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newstfionline · 3 years

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Friday, June 4, 2021

America’s Biggest Companies (Fortune) Fortune magazine released its annual ranking of America’s largest companies, with Walmart topping the list for the ninth straight year. Boosted by the pandemic-driven consumer shift to online and bulk purchasing, the retail behemoth brought in nearly $560B in revenue. The company was followed by Amazon ($386B in revenue), Apple ($275B), CVS Health ($269B), and UnitedHealth Group ($257B). The combined list generated almost $14T in revenue last year—about two-thirds of the US economy.

Drought ravages California’s reservoirs ahead of hot summer (AP) Each year Lake Oroville helps water a quarter of the nation’s crops, sustain endangered salmon beneath its massive earthen dam and anchor the tourism economy of a Northern California county that must rebuild seemingly every year after unrelenting wildfires. But now the mighty lake—a linchpin in a system of aqueducts and reservoirs in the arid U.S. West that makes California possible—is shrinking with surprising speed amid a severe drought, with state officials predicting it will reach a record low later this summer. While droughts are common in California, this year’s is much hotter and drier than others, evaporating water more quickly from the reservoirs and the sparse Sierra Nevada snowpack that feeds them. The state’s more than 1,500 reservoirs are 50% lower than they should be this time of year, according to Jay Lund, co-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California-Davis. If Lake Oroville falls below 640 feet (195 meters)—which it could do by late August—state officials would shut down a major power plant for just the second time ever because of low water levels, straining the electrical grid during the peak demand of the hottest part of the summer.

Miami Faces the Hard Choices of Climate Change (NYT) Three years ago, not long after Hurricane Irma left parts of Miami underwater, the federal government embarked on a study to find a way to protect the vulnerable South Florida coast from deadly and destructive storm surge. Already, no one likes the answer. Build a wall, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed in its first draft of the study, now under review. Six miles of it, in fact, mostly inland, running parallel to the coast through neighborhoods—except for a one-mile stretch right on Biscayne Bay, past the gleaming sky-rises of Brickell, the city’s financial district. The dramatic $6 billion proposal remains tentative and at least five years off. But the startling suggestion of a massive sea wall up to 20 feet high cutting across beautiful Biscayne Bay was enough to jolt some Miamians to attention: The hard choices that will be necessary to deal with the city’s many environmental challenges are here, and few people want to face them. The trouble is that the magnitude of the interconnected obstacles the region faces can feel overwhelming, and none of the possible solutions are cheap, easy or pretty.

A deadly vote (Washington Post) TAXCO, Mexico—Mario Figueroa sat in his armored SUV, surrounded by bodyguards clutching semiautomatic rifles. The bulletproof vest was stashed behind the back seat. These days, Figueroa rarely travels without his security team. As a candidate for mayor of this Spanish colonial city—once popular with American tourists, now lashed by drug violence—the 53-year-old businessman has already taken a bullet in the chest. Mexico is in the final days of one of its most violent electoral campaigns in modern times. Eighty-nine politicians have been killed since September, according to the security consulting firm Etellekt. Scores more have been wounded or threatened. The campaign has become a stark illustration of crime organizations’ quest to expand their control of Mexico’s territory. The violence has focused largely on races for mayor and other local government posts. “They want control of the police, control of public works projects, the budget, and illicit activities,” said Marcial Rodríguez Saldaña, the state leader of Morena, the party of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “We’ve reached an extreme,” Figueroa said.

US troops storm sunflower oil factory in Bulgaria (Foreign Policy) The owner of a sunflower oil factory in Bulgaria has taken legal action after U.S. soldiers accidentally stormed his business during a NATO training exercise. The mix-up occurred while soldiers were simulating the clearing of an airfield in southern Bulgaria, and continued on to Marin Dimitrov’s factory, where workers watched on as gun-wielding soldiers stalked through the premises. The incident has led to a rebuke from the highest levels with Bulgarian President Rumen Radev calling it “absolutely unacceptable.” “We always learn from these exercises and are fully investigating the cause of this mistake,” the U.S. embassy in Sofia said in a statement.

Beijing Introduces Three-Child Policy (Foreign Policy) On Monday, China announced that married couples would be allowed to have up to three children, raising the official two-child limit in a widely anticipated move. Despite government hopes, the introduction of the two-child policy in 2016 failed to produce a baby boom. It’s unlikely the latest policy change will affect China’s fertility rate, either. The public has responded with mocking contempt toward the idea that government restraints have held parents back from having more children, rather than the exorbitant costs of child rearing in China—from migrant families forced to pay fees for local public schools to upper-class parents who fear their children will fall behind without flute or calligraphy lessons. So why keep a limit on the number of children a couple can have at all? One reason is to provide cover for the ongoing forced sterilization of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang, whose birthrate fell by nearly 50 percent between 2017 and 2020. Another is that China now has an enormous family planning bureaucracy that supports many jobs. Party leaders may also be concerned that the rich flaunting large families—such as late Macao casino tycoon Stanley Ho, known for his four wives and 17 children—would spark resentment.

Lebanese leaders exchange barbs as country sinks into crisis (AP) Lebanon’s president and prime minister-designate traded barbs Wednesday, accusing one another of obstruction, negligence and insolence in a war or words that has for months obstructed the formation of a new government as the country sinks deeper into economic and financial crisis. The power struggle between the premier-designate, Saad Hariri, on one side and President Michel Aoun and his son-in-law Gebran Bassil on the other, has worsened despite warnings from world leaders and economic experts of the dire economic conditions tiny Lebanon is facing. The World Bank on Tuesday said Lebanon’s crisis is one of the worst the world has seen in the past 150 years. In a late night burst of anger, protesters blocked main roads in Beirut and north of the capital. A young activist told a local TV station the protest was against the constant humiliation of Lebanese who line up to fill their cars with fuel, increasing power cuts, search for medicine and deal with confused banking decisions that are robbing thousands of their savings. The Lebanese pound, pegged to the dollar for 30 years at 1,507, has been in a free fall since late 2019. It is now trading at nearly 13,000 to the dollar at the black market.

Netanyahu opponents reach coalition deal to oust Israeli PM (AP) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s opponents announced Wednesday that they have reached a deal to form a new governing coalition, paving the way for the ouster of the longtime Israeli leader. The dramatic announcement by opposition leader Yair Lapid and his main coalition partner, Naftali Bennett, came shortly before a midnight deadline and prevented what could have been Israel’s fifth consecutive election in just over two years. The agreement still needs to be approved by the Knesset, or parliament, in a vote that is expected to take place early next week. If it goes through, Lapid and a diverse array of partners that span the Israeli political spectrum will end Netanyahu’s record-setting but divisive 12-year rule. Netanyahu, desperate to remain in office while he fights corruption charges, is expected to do everything possible in the coming days to prevent the new coalition from taking power. If he fails, he will be pushed into the opposition. (Foreign Policy) While a new government is not yet set in stone, normal business carries on: Benny Gantz arrives in Washington today to request $1 billion in emergency military aid in order to replenish Israel’s Iron Dome defenses and help restock its bomb supply following the bombardment of Gaza. “I would imagine that the administration would say yes to this request and it will sail through Congress,” Senator Lindsey Graham said on Tuesday.

In Syria camp, forgotten children are molded by IS ideology (AP) At the sprawling al-Hol camp in northeast Syria, children pass their days roaming the dirt roads, playing with mock swords and black banners in imitation of Islamic State group militants. Few can read or write. For some, the only education is from mothers giving them IS propaganda. It has been more than two years since the Islamic State group’s self-declared “caliphate” was brought down. And it has been more than two years that some 27,000 children have been left to languish in al-Hol camp, which houses families of IS members. Most of them not yet teenagers, they are spending their childhood in a limbo of miserable conditions with no schools, no place to play or develop, and seemingly no international interest in resolving their situation. Only one institution is left to mold them: remnants of the Islamic State group. Kurdish authorities and aid groups fear the camp will create a new generation of militants. They are pleading with home countries to take the women and children back. The problem is that home governments often see the children as posing a danger rather than as needing rescue.

‘Come On In, Boys’: A Wave of the Hand Sets Off Spain-Morocco Migrant Fight (NYT) Daouda Faye, a 25-year-old migrant from Senegal, was elated when he heard that Moroccan border guards had suddenly started waving in undocumented migrants across the border to Ceuta, a fenced-off Spanish enclave on the North African coast. “‘Come on in, boys,’” the guards told him and others as they reached the border on May 17, Mr. Faye said. Normally, Morocco tightly controls the fenced borders around Ceuta, a six-mile-long peninsula on Morocco’s northern coast that Spain has governed since the 1600s. But now its military was allowing migrants into this toehold of Europe. Over the next two days, as many as 12,000 people flowed over the border to Ceuta in hopes of reaching mainland Spain, engulfing the city of 80,000. The crisis has laid bare the unique pressure point Morocco has over Spain on migration. Spanish government officials and other experts say Morocco increasingly sees the migrants as a kind of currency and is leveraging its control over them to extract financial and political prizes from Spain. Hours after the migrants began pouring into Ceuta, Spain approved 30 million euros, about $37 million, in aid to Morocco for border policing.

A Military Drone With A Mind Of Its Own Was Used In Combat, U.N. Says (NPR) Military-grade autonomous drones can fly themselves to a specific location, pick their own targets and kill without the assistance of a remote human operator. Such weapons are known to be in development, but until recently there were no reported cases of autonomous drones killing fighters on the battlefield. Now, a United Nations report about a March 2020 skirmish in the military conflict in Libya says such a drone, known as a lethal autonomous weapons system—or LAWS—has made its wartime debut. But the report does not say explicitly that the LAWS killed anyone. The assault came during fighting between the U.N.-recognized Government of National Accord and forces aligned with Gen. Khalifa Haftar, according to the report by the U.N. Panel of Experts on Libya. “Logistics convoys and retreating [Haftar-affiliated forces] were subsequently hunted down and remotely engaged by the unmanned combat aerial vehicles or the lethal autonomous weapons systems such as the STM Kargu-2 ... and other loitering munitions,” the panel wrote. The Kargu-2 is an attack drone made by the Turkish company STM that can be operated both autonomously and manually and that purports to use “machine learning” and “real-time image processing” against its targets.

#headlines #news

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rametarin · 3 years

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The Fuddsucker.

I thought in my head about how to make the most milquetoast, most emasculated, most pointless firearm that the ATF would allow after whittling away every other freedom and liberty about firearm ownership. The sort of firearm that the ATF and anti-gun people would allow to exist, just as a honeypot to torture gun owners into not seeing legal gun ownership and possession as worth their trouble. Here’s what that would look like.

To start, the Fuddsucker is a handgun. Why a handgun? Because the Powers that Be that are the ATF and the masters they answer to clearly don’t mind handguns. Handguns can be used by the criminal element for small time burglary as well as mafioso work, and they cannot be used to threaten rich and powerful people from a reasonably long distance. That lack of assassination range is crucial. The ATF does not care as much about handguns, clearly, as we see in any state or city where the majority of gun crime comes from narco gangs using revolvers and pistols.

So, the gun would be a handgun. How long the barrel? Too short to be effectively accurate at any respectable range and too long to be a snub nosed for very close melee stuff. So, standard regulation orthodoxy milquetoast size.

And what would the body be made of?

Cheap steel. Designed both for easy detection by law enforcement and feds using state-of-the-art metal detectors if they need to find it, as well as to force the person to clean it often. If it’s not cared for and well maintained, the firearm owner is considered negligent and unfit for firearms ownership, and the property seized.

And what sort of bullet would it fire?

Why, a special, proprietary bullet, of course. This bullet would be a composite type material, because it’d be better for the planet than lead. It’d also be very light. Lighter than copper or bronze, and unable to be melted down to be re-used upon impact. Because can’t have metals that could be used to smelt bullets, can you? No that’d be against the law. So the bullets have to be one-shot and then lost forever unless you have a machine capable of manufacturing more of them.

This bullet would be of a caliber that was too small to do more than wound a person. We’re talking, ‘Makes the .22 look roided up by comparison’. Like the Kolibri’s ammo. Maybe it’d embed in their skin and possibly get infected and gangrenous, but the infection would be more dangerous than the penetration. You MIGHT be able to shoot a rat with it, but then you might get busted for your mental health. The bullets would come individually in tiny boxes like Funko Pops, each with their own serial number and little inaudibly chirping signature that the gun can read. The bullets’ proprietary nature allows them to assign them to a person based on an account they have with the company- which is one proxy removed from the ATF having a national gun registry- and so they can see both how many bullets you’ve bought in the past, how many bullets you currently have on you, how many bullets you’ve personally fired and how many were fired from that gun specifically. And they can limit how many bullets you’re ultimately allowed to own before raising the flags and deciding someone needs to go to your house and collect the, “excess.” You know, so you don’t get any funny ideas about hoarding ammunition for any reason.

The gun itself would not be analog and mechanical, it’d be electronic. The computer IS the firing mechanism. No computer, no functional firing mechanism. The Fuddsucker is built to monitor itself and the integrity of its systems. If it falsely or correctly senses it has been disconnected, it peeps wirelessly to home. If Home loses connection with your Fuddsucker, they phone call you to let you know, “the gun isn’t able to chirp at us to let us know it’s fully intact and healthy. You need to assess that and get it functional within 92 hours, or we’re sending someone to confiscate it. And if we can’t, you’ll be imprisoned for criminal negligence for allowing your gun to be stolen.”

The Computerized Fuddsucker would have tiny diode cameras that take pictures of whatever you’ve fired it at at the second of fire to upload them to the home site of the Fuddsucker company, for legal posterity. The gun snitches on its own GPS location, right down to the millimeter, and the vector or angle the barrel is pointed at, every single second and the exact time it fires.

The gun also will only allow you to chamber a single bullet at a time and deliberately makes the reloading process as tedious as possible while still pretending to be practical about it. So you get one singular round, and the chamber has small glowing OLEDs that light up to display when there’s a bullet in the chamber. A pressure sensor on the trigger makes these OLEDs turn red and glowing and make a tiny, consistent whining noise when your finger is on the trigger. You know, so it’s impossible for you to use the gun silently and stealthily at all.

Returning to the bullets; each bullet has to be purchased individually for a premium, and its own case serves as a gun case. To free each bullet from its case, you have to phone the company and get it authorized to use each bullet individually. Where they would write down your consent and request to utilize each individual bullet by its unique identity and signature.

The gun itself keeps a biometric lock record of all the people that have touched or held the gun, whether it was loaded or not, for evidence purposes. And you have to be holding the gun when requesting authorization for the company to allow the bullet mini-safe to open. If you break the case and remove the bullet from it without this compliance, you will be considered in violation of federal law and that will be taken as intent to commit an unlawful act.

The bullets themselves store in their own separate ammunition safe, proprietary to the company. Only bullets of that particular company are allowed to be stored inside of the compnay ammunition safe; cameras inside must be accessible to the company at any time with a live webcam feed, with a weight sensor. Any boxes of ammo discovered that are not that caliber or round and it will be considered a misdemeanor and mishandling of the gun. The ammunition safe is also biometric as well as password protected, and access is permitted only by phoning the company meanwhile for facetime.

Similarly, the gun itself has to be accessed this way, and the gun safe has to be kept in another part of your home. If your home is too small for regulatory gun safety, that’s too bad. You couldn’t have it in an apartment building, because you wouldn’t have enough distance between them. Tough shit, peasant.

In order to acquire your Fuddsucker gun, you’d need firearm insurance and to sign a waiver to all “unnecessary searches and seizures.” Just possessing the Fuddsucker means that absolutely no forms of monitoring or tapping or eavesdropping on your transmissions, conversations or contacts is considered a violation of your civil rights, because it’s in the interests of making sure you don’t go ham with your big scary gun. The Firearm Insurance industry is very pricey, and medal prices go up to handle firearm injuries or fatalities, forcing firearms owners to pay out the ass in order to legally possess and take part in firearms culture. And if you won’t play the game this way? No right to participate for you. And anyone that misuses the Fuddsucker brand firearm opens the Fuddsucker company up to being sued out of commission as liable for every injury sustained to any person shot with them.

As the Fuddsucker also records every angle and direction and GPS location and time every shot is fired, every bullet is a snitch, every bullet is individually registered and chirps its status and location every second to headquarters, it will know exactly what surface it hit, where the bullets went, where they were fired from and whom fired them. They will always know exactly what inanimate objects were damaged or destroyed, and the shooter as well as the insurance company will both have to pay an absolute premium for the destruction of both private and public property, as well as face heavy fines for negligent discharge of a firearm and willful destruction of property, possibly resulting in seizure of property, jail time and a permanent criminal record.

In addition to all this, a middleman for the Fuddsucker company will show up at your house unnanounced for the random inspection in person to make sure all your guns and all bullets registered to you are still there, the safes are intact, your papers are all together, you don’t have any hint of domestic problems- from the main or extended family, and to make sure you don’t have signs of ownership of any analog firearm, or “hostile or harmful paraphanelia,” like bump stocks, suppressors or scary over or under barrel attachments for lights or laser scopes, like some sort of Hollywood spy or assassin!

In order to acquire your Fuddsucker brand firearm, you have to go through an expensive gun training course that “deprograms” and “decolonizes” you of your “whiteness.” Said history course will go over how your, “whiteness” is evil, behind all atrocities on planet earth, the warming of the planet, the marginalization of minorities, the deprivation of non-white communities across the globe, and these aspects of gun ownership WILL be on the test. If you are not white, you’ll automatically score higher on all written portions and fewer points will be deducted for spelling errors or grammar mistakes, because, “That is English spoken by your culture! It’s not wrong!” Accepting that you are an oppressor just by sitting at a table with another human being of a different skin color, or that a white man is your oppressor for doing such, will be as important a lesson in gun handling and safety, as trigger discipline. And if you answer wrong or dissent to answering that way, you fail the course and cannot be trusted with a firearm, as well as getting flagged for potential criminal or hate crime activities. You will be time gated from applying to the course again for a minimum of a year, to incentivize getting it right the first time. And while you’re there it might also improve your odds to donate cash or property to BLM, or any of another dozen groups.

The gun would also feature faux-wood paneling, like a cross between an electronic cigarette and a 1970s station wagon. Because only evil terrorist white supremacist gun nuts use metallic finishes on “AR style” firearms. Nice happy farmer firearms have wood grain texture. But, this wood pattern is merely aesthetic. Underneath the thin veneer are sensors that measure pressure. If it senses you’re addding after-market stocks or accessories, it squeals to home. The gun safe itself that constantly monitors the presence of your Fuddsucker’s state will be alerted, and if the undesired pressure on the skin exists too long, a representative will tele-conference with you and demand to see the gun to make sure you aren’t applying something like a bump stock, or an illegal stock to it. If you do not comply, they’ll send law enforcement to seize the gun. If the machinery is malfunctioning, they’ll send a technician to take your gun from you for refurbishing. Expect to lose access to your firearm for 4-6 weeks, and forever if they determine (correctly or incorrectly) that the cause of the damage was willful negligence or malfeasance.

You will also pay, over the course of your life, for the cost of the gun transferring back to the company (government.) Your next of kin will not inherit your firearms, but the family gets a 100 day window to proactively pursue taking up your legal firearm. If they have the property, papers, are deemed mentally fit, are willing to start paying the insurances, all of that themselves, sign the papers, then they can inherit your gun. The gun’s history will be updated for the new owner as if they bought it fresh from the company, and they’ll have to pay the cost for every bullet in the gun safe as well as for the gun safes as if they were new to transfer legal ownership to them, regardless of their condition or any improvements to the makes or models over the last 5-50 years of the product’s existence.

And after all of this, you’ll still have anti-gun people asking, “What do you need a gun for? Really? What are you going to do with that? Stop a tyrannical government? They have full auto and nuclear bombs and fighter jets. You have a Fuddsucker, Farmer Jimbob. :^) What are you going to do with that?”

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asterinjapan · 7 years

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Nikko revisited

Ah, Nikko, you’re not making it easy for me to love you.

I’m talking about the city by the way, haha. I visited it for the first time back in 2015, but the day was overshadowed by hordes of Chinese tourists and really bad weather.

Today, my day was already off to a not-so-good start, since I had a very short night and not in any fun way. At 2 AM, was literally shaken awake – it took me a couple of minutes to wake up enough to realize this had to be an earthquake. Logically, I know I should expect these in Japan, but it still took me by surprise and I was a little scared to go back to sleep. Luckily, the Japanese are used to it and are very quick to update their news websites, so it was soon obvious that this was nothing to worry about. Still, the ground trembled a couple of times more in the morning, and it took me some hours to get rid of the shaky feeling (no pun intended).

Since I was so tired and still a bit shaken, I went to the train station too early out of nerves and accidentally took a wrong train. Well, it was a local train for Omiya station, but I wasn’t sure if that would take me there in time to catch my transfer to the bullet train. Luckily I passed a station that was also on the list for the rapid service, so no harm done, just an extra transfer.

The bullet train predictably went fast: from Utsunomiya, I took the JR Nikko line for uh, Nikko, and just sat back and relaxed, since that was the last stop too.

The JR station Nikko leads to an information center, and you can also buy a ticket for the buses at the station. The day pass is shaped like an amulet and pays off really quickly, so I got one of those and hopped on the bus.

I first wanted to visit the famous bridge here, but I was on the wrong bus for that, so I first went to Rinnoji temple. At this point, it had started to rain, just a drizzle but enough to warrant an umbrella. Spoilers: despite the weather forecasts, this did not change the entire day.

Rinnoji is the most important temple in Nikko, a mountain town that has been the center of worship in both Buddhism and shintoism, long before the Toshogu was built (we’ll get to that one later). Sadly however, it is also under covers for years, since they’re working on major renovations here. However, it is entirely possible to enter, and see the gold-lacquered statues of worship, and even go up to see how the renovations are coming along.

Before I did that, I found the treasure house with a Japanese garden across the road, so I first got a ticket for that. The exhibition in the treasure house was very interesting and mostly focused on the Tokugawa shoguns (who ruled during the Edo period, 1600-1868) and Buddhism as practiced here in Nikko. The garden was lovely, although I’m sure it would be even loverlier in any other season than summer, especially without rain, haha. I must say though, because we’re in the mountains, the slight rain meant that there was a light fog hanging around the trees everwhere, which gives most of my photos a nice mysterious look. That is however an effect I woudln’t have minded added later on….

Anyway, enough whining! I went into Rinnoji as mentioned, something I neglected to do last time I was here due to aforementioned renovations. I’m glad I went in after all, though, since there was a lot to see and it’s also interesting to see how detailed these renovations are. They’re really going back to the bare bones of the building to restore it, wow. It should be done in 2019.

Thankfully in this weather, most of the major spots in Nikko are a stone’s throw removed from each other. My next stop was the nearby Toshogu shrine. This is the final resting place of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the first one of those Tokugawa dudes and coincidentally the one who completed the unification of Japan and brought a long period of relative peace, after a period of warring states within what we now know as Japan. So yeah, he’s a big deal, and so is this shrine. The entrance fee is high (1300 yen!), but I must say the complex is pretty big, so you can easily wander around here for an hour or two.

A couple of things stand out here: first, this complex is also undergoing renovations, but since March this year, the incredibly intricately decorated gate Yomeimon has been unveiled again, so I was excited to see it now after having witnessed it all wrapped up last time.

There’s also a pagoda here, which is as high as the Tokyo Sky Tree! … Except they count from sea level up, and we’re on a mountain, so this pagoda isn’t exactly 634 metres high, pff. Still pretty as it looms behind the trees.

This complex became so huge thanks to Ieyasu’s grandson, Iemitsu, who really wanted to honor him and didn’t want his own mausoleum to outshadow that of Ieyasu. Hm. Anyway, this is one place where you see elements of both Buddhism and shintoism: both were intermingled throughout much of Japan’s history until the Meiji-revolution (1868), when they were forced to be separated. They couldn’t do that here, since they’re so woven together, so it’s an interesting mix here.

Finally, there’s a couple of interesting carvings in the various buildings here. First, we have the ‘see/hear/speak no evil’ monkeys, which seem to have had a fresh dye job, because I don’t remember the colours being so vivid last time. There’s also the ‘elephants by this dude who had never seen an elephant in his life before’, which worked out about as well as you think. And there’s the sleeping cat, guarding the stairway that lead you up to the actual mausoleum. This is actually my favourite part of this complex, and here is where I didn’t mind the weather all that much: the fog between the high trees and the relatively humble mausoleum gave this really serene atmosphere.

Last but not least, there’s also the hall of the Crying (or Roaring) dragon. There’s a ceiling painting here of, you guessed it, a dragon, but something interesting happens here: if you clap two pieces of wood together, there’s no echo anywhere – except when you do so right under the dragon’s head. So it almost seems as if the dragon is indeed roaring, although the echoing sound doesn’t quite fit my definition of ‘roaring’, but ssh.

My lunch for today was these delicious mochi (rice cake balls with sweet red bean paste filling) with a pinch of salt that were sold here outside of the Toshogu, and to my joy, they were still sold this year too! Not a very responsible lunch, but ssh.

Nearby, there was the Taiyuinbyo, another mausoleum. This one is for Tokugawa Iemitsu, Ieyasu’s grandson, who as I mentioned didn’t want to outdo his grandfather due to his deep respect for him. Nevertheless, this complex is very detailed too and probably shimmers very lovely in the sun with its golden details, but I guess I’ll never know, since it’s always rainy when I go here, haha.

Even closer is the Futarasan shrine, founded by the monk Shodo Shonin, who also founded Rinnoji temple when he brought Buddhism here to Nikko. This shrine is dedicated to the deities of the three most sacred mountains of Nikko, hence the -san in its name (which is one reading for the character for mountain). There’s a small paid area here, which has a couple of more buildings and interesting spots like a wooden heart, where you can put your own little heart with a wish (I mean a little wooden heart, not your actual heart). There’s also a cafe here, but it was sadly already closed for today.

Finally, part of the Futarasan is the bridge I wanted to visit at the start, but it’s quite a distance from the shrine, and I really didn’t want to walk through the rain anymore. I hopped on the bus and left it up to chance: if it would stop at the bridge, I would get off.

And well, it did, haha. I got off and made my way to the Shinkyo bridge, one of Japan’s three finest bridges (yep, they have a top three). To be fair, it is really lovely, the red standing out against the green forests and the blue water (which was rather stormy underneath today). I really should have started with it today since it’s the gateway to the World Heritage sites (the aforementioned shrines and temples I already visited), but whatever, it’s nice to end with too. According to legend, the monk Shodo needed to get over the river, so he prayed and a god appeared with two snakes, who wove together to form a bridge. There was actually an event going on related to that, so you could leave your wishes near the bridge. Naturally, you have to pay for that (Nikko is not a cheap day out), so I opted out. You can, however, also pay to cross the bridge! This is A Big Deal, since the current bridge has looked like this since 1636 (though has been rebuilt since), when only messengers of the imperial court were allowed to use it.

I only got a quick photo of the bridge last time, from the bus, so I took my time taking actually decent pictures this time before walking back over the bridge. I actually really liked this, even though you can easily see the entire bridge within 5 minutes. It’s definitely very pretty though.

I did some minor souvenir shopping and then took the bus back to the train station, where it was a half hour wait for the next Nikko line to bring me back to Utsunomiya.

Well, I’ve been back in my room for a while now, but gosh, I’m tired. I hope the ground will stay quiet tonight so I can catch up on sleep.

Not sure about my plans for tomorrow yet; it’s too much to do another long trip now, so I might just stay in Tokyo or go to Kamakura or something. Although to be honest, just sticking to Tokyo for now and maybe do some shopping or karaoke sounds pretty good right now, haha. It’s a bit of a waste of my JR pass, so I’ll see if I can visit a garden or something, but if the weather’s bad… yeah, shopping, probably, haha.

See you tomorrow!

#japan 2017 #report #report: japan 2017 #places: nikko

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burntfingers · 7 years

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My Talk With God, and How He’s a Space Nazi

I promise, crossed my heart, that this story actually happened. I also need to remind you that I never promised that ANY of this will make sense. I’m gonna have to do this in bullet points.

My second cousin was dating this guy, Brad. At the time I became aware of Brad, it was nearing Christmas time. So I was invited up to Brad’s house to hang out with him and my cousin, who I hadn’t seen in almost 10 years. I went up to Maryland to the house, and right away, I noticed a problem. The house was so damn out of the way that if you wanted its location you had to do geocoordinates. But I arrived safe and sound. My cousin was not coming until the next day, so I got to talk to Brad a bit. Here’s what I found out:

- He was super fucking racist. I gotta get that one out of the way. He legitimately thought that anyone not white (or “Germanic” as he insisted any white person was) was on a lower tier of the evolutionary scale. Lowest on the scale were black people. He refused to refer to other races by anything other than pejorative terms. This pretty much was the foundation of his entire character.

- He thought he was god. Not like, the monotheistic god-with-a-capital-g, but more that he thought he was descended from Odin. (He insisted it was spelled “Oden”) so he of course insisted that his demigod status have him a higher plane of existence than everyone else on earth, and that it allowed him to pass through time warps and allowed him to see Vikings in visions. He also believed that this made him the best guitarist on earth, but that’s another section of the story.

- He was somewhat obsessed with Vikings, in case you didn’t already get that. He paid a lot of money to have runes tattooed into his arms, but they were so poorly done that they looked like they were done with green sharpie. He also worshipped Odin, but did so in a bizarre way. Whereas most people who make burnt offerings (I’ve gotta go off of various books, I don’t know anyone else who does…besides my dad when he grills) will insist on buying a live animal, slaughtering it, and ritually preparing it. Our friend here would just have his mom buy him a butterball turkey, and he’d go out and burn it on an altar. Also he’d talk about how amazing his religion (Asatru) was, due mostly to the fact that, in his understanding, it encouraged wanton destruction of lesser races, subjugation of women, and a lack of personal responsibility. REAL charmer right there. He also would parade about the house in a cheap Viking costume, and whenever he passed a mirror, he’d flip his shoulder-length hair and scowl into it, as if he were trying to intimidate his reflection. He also had his parents buy him a meter-long sword. Yes it was real. Yes it was sharp. And yes, he thought it was the greatest thing ever. He would often tout it as the “Greatest home defense weapon ever,” to which I’d reply “Yes but wouldn’t you have a problem swinging a meter-long blade inside a house?” His response tied into the next point.

- He wanted to start a kingdom…in Maryland. You heard that right. The end goal of this would-be demigod Viking was to buy up a ton of land in Maryland, declare independence from the United States, set up a little nation devoid of racial minorities and/or socialists, and call it “Ascalon.” He wanted to have a castle, tons of statues, and a guard unit called…the High Guard. Creative. Basically he wanted to go to Europe (Never Africa or Asia, for reasons you already know) and adopt up young male orphans, and train them as his brainwashed soldiers. (Literally his plan was to get them, preferably younger than 6, and raise them on a steady diet of Ayn Rand, swordplay, and hate speech) Also he wanted to institute gladiatorial combat as the primary form of capital punishment. What merits capital punishment in the (Allegedly) Libertarian Monarchy of Ascalon? Murder, rape, theft…and Socialism. That’s right, in this “Free society” simply preaching in favor of socialism could land you in the ring across from Robbie the Rapist, and you’ve got to fight to the death. Of course, I was like “Don’t these ‘utopias’ usually get…shot?” but I guess I’m just a cynic. - Now you’re probably imagining this guy as someone who is a.) 14, b.) playing Call of Duty, and c.) Rather scrawny (or fit, if he were really trying to fit into the stereotype of a Viking) Our friend was none of those. He was 20, spent all of his time playing Viking death metal on guitar, and had, by his own admission, never worked out a day in his life. He was 5'7" and 250lbs, and had rarely left his parents’ house, due to a crippling fear of people. He had long, wispy hair, which he fancied made him more Viking-like, and he admitted that he wore the same shorts for weeks at a time, but that was only when he wasn’t trooping around in the dime-store Viking costume.

- He played guitar, and idolized Viking death metal. Now that’s no crime in and of itself, but having your millionaire parents buy you $200,000 in guitars, amps, and cables and only playing one of those guitars IS a crime of some sort. And if it’s not, it should be. This kid’s first guitar was a $2,000 Eric Clapton Stratocaster, and he made his parents go through thousands of dollars until he settled on a guitar he liked. He even had a Gibson Les Paul…signed by Les Paul (Who is dead, btw) which alone is worth a fortune. This feeds into his plan for world domination, trust me.

- So his kingdom? How did he plan on funding that huge land grab? Obviously that was one thing his parents WOULDN’T pay for. So he had a plan that involved taking over the music industry, the video game industry, and eventually, the world. Basically he wanted to start by creating a game that he described as a cross between “Minecraft and Morrowind” that would be infinite and self-aware. All geekiness aside, such a thing is impossible on modern hardware. He wanted to make the game with 5 people, and he said it would make millions of dollars in a few years. Then he’d use that money to build studios in every major city in the Caucasian-dominated world (Sorry, he hated that term, he’d prefer “Germanic”) and make Viking Death Metal the dominant genre of music in the world. This is because he was pissed that “Black people music” had become the dominant style in the world, i.e. hip hop, pop, and dance music.(He SURE didn’t say “black people” but I’m not gonna repeat what he said) That being said, he viewed metal as the whitest genre of music ever to be recorded, completely ignoring the fact that metal came from rock, which came from blues, which came from the soul and gospel music of…you guessed it, black people. So he was screwed either way. But that didn’t stop his racist megalomania one bit, because he planned on using the money garnered from his game and record company to buy up his kingdom in Maryland, and build a castle. And THAT is where he was gonna use his sword for home defense. So finally, we get to my visit with him. I visited and stayed for five days, much like a National Geographic journalist studying a maniacal dictator, and my cousin came. She showed up, smiling, happy to see us both, and with two GIANT boxes of cookies in hand. She was instantly berated by him for letting the cookies go stale. Then they went upstairs, and I didn’t see them for the rest of the day. Apparently that was because he was busy sulking that bread products, when exposed to air, tend to get a bit stale. So then, the next morning, I decided to be a good guest, and offer to help my cousin make breakfast (Brad wouldn’t be down until 12, she said) so we made some devilled eggs. He came down, pulled a face, and I didn’t see him until late that night, considering that he was sulking some more, this time because he didn’t like the smell of eggs. Then he finally came down at 10pm, and got in a fight with his mother, because she caught him mocking his father’s mannerisms. (His father had recently suffered a stroke) The next day, his friend Rich showed up. Rich secretly disliked Brad, and we both knew it. That night however, I decided to sleep in the attic, because there were real beds there. I did so, and regretted it immensely. Brad and my cousin were having VERY loud sex below me, and I spent the rest of the night covering my ears and getting very little sleep.

The next day, I woke up closer to lunch time. My cousin had prepared burgers, freshly ground and grilled, and Brad complained and told her that she sucked at cooking and shouldn’t do it anymore. His mother called him out on it, and he responded that “Encouraging the weak is a socialist value.” and continued to pontificate that it was “Crucial to the survival of our race” (He basically called everything that he liked “Crucial to the survival of our race” Be it a political cause or a videogame) he then continued that he idolized Anders Breivik, the guy who shot up and bombed a youth camp in Norway, because “The people in the camp were socialist Labour party members who were poisoning the youth.”

After I realized that I had had enough of this guy, I decided to pack my bags, and go home. After the visit, I cut off communication with him, and deleted him off Facebook and all other social media. Videos and photos of him still exist, somewhere, trying his best to look tough. So where is he now? After being dumped by my cousin, the last I saw of him was that he was advertising himself as “Lead Philosopher at Ascalon” and posting pictures of the night sky with emo quotes about how nobody loves and/or understands him.

Some god.

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