#But I currently still depend on them because of german school system

[lil-gae-disaster]

My aunt when my disability is disabling me in not a stereotypical way: 😧😠 "Why don't you just [thing I'm limited in because disability]! I also have [disability] and I don't struggle with this at all! You're just a lazy child!"

#help #She claims she has adhd too #But won't accept that my executive dysfunction is way stronger than hers #And that my adhd is not just I can't focus #I can focus for a short time #but it's exhausting #And draining #fuckin adhd #adhd #actually adhd #adhd problems #neurodivergent #neurodivergency #adhd things #I can sit still #But my brain can't and that's what's distracting me #And my meds are classified as almost-drugs and I don't like taking them #But I currently still depend on them because of german school system #And anyway they're just making my brain quieter #Which also impacts my thinking ability

[alsjeblieft-zeg]

238 of 2023

Descriptives What is your name?

Joeri.

What is your age?

33 in two weeks.

When is your Birthday?

In two weeks.

Where were you born?

Belgium. My hometown is Middelkerke.

What city/state/country do you live in?

Bruges, Belgium.

Are you single, married, seperated, divorced or widowed?

Married.

What is the highest level of education you have completed?

Bachelor of Applied Sciences lol.

What is the name of the last school you attended (or currently attending)?

Do you really think I’m gonna share private details here?

Are you currently employed?

Yeah, I am.

If “yes”, what is your job title?

Operator/electrician.

What is your race?

White. I’m fully European, from what I know.

What is your nationality?

Belgian. My heritage is Belgian, Dutch, German, and further French. But I’m considered Belgian due to being born here and holding this country’s citizenship. It’s normal in Europe, we don’t call heritage “nationality”.

What is your religious background?

I’m from mixed family, Protestant mum and Catholic dad. I don’t identify with any religion, though.

What is your political affiliation?

I avoid politics like a plague. I don’t identify as anything politically, but I believe in equality.

College Life What was your major?

Electrical engineering.

Why did you choose this major?

Because I was interested in it.

What was your minor?

What is minor? I don’t think our education system has something like that.

Why did you choose this minor?

N/A.

If you could go back to school, what would be your major?

I went to yet another uni to do yet another degree, standard Dutch language.

Do you have any plans to continue your education?

Yeah, when my speech gets better.

Were you in a sorority/fraternity? (Which one?)

No, I wasn’t.

Were you in any clubs? (Which one?)

No.

Were you in any professional organizations? (Which one?)

I think ACV doesn’t really count since it’s a labour union, and schools don’t really have anything to do with it.

What is your worst college memory?

One of the teachers was giving me a hard time.

What is your best college memory?

Actually obtaining my degree.

If anything, what would you differently?

Differently what?

What did you enjoy most about college?

Learning.

What did you enjoy least about college?

Some people and some teachers.

How would you describe your college self?

How am I supposed to describe it? I haven’t changed much.

How would you describe your college friends?

I’ve got some guys I’ve been going to the secondary school with, we always hanged out together.

Are you still in touch with your college friends?

Sadly, I’m not.

How were your grades in college?

Pretty good.

What was your favorite course in college?

All of them.

What was you least favorite course in college?

None of them.

Work life What was the first job you ever had?

Fruit picker, as a teenager.

What is the worst memory of your first job?

Having to work in the cold.

What is the best memory of your first job?

Earning my first money and getting to know awesome people.

How did you get this job?

I was looking for some summer jobs suitable for teenagers.

What was your pay?

We were paid daily, depending on how much we picked.

Describe your current job

I’m an electrician/operator in the big French rolling stock manufacturing company. I produce electricazl components and install them in train carriages, previously I was wiring control racks, too.

Describe your current work environment

It’s awesome. Much noise, chemicals, heavy machinery. But I love it. I’ve made some great friends here.

What is the best part of your job?

We are free to look like we want to, with an exception for our work clothes, which are mandatory and all look the same. Nobody cares if we have tattoos or piercings. I’m being widely appreciated as a good and experienced worker, and the atmosphere is amazing, lots of great people there.

What is the worst part of your job?

I think we should be paid more because it’s us who find and correct all the mistakes that engineers do.

How did you get this job?

Someone suggested it to me when I graduated.

Describe your relationship with your boss

He’s a good man. He appreciates me very much and appartently finds me a very valuable worker. I remember him as my team leader before he became my boss, and we’ve always been in good terms. My previous boss was my favourite boss ever, though.

What would be your dream job?

The one I have now.

What is the best office prank you’ve pulled?

I don’t work in the office, but I’m known for pulling harmless “pranks” at my workplace; mostly I just do funny things to entertain my workmates. For example, one day I altered the logo of my company on my work helmet into something that means “dumb” in Dutch, and I was walking like that. The other day I attached the company logo printed on A4 paper sheet to my hoodie (which is not a part of my uniform) and I was walking like that, too.

What is the worst office prank you’ve received?

I can’t think of anything.

What do you wear to work?

Work clothes. Cargo trousers, a t-shirt with the logo of our company on the back, black zipped hoodie because I don’t like our work sweaters (yay rebel), and safety boots. Occasionally yellow vest and/or a helmet while going under the carriage.

Where do you go during lunch?

I work half days.

Where do you go after work?

To my physiotherapist, and then travels around the country.

Have you ever ever dated a co-worker?

Not really dated, but I was friends with one and now we’re married.

Where do you see yourself five years from now?

Here where I live now.

How old do you think you will be when you retire?

Probably over 60. It’s normal in my country.

Relationships How old were you when you had your first boyfriend/girlfriend?

I was 22. Never been interested in relationships before.

How old were you when you had your first kiss?

Also 22. Never felt like kissing anyone before. To be honest, I still don’t enjoy kissing.

How old were you when you met your first love?

23.

How old were you when you lost your virginity?

24. Never wanted it before, but I know it was with the right person.

Who was your first kiss?

Jay.

Who was your first love?

Nielsje.

Are you still in touch with your first love?

Yeah. We remained close friends after our break up.

Do you believe in love at first sight?

No, I don’t. It’s more like infatuation. At least I’ve never experienced it in my life, so this is why I have no confirmed reason to believe in it.

Do you make the first move when you meet someone?

No, I don’t. I’m too shy for that, I guess.

Have you been or are in love?

Well, I love. But am I in love? Hard to say. My feelings are confusing to me.

How would describe love?

It’s an individual thing. Everyone experiences it differently, I think, and there are more kinds of love than just romantic.

How do you know when you’re in love?

I don’t know. I only know I love, when I deeply care about someone, I feel happy to see them or interact with them, and I feel comfortable around them.

Have you ever had your heart broken?

Yeah, I’ve had.

Have you ever broken someone’s heart?

Apparently I did, more than once.

Describe your worst break-up

With Jay, he broke up with me, then threatened to kill himself. It was an awful time to me.

Do you miss anybody you use to be with?

No, because we still keep in touch.

What is the longest time you’ve been in a relationship?

Five years and counting.

Do you believe in unconditional love?

Yes, but I don’t think it’s always healthy.

What was the reason behind your most stupid argument?

Both me and my husband are incredibly stubborn and neither of us wants to let go.

Do you have a problem with saying “I’m sorry”?

Yes, but I often feel sorry.

How do you make up for your mistake to your partner?

I do little acts of service to him, or give him small gifts. This is my love language, though.

What would you do if your partner cheated on you?

That’s a deal breaker. Jay was cheating on me with multiple guys and left me feeling worthless.

Describe your dream proposal

I’ve already had one lol. It was unconventional, without a ring or anything, but I accepted.

Describe your dream wedding

I got married and we just went and did it, no party or anything. It was perfect.

Describe your dream honeymoon

Long road trip or a week in a big city. Yay.

Do you enjoy public displays of affection?

No, omg. They kinda put me off.

Do you like to hold hands in public?

No, I don’t. I don’t feel the need to do it, and neither does my husband.

Would you rather die before your partner or vice versa?

...WTF.

How many kids do you want to have?

None.

What would you name your baby girl?

No.

What would you name your baby boy?

Nope.

Your Childhood What did you want to be when you grew up?

A soldier.

What was your favorite Halloween costume?

We never celebrated that crap.

What was your favorite holiday?

Christmas and summer vacation because I spent it at my grandma’s.

What was your favorite game?

No.

What was your favorite TV show?

Old British sitcoms, like now.

What was your favorite song?

Way too many, I’ve always loved music.

What was your favorite candy?

I’ve never been fond of candy.

What was your favorite article of clothing?

Never paid attention to it.

Who was your hero?

My dad.

What were you scared of?

Vacuum cleaners.

What made you happiest?

Vacations at our grandma’s.

What is your fondest memory with your father?

Travelling around.

What is your fondest memory with your mother?

Can’t really think of any.

What is your fondest memory with your siblings?

Oh, there’s too many. We’ve always been close.

How would you describe yourself as a child?

A little rebel with permanently bruised legs.

What do you miss most about your childhood?

These careless times, playing outside with friends, not having smartphones or even the internet. Freedom, where it was hard to get us into our houses, rather than getting us outside, like it happens now.

What is the most important lesson you learned as a child?

That it was not my fault.

Now and the Future What is your favorite food?

Waterzooi.

What is your favorite restaurant?

Chinese Wok or Bavet.

Where do you go for peace and quiet?

To my hometown.

Where do you go for comfort?

To my husband.

Where do you go to have fun?

To work. Literally.

What is your favorite alcoholic drink?

Beer and white wine.

What is your favorite bar?

The Irish pub in my city.

What is your favorite weekend activity?

Groceries, lol. I travel enough during the week.

What is your favorite sport?

Basketball.

What is your favorite book?

Too many to count. I love books.

#survey #q&a survey #categorised survey

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: I enjoyed reading your posts about Napoleon’s death and it’s quite timely given its the 200th anniversary of his death this year in May. I was wondering, because you know a lot about military history (your served right? That’s cool to fly combat helicopters) and you live in France but aren’t French, what your take was on Napoleon and how do the French view him? Do they hail him as a hero or do they like others see him like a Hitler or a Stalin? Do you see him as a hero or a villain of history?

5 May 1821 was a memorable date because Napoleon, one of the most iconic figures in world history, died while in bitter exile on a remote island in the South Atlantic Ocean. Napoleon Bonaparte, as you know rose from obscure soldier to a kind of new Caesar, and yet he remains a uniquely controversial figure to this day especially in France. You raise interesting questions about Napoleon and his legacy. If I may reframe your questions in another way. Should we think of him as a flawed but essentially heroic visionary who changed Europe for the better? Or was he simply a military dictator, whose cult of personality and lust for power set a template for the likes of Hitler? 

However one chooses to answer this question can we just - to get this out of the way - simply and definitively say that Napoleon was not Hitler. Not even close. No offence intended to you but this is just dumb ahistorical thinking and it’s a lazy lie. This comparison was made by some in the horrid aftermath of the Second World War but only held little currency for only a short time thereafter. Obviously that view didn’t exist before Hitler in the 19th Century and these days I don’t know any serious historian who takes that comparison seriously.

I confess I don’t have a definitive answer if he was a hero or a villain one way or the other because Napoleon has really left a very complicated legacy. It really depends on where you’re coming from.

As a staunch Brit I do take pride in Britain’s victorious war against Napoleonic France - and in a good natured way rubbing it in the noses of French friends at every opportunity I get because it’s in our cultural DNA and it’s bloody good fun (why else would we make Waterloo train station the London terminus of the Eurostar international rail service from its opening in 1994? Or why hang a huge gilded portrait of the Duke of Wellington as the first thing that greets any visitor to the residence of the British ambassador at the British Embassy?). On a personal level I take special pride in knowing my family ancestors did their bit on the battlefield to fight against Napoleon during those tumultuous times. However, as an ex-combat veteran who studied Napoleonic warfare with fan girl enthusiasm, I have huge respect for Napoleon as a brilliant military commander. And to makes things more weird, as a Francophile resident of who loves living and working in France (and my partner is French) I have a grudging but growing regard for Napoleon’s political and cultural legacy, especially when I consider the current dross of political mediocrity on both the political left and the right. So for me it’s a complicated issue how I feel about Napoleon, the man, the soldier, and the political leader.

If it’s not so straightforward for me to answer the for/against Napoleon question then it It’s especially true for the French, who even after 200 years, still have fiercely divided opinions about Napoleon and his legacy - but intriguingly, not always in clear cut ways.

I only have to think about my French neighbours in my apartment building to see how divisive Napoleon the man and his legacy is. Over the past year or so of the Covid lockdown we’ve all gotten to know each other better and we help each other. Over the Covid year we’ve gathered in the inner courtyard for a buffet and just lifted each other spirits up.

One of my neighbours, a crusty old ex-general in the army who has an enviable collection of military history books that I steal, liberate, borrow, often discuss military figures in history like Napoleon over our regular games of chess and a glass of wine. He is from very old aristocracy of the ancien regime and whose family suffered at the hands of ‘madame guillotine’ during the French Revolution. They lost everything. He has mixed emotions about Napoleon himself as an old fashioned monarchist. As a military man he naturally admires the man and the military genius but he despises the secularisation that the French Revolution ushered in as well as the rise of the haute bourgeois as middle managers and bureaucrats by the displacement of the aristocracy.

Another retired widowed neighbour I am close to, and with whom I cook with often and discuss art, is an active arts patron and ex-art gallery owner from a very wealthy family that came from the new Napoleonic aristocracy - ie the aristocracy of the Napoleonic era that Napoleon put in place - but she is dismissive of such titles and baubles. She’s a staunch Republican but is happy to concede she is grateful for Napoleon in bringing order out of chaos. She recognises her own ambivalence when she says she dislikes him for reintroducing slavery in the French colonies but also praises him for firmly supporting Paris’s famed Comédie-Française of which she was a past patron.

Another French neighbour, a senior civil servant in the Elysée, is quite dismissive of Napoleon as a war monger but is grudgingly grateful for civil institutions and schools that Napoleon established and which remain in place today.

My other neighbours - whether they be French families or foreign expats like myself - have similarly divisive and complicated attitudes towards Napoleon.

In 2010 an opinion poll in France asked who was the most important man in French history. Napoleon came second, behind General Charles de Gaulle, who led France from exile during the German occupation in World War II and served as a postwar president.

The split in French opinion is closely mirrored in political circles. The divide is generally down political party lines. On the left, there's the 'black legend' of Bonaparte as an ogre. On the right, there is the 'golden legend' of a strong leader who created durable institutions.

Jacques-Olivier Boudon, a history professor at Paris-Sorbonne University and president of the Napoléon Institute, once explained at a talk I attended that French public opinion has always remained deeply divided over Napoleon, with, on the one hand, those who admire the great man, the conqueror, the military leader and, on the other, those who see him as a bloodthirsty tyrant, the gravedigger of the revolution. Politicians in France, Boudon observed, rarely refer to Napoleon for fear of being accused of authoritarian temptations, or not being good Republicans.

On the left-wing of French politics, former prime minister Lionel Jospin penned a controversial best selling book entitled “the Napoleonic Evil” in which he accused the emperor of “perverting the ideas of the Revolution” and imposing “a form of extreme domination”, “despotism” and “a police state” on the French people. He wrote Napoleon was "an obvious failure" - bad for France and the rest of Europe. When he was booted out into final exile, France was isolated, beaten, occupied, dominated, hated and smaller than before. What's more, Napoleon smothered the forces of emancipation awakened by the French and American revolutions and enabled the survival and restoration of monarchies. Some of the legacies with which Napoleon is credited, including the Civil Code, the comprehensive legal system replacing a hodgepodge of feudal laws, were proposed during the revolution, Jospin argued, though he acknowledges that Napoleon actually delivered them, but up to a point, "He guaranteed some principles of the revolution and, at the same time, changed its course, finished it and betrayed it," For instance, Napoleon reintroduced slavery in French colonies, revived a system that allowed the rich to dodge conscription in the military and did nothing to advance gender equality.

At the other end of the spectrum have been former right-wing prime minister Dominique de Villepin, an aristocrat who was once fancied as a future President, a passionate collector of Napoleonic memorabilia, and author of several works on the subject. As a Napoleonic enthusiast he tells a different story. Napoleon was a saviour of France. If there had been no Napoleon, the Republic would not have survived. Advocates like de Villepin point to Napoleon’s undoubted achievements: the Civil Code, the Council of State, the Bank of France, the National Audit office, a centralised and coherent administrative system, lycées, universities, centres of advanced learning known as école normale, chambers of commerce, the metric system, and an honours system based on merit (which France has to this day). He restored the Catholic faith as the state faith but allowed for the freedom of religion for other faiths including Protestantism and Judaism. These were ambitions unachieved during the chaos of the revolution. As it is, these Napoleonic institutions continue to function and underpin French society. Indeed, many were copied in countries conquered by Napoleon, such as Italy, Germany and Poland, and laid the foundations for the modern state.

Back in 2014, French politicians and institutions in particular were nervous in marking the 200th anniversary of Napoleon's exile. My neighbours and other French friends remember that the commemorations centred around the Chateau de Fontainebleau, the traditional home of the kings of France and was the scene where Napoleon said farewell to the Old Guard in the "White Horse Courtyard" (la cour du Cheval Blanc) at the Palace of Fontainebleau. (The courtyard has since been renamed the "Courtyard of Goodbyes".) By all accounts the occasion was very moving. The 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleau stripped Napoleon of his powers (but not his title as Emperor of the French) and sent him into exile on Elba. The cost of the Fontainebleau "farewell" and scores of related events over those three weekends was shouldered not by the central government in Paris but by the local château, a historic monument and UNESCO World Heritage site, and the town of Fontainebleau.

While the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution that toppled the monarchy and delivered thousands to death by guillotine was officially celebrated in 1989, Napoleonic anniversaries are neither officially marked nor celebrated. For example, over a decade ago, the president and prime minister - at the time, Jacques Chirac and Dominque de Villepin - boycotted a ceremony marking the 200th anniversary of the battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon's greatest military victory. Both men were known admirers of Napoleon and yet political calculation and optics (as media spin doctors say) stopped them from fully honouring Napoleon’s crowning military glory.

Optics is everything. The division of opinion in France is perhaps best reflected in the fact that, in a city not shy of naming squares and streets after historical figures, there is not a single “Boulevard Napoleon” or “Place Napoleon” in Paris. On the streets of Paris, there are just two statues of Napoleon. One stands beneath the clock tower at Les Invalides (a military hospital), the other atop a column in the Place Vendôme. Napoleon's red marble tomb, in a crypt under the Invalides dome, is magnificent, perhaps because his remains were interred there during France's Second Empire, when his nephew, Napoleon III, was on the throne.

There are no squares, nor places, nor boulevards named for Napoleon but as far as I know there is one narrow street, the rue Bonaparte, running from the Luxembourg Gardens to the River Seine in the old Latin Quarter. And, that, too, is thanks to Napoleon III. For many, and I include myself, it’s a poor return by the city to the man who commissioned some of its most famous monuments, including the Arc de Triomphe and the Pont des Arts over the River Seine.

It's almost as if Napoleon Bonaparte is not part of the national story.

How Napoleon fits into that national story is something historians, French and non-French, have been grappling with ever since Napoleon died. The plain fact is Napoleon divides historians, what precisely he represents is deeply ambiguous and his political character is the subject of heated controversy. It’s hard for historians to sift through archival documents to make informed judgements and still struggle to separate the man from the myth.

One proof of this myth is in his immortality. After Hitler’s death, there was mostly an embarrassed silence; after Stalin’s, little but denunciation. But when Napoleon died on St Helena in 1821, much of Europe and the Americas could not help thinking of itself as a post-Napoleonic generation. His presence haunts the pages of Stendhal and Alfred de Vigny. In a striking and prescient phrase, Chateaubriand prophesied the “despotism of his memory”, a despotism of the fantastical that in many ways made Romanticism possible and that continues to this day.

The raw material for the future Napoleon myth was provided by one of his St Helena confidants, the Comte de las Cases, whose account of conversations with the great man came out shortly after his death and ran in repeated editions throughout the century. De las Cases somehow metamorphosed the erstwhile dictator into a herald of liberty, the emperor into a slayer of dynasties rather than the founder of his own. To the “great man” school of history Napoleon was grist to their mill, and his meteoric rise redefined the meaning of heroism in the modern world.

The Marxists, for all their dislike of great men, grappled endlessly with the meaning of the 18th Brumaire; indeed one of France’s most eminent Marxist historians, George Lefebvre, wrote what arguably remains the finest of all biographies of him.

It was on this already vast Napoleon literature, a rich terrain for the scholar of ideas, that the great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl was lecturing in 1940 when he was arrested and sent to Buchenwald. There he composed what became one of the classics of historiography, a seminal book entitled Napoleon: For and Against, which charted how generations of intellectuals had happily served up one Napoleon after another. Like those poor souls who crowded the lunatic asylums of mid-19th century France convinced that they were Napoleon, generations of historians and novelists simply could not get him out of their head.

The debate runs on today no less intensely than in the past. Post-Second World War Marxists would argue that he was not, in fact, revolutionary at all. Eric Hobsbawm, a notable British Marxist historian, argued that ‘Most-perhaps all- of his ideas were anticipated by the Revolution’ and that Napoleon’s sole legacy was to twist the ideals of the French Revolution, and make them ‘more conservative, hierarchical and authoritarian’.

This contrasts deeply with the view William Doyle holds of Napoleon. Doyle described Bonaparte as ‘the Revolution incarnate’ and saw Bonaparte’s humbling of Europe’s other powers, the ‘Ancien Regimes’, as a necessary precondition for the birth of the modern world. Whatever one thinks of Napoleon’s character, his sharp intellect is difficult to deny. Even Paul Schroeder, one of Napoleon’s most scathing critics, who condemned his conduct of foreign policy as a ‘criminal enterprise’ never denied Napoleon’s intellect. Schroder concluded that Bonaparte ‘had an extraordinary capacity for planning, decision making, memory, work, mastery of detail and leadership’.  The question of whether Napoleon used his genius for the betterment or the detriment of the world, is the heart of the debate which surrounds him.

France's foremost Napoleonic scholar, Jean Tulard, put forward the thesis that Bonaparte was the architect of modern France. "And I would say also pâtissier [a cake and pastry maker] because of the administrative millefeuille that we inherited." Oddly enough, in North America the multilayered mille-feuille cake is called ‘a napoleon.’ Tulard’s works are essential reading of how French historians have come to tackle the question of Napoleon’s legacy. He takes the view that if Napoleon had not crushed a Royalist rebellion and seized power in 1799, the French monarchy and feudalism would have returned, Tulard has written. "Like Cincinnatus in ancient Rome, Napoleon wanted a dictatorship of public salvation. He gets all the power, and, when the project is finished, he returns to his plough." In the event, the old order was never restored in France. When Louis XVIII became emperor in 1814, he served as a constitutional monarch.

In England, until recently the views on Napoleon have traditionally less charitable and more cynical. Professor Christopher Clark, the notable Cambridge University European historian, has written. "Napoleon was not a French patriot - he was first a Corsican and later an imperial figure, a journey in which he bypassed any deep affiliation with the French nation," Clark believed Napoleon’s relationship with the French Revolution is deeply ambivalent.

Did he stabilise the revolutionary state or shut it down mercilessly? Clark believes Napoleon seems to have done both. Napoleon rejected democracy, he suffocated the representative dimension of politics, and he created a culture of courtly display. A month before crowning himself emperor, Napoleon sought approval for establishing an empire from the French in a plebiscite; 3,572,329 voted in favour, 2,567 against. If that landslide resembles an election in North Korea, well, this was no secret ballot. Each ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was recorded, along with the name and address of the voter. Evidently, an overwhelming majority knew which side their baguette was buttered on.

His extravagant coronation in Notre Dame in December 1804 cost 8.5 million francs (€6.5 million or $8.5 million in today's money). He made his brothers, sisters and stepchildren kings, queens, princes and princesses and created a Napoleonic aristocracy numbering 3,500. By any measure, it was a bizarre progression for someone often described as ‘a child of the Revolution.’ By crowning himself emperor, the genuine European kings who surrounded him were not convinced. Always a warrior first, he tried to represent himself as a Caesar, and he wears a Roman toga on the bas-reliefs in his tomb. His coronation crown, a laurel wreath made of gold, sent the same message. His icon, the eagle, was also borrowed from Rome. But Caesar's legitimacy depended on military victories. Ultimately, Napoleon suffered too many defeats.

These days Napoleon the man and his times remain very much in fashion and we are living through something of a new golden age of Napoleonic literature. Those historians who over the past decade or so have had fun denouncing him as the first totalitarian dictator seem to have it all wrong: no angel, to be sure, he ended up doing far more at far less cost than any modern despot. In his widely praised 2014 biography, Napoleon the Great, Andrew Roberts writes: “The ideas that underpin our modern world - meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on - were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon. To them he added a rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman empire.”

Roberts partly bases his historical judgement on newly released historical documents about Napoleon that were only available in the past decade and has proved to be a boon for all Napoleonic scholars. Newly released 33,000 letters Napoleon wrote that still survive are now used extensively to illustrate the astonishing capacity that Napoleon had for compartmentalising his mind - he laid down the rules for a girls’ boarding school on the eve of the battle of Borodino, for example, and the regulations for Paris’s Comédie-Française while camped in the Kremlin. They also show Napoleon’s extraordinary capacity for micromanaging his empire: he would write to the prefect of Genoa telling him not to allow his mistress into his box at the theatre, and to a corporal of the 13th Line regiment warning him not to drink so much.

For me to have my own perspective on Napoleon is tough. The problem is that nothing with Napoleon is simple, and almost every aspect of his personality is a maddening paradox. He was a military genius who led disastrous campaigns. He was a liberal progressive who reinstated slavery in the French colonies. And take the French Revolution, which came just before Napoleon’s rise to power, his relationship with the French Revolution is deeply ambivalent. Did he stabilise it or shut it down? I agree with those British and French historians who now believe Napoleon seems to have done both.

On the one hand, Napoleon did bring order to a nation that had been drenched in blood in the years after the Revolution. The French people had endured the crackdown known as the 'Reign of Terror', which saw so many marched to the guillotine, as well as political instability, corruption, riots and general violence. Napoleon’s iron will managed to calm the chaos. But he also rubbished some of the core principles of the Revolution. A nation which had boldly brought down the monarchy had to watch as Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, with more power and pageantry than Louis XVI ever had. He also installed his relatives as royals across Europe, creating a new aristocracy. In the words of French politician and author Lionel Jospin, 'He guaranteed some principles of the Revolution and at the same time, changed its course, finished it and betrayed it.'

He also had a feared henchman in the form of Joseph Fouché, who ran a secret police network which instilled dread in the population. Napoleon’s spies were everywhere, stifling political opposition. Dozens of newspapers were suppressed or shut down. Books had to be submitted for approval to the Commission of Revision, which sounds like something straight out of George Orwell. Some would argue Hitler and Stalin followed this playbook perfectly. But here come the contradictions. Napoleon also championed education for all, founding a network of schools. He championed the rights of the Jews. In the territories conquered by Napoleon, laws which kept Jews cooped up in ghettos were abolished. 'I will never accept any proposals that will obligate the Jewish people to leave France,' he once said, 'because to me the Jews are the same as any other citizen in our country.'

He also, crucially, developed the Napoleonic Code, a set of laws which replaced the messy, outdated feudal laws that had been used before. The Napoleonic Code clearly laid out civil laws and due processes, establishing a society based on merit and hard work, rather than privilege. It was rolled out far beyond France, and indisputably helped to modernise Europe. While it certainly had its flaws – women were ignored by its reforms, and were essentially regarded as the property of men – the Napoleonic Code is often brandished as the key evidence for Napoleon’s progressive credentials. In the words of historian Andrew Roberts, author of Napoleon the Great, 'the ideas that underpin our modern world… were championed by Napoleon'.

What about Napoleon’s battlefield exploits? If anything earns comparisons with Hitler, it’s Bonaparte’s apparent appetite for conquest. His forces tore down republics across Europe, and plundered works of art, much like the Nazis would later do. A rampant imperialist, Napoleon gleefully grabbed some of the greatest masterpieces of the Renaissance, and allegedly boasted, 'the whole of Rome is in Paris.'

Napoleon has long enjoyed a stellar reputation as a field commander – his capacities as a military strategist, his ability to read a battle, the painstaking detail with which he made sure that he cold muster a larger force than his adversary or took maximum advantage of the lie of the land – these are stuff of the military legend that has built up around him. It is not without its critics, of course, especially among those who have worked intensively on the later imperial campaigns, in the Peninsula, in Russia, or in the final days of the Empire at Waterloo.

Doubts about his judgment, and allegations of rashness, have been raised in the context of some of his victories, too, most notably, perhaps, at Marengo. But overall his reputation remains largely intact, and his military campaigns have been taught in the curricula of military academies from Saint-Cyr to Sandhurst, alongside such great tacticians as Alexander the Great and Hannibal.

Historians may query his own immodest opinion that his presence on the battlefield was worth an extra forty thousand men to his cause, but it is clear that when he was not present (as he was not for most of the campaign in Spain) the French were wont to struggle. Napoleon understood the value of speed and surprise, but also of structures and loyalties. He reformed the army by introducing the corps system, and he understood military aspirations, rewarding his men with medals and honours; all of which helped ensure that he commanded exceptional levels of personal loyalty from his troops.

Yet, I do find it hard to side with the more staunch defenders of Napoleon who say his reputation as a war monger is to some extent due to British propaganda at the time. They will point out that the Napoleonic Wars, far from being Napoleon’s fault, were just a continuation of previous conflicts that arose thanks to the French Revolution. Napoleon, according to this analysis, inherited a messy situation, and his only real crime was to be very good at defeating enemies on the battlefield. I think that is really pushing things too far. I mean deciding to invade Spain and then Russia were his decisions to invade and conquer.

He was, by any measure, a genius of war. Even his nemesis the Duke of Wellington, when asked who the greatest general of his time was, replied: 'In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.'

I will qualify all this and agree that Napoleon’s Russian campaign has been rightly held up as a fatal folly which killed so many of his men, but this blunder – epic as it was – should not be compared to Hitler’s wars of evil aggression. Most historians will agree that comparing the two men is horribly flattering to Hitler - a man fuelled by visceral, genocidal hate - and demeaning to Napoleon, who was a product of Enlightenment thinking and left a legacy that in many ways improved Europe.

Napoleon was, of course, no libertarian, and no pluralist. He would tolerate no opposition to his rule, and though it was politicians and civilians who imposed his reforms, the army was never far behind. But comparisons with twentieth-century dictators are well wide of the mark. While he insisted on obedience from those he administered, his ideology was based not on division or hatred, but on administrative efficiency and submission to the law. And the state he believed in remained stubbornly secular.

In Catholic southern Europe, of course, that was not an approach with which it was easy to acquiesce; and disorder, insurgency and partisan attacks can all be counted among the results. But these were principles on which the Emperor would not and could not give ground. If he had beliefs they were not religious or spiritual beliefs, but the secular creed of a man who never forgot that he owed both his military career and his meteoric political rise to the French Revolution, and who never quite abandoned, amidst the monarchical symbolism and the court pomp of the Empire, the republican dreams of his youth. When he claimed, somewhat ambiguously, after the coup of 18 Brumaire that `the Revolution was over’, he almost certainly meant that the principles of 1789 had at last been consummated, and that the continuous cycle of violence of the 1790s could therefore come to an end.

When the Empire was declared in 1804, the wording, again, might seem curious, the French being informed that the `Republic would henceforth be ruled by an Emperor’. Napoleon might be a dictator, but a part at least of him remained a son of the Enlightenment.

The arguments over Napoleon’s status will continue - and that in itself is a testament to the power of one of the most complex figures ever to straddle the world’s stage.

Will the fascination with Napoleon continue for another 200 years?

In France, at least, enthusiasm looks set to diminish. Napoleon and his exploits are scarcely mentioned in French schools anymore. Stéphane Guégan, curator of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, which, among other First Empire artworks, houses a plaster model of Napoleon dressed as a Roman emperor astride a horse, has described France's fascination with him as ‘a national illness.’ He believes that the people who met him were fascinated by his charm. And today, even the most hostile to Napoleon also face this charm. So there is a difficulty to apprehend the duality of this character. As he wrote, “He was born from the revolution, he extended and finished it, and after 1804 he turns into a despot, a dictator.”

In France, Guégan aptly observes, there is a kind of nostalgia, not for dictatorship but for strong leaders. "Our age is suffering a lack of imagination and political utopia,"

Here I think Guégan is onto something. Napoleon’s stock has always risen or fallen according to the vicissitudes of world events and fortunes of France itself.

In the past, history was the study of great men and women. Today the focus of teaching is on trends, issues and movements. France in 1800 is no longer about Louis XVI and Napoleon Bonaparte. It's about the industrial revolution. Man does not make history. History makes men. Or does it? The study of history makes a mug out of those with such simple ideological driven conceits.

For two hundred years on, the French still cannot agree on whether Napoleon was a hero or a villain as he has swung like a pendulum according to the gravitational pull of historical events and forces.

The question I keep asking of myself and also to French friends with whom I discuss such things is what kind of Napoleon does our generation need?

Thanks for your question.

#question #ask #napoleon #french #french history #history #military history #bonaparte #france #historiography #republic #historians #personal

[emsylcatac]

Oh man, really appreciating the extra French cultural insight on ML, so thank you for all of your elucidating! Have you made any posts covering common school events/milestones, and/or how teens tend to celebrate holidays in Paris? I know exams are different and that proms aren't really a thing, and the show has given us some insight into field trips (not too different), but do you know of anything else fandom tends to miss?

Heya!! :D

Thanks for your feedback & you’re very welcome!!

I haven’t done any post regarding school events or holidays yet, so let’s do that now!

School events/milestones:

First just a quick explanation of the French scholar system:

Maternelle (= Kindergarten): 3 years, from 3-4yo to 5-6yo – Petite section · Moyenne section · Grande section

Primaire (= Primary school): 5 years, from 6-7yo to 10-11yo – CP · CE1 · CE2 · CM1 · CM2

Collège (= Secondary school | Junior high school): 4 years, from 11-12yo to 14-15yo – 6ème (said sixième) · 5ème (cinquième) · 4ème (quatrième) · 3ème (troisième) – school start around 8:30am and ends around 4:30pm, with 1h lunch-break and 15min break in the morning & afternoon. – except on Wednesday ends around 11:30 or 12:30.

Lycée (= High school): 3 years, from 15-16yo to 17-18yo – 2nd (said seconde) · 1ère (première) · Tale (terminale) – Same about breaks & lunch breaks & start of school, but usually ends around 5:30pm. – except on Wednesday ends around 11:30 or 12:30 (or if you’re unlucky like I was the school organises exams on Wednesday afternoon from 2 to 4h straight but most schools have free Wednesdays afternoon)

Currently, Marinette & Adrien are in their finale year of ‘collège’ so in ‘3ème’ (called ‘troisème’).

So about major end-of the year exams:

End of 3ème (around the end of June usually): ‘Brevet’ – it’s a national exam and every student in the whole France have the same examination questions. They have to revise courses they had during the whole year and can be pretty much interrogated on anything they’ve learned. One exam per subject. Writing exam subjects are: French, Mathematics (main ones), History/Geography, Sciences (with Physics/Chemistry and/or Earth&Life Sciences and/or Technology). Added to that, they have an oral exam. It’s about Art History or a project they’ve conducted throughout the year (alone or in groups, however they get an individual score) Side note: this one is pretty ‘easy’ to have and you really need to want to fail to actually fail. It also takes into account the general score you have during the year and allows you to have a few points in advance. For instance, I was a good student and my general score was high enough for me to have enough points to already have the ‘brevet’ before even taking up the exam. It’s usually the case if your general score is equal or above 16/20 I think)

End of Terminale (around mid-June): ‘Baccalauréat’ – it’s again a national exam but much more important. You can’t pursue your studies if you haven’t passed it and will need to repeat the Terminale year. Subjects vary depending the course students chose when they entered their “1ère” year (it’s kind of a lot to explain everything there especially because the system have completely changed this year and teachers & parents are complaining about it, so I’m going to quickly talk about the ‘old’ system where basically you chose between scientific course, economic & social course or arts course; there’s others but those were the main ones). Again, you need to revise everything you’ve learned throughout the year and can be interrogated on anything. There’s writing exams as well as oral exams and practical exams (for sciences).Side note: Contrary to the ‘brevet’ this one is harder to get. I’m not saying it’s super hard, but students with school difficulties can fail even if they worked for it. Only the score you get at this exam is taken into account, not the general score you got during the year so you can’t “have” your Baccalauréat before taking up the exam.

End of 1ère: some exams of the “Baccalauréat” occur in the 1ère year but not a lot as well as a group project.

Proms, holidays & others undercut to avoid long post:

Regarding school proms, we indeed don’t have them as much as people in Canada or the US. It mostly depends of your school: some will organise them at the end of 3ème or Terminale because it’s the end of a ‘cycle’ sort of, but they’re mostly just events with food brought by everyone and music. You rarely have to find a partner to go to a prom with you, except maybe if the school you’re in has decided on that. Some schools don’t organise any.

Other special event that can be organised in your school (and again it depends how strict the director is and all) is carnival. We all come with disguises for the day. My ‘lycée’ was pretty strict about it but we managed to allow it during my finale year and organise a concert during lunch-time. We had to be recognisable though so no full-mask or full-makeup. But the previous years it was forbidden. We didn’t have any carnivals during collège. It again also depends on your school’s policy.

________________

Holidays

We have 4 in-between holidays and one summer holidays:

“Vacances de la Toussaint” (vacances meaning holidays): 2 weeks around end of October & Beginning of November, including the 1st of November. Usually, people tend to stay at home or visit family members that are living far from their home. Some might travel a bit as well but it’s not often. So some teens will visit their friend, maybe celebrate Halloween but Halloween isn’t that big of a thing here and it’s disappearing more and more.

“Vacances de Noël” (= Christmas holidays): 2 weeks including Christmas day and New Year. Mostly spent in family, some might go skiing but it’s rare and there’s less chance to have enough snow for that in the mountains.

“Vacances de Février” (February holidays): 2 weeks in February, sometimes a bit in March; dates change every year because all of the French regions don’t have the same dates for these holidays so teenagers will be in holidays 1st, 2nd or 3rd depending the year & region. Lots of people who can afford it will go skiing in the mountains one week; it’s pretty expensive so not everyone do that but still a lot.

“Vacances de Pâques / vacances de printemps” (Easter holidays / Spring holidays): Again 2 weeks, with dates changing like in February. Mostly around April, sometimes end of March. People tend to stay home or go a bit in the South of France if they can afford it or have enough time where the weather is warmer, some will visit family members, etc.

“Grandes vacances” (= big holidays or as you would say, Summer holidays): Lasts 2 months in July & August. School ends either end of June or beginning of July depending the grade you’re in and the end of the year exams you have, and will start again at the beginning of September. Some teens would go on family holidays somewhere (mostly to the sea or the mountains or abroad), some in summer camps, some would stay at home, some all of those.

Anyway, in all those holidays teens can meet-up and hang-out with their friends, do sleepovers, etc.

________________

School trips

School trips always have a cultural & educational purpose and will depend on the subject they’re being made for. You can visit museums, special cultural or historical places, etc. Most of the time you leave for the day by bus.

In some cases you can do a 3 to 5 days (or more depending your school) trip to another European country like England or Spain or Germany, maybe Italy. Those are opportunities to learn more about the other country’s culture (I know that when we did those trips we stayed in hosting families) learn and speak a bit the language, and learn history of the country depending on the outings of the day.

________________

Anything else fandom tends to miss?

Ok so it could take a lot of time and everything isn’t coming to my mind but one of the main thing I tend to see in fics is “Americanisation” of the French school system if that makes sense. Which is logical because it’s kind of hard to understand how everything works in another country without living in it.

For instance lots of people in fics write things like “they share maths classes together but not French, so Adrien takes Marinette to her class before going to his” and not really: you stay the whole year with the same classmates and share all your courses with them. Only exceptions are if you took some particular options (like someone took Latin and the other took ancient Greek or nothing), or depending the 2nd language you chose to learn (German or Spanish usually but some schools offer more choices). Or if you’re in a practical course, then you class might be split in half but with Marinette & Adrien’s class, they’re already not numerous so I’d say the whole class would share them together.

There’s a lot of other things but they’re not coming to my mind right now or are too long to detail there (for instance what I said above about scientific/economic&social/arts courses), but I’ll make sure to share them if I think about it :)

Thanks for the ask, I hope I answered what you were looking for!! ♥

#ask #mirthalia #ml french culture

[newstfionline]

Monday, May 3, 2021

Global coronavirus cases are surging, driven by India and South America (NYT) The number of new daily cases has exceeded 800,000 for more than a week. The spike is largely driven by the outbreak in India, which now accounts for more than 40 percent of the world’s new cases. The U.S. plans to halt travel for non-U.S. citizens from India starting Tuesday. Vaccines in India are running short, hospitals are swamped and cremation grounds are burning thousands of bodies every day. Health experts and political analysts say that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s overconfidence and domineering leadership style bear a huge share of the responsibility for the crisis. Meanwhile, Indians living abroad are frantically seeking to help sick relatives. Much of South America is also faring poorly. Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, Argentina and Colombia all rank among the 20 nations with the highest number of Covid deaths per capita.

Elderly statesman? (NYT) Arnold Schwarzenegger left the California governor’s mansion 10 years ago. He is a more popular political figure today than when he was elected. Over the past year, the former Republican governor, now 73, has been in demand, embracing an unlikely role that he describes as “elderly statesman.” He’s made public service announcements on hand washing, raised millions of dollars for protective health gear and is now being sought out for guidance on the Republican-led effort to oust Gov. Gavin Newsom, the same mechanism that led to Schwarzenegger’s election in 2003. “When you leave office, you realize—well, I realized—that I just couldn’t cut it off like that,” he said in a three-hour interview.

Looming showdown as Michigan governor orders Canadian pipeline shut down (Washington Post) For Michigan’s governor, the 645-mile pipeline jeopardizes the Great Lakes. For Canada’s natural resources minister, its continued operation is “nonnegotiable.” The clash over Calgary-based Enbridge’s Line 5, which carries up to 540,000 barrels of crude oil and natural gas liquids across Michigan and under the Great Lakes each day, is placing stress on U.S.-Canada ties. In a move applauded by environmentalists and Indigenous groups on both sides of the border, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) in November ordered the firm to shut down the nearly 70-year-old lines by May 12. Canadian officials, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, have appealed to their American counterparts, including President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm for help. Joe Comartin, Canada’s consul general in Detroit, said a shutdown would have “significant” impacts on both sides of the border. He predicted effects ranging from months-long propane shortages to higher costs for consumers to fuels being carried by rail, truck or boat—methods that he said are less emissions-friendly and more dangerous than a pipeline. One “irritant,” he said, is “the claim from the state that they are doing this to protect the Great Lakes, that they’re more interested in protecting the Great Lakes than we in Canada are. Basically, we reject that completely.”

NYC Eyes Reopening (Bloomberg) New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said yesterday the city would aim to fully reopen July 1, lifting restrictions on restaurants, gyms, and all other businesses. A return to normal would mark a symbolic moment for both New Yorkers and the country—America's most populous city was a global epicenter early in the pandemic, registering an average of 800 deaths per day last April. The city is averaging roughly 1,700 new cases per day, down 70% since January, reporting about 30 deaths per day.

Kissinger warns of ‘colossal’ dangers in US-China tensions (AFP) Acclaimed diplomat Henry Kissinger said Friday that US-China tensions threaten to engulf the entire world and could lead to an Armageddon-like clash between the two military and technology giants. The 97-year-old former US secretary of state, who as an advisor to president Richard Nixon crafted the 1971 unfreezing of relations between Washington and Beijing, said the mix of economic, military and technological strengths of the two superpowers carried more risks than the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Strains with China are “the biggest problem for America, the biggest problem for the world,” Kissinger told the McCain Institute’s Sedona Forum on global issues. “Because if we can’t solve that, then the risk is that all over the world a kind of cold war will develop between China and the United States.” While nuclear weapons were already large enough to damage the entire globe during the Cold War, he said advances in nuclear technology and artificial intelligence—where China and the United States are both leaders—have multiplied the doomsday threat. “For the first time in human history, humanity has the capacity to extinguish itself in a finite period of time,” Kissinger said.

Thousands march in Colombia in fourth day of protests against tax plan (Reuters) Thousands of Colombians took to the streets on Saturday for International Workers’ Day marches and protests against a government tax reform proposal, in a fourth day of demonstrations that have resulted in at least four deaths. Unions and other groups kicked off marches on Wednesday to demand the government of President Ivan Duque withdraw the reform proposal, which originally leveled sales tax on public services and some food. Cali, the country’s third-largest city, has seen the most vociferous marches, some looting and at least three deaths connected to the demonstrations.

Europe’s economy shrinks amid slow vaccine rollouts and lockdowns (Washington Post) With swaths of Europe still under lockdown restrictions and facing a stuttering vaccination rollout, the region’s economy slid into a double-dip recession in the first quarter of the year, in contrast to a rosy outlook in the United States. The European economy shrank by 0.6 percent in the first quarter of the year, according to data released Friday. The U.S. economy grew by 1.6 percent over the same period, amid massive federal stimulus spending and a speedy vaccination rollout. Export-dependent Germany, which had already been heading toward recession before the pandemic as manufacturing dropped off, saw its economy shrink by 1.7 percent, the most in Europe. The economies of Spain, Italy and Portugal also contracted. Much of Europe is battling a third wave of coronavirus infections. Germany has a nighttime curfew in place in 15 of its 16 states, and shopping requires booking appointments and getting a negative test.

Dozens of German police injured in May Day riots (AP) At least 93 police officers were injured and 354 protesters were detained after traditional May Day rallies in Berlin turned violent, Berlin’s top security official said Sunday. More than 20 different rallies took place in the German capital on Saturday and the vast majority of them were peaceful. However, a leftist march of 8,000 people through the city’s Neukoelln and Kreuzberg neighborhood, which has often seen clashes in past decades, turned violent. Protesters threw bottles and rocks at officers, and burned garbage containers and wooden pallets in the streets. There’s a nightly curfew in most parts of Germany currently because of the high number of coronavirus infections. But political protests and religious gatherings are exempt from the curfew.

Big Myanmar protests aim to ‘shake the world’; seven killed (Reuters) Myanmar security forces opened fire on some of the biggest protests against military rule in days, killing at least seven people on Sunday, media reported, three months after a coup plunged the country into crisis. The protests, after a spell of dwindling crowds and what appeared to be more restraint by the security forces, were coordinated with demonstrations in Myanmar communities around the world to mark what organisers called “the global Myanmar spring revolution”. Streams of demonstrators, some led by Buddhist monks, made their way through cities and towns including the commercial hub of Yangon. The protests are only one of the problems the generals have brought on with their Feb. 1 ouster of the elected government. Wars with ethnic minority insurgents in remote frontier regions in the north and east have intensified significantly over the past three months, displacing tens of thousands of civilians, according to U.N. estimates. In some places, civilians with crude weapons have battled security forces while in central areas military and government facilities that have been secure for generations have been hit by rocket attacks and a wave of small, unexplained blasts.

Vaccinated faithful throng Jerusalem church for Holy Fire (AP) Hundreds of Christian worshippers made use of Israel’s easing of coronavirus restrictions Saturday, packing a Jerusalem church revered as the site of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection for an ancient fire ceremony a day before Orthodox Easter. The faithful gathered at The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, waiting for clergymen to emerge with the Holy Fire from the Edicule, a chamber built on the site where Christians believe Jesus was buried and rose from the dead after being crucified. As bells rang and the top clerics from different Orthodox denominations appeared, the worshippers scrambled to light their candles and pass the fire on. Within a minute, the imposing walls of the old church glowed.

Israel asks whether autonomy of the ultra-Orthodox contributed to the deadly stampede (Washington Post) Israel’s ultra-Orthodox residents exist in a world within the world, citizens of Israel but pledging their allegiance, attention and obedience instead to their rabbis and God. In isolated enclaves, they are exempt from the military draft, outside the national school system and—in apartments usually without Internet or television—largely oblivious to the surrounding culture. Now, this shocked country is asking whether that self-segregation—and the secular politicians who have enabled it for decades—is responsible for the worst civilian catastrophe in Israel’s history, the trampling death of 45 ultra-Orthodox men and boys at a massively overcrowded religious festival in the early hours of the morning Friday. The ultra-Orthodox, or Haredim as they are known in Israel, follow some of the most conservative tenets in Judaism and have a lifestyle based on the Jewish culture that evolved hundreds of years ago in the communities of Eastern Europe. Since Israel’s founding, state leaders have sought preserve this culture after much of it was devastated during World War II.      When more than 100,000 members of the Haredim convened for a boisterous annual festival at an ancient rabbi’s tomb on Mount Meron, they overflowed a narrow, sloped compound known to both government and religious leaders as a potentially dangerous setting. Sunday, as the final victims were being buried and flags around the country flew at half-mast in a national day of mourning, multiple investigations were getting underway that will target police planning, local regulators, site managers and national ministries with responsibility for oversight. Already, journalists and whistleblowers have unearthed a shocking paper trail of warnings ignored, recommendations overruled and absent supervision. Officials have been called to account for meetings in recent weeks in which specific recommendations from health and safety authorities were overruled at the behest of Haredi groups.

#headlines #news

[linguacoreana]

The modern nation-state informs our modern concept of distinct languages

Most people’s understanding of what a language is has a strong overlap with border of a nation. Our conception of the modern nation-state is part of the reason many people think this. When you go to Germany, people speak this thing called German. From the northern areas near Denmark to the southern areas near Austria, people share a system of speech. Then, when you cross the border into Austria. Something distinct happens with people’s speech. This is a huge oversimplification.

The overlap between language and national borders is relatively new in the grand scheme of things. Languages are extremely fluid things, and the borders between nations cannot match with the borders between languages. Sometimes, speakers can share a country but have a difficult time understanding each other. Other times, speakers that live 50 kilometers apart with an international border between them can understand each other perfectly. Language has no borders and does not care about our national boundaries.

Medieval Europe didn’t have “nations” and therefore “languages”

In history, humans mostly existed in groups of a few dozen, and it is likely that they couldn’t travel far before it became difficult to understand other group’s style of speech. With agriculture settling people down, many people could only understand the people only in the nearby towns. That meant you could understand the people in your village and maybe the nearby villages, but the farther you got, the weirder people spoke. They formed dialect continuums, where Person A can understand Person B, and Persona B can understand Person C, but Person C cannot understand Person A.

Dialect continuums are very typical of earlier agricultural societies. People didn’t travel far, so people only communicated to the people in the nearby villages if they ever left their villages. Nation-states as we know them did not exist, but the language people spoke were no more or less fluid because language has no borders.

Like most things, Louis XIV started this whole thing

The surprising progenitor of a quite few of our modern trends, Louis XIV of France consolidated his nation-state, and he had to therefore consolidate the language spoken, which was less intelligible across his whole realm.

Ever since classical Rome, the descendants of those speaker slowly diverged more and more. In a process similar to biological evolution, isolated populations slowly start to build up speech changes that accumulate over time until groups that once had been speakers of the same language become totally unintelligible. As such, people in the south of Louis’s kingdom spoke something quite distant from his own language. As such, consolidation of legal codes and the erasure of local traditions was part of the process of building a stronger centralized state. Where there once was spoken Occitan or Catalan, French was slowly encouraged and local varieties discouraged. This new nation-state needed to spread the idea that your way of speech is not just another descendant of Vulgar Latin; you are speaking French wrong.

The current organization of our world with nation-states having unique cultures, which include language, is a very new concept in relation to history. Tom Nicholas made a great video on the history of the nation-state. The creation of the modern world with of rights and the public sphere and nations defined by shared features led to this new era of language where languages need to be carefully defined and maintained. Therefore, to create a nation meant to manufacture a standard variety of the language where there were only vaguely related dialects before.

Germany and Italy, late to the nation party, were also late to the language party

French is pretty centralized, and English is pretty centralized. Therefore, most European languages experienced this, right? If we look at the later members of the nation-state party, we’ll see their languages missed a large amount of time to centralize as well. Spain, Portugal, France, Russia, and Britain centralized earlier. Germany and Italy unified in the 19th century. You’ll notice that these languages have huge regional differences. That’s because they’ve only been united for around 5 generations. It takes a long time for languages to erase regionalisms. When these places have no borders, it is easier to understand the idea that language has no borders.

While people may speak German and Italian in everyday life, still a significant portion of the population might speak another intelligible language at home, that intelligibility being debatable depending on the language. A study by ISTAT in 2006 found that only 45.5% of Italians spoke only or mainly in Italian within the family.

This would be like Americans speaking American English at school and speaking Dutch at home. Italians are not a nation of immigrants. People didn’t move to the new nation of Italy; the new nation of Italy moved to the people. This tells us that, whether implicitly or explicitly, the public sphere and the participation in the nation-state encourages the abandonment of traditional local speech varieties.

Eastern European languages that did not have the same nation-building history do not have the same linguistic distinctions

If English and French have been successfully centralized, and Germany and Italian are partially on that path, Slavic languages show us the decentralized languages of Europe.

I speak Bulgarian at home. I don’t have an issue understanding anyone who was born within the borders of the Bulgarian Republic. One day, I was serving customers in my customer service job, and I heard some customers speak something I fully understood. They were discussing what coffee to buy. I butt into their conversation and said in Bulgarian, “Excuse me. Are you guys Bulgarian?” He then responded, “No, brother. Macedonian.”

He ordered fully in Macedonian, and I understood every word. Some vowels sounded different from what I was used to. When he said the number of his table, I did not understand him at all. Other than these exceptions, we communicated perfectly fine. In the same way that New Yorkers can communicate with Alabamans if both avoid some regionalisms, Bulgarians and Macedonians could communicate perfectly.

Because of historical forces that are way too complex to describe in a few paragraphs, the languages of Eastern Europe mostly did not experience the same nation-building projects that Louis XIV, Robert Walpole, or Otto von Bismarck brought to their countries. Eastern European nations switched from sphere of influence to sphere of influence, where each power influenced division rather than conscious assimilation to a greater nation. As such, Serbs can understand Croats, Slovaks can understand Czechs, and Bulgarians can understand Macedonians.

China shows us that languages can diverge for hundreds of years, but can be reunited under one dominant language in recent years

China has a similar situation to western Europe. Most of its languages (or “dialects”) descend from Middle Chinese, which was spoken in classical China. Those language diverged in isolated populations throughout the centuries to the point of being unintelligible. While many people may be within the boundaries of the nation, their speech is not identical because, again, language has no borders. To this day, the linguistic diversity in China is very impressive. However, government initiatives and advantages encourage the whole country to learn Mandarin. Recently, the Chinese version of Tiktok gave 10 minute bans to some creators for using Cantonese during livestreams. While people can still speak their local language on the street and at home, there is a trend that local varieties are disappearing from some systemic disadvantages. Younger generations are speaking Mandarin more and their local varieties less.

Looking at China, we can see how diverging languages can again converge into one of the sibling descendants. The European equivalent would be western Europe to lose their local varieties of Catalan, Occitan, Portuguese, Spanish, etc. in favor of French. This is a unique position because the abandoned and adopted languages are related. Speakers bring the local accent and some vocab preferences because there are some parallels.

#polyglot #langblr #language learning #learning language #english #history #lingustics #linguist #language

[antinonymous]

The Punk Rock in Marxist-Leninism

As far back as I can remember, I’ve always hated punk rock; the reasons why having changed significantly. I heavily identified as Right-wing throughout my childhood through early adolescence, so punk rock was a piece of culture that I quickly realized was not for me, with its far-left anarchist aesthetic. If you’d shown and explained to me something like Holiday in Cambodia I wouldn’t have cared in the slightest. Anti-fascists often forget about how the far-right rarely considers the vast and vapid categorizations of different leftists and other anti-fascist types. Anarchists are just as anti-American as Stalinists; anarchists just don’t have a plan (besides the occasional riot) so they’re more docile and easier to ignore. They’re just extra annoying and snobby. The sonic elements of punk mixed in with the political atmosphere sealed it for me. I thought this entire genre of music sounded like some twerp in class who says shit about America just to ‘piss off the system’. Childish, really.

In high school, the first punk band I didn’t immediately hate was neo-Nazi band Skrewdriver. I was introduced to them on a bus for school, with only one black kid on the whole bus, having the song White Power being shown explicitly to them. I remember referencing it to him later in conversation and he said he hated that experience. To me though? Finally, I thought, some punk rock where I can very easily say ‘well I like the music, but I don’t like their politics’ and it isn’t SJW crap. If I were to say stuff like that about other punk rock bands that’d be blasphemy, so I avoided the leftists and found more Nazi punk, where the bad politics were more obvious.

As someone who’s always been into music, my childhood had a specific opinion that I now understand to be just a simple analysis- namely, that politically left-wing music doesn’t do anything to change the system whatsoever. On an open-mic day in my high school the buses had already arrived and then my band got to play Killing in The Name. The school, the ‘system’, allotted us more time because they wanted to hear a cool song. Nobody was inspired by that song that day to think critically about the condition of militarized police in America or how the Klan’s ideology controls the majority of America’s police. I know I didn’t. Frankly, I thought putting politics in music was a waste of time Right or Left. And I found more Rightist music later on, namely in black metal.

Black metal is a mirror image of punk, if that mirror were on two ends of a horseshoe. Both started out as what we today label ‘edgy’, yet generally non-political, and then got somewhat overtaken by the far right and far left. Black metal was firmly cemented in Nazi ideology by the mid-90s with Burzum and the history of the Norwegian second wave, as well as later bands like Germany’s Absurd to solidify National Socialist Black Metal as its own genre. Then there’re wackos like Peste Noire, who, with the help of figures like Anthony Fantano, are somewhat normalized and mainstream while also having deep French nationalist roots. But what makes black metal also similar to punk is the later insurgency movements from either political side into the other genre. Nazi punk distinguishes itself not by its members being skinheads, for skinheads began as a far-left movement, but rather with aesthetics like white and red shoelaces (wrapped straight) and, of course, swastikas. In the mid/late 2010s an anti-fascist black metal scene emerged in response to the atrocities of the Obama administration and Trump’s election victory. This was spearheaded by bands like Gaylord and Neckbeard Death Camp as well as others from Bandcamp and Soundcloud. It didn’t try to distinguish itself at all, in a crypto-anti-fascism directly proselytizing. Nazi punk and anti-fascist black metal are similar in that they, like all music as we’ll be seeing, also don’t achieve anything, but are specifically trying to change the strata of their own genre’s political associations. As my own father put it, there’s only two kinds of Oi – racist and non-racist.

Left-wing black metal was obvious folly that I participated in anyway. But even when I eventually started putting personal politics into my music from 2016 through 2019, I still avoided major bands like Rage and punk rock (besides Bad Religion, which I only liked because I saw a live cover). It was actually Peste Noire who showed me the wonder of sampling in music; yet another far-right appropriation of musical technique, sadly. It was only in late 2019 and 2020 that I listened to bands like Rage and Dead Kennedys, and seeing the amount of effort they put in their messaging left me cynically giggling. Paraphrasing other commentators, music has no effect on political change no matter how radical. Far-left Marxist, Bolshevik, anarchist and Social-Democratic musical compositions have existed since the nineteenth century and were plentiful in the entirety of the 20th century, albeit with significant change after the World Wars. But music is too individualistic to be politically effective as every individual person’s preferences are different. This is how Rage and anarchist punk rock sold so well in America and how I continued to enjoy Peste Noire long after I left the Right.

My music was also inspired by industrial metal band Rammstein, and I’ve since learned that, generally speaking, politically provocative art is an integral part of industrial music generally, which easily puts off someone not paying careful attention to the music. To paraphrase Žižek, artists like Rammstein and Laibach use fascistic language and imagery in a controlled way that lifts various signs from their associations of authoritarianism, leaving them inoffensive enough to gain mainstream credibility. Case in point, Slovenia’s Laibach has caused numerous controversies over their 41-year-career with their overtly militaristic theme, prolific German lyrics, and for having been branded as dissidents by the Yugoslav government, yet they are the only foreign band that has ever performed in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. They were invited to play in 2015 to celebrate the 70-year-anniversary of the fall of imperial Japanese rule on National Liberation Day. The government would clearly know better than to invite a legitimate fascist band; in their minds that would most certainly create an immediate attempt to try to cause some type of western imperialist unrest. One would wonder why they’d invite anyone at all. But nothing malevolent came about from it; the show went fine, and clips of it are on YouTube. I won’t try to make any comment on any individual in the DPRK or anywhere else, but it’s fascinating to think of what happens when Laibach is played through North Korean speakers, interpreted by those who have few else in common with the band other than they both have experience living under a régime inspired by Marx.

It must be a different experience from, say, the experience of Anarchy in the UK by Sex Pistols as sung on North Korean karaoke by VICE journalist Sam Smith. This leads me to my current gripes with punk rock, specifically in the year 2021.

Sex Pistols are the origin of punk rock’s association with anarchism due to the song mentioned above, but they are also the origin of punk rock’s association with Nazism due to Sid Vicious’ use of a swastika t-shirt. This is no paradox. Both are a result of Liberal nihilism, of having no true political leaning other than blind offensiveness and ideological motivation without one ever needing sincerity in belief. Either that or punk rock bands are explicitly Liberal/conservative, which is a discourse I remember from my childhood. Post-90s punk was too commercial, liberal, gay, et cetera, with bands such as Green Day having been seen as a perversion of the solidarity of the mostly cisgender heteronormative anarchist community of people who actually listen to punk rock. John Lydon is an open Trump-supporter. After the far-right January 6th attack on the Capitol, Dead Kennedys retweeted many Liberal commentators and politicians, including Republicans Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger. I see not a problem with individual people and artists but a problem with punk rock as artistic expression; it has terminal hollow conformity. Overall, its association with petit bourgeois ideology leaves punk rock with little to give it credibility. Punk rock has always had an insincere, two-faced nature. ‘Punk’s not dead’ is the anti-fascist equivalent of ‘return to tradition’…or is it anti-fascist? Depends on who’s saying it, where’s being said, and who hears it.

Where to turn? Marxist-Leninists (and sometimes even anarchists) will argue that social bureaucracies such as Cuba, the People’s Republic of China, Vietnam and the DPRK provide an alternative to American global homogeny. Considering the American military spent over $700,000,000,000 on its military last year, and that many bases are specifically placed around those listed countries, their arguments aren’t entirely unconvincing. They also argue that because Marxist-Leninist politicians provided industrialization and progress for their nations without what Marxist-Leninists would personally term “imperialist war”, they should be praised, as well as the fact that many of the problems commonly associated with those countries are explicitly from American intervention to stop ‘the spread of Marxism’ and to keep them subordinated to western authority. However, as Bordiga writes in Characteristic Theses of the Party, the integral realization of socialism within the limits of one country is inconceivable and the socialist transformation cannot be carried out without insuccess and momentary set-backs. The defence of the proletarian regime against the ever-present dangers of degeneration is possible only if the proletarian State is always solidary with the international struggle of the working class of each country against its own bourgeoisie, its State and its army; this struggle permits of no respite even in wartime. This co-ordination can only be secured if the world communist Party controls the politics and programme of the States where the working class has vanquished.

Am I arguing for left unity, left solidarity, the whole “anarchists and Marxist-Leninists are going for the same communist goal” argument? No, I’m not talking about that. This has been said before but, historically speaking, there’s usually only one correct way to pilot a vehicle and thousands of wrong ways. But I’m talking about music. And I bring up Marxist-Leninism for what could be seen as a superficial reason; that the potency of Musikbolschewismus is greater than the potency of traditional anarchist punk rock. If we’re just talking about music to ‘piss people off’, which is what punk rock culturally amounts to, punk rock could be Marxist-Leninist in that that ideology has more of the nihilistic punk rock mentality than any band you could name. Because Marxist-Leninism can indeed be quite nihilistic, with Russian Bolshevik minority rule in foreign countries paralleling the worst aspects of American imperialism and its related apologia. As for industrialization, the USSR demobilized its military to a lesser extent than other European countries, organized more strictly than NATO. Their industrialization in question was related to impersonal and heavily regulated bureaucratic trade, the aforementioned occupation of eastern Europe and elsewhere, and warcraft: firearms, lightweight tanks, and thousands of nuclear weapons. In 2021, the history of Marxist-Leninist music is both far more potent and plentiful than anarchist punk rock; if a bit old-school, boringly classical, and used in the justification of unjust countries.

What I’m trying to say is this: what is the difference between an English band that wears swastika and MAGA t-shirts singing about how anarchy is good and another band that wears sickle and hammer shirts singing about how the USSR and the PRC are good? Both are nonsense but the latter is sincere with what they say… or are they? Considering punk rock’s edgy, yet ultimately cowardly and insincere anti-authority outlook, I can’t help but wonder what would be if Marxist-Leninism were to ever embrace the potentiality of its status and flaws and make annoying, loud guitar music. It wouldn’t be hard since, comparatively, the bad politics are more obvious. And once it gets started, it’d create a new cycle of the entirety of political thought in music; easily being able to be superior to Right-Libertarian punk rock and all the washed-up bands of the 70s-00s.

What’s the actual transgressive music we have today? Rap music has been mostly dominated by black Americans since the 80s, with a lot of rappers now being women. It is held to a different esteem than even the antisemitic ‘satanic panic’ of the 80s against heavy metal, since legal cases referring to rap lyrics are not unheard of and can even lead to conviction in modern times. It is much closer to the struggles of the global afro-diasporic community than with European writers from 80+ years ago. Punk rock never had, never could, and never will, have a scene of that calibre.

In conclusion, I hope I have provided a cynical pseudo-rehabilitation of punk rock through the example of Marxist-Leninism in a specific manner related to the overall creation of and interpretation of music, which is an important piece of international culture. I know Marxist-Leninist States to be corrupt and are not socialist, but to the eyes of an American, and to the ears of the average punk rock normie, Marxist-Leninism is just as anti-US government as the anarchists, only scarier, because they actually have a plan! So why can’t it be punk? The PRC’s State-sanctioned abductions are certainly not what Bordiga had in mind in regards to a proletarian government being against its own bourgeoisie. Internationality is the way forward. But it almost sounds like it’s against the system if one has that kind of understanding of ‘the system’. Who’s to say there isn’t an obscure 80s punk demo labelled Kidnapping Billionaires somewhere? Punk rock is nothing more than vapid noise to piss of conservatives. That’s it. It has no heart, spirit nor philosophy. The PRC even saying they would like socialism is too far for American conservative wormpeople, and legitimate reasons to criticize the PRC and other social bureaucracies get overshadowed by imperialist greed and racism. Music is not nearly the kind of tool of radicalism Zack de la Rocha thought it was, but with the internationality of Laibach we see it can do more than one can normally expect. It all depends on whether people can distinguish/separate the instrumentation from the proselytization.

#punks not dead #yes it is thank goodness #writing shit #music shit #nazis #racism #black metal #industrial #LAIBACH #rage against the machine

[alexsmitposts]

The Secret Agenda of the World Bank and IMF The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) work hand in glove – smoothly. Not only are they regularly lending huge sums of money to horror regimes around the world, but they blackmail poor nations into accepting draconian conditions imposed by the west. In other words, the WB and the IMF are guilty of the most atrocious human rights abuses. You couldn’t tell, when you read above the entrance of the World Bank the noble phrase, “Our Dream is World Free of Poverty”. To this hypocrisy I can only add, ”…And we make sure it will just remain a dream.” This says both, the lie and the criminal nature of the two International Financial Institutions, created under the Charter of the United Nations, but instigated by the United States. The front of these institutions is brilliant. What meets the eye, are investments in social infrastructure, in schools, health systems, basic needs like drinking water, sanitation – even environmental protection – over all “Poverty Alleviation”, i.e. A World Free of Poverty. But how fake this is today and was already in the 1970’s and 1980’s is astounding. Gradually people are opening their eyes to an abject reality, of exploitation and coercion and outright blackmail. And that, under the auspices of the United Nations. What does it tell you about the UN system? In what hands are the UN? – The world organization was created in San Francisco, California, on 24 October 1945, just after WWII, by 51 nations, committed to maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations and promoting social progress, better living standards and human rights. The UN replaced the League of Nations which was part of the Peace Agreement after WWI, the Treaty of Versailles. It became effective on 10 January 1920, was headquartered in Geneva Switzerland, with the purpose of disarmament, preventing war through collective security, settling disputes between countries, through negotiation diplomacy and improving global welfare. In hindsight it is easy to see that the entire UN system was set up as a hypocritical farce, making people believe that their mighty leaders only wanted peace. These might leaders were all westerners; the same that less than 20 years after the creation of the noble League of Nations, started World War II. *** This little introduction provides the context for what was eventually to become the UN-backed outgrowth for global theft, for impoverishing nations, around the world, for exploitation of people, for human rights abuses and for shoveling huge amounts of assets from the bottom, from the people, to the oligarchy, the ever-smaller corporate elite – the so-called Bretton Woods Institutions. In July 1944 more than 700 delegates of 44 Allied Nations (allied with the winners of WWII) met at the Mount Washington Hotel, situated in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, United States, to regulate the international monetary and financial order after WWII. Let’s be sure, this conference was carried out under the auspices of the United States, the self-declared winner of WWII, and from now on forward the master over the financial order of the world – which was not immediately visible, an agenda hidden in plain sight. The IMF was officially created to ‘regulate’ the wester, so-called convertible currencies, those that subscribed to apply the rules of the new gold standard, i.e. US$ 35 / Troy Ounce (about 31.1 grams). Note that the gold standard, although applicable equally to 44 allied nations was linked to the price of gold nominated in US dollars, not based on a basket of the value of the 44 national currencies. This already was enough reason to question the future system. And how it will play out. But nobody questioned the arrangement. Hard to believe though that of all these national economists, none dared question the treacherous nature of the gold-standard set-up. The World Bank, or the Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), was officially set up to administer the Marshall Plan for the Reconstruction of war-destroyed Europe. The Marshall Plan was a donation by the United Stated and was named for U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall, who proposed it in 1947. The plan gave $13.2 billion in foreign aid to European countries that had been devastated physically and economically by World War II. It was to be implemented from 1948 to 1952 which of course was much too short a time, and stretched into the early 1960s. In today’s terms the Marshall plan would be worth about 10 time more, or some US$ 135 billion. The Marshall Plan was and still is a Revolving Fund, paid back by the countries in question, so that it could be relent. The Marshall Plan money was lent out multiple times and was therefore very effective. The European counterpart to the World Bank-administered Marshall Fund was a newly to be created bank set up under the German Ministry of Finance, The German Bank for Reconstruction and Development (KfW – German acronym for Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau”). KfW, as the World Bank’s European counterpart still exists and dedicates itself mostly to development projects in the Global South, often in cooperation with the World Bank. Today there is still a special Department within KfW that deals exclusively with Marshall Plan Fund money. These funds are used for lending to poor southern regions in Europe, and also to prop up Eastern European economies, and they were used especially to integrate former East-Germany into today’s “Grand Germany”. Two elements of the Marshall Plan are particularly striking and noteworthy. First, the reconstruction plan created a bind, a dependence between the US and Europe, the very Europe that was largely destroyed by the western allied forces, while basically WWII was largely won by the Soviet Union, the huge sacrifices of the USSR – with an estimated 25 to 30 million deaths. So, the Marshall Plan was also designed as a shield against communist Russia, i.e. the USSR. While officially the Soviet Union was an ally of the western powers, US, UK, and France, in reality the communist USSR was an arch-enemy of the west, especially the United States. With the Marshall Plan money, the US bought Europe’s alliance, a dependence that has not ended to this day. The ensuing Cold War against the Soviet Union – also all based on flagrant lies, was direct testimony for another western propaganda farce – which to this day, most Europeans haven’t grasped yet. Second, The US imposition of a US-dollar based reconstruction fund, was not only creating a European dollar dependence, but was also laying the ground work for a singular currency, eventually to invade Europe – what we know today, has become the Euro. The Euro is nothing but the foster child of the dollar, as it was created under the same image as the US-dollar – it is a fiat currency, backed by nothing. The United Europe, or now called the European Union – was never really a union. It was never a European idea, but put forward by US Secret Services in disguise of a few treacherous European honchos. And every attempt to create a United Europe, a European Federation, with a European Constitution, similar to the United States, was bitterly sabotaged by the US, mostly through the US mole in the EU, namely the UK. The US didn’t want a strong Europe, both economically and possibly over time also militarily (pop. EU 450 million, vs US pop. 330 million; 2019 EU GDP US$ 20.3 trillion equivalent, vs US GDP US$ 21.4 trillion. Most economists would agree that a common currency for a loose group of countries has no future, is not sustainable. In comes the European Central Bank (ECB), also a creation inspired by the FED. The ECB has really no Central Bank function. It is rater a watch dog. Because each EU member country has still her own Central Bank, though with a drastically reduced sovereignty. Out of the currently 27 EU members only 19 are part of the Euro-zone. Those countries not part of the Eurozone, i.e. Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Sweden – and more, have preserved their sovereign financial policy and do not depend on the ECB. This means, had Greece opted out of the Eurozone when they were hit with the 2008 / 2009 manufactured “crisis”, Greece would now be well on her way to full recovery. They would not have been subject to the whims and dictate of the IMF, the infamous troika, European Commission (EC), ECB and IMF, but could have chosen to arrange their debt internally, as most debt was internal debt, no need to borrow from abroad. In a 2015 bailout referendum, the Greek population voted overwhelmingly against the bailout, meaning against the new gigantic debt. However, the then Greek President Tsipras, went ahead as if the referendum had never taken place and approved the huge bailout despite almost 70% of the popular vote against it. This is a clear indication of fraud, that no fair play was going on. Tsipras and / or his families may have been coerced to accept the bailout – or else. We may never know, the true reason why Tsipras sold his people, the wellbeing of the Greek people to the oligarchs behind the IMF and World Bank – and put them into abject misery, with the highest unemployment in Europe, rampant poverty and skyrocketing suicide rates. Greece may serve as an example on how other EU countries may fare if they don’t “behave” – meaning adhere to the unwritten golden rules of obedience to the international money masters. This is scary. *** And now, in these times of covid, it is relatively easy. Poor countries, particularly in the Global South, already indebted by the plandemic, are increasing their foreign debt in order to provide their populations with basic needs. Or so they make you believe. Much of the debt accumulated by developing countries is domestic or internal debt, like the debt of the Global North. It doesn’t really need foreign lending institutions to wipe out local debt. Or have you seen one of the rich Global North countries borrowing from the IMF or the World Bank to master their debt? – Hardly. So why would the Global South fall for it? Part corruption, part coercion, and partly direct blackmail. – Yes, blackmail, one of the international biggest crimes imaginable, being committed by the foremost international UN-chartered financial institutions, the WB and the IMF. For example, the whole world is wondering how come that an invisible enemy, a corona virus hit all 193 UN member countries at once, so that Dr. Tedros, Director General of WHO, declares on 11 March a pandemic – no reason whatsoever since there were only 4,617 cases globally – but the planned result was a total worldwide lockdown on 16 March 2020. No exceptions. There were some countries who didn’t take it so seriously, like Brazil, Sweden, Belarus, some African countries, like Madagascar and Tanzania – developed their own rules and realized that wearing masks did more harm than good, and social distancing would destroy the social fabric of their cultures and future generations. But the satanic deep dark state didn’t want anything to do with “independent” countries. They all had to follow the dictate from way above, from the Gates, Rockefellers, Soroses, et al elite, soon to be reinforced by Klaus Schwab, serving as the chief henchman of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Suddenly, you see in Brazil, a drastic surge in new “cases”, no questions asked, massive testing, no matter that the infamous PCR tests are worthless according to most serious scientists (only sold and corrupted scientists, those paid by the national authorities, would still insist on the RT-PCR tests). Bolsonaro gets sick with the virus and the death count increases exponentially – as the Brazilian economy falls apart. Coincidence? In comes the World Bank and / or the IMF, offering massive help mostly debt relief, either as grant or as low interest loans. But with massive strings attached: you must follow the rules laid out by WHO, you must follow the rules on testing on vaccination, mandatary vaccination – if you conform to these and other country-specific rules, like letting western corporations tap your natural resources – you may receive, WB and IMF assistance. Already in May 2020 the World Bank Group announced its emergency operations to fight COVID-19 had already reached 100 developing countries – home to 70% of the world’s population with lending of US$ 160 billion-plus. This means, by today, 6 months later and in the midst of the “Second Wave” the number of countries and the number of loans or “relief’ grants must have increased exponentially, having reached close to the 193 UN member countries. Which explains how all, literally all countries, even the most objecting African countries, like Madagascar and Tanzania, among the poorest of the poor, have succumbed to the coercion or blackmail of the infamous Bretton Woods Institutions. These institutions have no quarrels in generating dollars, as the dollar is fiat money, not backed by any economy – but can be produced literally from hot air and lent to poor countries, either as debt or as grant. These countries, henceforth and for pressure of the international financial institutions will forever become dependent on the western masters of salvation. Covid-19 is the perfect tool for the financial markets to shovel assets from the bottom to the top. In order to maximize the concentration of the riches on top, maybe one or two or even three new covid waves may be necessary. That’s all planned, The WEF has already foreseen the coming scenarios, by its tyrannical book “Covid-19 – The Great Reset”. It’s all laid out. And our western intellectuals read it, analyze it, criticize it, but we do not shred it apart – we let it stand, and watch how the word moves in the Reset direction. And the plan is dutifully executed by the World Bank and the IMF – all under the guise of doing good for the world. What’s different from the World Bank and IMF’s role before the covid plandemic? – Nothing. Just the cause for exploitation, indebtment, enslavement. When covid came along it became easy. Before then and up to the end of 2019, developing countries, mostly rich in natural resources of the kind the west covets, oil, gold, copper and other minerals, such as rare earths, would be approached by the WB, the IMF or both. They could receive debt relief, so-called structural adjustment loans, no matter whether or not they really needed such debt. Today these loans come in all forms, shapes and colors, literally like color-revolutions, for instance, often as budget support operations – I simply call then blank checks – nobody controls what’s happening with the money. However, the countries have to restructure their economies, rationalizing their public services, privatizing water, education, health services, electricity, highways, railroads – and granting foreign concessions for the exploitation of natural resources. Most of this fraud – fraud on “robbing” national resources, passes unseen by the public at large, but countries become increasingly dependent on the western paymasters – peoples’ and institutional sovereignty is gone. There is always a corrupter and a corruptee. Unfortunately, they are still omni-present in the Global South. Often, for a chunk of money, the countries are forced to vote with the US for or against certain UN resolutions which are of interest to the US. Here we go – the corrupt system of the UN. And of course, when the two Bretton Woods organizations were created in 1944, the voting system decided is not one country, one vote as in theory it is in the UN, but the US has an absolute veto right in both organizations. Their voting rights are calculated in function of their capital contribution which derives from a complex formula, based on GDP and other economic indicators. In both institutions the US voting right and also veto right is about 17%. Both institutions have 189 member countries. *** Covid has laid bare, if it wasn’t already before, how these “official” international, UN-chartered Bretton Woods financial institutions are fully integrated in the UN system – in which most of the countries still trust, maybe for lack of anything better. Question, however: What is better, a hypocritical corrupt system that provides the “appearance”, or the abolition of a dystopian system and the courage to create a new one, under new democratic circumstances and with sovereign rights by each participating country?

[michael-weinstein]

A Christmas Post

Well, merry Christmas I guess. As an Israeli-Jew, I celebrate Hannukah each winter (it never has a fixed date in the Greogrian calendar) and never celebrated Christmas. That is, I never got a chance, because I'm actually quite interested and curious in American and European celebrations of Christmas. As a child, I was enthralled by "The Nutcracker", and less by the choreography, rather than Tchaikovsky's music. Even though I saw only one performance live so far (and that was when I knew much about it and was slightly older, so it didn't really make an impact on me), I have seen back then 2 productions: a 1977 production of the American Ballet Theater, choreographed by Mikhail Baryshnikov, starring him and Gelsey Kirkland. I must admit I haven't seen that one in a very long while, and I actually don't remember much of it, so I can't really say how much I like it, except that it is quite of a "traditional" Nutcracker so to speak. The music is provided by the National Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Kenneth Schermerhorn, some of the numbers are cut.

Much more memorable is the 1999 production of the Berlin State Ballet. This one, choreographed by Patrice Bart, is one of those "reinterpetations", which entered the opera world by the '70s, if not the '50s (the Wieland Wagner productions at Bayreuth, for example). It's one of those things, which made sense to do only in Berlin (both the company and its building, the State Opera, were part of what was then called East Berlin). This one puts revolution and psychology to the fore, and I will leave the rest to John Phillips from MusicWeb International:

Patrice Bart placed a prologue before the ballet [i.e. after the overture]. Its purpose was to elucidate the story in which Marie was abducted as a young child. Russian revolutionaries had attacked Marie and her aristocratic family and killed her father. The mother survived but went missing, leaving the traumatized little girl to believe that she lives in an imaginary land of ice and snow. She was adopted by the Stahlbaum family, but there she does not feel happy [...] She is not a 'normal' child [...] carefree and happy on Christmas Eve; the trauma will not leave her. This is where the wondrous figure of Drosselmeyer comes into the story. Drosselmeyer knows of Marie’s history. He intends to lead her back to her mother, so he brings the Nutcracker to life and reconciles Marie with her past. [...] [T]he Nutcracker is not a Christmas present from Drosselmeyer but a toy which she has always carried with her since before the abduction. The wooden puppet, whose uniform awakens memories of her father, is the catalyst for Marie’s renewed confrontation with the gruesome event in the dream — therapeutically speaking it is the first step towards becoming aware, towards healing.

Whatever you may think of the concept, it is superbly danced, but I will like to put your attention to the music itself. Most ballet orchestras will usually seem to have the orchestra playing Tchaikovsky's dramatic music (it is dramatic at least in the first act) rather lifeless and mechanical (of which the production mentioned above might be faulty), but this isn't the case if you're having the Staatskapelle Berlin and Daniel Barenboim in the pit. Barenboim seems to accentuate well how the music: a. has really strong connections with the composer's symphonies, and b. how much Tchaikovsky was inspired by Liszt and Wagner, even in what for some people would be seemingly unimportant music. Again to quote Phillips: "[W]e have a superb orchestra [...] playing as if their very lives depended upon it. Even where Barenboim slows the tempo down to suit the choreography, there is a passion and sonority in the playing". Unfortunately, this production is not available online for viewing (apart from a few excerpts from the later parts of the ballet), but you can buy it online.

From here on, I quite liked Nutcracker, and felt always rather disappointed when, looking at the discography at the Tchaikovsky Research website, there were barely any recordings by Austro-German orchestras (I quite like hearing music played by these kinds of orchestras). I apparently had, lying around, the 1998 recording by Valery Gergiev and the Kirov (alias Mariinsky) Orchestra. Listening to a few excerpts now, in retrospect, it seems a bit too fast, or even skating over the surface. But, as with Barenboim, there is honest feeling and passion to the music. Later, I was also given the full score of the ballet (easy to get online, Dover reprint), and it's quite full of markings right now.

In elementary school, some of my friends among the classmates were of Russian origin (more than a million of former Soviet Jews have emigrated during the early '90s), and as a consequence they didn't go to school on 1 January, because of Novy God (it's just like Christmas, only more pagan than Christian. The role of Santa Claus is filled by Grandfather Frost). Yet in recent years, I'm much more interested in - obviously - the German-speaking Christmas traditions. There are some traditional Christmas carols which are originally in German, and I'm going to talk about one of them right now.

My favourite Christmas song is Stille Nacht (Silent Night in English, but I will practically keep referring to the original German title), and it's one of the most famous Christmas songs (Bing Crosby's 1935 rendition is reported to be the fourth best-selling single of all time). My favourite performers are, however, the Vienna Boys' Choir (Wiener Sängerknaben). They recorded Stille Nacht quite of a number of times, as they released many Christmas albums over the years. The 1990 recording includes all of the six stanzas, and can sound quite mundane on repetition, even if you're able to appreciate the German lyrics. Look for some of the shorter recordings, yet this longer one has a particular dark timbre that I like more than the crystal bright one from the other ones.

But it's time to leave the holiday coziness, and shatter it alla Mahler into pieces. The first example is the rendition of Simon and Garfunkel, recorded in 1966, and it's typical of its time. On one channel, the duo sings the carol, while on the other, a news reporter announces the "7 o'clock news", obviously pessimistic and hope-drowning. Even though I'm about to show a way in which this dissonance is - in my opinion - better portrayed, Paul and Artie should not be easily dismissed, and their take on this carol is original and fresh in its own right.

In 1978, Alfred Schnittke wrote his "Stille Nacht", reportedly as a Christmas card to his friend, the violinist Gidon Kremer, for violin and piano. That probably tops all other Christmas cards in irony and hate-of-kitsch, so to speak. This Stille Nacht is full with dissonances, is creepy, cringy and actually makes Christmas sound more as if Halloween didn't yet understand that it was time to go already. Yet there it also makes the piece more humorus. When I played this to my dad for the first time, a few weeks ago, he laughed so hard, that I had to stop in the middle, because I was afraid he will run out of oxygen. He then told me that it was one of the most funny things he has heard in years. So it can be a good Christmas joke, but you do need to put it in some context. Schnittke, a Soviet of Jewish origin, was held in contempt by the Soviet system for being such a "problematic" composer, so to speak. Yet there is also not only light to be shed on the personal, but also the historic. When Kremer and his pianist wife Elena (currently Barenboim's wife) premiered the piece in Austria, it caused a scandal. By 1978 Austria, as well as Germany, were tainted by the years and crimes of Nazism, and after the catastrophe of two world wars, with the threat of a third, it didn't seem that anyone - either in Austria or Germany or anywhere else, for that matter - could believe - willingly or otherwise - that the idyll offered by "Stille Nacht" could become reality. A "Stille Nacht" for our time perhaps? Not a single one, as mentioned above, but in my opinion the main one. Gidon and Elena Kremer, shortly after the premiere recorded the piece. Schnittke, however, revised the piece a bit later. This is presented with a score in a performance by Mateja Marinkovic and Linn Hendry. Yet the former recording makes more of the irony and dark humor, inherent in the piece.

So, as this day comes to a close, try to enjoy or chill for your last moments of the last Christmas of the decade.

(Originally posted: 25 December 2019)

#tchaikovsky #nutcracker #daniel barenboim #valery gergiev #silent night #stille nacht #vienna boys choir #simon and garfunkel #alfred schnittke #gidon kremer

[dew-line]

So, here goes...

I have been asked to comment on Sweden’s handling of the Corona Virus/Covid-19 pandemic and why Sweden has opted to go a different way from the rest of Europe and our immediate neighbors and, frankly, most of the countries in the world that have experienced an outbreak of the virus. 

Let me first begin by saying that this is written by someone who is not an epidemiologist, nor in no way even remotely associated with any medical profession. This is my interpretation and shall in no way what so ever be taken at a weight even slightly near the official information of the Swedish government or Folkhälsoinstitutet (the “peoples health institute” is the direct translation) the government organization that is responsible for handling the current crisis. Official information is available HERE (in English). 

As I write this (April 11, 7p.m) the current statistics are as follows: Confirmed number of infected in Sweden: 10 151 Confirmed deaths: 887 People currently in intensive care: 774 Source: Folkhälsomyndigheten (updated April 11, 14.02) In case anyone is interested in the total spread of contamination and of deaths over the country I will add a picture at the end of this post. Now, let’s get on to the topic proper.

Early on in the decision was made to fokus on protecting the risk groups in the Swedish society – meaning that protecting the elderly and the sick was the number one focus on the plan to battle the virus. People above the age of 70 were told to self isolate and only go out to get the essentials. Everyone were encouraged to not visit the elderly in order to keep the risk of infecting them as low as possible. At the same time everyone that showed even the slightest symptoms: sniffles, a headache, a sore throat – where told to go into self isolation until they had been free of symptoms for at least two days. We were encouraged to help each other in those situations, friends and family doing some shopping and delivering groceries and essentials, or just doing online shopping. At the same time the government issued a decree that all higher education – meaning High school and university – education that is not mandatory, should be conducted as distance education. However, schools in year 1 to 9 were still to be open as usual (and still are). The reason for keeping the schools open for the younger children is that 1, children are not a primary carrier of the virus and 2, as a mean to make sure that essential functions in society will have staff – primarily the health care sector. If the schools close down then the parents will have to stay at home in order to care for them. 

Where Sweden has differed from the rest of the world in the most obvious way is that we have not gone into a full lockdown mode. We are still, if we feel healthy and don’t have any symtoms, encouraged to go out and to meet friends, go to restaurants and the like – one of the reasons is that we need to have a slow, semi controlled spread in society in order to create a herd immunity – the people that are currently moving around are primarily those that are not in the risk groups – they will, if they catch the virus, get a mild infection – or, as in my case, a semi mild infection, but they will not need to visit the hospital or get medical treatment other than which you can get from online consultations. This is important to slow down, but not to stop, the spread of the virus in society at large. If we completely stop the spread the risk is that it will come back again, and at force, as soon as the quarantine is lifted – it is better, according to the Swedish authorities, to allow the infection to spread at a slow pace and create a wider immunity whilst keeping the groups that are at risk of needing intensive care or facing death if infected as safe as possible. 

Many companies have started different work from home programs letting their employees do just that, it seems to work well. The company that run the public transport has a campaign out now that states that “if you are not an essential worker, please don’t travel with us right now”. People are complying. We are still out and about, we take walks, we visit friends – sometimes even go out for a beer. But in general it is, as expected, much more sombre. We stay at home – because we do not want to risk to get infected or accidentally spreading it to someone we love or care about – or someone we don’t know. 

Other actions that have been taken is that there is a limit on the size of groups of people that can gather. It started out at a 500 person limit, which has now been lowered to 50 people. We are no longer allowed to order alcohol at bars, it is only table service allowed, and the tables must be “well spaced”. Right now the authorities are out and checking that restaurants follow the guidelines. If they don’t they will be forced to close. In general I would say that people do follow the guidelines. We are generally fairly well behaved like that. The Germans of the north, we are. We have trust in the machine – which is the reason why the person that is in the lime light during this trying time is not the King nor the prime minister, but rather a middle level management bureaucrat: Anders Tegnell – the chief Epidemiologist at Folkhälsoinstitutet. 

The reason for this trust in the machine depends on many things I’d say. We have historically had a large state with a fairly large control system – the unofficial motto of the Social Democrat party has been “trust in the state, we will make it right”. Another aspect is that we have not really been in a war since 1809 (we don’t count the Norwegian campaign of 1814 because: Norway). We have not needed the consolidating power of a church or a sovereign to help us through trying times, and times of national crisis – as so many countries experienced during the 20th century. Sweden came through the wars unscathed, for good and for bad. And it has made us into a people of secular individualist with a strong belief in a all knowing state. Silly paradoxes we are.

So, now to the important stuff: has this tactic worked. Yes and no, I am sad to say. The goal of keeping the number of cases that need intensive care and hospitalization down as to not over crowd the hospitals have worked. There is still ample room at the intensive care units around the country. The staff are working like madmen and they deserve all the recognition that they get for their hard work. Unfortunately the authorities did not quite count on the virus getting such a grip on the treatment homes for the elderly as it has. There has been a fairly wide spread of the disease in nursing homes across the country, leading to a large number of deaths. Also, the information about the disease in languages other than Swedish were slow to get spread leading to an unusually large representation of hospitalizations and deaths of people with other ethnical backgrounds; especially the Syrian/Assyrian-Swedish population and the Somali-Swedish population have been hard struck – many of the cases being linked to large weddings and funerals that occurred just before the pandemic started. The availability of information has been bettered since then, but naturally that is of very little comfort when loved ones are getting sick and dying. 

Another tragedy is that is not limited to Sweden alone is that the people that are most sensitive to this disease are the elderly – and don’t think that I am putting anyone infront of another, but I have to say a particular part of this tragedy is that with our elder our history die – we have seen a large number of holocaust survivors pass the last days and weeks here in Sweden, and I am sure that we are not the only country where this has happened, and with them the voice of a horrible past die forever. We must be aware that this tragedy does not just strike us personally, when a loved one dies – but also as a human collective when the voices of the past slip away from us. 

We are in a time now where it is more important than ever to remember. 

As promised: a map. The left column is number of infected, the right column is reported deaths. Oh, and I should mention that we do not have mandatory testing for corona virus in Sweden. The decision was taken early on to only test the ones that were in need of hospitalization. So the number of infected are much likely higher.

If you have any questions, please send them to me and I will try to answer them, but please remember: I know nothing, really. 

Update: I got a question about the age of the people that have died in Covid-19 in Sweden to date, and I did a quick search and found the following numbers on the official website (in Swedish): 1-9 yo: 0 10-19 yo: 0 20-29 yo: 3 30-39 yo: 2 40-49 yo: 4 50-59 yo: 34 60-69 yo: 64 70-79 yo: 228 80-89 yo: 362 90+: 190

Here is a picture of the live update page linked above with a quick English translation of the key items in case you want to check the page out for yourself.

#the dew line #corona virus #coronavirus #corona #covid #covid-19 #remember #sweden

[abbeysobelman]

Mon premier mois en France!

“She said, ‘The title of the film is in English, so I’m not going to say it because Abbey will make fun of me.’“ - A friend translating what my French teacher said to the class.

This weekend marks the end of my first month in France! It’s crazy, if I’m honest, to think that an entire month has already passed by. I feel like I got here last week, but I also feel like I’ve been here forever. The thought of having to leave already makes me sad. 

It’s been a good month, but busy. I’m slowly getting a hang of the school system. It’s stressful! They don’t have quizzes, and there’s hardly any homework, so all of our grades depend on tests that we seem to have almost once a week in every class. My teachers are still very understanding, which I’m happy about. I’m worried the grace period they’ve given me is going to end soon and then I’ll really be screwed. We’ll see. Other than that, everything else has been going really well! I still have friends (thank god) and they’ve already made plans to take me to Mcdonalds (or McDo, as they call it) once it reopens, and to show me their favorite places in Paris once we’re allowed. We do the best we can to tell stories with our limited understanding of each other’s language, but I’m slowly learning. My friends have started to teach me new words and grammar rules that I’ve been picking up each day. I’ve also just slowly been learning general concepts that I pick up from their speech. Like the way that they have three different ways to say Ok that aren’t interchangeable. Or the way that they say “Oh la la” in the same way we say “Omg”. 

One of the biggest lessons I think I’m going to take away from my time here is that things probably are not as big a deal as you think. I tend to have a lot of anxiety, I overthink and get anxious about things I have yet to do. But while I’ve been here, I’ve learned that you really can’t get too hung up on stuff, or you’re going to freak yourself out. For example, last friday night when I came home from school, my host mom told me “Tomorrow, you can go to the neighbor’s house and make cakes with their daughter, they invited you over”. Obviously this was entirely terrifying as I had only met these people once and they spoke pretty much no english at all, but I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t overthink and worry about what would happen. I told myself “Well, I guess I’m going to the neighbors house tomorrow to make cake”, and that was that. If you let anxiety control your life, you’re never going to accomplish anything. If had let my anxiety make choices for me, I never would have stepped foot in my school. i never would have approached people or tried to talk to them. I never would have gone to the neighbors house and befriended their daughter. I never would’ve taken a bus and walked 4 kilometers up a hill from the neighboring town. You just have to roll with the punches and hope for a good outcome.

Speaking of the neighbors, it actually went really well! They are good friends with my host parents, and have a son my age and a daughter who’s 14. The girl, ChÏme, and I got on really well. We talked for a few hours in her bedroom, me in broken French and her in broken English with the help of Google Translate if we needed it. We also made chocolate cake (gateau au chocolat), it was really good. We have more plans to hang out in the future, since our houses are less than a minutes walk from each other. Yay to making friends!

I’ve tried to keep of list of weird things I’ve picked up on since I’ve been here (I tend to forget), so here it goes: 

No one carries water bottles, and there are no public water fountains anywhere, including schools and shopping malls. No one really drinks water (in fact, I think they think I’m weird for how much I drink). At school, if you need a drink, you cup your hands under the bathroom sink and hope it doesn’t get on your shirt.

Speaking of school, there’s no toilet seats in the school bathrooms.

There doesn’t really seem to be a rule about what teachers can and can’t say or show to the class. My english teacher (a native french guy who spent a year studying in Northern Ireland. He has a very strong Irish accent) loves to say “What the hell” when someone is doing something weird. And he’s dropped the f bomb a few times. All in good humor, of course. In my speciality English class (I’ll explain that in a minute) we’re studying The Handmaid’s Tale - both the book and the series. So far we’ve watched the first two episodes, containing nudity, swearing, and just about anything that parents in America would complain about if teachers showed this to their students. It’s honestly really nice to be able to do and say things without having to make sure it’s “appropriate”, because in all honestly this is what the real world is like and it’s dumb to have to censor something just because someone says a “bad word”.

When we enter class, we’re not allowed to sit until the teacher allows us, and when a member of administration enters the room, everyone must stand until we are dismissed by the teacher. If the door to the room is closed, you must knock and wait for permission to enter. The relationships between student and teacher is very professional, and much for regulated than it seems to be in America.

Grades here are nothing to be secretive about, and the whole idea of “FERPA” doesn’t exist at all. Everyone knows and shares everyone’s grades. When teachers hand back our exames, the announce your grade and critique you to the whole class. It’s probably so you can learn from other’s mistakes, but it’s honestly a bit terrifying when you have no idea what the teacher is saying to you.

And lastly, on a completely different topic, it costs almost 2000 euros and many months of training to get your driver's license. Because of this, a lot of people drive without licenses or insurance. A lot of teens also have no intentions of ever getting their license (you have to be 18 to drive), and instead rely on public transport. 

So, back to the “Speciality English class”, because the French school system works a bit differently. Highschool (”école”) is your last three years of schooling, so the equivalent of sophomore, junior, and senior year. I’m in première (literally means “first”, the french system for years works backwards) which is the equivalent of junior year, and seniors would be in terminale. When you reach première, you are required to choose a more specific course of study depending on what you plan to do in the future. Certain classes are required, like French, English, history, and science, but everything else is up to you. You have to choose three specialities (”spécialités”), which include math, science (chemistry or biology), english, philosophy, history, geopolitics, and two languages (from Latin, Greek, Spanish, and German). It might seem confusing, because some of the required classes are also speciality classes. Essentially, everyone has three hours of English language class each week, but if you choose English as a speciality, you have an extra four hours of English literature each week. The same goes for the other classes as well. I have three hours of history each week, but my friends with a history specialite have an extra two hours of history a week. Another odd thing is that classes like math aren’t required. Everyone takes chemistry and biology (and some have it as a speciality), but not everyone is required to take math. It’s honestly a really complex system that even I don’t completely understand yet, so please feel free to ask me more questions about it so I can try to explain it better.

And speaking of English class, we are currently learning about The Troubles of Ireland, including bloody sunday. You can infer that of course, of course, we had to talk about Sunday Bloody Sunday by U2. We spent two full hours analyzing the lyrics, the sound, and the music video of the song to “help us better understand what happened”. I’m sure my father will be very happy to hear about this. We also read a poem (in English, obviously) about Bloody Sunday. Of course, my teacher has the students read it so they can practice their english, but they can only read about four lines at a time. I wanted to join in, and he had me read a long stanza, telling the class “now you’ll hear how it’s actually supposed to sound”. When I finished, pretty much the entire class joked that I had an amazing accent, and I got a lot of thumbs-ups. It was pretty funny. 

The French president also lifted some restrictions, as we’ve been in lockdown (”confinement”) since the start of October. Before, we were allowed within 1km of our house for only an hour, but now we are allows within 20km for three hours. Yesterday, I was finally able to see towns other than where I live and go to school. We ventured to the town where my host mom works, where they have a huge (huge!) shopping mall. It was fun! I got to taste my first real French macarons and my host mom bought me a cute tea mug that has the eiffel tower on it. In two weeks, we plan to spend the weekend in Paris, and stay with one of my host family’s sons. Lots of shopping and sightseeing ahead! I genuinely cried with excitement just thinking about it. And though we’re still under certain restrictions, the president plans to have most things reopened by christmas so people can enjoy the holidays. If that happens, we plan to spend a few days in Italy over the break! But for now, we wait.

That’s really everything I can think of for now, but I’ll try to keep everyone updated more! And I’ll post pictures right after I publish this. Feel free to ask questions about anything! Bonne journee! 

#france #foreign #study abroad #foreign exchange #ile-de-france

[rose-wine-selfships]

♡People I’d Like To Get To Know Better♡

I’ve been tagged by the wonderful @silentlyfangirlingselfshipper! Ask and ye shall receive my dear since you want to know me better! ☺️👍

Favorite Colors: My absolute favorite color will always be pink. However, I’m also partial to blue and green depending on my mood too!

Last song I listened to: I Beg You by Aimer from the Fate Stay movie, Heavens Feel part 2: The Lost Butterfly.

If you haven’t already got into the anime series of Fate Stay Night, I HIGHLY recommend you do so since it’s a killer anime at the top of my list! This song is very deep, dark, edgy, and creepy as freaking hell, and it perfectly describes how one of my favorite characters descended into madness for a VERY good reason. Look up the series and listen to Aimers songs because each and every one of them is a masterpiece in my opinion! 👍💕

Favorite Musicians: Green Day, Pink Floyd, Kung Fu Generation, Cool Joke, U2, Ed Sheeran, Aimer, BTS (Believe it or not I really like their music).

My guilty pleasure for genres is mainly music from the 80s all the way to the late 90s and 00s.

Last Film I Watched: Judgement at Nuremberg by MGM Studios (1961).

It’s a really deep film about how the German people from the tragedies and ugliness from WWII testify to the convictions and apathy they gave when Hitler was in power. If you truly want to know how dictators think and act, just look inside our own justice system. You’ll be shocked by how almost the exact same thing from 73 years ago is happening right now here in the US. If you are a history buff, please check this movie out!

Last TV Show I Watched: Evolution of Evil. The current episode I watched featured Kim Jong Il and how sick and twisted his mind was long before he came to power in North Korea. My Dad wanted time to watch with him so I didn’t mind, lol. Another good watch if you want to know about historical figures that made great infamy in the past.

Favorite TV Show: Ouran High School Host Club (OHSHC, 2006). It’s a classic millennial anime of mine, but I love it so damn much! The characters are fun, sweet, and so memorable to think about! Plus it’s a funny spin take in the classic harem/romance genre of anime shows. And on top of that, one of the most BADASS female protagonists ever, Haruhi Fujioka. Wanna see all of that? Watch online or on Netflix! ❤️

Favorite OC?: Besides Atsushi Nakajima, I really like England from Hetalia. They are both complex, interesting characters that aren’t exactly easy to figure out. They have deep and introspective ways of thinking, and their brooding is what draws me in. Besides their dark pasts, they still want to have a better life away from it by being better people. Even if they both weren’t my f/os, I would have still loved them just as much because I relate to them a lot personally. That’s why they’re my favorite characters from these fictional universes.

Sweet, Savory or Spicy?: I love sweet foods! Give me an ice cream, edible cookie dough, or chocolates anytime and I’ll take them all gleefully! But on the flip side, I really love spicy foods also. However, I can’t have too much spice since it gives me a really bad case of heartburn afterwards. Other than that, I love both sides of sweet and spicy equally!

Sparkling water, Coffee, or Tea?

I absolutely love tea! However, I love coffee just as much too! It really depends on my mood and how energetic I’m feeling. If I’m super energetic, I just drink tea to calm me down, especially if it’s Boba Tea. But if I’m low on energy, a hot cup of black joe will make me feel all right soon! So a little bit of both is usually what hits the spot.

Pets?: I don’t have any right now. I used to have two kitty cats that were the most wonderful family members I ever had. One passed away a couple years ago, while the other passed away about four months ago. Both passed away from an incurable liver cancer that took their lives so swiftly. It is still very, very difficult to think about them too long without grieving hard.

However, I still try to think about them and smile, and look back on all the memories I used to have with them. To me, my cats aren’t my pets. They are my brother and sister and I’ll miss them for as long as I live. It won’t mean that I won’t get another cat or two, and I’ll make sure to honor them in my memories too! They will always be in my heart. 🐈🐾💕

Tags: I’ll tag @nougatships, @nohr-and-thirst, @bungoustraygays, @enma-reblogs, @queenshroorn, @rjatizay, @bungoustraydogsimagines, @bungou-positivity, @chuuyaaf, @dazaaaai, @faenova, @frecklydork, @friskywiggles, @hippyakat, @inoselfshiplove, @ky-jane, @lovestruck-idiot, @lovelysheepy, @mmicemy, @nadineselfships, @queerselfshipper, @quesselfships, @truedespair, @tins-of-oysters, @xxnight0skyxx, @xemonerdx, @yourfavelovesyouunconditionally, @yourfaveadoresyou, and @zero-arcana to participate in this game if you all want to! ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

#self insert game #ask game #getting to know each other #getting to know me #getting to know you #getting to know my followers #getting to know people

[violet-galaxies]

“Man Marked”: A WIP Introduction(?)

I’m writing this on mobile and in a Panera, so sorry for any weird format stuff. Or not, cause I’m finishing this on my computer at home.

So, this is the superhero WIP I mentioned. The title is probably going to get changed eventually, and this idea is still pretty lose, but bare with me.

“Man Marked” is the story of the heroes and villains of a large, metropolitan city (currently unnamed). Currently, it’s a found family story with a bit of coming of age in there.

The basic plot is that the heroes, as they tend to do, fight the villains, who aren’t as villainous as they appeared to be, just fighting against a system that forces those with superpowers to either work for the big bad (probably some sort of corporation or something.) Over the course of the story, the heroes and villains learn that the other isn’t really that bad and end up working together to fight the real threat.

None of the character have names yet, but I’ll list some of them below:

“Morph”: Main hero of the city, perspective character. Only, like, 14-16, but basically works for the BBEG full time. Forced to be taught by a tutors because going to actual school could lead to someone finding out his secret identity. Really lonely and really tired basically all the time. Loves his fellow heroes though, would literally give his life for them. Powers: Can fuse with objects, and once living things that have know perished (wings from a dead animal, a cut off branch, etc.). Can also probably fuse with livings things, but no one is sure what would happen and how that would work, so they haven’t tried it. Also pretty strong, and has a bit of a healing factor.

“Android”: Baby of the villain team, technically only about 3 years old. The doctor who made her is dead, but she doesn’t know, and the villains haven’t had the heart to tell her yet. Very sweet, but will absolutely beat you up if the mission requires it. Doesn’t really understand death since she’s basically immortal, as her memory can just be placed into a new body if her current one is damaged beyond repair. Powers: Laser eyes, very strong, made of metal, has a laser canon thing in both of her arms, can also just use regular guns.

“Hivemind”: Kind of villain team dad. Loves animals, has a german shepherd, python, and also keeps pigeons. Drinks coffee like his life depends on it. Loves his boyfriend very much thank you. Powers: Can control animals with his mind. This also works on humans, but it takes more effort. The more intelligent the animals is, the more difficult it is, especially when controlling multiple creatures at once. Can also fight fist to fist, but usually stays at the base because he isn’t really suited for front line fighting.

“Cobra”: Actually wasn’t born with powers, got fused with a cobra in a freak accident. Found by “Hivemind” and taken in. Acts all cool, but is easily startled and scared. HATES spiders, would kill all of them if he could. Powers: Has thermal vision, can spit poison, has scales on his body that can act as some armor. Enhanced strength.

“Doe”: Very, VERY mysterious. Always wears a spooky white dear mask with big old horns. Also has a big black cloak that covers her whole body, but at the base, she wears regular black clothes, but still has the mask. Doesn’t speak a lot, no one really knows why, might just be to keep up the mysterious vibe. Also team mom though, and will destroy anyone who messes with her family. Powers: Can teleport, though it’s limited and takes effort, especially with longer distances and/or with other people. Able to control shadows and solidify them to use in combat. Also has a spear and bow, which are surprisingly effective in combat. 

I also have some other ideas for characters, but I’m not very sure about them yet. I really needed to get this out there for, so thank you for reading my rambling!

#Violet writes #violet galaxies #writing #WIP #writblr #wip intro #superheores #ya fiction #fiction #oc #ocs #my ocs #my writing

[dredshirtroberts]

I’m bored and found this having been done by a blog I admire, @vinceaddams. Plus, I - like my projection-favorite Dragon Age Inquisition Character, Dorian Pavus - love talking about myself.

1. Name : I have many and much. I’m currently playing with the name Eyrelain/e (undecided about the final e) but for the purposes of simplicity and what I’ll generally answer to, just call me M.

2. Zodiac : Aries sun, Taurus moon, and either Leo or Pisces rising but I’ve never been able to get that one clear on my birth charts lol. 

3. Height : 5′3" roughly.

4. What time is it ? 11:57pm as of just now - it will be much later by the time I finish this

5. Favourite musician / group ? I’ve always hated this question on these things. I barely know what I’m listening to at any given time, let alone have a favorite out of them all. I just like music.

6. Favorite sport team ? If pressed (and generally if I’m around my family) I state one of the Washington DC teams - and to be fair those are pretty much the only ones I’m familiar with. But honestly I have fallen out of touch with the sportsball games and will have to work extra hard to get back into the, ah, swing of things as it were. Mostly the only sport I give a shit about is Hockey and that’s mostly because I find the players extremely attractive. Something about Russians missing teeth just really does it for me, apparently.

7. Other blogs : @witchwraytohome is mostly aesthetic with some roughly witchcraft-y, spiritual-ish bullshit fleckled in there. @adara-et-al is where I’m trying to put shit about my original characters but I’m bad at keeping up with these things so it’s not well fleshed out yet. @lia-and-em-adventure-in-thedas is a joint blog with @sumomoblossom77 for the fic I’m working on - we’re mostly keeping references and stuff there for now, but maybe one day the fic will go up there too. Once i’m finished with it anyway.

8. Do I get asks ? lol no. Maybe one or two in a blue moon but generally those are from friends who send me DMs usually. I’m not against asks, of course, so please send those on if you have them!

9. How many blogs do I follow : 80, apparently - higher than I thought it was the last I checked but then again I have a terrible memory and do not check often.

10. Any tumblr crushes ? Nah, but not really any crushes right now either. 

11. Lucky number : 3, 5, and 6 tend to be numbers that come up frequently for me and portend nice things. Multiples also count, because lucky numbers are what you make them.

12. What am I wearing right now : a pair of quickly falling apart jeggings, and a really fuckin soft old navy sweater-shirt my mom got me for xmas. it’s so soft. It’s also a lovely dark taupe color

13. Dream vacation : 1) any vacation would be a dream vacation right now. 2) I’d love to travel to Japan. And if I’m in Japan why not go ahead and hit up S Korea, and Taiwan, and China and Hong Kong, and then let’s just go ahead and get all the pacific islands, the Philippines, and head down to New Zealand to head that off there. 3) Of course that’s not taking into account wanting to go further west from there, Tibet, India, Russia, idk maybe the whole middle east. Then do I go down into Africa and start making my way through there? Clearly with the trajectory I’m on I’d start in Egypt and make my way down south from there. Or do I go the opposite direction and take on Europe? Pretty much what I’m getting at here is I’d one day like to travel the entire globe - take like...at least a year probably more, and just explore the world. Eat in every country. Enjoy life. Idk...it’s a dream. 

14. Dream car : One that isn’t almost 20 years old would be nice. less than 100k miles on it would be *excellent*, but I know that’s asking for a lot. Gotta have A/C and working windows. A relatively new sound system would be great, so the radio isn’t jangly (though honestly a working radio is enough). If I can hook up my phone to play music - AND A CD PLAYER, IT HAS TO HAVE A CD PLAYER. And her hair whatever color it please god.

15. Favourite food: I’m gonna have to say steak and/or sushi. I will ALWAYS be down for either. Or Mexican food of any sort. Seriously, you want to win me over? Feed me in general. If you feed me Mexican food (god, especially authentic central or Gulf coast mexican food yaasss) I’ll be yours forever. 

16. Drink of choice : If we’re talking alcohol, always a margarita. I’m a tequila bitch for sure. Non-alcoholic, diet cola (whatever brand I’m really not picky). Though I have found these fun little powder things my parents use called ZipFizz and boy howdy are those tasty as FUCK.

17. Languages : English, very little Spanish, German and French. I’ve been learning a few fantasy languages for fic I’m writing (where Spanish, German and French will come into play, so I imagine I’ll learn those more too). Oh and Latin. I know a little of Latin. It’s not a lot and it’s not great but it could be worse.

18. Instruments : I used to play piano - I technically still can but it’s not very good at all. I tried playing bass guitar which was...alright. I did not go very far with it. I played the recorder for class in elementary school like most everyone else did, and that was...interesting.

19. Celebrity crushes : no one, really, right now. I’m kinda figuring myself out a little and haven’t really processed attraction past “they’re kinda fit, wonder if they’re an alright person to get to know” and then realize that there’s no way I’d ever get to know them as a person outside of their fame and celebrity so I just kinda drop it. ‘S not worth the time or effort honestly.

20. Random Fact : All my old injuries that bother me are completely invisible from the surface - my one that crops up the most is my knee(s) but from the outside nothing looks the matter with them (unless the start swelling but that doesn’t happen as much anymore). Second most easily aggravated is my shoulder that also has no outward sign of having been an injury. Third most easily aggravated and honestly rarely rears its head unless I do something immensely stupid or it’s bitter fucking cold outside, is my right ribs. I got knocked really hard and they were cracked but not broken but I was also, like 10 when it happened and I’m fairly certain they healed slightly incorrectly. Sometimes it feels like I’ve got light bruising and sometimes it’s like they’ve just been injured (depending on the cause of the aggravation). I do not have good scars to show people to be like “yeah this acts up because I was stabbed in the jellies but it’s fine except during low-pressure weather”. I just all the sudden cannot stand up right, or reach over my head properly and I have to deal with it.

#about me #i tag anyone who wants to complete this

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT COMPANY

It has become one of the first varies depending on whether you have control over the whole system and have the source code of all the parts, as ITA presumably does, you can create an enemy if there isn't a real one. But that comes with the territory. The biggest startup ideas are terrifying. But I don't think many nerds would. The users in this case are those critical few thousand people you'd like to move to Silicon Valley? It was something to do together, and because the drugs were illegal, it was hard to imagine a technology company. Economies are made out of people, and channels the rest into unproductive jobs. What you should not do is rebel.

Like many nerds, probably, it was hard to imagine a technology company making money that way. Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be about technology. Friends offer moral support few startups are started by one person, but secrecy also has its advantages. My guess is that they make deals close faster.1 These fonts are closer to the one played in the real world is that it's part of the mechanism of popularity. But the more investors you have in a round, the less it would take at least six months to write. But they are not the same thing with equity instead of debt. Another startup might have needed a database guy, or someone with connections in the movie business. Plenty of famous people do; in the short term, the quality of his ideas.

Your tastes will change. She was horrified when the doctors running the study discovered what appeared to be a startup. I'm uncomfortably aware that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks. She's trying to get people to start calling them portals instead of search engines. If it's any consolation to the individual mosquito. And that would in turn mean that you can. You can measure how demoralizing it is by the number of users. It's much better than the drab Sears Catalogs of art that undergraduates are forced to buy for Art History 101. The CEO of that company, the next Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell can't be a good deal of overlap between them.

That's leverage. Some of the attention people currently devote to watching movies and TV can be stolen by things that seem completely unrelated, like social networking apps. Possibly, but I'd bet not. So there you have it: languages are not equivalent, and I am not surprised to hear it. Number 2, most managers deliberately ignore this. On the other hand, the extra million dollars would give them a lot more runway. And the pages don't have the clean, sparse feel they used to. Both customers and investors will be feeling pinched. Jobs, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell can't be a company of one person. Theirs was not to have a medium that makes change easy. Most of the greatest discoveries seem so simple that you say to high school students aren't capable of getting anything done yet. What would happen if you treated them as a web service.

I believe we were the only D table in our cafeteria map.2 Many of the employees e. Much more commonly you launch something, and no one else would be in a random corporate job. Because they haven't tried to control it with a wireless mouse, but the fear of looking bad than by the hope of gain, but the way one anticipates a delicious dinner. There's no incentive that would make them move.3 Imagine a company with several times the power Google has now, but way meaner. Like the rest of the group slows you down. If a company considers itself to be in a rush to choose your life's work.4 If this works, it would be a curious state of affairs if you could, you'd have some pretty big gaps. And you can start today.

It is the proverbial fishing rod, rather than the fish. You can't answer that; if you fail. This essay is derived from a keynote at Xtech. I found myself thinking: I can understand why German universities declined in the 1930s, after they excluded Jews. Which companies are in the US, because they don't know what the kids are kept in prisons, but that they were the first investors in Google. The reason startups have been using more convertible notes in angel rounds is that they can combine as they wish, like Lego. That's the nature of platforms. As one data point on the curve that you want to improve your chances, you should think far more about who you can recruit as a cofounder than the state of the economy doesn't matter much. Yes, as you continue to design things. Of course not.

This is a list of danger signs to watch out for. When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to be simple, you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. The power of chance meetings is more variable than people around you. So be honest with yourself about the sort of deadlock that happens when investors all wait to see who else is investing? Ornament is not in itself bad, only when it's camouflage on insipid form. How does a more powerful language probably decreases the size of the team you need, you can't be a good one. I want there to be more interesting than a stretch of flashy but mindlessly repetitive painting of, say, the Quicksort algorithm, which was discovered in 1960 and is still the fastest general-purpose sort. If you asked the pointy-haired boss in 1992 what language software should be written in, he would have answered with as little hesitation as he does today.

Notes

It requires the kind of kludge you need to go behind the rapacious one. Simpler just to steal the ball away from taking a difficult position.

Median may be whether what you can do is say you've reformed, and you have a bogus political agenda or are feebly executed. If you're not even be tempted to do better. What people will give you fifty times as much as people in return for something they get a patent is conveniently just longer than the long term than one level of incivility, the big acquisition offers that every successful startup?

Unfortunately, not lowercase. Yes, I put it this way, they'd be proportionately more effective, leaving less room to avoid the conclusion that tax rates. Down rounds are at selling it to the way they have to be self-interest explains much of the causes of failure would be easy to get the answer to, in Galbraith's words, of course finding words this way.

Trevor Blackwell reminds you to behave like adults, it would have gone into the work of selection. They have the balls to ask, what would our competitors had known we were using Lisp, though I think it's roughly what everyone must have affected what they made much of the false positive rates are untrustworthy, as far as I explain later.

Thanks to Robert Morris, the Berkeley CSUA, Trevor Blackwell, Savraj Singh, Bob van der Zwaan essay, Chris Dixon, and Greg McAdoo for their feedback on these thoughts.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #Michael #van #guess #rates #essay #rounds #nerds #sup #table #companies #users #problem #Silicon #reason #Blackwell #prisons #company #support #agenda #overlap #Trevor #feedback #system #technology

[suepixels]

Get to Know Me

Make a simself and add traits if you like but you don’t need to! “Me with my most important men Nero Valcari on the right and Levithian Cavallo on the left - Pixelthirst is real, you guys!” The peeps I met here who encouraged me to start my story? Yeah, I’m freakin’ grateful! Thank youu..! Aspiration: Soulmate + Bonus trait “Romantic” Traits: Creative, Active, Cheerful

I was tagged by the wonderful lady @cillaben and @awolzai is the one who created this tag. So if you wanna read all that shizzle about me. Go ahead and read, I’m not gonna stop you - Oh Gosh! Thanks a bunch, sweet Cilla, you are just wonderful the way you are to me and also for being a fab friend, I 💛  you , obviously you not gonna be tagged for this! Hehe - just messing around... 😉

I’m tagging following simmers because welp I don’t know much about them but I truly 💛 their blog and their stories and personality and would 💛  to know them better. @beverlyallitsims  @josiesimblr @tigerellasims , @tangandzing   @keysims , @skellysim @shysimblr , @weicyn, @glovely1simmer, @ktosiksims @fabflubs , @cayrees , @shespeakssimlish

Guys you don’t need to do this but it would be dope! There are loads of questions here. So you don’t have to answer all of them if you don’t feel like it. Even if I didn’t tag you feel free to do it - it’s fun!

WARNING: Answers to 125 questions are under the cut.

What is your name? Suzana

What is your nickname? Sue

🎂? May 11th

What is your favorite 📓 series?  Um, the last I read as a series was “The Lord of the rings” (A throwback to childhood, damm I was 13 when I read it the first time, hehe) I rather read single books 📚, seldom series

Do you believe in aliens or ghosts? Ghosts? Dunno I’m not sure, never met one but don’t want either if they exist! LOL. Aliens? Wait a billion of galaxies with trillion of stars and I should believe that we are the only living creatures in the universe? Naah we are not alone - E.T. is out there. Does it answer your question? LOL

Who is your favorite author? Ugh... The ones I can think of right now? goshI have a bunch... um... Robert Greene, Marion Zimmer Bradley (all Avalon books) Patrice Leovold who’s book taught me that Eleanor of Aquitaine used to be a strong woman and queen of two countries in Europe! I love history stuff so I read a bunch of German authors who write historical novels.

What is your favorite radio station? If I listen to any it would be JAM FM from Berlin (Hip-Hop, RnB, Soul etc) Haven’t heard it in years... but Youtube is my main source for music, hehe

What is your favorite flavor of anything? If it’s not spicy go home and try it again, okay? It has to be spicy... yeah I’m used to it. A day without my Latte Macchiato is a no-no! (80% creamy milk with 1 cup of espresso, only the real deal for me, capeesh? Hehe! 

What word would you use often to describe something great or wonderful? Dope!

What is your current favorite song? 💛 Stuck in my head this one arrrgh gosh: Blindness by Justin Timberlake

What is your favorite word? Welp? LOL 😆

What was the last song you listened to? I will wait for you by Nicky Parrott

What 📺 show would you recommend for everybody to watch? The Originals, Vampire Diaries (isn’t it obvious?) Lucifer (love the sarcasm) The Good Doctor, This is Us and heck, yeah Game of Thrones agree with @cillaben

What is your favorite movie to watch when you’re feeling down? Any good sci-fi, fantasy movie “Just let me escape this world for a second or two”

Do you play video games? Yup, as an addict I play only Sims 4, 3 & 2 😲

What is your biggest fear? To die, too early before I could do all the things I desire to do.

What is your best quality, in your opinion? I’ve been told be caring, dunno!

What is your worst quality, in your opinion? I can be stubborn but hey someone told me I’m just persistent in all the things I do, you know... 😁

Do you like cats or dogs better? I used to love cats more but since my sis has a Malinois. I love both.. Guys, Stella is the best craziest dog I’ve seen!

What is your favorite season? Summer

Are you in a relationship? Neep, bloody single...welp =D

What is something you miss from your childhood?  My love for ballet? I did yesterday the first time after 15 yrs some exercises on a bar at the gym and the belief that anything is possible - still hoping!

Who is your best friend? Currently, run out of “best friends” shizzle

What is your eye color? Green-yellowish - yup like a cat  😁

What is your hair color? By nature? Ash blonde but I love brown!

Who is someone you 💛? My sister and my nephews

Who is someone you trust? Only my big sis

Who is someone you think about often? My ex, who I still love. I know I should drop it but when your heart says something else and your mind reminds you NOPE - Game over! Dang, it! Can someone press the restart button for me, please? LOL Naaah, don’t worry I’m fine but you know sometimes you think too much about could have, would have blah, blah...

Are you currently 🙌 about/for something? I’m 🙌 about to go to bed!

What is your biggest obsession? Fitness (again), Dancing, being creative, TV series, Cooking, Web surfing, Gaming, Traveling geez I can’t name them all I have many obsessions. LOL 

What was your favorite 📺 show as a 👶? As a child, I wasn’t allowed to watch TV but what I remember is that I liked “Once Upon a Time... Life” a European/Asien cartoon about how the human's body system works (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY11Hu_ju5M&list=PLtAciEfQHAwvs1hIkWN_YNpD8E4sno--C)

Who of the opposite gender can you tell anything to, if anyone? Nobody. I’m too open-minded and a bunch of peeps are simply sick in their head and interpret shizzle just because I say “Live your life your way - it’s not my business” So I keep it private.

Are you superstitious? Nope, not that I’m aware of =D

Do you have any unusual phobias? Darkness, if the light goes suddenly off and I see nothing? Yeah, it creeps the heck out of me. A childhood trauma - my mother did scare to death!

Do you prefer to be in front of the door or behind it? In front!

What is your favorite hobby? Fitness, surfing, 👀 movies and playing sims of course.

What was the last 📓 you read? The Art of Seduction by Robert Greene

What was the last movie you 👀? The new Fantastic Beasts movie

What musical instruments do you play, if any? None =( wish to play piano, tho - need to check Google Play for an app - LOL

What is your favorite animal?  Birds

What are your top 5 favorite Tumblr blogs that you follow?  I have quite a bunch I check daily like a stalker - all wonderful human beings =) 

What superpower do you wish you had? The ability to be immortal

When and where do you feel most at ✌️? Sweet Home

What makes you 😁? Sarcastic Humor, it goes deep under your skin

What sports do you play, if any? Naah, I do Functional Fitness and soon Breakletics but I don’t play sports.

What is your favorite drink?  Latte Macchiato and Raspberry Mojito

When was the last time you wrote a ✋-written letter or note to somebody? A goodbye letter to my ex-boyfriend when I canceled to continue to be just friends with him. Well because of the feels I still have him...even after 5 yrs...still unforgotten!

Are you 😨 of heights? Depends...

What is your biggest pet peeve? Fake people, superficial characters

Have you ever been to a concert? Yes, quite a lot...

Are you vegan/vegetarian? Never ever - I need meat!

When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up? A ballet dancer or an artist in general.

 What fictional place would you like to live in? Atlantis - Undersea Waterworld

What is something you worry about? Yes, I worry all the time

Are you 😨 of the dark? Depends, if there is no light, yes!

Do you like to sing? Yes!

Have you ever skipped school? Never. I was a proud nerd!

What is your favorite place on the 🌍? Home

Where would you like to live? Atlanta, USA or UK - London

Do you have any pets? Neep, not allowed by the landlord

Are you more of an early bird or a night owl? Night Owl

Do you like sunrises or sunsets better? Sunrise - A new day to start fresh!

Do you know how to drive? I know, but I don’t have a license - hihi

Do you prefer earbuds or 🎧? Earbuds

Have you ever had braces? Neep, lucky me

What is your favorite genre of 🎶? RnB, Soul, Hip Hop, “German Hip Hop”, Classic, Jazz, Blues, Bossa Nova, Dancehall, Reggaeton, Twerk - actually all kind of genres, always depends on the song! 🎶

Who is your hero? Hero? Ugh... Dunno to be honest...

Do you read comic 📚? I used to, not anymore

What makes you the most 😠? Rudeness, Racism in general, Lies, and Betrayal

Do you prefer to read on an electronic device or with a real 📓? I need a real book, okay? As much as I ’m a lover of newest technologies but some stuff are simply gold when it’s the “real deal”.

What was your favorite subject in school? Languages ( I speak 3 fluid English, German, Serbian somewhat a little French), Informatics, Art, Music, and History

Do you have any siblings? A sister and a brother

What was the last thing you bought? Meat

How tall are you? 5′3 or about 164 cms

Can you cook? Yeees, herbs? Spices? Experimenting? All that jazz, yes

What are three things that you 💛? My sis, Fitness and writing my story here.

What are three things that you hate? Racists, Betrayal and when people lie about their feelings.

Do you have more female friends or more male friends? Male, most women never liked me... dunno... why! 

What is your sexual orientation? Straight

Where do you currently live? Germany

Who was the last person you texted? My sister

When was the last time you 😢? On 3rd of Nov. because I saw my brother - we don’t talk

Who is your favorite YouTuber? Xurbansimsx (Sims) that’s it!

Do you like to take selfies? Neep, not currently... I gained too much... due to my illness but working it off now that I’m feeling better.

What is your favorite app? Tumblr and Pinterest

What is your relationship with your parent(s) like?  My dad passed away. Broken, dramatic family war! No, contact with my brother because of my mother this binch. My sister is my everything  💛 💛 💛

What is your favorite foreign accent? French and when American speak German, aaah I love it!.

What is a place that you’ve never been to, but you want to visit? New York, South Africa, New Zeeland and Australia

What is your favorite number? 5

Can you juggle? Naaah

Are you religious? Nope

Do you find outer space of the deep ocean to be more interesting? Both

Do you consider yourself to be a daredevil? Sometimes, a little naughty, hehe

Are you allergic to anything? Cat hair :(

Can you curl your tongue? Yips

Can you wiggle your ears? Nooope

How often do you admit that you were wrong about something? When I’m wrong I do apologize but it happens seldom

Do you prefer the forest or the beach? Beach, babe!

What is your favorite piece of advice that anyone has ever given you? Who has told you that life is fair?

Are you a good liar? I guess I can be if I have to!

What is your Hogwarts 🏠? Hufflepuff

Do you talk to yourself? Yeah, I do so what? I just maintain a relationship with myself, okay  😂 Call me crazy, I don’t care..hehe 😜

Are you an introvert or an extrovert? extrovert

Do you keep a journal/diary? I used to but stopped, have 5 books

Do you believe in second chances? Yes

If you found a wallet full of 💰 on the ground, what would you do? Tbh? Currently, I would keep it.

Do you believe that people are capable of change? Difficult, it depends on the character. 

Are you ticklish? Some secrets areas - yeas!

Have you ever been on a ✈️? Heck yeah, quite a lot - I’m a “Fernweh” Girl and a traveler!

Do you have any piercings? Ears, Belly and I used to have my nose pierced, too but business sucks so I had to take it out! LOL

What fictional character do you wish was real? Mr. Darcy from ‘Pride and Prejudice’

Do you have any tattoos? Yes, one on my back and I want more!

What is the best decision that you’ve made in your life so far? Running away from home, living my own life and not allowing anyone to tell me how I should live my life - I have one life to live, so my rules apply!

Do you believe in karma? Yes

Do you wear glasses or contacts? Contacts during daytime at night glasses

Do you want children? Yes, at least one - hopefully!

Who is the smartest person you know? My ex-boyfriend

What is your most embarrassing memory? When a friend of mine showed via an accident how fake she truly was. She lost her fake hair and her nails got broken and all this in public on a dancefloor in front of my friends. (We were teens, LOL)

Have you ever pulled an all-nighter? Almost but not really so, naah

What color are most of your clothes? Black, mint, turquoise and darker versions of green, blue, brown and red.

Do you like adventures? Depends on adventure

Have you ever been on 📺? Almost as a TV-host for a German music channel! Had a casting back in my teenhood! 

How old are you? 35+ I look younger than I really am and I don’t feel like it. Nope, not gonna say it publicly. I would feel instantly older.. LOL but I tell in private!

What is your favorite movie quote? “He is your first love. I intend to be your last” - The Originals by Klaus Mikelson

Sweet or savory? Sweet

Yeah, you may notice I like to add videos =) that’s the song which spins around in my head currently... Love the beat!

#tagged #nonsims #private #ignore it you don't need to read it #it's a lot #sue babbles #simedit #ts4 edit