#not ones found in eurasia or anywhere else

[wiisagi-maiingan]

Just a tiny bit bitter that someone (jokingly) reblogged that post about plants and bugs to call me a spotted lantern fly when the post was originally because I was trying to look up wood violets and getting a bunch of pages about how to kill these lovely native wildflowers because they. . . look "bad" in the desolate wastelands that Americans call "yards."

I am fully in favor of culling invasive species (in a way that is quick and minimizes their suffering), but can we not just think about the implications with regards to how much of our world is seen as a pest to remove and destroy. Please. For me.

[halothenthehorns]

All in the Family

Chapter 32: Cornelius Fudge

Lily was the lucky one. She seemed to have landed in a large, sturdy chair that didn't even fall over as she was slammed into it. Her luck didn't hold, as Potter came stumbling right into her and landed in her lap.

"Sorry," he muttered as he blinked dazedly up at her.

"So am I," she scoffed as she pushed him off. She watched with disinterest as he fell the rest of the way to the ground before looking around. "Are we in Dumbledore's office?" She asked in surprise. It seemed to be as Harry had described, a great circular room with many portraits hung all along the wall. Most surprising of all, the occupants were all present, eyeing the students with great looks of unease.

"No, this isn't right," Potter corrected as he adjusted his glass, though he was only looking at the desk before him. "Dumbledore's desk has clawed feet. This one's not the same, and I don't know why he'd have any reason to change it."

"Plus that's not a Hogwarts view," Lupin agreed, once again at the window. An orange glow of sunset bathed his face as he looked out onto a balcony, the terrace set up for a grand dinner party, the flat lawn beyond something Lily vaguely recalled seeing on her television once.

"We're in the Minister of Magic's office," Frank managed around an awed voice, staring more closely at all the portraits around, particularly the one right behind Lily in a large ornate frame.

"Tas right!" The woman told him, eyeing the lot of them with great suspicion. She had tightly curled grey hair and tiny little specks set upon a mushroom nose. They all vaguely recognized her as their own current Minister for Magic, Millicent Bagnold. "And just what are you lot doing in here? Ministry never allowed tours right into my office in my day."

"Err, tours?" Frank asked eagerly, wondering if they could finally get some sort of clue of what happened to the outside world. "Exactly how long has this office been empty?"

Her face went blank in confusion, before she kept going on in a sharp voice. "Never you mind, you lot need to get out."

"Wish we could," Pettigrew sighed as he once again tried the door unsuccessfully.

An ugly old wizard who resembled a toad with a muddy brown backdrop right next to the door snapped, "wishing never got you anything, how's about you get on with it." Peter eyed the name, Ulick Gamp, committing it to memory so on his O.W.L. exams he could fill in the blank for rudest Minister.

"Right, well, I'm just going to," Black tried to edge towards the bookshelf, eyeing all the titles and looking for the one they needed. Most of them were so boring he couldn't believe anyone had ever cracked the spine open, you'd think a Minister would have a more lively office. Instead, while the place certainly had a grand feel with the domed ceiling and columns of book cases, a few even did have the same knickknacks he'd once spotted in Dumbledore's office, the place felt more like a front than if anyone had decorated with a care for themselves.

Regulus clutched a hat stand to get to his feet, which only had one lime-green bowler hat upon it. He got himself upright and found himself face to face with Artemisia Lufkin, a woman who vaguely resembled McGonagall. He sort of recalled her name as the first Minister to hold a Quidditch World cup in Britain.

"I've found the book," Potter announced behind him, the sounds of him rummaging through the Ministers desk audible. "Here Evans, like a turn?"

She scoffed, but to Regulus' surprise he heard, "give me that, I'll read it just to get us out of here. How about you not go through someone else's things for a change of pace?"

The sounds of another drawer opening stopped, and he heard a deep sigh. "Sorry Evans, can't do that, might be something important in here!" Then the rustling noises of papers being rearranged began.

The red head stormed past him out of his peripheral, and Regulus rolled his eyes for the display. Didn't those two ever get tired of antagonizing each other? "Look alive sunny," Artemisia Lufkin told him with a pleasant sort of smile now, "that's one spit fire you're in the company of."

He turned away in disgust, his eyes falling on his brother and Lupin now chatting animatedly with Grogan Stump, one whom he definitely recognized from his fathers lectures. Of course his brother seemed to like that one, the idiotic Minister who decided to classify all the differences in the sort of creatures out there, but he was also the one who created the Department for Games and Sports. He was one of the few lectures both brothers had enjoyed.

Regulus instead turned to Longbottom now trying to have a proper conversation with a Minister he most certainly did know. Faris "Spout-Hole" Spavin. His mother loved that man, always going on about the story of his attempted assassination by a centaur. "You don't have another portrait anywhere? Can't leave this room and find out if something's going on in the outside world? Merlin, you don't have a clue how we're in this mess? This has to be one of the most collective knowledgeable people in history, and not one of you-

"Oh, they're not going to be of any help," Alice interrupted with a sympathetic frown to her boyfriend. "They're of no more use than our photos you know, they can only say what their real life counterpart was most likely to have. Nothing of the sort we'd need for help, it's beyond them."

"I've never looked into how conscious the portraits are," Frank admitted ruefully.

"I have," Alice shrugged. "They're fascinating, I was thinking about taking up a class this summer."

Evans looked just as disappointed, but finally turned to the book and began reading. None of them recognized the name of Cornelius Fudge, but given their environment it wasn't too hard to put together who he was.

Regulus didn't have much care of the Potter brats worry his friend Hagrid was now the main suspect. That Riddle kid who had tried to put the blame on him was ridiculous, but then, he was from a Muggle orphanage, it was no surprise he was wrong. Obviously Hagrid couldn't be the heir of Slytherin, as far as Regulus knew he wasn't even a competent wizard. No pure-blood of Slytherin's line would be riffraff about the castle grounds.

Lily was reading all of this while trying not to chew her lip up in thought. She unintentionally agreed with Regulus, someone must have framed Hagrid those fifty years ago and then stopped the attacks knowing it would be foolish to keep going. This did nothing to explain Harry's current predicament of who was doing the same now, and why such a long wait in between attacks?

James at least was enjoying hearing of Harry discussing his options for more classes. He could commiserate the feeling of wanting to drop some, and then sat up with interest a new subject was being added.

"Divination?" Peter demanded, circling around the desk as James was now on his knees with files circling him. "Why couldn't we have had that option, do you know how much easier our life would have been to make up shit for our homework instead of Ancient Runes!"

"But you're great at that class," James looked up at him in surprise.

"Yeah, but still, I'd have liked a dozer option," Peter shrugged as he sat down beside him, careful not to sit on anything and block James' progress. "Looking for anything in particular?"

"Not really," he shrugged as he kept going. "Decided not to pass up the opportunity to see what goes on in here though. Mostly it's just his signatures on final documents about imported goods, some minor law regarding trade with Eurasia, food that needs to be shipped out to Azkaban-"

He stopped in surprise and looked around, Peter and everyone else with him as Evans read out the trashed out common room they'd currently left.

"Who on Earth would do such a thing!" Frank asked in surprise.

"Besides the Marauders," Evans agreed with a glare at the two she could still see, knowing the other two were still at it behind the desk.

"It was like that when we entered," Black said carelessly, but there was a suspicious frown on his face all the same as he tried to figure out who would have done this and why. Hermione's suggestion it could only be a Gryffindor didn't make any sense, Harry and Ron had already proved this year anyone in the castle could have gone in. The real question was, why?

They all grew uncomfortably still when they realized the object that was missing Riddle's diary!

"Well, I say good," Remus muttered as he sat down in the Minister's chair and kept eyeing James' work. "That thing was no good and didn't need to be around Harry or anyone. Whoever came and got it from him can deal with such a nasty dark object."

"I don't understand what the point of it was," Sirius was starting to pace in agitation and kicked a file right into James' lap by accident. A few papers scattered out of it while he kept going. "Was Harry supposed to find it? Was him finding it some elaborate trap? Who would care if the point of it was for Harry to see Hagrid being framed all those years ago? Anyone who knew him would know he'd never actually turn on his friend."

"Idiots about the school who don't know him well at all," Peter suggested as he went to pull the last page out from under the desk, while James tried to haphazardly put the rest back into a neat pile.

At least as Evans kept going they had the promise of a good Quidditch match to look forward too, until that was also ruined by that voice once again appearing.

Remus shivered and sunk deeper in his chair, thankful the sun was still clinging to the sky outside even if the sky was turning blood red for it. At least they weren't back in the castle having to hear of such a thing happening again.

"I swear Hermione would stop in the middle of a fight just to go look up a spell!" James laughed in surprise as she darted away again.

"Prongs, look at this," Peter suddenly hissed, now crouching very purposefully under the desk while Evans kept going. He froze in surprise and the two hardly even registered their friends grousing loudly about Quidditch of all things being canceled.

Frank and Alice listened with trepidation, holding each others hands and standing as close to each other as they could in the large office. It didn't matter they weren't in the castle, they could feel the impending doom of whatever had caused such a thing, and were horrified to be right. A double attack, and one was a girl they well knew would affect Harry.

"Oh!" Lily yelped in surprise, dropping the book as if it had scalded her as she read out Hermione's name. Her stomach heaved, she looked near tears. A prefect and another Muggleborn! She may as well picture herself there, petrified forever!

"Shh, hey, it's okay Lily," Alice was at her side then, as if she could rub comfort into her through her arm. "I'll finish this, alright, everything will work out."

"N-no," she said stubbornly at once. "I was just, surprised."

"It's alright to admit otherwise," Frank said kindly, watching her shaking hands in concern.

"Well, I don't need to because I'm not," she snapped, stepping away from both of them. She refused to be pandered too when there was nothing wrong! She was being ridiculous, picturing herself as such a thing, they'd never be getting anywhere near whoever was doing this.

The two exchanged a look of concern but didn't protest anymore, letting her work this out how she saw fit.

The mirror made no sense to anyone, though Regulus shifted restlessly as he was sure an answer was piling up right in front of them. Those school rules McGonagall was suddenly trying to enforce wasn't going to help anything. Then he scoffed in disgust how easily swayed the house of Gryffindor was so ready to blame and throw out anyone of his own house. Of course none of those idiots would recognize a frame up job when one was presented.

"What are you two looking at over there?" Sirius finally demanded when James and Peter shared a dreadful look over mention of Harry going to see Hagrid again. It seemed like a good idea to him, see what the gamekeeper really did have to say about all of this.

"That we don't think Hagrid will be there when the boys come knocking," Peter sighed.

"Why?" Remus sat up in surprise to snatch the paper away now. "Think he's going to make a run for it, that's ridiculous."

"I know I would if that was coming for me," James said grimly when Remus went white in surprise.

"Oh for the love of-" Sirius snatched it away next rather than waiting for Moony to find his tongue, and then promptly lost his own. He swallowed uncomfortably and could only breathe again when the boys did it and found Hagrid indeed still at his cabin. His state though made it clear he was now as aware of his pending doom as they were. Someone would soon be calling to arrest him and take him to Azkaban, as this order by the Minister declared.

"They can't do this!" Peter whispered in a horror mirroring Hagrid's, he'd be doing much more than just breaking teapots around his own place.

"Oh but they can," James spat in disgust, suddenly on his feet and stamping across everything now without a care. More pages scattered about the entire room now, he had half a mind to conjure up more and create a mini-tornado full of all the Ministers most precious things and cast them away forever. He would never let this stand, Hagrid had done nothing to deserve this! If they'd had proof of this act he already would have been locked away, now they were just rehashing an old suspect, and for what? To put the blame on anyone? Or the half-giant.

Dumbledore's presence was the most mild of relief, and that was ruined anyways in the next second as the Minister himself was there to fill out the order.

There was nothing but stunned silence and nasty faces as Evans told all why Fudge was there, and things still only grew worse when Lucius Malfoy arrived.

Regulus tried to look relieved, but he couldn't find the feeling anywhere in him. The pure-blood stepping in would surely make all of this better and stop all this happening to kids, he knew that's exactly what his mother would say, but then he realized he shouldn't even be wanting this to stop. It was true the only ones being attacked were Muggleborns, and who should care if a few less of them were plaguing the school?

He did.

He hated to admit it, even to himself. It left him nauseous with the feeling a knife was going to sprout in his back any second for such a thought, but he couldn't deny it anymore. It just wasn't right, this happening to kids he shared a class with! How could it ever be right to see anyone so terrified for their own life, as Evans clearly was.

He didn't know who to turn to or what to do with this news of Dumbledore now being just as forcibly departed as the gamekeeper. He really couldn't think of much of anything past the idea this had to stop somehow. He couldn't imagine how things could get any worse as they were ripped from this place once more.

[rjzimmerman]

This is a long post, but I want to post something positive (hope for the future) instead of all the negative crap I’ve posted because.......negative crap surrounded us for 4+ years.

While the US Fish and Wildlife Service acknowledges that the iconic monarch butterfly, a major pollinator, should be designated as a threatened species, it has declined to do so, saying it has to focus limited resources on higher-priority species. Noah Greenwald, director of the endangered species program at the Center for Biological Diversity, however, is hopeful the monarch can gain necessary protection under Biden. Wikimedia Commons/Via Center for Biological Diversity.

The photogenic, badger-like American wolverine, known for its round ears and thick fur, is known to patrol up to 500 square miles of snowy territory in a relentless quest for its next meal, scaling mountains in minutes. Wolverines’ historic ranges include northern Eurasia and North America; however, government-sponsored eradication programs and habitat loss in the early 1900s nearly eliminated the animal from the Lower 48. Beginning in the 1960s, they started making their way back to Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Now, an estimated 250 to 300 wolverines roam south of Canada—a stable population, though likely less than half the carrying capacity, or the number the environment can support. The species—which plays an important role in the ecosystem as predators that keep prey animal populations in check, furthering biodiversity—faces a range of threats, from loss of habitat to roads and other development, resource extraction, recreation, and, especially, climate change. Wolverines rely on deep snowpack lasting into May—a condition that, of course, will diminish as the planet warms. As far as climate-change-induced extinction goes, Greenwald describes the wolverine is a “real canary in the coal mine.” He adds, “We’re in court working to overturn the Trump admin’s refusal to grant them protections. If not, it’ll come down to the courts." Nigel Hoult/Via Center for Biological Diversity.

In October, the Trump administration finalized a controversial rule that removes ESA protections for all gray wolves in the lower 48 states, excepting Mexican gray wolves in Arizona and New Mexico. The move, long in the making, turns over management of this imperiled species to states and tribal governments. “We’re going to court, and we’re hopeful that both gray wolves and Mexican gray wolves will be able to expand further into their range in the southwest,” Greenwald reports. “We’re in the process with USFW of developing a new management and recovery plan for reintroduced species, and we’re hopeful it’ll be much easier to work with Biden’s [as yet unannounced] new head of agency. The current director used to work for Monsanto.” doublejwebers/flickr/via Center for Biological Diversity.

Yes, the ESA protects plants too! Advocates are proposing that the whitebark pine gain threatened status this year, due to its struggle under introduced disease and climate change. Noah Greenwald/Center for Biological Diversity.

The lesser prairie chicken, which calls the southern plains states of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas home, has lost much habitat in recent years to agriculture and oil and gas development. (Its habitat overlays the Permian Basin, which has seen more oil and gas development in the past decade than anywhere else in the world.) They also don’t do well with the addition of utility poles in their stomping grounds, as they double as perches for predators. “We petitioned to add lesser prairie chickens to the endangered list in the late 1990s, and while they got put on the candidate list, during that delay is when the fracking boom started, so threats to its survival only increased,” Greenwald shares. “Eventually, it got listed as threatened, with a somewhat unfortunate conservation agreement that would let the oil and gas industry off the hook, but we’re challenging that decision in April, and we’re optimistic that the Biden administration will list them as endangered, or at least threatened.” USFWS/Via Center for Biological Diversity.

Several years back, male jaguars started moving up from Mexico, and have since been spotted roaming throughout the Southwest and the Grand Canyon. Trump’s border wall, however, threw a wrench into one of the biggest cat recoveries the New World had seen. The fact that Biden has said he’ll halt construction on the wall, however, gives Greenwald hope. “It would at least give jaguars a fighting chance.” Flickr Commons/Eric Kilby/Via Center for Biological Diversity.

The dunes sagebrush lizard, which calls southeast New Mexico and West Texas home, is threatened by oil and gas development on the Permian Basin as well as sand mining for fracking. Greenwald says this fetching reptile is due for another decision on listing next year. USFWS/Via Center for Biological Diversity.

The Trump administration downlisted this pretty, black-and-red American burying beetle—found in South Dakota, Oklahoma, the Sandhills of Nebraska, and, oddly enough, Rhode Island’s Block Island—from endangered to threatened, based on a petition from petroleum lobbyists. Greenwald calls the decision “completely nonsensical,” as threatened status allows some states to all but exempt a species from protection, say, by legalizing gas and oil development in its habitat. Which is what happened recently in Oklahoma. “It was a total handout to oil and gas at the expense of the beetle, which is actually one of the few insects that raise its young,” says Greenwald. Fascinatingly, it does as much by finding bird carcasses, exuding a mucousy fluid from its anus to cover said carcasses and laying eggs and raising young atop them. “It provides a vulture-like service, feasting off carcasses’ nutrients,” says Greenwald, who is in talks with various advocates about action to override industry’s “special exemption” regarding these beetles. Doug Backlund/South Dakota Game, Fish, and Parks/Via Center for Biological Diversity.

There was some movement on the part of the Trump administration to delist the Florida Key deer, but luckily, it didn’t go anywhere. “Their numbers are up, but because they live in the Florida Keys, they’re likely to be underwater in the next 50 years if we don’t do something about GHGs,” says Greenwald. “It’s our smallest deer, so we’re hopeful that we’ll see enough climate action under Biden to give it a chance to survive.” USFWS/Via Center for Biological Diversity.

Coral species including staghorn (pictured) and elkhorn also occur in the Keys and have unfortunately been delisted since the aughts. “With ocean acidification from GHGs, coral in our reefs are disappearing quickly,” cautions Greenwald. “If we don’t get them back on the list, we’ll have lost a gorgeous world.” NOAA/Via Center for Biological Diversity.

[southeastasianists]

If you’re a medieval historian, you normally work a lot with manuscripts. A manuscript is just a text written by hand, although manuscripts are distinguished from inscriptions by the material on which they are written: a manuscript is normally written on perishable materials — like calfskin in much of Europe, birch bark in Russia and Central Asia, bamboo and paper in East Asia, and palm leaves in India and Southeast Asia — while an inscription is cut into a stone or metal surface. Manuscripts are usually a lot more informative than inscriptions and also a lot more diverse in content and authorship. In Europe and Northeast Asia there are a lot of medieval manuscripts.

An image from Royal Armouries manuscript I.33, the oldest armed martial arts treatise in the world. It was written in southern Germany in the early fourteenth century, and is thus older than almost any extant Indo-Malaysian manuscript on any topic. This says a lot about the range of sources historians working in each region can expect to use. Full manuscript can be found here (Wiktenauer).

Manuscripts are often illustrated, giving valuable information about life and times not explicitly recorded in writing. Their pages can be dated chemically, giving reasonably precise dates even to texts without written chronograms — although this isn’t necessary with many texts, as close dates can often be established on the basis of the script. If the script looks like a fourteenth-century script, you’re probably looking at a fourteenth-century text (although there’s more to it than that). There are enough texts to allow for this kind of detailed palaeographic analysis in much of Europe and temperate Asia.

The language and script (littera hybrida) of this manuscript tell us that it was written in around the middle of the fifteenth century in the Low Countries. There are tons of manuscripts in littera hybrida; it was practically the national script of the Netherlands in the fifteenth century.

All of this should be reasonably obvious and well-known. Here, though, I want to point out that medieval Afro-Eurasia — let’s leave the Americas aside for the purposes of this article — wasn’t a single temperate environment in which both state and private archives hoarded and preserved large numbers of texts written on organic materials. These kinds of sources just aren’t available for much of the world, whether because writing never developed there or because organic materials don’t last long in certain environments. Naturally, these problems are particularly acute in humid tropical climates.

In much of the tropics, insects, heat, and humidity meant that even if texts were written on palm leaves and animal skins, they had to be deliberately preserved or copied perhaps once in a generation in order to make their way down to us today. This wasn’t the case in England or China; a locked wooden box in a parish church or town hall would be sufficient to keep a piece of parchment safe and few special measures needed to be taken. The medieval historical record is thus inherently biased in favour of societies in temperate climes.

The number of genuinely medieval manuscripts from Southeast Asia can be counted on one hand, even though we know from inscriptions that writing has a long history in the region (dating back to the fourth century and possibly earlier). The oldest extant Malay manuscript has been radiocarbon dated to the fourteenth century, even though the oldest Malay inscriptions date to the seventh century and are thus slightly older than the oldest texts in English. We are consequently reliant on inscriptions for the reconstruction of much of medieval Indo-Malaysian history and society, and on much later (definitively post-medieval) manuscripts for the study of Southeast Asian literature. This gives a particular spin to historical events and restricts what can be studied through traditional philological methods.

“Raja Barus”, ‘the King of Barus’ in a Malay manuscript of 1797, one of the oldest copies of the Hikayat Raja Pasai. The story probably dates to the fourteenth century. Yes: it was written in the late eighteenth century. Yes: it’s a good source for the fourteenth century. That’s how a lot of history in the tropics works. Deal with it.

This presents scholars of the medieval Old World tropics with a bit of a problem. Historians of medieval Europe can freely parade manuscript illustrations in books and, nowadays, on social networks without any qualms because the illustrations they’re showing off are bona fide medieval images. But you can’t do that if the manuscripts didn’t survive, and there are a lot of issues involved in using later manuscripts to demonstrate earlier art and history. How can a complete picture of the Hemispheric Middle Ages be created and shown to the world when Indonesian and tropical African manuscripts are so late and so poorly represented?

Should scholars of the medieval tropics focus on ‘legitimately’ medieval things — bronzes, inscriptions, reliefs — or should they include later images of supposedly earlier phenomena and risk collapsing the entire history of e.g. Indonesia into one undivided whole?

In museums you tend to find the latter approach. In the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, the oldest keris in the world (made, or at least inscribed, in 1342 CE) is in the same case as a piece of nineteenth-century Muslim headgear. Colonial-era dress and artworks rub shoulders with tenth-century bronzes and thirteenth-century statues. I find that problematic; you wouldn’t put a medieval English sword and a Regency-era lady’s bonnet in the same display, I shouldn’t think. Europe and Indonesia are thus treated differently: Europe’s history is divided into sections that are studied more or less independently while Asian history, and especially tropical Asian history, is treated as one inseparable whole, divided more by region than by period. This is one reason among many why Southeast Asia may never be integrated into the academic study of the medieval world (let alone the popular imagination about the Middle Ages).

And what about eastern Indonesia and New Guinea? Neither part produced any written literature, as far as we know, before the fifteenth century, and the oldest manuscripts from eastern Indonesia date to the early sixteenth century. New Guinea was part of the medieval world; it was certainly known to people in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Java and other parts of Indonesia. But what can we show the world to represent this medieval Papuan history? There aren’t any manuscripts. There aren’t even any sculptures or very many bronze objects (although some of the latter are occasionally found). That doesn’t mean New Guinea just vanished from the world in the Middle Ages or that the people there preserved some primordial ‘Stone Age’ lifeways, though, as the popular imagination seems to have it.

Art in New Guinea, whether on the coasts or in the highlands, is dominated by wooden sculpture. While plenty of carved wooden objects survive from temperate medieval Eurasia, no examples of the wooden sculpture of medieval New Guinea have come down to us. Can we assume that modern sculpture is representative of earlier tradition?

That seems like a big leap to me. New Guinea isn’t a primeval place unchanged since the dawn of time but rather a place full of creative human beings, a place where fashion and religion operate like they do anywhere else. Showing a Papuan carving made in the twentieth century by a specific artist from a particular ethnic group as if it were representative of a prehistoric or medieval tradition would ultimately be as peculiar as using David Hockney’s oeuvre to showcase medieval English painting. Style always changes. Where truly medieval eastern Indonesian art has survived, as with a few of the lovely textiles preserved as heirlooms in Timor, the motifs are strikingly different from modern ones.

If we want to raise awareness of the tropical world, then, how do we go about it? How can scholars working on Europe get to know island Southeast Asia and the Swahili coast without introducing an orientalist bias that treats the Middle Ages as identical to modern times, or to some arbitrary ‘traditional’ point in the past? It’s a real conundrum. I suspect, though, that the solution is to help expand the traditional medievalist’s view of what constitutes valid evidence about the medieval world — and perhaps to highlight the ways in which the temperate world diverges from the tropics.

Does the absence of a written or artistic or sculptural record exclude a place from consideration as part of the ‘Global Middle Ages’? Yes — if you restrict yourself to the methods and ideas of traditional medieval scholarship. But if the objective is to account for and better understand the world before the Columbian Exchange, methods simply have to be broadened: the triangulation of archaeology, comparative ethnography, historical linguistics, oral history, and ethnohistory has to be brought in to complement traditional philological scholarship. If that isn’t done then our image of the medieval world will always be restricted to what was written down and preserved, and that naturally introduces a bias towards the temperate — and perhaps also to the European, the white, and the colonial.

This article first appeared as a post on the Medieval Indonesia blog, and a version of its argument has appeared in print in Bryan C. Keene (ed.), 2019,Toward a Global Middle Ages, Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum.

[neirawrites]

History of Jord

Lesson one: Prion diseases or “On cows, kissing and video games”

Narrated by doctor Liang Unnati

About the project 

Looking back at modern Jordish history, the twenties were the first golden age, unmatched by anything but the contemporary times. With the economy in full bloom, people were truly unified for the first time since the planet state of Jord was founded two decades prior. The astronauts we sent on the moon came back this time. Even the cinema went through a renaissance and graced us with beloved classics we know and love to this day.

And then came the thirties. 

VI6780921O. That was the identification number of the patient zero. It began with her; A simple cow from the Vikia Svaidi that died long before she could see her legacy.

Prions; Mad cow disease. That’s how you Elasi call them. On Jord, our public named it Gnjilainge, Rotten brain. A slow killer, but one that never misses their mark. Nervousness, aggressive behavior, difficulty with coordination, trouble standing up, the first symptoms of the Demon Cattle disease. In humans, it’s about 50 years, depending on the strain. But once they begin, it's only the matter of time before they claim a life.

In a span of a few years, it killed millions. But, unlike other diseases like small pox and polio, we never found a way to stop it. It will continue to rain destruction for generations to come. 

These prions were different than the ones on Elas. The pandemic still goes on to this day. Something in our genes changed. If your parents or grandparents had it, you’re more likely to get it yourself. You have something similar. Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. But, what’s one in a million occurrence there affects more than one in three hundred here. We all know someone who has died or will die from it. And it’s not a matter of if. They will die. A slow and painful death unless something else kills them first. Seven decades later, doctors are yet to find a cure. 

The world was never the same after that initial impact.

Beef and dairy are almost non existent. Countless amazing traditional dishes have been lost to history. Some Svaidi found a way to prosper. The Toqui of the South America kept to their traditional breeding practices of free range cattle, and haven’t had a single case. They still have beef stakes and even milk. In the recent years the people of the Xinabei and Illyria Svaidi of Eurasia have made an attempt to return to their roots. 

In order to prevent anything like this from ever happening again, the food safety standards turned draconian. The increase in automation in food production lead to loss of jobs, one of the main causes of the great depression of the 60's and early 70's. But more on that some other time.

Kissing in the public is a taboo. For a short while, the idea prions were in the saliva was of the leading theories, due to a mixed up results with a similarly timed, but much less lethal mononucleosis outbreak. We now know that’s not true, but fear is too powerful to be cured by mere facts.

Most hope comes, as it so often does, from science.

First came the artificial blood substitutes, to prevent the further spread of the invention. And after that, the 3D printed or cloned organs. With the rise of medical nanotechnology, maybe one day, we will be able to do more, but if that doesn’t work out, we have the real future ahead of us: 

Paainge pills and NiM, Nao i Metek, our first mechanical and artificial intelligence.They are my legacy. One day we will be able to scan the people’s  minds safely and upload them anywhere we want, a perfect replica, so no matter what happens to their actual brains, they can live on. We have done it seven times already, but out those individuals, four lost their lives and now only live as a part of NiM. 

Among those who survived is Hektor H. Hisek who, in the year 101, used his scan to create Yaloon: Rebuilds, one of the most bellowed and well regarded video games in the world. It just goes to show that even in the worst of times, art and human ingenuity will still find a way to prosper.

For me, it was of vital importance people of Elas learn about this aspect of our reality. Not only to prepare for the possibility of contamination and infection, but to see us for what we truly are: human. We made one mistake after another and we are paying for them decades later. But, that’s ok. You have made mistakes too. If we work together, maybe, one day, we will find a way to solve them.

Doctor Liang Unnati was born in the year 70 and is currently 35 years old. He is an acclaimed psychiatrists behind some of the most influential project in the modern science, including EchoLive gaming system, Paainge pills and NiM. He engaged to doctor and angakkuq Zeta Qualis, one of the five members of the Isokan crew. 

                                                   ************

So this is a new thing i'm trying out. When Jords sent Isokan crew to Earth, they had written a lot of these small articles explaining parts of their culture and history, intended for Elasi public. The main one (at lest the version Dafne Everson tried to get published) is the infodump first chapter of the first book.  I might do a few others, maybe their first trip to the moon, or NiM(even tho they are a minefield of spoilers) or even drunk history where Nova Jelani talks about her favorite princesses and queens from the past. or anything else you wanna know more about. 

Idk, this was fun to write and i get to work on character’s voices more. Liang  

Btw: Liang is hotter than you, no matter who you are. And Hektor H. Hisek is a trans man who has his own short spin off story and I just really like him, even tho he’s mentioned only by name in the main wips. 

Svaidi mean region. Paainge means big brain and every scientist who worked on them absolutely hates the name. 

I’m tagging @katekyo-bitch-reborn. They expressed desire to let me infodump. and also  @froggyphevoli because i know how much they like world building (they have my word building bible, they know most of this)  

[indomitablekushite]

The Black Power Pan-Africanist Perspective By Chinweizu Sundoor999@gmail.com The Black race will be exterminated if it does not build a black superpower in Africa by the end of this century. Black Egypt: Rehabilitating the self-image of the Black African (1) Having exhaustively demonstrated that the Pharaonic Egyptians were black, Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop argued that “the moral fruit of [Egyptian] civilization is to be counted among the assets of the Black world. Instead of presenting itself to history as an insolvent debtor, that Black world is the very initiator of the ‘western’ civilization flaunted before our eyes today.” --[Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, p. xiv] To help us appreciate just how much “western” civilization owes to Black Egypt, this essay presents a sampling of that contribution; a sampling of what the Greeks and Hebrews assimilated and took over from Black Egypt (Kemet) and passed on to modern Europe. Kemetic Precedents The purpose of this preliminary list of culture items (concepts, techniques, tools, symbols, artefacts, etc. assembled from scattered sources) is to make it easy to see just how far and comprehensively Kemet was ahead of all other cultures. Such items appear elsewhere later, sometimes by diffusion, sometimes 2 by independent invention, sometimes by theft. How it did so in each case is not always easy to determine. However, in some spectacular cases, plagiarism can be exposed. Items listed are the oldest example extant, or the oldest mentioned in the available sources. Dates are based on the Chinweizu Chronology which dates the founding of Kemet at 4443±61 BC. This initial list could be, and should be, very much expanded as the literature is combed more extensively and thoroughly. I: Science and Technology 1. Plant domestication: Domesticated wheat, barley, lentils, chickpeas, capers and dates were being grown and harvested in the Nile flood plains; at Aswan (Wadi Kubbaniya), Esna, Naqada, and Dishna in Upper Kemet (i.e. Southern Egypt), and in Tushka in Nubia; ca. 16,000 BC, during the last Ice Age when much of Eurasia was covered with ice. That was some 9 millennia before plant domestication occurred in Jarmo in Iraqi Kurdistan in SW Eurasia, where Eurocentric convention claims that plants were first domesticated.1[1 See Wendorff et al., “An Ancient Harvest on the Nile,” in Van Sertima, ed., Blacks in Science, New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1983, pp. 58-64. ] 2. Writing: Hieroglyphics (pictorial) : Predynastic 2 i.e. before ca. 4500 BC. [2 See Bruce Williams, “Lost Pharaohs of Nubia” in Van Sertima ed., Egypt Revisited, pp. 93-94.]3 Hieratic (cursive) : Dyn. I or earlier 3, i.e. ca. 4500 BC. [3 M. Hoffman, Egypt Before the Pharaohs, p. 290; Alan Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs, p.22.] Demotic (cursive) : Dyn XXV 4, i.e. ca. 700 BC. [4 Alan Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs, p. 21]. Alphabet: “The history of the alphabet begins in Ancient Egypt, more than a millennium into the history of writing. The first pure alphabet emerged around 2000 BCE to represent the language of Semitic workers in Egypt (see Middle Bronze Age alphabets), and was derived from the alphabetic principles of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Most alphabets in the world today either descend directly from this development, for example the Greek and Latin alphabets, or were inspired by its design.”--Wikipedia Hieroglyphics and Hieratic are the world’s oldest writing systems; from them are derived the Phoenician and Hebrew and Greek alphabets, making them the ancestors of the Roman alphabet which is now used world-wide.5 [5Alan Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs, pp. 25-26.] From them too derive the Arabic script via the Nabataean Aramaic script. Arabic numerals bear a striking resemblance to some of the symbols in Meroitic script, a late offshoot of the Kemetic scripts. 3. The balance and scales (for weighing): A symbol in hieroglyphics, and a central instrument in the rite of weighing the soul of the deceased in the Judgment Hall before Ausar. 6 [6 E. A. Wallis Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, pp. 2, 256, 261 etc. for its representation as a 4 hieroglyph and for its presence in vignettes that illustrate the book. For evidence that parts of the work date back to before Dyn. I, see p. xii.] The doctrine of the Judgment Day, and its symbolism, most probably date back to predynastic times; the scale is, therefore, probably a predynastic invention. 4. The Calendar: Kemet had two calendars from its earliest times -- the Civil calendar of 365 days to the year; and the Astronomical or Sopde (Sirius) calendar of 365.25 days to the year. These two were together in use by Dyn. I, and certainly before 4241 BC. Both were most probably invented in Predynastic times. 7 [7 Charles Finch, “Science and Symbol in Egyptian Medicine,” in Egypt Revisited, p. 328] The calendar used today throughout the world is adapted from the civil calendar of Black Egypt. “To the Egyptians we owe the practice of dividing the day into 24 hours. Our modern practice of starting the day at midnight dates back to the Egyptians.” 8—[8 John Pappademos, “An Outline of Africa’s Role in the History of Physics”, in Van Sertima ed., Blacks in Science, p. 187] 5. The oldest uninscribed paper: Two papyrus rolls from Dyn. I, found in a small box at Saqqara.9 [9 M. Hoffman, Egypt Before the Pharaohs, p. 291] 6. The wheel: Scaling ladders, fitted with wheels, and kept from slipping by a handspike, were used by construction workers as early as Dyn. V. (ca. 3380-3162 BC). They 5 are depicted on the wall of the tomb of Kaemhesit. 10 [10 See Blacks in Science, p. 81, fig. 7.] 7. The so-called Pythagoras Theroem: The theorem of the square on the hypothenuse was known and used in Kemet, millennia before Pythagoras took knowledge of it from there to Greece.11 [11 Cheikh Anta Diop, Civilization or Barbarism, p. 260] 8. Coordinates: A system of coordinates was in use in Kemet in Old Kingdom times. In one specimen, probably from Dyn. III, coordinates were used in an architectural drawing to draw a curve. Rectangular coordinate grids were used for star maps shown on the ceilings of tombs. A grid of squares was used to scale up construction plans. 12 [12 See Beatrice Lumpkin, “The Pyramids: Ancient Showcase of African science and technology,” Blacks in Science, pp. 67-83. ] 9. The Oldest record of sea-going ships: King Sahure of Dyn. V sent a fleet to the coast of Palestine and another to Punt (Somalia).13 [13 See Wayne B. Chandler, “Of Gods and Men: Egypt’s Old Kingdom,” in Ivan Van Sertima, ed., Egypt Revisited, p. 168.] 10. The oldest map in the world: A map, now in the Turin museum, showing the road to one of Kemet’s gold fields.14 [14 Alan Gardiner, Egypt of the Pharaohs., p. 42.]6 11. The oldest example of large-scale metal sculpture in the world: A near life-size copper statue group of Pepi I and his young son Merenre (Dyn. VI).15 [15 See M. Hoffman, Egypt Before the Pharaohs, p. 128.] 12. Stone-paved roads: “Probably the earliest stone-paved road was built in Egypt . . . when the Great Pyramid was built. In order to move the huge stone blocks making up the pyramid, a smooth road of polished stone was built about 60 feet wide and half a mile long.”16 [16 See “Road” in Britannica Junior Encyclopedia, Vol 13, (1965), p. 109(b) 13. Iron and steel: Iron was used in Kemet from predynastic times and down through the dynasties, long before its reported use anywhere else in the world. Specimens of materials made of iron have survived from the Gerzean period, Dyns IV,VI, XVIII-XXII.17 [17 C. A. Diop, The African Origin of Civilization, p. 293, n. 8;] The most ancient steel object extant, made of successive layers containing different percentages of carbon, is a knife from Kemet, made probably in the 9th c. BC.18 [18 C. A. Diop, Civilisation or Barbarism, p. 285.] Plutarch reports, based on Manetho, that iron was called “the bone of Typhon,” i.e. Set.19 [19 Manetho, p. 191,] There are references to “bat qemau,” iron of the south, in the Kemetic Book of Resurrection.20 [20 See, e.g. Budge, Egyptian Book Of the Dead, p. 13.]7 14. Gunpowder: Gunpowder was known and used in Kemet by the priests, but “solely for religious purposes at rites such as the Mysteries of Osiris.”21 [21 C. A. Diop, The African Origin of Civilization, p. 24.] 15. Glider plane: A scale model of a glider, made of sycamore wood, survives from Kemet. It measures 18 cm x 14 cm, and is in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The name of the maker of the model is Pa-di-Imen.22 [22 See Khalil Messiha et. al., “African experimental aeronautics: a 2,000-year-old model glider,” in Blacks in Science, pp. 92- 99.] Aeronautical scientists have examined it and confirmed that it is a model glider. The date it was made is uncertain. 16. Atomic theory, heliocentricity, and gravitation: There is evidence that these major theories of modern science were, long ago, known to Kemetic science. Isaac Newton left his written testimony about Kemetic knowledge thereof.23 [23 See John Pappademos, “The Newtonian synthesis in physical science and its roots in the Nile Valley,” Nile Valley Civilizations: 84-101, see especially p. 94 for quotes from Newton himself; and also Martin Bernal, Black Athena, Vol. I, p. 167.] TO BE CONTINUED (1520 words)

[stone-man-warrior]

December 6, 2020: 1:39 pm:

Russian Hoax Pieces Parts. A rough landing:

WOOOOF!

https://twitter.com/FoxNews/status/1335650144776237057

Any and all Russia investigations about anything the Russians are said to have been involved with, either for the good, or bad, or for making Vodka, is the same as searching for Bilbo Baggins at his eleventy-first birthday party after he put on The Ring.

"One Ring to Rule Them All"

The Russians are characters from a discarded set of writings for a book of fiction that never made it to a publisher when the British invaded, found the novel, and incorporated the story into the reality that existed at the time, 350 fucking years ago, no one has noticed that Russia is not there.

Russia is what happens when someone tells a lie to someone else, and then there are some problems with the lie, so, some other lie needs to be told in order to make the first lie make sense and look true, but, it's still a lie, that means there is still some truth somewhere that will foul up the lie, so, the people who told those two lies, go out and hunt down and kill all of the truth that could possibly reveal the first two lies that were told. The problem is that the hunting and killing of truth needs more lies to make it appear as if there was no hunting or killing, so, more lies are told to cover up the hunting and the killing of all of the truth that happened. Pretty soon, there is only lies, and lies themselves are fouling up the first two lies that were told. That's when they make Vodka, and pass that out to people so they won't care about truth and lies.

So about three centuries passed by with stories about Russians over Vodka, then, airplanes happened. People started to fly around while drinking small bottles of Vodka on the airplanes. A few people went somewhere that was said to be nearby where the airplane Vodka comes from, they wanted to get some to sell at their American stores, but, they could not find the Vodka or the very small bottles that airplane Vodka comes in, and, everyone said "Mongolia" while pointing north.

Pretty soon, prohibition happened, and those people still want to sell some Vodka in their American stores, but, they were convinced that there is no Vodka because the airplane only goes to someplace nearby Mongolia, so, they decided to make a secret club, where you can sign up for access to the latest lies and fake stories about Russia, and, they learned how to make booze, called it Vodka, put it in a bottle, told lies about where it came from in Leningrad, and charged a monthly fee for access to the Russia lies, so that the Booze that called Vodka could be blamed on Russian Bootleggers, just in case.

{late addition: 12-11-2020: 11:35 am:

You could think of that time as the very moment when Chinese Knock-Off Gucci and Rolex was invented, except it’s not Chinese Knock-Off Gucci, it’s Hong-Kong Knock-Off Russian Vodka Airplane Gucci & Rolex. China is not Russia, Hong-Kong is Britain, Gucci is too expensive for carrying a wallet, and Rolex is made of Jewels, is for people in Hollywood (”Harriewoooo”)}

Later, that club of regular stories access membership for Bootleggers who are not Russian, became Paramount Pictures, then, Universal, then, MGM with a Lion, so as the lies and the booze progressed among the club members who use Russia and Vodka to blame everything on, became network television, and then later, the reruns were Syndicated Television networks. All are based on Russian lies, Vodka, and a scapegoat.

Later, internet was born, and everyone has free access to all of the Russian lies they need, there is something for everyone to lie about, because the Russia turned into Iran when the escape boat showed up on the scene with new Vodka Sweet Crewed Oil, and the they tested it, called it the HMS ScapeGoat.

Basically, that's what happened.

There are a few people who know the story of the original airplane Vodka. They work for the airline industry for flights that go to Hawaii. They communicate with drinks aboard the Hawaii bound flights, hoping to get help, or, to see who else knows about the original Airplane Vodka. The use POG for that. Passion Orange Guava fruit drink. The secret communication is that the airplane that goes to Hawaii is the only place on Earth where you can get some POG. There are no other ways to get POG. The only way, is to fly to Hawaii on an airplane. You can get Passion Orange Mango, but you cannot get Passion Orange Guava anywhere but in the sky while going about 600 miles per hour over water while destined for tropical paradise.

They don't serve POG on the return flight. Those are the rules. POG, is a one way trip, there is no return once you learn the story of Vodka on airplanes that happened just prior to prohibition in USA, at a time when people began to fly around while drinking.

That Vodka on the airplanes opened up a can of Pandora Box Worms, the worst kind. It spoiled the Russia secret that the Brits had started so long ago. More lies, then more lies, then more. The bastards had to control all of he map making all around the world, just so they could cover their assess by making sure the maps all show that there is a Russia north of China on the maps.

Google was invented to handle that once the internet showed up.

IKEA maps were used as a decoy, to foul up any one who was looking for places on maps that don't exist. IKEA arranged that New Zealand was not on the map. The whole continent of New Zealand was missing. That means Newsyland Russian Hoax is behind the hidden from view Newsyland on the IKEA map, so no one will pay attention to the monster under the bed, Google, who was busy mapping the world complete with Russia at the time when the Easter Bunny hid Newsyland somewhere in the world.

So, the story about Russia includes intercontinental air travel per-prohibition, that fouled up other established and very old lies, so, new lies had to be told. There was a beverage called Vodka. What was it? Idunno, but it was served on early intercontinental flights to eastern Eurasia. It includes POG. There is a whole bunch of other lies that are POG Specific. The story about the POG includes Milk Bottle Caps, you can collect the POG Milk Caps, because the  POG Hawaiin drink is contained in a old style milk bottle on the airplane ride to Hawaii, they have caps with Fortune Cookie style messages under the bottle cap. The Milk inclusion in the Vodka/POG/Flight to Paradice is about "The Alpha Breast" where the mother of all money feeds it's children, in Mongolia, a place where there is no Vodka, and they don't have any idea about what Russia is. And therein, lies the reason for all of the above. "Olive The Above" is a Vatican style Martini, dry, with Gin from the Gin. All Fabricated Textiles.

There is more, lots more:There is this other lie, about a man named René Descartes , a Frenchman mathematician (also do a Google search to see a man named “Carta”). The story is told, as legend has it, that he got sick as a boy, and while laying in bed in his illness, he saw that there were flies on the ceiling above him. He was bored, so, he wanted to count the flies. There were too many to count, but the ceiling was made of tiles, square ones, so, he was able to estimate the total number of flies by counting only those that were within the perimeter of just one tile on the ceiling.

Cartography was born of a sick French boy counting contained fly's on the ceiling tile.

Tell me please that you understand what is going on with that part of the Vatican British Russian airplane ride to paradise in Mongolia.

====================================

Very, very rough... I am not seeking literary awards, I seek freedom. Please send help.

End Google Vatican British Russian Hoax in Paradise terror report: 1:49 pm.

=========================

2:44 pm:

Let me put some glue here, for the puzzle:

No one has cracked the code that leads to the truth about Russia and lived to tell about it, I can’t do it on my own, I need help, have some puzzle parts and want to share them because the existence of Russia, or the absence of Russia in the world drastically changes the perception of the balance of power throughout the world. With the absence of the hoax that Russia is, comes more truth, with that comes more peace.

Some glue:

The existence of the absence of Newsyland on the IKEA maps can be seen as “the news of the land that is not there” as a message presented to global terror soldiers who are called to action with that kind of statement presented that way, with a map that features sea where ground should be.

Other, bigger globs of glue:

That button on all of our electronic devices, “l/O”.

That is going to lead to the front door at l O Downing.

It also is part of why Disney spells “Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho, off to work we go” the way they do, and that is about a “Sleigh” that belongs to Santa Claus. The Sleigh is a slaughter partially hidden by Russian Hoax. (you have to run with that to other places, like a fractal, the hoax keeps on going, and you can zoom in to many different areas of the hoax fractal.)

The l/O is a power switch, if we turn the electronic device on, we consume power, and, we need to sing our way to work to pay for the l/O when it’s in the l position, to do the slaughtering, or, to be slaughtered. (you need to understand how the terror cells are like a “nine-to-five” job to go in that direction into the Russian Hoax fractal)

The Power is British/Vatican Christian Power, on your devices. There are ways to get from there to AC/DC transformers, every house is served by a power transformer at the place where the power line brings the electricity to your home, and that power is Alternating Current, (an “Alter” of power, for seeing how to apply more glue on other puzzle parts when you go look for them, or, when they come crashing down on you all at once). There are DC considerations about the l/O switch that Downing street put on all of the devices.

Russians will rush right in when they need to, so, that DC element is good to know about for Hoax Power when it becomes visible.

The Power chain is like a fractal, it zooms into our houses. That transformer and the main power grid, and the line that drops in to each home and comes from a Hydro-Electric Generator, is repeated inside the house in a zoomed in place of a repeating fractal. The terror exists inside of those small black boxes that showed up on so many electronic gadgets that we use. They are transformers. They change the Direct Current back into the Alternating Current that was already changed at the main power transformer, to Direct Current. There is a real example of something that can be seen, is tangible, can be decoded by people who want to stop terrorism. There are also light bulbs in the house. Those all changed over time from Incandescent, to Fluorescent, and are LED now. There is other newer technology coming down the road later that will change the lighting again, it has no light bulb, is completely different than any other means of making light, and is about a hundred time brighter in comparison to other light of similar power demands. I suspect there are listening devices in the florescent and LED bulbs that replaced the incandescent ones, and in those transformer black boxes that the gadgets all have now.

Smart Meters are a problem. They have transmitters inside, there is no secret to that. I suspect the small black box transformers use a pick-up not unlike a guitar pick-up to transform vibration into a signal that can be transmitted with a Smart Meter, processed at the meter, or, at it’s destination after transmission, for listening. The Rocky Mountain Power Companies, five of them, are behind that kind of captivity, where they listen to everything, and are a big part of the Power Fractal Zoom at all of it’s iterations.

Russia is the Alpha Hoax. You can follow in reverse all of the other hoaxes to find a way to actually get to Russia, a place that is not there. One lie is built on another, the communication that is used and is contained in the archives of  news media, music, television, movie, and Broadway entertainment all the way down to the school Christmas Play where your child performed, has puzzle parts that can be glued together to get back to Russia in some way, a place that is not there, never was there, is always going to be a mystery.

The l/O power switch is connected to the main grid, it comes from Hydro-Electric Generators at Dams (Damns, for when you apply glue to hard to find puzzle parts). The Dam is a place where the fish get caught up in a bottleneck, so, there is going to be ways to glue terror slaughter ideas to the fish in a dam, that, can be said for terror comm, with the “Heigh, Ho, Heigh Ho, off to work we go”, when the commands are hidden in news stories. Because the fish that use the power l/O switch need to pay for the power they consume. That, can lead to “What are you going to do next?”.... “I’m going to Disneyland” as the switch at the power grid that turns on the slaughter to begin at the Dam where the fish who need to pay are stuck in a bottleneck there. That is how the Christian terror works when the newsmedia and SAG actors and SAG athletes are commanding it.

The comm is made of threads that way. Fabricated. Sewn together to make one Pope’s Robe.

I don‘t have all of the answers, there is no possible way to contain a fractal. It keeps on going, forever if you have enough computing power to keep doing iterations of the same equation, or, have enough magnifying power to zoom in or out of a particular place in the fractal’s components. So, there are two more ways to apply glue to puzzle parts, the use of power of computing to see where in the big terror scheme of things the slaughter is happening, or other slaughter data that can be analyzed by the Pope and his minions. The zoom power to look into a fractal can also be a way that reveals the exact same data when viewed by SAG minions rather than Pope minions. All, of course, is coded into other words contained in news stories, advertisements, movies, music and other places where terror comm is coded for the millions of terror soldiers it needs to reach, globally. The Computing Power Zoom, and the Optic Fractal Zoom are abstract shell ideas, rules for coding the commands from at Terror HQ, where ever that may be, Hollywood Music Vatican Choir HQ, Hollywood Movie and TV SAG Command HQ, or Vatican Central HQ on Google Twitter, or SIS MI6 GCHQ Master Command HQ.

They all need some agreed upon basis to code the news stories from. The Mother of the basis is Russia, it trickles down the fractal path to Power and everything there is to know about power and the way circuits work, all is used a basis for other means of saying the commands in the news stories, music, movies, etc.

nsa and other Global Security may find that fractal, power, Russia Hoax information useful to expand from, helpful to stop the Vatican and l O Downing (House of Lords) from killing everyone.

Glue, there is a lot of it. It takes far less glue than parts of the puzzle to make things stick together enough to see the picture the puzzle reveals.

=======================================

12-7-2020: 2:48 pm: Additional Russian Power Lie Fractal Zoom thoughts:

I just read through what I jotted down yesterday about the Russian Mother of all Hoaxes, and am sympathetic to anyone who tried to read and understand from where I was coming from.

With that sympathy comes a mention of a very old Pink Floyd Album: Atom Heart Mother, from 1970.

Just something to think about with that tittle there, and from where the title comes from.

----

I want to add another direction the fractal of Russian Hoax Power Lies goes in, the thing has more than three dimensions, it has a time component. So, you can zoom your Russian Hoax Fractal Lie Viewer closer, farther, over, under, sideways, down, in or out.... and.... you have to also have a Way-Back Machine for the time components, because the Twitter newsmedia is currently presenting us with news that happened ten years or more in the past, but they are saying it’s all fresh news, is current, they tell us.

So, put a Way-Back Machine on a Cracker Jack’s Secret Agent Secret Decoder Ring from an old box of Cracker Jack’s in order to see the Russian Power Lie Mother of all Hoaxes Fractal iterations as they are presented today, of events of the past, for commanding terror events of the future.

This is what happened:

Giant size terror mongers decided they wanted to make a future that they have full control of, so, they set out on a Ten Year Mission to create, craft, film, a complex story line of news events. They did that between 2000 and 2010.

Later, now, those prefabricated old news events are being presented to us, as news. They feature all of the usual suspects that we can see all of the time in the news stories.

In that way, the Giant Size Terror Mongers are able to control many aspects of our current reality. As things progress for them, smaller insignificant news stories are inserted into the time-line in real time, and, those may repeat again in ten years from now. The inserted events represent binary ideas where the master plan experienced a glitch perhaps, needed another lie, so, one was inserted in effort to steer the giant terror craft in a desired direction. Those inserted stories could also be very big news events that reveal more complex changes to the master plan that was crafted for the Ten Year Mission Debut that happened in 2008 with Beta-Twitter, which seems to have been released two-years prior to it’s scheduled release... like a sneak-preview of a block-buster movie.

So, a buffer is present.

A useful place to put things until they are needed. A comfortable box. Like those little boxes that Rings are sold in, they look like little miniature coffins, all with silk and satin linings for the Ring, and are colorfully pleasing to look at.

=======

12-8-2020: 10:22 am:

You modem has a buffer. It takes the internet traffic that is streaming in, stores a little bit of it, then spits it out to your computer. That way the streaming movie can play without so many glitches on your computer. If you do experience glitches, you can adjust the resolution on your viewer, so that the incoming, buffered video feed will not be interrupted. So, the buffer serves the individual user by providing a way to see that there is a bottleneck, thereby allowing the accommodations to best serve the Bottlneck condition can be dialed in in effort to achieve smooth traffic flow on your computer movie viewer, and avoid glitches.

What do you think global terror Google bastards could hide inside of a modem that has somewhere around 13 Megabytes of hiding place to lurk around in? The modem works like a pond in the stream where the fish are at. There is a waterfall between your computer, and the pond upriver. There, lurks stuff that could all come crashing down the waterfall onto the heads of the fish there who wait for some food to eat at the bottom of that waterfall. Big fucking logs, fifty-five gallon drums of old oil cans, car parts, a garage could conceivably come down the waterfall after a storm. Inside the oil can, the garage, and other stuff, discarded big gulp cups, Pepsi Bottles (PepFlash Player, Google Chrome, is a place where unseen weapons are stored for those trees that also are able to come from 13 megs of modem RAM Internet Bottleneck, no one ever says anything about a Modem Bug, so, that is a perfect place for the Pope to hide, ready to pounce. There is no norton Symantec for Modem product, so, how to keep the bugs out of the Modem?

(Please scroll down low to see the linked music video about stuff that can come crashing down from a waterfall. Tumblr won‘t let me put it here where I want it to be.

---

System of a Down: Aerials lyric video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyLOw29VJIA)

---

now back to where I was at before 12-8-2020:

========================

Stuff to think about, all of it is Russian Power Mother of All Hoaxes Decoding information.

They set out on a Ten Year Mission, to create a controllable future that they can use to control and take over the world. Twitter is their vehicle. Google is their Buffer, and more.

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

now back to my regularly entered Tumblr Post:

======================

4:30 pm:

More about the fractal of power, for directing traffic:

Briefly: At my house, the computer is connected to Centurylink ISP network, that and other ISP’s are another direction in the zoom of iterations of the Russian Main Power Mother of all Hoax’s. You zoom your view towards internet networks, there are places in their where VOIP transcends from phone to internet fractal zooming.

I want to say that it’s become very clear that Pacific Power is a major component to the captivity that I have been subject to for so long, they stay mostly out of view, they have others do their in person spying for them. What has become clear is that when I say important terror information, I get a phone call from someone, some obscure unknown phone number interrupts my thoughts as I write, it’s very clear that someone is watching me type as I type, they interfere and take control of the computer in small ways that are difficult to detect. They change the font, erase the memory of what is available to paste, they take control of specific letters on the keyboard, the n and the M are of interest to the spies, they foul up use of the M and n often as I write.

So there are people at Centurylink, who are subordinate to Pacific Power, which is subordinate to Rocky Mountain Power, and all of that is subordinate to l O Downing Street (House of Lords)

Further into the subordinate fractal zoom is Walgreen‘s Pharmacy. They are obviously called to service by Centurylink to make those incoming calls I was referring to. Walgreen‘s has a way of consistently making an incoming call as I am saying important and difficult information to share here. Two such calls came in as I was saying these things here. It’s also become clear that Walgreen‘s has at least one Stingray Surveillance unit at the Grants Pass location on Union Ave. and Williams Hwy.

The traffic I was saying at the top of this part, is that Walgreen’s is used by Pacific Power, which is across the street from Walgreen‘s on Williams Hwy, to fool national security personnel who are also watching as I type.

The nsa are at Centurylink HQ, sitting there with the Centurylink terror operatives, who call on Walgreen‘s to make a call to my phone, while the county courts terror cell (extension of Pacific Power, manned with actors from SAG and Canadian terror soldiers ) is directing the nsa to believe that I have a criminal record, am a rapist, sell heroin, grow marijuana, and sell weapons to the Sandista’s in my spare time, all while being a homeless disabled man who lives somewhere in the forest around here.

The Wallgreen’s call is used to make more Russian Hoax. The nsa officers are directed there to the Walgreen‘s (a terror cell) across from Pacific Power (a leading global terror cell) where they do stake out, told that I am going to be there any minute now to fill a prescription that I got from someone I killed.

The nsa are constantly picked-off as I appear to be the reason they are disappearing while on stake out at the terror cell waiting for the victim to show up. Walgreen’s lures them, commanded by Pacific Power, who use data from the county courts to make me look bad, and Centurylink is the glue that makes it all stick together for the timing of the terror murder hit of the nsa on stake out at the terror cell at Walgreen’s. That is how the traffic is directed with the fractal at my house.

=================

6:55 pm:

This is an example of the way Google Twitter contacts and gets feedback from the terror soldiers they send. Google/Twitter is Vatican Command HQ, they are almost as high up the command as it gets. You would have to go inside of l O Downing, the Vatican, or House of Lords to get higher up the terror command chain.

That Control message is there for the assassin from Li’l Pantry/Sparacino who was just here a few minutes ago to make initial contact with Google/Twitter HQ had the hit attempt been successful. There would be other ways to make further contact, that is simply a quick yes or no of the hit.

I see those almost everyday on my suspended Twitter account after physical attack happens.

The assassin I am thinking was here has a license plate on a white Toyota or Honda four door modern late model car that is similar to a phone number that called yesterday;

The plate has a 515 on it.

The phone number is 707-961-0515 called 12-5 at 2:36 pm.

I suspect it was part of the County Courts terror cell Tax Assessor Office Attack scenario. Google search leads to Fort Bragg, and Fort Bragg is a Twitter news item yesterday.

There are more Fort Bragg inclusions below that one on the bottom.

Google terror includes that the Stingray Surveillance units are used to make a call that has a phone number that produced significant search results.

Many are “Reedsport” and “Brookings” search results for the most part of the incoming calls I receive.

That “Control” message was preceded by another one that similar looking pop-up style message that said “Review Your Phone”.

That “Review” message includes my phone number, Twitter wants for me to verify my phone for an account they already suspended, happens about once per week. Same is true for a different one “Review Your Email” to verify that, also about once per week, sometimes more often. All of it Is COVID terror hit oriented. I almost always just refresh the page and the message goes away, no verify required that way.

==================

12-7-2020: 4:21 pm: Additional Fractal Power Zoom Safety Information:

There are very few places where you can purchase reading glasses that have a “+ 1.25 magnification. Most available reading glasses start at a magnification level that is too great. That, I have learned from searching for reading glasses that have minimal magnification, historically, they are not readily available in a low magnification orientation. Only at Bi-Mart, could the low magnification reading glasses be had.

Things changed.

now, there are low magnification reading glasses available at Walgreen‘s, and, in a variety of brand and packaging options, so, I bought some “+1.25″ reading glasses at the Walgreen‘s on my last visit there. They were way, way, way down on the very bottomest part of the reading glasses display. There was a set of brand name that I tried on, they worked good, were $15.99 for one “pair” of glasses. I wanted three sets of them, they come in a three pack at the Bi-Mart, so, look Low.... and Behold! There they were, the holy grail! A three pack of “+1.25″ reading glasses, Walgreen‘s brand, for about the same money as one set of brand name reading glasses.

I picked those up like Taco’s after a day surfing.

There is a problem. You can‘t try them on like you can with the name brand ones. So, when I got home, I was disappointed that they didn‘t work nearly as well as the name brand ones did at the store when I tried them on.

I looked closely at the Walgreen‘s brand reading glasses.

I found that the Walgreen brand glasses are booby-trapped.

They have a very clear thin plastic film protective scratch cover on the lenses. The protective film is as clear as clear can be, and the protective film cover is applied to the lenses from edge to edge in all directions. You cannot see that there is a clear protective film plastic scratch cover on them. I wore them with the distortion feature long enough to see that there is a distortion feature built in to the Walgreen‘s “+1.25“ magnification reading glasses, three pack.

They are booby trapped with a distortion feature. It’s no accident, I smell foul play.

I was able to peel off the offensive distortion feature, a dangerous condition. However, I was still somewhat disappointed as the name brand ones I tried on worked real good, but that three pack of Walgreen’s brand for about the same money was too good to pass up, and was exactly what I wanted, a three-pack of reading glasses with low magnification. They don‘t work as good as the name brand ones did. The Walgreen’s ones still distort what you are looking at even when you peel of the booby-trap clear plastic scratch protection film coating.

So, when choosing a Russian Hoax Fractal Power Zoom Viewer, you should make sure that it works the way you need it to work BEFORE you are committed to it.

Walgreen‘s uses the products on the shelve that same as Walmart does, they can manufacture the items such that the items and the way they are placed on the shelf are used as terror communication.

There is a message contained in the Scratch Protective Film Coating Distortion application, edge to edge, when they are made available in low magnification of a three pack on the bottom shelf for reading glasses.

High Gain Amplification Distortion is present in a low watt EL 34 British made tube driven practice amp for the Pope’s Flying V guitar rig option, for low volume use without sacrificing the dirt.

4:56 pm.

---

12-7-2020 5:09 pm:

I have learned that when the sign on the store says “Mart” on it somewhere, they are taking you to the Dry Cleaners, one Hour Martinizing, where the washing machine is broken, is wet, rinses everything with Blackwater, they plumbing is backwards at the dry cleaner, where they are not even supposed to be putting any water on the laundry.

(”Blackwater” is a technical term used by people from Building & Safety Departments, and Department of Environmental Quality, for describing raw sewage, specifically the sewage from a toilet, rather than a sink in a kitchen, or a bathtub or shower, which is called “Grey Water”. Those terms are also used by people who have motorhomes, and RV Camper trailers for the same communications. That, could change the Russian Mother of all Hoaxes Fractal Power Zoom when you look at “Blackwater” Defense Contractors parts of the Fractal Russian Hoax of Lies.)

======================

Zoom your Cracker Jack’s Secret Decoder Ring towards Southern California, apply the Way-Back Machine settings to around 1975. There, you will see that motor homes and travel trailers serve as Pirate Ships. Just tack a Trump Supporter Flag on them in your thoughts, to see that sail, filled with wind.

not far from there, you can get a glymps of where the pirates were getting some of their orders, and supplies, at Peterson Publishing Company, “Wheels Afield Magazine”, and other “Off Road” (water) oriented titles.

From there, it may be possible to follow the Power Russian Fractal over to the present day, with anything and everything titled “Peterson”.

Locally, where I live, that would lead to Peterson Paving Company, and, to 1003 Three Pines Road, where a US Postal Service Mail Carrier owned or still owns property where pirates reside. Susan Peterson is that Postal Connection. That, will take your Fractal zooming over to “The Stork”, the terror cell that IS the US Postal Service. You may find that “The Stork’s” nest was built by those motorhome pirates you were looking at in around 1975 in Southern California, when the newsmedia said that the USPS had “Gone Postal”, with reports that resemble a pirate take over aboard the USS Postal Service Armada, one boat at a time, nationwide. So, that is a way to see how Fractal Viewing ideas can be helpful.

Big ideas come from people who think big, some say that is called “Global Thought”, and, those people are called “Global Thinkers”. There is also a way to talk about directional thinking, called “Lineal Thought”. It’s good to have some of both ways of thinking, with also staying free to roam with other abstract thought.

The British often demonstrate that they are Global Thinkers. One way is the way they think about and talk about the Atlantic Ocean as “The Pond”. It makes an enormous thing something that can be navigated easier than if it’s always the Atlantic Ocean, you could get lost, if you don‘t bring a compass.

So, I suggest setting the Cracker Jack Decoder Ring towards all things Atlantic, in effort to set a course that leads to l O Downing. The same as the “Peterson” idea, but, Atlantic, such as the Record Company. I think getting to Downing Street will be simplified greatly when the Atlantic is reduced to a Pond, the way they like it in Britain.

If you need to fight against an African Lion, there is very little chance of survival, but if the Lion can be reduced to a Hamster in your thoughts, your chances improve greatly.

If you are able to stab the Lion, somewhere, anywhere, the Lion runs away.

Ten terror soldiers attack at my house, I kill or injure one, they all run away, to deal with their dead or injured terror soldier. My chances of survival improve greatly when I fight, rather than roll over.

======================

12-07-2020: 9:02 pm:

Let’s take a survey fly over in the fractal.

Let’s go to the One Hour Martinizing parts of the Russian Mother of all Hoaxes.

It’s just a survey, so, the Way-Back Machine is on Autopilot, could wind up anywhere in the time-line.

That Crazy Seal Song says there is a man who goes to open a door, been dong that for seventy years.

Chinese Laundry shows up on the Decoder Ring Radar.

What can be said about Chinese Laundry?

Idunno.

The man though, is Chinese, comes from a place where the oldest knowledge is at.

He’s the guy we are looking for, the guy with the answers.

He’s at the Laundry, same place we are surveying. The door is open, the song says the door at the laundry is open, been open, is gonna stay open. But there was a gun, something went down at the Chinese Laundry.

The door is still open.

We have to swing by over at the Gnosis areas of the Russian Fractal of lies, that is where the Russian Mother of all Hoaxes was born, so, we know that there is Gnosis there at the Chinese Laundry. Gnosis is what happens when more lies are added to the fractal of Russian Hoax. The truth gets sprinkled with bullshit there, it gets some wrinkles, some places where the truth is not quite completely visible, hidden in the wrinkles, like elephant skin, all wrinkly, and really big.

So, they changed the name, from Chinese Laundry, to One Hour Martinizing.

Mar. That word is about water. There is a Mar Lago, a Mirra Mar, a Martian Planet, a Martini (Dry)... (hmmm Martini, Dry, Shaken, not stirred.) what other “Mar” is there? It all goes here for thinking about the Gnosis, the stuff that happens to truth when lies are told.

G

That really shows up on a Martinizing survey of the Cleaners, where the Chinese Laundry used to be.

How does dry cleaning really work?

We should get educated before we go too deep in the Chinese Laundry Fractal where we already learned that there is a dead Chinaman somewhere. (right there is the place where you need to do a quick look at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and that they hijacked the state police all over USA, just trust me, this is not my first rodeo.)

Ok, Rodeo Drive is in Hollywood, (RCMP, good cop/bad cop stuff is interfering with the survey right there, the bad cop tells the good cop to go to Hollywood to get educated, he says: “I know a Dean there, he works close to the Vatican Choir at Vintage Audio King, where they changed their name to Vintage King Audio, so, he knows all about name change at the dry cleaner, Dean Zelinsky”)

“That’s not exactly what I ....” says good cop.

“Dean Zelinsky, you’ll love him, he has all the best Schwagg too, might have something we can get dry cleaned at the Martinizer” Says RCMP Bad Cop.

“Dean makes a product called the ML, it looks just like a K, and, his last name starts with a Z. We should talk to him now, since that big fucking G showed up.” says the interfering RCMP bad cop.” Says bad cop.

Hmm... mar.... M.... L.... K... Z. says good cop.

“Mar is an M word. Mar and then the L... the K goes between the M and the L, right? Mar... K. I’ll bet the proprietors name is Mark.” says good cop.

“Let’s have a look at that ML.” says Good Cop.

Here you go:

“That does look like a K, sort of, I suppose.” Says good cop.

“I told you he could help. I’ll call him” says bad cop, who calls Dean, privately, he’s busy at VKA on Rodeo though, “we have to go on without him.” says RCMP Bad Cop.

--

On with the Survey at the Chinese Martinizing.

--

There is no water in the Dry Martini Martinizing. WTF?

Let’s back out of here for a minute, looks dangerous, the shit is mystery surrounded by lies, and there is dead Chinaman somewhere, I know there is a dead Chinaman, but where?

The Guy that runs the laundry probably knows where the Chinaman is at. That’s why we need to go there, have a closer look around.

Let’s pick up some Rayon garments at the Custom Taylor, they hate water. Apply some Gain with the Pope’s Practice Amp (EL 34 tubes, 15 watt, Vox) then, we have a reason to go to the One Hour Marinizing, to get that Rayon fabric cleaned up.

“Bloody Hell! What’s on this Rayon?” says the new Proprietor at the Chinese Laundry.

“I can‘t tell you. It’s a secret” might work, be careful though, it’s just a survey.

Could say something like: “My Celestian Speaker got swapped out for a Peavey Black Widow on the practice amp, I spilled some beer on it, and it was ruined”

“I have Gnosis, that will get that nasty stain out off that very expensive Rayon Custom Tailored Suit you have there.” is the kind of response we are looking for. “I’ll use heavy starch” is bonus.

We don‘t have to come back, we could just leave the Rayon there after we drop it for dry cleaning.

What is Rayon? Idunno, but it sounds like it’s made somewhere that is real close to the Sun to me. Maybe is secret code for “Go see the Martinizer at the Chinese Laundry where the Truth gets transformed into Gnosis.”

now what?

==========

12-8-2020: 8:46 am: Additional side trip in the Mother of all Hoaxes Russian Fractal Viewer, super fast forward:

We arrive over at the Justice Department in the years when Obama was leaving, and scan real quick over the Congressional Hearings featuring Mueller, and Russia, we follow that path to the present day, and find Russian Hoax Microcosm is present.

We need some High Magnification Reading Glasses adapter to the Fractal Viewer Decoder Ring. But from here, we can see that the Mueller Bullshit Quest includes Russia, Stzok, Page, Steel Dossier. Steal Tossier, and.. Hillary Clinton’s Server in the Bassment!. That’s a lot of bullshit. The observation we can make, is that place in the Fractal, “The Mueller Investigation” is a microscopic version of some of the best parts of the giant that the Russian Fractal of Hoax Lies is all about. It’s the Hokey Pokey version of the whole enormous Russian Mother of all Hoaxes, and if we could get some back up and some suitable reading glasses (name brand) we could learn a lot about the Russian Hoax all in one, easy to navigate, one stop shopping area, within it’s bigger brother, the Giant Hoax.

[some glue: I think the people who are wearing those big plastic clear industrial face shields are people who know that if you get too close to the source of the Bullshit, you could get shit-face, so, they wear a face shield, just in case. That, by he way, is a bad idea to do unless you are a terror soldier and instructed specifically to wear a plastic industrial face shield. If you study this account, you will see where I already explained that there are only two kinds of masks that can be worn without without being targeted for take-out. You have to wear a HOME MADE FABRIC MASK, or, a Bandana will work, but you better look like a rock star or movie actor to use the Bandana. All other masks will mark you as an outsider, you will be tracked down, followed, studied, poisoned with nitrous gas, captured, tortured, farmed of information, family, and assets, then killed after being used as bait to kill more people. So, either wear a home made fabric mask and blend in, or grow your hair long and wear expensive clothing and jewelry and use a Bandana. I recommend the home made mask for blending in with the terror rather than playing the fool with the Bandana of you don’t know what the fuck you are doing and wearing expensive jewelry.]

{safety advisory: I am pretty sure that the Mueller Investigation areas of the Russian Hoax Mother Fractal, is a place that works a lot like a One Hour Martinizing Cleaners does. If you get lured over there, the Proprietor will take you to the cleaners when you start explaining the dirt on the fabric textiles and asking questions at the place where the Chinaman used to to laundry.|

(now back to our regularly scheduled learning experience:)

==========

I don‘t want to go to the Gnosis factory, I like truth.

St. Martins Church is suddenly showing up on the Secret Decoder Ring Radar.

I don’t like it, I have no back up.

They could make me back up, very unpleasant.

(here comes Ivanka Trump, a Vatican Back-up singer at the Choir. What is she doing here?)

Ok... that’s all. I am not going in there without some help. That’s the end of the One Hour Martinizing Dry Cleaner Flyover at the Chinese Laundry until some help comes.

=============

12-8-2020: 10:56 am: additional Fractal View at the Dry Cleaner Martinizing areas at a smaller level, closer zoom:

Tube driven guitar power amplifiers have a secret mystery built in from the Vatican Choir HQ Watchmen, who monitor those who play guitar, baby-sit them from time to time, to check-in and make sure that the guitar players don‘t learn too much, and, to do housekeeping the same kind of way that the Martinizer cleans the Rayon.

The “Bias” for the tubes needs to be adjusted when the tubes are changed out for new ones in the amplifiers. That, is a mysterious Russian Hoax to look at. The guitar player has to take the amplifier to the “Amp Guru” who waves a magic wand around, maybe some smoke will happen depending on the guitar player’s attitude, and knowledge levels about the Pope’s Flying V. There are more than one kinds of smoke at the Amp Guru, who needs to put a blessing on the amp when the tubes are changed, all disguised as “Bias Adjustment”, or else the amp won’t work correctly, they say. The guitar players are subject to all kinds of scary and expensive to repair stories about what happens to the amp if you don’t go see the Amp Martinizing Guru for a Bias Adjustment when the tubes are purchased. The friendly sales counter representative at the Guitar Center will provide a business card for where the best Amp Guru’s are, and are advised to go there with the amp for Bias Adjustment, where smoke could happen. The amp will usually get a blessing, but no one really knows what happens to guitar players who learn about the Pope’s Flying V, and talk about that over smoke at the Amp Guru, who knows everything there is to know about Power Circuits and works for the Pope.

Martinizing Fractal Viewing is available at all professions, somewhere in the Mother of all Hoaxes Russian Fractal of endless lies.

If they don‘t have a specific Martinizer Amp Guru Cleaner representation for your profession, then, they have the County Courts to provide direction, with complications that can be found all over the place in the Russian Fractal, anything can happen, the courts can make it happen with a crumpled napkin on the bench. So, the courts can direct you to all kinds of special counseling variety of Martinizer Amp Guru like agencies by setting you up first, with help from County Sheriff. Locally, Options of Southern Oregon is such a cleaning outfit, gets the stains off. At a higher level, the Asante Hospital can send you to Crisis Resolution Center, which is very close to the Sun, where the Rayon comes from. Bad news at CRC.

======================

{late addition: 12-11-2020: 11:50 am: You could follow the Russian Alpha Hoax of Lies in a way that connects Knock-Off Gucci, to “Baby On Board” signs for your car w/suction cup attachment, to Lady Gaga, to Google, To Bergoglio Pope Francis (to Argentina G-20), to “Shoe Goo Shoe Glue, to capital letter G, to Jerry Lewis Telethon for MS Kids, to Bill Gates.... and keep on going... forever... it all leads to a plan created long ago, the plan even includes that the English language itself was created as a weapon, one that is “white man speak with forked tongue” based binary use alternative language, was made for Crusades, thousands of years in the making, all so that “The Baby” could be taken, kidnapped, controlled. Right now, “The Baby” is USA, but is also it’s people and it’s constitutional components. You could conceivably wind up at Genesis, featuring Phil Collins on Drums & Vocals at the Manger, then back to Gucci, and Moto Guzzi Replacement motorcycles for the Harley Davidson’s at the Los Angeles Police Department, Rampart Division, 1975-ish.......... the Alpha Russian Mother Hoax, is only the Mother Hoax.... it has a Father of all Hoaxes Companion, mate, husband. The two procreate Hoaxal Spawn, eternally. The Father of All Hoaxes is Christianity. “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe”... they always show a boot for the cartoon. Immaculate conception is when you step in dog shit, and it stinks, and you track it all over the house before you see or smell it.

Study the Mother Russian Hoax, where there is no place on Earth called Russia, is all a lie, and you WILL soon understand that the reason that Russia is there where it’s not at, is to conceal the existence of the Father of the Russian Hoax Children, spawn of lies and deception. The Father stays innocent looking, secretly is a guiding light to terror soldier crusade warriors, as the Mother Bitch Russia Hoax draws all of the attention away, looking all sexy and provocative, claiming that she did not have sex with that man, “Billy Jean, is not my lover, she’s just a girl that thinks I am the one”... in reverse, played backwards, in Vinyl, in stereo. (Micheal Jackson was murdered because he turned his skin white, and sang songs about the Russian Hoax Mother, and the Father. “Beat it” is about a solo act, but there is soooo much more to see in there, comes with one glove. The Mother Russian Hoax is like that, as the Father Hoax looks on. (personal note: I met Micheal Jackson at least once, I wrote about some of the details on this account, we went to a fast food restaurant somewhere near Santa Barbara. He is not the man the media says he is, he, was like me as I am now, trapped inside of a Twighlite Zone of prescribed events that repeat. I met him in around 1987-ish. He sent me a gift after that, a book, called “Build it Better Yourself”, it’s a good book. That time in the mid 1980′s was a time I really wish I had paid closer attention to what going around me, and to things.. events that took place. In that same year, I also met Sean Hannity, who was a painting contractor at the time. I went to Santa Barbara with him also, now, he’s a news media giant. In that same year, a police officer was shot in his car on the jobsite I was working at, he was shot, then handcuffed to his steering wheel with his own hand cuffs. The officer died in my arms as I was using his car radio to call for help after finding him there and trying to find the key to the hand cuffs. All of that, Jackson, Hannity, and the dead police in the same year was all connected somehow. What happened first? Jackson? Hannity? The Police with handcuffs on the steering wheel?.... I don’t remember what happened first, but can guess that Hannity happened first. After that, there were two kinds of Police in Simi Valley California, good cops, and bad cops. They did not like one another, and RocketDyne is one of many reasons why Olive the above happened,  is also the reason why Charles Manson was said to have killed Sharon Tate. He flew too close to the Sun, at RocketDyne. It’s all part of The Russian Hoax Mother of Lies. RocketDyne is one of “The Three Kings”, the other two are nasa and Raytheon.]

[writingwithcolor]

Pluralistic distinctions in Hinduism

Hi everybody!  If you follow my personal blog, you may have noticed I've been busy becoming a doctor, which unfortunately meant I had to be effectively dead to the world for a couple of months.

But now that's over, and I'd like to address a couple of points that have come across the WWC space in that time.  Some of these are unanswered questions on Indian history and Hinduism and some relate to questions that have been answered already that our followers have raised some commentary on, so if you asked a question about any of those topics, please read through this post as it's going to cover a lot of ground.

One question (directed at me in particular), asked how it is possible for a person to be both a Hindu and an atheist.  Another raised some concerns about the view of the sacredness of cows in modern Hinduism, and the intersection of cow-veneration and caste.  I think both of these intertwine and ultimately come together in the same place.

To start, let me deconstruct the basic structure of a common or garden Hindu myth:

Indra and/or Brahma: *does something stupid*

Indra and/or Brahma: I screwed up.

Indra and/or Brahma: Halp.

Vishnu: *concocts elaborate plan to restore order to the world, usually involving shapeshifting, logical technicalities, and possibly orchestrating a war or two*

If that looks silly to you, compare it to the central story of Christianity:

Humanity: *does lots of stupid stuff*

God: Y'all are screwed up.

God. You need halp.

God: *concocts elaborate plan to save mankind, involving shapeshifting, logical technicalities, and ritually sacrificing himself to himself*

Please resist the temptation to come at me for this, literally everyone.  I'm casting everything in deliberately silly terms, because if the Hindu myth looks silly to you and the Christian myth does not, you're merely getting a sense of what I did growing up, only in reverse.

Nontheistic Hinduism   

If you take the words of what we commonly call "religion" literally, you miss a great part of the picture, and I believe this is true for a literalist/fundamentalist and for a nonbeliever.  When we look at a religion, we must examine it as a historically-situated phenomenon, because that's what it is.  A religion doesn't just arrive one day fully-formed, even in the case of a single founder, which Hinduism doesn't even have.

"Religion" comes from the Latin religio, meaning "bond" or "reverence."  In a broader sense, it means "obligation," "sense of right," or "conscientiousness."  Already it seems obvious how subjective those terms are.  You may have heard of the "Just World hypothesis," which underpins most religious thinking, in that if we just do the right thing, destiny/fate/the world/the next world will naturally pan out in our favor.  The trouble with that, even if you believe it's true, is that you're still stuck trying to figure out what "the right thing" is.  Enter sacred texts, which seem to be formulas for the right behavior and belief, and it looks to many like we've got an answer to this problem.

If only it were that simple.  "The right thing" turns out to be different in every text you read, because these texts were written in different times and places by different people who, if they found some way of living that they thought was "the right thing," found something that worked for them in that time and place, but wouldn't necessarily function for anyone else anywhere or anywhen else.

Our ancestors may have promulgated a lot of BS that has since been proven wrong, but they weren't stupid.  They at least tried to make sense of the world but due to environmental factors and limited horizons around the world, those explanations they came up with, in sacred texts and practices and rituals, differ from each other in crucial ways.

But they do say something about how humans have viewed the universe and our place in it over time.  That's what I find compelling: the multitude of ways that our ancestors attempted to explain the workings of the universe.  I think the comparison and contrast tell us much more about ourselves, how we work, and our place in the world than any religious dogma.  What's cool is the pluralistic thought and argumentation and attempts to analyze real phenomena that might just happen to be wrapped in a context that we in the modern world view as religious but in ancient times it was just how a given group of people lived.  Personally, I couldn't care less about the specifics of salvation and divine grace and devotion.

So, yeah, I'm really not interested in hearing about how great and liberating your religion is.  That's great and I'm happy for you, but I really want nothing less than to participate.  Stop trying to convert me, please.

People often argue that being confronted with death makes you religious.  I would beg to differ.  I've dealt with a lot of death, especially in recent years, and if anything it's made me less theistic, not more, but also more thoughtful, more nuanced, and more appreciative of family and human connection.

With such an attitude, in a world constantly strained with tensions between different religions, and between the religious and non-religious, it's difficult to sit comfortably in any single group identity.  So, yes, I very often feel like I have no spiritual and political bedfellows other than people who've been dead for 1300 years and will forever dwell in anonymity.

In that sense, I've been lucky to have the background I do.  Although history is full of heterodox views springing up all over the world, in India many of them were recorded and never fully stamped out by political entities that favored the orthodox.  I have to chalk this up to the origins of the thing we call "Hinduism" being a very organic synthesis of elements from South, Southeast, East, and Central Eurasia, which all brewed together in the Indian subcontinent into a chaotic patchwork of tribal and communal distinctions in practice and belief that were, until about 1 CE, probably far more fluid than they were rigid.  It's always been impossible to enforce a singular belief system in that part of the world, so in that mix, people believed in all sorts of gods, and some of them believed in none.

There have been codified schools of thought that explicitly denied the validity of established rituals, the existence of and even the human need for belief in gods.

I talk about a few of them here.

Some quotes:

There is no heaven, no final liberation, nor any soul in another world. Nor do the actions of the four castes, orders, and others, produce any real effect.

- a verse attributed to the Cārvāka school

God is unproved.

- Sāṁkhyapravacana Sūtra, 1.92

But, after all, who knows, and who can say

Whence it all came, and how creation happened?

- Nāsadiya Sūkta, verse 6 (Rig Veda, 10.129)

Yes, despite the stereotype of India as a land of spiritual supernaturalism, explicitly and implicitly nontheistic belief systems have existed there since nearly the beginning of recorded history.  Sanskrit has a larger non-theistic literature than Ancient Greek or Latin.  "Hinduism" became the catch-all term for the collective indigenous beliefs of the Indian subcontinent, regardless of particulars.  The terms  "Hindu" and "India" come from the same derivation (referring to the Sindhu, or Indus, River in the northwest—but I won't assert that the two terms mean the same thing, as that is categorically untrue).  Therefore to claim that atheism is somehow "un-Hindu" is historically, anthropologically, and linguistically ignorant.  While perhaps unusual, disbelief in gods and the supernatural is as valid a position in "Hinduism" as any other.  It does mean, though, that it also coexists under the same label as its polar opposites—strong theism, superstition, and virulent fundamentalism.

Cows and Hinduism 

  This tension can be seen in some of the issues surrounding the position of the cow in modern Hinduism.  This potentially arose in the first place for secular reasons—it is true that cows probably acquired some status of reverence because of their utility in tilling fields, providing milk, dung for fertilizer, etc.  But meat is also a pretty useful product.  Did you know that modern India is the world's 5th largest beef producer, 7th largest beef consumer, and largest beef exporter?  All this despite legislation against cow/bull/bullock slaughter in half the country.  Plenty of societies through history have both valued the cow's utility while alive and dead.  Why the special status in Hinduism?

Cows have always been useful animals, but also more expensive to keep and maintain, compared to other herd animals such as sheep or goats, so they became a symbol of wealth in ancient Asia.  This association is thought to be very old, potentially dating to before the Indo-European expansion.  As they were expensive, only those at the top of the social heap could afford to keep many, and in ancient India, that was the Brahmin caste.  If you want to keep your cows, you can't have the possibility that someone's going to poach it for dinner, and so casting the cow as a respected or venerated creature is a pretty effective way to do that.  This also means that you get to keep your symbol of wealth and status and the poors don't get to have any.

As cow sacrifice and beef consumption is actually very well-attested during the Vedic period, what probably happened is that around 800 BCE, with the ascendancy of the Kuru Kingdom and the codification of rituals at a state and urban level, beef-eating began to be disfavored by lawgivers.  Heterodox movements at the time, which would give rise to Buddhism and Jainism, also emphasized vegetarianism and as these were becoming popular among all social classes, the orthodox priesthood adopted certain hallmarks (like vegetarianism) which had the side effect (intentional or otherwise) of making avoidance of cow slaughter into a status symbol.  So previously enthusiastic meat-eaters became strict vegetarians.  Other non-Vedic elements made their way into the Brahminical religion around this time, such as the cycle of birth and death, and these ideas are regarded as a characteristic of Hinduism today. However, as the influence Brahminical orthodoxy was limited to a core in north-central India, around the modern Delhi area, beef-eating continued as a practice on the frontier.  Today, Nepal, the most Hindu country in the world, consumes beef quite freely.

As mentioned before, you can argue that "Hinduism" isn't really a single thing.  When someone says that Hindus don't eat beef, what they mean is that certain varieties of Hindus don't eat beef.  Some Hindus don't out of religious reasons.  Some hold no religious belief against it but don't do it out of habit or tradition or other ethical consideration.  Some religious Hindus thrive on beef.  Beef is typically a nutritionally-dense, readily-available food for poor and working class people, including those from disadvantaged caste groups.  The act of condemning them for their eating habits or taking away a primary source of nutrition using a religious excuse is an act that can't be disconnected from its historical and sociocultural underpinnings discussed in the previous paragraphs.  An attitude toward the cow that may have started as an innocent economic consideration has become laden with a ton of cultural baggage about as complex as the history of the subcontinent itself.

I don't eat beef myself.  I've eaten it before, and it usually made me feel a bit ill.  I guess descent from countless generations of vegetarian Brahmins left my gut unprepared for that particular kind of meat.  Beef production also uses too much carbon for my comfort and I once ate a hamburger in front of a cow and it turns out they have very judgey eyes.  I'm holding out for vat-grown meat, personally.

However, when states in India pass beef bans, they do it on the grounds that it's an honored animal in Hinduism, and while that's true, there's a historical and social context behind that and not all varieties of "Hindu" actually observe that prohibition.  Politicians are doing it cynically to drum up support among a certain contingent of "values voters" so they can keep their jobs in the next election cycle.

Regarding the place of religion and cows in modern India, many people, intimately familiar with the realities on the ground, have written on the topic better than I ever could.  With the arrival of a new wave of invaders and colonizers, Europeans and the British in particular, identities shifted yet again, and those echoes are felt all over the modern republic.  Here's a good read. 

Hinduism and Pluralism   

When we take care to not drop all adherents of a particular religion into a sack with the worst ones, we need to remember to extend that courtesy to all religions, because all religions have assholes trying to make everyone around them think like them, and those are the people we usually end up hearing about on the news.  The choice to eat or not eat beef (or anything) is a personal one that, while informed by society and background and culture, isn't solely determined by it.  A claim, by a Hindu or non-Hindu, that any particular thing is "the Hindu way" is to fundamentally misunderstand the history of the thing that we've come to call "Hinduism."

I don't think it's a coincidence that societies like the Gupta Empire, the Tang Dynasty, the Abbasid Caliphate, and the Italian Renaissance are regarded as "Golden Ages" and were also more open to pluralism and heterodoxy than the societies before and after them.  Scholarship, philosophy, and science always flower when different views speak to and challenge each other freely and openly, and when they challenge the established power structure, even unsuccessfully.  If you can't withstand a robust challenge to your worldview, then you're not growing, and if you're not growing, you're failing.  If you have an allegiance or affection to a particular identity, then you owe it to yourself and those like you not to let the ones you call your own succumb to the worst among them.

So, I'm happy, comfortable, and proud to claim the label of Hindu even if I believe humans made demons and humans made gods, and that the stories I grew up with are just (really cool) fantasy.  I do it because the Hindu right would like everyone to believe that there is a single, homogenous Hinduism that never actually existed, and that is a view that I find at best impoverished and at worst geopolitically dangerous.  By claiming the label "Hindu" when I refuse supernaturalism and pseudohistory, I am able to do a small part to render that worldview false.

--Mod Nikhil

[amarynceus]

Political Blitherings, et c.

Preface 0.1.  Politics, race issues, anger.  Part venting, part thinking. Below the cut.

Questions? Responses?  Acknowledge my right to exist and equal treatment, and I’ll debate almost anything.  There’s an ask button, use it.  Fail to acknowledge that basic point and we are done, full stop.

Preface: NDN = decendant of indigenous peoples of the continents located between Western and Eastern Eurasia, in case you didn’t know.

Second preface; I hope even if you don’t agree with me on very many things, so long as you agree on my basic premiss, that you will read this through if you care about current events.  I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that you already like one or two of the drawings I’ve made, if you’re still watching me at this point.

I’d just like to note that I might be occasionally strident and political from time to time for the next, well, foreseeable future, as long as we have an ACTUAL. FUCKING. TOOL. OF.THE. KREMLIN. IN. WASHINGTON.  I would prefer just to paint sailing ships and stupid pones, but times are what they are and people like me are now under attack from my own fucking government in this climate.  I love the Socialism.  I hate Fascism, Soviet communism, and their various interbred ancestors and descendants, and hate the idea of them growing stronger here.

Creating art is an essentially political act, and don’t let any two-bit neo-nazi pieces of shit tell you otherwise.  What difference it makes is debatable, but what isn’t is that silence is complicity.  Do not be silent.  Do not let others tell you that your fear, that your oppression, that your experience and your identity do not matter.  Do not be gaslighted.  There are four lights, and let no one tell you otherwise.

My first President, and the last I felt any respect for, was Carter.  The first I could vote for was Clinton, and I couldn’t stand him.  The first I could actually vote FOR, rather than against, was Obama, and only the first time around.  I’m an NDN.  I hate the fucking United States, the agent of physical and cultural genocide, that destroyed so much of my people and my culture and my very social fabric.  I hate the flag, I hate the government, I hate every shred of this godsdamn pathetic farce of a Republic that has the balls to call itself a Democracy.  I want to see the US burn, fall, fail harder than Rome ever did.

But.  I still live here. This is my land.  My ancestors’ land, ripped away by the white man’s (and woman’s - the white woman’s complicity in colonial oppression is deep and rarely conveyed) violence and greed.  We have been here, and I mean my cultural group, the NDNs of the Columbian Plateau, TEN THOUSAND years at a BARE MINIMUM -- even white anthropologists and archæologists, some of the most racist academic disciplines, acknowledge this.   When humans in the middle east were first starting to put one sun-fired brick on top of another, we were figuring out how to balance the recources we had and the needs we had.  For thousands of years, my people lived a way that did not degrade the land, and did not require war, or conquest, to maintain that way of life.  What kind of mis-steps led to such a thing, I do not know - I have long assumed that some kind of gross overharvesting/overexploitation of the available resources led to the realization that resources must be managed, and human populations controlled, if there was to be any balance between humans and the landscape that gives us life.

So.  Where am I going?  I don’t know.  I’ve had a cider and just now a beer.  So I’m just expressing at this point, because I’m starting to feel a tiny bit comfortable about my audience here, small (but growing! thank you!) as it is. 

Basically, silence is no longer an option at this point.  Those of you still in your early twenties or so (I don’t want to assume, but demographics say almost half of you are under 24), might not really get what an important place we stand in, right now.  But let me say this directly right now.  Even if you’re well aware of it.

All of our values, and all of the values our founding folks held (regardless of their hypocrisies or defects, etc., etc.) are under attack right now.  The very essence of what is a ‘fact’ is under assault right now.  Science is under assault now.  People who are not white, straight, and devoted to the myth that this is a white, straight nation are under attack right now. 

If you’re white, stop criticising the anger and rage of POC right now.  If you’re male, stop criticising the anger and rage of women right now.  If you’re a Nazi, kindly fuck off and live in the most excruciatingly painful manner possible.  If you see a Nazi get punched in the face and you say ‘well, but...’  fucking ditto, I have no time for your temporizing.  Say ‘well, but...’ one more time, and as a lifelong pacifist who has never yet dirtied their knuckles on anything more offensive than a sheetrock wall, I will happily break your nose and dislocate your testicles, free of charge.

We need to pull together.  I’ll say for one time, and hopefully one time only, I have a hard time with white liberals.  I’ve been betrayed so many times by them.  But we do need you to come to your senses and stop attacking the rest of us who are now genuinely under threat.  Unless you thrust the topic under my nose, I don’t intend to bring it up again (might RB stuff about it tho).  But y’all have had the reins for centuries now, sit down, shut up, and listen.  And that’s the end of that topic.

We all have our own concerns.  I’m not exactly proud, but I have a difficult time in a lot of political debates concerning race, due to the fact that NDNs are consistently shut out.  I try my best to rally myself behind other folks’ suffering, but when it’s usually <this group this group us us us us> or <that group that group me me me me> one gets left on the sidelines sometimes, it is true.  Trumping another victim’s card with your own weighty suit is bullshit, though.  The IDEA of the White Man has fucked us all.

Let me come back to that, because I think it’s important.

THE IDEA OF THE WHITE MAN HAS FUCKED US ALL.

The IDEA of unique importance.  The IDEA of a special place in history and destiny.  The very IDEA of anyone being inferiour.  The IDEA of a mandate over others not of our own people.  The IDEA of absolute rule.  The IDEA of divine right.  The IDEA that being stronger and more violent has anything to do with superiority.

Sadly, all of these are pretty much true of us all, regardless of time or place.  Humans are pretty shitty.  But a certain concatenation of events conspired to place white European males at the temporary top of the heap of worldwide power intrigue, and they went fucking crazy with it.  Crazy in a way that the world has never before seen sort of crazy, setting aside all those cautionary tales of Mu or Atlantea or whatever.  Crazy as in this-single-way-to-live-is-the-only-way-or-else-I’ll-kill-you sort of way (which is, sadly, almost universal).  Whether it be the worship this dead man on a stick or die, or dig gold or die, or slave-in-the-fields-because-you-happen-to-be-darker-than-me-therefore-you-deserve-to-die-horribly-because-this-guy-who-has-the-building-with-the-gold-but-don’t-die-until-I’ve-extracted-every-last-bit-of-labour-I-can-without-expending-any-capital-or-indeed-meaningful-effort-of-my-own.

Again, do I have structure here?  No.  I don’t care about structure.  I’m fed up with being constrained on discourse.  I’m done with letting conventional liberals, white or not, dictate the path and the method by which I expound ideas and express my emotions.  I’ve had a Cider and a Beer, and these days that’s about enough to make it slightly difficult to type straight and copy-edit as I go.  Make that two Beers as I’m half through with the second.  I’m just done with excessive self-restraint in general - though that’s my limit with drinks.

I think that’s my limit on discourse here, though.  I streamed all day, and chatted all day, which was fucking awesome (seriously, you know who you are, I appreciate your support and your interest).  I’m worn out -- by now some of you know fairly well just why that is, and in time all of you who stick around will.  Like so many who differ from the norm, I’m tired of defending the very basics of rational discourse.  I’m tired of Nazis.  I’m tired of Nazi sympathizers.  I’m tired of racists.  I’m tired of those who will ally themselves with racists to further their own worldviews.  I’m tired of White Liberals who try to balance everything because it all comes out of a fucking Textbook and -- well, I’d disgrace myself totally and forfeit any right whatsoever to rational discourse if I posted the clauses I just deleted. D:  Let’s just wrap that up and say I’m tired.  Unless you’ve got a serious legacy of oppression and trauma in your own life as well as your family’s -- this is the time to shut up, sit down, support, and spread your ears wide fucking open.

You might be ‘white’ right now and you might have this shitty legacy of oppression, too.  It’s important to realize that ‘race’ is such an arbitrary constrict -- a good modern starting point is ‘Whiteness of a Different Colour’ (ISBN-13: 978-0674951914) -- and that many of you that might be considered ‘white’ now weren’t ‘white’ a mere century or less ago.  If you’re of Irish, or Scottish, or Italian, or any country with any modicum of Catholicism, or anywhere near Poland at all (for fuck’s sake I want the US to burn but I wish I could apologise for those Polish jokes), I hope you’re nodding right now.  ‘Whiteness’ has always been a fluid definition, subject to the convenience of those who are in power.  Sometimes you’re in, sometimes you’re out.  A lot of people last year were convinced along these lines, alas. Especially white women -- it’s hard to say, but I am deeply disappointed in any gender whose space I drift into regularly --- where’s my fucking third option, thank you very much, please, reality, let LeGuin’s writing instantiate.  The amount of white women who voted for a... thing that despised their very gender was, quite frankly, so astonishing, even disgusting, that it was hard to credit. 

So at this point I think it’s important to distinguish between two groups: those that explicitly benefit form the current regime, and those who don’t.  Establishing the basic premiss that I’m not particularly inclined to either nuance or compromise at this point, I think I can draw the lines thus:

With the Orange one are Nazis (or Neo-Nazis if you want to split hairs, I see zero fucking difference), other forms of White Nationalists, the KKK, Kremlin sympathizers, and a general cadre of the most ignorant and least qualified set of people ever set to take government positions, even factoring in the presidencies of Grant and Hoover.  These people deny science, deny facts, deny the right of people like me to exist.  I don’t believe in anything but the serious danger of absolute belief.  But I do trust and have some shred, some modicum of faith, one might even go so far as to say, in scientific method, rational skepticism, tolerance, and love.

These people that are scrabbling for the levers of power have none of these things.  They want unquestioning obedience, slavish devotion, denial of diversity.  They want us to believe their lies, their ‘alternative facts’ or whatever the shit was that’s so ridiculous my fore-brain refuses to scrabble for the correct terminology.

But this isn’t the 1920s or the 1930s.  Remember that the well-nigh universal lesson from that time regarding Fascism is that people didn’t strike back hard enough, fast enough, strong enough.  Don’t succumb to the idea that it’s worth your while to debate people who don’t accept your simple existence and your equal rights as a basic, fundamental point.  If they don’t, punch them if you can.  Or find a bigger friend to punch them.  Kick them in the balls -- most of these Nazis have balls, I know not how -- or hit them with a bat, or a bat with nails in.

Remember.

If.

They.

Do.

Not.

Unconditionally.

Acknowledge.

Your.

Right.

To.

Exist.

As.

A.

Basic.

Premise.

There.

Is.

No.

Intellectual.

Debate.

Nazis and their ilk don’t want people like me, or many of you, to even exist.  (I look at every follower’s profile, you delightful people and sometimes perverts [me too, no worries - even some aces get saucy every few dozen moons or so!  I love you all, apart from those strange porn blogs, I don’t draw naked anything yet, please go away.])  Even after deflecting myself there, I re-emphasize that:

DEBATE CAN ONLY OCCUR WHEN BOTH PARTIES AGREE TO A CERTAIN SET OF FACTS AND PHILOSOPHICAL PREMISES.  Foremost in 2017 being: an acceptance of the scientific method and of the complexities and conclusions of modern science, an acceptance to the basic freedoms of the press and of political discourse as established from our flawed founding fuckers to the current day, and an acceptance of the basic rights of all human beings irrespective of ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation.

Anyone who can’t agree to this basic, fundamental, and fundamentally inoffensive set of premises is not worth your time or energy.  If they try and throw sand in your face, avert them.  If they put up a mask of civility, state the basics and deflect them.  If they assault or insult you, ignore them, or if appropriate, punch them -- at this point, they deserve it.  As a life-long pacifist -- they so deserve it.

Keep your thumb outside of your fingers, please.  I want you to be able to draw even after you punch Nazis.

Remember:

Anyone who does not acknowledge your right to exist has not established the most fundamental level of Rational Discourse.

I’ll try as best I can to keep this blog to mainly just art, but I refuse and reject all notions that I should keep politics out of my art.  The act of intentionally creating a piece of art is an essentially political act, it always has been, and it always shall be.

On that point, I’ll allow one exchange to give you a chance before I block your arse on whatever platform.  I DGAF about followers, sales, or bottom lines, tiny though they may be. All I want are people who I can have a rational discourse with.

I wish I could say I’m sorry to be so angry. 

I am absolutely not

.  I refuse to let my anger dominate my day to day living, but I also refuse to put it aside, and I think you should too.  Don’t let go of that anger, but don’t let it eat your heart (it will eviscerate you in a breath if you let it.)  Forge it into a sword, into a shield, into a bow and arrows to give cover to your loved ones.  This is not a time for complacency, for conciliation for those who would not have us live at all.  Recognize that there is a point at which rational debate has come to an end, that there are those who want us dead and are not at all joking with all those oven threats. NAZIS FUCKING EXIST RIGHT NOW.  Just as their vile counterparts have existed at so many times throughout history.I could name to you ancestors that were killed, or sent to prison, or locked in mad-houses, or worse, simply because they were NDN and said that we should have rights, that we should be treated like human beings, that we DESERVED to EXIST.  I have zero patience for the establishment or the White Man in Washington.  I have some patience for the White Woman, even though they have often been a worse oppressor than the Man (seriously -- look at the treatment of ‘Natives’ in ‘America’ and Indians in India in the periods when it was just the by far majority male explorers, trappers, traders, etc, compared to when the women come in -- rapid swings between Tolerance and Accomodation, to Prejudice and Exclusion, all overcome with the Sickening Sweet Smell of Straight-Laced Biblical Morality and okay I can’t go on, if you are still reading I haven’t completely offended you and I would honestly not prefer to do so excessively.)  but it’s really hard to trust in straight white women at this point.  So many sold us out to a self-confessed ‘p*ssy grabber’ in November. ANYWAY. Anger blah blah arg razzle frazzle argiuhalsdkfgjalkdfgjh lasidfuyao psidgyoiasdygoi asydfgo iasdygpoiasdo et cetera, et  cetera, et. cetera. yeah. welcome to 2017. Let’s all go punch Nazis.  Or, if we can’t punch Nazis, let’s all support those who do. Because what’s more American than punching a Nazi in his (or her) Godsdamned face.

[sciencespies]

Oldest arrowheads outside of Africa have been found in the rainforests of Sri Lanka

https://sciencespies.com/humans/oldest-arrowheads-outside-of-africa-have-been-found-in-the-rainforests-of-sri-lanka/

Oldest arrowheads outside of Africa have been found in the rainforests of Sri Lanka

Archaeological excavations deep within the rainforests of Sri Lanka have unearthed the earliest evidence for hunting with bows and arrows outside Africa.

At Fa-Hien Lena, a cave in the heart of Sri Lanka’s wet zone forests, we discovered numerous tools made of stone, bone, and tooth – including a number of small arrow points carved from bone which are about 48,000 years old.

When was the bow and arrow invented?

The invention of the bow and arrow allowed people to hunt prey at a much greater distance. People no longer had to get within “a stone’s throw” of prey which could suddenly bolt and escape. This innovation greatly increased the chances of a successful hunt.

Bows and arrows also made it much safer to hunt dangerous prey. If you don’t have to get too close, you’re less likely to be trampled or mauled by a hurt and angry animal.

The origin of the bow and arrow is one of the great mysteries of human technological innovation. How did it come about? When? Where? And why?

One of the small bone points discovered at Fa-Hien Lena. (M. C. Langley)

Currently, the oldest evidence for the use of the bow and arrow are small stone points found in Sibudu cave in South Africa, which are some 64,000 years old.

Outside Africa, the oldest finds were previously pieces of bows found in Germany dating back no more than 18,000 years.

Because bows and arrows are mainly made from highly perishable stuff like wood, sinew, and fibres, they don’t leave a lot of evidence behind for archaeologists to find. So the small bone points recovered from Fa-Hien Lena are an important discovery.

The bone points show evidence for having been fixed to a small shaft and shot at high speed into prey – which were apparently mostly small monkeys and giant squirrels, judging by the butchered bones thrown away at the site after meals.

Bone technology of Fa-Hien Lena. (M. C. Langley)

Above: Tools made from bone and teeth of monkeys and smaller mammals recovered from Fa-Hien Lena, Sri Lanka. This technology included small bone arrow points (bottom right), and skin or plant-working tools. 

Complex tools, complex minds

The discovery of such ancient bone arrow points is startling in itself. However, we also found other tools which give equally rare insights into the lives of the earliest members of our species currently documented in Sri Lanka.

Particularly interesting are well-preserved knives, scrapers, and awls made from the bones and teeth of monkeys and deer, which were used to work skins or plant materials.

These tools are our only way to learn about the other, more fragile items that may originally have been at the site, because anything made from leather or plant fibre (such as clothing, bags, baskets, mats, or nets) stood no chance of surviving 48,000 years in the humid tropical environment.

One of these artefacts is an unusual implement with carefully spaced notches down each side. It appears to be a shuttle for creating nets of woven fibres. No doubt nets would have been incredibly useful for catching the tree-dwelling prey the people of Fa-Hien Lena hunted, as well as bringing the fish up from the rivers.

Symbolic items of Fa-Hien Lena. (M. C. Langley)

Above: Some of the symbolic artefacts recovered from Fa-Hien Lena, Sri Lanka. Here you can see shell beads and different pigments in bright red, yellow, and silver which were used to decorate bodies or items. 

These rainforest pioneers also left behind evidence about their social lives in the form of white shell beads and small blocks of mineral pigments in bright colours: red, yellow, and silver.

Each of the pigment nodules show signs they were used to create paints for the body, and three of the bright red nodules were drilled to be strung as beads – something we have not found anywhere else in the world.

The white shell beads, on the other hand, are similar to those found in Africa and Eurasia, but were collected or traded from the coast some 20–30 kilometres away. Apparently, small, shiny, white shell beads never get old.

With these finds, it is becoming more and more clear that we have only just begun to scratch the surface when it comes to understanding the earliest modern human communities.

Michelle Langley, Senior Research Fellow, Griffith University; Oshan Wedage, Researcher, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and Patrick Roberts, Research Group Leader, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

#Humans

[shoveler-domain]

Shoveler 3

The bill of the Shoveler is ideally suited for straining small swimming invertebrates from the water and mud. Seeds and aquatic plants are also important food ... Male northern shovelers have an iridescent green head and neck, white chest and breast and chestnut belly and sides. small wild or domesticated web-footed broad-billed swimming bird usually having a depressed body and short legs. WORD FORMS ... Ralph C. Ireland began his waterfowl sculpting career in 1964. You will marvel at the choice and accuracy of colours deftly applied by our painters! Oct 1, 2005 - SPECIES INFORMATION: The koloa mōhā, or northern shoveler, is a common North. American dabbling duck (Family: Anatidae) that winters in ... This blue two-handed mace has an item level of 37. Requires Warrior. It is looted from . In the Two-Handed Maces category. Added in Classic World of Warcraft. Synonym.com is the web's best resource for English synonyms, antonyms, and definitions. Feb 21, 2019 - The Northern Shoveler (Spatula clypeata) is one of the dabbling ducks that can be found in Washington state. It is appropriately named for it's ... The Shoveler is a rare Two-hand Mace with a damage of 88 - 133 (32.5 DPS), and a speed of 3.4. It has a required level of 32 and item-level of 37. This item is ... Click here for more information about the Red List categories and criteria. Justification of Red List category. This species has an extremely large range, and ... Results 1 - 25 of 49 - Get the best deals on shoveler decoy when you shop the largest online selection at eBay.com. Free shipping on many items | Browse your ... Northern Shoveler (Spatula clypeata) bird sounds free on dibird.com. Breeding in North America, Eurasia: widespread; can be seen in 191 countries. 212 Shoveler jobs available on Indeed.com. Apply to Snow Shoveler, Help Wanted, Crew Manager and more! The Northern shoveler's specialized bill earned it in the nickname "spoonbill" among waterfowl hunters. The drake is strikingly handsome with a dark head, white ... Product Type. Decoys. Decoy Type. Duck. Species. Northern-Shoveler · clear. Series ... Pro Series Northern Shoveler. [4]. Pro Series Northern Shoveler. $49.99 ... A character profile for the terrible super-hero the Shoveler, from the movie Mystery Men, as played by William Macy. Photos, skills, quotes, personality... Amazon.com : MOJO Outdoors Spoonzilla Shoveler Duck Motion Decoy - Spinning Wing Decoy (New) : Sports & Outdoors. Drakes measure 14 x 6.25 inchesHens measure 13.75 x 6.25 inchesGreenhead Gear Over Size Shoveler Pack duck decoys are molded from original ... Vessel SHOVELER (IMO: 9459979, MMSI: 209182000) is a Bulk Carrier built in 2009 and currently sailing under the flag of Cyprus. Anas clypeataNamed for its large bill with a broad spatula-shaped tip, the northern shoveler is a dabbling duck widespread throughout the northern hemisphere. Dec 17, 2015 - The Northern Shoveler (Anas clypeata) is a very distinctive, medium sized (19" and about a pound and a half) duck. Although the drakes ... Home Shoveler. Anas clypeata. Family: (Anatidae) Ducks, Geese, and Swans. Preferred Habitat: Marshy ponds and lakes. Seasonal Occurrence: Abundant October through April. Mar 27, 2018 - Birder's Notebook by Bob Andrini; 27 March Entry. Among the early spring migrants is the Northern Shoveler. Looking at the picture, you can ... Dec 22, 2016 - While the city hasn't seen a major snow storm yet, it's only a matter of time until one hits and we find ourselves snowed in—and procrastinating ... Jan 30, 2019 - Friends come together to make some beautiful folk music to share with you in en evening of relaxation. Come join us and have a cold beer ... It is a rare breeder in the Rainwater Basin (Jorgensen 2012); Evans and Wolfe (1967) only located five Northern Shoveler nests out of 206 duck nests ... Find high-quality Northern Shoveler stock photos and editorial news pictures from Getty Images. Download premium images you can't get anywhere else. The northern shoveler (/ˈʃʌvələr/; Spatula clypeata), or northern shoveller in British English, sometimes known simply as the shoveler, is a common and ... The Red Shoveler is a medium-sized duck of southern South America. Populations in the southern part of its range are short-distance migrants, while more ... Shoveler (Spatula clypeata). Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos). Change species: Select another species for comparison, Alpine Accentor (Prunella collaris), Alpine ... dict.cc English-German Dictionary: Translation for shoveler.

[drtanstravels]

In my last post we had spent a few nights in Vienna, Austria as Anna was a guest of Bayer at the 2018 Euretina Congress. We had always planned to have a holiday after the conference because it is kind of pointless to fly halfway around the world and not really see anything. Initially, we had decided on Poland because neither of us had been there before, but those plans soon changed when it became apparent that one of Bayer’s stipulations was that we fly with Turkish Airlines, with the flights to and from Vienna involving a layover in Istanbul, Turkey. Neither of us had been to Turkey either, but I went to university with a few Turkish people who were always saying how nice it was over there, an opinion echoed by a few other friends we know that have been, as well as a former student of mine who is now a pilot for Turkish Airlines. Turkey also often gets a bit of bad press, mainly due to what’s happening at the Syrian border, but we  wouldn’t be heading in that direction so we figured we had nothing to worry about. Instead, we would be spending one night in Istanbul, two nights looking through caves and underground cities, as well as exploring rock features in Cappadocia, another two nights checking out ancient ruins and salt mines around Izmir, then a final night back in Istanbul before flying back to Singapore. Let’s take a look back at that first leg of our Turkish adventure, our time spent exploring Istanbul, but be forewarned; a lot of this post — and the following posts from our Turkish holiday — may seem a bit like a history lesson, but that’s what happens when you go on personal guided tours through ancient cities.

Monday, September 24, 2018 By the time we had flown out from Vienna, landed in Istanbul, collected our luggage, and  arrived at the hotel, it was about 8:30pm. That didn’t really seem to be a problem, however, as people tend to do things late around here. A little bit of background information about Istanbul, a city we didn’t really know a whole lot about:

Istanbul, historically known as Byzantium and Constantinople, is the most populous city in Turkey and the country’s economic, cultural, and historic center. Istanbul is a transcontinental city in Eurasia, straddling the Bosporus strait (which separates Europe and Asia) between the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea. Its commercial and historical center lies on the European side and about a third of its population lives on the Asian side. The city is the administrative center of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (coterminous with Istanbul Province), both hosting a population of around 15 million residents. Istanbul is one of the world’s most populous cities and ranks as the world’s 4th-largest city proper and the largest European city. Istanbul is viewed as a bridge between the East and West.

Founded under the name of Byzantion (Βυζάντιον) on the Sarayburnu promontory around 660 BCE, the city grew in size and influence, having become one of the most important cities in history. After its reestablishment as Constantinople in 330 CE, it served as an imperial capital for almost 16 centuries, during the Roman/Byzantine (330–1204 and 1261–1453), the Latin (1204–1261), and the Ottoman (1453–1922) empires. It was instrumental in the advancement of Christianity during Roman and Byzantine times, before the Ottomans conquered the city in 1453 CE and transformed it into an Islamic stronghold and the seat of the Ottoman Caliphate.

Istanbul’s strategic position on the historic Silk Road, rail networks to Europe and the Middle East, and the only sea route between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean have produced a cosmopolitan populace. While Ankara was chosen instead as the new Turkish capital after the Turkish War of Independence, the city has maintained its prominence in geopolitical and cultural affairs. The population of the city has increased tenfold since the 1950s, as migrants from across Anatolia have moved in and city limits have expanded to accommodate them. Arts, music, film, and cultural festivals were established towards the end of the 20th century and continue to be hosted by the city today. Infrastructure improvements have produced a complex transportation network in the city.

Sounds pretty cool to me so we checked into our hotel, Fer, took the bags up to the room, and then hit the town. The hotel was in a great spot, making it easy to just wander around the city, checking out the shops, markets, bars, and restaurants. We strolled past some mosques, the Column of Constantine, an old cemetery, and a lot of other ancient buildings, but they were all things we would be spending the bulk of the following day taking in on a guided tour. Tonight was going to be all about eating and drinking and one thing that didn’t even cross my mind until that point was trying Turkish delight, most likely because I hated it as a child. When you grow up in rural Australia, you aren’t exposed to many authentic international foods, but more to international-inspired Australian food — Dim sims, anyone? Quite often boxes of assorted cream chocolates such as Cadbury Milk Tray had a disgusting Turkish Delight flavoured one that was just awful, but fortunately for the sake of humanity, Milk Tray discontinued the Turkish Delight flavour, renaming it Exotic Delight in 2013 and then replacing it altogether in 2015 with the far more palatable Apple Crunch. Anyway, my family generally only bought these types of chocolates at Christmas or on a special Family Night where we rented a video and spent Saturday night together, but if you were too engrossed in the movie and weren’t reading the key to the chocolates, you could absentmindedly grab that Turkish Delight one and your night was instantly ruined, even if you had chosen the movie. This is coming from someone who once ate a handful of compost as a dare, I’m not a fussy eater, but I hated what I thought was Turkish delight so I was skeptical when we stumbled upon Hafiz Mustafa, makers of what are considered the best Turkish delights available. We went inside the store, tried some of the samples and it was, well, delightful! Turkish delight in Turkey is absolutely delicious; instead of the pinkish-coloured bitter snot coated in overly sweet chocolate that I was accustomed to, traditional Turkish delight is a gel made of starch and sugar, sometimes coating dried fruit or nuts and then dusted with icing sugar, an ancient treat that became the inspiration for the modern jellybean. The flavours available are really interesting too, such as rosewater or mandarin. We ordered a bunch of different Turkish delight and cake, some rose tea, and kicked back for a bit before buying some more to take away and hit the street again. Some scenes up until that point:

Looking down next to the elevator from outside our hotel room in Hotel Fer

Not sure who lives in there

Moseying into town

A giant mosque

And another

Passing an old cemetery

Outside the Atik Ali Pasha Mosque Complex

Just spotted Hafiz Mustafa

Anna’s happy to be here

Havin’ tea

Some of the Turkish delight available

More of their selection

The bag ours came in. Definitely need to buy a fez.

After a few cups of tea and plenty of Turkish delight, we headed back out to look at the shops in the area, as well as find somewhere to eat, but we accidentally found ourselves in a market area, looking at jewellery. Anna almost has a sixth sense when it comes to sourcing out rings when we’re overseas so it came as no surprise that she stumbled upon Sûfî, a small store that sold a lot of traditional handmade Turkish items, in particular one-off rings. The owner was a really funny, albeit extremely sarcastic guy, and Anna could’ve spent a small fortune in there, but she managed to limit herself to two really cool rings that she’ll never be able to find anywhere else. That’s how she justifies it to herself, anyway.

Next on the agenda was the main reason we had come out — Dinner. Anna managed to find an area of bars and restaurants so we strolled past the mosques, statues, sculptures, and fountains that we’d see in more detail the next day and decided where to hunker down for the night for a bite to eat and a few drinks. The entire street was bars and restaurants so we chose one that looked good, Duvares Cafe, and pulled up a seat. Most people think of Turkish food as being a lot of bread, ground meat, and cheese, and this is generally true, but because Istanbul is on the coast, there is some really good seafood there too. We ordered some prawns, beef and eggplant, and a few other dishes but then our waiter, always the showman, brought over a table with a fire on it and a large clay vase covered in foil. He then put the vase in the fire and started banging on the table with his cutlery while an older man with a drum came over and started singing. When the dish was ready, he cracked the bottom off the vase and poured a pretty special looking stew into a bowl for the diner who had ordered it. I think I’ll be ordering this at some stage during our time in Turkey:

We sat there, eating our food while still being a little envious of those who got the stew and the old guy singing and playing the drum continued to hang around our table, doing his thing. He was obviously working for tips, however, we hadn’t had a chance to get any Turkish lira, the local currency, out so we only had euros. Not to worry, the lira was in some serious trouble and still is to this date so it would probably be advantageous for him to receive euros, he could just take them to a money changer and cash in, but he still didn’t look particularly happy. We finished our dinner and it turned out that there was a shisha bar just down the road called Just Bar so we went in there and ordered an apple shisha. In the past we had ordered double-apple, but it had tasted like aniseed, something both of us can’t stand, but a guy who overheard us at the next table told us that regular apple doesn’t taste that way and he turned out to be correct. We sat around the rest of the night drinking, smoking our shisha, eating Turkish delight, and listening to some great music, Anna deciding the Turkish delights looked like the coals on the shisha. Our waiter from Duvares spotted her holding a piece out and cheekily came over, snatched it, and ate it, telling us that the ones from Hafiz Mustafa have always been his favourite. A bit of what we saw that evening in Istanbul:

We’d be doing a tour of this, The Blue Mosque, the following day as well

Making our way down into the market area

Heading to the bar and restaurant district

Now walking to another part of town

Anna with the owner in front of Sûfî, where she could’ve almost singlehandedly fixed Turkey’s economic crisis just by buying rings

Still going

There were some good choices for places to eat on this street

Post dinner drinks and shisha

Anna getting hungry

The drummer who couldn’t appreciate a stronger currency

In Duvares Cafe

Turkish delight does look like the coal, I guess

Hanging with my woman

It looks like they sell a fair bit of that stew

A closeup of the German Fountain when we were going back to the hotel

A cool building we passed on our way home

Tuesday, September 25, 2018 We managed to get up at around 8:30am, despite returning to the hotel only seven hours earlier and our private tour guide was waiting for us in the lobby of our hotel, keen to show us around town, however, she said there was going to be a lot of walking so she suggested we grab some of the free breakfast upstairs first. Once we had had our fill of food and coffee it was time to hit the road. When taking private tours like this around any city, you are absolutely inundated with information and it becomes a little difficult to recall exact details about locations so for this post, as well as subsequent posts from this holiday, I figure the best approach is to get the details about the location from Wikipedia and then add any personal stories from that leg of the tour, followed by some photos (provided I was allowed to take them).

We walked from the hotel, past some interesting buildings we’d seen on our way into the city the previous night, and then we were supposed to begin the tour by seeing Topkapi Palace, which was used by the Ottoman Sultans from the 15th to 19th centuries, taking in what is supposed to be an impressive collection of priceless jewels, crystal, silver and porcelain, robes worn by the sultans, and relics of the prophet Mohammed while we were there. We could even pay a little extra to enter the palace’s Harem, however, Topkapi Palace isn’t open on Tuesdays. Another chapter in the never-ending account that is the T-Factor? Perhaps, but instead our first stop for the day was Hagia Sophia and it definitely wasn’t a bad alternative:

Hagia Sophia is the former Greek Orthodox Christian patriarchal cathedral, later an Ottoman imperial mosque and now a museum (Ayasofya Müzesi) in Istanbul, Turkey. Built in 537 AD at the beginning of the Middle Ages, it was famous in particular for its massive dome. It was the world’s largest building and an engineering marvel of its time. It is considered the epitome of Byzantine architecture and is said to have “changed the history of architecture”.

From the date of its construction in 537 until 1453, it served as an Eastern Orthodox cathedral and the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, except between 1204 and 1261, when it was converted by the Fourth Crusaders to a Roman Catholic cathedral under the Latin Empire. The building was later converted into an Ottoman mosque from 29 May 1453 until 1931. It was then secularized and opened as a museum on 1 February 1935. It remained the world’s largest cathedral for nearly a thousand years, until Seville Cathedral was completed in 1520.

In 1453, Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman Empire under Mehmed the Conqueror, who ordered this main church of Orthodox Christianity converted into a mosque. Although some parts of the city of Constantinople were falling into disrepair, the cathedral was maintained with an amount of money set aside for this purpose. Nevertheless, the Christian cathedral made a strong impression on the new Ottoman rulers and they decided to convert it into a mosque. The bells, altar, iconostasis, and other relics were destroyed and the mosaics depicting Jesus, his Mother Mary, Christian saints, and angels were also destroyed or plastered over. Islamic features—such as the mihrab (a niche in the wall indicating the direction toward Mecca, for prayer), minbar (pulpit), and four minarets—were added. It remained a mosque until 1931 when it was closed to the public for four years. It was re-opened in 1935 as a museum by the Republic of Turkey. Hagia Sophia was, as of 2014, the second-most visited museum in Turkey, attracting almost 3.3 million visitors annually. According to data released by the Turkish Culture and Tourism Ministry, Hagia Sophia was Turkey’s most visited tourist attraction in 2015.

Very few buildings can claim to have been both a Catholic cathedral and a mosque in its history, therefore it is understandable why so many people want to see this place so our guide got the tickets for us and we were inside Hagia Sophia. Fortunately we got there early so it wasn’t too crowded, we could check out all of the mosaics and domes unobstructed. After we had strolled around at ground level for a while and taken in the sights, we were led up a slippery, narrow corridor that would take us to the upper gallery, allowing us to look out over the floor of the museum, as well as over the coast outside. Once back down, we looked through some of the outdoor ruins before cutting back through to exit and moving on to the next stop of our tour. A look around Hagia Sophia:

Standing in front of Hagia Sophia

A cool little building we saw en route

The entrance to Topkopi Palace

Fountain (Şadırvan) for ritual ablutions

A small portion of ceiling

Had to wait until almost everyone had moved on to get this shot

Imperial gate mosaic (late 9th or early 10th century)

Panoramic shot once inside

A minbar, the pulpit where the imam delivers his sermon

Apse mosaic of the Virgin and Child (9th century) above the mihrab

Columns made of green Thessalian stone

A golden gate

Taking a slippery path upstairs

The ceiling in the upper gallery

Looking from the upper gallery

Panoramic shot from the upper gallery

The marble door

The Deësis mosaic (c. 1261)

The Comnenus mosaic (c. 1122)

The Empress Zoe mosaic (c. 11th century)

Anna in the slippery hall

Remains from the second Hagia Sophia

More remains from the second Hagia Sophia

Another part of ceiling

Southwestern entrance mosaic (c. 10th-11th century)

Now it was on to the next stop on the tour, the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, also known as the Blue Mosque due to its interior being decorated with 20,000 iznik tiles. Anyhow, this is what we would be occupying once we eventually entered the Sultan Ahmed Mosque:

The Sultan Ahmet Mosque is a historic mosque located in Istanbul, Turkey. A popular tourist site, the Sultan Ahmed Mosque continues to function as a mosque today; men still kneel in prayer on the mosque’s lush red carpet after the call to prayer. The Blue Mosque, as it is popularly known, was constructed between 1609 and 1616 during the rule of Ahmed I. Its Külliye contains Ahmed’s tomb, a madrasah and a hospice. Hand-painted blue tiles adorn the mosque’s interior walls, and at night the mosque is bathed in blue as lights frame the mosque’s five main domes, six minarets and eight secondary domes.

The Sultan Ahmed Mosque has five main domes, six minarets, and eight secondary domes. The design is the culmination of two centuries of Ottoman mosque development. It incorporates some Byzantine Christian elements of the neighboring Hagia Sophia with traditional Islamic architecture and is considered to be the last great mosque of the classical period. The architect, Sedefkâr Mehmed Ağa, synthesized the ideas of his master Sinan, aiming for overwhelming size, majesty and splendour. It has a forecourt and special area for ablution. In the middle it has a big fountain. On the upper side it has a big chain. The upper area is made up of 20000 ceramic tiles each having 60 tulip designs. In the lower area it has 200 stained glass windows.

Getting into this mosque seemed like it would be no easy feat, not because we aren’t Muslim, but because the line to enter was enormous. This would also be a time when we would discover that our tour guide, a local woman in her mid-twenties who was doing her master’s degree in Ancient History, could be exceptionally fierce! There were people trying to cut the queue, either by pretending that they didn’t realise that the hundreds of people lined up in front of them were also waiting to enter, a technique quite often adopted by members of foreign, particularly Chinese, tour groups visiting popular tourist attractions around the world, or locals spotting a friend further up the line, going up to chat to them briefly, and then taking the spot behind them in the queue. Our guide wasn’t buying this from anybody — She approached anyone who appeared to be cutting the queue and screamed at them in English or Turkish about what the rules were, that they were not special and the rules applied to them as well, and how one should conduct oneself in a crowded public environment. If they didn’t speak Turkish or English, she just kept pointing at their ticket and then to the back of the line with an extremely intimidating look on her face until they walked off with their tail between their legs and joined the end of the line. She was doing a better job than the actual security burdened with the task of stopping people cutting in line and in the process of doing so, she also managed to find an entrance specifically for groups of four or less people, allowing us to cut the queue. When we got to enter, we were required to take our shoes off, as is the case upon entering any mosque around the world, however, many people fear losing their shoes or someone else taking the wrong pair — I used to work opposite a mosque in Singapore when I was teaching and I remember going to get something for lunch one Friday, the Muslim holy day, and there were a pair of sandals among all of the other shoes out the front that had been fastened together with a bike lock! The staff at the Blue Mosque had already addressed this dilemma by providing everyone who entered with a bag in which to carry their shoes. We obliged and carried our sneakers in the bag, but security were getting annoyed with a woman behind us who happened to be from one of the aforementioned tour groups; apparently she had asked for an extra bag and then just tied them over her shoes while she was still wearing them, trying to justify not needing to take off her shoes due to them being covered. It just doesn’t work that way. The Sultan Ahmed Mosque was beautiful inside, but there were areas where you weren’t allowed to take pictures due to the camera flash potentially damaging some of the artwork, our guide loudly informing anyone who tried to discretely snap a shot of this fact. The photos we could take may not show the true detail of the thousands upon thousands of tiles inside, or the queue we had to conquer in order to see them, but they should give you the gist:

In the courtyard, a portion of the queue in front of us wrapping behind a fountain, with a minaret in the background

The line behind us

More of the line behind us as we were about to enter

Taking in some of the tiles and windows

Another angle

An area of preserved ceiling

The edge of the prayer area

A look at one of the domes

A small portion of the prayer floor

Looking back toward the entrance

Next on our tour was the Hippodrome, an area we had walked through several times the previous night, including taking photos of the German Fountain, but knew nothing about. Well, this is what the Hippodrome is:

The Hippodrome of Constantinople was a circus that was the sporting and social centre of Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire. Today it is a square named Sultanahmet Meydanı (Sultan Ahmet Square) in the Turkish city of Istanbul, with a few fragments of the original structure surviving.

The word hippodrome comes from the Greek hippos (ἵππος), horse, and dromos (δρόμος), path or way. For this reason, it is sometimes also called Atmeydanı (“Horse Square”) in Turkish. Horse racing and chariot racing were popular pastimes in the ancient world and hippodromes were common features of Greek cities in the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine era.

Now obviously we weren’t here for horse racing, but we found the answers to the questions we had about the structures we had seen the night before. Two of the first structures we encountered that were located close together in the Hippodrome were the Serpent Column and the Walled Obelisk. First, the Serpent Column:

To raise the image of his new capital, Constantine and his successors, especially Theodosius the Great, brought works of art from all over the empire to adorn it. The monuments were set up in the middle of the Hippodrome, the spina. Among these was the Tripod of Plataea, now known as the Serpent Column, cast to celebrate the victory of the Greeks over the Persians during the Persian Wars in the 5th century BC. Constantine ordered the Tripod to be moved from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, and set in middle of the Hippodrome. The top was adorned with a golden bowl supported by three serpent heads, although it appears that this was never brought to Constantinople. The serpent heads and top third of the column were destroyed in 1700. Parts of the heads were recovered and are displayed at the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. All that remains of the Delphi Tripod today is the base, known as the “Serpentine Column”.

Our guide seemed more than a little bitter when she told us that another one of the serpent heads from the eight-metre high (26′) column is actually in the British Museum. Just behind the Serpent Column was the slightly less interesting Walled Obelisk:

In the 10th century the Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus built another obelisk at the other end of the Hippodrome. It was originally covered with gilded bronze plaques, but they were sacked by Latin troops in the Fourth Crusade. The stone core of this monument also survives, known as the Walled Obelisk.

We had taken a few photographs of both of these monuments at night and their appearance both in the light and the darkness is quite cool so here’s how we saw them on both occasions:

The Walled Obelisk in front of Hagia Sophia at night

The Serpent Column from a distance in the moonlight

Looking down into the up-lit remains of the Serpent Column

The Walled Obelisk from a different angle

The Serpent Column and the Walled Obelisk in the daylight

Without the lights

At the other end of the Hippodrome was the Obelisk of Thutmose III, also known as the Obelisk of Theodosius, which is in incredible condition when you consider its age:

The Obelisk of Theodosius is the Ancient Egyptian obelisk of Pharaoh Thutmose III re-erected in the Hippodrome of Constantinople by the Roman emperor Theodosius I in the 4th century AD.

The Obelisk of Theodosius is of red granite from Aswan and was originally 30m tall, like the Lateran Obelisk. The lower part was damaged in antiquity, probably during its transport or re-erection, and so the obelisk is today only 18.54m (or 19.6m) high, or 25.6m if the base is included. Between the four corners of the obelisk and the pedestal are four bronze cubes, used in its transportation and re-erection.

Each of its four faces has a single central column of inscription, celebrating Thutmose III’s victory over the Mitanni which took place on the banks of the Euphrates in about 1450 BC.

The marble pedestal had bas-reliefs dating to the time of the obelisk’s re-erection in Constantinople. On one face Theodosius I is shown offering the crown of victory to the winner in the chariot races, framed between arches and Corinthian columns, with happy spectators, musicians and dancers assisting in the ceremony. In the bottom right of this scene is the water organ of Ctesibius and on the left another instrument.

Some parts of the marble base aren’t original as is visible in these pictures, but I managed to snap a photograph of both the obelisk and a closeup of the pedistal from each angle:

Theodosius I offers laurels of victory (east face). Translation: “Though formerly I opposed resistance, I was ordered to obey the serene masters and to carry their palm, once the tyrants had been overcome. All things yield to Theodosius and to his everlasting descendants. This is true of me too – I was mastered and overcome in three times ten days and raised towards the upper air, under governor Proculus.”

The emperor and his court (north face)

Submission of the barbarians (west face). Translation: “This column with four sides which lay on the earth, only the emperor Theodosius dared to lift again its burden; Proclos was invited to execute his order; and this great column stood up in 32 days.”

The emperor and his court (south face)

We had one final stop on our tour before we had the rest of the day to ourselves; we were going to go underground and walk around the Yerebatan Underground Cistern, better known as the Basilica Cistern:

The Basilica Cistern is the largest of several hundred ancient cisterns that lie beneath the city of Istanbul, Turkey. The cistern, located 150 metres (490 ft) southwest of the Hagia Sophia on the historical peninsula of Sarayburnu, was built in the 6th century during the reign of Byzantine Emperor Justinian I.

Ancient texts indicated that the basilica contained gardens, surrounded by a colonnade and facing the Hagia Sophia. According to ancient historians, Emperor Constantine built a structure that was later rebuilt and enlarged by Emperor Justinian after the Nika riots of 532, which devastated the city.

Historical texts claim that 7,000 slaves were involved in the construction of the cistern.

This cathedral-size cistern is an underground chamber approximately 138 metres (453 ft) by 65 metres (213 ft) – about 9,800 square metres (105,000 sq ft) in area – capable of holding 80,000 cubic metres (2,800,000 cu ft) of water. The ceiling is supported by a forest of 336 marble columns, each 9 metres (30 ft) high, arranged in 12 rows of 28 columns each spaced 5 metres (16 ft) apart.

When we descended the 52 stone steps to enter the cistern, I had a strange feeling that I had seen this place before and I’d soon know the reason; our guide told us that the cistern was a location in From Russia with Love, the 1963 James Bond flick. I guess that was where I recognised it from. It might’ve been a bit damp down there, but it was incredible to see and impossible to comprehend how it was built. I especially appreciated the Medusa column bases:

Located in the northwest corner of the cistern, the bases of two columns reuse blocks carved with the visage of Medusa. The origin of the two heads is unknown, though it is thought that the heads were brought to the cistern after being removed from a building of the late Roman period. There is no written evidence that suggests they were used as column pedestals previously. Tradition has it that the blocks are oriented sideways and inverted in order to negate the power of the Gorgons’ gaze; however, it is widely thought that one was placed sideways only to be the proper size to support the column. The upside-down Medusa was placed that way specifically because she would be the same height right side up.

Add to this the Hen’s Eye column, a column decorated with the Turkish all-seeing eye, something you encounter everywhere in Turkey in order to ward off bad luck, and our little wander around underground capped off a great end to the day’s fascinating, yet exhausting, history lesson:

Upon entry of the Cistern

From another angle

A random square column for some reason

The Hen’s Eye column

Closeup of the Hen’s Eye column

A Medusa-head base

And another

The learning was over and the rest of the day was ours, however, our guide walked us back to the Grand Bazaar suggesting it and the surrounding area to be a good place to get lunch. Okay, the history lesson isn’t quite over, a little background information on the Grand Bazaar:

The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul is one of the largest and oldest covered markets in the world, with 61 covered streets and over 4,000 shops which attract between 250,000 and 400,000 visitors daily. In 2014, it was listed No.1 among the world’s most-visited tourist attractions with 91,250,000 annual visitors. The Grand Bazar at Istanbul is often regarded as one of the first shopping malls of the world.

I had also received this message the previous night from my friend Yarny, the one that was on Masterchef: Singapore:

We were definitely in the right place for it as the Grand Bazaar had endless stalls selling spices, as well as jewellery, food, souvenirs, tiles, antiques, and copious amounts of counterfeit goods. In fact, before we went to Hangzhou, I never thought I’d say that there was far more fake shit available in Turkey than in China, but it was simply the truth. Sure, we encountered fake and counterfeit items while we were in China, but nowhere near to the extent that we did in Turkey and you’ll find that this will be a bit of an ongoing theme over the course of my posts based throughout the country. We picked up the spices for Yarny and also grabbed a bag for ourselves and I have to say that that stuff is delicious, especially on fish because it’s kind of citrusy. But despite the fact that the bazaar boasts over 4,000 stores, it all gets a bit the same after a while, plus you’re constantly being hassled to come into people’s shops and you have to barter and haggle for anything and we just weren’t in the mood for it. One thing we weren’t expecting to find in the Bazaar, however, was the restaurant of Nusret Gökçe, A.K.A. “Salt Bae” (above, right). Anyone who has logged onto the internet even once in the past 18 months would more than likely have encountered at least one meme of this douche and his salt. Well, one branch of his chain of steakhouses, Nusr-Et, was located in the Grand Bazaar and it looks exactly what you’d expect from this self-righteous sociopath, despite the fact that it has received generally mixed reviews for both its food and its politics, with the general consensus being that it is overpriced for rather average food. In fact there was a review earlier this year for the New York branch in The Observer entitled “My Disappointing Meal at Salt Bae’s NYC Restaurant Cost $1,400.” Anyway, if you had to picture in your head what his restaurant would look like, your mental image is probably correct. This pretentious tool has stencils from the meme on every possible surface, as well as a life-size wax model of himself at the entrance in his signature pose. I honestly could not stop laughing and almost felt bad for the guy if it weren’t for the fact that his chain has been valued at $1.5 billion. Oh well, he can go cry into a pool of money. Some scenes from the Grand Bazaar, including Nusr-Et:

Anna loved these tiles near the entrance

Where we entered the Grand Bazaar

It begins…

Oh, God!

He’s really milking that meme

If only it were a voodoo doll

More of the Bazaar

Anna and a shisha shop

I wasn’t kidding when I said it all seems kind of the same after a while

If you look closely, there are some crazy shoes in that cabinet

Our bag of pul biber

We still hadn’t eaten lunch and there was no way I was going to blow over a grand on a steak unless it came from a thylacine or some other similarly hard-to-come-by being so we left the Grand Bazaar and decided to explore a bit more of the city. Before long we found a strip that was all coffee shops and stalls that served massive amounts of meat and kebabs so we pulled up a stool and gorged ourselves on a mixed-grill platter and some rice things that were wrapped in vine leaves. Nobody really has a name for them, but they are delicious! Once lunch was done, we crossed the Galata Bridge over the body of water known as the Golden Horn and entered the Beyoğlu district of Istanbul, technically leaving Asia for Europe. All of the little neighbourhoods in Beyoğlu have a far more cosmopolitan vibe than those in the old city, with trams traveling along the avenues, while the backstreets and laneways are full of shops, patisseries, cafes, and a whole heap of pubs and wine shops. There are also a lot more foreigners in Beyoğlu, mostly European, and we later found out that it is Istanbul’s arts hub. We spent a couple of hours wandering around the painfully steep, narrow streets, looking through the shops, and playing with the dogs around town. One thing we learned about Turkey is that there are a lot of stray dogs around the streets, but they are clean, playful, extremely well-looked after, and even vaccinated. In fact, a tag through the dog’s ear signifies that it has had its complete round of rabies shots. I found this interesting in a mostly Islamic city, because Muslims in Singapore are generally terrified of dogs and believe that any wet part of a dog is Satan’s saliva, however, we were later told that Sunni Muslims apparently have a different, more affectionate approach to canines than Shiite Muslims, although I’m not quite sure how accurate that statement is.

After strolling through Europe, it was time to cross the Galata Bridge back into Asia, past the rows of men fishing from the bridge in the increasingly terrible weather, battling the wind and drizzle in order to land a catch. There must be something decent in those waters because not only was there a ton of fishermen, but there is also a decent stretch of seafood restaurants along the bottom of the bridge on the side of the old city. Once closer to home we had a look through the Egyptian Bazaar, stocked with the standard spices and fake goods, before stopping off at a bar for a bit. Here’s how the remainder of the afternoon looked once we had left the Grand Bazaar:

Meaty

It doesn’t get much more Turkish than a bunch of dudes sitting around and drinking coffee

Lunch

Fisherman doing their thing

Now in Europe

I wasn’t kidding when I said these streets were steep

A tower at the end of another small street

A massive stray dog just chilling

Anyone need a mace?

Going downhill this time

A little provocative

Those are some massive loaves of bread!

The seafood restaurants under the bridge

Back in Asia again

In the Egyptian Bazaar

Seems legit

Our stay in Istanbul had come to an end, as we had to return to the hotel to get our luggage and take our shuttle to the airport to catch our 9:30pm flight to Cappadocia so we could spend the next few nights staying in a cave and exploring the area, hopefully by hot-air balloon at dawn (the title probably gives away how that went), but that’s all a story for next time. Stay tuned for Part 2!

Climbing, Caving, and Canceled Ballooning in Turkey, pt. 1: Istanbul In my last post we had spent a few nights in Vienna, Austria as Anna was a guest of…

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Day 2 - Geography [WBJ]

I’m a dumb and I didn’t make any maps, but most of the world in Depth is actually the ocean and the rest are somewhat familiar landmarks. Hooray for lazy geography! These lists aren’t extensive, but detail some of the locations that are actually inhabited and important. Most of the areas in Depth considered safe enough to inhabit are in Eurasia and South America.

I also ran into some...things while working on this, so it’s going to be shorter than I’d like. Oh well. I’ll try to edit this at a later date to include more information about the other areas.

Achik Paqar (La Rinconada and surrounding areas in Peru) - Before the flood, Achik Paqar was a moderately-sized mining town in Ananea; once the coasts began to be swallowed up by water, it became a popular destination for refugees. Most of Ananea and its mountains was converted into a large base camp with La Rinconada as its center. Achik Paqar is notable for being the main place of trade for both North and South America.

Tanggulashan (Tanggula Town in China) - Tanggulashan saw one of the most dramatic population booms post-flood, going from an estimated 2,000 people to a population of 800,000. It is one of two places in East Asia that is inhabited year-round; the other is Tsengel-Ulaankhus. Tanggulashan has the largest population of sheep in the world and is the largest provider of wool.

Sagarmatha (Sagarmatha National Park in Nepal) - Sagarmatha is the area around Mount Everest and is home to a variety of flora and fauna not found anywhere else in the world. The abundant presence of bamboo in Sagarmatha makes it vital, since bamboo is used in construction in many areas of the world; to a lesser extent, Sagarmatha is a destination for its many birds and juniper.

Other areas of importance:

Denali

Leadville

Hikkim

Chatyndy

Parinacota

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New Post has been published on Webpostingpro

New Post has been published on https://webpostingpro.com/a-look-inside-aktau-kazakhstans-other-hub-on-the-new-silk-road/

A Look Inside Aktau, Kazakhstan's Other Hub On The 'New Silk Road'

Further to the an awful lot-discussed Khorgos Japanese Gate SEZ and dry port, which has been covered in intensity here on Forbes.Com and is the focal point of an upcoming BBC Global documentary, Kazakhstan additionally has a lesser-acknowledged western gate. Sitting on the coast of the Caspian Sea at the western fringe of u . S . A ., in any other case surrounded by using wilderness, is Aktau. Nearly as far away as its Jap counterpart at Khorgos, Aktau is also trying to transition from the center of nowhere to an epicenter of trans-Eurasian shipping and change.

At the beginning a “secret” Soviet metropolis devoted to uranium mining,

Aktau is these days pleasant known for being the heart of Kazakhstan’s oil enterprise. But as a middle issue of a countrywide motion to construct a logistics industry to diversify the financial system far away from being solely reliant on aid exports, Aktau is attempting to become an awesome crossroads at the core of Eurasia that is directly linked in with China to the east, Russia to the north, Iran to the south, and Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Europe throughout the Caspian Sea to the west. Aktau is at a high position on a rising hall of the new Silk Avenue, which is presently the most southernly of a chain of 3 parallel multimodal shipping routes that make bigger among China and Europe.

“The rail connection from Khorgos to Aktau port will enable shipment to be transported alongside the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus to Europe in addition to to the south thru Iran to the Persian Gulf. With the new railway line connecting Georgia & Turkey, shipment can now be shipped via Aktau over the Caspian Sea after which by way of rail thru Azerbaijan and Georgia for shipping in Turkey and past,” stated Steve Huang, the CEO of China operations for DHL, one of the freight forwarding organizations that are pioneering this delivery route.

Why You Should Look For A Towing Truck

F you have got ever met vehicle troubles within the middle of the road you know that it is very horrifying. Whilst you are having a chief street hassle a tow truck organization can most effective help you inside the pleasant manner.

The unhappy factor is that most people don’t have any idea about a towing corporation. They don’t even recognize when they ought to call the corporation. If you are a normal vacationer here are a number of the maximum obvious motives why you must look for a tow truck company.

The main Collision

Regardless of whether you are a very good driver or a horrific one all and sundry can get right into a collision whenever. If you have an automobile coincidence you ought to check the vehicle situation and ensure that it’s miles safe to force.

You must keep in mind that even when the automobile looks secure and drivable it’s miles nevertheless risky to take out in a street. You need to speak with the local authorities and verify whether or not your automobile is in a wonderful circumstance.

In case you experience that the car isn’t always in an amazing situation you should search for the best tow truck enterprise who can tow the automobile to the right destination.

test The Engine

it’s miles always a terrific idea to check the water tiers in your vehicle engine. But, the engine may get overheated because of injuries and mechanical mishaps. In case you do not know a mechanic on the website you ought to immediately call the towing employer and pass your car to the garage as quickly as viable. Humans who’ve rented the car have to additionally name the towing truck to return the car to the organization.

Out Of Gasoline

That is one of the most stupid mistakes but Humans sometimes emerge as a victim of such situation. This is a kind of factor which could even take place to the maximum responsible motive force on street. In case you are in a nearby area, you may both name your pal or family member to convey the Gasoline. In the case, In case you’re in an area where you might not get any assist call the tow truck organization. The truck can also carry the automobile.

Inflated Tyre

That is a little bizarre, but you ought to also keep in mind that one could effortlessly exchange a flat tire. If you don’t know a way to do it you have to name the towing carrier issue to help you in converting the tire. Preserve these kinds of splendid hints in thoughts to pick out the first-class provider issue for the venture.

My Husband Wants To Date Other Women During Our Separation – What Now?

I lately heard from a spouse who turned into devastated that her husband becomes pressing for a separation. He had advised her that he meant to transport out the subsequent weekend, and he or she become bracing herself for an awful day. And her husband had just lately dropped some other devastating piece of news. He told her that he felt they ought to see other people for the duration of the separation. His reasoning in the back of this changed into that doing so would allow them to see in the event that they had been missing something by way of being married. And, he reasoned, in the event that they met and had been attracted to someone else, this will tell them that the marriage wasn’t genuinely well worth saving anyway.

The spouse failed to trust this reasoning. She felt that relationship different

Human beings turned into pretty a whole lot assuring that the marriage turned into going to come to an end. In reality, she suspected that her husband changed into just trying to ease her into a divorce. In any case, when they started seeing other human beings, how in all likelihood changed into it going to be that they had been going to paintings on the marriage? She stated, in element: “I am devastated that he wants to see different humans. We’re getting separated, no longer divorced.

Courting others isn’t something that you have to do even as you are

Nonetheless married. If he absolutely thinks there is a danger that we could shop our marriage, then why does he need up to now different human beings? I am just floored by this. I’ve attempted to motive with him but he might not listen. Is there any manner that I can make him trade his mind? My buddies say I simply have to date other humans to make him jealous, however, I do not want to do that. What are my options?”

This is a completely tough scenario. The husband had made it clear that he, in reality, wasn’t willing to speak any extra approximately this due to the fact his mind changed into made up. And I’ve visible marriages that had been stored even after a separation wherein the spouses dated others. however, the spouse becomes right to be reluctant due to the fact there’s also a bargain of chance worried. But, inside the following article, I’ll go over a few matters that you can need to consider or attempt if you’re in this situation.

Tire Insurance: Myths and Facts About Road Hazard Policies

Coverage–it is anywhere. You can still insure pretty much whatever. Are tires an investment one desires to insure? Tire Insurance, additionally known as a street danger policy, street risk assurance, or tire compensation plan, is a hastily growing industry within the car global.

Tire warranty plans pay in full or in part for the alternative or restore of damaged tires and/or rims from “street hazards.” street hazards are defined as pot holes, debris, nails, wood, and different risks found on the road. Curbs, sidewalks, and stone walls are not street risks. That is an vital distinction to don’t forget while deciding if tire Insurance is right for you (mentioned further beforehand).

Tire plans ultimately for a specific period of time and tire put on tread-depth

A  few plans last 2-3 years. Others can last 5 years or 60,000 miles. Numerous plans come with fixed quantities of insurance: $500 per 12 months up to 4 years. Many contracts require 3 years of regulation school to recognize. In terms of tread intensity, a tire is normally taken into consideration worn out (and as a result of the plan null and void) at 2/32 to a few/32 of an inch.

Another vital difference is the type of plan.

Tire reimbursement plans are simply what they are saying. You, the plan holder, will be reimbursed after the claims system is finalized–typically 2-eight weeks. There’s an out-of-pocket expense. These plans are regularly bought through new automobile dealerships. The prices can variety from $300 to $six hundred dollars.

Avenue danger rules operate further to reimbursement plans. However, A few tire Coverage companies, in partnership with the restore facility, might also have a direct-pay relationship. therefore, there would be no out-of-pocket fee, besides for relevant deductibles, and gadgets no longer protected in component or in full. Those plans are in general offered by using tire sellers and repair stores. The costs range from $10 to $30 according to tire. Additionally they can be based totally on a percent of the price of the tire: generally 12% to fifteen%.

Both styles of plans have some of the variables, requiring a magnifying glass to study the pleasant print. also, many are seasoned-rated warranties, protecting best a percentage of the price of the tire based on its put on.

Claims and coverage

Relying on the plan, claims are initiated by way of the repair shop. The technique is fairly smooth, although there can be a enormous delay from the company for authorization. This delay can be an hour or a whole weekend. This means that you’ll ought to “good enough” the tire substitute, after which desire it is legal for the total quantity, or drive to your spare.

A few plans offer national coverage both amongst their provider facilities or from other restore centers. Claims approaches will vary. Others best offer local coverage or insurance at the promoting facility.

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New Post has been published on Webpostingpro

New Post has been published on https://webpostingpro.com/a-look-inside-aktau-kazakhstans-other-hub-on-the-new-silk-road/

A Look Inside Aktau, Kazakhstan's Other Hub On The 'New Silk Road'

Further to the an awful lot-discussed Khorgos Japanese Gate SEZ and dry port, which has been covered in intensity here on Forbes.Com and is the focal point of an upcoming BBC Global documentary, Kazakhstan additionally has a lesser-acknowledged western gate. Sitting on the coast of the Caspian Sea at the western fringe of u . S . A ., in any other case surrounded by using wilderness, is Aktau. Nearly as far away as its Jap counterpart at Khorgos, Aktau is also trying to transition from the center of nowhere to an epicenter of trans-Eurasian shipping and change.

At the beginning a “secret” Soviet metropolis devoted to uranium mining,

Aktau is these days pleasant known for being the heart of Kazakhstan’s oil enterprise. But as a middle issue of a countrywide motion to construct a logistics industry to diversify the financial system far away from being solely reliant on aid exports, Aktau is attempting to become an awesome crossroads at the core of Eurasia that is directly linked in with China to the east, Russia to the north, Iran to the south, and Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Europe throughout the Caspian Sea to the west. Aktau is at a high position on a rising hall of the new Silk Avenue, which is presently the most southernly of a chain of 3 parallel multimodal shipping routes that make bigger among China and Europe.

“The rail connection from Khorgos to Aktau port will enable shipment to be transported alongside the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus to Europe in addition to to the south thru Iran to the Persian Gulf. With the new railway line connecting Georgia & Turkey, shipment can now be shipped via Aktau over the Caspian Sea after which by way of rail thru Azerbaijan and Georgia for shipping in Turkey and past,” stated Steve Huang, the CEO of China operations for DHL, one of the freight forwarding organizations that are pioneering this delivery route.

Why You Should Look For A Towing Truck

F you have got ever met vehicle troubles within the middle of the road you know that it is very horrifying. Whilst you are having a chief street hassle a tow truck organization can most effective help you inside the pleasant manner.

The unhappy factor is that most people don’t have any idea about a towing corporation. They don’t even recognize when they ought to call the corporation. If you are a normal vacationer here are a number of the maximum obvious motives why you must look for a tow truck company.

The main Collision

Regardless of whether you are a very good driver or a horrific one all and sundry can get right into a collision whenever. If you have an automobile coincidence you ought to check the vehicle situation and ensure that it’s miles safe to force.

You must keep in mind that even when the automobile looks secure and drivable it’s miles nevertheless risky to take out in a street. You need to speak with the local authorities and verify whether or not your automobile is in a wonderful circumstance.

In case you experience that the car isn’t always in an amazing situation you should search for the best tow truck enterprise who can tow the automobile to the right destination.

test The Engine

it’s miles always a terrific idea to check the water tiers in your vehicle engine. But, the engine may get overheated because of injuries and mechanical mishaps. In case you do not know a mechanic on the website you ought to immediately call the towing employer and pass your car to the garage as quickly as viable. Humans who’ve rented the car have to additionally name the towing truck to return the car to the organization.

Out Of Gasoline

That is one of the most stupid mistakes but Humans sometimes emerge as a victim of such situation. This is a kind of factor which could even take place to the maximum responsible motive force on street. In case you are in a nearby area, you may both name your pal or family member to convey the Gasoline. In the case, In case you’re in an area where you might not get any assist call the tow truck organization. The truck can also carry the automobile.

Inflated Tyre

That is a little bizarre, but you ought to also keep in mind that one could effortlessly exchange a flat tire. If you don’t know a way to do it you have to name the towing carrier issue to help you in converting the tire. Preserve these kinds of splendid hints in thoughts to pick out the first-class provider issue for the venture.

My Husband Wants To Date Other Women During Our Separation – What Now?

I lately heard from a spouse who turned into devastated that her husband becomes pressing for a separation. He had advised her that he meant to transport out the subsequent weekend, and he or she become bracing herself for an awful day. And her husband had just lately dropped some other devastating piece of news. He told her that he felt they ought to see other people for the duration of the separation. His reasoning in the back of this changed into that doing so would allow them to see in the event that they had been missing something by way of being married. And, he reasoned, in the event that they met and had been attracted to someone else, this will tell them that the marriage wasn’t genuinely well worth saving anyway.

The spouse failed to trust this reasoning. She felt that relationship different

Human beings turned into pretty a whole lot assuring that the marriage turned into going to come to an end. In reality, she suspected that her husband changed into just trying to ease her into a divorce. In any case, when they started seeing other human beings, how in all likelihood changed into it going to be that they had been going to paintings on the marriage? She stated, in element: “I am devastated that he wants to see different humans. We’re getting separated, no longer divorced.

Courting others isn’t something that you have to do even as you are

Nonetheless married. If he absolutely thinks there is a danger that we could shop our marriage, then why does he need up to now different human beings? I am just floored by this. I’ve attempted to motive with him but he might not listen. Is there any manner that I can make him trade his mind? My buddies say I simply have to date other humans to make him jealous, however, I do not want to do that. What are my options?”

This is a completely tough scenario. The husband had made it clear that he, in reality, wasn’t willing to speak any extra approximately this due to the fact his mind changed into made up. And I’ve visible marriages that had been stored even after a separation wherein the spouses dated others. however, the spouse becomes right to be reluctant due to the fact there’s also a bargain of chance worried. But, inside the following article, I’ll go over a few matters that you can need to consider or attempt if you’re in this situation.

Tire Insurance: Myths and Facts About Road Hazard Policies

Coverage–it is anywhere. You can still insure pretty much whatever. Are tires an investment one desires to insure? Tire Insurance, additionally known as a street danger policy, street risk assurance, or tire compensation plan, is a hastily growing industry within the car global.

Tire warranty plans pay in full or in part for the alternative or restore of damaged tires and/or rims from “street hazards.” street hazards are defined as pot holes, debris, nails, wood, and different risks found on the road. Curbs, sidewalks, and stone walls are not street risks. That is an vital distinction to don’t forget while deciding if tire Insurance is right for you (mentioned further beforehand).

Tire plans ultimately for a specific period of time and tire put on tread-depth

A  few plans last 2-3 years. Others can last 5 years or 60,000 miles. Numerous plans come with fixed quantities of insurance: $500 per 12 months up to 4 years. Many contracts require 3 years of regulation school to recognize. In terms of tread intensity, a tire is normally taken into consideration worn out (and as a result of the plan null and void) at 2/32 to a few/32 of an inch.

Another vital difference is the type of plan.

Tire reimbursement plans are simply what they are saying. You, the plan holder, will be reimbursed after the claims system is finalized–typically 2-eight weeks. There’s an out-of-pocket expense. These plans are regularly bought through new automobile dealerships. The prices can variety from $300 to $six hundred dollars.

Avenue danger rules operate further to reimbursement plans. However, A few tire Coverage companies, in partnership with the restore facility, might also have a direct-pay relationship. therefore, there would be no out-of-pocket fee, besides for relevant deductibles, and gadgets no longer protected in component or in full. Those plans are in general offered by using tire sellers and repair stores. The costs range from $10 to $30 according to tire. Additionally they can be based totally on a percent of the price of the tire: generally 12% to fifteen%.

Both styles of plans have some of the variables, requiring a magnifying glass to study the pleasant print. also, many are seasoned-rated warranties, protecting best a percentage of the price of the tire based on its put on.

Claims and coverage

Relying on the plan, claims are initiated by way of the repair shop. The technique is fairly smooth, although there can be a enormous delay from the company for authorization. This delay can be an hour or a whole weekend. This means that you’ll ought to “good enough” the tire substitute, after which desire it is legal for the total quantity, or drive to your spare.

A few plans offer national coverage both amongst their provider facilities or from other restore centers. Claims approaches will vary. Others best offer local coverage or insurance at the promoting facility.