraq, including the nearly impossible task of integrating Sunni and Kurdish minorities into a coherent national whole.  Instead, Washington had left a highly sectarian Shia strongman, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in control of the government and internal security forces, while al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI (nonexistent prior to the invasion), never would be eradicated.  Its leadership, further radicalized in U.S. Army prisons, bided its time, waiting for an opportunity to win back Sunni fealty. 

Luckily for AQI, as soon as the U.S. military was pulled out of the country, Maliki promptly cracked down hard on peaceful Sunni protests.  He even had his Sunni vice president sentenced to death in absentia under the most questionable of circumstances.  Maliki’s ineptitude would prove an AQI godsend.

Islamists, including AQI, also took advantage of events in Syria.  Autocrat Bashar al-Assad’s brutal repression of his own protesting Sunni majority gave them just the opening they needed.  Of course, the revolt there might never have occurred had not the invasion of Iraq destabilized the entire region.  In 2014, the former AQI leaders, having absorbed some of Saddam’s cashiered officers into their new forces, triumphantly took a series of Iraqi cities, including Mosul, sending the Iraqi army fleeing. They then declared a caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Many Iraqi Sunnis naturally turned to the newly established “Islamic State” (ISIS) for protection. 

Mission (Un)Accomplished!

It’s hardly controversial these days to point out that the 2003 invasion (aka Operation Iraqi Freedom), far from bringing freedom to that country, sowed chaos.  Toppling Saddam’s brutal regime tore down the edifice of a regional system that had stood for nearly a century.  However inadvertently, the U.S. military lit the fire that burned down the old order. 

As it turned out, no matter the efforts of the globe’s greatest military, no easy foreign solution existed when it came to Iraq.  It rarely does.  Unfortunately, few in Washington were willing to accept such realities.  Think of that as the twenty-first-century American Achilles’ heel: unwarranted optimism about the efficacy of U.S. power.  Policy in these years might best be summarized as: “we” have to do something, and military force is the best — perhaps the only — feasible option. 

Has it worked? Is anybody, including Americans, safer?  Few in power even bother to ask such questions.  But the data is there.  The Department of State counted just 348 terrorist attacks worldwide in 2001 compared with 11,774 attacks in 2015. That’s right: at best, America’s 15-year “war on terror” failed to significantly reduce international terrorism; at worst, its actions helped make matters 30 times worse.

Recall the Hippocratic oath: “First do no harm.”  And remember Osama bin Laden’s stated goal on 9/11: to draw conventional American forces into attritional campaigns in the heart of the Middle East. Mission accomplished!

In today’s world of “alternative facts,” it’s proven remarkably easy to ignore such empirical data and so avoid thorny questions.  Recent events and contemporary political discourse even suggest that the country’s political elites now inhabit a post-factual environment; in terms of the Greater Middle East, this has been true for years.

It couldn’t be more obvious that Washington’s officialdom regularly and repeatedly drew erroneous lessons from the recent past and ignored a hard truth staring them in the face: U.S. military action in the Middle East has solved nothing.  At all.  Only the government cannot seem to accept this.  Meanwhile, an American fixation on one unsuitable term — “isolationism” — masks a more apt description of American dogma in this period: hyper-interventionism. 

As for military leaders, they struggle to admit failure when they — and their troops — have sacrificed so much sweat and blood in the region.  Senior officers display the soldier’s tendency to confuse performance with effectiveness, staying busy with being successful.  Prudent strategy requires differentiating between doing a lot and doing the right things. As Einstein reputedly opined, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

A realistic look at America’s recent past in the Greater Middle East and a humbler perspective on its global role suggest two unsatisfying but vital conclusions.  First, false lessons and misbegotten collective assumptions contributed to and created much of today’s regional mess.  As a result, it’s long past time to reassess recent history and challenge long-held suppositions.  Second, policymakers badly overestimated the efficacy of American power, especially via the military, to shape foreign peoples and cultures to their desires.  In all of this, the agency of locals and the inherent contingency of events were conveniently swept aside.

So what now? It should be obvious (but probably isn’t in Washington) that it’s well past time for the U.S. to bring its incessant urge to respond militarily to the crisis of the moment under some kind of control.  Policymakers should accept realistic limitations on their ability to shape the world to America’s desired image of it. 

Consider the last few decades in Iraq and Syria.  In the 1990s, Washington employed economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein and his regime.  The result: tragedy to the tune of half a million dead children. Then it tried invasion and democracy promotion.  The result: tragedy — including 4,500-plus dead American soldiers, a few trillion dollars down the drain, more than 200,000 dead Iraqis, and millions more displaced in their own country or in flight as refugees. 

In response, in Syria the U.S. tried only limited intervention.  Result: tragedy — upwards of 300,000 dead and close to seven million more turned into refugees. 

So will tough talk and escalated military action finally work this time around as the Trump administration faces off against ISIS?  Consider what happens even if the U.S achieves a significant rollback of ISIS.  Even if, in conjunction with allied Kurdish or Syrian rebel forces, ISIS’s “capital,” Raqqa, is taken and the so-called caliphate destroyed, the ideology isn’t going away.  Many of its fighters are likely to transition back to an insurgency and there will be no end to international terror in ISIS’s name.  In the meantime, none of this will have solved the underlying problems of artificial states now at the edge of collapse or beyond, divided ethno-religious groups, and anti-Western nationalist and religious sentiments.  All of it begs the question: What if Americans are incapable of helping (at least in a military sense)?

A real course correction is undoubtedly impossible without at least a willingness to reconsider and reframe our recent historical experiences.  If the 2016 election is any indication, however, a Trump administration with the present line-up of national security chiefs (who fought in these very wars) won’t meaningfully alter either the outlook or the policies that led us to this moment.  Candidate Trump offered a hollow promise — to “Make America Great Again” — conjuring up a mythical era that never was.  Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton offered only remarkably dated and stale rhetoric about America as the “indispensable nation.”

In the new Trump era, neither major party seems capable of escaping a shared commitment to the legends rather than the facts of America’s recent past in the Greater Middle East.  Both sides remain eerily confident that the answers to contemporary foreign policy woes lie in a mythical version of that past, whether Trump’s imaginary 1950s paradise or Clinton’s fleeting mid-1990s “unipolar moment.” 

Both ages are long gone, if they ever really existed at all.  Needed is some fresh thinking about our militarized version of foreign policy and just maybe an urge, after all these years, to do so much less. Patriotic fables certainly feel good, but they achieve little.  My advice: dare to be discomfited.

Major Danny Sjursen is a U.S. Army strategist and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.  He lives with his wife and four sons near Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. 

[Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author in an unofficial capacity and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Command and General Staff College, Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, as well as Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2017 Danny Sjursen

via Informed Comment

[fd-citylife-blog]

Nur eine von vielen tollen Sachen im neuen citylife: Leckere Rezepte mit dem neuen alten Superfood Mangold. Für euch hier und jetzt online oder gratis im neuen citylife an allen bekannten Auslagestellen!

[kumail-fan]

Athanasius Kircher

Kircher was brought into the world on May 2, 1601 or 1602 (he, at the end of the day, didn't have a clue) in Geisa, Buchonia, close to Fulda. From his origination he took the sobriquets Bucho, Buchonius and Fuldensis which he some of the time added to his name. He went to the Jesuit College in Fulda from 1614 to 1618, when he joined the request himself as a seminarian. The most youthful of nine kids, Kircher was a gifted adolescent who was shown Hebrew by a rabbi notwithstanding his investigations at school. He considered way of thinking and religious philosophy at Paderborn, yet escaped to Cologne in 1622 to evade propelling Protestant powers. On the excursion, he barely got away from death in the wake of falling through the ice crossing the frozen Rhine—one of a few events on which his life was jeopardized. Afterward, making a trip to Heiligenstadt, he was gotten and almost hanged by a gathering of Protestant warriors. At Heiligenstadt, he showed science, Hebrew and Syrian, and created a demonstration of firecrackers and moving landscape for the meeting Elector Archbishop of Mainz, showing early proof of his advantage in mechanical gadgets. He joined the brotherhood in 1628 and became teacher of morals and science at the University of Würzburg, where he likewise showed Hebrew and Syrian. From 1628, he likewise started to show an interest in Egyptian pictographs.

Kircher distributed his first book (the Ars Magnesia, announcing his exploration on attraction) in 1631, yet that very year he was driven by the proceeding with Thirty Years' War to the ecclesiastical University of Avignon in France. In 1633, he was called to Vienna by the sovereign to succeed Kepler as Mathematician to the Habsburg court. On the intercession of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, the request was revoked and he was sent rather to Rome to proceed with his academic work, yet he had effectively embarked for Vienna. In transit, his boat was brushed off base and he showed up in Rome before he knew about the changed choice. He based himself in the city for the remainder of his life, and from 1638 showed arithmetic, physical science and oriental dialects at the Collegio Romano for quite a long while prior to being delivered to give himself to investigate. He concentrated first jungle fever and afterward the plague, and amassed an assortment of artifacts which he displayed alongside gadgets of his own creation in the Museum Kircherianum. In 1661, Kircher found the remnants of a congregation said to have been built by Constantine on the site of Saint Eustace's vision of Jesus Christ in a stag's horns. He fund-raised to pay for the congregation's recreation as the Santuario della Mentorella, and his heart was covered in the congregation on his passing.

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[courtneytincher]

David Crosby on How Trump Is ‘Under the Control of Russia’

Axelle/Bauer-GriffinIn the 1950s, in the fearsome early days of the Cold War, American baby boomers learned to dive under their school desks in drills that even 8-year-olds knew were not going to do much good in a nuclear war that could end all human life on Earth. Through the ‘60s and ‘70s, the Soviet Union was very, very powerful, and convinced that its next major war would be with us, even as smaller wars raged from Korea and Southeast Asia to Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America.Russian generals formulated a plan to charge through the Fulda Gap in Germany with a few thousand tanks and beat their nemesis, NATO. The Western allies developed counterstrategies. But by the 1980s, even though an apocalypse seemed possible, it no longer seemed likely.And then: the Soviet Union crumbled from within. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the East European satellite nations broke away, and by the autumn of 1991 the Soviet Union had collapsed, tearing apart not only the territories of the communist empire, but the Russian empire dating back centuries. Demagogues don’t blame themselves, however, and Russia was full of them—including a former KGB spy named Vladimir Putin. The fault, they decided, lay with the United States, which had exploited their internal weaknesses. When Anthony Bourdain Called Out Putin and Trump—in RussiaRussia was no longer the powerhouse the Soviet Union had been, but Putin had a plan: Moscow would erode the Western democracies from within by exploiting their own weaknesses. That’s why it started its current campaign of attacks against us years ago, and why they are still going on. Basically, the Russians take hold of any division in our society—racial prejudice, class war, fear of vaccines, any division that has two sides—and they work it. They pose as a group of radical people of color and say awful stuff about whites, and then they turn around and play white supremacist KKK crazies and say we should ship all blacks back to Africa. They do it with every issue they can. Their plan is to divide us and thus render us helpless.In Donald Trump, they saw an opportunity that could not be better for them. Here was a man so ignorant, and so completely unaware of geopolitics, that he could be outwitted and misled before Putin got out of bed in the morning, easily—even without the very real possibility that Putin has incriminating evidence with which to blackmail the president. U.S. President Donald Trump chats with Russia's President Vladimir Putin at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders' summit in the central Vietnamese city of Danang on November 11, 2017.Mikhail Klimentyev/AFP/GettyIt seems clear to me that Russia may well have some kind of info they are using to blackmail Trump with—“kompromat” as the Russians call it. It could be the alleged “pee tape,” could be some truth to the whispers that Trump has been laundering Russian mob money for at least 20 years through his New York real estate deals, stashing illegal money in multimillion-dollar apartments and condos all over town. Could just be the fact he lied about working on a deal for Trump Tower Moscow while he was running to be President of the United States in 2016. This could be why Trump is so completely under the control of Russia and so utterly disloyal to the United States. This could be why the Republican Party is blocking the passage of laws to protect our elections from outside influence, because that’s how they installed Trump, and that’s how they intend to win again in 2020. I love this country. I believe democracy is the very best way for humans to live together under the rule of law. This next election involves rescuing our country from racism and greed and hatred, but it also involves saving the future of the whole human race from the horrors of climate change. Climate change is real and is coming right at us, as months of record-breaking temperatures all over the world demonstrate. We are a great country. We have the brains, the money, and the know-how to lead this fight, and we should be leading it. I can’t just sit by and watch us squander our children’s future now that they, too, face a threat to all human life on Earth.So here I am again, speaking my mind.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

Axelle/Bauer-GriffinIn the 1950s, in the fearsome early days of the Cold War, American baby boomers learned to dive under their school desks in drills that even 8-year-olds knew were not going to do much good in a nuclear war that could end all human life on Earth. Through the ‘60s and ‘70s, the Soviet Union was very, very powerful, and convinced that its next major war would be with us, even as smaller wars raged from Korea and Southeast Asia to Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America.Russian generals formulated a plan to charge through the Fulda Gap in Germany with a few thousand tanks and beat their nemesis, NATO. The Western allies developed counterstrategies. But by the 1980s, even though an apocalypse seemed possible, it no longer seemed likely.And then: the Soviet Union crumbled from within. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the East European satellite nations broke away, and by the autumn of 1991 the Soviet Union had collapsed, tearing apart not only the territories of the communist empire, but the Russian empire dating back centuries. Demagogues don’t blame themselves, however, and Russia was full of them—including a former KGB spy named Vladimir Putin. The fault, they decided, lay with the United States, which had exploited their internal weaknesses. When Anthony Bourdain Called Out Putin and Trump—in RussiaRussia was no longer the powerhouse the Soviet Union had been, but Putin had a plan: Moscow would erode the Western democracies from within by exploiting their own weaknesses. That’s why it started its current campaign of attacks against us years ago, and why they are still going on. Basically, the Russians take hold of any division in our society—racial prejudice, class war, fear of vaccines, any division that has two sides—and they work it. They pose as a group of radical people of color and say awful stuff about whites, and then they turn around and play white supremacist KKK crazies and say we should ship all blacks back to Africa. They do it with every issue they can. Their plan is to divide us and thus render us helpless.In Donald Trump, they saw an opportunity that could not be better for them. Here was a man so ignorant, and so completely unaware of geopolitics, that he could be outwitted and misled before Putin got out of bed in the morning, easily—even without the very real possibility that Putin has incriminating evidence with which to blackmail the president. U.S. President Donald Trump chats with Russia's President Vladimir Putin at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders' summit in the central Vietnamese city of Danang on November 11, 2017.Mikhail Klimentyev/AFP/GettyIt seems clear to me that Russia may well have some kind of info they are using to blackmail Trump with—“kompromat” as the Russians call it. It could be the alleged “pee tape,” could be some truth to the whispers that Trump has been laundering Russian mob money for at least 20 years through his New York real estate deals, stashing illegal money in multimillion-dollar apartments and condos all over town. Could just be the fact he lied about working on a deal for Trump Tower Moscow while he was running to be President of the United States in 2016. This could be why Trump is so completely under the control of Russia and so utterly disloyal to the United States. This could be why the Republican Party is blocking the passage of laws to protect our elections from outside influence, because that’s how they installed Trump, and that’s how they intend to win again in 2020. I love this country. I believe democracy is the very best way for humans to live together under the rule of law. This next election involves rescuing our country from racism and greed and hatred, but it also involves saving the future of the whole human race from the horrors of climate change. Climate change is real and is coming right at us, as months of record-breaking temperatures all over the world demonstrate. We are a great country. We have the brains, the money, and the know-how to lead this fight, and we should be leading it. I can’t just sit by and watch us squander our children’s future now that they, too, face a threat to all human life on Earth.So here I am again, speaking my mind.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

August 10, 2019 at 10:16AM via IFTTT

[keruihardware-blog]

Kerui Furniture Hardware Drawer Rebound Device factory Ten brands of door closers influence ranking

Ten brands of door closers influence ranking There are many manufacturers of automatic door closers now, but there are not many really good ones. Xiaobian has listed the top ten brands of automatic door closers and the data comes from Zhiyan Data Center. Finished tenth place: Fulda CNFRD Suzhou Fulda Industrial Co., Ltd. integrates production, trade, and research and development. It specializes in the manufacture and sale of automatic door closers and other hardware products. It is one of the manufacturers of automatic door closers with high quality of influence in Asia. The factory is located in Taicang City, Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, only 56 kilometers away from Shanghai People's Square, with convenient transportation. Currently occupies an area of ​​60 mu, owns a manufacturing workshop of 30,000 square meters, employs more than 300 people, has the right to self-import and export operations, and has passed ISO9001 quality management system certification. Ninth place: Jianlang Jianlang is a professional company engaged in the research, manufacture and sales of architectural hardware products. Its business is to provide high-quality architectural hardware products and related technical advice. After years of development, Jianlang has become a famous brand in the field of architecture. 8th: Hui Tai Long Hui Tai Long Hardware & Bathroom Co., Ltd. is a professional decoration material Co., Ltd. which has more than 10 years experience in manufacturing hardware sanitary ware. It owns the marketing headquarters of Pearl River New City in Guangzhou, China, and a large modern production base in Foshan. To produce high-end hardware bathroom intelligent electronic locks, set design, research and development, manufacturing, marketing as one. Seventh place: Yajie ARCHIE Guangdong Yajie Hardware Co., Ltd. was established in 1990. It is a high-end brand enterprise mainly engaged in the R&D, production and sales of architectural decoration hardware products. It is the “Intellectual Property Superiority Enterprise of Guangdong Province” and “Guangdong Top 100 Private Enterprises ”. In 2012, Yajie won the China Lock King &rdquo honor title with its continuous innovation and outstanding brand image. Sixth place: Panasonic Panasonic Panasonic Panasonic is one of the largest electronics manufacturers in the world. Matsushita Electric has unified Panasonic's global brand name with Panasonic's 'Panasonic ideas for life' concept. It is a slogan for 'to realize a networked society' and 'coexist with the global environment' for the company's vision. , From video and audio equipment to information and communication tools, from home appliances to components, in a wide range of areas continue to provide you with high-tech environmental protection products, make your life more rich and exciting. Fifth place: Briton Beng Ingersoll-Rand is one of the earliest foreign-funded enterprises that entered China after the implementation of the reform and opening-up policy in China, and was also the first foreign-funded enterprise to introduce screw machine technology into China, thus laying the foundation for the compressor industry. leading position. No.4: Haobao Oubao Baobao Security Technology Co., Ltd. is the first joint-stock enterprise to produce automatic door closers in China. It is also the largest manufacturer of automatic door closers in China. It was founded in 1987. Third place: GMT has 'The King of Hardware' & 'Stanley Black' &Decker) joined forces with GMT, the largest ground spring production and sales company in China, to form a joint venture with Stanley East Rail (Shanghai) Hardware Co., Ltd. Second place: GEZE GEZE DOMA is a global supplier of active gated technology systems, a leader in global markets for gated hardware products, active sound insulation walls and automatic door systems. Dorma Gate Control (Suzhou) Co., Ltd. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dorma Group. It was founded in June 1998 and was officially put into production in August 1998. The factory is located at No. 101, Tongsheng Road, Industrial Park, covering an area of ​​30,000 square meters. The Dormar Suzhou plant now produces automatic door closers, floor springs, door hardware accessories, active sound insulation partitions and automatic door series, including revolving doors and other products. First place: DORMA Doma Doma is an active supplier of global gated technology systems, a leader in global markets for gated hardware products, active sound insulation walls and automatic door systems. Dorma Gate Control (Suzhou) Co., Ltd. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dorma Group. It was founded in June 1998 and was officially put into production in August 1998. The factory is located at No. 101, Tongsheng Road, Industrial Park, covering an area of ​​30,000 square meters. The Dormar Suzhou plant now produces automatic door closers, floor springs, door hardware accessories, active sound insulation partitions and automatic door series, including revolving doors and other products. With technology speeding up in lighting speed, have created quite a name for itself amidst Drawer Rebound Device factory and it happens to have a lot of benefits as well. Super quality are in offer at Kerui Furniture Hardware, welcome to visit us. Our commitment to equal employment and diversity is a global one as we serve customers and employ people around the world. Kerui Hardware Products Factory finds it as a business imperative that is essential to thriving in a competitive global marketplace. Although there are various available in the market (such as Drawer Rebound Device factory, Drawer Rebound Device factory, and Drawer Rebound Device factory), recent study results have made this Drawer Rebound Device factory rebound device a preferred Door rebound device choice of the people. Turn to Kerui Hardware Products Factory if you are looking for premier Drawer Rebound Device factory solution, affordable packages, and quality Drawer Rebound Device products! We produce wide series of high quality, first-class , and provide professional rebound device services at great prices. Media contact Company Name: Kerui Penumatic Co.,ltd Contact Person: Lily Xu Address: Jintao Industril Park Jinli Town Gaoyao City Guangdong Province,China E-mail: kerui_lydia@163.com Website: http://www.keruihardware.com/