#Foreign Site Reference Number

[yamayuandadu]

A case of twice-mistaken identity: on “Asherah” in Strange Journey

In 2009, Atlus released one of their most unique games to date - Strange Journey, an rpg set in a deliberately unrealistic setting in which demons exist, while the UN does something beyond issuing a non-binding resolution in the face of crisis. In contrast with many of the previous SMT installments, Strange Journey only introduced a handful of new demons. They were some of the last designs Kazuma Kaneko provided for the franchise, but most of them became instant fan-favorites, sparking a veritable avalanche of fanart (by Megaten demon standards, at least) and endless discussion. Going by the raw numbers on pixiv and similar sites, the consensus view seems to be that the standout among them is the “protagonist” of this article, seen above. The English translation of the game, as well as official English translations of all subsequent Megaten media, opted to romanize the name of the discussed entity as Asherah. I have a strong reason to suspect this is wrong, and that “Asherah” is not who most of us assumed she is on this basis. In this article, I will explain the origin of the term asherah and examine if it was ever the name of a deity. I’ll also look through its cognates in multiple languages. Finally, every Megaten fan’s favorite fringe tome will be consulted for additional hints. As a result, the true identity of “Asherah” shall be revealed.

“A horrid thing”: the asherah in the Bible and related sources

The term asherah appears in the Bible, though it’s actually up for debate if it can be interpreted as the name of a deity (Steve A. Wiggins,  A Reassessment of Asherah With Further Considerations of the Goddess, p.105). Ignoring occasional modern attempts at emending passages which do not require that, it occurs forty times in scriptural sources (A Reassessment…, p. 110). Nearly all of them point to the asherah being some variety of cultic object. In some cases a plural form is given, though the grammatical gender is inconsistent, with examples of both asherot (Judges 3:7) and asherim (1 Kings 14.23; 2 Kings 17.10; 23.14). The masculine variant is more common, which makes it unlikely the singular form was particularly commonly viewed as a feminine noun - unless, perhaps, the compilers considered an intentionally ungrammatical plural some sort of irony (A Reassessment…, p. 110-111).

Most of the references are fairly formulaic, and occur in passages from books belonging to the tradition of “Deuteronomistic History” explaining why Yahweh became angry with the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. In those cases the anger appears to be tied to placing one or more asherah in the proximity of an altar. Based on the fact that an asherah could be planted, and destroying it was typically accomplished by burning or hewing, most likely they should be understood as wooden objects (A Reassessment…, p. 111-112). Nothing more can be established with certainty, and in absence of precise descriptions labeling any objects recovered from excavations as examples just because they’re wooden should be avoided (A Reassessment…, p. 261).

A possible reference to Asherah understood as a foreign deity might be present in 1 Kings 18:19, where “400 prophets of Asherah” are among Jezebel’s associates singled out by the prophet Elijah  (A Reassessment…, p. 127-129). However, it is implausible that this reflects historical reality. Jezebel hailed from Tyre and no deity bearing an even barely similar name is attested in the local pantheon of Tyre - or, for that matter, in any other Phoenician city in the Iron Age (Spencer J. Allen, The Splintered Divine. A Study of Ištar, Baal, and Yahweh. Divine Names and Divine Multiplicity in the Ancient Near East, p. 280).

A further example might be 2 Chronicles 15:16, where at least according to the Masoretes Asherah is used as a personal name. The passage deals with the deposing of queen mother (gebirah) Maakah by king Asa of Judah after she created an unspecified “horrid thing” for Asherah - or, if the Masoretes were incorrect, perhaps created an asherah, a “horrid thing”, for herself (A Reassessment…, p. 125-126).

Rabbinic tradition generally considers the asherah to be a type of tree (A Reassessment…, p. 148-149). Similarly, the Septuagint (and by extension other translations derived from it) renders the plural form of this term as “groves” (A Reassessment…, p. 269). While especially in the 1990s it was common to argue that the hypothetical namesake goddess must have been some sort of tree deity as a result (A Reassessment…, p. 239), no evidence in favor of this interpretation is available (A Reassessment…, p. 261-263). In the end, the supposed arboreal Asherah is little more than a result of overinterpreting a historical guess about the meaning of a term whose original context was entirely lost by the first centuries CE (A Reassessment…, p. 269).

A decorated pithos from Kuntillet Arjud (wikimedia commons)

As far as extrabiblical materials go, the most relevant source offering some further hints about asherah are two early first millennium BCE Hebrew inscriptions from Kuntillet Ajrud in Egypt which mention blessing someone by “Yahweh of Teman and his asherah” and “Yahweh of Samaria and his asherah” (The Splintered Divine…, p. 265). It’s up for debate if “Yahweh of Samaria” and “Yahweh of Teman” were understood as two fully separate deities - the way, say, Ishtar of Nineveh and Ishtar of Arbela were in Mesopotamia - or simply as two regional manifestations of the same deity (The Splintered Divine…, p. 272). The fact that similar formulas find no other parallels in any other texts in Hebrew doesn’t help (A Reassessment…, p. 204). This is ultimately outside the scope of this article, though.

What matters for the discussed subject is that the original publication of the Kuntillet Ajrud material in 1979 sparked what by the early 2000s came to be referred as an “Asherah boom” or “Asherah craze” (Izak Cornelius, The Many Faces of the Goddess: The Iconography of the Syro-Palestinian Goddesses Anat, Astarte, Qedeshet, and Asherah c. 1500-1000 BCE, p. 3). 

Crucially, the inscriptions were commonly held as evidence that Yahweh had a wife, and that she was named Asherah (A Reassessment…, p. 190). Nothing explicitly indicates that their authors considered asherah to be the name of a goddess, though (The Splintered Divine…, p. 309). 

It is entirely possible that the familiar wooden cultic object is meant (A Reassessment…, p. 198). We might be dealing with a formula similar to Eliezer’s considerably later) invocation of the altar of the Second Temple alongside Yahweh, which obviously does not indicate that he treated a piece of furniture as an independent deity (The Splintered Divine…, p. 309). It might also be worth noting that an asherah was made for Yahweh in Samaria under king Omri’s orders, according to 1 Kings 16:33 (The Splintered Divine…, p. 278).

It should be noted that while one of the inscriptions is accompanied by a drawing (as seen on on the illustration above), it is unlikely to be related to its contents (A Reassessment…, p. 199-200).

It has been argued that a further reference to “Yahweh and his asherah” occurs in a roughly contemporary funerary inscription found in Khirbet el-Qôm in the West Bank, though the poor preservation of the text makes any translations tentative. It cannot thus be used to argue even for a link between Yahweh and the cultic object asherah, let alone for the existence of a goddess named Asherah (A Reassessment…, p. 190-196). It has been argued that it is effectively a Rorschach test of sorts for a given author’s views about the asherah and Asherah (A Reassessment…, p. 274). Ultimately it’s difficult to evaluate if Yahweh ever had a wife, let alone if that wife was named Asherah. If that was the case, it’s hard to disagree that the archeological evidence is beyond sparse, though (A Reassessment…, p. 281).

Looking at material from other nearby areas from the first millennium BCE does not provide any further evidence for a goddess named Asherah. The Phoenician term ʾšrt, which is likely a cognate of asherah, has a handful of attestations (one inscription each from Umm El-Amed, Acre and Pyrgi), but invariably refers to a place - presumably a (type of) shrine or sanctuary - not to a goddess (A Reassessment…, p. 212-214). An alleged Phoenician attestation of Asherah on an amulet from Arslan Tash seems to actually be a reference to the Assyrian head god Ashur, and the object might be a forgery anyway, which would render it virtually worthless as a source (A Reassessment…, p. 210-212).

The supposed Aramaic evidence is even more flimsy. An alleged reference to Asherah (ʾšyrʾ) on a fifth century stela from Tema turned out to be a misreading, with a local deity named ʾšymʾ actually meant. A stela from Sefire does affirm that a cognate, ʾsrt, was used to designate a type of sanctuary, much like in Phoenician, though (A Reassessment…, p. 214-215).

“Lady of the sea”: Athirat in Ugarit

If the evidence for the biblical asherah being a theonym, rather than a term, is flimsy at best, where does the idea that a deity with an identical name existed? To find an answer, we need to travel a few centuries further back than the oldest material discussed in the previous section.

In the early twentieth century, excavations in Ras Shamra in nothwestern Syria revealed that this site was originally a Bronze Age city, Ugarit - and that the local pantheon included Athirat, whose name was suspiciously close to a biblical term for some sort of cultic implement (A Reassessment…, p. 225).

It needs to be stressed that the information from Ugarit cannot be transferred to areas further south in different time periods (The Many Faces…, p. 18). Also, in particular the labeling of Ugarit as “Canaanite” - very common online - should be avoided. It was not located in Canaan - this label only applied to the area more or less from Byblos to Gaza (The Many Faces…, p. 8); it belonged to the circle of Amorite culture (Dennis Pardee, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit, p. 236).

With that in mind, let’s look at Athirat. Her name is undeniably a cognate of the biblical term and its Phoenician and Aramaic analogs. It might very well be that the word originally meant “holy place” or “sanctuary”, and that a theonym developed from it, rather than the other way around (A Reassessment…, p. 221-222). It’s worth stressing right away that Ugarit provides by far the most references to any of the cognate terms which are the subject of this inquiry - Athirat is, ultimately, better attested than asherah (A Reassessment…, p. 105).

Tablet with a section of the Baal Cycle (wikimedia commons)

Athirat is arguably best known from, and most prominent in, the Baal Cycle (A Reassessment…, p. 33). She first appears in the section dealing with the conflict between Baal and Yam, the sea god, though her precise role in the relevant passage is uncertain. She might be involved in providing Yam with a new name or title (A Reassessment…, p. 34-42). Her role in the second of the three sections, which deals with the construction of a palace for Baal, is much better understood. Baal and his ally Anat convince her to mediate with El, her husband, so that Baal can have a house built for himself. Athirat doesn’t appear to be fond of them (in fact, at first she assumes they want to fight her), and convincing her requires numerous gifts provided by the craftsman god Kothar-wa-Khasis. It’s possible Yam, despite already being defeated by Baal earlier, is also present in this scene, and that Athirat temporarily restrains him with a net while her negotiations are ongoing (A Reassessment…, p. 42-74). Athirat makes her final appearance in the third part of the cycle, in which Baal temporarily dies at the hands of Mot. The implied hostility between her and Baal seemingly resurfaces, as Anat remarks that she will surely rejoice after hearing about his untimely demise. El tasks her with appointing a replacement, which she promptly does, choosing Attar to act as a new king of the gods. She seems to be so enthusiastic about this that it has been suggested that it is this opportunity to show off her position this way that’s the cause of her good mood, as opposed to Baal’s death (A Reassessment…, p. 75-77). Athirat’s role is overall less prominent in other literary texts in which she appears. These include the Epic of Keret (A Reassessment…, p. 25-33); Shachar and Shalim (A Reassessment…, p. 86-92); and a variety of shorter or fragmentary compositions (A Reassessment…, p. 92-98). She only occurs with a limited frequency in sources tied to the sphere of cult (A Reassessment…, p. 274).

While none of the Ugaritic texts make that explicit, it can be safely assumed that Athirat was regarded as the wife of El, the head of the pantheon (The Many Faces…, p. 99). Nothing indicates she played this role vis a vis Baal (A Reassessment…, p. 84). The only cases where they occur side by side are offering lists, and this is ultimately as informative when it comes to determining the connection between them as a modern church named jointly after, say, St. Andrew and St. George is for establishing the personal connections of the respective saints (A Reassessment…, p. 101)

El and Athirat have a variety of matching titles, designating them as senior members of the pantheon and creator deities - while El is the “father” and “creator” of the gods, Athirat is accordingly the “mother” and “creatress” (Aicha Rahmouni, Divine Epithets in the Ugaritic Alphabetic Texts, p. 331). The former title only appears once in the entire corpus (Divine Epithets…, p. 73), the latter  - six times (Divine Epithets…, p. 276-277). 

It needs to be stressed that the “maternal” titles do not designate Athirat as some sort of Frazerian “Great Mother”. They are a reflection of status: she is a creator deity, and a senior member of the pantheon, but not some transcendent all-encompassing ur-mother (A Reassessment…, p. 237). Simply put, she does not represent the popcultural image of a “mother goddess” (A Reassessment…, p. 83-84; The Many Faces…, p. 99).

It is perhaps best to describe Athirat as the divine counterpart of a queen mother, going by her portrayal in the Baal Cycle, especially her role in the appointment of a new king of the gods. It has been argued that her title rbt might specifically reflect this role, judging from the context in which its Akkadian cognate rabītu was used in Ugarit (A Reassessment…, p. 77-78). However, since the sun goddess Shapash is also designated as a rbt, this might be incorrect, at least as far as epithets of deities go (Divine Epithets…, p. 281-282). Athirat’s high status is also reflected by her placement in a trilingual god list based on the Mesopotamian Weidner god list, with Hurrian and Ugaritic columns added. It establishes an equivalence between her, Ninlil and “Ašte Kumurbineve” (Aaron Tugendhaft, Gods on Clay: Ancient Near Eastern Scholarly Practices and the History of Religions, p. 175). The former’s character was similar. She was the wife of a pantheon head, and the epithets highlighting her status similarly refer to her as the “mother” (ummi) or “creatress” (bānīt) of the gods (Divine Epithets…, p. 73). The latter is actually a pure scribal invention, though - the name simply means “Kumarbi’s wife”. No such a goddess was actually worshiped anywhere, she was invented entirely for completeness’ sake (Gods on Clay…, p. 177-178).

Yam (“Ym”), as portrayed in Shin Megami Tensei (MT wiki, via VeskScans)

Seniority is not Athirat’s only characteristic. Her most common epithet is actually “lady of the sea”, which occurs twenty-one times total - all of those attestations are from the Baal Cycle, though (Divine Epithets…, p. 281). While it contains the same word for sea - ym - as the one which doubled as a theonym, it is agreed that an ordinary body of water is meant in this case, not the sea god par excellence, Yam (Divine Epithets…, p. 284-285). Steve A. Wiggins suggests that the title might be a reference to some hitherto unknown tradition about Athirat’s origin, as opposed to an indication of involvement in unspecified marine matters. While this proposal is interesting, it ultimately remains entirely speculative (A Reassessment…, p. 273). Athirat’s presumed association with the sea might explain why a minor deity consistently described as her servant, Qudshu-wa-Amrur, is addressed as her fisherman (Divine Epithets…, p. 150-151). A further deity defined by a connection to Athirat is Dimgay, her handmaiden, though she is much more sparsely attested (and has no aquatic associations). In the sole text to mention her she is paired with Tallish, who fulfills an analogous role in the court of the moon god Yarikh (Divine Epithets…, p. 78-79).

Excursus 1: the illusory triple A goddess(es)

Anat (right) and her #1 fan, pharaoh Ramses II (wikimedia commons)

While Athirat’s connections with El and with her servants are well documented, a common misconception, repeated especially commonly in older scholarship, but also online, is that she, Anat and Ashtart were associated with each other so closely they basically formed a group. As an extension, the three of them are presented as the only major goddesses in Ugarit (and beyond). However, this grouping is both modern and entirely artificial. It’s worth noting that as far as the Ugaritic evidence goes, Shapash, the sun goddess, was actually comparably, if not more, important as Ashtart (A Reassessment…, p. 230).

Nonetheless, at least among Bible scholars it’s possible to find examples of complete and utter credulity leading to presenting Athirat, Anat and Ashtart as not just closely related, but somehow interchangeable (A Reassessment…, p. 283). Typically questionable publications aim to present Athirat and Ashtart as somehow identical or at least conflated with each other. This is based entirely on the superficial similarity of their Romanized names - they were not very similar in Ugaritic, seeing as one begins with an aleph and the other with an ayin. Ashtart doesn’t even appear in parallel with Athirat; if she is paired with another goddess, it’s Anat (A Reassesment…, p. 57). However, while Anat and Ashtart did share multiple characteristics, even they were not conflated with each other (The Many Faces…, p. 100), let alone with Athirat.

A typical depiction of Qadesh (middle), accompanied by Min (left) and Resheph (wikimedia commons)

Despite lacking any strong foundation in reality, the “triple A” misconception managed to influence early scholarship pertaining to a fourth deity - one who doesn’t even have anything to do with Ugarit, at that. Starting with the 1930s, the idea that the goddess Qadesh must be one and the same as “Asherah” arose. This rested on two far reaching conclusions: that if Qadesh appears with Anat and Ashtart in a single inscription, she must be a foreign goddess of comparable importance; and that qdš (“blessed”) was an epithet of Athirat in Ugarit (A Reassessment…, p. 226).

The first problem is that the sole source to group Qadesh with Anat and Ashtart - the so-called Winchester College stela - is nowhere to be found today. It has been lost at least since the 1990s, if not earlier (A Reassessment…, p. 229). It’s not entirely impossible that it was a fake, since back when it was still accessible to researchers in the 1950s it has been pointed out that the artist had an oddly poor grasp of the hieroglyphic script (The Many Faces…, p. 95). 

There is also no evidence that qdš was a title of Athirat (A Reassessment…, p. 226). It does occur as a title of El in the Epic of Keret, though, and is actually grammatically masculine (A Reassessment…, p. 227). Alas, I don’t think anyone is bold enough to suggest Qadesh is El’s drag persona.

A further issue is that while no certain examples of depictions of Athirat have been identified, textual sources indicate she would in all due likeness look considerably less youthful than Qadesh does (The Many Faces…, p. 100). Considering all of these serious obstacles, it should come as no surprise that identifying Qadesh as Athirat largely fell out of favor by the early 2000s (The Many Faces…, p. 95). The modern consensus is that she actually wasn’t fully an “imported” deity in Egypt in the first place, in contrast with Anat and Ashtart. Her name does go back to the root qdš, but she was invented in Egypt (Christiane Zivie-Coche, Foreign Deities in Egypt in the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, p. 5-6).

Qadesh is first attested during the reign of Amenhotep III (1389-1349 BCE), already in a firmly Egyptian context, on a statue of a certain Ptahankh, an inhabitant of Memphis and affiliate of the priesthood of Ptah (Foreign Deities…, p. 3). It is also known that a temple dedicated to her existed in this city. Her firm position in ancient Egyptian religion is also presumably reflected in epithets such as self-explanatory “eye of Ra” and “great of magic”, a designation for goddesses linked to the pharaoh’s crown in one way or another (The Many Faces…, p. 96). She may or may not have been a love goddess, but no strong evidence in favor of this view exists (The Many Faces…, p. 97).

“Mistress of voluptuousness and joy”: Ashratum in Mesopotamia

While the notion of an association between Ugaritic Athirat and Qadesh is ultimately erroneous, she does have a “relative” who can be considered at least superficially similar: the Mesopotamian goddess Ashratum. While Ashratum can be effectively considered a derivative of Athirat (or, perhaps, a more divergent descendant of a common ancestor), it needs to be stressed that her character differed considerably (A Reassessment…, p. 219). Needless to say, information pertaining to her cannot be randomly applied to Athirat (A Reassessment…, p. 153).

Itūr-ašdum‘s votive inscription (wikimedia commons)

Her character is perhaps best exemplified by the most famous primary source dealing with her, a votive inscription invoking her dedicated to Hammurabi of Babylon (reigned c. 1792–1750 BCE) by a certain Itūr-ašdum. This text describes her as the “lady of voluptuousness and happiness” (A Reassessment…, p. 155-156). This title may or may not hint at involvement in the erotic sphere (A Reassessment…, p. 158). The same term translated her as “voluptuousness” - ḫili - also appears in the ceremonial name of her temple in Babylon, Eḫilikalamma - something like “house of voluptuousness of the land (A Reassessment…, p.163).

As far as I am aware, no study offers a good explanation for why Ashratum came to be associated with the qualities reflected in her title and the name of her temple. However, it has been securely established that her other Mesopotamian characteristics stemmed from her close association with the god Amurru, who was regarded as her husband  (A Reassessment…, p. 219). It presumably reflected her own Amorite origins (A Reassessment…, p.153). Amurru (“the Amorite god”) was effectively a personified stereotype - the archetypal nomadic simpleton unfamiliar with urban life, a reflection of the Mesopotamian perception of Amorites arriving from the west (Paul-Alain Beaulieu, The God Amurru as an Emblem of Ethnic and Cultural Identity, p. 33-34). Textual sources indicate that his attribute was a crooked staff (gamlu), possibly originally associated with Amorites on the account of their pastoral lifestyle (The God Amurru…, p. 35-36). To put it in modern terms: you could compare him to a cartoony redneck or hillbilly, complete with a banjo and a jug of moonshine. Except people actually built temples dedicated to him, named children after him, and for all intents and purposes treated him as a valid, if not particularly major, member of the pantheon (The God Amurru…, p. 41-43).

As Amurru’s spouse, Ashratum could be referred to as “tenderly cared for in the mountains”. This is implicitly supposed to be understood as “cared for by Amurru”, seeing as he was regularly referred to as the “lord of the mountains”, bēl šadi (A Reassessment…, p. 158). He could simply be treated as an inhabitant of mountainous areas, though it’s possible his association with this environment doubled as a pun of sorts. The cuneiform sign KUR could be used to write both the word “steppe” (where one would expect to find migrating nomads) and “mountain” (The God Amurru…, p. 38-39).

Amurru’s connection similarly applied to his spouse, and is also reflected in their matching epithets - Amurru was the “lord of the steppe”, bēl seri, while Ashratum accordingly could be called belet seri, “lady of the steppe” (The God Amurru…, p. 38). It should be noted there was another, unrelated Belet-seri, who acted as Ereshkigal’s scribe - seri in this case being understood as an euphemism for the underworld (more about her in my next article). I’m not aware of any cases where the two were confused, barring a possible indirect example - Amurru apparently occasionally appears in the company of some of the goddesses who could be identified as Ningishzida’s wife; and the latter role could be fulfilled by Geshtinanna, who was regularly identified with Ereshkigal’s Belet-seri (Andrew R. George, House Most High. The Temples of Ancient Mesopotamia, p. 37-38). Given the expected difference in demeanor, it is a shame no source has the two belet-seris interact.

The association with Amurru is also why Ashratum could be called the “daughter-in-law of Anu”, the sky god and Amurru’s father. Online an incredibly antiquated interpretation seems to be spreading up to this day (including in Megaten context), with Ashratum misinterpreted as Anu’s spouse. This is the result of a misunderstanding: in both Sumerian and Akkadian, the term “daughter-in-law” (egia/kallatum) can also designate a bride. That simply reflects the fact that typically a father would pick his son’s wife, though - there’s no ambiguity whose spouse Ashratum is supposed to be (A Reassessment…, p. 157-158). Interestingly, a single unique source would indicate that in addition to the happy-go-lucky Ashratum at least some people in the south were aware of her “relative”. A unique Amorite-Akkadian bilingual lexical list published recently explains a-še-ra-tum as DIĜIR.MAḪ, ie. Bēlet-ilī, the "queen of the gods" (Andrew George, Manfred Krebernik, Two Remarkable Vocabularies: Amorite-Akkadian Bilinguals!, p. 115). On textual grounds, it was dated to the Old Babylonian period, specifically to the times of Rim-Sin I and Hammurabi (Two Remarkable…, p. 113). Based on the character of the goddess listed as the Akkadian “explanation” of the name (which you can guess from its meaning), it can be safely assumed that in this case the same deity as in Ugarit is meant - a senior, “respectable” goddess (Two Remarkable…, p. 118).

YBC 2401, the most complete copy of An = Anum discovered so far (Electronic Babylonian Library; reproduced here for educational purposes only) On the opposite end of the spectrum, the considerably later An = Anum appears to treat Ashratum’s section as little more than a wastebasket for any feminine western theonyms, including, inexplicably, Anat (Wilfred G. Lambert, Ryan D. Winters, An = Anum and Related Lists, p. 26). Note she has her own entry in the Amorite-Akkadian bilingual (Two Remarkable…, p. 115). In Ugarit, the trilingual list transcribes her name phonetically in the Hurrian column, and lists (distinctly male) Sagkud as her Mesopotamian counterpart - not Ashratum (Gods on Clay…, p. 176). Interestingly, since Ashratum appears in the original Weidner god list it can be assumed that scribes from Ugarit would be familiar with her thanks to the import of this source. Sadly, we have no clue what they thought about her and her Mesopotamian spouse (A Reassessment…, p. 161).

Excursus 2: odds and ends

A few other names cognate with the biblical asherah, Athirat and Ashratum are not attested well enough to warrant separate sections of their own.

A letter from Tell Taanach in Palestine written in Akkadian (the diplomatic lingua franca in the second half of the second millennium BCE) mentions a deity named Ashirat. This is most likely a reference to the same goddess as the one known from Ugarit. However, the text provides no detailed information about her - it only mentions a cultic specialist in her service in passing (A Reassessment…, p. 170-171). A ruler of Ugarit’s southern neighbor, the kingdom of Amurru, bore the theophoric name Abdi-Ashirta, “servant of Ashirta”. The variant form Abdi-Ashratum is also attested, so we are pretty clearly dealing either with another form of the name of one of the previously discussed goddesses, or a further deity with a cognate name. The matter is complicated by the fact that multiple times the name is written with typos by Egyptian scribes with only a rudimentary understanding of cuneiform, though (A Reassessment…, p. 168-169).

An apparent Hittite adaptation of the Ugaritic Athirat, Asherdu (sic), is attested exclusively in a short myth in which she and her partner in crime Elkunirsa (an adaptation of El, as you can probably guess) plot against a weather god of uncertain identity. The last of these characters clearly takes Baal’s role, but his precise identity cannot be established, as he’s only referred to with a generic logogram which could designate different weather gods, not with a given name. The entire composition might be based on some hitherto unknown southern forerunner, but not much can be said about its development beyond that (A Reassessment…, p. 172-175).

An example of Qatabanian script (wikimedia commons); no relation to cuneiform.

Finally, a handful of references to a more distant “relative”, Athrat, have been identified in texts from the kingdom of Qataban in Yemen dated to the second half of the first millennium BCE; she is thus separated from Athirat, Ashratum et al. by both a temporal and spatial gulf (A Reassessment…, p. 187). The available sources don’t provide much information about her. Two mention a temple she shared with Wadd, a local moon god, while another relays she received offerings alongside ‘Amm, the national god of the kingdom of Qataban (and possibly also a moon god). The nature of the precise connection between her and those two, and in particular whether she might have been viewed as the spouse of either of them, or even both (perhaps in different locations within the kingdom), is a subject of debate  (A Reassessment…, p. 180-181). If she was, she might have been viewed as a solar goddess, though that remains uncertain (A Reassessment…, p. 186). The fact that it’s possible in some of the Qatabian inscriptions a structure is meant, and not a goddess, does not help much with the evaluation of the scarce evidence (A Reassessment…, p. 177-178).

“Genital center”: Asherah according to Barbara G. Walker

The Japanese edition of Walker's book (via an expired online listing with an asking price of 600+ USD [sic]; reproduced here for educational purposes only)

The previous sections more or less summarized what actual scholarship has to say about the term asherah and its cognates. However, with Megaten being Megaten, this is insufficient . No inquiry is complete without also consulting Atlus’ favorite publication: Barbara G. Walker’s magnum opus The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets.

Evidently not only Atlus is enamored with her writing - it has influenced a number of other popular Japanese franchises, especially Fate. It also has overwhelmingly positive reviews on Goodreads. There is a non-trivial number of people out there who find it credible, despite the author’s complete lack of relevant credentials, poor sourcing, and questionable at best methodology. Ironically, I have a strong suspicion that Walker herself might no share this view. I’d hazard a guess that this tome - and Walker’s numerous other less discussed New Age publications, including such smash hits as I-Ching of the Goddess - are a cynical grift, since she describes herself as an atheist elsewhere (sic). I digress though.

Walker’s book contains a total of 29 references to Asherah. She gets her own separate entry, but it surprisingly only occupies one page. To be fair, we have to bear in mind that in the early 1980s, when the book was written, the “Asherah boom” was only starting. Most of the entry is not particularly unique, and is limited to Bible-based speculation from before the discovery of the “Yahweh and his asherah” inscriptions, with a dash of Ugarit. Walker basically subscribes to the notion of a “tree goddess” wholesale, and adds that clearly the “groves” were a metaphor for Asherah’s “genital center”. She had to throw in something uniquely baffling, though, and speculates the name Asherah somehow goes back to Old Iranian asha, which she translates as “universal law” (for the actual meaning of this term, consult Encyclopedia Iranica). Further, she connects her with Isis at random, and asserts she was worshiped in Thebes as a result (The Woman’s…, p. 66).

Elsewhere in the book Walker simply rehashes questionable dated scholarship of the sort already discussed earlier. She proclaims Asherah and Baal a couple (The Woman’s…, 85); in Anat’s entry she treats her and Asherah as interchangeable and, inexplicably, also as the goddess of Jerusalem (The Woman’s…, p. 30). Astarte gets similar treatment  (The Woman’s…, p. 69). This identification also gets an extended version which includes Aphrodite and Lucian’s Dea Syria as bonuses (The Woman’s…, p. 44). As far as I am aware, the identification with Aphrodite is a Walker original. She liked it so much it also pops up in Adonis’ entry, where she explains he was paired with “Aphrodite or Asherah” in Mesopotamian Mari (The Woman’s…, p. 10). This sort of complete disregard for temporal (Mari ceased to exist in Hammurabi’s times) and linguistic rigor is a mainstay of her work. Interestingly, Walker appears to be entirely unfamiliar with Ashratum, and instead asserts that the Mesopotamian counterpart of “Asherah” was Ashnan. She describes this name as Sumerian (The Woman’s…, p. 66). In reality, Ashnan’s name is Akkadian and means “grain”; the same goddess’ Sumerian name was Ezina - which, as you can imagine, also means “grain” (Julia M. Asher-Greve, Joan Goodnick Westenholz, Goddesses in Context: On Divine Powers, Roles, Relationships and Gender in Mesopotamian Textual and Visual Sources, p. 41). Needless to say, she had nothing to do with Ashratum.

Conclusions: Asherah, Athirat, or Ashratum?

With both the credible and questionable sources summarized, it is time to finally try to figure out who the “protagonist” of this article is supposed to be.

The translators of Strange Journey evidently concluded they’re dealing with the sort-of kind-of biblical figure. The assumption that’s who “Asherah” is supposed to be is common among English-speaking fans, and recently made it to her entry on the new Megaten wiki, which proclaims the discussed entity was “depicted as the wife of (...) Yahweh” (which, as I already pointed out, is at best a theory). As some of you might remember, in the past even I accepted it, and it was quite surprising to me that Atlus - with the well known love of dubious material, and a penchant for making everything revolve around YHVH which if anything only grew in more recent instalments - did nothing with this in Strange Journey. Or in any other game, for that matter.

I think the answer why that never happened is simple: “Asherah” was never meant to be who the romanization made her. It’s a case of mistaken identity.

As demonstrated on the screencap above, the name used in the original game, as well as in SJR and subsequent SMT installments, is spelled as アシェラト in katakana. A quick search will demonstrate that the biblical term is actually rendered as アーシラト - that’s the spelling Japanese wikipedia uses, for instance.

Who is アシェラト, then?

While this might not be evident at first, apparently the conventional Japanese spelling of Ugaritic Athirat. Japanese Wikipedia claims so outright, though without providing sources. However, I think we can trust it in this case. Most of the relatively few non-Megaten results for アシェラト appear to come from Ugarit hobbyists, here is just one example; I can vouch for this person’s credibility, they are pretty clearly well acquainted with the primary sources and relevant scholarship.

This impression that Athirat, not Asherah, was the intended name is further strengthened by the romanization of the name used in Shin Megami Tensei Series 25th Anniversary Memorial Book: MegaTen Maniacs, a book released as a bonus with a limited edition of Strange Journey Redux (p. 133; thanks to @purseowner4thequalityanimation for directing me to it!):

This is far cry from Asherah, but remarkably close to the non-vocalized form of the Ugaritic Athirat’s name, aṯrt. However, the name is not all. The compendium entries also provide some clues. Her original one describes her as “a Semitic goddess who was the one to bring fertility to the Babylonian lands. She is known as the mother of the gods. It is believed that in Phoenicia, she became Astarte.” I’m not a huge fan of implying there ever was such a thing as a “Semitic pantheon” - only languages can be described as “Semitic”, deities, let alone a “religion”, not really (Michael P. Streck, Semites, Semitic in RlA vol. 12, p. 386-387) - but the information, by Megaten standards, is relatively rigorous. We get a mix of Ugaritic Athirat (“mother of the gods”) and Mesopotamian Ashratum (explicit reference to Babylonia), with the questionable conflation with Ashtart (Astarte is simply the Greek spelling of this name) I mentioned thrown in for good measure. No references to the Bible or the inscriptions which sparked the “Asherah boom” are present, though.

Perhaps most curiously, even if not ideal, the sources consulted were clearly of much higher quality than Woman’s Encyclopedia - which, in fact, seemingly didn’t have any impact on Asherah’s bio. Mashing Ashratum and Athirat together is questionable, much like mashing together, say, Zeus and Tyr based on the shared origin of their names would be, but it’s miles ahead of many other choices made by Atlus. SMT IV didn’t change much. She appears in an NG+ quest which presumably reflects Atlus’ love for unnecessary equations - in this case with Ishtar. The less said about that, the better.

When Asherah was later added to Dx2 - which for now is her final appearance in the series -  she received a new compendium entry, which describes her as “a goddess from ancient Semitic religion, married to the Lord of the Mountains Amurru. She is thought of as the Mother of all Gods. As the goddess of love and fertility she was worshiped in ancient Babylonia. She is also known as Astarte in other religions.” Most of the information from the previous version returns, but we have a surprising case of doubling down on the reference to Mesopotamia - with a surprisingly accurate reference to Amurru thrown in. Once again, no trace of Yahweh, biblical cultic objects, or anything of that sort, though. Walker’s influence also cannot be detected. Later on, the Ugaritic material got an additional shoutout in Dx2 - with the advent of a feature letting the player turn spare demons into equipment, the option to turn Asherah into a sword with the ability “Lady of the Sea” was added. It should be noted that Dx2 later did throw the Bible into the mix, though - a craftable shield from the same update is named Asherah Pole, an obvious reference to the cultic objects discussed in the first section of the article. Still, I believe I’ve conclusively demonstrated nothing indicates that was the intent when the design was created for Strange Journey.

To sum up, ignoring the single outlier from Dx2, “Asherah” appears to be a mashup of the Ugaritic Athirat and Mesopotamian Ashratum - with the name clearly pointing at the former. That, at the very least, should be the romanization of it. I do think this adds a second layer of mistaken identity - Athirat and Ashratum have cognate names, but their character is dissimilar, and they were worshiped in different areas - but once again, the series has seen much worse.

My only problem with treating “Asherah” as Athirat is her design. It’s not that I necessarily dislike it (quite the opposite). It’s striking for sure, and its position as a fan favorite is well earned. I won’t delve into speculation whether the popularity boils down to Asherah being a large scantily clad woman covered in geometric patterns who’s easier to draw than fellow scantily clad large woman covered in geometric patterns Maya, and more prominent than fellow scantily clad and covered in geometric patterns (but not necessarily large) Cybele (who’s not in the base SJ which is beyond bizarre to me given that the game is a joyful tribute to Frazerian phantasmagorias by the way of Barbara Walker, but I digress). To be entirely fair, there isn’t really anything I could compare it to. No unambiguously identified iconographic representations of Athirat or Ashratum - let alone of the hypothetical “Asherah” - exist (A Reassessment…, p. 264). The so-called “pillar figures” are frequently labeled as “Asherah” (even in her wikipedia article), but for no particularly strong reason (A Reassessment…, p. 267).

Baal Cycle beach episode (personal screencap from 2021 or so; I do not recommend actually playing the gacha)

A question we should ask ourselves is whether it’s possible to imagine her playing her role from the Baal Cycle, given that it’s the most extensive source dealing with either Athirat or Ashratum. Despite never really adapting it, Megaten somehow managed to give us nearly the complete cast - and I would argue Baal, Anat, Yam, Mot and Attar all look like they could pull off their roles from this cycle of myths. How about “Asherah”? In theory she could, I suppose, though I personally would prefer Athirat to look visibly older, and somewhat less naked (I quite like this one). As the Mesopotamian Ashratum, the design would work perfectly fine, though. I will refrain from trying to evaluate whether the Old Babylonian official who called her the “mistress of voluptuousness and joy” would be fond of the contents of her pixiv tag, but I think her appearance represents this description pretty well.

The alien Dada from Ultraman, an Elamite boar vessel (via MET) and two pieces of Halaf ware (wikimedia commons)

As a side note, while Asherah’s coloration and patterns ultimately simply reflect Kaneko’s enthusiasm for an abstract art themed alien from Ultraman (I suspect the size does too), they unintentionally(?) make the “heroine” of this article resemble painted pottery - which works well enough, I think. 

Post scriptum: Asura in Strange Journey

Asura, as portrayed in Strange Journey (MT wiki, via VeskScans) An article dealing with Asherah in Strange Journey - even one focused on different aspects of her role in the game -  cannot leave out perhaps the most puzzling choice made during its development. I am referring, of course, to having Asura turn into her. Apparently a few years ago an assumption that Barbara G. Walker might be to blame was making rounds, though this is, surprisingly, entirely baseless (as documented here). My suspicion is that this has nothing to do with Asherah, and instead is a leftover of an earlier version of the game.

As revealed in the already discussed Megaten 25th anniversary book, Asura was initially supposed to turn into Ashur, the tutelary god of the city of Assur, and by extension Assyria as a whole (Megaten Maniacs, p. 133).

While there’s no deeper connection between the two other than a superficial phonetic similarity, presenting them as closely related is not actually not an invention of Atlus either. The notion that the Hindu Asuras have something to do with Ashur, or at least with Assyria more broadly, enjoyed some renown in the early decades of the 20th century, though even then wasn’t universally accepted (Hannes Sköld, Were the Asuras Assyrians?, p. 265-266). Today it is kept afloat largely just by all sorts of fringe websites, including but not limited to puzzling Hinduism-adjacent blogs and Atlantis truthers (are there people searching for the location of Hobbes’ Leviathan too?). Presumably, someone at Atlus found it in a similarly dubious source.

Ashur obviously didn’t make it into the actual game, and Asherah took his spot for some hitherto unknown reason. As per the same source (ie. Megaten Maniacs, p. 133), multiple other demons were replaced at some point in the game’s development. Interestingly, Ashur and Asura are the only case of only one half of a pair being replaced. Morax and Moloch were added as a replacement for Minotaur and Asterius, while Mithras and Mitra - for Asmodeus and Aeshma. Both of the scrapped pairs are closely related thematically: Asmodeus is a Jewish take on Zoroastrian Aeshma in origin; Asterius in this context was presumably intended as Minotaur’s actual given name (as given for example by Pausanias), and not one of the numerous other bearers of the same name in Greek mythology.

It sounds a bit as if some of the changes were done in a hurry. Going beyond the pairs, Ouroboros was supposed to be replaced by but they apparently failed to find someone appropriate - a figure with ma in the name who could take an “administrative role” among the mothers - on time (I think Ninimma would work - she has ma in her name, disputed claims of a “maternal” or “creative” role, and she clearly would work well as an “administrator” - but I digress). Even Mastema almost got replaced at the last minute. The developers apparently worried about his appeal to the potential audience, and considered replacing him with another angel, though no more precise information is provided. Given that he’s easily one of the most popular demons today this sounds pretty silly in retrospect.

Could it be that Asherah’s introduction was a last minute change like that? Perhaps Asura remained simply because there was no time left to design a more fitting demon to go with her (not that he was a particularly good match for Ashur in the first place)? These questions must remain unanswered, unless by some miracle more information about SJ development will emerge in the future, sadly. I feel obliged to point out that the Ashur case might've been a rare example of a situation in which Atlus could’ve instead just resorted to one of the series staples to make it more coherent. I’m talking, of course, about the persistent conflation of Asura and Ahura Mazda (as recently discussed by Eirikr here; note that even Asura’s SJ compendium entry brings it up). 

The Assyrian god inside a ring (wikimedia commons)

The Achaemenid figure inside a ring (wikimedia commons) A connection between Ahura Mazda and Ashur, while not directly attested, is a fairly common subject of speculation in scholarship up to this day. To be specific, a symbol common in Achaemenid art, a winged figure inside a ring, is argued to be a representation of Ahura Mazda patterned on earlier Assyrian depictions of a god usually interpreted as Ashur (Michael Shenkar, Intangible Spirits and Graven Images: The Iconography of Deities in the Pre-Islamic Iranian World, p. 47-50; note that identification with Shamash is also relatively common, though).

A possible eastern depiction of Indra-like Ahura Mazda (left) with Nanaya (center) and Weshparkar (right) from Dandan Oilik (wikimedia commons) While Zoroastrianism is, at least nominally, aniconic, historically especially in the peripheries of the areas inhabited by its adherents (like the Caucasus or the western frontiers of China) the borrowing of iconography from neighboring cultures was frequent. The possible Ashur-Ahura Mazda depictions have less ambiguous parallels involving the iconography of Zeus (in Commagene, in Bactria, and on Kushan coins; Intangible Spirits…, p. 61-62) and even Indra (in Sogdia, sometimes complete with elephant mount; Intangible Spirits…, p. 63) being adopted to represent Ahura Mazda. I guess Ronde gets the last laugh here: the bizarrely Zeus-like Ahura Mazda accidentally turned out to be pretty accurate.

[elodieunderglass]

Hi, Elodie —

I have been allowed to fire a number of replica historical firearms and am happy to share my method.

Find your local reenactors (they may only be semi-local) for the period you want or as close as feasible. Go to an event. Meet the reenactors and explain your needs. Someone will almost certainly let you have a go, with blanks obviously, on-site or at a later time in a less-populous place, depending.

They will ABSOLUTELY talk you through the steps, care, and features of their weapon and let you hold it and take photos.

Warning: they will try to recruit you and they’re a ridiculously fun bunch so it might well work.

(In reference to this post - They need to do that thing where actual professionals in certain fields have seminars for writers but with letting historical... – @elodieunderglass on Tumblr)

That's absolutely lovely, thank you so much! Hey @werewolfetone - here's something for you!

I myself am not super interested in firearms! I can shoot tin cans with an air rifle and perceive that as being perfectly sufficient. if I ever write a story with guns in it - just watch out, if you're beer-can-shaped, that's all I can tell you. you'll also be like "what about the gunpowder elodie" and I'll be like "air's good enough for me and it's good enough for you. I don't like percussive noises. AU without gunpowder."

My husband is good at them - firearms, I mean. Percussive noises also, I suppose. Upon moving to America, he took them (firearms) up as a hobby, was adopted by all sorts of deeply odd older men, took some progressively specific tactical courses, and placed unexpectedly highly in some semiprofessional competitions.

I remember conservative older American guys being absolutely bewildered that foreign nationals like Dr Glass technically shouldn't be allowed to, like, purchase their own home-defense cannon or become licensed arms dealers or go on Secret Courses or whatever the hell they kept encouraging him to do. "I'm English, stop arming me," he'd say, but they wouldn't.

when we moved over to resolve our two-body problem, the old man gun friends were so disbelieving that Dr Glass could TRULY permanently returning to Europe that one of them kept and stored his guns for him for years, and only recently sold them on his behalf.

anyway some of them were indeed re-enactors and they would be fully like. hey dr glass would you like to come along. you can be a good guy if he like. and he was like. can you please stop arming the british (me). thanks for your enthusiasm though. thanks.

where was I going with this? thank you.

[mariacallous]

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, used the same easily cracked password for different online accounts over a period of years, according to leaked records reviewed by WIRED. Following her participation in a Signal group chat in which sensitive details of a military operation were unwittingly shared with a journalist, the revelation raises further questions about the security practices of the US spy chief.

WIRED reviewed Gabbard's passwords using databases of material leaked online created by the open-source intelligence firms District 4 Labs and Constella Intelligence. Gabbard served in Congress from 2013 to 2021, during which time she sat on the Armed Services Committee, its Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations, and the Foreign Affairs Committee, giving her access to sensitive information. Material from breaches shows that during a portion of this period, she used the same password across multiple email addresses and online accounts, in contravention of well-established best practices for online security. (There is no indication that she used the password on government accounts.)

Two collections of breached records published in 2017 (but breached at some previous unknown date), known as “combolists,” reveal a password that was used for an email account associated with her personal website; that same password, according to a combolist published in 2019, was used with her Gmail account. That same password was used, according to records dating to 2012, for Dropbox and LinkedIn accounts associated with the email address tied to her personal website. According to records dating to 2018 breaches, she also used it on a MyFitnessPal account associated with a me.com email address and an account at HauteLook, a now-defunct ecommerce site then owned by Nordstrom.

Records of these breaches have been available online for years and are accessible in commercial databases.

The password associated with all of the accounts in question includes the word “shraddha,” which appears to have personal significance to Gabbard: Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that she had been initiated into the Science of Identity Foundation, an offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement into which she was reportedly born and which former members have accused of being a cult. Several former adherents told The Journal that they believe Gabbard received the name “Shraddha Dasi” when she was allegedly received into the group. Gabbard’s deputy chief of staff, Alexa Henning, responded to questions from The Journal at the time by posting them on X and accusing the news media of publicizing “Hinduphobic smears and other lies.”

“The data breaches you’re referring to occurred almost 10 years ago, and the passwords have changed multiple times since,” wrote Olivia Coleman, a Gabbard spokesperson, in response to questions from WIRED. “As our deputy chief of staff has already made clear on a number of occasions, the DNI has never and doesn’t have affiliation with that organization. Attempting to smear the DNI as being in a cult is bigoted behavior.“

“Your bigoted lies and smears of a cabinet member and your story fomenting hinduphobia is noted,” wrote Henning in response to a follow-up question about the probability of Gabbard’s password containing the same name she was reportedly received into Science of Identity Foundation with, given her denials that she has ever been affiliated with the group. “This was well litigated during her confirmation hearing so congrats on being about 6 months late to this story. Great job.”

Science of Identity did not respond to a request for comment.

Security experts advise people to never use the same password on different accounts precisely because people often do so. If a password for one account is revealed in a breach, hackers will often attempt to use it to access other accounts controlled by the same person. Reusing passwords is especially dangerous with email, because a compromised email account can be used to reset credentials for other accounts or systems.

The Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency, the top US government authority on digital security, advises members of the public to use a password manager to generate a different password of at least 16 characters, consisting of random strings of mixed-case numbers, letters, and symbols or at least four unrelated words, for every account they use.

As director of national intelligence, Gabbard oversees the 18 organizations comprising the US intelligence community, including the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, and their budget of roughly $100 billion. By statute, she is the principal adviser to the president and the National Security Council on intelligence matters relating to national security, and so is charged with maintaining the security of much of the most sensitive information in the government. The Democratic National Committee, citing a 2019 statement that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was “not the enemy of the United States,” news reports on the support she has enjoyed from Russian state media, and her ties to “conspiracy theorists,” has characterized Gabbard as a “direct threat to our national security.”

Gabbard addressed these criticisms during her Senate confirmation hearings in January.

“Those who oppose my nomination imply that I am loyal to something or someone other than God, my own conscience, and the constitution of the United States, accusing me of being Trump’s puppet, Putin’s puppet, Assad’s puppet, a guru’s puppet, Modi’s puppet, not recognizing the absurdity of simultaneously being the puppet of five different puppet masters,” she said. “The fact is, what truly unsettles my political opponents is I refuse to be their puppet.”

[zvaigzdelasas]

“Cyprus will be part of this war too” if it opens its airports and bases to Israeli forces, Hassan Nasrallah said in a televised address that came just a day after Israel warned the powerful Iran-backed militant group that the prospect of “all-out war” was “getting very close.”

The comments by the Hezbollah leader are the first time he has threatened Cyprus, a member of the European Union that lies in the Mediterranean sea, roughly 125 miles (200 kilometers) from Lebanon, and which has held joint military exercises with Israel since 2014 and as recently as last year.

Nasrallah’s threat came as part of a fiery response to Israel’s warning that saw him boast of his group’s growing capabilities and threaten to “shake the pillars” of Israel if a war “were to be imposed on Lebanon.[...]

[On Tuesday] Hezbollah flaunted a 9-minute video filmed by a drone showing civilian and military locations in and around one of Israel’s largest cities, Haifa. The video prompted Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz to warn of an “all-out war” in which “Hezbollah will be destroyed, and Lebanon severely beaten.”

On Wednesday, Nassrallah celebrated the video as evidence of its growing ability to gather intelligence.

“The enemy knows that no place in the entire (state) is safe from our missiles, and it won’t be arbitrary. Everything will be deliberately targeted,” Nasrallah said in his speech.

“We have long hours of footage of Haifa, of the outskirts of Haifa, and what comes after Haifa, and after after Haifa,” Nasrallah said, in an apparent reference to a Hezbollah slogan from the 2006 war with Israel, when the group’s rockets hit Haifa for the first time.

In response to the threat by Nasrallah, Cyprus’ President Nikos Christodoulides said the island was in “no way involved in the war conflicts.”[...]

Parts of the Hezbollah footage, filmed in the daytime, claimed to show Krayot, a cluster of “highly populated” residential cities north of the Israeli city of Haifa and 28 km (17 miles) south of the Lebanese border, along with malls and high rises.

Other parts claimed to show a military complex near Haifa belonging to Israeli weapons manufacturer Rafael – including Iron Dome batteries, missile storage sites and radar sites – and military boats, ships and oil storage depots in the port of Haifa.

CNN analysis has geolocated the video to a number of locations around Haifa. Those locations include a number of sensitive areas, including at least two military installations: a base in northern Haifa and the port of Haifa. The drone also flew over the oil tanks that sit north of Haifa, the Haifa airport and several residential areas.

CNN also analyzed the shadows in the videos, which indicate the drone mission over Haifa lasted multiple hours, or took place over multiple days. The analysis shows parts of the video have been sped up.[...]

Hezbollah has claimed the video was the “first episode,” suggesting more videos would surface from deep inside Israeli territory.[...]

The release of the footage comes as Israel’s military says it has “approved and validated” operational plans for an offensive in Lebanon and made decisions on increasing the readiness of troops in the field.[...]

Hezbollah has fired more than 5,000 rockets, missiles and drones at northern Israel since October 7, claiming that its attacks are in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Hezbollah has said in the past that it will only stop firing on Israel if Israel stops the war in Gaza.

"Opening Cypriot airports and bases to the Israeli enemy to target Lebanon would mean that the Cypriot government is part of the war, and the resistance will deal with it as part of the war," Nasrallah threatened.[...]

“Hezbollah is not far away at all. If they can target the outskirts of Tel Aviv then they can hit Cyprus. It’s not something that can be excluded,” Haritos said.

Nasrallah’s threat against Cyprus came as its foreign minister, Constantinos Kombos, wrapped up a meeting on Monday in Washington with his counterpart Antony Blinken.

“Cyprus is an important player in the region, and a partnership for the United States that we deeply value,” Blinken said.

Since 7 October, Cyprus has emerged as a hub for US special forces. US Naval Special Warfare Operators conducted joint training with Cypriot counterparts this year. Cyprus also actively billed itself as a staging ground for aid into Gaza and the Port of Larnaca has been the first point of entry for aid traveling to the US-built pier in Gaza. [...]

In the last decade, Israel has grown increasingly close to both Cyprus and Greece.[...]

Cyprus was a founding member of the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum, which sought to deepen energy cooperation with Israel and Arab states, amid maritime tensions with Turkey. Last year, Cyprus pushed to cement its energy ties with Israel by lobbying for a new gas pipeline between the two, MEE reported.

Cyprus, like Greece, has also benefitted from an influx of Israeli real estate investment in recent years, ironically, along with renewed interest from Lebanese investors. [...]

Israel's air force has reportedly also used Cypriot airspace to conduct a drill simulating the scenario of an Iranian attack on Israel.

But Cyprus has been cooperating with Israel on security for years.

Since 2021, it has participated with Greece and the US in annual naval exercises under the moniker "Noble Dina". They also conducted largescale naval exercises in 2023 that saw Israeli naval fleets sail to Cyprus.

Israeli special forces also train in Cyprus where the rocky terrain resembles Lebanon.[...]

Middle East Eye reported on Wednesday, that US envoy Amos Hochstein told Lebanese officials that the US would back an Israeli offensive on Lebanon after five weeks if there was no halt to daily fighting between the Iran-backed group and Israel.

“Throwing Cyprus into the mix means Nasrallah is under pressure and believes Israel may go ahead with an attack,” Harari said.[...]

In 2018, [Cyprus] signed a bilateral security cooperation statement and in 2022, US President Joe Biden's administration lifted a decades-old arms embargo on the island.[...]

Cyprus's burgeoning relations with Israel marks an extraordinary change since its independence from British colonial rule in 1960 when the country's then-leader, Greek Orthodox Archbishop Makarios III, welcomed figures like Gamal Abdel Nasser and the island openly embraced Palestinian resistance fighters.

For years, Cyprus harboured anti-Americanism over lingering frustration that the US quietly backed Turkey’s 1974 invasion of the island after a failed coup attempt to unite it with Greece. Turkey maintains more than 35,000 troops in occupied northern Cyprus.[...]

"[Nasrallah] is saying if you help Israel there will be ramifications."

19 Jun 24

[beardedmrbean]

Opposing protests took place in the southern German city of Munich on Sunday following a deadly car-ramming attack that killed two people and rekindled a debate on deportations just days before a nationwide election.

On Thursday, a 24-year-old Afghan national drove a car into a trade union demonstration in Munich, injuring at least 39 people, some seriously. A 37-year-old woman and her 2-year-old daughter died on Saturday as a result of their injuries.

Investigators in the state of Bavaria currently assume that the crime had an Islamist motive, based on statements made by the driver after his arrest.

The far-right anti-migrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) staged a vigil on Munich's central square Königsplatz on Sunday, a few hundred metres from the scene of the attack.

Those opposed to exploiting the attack for political purposes held their own demonstration opposite the AfD gathering. Police put the number attending the AfD vigil at 70, and the demonstration at 600.

Around 50 counter-protesters formed a human chain to prevent AfD supporters from laying flowers at the site of the attack, police said.

Footage showed police then using force on several people, as witnesses also reported. Police said they briefly detained eight people for offences against a ban on wearing masks and an attempt to cause bodily harm to police officers.

In a statement published by the Munich authorities on their official website earlier on Sunday, the family of the woman and child had appealed for the attack not to be used to foment hatred.

"Amel was a person who worked for justice," the statement said, emphasizing that she had been active in seeking rights for workers and in promoting solidarity and equality.

Amel, who was born in Algeria and came to Germany at the age of 4, had been opposed to xenophobia and had wanted to pass these values on to her daughter, Hafsa, the statement said.

Bavarian premier calls for negotiations with Taliban on deportations

The political debate in the aftermath of the attack centred on the issue of deportations, with Bavarian Premier Markus Söder calling for immediate negotiations with the Taliban on deportation flights to Afghanistan.

"A flight is needed every week," Söder told the Sunday edition of Germany's Bild newspaper. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Interior Minister Nancy Faeser should speak directly to the Taliban about deportation flights from Monday, he said.

Söder said there are almost 2,000 Afghans in the state of Bavaria alone who are required to leave Germany. Almost 200 of them are serious offenders, he added.

"Afghans obliged to leave the country must do so quickly, and the issuance of new visas [for Afghans] must be stopped for the foreseeable future," the conservative premier said.

"First Aschaffenburg, now Munich: Enough is enough. Germany needs an emergency plan for Afghanistan," he said, referring to another attack committed by an Afghan national in a different Bavarian city in January, which left two people dead.

According to the authorities, the alleged perpetrator of the attack in Munich was legally resident in Germany.

A court judgement rejecting his asylum application from October 2020 showed that he is said to have lied about his escape story. However, Munich city issued a toleration decision in April 2021 and granted the man a residence permit in October of the same year.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Saturday said the man will be deported after serving his sentence. "Anyone who does something like this must expect the harshest penalties," he said.

The first deportation flight from Germany to Afghanistan since the Taliban took power three years ago took place in August 2024. It transported 28 convicted criminals who had received deportation orders back to their home country.

Faeser emphasized after the attack in Munich that deportations to Afghanistan would continue. However, such flights are difficult to implement as they require cooperation with the Taliban, either directly or indirectly via neighbouring countries.

The Taliban expressed openness to cooperating on deportations in the wake of the attack in Munich, but demanded a consular presence in Germany in return. "We have shown our willingness to resume consular services for Afghans in Germany that cover all aspects of migration," Taliban Foreign Ministry spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi told dpa.

Critics have warned in the past against such talks with the Islamist Taliban, which is isolated internationally. The Taliban could benefit from deportations by using them as an opportunity to work with a Western state, they warn.

Parliamentary committee to hold special session

The internal affairs committee of the German Bundestag, or lower house of parliament, is planning to hold a special session this week to find out more about the background to the attack and the ongoing investigation.

The meeting is expected to be held on Wednesday, according to members of the committee, but the time has not yet been set.

The leaders of the parliamentary groups received initial information about the case in a telephone conference from the Interior Ministry.

"Despite the perpetrator's statement during the interrogation, the question of motive remains the focus of attention," Martina Renner, an expert on domestic policy from The Left party, said.

Due to the particular significance of the case, the Federal Prosecutor General has taken over the investigation.

[lunarry]

Silence, Siege and Persecution: Venezuela’s Media After the Elections

“Today I heard on the radio: ‘Our programming today will be 100% music, because music is a refuge, a safe place,’” economist Omar Zambrano tweeted a few days after the July 28th elections. In fact, for almost two weeks after the disputed results were announced by the National Electoral Council and spontaneous protests erupted throughout the country, most radio shows –including those with the largest audiences, such as journalists Shirley Varnagy’s and Román Lozinki’s– went off the air.

“These have been difficult weeks for all of us as citizens, including those of us who practice this profession”, Varnagy said in an Instagram post after two weeks of silence. “The circumstances force me to think very carefully about the words I say and write. I don’t live abroad, I’m inside.” Varnagy then announced she wouldn’t return to the radio until September 9th, more than a month after the presidential elections. Lozinski returned on August 26th. “I insist that these have not been easy days for those of us who make a living from the radio,” he said on an Instagram post announcing his return.

But the silence, the veiled messages, weren’t limited to Venezuela’s already highly-censored radio stations – of which more than 150 have been closed down by CONATEL, the government’s telecommunications agency, since 2022 according to the National Press Workers Union (SNTP).

As reports of detentions and passport annulments multiplied after the elections, the silence–usual in television, newspapers and most radio shows–suddenly swayed through social and online media too.

Journalists put their accounts private or altogether stopped tweeting, political podcasts halted and Venezuelan independent media started to publish articles without bylines (as we’ve been doing in Caracas Chronicles).

A week after July 28th, journalist Alonso Moleiro accurately described the ambiance: “The prevailing feeling is fear,” he wrote in the Spanish newspaper El País. “Politicians are hermetic. Interviews are canceled. People close to political leaders change their phone numbers. There is a huge hesitance in WhatsApp groups; Zoom conversations are rare. The police harass citizens looking for data on their mobile phones.”

The crackdown against the press ramped up before July 28th, when CONATEL ordered that public and private internet providers block a series of independent media, watchdogs and fact-checking websites. First, on early July, the government blocked anti-disinformation fact-checkers Es Paja, Cazadores de Fake News and Observatorio de Fake News alongside the media NGO Instituto Prensa y Sociedad de Venezuela (IPYS Venezuela) and VPN service Proton. Then, on July 22, the sites of watchdogs Medianálisis and VE Sin Filtro were blocked alongside independent media El Estímulo, Analítica and Runrunes.

During the same period, Nicolás Maduro repeatedly referred to foreign media agencies –including Reuters, AFP, AP, EFE and CNN– as “garbage” and “hitmen of untruthfulness.” His legislature speaker, Jorge Rodríguez, even engaged in an online brawl with APEX–the Foreign Press Association in Venezuela.

Then, the elections came. And detentions followed.

Since July 28th, 13 journalists and press workers have been detained in the country by state security forces, according to the SNTP (four have been freed, including one on parole). Three of them–including Ronald Carreño, a political prisoner with ties to opposition party Voluntad Popular who had been released last year as part of the US-Venezuela talks–were arrested for belonging to opposition parties. Other detained journalists including showbiz reporter Carmela Longo–who was released on parole afterwards, but charged with terrorism–, La Patilla journalist Ana Carolina Guaita in La Guaira, and photojournalist Deisy Peña in Los Teques, were taken for just doing their jobs.

“Our media outlet has a profile that is very different from the rest and we don’t do hard news,” says Irene (fake name), who works in a small Venezuelan digital outlet. “But in the end, as Carmela’s case shows, anyone can get in trouble for whatever reason now without you necessarily doing anything.” The pattern is changing. Before the elections, detentions were mostly focused on people helping the opposition campaign or participating in it. In fact, the three journalists detained before the elections–Gabriel González, Luis López and Carlos Julio Rojas–had ties to political parties or grassroots political movements. But, since July 28th, repression has drifted towards reporting-focused journalists.

The role of journalists in narrating the people’s rejection of the results announced by the CNE and the coverage on their veracity led to a “policy of silencing, of siege, of persecution” against the press, SNTP Secretary General Marco Ruiz says. Similarly, he says, there’s been a policy of silencing the coverage of protests and anti-government expressions.

And the July 28th elections have not only unleashed detentions. “We have recorded campaigns of hate and criminalization against journalists in different states like Aragua, Portuguesa, Carabobo, Zulia, Bolívar, Táchira,” Ruiz says, “Many of them are now in safekeeping. In other cases, we have had to use extraction procedures and they are outside the country because they were at risk of arrest.”

The situation has also changed the content and internal dynamics of Venezuelan outlets. “Everything we had planned to publish during the rest of the year is now paralyzed,” Irene says, “because now we are not publishing anything that doesn’t have to do with what’s happening, because we think there’s nothing more important.” Some of her colleagues, she says, have also stopped tweeting because of the emotional toll.

Similarly, outlets –including Caracas Chronicles– have faced difficulties to find sources willing to speak on the record or contribute with their analyses. “I can’t find voices willing to give a testimony on what’s happening in Venezuela, they are taking a lot of care”, says veteran Venezuelan journalist César Miguel Rondón, who hosts a radio program in Miami, “No one wants to end up disappeared, in a jail, because of some henchman’s whims… I think we had never seen a situation as ugly and dangerous as this one.”

In fact, many journalists have been affected by the massive annulment of passports that social activists, politicians and NGO members have also reported. “I know of correspondents who had their passports annulled,” says Nancy (fake name), who works as a stringer in Caracas for an international outlet and decided to leave the country after the elections. “I know of other journalists who also left the country under the radar, I know of photojournalists who have decided not to publish political pictures on their social media or asked for credit to be removed, I know of international media outlets who are now solely doing remote work to avoid the risk of going to their offices.”

This is why so many outlets are publishing articles without bylines and the alliance Venezuela Vota resorted to creating the AI avatars of Operación Retuit to broadcast news summary videos without risking their staff.

“We put safety of the team and staff as the top priority of the media outlet where I work and lead,” said Carlos (fake name), the director of a Caracas-based digital outlet. His site is not publishing bylines and has avoided sending journalists to cover protests “due to the risk of arbitrary detention.” The team is also using alternative messaging applications like Signal (blocked in Venezuela after the elections) and working remotely. Carlos says they have also designed a protocol to offer a safehouse to any journalist in his team who is threatened and even to be extracted from the country “in coordination with international networks of journalists specialized in this type of actions.”

For Nancy, journalists in national and regional outlets are at more risk but she doesn’t rule out the possibility of crackdowns on correspondants and stringers. “Now I have an enormous terror I had never felt,” she says, “especially because of how random the decisions seem and how unclear the rules of the game are. It’s basically a roulette and you never know when your turn will be.”

The State has also cracked down against social media and digital communications beyond the work of the press. Checkpoints where officers check people’s phone for pro-opposition content, usually leading to detentions or thousand-dollars extortions, have become common throughout Caracas and the rest of the country after July 28th. In fact, the government has called on Venezuelans to stop using Whatsapp and even blocked X–originally for ten days, but the deadline passed on and the network continues to be inaccessible in Venezuela without a VPN.

“The underlying problem is that WhatsApp is the platform that people used to efficiently disseminate information horizontally” and without censorship during the campaign and post-electoral protests, human rights activist Rafael Uzcátegui says. “Censorship in social media is not only to try to avoid people from expressing themselves, or being afraid to do so, but also to neutralize their autonomous capacity to establish links with others that bypass the state” and its media ecosystem.

In fact, the government has even threatened influencers who publicly supported María Corina Machado.

“You have to decide whether you want to continue your careers, first of all, with your families in Venezuela”, Maduro said, addressing celebrities–particularly Miami-based Youtube humorist Lele Pons–and social media stars that hosted lives and podcast episodes with Machado.

Maduro even accused Pons of conspiring to “impose” a government in Venezuela.

In fact, on July 31st during a press conference with international media, Maduro said “TikTok and Instagram are in the hands of imperialism” and “they are manipulating [people] to bring a civil war to Venezuela.” He then lambasted international agencies: “Do not insist on your agenda to bring war to Venezuela,” he said, “you, the international media, are responsible for the death and wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.”

A month after the elections, Maduro charged against the media again: this time, he accused local outlets TalCual, Efecto Cocuyo and El Pitazo of receiving USAID funds and of being part of the alleged conspiracy that the government blames for the recent nationwide power outage.

“This is an informal curfew against journalists, imposed de facto,” Ruiz says, “to dismantle the journalistic profession and the media in practically all the states of the country.”

“What I fear the most is the government’s level of evilness. I know they are capable of going against children and the elderly alike, and I will die if they touch my parents or my child,” says Nancy, who is unsure about returning to Venezuela, “this changed. And very quickly.”

[girlactionfigure]

🔅 Friday - ISRAEL REALTIME - Connecting to Israel in Realtime

Erev Shabbat - Parshat (Torah Portion) Chukas - Numbers 19:2 - Moses is taught the laws of the red heifer.  After forty years of journeying through the desert, the people of Israel arrive in the wilderness of Zin. Miriam dies, and the people thirst for water. G‑d tells Moses to speak to a rock and command it to give water. Moses gets angry at the rebellious Israelites and strikes the stone. Water issues forth, but Moses is told by G‑d that neither he nor Aaron will enter the Promised Land.

▪️US “WILL NOT PROVIDE” (more) 2,000 lb BOMBS TO ISRAEL.. US President Joe Biden:  “I know all this criticism about how I wouldn’t provide the weapons they needed. I’m not providing the 2000-lb bombs. They cannot be used in Gaza or any populated area without causing great human tragedy and damage” (Times of Israel)

(( Hezbollah and Iran get to use any size bombs they want against Israel.  But the US knows best on how Israel should defend itself.  And if Israel doesn’t have the accurate and right sized munitions it needs to defend its citizens from MASS SLAUGHTER, what do they think is going to happen?  Because the options are: (1) Israel will roll over and die, allowing the Jews to be mass raped tortured murdered, or (2) stop being more accurate and safe, and fire the unspoken weapons.  But sure, block Israel from getting the bombs they need. ))

▪️A HERO SOLDIER HAS FALLEN.. Valeri Chefonov, 33, from Netanyahu, fell defending the north by a suicide drone hit.  

▪️IRAN DELIVERING MASS MISSILES TO SYRIA AND LEBANON.. The delivery of the missiles included dozens of Iranian-made missiles, including short-range missiles, 610 mm surface-to-surface missiles (Zalzal-1) and (Zalzal-2) and Shaheen-1 missiles. Caliber 333 mm, Al-Mohandis missiles ) and missiles (Al-Nazat), in addition to many of their launch platforms. The shipment arrived at the Maza military airport in Damascus, aboard a plane that flew from Deir Ez-Zor airport, with the protection of dozens of members also on the road leading to the airport by Iranian militiamen at the time of the plane's arrival. .. and they have no problem announcing it.

▪️CONCERN OF INFILTRATION BY ASHKELON COAST / OTEF AZA.. overnight.  The security department and the council's standby squads conducted scans together with the IDF forces. No unusual findings.

▪️UNRWA TERROR MEMBERS.. German news Bild says the Israeli foreign ministry sent a letter to Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini with the names, passport numbers, and military identification numbers of 108 UNRWA workers who also served as Hamas or Islamic Jihad terrorists.  The letter says that there are many more names, but they could not be included for intelligence considerations. 

🔸DEAL NEWS.. Barak Ravid: In Israel, they estimate that Hamas is at a point of weakness and wants a ceasefire - and therefore they are hardening their positions.

.. Senior Egyptian source: There has been progress in the talks regarding the hostages and Israel's withdrawal from areas in Gaza.

▪️OVERNIGHT PROBLEM WITH 102 FIRE EMERGENCY LINE.. problem has been resolved, 102 working again.

▪️TURKEY SAYS WILL BLOCK ISRAEL.. Turkish President Erdogan at the NATO summit: We will show no tolerance for attempts to promote cooperation between Israel and NATO.

⭕ HEZBOLLAH ANTI-TANK MISSILE hits B&B in Shatula, destroying it.  (( For reference, the B&B was not a tank, nor a military site. ))

⭕ HEZBOLLAH ANTI-TANK MISSILES (2) hit Metulla, damaging buildings and causing a power outage.

⭕ ROCKET FIRE FROM SYRIA falls in the southern Golan.  IDF counter-fire: IDF says it struck a Syrian military post in southern Syria's Tasil overnight.

⭕ HEZBOLLAH ROCKET FIRE at northern towns,.  3 rounds this morning.

[peccatulum-b-gone]

Eisen und Blut, feat. Peccatulum Sweep. A report of the recent events in L Corp. territory

Since I have finally have the time to wind down and write this out, here it is. Note that some of the details were obscured* by myself as they fall under an NDA, but after a brief consultation I was advised to include them. All the same, the information does not fall under Hana Association´s censorship policy, so I had to make do with what resources I have available.

*■■■■■■■■■ ■■■■ is not responsible for any attempts of accessing the obscured information

Following a wave of peculiar inactivity from the peccatula in the fallen L Corp. streets, necessary research was conducted. After studying the resources provided by the Dieci Association´s library, it appeared that a foreign dangerous presence has entered the territory, upsetting the "local ecosystem". This theory was further supported by finding material evidence, an N Corp. Inquisitor seal.

Though approach of the situation was most delicate, the abrupt ambush by N Corp members had pushed me to engage F. Kromer, more commonly known as "The One Who Grips" in a state which resembled the distortion phenomenon. However, it had distinct difference to the distortion phenomenon, as the subject bore peccatulae form with some humanoid traits retained. Such form had not been part of the distortion phenomenon and as the consensus on distortions states that "peccatula are distinctly what becomes of individuals who had failed to enter the distorted state", I will refer to it as "chimera".

Due to past history with the individual prior to entering the chimera form (a brief period of obrumuk uqvrr dll wapw samxpsn), I have attempted to reason with them, as I imagined she was a distortion and thus retained some level of cognition. This was quickly proven as a falsehood, as the chimera attacked with little warning. Though I have successfully fended off the combined forces of a group of armored Inquisitors alongside the chimera, I was injured in the combat.

Following the necessary safety protocol issued following my demotion, I have isolated myself while in the vulnerable state. Thanks to the in-person request made by the @zwei-association-official, I was able to acquire the crucial symptom mitigation substance mix, as delivered by the @zweiassociationfixer.

PECCATULUM SWEEP ADDENDUM

In accordance with the fixer request protocols, I have taken the case as presented by the Zwei reports. Caged peccatula have appeareed around the City in numerous locations with major leads pointing to L Corp. as the source of this "trade".

Working with @zweiassociationfixer, few sites of capture and containment were identified and dismantled within an old L. Corp branch. N Corp. is suspected to have hand in this trade, as vast amount of activity had ceased after the N Corp. Inquisitors were dealt with. Ever since, the number of peccatula running around the L Corp. has stabilized. Whether that is a good thing is up for a debate.

END OF REPORT

Signed, ■■■■■■■■■ ■■■■, more widely known as SnakeHead

ERROR: Insufficient Disclosure Privileges. This information was hidden from you by the Hana Association

[syrakhanistan]

Me when I saw you in my notifications: why is a random government liking my post

Me when I read your bio: how do I apply for citizenship

Welcome to the Citizenship Application Hub for Syrakhanistan.

===

Hello, potential citizen! Allow me to guide you through the formal application for citizenship process, or Citizen Acquisition Process (C.A.P.), on behalf of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Syrakhanistan.

There are several key differences between acquiring citizenship in Syrakhanistan to other nations - predominantly, a lack of any required documentation (although documents of your current residence are useful). This is due to the nation’s policy of an open border for anyone who wishes to enter.

Ideally, however, you should have on hand any form of your current nation’s identification such as a passport, birth certificate, national identity card, or a driver’s license; other forms of identification, such as a bank statement or a university student registration can also suffice.

Next, we ask any potential immigrant three crucial questions, that will be used to find their most suitable immigration path:

1. Do you or any of your family have any previous connection to Syrakhanistan, or any nation that formerly existed within the borders of Syrakhanistan? If so, you will want Process SR. If you do not, move to Question 2.

2. Do you suffer from any form of discrimination, criminalisation, or outstanding debts or fines in your country of origin? This can range from anything, from a lack of a nation’s rights for a protected minority, to a parking ticket. This is not to infantilise the suffering of any particular group, but is predominantly due to our nation’s unique circumstances within the international order (for reference, please see the government website of The Department of the Monopoly on Informal and Valued Trade, or DMIVT). Depending on your situation, your potential status as one of Syrakhanistan’s many protected identities, and many other factors, you will likely require either Process RF or Process AC; however, if you intend to apply for citizenship not as an immigrant, but as a refugee or asylum seeker, then you will be required to access Process LT. If none of the above apply to you, please proceed to Question 3.

3. Are you a member of any Specially Designated Organisation or Protected Group? If you are, please access Process MG, Process MS, or Process QB; alternatively, directly contact [A number is written here, but it seems to blur before your eyes…] to assist you. If you’re not, and none of these questions apply to you, then you likely require Process NA (if you are at all confused at this point, please find the full list of questions and potential processes in the links below, or contact us directly).

The other processes have direct links to their relevant subject matter; however, the vast majority of applicants will only require Process NA. Therefore, Process NA will be the subject of the rest of this article.

Potential immigrants who have answered Questions 1-3, and who do not apply for the Processes therein, will be given the next two questions:

4. What is your primary intent for immigrating to Syrakhanistan? Is it for work, for a new home, for study, or for other reasons?

5. Are you sure that no other potential processes for entry to Syrakhanistan apply to you, such as temporary travel status, holiday visa, visitor’s visa, temporary residence permits, temporary work permits, religious transit visa, religious transit and temporary residence visa, secondary temporary travel status, or temporary access permits?

With these five questions answered in the form available below, you will then be asked to come to your local Syrakhanistani Embassy, Foreign Delegation, or Commercial Outpost to deliver it in person - you will then be asked to perform a small interview; this can be done in person, or done via a communications terminal separating the interview participants: however, it will be done on site - it cannot be done from home, or online.

Following the interview and submission of application, you might be accepted at that very moment - if you are, we will endeavour to transport all your belongings to you as you arrive in our nation. If you are not immediately accepted, you should wait for a response - a negative one is required, by Syrakhanistani law, to be delivered to you within a single week, while a positive response of acceptance or continuation of process can take up to three months, with the maximum being six months.

If you are forced to wait for more than three months, please inform your local Syrakhanistani mission, or contact us directly, as you are entitled to financial compensation for our failure to assist you.

Even if you are not accepted, you may still receive complementary apologies from us - depending on the reasons for your denial and the length it took, this can be something as small as a souvenir flag, to a small sum of cash, to a direct visit from a Syrakhanistani delegate to personally explain the reasoning, which would also usually include complementary dinner as well as a sum of financial assistance when needed.

We hope this explanation of the basics of the immigration process are helpful to you, and we hope to be in contact with you in the future!

For downloadable forms, website versions in different languages, full list of possible questions and processes, and relevant website redirects, please see below. For the Frequently Asked Questions, click the link at the end of the page.

===

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ):

Q: Why are so few documents required to submit an application?

A: This is predominantly due to Syrakhanistan’s unique relationship to the rest of the nations of the world; however, it is also ideological - we have an open border for anyone who wishes to enter, and therefore do not wish the process to be exceedingly difficult, tedious, or frustrating.

Q: Why do you have an open border policy? Doesn’t that potentially endanger your country/invite crime/bring trouble/[other potentially racist remark]?

A: It is the belief, not just of this Ministry but of the full government of Syrakhanistan, that immigration is a net benefit for all involved. Indeed, the only thing that truly loses in immigration is the nation an immigrant is emigrating from. Our nation receives a new person - a potential friend, a potential worker, a potential soldier, a potential ally; the immigrant received a welcoming new home, whose experience will be tailored directly to them throughout the full process. A nation is, for all intents and purposes, a large group of people - why should we not want more people to join us, and benefit from the fruits of our shared world?

Q: What’s that part about criminalisation about?

A: Please refer to The Department of the Monopoly on Informal and Valued Trade (DMIVT) website.

Q: Financial compensation? Isn’t that bribery?

A: Time is money. Time is something that could be used elsewhere, to be spent with your family, on work, reading a book, or sleeping. Time is also a two-way process; you invested time trying to apply to our nation, and we used that time - if you do not receive a successful response, or are at all displeased with your interaction with us, should you not be recompensed at least for the effort you put in?

Q: Why does the interview have to be done on site?

A: Logistics and bureaucracy; simply put, we have the best ability to assess potential immigrant candidates when in close proximity, as well as with close proximity to the full resources of our nation. Every possible effort will be taken to make the process as comfortable as possible - if you do not wish to do an interview in person, then you can do it via a separate room with a communication terminal. If you dislike instant communications at all, you can write your response, pass it through the room’s door, where it will be given to the interviewer to respond to. If you are physically uncomfortable, we can give you a better chair, a bed, a sofa, and so on and so forth. If you grow hungry or thirsty during the interview, we will give you food and drinks free of charge. However, the interview must still take place and it must be done on site - there is, sadly, no way around it.

Q: The website keeps referring to an “open border for anyone who wishes to enter” - why be so specific about that?

A: The border is open for entry - it is typically not open for exit for citizens. Please refer to the Syrakhanistan Stability Policy for information about emigration from Syrakhanistan. However, to put it simply - Syrakhanistan takes a great deal of pride and care in it’s citizenry, and therefore cannot bear to see it’s beloved citizens to go. When you’re a citizen, you’re a citizen for life, as will be your family. The full immigration process will explain this better in detail, should one apply.

Q: What if my country has no representation for Syrakhanistan, but I still wish to immigrate?

A: You will be granted access to Process QT. So long as you show willing - Syrakhanistan WILL find a way. We guarantee the security and safety of all our people.

===

(C). (20XX). Neo-Kirkukihara: Publication Office of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs - Syrakhanistan.

[mariacallous]

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced the US was imposing reciprocal tariffs on a small collection of Antarctic islands that are not inhabited by humans, as part of a global trade war aimed at asserting US dominance. The Heard and McDonald Islands, known for their populations of penguins and seabirds, can only be reached by sea.

Trump announced the countries now subject to tariffs in a Wednesday press conference, using a poster as a prop. Additional countries—including the Heard and McDonald Islands, which are, incidentally, not countries—were listed on sheets of paper distributed to reporters.

One of the sheets claims that the Heard and McDonald Islands currently charge a “Tariff to the U.S.A.” of 10 percent, clarifying in tiny letters that this includes "currency manipulation and trade barriers." In return, the sheet says that the US will charge "discounted reciprocal tariffs" on the islands at a rate of 10 percent.

The islands are small. Their reported 37,000 hectares of land makes them a little larger than Philadelphia. According to UNESCO, which designated the islands as a World Heritage Site in 1997, they are covered in rocks and glaciers. Heard Island is the site of an active volcano, and McDonald Island is surrounded by several smaller rocky islands. The islands are home to large populations of penguins and elephant seals.

The Australian Antarctic Division manages the islands, preserving the environment and conducting research on the large wildlife population, as well as climate change’s impact on Heard and McDonald’s permanent glaciers. On Wednesday, Australia and a number of its island territories, including Christmas and Cocos Keeling Islands, were also hit with tariffs of 10 percent. Norfolk Island, which Australia also claims, got a tariff of 29 percent.

The White House did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment. When reached for comment, the Australian Antarctic Division referred WIRED to the country’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which did not respond prior to publication.

"One could argue this is in breach of the international Antarctic spirit," Elizabeth Buchanan, a polar geopolitics expert and senior fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, tells WIRED.

Under the Antarctic Treaty, which promotes international scientific cooperation and stipulates that the continent should be used for peaceful purposes, land in Antarctica cannot be owned by any country. However, Australia has claimed since 1953 that the islands are Australian territories. Australia also laid claim to the water surrounding the islands via a 2002 act that established a marine reserve. Last year, the country passed a law extending the boundaries of that reserve, approximately quadrupling its size.

The Australian Defense Force monitors the waters surrounding the Heard and McDonald Islands as a part of Operation Resolute, which covers the area 200 nautical miles from Australia’s mainland and “approximately 10 percent of the world's surface.” In addition to Heard and McDonald Islands, it also applies to the water surrounding the Christmas, Cocos Keeling, Macquarie, and Norfolk and Lord Howe islands. The Australian Defense Force claims that the goal of Operation Resolute is to address "security threats" like piracy and pollution.

The Australian Antarctic Division claims that the area occasionally receives ships involved in scientific research, commercial fishing, and tourism.

[misfitwashere]

September 19, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

SEP 20

Yesterday morning, NPR reported that U.S. public health data are showing a dramatic drop in deaths from drug overdoses for the first time in decades. Between April 2023 and April 2024, deaths from street drugs are down 10.6%, with some researchers saying that when federal surveys are updated, the decline will be even more pronounced. Such a decline would translate to 20,000 deaths averted.

With more than 70,000 Americans dying of opioid overdoses in 2020 and numbers rising, the Biden-Harris administration prioritized disrupting the supply of illicit fentanyl and other synthetic drugs. They worked to seize the drugs at ports of entry, sanctioned more than 300 foreign people and agencies engaged in the global trade in illicit drugs, and arrested and prosecuted dozens of high-level Mexican drug traffickers and money launderers. 

In March 2023 the Biden-Harris administration made naloxone, a medicine that can prevent fatal opioid overdoses, available over the counter. The administration invested more than $82 billion in treatment, and the Department of Health and Human Services worked to get the treatment into the hands of first responders and family members. 

Addressing the crisis of opioid deaths meant careful, coordinated policies.

Also today, markets all over the world climbed after the Fed yesterday cut interest rates for the first time in four years. In the U.S., the S&P 500, which tracks the stock performance of 500 of the biggest companies on U.S. stock exchanges, the Nasdaq Composite, which is weighted toward the information technology sector, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, an older index that tracks 30 prominent companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges, all hit new records. The rate cut indicated to traders that the U.S. has, in fact, managed to pull off the soft landing President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen worked to achieve. They have kept job growth steady, normalized economic growth and inflation, and avoided a recession. 

As they have done so, the major U.S. stock indices have had what The Guardian's Callum Jones calls “an extraordinary year.” Jones notes that the S&P 500 is up more than 20% since the beginning of 2024, the Nasdaq Composite has risen 22%, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gone up 11%.

Bringing the U.S. economy out of the pandemic more successfully than any other major economically developed country meant clear goals and principles, and careful, informed adjustments.

And yet the big story today is that Republican North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson frequented porn sites, where between 2008 and 2012 he wrote that he enjoyed watching transgender pornography; referred to himself as a “black NAZI!”; called for reinstating human enslavement and wrote, “I would certainly buy a few”; called the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a “f*cking commie bastard”; wrote that he preferred Adolf Hitler to former president Barack Obama; referred to Black, Jewish, Muslim, and gay people with slurs; said he doesn’t care about abortions (“I don’t care. I just wanna see the sex tape!” he wrote); and recounted that he had secretly watched women in the showers in a public gym as a 14-year-old. Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck of CNN, who broke the story, noted that “CNN is reporting only a small portion of Robinson’s comments on the website given their graphic nature.”

After the first story broke, Natalie Allison of Politico broke another: that Robinson was registered on the Ashley Madison website, which caters to married people seeking affairs. 

Robinson is running for governor of North Carolina. He has attacked transgender rights, called for a six-week abortion ban without exceptions for rape or incest, mocked survivors of school shootings, and—after identifying a wide range of those he saw as enemies to America and to “conservatives”—told a church audience that “some folks need killing.”

That this scandal dropped on the last possible day Robinson could drop out of the race suggests it was pushed by Republicans themselves because they recognize that Robinson is dragging Trump and other Republican candidates down in North Carolina. But here’s the thing: Republican voters knew who Robinson was, and they chose him anyway. 

Indeed, his behavior is not all that different from that of a number of the Republican candidates in this cycle, including former president Trump, the Republican nominee for president. Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC) embraced Robinson’s candidacy, and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) welcomed “NC’s outstanding Lt. Governor” to a Republican-led House Judiciary Committee meeting “on the importance of election integrity.” “He brought the truth with clarity and conviction—and everyone should hear what he had to say!” Johnson posted to social media. Robinson spoke at the Republican National Convention.

The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans in this election is stark, and it reflects a systemic problem that has been growing in the U.S. since the 1980s. 

Democracy depends on at least two healthy political parties that can compete for voters on a level playing field. Although the men who wrote the Constitution hated the idea of political parties, they quickly figured out that parties tie voters to the mechanics of Congress and the presidency.

And they do far more than that. Before political thinkers legitimized the idea of political opposition to the king, disagreeing with the person in charge usually led to execution or banishment for treason. Parties allowed for the idea of loyal and legitimate opposition, which in turn allowed for the peaceful transition of power. That peaceful exchange enabled the people to choose their leaders and leaders to relinquish power safely. Parties also create a system for criticizing people in power, which helps to weed out corrupt or unfit leaders.

But those benefits of a party system depend on a level political playing field for everyone, so that a party must constantly compete for voters by testing which policies are most popular and getting rid of the corrupt or unstable leaders voters would reject. 

In the 1980s, radical Republican leaders set out to dismantle the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. But that system was popular, and to overcome the majority who favored it, they began to tip the political playing field in their direction. They began to suppress voting by Democrats by insisting that Democrats were engaging in “voter fraud.” At the same time, they worked to delegitimize their opponents by calling them “socialists” or “communists” and claiming that they were trying to destroy the United States. By the 1990s, extremists in the party were taking power by purging traditional Republicans from it.

And yet, voters still elected Democrats, and after they put President Barack Obama into the White House in 2008, the Republican State Leadership Committee in 2010 launched Operation REDMAP, or Redistricting Majority Project. The plan was to take over state legislatures so Republicans would control the new district maps drawn after the 2010 census, especially in swing states like Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It worked, and Republican legislatures in those states and elsewhere carved up state maps into dramatically gerrymandered districts.

In those districts, the Republican candidates were virtually guaranteed election, so they focused not on attracting voters with popular policies but on amplifying increasingly extreme talking points to excite the party’s base. That drove the party farther and farther to the right. By 2012, political scientists Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein warned that the Republican Party had “become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

At the same time, the skewed playing field meant that candidates who were corrupt or bonkers did not get removed from the political mix after opponents pounced on their misdeeds and misstatements, as they would have been in a healthy system. Social media poster scary lawyerguy noted that the story about Robinson will divert attention from the lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets, which diverted attention from Trump’s abysmal debate performance, which diverted attention from Trump’s filming a campaign ad at Arlington National Cemetery. 

When a political party has so thoroughly walled itself off from the majority, there are two options. One is to become full-on authoritarian and suppress the majority, often with violence. Such a plan is in Project 2025, which calls for a strong executive to take control of the military and the judicial system and to use that power to impose his will.    

The other option is that enough people in the majority reject the extremists to create a backlash that not only replaces them, but also establishes a level playing field.  

The Republican Party is facing the reality that it has become so extreme it is hemorrhaging former supporters and mobilizing a range of critics. Today the Catholic Conference of Ohio rebuked those who spread lies about Haitian immigrants—Republican presidential candidate Trump and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance were the leading culprits—and Teamsters councils have rejected the decision of the union’s board not to make an endorsement this year and have endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris. Some white evangelicals are also distancing themselves from Trump. 

And then, tonight, Trump told a Jewish group that if he loses, it will be the fault of Jewish Americans. "I will put it to you very simply and gently: I really haven't been treated right, but you haven't been treated right because you're putting yourself in great danger."

Mark Robinson has said he will not step aside.

—

[yatescountyhistorycenter]

The lost village street of Penn Yan

By Jonathan Monfiletto

From the site of a planing mill that produced grape baskets, caskets, and furniture to a short existence as an even shorter Penn Yan village street to a private driveway for a private residence – in a nutshell, that is the story of Hopkins Place.

You probably wouldn’t know it now by looking at the Penn Yan Public Library building, but once upon a time there was a street on the south side of the library – created when the library was built in 1905 – from which sprang a lively neighborhood in the first half of the 20th century. Before the library’s construction, though, the site was not any less lively, as it was the location of the Hopkins brothers’ works.

Elisha G. Hopkins was born in Whitestown, Oneida County, but came to Penn Yan as an adult and established his business along Main Street in 1828 on a parcel near the intersection with Chapel Street. The factory started out manufacturing cabinets and chairs and later produced grape baskets and then caskets for the Hopkins undertaking business.

Hopkins’ sons, Fletcher and Edward, succeeded their father at the helm of the business in 1868, just three years before Elisha died. At age 78, the elder Hopkins apparently died while working at the planing mill in 1871. In 1884, the brothers removed the old shop their father built and erected a new office and warehouse for the undertaking business, with the planing mill and lumber storage at the back of the shop.

Indeed, the 1886 Sanborn map of Penn Yan labels the parcel as the “Hopkins Bro’s Coffin Fac.” and depicts a frame building labeled “undertaker” on Main Street with a larger wooden building – labeled as containing woodworking on the first floor and storage on the second floor, with a stone addition – behind it. A frame dwelling adjacent to the undertaking building on the south side was the home of Elisha Hopkins’ widow until her death in 1894.

Edward Hopkins tore down the home in 1900 and replaced it with the current home, presently addressed as 210 Main Street. In 1903, the undertaking business was sold to the Corcoran brothers, and the planing mill was torn down. In 1904, the site of the undertaking building was chosen as the location for the public library – which steel magnate Andrew Carnegie had agreed to finance the year before – as the community banded together purchase the property and donate it for the library.

During the library’s construction, the undertaking building was moved to the rear of the property and renovated into a home that became addressed as 5 Hopkins Place. Two more homes were built behind the library to create a neighborhood on a street called Hopkins Place. The 1909 Sanborn map of Penn Yan shows the three homes behind the library but not the street; the 1922 Sanborn map appears to be the first to depict Hopkins Place.

All in a line behind the library, the homes were initially addressed as 1, 2, and 3 Hopkins Place, but later the addressed were changed to all odd numbers so the homes became 1, 3, and 5 Hopkins Place. All that remained of the Hopkins brothers’ property was a carpenter shop and a carriage house, but those were torn down in the 1930s to make room for a three-car garage at No. 5.

With the public library opened in 1905, the first newspaper reference to Hopkins Place as a village street comes from the Penn Yan Express of April 22, 1914 with a notice of a meeting of the Flower Committee of Penn Yan First Baptist Church at Mrs. Milton Rapalee’s home on Hopkins Place. The following year, the Loyalty Class of Penn Yan Presbyterian Church held its social and business meeting at Mrs. Clarence Messenger’s home on Hopkins Place. Another time, later in 1915, the Loyalty Class met at Mrs. William Snyder’s home, also on Hopkins Place; yet another time, in 1920, the Loyalty Class gathered on Hopkins Place at the home of Mrs. Titus.

Later on in the 1920s, Mrs. Lucy Price hosted a gathering of the Foreign Missionary Society of Penn Yan Methodist Episcopal Church at her home on Hopkins Place. Mrs. Price hosted several more meetings of the Foreign Missionary Society over the years, and meetings of the Dickens Club also took place in her home. The social and personal sections of the newspapers are sprinkled with references to the happenings on Hopkins Place – who was eating dinner with whom, who was going where on vacation, who was moving to and from the street, and other comings and goings of the people.

In a roundup of the village Christmas decorations in The Chronicle-Express of December 26, 1929, Hopkins Places was highlighted as “among the shorter thoroughfares which are gaily attired for the holidays.” The Dickens Club and the Foreign Missionary Society continued to meet at Mrs. Price’s house during the 1930s, and the Ladies Aid Society from the Methodist Episcopal Church met at Miss Ada Smith’s home on Hopkins Place in 1936.

In the 1940s, two sons from Hopkins Place went overseas for military service during World War II. In February 1940 – before America officially entered the war – 20-year-old Harold Jensen sailed to Hawaii aboard the USS Republic to be stationed at Hickam Field with the Army Air Corps. December 1940 found Fred Goundrey at Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina with the Army. Jensen was a witness to the Japanese attack on the Pearl Harbor naval base near Hickam Field. Meanwhile, Goundrey, 28 years old, was killed in action in France on July 17, 1944. 1959, another Hopkins Place resident and fellow service member, Barbara Hoose, joined the Women’s Army Corps.

In 1971, the Penn Yan Pubic Library purchased the homes behind its building in order to demolish them and install a parking lot. At that point, Hopkins Place changed from a residential street to an entryway to the library. In December 1974, the Penn Yan village board announced a public hearing set for the following month to consider discontinuing maintenance on Hopkins Place, which had never been officially dedicated to the village. The library board, however, asked the village to continue maintaining the street since village residents use it to access the library. In April 1975, the library conveyed a strip of its property to the village so the village could widen the street and maintain it.

According to The Chronicle-Express of February 1, 1989, the village board once again set a public hearing to consider discontinuing Hopkins Place, calling it “a village-owned street that is no longer in use” and in fact was blocked off by two adjoining property owners. The village board appears to have succeeded in discontinuing Hopkins Place this time around, as this is the last mention of Hopkins Place in the newspapers and Hopkins Place is no longer a village street nowadays. What once was a village street is now the driveway for the home next door to the library on its south side, where the Hopkins family once lived.

[beardedmrbean]

A far-left group has claimed responsibility for the suspected act of sabotage on a Tesla factory's power supply on Tuesday , with police now confirming their message is "authentic."

"We consider the letter to be genuine, authentic," said a spokeswoman for the Brandenburg state police on Wednesday, still referring to the incident as "deliberate arson" rather than explicitly calling it an attack.

The Tesla Gigafactory in Grünheide, near Berlin, was evacuated on Tuesday, and thousands of homes were left without electricity after a major power outage for which the "Vulkangruppe" (Volcano Group) has claimed responsibility.

How has Elon Musk reacted?

Tesla owner Elon Musk on Tuesday decried the group as "the dumbest eco-terrorists on Earth." However, the left-wing extremists say their motivation was "extreme conditions of exploitation" suffered by the workforce.

Musk also spoke to the economy minister for the state of Brandenburg, who described the US entrepreneur's reaction as "objective."

"Elon Musk was very objective and assured," Jörg Steinbach told Berlin's Tagesspiegel newspaper on Wednesday. "We immediately agreed that we must not react in such a way that would hand the assailants a success."

He said Musk had expressed "solidarity" in his reaction but had also demanded "concrete, trust-building measures to support the business and its employees."

Steinbach insisted that no further consequences are to be expected provided state government and police demonstrate an "adequate response." 

What has the German government said?

On Wednesday, the German government strongly condemned such attacks on key energy infrastructure, with vice-chancellor and economy minister Robert Habeck describing it as a crime that must be investigated.

"This is by any standards wrong and not acceptable in any way," he said, adding that while protest is a democratic right, political debates should not cross a line.

"I have the feel we're approaching a juncture and must not go in the wrong direction," he said.

What is the fallout for Tesla?

US electric car manufacturer Tesla said on Wednesday that the incident has caused several hundred million euros worth of damage.

"This means economic damage in the high nine-figure range for us," said plant manager Andre Thierig, saying that costs stem from the number of vehicles that cannot be produced during the power outage and, therefore, will not be sold.

The plant manager reckoned that more than 1,000 cars per day would be lost and assumed that production would be canceled for at least this week.

The Grünheide plant is Tesla's only manufacturing plant in Europe and is where the Model Y is produced. The cars sell for between €45,000 and €60,000 ($48,900 and $65,300).

The head of the Center of Automotive Management (CAM) in the western German town of Bergisch Gladbach expressed concerns on Wednesday that the incident risked damaging foreign investors' trust in Germany as a secure manufacturing site.

Stefan Bratzel said that there were other ways of disrupting production than just cutting off power, such as blocked delivery routes and cybersecurity. He called on the state to ensure that "criminal energies are contained."

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Eric Berger at The Guardian:

Political groups on the right and left are using fake news websites designed to look like reliable sources of information to fill the void left by the demise of local newspapers, raising fears of the impact that they might have during America’s bitterly fought 2024 election. Some media experts are concerned that the so-called pink slime websites, often funded domestically, could prove at least as harmful to political discourse and voters’ faith in media and democracy as foreign disinformation efforts in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. According to a recent report from NewsGuard, a company that aims to counter misinformation by studying and rating news websites, the websites are so prolific that: “The odds are now better than 50-50 that if you see a news website purporting to cover local news, it’s fake.” NewsGuard estimates that there are a staggering 1,265 such fake local news websites in the US – 4% more than the websites of 1,213 daily newspapers left operating in the country.

“Actors on both sides of the political spectrum” feel “that what they are doing isn’t bad because all media is really biased against their side or that that they know actors on the other side are using these tactics and so they feel they need to,” said Matt Skibinski, general manager of NewsGuard, which determined that such sites now outnumber legitimate local news organizations. “It’s definitely contributed to partisanship and the erosion of trust in media; it’s also a symptom of those things.” Pink slime websites, named after a meat byproduct, started at least as early as 2004 when Brian Timpone, a former television reporter who described himself as a “biased guy” and a Republican, started funding websites featuring names of cities, towns and regions like the Philly Leader and the South Alabama Times. Timpone’s company, Metric Media, now operates more than 1,000 such websites and his private equity company receives funding from conservative political action committees, according to NewsGuard.

[...]

The left has also created websites designed to look like legitimate news organizations but actually shaped by Democratic supporters. The liberal Courier Newsroom network operates websites in Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Michigan and Nevada, among other states, that like the conservative pink slime sites, have innocuous sounding names like the Copper Courier and Up North News. The Courier has runs stories like “Gov Ducey Is Now the Most Unpopular Governor in America,” referring to Doug Ducy, the former Republican Arizona governor. “In contrast, coverage of Democrats, including US President Joe Biden, Democratic Arizona Gov Katie Hobbs, and US Sen Mark Kelly of Arizona, is nearly always laudatory,” NewsGuard stated in a report about Courier coverage.

Democratic strategist Tara McGowan founded the Courier Newsroom and has received funding from liberal donors like Reid Hoffman and George Soros and groups associated with political action committees, according to NewsGuard. “There are pink slime operations on both the right and the left. To me, the key is disclosure and transparency about ownership,” said Franklin. While both the left and the right have invested in the pink slime websites, there are differences in the owners’ approaches, according to Skibinski. The right-wing networks have created more sites “that are probably getting less attention per site, and on the left, there is a smaller number of sites, but they are more strategic about getting attention to those sites on Facebook and elsewhere”, Skibinski said. “I don’t know that we can quantify whether one is more impactful than the other.”

[...] Republican lawmakers and leaders of the conservative news sites the Daily Wire and the Federalist have also filed a lawsuit and launched investigations accusing NewsGuard of helping the federal government censor right-leaning media. The defense department hired the company strictly to counter “disinformation efforts by Russian, Chinese and Iranian government-linked operations targeting Americans and our allies”, Gordon Crovitz, the former Wall Street Journal publisher who co-founded NewsGuard, told the Hill in response to a House oversight committee investigation. “We look forward to clarifying the misunderstanding by the committee about our work for the Defense Department.” To counter the flood of misinformation, social media companies must take a more active role in monitoring such content, according to Franklin and Skibinski.

A deluge of “pink slime” websites on both sides of the political spectrum, mostly on the right, that purport to look like real news sites are cropping up to shape political opinion.

[aintitfierce]

GET TO KNOW YOUR ADMIN !!

NAME -- masha

PRONOUNS -- she/her, but they/them or it/its could be nice. i won't kick up a fuss to he/him, either, but it does give me a brief pause

PREFERRED COMMS -- lies down probably IMs here, unfortunately. i have 'not getting out of this chair-itis' rip also my computer (not the laptop) is like 15 years old and dying a slow death so i can't open more than a single tab and maybe my pictures folder without everything slowing to the speed of molasses on a cold day

HOWEVER, i have gotten over myself a little bit and i do have an active discord now. so i've been thinking about moving some stuff there

NAME OF MUSE -- vanya, but he prefers pretty vanya or anything similarly Fawning. he has a noticeable, unexplained fondness for being referred to as the nondescript 'creature' as well

EXPERIENCE IN RP -- my first experience with RP was in the gaiaonline forums as a teenager lmAO. i used to scrounge around in the forums for any literary magical school-based RPs. then i kinda fell away from it once i left the site. i didn't pick it back up again until after i'd been on tumblr for a few months in 2013-2014 or so, stumbled into the kung fu panda fandom and made a friend who got me into RPing canon characters through skype ghfhiieo then i opened up an ask blog in june 2014 which very quickly morphed into just a RP blog instead and the rest is history

BEST EXPERIENCES -- back on gaia i joined a roleplay which was taking place in some school for people with super powers (i was in a lot of those as u might have guessed, they were my favorites lmao). me and one other person were the only ones awake and active at one point and it was just a rapid fire interaction between our muses for a couple pages, after which we laughed at The Shenanigans bc we were pretty sure our two characters had just become the comic relief of the entire thread and wondered how the other players were going to react when they inevitably came back

honestly i just remember it being a ton of fun. that style of RP is so incredibly foreign to me now, but nostalgic

PET PEEVES / DEALBREAKERS -- i had to take a long time to think about this, and i think the number one thing that gets to me is infomodding. i very much prefer having a running tally of what our muses each know about each other and more importantly what they Don't. i wrote with someone once who would occasionally consider what they knew about my muse to be fair game for their muse to know as well, without any reasoning for how they'd know this information or when they found it out

additionally, the only other thing i can think of that does get to me pretty badly is related to pacing. like i mention below, i like interactions that feel relatively real and natural, and sometimes that means letting the conversation unfold on its own and allowing awkward silences and lulls to play out to their conclusions. it drives me a little crazy when i'm just getting comfortable in a conversational thread but my writing partner is instead evidently feeling Bored with the small talk, so they inject some drama or some other bombshell to Liven It Up and get the action rolling orz usually has killed the thread for me in the past

MUSE PREFERENCE ( FLUFF, ANGST, SMUT ) -- out of these three probably angst, but i rarely RP it bc i don't feel that i'm very good at it. also idk how Seriously people could pretty vanya angst lmao

i've done so little actual RPing with him (my own fault, tbh) that i don't really know what my preference is with him yet. him being captured by big jack bc there were rumors about him being Powerful And Rare has probably been one of my favorite interactions so far. i admittedly do enjoy writing more antagonistic interactions more than i do friendlier ones

PLOT OR MEMES -- my Natural State is that of a pantser, to be completely honest, but there's a special place in my heart for plotted threads. i do enjoy laying out the basics and then letting it go with a check-in every now and again when one of us is running out juice or Unsure about anything

LONG OR SHORT REPLIES -- either or. i'm no good at one-liners, and i struggle with novella length (condensing my partner's response into something i can reply to while being careful to keep the story Moving takes a lot of brainpower for me). i do however love replies and threads and partners, perhaps, who are okay with letting some parts of the conversation Drop and potentially come back into play later. i like that sense of continuity, where it feels like a real or natural interaction two people might have with lulls in the conversation and callbacks

BEST TIME TO WRITE -- at this point i have no clue wheezes

ARE YOU LIKE YOUR MUSE? -- lord i hope not lmao

[cogitoergofun]

Many years ago, when I first started covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I got to know a gifted Palestinian journalist who, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment, I’ll refer to only by his first name, Said.

As with many other Palestinian journalists, Said’s primary source of income was working with foreign reporters as a “fixer,” someone who could arrange difficult meetings, translate from Arabic, show you around. Said had an independent streak and he was no fan of Yasir Arafat, which made him particularly helpful in cutting through the Palestinian Authority’s propagandistic bombast.

With Said, I interviewed senior Hamas leaders in Gaza, officials in Ramallah, retired terrorists in Nablus, political dissidents in Jenin and construction workers in Hebron. We developed a friendship. Then, shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, he called me in a panic because something I had written in The Wall Street Journal had met with the displeasure of officials in the Palestinian Authority. The goon squad, he said, had paid his family an admonitory visit in their apartment, and he wanted me to take the story down. That was out of the question, I told him. It was never safe for us to work together again.

I mention this anecdote in the wake of last week’s sensational story that an Israeli airstrike had killed some 500 people at a Gaza hospital — a story variously attributed to “Palestinian officials,” “the Gazan health ministry” and “health authorities in the besieged enclave.” The story sparked violent protests throughout the Middle East.

It has since become clear that nearly every element of that story is, to put it gently, highly dubious.

A missile did not hit the hospital but rather the parking lot next to it. Abundant evidence, confirmed by U.S. intelligence and independent analyses, indicates that the explosion was caused by a missile fired from Gaza, which was intended to kill Israelis but malfunctioned and fell to earth. There is no solid reason to believe the death toll reached anywhere near 500. And the “Gazan health ministry” is not some sort of apolitical body but a Hamas-owned entity, towing and promoting whatever the terrorist organization demands.

I’ll leave the media criticism to others. But Western audiences will never grasp the nature of the current conflict until they internalize one central fact. In Israel, as in every other democracy, political and military officials sometimes lie — but journalists hold them to account, tell the stories they want to tell, and don’t live in fear of midnight knocks on the door.

The Palestinian territories, by contrast, are republics of fear — fear of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and of Hamas in Gaza. Palestinians are neither more nor less honest than people elsewhere. But, as in any tyrannical or fanatical regime, those who stray from the approved line put themselves at serious risk.

This is a truth that only rarely slips out — but when it does, it’s revealing.

During the first major Israel-Hamas war, in 2008 and 2009, Palestinian groups claimed the death toll was mostly civilian, with roughly 1,400 people killed. But a Palestinian doctor working in Gaza’s Shifa hospital told a different story. “The number of deceased stands at no more than 500 to 600,” he said. “Most of them are youths between the ages of 17 to 23 who were recruited to the ranks of Hamas, who sent them to the slaughter,” he said. Tellingly, according to the Israeli news site YNet, “the doctor wished to remain unidentified, out of fear for his life.”

Or take the case of Hani al-Agha, a Palestinian journalist who was jailed for weeks and tortured by Hamas in 2019. In that case, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate took the extraordinary step of condemning al-Agha’s arrest and torture as “an attempt to intimidate journalists in Gaza Strip, who are subject to repressive police authority.” Yet, outside of a few news releases, the story received almost no coverage in the wider media.

Human rights organizations occasionally take a break from their incessant criticism of Israel to pay attention to this kind of atrocious repression. But only rarely do Western audiences understand the full extent to which information emerging from Gaza is suspect — at least until it has been extensively and independently corroborated by journalists who aren’t living in fear of Hamas, and don’t need to protect someone who is. Readers who wouldn’t normally be inclined to believe man-in-the-street interviews in, say, Pyongyang, or regime pronouncements coming out of the Kremlin, should be equally skeptical about the phrase “Palestinian officials say.”

The news media still needs fixers and freelancers to tell the full story in war zones. But people consuming that media should know the threats, pressures and cultures that these journalists operate in — not because we necessarily distrust them individually, but because we appreciate the dangerous circumstances in which they find themselves.

The next time there’s a story about an alleged Israeli atrocity in Gaza, readers deserve to know how the information was acquired and from whom. It’s bad enough that Hamas tyrannizes Palestinians and terrorizes Israelis. We don’t need it misinforming the rest of us.