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meryton-etc · 1 year

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Rest on Your Oar (and See) Commentary Track

It’s been two years, nearly, since I published Rest on Your Oar (and See). According to AO3, it is my 6th most popular fic by hits, and my 4th most kudos’ed. By Popular demand (twitter poll) here is some commentary about politics and references in the text! It may be THE MOST PRETENTIOUS THING i've ever written

Read this with the fic (here) open beside you, I guess? I don't know how to do this kind of thing

Content Warnings: Discussions of the holocaust / Shoah, mass death on the Mediterranean and English Channel, depression, suicidality, parental abuse

Rest on Your Oar began life in my green notebook, which also contains fan favourites such as every Silmarillion fic I’ve ever posted, and ‘An Ebb, a Wave, a Soft Crash.’ I write most things longhand first, and then type up the second draft. If something strikes me as having potential i’ll polish the second draft into a third, but not always.

Rest on Your Oar wasn’t so much something that I wrote as much as something that created itself. It felt like it was in my hands already as I began to put it on the page, although that’s not to say I didn’t put a large amount of work into it. The longhand version follows the same structure as the published one, although it’s about half as long and it’s not as good. I don’t spend much time thinking about law in draft one, which is funny, because I think that’s the most important element of the entire thing.

If there’s one thing this fic is about about, it’s Modernity, and more specifically the space that law currently fills in our lives (one that might once have been filled by something else [God]). It is also about Europe, History-with-capital-H, [both of which are really just Modernity again] abuse, queerness, and depression. Modernity was when the disenchantment started: the scientific method and bureaucratisation came in - both forms of systematisation - as a result racism became codified by science instead of Religion, the individual conscience became king, and the King lost his head. And more!!

Why yes, I have read Angels in America, thank you for asking.

This commentary will explain some of my thinking on this, as well as things that I would change, now. As I said, it’s been nearly two years, and they’ve been personally eventful. This is especially true of the focus on Europe.

I should have been clearer: the [ongoing] colonialism that has endured for the last six centuries and the current focus on borders, borders, borders make this place, at this moment, an Evil one. At this moment, we would rather maintain an absurdly expensive and brutal system of social murder, rather than deal with problems we ourselves have caused. If you’re looking for a cause to throw €5 to over the next few months - and God knows you probably aren’t, given the cost of living these days - consider organisations that come under the banner of the Calais Appeal (you can find it on instagram). Over 300 people have died in Northern Europe (France and Belgium mostly) trying to get into the UK. In 2021, according to the UN, 3,231 people lost their lives crossing the Mediterranean sea. These are people with beating hearts, inner lives, families and friends that love them dearly.It is international law that you can claim asylum in any country you want. The EU and the UK are breaking international law. There are NO LEGAL ROUTES into this place unless you are already a member of a privileged minority. The EU knows that this is the case and persists in these brutal policies regardless.

A final note before starting - Edgeworth is deeply depressed during this fic, and surprise! I was deeply depressed when I was writing it. Depression is very difficult to measure when it gets that bad, because your perceptions of everything, including time, are skewed and sometimes unreliable. I know now that I was deep into it, and this comes through occasionally in the writing and the language used. I want to say that I appreciate every comment - some of the loveliest, most gracious, best-written comments I have ever received are on this fic - and would like to let people know that I’m doing better now. In case you were wondering!

The title comes from an Eileen Ní Chuilleanáin (pronounced Eye-leen Nee Quill-en-awn) poem, “The Second Voyage.” It’s about Odsseus deciding that he hates the sea and must leave it, and then realising that he can’t, and must go back. I love Ní Chuilleanáin so much - she writes with an acute eye for detail. Can’t recommend enough. Anyway, you should read the poem alongside the piece, and bear in mind the ending. Is it happy?

Is fanfiction literature? I’m going to ruffle a few feathers here and say that I’ve been reading fic for a good deal more than half my life, and I think the answer is usually not, or at least it’s not usually good literature. I’ve published more than 33 fics, which is quite a few, and even then, I think there are maybe three that I could possibly, possibly, with a lot of work, spend a few months editing and send off to a magazine. I write in the fanfiction genre and mostly, for me, generally, that precludes analysis or deep themes. Some people treat it differently. I approached Rest on your Oar differently. That’s why the references to the Holocaust and the Second World War are in here. If something is about the Law, and about Europe, then it is for me very important that we mention where the law in Europe can lead. However, generally I think it is absolutely inappropriate and wrong to trivialise the Holocaust by setting a fanfiction there. Like the new trend of novels that treat Auschwitz as a tragic backdrop in which characters can self-actualise, such fics show an absolute misunderstanding of what happened, and what was done. It was important for me to acknowledge, in my fic about a kind-of German lawyer battling with the legacies of his lawyer father(figure), that it was Europe’s celebrated legal and infrastructural machinery that made the murder of roughly 7,000,000 people (of whom 6,000,000 were Jewish) possible.

Anyway.

He’ll disembark at Bordeaux. A big enough city that the police won’t blink twice at an anonymous body in the treacherous river. He won’t upset anyone – he won’t make anyone he knows discover – it’ll be OK once he gets off the train

The fic starts with Edgeworth on the Paris-Hendaye high-speed rail service, in the midst of a full-blown break with reality.

By poetic licence, the carriage is empty. A last-minute ticket for the TGV on this line, in the evening, in first class (of course) would cost you about €173.00, if not more. Provided you could find one. Jesus!! You can get to Greece (by plane) for that!!

Why the Basque country? Firstly, I lived near there for a few months and absolutely adored it. The Sea, the cliffs, the people (the people!!) the towns, winding roads, villages, houses all facing the same direction, Saint Sebastian, the language, the rain, the beaches that attract tourists and the constant wind that disappoints them, and again, above all, from everywhere, the Sea, the Sea, the Sea. I use the water as a metaphor in my writing, which is really original and unique of me. Why the Basque country? It’s old, and not German at all, easy to get to, and the seaside towns are very underpopulated during the Winter. A lot of empty houses, empty apartment blocks, and rain from the Atlantic.

The platform at Biarritz is drab and rain-soaked.

You ever get the impulse to stay on the train you’re on, and get off somewhere nicer? I don’t want to get off at Marne-la-Vallée/Chessy. So rainy and cold. And for what! Disneyland!?!? I’d rather be getting off in Avignon [ ;-) ]. This is not what Edgeworth feels, except for it is. I don’t know! He’s in the middle of a breakdown! Those aren’t coherent thoughts he’s having! I wanted to express here how tar-ry depression can be. All of your brain feels heavier, and whatever thoughts you are having are unclear and move like viscous. I imagine, for quick-on-the-draw person like Edgeworth, who may have spent most of his childhood very alert to his guardian’s moods and potential violences, that state is particularly alien. Does he want to die, or does he want to live? It can be surprising, for those who have not been there, how unclear that demarcation can be.

Corrupt.

Also I don’t forgive him the corruption until he decides that he’s going to fix it. It’s very illegal and absolutely morally repugnant, what Lana did to him. It’s absolutely the kind of thing that could mess you up for life, and I imagine would be fertile grounds for a civil case as well as a criminal one. But he’s still in a position of authority. Prisons are evil places in real life, and in Ace Attorney they seem to be mediaeval dungeons with Victorian hard-labour standards. One imagines Genet thriving in the environment. It’s on the prosecutor to think long and hard about what the truth of the matter is. Can we achieve true justice on Earth? Debatable. But Edgeworth’s approach sure isn’t helping!!!

And yet, I think it’s pretty obvious that he does, even at his worst, care about Justice.

At least there isn’t anyone they could call. Not one. The thought is freeing. He used to have Von Karma listed, but his office number, not his personal line.

Not having an emergency contact - it’s very difficult to live that way. You don’t realise how much you need one - pretty much for every job application, pretty much for every club you want to join, and certainly for doctors, dentists, and any other place where you may need insurance. For more on this, read the very beautiful How to Be Alone by Lane Moore.

Von Karma had been total

I hate it when people use political theories to describe interpersonal relationships, and vice versa, because it contributes to petty bourgeois philosophy about government spending and the worst excesses of liberal twitter, but here I present my take on parental abuse. Apologies, as ever, to Hannah Arendt.

He stumbles up the street, to the bright neon promise of an open hotel, its windows reflected in the puddles on the ground.

Anyway, I spent an enjoyable three hours looking for a fancy hotel that Edgeworth might check into. I can’t remember the one I picked but it was very white-plaster light-wood beams, healthy food, open all year round. I think to be truly in-character Edgeworth would go with the Hôtel Palace, which is just as baroque and expensive as you can imagine, but he’s not in character here, as also shown by his eschewing of the SUIT.

Where does Edgeworth buy his fancy and boring clothes? There is a shopping centre in Gare Montparnasse, where the Paris-Hendaye service originates. So Levi’s for t-shirts, the Kooples, and so on. Some aspects of this fic are so unbelievably thought out, and some are completely symbolic and not realistic in any way. Don’t think too hard about it.

To skip forward - here is where place Edgeworth visits in Biarritz (Le Rocher de la Vierge):

Places Miles and Franziska were brought as children for educational reasons

And the little village he settles in is one of my favourite places in the entire universe, that is, Guéthary, a little further down the Basque coast.

How gorgeous?!?!? Many a happy cigarette smoked on this harbour. Also a comedically dramatic tumble from a bicycle, ripping the knee of some nice yellow jeans.

For people who aren’t aware, there is ongoing conversation in the Basque country over the topic of independence. The Basque region encompasses some of France’s South-Western coast and also a large amount of Northern Spain. It skewed Republican (good) in the Spanish Civil War (a war so terrible that any amount of reflection upon it will have you pretty much despondent) and as a result suffered heavily when the fascists won. Picasso’s painting Guernica is based on the German bombing of the Basque cultural and market town of the same name.

Up until fairly recently, this was a conflict, with armed group ETA on one side (pro-independence) and the Spanish police and the Guardia Civil [guilty of war crimes for sure, but no charges] on the other. The EU will not tell you this because they like to pretend there hasn’t been war since 1945. When they say this, they mean “literally tanks sent between France and Germany.” (I’m not anti-EU in principle but I am a mostly unemployed leftist so I have things to critique. To be clear this is not a Brexit support blog).

Philadelphia Story had been his favourite. His father had ruffled his hair and laughed when Miles said so. He said, why am I not surprised. My clever little boy.

Katherine Hepburn forever. Gregory Edgeworth in no doubt as to who his son is.

Larry didn’t like it so much – “Mulan’s for girls” he’d said, and Phoenix had looked down at his hands and agreed, albeit far more quietly than usual.

Miles Edgeworth runs up against male socialisation and it hurts. Also Phoenix lives with his aunt - why? Not for this fic to explore.

Past empty campsites, fields full of luxury white cuboids waiting for May.

Anyway I myself was a campsite worker, poisoning the air of the beautiful small town with my shouted English. Shame on me! I know.

But here, on this cliff - he wasn’t expecting this, either – he thought he’d seen the town’s war memorial – but here’s another one, stones turning their faces to the sea, and it’s blunter – it’s -

If your mother did a master’s thesis on French historical memory of the second world war, please hit me up! We can commiserate together. The effects of this thesis on me are manifold, but one is that I MUST find the war memorial in any town I go to and see who EXACTLY is memorialised. Obviously we have the First World War dead, which is as close to neutral remembrance as you can get in this sphere - and it’s important to look at the length of these lists in small villages and reflect!!!! And then more rarely, and always a much shorter list, you’ll have the lists of the Second World War dead. Usually resistants, but sometimes civilians as well, and generally it won’t say whether they were shot on the street or deported.

So in Bidart (this memorial is in Bidart) that is not the case. It’s very stark, hence the flashback. My favourite war memorial is in Biarritz because it goes into a lot of detail about deportees &tc.

And speaking of memorials!!!

This is the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe on Hannah Arendt Strasse:

And this is the separate memorial across the road to the murdered members of the LGBTQ+ community

Both of these memorials are extremely powerful; Von Karma here weaponises this power to threaten and oppress. Power and aura, for art in everyday life, can be used for both affirmative and negative ends. Memorials to atrocities of this scale are complicated places, and while I think Berlin has done a phenomenal job at limiting the potential for misuse, it is still there. The memorial does not tell you what to think.

Similarly, you have to think about coming into an understanding of your own identity in a world where the visible, public and celebrated elements are monuments to oppression, illness, institutional hatred and . What does it mean to understand your sexuality, religion or gender through displays of public contrition and grief, or as sites of public debate before you understand it as what it means for you and your heart?

To close out this section, consider the words of Primo Levi:

It happened, and therefore it could happen again; this is the core of what we have to say.

This is why we must reflect on the Law, and on current European fascism, and on current European migration policy. I hope at least that there will be memorials to the people we have lost due to the above.

On his mother’s birthday, it rains.

Who is Miles Edgeworth’s mother???? Assumedly just as dead as his father, but why the complete absence from the text? Misogyny, obviously, but why else??? When you think about it it’s a horrifically sad story. Edgeworth wanting to die (more actively than passively at this stage) on her birthday is a detail I added to make it worse!! One imagines she’s buried or memorialised in his hometown. Did they go to her grave? Did Gregory miss her out loud?

She would have been 60. All the terrible people in the world who reached that milestone.

This is a reference to the fact that Henry Kissinger is !!! Still !!!! Alive ?!?!?!?!?

The ocean revolting against itself and the pure rage of its power

The sea is a neutral force. A neutrality that is still very powerful.

His first thought is I like that bicycle, with the pink streamers on the handlebars.

Edgeworth is starting to recognise his inner child. This will be, in the end, what saves his life, and possibly what saves us all. I once had a therapist that called herself an “early childhood development professional, only one that deals with adults.” She was the best therapist I ever had!! Miles Edgeworth needs to start feeling and healing!! And so do I, and dear reader, probably so do you! Also this scene was written two years before I met this person, but falling off a cliff is a real thing that can happen. I had a coworker that fell off TWO separate cliffs. Excessive? She certainly thought so!

A Portuguese nurse asks if he’s alright as he comes in (what a question) and he tells her no.

Because mental illness is actually quite common and I imagine Edgeworth is underplaying his symptoms, they don’t keep him in for observation like I imagine they probably should. In my country the healthcare system is so broken that they don’t have the money to do things like that, but in France it’s generally efficient and well-funded. What’s going on here? Maybe he doesn’t have his EHIC card or something. Anyway, prozac made me much worse! He should be on sertraline. And then, after all of that - all that agony and humiliation - he’s still just as bad as he was before, worse maybe.

He is fourteen and lying on his back. The parquet rubs cold against his legs

There is no worse age to be in the entire world alive than 14. Is the suicidality already latent in young Edgeworth, or is it that he is looking back with poisoned lenses?

“Hello, detective.”

You can’t escape!!!!!!!! You may desperately want to - the love of your friends and family can be the most painful and heavy thing, the most awkward burden to bear - but you can’t escape it. Thankfully.

Ride your bike down to the sea and relish in the breeze blowing the hair back from your face.

“9 out of 10 days are slightly disappointing

But on the tenth, you see that light beckoning”

Annika Norlin, “Silent Night”

Transcendence is rare, but it happens. It will happen to you. You will come to a place where you will recognise the beauty around you and inside you, and you will know that you were supposed to make it here. You will not want the mire of mental illness anymore; you will know that you are better when you are freer.

And then it will go, and you will forget the feeling, but not that you had it. As Elizabeth Bishop says: Somebody loves us all.

The wanting of the bad thing is a strange thing to explain. There’s no such thing as true freedom from it. It is always in the back of your head, there’s always another shoe that can drop, and there will be people and things said to you - Never Quite Free by the Mountain Goats, people, don’t ask me to explain more than that.

In the future, Phoenix Wright will run into the same stretch of sea…

See High Season

he shady tactics (not illegal), the withholding of certain pieces of evidence (not illegal), the decisions on what sentence to push for, and for whom, and when to take a case and when to decide against doing so

Be VERY cautious of prosecutors. I myself am absolutely anti-prison. I don’t see any reason for that kind of barbarity in our world. I can see that not everybody feels that way. But always remember: prosecutors in most of today’s systems are on very good friends with the cops. And the cops are never your friends.

Old man, Edgeworth thinks, old man, I am not ashamed

Edgeworth is gay and now he can say “i am gay” out loud to himself. This kind of brutal repression, that either abusive parents or abusive environments instil, is violence. That is, violence as defined by Johan Galtung: the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual, between what could have been and what is.

Thank you not-Guéthary! We are moving on!

The Cévennes! Beautiful mountains, barely populated, old old old. And I believe a place where the Maquis (part of the French Resistance) tended to congregate. Resistance… potential changes on the horizon for dear M. Edgeworth. The town that I based this town on is Florac, another stunning location. Best avocado of my entire life. I can still remember that salad, all these years later. And a very lovely skirt, silk, in blue-grey!

Oh my GOD I have got to get back there. I forgot how beautiful it was. I wonder how much rent is. I could finally write my masterwork in peace.

The man at the till, tall and dark, smiles at him

When I was there there were no handsome Spanish men selling books but in all fairness I don’t have any use for handsome Spanish men, so maybe there were some I missed?

Unusual for a Catholic church to be so unadorned

Edgeworth does not Find Religion here. Pity! I think there are some themes in Catholicism that could help him! Not Catholicism itself, but a few of the ideas within it. Not the devotion bit - he’s maybe had too much of that already.

He liked the moomins too, although he got the feeling the other children in the class would have the same reaction to that as they did to Mulan

I must admit to taking the shame of loving the Moomins as a homage to Philip Pullman, who wrote sweetly about the same thing in an essay which I cannot find (here’s a different one), but nobody picked up on it in the comments and so now I think it’s just plagiarism??? Help!?!

He has a Spanish accent; more Southern than Northern

Javi García Cortes is from Grenada

Von Karma had slapped him, once, hard, across the face

Von Karma physically assaulting him like this is deeply humiliating, and acts as a threat to Franziska as well, though I don’t think he would do the same to her.

The chasm it will open has been a spectre, his life since he was nine years old. The dark at the centre of the spider’s web.

So the “dark at the centre of the spider’s web” is a serious image that I am using seriously, but I was listening to an improv podcast by Paul F Tomkins where “Hans Christian Anderson” is being interviewed, and HE USES THE SAME IMAGE!! But it’s so funny! Truly one of my favourite jokes ever. This is a coincidence, but it’s ruined this paragraph for me.

He was an omnipresent threat of power and violence, and he shaped Edgeworth, gave him purpose and an appreciation for Handel and Bach.

If someone gives you art, knowledge, understanding and education, feeds you - you’re a real person at least partly in their image, and - it’s unbearable, that the person that was supposed to love you and nurture you not only didn’t care enough to do that, but also hurt you, maybe on purpose and maybe by accident. Apologies would never be enough, and Miles Edgeworth does not even have that. I mean, really put yourself in his shoes: you’ve found out that this man who was responsible for your growth and development and your choice of career actually hated you and wanted to kill you and it wasn’t even for anything he thought you did. (And then it turns out your trusted co-workers were responsible for you sending hundreds of people to prison). And then also you’re in the middle of a nervous breakdown and you can’t stop thinking about the last time you were happy. Which was when you were nine years old.

lying on the shore beside Javi García Cortes, who had just kissed him in full view of the road, the best kiss of his life

I love Javi so much.AO3 user Eggybaguette posted this absolutely incredible comment, which is such a good analysis and you’re so smart for this if you’re reading this, like genuinely you are so intelligent. “[Edgeworth] seeing himself, an anonymous body in a river in the beginning, and then letting himself be recognized and experience intimacy in a river with Javi,” as they point out, is an important character progression. It’s also important in terms of borders - rivers and seas are often sites of division. Here Edgeworth is allowing himself to broaden the horizons of what he thinks his body is for. This is also true of the scene where he goes sea-swimming.

He doesn’t get out of bed except to use the bathroom for three days straight

Oh God I forgot how horrible I am to this poor man in this section. Healing isn’t linear!

He loves this movement. He loves the clarinet.

Ah, Mozart’s Piano Concerto no.23 in A Major (K488). Truly I don’t know where this man got his genius from but he understood how to express light in music! The fête de la musique that Edgeworth is attending is an annual event that has musicians play in towns across France. It’s really great! I don’t know how good an orchestra from a tiny rural town would be, but let’s pretend it’s a good one for this.

And it was not The Law that stood in his way.

IS THIS A WHISPER OF REDEMPTION? I have been a sucker for a redemption arc since I recognised a kindred spirit in Zuko from Avatar, and to be honest I am so obsessed with Ace Attorney deciding that was something Edgeworth would probably undergo, but totally off-screen. So what changed? What was the “true meaning of being a prosector?” Is the system broken beyond repair, or can it be fixed? Choose carefully, because if something can be fixed, you might find you have an obligation to fix it… not that Edgeworth is there yet in his emotional journey.

The next morning, he’s feeling pretty bad, but he gets up anyway

HE IS ABLE TO GET UP IN THE MORNING AND FEED HIMSELF!!!!!!! Just as triumphant a moment as running down to the sea imo. This is the hard work of living.

the teachings he had to impart made a certain amount of sense. They twisted the world around, so that they confirmed your worst fears, and the more you got the more you needed

More Wanting the Bad Thing.

Sometimes the two of them, miserable on the sofa together. Miles went to a lady to talk about it, sometimes, and the way he couldn’t really make friends

It was partly inherited all along :( The thing is sometimes something happens which explains it all, and sometimes it doesn’t, and often it is a combination. Gregory Edgeworth here being an exemplary father, meaning that when he noticed his son was more sad than the usual child he went and tried to sort it out.

Oh God, had nobody – the little boy who would sleep in single bed strewn with books and signal samurai pillowcases – had nobody thought, Manfred Von Karma will damage this child

Where are the child protection systems in Ace Attorney. Mr Phoenix sir I know you care very deeply for Trucy but you can’t just take a child back to your house without some kind of documentation. Von Karma should not have been able to randomly take a child out of his community to a different continent. As John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats says, though, “Take the character seriously.” So if this was the state of the issue - what the Hell would that feel like? Not good! Edgeworth is feeling the grief of realising that childhood and its moral simplicities are over, the fact that he has been forever damaged by his upbringing, and that he will never get to be nurtured by people who loved him. And also there are fifteen years of pain that he has not let himself feel, that are all now demanding their day in court.

Well. Miles has always cared about justice, fairness, truth (whatever those words really mean for adult lives, there is something very clear and beautiful about a child’s perception of the concepts). Edgeworth is in a position to help with that.

Try and build a life that you would be proud to show to your childhood self. It doesn’t have to be the life that they wanted.

Phoenix cried for the whole thing, pretty much

Phoenix is deep in grief!

as the river cuts a gash across the continent more political than physical.

Goodbye, Cévennes! I will miss you dearly!!

But there will be time enough to return. Go on, go on, let the magnets and the engineers carry you forward.

Perhaps there’s something important good and connective about trains, as well? Maybe there is space to redeem ourselves? Maybe if we leave our own interests behind and join in common cause?

I attended the centenary of the 1918 Armistice on a footbridge across the Rhine on the France-Germany border. Then there were lots of jokes about how it was about time for Alsace-Lorraine to go back to Germany, and also tears of relief that such a war hasn’t happened since 1945. If there are no wars between France and Germany for so long then surely more is possible.

Borders are weird places.

“The architecture here is, like, really weird,” Trucy says, eating her solero and looking, unimpressed, at one of the Europe’s greatest achievements. “Is it supposed to look like a spaceship?”

Trucy is right. It is weird. I love it so much. I think Edgeworth is absolutely involved in the European Court of Human Rights. It’s a bit for show, a bit actually effective, and mostly a massive symbol for… something.

While he’s there the law will change, and there will be dancing in the streets.

The Law has enormous power. In the right hands, it promotes human justice, and allows for the truth to be codified. In more mundane light, too, it orders things you hardly think about. A number of years ago, it was revealed that a mix-up on my birth certificate means that I have two available names. It took a while to actually work out what this meant; for a while I thought that I was legally registered under a name that wasn’t mine. It was upsetting! And then for trans people, getting the right name of their birth certs and personal IDs is a concrete affirmation. According to the state and its laws, this is who you are.

Sharp Objects says: I have returned to my childhood, the scene of the crime. This refers to real crime and also a more abstract one.

Anyway I have no way to end this. Let me know if you have any questions?

The Prodigal

The brown enormous odor he lived by was too close, with its breathing and thick hair, for him to judge. The floor was rotten; the sty was plastered halfway up with glass-smooth dung. Light-lashed, self-righteous, above moving snouts, the pigs' eyes followed him, a cheerful stare-- even to the sow that always ate her young-- till, sickening, he leaned to scratch her head. But sometimes mornings after drinking bouts (he hid the pints behind the two-by-fours), the sunrise glazed the barnyard mud with red the burning puddles seemed to reassure. And then he thought he almost might endure his exile yet another year or more.

But evenings the first star came to warn. The farmer whom he worked for came at dark to shut the cows and horses in the barn beneath their overhanging clouds of hay, with pitchforks, faint forked lightnings, catching light, safe and companionable as in the Ark. The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored. The lantern--like the sun, going away-- laid on the mud a pacing aureole. Carrying a bucket along a slimy board, he felt the bats' uncertain staggering flight, his shuddering insights, beyond his control, touching him. But it took him a long time finally to make up his mind to go home

-- Elizabeth Bishop

If you liked this, then you’ll LOVE

A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel

Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, including: Filling Station, At the Fishhouses

The Seasons Quartet by Ali Smith

Angels in America by Tony Kushner

How to be Alone by Lane Moore

The Vichy Syndrome by Henri Russo

Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 by Tony Judt

If This is a Man and The Truce by Primo Levi

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

All About Love by bell hooks

Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

Less, by Andrew Sean Greer

Sharp Objects, by Gillian Flynn

The Mountain Goats discography, specifically these songs: Heretic Pride **Never Quite Free Cry for Judas

Can't Get You Out of my Head docuseries by Adam Curtis

22, 25 by Rosemary Valerlo-O’Connell

#my fic #commentary #writing #rest on your oar #edgeworth #aa #rest on your oar (and see)#politics #Europe #modernity #pretention #elizabeth bishop #The Law #ace attorney #fic writing

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

Text

Into the breach

US law enforcement has literal centuries of shameful history of infiltrating and spying on politically disfavored activist groups, from trade unionists to suffragists to abolitionists to civil rights advocates to antiwar advocates.

Long before Cointelpro, federal agencies were intercepting communications and embedding as provocateurs in radical political movements, often with the help of mercenary "contractors" like the Pinkertons. The digital age only ramped up this public-private surveillance.

The Dakota Access Pipeline protests were infiltrated and surveilled by beltway bandits who billed the US taxpayer handsomely for the service.

https://theintercept.com/2018/12/30/tigerswan-infiltrator-dakota-access-pipeline-standing-rock/

2020's BLM uprising was subjected to the full array of military and national intelligence surveillance: drones, IMSI catchers, mass interception, infiltrators, wiretaps, "reverse warrants" to recover location data from Big Tech monopolists and more.

https://theconversation.com/police-surveillance-of-black-lives-matter-shows-the-danger-technology-poses-to-democracy-142194

And yet, federal and local agencies were seemingly totally unprepared for a mob of thousands of armed terrorists who stormed the capitol, disrupted the transition of presidential power, and threatened the lives of US legislators as well as the integrity of state documents.

The thing is, the plans were in plain sight. For weeks, I've been seeing screengrabs from far-right forums that leaked onto public social media in which violent psychopaths laid out detailed plans to commit murder and overthrow the government.

I wasn't even looking for this stuff. I was on vacation and only cursorily checking the internet. But it was obvious. How obvious? Well, the President was the keynote speaker at the riot and he openly called for violent insurrection. That might have tipped the cops off.

Since 1999's Battle of Seattle, cops have acted like pants-wetting cowards at the first whiff of protest.

2017's plan for dozens of paralyzed, wheelchair-using Medicare For All activists to peacefully occupy the capitol begat violent police panic.

https://twitter.com/MarkAgee/status/1346904850886397954

But when armed terrorists followed through on their widely proclaimed plan to invade the capitol building yesterday, law enforcement foundered. They weren't just unprepared to stop terrorists for breaking in, they were also unprepared to deal with them after the break-in.

To get a visceral sense of the shitshow, listen to Ryan Grim's interview with Matt Fuller, recorded while Fuller was hiding in a secret bunker with other Congressional reporters, Members of Congress and their staffers.

https://theintercept.com/2021/01/07/deconstructed-capitol-inside-the-insurrection/

There's a lot of fingerpointing today between the agencies, with a starring role for the US Capitol Police, who get $460m/yr (10% of Congress's total budget) and have demanded a stonking increase for 2021.

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2021/0107/Lawmakers-vow-a-probe-into-Capitol-Police-for-breach-by-mob

They definitely have some serious questions to answer (including why their officers posed for selfies and seem to have opened the gates to permit terrorists to storm the building).

https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1347054783333625857

But as Neal Stephenson pointed out in his 1994 comic technothriller masterpiece INTERFACE, DC is a "cop zoo" with literally hundreds of different law enforcement agencies operating in its city limits.

https://memex.craphound.com/2007/12/10/interface-neal-stephensons-underappreciated-masterpiece/

Did none of these agencies see the terrorist plan that had been scrawled in 100' tall flaming letters across the internet? How could they be caught this flatfooted?

From: Propublica: "a thin line of U.S. Capitol Police, with only a few riot shields between them...struggled with a flimsy set of barricades as a mob in helmets and bulletproof vests pushed its way toward the Capitol entrance."

https://www.propublica.org/article/capitol-rioters-planned-for-weeks-in-plain-sight-the-police-werent-ready

In her excellent Naked Capitalism roundup of yesterday's failures, Yves Smith examines the logical conclusion that the police were on the terrorists' side. After all, police unions and officers rallied for and endorsed Trump. Would they support a coup to keep him in power?

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/01/maga-cosplayers-seize-capitol-while-cops-flounder.html

Biden is no defund-the-police radical. He pledged to *increase* cop funding by 10%.

But Trump doesn't just promise money for cops: his offer is total impunity. Remember when he told police they should deliberately brutalize people during arrests?

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-police-nice-suspects/story?id=48914504

US policing has its origin in "slave patrols" that abetted enslavers by kidnapping Black people and forcing them into slavery. Slave patrols' legacy lives on in modern policing, with US police forces riddled with white nationalist terror supporters:

https://theintercept.com/2017/01/31/the-fbi-has-quietly-investigated-white-supremacist-infiltration-of-law-enforcement/

Trump himself is a white nationalist. A significant proportion of US police might be tempted to abet a coup to perpetuate the rule of a despot who promises them a free hand to torture and brutalize, and who backs white supremacy.

The failure of US law enforcement to prevent yesterday's botched coup will have long-term, ongoing consequences. While most of the terrorists were Qanon-addled fools, it's impossible to rule out some of them being sophisticated enough to attack the Capitol's IT systems.

Resecuring the Capitol's IT infrastructure should probably involve shredding every device, cable and thumb-drive, tearing open every light-socket and power-outlet, and even then, it will be hard to fully trust the building and its systems.

My 2020 novel ATTACK SURFACE has a B-plot that closely tracks yesterday's attacks; complicity between far-right insurrectionists and palace guards, and massive breaches of official covert IT systems after the government falls.

http://attacksurface.com

I'm not the only one who fictionalizes attacks like this. Within hours of the attacks, right wing conspiratorialists were calling it a false flag and describing their colleagues in the videos as secret antifa infiltrators.

The narrative aftermath of this is gonna be *wild*.

Take the War of 1812. Many commentators have invoked that war - in which enemy forces burned down the White House - in discussing yesterday's assault. But what most Americans don't know is that they are told a highly parochial version of that war-story.

Americans think the War of 1812 was fought with the British, and that the US won. Meanwhile, Canadians believe that the War of 1812 was fought between the US and *Canada*, and that *Canada* won.

Indeed, we have delightful comic folksongs that celebrate the burning of the White House by victorious Canadian troops:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7jlFZhprU4

And the White House burned, burned, burned And we're the one's that did it! It burned, burned, burned While the president ran and cried It burned, burned, burned And things were very historical And the Americans ran and cried like a bunch of little babies Waa waa waah!

Can you imagine the story the descendants of Qanon believers will be telling themselves of yesterday's attack in a century or two?

#pluralistic

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girlactionfigure · 3 years

Text

Four Days in May

This story has everything: the moral bankruptcy and cowardice of Western academia, the obsessive need of Palestinians and their supporters to make everything about them, and the emptiness of their insistence that they are not antisemitic, only “critical of Israel.”

On 26 May 2021, the Chancellor and Provost of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, released a statement* by email condemning recent antisemitic violence, called “Speaking Out Against Acts of Antisemitism.”

Recent incidents of hate directed toward Jewish members of our community again remind us of what history has to teach us. Tragically, in the last century alone, acts of prejudice and hatred left unaddressed have served as the foundation for many atrocities against targeted groups around the world …

If you have been adversely impacted by anti-Semitic or any other discriminatory incidents in our community, please do not hesitate to reach out to our counseling and other support services on campus. Our behavioral health team stands ready to support you through these challenging times …

We have also been witnesses to the increasing violence between Israeli forces and Hamas in the Middle East leading to the deaths of children and adults and mass displacement of citizens in the Gaza region and the loss of lives in Israel.”

On 27 May, the infuriated Rutgers Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) replied in a long post on their Instagram account (here significantly shortened):

… The Chancellor and Provost’s statement exclusively addressing antisemitism comes during a time when Israel’s occupation of Palestine [sic] is finally receiving widespread criticism, and despite mentioning the “deaths of children and adults and mass displacement of citizens in the Gaza region,” conveniently ignores the extent to which Palestinians have been brutalized by Israel’s occupation and bombing of Gaza.

… the fact that [the statement] comes at such a critical time involving global protests and critiques against Israel’s occupation of Palestine [sic] is a decision that cannot be separated from widespread attempts to conflate antizionism [sic] with antisemitism and derail Palestinian voices and activism. …

Chancellor Molloy and Provost Conway proceed to refer to “increasing violence between Israeli forces and Hamas in the Middle East.” By choosing to center the crossfire between Israeli Occupation Forces [sic] and Hamas, rather than Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine [sic], the Chancellor and Provost minimize the impact of settler-colonialism on Palestinians and attempt to portray the violence as an equal conflict, which we know it not to be in the slightest. …

Most importantly, the Chancellor and Provost notably neglected to use the words “Palestine” or “Palestinian” in their statement, instead opting to use phrases such as “the Middle East” and “the Gaza region.” This refusal to acknowledge and affirm the existence of Palestine [sic], and thus the Palestinian faculty and students at Rutgers University, reveals the administration’s inability to stand in genuine solidarity with the Palestinian members of its University, a community that is grieving the death of over 200 Palestinians including many women and children. It isolates them and shows that Rutgers does not stand with or support them in their struggle for freedom and liberation, and contributes to the racist efforts of zionists [sic] to erase Palestinian identity and existence. …

We therefore demand an apology from Chancellor Molloy and Provost Conway for dismissing the voices and visibility of Palestinians and allies, as well as demand an acknowledgement and explanation of why they did so. We demand that the Rutgers administration call out and expose any and all ties to Israeli apartheid and commit to action that reflects a global call to uplift the humanity of Palestinians, to recognize their violent displacement by the state of Israel, and acknowledge the gross mass murders occurrings [sic] at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces, adjacent to the American police violence condemned by the University.

On 28 May, the Chancellor and Provost sent a second email,* titled “Apology.”

Rutgers University–New Brunswick is a community that is enriched by our vibrant diversity.

However, our diversity must be supported by equity, inclusion, antiracism, and the condemnation of all forms of bigotry and hatred, including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

As we grow in our personal and institutional understanding, we will take the lesson learned here to heart, and pledge our commitment to doing better. We will work to regain your trust, and make sure that our communications going forward are much more sensitive and balanced.

It is absolutely stunning that university officials found it necessary to apologize for condemning antisemitism! But of course the apology was inadequate to calm the fury of SJP, who had demanded far more, and on the same day they produced an even longer Instagram diatribe, from which I will quote just one piece:

… Chancellor Molloy and Provost Conway had no urgent or context-based prerogative to address antisemitism. Condemnation of the unjust murders conducted by a Zionist institution does not equate to condemnation or attack upon Judaism or Jews; to explicitly cite the Jewish community in need of support in context to global criticisms of the Zionist occupation of Palestine [sic] is to conflate antizionism [sic] with antisemitism and derail Palestinian voices and activism.

In other words, SJP holds that the antisemitism university officials have condemned is actually just anti-Zionism, which SJP sees as totally justified! SJP admits that anti-Zionism is essential to Palestinian identity, and therefore to condemn it is to “erase” Palestinian identity. I agree with them: the only uniquely “Palestinian” part of Palestinian culture is its opposition to Jewish sovereignty. But it is becoming more and more clear that the anti-Zionism of Palestinians and their supporters is viciously antisemitic.

At this point, well-deserved criticism for their craven apology rained down on the poor Chancellor and Provost. And so, on 29 May, Rutgers found it necessary to release a third statement, this one by the President of the University, to un-apologize, and to make it clear that like the US Congress, they oppose every imaginable form of bigotry (and therefore criticize no one).

Rutgers deplores hatred and bigotry in all forms. We have not, nor would we ever, apologize for standing against anti-Semitism.

Neither hatred nor bigotry has a place at Rutgers, nor should they have a place anywhere in the world. At Rutgers we believe that anti-Semitism, anti-Hinduism, Islamophobia and all forms of racism, intolerance and xenophobia are unacceptable wherever and whenever they occur.

An Orwellian note: with each iteration of its position, Rutgers replaced the previous one on their website. All the links in the media that pointed to the original statement, the apology, and the un-apology now redirect to the same place, the un-apology. The others have been dropped into the memory hole.

Some 140 members of the Rutgers faculty joined SJP in opposing Israel’s right to self-defense. You can read their letter here. These are the folks that would teach your children if they go to Rutgers.

I can’t imagine that I would want my children to study in a North American or European university today. Far better for them to learn a trade; they will come out with smaller debts and without antisemitic baggage.

_________________________________

* I would have liked to provide “official” links to the complete, original emails, but as I wrote, they no longer can be found. The quotes provided are taken from several news accounts that included the content of the emails.

Abu Yehuda

#Academia #Jew Hatred

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comunidadchileglasgow · 4 years

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DON’T SELL ARMS TO CHILE

Text of a talk at a protest organised by Glasgow university arms divestment coalition https://uofg.fail/

Glasgow University 26/02/2020

On the 18th of October, we started to see similar scenes to what had happened during the 1970s dictatorship in Chile, as people rose up against a neoliberalist state that had already impoverished most of the population creating huge disparity between a small powerful elite and the masses of precarious workers at the mercy of a fully privatised colonial state.

Since protests began, instead of making any serious changes, the government only increased it´s expenditure on arms to repress and control the population, who was now rising up en-masse. A curfew was imposed across all major cities and we started to see and hear reports of the most atrocious murders and killings of activists both during protests or in disappearances where people are taken from their homes.

There have been so far 4300 legal actions have been taken against the human rights abuses that have taken place. 23,449 people have been arrested, 268 people have been wounded by tear gas canisters fired directly at the upper body. 2114 have been wounded by rubber bullets and pellets, and 427 people have experienced ocular trauma, some of whom have total loss of vision. This is why when you see a protest to do with Chile, you will see eyes. Some of those who have died, died due to the police continuing to attack after people tried to stop them, and we have seen reports of a strange green and a yellow gas, of a strange white powder in the water cannon, which uses a huge amount of water itself during a national drought.

As history goes back, political relationships between the UK and Chile have black pages that had been dusted off fairly recently in the XXI Century. The Thatcherite-style policies were known on the other side of the ocean under the auspices of General Augusto Pinochet, who took power in a coup in September 1973. Margaret Thatcher was a strong supporter of the brutal dictator right up until his death on house arrest awaiting trial and Chile, under Pinochet’s dictatorship, looked up to the iron lady as it suffered from violently-implemented restructurings on the ashes of dismantled political institutions and thousands of victims.

Pinochet’s legacy is not that different from Thatcher’s. A strong anti-union bias, wage and welfare cutting, the privatisation of health, education and transport while at the same time strengthening the authority and power of the state and maintaining a fervent anti-leftism are just some of the similarities. But to observe even deeper, as sociologist Ralph Miliband, said: “Mrs Thatcher is the first British prime minister to convey the very strong impression that she could, in suitably fraught circumstances, very comfortably play the role of a Pinochet”.

It was reported in Chile that Britain sent over US$160 million worth of weapons to Chile after 1980 when Britain lifted its arms embargo with Chile that had been put in place since the Pinochet-led military coup d’état against the civilian government. Weapons received by Chile, even before the blockage, included missiles and jet fighters, such as the British Hawker Hunter jets that bombarded La Moneda, the government palace. The relationship between Thatcher and Pinochet was strengthened during the Falklands War of 1982. Even though the military regimes in Chile and Argentina were close allies during the infamous Operation Condor, the Pinochet regime would send Britain intelligence information regarding Argentina.

And not so long ago, in 2013, Chile and Britain aggressively refreshed their ties on defence with a busy schedule of visits, discussions and “study tours” by delegations of military and civilian security and defence officials held in Chile and organised by Britain’s Royal College of Defence Studies with the support of the UK Embassy in Santiago. There’s no secret to Britain’s current ties to Chile’s military: the British government has advertised these visits on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website, stating that counterinsurgency training “was organised as part of the ongoing efforts to reinforce and strengthen the close ties between the British and Chilean Ministries of Defence”. These “training tours” have called the attention of Human Rights specialists because Santiago’s law-and-order establishment have been criticised for heavy-handed repression against student protesters, and for using anti-terror legislation to permit violence against the indigenous community of Mapuches.

In Santiago on July 30, 2013, British academics from the UK’s Army Officer School presented a counterinsurgency course to participants drawn from Chile’s military. By coincidence, also on July 30 in the capital, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism expressed concern over the “confused and arbitrary … misuse” of Chile’s counter-terrorism legislation that had “resulted in real injustice” against the country’s Mapuche indigenous people.

Of course we are suffering a media blockade like many protests across the world. if you look on the BBC, the Chilean press, most international mainstream newspapers, you won’t hear that we recently passed our fourth month of protests, which will only intensify in the coming months, that even now during the annual music festival in Viña del Mar is witnessing burning cars and crowds of protesters forcing heavily militarised police to back up along streets. Now violent right wing groups are going to their own protests armed and ready to beat up any opposing marches, with police protection and advice, So any statement or show of solidarity from the UK would have a huge on the consciences of people who would like to appear not to be so violent and stop this flow of weapons from being a normal occurrence.

https://media.hrw.org/preview/2428/Chile:-Reform-Police-in-the-Wake-of-Protests/eng

https://www.caat.org.uk/resources/export-licences/dashboard?region=Chile May be of interest

https://orientxxi.info/magazine/chile-a-testing-ground-for-israeli-weapons,3462

https://antropologiaparatodos.wordpress.com/2018/03/09/la-compania-explotadora-de-isla-de-pascua-patrimonio-memoria-e-identidad-en-rapa-nui/ Scottish involvement in colonisation & extraction in easter island

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savedfromsalvation · 5 years

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Compiled by Jim Walker

Babylon Is Fallen

"And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground." (Isaiah 21:9)

Comment

Many soldiers have used Bible verses to justify horrific destruction against their enemy. Such beliefs can comfort the minds of men to do virtually any kind of atrocity against men, women, and children of the enemy. The Crusaders of the 12th century, slaughtered or tortured anyone who stood in their way. The Bible's words gave them their justification.

Even today, our government, military and religious leaders judge wars as "moral" based on Biblical reasoning. Fighting men feel, not only comforted, but glorious in their actions against the destruction of fellow human beings. In the Gulf War, for example, an F-16 fighter/bomber had "Isaiah 21:9" written on its bombs.

David Slaughters Them

"And he brought out the people that were in it, and cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes..." (I Chronicles 20:3)

Comment

Chapters 17-19 (17-18-19) tells us that David killed 22,000 Syrians and that Abishai killed 18,000 Edomites. No one expresses shame at such slaughters.

Here in 20:3, we have David, counted as a great leader of the Israelites, slaughtering captives after the cessation of hostilities. From what high moral ground should we admire this action?

Decapitate Them!

"And Israel joined himself unto Baalpeor: and the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel. And the LORD said unto Moses, 'Take all the heads of the people and hang them up before the LORD against the sun, that the fierce anger of the LORD may be turned away from Israel.'" (Numbers 25:3-4)

Comment

Those who worshipped other gods must die, and even more horribly, their heads displayed publicly. Either God never said anything so cruel, or we truly live in a cursed universe, ruled by a maniac Supreme Being.

Millions of people, today, switch their religions. If God had any interest in this ongoing process, there appears no evidence of this.

Gideon Slaughters

"And Gideon said, Therefore when the Lord hath delivered Zebah and Zalmunna into mine hand, then I will tear your flesh with the thorns of the wilderness and with briers" (Judges 8:7)

"Now Zebah and Zalmunna were Karkor, and their hosts with them, about fifteen thousand men, all that were left of all the hosts of the children of the east: for there fell an hundred and twenty thousand men that drew sword." (Judges 8:10)

Comment

The Gideon Society places Bibles into motels and hotels across America. One would assume Gideon lived as a person of exemplary character and great worth to have a worldwide society named after him. Below describes some of Gideon's accomplishments:

Gideon slaughtered thousands in battle by plotting with the "Lord" to use Treachery.

Gideon murdered thousands more for worshipping "false Gods."

Gideon tortured and killed still more for daring to taunt him.

Gideon plundered the bodies of his victims (to fashion a jeweled priestly vestment).

Gideon fathered an offspring who killed 69 of his stepbrothers.

Read the story of Gideon in Judges, chapters thru 6-9 ( 6-7-8-9). The tale of Gideon describes just one of the many horror stories in the Bible, a book that glorifies behavior abysmal to modern society. The clergy and leaders have hoodwinked millions of people about the stories in the Bible. Don't let others decide for yourself.

God Buries Them Alive

"And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods. They, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them: and they perished from among the congregation. And all Israel that were round about them fled at the cry of them: for they said, Lest the earth swallow us up also. And there came out a fire from the LORD, and consumed the two hundred and fifty men that offered incense." (Numbers 16:32-35)

Comment

Moses relays a sadistic threat that asks us to believe that God punishes members of families, including innocent infants. And again we have the Satanic fire coming from God burning his creations.

God Kills The Firstborns!

"And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle. And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead." (Exodus 12:29-30)

Comment

If we believe every word in the Bible as coming from God, then it stands to reason that the violent actions from the God described in Exodus cannot give us a moral comparison to live our lives in a peaceful world.

If one wishes to believe that God possess love for His creations, then the killing of innocent children cannot possibly come from God, and therefore, these verses from the Bible must have come elsewhere. But note that if one takes the Bible's words as absolute truth, then not only did God smote the firstborn children, but all firstborn regardless of age. This means all firstborn teenagers, firstborn men & women, firstborn octogenarians, and even all firstborn cows and bulls. Regardless of how much love, charity, or goodness they may have imparted to the world, if they had the unfortunate luck to have first passed through their mother's vagina in the land of Egypt, according to the Bible, God killed them!

God Sends Pestilence

"Either three years' famine; or three months to be destroyed before thy foes, while that the sword of thine enemies overtaketh thee; or else three days the sword of the LORD, even the pestilence, in the land, and the angel of the LORD destroying throughout all the coasts of Israel..." (I Chronicles 21:12)

"So the LORD sent pestilence upon Israel: and there fell of Israel seventy thousand men." (I Chronicles 21:14)

Comment

David made an offense against God in taking a census of the people, so God gave David a choice. Oddly enough, David ignores God and never actually gets around to making a choice; so the Lord makes the decision for him and sends pestilence upon Israel.

It appears unclear as to why David committed a crime, but why shouldn't God have punished individual offenders instead of killing an army of innocent bystanders? Atrocities such as this appear outrageous enough when perpetrated by Attila the Hun, Hitler or Pol Pot, but when it comes from a, supposedly, loving God, it should make one wonder if this represents a Devil instead of a God.

God Slaughters Blacks

"And there came out against them Zerah the Ethiopian with an host of a thousand thousand, and three hundred chariots..." (II Chronicles 14:9)

So the LORD smote the Ethiopians before Asa, and before Judah; and the Ethiopians fled. (II Chronicles 14:12)

Comment

It appears that Black Christian Bible studies programs ignore these verses, for it says that the Lord God slaughtered over a million blacks.

The association of black with evil goes far back in Western Christian culture. The early Church fathers, Origen, Jerome, and Augustine of Hippo wrote about devils appearing as Ethiopians.

White racist groups (such as the Ku Klux Klan who think of themselves as opposite of black devils) see these Biblical verses as evidence to justify their beliefs. We still hear phrases such as "Prince of Darkness" or "Black magic" which link blackness with sin.

In the story of Ham and Japheth, the word "ham" has connotations of "hot" and "dark" in Semitic languages. To the ancient Israelites, as well as some modern Jews and Christians, the "children of Ham" had dark skin and lived in eastern Africa. Thus they see the "Curse of Ham" as a link with black skin and sexual license.

God's Threat To Kill

"And Moses said, Thus saith the LORD, About midnight will I go out into the midst of Egypt: And all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill; and all the firstborn of beasts." (Exodus 11:4-5)

Comment

After reading such verses, it would become apparent, even to a child, that this does not describe the actions of a loving Being. Anyone who reconciles the killing of innocent children with an intelligent and loving Creator can only come from great ignorance under the addiction of blind faith.

"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize humankind."

--Thomas Paine

Godly Head Wounds

"But God shall wound the head of his enemies, and the hairy scalp of such a one as goeth on still in his trespasses. The Lord said, I will bring again from Bashan, I will bring my people again from the depths of the sea: That thy foot may be dipped in the blood of thine enemies, and the tongue of thy dogs in the same." (Psalms 68:21-23)

Comment

If anyone believes these sadistic words come from God, then it might serve prudence to stay away from such people. For anyone who holds to such beliefs may very well do the same to others.

Godly Mass Murder

"And he smote the men of Bethshemesh, because they had looked into the ark of the LORD, even he smote of the people fifty thousand and threescore and ten men: and the people lamented, because the LORD had smitten many of the people with a great slaughter." (I Samuel 6:19)

Comment

Here we have just one more instance of God performing mass murder, a sadistic killer far worse than Hitler, Attila the Hun or Pol Pot.

These verses should insult the intelligence of any person who thinks that God possesses a loving nature.

One should not dismiss the Old Testament's repeated demand for the vilest atrocities as something peculiar to the early Hebrews. Even today, our most atrocious wars, terrorism and hate crimes occur around the world based on ancient religious beliefs, many of them coming directly from verses in the Old and New Testament.

Kill All Unbelievers

"And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death; because he hath spoken to turn you away from the LORD your God..." (Deuteronomy 13: 5)

"If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers;" (Deuteronomy 13: 6)

"Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people." (Deuteronomy 13:8-9)

"Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword." (Deuteronomy 13:15)

Comment

These severe laws commanded the members of the Hebrew religion to murder even their own children if they did not worship Yahweh (God).

These Bible words can justify, to a fanatical fundamentalist believer, the killing of friends or family simply because they may fail to change their beliefs.

Why anyone today would accept these words, much less allow them to exist in a sacred book goes against the nature of any tolerant and loving people.

Kill Man, Woman, Infant

"Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." (I Samuel 15:2-3)

Comment

No matter how one can justify possible crimes from adults, suckling infants have no means of acting out crimes. And what evil against God could the animals have possibly performed? Only an evil entity could kill innocent infants and animals, no matter what their parents and owners may have done.

King David's Holocaust

"And he brought forth the people that were therein, and put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under the axes of iron, and made them pass through the brickkiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon. So David and all the people returned unto Jerusalem." (II Samuel 12:31)

Comment

From the sacred scripts from the Bible we learn that the great King David carried out atrocities that rivaled the cruel acts from the holocaust of World War II. If we condemn the Nazi's for their atrocities, why should we not do the same for David's bloodthirsty actions?

Moses' Mass Murder

"Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the LORD in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the LORD. Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves." (Numbers 31:16-18)

Comment

Moses commands the murder of approximately 100,000 young males and, roughly, 68,000 helpless women.

Consider women and children of your own family: No matter how sick they may lay, or how they may go against a religion, how would you feel if a man named Moses, claiming to speak for God, sent men into your house and hacked to pieces the women and male children? Also, how would you react if they spotted a female child, dragged her off with them to do as they please with her? Note that these innocent virgins served for their own sexual pleasures.

Midian, the land of the Midianites, did not reside in an area regarded as a natural enemy of Israel for centuries, and in fact lay hundreds of miles away from the Israelite encampment. Moses, himself, had lived in Midian as fugitive after committing his first murder. In short, Midian presented no threat to God's "Chosen People."

Nail His Head!

"Then Jael Heber's wife took a nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died." (Judges 4:21)

Comment

In verse 16 the Israelites surprise Sisera's army and that "there was not a man left," except Sisera who deserts his army and flees, a deed punishable by court martial today. Sisera then goes to the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber. Jael takes him in, hides him under a blanket, gives him milk to quench his thirst, and promises to stand guard at the door while he sleeps. Then Jael kills Sisera!

We see no telling of the slightest shame, but rather, Jael proudly flaunts her kill. The author of this piece of Scripture makes it clear that the passage represents a deed, not only as grand and heroic but also consistent with the will of God (see Judges 4:23).

Raping And Killing

"Every one that is found shall be thrust through; and every one that is joined unto them shall fall by the sword. Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished." (Isaiah 13:15-16)

Comment

These verses foretold the deaths of the people of Babylon. Fortunately not everyone in Babylon (now modern Iraq) fell by the sword or had their children dashed to pieces or their wives raped (just another instance of errors in the Bible). How some people who believe in an infallible Bible can accept these verses as God inspired, or morally uplifting can only give evidence to the blinding nature of belief. For if we believe these words as God inspired, then the killing of children and the raping of wives must also come as an inspiration from the Supreme Being.

Shed The Blood

"And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made the man." (Genesis 9:5-6)

Comment

Some anti-abortionists have used these words to justify the killing of abortionists. As such, these words helped inspire Michael Griffin to kill Doctor David Gunn on March 10, 1993.

Consider that the Bible never directly addresses abortion, much the less the condemnation of it. On the contrary, God himself has condoned, not only miscarriages, but has personally called for the killing of suckling infants and the bashing of children against the rocks.

(See Numbers 5:26-27, I Samuel 15:2-3, and Psalm 137:9)

Slaughter Of Innocents

"And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain." (Deuteronomy 2:34)

"And we utterly destroyed them, as we did unto Sihon king of Hesbon, utterly destroying the men, women, and children, of every city. But all the cattle, and the spoil of the cities we took for a prey to ourselves." (Deuteronomy 3:6-7)

Comment

Such words helped give justification to mediaeval Crusaders who slaughtered men, women and children along their way to Jerusalem and stole the spoils of the cities. Even today, many Christian military men use Scripture to justify their actions. If any soldier harbors doubt about killing his fellow humans, he need only consult a military chaplain or read the Bible to calm their worries. Even George Bush (the First), with Billy Graham beside him, proclaimed the Gulf War as "moral." George Bush (the Second) continued in his father's steps by killing thousands of Iraqi civilians in the Iraqi war. Such moral wars result in thousands of "utterly destroyed" innocent men, women and children.;

(For a few more examples [but not all] see also Deuteronomy 3:3, 7:2, 20:16-17 , 25:19; Joshua 6:21, 8:26, 10-28-40; Numbers 31:17-18; I Samuel 15:3; Isaiah 13:16; and Hosea 13:16)

Slay Old And Young

"And to the others he said in mine hearing, Go ye after him through the city, and smite: let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity: Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and woman: but come not near any man upon whom is the mark; and begin at my sanctuary. Then they began at the ancient men which were before the house." (Ezekiel 9:5-6)

Comment

These words, commanded by God, orders the slaying of not only women and the old, but of little children. These accounts of cold-blooded massacres occurred simply because people refused to accept Yahweh. These phrases should give warning to anyone who knows a person who believes every word in the Bible.

For what sense of moral reasoning should we allow ourselves to admire such Biblical verses?

The Survivors

"Saying, Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads. And I heard the number of them which were sealed: and there were sealed an hundred and forty and four thousand of all the tribes of the children of Israel." (Revelation 7:3-4)

"And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power. And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads." (Revelation 9:3-4)

"And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred forty [and] four thousand, having his Father's name written in their foreheads." (Revelation 14:1)

"...the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth. These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins." (Revelation 14:3-4)

Comment

Here we have the great future destruction where billions of people will die. Only 144,000 virgin Jews with a protective mark on their heads will survive. (I suppose the 'Jews for Jesus' cult would serve as the leading candidates.)

How many believers realize that this means the death of everyone on earth but a few virgin Jews? And this includes the destruction of all Christians! (Of course the alleged Jesus, a virgin Jew, who claimed only a few would enter heaven would agree with this).

Note: Of course faithful Christians cannot accept the 144,000 figure so they must either become atheists, ignore these verses, reject Revelation as just dream nonsense, or try to revise its meaning to something they can accept. Some try to get creative by claiming that

Rev. 7:-9

,"...a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues...," means an unlimited number will enter heaven. Not so. The "all" in this verse speaks about all the tribes of Israel (the Jews) scattered around the nations of the world. The verse comes right after listing the tribes in

Rev. 7:1-8

. And man doesn't name the number but rather the angel who speaks in John's dream. And John reports the number, three times, in chapters 7 and 14, as shown above. Sorry Christians but all of you will have to suffer with all the atheists and unbelievers in God's hell. Welcome to the club!

Beware of a future "Armageddon" caused by religious people. Belief in self-fulfilling prophesies creates self-fulfilling acts.

Utter Destruction, 1

"And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword." (Joshua 6:21)

Comment

These "God inspired" words give not a hint of mercy to innocent slaughtered women, children or the old.

After Moses and Aaron died, Joshua assumed command and the Israelites entered Jericho. Note that in the same siege, "all the silver, and gold, and vessels of brass and iron, are consecrated unto the Lord: they shall come into the treasury of the Lord" (Joshua 6:19)

In the battle of Ai, the Bible tells that twelve thousand, the whole population of Ai, got slaughtered. (Josh. 8:25)

Note that many invaders throughout history have used such words as justification for wars and looting.

Utter Destruction, 2

"Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree: And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place." (Deuteronomy 12:2-3)

Comment

The Lord, here commands the destruction of all the places where people worship other gods. There appears not a shred of religious tolerance here!

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own-- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism."

--Albert Einstein

(For other examples of utter destructions, see Numbers 21:2; Deuteronomy 3:6-7, 7:2, 13:15, 20:17, Judges 21:11, II Chronicles 20:23; I Kings 20-42; Isaiah 11:15, 15:3, 9, 18; Jeremiah 12:17, 25-9, 50;21, 26, 51:3; Daniel 11;44; Amos 9:8 )

Washing Feet In Blood

"The righteous shall rejoice when he sees the vengeance. He shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked." (Psalms 58:10)

Comment

How many "good" Christians realize that such a verse appears in the Bible? Of course most preachers keep these bloodthirsty words away from their congregations, and the few Christians who do come across these verses, re-interpret them for their own purposes, not realizing the impact these words can have on others. Unfortunately the few that take these verses literally can justify atrocities against anyone who they wish to define as "wicked."

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theliterateape · 6 years

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"You’ll Never See His Like Again!": Revisiting Comics Legend Stan Lee’s Best, Most Literary (and Vastly Underrated) Story, The Silver Surfer (1978)

By Jarret Keene

Stan “the Man” Lee is dead, but his creations are alive, pouncing across theaters, game screens, and t-shirts with equal parts vitality and sorrow. Today, Spider-Man and Thor and Captain America and Black Panther and so many others dominate our media landscape to a degree unthinkable 40 years ago when my father bought me The Silver Surfer graphic novel from a B. Dalton inside Tampa Bay Mall.

Back then comics (22-page floppies) were relegated to a single spinner rack in mall bookshops, a gimmick to draw kids into the store so their parents felt obliged to pick up garbage Sidney Sheldon’s thriller Bloodline. But The Silver Surfer didn’t fit in a metal rung; instead it was displayed amidst the regular literary trade paperbacks. Today it is vaguely praised on obscure blogs as being among the very first efforts to push comics into the realm of the literary epic during a brutal moment in the history of the comics industry. Staggering inflation, a crushing 1977 (and then a 1978) blizzard, and rising paper costs nearly sank DC Comics. Marvel, though, endured such challenges with Stan Lee’s relentless cheer, his grace under pressure, his courage to always try something new when everyone else cowered, caved.

In the late 1970s, the U.S. continued to fall apart. There was the ongoing energy crisis, serial killers like Ted Bundy lurked in every shadow, the Jonestown mass suicide played out like a dress rehearsal for a larger and more diabolical event, toxic waste burbled in landfills adjacent to pleasant neighborhoods, and Soviet Russia rattled its nuclear saber. You wouldn’t know this from reading Marvel Comics, every issue offering a column called Stan’s Soapbox, wherein Lee waxed passionately, positively, and with the eloquence of a poetry-reading pitchman, about what was forthcoming from “the House of Ideas.”

Today Marvel is an idea-resistant shell of the company Lee built and oversaw, a house of ideology teeming with dour, OMG-chirping social-justice superheroes (gay mutant Iceman, lesbian Latinx warrior America Chavez, Muslim teenager Kamala Khan a.k.a. Ms. Marvel, female cancer-stricken Thor). Instead of debuting new characters, the current editorial team is content to reverse race and flip gender of, and add a dash of disability to, classic characters. In its prime, though—and starting in 1961 with the first issue of Fantastic Four — Marvel excelled at depicting authentic outcasts who felt a fierce responsibility to protect even those who hated them, feared them, wanted them dead. Lee’s characters — which he co-created with Jack Kirby, the artist who visually defined comics for an international audience — didn’t nurture wounds of identity and grievance; they waged their internal battles on a mythic scale. In the same way Oedipus confronted the ignorance of his birth, in the same way petulant Achilles struggled to overcome his narcissism, so did hapless high school reject and science nerd Peter Parker combat his own teenage doubt and ego and feelings of inadequacy.

Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962) containing the debut of Spider-Man, is arguably the single greatest and most important comics story ever written, its 11 pages defining not just the Marvel superhero but also the last half-century of U.S. comics. “With great power comes great responsibility” wasn’t merely an inspirational and moral slogan; it was also a metaphor for American exceptionalism, which could only result in senseless death (like, say, the murder of Peter’s uncle, Ben) if not applied toward just and proper ends. Parker is spoiled, his own worst enemy. He’s a purveyor of fake news, taking photos of himself in action as Spider-Man and selling them to the Daily Bugle to cover the cost of college tuition. We love Parker for his flaws, though, and for his commitment to overcoming them. We cherish his humanity even as we’re thrilled by his brawls with violent predators like Kraven the Hunter, bulky crime boss Kingpin, hideously armed Doctor Octopus.

The Silver Surfer isn’t human like Parker. The Surfer is carved from the “doomed messiah from beyond” mold a la Superman (or Beowulf or Jesus). But he isn’t adopted as a baby and given a Midwest upbringing. He is a silver-skinned alien riding a floating board, arriving on Earth to determine if it’s suitable for his planet-eating master Galactus. Lee and Kirby made a wise choice in never pinning down the exact size of this god of interstellar death, who, like the Surfer, was first introduced in the pages of Fantastic Four #48–50 (1966). That three-part story is a must-read, yes, but then, a decade later, Lee and Kirby collaborated on a 100-page retelling of the Surfer-and-Galactus saga, only this time the superheroes were removed, leaving just the god and his fallen angel. The result is a romantic, philosophical, and artistic statement that outstrips everything else Lee and Kirby collaborated on prior — which is saying a lot. It is also the last major work either of them would produce for Marvel, or for any company thereafter.

Today Marvel is an idea-resistant shell of the company Lee built and oversaw, a house of ideology teeming with dour, OMG-chirping social-justice superheroes

The Silver Surfer was published by arrangement with Fireside Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster in New York known for publishing a famous chess book. Based on a Kirby sketch, the cover is by artist Earl Norem, known for painting the covers of men’s adventure magazines and more than a few Marvel mags (like Savage Sword of Conan). Indeed, the painted cover gives the book literary gravitas. The interior art is all prime Kirby, with eloquent inks by Joe Sinnott, colors by Glynis Wein (first wife of the late Len Wein, who created Wolverine). The Silver Surfer is a feast for a comics-lover’s eyes; my battered copy still radiates visual power. But it’s the heartbreaking story and dialogue that set this effort apart from anything else in the history of comics and in the bibliography of Lee and Kirby.

Here the protagonist must choose between living forever to serve a devourer of worlds, or else die alongside eight billion earthlings to be rejoined with the obliterated love of his life, lovely and golden Ardina. In The Silver Surfer, Lee gives us a hero who sells his soul to the devil so as to thwart a holocaust and save a populated globe. He only meets a few dozen — many of who attack him physically. But he understands their potential to grow beyond their limitations. It’s not a story in tune with the 1970s, that post-Vietnam, post-JFK, post-Watergate era during which Marvel delivered dark, humorous characters like Ghost Rider. No, this was something else entirely.

The opening splash page is the closed fist of the planet-eater: Behold! The hand of Galactus! Behold! The hand of him who is like unto a god. Behold! The clutch of harnessed power — about to be released! The tone here is elevated, serious, Lee is writing in a style that evokes the Old Testament of the King James. The second page is a splash, too; in it, the mitt of Galactus opens and from it erupts the Surfer, who “streaks through the currents of space — ever-seeking, ever-searching — for he alone is herald to mighty Galactus.” The image is the visual distillation of an artist’s self-confidence, his arrogance. After all, doesn’t every artist believe himself to be God as he manipulates his characters, his images, to suit his imaginative fancy? It’s also a breathtaking rendering of a big bang, or a biblical birth of the universe, without a benevolent designer in control. Here the god of the universe is a destroyer.

The universe seems endless and infinitely alluring to this mysterious star-wanderer, who yearns for his own homeworld, Zenn-La, lost to him forever for reasons Lee doesn’t initially explain, but we presume Galactus ate it.

The Surfer enters the atmosphere of “a verdant sphere” unlike any he’s seen before. Soaring high above the streets of New York, he doesn’t hide from view. He is fascinated by the fear in the eyes of people, noting “how it is always the young who are the first to accept — and to trust.” He sees a woman who reminds him of Shalla Bal, a woman the Surfer loved on his own world. Haunted by her memory, he pursues this woman through the alleyways of Manhattan while imagining a conversation with this Shalla Bal lookalike. We learn that, years ago, the Surfer sacrificed his mortal body to Galactus to save Zenn-La from destruction.

Finally, the woman abandons him to his painful recollections… and then Galactus suddenly appears in a whirlwind of crackling energy, ready to devour Earth.

He congratulates the Surfer on a job well done and articulates in excruciating detail how he plans to sate his appetite: “Here shall I drain the gently rolling seas. Here shall the bountiful land yield to me its gift of life.” It is an impending act of reverse creation, a backward Genesis. But the herald of Galactus isn’t having any of it. When the Surfer fails to convince his master that the price of eight billion souls is too high, he lashes out at Galactus with “the power cosmic,” using it seal the destroyer in a concrete cocoon. It doesn’t hold Galactus for long. Disgusted, the world-eater blasts the Surfer from the sky, cursing the herald to live amidst “the dunghills of man” for a spell in order to ponder his mistake. Then Galactus disappears.

The Surfer recovers from his fall, then disguises himself by altering his appearance to resemble a male fashion model from a billboard. He wanders the city with admiration for its denizens until muggers approach him in Central Park. The Surfer shoos them away with a pyrotechnical display, then pledges to walk around without hiding his identity; concealment did nothing for him anyway. Meanwhile, we witness Galactus gorging on a planet in another solar system. Sated, his thoughts turn toward his missing herald. What can Galactus do to make the Surfer submit? The world-eater’s counsel, a sniveling Master of Guile, advises Galactus to provide the Surfer — our alien Adam — with an Eve, someone to betray the Surfer’s heart.

And so beautiful Ardina enters the picture. She sneaks the instantly smitten Surfer beyond Earth’s atmosphere, and they share in the pleasures of the spaceways. Floating now on a patch of green ringed with bright flowers in a neighboring galaxy, our hero is tempted to give up his standoff with Galactus. In the same way Dido tempted Aeneas to give up his destiny to found Rome, so does Ardina begin to entice the Surfer to submit to her — and by extension Galactus. He refuses, says he’s willing to die to save Earth, and so Ardina leads the Surfer on a journey into human darkness. “You will perish for a worthless cause,” she warns. She shows him “brutal images, a morbid montage of heart-rending scenes filled with carnage and strife.” Domestic violence. A child killed by a hit-and-run driver. A mass execution. Bombed ruins of a once-thriving city. The Surfer is jarred but not dissuaded.

And then something interesting happens: Ardina, designed to coldly seduce the Surfer to make him betray his convictions, ends up feeling a warm love for him.

So much so that when the Surfer, driven mad from having set foot inside a suburban home where the walls seem to be closing on him:

The ceiling — almost touching my head! No room to move! No place to soar! I see no sun — no sky — no endless reaches of rolling space! Wherever I face — wherever I turn — I am surrounded by smothering objects! Shelves and books! Pictures, clocks, and lamps! Chairs and drapes and shuttered windows! But where is the sky? Where is the cold, crisp touch of rolling space? Where are the hills, the seas, the nourishing stars in endless profusion? Without them I perish!

Interestingly, the aspect of humankind that nearly causes the Surfer to surrender his mission is man’s stultifying existence inside tract-housing boxes.

Troubled by the experience, the Surfer races to escape Earth’s atmosphere. Riding bitch, Ardina screams: “The barrier! You have forgotten the barrier!”

The Surfer falls to Earth while Ardina re-materializes before Galactus inside his giant space vehicle. She admits she has failed. She confesses her love for the Surfer. Displeased, Galactus recalibrates her cloned body for one last mission. A mission that involves shattering the Surfer’s heart.

Meanwhile, the Surfer continues to be attacked by various humans. He is shot at, shackled and hammer-smashed, then the U.S. military blasts him with an ultra-sonic cannon, which nearly kills him. Ardina consoles him for a moment, kisses him, telling the Surfer she is with him and by his side, even after death. Which is when Galactus dissolves her into dead particles using a matrix-drone.

Now Galactus asks the Surfer to again join him in scouting the universe for other edible planets. It’s the only way Earth can be saved. The command is agonizing, for what Galactus offers is a living hell. To save Earth, the Surfer must cast off death, the ultimate escape and the one chance he has at being reunited with Ardina. But as the Surfer himself says: “Never was there a choice!”

The curse of immortality at the cost of true love is a familiar idea in ancient epics. The sea nymph Calypso offered Odysseus eternal life, but he refused it in order to be with his wife Penelope. But the Surfer has no options; he can’t be selfish enough to die and thus doom the Earth. What makes him a hero is his refusal to surrender and his willingness to embrace the agony of existence, of enslavement. He must deny himself every exit for humans to live on until they hopefully change themselves for the better. They must have a chance; the Surfer and Galactus give them one.

The Surfer returns to the gauntlet of Galactus, disappearing within the destroyer’s fist.

✶

In this story, there is no Fantastic Four. No cameo appearances by Lee and Kirby. No clever narrative captions. Just the purest narrative of a hero fighting for an ideal, for the steadfast belief in our ability to one day rise above our petty evils, our arrogance and wrath. Lee wrote so many masterpieces of comics literature, but this one is his best because it best speaks to the principle he and his characters lived by: Never succumb to nihilism and despair. Never forget that we are similar in our anxieties and weaknesses, and that our individual identities matter less than our collective aspiration to improve our world and the lives of the people who inhabit it.

It’s a moral stance that today remains obscured by Internet social-justice frothing and the political insanity of being ruled by a reality-TV star. But the embers of Lee’s views are there for anyone to ignite and carry forward. Make no mistake: the world is poorer now without Lee. As the blurb on The Silver Surfer ’s back cover announces: “You will never see his like again!” We can, however, always see Lee’s passion and his love for humanity — for life! — in the work he and Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and others left for us to enjoy.

Lee didn’t need to die for our sins. He endures, and so will we.

Never was there a choice.

Jarret Keene is an assistant professor in residence in the English Department at UNLV, where he teaches creative writing and ancient and medieval literature. His fiction, essays and verse have appeared in literary journals such as New England Review, Carolina Quarterly, and the Southeast Review. He is the author of several books and editor of acclaimed short-fiction anthologies. He is currently working on a critical biography of comic book legend Jack Kirby.

#Stan Lee #Silver Surfer #Marvel Comics #Comics as literature #Silver Surfer First Appearance

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snakebusters · 3 years

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Reptile parties man honours dead American. George Floyd is recognized by having a new species of turtle named in his honour.A peer reviewed paper has formally named a recently discovered species of Australian Saw-shelled Turtle Wollumbinia georgefloydi Hoser, 2021 in honour of George Floyd. Floyd was bashed and killed by four police officers at Minnesota, USA, in 2020 and his death sparked outrage and protests globally. The naming of this turtle in honour of George Floyd follows a massive three volume monograph on the Australasian Tree Frogs published by Hoser in 2020 in which Hoser announced the formal discovery of 62 new species. One of those new to science species was also named in honour of George Floyd. At that time, Raymond Hoser wrote: “The species is named in honour of the late George Floyd, a victim of an unprovoked attack by four thug police officers at Powderhorn, in downtown Minneapolis, USA, on 25 May 2020.” A second frog species was also named Kumanjayiwalkerus kumanjayi in honour of Kumanjayi Walker a 19 year old Aboriginal (Black) Australian who was unlawfully shot and killed by a police officer in 2019. Hoser wrote: “The species Kumanjayiwalkerus kumanjayi sp. nov. is named in honour Kumanjayi Walker, another indigenous Australian victim of an execution by a racist white Australian police officer in the Northern Territory (NT), being one of over 400 such victims in Australia since 1990. The 19 year old was shot and killed by NT Police Officer Zachary Rolfe in November 2019.” Hoser also wrote: “The world is full of memorials and species named in honour mass murderers, thieves and despots and it is appropriate that victims of these people should also be honoured occasionally.” The frog paper was published in hard copy on Friday 5 June 2020 and following publication of this paper, a number of people have heeded Hoser’s words and toppled statues of racists and murderers and thrown them into rivers and lakes. The paper naming the new turtle species in honour of George Floyd was published on 16 August 2021. Wollumbinia georgefloydi occurs in the wet tropics region of north Queensland, Australia, bounded by the Burdekin Gap in the South and found as far north as about Cape Flattery. Hoser also named another newly discovered species Wollumbinia darnellafrazierae Hoser, 2021. Wollumbinia darnellafrazierae is named in honour of Darnella Frazier. Born 2003 in Nashville, Tennessee to parents LaTangie Gillespie and James Frazier. She has three brothers and one sister. Most of Darnella’s life, however, has been spent in Minneapolis, Minnesota. After being active in varsity basketball, she graduated from Roosevelt High School in that city. She is an American woman who (at age 17) video recorded the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and then posted her video on Facebook. Because Frazier’s video contradicted the initial Minneapolis police account of Floyd’s death, it sparked global protests regarding police abuse, lies and corruption. Demonstrations demanding justice for Floyd exploded over the summer of 2020 involving an estimated 26 million U.S. citizens in more than 2,000 cities across the nation. Similar protests took place in over 60 nations around the world. The Frazier video sparked the greatest level of demonstrations and protest in human history. More immediately her video led to more intense monitoring of police behaviour around the world including investigations of past acts of police killings of unarmed black men, women, and children. Without her video, the Floyd death would have been ignored and the victim blamed.The genus name Myuchelys Thomson and Georges, 2009 was illegally coined as a genus name to over-write Wollumbina Wells, 2007 by a pair of taxonomic vandals and police protected criminals, Scott Thomson and Arthur Georges. The name Myuchelys is an objective junior synonym of Wollumbina and the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) has ruled that the illegally coined Myuchelys should never be used. In spite of the ICZN ruling of 2021 against the thieves, Thomson and Georges have aggressively promoted their illegal name online, including on wikipedia pages that they obsessively control and so a warning against their reckless misinformation is given here.Raymond Hoser, is the world’s foremost expert on reptiles and frogs. He has authored numerous major books on wildlife, handles the world’s deadliest snakes on a daily basis, does reptile shows for kids and adults and invented Reptile Parties for birthday parties, which are now copied by businesses worldwide and hailed as one of the greatest wildlife conservation and education initiatives in recent times. To date he has discovered and named over 350 species of reptiles, as well as discovering and naming dozens of species of frogs and mammals. Not as well-known is that in 1990 Hoser was bashed by several police in a police station in Melbourne, Australia and nearly killed in the same manner George Floyd died. Hoser escaped that attack with a broken nose, smashed back and arms and required surgery and years of ongoing medical treatment. He also got hit with a series of falsified criminal charges which he eventually beat. Hoser's story was published in the best-selling books The Hoser Files and Victoria Police Corruption - 2. The Victoria police officer who led the attack on Hoser, Richard George Valentine was found guilty in the courts of unlawful assault at the same time Hoser's name was cleared of the false charges, but Valentine kept his job in the police where he could continue to engage in acts of corruption and brutality. The lead police witness against Hoser was a rent-a-witness, being a police protected criminal and pedophile named Brett David Winduss, whom even Valentine could not protect forever and was eventually jailed for a vicious attack on young girl in Kew, Melbourne. The unprovoked attack on Hoser by the corrupt police was sparked after Hoser complained in writing of another police officer (Ross Bingley) who was corruptly protecting a gang of criminals attacking taxi drivers in the 1980's. While an internal police investigation also found against Bingley, he too kept his job. Hoser noted "Watching the attack on George Floyd on TV, brought back the memories of the pain and suffering I suffered at the hands of Valentine and his gang of thugs 30 years ago. ... it hit a raw nerve. ... even now I suffer 24/7 pain in my back, elbows and hands as a result of several police jumping on top of me on the floor of the Kew Police station. ... this sort of vicious attack you never recover from."

#Wollumbinia georgefloydi #Ross Bingley #Richard George Valentine #Victoria Police Corruption - 2 #The Hoser Files #Wollumbinia darnellafrazierae #Kumanjayiwalkerus kumanjayi #George Floyd

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rapidsnakeremoval · 3 years

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George Floyd gets a frog named in his honour. He also had a turtle named in his honour as well. George Floyd was recognized by having a new species of turtle named in his honour.A peer reviewed paper has formally named a recently discovered species of Australian Saw-shelled Turtle Wollumbinia georgefloydi Hoser, 2021 in honour of George Floyd. Floyd was bashed and killed by four police officers at Minnesota, USA, in 2020 and his death sparked outrage and protests globally. The naming of this turtle in honour of George Floyd follows a massive three volume monograph on the Australasian Tree Frogs published by Hoser in 2020 in which Hoser announced the formal discovery of 62 new species. One of those new to science species was also named in honour of George Floyd. At that time, Raymond Hoser wrote: “The species is named in honour of the late George Floyd, a victim of an unprovoked attack by four thug police officers at Powderhorn, in downtown Minneapolis, USA, on 25 May 2020.” A second frog species was also named Kumanjayiwalkerus kumanjayi in honour of Kumanjayi Walker a 19 year old Aboriginal (Black) Australian who was unlawfully shot and killed by a police officer in 2019. Hoser wrote: “The species Kumanjayiwalkerus kumanjayi sp. nov. is named in honour Kumanjayi Walker, another indigenous Australian victim of an execution by a racist white Australian police officer in the Northern Territory (NT), being one of over 400 such victims in Australia since 1990. The 19 year old was shot and killed by NT Police Officer Zachary Rolfe in November 2019.” Hoser also wrote: “The world is full of memorials and species named in honour mass murderers, thieves and despots and it is appropriate that victims of these people should also be honoured occasionally.” The frog paper was published in hard copy on Friday 5 June 2020 and following publication of this paper, a number of people have heeded Hoser’s words and toppled statues of racists and murderers and thrown them into rivers and lakes. The paper naming the new turtle species in honour of George Floyd was published on 16 August 2021. Wollumbinia georgefloydi occurs in the wet tropics region of north Queensland, Australia, bounded by the Burdekin Gap in the South and found as far north as about Cape Flattery. Hoser also named another newly discovered species Wollumbinia darnellafrazierae Hoser, 2021. Wollumbinia darnellafrazierae is named in honour of Darnella Frazier. Born 2003 in Nashville, Tennessee to parents LaTangie Gillespie and James Frazier. She has three brothers and one sister. Most of Darnella’s life, however, has been spent in Minneapolis, Minnesota. After being active in varsity basketball, she graduated from Roosevelt High School in that city. She is an American woman who (at age 17) video recorded the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and then posted her video on Facebook. Because Frazier’s video contradicted the initial Minneapolis police account of Floyd’s death, it sparked global protests regarding police abuse, lies and corruption. Demonstrations demanding justice for Floyd exploded over the summer of 2020 involving an estimated 26 million U.S. citizens in more than 2,000 cities across the nation. Similar protests took place in over 60 nations around the world. The Frazier video sparked the greatest level of demonstrations and protest in human history. More immediately her video led to more intense monitoring of police behaviour around the world including investigations of past acts of police killings of unarmed black men, women, and children. Without her video, the Floyd death would have been ignored and the victim blamed.The genus name Myuchelys Thomson and Georges, 2009 was illegally coined as a genus name to over-write Wollumbina Wells, 2007 by a pair of taxonomic vandals and police protected criminals, Scott Thomson and Arthur Georges. The name Myuchelys is an objective junior synonym of Wollumbina and the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) has ruled that the illegally coined Myuchelys should never be used. In spite of the ICZN ruling of 2021 against the thieves, Thomson and Georges have aggressively promoted their illegal name online, including on wikipedia pages that they obsessively control and so a warning against their reckless misinformation is given here.Raymond Hoser, is the world’s foremost expert on reptiles and frogs. He has authored numerous major books on wildlife, handles the world’s deadliest snakes on a daily basis, does reptile shows for kids and adults and invented Reptile Parties for birthday parties, which are now copied by businesses worldwide and hailed as one of the greatest wildlife conservation and education initiatives in recent times. To date he has discovered and named over 350 species of reptiles, as well as discovering and naming dozens of species of frogs and mammals. Not as well-known is that in 1990 Hoser was bashed by several police in a police station in Melbourne, Australia and nearly killed in the same manner George Floyd died. Hoser escaped that attack with a broken nose, smashed back and arms and required surgery and years of ongoing medical treatment. He also got hit with a series of falsified criminal charges which he eventually beat. Hoser's story was published in the best-selling books The Hoser Files and Victoria Police Corruption - 2. The Victoria police officer who led the attack on Hoser, Richard George Valentine was found guilty in the courts of unlawful assault at the same time Hoser's name was cleared of the false charges, but Valentine kept his job in the police where he could continue to engage in acts of corruption and brutality. The lead police witness against Hoser was a rent-a-witness, being a police protected criminal and pedophile named Brett David Winduss, whom even Valentine could not protect forever and was eventually jailed for a vicious attack on young girl in Kew, Melbourne. The unprovoked attack on Hoser by the corrupt police was sparked after Hoser complained in writing of another police officer (Ross Bingley) who was corruptly protecting a gang of criminals attacking taxi drivers in the 1980's. While an internal police investigation also found against Bingley, he too kept his job. Hoser noted "Watching the attack on George Floyd on TV, brought back the memories of the pain and suffering I suffered at the hands of Valentine and his gang of thugs 30 years ago. ... it hit a raw nerve. ... even now I suffer 24/7 pain in my back, elbows and hands as a result of several police jumping on top of me on the floor of the Kew Police station. ... this sort of vicious attack you never recover from." For further information and hi res. photos of the relevant new species contact Raymond Hoser in Australia on: +61412777211

#George Floyd #Frog #turtle #new species

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red-will · 3 years

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This is how we can envision Black freedom

For the U.S. to untangle itself from its legacy of white supremacism, we must live like we understand what our true history teaches us, from Emmett Till to George Floyd.

PUBLISHED MAY 25, 2021• 20 MIN READ

On June 27, 2015, Black artist and activist Bree Newsome Bass climbed the flagpole at the South Carolina statehouse and took down the Confederate flag that had flown above the people of that state for over 50 years. This act came 10 days after a white supremacist murdered eight Black parishioners and their pastor at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. Grown from a congregation first organized by enslaved and free Blacks in the late 18th century, Emanuel is the oldest African Methodist Episcopal church in the American South. It is a church where Black freedom has been envisioned and practiced throughout the entirety of its existence, from the 19th-century congregant Denmark Vesey—who bought his own freedom and helped plan a revolt of his fellow human beings who were still enslaved—to the 20th-century civil rights marchers and leaders who regularly gathered within its sacred space.

As she expected, Newsome Bass was arrested as soon as she rappelled down the statehouse flagpole, Confederate flag in hand. Her act memorialized Emanuel’s pastor and parishioners. It also made an ephemeral but indelible monument to Black freedom.

When asked why she did what she did, Newsome Bass answered, “I did it because I am free.”

What does it mean to be Black and free in a country that rejects Black freedom?

II.

I am an educator who teaches students about submerged histories, revelatory art, and the critical thinking that sharpens questions that move us toward truth. I am a poet, and my poet’s tool is the word. The word is holy and bears the heft of human experience; the poet must wield it as precisely as possible. I have found that writing poems brings me closer to understanding my fellow human beings—individually and in community—in our many contradictions and complex histories. Poems give form to truths and understandings that might otherwise be lost.

As leader of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, I am privileged to help support artists, thinkers, researchers, and other kinds of builders who illuminate stories and experiences that have often been hidden, overwritten, or mistold.

In a year darkened by loss, their light shone with particular power through the work we are supporting with the largest initiative in our history, the Monuments Project.

We have found inspiration in monuments like artist Judith Baca’s “Great Wall of Los Angeles,” a vibrant mural more than half a mile long that has brought together dozens of community members over 40 years to paint a richer, more inclusive history of California.

We supported a new memorial to Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago who, when visiting family in Mississippi in the summer of 1955, was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by two white men for allegedly whistling at a white woman. His mother brought his body back to Chicago for an open-casket funeral to “let the people see what they did to my boy,” and Jet magazine published photographs that would widely spread the word of a terrifying story that was not isolated.

Till became an emblem of the racist violence that Blacks were still subject to and helped to catalyze the civil rights movement. The site sign that marks where his body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi had to be replaced many times because it was riddled with bullet holes.

As an educator and fieldbuilder in African American studies, I believe that the knowledge from this field sits at the center of any genuine understanding of the United States, holding the legacy and ongoing existence of anti-Black enmity in its unflinching gaze alongside the knowledge, philosophy, and creativity that emerges from this American history of struggle and endurance.

The lynching of Emmett Till and the mass murder of the Emanuel parishioners—among countless other acts of anti-Black terrorism down through the generations—underscore this truth about our country: It was built in part, and is still being built, on anti-Black hatred and violence. How do we move forward with this contemptible knowledge and its antidotes as our guides?

III.

On January 6, 2021, domestic terrorists carried out a violent insurrection at the United States Capitol. Incited by the president and some in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, this armed and organized mob brutalized law enforcement; killed a police officer; terrorized democratically elected representatives, their staffs, and some of their family members; assaulted journalists; erected a gallows; looted offices; stole documents and laptops, including that of the speaker of the House, which the thief allegedly planned to sell to Russian agents; smeared human feces through the building; and extensively defaced commemorative displays and works of art, including a memorial placard to Congressman John Lewis, the recently deceased civil rights icon.

Also on that day: A Confederate flag, which had never before breached the heart of Congress, was waved in its halls by one of the terrorists. This flag memorializes white supremacy, commemorates the lost cause of those who fought a war to keep Black Americans enslaved, and instructs race-based hatred.

After hours spreading savagery and chaos through the halls, the terrorists were largely allowed to depart the Capitol unfettered. Photographs showed Black and brown custodial workers cleaning up the wreckage the mob left behind.

IV.

Years ago, I wrote a series of sonnets in the voices of young Black women who studied at Quaker educator Prudence Crandall’s school in Canterbury, Connecticut, in the 1830s. White parents pulled their daughters from the school because they did not want them educated alongside Black students, but Miss Crandall continued educating those young Black women and girls despite the violent opposition of Canterbury’s white residents. Those residents ultimately burned the school to the ground. Miss Crandall’s unwavering courage could not keep the schoolhouse safe. But in the sonnets’ vision, the rare quest for education for Black women was “the one perfect religion” that the townspeople could not destroy.

Without learning, without knowledge, without the voices and the experiences and the insights gained from a determined excavation of our country’s past, we will never eradicate racism and racial violence. If we are to stop weaving white supremacism into the fabric of our country, then we must learn our full histories. We must live like we understand what that history teaches us.

In a poem, I once portrayed the great poet Robert Hayden in the 1940s as he dedicated himself, “stoop-shouldered,” to sifting through the records of the slave ship Amistad, extracting history’s hidden insights and the story of resistance from that ship’s log. “Blood from a turnip,” I wrote of his daunting and exhausting process of deep research to tell the story of “this / protagonist-less / Middle Passage” from the perspective of the captives rather than solely that of the captors.

Ultimately the “slavers’ meticulous records” revealed the determination of the Africans on board to resist being dehumanized as property. That gave Hayden, in turn, the knowledge he needed to tell us the story too few had contemplated: that there were many Black people who challenged slavery as their fate and fought back for their freedom, as well as white people who were their allies.

To return to Miss Crandall: After her school was destroyed, in 1834, one of her students, a young Black woman named Julia Williams, moved to New Hampshire to study at an integrated school. There, as in Canterbury, the act of teaching Black and white children together drew a violent response from white people in the community. I researched the history and then described, in the conjured voice of Miss Williams, an unforgettable true scene:

From the town and neighbors came three hundred armed men, ninety oxen teams.

They dragged the school building utterly off its foundation. I have twice seen bloodlust and ignorance combust. I have seen it.

Bloodlust and ignorance combust. I continue to return to those words.

New York City, where I was born, is a city that exists in the mind and in the matter-of-fact corporeality of day-to-day New Yorkers as one definition of freedom—freedom of expression, freedom of belief, and the power of a multicultural metropolis.

The identity emerges from complexity. More enslaved Black people lived in New York City in the 1700s than in any city other than Charleston, South Carolina. Many free Black people lived in New York as well, in places such as Seneca Village, where residents were forced out by eminent domain in 1857 before the community was razed to build Central Park. Those enslaved and free Black people’s stories still speak to us through material clues such as the coins, beads, coffins, and shrouds left behind in subterranean sites like the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan.

In Brooklyn, in 2001, five corncobs laid out in a distinct shape were found in a crawl space of a house. Those corncobs formed a star, scholars determined, that suggested a West African cosmogram, one that conveys two worlds of the living and the dead, both eternally connected in a West African vision of the cosmos in diaspora.

When I read about that archaeological discovery, I envisioned the moment when the rumor of freedom was made real, in a poem called “Emancipation”:

Corncob constellation, oyster shell, drawstring pouch, dry bones.

Gris gris in the rafters. Hoodoo in the sleeping nook. Mojo in Linda Brent’s crawlspace.

Nineteenth century corncob cosmogram set on the dirt floor, beneath the slant roof, left intact the afternoon that someone came and told those slaves,

‘We’re free.’

Imagine, the revelation of freedom—two words, “We’re free.” We are still enacting and imagining the aftermath.

VI.

In mid-century Los Angeles, in the Watts neighborhood, an Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia built an extraordinary structure by hand. The Watts Towers soar toward the sky in multiple forms, nearly a hundred feet tall at the highest. Rodia envisioned and built the towers day by day over three decades, from durable steel and delicate wire mesh, bottle glass, white seashells, pottery shards, mint chip and maraschino mosaic tiles, shades of lapis lazuli, cobalt, and the thick, bright yellow of a crayoned sun. Like the “corncob constellation” left behind in the crawl space of the house in Brooklyn, each seemingly mysterious object carries power and meaning.

“It shows that we are people too, that we have brains and we can make it too if we put our minds to it,” Carolyn Byers, a young woman from Watts, said of the towers. She was talking to a reporter in 1991, the year Rodia’s vision was designated a national landmark; six months before that, a Black man named Rodney King was brutally beaten by white police officers in the San Fernando Valley, and the officers’ subsequent acquittal sparked five days of riots across South Los Angeles.

Rodia moved to Watts about a century and a half after the Spanish founded the pueblo that became Los Angeles. Many of the Gabrielino-Tongva peoples who were the first inhabitants of the Los Angeles Basin were forced into enslaved labor at the region’s Spanish missions. By 1848 the part of Tovaangar that would become Watts had passed from the Spanish Empire to the Republic of Mexico and then was taken, along with more than half of Mexico’s territory, by the aggressively expansionist United States at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War.

Rodia lived in the community as it changed from one populated mostly by whites and Mexican Americans to a home for African Americans who had left the South in the Great Migration. By the time he completed the towers in 1954, the Watts community was predominantly Black; today, one full century after he first put his hands to steel at East 107th Street, it is majority Latinx, including large communities of Mexicans and Salvadorans. Throughout this time—throughout Los Angeles—descendants of the Gabrielino-Tongva peoples have continued to live in and honor their ancestral homeland. None of these complexities contradict; we must understand them together.

I have always been so moved by the inspirational power and seeming impossibility of the towers that I described them in the poem “Stravinsky in L.A.”: “The Watts Towers aim to split / the sky into chroma, spires tiled with rubble / nothing less than aspiration.”

To aspire: from the root meaning, fundamentally, “to breathe.”

VII.

When my family moved to Washington, D.C., from Harlem in late 1963, many parts of the city were racially segregated. I grew up a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. My family and I would regularly stroll its meticulously tended grounds and sometimes picnic. Most years on the Fourth of July, we’d lay out blankets in the humid evening and listen to the U.S. Marine Band as fireworks exploded overhead in the summer deep darkness.

The Library of Congress was my childhood library because the Library of Congress is a public library. In high school I would research and write my papers there. Sitting in the glorious rotunda, I would think with excitement how the very building in which I learned held almost every single book on Earth. Anyone who walked through the doors had access to them.

I knew that the Capitol was where the actual business of our country’s governance took place and that it stood gleaming as both a symbol and a site for working out the complexities of millions of different people, with all their beliefs and backgrounds and experiences, living alongside one another in an ever evolving democratic experiment. My parents taught me that the Capitol was built by enslaved Black people, and that reverence for a space that was ours did not erase understanding voter suppression and the three-fifths compromise. They showed me how to hold seeming contradiction with a comprehension of our full history.

At the Lincoln Memorial, the towering marble form of the 16th president might make a child feel dwarfed, just as it made me feel as a child. But I want the child of today to understand that this figure is not merely a shadowing stone statue. It is also a site of powerful community gathering and activation. As the central location of the 1963 March on Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech—and so many marches to follow—the Lincoln Memorial is one of the most significant sites of civic action in our history. When Marian Anderson sang “my country, ’tis of thee” on its steps in 1939, she rebuked the segregation that had barred her from singing in Constitution Hall before the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Monuments and memorials are places where people come together to remember, to collectively mark a moment, to be a “we,” to help identify a new direction, and to make a way forward. This is the case even when the way forward is shaped by grief and not by joyful determination. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, designed by the artist and architect Maya Lin when she was just 21 years old, introduced into the D.C. of my young adulthood a memorial that had no precedent in the D.C. of my childhood. This slash into the earth bears no figuration. It holds instead the ephemeral reflections of those who walk down into the ground to mourn their dead, evoking the true cost of all wars. It does so even as it raises unarticulated questions about the millions of Southeast Asian people who also were killed in that particular war, and whose names are not recorded on the memorial’s black granite.

What would it mean for us to have monuments and memorials that do not teach us to memorialize war or to commemorate fighting against others? What would it mean to enact the enduring spiritual’s words, “I ain’t gonna study war no more,” in our monuments?

VIII.

Tell the whole damn truth, in our history, our art, our words, and our memorials.

Mighty civil rights and voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer’s words are the simple truth: “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” Fighting for Black freedom means, in the words of Robert Hayden, “visioning a world where none is lonely, none hunted, alien.” It means understanding 19th-century Black enslavement alongside 21st-century Black mass incarceration; comprehending why Emmett Till’s casket is the most sacred object in the National Museum of African American History and Culture; acknowledging the horror of George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s murders standing in seemingly never ending seriality with so many other murders. Fighting for Black freedom means centering the crucial questions raised by decades and decades of African American studies; they are still the right questions. And recognizing that the bravery of Bree Newsome Bass in June 2015 is more powerful than the violent desecration of the U.S. Capitol in January 2021.

Most days I play or hear in my head Nina Simone’s 1967 version of the Billy Taylor song, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.” The song has light and delight; it is singable, and in one facet, joyful. But the “wish” is both a commanding action—wish it, make it happen—as well as a word that says we’re not there yet. The conditional tense, “would,” marks that freedom is not fully attained.

The song’s bright music moves us ever forward. But Simone’s voice, in all its coloration and nuance, the dark side it carries in its light, reminds us that freedom—the right of every one of us—is a process. Freedom is work. Freedom doesn’t come by wishing. We must vision it. And we have survived by enacting those visions.

Elizabeth Alexander—poet, educator, memoirist, scholar, and cultural advocate—is president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is the author or editor of 14 books and twice was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; her book The Trayvon Generation is to be published this fall. She wrote the poem “Praise Song for the Day” for Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration in 2009 and delivered it there.

This story appears in the June 2021 issue of National Geographic magazine.

#black freedom #elizabeth alexander #nat geo #national geographic

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iwmfontheground · 7 years

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A few years ago, I had the night shift organizing and editing testimonies from the historic Ríos Montt trial, the first time a former head of state was tried for the genocide of indigenous people in a national court.

Sound bites of unthinkable torture and brutality would play back at night. I remember our director sending the team self help resources for those working in human rights. I wondered what it would be like to face someone as they mustered up the courage to recount such a violent past. Regina Jose Galindo, a performance artist we interviewed today told us she was brought to tears during one of the rape testimonies. An indigenous women turned to her and told her to stop, explaining that this was the time to be strong and continue in resistance.

On our first day of reporting here in Guatemala, I learned that second hand accounts in person can be stronger than first hand accounts through a screen.

McSuina, a rapper who goes by Coco, told my reporting partner Victoria and me about the long line of revolutionary women she comes from. They were all directly affected by the armed conflict. She has a bright two, almost three year old daughter.

What do you want for your daughter?” Victoria asked Coco. “I want her to be happy.” “And when she turns 5 I’ll take her to protests.”

McSuina’s mother encouraged her to take to the streets growing up; she didn’t have to ask twice. Her mother was on the list of “communist” threats who would be gunned down as soon as they were spotted. Many of these student activists were murdered in firing squads at the Verbena cemetery by her house in the “medio roja” zona 7. The Verbena cemetery holds the mass graves of students and victims of the Dos Erres Massacre in 1982. “You could say there’s a lot of energy here,” she explained. Her mother’s best friend was tortured and disappeared in Dos Erres. She reminded us that none of this is in the history books.

Her mother saved both their lives by cutting her hair short one day without thinking about it. She had had long hair and a militar showed her a picture of herself and asked if she’d seen her…

McSuina’s grandmother told her the stories about the Guatemalan army torturing Mayan women, killing babies with a stick, leaving any survivors in flames.

Her great grandmother fled Mexico via the coast. She used to be embarrassed of her Mayan roots, and remembers people telling her she had an Indian nose in school. But in college she learned to be a proud mestiza.

Coco’s blood memory keeps her accountable. Her lucha cotidiana involves creating spaces for young women in hip hop, and she is an example to a new generation. She teaches theatre and breakdancing to youth. She explained that ‘rap consciente’ is transforming the minds of the future of Guatemala, and that it gives kids somewhere turn to besides gangs. She keeps going so that the next generation can be able to speak out against her country’s genocidal past and ongoing corruption, “porque creo que hip hop es revolución.” (Because I believe that hip hop is revolution.)

- Monica Wise

Here’s an excerpt from her work:

#IWMFfellows #Guatemala #submission

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blkrosebks · 7 years

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The caucasian's greatest power throughout history have always been their control over images and information, because this allows them to control what the world believe. To continue their white domination over Black people, the caucasians have always used their monopoly over information to feed Black people lies that conveys the myth of their white superiority. Therefore, everything that we've been taught by the Caucasians have been lies that glorifies themselves. HOWEVER MILLIONS OF BLACK PEOPLE ARE WAKING UP; WE NOW KNOW MANY TRUTHS. These are just a few revelations: For centuries caucasians claimed that our ancient Egyptian (Africa's Kemet) history was theirs: For although Egypt is a country thousands of miles well within the African continent, and although all of its Pyramids, and the Great Sphinx, were built by Africans thousands of years long before the first Arabs arrived there in the 7th century, white historians ridiculously claims that the ancient Egyptians were caucasians--(or at the very least Arabs in order to take their monumental achievements away from Africans) However, the dispute concerning the race of the ancient Egyptians has been solved scientifically by the DNA tests conducted on the mummies of the ancient Egyptians in 2012 and 2013. THEY WERE BLACK/AFRICANS!!! In December 2012, DNA tests were conducted on the mummies of Pharaoh Rameses III and his son, which proved that they belonged to human Y chromosome group E1b1a. This is the Y chromosome group of Sub Saharan Africans who speak Niger–Congo languages. The disclosed Y chromosome group of the Pharaoh, at the time of releasing the report, was considered as just one of the details to make the investigation scientifically solid with facts. Another group of mummies from the Amarna period of Egyptian pharaohs were tested by DNA Tribes, an American Company which specialises in conducting DNA tests, in 2013. The conclusion of the tests were that the mummies autosomal profiles would be most frequent in the present day populations of the African Great Lakes region and Southern Africa. Subsequent analysis of the autosomal profile of the mummy of Pharaoh Rameses III also concluded that this matched the genetic profiles of the population of the Great Lakes region as well. It was reported in the DNA Tribe’s digest of February 2013, that the DNA match results of the ancient Egyptian Amarna royal mummies with the present day world regions reflect the population changes in Africa after the time of Rameses III . One issue which remains unresolved is that of language. The language of ancient Egypt is classified as belonging to the Afro-Asiatic family of languages, which are spoken by people like the Somali and Amhara of Ethiopia, while the genetic profiles of the mummies match those of Niger–Congo language speakers. The most likely explanation is that some of the Niger-Congo speaking people, who were carriers of human Y chromosome E1b1a, moved into ancient Egypt along the Nile from the Sahara region as the region dried up and fused with the Afro-Asiatic speaking people, giving rise to the unique language of ancient Egypt. However, these speakers of the Niger–Congo language went on to form the ruling class producing pharaohs for Egypt, while retaining the customs which they practiced in common with their relatives who had migrated south into the Great Lakes region as the genetic tests have shown. The ancient Egyptians were NOT white nor Arabs as depicted in white made movies but indeed Black Africans. Furthermore for centuries many caucasians have regarded African people as being ape like sub human and themselves as being the superior evolved humans. WE NOW KNOW THE TRUTH: THE EUROPEAN'S RH:(RHESUS MONKEY) FACTOR SECRET One of the biggest kept secrets in the white world of medical science is the blood group that is exclusively "European". That group is called the RH-FACTOR. The RH stands for RHESUS, and rhesus is short for RHESUS "MONKEY". The RH-factor is a plasmic agglutinogen anti-body first found in the blood stream of Rhesus monkeys. According to white geneticist and bio-chemist, that agglutinogen anti-body was found to be of hybridic structure, which supposedly classifies the RHESUS-Monkey as a "macaque-mullata", which means mixed origin or mixed breed or produced by genders of a different species. 90 percent of the European Caucasoid race, as indicated in any physiology-medical book you pick up, is in fact RH-FACTOR-POSITIVE, possessing the identical agglutinogen anti-body (anti-RH serum) as the Rhesus Monkey. Here is a medical fact: When the RH-positive agglutinogen (white race) is injected (blood transfusion/semen-sex) into an RH-negative (AFRICIAN) person; anti-RH agglutinins automatically develop in the blood stream of the African. The African body automatically response by protecting itself from the RH. Furthermore, according to two new studies, published in the Journal Nature, that looked at the DNA fossils hidden in the modern human genome, Africans are the ONLY 100% Pure Humans and all white people share Neanderthal DNA. This means Darwinian evolutionary theory ( ‘Origin of Species’) DOES NOT apply to African people. Africans didn't evolve from primate but have always been humans. Isn't it ironic that some whites have regarded Black people as sub human and as apes for centuries but it turns out that the truth is that Africans are actually the only pure Homo sapiens and caucasians are the ones that comes from the apish Neanderthal. The implications of these findings are ENORMOUS! This means that Caucasian people LITERALLY came from cavemen. These studies also revealed that people of European descent today are not African albinos as previously believed, but instead retain Neanderthal DNA that affects their hair, skin, fertility, predisposition to certain diseases and possibly other characteristics. According to the study, European's white skin, like their blue or green eyes and long recessive hair are direct genetic traits of Neanderthal DNA. It also showed that nine previously identified human genetic variants known to be associated with specific traits likely came from Neanderthals. These variants affect lupus, biliary cirrhosis, Crohn’s disease, optic-disk size and type 2 diabetes and also some behaviors, such as the ability to stop smoking. Throughout history the caucasians have demonstrated an entrenched predisposition for brutality and racism that is matched only by their proclivity for deceit, greed and hunger for power. They alone are the most deceitful, and the race most predisposed to racism; all other races have been their enemies or their victims. Their history is consumed by unrivaled racism, as well as unjustifiable wars and crimes against humanity. Their subjugation, murder and exploitation of all other races are unparalleled. The caucasian's, have also throughout history, demonstrated an almost complete absence of ethical or moral behavior and an almost total disregard for the human lives of nonwhites. Their subjugation, murder and exploitation of all other races are unparalleled. Against people of color whites have committed crimes against humanity. They have committed mass genocide, enslavement, lynchings, castrations, and decapitations, and the raping of not just women of color, but of also men and children of color. These horrific crimes committed by whites against ALL people of color throughout history is not because whites did not know the difference between right and wrong, the truth is that they simply ignore the concept. While labeling all other races as being savages the white race has in fact been the most brutally savage throughout history. Is is NOT possible that the caucasian's Neanderthal DNA may also be connected to their entrenched predisposition for brutality, racism, sexual perversion, proclivity for deceit, and greed for power also? Moreover, in spite of the fact that President Obama receive over 90% of the Black vote in both election many African American believes that the Willie Lynch programming is true that Black people are programmed to never support each other. WE NOW KNOW THE TRUTH: THE AUTHOR OF THE WILLIE LYNCH LETTER ADMITS LYNCH NEVER EXISTED Dr. Kwabena Ashanti, who lives in Durham, NC, is the author behind the Willie Lynch hoax. He confirms that Willie Lynch never existed. WE BLACK PEOPLE ARE NOT PROGRAMMED TO HATE EACH OTHER! The letter purported to be a verbatim account of a speech delivered by Willie Lynch to an audience gathered on the bank of the James River in Virginia in 1712 regarding the management of slaves. Lynch, a slave owner, tells other slave masters that he had discovered the secret to controlling black slaves by setting them against one another. Ashanti claims that he wrote the letter in 1970 as a way to present his theory related to the current division inherent in the black community. The document was assumed to be an authentic account of slavery during the 18th century, and was used by members of the academy, ministers and activist to draw attention to the ongoing implications of slavery. The letter advises slave owners to take advantage of the differences among the slaves – dark skin versus light skin, straight hair versus nappy hair, house slave versus filed slaves. The philosophy of the letter fit already existing assumptions within the black community. The letter gave credibility to the notion that deep division within the black community is a carryover from enslavement. However, Willie Lynch never existed. Many Black people are adamant that the Willie Lynch story is true because they insist they've witness the symptoms that it causes first hand themselves. However, the behaviors that's being mistaken as the fictional Willie Lynch syndrome are actually being caused by a Black a racially demoralizing psychological warfare program that white governments uses to control Black populations. WE ALSO NOW KNOW THE TRUE REASON WHY THE EARLY WHITE CHRISTIANS CONVERTED AFRICANS INTO CHRISTIANS: The early white Christians did not convert Africans into Christians to save their souls so that Africans may join them in heaven- in the afterlife. This is irrefutably, because they perceived it that Africans had no souls, and that heaven was for whites only. In fact many early white christians believed that the thought of black people entering the kingdom of heaven was as ridiculous as a dog going to heaven. When we critically think and look logically at the fact as they were, we can say with great certainty that the white enslavers conversion of Africans into Christians had absolutely nothing to do with saving African souls. There was another self serving reason why these racist enslavers put their time, and energy into teaching Christianity to a people they otherwise treated so brutally. The true self serving reason was to indoctrinate the image of a white god into their minds. The early Africans were taught to believe that God, the greatest entity in the universe was white. By conditioning Black people to believe that the greatest entity in the universe was white this creates a profound admiration towards whiteness, within the subconscious minds of many Black people. This admiration towards whiteness is then subliminally transferred over onto the entire white race- thus causes many Black people feel inferior and act subservient towards white people. This happens often without most Black people even realizing it. Furthermore, through Christianity million of Black people have been brainwashed to believe that all of the wrongs that whites have done to them throughout history, have been washed cleaned by the blood of a white Jesus. Black people were also forced to become Christians, and then its doctrine was use to compel them to forgive whites for all the brutalities afflicted upon them by whites Christians. However, whites never actually repented for their evil deeds committed against Black people they merely insisted that Black people, as good Christians, forgive them as their doctrine teaches. WE ALSO KNOW THAT IT WAS THE ROMANS THAT CREATED THE JESUS MESSIAH MYTH The Jesus messiah story was an ingenious scam created by the Roman emperor Constantine in 324 AD. The Jesus myth gave the Roman church greater power. By making Jesus into a messiah figure to be worshipped as the key to heaven---and given that this image was controlled by the Roman church-- this greatly increased the Roman churches power over the people. It literally gave the Roman church ultimate power on earth because it actually meant that they literally held the key to heaven. WE ALSO NOW KNOW THAT WHITE SUPERIORITY IS A DELIBERATELY PERPETUATED MYTH: The myth of white superiority is greatly propagated through the illusion that most technological advancement comes from white minds. However this is totally untrue. For despite cultural traumas wrought by the injustice of white racism and slavery, Black people have made significant contributions to society and, indeed, to the world through advances in technology, medicine, science, arts, and the humanities. In fact most of the technologies that we enjoy today came from Black minds. The following is an incomplete list of some astounding contributions made by Black people: If you enjoy the internet thank a African American name Emmit McHenry. McHenry created a complex computer code whereby ordinary people can now surf the web or have e-mails without studying computer science. He created what we know today simply as .com. If you enjoy your digital cellphone thank an African American name Jesse Eugene Russell. He is an inventor and electrical engineer that invented digital cellular technology. He pioneered the field of digital cellular communication in the 1980s through the use of high power linear amplification and low bit rate voice encoding technologies and received a patent in 1992 (US patent #5,084,869) for digital cellular base station design. Jesse Russell holds several patents and is a key person to the invention of the modern cell phone. If you enjoy using your PC monitor thank an African American named Dr. Mark Dean. Dean is the Inventor/Computer scientist and engineer responsible for developing a number of landmark technologies, including the modern color PC monitor, the Industry Standard in 1981. In 1999, Dean also led a team of programmers to develop one of the stepping stones of modern day computer technology— the first gigahertz chip. The CMOS microprocessor chip is remarkable because it processed a billion calculations and large amounts of data in a second. Dean hold 20 individual patents. Philip Emeagwali, a Nigerian computer scientist, is regarded by many as being the father of the Internet. He invented the super computer in 1987. It was his formula that used 65,000 separate computer processors to perform 3.1 billion calculations per second in 1989. That feat led to computer scientists comprehending the capabilities of supercomputers and the practical applications of creating a system that allowed multiple computers to communicate. Philip Emeagwali also invented the accurate weather forecasting system in 1990. He also used his mathematical and computer expertise to develop methods for extracting more petroleum from oil fields. Dr. Thomas O. Mensah is a Ghanaian born chemical engineer and inventor. Is the inventor of fiber optics and nanotechnology. He was awarded 7 USA and worldwide patents in fiber optics. In all, he has some 14 patents. Dr. Patricia Bath, an African American scientist invented, and patented in 1988 the cataract laserphaco probe that help save the eye sight of millions. Millions of people around the world unknowingly owes their eyes sight to this Black woman. There's more: Mark Hannah developed the 3D graphics technology that now used in many major Hollywood movies Henry Sampson invented the non digital cellular phone in 1983. Gerald A Lawson invented the first home video game system with inter changeable cartridges. The following is a list of other Black inventors: Mark Hannah developed the 3D graphics technology that now used in many major Hollywood movies Percy L. Julian invented the process of synthesis which led to the birth control pill and improvement in cortisone production. G.T. Sampson invented the clothes drier in 1892. George R. Carruthers invented the ultra violent camera spectrograph The first open heart surgery was performed by Dr. Daniel Hale Williams In1885, two Black inventors, L S. Burridge and N.R. Marsham, invented the typewriter J. Gregory invented the motor Six African Americans scientists helped in the making of the first atomic bomb. One was J. Ernest Wilkins, one of the world’s leading mathematicians who earned his PhD at the age of seventeen. Alexander Miles invented the Elevator and safety devices for elevator. Patent no 371,207 Alice Parker, a Black woman, is credited with inventing the heating furnace in 1919 which provided central heating. Garret A. Morgan invented the automatic traffic signal and the gas mask. Edmond Berger invented the spark plug. Dr. Charles Drew, in 1940, invented blood plasma and established blood banks around the world. J.B. Winters invented the fire escape ladder. John L. Love invented the Pencil sharpener 23- 11-189 Patent # 594114. Fredrick Jones invented the air conditioner. John A. Johnson invented the wrench John Standard invented the refrigerator Lewis Howard Latimer invented the electric lamp and the filament for the light bulbs. The small Pox Inoculation method was brought from Africa by African named Onesimus Phillip Downing invented the letter drop mail box 10-27-1892 John Burr invented the Lawn mower Marjorie Joyner holds the patent for the permanent hair wave machine. Lloyd Hall created the chemical compound that preserves meat S.H. Love invented improvements to military guns 22-4-1919 S.H. Love invented improvements to the vending machine 1-21-1933 W.A. Lovette invented the advanced printing press Thomas J. Martin invented the fire extinguisher 3-261872 W.D. Davis invented the riding saddle 10-6-1895 etc, etc... The reason you probably didn't know about most of this achievements by Black people is because you exist within a system of white supremacy. The system of white supremacy is designed to perpetuate the myth of white intellectual superiority even when the technology is coming from the genius minds of Black people. For black inventors to get their invented technologies mass produced and marketed, they have to go before white companies. These white companies then acquires the rights to these inventions, and then places white faces in front of the technology. This scenario literally allows whites to continue exploiting the intellectual genius of Black people while maintaining the appearance that all technological advancement are the result of white intellectual superiority. White intellectual superiority is a well orchestrated illusion. Did you also know that African Babies Advance Earlier and Faster Than European Babies? In the Developmental Psychology of the Black Child, Dr. Amos Wilson analyzes studies conducted by white social scientists that revealed significant differences in how quickly Black babies develop compared to European babies. The study found that at only 9 hours old African babies were able to prevent their heads from falling backwards. It took European babies roughly six weeks to accomplish this. By the time African babies were 11 months old, they were able to climb the steps alone while European babies typically didn’t accomplish this until they were 15 months old. The study focused specifically on African babies, but Wilson explains that the same trends were also found to be true in Black children of other nationalities. Studies have also found that Whites are also More Prone to Life Time Mental Disorders than Blacks: Four recent studies funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Consortium on Psychiatric Epidemiology Studies (CPES) reported that whites have the highest rate of lifetime mental disorders. These four reports are also a direct contrast of the perpetuated myth of white superiority. A Cornell University led study also found that Whites are both genetically weaker and less diverse than Blacks: The Cornell study, published in the journal Nature, also found by analyzing the genetic makeup of 20 White Americans and 15 African-Americans, that whites had many more possibly harmful mutations than did African Americans. That fact was reinforced by a larger-scale study, also published in Nature, led by scientists from the Universities of Michigan and Virginia who analyzed genetic samples of 485 individuals scattered around the globe whose DNA is recorded in a French databank. The researchers also found that Blacks are genetically stronger and had the greatest amount of genetic diversity. White people are far more prone to various genetic defects, malfunctions and disorders. White people also have thinner skins that ages more rapidly than the skin of black people. Their skin begins to wrinkles and muscles begins to decrease at a much faster rate than we blacks do. The bone density of white people are also less dense than those of black people. These types of studies and results are being intentionally withheld from major media circulation in order to perpetuate the myth of white superiority. Caucasians constantly uses their monopoly over information and the media to create a distortion of reality that perpetuates the myth of their white superiority and falsehood of Black inferiority. The myth of white racial superiority is also totally debunked at its genetic core: The genetic characteristic of Black people are defined as the dominant gene while the genetic characteristic of whites are defined of the recessive gene. By definition in the study of genetic science the Dominant genes are defined as superior to the Recessive genes. This is a scientific fact of the science of genetics. A fact that whites deliberately hide because it scientifically refutes the perpetuated myth of their racial superiority. Brown Eyes vs Blue Eyes Dark brown eyes are the dominant gene while blue eyes are a recessive genetic. The brown in the eye is a melanin compound that allows you to absorb sunlight better and is beneficial in other ways as well. Blue eyes are the most sensitive to lights and dark brown eyes are least. Do you know that the real reason white people perform laboratory experiments on white lab rats is because those white lab rats share the same genetic code as they share? They share two common factors. Those white rats are deliberately inbred to mimic the genealogy of so-called “Caucasians.” White people perform experiments on white inbred rats to see how experiments potentially go over in the human Caucasoid population. If they want to know how something will impact the normal population, the benchmark used is a normally colored rat. In the human world, if they want to know how something will impact the normal human population, their benchmark is a black human being. Black humans contain the fully dominant developed genes and genealogy is the benchmark for normalcy. Ever notice why white people have far more tolerance for milk? (they're the most lactose tolerant because they need it the most) Since white people reflect sunlight with white skin, they do not synthesize vitamin D like normal people, and this automatically decreases calcium levels in the blood. This is why white people-particularly white women--are at greatest risk for osteoporosis. Their bodies always need calcium because it is always robbed from their bodies. To compensate, they have to have calcium depleted from their bones, leaving their bones porous and weak and leaving whites susceptible to osteoporosis. Normal people, after reaching a certain age, no longer need milk and should be waned off of it. In the wild, when was the last time you saw a full grown animal still suckling its mother? Most Black adults do not require the need for milk as whites do. Black people are able to absorb Vitamin D they need from sunshine. Caucasians need supplements to help them make up for the Vitamin D deficiency. This is why most people who are lactose intolerant are black people. White people are not only the most lactose tolerant, but most needy. In the supermarket, notice how many products have calcium added in them from orange juice and other fruit juices to breakfast cereal? All that extra calcium fortification is to aid whites in their inability to maintain healthy vitamin D levels in their bodies because of the genetic defect. This is the governments way of “leveling the playing field” if you will. There is even more: Did you know that the real reason why Africans were used as slaves in America, rather than the Native Americans was because Africans have the strongest immune systems? The slaves needed by the white invaders needed stronger immune systems to survive the many of diseases carried by the Europeans. Europeans brought a large numbers of diseases to America that caused the deaths of millions of Native Americans. Europeans brought syphilis and gonorrhea to America (Syphilis and gonorrhea are disease transmitted by sexual contact). The others diseases included where smallpox, influenza, pneumonia, measles, scarlet fever,or chicken pox" etc.. Nearly all of the European diseases were communicable by air and touch, thus making it easy for the disease to spread rapidly. This made it very easy for the Indians to become infected by these diseases. It is estimated that millions of Native Americans died due to diseases carried by the Europeans. This fact has been conveniently left out of the history books. White historians have miseducated the entire world to forget their true unpleasant history. Clearly the bodies of whites are not genetically superior. White superiority is a myth created by white controllers of misinformation. The truth is the exact opposite. There is still much more. Your perceptions of white racially superiority is nothing more than an elaborate illusion. You see for oppressors to maintain their dominance over the oppressed they must condition them to believe they're inferior to their oppressors. Therefore, we Black people are the unknowing victims of an elaborate psychological warfare program that perpetuates the myth of white superiority. The Program: Presently there are white social engineering scientist and propaganda experts that works behind the scenes manipulating the perceptions and opinions of the Black masses according to the will of the ruling white elites. These men govern our minds, molds our opinions of the world, and of ourselves through the societal information they routinely present to us. Because whites control the media programming that most Black people routinely see, this allows them to also control what many Black people believes. People's minds and behaviors are easily controlled by the information they are routinely given about themselves. For example: When people are routinely given positive affirming information about themselves this unifies and uplifts them. However, when people are constantly inundated with negative demoralizing information about themselves, this turns them self hating, self doubting and divides them. It also makes them more compliant with the dominance of others over their lives. This negative and demoralizing scenario is precisely what's being done to Black people. To make Black people more compliant with white dominance over their lives, these white social engineering scientist and propaganda experts deployed an elaborate black racially demoralizing psychological warfare campaign that constantly inundates Black people with fraudulent negative information about themselves. This psychological warfare campaign was implemented in response to the 1960's decade of unprecedented Black protest, and civil unrest demonstrated not only in the U.S against its Jim Crow segregation system, but also in South Africa against its white regime Apartheid segregation system. It was also deemed necessary due to an immense fear of Black retribution that already exist amongst those white nations that benefited historical, and that continues to do so presently, from their exploitation of Africa and its people. This practice of manipulating the mind's of the oppressed is not uncommon. Throughout Western history, those empires that maintained their powers have always done so by manipulating the minds of the oppressed to think in ways that serves the interest of the dominant society. Therefore, the oppressed population's perception of themselves, and of reality is never truly their own. They're always false perceptions that have been shrewdly indoctrinated into their minds, by their oppressors, without them even knowing it. To our detriment this insidious practice is what's now being done to Black people. This psychological warfare system is the real reason why Black people are constantly live under the umbrella of such defamation of their characters as a group. This system is extremely effective because when Black people are constantly being inundated with messages conveying the myth of white superiority it can be very difficult to resist it's implied propaganda programming. Especially when the propaganda is being told daily and so unrelentingly. Those Black people that do not think critically--and question the validity of all information being constantly fed into their minds from entirely white sources--never notices what is being done to them. Whenever a population is made to think less of themselves they're easier to suppress, easier to divide, and ultimately easier to control. This system works so well in fact that it not only makes Black people more compliant with white dominance over their lives, it in fact makes many even prefer it.It is at the root of both the profound division and self hatred now afflicting so many Black people and is at the heart of internalized feelings of superiority that many whites possess. The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.-Frantz Fanon This psychological warfare system was developed many decades ago at the Tavistock Institute of Human Behavior. The Tavistock Institute was founded in London in 1946 with the aid of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. The institute praises Dr. Edward Bernays as being its greatest prophet. Bernays was an expert on mass manipulation psychological warfare. He was also an advisor to several US Presidents. By Franklin Jones -- The Black Matrix www.theblackpeoplematrix.com.

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Black Lives Matter.

New Post has been published on http://tiptopreview.com/black-lives-matter/

Black Lives Matter.

The time to use our platforms and privilege to speak out against the deep racism that plagues our society was years ago. I regret staying silent in those moments. The next best time is now. Silence is harmful because it prioritizes the comfort of those of us who benefit from racist policies at the expense of those exploited and victimized by them.

It’s not enough to simply “do no harm” or “not be racist.” That well-trodden path has produced the same brutal results again and again. At Moz, we’re moving to a higher standard. The creation of a more just world requires us to be loudly, unceasingly anti-racist.

We must acknowledge that human rights exist beyond politics.

We must hear and validate the lived experiences of people of color and amplify their voices.

We must show up.

We must reinforce, loudly and often, that Black lives matter.

This is an uncomfortable conversation for most of us. We’re afraid of saying the wrong thing, offending people, losing relationships, jobs, customers, and in some cases physical safety. By design, white supremacy has made it uncomfortable to speak out against white supremacy. Fearing angry backlash for speaking out against the risks and injustices people of color face every single day only serves a system designed to keep us silent — a system that has been shaped over centuries to oppress and exploit people who are not white. At Moz, we will practice the courage to speak out and show up for love and justice. Maya Angelou said wisely, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.”

Today, we express solidarity with Black people grieving the losses of David McAtee, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and many, many others. We share and honor the outrage rippling through our country. We stand with you and we stand for justice and love.

We want to amplify the signal of inspiring people doing powerful work. Activists like Rachel Cargle and her work on The Great Unlearn project. Resources like the Intentionalist, an online directory that allows you to discover and patronize diverse local businesses in your community. Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race illuminates the harsh reality of police brutality, inequitable mass incarceration, and other lived experiences of Black people in the United States and gives us tools to talk about race and racism. EmbraceRace is an organization focused on helping parents, teachers, and community leaders raise children to think and act critically against racial injustice. Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist asks us to think about what an anti-racist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it. Ross Gay’s poem, A Small Needful Fact, is a powerful memorial that says so much in a few beautiful words. I invite everyone to re-read or listen to Martin Luther King Jr.’s full Letter From a Birmingham Jail. His statements and questions are heartbreakingly relevant today. May you be moved beyond thought to action, as we are.

Be well and love each other.

Update 6/4/2020: We’ve heard your concerns and questions about what steps Moz is taking to address racial injustice. In writing this post, our goal was to support the cause and the Black voices that deserve to be listened to, especially at this critical moment. It didn’t feel right to center Moz when the conversation should be focused elsewhere. After listening to your feedback, we realize we missed the mark by staying quiet about our own efforts in this area. It’s important to share not just our words, but the actions that uphold them.

What we’ve done in the past hasn’t been enough. We must improve. Understanding that we have more work to do, Moz also has a history of working toward equality within the tech space.

Internally, we offer support and training to employees as part of our ongoing work to create an inclusive, equitable, anti-racist work environment. All employees are required to participate in implicit bias training, and we encourage Mozzers to take our additional training in Understanding Microaggressions, Owning Our Rank & Power (a course about understanding and using privilege for good), and Allyship.

We partner with amazing companies doing the important work of addressing the root causes of systemic injustice:

Techbridge provides STEM education to girls from low-income and under-resourced communities. We regularly invite Techbridge classes to visit Moz and learn from women whose work in tech can inspire and energize them.

IGNITE Worldwide works to improve gender equality in STEM opportunities. Similar to our partnership with Techbridge, we invite IGNITE classes to come to our office and speak with the women at Moz who have forged careers in tech.

Year Up connects young adults facing social and economic injustice to opportunities in tech that can grow their skill sets and forge new career paths. We’re proud to call our Year Up program alumni colleagues.

Ada Developers Academy provides tuition-free coding education to women and gender diverse adults, with a focus on those with low-income and from diverse backgrounds and the LGBTQIA+ community. We’ve welcomed multiple Ada graduates into our software engineering teams as full-time Mozzers.

Un-Loop provides opportunity to students in Washington State prisons, building a path toward careers in web development. Their first program graduate interned with us and we’ve hosted a fundraiser for the program.

HERE Seattle fosters an inclusive and diverse community in technology. Moz was an inaugural sponsor and partnered on events.

As CEO, I’ve chaired the diversity and inclusion committee in the Washington Technology Industry Association (from which programs like Apprenti launched), as well as lobbied for stronger equal pay laws in Washington State. Twice a year, Moz examines its pay structures by race to ensure equitability, and we regularly review and adjust our hiring practices to increase the diversity of our workforce.

We know we have more work to do. While our gender diversity has increased, we have not made substantial progress on racial diversity. In the coming weeks, we’ll share an update on what further steps we’ve taken to support the Black community — both in this time of crisis and in an ongoing capacity. To hold ourselves more publicly accountable, we plan to create and maintain a page on our site that gives transparency to the actions we’re taking.

For now, though — today, this week — we want to share our support for the cause of equality and leave space for Black voices that need to be heard.

Editor’s note: We’re disallowing comments on this post to make sure the focus remains on the problem at hand: the indiscriminate mistreatment and murder of Black people in the United States. In addition, we will be forgoing our typical publishing schedule to make space for the more critical conversations that need to be held.

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