#it perfectly represents the state of affairs in just about every community

[guardians-of-las-vyxen]

Can we talk about episode 4 of Rise of the Pink Ladies and the blame song? Cause that shit is so bouncy that you don’t expect it to hit as deep as it does.

[spiritualgateway]

The crisis virus

written by Steven Black:

While you look around and get the impression that the whole world has gone crazy and is going nuts, you have to realize: This is all perfectly normal and has happened over and over again. With the pest plague, the cholera and the Spanish flu – people reacted with unreasonableness, resentment and rebellion, against ordered measures.

With the plague, people selectively believed that bad winds, an unfavorable constellation of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn or the contaminated water were to blame because the Jews were poisoning the wells. As a logical consequence of such thinking, persecution of Jews throughout Europe occurred. Entire Jewish quarters were burned down and their inhabitants murdered.

Oh yes, a punishment by God was also possible. Even then, in the early 14th century, quarantine and isolation were ordered – as a very late measure.

In the case of cholera, 1831, quarantine and isolation were also applied. From the chronicle of the german city Stettin of this time, one learns:

„The burial of the deceased, buried in a special newly built churchyard […] aroused fear and horror, especially among the lower classes of the inhabitants. These precautions were made even worse by the complete blockade of traffic, which deprived a large part of the inhabitants of their livelihoods and probably also their means of subsistence. The lower classes could not bear this state of affairs and, believing the most absurd rumors, saw in the precautions taken only the means to their perdition.

„The prolonged duration of the cordoning off increased the bitterness, the excitement grew with each passing day, so that the workers most affected were finally inclined to use force to overturn the hated coercive rules.

„…because the agitated crowd, misled by some troublemakers, was under the delusion that cholera and security measures were only being used „to exterminate the common rabble.

The Spanish Flu, 1918 – 1919, rolled over the globe in three successive waves and claimed millions of lives. Conjecture and conspiracy theories arose among the most diverse peoples. Some saw the disease as the devil’s work of German agents, and Germany was suspected of either using insidious biological weapons or poisoning aspirin tablets from the pharmaceutical manufacturer Bayer in order to win the world war. Another theory, widespread at the time, was that the flu had been imported from Spain in tins, which had been poisoned by the Germans who had brought the Spanish canneries under their control. Or it was oraculated that the cause was consequential damages of the war by poison gas missions, which were caused by the exhalations from the mountains of corpses of the battlefields. And of course there was also the evergreen that it was a punishment from God …

First with the second wave, the danger was really recognized and flu alarm systems were introduced, quarantines were imposed over ports and railroad stations, isolation stations in hospitals were set up. „Social Distancing“ was ordered, mass gatherings were prohibited. Schools, theaters, markets and churches were closed. The use of face masks and disinfectants was recommended and in some areas made mandatory by law.

Those who refused to wear face masks were fined. By the way, later studies proved that the prohibition of mass events and the requirement to wear a mouth-and-nose mask reduced the death rate in American cities by up to 50 percent. Where it was not prescribed by law, i.e. only announced as a recommendation, there were many more deaths. The same thing is currently happening in Sweden.

The Corona Virus – today

100 years after the Spanish flu, a new medical crisis is entering the global stage. And just as with the plague, cholera and Spanish flu, where fear and uncertainty accompanied the daily events, the most colorful rumors and theories are flourishing. There seems to be a lid for every pot.

Some political party sees the Corona virus as an obvious foreigner epidemic. Logically, migrants must be to blame for it too. Within the extreme right groups the old perennial argument is active that the Jews are to blame for Corona.

Many vaccination critics freak out at the name Bill Gates, who allegedly wants to decimate humanity and enslave it with microchips. He has the WHO, the media and Angela Merkel personally in his pocket. Then there are people who believe that the new 5 G technology is the real cause of the Corona virus. The Qanon community believes that the virus is merely an excuse for Donald Trump to free thousands of poor, tortured children from underground tunnels.

There are an ever increasing number of people who believe that the virus is nothing more than a normal flu. There is also the idea that this Corona virus does not exist – it would all be just an excuse to get rid of cash and have a controlled financial crash. The usual suspects also know exactly from whom and why – of course to enforce the infamous New World Order, either by the „Deep State“, the „Kabale“ or the „Illuminati“.

A few fundamentalist church officials also took up the same cause:

In a text entitled „A Call for the Church and for the World – to Catholics and all people of good will“, signed among others by the German Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller and initiated by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, former Pontifical Ambassador to the USA, the Corona measures were sharply criticized. The signatories had previously spoken out against bans on worship because of the corona virus and they are all arch-conservative opponents of the current pope. The text stated: „It is a fact that under the pretext of the Covid 19 epidemic, in many cases inalienable rights of citizens have been violated and their fundamental freedoms have been disproportionately and unjustifiably restricted, including the right to freedom of religion, freedom of expression and freedom of movement.

It was further stated that there is reason to believe „that there are forces that are interested in creating panic among the population. Their goal is to permanently enforce „forms of unacceptable restriction of freedom and the associated control over persons and the persecution of all their movements“. „These illiberal attempts at control are the disturbing prelude to the creation of a world government that eludes all control“.

Personal note: By the way – dear church idiots: What about the „forms of unacceptable restriction of freedom“ of my mind, by your religious doctrine? Or „the associated control over persons“, where you let people slide around on their knees and establish a sense of sacrifice by having a figure nailed to a cross worshiped? But a „God’s world government“ would be all right with you, wouldn’t it?  

Anyway, I don’t really expect an answer to that. But what else you should know – the signatories represent an arch-conservative, right-wing current within the Catholic Church. They fervently hate the current pope because he accepts homosexuality and divorce as facts of life and is open to pro-migration and capitalism-critical positions. It is also no coincidence that these clerics of all people are waving their fear of a „new world order“ around. The whole thing is organized by a notorious ultra-right-wing populist – namely Steve Bannon. The man who brought Donald Trump to power through tons of fake news and conspiracy theories.

By the way, there are strong indications that the art product „QAnon“, a fictitious Internet personality, is a product of Steve Bannon. He is the thinking head and mastermind of the so-called new right.

The American government, led by Donald Trump, sees itself as the victim of a Chinese conspiracy initiated either by a mysterious „Deep State“ or preferably by the Democrats – which is one and the same thing in his case. Evangelical clerics see the Corona virus as a punishment from God for homosexuality. A handful of doctors contradict the official statements and believe that the Corona virus is little more than a common flu. The population would get scared over nothing and wearing masks would be very unhealthy. And in the chest tone of conviction, many an empathy-free idiot rambles that it would only affect pre-existing patients who would have died soon anyway.  You know, just collateral damage …

In the USA, the president himself is the main accelerator of emotional states. There were protests against the curfews in several US cities and about 3000 demonstrators, some of them armed and wearing Trump campaign caps and flags, took to the streets in Michigan. Encouraged by Donald, who tweeted „Free Michigan,“ dozens of gunmen entered the parliament building in the city of Lansing.

In Germany and Austria, people suddenly took to the streets and demonstrated against the corona measures of their government. Against an alleged panic-mongering, against an allegedly intended compulsory vaccination, against the curtailment of their basic rights, against an allegedly threatened freedom of opinion, against the obligation to wear masks, against an alleged „Corona dictatorship“, against a „New World Order“ by Bill Gates and much more. What one would not have thought possible before, happened now:

People who call themselves „leftists“, right-wing conservatives, neo-Nazis, people of the freeman movement, spiritual people, and also people who had never been involved with any of the groups mentioned before, stood together in a public square and chanted „We are the people“. And of course they did not wear masks, and of course they did not keep a „minimum distance“. With righteous indignation they held flyers in their hands where „The Basic Law“ is written on them and lamented a loss of it. Although the basic right to personal liberties was only limited due to the situation and receded into the background in favor of the basic right to personal integrity of EVERYONE, suddenly not only the Corona virus seemed to mutate.

A wide range of people suddenly mutated into virus specialists and health experts, legal luminaries and political insiders. It was not at all helpful if individual physicians and virologists publicly held different views, which are not in accordance with the scientific consensus. These people were suddenly elevated to „heroes of „truth“ and made anti-witnesses of the establishment.      

Like moths to a flame, all the discontented, angry opponents of the system, critics of capitalism, right-wing populists pouring oil on the fire, bawling bald-headed people and „Merkel must go“ yellers flocked together and mingled with yoga practitioners, meditators, as well as people who simply wanted a „better system“. Emotional fire accelerators like KenFM, Sven Liebich, Lügenstöckl, NPD offshoots and various AFD supporters moderated the „happening“ and it did not take long until this situation led to the foundation of a new party – called „Resistance 2020“. Founded by Victoria Hamm, the Sinsheim swindle doctor Bodo Schiffmann and the Leipzig lawyer Ralf Ludwig.

The appeal of „Resistance 2020“ continued as long as Covid 19 and the restrictions imposed by governments were highly active. In the meantime this has abated. First the chairwoman Victoria Hamm stepped down from the party (because of internal differences of opinion), her replacement, the chairwoman of the supervisory board of „Humanimity“, Sandra Wesolek, also threw in the towel soon after. And now also the founder and vice-chairman of the party, Bodo Schiffmann, has left Resistance 2020. Only Ralf Ludwig remains, who keeps the coma patient „Resistance 2020“ alive.

In conclusion – it will not yet be completely silent about the topic Covid – 19, but it slowly fades in its importance. At least for the moment. If we are lucky and there will be no 2nd or third wave, it will stay that way.      

Crisis intensification

Another topic has now captured the attention of the world, people and media – a topic that has never been completely absent: racism and police brutality in the USA.

The violent death of the African-American George Floyd, after a police operation, was followed by peaceful protests in the USA, but there were also riots and looting. And as in dealing with the corona virus, Donald Trump shifts to denial of the structural problem, puts the blame on others and does just about anything to pour even more fire into the heated atmosphere.

Under the hashtag #blackllivesmatter, which has been known since 2013 and is a name for an African-American civil rights movement, people are gathering again to demonstrate against state arbitrariness, police brutality and unfair treatment of dark-skinned people. Previous slogans of the movement, such as „Hands up, don’t shoot“, „White silence is violence“, „No justice, no peace“, „Is my son next?“ are being used again, including the now popular „I can’t breathe“ and „BlackOutTuesday“.

It is no longer just a movement of the „black community“. Within just a few days, numerous politicians, celebrities and large companies have raised their voices and spoken out in favor of the BlackLivesMatter movement. More and more representatives of the video game industry are also joining in. Sony, for example, has refrained from presenting the new Playstation 5 due to the current situation. But also companies like Microsoft, Activision, EA, Massive Entertainment, Square Enix, Bethesda, Naughty Dog, Disney, Marvel, Warner Bros, and many other global big players made clear statements against racism and expressed their solidarity. Over 50 influential companies have donated large sums of money to the movement.

Yes, Soros‘ Open Society Foundation is one of them (about $33 million), but is rather outdone by all others, especially FORD Foundation and Borealis Philanthropy (about $100 million). Also worthy of mention are the Hill-Snowden Foundation, Solidaire, the NoVo Foundation, the Association of Black Foundation Executives, the Neighborhood Funders Group-Funders for Justice, Anonymous Donors, and many more.  

It is already becoming apparent that this issue could potentially break Donald Trump’s neck and prevent his re-election. „Poor Donald“, after his mismanagement in the Corona crisis became visible to everyone, now police brutality and racism challenge him. And here again he reacts headlessly and impulse-driven instead of showing presidential leadership. Instead he meets the problem in the familiar perpetrator-victim reversal tactic.

Incidentally, the same thing happens as in the Covid 19 demonstrations in Austria and Germany – extreme right-wing „withe supremacy“ agitators mingle with the demonstrators. They incite people and loot, start brawls and set fire to buildings. Incited by Donald Trump, who simply claimed that it was „the ANTIFA“ that was firing up the demonstrations, his followers do everything in their power to discredit the movement and make it look bad in the eyes of the public.

In a series of messages, a Twitter account called „Antifa US“ had called on protesters to march into neighborhoods and „take what is ours“. Twitter itself had cleared up the fact that behind this account „American Identity Movement“ is the extreme right-wing formerly known as „Identity Evropa“, that was behind the protest and deleted the account.

Blacklivesmatter is a movement that I wholeheartedly endorse. What I find less good about it is that this conglomeration of people is happening on the streets while the corona virus is still highly active in the  world. There is also no question of keeping a distance, a large majority can be seen wearing masks during the protests, but not all of them. I fear that this will have some unpleasant consequences. But the German demonstrations against a „Corona dictatorship“ and against police arbitrariness and brutality by blacklivesmatter could not be more different.

The sense of demonstrating against a world domination by Bill Gates and an alleged forced chippings or because one is forced to wear a mask temporarily stinks against blacklivesmatter. This is about addressing really important issues of the human species. The core statement of „Blacklivesmatter“ is – “ stop treating us like shit!“

It did not take long, of course, for the rumor mill to start bubbling on this topic as well and the „usual suspects“ went peddling „THE truth“ about it to everyone. You know, from „it’s all a government diversion“ to George Floyd wouldn’t be dead. It would all be a false flag operation and George Soros would be behind the protests. Xavier Naidoo also tells his followers about it and although the man from Mannheim had his own experiences with racism, he is not too stupid to devalue the blacklivesmatter movement. He described the demonstrators who are now taking to the streets against racism and police violence as hypocrites. And ends with a whataboutism rant – „anyone who comes up with an organization called Black lives matter is a divider“.

Naidoo justified his statement by saying that for him all lives count. Sounds plausible on the surface but clearly demonstrates that he did not understand the fundamental problem at all. Naidoo parrots something he has probably read or heard from Alex Jones or another opponent from the disinformation movement. The blacklivesmatter movement has been struggling with such whataboutism arguments from the beginning, since 2013. Not surprisingly, „All Lives Matter“ is often used as a counter-argument by the racist „white supremacy“ groups.

Barack Obama found good words for this: „I think the reason why the organizers use the term „Black Lives Matter“ was not because they wanted to imply that other lives do not matter. They are saying that there is a specific problem in the African American community that does not exist in other communities. This is a legitimate problem that we need to address.

Sounds logical, right? It is. Let’s say you broke your arm and you go to the doctor. He won’t tell you – „all bones count“, but will turn to the current problem. The bone that is just broken. If your house is on fire, the fire department will not tell you “ all houses caunt“ – they will simply put out the fire.  

If you come to blacklivesmatter with alllivesmatter, you are part of the problem not the solution. This tries to ignore or disguise the problem by directing the criticism behind it to another topic.

It is definitely crisis – and virus time

A virus form that is completely unknown to most people is going around and is at least as infectious as Covid 19. They are mental and emotional viruses. Positive, negative, destructive and constructive viruses of all kinds. Created by humans every day and they influence all humans, more or less.

We are usually not used to accept the idea that our thoughts as well as our feelings and the words we utter have substantial meanings. Substantial is literally meant here – both thoughts, emotions and words contain substances that act as carriers of their expression. Through which the respective content of thoughts, feelings/emotions and words is transported, which always involves an „inaudible“, complex bundling of frequencies and takes on form, sound and tones. We do not „just think“, we generate a thought form for it, depending on the intensity of our respective thoughts – a kind of „pale being“.

And we do not „just feel“, we generate emotional signatures that can be perceived, „read“, felt and recognized by other people, consciously or unconsciously. We do not „just talk“, our words always convey a large context of mental and emotional content. Whoever listens carefully can often discover contradictions in the words, because the transported feelings are not in harmony with them.

As the person we are, we resemble a piano. We are a musical instrument with many keys and tones, with which the most diverse vibration frequencies can be expressed. Depending on how well we have learned to handle our instrument and how the individual tones are tuned, it will decide how harmonious or disharmonious our personal sound, our own melody, is. Everything we think, feel, say or do sounds through us and creates sounds that are received by others.

The more sensitive a person is or the better he can listen, the more contents of his counterpart he will be able to perceive. How aware someone is or is not of these levels, however, is basically irrelevant. The thought forms, emotional content, sounds and frequencies of other people are also perceived unconsciously. Basically, we all speak through individualized codes – the spoken or written words mean nothing in themselves. The linear arrangement of symbols (letters) that form words has a meaning for us because they are charged with emotional and mental sounds that form a kind of overall picture. We all encode such images on a daily basis and send them out from us. And we all decode every day a huge accumulation of sent consciousness images – which we have either seen, heard or read.

How much we are influenced by the opinions of other people or media – their generated images – depends to a large extent on our own identity structure. And on the respective topics that are founded in it.

Our exchange of information and images becomes a virus – either constructive or destructive – when it spreads in wide circles and becomes more and more emotionally charged. Our thoughts, emotions and the words we speak not only influence ourselves, but also other people. This means we infect other people with our ideas. And other people infect us with their ideas. If an idea or assertion fascinates, impresses, captivates or outrages us, it can go so far that we forget the origin and, spurred on by the charge of an idea, run amok with it.

All of us together are embedded in a collective frequency field, which is reflected in personal, national and global situations. None of us is virtually „an island“, we all manipulate and influence each other. We can hardly escape this, unless we have no contact to other people anymore. But even then it would probably be difficult to escape the collective astral field.

The collective field contains positive, negative, destructive and constructive viruses of all kinds. We encounter emotional and mental viruses all the time, but nowhere in such a concentrated form as in the „social media“. In this respect, the Internet is a single, gigantic virus slingshot. And all of us who make use of it cannot get away with it.

The opinion of others

The technical development of the Internet has made it possible for us to be exposed to a storm of opinions and views on a daily basis in a way that has never been possible before. About 22,510 GB of data are fed into the Internet every second. That is about 2 billion GB per day (exactly 1,944,864.00 GB [2015]). YouTube has a monthly data volume of about 16 Exabyte (Exabyte = 1018 Byte). About 3 million videos per hour are consumed on YouTube. There are 1. 012 315 000 websites on the net. About 16 million of these websites are hacked annually.

About 4 million new blog entries are written every day, 80 million photos are uploaded to Instagram, 618 million „tweets“ are posted – that is 7130 tweets per second. Facebook processes 2.5 billion pieces of content, 2.7 billion likes and 300 million photos every day. All in all, this adds up to a daily data volume of more than 500 terabytes, just for FB alone. About 4 billion search queries are made daily via Google and 10 billion videos are viewed on YouTube. And these numbers will increase, the rush on our inner senses will become more and more intense.

One drama after the other is being chased through the internet every day. An ever-increasing number of bloggers and websites vie for our daily attention. And hardly anybody takes the time to ask themselves, is it really true what I hear or read? What is it really about? And what would be even more important: Does it really have anything to do with ME? Is this really MINE? Or did I just get infected with an emotional virus that is related to a personal topic?

Although we humans generally assume that we have reasonable opinions and justifiable arguments, or that we see the world with clear eyes – this is rarely the case. Each of us lives in our own reality and we all believe that the world is as we secretly assume it to be. The perspective of how we see the world is largely based on the filter of our own beliefs.

One of the effects that has come through the Internet is the amazing development that many people have become aware of how the mainstream press often reports manipulatively or at least with omission – and sometimes doesn’t present the whole picture. By the way, this is not the fault of the press. Nobody can cover all sides of a story, and certainly not in a single article. If you want to know halfway exactly what’s going on, you have to make an effort yourself and look at different perspectives. But the same people then believe every shit that somebody says on YouTube. Actually, many people today don’t believe anything anymore.

But „alternative facts“ to the corona crisis, you believe them. Doctors who are not virologists or virologists who have not been up to date in this field for a long time, we listen to them more than to the top specialists.

We believe that a statesman who uses victim reversal as a means of perpetration. People who lament with a chest sound of the conviction that the Basic Law is in danger – we let ourselves be influenced by that. We reject a black civil rights movement because we allow ourselves to be persuaded that this means that not all lives count. One encounters „BlackLivesMatter“ with WhiteLivesMatter or „AllLivesMatter. Or if someone once again complains – „you’re not allowed to say all this anymore“ – we agree with indignation. Not realizing that he/she has just said it on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, blogs, etc. Which of course leads the statement ad absurdum, but somehow we don’t really notice it anymore.

A youth movement for environmental awareness, „Friday for future“, is met with „Friday for poverty in old age“. Renewable forms of energy, such as wind turbines that generate renewable electricity, are met with „but they kill innocent insects“. If you read somewhere, in any newspaper, that right-wing extremist violence has increased again in the last year, you don’t have to wait long for someone to comment „hey, what about left-wing violence? A women’s movement for sexual abuse and violence is countered with the argument that there is also abuse of women against men. An African-American movement against police brutality and structural racism is countered with „and what about racism against whites? Particularly deep-seated – „what about racism against Germans?

What is actually wrong with us?

Why do we let „whataboutism arguments“ manipulate us? Why can’t we see through the transparency of such cheap maneuvers and recognize that they distract us from the actual core of a situation or a justified criticism and divert our attention to another area?  

Besides all the positive and constructive things the Internet stands for, there is also a dark side to it. Among other things it is misused for a modern form of witch hunts and witch burning. Angela Merkel, Greta Thunberg, Barack Obama, George Soros, Bill Gates, the Rothschilds, Rockefeller and many other public figures are burned at some Internet stake every day, applauded and cheered. And this comes not only from the right, but from all sides. If you look at the comments on such postings, you can observe the violent reactions, where a storm of indignation, anger and hatred is unleashed, which is then projected onto the designated persons.

The art of differentiation seems to have become a lost art.

There is such a variety of information and opinions, often colored by interests, sometimes just imaginatively lied about and only partially true, that it would basically take some time and energy to separate the facts from rumors and lies. A personal effort that hardly anyone is willing to put in, or perhaps doesn’t have the time.

But that is what we all have to learn.

Media competence

Without media competence, we run the risk of drowning in the flood of information. Not only reading texts, but also watching YouTube videos or films today requires more and more critical discernment. The critical filtering of information, comments, text content and the images offered in addition, is proving to be an ever increasing challenge. Today, for every x any topic, completely different and often contradictory opinions are in circulation. And we are experiencing the phenomenon that people often only read the headlines of articles and not the whole article. The attention threshold has become extremely low for some people. Headlines alone can lead to emotional convulsions …

It is important that we learn to understand how communication works and how information affects us. When we read or hear words, we don’t just sort the meaning of the words and sum them up in a particular context. We also record all the unsaid, the energetic, mental and emotional signatures that the speaker or writer gives to their words. It is already scientifically known that in communications, brains are synchronized. To a synchronization of brain waves that goes beyond mere speech processing. It will not be long before we discover that this synchronization does not only occur in spoken communication, but in any kind of communication, even when the information is transported via screens.

If we identify with what someone writes or says because something within us resonates with it, then synchronization occurs with the mental, intellectual and emotional content that is presented to us. Emotional content of all kinds affects the heart field, the glands and the electrochemical energies of the body, i.e. the energetic environment in the body, which causes either an increase or decrease of the personal energy level.

The question that arises is, what do I focus my personal attention on? And can I think for myself or do I simply take over every piece of information offered to me, which includes concepts and perspectives from other people that I usually don’t even know? If we take over everything that strangers prepare for us, we are condemned to walk around with concepts that are not our own.

But the only person who has a responsibility here, what kind of information he lets into his system, is me. The only person who is able to differentiate between the information and my personal feeling about it is me. The only one who can learn to check the opinions of others is me. Nobody will do that for me.

Nevertheless, it is also true that constant effort, investigation, checking and research is no guarantee for a secure knowledge – sometimes you are simply confronted with the fact that you cannot know at the moment! But you can learn to endure that.

What we see is in my eyes, in many respects, an expression of a massive crisis of orientation and a resulting upheaval. Humanity is beginning to define itself anew, once again. We are moving from an age where people were rather „prisoners of their consciousness“ and their experience, to an epoch where people understand that they are NOT their consciousness. But that his consciousness is an attribute, a quality, his very own being and his creative power. And how this is expressed, lies in his very personal responsibility.

The old psychological self of humanity, which accepted oppression of the weak, predator capitalism, perpetrator-victim conversion, wars, exploitation of earth and humanity, will be replaced. But this old energy is struggling for survival. Hard and fierce. We are far from being through this.

One thing can be sure – the next crisis is waiting. And again it will be driven through the Internet village in an over-dramatized way. Where will you stand then? To which side will you then give your spiritual support? What will you be guided by? Your reason and your own views after you have dealt with the situation to some extent or will you follow the emotional pull that was triggered by the opinions of others?

What kind of sound will you add to the overall melody?

Until next time same station

DISCLAIMER: Nothing you read here is THE truth. It is my truth. My perception and how I see things – now, in this moment.

THE INFORMATION SPACE

[ryanhamiltonwalsh]

“Hammond” - The Roches

File Under: But What Is The Song Actually About?

Released by Warner Brothers in 1979, the song features stunning sisterly blood harmonies and the most perfectly out-of-place Fripp guitar solo of all time. Lyrically, the song seems to present a parental warning to their (mostly) grown children & the children’s rebuke, but the specifics of the song are never quite explained. Where is Hammond and why is it a path to the wrong track? Here’s what I found:

In 1970, Maggie and Terre attended Paul Simon’s songwriting seminar at NYU. Two years later, they called him up and asked to audition for him. Simon was impressed enough to have them sing backup on There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, and he also introduced them to his lawyer, who negotiated an album deal with Columbia. Seductive Reasoning, an interesting, uneven record, which had four producers, was released in 1975 to resounding public indifference.

Devastated, Maggie and Terre retreated for several months to a friend’s kung-fu temple in Hammond, Louisiana, where, in Maggie’s words, “a lot of people went to learn how to beat people up.” When the temple dissolved, they drifted back north and into performing again. - Rolling Stone

Huh. Well, that’s unexpected, right? Louisiana? A Kung Fu Temple?

Suzzy Roche to Slate in 2020:

I mean, the song is a story, but, well, imagine Terre had met this guy who had a Kung Fu temple, as you do in Hammond, Louisiana.

And by the time I was was down there, when I arrived in the middle of the night by Greyhound bus, I realized quickly it was an abandoned telephone company building. And there were all these guys there who were studying Kung Fu. And us and Maggie and I had jobs at a truck stop and Terry was working at the Magnolia Diner. And I really cannot tell you how strange it was, is very extreme. But needless to say, my parents were not terribly thrilled about the whole thing. And I think that that song, the Hammond song, has to do with that.

Terre weighs in:

“We were humiliated,” Terre added. “We wanted to get out of the whole situation. We had a friend in Hammond, Louisiana, who was running a Kung Fu school. We gave up our apartment and told the record company, ‘We’re not going to promote the record anymore; we’re going away for a while.’ This was two weeks after the record came out. Maggie wrote the ‘Hammond Song’ about the whole experience.”

Cursory searches for more information about this Kung Fu temple in an abandoned telephone company building yielded nothing. Same with Magnolia Diner. So what about the town itself? Hammond highlights from its Wikipedia entry:

The city is named for Peter Hammond (1798–1870), the surname anglicized from Peter av Hammerdal (Peter of Hammerdal) — a Swedish immigrant who first settled the area around 1818.

During the Civil War, the city was a shoe-making center for the Confederate States Army.

The city later became a shipping point for strawberries, so a plaque downtown gave it the title of "Strawberry Capital of America."

During World War II, the Hammond Airport (now Hammond Northshore Regional Airport) served as a detention camp for prisoners of war from Nazi Germany.

The city was the home base for production of the first season of the NBC television series In the Heat of the Night, starring Carroll O'Connor.

Shoes, strawberries, and Nazis. Got it. Ok, so how did Fripp get involved? His own account from August, 1979:

RF: Originally, I'd been in..., I visited The Kitchen Arts and Video Center in Soho and John Rockwell was there, the critic from The New York Times. He introduced himself and I said... would he recommend anyone I should go and see? And he said, "Go and see The Roches." So I went to see The Roches at The Bottom Line not long aftrewards, they were there a few days later. Fell in love immediately, remarkably impressed. Since they were obviously so talented and seemed to be fairly innocent, I sensed that they were good canidates for being ripped, so I made one or two phone calls to make sure their affairs were being taken care of, which they were, and expressed interest in producing them should this arise. The Roches, for their part, felt that they needn't look for a producer, that when the producer came along, he would look for them. So eventually, I was interviewed by them for the job. They really gave me a grueling two hours, in which they said nothing. They simply said nothing.

RG: Just drilling you with questions?

RF: No, they said nothing. They just sat there and said nothing.

Delightfully strange. Terre says some King Crimson fans didn’t appreciate Fripp producing a folk act:

We were at that point every music career gets to where the honeymoon was over. The Roches had burst onto the music scene in 1979 with a shower of press infatuation rarely accorded a folk group. The unlikely pairing of King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, with his hard-driving English art rock, and the three singing sisters from New Jersey had caught the attention of music writers even before the album was released. Liz Rosenberg, our publicist at Warner Brothers, told us the press was calling her for interviews. She told us this was extremely unusual.

When the actual record came out, the momentum accelerated. The sound of three fairly soft voices and three acoustic guitars, with songs about waitress jobs, commuter trains and longing to be accepted by your parents,                    issued forth into the 1970s climate of disco fever like a drop of powerful medicine into a compromised bloodstream. Fripp, in an interview, put forth that people don’t realize gentle music can be revolutionary.      

Some of his fans were upset that he’d traded in bombastic male music for lily-white warbling so delicate you had to turn up the dial to hear it. “The Roches” was No. 1 on The New York Times’s list of the year’s best albums. We were on our way.

Cristgau loved it. Marcus hated it.

And that represents the bulk of relevant information I could find on “Hammond.”

I’ll add that I appreciate how the song is aware that it’s a song (a sub-genre I try to keep a running list of) and how it seems to serve as direct communication to The Roches’ actual parents. I wonder if they ever gave their daughters an answer or told them they were ok?

Do your eyes have an answer To this song of mine They say we meet again On down the line Where is on down the line How far away? Tell me I'm okay

The combination of a folk song structure, three part harmony, and a prog-rock guitar solo suggests a new kind of musical genre that never quite got off the ground. I wish there was more music that could live comfortably next to this song.

Please reach out to me if you ran the Kung Fu temple in an abandoned telephone company in Hammond, Louisiana. I have questions.

[starr-fall-knight-rise]

Humans are Space Orcs “Action Without Order.”

Here is a story to answer a couple of plot questions and requests you guys have been giving me. I hope you like it :). If you have any questions , or ideas feel free to ask!

This wasn’t good, this wasn’t good at all. Captain Vir Stood facing them, as the two Military MPs pulled his hands behind his back locking the energy cuffs around his wrists. Krill stepped in to stop Sunny as she took a step forward eyes wide with confusion and worry.

From where he stood flanked by two massive MPs, the Captain lifted his head, “It’ll be alright, Sunny, Krill, this is just a mistake….. It will be alright.” Despite the reassuring smile on his face, his single eye was wide with worry, the usually blushed human skin of his face had turned white. Though he did not struggle against the arms that held him, he did struggle against something more internal.

“What are the charges?” Sunny demanded. Looking up, the two MPs stared at her in immense distrust and readiness, “I said, what are the charges?” She demanded her looming height casting a shadow. “Don’t you humans have laws for this sort of thing!”

“Sunny, calm down, let them speak.” He turned to look at the MPs who had gone from wary to calm and collected.

“Adam Vir, Captain in the USPC Space Corpse, you are hereby charged with the unlawful divulgence of state secrets, the harboring of non-military personnel aboard a military ship, action without order, and the harboring of an enemy agent. Your court martial trial will be held in one month’s time to refute this counts before UN representatives and Military council. Your rights, if you do not know them will be read to you at your request.”

“I know my rights”, Vir whispered before looking to Sunny and Krill, “Contact the crew, tell them what’s going on. I’m going to need them, and don’t worry about me, I’ll be just fine. Keep your heads, and don’t get into any trouble. Follow the signs back to the LA Interplanetary terminal and show them your passes that will get you back to the moon. You can call the rest of the crew from there. Please stay safe.” They were dragging him off now pulling him in increments to the armored vehicle parked off to the side hovering with its glowing blue power source underneath.

Sunny stepped forward again, and Krill stopped her again, “No Sunny, You’ll only make it worse.”

Captain Vir was pushed into the back of the truck sitting down with his hands cuffed behind his back. He looked up from where he was sitting, the smile had dropped from his face.

***

The sky above the Martian desert was a misty grey blue. Despite its similarity to earth, it had never lost its more grey than blue horizon. The cities were built upon gravity mats, a task implemented by earth after studying the negative effects upon humans living on a planet with only 38% gravity. Maybe you can terraform, change the atmosphere, but you cannot change an entire planet’s gravity.

Krill had been staring out the window of the courtroom until this point. It was a marvelous affair of human engineering specifically designed to intimidate the people who stood on the floor. The viewing gallery sat just behind the desks rising up a good seven or eight rows. At the very front of the room, a massive semi-circular desk took up almost a third of the room framed by the equally massive set of windows looing out on a Martian horizon.

The room was almost full. Many crew members sat in the gallery while Krill and Sunny had been urged to sit as witnesses for the defense.  At the head of the room, the semicircle desk was filled to the brim with generals, admirals, commanders, and delegated members of the UN. Sunny shifted in her seat as half of the room collectively glowered at her form the stand.

A lot of these men had been part of the battle with the Drev, and some of them had been part of operation Steel Eye, there was a lot of anger in this room. Additionally, members of the Galactic Assembly were there, and upon seeing Sunny they had gone very stiff and very silent staring at her with fear in their eyes, fear that Sunny had come to loathe.

It was ten that Captain Vir was escorted into the room. He was wearing his uniform dressed up to the nines, the uninform that includes all the ribbons, bars, captains cap, and a tie, it was dark grey in color.

He looked up at them encouragingly from where he stood. Sunny did a double take when she saw his face: the eyepatch was gone replaced by a complete and working eye. Form this distance it almost looked real despite for an odd mechanical shimmer over the iris. Though it looked normal, the captain kept blinking and rubbing at the eye with a horribly uncomfortable look on his face. Tears shimmered on the face of the mechanical eye. Sunny shifted nervously in her seat.  He had never traded his eye patch for an eye….. she was beginning to understand just how serious things were shaping up to be.

Krill and Sunny sat through the early portion of the hearing fidgeting and sickened as the groundwork was laid before them. Human politics became clear and evident within the first few minutes. Sunny was stunned and shocked to hear the things the other humans were saying, the things they had said behind the captain’s back. She had always assumed that the humans were relatively open and free with each other, helpful and supportive…. But…. But this was something else.

They told a story about a man who looked for every opportunity to go rogue from the army, to disobey orders, and start unauthorized contact with alien races. Because of hi humans were being given a bad rap all over the galaxy. Galactic laws were based primarily on him and his crew all against USPC orders. Not only that, but he had two unauthorized aliens aboard his ship who were unregistered in the USPC, and were likely privy to classified military information which, by itself, was enough to send him to a  class B penal colony for the rest of the foreseeable future. This was only made worse by the fact he had allowed an alien raced deemed public enemy number 1 aboard his ship.

A fight broke out in the gallery upon this revelation, and a group of marines had to be dragged from the room yelling and screaming about the unfairness of it all. Captain Vir remained absolutely silent during the entire think looking on in worry for his marines as they were carted away.

“Captain Vir, how do you plea.”

He straightened himself up and took a deep breath, “Not guilty, Sir.” Up on the stand the group of officers sat back in their chairs. Some seemed angry, others worried, the Galactic assembly members were absolutely baffled but not at the Captain, instead towards behavior of the other humans.

Next to the Captain, another man in similar uniform took to the floor beginning an eloquent speech on behalf of the captain which lasted for many minutes minutely detailing the truth of these matters, “If you look at his spotless military record, you would know that Captain Vir has never done anything that was contrary to the needs of earth. During first contact with the galactic assembly he was essential in the continuance of peaceful negotiations during a tense encounter, after these incidents, he almost gave his life in service during the  Drev War, and received a purple heart and a bronze star for his bravery. Even after all of that, he returned to the USPC to continue aiding his planet, and was rewarded, by members of this council I might add, with a ship of his own. Additionally, I am here to remind the court that his original instructions were to and I quote ‘Foster feelings of good report between the human race and members of the galactic alliance’, as such, he is, in times of need, authorized to act on behalf of the Galactic Assembly.” The lawyer paused for a moment looking around the room, “This means that the USPC gave up right to complete control over the captain and his crew, who have saved countless planets, species, and his own crew from destruction, invasion, sickness, and poor diplomatic relations. The laws the galactic assembly have put into place have done nothing but foster good will between our two groups, and ensured the safety of humans. All loss of life detailed in the captain’s exploits have been a direct result of self-defense, or the defense of children. These facts alone clearly refute the charge of action without order”

“As for the aliens, I would have Krill of the Vrul take the stand.”

Sunny watched with pent up breath as krill scuttled onto the stand openly an aggressively examined and cross examined before the group of humans. He never showed confusion or worry, always stating the facts, always perfectly honest. When asked about the divulgence of state secrets he openly said that he had never been privy to the military Intel of the captain as a medic aboard the ship. In fact, all the information he had could be found on the open crew database of the bridge computers, which anyone of any rank could access. When asked on how he was picked up for the crew he responded with a story about fixing the captain’s damaged eye after an unfortunate accident, and the crew’s need for a well-versed medic this far out in space with knowledge of alien diseases and pathologies.

“As it seems to me, anyone intent on fostering good will between humans and the galactic community would be wise to allow non-humans aboard his ship especially one with extensive medical knowledge Furthermore allegations of divulging state secrets was immediately refuted, There was no proof the captain had let anything slip that had not previously been declassified. All information Krill had was public knowledge to anyone with access to crew computers, and this included civilian analysts between docking and voyages.

There were no official rulings set in place as to the harboring of aliens aboard a ship other than the arbitrary ones command had come up with in response to the Drev threat they were so intimidated by.

Sunny was called to the stand next and nervously made her way up sitting down in the small, human sized seat in front of all those watching eyes.

“State your name for the court.”

“Sunny…..”

“Just Sunny?”

“Yes, the Drev only have one name, unless you wish for my military title… Squadron leader Sunny.”

“And you fought during the Drev war?”

She nodded, she wasn’t sure what to say. She didn’t know how to lie, and she had a feeling that any attempt would only make things worse, so she lowered her head, “Yes, I did.”

“And during the war, did you hurt humans.”

She shuffled in her seat, “Yes….”

“How many.” The lawyer demanded eyeing her with his distinctly predatory eyes

“Hundreds…. I cannot be sure how many.”  The room shifted uncomfortably, and she had trouble looking towards captain Vir, she felt so helpless, she wasn’t good with words, she couldn’t help him like he needed.

“Do you remember any of those humans that you killed, that you hurt?”

“Objection your honor!” Cried he defense lawyer glowering at the wolfish human as he grinned on with a malicious sneer.

A hand was raised, “Let him speak.”

“Yes…. I remember them…..” She shad softly ringing two sets of her hands together. She didn’t remember picking that up from the humans

“Do you know any by name?”

“Yes.” She sunk further into her chair

The layer seemed surprised, but he continued on with a shrug, “Who?”

…., “Adam Vir.”

There was a gasp about the courtroom, as the groups stared on in shock and disbelief at her as she looked down at her hands. The voices rose for a long moment before something hard and loud was slammed against the counter, “SILENCE!” It died down.

“How did you hurt him?” The man wondered.

Sunny hunched further into her seat, “I…. I tore off his leg.” The court room was dead silent now as the humans looked on in horror and confusion.

The grinning, wolfish layer turned to the judge, “As you can see, Sir. A killer, no man in his right mind would let the creature that tore his leg apart aboard his ship. If anything this calls his sanity into question, and at worst it calls into question his loyalty.”

“Objection your honor!”

“Go on.”

“This act proves nothing about honor, or loyalty. This proves a man who has an amazing capacity to forgive. As I have been told, Sunny approached Captain Vir seeking forgiveness and a desire to learn from the humans. He did not bring her on board with full trust, and spent months as we are now, skeptical, but she has proven her loyalty, has visited earth, and not once in that time has she caused injury. I must hereby remind the court that this is not a trial for the Drev. Humans have warred with each other for centuries, we make war personal, but the Drev do not. Like the south and the north, Europe and America, the allies and the axis, we have fought and we can forgive. The prosecution has no proof my client has divulged state secrets, harbored unlawful passengers, or acted without order.”

The room rumbled again.

The prosecutor was smiling, Sunny didn’t like that smile, “Isn’t it true, that the Drev are not members of the Galactic Assembly.”

A horrible silence.

The grin on the face of the prosecutor grew larger, “If anything, by your own logic this Drev’s presence aboard the ship is NOT to ‘foster good will in the galactic community’ she is, in fact, ostracized from the community, proving that the captain acted in his own self-interest, and against the outstanding orders of the USPC and the galactic assembly. This Drev does not belong aboard a Galactic Assembly or USPC ship especially not without express acceptance from either organization.”

Captain Vir went white, the court room erupted, and the defense lawyer demanded an immediate recess. He was granted his request and Sunny was hurried from the stand in shock and horror. She wanted to scream, to rip something apart. She watched as the captain was hurried away both real and fake eye wide with worry and sickness. She milled with the others for a good half hour huddled with the marines, and the flight crew all looking on in horror.

Then the court was called back into session, and the two men came walking back into the room. They were sparingly calm for the situation standing behind their desk. Sunny sat nervously expecting a horrible verdict, but she was immediately called back to the stand. In confusion, she went back up.

The defense attorney stood, “Sunny, are the Drev tribal?”

“Um… yes, I suppose in human terms, we are.”

“And you often war with one another for power?”

“Yes, very often, sometimes for power, status, or resources.”

“Do you ever integrate a member of another clan into your own?” The man wondered. To the side the other lawyer was looking on in suspicion. He didn’t know where this was going.

“Yes, sometimes.”

“How is this done?”

“A gift is usually offered, one to make the person one with the tribe. When they wear it, they are immediately adopted into our lineages, they have full rights in our clan and government. They may duel upon request, and can become reconciler if they so wish.”

The man then turned to the judge, “And you know the ruling of Dawson V Cybercorp?”

The judge furrowed his eyebrows, “The case that ruled body modifications, implantations, and prosthetics were considered part of a person, and if tampered with constituted as assault rather than property damage?”

A smile, “In that case.” He turned looking at the captain, who, stepped forward onto the floor. Placed his foot on a nearby chair, and pulled up the pant leg on his uniform.

The light that cut through the room was bright blue and metallic. It hand an unusually inhuman set of joints, and Sunny recognized it immediately.

He was wearing the prosthetic.

“In accordance with Dawson V Cybercorp and the traditions of the Drev tribal law. That leg is part of Captain Vir, it includes armor taken From Sunny’s own person. This was a gift to him from Sunny to integrate him into her tribe. Therefor as a member of the Drev, that means that the Drev, or Sunny’s tribe is part of the Galactic Assembly by default.”

[the-house-of-the-nine]

In Depths Below, Masquerade, Part 6

[Part 6, Just a warning that we’re getting to the violence, blood and reveals here.  If you’re enjoying this, please like and share to your friends! Help us to reach new faces! We’ve been so blessed to have help from this fantastic community here, every single one of you have helped us in so many ways!  And feel free to send anonymous ASKS if you are curious about writing with us!  We absolutely welcome new faces!   Without further delay....]

Over the next few minutes...

Staff and guest alike would be escorted out of the ballroom and down the carriage pathway that led to the waterfront.  Down where Whistletorque had set up a marvelous fireworks display; that to be perfectly honest was a fairly expensive bit of explosives.  Sunwood had paid to have them all here but Westley had made perfectly sure that everything he purchased was top of the line, and as expensive as possible.

“Now. . .I believe we can begin.” Honeywell said as he peered around the room looking over what; and who was left.

The remaining group consisted of Magisters Brightsong, Sunvale, Dewdrop, Goldencrest, Honeywell, Sunwood and finally Magister Dawnseeker himself.  Each one of them representing a different branch of their group; the network that was organized to seize control.

“Of course.” Magister Sunwood replied.  He had been ever strong in his resolve to aid The Nine as they orchestrated the attack, but there was still more to do.

“Master.” came the voice of the Honeywell again when he looked over to Dawnseeker; the lead of this little organization.

“Where is Sinefel. . .” the horrid tone of the arrogant Magister hissed, not even acknowledging the others voice.

“Magister Sinefel sends his regards Master, but he was unfortunately detained in the Searing Gorge.”  Sunwood replied as quickly as he could.  Zalra remained on his arm, though it was clear so many of the other magisters also still had their significant others present.

“. . . and Sunfire.  Evesblood . . .Lightheart. . .” Dawnseeker slowly lofted a gloved hand as he pushed a few stray amber hairs from his vision.

“Had it not occurred to any of you that perhaps something has gone wrong with our investment?”

“Master. While there are some of us not present, the majority of us have had not a single problem remaining true to our original plan.” Honeywell said as he tried to steer the attention away from the missing members of their group.

“Of course, yes. . .of course Aloysius. Though I do find it disturbing that two of my most prominent and influential supporters could not find time in their busy schedule to attend this years festivities.”  Dawnseeker said eying the group carefully.

“We know that m’lord.  But we have heard from all of those who are not in attendance.  We can assure you that the investment still stands; and all is continuing without any failure.”  from the silence that was surrounding them and the judgemental eye that scanned, Sunwood would speak up.

“Yes, that is promising news indeed, Magister Sunwood.  I believe it was you who detained our little insurance policy, am I not mistaken?”

“Correct m’lord.”  Sunwood said with his arm still being held to by his ‘wife’.

“You should be proud of what you have accomplished dear Sunwood.” Dawnseeker said as he eyed the female at his side, then back to the man directed.

Zalra felt the lump in her throat grow to a size that she was almost certain could be seen by everyone there.  Her eyes were no doubt focused on him, she could feel that hot burning sensation slowly start rising up her neck and back.  She would remain silent when the glance moved back to Sunwood.

“I. . .was  . .only looking out for your interests m’lord. . . this gift was meant to show we’ve completed our task...”

He peered toward the Magister who was giving him that dead to rights stare that he had given so many others in his group up until that moment.  An awkward silence that was growing in the room caused a bit of tension to slip past his own narrowing gaze.  And Sennaris could detect flutters within the collective group of many mixed emotions.

“A finer sentence has not graced these ears since I listened to my own dictation on the our ‘Horde First’ initiative. Selflessness, that is something we should all consider; this isn’t about one. . . it is about the group as a whole, our success. Well said Sunwood and for the record, perhaps it is you I should be promoting instead of Honeywell here.” Dawnseeker laughed and threw back another sip from his wine glass.

The group of magisters, even the one referenced in the little jab shared a collective laugh at his expense.  Secretly though, it would be one of those passing sentences that lived to burrow deep in the back on ones mind to make them second guess everything they were doing.

“Now. . .where is the prize I have so been longing to see.” Dawnseeker stated as he peered across the room at the silent and still sitting Siida Kash’ebahl.

“Right this way Master.”  Honeywell interrupted before Sunwood could speak.  Moving to lead the head man toward where the captive was sitting.

The entire group of Magisters moved at this point.  Each one of them more hesitant than the last to truly say anything other than agreeing with their leader.  As they stepped closer, the young Matron continued to reassure herself that nothing would happen.  Zalra and Sennaris were right there; if anything went south they would drop cover to help her.  And Marseille, where was he?  

Verzatea and the pale old elf were currently hiding behind the edge of their booth where they could remain out of sight but still listen in.

“M’Lady Kash’ebahl.”  Dawnseeker said in a haughty, and snobbish tone.

“Magister Dawnseeker.”  She replied as her golden orbs peered up from the table at him. “I would invite you to pull up a seat but we both know how you enjoy lording over those you surround yourself with. . .”

Dawnseeker was silent.  His face was that of stone.  Nothing could have broken his resolve and when she insulted him; he would only flash his pearly smile.

“It is good to see that our esteemed guest has not lost her sense of humor. . .”

The magister retorted as his own rich golden eyes peered back and forth among the group; insisting he hear a laughed, which was directly behind his quip.

“Don’t you mean prisoner?”  she replied, still sitting as tall as her back would allow.

“Don’t be so silly Miss. . .it is Miss isn’t it.  I recall you once having a brief affair with a noble lord, prior to your knowledge of your origin.” he paused as his hand slowly reached down and rested on the table to help him better lean in. “Miss Kash’ebahl. You are a welcomed person among us this evening.  What would make you think ‘prisoner’ is a proper term?”

She would hold her stance firm while she glared back at him.  Despite his intimidating features and mannerisms, she was not going to be bullied or threatened.  And she was certainly not going to sit there and listen to him prattle on about how welcome she was.

“Welcome guests don’t often get escorted in irons to and from important occasions.  Nor was I allowed to send any regard to my house to let them know I was unsuccessful in my task.” Siida hissed while she frowned.

“I heard about your little adventure down to Stranglethorn.  Magister Sunwood was most generous on the details.  How you threw yourself at him, pleading for your brothers life, begging for his release.” the magister smiled, knowing that the subject was still tender. “How is he these days?”

“I could ask you the same question.”  she responded almost immediately without so much as an eyelash out of place.

“You have. . .”  He paused and peered back toward Sunwood and Honeywell. “Where-is-he. . . ?”

“Whats the matter?” Siida interrupted while they spoke, a smirk on her face. “Don’t know where he is either?”

Dawnseeker would calmly turned on his heel as he methodically resumed his conversation with the little sister.

“Why do I get the feeling you are hiding something from me.”  his sinister tone slithered as if he was about to bite.

“That is not important, what is important is that I be released to my family; you are stepping very far out of line and I don’t believe I wish to tolerate these games any longer.” Siida announced suddenly as she huffed. “And get these restraints off of me.”

“Restraints” he asked curiously when she went to go lift her arms and there was nothing.

“Yes. . .Honeywell found it necessary to bind my wrists with an Arcane filament to ensure I did not attempt anything heroic.”

Dawnseeker instantly whipped back around and his eyes burned holes in man in question.

“Why. . .is she. . .bound.”  

“Master, I . . .did not think--”

“No you most certainly did not.  Release her.” he spat suddenly and the magister he’d been speaking to would summon a spell to dismiss the conjured tether.

Siida slowly brought her hands up toward her chest, rolling her wrists back and forth and seeing that everything was in tact.  Her golden orbs glancing past; and directly into the eyes of the lead Magister when she rose.

“I offered my trust to Magister Sunwood; that I would have this opportunity to speak with you face to face.  It was never my intention to come here threatening you; but to plead with you to tell me where my brother possibly could be.  And ask you to please cease this insufferable intolerance against our house.”  

Her voice was firm, yet slightly shaken by the intimidation of the room.  It was full of several of prominent Magisters. She proudly turned her nose up and held her chin high while during, and after her speech.  And she would stand her ground even when the lead man came forward to stand before her.

“Siida Kash’ebahl. . .there are things; many things, that remain unsaid between you and your brother.  And most certainly things that he has not told you.  Things that I discoverer while investigating your House and his affairs.  It is not just a simple money grab to obtain your stake in the business the Kash’ebahl family has been running for some near three centuries, but an attempt to weed out a rat from our collective group.”

As he continued to speak, Marseille and Verzatea were tucked behind the paper construct of their bakery stand.  They could hear everything that was going on, and at the mention of these dealings, both of them would peer toward one another wondering what ‘truth’ he actually had found.

“Were you aware that your brother is transferring illegal weapons across faction lines?  Items that Quel’thalas has struggled to get during this time of war that he so easily is able to aquire?  And rather than give it back to his own people; he has been selling it. . .or perhaps giving it to our enemies?”

As she went to go speak, her voice was silenced when he presented more facts.

“Are you also aware that several people standing in this room; including the ones who are not currently able to join us, have been solicited with bribes? Asked to look the other way and turn a blind eye to the blatant disregard to our cities customs and trafficking laws?”

Verzatea peered over at the pale old elf and yawned.  It was about all she could do to prevent herself from falling asleep.  These crimes were entirely old news to them.  They all knew what Lazarius was doing.

“And what about dealings with Stormwind? Yes we have been blackmailing to keep this information silent.  And yes we have been extorting him for money.  But not a single one of us here would fraternize with the enemy.”

Zalra and Sennaris would remain at their post when Siida forcibly balled her knuckles and clenched her fists at her side.

“And that does not give you any right to openly attack him!”  she shouted, which to everyone's amazement was the first time anyone had every done so to the Magister.

He held in a laugh for far too long, and finally erupted in a sinister cackle that echoed along the ballroom.

“Do not make me laugh child, I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”   his voice sang, hardly worried about her accusation.

“No? What about filtering the money you extorted from my brother into a separate banking account so that you could have hush money for some of your nefarious deeds.” Siida belted out.

“I never--”

“Or the fact that you hired bounty hunters to capture my brother, and return him to you in Quel’thalas so that he could be hung!”

“Well tha--”

“You lied to me, you lied to the courts and you lied to your own supporters because of your selfish greed and ignorance!”

“Enough!” he howled.

To be continued... In Depths Below:Masquerade,Part 7

@pyravari-kashebahl

@daltalah

@whatadarkbitch

@siidaraykashebahl

@thebladeitself

@suncrest-legacy

[alexalee16fan-blog]

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Choosing a proper delicate supplier is nearly as significant as offering for the chance. Many delicate suppliers offer development organizations a bigger number of chances than others. The more open doors accessible to organizations, the more probable the business will arrive a reasonable agreement. Guarantee that the delicate supplier offers tenders from both people in general and private segment. This will ensure that your development organization finds the best chances.

Through delicate sites, organizations may scan for tenders by industry, area or other propelled techniques. During enlistment, a few sites will accumulate data about the business to convey important delicate open doors through email. At the point when the organization finds an important delicate, an agent of the organization will set up a PQQ or ITT. These reports contain questions that organizations should enough answer with respect to the chance. The inquiries must be addressed completely to show your business' upper hand over different organizations offering for a similar development contracts.

A few organizations that apply much of the time for development agreements might be enticed to reorder answers into the fields gave. While this spares the organization time, regularly the data isn't pertinent to the inquiry posed. In the event that the data isn't important, this will cause the organization to show up less educated about the chance. The evaluator will at that point select the following candidate that gave a nitty gritty depiction of how the task will be finished. The business with the most minimal offer that addresses the undertaking's issues will win the agreement. At the point when the offer is won, the development organization is relied upon to meet the criteria laid out in the offer, including the offer cost. The individuals who don't might be punished.

Organizations that are centered around nearby position agreements ought to perceive that little and medium estimated organizations are considered. In 2004 and 2005, these organizations won 59% of the all out neighborhood authority contracts. Development agreements were incorporated into this rate. These sorts of organizations are urged to exploit the nearby power spending plans also.

Lower Value Contracts

Agreements esteemed under 100,000 are viewed as lower worth agreements. A few agreements are offered underneath expense to give benefits under uncommon conditions. A large number of these lower worth tenders are regularly found in development, transport, security and electrical. Organizations ought to know that these agreements exist. Lower worth tenders fill in as an elective wellspring of salary. Organizations that perform well on these agreements might be considered for different tenders at full worth.

Changes in Construction Tendering

In 2009, more than 13 million was assigned to development by the neighborhood authority, as per the Office of National Statistics. The sum increments consistently a seemingly endless amount of time after year. Since 1997, the neighborhood authority spending plan for development has expanded by more than 10 million. Every year, the financial backing expanded steadily by 2 million, in spite of the worldwide downturn. Development offering is a feasible route for organizations to procure a practical pay.

As of now, the open part represents 40% of the complete development commissions totaling more than 33 billion. While nearby power development contracts and other open area agreements are a sound wellspring of pay, they are by all account not the only wellspring of salary in the development business. Organizations ought to likewise think about the private segment and others as a hotspot for tenders. This will build a business' odds of acquiring a high worth delicate.

Outline

Organizations looking for development agreements will discover more than 51,000 new open doors distributed every month on some delicate sites. Each agreement is esteemed dependent on the work performed and the length of the agreement. Development tenders normally hold a higher incentive than different tenders, on the grounds that the ventures are bigger and more work concentrated than other delicate chances.

Development is a practical wellspring of pay for organizations situated inside the UK. Development organizations ought to create procedures for offering that will feature their upper hand over different bidders. This will build the quantity of fruitful offers made by the organization. Organizations that reliably win offers will expand income and continue their business.

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Write My Essay For Me Service I go searching my room, dimly lit by an orange light. On a desk within the left corner, a framed image of an Asian family is beaming their smiles, buried among US history textbooks and The Great Gatsby. A Korean ballad streams from a pair of tiny computer speakers. Before the pandemic, many people were already engaging in a type of social distancing. The present state of affairs put the world on pause, however this pause gave me time to replicate on troubling issues. Time that so many others like me in all probability also desperately needed to heal without even knowing it. Sometimes it takes one’s world falling apart for essentially the most beautiful mosaic to be constructed up from the broken pieces of wreckage. Over time, I found it difficult being my family’s glue. I wanted again the household I had earlier than the restaurant--the one which ate Luchi Mongsho collectively every Sunday evening. Over the subsequent two years, issues were at times nonetheless onerous, however progressively improved. Now my pals in Switzerland come to me asking me for advice and assist, and I really feel as if I am a significant member of our community. My close good friend Akshay just lately started stressing about whether or not his dad and mom have been going to get divorced. With John’s advice, I started checking in on Akshay, spending more time with him, and coaching him before and after he talked to his parents. I started spending more time in our garage, carefully setting up planes from sheets of foam. I found purpose balancing the fuselage or leveling the ailerons to precisely ninety levels. The chicken--confused, betrayed, disturbed--slowly lifts its eyes from the now empty floor. For the first time, it appears past the silver fence of the cage and notices an unkempt sweep of colossal brown and inexperienced grasses reverse its impeccably crafted surroundings. Cautiously, it inches closer to the barrier, farther from the unbelievable perfection of the farm, and discovers a large sea of black gravel. Stained with gray stones and marked with yellow traces, it separates the chicken from the opposite subject. In this new place I really feel like an actual particular person, with real feelings. This place is someplace the place I can express myself freely and be who I need to be. I am a much stronger, healthier, and more resilient particular person than I was two years in the past. While it hasn’t been easy, I am glad to be the place I am at present. On the wall within the far back, a Korean flag hangs in addition to a Led Zeppelin poster. As with rock-paper-scissors, we often cut our narratives short to make the games we play simpler, ignoring the intricate assumptions that maintain the game running smoothly. Like rock-paper-scissors, we have a tendency to accept one thing not as a result of it’s true, but because it’s the handy route to getting issues accomplished. We accept incomplete narratives once they serve us well, overlooking their logical gaps. Other times, we exaggerate even the smallest defects and uncertainties in narratives we don’t want to deal with. Leaving home in the beginning of my adolescence, I was sent out on a path of my own. While for some, highschool is the most effective time of their lives, for me, highschool has represented a few of the finest and, hopefully, worst occasions. Even with the struggles I’ve confronted with my household, I am grateful for this path. It has brought me to a place that I solely thought was fictional. I liked chopping new parts and assembling them perfectly. But at occasions I nonetheless needed to emotionally assist my mother to avoid sudden India trips, or put my siblings to bed if my mother and father weren’t house at night. Pamphlets of American schools are scattered about on the floor. A chilly December wind wafts a wierd infusion of ramen and leftover pizza. I guess the reasoning behind this recreation has so much to do with context. If we are to rationalize the logic behind this sport, we've to imagine some kind of narrative, an instance during which paper would possibly beat rock. Unfortunately, I can’t argue for a convincing one. I analyze why I suppose this essay works in The Complete Guide, Session 6.

[creepingsharia]

Muslims team with antifa to obliterate critics of 'religion of peace'

There are new indications that forces on the left are building coalitions with Muslim Brotherhood fronts and fanning out across the U.S. in search of meetings, conferences, even informal church gatherings where Islam might be discussed in a negative light.

When they find them, they pounce.

The latest attempt to shut down a meeting in which a speaker was planning to provide information critical of Islam occurred in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Ron Branstner, a researcher based out of St. Cloud, Minnesota, had booked space at the Sioux Falls History Club for Oct. 26. This is a club that has a 100-year history of discussing world events from the perspective of free and open debate.

But while driving to the event Thursday night, Branstner received phone a call from the venue and was told not to come. A powerful Democratic politician with connections to the history club had been contacted by a Muslim lawyer named Taneeza Islam.

Apparently, that's all it takes in Sioux Falls to shut down the First Amendment, said Branstner, whose presentation was focused, ironically, on Islam and the First Amendment.

"I was going there to speak about the First Amendment, our first right to free speech, and how it is being stolen from us," Branstner said. "We ended up having to change the venue to another town 27 miles away and so everyone had to drive 27 miles to hear my presentation."

Taneeza Islam

The female Muslim attorney, Taneeza Islam, has connections to radical Islamist Linda Sarsour and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR. She is involved with the Islamic Center of Sioux Falls, the same mosque that protested former Muslim Shahram Hadian's speaking event earlier this year in the city.

Taneeza Islam is a Bush Foundation fellow and civil-rights activist who also works as an immigration attorney, representing Muslim refugees and illegal aliens from Central America. She also pushes the idea that anyone who objects to unlimited refugee resettlement and illegal immigration in America is a "white nationalist."

Islam promotes the #CounterACThate meme on Facebook which tries to shut down and destroy ACT For America chapters holding meetings to educate people about Shariah law.

"She's connected to that mosque in Sioux Falls, and very politically active," Hadian said.

And that mosque, the Islamic Center of Sioux Falls, is owned lock, stock and barrel by the North American Islamic Trust or NAIT, which has been linked to the extremist Muslim Brotherhood.

Pastor Shahram Hadian grew up Muslim in Iran and later converted to Christianity, after his family defected to Canada and eventually the United States.

"She was there at a protest outside the hotel where I spoke in April, she was with the imam doing the prayers, they had all the interfaith people standing around them with their backs to the Muslims and their faces turned out while the Muslims were doing their prayers, that's a great picture of how foolish these people are," Hadian said of the April event.

So let's take a look at a few of the other recent cases that would indicate First Amendment rights no longer apply to Americans speaking out critically about one religion and one religion only – Islam [remember, criticism of Christianity is perfectly acceptable and not considered the least bit "bigoted" or "Christophobic."

****

On Thursday, Oct. 26, in Sioux Falls, author/scholar Steve Kirby, who has written five books on Islam and has a doctorate's degree in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia, had his speaking event at a community room inside the Pizza Ranch canceled when the restaurant chain caved to protesters demands and said it didn't want to risk any incidents that might put the safety of its patrons at risk.

Kirby had to move his event at the last minute to the public library, where he was met by protesters from members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, and an allied group called Indivisible, which has been financed by George Soros and has ties to former President Barack Obama's Organizing for Action.

Protesters sat in the front rows and held up newspapers to block people's view of Kirby's presentation.

Indivisible has a presence in practically every state with the sole mission of sowing seeds of discord among Republicans and disrupting the flow of free speech wherever the issue of immigration or Islam pops up.

Their stock and trade is in vicious, Saul Alinsky-type ad-hominem attacks, with some of their favorite names for those holding opposing political views being "bigot," "xenophobe," "Islamophobe" and "racist." But the latest smear-of-choice, popularized by the Charlottesville, Virginia, incident this summer, is "white nationalist."

Since the election of Donald Trump a full convergence is playing out between radical leftists with ties to Indivisible/Antifa and those with Islamist connections such as CAIR, ISNA and the Muslim Student Association.

Anyone who questions whether open borders and "welcoming" Islamic Shariah law into your community is a good thing, gets branded a white nationalist, racist bigot. The town "bigots" are typically announced through social media posts, an article in the local newspaper and even some TV spots. Even if local media allows the accused bigot a chance to defend himself, as the Des Moines Register did for Steve Kirby, the accused comes across as having to defend himself and sounds guilty to the uninformed masses.

Jacob Hall of Sioux Center, a board member of Sioux County Conservatives, strongly rejects the argument that anyone disagreeing with the hardcore left must be a bigoted white nationalist.

"This is just another example of the unhinged left trying to suppress free speech. They don’t want a dialogue," Hall told the Des Moines Register. "They don’t want the other side to be pointed out," and they don't want a scholar who has written books about Islam to discuss the topic, he added.

The Pizza Ranch is a frequent host of Republican and conservative speaking events in the Sioux Falls area, but apparently it only takes a few calls to the restaurant management from leftist protesters to get an event canceled.

Since the protests only seem to roll in when conservatives take up the issue of Islam, the message is clear, says Dr. Mark Christian, a former Muslim turned Christian whose Omaha-Nebraska-based Global Faith Institute specializes in educating Christians about the differences between the two faiths.

"The ownership of the Pizza Ranch has now let it be known that if you speak there, you'd better not talk negatively about Islam," said Dr. Christian.

***

On Sept. 12, former FBI counter-terrorism agent John Guandolo and journalist Chris Gaubatz spoke at the city-owned community center in tiny Oakland, Iowa, near Council Bluffs in Pottawattamie County. There topic was "Understanding the Threat: The Muslim Brotherhood's Secret Strategies for the USA."

Not only did the event get protested and disrupted, again with newspapers held up in the front rows and loud talking, but police had to be called in to restore order.

Weeks after the event the local GOP chairman for Pottawattamie County, Jeff Jorgensen, was removed from office by the GOP when it was discovered he played a role in inviting Guandolo and Gaubatz to the area to speak about Islam.

***

On Oct. 18, the Sportsman's Club in Stewartsville, Minnesota, canceled an event where Usama Dakdok, an Egyptian Coptic Christian who travels around speaking about how Christians are treated by Muslims in Muslim-majority countries such as his native Egypt.

The Sportsman's Club, which is rented out for various community events including those hosted by Muslims, has an eight-person board of directors that voted 6-2 to cancel the contract for Dakdok's speaking event. The board took this action only after protesters began phoning the club and demanding it not rent space to Dakdok, even though a contract to book the venue had already been signed, according to the Post Bulletin of Stewartsville, which is near Rochester, Minnesota.

One of the Sportsman's Club's board members said he was reluctant to cancel the contract because he was "kinda on the side of free speech."

"And I'm not biased against Muslims whatsoever. I don't have a problem with them. It's just the ISIS parts that I have an issue with," Bunde told the Post Bulletin, referring to the Islamic State.

Regina Mustafa, a 37-year-old native of Philadelphia, announced a run for Congress in Minnesota, where she has lived for the last 12 years and been an activist for interfaith dialogue between Islam, Judaism and Christianity. She recently pulled out of the race.

Regina Mustafa, a Muslim convert and CAIR operative, was one of the ringleaders who helped pressure the Sportsman's Club to cancel Dakdok's event. She said she supported the club's decision, but didn't discount the possibility that Dakdok might secure another venue around Rochester. So, just to be sure, she said she would forge ahead with plans to hold a counter-event at the Rochester library, which is set for Oct. 29 from 2:30 p.m. to 4 p.m., the same day Dakdok was set to speak.

"I'd like to still have this event," said Mustafa, who teaches that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance. "There's a great amount of interest in it already."

***

In April 2017, a heavily armed Muslim Ehab Jabber infiltrated a Christian conference at a local hotel in Sioux Falls. He entered the ticketed event undetected with a handgun and was told to leave, then livestreamed threats to the Christians from his vehicle in the parking lot, where he had a cache of weapons including an assault rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Jaber has since pleaded guilty to federal weapons charges but the state charges remain unresolved. "I have a feeling they're going to drop those charges. Lost his guns and right bear, is now a felon, but the other [local] prosecutor said the guy did nothing wrong."

***

Hadian embarked on a four-city tour through Minnesota and Wisconsin in August-September. He was protested at three of the events and at the fourth, the host received calls pressuring him to cancel the event.

At one of the events in Browerville, Minnesota, on Sept. 12, a couple of the protesters got inside and came up and stood in front of Hadian and disrupted the meeting.

"The sheriff was there and one of the two was literally dragged out, and of course he was claiming he was assaulted, but there were too many witnesses to see he would not leave and was disrupting the event, and when the security put hands on him he went limp," Hadian said.

The next night in Freeport, Minnesota, there were no protesters but the owner of the facility said Muslim activists and their supporters were calling him at home trying to pressure him to cancel the event, saying they were going to boycott his business. He held firm and did not cancel.

***

Two nights later, on Sept. 14 a group of communists allied with liberal Christians and radical Muslims decided they would take their protest directly to the enemy. This time they would actually protest a group of Christians meeting in the privacy of their own church -- the Granite City Baptist Church in St. Cloud, where Hadian was scheduled as a guest speaker on the topic of "The Trojan Horse of Interfaith Dialogue."

Hadian believes the interfaith movement is geared toward getting Christians to accept the general claims of Islam and ultimately deny the deity of Christ. He was greeted by about 50 protesters, roughly half of them from the interfaith community called UniteCloud, which includes an amalgamation of Christians, Jews and Muslims. Several infiltrated the meeting inside the church.

Hadian said he saw at least two people wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts and others appeared to be members of local communist and/or antifa-affiliated groups called Expect Resistance and the IWW General Defense Committee Local 17.

These groups had been agitating on Facebook in the days leading up to the meeting. They also put flyers around town calling Hadian, who is a native of Iran with brown skin, a "white supremacist."

That was the first time where we saw that element, a communist group, along with BLM and an interfaith group called UniteCloud, which includes people who say they are Christians," Hadian said.

"And one of their Facebook posts called me a white supremacist, that we were recruiting white people to go kill Muslims," said Hadian, a former police officer turned Christian pastor whose ministry is called the "Truth in Love Project.

"We hired police officers, we did bag searches for everyone coming into the church," he said.

Prior to Hadian's event, the Granite City Baptist Church had been vandalized after hosting another former-Muslim speaker from Pakistan.

"They said on their Facebook posts they were going to disrupt the event during Q & A period. At what point does that become defamation to say I am inciting people to go kill and hurt Muslims?"

Hadian advises others who want to hold meetings or events on Islam to avoid city-owned public properties, such as libraries, schools or community centers, and if that is the only available space then make it a ticketed, private event.

"One, they can cancel you last minute, pull the plug, and number-two it's public space. Even if you have to charge five bucks for a ticket, it's worth it, or better yet get a church because now it's private property and it just looks better. A church service you add the element of infringing upon an entire group's First Amendment rights, so it looks really bad for the protesters to be protesting a church's private gathering."

***

The last leg of Hadian's three-city tour was in Milwaukee on Sept. 16. Again, protesters converged on his event.

"About 15 people gathered outside, and they came in to disrupt and also got escorted out by sheriff's deputies," Hadian said. "So on that trip I got protested three out of four trips, and the other venue tried to cancel, so this is now the new norm.

"The whole modus operandi is to shut down the event, make it expensive because you have to hire security, anything to stop this information from getting out to Christians who need to hear it."

The travesty is that the anti-free speech leftists and Muslims conduct their operations against the First Amendment under this faux argument that they want to promote dialogue.

"And yet they don't even want us to engage in dialogue, they just want to shut us down, so it's a one-way tolerance, and apostasy on the part of the Christians who are involved in this," Hadian said.

Engaging in a true dialogue is one thing, but Christians who claim to be "uniting" with Muslims around a religion that denies the deity of Christ, denies the crucifixion, death and resurrection of Christ, are doing nothing if not rallying to the support of a global anti-Christ religious system, he said.

Antifa, an amalgamation of Marxist and anarchist groups, is planning a series of nationwide rallies Nov. 4 that it hopes will bring down the Trump-Pence administration. Sign up for WND's free in-depth report on the inner workings of this dangerous organization.

[dupuytrens-org]

New Post has been published on https://dupuytrens.org/drg-goes-to-washington/

DRG goes to Washington

On July 10th and 11th, the Dupuytren Research Group went to Washington DC. We visited offices of Congressional representatives and other organizations to raise awareness about the impact of Dupuytren disease and the need for federal funding of Dupuytren research. Right now, there are no federal funds directed specifically for Dupuytren research – not at the NIH, CDC, or DOD.

Dupuytren Research Group board members (L-R) Peter Geimer, Charles Eaton, and Laura Holmes Jost meeting with Rep Donna Shalala (front) in Washington DC.

Over these two days, DRG Board of Directors Laura Holmes Jost, Peter Geimer and I visited over a dozen congressional offices and logged over 10 miles of walking back and forth through the tunnels beneath the White House which connect the Senate and House of Representatives buildings.

We met with Democratic and Republican members of Congress. We were well received: Dupuytren is a bipartisan disease. Nearly every office we visited reacted with the same two sentences:  “I’ve never heard of this before” and “Why haven’t I heard about this before?“. It was a clear validation of the need to continue with outreach and awareness efforts at all levels of government. We provided materials to all of the offices including pictures and documentation of the impact of Dupuytren disease on individuals, families, and the country. We sought out connections and advice on how to advocate more effectively for federal funding of Dupuytren research. We provided materials in both short and long versions explaining the need for Dupuytren research.

The materials we gave out included the following, which you might find helpful explaining to others why Dupuytren advocacy is so important and why we need to have honest conversations about the real impact of Dupuytren disease and related conditions:

We need to talk about the real impact of Dupuytren disease

Dupuytren is a common problem, but advocacy is a challenge because of perception. Most people have a mild version of Dupuytren and for them, it may be a minor concern. At any one time, only one in five people with Dupuytren are ready for a hand procedure. People may have a lump or a slight finger bend as the only issue of their lifetime. Or their fingers aren’t yet bent enough to need straightening. Or they might have one finger affected, have a successful procedure, and never another problem. If everyone fit into that category, there would be no compelling reason to push for better treatment options.

But not everyone has mild Dupuytren. Three to five percent of people with Dupuytren – three hundred thousand to half a million Americans – have a treatment-resistant disease which keeps coming back after treatment. Repeat treatments are increasingly riskier and less effective. The chance of a permanent complication goes up with every procedure. For this group, even radical operations are likely to fail over time.

Recurrence is the most important problem with Dupuytren because it eventually leads to disabled hands that doctors can’t help. Radical operations may slow recurrence but don’t prevent it. The reality of treatment failure is often missed because individual doctors don’t treat many patients with aggressive Dupuytren. When the surgeon’s perfectly executed state-of-the-art procedure quickly fails because of recurrence, they are baffled, frustrated, and out of optimistic answers. Patients give up. Surgeons give up. This is the group that needs fundamentally different options than what doctors currently have to offer. This is the group that has fallen through the cracks. This is the motivation for our work.

The common misperception – doctors and patients alike – is “It’s just a finger – not a real problem.” and the discussion stops. The truth is Dupuytren is a health issue much larger than bent fingers. Several studies have concluded that people with Dupuytren severe enough to require treatment are in fact at greater risk for a variety of other medical problems, cancers, and shortened lives. This isn’t fearmongering. It’s the nature of the disease: Dupuytren is a systemic problem which shows up most obviously in the hands but isn’t confined to them. This is true of many other diseases. Psoriasis, for example, is often seen as a local skin problem. It’s not. Psoriasis is a systemic problem which shows up most obviously as a skin rash, but almost one-third of people with psoriasis will also develop psoriasis-related arthritis and other health issues. This is why aggressive psoriasis is treated with systemic medicines like Enbrel. It was blood test research like we are now doing which led to the development of medicines like Enbrel. People with Dupuytren don’t need a new operation. They need a new medicine to turn off the process at the source, in their bloodstream.

We must talk about the fact that Dupuytren is more than bent fingers. It affects overall health. Most surgeons miss this because health-related Dupuytren research is published in medical journals, not surgical journals. Even if a surgeon is aware, it’s off their radar: surgeons don’t dwell on medical problems because they don’t treat medical problems.

We must talk about the fact that because Dupuytren affects overall health, Dupuytren care places a large unrecognized financial burden on the federal government, on private insurers, and on individuals. 

There is hope, but not without difficult conversations about the full impact of Dupuytren. I am very optimistic that this work will transform Dupuytren care, reduce the need for surgery, and lead to healthier lives for those affected. But to do this, to make progress funding and doing research for a cure, we have to have the tough talk: Dupuytren is a major health issue, not just a finger problem. Until more people know this, nothing will change.

There’s an even more important reason to talk about Dupuytren-related health issues: research itself. Dupuytren biology is similar to that of other fibrotic medical diseases which have very active research communities: lung fibrosis, liver fibrosis, kidney fibrosis, arteriosclerosis, and others. These diseases are not directly related to Dupuytren, but because of their similarities, fibrosis research benefits Dupuytren research and vice versa. I regularly reach out to researchers in these areas to collaborate because all these fibrotic diseases are – like Dupuytren – local effects of a systemic problem. Their cures need systemic, not local treatments. Dupuytren research may lead to advances in their research. We’re refining research tools honed on these diseases to solve the mystery of Dupuytren.

Our delegation either connected with or got leads to connect to a variety of government offices whose missions align with the Dupuytren Research Group: the Rare Disease Caucus, Veterans Affairs, FDA, HHS, National Council on Aging, HELP Committee, DOD, NIH, NIAMS Coalition, NIAMS, Senate Special Committee on Aging, House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, Authorization and Appropriations Committees, and others.

The path is being forged. It’s a daunting task, but based on the experience, I’m more optimistic than ever that our efforts will we will bring about much-needed government support for research to find a cure for Dupuytren disease and related conditions.

Charles Eaton MD

[digitaltechnology682-blog]

14 Common Misconceptions About Corporate Event Management

It does not depend which market that you are in - finance, style, retail, or audio - when it comes to setting up an occasion. Occasions are getting to be a fundamental prerequisite of businesses in any industry to promote their items and Establish the brand repute, and important are event professionals to prepare these activities.

As simple as it might audio, organizing an occasion is just not an easy task. The celebration administrators really have to experience various stimulating worries and one-of-their-variety situations to help the manufacturers develop and to create them selves as corporate function management teams.

Celebration organizers by themselves are authorities within their subject. Nevertheless, they utilize a pool of qualified experts that represent a cross-practical team and work in co-ordination with each other to maintain substantial expectations of top quality. Flexible groups that present a commitment to their career though making sure productive cross-team communication can at some point end up building a thing exceptional and price admiration. Function management organizations make certain these types of potential in their groups to ensure that they could build unmatched designs not to seek a second prospect, which has no place for itself, even while in the worst-case state of affairs In terms of an party.

It's the task of corporate occasion administration providers to placate their buyers to catapult for the foremost place. They, As a result, Arrange their clients' occasions as they would Arrange their unique. Yes, although they approach an function for yourself, they manage your funds, establish dates as per your comfort and in any expected case, are All set with alternate dates too. Not simply this, they finalize the internet site, prepare for speakers, develop a topic, and keep watch over anything starting from tables to tents, catering to décor, and moveable toilets to unexpected emergency options.

Amid their special and purchaser-welcoming functions may very well be weddings, company events, seminars, events, and conferences. The informational activities assist your consumers in examining your model's possible foreseeable future for example When the expert services are working as vowed. Together with staying a brand name marketing and advertising agency, it is vital for an party administration team to increase itself being an amusement group so as to supply stop-to-finish, tailor-designed alternatives towards the consumers, As a result guaranteeing optimum fulfillment at their close.

Exactly what is a necessity for an party organizer is to have the chance to talk to all kinds of individual, that may help him to construct his company's name as a corporate party management business. Rather than producing bogus promises, celebration supervisors need to adhere to ground realities to assure unforgettable situations that thereafter deliver a high market share. It can be not easy to become a pacesetter, although not difficult likewise. All it requires is Management excellent with the opportunity to negotiate between customers, location staff and suppliers, with adaptability.

The only Reason

The sole purpose why someone or a company in general must Choose an occasion organization corporation is to save lots of by the due date and shift the pressure of Arranging a giant occasion to someone else. A bit strain, however, is That which you can know when you find yourself to decide on these an organization. You must try to find certain characteristics inside the firm, some of which are encompassed below:

one. Management of time

An outstanding event administration group should be adept in controlling time as well. But not surprisingly, it is important to gather each and every depth perfectly in time or else, the celebration could indicate a catastrophe. It is basically necessary to line things up and decide on the target shoppers, location, food, décor, and every little thing else in time.

two. Proficient crew of gurus

Organizing a functionality, Creative Marketing Agency irrespective of whether corporate or social, is a giant deal. As a result, a talented workforce is a prerequisite for just a company inside the event administration market. The staff customers might be assigned diverse jobs, which would make it easier for the corporate to deliver the most beneficial results.

three. Skills and Skills

Party professionals should have the skills to amicably handle their shoppers and their prospects. Becoming courteous may help in making lengthy-term relationships with people today.

4. Transparency

It's important to keep up transparency between the corporate and the clientele. Shoppers ought to know very well what the corporation is focused on and what it could do for them. In case of any situation, the corporate should notify the customer perfectly upfront so that another might be established.

5. Overall flexibility

For an occasion organizer, it is critical to obtain the quality of adaptability in him. It can be done that improvements are desired at anytime from the function. The manager must be ready to experience the same and should have a backup in his brain so that there is no situation even though offering the commitment by the due date.

You are actually not merely able to get an event organized at any time to build your model and popularity, but in addition to choose an party management corporation that may get it done the best way achievable.

[ramrodd]

The History Lecture No One Slept Through (Acts 7:1-53) | TMBH Acts #28

J’accuse!

COMMENTARY:

Metaphorically, you put your MAGA hat on at approximately 7:50, when you come up for air and declare that you love history and begin pushing the Pro-Life Evangelical party line with a little analysis by anachronism, a reference to the manufactured issue of greetings around the end of the solar year and a delicate march through America's racist battles without ever mentioning white folks as the stiff-necked demographic who continue to sustain their embrace of white supremacy and prerogatives of social domination based on the 19th century racial theories that justified chattel slavery, but then, that was the basis of the Christian academy your folks sent you to avoid any danger of you getting cooties from being in a classroom with colored kids.

My assumption is that your target audience is basically the 15 year old white Christian baseball camp market with a bunch of rowdy boys like Nick Sandman. Anybody who would go out of his way to provide a medieval illustration of King Saul taking a shit has barely escaped that culture, himself, and hopes to recreate it in his own classroom as the cool, with-it, it's not a sermon just some serious Salvation Gospel indoctrination with a patina of street cred. The point you make about the schism between Jewish orthodoxy and Jewish resurrection ministry is exactly the same as the schism between the Pro-Life Evangelical business model and who you would characterize as the heresy of the liberal Christian left of the Liberation Gospel with whom I associate myself. That's why you need to put on your MAGA hat in solidarity with Nick Sandman.

Now, you really know your shit. I learn something new with every video, but when you start talking about communism and godless communism and the virtues of capitalism, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about. That's number 1. I began studying the Soviets in 1955 when my dad was stationed at USAEUR as Comptroller and the Hungarian Revolution was going on a no farther than a day's drive by the Autobahn. That was a little scirmish America started as part of the grand strategy emerging from George Kennan's Long Telegram. But it is an instance when we fucked with the domestic politics of a sovereign nation to advance our own ambitions. Personally, I believe history has determined that we were on the side of angels, although a bunch of people got run over by tanks pretty much the same way the armored cars loyal to the constitutional authority in Venezula ran into those crowds. When assholes like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson talk about the need to dismantle the administrative state, this is how it happens. This is the existential reality of violent revolution and/or authoritarian suppression, take your pick. This is what was going on in Budapest I was 8 years old and a day by tank away from the godless commie cocksuckers in the tanks Moscow sent to crush democracy. I identified with the guys with the Molotov coctails bullfighting the tanks.

So, I have been studying Marxism my entire self-conscious life, having a working relationship with the Holy Spirit being a dimension of the self-conscious life, or, as one of those old Greeks, probably Plato, said, "The Un-Examined life is not worth living". There is no doubt in my mind that Socrates, Plato and Aristotle had a working relationship with the Holy Spirit just like me. There is also no doubt in my mind that Socrates had the same relationshship with Yaweh, Queen of Battle, as Jesus and Cornelius: Socrates was a combat veteran and his whole way of dealing with PTSD was to lay a trap for the same coalition of orthodoxy that St. Stephen addresses and the political coalition Bill Barr represents. You know, the MAGA hat crowd. People that are supporting your ministry and Tucker Carlson's turtorial on white privilege (I don't think Tucker went to a Christian Academy, the legacy of the "Massive Resistance" of your daddy's political orientation: they were probably too déclassé for his whiteboy elitist pretentions). But, given all that, I am not a Marxist scholar: I studied it in the way the mongoose studies the cobra: to strike to kill.

In terms of Maxism, capitalism, and the economics of the Green New Deal, you guys are clueless, everybody. If people like Ray Dalio and Jamie Dimon actually understood how economics actually works, we would have been to Mars by now. It's that simple, If you want to get to Mars, AOC has the blue prints for the Green New Deal Star Gate.

The shit you're selling is the Harvard Business School version of the American economy when buggy whips were still a sound investment.

I've been engaged with the Kremlin since 1975 in what has become the Sovereign Democracy agenda Putin and any given POTUS inherited from the Nixon-Breznev Detente by way of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. In 1975, the only way you could do business with the Soviet Union was through the Kremlin. In 1986, Donald Duck Ass, aka POTUS, became engaged in the Sovereign Democracy agenda and has never put a deal together because of his lie, cheat and steal "Art of the Deal" business model. That's why he won't make a deal with either Chairman Kim or President Xi until he keeps his promise he made to Chairman Kim to get a GI haircut like Elvis and to implement the Green New Deal. Kim is ready to give away the ranch in a regional partnership with President Moon of the Republic of China and the Belt and Road Initiative of President Xi. The only difference between the Belt and Road Initative and the Green New deal is Democratic Socialism and that's one thing that is missing from Duck Ass Don's lie, cheat and steal "Art of the Deal" business model. The last time a Soviet Marxist made a deal with someone with a similar business model as Donald Duck Ass, it was Stalin with Hitler and the hard core commies have never let it happen again.

The chances are, you don't have a clue what I am talking about, Don't never you mind: neither did Valerie Jarrett when I tried to explain how stupid Obama's version of the Tory Socialism and class warfare of the Reaganomics bullshit you are selling and the macro-economic populism of the White House.

The thing that you and virtually every American of any political, religious or lifestyle persuasion don't understand is that, while Putin did correctly observe that Marxism is a fairy tale, it is a very intellectually rigorous fairy tale. Marx was immersed in the dialectical forensics of Martin Luther, growing up, as was Hegel, and Marx's Dialectical Materialism is as formidable as the 99 Thesis, intellectually. It just doesn't work as a social construct.

That's why Putin, Kim and Xi understand the importance of the Democratic Socialism of the Green New Deal is the missing ingredient of the Harvard Business Model: they have a working model of Democratic Socialism right in the region with the President Moon's Republic of Korea, especially because of K-MAG, the US Army's point of technology transfer for constitutional capitalism virtually a component of the ROK Army.

But I don't want to teach you economics: I want you to repent of your evil Evangelical orthodoxy and get right with God. Start by putting on a MAGA hat in all the videos you make from now on like a leper, moving through the streets calling out “Unclean! Unclean!”.

Now, if I was equipped with the 17 years of serious Bible studies like you and I wanted to introduce the Bible as literature instead of history, I would stay with the J'accuse of St. Stephen and point out the rebuke of Nathan regarding Bathseba and the rejection of Nazareth of Jesus in Luke 4:14 – 28. What happens to Stephen is what could have happened to either Nathan or Jesus and why it doesn't happen to either Nathan and Jesus falls perfectly into your talent for dramatic explication. And you can point out that Émile Zola was the Atticus Finch of the Dreyfus Affair. You love making obscure historic allusions and this will reinforce your point.

You know your shit but you don't know the difference between your good shit and your bummer shit. You are a MAGA hat guy: if you believe in that shit and the idea that there were really good people on both sides in Charlottesville, well, say it loud and say it proud. Don't hide your MAGA lamp beneath a solar panel for a sex toy.

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❝ I sit before flowers hoping        they will train me in the art of opening up   I stand on mountain tops believing that avalanches will teach me to let go.❞

Charlotte Zerilli | twenty-four (III) | The Quarrel Club | Shay Mitchell | taken

non-graphic nonconsensual sexual intercourse attempt trigger warning Charlotte was born a mobster princess and she grew up to hate every thorn on her pretty little crown. It isn't that she doesn't love her family — because her father would deny her nothing and smothers her, if anything, with affection and attention, her mother dedicated her life raising her and Charles, braiding her long hair and teaching her all the appropriate dances a young girl should know and her twin wouldn't step back from doing anything if she asked, or even if she didn't voice the words, but thought them intensely. She loves her family and wishes them the best, but, during her high-school phase, she felt like nothing about it represented her. She has always been such a zephyr-like breeze, a fresh taste of air that couldn't seem to find room in her heart for the agitation of her father's affairs and just wanted a normal home to go back to after long classes of school, not the sequel of the Godfather waiting for her in a ridiculously large house. She simply felt too sophisticated and bright to be surrounded by such a primitive world, always trying to squeeze the best out of life and end up a vital part of the civilized community. Just when her parents, understanding but heavy-hearted, figured out the translation behind her distancing, howsoever, Charlotte came to the delayed conclusion that she couldn't just separate herself from the people she cared about, no matter how strong her distaste for their occupations was. She had been wrong to assume that she could just detach and hide her maiden name behind a random, chalk written one she would have gained through meaningless marriage. She had been a fool to imagine that she could outrun her origins, when they were glued to her, in every atom of her being, swimming in her blood and building her up, exactly the way she was. It would always catch up to her, and even if it didn't, how could she leave her brother behind when he has been the only real friend she had, at the end of the day, and when he was more like her than anybody else, no matter how intelligent they were and he was less? As she approached adulthood, she changed her values, still dreaming big and seeing greatness looking into her future With such a fickle mind and trembling personality — never too sure of herself and in a constant process of change for the better — Charlotte doesn't look like a shining mind to most, but the half of her brilliance is how she never stops moving or looking for answers to already solved questions. After a lifetime of hissing her way out of the family business, the young woman now wants to know as much as possible, as if she could become both the first female president and the first gangstress, wanting to know everything and collect as much and as diverse information as possible, even about something she used to want to never be affiliated with. Truth be told, her affinity for the Mafia lies in her DNA, as she had twenty years to analyze her father's every move and bring a question mark next to his every decision as a child, just so he would explain his logic for her to assimilate, but there are times when she finds her potential too deep-colored for her to waste it on illegal matters that would endanger her, if anything. Not to mention that she doesn't want to steal what she thinks is her brother's only calling, when she has so many other options. People watch her with awe glimmering in their eyes — how she gets out of class holding her textbooks and tablet close to her chest, how she seems restless when facing an assignment, how, later the same days, she can be found, glitter eyeshadow and long eyelashes on, at every party she is expected to attend, never backing from a challenge. Yet, the truth is that Charlotte has half as much fun as she seems to be having, mainly pretending to be drinking and pouring her spritz down the drain when nobody is looking, because she doesn't really have the resistance she is claiming to have and can never compete with her brother and Aria, just letting them think that she is. The one exception to the rule she remembers too well, tipsiness aside, just because it has been marked by somebody else. Five shots past her alcohol tolerance and having smoked all night, she didn't even feel the hand on her waist guiding her towards an empty bedroom and she wouldn't have realized it until the morning after if it weren't for a lucky intervention that saved her. She tries to sweep it under the rug and just ignore it now, but it is only a matter of time until that haunting memory catches up with her as well, because it did leave a mental bruise on the girl who would have lost her virginity in an error.

Lauren Hastings Charlotte can easily see past Lauren’s desperate attempts to look perfect in any situation and is disgusted by how obsessed with the others’ opinion on her she is. Most of times, Lauren chooses to avoid her and pretend to have missed her caustic comments about her and her life style. In spite of that, she is growing resentful and frustrated about how she got caught and gave the other girl the opportunity to call her fake, no matter how true it is. She plans on having a serious talk with her very soon. Howsoever, Charlie-girl seems uninterested to hear anything the blonde would have to say to her and is trying to get everybody to see what’s beneath the make-up. After all, if anybody at all on campus is a dream come true, it would be her, not Lauren-whatsoever. Miles Kenilsworth As probably the true geniuses of each of their club, some sort of partnership had to be built imminently, and although they don’t get along on every aspect, when both are in the room, they create some sort of bubble of exclusivity that you’d need to take an IQ test and match their results to be welcome in. Yet, differences aside, they need each other’s brains and conversations that nobody else would be able to stand over brunch. Charlotte is happy to, for once, be mentally challenged — no matter how much she loves everybody in her group of friends — and feels like, without Miles, her brain would rot. On the other side of it, the man is just as grateful, and no matter how competitive and inamicable their interactions get, he still considers Charlie his only friend in a strange, distanced, unfeeling way. Charles Zerilli No matter how many girls pass through Charles' heart, Charlotte is the only constant in his life and their connection is so strong that he doesn't need http://68.media.tumblr.com/0b470fc2e3084403faafb15707a41e76/tumblr_oogdvkbFqE1uqzjvao1_250.gifto tell her that — as if she can read his thoughts to make sure of it. She is his only weakness and he is her most solid strength, and, looking at them, all the twin stereotypes come true. Although, personality speaking, they are nothing alike, the Charlies are in perfect harmony. Although Charlotte isn't certain of too many things in her life, she is certain of her brother and everything he means to her — and needless is it to say that the feeling is mutual. When it comes to potential, he sees hers like through a transparent glass and believes in nothing, not even God, more than he believes in her ability to untie links with their family name and start fresh a walk down the path to success. It saddens him to see Charlotte heading such a different direction, but there is nothing he wants more than her happiness. Cordelia McQueen Cordelia saved Charlotte that night she got carried away and found herself in a position she didn’t want but couldn’t escape, given the state she was in. She stepped in and detached the random man’s mouth from her throat, separating the two, and ever since has she been the support she needed and, for once, couldn’t find in her brother, although the two rarely discuss it openly, at the victim’s request. It makes her guts tremble and her eyes become liquid that she could be so weak and soft and that she needed help getting out of that situation, so she would rather not remember at all. Both are private people who wouldn’t wash their dirty laundry in public and for that, Cordelia understood perfectly why she has to keep her lips pursed and not whisper a word about that night, if that is what Charlotte wants. She knows how wrong it is and has even tried to convince her to change her approach, but the girl seems convinced that the secret she isn’t even responsible for has to remain between the two of them and the man who wronged her, until the right moment.

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Reflections, 20 years Later, on A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace #1yrago

John Perry Barlow:

Does Cyberspace Exist? Is It Free?

Twenty years ago tonight, I was at a staff party for the closing of the World Economic Forum, lured there by a coven of the contemporary geishas that staffed the Forum in those days, composed largely of doctoral students in Foreign Affairs at the University of Geneva. But I had also agreed to write something about that moment for a book called 24 Hours in Cyberspace. This was a slightly silly proposition, given that it was largely a book of photographs, and a photograph has yet to be taken of anything in Cyberspace.

But one of the photographs destined for the book was taken on a primitive digital camera by Tipper Gore as Bill Clinton signed into law the Communications Decency Act, a wholly futile piece of legislation that proposed at $250,000 fine on anyone uttering online any of seven words I have never failed to hear every time I was a guest in the Senate Members Dining Room.

The bill was a sweeping assertion of powers that were unconstitutional in the U.S. and utterly without legal basis anywhere else in the world.

So, facing a deadline, and filled with a gathering sense of indignation not only at the Communications Decency Act, but at the many bland assertions I’d heard at the WEF about regulating and controlling the Internet, I decided to write a manifesto declaring the natural anti- sovereignty of the global social space I had started calling Cyberspace seven years earlier.

Like the people in Congress who had passed the Communications Decency Act, few of the powerful men at the WEF had ever been online or had much interest in getting there. They had secretaries who typed. It wasn’t just that they were clueless about the Internet. They were dynamically anti-clueful and took it as a badge of honor. 1996 was the first year the Internet became a topic of interest at the WEF and they’d brought in a few wired types like myself, mostly as curiosities and certainly as part of the entertainment. Dancing bears would have been cheaper and probably more entertaining.

So I had few illusions about how many representatives of the Powers that Had Been were going to quake at any broadside I might write at that moment. But that wasn’t why I wanted to write it. I wanted to write it because it needed to be said, whether anyone from the “weary giants” ever read or understood it.

So I decided, in the middle of this fabulous, glittering party, that I would use the opportunity to declare – on my own authority, representing no one but myself – my conviction that Cyberspace, the fast-blooming organism of all connected thought, was already free and already independent. It was not a freedom we had to wrest from some King. It was a freedom we’d had all along, based on the simple lack of enforceable jurisdiction and the inherently open architectural design of the Internet.

What I felt compelled to declare was pretty simple really.

First, I wanted to declare that no government, neither ours nor Saudi Arabia’s, had the authority, much less the ability to tell the “people of Cyberspace,” that global constituency who already identified with the design, creation, and defense of the still larval Internet, what they might express online. Even in those many parts of the world that didn’t share America’s purported values regarding freedom of expression, privacy, prior restraint, unreasonable search and seizure, etc. there were still not many who were ready to cede to the United States such moral authority without legal standing.

Second, I wanted to make clear my belief that Authority, heretofore God-given down a long white column with the Almighty on top and you on the bottom, was about become something that could only be derived from a horizontally networked consensus, since in most cases there’d be no practical way to impose it hierarchically.

I admit that, coming from Wyoming, where unwritten social contracts seem to work pretty well, I was susceptible to the view that in the absence of credible law, such “organic” methods of self-regulation of might develop in the online world. To some degree, they have. In most ways, they have not. As the entire Human Race came online, including the very worst of us, it was naïve of me to think that the Russian Mob (or the Russian Government, for that matter) was going to have much truck with consensus systems aimed at the commonweal.

But it was late, I was in a hurry, and there always seemed to be a pretty girl next to me pouring another glass of champagne. So I wrote a number of things I might not have written in a cold, gray dawn. This probably also accounts for my decision to imitate the grandiloquent literary style of a notorious slave-holder like Thomas Jefferson. (For which I took endless grief from Post-Modernists all over Europe.)

Third, I felt a need to make clear that the whole notion one could own free speech was going to be very hard to perpetuate in any environment where anybody could perfectly reproduce anything humans make with their minds and distribute it infinitely at zero cost. Since the desire to share cool stuff is a human impulse just this side of sex, it didn’t seem likely to me that harsh laws, all of them local, were going to keep people from sharing everything from songs to mathematical theorems across Cyberspace. And I could see that the primary tool of censorship was going to be copyright law and not such stalking horses as kiddy porn and terrorism.

As I wrote the piece between dances, I received substantive help from Mike Nelson, which was ironic in that Mike was at the time the Clinton Administration’s Main Man on Internet matters. Finally, he was getting a chance to support me rather than debate me over positions with which he secretly agreed.

Eventually, I just hit “send” and dispatched the piece to the editors of 24 Hours in Cyberspace (who found it too controversial to include in their coffee table book). In addition, I sent it out the next day to the 600 or so friends I had with e-mail addresses.

And then I had my first experience with online virality. With a couple of days I was receiving supportive e-mails by the megabyte from all over the planet. At the end of a month, it appeared, using the primitive tools of the day, to be on at least 10,000 Internet sites. I had apparently spoken for somebody.

And then my Declaration largely faded from general consciousness, though it has been perennially fashionable for representatives of the Old Order to trot it out as an example of the sort of wooly- headed hippie thinking we could entertain in more innocent times, but certainly not now with all these Boogie Men cavorting online, whether ISIL, Pirate Bay, Anonymous, and leakers of all sorts. Most of the excellent personages who hold it up for ridicule have either not read it or still failed to understand it when they did. And thus they might be forgiven for not knowing what it said.

Or checking it for accuracy. And while there were things I might have done differently had I thought I was going have to defend it to the end of my days, nonetheless, I will stand by it still.

I do not believe that the Nation State, for all its efforts to bring the Net to heel, has really succeeded.

It is still the case that if one is reasonably savvy technically, he or she can express whatever they wish without fear of reprisal. But what about China, you will sputter? Well, in my experience, the actual relationship between China and the Internet is much more nuanced and complex than appears through our media. The Chinese government isn’t stupid. They don’t want to deny their smartest people access to our smartest people, even as they attempt to insert enough “capacitance” into their version of the Internet to prevent the formation of another Great Cultural Revolution online.

What about NSA surveillance, you ask? Given that even the NSA is now calling for more powerful and generalized use of encryption to protect American systems from foreign mischief. And the State Department is one of the most effective proponents of distributing tools to assure anonymity to dissidents in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Actually, things have turned out rather as I expected they might 20 years ago. The War between the Control Freaks and the Forces of Open-ness, whether of code, government, or expression, remains the same dead heat it’s been stuck on all these years.

Which is enough to make me believe that my vision of an Internet that will one day convey to every human mind the Right to Know all that curiosity might propel them toward, a “world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

Please read A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, and judge for yourself. It holds up.

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