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earworkinggroup · 4 years

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Hand-Antennas: Protocols from Extrasensory Aesthetics | 2017

20/10–19/11 2017 Exhibition @ Josef Sudek Studio, Prague Part of Fotograf Festival 2017

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How to understand each other without words? How to perceive without the senses? How to change something from the inside? How to move someone remotely?

HAND ANTENNAS

When Vilém Flusser – in his book Do universa technických obrazů (To the Universe of Technical Images) – says that today, when the world has disintegrated into abstracted points, we do not take things in our hands but rather control them by pressing buttons and keyboards, he actually describes new manual economics and a new attitude toward the world booming with the expansion of digital technologies. Hands represent a model of simple tools. They are extended by the form and function of these tools. But what if some devices are similar to hands, whether morphologically or functionally? The RUKA (Hand) antenna, whose name is an abbreviation of the names of its Czech inventors, František Kahuda and Aleš Rumler, resembles a hand not only with its name. As its creators say: “All psycho-energetic experiments prove that the head and hands–palms are parts of the human body emitting the most radiation [...].” Under certain circumstances, “a hand with outstretched fingers acts like an antenna”. For “psycho-energetics” or “psychotronics”, the special relationship between the biological and the technical is symptomatic. Like Flusser’s buttons, psychotronic technologies and devices ask for a different way of dealing with things. The materialistic approach to seemingly immaterial phenomena brings unprecedented possibilities for communication and manipulation. In a way, the dreams of telepathy, telekinesis and telegnosis or clairvoyance come true in technical apparatuses available today. From the perspective of psychics, however, the current state does not mean meeting their goals, but rather a new challenge.

METHOD, DISCOURSE, INSTITUTIONS

Psychotronics is trying to establish itself as a new science and meet the methodological, discursive and institutional requirements to do so. In Czechoslovakia, the most ardent promoters of psychotronics included František Kahuda and Zdeněk Rejdák. The local parapsychological tradition adapted to new conditions, absorbing many ideas from the USSR. The very term of psychotronics expresses the intention to take a “more scientific” approach to the studied phenomena. While similar phenomena were historically explored mostly by curious individuals or interest groups, new professionalism reached official institutions as well. Since the late 1960s to the early 1990s, there was a number of psychotronic institutions in Czechoslovakia, including the Coordinating Group for the Research of Psychotronics, the Psychoenergetic Laboratory (PEL) at the Technical University (ČVUT) in Prague and later at the Institute of Chemical Technology (VŠCHT) in Prague (headed by Kahuda), the Research Institution for Psychotronics and Juvenology at the same institution (headed by Rejdák), the Section for the Research of Psychotronics at the Committee of Applied Cybernetics of the Czech Science and Technology Society (ČVTS), the Department of Experimental Psychotronics at the Research Institute of Animal Production, the Commission of Psychotronics of the Gerontological Society of the Slovak Medical Society, the Commission of the Slovak Council of the Czechoslovak Scientific and Technological Society for Psychotronics, and more. Since 1973, there were also conferences of the International Society for Psychotronics. The first edition was held in Prague on 18–22 June 1973.

In Czechoslovakia, the term psychotronics is promoted by Zdeněk Rejdák who refuses the term parapsychology. According to Rejdák, psychotronics includes telepathy, telekinesis and telegnosis. Rejdák also refers to his French colleague Fernando Clerc who says: “We already have electronics, cybernetics, stereotronics – and what do we still lack? We can suggest the term psychotronics for the phenomena using the energy emitted during the thought process and the energy carrying the impulse of the human will.” According to Clerc, “every one of us has the ability of certain, though extremely weak action at a distance. It will not be long before we can focus our will, safely protected from external influences, to run relays and servo motors.” František Kahuda distinguishes between the Western psychotronics, which tries to explain the phenomena studied with “known forms of energy”, and the Czechoslovak and Soviet psychoenergetics, which assumes the existence of a distinctive psychic or mental energy. However, Kahuda did not maintain this distinction consistently and even he later resorted to the concept of psychotronics. The idea of the specific nature of the Eastern concept of mental energy compared to the Western one is somewhat misleading: although the Soviet scientist N. I. Kobozev came with the theory of bio-energetic particles, the so-called psychones, the Soviets generally concentrated on physically explainable psychotronic phenomena (such as electrostatics and electromagnetism) and explored the relationship between parapsychological phenomena and the known types of radiation. Kahuda resonates with the Leninist theory of reflection, which sees the psyche “as an image (projection) of the objective reality”, as “the supreme product of the matter organized in a special way” which is “the result of the transformation of the energy of an external stimulus into to the fact of consciousness.” Moreover, Kahuda, referring to V. M. Bechterew and P. P. Lazarev, assumes that “the interactions in the process of thinking in the human nervous system energetically manifest themselves also outside the human brain”, as attested by cases of telekinesis or telepathy. The theory of mentions is supposed to complement scientific knowledge: it describes the “third signal system” (in addition to the two signal systems defined by I. P. Pavlov), “the fifth type of interaction” (in addition to the four types of interaction – nuclear, electromagnetic, weak nuclear and gravitational – studied by physics), and “the sixth sense” (called “temp” by Kahuda). Kahuda’s belief in the material mention character of mental energy is still a subject of disputes among those who are interested in psychotronics, as can be seen chielfy in the discussion about the nature of the telepathic transmission.

Rejdák describes psychotronics as an interdisciplinary discipline and puts it into the context with other sciences studying the aspects of psychotronic phenomena: physics, communication science, mathematics, cybernetics, psychology, psychiatry, medicine, neurophysiology, physiology, anthropology, geology, cosmobiology, sociology, and bionics. The “limit” nature of the studied phenomena asks for a certain interdisciplinary approach as the interdisciplinary dimension of research is emphasized both by Rejdák and Kahuda. Kahuda frames the discipline by the Marxist notion of “one science”, which includes physics, psychology and psychophysiology, biology and sociology. Like his Soviet colleague P. K. Anochin, he believes that the research on the brain must combine the findings of neurophysiology and behaviourism. He finds the “systemic approach” particularly suitable.

STR AND SHR

According to its proponents, psychoenergetics will substantially influence the ongoing scientific and technological revolution. Kahuda predicts “that the first half of the twenty first century will be the age of a new, yet unknown, though existing mental energy. Its control as the highest value of man should have the form of an active intervention into the confident shaping of mental processes to form the human for the benefit of the future society in a more rational way than ever before.” Scientific knowledge and rational application of this mental energy will then ensure “not only technical and economic development, but also the elevation of interpersonal relationships in the advanced socialist society to the highest attainable level. The scientific and technological revolution also and, perhaps above all, concerns the man and all workers who make it possible.” A different view is held by Břetislav Kafka, sculptor and hypnotist from Červený Kostelec, in his book Člověk zítřka (The Man of Tomorrow, 1947): “Technical sciences take the man away from the human. They confirm his notion that progress is about having more perfect machines, not about being better today than we were yesterday.” According to Kafka, “the aim of humanity” is “material and spiritual well-being. Industrial civilization defers this aim. Modern civilization sacrificed the sense to the matter. The man had become accustomed to his life by repeating the same movement every day, by processing one element.” Zdeněk Rejdák, who used to visit Kafka like many others, later speaks of the need for a “scientific and human revolution”, which should complement and counterbalance the ongoing scientific and technological revolution if we do not want to “flood the world in the next century with mechanical and human robots and enhance the alienation and social decay”. In Rejdák’s model, the man and mankind stand in opposition to the dehumanizing technology although they are complementary with it. Kahuda’s psychoenergetic dialectical materialism and Rejdák’s psychotronic socialist humanism are quite similar.

PSYCHOTRONICS, INFORMATION SCIENCE AND CYBERNETICS

Most generally speaking, psychotronics deals with unusual or unexplained types of information transmission. According to Valdemar Grešík, the last director of the Psychoenergetic Laboratory (PEL), closed in 1991, psychotronics “is based on the assumption that man is able to acquire and transmit information in other, so far unknown ways or paths. [...] To a great extent, diagnosing and looking for various objects and healing, all represent kinds of information transmission – in an energetic form, of course.” In this context, Kahuda speaks of “mental information science” which “lies in decoding the information encoded in substances. Such use of mental energy emitted by a psychic as a subject of an information process, when the energy has a similar role like the quanta of electromagnetic energy broadcast by an antenna in short wavelengths (radio microwaves) to the target subject, from which the wave is reflected and received in intermittent broadcast by an image tube which then receives the information about the observed object [...]. In this process, the quanta of mental energy function as a mental radar while the emitted clusters of mental energy are qualitatively directed to the object of the process, i.e. contain the required information in the form of instruction and query on the way to the target, and in the form of feedback response on the way back to the source (brain). The detection of the target during the mental reflection is not only about a mere physical reflection, but also about finding the qualitative characteristics of the detected object.” Moreover, according to Kahuda, the mentions – unlike the known particles – can penetrate any obstacle, which makes them suitable for the “action at a distance”. Before Kahuda, the striking parallelism of telepathy and radiocommunications was mentioned also by Upton Sinclair in Mental Radio (1930) and B.B. Kazinskij in Biological Radio communications (1962). The effort to clarify the physical nature of parapsychological phenomena and the recurrent recognition of similarities between these phenomena and technological apparatuses is also noteworthy.

Kahuda says that “the use of a variety of devices for contactless communication with both the living and nonliving matter, using a psychophysical method, will certainly be very important one day”. According to Kahuda, the role of mentions is to transfer “quality-oriented information in various types of nonverbal mention communication”, including communication with animals and plants. Mental energy is supposed to be useful “especially in the area of communication, control, management, influencing various events”. This statement is strikingly reminiscent of the definition of cybernetics by Norbert Wiener as a science of control and communication in living organisms and machines. Besides the contemporary fascination with cybernetics (developed in the Easter Bloc since the late 1950s), there is also a certain structural similarity attracting the psychics. If hands in the eyes of psychics resemble antennas, the second key part of the human body, the head – and namely the brain, is obviously associated with computers. This comparison often occurs in the texts. Kahuda concludes that “man is not [unlike computers] only a ‘product’ of the social environment, a passive object of the internalized (interiorized) effects of the external environment, but uses its own self-regulatory system to create and change the external stimuli, to exteriorize them with ideas and work, thus actively influencing the world and acting as an active creature”. At the First International Conference of Psychotronics, Rejdák presented his paper “Psychotronics reveals new possibilities for cybernetics” which concluded that psychotronics “can help cybernetics solve one of the most difficult tasks – to help teach machines to create”.

The context of psychotronics and cybernetics can be detected at multiple levels, as shown by American researchers Lynn Schroeder and Sheila Ostrander who described the state of Czechoslovak psychotronics in the late 1960s in Psychic Discoveries behind the Iron Curtain, describing the Czech experiment whose executors decided to “think of telepathy as a channel with such a high degree of noise that it almost drowns the entire message. Information theory knows the means to overcome the problem of noise, such as calculations indicating, among other things, how many repetitions of one bit of information is necessary for proper reception. The Czechs used these calculations when they asked two people to try to telepathically send messages in a binary code back and forth while the computer found the necessary formula according to information theory.” In the experiment, telepathy reportedly proved to be more reliable than a field radio.

PYRAMIDS AND GENERATORS

Although psychics announce the immense impact of their discoveries in the near future, the practical application of the research is limited to relatively marginal cases. In 1959, one of the most important representatives of Czech psychotronics, radio engineer Karel Drbal won a patent for the “method for maintaining shaving knives and razors sharp” using small pyramids, made from for example, cardboard or plastic. To achieve the desired effect, it was necessary to orient the pyramids of certain shapes with respect to the Earth’s magnetic field. Drbal’s repeatedly applied for the patent which was allegedly granted to him only after the sceptical director of the Patent Office successfully used the invention himself.

The present results exceed the expectations and concern. The most attention is raised by the possibility to use mental energy for military purposes. Psychotronics seems to be a very strategic weapon for the cold war. A CIA report says that psychotronic weapons would mean a “serious threat to the military, diplomatic and security functions of the enemy. Transmitted energy would be quiet and hardly detectable by electronics (although the Soviets claim to have developed efficient sensors of biological energy) and the only needed source of energy would be a human operator.” Given the scarcity of available information, the US agents took the East European psychotronic research very seriously.

In this regard, CIA reports and the StB (Czech state police) were considerably interested in the so-called psychotronic generators produced by Robert Pavlita in his workshop in Lázně Bělohrad since the 1940s. These are mostly metal objects of various sizes and shapes that can be charged with biological energy under certain conditions. The efficiency of the generator depends on the form and material. Pavlita sees his generators as a kind of bioenergetic batteries that can be effectively controlled and regulated thanks to this technical extension. Using the generators, he can, for example, magnetize wood in a scientifically inexplicable way. Pavlita, who works as a textile technician, suggests that the generators can be used to purify water heavily polluted, among other things, during the production of textiles. Pavlita and his daughter Jana demonstrated the generators at the First International Conference of Psychotronics in Prague in 1973 as part of the lecture titled “The inductive effect on the human body mass”.

DOWSING RODS AND COAL

In 1991, physicists Luděk Pekárek and Milan Rojko published an article where they wrote: “In the past few years, the promotion of dowsers on TV and the radio, in daily press and entertainment and popular magazines in our country has caused that the national committees issue trade licences even to dowsers. Recently, geopathic zones on land and in flats are marked not only by individuals but also cooperatives and private companies. During the First Republic, dowsing was not even listed as a recognized craft by the Trade Chamber.” Since the late 1970s and 1980s, The Psychoenergetic Laboratory (PEL) conducted research on the possible use of dowsers in coalfields, and carried out projects like “Research of non-traditional methods of searching of anomalies in the mining front and quarry foothills and non-traditional forms of care for people in the North Bohemian brown coalfield” (for the North Bohemian brown coal mine in Most) or “Research on the protection of people in difficult mining conditions using mental energy” (for the Research Institute in Ostrava-Radvanice). These projects reportedly belong to the most successful PEL projects. Based on one of Kahuda’s suggestions to “implement the psychoenergetic research in the 8th Five-Year Plan”, a “scientific and production telesthesic association Ostrava Most, with a joint scientific council and specialized workplaces in the Research Institute in Ostrava-Radvanice (VVUÚ) and the Research Institute of Brown Coal in Most (VÚHU)”, was supposed to be established. The attitude of psychics to dowsing is still far from clear and depends on its application, as evidenced by Zdeněk Rejdák who joined the discussion in the Education Club of the Revolutionary Trade Union Movement (ROH) on physics and modernized superstition, held on 16 February 1989 by the Prague branch of the Union of Czechoslovak Mathematicians and Physicists. He said that marking “pathogenic zones in flats and prefabricated houses is for absolutely ‘untrustworthy and nonsensical’ and he thought that such activities should not be allowed and one should against protest against their authorization.”.

AUTOGRAPHY AND ELECTROPHOTOGRAPHY

The techniques deployed in psychotronic research also include photography. Attention is also paid to various forms of autography and electrography that makes invisible forms of radiation visible. In the Czech society, there were some prerequisites for such an interest, as evidenced by references to the pioneer of autography, Bartoloměj Navrátil, who discovered the “New kind of electrical patterns” (published in Časopis pro pěstování matematiky a fyziky in 1889). A special place belongs to Kirlian photography, which was the subject of lectures of many speakers at the First International Conference of Psychotronic in Prague in 1973, including the Kirlians themselves. According to Kahuda, to explain the Kirlian effect, though proven in many experiments, one needs the “materialistic mention theory of fundamental material radiation”. Kahuda’s materialism, however, still pays attention to the social dimension, stating that the intensity and colouring of pictures of human organs depend on the mental state of man and vary “particularly according to the function of the man in nature and the society”.

One of the PEL research groups attempts to capture the mysterious radiation from Pavlita’s bio-generators on photosensitive material and experimentally prove the existence of mentions. These experiments are inspired by the research led by psychiatrist Jule Eisenbud in the Colorado Psychiatric Hospital in Denver in the 1960s. Eisenbud worked with psychic Ted Serios who used his psychic powers to create “thoughtography” on Polaroid film. Milan Smrž describes a series of experiments trying to capture mental energy on photosensitive paper in his research report for the project entitled “Physical chemical detection of mental energy” carried out by the PEL in 1980. On some photographic materials, there were strange spots, including “characteristic colons”. Although the report, written by Milan Smrž, mentions a number of inconclusive tests and does not provide a definite conclusion about the origin of the mysterious patterns, Kahuda summarizes the experiment in the darkroom in the following way: “To avoid doubt that it is the interaction of aura, existing in the space around the head of the psychic, with the film emulsion, and not a direct contact of the emulsion with the head surface, a film strip was inserted into a ‘crown’ made of stiff/drawing paper and deposited in the emulsion to the outside circumference of the crown, so that the fundamental primary mention radiation first passed through a strong paper barrier, then ionized the air in the gaps before the film emulsion, and continuously exposed the film emulsion with the resulting secondary photon radiation. This action took place simultaneously in the space around the head of the emitter. Different colours in different places of the film strip indicate various actions and functions of the human brain tissue at the time of exposure under the psychological and medical condition of the emitter. This function of the human aura could also be used in practice to distinguish between different kinds of the brain activity, similarly to the AG and EG [...].”

Vojtěch Märc

#exhibition

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vexedtonightmares · 5 years

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La Fin Des Temps Chapter 5 (Elu Hogwarts AU)

Samedi 15:43 - “Nice hat”

The trip to Hogsmeade hadn’t been very interesting, Lucas spent most of it anxiously waiting to go back and do his patronus lesson with Eliott. He hadn’t told his friends what he was doing when they returned to the castle, but he didn’t totally know why. It wasn’t like they would be mad at him for spending time with Eliott. In fact, they’d probably want to join him. Maybe that was why he hadn’t said anything.

Eliott had spent every day that week sitting with him and Yann during meals, including dinner. Most times Arthur and Basile joined too, now that more people were on board with Daphné’s ideas for inter-house unity. Lucas still had yet to post anything on Instagram, not really seeing a point in it. He had been surprised Basile wasn’t blowing up his phone with posts yet, but Basile claimed he was waiting to post something Daphné worthy, whatever that meant.

“I wonder why Eliott didn’t want to come to Hogsmeade,” Yann said, sorting through Bertie Bott’s every flavor beans, trying to decipher whether the pink one he held was strawberry or vomit flavored.

“Maybe he’s working on Polaris,” Arthur suggested dramatically, causing Lucas to perk up to attention.

“Polaris?”

“Yeah, the thing he posted on his Instagram. You didn’t watch the link he put in his bio?” Arthur asked. Lucas had not watched because he had yet to seek out Eliott’s Instagram. He knew that it was pointless to hold off on doing so, but if Eliott wasn’t going to look at his Instagram, why should he give in and find Eliott?

“I don’t follow him,” Lucas shrugged, trying to appear nonchalant.

Arthur looked personally affronted. “You don’t-- dude, you have to follow him!”

“He doesn’t follow any of us,” he pointed out, but Arthur just rolled his eyes.

“So? He doesn’t follow anyone.”

Lucas merely shrugged again, bringing the conversation back to what he had originally asked about. “So what’s Polaris, then?”

“Follow him and find out,” Arthur said innocently as they made their way back up the stairs into the castle. Yann laughed and waved at them all as he left for the library, again. Basile and Arthur invited Lucas to come hang out with them out on the castle grounds, but he declined, saying he had homework to do. Technically he wasn’t lying.

Eliott had told him the day before to meet in the charms classroom because it was generally always open for student use on the weekends. The spring in his step that had been present since that Monday was still present as he made his way across many changing staircases and long hallways.

When he arrived the room was still empty, no sign of Eliott anywhere. Was he too early? Sighing, he sat down on one of the empty desks, pulling out his phone. He didn’t know what Eliott’s username was, but he was able to find the account easily enough by looking through the four people Arthur followed.

Srodulv. What was that supposed to mean?

Ignoring the nonsensical name, Lucas tapped on the profile, immediately accosted by the ever growing number of followers Eliott had accumulated. There was only one post, a drawing of two people holding hands, the words ‘To enter Polaris trust Cesar’ written over them. Curious, Lucas clicked the link in the bio which led him to a website that seemed to be meant for fundraising of some sort. The money goal hadn’t been reached but there was a video that described the project. Checking once to make sure Eliott wasn’t on his way into the room, Lucas clicked play.

Eliott’s face filled the screen, bright smile lighting up the entire video, even in the somewhat low resolution. He went on to describe a story he had come up with for a short film he wanted to create, titled Polaris. It seemed odd to Lucas for a wizard to want to pursue this in such a muggle-like way, but nevertheless he took in the video, paying attention to every word.

Polaris was about two characters, a hero who was afraid of the dark and an unnamed entity afraid of the light. Throughout the course of the story they fell in love even though they never saw each other, on opposite sides of a tunnel. It was only when they conquered their fears of each others worlds that they were able to live freely and truly, in love with one another. The video ended with an animated storyboard that matched the one that had been posted on Eliott’s instagram of the pivotal scene when the two characters would meet.

Lucas was so entranced by the video, tears brimming in the corners of his eyes, that he didn’t notice when Eliott made his way into the room.

“What are you watching?” Eliott asked Lucas, causing him to hurriedly turn off his phone and shove it in his pocket, nearly throwing it to the floor. Eliott gave him an amused look and Lucas’ cheeks got redder than they probably already were.

“Nothing,” he said unconvincingly.

Eliott waited for him to elaborate, huffing out a small laugh and shrugging when it became apparent Lucas wasn’t going to say anything else on the subject. Lucas took this time to take in Eliott’s appearance, heart beating a little too fast for his liking. While students were no longer technically required to wear full uniforms, professors accepting their appearances as long as they had their house robes on, many students still donned the standard black pants or skirts, white button downs, sweaters, and house ties underneath their robes. Lucas himself generally switched between the full uniform and some of his muggle clothes depending on his mood. During the weekends, however, nearly all the students wore muggle clothes.

This was the first time Lucas had seen Eliott out of his uniform and he was feeling a whole lot of things he would have preferred not to be. He wasn’t even wearing anything special, just a brown bomber jacket, black t shirt, ripped jeans, white sneakers, and a black hat with a B on it, covering his normally wild hair. They were practically the same level of dressed down, but Lucas still felt inadequate in his white t shirt, jeans, nike shoes, and blue jacket.

“Nice hat,” Lucas said, not knowing what else to say. Eliott brought one hand up to his hat as if just remembering he was wearing it. He held it there for a moment before pulling the hat off and tossing it to Lucas, who caught it in surprise. Eliott ran his hands through his hair, fluffing it up so it didn’t reap the consequences hat wearing usually brought. As if his hair could ever look anything but perfect, Lucas thought bitterly.

“You can probably pull off hats better than I can,” Eliott said, indicating the hat he had just thrown to Lucas, “It’s from Beauxbatons, hence the B.”

Lucas turned it over in his hands. Was Eliott implying that he should wear the hat? He slipped it on, hoping he hadn’t been reading the situation incorrectly. Not that there was any situation to be reading correctly or incorrectly. Was there?

Eliott’s face broke into a wide grin. “I knew it. Plus, the letter is red, it’ll match your robes.”

Lucas didn’t totally know how to respond so he decided to change the subject. “So… patronuses?”

“Right.” Eliott blinked as if coming out of a dream. “Right. Um, how do you want to start?”

Eliott’s sudden lack of confidence startled Lucas a bit. Wasn’t Eliott the one who had offered to help Lucas out in the first place? How was Lucas supposed to know where to start when he barely knew how to perform the spell?

“You could show me how to do it,” Lucas offered.

Eliott nodded his head. “Yes. I could do that, sure.”

“Are you ok?” Lucas asked hesitantly.

“Yeah, yeah,” Eliott assured him, forcing out a laugh, “Sorry I just got distracted for a minute.”

Before Lucas could respond, Eliott got out his wand and pointed it into the air. “Expecto Patronum!”

Simple as that, a glowing silver raccoon floated from his wand gracefully, dancing through the air with and expression that looked somehow Eliott-like. Lucas was mesmerized, watching it move around the room, searching for dark forces to fend off.

“He keeps me company sometimes,” Eliott said, eyes following his patronus. “He’s like an extension of me in some ways and a friend in other ways. This way I never get lonely.”

Eliott’s voice was distant, almost as if he hadn’t meant to speak at all. Lucas couldn’t imagine how this silvery raccoon could be tied so deeply to Eliott’s being, but found that he wanted to have as much certainty and attachment to something as Eliott did to his patronus.

“Should I try?” Lucas asked, not entirely knowing what to say.

Eliott blinked, thoughts visibly clearing from his eyes. “Sure. I guess I don’t really know how I make it work, but you have to believe it will. When I was learning they told me to channel my happiest memory, but that’s sort of a hard thing to think of on the spot, so I settled for thinking of the last time I was sublimely happy, that way it was always changing.”

Lucas’ mind immediately went to how he felt when Eliott had asked him to practice patronuses the day before, then blushed. Eliott smiled at the look on Lucas’ face. “Good memory?”

“Yeah,” Lucas said a bit breathlessly.

“Good,” Eliott said softly, leaning against one of the desks, “Now just try the spell and see what happens. Keep whatever memory you’re thinking of at the forefront of your mind. Don’t even think about trying to make the spell work, just think about how that memory makes you feel and channel that into your words.”

Simple enough, Lucas thought, raising his wand and steadying his breathing. An image of Eliott smiling at him popped into his mind and, instead of ignoring it, he embraced it, letting his heart race and his breathing shorten. He closed his eyes. “Expecto Patronum!”

When he opened his eyes he nearly screamed in shock. There was a silvery light emanating from his wand. It wasn’t a full patronus, sure, but it was something.

“Eliott! Eliott! Are you seeing this!” he yelled excitedly, not even trying to remain cool and collected. Eliott’s voice was equally exuberant as he answered, “I’m seeing it!”

Eliott’s confirmation filled Lucas with another surge of happiness, causing the light from his wand to brighten and release a few nondescript shapes into the air. Once they had been released, the light from his wand ceased to glow and a wave of exhaustion overtook him. Patronuses were hard work.

“At this rate you’ll be producing a corporeal patronus in no time.” Appreciation was evident in Eliott’s voice as he spoke and Lucas to bite his lip to keep from smiling in pride. “What memory did you think of, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Lucas stiffened. “Oh, it was nothing…”

“Ok, yeah, sorry that was kind of personal.” Eliott retreated back to the desk he had been leaning on, shaking his head as if clearing it from a fog. Lucas wanted to reassure him, but he also didn’t want to tell Eliott that he had been thinking of him. “Want to try again?”

Lucas nodded and took up the same position speaking the words to the spell and thinking of Eliott all the while. He didn’t know how long they practiced, it could have been days for all he knew, but he was still unable to make a shape out of the thin wisps of silver that were emitted from his wand with each attempt. Eliott was endlessly supportive, but it was hard for him not to be a bit frustrated.

On his last attempt, Lucas nearly fell over from exhaustion, immediately embarrassed. Eliott cursed under his breath and looked out the windows where the sun had set without either of them realizing it.

“Shit, what time is it?” Eliott asked. Lucas shrugged, pulling out his phone to check. He blinked in surprise when the screen told him that it was nearly eleven at night, long past dinner.

“Fuck,” he laughed, showing the screen to Eliott. Eliott looked at it for a minute, then back to Lucas with a slight smirk and a glint in his eyes Lucas wasn’t sure if he liked the look of. Lucas turned his phone back around and saw that he had accidentally unlocked it and shown Eliott the screen with Eliott’s Instagram page still pulled up.

He opened his mouth and closed it again, unable to form any words that would make the situation less awkward.

“You still haven’t followed me,” is all Eliott said. Lucas gulped, stowing his phone away.

“No,” he answered, leveling Eliott with a falsely confident stare that he hoped looked believable. Eliott hadn’t followed him either. Eliott simply raised his eyebrows and laid down on the floor, gesturing for Lucas to follow. Lucas did, taking any excuse to distract from the fact that he had clearly been stalking Eliott’s page. He laid with his body opposite Eliott’s so their heads were aligned, legs pointing in opposite directions.

Lucas was just about to ask why they were laying on the floor when Eliott turned his head to meet Lucas’ eyes. “What do you think your patronus will be?”

“At this point? Nothing,” Lucas answered bitterly. Eliott scrunched up his eyebrows in an adorable fashion, even from Lucas’ upside down view of it.

“What are you talking about? You almost did it just a few minutes ago.”

“But I didn’t.”

“But you will. Especially with me to help you.” Eliott grinned, warming Lucas’ insides.

Lucas sighed. “I guess so.”

“So what animal, then?” Eliott looked genuinely curious, eyes lit up in interest.

Lucas paused a moment to think. He hadn’t really ever identified with any animal like Eliott clearly had with his raccoon. “Maybe Ouba,” he blurted.

Eliott began laughing so hard it rang out in the empty room. “What the hell is an Ouba?”

“Ouba is my dog,” Lucas said defensively, waiting for Eliott to stop laughing so hard.

“Sorry, sorry,” Eliott apologized, “That just wasn’t what I was expecting. Do you have Ouba at school with you?”

Lucas nodded to the best of his ability, a bit of a difficult task considering how he was lying down. “She should be up in my dormitory right now. Fuck, hopefully Manon fed her tonight.”

“Why would Ouba be your patronus?”

Lucas shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve had her since I started here though, so she sort of feels like a part of me. She’s seen it all, the good and the bad.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean she’s a part of your soul. I love Brian, but he never would have been my patronus,” Eliott countered. Their mouths were so close, Lucas realized.

“Brian?”

“My snake.”

Lucas coughed harshly. “Your-- your what?”

“Snake?”

“How, uh, how big are we talking? Could it, like, eat me?” Lucas was fucking terrified of snakes.

Eliott let out an amused giggle. Lucas could feel Eliott’s breath on his face from this close distance. Was it possible they were closer now than they had been a minute before? Eliott spoke, bringing Lucas back to the present. “No? I can hold him in my hand. He’s fun to talk to, though. Not much of a conversationalist, but we’re working on it.”

“I can’t tell if you’re being serious right now.”

“Completely serious,” Eliott confirmed somberly.

“You speak parseltongue?”

“Yeah. Why?”

That didn’t make much sense to Lucas. Parselmouths were really rare and heavily associated with Slytherin. He explained this to Eliott who just shrugged. “I wasn’t born able to speak it. I learned it last year.”

“You… learned parseltongue?” Lucas hadn’t even thought it was a language you could learn. “Why? How?”

“One of my friends was a parselmouth,” Eliott said shortly, a bitterness to his voice that Lucas hadn’t heard before. He wanted to press for more details but the look on Eliott’s face told him that maybe this wasn’t the time. Lucas felt his eyes drifting closed against his will. Their lips were so very close…

Eliott sat up suddenly, looking once out the windows before standing completely. “We should go, it’s almost curfew.”

“Right.” Lucas’ eyes shot open as he sat up and followed Eliott as he walked out the door.

“I have to run to the library really quick, so I guess I’ll see you Monday?” Eliott said, already drifting away from Lucas’ side.

“I can go with if you want, the school can be pretty confusing,” Lucas offered, wanting to know why Eliott was suddenly so distant.

Eliott shook his head. “I’m sure I’ll be fine, thanks anyway.”

Without another word he turned and walked away, leaving Lucas staring after him in utter confusion. Had he done something wrong? Had Eliott realized how close they had been, lying on the floor like that?

Lucas walked up to his common room in a daze, wishing Eliott was still beside him so badly. Ouba jumped out of her bed the minute he entered the dormitory, licking his ankles.

“Hi girl, hi hi hi!” He tried to muster some excitement into his voice, but it still sounded a bit dead as it came out. Yann sat up in his bed and looked at Lucas.

“Where have you been?”

“I was just working on some spells in the charms room,” Lucas explained, not technically lying. Yann nodded, accepting the answer, then pointed to Lucas’ head. “Where did that come from?”

Lucas brought his hands up in confusion, nearly pulling the hat he hadn’t realized he was still wearing off his head. “Oh, this? I ran up here to grab it while you were in the library. It’s an old hat, I don’t wear it often.”

“Mmm,” Yann shrugged, lying back down with the book he’d been reading. Lucas shrugged off his jacket and startled a bit when he received a notification on his phone. It was from Instagram. Confused, he opened the app and nearly stopped breathing.

srodulv started following you

He clicked on the profile to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating. It took a moment to load, but when it did his heart started beating once more. It was who he thought it was. Twenty-two thousand people following him but he was only following one. Lucas.

Lucas smiled down at his phone, then at Ouba, still dancing around his feet. “Come on,” he told her and took her into the bathroom with him. He lifted her and snuggled into her fur, snapping a picture in the mirror. It may not have been the best picture, but he finally had a reason to post on Instagram.

He uploaded the photo and waited. Five minutes. Ten minutes. A few of his friends like the picture, Manon even commented on it, but nothing from Eliott. Maybe it had been a fluke, maybe Eliott hadn’t meant to follow him. He checked again to see if Eliott was still following him, and he was. Lucas was more confused than ever.

Defeated, he finally took off Eliott’s hat and ran his hands through his hair before flopping onto his own bed, drawing the curtains shut. He had nearly fallen asleep when his phone lit up beside him, once, twice.

srodulv liked your post

srodulv commented: nice hat

Grinning like an idiot, Lucas quickly followed Eliott back. He wanted to respond to the comment, but he didn’t know what to say so he just left it, deciding he would try to remember to respond in the morning.

If only they had been practicing patronuses now, because Lucas was certain he would have been able to produce the best one the world had ever seen in that moment.

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4

AO3

#elu hogwarts au #skam france #elu fic #la fin des temps #lucas lallemant #eliott demaury #elu #skamfr

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skipperbeat · 2 years

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independent stranger things original character , 𝐒𝐊𝐈𝐏𝐏𝐄𝐑 𝐉𝐀𝐍𝐄 𝐇𝐄𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐑𝐒𝐎𝐍 . the older sister of dustin henderson . a 𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑑𝑦 in : a strained parental relationship , the classic girl next door , ‘ it ’ girl , world flipped upside down , closeted nerd , popularity & friendship . written & adored by 𝙼𝙰𝚁𝙸𝙴 | 𝟹𝙾+ | 𝚜𝚑𝚎 / 𝚑𝚎𝚛 .

— 𝟸𝟷 + 𝙾 𝙽 𝙻 𝚈 ! —

* 𝙼𝙴𝙼𝙴𝚂 // 𝙳𝙾𝙲 // 𝙷𝙴𝙰𝙳𝙲𝙰𝙽𝙾𝙽𝚂 *

other blogs : @upsidehell , @wakeupchrissy , @emends & @mazcaps .

[ O7 / 18 / 22 ] — the UK heat is ridiculous right now so under the cut it a brief bio of SKIPPER. i will be working on her DOC the moment it gets cooler, but until then enjoy whatever shit i spin below. subject to change when thy brain decides it can think.

the plan for me doing thy DOC tonight is hindered by the temp, but for those who wanna know briefly. skipper is dustin’s older sister. she moved in with her dad across town just after season one, but she still attended hawkins up until she graduated in 84-85 ( need to do the maths on that one ). after graduating she took it upon herself to get her parents to invest in a small derelict building in the middle of town, in hopes to turn it into a little cafe. it wasn’t effected by the events in S4E9. her little shit shack was safe from it. although her little cafe is far from completion, she uses it as a soup kitchen for those who were hit by the events.

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megers67 · 6 years

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BNHA OC 2: Tanaka Rin

My second OC for BNHA. I came up with her second as a counterpart to Hibiki but I love her on her own as well.

Hibiki's Bio

Hero Profile

Once again, I'm so sorry there isn't a Read More. I'm on mobile and there's no damn way for me to do it.

APPEARANCE: Rin is pretty tall and of athletic build. She has bright blue hair (dyed from her natural darker blue) that, while the style changes fairly frequently, always stays short. It's never past her chin and is usually shorter than that. Because of her quirk, she is completely unaffected by the outside temperature. That means she can literally wear anything she wanted at any time, much to the annoyance of her friends. She has a decent fashion sense, but is literally blind and so can't see the colors for anything. Though even if she could, she has the confidence to wear crazy color combos. She likes people's reactions to her attire like a neon pink miniskirt in the dead of winter or a big fluffy coat in the summer heat or something. Rin does generally keep it seasonal for the most part though she still wears clashing colors. Doesn't help that Hibiki is usually the one to help Rin out in that department, and while SHE is sighted, she has absolutely no fashion sense herself. So Rin gets to enjoy walking around like a fucking disaster. For those who try to make negative comments, she cheerfully informs them that she's blind and that usually shuts them up. She also usually wears sunglasses because it's much easier to use her thermal vision when outside light is blocked out.

This doesn't really do it justice, but I'm limited to what Love Nikki is giving me. I could go more clashing, but most of that also involves clothes that don't line up (like shirts going outside the coat, etc) and I hate the look of that.

PERSONALITY: Rin is bright and cheerful and very outgoing. She is persistent in her desire to befriend most people she comes across, but knows when to tone things down or when someone needs space. Like Hibiki, she will also drop everything to help someone out, though it is far less draining on her than Hibiki. She's a fixer though so she's not great to go to if you just want to vent. If you do want to do something about something or help getting something done, then she is perfect for the job.

While Rin exudes positivity, she certainly has her own insecurities, mostly stemming from her fear that she isn't good enough to be a hero. She's not the strongest or the smartest, the fastest, most technically skilled, or have the best quirk. On top of that, she's blind. While her quirk goes a long way to make her independent, she still relies on others for a lot of things and suffers from imposter's syndrome. Being at UA has actually helped her a lot to combat these feelings, but they can still hit her pretty hard. Because she hides it behind a wall of positivity, it can be hard to spot when she's beating herself up over something. Hibiki seems to be one of, if not the, only one who can consistently read her and guide her through it. Rin isn't quick to anger unless it is on someone else's behalf in which case, she really lets it loose and will want to do something about it.

QUIRK: Her quirk is Heat. Specifically, she can make herself a heat sink or heat source and can use that to control the temperature of what she touches or the air immediately surrounding her. Her entire body is therefore unaffected by extreme temperatures (and she doesn't need to regulate a normal body temperature). This means that she doesn't get burned or frostbite so she can be standing in a raging inferno and only need to worry about getting enough air to breathe. She has yet to reach the temperature limits on her body so her intensity and range is largely limited by the amount of energy she has and any environmental constraints. Because her quirk uses her body's energy, she needs to eat a lot to keep up. Her range can increase with contact with a conductive material as it can help direct the flow of energy. Her quirk doesn't produce fire or ice and so can be difficult for an opponent to track if they're not aware of it. Rin also uses her quirk as a form of thermal imaging to navigate the world around her. This means that she has a lot of independence and doesn't need external aids for most situations. Additionally, she is completely at ease in the dark as there is little change to her.

There are, however, limitations. She can't sense through barriers such as walls, even those that sighted people can see through like glass. She can sense through barriers if a conductive material goes through it to the other side, but even then the clarity is greatly diminished. Though even that can be very useful. Another limitation is that she can't read anything printed or written on a page, screen, sign, etc. She just sees that there is a paper there. For school work, she is allowed a laptop that has a text-to-speech option so that she can hear back her notes after she types them. Rin will also have one of her classmates go over her notes to make sure she didn't miss anything, though usually her own notes tend to be better since it's faster to type than to physically write things down. For non-school work, ie. when she's out and about, she has Hibiki or someone else with her read something out to her. She would even ask strangers, but this usually only happens when she's out shopping and needs to know a price. The same goes for colors. Rin was previously sighted so she remembers colors and even processes her thermal vision via colors but she doesn't know something's real color. Hibiki has gotten pretty good at describing colors to her.

PAST: Not nearly as sordid (or detailed) as Hibiki's to be sure. She has a loving family and an older brother. Her childhood was fairly normal to be sure. Rin was always popular in school because everyone just liked her and she always made an effort for anyone to feel included. Especially the new girl, Hibiki, who keeps to herself in the corner. And she even succeeds in becoming her friend! Yay!

But her life changed forever when she turned 11. All she wanted was to figure out the limitations of her quirk. Naturally this meant trying to get her hand as hot as she could as fast as she could. Turns out that really hot things get really really bright and that prolonged exposure to bright light can permanently damage your eyes. After one too many times, her sight never returns. After that, Rin was a mess. Losing a sense was hard and it didn't help that everyone treated her like a fragile porcelain doll. Almost everyone. Hibiki didn't. In fact, she was the same calm voice of reason that she always was. In fact little had changed between them. Just the subject matter of their conversations. It was Hibiki who pointed out that maybe she could try using her quirk to sense things like the goggles police and heroes sometimes use. And like that, they went from friends to inseparable best friends.

They applied to UA together and while they both got in, Hibiki didn't make it to the hero course like she did. Initially Rin was nervous because Hibiki helped her out a lot over the last few years and now they could only be together during lunch or off hours (even though Hibiki was convinced that being in different classes mean they would drift apart, Rin insisted otherwise). She would have to face being blind alone for the first time. That anxiety didn't last very long because her class was pretty cool about it. Her teachers also made sure she had proper accommodations both in and out of class.

The sports festival was very exciting because she was able to see just how much she'd grown, but Hibiki as well. Rin made sure that they did their handshake in front of everyone to show both Hibiki and the world that whatever happened, they were still friends. And even as Rin finally knocked Hibiki out of the ring, both were smiling. Even though she didn't win, getting third was pretty damn cool.

Rin does her field training with Backdraft in the Musutafu fire department. She finds that she actually quite likes rescue work even though she still wants to fight villains. She continues to train, increasing her stamina to use her quirk more and in larger strength.

Even though she was sad that one of her classmates chose to drop the hero course, she was very happy that that meant that Hibiki was now joining the class. She was very active in getting Hibiki accepted into the group. Rin also worked hard to make sure that Hibiki was all caught up as far as the hero course was concerned. Rin got her provisional license and did her internship with a hero that was more villain-centric to get that kind of experience and was particularly useful for night missions because of her thermal vision, but it made her lose a lot of sleep. She started taking naps between classes and during lunch, relying on Hibiki to sneak her snacks during class to keep going.

OTHER SKILLS AND TIDBITS: Rin is the resident Hibiki whisperer. If you ever wanted Hibiki to do something, your best bet is to get Rin on it. Rin is down for pretty much anything and can talk Hibiki into pretty much anything even for a more passive role.

She has ADHD. She has it mostly under control, but when she doesn't, Hibiki knows how to pull her back together and get back to work.

Because Rin's body is resistant to extreme temperatures, when she thinks she is getting sick, she will "flash" to basically incinerate the pathogen. Unfortunately this also burns away any good bacteria she has in her gut as well as any non-digested food still in her system. The combo makes her nauseous anyway. She gets scolded for it every time but still insists she'll get it right some day.

She is the undisputed best cuddler because she can make her body temp juuuust the right level of warmth for whoever she's cuddling. This is especially popular during the winter.

By default, her body temperature is the normal and average level. But sometimes it will accidentally rise or lower itself without her noticing, usually due to emotions. She doesn't really notice until it's pointed out by someone that she accidentally burned or froze something.

Rin is really good to have in the kitchen because she can tell when things are cooked through to the exact temp it should be, make sure something is cooked evenly, or retrieve an ingredient that accidentally fell into boiling water too early, etc. Her favorite "party trick" is for when people are unfamiliar with her quirk, she will "accidentally" lean on a hot stove and freak them out.

She has a pretty mischievous streak in her. While she doesn't like initiating pranks, she loves being an accomplice in them. Rin is staunchly neutral during prank wars but is more than willing to lend her services to either side.

Rin likes "watching" movies even though she can't see the images on the screen. She enjoys making up her own as she hears the dialogue. The first question her friends usually have when the credits roll is "okay, what do you THINK just happened?" A lot of the time, the answer is a lot more fun than what actually happened because she has a really active imagination.

She can read Japanese braille, but it doesn't come up incredibly often. Rin is in the process of learning Japanese sign language because she wants to be good representation for disabilities and advocate for accessibility.

Rin doesn't like "turning off" her thermal vision very much, but it can get tiring after a while. She tends to do so during class since she doesn't really need it then. She'll only "turn off" outside of class if she's alone with Hibiki since she was around from the beginning. She's okay being vulnerable around her.

She doesn't like having long hair herself, but greatly enjoys playing with Hibiki's.

Rin is pansexual and has known since junior high. But she hasn't done a lot of dating since she only seems to have a consistent crush on a certain someone who just doesn't seem interested.

Rin doesn't like travelling very far by herself because she's afraid that she will suddenly get too tired to maintain her thermal vision, leaving her vulnerable, lost, and alone.

She really likes cats, but it's kind of a problem because Hibiki is allergic. Hibiki will still go with her to cat cafes to keep her company, but Rin usually feels really bad about it and so will usually ask other people to join her before resorting to asking Hibiki.

Just as Hibiki is the best hider in hide and seek, Rin is the best seeker because of her thermal vision. She is no longer allowed to be seeker.

#bnha oc #oc #mha oc #megers67 oc #oc: rin

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years

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Postmaster DeJoy’s First Company Was Plagued By Claims of Racism, Harassment, and Abuse

The swastikas started to appear in 2006, according to the lawsuit, soon after the man’s co-worker called him a “nigger” and “mayate,” a Spanish slang term for the same word. First, a swastika made out of magnets near his work station; then, one burned into a tool he used every day.

By 2009, Sterling Davis was suing the employer where he’d been, he claimed, subjected to racialized harassment and intimidation: New Breed Logistics, a supply chain and distribution company with warehouses across the United States, and its headquarters in North Carolina. Its CEO was Louis DeJoy, currently the Postmaster General.

While DeJoy has touted his 30 years at New Breed as a business success story, employment lawsuits brought by Davis and a multitude of other workers at New Breed paint a troubling picture of the workplace culture there. Davis, who is Black and worked at New Breed as a repair technician, said in court filings that he was subjected to relentless abuse from a co-worker, while their joint supervisor did nothing.

“I’m not your babysitter,” Davis alleged the supervisor said to him and the man who was harassing him, after seeing the magnet swastika. “You need to work your problems out.” At a shop meeting, both men and their coworkers were told to “shape up,” and that the workplace “was not the place for that kind of thing.” The two men were jointly admonished to “get along.”

In April, Davis said in the filing, the two men were both suspended while an investigation was conducted. On April 22, Davis learned that management couldn’t decide who was at fault, and that both men were fired. Davis’ lawsuit was resolved in 2009; his attorney said it was a confidential matter that he could not discuss.

Do you know anything about New Breed or Louis DeJoy we should know? Contact the reporters at [email protected], [email protected], or [email protected].

These details come from one of more than a dozen employment-related lawsuits filed against New Breed Logistics by former employees and contractors over the years, including one brought by the federal Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, or EEOC. The Daily Beast reported on the EEOC complaint in May, and the treatment of workers at XPO Logistics, the company that bought New Breed and where DeJoy was CEO of its supply line business, was covered in a 2018 story by the New York Times. But an examination of the civil lawsuits against New Breed adds another layer to the portrait of how workers have said they were treated under DeJoy.

The complaints in these cases describe extreme racial and sexual harassment, claims that workers were fired after being injured or becoming ill, and management that seemed indifferent where it wasn't actively malicious. In one case, a jury awarded $1.5 million to several women the EEOC said were subjected to “unwelcome sexual touching and lewd, obscene and vulgar sexual remarks” by a Memphis warehouse supervisor and to a man who was fired after objecting to the harassment. According to the lawsuit, New Breed supervisor James Calhoun told one woman he wanted to “eat her pussy,” told another that he was “gone fuck you good” before warning her that if anyone went to HR they would be fired, and told a third that he wanted her to “suck his dick.”

Many of the lawsuits were settled privately, on terms covered by confidentiality agreements. In some instances, those agreements prevented anyone involved from even acknowledging that there had been a settlement, according to sources with direct knowledge of the cases. In normal circumstances they would remain obscure and forgotten, especially because New Breed itself no longer exists, having been sold to another distribution company, XPO, in 2014. They are newly relevant, though, because Louis DeJoy, the longtime CEO of New Breed, has gone on to bigger things. The major Republican donor was appointed Postmaster General of the United States Postal Service in May of this year. He has, famously, wasted no time in radically reorganizing its business.

DeJoy’s critics, including Democrats in Congress, claim he’s weakening the Postal Service, throwing it into chaos designed to make voting by mail impossible in time for the presidential election. Donald Trump has openly said that he’s intentionally withholding money from the USPS to make it more difficult for them to execute mail-in voting in November.

“They need that money in order to make the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said on Fox Business recently, explaining why he was starving the USPS of funds. “But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.” By August 18, faced with a massive national backlash, DeJoy said any new changes to the USPS would be postponed until after the election.

DeJoy’s defenders—and the man himself—say he has the business acumen needed to save the post office. “DeJoy’s vast and relevant expertise presents a fresh opportunity to reform and transform the USPS,” exulted a pro-business advocacy group, the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council. “He brings 35 years of private sector know-how, having built New Breed Logistics from a 10-employee family-owned business to a sophisticated and technology-oriented logistics company with 9,000 employees.”

New Breed, in other words, is an integral part of Louis DeJoy’s success story, trotted out to show his business acumen and the bona fides he possesses that will enable him to turn the post office around. In glowing profiles, DeJoy has touted his success after taking over New Breed, which his father founded in Long Island in 1968 as a trucking company. DeJoy began working for the company in 1982, and became CEO the following year, according to a bio on the website for his family foundation.

“That attitude that you are the most important person is self-destructive,” DeJoy told the News and Record, a North Carolina newspaper, in 2015, referring to the then-hit TV show The Apprentice and its star, Donald Trump. If he were on the show, DeJoy said at the time, “I’d be fired.” His business, the Record reported, “relies on a team of people, many of whom have been with him for a decade.”

Allegations in court filings, though, reflect part of what his vaunted private sector know-how consists of. In their totality, the claims contend that New Breed, in various times and at various places, fostered environments where harassment, discrimination, and deeply inappropriate work behavior were accepted. Workers in these cases made allegations about everything from wage theft to being fired for filing a false workers compensation claim after a paper cut sustained on the job led to an amputation.

XPO Logistics declined to comment after being provided a detailed list of questions by Motherboard. DeJoy did not respond to a request for comment submitted through the USPS.

New Breed's issues with labor were deeply rooted. In 1997, the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, found that the company had engaged in unfair labor practices at the Compton Army Terminal in Compton, California, where it was a subcontractor. The NLRB found that in 1994, when New Breed won a bid to take over the Army Terminal from the then-current contractor, Maersk, it went out of its way to avoid re-hiring the unionized workforce then employed at the facility. The company employed extreme secrecy to make sure that unionized Maersk employees weren’t even aware of the hiring process:

It is uncontested that New Breed recruited new employees by placing anonymous advertisements in local newspapers. Responses were then screened, and promising applicants were interviewed at a local hotel. New Breed did not post notices of job openings at the army terminal; did not tell Maersk employees of the interview process; and did not inform the Unions of the hiring process. As a result, no Maersk employees filed employment applications with New Breed, or requested interviews

In 1995, an administrative law judge recommended to the NLRB that New Breed be ordered to “reinstate the Maersk employees to their former positions, recognize and bargain with the Unions, and restore the status quo ante with respect to wages and terms and conditions of employment.” The NLRB also found that the company had specifically acted with “anti-union animus.” As the Daily Beast reported in May, testimony from New Breed employees indicated that DeJoy was personally involved in the hiring process and its end-run around the union. New Breed unsuccessfully appealed the decision in the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeal.

The anti-union sentiments identified by the NLRB are significant for DeJoy’s current job. The USPS is a highly unionized workforce, with workers represented through the American Postal Workers Union (for facility employees) and the National Association of Letter Carriers. (The APWU didn’t respond to a request for comment from Motherboard; it publicly opposed the policies DeJoy attempted to implement.)

The NLRB case wasn’t New Breed’s last run-in with a federal agency. In September 2010, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued New Breed on behalf of four former employees, saying that a supervisor at the company's facility in Memphis, Tennessee sexually harassed three women and that the company fired them for complaining about it. The lawsuit also said that New Breed fired a male employee because he tried to oppose the sexual harassment. (The plaintiffs in the case could not be reached for comment.)

A temp agency called Select Staffing placed Tiffany Pete at the facility in April 2008. There, she worked under superviser James Calhoun, who could not be reached for comment, in the receiving department. The lawsuit said that Calhoun “talked about Ms. Pete’s ‘big butt’ and how good it looked in her jeans. He licked his lips and said that he wanted ‘to eat her pussy.’ He told her daily that he ‘wanted to fuck her.’” Pete, according to the lawsuit, was warned by other women that she would be fired if she complained.

After about a month, the lawsuit said, Pete called New Breed's anonymous hotline to report that Calhoun was harassing female workers, and then followed up. In the second call, she revealed her identity. The lawsuit said that not only did New Breed not investigate Pete’s claims or interview any women who worked with Calhoun, it terminated her without notice or explanation, a mere four days after her first call to the hotline. After she was fired, Pete provided a written statement to the temp agency reporting what had happened and describing Calhoun’s sexual harassment, the lawsuit said. The temp agency sent it to New Breed; only then did the company investigate and fire Calhoun.

Capricious Pearson was also placed by Select Staffing at the New Breed's Memphis facility in April 2008, and also worked in the receiving department under Calhoun, the lawsuit said. According to the filing, Calhoun “told her she owed him because he got her hired. She also heard on that day that [he] fired people who did not give him what he wanted. Within her first week, Calhoun said to her and another young lady, ‘I want to fuck, I want to fuck.’” The lawsuit said that he became more explicit, saying, ““I’m gone fuck you good,” and asking her when they were going to “hook up” and on one occasion, when Pearson was feeling sick, grabbing his crotch and saying, “I got something to knock that out.” Calhoun also touched Pearson inappropriately, “rubbing her thigh and her butt, and blowing air down her neck,” per the filing. Pearson complained directly to Calhoun and asked him to stop; he responded by telling her that “If anyone goes to [the HR Director] on me, they will be fired.” Pearson was fired on the same date as Pete, the lawsuit said. Pearson also submitted a written complaint to Select Staffing, which sent it to New Breed Logistics.

Jacqueline Hines also worked under Calhoun in the receiving department. The lawsuit said that “on a daily basis” Calhoun told Hines how “he would ‘love to eat her pussy,’ ‘fuck her,’ ‘give her money,’ and he wanted her to ‘suck his dick.’” Hines complained to Calhoun and told him to stop; within a week, the lawsuit said, she was fired.

Christopher Partee worked in the Memphis facility, also under Calhoun, from October 2007 through May 2008, first as a temp worker and then as a permanent employee, per the filing. The lawsuit said that Partee witnessed Calhoun make sexual comments to the female employees, and that he said as much when interviewed by New Breed's regional human resources manager. After Partee spoke to HR, the suit said, Calhoun falsely accused him of stealing company time, and Partee was fired without an investigation.

According to a 2017 Associated Press article, “New Breed claimed that Partee was suspended for clocking in overtime hours without authorization. It tried to argue that the human resources official who suspended him did not know he had agreed to back up Pete’s complaint. In the end, EEOC provided evidence the official knew Pete had named Partee as a witness.”

In 2013, a jury, after a seven-day trial, found in favor of the EEOC on both the sexual harassment and retaliation charges and awarded the plaintiffs $1.5 million. New Breed appealed the verdict and mounted vigorous defenses, including the arguments that New Breed had no knowledge of the complaints before the workers were fired and that Hines was fired for attendance reasons, not for complaining about Calhoun’s harassment. In April 2015, a federal appeals court affirmed the $1.5 million settlement.

The EEOC case was not the only one in which a New Breed worker claimed they were fired after reporting harassment to human resources.

In 2010, a woman named Sulema Garza, who worked as a battery charger at a New Breed facility in Texas and could not be reached for comment, filed suit against the company and a coworker who, according to court filings, "drew and circulated drawings of Sulema with a penis and with a vagina and pinched Sulema causing Sulema to bruise." Three people, the filings said, "would pretend to strip and grab each other's breasts, groins, and buttocks in front of Sulema and would tease her. Sulema reported the harassment to her supervisor," the filings said, but it did not stop; one of the offending coworkers "would cause to be placed on Sulema's backside paper 'stickies' with the words 'Sexy' and 'Baby' written on them."

According to the filing, Garza's supervisor, who could not be reached for comment, said "'they are not listening' or words to that effect" and asked Garza to take the complaint to HR; after she did so, she was first suspended without pay and subsequently fired. An HR employee named Denise Buntaine, asked in a deposition about Garza's firing, said: "Everything was pretty much blessed out of headquarters. You did nothing without headquarters knowing about it."

“You did nothing without headquarters knowing about it."

In December 2011, according to court filings, the parties reached a settlement. Garza's lawyer, reached by Motherboard, said he would need to research the case to comment on it and would call when he had done so; he had not done so by press time.

One consistent theme in suits against New Breed involved workers claiming they were fired after being injured on the job or becoming sick.

In a 2010 case, a woman named Jeanette Pierson sued for retaliatory discharge. According to Pierson’s complaint, she sustained a paper cut at work, which she showed to her supervisor; the cut soon became infected, and in early April, she went to the emergency room and was hospitalized into May, with the infection becoming so severe that part of her ring finger had to be amputated.

In mid-May, per the lawsuit, she received a letter from New Breed stating that she was being terminated “due to violation of company policy.” When she called to ask what policy she had violated, the suit said, the company alleged that she’d made a worker’s compensation claim for a “non-work related” injury. Pierson countered that she’d gotten permission to file her first doctor’s visit under a workers compensation claim, that New Breed placed her on medical leave themselves, and that her firing was clearly retaliation for filing a workers compensation claim.

The parties agreed to dismiss the case, having resolved the dispute. Jonathan Bobbitt, who represented Pierson, told Motherboard that he could not comment on the case, but that the record showed what the record showed, and that if the outcome was vague, that was purposeful.

In 2012, alleged a 2016 suit, a man named Julian Perez was injured on the job moving a rolling cart to an elevated pallet. Perez worked for New Breed at its location at the Corpus Christi Army Depot, where the company was a subcontractor for another company, Patricio Enterprises. (Many of New Breed’s locations worked this way, as a nesting doll of contracts and subcontracts; that’s not unusual for shipping and logistics firms.)

According to court documents, Perez’s doctor said he would have been able to continue working with some restrictions. Perez returned to work on August 15, 2012, with a letter of employment from New Breed in hand laying out those restrictions. After only a few hours, he was escorted off the premises and told his employment was terminated; he later learned, according to the documents, that New Breed and Patricio Enterprises had falsely told the military contractor who ran the Army Depot that he’d shown up to the site of his own accord, not because his employment had been reinstated. Perez first filed a complaint with the Texas Workforce Commission and then the EEOC. According to his complaint in civil court, New Breed cooperated with the EEOC on a possible settlement until the company “unexpectedly withdrew its cooperation” because it felt the penalties the EEOC was demanding were “too harsh compared to the severity of its violation.” The case was settled out of court in 2018, on terms that are not part of the public record. Perez and his attorney could not be reached for comment.

In 2013, a man named Fort Wiseman filed suit against New Breed in Mississippi. He had worked for the company for about three and a half years, according to his suit, with his main job being to move trailers into a bay for unloading. In April 2012, per the suit, he took a week of medical leave to deal with an artery issue, and a white contractor—Wiseman is Black—was brought in, making more money than Wiseman. After his return from leave, Wiseman accidentally destroyed a door—a common occurrence, he told Motherboard—and was subsequently fired. The suit claimed that this could not have been the reason for his firing because the contractor who had filled in for him had destroyed two doors without being fired, and was fired only after destroying a third door. The real issue, the suit claimed, was that when Wisemen "took medical leave, he incurred an approximately $2,000.00 in medical bill. Defendant did not pay the bill, and apparently regarded recurring medical expenses as a detriment." The suit asked for actual damages for lost income, liquidated damages because of violation of the Family and Medical Leave Act, damages for lost income, mental anxiety, medical expenses, and race discrimination.

"There was a NDA in the case," Wiseman's lawyer, Jim Waide, told Motherboard. "The way I read it, even the fact of the settlement, I can't even say it was settled. It's a strict confidentiality agreement, is all I can say."

"The work was alright when I worked there," said Wiseman, "but I think they were wrong for firing me for knocking a door off.

Wiseman's wasn't the only case where allegations of different kinds of discrimination intersected.

A worker named Ana Ramos sued in 2013. Ramos, a Spanish-speaking legal resident from Mexico who began working at the Memphis warehouse facility in 2007, was fired in 2012 when she asked for translation assistance before signing a workers compensation form written in English, the lawsuit said. She had injured her shoulder on the job and the HR manager who was handling her workers compensation claim, the suit said, refused to provide a translation or allow Ramos to consult her brother about the workers comp form; the HR manager then took her badge and subsequently issued a separation notice that Ramos had abandoned her job. “When Ms. Ramos refused to allow the Defendant to take advantage of her lack of knowledge of employment practices, it terminated her,” the lawsuit said. “Defendant would not have attempted to exploit an English-speaking, native-born American employee by asking him to sign a document that he didn’t understand or terminating him for refusing to sign.”

The parties filed a joint stipulation of dismissal in 2014.

In 2012, a former New Breed employee, a shipping supervisor named Reginald Franklin, filed an EEOC complaint alleging discrimination on the basis of race and age, and then sued the company after receiving a “right to sue” notification from the EEOC. The lawsuit said he was unfairly fired and replaced with a younger white man, despite receiving satisfactory and favorable work evaluations since he began at the company in 2007. The lawsuit alleged that New Breed failed to pay Franklin the minimum overtime rate, in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act. The two parties reached a settlement in 2014, the terms of which were not disclosed.

"I cannot discuss the settlement because we got a nondisclosure agreement," said his lawyer, Forrest Craig. "It was a mutual settlement."

"I cannot discuss the settlement."

Franklin wasn’t the only employee to sue New Breed for wage theft. In 2012, a Texas woman named Blanca Sanchez filed a lawsuit saying that she’d been hired at New Breed as a “planner/scheduler” in 2007, and paid an hourly rate plus extra for overtime above 40 years a week. In 2008, Sanchez alleged, she was “reclassified” and paid only a salary, even though she regularly worked in excess of 40 hours a week. Just as abruptly, she said in court filings, she was made “unexempt” in 2012 and given overtime again. Court records show that Sanchez’s lawyer, Brett Myers, allowed New Breed to have seven time extensions to answer her complaint; the parties filed a joint stipulation of dismissal in August 2013. Myers, who didn't recall how the case was settled, told Motherboard it was a fairly straightforward case, based on his memories; Sanchez, he said, was a "very nice lady who believed she was owed money."

In a 2010 employment discrimination suit a Memphis woman brought herself after receiving a right to sue notice from the EEOC, and which was ultimately dismissed years later, she listed "Race, religion, retaliation, age" as the circumstances under which she was discriminated against. On a form asking what she wanted to court to direct the defendant to do, she wrote, "That discrimination acts ends, that intimidation end."

The end of New Breed did not represent an end to claims from workers against companies where DeJoy held a high position. In 2018, the New York Times covered the story of how multiple pregnant workers at a warehouse in Memphis run by XPO suffered miscarriages after, they said, supervisors disregarded doctor’s notes recommending they not lift heavy boxes. The problems spanned companies: Four women miscarried when the warehouse was owned by New Breed, according to the Times, and two more after XPO acquired the company.

“It was the worst thing I have ever experienced in my life,” one of those women, Erica Hayes, told the Times.

DeJoy has made it clear that he views “significant” changes as central to his goals at the USPS. In a public statement issued on August 18, after he promised to pause some of his more drastic changes until after the election, DeJoy said, “I came to the Postal Service to make changes to secure the success of this organization and its long-term sustainability. I believe significant reforms are essential to that objective, and work toward those reforms will commence after the election.” (As Motherboard has reported, that’s probably not going to happen.)

But the track record of alleged abuse, sexism, racialized harassment, wage theft, and other offenses against ordinary workers is disturbing. And as the USPS grapples with an uncertain future, the most urgent question, perhaps, is whether DeJoy’s vision will match what workers have said is lurking in his company’s past.

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Postmaster DeJoy’s First Company Was Plagued By Claims of Racism, Harassment, and Abuse syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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Really Big Hourglass

Time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises. URSULA K. LE GUIN, The Dispossessed

Shimane hourglass recognized by Guinness as world's largest

One ton of the sand is designed to fall through the glass container over a year... An hourglass at a museum in Shimane Prefecture that measures the duration of a year has been recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest, the museum said Sunday.

Largest Hourglass - one year hourglass Located in the tallest of the six pyramids that house the Nima Sand Museum, Japan, is a 5.2-m-tall (17-ft 0.72-in) 560-kg (1,234.6-lb) hourglass with a diameter of 1 m (3 ft 3.37 in). It is filled with 629,100,000,000 grains of the “singing” Osodani sand, which weigh 1,000,368 g (2,205 lb 6.88 oz). The sand, sifted to ensure that each grain measures an average of 0.11 mm, flows continuously through a nozzle measuring 0.84 mm in diameter. The hourglass, built at the Nima Sand Museum in Oda, is 5.2 meters tall and has a diameter of 1 meter.

Nima Sand Museum

The subject matter of this museum is the singing sand of Kotogahama. The design of this museum will catch your eye with its small and large glass pyramids.

Nima Sand Museum There is a one year hourglass here that uses the singing sand The girl’s manga Sand Chronicles that is set in the Sand Museum is popular and become famous overnight when it was turned into a drama and movie. The Festival of Time is held on New Year’s Eve every year to half-turn the one year hourglass. You can also try making glass crafts. You can produce original pendants and clear candles. The Biggest Hourglass - One Year Hourglass

List of largest hourglasses

Built in 2000, this hourglass is located in Ybbsitz and is called Panta Rhei. The hourglass Panta Rhei was built during the Ferraculum 2000 at Ybbsitz. Work was guided and lead by Alfred Habermann.Built in 1984 and located in Mainz, this hourglass was donated by Schott Glaswerke.Unveiled in 2008 and located at the Red Square in Moscow. For the European launch of the latest model of BMW 7 series, a gigantic hourglass construction was placed on the Red Square in Moscow, Russia. The world’s largest hourglass was filled with more than 180,000 shiny silvery balls. The balls slipped through the hourglass and gradually revealed the hidden BMW flagship model in a style never seen before. The 12-meter-high glass contraption was the centerpiece of the launch reception.Budapest time wheel. Called Timewheel, this hourglass is located in Hungary near Hősök tere and was first revealed in 2004 in commemoration of Hungary's accession to the EU. The monument was constructed by the notion of Herner János philosopher, and by the draft plans of Janáky István architect, who made their plans in the 1990’s. Although many different dates were considered for the implementing, the sculpture was finally inaugurated on April 30th 2004, in memory of Hungary’s European Union accession.Semi-Transparent. Built in 1991 and located in the Nima Sand Museum, this hourglass is 5.2 metres high and contains around 1 ton of sand. Built in 1991, the huge sand timer is flipped over at midnight every 31 December, with the upper globe taking exactly one year to empty into the lower globe. It began ticking on Jan. 1, 1991, using quartz sand from Yamagata Prefecture.Built in 1999 and located on Jeongdongjin Beach it takes one year for the sand to fall to the bottom. Jeongdongjin Hourglass Park is a sunrise spot with the world's largest hourglass which has a diameter of 8.06 meters, a width of 3.20 meters and a sand weight of 8 tons. Every midnight on December 31st, you can see a huge hourglass rotating to greet the New Year. The relationship between Jeongdongjin and the Hourglass began in the 1990s, with the fame of the popular korean drama “ Hourglass ” ‘which was filmed in Jeongdongjin.A two metre high hourglass, filled with artificial blood, was installed at Downing Street in London as part of a protest demanding British intervention in the Darfur conflict.In 2009, a number of large hourglasses were installed in several major cities in Brazil to mark the enaction of an anti-smoking law.Filled with ground ivory, this hourglass was on display from mid 2005 to mid 2006. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_hourglasses