#their club was literally the society of the friends of the constitution

[shitpostingfromthebarricade]

The Communist Manifesto didn't come out until 1848, so it's impossible for Feuilly to have read it in canon; however, Les Mis wasn't published until 1862, and I refuse to believe that Feuilly's character was not at least informed by some of the ideas.

[onecanonlife]

Wilbur has never had wings. He has long since resigned himself to that fact. However much of his father's blood runs through his veins, it is not enough to grant him that gift.

Wilbur comes back to life, and his back begins to ache.

(word count: 6,141)

---------------------

It’s stupid, but when his back first begins to ache, he assumes it’s old age.

The thing is that he doesn’t have any real frame of reference for what constitutes as old and what does not. His father is old, but his father has lived for literally thousands of years. Technoblade is not quite so old as that, but Technoblade never dies is more than just a catchphrase. Tommy is young, he’s sure of that much, but Tommy has days where he wakes up and his head and ribs won’t stop aching, remnants of that third death that have never quite left him, so Tommy is perhaps not the best gauge of what pains are and are not normal for a young person.

Wilbur doesn’t think that he’s particularly old. He’s still not yet thirty, unless he counts the void years. Then, he’s older than thirty. Then, he’s older than his own bones. He tries not to dwell on the void years, because dwelling on the void years gives him urges that he’s still learning how to ignore. Urges like informing everyone gaily and at length when the inevitable heat death of the universe will be, or giving everyone a graphic description of what happens at a microscopic level in the human body when it picks up a stomach bug.

The point is, he’s not very old. But he feels it, a lot of the time, so when he wakes up one morning and his back is killing him, he shrugs it off and goes about his day. It hurts, sure. It hurts kind of a lot. But he’s had worse. The void took him apart molecule by molecule and put him back together again so many times that he learned to love it, and compared to that, this is nothing at all.

Life in the Arctic has been—nice. It’s been nice, reconnecting with Phil, cautiously rebuilding his relationship with Technoblade. Tommy comes to visit a lot, and it’s odd, trying to juggle the kid he thinks of as a brother with his father and his father’s best friend, especially when there’s so much bad blood between the lot of them, but they make it work. And Ranboo is around a lot, and he’s a nice kid, and Niki stops by every so often, and it’s good to see her. No one else is very interested in coming to visit him, which is understandable, but she always smiles at him, and he knows that they’re still friends. Which is good.

He’s fairly sure that the four of them, Phil and Techno and Niki and Ranboo, have some sort of secret club thing going on. They always give him different answers when he asks about it; Niki blinks and tells him it’s a book club, and Ranboo does not blink because he does not have eyelids, but Ranboo claims that it’s a pet grooming society. So they’re lying to him for sure, and he thinks he could know the truth if he wanted to, if he tapped in just a bit more to those bits of void that have nestled in his heart. The temptation is strong, sometimes, but he resists.

He doesn’t want to mess with a good thing, is all. He’s found a peace here in the snow that he didn’t think he would be able to find outside of the grave. He is hesitant to call himself healing, but most days, when his head cries out for blood and fire and burning the world and himself along with it, he can push the idea away and carry on without trying to act on it. That is healing, perhaps.

Captain Puffy tells him it is, anyway, and he’s found that Captain Puffy tends to know what she’s talking about.

But so. His back hurts. And he expects it to stop after a while, because even old person aches surely can’t last forever. Except, it doesn’t, and in fact seems to only get worse over the next few days, to the point that he starts to worry that it’s going to begin interfering with his functionality. Which he doesn’t want. He needs freedom, freedom to go where he wants, even if where he wants to go usually isn’t very far. It’s the principle of the thing. He does not do well with confinement, with spaces that are too enclosed, and if this pain ends up laying him out in his room, he’s going to go insane.

Poor choice of words, that. But the point still stands, so he makes a decision. The decision is this: he’s simply not going to allow that to happen.

So he slaps a smile on his face and carries on with his business, and does his best to ignore the way his spine starts to feel like it’s cracking open and stabbing into the surrounding muscle. And he is a very good actor, if he does say so himself, so for the most part, no one seems to notice that anything is wrong. Phil asks him if he’s feeling alright, but he’s able to deflect by claiming fatigue, and Phil accepts the explanation easily. And the pain only increases, does not let up at all, but it’s a gradual sort of increase, so before too long, he figures out how to adjust to it. It’s fine. He’ll be fine.

And then Tommy stops by for a visit, and they’re chatting outside for a moment, and Tommy says something stupid and ridiculous, so he smacks him gently upside the head, which Tommy takes objection to. And then they’re wrestling, which makes the pain flare a bit, but it’s manageable, especially since he gets Tommy pinned in about four seconds flat, which. Is concerning, a bit, because he is not particularly strong, physically, so if he can pin Tommy, there are a lot of other people who could also definitely pin Tommy.

But he’s probably not thinking about it the right way. This was a play fight, not a real one, and it’s difficult, sometimes, to remember that the server is currently at peace.

He pins Tommy, both of them panting and grinning in the snow, and he doesn’t let up until Tommy admits defeat. And then he gets to his feet, and here is where he makes the error: he turns his back.

The snowball impacts him right between his shoulder blades. He stumbles forward with the force of it, and his knees hit the snow.

Tommy is already cackling, is calling him a bitch. Wilbur barely has time to think oh, shit before something spasms, and it’s like something has taken a knife to him from the inside out. He hears a strangled little scream, choked and agonized, and barely recognizes the fact that it’s coming from him, because black spots are dancing across his vision and his lungs aren’t inflating properly and he can hardly think.

“Oh, come on,” Tommy says, a wide smile still in his voice. “Don’t be such a pussy. I didn’t even pack any ice in.”

He can’t reply. The agony is centered where the snowball hit, but it’s radiating outward, and the whole of his back feels like it’s burning and freezing all at once, and he shudders violently, breaths coming in short, quick gasps. He clenches his fists, braces them against his thighs, pressing down hard enough to leave bruises.

“Wilbur?” Tommy asks, more uncertain. And then, Tommy is there, kneeling down in front of him, and his face goes all wide and panicky. “Wilbur? Holy shit, are you dying? Are you having a heart attack? A stroke? Are you freezing to death? Have I just killed you with a snowball? You’ve got three lives again, right? Where are you hurt, Wil, come one, you’ve got to tell me, you’ve gotta tell me so I can fix it, are you—”

“My back,” he manages, “my back’s been—my back’s been hurting, it wasn’t your fault, it’s just—” He cuts off with another gasp as all the muscles in his back convulse, tensing and untensing and tensing again and sending a wave of stabbing pain through his nerves.

“Oh, Prime,” Tommy says, “oh, Prime, alright, you’re gonna be fine, big man, let’s just get you inside, alright? Can you walk? Nevermind, just—” Tommy hooks his hands underneath his arms and hauls him to his feet, slinging one of his arms across his shoulders as soon as he can get them in the right position. He lets out a little whimper, and hates himself for doing so, just a little bit, but fuck, that hurts.

The stairs are a trial. His feet drag, and he would trip and fall flat on his face if it weren’t for Tommy. But then, they’re inside Phil’s house, and Tommy sits him down on Phil’s ratty little couch, and he immediately curls in on himself, hands gripping his forearms as if the pain will go away if he hugs himself hard enough.

“Okay, shirt off, Wil, let me see,” Tommy says, and he blinks dumbly for a moment.

“What?” he asks, his tongue thick and heavy in his mouth.

“No, just—you’ve got to let me see what’s wrong, yeah?”

“‘S old man aches,” he mumbles, but doesn’t try to fight it when Tommy begins manhandling his arms, pushing at his coat sleeves.

“What the fuck are you on about?” Tommy demands. “You’re not that old. Who do you think you are, Philza fucking Minecraft? Come on, just let me see—” He finally manages to get the coat off, and then the shirt, and his skin erupts in gooseflesh as it’s exposed to the air. Tommy freezes.

“What?” he asks. “What is it, what’s—”

“I don’t,” Tommy says, running a hand through his hair, “I don’t, Wilbur, I don’t know what this is, I don’t—holy shit, that’s actually kind of scary. Um! No, nevermind, don’t pay attention to me, just keep um, breathing! Breathing is good! Breathing exercises!” He breathes in and out, loud and exaggerated. “See, just like that. I’m just gonna—”

And he puts a hand out, and before Wilbur can stop him, he rests it on his back. Light and cautious, but still too much, and Wilbur stuffs a fist into his mouth to stop himself from screaming. In the same motion, he flinches away, violently, but the damage has already been done. Because the contact hurts, a lot, but what’s worse is the horror, because in the split second that Tommy’s hand touched his skin, he could feel the way that it is wrong, that his back is wrong, that there is something terribly wrong. Because there are ridges protruding from his back, long and thick and raised, and it’s wrong and it hurts and Tommy’s right, actually, this is scary, he’s fucking scared.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Tommy is saying, “I’m so sorry, I’m so fucking sorry, I won’t do that again, I’m so sorry, Wilbur, are you okay? Please be okay, please—”

He nods, though it’s more like he lets his head fall and then painstakingly brings it back up a little.

“Okay, I think we need—” Tommy says. “I think that I don’t know what to do, so I think we need—” He takes a deep breath. “Phil! Phil!” Loud, panicked, earsplitting. Wilbur winces. “Phil! He is home, isn’t he? Phil!”

A second passes, and then, drifting up from the basement, a distant, “Tommy? Everything good?”

“Phil, get up here right fucking now!”

There is a beat of silence, and then there are footsteps, quiet at first but growing closer, and they are quick, hurried. Phil must have detected the genuine fear in Tommy’s voice, because Tommy and Phil generally stand on very shaky ground with each other, so while Phil will typically indulge Tommy in his whims, it depends on the day as to how far he’ll go, how quick he’ll respond. But it’s only a moment or two before Phil’s head pokes out of the floor, his hands clinging to the ladder, his face twisted in confusion.

“What on earth is the matter?” he asks, and then breaks off as his eyes land on Wilbur, who—he must be a sight. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t care. But terror flashes across Phil’s face, and he is crossing the floor in an instant, hands hovering over him, fluttering helplessly, though thankfully, he doesn’t touch.

“What’s wrong, where are you hurt, what—” The words come out in a jumbled flurry, but he stops just as abruptly, and Wilbur knows that he is looking at the horror show that is his back.

“It hurts, Phil,” he whispers.

“Okay,” Phil says, sounding—still concerned, but perhaps marginally calmer? “Okay, you’re going to be alright. I think I know what this is.” He settles himself on the couch right next to him and opens his arms, and Wilbur doesn’t hesitate before leaning forward, slumping against him. Phil seems to know better than to put any kind of pressure on his back, and instead places one hand on his arm and the other on the back of his head, threading his fingers through his hair.

“Then what the fuck is it?” Tommy demands.

“Tommy, I need you to run over to Techno’s and ask him for something for pain, and something for sleep. Can you do that for me?” Phil asks instead of answering, and perhaps Wilbur should be terrified by the implication that he’s going to need either of those things, but the promise of some kind of relief overrides any kind of trepidation.

“Like fuck I will,” Tommy says, “Not before you tell me what the fuck is wrong with him!”

Another convulsion wracks him. He bites his lip to keep from crying out, and tastes blood. His breath is hitching, and he can’t stop it.

“Tommy.” Phil’s voice is sharp, but then, Wilbur feels rather than hears him sigh. “It’s wings, I think. I don’t understand why now, but I went through this a long time ago, when I was very young. I recognize the signs. So Tommy, please.”

Tommy makes a surprised little sound. Wilbur isn’t looking, has his face buried in Phil’s shoulder, but he can imagine the look on his face: the slack jaw, the wide open eyes. And then, there are rushed footsteps retreating, and the door slamming, and Tommy’s muffled voice calling out for Technoblade.

And then, Wilbur processes what Phil just said.

He twists his head around so he can see his face, regretting it a moment later. Any kind of movement seems to make the pain worse, and he has to take a moment to tremble through it.

“Wings?” he whispers. “How?”

He’s never had wings.

If he were going to have wings, he would have gotten them a long time ago. He remembers nights spent as a child, staying up and hoping for feathered appendages to somehow miraculously appear on his back, just so he could be more like his dad. He remembers the crushing disappointment when he finally accepted that no matter how much divine blood runs in his veins, it is apparently not enough.

But he did accept it. He accepted it years ago. There is absolutely no reason for him to be developing wings now, as a fully-grown adult, but Phil sounds so very sure, and his back hurts so very much, and perhaps that’s consistent with actual appendages trying to sprout out of him.

“I don’t know,” Phil says. “I’ve never heard of it happening so late, even in avians. Which, I’m not exactly, but I got mine when I was a kid like they do, and I don’t—I don’t know, Wil, I really don’t, but I remember what it was like, yeah? I know what to do. It’s gonna suck for a little while, but you’re going to be fine, I promise.”

“Okay,” he croaks, “okay—” and then he has to stop talking, because the pain flares again, bright and intense and holy shit, but it’s worse this time, because now that he knows what’s going on, he can feel them. He can feel things inside of him, pushing against his muscles and his skin in ways that absolutely should not be possible, and there is too much of him to be contained in his body, and there are things inside of him trying to escape—

It’s almost like the way he gets when he thinks about the void too hard. Except not, because when he does that, he feels the urge to dissolve away, gently and peacefully, to let himself back into the quiet that is not quiet and the darkness that is not dark, where all the knowledge of the world is at his fingertips, too much for a mortal brain to contain and remain sane. That is not this. This is his own body trying to explode. There is no peace, no dissolution; it’s messy and physical and Prime he just wants it to stop.

He shifts in Phil’s grasp, fruitlessly trying to find a position that takes the pressure off, a little bit. It’s no use, of course, because he can still feel something moving under the skin of his back, and his vision whites out, and when he comes back to himself, he’s shivering, shivering and shaking and sobbing in Phil’s hold, and he doesn’t remember when he started crying but he can’t seem to make himself stop. Phil is keeping up a steady stream of soothing nonsense, and he latches onto the sound of his voice like it’s the only lifeline he has.

And then the door bursts open, and Wilbur doesn’t bother trying to look, but there are two sets of footsteps, not just one.

“Here,” Tommy says, panting, and there are several thumps, and several clinks, glass on glass.

“Oh god, don’t—and he’s doing it, he’s just dumping all of that on the floor. Don’t break those, Tommy, those aren’t splash pots. Have you never handled a potion before.” Technoblade pauses for a moment. “So, what exactly’s wrong with him? The child was making no sense at all.”

Wilbur thinks he detects a note of concern. But he’s not thinking clearly, and it’s always hard to tell anyway, with Technoblade.

“He’s got wings growing in,” Phil responds, voice clipped. Wilbur feels his hand leave his arm, and he whines at the loss of touch. And then another spasm, and he whines again, pressing his face harder into Phil’s shirt.

“Oh. Huh. Yes, that makes perfect sense, of course.”

Phil’s arm dips a bit, and Wilbur finds himself being moved, his head gently tilted back. Phil’s face comes into view, pale and blurry.

“You want to drink this for me, Wil?” he says, and then there is glass at his lips, and he parts them immediately. He doesn’t like being knocked out, doesn’t like the loss of control that comes with it, but if he has to be aware for another five minutes, he’s not going to be able to keep himself from screaming aloud.

He swallows, grimacing at the taste. The effects start hitting right away. His mind detaches from himself, and the pain drains from him. Every muscle goes lax.

He exhales.

“There we go,” Phil murmurs, “there we go. It’s gonna be alright, Wil. I’ll be here the whole time. You’re gonna be okay.”

The world falls away. He lets it. He trusts his father to catch him.

----------

He wakes up a few times, and each time, it hurts. Phil is always there, and usually, Tommy too, and sometimes Techno, and he can barely move but they always see that he’s awake, and they give him a potion and he’s under again, and he’s glad for it, because those moments of consciousness are a spiral of pain and confusion and his thoughts flying apart because he barely understands what’s going on or why he’s hurting and he just wants it to go away.

And then there is the time he wakes up and he thinks somebody is cutting his back open, and he can feel his own blood on his skin, sticky and hot, and he thrashes, trying to get away, and that makes the pain so much worse, and the sound that comes out of his mouth is inhuman, and he fights until a potion is poured down his throat and it’s back to sleep again.

And then there is the time he wakes up, and people are talking in low, hushed tones. He can’t make out what they’re saying. He cracks his eyes open, and it’s Phil and Technoblade, deep in some discussion, both looking terribly concerned. He decides he’ll ask what’s wrong later, and then closes his eyes and goes back to sleep again.

And then there is the time he wakes up, and some part of him is moving, and he doesn’t understand what it is because it’s not any of his limbs, not his arms and not his legs, and it feels alien and foreign and his back feels like it’s been shoved under a woodchipper and then tossed through a paper shredder for good measure, and he’s not aware enough to know why, so he panics. There is a bit of the void that still dwells in his heart, and he calls on it, cries out to it, and it answers, comes rushing in around him, and his mind expands to peer into galaxies.

Philza is at his side a moment later, and he is able to look at him and see all the weight of years that lie behind his eyes, and all the years that lie ahead of him, and the moment of his death, all spiraling out like a tapestry and like a mass, and the music is atonal, confused, but a closer glance reveals it to be twelve-tone, order in the chaotic lines. Wilbur is with the void again, and his heart still beats, but it’s a near thing, and he could stop it if he chose.

“Do you want to know, Philza?” he asks, words spilling from his lips like rain, like the river, like the flood. “Do you want to know when it will happen? I can see it. I can see how some part of you wants it. All our histories are like tangled up threads, but they all come to an end, and I can see those endings, Philza, I can tell you about them if you like.”

Pain constricts Philza’s face, and Wilbur doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know who wouldn’t love the void and its peace and its everything.

“I know, Wilbur,” Philza says, “I know, but how about you come back to me now, okay? Come back to me?”

“We’re all little bits of code, Philza,” he informs him. “None of us are real. We’re little bits of code and words on a page and lines in a script written by our better selves. Nothing in this world really matters. We might as well have all the fun we can before the lights go out. Do you want to know when that will be, Philza? Not too long after you, Philza. Not too long at all. I told Tommy, he knows, he didn’t want to know but that’s alright, he’s better off for it, if he hasn’t forgotten.”

“Come back, Wil, come on,” Philza says, “you can do it. You’ve got a heartbeat, do you feel it?”

Philza takes his hand and places it over his heart, and—that’s right. He’s alive. He’d forgotten. The void spins, and then it tucks itself away again, waiting for the next moment he needs it, and he is left with only vague impressions of what he’s just said and a vague idea that everything hurts and something is wrong with his back and he’d like to go to sleep now, please.

“Alright, yeah,” Phil says, “here, you can have this, you can sleep. You’re doing so well, Wil, I promise it’s almost done.”

He takes the potion. Or tries to; Phil has to hold it for him.

“Okay,” he says faintly. “I’m sorry.”

“You’ve nothing to be sorry for,” he hears Phil say, very far away. “So long as you come back, everything’s okay.”

He goes back to sleep again. He thinks he wakes up a few more times, but he doesn’t really remember. He doesn’t really want to.

----------

And then: awareness.

The first thing he processes is that everything aches, deeply and acutely, but none of it feels nearly as bad as it did before, and not even as bad as it’s been over the past couple of weeks. It’s irritating, painful, but more than manageable, really, practically a relief. The second thing he processes is that he’s lying on his stomach, and that there is something weighing him down.

His mind puzzles over this for a moment. He tries to roll over, to see what’s going on, but something stops him, and then he remembers: wings.

He’s got wings. There are wings on his back. Growing out of him. A part of his body. Wings.

As soon as he realizes that, he becomes aware of them. And it is so very strange, to suddenly have access to two extra limbs, to suddenly have additional body parts to move about and control. It’s a feeling impossible to describe, and he has to take several minutes to process it, to try to become accustomed to it. It doesn’t really work, but he tries moving them anyway, just a bit of a flex, and—

Ouch.

He groans, shoving his face into the pillow. A mistake. That was a mistake. He’d rather like to go back to sleep now and pretend that none of this is happening.

But his vocalization draws attention, and then there is a hand on his shoulder, gently brushing him just enough to feel, not enough to pain him. He turns his head to the side, reluctantly, and Phil is kneeling beside him, his face open and soft and clearly relieved, his lips curling into a slight smile.

“Hey,” he says. “How you feeling, Wil?”

He considers this, and decides on honesty. “Bit like I’ve been caught between a piston and a wall for the past couple of days,” he admits. “Better than before, though.”

“Good to hear,” Phil says, and then his face goes a bit more serious. “How much of that do you remember?”

“Not much?” he says. “I don’t think? Impressions, I guess. I know I wasn’t having a good time. I’m glad I don’t remember it too clearly. I was out for most of it, yeah?”

“Most of it,” Phil agrees, and Wilbur thinks that perhaps there is something he’s not saying, but he doesn’t feel like pressing the matter. He can guess what it is, anyway; there is a chill in his chest, and his thoughts feel just slightly more fractured than usual, so it’s not hard to assume what might have happened. Not hard to assume where he might have gone. He’s sure he’ll feel terrible about it when everything stops feeling so surreal.

He has wings.

“It’s over now?” he asks, and winces at the way his voice cracks. “It’s done?”

Phil’s eyes do the thing where they go immeasurably soft and crinkly at the edges, and it’s love and relief and sadness all at once. “It’s done,” he agrees, and then hesitates. “You’re not gonna be able to fly on them for a while, but would you like to see?”

He doesn’t understand why Phil is being so cautious about it. Of course he wants to see. If he’s going to be put through hell, he wants to see what came of it. He wants it to be worth it.

“Usually, when wings grow in, they’re all downy and shit. Like a baby bird,” Phil says, probably in response to whatever face he’s sure he’s making. “Flight feathers come in over the next few weeks.” He pauses again, and Wilbur thinks he understands his reticence, now, understands the still-present concern.

“But that’s not what happened with mine,” he states, and Phil shakes his head.

“Yours are fully fledged,” he says. “Probably part of why it hurt so much. I don’t know why, Wil. But do you wanna have a look?”

Wordless, he nods, and Phil takes that as his cue to reach out and help him sit upright. It’s far more effort than it should be, compounded by the fact that his sense of balance feels all wrong, and that’s going to take some getting used to, he can already tell. And he’s sore, like he’s run a marathon or fought another half dozen wars all in one go, and his head spins a little bit when he finally situates himself. He closes his eyes against it, breathing in sharply.

He feels Phil guiding his wings forward, into his field of vision. He opens his eyes.

They are very big, is the first thing he notices. They would have to be, of course, to hold his weight up. Magic and suspension of disbelief only stretches so far. They are very large, and the feathers are very large, and they are very angular and neat as well, so neat that someone has to have arranged them while he was unconscious, because there’s no way that they came out looking like that.

The color, though. The color. He swallows, hard.

They are black, perhaps. They look black. But he knows on an instinctive level that they are black in the same way that the void is black, and that if someone were to stare at them for too long, they would realize as much, would realize that actually, they are not black at all, but rather some color or some lack of color that is beyond human comprehension. The void translates as black to the human mind because it is as close as the human mind can get to true perception, and most of the time, Wilbur remembers it as black, but it was not, and his wings are not, and he is never going to be free of it, is he?

On some level, he knew that. Knew that the void is in him and about him, and no matter what he does, it will never leave him completely, not after all the years he spent with it, intertwined with the infinite nothing. But now he has wings on his back, and they should be a connection between him and Phil, should be something to celebrate, but he stares at the plumage and feels sick to his stomach.

“Wil?” Phil asks. He sounds confused, sounds worried by his reaction. “You okay, mate?”

He’s not sure how to phrase this in a way that Phil will understand. Not sure that he wants to.

“Void,” he manages, voice a broken whisper. “They look like void, Phil.”

He looks up just in time to see Phil’s face crumple.

“Wil—”

“They look just like it, Phil,” he continues. “Just like it. And I know I’m not always good about, about being here, about keeping myself stable, but I’m trying. I try to ignore it when it calls, I try not to reach out to it, and when I fail, I, I try to come back, I do, I swear. I can’t—I can’t have these, Phil, they’re from it, that’s why I’m getting them now, maybe it triggered something, I don’t know, but I can’t, Phil, I can’t—”

He reaches out toward them, intending to do—something, maybe, and Phil must have a better idea than he does, because his hand darts out and snags his, stopping him in his tracks.

“No, Wil, don’t do that, okay? We can work on it, we’ll figure it out, but please don’t—”

“You’re up!”

He and Phil both freeze, and as one, look to the door. Tommy is standing there, grinning like nobody’s business, and Technoblade is lurking behind him, his face contorted into an expression that looks like he wants to murder someone but really just means he’s feeling very awkward.

Tommy glances back and forth between the two of him, and his face slowly falls.

“Is everything okay?” he asks. “Nothing—I mean, it all went right, didn’t it?”

He blinks. Tilts his head slightly. Gently removes his hand from Phil’s grasp, and then spreads out his wings behind him, putting them on full display, as far out as he can make them go, and it aches and he’s not going to be able to hold them there for long, but it’s worth it. He wants Tommy to see. Because Tommy will know. Tommy remembers. And unlike him, Tommy hates to remember. Tommy hates the void. So perhaps this is an act of self-sabotage. That’s what Captain Puffy would say. But he does it anyway, because he wants someone else to see and understand, understand in a way he knows Phil won’t be able to.

“I’ve got void wings, Tommy,” he says, and a smile splits his face. “See them?”

Tommy’s eyes widen, and he flinches.

Gratification is not nearly as sweet as he thought it would be. Actually, he just sort of feels like crying.

But then, Tommy’s brows draw together. And he steps further into the room, coming closer and closer until he’s standing right up against the bed, staring at the feathers. Wilbur holds himself very still.

“I see,” Tommy says slowly, “but Wilbur, I’m not sure you do.”

“What are you talking about?” he asks, and cranes his neck to try to see whatever Tommy’s looking at. For a moment, he doesn’t; there’s just the feathers, void feathers, death feathers, a reminder that—

But arctic sunlight slants through the window, and if he shifts his angle just a little bit—

The noise that escapes him is small and involuntary. He hopes no one calls him on it, but that’s the least of his concerns right now. Because the colors do not change, not exactly, but if he holds them to the light, the sun illuminates the feathers, haloing their edges in gold, and there is a sheen of color running across them, a sheen that ripples and moves as he shifts them in the sunbeam, and it is a beautiful, rich blue.

And they’re lovely.

“Oh,” he says, and Tommy laughs at him, the fucking gremlin.

“Yeah, fucking oh,” he says. “You’re such a moron. They’re so fucking ace, Wilbur.”

“I think that maybe you need to work on rememberin’,” Technoblade says from the doorway, “that you’re the sum of all your experiences, and not just one.”

Wilbur stares at him.

“Oh my god,” he finally says. “That’s so cheesy. Who the hell are you and what have you done with Technoblade?”

“Alright,” Techno grumbles, “see if I do anythin’ nice for you ever again. I didn’t come up here to receive this kind of treatment. This is an outrage.”

He laughs. He laughs, from the sheer relief of it, and his trepidation is melting away like snow in the sunshine, and he can allow himself to revel in it, to revel in the wings on his back, and he is sore and tired but this is what glory feels like, maybe, and perhaps he can fly into the air and there will be no wax to drip away.

Perhaps these wings are of the void, but they are of him, too.

And he looks to Phil again, and Phil is smiling at him, warm and happy. His own wings are flared out behind him, tattered at the edges, so many feathers torn or still missing entirely, and the more time that passes, the more and more likely it is that those feathers are never going to grow back, that Phil truly will never fly again. Phil has already resigned himself to it, he knows, but Wilbur has never given up hope, will never be able to bring himself to give up hope.

“It’s not fair that I can fly when you can’t,” he says quietly, and the room goes still and quiet. Especially when it’s my fault, he doesn’t say, though he knows everyone hears it.

“Wil,” Phil says, “nothing could bring me more joy than this.”

And Wilbur hears what he means: you, here.

So he flexes his wings and revels in the ache and revels in the sunshine and revels at his family, here, his father sitting by him and his friend-protege-brother poking at curiously at his feathers and Technoblade still in the doorway, not leaving even for all his grumbling. He revels in this, revels in this life, and for a time, the void recedes entirely.

And in its wake is the sunlight.

[quietnqueer]

Post-pandemic, we’re going to see the ‘Extrovert Ideal’ on steroids

It was World Introvert Day yesterday, and there’s no denying that 2020 was our year, with the pandemic forcing most of the world to stay home and reduce social contact. This was no big deal for us introverted/asocial/solitary types. Lockdown didn’t really make a huge difference to the way we lived our lives, because staying inside and keeping to ourselves is what we do anyway. What was different though, was how the introverted way of life became the new social norm, which meant that us introverts have been able to enjoy a reprieve from the tyrannies that constitute everyday life under Extrovert Supremacy. We’ve not had to worry about turning down invitations, or slipping out early, or feeling weird/wrong/guilty for wanting to stay home for the third weekend in a row.  It’s literally been against the law to mix with people from other households!

But our time is about to come to an end; because once the vaccine’s been rolled out, the Extrovert Ideal is going to return. And it’s going to do so with a vengeance.  

There’s talk that post-pandemic, we could see something akin to the ‘Roaring Twenties’. After being locked down for so long, people will be chomping at the bit to enjoy their freedom again; to be back out there dancing eating drinking and mingling with one another, face to face, in the flesh, away from that goddamn Zoom screen like in the good ol’ days BC (Before COVID). So, once enough people have been vaccinated and we’re given the green light to GO! again, we can expect to see an upsurge in nights out, foreign travel, wining, dining, and just general pissed-up party times.

This is going to be pushed by media, big business and our politicians. We’ll be told to GET BACK OUT THERE!; to socialise ‘n’ spend, socialise ‘n’ spend. We’ll be told it’s our duty to do so, to help our country get back on its feet, to aid our recovery.

This is going to be HELL for introverts.

The Roaring TwentyTwenties won’t go easy on those of us who want to continue to stay in, to work from home, and to sack off the after-work drinks. No, no, no. ‘This is not the time for staying home, for doing things alone,’ expect to be told. ‘That was for the COVID-era. There’s no need to be living that way no more. We’ve been cooped up inside, socially distanced from one another for too long. Now it’s the right thing, the best thing, the HEALTHY and NORMAL thing, to get back out there, to party and play, to SOCIALISE.’

For this is the thing: we’re going to see the Extrovert Ideal being pushed because it’s a way to help the economy recover; but it will be done via messaging that extols the benefits of socialising for people’s mental health. ‘Going out’ with friends/family/co-workers will be sold as the feel-good cure we all need after the many many months we’ve had to spend inside, unable to be with one another.

A colleague of mine recently wrote in an email: ‘we should have a big party when this is all over!’ I’ve also heard people suggest we should be given a couple of extra bank holidays in the summer once enough people have had the vaccine so we can all GO OUT and CELEBRATE!  

I fear there’s going to be so much more where this came from.

We introverted/solitary/asocial types have always found it hard to turn down social invitations; our extrovert-biased society has always eyed those of us who prefer a quiet night in over a rowdy night out with suspicion, as if there must be something wrong with us.

This is only going to intensify in the hyper-social, extroversion-on-steroids, post-pandemic world we’re about to enter into.

For whilst 2020 was the year of the introvert, there was still plenty of extrovert bias around. Staying home was made out to be something that had to be endured, not enjoyed; the general assumption was that those living alone would find things particularly difficult, because how can one not get lonely/bored/depressed when they don’t have anyone to hang out with/talk to? A life which involved staying home a lot and not going out much was made out to be a half-life.

This is why as soon as we’re allowed back out again, I reckon introverts are going to be in for a tough time. Choosing to continue to lead a quieter, more solitary life in the midst of so much ‘GO OUT!’ messaging could see introverts/asocial sorts being deemed even sicker and weirder than we were before.

How are we going to decline that first party invitation without being deemed a total pariah?

How are we going to affirm our precious solitude in a society hell-bent on getting us out the house, that will be shouting from the (night club) roof tops that socialising is imperative – for the good of our health and for the good of the nation?

[mamthew]

I figured for you fine folks playing Persona 5 Royal, I'd take some time to write about some Japanese cultural features I learned while researching the game that might help some folks to contextualize the game's themes. I hope that this knowledge might enhance others' experiences with the game that way it has enhanced mine. Before I start, though, I'd like to start with two disclaimers: First, it's important to remember that while these cultural features might hold different levels of importance in our own respective cultures, that doesn't mean they're entirely alien to us, either. Bong Joon-ho said of the success of his film, Parasite, that "we all live in the same country now: that of capitalism," and that sentiment similarly applies to many of these other concepts. Much of what I'm writing about here are simply the Japanese flavor of power dynamics and societal structures we all live in, and I'm neither looking down on Japanese people nor claiming that my own culture is free of these power dynamics and societal structures when I identify them. Second, I'm not Japanese, and thanks to the Covid outbreak, I actually missed my shot to visit Japan. I have a close friend from Japan with whom I've discussed much of the research I've done, but I'd love to hear from other folks who are more familiar than I am. If I say something here that's inaccurate, or doesn't line up with your own experiences, let me know in the comments, or direct message my page! I've pulled much of this from a bunch of different academic sources, but unfortunately I've only got the one personal source with whom I can regularly discuss what I've learned, and he obviously can't be an expert at everything I've read about. The most central theme to Persona 5 is that of seki, which Joanna Liddle describes in "Rising Suns, Rising Daughters: Gender, Class, and Power in Japan" as "the idea that there is no proper place in society for a person who is not registered in an institution or organisation." Persona 5 is a game in which all of its characters are stuck on the margins of society, and playing it through the lens of seki helps to place this into sharp focus. Seki is best understood as the organization of society into in-groups and out-groups. In Yasuo Aoto's "Nippon: The Land and its People," he notes that this very strong consciousness of who is and isn't in groups can be attributed to historical factors, citing the need for joint cooperation in rice cultivation, the long history of feudalism, and the Confucian emphasis on belonging to a clan. The most clear example of a seki is the koseki family registration system, an outdated holdover from a bygone era, maintained for so long essentially to maintain some form of codified oppression of women after the current constitution bestowed them full rights. The koseki was once a fully public document that displayed the names of every member of a specific family. Women who married were stricken from their family's kosekis and written into their husband's kosekis instead, while women who divorced were stricken from those, finding themselves and any children they took with them without a family to which they officially belonged. Women who married into families without kosekis (to foreigners, for instance, or to a "mukosekisha," a person whose birth wasn't registered) were stricken from their own kosekis but weren't written into new ones, essentially making them less Japanese. Now, kosekis aren't accessible to the public, but they still legally enforce that certain people are less legitimate as citizens. In some ways, not being in a koseki provides similar issues as not having a birth certificate or social security number would in the states. This is a major factor in the stigma against divorcees, as it is common knowledge that a divorced woman and her children are not logged in any koseki. Most of the characters in Persona 5 are from broken families, which means that many of them are not in kosekis, and therefore on a cultural and legal level are less legitimately Japanese for it. Only one of Ann's parents is Japanese; Ryuji's mother divorced her husband; Yusuke, Futaba, and Akechi are orphans. However, seki as a concept is broader than this. One's family is a seki, but so is the company for which they work, their group of friends, their group of coworkers, their classmates, clubs or social groups to which they belong. Sataka Makoto writes in "105 Key Words for Understanding Japan": "There are only a very few people who hop jobs or religions. Job-hoppers are criticized as unstable characters and 'isshakenmei,' [or] devotion to one company, is considered better than 'isshoukenmei,' [or] trying one’s best (....) The Japanese companies are still very much like feudal clans. The top position is often hereditary, like that of a feudal lord, but the employees don’t complain strongly." This strong devotion to one's company has been purposely cultivated to suppress class consciousness. It's commonly believed in Japan that over 90% of Japanese people are middle class. Nakane Chie states that social stratification in Japan is broken up vertically, between companies, rather than horizontally, between classes, saying that, "it is not really a matter of workers struggling against capitalists or managers but of Company A ranged against Company B (...) [they] do not stand in vertical relationship to each other but instead rub elbows from parallel positions." Obviously, it's not true that Japanese is almost entirely middle class; Liddle notes that the economists who argued this defined members of the same class as "homogeneous in lifestyle, attitudes, speech, dress and other status dimensions," but that there is still much variance in assets and vulnerability to economic change. On top of this, the ruling class does still function as a bloc, acting with much more class unity than the working class does. Persona 5 discusses the drastic amount of worker exploitation in the Okumura dungeon. The game shows us "karoshi," a term that literally just means dying from working too much, which is a common occurrence in Japan, and absolutely a result of exploitation of the proletariat by the ruling classes. It's hard to fight back against this exploitation, though, because of the vertical stratification of workers into different corporations. It's a major barrier to class solidarity when workers from two different companies see themselves as being members of different sekis, and therefore not really meant to interact all that much. There's more I'd like to write, especially about the single-party system and just how much Shido is mean to represent Shinzo Abe, but it's almost 4 AM, so I'd better hold off on that. Anyone who's interested in the Koseki can read at least parts of Gender and the Koseki in Contemporary Japan on google books: https://books.google.com/books?id=gR9WDwAAQBAJ This article from 2016 on the koseki system is a quicker read and helps to bring to light some of the system issues: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2016/07/10/issues/japans-discriminatory-koseki-registry-system-looks-ever-outdated/ Part of Rising Suns, Rising Daughters is on google books, and it's a fascinating read if you're interested in class, gender, and the intersections between the two: https://books.google.com/books?id=X7h_6gCRuAUC This article was a good jumping-off point to start seeing some of the real issues discussed in Persona 5: https://www.usgamer.net/articles/the-real-world-problems-behind-persona-5

[fckeverything-v]

 1. Do you bite or lick ice cream? Lick

 2. What is home to you? Alabama:/

 3. What was the last lie you told? I couldnt tell you

 4. Does everyone deserve the truth? Maybe not?

 6. Describe a moment in which you did something unacceptable in a bad situation. Walk away, move states..

 7. List two things that are more easily done than said. (No, I didn't mix them up.) Being alone & fuck irdk

 8. When was the last time you worked really hard to achieve something? Mhm 4 years ago.

 9. How many all nighters have you pulled? A lotttt haha

 10. If humans didn't evolve to laugh or smile, how would we express our happiness instead? Woah people express that? no but humans would probably bone all the time.

 11. How many romantic "things" or "flings" have you had? Only 2 (technically 3) serious relationships. Many flings.

 12. What is your paradise? I dont have one :(

 13. What is your favorite background noise? (Ex. Water dripping, people talking.) Music

 14. How many hearts do you think you have broken? Only 1... maybe 2 soon. (not you hehe.)

 15. What is the most important thing about electronics? What does this say about you? Finding friendships through social media or other platforms. And mhm probably that im a lonely pos

 16. Why do people care about celebrities? Do you care about celebrities? Because they're pretty. Not really.

 17. What is the most annoying thing someone can do to you? Chew loud.

 18. Do you overexaggerate? What are the pros and cons of this? Eh, yeah. And I cant think of any pros.

 19. Have you played any instruments before? Which instruments? Piano, saxophone

 20. Do you like taking selfies? Why or why not? No. I stare at it until i hate it.

 21. List 3 things you like about yourself?

 22. What is the best advice someone has ever given you? To not give up. As simple as that sounds.

 23. Do you have what it takes to raise a child? Why or why not? No. Dont you need to be mentally stable- i would hope so..

 24. How do you cheer yourself up after a bad day? Play games for hours.

 25. When was the last time you felt awkward? Ha. Literally 5 minutes ago.

 26. Are you introverted or extroverted? Or a mixture of both? Introverted x100000

 27. What constitutes a good friend? Someone who doesnt give up on you amd atleast tries to understand.

 28. Would you rather have a lot of friends to hang out with or just one best friend? One best friend.

 29. In a regular day, what do you not want to hear? 'Hey hows your day going'

 30. What is your dream job? Fuck, is this still a question.. to be a homicide detective in the biggest city i can think of.

 31. Is it better to be lazy but smart or hardworking but unintelligent? Lazy and smart DUH

 32. What is a truth about yourself that others find hard to believe?

 33. What have you always wondered about the other gender? What it feels like to GET OFF. DUH.

 34. Which fantasy world would you like to visit the most? Um my own dreams i guess.

 35. Describe the worst friend you have ever befriended. Im not wasting my time describing that.

 36. Imagine that you have switched bodies with someone you don't know. You can't switch back. What do you do? Live it up. I think id feel happy honestly.

 37. If you found the recipe for immortality, would you sell it or would you burn it? Mh. Sell it, their problem now and im rich.

 38. What is the most important, applicable class you have ever taken? Current events.

 39. Name the last book you read. Dammed- chuck palahniuk

 40. Imagine that you are unable to express emotion. How would this affect your world? No change

 41. When was the last time you made the first move? Um never..

 42. What is your opinion on electronic music such as dubstep or trap? Trash

 43. What was the last tv show youve watched? Rick and Morty.

 44. Do you like and appreciate your life? I appreciate what i am trying to do.

 45. Do you like and appreciate yourself?

 46. When was the last time you cried? Yesterday

 47. What are you scared of? Heights.

 48. What is the most embarrassing, cringe-worthy thing you have ever done? Um live my life everyday probably.

 49. What are some of your hobbies? .... literally WORSE question. I smoke cigs. Is that a hobby?

 50. What is a superficial yet annoying mistake you constantly make?

 51. Are you a good friend? What makes you a good friend? If not, what makes you a bad friend? I feel like i am both. I try to be there for them. But also, im so hard to get so i feel like i might come off the wrong way a lot.

 52. Do you honestly learn from your mistakes? Honestly; nope.

 53. What have you learned the hard way? Not to care what people think. After wasting my whole life. Im starting to realize it doesnt matter.

 54. What is the most important thing to have in order to attain happiness? Follow your heart

 56. Are you a creative or a logical thinker? Both but probably logical.

 57. What is the smartest thing you have ever done?

 58. What is your ideal meal? Fuckk probably so good ass chicken with some gooooood asssssss mac and cheese. As lame as that sounds hahaha.

 59. What is the worst thing someone could do on a date? 1. Go on date with me

 60. Do you like animals? Which kind is your favorite? Yeah and dogs are cute but i love elephants.

 61. If you could turn one legal thing illegal, what would it be? Christmas.

 62. Do you have any guilty pleasures? Of courseeeee (;

 63. What is the best thing that the internet has ever created? Video games.

 64. Do you like playing video games? Which video games? Woah you read my mind of sum? Shooter games.

 65. What is your opinion on beauty in today's society? Bullshit

 66. Are you a morning person? When do you usually wake up? No not really and like 5pm nowadays.

 67. Do you have a favorite Disney movie? Character? No

 68. Would you rather live in the city or in the countryside? City but i love the countryside

 69. Would you rather live near the ocean or in the mountains? Mountains

 70. What are the best things about winter? Cold. Even though i hate it. Snow. Even if i dont see it. Trees dying.

 71. What scares you most about the future? Literally everything.

 72. What makes you feel old? Doing nothing.

 73. How many hours do you spend on the computer or phone on average? Idk like 5.

 74. What are some of your New Year's resolutions? Be a better me.

 75. What is your life story in 6 words?

 76. Describe yourself in one word. Awkward.

 77. What bad habits do you do? Smoking

 78. What genre of music do you listen to? everything

 79. Most prominent childhood memory? I would say, but its embarrassing that that's the memory.

 80. Imagine if you had an older brother. If you already have one, what is it like? If you don't, how would this change your life? My life would be so different. Maybe i would have someone to talk to.

 81. Spirit animal?

 82. Do you believe in horoscopes? Yes

 83. What is the worst advice you've ever been given?

 84. List the 3 most important people in your life right now. 1. Fox 2. Fox 3. Fox

 85. Favorite memory of your family. :/

 86. What do you look for in a relationship? Happiness

 87. Do you have a role model? Why or why not? No. I dont need it. But now that i think about it i have one role model.

 88. What is your opinion on social media? Dumb

 89. Are you a pessimist or an optimist? Pessimest

 90. List some things that you think are overpriced? Food

 91. What is your worst memory or creepiest experience? ..

 92. What superpower would ruin the world? Any of them

 93. What is something you swore you would never do when you grew up, but you did anyway? Exactly what im doing now. Nothing. Giving up. Dropping out

 94. What lessons have you learned from movies and which movies were they? Dont trust yourself when you know you arent okay. Fight club

 95. If you could travel anywhere, where would you go? Europe

 96. How do you approach people? I dont but i guess a smile.

 97. What is your opinion on first impressions? I think theyre okay. Only if you dont judge.

 98. What are some things you did as a child that you no longer do? Lol play with imaginary friends

 99. What languages can you speak? English

 100. What do you think society will be like in 30 years? Lol hopefully ill be dead bc that shit sounds terrible

 101. What do you do on your lazy days? Play games.

 102. What ended your last relationship? I had enough.

 103. Favorite food? Soul food

 104. What is the most terrifying dream you've ever had? Fuck im not saying.

 105. When was the last time you got seriously angry? Last night

 106. What was the last friendship you broke? My friend Ashley:(

 107. Do you have any pet peeves? Close minded people

 108. Who was the last person you gave a hug to? Zack

 109. When was the last time you got seriously stressed? Last night

 110. What part of your personality do you want to change? I dont have one.

 111. Who is the most positively influential person in your life right now? My sister Grace.

 112. What is your biggest motivation? My siblings. Faith & Grace.

 113. What did you want to be when you were little? Honestly i never knew.

 114. What are some things that you are good at? Smokin weed

 115. What is one thing you want to be good at? Social skills

 116. What distracts you the most, especially when you're trying to work? My mind

 117. How important is privacy to you? Eh pretty significant i guess.

 118. If you could create one social norm, what would it be? Be friends with everybody.

 119. What's the craziest lie you've ever told? Um.. i told my 2nd grade teacher my family died in a car crash.

 120. What story do you like to tell about yourself at parties? I dont go to parties haaha

 121. What is the lamest thing that you have seen someone do? have friends and socialize too much like woah calm down you know youre still alone.. right. Like its only you. Hahah jk. But irdk.

 122. What is the stupidest thing you've done to impress someone? a guy invited me over and ive never done anything sexual before so i pretended like i knew and i hurt his dick like bad. (We didnt have sex)

 123. What is your morning routine? Wake up, wash face, brush teeth, get dressed, and then boom feel sad

 124. What's the last thing you did that is worth remembering?

 125. If karma was coming back to you, would it help or hurt you? Help

 126. What is your opinion on playing "hard to get?" Being sort of isolated like not opening up. Which is okay bc if they want you they'll wait.

 127. What are the pros and cons of straightforward? Cons, you may hurt feelings. Pro, you know yourself and what you want to say congratulations

 128. What do you consider "leading" someone on? Being fake happy.

 129. Are you the friendzoner or the friendzoned? Friendzoner

 130. What do you admire most about your friends? How beautiful he is. Inside & out.

 131. What do you admire most about your family? They're still here.

 132. What is your opinion on "going with the flow?" You may forget where you are trying to go. Or who you are.

 133. Do you enjoy talking or listening? Listening.

 134. When is it time to end a friendship? Idk

 135. What is the worst excuse you've ever come up with? Lol too many.

 136. If GPA didn't matter, what courses would you have taken? Doesnt matter.

 137. What are your favorite baby names? Ive always liked Riley for a girl name and idk havent thought Bout a boys name.

 138. When was the last time you had a deep conversation with someone? Maybe a week or so ago. Or a few days ago.

 139. What instantly ruins a conversation? Lack of excitement

 140. Biggest turn ons and turn on offs. Affection. And idk

 143. When did you last do something outside of your comfort zone? God every day.

 147. What do you like about the 21st century? ???

 141. Biggest disappointment. Myself

 142. Do you have any self-restraint? A little.

 144. Prized possession(s)? little things

 145. What is your opinion on second chances? They might seem okay but idk.... depends i guess

 146. Text or call? Both, depends on whom im texting or callin

 148. What advice would you give to yourself 5 years ago? Life is hard and stupid but choices you make will stay with you forever so what are you gonna do, follow your heart or head? (head is better hope)

 149. How organized are you? Eh not really anymore.

 150. Favorite mode of transportation. My car

[the-funtime-autocrat]

Enrique Carlos Alberto Mosconi (21 February 1877 – 4 June 1940) was an Argentine military engineer, who is best known as the pioneer and organizer of petroleum exploration and extraction in Argentina.[2]

Mosconi was born in Buenos Aires to Enrico Mosconi, an Italian engineer hired to build railroads, and María Juana Canavery, an Argentine of Irish descent. Enrico Mosconi founded the town of Villa Gobernador Gálvez on 26 February 1888. Enrico Mosconi wanted a medical doctor son; his mother wanted her son to follow the family military tradition of Ángel Canavery, his uncle, who had taken part in the Conquest of the Desert. 

In 1903 he was transferred to the Engineering division of the Army as a military engineer, and in 1904 he received a prize for a construction project. Between 1906 and 1908 he was part of commission of Argentine graduate students sent to Europe (Italy, Belgiumand Germany) to study and acquire hydroelectric and gas power plants. He was assigned to the German Army engineering corps, and spent four years embedded in the 10th Battalion of Westphalia, while in postgraduate studies at the Artillery and Engineering Superior Technical School of Charlottenburg. In Germany he became acquainted with the ideas of Friedrich List (1789–1846), an economist whose industrialist ideas had great influence in Europe and the United States.

YPF was created by President Hipólito Yrigoyen and General Enrique Mosconi on 3 June 1922. It was the first entirely state-run oil company in the world, the second being the French Compagnie française des pétroles (CFP, French Company of Petroleum), created in 1924 by the conservative Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré.[8] YPF's creation was followed by the creation of ANCAP in Uruguay (1931), YPFB in Bolivia (1936), Pemex in Mexico (1938), ENAP in Chile (1950), and Petrobras in Brazil (1953). Mosconi served as YPF's first director.

Juan Hipólito del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús Yrigoyen (12 July 1852 – 3 July 1933) was a two-time President of Argentina who served his first term from 1916 to 1922 and his second term from 1928 to 1930.

His activism became the prime impetus behind the obtainment of universal suffrage in Argentina in 1912. Known as "the father of the poor," Yrigoyen presided over a rise in the standard of living of Argentina's working class together with the passage of a number of progressive social reforms, including improvements in factory conditions, regulation of working hours, compulsory pensions, and the introduction of a universally accessible public education system.

On 16 October 1922 Mosconi was appointed by the president Alvear as Director-General of the Fiscal Petroleum Reserves (Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales, YPF), where he would stay for eight years, devoting large efforts to increase exploration and development of petroleum extraction. [6]

YPF received an initial grant of 8 million Argentine pesos by the national government, and from then on became self-sufficient, financing itself with the profits of extraction and, of course, without foreign investment or loans. In 1925 Mosconi considered the possibility of a state-private society, but in 1928 he turned back on his proposal and further stated:

"There is no other way but the monopoly of the State in a wholesale fashion, that is, in all activities of this industry: production, elaboration, transport and trade... Without an oil monopoly it is difficult... it is impossible for a State company to defeat private capital organizations."

He also remarked that, in order to defend Argentine fiscal oil reserves from the foreign companies, there was the need of "a magnificent insensitivity to all demands on the part of private interests, either in accord or not with the collective interests, but even more, what is needed is a political power capable of containing all opposing forces". Some of the nationalistic policies of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez have been marked as a continuation of this doctrine.

The first YPF oil refinery was inaugurated in December 1925 in La Plata, and was at the time the tenth largest in the world.[11] According to Mosconi, this spawned the beginning of "the mobilization of all sort of resistance and obstacles" from the oil trusts, in particular from Standard Oil, which was one of the most influential foreign companies in Argentina, with a presence in Comodoro Rivadavia, Jujuy, and Salta.[11]

He created in 1927 the Alianza Continental (Continental Alliance) advocating economical independence for Latin American states, an association gathering mainly students and intellectuals, and focusing in particular on oil policies. Between 1927 and 1928 Mosconi toured Latin America telling and teaching the authorities about the Argentine experience with regards to fossil fuels, campaigning for an integration of efforts in the matter of petroleum as a resource. Mosconi was the major proponent of a national policy that put natural resources at the service of economic, industrial and social development of the nation. He defended nationalization of these resources, an absolute fiscal monopoly on surveyance and exploitation, the need for Latin American countries to agree on common actions in this matter, and the passing of resource-related legislation that was advantageous to the interests of the national states. During this trip, Mosconi met with Lázaro Cárdenas, who would nationalize oil in Mexico ten years later, and General Elías Plutarco.[7] The influence of these doctrines reached Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia and Colombia.

Mosconi managed YPF efficiently and, while establishing a soon-to-be major oil company, starts fighting the political pressure of two giants of hydrocarbon exploitation: the British-Dutch Royal Dutch, and John D. Rockefellers' Standard Oil.

The Chamber of Deputies approved a law on 28 September 1928, establishing a state monopoly on oil.[12] The monopoly, however, was not absolute, being limited to oil exploration, exploitation and transport, but excluding selling and imports.[12] Private firms opposed themselves to the law project, refusing to pay a 10% royalty.[13] The bill was supported by President Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear but was ultimately blocked by the conservatives in the Senate.

Oil nationalization became an important theme of Yrigoyen's electoral campaign of 1928, although the Yrigoyenistas focused their criticism on Standard Oil of New Jersey, abstaining themselves from attacking British Empire interests, to which Argentina's economy was closely linked (in particular Royal Dutch Shell).[13]

Following Yrigoyen's victory in the 1928 elections, YPF, still directed by Enrique Mosconi, reduced oil prices in May 1929, leading to the cheapest petroleum in the world[13] and to an important increase in YPF's sales compared to its rival private companies, forcing them to also lower their prices.[13] Mosconi also reduced the price of kerosene and agrochemicals to contribute to the development of the interior regions of Argentina.[13] YPF produced 5.5 million barrels by 1929, and though its share of domestic output had declined to 58% (from 77% in 1923) amid a sharp rise of Esso and Royal Dutch Shell production in Chubut, the firm now covered a third of the nation's oil market. A partnership with distributor Auger & Co. signed in 1925 resulted in a network of over 700 filling stations selling 178 million liters (47 million gallons) by 1930 – an 18% market share. Company revenues in 1930 reached US$25 million.[9]

The Petroleum Institute (Instituto del Petróleo) was created on 30 December 1929, and directed by Ricardo Rojas, the rector of the University of Buenos Aires. Foreseeing conflicts with US private companies, Mosconi proposed an agreement with the Soviet state company Amtorg, which was to allow Argentina to import 250,000 tons of petroleum each year, paid by trade with leather, wool, tannin and mutton.[14] The agreement was to be made official in September 1930, along with the complete nationalization of oil resources;[14] but on 6 September 1930, Yrigoyen was deposed by a military coup headed by General José Félix Uriburu, and the project was withdrawn.

This was the first military coup since the adoption of the Argentine constitution. After the coup d'état Enrique Pérez Colman, Minister of Finance in the Yrigoyen cabinet; General Moscini, former Director of oil fields; General Baldrich and a number of Yrigoyenist deputies were under arrest by the provisional government of General Uriburu.

The new government of Uriburu adopted the most severe measures to prevent reprisals and counter-revolutionary tactics by friends of the ousted administration of ex–President Yrigoyen. The aforementioned Yrigoyenist personalities were later released. [6]

In 1929 Mosconi received Edmundo Castillo, Uruguay's Minister of Industry, and counseled him about the establishment of a national refinery and a state corporation to sell its products. This led to the creation of ANCAP (Administración Nacional de Combustibles, Alcohol y Portland), the state energy corporation created by the Uruguayan government in 1931.

In 1936, after the Chaco War, the state of Bolivia created Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB) after the model of the Argentine company, and soon afterward it dictated the expropriation of the Bolivian Standard Oil Company.

In 1938 the same ideas led to the Conselho Nacional do Petróleo (CNP). That year Mosconi was awarded a medal by the Academy of Science and Art of Rio de Janeiro, in recognition for his work.

The coup was lobbied for chiefly by Standard Oil, whose interests in Salta Province and neighboring Bolivia conflicted with those of YPF.[5]The subsequent Concordance regime supported YPF, however, and its role as the nation's leading oil distillates retailer was bolstered by a 1936 agreement with the Automóvil Club Argentino (ACA) to supply a chain of ACA service stations. Oil production by YPF continued to grow, and soon eclipsed private production: from just over 5 million barrels (37% of the total) in 1934, production grew to 15 million in 1945 (67%).[9] The development of the nation's sizable natural gas resources also originated largely from YPF. Drawing from an initiative by YPF director Julio Canessa, President Juan Perón ordered that the gas flared off in YPF oil extraction should instead be captured, and sold by a state company, thus establishing the sister firm Gas del Estado ("State Gas") in 1946. The nation's first gas compressor and what at the time was the world's longest gas pipeline were completed by 1949, leading to a fifty-fold increase in natural gas production.[15] Oil production at YPF surpassed 25 million barrels (84% of the nation's total) by 1955.[9]

This gain was partly offset by a 40% drop in private-sector output, however, such that overall oil production rose by only one-third during the Peronist decade while annual consumption nearly doubled to 70 million barrels. The nation's oil supply thus shifted from 60% domestic in 1945, to 60% imported by 1954. Oil imports by 1955 rose to US$300 million, or over one fourth of total merchandise imports.[16] Perón had made economic nationalism a policy centerpiece. YPF was granted an exemption from steep oil import tariffs levied on private firms, and Article 40 of the Constitution of 1949 stipulated the nationalization of all energy and mineral resources. The deteriorating oil deficit led Perón to court foreign investment in the sector as early as 1947, however, when an oil drilling contract was signed by YPF with U.S. firm Drilexco.[17] Total exploration doubled, and significant reserves in Salta Province were developed.[18] A more controversial joint venture with Standard Oil of California was signed in 1955 for the eventual production of up to 56 million barrels a year.[17] These initiatives were opposed by much of the Army, the opposition UCR, and among others Perón's point man on national oil policy, YPF head Julio Canessa, who was dismissed. The venture ended following Perón's overthrow in September.[19]

YPF was privatized in 1993 and bought by the Spanish firm Repsol S.A. in 1999; the resulting merger produced 'Repsol YPF'. The renationalization of 51% of the firm was initiated in 2012 by President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.[6] The government of Argentina eventually agreed to pay $5 billion compensation to Repsol.[7]

@artist-tyrant

[v-le]

Ktravels/Klife: Halfway through it all / 첫 학기 끝 !

Foreword: I am almost done! I am almost done with my first semester at Yonsei… damn.

I honestly cannot believe that time flew by so fast. I’ve mentioned this before, but I had been thinking about studying abroad for over a year before coming here. And now that I am about halfway through with this experience… damn, I just have no words. Jk I do, which is why I’m writing this right now lol.

My favorite parts about Korea so far: it is my emotional, musical wonderland. More on that later, but… it’s heart-warming to hear so many of my favorite, treasured artists occasionally on the streets or in a café. And no, not K-pop lol I know nothing about K-pop anymore. In terms of café culture, it’s a love and hate relationship because some of them are just so expensive sigh. BUT, after going to so many different cafes like all around Seoul, I have come to actually have specific preferences for what constitutes a gr8 café (for studying specifically bc that’s all my friends and I mostly do at cafes anyway LOL) hehe:

AFFORDABLE!! No normal person should be paying like 7 or 8 bucks for a goddamn coffee. Base price for drinks should be around 5,000 won. If their iced caramel macchiato costs more than 5,500 won, the place is too expensive.  If it’s less than 5,000 won,

Reasonable cup sizes! Or better, LARGE ONES! (안녕, 낯선 사람 in hongdae has some super bang-for-your-buck coffee drinks, the best I’ve seen!! :^))

Music that isn’t too loud

OUTLETS. OUTLETS ARE A MUST.

Plentiful seats so that it’s never too packed & large-enough tables

Nice temperature (aka not too cold in the winter, not too hot in the summer)

You can sneak in outside food & eat it blatantly even if there are signs saying not to, and no one will ever say anything

Not too crusty: cozy, but clean

A nice, well-maintained bathroom

It may seem impossible to find the perfect café that could meet all of these expectations, but honestly there are just SO many cafes in seoul, that if you search hard enough or have enough luck, some will be out there somewhere :^)

ALSO can I address the business turnover rate here?? Is this why Seoul is considered a fast-paced city?? So many times, my friends I have tried to go to cafes or restaurants or stores we’ve seen online or found on Kakao/Naver Maps, only to arrive and discover that THEY’RE GONE. Even if I did thorough research and found a blog post of a place from 2 months prior, the place is just POOF, disappeared into thin air. This has literally happened countless times and we are flabbergasted each time LOL. As limited as the database of 맛집’s and cafes already is online, the Internet & maps can’t even keep up to date with information either. Businesses open up so randomly fast, too it’s crazy… Mangoplate, the supposed “yelp” of Korea honestly is not that useful either LOL it usually has places on the pricier side, it is also not always up to date, and I just feel like Seoul/Korea has way too many places & businesses worth trying that they can’t even all fit into one database. There are just so many of those un-documentable places. So I suggest: find a neighborhood, go with your friends, take a stroll around the place, and try to stumble upon a place of your liking. Unless you can read Korean & utilize naver blogs (slightly more extensive and useful than mangoplate but still not 100% reliable all the time), then walking around is probably your best bet rather than attempting to do research online. Trust me.

Hmm what else is there… It’s really nice to be able to get/buy anything pretty easily, with convenience. I am afraid I will get too used to this once I go back to the states.

I think once the work started to pick up later in the semester, I definitely started falling into a routine of going to my morning class & then leaving sinchon to run errands elsewhere in Seoul, or simply doing work in the business building which quickly became my go-to spot because 1) outlets, 2) can eat food 3) very nice facility, literally sparkling 4) on campus. It kinda hurts to think that this short-lived routine will be over quite soon, but maybe next semester will be a little more exciting.

Although I haven’t been speaking as much Korean as I would like to, I do feel like my Korean has improved to an extent: (very slightly) vocab-wise, reading-wise, and writing-wise. It is honestly SO refreshing to finally be learning Korean in a formal, classroom setting. It honestly makes me regret not doing it sooner. Why did I lock myself up in my room for 8 years and only settle for learning on my own?? Sigh, it’s okay. I can only get better from here, right? As much as I hate the timing of KLI, I still really do enjoy the class nonetheless and I feel some sort of… growth? I appreciate how all my background knowledge of Korean has helped me up to this point as well. That at least, I can be proud of lol.

With languages and culture in general, throughout the semester, for the first time ever, I got to reflect on how valuable languages are. It is so interesting; I’ll try my best to explain my realizations, but it might come out as gibberish in the end… I really think anyone that has been born & raised in the US should spend a prolonged amount of time abroad. As homogeneous of a society Korea is, being here has opened my eyes to the global society. The society in which multiculturalism is embraced, there is no one correct language of communication, and every member listens to the various cultural values of one another without judgement. I never thought of English as being a powerful language. In fact, I honestly think I have been taking English for granted. I have never realized the immensity of the English language, how the rest of the world vies to master it, and how I have been blessed to have grown up with English as my native tongue. But on the flip-side, learning other languages is just as worthwhile. Communicating in a different language is literally honing a different perspective, mentality, and set of values. You can try to translate target languages into your native tongue for ease of comprehension. Or, what I have come to deeply appreciate and understand is, you can and should take the target language as it is. In order to connect with the language and consequently the culture, stop thinking in terms of your native tongue. Doing this to a deeper extent in Korea than I ever did before has felt extremely rewarding: it makes the language dynamic and exciting to learn. It has led me to cherish specific words or phrases, more so than I already did before arriving here. And it really is just… beautiful. LEARN A SECOND LANGUAGE! EXPLORE GLOBALIZATION!

Quite frankly though, I am disappointed that I haven’t been able to go to as many places as I would like, within in Korea. Okay more like: I am super grateful for the gorgeous places I have been to, but I also wish I could’ve visited those classic, “must-see” places like Busan, Jeju-do, Jeonju, Daegu, etc. I did however, visit lesser known, less expecting (??) places like Gangwon-do (Jumunjin Beach, Gangmun Beach, Gangneung, Yeongwol, Jeongseon, Pyeongchang) & Gyeongju & like Anyang & Seongnam…? Do these last two even count LOL theyre just smoller cities outside of Seoul… but yeah, I guess I’ll just have to save Busan and Jeju and the others for next semester… when I’m not as broke hopefully lmao.

But forreals, I actually really appreciated my trip to Gangwon-do even though it was technically an assignment for one of my courses called “New Media and Digital Storytelling” (shoutout to prof ted for supporting us with this valuable experience!!) because it was literally a breath of fresh air. Seoul is constantly jampacked with people and cars and smog and noises, but Gangneung was still a city, still just as civilized, but much quieter. Granted, nothing much happens out there and some parts are straight up just farming grounds, but the beaches have these stunning sunsets that look like they’re straight out of a graphically-altered fantasy movie. It was stunning and the image still lasts behind my eyes to this day.

One of the other things that I have been struggling to accept is that fact that I feel… unproductive in life? I wish I put myself more out there this semester. Even though I met a good number of locals and have had a few valuable conversations, I never deeply connected with any of them. Plus, almost all of them are going abroad next semester or graduating ☹. I also did not join any clubs or organizations or sports teams nor did I get a job or an internship or do any tutoring or volunteering on the side… I have just been going to class, occasionally spending a lot of money, and then spending some more. Last year at UCI, I feel like I ran into my freshman year with a fiery heart: I joined the badminton team, became a part of the Antleader Mentorship Program (AMP, which I miss so dearly with all of my heart) in fall & winter quarter, and took all upper division education courses my spring quarter as well as fulfilled my fieldwork major requirement by tutoring at a Kindergarten class for 6 hours every week. But coming to Korea, everything felt stagnant. Academically, career-wise, I feel like everything has been on a pause. Granted, many people could tell me that “Oh, you just being in Korea is already so much more than you need! You are doing more than enough, don’t worry”. But am I really?? I beg to differ. I am honestly pretty disappointed in myself and at this point all I can push for is to try to get more involved next semester. It has also been hurting to know that I have been digging into my precious savings that took over 2 long years to build up so quickly :(.

SO yeah, as great as Korea has been, it’s also been money-draining and disappointing from a personal-growth kind of view. Maybe I’m being too hard on myself, but that is also simply my reality. I think I am also choosing to be hard on myself because my luck with all my favorite artists has just been… totally undeserving.

I feel so blessed and “but why me??” at the same time. I have gotten to see Roy Kim four times live (fifth time will be this coming Sunday; the Seoul shows were blessedly scheduled the weekend right before I leave) & he released a new song in September. Eddy Kim, whom ive been waiting 4 years for to come back, finally did so right in the middle of my time here. Fromm, my extremely beloved indie goddess for YEARS now, released a new mini album in November; I got to see her 3 times live, and even attended her breath-taking solo?? Alone?? Personal? 그냥 단독 콘서트. Sam Kim, who I first listened to when I was 15, who has saved my life so many times with his music, finally released a FULL-length album 2 years and 6 months since his debut EP. Not only was I selected to go to his album’s release showcase, but I also got to a meet him through a fansign event. Oh yeah, I also met Fromm through a free fansigning & Eddy Kim through his new album’s fansign event, too. (I will post about these artist-meeting experiences separately because I feel like these three occasions alone have taught me so much). I saw DAY6 live for their third-year debut anniversary and I could feel the immensity and sincerity brimming from their voices, especially with an unfortunately missing member from stage; I will be seeing them soon for their newest music release, which also happened to come out this December. Nam Woohyun of Infinite, the group that I gave my heart to for over a third of my life, the group that I owe so much of my existence to, released another solo mini album, and I was lucky enough to even attend day 3 of his solo concert series; I saw a few other members of Infinite, I could feel my 12-year-old heart screaming & flailing & crying & apologizing from within because I’ve missed them for so long now, and I even heard a never-before released track from him as well. It was a miracle; I saw Woohyun & glimpses of the others on November 4th. Almost exactly 5 years ago in 2013, on November 11th, I went to a concert for the first time in my life and saw those very own loves with my own eyes: Infinite.

ALL OF THESE. ALL OF THESE EVENTS. Have been a blessing. Have been some sort of indescribable, boundless, breath-taking stroke of luck. I promise you, just luck. Roy just somehow decided to take a break from school at Georgetown THIS semester. Eddy Kim, Fromm, Sam Kim, Woohyun, and DAY6 all just somehow decided to release new music within the last half of this year. ME, I, just somehow decided to study abroad not as a 3rd year nor a 4th year, but a mere 2nd year. I decided to leave my home university barely 1 year in, and go to Korea. Just because. Because it felt right and I knew I wanted to, I knew I had to. But never could I have predicted any of these things to happen. Never in a million years. The very artists that I had only been listening to and watching from my computer screen for years as I hid beneath the deep blankets of my bed, the artists that have made me cry on cue because of how beautiful, meaningful, and healing their music is, the artists that seem to barely exist on the Internet, that are so lowkey and precious that I feel like I am the only that really listens to and loves them, the very artists that make my world revolve, that push me to go on when I want to give up, that I owe so much of my life to, all decided to release music, suddenly be active, hold events, and meet their fans in one way or another. Right. When. I am here, too. This sort of timing in life is nothing I had control of. It was all luck and I am just so deeply, infinitely, perpetually, until the end of this world, thankful. Every day I am so thankful. I didn’t ask for any of this, I didn’t hope for it, I didn’t even think about the possibility of these events happening in my life. But they did somehow. And for that, I am just so so so grateful. It’s just crazy to think that years ago, as a sophomore in high school. My heart would bulge with immense affection for these people & their music. They were unreal, almost-fantasy-like existences that made life-saving music and that I cherished so immensely. But little did I know 4 or 5 years later, this could happen to me. That there was actually a worth to loving these almost “nobody” musicians. I just constantly feel like I am always receiving from them, and never giving back. I really do owe them so much. Thank you, to my beloved artists. For everything.

Moving on to the people that have made my first semester here at Yonsei even brighter: our dumbass squad consisting of lil hoorey, 왕언니 ana, smol laura, dumbass closted weaboo Wilson, & even dumber josh LOL I am so blessed to have met such funny, stupid, understanding friends. Before arriving to Korea, I was STRESSED that I wouldn’t be able to find friends because I hate alcohol, I hate clubbing, I hate mainstream K-pop and simply many parts of popular Korean culture are things that I am not particularly a fan of. But thankfully, I have found an endearing group of friends that share these same sentiments. These reliable people have honestly shaped so much of my experiences here and I am forever thankful. IT JUST SUCKS THAT I AM THE ONLY ONE STAYING FOR A YEAR LOL. But yes, thank you friends, for everything <3 .

Have I exhausted all of my thanks at this point?? Probably not. But I’ll save those for my own heart and mind to cherish. Going abroad was and has been and will be an experience that I don’t think I could ever properly express with words alone. I think it’s always like that when it comes to these rants LOLLL. I rant because I need to vent these feelings and emotions and flaring thoughts. But I just end up struggling to articulate everything and get my heart across properly. Sigh.

Homesickness? Is this something I was supposed to address? Maybe exchange students are probably expected to always talk about this. But for me, it was a nonexistent notion. Being born and raised in the bay area, having lived in the same exact house, having slept in the same creaky, old bed for 18 years in a row, has provided me with a comfort that I probably take for granted more than I should, but has also left me with an intense urgency to explore more, see more, do more, and just breathe more. The Bay Area can be extremely toxic and suffocating in so many ways, and it a space that I know I can go back to whenever my heart desires, but it is also a space that I do not wish to prolong my stay in any further. My immediate family has also never been a significant part of my life: I have never relied on them for emotional nor mental support. Maturing into an adult with this sort of detachment has hindered and helped me in countless ways. There were definitely times throughout my life where I despised them for the way in which everything turned out. For how miserable or lonely or stuck or negligent I sometimes felt. But I know that without that detachment, I would not be where I am today. To my next semester at Yonsei, you look questionable, daunting, and exciting. I honestly can’t even begin to imagine what will be in store for me. All I can wish for is health & happiness.

가즈으으아!!~

[dallasareaopinion]

the truth is as ugly as you think

First of all I am a conservative, an independent conservative. If you read my posts regularly you know I sometimes call some Republicans CINO (Conservative in name only). And I am very conservative. It may be hard to tell much of the time because when I talk about public policy, my ideas are moderately conservative to what some would call liberal ( I am highly supportive of green initiatives, but in a business way). And one of the reasons I consider myself very conservative is based on values.

These values include hard work leads to success or it should, families are important, small businesses are important, especially to help build wealth and help the economy overall, respect for life from conception to natural death, the Constitution actually means something, and basic conservative talking points such as smaller government, balanced budget, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, free markets, you get the point.

I wasn’t always a conservative, or maybe I was, just didn’t realize it till I got older. At the ripe ole age of 14 while visiting that very same building that was recently desecrated I told an elevator full of military brass that we should get out of Vietnam. I participated in Vietnam protests. I protested against Nixon. I did a heck more than just taking a knee. 

I also once participated in a “protest” that by the end of it I was wondering exactly what we were protesting. I was “beat up” by the police that day and on that day I harbor no grudges. We were wrong that time and we shouldn’t have been there. I actually realized the truth a few minutes too late and I was trying to get my friends to leave when the police moved in. There were thousands “protesting” actually so it got pretty scary, but after being clubbed a couple of times and pushed over I managed to get up scream at a police office I am trying to leave, literally grabbed and pulled a couple of my friends away and we left. No ones rights were affected or taken away that day. 

So after years of being a protester, anti government person, anti establishment, I learned that there are times when you need to speak up and there are times when there is no real fight. What I have also learned is that my generation had motivation to do what is right at one point, but somewhere along the line, greed and self entitlement took over. I watched it happen. Slowly at first in the seventies, and it was building then, up until the eighties when full force greed took over this country. And also coke fueled entitlement. Me was the in word and in philosophy. If you hear anyone say anything different they are lying to you. Self entitlement and greed took over as the main drivers of values.

Sad, but true. And once basic values are corrupted which they were all the way to the top of our society, things come crashing back down on top of people. People no longer cared about values, it was only about what was in it for me. And this is the environment that motivated people like Trump. He didn’t care back then about others and obviously he doesn’t now. 

And you have read me say this about him for years. And many many others have said the same thing. So why do tens of millions of people think he is right? That question is beyond me. I occasionally try to find an answer, but for him to  convince so many people of his lies is incomprehensible. I grew up figuratively with many of these people. I watched them lose moral compasses, I watched them raise families so in some ways you can see the decline in society, but for the masses that follow him to be so enthralled with someone so shallow amazes me.  And for some even scarier reason they think something precious is being taken away from them.

They no longer understand what is precious or valuable. They have no clue what is truly their rights. They scream loudly and say nothing. They think a piece of cloth covering their mouth so not to spread germs is an affront to their liberty, yet they no nothing of the true value of their liberty. Tens of millions of Americans, know not of what they speak. And if you try to reason with them, you are taking away their freedoms. They gave away their freedom when they quit trying to think for themselves; when they let a weak man con them, when they believed lies with no evidence, when they accused others of the very same problems they exhibit, they gave away themselves body, heart and soul. 

So how on God’s green earth did so many average most hard working, Americans become so misguided. Yes, people are writing books on it now, but they do not have the answer. This complete destruction of the self will not be easily understood, yet I watched it happen over the last thirty years. I saw it and cannot explain it. I have friends who have fallen victim to it. I have friends who are just as perplexed by it as myself. There are a few complete idiots out there making the most noise that really don’t even care about Trump. They are just getting to make noise and act tough and that is all they want. There are though the tens of millions who do believe something was stolen from them. It wasn’t. They gave it away and I am not talking about the election. I am talking about their souls, brains, intellect, common sense. I am talking about their being. They just gave it away. And for what?

Societies do not experience what we experienced overnight. This happens over time, slowly then finds momentum and that momentum begins to consume things in its path. Eventually it hits something. Well it hit something this week. The question becomes is it breaking apart into many pieces that linger or did it bowl over the obstacle in its path and has become stronger. Soon we may know the answer to that particular question. And even it it lingers a new momentum can develop from the pieces if we are not careful. 

So what happened this week? God only knows for the time being. People were there for trouble, some were there because again for who knows what reason, think they were robbed of something. Instead their ignorance robbed us. This was obvious from a long ways out, yet people on the news say this was surreal. It wasn’t surreal, it was the truth hitting us upside the head. This was happening right in front of us for a very long time. We choose to ignore it. The rich, the poor, the politicians, the lay people, the media, the pretentious left, the alt right, the conservatives, the liberals, all of us watched it grow into the mess it became on Wednesday. And it is not over. Again, are we dealing with pieces that linger or is the momentum now solidified? 

On the side notes, Ted Cruz is a weak kneed prick, I do not know Hawley, but have no respect for him, there are others that are opportunists who have learned to put themselves first and get what they can. And some call themselves conservative. They aren’t. Lies, theft, cons, they are part of the problem, but only the visible sores of the true problem. We lost our souls, our values, our true understanding of what it means to cherish life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This is the underlying factor that caused Wednesday. Trump is just the ugliest sore or cyst on this body called the United States of America, but he is not the root of the cancer. 

He and others though do need to be held accountable. And there will be ugliness holding them accountable. If we don’t, the cancer will grow, the momentum will grow or the pieces will rebuild. Just like cutting open the human body to remove the cancer, there will be pain, but we have to endure this pain to cure our cancer.

I love our country, our Constitution and our people. Most are hard working and care about something. We just need to get some people to start caring about true values and freedoms again. Even those of us who think we care about what is right because it is obvious we didn’t enough. 

Unfortunately no cheers tonight. Stay safe my friends, the enemy is us and yes a cartoon character said that. Thank you Walt Kelly.  A drawing is smarter than most of us.  Oh and a naval officer also chimed in long beforehand, different context though. 

And this virus doesn’t care that we are struggling as a body politic. It is still out to get us. 

[thinking-outline]

#thout #thinkingoutline

“I Take Responsibility” and the Limits of Celebrity Activism

The current cultural moment is one whose urgency feels particularly ill-suited to the sort of vapid pageantry on display in the video made to promote the “I Take Responsibility” initiative.Source: Confluential Films / YouTube

Hollywood is perhaps one of the last places to look for inspiration—practical, emotional, or otherwise—in times of crisis. Still, our gilded class’s response to the societal shitstorm that has dominated our minds and screens for the last four months has felt notably unfastened. In April, the comedian and talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres made headlines when she joked that life while quarantined in her ten-thousand-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion felt like “being in jail.” The same week, the Times reported on the four hundred inmates being held at Rikers Island for minor parole violations, despite a worsening pandemic. The inmates included Raymond Rivera, a fifty-five-year-old man who, after having his case delayed several months, contracted covid-19 in jail and died the day after state officials lifted the warrant against him. As public sentiment has turned from coronavirus-induced fear to sadness and anger following the tragic killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, the celebrity response has ranged from milquetoast to head-scratching.

In a video shared to Instagram on June 2nd, the movie heartthrob turned Silicon Valley financier Ashton Kutcher choked back tears as he recounted a pre-bedtime conversation that he had with his two young children. He explained how his son wanted to be read to first, but Kutcher told him that his sister would go first because “for some boys, girls don’t get to go at all.” The story was meant to serve as a poignant and instructive allegory for the scores of Instagram users who had commented “All Lives Matter” under a recent post of his where he had opined “BLM.” Around the same time, Virgil Abloh, the artistic director of menswear for Louis Vuitton and the founder and C.E.O. of Off-White, was being memed into a fine dust after posting a screenshot of his paltry fifty-dollar donation to a bail fund started by the Miami art collective (F)empower. And, on Thursday, a two-minute video for an initiative bluntly titled “I Take Responsibility” joined the ever-growing canon of the unsought celebrity P.S.A. The video features a coalition of white actors and entertainers asserting their culpability in perpetuating anti-black racism. Filmed in a sombre black-and-white and scored with saccharine piano, the spot shows Sarah Paulson, Stanley Tucci, Kesha, and others vowing no longer to “turn a blind eye” or “allow racist, hurtful words . . . to be uttered in my presence” and “to stand against hate.” The Web site for the initiative allows visitors to decide which vice they feel most guilty of (“Saying racism doesn’t exist,” “not being inclusive,” etc.) and to “make it better today” by pledging to do things like “donate to families affected [by racism]” before directing them to various organizations and petitions. Elsewhere, many celebrities simply invoked proverbial, and often literal, “prayer hands” emoji (🙏)—a de-facto “get well soon” to society and all its ills.

The missed notes have been particularly grating in the pop-music world, where many stars have built careers and amassed huge profits working within black musical traditions and selling their work to black audiences. As black communities are being disproportionately decimated by the coronavirus and black people continue to die at the hands of law enforcement, there are some who feel that figures like Drake should use their gigantic platforms to do more than, say, offer a fan the chance to fly on his private jet. (On June 1st, Drake was challenged by his fellow Toronto artist Mustafah the Poet to match a four-hundred-dollar donation to a black bail-fund network. The rapper reportedly replied, “Say less, brother,” and posted a donation receipt for a hundred thousand dollars.)

A similar desire to push industry leaders toward more decisive action in combatting anti-black racism is likely how #TheShowMustBePaused was first conceived. Led by Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang—two black women who have worked in executive roles at major record labels—the initiative was meant to be an industry-wide day of observance for “the long-standing racism and inequality that exists from the boardroom to the boulevard.” According to the stated mission on the project’s Web site, the women hoped that this day of reflection would be a positive first step in the effort to “hold accountable the industry at large . . . including major corporations and their partners who benefit from the efforts, struggles and successes of Black people.” On Tuesday, June 2nd, scores of artists posted black squares on their Instagram feeds, often alongside the hashtag #BlackoutTuesday. Nearly all the major music labels observed the blackout, and explained, with varying levels of specificity, what a continued commitment to this mission would look like at their respective companies. The trend was quickly picked up by many people outside the industry, too. And, somewhat ironically, the flood of black-square posts ended up saturating the #blacklivesmatter tag on Instagram, displacing resources and information that some organizers had been compiling for years. By Wednesday, it was back to business as usual on many artists’ feeds—after all, there were deluxe-edition albums to promote.

The current cultural moment is one whose urgency feels particularly ill-suited to the sort of vapid pageantry that typically constitutes the “socially conscious” arm of a celebrity’s public-relations repertoire. Given all the vested corporate interests that celebrities have, and the timeworn tradition of rewarding famous people for the appearance of political integrity more than its actual presence, it’s wishful to expect every musician with more than a million followers to be schooled in the perils of systemic racial inequality, much less to be equipped to speak publicly about it. In fact, it would probably be in our collective best interest that not all of them did. Still, one hopes that, among the faction of the highly followed and highly influential who were jumping to post black squares and vague sentence fragments, there are some who could use their visibility to do more. The increased pressure on artists to monetize their personal brands and the subsequent professionalization of social media have turned these solipsistic Internet spaces into de-facto storefronts for mini corporations. Sadly, it seems that many of the famous names behind these accounts have also adopted the sort of risk-averse, politically opaque rhetoric favored by Fortune 500 companies—opting for tepid platitudes and lazy hashtag activism in lieu of more resolute (and potentially alienating) public displays.

The tiptoeing of the entertainment industry’s biggest names has been made all the more conspicuous by the activity of their less popular peers. Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, and now in the wake of the George Floyd murder and other police-related violence, smaller and independent artists have used their reach to compile and disseminate resources like recommended viewing and reading lists (flawed as they may be), to amplify the work of organizers, and to publicize bail funds to donate to in support of the many protesters who have been arrested in cities across the country, and they have gone to protests themselves. Corpus Family Mutual Aid Fund, the initiative started by the New York creative collective affiliated with the Queens hardcore band Show Me the Body, has amassed more than twenty-two thousand dollars in just over a month, with the bulk of proceeds going to members of the New York City D.I.Y. music scene who have been financially affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

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Of course, not all of the ultra-famous have blown hot air. Various high-profile figures have disrupted their seemingly endless promotion cycles and retrofitted their social channels to speak pointedly about the current moment. One such figure is “Star Wars” ’s John Boyega. Despite apparent pushback from some of his fans, the British actor, who is of Nigerian descent, has been very outspoken in disparaging racism and brutal policing and has voiced support for protests around the world. On June 3rd, a video of an impassioned Boyega addressing the crowd at a large Black Lives Matter demonstration in London circulated widely online. Elsewhere, figures such as the Chicago rapper Noname, whose popular online book club has highlighted titles by Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, and Octavia Butler, have continued to use their platforms to galvanize their following and espouse their unequivocal beliefs. Some celebrities who in the past had been perhaps overzealous in exploiting their soapbox (ahem, Kanye) even seem to have stepped back and taken a more measured approach this time around.

What shouldn’t be overlooked is the work that plain old non-celebrity people have been doing. Within the past few weeks, funds for, among other causes, pretrial bail for trans people being held in New York City jails, George Floyd’s young daughter Gianna, and Ramsey Orta—the man who filmed the murder of his friend Eric Garner in 2014 and was released from prison this year—have been flooded with contributions. Bail-fund organizers in particular have seen an unprecedented spike in support in recent weeks. Many people have been posting receipts of their donations and challenging friends in their network to match them.

What these examples show is not that every single celebrity has to commit to leading the revolution but what can happen if these platforms were treated less like public-relations buildouts and more like the powerful communication channels and resource vectors that they are. Ideological fluffiness on the part of people with huge online followings can be at its best a wasted opportunity and at its worst deleterious to more substantive activism happening on social media. A #blacklivesmatter post on Jennifer Lopez’s Instagram page reaches an audience larger than those of most regional television stations. And although reposting an aerial video of a street mural is nice, it lacks the efficacy of a bail-fund link to free those arrested while marching across it.

[dancekickboxcardio]

Hmmmm... 🤔 How do you this?

I decided to write 🖊 my execution of today’s work out 💪🏾 🏃🏼‍♀️ routine. I have been up pretty early and I have not completed my nights 🌃 rest 😌 . Yes, I am going back to bed 🛌 . Surprise 😮, I have no bad hips. I was holding on to the grab bars treadmill. It was a difficult adjustment coming from a three day 📆 sit. I was dragging my feet and a touch lazy. But I did what I need to do to establish a tone. I measured myself. Ah, 📏I should totally do the body stats thing and I don’t mean just weight. The size and proportion. Thick legs 🦵🏾.

I got to catch up with some of my gym 🏃🏼‍♀️ 💪🏾 friends. I asked them about their plans for the holiday 🎄. It’s still two weeks off and yet it is fast 💨 approaching. I am waiting for the week to move along so I have my allowance 💵. I am bad. Vie, can you focus your attention on other stuff. But I love ❤️ shoes, make up 💄, clothes 👗, bag 💼. The sad 😢 part is I am getting essentials. They don’t have to be expensive 💲💲💲💲💲 and I am aware of that. But you have to realize great function when you see one. You totally can realize and be like the price you pay is commensurates the product that you are getting. Even then, I don’t pay retail. However, let’s face it. High end Lululemon is not going to put it on sale 🏷 and really it is a novelty item that I need now. I know I am annoying 😒 . It’s more than durable. Like many things I would like to be reminded that life must be enjoyed 😊 slow. Relish the time spent working on self. How many people do you thing have that? Develop not on the constraints society tells you. You dictate your terms (because you can). Merry Christmas 🎁. I have my water 💦 bottle but I got distracted to making my espresso ☕️ . Someone is training Jajamoose to have yogurt 🍦. I was having my early breakfast 🥞 snack. He loves 💕 it and he’ll be in your face at every turn.

I am not turning on podcast 🎙. But I am painting my nails 💅🏾. I would like to provide my commentaries on pictures 📸 . Artsy farsy. But that defeats the purpose of impressions right. Let’s break it down segment by.

I had a morning ☀️ similar to today. I was up at 600a and couldn’t go back to bed easily. I got up had a yogurt 🍦 and my espresso to jump start my system. I sat in my chaise 🛋 studying 🤓 👩🏼‍💻 American Constitution. I finished the four week lectures which is the equivalent of 1/8 of a semester’s course work. Maybe even less. But the condense materials 📑are nevertheless robust. I am getting a certificate 📜 . I love ❤️ collecting tokens ✨ of accomplishments apart from lipsticks 💄, blushes and eyeliners 👛.

He is sticking with me this morning. It must be the yogurt 🍦. Although he has been extra sweet 😻 lately. Then, I see him bossing his older bro’s around 😆.

I need to change my sheets.

I don’t seem to like the chicken 🍗 that I made. It needs more salt and I would love ❤️ the crispy coating. But I am eating 🍽. I’m not going to throw it away. I saw that duck 🦆 and turkey 🦃 were on sale in the grocery 🛒. But I calculated the cost of an entire weight of meat 🥩 it’s a lot. I chose not to have a gourmet meal 👩🏼‍🍳. I can almost taste 😋 the orange 🍊 glaze. I was prepped early. My Mom interrupted my sleep 😴 for a schedule 🗓 change. It was resolved. I had lunch 🍴 early and at 600p, yes I was hungry 😋 for dinner in my cool down stretches 🙆🏼‍♀️ .

Police 🚔 was in as I walked. He opened the door 🚪. I wanted to see if it was the same officer who took my report. I said hi 👋🏾 to Joe who checked me in. I smiled at the Frozen display. “Let it go. Let it go.” ❄️ I missed K. There was a new gal at the desk. I haven’t started my work out 💪🏾 🏃🏼‍♀️ and my hair is already disheveled. I looked 👀 sweaty 🥵 exhausted too. I sat in the sauna 🧖🏼‍♀️ to literally warm up my muscles. I wanted to take a picture where I was sitting and put the bag 💼 I have my eyes 👀 on. Just being silly 🙃.

I went upstairs and I didn’t take a shot of the inbody. I saw Molly and commented on having cookies 🍪. I wanted to tell her that I had some graham crackers covered in white chocolate 🍫. I tried a little bit restrained. Then, I saw Lane. I didn’t recognize him because he was in regular clothes and he was as I told him going out wild 🌲. I discovered that he was going to California for a competition. I went deep. I was like, “ have a passion for something.” Somehow I was able to complain about my tote 👜 that smelled 👃🏾 like hospital 🏥 after I smelled tea 🍵 on it last week 🗓. I don’t remem the transition. But I bid him good luck 🍀. “California. California. California.” 🎶 OC theme song. Obsessive Compulsive. Speaking of which I forgot to sanitize my mat. Freak out. It’/ cold and flu season and my nose is always running. I feel ok this morning. Thank God. Imma do moderate. No, like what I was randomly 💭 thinking in the treadmill, 90 minutes sustained cardio ❤️. Did I tell you guys how bad I was. My body was behind. Out of condition after not being in the health club for 3 days. As a result it has a steep slope. I mean mentally I wasn’t there. I wasn’t up for it and I didn’t want to weather. It was easy peasy lemon 🍋 squeezy. I decided to do the usual, make it harder but with assist. My hands 🤚🏾 where on the grab bars the entire time.

I actually decided to do moderate Tuesday. I usually charge hard esp that I am well-rested and have the energies ⚡️. I decided to warm up slow and conserve what I have to finish the week. I am not looking at it day by day. I see it in the entirety and make some sort of ways to make sure I completed ✔️ another straight 5 days of 7. Day 2 today. I wasn’t able to fill up all the blanks in my worksheet 🗒because I had no pen 🖊 in the café. I thought 💭 I kept one in my 🎒 backpack. I did back. I am not as sore. I still feel my back legs 🦵🏾 taut. I am thinking 🤔 perhaps it wasn’t the personal training session on the area. It Cardioing the Right way 👟 . My legs are now actually doing the work no hands on the bars. I wished I had a journal 📓. It would be nice not to be laser focus. Be distracted, disorderly and doing output instead on focusing input. Everybody was very aware at how they relate to the space. They were all in attention. Well others stiffer than others. But I smiled 😃 a lot. Ian was there. For some reason he came off strict and nasty mean yesterday. Just yesterday. Impatient? He’s usually the funny 😆 approachable easy going one. I love 💗 the new book 📚. I wanted to take notes on the further reads at the back book 📖 cover. But it was a mind blowing 🤯 topic. I am so eager to follow along. I had bits and pieces. I think 🤔 the Outrace area is pretty cool 😎. There was a girl she hung in one of the grab bars. I was always bad at monkey 🐒 bars. I wondered to myself why I chose the band instead of the TRX things. It came first to me and also I had to make sure I am not whooped the next day. I was ill-at-ease with my forms. Vie, that’s the idea 💡 . I have to make sure I am doing it correctly. I keep on checking my behind and make sure I am not displaying my old Victoria’s Secrets and my moon 🌝 buns.

Ugh 😑, it doesn’t always have to be the same way. Life is not in a well-controlled cog. At least for me. I keep running to the bathroom. Vie, more than the liquids and some fear at the back of your mind your belly. Yeah, I know. At least I get to freshen up and reapply make up. There was this guy who made eye contact with me and lingered. Yeah, I was malicious. Defense. Defense. 👏🏾 I put some lotion 🧴 as my lack of gloves 🧤 makes my hands dry sensitive. Also, the towels are softer and easier on the skin. Yeah, I noticed. Mariah explained to me that they have new towels and soap 🧼. Since we are at it, my water 💦 from the tap taste like peppery. I was like, is it coming from what I ate like lingering taste 😛. Weirdo. That’s my name for Mark Consuelo. I hope 🤞🏾 he doesn’t think me mean and rude and insulting. I am not catcalling him at all. Yeah. Yeah. I am just being nice.

I didn’t get a shot of my area. It was too busy at least to my perception. A lot is going on. Hysterical 😩. Vie, cool 😎 cub. I should take off my headphones 🎧 to stress 😬 me out tension. I like my listening 👂🏾 pleasure. But ok. I’ll work with on earpiece today for the heck. The suave guy waved at me and I was wondering why so I said hi 👋🏾 back. It was at the hallway. He checked in my Dad one weekend. I should have asked for his name for appreciation. I wasn’t in the tally mood because nothing was going right. I had no pen 🖊 to complete my fitness log, the Internet 🌐 is slow, I want to get to the sauna 🧖🏼‍♀️. Did I smell Eucky? It wasn’t pronounced. I wasn’t in a hurry. I had plenty of time ⏱. I ran into my Mom in the bathroom before Dance Jams 💃🏼. I met her in the classroom. I found out the name of my Korean friend and wondered if I am saying it right. I took it easy like I told Shelly. She was at it yesterday. Angie is fun 🎊. I was enjoying 😊 myself like everybody else. You don’t realize that her exercises are high in intensity. Oooh 😯, that last song 🎼 my thighs are on fire 🔥. I was thinking 💭 to hold on, “Strong legs.” I think I saw L’Tan. I was trying to get a leaving selfie 🤳🏾. I thought 💭 I look 👀 a lot like holding it in 😂. Head shake.

I was hungry 😋 before going to bed 🛏 at 1200a. I had fruits 🍍 and it didn’t cut it. What happened to intermittent fasting. But I am feeling the need to eat 🥙. The better part is it’s not sugar. Ooooh, 😮 I want those caramel cookies 🍪 . I also saw essential oils for the total health and wellness practitioner 🙏🏾. What the heck— Hip-pish-ster 👓.

[dangolding]

Spec Ops: The Line and the fine art of subversion

Every writer has a piece that they never quite got placed with a publication. I wrote this many years ago now when Spec Ops: The Line was first released and showed it to a few friends and editors, but it was never published. Now that the game is five years old, I thought I’d just put it online.

///////////////////////////////

And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air

Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there

 The first thing you encounter in any videogame is its menu. People generally spend very little time on menus—they are doorways, the thresholds of videogames, ready to set the tone but quick to get out of the way. Despite their importance, they are often relatively disposable for the player, and quickly forgotten. Press Start. Hit A to begin. Now here’s the real game.

 But the first thing you notice about Spec Ops: The Line is its menu. It is not here to get out of the way, to be an open door between the player and the ‘real’ game. It is here to make a statement. A dilapidated American flag takes up much of the screen, flying upside-down, either a sign of distress or a deliberate desecration. In the distance sits a Dubai in sandy ruins, the contemporary symbol of capitalist expansion and reach destroyed.

 Playing over the top is Jimi Hendrix’s famous 1969 Woodstock performance of “The Star Spangled Banner”. The sonorous, roundly distorted notes signal its arrival half a phrase in; the manic, free-form drumming of Mitch Mitchell barely audible in the background. Already, The Line is in many ways radically different for a standard military-themed videogame. In the place of the usual proud flags and dutiful trumpet calls, The Line populates its menu with complicated and troubling symbols.

 Of course, The Line is a deliberate attempt at subversion. Military shooters have long been at the core of the videogames industry (the latest installment in the Call of Duty franchise, for instance, grossed over $400 million in its first 24 hours on sale late last year), and while sometimes technically innovative and exciting, few of these games have very much to say. Some, like the Modern Warfare franchise, will occasionally look to have the appearance of philosophizing on war, but generally, the most generous conclusion to take from these sorts of games is something like this: War is hell. War is also spectacular. The people who choose to go into it and come out alive are amazing.

 It’s in this context that The Line presents itself as a sweeping counter to the traditional claims of the military videogame. It isn’t all just upside-down flags and Jimi Hendrix, either. The game’s plot is for the most part, a fairly reasonable appropriation of the general thrust of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. We follow three soldiers—Sergeant Lugo, Lieutenant Adams, and Captain Martin Walker, the last of whom the player controls—as they journey into a Dubai of the near-future, one that has been destroyed by dust storms. A battalion lead by a Colonel John Konrad (in the game’s most guileless reference to Heart of Darkness) has disappeared in the city, and as we find out, has of course gone rogue.

 Throughout your journey to look for survivors, Spec Ops continually throws horrifying experiences directly in the face of the player. Needless, limitless bloodshed, civilian massacres, warcrimes.

 But The Line’s most unexpected move is its bold indictment of the player in this context. You did this, the game says. Not us, the designers, not the characters, but you. It’s all your fault.

 *

 When Jimi Hendrix performed “The Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock in 1969, many, if not most onlookers assumed it was an antiwar statement of sorts. Hendrix’s unorthodox performance was not the first controversial appropriation of America’s national anthem (Jose Feliciano had played a folk-ish version a year earlier at a Baseball match, the fallout of which he claimed stalled his career for a number of years), but it was certainly its most violent. Strewn between the heavily distorted, oppressively bland notes of the anthem were Hendrix’s own embellishments. He threw his plectrum up and down the strings, smashed away at the pitch-bending tremolo arm, and deliberately induced piercing feedback.

 The fact that most of these embellishments coincided with the lyric, “and the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,” just reinforced the idea that the performance was about the Vietnam War. The rockets’ red glare was being broadcast on television screens every evening in 1969. It was hard not to take it literally. Hendrix’s slides became missiles, his muted strumming became gunfire (much like his later song, “Machine Gun”), his distortion became bombs, destruction, and cries of the innocent. Played into Jimi Hendrix’s guitar were the nightmares of a generation of disillusioned Americans, his instrument an orchestra of national disaster.

 Hendrix’s Woodstock performance is often mythologized as a kind of paradigmatic moment of counter-culture appropriation, of culture jamming fifteen years before anyone had thought of using the term ‘culture jamming’. Here was a noble and patriotic song being roughly hewn back into the militaristic fires from whence it came, Hendrix’s bloody tableau mirroring the war of 1812 that served as inspiration for Francis Scott Key’s original poem.

 But it’s not usually remarked on that “The Star Spangled Banner” was actually a British song to begin with. The tune was first known as “To Anacreon in Heaven”, and was written by organist John Stafford Smith as a constitutional song for the Anacreontic Society, a British gentlemen’s club dedicated to “wit, harmony, and the god of wine.” Despite the notorious difficulty in singing the Anacreontic melody (one wonders if the Bacchanalian nature of the society made the task even less viable), the tune was a popular fit for a number adaptations (known as contrafactums) at the time, of which “The Star Spangled Banner” was only one. It also served as a vehicle for Robert Paine’s ode, “Adams and Liberty” in the late 18th century, for example.

 The themes of appropriation and reappropriation are perhaps the one constant in the life of “The Star Spangled Banner”. Whoever knows what Hendrix meant when he played it at Woodstock. It does seem likely, after all, that there was some kind of protest meant, but if Hendrix saw what happened to Feliciano a year earlier, he’d have good reason not to push it further.

 Curiously, Hendrix himself never said that the performance was meant particularly as a protest. In fact, he never really explained the meaning of the performance at all, except for a brief remark at a press conference a few weeks later.

 “We play it the way the air is in America today,” Hendrix said. “The air is slightly static, don’t you think?”

 *

 One of Spec Ops’ central villains used to write for Rolling Stone. Robert Darden, a bearded, Hawaiian-shirt wearing reporter taunts the player over a city-wide broadcast system for much of the game, earning him the nickname of the ‘Radioman’. He also has pretty good taste in music, and through several key scenes in the game blasts out Deep Purple, Martha and the Vandellas, and The Black Angels.

 Having an antagonist like Radioman allows music to come to the fore in The Line. Rock music is often blasted diegetically through the game’s Dubai, sometimes as a complement to the action and sometimes as a counterpoint, but always as a reminder of the foreignness of the American presence in Dubai. The music writes over the Emirati landscape, reminding players that it is American against American in this game, and that Dubai is only present insofar as it is an immutable reminder of America’s foreign entanglements. This is, by and large, a game about America and American culture: whatever the problems are of sequestering Dubai for thematic ends, The Line is not interested in it as much more than an emblem.

 In one early sequence that announces the game’s engagement with popular culture, a lengthy firefight is set to Deep Purple’s 1968 hard rock hit, ‘Hush’. In the context of The Line, ‘Hush’ should act as an ironic counterpoint to the action—“Hush, hush, I need her loving,” sings Rod Evans, “But I'm not to blame now.” When Alfonso Cuarón used the same song in his terrifyingly bleak Children of Men, the Los Angeles Times called it “a sly lullaby for a world without babies.” When Spec Ops makes other similar allusions with its music, as with Martha and the Vandellas’ 1965 Motown classic, ‘Nowhere to Run’, the point is clear enough, even erring on overstating things. “Got nowhere to run to, baby,” runs the Holland-Dozier-Holland lyrics as the bullets fly over our protagonists, “Nowhere to hide.”

 But right then, in the heat of the Deep Purple battle, the unsettling point is lost in the haze of cover-to-cover sprinting and pop-and-stop shooter mechanics. The lyrics might say one thing, but the cutting backbeat and the powerful bass line says something else entirely. All this shooting, this strategy, this chaos, this music—this is a little bit cool.

 “Hey, you guys hear music?” asks one of The Line’s protagonists.

 “Who cares?” answers our character. “Just shut up and keep fighting.”

 The tension between critical commentary and surface level enjoyment lingers throughout The Line. When, later in the game, a slow-motion escape from a missile blast is set to Verdi’s ‘Dies Irae’, this unease is amplified. Like the Wagner helicopter attack sequence from Apocalypse Now (which was undoubtedly the scene’s inspiration, as the blast comes from a helicopter here, too), The Line runs a real risk of its intended commentary being literally drowned out by a one hundred person orchestra. The ironic juxtaposition of dead white European classical composers with macho violence is subsumed by the grandiloquent power of Verdi and Wagner, a tension that Coppola played with in Apocalypse Now but that has eventually been defeated by Hollywood iconography. Though Wagner-and-the-helicopters has now entered into the pop culture lexicon, how often is it used to invoke the madness and the masculinity of war, as intended? How often is it instead used to illustrate military elegance and the iconographic power of the Vietnam war?

 This is the fundamental problem of The Line, one that is clearly reflected in its use of music. Does it matter that the game offers up a heartbreaking critical commentary on war and videogames, if from moment-to-moment, all I can do is enjoy the mayhem? Does it matter that my enemies are screaming at me that I’m a murderer, that their radio chatter becomes increasingly fearful of me as I move forward through their soldiers like some sort of nightmarish Superman, if the game has also been perfectly calibrated to give me pleasure from discharging my weapon into the faces of oncoming, depersonalized enemies?

 “Shut up and keep fighting.” The context of that terse comment is one of maintaining control in the heat of battle, of blocking out pain and trauma until later, when it might be safe to reflect on your horrific deeds. Yet it could equally also apply to the naive player, the kind not interested in The Line’s plot but in its thrilling action; not so much a remark on a lack of time as a lack of care. “Shut up and keep fighting.”

 *

 Of course, the simple fact that players are not likely to miss The Line’s critique does not automatically mean anything at all. Earlier this year, the Australian army released the Chief of Army’s Reading List for soldiers. Conspicuous on the traditional list were books like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, while films included the likes of David O. Russell’s Three Kings, Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley and of course, Apocalypse Now.

 The presence of these works on such a list appears, at first, to be inexplicable. What use could Catch-22—a book that coined the anti-Vietnam war slogan, “Yossarian Lives!”—have for army bureaucracy? Why would army officials want soldiers to watch a film like Three Kings, a film that tracks three soldiers’ attempts to steal gold in the wake of the first Gulf War, a film that was described by the Los Angeles Times as “one of the defining antiwar films of our time, a scathing and sobering chronicle of U.S. misadventures in the Middle East”?

 In commenting on the success of The Hurt Locker at the 2010 Oscars, Slovoj Žižek offers this: “In its very invisibility, ideology is here, more than ever: we are there, with our boys, identifying with their fear and anguish instead of questioning what they are doing there.”

 Perhaps it is impossible to make an anti-war film. Perhaps there is always the possibility that despite context and framing, the exhilaration and terror of combat will always translate into romance for some. The strategy for most so-called anti-war films is still one of audience identification: here are innocent characters, thrown into a terrible scenario so beyond the realms of civility that we feel for them even as they commit heinous acts.

 Even when characters are allowed some complexity, or are even pushed to become monsters, we can still see glimmers of our own collective guilt, our tortured souls played out within these people. There but for the grace of God, go I. Anti-war films are the best recruitment tool for fascists who still believe in their own soul.

 And so it goes with The Line. No matter how hard the game tries in being anti-war, or even just to be a confronting critique of its genre, it never fails to also re-articulate the pleasures of the military videogame. Subversion is frequently too enormous, too clumsy, and too delicate a task to undertake meaningfully. Too much is pulled in too many directions; too many elements left unaltered. For every player who gets The Line’s Joseph Conrad references, another handful will simply find pleasure in the game’s tactical gunfights.

 Subversion, especially in a medium as commercial and unwieldy as the videogame, is an imprecise art.

 *

 In 2000, the virtuoso guitarist Joe Satriani opened a Baseball match between the Giants and the Mets with his own homage to Hendrix’s performance of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, a moment that was in turn recreated in last year’s Moneyball. His version was nearly identical to Hendrix’s, even down to the guitar tone and layering of effects. What was not recreated, however, was the crushing, distorted sounds of machine guns, bombs, and cries of terror. Why, after all, would you bring that sort of subject matter up at a baseball match, a time where national disgraces are usually tactfully concealed behind layers of professional competition?

 What Satriani was left with was just a somewhat stylish, metal-cool version of the American national anthem. He played it, the audience stood, some sang along, and most cheered when it was over. Hendrix was back in the patriotic fold, the ambiguous and potentially subversive elements of his performance smoothed over by a modern rock star. There were no rough edges anymore.

 Somehow, between 1969 and 2000, the context of playing the anthem on an electric guitar had shifted from disruption to celebration, from national anthem to rock anthem. There’s something telling about the fact that the only videogame to feature Hendrix’s version of “The Star Spangled Banner” before The Line was Guitar Hero 2.

 Look at this page on Answers.com:

 The question: “Did Jimi Hendrix mean to dishonor the Star Spangled Banner?”

 The answer: “He would never disrespect our country. He played the song that way to honor the troops that were fighting in Vietnam.”

[automaticmoons]

as a French anarchist I kind of wish Anglo-Saxon ancoms out there could stop being so un-critical of the Invisible Committee and fantasizing about it. Regarding the content of their books but also the articles they/their little elitist club write on French anarchist media from time to time, I’m very surprised they’re considered as a model by people who seem to be attached to collective organisation and liberation.

I mean, they do write well-put constatations on the current state of society and the current state of leftist milieus, right, I get it. It’s true. They’re good at… describing obvious stuff. Guess that’s not surprising when you’re a bunch of freshly graduated students from the most elitist schools in France.

But like... their first text “The Call” is a mere description and not a call to anything, and it’s quite logical when you think of it: they do not have any project. They don’t want any better world, they’re only putting themselves in a warlike perspective; that’s it. They justify this by the fact that everything is a desperate cause and that you therefore have to quit waiting for another world. And like… this doesn’t interest me??? I’m a revolutionary because I want to build something afterwards???

But, ah yes, there’s the rub. This demands work. Fucking dirty activist work, like you know... going and talking to non-politicized people, organising protests and gatherings and making sure everyone will be as safe as possible, taking in account the material capacities of everyone in the struggle, defend people against their bosses in everyday life. But hey! since they’ve persuaded themselves that “the insurrection” will just… somehow happen, run (spontaneously!!) by the revolutionary elite, they don’t have to do that job! and they can stay in their (literally, I don’t mean this to exchange insults) bourgeois academic environment, how convenient. There’s always a kind of sick fascination for pure and gratuitous destruction in their books, with the idea that there’s nothing to claim. So it’s totally empty, all they offer is a theory of pure emotional release and there’s absolutely no will for an emancipation of human beings.

Their cult of spontaneity unsurprisingly doesn’t lead anywhere; the guys who put the IC’s ideas in practice just... well, they break stuff at protests. Okay cool. Then what. I’m deeply disturbed by their positions on trade unions and, frankly, on any form of organisation except the “commune”, which they see as a sum of spontaneously gathered human beings in the purest individualistic tradition. Not only do they refuse to support trade unions (who have many flaws but are at least useful tools for everyday life when you’re a worker and can set up a power imbalance between workers and bosses, I thought this was admitted ffs), but they also deny the existence of social classes—well, these two facts are obviously linked. And to me, by doing so they refuse to base their analysis on anything real (in the sense of: what people live everyday), and no one can liberate oneself with that. This is truly dangerous; it erases any possibility of fighting social domination and it actually maintains this domination: when you don’t reflect on power imbalances and on how to share the power equally and how to set up autogestion/self-management practices, you just allow leaders to emerge and become uneradicable. They don’t identify any power imbalance between social groups, this is not part of their lexicon; they’re against “the empire”, against “the desert”, against “the ennui”, but never against any systemic oppression. They want to steal things and plant flowers to make some herbal tea, but: who’s able to do that? probably only their cherished vanguard elite. They denounce the “milieu” but are precisely speaking to this very milieu and consider it as the only possible executor of their fantaisies. They’re extremely contemptuous towards “identities” without understanding that those identities take root in material conditions of existence. However their new obsession is about generations, and how that “ungovernable generation”, i.e. young people, will gather (spontaneously!!) to make the insurrection happen, denigrating the very numerous old people who went to march against labour law last year, who fight on a daily basis in trade unions, etc. They oppose generations because it allows them to gather high schoolers and students, who constitute the main part of their followers, and because it allows them to avoid class analysis. “every episode of revolt, every strike, every occupation, is a breach opened up in the false self-evidence of that life, attesting that a shared life is possible, desirable, potentially rich and joyful”, they say in To Our Friends. Wow that’s so exciting!! too bad that joyful moments aren’t enough to live decently when you come from a low to middle class background. But since social classes don’t exist... it must be that people are too alienated to appreciate that “breach opened up in the false self-evidence of that life”. This aestheticisation and romanticisation of struggle as an end in itself is truly worrying me.

Their assumed vanguardism is just unbearable, they’re perfectly okay with the idea that the revolution will be made by a few enlightened people, actually they don’t see it otherwise. They put themselves in the position of those who have understood everything before everyone, telling everyone else what to do, what is revolutionary and what is not, distributing good an bad marks. This is obvious in their very writing style: a lot of italics (cause ”I’m trying to instil something important in your stupid brain you little twat”) and convoluted words to describe familiar and evident situations, with a kind of mystical/philosophical reflection using obscure terms… I mean, they see themselves as revolutionaries but exclude the overwhelming majority of people, the very people who could benefit from the revolution but do not have access to that kind of vocabulary and discourse. This two-cents lyricism is excedingly painful and condescending.

Frankly, they’re a caricature of post-situationist pseudo-intellectuals who jerk off on their comprehension of the current world as decaying and depressing. They’re anti-materialistic as fuck and totally disconnected from pretty much everything—save for what could improve their popularity on social media and among Parisian high school/student circles. I wouldn’t be so angry about them if their shit was only some poetical sci-fi thing that did’t present itself as revolutionary. But their books have created a whole movement which is very visible in the French anarchist milieu, and they essentially behave as reactionary fucks (against the notion of social classes, against trade unions, against the communist project, against collective emancipation, against civilisation as a whole… doesn’t that ring a bell? They have recuperated pretty much every fascistic philosopher only to denigrate the workers’ movement????). I get that their style is aesthetically pleasing but please stop treating them as politically pertinent theorists T__T

[everything4everyone]

Through the looking class

When I look in the mirror, I see more than a simple reflection of my outward appearance. Most of the time I see a ‘me’ that is more ‘me’ than yesterday. This is partly an effect of growing old. A few months back I was driving home when I stopped to let an old man and young woman cross the road. He was walking with a slight stoop, his face was pinched and his clothes had clearly seen better days; it was only when he had crossed that I recognised him as one of my best friends. He was on the wrong side of town at the wrong time of day but it was still a shock to realise that this battered old man was only 12 months my senior. Fuck! Is that what I look like?

But it’s more than just old age that stares back at me. There’s been a steady accretion of experiences, postures, and events which all combine to make me more ‘me’ than ever. Thirty years ago the ‘me’ that stared back from the mirror was more unformed. Less substantial maybe but also open, unshaped. A face that was (literally) not yet scarred. A face that was to-come. Today the lines on my face tell a story of where I’ve been, of who I’ve been, of who I’ve become. These calcifying layers put me in mind of a 1950s B-movie where the protagonist is gradually sheathed in some kind of hard carapace until the only thing moving is an eye which grimly blinks out an S-O-S like a human lighthouse. Actually I think I’m combining several different cinematic tropes here but you get the picture: as I’ve become more ‘me’, the conditions of possibility have necessarily become more constrained.

There’s a link here, I think, to one of the problems of political organisation: how do you grow without becoming more like yourself? Of course this isn’t necessarily a problem if you see revolution as a matter of aggregation, of marshalling our forces until we have the strength to overthrow our rulers. That’s a typically Leninist top-down view, where the aim is precisely to grow, to become more like yourself, changing only in volume. Qualitative change (revolution) occurs through quantitative growth. We are nothing but must be everything and the way to do that is to build the party, recruit members, flex your muscles.

To be fair, this sort of approach makes lots of sense even if you’re not a Leninist. Every group has to reach some sort of critical mass in order to do anything, and constructing a group identity is an inevitable part of this. It also defines a collectivity, ensuring that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But there’s a problem. Once the identity assumes a certain shape, it tends to become meaningful to a limited number of people; in the worst case it might only be visible to a tiny minority. In some cases this might be fine—a Cheese and Wine Appreciation Society, for instance, doesn’t have to care about vegan teetotallers. But if you want to transform the world, and you see real change only coming from below, organisations with a skewed membership are problematic because they tend to end up with a skewed (or at least partial) outlook. If all you see around you are fresh-faced twenty-somethings, then you can easily end up thinking that’s all the world is composed of. It’s like the classic London bubble where “politics” amounts to talking heads prattling on to other talking heads about events in Westminster.

One way to deal with this is to think about the make-up of a group, the way that’s it weighted in favour of certain types of people (and therefore more or less attractive to others). But that runs the risk of collapsing back into a very static idea of what constitutes identity. It might be more useful to come at it from the other direction, by taking seriously (Groucho) Marx’s claim that “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.” The collectivity of an organisation offers us a space to become more than the sum of our parts. In other words, part of the reason I want to join a club is precisely in order not to be me.

“I am nothing but I must be everything.” That’s definitely one strand of revolutionary politics. On the evening of Rosa Luxemburg’s murder, she wrote: “Your ‘order’ is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already ‘raise itself with a rattle’ and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I shall be!” This is class as something which just “is”, and as something which has a historic role. Back in the late 1980s/early 1990s Class War operated mostly with just such an approach. But there’s an equally important strand which looks at class as process, as something which happens. In the Preface to his seminal Making of the English Working Class E P Thompson is crystal-clear: “I do not see class as a ‘structure’ nor even as a ‘category’ but as something which in fact happens.” Class, in this sense, is also something which is always to-come. If we think about political organisations in this way, then we can flip Marx’s assertion and start to ask different questions: rather than becoming everything, how do we (as an organisation) become nothing? How do we come to the end of ourselves as we are?

In politics, demands go from one body to another. “We” demand more pay, better resources, greater freedom. “They” demand tighter border controls, more armed police on the streets etc. When we make those demands, we often reinforce our identity as a social force. “We” become ever more workers, social democrats, trade unionists, activists etc. But “everything for everyone” is a very different sort of demand because it doesn’t go in any specific direction. It isn’t to anyone. And it isn’t from anyone. In that respect, it might be one way to step through the mirror and address the perennial paradox of revolutionary transformation, summed up brilliantly by Kathi Weeks:

Can we want, and are we willing to create, a new world that would no longer be “our” world, a social form that would not produce subjects like us?

[photographerguide-blog]

2018: A Year in Photography

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2018: A Year in Photography

2018 was a pretty busy year for me. I set foot in 24 countries, visited a whopping 42 new UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and over 20 National Park Service Sites in the US.

On the photography front, I was named Photographer of the Year for a fourth time by the Central States chapter of the Society of American Travel Writers, won seven NATJA Awards, and was named Best Travel Photography Blog at the TBCAsia Awards in Sri Lanka.

You can also check out my year-end photo essays for 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017.

As always, I hope you enjoy viewing them as much as I did taking them!

Image at the top of the page is of the Jungfrau Express, Switzerland.

[1] My first trip of 2018 was to New York for the New York Times Travel Show, where I was a speaker. Whenever I visit New York I try to visit National Park Service sites in the area. This year I decided to visit St. Paul’s Church, which is a Revolutionary War Era church which is located just outside the city limits of New York. It is literally about 200m away from the last subway stop in the Bronx. Very few people know about this site, including most New Yorkers. I visited with my friend Seth Kugel and we recorded an episode for his YouTube Channel “Amigo Gringo” (FYI, it’s in Portuguese).

[2] In February I visited Montenegro, one of my favorite countries in Europe, and one that I firmly believe is one of the up and coming destinations over the next few years. Visiting in February gave me a totally different perspective than most people get who visit by cruise ship during the summer. When I visited the Old City of Kotor, it was basically empty. I saw no other tourists anywhere.

[3] I was able to explore parts of Montenegro which most visitors never see. Driving up the mountains above Kotor gave me a view of the entire Bay of Kotor. You could see all the way to Herceg Novi where I stayed during my trip. If you ever visit the Bay of Kotor, I highly recommend going up the mountains surrounding the bay for the best views.

[4] In my quest to visit world heritage sites, I had to visit one of the newer site, the Stecci Medieval Tombstone Graveyards. They are located all over the Balkans, with two of them in Montenegro. Getting there was quite the adventure as everything in the north of Montenegro was covered in snow, the road there wasn’t plowed, and there were no signs. However, I found the GPS coordinates and we managed to find it in the middle of a snow-covered field!

[5] I was surpsied to find one of the most beautiful vistas I’ve seen in Europe in Montenegro. The Pavlova Strana Viewpoint is a spot which is perfectly aligned with the waters and island of Lake Skadar National Park. While it isn’t a place most people know about, it isn’t very hard to reach if you have a car.

[6] In February I traveled to Lousiana to attend my first ever Mardi Gras. Unlike most people, I was able to experience Mardi Gras in Lafayette and parts of rural Louisiana, not New Orleans. One of the highlights of the trip was attending a boucherie, which is a community festival where they butcher a pig and eat every single part of it. There was sausage, cracklings, and even headcheese. This photo was of one of the butchers who was waiting for the food to finish cooking.

[7] The Courir de Mardi Gras is the rural celebration of Mardi Gras on the actual day. It is a long parade which consists of lots of costumes, floats with porta pottys, alcohol, and occasionally chasing a chicken.

[8] Floats during the Mardi Gras parade in Lafayette are all created by “crews” who are clubs or organizations who get together to create their floats. As with the rural version of the parade, there is lots of alcohol and plastic beads.

[9] Prior to 2018 I hadn’t spent a lot of time in Louisiana. I had been there before, but this was the first opportunity I had to spend significant time in the state. In addition to the Mardi Gras festivities, I was also able to see some other sites, including canoing in Lake Martin. It is an incredibly photogenic area.

[10] In early March I went north up to Churchill, Manitoba to see the northern lights. I had been up to Churchill back in 2016 to photograph polar bears and it is one of my favorite places in Canada. I’d never pass up an opportunity to visit Churchill. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any luck with the northernlights, but we did have an amazing meal in Fort Prince of Wales, and I was able to go dog sledding again.

[11] In May I was scheduled to attend the big IPW travel show in Denver. I had some time, so I figured I’d drive there and visit some national parks along the way. One of the spots I visited was the northern section of Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. I had been to the park before, but only the southern section which is located on Interstate 94. The northern section gets fewer visitors and in many ways has more dramatic scenery.

[12] After Denver, I headed west to visit some more parks in Colorado and Utah. One of the most surprising places was Colorado National Monument, which is just outside of Grand Junction. It easily could be upgraded to full national park status at some point in the future. I had never been in the northwestern part of Colorado before and it was interesting to see how it different it was from the rest of the state.

[13] Another surprising site was Dinosaur National Monument, which is located right on the Colorado/Utah border. There is an entire wall of rock with in-situ bones of dinosaurs which you can see. It is perhaps the best palentology site I’ve visited in the world, and I have visited several of them.

[14] I finally got to Arches National Park in Moab, Utah. Unfortunately, I wasn’t really paying attention to the calendar, and I wound up there on Memorial Day Weekend. The park was very busy and hotels in Moab were incredibly expensive. I’d love to return in the winter when the crowds are gone and there is snow on the ground.

[15] About 20 miles away from Arches is Canyonlands National Park. Even though they are in close proximity of each other, Canyonlands gets significantly fewer visitors than Arches does. Oddly enough, I found Canyonlands to be the better park. There are some dirt roads you can drive in the park, but they require a four-wheel drive vehicle and more time than I had. I’d love to return to Canyonlands to photograph the park away from the main road.

[16] Capitol Reef was the fifth and final of the Utah National Parks that I visited. It is unually busy considering that I thought it was the least interesting of the 5 Utah parks. However, it is also the closest park to Salt Lake City, which probably explains the attendence. The park has a very odd shape, and like Canyonlands, most of it can only be explored off-road.

[17] Going back into Colorado, I made a visit to Mesa Verde National Park. This was my second time in Mesa Verde and this visit really was too short. Again, because of Memorial Day, I was very lucky to get a hotel room. I think I got the last available room in Cortez just because someone else canceled.

[18] From Colorado I drove through New Mexico to Amarillo, Texas where I was speaking the Central States Chapter of the Society of American Travel Writers. The Texas Panhandle is often overlooked as a destination, which is too bad because I’ve enjoyed my trips there the last two years. Carhenge is one of the most photographed attractions in Amarillo and it is located off the interstate just west of town.

[19] On the way back home I visited more national park service sites, including one that I’ve wanted to visit for several years: Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. I love the prairies and there isn’t much of it left anymore as most of it was plowed under.

[20] In June I was back in Louisiana, this time to New Orleans. Believe it or not, this was my first ever visit to New Orleans. I was speaking at the annual travel convention for the Public Relations Society of America. This shot was taken at the Chalmette Battlefield, which was the location of the famous Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812.

[21] My summer trip to Europe began in Eastern Europe. I was there to travel on a trip with G Adventures through the Baltic Countries. I arrived early, however, because I wanted to visit Belarus. Belarus offers a 5-day visa on arrival for anyone who arrives at the Minks Airport. I took the very short flight from Vilnius to Minks and spent several days visiting some of the world heritage sites in Belarus. This is a photo of Mir Castle, a 15th-century construction and one of the most popular attractions in the country.

[22] My G Adventures tour of the Baltic States began in Vilnius. I found Vilnius to be the most artistic and countercultural of the 3 Baltic capitals. This street art is a good example of that attitude.

[23] Vilnius is also the location of the Republic of Uzupio, which is a ficticious country in the middle of a bohemian section of the city. The “republic” has their own constitution which consists of 38 articles which is printed on metal plates in 23 languages.

[24] Just outside of Vilnius is the town of Trakai and Trakai Castle. It is located in the middle of a lake and gets a far amount of local visitors in the summer from Vilnius. It is a beautiful area with many cafes and restaurants on the shore of the lake. The castle itself is open to the public and is worth a visit.

[25] The next stop in Lithuania was the Curonian Spit, which is a large sand spit which is in the Baltic Sea, and is shared between Lithuania and Russia. We stayed in the town on Nida which was only 2km from the Russian border. We did a 20km bike trip, which wasn’t bad but was also something I haven’t done in a long, long time. Needless to say, my butt was very sore that day.

[26] Riga really showed the differences between the Baltic countries. Even though they are often thought of as a group, they have very different liguistically and culturally. Lithuania is predominantely Catholic, for example, where as Latvia and Estonica are Protestant. Riga, being a port on the Baltic, had a much more international feel than Vilnius did.

[27] In Estonia, our first stop was on the island of Saaremaa, which is the largest island in Estonia. While Tallinn gets most of the international visitors, Saaremaa seemed to be more of a destination for locals. The isalnd was pretty laid back and we saw Kuressaare Castle and one of the best preserved impact craters in Europe.

[28] Tallinn, was probably my favorite of the Baltic capitals, even though it is also the most visited. It gets many visitors from the cruise ships which stop there, as well as from people making the short ferry trip from Helsinki. Estonia was the most Nordic of the Baltic states, which makes sense given its location.

[29] As with my trip to Belarus, I took advantage of the visa rules to finally visit Russia. You can get a 72-hour visa if you visit St. Petersburg by ship. I took the ferry from Helsinki. Overall, the experience wasn’t really great. It was cold and raining, and I barely had 6-hours in the city before I had to get back on the ferry. I couldn’t even get into the Hermitage because the lines were so long. A longer, proper trip to Russia is still on order for me at some point in the future.

[30] From Helsinki, I flew to London and took the train down to Portsmouth where I crossed the English Channel to Normandy where I traveled along the Liberation Route, following the path of the Allied forces during WWII. While I was in Normandy I visited all of the landing beaches as well as most of the museums and cemeteries of the region.

[31] Driving up from Normandy I visited the town of Bastogne, which was made famous during the Battle of the Bulge in WWII. The museum here was surprisingly good, and the collection of WWII military equipment they had was outstanding. So much of the equipment that the United States manufactured for the war was left in Europe. Much of that today is in the hands of the various WWII museums. The military equipment museum in Bastogne, located in the old military barracks, in one of the best in Europe.

[32] One of the most inspiring moments I had in 2018 was doing the Sunset March across the bridge in Nijmegen, Netherlands. The bridge was the location of action during Operation Market Garden where 48 Allied soldiers lost their lives taking a bridge across the Waal River. In 2013, a new bridge was constructed with 48 pairs of street lights which turn on at sunset to represent the 48 men who lost their lives. Since its opening, every evening at sunset a march across the bridge is lead by military veterans. Veterans from all countries are invited to take part and everyone is welcome to march with the veterans. The march itself takes about 12 minutes, not including the time requires to talk back across the bridge after it is completed.

[33] On my way to Berlin I stopped at the Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe outside of Kassel, Germany. It is a giant hillside waterworks which was built in the 18th Century. They only run the water 2 days a week (Wednesday and Sunday) in the summer and I was lucky to be there on a Wednesday. There are huge crowds which gather to see the water flow down the hill as well as the fountains and waterfalls along the way.

[34] After Germany, I began a trip to visit all of the World Heritage Sites in the Czech Republic which I hadn’t previously visited. One of the highlights was the town of Kuta Hora. Prague seems to get all of the attention in the Czech Republic, and towns like Kuta Hora are often ignored by foreign visitors. That is too bad because while Prague is great, there is a lot which the Czech Republic has to offer if you just get out of the city.

[35] Another World Heritage town in the Czech Republic which I enjoyed was Telc. The town square is what it is most famous for, but the entire area surrounding the town is captivating as well. Again, it is well known amongst Czechs, but not as much with the rest of the world.

[36] The column in Olomouc was high on my list of places to visit for one major reason: this is the smallest world hertiage site on Earth. Just as a test, I timed myself and it took me 54 seconds to walk around the column at a leislury pace. It was originally built as a thanks for surviving the black death.

[37] I ended my trip in the Czech Republic in Ostrava where I spoke at TBEX Europe. The event was held in a converted industrial facility. It was really an interesting place to hold a conference. The main stage was actually built inside and old fuel tank.

[38] From the Czech Republic I flew to Zurich where I started a trip where I visited all of the World Heritage Sites in Switzerland. The first site I visited was the Serdona Tectonic Area. High up in the Apls, it is a popualr hiking area. You can get a vantage point where you can see the entire country of Liechtenstein! During my day hiking here, my Fitbit told me I had climbed the equivalent of a 226 story building….and that is only the uphill part.

[39] I’d been to Switzerland before, but I had only visited the German-speaking areas around Zurich, Basel, and Bern. This trip I was able to explore most of the country including the Italian, French, and Romanch speaking regions. I fell in love with the Italian speaking city of Bellinzona and the entire canton of Ticino. The world heritage site was the three castles in Bellinzona, but everything in the region was amazing.

[40] Prior to this trip, the site I was looking forward to visiting the least was the watching making town of La Chaux-de-Fonds. I left Switzerland thinking that this was the most interesting world heritage site in the country. I was really unaware of the history of Swiss watching making and just how much of it was centered around this community. Every major watch manufacturer I’ve ever heard of has offices and/or a factory here. The museum of watchmaking museum in La Chaux-de-Fonds was fascinating and I could have spent several hours more there.

[41] In September I flew down to Barbados for the SATW annual convention where I was a speaker. I had been to Barbados previously, but it was a short trip and I didn’t get to see Bridgetown properly. This time I was able to do a proper tour and learn more about why Barbados was so central to British colonial efforts in the 17th and 18th Centuries.

[42] In October I drove down to Chicago for the Visit Europe Media Exchange where I met with several European destinations. I was also able to do a bit of exploring and took a boat tour on the Chicago River, something which I had never done before. In my opinion, Chicago has the best architecture in the United States, easily beating New York. I also visited the Pullman National Monument in Chicago, which is one of the newer additions to the National Park Service.

[43] I made a last minute decision to drive to St Louis rather than go directly back home. That took me through Springfield which was the home of Abraham Lincoln and the location of the other National Park Service Site in Illinois. In addition to Lincoln’s Home, I also visited his tomb, which is where is photo was taken.

[44] I hadn’t visited the St. Louis Arch in almost 20 years, so I wanted to return so I could photograph it. The arch had been closed for renovation and when it reopened, it was also renamed Gateway Arch National Park; the newest and smallest national park in the United States. The new visitor center under the arch is well done and it is a worth place to visit, even if I don’t think it should be called a national park.

[45] I was invited to speak at a blogging event in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Having never been to Sri Lanka, I jumped at the chance to go. I was able to visit the region around the central Sri Lankan city of Kandy. This is the entranct to the Temple of the Tooth, a temple which is believed to hold a tooth of the Buddha.

[46] The central region of Sri Lanka is very moutntainous, which can make getting from place to place rather time consuming. However, it also makes for beautiful landscapes. This photo was taken in the Knuckles Mountain Range, which is one the 8 World Heritage Sites in Sri Lanka.

[47] In Kandy, we visted the Royal Botanical Gardens which had an excellent collection of trees and flowers from Sri Lanka. It also had quite a few monkeys, some of which took the time to pose for the camera.

[48] Considering how far I had to come to get to Sri Lanka, I figured I might as well go to the Maldives while I was there. It is only a 90-minute flight from Colombo. I stayed at a Cinimon Hotels Resort on the island of Ellaidhoo. I was able to play with my drone, read, and relax. It was the closest thing I had to a vaction all year (traveling is not necessarily a vacation).

[49] Late November brought me to Spain. I have been to Spain many times before, but this trip took me to Extremadura, a region which is west of Madrid and north of Andalucia. It doesn’t get nearly as many visitors as other parts of Spain, but it is one of the richest regions in terms of culture, history, and food. My first stop there was the Royal Monastery of Santa Maria of Guadalupe. I took this photo of the monastery from the balcony of my hotel at night.

[50] I didn’t know much about the city of Merida before I had arrived, other than it was one of the world heritage sites in Spain. I left thinking it was one of the best sites for Roman ruins and history in the world. It is on a par with other Roman towns you can visit today such as Jerash, Ostia Antica, and Pompeii. The museum of Roman history in Merida might be the best museum of Roman artifacts I have ever visited.

[51] The town of Trujillo is not a world heritage site, but perhaps it should be. It was one of the important centers of early Spanish colonization and the home to many of the first Spanish Conquistadors.

[52] My 2018 travels ended in a place I was not expecting to visit: Saudi Arabia. I was invited to attend the inaugural Formula E race which was held in Riyadh. Saudi Arabia has been a notoriously difficult country to visit in the past because they never offered tourist visas. They have just started offering tourists visas and opening up the country to the rest of the world. We took a side trip to the north of the country to visit Madin Saleh, a site I never thought I’d actually be able to visit. It is a site built by the Nabateans, which are the same people who built Petra in Jordan.

Source

https://everything-everywhere.com/2018-a-year-in-photography/

[finalmajorwilde]

Lord Alfred Douglas

(18/04/2018)

The following blog entry is not a summary of the life of Lord Alfred Douglas but hopefully a summary of everything that happened regarding Oscar Wilde.

Lord Alfred Douglas was born on the 22nd of October and was the Third son of the Ninth Marquess of Queensbury; John Douglas. Boise was apparently a nickname given to him by his mother which carried throughout Alfred Douglas' life. By accounts, Bosie's father was considered to be rather brutish and accordingly abused his children and wives. The Marquess himself also invented some of the rules for modern boxing. Bosie In the film "Wilde" , Bosie and Oscar met at the premier of Lady Windermere's Fan. They wrote to each other a lot and quickly became a couple of sorts (Wilde himself was married).

Bosie later introduced Wilde to the underground society of male prostitution (otherwise known as rent boys/renters), though Wilde indulged in this, by reading his letter it would appear that Oscar was far more interested in Bosie than rent boys. By accounts Wilde didn't make too much of an effort to hide his relationship, enjoying the shock it caused in a Victorian society, though there were rumours most of England thought them false as Wilde was known mostly for his wit, writings and plays. Bosies father (Marquess of Queensbury) became enraged by Wilde and Bosies relationship and set about to but an end to it. The Marquess instructed Bosie to not see Oscar Wilde and threatened to cut Bosie out of his allowance. Boise refused to stop seeing Oscar Wilde and sent a telegram to is father saying "What a funny little man you are".

Bosie and Wilde had a slightly rocky relationship, apparently Bosie frequently had "tantrums" and became angry when we wouldn't get his way. Bosie quickly became a large part of Wilde's life, surprisingly though, Bosie got on well with Wilde's wife Constance and he often accompanied them on their travels. It is thought to be very unlikely that Constance was aware to the extend and depth of Wilde's and Bosie's relationship.

On the 18th of October 1894, Bosies brother Francis dies, suspected suicide, his father apparently said this was a judgement on the relationship between Bosie and Oscar Wilde. This of course upset Bosie greatly and fuelled anger for his father. The Marquess came to Wilde's premier of The Impotence of being Earnest with the intention of throwing rotten fruit and vegetables at Wilde, he was however barred entrance by the Theatre. After this, the Marquess left a open card at Oscar Wildes Club reading "Oscar Wide- ponce and somdomite" or by other account "Oscar Wilde- Posing as a somdomite"  what he said is somewhat guesswork as the note was famously written in inaudible handwriting. He also misspells sodomite and instead writes "Somdomite".

Because the Marquess had written it on an open card it could be considered public abuse and therefore constituted legally as a Libel. Of course in the Victorian era, acts of homosexuality were very illegally so of course technically the card was true but Wilde, with a wife and children could just state it was false. Bosie pestered Wilde to take his father to court which was of course a disastrous move, if the only people who has seen it was the staff at the club that was of course, little harm done. Wilde's friends, notably Robbie Ross heavily advised Wilde to ignore the card, but Wilde did eventually give into Bosie and tried to sue for libel. The court went horrendously in Wilde's favour, after the first trail there was a hung jury and so he was tried again and after that was sentenced to two years hard labour for the crimes of "Sodomy and Gross indecency".

While in prion Wilde wrote a love letter to Bosie called "De Profundis" ( Latin-From the Depths). This letter was not ordinary, it was fifty thousand words long in which Wilde says how he loves Bosie dearly but they can never be together. An interesting fact is that Wilde's wife never divorced him, she even visited Oscar in prison in hopes that he would return home under the condition that he couldn't see Lord Alfred Douglas. Sadly, Oscars wife Constance died before he got out of prison, as well as this Oscar was forbidden allowance to see his children. In "The Son of Oscar Wilde", Wilde approached this children's guardian but was turned away.

After this Wilde did reunite with Bosie only to separate three months later. After Wildes death, Bosie wrote about Wilde, lots of rumours still circulated Around Lord Alfred Douglas, he even married a woman; the British poet Olive Custance. In Bosies writings he attacked Wilde and famously said: "He was one of the most powerful forces for evil that has happened in Europe for the last three hundred years,"  and also "I do not know of any man who more truly or literally sold himself to the Devil than he did.". Bosie also founded a strongly anti-Semite magazine.

 An interesting afterward of this is in Vyvyan Hollands Book "Son of Oscar Wilde", in this book Vyvyan writes to Douglas inquiring about his father. Sadly we only get to see Douglas's replies and not Vyvyans letters. In the first letter Douglas says " You are quoted as saying that Harris's book The Life and Confessions of Oscar Wilde contains the truth about my association with your father. May I point out that, firstly, you are in no position to judge on that point? You were a small child when the affair took place and you can have no personal knowledge of the matter;" A relatively defensive piece of writing on Bosie's half but not entirely impolite. Toward the end of the letter Bosie writes: "Could you not manage to get out of your mind the ill-feeling which you appear to cherish? I have only good feelings towards you. Yours sincerely, Alfred Douglas"  This sounds all well, friendly and even diplomatic. Bosie appeared to spend the rest of his life denying the affair with Oscar Wilde but this has later been discovered to be a false denial. Whether he was a suitable match for Wilde is arguable but it is more than likely Alfred Douglas denied his relationship with Wilde purely because of society's option on homosexuals and homosexuality held at the time.

I believe in this blog I haven given substantial information on Lord Alfred Douglas and his relationship with Wilde, enough certainly to inspire some physical work . I shall get some concept sketches for designs drawn up as soon as possible.

The information here comes from the books- "Son of Oscar Wilde" by Vyvyan Holland, "De Profundis" Which is a love letter to Bosie written by Wilde himself whilst in prison, the film "Wilde" starring Stephen Fry and Jude Law and a lecture on Oscar Wilde given by Stephen Fry ( I have reviewed this lecture in a previous blog) . As well as all this, if one types in "Letters from Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas" various websites appear containing copies of said letters, I shall link a few of these sites below. As well as this I shall include various information which I have discovered myself and believe to be true, this was gathered from over the period of this project.

http://www.famous-trials.com/wilde/323-letters

https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/07/15/oscar-wilde-love-letters-bosie/

http://rictornorton.co.uk/wildelet.htm

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3681293/Oscar-Wilde-letter-to-lover-Lord-Alfred-Douglas-resurfaces-after-50-years.html

I also used the linked page below to find out Bosie's age and which birth order he was within his family.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?source=hp&ei=5wTXWuLxM8GUmwW2zKj4Aw&q=lord+alfred+douglas&oq=lord+alfred+douglas&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0l10.955.4479.0.4557.19.11.0.8.8.0.102.842.10j1.11.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..0.19.1047...0i131k1j0i131i46k1j46i131k1.0.koomfBvlfsc 

The next link was to find out the word from word statement Douglas said about Wilde after his death.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/bosie-on-wilde-a-powerful-force-for-evil-who-sold-his-soul-to-the-devil-543896.html

[ukrainenews-blog1]

Poroshenko Ukraine will cost more expensive than Yanukovych

The power of the Ukraine broke the blockade of trade "on the blood" with ORDLO. Trains with cargo for killers of Ukrainians can continue to cross the front line — as it has been all these years, since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As go trains from Ukraine with cargo for Russia, killing, abducting and torturing citizens of Ukraine forbade even transit of Ukrainian goods on its territory. Perhaps the greatest achievement "trade embargo on blood — autopsy of fact and of joint business operations Poroshenko, Medvedchuk and Akhmetov, swift cover by the SBU. As well as the extent of the anti-Ukrainian activities. "Proved" that Petro Poroshenko, Igor Kononenko, Viktor Medvedchuk and Grigoriy Surkis is business partners, associates and accomplices. And this much — if not all — explains.

Selling coal from ORDLO Medvedchuk requires partner Poroshenko disperse blockade. Why? Because Around doing business on the Hill of Ukraine under patronage Poroshenko — media. Because Medvedchuk and Rosneft will earn the Ukrainians with the support of the "Pocket" of Ukraine. Because Medvedchuk and Poroshenko: the market of liquefied gas. In topic: Leshchenko proved that the SBU is engaged in destruction of private business "on demand" (documents) Russia kidnaps citizens of Ukraine, tortures them, falsifying criminal cases? But Ukraine since the beginning of the year 2017 bought aggressor Russia coal at $250 million. Groisman promises to prevent the privatization of "orphan" oblenergo aggressor country investors? Yes spit "investors" with "FSBshnymi ksivami" from the stator Medvedchuk wanted on yesterday's Bazaar trader with purchased diplomas. And here we have: Subversion: Antimonopoly Committee allows Russian LNG to buy 50% of shares of "Chernyvtsyoblenergo". Despite the war, annexation, killing thousands of Ukrainians, the head of the ANTIMONOPOLY COMMITTEE of UKRAINE — henchman Petro Poroshenko — gives permission for the purchase of a controlling stake in strategic energy asset friends Medvedchuk from Russia, members of intelligence (FSB) «Luzhniki» OPG. And at the same time the authorities "lnr-DNI" allegedly "industry" property of the Kremlin-backed strongman Akhmetov — thereby freeing it from having to repay huge loans from Western banks: force majeure, you understand. Rinat started kartezhnym "kidaloj" and finishes: Crouchback's grave will fix. That is, seeing that the annexation of Ukraine continues beshennymi rate changed only its form. Why shove troops bear the losses and costs, when you can just "rewrite the hut on the cat" Ukrainian authorities their people? Capture Russia Donbass, if anyone remembers, in the mid-1990 's began with this: large-scale weaning companies and business in the region through human — that is created with participation of Russian special services — Donetsk OPG. And with the active support of this process by the then leadership of SSU (Hi Evgeny Marchuku, ex-President of Ukraine, party of "Minsk process!). Trade blockade "on the blood" has revealed that the process running in the 90 's, continues today — the same "patterns" scenarios. And with the support of the SSU. In topic: Ssu and PGO smooth out the market for joint business Medvedchuk and Poroshenko — people And what about civil society? Information space of Ukraine disastrously for civil society is distorted. Virtually destroyed. An adequate situation, balanced information to citizens of Ukraine found almost nowhere. All any influential media (who because of threats, who is out for money) did not broadcast point of view different from the official. While social networks are covered with dense "network" pro-Government commentators, bots and trolls. We can laugh with "porohobotov", praising Peter and co. and "block up" any critical point of view, but in fact the problem long ago acquired the dimensions of the catastrophe State scale. Citizens simply nowhere to take truthful information about current events. And other media critical of the Poroshenko and Russia viewpoints publicly derided and humiliated.

As a result, in the public space "point of view" is one of the ruling factions, whose dependence on the Kremlin and the FSB is already obvious. In the event of an escalation of the military conflict with Russia and of active hostilities, this powerful machine of misinformation will fight against Ukrainians (fights) and against the State of Ukraine. Most likely, "information support" Petro Poroshenko is one of the projects (Tools) of the Kremlin to destroy Ukraine. One of the leading politkonsul'tantov p. Poroshenko — Oleg Medvedev, since the second half of the 1990 's and to this day, serving the interests of the human factions Medvedchuk-Surkis. This guy is behind the many information campaigns in support of a wide variety of shares of this FSBshnogo enclave — from Raider to political. Yes, long time on Medvedev formally worked for m. Brodsky and y. Tymoshenko, but it is usual for Surkis-Medvedchuk rule when valuable professionals for them are hidden behind signs them friendly structures. The same Brodsky is a shadow and long-term companion brothers Surkis, and relations of Tymoshenko, Medvedchuk and Kremlin-well-known. Thus, the destruction of informprosmtranstva Ukraine manages official Adviser Petro Poroshenko, a representative of the FSBshnoj intelligence group. A fluke? No, if we take into account that in the information processing of Poroshenko almost in its entirety included frames work in this field during the reign of Viktor Yanukovych before his escape. Such coincidences do not exist. Remember the most powerful informational attack team (gang) Poroshenko since his appointment to the post. The first was an attack on "freedom" party. The party, which with all the shortcomings of his leadership people lost on the Maidan and dobrobatah more than any other party in Ukraine, was literally "erased" with informprostranstva. In topic: Mayhem National-Patriots: why Poroshenko Then attack on volunteers, with the exception of fast "lured" and admitted to "trough". Then click on dobrobaty. Then on political and business rival of Arseniy Yatsenyuk, until his removal from the post of Prime Minister. Then point "knockout" deputies, criticizing gang Poroshenko. A single blow was inflicted on the last of the influential media, remaining outside the spheres of influence of Poroshenko and co.-the Internet Edition "ukrainska Pravda". First, from the mouth of Igor Kononenko, partner of Poroshenko, sounded the threat of physical violence in the Top address of the author of "UE", Deputy Sergei Leschenko. In the theme: Igor Kononenko will fail miserably as a bandit And in less than a month and a half was significantly killed is blown up in a car — a civilian husband, loved one owner "UE" Alena Pritula and baiting s. Leshchenko continued with an even larger scale, involving SAP, GPU and SBU. A sign that this particular version is a thuggish, personal revenge environment Poroshenko — "the investigation" did not consider. Although the motive of such retaliation is obvious: publish Leshchenko and his public activity cost grouping Poroshenko-Kononenko-Medvedchuk hundred million hryvnas (uncovered criminal schemas, relations with Russia, discrediting the contacts etc. etc.). By the way, poedinok Petro Poroshenko and Viktor Medvedchuk was evident even before the presidential election. One eloquent detail: the youngest son of Poroshenko — Mikhail trains in junior Dynamo Surkis. President belligérant confides his infant son club whose owners — Grigory Surkis and Victor Medvedchuk is included in the pool of personal friends and associates of Vladimir Putin, terrorist and murderer. Poroshenko makes it clearly without fear of any consequences. So may be the only person for whom Medvedchuk and surkis, are so close that they can be trusted with your own child. In topic: Poroshenko Jr. already takes balls in the junior Dynamo Surkis And not only the child but also business: crime and "purse" Poroshenko Igor Kononenko, formerly Secretary of the Komsomol organization of the Kiev University is actively engaged in business in the sphere of energy together with Grigoriy surkis. Joint business with killer OPG is a token that explains everything. But, alas, not the Ukrainian voters, a voter for any crap in a shiny package. 

Here's the answer to the questions why Poroshenko sabotages the introduction of martial law in the country and its translation to "armed forces"; prevents the visa regime with Russia, winding down to a minimum of diplomatic relations with a country-aggressor; tried to disrupt energy blockade of Crimea, tried to impose on Ukrainians Constitution written by Putin aide Vladislav Surkov. Why started in "Minsk" notorious "friends" of the Ukrainian people, during Soviet times who were personally involved in the persecution of dissidents through KGB Viktor Medvedchuk and Yevhen Marchuk. Why did everything to make the so-called "Rada Oppoblok" and not to ruin there "freedom" ("medvedchukovec" helped Okhendovsky) why consisting of STDS brought by Radu direct agents of the FSB (Dmitry Golubov, etc.) why personally supervised the process of inference criminal prosecution under direct "friends of Russia and enemies of independent Ukraine-Ivanyushchenko brothers klyueva, Firtash. It is Petro Poroshenko surrogates in the State National Bank, a number of ministries and regulatory authorities have made possible the excretion of influential members of the family of Mr. Yanukovych» all your assets from Ukraine (textbook example is the energy assets of the brothers Kljuevyh, departed Russia for China). Why destroy any Rostock political competition provided really Ukrainian patriotic forces. Why, finally, the establishment of territorial self-defence forces sabotages — such as those that are actively created in the Baltic States and Poland.

Neither the Office nor two years later the President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko has not unveiled its plan to build a State Ukraine. Campaign slogans and promises are just words. But where the plan let formal, but the State leader to restore order in the country, the Elimination of destructive consequences of the Russian anti-Ukrainian activities, modernization of State institutions, the country's economic recovery? President plans Poroshenko to modernize the country, its defense, prospects of development of the society. And that said it all. Because the development of the State of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko agenda-citizen did not stand. It focuses on the other set him tasks. The topic: why trade with the enemy is a business administration President Petro Poroshenko If you divide the words and deeds of Petro Poroshenko, you can see that both times his actions were aimed at: a) discrediting and destroying the patriotic movement and civil society in Ukraine, b) protection of Russian assets and business interests (examples are trading with Russian business from ORDLO and Ukrainian authorities deblokada "on blood torgvoli with ORDLO) in) protection and preservation of Russian intelligence agents ("frames Medvedchuk) in key positions in the Executive (the head of the CEC, forger Okhendovsky; key judges, non-reformed and not refined from Russian intelligence agents" Pocket "SBU, officials in the ministries, etc.); g) containment, localization, and drain any manifestations of civil activity, whether the process of lustration corrupt judges or demands the resignation of prosecutors and odioznejshih SSU branded a traitor and a thief on the forehead. And even non-holding of all-Ukrainian population census is the same "series". The last census of the population of Ukraine was conducted in 2001 year. By international standards, it must be carried out not less than once every 10 years. But the Census has been postponed three times — the Yanukovych team suspected sociologists to retain the power to manipulate roughly 1.5 million votes "dead souls", in favour of the authorities, of course. If Poroshenko Cabinet Yatsenyuk boldly moved the Census up to 5 years — the year 2020. This was done at the insistence of p. Poroshenko. Census, which "zapozdaet" in Ukraine is already at 10 years, needs to establish, including the exact number of the electorate in a State to deny the CEC to manipulate the "voices" of non-existent voters. But it is obvious that Poroshenko and standing behind it the enemies of Ukraine this census is not needed. All this together (and examples can be multiply and multiply) is aimed at weakening and destroying the State of Ukraine. So can act — and act! only the enemy of Ukraine. De facto, the revolution Dignity helped clan Medvedchuk reset with post hated him, casting his hand on perennial-and billions — "obbiranija" budget scheme "jesdjekami". And gave a formal occasion and an opportunity for Putin to annex part of Ukraine is a strategically important geographic and economic potential. As a result, artful manipulation of public opinion and electoral process in the head of State was approved by henchman Medvedchuk-Petro Poroshenko. The son of a convicted thief, even during Soviet times, Member of the Presidium of the sdpu (o), the founder of the party of regions, the inhabitant of offshore jurisdictions, embezzler and a liar. Everything else that is going on in the State since June 2014 onwards is a derivative of these manipulations. The continued dismantling of the State of Ukraine under the guise of "bezviza" and unpromising litigation with the RUSSIAN FEDERATION at the Hague, acceding to the aggressor, trade with the Bandit regime of Putin, process all reform initiatives, the destruction of surreptitiously NABOO, baiting of the Ukrainian patriotic movement, simulating defence work, favoring "Putin's" business in Ukraine — that's "Presidency" Poroshenko, partner Medvedchuk. The trouble is already in our House. 

Source: http://argumentua.com/stati/poroshenko-oboidetsya-ukraine-dorozhe-chem-yanukovich