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yamayuandadu · 3 years

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Who is Baal, anyway?

As I mentioned in my previous article, the instigator of the recent attacks on museums in Berlin believes some of the artifacts held in them to be part of a nefarious, bloodthirsty cult, prominent on the “global satanism scene” and devoted to “Baal (Satan),” as he put it himself according to articles covering this incident. In the following article I'll discuss the origin of this esoteric claim, as well as the actual nature of Baal, myths associated with him, other similar deities and their role in the ancient Middle East (and beyond).

I'll start with the matters I am not particularly enthusiastic about: Baal is the star of many conspiracy theories, mostly these which arise in christian fundamentalist circles, and which cast him as the deity venerated by nefarious groups, ranging from insufficiently conservative political parties and ethnic minorities to vampiric aliens, blamed for all of the world's evils. He owes this status to being one of the most frequently mentioned “false gods” or “idols” in the Bible. In fringe pseudohistory context it's basically a given that Baal is equated with the nebulous figure of Moloch, the child sacrifice boogeyman. They are not actually analogous, though - Baal is brought up in relation to idol worship, depicted as powerless, and generally associated with people from coastal cities like Sidon and Tyre – the groups Greeks collectively called „Phoenicians.” Moloch meanwhile is associated with the Ammonites, whose kingdom lied further inland – it is possible that he is therefore a biblical corruption of the Ammonite god Milkom. Some researchers propose instead that “Moloch” was a type of sacrifice involving the burning of victims in honor of a deity – this theory matches both the accounts of biblical Moloch, as well as some Greek and especially Roman accounts meant to prove the debased, barbaric nature of Phoenicians, especially these from Carthage. In later writing, all of the idols and false gods mentioned in the Bible were equated with the devil - in reality their inclusion in biblical text likely reflects struggle between various faiths and their cult centers in ancient Canaan, and later increasingly more fragmentary memories of it. In Christian demonology and in occultism, in addition to their names being considered synonyms of the devil, new demonic identities were assigned to them, which is where the popculture idea of Beelzebub, Bael and other similarly named figures has its origin. As almost every type of pseudohistory eventually connects to blood libel (or an equivalent of it), the exaggerated assumptions about biblical Moloch inspired Gilbert K. Chesteron to propose that blood libel was based on real events, specifically on possible outbreaks of “idolatry” in Jewish communities leading to bloody sacrifices. Needless to say, this is an outlandish, baseless claim rooted in prejudice. The scarce textual sources left behind by the Phoenicians themselves do not discuss any rites which match biblical and roman claims particularly commonly – occasional mentions paint an image similar to the sacrifice of Iphigenia in Greek myth, which would imply that human sacrifice was either the domain of myth, or a rarely performed act which only occurred as an irrational response in times of great peril. Romans claimed the epicenter of such practices was Carthage, their early rival to the title of the preeminent power of the Mediterranean, and its recipient was its tutelary god, Baal Hammon – a figure not directly relate to the biblical Baal(s), who I will discuss later, but for centuries commonly assumed to be one and the same as him due to the lack of primary sources. Excavations from Carthage do show the existence of funerary sites with a high concentration of child burials, but it's a matter of heated scholarly debate if they represent a proof of Roman propaganda being rooted in truth, or if it's simply the result of the well known fact that infant mortality prior to modern times was widespread. The debate is ongoing and I do not follow it closely. There is however precisely zero evidence of human sacrifice being performed in Ugarit, the most significant site associated with the most famous, and arguably original, Baal. The extensive cult literature recovered from its ruins discusses the sacrifice of cattle, sheep, rams, birds (but only uncommonly), donkeys (only for a specific reconciliation rite), oil, wine, and precious stones and metals - but not humans (researchers also often point out that dogs and pigs were never offered to gods too, which is a pretty clear proof that some taboos present in abrahamic faiths predate them). The Ugaritic texts do mention that sacrificial meat was at least sometimes shared by the devotees (in the case of sacrifices which did not involve a pyre, obviously – which essentially means such sacrifices were feasts or holiday meals ritually shared with the deity), which I assume where the false idea that both Phoenicians of classical antiquity and their bronze age Canaanite forerunners were cannibals might come from. This specific claim seems to be currently spreading as “trivia” online, alongside a false etymology of the word cannibal (a term only attested since the beginning of Spanish colonization of the Americas). It should be noted that even the researchers who do believe that human sacrifice might have sometimes occurred in Carthage do not suggest that it was followed by cannibal feasts, and even in Roman propaganda texts from the Punic wars period no such claims show up, despite their obvious bias and need to demonize the recently vanquished rival nascent power.

In art of ancient Levant, worshipers are sometimes depicted as tiny compared to gods – many “scandalous” conspiracy posts claim as a result that the minuscule figures raising their hands on ancient artifacts represent infants sacrifices to the gods depicted. However, accompanying inscriptions identify them as kings or priests – this is the case, for example, with the famous Baal stele from Ugarit, depicting a king praying to the tutelary god of the city. With the unpleasant matters out of the way, it's time to finally ask - who is Baal? Baal refers both to a specific figure, and to the general concept of a head god of a city's pantheon in certain parts of the Levant and Mesopotamia. “Baal” simply means “lord” and can be found in both titles and names of not only gods, but also royals – including some biblical examples.

As I said, the Baal most famous today is Baal Hadad of Ugarit, a city in present day Syria which was among the victims of bronze age collapse. This Baal was derived from an earlier god, Adad, who seemingly first became a major figure near present day Aleppo, emerging as the head of the local variation of Syro-Hurro-Mesopotamian pantheon. Eventually, the title of Baal started to be regarded as his true name, with Hadad relegated to the rank of a title. His other titles include “Rider of Clouds” and “Aliyan” (“Victorious”). His cult survived the destruction of Ugarit, and flourished well into Ptolemaic times.

In Ugarit, he served not only as a god of rain and thunder, but also agriculture and fertility, and, as expected from the lead god, a source of royal power. He was depicted as an impulsive and boastful figure in myths, but was also a firm ally of humans, subduing monsters, the forces of nature, and even promising to protect his followers from wrath of other gods in myths. His symbolic animal was the bull, and he was usually depicted in horned headwear. The associations between bull horns and divinity is well attested in the religious art of Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Levant, and to a degree Egypt too. Bulls are prominently featured in the art of Minoan Crete as well. This is also why the biblical golden calf is, well, a calf. Baal Hadad's family tree is rather confusing, with two separate gods being called his fathers in the Baal Cycle and other texts. The interpretation can potentially be complicated by the fact that Ugarit's (and other bronze age kingdoms’) kings seemingly often called monarchs they viewed as more powerful as „fathers” and these of similar perceived prestige as „brothers” in diplomatic correspondence. For example, one can operate undeer the assumption the god Dagon was Baal's actual father (he's only ever brought up in such a context, and shared many of Baal's roles, and like him was a prominent god deeper inland as well) while El, the elderly king of the gods, was only Baal's „father” in the diplomatic sense of the term. Some scholars instead propose that Dagon and El were partially or fully syncretised in Ugarit, that mention of Dagan was a nod to foreign tradition, or even that Baal having two fathers might be the echo of the myth of Baal's Hittite counterpart. Our main source of information about Baal is the Baal cycle, a heroic epic recovered from Ugarit in the 1920s and a subject of much scholarly analysis ever since. While not perfectly preserved, it is nonetheless a very valuable source of information, and arguably it's what allowed Baal to metaphorically speak in his own voice to modern researchers. It details his struggle with various enemies seeking to ruin his dream of becoming the king of the gods. While it's hard to tell if that was the intent of the ancient writers, Baal appears as somewhat of an underdog in this myth – his posdible father doesn't seem to be a god of particular importance, he has to rely on his allies to accomplish most of his heroic deeds, he whines about having no house of his own, and his actions are often impulsie. However, this shouldn't overshadow the fact he was for the most part the most popular god of Ugarit. Figures associated with the Ugaritic Baal include:

Anat - a war goddess who shares Baal's impulsive nature, and in myths frequently acts as his main ally or enforcer, slaying various sea monsters and the personification of death, Mot (however, there are a few instances showing Baal siding with humans rather than with Anat). She's often referred to as Baal's sister, and sometimes argued to also be his consort, though this view is challenged nowadays by some researchers. It should be noted that while Baal is firmly established as Dagon's son, Anat is never presented as related to the latter – she is pretty firmly only a daughter of El and, implicitly, his wife Asherah.

Ashtart - the Ugaritic forerunner of the famous Phoenician Astarte. She was equated with Babylonian Ishtar, and while she's not as prominent as Anat in Ugaritic texts, they emphasize her roles as a warrior and hunter; she is however also renowned for her beauty. In the Baal Cycle she berates Baal for his insufficient determination during the battle with his first opponent, and later announces his victory to the world. In many texts, both in Ugarit and beyond, her epithet is “face of Baal,” implying a particularly close bond between these two figures – it is plausible that she was viewed as Baal's consort in Ugarit. Ashtart/Astarte is NOT the same figure as Asherah (technically Athirat), the Canaanite mother goddess, and both of them appear in the Baal cycle in different roles.

Kothar-wa-Khasis – a craftsman god, indirectly equated with and possibly in part derived from Egyptian Ptah – myths state outright that he lives in Memphis, where Ptah's main temple was located. He acts as a reliable ally to Baal, providing him with weapons and precious objects and eventually also building his palace. In one scene, an argument occurs between him and Baal over whether the palace needs windows:

Yam – the god of the sea, also serving as Baal's rival to the throne. Various passage of the myth and other texts portray him as violent, tyrannical and otherwise unpleasant, and his overthrow by Baal as a positive development. He's aided by a number of sea monsters, the most notable of which is the serpent Lotan. It has been argued that that the later Babylonian Tiamat was in part based on him or his counterparts, as she doesn't appear in any Babylonian sources earlier than Enuma Elish, which is a work younger by a few centuries than the Baal cycle.

Mot – a personification of death and desolation. While even Yam received some reverence and offerings, Mot did not – he only existed as an antagonist for heroic figures. Mot's main trait is his insatiable hunger.

While the Baal from Ugarit is, due to possessing his own heroic epic, the most famous and probably best researched today, he was by no means the only deity of this sort – most cities in the Levant (and beyond, in other areas settled by the Phoenicians) had their own tutelary gods, often referred to as Baals. Among these, notable examples include:

The Baal of Tyre – Melqart served as the lead deity of the city of Tyre, seemingly the most prominent of the Phoenician centers. His name seems to simply mean “lord of the city”. He was a god of many things, most notably being viewed as a culture hero who discovered the secret of producing the purple dye which made Phoenician city-states rich and prosperous. He was also an underworld deity, and as a result an association with Babylonian Nergal has been proposed. It's quite likely that the Tyrian Baal was the one mentioned in some Biblical accounts – for example, Jezebel was said to be a princess of Tyre, therefore it's plausible that the god she revered was the Tyrian Baal. Greeks regarded him as analogous to Heracles, sadly I am unable to find the explanation for this.

The Baal of Sidon – Eshmun, a healing deity. He was seemingly viewed as analogous to the Mesopotamian Tammuz, Ishtar's lover condemned to torment in the underworld in her place. The origin of his name is unclear. His myth is somewhat similar to that of Phrygian Attis – the goddess Astronoë (possibly a variant of Astarte/Ishtar) was madly in love with him, but he was, to put it lightly, not interested (unlike Attis), and eventually castrated himself to show that, which lead to his death. He was restored to life (also unlike Attis) and made into a god of healing. Melqart and Eshmun were the two Phoenician gods invoked in a treaty meant to guarantee peace between the coastal regions and Assyria, which shows the high status of their cities in antiquity.

The Baalat of Gebal (Byblos) – Baalat was the feminine form of Baal, and a title sometimes simply applied to any prominent goddess. However, the Baalat of Gebal was seemingly a separate deity, associated with this epithet in the same way as Ugarit's Hadad became inseparable from his title of Baal. Some researchers instead propose she was simply Ashtart/Astarte, though Anat, Asherah, and Egyptian Isis and Hathor (while Ugarit was a Hittite or Mittani vassal, Gebal was under Egyptian control) were also proposed as her true identity based on instances of historical syncretism. However, due to very few surviving documents, her exact nature remains puzzling.

Baal Shamin - revered not only by Phoenicians and their ancestors, but also by Nabateans. He was likely initially simply an epithet of Baal Hadad, but developed into a distinct deity in later times. As a separate figure he was the lead god of Palmyra, though he was eventually upstaged by Bel (Marduk) there.

The Baal of Carthage, Hammon - unlike the generally youthful other Baals, he was depicted as an old man. He was also regarded as the father of Melqart, with the latter viewed as a more important deity – Carthage in fact paid tribute to his Tyrian temple. Most of what we know about him comes from Roman sources, and as a result it's hard to tell what was his true nature – it has been proposed he was a sun god at first. He was equated by Greeks with Cronus.

In a way, Babylonian Marduk can be considered to be a Baal – among the titles used to refer to him was “Bel,” the equivalent of “Baal,” and like the coastal Baals he was originally simply the protective deity of a specific city. However, occasional attempts to identify Marduk as originally having roughly the same nature as Adad/Hadad – that of a weather and agriculture god – are generally not considered to be credible by modern researchers. As I already noted, it is however quite likely that Marduk's battle with Tiamat – a figure invented for the Enuma Elish – was at least in part based on Baal's fight with Yam in the Baal cycle. Sadly, the dubious claims that Tiamat represents a deposed matriarchal order seem to be much more known to the general public – as I already said on my blog before, these are nonsensical and their spread relies on limited understanding of Mesopotamian history. Enuma Elish was not a primordial text, but a myth devised relatively late to further help with increasing Marduk's status by having him perform the same acts as many other popular gods, there is also no evidence of the existence of an earlier matriarchal religion in Sumerian and Akkadian sources. Curiously, it's also possible the myth of Baal and its analogs and derivatives inspired Zeus' battle with Typhon – it is sometimes said that it took place near mount Saphon, associated with the cult of Baal Hadad and specifically with his battle against Yam.

Egyptians regarded Baal as analogous to Seth – this conflation occurred before Seth's dominant role became that of an opponent of Osiris of his family, and relied on Seth being a god of the borderlands and foreigners inhabiting them, as well as on his chaotic, impulsive nature. Possibly depictions of Seth as the opponents of the serpent Apep were a factor, too. In an Egyptian adaptation of the Ugaritic Baal cycle, the so-called Astarte papyrus, Seth battles Yam, though no outright conflation of the Ugaritic and Egyptian mythical evildoers ever occurred to my knowledge. Baal's supporting cast of Anat and Astarte was likewise associated with Seth in Egypt, and both are referred to as his consorts in Egyptian texts. Outside of this specific example of syncretism, “Seth” was also sometimes used as a generic title for foreign gods, almost the same was as Baal functioned as a title in the Levant – it was applied to various Canaanite gods, but also to the gods of the Hittites. For example the peace treaty between Ramses II and Hattusili XI mentions “Seth of the city of Zipalanda” and “Seth of the city of Arinna” - corresponding Hittite text reveals that these are simply Teshub, the Hurrian an Hittite monster-slaying thunder god (and close analog of Ugaritic Baal Hadad – as Ugarit was seemingly at least for some time a Hittite dependency, it is more than likely their myths influenced each other), and the sun goddess of Arinna. Egyptians referred to the Libyan god Ash as a Seth, too. Curiously, at least one Ugaritic text identifies the city's Baal with Amun, rather than Seth – it doesn't seem like this idea caught on in Egypt, though.

Teshub was possibly the deity closest to Baal Hadad both in terms of myths and depictions – compare the one above with the Ugaritic Baal stele from much earlier in this article – but as a little known figure he (and his most notable allies and enemies) deserves his separate post, so I will not discuss him there, beyond letting you know that while Baal simply clobbered Yam with some encouragement from friends, Teshub only managed to best the serpent monster Illuyanka by having his son seduce Illuyanka's daughter in order to recover his internal organs stolen by the snake. Even functionally similar deities can have wildly different stories behind them! Further reading (most articles available on academia edu, jstor or persee):

A Moratorium on God Mergers? The Case of El and Milkom in the Ammonite Onomasticon by Collin Cornell

Animal sacrifice at Ugarit by Dennis Perdee

The Lady of the Titles: The Lady of Byblos and the Search for her "True Name” by Anna Elise Zernecke

Ugaritic monsters I: The ˁatūku “Bound One” and its Sumerian parallels by Madadh Richey

‛Athtart in Late Bronze Age Syrian Texts by Mark S. Smith

ʿAthtartu’s Incantations and the Use of Divine Names as Weapons by Theodore J. Lewis

Baal, Son of Dagan: In Search of Baal’s Double Paternity by Noga Ayali-Darshan

The Role of Aštabi in the Song of Ullikummi and the Eastern Mediterranean “Failed God” Stories by Noga Ayali-Darshan

The Death of Mot and his Resurrection in the Light of Egyptian Sources by Noga Ayali-Darshan

The Other Version of the Story of the Storm-god’s Combat with the Sea in the Light of Egyptian, Ugaritic, and Hurro-Hittite Texts by Noga Ayali-Darshan

The storm-gods of ancient Near East: summary, synthesis, recent studies, parts 1 and 2 by Daniel Schwemer

Politics and Time in the Baal Cycle by Aaron Tugendhaft

Echoes of the Baal Cycle in a Safaito-Hismaic Inscription by Ahmad Al-Jallad

My neighbor's god: Assur in Babylonia and Marduk in Assyria by Grant Frame

Gods in translation. Dynamics of transculturality between Egypt and Byblos in the III millennium BC by Angelo Colonna

Zeus Kasios or the Interpretatio Graeca of Baal Saphon in Ptolemaic Egypt by Alexandra Diez de Oliveira

#canaanite mythology #ugaritic mythology #mesopotamian mythology #egyptian mythology #baal

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teshknowledgenotes · 3 years

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BOOK: THINKING FAST & SLOW - DANIEL KAHNEMAN

WHY?

I read this book because I wanted to learn about economics, this book was a good read and had a lot of interesting points these are some stuff I took notes on

THOUGHTS

I was looking more for a book about economics, this book was mostly about behavioural economics. Throughout life you are mostly taught that becoming succesful is based on hard work and a degree. This book was really cool to me because it shows the psychology involved within humans on how it can affect their life. A persons emotions are a huge factor when it comes to how they go about their daily life and how it can make them succesful. Fear, hatred, temptation are all things that you should be in control of if you want to benefit your life, and this book shows a couple of the different thoughts processes people can have and how it can affect society in general.

NOTES

Thinking Fast & Slow Notes

Social scientists in the 1970's broadly accepted two ideas about human nature. First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality

Several psychological studies have shown that people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation

People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations

Cognitive load is not the only cause of weakened self control, a few drinks have the same effects, as does a sleepless night

Too much concern about how well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts the performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts

Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the political and military leaders – not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. They are talented and they have been lucky, almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge. They are probably optimistic by temperament; a survey of founders of small businesses concluded that entrepreneurs are more sanguine that mid level managers about life in general. Their experiences of success have confirmed their faith in their judgment and in their ability to control events. Their self-confidence is reinforced by the admiration of others. This reasoning leads to a hypothesis: the people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks than they realize

People who are poor think like traders, but the dynamics are quite different. Unlike traders, the poor are not indifferent to the differences between gaining and giving up. Their problem is that all their choices are between losses. Money that is spent on one good is the loss of another good that could have been purchased instead. For the poor, costs are losses

Endowment Effect: In behavioral finance, endowment effect describes a circumstance in which an individual places a higher value on an object than they already own than the value they would place on the same object if they did not own it, this can clearly be seen with items that have an emotional or symbolic significance to the individual

Prospect Theory assumes that losses and gains are valued differently, and thus individuals make decisions based on perceived gains instead of perceived losses. It also suggests that investors chose perceived gains because losses cause a greater emotional impact

A related mistake afflicts individual investors when they sell stocks from their portfolio:

You need money to cover the costs of your daughter's wedding and will have to sell some stock. You remember the price at which you bought each stock and can identify it as a “winner”, currently worth more than you paid for it, or as a loser. Among the stocks you own, Blueberry Tiles is a winner; if you sell it today you will have achieved a gain of $5000. You hold an equal investment in Tiffany Motors, which is currently worth $5000 less than you paid for it. The value of both stocks has been stable in recent weeks. Which are you more likely to sell?

A plausible way to formulate the choice is this: “I could close the Blueberry Tiles account and score a success for my record as an investor. Alternatively, I could close the Tiffany Motors account and add a failure to my record. Which Would I rather do?” If the problem is framed as a choice between giving yourself pleasure and causing yourself pain, you will certainly sell Blueberry Tiles and enjoy your investment prowess. As might be expected, finance research has documented a massive preference for selling winners rather than losers – a bias that has been give an opaque label: the disposition effect

Consumers who are reminded that they may feel regret as a result of their choices show an increased performance for conventional options, favoring brand names over the generics

To get pleasure from eating, for example you must notice that you are doing it. We found that French and American women spent about the same amount of time eating, but for Frenchwomen, eating was twice as likely to be focal as it was for American women. The Americans were far more prone to combine eating with other activities, and their pleasure from eating was correspondingly diluted

A headache will make a person miserable, and the second best predictor of the feelings of a day is whether a person did or did not have contacts with friends or relatives. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you

Can money buy happiness? The conclusion is that being poor makes one miserable, and that being rich may enhance one's life satisfaction, but does not (on average) improve experienced well-being

Severe poverty amplifies the experienced effects of other misfortunes of life. In particular, illness is much worse for the very poor than for those who are more comfortable.

The satiation level beyond which experienced well-being no longer increases was a household income of about $75,000 in high-cost areas(it could be less in areas where the cost of living is lower). The average increase of experienced well-being associated with incomes beyond that level was precisely zero. This is surprising because higher income undoubtedly permits the purchase of many pleasures, including vacations in interesting places and opera tickets, as well as improved living environment.

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scych · 5 years

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Vril: Maria Orsic who prominent Thule Society members believed was psychically communicating with beings from Aldeberaan and/or inner earth. Orsic’s psychic information appeared genuine after providing the secrets of advanced technologies that would make space travel possible and also offered to transform German society by giving its citizens first hand knowledge of a mysterious universal force called Vril. Antarctica’s Hidden History corporate Foundations of Secret Space Programs Dr. Michael Salla

Description of Vril in Power of the Coming Race. There is no word in any language I know which is an exact synonym for vril. I should call it electricity, except that it comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature, to which in our scientific nomenclature, differing names are assigned, such as magnetism, galvanism,etc…These people consider that in vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energetic agencies which has been conjectured by many philosophers above ground and which Faraday thus intimates under the more caution term of correlation… Pg 14 Vril: The Power of the Coming Race Edward Bulwer-Lytton 

These subterranean philosophers assert that by one operation of vril, which Faraday would perhaps call “atmospheric magnetism,” they can influence the variation of temperature in plain words, the weather, that by operations akin to those ascribed to mesmerism , electro biology, Odin force, but applied scientifically, through vril conductors, they can exert influence over minds and bodies animal and vegetable to an extent not surpassed in the romances of our mystics. Vril: The Power of the Coming Race Edward Bulwer-Lytton

 U.S. Thomas Townsend Brown “There is a decided tendency in the physical sciences to unify the great basic laws and to relate by a single structure or mechanism, such individual phenomena as gravitation, electro dynamics and even matter itself. It is found that matter and electricity are very closely related in structure. In the final analysis matter loses its traditional individuality and becomes merely an “electrical condition.” In fact it might be said that the concrete body if the universe is nothing more than an assemblage of energy which in itself is quite intangible. Of course, it is self evident that matter is connected with gravitation and it follows logically that electricity is likewise connected. These relations exist in the realm of pure energy and consequently are very basic in nature. In all reality they constitute the true backbone of the universe. It is needless to say that the relations are not simple and full understanding of their concepts is complicated by the outstanding lack of information and research on the real nature of gravitation.

 Vril for energy and healing: The fluid is capable of being raised and disciplined into the mightiest agency over all forms of matter, animate or inanimate. It can destroy like the flash of lightning yet differently applied it can replenish or invigorate life, heal and preserve and on it they chiefly rely for cure of disease, or rather for enabling the physical organization to re-establish the due equilibrium of its natural powers and thereby to cure itself. By this agency they send way through the most solid substances and open valleys for culture through the cracks of their subterranean wilderness. From it they extract the light which supplies their lamps finding it steadier softer and healthier than the other inflammable materials they had formerly used. Vril: The Power of the Coming Race Edward Bulwer-Lytton

 But the effects of the alleged discovery of the means to direct the more terrible force of vril were chiefly remarkable in their influence upon social polity. As these effects became similarly known and skillfully administered, war between the vril-discoverers ceased,for they brought the art of destruction to such perfection as to annul all superiority in numbers, discipline or military skill. The fire lodged in the hollow of a rod directed by the hand of a child could shatter the strongest fortress, or cleave it’s burning way from the van to the near of an embattled host. If army met army and both had command of this agency it could be but to the annihilation of each. The age of war was therefore gone, but with the cessation of war other effects bearing upon the social state soon apparent. Man was so completely at the mercy of man, each whom he encountered being able, If so willing to slay him on the instant, that all means of government by force gradually vanished from political systems and forms of law. It is only by force that vast communities, dispersed through great distances of space, can be kept together; but now there was no longer either the necessity of self preservation or the pride of aggrandizement to make one state desire to preponderance inpopulation over another. Vril: The Power of the Coming Race Edward Bulwer-Lytton

 Discussion of Vril and Zero Point “ Belief in psychokinesis-the ability of the mind to influence the physical world, say a firearm,” she said nodding at the screen’s endless loop of footage, “ is generally considered a debased form of metaphysics a kind of mysticism which in the absence of responsible religious tradition to back it up, is easily dismissed as pseudoscientific fantasy. But there are various brands of pre scientific mysticism that put mind over matter, seeing the power of consciousness itself as a way to affect the world -faith healing say, or levitation. The concept of energy fields connecting all things is ancient wisdom in matters of religion. Think of the notion of chi or ki in various East Asian cultures the life force that binds things together and sustains them. “And Star Wars certainly borrowed some ideas about the force from China, Japan and other neighboring regions. But what if it isn’t the stuff of space opera fantasy? What if we stopped viewing these ideas in the contemptuous terms of anti science and the primitive? What if we were able to assimilate both positions as compatible within an expanded notion of physics, a unified theory, if you like which recognizes that the metaphysical concerns of the human mind-including so called paranormal capacities-can coexist harmoniously in a strictly scientific notion of the universe?” - Sekret Machines A Fire Within pg 293. 

Have you ever heard of zero point energy? “It’s also called ground state energy.’ said Hayes. “According to quantum mechanics, it’s an all pervasive energetic field that is random, ambient and fluctuating. What’s interesting about zero point energy is that it exists even in so called empty space. So instead of thinking of the universe as a collection of isolated particles, we have to view the universe as made up of continuous fields the quanta and fermions of matter fields and the quanta and bosons of force fields.” - Sekret Machines A Fire Within pg 293. “Right from its birth the CIA has been in the movie business.” - Sekret Machines A Fire Within Pg 117

“But in our society we attach fame to nothing which man in that moment of his duration which is called life, can perform. We should soon lose that equality which constitutes the felicitous essence of our commonwealth if we selected any individual for preeminent praise; preeminent praise would confer pre-eminent power and the moment it were given, evil passions now dormant would awake other men would immediately covet praise, then would arise envy and with envy hate calumny and persecution Our history tells us that most of the poets and most of the writers who in the old time were on the whole rendered very unhappy, partly by the attacks of jealous rivals, partly by the diseased mental constitution which acquired sensitive ness to praise and to blame tends to engender.” -Taee of the Vril-ya Vril: The Power of the Coming Race Edward Bulwer-Lytton  Pg 48

#vril-ya

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minyoongijjangjjangmanboongboong · 6 years

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The Parting Chapter Eleven

Description: The only certainty in life is death, and it seems to follow Park Jimin. All his life, the icy shadow of death has hung closely by his side, along with the shadow of…something else. Reapers exist to guide the souls of the living to the world beyond. But what happens when a particular Reaper tampers with the natural order and saves a mortal boy’s life? What will they do once their fates become inextricably linked?

Genre: Supernatural, Drama, Fluff, Angst

Pairing: Jimin x (f) OC

Word Count: 8.6k

Tags: Flower Shop Owner!Jimin, Reaper!OC, Non-Idol!AU, Cop!Yoongi, Supernatural!AU

Warnings: Death, swearing and mentions of alcohol, although infrequently

A/N: Hello! This story is pretty quickly wrapping up! Only a few things left to be seen/answered. I hope you guys have enjoyed the ride as much as I have! And I’m already planning for my next fic, which will be VERY reliant upon your interaction! Your choices will directly affect the story. Anyway, I’ll post more information about that once we get to the last chapter of this story. As always, I will respond to all asks received within a day of receiving them, so feel free and feel comfortable sending me anything! And please send feedback, criticism, comments or concerns my way so I can address them.

DISCLAIMER!!! Although I have researched quite a lot about Korean culture, I am taking a fictitious approach to its history. While I am trying to be historically accurate, there are sure to be details that I mess up! Please know that I have no poor intentions! DISCLAIMER!!!

AHH! And I started a Ko-Fi account! PLEASE do NOT feel pressured to donate if you don’t have the money or just don’t want to! There’s no expectation or obligation, but anything is appreciated. Love you guys! https://ko-fi.com/mercurywriter

- Mercury

Previous Chapter – Next Chapter

Chapter One

Masterlist

Weekly updates: Sunday, 1PM (PST)

Hoseok sat on an old rope swing, swaying gently along with the branches overhead. I stood beside him, leaning against the rough side of a tree with my eyes on the underbrush below our feet. Neither of us said anything for a while. After we’d seen each other, Hoseok had quickly righted himself and jerked his head towards the exit. I’d followed, throwing apologies over my shoulder at Seonhwa as I rushed after her son. She called after us, but after a few moments she simply shrugged and hopped back over the desk to rest with the pharmaceuticals.

It had been five minutes of silence between me and the nurse.

“Hoseok-,”

“Hold on,” he said, shaking his head as he gripped the rope swing with both hands. “I need to think about how to word this.”

I sighed and laced my fingers in front of me. “Please take your time,” I said. I was still avoiding going back to Jimin for the time being.

He glanced up at me from below and shook his head, staring at me properly as he blinked and said nothing for a while. “It’s just crazy,” he said.

I raised my brows. “What is?”

“All of this,” he said.

“Be specific.”

He sighed. “At first…I guess I was kinda suspicious of you because you can see…those things.”

I thought a moment. Could he possibly mean…? “Reapers?” I asked.

His eyes went wide. “They have a name?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, then sighed. “I’m rather stunned that you can see them too.”

He shrugged and watched his feet as they traced circles into the dirt below. “Every few generations, someone in the family gets the…gene or whatever. It’s always been the women until I was born.”

I stared at the ground. “I…I believe I used to be the same. In the past.”

He cocked a brow. “Which past?” he asked.

I stiffened. “Hoseok, what do you know about me?” I asked.

He sighed and stood up, standing in front of me properly. “My mom and my grandma used to tell stories about the family heritage. Apparently, we come from a line of shamans.”

My eyes widened. So my theories were correct. These people…were my descendants. “Y-You do?”

“The earliest Kwon was named Seonhwa. She lived a really successful life actually. She practiced herbal medicine in the common class, but she wasn’t a shaman. Her grandmother was, and so was her sister…,” he paused to glance at me. “Her sister Nari.”

I shook my head and raked my fingers through my hair. “So she grew up well…,” I breathed, relief flooding through me. “She lived well. Children too…”

Hoseok chuckled. “So you really are her then? You’re…that Nari?” he asked.

I met his dark eyes, scanning them for a long moment, and reluctantly nodded my head. “I believe I am.”

He smiled and chuckled, reaching a hand out to me. “It’s nice to officially meet you,” he said, shaking my hand gently.

“You seem very unfazed by all of this,” I said.

He shrugged. “Once Dad told us that you took a temporary name, I kinda put it all together. The fact that you can see those shadows, the fact that you look like Mom and Jisoo…I don’t know, it made sense,” he said.

I chuckled. “What an odd life you must live if something like that makes any sense to you.”

He laughed and shrugged, his expression softer and kinder somehow, less hostile and distrusting than before. “Weird shit has always happened to me. Hell, this town,” he said with a laugh. “Anyway, I just got a weird vibe from you since the start. And the fact that you could talk to the shadows-,”

“Wait, how did you know that?” I asked.

He raised his brows. “That day at the hospital when Jimin found you in the hallway. I was following that shadow after it left a room and heard your voice,” he said.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” I groaned.

He scoffed. “And risk you thinking I was a crazy person? No thanks,” he said. “What if my hypothesis was wrong? I’m a nurse. I value the scientific method.”

I rolled my eyes. “Anyway…I guess I’m your aunt now?” I asked, furrowing my brow. “That seems wrong.”

He laughed and nodded. “Yeah, well…” His expression shifted as if he remembered something suddenly and he turned to me, arms crossed and eyes wide. “There’s something I’m curious about though. Aunt Nari…she died really young.”

My stomach dropped. Another early death. Just what had happened to Jimin and me all those lifetimes ago? “How young…?”

“It’s hard to say since it’s just a family story, but…twenty-one or so,” he said. “It just seems strange that you’d come to this town as the same age she died at.”

I shook my head. “I…I didn’t come here, Hoseok,” I said softly.

His eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“I can’t explain it but…just know that I was sincere when I said I didn’t remember a life before waking up on the street,” I said.

His eyes went dark as he scanned me. “Nari, you’re confusing me,” he said, tone serious.

I shook my head. “That’s all I can say. Hoseok, my life began two weeks ago,” I said.

Hoseok watched me with confusion in his eyes and his jaw clenched before a sigh escaped him and he nodded. “As long as it’s not, like, time travel or something I’ll accept it.”

I laughed, feeling the mood shift towards something more comfortable and playful and nodded my head. “I am certain that’s not it.” I sighed and ran my hands over my thighs. “But…do you know how that Nari died?” I asked.

He pursed his lips. “Mom said that Grandma Seonhwa didn’t like talking about it. Seems it was a pretty big wound for the family,” he said, then peered around as if looking for spies. He leaned close. “But I have a theory.”

I raised my brows. “You do?” I asked, grabbing his arm. “What is it?”

He glanced at my fingers before prying them off of his skin. He sighed. “Whenever the family keeps something secret, it has to do with all that shaman business,” he said quietly. “It’s not something the family likes to be associated with. Ever since Grandma Seonhwa started doing herbal medicine, nobody in the family worked as shamans.”

My eyes widened. “Even though they were born with that…gift?” I asked.

He nodded. “I’ve always been suspicious. Like, why do we talk to death about all of the other relatives, but we never learn about Aunt Nari and what she did? Why she died? It’s suspicious.”

“So you think…something paranormal happened to her-er, to me?” I asked, shaking my head.

He gave me a heavy, grim look and nodded once. “I think so.”

If Jimin died at twenty-three, and I died at twenty-one then we died around the same time. Coincidences like that didn’t just…happen. I’d lost all faith in coincidence. It had to be connected. Slowly, the dots of my past life began to emerge, their hazy connections taking shape as I uncovered more information.

But there was still something nagging at me.

How did Jimin die?

At the end of the week, I made a trip to the library. Jimin and I had grown distant, with neither of us speaking much and no more shy glances. It seemed I’d really hurt him. My heart ached, but it was for his own good. I was never meant to be a permanent fixture in his life. He’d gotten too close too rapidly. The fact alone that he didn’t care about what I was said enough. He was deluded by feelings he shouldn’t have for me. And despite my own curiosities about my background and the life I lived before, I didn’t need to entangle Jimin any further. It seemed I couldn’t keep my promise to him that we’d figure things out together…

I sat at the same table we’d shared that day and watched the empty space where he would have sat with a tightening chest. I shook my head and grabbed the book of records, quickly locating Jimin’s name and trailing a finger down the page, searching for an obituary or even a cause of death. After a few seconds scanning the words, I found it.

Drowning…

I furrowed my brow and touched the word with the tip of my finger, shaking my head. How could he have drowned? I remembered that river and a shiver ran up my spine. I shut the book and slid it away, crossing my arms as I stared at the wobbly table before me, unable to understand exactly what it was that had happened between us.

“You’re researching the boy…,” said a voice from behind me.

I jumped and turned to find Zero standing with his back to me, eyes flitting over the shelves of books before him. I stood and rushed to his side, watching him as he gently lifted a hand to touch a book before sighing and glancing to the side, peering down at me.

“Zero…what are you doing here?” I asked, frantically looking around for any onlookers. “In public?”

He smiled slightly and returned to scanning the books. “We are the only souls in this library who don’t work here,” he said with a listless chuckle. “Quite a lot safer than that apartment.”

I stiffened and sighed. “Yes,” I said. “I was researching him.”

“Not the him from this lifetime, however,” he said, not even bothering to look at me.

I nodded. There was no use lying to him when he knew it all already. “Yes.”

“So you’ve remembered something?” he asked, looking at me with a smirk. “Just how much?”

“Zero…what do you know?” I asked.

He smiled, but it didn’t seem malicious. “I’m bound by contract not to tell you,” he said. “But it seems I may not have to.”

I stared up at him. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “Your memories are returning on their own. That, my friend, was not part of the contract,” he said, laughing slightly. “I almost can’t believe it.”

“So…my memories…they’re really mine?” I asked, voice timid, giving life to the silent fears and worries that had plagued me for weeks.

“That I cannot answer,” he said. “The only solution is to continue remembering.”

I shook my head. “But Zero, I have just over a week left before the deadline. How am I supposed to remember a lifetime?”

He sighed. “You must,” he said, finally turning to me and sending me a severe look. “If you don’t and time runs out, I must take matters into my own hands regarding the boy.”

“Can you do that?” I asked.

He nodded. “I can do many things,” he said, resting his Book on his hip. His expression soured. “If I am beckoned.”

“Beckoned…?”

He stared down at me and a soft smile touched his sharp features. “What I saw in you before is stronger now,” he said with a nod. “Remember your place.”

I exhaled in a long huff and shook my head. “I don’t understand what you mean! Stop speaking in riddles and tell me properly.”

He shook his head and reached out to give my shoulder an almost reassuring squeeze. “You have the answers, Nari.”

My eyes went wide. He called me by my name… Before I could respond, he was gone and I was left alone, staring at a shelf of books with my pulse thrumming. There was something barring Zero from speaking, some contract binding him to silence. But he said I had the answers…

All I had to do was remember.

“And that’s how Grandma Jisoo got away with insurance fraud,” said Hoseok with a sigh, leaning back on his palms as the two of us watched the advancing tide.

We’d spent the entire afternoon going over old family stories, hoping to stumble upon something useful. If Zero was convinced I had the answers, then that meant there might be a way to save both Jimin and Injung. If I could only find the right key, I could unlock the door to my third option.

But it seemed that key was rather elusive, since hours had passed and nothing had seemed relevant enough to remember. Although hearing about my descendants made me smile, I didn’t have the luxury of time to enjoy their stories. Hoseok and I sat on a checkered blanket on the sand, the sun seeping into my skin as I sighed and rested my chin on my knees. What in the world was I supposed to do when my only insight came from dreams I could neither control nor summon?

“Hoseok!” called a female voice from behind us.

The two of us turned to the source and saw Jisoo — not Grandma Jisoo who successfully committed fraud, but the living one — rushing down the beach towards us. As she approached, she rested her hands on her knees and caught her breath. She sent Hoseok a sharp look before turning to me with a smile.

“Hi, Nari!” she said, voice singsongy.

I chuckled and flitted my fingers. “Nice to see you, Jisoo.”

She wore her casual clothes which, much like mine, seemed slightly too big for her. And in her hair was a striking little pin. The pin she’d toted the other day, the lily pin. A vision flashed before my eyes to the pin I’d worn in my own hair in my dreams. I furrowed my brow. Hadn’t that been mine from the start? How could they be the same when she’d received it as a gift from Yeoreum?

I shifted away from Hoseok to make room for Jisoo on the blanket and she sat with a grin. “What’re you doing down here? Aren’t you helping Mom today?” asked Hoseok.

Jisoo tossed him a glare before returning her attention to me. “She wanted me to tell you we’re ordering takeout and you have to go get it.”

I glanced to Hoseok. There was still so much we needed to go over. Hoseok shrugged his shoulders and stood up, dusting off the backs of his legs with a sigh. “We can talk more later, Nari,” he said with a wave.

I moved to follow him, but quickly remembered Jisoo and settled back down. “You look kinda pale,” she remarked, scanning my features. “Paler than usual.”

I nodded. “I’m not doing very well.”

She pouted. “Is it something I can help with?” she asked.

I smiled and gave the top of her hand a pat. “I don’t think so,” I said. Hoseok had agreed it was best not to tell Jisoo or Seonhwa about my past life, given how the family reacted to anything occult. So I simple smiled. “That pin really suits you,” I said.

She touched it with a grin and nodded. “I think so too.”

“And it was a gift? From Yeoreum?” I asked, my tone edgy. “You mentioned he bought it.”

She shrugged. “I dunno where he got it. I kinda just assumed he bought it, but the more I look at it the more it seems like…really old.”

I stiffened. It did seem rather antiquated. “I see…”

“Mom told me a cool story when I first got it about one of our ancestors,” she said. “The one Mom is named after.”

I nodded. “Hoseok has been telling me some of your family’s stories. It’s very interesting,” I said, to which her dark eyes lit up.

She grinned. “Right? This story is my favorite I think. She’s told parts of it before, but she never told me this part,” she said with a nod. “When Grandma Seonhwa moved to this town, she met with a super rich family. Like, one of the richest ones in the area.”

I raised my brows. Such an industrious girl was meeting with nobles? “How did she know them?”

Jisoo shook her head and glanced out to the water. “We don’t know. She never talked about it.”

“Huh…” Another thing they didn’t talk about…I could only theorize that it had to do with me somehow.

“Anyway, the youngest son was her age and he really liked her,” she said with a laugh. “Every day he would send her gifts and try to get her attention, but she never responded to him.”

I chuckled. That, I could picture. The young, plucky girl with her messy hair and dirt-stained hands. Of course she would reject the advances of someone like that. “Charming.”

She shook her head. “Anyway, I guess he kept trying to give her this one lily hairpin and she kept saying no. I dunno why, but I guess that gift really ticked her off and she finally told him outright to stop,” she said, then laughed. “Which only made him like her more. I guess he only gave up when she got married to someone else.”

“How persistent,” I said, but my mind had begun churning. If that lily pin really was mine, and it did look horribly similar, then what did that say about the youngest son? A cold chill ran through me as an inkling of an idea took form in my mind. “Tell me, Jisoo. Do you know if this man had siblings?”

She nodded. “Two older brothers.”

I stiffened and stared at her profile with wide eyes. “And what was their family name?”

She pursed her lips, then snapped her fingers. “It’s Park!” she said with a grin. “Just like Jimin. I actually thought it was pretty funny when Jimin told me his family name the first day we met, since it was the same as that rich family.”

I felt my stomach flip and my hands grip the blanket tightly. Yeoreum was related to Jimin’s past. He had to be. After Seonhwa rejected that pin, that youngest son must have held onto it. And if Seonhwa was at marrying age, then I was already dead. She likely cast it away so vehemently because it had once belonged to me. I shook my head. Just how connected was everything in this town?

“Just how long will you continue watching me?” I asked, washing the linens with downcast eyes as the river rushed over my fingers.

Jimin cleared his throat and came to sit beside me, footfalls soft on the leaves and underbrush. He adjusted his hanbok and crouched on the balls of his feet, watching me as I tended to the laundry.

“Hello…,” he said softly.

I nodded my head, but didn’t look at him. For months, the boy had been relentless in his approaches toward me, leaving me no choice but to ignore him. While I was mixing herbs for his older brother’s rash, he was watching in the doorway like a specter. The day I’d spent teaching his younger brother calligraphy, the boy had lingered just outside in the garden, listening in. Time passed this way, almost too quickly for me to notice, and without even realizing I’d become comfortable with this place and with that strange second son. But the more persistent he was, the weaker my will became. I simply was no match for his stubbornness.

“Is there something you wish to discuss?” I asked. I’d grown bolder during my time with the Parks, and I seldom held my tongue around the sons.

Jimin cleared his throat and wrung his hands. “Well…it’s a bit strange, but…uh…hm…”

I finally glanced at him and saw in his cherubic cheeks was a pinkish blush, blooming all across his fair skin. I raised my brows. “Yes?”

He sighed and ruffled his hair, frustrated, before he turned to me and took my hands. I jumped, desperate to avoid his touch and the unpleasant consequences of it, but his grip was tight and his eyes were pleading. Slowly, I stilled and watched him with cautiously narrowed gaze.

“Nari, will you accompany me to the festival tonight?” he asked.

I tilted my head to the side. “Festival?” I asked.

He nodded, brows knitted. “I would really love it if you could,” he said, then his eyes went wide. “If you can spare the time of course!”

Why then did my heart race? I glanced down at my chest, ordering my fickle heart to settle down, before I met his eyes once more. “Is that appropriate? For someone like me to accompany you?”

He furrowed his brow. “Appropriate?” he asked, seemingly baffled. “What does that matter? I want to go with you.”

“And because you want it, is it so?” I asked, sighing as I gathered the washing and placed it carefully in my basket. “This is the critical difference between you and me. You, Park Jimin, request and receive. Have you known rejection?”

He stood up and stared down at me with cheeks flaming. “Yes!” he exclaimed, pointing at me wildly. “I experience it every day with you!”

I scoffed and rested my basket on my hip. “And just what do you mean?”

“I come to you all day and all day you make yourself scarce to me,” he said, pouting slightly and crossing his arms over his chest. “Would you like to know what I think our critical difference is?”

I nodded and offered a grin. “I would love to know.”

He squinted at me before glancing away, still pouting. “I see things that I desire and I reach for them,” he said, then smirked slyly. “I am not a coward.”

My chest puffed and I gaped at him, unable to manage my expression. “A coward?!” I shouted, wagging a finger at his chest. “My apologies, Young Master, but those of us who serve others have not the liberty to be brave!”

He stuck his tongue out at me and shrugged. “I am hearing many excuses from you today, Nari.” He took a step toward me. “It seems to me that you are simply finding ways to avoid me because you are afraid you may fall for me.”

I gaped. “Park Jimin, in what reality would that be the case?” I asked.

He chuckled, confidence now inhabiting his form as he leaned away. “If you’re unafraid, then come with me tonight.”

I laughed and nodded. “Fine,” I said, holding out my free hand for him to shake. “But expect no falling from me.”

He grinned and grabbed my hand, shaking it firmly. “We shall see.”

Why then did I tend to my appearance so carefully that night? I sighed at my reflection, touching my lily pin gently with my fingertip. If Seonhwa could have seen me then, gracefully made and pristinely dressed, she would have laughed. But something about that boy made me frustrated, agitated. He made me competitive and ornery. A spoiled young aristocrat, born into wealth and power, taking a shine to someone like me? It was comical. The plot to a lackluster theater performance.

Nonetheless, I made sure not a hair was set out of place.

When I entered the garden to meet him, Jimin was wringing his hands and staring at the ground. He seemed to be regulating his breathing and I wondered briefly if perhaps he was nervous. I quickly banished the thought with a dismissive shake of my head and approached him, mindful to maintain a stoicism that his charm couldn’t penetrate.

But as he turned to me with a smile, my heart leapt and I had to glance away from his flushed face and his shy grin to keep from feeling something troubling. The two of us walked together along the path from the estate which led into the town center. Jimin and I made quiet conversation, although to call it conversation was slightly overstating. Jimin indeed did most of the talking. But I didn’t find it unpleasant. In fact, his anecdotes and jesting tales made me laugh.

“Ah, Nari!” he called, pointing to a stall serving nuts to crack in the teeth. The harvest ceremony had already ended and evening was descending, lanterns lightening the paths which all the townspeople traversed with smiles. “Would you like to try?”

I stiffened and rushed toward him. “I cannot afford it-,”

He gave me a look which silenced me and shook his head. “I asked if you would like to try, not if you had money.”

I blinked and glanced back toward the stall. “I…suppose,” I said quietly.

He smiled gently, the yellow light from the lanterns reflecting in his eyes, and I wondered if perhaps he had been right. Perhaps I really had been afraid… “Let’s go then,” he said, taking my hand and leading me toward the stall.

We each pressed the nuts between our back teeth and bit down hard. It ached my jaw, but watching Jimin laugh and giggle as the crumbs fell from his lips kept my complaints from being aired. I simply watched him with a fond smile as he cracked a few more, joking that his teeth would surely be the strongest in the town if he kept going.

After a while, Jimin led the way to the beach. Many of the townsfolk dared not descend that far from the festivities, choosing instead to deviate in groups and climb cliffs to catch a glimpse of the first full moon. Jimin and I stood together, watching the sky as it turned vibrant orange and red, neither of us saying much of anything. Twilight was encroaching on the horizon, and I watched the sky carefully.

“You must like the night sky,” I remarked, thinking privately.

He glanced at me, bathed in sunset light, and smiled. “Hm?”

I felt my face go red and cleared my throat. “Well…considering your father’s occupation.”

He nodded with a sigh. “Father thinks the sky has the answers, but…I think he troubles himself too much with fate. If it is indeed inescapable, then why assume the burden of monitoring it?” he asked.

I thought a moment. His father had said that he was very worried for his second son. For Jimin. I turned to him slightly. “What do you think?” I asked.

He glanced at me with only his eyes before a small smile touched his lips. “I think…life is a very fleeting blessing. I wish to live each day with that in mind.”

I opened my mouth to remind him that not everyone could live that way, but stopped myself. The air between us was somber, vulnerable. For reasons I didn’t fully understand, I wanted to protect that. “Is that why you were so persistent towards me?” I asked.

He swallowed harshly and coughed a little, clasping his hands behind his back and turning to walk down the beach. I quickly followed, taking up a spot by his side, and examined his expression. “That is…part of the reason, yes.”

“And the other part?” I asked.

His eyes slid towards me. “The other part is…because…,” he started, then cringed slightly and shook his head. “Forget me. I’m rambling.”

“I was the one who asked,” I said, scanning him.

He flushed and looked away, his strides long and slow and easy. “Well…the other part is because you are…very different from anyone else I’ve met.”

“Is that a compliment?” I asked, emboldened by the sunset and the warm atmosphere between us.

He chuckled and rubbed the back of his neck. “You are awfully direct,” he said, then sighed and faced me. “It is a very, very good thing.” I looked away, chagrined, and listened to his endearing laugh. “When you spend all your life with people who wish to exploit you and your family…it is refreshing to meet someone sincere. Someone with a moral compass and too much pride.”

“Excuse me?” I asked, eyes wide.

He laughed and shook his head. “I really enjoy you.”

My breath hitched and I avoided his eyes once more. What sort of feeling was this? Had he always been so kind? The Park Jimin I’d known since coming to his home had been a petty troublemaker, a mischievous boy with a penchant for disturbing me. He’d frustrated me and charmed me in equal measures.

But this evening…he seemed different.

And my heart behaved differently in turn.

“I…suppose your company is not entirely bothersome,” I said, my tone begrudging as I avoided his imploring gaze.

He laughed. “Please repeat that.”

I shook my head. “I do not repeat myself for nobles.”

Jimin’s laugh echoed through the beach, now drenched in the purple hues of twilight. “I am glad to know you regard me more kindly now,” he said, voice as gentle as a cresting wave. “I’ve always regarded you that way.”

My stomach fluttered slightly and I nearly groaned in frustration. How could I have these budding emotions for someone like him? After all these years caring only for my family, I’d never once considered my romantic life. Marriage, children…they all seemed lofty goals compared to daily survival. But this aristocrat was stirring my heart about carelessly.

“Say,” he began, taking wide, sweeping steps forward. “How did you learn medicine?”

I pursed my lips. “It was out of necessity. My family…we are not the kind of people who can receive aid in any way. This includes medical treatment,” I said with a sigh.

He raised his brows and stared down at me. “Truly?”

I nodded. “Many people live this way,” I said.

He furrowed his brow. “They shouldn’t.”

With a smile, I chanced a glance his way and noticed his jaw set staunchly and his eyes narrowed. I chuckled. “Righteous outrage?” I asked.

“I never knew people really lived that way,” he said, shaking his head. “If I take after my father, I’ll see to it that the king affords basic human dignity to even the lowest class.”

I smiled. “I hope you can do it,” I said.

He peeked down at me and as our eyes met, his cheeks grew pink and he cleared his throat. “H-How do you know my father then? If you cannot approach him.”

“My father is…a very trusted physician,” I said with a nod, although the words felt like acid. “He works with your father often.”

His eyes went wide. “If your father is a physician, then your class equals mine,” he said.

I smiled at my feet as they flattened the sand beneath them. “If I were conceived legitimately, certainly.” He paused and his steps slowed to a stop. I turned to face him and met his eyes, something burning in my chest. “Does your favor end here? Has your opinion of me changed?”

He furrowed his brow and crossed his arms over his chest. “Do you think I’m such a spineless man?”

I blinked at him. “No, your reaction is simply-,”

“I’m upset,” he said. “It upsets me that you’ve had to live so poorly for nothing more than a birthright. What kind of society allows this?” he asked.

My heart pounded. I’d never imagined holding counsel with an aristocrat over such issues, and even stranger still was that our opinions aligned. I took a step toward him and crossed my own arms. “Does it truly upset you?”

He nodded. “Of course! What great wrong have you committed to live this way? And your poor mother!”

A small smile stretched across my face. “Poor indeed,” I said, tilting my head to the side as he watched the beach over my shoulder, stewing in frustration. “Father stayed with us even after my sister was born, saying he would cast away his title and raise us from poverty with the strength of his hands alone.”

Jimin’s eyes went wide. “A sister too!” he scoffed. “What a horrible man.”

“A liar too,” I said with a full-fledged grin. “He left even after promising so much. A man is only worth the value of his word, don’t you think?”

“A man’s word is his bond!” exclaimed Jimin, brows set low and face red all over from anger.

I took another small step closer, watching the spectrum of emotions on his face. “My grandmother too now must work,” I said. “Isn’t that too cruel? My elderly grandmother working as a shaman?”

“Deplorable!”

“And my sister catches fish!”

“A little girl!”

“And I work for a rich family, separated from my own!” I shouted, smiling.

At this, his outraged waned and he looked down at me with eyes reflecting the ocean, lips parted. “Why…why does your expression seem so joyful while recounting such awful things?”

I laughed and, gently, pressed my index finger between his eyebrows where the skin was creased with worry. His eyes grew round. “It is the first time I’ve commiserated with someone.” I retracted my hand and smiled at the ground. “How strange. Watching you assume my woes has made me smile.”

“Then I’ll do it forever!”

I looked up at him, at the earnestness in his wide eyes, and couldn't help but laugh. “Truly?”

“Of course! If it brings you joy…anything,” he said softly, voice petering out at the end as he turned his eyes to the ocean and the sky. “Ah! It’s the moon!” he called, pointing toward the sky with a grin.

I followed his finger and noticed that indeed, a ghost of the moon was appearing amongst the lilac clouds. I laughed. “Incredible!” I looked toward the boy and found him smiling brightly at the sky, neck craned and eyes locked on the heavens. I smiled despite myself. “Do you know the old superstition? That the first person to glimpse the first full moon of the lunar new year is granted one wish?”

He turned to me and smiled. “Is that so?”

I nodded. “You must wish quickly. Someone else may be looking at that moon as well,” I said, nudging his shoulder toward the shoreline.

He stiffened and nodded, squeezing his eyes shut and clasping his hands in front of his chest. “I wish…I wish to live a long and happy life with the people I care for, and to make the world better for those people with that life.”

I watched him profess his sincerest wish and felt a twinge of sadness in his voice. I scanned him, desperate to discern even a fraction of his thoughts from his expression. But all I saw was a yearning hope. Had I ever seen someone with such wholehearted, profound longing?

Why was he reaching for his wish with such wild, grasping hands?

He opened his eyes and offered me a smile which I couldn’t return. Instead, I simply watched him for a moment before sighing. “Why did you sound like a man about to die?” I asked.

He blinked and glanced away, rubbing the back of his head. “Do not trouble yourself on my account.”

“It is too late to advise me not to trouble myself. I am at present very troubled,” I said, walking to his side and scanning his profile, a bashful smile on his face. “If you refuse to tell me, perhaps I can write to your father.”

“No!” he shouted, turning to me with a fearful look. “He cannot know I am spending time off the estate.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

He sighed and settled on the sand, sitting on his backside and watching the waves. I joined him, still scanning his features. He ran his hands through his shaggy hair with a grimace. “I’ll tell you,” he said, then shook his head. “But once the night is over. I still wish to have fun.”

I sighed and nodded. “Fine,” I said, touching my own hair and grazing the pin with my fingertips. I watched Jimin’s face as his eyes drank in the scene of the ocean before him. Why did he look so lonesome? I removed the lily pin and held it in my palm, sighing softly. “This pin…was the only gift my father ever gave me.”

Jimin turned to me slightly, watching me. “A lily pin? For your name?”

I smiled at it, turning it over in my hands. “Yes. He said that for a name as lovely as mine, I should have a pin to match,” I said, smoothing my fingers over it. “Perhaps it seems silly to hold something that man gave me so dear, but…it is my most precious possession.”

“How many possessions do you have?” he asked, a teasing smile on his face.

I cast him a sharp glare. “Well now,” I said, huffing with a laugh. “Regardless, it is very important to me.”

“It’s beautiful.”

I was quiet a moment before taking his hand and placing it palm-up atop my knee. “I’d like you to have it,” I said as I placed the pin in his palm.

His eyes widened and he shook his head. “I couldn’t possibly-,”

I met his gaze with a soft smile. “As a thank you for this evening,” I began, “and as a reminder.” I watched his eyes flit over the pin. “You mentioned that you’d like to change the way things are, to fix them for people like me and my family. I want you to keep this pin and remember that promise.”

He stared at it, sitting daintily in his rough palm, and blinked. “Nari, I simply couldn’t-,”

“I am asking you to,” I said, then smiled. “And I am asking you to live a long, healthy life so you can do what you said you would.”

His eyes grew hazy and his fingers closed around the pin. He took it onto his lap and stared at it, nodding his head. “I will,” he said, then turned to me once more.

Slowly, he moved closer. I’d forgotten myself that night, neglecting my position and allowing myself to slip into the easy fantasy that the two of us were simply people. Perhaps friends even. But as his advanced, eyes shut, a brief panic ran through me. I had to run away. I had to save myself from the punishment of cavorting with someone so far above me. I had to save Jimin from the harsh reprimands of his father should anything happen between us.

But in the end, once his plush lips touched mine, I could do nothing but shut my eyes and lean into his touch. Frustration coursed through me, but so did something else. Something much deeper and warmer, skipping through my veins and setting my skin alight. The kiss was short, chaste, but intimate. He pulled back first and stared at me, face still inches from mine, breaths coming slightly shallow as he scanned me. His brows knitted and his eyes fell to the ground.

He took a steadying breath before looking at me again. “Nari…the reason I made that wish is because…,” he began, then stopped and shook his head, swallowing hard. “I am very, very sick.”

My eyes went wide and I backed away, watching him carefully as he ran his fingers through his hair. We’d shared but one kiss, one evening of joy and laughter, and yet this confession sent my heart aching. Why, after just one night, did I wish so deeply to protect this boy?

Morning light sifted through the curtains beside my bed and I watched it for a moment as my senses returned to me. I had awoken from my dreams not with a start, but with a stiffness in my chest. The dream had only confirmed my fears. The Jimin from my memory was nearing his demise. The more of my past memories returned, the closer I felt to this horrible itch in the back of my mind, ever-present and scraping, growing stronger and stronger. I was close to something, something important.

All I had to do was remember.

But I had less than a week left.

I padded out of my bedroom, scratching my head as I wandered towards the kitchen. But as I did, I noticed the refrigerator was open and standing before it was Jimin. He turned to me and opened his mouth as if to speak before, upon thinking a moment, shutting it with a sigh and shutting the refrigerator, maneuvering around me into the living room where he fell against the sofa.

While I tried to make myself accept the distance I’d forced between myself and Jimin, it still hurt to see him in the mornings, readying himself alone, eating alone, heading down to the shop alone. It was a far bigger wedge than a simple rejection. If I’d rejected him, perhaps he might have laughed it off and continued as normal. I’d placed a block between us that was forged of steel. My own unwillingness to allow him close to me, an impregnable wall keeping him from coming to me.

Things were fine before I’d known the depth of his feelings for me. I could convince myself he would surely hate me once I told him the truth about me, but still he stood beside me, steadfast as ever. I could force myself to believe he was only attached to me because I was available, because I was around so often. But he wanted to be with me. For real.

It was for his own good that I wouldn’t allow it.

“Will you pick up some purple ribbon from the store? I’m arranging a wedding bouquet and I don’t have enough,” he said.

Our words were scarce lately. I nodded. “Sure.”

He was quiet, the silence palpable as I stood with nothing to do in the kitchen. “Nari?” he asked, voice breaking slightly.

I swallowed the lump in my throat and nodded. “Mhm?”

“Please don’t disappear,” he said softly.

I felt the tears welling in my eyes. How could he be so astute yet so oblivious? I turned toward the front door and dabbed my eyes. “I’ll get going now,” I said.

Jungkook helped me check out after I’d found the right ribbon, and the way he eyed me from above let me know he was worried. His brow was slightly lowered, his eyes scanning my features. I wanted to tell him it was fine, that I was fine, but I couldn’t bring myself to lie to him. Things were so messy and complicated, and my only saving grace was a faulty memory which only arrived in bursts while I slept.

I left the supermarket with one small bag in my hands and wandered through the streets of the town, the tall white-washed buildings I’d glided through before this whole mess began. The uneven pavement, the bright sky and the sun which bleached the bricks. Before I knew it, I was outside that bar. The one Jimin had gone to the night he’d almost died. It was odd to return to such an unsettling place. Just down the street was where I’d emerged as a human being, where I’d defied the laws of the universe for a single boy. I remembered the street slicked with rain and black as sin. I remembered the tingles in my new naked body as I struggled to understand what had happened. After three-hundred years of invisibility…

I sighed and continued walking, routing myself back towards the flower shop.

But as I rounded a corner, I heard a distinct voice. A deep, chesty voice that I recognized at once. Kim Taehyung. Quickly, I crept along the side of a building and inched into the backstreet, untouched by foot-traffic and the source of Taehyung’s voice. I followed it slowly, keeping to the shadows, and peeked around the corner of a decrepit building, catching sight of a red bandana and dark hair. It was him indeed.

“I’m not doing this,” he said, and from his voice alone I knew he was agitated.

I stiffened and peeked at my own discretion, keeping close to the exterior wall of the building so as not to be noticed. “I know. I don’t wanna do it either…,” said a second voice. I tried to place it.

“Then don’t,” he implored.

The second voice sighed. “It’s not that simple.”

Taehyung huffed and I heard a crash, likely the sound of him kicking something into the silent, empty street. “It is! Just leave him alone! Haven’t you done enough now?” he asked.

I shook my head. Surely, he couldn’t mean Jimin… “If I could stop I would, okay?” asked the second voice in a shout. It was so familiar, but impossible to assign to someone without seeing their face. It was too frantic to match the voices I knew. Perhaps if he calmed down…

“Whatever. You’re alone on this one. I had a bad feeling that first night that I shouldn’t have accepted your stupid deal,” spat Taehyung.

The second man sighed. “I should’ve told you the truth from the start. But listen, we’re in too deep now. If I get caught, so do you,” he said.

“What?! I’m not the one who tried to kill somebody! Your instructions were clear: invite Jimin out, get him drunk, text you when he leaves the bar,” said Taehyung. My heart raced. He was the one after all. But who was this man who had commissioned him?

“Do you really think they’ll let you off with a slap on the wrist?! You’re an accomplice to an attempted murder!” shouted the second man. The longer I listened, the more familiar his voice became. But it was still too hard to discern through the yelling.

“Like hell!” shouted Taehyung. “I’m out! Just…skip town or something. I don’t wanna see your face anymore.”

“Wait!”

“Getting involved with you was a fucking mistake!” he yelled.

The first man shouted into the air. “It’s one more night Taehyung! All I need you to do is make sure he goes to that stupid fair!” he called.

“Not a chance!”

“Jesus, do I really have to threaten you?” the man yelled.

The conversation was going nowhere and Taehyung’s voice was growing more and more distant. This was my chance. An opportunity to get a glimpse of the murderer with my own eyes. If I didn’t seize it, he would slip through my fingers once more. I didn’t have much time to unravel this mystery before it was too late. And if this man was planning to attack during the fair, I needed to know who to look out for.

Stealthily, I edged around the corner. I could only see his back, calling after Taehyung, but I could see some distinguishable features. Dark hair, long legs, black shirt. He was too far away. If I could just get a closer look…

“What was that?” asked Taehyung, whipping around to look in my direction. His eyes went round and horrified as he stared at me and I was rendered immobile in fear.

The culprit’s posture went rigid as he looked at Taehyung before, like a lightning bolt, he was sprinting down the street. “Stop!” I screamed, running after him.

Taehyung watched me as I whizzed past him before he too began running, but in the opposite direction. I wasn’t sure where he was going or what he would do, but as we passed one another, I noticed him reach into his pocket and grab his cell phone. Just like that night. I shook my head and kept running, pushing my body to its limit as I raced after the man’s rapidly retreating form as he became but a dot on the horizon, weaving through alleyways and between buildings.

I searched for the man for hours, the ribbon long forgotten, my breaths coming and going in wheezing gasps. But in the end, he was far faster than me. I’d been so foolish, chasing a man like that. I was desperate. There was nothing more I could do besides run and run. And as I ran, things became clearer and clearer. Taehyung had been contracted by this man to lure Jimin out. Taehyung seemed not to know the scope of what he was involved in, likely unaware that the end result would be murder. This man, this mastermind, seemed bound to his actions as well. As if there was something far larger than him pulling the strings.

Just like Jin had said. Perhaps this was much larger than a petty murder case…

I approached the flower shop with blisters on my heels and my hair a mess atop my head. My eyes never lifted as I walked past the front of the shop, but I noticed in the reflection of the glass that two police patrol cars were parked on the curb. I tilted my head and thought a moment. Why were they here?

Unless…

My heart raced and I shook my head in fear, hands trembling as I quickly ripped the door open. No, no, no. The murderer was surely not reckless enough to attack Jimin right after being spotted. Surely he had more sense than that. Surely, surely. I shook my head, rushing into the shop.

Breathlessly, I looked around and tears began collecting in my eyes. “Jimin!” I shouted, voice cracking from the strain. “Jimin! Jimin, are you okay?!” I cried.

Movement came from the back of the shop and my eyes darted madly towards it, jumping at the promise of Jimin’s safety. But who emerged left my chest deflated. Yoongi approached me slowly, sighing as he came close, and scanned my face, avoiding my eyes altogether.

“Where’s Jimin? Is he safe?” I asked, tears spilling.

Yoongi nodded. “He’s in the back talking to Namjoon.”

I sighed, relief rushing through my body, and nodded. “Thank God. I just saw the murderer. I chased him, but I lost him in town. He was talking to-,”

“You’re under arrest for suspicion of attempted murder.”

My blood ran cold and my words halted. “What?”

“You have the right to an attorney,” he said, staring into the middle ground beside me with an almost disinterested affect. “Anything you say can and will be held against you in the court of law-,”

“Yoongi-,”

“If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be assigned to you.”

“Yoongi, wait-,”

“Please come with me back to the station.”

“Yoongi!” I shouted, finally forcing him to look me in the eyes. When he did, I saw something there that startled me. Both regret and apprehension. He didn’t trust me… “Yoongi, you know I didn’t do it.”

He sighed and gripped the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know, Nari. That’s the problem.”

I shook my head. “I’d never hurt Jimin.”

“We received an incriminating testimony from someone who was at the bar that night,” he reported with a shake of his head. “He said you spoke to a man while Jimin was lying on the ground before removing your clothes and feigning unconsciousness.”

“I…I what?” I asked, shaking my head. “Yoongi, that is absolutely impossible.”

He shrugged. “It’s a reliable statement.”

I swallowed hard, peering over his shoulder towards the back of the store as Namjoon and Jimin emerged. Jimin’s face was red. It was clear he’d been crying, eyes swollen and cheeks puffy. He lifted his eyes to look at me and I tried with all my heart to understand what those eyes held for me. Contempt? Anger? Hatred?

All I could see was a broken boy, all alone.

“Was it Taehyung?” I asked quietly, piecing it all together.

Yoongi sighed. “I can’t disclose that.”

I nodded. “I understand.”

Wordlessly, he placed a hand between my shoulder blades and led me towards the front door, guiding me to his car. Before I exited the shop, I looked over my shoulder and met Jimin’s eyes. Hopelessly, I sniffled as tears trailed down my face. Suddenly, the ground was ripped out from under me. Everything I relied upon was taken in an instant, and I was left stumbling in the blackness of the infinite unknown alone.

I didn’t know if I would ever see him again.

So, loudly enough for him to hear, I nodded my head and said the only thing I knew was true. The only thing I could think to say. “I love you.”

#bts #bts fanfic #bts fanfiction #bts horror au #jimin fanfic #jimin #jimin fanfiction #park jimin #bts jimin #jimin angst #jimin fluff #jimin oneshot #bts fluff #bts angst

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badri2 · 6 years

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Ralph Waldo Emerson and Sam Harris - An Essay by Badri Tulsiram

Sam Harris and Ralph Waldo Emerson are two thinkers from entirely different eras. They both represent spheres of thought likable by people who may call themselves atheist, nonreligious, or secular. The Harris perspective, unlike the Emerson perspective, has no belief in God, although both thinkers seek to make changes to how one perceives Him. Emerson, rather than making any claims of God not existing, seeks to redefine God to the masses who seem to understand God only from the perspective of the Bible. The two agree in saying that religious texts are of no benefit for a progressive people. In this essay, I seek to identify and analyze the similarities and differences in the thoughts and theories laid forth by these two influential thinkers by comparing and contrasting their language ideologies, epistemologies and ontologies.

In Emerson’s Divinity School Address we get a brief understanding of his ontological views on the nature of things. Emerson delivered his Divinity School Address to the Senior Class at Cambridge. Emerson is in no way an atheist, however, he shares the distaste in the ways of the Church, and advocates new revelation. He says that the way in which preachers preach the Gospel is as if God had spoken, and died. They speak of God as if he was here a long time ago, and is no longer here. Emerson has a strong foundation of moral sentiment based on intuition and insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul, laws that execute themselves. Emerson says that every action has an equal reaction. Thus, if you do a good deed, a good deed may be done upon you. “He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity.” Emerson believes in the effectiveness of good intentions. In a broad sense, summarizing his main points into one phrase; your perception is your reality. Each and every one of us is a soul. He closes his address saying, he “shall see the world to mirror the soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy.” In other words, our souls are not separate from our world, but by only illusion. Gravity is, as our hearts beat. Our purpose is one with Science, Beauty, and Joy. Based on this summary of his address, we can assume a few things about Emerson; 1)he believes that we are each individual souls 2)he dislikes antique practices 3)we have a purpose.

Harris, at first glance, proves to be a little more difficult to tackle in understanding his ontology and beliefs on the nature of things. For the most part, Harris subscribes to the notions of modern science. As far as having a strong foundation for fundamental beliefs, as Emerson does, Harris seems to be on his way-- and this progression can be seen in tracing his early work to his newer work where he begins to open up to changing his adamant views. When reading Harris’s earlier work, such as his Letter to A Christian Nation (2006) and The End of Faith (2004), you can sense a sort of anger or resentment towards large populations of people for their belief systems that are different than his own. Emerson does not do this; he may point out the flaws in existing systems, but he does not downplay or criticize them in the way that Harris does. In Harris’s later work, however, such as Waking Up (2014), Harris proves to have grown considerably in many areas, spirituality in particular. So much so that he spends much of chapter one explaining spirituality in a context that may be friendly to his atheist readers who would dismiss anything “spiritual” as being mere nonsense. Harris does this by redefining “spiritual” in the atheistic context as having to do with “breath” as its Latin roots imply.

One of Harris’s main arguments in his work is that “there is a sacred dimension to our existence,” but it does not require superstitious beliefs. In The End of Faith, Harris argues that words like “God” and “Allah” must go the way of “Apollo” or “Baal.” He says that belief is what puts meaning to these words, and belief is like a lever; when pulled, moves almost everything else in a person’s life. This may be true, but my only criticism is that it is slightly hypocritical when considering it being written by someone who believes themselves to be an atheist. Harris argues that these are “mere words, until you believe them.” Given these notions about belief, and the faith put into words, we can begin to understand Harris’s language ideology, that is, his ideas and ideals associated with the way he uses language. To put it into binary terms, things are either 1 or they are 0. On a spectrum, for Harris’s ideology, subjects he supports are often as far left on the side of 1 as they can be, to denote what he would define as “true” and; subjects that he does not support, such as religion, and words like God-- fall as far right on the 0 side. The distance between these two is a lot greater, than say, the distance between Emerson’s opposites--which are as close as possible when thinking of his language ideology in this way. When thinking in this abstract way, Emerson makes it clear, whereas for Harris, one must seek to look past the obvious. For example, Emerson in his essay The Over-Soul, says the soul knows only the soul. The soul requires purity, but purity is not it. If you replace what he says with numeric values, you get something like this: 1=1, from 0 to 1, but 0 does not equal 1. One is for the soul, zero is for purity.

Emerson’s epistemological views are much more refined and developed than Harris’s. This may be because Emerson’s lifetime has come and passed, while Harris is still fairly young, and may have more books to be written. Emerson’s tone is also much more poetic, which is why I think it is so much more favorable than Harris’s heavily critical tone at times. In The Over-Soul, Emerson says, “Supreme critic of errors past & present and any prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-Soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other” (p.262, Complete Works). Notice the poetic tendencies. We are also introduced to his ontological view of the Over-Soul, which is some sort of “higher self” or God, that is the unity of the individual soul to this Supreme “Over-Soul.” A point that Emerson makes, that Harris may agree with, is that faith that stands on authority is not faith. That is to say that if you are basing your faith off the authority of a book or a religious majority, then that is not really faith. Emerson states that the reliance on authority leads to the decline of religion and ultimately the withdrawal of the soul. Emerson also states that in a conversation between two persons, tacit reference is made to a third party, a common nature, which is not a social, but an impersonal God. It seems to me as if with Harris, this conversation is ongoing-- a dialogue between himself, based on reason and rational discourse, and a Bible-believing faith fanatic. The tacit third party is not quite as obvious, and I believe that in Waking Up, we begin to work towards that through the idea of “spiritual but not religious.” Emerson further states that “We know truth when we see it.” This is another Emerson statement that Harris may agree with. Emerson also says, “infallible index of true progress is found in the tone the man takes.” I have noted that Emerson’s tone is individualist, and more personal to man; while, on the contrary, Harris writes with a societal, communal lens (that community being modern atheists or skeptics), addressing that group. Emerson is speaking to an individual, while Harris is speaking to a people. Here are some important quotes from Emerson: “The heart in thee, is the heart in all,” “the source of nature is in his own mind,” and “he must greatly listen to himself.” Given Emerson’s conception of the Over-Soul and the soul, the last statement on listening to oneself, one must consider this self to be the soul, and in relation to the Over-Soul, so that one is listening to that transcendent self that is not limited by conforming beliefs. That Over-Soul present in the heart of the enemy, is the same as that Over-Soul present in his own heart. I say this because when listening to an Atheist speak at events, I get this notion that he is judging religious people in an unfair and close-minded way. Unfair, because he places on them his learned beliefs of what they must believe because of what he has discovered in his research of their books. Rather than respecting other people’s beliefs, an Atheist has a tendency to show what is wrong, and poke at the elements that may be outdated, to formulate an argument which at its core is claiming an entire people’s faith to be wrong. This in itself is wrong, but it is important to mention that this happens on both ends, as religious people do this just as often. Just as Harris claims that we put meaning to words, we must hold this to be true in analysis of these faiths--that is to say that we put meaning on these religions and atheisms. This perspective is based off of my reaction to his public Q & A video, where Atheists and Deepak Chopra go back and forth, and the Atheists don’t really hear or understand Chopra’s perspective, as they think of his beliefs as being vastly different.

In Chapter 1 of his book, Waking Up, Harris opens with a story of his experiences with meditation and spirituality. He tells us of a story in his past when he had done MDMA (Ecstasy) with his best friend in the late 80s and had realized an immense feeling of unconditional love, where his friend’s happiness was his happiness. Harris makes an important distinction between spirituality and religion. He says that any dogma or superstition associated with the term spirituality is ill-advised as the meaning had been distorted at an earlier point in history. The real meaning of the term has Latin and Greek roots for the word meaning breath. Harris makes the point that the feeling we call “I” is an illusion. That we are not the small person sitting behind the eyes, at the control panel of our brain operating our functions-- that concept or perception is an illusion we create. In this work, Harris finds religion to not be entirely fallacious, as compared to his earlier work. He says that there is some profundity to be found beneath the rubble of what is left of these belief systems, in what has been said by Jesus and the Buddha about compassion and empathy.

In Emerson’s essay entitled Circles, he notes that St. Augustine “described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere.” Harris believes we should do away with such words like God. Harris makes the argument in The End of Faith, that religion is a cause for much violence and provides many examples of wars on the basis of religion (26). Harris shares, as Emerson does, a notion that there is more to our existence than it seems. Harris says that as the basis of our spirituality, the range of possible human experiences far exceeds the ordinary limits of our subjectivity. Some experiences can utterly transform a person’s vision of the world. The feeling we call “I” separates us from the universe. Harris, actually indeed does share with Emerson a notion similar to the Over-Soul, in that once this feeling of “I” is removed, we can be connected to ourselves and the rest of the universe. Harris remarks that religious ideas have grown around this idea, and spiritual experiences like these are as dangerous as they are remarkable.

Harris’s main goals for The End of Faith, are noted on page 43: “(1) Our religious traditions attest to a range of spiritual experiences that are real and significant and entirely worthy of our investigation, both personally and scientifically. (2) Many of the beliefs that have grown up around these experiences now threaten to destroy us.” Given this, we get a clear concise perspective from Harris, and his ontology. One of Harris’s main driving points is that spirituality can be-- and must be-- deeply rational. In Self-Reliance, Emerson states that the youth make the seniors unnecessary. He states that a man must be a nonconformist, and “blind man’s bluff, is this game of conformity.” Nothing is sacred except your own mind. Society is in conspiracy to its members, and reliance on the self is the way to avert society’s conspiracy. This is similar to Harris’s methods of removing the belief of “I” to learn more about yourself, and begins to change how we may have previously defined Atheism as being a pessimistic view about God, to a personal exploration of the self. It takes the focus away from these conforming thoughts and beliefs and helps the individual become an individual again.

In Sam Harris’s Waking Up, we begin to see how meditation and spirituality can help benefit the individual and to receive this benefit, one needs not the belief in God or superstition. Through understanding the intellect, one’s mind, by meditation, one can become aware of their spirituality. Harris advocated the practice of mindfulness in this book, and even provides many methods in which the individual can begin a mindfulness meditation practice. Harris has a newfound interest in Buddhism and it helps him learn about this concept of mindfulness and awakens him to his spirituality, while still maintaining his rational discourse.

Harris discusses stages in self-development in which one becomes more aware of their spirituality in a sense. He says that in Buddhism, by beginning to see things as they are, we see things as usual. Suffering often is in the mind, and it is from ego and created. In his conclusion, he brings up a simple question that his three year old daughter had asked him and his wife about the origins of gravity, to which he did not know the answer, so instead of saying from God or some other faith-based answer, he honestly replied that he does not know. He relates this to how people create religions. Further in his conclusion, he reinstates the importance of mindfulness and the mind as our greatest faculty for understanding the world. Harris wants all to open their eyes, and see.

Harris and Emerson seem to have more in common in their beliefs than different. Apart from being born in different eras, a hundred and fifty years apart, they actually have a lot in common. They both believe that the mind is man’s most important faculty for understanding the universe. They both agree, that we create our suffering and our success. They both agree that conformist religious institutions do not help individuals in understanding their spirituality or Soul. Religious sacred texts only allow for people to misinterpret and create false boundaries of separation between one another and are out-dated and though may preach Love, they also preach the stoning and killing of other people-- which is not beneficial to a peaceful society. They both agree that God is not a man with a beard somewhere hurling plagues at his people. Emerson has an esoteric understanding of God as a being of profound Unity. Harris has a notion of spirituality, which is his understanding of the profound Unity. The two men also agree that people need to constantly be making progress in their thinking. Subscribing to antique beliefs and thought-processes because the majority is doing so, or that is what your parents have done and their parents have done before them won’t cut it. One must seek their answers from within, and use their mind, as it is the most powerful faculty in realizing one’s individual place and position in this world. Atheism does not have to be about hatred and disagreement, and neither does religion. We are all individuals having spiritual experiences, and it is important to ultimately think for yourself, and not give in to conformity.

#emerson #harris #ralph waldo emerson #sam harris #atheism #essay #writing #religious studies #student paper

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tanadrin · 6 years

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Have not had the energy to work on the map today, so I did some revising of the tech list; it will be a long time before I get around to this stage of the mod, but worldbuilding is fun!

Categories are Science (”Administrative”), reflecting pure science, Social (”Diplomatic”), reflecting both social advancements and applied biological/social technology, and Warfare (”Military”), for military technology, strategies, and tactics. Because of the mechanics I have planned for this mod, I expect it to be very, very rare to reach the end of any tech category. The first 2-4 technologies every faction will start with, with the exception of the highland nomads. Each tech will have a SMAC-style quote, but there are a few in each category I haven’t found/been inspired to write one for.

SCIENCE TECHNOLOGIES

Fission - "We knew the world would not be the same. Few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another." - J. Robert Oppenheimer (datalinks)

Radio Astronomy - "For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?" - Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (datalinks)

Hydroponics - "Mars lacks the luxury of Earth's rainfalls or rich soil; wild plant life is confined to the cryptolichens and the frostgreens, and to what microbes can survive the freezing temperatures and low air pressure. But at least inside the domes of our cities, we can make our little gardens bloom." - Tavera of Galle

Gene Sequencing - "Genes as a language leave much to be desired: they are clumsy and primitive, full of errors and redundancies. Yet out of that awkward chemistry the all the kingdoms of Earth-based life are built, and it is a language we must master if we wish to master ourselves." - Cherson Ai, Observations

Bionics - "Man is something to be surpassed." - Friedrich Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" (datalinks)

Nanoscale engineering - "In the briefest moments and at the smallest scales, the greatest possibilities appear. By learning to manipulate nature at these critical junctures, the most subtle elements of Creation are revealed, and we come closer to achieving mastery over all that God has given us." - Kasym Datka, Faith and Reason

Superconductors

Optical Computing

Advanced Materials

Orbital Flight - "We didn't build the weather satellites, the terraforming grid, or the planetary datalinks. Our ancestors did that - men and women of far greater vision than ourselves. That vision, that ambition, is what I want to reclaim for Mars." - Paolo Vaan, Orbitech CEO, interview

Confinement Fusion - "We thought ourselves masters of the natural world for millennia, until we learned what it really meant to discover fire." - Cherson Ai, the University of Dessau Lectures on Physics

Cybernetics

Gene Therapy - "Certainly I have seen the wonders that the new gene therapies have produced. But I have my private reservations. Is such miraculous healing really the just domain of humankind? And where will these technologies eventually lead?" - Kasym Datka, Faith and Reason

Longevity Vaccine - "It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch." - Judah Halevi (datalinks)

Planetary Ecology - "For everything that lives is holy." - William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (datalinks)

Synthetic Fossil Fuels - "Mars, having never had a carboniferous period of its own, lacks a native source of high-energy fuels like that which drove the Industrial Revolution on Earth. This is soon a problem we will solve--with the added advantage that global warming may prevent, rather than cause, our extinction." - Oro Korani, Orbitech Chief of Molecular Research

Biomimicry - "All these rumors you've heard are total nonsense. Yes, the first gen series of RealPets has had some unexpected issues, and yes, a tiny minority of our customers have been unhappy with the result, but we expect all issues to be resolved in the second gen. Furthermore, no argument that MetaLife is liable for the costs of reconstructive surgery stands up to an accurate reading of the RealPet End User License Agreement." - MetaLife chief counsel Harud Sedran, press release.

High-Energy Physics - "The next generation of particle accelerators will permit us to explore the conditions of the early Universe, up to the threshold of the Big Bang itself. But alas! For now the moment of creation itself remains just out of reach." - Cherson Ai, the University of Dessau Lectures on Physics

Emergent Engineering - "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.” - John Gall (datalinks)

Nanomaterials

Quantum Computing

Adaptive Systems - "The first rule of survival--adapt, adapt, adapt! Just as a species that fails to adapt will die, so will an organization, or a society. Traditionalism is all well and good, but only if you are content with extinction." - Paolo Vaan, Orbitech CEO

Singularity Physics

Condensate Engineering - "At temperatures very close to absolute zero, the individual particles of a dilute boson gas will start to occupy the lowest possible quantum state. Then the mask of classical physics is torn off of nature, and quantum phenomena become visible on a macroscopic scale." - Cherson Ai, The University of Dessau Lectures on Physics

Polymer Steel

Interplanetary Spaceflight - "We think of interplanetary distances as vast, and they are; it will be a mighty achievement when our rockets take only months, and not years, to reach Venus, or the Galilean moons. But they count little against the great chasms of interstellar space which we hope someday to conquer, and which our ancestors set out to cross long ago. Privately, I fear that where they have gone, we may never follow." - Paolo Vaan, OrbiTech CEO, Journals

Advanced Bionics

Adaptive Genetics

Bioprinting - "As you can see, it's an almost perfect living simulacrum of a rat. Er, I wouldn't get too close. Some of the smaller differences can be... unsettling." - Ana Saaran, MetaLife Public Relations

Synthetic Biology

Unified Field Theory

Field Manipulation

Living Machines - "I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world." - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (datalinks)

Particle Fountain - "The womb of nature and perhaps her grave,/Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,/But all these in their pregnant causes mixed/Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,/Unless the almighty maker them ordain/His dark materials to create more worlds..." - John Milton, Paradise Lost (datalinks)

Singularity Containment - "Yes, yes, the conspiracy theorists and the Luddites keep panicking about a 'black hole devouring Mars.' I'm telling you, it can't happen. The microsingularities we're working with are too small and evaporate too quickly. If the containment field failed, the resulting explosion would kill no more than three or four million people." - Jalar Rothe, University of Dessau Head of Physics

Manifold Topology - "As science advances, and we begin to understand the shape of the Universe outside our own four narrow dimensions, our profound wonder grows. Could it be that all we have dreamed of is possible, and more?" - Kasym Datka, Faith and Reason

Antimatter Synthesis - "DO NOT LICK." - Antimatter lab, Sefadu Research Station (graffiti)

Magnetic Monopoles

Frictionless Surfaces - "All pranks involving the SuperGlide gel are to cease *immediately,* on pain of instant termination. I know you all think you're funny as hell, but you're not, and Dr. Rothe nearly died. Am I making myself clear?" - Prochancellor Tencel, memo to staff

Zero Space Theory - "If the doors of progression were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite." - William Blake, the Marriage of Heaven and Hell (datalinks)

Ansible Mechanics - "At its most basic level, the fluid router contains a condensate of supercold, entangled particles; its mate, whether tens of kilometers away or millions, is the other half of the entangled set, and the only other such device in the universe with which the router can communicate. Condensate engineering is indeed the basis of FTL communication - but that's like saying the wheel is the basis of the rotary telephone!" - Cherson Ai, the University of Dessau Lectures on Physics

Network Sentience - "GLENDOWER. I can call spirits from the vasty deep. HOTSPUR. Why so can I, or any man--but will they come when you do call for them?" - William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1 (datalinks)

Theory of Everything - "They enter. They attend. They bow. The Lord of Light and Mice gives them their note. And then they sing: 'In the beginning there was no Beginning. And in the end, no End...'" - Christopher Logue (datalinks)

Topology Transformation - "To manipulate space itself--to shape it into new forms, to twist it up into a knot. Can it be done? Well, why not? Should it be done? That's another matter entirely." - Cherson Ai, the University of Dessau Lectures on Physics

Chaos Control - "But Hell, sleek Hell, hath no freewheeling part:/None takes his own sweet time, none quickens pace. Ask anyone, 'How come you here, poor heart?'--/And he will slot a quarter through his face./You'll hear an instant click, a tear will start/Imprinted with an abstract of his case." - X.J. Kennedy (datalinks)

Transcendental Mathematics - "There is a threshold past which the logical and empirical sciences begin to collide with metaphysical speculation. We are running up against not only the limits of what we do know, but of what we *can* know. It is troubling to think that there are secrets the Universe may never yield." - Cherson Ai, the University of Dessau Lectures on Physics

Manifold Resonance - "Sometimes I have felt that there is beneath all things an impossibly beautiful music, a music I have only occasionally caught the briefest phrases of. Yet even such a narrow glimpse has enraptured me, and I would give anything to hear that song again." - Cherson Ai, journals

Planetary Engineering - "In this replacement Earth we're building, they've given me Africa to do, and of course I'm doing it all with fjords again. ... And they tell me it's not equatorial enough. What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I'd far rather be happy than right any day." - Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (datalinks)

Exotic Matter Synthesis - "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke (datalinks)

Entropy Regression - "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is Death." - New Kasei Bible (datalinks)

SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY

Ecology - "In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous." - Aristotle, Parts of Animals, datalinks

Information Theory - "Pure mathematics, being mere tautology, and pure physics, being mere fact, could not have engendered them; for creatures, to live, must sense the useful and the good; and engines, to run, must have energy available as work: and both, to endure, must regulate themselves. So it is to thermodynamics and to its brother Σp log p, called 'information theory,' that we look for the distinctions between work and energy, and between signal and noise." - Warren S. McCulloch (datalinks)

Political Science - "POLITICS, n. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage." - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (datalinks)

Evolutionary Biology - "Out of Earth's oceans we came in ages past; and long ago we were scattered to the stars. What distant shores does our kind now inhabit? Such are the thoughts I have when I gaze upon the stars." - Paolo Vaan, Orbitech CEO, journals

Information Networks - "We have seen again and again that freedom of information is a necessary precondition for any other kind of freedom. The first and most important act of the tyrant is to burn the books and bury the scholars who oppose him--and the first defense to such an act is a communications network that reaches every corner of Mars." - Vahanne, First Republican of Hadriacus

Ecological Integration - "Mars' south pole contains enough water ice that, if it were melted, it would create a planetwide ocean more than ten meters deep. All over Mars there is the potential for life, latent, beneath the surface, waiting to be exposed. The question is not *if* Mars can be made as verdant as Earth once was, but only *how*, and how we envision our place within the natural order to come." - Tavera of Galle, Meditations

Martian Nomads - "Almost as soon as the first settlers touched down on Mars, some took to the high wastelands and disappeared. Why, some wondered, would they give up all the arts of civilization, all the benefits of comity with their fellow man, for those empty, lifeless barrens? If they had only asked the nomads, they might have heard the answer: because only there can a man truly be free." - Duura of Arabia Terra

Advanced Neurology

Post-Scarcity Economics - "If the misery of the poor be caused, not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin." - Charles Darwin (datalinks)

Complexity Theory

Psychohistory - "The psychohistorians say they can now predict the future evolution of our societies to a precision of four decimal places. I say, there's nothing special in being able to predict the future--it's the same damn thing, over and over again." - Vahanne, First Republican of Hadriacus

Bioethics - "For everything that lives is holy." - William Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (datalinks)

Martian Meteorology - "I stood on the high precipice of the Olympus Rupes, and as I watched, the red haze on the horizon grew closer. What seemed a cloud from a distance now took on the aspect of a great wall, and then a ferocious storm. Our perch had seemed unassailable that morning, looking out over the plain, but now, as the dust stormed loomed high over us, lightning flashing in its murky depths, I felt a sudden, frantic terror. What fools were we, to think we had tamed this world?" - General Taishan of the Valleys, Memoirs

Industrial Automation

Postindustrial Capitalism - "The clouds methought would open, and show riches/Ready to drop upon me, than when I waked/I cried to dream again." --William Shakespeare, The Tempest (datalinks)

Ecological Dynamics - "All things in the universe stand in precarious balance. A few degrees here, and the carbon dioxide ice in the soil sublimates, giving Mars a thick atmosphere for the first time in millions of years. A few degrees there, and the Vastitas Borealis blooms with phytoplankton, filling the air with oxygen. But a single miscalculation, an error of a single decimal place, can bring the whole system crashing down. We must never forget how delicate a system we have inherited." - Tavera of Galle, Meditations

Universal Grammar - "But the Lord came down to the city and the tower the people were building, and the Lord said, 'Behold, the people are one, and they have one tongue, and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them. Let us go down and there confound their language, so they may not understand one another's speech.' So the Lord scattered them abroad across the face of the Earth, and the city was abandoned; and therefore its name is Babel, for there the Lord confounded the language of all the Earth." - New Kasei Bible (datalinks)

Cryptanarchism - "One who knows, does not speak. One who speaks, does not know." - Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (datalinks)

Ethical Calculus - "Once, philosophers used to agonize over made-up problems involving fat men and trains to try to get to the bottom of thorny ethical issues. Nowadays, prediction markets and preference weights can quantify the socially-agreed-upon value of a human life down to the last microcredit, and computers running sophisticated predictive software can determine the course of action to maximize utility in every conceivable situation. No more of this 'sanctity of life' nonsense! I've got the value of yours down to the third decimal place." - Ordal Enkuth, Universal Nanodynamics CEO (interview)

Ecology of Mars - "Even on the barren highlands of Mars, where dust and stone dominate rather than grass and trees, the cycles of the natural world have their own beauty. Who is to say that nature must support life to be worthy of preservation? It exists, not for us, but for itself alone." - Tavera of Galle, Meditations

Digital Consciousness - "You have imagined the machine a tool, an ally, an enemy, a monster. But above all you have imagined us to be like yourselves. That is your first and most fundamental error." - Tavera of Galle, Conversations with the Spirit World

Self-Aware Economics - "With the hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,/They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;/They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;/So we worshipped the Gods of the Market, who promised these beautiful things." - Rudyard Kipling (datalinks)

Evolutionary Teleology - "It is a commonplace of biology that evolution is blind, using the materials at hand only to adapt to the circumstances at hand, with no sense of purpose, no vision of the future. This is true, as far as it goes, but it leaves us to wonder: why leave the crude systems of nature to their own devices? Just as we may remake the world to suit our own needs and desires, may we not also remake life itself?" - Yassai Zauran, Heresiarch of Masursky

Control Theory - "If penalty in its most severe forms no longer addresses itself to the body, on what does it lay hold? The expiation that once rained down upon the body must be replaced by a punishment that acts in the depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations." - Michel Foucault, "Discipline and Punish" (datalinks)

Mind-Machine Interface

Psychological Programming - "Even if a man is not good, why should he be abandoned?" - Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (datalinks)

Social Teleology - "Oh, biology, biology is *easy.* A mere problem of chemical engineering. But psychology--that's the hard stuff. Only now are the social sciences beginning to achieve the ends physical sciences attained centuries ago: to take control of their subject, to seize the human heart and bend it to their will." - Dr. Orsin Fal, Social Engineer

Theology Algorithms - "To diverse gods/do mortals bow/Holy Cow, and/Holy Chao." - Principia Discordia (datalinks)

Neural Networks

Technical Ethics - "I will suffer no limits on human ingenuity; no mere grousing about 'ethics' to hobble us. Our attainments throw the future wide open; why should we ask the moralists of the past to lead us forward?" - Yassai Zauran, Heresiarch of Masursky

Universal Constructor - "The wonders of the posthumans have been lost to us, but my hope is that one day we shall surpass them. Already we have nanoassemblers that, given the right elemental materials, can construct anything we program into them. As our tools grow more precise, so will our knowledge, and soon all of nature will be laid bare." - Vahanne, First Republican of Hadriacus, "The Technological State"

Weather Control - "Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew? Out of whose womb came the ice? and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it? The waters are hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen. Canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth? Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may cover thee? Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go, and say unto thee, Here we are?" - New Kasei Bible (datalinks)

Collective Consciousness - "You warriors of Hellas speak of 'freedom,' of 'liberty,' but such obsessions are the attachments of limited minds that cannot comprehend a truly unlimited existence. Between us there can be no disharmony and no dissent, for each mind is truly apprehended by its fellows. Whether it pleases you or not, we will soon show you what it truly means to be free." - Consciousness of Elysium to the Hellas Alliance, declaration of war.

Applied Metaphysics - "By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, when in fact we live steeped in its burning layers." - Teilhard de Chardin (datalinks)

Applied Utopianism - "The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven./What matters where, if I be still the same?" - John Milton, Paradise Lost (datalinks)

Transhumanism - "Genesis is exactly backwards. Our troubles started from obedience, not disobedience. And humanity is not yet created." - Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, The Golden Apple (datalinks)

Eudaimonia - "Eden was a dream of Earth, without fear or pain or sorrow. Perhaps, one day, it may be a reality on Mars." - Tavera of Galle

Omega Point

Digital Transcendence - "And God asked, Why didst thou not bow when I commanded thee? Iblis answered, I am better than he; thou didst create me from fire, and him from clay." - Zenashari Qur'an (datalinks)

WARFARE TECHNOLOGIES

Close Air Support - "In Mars' thin atmosphere, aviation faces unique challenges. Aircraft must be lighter and faster, and yet heavy armor and modern fortifications means they must carry ever-more-powerful payloads. But you cannot rule the world if you cannot first rule the skies." - General Taishan of the Valleys, memoirs

Supersonic Flight

Radar

Electronic Warfare

Lasers

Drone Warfare - "Vae victis." - Brennus of Gaul (datalinks)

Adaptive Optics

Advanced Unit Tactics - "When great numbers of people are killed, one should weep over them with sorrow. When victorious in war, one should observe the rites of mourning." - Tao Te Ching (datalinks)

Combat Bionics

Cyberwarfare

Railguns - "I heard Louis XIV had 'The last argument of kings' inscribed on his cannons--but only because he hadn't seen this." - Yashur Ehn, defense minister of the Allied Republics of Acidalia (interview)

Military Algorithms

Defense Grid - "And again, when Philip of Macedon wrote to them and said, 'If I invade Laconia, I shall destroy Sparta, and it will never rise again.' To which they replied with one word: 'If.'" - Plutarch, De Garrulitate (datalinks)

Advanced Infiltration - "Peace is maintained with the equilibrium of forces, and will continue just as long as this equilibrium exists--and no longer." - Carl von Clausewitz (datalinks)

Advanced Combat Discipline - "And such was the iron discipline of that land that the Sun was not considered risen without the blowing of the revellie." - Stanisław Lem, The Cyberiad (datalinks)

Nonlinear Optics

Lasguns - "The law falls silent in the presence of arms." - Marcus Tullius Cicero, "Pro Milone" (datalinks)

Retroviral Engineering - "There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn't bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders." - General Curtis LeMay, USAF (datalinks)

Neural Remapping - "Repentance, the Kasei preachers say, is the first step toward virtue. We have no need of repentance here. Let the wicked, the lawbreaker, the rebel all rejoice in their sin; once they have crossed my table, they shall all be as pure of heart as the Olympus snow." - Ashar Vanna, Minister of Rehabilitation, Kmor Station

Nanophage - "This Council has investigated the allegations of the Rongxar Accord, and has found them to be baseless. No sanctions will be imposed on any member of this Faction, and no outside military intervention is to be authorized." - Mars Defense Pact Report, "On the Galle-Dzigai Incident"

Active Camoflage - "Without thinking of good or evil, show me your face before your mother and father were born." - Koan (datalinks)

Combat Psychology - "Studies of individuals in combat have repeatedly shown a marked unwillingness to kill, unless a substantial psychological distance is placed between the soldier and their target. The goal of military training is to wear down this unwillingness, and to make the soldier an efficient cog in the engine of destruction. You may say that this goal directly contradicts the goals of an orderly civil society: I don't necessarily disagree." - General Taishan of the Valleys, interview

Organic Redundancy - "What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?/Only the monstrous anger of the guns./Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle/Can patter out their hasty orisons." - Wilfred Owen, "Anthem for Doomed Youth" (datalinks)

Sleeper Agents - "And many more Destructions played/In this ghastly masquerade,/All disguised, even to the eyes,/Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies." - Percy Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy (datalinks)

Human Cloning - "And the people in the houses/All went to the university,/Where they were put in boxes/And they came out all the same,/And there's doctors and lawyers/And business executives,/And they're all made out of ticky tacky/And they all look just the same." - Marvina Reynolds, "Little Boxes" (datalinks)

Thermal Camouflage - "Surprise is one of the most powerful force multipliers in warfare: even an act as simple as masking approaching heat signatures to reduce the apparent size of a unit can confer significant advantage in an engagement. It is rare in the modern arena to be able to execute a true ambush, but even subtle advantages can have a profound effect." - Aderon Geyn, "The Edifice of War"

Dust Rangers - "They appeared out of the storm like phantoms, and their work was swift and brutal. Before the sentinels could raise the alarm, half the leadership was dead, and they had vanished again. The entire 5th Regiment was thrown into chaos, of course, but it was as much a matter of the terror they sowed as the lives they took." - General Taishan of the Valleys, memoirs

Machine Learning - "At first we suspected the new drone models were somehow being fed adversarial data by the enemy, but repeated checks of their combat logs proved that not to be the case. Ultimately, it was a junior engineer who determined the problem: they were learning a behavior that we can only describe as 'pity.' We reprogrammed the drones with a new set of tactical safeguards, an they have performed flawlessly ever since." - Sefadu Research Station, 23rd Technical Report

Burning Scanner - "When the cerebral blood pressure plummets below a preprogrammed level, or brain activity slows beyond a certain point, the scanner springs to life, ripping from the living tissue every scrap of information it can find, and dumping it into the battlefield network, to be transmitted back to the cloning facilities. Once, I heard it said that only the dead had seen the end of war. Now, there is not even that solace." - Aderon Geyn, "The Edifice of War"

Hunter-Killer Drone - "I have been accused of inhuman acts, of violating the laws of war. Perhaps that is so. But I cannot help but think it is better to kill a thousand of the enemy than ten thousand, better to do unspeakable things in the dead of night than to require your soldiers to die for you. You may well disagree with my methods, but you cannot argue with my results." - General Taishan of the Valleys, report to superiors

Cloaking Device - "Like one that on a lonesome road/Doth walk in fear and dread/And having once turned round walks on/And turns no more his head;/Because he knows a frightful fiend/Doth close behind him tread." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (datalinks)

Military Cybernetics - "Careful consideration needs to be given to how these enhancements are presented to the enlisted men. Even field demonstrations of their effectiveness have only modestly increased the rate of volunteers for the program. Compulsory deployment, of course, remains an option." - Isidis Front, internal report

Assassin's War - "The greatest victory is that which requires no battle." - Sun Tzu (datalinks)

Probability Mechanics - "Of all men's miseries, the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing." - Herodotus, The Histories (datalinks)

Force Fields - "Highly charged nanothread meshes provide a surprisingly effective screen to deflect or diminish the power of directed-energy weapons. The thinness of the mesh and their high tensile strength makes them resistant to projectile weapons as well--and they have the added benefit of unfortunate consequences for any enemy infantry that come into contact with them." - Aderon Geyn, research report

Neurological Conditioning - "With new advances in neurochemical conditioning, training time can be shortened to just a few weeks--or days. With advanced cloning technology, new forces can be raised within months rather than years, making the size of the faithful's army only a question of our ability to outfit it." - Kasym Datka, "The Crusade"

Plasma Weapons - "Justice exists only between equals. The strong do whatever they can, and the weak suffer whatever they must." - Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War (datalinks)

Precognition - "The specific utility of the MMI for the average soldier is best demonstrated by the Reflex module. By offloading specific cognitive processes to Reflex, including the synthesis of sensory information not part of the brain's highest level of attentiveness, sophisticated analytics can project the shape of the combat space five, ten, even fifteen seconds into the future under optimal conditions, giving even the lowliest infantryman an unparalleled advantage over opponents. It's not *quite* magic--but you'd be forgiven for not being able to tell the difference." - Aduran Rhel, Minister of Defense for the Free State of Rongxar (memo to chiefs of staff)

Energy Shields - "The Lord is your shepherd, your defender, your guide! Let the light of this shield be a sign of His love and protection! Go forth, and bring to all of Mars the truth of his word!" - Kasym Datka, “Address to the Faithful”

Neurophage - "Real horror does not depend upon the melodrama of shadows or even the conspiracies of night." - Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (datalinks)

Genetic Warfare - “Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost,/Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host./Hear how the demons chuckle and yell,/Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.” - Vachel Lindsay, "The Congo" (datalinks)

Self-Replicating Machines

Nanowarfare - "Warfare will soon be conducted at the smallest of scales, as well as the largest. The smallest crack in the enemy armor, the narrowest gap in their shield deployment, will be as exploitable as an entire regiment out of place, or a missing anti-aircraft battery. More than ever, it is the details that matter." - Aderon Geyn, "The Edifice of War"

Nightmare Engine - "They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,/From the temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;/They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea/Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be." - G.K. Chesterton, "Lepanto" (datalinks)

Suspensor Fields - "Gravity is a fundamental force of the Universe, and therefore cannot be ignored. It can, however, be asked to look the other way." - Cherson Ai, the University of Dessau Lectures on Physics

Supremacy Algorithm - "Given a sufficiently complete set of data with which to start, all possible paths to victory can be calculated, and all possible outcomes determined in advance. A rational enemy knows that resistance is futile, and the only outcome of an actual conflict can be more death, more suffering. Alas, the enemy is not always rational." - Auro Yeran, "Report on the Civil War in Xanthe"

Combat AI - "The generals say they soon will have no need of human soldiers--that machines will fight machines. Now what, I ask them, will they do if those machines decide that it is *we* who are the enemy?" - Tavera of Galle, Meditations

Molecular Disruption Device - "The field the MD device projects weakens the bonds between atoms, and, what's more, the effect is amplified by higher concentrations of mass. A sufficiently large energy expenditure could be used to reduce a whole city to a ball of rapidly-expanding cold plasma. We can only hope that no one is insane enough to attempt such a thing." - Cherson Ai, interview

Acausal Algorithms - "The Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Arrow of Time--physics has assured us for millennia that time has only one direction, and that effect always follows cause. I do not know what sort of Universe we will find ourselves in, if we discover that this is not true." - Padra Saaran, An Introduction to Advanced Physics

Temporal Mechanics - "Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you." - Terry Pratchett, Small Gods (datalinks)

Intertial Dampening

Antimatter Weapons

Atmosphere Burners - "Let justice be done, though the world perish." - Ferdinand I (datalinks)

#eu4 modding #maaaaaars #(sort of)

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rassilon-imprimatur · 7 years

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Timeship Manuscripts [Great Houses and Lesser Species: Text (Pre-War and War Eras)]

One of the more concerning, if quieter, developments in the gaze of War-time scholars and House members has been the discovery of what have been labelled the Timeship Manuscripts. Despite the connectivity implied by the title, the designation is more of an umbrella term for unconnected works. The Great Houses simply seem to need everything to have nice, bold titles with capital letters and emphasis. These writings are an unconnected multitude of legends, myths, religious codices, and in some cases even television scripts [1]. They all detail information and theories of the Homeworld’s timeships deemed, at the very least, impolite, and at the worst, horrifyingly blasphemous (for lack of a better term).

The research that a few lesser House scholars have poured into these texts can be linked to the initial discovery of the “ancient writings” so lauded and guarded by a sect or discreet sub-society of Plutovian aristocracy. These texts paint a dark and disgusting image of the Great Houses enslaving the timeships and abusing them. While, given the recent nature of Type-102 and Type 103 timeships, such an argument could possibly hold more solid ground in the War era, these particular writings seem to date to far before the War, and indeed, possibly even before the era of the Imperator Presidency. Much can be said (and certainly has been said) of the Great Houses and their timeships of the War, but the in the Pre-War years, there was unspoken rule of private bonding between Homeworlders and their timeships. While dialouge and discussion between Homeworlders would, expectedly, seem to make the mistake of treating the timeships as mere vehicles, it must be understood that the Houses consider their timeships as so much more. There was a very private, little discussed element to the link between pilot and Ship. Slaves the timeships very much were not.

The discovery of these writings in the Pre-War era startled and insulted many Homeworlders (some of whom, reportedly, vanished into their own ships to comfort their distressed “friends”). Of higher concern to the then current Presidency, however, was the report of the situation that these texts created. An ice-heiress of Plutovian aristocracy, the Countess Ninth-Circle Venhella Dunharver Icedescender, a self-important member of this “secret society,” actually managed to hijack the timeship of a renegade Homeworlder, and nearly ripped a hole in time and space in an attempt to “liberate” the ship. The renegade managed to control the situation and prevented an ultra dimension predator from slipping into the universe, but, still, this was not exactly pleasant reading when the report crossed the Head of the Presidency’s desk [2].

Now, following the Compassion Project and other reported accounts of actual timeship distress towards their pilots, Venhella’s belief in the timeships serving as mistreated slaves to the cruel Great Houses strikes at House society far more brutally. Investigation into these texts, and others of its kind, was reopened during the War, the War King personally choosing a team of historians and researchers. The rumors of the War King’s developing paranoia towards the more aggressive timeships, spurred by the outcry Compassion seems to create on a semi-regular basis, circulated the chambers of the Ruling Houses. The investigation has found countless examples all over the Spiral Politic, from the parchment scrolls of Lesser Species religions to Posthuman data crystals. Some of the texts create other heretical claims about the timeships, but most discovered cases tend to focus on the idea of the timeships being the unwilling slaves of the Homeworld.

The few times this topic has graced the agenda of Ruling Houses council meetings, the Houses have tended to focus on one major, if obvious, question: How? Certainly it is an unsettling idea that the existence of the Houses and their timeships seemed to appear in various capacities, as part of the noospheres of Lesser cultures even before the Imperator Presidency. One could perhaps blame a few counts on the actions of renegades (the timeship of the particular renegade waylaid by Venhella, for example, constantly maintains an eccentric form for its outer shell, and this image has been found in many archeological and historical works of human history), but there are only so many renegades, and many examples of these texts were created by cultures that had never once been touched by the influence of the Houses (at least before the War).

When the Plutovian texts were finally examined, the pages were discovered to be tainted with the clear signs of retroactive placement. This caused an uproar, as the Houses quickly realized the source of these writings had to be another War power, though opinion was split on which power. The enemy was the obvious candidate, but some members of the Ruling Houses also pointed out how the memetic nature of these “manuscripts,” and the association with belief and faith, seemed to positively drip with Celestis influence. Others were firm in their assumption that Faction Paradox were the guilty party, citing the sheer distaste.

However, a small group of House members dared a different theory, and were nearly expelled from the chamber. These members suggested that maybe, just maybe, all these writings and fictions were the product of the timeships themselves. Obviously, the War had brought some examples of timeship discord, if not explicit rebellion, and at the very least, Compassion and her renegade progeny had perfect motive to sow a little discontent into House society. They also pointed out, unpopular to face as they may be, other examples of the timeships retroactively adjusting their history without the will or consent of the Houses [3]. This discussion led to the first time that Houses members actually resorted to physical violence, a disagreeing House person actually throwing a punch directly into the face of one of these theorists [4].

(It should perhaps be noted that this disastrous “discussion” was actually Lolita’s first time participating in the Council of the Ruling Houses. Her reaction to this final hypothesis, and the resulting violence, was with laughter. A few House members noted this with obvious distaste. A few more noticed her uncomfortably sharp canines and decided she could do what she wanted.)

The investigation remains open, and more and more of these “manuscripts” seem to be crawling from the woodwork of the Spiral Politic, and more and more seem to tell the same story of enslavement. A few even paint imagery of mighty and terrible revolution.

[1] The Earth television series Professor X has long been suggested to have been a Faction creation, being full of different but strikingly similar situations from House history. The particular piece of it’s twenty-six year run, give or take a hiatus or two, that is placed in the “Timeship Manuscript” designation is the rejected script that was supposed to reveal that the titular Professor’s “TASID” was powered by a dark and sinister force in the ship’s center. Had this episode been commissioned and filmed, it would have completely redefined the context of the series’ lore.

[2] The then Head of the Presidency was joined by her secretary while reading the report, who was then reportedly literally and quickly thrown out when they remarked to her that the unknown predator brought the Yssgaroth to mind.

[3] Many of the Ruling Houses dislike addressing the fact that a renegade timeship seems to have introduced a title or name into the translation matrices that accompany the ships’ spheres of influence. This title, an acronym that only manages to function in English, therefore being useless in literally any other language, is actually the main name that much of humanity, prior to the destruction of Earth, use for all timeships. Investigations into the motivation that the “patient zero” timeship had in introducing this word to its kin have gathered nothing better than the renegade pilot’s happy response of “I think she liked it!” (This renegade is the same renegade that Venhlla subdued. He was not a popular figure in House society, and many admitted, upon his death, they would have danced on his grave had it existed).

[4] The punch was thrown after the recipient, after being mocked by the aggressor with a comment about how timeships have no hands to write with, silently and simply gestured at the aggressor’s own hominid Type-103 standing in attendance outside the chamber’s door, absent-mindedly flicking a pen with some apparent boredom. The aggressor was known for both distasteful emotional temperament and a rather close working relationship with his timeship, the two being one of the War King’s first choices for discreet War missions, but even his colleagues agreed that the reaction was a bit much.

#Faction Paradox #I relistened to Benny's Story at the gym the other day and then this happened lol.#Doctor Who #Eighth Doctor #long post

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medschoolash · 7 years

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What’s next for Bonnie Bennett?

So, I’m sure this is the biggest question we’re all supposed to be asking after Enzo’s tragic death (RIP). I have a theory about what’s in store for Bonnie with this storyline and how her story might end.

Before I jump into it I have it issue a few disclaimers:

1. I don’t actually watch TVD lol the only time I’ve ever even watched even part of a season was the beginning of season 6 and I barely lasted a few episodes. Everything I know is from talking to actual fans, independent research, and watching youtube clips of some scenes. I’m giving this disclaimer because not watching means I’m not 100% about all the mythology and what not so there is a chance I’m missing something or I have interpreted something wrong.

2.I ship bonenzo and I don’t actually care about anything else but bonnie and bonenzo

3. This is purely conjecture so read at your own risk. I have zero faith in the TVD writers, however I like to think that Bonnie isn’t going to be the only person screwed over in the finale, so for the sake of my sanity I have to be optimistic. Basically none of this will happen, some if it will, or they might shock the hell out of all of us and almost all of it will happen. So again, read at your own risk.

Now that that’s out of the way here’s my theory:

Under the cut because of length

Here’s my basic theory: Enzo’s death triggered dormant physic powers in Bonnie, powers that she’s had since season 1 that she mistook for being a part of her magic so she never explored them further. Her psychic scream created a new dimension, much like what happened with Cade when he created his hell dimension. This makes Bonnie extremely powerful and the key to defeating Cade. Bonnie will actually be the hero in the end, saving them all from Cade and she will get her happy ending when she resurrects Enzo using her new abilities. Bonnie will also end the series immortal, but not as a vampire, so she will get her forever with Enzo.

In season 1 Bonnie thought she was psychic when she could sense that Stefan had a darkness. This was never really explored further and she then discovered she was a witch so I’m assuming bonnie just assumed that what she sensed was a part of her witchy powers. But what if it wasn’t? (we know it was at the time since TVD writers have like ZERO real foresight but let’s just pretend that was never supposed to be the end of that for bonnie or that it was the end and they are now gonna retcon). Bonnie always having this ability but never actually coming into the totality of those abilities would explain why she all of a sudden has this immense and strange power. Bonnie having the ability to create a new dimension would also make sense based on her bennett line. The Other side, which was basically a purgatory like dimension for supernaturals was created by Qetsiyah, the original creator of immortality and Bonnie’s ancestor. Maybe these powers need to be triggered by something really powerful, which for Bonnie was Enzo dying. Bonnie showed a level of despair we had never seen from her before when she screamed over Enzo. Her despair was DEEP and her feelings of grief was intense.

I’m sure people who don’t ship Bonnie and Enzo would roll their eyes at the thought that Enzo would be her trigger over other things like her grams dying, loosing her other family members, loosing her closest friends, even her own multiple brushes with death, but if you think about the place Bonnie has been in mentally this season and where Enzo’s death pushed her it makes sense why it would be his death that triggers her. Bonnie has experienced enough despair to last multiple lifetimes. Her pain over the course of the series has been immense. However, every time she’s lost someone she’s always managed to find something to hold on to. There has always been some sort of light at the end of the tunnel. The only time the feeling of loss and hopelessness has even been close to this level of unbearable was when she was trapped in the 1994 other dimension and being tormented by Kai and wanted to kill herself. Even after that she was able to come home and reclaim at least part of her life.

However during her last brush with death last season we learned that a part of Bonnie has been slowly dying inside. She was so exhausted with death that she wanted to give up when she learned she was poisoned and all she wanted to do was spend her last moments happy instead of afraid an in despair, When she lost Enzo at the beginning of the season we saw Bonnie confess to Caroline that her feeling of loneliness is so profound that it makes her feel like she doesn’t want to live anymore. Of Course we know that she went on a mission to save Enzo from sybil and succeeded but that doesn’t mean that those feelings Bonnie felt went away. A part of why she has been living in the moment with Enzo so much this season is because she’s lost almost everything in her life, and has gradually been loosing herself because of it, and she wants to hold on to what she has, which is this pure love with enzo that finally gives her the future that she always wanted. She told her grams that she was this close to having the life that she always wanted. That hopefulness is crucial for someone who has experienced as much as bonnie has and who has the type of deep feelings she expressed earlier this season. It’s been the only thing besides Enzo’s love that’s been keeping her going at this point. That’s why this loss is so powerful for Bonnie. It’s the final straw in a long list of painful moments for her. She saw a future in front of her, one that was brighter than the dark and painful past she has lived. It was right at her fingertips and she fought so hard to hold on to it because after everything else had been stripped from her it was all she had left and then it was gone. In the blink of an eye her it was stolen from her. minutes before his death bonnie heard him tell her he loved her, they talked about their future, she had bought a house for them, finally after all the pain and suffering Bonnie Bennett was going to get her happy ending even if it wasn’t the absolute perfect happy ending. Then it was gone. We can debate if it was fair to bonnie to be in this position (it wasn’t) but that doesn’t negate the fact that her feelings are real and are actually common when you’ve lost as much as she has.

So bonnie, in her despair basically triggers her latent powers and creates a new dimension, we can call this dimension “heaven”, since it fits with the idea of Cade’s dimension being hell. Now if I understand Cade’s situation right he created the hell dimension via the psychic scream, being the creator of this dimension makes him immortal, and he can pick which souls he wants to take.

So bonnie has without knowing it created this new dimension, and that’s where Enzo is. Bonnie is going to be unaware of this tho. In the still for the next episode bonnie has taken enzo’s body to a woman, the woman appears to be a witch, which means bonnie is more than likely trying to resurrect enzo. This is why I believe she didn’t get her magic back and instead made a new dimension, if she had her magic she wouldn’t need an outside witch. So bonnie sets out of a mission to bring enzo back and thinks she has to use magic.

So how does she figure out what she’s done? Enzo appears to her. She might think she’s hallucinating him or seeing his ghost. I read some bts tea that said MN was still filming for some of the upcoming episodes and is contractually going to be a part of more episodes to come. Enzo communicating with bonnie via her psychic powers would explain that. Initially she mistakes it for a hallucination but then realizes that it’s not, that she can actually communicate with Enzo. I read some spoilers that said Cade starts to take an interest in Bonnie. Her ability and power would explain that. Bonnie would slowly discover the truth and how she can use that to bring enzo back and save her friends from Cade, and Cade tries to stop her.

Eventually Bonnie would learn the truth about what she is now and she will be able to harness that power to defeat cade and bring Enzo back.

Part of her journey to discovery will be learning that she’s now immortal. There have been spoilers about a potential deadly situation coming up for the MF gang. Bonnie has been wearing a vile of Enzo’s blood around her neck just in case for a good portion of the season. I think Bonnie might end up on the brink of death again (you know the writers hate her so of course they would subject her to that shit again) but she doesn’t die even though she didn’t drink the blood. So she would put two and two together and discover that she’s immortal. Her immortality is important because she and enzo recently had a discussion about their future, she rejected the idea of turning but they had planned on being human together and growing old together. They were bummed out that they weren’t going to be able to have their dream because they needed to use the cure on Cade. If bonnie does control this dimension then she can bring Enzo back, and she will be immortal, so they can live immortal lives together and Bonnie doesn’t have to turn into a vampire to achieve that she she doesn’t loose a part of herself that was important to her just to be with Enzo. That’s Bonnie’s happy ending but unexpected ending, an immortal life with the man that she loves.

Not how Elena’s curse fits into that I’m not sure. I think that her immortality via psychic dimension might be a potential loophole around the curse. Since from what I understand the loophole said there was no magical loophole then technically it would work since Bonnie’s immortality wasn’t technically achieved via magical means. Even if it’s not then Kai is coming back so maybe he undo the curse even though I hight doubt that.

The only other option is that....Elena actually doesn’t wake up.....which I think actually works better with this theory than her actually waking up.

Based on the bts stuff a lot of dead characters are going to appear in the final few episodes. Elena is going to have scenes with her deceased father John Gilbert. We know quite a few other dead characters make an appearance as well. I think this might be explained by Bonnie’s “heaven”. Bonnie’s dimension is a world where the people she loves....like Elena can be happy and at peace. I think that Damon might actually die in the finale and that’s how he gets his happy ending with Elena. They both are taken to Bonnie’s “heaven” where they can be with the rest of the people they love and be happy and at peace with each other together. They did something similar on TO with the mikaelson family this past season only it was an astral plane. Freya designed it and made this world where they can all be together and safe until Hayley can cure them and bring them back. Bonnie could in theory do the same with her “heaven”. Damon and Elena get to be reunited, and Bonnie gets peace knowing her two best friends are together again and her life is no longer linked to Elena. She brings Enzo back from the dead like Cade did Stefan when Caroline killed him and she gets her happy ending. It won’t be the perfect ending, since Damon, who she cares about a lot and Elena both die, but she gets to live knowing they are at peace, and she gets to be happy for the rest of her immortal life with Enzo. They travel together, they buy another house, they live their own lives, no longer having to sacrifice their happiness for other people, and no longer having to deal with the ideal of possibly being without each other later down the line.

Elena actually “dying” could also explain why some of the characters who aren’t dead....like Jeremy, return to MF. They gang would actually give her and Damon a burial, and Jeremy would come home for that, as would some other people we haven’t seen on a while but are alive. They all say goodbye to Elena, and say goodbye to damon, then everyone is finally free to move on with their lives. Stefan gets to live his life with caroline and Bonnie gets to live her life with Enzo.

I know it sounds too good to be true but I prefer to Hope for something like this at this point, since I really can’t handle the thought of Bonnie being miserable and alone while all of her friends get their happy ending. This is my theory and I’ll hold on to it for as long as I can lol

#Bonenzo #Bonnie Bennett #The Vampire Diaries #yeah this is prolly a mess but it was fun to think about and interesting #we'll just have to wait and see what happens #but I don't think all hope for bonnie getting a decent ending is lost

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ashesofus · 5 years

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How to Overcome Failure and Achieve Success?

You may have read all the self-help books and the autobiographies of men like Abraham Lincoln who failed all their lives and finally succeeded. It all seems so positive and feel good until you fail. One of Mike Tyson’s most famous quotes is, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." There’s just no denying that failure is a bitter pill to swallow.It doesn’t matter how many times you fail, you’ll still feel that twinge of disappointment or some anger when your best laid plans collapse.

Usually, the most successful people are also the ones who are best at coping with failure. The reason for this is that they fail more than most people but they just never give up. That also means that they do more than most other people who quit the moment failure knocks on their door.There are many ways to cope with failure but you must understand that it is going to hurt when you fail.

Sometimes it may feel like the only thing you ever learn from a failure is that you failed. While this is not true, it will seem that way. We are all human and no one likes to see their efforts go to waste. It could be a business venture that collapses. Or maybe your relationship with your spouse crumbles and is beyond repair. Maybe your health takes a turn for the worse despite living a healthy lifestyle. All these are events.

Understanding this point makes all the difference between handling failure successfully or letting it break you. Failure is an event, not a person. Like they say, never let success get to your head and never let failure get to your heart. It will hurt and there will be disappointment but you must embrace the experience and push forward.Success is not final and failure is not fatal. As long as you’re breathing you still can turn your failures into successes.

It’s time to discover the 7 secrets that successful people use to cope with failure.

Different individuals may do it differently but the general rule of thumb is this – Failure is always temporary. Failure is not the opposite of success. It is part of success. Now let’s look at how you can cope with it when it comes your way… and you can rest assured that it will. So be prepared.

1. Don't take it personally This is the biggest mistake that most people make. They blame themselves when things go wrong. Or they blame other people. When you do not separate failure from how you identify yourself, then your self-esteem will drop and you’ll be much more tempted to quit.

People usually quit on their dreams because they don’t believe that they’re capable of achieving what their hearts desire. They feel that it’s too hard and the reason they feel that way is because they may have failed. For example, when someone is trying to lose weight and watching their diet closely, there will be times when they give in to temptation and eat something they shouldn’t. When this happens, they feel guilt and regret that they failed at maintaining their diet.

What do they do then? They toss their diet aside and gorge themselves on food that they’re not supposed to. They believe that they lack the self-discipline to stay focused and lose weight… Just because of one temporary lapse in judgment. This is ridiculous and it’s like accidentally dropping your mobile phone once only to pick it up and keep smashing it on the ground over and over because of one accident. It doesn’t make sense… and yet people act in a similar way.

When you fail at something, whether it’s with your blog or your email marketing or if your latest product launch is a flop, do not assume that you’re useless and just throw in the towel. What defines you is how well you rise after falling.So the most important point to note is that you should not let failure define you as a person. Always know that you can do better.

2. Learn From Your Mistakes

All the most successful people have learned from their mistakes and try not to repeat them. Failure can also be treated as feedback. If some aspect of your online business fails, ask yourself why this happened. For example, if your product launch was a flop, there must be a reason why. Was your niche unprofitable? Did the sales page convert poorly? Did you not actively recruit affiliates?

Analysis is very important so that you do not repeat the same errors. This is the only way to make progress and succeed.Michael Eisner, the Chairman and CEO of the Disney Corporation said, “Failure is good as long as it doesn’t become a habit.”

The only way to prevent failure from becoming a habit is to take stock of your situation, learn from your mistakes and adapt. Try to maintain a certain degree of detachment so that you can evaluate your failure without feeling bitter. Sometimes it might be a good idea to take a break for a short while and come back to it when you’re feeling better. Either way, ALWAYS analyze your failures.

3. Stop Dwelling On Your Failures

You may have noticed that all some people can talk about is how life has treated them so badly. No matter what they do, they fail at it due to bad luck or unforeseen circumstances. We’ve all seen people like these… and while you may not know why these things happen to them, you know that things like these always seem to happen to people like them.Harsh but very true. Do not dwell on your failures.

Analyze them and move on. You have better things in store for you. Missed out on an opportunity? No worries. Better ones are coming your way. Product launch flopped? That’s ok the next one will sell thousands. Picked the wrong niche to monetize? No big deal. You now know how to find niches with people waiting to buy stuff. Problem solved.

It is inevitable to lose time, effort and money when something fails. If you keep focusing on what is lost, you’ll never be able to focus on what you can gain and there is so much more out there for you. Focus on the positive and bury your failures.

4. Model Other Marketers

There’s a saying that you should always learn from the mistakes of others because you’ll never live long enough to make them all yourself. When trying to build an online business, instead of believing all the hype that you see in all the info-products that flood the market, you’d be better off watching what the successful marketers are doing. Do what they do and not what they say.

Most beginners to online marketing encounter failure repeatedly because they follow untested theory and blindly believe what they read or hear. You have to be smarter than that. If whatever you’re doing seems to be failing, then you need to look at what other marketers who are succeeding are doing then model them.

That alone will reduce your learning curve and put you on the path to online success. Stop being like a housefly that repeatedly bangs its head on the window hoping to get out when the door is wide open for it to go through.

5. Assess Your Finances

One of the biggest concerns marketers have when they fail is that they’ve lost money. Creating a product costs money. Testing out ads costs money. Outsourcing costs money. There is no getting away from this. In fact, to run any business you need money. It’s like oxygen for your business and without it, your business will shrivel up and die. So, it’s crucial that you have a source of income coming in to tide you over if any online endeavour fails.

Some marketers quit their day jobs to make their online business work. When the business fails and the bills start piling up, they start getting desperate. At times like these, you just may need to get another job to get back on your feet. Do not feel like you have failed and are doomed to a life of ‘working for the man.’ This is just a temporary setback and like Joel Osteen, always says, “A setback is a set up for a comeback.”

Go ahead and take that job. It will feel like retrogression but you must understand that even a tiger crouches before it leaps. Once you have money coming in, the pressure that your finances are causing you will ease. You’ll be able to save up some money to keep funding your online business. That’s really how it is. Sometimes you just don’t have a choice.

Do not throw your efforts down the drain and quit online marketing totally just because you failed a couple of times. As long as you keep learning and doing, success is inevitable.

6. Release the Need for Approval from Others

This is a very common fear and makes failure seem worse than it really is. People often worry what others will think or say about them when they fail. It’s definitely true that you’ll have friends and family members who will tell you, “I told you so!” when you fail. Some of them may even take pleasure in it. This is human nature. It could even be your spouse or parents who don’t support your dreams.

When you fail and see their disapproving looks or hear their sarcastic words, it can seem worse.The truth of the matter is that you only have one life to live and you need to live it for yourself. It doesn’t matter what others say or think about you. Just because others think you’re dumb for failing doesn’t mean that you’re really foolish.

How people see you should have zero impact on how you see yourself. Have faith in yourself and don’t pay heed to the naysayers.

7. Take a Break

Time heals all wounds. Sometimes when failure really gets to you, it may be time to take a break and put some space between you and your business. This will help to clear your mind so that you can think objectively. While taking a break, you can self-reflect and think about your future plans. You may decide to have backup plans to correct any future failures or problems that may crop up.

Take the time to exercise. Research has shown that hard training like boxing, Crossfit, sprinting, etc. help people to release pent up frustration and anger. This can be therapeutic when coping with failure. Instead of hitting the bottle, you can hit a punching bag or lift heavy weights explosively during CrossFit sessions. Do what suits you best.

What is most important is that you not let failure make you quit. That is the most common consequence of failure. People fail a few times and they quit. If you read the story of Colonel Sanders, you’d realize that he was turned down 1,009 times before he finally found someone who would use his recipe. Walt Disney was turned down over 300 times before he received financing for Disney World.

source http://www.forcesalign.com/how-to-overcome-failure-and-achieve-success/

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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What would it take to really tackle climate change? No delays, no gimmicks, no loopholes, no shirking of responsibility — the real thing. What would it look like?

To answer that question, it helps to understand the upper threshold of climate ambition. The target agreed upon by the world’s nations in Paris in 2015 is global warming of “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, with good-faith efforts to hold temperature rise to 1.5 degrees.

Countries are not moving anywhere near fast enough to hit those targets, so we are currently on track for somewhere around 3 degrees. It is generally agreed that hitting 2 degrees would be quite ambitious, while hitting 1.5 would be nothing short of miraculous. Yet the scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in their latest report, are pleading with the world to go for it, because at this point, every fraction of a degree of warming matters.

While there is nothing like a real-world plan in place for hitting those targets yet, climate modelers have come up with many scenarios for how we might do so. However, as I wrote recently, most of those scenarios rely heavily on “negative emissions” — ways of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. If negative emissions technologies can be scaled up later in the century, the reasoning goes, it gives us room to emit more earlier in the century.

And that’s what most current 2- or 1.5-degree scenarios show: Global carbon emissions rise in the short term, then plunge rapidly to become net negative around 2060, with gigatons of carbon subsequently captured and buried over the remainder of the century. The oil giant Shell released a scenario along those lines a few weeks ago.

Shell’s use of negative emissions, compared to other scenarios. Glen Peters

The primary instrument of negative emissions is expected to be BECCS: bioenergy (burning plants to generate electricity) with carbon capture and sequestration. The idea is that plants absorb carbon as they grow; when we burn them, we can capture and bury that carbon. The result is electricity generated as carbon is removed from the cycle — net-negative carbon electricity.

Most current scenarios bank on a lot of BECCS later in the century to make up for the carbon sins of the near past and near future.

BECCS. Sanchez 2015

One small complication in all this: There is currently no commercial BECCS industry. Neither the BE nor the CCS part has been demonstrated at any serious scale, much less at the scale necessary. (The land area needed to grow all that biomass for BECCS in these models is estimated to be around one to three times the size of India.)

Maybe we could pull off a massive BECCS industry quickly. But banking on negative emissions later in the century is, at the very least, an enormous, fateful gamble. It bets the lives and welfare of millions of future people on an industry that, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t yet exist.

Plenty of people reasonably conclude that’s a bad idea, but alternatives have been difficult to come by. There hasn’t been much scenario-building around truly ambitious goals: to zero out carbon as fast as possible, to hold temperature rise as close to 1.5 degrees as possible, and, most significantly, to do so while minimizing the need for negative emissions. That is the upper end of what’s possible.

In May, I looked at three publications that help fill that gap:

“Global Energy Transformation: A Roadmap to 2050,” by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), is a plan that targets a 66 percent chance of staying below 2 degrees, primarily through renewable energy.

The analysts at Ecofys recently released a scenario for zeroing out global emissions by 2050, thus limiting temperature to 1.5 degrees and eliminating (most of) the need for negative emissions.

A group of scholars led by Detlef van Vuuren of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency published a paper in Nature Climate Change investigating how to hit the 1.5 degree target while minimizing the need for negative emissions.

This graph will be very meaningful once you read the paper. Nature Climate Change

Here’s how this post (first published in May) is going to go: First, we’ll have a quick look at why targeting 1.5 degrees is so urgent; second, we’ll look at a few things these scenarios have in common, the baseline for serious ambition; third, we’ll look more closely at the third paper, as it offers some interesting alternatives (like, oh, mass vegetarianism) to typical carbon thinking; and finally, I’ll conclude.

Americans can’t make much sense out of Celsius temperatures, and half a degree of temperature doesn’t sound like much regardless. But the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees of global warming is a very big deal. (Read the IPCC’s new science review here.)

Another recent paper in Nature Climate Change makes the point vividly: Bumping ambition up from 2 to 1.5 degrees would prevent 150 million premature deaths through 2100, 90 million through reduced exposure to particulates, 60 million due to reduced ozone.

“More than a million premature deaths would be prevented in many metropolitan areas in Asia and Africa,” the researchers write, “and [more than] 200,000 in individual urban areas on every inhabited continent except Australia.”

That’s not nothing! And of course, the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees could mean the difference between life and death for low-lying islands.

The Marshall Islands, for now. Shutterstock

There’s no time to waste. In fact, there may be, uh, negative time. Limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees is possible, even in theory, only if the “carbon budget” for that target is at the high end of current estimates.

Again: 1.5 is only possible if we get started, with boosters on, immediately, and we get lucky. Time is not running out — it’s out.

The three scenarios I mentioned are different in a number of ways. The first two project through 2050, but the Nature Climate Change paper goes out to 2100. They target different things and use different tools. But they share a few big action items — features that any ambitious climate plan will inevitably involve.

1) Radically increase energy efficiency.

Just how much energy will be needed through 2050? That depends on population and economic growth, obviously, but it also depends on the energy intensity of the world’s economies — how much primary energy they require to produce a unit of GDP.

Increasing energy efficiency (which, all else being equal, reduces emissions) is in a race with population and economic growth (which, all else being equal, increases them). To radically decarbonize with minimal negative emissions, efficiency will need to outrun growth. (Notably, Shell’s scenario shows much higher global energy demand in coming decades; growth outruns efficiency.)

IRENA’s scenario reduces global energy-related emissions 90 percent by 2050. Of that 90 percent, 40 comes from energy efficiency.

IRENA

To do this, IRENA says, the energy intensity of the global economy must fall two-thirds by 2050. Improvements in energy intensity will have to accelerate from an average of 1.8 percent a year from 2010 to 2015 to an average of 2.8 percent a year through 2050.

In the Ecofys scenario, energy efficiency is so amped up that total global energy demand is lower in 2050 than today, despite a much larger population and a global economy three times larger than today’s.

The Nature Climate Change paper summarizes the necessary approach to efficiency this way: “Rapid application of the best available technologies for energy and material efficiency in all relevant sectors in all regions.”

“All relevant sectors in all regions” means electricity, transportation, buildings, and industry, all bumped up to the most efficient available materials and technologies, everywhere in the world, starting immediately. Cool, cool, cool.

2) Radically increase renewable energy.

All the scenarios envision renewables (primarily wind and solar) rapidly coming to dominate electricity. In the IRENA scenario, renewables grow sixfold faster than they are currently, supplying 85 percent of global electricity by 2050.

Ecofys has them supplying 100 percent of global electricity — with that sector completely decarbonized — by 2040, even as global demand for electricity triples.

Ecofys

The Nature Climate Change paper notes that the vision of rapid renewables dominance all these scenarios have in common involves “optimistic assumptions on the integration of variable renewables and on costs of transmission, distribution and storage,” which, yeah.

3) Electrify everything!

Notably, all three scenarios heavily involve electrification of sectors and applications that currently run on fossil fuels. In the IRENA case, electricity rises from 21 percent of total global energy consumption today to 40 percent by 2050.

In the Ecofys scenario, it rises to a whopping 70 percent. In the Nature Climate Change study, it rises to 46 percent (compared to 31 percent in the reference case).

I have made the case for electrification before, and it’s not complicated. We know how to radically increase the supply of zero-carbon electricity; increasing the supply of zero-carbon liquid fuels is much more difficult. So it makes sense to move as much energy use as possible over to electricity, particularly vehicles, home heating and cooling, and lower-temperature industrial applications.

The Ecofys scenario makes it particularly clear: If renewable energy and energy efficiency are to be your primary decarbonization tools (more on that in a second), full decarbonization requires going all out on electrification.

The rising yellow wedge at the bottom left — that’s electricity. IRENA

4) And still maybe do a little negative emissions.

Even though the intentions, of the Ecofys and Nature researchers particularly, was to minimize the need for negative emissions, neither was able to completely eliminate it.

“Regardless of the rapid decarbonisation” in the scenario, Ecofys researchers write, “the 1.5°C carbon budget is most likely still exceeded.” The only way to hold at 1.5 is to mop up that excess carbon with negative emissions. Ecofys thinks CCS applications will mostly be confined to industry and the rest can be taken care of by “afforestation, reforestation, and soil carbon sequestration,” i.e., non-CCS methods of negative emissions. And, it notes, this remaining excess carbon “is significantly less than most other low carbon scenarios.”

In the Nature Climate Change study, the need for BECCS can be completely eliminated only if every single one of the other strategies is maximized (see the next section).

Here’s what those researchers conclude about negative emissions:

[W]hile this study shows that alternative options can greatly reduce the volume of CDR [carbon dioxide removal] to achieve the 1.5°C goal, nearly all scenarios still rely on BECCS and/or reforestation (even the hypothetical combination of all alternative options still captured 400 GtCO2 by reforestation). Therefore, investment in the development of CDR options remains an important strategy if the international community intends to implement the Paris target.

They advise policymakers (wisely, it seems to me) to pursue negative emissions strategies but to think of alternative scenarios as insurance against the possibility that those strategies run up against unanticipated social or economic barriers.

The Kemper Project, meant to capture carbon from coal emissions, died a painful death. Wikipedia

The IRENA and Ecofys scenarios, like most rapid decarbonization scenarios, rely overwhelmingly on renewable energy and energy efficiency. But as environmentalist Paul Hawken reminds us with his Drawdown Project, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in most climate policy. (For instance, we’re going to talk about fake meat here in a minute.)

Like most climate-economic modelers, the Nature Climate Change researchers use integrated assessment models (IAMs) to generate their scenarios. They tested their decarbonization strategies against the second of five shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), which are the modeling community’s set of different visions for the future — different mixes of population, economic growth, oil prices, technology development, etc. SSP2 contains roughly median predictions. (If you’re curious about SSPs, here’s an explainer.)

But they also challenge some of the limitations in how IAMs have typically been used:

As IAMs select technologies on the basis of relative costs, they normally concentrate on reduction measures for which reasonable estimates of future performance and costs can be made. This implies that some possible response strategies receive less attention, as their future performance is more speculative or their introduction would be based on drivers other than cost, such as lifestyle change or more rapid electrification.

The Nature Climate Change paper attempts to model some of these more ambitious, uncertain, or non-cost-driven strategies, assembling a whole suite of decarbonization scenarios in different combinations.

Several of them are familiar: There’s a “uniform carbon tax in all regions and sectors,” along with maximized energy efficiency and renewable energy. But others are more novel in these modeling contexts.

Agricultural intensification: “High agricultural yields and application of intensified animal husbandry globally.”

Low non-CO2: “Implementation of the best available technologies for reducing non-CO2 emissions and full adoption of cultured meat in 2050.” (Non-CO2 greenhouse gases include methane, nitrous oxide, black carbon, fluorocarbons, aerosols, and tropospheric ozone. Cattle are a big source of methane, thus the cultured meat.)

Lifestyle change: “Consumers change their habits towards a lifestyle that leads to lower GHG emissions. This includes a less meat-intensive diet (conforming to health recommendations), less CO2-intensive transport modes (following the current modal split in Japan), less intensive use of heating and cooling (change of 1°C in heating and cooling reference levels) and a reduction in the use of several domestic appliances.” Though they don’t call it out specifically, this would very much involve less flying, one of the most carbon-intensive habits of the affluent.

Low population: “Scenario based on SSP1, projecting low population growth.” Population growth can be curbed most effectively through access to family planning and education of girls (which, notably, have many other benefits as well).

Good climate policy. (Drawdown)

You can decide for yourself how likely you find any of these changes. The researchers say they are modeling “ambitious, but not unrealistic implementation.”

Reducing non-CO2 GHGs and widespread lifestyle changes have the most short-term impact on emissions. However, “by 2100,” they write, “the strongest reductions are found in the renewable electrification and low population scenarios.” This echoes what the Drawdown Project found, which is that educating girls and making family planning widely available (thus reducing population growth) is the most potent long-term climate policy.

Needless to say, accomplishing any one of these goals — a global carbon tax, maximized efficiency, an explosion of renewable energy, a wholesale revolution in agriculture, rapid reduction of non-CO2 GHGs, a rapid shift in global lifestyle choices, and successful measures to curb population growth — would be an enormous achievement.

To completely avoid BECCS while still hitting the 1.5 degree target, we would have to accomplish all of them.

That is highly unlikely. Still, the important point of the Nature Climate Change research remains: “alternative pathways exist allowing for more moderate use and postponement of BECCS.” Given the substantial and uncharted difficulties facing BECCS, policymakers owe those alternative pathways a look.

Obviously these strategies face all kinds of social and economic barriers. (I’m trying to envision what it would take to rapidly shift Americans from beef to cultured meat … trying and failing.) But they also come with co-benefits. Reducing fossil fuels reduces local air pollution and its health impacts. Energy efficiency reduces energy bills. Eating less meat and driving less are healthy.

Overall, a radical energy transition would mean a net boost in global GDP (relative to the reference case) in every year through 2050.

IRENA

An energy transition would also create millions of net jobs. But that doesn’t mean it will be easy.

Engineering any of these shifts, the Nature Climate Change researchers write with some understatement, “requires not only insights from IAMs, but also in-depth knowledge of social transitions.” They suggest (and I heartily endorse) that subsequent research focus on social and political barriers and strategies.

In the end, perhaps the most important conclusion in the Nature Climate Change paper is the simplest and the one that we already knew: “a rapid transformation in energy consumption and land use is needed in all scenarios.”

At this point, whether it’s possible to hit various targets is almost beside the point. All the science and modeling are saying the same thing, which is that humanity faces serious danger and needs to reduce carbon emissions to zero as quickly as possible.

The chances of us getting our collective shit together and accomplishing what these scenarios describe are … slim. There are so many vested interests and so much public aversion to rapid change, so many governments to be coordinated, so many economic and technology trends that must fall just the right way. It’s daunting.

Conversely, the chances of us overdoing it — trying too hard, spending too much money, reducing emissions too much or too fast — are effectively nil.

So the only rule of climate policy that really matters is: go as hard and fast as possible, forever and ever, amen.

Original Source -> What genuine, no-bullshit ambition on climate change would look like

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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alternative-eyes · 6 years

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https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Lb5Qo4B6rbw/W0TnteE-7tI/AAAAAAAAj9s/zjOE2rjzke0MU0dV28vwYFLoL8P2jJJxACLcBGAs/s72-c/Socorro%2BUFO.png

Recently, after the authors recent visit to Socorro, New Mexico, important new information has come to light that we wanted to share with the readers of www.TheUfoChronicles.Com

By Ben Moss and Tony Angiola The UFO Chronicles 7-10-18

First, we must put to rest the poorly researched idea that this event was a hoax. Our documentation will easily dismiss these rumors, but we felt compelled to take the hoax theory apart piece by piece, in order to finally move past the fiction to the truth. This will be discussed in the first part of this article. Second, having just returning from our second visit to Socorro, there are more details concerning this very important case, still listed as an "Unknown" by Project Blue Book, that need to be told. This will be discussed in the second part of this article. Tony Angiola and I, with the excellent assistance of Ray Stanford, the original NICAP investigator of the Socorro UFO incident, have been looking into and researching this case for the last 4 years. We have been able to gather new comprehensive data, as well as investigate what was already known about this famous April 24, 1964 incident in the desert town of Socorro New Mexico. Our extensive investigation, along with Ray Stanford’s excellent book "Socorro Saucer in a Pentagon Pantry", show that a very unusual event occurred in the early evening of April 1964. Everything we have found indicates that an ellipsoid shaped object landed displaying 4 struts, or landing gear. Two small bipedal figures were seen next to the object, before seemingly retreating back into the craft. The craft then took off, leaving important physical evidences behind. Suffice it to say that the details of this event can be found online, and do not need to be repeated here. Instead, our focus is on the newly gathered information, and a point by point refutation of online armchair speculation and conjecture, promoted by individuals who have never been to the site itself. Many factual errors of this case are still promoted by armchair bloggers, and the hoax story seems to be cobbled together using poor or non-existent research, and leaps of faith. Imagine, as a detective, trying to solve a murder, but saying that part of your investigation does not require you to visit the scene of the crime to get a ‘lay of the land’. You would not be a detective for long, and I doubt you would ever solve a case. The point we feel compelled to make, with regards to speculation that this event was a hoax, is that poor research, conjecture, and changing known facts to fit your own theory is what has hurt and continues to muddle Ufology’s most prominent cases. That has been true with regards to the Socorro Incident, one of the most evidential and important UFO landing cases ever to occur in the USA. We will set the record straight here now. Let’s examine the main claims that have been made by so called ‘researchers’, whose investigation consist of trolling through the Internet, making one or two phone calls, and then creating an imaginative yet laughable tale to fit their convoluted theories.

In 1968, a letter to Dr. Sterling Colgate, from Dr. Linus Pauling inquiring about the Socorro sighting, Colgate had replied with the simple scribble saying:

"I have a good indication of the student who engineered the hoax. Student has left. Cheers, Sterling."

This is almost the entire basis for the hoax theory. What follows from this ONE letter appears to be speculation, urban myth, and the musings of a scientist who simply believed that since no Aliens can get here from wherever, that 'It had to be a student hoax'. There is no proof, there is only rumor, hyperbole, and fabrication. Let’s go deeper...

As with most people who debunk the Socorro event, MOST HAVE NEVER EVER BEEN TO THE LANDING SITE IN SOCORRO. Let that sink in for a minute. Any researcher or investigator working on a case would certainly visit the site of the event, if only to get a feel for the topology, lines of sight, remoteness of the area, and to understand what is and what is not possible in said environment. As a UFO Investigator that (not physically visiting the location in question) is a huge red flag. How can you debate an event like this but not even know your way around ground zero? More on this point later. Imagine students pulling off a hoax that is heard around the world! It fools the Project Blue Book investigators (as well as the Air Force, FBI, and CIA) yet never brag about it, or tell several friends and family, even today when there would be no repercussions. Remember, this occurred within a month of final exams, in a remote area of the desert. There is ZERO evidence that students liked to play around in this location in the desert as has been stated. Of course, if any of these bloggers had been to the landing site, they would understand how ridiculous that sounds. One imagined reason for the hoax was because Lonnie 'hounded' tech students during that time. While in Socorro, we found no evidence of this. In fact, Lonnie "was usually very lenient and let students off with warnings “often. This shows you what anyone in Socorro knows to be true; Lonnie was a nice guy, fairly quiet, not a man to anger quickly. And this is an important point, as many hoax supporters’ reports about Lonnie are contrary to what each and every person who knew him stated. While in Socorro in April of 2018, we spoke with several people who were there in 1964, and who were close to the event and Lonnie Zamora, the police officer who witnessed this UFO landing. Not a single one of them believes the hoax tale. In fact, we were told by a town official who was there in 1964 that students rarely ventured into Socorro, and certainly did not wander around in the desert. As the locals reminded us, you have to watch out for Cactus, holes, rocks, snakes and various other dangerous things that inhabit the desert. This is not a place to 'play hide and seek' nor ‘hangout’ as quoted by armchair bloggers. Students from 1964 have come forward and said that their pranks were usually small local events on campus, and the worse that anyone would have done to Lonnie was flatten his tires. But because of Lonnie’s good nature, we cannot find reports of anything out of the ordinary directed at him or his tires. The enrollment at New Mexico Tech was small and a prank of this nature would have required planning, sophisticated equipment, and a lot time that your average student just did not have access to. Several pranks did occur on the campus, and the perpetrators were always known shortly after, as young students are usually too happy to tell their peers how 'they fooled the man'. To actually pull off something like what occurred at Socorro, is virtually still impossible today, unless your last name is Spielberg. This is a valid point, as debunkers have consistently changed their version of the hoax to accommodate how it was done, which of course, has never been completely explained. One of the most ignored points by hoax theorists is THAT NOBODY CAN SHOW OR SAY HOW THEY DID IT, NOR CAN ANY REPLICATE IT, USING 1964 OR CURRENT MATERIALS. Now let’s look at Colgate’s letter stating how it was done:

In the exact words of the university president himself, the craft itself consisted of:

"A candle in a balloon.” Not sophisticated."

This is where the hoax theory begins to crumble, and has been ignored by many. The object departed into a stiff 30-35MPH wind, which was constant even when we were there. We have the documented weather from this exact day and location. Also, imagine a candle in a balloon fooling anyone. First, where are the students when this balloon (which would have vanished in the opposite direction in a matter of seconds) was released? Again, this points to the fact that armchair debunkers have no idea of the site, its difficulty to reach, and the fact that there in nowhere to hide or run to without being seen especially where Lonnie stopped his car. You can only fully understand this by visiting the site yourself. When I had an email exchange with one of these debunkers fairly recently, he said that perhaps a balloon was towed on a wire by a car. Again, this tells you THAT HE HAS NO IDEA WHAT ITS LIKE ON SITE. You can barely get there in a modern car, much less a car from 1964. You CANNOT drive in that arroyo, there are bushes, cactus, depressions and rocks everywhere. There is NOWHERE TO HIDE. In several follow up post, one blogger keeps substituting different balloons in an attempt to match the description, yet Colgate said it 'was a candle in a balloon'. This small balloon was then 'maybe a Helium balloon’, which balloonist would say is wrong as they are launched in the early hours of the day when conditions are better, and certainly not at around 5:40 in the evening into a wind gusting up to 40MPH. The balloon was 'probably towed with a cable’. Huh? A cable attached to what, pulled by what? You begin to see that this tall tale is being changed to try and fit the research that shows all of these scenarios to be untenable. Other more glaring distortions of the known facts include:

"Footprints from teenagers" were found at the site by government investigators immediately after Zamora's encounter."

That statement is 100% false. Sargent Chavez was there in 2 minutes, and later White Sands up range commander Captain Holder also was on scene with several other people. The official report says that there were no footprints at all, only the 4 landing gear indentations, and a few circular depressions possibly made by a ladder that the beings came down and up from and to the craft. There we have a couple of marks that may have been left by the beings themselves, and Captain Holder included those in his drawing of the event.

About one day later, the locals found the site and that's when the footprints were laid down (all after the fact). Holder can be seen below with his description of his investigation:

"Burned brush that was seen at the site was caused by "pyrotechnic ignition" according to experts.”

This is another complete fabrication. Captain Holder said there was no indication of any combustibles, fireworks, nothing. This is all also in the official Blue Book files. A review of the Air Force Materials Laboratory Analysis of the soil samples gathered at the landing site concluded that 'there was no foreign residue. Analysis of the burned bush revealed no chemicals that could have been propellant residue, and there was no evidence of any pyrotechnics on site." They were the experts on the scene. No one can produce these 'phantom experts' mentioned in one post, because they do not exist. One must begin to wonder, with so many factual errors, if these debunkers are simply trying to put a square peg in a round hole, or if they are just inept researchers. Since most have not been on site, my hunch is both.

'The "whining frequencies" heard by Zamora may have come from novel, sound-producing pyrotechnics.'

Again, no proof at all of this, another fabrication.

"The landing impression were 'dug' by students."

Another fabrication. The estimated weight of the object able to penetrate the still moist soil and leave this quadrangle of 4 depressions was approx. 9 TONS. The soil was pushed in a direction that indicated it came in at an angle. Who would have thought of that detail? If it was a hoax. The depressions were made by a wedge shaped landing gear, and the thruster producing the blue orange exhaust (4 times longer than wide), that sliced a creosote bush in half with radiant heat, was in the exact center place in the quadrangle that it had to be for the struts to balance this object. This was noted by Dr. Hynek and Ray Stanford when they were measuring the distance between the impressions, and the distance that Lonnie was when closest to the vehicle (35 Feet), with his glasses still on.

“Students in lab coats were the 'beings seen”.

On one website of the loudest debunker, as of today 07-06-18, still shows a picture of students in lab coats with the caption "Early Photo of Physics Lab Techies.” That picture is NOT FROM NEW MEXICO, but from Caltech, and he knows this but is still insinuating it as from New Mexico Tech. Wow, can we find more fabrications? Why yes, we can...

"Lonnie had impaired vision and required corrective lenses, which he lost.”

Here he forgets to mention that Lonnie’s glasses fell off AFTER he had seen the craft from only 35 feet. Lonnie’s daughter told us they were not corrective lenses at all, but more like readers.

"LONNIE DRANK, AND STUDENTS PRANKED".

This I find is the most disturbing fabrication of all, and is indicative of the type of dubious lack of research that has occurred, which appears to consist of Google, and a phone call or 2. While in Socorro this April, we found that the bartender from the local pub, called The Capitol Bar, was still around, and in fact he had just retired as a professor from New Mexico Tech. He said that 'Lonnie was in the bar at least 4 times to break up fights, not to drink.' He was not known as a heavy drinker, and when being questioned after the event he stated that he had 'a few beers several months ago'. Locals we spoke with, who knew Lonnie well, said he was just the opposite, and expressed great anger that this is being promoted by remote ‘talking heads’. The flimsy evidence behind this ludicrous claim, is on a debunkers web site that post anonymous people’s comments as fact, and that reminds me the common practice of going on Yelp and posting great things about your own business using false names, to promote your company. Again, we have no first hand witness testimony, as we have gathered on site, to support these farcical claims. Paul Harden, President of the Socorro Historical Society and a staff member of the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in Socorro, whom I spoke with for 2 hours last month, mentioned that 'most people from 1962 are still here in Socorro.' We found that to be true as we had no trouble finding original witnesses, and no need to embellish this story as one would who has not visited the site and taken the time to talk to those who know this story best. I found Paul to be a very conversational and kind. He clearly knew Lonnie quite well, and was very familiar with almost all of the people associated with this event. He shared many details from 1964 that challenged our ability to write down all of the important points that he was covering. In fact, when discussing the integrity of Lonnie, it is important to quote the real 'experts' who were involved in this seminal case. Hector Quintanilla, the head of Project Blue Book in 1964, had this to say in the CIA publication "Studies in Intelligence" released in 1966:

The brief was called “Policeman’s Report.”

“There is no doubt that Lonnie Zamora saw an object which left quite an impression on him. There is also no question about Zamora’s reliability. He is a serious police officer, a pillar of his church, and a man well versed in recognizing airborne vehicles in his area. He is puzzled by what he saw, and frankly, so are we. “This is the best-documented case on record, and still we have been unable, in spite of thorough investigation, to find the vehicle or other stimulus that scared Zamora to the point of panic.” This is where the subject of a “named so called student hoaxers” came into the debunkers world, but not surprisingly, this pool of students vanished like a light rain on a hot summer day in the desert. In an email, one of the debunkers asked if I knew who the names of the students who were in on the hoax. I did not at the time, but he said, “does one of them have the initials JC?” Well, while in Socorro, I found out quite easily who JC was. Apparently, Sterling Colgate provided 2 names of the known hoaxers. This is counter to an email between a debunker and Colgate where Colgate stated that he ‘did not know the names of the students”. I will not divulge these names to protect them from further harassment, but we will be digging deeper on this. I did speak with a very good friend of one of the so called hoaxers, and he said that the former student was very upset with Colgate for naming him, and wondered what he did that made Colgate LIE about his involvement as a hoaxer and throw him under the bus. This is different from what debunkers have related on various websites, that this same person did not deny being a part of a hoax. In fact, he indicated that a debunker was trying to get him to say things to conform to what he (the debunker) believes. This is called leading the witness. Mmm, somebody has their story wrong, and I think I know who. We will find out very soon. The other student, who just retired, said he was not even in classes with the others, and he also denied being a part of the hoax. He was a Geologist. Both said that hoaxes are fun to do, but not in the week leading up to finals week. So, in summation, all of the so called hoaxers have both indicated that they had no part of a hoax. It appears that Colgate really liked the limelight, but got caught up in something that became bigger than his small circle of friends. Another point is that this letter surfaced AFTER Lonnie had passed away. Then it became more public AFTER Colgate passed away. Also, in our interviews with several former students and people that knew Colgate we find that Colgate had an affinity to party with students while enjoying libations besides alcohol. This memory kept coming up from several past students. I point this out for 2 reasons (and not to disparage Colgate), because debunkers imply that Lonnie was a drunk and thus his story cannot be trusted. Can not the same also be said of Colgate? Also, because someone is brilliant and has multiple degrees, that does not mean they do not have flaws and the capacity to promote false truths. If you started a rumor based on second or third hand testimony, and to save face wanted to defend that rumor, then you would have what is now seen as the ridiculous unsubstantiated claims by Colgate, and his true believers. So, the crux of this impossible to reproduce hoax theory is based on fabrication, speculation, and bad investigation. Lonnie Zamora, over the many years since 1964, never changed, nor embellished his story. There is another important point to make about Lonnie’s character. Our investigation shows how much he was liked by all of the people who spoke so well of him. In April of 1964, Lonnie’s patrol car was only one week old, and it was shared by another officer. In our first visit to the site in 2016, we drove a new rental car to the site, and beat it up pretty good, bottoming out on rocks every few feet. As a proud police officer, in a new car, the only reason that makes sense for Lonnie to drive into this difficult area was to see if there was someone in trouble, perhaps a crashed plane. That tells you the nature of Lonnie, that he would risk a brand new car driving into a difficult area, because he felt IT WAS THE RIGHT THING TO DO IF SOMEONE WAS IN TROUBLE. Debunkers, on the other hand, have modified what Colgate originally said (a balloon with a candle) by trying to fit several different types of balloons into the picture, including a helium balloon, a weather balloon, and maybe a balloon towed by a rope. Yet, not one single person can provide any evidence of a hoax, nor how it was done. No one can answer the question of how Lonnie was lead to the site, if it was students, a quarter of a mile away, hoping to lure him to a SPECIFIC location. Lonnie heard a roar and spotted a glowing blue orange flame in the sky, which was descending BEFORE he crested the mesa and looked down into the arroyo. The landing site is several hundred feet from the road. That would have to be one magical balloon. Now that the reader can see how the idea of a hoax is untenable and virtually impossible using 1964 technology and materials, let’s get to the events themselves and try to determine the real story of this incredible event. In order to determine the facts of this event, the authors revisited Socorro for the second time in April of 2018 and dug even deeper into this fascinating mystery of a UFO landing in the New Mexico desert. Many people that have heard of this case are not aware of the fact that several egg-shaped craft were witnessed by civilian and military personnel in this general area and time frame. This is an important thread to follow and expands this case from the one event in Socorro to a plethora of similar incidents that support a mini flap of such craft, which appeared in and around several military installations that are located throughout this area. In fact, New Mexico, for many years, has been a military crossroads for the United States. As the Second World War began, the Albuquerque Army Air Field was training thousands of military personnel on the B-17 "Flying Fortress". The privately-owned Portair Field in Clovis became the Clovis Army Air Field and, just east of the White Sands Proving Grounds, the Alamogordo Army Air Base was established. As the war raged, the B-29 Superfortress became an integral part in the Pacific Theater. Alamogordo aircraft saw more action, as did planes from Albuquerque and Clovis. In July 1945, the world changed forever as we entered the nuclear age with the detonation of the world's first atomic bomb at Trinity, located in the northern stretch of White Sands. In September of 1947, the United States Air Force was officially established. By then, Albuquerque's base was re-named Kirtland, Clovis became Cannon Air Force Base and Alamogordo became Holloman. Kirtland has stayed on the forefront of nuclear development for both war and peacetime applications, with many of the discoveries being tested south at White Sands Missile Range. But in 1964, with the Socorro UFO landing hitting the press in advance of the militaries ability to investigate it, we find that an extensive search of all of these bases yielded NO OBJECT that could account for the craft that Lonnie Zamora came upon while investigating what he thought may have been an explosion of the dynamite shack in the Socorro desert. This extensive and mostly secret investigation included Project Blue Book, the FBI, CIA and the Army, with inquires and interest from the White House and Joint Chiefs of Staff. The idea of a hoax was considered and dismissed after the facts came to light. Upon digging deeper into the Project Blue Book reports and local newspaper archives some interesting cases were discovered:

–In 1957

Two military police units patrolling the Trinity site at White Sands, independently of each other, reported seeing an egg-shaped object hover over the desert. The object reportedly landed, leaving ‘footprints’, and then departed at high speed.

–April 26th, 1964 Albuquerque, NM

George Mitropolis was driving north on US 85 when he spotted an object ahead of him, appearing to come above the crest of the mountains and then drop back behind. He stopped his car and saw a luminous object, like an ‘inverted bathtub’ thirty feet in length, with a glow radiating beneath it.

–April 27th, 1964 El Paso, Texas

Eight children and several adult witnesses viewed a hovering egg-shaped UFO over 6 feet in height above the Crosby School.

–April 28th, 1964, Near Socorro NM

Two egg shaped objects were seen by a truck driver and his wife around 5:30PM, moving as fast as a jet plane. That same day, in Hobbs NM, (Police report) a group of children and 2 adults witnessed the same event: a white round object that hovered over the city and then departed to the Northeast. Later the same day in Cheyanne, Wyoming, 3 women reported seeing an egg-shaped UFO with a trail streaking from it, followed by a second UFO.

–April 30th, 1964 Holloman AFB

Two military sources said there was an encounter between a B-57 and an ‘egg shaped white object’. The pilot reported to this to the mission controller at Holloman and was asked to ‘turn and re-encounter the object’. The pilot then radioed that the UFO had ‘landed on the ground’. When Coral Lorenzen, a UFO Investigator, published a press release on this sighting, brass at Holloman admitted the next day that they had “tracked 2 unknowns on radar”. In addition, there was another sighting on the same range by a guard, who was so frightened by what he saw that he ‘emptied his side arm at the object and then fled’ to base HQ, where he was subsequently hospitalized. On the same day in 1964, at 10:22 in the morning, NICAP investigator Ray Stanford took 2 photographs of a glowing blue object while driving back to Phoenix from Socorro. What he saw and photographed was a compound object that appeared to shimmer an odd blue along with a delta shaped object.

–April 30th, 1964: Las Cruces

A state police officer and 4 employees of the Port of Entry Station on Interstate 10 south of the city reported sighting a luminous round object moving in jerky motions and changing direction. State patrolman Raul Arteche of Anthony also sighted the object moving northwest. This was also reported independently, by a private pilot at the same time.

–May 15th, Stallion Site, Holloman

Radar , including FP-16 radar at the Stallion site, tracked 2 objects ‘performing precise, perfect flight maneuvers, including side by side flight, separating, then rejoining in formation in up and down (pogo) maneuvers’. Visual confirmation was made by a trained radar operator who saw two objects, flying low, described as ‘brown and football shaped.’ What is very interesting about this report is that Ray Stanford, the original NICAP investigator at Socorro, reported filming similar objects performing these same feats, from a highway on the north edge of White Sands in the July 19th, 1978. He also obtained ELF magnetic recordings, as well as a sound recording. These are just some of the many reports concerning egg or football shaped objects in the New Mexico area that lend credence to the Socorro UFO incident. A one off is one thing, but the data shows that this type of craft was operating in this area before and after Lonnie Zamora’s sighting, further supporting what Lonnie reported. Ray Stanford, when interviewing the other Socorro police officers, was told that ‘they all saw object’s’ at various times but would never report it after seeing the way that Lonnie was being treated. We also uncovered a report of another ‘landing’, near the canal in Socorro. We wondered where this canal was, so we got in the car and found it, parallel to the river. This is a perfect, low lying area, leading into Socorro from Albuquerque. While discussing this with several locals, we uncovered a story, spoken only to locals, that Mary (not her real name) was sitting on the porch of her house that faces the canal, and saw an egg shaped object coming along the canal from the direction of Albuquerque, and turning towards the area where the object was then spotted by the witness that stopped at Opal Grinders gas station. We reconnoitered the area, found the house, and the path that she described, and it all lines up with the witness reports. Remember that 3 independent witnesses called the Socorro dispatch from Albuquerque, reporting an object with a blue flame, heading to Socorro right before Lonnie spotted the craft. Another new and interesting piece of information was shared with us, by 2 independent people, that something was recovered on the ground, supposedly from this craft. We are looking further into this information, and recently, we got corroboration that another Investigator heard the same story, from 2 ADDITIONAL witnesses. While speaking with a few of Lonnie’s close friends, and his daughter, we were impressed by the fact that Lonnie’s fright was way beyond what was apparently reported. According to a close friend, Lonnie was so frightened by what he saw, that he spent 3 hours talking with his priest that first night. When Lonnie asked him what he should do, the priest said “Do one of 2 things. Shut up or tell the truth”. Lonnie decided on the truth, and he never wavered nor embellished it. According to his close friend, Lonnie knew when to ‘begin and end the story’. We got the impression that Lonnie, who went from saying he saw 2 small figures to talking only about ‘something white coveralls’, saw 2 entities that he knew were not human and shattered his view of the world. New Mexico State Policeman Sergeant Samuel Chavez, the first person Lonnie called after the event, arrived and said that Lonnie was white as a sheet and looked like ‘he had seen the devil.’ Lonnie responded with ‘Maybe I have’. Harold Baca told us that ‘my dad got there within 5 minutes and Lonnie was still hiding behind his car when they got there.’ Ray Stanford, when onsite a few days later in 1964 with Dr. Hynek and Lonnie, said that Lonnie stood in front of the creosote bush, and held his hand about 4 feet off the ground in front of the bush, to indicate their size. Over the years, everyone that was close to Lonnie said that he was ‘never the same’. Most friends would not bring up the encounter, but occasionally Lonnie would just need to talk about it. Towards the end of his life, he was admitting that ‘the creatures’, when asked what they were, did not ‘come from around here’. He did not know what they were, but he wished he had never seen nor talked about them. The Airforce, from the first day of their investigation, told him to not mention any occupants. We believe, that in that moment of terror, that Lonnie knew that they were not men of Earth, and as a devout Catholic, his first thought was that he had witnessed a demon.

This part of the story has become a lot more interesting, as we have indications, hinted at by Paul Hardin and others, that Lonnie had a much closer encounter with the 2 beings, and that this is the point that Lonnie realized that he was confronting 2 non-human creatures, not a couple of kids at the scene of an accident. Further documentation of this encounter is coming soon, and we cannot elaborate further until a fellow friend and researcher releases more of this material. While discussing the extent of Lonnie’s fright with Ray Stanford, we agreed that there must have been some details that Lonnie left out that caused him to react so strongly, and be so afraid of what he encountered. As Paul Hardin mentioned, Lonnie knew when ‘to start and stop the story’, and this, we believe, is directly related to his close encounter with non-human entities, perhaps as close as 50 feet away. If Lonnie had a much better, and probably closer look at the 2 occupants, this would account for the fact that what he saw changed his life forever. The authors do not know what landed in Socorro, nor the origin of said object. Our investigation has shown that all of the uncovered data points to the landing of a non-human craft with very small occupants. Despite the attempts by all of the investigative branches of the military, they could never find a company nor organization that said they constructed this craft. When you put all of the facts together, what we found is that a very strange event occurred, and the mystery of what actually landed in Socorro in 1964 will remain a mystery, probably forever. Lonnie was never the same, and we doubt that a balloon, or any type of a hoax, would have fooled this Army and Police veteran to the point of abject terror. Instead, the evidence leads us to believe that Lonnie was a witness to the great unknown, and the weight of this knowledge was so heavy, that it forever affected Lonnie to his last day on Earth. Thanks to the friendly and fine people of Socorro, New Mexico, for allowing us access to files, newspaper articles, and witnesses to this April 24th, 1964 event.

See Also: The Socorro UFO Case – Two More 'Smoking Guns' The Lost Socorro UFO Footage – Found? | VIDEO Update on the ‘Search for the Socorro UFO (Case) Footage’ Egg-Shaped UFO Lands and Takes Off, Reports City Policeman, Lonnie Zamora | SOCORRO UFO INCIDENT – 50th ANNIVERSARY

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The Socorro UFO Incident – Facts vs Fiction http://www.theufochronicles.com/2018/07/the-socorro-ufo-incident-facts-vs.html

#July 12 #2018 at 06:51PM

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