#gun and camera in southern africa

[julianhuxley]

Chanting Hawk and Many-Banded Sparrow Hawk from Mosita and Maritsani River, British Bechuanaland (now Botswana).

Source: H. Anderson Bryden, Gun and Camera in Southern Africa (London: Edward Stanford, 1893).

[backtothestart02]

At the Stroke of Midnight - 1/1 | westallen fanfiction

A/N: Probably going to be my last fic for a while, since I've really gotten into vidding again, but this was a fic suggestion/request I got on insta that I originally meant to write & post for NYE. So, here you go! I hope y'all enjoy!

...

Synopsis: AU - Iris West is an elusive diamond thief and the Flash's greatest weakness.

...

Iris breathed in the fresh smell of museum and diamonds as she took her first step into the Royal Treasury exhibit at the Central City Public Museum. Clad in form-fitting leather with her hair pulled back from her face, Iris hesitated only briefly to talk into her com.

“Coast clear, Reverb?”

“Clear as the night sky, your highness. All cameras and alarms disabled.”

She smiled to herself and flexed her glove-encased hands as she approached the jackpot, a 500 carat diamond discovered in southern Africa and brought first to the U.K. by royal demand and then to the U.S. for temporary display. It would stay in the U.S. but in her possession, at least until she decided to sell it on the black market for a price. Maybe she’d have a chunk got off to hang around her neck. She could wear it in broad daylight with no one the wiser. She was practically giddy at the prospect.

She was halfway through unscrewing the lid of the glass case shielding the diamond from her grasp when a whoosh of air followed by a crackle of lightning stole the tools from her hands and tightened the screws once more, snatching the gun from her holster away for good measure.

Oh, and she was handcuffed suddenly.

The sigh and roll of her eyes escaped her before the figure in red even came to a stop, grinning before her with his arms crossed and his chest puffed.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this, Flash.”

He chuckled.

“I agree.” He approached her slowly. “If only you’d stop trying to steal diamonds.”

“Trying?” she scoffed. “I was successfully stealing them until you started showing up.”

He shrugged innocently.

“What can I say? I’m in the business of stopping thieves.”

“And yet, you haven’t put me away once.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Why is that, I wonder,” she murmured, her eyes dropping to his lips and back up to his darkening eyes.

“Uh-uh,” he said, though his voice sounded a bit strangled, and Iris couldn’t help but glance at the hint of a bulge below his belt. “That’s not going to work this time, Miss West.”

She smirked and moved within an inch of his body, tipping her head up to look at him, her leather-clad body now brushing against him.

“Isn’t it though?”

He swallowed.

“The police will be here any minute.”

“I don’t hear sirens,” she whispered.

“Ugh.” He took a step back, confusing her.

He turned away, ran a hand over his face, gathered himself together so his growing erection was under control, then turned back to her, only to find the handcuffs clanking on the floor. When he looked towards the exit, all he saw was the heel of her knee-high boots disappearing into the hall.

He flashed over to her, blocking the exit just before she zipped through.

“Bobby pin in your pocket?” he guessed.

She shrugged innocently.

“Never know when you might need one.”

She grinned devilishly, then closed the distance between them, yanked his head down to hers and planted her glossed lips on his surprised ones. She waited for him to respond just barely, then she pushed him away, leaving him stunned and gasping for air.

“Something to remember me by.”

She winked and walked through the door easily. By the time Flash had recovered from the kiss and jolted back to the reality that she was escaping once again with her counterpart in her fancy car, it was too late. He could’ve flashed after them and put both in jail once and for all.

But he could only get them for breaking and entering. They hadn’t technically stolen any diamonds. Because of him.

He supposed that was good enough for now.

…

A knock on his door several hours later kept him from depositing his freshly showered self on the living room couch and watching Netflix until the stroke of midnight, after which he’d have to endure friends calling and texting since he’d bailed on the New Year’s Eve rooftop party that had been organized months ago.

He frowned, since he’d only just ordered the pizza but went to the door anyway, peering into the peephole before stifling a groan just barely.

“I can hear you breathing.”

He sighed and pressed his forehead to the door.

“Kara, no.”

“You do realize I could use my laser vision to burn your door knob off and then waltz right in.”

Barry gave a strained chuckle and opened the door to find his best friend standing there smiling brilliantly.

“Yes, but you wouldn’t want to put me through the trouble of repairing that, now would you?”

Her smile never wavered.

“It’s good to know my best friend still has some common sense.”

She pushed past him and spun around once he’d closed the door and she had his attention again.

“You look nice,” he said, taking in her sparkly dress and curls in her hair, complete with equally sparkly eye shadow and a lipstick shade that made her lips pop.

She grinned for a few more seconds before taking in the stretched out collar on his t-shirt and the raggedy sweatpants that clung to his ankles. At least his socks looked decent.

“Why aren’t you dressed?”

He looked down at his apparel.

“I’m wearing clothes.”

She rolled her eyes and walked down the hall into his bedroom.

“Kara, don’t…” He sighed and joined her in his room.

“Look at all these nice clothes you have that you never wear.” She sifted through the shirts and pants in his closet. “I wonder who gave them to you.” She looked at him pointedly over her shoulder.

“Hey, I paid for them,” he defended. “And tried them on.”

Kara picked out a couple items and pushed them against his chest till he instinctively wrapped his arms around them.

“And I thank you for your service. Try them on again.”

She flounced past him back into the hall.

“I’ll be in the living room popping the champagne I put in your fridge last week!”

Barry blinked and then chuckled.

He supposed the evening wouldn’t be too bad with Kara by his side. She always made things fun. Maybe she’d manage to make him forget about that devastatingly impulsive kiss Iris West had planted on him before she made her escape.

Maybe.

…

Kara was a social butterfly. He should have taken that into consideration before the party. She was also a reporter, which meant she was always keeping her eyes and ears open for a possible story no matter where she went, even a social event where she was meant to just enjoy herself.

So, as luck would have it, she drifted from Barry and found herself clustered amongst some females, indulging in all the dirty secrets they had to offer that flowed freely from their tongues whilst they proceeded to drink themselves into a hangover and some vomiting.

Barry wound up near the edge of the rooftop, gazing out over the city, trying and failing to think of something other than Iris West’s lips on his when, at 10 to midnight, another presence settled beside him.

“Mind if I join you?”

He’d half-expected it to be Kara or some flirty, drunk stranger at the party. His eyes widened briefly when he recognized the eyes behind the lacy cropped mask she wore as none other than Iris West’s.

He wanted to call her out on it, but then he remembered she didn’t know his secret identity. She’d never caught him with his cowl down or having revealed his secret, so he forced himself to keep mum about it and carry on the conversation as if they didn’t know each other at all.

“Not at all.”

He forced a smile. It wasn’t too hard given who he was smiling at, and how right now she wasn’t a criminal but a gorgeous woman who wanted his attention.

“Is this yours?” she asked, gesturing towards the barely touched glass of champagne on the little table beside him.

He winced.

“I’m afraid so. I’m not much of a drinker.”

“Well, that’s a shame.” She reached for his glass and handed it to him. Reluctantly, he took it. “Is that because of the taste or the speed running through your veins?”

His jaw dropped, despite himself.

She couldn’t possibly have figured it out. Could she?

“Don’t ask so surprised, Flash,” she lowered her voice. “I used to be a reporter too. Just like your friend over there – Kara, is it?”

His eyes darkened.

“If you hurt her, I swear to-”

“Oh, don’t swear. It’s not becoming on a do-gooder like you.”

He scoffed.

“Besides I’m hardly dangerous without my tools. And my gun. Which I’d like back by the way.”

“You’re dreaming.”

“You don’t usually make it into my dreams, Allen. Sorry to break that to you after our steamy goodbye kiss.”

“So, what do you want?”

She turned fully towards him, and he got a good view of her cleavage through the low-cut slimming black dress.

“I’d like you to leave me alone. Let me steal my diamonds, leave it to the police if you must. I can outsmart them just fine. And in exchange, I won’t tell anyone your secret identity.”

His eyes narrowed.

“I could put you behind bars right now. You’re a wanted a woman, West. They’d take you without question.”

“Yes, but you won’t do that.”

“And why wouldn’t I?”

“Well, for starters, you’d have no one to kiss at midnight.”

He snorted.

“I’ll live.”

“And, also, you’ve had dozens of opportunities to put me away. And yet, here I am, freely roaming a New Year’s Eve party, without a care in the world.”

“You have no proof I’m…who you say I am. I can say you’re bluffing and the whole world would believe me over you.”

“Maybe.” She shrugged. “Maybe not. Guess it’s your call to see how much you’re willing to risk.”

She lifted her glass.

“Bottoms up.”

The liquid poured into her throat, almost all of it. Then she set it down where his had been. He was surprised his fingers didn’t snap his glass in two.

She walked away from him, mingled with the other guests, while time ticked away closer to midnight. He was so focused on his conversation with Iris that he almost didn’t hear the people around him counting down loudly to minute from the 10-second mark on.

At three seconds, Iris appeared before him again, grinning like the Cheshire cat she was.

“Two…one…”

And just like before, she pulled him down on her and planted her lips on his. This time she stuck her tongue into his mouth, giving him a truly steamy kiss for the several seconds that followed. He forgot about their circumstances and her blackmail in those seconds, cupped her face and kissed her back.

She was the first to pull away, as he probably should’ve expected.

“That was one hell of a kiss, Barry Allen.”

She dabbed at the corner of her lips.

“I guess that solidifies our deal,” she concluded.

“Not on your life,” he whispered harshly.

“We’ll see about that,” she purred, shooting him a wink before turning away and sashaying out of the party. His eyes were glued to her ass the whole way.

Moments later, Kara appeared beside him, demanding to know the whole story.

“Who was that?” she gawked, watching as Iris disappeared into the elevator. “You kissed her like you knew her.”

“I do,” he said grimly.

Kara blinked, her gaze focused entirely on what he’d say next.

“Well? Who is she?”

He inhaled steadily and released his breath.

“Iris West, criminal at large.”

[fedtothenight]

this competition asked to write a short story in the dystopian genre and my entry's below - don't rb!

the sweetest fruit

The boy gasped, straining against the padded frame of the jeep just as the vehicle slowly came to a halt. ‘Look!’ he shouted, pointing at a spot about a hundred feet from the group. ‘Look, Mum! That’s so cool!’

Half-instinctively, his mother had already grabbed a fistful of his tank-top, ready to yank him back. She had spent the entirety of the trip sitting as still as possible, facing forward, eyes stubbornly fixed on the self-cooling top of the car in a pointless effort to fight her motion sickness: her patience was already wearing very thin without her eight-year-old personal safety hazard trying to get himself killed.

‘Ethan, for the love of God,’ she snapped. ‘I already told you to stop leaning over the frame! Do you realise how dangerous that is?’

‘No, Mum, you’ve got to look!’

‘Emma, darling,’ her husband whispered, a gentle hand on her shoulder. ‘You should really look at this. It’s magnificent.’

Whatever it was, even her fifteen-year-old daughter - who had spent the last thirty minutes texting her friends back home without so much as a glance at the scenery - was jaw-slacked, so she slowly got up on her wobbly knees and peered over her shoulders.

In the shadow of a tree, protected from the sweltering heat, two lions were feasting on a zebra. Perhaps belatedly, as it’d taken her a second to drink the sight in, she realised that the poor thing was still alive: writhing as blood, red and hot and pulsing, gushed out from where the bigger lion - the male - had bitten into its back.

The smaller one, the female, soundlessly sank its teeth into the dying animal’s neck, and the latter gave one last weak kick, finally falling limp. When the lioness stood again, it was almost impossible, from this distance, to see her eyes amidst the bloodied mess on her face.

‘Oh, my God, Matt,’ Emma said. ‘This is beautiful. Nature truly is beautiful.’

‘You don’t really get to see this kind of show anywhere else today,’ their guide said from the driver’s seat. He sounded proud, as if he’d hunted and fed the zebra to the lions himself.

Alberto wasn’t wrong, Emma reasoned. Given that they were parked in the middle of the privately-owned biggest North American savanna, he - or rather, his employer - was the one effectively feeding the lions. Like feeding mice to cats. She glanced at her children, glad they could have a window on a reality that was long gone. To think it would have taken a trip around the world to watch this spectacle - imagine the motion sickness then! If only, she considered wistfully, there could be a way of replicating glaciers just as accurately.

‘Honestly, it seems a bit unfair that they get to eat real meat,’ Ethan said at the dinner table a few hours later. He was picking at his plate, moving the fried grasshoppers they’d been served for dinner around, but not really eating any. ‘While we are stuck with insects and microprotein or whatever.’

Emma pinched the bridge of her nose. She was tired and sunburnt, her sensitive pale skin suffering under the blistering sun of the region, so different from the temperate weather back home North. She had a splitting headache, too. She was, yet again, at the so-called end of her tether. ‘Ethan…’

‘You should be glad you get to eat at all,’ her daughter said at the same time. ‘There’s a reason it’s illegal to eat meat. These animals are here for show, anyway. They were originally from Africa.’

‘Shut up, Becca,’ Ethan mumbled. ‘Everybody knows there are no animals in Africa. There’s nothing there.’

Becca’s cheeks were tinted pink, eyebrows furrowed. ‘Of course there were animals. There were animals everywhere before the Climate Crunch.’

‘Both of you, stop it,’ Matt interjected. ‘Ethan, your sister is right. You should be grateful that we are here in the first place. That said…’ He leant forward, voice down to a whisper: ‘I have a surprise for you. Or, well, Richard has a surprise for us. When he arrives tomorrow, he’ll bring us real meat. Bovine meat.’

‘But it’s illegal,’ said Becca.

‘It’s technically illegal,’ Matt acknowledged. ‘It’s not if you know how to get some and no one from Animal Conservation finds out. Do you think our president only eats insects? Please, Becca. Use that big brain of yours.’

‘Yes,’ Ethan snickered. ‘Use your brain, Becca.’

‘That is too generous,’ Emma said. ‘Inviting us here in the first place was, when even he hasn’t gotten here yet. Now this. I wouldn’t know how to repay him.’

Truly, all she felt was jealousy. Her guts twisted with the sheer force of it. Yes, she had known that Richard was comfortable. The gated, heavily guarded estate spanned for thousands of acres, comprised the 5000sqt villa they were staying at (five bedrooms, seven bathrooms, a cinema, marble floors and solar panels on the rooftop), an indoor swimming pool inspired by vintage photos of Amalfi, two indoor tennis courts, and the savanna they’d explored earlier in the day. ‘The biggest conservation area in North America since they repurposed the Midwest,’ he’d bragged in a video call, two weeks before. ‘You will love it. The holiday you deserve. Make yourselves at home.’

But meat? He could get meat?

Matt’s family had designed DeNuketify, which was basically the only effective way of purifying ocean water from whatever nuclear waste Japan kept spewing so that it could be used and, most importantly, drunk. They had managed to flee the continent with the last handful of greencards about the time her family did, too, taking their precious Queen’s accent with them to found Nova London. She was the governor of Nova London now, for God’s sake. The bloody queen herself was long dead but she was alive, and yet, yet - they had never had meat.

‘We don’t have to, Emma,’ Matt said. ‘We just need to remember how lucky we are to enjoy this meal, this house, this holiday. Look at that,’ and he nodded towards the TV screen again. ‘Actually, Alexa!, volume up!, I think the Italians have finally surrendered.’

The war correspondent’s voice grew louder. She - they, Emma reminded herself: Becca always told her not to assume anyone’s gender - was wearing a dust mask and reading from a bundle of documents. ‘The last military hospital in the island of Palermo was destroyed four days ago by a Canadian airstrike,’ they were saying. ‘The rebels surrendered soon after, followed by the group of extremists in the Nebrodi island. Etna had already surrendered last year.’

‘It’s important to remember that these actions were necessary to finally put a rest on the instability of the region,’ they added. ‘Canada will fund a complete restoration of the Southern archipelago. The remaining civilians will be provided with a shelter and then, when the time comes, a suitable job. Nova Italia will be the sixteenth Canadian state, the fourth offshore. There are also hopes to extract petroleum from the seabed of the sunken city of Gela.’

‘Watch them make it into a holiday hotspot,’ Matt commented. ‘The weather is still nice there.’

‘Ooh, I heard about this.’ Becca picked her phone back up and started furiously typing away. ‘There’s this journal entry soldiers found over there, under the rubble, that’s gone viral. It was translated into English. Wait, I’ll pull it up. Alexa, volume down.’

‘I’m not sure I want to hear it,’ Emma said, uneasy. ‘We’re on holiday. Should we not watch a movie? Something funny?’

Becca waved her away, as if she was an annoying fly. ‘It’ll be good practice for my drama class.’

Matt didn’t help—he simply shrugged, half-apologetic, as if to say: Let her do her thing.

Becca made a show of clearing her throat, too, before she started reading from her phone—her high voice now grave, studied, as if she were speaking to a larger audience: ‘I wonder what peas taste like.’

Right then, the scene on screen changed to footage of what looked like a destroyed village, something out of an apocalyptic movie. Emma found herself unable to look away.

‘Nonna used to say that her own great-grandmother grew them in her garden. Figs, too,’ Becca read. ‘They say they were the sweetest fruit.’

Emma wondered if this journal was actually written by a child or a teenager. It didn’t sound like an adult at all. She couldn’t help but picture a girl, a brunette, not much older than Becca, perhaps a rebel, or a trainee nurse on the sweet cusp of adulthood, holding this journal of hers, or perhaps a gun. It violently reminded her that her own daughter, too, would have to serve her time in the Forces in three years.

On screen, the Canadian soldiers walked among the ruins, zigzagging between torn up clothes and discarded weapons, surely looking for surviving rebels under the rubbles.

‘Isn’t it silly that we can hear the fighters overhead and that all I can do is think about food?’ said Becca. ‘I wish we could also eat figs and be happy.’

On screen, the camera zoomed in on a long-forgotten man's shoe, some crumpled photographs, on a pile of bodies in black bin bags.

‘Grandma - I miss her - left me a poetry book, too, from T.S. Eliot. I hope the book is with me when I die, so I can give it back to her when we meet again, afterwards. So I can tell her that T.S. Eliot was wrong.’

On screen, one of the soldiers approached and showed a little trinket to the camera: a bloody, heart-shaped locket that must’ve once been golden, hiding the miniature pictures of two brunette children that would never have a name.

‘That’s enough,’ Emma said. She closed her eyes, taking a deep breath. ‘Stop reading.’

‘The world may have not ended with a bang, but it didn’t end with a whimper, either: the world didn’t end at all. Sometimes,’ Becca finished reading, ‘I wish it had.’

‘What a load of rubbish,’ Matt scoffed. ‘Everyone should feel lucky to be alive. I bet this journal is a fake. Alexa, turn the TV off.’

As the screen faded to black, Ethan finally popped a grasshopper in his mouth. ‘I can’t wait to have meat tomorrow.’

[unofficialrivermonsters]

ICYMI: Exclusive behind the scenes look at River Monsters 3D

via 3D Focus (12 August 2012)

Icon Films talk to 3D Focus about the challenges of producing a 3D episode of hit Animal Planet series River Monsters.

Fronted by biologist and extreme angler Jeremy Wade, River Monsters is Animal Planet’s most popular series. Summarised by the presenter as “a genre of its own”, the series, now in its fifth season, investigates unusual fisherman’s tales across the globe. In River Monsters 3D, Jeremy travels to the Okavango Delta in Southern Africa, after a group of people capsized and were attacked by a frenzied group of unknown creatures. Some people drowned and others suffered severe mutilations after, what looked like, Piranha attacks although there are no such fish in that part of the world.  It turns out the feared Tiger Fish was the culprit – a pack hunting species that Jeremy aims to catch.

River Monsters 3D: Pack of Teeth, was premiered on 3net in April this year. “Bringing a high-quality ratings hit like Animal Planet’s River Monsters to 3net audiences in immersive, native 3D for the first time ever underscores our on-going commitment to deliver the most unique and compelling content possible,” said Tom Cosgrove, president of 3net. “This series is a perfect fit for 3D and the kind of eyes wide open experience our viewers have come to expect”.

River Monsters, including the 3D episode, is a production of Icon Films for Animal Planet. Being Icon Film’s first 3D production, the crew attended lots of training courses and paired up with 3D specialists Inition who supplied Stereoscopic Supervisor Campbell Goodwille. Thomas Kelpie was Icon Films 3D Workflow Consultant for the project and Barny Revill was the director (who also directs the regular 2D series).

“What I am most proud of is that the whole thing works as a film, it is not just a 3D spectacle. I think a lot of 3D productions get overly caught up in the 3D mechanics” said Barny Revill “It’s still a River Monsters film through and through; it’s got the pace and the energy and we haven’t compromised it because it’s 3D. It’s not gone from being an exciting series to a very static tripod type show”.

For those of you who are not familiar with the TV series River Monsters, which is broadcast on the Animal Planet channel in the UK, the show is very filmic in its style with fast paced editing, dramatic reconstructions, Hollywood style sound effects and strong narrative threads.

Maintaining the run-and-shoot look was the challenge Inition’s Campbell Goodwille had to face although he was armed with years of experience of shooting 3D in extreme locations.

“The bulk of our filming was done with SI-2Ks using Canon lenses on a Pulsar rig. The main rig weighed just under 20 kilos so the Cinematographer used our Easy Rig (pictured) which supports the camera. That was able to provide the ‘run and gun’ aesthetic of the show. We then had an umbilical from the cameras to my backpack mounted unit. I built a custom recording system which allowed me to have a touchscreen in front of my face the whole time to allow me to adjust the 3D settings”.

Jeremy Wade was initially sceptical about producing a 3D version of the hit series, especially when filming River Monsters is already difficult. Speaking before a recent premiere in Bristol, Wade said “River Monsters in 2D is a challenge enough to make. Fish are wild animals, a lot of people forget that. In order to film them you have to be mobile and relatively stealth. When we started discussing the possibilities of doing it in 3D, I was very sceptical. I was thinking that this was possibly a step too far. You are going from a crew of four to maybe seven or eight with great big bits of kit. But the amazing thing was that it worked, it was incredible. I thought it was going to really slow things down but it wasn’t too different from a normal 2D shoot. Part of that was due to very meticulous planning and also because we were very fortunate with our location”.

Icon Films 3D Workflow Consultant Thomas Kelpie (who doubled as a Safari Warden in the show) edited the programme using AVID 5.5 and ended up with burnt in side-by-side footage created by the offline support people at Films@59.

“That worked quite well but it meant that we didn’t have any opportunities to fix the 3D problems that you inevitably come across” said Kelpie “I got the guys to create some preset filter effects for percentage parallax corrections as well as being able to set the depth and convergence just for the offline viewings. We didn’t want to cause any pain for the American executives who hadn’t been watching that much 3D because its wasn’t exec’ed by a 3D channel (Animal Planet)”.

Although ‘River Monster 3D : Pack of Teeth’ is being distributed by ITV Studios, River Monster 3D has so far not aired in the UK and the programme highlights the different approaches taken by 3net and Sky 3D regarding extremity of 3D according to Kelpie… “We were always aiming for about 3% but in run and gun mode, some of the second cameras we had ended up with some shots that were up to 5 and 6%. Some of those got through all the way to the US version. I haven’t seen whether they made it into the Sky 3D friendly version yet. When we came to the online and doing the depth grades we went for a Sky 3D style. I took it to Discovery Centre in the States and I was able to sit in their 3D depth review where the guy re-depth graded two thirds of the film to bring everything out. The Americans are not too fussed about edge violations – they just want everything out, slapping you in the face wherever possible”.

Jeremy Wade revealed some of the TV trickery required when dealing with wild animals and to ensure their welfare, especially in a fast paced production… “When you have actually got the fish, it’s pressure on everybody because the crew has got to get the filming right first time…. We do sometimes employ a little bit of trickery. We can do a two shot of me plus fish, then we do close ups of the fish, put the fish back and do close ups of my face talking as if I am still holding the fish, cutting between both”.

Across the River Monsters series in general, Jeremy Wade spends less time with a fishing rod than you might think with an average of about 30% of any shoot involving fishing.  Also, as with River Monsters 3D, the final sequence of catching the fish was filmed at the beginning to ensure the main element of the programme was in the bag, although those sequences appear at the conclusion of the episode.

Choosing the right episode for the first 3D version of River Monsters was important. The subject matter and location were key elements behind the decision to travel to the Okavango Delta. Many episodes of River Monsters involve shooting in several locations, but ‘Pack of Teeth’ required only two, highly beneficial when moving large equipment and crew around. The team sourced a floating platform originally designed to take vehicles over the river which provided a steady platform for filming and the Tiger Fish themselves were known to not be as elusive as others.

“Part of the reason we decided to shoot the tiger fish episode in 3D was, of all the ones in this season, we knew we would have more than one chance with this fish. It wouldn’t be one moment we had got it for five minutes and then ‘what do you mean the stereo was all messed up!?!’. We knew that we would probably have a few chances” said Director Barny Revill.

Looking at the final piece, Jeremy Wade said he was delighted with the result, suggesting 3D can enhance the format saying “If you are showing an unfamiliar animal, 3D does really give you a better sense of what that creature is like” and Barny Revill  learnt a lot from the experience… “The big thing that I learnt was, as a director on a 3D shoot, you are one of the only people that is not really thinking about the 3D. It’s not your sole focus. Your focus is the narrative the story – It’s not just a 3D showcase. Inevitably you might have a shot that is not the best 3D shot in the world but you need that because you’ve got a story to tell…This was my first 3D project and I loved it. I just think it’s going to get better and better.”

Finally, when we asked if Icon Films would shoot the rest of their documentaries in 3D, the answer was a very quick “NOOO!” with Thomas Kelpie saying “We were very lucky with this episode worked so well in 3D with the flat platform but if we had to lug all that kit up valleys and mountains it wouldn’t have worked as well. But, that doesn’t mean that in the future that everything wont shrink and become better and faster.”

River Monsters 3D is being distributed by ITV Studios Global Entertainment and it is their first 3D product. They are pursuing sales for the programme in territories around the world. ITV SGE say there are no plans to release the show on 3D Blu-ray unfortunately but agreements might be made at this year’s MIPCOM to have it shown in the UK.

[alarawriting]

52 Project #6: Birds

(I am not 100% positive that this is a story per se, but it’s as much of a story as China Mieville’s “The New Death” and other such “new weird” stories, so... here you go.)

***

One day all the men in the world woke up to find that they had been turned into birds.

It began in New Zealand, where a day is first born on the planet Earth. By the time that women were waking and going into hysterics because the men and older boys in their lives had all turned into birds, the men of Central Asia, India, and the middle of Russia had already gone to bed. It was late enough in Europe that many men were getting ready for bed; a large number of them missed the warnings. Not that the warnings helped; men who tried to stay awake all night stayed human, but sooner or later, they all had to sleep.

In Western Europe and the Americas, there was an idea that maybe if someone would keep waking a man up, he wouldn’t turn into a bird, so many women kept watch by their husbands’ bedsides. It didn’t help. No one was able to see the transformation; they’d blink and a human lying in bed would suddenly be a bird. Even with high speed cameras, it proved impossible to catch the transformation. One frame, human man; next frame, bird. And they were many different kinds of birds – pigeons and roosters and peacocks, ostriches and starlings and falcons, flamingos and penguins and seagulls. Practically every kind of bird you can imagine, including some extinct birds – at least two men became dodos and one became a passenger pigeon.

Fortunately, it turned out that the birds could still talk, and sounded exactly like the men they used to be. This was helpful when linking birds to their former identities, because of course, none of them matched the pictures on their ID cards. It took a little bit longer to convince everyone, closer to a week, but eventually it was proven that the birds all retained every aspect of their former intelligence and personality.

Birds argued that this meant nothing should change significantly; birds could still go to work at their old jobs. This was true of birds who worked in banks and in IT and in management, for the most part, but any jobs that required physical strength, dexterity, or simply having a human-sized body? Birds couldn’t do those jobs. So for a while there was a severe shortage of plumbers, electricians, construction workers, garbage collectors, and bus drivers. Some New York city pigeons argued that if people with no legs could drive cars, surely adaptive equipment could be built to let pigeons drive the buses, but it was easier to get women to do the job than to build such equipment. Birds either lost their jobs entirely in those kinds of industries, or were kept on the payroll to teach women how to do what they had been doing when they were men.

For a while it was thought that there were occasional anomalies – men who didn’t turn into birds, women who did – and this gave people some idea that the situation could be reversed, but this proved to be a false hope. To a man, everyone who didn’t turn into a bird was not in fact a man; anyone with a penis who didn’t turn into a bird was either a trans woman or a nonbinary person. Likewise, trans men did turn into birds – male ones. All the birds were physiologically male even if they had seemed to be women when they were human. This was a stressful situation to be sure, since all the trans women had just been forcibly outed, but on the other hand, it was fairly good evidence for their contention that yes, they really were women, that whatever force had transformed the men hadn’t touched them.

After an initial difficult adjustment period, birds who’d been men were soon flying, or in the case of penguins, swimming. Some domestic geese and roosters, too heavy to fly, hit the gym to train their wings and lose weight. Personal trainers who were now birds devised regimens that other birds could follow, to strengthen their wings, and personal trainers who were still women helped birds to do the regimens, since there weren’t yet gym machines designed for birds. Birds discovered, to general happiness on their part, that whatever special ability the bird they had transformed into had, they now had it. So pigeons could always find their way home, and roosters could crow. Roosters in fact were very, very fond of crowing. Owls could see very well in the dark and eagles could see tremendous distances and parrots could imitate any sound they heard and pelicans could stuff their beak full of whatever they wanted to carry.

In addition, the birds they’d become seemed to have some connection to the personality they’d had as men. Men who’d thought there was no place like home became pigeons. Men who’d been models or actors who’d loved to show off their handsome bodies became peacocks. Men who were short and aggressive and always on the go became hummingbirds. The species was usually appropriate to the location as well; birds of wild, native species always turned out to be living in the area that species was native to. Temperature and environment seemed to also be a factor; the only men who turned into penguins had been living in cold places, near water. Since the entire Southern Hemisphere was having winter at the time, this might have resulted in a disproportionate number of penguins in Africa and South America, but it was more common for birds who weren’t penguins, who’d loved Polar Bear Challenges and skiing and cold weather sports, to regret the fact that they weren’t penguins because it was too hot for penguins where they lived when the change came, than for penguins to regret their penguin identity.

This was all quite nice and a boon for the birds, whose lives had been so very disrupted by their transformation, and many argued that in fact they had the far better deal than the women who’d gotten to keep their humanity; they had their intelligence and their speech but they could also fly. How awesome was that? Women generally responded to such comments either with amused tolerance, or with an obscene gesture that involved the use of an opposable thumb, because of course that was the main thing the birds had lost. Many bird talons were very dexterous and had opposable thumbs, but they were feet, and the birds couldn’t use them for the same tasks that had been easy for hands. Deaf birds were devastated; by losing their hands, they’d lost speech. They could type notes to their wives or mothers or other birds in their life, but it wasn’t the same. Groups of deaf people, both birds and women, gathered to discuss and work out signs that birds could make, but this was essentially telling birds that they needed to learn an entirely new language to translate their own into.

Plus, there were certain biological realities that had upended the order of things that humans had grown to expect. Now, aside from a few ostriches, cassowaries, emus and other very large birds, every human woman was bigger than most of the birds. Birds who’d been abusive men found themselves in cages, and when policewomen and policebirds came to do wellness checks and investigate why a certain bird hadn’t been seen in a long time, those cages often ended up in closets or the basement or the attic, and were never found by the police.

It wasn’t all that suspicious. Many birds, especially ones who’d lost their jobs, had decided to give up on running the human rat race, and had abandoned their human families and flown off with a flock of like-minded birds, usually of similar species. Why not? Birds could forage for food on their own – they didn’t need to go grocery shopping. Why did they need money, or jobs? They could live like the wild birds did!

A lot of these came back, injured by predators or far too thin, because they didn’t know nearly as much about getting the available food as the never-human birds did.

Many birds died in the early days – cancer patients couldn’t get chemo that would work on birds, but they still had cancer. Men who’d needed open heart surgery became birds too small for anyone to safely operate on. Also, there weren’t nearly enough trained bird doctors. Most veterinarians knew dogs and cats; bird specialties were rare. And obviously, human doctors knew nothing about birds. So there was a massive shortage of doctors who could do anything about the problems birds suffered, and half of the few doctors there were, were birds themselves.

Birds who were vets with a specialty in birds were shadowed by women who were vets, and sometimes women who were human doctors, trying to learn all they could about care for birds. Women and birds in veterinary colleges elected to learn about birds, and the same professors who taught bird specialties to veterinarians were called in to teach med students. Most countries allocated huge amounts of money to getting bird doctors trained up and ready as soon as possible.

The balance of power shifted. In the United States, several female senators argued that birds had no business being allowed to make laws for humans. What if all they did was vote for free birdseed and the extermination of cats? The bird senators argued that the United States was now a country for both humans and birds, and needed to be represented by both. The women pointed out that there were far, far too few women for that to make sense; birds should represent birds and women should represent women, and since every senator here had been voted for by humans, and now only women were humans, all the existing seats in the Senate should be taken by women, and birds could go have their own Senate. Some human senators from states where gun rights were important showed up to the senate exercising their Second Amendment rights to carry weapons… which, of course, birds could not do. In response, a falcon insisted on reading the entire script of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds into the senatorial record. In the end it was decided that the states would vote on a constitutional amendment to set aside one seat per state for a bird and one for a woman, and in the meantime, a lot of senatorial birds got female aides or proteges to speak for them in the Senate, so anything the bird wanted to say went through the human first.

Many other countries went through similar experiences. In countries where women had been virtually or entirely shut out of power completely, birds found that their expertise in rule was not desired, thank you, and many, many birds found themselves in birdcages. Large numbers of women objected to this, arguing that if it was the will of God for women to rule, God would have already allowed this. Other women retorted that what better evidence did you need that God wanted women to run things than that God had turned all the men into birds? More egalitarian countries generally had more peaceful agreements between women and birds as to how to split up leadership roles.

The President of the United States – the new one; the old one had been tragically killed when he’d transformed into a house wren, a very small bird with a very loud mouth, and the First Lady had accidentally rolled over on him in the middle of the night – agreed to abdicate in favor of the Speaker of the House, who was a woman, if the House would pass an emergency resolution that there would be a new election as soon as possible and that birds and women should both be explicitly authorized to vote for any candidate of either type, bird or woman. Birds were suddenly very much in favor of gun control, and while many women had been in favor of total freedom to use guns, more women in general favored gun control as well, so the United States finally got sensible gun laws.

In Great Britain there was a kerfluffle – Queen Elizabeth was ancient and her heir was a bird. It was argued that birds, no longer being human, could not possibly still be part of the royal bloodline. Birds, of course, argued against this proposition, and women in Great Britain didn’t generally have guns. They did, however, have rocks. It turned out that the remarkable human ability to throw rocks was now a problem for birds. Her Majesty ended the conflict by demanding that Parliament pass an emergency amendment allowing birds to serve as King so long as there was a woman of sufficient rank and bloodline standing as his Queen.

Of course, all of this was going to be moot very soon if humanity didn’t confront the elephant in the room – sex and reproduction.

The sperm banks were going to deplete within a generation. Trans women and nonbinary people born with penises could make a great deal of money selling sperm, if they still had the equipment to make it with, because women still wanted children. Immediately after the change it had seemed that perhaps the human race would be spared after this generation, because baby boys hadn’t transformed – boys as old as 4 had remained human. However, within two weeks, the news went around the globe that a little boy had just turned into a bird, and it continued to be the case that as boys aged, they would transform into birds too. The population of humans who still had testicles that worked was very, very small, and scientists warned that there would be unacceptably high risks of massive interbreeding if every cis woman who wanted a baby was buying sperm from a trans woman. Fertility experts worked day and night on finding a way to either cause a somatic cell in vitro to undergo meiosis, or to permit two eggs to be merged into a viable zygote.

Birds had lost all sexual interest in human woman. Many birds still had lingering romantic feelings for the women they had loved, but it wasn’t sexual. Instead, they were sexually attracted to other birds of their species. The gay and bi birds were widely considered to have gotten the best of it, since while many male-male couples were broken up by the two birds being of different species, at least some got to be two birds of the same kind, and they could continue to be lovers. And some couples made it work even when they were different species of bird. Obviously, nearly every single heterosexual couple – with a few kinky exceptions – lost their sex lives completely. Birds who’d been straight men would mate with never-human birds, and while many women, and some birds, argued that this was bestiality and it was repulsive and should be against the law, most birds felt that it was necessary. What other options did they have?

Meanwhile the sex industry was turned upside down. Prostitutes and porn stars and other sex workers suddenly had no clients interested in what they had to sell. But they knew the truth – human women were horny, and desperate for sexual contact with human men, which could no longer happen. Straight-up porn of the wham bam thank you ma’am type was not appealing to most women; whether having been raised to think Good Girls Don’t, or having some biological predilection, none could say, but the truth remained that women wanted their porn in context, with men who had strong emotional bonds with the people they were ostensibly fucking. Lesbians had no trouble finding porn in the new world, but it was heterosexual women who were starved for sexual attention, and they were the new big market.

Different strategies for creating porn with men in it were used. Some dead men or former men were resurrected on film by the miracles of CGI. Women with strap-ons could be rotoscoped into handsome men. The biggest new market, however, was animation. Birds still sounded like men – their voices tended to be tinny, lacking the full timbre of a human voice, but this could be fixed by a good sound mixer – so voice acting became a very popular profession for birds. Some birds went into doing phone sex; they weren’t interested in human women anymore but they were interested in fat paychecks, and they remembered what it had been like well enough to act.

Similar transformations encompassed Hollywood and in fact the entire entertainment industry. Rock stars who’d been famed for their voices could still sing, but they couldn’t play guitar, or keyboards – some birds managed to keep up with drums – so birds who could sing ended up making albums with women who could play instruments, and the stars who’d been famous for their virtuoso skills with their instruments… either went into singing also, learned how to program synthesizers to sound like the instruments they’d once played, or took advantage of their ability to mimic noises to be their own instrument, singing like a bird instead of like a human. Or left music entirely. Theatre, for the most part, dressed up women to play the parts of men, although some more avant-garde productions kept birds in some important roles. Movies and TV became dominated by CGI and traditional or computer-assisted animation, although some television shows set in supposedly modern times just rolled with it and incorporated the bird transformation into their storylines, so they could keep their bird actors.

Things settled down after it had been a year or so since the transformation. Birds still worked in entertainment and in professions where their minds were their greatest assets – writers, professors, researchers, programmers – and in most countries, were guaranteed all the legal rights they’d had as humans, though some countries had adopted new rules regarding bird representation in their government. Women did everything else. This left a lot of unemployed birds – they couldn’t all do phone sex – and many of these either opted out of the human race, joining in flocks of like-minded birds, or they stayed in their homes all day, surfed YouTube, and played video games with controllers that had been designed for birds.

It was around that time when scientists made a tremendous breakthrough. Sperm from birds, if collected rather than deposited into another bird’s cloaca, would, after two or three days in a refrigerator, spontaneously transform into human sperm. The human race was saved. Birds still didn’t have any sexual interest in human women, but many birds were definitely interested in the ability to father human children; their bird children were ordinary never-human birds, unable to speak. Fortunately, birds who’d been romantically interested in women back when they were men were often still romantically interested in women, and women found that they were entirely capable of falling in love with birds. For sexual release, birds needed to be with birds and women usually turned either to vibrators or to women (or sometimes nonbinary people with penises, but many of those felt uncomfortable in relationships with average women, feeling that most women saw them as men even though they weren’t), but women could pet birds, and birds could preen women’s hair, and birds and women could still join finances and households and raise children together.

The killing of birds was outlawed almost everywhere, since how could you tell the difference between a never-human bird and a bird who was just tongue-tied? Some argued that the killing of female birds should still be okay, but others pointed out that birds could father never-human female birds, and that even though their children couldn’t talk and had animal intelligence, they still loved them. The poultry industry was devastated. People discovered that lizards tasted just like chicken, and soon breeding lizards for food was a new norm. Unfertilized eggs were still considered edible, so hens were still raised for eggs, but never-human roosters were often dumped in the woods because they couldn’t be killed and they weren’t useful to egg producing farms. They usually ended up feeding some creature who wasn’t a human. Sometimes those creatures were formerly human birds of prey like falcons or eagles, who knew it was illegal to feed on other birds, but knew they’d probably get away with it because no one cared about the never-human roosters except some animal rights activists. Roosters who had been human were not legally allowed near the egg farms; no one wanted them to mate with hens and perhaps produce rooster chicks who’d eventually be abandoned in the woods. It was, however, perfectly legal for a rooster to buy hens and keep them in a coop at his home, as long as he understood that he had the obligation to protect and provide for any offspring from such a union.

Eggs being breakable by rooster beaks, very few roosters actually ended up having to support chicks of their own.

Before long, things had settled down into a new normal. “People” now consisted of human women (and non-binary people, but they were a small enough part of the whole that sadly, people kept forgetting they existed) and talking birds. In addition to having a birthday, boys got to celebrate their bird-day, the anniversary of their bird transformation, and All Birds’ Day – the anniversary of the day the world changed -- was an international holiday. Girls and non-binary children – basically, all the kids who remained human – would study “humanity” between the ages of five and seven in preparation for their “confirmation”, an official recognition of their human status. While humanities, plural, had once meant the study of art, literature, history and languages, “humanity” was a class aimed at children that focused on human history (with rather more emphasis on the contributions of women than their parents remembered from their schooldays), and at teaching skills that were specific to being human, or at least, to not being birds. Throwing balls. Playing musical instruments. Endurance running. In rural areas, shooting a gun. In coastal areas, swimming. This wasn’t technically unique to humans – penguins could swim underwater, and many birds could swim on the surface – but it was true that most birds couldn’t do it. Sometime between a human child’s seventh and eighth birthdays, they would usually have their confirmation ceremony, affirmatively declaring their humanity, and then they’d get to celebrate their “human-day” like the boys got bird-days.

This was done as late as it was because of the trans boys. Most trans boys didn’t change as young as the cis boys, but almost all of them had changed by the age of seven. A rare few wouldn’t change until they were teenagers; this was thought to be the result of the hormones of puberty hitting the brain and finalizing the child’s gender. This didn’t happen the other way around; birds had much shorter childhoods than humans, so little boys would always change into adolescent birds. The lifespan of formerly-human birds seemed to equal to the lifespan of humans, not the species they’d turned into – at least, so far, although at this point no one could yet tell if maybe the parrots might have been shortchanged a bit -- but the boys got through adolescence and into physical adulthood long before their skills at navigating civilization were solid. High speed cameras left focused on apparent boys successfully, once or twice, caught a moment where a child became a bird and then immediately turned back into a human, and after this they were always certain that whatever they were, they weren’t boys, even if they’d seemed to identify as boys previously. So trans girls and nonbinary children with penises were never birds for longer than half a second, because when they changed into birds, the hormones that finalized their gender were already present and said that they weren’t male. However, these cases were very, very rare – in general, a child of seven was either a bird or a human and would remain so for the rest of their lives.

It was somewhat more than two years after the transformation when a new phenomenon was discovered. Fledgling birds would wander into cities or other human settlements, go to sleep on the ground even if they were a bird species that normally roosted up high, and then they’d turn into toddler girls. Invariably, when it was possible to figure out where they’d come from, it turned out they were the result of formerly-human birds mating with the female offspring of other formerly-human birds, so in a sense, these birds were three-quarters human to start with. It didn’t seem to happen to all of them – in a clutch of four eggs, all of which hatched female, maybe one would be strongly attracted to humans, and the ground, and would then turn into a human child. Generally, when birds saw female fledglings on the ground near human habitation, they would bring it to the attention of women, who would often scoop up the bird and keep her in a human crib for a while. If she didn’t change, she’d eventually fly off. These bird-girls didn’t know human speech, obviously, when they first transformed, but they caught up and were usually fully verbal to the expected level for their development after a year or so. They tended to be more independent than human children of the same apparent age, but also very sociable, craving the presence of humans. Some longed to fly and begged their adopted mothers for hang gliders and zip lines; some were very happy with being grounded. Egg-clutch-sisters of the human bird-girls remained non-human birds, unable to talk, but were often far more intelligent than their species would normally suggest, as were their brothers.

Humans worried about what might be happening out in wilderness where humans rarely went, and where a fledgling bird would have a hard time finding a human habitation, but no one ever found a child, alive or dead, in those circumstances. Perhaps whatever compelled the bird-girls to seek the ground and the presence of humans wouldn’t allow them to transform if they couldn’t find those things.

Life returned to normal. Bird boys went to school beside human girls. (And nonbinary children. They weren’t common, but they existed in large enough numbers that there was usually at least one in a normal-sized school at any given time.) Boys who couldn’t find a profession that was open to birds that they would enjoy would graduate and then, often, fly off to spend a few years in semi-wild flocks of formerly human birds. Very few girls ever had trouble finding a job, given that all the jobs that birds could no longer do fell on them. Both were encouraged to get a good education to ensure they could get a job they actually wanted.

It was very useful for humans and birds to live together, if the bird wanted to live as part of civilization and have access to internet, television and refrigerators for their bird food. Birds and humans could pool their income, raise children together, and compensate for each other’s species-based inabilities; among the things birds could do that humans could not were environmentally friendly bug extermination (many birds loved to eat bugs, and with human intelligence, it wasn’t hard for them to seek out and destroy anthills and wasp nests), alerts for potential dangers (bird hearing and eyesight were often better than human, and prey birds, with eyes on either side of their heads, could see a wider range than humans with their stereoscopic vision), and early detection of noxious gas (when a bird in your house complains that he’s dizzy, you grab him and run.) And of course there were many, many things that the women could do with their height, strength and opposable thumbs, that the birds could not. Because of these advantages, and because birds and humans could be romantically attracted to each other, birds and humans began to date, just as they had when the birds were men, but without any expectation that they would have sex (aside from formerly mentioned extremely kinky couples.)

Birds who resented the lack of opposable thumbs or human size learned to pilot robot drones that had such things; humans who resented the lack of flight took up ballooning, small aircraft piloting, hang gliding, bungee jumping, and every other thing that humans had always done to get as close to flight as they could. Oddly enough, almost everyone was happy with what they were. Little boys would eagerly share with their preschool playmates what sort of bird they hoped to be, but whatever they got, they usually found they were satisfied; little girls might initially be upset that their playmates got to be birds and they didn’t, but by a girl’s confirmation she’d been taught all the advantages of being human and usually thought it best that that was what she was. Birds and humans might be somewhat resentful of the other’s abilities, but in the end most of them agreed they wouldn’t really want it any other way.

Aside from the deaf birds, who had to completely reinvent sign language for talons and wings, accommodating disabled humans’ needs became much, much easier in a world where companies and governments had to accommodate birds of various sizes, abilities and needs; at least usually the disabled humans were roughly within the same size and shape range, in comparison to the diversity of birds. Racism remained, but was much harder to act on; while white women often continued to be racist to black women, they couldn’t tell what race a given bird had been unless his accent or his speech patterns gave it away, and birds mostly got over racism because they were too busy being prejudiced against other bird species. The idea of discriminating between humans on grounds so tiny as skin tone and hair consistency became ridiculous when you could be a chicken and have to deal with other roosters ranging from tiny gamecocks to giant Oshamu roosters, not to mention, every other bird in the world that humans had turned into. Religions had turned weird because they all had to take into account the concept of a God who’d turned all the men into birds; birds tended to think that God was probably a bird, and women tended to think that God was probably a human and either female or genderless, so most religions split in at least two, notwithstanding the ones that had multiple schisms because birds of different species all wanted to imagine a God that favored their species. Polytheism came back.

Sometimes there were still wars, flocks of birds viciously pecking and slashing at each other in the air while women on the ground shot at each other, and at birds wearing the enemy colors. It didn’t happen as often as it used to, though. Terrorism continued, and even got worse at times, because security measures designed for humans couldn’t keep birds out, but the disaffected young men who had no jobs and no futures, that had usually supplied the backbone of any terrorist movement, just weren’t there anymore. They were out flying in flocks with their friends, enjoying the freedom of the air and hunting for food. And environmentalism became a deadly serious issue; birds were more likely to be negatively impacted by any drastic change to the environment, so most of them were strongly in favor of reigning in the excesses of capitalism and cleaning up the planet. Who wanted to fly in a cloud of smog?

All in all, it was surprising how much better the world built by birds and humans, working together, was than the world that had been before. It was far from perfect, and there were many new problems that hadn’t previously existed – women’s near-universal sexual frustration, birds being unable to get jobs, the high cost of having children in a world where artificial insemination was the only means by which all but a tiny number of the women could get pregnant, plus the phenomenon of birds having ridiculous prejudices against other birds, as well as many others. But other problems that had plagued humanity for centuries turned out to be very easy to solve once all the men were birds. And so the people of Earth stopped looking for a cure; they were happier in the world where half of them were birds than they had been before, overall.

[raksulovesdogs]

James Cook - Wikipedia

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What island was discovered by James Cook in 1769?

New Zealand belongs to the British Commonwealth.

The time between is the time of immigration and the land wars between the immigrants and the Maoris. The increased demand for pasture and farmland by the immigrant Europeans led to armed conflicts between some Maori tribes and British troops. Each of the immigration flows has left its mark on the country. The Scots founded the first university, the Chinese shaped the horticulture industry and supplied the New Zealand troops with food during World War II. The Polynesian islanders influenced food, lifestyle and art, the Dutch gastronomy, landscape architecture and the fashion industry. Via Ismailow he sent mail to the admiralty. As the southern winter approached, Cook then moved towards the tropics. In August, he stood near the position of Pitcairn indicated by Carteret, but the island was certainly not located there. On the HMS Adventure again twenty cases of scurvy had appeared.

Where was James Cook born?

Maori. They colonized one of the last uninhabited areas on earth: the Maori. After centuries alone in New Zealand, European settlers came and tried to impose their way of life on the Maori. There are many legends surrounding the arrival of the Maori in New Zealand. A comparable vegetation with often evergreen deciduous and coniferous woods and partly tree ferns can be found on the south coast of South Africa, in Tasmania, Chile and along the Pacific coast from California to Canada. In 1840 the Treaty of Waitangi, an agreement between the British Crown and the Maori chiefs, was signed. The document introduced British law to New Zealand and at the same time gave New Zealand's Maori authority and determination over their land and culture. The treaty is now regarded as New Zealand's founding document. The square and buildings where the treaty was signed at that time are now the popular tourist attraction "Waitangi Historic Reserve".

The far north is almost subtropical, in the south there are cold winters.

The South African rugby tour divides the nation.

Only about 12.000 of these mighty marine mammals still live on the small islands off the coast of New Zealand.

But even ice hockey players have tried this form of intimidation, because many an opponent's knees started to shake at the sight of the determined men.

More by chance Tasman discovered an island, later Tasmania, during his expedition in the south.

>/ul> The permitted maximum speed of 100 km/h should not be regarded as a goal, this speed is too high in rain or darkness and for many curves. Speed controls are carried out throughout the country with radar cameras and mobile radar guns. The maximum penalty for speeding is 1'000 NZD. Cook's voyages of discovery have now also attracted international attention. Read more about campervan hire New Zealand here. It was under the control of a minority government

[sodoyouknowbts]

Jungkook x Reader - Sugar and Spice (One)

Genre: Humour, fluff

Author: Pilot

“Keep going, you have plenty of room!”

Your friend shoots you a nervous look and her hands are most definitely not at the twelve and three o’clock positions on the steering wheel as was taught and recommended by the driving instructor six years ago when she first got her license. They’re bunched up at the top of the steering wheel, her knuckles white from gripping so hard.

You suppose you shouldn’t have driven if you were going to end up drinking. Then again, you weren’t exactly expecting your friend Sebastian to order two bottles of soju at your favourite casual Korean restaurant on the outskirts of the central business district. He’d asked the petite waitress with perfect circular frames for two small shot glasses and before you could protest he had cracked open the green cap and poured you drink.

Your mother didn't raise you to waste. “Think of the starving children in Africa!” she had ingrained in your head, her shrill voice never choosing to expand her selection of continents or countries.

And in no way were you about to say no to free alcohol. That shit was expensive and your penchant for cheap five dollar bottles of Sweet Lips Moscato had given you more pimples than it was worth due to the high sugar, low alcohol content.

You tap on the passenger window from the outside and watch as Moxie presses an unsteady finger to the window controls. The window winds down just a fraction and you give her a judging look from under your heavier than usual eyelash extensions. You step off the kerb and bring your lips between the small gap.

“Wind it down more! How can you hear me give instructions if it’s still up?”

“Ugh fine!” She exclaims and presses the button. It sends it upwards, almost catching your hair and you scowl, moving up and back onto the sidewalk.

“Why did you park here?!” she yells out in frustration. The window is down. “And parallel of all places?! Why couldn’t you have been a normal person and parked in a normal parking bay closer to the restaurant?”

“No!” It’s your turn to exclaim. “It’s free parking here! You know how hard it is to find parking for free on a Friday night this side of the city. Besides,” you continue, “I need to equalise the amount of money I spent on that parking ticket I was wrongfully given last week.”

Moxie rolls her eyes and shifts the car into reverse.

“You deserved that parking ticket. You parked in a loading zone,” she mumbles under her breath.

You had to give it to her. She was unfamiliar in your car, not used to the way the car’s nose was shorter than it looked and how its white backside stuck out more than it should.

“Keep going!” you encourage, a little less forceful now.

She moves back slowly, a small acceleration for every step on the break pedal. The rear-lights flicker on and off as she does this and you wonder if the two of you will ever get home.

Finally, the car is at a good enough spot that if she just turned a little more to the right she’d be able to manoeuvre the car out of its precarious position. You tap on the side of the car to suggest to stop and she does. You signal to her to go forward and she does, but again slowly. She’s getting on your nerves and you yell out to her.

“Hurry up!”

Agitated, she throws you a glare over her shoulder and adjusts the rear-view mirror. She turns the steering wheel and the front wheels grate on the road.

“Yep, keep going, going, yep - no stop, stop, STOP!” you yell out. It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion. Literally. Because she’d gone too far.

So far in fact that she had side swiped the base of the car that had parked too close for comfort in front of her. After all, it was this stupid car, that had boxed you pretty much in with little to no wriggle room. Only so many tiny three point turns would be able to get your car and its massive ass out of the small street.

You’re glad that prior to dinner you had decided to take a photograph of both a) the fact that you had parallel parked in such a straight fashion between the faded red Toyota and the pick up truck and sent it as a glorified picture to your friend of your parallel parking skills and b) you’d taken another albeit slightly blurrier photograph of your car stuck between the pick up truck and an expensive looking soccer mum car as photographic evidence of the injustice you’d come back to.

“Sweet Jesus.” Moxie steps out of the car and you run over to the side to inspect the damage. There’s a lot of damage. White paint has transferred from your car to the SUV in front of you and there’s a huge dent on the rear step bumper.

You crouch down, bundling and shoving your skirt between your legs so that the hem doesn’t trail the road.

“Do you reckon they’ll notice?” you ask, your fingers trailing the damage.

“Don’t tell me we’re literally going to hit and run?” the perpetrator asks.

“We’re going to hit and slowly, cautiously drive out of here and down the street, never to be seen again.”

“We can’t just leave it like this!” Moxie interrupts.

“Yeah, we can.”

“Uh, no we can’t. It’s all on camera.”

She extends a delicate arm out and points upwards at a nearby CCTV camera perched on the edge of a lamp post at the edge of the street.

You look upwards at the security camera. You swear it’s recorded footage of you, grey and white and you bet your eyes are little pinpricks of light.

“Motherfu-”

“Should we wait? We should do something.”

“Why? No. Let’s go. They won’t be able to tell who did it.”

“It’s your car! They’ll have your license plate.”

“But you were driving!” you argue back.

“I wouldn’t have had to drive if you hadn’t decided to drink!” she throws her hands up, her voice strained.

“Fine, fine. Look. I’ll leave a note.” you rationalise, throwing your hands up in truce. You quickly stick them into your bag and pull out a small notebook you’d kept on you after work. You flip through a few pages and bust out a pen from the front pocket of your bag, shoving the lid in your mouth as you write. Satisfied with your scrawl, you rip the page out of the book and head over to the front of the SUV.

The front looks incredibly new and you sigh. It’s a Lexus. A fucking Lexus SUV. You didn’t even know that Lexus made soccer mum cars. You can only imagine how expensive it’s going to cost to repair. Your eyes scan the interior. There’s a baby seat in the back and a small little shaking solar pot plant sitting on the dash and a crystal angel hanging off the rear-view mirror. There’s even a box of tissues on the dash in an obscene pink fluffy tissue box cover. You despised people with unnecessary trinkets in their cars.

You pull up a windshield wiper and stick the note underneath it and let the wiper go. It slaps harshly with a crisp sound against the tinted glass and you cap your pen and put your notebook away.

“Okay, happy?” you ask, heading back to your car.

Moxie narrows her eyes at you and walks over to read what you’ve read.

“Don’t park so fucking close to other cars, asshole.” She reads out. “You can’t just leave that!”

“I can. And I have.”

“You need to at least let the insurance cover this, you haven't cancelled it yet have you?”

Begrudgingly you shake your head. No, you hadn’t, but you had been close to it. You suppose it was fortuitous that you had decided not to stick it out for another minute more of the forty-seven minutes you’d spent on hold. Who knows, you might have actually gotten through and cancelled it and then this would have happened and you wouldn’t have been covered.

You pull your pen back out from your bag and add an additional note, holding the scrap paper down on the window.

You add a contact number and your name, in addition to a further instruction.

I’ll only cover half the costs.

Somewhat satisfied, Moxie lets out a “hmph” and gets back into your car. You take another look at the SUV and the dent. You notice that the car even has those horrible “My Family” stickers on the back window. A mother, father and two young children, one boy and one girl. You roll your eyes at their poor choice in car decals and pull your bag off your body and round over to the passenger side of your own car, where you then get in.

Moxie steps on the accelerator and pulls out, but not before you fiddle with the Bluetooth. I’m it by Kota Banks plays as you drive away.

//

“But Jensen, I’m not sure if this is right...” your voice trails off.

“What do you mean, lass?” His Southern accent is smooth and buttery.

You turn away from him and clasp your hands to your heart. “I just don’t know if I can do this. Do you really love me?” You turn back around, the hem of your skirt billowing behind you. You note the yellow grassy knoll you’re standing on, the way his boots crunch on the dry grass as he steps closer to you.

“I’ll leave her. I swear it on my dead father’s name. She doesn’t make me feel the way you make me do. The steadiness in my heart, the reasoning in my head, the fire in my loins. I can’t fight the yearning.”

Jensen Ackles reaches out for your waist and spins you back around to face him. The bodice of your pale cream dress tightens under his large hand and your breath escapes you. Your fingers find themselves trailing across his chest, which is slightly bare in the white cotton shirt he has on. You look down, he’s wearing knee high brown boots, tight cream pants and a brown holster where he keeps his gun.

His fingers push the hair away from your face and he begins to untie the bonnet you’re wearing from the loops around your chin.

Suddenly the sound of a stock Samsung tune interrupts the moment.

“What is that foreign sound?” Jensen looks up, eyes fearful. He holds you close to him with one strong arm and the other is poised above his holster.

“Oh it’s just a phone - someone’s calling.” you respond, your hands now reaching for his face, to avert his attention back to you. He was just about to kiss you and -

“No, what is this noise? This ... ringing?”

“Look it’s nothing, can we get back to what we were doing, my love?”

The ringing sound grows louder and you groan.

You sit upright in bed, awakened from your dream of a 17th Century Jensen Ackles romance and haphazardly shove your hand through your bedsheets in search for the culprit interrupting your sleep. Instead you come across the Little Black Dress Book you had been reading before you’d fallen asleep.

Sighing, you finally grasp your hands around your mobile phone and pull the Hello Kitty eye mask you’re wearing up from over your eyes. It sits awkwardly on your head, scrunching up your hair.

“Hello.” A mellow boyish voice flows through the speaker.

You frown at the unfamiliar voice on the phone and pull it back away from your ear to scan the caller I.D. It was eight in the morning for goodness sake.

Puzzled, you remark a hello back.

“Sorry, who is this and how did you get my number?”

“You should know, I mean you gave me your number.”

You frown and try to rack your brain. Number, number. Oh God, was it the guy you’d made out with at three in the morning after you got kicked out of the gay club in the city? You remembered him giving you his mobile number but you couldn’t recall exchanging yours. He was kind of cute, had a nice little button nose but he was a bit of a sloppy kisser and -

“Hello? Are you there?”

“Sorry. Look buddy. Last weekend was fun, plenty of fun. And you’re a pretty good kisser, I mean you just need to work on lessening your saliva and you’d be a great kisser. But I don’t think I’m keen to get into anything right now and -”

“What?”

“What?”

“It’s me, the asshole whose car you rear-ended.”

You sit up straight in bed, your eye mask slipping down your face. You pull it up off over your head and discard it on your sheets.

“Oh so you’re the asshole who decided to park incredibly close to my car.”

“There was plenty of room for you to have gotten out.”

“No. No there wasn’t. If you’re going to purchase such a large car, learn how to drive it, soccer mum.”

“S-soccer mum?” He scoffs. “I am not a soccer mum. It’s not my car.” He sounds offended.

You remember the poor choice of stickers on the left corner of the rear window of the Lexus. No, there were definitely only four family members.

“If it’s not your car why are you calling me?”

“It’s my sister’s car. I'm looking after it while she’s away.” He lets out an exasperated sigh which reverberates through the phone and you pull a face as the sound gives you unnecessary goosebumps. You poke a finger in your ear and wriggle it around, trying to get rid of the weird after effects of the ASMR you’d be on the receiving end of.

“Fine. Let’s say you’re the brother of the car’s owner. You’ll have to prove it. I’m not going to sort anything out until I have evidence. Who knows, this might be a scam.”

“How could this be a scam?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You could have just seen the note on the windshield and thought great, I can make a bit of quick cash from this poor, unsuspecting woman and -”

“Unsuspecting?”

“- take me for a complete ride and take all my money.”

“Trust me. I have far better things to do with my time than sort out some juvenile hit and run criminal.”

He sounds condescending and rude. You’re not that inclined to sort this out in a hurry.

The asshole lets out yet another sigh and you physically pull your mobile away from his ear before the end of it reaches you and gives you that same unwanted goosebump effect.

You switch it to speaker and ditch your phone on your bed as you get up and begin to stretch your arms above your head. Once done, you take your phone with you to the bathroom, balance it precariously on the side of the bathroom sink and turn the tap on to brush your teeth.

“So?” he says, expectant, as it had been quiet for the last minute as you’d squeezed toothpaste onto your toothbrush.

“So what?” You garble between minty foam.

“How do you want to sort this out? You said on your note to call you. That you’d pay for half the damages. I just want this sorted. I think you should pay for the whole thing but I’m willing to go halves.”

You spit out your toothpaste and turn the tap back on, cupping your hand under the running water to rinse your mouth.

“Oh, how kind of you,” you state dryly as you wipe the corner of your lips.

“Whatever. I think this will be easier to sort out face to face. Where do you live?”

“What? Don’t think I’m about to give some stranger and potential soccer mum murderer my home address.”

“I’m not a soccer mum!”

“So you admit to being a murderer?”

Exasperated, he lets out a groan.

“I wanted to know the suburb so I could suggest somewhere close-ish to meet. Somewhere public where you can’t oh, I don’t know, run me over with your car.”

You roll your eyes and squeeze out a bit of face wash into the palm of your hand. You might as well get this over with. You could hear Moxie’s voice of reason in your head. Maybe you shouldn’t have written ‘asshole’ on the note although he definitely sounded like he was one.

“Fine.” He’d woken you up early, disturbed your hot dream with Jensen Ackles and you still had a few hours to kill before meeting your friend Luna for breakfast. If you’d have to sit through fifteen minutes of car insurance torture with him, you might as well do it over a cup of coffee. “Are you free now?”

“Now?” he asks it as if it’s an inconvenience. He was the one who wanted to sort this out pronto. If he couldn’t make himself available now he’d just have to wait.

“Ok, fine. Now is fine. Give me about half an hour? Text me where you want to meet.”

“See you then.” You hang up on him and begin to lather your face wash into your cheeks.

//

The cafe you suggested was a local favourite. They roasted their own beans, tried their best at being sustainable and sourced their produce from local growers in the community.

If anything, going there made you feel better about the fact that you were still being wasteful, albeit in a more eco-friendly way. You liked to think that the money you spent daily on coffee and food there was going back to the community.

Your altruism was certainly helped along by the fact that the coffee was actually good, although you constantly got a “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed” look from the barista every time you ordered your skinny flat white in a take away coffee cup as opposed to a more environmentally friendly Keep Cup.

You didn’t get why he always gave you that look that weighed momentarily on your guilty conscience, particularly given the cafe continued to stock paper coffee cups anyway. You found it a bit contradictory. Luna liked to reason it to the cafe staff “just trying to do their best”.

She was far too optimistic sometimes.

You’re seated near the window, on a small table for two. Two bright yellow daisies sit in a small thin plastic jar, that looks like it’s an empty pepper grinder. You take a sip of the water while you wait.

He’s late. Or maybe he’s not. Maybe he had already gotten here before you and had taken a seat and you’d taken a separate seat, becoming just two strangers with the same agenda waiting for the other to make the first move.

Your eyes scan the cafe. You spot a young boy with a dog seated at his feet outside. He’s drinking a smoothie as he scrolls through what you presume to be his Instagram feed on his phone. You narrow your eyes. He seems a bit too young to be driving around soccer mum cars. You doubt it’s him and move onto another candidate.

This man looks a bit older, at least in his thirties. He’s sipping a latte as he flips through the morning’s paper. The voice on the phone doesn’t seem to match the man’s face.

You wonder if you should buckle and go to call him when your phone begins to buzz. You quickly look around to see if you can spot someone on their phone. You see someone from the corner of your eye. They have short brown cropped hair and - they turn around. She’s a lady.

Reluctantly you pick up your phone. The caller I.D. has been set to Soccer Mum. You answer.

“Hello?” you narrow your eyes as you look outside the window for any guy that matched the voice. “I’m here, where are you?”

“I’m just rounding the corner now. It’s The Apple Tree right?”

“That’s the name of the cafe I texted.”

“What are you wearing?”

“Whoa, whoa. At least buy a woman a drink first.”

He says nothing and doesn’t even chuckle at your joke.

Sighing, you reply “I’m by the window, seated inside. I’ve got a black beret on.”

“Right,” and he hangs up.

A few moments later a tall man, about your age, walks into the cafe. He’s holding an envelope in one hand and his phone in the other. He’s striking. A round nose and large brown eyes, framed only by a black fringe of hair. He’s wearing jeans and a black hoodie, joggers and a look of contempt on his good-looking face.

He spots you in your beret and strides over to the small table for two. You stand up, outstretching your hand and he takes it with a firm shake.

“Nice to meet you, Soccer Mum.”

“It’s Jungkook, actually.”

To be continued

[beinglibertarian]

The Waste of A Wall

The big, beautiful border wall is always on President Donald Trump’s mind. “Build the wall” is chanted at rallies. The wall was used as an excuse when Trump University lost in court. Now, to force its construction, the Trump administration is using deplorable treatment of illegal immigrants as a bargaining chip. We have been told time and again how Mexico is paying for said wall despite attempts to wrangle it into an immigration bill and to have Congress allocate taxpayer money to fund it. All of this for a $25 billion price tag.

But that pales to the actual waste.

The upfront price tag might be $25 billion, but how much will it cost to maintain this wall? Let’s use a car as an example: you buy a $25,000 car and spend 1% of its value on maintenance; about $250 a year. Some years will be more, some will be less. So a guesstimate would be $250 million a year for upkeep – every year until when exactly?

The Constitution makes no mention of the border, but it does have the 5th and 14th Amendment guaranteeing due process of law before seizure of property. That’s important because the United States doesn’t actually own the border with Mexico. Most of the border is owned by private citizens; some of whom will willingly sell their land to the government, but some will not. So the government will confiscate it by force with eminent domain. Those cases will be adjudicated in court, consuming more time, money and resources. In the end, the government will likely get what it wants through theft from people through tyrannical force.

The ecological impact of the wall is incalculable. Animals migrate across the border. The semi-arid and arid regions of the southern border are delicate ecosystems and, when altered, many species struggle to adapt. How many animals’ extinctions is a wall worth?

Would a wall even work? There is a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, going back thousands of years.

Let’s begin with the most famous wall: the Great Wall of China. It took hundreds of years to construct. Sections were built upon the bones of the dead workers, and it never kept anyone out. Mongul invaders routinely raided China. Increasingly, more resources were needed to maintain and expand it, with little effect upon raids.

How about more modern examples? After World War I, France built the Maginot Line; defense structures along the German border to protect against a future German invasion. Manned by the most experienced French soldiers, bunkers, concrete fortifications, anti-tank obstructions, and machine gun nests were simply bypassed through the Low Countries. After the success of the Maginot Line, the Germans in turn built the impenetrable Atlantic Wall. Then came the Berlin Wall, a symbol of everything wrong with communism, that still could not stop 5,000 people from wanting to be free and risking everything to attain that freedom.

The most modern example is the Israeli West Bank barrier. Israel controls the West Bank where many Palestinians and Israelis live. They built a security wall to control and restrict travel of the people that live there.  Yet there are still terror attacks. Mortars and rockets fly perfectly fine over the wall, terrorists still tunnel beneath it, and there are even attacks using incendiary balloons and kites.

The purpose of the great southern wall is to keep out illegal immigrants and drugs. How successful would it be? Not very. According to Pew Research, 26% of illegal immigrants come from Asia, the Middle East and Africa, Europe and the Caribbean, most of whom simply overstay their visas. Unless we are building a wall 30,000 feet high to keep out airplanes, ¼ of illegal immigration will be unaffected.

Then there is the drug angle. The War on Drugs has failed. After 40 years, $1 trillion, countless lives lost and ruined, a wall will do nothing more than be a speed bump. 40% of illegal drugs do not cross the southern border. The current scourge fentanyl is manufactured in China, and because of its potency, minute amounts can be trafficked through any open door into the country.  A single person can carry a few ounces that would be enough fentanyl to kill dozens. In addition, drug and human traffickers are extremely innovative. They use submarines, tractor trailers, drones, the postal service, cannons, tunnels, speed boats, planes, hidden car compartments, balloons, or they just walk right through one of the open doors. As long as there are doorways of legal immigration, of free travel and exchange of goods, there will be illegal crossings and drugs trafficked.

It wouldn’t be the government without some fearmongering, so what about those terrorists sneaking across the border? Some suspected terrorists have been apprehended, but no one has ever entered this country through the Canadian or Mexican borders and plotted or carried out a terrorist attack. This scare tactic invented by the Bush administration after 9/11 still persists.

Most people can agree that we need border security, but not at a $25 billion dollar price tag for something that is obsolete even before it is built. Republican congressman William Hurd, who represents 820 miles of the Texas-Mexico border, introduced a bill for a “SMART wall” of radar, lidar, drones, cameras, and sensors. All are far cheaper than a physical barrier, cheaply replaceable and cheaply upgradeable. That bill was introduced on 27 January 2017; it has not even gone to committee for consideration or debate. Hurd’s fellow Republicans’ vision has been obscured by the wall.

The border boils down to some basic economics of supply and demand. Illegal immigrants are looking for a supply of jobs, safety, and freedom. Because of quotas and a terrible system of legal immigration there will always be illegal immigrants in America. The harder it is to become a legal citizen, the more illegal immigrants there will be. The demand is unaffected. If the wall was built tomorrow, it would simply shift where illegal immigration comes from. Same with drugs, except we have actually tried to affect both sides of supply and demand with no change in outcome. A hard truth is that people in America demand drugs, and they will get their drugs somehow. Prohibition, or a wall, will not change this, but simply change where it comes from.

We can live in an utterly safe and secure society depending how many freedoms you want to give up. We can cede more money and power to the government, or we can work on real world solutions. Walls, either physical or mental, are an impediment to the free exchange of ideas and to the very idea of free people. By erecting walls, we are not keeping people out – we are forcing ourselves in.

Sources:

https://ift.tt/1osdmV1

https://ift.tt/2tmZbpI

https://ift.tt/1v57dui

https://ift.tt/2ytzWrK

https://ift.tt/2o3eOD3

https://ift.tt/1QVqVKD

https://ift.tt/ZEJ8Bi

https://ift.tt/2tmZe4S

https://ift.tt/2MLyjIV

hurd.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/hurd-introduces-21st-century-smart-wall-legislation

* Michael Telesca is a seasoned salesmen and amateur/hobbyist writer who hates seeing money wasted whether it be personal or tax dollars and people’s freedoms being trampled upon.

The post The Waste of A Wall appeared first on Being Libertarian.

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[julianhuxley]

Appel the pony, with their human, H. Anderson Bryden.

Note: I believe this is the only photo of Bryden to exist online.

Source: H. Anderson Bryden, Gun and Camera in Southern Africa (London: 1893).

[psitrend]

Interview with Les Bird, author of 'A Small Band of Men'

New Post has been published on https://china-underground.com/2020/01/29/interview-with-le-bird-author-of-a-small-band-of-men/

Interview with Les Bird, author of 'A Small Band of Men'

Les Bird, born in 1951 in Staffordshire, England, after leaving school, he traveled extensively in Africa and Australia before joining the Royal Hong Kong Police in 1976.

As a senior officer, he dealt with sensitive issues including refugees fleeing Vietnam and the smuggling of guns, drugs, and people to or from Communist China during the handover of the colony back to China in 1997. Bird is a founder member and chairman of Asia’s Rugby Football Club. He is married with two daughters. He still lives in Hong Kong.

‘A Small Band of Men’ by Les Bird, Earnshaw Books

Was it difficult to go over so many memories?

I was fortunate in that throughout my 20-plus year career I always carried a camera in my kitbag and, when out at sea, and if circumstances permitted, I would take photographs of our work.

I have a collection of about 500 shots, some of which show when I first began as a young inspector in rural Tai O in west Lantau, the decade I spent on the Southern Boundary as hundreds of thousands of refugees came in by boat following the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975.

And then there was my work in the Tolo Channel combating smugglers.

These photographs helped me remember many of the more important moments so that I was able to write in detail about them. But of course, with a memoir, the facts are all important.

Times, dates, places must be exact, so there were also many long hours of research in government archives before I began writing. From an emotional perspective, some memories are more positive than others, the camaraderie and the loyalty of your team and not being in a boring desk job!

But there were also the young mainlanders we picked up, who didn’t make it after being attacked by sharks or barracudas as they tried to swim from the mainland to Hong Kong. And my young officer Billy Lee who got killed outright when a smuggler’s armour-plated speedboat went straight into him. Those kinds of memories aren’t easy. 

How did you get to Asia and how did you join the Hong Kong Police?

After leaving school I traveled extensively in Africa and Australia, before returning to the UK at the age of 23, where I began looking for a career. I joined the Hong Kong Civil Service in London and came out to Hong Kong for the first time in 1976.

After joining the Royal Hong Kong Police I volunteered for the Marine District, so the Marine Police, and was accepted. I spent almost all of my 21-year career in the force out at sea working on board patrol launches.

How was your first impact with Hong Kong?

I fell in love with Hong Kong immediately. I found the city vibrant and exciting. I loved the hustle and bustle of the place. Upon arrival, together with my fellow recruits, I was sent to school to study Cantonese. I think being able to understand and speak the local language helped us integrate into society. Being able to communicate certainly helped us better appreciate our new home.

What was the purpose of your unit?

I was the commander of a specialist marine unit that was initially established to combat illegal immigration from mainland China into Hong Kong. But over time we expanded and developed into the Hong Kong Government’s maritime counter-terrorism unit. This unit was highly trained, and selection to serve in it was tough.

In addition to counter-terrorism work, the unit was also deployed as an anti-crime task force. Between 1989 and 1991, our main duty was combating the cross-border smuggling by high-powered speedboats, known locally as ‘daai feis’. This was an extraordinarily dangerous job in which high-speed chases would take place at sea and at night, in total darkness. There were many instances of collisions, injuries and, sadly, fatalities. 

How were the foreign agents received by the local population?

We were given a mixed reception. A mix of smiles and suspicious stares. But I always felt that as foreigners it was important for us to prove ourselves. Of course, in those days Hong Kong was a British colony, and I am British, so that might sound a bit odd.

But as government servants, it was our duty to serve a population that was 98% Cantonese. I always felt it was our job to integrate into Hong Kong. But, I think back then, in the 1970s and 1980s, most local people were pleased to see us, foreign officers.

The book is filled with fascinating and powerful stories spanning twenty years. What were the events that most struck you?

The stories involving people in distress never leave you. Early on in my career, I was deployed along the sea border with China in order to catch those attempting to enter Hong Kong illegally. Most were very young people, the same age as myself, who wanted to come to Hong Kong to start a new life, just as I had done a few years before. It was an odd sensation having to send them back to China. Also, for most of my career, there were the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese boat-people coming to Hong Kong in the hope of starting a new life.

After the war in Vietnam ended in 1975, Hong Kong was flooded with refugees arriving by sea. Many were in very poor physical and mental state. Being the first people they saw after leaving Vietnam our duty, in effect, became more of that of welfare officers than police officers. There were lots of medical requirements. Many of those arriving in Hong Kong after months at sea in small wooden vessels were malnourished and dehydrated. And, in 1979, they were arriving in their thousands, every single day. 

How has Hong Kong changed over the years, what has changed on 1st July 1997?

For me, it has changed a great deal. During my first three-year tour of duty, I lived out at Tai O, the westernmost village on the Lantau coast, overlooking the Pearl River estuary. I lived at the old police station that, today, is a luxury boutique hotel. It was a very rural existence back then. There was also the isolation. There was no road between the police station and the village, and the road between Tai O and Mui Wo, in the west, was just a dirt track. We had just one telephone at the station, but that didn’t work if it was raining.

Apart from the Italian Catholic priest, I was the only gwailo living in the western half of Lantau. Of course, the 1980s were the boom years for Hong Kong in terms of finance. This was the decade when Hong Kong cemented its position in the world as a major financial hub.

Thinking back to my days in the 1970s walking through Tai O village, and then comparing it to walking through Central District today – it’s like a different world. But to answer your 1997 question. Life for me changed a great deal that year. I left the Royal Hong Kong Police, Marine District, on 30 June 1997 and moved into the private security business world. So, on the day of the handover, I became a civilian.

Did your former colleagues read the book?

Yes, in Hong Kong I have received a lot of comments and feedback from former colleagues who have read the book. I am happy to say that most of the feedback has been very good indeed, with many writing to thank me for reminding them of the days when they too served in the Marine District.

Also, as my book will be published in the UK at the end of February, I am hoping for more of the same comments from the former officers that retired to the UK after their service ended. But what is interesting for me, is that most comments have come from people who were not living in Hong Kong in those days. I guess my book also serves as something of a historical record of the final 20 years of British Hong Kong.

Photos courtesy of Les Bird Thanks to Earnshaw Books

#Autobiography, #HongKong, #HongKongOldImages

[kilojulietsierra]

Better The Devil You Know - Chapter Three (Ulysses Klaue/OC)

Read Chapter One Here - Read Chapter Two Here

Chapter Three - July 17, 2014 Outside Manguzi, South Africa

“Who was that boss?”

Ulysses Klaue smiled like the madman he was, ”An old girlfriend.” Still with the smile plastered on his face he turned back to the two men on their knees. “Yes, she wants to get together tomorrow, when she gets into town. Which is good news for you two.” He pointed his own pistol at the men who each had AK-47s pointed at the backs of their heads.

The terrified pair shared a truly lost look, faces sweaty and hands still bound behind their backs.

“Yes! I’m in a very much better mood now and so, I will let you go. This one time with a warning.”

“Really? Are you serious?”

“He questions me? I spare your life and you question me? Yes really, go now, get in your car and leave!” He waves to the mercenaries behind them, “Cut them loose, let them go.”

After a moments pause the two, previously doomed, men scrambled to their feet and fled to their car parked across the dirt lot. The car spun its tires and threw gravel as they sped away.

Klaue gave the order to his men to load up and as they headed back to their own vehicles Ulysses holstered his weapon and pulled out a small transmitter, the button of which detonated the fleeing vehicle, killing its two occupants in a fiery explosion. He could not keep the smile off his face if he tried, “I am having such a great day! Let’s go!”

~~~~~~~

July 18, 2014 Johannesburg, South Africa

It was early when the town car arrived for him, before seven. His eyes were still blurry from lack of sleep but Marcel could not help but stare, wide eyed, at the mansions they passed on their way to meet this Miss Thorne. Nearly half an hour later the driver pulled up to a large estate with a gated entrance and the knots started to form in his stomach.

He had assumed Miss Thorne had money, anyone that made a living in the oil business generally lived a social class or two above himself, but her property seemed like something out of a Hollywood movie.

The gate was set off the road, in a white stone wall that blocked the view of the estate from passers by. What the wall didn’t conceal the vast and varying trees and gardens did. The car drove down a long, paved driveway and up to the front door of the first, real mansion he had ever seen up close. The driver opened his door for him and he was immediately greeted by a young girl, no more than twelve or thirteen years old.

She was bright and cheery with a slim face and a close cropped sort of hair cut. She bobbed her head once, “Good morning Mr. Eler. Missy Savannah asks you wait on the veranda. This way.” She smiled and nodded several more times before leading him through the front door.

The first thing he saw upon entering the house was the very large and stoic man that held the door open for them. The second was a baby grand piano set on a zebra skin rug with a wall of windows as a backdrop. He didn’t have time to look around much, though he tried. The walls were covered in paintings and tapestries, with hides and trophy mounts scattered among them.  The aroma of incense and oils filled his nose as the house girl shuttled him through the foyer, past a formal dining room, then the casual dining area off the kitchen where the incense were overpowered by a dark and bitter smelling coffee, then a large sitting room furnished in grays, whites and jewel tones, all before finally coming to an outdoor dining area.

When the girl pulled out a chair for him he had to force his eyes away from the expansive backyard. Surrounded on three sides by more trees and gardens of flowers and vegetables. Grassy, amphitheater steps to his left led to a lower part of the yard, which held a narrow lap pool with precisely placed fountains all along the waters edge to create a mesmerizing pattern in the ripples on the pools surface. He barely got out a, “Thank you.” before the girl had disappeared back into the house. So engrossed he had become in taking in the immaculate landscaping and architecture of the home, he nearly jumped when another woman came to the patio with a tray.

“Coffee and sweet tea.” This woman was older, her skin dark and her hair a seemingly impossible nest of braids. “Which would you like?”

“Oh, uh coffee is fine. Thank you.” He smiled graciously as he accepted the cup and nearly choked at the bitterness of his first sip.

The woman laughed and set two small jars on the table in front of him, “Sugar. Cream.” She pointed to each one in turn and then picked up her tray to leave.

Marcel took a spoonful of sugar and then a second. He tried another sip and still made a face.

“Sorry, I take it a little strong. Even by local standards.”

He jumped to his feet at the sound of another woman behind him, this one with a heavy southern accent.  Marcel turned, coffee cup still in hand, to find a beautiful, young woman chuckling at him and taking a cup of coffee for herself.  

She said something to the woman, in a language Marcus didn’t understand, with a smile and a wink before she turned to face him. “Didn’t mean to startle you. I’m Savannah Thorne.” She stepped forward and extended a hand, “Thank you so much for coming, I know it was… inconvenient.”

“No, no.” He set his coffee cup down and shook her hand in both of his. “I’m thrilled at the opportunity, really, truly I am. No, inconvenience at all. Honestly, it’s worth it enough just to see this.” He released her hand to gesture to the estate.”You have a remarkable home, Miss Thorne.”

Miss Thorne rewarded him with a brilliant smile, “Happy to hear it, and thank you. I am quite proud of it myself.” She took a sip of the coffee and hummed in appreciation. “It belonged to my mothers family, but I’ve added and updated here and there. If you’d like we could walk and discuss our business rather than sit? They’re working some of the polo ponies down by the barn, if you’d like to see.”

Why he was surprised there was a stable he didn’t know, but he nodded. “Sounds like a great idea.”

“Perfect.” She stepped back into the wide open sitting room and called into the kitchen, “Isisa!” She said something else in the language and then waved as she joined him back on the patio. “Come on, let’s talk about these great ideas of yours that I’ve heard so much about.”

~~~~~~~

Klaue glanced around him as he and his men exited their two vehicles. Before they could knock, the heavy wooden door swung open to reveal a tall, heavyset fellow that seemed to be a part of Savannahs security team. He said nothing, only led them into the foyer and to the sitting room immediately to their right. Here another guard stood with his back to the patio doors, “You will wait here.”

The guard that had opened the door left them to make themselves comfortable. The cook brought in a tray of the southern style sweet tea Savannah was so fond of and the men helped themselves. Ulysses pulled his sunglasses off to hang in the front of his shirt and wandered the sitting room looking at the decor, poking and prodding pieces as he went. He stopped in a front of a Cape Buffalo trophy mounted to the wall, “Oh, I remember this one.”

He only had to wait a few more minutes before the guard returned. “You come. The rest of you stay.” The guard jerked his head down the hall as a signal for klaue to follow.

They passed through the relatively empty house and out to the back patio. His eyes had been focused on picking out guards from regular staff and locating security cameras. Which is why he missed a beat when he first saw her walking towards them. He only wasted five seconds determining the man walking with her was not a threat in any way and then focused all his attention on Annah.

Her hair was lighter, sun bleached, not dyed. She had it french braided back into a high ponytail that bounced and swayed as she walked. Her clothes were simple; a plain white tank top that fit her perfectly and a bright, printed skirt that just barely brushed the ground with each stride. The morning sun glinted off the necklaces that bounced against her chest as well as the rings on her fingers and her toes.

Ulysses couldn’t stop himself from smiling at the sight of her strolling her estate barefoot and adorned like some sort of gypsy goddess.

When she noticed him she did not smile. Instead she placed a hand on her walking companions shoulder and seemed to tell him to wait there. Savannah through a sideways glance towards Klaue as she ducked into the house only to return quickly with one of the young house girls. The girl took the man into the house and then Savannah approached them, “Pat him down.”

Klaue chuckled as he spread his arms out wide and stood still to be searched.

The guard pulled the pistol from his back and held it up for her to see, “That’s it.”

Savannah nodded, but before she could speak Ulysses took the opportunity, “I’d just like to point out that the last time you and I were together you were the one that pulled a gun on me.”

She scowled and sarcastically hiked her skirt up high. High enough to show the spandex shorts she wore underneath. No thigh holster. Then she dropped the hem back to the ground before she lifted the bottom of her shirt and turned a circle to show she had nothing in her waistband. “Feel better?”

“Much.” Ulysses grinned as he watched the guard walk off with his handgun and leave the two of them alone in the backyard.

For a moment they simply stared, sized each other up after a few years of absence. “Rollin’ a little deep for a meeting with an old friend?” She gestured to the lower yard and started in that direction.

He assumed to avoid the ears of her saff and both of the security as much as possible. “Like I said, last time…” He let the rest of the sentence fall off as they started down the grass covered steps. “So what’s the matter? Can’t find anyone that can satisfy you needs like I can?” Klaue smiled and stopped three steps from the bottom, forcing her to look up at him.

It only worked for a second as she turned and continued down the stairs. She shook the bead bracelets on her left wrist back into place, “Sure, let's go with that.” Savannah spared him a second glance before moving to sit in one of the adirondack chairs beside the pool.

The smile on his face grew the second he saw that familiar tell, an unconscious fidget, barely a tick, but it told him plenty. After he joined her by the pool he slouched back in his own chair and crossed his outstretched legs at the ankles. “Tell me what you need Love.”

It seemed to be physically painful for her but she looked his way and started right into the business at hand, “A dozen cases of M4s, four Barrett 50 cals, all with thermal scopes, a case of SAWs…”She trailed off, took a breath before she continued, “Two dozen extra men, body armor, NVD goggles and sights. Ammo for everything, of course, and I want a Predator. Fully loaded.”

What started as a cheeky smile nearly doubled in size as Ulysses sat up a little straighter in his chair, elbows braced on his knees. “Oh, I love it when you talk dirty.” He shifted his seat slightly to face her better, “But, here’s what I am wondering. Any arms dealer can get you this stuff. Why call me? Not that i’m not happy you did!”

Savannah sat on the edge of her chair, knees crossed, the bridge of her nose pinched between her thumb and forefinger. “There’s one more thing I need.”

His interest peaked Klaue ducked his head, trying to catch her gaze, “Yes?”

After another deep breath she released the pressure point on her nose and faced him, “Vibranium… and someone that knows how to work with it.”

~~~~~~~

Savannah regretted everything as soon as she saw that stupid look on his face. This was a huge mistake, but it was her only choice and far too late to back out now. “Go ahead, hit me with it. What’s this gonna cost me?”

He would not quit smiling and he began rubbing his palms together. He didn’t answer right away, seemed to enjoy her dread and discomfort. “The guns,  I have on hand, the men and the gear, I’ll give you for.. Ten percent off street value.” He ignored the shock that crossed her face and continued, “The drone will take some time and it’ll be pricey but I can get it.”

“And the vibranium?” Her eyes were dark and skeptical as she squinted at him, trying to get a read on what game he was playing.

It only made him smile more, “A favor for a favor.”

That had her up and out of her chair, “Oh no, not a chance in hell. Name a price, give me a number and I’ll send you home with it in cash. But, no favors.”

Klaue stayed seated, “No favor? No vibranium. Which is worse? Losing half of your oil wells or doing a favor for, like you said, an old friend.”

Savannah started to pace, her teeth gritted together and she began to regret her poor choice of words earlier. Fuck him and that look on his face. She ignored how he knew the specifics of her predicament and focused on why it pleased him so much. “What’s the favor?”

He stood up, “Do we have a deal?” He took a step towards her, smiled when she stood taller rather than retreat even an inch, extended his hand to shake.

She ignored his hand, choosing instead to stare him down eye to eye, “What’s the favor?”

With a chuckle he let his hand drop but he kept a hold of her gaze. “I have a potential… associate, in town this weekend. He’s skittish, I need help to warm him up and calm his nerves. Something you used to be very good at.”

When he winked Savannah fought the urge to shove him in the pool and hold his head under. But, as loathe as she was to admit it, she needed him and his stupid vibranium. “I want my guns and my men on a plane to Libya by Friday. Drone included.” She was not going to cave in so easy.

Not that that mattered. He had already won and they both knew it. His face said as much. He held his hand out again, closer to her this time, “Deal.”

“Lord give me strength.” She took his hand in hers and gave it a squeeze, Harder than necessary, the way her Daddy had taught her. “Deal.”

Ulysses kept her hand and raised it to his lips so he could drop a kiss on her knuckles, “Beautiful.” When she scowled and jerked her hand away he could only laugh.

~~~~~~

Read Chapter Four Here

[the-firebird69]

Several shatteredome are ready to fall there's the one in

Africa it's almost empty

South America has two that are almost empty

Florida has three that are almost empty

Pennsylvania has one that is pretty much empty we can't take it over because it's in the middle of their territory which is true nothing about occupying it though

The two in Russia are hours and we're already emptied

There's several more that are emptying they're small one of them is

Texas it's a 500 but it's not as large as the others but it will be it's almost empty tonight it will be and will take it and I'm going to build it and we might make it a bit harder and thicker and we were thinking of doing that and he thinks it's good too so we shall put a bunch of guns in it

The agobe desert is ours it has been since yesterday but it's fully empty now meaning we cleared it out too and we're building now it should be reinforced by tonight and cured by tomorrow once again we're putting out the request anybody else to go please go there

Mac daddy puts in a request trying to make it happen so see if one of the crack can look like him when he has to go to the bathroom he makes noise or moves around and he makes it worse when he's trying to hold it

The civil war they're smaller but really that's what's going on the Atlantic to and Pacific to are emptying all are about half except the Southern Pacific which is less than half not much less

The blockade is falling in several areas the South Pacific there's no surprise anyone the North Pacific it is holding but falling in several small holes the area around Hawaii is almost free of the blockade and the Atlantic it's breaking surprisingly at Florida he's not surprised the golf doesn't have a blockade anymore and the north is the blockade is holding that's where the blockade is now the forgieners are moving out

Gswb will be on the train in an hour and heading north and he'll probably hear about it and they'll be shut down here getting ready to

Camera and camera are still under there as well as Godzillas please help me so you're ill and got a swipe for sending people and Poseidon and got his wife and that is your real and goddess wife those two should be out fairly soon the other two in a couple weeks it's not that hard to imagine they're pretty big though

Trump begins his journey and it will end badly in The matrix and much worse than Ghost Rider as well as friend cork no his friend is the same as he is was born in a different time

The Jesus Christ parameter April 15 roughly Good Friday and through Sunday we're prepping for every time we go to prep for it we run into something it's becoming bigger and bigger and bigger this year and we are taking down tons and tons of satanists who the tune of one to two trillion trillion for this event alone we may end up destroying Washington DC they were prepping to do that this run was ghwb up through the middle may pull out 95% of them or more they're just squatting and sitting there and we will probably move to dee soon after and he's saying to prep her he's tired of waiting for a lawsuit it's not going on much at all

We prepared now this is the biggest problem we've come up to in a long time is Easter and it's getting worse and worse every year and we're going to prepare everything we can we're making huge weapons and gigantic ones that are working now he told us to go ahead with 500s because they're quicker and thousands and we are and they kick ass we need that very badly and it said to do it before and it hesitated he said we have to do one big one and a bunch of them and that's how it goes for planet and a bunch of them will make it possible to do it more and more big ones so today I put the order in and we're getting three or four of them up tonight tons and tons of them will be ready by tomorrow that's the best thing is ever decided para has been doing it and got it approved I saw it and they said that's what we should do and he's behind it and it is like his patchwork and it's like going after Corky also it's a weird things work with him so you can make things and dents in them and get away with it that's a way to raise the army we should start some patchwork in an areas that are problematic with ours Jesus Christ time is the best time to use as a excuse we shall get it going to a meeting now and thank you for your input Hera and Zeus

Thor Freya

We meet shortly and we know he was thinking and remind him later he needs to eat dessert and heal up

Olympus

And thank you Zeus for your help this is amazing what an idea it works so well the small ones first they love it too all the captains are younger and they're helping their father and mother is going up that way

Hera

You're beautiful Hera

Zues

I know you are too

Hera

Aw aw

Freya

Just saying that's not what I said to me she said all aw only

Thor but longer but he's tired

[noellevivante]

Solidarity in a Time of Crisis

I wrote this on Wednesday, August 20, 2014.

Recently, we’ve had national discussions about: gun control, healthcare, poverty. The list goes on. These conversations inevitably get sidetracked and fade from the media, though the issues continue to burn in our minds. The economy continues to limp along. Legislators strike down labor laws. We are increasingly entwined in the lives and struggles of those across the world.

This barrage of ills, combined with a bombardment of local and international horrors, fosters apathy. Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Pakistan, Russia, and West Africa have been in the news recently because of overwhelming illness and violence, and we all know the media only shows a fraction of suffering and injustice in the world. Contradictory reports convey situations as muddled, murky, and convoluted.

But what do we actually know about Ferguson? A white policeman shot an unarmed young black man six times. The police responded by leaving the body in the sun and preparing for protests with military equipment. They shot rubber bullets at crowds and teargassed people into their homes. They arrested, threatened, and assaulted civilians, including journalists. They pointed sniper rifles at innocent protestors. The governor declared a curfew on the town. The police refused to release information about the alleged perpetrator until they simultaneously released a video of the victim supposedly robbing a store.

The paragraph is in past tense, but it’s not over.

Have there been riots and looting? Yes. Has there been violence? Yes. Have there been shootings? Yes.

Let’s look at the Civil Rights Movement during its most famous years. It was peaceful. It was simple. It was quickly accepted by citizens across the country. Right? Wrong. It was divided and dangerous. It was organized and strategic. It was considered a distraction from more important evils.

Right now, conservatives are criticizing protestors by pointing out the evils of ISIS, as though fighting against systematic racism and violence supports a vicious, self-declared caliphate. Back in the ‘60s, civil rights activists were condemned for causing trouble when the Soviet Union was oppressing its civilians and threatening world annihilation.

The language then and now is very similar. “Don’t they have anything better to do? Why can’t they control themselves and let the system work itself out? They only care about blacks. What about the rest of the world? There are two, equally valid sides to every issue. Why are they instigating violence?”

Even though the vast majority of protestors have been peaceful (some are actively preventing looting), the police blame their own brutal reaction on the handful of violent civilians. “Why can’t they just be peaceful and remember Martin Luther King, Jr.’s message?”

Here’s why: the only reason why so many (but not nearly all) civil rights activists in the 1960s were nonviolent was the highly concerted effort to train protestors to react to abuse with nonviolent resistance. They provided this training because they knew the natural human reaction to threats is fight or flight.

The police in Ferguson have devolved into “us versus them” mentality, which is why they don’t even have the judgment to make themselves look good on camera. Empathy and compromise become less likely. Some of them are having the time of their lives, finding thrill in fighting “the enemy” every night. Some are scared, because large groups of angry people, especially when they have just cause, are scary. White Southerners who beat peaceful activists in the sixties often described themselves as being driven by fear to “defend” their community.

The Ferguson police are taking out the media in a variety of ways. In many Southern attacks on activists, reporters were the first to be taken out. Cameras were smashed, journalists were beaten. It makes sense to remove the means of recording a serious crime. Thankfully, civilians now have ways to record and quickly disseminate information.

Racism today is perceived as being more subtle than it was in the past. Segregation and voter disenfranchisement still exist, but the solutions are less clear-cut. People dismiss this epidemic of police violence due to it being directed at “criminals.” The prison-industrial complex is so ingrained in American culture, many hardly think twice about it.

This is how discrimination happens. This is how inequality exists. This is how atrocities occur. They become normal and, thus, invisible. Those who experience it every day are told to shut up and stop exaggerating.

But the world was watching when white Southerners beat black activists fifty years ago, and the world is watching now. And they are outraged. Recordings of police brutality have been popping up for years. A few simple laws could significantly reduce police violence.

In 1961, the nation’s youth poured into Mississippi and Alabama to protest segregated bus stations. That sense of solidarity happened then, and it can happen now. In spite of widespread prejudice and racism today, past activists DID make a difference. This new world includes the internet, a tool for coordinating, fundraising, and gathering information, as we have seen across the planet.

We can learn from past and present movements. Gazans, also trapped in their homes, instructed Ferguson residents on how to handle tear gas. The most successful civil rights groups were and are tactical. Working together can be as challenging as facing down oppressors. Something Occupy Wall Street severely lacked was focus, an essential element in affecting change.

Diane Nash, a leader of the 1960s Movement, pointed out that metal is most malleable when hot and least manipulable when cool.

And right now, it is hot.

[bountyofbeads]

The Global Machine Behind the Rise of Far-Right Nationalism https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/10/world/europe/sweden-immigration-nationalism.html

The Global Machine Behind the Rise of Far-Right Nationalism

(Russia’s hand in all of this is largely hidden from view. But fingerprints abound.)

Sweden was long seen as a progressive utopia. Then came waves of immigrants — and the forces of populism at home and abroad.

By Jo Becker | Published Aug. 10, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 11, 2019 8:38 PM ET |

RINKEBY, Sweden — Johnny Castillo, a Peruvian-born neighborhood watchman in this district of Stockholm, still puzzles over the strange events that two years ago turned the central square of this predominantly immigrant community into a symbol of multiculturalism run amok.

First came a now-infamous comment by President Trump, suggesting that Sweden’s history of welcoming refugees was at the root of a violent attack in Rinkeby the previous evening, even though nothing had actually happened.

“You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden! Who would believe this? Sweden!” Mr. Trump told supporters at a rally on Feb. 18, 2017. “They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.”

The president’s source: Fox News, which had excerpted a short film promoting a dystopian view of Sweden as a victim of its asylum policies, with immigrant neighborhoods crime-ridden “no-go zones.”

But two days later, as Swedish officials were heaping bemused derision on Mr. Trump, something did in fact happen in Rinkeby: Several dozen masked men attacked police officers making a drug arrest, throwing rocks and setting cars ablaze.

And it was right around that time, according to Mr. Castillo and four other witnesses, that Russian television crews showed up, offering to pay immigrant youths “to make trouble” in front of the cameras.

“They wanted to show that President Trump is right about Sweden,” Mr. Castillo said, “that people coming to Europe are terrorists and want to disturb society.”

That nativist rhetoric — that immigrants are invading the homeland — has gained ever-greater traction, and political acceptance, across the West amid dislocations wrought by vast waves of migration from the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. In its most extreme form, it is echoed in the online manifesto of the man accused of gunning down 22 people last weekend in El Paso.

In the nationalists’ message-making, Sweden has become a prime cautionary tale, dripping with schadenfreude. What is even more striking is how many people in Sweden — progressive, egalitarian, welcoming Sweden — seem to be warming to the nationalists’ view: that immigration has brought crime, chaos and a fraying of the cherished social safety net, not to mention a withering away of national culture and tradition.

Fueled by an immigration backlash — Sweden has accepted more refugees per capita than any other European country — right-wing populism has taken hold, reflected most prominently in the steady ascent of a political party with neo-Nazi roots, the Sweden Democrats. In elections last year, they captured nearly 18 percent of the vote.

To dig beneath the surface of what is happening in Sweden, though, is to uncover the workings of an international disinformation machine, devoted to the cultivation, provocation and amplication of far-right, anti-immigrant passions and political forces. Indeed, that machine, most influentially rooted in Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia and the American far right, underscores a fundamental irony of this political moment: the globalization of nationalism.

The central target of these manipulations from abroad — and the chief instrument of the Swedish nationalists’ success — is the country’s increasingly popular, and virulently anti-immigrant, digital echo chamber.

A New York Times examination of its content, personnel and traffic patterns illustrates how foreign state and nonstate actors have helped to give viral momentum to a clutch of Swedish far-right web sites.

Russian and Western entities that traffic in disinformation, including an Islamaphobic think tank whose former chairman is now Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, have been crucial linkers to the Swedish sites, helping to spread their message to susceptible Swedes.

At least six Swedish sites have received financial backing through advertising revenue from a Russian- and Ukrainian-owned auto-parts business based in Berlin, whose online sales network oddly contains buried digital links to a range of far-right and other socially divisive content.

Writers and editors for the Swedish sites have been befriended by the Kremlin. And in one strange Rube Goldbergian chain of events, a frequent German contributor to one Swedish site has been implicated in the financing of a bombing in Ukraine, in a suspected Russian false-flag operation.

The distorted view of Sweden pumped out by this disinformation machine has been used, in turn, by anti-immigrant parties in Britain, Germany, Italy and elsewhere to stir xenophobia and gin up votes, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based nonprofit that tracks the online spread of far-right extremism.

“I’d put Sweden up there with the anti-Soros campaign,” said Chloe Colliver, a researcher for the institute, referring to anti-Semitic attacks on George Soros, the billionaire benefactor of liberal causes. “It’s become an enduring centerpiece of the far-right conversation.”

From Margins to Mainstream Mattias Karlsson, the Sweden Democrats’ international secretary and chief ideologist, likes to tell the story of how he became a soldier in what he has described as the “existential battle for our culture’s and our nation’s survival.”

It was the mid-1990s and Mr. Karlsson, now 41, was attending high school in the southern city of Vaxjo. Sweden was accepting a record number of refugees from the Balkan War and other conflicts. In Vaxjo and elsewhere, young immigrant men began joining brawling “kicker” gangs, radicalizing Mr. Karlsson and drawing him toward the local skinhead scene.

He took to wearing a leather jacket with a Swedish flag on the back and was soon introduced to Mats Nilsson, a Swedish National Socialist leader who gave him a copy of “Mein Kampf.” They began to debate: Mr. Nilsson argued that the goal should be ethnic purity — the preservation of “Swedish DNA.” Mr. Karlsson countered that the focus should be on preserving national culture and identity. That, he said, was when Mr. Nilsson conferred on him an epithet of insufficient commitment to the cause — “meatball patriot,” meaning that “I thought that every African or Arab can come to this country as long as they assimilate and eat meatballs.”

It is an account that offers the most benign explanation for an odious association. Whatever the case, in 1999, he joined the Sweden Democrats, a party undeniably rooted in Sweden’s neo-Nazi movement. Indeed, scholars of the far right say that is what sets it apart from most anti-immigration parties in Europe and makes its rise from marginalized to mainstream so remarkable.

The party was founded in 1988 by several Nazi ideologues, including a former member of the Waffen SS. Early on, it sought international alliances with the likes of the White Aryan Resistance, a white supremacist group founded by a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Some Sweden Democrats wore Nazi uniforms to party functions. Its platform included the forced repatriation of all immigrants since 1970.

That was not, however, a winning formula in a country where social democrats have dominated every election for more than a century.

While attending university, Mr. Karlsson had met Jimmie Akesson, who took over the Sweden Democrats’ youth party in 2000 and became party leader in 2005. Mr. Akesson was outspoken in his belief that Muslim refugees posed “the biggest foreign threat to Sweden since the Second World War.” But to make that case effectively, he and Mr. Karlsson agreed, they needed to remake the party’s image.

“We needed to really address our past,” Mr. Karlsson said.

They purged neo-Nazis who had been exposed by the press. They announced a “zero tolerance” policy toward extreme xenophobia and racism, emphasized their youthful leadership and urged members to dress presentably. And while immigration remained at the center of their platform, they moderated the way they talked about it.

No longer was the issue framed in terms of keeping certain ethnic groups out, or deporting those already in. Rather it was about how unassimilated migrants were eviscerating not just the nation’s cultural identity but also the social-welfare heart of the Swedish state.

Under the grand, egalitarian idea of the “folkhemmet,” or people’s home, in which the country is a family and its citizens take care of one another, Swedes pay among the world’s highest effective tax rates, in return for benefits like child care, health care, free college education and assistance when they grow old.

The safety net has come under strain for a host of economic and demographic reasons, many of which predate the latest refugee flood. But in the Sweden Democrats’ telling, the blame lies squarely at the feet of the foreigners, many of whom lag far behind native Swedes in education and economic accomplishment. One party advertisement depicted a white woman trying to collect benefits while being pursued by niqab-wearing immigrants pushing strollers.

To what extent the party’s makeover is just window dressing is an open question.

The doubts were highlighted in what became known as “the Iron Pipe Scandal” in 2012. Leaked video showed two Sweden Democrat MPs and the party’s candidate for attorney general hurling racist slurs at a comedian of Kurdish descent, then threatening a drunken witness with iron pipes.

Under Mr. Akesson and Mr. Karlsson, the party has hosted the American white nationalist Richard Spencer. High-ranking party officials have bounced between Sweden and Hungary, ruled by the authoritarian nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Mr. Karlsson himself has come under fire for calling out an extremist site as neo-fascist while using an alias to recommend posts as “worth reading” to party members.

“There’s a public face and the face they wear behind closed doors,” said Daniel Poohl, who heads Expo, a Stockholm-based foundation that tracks far-right extremism.

Still, even detractors admit that strategy has worked. In 2010, the Sweden Democrats captured 5.7 percent of the vote, enough for the party, and Mr. Karlsson, to enter Parliament for the first time. That share has steadily increased along with the growing population of refugees. (Today, roughly 20 percent of Sweden’s population is foreign born.)

At its peak in 2015, Sweden accepted 163,000 asylum-seekers, mostly from Afghanistan, Somalia and Syria. Though border controls and tighter rules have eased that flow, Ardalan Shekarabi, the country’s public administration minister, acknowledged that his government had been slow to act.

Mr. Shekarabi, an immigrant from Iran, said the sheer number of refugees had overwhelmed the government’s efforts to integrate them.

“I absolutely don’t think that the majority of Swedes have racist or xenophobic views, but they had questions about this migration policy and the other parties didn’t have any answers,” he said. “Which is one of the reasons why Sweden Democrats had a case.”

A Right-Wing Echo Chamber

As the 2018 elections approached, Swedish counterintelligence was on high alert for foreign interference. Russia, the hulking neighbor to the east, was seen as the main threat. After the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016 American election, Sweden had reason to fear it could be next.

“Russia’s goal is to weaken Western countries by polarizing the debate,” said Daniel Stenling, the Swedish Security Service’s counterintelligence chief. “For the last five years, we have seen more and more aggressive intelligence work against our nation.”

But as it turned out, there was no hacking and dumping of internal campaign documents, as in the United States. Nor was there an overt effort to swing the election to the Sweden Democrats, perhaps because the party, in keeping with Swedish popular opinion, has become more critical of the Kremlin than some of its far-right European counterparts.

Instead, security officials say, the foreign influence campaign took a different, more subtle form: helping nurture Sweden’s rapidly evolving far-right digital ecosystem.

For years, the Sweden Democrats had struggled to make their case to the public. Many mainstream media outlets declined their ads. The party even had difficulty getting the postal service to deliver its mailers. So it built a network of closed Facebook pages whose reach would ultimately exceed that of any other party.

But to thrive in the viral sense, that network required fresh, alluring content. It drew on a clutch of relatively new websites whose popularity was exploding.

Members of the Sweden Democrats helped create two of them: Samhallsnytt (News in Society) and Nyheter Idag (News Today). By the 2018 election year, they, along with a site called Fria Tider (Free Times), were among Sweden’s 10 most shared news sites.

These sites each reached one-tenth of all Swedish internet users a week and, according to an Oxford University study, accounted for 85 percent of the election-related “junk news” — deemed deliberately distorted or misleading — shared online. There were other sites, too, all injecting anti-immigrant and Islamophobic messaging into the Swedish political bloodstream.

“Immigration Behind Shortage of Drinking Water in Northern Stockholm,” read one recent headline. “Refugee Minor Raped Host Family’s Daughter; Thought It Was Legal,” read another. “Performed Female Genital Mutilation on Her Children — Given Asylum in Sweden,” read a third.

Russia’s hand in all of this is largely hidden from view. But fingerprints abound.

For instance, one writer for Samhallsnytt, who previously worked for the Sweden Democrats, was recently declined parliamentary press accreditation after the security police determined he had been in contact with Russian intelligence.

Fria Tider is considered not only one of the most extreme sites, but also among the most Kremlin-friendly. It frequently swaps material with the Russian propaganda outlet Sputnik. The site is linked, via domain ownership records, to Granskning Sverige, called the Swedish “troll factory” for its efforts to entrap and embarrass mainstream journalists. Among its frequent targets: journalists who write negatively about Russia.

“We’ve had death threats, spam attacks, emails — this year has been totally crazy,” said Eva Burman, the editor of Eskilstuna-Kuriren, a newspaper that found itself in the cross hairs after criticizing the Russian annexation of Crimea and investigating Granskning Sverige itself.

At the magazine Nya Tider, the editor, Vavra Suk, has traveled to Moscow as an election observer and to Syria, where he produced Kremlin-friendly accounts of the civil war. Nya Tider has published work by Alexander Dugin, an ultranationalist Russian philosopher who has been called “Putin’s Rasputin”; Mr. Suk’s writings for Mr. Dugin’s think tank include one titled “Donald Trump Can Make Europe Great Again.”

Nya Tider’s contributors include Manuel Ochsenreiter, editor of Zuerst!, a German far-right newspaper. Mr. Ochsenreiter — who has appeared regularly on RT, the Kremlin propaganda channel — worked until recently for Markus Frohnmaier, a member of the German Bundestag representing the far-right Alternative for Germany party. Documents leaked to a consortium of European media outlets — documents that Mr. Frohnmaier has called fake — have suggested that Moscow aided his election campaign in order to have an “absolutely controlled MP.”

Mr. Ochsenreiter, for his part, has been implicated in Polish court in the financing of a 2018 firebombing attack on a Hungarian cultural center in Ukraine. The plot, according to testimony from a Polish extremist charged with carrying it out, was designed to pin responsibility on Ukrainian nationalists and stoke ethnic tensions, to Russia’s benefit. Mr. Ochsenreiter has not been charged in Poland, but prosecutors in Berlin said they had begun a preliminary investigation. He has denied involvement.

Mr. Suk declined to comment.

Then there is Nyheter Idag. Its founder, Chang Frick — a former Sweden Democrat official who takes a maverick’s glee in his defiance of orthodoxy — readily admits to being a paid contributor to RT. At a pizza shop near his home one afternoon, he pointedly noted that his girlfriend was Russian and, with a flourish, pulled out a wad of rubles from a recent trip.

“Here is my real boss! It’s Putin!” he laughed.

But Mr. Frick, the son of a Swedish Roma and a Polish Jew, said Nyheter Idag answered to no one, neither the Sweden Democrats nor the Kremlin, though he added that his relentless reporting about the problems posed by immigrants dovetailed with both their agendas.

“People can see what’s happening in the streets,” he said, adding, “I’ve been accused of being a racist — I’m being ‘paid by the Sweden Democrats,’ I’m ‘a spy for Russia.’ That just tells me I’m kicking where it hurts.”

Still, he said he had reason to believe that “there is a little bit of collusion between Russia and some Swedish right-wing media.” One of his early scoops involved exposing the drinking and womanizing shenanigans of a Sweden Democrat member of Parliament who had been invited to Moscow. During that reporting trip, he said, he was invited to serve as an independent observer in Russia’s presidential election and to meet Mr. Putin.

He declined the invitation.

There is another curious Russian common denominator: Six of Sweden’s alt-right sites have drawn advertising revenue from a network of online auto-parts stores based in Germany and owned by four businessmen from Russia and Ukraine, three of whom have adopted German-sounding surnames.

The ads were first noticed by the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, which discovered that while they appeared to be for a variety of outlets, all traced back to the same Berlin address and were owned by a parent company, Autodoc GmbH.

The Times found that the company had also placed ads on anti-Semitic and other extremist sites in Germany, Hungary, Austria and elsewhere in Europe.

Which raised a question: Was the auto-parts dealer simply trying to drum up business, or was it also trying to support the far-right cause?

Rikard Lindholm, co-founder of a data-driven marketing firm who has worked with Swedish authorities to combat disinformation, dug deeper into the Autodoc network.

Hidden beneath the user-friendly interface of some of the earliest Autodoc sites lay what Mr. Lindholm, an expert in the forensic analysis of online traffic, described as “icebergs” of blog-like content completely unrelated to auto parts, translated into a variety of languages. A visitor to one of the car-parts sites could not simply access this content from the home page; instead, one had to know and type in the full URL.

“It’s like they have a back door and it’s open and you can have a look around, but to do that you have to know that the door is there,” Mr. Lindholm said.

Much of the content was not political. But there were links to posts about a range of divisive social issues, some of them translated into other languages. One hidden link — about female genital mutilation in Muslim countries — had been translated from English to Polish before being posted. Yet another post, from a site called AnsweringIslam.net, concluded, “Islam hates you.”

Thomas Casper, a spokesman for Autodoc, said the company had no “interest at all in supporting alt-right media,” and added, “We vehemently oppose racism and far-right principles.”

He said the company’s digital advertising team worked with third parties to place ads on “trusted websites with substantial traffic.” Autodoc, he said, had instituted controls to try to ensure that it no longer advertised on far-right sites.

As for the icebergs, after receiving The Times’s inquiry, the company removed what Mr. Casper called the “obviously dubious and outdated content.” It had originally been placed there, he said, to improve search engine optimization.

But Mr. Lindholm said that made no sense. “By linking to irrelevant content, it actually hurts their business because Google frowns on that,” he said.

Links Abroad

Another way to look inside the explosive growth of Sweden’s alt-right outlets is to see who is linking to them. The more links, especially from well-trafficked outlets, the more likely Google is to rank the sites as authoritative. That, in turn, means that Swedes are more likely to see them when they search for, say, immigration and crime.

The Times analyzed more than 12 million available links from over 18,000 domains to four prominent far-right sites — Nyheter Idag, Samhallsnytt, Fria Tider and Nya Tider. The data was culled by Mr. Lindholm from two search engine optimization tools and represents a snapshot of all known links through July 2.

As expected, given the relative paucity of Swedish speakers worldwide, most of the links came from Swedish-language sites.

But the analysis turned up a surprising number of links from well-trafficked foreign-language sites — which suggests that the Swedish sites’ rapid growth has been driven to a significant degree from abroad.

“It has the makings, the characteristics, of an operation whose purpose or goal is to help these sites become relevant by getting them to be seen as widely as possible,” Mr. Lindholm said.

Over all, more than one in five links were from non-Swedish language sites. English-language sites, along with Norwegian ones, linked the most, nearly a million times. But other European-language far-right sites — Russian but also Czech, Danish, German, Finnish and Polish — were also frequent linkers.

The Times identified 356 domains that linked to all four Swedish sites.

Many are well known in American far-right circles. Among them is the Gatestone Institute, a think tank whose site regularly stokes fears about Muslims in the United States and Europe. Its chairman until last year was John R. Bolton, now Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, and its funders have included Rebekah Mercer, a prominent wealthy Trump supporter.

Other domains that linked to all four Swedish sites included Stormfront, one of the oldest and largest American white supremacist sites; Voice of Europe, a Kremlin-friendly right-wing site; a Russian-language blog called Sweden4Rus.nu; and FreieWelt.net, a site supportive of the AfD in Germany.

This loosely knit global network does not just help increase readership in Sweden; researchers have tracked how Russian state outlets like RT and Sputnik, along with Western platforms like Infowars and Breitbart, have picked up and amplified Swedish immigration-related stories to galvanize xenophobia among their audiences.

Bjorn Palmertz, a disinformation specialist at the Swedish Defense University, said this “information laundry” had resulted in globally viral stories like the one about the Swedish town that allowed a mosque to issue calls to prayer while denying a church’s application to ring its bells — never mind that the church had not applied.

“Sweden is portrayed either as a heaven or a hell,” said Annika Rembe, Sweden’s consul general in New York. “But conservative value-based politicians in Hungary, Poland, the United States and elsewhere would use Sweden as an example of a failed state: If you follow this path, your society will look like Sweden’s.”

The ‘Village Of The World’

The auditorium at Rinkebyskolan, a middle school across the street from Rinkeby’s town square, filled rapidly. Women wearing hijabs and burqas spilled in, taking their seats on the left. Men sat to the right. From the speakers came the voice of an imam reading from the Quran.

Developed as part of a 1960s-era government initiative to build a million affordable dwellings, Rinkeby was originally home to a mix of Swedes and laborers from southern Europe. Over time it became known as Sweden’s “Village of the World,” with people from more than 100 countries living in drab, low-slung apartment blocks. Today, more than 91 percent of Rinkeby’s roughly 16,400 residents are immigrants and their children.

At a long table in front of the auditorium sat Niclas Andersson, a towering man who serves as Rinkeby’s police chief. Once prayers concluded, the audience began peppering him with questions.

Some worried about drug trafficking inside the apartment complexes, others about the prevalence of guns. Could the police install more cameras?

To be sure, Mr. Andersson said in an interview afterward, there were problems in Rinkeby, his posting for 18 years. But it is hardly the hellscape that nationalists bent on painting Sweden as a failed state hold it out to be.

Many newcomers still struggle to get a foothold in the job market, so unemployment is relatively high, at 8.8 percent. And in the larger Rinkeby-Kista borough, there were 825 reported episodes of violent crime last year, a rate 36 percent higher per capita than Stockholm as a whole.

But Mr. Andersson does not recognize the Rinkeby portrayed in the movie — directed by a filmmaker who has shot political ads for Republicans in Congress — that led Mr. Trump to make his “last night in Sweden” remarks. Rinkeby is not a no-go zone, Mr. Andersson said, an assertion supported by the film’s chief cameraman, who has acknowledged that officers who seemed to suggest otherwise had been edited out of context.

In fact, the number of police officers in Rinkeby has more than quadrupled since 2015. Assaults and robberies are down, Mr. Andersson said. Fatal shootings are down, too — of 11 in Stockholm last year, one was in Rinkeby. Nationally, the violent crime rate is one-fifth that of the United States.

“It was a heavily slanted picture,” Mr. Andersson said. “You zero in on a couple of incidents, then use that to describe the whole area.”

By the time Mr. Trump zeroed in on Rinkeby, “the government was tackling the problems,” said Amela Mahovic, a local reporter for Swedish public television. When the actual clash broke out soon after, she said, community elders spread the word to local youths: “You need to stop this.”

But soon, they said, they found that outside forces wanted the world to see a different picture.

Guleed Mohamed, then a researcher for public television, said he had spoken to a reporting team from Russia and Ukraine in Rinkeby Square that week and had tried to ask about Russia.

“They changed the subject to how multiculturalism doesn’t work,” he recalled. “And then they quickly connected that to the clash — ‘I want to talk about the riot. Don’t you think this is connected to the influx of migrants?’”

Hani Al Saleh, a Syrian who came to Sweden as a teenager, was working as a guard in Rinkeby. Tall and muscular with a sculpted beard, Mr. Saleh is known as “Amo,” or uncle, by the local youth. He said three young immigrants he knew told him that Russian journalists had tried to bribe them with 400 kronor (about $43) apiece.

“Boys, do you want to do some action in front of the camera?” they said the Russian journalists asked them.

Mr. Saleh later took a Danish journalist to meet two of the young men. After searching online, they recognized the logo of the Russian state-owned news channel NTV, along with the Russians who had made the offer.

The journalist contacted NTV, which denied the whole thing. But besides Mr. Castillo, the night watchman, The Times found other witnesses who backed up Mr. Saleh’s account.

Elvir Kazinic and Mustafa Zatara said they were in the square a couple of days after the clash when they overheard another group of young men talking about Russian journalists and a 400 krona bribe to fight.

“To stoop to that level and offer kids money,” said Mr. Kazinic, a Bosnian émigré who serves on Rinkeby’s district council, “that is low.”

Mr. Zatara, a poet, knows well the consequences of stirring up anti-immigrant racism. His father, Hasan Zatara, a Palestinian, came to Sweden in 1969, earned a high school diploma and opened a convenience store.

Standing behind the cash register on a January afternoon 27 years ago, he became the final victim of John Ausonius, a serial shooter who terrorized immigrant communities, killing one person and wounding 10 others. Hasan Zatara was paralyzed.

Mr. Ausonius later said he was inspired by the anti-immigrant party of the day, New Democracy.

“When my father was shot in 1992, we had New Democracy,” Mustafa Zatara said. “Today we have the Sweden Democrats. Then, they wore bomber jackets and boots. Today, they wear bow ties and suits. It’s normalized now in the Swedish political corridor.”

Building A Coalition

After the commotion in Rinkeby died down, Russian news agencies kept calling the police, fruitlessly asking permission to ride with officers patrolling the district.

“This went on week in and week out,” said Varg Gyllander, the department’s press officer.

Last September, right after the Swedish elections, the requests abruptly stopped.

The Sweden Democrats had their best showing yet. Their nearly 18 percent share of the vote hamstrung Swedish politics, with the mainstream parties unable to form a government for more than four months.

The Social Democrats finally formed a shaky coalition that excluded the Sweden Democrats. But it came at a price: some prominent center-right politicians are now expressing a willingness to work with the Sweden Democrats, portending a new political alignment.

In February, the Sweden Democrats’ Mr. Karlsson strode into a Washington-area hotel where leaders of the American and European right were gathering for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. As he settled in at the lobby bar, straightening his navy three-piece suit, he was clearly very much at home.

At the conference — where political boot-camp training mixed with speeches by luminaries like Mr. Trump and the British populist leader Nigel Farage — Mr. Karlsson hoped to learn about the infrastructure of the American conservative movement, particularly its funding and use of the media and think tanks to broaden its appeal. But in a measure of how nationalism and conservatism have merged in Mr. Trump’s Washington, many of the Americans with whom he wanted to network were just as eager to network with him.

Mr. Karlsson had flown in from Colorado, where he had given a speech at the Steamboat Institute, a conservative think tank. That morning, Tobias Andersson, 23, the Sweden Democrats’ youngest member of Parliament and a contributor to Breitbart, had spoken to Americans for Tax Reform, a bastion of tax-cut orthodoxy.

Now, they found themselves encircled by admirers like Matthew Hurtt, the director for external relationships at Americans for Prosperity, part of the billionaire Koch brothers’ political operation, and Matthew Tyrmand, a board member of Project Veritas, a conservative group that uses undercover filming to sting its targets.

Mr. Tyrmand, who is also an adviser to a senator from Poland’s anti-immigration ruling Law and Justice party, was particularly eager. “You are taking your country back!” he exclaimed.

Mr. Karlsson smiled.

Christina Anderson contributed reporting.

[passportandplates]

“You’re traveling where?!”

“Aren’t you scared?”

“I would never travel to that region of the world.”

“You’re so brave for traveling alone.”

  In the last year or so, the United States government has issued travel warnings to virtually every country in the world. At the time of writing, the United States has deemed it “unsafe” to travel to the entire continent of Europe, significant portions of Central and South America, almost the entire continent of Africa, and (of course) the majority of the Middle East and Central Asia. Naturally.

So, that essentially leaves Americans the option of traveling to Oceania (Australia, New Zealand and the nearby islands) or Asia if they’d like to go overseas and heed the wise words of our government.

I announced earlier this year that I would make 2017 the Year of the Middle East and North Africa (for the most part). The countries I’ve chosen are not only places I already want to visit, but they’re places that are not “unsafe,” despite what the media says. If you listen to the media, you’ll never leave your house, let alone travel.

What keeps you from traveling to these places, really? What makes a country safe or unsafe? Is it violent crime? Is it fear of terrorism? Is it because the media said so? Is it because the government issued a travel alert? What actually causes a fear of traveling?

Khartoum, Sudan

Cairo, Egypt

  What is safety, really?

Asking a serious question here. Every time I travel abroad, I meet Europeans, Australians, and Kiwis who are afraid to travel to the U.S. If you’re American, you may be bewildered to hear this. What’s so scary about the United States, right? Well, according to foreigners: guns, police brutality, and racism, in a nutshell. Our current political state isn’t exactly helping, either. Maybe as Americans we don’t feel like our day-to-day lives are threatened by any of these things. Maybe (especially if you’re a minority), you feel threatened by 1-2 of these things. And most probably, you don’t consider these as factors that should deter people from traveling to the United States. Yet, the media abroad highlights these issues frequently enough to deter people.

So, what does safety mean, really?  I ask myself two questions: is the country stable? and are there lots of crimes against tourists? If a country is more or less considered politically and economically stable, then I’m down for a visit. Would I visit Yemen, the Congo or Syria? Absolutely not. Would I visit Iran, North Korea or Egypt? Yes, I would. In fact, I’m in Egypt right now. I’m aware of the political situations in these countries, and it is unlikely that a sudden civil war will break out. Same goes for crime towards tourists. For example, pickpocketing is a huge issue in Italy, France, and Spain. Will that stop me from visiting these countries? No. It just means I’ll have to keep an eye on my stuff. Violent crime is SO rarely targeted toward tourists. You can get robbed or pickpocketed in any country, anytime. That should not deter you from traveling.

Fez, Morocco

Marrakesh, Morocco

  If it bleeds, it leads.

How many times have you read good headlines on news sites? Do you read about the hundreds of thousands of tourists who travel every day without harm? Do you read about the millions of Muslims who live their day-to-day lives with kindness and compassion, without the sudden urge to blow something up? Do you read feel-good stories, at all? You probably don’t and it’s not because they don’t exist. It’s because they aren’t being published. Let’s face it, we all think we want to read about the good, but the reality is, bad news sells – it sells newspapers, magazines, and advertising. And everyone wants to make money, news sites included. Fear makes people make irrational decisions and think emotionally, not logically. The media has the power to change the minds of many. It’s what makes people think that all Americans own guns and it’s what makes many Americans think we’re all going to die in a terrorist attack. It’s what elected our new president. Bad news sells, period.

  You’re not in control.

People tend to overestimate their chances of being a victim of terrorism. In the United States 13,000+ people are killed by guns every year. 37,000+ are killed by car crashes. You’re more likely to die by getting crushed by furniture or even struck by lightning than be a victim of terrorism.

The point is, you are not in control of how you’re going to die. You could be an adrenaline junkie who lives to be 100. You could be an over-cautious germaphobe who dies tragically young. The only thing we know for certain is that we’re all going to die someday. Wouldn’t you rather live your life to its fullest (pardon the overused cliché) than to live a life full of “could haves?”

At the Giraffe Manor in Nairobi, Kenya. I would have never come here if listened to the media.

  Don’t let fear rule your life.

If your dream is to travel, don’t let it hold you back. Learn firsthand about the world instead of through media sources. Go to Jordan and learn what it’s like to be a sheepherder with A Piece of Jordan. Learn about the history of the mafia in Southern Italy with Visit.org. Whatever or wherever your experience may be, let it serve as a way for you to learn about the world, and about yourself.

  Travel is the ultimate teacher.

If you never travel and never read and never leave your town but simply watch the news then maybe you’ll think that religious tolerance doesn’t exist. Maybe you’ll think that all countries in the Middle East and North Africa are filled with burqa-clad women. Maybe you’ll think that Africa is filled with dirt huts and unpaved roads and starving children.

Religious harmony exists all over the world, despite what the media says. In Singapore, I’ve seen mosques, temples, and churches all within a mile of each other. There are synagogues in Morocco, a Muslim-majority country. In Indonesia, there are a plethora of Muslims, Buddhists and Christians. Harmony exists, despite what the media tells you.

Many express how shocked they are by just how western the United Arab Emirates is, but guess what? It’s home to countless expats. There are more expats in the UAE than there are Emiratis. Morocco and Qatar are two other examples of Arab countries with a significant expat population.

And while I won’t start on my Africa is not a country rant, all I have to say is that Africa is rich and diverse in culture, language, resources and landscapes. The below photos are all various African cities. Not what you expected, huh?

Cairo, Egypt

Nairobi, Kenya

Meknes, Morocco

So travel. Travel to a nearby town, to the next state or to another country. Interact with locals. Leave the tourist area and talk to people. Do a homestay. Stay at an airbnb. Support local guides.

Do this because travel is the best education you can ask for. Because nothing compares to experiencing the world and its people for yourself. Do this because the world needs more love, tolerance, and understanding. Do it because fear is a mindset.

  A quick note about safety.

Before you head to a new place, do your research. Ask other travelers. Read travel blogs. Find local news sources and organizations. Always tell your family and / or friends what your plans are. Buy a local SIM card so you can be accessible. Keep contact information to the local embassy handy. Stay aware of your surroundings. And, if you’re American, enroll in the U.S. Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP) for travel updates.

  Don’t succumb to alarm or fear. Travel to learn. Because when you let fear deter you from traveling, you’re missing out on so much of this beautiful world and its kind-hearted people.

  Tell me: have you ever traveled somewhere that most people think is unsafe? What was your experience like?

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Don’t Let the Media Fuel a Fear of Traveling “You’re traveling where?!” “Aren’t you scared?” “I would never travel to that region of the world.”

[arthurpendragons]

A model performer | Writer, director, actor and even cinematographer, Eoin Macken has proved he’s more than just a pretty face

THE FIRST time we see Eoin Macken in the new Resident Evil film, Milla Jovovich has him in a headlock. The Bray native might be the closest Ireland has to a renaissance man — given his dalliances with writing, acting, directing, modelling and cinematography — but when crushed between the biceps of a former supermodel who is versed in Brazilian jiujitsu, he looks surprisingly useless. Macken proceeds to fight zombie dogs, repel armies of undead with a nail gun and risk amputation from giant turbines.

In Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, a conclusion to the action horror franchise, he plays Doc, the leader of a group of rebels attempting to survive the apocalypse. The film is solid action from start to finish. In the most emotionally revealing sequence involving Macken and Jovovich, the pair converse while running.

“Milla had a baby about six months before we started filming,” says Macken, 33. “She was doing all these action sequences. I don’t know how she did it. I was knackered after 12 hours. She was doing 18 hours [a day], including training. She’s hardcore.”

Arriving at a bar on Dublin’s Leeson Street, the actor has more important things on his mind than zombie armageddon: he left a woollen hat on the Dart and is mourning its loss. Then he receives a call from his mother; at the same time I receive a text message from mine. “What a pair of mummy’s boys,” he snorts. No wonder Jovovich could have had him for breakfast.

Despite the gruelling workout, he insists the film was a breeze. Jovovich and Paul WS Anderson, the director, are married and have made six Resident Evil films together since 2002, so it’s a family affair. “Because they’ve been doing it for 15 years, they never get stressed. It’s a $70m movie; we’re in South Africa — Johannesburg and Cape Town — in these mad, wrecked locations; but it was very easy.”

When we meet, Macken is just back from the movie’s Japanese premiere, which was almost as unhinged as the film. Capcom, the Japanese videogame company behind Resident Evil, laid on a red carpet, and fans turned up dressed as zombies. His mother accompanied him and they visited robot restaurants, temples and sumo wrestling bouts. He wanted to see the Aokigahara woods, the setting for The Forest, a recent horror film in which he acted, but requests for directions were lost in translation. Locals thought he was looking for the electronics district Akihabara, he explains with a sigh.

Over the past few years he has worked in Tunisia, Morocco, Serbia, Canada, France, Spain and Mexico. He has lived in Los Angeles and spent a lot of time in Albuquerque, where he shoots The Night Shift, a series for NBC. Macken plays a doctor, TC Callahan, following in a long tradition of medical screen hunks.

As you can see from an early publicity photograph in which Macken sits astride a motorbike in a hospital lobby, while badly Photoshopped characters run in all directions, the show does not take itself too seriously. It’s more M*A*S*H than ER.

“I knew you were going to bring that [photo] up,” he says. “We all had a laugh about that. Why am I on a motorbike in the studio? No one knew. The show isn’t quite as cheesy as that. The Night Shift has a mixture of comedy and drama. It’s not as dark as a lot of medical shows. There’s a warmth, even a cheekiness, to it.”

Although his mother works as a nurse, Macken insists that he would not be any good in a medical emergency. “Hopefully that won’t happen. We did a week of medical stuff before we started the show, and we do a few days’ top-up before each season.”

The show premiered in 2014 and has been a hit with audiences. It was recently commissioned for a fourth series, making its leading man a hot property. When in Japan, he met the voiceover artist who dubs him for the local version. “He also does the voices for Frozen, Tangled and Tom Cruise,” Macken marvels.

He never wanted to restrict himself to a single line of duty. While studying psychology at University College Dublin, he moonlighted as a model and an actor. But he suffered the same prejudices that Jamie Dornan faced at the start of his career: casting directors refused to take him seriously. “Because I did modelling, people would remark on it in a derogatory way. Casting people questioned why I wanted to act. In America, they don’t care. In Ireland, they did. It didn’t really bother me, though.”

In 2009, he teamed up with another male model to make a documentary, The Fashion of Modelling, which he sold to RTE. The concept may have teetered on Zoolander territory, but the screen credits revealed a production-oriented mind. Macken was credited as director of photography, director, editor, producer and writer. From his early days as an actor on Fair City, he strove to explore every facet of film-making.

“Modelling paid for my acting training, camera equipment, and ultimately allowed me to make my own films. I went to New York to model and spent four nights a week training. After finishing college, I studied cinematography for a year.”

In 2008 came his first outing as an auteur, when he wrote, directed, edited, acted in and worked as cinematographer on the film Christian Blake.

He piled a cast and crew of 10 into a Volkswagen camper van, which he used as a production base, and crafted a slipshod narrative out of action sequences. The results were amateurish, he admits, but the actor was eager to learn and unafraid to experiment.

He worked the cameras on Stalker, Mark O’Connor’s stunning yet underappreciated 2012 film starring John Connors as an unhinged vagrant. He also shot Charlie Casanova, a Terry McMahon opus that provoked an angry critical reception in 2011. “I’m even prouder of that film now,” says Macken. “A crew of six people made it. Terry made the film for about €1,000. Some people were scathing because it misses aspects from a $2m movie. It should be celebrated rather than denigrated.”

The actor considers his entire career a learning process. Working with independent Irish film-makers such as O’Connor and McMahon encouraged him to create experimental projects. The Inside (2012), for example, was a found-footage horror, shot in Dublin, which included a 20-minute unedited sequence in which the actors cut loose.

Leopard (2013) and The Green Rabbit & The Ice Cream Girl (2015) were inspired by his love of Wim Wenders and John Steinbeck. The latter was shot in Ireland, the former in the Mojave desert in southern California.

“The more I’ve lived away from home, the more I want to come back and make a film in a style influenced by America or European cinema in Ireland. Being away makes you look at Ireland in a different way,” he says.

In 2014, Macken made his debut as a novelist with Kingdom of Scars, a coming-of-age story. Hunter and the Grape, his second novel, about a road trip from Albuquerque to Los Angeles, is due for publication later this year.

Ultimately, he considers himself an actor “because that’s what pays the bills”. But his diverse talents inform his roles and on-set interactions. “Film-making is a collaboration: from acting to sound, costume to cinematography. Sometimes actors can be overly celebrated. There’s an inherent narcissism attached to the job. Understanding how it works behind the scenes is important. I suppose I’m an actor who likes to make things.”

The Night Shift is broadcast on RTE, but the show has more traction in the US, South America and Asia, so he longs to work more in Ireland. For his next project, he has adapted Here Are the Young Men, Rob Doyle’s novel about a debauched summer in Dublin at the height of the Celtic tiger.

Homesickness may have been inevitable, but seeing the world has informed his creative vision. One of his most formative experiences, Macken reveals, was travelling to Mozambique in 2014 to make a documentary about Sightsavers, which tackles avoidable blindness — he was overcome with western guilt. “It was humbling and made me appreciate friends, family, everything I have. It made me question my place in the world, what I’m supposed to do with my life.” He sighs. “I’m still figuring out what type of films I want to make, which is why I’ve tried so many different things.”

Macken is determined to reach creative enlightenment, one headlock at a time.

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