#instead of further expanding civilization into parts of nature that are home to millions of species of reptiles

[citrineghost]

Here's a direct link to the change.org petition linked in that article

They will destroy nature and call it saving the planet.

[avatar-news]

The Fire Nation Awaits 🌺 An in-depth look at the ever-elusive islands in the era of Korra and when we will finally pay them a visit

[Artwork by Avatar News; not official.]

Note: This article was published before the official announcement of Avatar Studios at the Paramount+ investor day.

“Water. Earth. Fire. Air. Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.” We’ve all heard those words a million times. The four elements, and the power to control them bestowed by four subspecies of giant lion-turtles, are at the very heart of the world of Avatar. The balance between them was once upon a time broken by one of the four, the Fire Nation, forming the main conflict of Avatar: The Last Airbender. For much of Aang and the Gaang’s quest at the close of the Hundred Year War, the Fire Nation was a forbidden, far-away location, until the curtain was finally drawn back in the aptly-named Book Three: Fire when our heroes entered the inferno, undercover behind enemy lines. A dramatic tropical destination! New outfits! Culture shock! Needless to say, it was a big deal.

→ 🌺 The big reveal of the Fire Nation in Book Three: Fire had its own marketing push, matching public anticipation.

When the Hundred Year War ended, the newly-instated Fire Lord Zuko dedicated his life to righting the wrongs of his forefathers and working with Avatar Aang to bring the Fire Nation back into the fold under peace. By the time Aang’s successor debuted as the next Avatar in the titular The Legend of Korra, Zuko had abdicated the five-pointed crown and his daughter, Fire Lord Izumi, took the stage leading a reformed, rebalanced Fire Nation.

There was no more war, no more enemy lines, yet the Fire Nation became more distant and mysterious than ever before.

Korra’s close encounters with the land of fire

To this day, Korra has never visited the Fire Nation, nor has it been seen at all, nor do we know anything about it in her era. In fact, practically the only thing we do know is that its leader is a noninterventionist, which conveniently gets it out of the way of making an appearance in Korra’s journey as the Avatar so far.

The closest we have come to seeing the Fire Nation in The Legend of Korra was in Book Two: Spirits, Chapter Five: Peacekeepers. In the midst of the Water Tribe Civil War, Korra sets out across the sea to get help from the royal family, however, she is intercepted by a dark spirit and never makes it to her destination. In the next episode, she washes up on a secret island home to the Bhanti sages, which probably technically counts as Fire Nation territory, but as we know from The Shadow of Kyoshi (more on that later), this faction predates the Four Nations themselves so it doesn’t really count.

→ 🌺 Korra washes up on the beach of Bhanti Island in Book Two: Spirits, Chapter Six: The Sting.

No, as cool as that location and the events of the Beginnings two-parter that happened there were, it wasn’t the main draw of seeing the Fire Nation that we’re still waiting for: seeing how the Fire Nation, which was already industrializing in Aang’s time, changed over the decades, compared to places like Republic City and Ba Sing Se; meeting new characters; visiting new and familiar locations; worldbuilding both new and expanding on what we already learned.

After this aborted tease in Book Two, we never come close to the island country again (at least not with this Avatar and in her era; yes I’m leading up to something...). Instead, the focus turns strongly to the Earth Kingdom in the third and fourth Books, and beyond.

Keep in mind that The Legend of Korra aired for about two-and-a-half years total from 2012 to 2014. Since then, the story has continued in comics. The comics era has lasted from 2015 to present-- seven years to the animated series’ two. In that time, there have only been two comic trilogies due to various production troubles, and neither have touched the Fire Nation. Instead, they directly continue the Earth Kingdom-focused threads started in Books Three and Four of Korra, both originally airing in 2014. Or, in perspective: we had a focus on Republic City in 2012, the Water Tribes in 2013, and the Earth Kingdom from 2014-2021.

Will we finally see the Fire Nation in the next graphic novel trilogy?

This question comes to mind every time new Korra content is supposed to roll around, and the powers that be know it-- it’s a pretty obvious gap in the world of Avatar right now. This franchise is iconically built around four elements and the Four Nations based on them, so one of them being MIA is quite glaring, and for that reason everyone is understandably always asking about it.

The most concrete confirmation we’ve gotten was this AMA answer from franchise co-creator Michael Dante DiMartino in 2016, two years after the show ended and a year before the first graphic novels did come out:

“Yes, hopefully in the [Korra] comics, we’ll have a chance to go to the Fire Nation and see how it has changed since A:TLA.”

Since then, as previously discussed, two comic trilogies have come and gone, obviously not getting closer to the Fire Nation-- and I would actually argue entrenching themselves further away from it.

I want to make it clear that I’m against fan entitlement. Creatives telling the tales they want to in service of the story and the artform is how the industry should run. I’m just hoping to offer some perspective on how we got to where we are almost a decade into the era of Korra and the metatextual pacing of the franchise itself.

Either way, the next Korra comic trilogy has been official confirmed by the editor for Avatar at Dark Horse Comics in this informal statement on Twitter:

We’re not ready to announce any details yet, but we are working on the next trilogy. I really appreciate your patience and hope it’s worth the wait! ✨

There’s currently some kind of holdup for which we really have zero context or information, and we of course have no idea what this next trilogy will be about. (I do speculate a bit on what it could be a few paragraphs down.)

But, like what turned out to be Ruins of the Empire before it, I faithfully made a mockup graphic for my post announcing the confirmation of the next The Legend of Korra graphic novel trilogy. And like before, I chose to completely speculatively and blindly make it Fire Nation-y, as if the next comic could/would(/should?) feature it. This is mainly because I feel like that’s what most people’s eyes would be caught by and thus result in the most successful post (hey, at least I’m honest), but also because it’s just fun.

Here are both images, from 2018 and 2020 respectively:

→ 🌺 Speculative edits I made for my posts on the announcement of previous and upcoming Korra comics before we knew anything about them.

In both cases, the response was huge, and people were super excited about the prospect of Fire Nation content just from my quick speculative mockups. I am of course hoping that the new artwork I made of the Krew for this post will have a similar effect (it’s the first time I just straight-up drew it instead of editing existing images) but again it’s really mostly just for fun.

Anyway, until the next trilogy is properly revealed, we’ll just have to wait and see.

However, that’s not the only place this could happen.

Are they saving the Fire Nation for an animated movie?

With Avatar’s HUGE success on Netflix last year, interest in the franchise rocketed to an all-time high. The streaming wars have begun, and Avatar’s owner and its parent company, Nickelodeon and ViacomCBS, have finally started to notice.

ViacomCBS is launching Paramount+ on March 4th, a relaunch of its existing streaming service CBS All Access. Paramount+ is meant to be a big expansion and refocus to compete with the big hitters: Disney+, HBO Max, and, yes, Netflix. (There’s quite an entanglement there, with Netflix being the home of Avatar’s big year and the upcoming live-action series.)

One of the keys to a successful streamer today is high-profile originals to drive new subscribers. ViacomCBS knows this and they know Avatar has just become among the highest profiles a property can have, breaking records and going toe-to-toe with other big-hitting sci-fi/fantasy/genre franchises. This knowledge goes right to the top of the food chain: the CEO of ViacomCBS mentioned Avatar by name when discussing potential originals for Paramount+.

I have previously discussed how The Search relates to this. The Search was the second ATLA comic trilogy, focused on the search for Zuko’s mother in the thick of the Fire Nation, and if you didn’t know, it was originally pitched by Bryke as an animated movie after the original series ended.

I just want to be clear that what I’m discussing here is purely speculative, but this is the only other piece of the Avatar franchise that we know was optioned for animation besides the shows themselves. It’s possible they would be interested in going back to this idea as a Paramount+ original (and it would certainly be popular among audiences), but it is of course set during the era of Aang and thus covers both a time period we’ve already seen, and also by nature of already being released as comics, events we’ve already seen too.

However, the whole point of this article is that there is one major, huge thing we haven’t seen yet, with massive anticipation building for a decade behind it: the Fire Nation in the era of Korra. So, again, this is just speculation, but it’s also possible that they could return to the very smallest seed of the original idea for a The Search movie, and do a Fire Nation-focused Korra movie now.

→ 🌺 ATLA’s Fire Nation-focused The Search was originally pitched as an animated movie.

You can skip this next part if you don’t want to see me embarrassingly promote my fan idea 😆 but this is where the artwork I made for this article comes into play. The general idea for it, and the reason I tried to replicate the show’s style as much as possible, is that it’s what a Fire Nation-focused movie could maybe look like. Something as standalone and unrelated to Earth Kingdom drama as possible, with fresh new looks for the Krew to get people excited for something fresh and new! I really feel like the Avatar franchise has so much potential for expanded content like this, that’s why I have high hopes that Paramount+ will make the most out of it! You can see the individual characters’ artwork in larger size here. Ok I’m done back to business.

If the idea of a movie seems too impossible to you, we can also take a deeper look at Bryke’s involvement with upcoming comics instead.

After Korra ended, they officially each went their separate ways. They vaguely consulted on Avatar stuff, and Mike of course wrote the Korra comics, but Bryan was planning on writing and drawing his own original non-Avatar comic series and Mike was releasing his own non-Avatar novels. This all appears to have come to a stop when they signed on to showrun the live-action retelling of ATLA at Netflix, officially reuniting the partnership and committing to Avatar again in a big way. Of course, they ended up leaving that project over creative differences, but it did result in a big, lasting change: this time they remained official creative partners and have indicated they’re still working on Avatar now, together. This is a far cry from the official breakup after Korra, so it begs the question what exactly they’re working on. I of course have my fanciful predictions of a sprawling expansion of the Avatar franchise at Paramount+, but what if it’s actually a combination of the ingredients from before the live-action series...

More speculation, but what if the reason for all the mystery behind the next Korra comics is because they will be made by Bryke, with the two of them co-writing and Bryan doing the art for the first time? If that’s the case, they could want to make them a bigger deal than the other Avatar comics have been so far, and maybe that’s why it’s taking so long to iron everything out, have a more significant story, have more of a marketing push, etc. If they’ve been saving the Fire Nation for something big, this could be it.

I personally think this is less likely than a show or movies or something, but it is possible. Anything is possible right now since we know so little about the large-scale direction of the franchise moving forward, just that it’s gonna get big.

⛰️🌋 The Fire Nation in the era of Avatar Kyoshi

We’re not done! Despite everything I’ve written here, believe it or not, the Fire Nation was actually the star of the show in the last year.

With the debut of the Avatar franchise’s first original novels, Kyoshi made a huge splash (in a way only she can). If you haven’t read them yet, you NEED to-- they’re some of the best Avatar content EVER. The Rise of Kyoshi hit shelves in 2019 and The Shadow of Kyoshi followed in 2020. The latter is of particular interest here, because it was almost entirely set in the Fire Nation and featured practically everything and anything you could want from a visit to elusive islands. Though obviously set in a historical period some four hundred years before Aang’s time, Kyoshi’s sojourn in the Fire Nation gave us a huge amount of new information, a depth and breadth of worldbuilding, culture, and character we’ve never really seen in Avatar before. It truly makes the most of the literary medium, so hats off to author F. C. Yee for the passion and effort he put in.

In The Shadow of Kyoshi, we learn about the era of the previous fire Avatar before Roku, Avatar Szeto. Through Kyoshi and her own Team Avatar, we learn about the different clans and islands of the Fire Nation, as they experience the fraught early reign of Fire Lord Zoryu and the conflict between the Keohso and Saowon clans, culminating in the Camellia-Peony War. We get a multitude of fleshed-out perspectives from the upper crust to the flea-bitten underworld, matching the heights of the worldbuilding quality of Republic City. It’s such cool, intricate stuff, and really shows Avatar’s potential (and that’s all just the worldbuilding-- the character work is also top-notch).

That’s not the only place the Fire Nation has shone recently. One of Insight Editions’ awesome scrapbooks, Legacy of the Fire Nation, gave us a tour through the royal family’s history, including never-before-seen looks at young Iroh and Ozai and much, much more.

All this just goes to show that the Fire Nation has been a hot ticket throughout the ages and there’s one conspicuous gap in that history: the era of Avatar Korra. With so much recent expansion and development of the Fire Nation in our world, it would be perfect to see the culmination of it all in the current time period in the world of Avatar too.

If this made you excited for the potential of what the Avatar franchise could look like in the coming years, same boat!

The next concrete date where something could be announced is February 24th, when ViacomCBS will host their investor day and present their streaming strategy, including Paramount+ originals. There’s no guarantee Avatar is mentioned, but I’m keeping a hopeful eye out.

As for comics, Dark Horse’s schedule marches to its own beat, so there’s no way to know when the next drop of information is coming our way.

Could this finally be the comics that take us to the Fire Nation, or could the much-anticipated visit be in another medium like animation? Stay tuned-- as always I’ll post as soon as we learn anything new!

[alexsmitposts]

Meet The Space Force: More Embarrassing Political Pornography On Jan. 3rd, 2019, China landed the Chang-e 4 rover on the far side of the moon. This was a dramatic accomplishment in terms of extraterrestrial activity. The mission had a concrete purpose, not merely in terms of scientific research, but also in terms of technology.Helium-3, the rare, non-radioactive isotope, is quite hard to find on earth. Due to its rarity, it costs roughly $40,000 per ounce. However, Helium-3 is highly abundant on the far side of the Moon. The Chang’e 4 is believed to be the first step, with China intending to send up Chang’e 5, which will land on the moon, load up, and return to earth with a cache of Helium-3, extracted from the lunar surface. Helium-3 is in high demand right now, as fusion energy research is taking off. Many believe that Helium-3 could be used in a fusion reactor that could be developed, and completely change life on this planet with abundant levels of new energy. Russian President, Vladimir Putin is a champion of these efforts, saying: “Potentially we can harness a colossal, inexhaustible and safe source of energy. However, we will only succeed in fusion energy and in solving other fundamental tasks if we establish broad international cooperation and interaction between government and business and join the efforts of researchers representing different scientific schools and areas. If technological development becomes truly global, it will not be split up or reined in by attempts to monopolize progress, limit access to education and put up new obstacles to the free exchange of knowledge and ideas…The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) serves as a prime example of open scientific, technological cooperation. Scientists are now planning to use it to launch the process of controlled thermonuclear fusion…Our country is actively participating in this project, and is now prepared to suggest that they use Russia’s scientific infrastructure for joint research, joint scientific investigation, for the international scientific teams that are working in the sphere of nature-like and other breakthrough technologies, including unique mega-science installations.” The US space program originated with similar aspirations. NASA sought to advance human civilization, develop new energy sources, and make life better on earth by reaching for the stars. On Sept. 20th, 1963, US President, John F. Kennedy spoke at the United Nations and proposed that instead of having a “Space Race” that the United States and the Soviet Union work together. He said: “In a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity–in the field of space–there is room for new cooperation, for further joint efforts in the regulation and exploration of space. I include among these possibilities a joint expedition to the moon.” 2020: Pornography Takes the Place of Politics When describing the years of 1907-1910, a period when Russia was gripped by hopelessness after the failure of the 1905 revolution, Vladimir Lenin wrote: “Depression, demoralization, splits, discord, defection, and pornography took the place of politics.” Such words accurately describe the current atmosphere within the United States. Suicide rates are higher than they have been in decades. Opioid addiction is also claiming lives at a very high rate. Roads across the country are being un-paved because municipalities cannot afford to maintain them. Water is not being properly purified. Demoralization and depression are abundant, and discord among the country’s different demographics and regions is also widespread. In terms of “pornography,” the US Commander in Chief, Donald J. Trump boasted about the size of his penis in during a Republican primary debate. Furthermore, the “October Surprise” from his detractors, which dominated much of the political debate in the lead up to his electoral victory, was the infamous “Access Hollywood Tape” of Trump describing lewd activities with women, in a manner many interpreted as advocating sexual assault. After Trump was elected, feminist activists poured into the streets, dressed in pink to oppose him in a series of “Women’s Marches.” Many of the marchers wore hats sewn specifically to look like female genitalia. As impeachment proceedings continue against Trump in the US Congress and hopes that he would be a non-interventionist have faded away after his rapid escalations against Iran, Donald Trump continued to press forward with one of his favorite projects: The Space Force. On January 27th, just over a year after China’s historical intergalactic accomplishment, Trump released the logo of the new branch of the US Armed Forces created by this year’s congressional defense spending bill. The logo of Trump’s “Space Force” was immediately met with mockery and laughter, because it bears an obvious resemblance to the insignia used in the Star Trek TV programs. Trump’s Space Force is not an extension of NASA or push to send humans to Mars. It is not part of Russia and China’s efforts to make breakthroughs in Fusion Energy. The Space Force is purely military. As Trump explained: “Our destiny, beyond the Earth, is not only a matter of national identity but a matter of national security.” The White House proposed that the new branch of the US military be required: “Strengthen America’s ability to compete, deter and win in an increasingly contested domain. Organize, train and equip our space warfighters with next-generation capabilities. Maximize warfighting capability and advocacy for space while minimizing bureaucracy.” “We don’t want China and Russia and other countries leading us. We’ve always led — we’ve gone way far afield for decades now, having to do with our subject today. We’re going to be the leader by far. We’re behind you a thousand percent,” Trump said when he announced the proposal. LARPing from the White House Indeed, if Trump were to push the Space Program as it had originally been intended, it would require massive reforms to the US educational system. Instead of importing engineers and scientists from across the planet, the United States would be forced to start providing its young people, who greatly trail behind in Math and Science, with a much higher quality education. In response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, US government funding of education vastly increased. However, Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Education Secretary, favors dismantling public education, replacing it “schools for profit” Charter Schools, as well as schools run by religious institutions. While Betsy DeVos wouldn’t favor ramping up NASA, the Education Secretary and Billionaire Heiress, whose brother is none other than Erik Prince, founder of the Blackwater (Academi) Military contracting corporation, is most likely happy with Trump’s alternative move. The entire military industrial complex must be excited about expanding the highly profitable market for cruise missiles, bombs and drones into a whole new frontier. If the logo is any indicator, the Pentagon is probably on the verge of announcing new plans to develop phasers, laser beams, and lightsabers. The fact that the Space Force is intended to appeal to young voters, who tend to disfavor Trump, is no secret. In announcing the proposal Trump said: “A new generation of young people seeks to challenge — really challenge hard — to get their talent and their skill to work. And now we’re giving them a forum and a platform from which they can put that genius to work.” Indeed, many of America’s youth, young men, in particular, are probably quite excited about the Space Force. As young Americans find themselves stuck in low-wage, short term, service sector jobs, unable to earn a living, get married, buy a home, and have children, many are reduced to a kind of prolonged adolescence. Instead of raising kids and having fulfilling careers, many young people who are stuck making coffee or sweeping floors have found the world of Science Fiction and Fantasy as a place of solace. Many young Americans, who don’t seem to have much else to do, having been robbed of a fulfilling adult life, take pleasure in “LARPing” or “Live Action Role Play.” They dress in costumes like their favorite science fiction and fantasy characters, holding conventions and acting out scenes. While this LARPing subculture is new, Star Trek fans have been doing for decades. In the 1970s and 80s, the “Trekkies” were the object of mockery, but now their practices of dressing up in costumes and pretending to engage in outer space or medieval combat are much more respected. Oddly, a section of the new, white supremacist right-wing emerged that seemed to be somewhat reminiscent of the LARPers, though more dangerous. The group called itself the “Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights” and trained its members in using sticks, wearing helmets, and carrying shields of the purpose of street fighting. While images of the group’s members certainly look reminiscent of LARPers, their intentions are quite different. While the LARPers shy away from politics and are very clear that what they do is all play and pretend, despite the costumes, the Alt-Knights seem to be ready for a real confrontation as they rant and rave about “western civilization” and “cultural Marxism.” Many reports indicate that the Alt-Knight organization has effectively become defunct in the aftermath of the 2017 incident in Charlottesville. Outer Space Atlanticism in an Age of Pessimism Regardless, for millions of young people who spend their weekends pretending to be intergalactic fighters, Trump’s “Space Force” proposal sounds like their greatest hope. It is a chance to make their weekend fantasies come true. To paraphrase the old 1960s bumper sticker mocking US military recruiters, they can travel beyond the earth, meet new interesting people… and kill them. The Space Force seems to be yet another expression of Atlanticism. It fits the geopolitical trend of two different civilizational models. Societies based on Eurasian landmass have focused on building up industry and infrastructure, making scientific, architectural and mathematical breakthroughs. These Eurasian civilizations have been contrasted with the Atlanticist Empires, from ancient Rome to the 1800s British, who focused simply on control of the trade routes and extracting tribute at the point of a spear. One wonders if the American “Space Force” will seize the next Chang’e mission to the Moon, and demand it hand over some Helium-3 in exchange for crossing into extraterrestrial territory declared to be “ours.” Such a tragic event would fit the patterns that have played out since the dawn of agriculture, when some humans started to build cities to function as trading hubs, while others chose to remain in the forests, hunting animals and robbing travelers. The French philosopher George Sorel, himself an outspoken pessimist contrasted the two views as they were manifested in Ancient Greece, writing: “It seems to me that the optimism of the Greek philosophers depended to a great extent on economic reasons; it probably arose in the rich and commercial urban populations who were able to regard the universe as an immense shop full of excellent things with which they could satisfy their greed. I imagine that Greek pessimism sprang from poor warlike tribes living in the mountains, who were filled with enormous aristocratic pride, but whose material conditions were correspondingly poor… they explained their present wretchedness to them by relating catastrophes in which semi-divine former chiefs had succumbed to fate or the jealousy of the gods; the courage of the warriors might for the moment be unable to accomplish anything, but it would not always be so; the tribe must remain faithful to the old customs in order to be ready for great and victorious expeditions, which might very well take place in the near future.” Regardless, as pessimism is on the rise across the United States, Trump’s new sixth division of the US armed forces seems to capture the spirit of the times, LARP-style logo included. Despite celebrations amid the widespread mockery, no proposal to add a sixth wall to the Pentagon has yet been proposed.

[shirlleycoyle]

Meet The Redditors Using Astral Projection to Escape Quarantine

Late last year, the internet was crackling with plans to stage a million-strong raid on the supposed alien stronghold, Area 51. Now, with the COVID-19 pandemic forcing everyone to quarantine at home, venturing farther than the local park seems like a dream from a lost reality.

But what if there was a way to explore our planet that didn't put us in harm's way and was more stimulating than scrolling through Google Earth? And what if, while we were at it, we could storm Area 51 too?

According to a group of paranormal enthusiasts on Reddit, astral projection could be the vehicle we need.

Falling somewhere between a lucid dream and a near-death experience, astral projection is the sensation of separating from your physical self, keeping your mind awake while your body is asleep. Early records of the practice trace back to the Roman Empire. Experiences feel profound, and astral travelers have even claimed to learn things they otherwise couldn't have known.

Today, thousands of practitioners not only trade success stories for consciousness-expanding cosmic exploration, but have built a network to share techniques for traversing time and space using a toolkit available to everyone—the human mind.

Reddit's /R/AstralArmy is a focal point for the psychically curious to embark on out-of-body “missions” to off-limits locations, including military bases, Wuhan, the Pentagon, and supposed hives of paranormal activity like Skinwalker Ranch. The idea is intriguing: if you could go anywhere at all, what secrets could you learn?

A nineteen-year-old Wisconsinite who goes by Commander XXX told Motherboard via voice call that he started the subreddit (motto: “projection for protection”) because he was intrigued by the possibilities of group astral projection.

Here's how he says it works: the traveller creates an “astral scape” by visualizing a location in great detail. How do you visualize somewhere you've never been? Well, you use your imagination.

Then, you connect this visualization to a “sigil,” an occult symbol that is energized with a certain intent. By meditating on this sigil and recalling it in the out-of-body state, you can use it as a shortcut to the desired location, mirroring fast-travel in a video game. There's even a sigil for hanging out together, like an astral group DM.

There is a long history of out-of-body experiences (or OBEs) as religious events, with biblical explanations concerning the soul, or more recently, 19th-century new-age spiritualism. Today, there's reams of discussion on faith forums about whether astral projection is real, allowed within a religious framework, or simply total nonsense.

One group that took OBEs seriously was the US government’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

In 1995, the CIA declassified details of the DIA's nearly two decades of psychic research, the $20 million Stargate Project. From 1978, the program investigated the potential for psychic spying during the Cold War. Some of the wildest accounts of “remote viewing” entail visiting civilizations inhabiting the red rocks of Mars.

Skeptics ultimately lambasted the project. But the archive continues to fascinate parapsychology researchers, and clearly inspires Reddit's astral travelers.

"Most people are pretty basic astral projectors," Commander said, amid a baffling explanation that their missions are not necessarily representative of physical locations, but could be muddied by the interplay of how thoughts impact reality. His argument is that you never know if anything is objectively true anyway, a concept about competing forms of perception that is not as far-fetched as it first appears.

"We choose to believe what we want to believe for the most part," he said. "I don't think astral projection is any less a question of being real, as the physical."

Some of the Redditors who had claimed to infiltrate the Pentagon or the White House reported running up against barriers that prevented them from exploring further, feeling physically drained, or in one case, encountering astral Green Beret-esque guards.

Others made even more extraordinary claims, including encountering a moon base protected by a gigantic bubble, and speaking to nautical folk legend Davy Jones aboard the ghost ship, The Flying Dutchman—a conjoining of myths pioneered by The Pirates of the Caribbean. Some of this, I felt, stretched the realms of believability, and I wondered if this was an elaborate form of crowdsourced role-playing.

**

But the group isn’t setting out to convince anyone, including me: they just wanted to discuss their experiments in consciousness undisturbed. Commander didn't care whether people believed, and would rather mainstream science did not investigate.

Some scientists are interested in out-of-body experiences, however.

Jane Aspell, a cognitive neuroscientist at Cambridge's Anglia Ruskin University, told Motherboard that one of the first studies was led by Olaf Blanke, who sought to determine whether people who had undergone these experiences had anything in common—say, brain damage.

Blanke discovered a shared abnormality among five patients—four with epilepsy, and one who suffered frequent migraines—in the temporal parietal junction (TPJ), a part of the brain which deals with cognitive function and perception.

Suggesting a link between the TPJ and OBEs is a 2007 paper about a 63-year-old man who had intractable tinnitus and was implanted with electrodes to alleviate his condition. Instead, the researchers found they were able to consistently induce OBEs in the patient by stimulating these regions with the electrodes.

But the very nature of OBEs—that they tend to occur erratically, if at all—means they're incredibly difficult to study in a lab.

"We think this area is not functioning correctly, either because of damage, epilepsy, migraine, a stroke—or all kinds of reasons," said Aspell. "Or by stimulating it you can cause it to behave abnormally, so any kind of abnormal activity in this area can give rise to an out-of-body experience."

Whatever is happening, there's still much that's unknown.

"What they see can be very detailed," said Aspell. "They can see objects in the room, maybe people in the room, and obviously they're not really seeing it from there. But what's in this person's brain knows what's in the room because they've looked at it at some point. The brain is somehow reconstructing how that room would look from above. It's as if you had to draw a picture of your office or your bedroom for a bird's eye view—you could do that mental transformation consciously.”

"The brain is able to do it spontaneously, in a very rich and vivid way. We don't know how that can happen," she added.

Astral projection has never been proven in a scientifically controlled way, but Aspell doesn't think most experiencers are lying.

"They're as old as humanity, I think," she said, adding they may not even be limited to our species—chimpanzees might be having them too.

There's also a proposed link between quantum physics and consciousness. While perhaps the most famous OBEr in science, Dr Susan Blackmore, has put distance between her own experiences and these theories, the ideas persist.

Anthony Peake, who authored The Out Of Body Experience: The History and Science of Astral Travel, took me on a whirlwind tour of quantum physics, theorizing that entanglement, where particles are innately linked by some special quality, suggests instantaneous communication at a distance could be possible. If every particle that exists has a single source (the Big Bang) can we perhaps tune into "certain information fields non-locally?" Peake suggests maybe this is what happens when we travel out of our bodies.

But Dr Alastair Butcher, author of Super Smart Science: Astrophysics Made Easy, said that although seemingly instantaneous communication occurs between certain particles, there's no way of externally accessing this information. "These phenomena are extraordinary and throw up questions about the nature of quantum mechanics and, therefore, reality itself," Butcher told Motherboard.

"There are many interpretations of quantum mechanics, each with interesting implications. However, they're not currently provable or, more importantly, disprovable,” Butcher continued. “It's tempting to take one and run with it, especially as an explanatory device for something else not fully understood such as consciousness. However, this is an unscientific and in many cases unprovable approach to determining the nature of things."

Clearly, the only way I'd be able to see if there was something to all this would be to try it out myself.

Short of stimulating my TPJ by jamming a q-tip deep into my ear, I would have to rely on tried and tested techniques to astrally say "hiya" to my target: my cat, Zeus, who I'm cruelly separated from at this time.

I had a head start: a decade ago, I started lucid dreaming regularly during a period of insomnia. Being generally anxious, these perturbations spilled into my dreams, so when I reached the buzzing sensation practitioners associate with bodily separation, I would awake in a panic. Rather than roll out of body and into the cosmos, I'd roll out of my bed and onto the floor.

I tried the "Wake Back To Bed Technique" first. You wake up and go back to bed, holding the intent to astrally separate. The “back to bed” part was easy, but that's all that happened for me beyond better dream recall.

Next, I experimented with a technique an /r/AstralArmy mod outlined for me called “half-projection,” which is a little like remote viewing.

Although I could clearly visualize Zeus, I wasn't convinced I really was using some innate psychic ability to grossly impinge upon his privacy. I could easily have been merely imagining the one activity I know he gets up to day in, day out: waiting between refills of his crunchies bowl.

The author's cat Zeus was the first target of astral spying.

I turned to the organization that had perhaps achieved more than any other in popularizing out-of-body experiences, the Monroe Institute, founded by the guy the Simpsons loosely based Dr Marvin Monroe on. Monroe, a former radio executive and author of Journeys Out Of The Body, was mystified by his OBEs, and financed efforts to better understand them, especially with sound design, using himself as a test subject.

He found something called binaural beats could expedite inducing OBEs, and these would be developed into the Institute's patented “Hemi-Sync” meditations.

According to Luigi Sciambarella of the Monroe Institute UK, binaural beats consist of two separate sine waves played independently to each ear. To square the difference, the brain generates a beat frequency of its own.

For example, if you play 100 Hz in your left ear and 104 Hz in the right, the brain cancels the competing sounds and leaves you with a 4 Hz pulse, not actually in the audio file, but generated by the brain.

Sciambarella claims that with practice, listeners can lull themselves into a "mind-awake, body-asleep state" with relative ease after about ten minutes.

Anyone can try a free sampler. You have to pay hundreds of dollars for more, though—or just look on YouTube.

Sciambarella says that other reasons for using the tools could include personal growth or tapping into the creative qualities of the mind. In the same way that “mindfulness” exercises claim to help us pay attention to our waking lives, he believes OBEs can help us pay more attention to our sleeping selves.

Sciambarella says these “mind awake, body asleep states” occur on a spectrum. While we may think of OBEs as peeling away from your physical body, the Institute views them as "moving out of connection with our physical body to different degrees."

Daydreaming—which comprises almost half our waking life, according to researchers at Harvard University—is somewhere on that spectrum, for example. Sciambarella compares it to a familiar car ride: your body operates on autopilot while your mind's elsewhere.

This all made me feel better about my failure to explore moon bases with a lunar sigil. But I still wasn't getting very far.

Sciambarella offered some advice: Start small with visualization exercises where you engage your imagination in easily repeatable actions, like playing with a door handle. Intention is key, too. And relax.

Even with that guidance, I haven't managed to leave my corporeal self behind. While I'm doubtful I'll be exchanging ripostes with Davy Jones soon, my psychic disembodiment efforts have allowed me to reach states of relaxed stupor I hadn't thought possible.

Given the isolated nature of our current reality, there's hardly been a more opportune time for inward reflection. If that leads to outward psychic adventures, well, that's a bonus.

Meet The Redditors Using Astral Projection to Escape Quarantine syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[bountyofbeads]

Russia Says Its Troops Are Patrolling Area in Northeastern Syria

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/world/middleeast/kurds-syria-turkey.html

Russia Says Its Troops Are Patrolling Between Turkish and Syrian Forces

Russia may be moving to fill a security vacuum left by the U.S. withdrawal and illustrates how the power balance in the region is rapidly shifting.

By Carlotta Gall and Patrick Kingsley | Published Oct. 15, 2019 Updated 9:25 AM ET | New York Times | Posted October 15, 2019 10:10 AM ET |

CEYLANPINAR, Turkey — Russia said on Tuesday that its military units were patrolling territory in northern Syria between Syrian and Turkish forces after the American withdrawal from the area, underscoring the sudden loss of United States influence in the area and illustrating how the power balance in the region has shifted rapidly in the past week.

The announcement that Russian forces were now patrolling an area where the United States had until Monday maintained two military bases appeared to signal that Moscow was moving to fill a security void left by the withdrawal of both the American military and its partners in an international counterterrorism mission.

Videos circulating on social media appeared to show a Russian-speaking man filming himself walking around a recently evacuated United States military base in northern Syria.

The Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement that its military police, which had already established a presence in other parts of Syria, were patrolling “the northwestern borders of Manbij district along the line of contact of the Syrian Arab Republic military and the Turkish military.”

It added that its troops were coordinating “with the Turkish side” and that “the Syrian government army has taken full control of the city of Manbij and nearby populated areas.”

The developments on Tuesday came as a spokesman for the United States-led coalition said on Twitter that its forces, which include French and British soldiers, had left the formerly Kurdish-held town of Manbij. “Coalition forces are executing a deliberate withdrawal from northeast Syria,” Col Myles B. Caggins wrote. “We are out of Manbij.”

Russia and Turkey will soon be the only international armies in the area.

Turkish and Syrian troops are racing to control large parts of northern Syria that were run by an autonomous Syrian Kurdish government until a Turkish-led invasion began last Wednesday.

On Tuesday, Syrian government troops were deployed inside the northern city of Manbij, a Syrian state broadcaster said, as Turkish-led forces advanced in the countryside outside the city. Elsewhere, Kurdish-led fighters attempted to retake the strategic Syrian border town of Ras al-Ain from Turkish-led forces.

Heavy fire from machine guns could be heard to the south and southwest of Ras al-Ain and from the Turkish border town of Ceylanpinar, which is less than a mile from the fighting. Turkish artillery pounded an eastern suburb of the Syrian settlement midmorning, raising clouds of smoke above low farmhouses and pistachio groves.

Where Turkish forces and the Syrian government have moved into Kurdish-held areas

As of Tuesday, fighting in Ras al-Ain and other areas in northern Syria has forced at least 160,000 people from their homes, according to United Nations estimates. The Kurdish authorities put the figure at 270,000.

The battle highlighted the fluctuating nature of the Turkish incursion, which began last Wednesday after President Trump ordered the evacuation of American troops from the Turkish-Syrian border, opening the door for Turkish troops and their Syrian Arab proxies to enter Kurdish-held territory in northern Syria.

The White House decision drew global condemnation and left Kurdish fighters feeling betrayed, and the situation has quickly turned into a blood bath. Experts on the region warned that the withdrawal of American troops would embolden Russia, Iran and the Islamic State.

Abandoned by the Americans, and quickly losing land to the Turkish force, the Kurdish authorities sought protection from the Syrian government and its largest backer, Russia.

Since the Kurdish authorities asked the government of President Bashar al-Assad for assistance, thousands of Syrian Army troops have flooded into northern Syria for the first time since the government lost control of the region several years ago.

But Syrian government troops have stayed clear of the border region near Ras al-Ain, where Kurdish troops fight on alone. Instead, government forces have deployed to other strategic positions, such as the western cities of Manbij, to help alleviate pressure on Kurdish fighters on the front line.

The last-minute alliance comes at great cost to the Kurdish authorities, who are effectively giving up self-rule.

Syrian Kurdish militias established a system of self-rule in northern Syria in 2012, when the chaos of the Syrian civil war gave them the chance to create a sliver of autonomous territory free of central government influence.

The fighters greatly expanded their territory after they partnered with an international military coalition, led by the United States, to push the Islamic State from the area.

After the Kurdish-led fighters captured ISIS territory, they assumed responsibility for its governance, eventually controlling roughly a quarter of the Syrian landmass. They have also been guarding thousands of ISIS fighters and their families, hundreds of whom fled a detention camp in Ras al-Ain after Turkish-led forces bombed the surrounding area.

The Kurds’ control of the land in Syria enraged Turkey, since the militia is an offshoot of a guerrilla group that has waged a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state. Turkey has long pressed the United States to abandon its alliance with Kurdish fighters so Turkish troops could enter Syria and force the Kurds from territory close to the border.

Washington rebuffed Turkey’s requests for several years, maintaining a de facto peacekeeping presence along the border near Ras al-Ain, the town at the center of the fighting on Friday. But that changed last week, when Mr. Trump made a sudden decision to withdraw troops — first from that particular area, and later from all of northern Syria.

In Britain, meanwhile, a day after foreign ministers from all 28 European Union member states agreed unanimously to stop selling arms to Turkey — the first time the bloc has reached such a decision about a NATO ally — Britain announced a pause in such ties with Turkey.

Dominic Raab, Britain’s foreign secretary, told the House of Commons on Tuesday that “no further export licenses to Turkey for items which might be used in military operations in Syria will be granted” until the government had conducted a review.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has made clear he will not bow to pressure to halt the offensive. “We will soon secure the region from Manbij to the border with Iraq,” he said on Tuesday during a visit to Azerbaijan, referring to the 230-mile expanse of territory.

Carlotta Gall reported from Ceylanpinar, and Patrick Kingsley from Istanbul. Anton Troianovski contributed reporting from Moscow, and Iliana Magra from London.

**********

4 Big Questions

About Syria’s

Future

By Anne Barnard, Anjali Singhvi, Sarah Almukhtar, Allison McCann and Jin Wu | Published Oct. 15, 2019 | New York Times | Posted October 15, 2019 |

The surprise American withdrawal from parts of northern Syria last week reshuffled old alliances and touched off a new stage of the eight-year war. The only certainty is uncertainty — but the answers to these four questions will shape the country’s future.

1. Who will control

northeast Syria?

A swath of Syria that had been relatively stable since the defeat in March of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate has plunged back into chaos.

As one military force (a small American contingent) abruptly pulled out, two competing ones (Turkey and the Syrian government) pushed in.

Just over a week ago, a roughly triangular slab of northeastern Syria, about a third of the country, was controlled by a Kurdish-led Syrian militia backed by the United States. That militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces, was the main ground force that defeated ISIS in Syria.

But on Oct. 6, President Trump gave Turkey the green light to cross the border and attack the group.

Turkey had long been angry about the American alliance with the Syrian Democratic Forces, known as the S.D.F. The militia’s leadership has ties with a Kurdish group that has fought an insurgency inside Turkey for years; Turkey considers the group to be a terrorist organization.

Turkey wants to establish a buffer zone by driving the S.D.F. out of a strip extending at least 30 kilometers into Syria along the border.

At least 100,000 people have fled the Turkish assault.

And, facing a rout without support from its old allies, the militia’s leaders turned for help to the Syrian government, a foe of both Turkey and the United States. Over the weekend, the Kurds said they had struck a deal for Syrian government forces to re-enter areas they had ceded to Kurdish forces years ago as an uprising swept the country.

The sudden turn of events is creating new risks, as instability and violence increase. And Turkey is seeking to push still deeper into Kurdish territory, using Syrian opposition fighters, mostly Arab and Turkmen, as ground troops. That stokes the potential for ethnic conflict.

Turkey, a NATO member, is competing for territory with the Russian-backed Syrian government, their forces racing to take cities near the border. That raises the prospect of a NATO-Russian conflict, but some experts and observers on the ground believe Turkey and Russia have a deal to carve up the map. They have increasingly worked together on Syria, even as they officially back opposing factions.

At stake is the fate of some four million Syrians living under S.D.F. rule who had found a respite from repression — both from ISIS and from the Syrian government, which has bombed its own cities and sent tens of thousands of people to torture prisons to stay in power.

Recent American statements have called for Turkey to curb its actions, and the United States has sent mixed signals about whether it will try to keep some forces in the area.

But experts said that by allowing the Turkish incursion to begin at all, the United States has effectively ended its military protection of the S.D.F., at least for now. The Turkish incursion makes any continued American presence untenable, they said, by cutting supply routes and undermining locals’ trust in the United States.

2. How will this turn

out for the Kurds?

Without American backing, the Kurds are facing an enormous blow to their hopes of retaining a degree of autonomy. They have lost leverage in any future dealmaking with either Turkey or the Syrian government.

And questions remain about precisely what agreement the Kurds reached with the Syrian government. Each side has cast it somewhat differently.

The S.D.F., which has almost never fought the Syrian government or its allies, has suggested that the agreement entails allowing Syrian forces to enter its areas and raise the Syrian flag, to deter Turkey from attacking. It says it will retain its military structure and control of local governing councils.

But the Syrian government has said it will require the S.D.F. to disband and put its fighters into Russian-run fighting formations like the Fifth Division, which has absorbed surrendering Syrian rebels from other parts of the country. That would be more in keeping with precedent.

Damascus did once effectively cede the northeast to Kurdish forces early in the Syrian uprising as it focused on quelling Arab opposition fighters in the country’s more populous west. And until now, it has even kept offices in two Kurdish cities and an airport.

Kurdish leaders, never fully trusting the United States, have always kept channels open to Moscow and Damascus.

But Damascus has a long history of repressing Kurds, and President Bashar al-Assad’s government is not known for making deals: In areas it has retaken, it has insisted on total surrender, with no concessions. And it has punished those who defied it, conscripting and even disappearing those who sought autonomy.

Some believe the Kurds may fare better. But in majority-Arab areas, the mood is fearful. That opens a door for resurgence of armed opposition, including extremists.

3. How are civilians

being affected?

Some 100,000 civilians — many of whom have already been displaced repeatedly — have already fled the border zone that Turkey is attacking. Roads out of major cities are clogged, and families packed into cars are telling reporters that they have no idea where to go. Routes to Turkey are blocked.

Some are trying to flee to the Kurdish region of Iraq, others to Syrian Democratic Forces territory further south, where militia officials say they are relocating some refugee camps.

But both of those regions are exhausted and destroyed after years of battling the Islamic State, and have few resources to offer refugees. To make matters worse, the international relief group Mercy Corps is pulling out of northeastern Syria because it can no longer reach people in need. In a statement, it called that “a nightmare scenario.”

Civilian injuries have already been reported, some attributed to Turkish shelling. Civilians have also been killed in Turkey in cross-border shelling by S.D.F. fighters.

Another threat could emerge if Kurds in the S.D.F. decide to fade into the population and carry out an insurgent campaign against the Turks.

Turkey has tried to sell its border zone to some Syrians as a Syrian opposition protectorate that could foster some local autonomy and restore the homes of Arabs who have been displaced by Kurds. But the Syrian rebel groups that work with Turkey have lost credibility, with some dismissing them as “Turkish mercenaries.”

Turkey has also said that it wants to push many of the 3.6 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey over the border and into the buffer zone it is trying to make in Syria, a move that would violate international law. The largely rural area has no capacity to absorb that many refugees, who come from all over Syria.

4. Will ISIS come back?

The chaos of the last week has opened the door to two possible threats from ISIS: the escape of former fighters detained when the group was defeated, and the reactivation of sleeper cells the militants are believed to have put in place.

Thousands of suspected militants were being held in detention facilities throughout S.D.F. territory. They include at least 2,000 foreign citizens whose home countries have so far refused to take them back.

Some of the prisons are located within the 30-kilometer strip that Turkey has vowed to seize. So are some of the camps holding tens of thousands of people from areas once held by ISIS, including many women and children.

Already, there have been reports of escapes, and American forces were unable to extract dozens of high-value prisoners ahead of the fighting. One prison, in the border city of Qamishli, was hit by Turkish mortars on Friday, and five ISIS suspects fled in the aftermath.

S.D.F. guards have been trying to hold their positions at the prisons, but it is unclear how long they can remain. The main prison site, at Al Hol, lies outside the border strip, farther southeast toward the Iraqi border.

There is also fear that ISIS sleeper cells throughout the area could take advantage of the turmoil and reactivate; the group has already claimed responsibility for one suicide bombing in Qamishli since the Turkish operation began.

Many Arabs fear the return of the ISIS militants. But the threat of a return of Syrian government forces — which could mean torture or conscription, especially for young people in the opposition — could tempt some to support any alternative, even extremists.

**********

Trump Is Making Syria, and the Middle East, More Dangerous

As desperate Kurds ally with Assad, the specter of the Islamic State threatens again, and American power dims.

By The Editorial Board | Published October 14, 2019 | New York Times | Posted October 15, 2019 10:00 AM ET

The roughly 1,000 American troops  stationed in Syria find themselves in an impossible situation, by order of their commander in chief. They are now caught between the Syrian forces of President Bashar al-Assad, an unrepentant war criminal who has used poison gas against his own people, and the Turkish military — a NATO ally — which has already rained down artillery shells near positions held by American soldiers.

When Donald Trump won the presidency on a promise to end “endless wars,” it was always unspoken that doing so would mean to some extent abandoning allies, like the Kurdish forces that helped devastate the Islamic State, or the Afghan government in Kabul. But surely putting America first never meant leaving American soldiers behind. The Times reported Monday that removing the American troops from Syria may require an airlift, a move that may also be needed to relocate the estimated 50 American tactical nuclear weapons housed at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey.

Dozens of civilians and combatants  were killed in fighting, according to the BBC, when Turkey struck south into Kurdish-held areas of Syria over the weekend, an operation that was greenlit by the White House. Islamic State fighters and their family members, who had been held in a detention camp by Kurdish forces, have scattered to the winds, The Times reports. The Kurds, under fire from Turkish forces, quickly allied with the Syrian government, which sent its own Russian-backed army north.

One thousand decisions led the United States to find itself refereeing the border between Syria and Turkey, but only one decision — made abruptly just over a week ago by President Trump after a phone call with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey — led to the chaos and bloodletting that has gushed across the region in the past few days.

That decision may have been made in the service of a coherent grander strategy, but there is little evidence of it. Mr. Trump allowed the invasion and then threatened to destroy the Turkish economy if it went too far, without specifying how far that might be. He doubled tariffs on imported Turkish steel on Monday as the Treasury Department and Capitol Hill discussed options for an economic counterpunch to the invasion Mr. Trump only just approved. Adding to the confusion of the situation, Vice President Mike Pence late Monday said Mr. Trump had asked the Turkish government for a cessation of hostilities.

The threat to destroy the Turkish economy was made, as is Mr. Trump’s wont, in a tweet that was such a departure from historical presidential pronouncements that it is worth quoting: “As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!).”

No wise person would take such headlong action in one of the planet’s most volatile and contested regions. As for limits, it is unclear what those are.

On the ground, Syrian Arab forces allied with the Turkish military executed at least two Kurdish prisoners on Saturday, filmed the killings and blasted the images across social media. Defense Secretary Mark Esper admitted in an interview Sunday that “we see a humanitarian crisis emerging.” Two United States officials told The Times that the precipitous withdrawal of American forces forced them to leave behind five dozen “high value” Islamic State prisoners. The situation is sure to get worse, especially for the estimated two million civilians living in northern Syria.

“They trusted us, and we broke that trust,” an Army officer who has worked alongside the Kurds in northern Syria told The Times. “It’s a stain on the American conscience.”

The decision makes as little sense strategically as it does morally. American allies from Berlin to Riyadh  are alarmed. “Anyone who wants to assist Syria in protecting the Kurds is good with me, whether it is Russia, China, or Napoleon Bonaparte,” Mr. Trump wrote almost flippantly on Twitter on Monday. Yet at the same time that Mr. Trump has signaled that the Middle East should be someone else’s problem and has talked about bringing the troops home, he recently ordered another 3,000 to Saudi Arabia to deter Iran — which, like Russia and the Syrian government, has now only been emboldened by his flight from Syria.

History is littered with instances of one-time allies abandoned by Washington to their fate — the Bay of Pigs invasion; the fall of South Vietnam; numerous internal uprisings, like Hungary in 1956, that were fanned by the United States only to be smothered when aid, implicit or explicit, was withheld. The United States has abandoned the Kurds — a stateless people who live in parts of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Armenia and Iran — on numerous occasions in just the past half century. The most infamous of these betrayals came when Saddam Hussein attacked them with poison gas in 1988, and the Reagan administration protected the Iraqi government from congressional sanctions.

Yet the decision by the Trump administration to quit Syria stands apart because the status quo was entirely sustainable. American forces were not taking high numbers of casualties. The region under control of the Kurds was largely quiet. Islamic State fighters were penned up. There wasn’t major international pressure for the United States to withdraw. If the Trump administration had wanted to acquiesce to Mr. Erdogan’s pleadings to let Turkey take stronger actions in service of its own national security, it could surely have managed such steps in a far more measured and coordinated manner.

Several Republicans, including Senator Lindsey Graham and Representative Liz Cheney, expressed outrage at the overnight betrayal of the Kurds. (Ms. Cheney went so far as to suggest that the Turkish military launched its invasion because Mr. Trump is weakened by an impeachment inquiry over his wielding of presidential power.) But they have only their party to blame for resisting any effort to hold the president accountable for his erratic navigation of American foreign policy or to temper policy decisions that have landed migrant children in cages at home and left longstanding alliances in tatters overseas.

If Mr. Trump hoped to improve relations with Turkey (where two Trump towers license his name, by the way) then he got that wrong, too. Anyone who could think half a step ahead would realize that any such warming would surely be chilled by the inevitable economic sanctions. In the wake of the invasion, the European Union opted to limit arms sales to Turkey, while sanctions under consideration on Capitol Hill could shut off flows of weapons, spare parts and ammunition from the United States.

At the moment, America’s priority must be to protect its soldiers in the field and secure its nuclear weapons. Turkey must understand that NATO will not come to its aid if its adventurism in Syria spins out of control and that the international community will reject any effort to dilute the Kurdish population by moving in other ethnic groups.

A few days ago there were valid options to answer the question of what the United States could do in response to the invasion. Harsh sanctions and other actions might have compelled Turkey to pull back, allowing for American troops to restore the status quo. Now the only alternative to Turkish control of the north is Mr. Assad’s control of the north. America’s alliance with Kurdish forces is probably dead, and it’s hard to see what role the United States can play in Syria or in the fight against the Islamic State. They say if you break it, you own it. But maybe all the United States has done is break it.

*********

What the World Loses if Turkey Destroys the Syrian Kurds

A radical political experiment is in peril.

By Jenna Krajeski, Ms. Krajeski is a journalist with the Fuller Project for International Reporting. | Published October 14, 2019 | New York Times | Posted October 15, 2019 10:10 AM ET |

In spring 2015, the only semiofficial way to enter the Kurdish-controlled areas of northern Syria, referred to by Kurds as Rojava, was by boat across the narrow Tigris River from Iraqi Kurdistan. The boats were small and rusty. Weighed down with migrants and supplies, they moved with the urgency of sunning water buffalo. It was a trip for desperate people — I shared the boat with an elderly couple headed for Islamic State-held areas hoping to save their family home from occupation — taken at a tourist’s pace.

Like much of Rojava at the time, the border crossing was part reality and part wishful thinking. Our rickety boat flew the green, red and yellow Kurdish flag as proudly as a naval warship. The security forces wore badges declaring themselves to be members of the People’s Protection Unit, or Y.P.G., a fledgling force devoted to protecting the would-be autonomous region. Distributing handwritten permits that would allow us to pass through checkpoints, they welcomed us as though Rojava wasn’t still mostly a Kurdish dream.

Over decades of United States intervention in the Middle East, Kurds have been most often measured by their worth as military allies, and in relation to how much or how little they have helped Americans defeat an enemy. In Rojava, that enemy was the Islamic State; in Iraqi Kurdistan it was Saddam Hussein. Since President Trump ordered the withdrawal of American troops from northern Syria, opening the doors for a Turkish incursion, outcry in the West has been focused on the abandonment of fighters who led a dangerous charge against ISIS. The withdrawal has been rightly characterized as a “betrayal” and the ensuing bloodshed provides more than enough evidence of the brutality of Mr. Trump’s decision.

But to see the move as simply a betrayal of military allies is to miss much of what is currently at stake in northern Syria, where a would-be Kurdish autonomous region is also the site of a deeply ambitious — if young and controversial — attempt at democracy, equality and stability. While the Y.P.G. members and their female counterparts in the Women’s Protection Unit fought on the front lines, Kurds in Rojava worked to fulfill a plan for Kurdish democracy at least three decades in the making. That plan included equal representation of women and minorities; fair distribution of land and wealth; a balanced judiciary; and even ecological preservation of northern Syria’s rural landscape.

Rojava is a flawed and often fraught experiment. But amid major crackdowns on supporters of the Kurdish movement in Turkey and setbacks in the campaign for independence in Iraqi Kurdistan, Kurdish Syria became the heart of the greater Kurdish movement — and the people living there much more than military allies. Those who fought the Islamic State did so alongside Americans they truly regarded as partners. But they fought for Rojava.

Before visiting Rojava, I had spent years reporting on Kurdish movements in the region, with a focus on those influenced by the imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan. Over 40 years, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the group known as the P.K.K. that Mr. Ocalan founded as a guerrilla army — and which Turkey, the United States and the European Union consider a terrorist organization — grew into a political and social force. The success of his doctrines was particularly apparent in the prominent role of Kurdish women in Kurdish politics.

But Kurds in Turkey, like Kurds in Iraq, forged their political and cultural gains in the context of much stronger central states. In Syria, war and political upheaval created a power vacuum in the north. Kurds rushed to create their ideal Ocalan-inspired society.

As an experiment, Rojava was deeply compelling. I met political leaders like Hediye Yusuf, a woman whose early political identity was shaped in Syrian prisons and who eventually became co-president of one of Rojava’s three regions. I met women who were trained to intervene after reports of domestic violence. I talked to shopkeepers who distributed their goods to families in need, and to a Christian Syrian who stayed in northern Syria to ensure Christian representation in the P.Y.D., the governing political party.

What I saw was in keeping both with Rojava’s guiding doctrine — a document called the Social Contract — and a result of extreme circumstance. ISIS wasn’t far away. One farmer shared his food not because he had read the Social Contract but because that’s what you did for your neighbors during a trade embargo. A female fighter would have preferred to be a photographer, but that would have to wait. The ideals of Rojava were often impossible to separate from the pressures of war.

It was tempting to romanticize. Journalists and politicians, drawn to the region by the promises of the Social Contract, were treated to guided tours and organized conferences. The word “utopia” was often applied in headlines, and comparisons were made between the Y.P.G. fighting ISIS and those who fought the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Mr. Ocalan’s writings incorporate the teachings of the American philosopher Murray Bookchin and made reference to the Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson’s critiques of nationalism, which gave the Kurdish project worldwide appeal. Defending Kobani, a border town with little strategic significance but huge symbolic importance, raised the profile of the Syrian Kurdish forces in 2014. When the Y.P.G. helped open a safe passage for Yazidis escaping ISIS genocide in Iraq, they were regarded as heroes, not terrorists.

Kurds outside of Syria, particularly in Turkey, hung their dreams of Kurdish autonomy on the dream of Rojava. In 2015, a Kurdish architect in Turkey laid out long-term plans for Kobani. Houses would be built with solar panels, low and whitewashed like on a Greek island, he told me. A Kurdish lawyer drinking tea by the border said he would have never predicted Mr. Ocalan’s ideas would play out in Syria, rather than Turkey. But he was happy about it. “It’s a dream come true,” he said at the time.

Kurdish autonomy and United States support made Rojava a threat to Turkey and to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Using the language of counterterrorism, his administration in 2015 began increasing efforts to imprison supporters of the Kurdish movement in Turkey, removing democratically elected Kurdish leaders from their positions and cracking down on protests so brutally as to transform cities in southeastern Turkey into war zones. Last year, Turkish-backed forces took over Afrin, part of Rojava. “Erdogan started a war,” Adem Uzun, head of foreign relations for the Kurdish National Congress, told me. “He was afraid that Kurds in Rojava would achieve something and gain recognition.”

Mr. Erdogan’s attacks in Syria show signs of awakening a political fervor that he had effectively quashed; in Diyarbakir, historically the political center of Kurdish Turkey, small protests have materialized in the streets. “When you talk to people they say: ‘O.K., we have lost a lot here. They destroyed our cities. But at least in Rojava we have made some gains,’” Ramazan Tunc, a businessman and politician who until the 2015 crackdowns was working to open a Kurdish-language university in Turkey, told me. The attacks in northern Syrian, he said, “may trigger unrest.”

To be worthy of protection, Rojava doesn’t need to be romanticized or viewed solely through the lens of American goals in the region. It is a uniquely Kurdish experiment, grown out of decades of military and political struggle in every part of a would-be Kurdistan and constantly adapting to the circumstances of war.

It is rightly criticized. In my reporting, I’ve talked to Kurds who fled the political dominance of the P.Y.D., and human rights groups who have accused the Y.P.G. of recruiting child soldiers. Rumors of a political alliance, perhaps tacit, with the regime of Bashar al-Assad have now been given more weight as a result of a new military alliance in the face of the Turkish assault. Those who consider the revolution delegitimized by any ties to the Assad regime will have their argument strengthened; others will say Kurds, as they often have, are simply trying to survive in an impossible situation.

But Rojava has been successful against astonishing odds, laying the foundations of a flawed but ambitious local democracy. “I do not claim it was a perfect place,” Yasin Duman, an academic whose research focuses on the administration in northern Syria, wrote to me in an email. “But they have taken a huge step toward achieving an autonomous region that is able to accommodate many of the needs of different ethnic, religious and political groups. All this happened when the region was under attack from different groups and regimes.”

Rojava’s strength, he explained, came not just from its vaunted fighting units. It also came from teaching Kurdish language and culture, respecting other religions and ethnicities, and building toward gender equality. “I do not think Trump’s administration can, or is willing, to understand this,” he wrote.

[csrgood]

SC Johnson Accelerates Progress Boosting Plastic Recycling and Reuse

Today, SC Johnson is announcing a series of commitments to further reduce its own plastic footprint, by boosting recycled plastic content in its packaging, supporting reuse of plastic bottles through concentrated refills, and launching an effort to make Ziploc® bags recyclable at curbside. 

For decades, plastic has been making lives better for people around the world. The problem of plastic pollution, however, has become a growing one with more than 30 percent of plastic waste escaping collection systems and going into the environment. Ocean plastic has reached a global crisis level, with 8 million metric tons of plastic entering the ocean every year – the equivalent of one dump truck load every minute.[i] Fisk Johnson, Chairman and CEO of SC Johnson, witnessed this pollution himself on a dive recently in Indonesia.

“At SC Johnson, being an environmental leader has been a principle we have worked hard at for generations,” said Fisk Johnson, Chairman and CEO of SC Johnson. “With the increasing spotlight on the global plastic waste crisis, we wanted to share our efforts externally. We hope they inspire other companies to take similar steps toward a circular plastic economy, because the planet simply cannot sustain the status quo.”

SC Johnson has a longstanding commitment to preserving the environment and has been working to improve the sustainability and circularity of its plastic products for more than a decade. Today, SC Johnson is announcing a series of commitments in accordance with the New Plastics Economy Global Commitment to reduce its own plastic footprint, and encourage reuse and recycling of plastic products:

100% of SC Johnson plastic packaging will be recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025. Currently, 90 percent of SC Johnson’s plastic packaging is designed to be recyclable, reusable or compostable.

Triple the amount of post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastic content in SC Johnson packaging by 2025. SC Johnson will increase its use of PCR plastic in its packaging from 10 million kilograms to more than 30 million kilograms by 2025. As part of this, SC Johnson will increase the percentage of PCR plastic that it uses in its North American and European bottles from 20 percent today to 40 percent by 2025.

Expand the number of concentrated refill options for SC Johnson products by 2025. Since 2011, SC Johnson has been making concentrated liquid refills for its Home Cleaning trigger bottle products in the U.S. Each trigger bottle is designed to deliver 10,000 sprays so it can be refilled and reused an average of 13 times, every time avoiding a single-use alternative. The company will continue to expand its variety of concentrated refill options, enabling consumers to reuse packaging and reduce waste.

Continue to remove excess plastics wherever possible. SC Johnson has been relentlessly focused on designing unnecessary packaging out of its products. From 2011 to 2017, the company has removed 9.5 million kilograms of materials from its packaging.

Champion curbside recycling of plastic film. SC Johnson will continue its effort to make curbside recycling of flexible plastic film such as Ziploc® brand bags a reality in the U.S. SC Johnson is also promoting reuse of Ziploc® brand bags, which are made to be reused many times.

Work with industry and other organizations to support circular plastic economy models. SC Johnson will work with industry and NGOs to further support the circular plastic economy and keep plastic out of landfills and the environment.

Transforming Industry: SC Johnson is Leading a Plastic Recycling Revolution

Creating a circular plastic economy isn’t just about products. It’s also about transformative change across industry. SC Johnson has spent years working with recycling industry experts to understand barriers for recycling and find solutions to overcome them.

Most recently, in 2018 the company launched Ziploc® brand recycled trash bags, proving that recycled plastic film can be diverted away from landfills and reused for valuable new items instead. The trash bags are the first made with 100 percent post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastic film collected through a U.S. recycling center.

More than a Decade of Progress Reducing Plastic Waste

Like its Greenlist™ ingredient selection program and investments to fight deforestation, the company also has a systematic approach to reducing plastic waste.

SC Johnson has relentlessly focused on designing unnecessary packaging out of its products for years. From 2011 to 2016, the company removed 8.5 million kilograms of packaging materials across its business. In 2017, it cut an additional 1 million kilograms of plastic from its product packaging.

Just as important, 90 percent of SC Johnson’s plastic packaging is designed to be recyclable or reusable. Its Home Cleaning trigger bottles – for products like Windex®, Scrubbing Bubbles® or Mr Muscle® – are designed to deliver 10,000 sprays. This means the same bottle can be refilled and reused an average of 13 times. The company has sold refills in numerous global markets for years and launched concentrated Home Cleaning refills in the U.S. since 2011.

The company’s SC Johnson Professional® products, used in settings like hospitals and hotels, also minimize waste. SC Johnson patented a reusable cleaning bottle with recyclable concentrated liquid refill cartridges. Each bottle is designed for 250,000 trigger pulls and each cartridge replaces 16 single-use bottles, on average.

SC Johnson is also hard at work to promote reuse and recycling of Ziploc® brand bags and offer compostable alternatives. 100 percent of Ziploc® brand bags and containers are reusable. Ziploc® brand bags can be reused on average 10 times and Ziploc® containers on average 30 times, depending on how they’re used. SC Johnson is further promoting innovative ways to reuse Ziploc® brand bags with imaginative ideas for activities, crafts and storage solutions that encourage reuse

The company continues its mission to make curbside recycling of used flexible plastic film a reality in the U.S. and reduce waste that enters into landfills. SC Johnson achieved an important milestone this year with the introduction of the first-ever trash bag made with 100% PCR film, including Ziploc® bags, collected through a pilot program at a U.S. recycling center. In addition, SC Johnson will expand production of Ziploc® Compostable Food Scrap bags for consumers with access to commercial compost facilities in their communities.

A Legacy of Bold Decisions

SC Johnson’s actions over the years to improve the sustainability of products has required

bold decisions. In 2004, SC Johnson eliminated PVC and PVDC from its products and packaging, including Saran® Wrap, due to concerns about the release of toxic chemicals into the environment when materials containing chlorine end up in municipal incinerators. While other companies continue to use PVDC, and the ingredient’s removal created a competitive disadvantage for the iconic Saran® Wrap brand, it was the right thing to do.

“As the fifth-generation leader of our family company, I know our job is to protect not only our business interests, but also the values on which this company was founded,” said Johnson. “When we make decisions that are for the good of people and the planet, we gain a surer sense of who we are as a company and what we want SC Johnson to represent.”

Experiencing the Ocean Plastic Issue Firsthand

A lifelong diver, Johnson recently participated in a dive with long-time NGO partner Conservation International to explore the issue firsthand in the waters off the coast of Indonesia. He was able to see the diversity of marine life, but also better understand the risks of plastic in the water and washing ashore on beaches.

“It is amazing to see firsthand the natural beauty and diversity of our oceans, and to fully appreciate what’s at stake here,” said Johnson. “I think it’s incredibly important that business, governments, civil society and people around the globe work together to solve this really important problem for humanity.”

Johnson plans to do other dives in the coming months to explore the impacts of ocean plastic on marine life.

For more information on SC Johnson’s commitment to addressing plastic pollution and to learn how the company is helping to support a more circular plastic economy, visit www.scjohnson.com/plastic

###

[i] World Economic Forum, Ellen MacArthur Foundation and McKinsey & Company,

The New Plastics Economy — Rethinking the future of plastics

(2016, http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/publications).

source: http://www.csrwire.com/press_releases/41492-SC-Johnson-Accelerates-Progress-Boosting-Plastic-Recycling-and-Reuse?tracking_source=rss

[bloodroyalsrpg]

CONGRATULATIONS, CLARA!

You have been accepted for the role of NARCISSA MALFOY. With four application for Narcissa in our inbox, the competition for her was fierce. What really stood out about your application was how indepth a portrait it painted of the Hothouse Flower and how much it expanded on her given skeleton. Narcissa's subtlty and motivations were well articulated, the thought and depth you put into elaborating on her political views was exactly what we’re looking for, and her boggart (literal and symbolic) was truly stellar. Well done! Please look at the CHECKLIST for next steps. Welcome to Blood Royals!

♕ I: OUT OF CHARACTER ♕

NAME / ALIAS: Clara

♕ II: CHARACTER INFORMATION ♕

FULL NAME: Narcissa Cassiopeia Black

Narcissa: the feminine form of the Greek Narcissus – a God who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water, and drowned because of it. Also the name of a genus of flowers, commonly known as daffodils.

Cassiopeia: a Queen from Greek mythology who boasted about her unrivalled beauty, and one of the 88 modern constellations

FACECLAIM: Sarah Gadon is perfect

DATE OF BIRTH: 25, June 12

HOGWARTS HOUSE & YEAR: Slytherin & Graduated

GENDER & PRONOUNS: Cisgender female, she/her

SEXUALITY / SHIPS / ANTI-SHIPS: Narcissa has never had to question her sexual identity and if the question were ever raised she would give the asker a withering look because it is not an appropriate question to be asked of a married woman.

She would likely identify as heterosexual, however she does, on occasion, experience same-sex attraction.

I do ship Lucissa (I love them!), but I ship chemistry above everything else. I wouldn’t want anyone to feel trapped in a ship without chemistry, and would want any shipping partner to know they could feel free to explore other ships if the fancy took them.

OCCUPATION: Socialite & Philanthropist

Narcissa does not have an official job. Such a thing is for men, and for women of lower classes. However, she dislikes being idle and instead invests her time in charitable and volunteer endeavours. She is the chair of several charities, and raises millions of galleons for them each year. However, one should not be confused or believe that these endeavours are selfless by nature. Narcissa is aware of the importance of good public image, and many of her charities, whilst looking wonderful from the outside, hide more sinister motives. Like the recently opened Home for Orphans of the War, where the children of half-bloods and muggleborns harmed by the war can be raised together with proper ideology, free from the radical thinking of those who believe they should be equals to their pureblood peers. And then there are the ‘administration fees’ that are incurred by every charity, though some of these are skimmed and sent to help fund the Death Eater cause.

ALLIANCE:Neutral (but sympathetic to the Death Eater cause)

POLITICAL VIEWS: Narcissa is a firm believer in the benefits of blood purity for society.

As a horse woman, she knows the importance of good breeding and how it can affect the potential of the individual. Those animals with lesser parents rarely reach the same level of performance as those from peak stock, in her experience. However, she is also of the view that muggleborns could be useful, provided that they remember their place. She sees them as tools to be used to ensure the continuation of wizarding society, but does not believe that they should ever have any true status in society, or hold any position of influence.

So long as they know their place - and acknowledge hers - she is content to be civil towards those of lesser blood, but would not ordinarily actively seek out their friendship. However, to her mind, muggleborns remain lesser than halfbloods, being less magical. She ascribes to the somewhat popular mythology that muggleborns “steal” their magic - it is not a birthright, and must come from somewhere, after all. She is, accordingly, resentful towards them because of this.

She views the war with trepidation, but also views it as a necessary evil to put the upstarts back in their place. To her mind, the society structure is not broken, so those seeking to change it are merely seeking to cause a disturbance and disrupt the peace - furthering their own agenda without proper regard to the negative impact on society that it could have (because, after all, only purebloods are fit to safeguard society) - and so largely deserve whatever retaliation they receive.  

Narcissa has no desire to take the step of becoming an official Death Eater. She has always preferred to be a puppeteer rather than centre stage, and her strong instincts for self-preservation prevent her from committing to any organisation whose fate would become attached to her own. She is pragmatic enough to realise that a Death Eater Victory is far from a certainty, and if they fail she does not relish the idea of living out her days in disgrace. Her husband being part of the Death Eaters ensures they seem appropriately committed to the cause, and it means that she can instead busy herself with making contingency plans for if things should go wrong.

While she is not vocal in her views, they are an open secret amongst those that matter. She is not so gauche as to say anything too loudly or where she might be overhead and find herself in trouble, but those who matter definitely know how she feels, and she is certainly not afraid to encourage others to voice her views on her behalf.

KNOWN FACTS:

[Rumour based in fact] The Malfoys might act like all of their business is legitimate, but if one scratches below the surface, they will see that they are very much involved with the seedy underbelly of society.

[Rumour that is pure gossip] There is no way that Lucius and Narcissa love one another. Everyone knows that he only married her because he knocked her up. And obviously they’ve been cursed by someone (probably his ex-fiance or her family) because otherwise they’d have children by now. It’s even been said that they each keep a stable of lovers because they can barely stand to be in the same room as each other when they’re not in public.

[Fact] The Malfoys have had difficulty conceiving a child. [Rumour] This is why Narcissa makes so many charitable donations to St Mungo’s.

[Rumour based in spiteful gossip] Narcissa isn’t even a real Black. Druella had an affair prior to the girl’s birth and that’s why she’s the only one who is blonde.

[Fact] The Malfoy wedding was the largest and most ostentatious in recent memory

BOGGART: A Goblin

For as long as she can remember, Narcissa has had more than a strong aversion to the misshapen creatures that run Gringotts. The first time the fear became an issue, the family had taken a trip into Diagon Alley. While Andromeda, Druella, and Bellatrix had decided to wait outside Gringotts in the sunshine, Narcissa had insisted on trailing Cygnus down into the vault. She had only made it a few steps indoors when she stopped, stock still, taking in the sight of the creatures - like the elves that oversaw their home, but more menacing. Luckily, her father spotted the warning signs of the oncoming tantrum - child Narcissa’s favoured method for dealing with emotions that she did not like or understand - and removed her to Druella’s care before too much of a fuss was kicked up.

Not only does she find their appearance unsettling - humanoid, but only just, with their long, hooked noses, and small pointy teeth -  but the idea that a race of non-human creatures are in control of the entirety of the fortune that keeps her family, and society, in the prominent position in which they reside, is a frightening one for her. To avoid having to go to Gringotts more often that is strictly necessary, she keeps a stash of galleons in a private safe in her room at the manor.

While the Goblin is a literal fear, it also operates on another level. Narcissa’s biggest intangible fear is of those she considers to be lesser than her (half-breeds, humanoid creatures, and mudbloods) to attain positions of status and power over her.

AMORTENTIA:

+ her own perfume. This signifies the scent that Narcissa loves. Largely enamoured of herself, this scent was manufactured only for her by a small parfumier in Grasse, this is the scent she most strongly identifies with herself - a subtle scent of bergamot, damask rose, white musk, and jasmine.

+ pine trees. This signifies the scent that Narcissa associates with a beloved memory. Christmas is always Narcissa’s favourite time of the year, and she particularly enjoys decorating the tree - or at least, directing the elves to the task under her strict supervision.  

+ expensive leather. This signifies the scent associated with the person Narcissa loves. It makes her think of expensive shoes, belts, and handbags gifted to her.

PERSONALITY TRAITS: At least four detailed personality traits

Resilient

“The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.” ― Robert Jordan, The Fires of Heaven

Despite the wealth and status, it is not easy growing up in the Black Family. High expectations and little tolerance for failure mean that Narcissa grew up in a high pressure environment. As much of her young life was spent being a gross disappointment to the more senior members of her family, Narcissa learned to develop a thick skin and to quickly overcome disappointment. She is tenacious in pursuing her goals, and will not allow minor setbacks to get in her way.

Kind

“Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolution.”  Kahlil Gibran

Narcissa has an aptitude for empathy that she barely understands. Her instincts always point her towards doing what is right first and foremost. It is her mind that convinces her to do otherwise. However, when pushed, she will usually ultimately try to help those who are in need of it. Of course, when it comes to her family and her closest friends, there is nothing that Narcissa would not sacrifice to ensure their safety and happiness. However, she is insecure in this trait, generally seeing kindness as a weakness. For this reason, her good deeds are often wrapped up in deceptive packages. For example, she is the master of the backhanded compliment, and has made many anonymous gifts and donations.

Narcissistic

“You don’t care about anything except you. You just want to persuade people that you love ‘em so much that they ought to love you back. Only you want love on your own terms. Something to be played your way, according to your rules.” — Jedediah Leland to Charles Foster Kane, Citizen Kane

Twice named for people obsessed with their own beauty, it may be trite to say that Narcissa is firmly self-obsessed, but that is only because there does not seem to be a phrase to better encapsulate the phenomena. She acts as though the world revolves around her, and that she is entitled to all the good that the world has to offer. She also believes that she should always look her best, because that is what was expected of her as a Black, and is now expected of her as a Malfoy This narcissism is the heart of her demanding, fastidious, nature. In part, her narcissism has grown out of insecurity for her looks. Because she was not always beautiful, she has an innate, if irrational, fear that her good looks will one day slip away.

Pragmatic

“Pragmatist that I am, I always meet necessity with enthusiasm.” - Jane Fonda

Narcissa is a pragmatist in that she does not become caught up so much in the ideology of whether something is necessary or right - her main motivation usually provides a fairly clear path in that respect - but once having decided that it must be done, concerns herself immediately with the process of bringing it into being.

This way of thinking means that she tends to not dwell on the negatives, or those things that she cannot change. She is focused, always, on those things that can be altered to suit her - and with her resources and connections she tends to believe that she can effect more of a change than the average individual. She is usually good at generating solutions to problems, and taking the steps to get there (or employing the help of others who can take them) - which is not to say that she will have assessed all the risks or potential consequences, her blinkered thinking usually meaning that she has only truly assessed the likelihood of the outcome she wants. What this can also mean is that she does not always appear empathetic to others. She is not as good at just listening to others talk of their problems. She prefers to make plans to help them. This does not always sit well with others, especially when they are just seeking an outlet for a mere annoyance that does not necessarily need to be solved.

SPECIAL SKILLS:

Is multilingual. Narcissa can speak, write and read French and English fluently, but is also proficient in conversational Italian and Spanish.

Has been tutored in piano and violin, drawing, painting, and singing. Her mother stopped paying for singing lessons after two months because she thought the endeavour to be a lost cause.

Has a particular interest in horses and is an accomplished equestrian

Is a passably good flier, but does not enjoy it. These days she would require a hefty bribe to consider sitting on a broom.

Is an exceptional liar. During her time in France with her grandmother, Narcissa learned the art of lying. Her grandmother identified her tells and helped Narcissa to subdue them. She does not lie often, preferring ambiguous turn of phrase over a bald faced untruth, but when she chooses to lie she is rarely caught out - at least in the moment. There is not much that she can do about contrary facts that appear afterwards.

Is decent when it comes to spell work, but she is not particularly good when under pressure. She is therefore quite useless when it comes to duels. But this is not something that she has ever thought that she would have to be good at. Bellatrix fought her battles when she was younger, and she allows her husband to fight them for her now.

BIOGRAPHY:

Narcissa Malfoy née Black, flower of the Black Family, was not an attractive child. She broke her mother’s heart not because she, the last chance for a male heir, was born a girl, but because she was not beautiful. It took years before she grew any notable hair, and when she did it was fine and limp. Her eyes were too large for her face, and her lips too full, with none of the full cheeks that might have made her cute instead of plain. And she was a sickly child. Others in society whispered behind their hands that it would have been better to have had no child at all instead of one who teetered on the edge of sickness and health. How ironic, they said, for such a homely child to be named for something so beautiful.

Unfortunately for Narcissa, her plain looks followed her into her teenage years. She grew far too tall, far too quickly, and for some years she was an awkward mix of gangly limbs, with features too large for her pointed face. Her mother often had to remind her not to hunch her shoulders, and to stand tall and proud. Narcissa often wondered what there was to be proud of. She should have preferred to sink through the floor most days, to avoid the scrutiny and attention. However, in some ways, her plain looks were an asset. Narcissa, unable to rely on her looks, had to learn other ways to gain favour. She carefully cultivated a personality to please those around her, she learned kindness and loyalty, how to listen, and how to flatter without seeming disingenuous. Despite her looks, she was usually well-liked, at least among her mother’s peers if not always her own.  

But it is often said that the flower that blooms late has the most beautiful bloom of all; a truism in Narcissa’s case. The Summer of her sixth year, Narcissa was sent to Paris to live with her Grandmother. There she learned the subtle arts of society: how to walk, how to present herself favourably, how to listen the right way to hear what was not being said, as much as what was, how to put suggestions to others so that they do what you want, without directly asking, and other subtle matters. The aim of learning such things was to make her more of an asset to any future husband - much as her mother was able to influence those about her, and gather gossip that might be of interest to Cygnus. She learned, more or less, to be the lady that her mother had always hoped she would be. Blessedly, it was also the summer that she finally grew into herself. Limbs that had always been considered gangly became elegant. Too-full lips became soft and inviting. Almost alien eyes settled into their dark lashed frames above high, aristocratic cheekbones. When she returned with a new wardrobe and new confidence, she was nearly unrecognisable. And all at once, the world opened for her.

Those who had scoffed at her before the metamorphoses were soon eating their words, clamoring to know the girl from the prestigious and powerful family. But she would always remember just who sought to be her ally only once she was beautiful, like she would always cherish those who had accepted her before.

They would do well to remember that even the most delicate hot house flower may have thorns.  

CONNECTIONS: [note: these are obviously just how I see them. I am open to change any & all details]

Lucius Malfoy: Narcissa adores her husband. She thinks she has been at least half in love with him since she first spied him across a ballroom floor. He had been dancing with someone else, and she had thought that he would never notice her. And why should he? She was only fourteen, and not yet beautiful.

She was seventeen when he first asked her to dance. She remembered how her heart had fluttered in her chest, but all the same she looked down her nose at him as she refused. Druella had been furious. Refusing an opportunity to dance with the Malfoy heir, even if he was betrothed to another? Did she intend to ruin them all? She might just drop dead from the embarrassment of having raised someone so inept. But Narcissa knew that a prize easily won was not one that Lucius would think worth having. If she did as her heart bid and gave in to his every request, he would tire of her in an instant. She had to be careful, and clever. To toy with him just so, to dangle herself in front of him until he was driven to near madness with wanting her.

And in the end, her plan worked better than she could have ever imagined. Lucius was hers, the partner she had always dreamed of and yet never expected to have. She would do anything to protect him and their family.

Bellatrix Black: When Narcissa was little, she struggled to keep up with the games of the other children, but that never stopped her from wanting to be involved. The other children might have resented her slowing them down if it weren’t for Bellatrix. Bellatrix ensured that Narcissa was included in the games in a way that pleased her. Similarly, if ever Druella or another Governess was too harsh, it was Bellatrix who would come to her defence. Ever the protector of the willowy blonde, Bellatrix made a habit of doting on her younger sister.

To this day, if Narcissa ever has a problem, Bellatrix is the first person she seeks out. Her close confidant and dearest friend, there is nothing that Bellatrix could do to break the bond between them.

Violette Parkinson: If there was ever a constant in Narcissa’s life, it was her very best friend, Violette. When the other children wanted to play rough games, Narcissa could always trust prim and proper Violette to sit by her and play at dolls and tea parties. Narcissa was never good at opening up to others, but she finds it difficult to keep secrets from Violette. And when Narcissa grew into herself, and accepted her legacy, she never felt that Violette resented her for it.

It didn’t surprise anyone when Bellatrix and Violette were names as Narcissa’s bridesmaids.

Narcissa still feels guilty for suggesting that Violette be betrothed to Sirius. And because of this guilt, she sometimes wonders whether she isn’t still friends with the girl out of obligation and not desire. She waves the thought away as foolishness every time, of course, but she can’t help the creeping feeling that sometimes her kind gestures for her best friend are borne from regret and not from love.

♕ III: FREESTYLE ♕

The blog I submitted this from [narcissa-br.tumblr.com] has been set up as a mock blog/muse inspo blog for this incarnation of Narcissa. Note: some of the info in this section is quoted from outside sources. I’ve put quotations around it but for some reason I can’t make the links to the sources work. I can provide them if need be.

- I took a lot of inspiration from the idea of Narcissa being a hot house flower. In particular the idea that some flowers are started in hot houses because they are too delicate for the outside climate, and so must be sheltered from it, but eventually they can be transplanted in the garden proper. I thought it was a nice  metaphor for Narcissa, starting as a delicate, sickly girl, who, thanks to her background and the fact that her childhood wasn’t always easy, is now able to flourish in society.

- Plots that I am interested in: I enjoy a good ship as much as the next person, but what really makes an rp for me is developing deep and interesting backstories and plots with other characters. Part of why I was so intrigued by this rp is because there is so much scope for developing those stories because it can be assumed that all of the characters know about each other on some level. In saying that, I am interested in developing Narcissa’s familial ties to Bellatrix and Regulus (and Evan if that mun sees them as cousins, but i’m super flexible with this). I would also like to explore rivals, both those that developed in childhood as well as those that are more recent. I’m also interested in friendships, confidants, and possibly even a plot where someone is manipulating/exploiting narcissa and the fallout that could come from that. I’m also really excited to explore a plot with Violette, what she knows about the betrothal/Narcissa’s involvement in it, what she doesn’t, and Narcissa fessign up to her guilt over something that she sees as 'ruining’ Violette’s life

Removed from bio for length:

Narcissa’s time at school was largely uneventful. A clever girl, but with no desire for grandstanding, she received good grades, but was not the top of her class. She had friends, though only a few that kept close. Accustomed to wearing an illusory mask, there were only a few girls that Narcissa trusted to see who she really was beneath it, but to those she trusted, there was no more loyal or steadfast a friend than Narcissa.

After graduation she felt lost for a time. The man she loved was engaged to someone else, and she had no idea what to do with her life. However, Narcissa was not one to give up easily. She set her sights on winning over Lucius Malfoy, and in the meantime, set about doing what she could to ingratiate herself into her mother’s society. She attended brunches, and lunches, and galas, and afternoon teas. She assisted and volunteered wherever she could, doing whatever job was asked of her to prove her worth. And eventually, she became an invaluable fixture of the social set. Her parties were well attended and well received. Her reputation as a Perfect Lady of Society grew until it was indisputable.

She thought that she would be ruined when her sister and then her cousin left the family. But that, too, was navigated, the mask she wore to hide her pain from sight never once slipping from place. But once she was married and sitting at the top of the social food chain, she again began to feel bored. Discontent with sitting at home while her husband busied himself with other things, Narcissa started her own charities to pursue and aid in the causes that were of most interest to her. And when the opportunity arose to assist her husband in the Death Eater Cause, she accepted. They needed to present a united front, and if there was anything that she could do to cement the future success of her family, then she would do it, and gladly.

Headcanons:

Narcissa does not see herself so much as a Queen Bee but as a King Maker. She considers Queen Bee to be too precarious a position, and requires far too much time invested in it to maintain sufficient control. Instead, she prefers to befriend those that she things should be people of influence, assisting them to make the right sort of connections to get them to where they want to be. By doing this, she ensures that her friendship is always seen to be advantageous, as well as constantly strengthening her bonds in society so that she can remain secure in her position towards the top.

She is more of a dog person than a cat person. At Hogwarts she had a fluffy white cat and it used to drive her mad by always leaving its fluffy white hair all over her possessions. She has an Irish Wolf Hound called Henry that she is very fond of. She will often take it out and about in London when she is shopping or meeting ladies for brunch.

[Subject to discussion with any Lucius mun] As much as Narcissa adores the Malfoy Manor, she prefers staying in the Malfoy Townhouse in London when she has the chance. She enjoys the hustle and bustle of the city, but recognises that the Manor would be a much better place to raise children.

Narcissa is quite tall. She favours flats in her everyday life, saving heels for special occasions. And while she wears skirts and dresses while in public, she enjoys wearing slim-line pants in her own home.

If she weren’t an heiress, or if her marriage to Lucius Malfoy had not worked out, Narcissa would have liked to be a nanny. She adores children, and she thinks she would have been quite good at it.

She is an avid gardener. At the town house she keeps several plants on a small balcony. At Malfoy Manor she has commandeered a small part of the land for her own cutting garden. She primarily grows flowers for indoor arrangements, however on occasion she will also grow herbs or berries as it suits her.

She drinks her tea black with a twist of lemon on special occasions. She will judge you if you add milk to your tea, but she won’t say anything about it. Coffee is only her drink of choice when she is in the throes of a particularly hellish hangover (not that she would ever admit to being hungover - how unladylike!)

Her favourite place in the world is the South of France. She says that her prefers Cannes, but her actual favourite place is Grasse, with the perfumeries and fields of flowers.

She cannot stand sad endings. She feels utterly betrayed whenever a story ends and the romantic leads do not have a happily ever after. It is part of the reason she prefers to read romance fiction.

There is an inherent conflict within Narcissa between doing what her heart tells her is right, and doing what her head tells her would be correct by society’s standards. Her head may usually win, but the end result is often tempered by her heart.

If Narcissa could cast a corporeal patronus, it would take the form of a white swan. ”White swans are creatures associated with grace, beauty, and loyalty. They are incredibly loyal and protective of their mates and children.“

Wand: Elm, unicorn tail hair, 11inches, reasonably springy

"Elm wands usually favour owners with magical dexterity and a certain native dignity, and are considered desirable to those who espouse the pure-blood philosophy. They are elegant, and produce the fewest foolish errors. ”

“Unicorn hair, when used as a core, is known to produce consistent magic, and these wands tend to bond strongly to their first owner.”

Finding the wand took an unusually long time. The girl was picky – claiming that nothing felt right, even with the very few wands that were moderately responsive. It was not until Ollivander placed in her hand an ornate wand that had sat on the shelf for a very long time that it clicked, and she knew that this was the wand for her.

MBTI: According to the quiz, she is “THE EXECUTIVE” (ESTJ-T) but I can also see her as an ENTJ.

“ESTJs are conventional, factual, and grounded in reality. They honor traditions and laws and have a clear set of standards and beliefs. ESTJs are natural leaders and have a clear vision of the way things should be. They expect others to follow their lead and may have a reputation for being stubborn and inflexible. The main challenge for ESTJs is to recognize that not everyone follows the same path or contributes in the same way. Its not surprising that ESTJs make up many of the US nation’s presidents and lawyers.”

Astrology Stuff

Life Path Number: "A person with Life Path number 1 is hard working, a natural born leader, has a pioneering spirit that is full of energy, and a passion for art. They have a strong desire to be number one, which means a person with this number can manifest very easily. Due to their determination and self motivation, they won’t let anything stand in their way of accomplishing a goal. Their drive allows them to overcome any obstacle or challenge they may encounter, and they have the desire to accomplish great things in their lifetime. Their only need is to focus on what they want in order to achieve it. Because Ones are critical of themselves, they can also be very critical of others. The Ones will not tolerate laziness from the people they spend their time with. People with Life Path 1 are very independent and feel the need to make up their own mind about things and follow their own personal convictions. All this drive and determination means that they can easily become irritated when things don’t go their way.“

Year of the Horse: "People born under the sign of the Horse are clever, active, energetic, quick-witted, fashionable, agile, popular among others and have the ability to persuade others. On the other side, they might be some selfish, arrogant and over-confident.”

Gemini Sun with Scorpio Moon: “Your intellectual quickness and your emotional depth can combine to make you a forceful, magnetic, and versatile person if you can ever get them working together. The danger of your nature is that sensationalism, over-emphasis on the personal and self-indulgent pleasures of life, will absorb your vitality and your energy.

Of considerable brilliance and promise, you tend to fall in with evil companions and to be attracted to the waifs and strays of the world. You have to be continuously careful of your associates not only because “a man is known by the company he keeps” but also because you’re prone to take on the color of your surroundings and therefore, the better the surroundings, the better color you take on. Without caution, you can be like the chameleon which, being put on a Scotch plaid, went crazy trying to make good. You will rise when the tide is rising and sink when it sinks, if you aren’t always vigilant in keeping alive your driving force.”

[globalwarmingisreal]

Climate Refugees, the Paris Agreement, and the Delusion of Isolation

One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic

Be it from social unrest, economic upheaval, or environmental collapse, forced human migration is at unprecedented levels. According to the UNHCR, there are more than 65 million displaced people in the world today. Of those, more than 22 million are forced refugees. Over half are under 18 years old. Nearly 20 people are displaced from their homes every minute.

Sixty-five million people forced to flee their homes? However disquieting, it almost doesn’t matter. As awful as that sounds, our emotional and mental resources aren’t naturally up to the task of finding empathy for so many. What researchers call “compassion fade” creates “psychic numbing.” Our minds are desensitized by numbers like these. It is, as research psychologist Paul Slovic calls it, the “arithmetic of compassion.” It’s hard for us to wrap our heads around such numbers. We are much more likely to respond to the image of one single child – bruised, dazed, and recently orphaned sitting alone in an ambulance – than to the collective human tragedy swirling around one unfortunate little boy. Overcoming this cognitive dissonance between caring and callousness is no easy task, but necessary.  We risk allowing the numbers of displaced people to expand by orders of magnitude, overwhelming not only the material resources but also the compassion to care. Ostensibly due to civil wars, religious extremism, and political unrest, there is one underlying progenitor to forced human migration.

Until we address it, no humanitarian aid, no travel ban, no walled-off border will slow the tragedy of human displacement. It is the one common denominator that we all share: the planet; living on it.

Confluence

Violence and unrest spread across the Middle East into Europe and further. In its wake, a growing “tide” of human migration. For some, it is a crisis of conscience, for others, a threat to their perceived well-being and cultural identity. For most of us, it’s numbing. For all, figuring a solution to the refugee crisis remains elusive. The problem seems intractable, but we look for easy answers. People continue to suffer, lives are uprooted, children orphaned, but we propose policies that do little to address the root causes. Vigilance turns to aggression; caution to isolation.

For executive director Joe Speicher, and his colleagues at the Autodesk Foundation, human migration is ground zero for impact. Speicher works on-the-ground in some of the world’s most vulnerable areas where human migration and climate change converge to help bring relief from immediate threat and solutions to long-term risks. With their partners from around the globe (including the UNHCR), Speicher and his colleagues see first-hand the tragedy, heartbreak, and inhumanity of the refugee crisis. In the context of ongoing human suffering, it may seem counter-intuitive, but the refugee crisis will never be solved until and unless we deal with climate change. In fact, it will only get worse. “We think 65 million refugees currently around the world – that we know of – is a lot,”  he says.

“If we don’t deal with the impacts of climate change, the number of refugees increases by orders of magnitude.”

We spoke Speicher on World Refugee Day. He doesn’t typically “assign much value” to “World (pick your issue) Day” observances “ He makes an exception for World Refugee Day.”This is the perfect issue conflating social impacts and environmental impacts,” Speicher says.

“These are emergent problems with multivariate inputs that lead to something like the Syrian crisis. Climate change is one of the underlying causes.”

Research suggests climate change could force between 200 and 500 million coastal residents from their homes in the next 30 to 80 years. Imagine the social tension with a half-billion people in migration. “We don’t connect those dots enough because it’s complicated,” Speicher says.

“It’s much easier in the reductionist political discourse to point to one thing”

Of those that have connected the dots, however, few are more formidable than the U.S. armed forces.

Red team, blue team; no time, no reason

For years, military leaders have warned of the cascading regional climate impacts that jeopardize global security and disrupt the geopolitical map. Climate change is on the military’s “radar” as a threat multiplier.  The generals and admirals understand global warming much better than their current civilian leaders. But in Washington, the Trump administration’s EPA chief Scott Pruitt invites yet more “discussion” about the veracity of climate science, instead of the real issue of what to do about it. The well-worn playbook of false equivalency and obfuscation continue with renewed vigor from the new U.S. administration.

“The Department of Defense mitigates against the risks climate change,” says Speicher,”Yet, we continue to debate (climate change) at the 30,000-foot view in Washington, D.C.” Perhaps even worse than the ceaseless effort to dilute the issue is President Trump’s attempt to isolate the United States from the rest of the world on every important issue of national and global stability. As Speicher says, the refugee crisis is a confluence of the pressing social and environmental impacts caused, in part at least, by climate change.

Global warming cedes authority to no border. Despite the president’s desire to wall off the country from all travails of the outside world, it is a futile ambition. Isolation cannot be achieved and it is not leadership in a complex world.The human story of climate displacement is already begun. And not only in some far-flung corner of the world, but right here in Donald Trump’s America. “We are already resettling climate refugees in the U.S.,” says Speicher.

From the Bayous of Louisiana to the barrier islands off the Atlantic coast and native villages of Alaska, climate change has arrived and it is taking names.

Laughing at us

The president represents all Americans everywhere. Including Pittsburgh. While a nominally clever soundbite, the implication inherent in “Pittsburgh, not Paris doesn’t add up.

Today, there are more than 90 coastal communities in the United States struggling with chronic flooding. The kind of flooding, writes Laura Parker in National Geographic, that is “so unmanageable it prompts people to move away.” According to a study published in the journal Elementa, more than 170 U.S. communities face flooding and inundation within less than 20 years. The very people he says will “no longer be forgotten” are first in line to feel the impact of global warming.

President Trump claims that U.S. participation threatens coal jobs, sacrifices our economic advantage, and, worse yet, is little more than a global inside joke. People are “laughing at us.” Nobody likes getting laughed at.

Behind the vague, isolationist, and misinformed reasoning for withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, the President reveals his essential “us vs. them” mentality; admittedly never far from the surface in any case. Yielding to the self-interest his EPA administrator and chief strategist, President Trump is unable to grasp the significance of the Paris Agreement, let alone its specific details, let alone the gravity of the situation. With a unique twist of neurosis thrown in for good measure: “We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore,” he says to the world. “And they won’t be. They won’t be.”

In President Trump’s mind, there are no win-win scenarios. It is always a simple zero-sum game.  The Paris Agreement is, by design, a means of gaining “advantage” over the U.S.

“The rest of the world applauded when we signed the Paris agreement – they went wild, they were so happy – for the simple reason that it put our country, the United States of America, which we all love, at a very, very big economic disadvantage.”

Despite President Trump’s logic, the economic disadvantage of climate change is not from action or participation in the hard-won Paris Agreement, but from inaction and isolation. “This is not an issue that, as we do all too often, allows us to avoid the prevention upfront and seek treatment after the fact,” says Speicher.

Doing the math, no place to hide

In his interview with David Muir last January, President Trump makes a valid point when he tells Muir that the “world is a mess.” Indeed, it is true. Many unprecedented challenges define our new century. There is no assurance we are heading in a direction from which we will emerge into the next century “happily ever after.”

So, yes, on the face of it, President Trump’s perspective is credible. Such a worldview is arguably even more troubling than the “mess” we are in. We look to our leaders to shape the narrative around which we define the dangers and possibilities of our times. Whatever the politics, we remember best those who inspire within us a vision of how the world should be, could be. By tapping into the emotional psyche of society, people are motivated to action by a common narrative, driven either by fear and distrust

We look to our leaders to shape the narrative around which we define the dangers and possibilities of our times. Whatever the politics, we remember best those who inspire within us a vision of how the world should be, could be. By tapping into the emotional psyche of society, people are motivated to action by a common narrative, driven either by fear and distrust or hope and unity. I suggest that President Trump’s rhetorical style is less than inspirational. His reasoning for withdrawing from the Paris Agreement does not reflect our better nature. It belies the arithmetic of compassion. The failure of his vision acquiesces to his emotional limitations; forsaking the long, hard road of global cooperation in service of our common challenges. The United States is no longer reliable as a global leader. And so, we look elsewhere for leadership. Business leaders, mayors, governors, citizens.

I suggest that President Trump’s rhetorical style is less than inspirational. His reasoning for withdrawing from the Paris Agreement does not reflect our better nature. It belies the arithmetic of compassion. The failure of his vision acquiesces to his emotional limitations; forsaking the long, hard road of global cooperation in service of our common challenges. The United States is no longer reliable as a global leader. And so, we look elsewhere for leadership. Business leaders, mayors, governors, citizens.

“President Trump’s short-sighted and politicized decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement has catalyzed corporations, states, and cities to do even more for climate change,” Speicher says, “creating a path forward to help solve two crises – climate change and refugees.”

“If we want to keep those numbers manageable,” Speicher says, “we’ve got to start dealing with the impacts of climate change.”

Some may argue the number of refugees in the world is already at unmanageable levels. Some seek to wall off their surroundings from the tumult of human misery. That works, perhaps, for some; for a little while. It is no solution. Isolation is a delusion motivated by fear. Climate change, and the human unrest it engenders, finds us all.

Images courtesy of United Nations, White House This article originally appeared in TriplePundit

The post Climate Refugees, the Paris Agreement, and the Delusion of Isolation appeared first on Global Warming is Real.

from http://bit.ly/2v80usn

[shirlleycoyle]

The Proto-Communist Plan to Resurrect Everyone Who Ever Lived

Is there anything that can be done to escape the death cult we seem trapped in?

One of the more radical visions for how to organize human society begins with a simple goal: let’s resurrect everyone who has ever lived. Nikolai Fedorov, a nineteenth-century librarian and Russian Orthodoxy philosopher, went so far as to call this project “the common task” of humanity, calling for the living to be rejuvenated, the dead to be resurrected, and space to be colonized specifically to house them. From the 1860s to the 1930s, Fedorov’s influence was present throughout the culture—he influenced a generation of Marxists ahead of the Russian Revolution, as well as literary writers like Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose novel, The Brothers Karamazov, directly engaged with Federov's ideas about resurrection.

After his death, Federov’s acolytes consolidated his ideas into a single text, A Philosophy of the Common Task, and created Cosmism, the movement based on his anti-death eschatology. Federov left the technical details to those who would someday create the prerequisite technology, but this did not stop his disciples: Alexander Bogdanov, who founded the Bolsheviks with Lenin, was an early pioneer of blood transfusions in hopes of rejuvenating humanity; Konstantin Tsiolkvosky, an astrophysicist who was the progenitor of Russia's space program, sought to colonize space to house the resurrected dead; and Alexander Chizhevsky, a biophysicist who sought to map out the effects of solar activity on Earth life and behavior, thought his research might help design the ideal society for the dead to return to.

The vast majority of cosmists were, by the 1930s, either murdered or purged by Stalin, muting the influence of their ambitious project but also leaving us with an incomplete body of work about what type of society resurrection requires or will result in, and whether that would—as some cosmists believe now—bring us closer to the liberation of the species. Now, I think it is obvious that—despite what today’s transhumanists might tell you—we are in no position, now or anytime soon, to resurrect anyone let alone bring back to life the untold billions that have existed across human history and past it into the eons before civilization’s dawn.

To be clear, I think cosmism is absolute madness, but I also find it fascinating. With an introduction to Cosmism and its implications, maybe we can further explore the arbitrary and calculated parts of our social and political order that prioritize capital instead of humanity, often for sinister ends.

**

What? Who gets resurrected? And how?

At its core, the Common Task calls for the subordination of all social relations, productive forces, and civilization itself to the single-minded goal of achieving immortality for the living and resurrection for the dead. Cosmists see this as a necessarily universal project for either everyone or no one at all. That constraint means that their fundamental overhaul of society must go a step further in securing a place where evil or ill-intentioned people can’t hurt anyone, but also where immortality is freely accessible for everyone.

It’s hard to imagine how that world—where resources are pooled together for this project, where humans cannot hurt one another, and where immortality is free—is compatible with the accumulation and exploitation that sit at the heart of capitalism. The crisis heightened by coronavirus should make painfully clear to us all that, as J.W. Mason—an economist at CUNY—recently put it, we have “a system organized around the threat of withholding people's subsistence,” and it "will deeply resist measures to guarantee it, even when the particular circumstances make that necessary for the survival of the system itself." Universal immortality, already an optimistic vision, simply cannot happen in a system that relies on perpetual commodification.

Take one small front of the original cosmist project: blood transfusions. In the 1920s, after being pushed out of the Bolshevik party, Bogdanov focused on experimenting with blood transfusions to create a rejuvenation process for humans (there’s little evidence they do this). He tried and failed to set up blood banks across the Soviet Union for the universal rejuvenation of the public, dying from complications of a transfusion himself. Today, young blood is offered for transfusion by industrious start-ups, largely to wealthy and eccentric clients—most notably (and allegedly) Peter Thiel.

In a book of conversations on cosmism published in 2017 titled Art Without Death, the first dialogue between Anton Vidokle and Hito Steyerl, living artists and writers in Berlin, drives home this same point. Vidokle tells Steyerl that he believes “Death is capital quite literally, because everything we accumulate—food, energy, raw material, etc.—these are all products of death.” For him, it is no surprise we’re in a capitalist death cult given that he sees value as created through perpetual acts of extraction or exhaustion.

Steyerl echoes these concerns in the conversation, comparing the resurrected dead to artificial general intelligences (AGIs), which oligarch billionaires warn pose an existential threat to humanity. Both groups anticipate fundamental reorganizations of human society, but capitalists diverge sharply from cosmists in that their reorganization necessitates more extraction, more exhaustion, and more death. In their conversation, Steyerl tells Vidokle:

Within the AGI Debate, several ‘solutions’ have been suggested: first to program the AGI so it will not harm humans, or, on the alt-right/fascist end of the spectrum, to just accelerate extreme capitalism’s tendency to exterminate humans and resurrect rich people as some sort of high-net-worth robot race.

These eugenicist ideas are already being implemented: cryogenics and blood transfusions for the rich get the headlines, but the breakdown of healthcare in particular—and sustenance in general—for poor people is literally shortening the lives of millions … In the present reactionary backlash, oligarchic and neoreactionary eugenics are in full swing, with few attempts being made to contain or limit the impact on the living. The consequences of this are clear: the focus needs to be on the living first and foremost. Because if we don’t sort out society—create noncapitalist abundance and so forth—the dead cannot be resurrected safely (or, by extension, AGI cannot be implemented without exterminating humankind or only preserving its most privileged parts).

One of the major problems of today’s transhumanist movement is that we are currently unable to equally distribute even basic life-extension technology such as nutrition, medicine, and medical care. At least initially, transhumanists’ vision of a world in which people live forever is one in which the rich live forever, using the wealth they’ve built by extracting value from the poor. Today’s transhumanism exists largely within a capitalist framework, and the country’s foremost transhumanist, Zoltan Istvan, a Libertarian candidate for president, is currently campaigning on a platform that shutdown orders intended to preserve human life during the coronavirus pandemic are overblown and are causing irrevocable damage to the capitalist economy (Istvan has in the past written extensively for Motherboard, and has also in the past advocated for the abolition of money).

Cosmists were clear in explaining what resurrection would look like in their idealized version of society, even though they were thin on what the technological details would be. Some argue we must not only restructure our civilization, but our bodies so that we can acquire regenerative abilities, alter our metabolic activity so food or shelter are optional, and thus “overcome the natural, social, sexual, and other limitations of the species” as Arseny Zhilyaev puts it in a later conversation within the book.

Zhilyaev also invokes Federov’s conception of a universal museum, a “radicalized, expanded, and more inclusive version of the museums we have now” as the site of resurrection. In our world, the closest example of this universal museum is the digital world “which also doubles as an enormous data collector used for anything from commerce to government surveillance.” The prospect of being resurrected because of government/corporate surveillance records or Mormon genealogy databases is “sinister” at best, but Zhilyaev’s argument—and the larger one advanced by other cosmists—is that our world is already full of and defined by absurd and oppressive institutions that are hostile to our collective interests, yet still manage to thrive. The options for our digital world’s development have been defined by advertisers, state authorities, telecom companies, deep-pocketed investors, and the like—what might it look like if we decided to focus instead on literally any other task?

All this brings us to the question of where the immortal and resurrected would go. The answer, for cosmists, is space. In the cosmist vision, space colonization must happen so that we can properly honor our ethical responsibility to take care of the resurrected by housing them on museum planets. If the universal museum looks like a digital world emancipated from the demands of capital returns, then the museum planet is a space saved from the whims of our knock-off Willy Wonkas—the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezos of the world. I am not saying it is a good or fair idea to segregate resurrected dead people to museum planets in space, but this is what cosmists suggested, and it’s a quainter, more peaceful vision for space than what today’s capitalists believe we should do.

For Musk, Mars and other future worlds will become colonies that require space mortgages, are used for resource extraction, or, in some cases, be used as landing spots for the rich once we have completely destroyed the Earth. Bezos, the world’s richest man, says we will have "gigantic chip factories in space” where heavy industry is kept off-planet. Beyond Earth, Bezos anticipates humanity will be contained to O'Neill cylinder space colonies. One might stop and consider the fact that while the cosmist vision calls for improving human civilization on Earth before resurrecting the dead and colonizing space, the capitalist vision sees space as the next frontier to colonize and extract stupendous returns from—trillions of dollars of resource extraction is the goal. Even in space, they cannot imagine humanity without the same growth that demands the sort of material extraction and environmental degradation already despoiling the world. Better to export it to another place (another country, planet, etc.) than fix the underlying system.

Why?

Ostensibly, the “why” behind cosmism is a belief that we have an ethical responsibility to resurrect the dead, much like we have one to care for the sick or infirm. At a deeper level, however, cosmists not only see noncapitalist abundance as a virtue in of itself, but believe the process of realizing it would offer chances to challenge deep-seated assumptions about humanity that might aid political and cultural forms hostile to the better future cosmists seek.

Vidokle tells Steyerl in their conversation that he sees the path towards resurrection involving expanding the rights of the dead in ways that undermine certain political and cultural forms,

“The dead … don’t have any rights in our society: they don’t communicate, consume, or vote and so they are not political subjects. Their remains are removed further and further from the cities, where most of the living reside. Culturally, the dead are now largely pathetical comical figures: zombies in movies,” he said. “Financial capitalism does not care about the dead because they do not produce or consume. Fascism only uses them as a mythical proof of sacrifice. Communism is also indifferent to the dead because only the generation that achieves communism will benefit from it; everyone who died on the way gets nothing.”

In another part of their conversation, Steyerl suggests that failing to pursue the cosmist project might cede ground to the right-wing accelerationism already killing millions:

There is another aspect to this: the maintenance and reproduction of life is of course a very gendered technology—and control of this is on a social battleground. Reactionaries try to grab control over life’s production and reproduction by any means: religious, economic, legal, and scientific. This affects women’s rights on the one hand, and, on the other, it spawns fantasies of reproduction wrested from female control: in labs, via genetic engineering, etc.

In other words, the failure to imagine and pursue some alternative to this oligarchic project has real-world consequences that not only kill human beings, but undermine the collective agency of the majority of humanity. In order for this narrow minority to rejuvenate and resurrect themselves in a way that preserves their own privilege and power, they will have to sharply curtail the rights and agency of almost every other human being in every other sphere of society.

Elena Shaposhnikova, another artist who appears later in the book, wonders whether the end of death—or the arrival of a project promising to abolish it—might help us better imagine and pursue lives beyond capitalism:

“It seems to me that most of us tend to sublimate our current life conditions and all its problems, tragedies, and inequalities, and project this into future scenarios,” she said. “So while it’s easy to imagine and represent life in a society without money and with intergalactic travel, the plot invariably defaults to essentialist conflicts of power, heroism, betrayal, revenge, or something along these lines.”

In a conversation with Shaposhnikova, Zhilyaev offers that cosmism might help fight the general fear of socialism as he understands it:

According to Marx, or even Lenin, socialism as a goal is associated with something else—with opportunities of unlimited plurality and playful creativity, wider than those offered by capitalism. … the universal museum producing eternal life and resurrection for all as the last necessary step for establishing social justice.

In the conversations that this book, cosmism emerges not simply as an ambition to resurrect the dead but to create, for the first time in human history, a civilization committed to egalitarianism and justice. So committed, in fact, that no part of the human experience—including death—would escape the frenzied wake of our restructuring.

It’s a nice thought, and something worth thinking about. Ours is not that world but in fact, one that is committed, above all else, to capital accumulation. There will be no resurrection for the dead—there isn’t even healthcare for most of the living, after all. Even in the Citadel of Capital, the heart of the World Empire, the belly of the beast, the richest country in human history, most are expected to fend for themselves as massive wealth transfers drain the public treasuries that might’ve funded some measure of protection from the pandemic, the economic meltdown, and every disaster lurking just out of sight. And yet, for all our plumage, our death cult still holds true to Adam Smith's observation in The Wealth of Nations: "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."

The Proto-Communist Plan to Resurrect Everyone Who Ever Lived syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/