FIC REC LIST - DESTIEL EDITION

It’s fic recs time again. (part i | part ii | part iii)

Actus Fidei by manic_intent - 5.6k, rated E

Summary:  On the very first time that Castiel manifests in front of Father Dean Winchester, he gets as far as “Rejoice, for you are blessed-” before Dean shoots him with a salt-loaded shotgun.

It’s on my re-reads list. So well writen and well developed. Short and powerful and made me fall in love with Father Dean fastest than that girl Fleabag.

Unknown Quantities by xylodemon -  8.5k, rated E

Summary: No one ever tells Dean anything.

(or: Dean Winchester and the not-relationship crisis of 2014)

There’s Dean and Cas and sexual tension and they’re having sex before they can figure anything else on their relationship. It’s perfect.

Crazy Diamonds by pantheon_of_discord, 25k, rated E

Summary: A week ago, Dean was pulled out of Hell. Now, he’s apparently woken up in 2018, and the angel that a mere twenty-four hours beforehand had threatened to chuck him back into the pit is sleepily pouring himself coffee and wearing Dean’s second-favourite Zeppelin shirt. It all seems like a perfect happy ending, but with Hell’s scars still so fresh, Dean can’t imagine how he could have possibly gotten there.

Time travel fic, which would be enough. Plus it works both ways: the Dean from the future is sent back to the past.

where the weeds take root by deathbanjo, 30k, rated E

Summary: “Are you happy? Y’know. Just—being here,” Dean says, gesturing to the yard with his beer bottle. “Being with—I mean, you used to fight in celestial wars and—and save the world. Now you’re growing vegetables and talking about chickens.”

That’s a personal favorite, re-read list. The slow burn, the domesticity, the pinning, the desire. The chickens. Just read it.

The Mirror by cloudyjenn, 25k, rated M

Summary: When Dean touches a strange mirror, he’s whisked away to one alternate reality after another and it doesn’t take him long to realize the universe is trying to tell him something.

Surprise! Contrary to popular beliefs, Dean and Cas are in love in every universe. Also some great genderbend.

Some Boys are Sleeping Alone by prosopopeya - 4.2k, rated M

Summary: This isn’t something that’s okay, not for him, but it chases him through the years until it turns into something he can’t – doesn’t want to deny.

This one is totally a bait to my personal likings: dean’s bisexuality addressed, background Dean/OMCs, John Winchester’s A+ parenting and Dean getting what he wants.

More Than Ever by Sass_Master - 20k, rated E

Summary: Dean’s getting some pancakes together for breakfast when Cas saunters in after a run.

He’s trying to focus on whisking batter, unfairly distracted by Cas a few feet away, breathing heavily and shining with perspiration. Dean’s been painfully aware for a long time that Cas is pretty easy on the eyes, but he’s used to seeing Cas buttoned-up and unflappable, looking straight-laced in a stiff oxford and an unflattering trenchcoat.

Now Cas is sweating, Dean’s borrowed t-shirt clinging to his skin, flushed from exertion and Dean really can’t deal with that in his kitchen right now.

Then again, there’s dean and Cas and ogling and drooling and the aways good way in wich you can cut the sexual tension with a knife. That’s a win or win scenario.

The Story of You and Me by the_diggler - 55k, rated E

Summary: Dean wakes up in bed next to a very human Castiel, and a journal in his own handwriting that tells him it’s two years in the future. The house looks a lot like Bobby’s, and Sam lives there too… He just can’t remember how they got from angels falling in the sky – to comfortable domesticity.

While there is much in the journal Dean doesn’t remember, there is much of their story he’s always known. And as he settles into the routine of his new life and relationship with Castiel, it quickly becomes something he doesn’t know how to live without.

The best thing about cliches? You know exactly what’s gonna happen, and that’s great. Classic djinn fic.

The Girlfriend Experience by rageprufrock - 15k, rated E

Summary:  While it’s not like Dean hasn’t had a couple of truly regrettable hit-and-runs in his sexual history, this is probably the saddest fucking thing that has ever happened to him.

Once again, they start having sex before anything else going on between them is addressed. Because sometimes sex is the easiest part.

like moses and batman and james dean by saltyfeathers - 31.5k, rated E

Summary:  dean used to turn tricks. over a decade later, he met cas.

The angst from our favorite angst boy.

things happen (they do, they do, and they do) by sobsicles - 28k, rated E

Summary: So, the first thing that happens is Castiel comes back.

Well, as a spn finale denialist myself, I choose to love this one. Just go read it.

Formal and Shining and Complete by pollutedstar - 3.2k, rated T

Summary: "But Dean’s intelligence was every bit as formal and shining and complete, without the tedious intellectualness. And his ‘criminality’ was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-coming. Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced into society, eager for bread and love.“

- On The Road by Jack Kerouac

Dean Winchester’s coda, the best it can be. It hurts just in the right places.

Heroes for Ghosts by pantheon_of_discord - 43k, rated E

Summary: After Sam and Dean are arrested, Castiel is left alone and scrambling to find them. He knows they’re locked away in a government facility, and he’s still able to hear their prayers, but no matter how he tries Castiel can’t seem to track them. He chases leads and even attempts to hunt on his own, but Mary is AWOL, Crowley refuses to help, and Castiel’s options are running out.

The slow realisations and the prayers as foreplay work for me wonderfully.

Plain and Tall by destielpasta, mtothedestiel - 70k, rated E

Summary:  Dean is a Kansas farmer who only wants to work his land and care for his infant daughter. With his wife gone and his brother moving on to a life beyond the homestead, Dean finds himself in need of another pair of hands. Castiel, a lonely drifter freshly arrived in town, may prove the solution to Dean’s troubles. Over the course of four seasons, the two men face the everyday challenges of prairie life, and learn to overcome the betrayals of their past to discover a new definition of family.

It’s different from the things I usually go for, but made me go through hours with a smile on my face. Period farmboys AU.

FIC RECS: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4

Jayna Dar (Revised)

Basics

Full Name: Jayna Dar

Bounty Hunter Alias: Myra Tillo

Home Planet: Chalacta

Age: 32 at the start of The Clone Wars

Sexual Orientation: Bisexual

Appearance

Species: Human

Skin Tone: Deep brown

Eye Color: Green

Hair Color: Black

Hairstyle: Usually worn in classic Star Wars braids, but eventually cut just above her shoulders

Makeup: Heavy around the eyes and not much else

Build: Like a gymnast; muscular and lean

Height: 5’ 8’’

Style: Before joining Maul her clothes are more western inspired; long dust jacket, boots the works. She wears minimal armor and tight clothing underneath to allow her to move freely.  She also makes sure to cover her lower face by a mask at all times. After joining Maul, she abandons the mask and only wears the dust jacket on special assignments.

Weapons: Purple lightsaber and two DH-17 blaster pistols

Personality

General Personality Traits: Private, Strong Willed, Sharp Tongued

Strengths: Intelligence, Resourcefulness, Reliability

Flaws: Stubborn, Ruthless, Resentful

Habits And Mannerisms: Never leaves her back to the door, has a tendency to lean against anything she can find, refuses to sit in a chair like a normal person, master for the perfectly timed eyebrow

Secrets: She was a padawan before becoming a Bounty Hunter; her master was killed and the Jedi never came for her, assuming she was dead

 Regrets: Allowing herself to rely on anyone

Skills/Talents: Force sensitive (doesn’t have as much control in the mind category, but can reliably manipulate the force to assist in jumps and her strength), Fast reflexes, hand to hand combat, sharp shooter, and can annoy the living hell out of anyone

Likes: A good fight and getting paid

Dislikes: Getting screwed over

Sense of Humor: Biting and sarcastic

Guilty Pleasure: Actually, indulging in friendships and genuine connections with people

Defining Moment: Deciding to stay with Maul after the Siege of Mandalor and Order 66, helping him to gain back control of Crimson Dawn

Relationships

Friends: Cad Bane (to a point), Hondo Ohnaka (to a point), Obi Wan Kenobi (a long time ago)

Enemies: Most of the Jedi, Palpatine, Dooku, a good handful of gangsters, a few bounty hunters, a lot of people basically

Rivals: Aurra Sing and Cad Bane

Lovers: A string of one-night stands, currently Darth Maul

Relationship Status: It’s complicated

Reputation: Here for a fun night, but won’t stick around for coffee in the morning

Miscellaneous

Collections: Replacement parts for her lightsaber stolen over the years

 Accent: British, but filtered through an Indian dialect

Voice: Smooth as silk

Signature Quote: “Who says I stole it?”

Song: Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked by Cage The Elephant

Backstory

Jayna doesn’t remember her life on Chalacta before the Jedi came for her.  She was only about five when she arrived at the Temple and already showed a deep connection to the force.  She was trained along with several younglings around her own age, including one Obi Wan Kenobi.

She was always rather reckless, experimenting with her abilities and thinking of new and creative ways to use it.  However, she did not have the same natural control of her emotions the others did, which proved difficult in her training.  This didn’t stop her and Obi Wan from forming a close bond in their early days.  While he had a better sense of when to stop, they encouraged each other in their studies and pushed the limits of what was and was not allowed.

Eventually, Jayna passed her trials and moved to the status of Padawan at thirteen under the guidance of Master Kira Odan, a female Pandoran.  She did her best to counterbalance her Padawan’s more reckless tendencies, but they did not have long together.

When Jayna was fourteen, and her master were sent to settle of dispute on the edge of Wild Space.  They were so far out, contact with the Republic was extremely difficult, which proved their undoing.  The village in which they were staying was attacked by slavers.  Master Odan was killed and Jayna was taken as a slave. It took weeks for the Jedi to finally reply to the distress call.  When they got there, the village was burned to the ground.  Both Master Odan and her padawan were presumed dead.

Jayna was eventually taken by the Pykes to work in their spice mines. She tried to keep her abilities under wraps.  She knew well enough to know she could not fight everyone on her own, and especially without her lightsaber (she had destroyed it not long after being captured, making a point to pull out the kyber crystal before her slavers could discover it).  But, she found it difficult to obey orders and was often beaten down for her trouble, which only fueled her rage and made it harder to control her abilities.

Luckily for her, this inability to back down from a fight caught the interest of a Bounty Hunter employed by the Pykes, a Twi’lek named Daymar.  He bought her for a rather low price since she was “too much trouble”.  

Jayna saw this as her chance to escape, but Daymar easily caught her and brought her back to their came.  She had also given up her secret in the escape attempt.  Seeing this as an opportunity, Daymar convinced her to stay, playing into her insecurities about the Jedi abandoning her.  Feeling alone in the world, and scared, Jayna agreed to stay with Daymar.

She took on the alias Myra Tillos as Daymar trained her to be a bounty hunter. She learned to be sufficient with a variety of weapons as well as how to hide her abilities in order not to draw attention to the Jedi and other hunters who might want to take her away.  She even managed to scramble together bits and pieces of machinery to eventually rebuild her lightsaber.  This only added to her growing reputation as rumors spread on where and how she got the weapon.

All seemed to be going well until she was nineteen and got her final lesson.  

While on a job, their employer discovered Jayna was force sensitive.  He convinced Daymar to hand her over in exchange for Jayna’s cut plus an extra twenty percent.  Daymar did so without hesitation, telling Jayna that “it was nothing personal, just business”.  It was then Jayna realized Daymar had just been using her, just like the slavers had used her, and the Jedi before them.

Unfortunately for her latest buyer, he underestimated her abilities, thinking she had never been properly trained.  She killed him in the escape as well as everyone else who knew of her abilities.  She then tracked down Daymar and killed him too.

Now free, she vowed never again to have any form of Master.  She soon developed her own reputation as a solo act known for quick jobs and miraculous escapes. She rarely worked with other Bounty Hunters if she could help it, knowing the chances of her being stabbed in the back when she was by herself was a nice healthy zero.  However, she eventually got into some friendly competition with Cad Bane and could even manage some jobs with him with little pain on either end.

She spent a little over a decade like this until The Clone Wars.  With the war brings change and an imbalance in the force even she can’t ignore.  

Persona 5 Scramble Japanese Demo Nintendo Switch Review

Is it a Last Surprise or is it “too fast for eyes?”

By: Nay Holland

The Persona series has come a long way in terms of its success. What was once a spinoff of a series that is currently three decades strong is now a franchise all on its own. The latest game in the series, Persona 5, proved to be a financial and critical success despite the infamous “Winter 2012” meme. Five years later and the Persona 5 van still has a lot left in the tank.

With an anime series, a manga spinoff, countless audio dramas, a handheld RPG spinoff, and a dancing game spinoff, Joker has been around the world and back. At the time of writing, the updated re-release, Persona 5 Royale, hit Japanese store shelves in December with a Western release at the end of March 2020. 

There is one more game in the Persona 5 universe that has yet to be mentioned. Scramble.

When this game was first announced, it was met with a favorable, yet confused, response. Here was a Persona 5 title announced for the Switch; A game that was a Playstation exclusive. While many initially thought it was the highly requested Switch port, the Omega Force logo revealed otherwise. It was instead a Musou game. Or, a Warriors game for the Western audience. Several months later, a PS4 version was also announced, further nullifying the dreams of a Switch-port of Persona 5 for now.

Omega Force are the brains behind the long running Dynasty Warriors series. Can you believe that this series started back in ‘96? As a fighting game nonetheless? The climate was different in the mid-90s that’s for sure.

After countless, and I mean this quite literally, countless entries in the Warriors series, several spinoffs were released. This included Samurai Warriors, which featured Japanese historical figures substituting the Three Kingdoms characters, and Warriors Orochi, which combined both because why not?

It was due to the wild collision course between Oda Nobunaga and Lu Bu clashing swords that other possibilities began to bore fruit. Someone in the Bandai Namco office thought “What if we had Gundams engage in intergalactic battles vs hundreds of Zaku units?” Omega Force obliged.

Several years later, someone else, probably the same person as before, in the Bandai Namco office thought “What if we had Luffy fend off hundreds of pirates?” Omega Force went to work.

Long time partners, Koei Tecmo, pitched the idea of a Hokutou no Ken Musou game and OF was on the scene.

After a while, it did not matter what the source material was. Berserk? Fire Emblem? The Legend of Zelda? It didn’t matter. So long as Omega Force had a check to look forward to, nothing was impossible for them.

So to see the Omega Force brand assigned to the Persona series raised eyebrows, but those in the know nodded their head in approval. Fans such as myself were wondering how a game like Persona would incorporate their mechanics in a Musou game. With the Persona 5 Scramble public demo released on February 5th, our curiosities are finally sated. Or are they?

Turns out it’s not an English demo, but it’s a Japanese demo. Fortunately, it’s not awfully difficult to obtain nor play through the demo, but for the sake of convenience, I’m covering the Switch port. The main reason was that I already had a Japanese Nintendo account. The second reason was my curiosity. I wanted to know how the game played on a console with lesser specs. 

I played the demo on the Switch Lite, so I exclusively played on handheld mode. That said, the game played really well. If there were any slowdowns, it wasn’t noticeable for me. Controls were responsive and everything I wanted Joker to do, I was able to do with no hindrance.

When you first boot the demo, you’re introduced to a sizzler of sorts as you fight several shadows in Shibuya until the game cuts away to several cutscenes.

Now, this is where we reach our main caveat. These are first world problems, but I cannot tell you much about the story. Not because of spoilers although there are certainly here, but because the voices and subtitles are in Japanese. I could deduce what’s going on based on the original story however so, I’ll try my best.

Judging the time of the game, July, the game takes place quite some time after the ending of Persona 5. Several key giveaways are the props within Cafe Leblanc, such as Yusuke’s painting. All of your comrades are present and accounted for, with new attire and the like.

Immediately something is amiss as another app is downloaded on the phone. It is here where you can name your character. Remember when I said this was a Japanese game? Japanese characters and alphanumeric characters only! With very limited space as well!

I went with this. It’s a demo. Don’t judge me.

So, you’re sent to investigate any abnormalities in Shibuya with your best bud Ryujii when an idol appears to have a concert. Almost immediately you’re placed in the Metaverse. A few seconds later you’re fighting hordes of shadows with your buds in Shibuya. 

It is here that several mechanics are introduced, so, I’ll list the controls that are the most important.

X - Light Attack

Y in the middle of a combo - Heavy attack

Y by itself - Projectile

Just like in most Musou games, any combination of light attacks can be finished with a Heavy Attack to provide various results. If you use the Heavy attack by itself, Joker will use his gun.

ZR - Dodge

While walking and holding ZR - Run

R + Button = Spells

These are self explanatory. You can dodge and weave in between enemy attacks. Just like in Persona, he has access to skills. Each skill has a different effect within a different radius. The Eiha spell will hit enemies in a circle while Cleave will hit those in a cone.

X+A - Showtime 

This is this game’s version of the Musou attack. In Warriors games, these are the cinematic attacks that deal massive damage to those around the user. Not only does it look badass, but you’re also invulnerable while using it. This can be used as a way to form wiggle room when overrun.

Halfway through the first palace, as you are introduced to the palace owner and are disposed of, you come across a giant cube. As Joker interacts with the cube, a girl emerges from the cube. The girl tags along with you until it is revealed that this girl is nowhere near defenseless. She can hold her own in combat quite well. The cube she emerged from seems to be her Persona of sorts.

A - Grants you access to the interactable environment around Joker

B - Jump, press again to double jump Environmental attacks let you interact with your surroundings, like the streetlamps in Shibuya. These allow you to stay perched, away from harm as you swoop down on your enemies like a hawk to his prey. Hitting this successfully chains into another wide-ranging attack  for even more damage.

Utilizing the environment to your advantage can also provide a tactical advantage. There’s a moment in the demo where there are three powerful shadows. There’s an alternate path you could go to and sneak behind them. You could choose to fight the shadows head-on, but if you take the beaten path you’ll see a flimsy scaffold. If you use the environment attack on the scaffold, not only will the platform break, but you’ll  also surprise the enemy.

Weaknesses, critical attacks, and technical bonuses from Persona 5 are also existent here. If you hit an enemy’s weakness, you’ll be able to hit them while they are staggered to torment their surrounding foes. Tech bonuses, like in Persona 5, activate when a combination of elemental skills are used in succession. I wasn’t able to activate the tech bonus, but a tutorial prompt explaining the bonus did appear.

In Persona 5, you can negotiate with shadows to coerce them into joining your party as a persona. This game works a little differently. Sometimes if you defeat a shadow, they have a chance to join you as one of your Personas. This is good to cover your strengths and weaknesses.

As in Persona 5, certain enemies are resistant, weak, or invulnerable to specific attacks. The more personae you have, the better equipped you’ll become.

Eventually you’ll face a powerful shadow. This serves as this demo’s boss. These boss fights work a bit different from the rest of the fights thus far. The more you hit a shadow’s weak spot, the more you’re able to attack as they are staggered. Exploit their weakness enough and you’ll be able to do an All Out Attack, much like in the original game.

It is here that the demo ends. If you skip through the cutscenes you can easily beat the demo in about an hour. First impressions, I’m honestly surprised how integral the story is to the game. I’m surprised that I’m surprised, considering the source material is a story intensive game.

I wasn’t able to understand the dialogue, but it was great to travel through Yongen-Jaya and Shibuya once again. It was also nice to see that the game’s story seems to be canon to the main story. The combination of Persona’s mechanics with the twitch-reaction of Musou is like chocolate and peanut butter.

By the way in case you were wondering. The menu animations make a return and they look just as beautiful now as they did in Persona 5.

With the game’s release right around the corner in Japan, Western fans are still starving for so much as a crumb of information relating to a release date. Heck, even a confirmation that the game is coming out to the States at all! While it may be up in the air when fans will be able to look forward to news, there’s still a demo that we can enjoy.

Persona 5 Scramble releases in Japan on February 20th

Outlasting the darkness: lessons of six Scottish winters

A view towards the Isle of Mull from its neighbor island, Kerrera--spring

I begin these winter musings in the final weeks of the American summer. Light is waning, and we splash one last time in the magnificent lake, pretending that the golden heat of this muggy, molten season will live on forever. In reality, the earth in its tilted run is already siphoning the minutes off the days. We can no longer reliably plan late evening BBQs around our garden’s shady oak tree, for it will already be dark by 7pm in these last weeks of August. Suddenly, we’re careening into the hectic, school-filled days of early September. One or two punctilious neighbors have already mutinously exchanged flip-flop door wreaths for pumpkins and gourds. I know that in the weeks to come, a veritable sea of hay bales and potted autumnal mums will sprout up in pleasant but unoriginal beatification of this dying season.

Chrysanthemums seem seductive envoys of death, cultivated to bloom only in hues mirroring those of a mature leaf’s swan song—pear-like yellows, burnt oranges, reds umbers, and even crackling browns. Flowers that are unwelcome and doer in the heady exuberance of spring find themselves the befitting adornment of atrophy and waning. Festive gourds, Halloween treats, and crisply weathered hayrides ease us like a conciliatory lullaby into the season that flows towards the utter darkness of the northern hemisphere’s agonizing winter solstice.

I will admit that It is not beyond me to pray, to beseech, to quietly plea for something as elementary as winter sun. Just as I pray quirky prayers that as a Western populace we’d forgo ease and profit for truly earth-honoring, nutrient rich, non-carenogenic farming, or that God would bring suffering children out from pain and fear this night, or for a friend who’s mother no longer lives, so I whisper this prayer for the mercy of winter light. I lift my voice in an entreaty that as the icy air stings our braced, pale faces, and layers panoply our bodies, that the far off winter sun with its weakened winter force would reign over our sky.

I come to these prayers with memories of winter’s capacity for mental woundedness. For six long seasons, I lived as a young adult through the insanity inducing darkness of west coast Scotland’s seemingly amaranthine, sodden winters. While before my travels I had known in theory that places such as Finland, Alaska, and Russia endured a departed sun for seasons together, I was wholly unprepared for the true, if somewhat functional insanity human beings endure when caught in the grip of a dark, far north winter. I had come to a country whose springs and summers produced some of the most stunning landscapes on earth, but whose winters’ lightlessness and wet stung the equilibrium of every cogent citizen. At ten steps beyond cozy indoor lounging, and peaceful snow-filled Saturdays, winter in the Scottish city I’d called home was, in my experience, something to survive, like an ancient, enveloping, heavy, returning foe. This is my small tale of everyday endurance.

When I left east coast America for Glasgow, Scotland in 2005 as an energetic, adventure-seeking twenty-two year old graduate student, I only vaguely considered British lore of generally omniscient rain and mist. If tea and scones accompanied that promised rain, I felt equal to its challenge. After all, I was no stranger to varieties of weather. We of the American Northeast gloried in the wonder of nature’s four faces, and cherished each one’s splendor.

Not we the soft, milk toast citizens of mild Florida, with its perpetual clemency like the slog of a meteorological purgatory, never proceeding from heaven into hell, or fleeing hell into the promise to heaven (apart from those apocalyptic moments of hurricane decimation, to be fair!). Nor were we the unfathomable folk who think it prudent to nurture community so far north as to warrant cars block heaters and homes with double heating systems. Surely a routine -30 F was nature’s indication, to western folk at least, that such landscapes as Alaska or Manitoba were not intended for human flourishing!

For all the variety of season, one reasonable constant was sunshine. From fifteen hours of committed, humid sunlight in the height of a suburban Philadelphia summer to a mere, miserable nine hours mid-December, with sunsets slipping down by 4.36pm instead of summer’s 8.32pm, the sun still at least shone weakly and cruelly in winter. How different it all was just across the pond where dramatic lochs lay and bagpipers piped.

In the beginning, my new young adult life in the art-loving, gritty, dually medieval and Victorian city of Glasgow proved mostly splendid. The beauty of nearby Hebridean islands, hill walking, and Harry Potteresque Edinburgh all soothed the longing I’d followed for vivid, three-dimensional encounter with everything I’d seen on the countless BBC murder mysteries and Jane Austen adaptions. With ceilidhs to dance, coffee shops to visit, curry to discover, and accents to unpack, the insidious impact of a profound lack of vitamin D3 upon my skin and in my body went under my radar. My mind perhaps registered the lack of sun, but only to complain or “winge” of its inconvenience, as the Scots would say. Surely, the November sky was darker than I’d ever known, but there was a jolly Burns night feast to attend, and a grotesque Haggis to address and devour.

Loch Katrine, July

Soon, alongside studies, I had found work at an inner city hotel’s vivacious restaurant. The job stretched my world from church and post-graduate university to the bustling business district of that medieval city. Working the evening shift at the flashy five-star hotel’s eatery, I saw business executives live in rooms week-to-week as their veritable second home, while lush, pleasure-seeking weekend holiday makers shifted the energy to indulgence come weekends. Often, I’d wake from a drug-like sleep the next afternoon in recovery from a previous night’s early morning finish. Weary from consecutive hours of cultivating restaurant elegance on the ground floor, while then frantically couriering steaming room service to more private, weary, or work burdened guests on upper floors, we topped long evenings with free beers and huge communal plates of greasy chips in the wee hours. Night after night, we sat like those participating in a greasy, ritualistic, pagan Scottish communion, where no one but me remembered Jesus’ body and blood.

As the sun glowed a very muted gray buzz across the daytime sky, I’d then half glimpse two hours of cloudy half-light before diving back into the murky cave of our sophisticated but windowless hotel restaurant. Here, I served Scottish rack of lamb to the lonely Welsh businessman, or waited upon the elderly far north Scot who kept the chefs in their windowless aluminum kitchen interested in life by routinely ordering the “special” of the day, chased down by an elegant but heavy triple Laphroig. We’d watch this distinguished man canter very intentionally, like a lad pulled over for his sobriety test, back across the street to the more budget hotel where he slept off this gourmet evening, ready for the following day’s to work on Scottish Educational databases.

When I’d dart out to the wide atrium bar for a diner’s wine or beer in winter, not a spot of sunlight could be seen after 3.30pm, despite the 25 foot floor-to-ceiling windows that invited every ray of lingering sun. Blackness framed the football (soccer!) fans zealously bedecked in their ribald sporting colors, marching drunkenly through the streets to and from pubs screening their games. Their glamor and serious fervor was like a shout of resolve against the depressing dimness.

As I raced along hotel corridors with my dented aluminum room service trolley and my tender, undying hopes of a small cash tip, I’d consume any glimpses of light or sky in passing windows. The mournful beauty of gulls swooping in the inky night’s electric semi-glow is my salient memory of visual grace on these long roomservice patrols along unrelieved gray corridors. Arriving at the penthouse suite on such a preternaturally shaded evening, burdened with the happy, hot, succulent roast chicken for Tony Bennett or hot chocolate and scrambled eggs for Jermaine Jackson and his shy, Caucasian girlfriend, I would sometimes pity the confusion I imagined these grand American stars must feel in our dark cityscape. Why would a civilization choose to stay and inhabit such a gritty and preternaturally dark island? On the surface of things, our commitment to this dim, soggy winter space seemed bewildering and foolishly patriotic.

Wrapped in the stalwart blanket of Scottish pride, Scots rarely discussed why they stayed at all, or how they survived. A tale of explanation that I once read was that in former generations the peoples occupying the coastal lands had found the atmospheric shoreline and islands habitable by aid of their vitamin D3 rich fish, seaweed, and cod liver oils. These they kept in a vat of fermenting sea fruits near the door of their mud-made huts. Oozing the invaluable nectar D3–liquid sunlight in food form--these earlier chiefs and clanspeople weathered the darkness abetted by foodstocks most natural to human survival in their particular climate. Did some of this impulse survive in the English and Scottish default to fish and chips on any possible occasion? In America, we grab burgers or sushi on the run. In Scotland, folk did a wee nip doon to the chippie, perhaps in an unconscious genetic compulsion back towards the fish liver oil origins enabling their earlier mental survival. 

Modern-day Scotland offered not so much a supplemental strategy, as a mission of pitiable smothering —endurance through camaraderie and pub life. In short, we drank the winter away. The prevalence of alcohol, clubbing, and more alcohol, to forget or enliven the threatening, consuming darkness was farught reality. This turn to the wine, the jack and cokes, the gin and tonics, and what became gallons of hard cider was followed, inevitably, by pursuit of deliciously repulsive fried food. A vivid memory of a winter’s evening during my university years in Glasgow was standing with friends in a grease-filled chip shop at 3 am, where a sober, level-headed, but smirking shop owner in turban and mustache served the scantily dressed, blitzed, and literally tottering western “Christian” guests a zero nutrient meal of hot chips (fries), with the chip shop’s familiar grayish green anointing curry. Indeed, a mini industry had sprung around the predictable depression of winter-bound, partying Scots—that of chippies and fish shops, open into the wee hours of the morning. By the end of six years in Glasgow, I stood well aware of the national sting of alcoholism, but certainly, and sadly, not without understanding.

I paint with broad strokes here, of course. These are memories mainly from days spent among hotel friends and university colleagues. My church friends weathered the winter rather more sedately, but not without a wee nip to get through the days, and certainly with a lion’s share of fish and chips. West Wing DVD binges, evening parties of games and “chewing the fat” (fun, leisurely chat), and mini-breaks for those who could afford to flee the gray all sustained the less alcohol prone types, as we grinned and struggled to bear the black winter away.

For myself, winterizing our let Scottish flat remained central to my mental survival. There is such a thing as cutting off your arm to spite your face. And, there is such a thing as having no good choices. When the darkness of a Scottish winter crept into Glasgow like the angel of death looking for blood on the lintels of homes, I was living with two American expatriate friends in a grand West End Glasgow flat. A magnanimous blonde stone mansion that had once outfitted an oil or railway baron of sorts in one of Glasgow’s poshest neighborhoods had now been sequestered into four elegant westend Glasgow flats. By some beneficence I still thrall to remember, we three American post-grad students had obtained “letting” rights to this splendor over a small host of other applicants. During spring, summer, and into autumn, we were the envy of all we knew. Our sprawling lounge with its twelve foot high bay window allowed in light, images of foliage, and the sound of children at play on the grounds of their expensive public (private) school across the way.

As winter crept through, however, opulent settings that had once framed our elegant spring view transmogrified to the Achilles heel of wellness and peace. My male flatmate at the time worked part-time researching medieval and modern lives of the saints, and the other seventy percent of this time drinking Jack Daniels and coke and playing an internet based video game with brothers and friends back in the US. His perch was the delicious round table within the sweep of the elegant bay window. Come November, he and I would rather awkwardly heave out the hidden, original, indoor Victorian window shudders, painted black and capable of covering literally the entire span of the floor-to-ceiling windows in a complicated inter-working of hinges and panels. Assembling this indoor screen felt like the muzzling of a bulldog or the blinding of hero, Samson-style. But we did this because there was other way to keep warm. The meager oil heaters scattered here and there like tokens to modernity held no real efficacy. They were no match for the high ceilings and now-insanely tall windows, and this shudder system in effect double glazed the space, however imperfectly. Whereas with a modern home, one stood a chance of creating somewhat stable warmth with space heaters and extra layers, these old flats stood impotent against the softly insidious sting of that millions-strong army of wet winter water cells.

In western Scotland, winter was not the season of snow, but of the far worse dual enemy of damp and darkness. This was the place of clothes that took a week to fully dry on British drying racks, and Victorian floorboards that leeched cellular moisture perpetually. Continually running dehumidifiers, we found, was positively the most effective form of heat management. Would the yesteryear drying power of real fires in the tenement fireplaces proven the key to survival against the potency of this winter water cell army? I certainly hope so for the sake of our forefathers and foremothers!

When we were done securing the blackened panels across our lounge’s windows, I turned to my own small room, likely once a servant’s quarters. There, too, hung original wooden indoor shudders for my window. Around the awkward fitting paneling, I stuffed old pajamas and the summer shorts and tank tops I’d literally never worn in Scotland. Their summer lightness now served as plugs and sealants against my greatest enemy--winter. At last, my small space lay hermetically sealed and guarded against any speck of outdoor water, and indeed, any ray of weak winter sun. I slept, lived, and worked in a cavernous darkness at least three or four months of those years in which I resided in that flat of historic luxury. Night blended almost unnoticed into day, and a cell phone flashlight directed into my eyes each morning was the best means of indicating dayspring to my searching body.

Deeper into the stretch of the city’s west end, my husband-to-be, with a professional job, traditional office hours, and a somewhat larger bank account, battled the lows of the western Scottish winter more genteelly. His best mate, a distinguished Scottish surgeon, lured him into membership at the sleek and financially exclusive David Lloyd west end gym. Here was a gorgeous, artificial, perpetual summer of sorts—the chemical paradise of an indoor pool, ensconced safely within the glass. Here, eminent surgeon sat swan alongside high stakes IT programmer, property developer alongside Oxford-trained eye surgeon. Thus it was that Alistair and Chris swam their way through the sadness of winter.

Somehow, when I think of Alistair, quietly and dramatically insisting that the David Lloyd gym and the pool were the only places keeping him from actual insanity between the pressures of complicated, risky surgeries at a large regional hospital, estrangement with his brother, tensions with a difficult mother, and the memory of a dead, beloved father, I recognized a specter of my own mental workings–a reluctance to admit or inability to see that a beloved object or passion could actually be foremost implicated in my own harm. Was the west coast Scottish darkness the true force that exacerbated all other struggles beyond the point of endurance? Yet, for this Gaelic patriot, the Scottish winter’s almost unrelenting lightlessness never came to the fore as perhaps the central instigator of mental agony. Alistair loved Scotland deeply. The main fonthead of soul-reviving relaxation outside of the gym lay in his emotional involvement with the waves and rhythms of Scotland’s contemporary celtic music. For a man so somber and focused by day, it was spellbinding to observe him unwinding with dances, fast foot-tapping and a subtly rocking body at modern celtic concerts.

As I would think of those two friends, my mind would automatically contrast them, for some reason, with the astonishing scarred man I met at the Garnethill laundromat one Scottish summer’s day. It must have been the year after my own traumatic second degree burns to my feet—boiling kettle, rushing for church, tired and stressed, slippery hands–and my subsequent skin graft surgery at Glasgow’s Royal Infirmary. The scarred man was short, almost childlike in stature, as I found many Scottish men to be, but clearly aged. Almost up the rim of his chin, where neck and head met, danced plaited, pleated scars so complete and decorative that he almost seemed reptilian.

A thick, three-dimensional scar smiled darkly across the top of neck of where throat and chin meet, reminding me of the mark made by my great uncle, who, carrying the burden of PTSD from violence seen in WWII Pacific battles, and now in the first stages of dementia, had slit his throat with a huge metal saw. This gentle, kind, and tall music-loving man had once played the saw musically, eliciting its wobbling, otherworldly siren song with a cello bow against the flat side of the tool. The musical saw’s sound is piercing and otherworldly, finding its sound family with the glassy, wobbling chords of Benjamin Franklin’s glass harmonica. Two decades later, during my undergraduate years, that tall, German-American vet who’d lied about his age to begin serving before he actually turned 18, took that very musical blade slashed it across his neck. “Look what you made me do,” he cried to my usually strong, forceful Polish-American great aunt. He survived, but forever wore that same ring around his long, elegant neck.

Now, as I bid hello to this diminutive, thoroughly scarred man, I looked quickly away, resolved to appear oblivious to what seemed a very intimate tale of attempted suicide on his body. To my surprise, however, after polite greetings in the otherwise empty laundromat, he immediately commenced the tale of his body with strong Glaswegian inflections. Perhaps it was our isolation. Perhaps it was my conspicuous burns scars blazing through summer sandals. Whatever it was, I was so glad to know him, and moved hear his story. I’ll loosely translate from that lilting Glaswegian brogue into more comprehensible but less lyrical American style.

When he was no more than 5 years old boy, he began, his mother had spilled a full kettle of boiling water over her wee son in a horrible kitchen accident. He was taken to hospital, and almost died. These scars besmirching his flesh were the best doctors could do in skin repair forty years ago, and so he’d borne these ostracizing wounds for almost his entire life. Through no fault of his own, this scarred and anxious man stood thoroughly adorned by permanent markings of unintentional violence. He displayed on one frame forever, something of every person’s lifetime of wounds, internal and external, secrets which other bodies adeptly conceal.

He continued his story by describing a most isolated life, one that I can only attribute to the visual taboo of his grotesquely slashed and matted skin. His home was a single bedsit in the Glasgow city center, where he shared a tiny kitchen with four other single men. His trade, however, was sharpening knives and blades of all kinds. I was mildly surprised to learn that he worked, for it had become routine to me to meet men and women “on benefit” for an array of real mental and physical struggles. The delight he took in his labor delighted me.

From the small, highly regulated and much rarer hunting knives that still circulated after the successful 2005 Scottish gang crackdown and knife amnesty, to larger industrial blades for manufacturing machinery, the man whose name escapes my memory, but whose face and form I’ll never forget, could sharpen them all. Here, with talk of his trade, his eyes finally shifted from their haunted anxiety to brightness. I was blessed to hear him speak with some joy of camaraderie among the gents who worked on site with him at the mechanic’s shop. While the rest of the team fixed tires and engines, he practiced his own highly tailored, solitary trade in a small corner.

Perhaps boldly, because of the safety of my engagement ring, I asked him about girlfriends and women, only to hear confirmed a lifetime of isolation and singleness. He sticks out to me among these contemplations of winter for perhaps unmatched mental resilience against outwardly imposed suffering—a human creating what order, purpose, and joy he could amidst day to day agony. It was the story of a lifetime’s Glasgow winter.

I longed for him was to experience acceptance and community across ages and genders. And so, I, not being one to routinely do so, invited him to stop in at our church in the center of the city, a place of community at the very least. I knew men like him there, faint bodily memories of times past —beatings, disabilities, and trauma—but now slowly flourishing, incrementally renewed, and even married against all odds.

At just that moment, my posh Oxbridge roommate arrived. In the wake of the awkwardness of that invitation and her aura which recalled both my connection with another social realm and his gendered isolation, he quickly scurried off down the road, bearing the burden of his laundry like Quasimodo returning to the tower. I have thought of him often since then, praying for love, for community, and great, new hope. As I write here of winter and mental survival, of Alistair needing the bright lights and chlorinated waters of the posh David Lloyd spa and fitness club, of drunken friends, and mentally suffering colleagues, I think of him. I think of the steady, determined living of the scarred, knife-sharpening man.

One late winter’s evening sitting before the artificial blue glow of my laptop in a room enclosed by the total blackout of a Glasgow winter’s evening, I purchased tickets to the romantic heart of Southern France to visit a childhood friend. I was going on mini-break! Think Van Gogh’s cafe by night painting, and you will know Arles, France, the actual location of that iconic coffee shop, and the Dutch master’s home while at the from February 1888 to May 1889. Late February, almost March, I flew from Glasgow to Barcelona, Spain, and from Barcelona to Grenoble, France, and then by train to Arles. My dear American friend’s smile and transcendent ruby curls greeted me, and together we sauntered like those who’ve reached heaven itself through her adopted hometown, a healing intellectual and aesthetic distance from the New Jersey suburb of her youth. I posed by a Baroque fountain, while an enthusiastic male youth, adorned in an expensive Chanel “merce”, man-purse, jumped in to cradle me and photobomb the shot. We paused at a cafe on a winding, cobblestone street resounding with gentle guitar music for coffee and cocoa--all my European dreams were coming true. We continued on to Arles’ ancient Roman arena, where I heard tell of jazz and opera concerts, and finally emerged before the pinnacle, iconic Arles sight–its mirthful 1900 carousel.

Each of Katherine’s overseas guests were brought here and invited to ride the most famous of all Arlesian beasts—the black bull—El Toro of the carousel. Arlesian voices, Katherine explained, cacophonied in a dynamic, regional debate over the beauty or butchery of the bullfight. When these people of Southern France craved societal momentum, their chosen form of activism was always the formation of a society–the Society for Perpetuating Bullfights, the Society for Ethical Treatment of the Bull, the Society for Ending all Bullfights, etc. Across the road from one such society in an elegant turn of the century building, I paid my euros, and we laughed as the little carousel propelled my postgraduate student body up and down like a child’s. I balled my hands into fists and extended pointer fingers into two playful horns for my own forehead. For one puerile moment, I embodied El Toro himself.

For all the charm of that exploratory, Southern France day, the moment that stands immortalized in my mind was a quiet one. Descending the bull, and resting on the cobblestone pavements between the carousel and the boulangerie where Katherine quickly ran to purchased dinner baguettes, I felt a warmth steal across my face, neck, and decolletage. What was this glowing orange heat descending from the sky? How was this mercy of a peachy, gentle heat present on a mere late February day? Soaked in the mild ecstasy of this magnanimous anomaly, I drowsily wondered again what was this golden orb was doing filling the winter sky so warmly. I am not one to anthropomorphize flesh, but in that moment, my assemblage of cells spoke almost audibly. They begged me to pause, to stop, to soak, to drink in every lingering ray of sunlight. They would not budge.

There can be tears for the relief of battle we barely knew we had. There can be weeping with the realization that we had unknowingly survived truly destabilizing insufficiencies for so long. And at that moment, tears literally sprang to my eyes as I luxuriated in the gentle fullness of a benediction so long denied—the necessary mercy of sunlight for my pale, deprived epidermis. Here was a long forgotten grace for both body and mind. Here was a reminder of an alternative world where sun reigned not as a far off, chance promise, but as an immanent, abundant love.

In 1971, John Denver, the American folk singer with a flaxen gold bowl cut sang, “Sunshine, on my shoulders, makes me happy…Sunshine almost always makes me high.” This racy line sat neatly memorized in my mind, snuck in among other more lighthearted folk fare from my parents’ 1970’s favorites. I vividly recall my parents discussing, with insufficiently hushed voices from the front seat of our gray airport limousine-style van on a trip west around America in the mid-1990’s, whether Simon and Garfunkel’s Cecilia was appropriate musical fodder for the mixed company of our family’s emerging pre-teens, teens, toddlers, and elementary students. “Makin’ love in the afternoon with Cecelia, up in my bedroom! Makin’ love!…” So little music did our parents bring, and so many long hours in the car made for a categorically memorized albums–beauty, revolution, salaciousness, and all. By the end of that month-long trek we kids had memorized much of Peter Paul and Mary’s In The Wind, John Denver’s Best Of, and Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Waters—all of which rotated like clockwork with an audiobook performance of Jane Eyre.

That day, standing in the long alien sun on that street in southern France, the line from John’s “Sunshine” filtered to the surface of long forgotten memories. To be clear, whether it makes me nerd or novice, I have never been “high” in the usual illegal, high school manner; yet, I have experienced the ebullience of a day out with friends and no obligations and money to spend, or the delight and honor of winning a grand, unexpected prize, whether first place in a the school wide coloring contest in kindergarten, or the university Presidential Award. This moment of sun’s mercy was like that—a shock of sheer biological joy, soaking in upon my skin, almost against my will or asking, and ushering with it, a deeply gladdened heart and endorphins. I no longer giggled and smirked at John Denver and his chillaxed, hippy musings. I sang alongside in fully realized understanding. How, oh how, could I return to dark Scotland?

Back in my little cavernous bedroom a week later, I distractedly ordered a large jar of encapsulated vitamin D3. Each small, smooth and marble-like tablet appeared so inane, harmless, even placebo. I tossed one in my mouth, In fact, I think I tossed 5 in my mouth for few days straight. I had no idea of their efficacy, but I reasoned that if in theory, I had been missing out on this necessity for five years, my body would require a small jolt of awakening to begin its journey into recovery. Chasing them down with water, I probably raced on with the movements of my busy life. And suddenly, a week or two later, as I turned up the circular staircase of our Victorian flat, I noticed that the unhinged sadness and chaos that had darkly plagued my inner world had calmed ever so subtly.

It was not the burst of what I imagine a drugged high must be, but the soothing calm of gently increasing stability, the slow, almost imperceptible release from the whirling bedlam of a blurred and muddied mind. The little blue pitch-forked demons of Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty had ceased their authoritative dance and disappeared into a poof of nothing.

“Wow, I’m not insane anymore,” I muttered softly to myself. Gratitude, then annoyance flowed through me. Why, oh why, hadn’t I just tried it before? I would have liked to know that I was more than the “sweet” but distracted and zany blonde—that a measure of winter peace was possible, ever so subtly.

I’ve been a sun chaser ever since. I could not go back, could not slacken my pursuit of the gift of God’s best UV rays. My body and practices have grown more savvy, tailoring their thirst to the most vanguard research—10-20 minutes a day of obsolescence before the orbital rays on as much skin as possible in the prime window of lowest UVB rays—10am to 2pm. I respect the sensitivities of the face, neck, and shoulders.

For so long, I’d scorned the Glaswegian flight to crass, boozy Majorca, Spain, with what I deemed to be its tacky modern hotels and abundance of alcoholic loitering on the sands. Why, I mused, would a nation with such ready access to Europe’s innumerable cultural splendors and fine countrysides beeline in droves to a that tasteless resort landscape? I’d drunk the molding Kool-aid of belief in fading science—wearing sunscreen even on overcast days in cloudy Scotland, and trying to cover every inch of skin with fabric, even on warm far northern days, dreaming all the while of the crowning trophy of smooth, creamy pensioner (retiree) skin, coupled with a remarkable freedom from skin cancer. But now, after seven years of winter darkness and year-round mist, my snobbish disdain broke down with understanding for those I’d once slighted –you must fill up on sun and wellness before any culture becomes important. Pale and D3 deprived as I was, it dawned on me that there was grave logic to British comedian Michael McIntyre’s routine about the Glaswegian airport bombing attempt. Contrasting successful terrorists in London and Manchester, British born Islamic jihadists failed in their malicious bomb plots here in Glasgow, where a winter-beaten Glaswegian man tackled the physician- turned-jihadist in overweening determination to let nothing keep him from…Majorca.

When I next visited Glasgow seven years following our emigration, my friend Lindsey stood contemplating my Americanized postpartum body. She who had known me well in the Glasgow days observed, “You have some curves to you now, and some colour!” It was late October then, and so particularly gratifying to appear even remotely tanned! I reveled in my new hue, a sun-kissed peach, no longer the pallid, muted white linked to breast cancer and MS.

Now as a thirty-something year old scholar, mother, and partner, I look to photos of fellow thirty year old Scottish friends. Two Octobers ago, I sat with them in an ornate Victorian sandstone building-turned-Starbucks, drinking in the miracle of their lovely children, and seeing photos of their flourishing middle class lives. They worked as a professors, teachers, bank tellers, mothers, and volunteered with refugees, addicts, and international students. They lived day by day still in this cloud of gray, and theirs is a resilience I marvel to behold. I raise my glass of almond milk and another of kombucha to them, and salute their Scottish hardiness. My heart opens in prayer for the gift of mental wellness for them, and for those of us everywhere who find the shift to winter darkness an elephant of gloom sitting upon hearts. Let us fill our homes with green plants, keep connected in fun and kinship with friends, especially the lonely, pop our vitamin D3 with its enabling K2 buddy, and long for the lights of Christmas, Hanukkah, and Yule who offer bright, needful stars of hope and celebration against a black winter sky.

As we walk in darkness, visions of summer remains my close companion hope, a specter walking by my side, the dream, like heaven reaching close to earth. And if we have eyes to see, we raise our fragile fingers to touch the veil between this present world and the next springtime. Memories and testimonies from far across the equator where antipodean New Zealand and Australian summers reign alongside our winter become the motivating promise that at the culmination of this obligatory darkness, there will be my body glistening with sun and sweat by the sonorous utterance of the lapping ocean waves.

Art by the awesome @tommieglenn!

Of Gods and Men Summary:

When the gods returned to Gielinor, their minds were only on one thing: the Stone of Jas, a powerful elder artefact in the hands of Sliske, a devious Mahjarrat who stole it for his own ends and entertainment. He claims to want to incite another god wars, but are his ulterior motives more sinister than that? And can the World Guardian, Jahaan, escape from under Sliske’s shadow?

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QUEST 07: DISHONOUR AMONG THIEVES

QUEST SUMMARY:

Due to his status as the World Guardian, Jahaan wound up as part of Zamorak’s heist team. Their task? Steal the Stone of Jas from Sliske and return its power to Zamorak. Jahaan gets to learn more about a god propaganda had always skewed, but will he be on board with Zamorak’s plan in the end…

CHAPTER 4: THE HEIST

Morytania. The cruelest and most unforgiving kingdom in all of Gielinor. Sure, you had the lawlessness of the Wilderness, but that was mere anarchy - bandits and small groups of various races and creeds carving out a little piece of something to call their own, no matter how corrupt it was. Morytania was organised chaos, apt as it was the only Zamorakian kingdom left in the world. Morytania was a land of darkness and evil, inhabited by various creatures secluded in the region, scarcely seen outside of the kingdom’s clouds. Such species include the vampyric race, werewolves, ghosts of unruly souls, ghasts and more. While some humans still remained, most of them were helpless under the tyranny of the vampyres.

During the Second Age, the northern and western areas of Morytania belonged to Zaros, while the southern parts belonged to Saradomin and were known as the ‘Hallowland’. Once Zaros was deposed by Zamorak, the new diety gave Lord Lowerniel Vergidiyad Drakan, a vampyre lord who followed Zamorak during the God Wars, permission to conquer Hallowland as a reward for his hand in the rebellion. It wasn’t long before Draken seized Hallowland for himself and renamed the city as ‘Meiyerditch’. The citizens were held in the city so that Drakan's vampyres could drink their blood as ‘tithes’. And so, Hallowvale turned into a blood-farming ghetto, the sky permanently darkened so that vampyres were no longer hampered by the sun. The death that Drakan brought destroyed the lands of Morytania. He turned fields into swamps, and any that died in their murky depths became undead known as ghasts. Lush forests were transformed into dead clusters of trees. Since its taking, Meiyerditch has been changed into an unrecognisable public squalor. The city is entirely isolated by massive walls on its north, east, and west side, and the south-eastern sea at its southern end effectively boxes the city in. To say that the conditions within Meiyerditch are terrible is an understatement. The city is overcrowded, with humans herded into small wooden apartments that have long since lost walls and roofs to the rot. Food is rare, and many are forced to eat rats to survive. Clothing and other basic necessities are also in short supply. All throughout the city, dying citizens can be seen huddled against walls and in the dark confines of alleys. The ghetto is divided into six sectors, each of which has a number of residents barricaded within. The inhabitants of these sectors pay forced blood tithes on a rotational basis, so as to prevent the large majority from dying of blood loss. Despite this ‘measure’, many citizens do not survive the tithes.

This is only a portion of the kingdom: Mort Myre Swamp lies in western Morytania, plagued by ghasts. It was once a beautiful forest by the name of Humblethorn, but was turned into a swampland once the evil denizens of Morytania descended. The Haunted Woods is a long-dead forest, the remnants of a once luscious and tranquil forest that spread across Morytania. However, when the vampyres arrived, the whole land began to decay and rot. Then there was Mort'ton, a village situated in Morytania, south of the Mort Myre Swamp. The town was once famed for its funeral pyres, though now it is populated by afflicted, strange zombie-like creatures that are the result of a disease which spread through the town some time in the Fifth Age, infecting the population. Nowadays, Mort'ton lies in ruins and, though the Sanguinesti Affliction is no longer contagious and does not present a threat to visitors, the afflicted citizens of the town still wander the streets, and derelict buildings and streets are prowled by shades of long-dead spirits, making the place even more hostile. Directly to the south was the ramshackle town known as ‘Burgh de Rott’ that served as the base for the Myreque rebels who fight to reclaim Morytania from the vampyres.

In the late Third Age, an army of Saradominist soldiers from Misthalin, led by six brothers - Ahrim, Dharok, Guthan, Karil, Torag and Verac - attempted to eradicate the evil creatures of Morytania. These commanders had been given extremely powerful sets of armour and weapons by a mysterious stranger, a follower of Zaros, and led their army with valour through the gloomy swamps of Morytania. Saradominist forces pressed from Paterdomus on the River Salve, all through Mort Myre Swamp, to the walls of Darkmeyer itself, the capital of the Sanguinesti region and the twin city of Meiyerditch. Darkmeyer was Drakan’s residence at the time. Here the brothers made a heroic but bloody and catastrophic stand against Drakan's forces, slaying many. However, as they did, the mysterious stranger that had blessed them before their campaign arrived and told them that they must die, and when they fought with Drakan once again, their powers were greatly diminished. They received horrific wounds and many of their soldiers were killed. The troops were forced to retreat back to their camp. The army tried to treat the brothers' injuries, but their wounds proved fatal, and they all succumbed to their injuries. The soldiers were distraught; they knew that without their commanders, their campaign would end in failure. So, pausing only to bury their dead generals in six barrows, they turned back and fled to their beloved Misthalin.It was here the Barrows Brothers were laid to rest, but they did not rest in peace, becoming the property of their new master and serving as his undead soldiers.A stone’s throw to the south of the Barrows’ graves was Sliske’s lair.

Without the aid of Moia’s teleportation, Jahaan doubt he would have made it on his own. At least, not for a year of so, and likely missing some limbs along the way. It seems as if everyone else had the same idea, arriving in flurries of magic one after the other.When Jahaan landed, he instantly wretched, the sudden onslaught of decay and rot assaulting his senses, the smell unbearable. He’d landed in sodden mud that coated him up to the ankle, scrambling to free himself before he sunk any further.Welcome to Morytania, he grumbled internally, shaking off a few flakes of mud which accidentally splattered onto the back of Zemouregal’s armour. Luckily he didn’t seem to notice.The assembled group quietly trekked through a tiny portion of the swamp until they arrived at the entrance Viggora had described. Prising open the hatch, Bilrach climbed down first to scout out the area, waving the all-clear after a few moments of scanning. However, when they all made it down, their hearts collectively sank.The tunnel was lit, torches protruding from the rocky walls, and on a plinth in front of them was a small handwritten note. Upon closer inspection, it appeared to be a poem, reading:‘A Poem for the Lost’Think no more of the bright, blue skies aboveYou can barely see five fingers raised in the darkThe green grasses you ran through as a child are goneNo longer surrounded on three sides by earth, wind and seaDoes your red blood even flow or heart beat anymore?North, east, south and west are all the sameOnly light and dark combined can guide you now

Using a small spark of fire magic, Moia burned the note, announcing what everyone was thinking, “He’s been waiting for us.”Instantly, Zemouregal snapped around to Jahaan and cornered him against one of the walls, growling, “Did you say something to that snake, World Guardian?” he spat the title as if it were a curse. “You were so chummy with Sliske and his Zarosian pals at the Ritual, after all.”Jahaan glowered up at Zemouregal, not letting the size difference put him off as he argued, “Hey, Sliske’s no friend of mine. Don’t you start throwing around bullshit claims you can’t back up, or we’re going to have a problem.”Roaring a chilling laugh, Zemouregal smashed a fist into the rocks behind Jahaan’s head, breaking of chunks as he did so. “Is that a promise, or a threat?”“Besides, Sliske can sense the Mahjarrat,” Jahaan defiantly countered, making a good show of not being fazed by the towering figure looming over him. “He probably tracked your movements!”“We’ve been here for mere minutes,” Zemouregal snapped back. “How could he-”“ENOUGH!” Enakhra shrieked, the flames in the torches flickering with cowardice as she did so. “It doesn’t matter how he knew - all that matters is that he does. Zamorak’s plan of stealth is null and void now. We have to charge through and make sure we get to Sliske before he disappears with the Stone again.”“Enakhra’s right,” Bilrach concurred. “Stealth would have been ideal, but we can’t waste anymore time. He’s waiting for us, that means he wants an encounter.”“So we need to go, now,” Moia finished, leading the way down the tunnel. Her momentum didn’t last long before she was surrounded by cave openings on all sides, clueless as to where to go first. Above each one was a coloured paint stroke.“Vich way?” Jerrod sniffed at the openings, trying and failing to catch a scent.“Oh blast, does anyone remember the poem?” Lord Daquarius asked, realising, “I think Sliske left us clues on that note.”Looking guilty, Moia didn’t answer. After cursing an unfamiliar word, Khazard snapped, “Useless halfbreed! We needed that!”“Well how was I supposed to know!” Moia whirled around. “And don’t you DARE call me-”“Blue skies!” Jahaan loudly cut in, silencing the quarrel. Once everyone was listening, he quietly repeated, “The poem mentioned blue skies. Look for something blue.”In moments, the group had found the blue paint stroke above one of the doors and quickly proceeded into the next tunnel.“Five fingers,” Jahaan stated the next clue he remembered, unsure as to how he could remember such a poorly written poem over the name of Lord-...fuck. Nevermind, the poem is more important.Pointing to a ‘V’ over one of the doors, Bilrach announced, “The Infernal symbol for five. This way.”They continued on like this, making light work of the rest of the tunnel system until they reached one last corridor leading to a large expanse. Upon brief inspection, it was a crudely constructed maze with wight guards patrolling at every turn.After peering out from their safe spot to survey the best route, Moia declared, “We’ll have to sneak past them. If we alert them to our presence, more might arrive.”“We can handle whatever comes our way,” Khazard declared, drawing his mighty longsword, the blade glinting in the low torchlight.His ears pricked to the never-ending footsteps of the marching wights, Bilrach countered, “We might get overrun. Who knows how many he can spawn? If we falter this early on, all this effort was for nothing.”Nomad stepped forward. “Leave it to me - these wights are no match for my prowess. I’ll deliver the Stone to Zamorak with ease.”Sliding in front of him, Zemouregal sneered, “Nice try, mage, but I wouldn’t trust you to deliver a letter. You’re not leaving my sight.”“Oh, and you think you have the power to stop me?” Nomad challenged, jeeringly. “How droll.”“When this is over, I’m going to deliver you to Death in parcels.”“Gentleman, please!” Lord Daquarius interrupted, the vain in his forehead bulging. “This is getting old. Let us but aside our petty differences and take down these wights together. We must not fail Lord Zamorak.”Wordlessly striding past Lord Daquarius with a self-righteous grin carved into his ashen face, Zemouregal summoned a bolt of smoke magic and blasted the closest wight to pieces before anyone could stop him. Instantly, five more rounded the corner, their green glowing eyes lighting up the end of the hall.“There. No more debating. You’re welcome.”From the sounds of the incoming footsteps, more wights were arriving.Summoning fire to her palms, Enakhra growled, “Zemouregal? You’re an asshole.”

From the looks of the scenery Jahaan passed as he slashed through the horde of wights, Sliske had clearly devised some elaborate stealth-based mazed, complete with glowing masks to avoid, patrolling wights to assassinate, and levers to toggle certain doorways and passages.The Zamorakians had botched all of that, charging through with the subtlety and grace of a fox in a hen house.Fortunately, they didn’t get overrun by Sliske’s wights. In fact, the danger they presented was more to one another, accidentally tripping over each other’s robes in such a narrow corridor, or sending a spell that shot past an ally a little too close for comfort, or straight up just running into one another as they barged through the wights.Yes, Zamorak would be pleased...

When the group made it past the wight guards and into the next room, they weren’t thankful for what greeted them; a narrow bridge, crowding them all together once more, that approached a large set of doors. A basic representation of Sliske’s face was painted upon them. Not egocentric at all…Embedded onto either side of the doors were two wooden masks; one, the picture of glee and mania. The other, morose and miserable. Enchanted, the pair of them - magical energy radiated from their carvings, and it allowed them the power of speech.“Welcome, welcome! It’s so nice to have guests!” the joyous one cheered, the positivity positively sickening.The dirgeful mask seemed to concur that his partner was annoyingly over the top, remarking, “Must you be so incessantly cheery all the time, Light?”“Oh come now, Shadow, we hardly have visitors,” Light tried to reason, its joyful energy never wavering. It’s voice was an over-enthusiastic replica of Sliske’s own, with the dial turned up to eleven. “Besides, they’ve made it this far. They’ve come to play our little game! Won’t that be fun?”“No. It won’t be,” Shadow grumbled. Like its mania-induced counterpart, this mask, too, spoke with Sliske’s accent and intonation. However, unlike its opposite - and indeed unlike Sliske himself - this mask’s voice sounded earnest, genuine, not a parody of emotion. “I suppose the sooner they leave, the sooner I can sleep and be rid of you. Fine, fine. Get on with it.”The elation (and subsequent irritation) of Light managed to increase tenfold. “Fantastic! Now, this game is rather simple, once you get the hang of it. There’s shadow and light energy gauges on this here door, and two of you must keep them balanced at all times. Thing is, the energy beams are in the Shadow Realm, so a couple of you more skilled fellows will have to open up a window into it for the others to connect themselves to the streams. A few delicate wights are lurking around with knowledge of how to crack the door’s code, so stealing their memories will make unlocking the door a doddle. Ah, but there are a few troublesome souls waiting in the wings to overrun you all, so you best delegate a couple of agents to defend against them. Careful, too much light or shadow energy will cause a bit of an explosion, and I’m not quite sure any of you would survive, which would be such a shame.”Shadow sighed with the world-weariness of a broken down furnace. “Just steal the memories of the wights, balance the energies, unlock the door, try not to die. You don’t need all that nonsense, Light. Just get to it.”Light sighed himself this time, but his had the hint of a chuckle. “You really are no fun, are you old chap? Nevermind. It’s time for these fellows to get cracking! Best of luck, you chaotic little so-and-so’s!”

The team quickly got to work after the masks grew silent. Jerrod would sniff out an undead guard and bring him to Moia for his memories to be read. Meanwhile, Nomad and Enakhra kept the shadow and light energy streams balanced, respectively, as Bilrach and Khazard used their prowess with the Shadow Realm to keep windows into it open. Zemouregal fought to defend the room from the undead hoard that tried to break through. When the wights ended up encroaching from all angles, Jahaan and Lord Daquarius ended up fighting them off too.

Low moaning echoed from the wight Jahaan tangled with. Once it was dead for good this time, he called out, “How’s everyone doing?”Looking around, he saw Enakhra and Nomad straining under the pressure of the energy beams, trying to keep them in balance.“We need more light energy!” Nomad called out, and he would get a brief moment of respite to relax while Enakhra all but crumbled under the increased pressure.Fighting under the weight, Enakhra shouted, “Moia, how much longer?”With her hands on a prayer-like motion, Moia channeled her focus into the wight Jerrod had brought before her as it struggled under the werewolf’s grasp. “Soon. I have three of the four runic symbols required.”This wasn’t reassuring enough for Enakhra who, unfortunately, crumbled under the weight of the beam, crying out as the energy engulfed her. Hearing this, Zemouregal shot around and charged towards Enakhra, throwing her out the way as he took the weight of the light beam himself. While Enakhra struggled to catch her breath, panting and choking from the pain, Zemouregal kept up his end of the beam long enough to rectify the damage his female Mahjarrat comrade had unintentionally inflicted upon the energy metre. Soon enough, it was Nomad’s turn to bear the pressure, but luckily, he managed it well. Still, this little switch-out had left Zemouregal's corner undefended. As there seemed to be less monsters coming into his section, Jahaan pulled double duty, running across the chamber to dispatch the conga-line of wights that had piled up in such a short amount of time. Eventually, Enakhra was recovered enough to defend against the wights, but she did not volunteer to retake the beam from Zemouregal. Naturally, she didn’t even say thank you.“It’s done!” Moia exclaimed, backing away from the guard she was harvesting a memory from and sprinting over to the door, quickly inputting the combination. As soon as the last symbol was twisted towards, the assault of the undead hoards ceased, as did the light and shadow beams.After a series of clinking metallic sounds from inside the door’s mechanism, it swung wide open.Inside, straight ahead, a platform, built for the Stone of Jas.But there was no Stone of that platform.There was only Sliske.

DISCLAIMER:

As Of Gods and Men is a reimagining, retelling and reworking of the Sixth Age, a LOT of dialogue/characters/plotlines/etc. are pulled right from the game itself, and this belongs to Jagex.

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“The intervention was questionable in the first place, and the reasons for staying are murky.

Donald Trump is looking to make a precipitate exit from Syria. His advisers, most of the leading opinion writers in the country, and all the great and the good of America’s foreign-policy elite are crying out at the blunder they anticipate it will be. The president is handing a gift to Vladimir Putin and Iran. The president is betraying our allies. Disaster.

I don’t think so.

You may remember that the U.S. Congress refused to authorize intervention in Syria in 2013, when President Obama kicked the question to them. They refused to do so because of polls showing that Americans opposed intervention overwhelmingly, roughly 70–30. And support for intervention tends to go down over time. However, U.S. forces had already been active in Syria, and in Syria’s civil war, for at least a year by that point, working with the CIA to arm and train Sunnis fighting the government. Alas, in our scramble to find “moderate rebels,” we often ended up arming Al Nusra, the franchise of al-Qaeda that is native to Syria.

More U.S. forces came into Syria in 2014 and 2015 to combat ISIS, which had formed its burgeoning statelet in the chaos of western Iraq and eastern Syria. They did so under the dubiously reinterpreted congressional Authorization for the Use of Military Force from 2001.

As refugees and migrants flowed out of Syria, every great power, regional power, or freelancing wannabe flowed in. The United States, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, most of the Gulf states, Russia, and lately even China have tried to get involved in one or another aspect of the fight. Even the persecuted Uighur minority of western China, improbable as it sounds, has fighters involved in northwest Syria.

In the midst of this, you might ask, what are Americans trying to accomplish in Syria? For laymen, it certainly is confusing. Advocates for staying in Syria are sometimes specific and sometimes vague. One commentator will say we have to stay in order to defeat ISIS, another will say we have to stay to honor and protect the Kurds because their militias helped us defeat ISIS. Another will say that we are there, joined in the struggle to secure a post-war order in Syria. Still others will say that the mission is to prevent Russia from achieving greater influence in the region.

American policymakers have mostly given up on the mission of helping rebels topple the Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad, partly because it would be very difficult to dislodge him. Intervention remains unpopular, and Russia proved willing to intervene dramatically. Of course it did; it naturally wants to protect naval assets hosted by a longtime regional ally, especially at a time when it considers other naval assets in Ukraine to be under pressure.

America turned its fire on the Islamic State and destroyed the burgeoning caliphate. That burgeoning statelet has been annihilated. But there are still thousands of ISIS fighters in the region, mostly in northern Syria, many of them among the rebel forces that occasionally excite American sympathy. This is why the president and experts seem to say that ISIS is defeated in one breath, and ISIS is still a threat in the next. But Syria is not the only place where ISIS can be found. ISIS also has places to operate in western Iraq, which is still barely reconciled to the government in Baghdad. And “affiliate” groups exist throughout much of North Africa.

In the fight against ISIS, we’ve worked closely with left-wing Kurdish militia, who are a thorn in the side of our NATO ally Turkey. Kurdish-controlled zones tend to be more religiously tolerant than neighboring ones, though they are also considered a security threat by Erdogan and Assad. The fights between Kurds and Turks should give readers an idea of how “entangled” our alliances have become in the Middle East.

So in this situation, commentators argue against leaving because it would abandon our Kurdish allies on the ground to the tender mercies of our Turkish allies. This would ruin our credibility when we intervene elsewhere. It would give Putin a “gift” and we would lose leverage in a post-war Syrian settlement.

Much of that is true. There are always costs to abandoning a bad investment. And yet these costs are preferable to an endless, ever-evolving mission that has no popular support or mandate. What critics of withdrawal refuse to do is describe the actual sustainable ends they want to achieve with America’s military in Syria.

What would a post-war Syria that is acceptable to America look like, and how can America bring it about at a cost Americans are willing to accept? We are not told. What are the conditions we hope to achieve before the mission can end? This question is also met with silence.

It is as if the downsides of leaving are cited only because staying keeps American soldiers and matériel near the ongoing disaster in Syria, a disaster that may yet yield an international outrage that will motivate Americans to expand the mission to include regime change. Every few months, as Assad’s government reclaims more territory, media outlets dutifully relay the messages of rebels ahead of their latest evacuations. So far public opinion has refused to satisfy the foreign-policy hawks.

As for Russian prestige, is it so enhanced? As in eastern Ukraine, so in Syria: The United States placed a gamble on a people-powered movement that would have the effect of depriving Russia of an ally that hosts vital Russian naval assets, and Russia eventually scrambled to avoid this major loss. It is not so much a gift as the successful and costly prevention of a theft.

If Russia’s prestige has been enhanced in the Middle East, perhaps it is not so much the fecklessness of American intervention and the resolution of Putin, but that Russia simply had the more viable strategy. Russia has intervened on behalf of traditional state actors, Iran and Syria. The United States, since the Arab Spring, has fitfully allied itself with demotic and even revolutionary Sunni movements. The relationships of these movements to Sunni terrorist movements such as Al Nusra and ISIS has been rather fluid.

In fact, Russia’s reentry into the Middle East has been made much easier by U.S. failures in the region, in the exact same way that increased Iranian influence follows American failure. The Iraq War increased the polarization of Sunni and Shia across the region, and Russia has simply sided with those who have more reason than ever to resent American involvement in the region. Russia could even advert to its own people and to the world that it was returning to its role as a protector of Christian religious minorities. It can make this ruse almost believable, because America’s and Saudi Arabia’s actions support, directly and sometimes indirectly, Sunni movements that are fantastically intolerant. If Syria is a gift to the Russians, let them have it — just as we took the “gift” of Afghanistan, only to discover how unhappy it has made us.

My friend Noah Rothman writes in Commentary, “Political commentators and anti-interventionist ideologues will note that withdrawing America’s modest footprint from Syria is popular with the public. But what would you expect? Precisely no one in the political class is making a case for sustained and substantial American intervention in this conflict zone.”

Are we sure that we have cause and effect in correct order? At the height of anger and outrage at Bashar Assad’s government, most of the press, most of the U.S. Senate, and the president himself were making a case for intervention against Assad. They did so on the limited basis of enforcing norms against the use of chemical weapons, though the war aims would surely be wider, just as a few years earlier the mission in Libya went from protecting human life to decapitating the regime. Americans were against such an intervention in Syria nearly four to one. The Parliament of the United Kingdom opposed it. Then the U.S. Congress dropped it. The wisdom of putting the power of war in the people’s house is that democracies cannot fight successful wars without popular support.

As for credibility with our allies, the Kurds allied with us, as did others, because we are powerful and rich. They are capable of remembering how George H. W. Bush encouraged Iraqis and Kurds to rise up against Saddam in the early 1990s, only to extricate ourselves. They knew the risks. They also know who is president of the United States, and have started talks about guaranteeing a tolerable order with the Syrian government.

When the U.S. embarked on its bid to transform Iraq, it did so while touting a “democratic domino theory.” A free Iraq would be an example that weakens the grip of authoritarians and despots across the Arab and Muslim world. So we were told.

And we did set the dominos in motion. But instead of stable democracies, what spread was chaos, Sunni radicalism, and an intensifying of the Sunni–Shia conflict across the Islamic world. Knocking over Iraq’s government put Baghdad in the grasp of Iran-sympathetic Shia, whose misgovernance encouraged a revolt across Iraq’s Sunni triangle and eventually in Syria. Similar Sunni radicalisms swept over Libya and Egypt. The results have been the destruction of minority religious communities of Christians and Yezidis and an ongoing refugee and migration crisis that has destabilized politics across almost the entirety of Europe.

We were told that we have to fight them over there, so that we do not have to fight them at home. But instead, we went to fight them over there, and find we are fighting them everywhere.

America has been conducting its terrorism fight according to the logic that obtains in imperial orders, where the great power at the center maintains an expansive, world-bestriding reign and tries to pick its fights along the permeable periphery of that order. Christmas markets and major public buildings at the centers of that order are reinforced and protected by concrete barriers.

But the unpopularity of intervention in Syria shows that Americans still have a small-r republican streak. Instead of trying to construct barriers to terrorism around Syria, and around a few important buildings in our cities, they would prefer barriers at the national border. It would be a shame if we ever gave up entirely on this republican spirit. Certainly nothing the hawks promise we’ll find in Syria seems worth sacrificing it.”

MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY — Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

Monday, September 27, 2021

COVID-19 vaccine boosters could mean billions for drugmakers (AP) Billions more in profits are at stake for some vaccine makers as the U.S. moves toward dispensing COVID-19 booster shots to shore up Americans’ protection against the virus. How much the manufacturers stand to gain depends on how big the rollout proves to be. No one knows yet how many people will get the extra shots. But Morningstar analyst Karen Andersen expects boosters alone to bring in about $26 billion in global sales next year for Pfizer and BioNTech and around $14 billion for Moderna if they are endorsed for nearly all Americans.

So close! Iceland almost gets female-majority parliament (AP) Iceland briefly celebrated electing a female-majority parliament Sunday, before a recount produced a result just short of that landmark for gender parity in the North Atlantic island nation. The initial vote count had female candidates winning 33 seats in Iceland’s 63-seat parliament, the Althing. Hours later, a recount in western Iceland changed the outcome, leaving female candidates with 30 seats. Still, at almost 48% of the total, that is the highest percentage for women lawmakers in Europe. Only a handful of countries, none of them in Europe, have a majority of female lawmakers. According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Rwanda leads the world with women making up 61% of its Chamber of Deputies, with Cuba, Nicaragua and Mexico narrowly over the 50% mark. Worldwide, the organization says just over a quarter of legislators are women.

Copenhagen’s hippie, psychedelic oasis Christiania turns 50 (AP) After a half-century, the “flower-power” aura of Copenhagen’s semi-autonomous Christiania neighborhood hasn’t yet wilted. “It has become more and more an established part of Copenhagen,” said Ole Lykke, a resident of 42 years at the enclave near downtown Copenhagen. “The philosophy of community and common property still exists. Out here we do things in common.” It all started as a stunt 50 years ago, when a small counterculture newspaper that needed an outrageous story for its front page staged an “invasion” of an abandoned 18-century naval base. Six friends with air rifles and a picnic basket entered the former military facility base, proclaimed it a “free state” on Sept. 26, 1971, took some photos and went home. The paper ran the story, urging young people to take the city bus and squat the barracks. Hippies flocked to what they dubbed Christiania—no one remembers why they picked that name—that evolved into a counterculture, freewheeling oasis with psychedelic-colored buildings, free marijuana, limited government influence, no cars and no police. In 1973, it was recognized as a “social experiment.” After more than four decades of locking horns with authorities, Christiania’s future was secured in 2012 when the state sold the 84-acre (24-hectare) enclave for 85.4 million kroner ($13.5 million) to a foundation owned by its inhabitants. The residents—nearly 700 adults and about 150 children—now rent their homes from the foundation and are financially responsible for all repair and maintenance work to the roughly 240 buildings.

UK gas stations run dry as trucker shortage sparks hoarding (AP) Thousands of British gas stations ran dry Sunday, an industry group said, as motorists scrambled to fill up amid a supply disruption due to a shortage of truck drivers. The Petrol Retailers Association, which represents almost 5,500 independent outlets, said about two-thirds of its members were reporting that they had sold out their fuel, with the rest “partly dry and running out soon.” Association chairman Brian Madderson said the shortages were the result of “panic buying, pure and simple.” “There is plenty of fuel in this country, but it is in the wrong place for the motorists,” he told the BBC. “It is still in the terminals and the refineries.” Long lines of vehicles formed at many gas stations over the weekend, and tempers frayed as some drivers waited for hours.

U.K.’s Migrant Boat Dispute Has Eyes Fixed on the Channel (NYT) Using high-powered binoculars and a telescope, three volunteers from a humanitarian monitoring group stood on the Kent coast, peering across the English Channel. The looming clock tower of the French town of Calais was visible on this clear morning, but so was the distinctive outline of a small rubber dinghy. The volunteer group, Channel Rescue, was set up last year to watch for the boats packed with asylum seekers trying to cross this busy waterway, to offer them humanitarian support—like water and foil blankets—when they land on beaches, or to spot those in distress. But they are also monitoring Britain’s border authority for any possible rights violations as the government takes an increasingly hard line on migration. For much of the year, the numbers of migrants crossing the channel in dinghies has risen, brewing a political storm in London and leading Home Secretary Priti Patel to authorize tough tactics to push boats back toward France. The authorization—not yet put into effect—has stirred anew the national debate over immigration and created a further diplomatic spat between Britain and France, whose relations were already strained after Brexit over issues including both fishing rights and global strategic interests.

German elections (AP) Germany is embarking on a potentially lengthy search for its next government after the center-left Social Democrats narrowly beat outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right bloc in an election that failed to set a clear direction for Europe’s biggest economy under a new leader. Leaders of the parties in the newly elected parliament were meeting Monday to digest a result that saw Merkel’s Union bloc slump to its worst-ever result in a national election, and appeared to put the keys to power in the hands of two opposition parties. Both Social Democrat Olaf Scholz, who pulled his party out of a years-long slump, and Armin Laschet, the candidate of Merkel’s party who saw his party’s fortunes decline in a troubled campaign, laid a claim to leading the next government. Scholz is the outgoing vice chancellor and finance minister and Laschet is the governor of Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia. Whichever of them becomes chancellor will do so with his party having won a smaller share of the vote than any of his predecessors.

Basta! Romans say enough to invasion of wild boars in city (AP) Rome has been invaded by Gauls, Visigoths and vandals over the centuries, but the Eternal City is now grappling with a rampaging force of an entirely different sort: rubbish-seeking wild boars. Entire families of wild boars have become a daily sight in Rome, as groups of 10-30 beasts young and old emerge from the vast parks surrounding the city to trot down traffic-clogged streets in search of food in Rome’s notoriously overflowing rubbish bins. Posting wild boar videos on social media has become something of a sport as exasperated Romans capture the scavengers marching past their stores, strollers or playgrounds. Italy’s main agriculture lobby, Coldiretti, estimates there are over 2 million wild boars in Italy. The region of Lazio surrounding Rome estimates there are 5,000-6,000 of them in city parks, a few hundred of which regularly abandon the trees and green for urban asphalt and trash bins. In Italy’s rural areas, hunting wild boar is a popular sport and most Italians can offer a long list of their favorite wild boar dishes. Those beliefs are not shared by some urban residents.

Taiwan says China is a ‘bully’ after one of the largest PLA warplane incursions yet (CNN) Taiwan on Thursday accused China of “bullying” after Beijing sent a total of 24 warplanes into its air defense identification zone (ADIZ), the third-largest incursion in the past two years of heightened tensions between Beijing and Taipei. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft, including bombers, fighter jets, anti-submarine planes and airborne early warning and control planes, entered Taiwan’s ADIZ in two groups—one of 19 planes and a second cohort of five jets that came later in the day. The air incursions came a day after Taiwan officially submitted an application to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) free-trade pact. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs signaled its strong opposition to Taiwan’s application. “We firmly oppose official exchanges between any country and the Taiwan region, and firmly oppose Taiwan’s accession to any agreement or organization of an official nature,” ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said.

Taliban hang body in public; signal return to past tactics (AP) The Taliban hanged a dead body from a crane parked in a city square in Afghanistan on Saturday in a gruesome display that signaled the hard-line movement’s return to some of its brutal tactics of the past. Taliban officials initially brought four bodies to the central square in the western city of Herat, then moved three of them to other parts of the city for public display, said Wazir Ahmad Seddiqi, who runs a pharmacy on the edge of the square. Taliban officials announced that the four were caught taking part in a kidnapping earlier Saturday and were killed by police, Seddiqi said. Since the Taliban overran Kabul on Aug. 15 and seized control of the country, Afghans and the world have been watching to see whether they will re-create their harsh rule of the late 1990s, which included public stonings and limb amputations of alleged criminals, some of which took place in front of large crowds at a stadium.

UN and Afghanistan’s Taliban, figuring out how to interact (AP) It’s been little more than a month since Kalashnikov-toting Taliban fighters in their signature heavy beards, hightop sneakers and shalwar kameezes descended on the Afghan capital and cemented their takeover. Now they’re vying for a seat in the club of nations and seeking what no country has given them as they attempt to govern for a second time: international recognition of their rule. The Taliban wrote to the United Nations requesting to address the U.N. General Assembly meeting of leaders that is underway in New York. They argue they have all the requirements needed for recognition of a government. The U.N. has effectively responded to the Taliban’s request by signaling: Not so fast. Afghanistan, which joined the U.N. in 1946 as an early member state, is scheduled to speak last at the General Assembly leaders’ session on Monday. With no meeting yet held by the U.N. committee that decides challenges to credentials, it appears almost certain that Afghanistan’s current ambassador will give the address this year—or that no one will at all. The U.N. can withhold or bestow formal acknowledgement on the Taliban, and use this as crucial leverage to exact assurances on human rights, girls’ access to education and political concessions.

For the second time this year I had the opportunity to return to one of my favourite countries – South Africa. There are many reasons why I love this beautifully diverse and naturally rich country, but the main draw for me is the wonderful people and of course, the high diversity of chondrichthyes – 204 species, to be exact.

When heading to the Western Cape this time, I knew that my experience was going to be different. Previously I’ve become accustomed to working with enormous charismatic species – namely great white and bronze whaler sharks – but this time I would be working with much smaller, endemic species. Don’t be fooled though, these sharks are still cool in their own right – more on those later.

So where was I heading? The South African Shark Conservancy is based within the stunning Old Harbour of Hermanus and was founded in 2007 by shark scientist Meaghen McCord. Their flagship programme, Women in Shark Science, was my reason for working with them this month and is in its third year. With the aim of giving a louder voice to women in STEM, alongside training the next generation of shark scientists, it was set to be an inspiring month. My main goal in participating in the programme was not only focused on gain further experience in working with sharks, but also to gauge a deeper understanding of the challenges facing women in STEM and to develop my practical skills like teamwork, communication and project-management.

But it was so much more than that for me.

For the purposes of this blog post I’m going to give you a quick overview of our schedule. A considerable amount was packed into the four weeks, including BRUV deployment in Walker Bay, estuary monitoring in the Klein River,  endemic catshark telemetry and Q & A sessions with various prominent women in shark science like Melissa Cristina Marquez and Alison Towner. Phew! And that’s not even covering half of it.

Working and living together is not without its obstacles - let’s not underestimate that. As someone who is incredibly independent and has become habituated to working alone, personally this aspect was always going to be hard. But every challenge has a silver-lining and self-reflection is a critical component of better yourself – if you’re not growing, you’re not moving forward, right?

This internship has not only given me a variety of practical skills that will make me become a better shark scientist, but I also feel like I’ve grown personally as a result. Heck, I’m not perfect, nor am I striving for perfection, but I am learning to be more realistic about not only my strengths, but also my weaknesses. Being surrounded by so many people who were willing to be open and have upfront conversations is something I had never encountered prior to this placement, and I can honestly say it was a very healthy environment to be immersed in.

In future blog posts I’ll discuss in more depth the awesome science we did during our month with SASC and delve deeper into the fantastic diversity of life that exists in Walker Bay. But for the purposes of this post I wanted to summarise my personal feelings and reflections as a result of the programme and a few lessons I’ve learnt along the way.

1.       Imposter Syndrome is a VERY real phenomenon

Prior to this experience I felt like imposter syndrome was that ghastly elephant in the room no one discussed.

It was something nearly everyone I knew suffered from, but no one wanted to admit.

Chatting to not only the SASC team and the other Women in Shark Science ladies, but also other scientists made me realise that it is far more rife than the world lets on.

I made a promise to myself when I finished this experience that I would be more open about my personal imposter syndrome in an attempt to showcase that it is perfectly normal to feel that way, particularly within academia.

So yeah, I have imposter syndrome, so that’s now out there in the world…

2.       It’s okay not to be okay

I’ll let you into a secret – I’m a crier. Like a MASSIVE crier at times.

Once those waterworks start, they do not stop for a considerable amount of time and most of the time it’s over irrational things.

Sometimes I hate myself for crying so much over seemingly futile things, but with time I’m coming to realise that it’s just part of being human. Nobody is an emotionless robot, no matter how much they may try to be.

Having the occasional cry does not make you any less professional nor does it make you a failure, so just let it all out.

All of your feelings are valid.

3.       Women are strong as hell

And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Not just physically, but also emotionally they are mind-bogglingly resilient.

Hearing from women about their personal struggles, on top of the barriers life has already thrown at them, and their defiance to not let anything get in their way of achieving their shark science dreams was inspiring to say the least.

Don’t underestimate the challenges experienced by everyone you meet.

Almost everyone is fighting a battle of some kind, you’re not alone.

4.       Academia can be ruthless

Exhibit A – I got rejected from a PhD for my A Level choices.

Exhibit B – a friend of mine was rejected from a PhD for having a 1% lower average in her undergraduate degree, despite having a MSc with distinction and multiple years of infield experience.

I could go on.

It can feel like you’re scrambling against the world sometimes when you’re trying to make it within academia, particularly as an early-career scientist.

I often feel like I’m drowning and I consistently have to prove myself like everything’s a competition, but this isn’t a healthy perspective to have and can often bring out the worst in people.

It’s hard, but try to take it all in your stride. As much as life is short, it is also long, and you have plenty of time to achieve all of your hopes and dreams - just don’t leave your family and friends behind, they’re the most important people in your life.

5.       Patience really is a virtue

I remember my mum telling me this as a teenager and I ignorantly ignored her at the time.

Not everyone is on the same wavelength as you and that’s perfectly okay.

Often it can seem like you’re continually trying to hit goalposts other people have laid out for you as you hit certain milestones in life, but we are all on our own path.

Support each other and celebrate wins, no matter how big or small.

Relax, breathe, and enjoy the ride.

It’s easy to be hard on yourself and overly critical when the world is seemingly so unforgiving. I think it’s important we open the discussion on the human element of being a scientist and be brutally honest with each other – it isn’t just about how many papers you publish, or the competitive grants you’ve won, or the incredible fieldwork opportunity you’ve got coming up.

Yes, they are all awesome things and definitely something to be celebrated, but I feel it’s also important to document our losses and talk about when times are tough too.

Creating an unrealistic version of what life is like being a scientist in my mind does a disservice to the next generation. If someone believes it will all be rosy, and then it isn’t for them, their bad experiences have the potential to be harmful to them and their mental health.

Success isn’t a straight path. It’s full of downward spirals and the occasional breakdown sprinkled with the odd feeling of hopelessness, but when that win does come along it makes it all worth it.

We all have our own demons to fight with, so why are we still maintaining that stiff upper lip and acting like everything is always sunshine and rainbows?

via Science Blogs

Top 12 Tips for Traveling Turkey - What to Know Before You Go

We came to Turkey with a loose itinerary and the expectation to spend about a month backpacking through different regions - so much for that idea - Turkey stole our hearts and we lost ourselves in the beauty of its nature, the generosity of its people, and the significance of its history. Not only did we use up the entirety of our 90-day visa, we accidentally exceeded it (fortunately no Midnight Express type prison experience for us, just a fine). Recommendations from locals and travelers alike took us to the western, southern, central and eastern regions of Turkey and we soaked up every moment of the journey. From feasting on the regional food, to hiking the Lycian Way, to renting an apartment on the Turquoise Coast, to exploring ancient Mesopotamian cities, to volunteering on a farm, Turkey hooked us. It’s a culturally, ethnically, religiously, and geographically diverse country with a history that’s so extensive it’s mind-boggling. Do yourself a favor and don’t make Istanbul your only stop in Turkey - there’s so much more to do and see. If you’re planning to visit Turkey read our top tips and take-aways below to know what to expect and make the most of your trip.

Tips for Traveling Turkey

1. Take your shoes off when entering a home. Make sure to be a respectful guest and keep your hosts’ house clean by removing your shoes. Typically, slippers are provided by the host for you to wear inside. Keep this shoe removal practice in mind as it’s likely that you’ll be invited into the homes of a few Turkish people. They are an unbelievably friendly lot. Taking your shoes off also applies when entering a mosque. And ladies, don’t forget to cover your head when entering a mosque. You’ll find that bringing a scarf along on your travels will prove quite handy.

2. Turkish hospitality isn’t just a saying. There’s a belief in Turkey that “guest is God,” and truly we have never felt quite as special or welcomed in any other country than we did in Turkey. We found the Turkish people’s generosity and kindness to be know no bounds. When we asked for directions we were escorted to bus stops, hailed cabs, called cabs and on several occasions taken under the wing of exceptionally friendly Turkish people who accompanied us to different sites becoming our own tour guide of sorts. We were invited into the homes and shops of dozens of locals with offers of Turkish tea (çay) and food. In fact, we were offered so much food throughout our travels in Turkey that we each put on a few extra pounds! To courteously decline such offers, place a hand over your heart and say “thank you” or “teşekkür ederim,” in Turkish. I’d strongly advise against turning down that cup of çay though; sharing tea is a great way to learn about the local culture and make a new friend.

3. Breakfast starts the day right. You haven’t had breakfast until you’ve had a Turkish breakfast. Turkish breakfast, called kahvalti, is a feast for the eyes as well as the stomach. Small platters of fresh food fill every inch of the table resulting in a tantalizingly colorful spread. Breakfast includes at least 2-3 types of cheeses, a variety of spreads (tahini mixed with grape or pomegranate molasses - the Turkish version of PB&J, honey, black olive spread, hazelnut spreads, butter, and fruit jams), spicy sausage, fried eggs or menemen (scrambled eggs with bell peppers, tomatoes and scallions), an assortment of olives, cucumbers, tomatoes, arugula, and all sorts of breads. Kahvalti is lingered over, sometimes for hours on the weekends, and enjoyed with a tulip shaped glass of black tea which, contrary to popular belief, is the hot beverage of choice for Turkish people, not Turkish coffee. If you’re a breakfast lover do not miss the eastern city of Van where breakfast is the number one attraction.

4. Need to get somewhere? There’s a dolmuş for that. There may not be a direct bus to get you where you need to go but surely 2 or 3 consecutive minibus rides will get you there! The dolmuş is Turkey’s notorious and affordable transportation solution. Running short routes back and forth all day long, these minibuses are a reliable option for getting around. Dolmuş translates to “stuffed” and sometimes they are just that; completely jam-packed! They pick up from bus stations and virtually anywhere along the road where it’s safe enough to pull over. Look at the sign hanging in the front window to check the final destination and hop on. Riding the dolmuş is always an adventure.

5. Don’t fear the squat toilet. It’s almost a guarantee that you’ll come across a squat toilet in your travels through Turkey. Science supports that squatting is better form for emptying the bowels, so why not give it a try? There’s a good chance, however, that the bathrooms will not have toilet paper. So bring your own toilet paper or use the water hose provided (the “bum gun”) to rinse yourself. Flush the toilet by filling up the small pitcher provided with water from the tap (located somewhere on the wall near the toilet) and pour the water into the toilet. Throw your toilet paper into the small trash bin in the stall, not into the toilet. Often times the plumbing isn’t equipped to handle paper.

6. Share a car, make a friend. Turkey is an extraordinarily hitch-hiking friendly country. We can attest to this fact firsthand. As an extension of the Turkish hospitality, the Turkish people are generally happy to help you out with a ride and you won’t wait long before a car stops. Do consider your safety, especially if you are traveling alone and/or are a female. Ladies, if you plan to hitchhike remember to dress modestly, lest your intentions be misinterpreted. Unfortunately, there is an unfounded misconception that western women are more willing to participate in casual sex.

7. It may sound disrespectful, but it’s not. Something that took a bit of getting used to was hearing the “tut, tut” sound which is produced by smacking the top teeth with the tongue. Initially this sound registered as quite rude to our foreign ears and we felt like we were being scolded. It turns out that this sound is regularly used in Turkey in place of saying “no.” So, when you hear this sound you need not be offended!

8. Take your tent with you. Wild camping is legal just about everywhere in Turkey. You don’t need to find a campground in order to enjoy Turkey’s picturesque scenery - just pick a spot with a view and pitch your tent. Make sure to “pack in and pack out” in order to preserve Turkey’s wilderness and lessen your impact on the environment. If you enjoy hiking and camping check out Turkey’s long distance hiking trail, the Lycian Way, which was named one of the top long distances hikes in the world.

9. The expression “you smoke like a Turk,” holds true. Despite bans on smoking in many public places you’re sure to inhale more than your fair share of second hand smoke in Turkey. An image that quickly became familiar on our travels around Turkey is that of elder men clustered around tea house tables playing okey, drinking cay, and smoking like chimneys. Additionally, we had one particularly unfortunate experience while riding a regional bus where the bus driver and several passengers lit up during the ride making for a very smokey journey, sigh.

10. Kurdistan exists and it doesn’t. You wont find Turkish Kurdistan on the map but it does exist. In fact, Kurds make up about 20% of Turkey’s population. Turkey’s Kurds have a rich culture and equally rich cuisine. With roots as nomadic goat herders, the Kurdish people eat a lot of milk products. They certainly know how to whip up all sorts of tasty cheeses and yogurts! Turkey’s Kurdish population lives predominantly in the southeast region of the country. This area, called Northern Kurdistan, also extends into the neighboring countries of Iran, Iraq, and Syria where it is called Eastern, Southern, and Western Kurdistan. The history of Turkish Kurdistan is riddled with conflict due to the Kurd’s desire for self governance and/or political representation. Despite its turbulent past, we absolutely adored Kurdistan. The Kurdish people are unbelievably kind and welcoming - we were even invited to a Kurdish wedding! Something to note: while many Kurds in Turkey speak Turkish, their first language is Kurdish.

11. Don’t miss the south and southeast! The fertile crescent, the cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia - need I say more? The history in this region of Turkey is almost unfathomable. The southeast is home to impressive historical sights like Göbekli Tepe, a 12,000 year old temple and cuisine to die for. In fact, Gaziantep, a city in the southeast, is the birthplace of baklava. The best part about these destinations in the south and southeast is that they are currently less visited by foreign travelers and maintain their unique cultures and authenticity. The south and southeastern regions feel different than the rest of Turkey. In these regions you can observe Kurdish and Arabic influences and ancient religions like Assyrian Christians, who speak a dialect descended from the language of Jesus. Visiting the south and southeast of Turkey will provide you with many fascinating places to explore and locals who’ll welcome you warmly. You won’t regret visiting!

12. Cig kofte is a reliable vegetarian option (except when it isn’t!) We fell in love with these spicy, meat-free bulgur meatballs. Wrapped up “durum” style in a flat bread or served alongside lettuce, cig kofte is a delightful mouthful. Packed with fiber and spice, cig kofte is fast food item that hits the spot every time. They’re often served along side an assortment of goodies like pickles, peppers, lemon, cilantro, pomegranate molasses, spicy sauce, and bread. Cig kofte is an explosion of flavor for a price that will only set you back about a dollar. Historically cig kofte was made with raw meat, explaining the name “raw meatball,” but this practice was outlawed in order to prevent the spread of food born illness. However, the rare street vendor can still be found serving cig kofte with raw meat. We accidentally tried this raw meat version while in Diyarbakir and I hate to admit it, but it was delicious.

Chasing Waves on Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way

In the 1970s and 80s, the California surfer and writer Kevin Naughton and the photographer Craig Peterson traveled the globe “Endless Summer”-style searching for perfect waves.

When they arrived in Ireland, with its friendly locals and powerful, mostly empty waves, amid a landscape of stone walls and ruins, Mr. Naughton recalled, “there was a sense of disbelief,” an improbable feeling that perhaps of all places, on the often frigid island in the North Atlantic they had found what they were looking for.

“I’ve had more great solo days in Ireland than anywhere else,” Mr. Naughton said when I called him to research an Irish surfing trip.

Over the years Ireland has gained a somewhat mythical reputation in the surf world as a wild and unspoiled place for exploration and crowd-free surf. But you can’t jump on a flight and count on great waves, which explains why, along with the cold water, it has remained off the mainstream surf-travel circuit.

The prime Irish surf season is September through November when the water is warmest (relatively speaking, that is; it peaks in the low 60s) and storm swells stream out of the North Atlantic from hurricanes and early nor’easters coming off the eastern coast of the United States. Winter brings the coldest, biggest waves, with water temperatures dipping below 50 degrees, but it’s also the season that attracts big-wave experts from all corners of the globe.

It’s a capricious island, going from sun splashed and sparkling to dark and menacing in minutes. So the plan for a two-week trip in June was intentionally flexible, driven by weather and waves. The general idea was to drive from south to north along the Western coastal route known as the Wild Atlantic Way in a camper van, looking for surf.

My wife Idoline and I picked up a 24-foot Mercedes-Benz van at Shannon Airport, about two thirds of the way down the west coast, and headed west in an unwelcoming drizzle.

An hour or so from Shannon we turned off the main road onto a narrow, winding strip of pavement through the mostly treeless coastal range. It appeared on the map as a short cut to a surf beach. It wasn’t. The road ran like a twisty runnel through fuchsia hedges and bright fields of buttercups and cow parsley, up to a pass among the 3,000-foot Slieve Mish mountains. The only other vehicle was a farmer’s van coming the opposite direction, a sheepdog riding shotgun.

We came to a stop, seeing as the road was barely wide enough for one of us. We faced off calmly, taking the measure of each other to see who would back up to some unseen wider section where passing would be possible. I smiled and waved. He smiled back. I backed up and he waved as he passed. This civil face-off, we would learn, is part of rural Irish driving.

Somewhere near the summit we got our first glimpse of Ireland’s beckoning magic. With our van nudging through flocks of sheep in the road, the rain let up and the sun turned the clouds from gray to gold. In the distance we could glimpse the placid Atlantic.

To Inch Strand

The Irish call their beaches strands, and by mid afternoon we’d made it to Inch Strand, in County Kerry, where we witnessed one typical Irish surf scene.

The end of the so-called Irish Troubles, the bloody conflict in Northern Ireland, and the advent of the Celtic Tiger, the great Irish economic boom, kicked off a surge of surfing around the turn of the century. Seaside beach holidays to the Irish coast began to include surf lessons, made easier and safer by soft foam surfboards and comfortable, warm wet suits. Big, well-organized surf schools, offering inexpensive (by American standards) lessons flourished.

Now, on any given day, hardy throngs of learners, most frequently in group classes, are braving the waves everywhere in Ireland. On this moody, cool day in June, with rain and sun in a full wrestling match, more than a dozen people splashed in the easy rollers at Inch when we pulled up, a scene we would see repeated at the long, wide beach at Rossnowlagh, in Donegal, and Lahinch, in Clare.

The waves at Inch were ideal for first-timers, but too gutless and small for our purposes. We moved on.

The colorful little commercial fishing and tourist town of Dingle is the surfing hub in the region. The Dingle peninsula itself has a jagged coastline of beaches and breaks within driving distance and with southern, western, and northern exposures to catch any swell in the Atlantic.

Dingle town was hopping the Tuesday night we rolled in, with traditional Irish music at seemingly every drinking and eating establishment. At Lord Baker’s, which claims to be the oldest eatery in town, going back to the late 1800s, the proprietor, John Moriarty, regarded our surfing adventure with amusement.

“You’re not confusing Ireland for Hawaii are you?”

A rumor of surf at Coumeenoole

“You might find something at Coumeenoole,” the owner of Dingle Surf, Ben Farr, told me when I stopped at his shop in the village for advice the next morning.

In a version of a story we’d hear often from expat surfers, Mr. Farr, a Briton, moved to Dingle 20 years ago. He came from his home in Cornwall to help his mother relocate. A few surfs later, he decided to stay. He took over a butcher shop and turned it into a surf shop, and eventually opened a surf school. Business is thriving.

Coumeenoole is on the Dingle loop, 30 road miles around this western tip of Europe. It doesn’t get the billing of the Ring of Kerry, but the Ring of Dingle has all the history and breathtaking scenery, some half a million sheep and rumors of excellent surf. The road winds past thousands of years of Irish history, abandoned cottages and farms, hillsides divided into a patchwork of stone walls, late-Stone Age and Iron-Age forts, defensive ramparts and ditches.

Optimism was high as we rounded Slea Head and Coumeenoole came in to view, a white-sand cove amid the cliffs. The sun was high, and the wind was light. Not a surfer in sight, only a handful of beachgoers. A tiny wave peeled across a sandbar. It wasn’t much, but we parked, unloaded, and stroked out into the water to catch a few. I could see how on a day with some real swell this place might deliver dream surf. But sparkly and pretty as it was, the waves were barely waist-high, and after a few rides we joined the nappers on the beach.

Looking at Aileen’s

One of Ireland’s reputations in the surf world is for big, menacing waves, among the most terrifying surf on earth. Surfers from everywhere come to test themselves against the Irish monsters. “Slabs” as the locals call them — breaking so big, so hard and so fast that you have no choice but to ride inside the massive breaking “tubes,” the perilous interior pockets of a wave. “Slab hunters” make up a small, nervy subset in the surf world, and Ireland has its share.

One of these breaks, Aileen’s, pitches directly into the dramatic and moody Cliffs of Moher in Clare. Locals had eyed the spot for years before a group summoned up the courage in 2006, scrambled down a narrow cleft in the rocks, and paddled out. John McCarthy, who runs a surf school in nearby Lahinch, was among them. He remembered a friend telling him the spot was so treacherous and complicated that it would become “a career.” Which it has been for a few surfers.

“Down there.” The Irish surfer and filmmaker Kevin Smith, perched on a narrow promontory over the ocean, pointed at a spray of white water some 500 feet below at the northern end of the cliffs. A tiny track snaked down out of sight to a rocky sliver of shore. We had met Mr. Smith in nearby Doolin. “That’s the paddle out.”

There wasn’t anything ride-able in sight, but I tried to imagine it, the half-hour walk and hike down to the boulders only to plunge into an ocean throwing waves the size of houses onto the cliffs.

Remarkably, no surfer has died at Aileen’s although the local Coast Guard has been called in numerous times to retrieve stranded and injured surfers, both by boat and helicopter. In some cases, helicopter crews have had to lower cages to snatch surfers trapped between the violent sea and the cliff wall.

“The first time we scrambled down the cliff and paddled out I remember I was scared. It wasn’t really my thing,” Mr. Smith said. “But Fergal was really into it.”

Fergal, Kevin Smith’s brother, is one of Ireland’s most respected and talented wave riders. Aileen’s was a proving ground.

After a number of years traveling the globe surfing as a pro, he had an epiphany. He became a farmer and hasn’t stepped on a plane in more than five years, his brother said.

“We have all the waves we want right here,” Kevin Smith added.

I was beginning to wonder.

Spanish Point, Doolin, the Peak — all flat

On the way north we passed all the known breaks, Spanish Point and Doolin, in Clare, and, later, even the celebrated Peak, in Bundoran. All were flat. We also passed endless other possibilities, beaches and rock reefs that clearly, on another day, could be a surfer’s dream. In a van, with time, Mr. Naughton had been right: it is beyond belief that such an accessible, stunning coastline, so open to good surf, remains so unspoiled and un-surfed.

The surf wasn’t cooperating but we found consolation in the camping, the history and the natural beauty.

Ireland, from its ruins and cliffs to its sky above, is a spellbinding interplay of lightness and dark, like the Irish story itself. In the village of Ballyshannon in County Donegal an inconspicuous plaque on an old wall in a sun-splashed flowery churchyard marks the burial ground for hundreds who died of disease and starvation during the Irish potato famine in the 1800s. The vestiges of British rule and Irish nobles, forts and castles, dot the landscape, along with stone dolmens, built thousands of years ago, but for what purpose and how remains a mystery.

We’d obtained a booklet of campsites, places with electric and water hookups, and toilets. But as it turned out we camped on remote headlands and beaches every night, for free and almost always alone. Much of western Ireland remains remarkably wild and, except for the height of summer, with a little effort you can find blessed solitude.

The road north winds through Galway and Mayo, around remote Achill and Bel Mullet Islands, which are connected to the mainland. We found mountains to hike and cliff-top perches for picnics. We swam every day despite the chilly weather, staying in as long as we could bear it, the water going from tropical to arctic blue as the sun moved in and out of the clouds.

We learned to ignore the weather forecasts. One day in The Irish Times: “A cloudy start with some heavy rain which will become more showery in the afternoon.” It was sunny that day.

At Carna, in a faraway corner of Connemara, the cashier at the country market asked if we knew Marty Walsh, the mayor of Boston. You get this often in rural Ireland, the questions about Irish Americans and our two nations’ deeply connected histories, asked endearingly, as if we are all related.

“Marty Walsh’s parents were born nearby,” she said. “He came to visit recently, hundreds turned out, more than they had for Trump.”

The president came up frequently, too, as he owns a hotel and golf course in Doonbeg, County Clare, directly on a popular surf beach. Mr. Trump’s organization’s plan for a sea wall there to protect the golf course from erosion has prompted fierce opposition and protests among locals and surfers — “Trump’s other wall,” local media has taken to calling it.

At Rossnowlagh, we paid a visit to the artist and surfer Barry Britton, whose family for many years owned and ran a big hotel on the beach. In the 1960s his mother returned from an Irish tourism board junket to California with two surfboards, reckoning Ireland had better waves. The boards, a novelty in Ireland then, were for the hotel guests, but were quickly claimed by Mr. Britton and his brothers who would become pioneers of Irish surfing.

But on this day, he wasn’t hopeful. “Why don’t you come back in September for waves,” he advised.

‘North swell tomorrow’

“There’s a north swell in tomorrow and Friday. North swell will light up an area called Easkey in County Sligo.”

We’d begun to despair before Dylan Stott’s text arrived. Surfing has, at its core, tension, tension that builds every time you go to the ocean and find it flat and bleak and pointless, tension that builds through waveless spells and ragged gales, until that magical convergence: swells from far away storms meeting just the right winds at the coast. And, then you, with perfect timing, meet all of that on a surfboard. The indescribable magic of these moments was more powerful before the predictability of online surf forecasting and surf resorts. But you’ll find it still, traveling an unfamiliar coast in a van.

A surfer originally from Southampton, N.Y., Mr. Stott showed up in Bundoran, in 1999, inspired in part by the Irish surfing scenes in the cult surf film “Litmus: A Surfing Odyssey.” His luck was better than ours: the surf was on, big time. That’s all it took. Mr. Stott would make Ireland his home. He went to college in Dublin, and in his spare time joined the ranks of a crew of local surfers, ex pats and Irish, whose exploits in giant Irish surf are the stuff of movies and magazine covers.

Eventually, he married and settled in Bundoran permanently in 2006 where he works as a writer and a teacher. He and his wife live feet from the ocean — facing the fearsome Pampa surf break — and amid what is quietly described by those who know as one of the most wave-rich coastlines (from Enniscrone in Sligo to Rossnowlagh in Donegal) on the planet.

Mr. Stott and I connected through the New York surfer grapevine. Following his bread-crumb trail of texts, I found a narrow lane through a clutch of barns and farmhouses to a cove. It was a near windless afternoon, with head-high waves breaking over a smooth limestone ledge. On my scale it was excellent. For Mr. Stott it was an average practice day, so he surfed his tiny board with the fins removed for an additional challenge.

In the lineup with us was only one other surfer, Paul O’Kane, an Australian who’d come to Ireland 20 years ago for his honeymoon and, like so many others, stayed. Starved for it, I stayed in for hours. A contingent of friendly locals rotated through. Ireland is so far north that when I quit it was close to 10 p.m. the sun still just above the horizon. We had dinner, slept right there, and went at it again the next morning.

The swell lasted four more days. Between shifts in the wind and downpours we got our fill on that north coast. We moved our camp to near the ruins of the thousand year-old Rosslea Castle on a grassy bluff overlooking the two main breaks at Easkey, our only company a family of Germans who’d ferried over in their own van.

In quaint little Easkey village we joined the locals at McGowan’s pub for a Guinness, and ate nearby at Pudding Row, a hip little award-winning restaurant and bakery provisioned from local farms.

On the last morning, camping at a beach an hour from Shannon airport, I rose in the predawn to catch a few fading rollers. Alone, with my pick of fun, glassy waves, not another soul in sight, amid miles of beach and dunes, it felt like a throwback to another time when surfing was in its infancy. Surfing in Ireland can feel that way.

Biddle Duke is a writer, magazine editor, and small-time oyster farmer based on eastern Long Island.

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“The Important Stuff Is Personal Asked to reflect on what has contributed the most to his investment success in the years since, Singer says, “I actually think the technical skills are secondary. The important stuff is creativity and a little intelligence. You have to be good at numbers and have the ability to analyze. The legal background was good—really important. As a lawyer, you’re supposed to be able to read complicated documents, analyze complicated situa”“tions, learn about new things your client is doing, figure it out, and drill down to the essence. As an investor, you need tenacity, resilience. Everybody makes mistakes—sometimes big—and you have to have resilience to come back, survive, make decisions amid ambiguity.”“Evolution to Distressed

The other critical variable behind his success, Singer explains, has been “risk management. It is something that needs to be central to every investor’s and every money manager’s consciousness. It’s so odd how most people don’t bother looking at history and asking, ‘Has anyone ever consistently ”“gauged turning points, timed markets?’ Sure, people can get it right once, twice. But then they’re dead the third time or the fourth time. I mean dead. I mean, buried.” Singer then points to the crash of 1987—which his erstwhile guru, Marty Zweig, ironically enough, predicted on Lou Rukeyser’s TV show—to prove his point. “The strategy that had worked for us for ten years at that point was convertible bond arbitrage. Long the bond, short the stock—generate a big positive cash flow, a couple of bucks trading profit, and you’re done. Not too much leverage—I’m not a big fan of leverage. It did the job, meaning that it produced consistent, modest returns, making money more or less all of the time. Then the crash of ’87 comes as a big surprise.” But, Singer emphasizes, “I survived the crash by being hedged.” And his commitment to his goal, not to lose money, was reinforced once more. A specialized form of arbitrage, convertible bond hedging was a quiet but lucrative backwater in the investment world when Singer started plying the trade in the mid-1970s. “The ownership of convertibles used to be 20 percent arbs and 80“percent institutions,” he recalls. “Then it shifted, and over a period of ten or fifteen years became the opposite. It became dominated by arbs, very competitive and very quantitative. People started using computers, the arbs were monetizing volatility, and pricing became completely ridiculous. Plus, there were two or three convertible hedging crashes in the last twenty years. So the business became very uninteresting to me.” Luckily for Elliott’s clients, however, “another business had begun to catch Singer’s eye—even during the heyday of convertible hedging—in the 1980s. It is called distressed investing—buying the securities, usually bonds, of distressed companies at bargain prices and holding on to profit via repricings, redemptions, or conversions into equity in a restructured entity. “I’m a curious guy, good at math,” he explains, “also a tell-me-a-story kind of guy. So I got involved in distressed investing early. There was Western Union’s liquidity crisis in ’84, I believe. I know that LTV’s Chapter 11 [at that time, the largest in history, with $4 billion in liabilities] was in the summer of ’86. [LTV Corp. was the second-largest steelmaker in the United States.] Then Public Service New Hampshire’s bankruptcy in ’88 was another opportunity, and there were

“others—El Paso Gas & Electric a year or two later.” In fact, Singer allows, “I don’t want to rank our businesses, but one of our strengths is distressed situations. The only problem is that it comes and goes. So it’s parenthetically interesting that there have been some intriguing distressed positions—Caesar’s restructuring, the entire energy sector—in recent years, despite the nine-year bull market. It’s actually weird to have this juxtaposition of a bull market with a real collapse in the securities of energy companies.” Don’t think Singer is complaining, however.

He observes, “It’s not an accident that when Mike Milken’s high-yield business created this pool of preprogrammed distressed stuff—this asset class, the Macy’s and the Federated, the Southmark—that it was arbs ”“who mostly were the first to populate the world that Milken had helped create. Sure, there was a Marty Whitman, a curmudgeon who had been a lawyer for distressed clients, who became a distressed value investor [M.J. Whitman & Co. and Third Avenue Managment]. But more typical were the guys at Angelo, Gordon & Co. and me—I mean, we were arbs—and it was an easy migration from arbitrage into distressed.” Delphi Automotive: The Big Workout One of the most well-known (infamous) distressed deals Singer and Elliott have successfully navigated was the exceedingly fraught reorganization of Delphi Automotive out of bankruptcy at the tail end of the financial crisis. Looking back, says Singer, “The num”Excerpt From: Kate Welling. “Merger Masters.” iBooks. 

“ber of forces and factors that converged for a process and result with Delphi Automotive made it particularly interesting.” He continues, “If you remember, when President Obama came into office in January ’09, the auto industry was on the brink. We got involved with Chrysler, with Chrysler Financial Co., with GMAC and General Motors, with a variety of securities. We had Chrysler Finco bank debt—among others. There were a lot of things happening back then, but the first major thing that happened in the reorganization world was that the government basically worked out a deal for Chrysler that gave its unions a recovery much, much greater than their pari passu recovery.” Singer goes on: They stuffed it to the creditors. The ”“president’s team actually threatened to call out the creditors personally if they didn’t sign up for that deal. As in, “You sign up for this deal by 6:00 p.m. tonight or the president is going to name you tomorrow during his press conference.” That was the threat made to the holders of Chrysler Finco bank debt. So we, the “combative” Elliott, immediately folded. We folded because the bid/ask spread actually wasn’t far away from the president’s price. We thought that the administration’s behavior was wrong on so many levels—but we also thought that, at the end of the day, the judge might approve it. I’m telling you that just to set up the environment we were operating in back then. Because the next thing that happened—just a few weeks later, as I recall—was the General Motors bailout. It was also a completely ridiculous, contentious, and unfair process. The unions win, the bond holders lose; creditors’ committees screaming, yelling, battling, surrendering. All that is context. I think we managed to make some money. We were left with some bonds but resigned from the creditors’ committees because we just weren’t in the mood to go through “accounting irregularities” in 2004 and filed for Chapter 11 protection from its creditors the very next year, even though automotive industry sales were still chugging along. “There followed two or three attempts to do restructurings,” recalls Singer, “and the latest attempt had been David Tepper’s—Appaloosa Management’s—agreement to put in a large amount of money.” [Appaloosa committed $2.55 billion in equity to a $3.4 billion deal with Cerberus Capital Management to bail out Delphi, in a plan announced in 2006, but not accepted by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court until August 2007—after major revisions.] “Then Tepper backed out in April 2008,” Singer goes on, “because there had been a melt of value, obviously, in all of these businesses—but Delphi really had a big head start in the melt.” Appaloosa’s exit sent both GM and its former subsidiary scrambling for reorganization financing to keep critical auto plants running. “In late April or May of ’09,” recalls Singer, “there was such lender exhaustion—hatred, whatever—that there was an opportunity. It was like they needed muscle. They needed a fresh, vigorous force to enter the negotiations. So we looked at it. There were three tranches of the DIP loan“—and the third and largest tranche was only going to be repaid about 20 cents on the dollar in the proposed reorganization. The debtor-in-possession loan—busted! It was such a mess. In terms of the company’s business, as I recall, Delphi had a bunch of foreign facilities, some of which were highly profitable.”

“No Compelling Interest Singer continues, “What was problematic was that the government guys were going to sell the foreign plants to their pals. So, when we decided to step into Delphi, it was with knowledge that almost all of our peers had looked at Delphi and said, ‘Cars, government, unions—no way!’ ” Nonetheless, Singer adds, what Elliott realized was “the government had no compelling interest in that financing arrangement at all. They certainly had a compelling interest in the U.S. plants and in keeping General Motors alive, but there was no necessity for them to sell the foreign stuff to Platinum Equity. I mean, it was unbelievable.” Platinum, a Beverly Hills-based private equity firm, had spent three years trying to structure a $3.6 billion reorganization deal ”

“for Delphi, with almost all of the funding coming from GM or the federal government—and only $250 million in cash plus an additional $250 million credit line coming from Platinum investors—who nonetheless would have ended up in control of Delphi’s extensive foreign operations. Platinum’s “sweetheart” reorganization plan also provided for very little in terms of debt repayment for Delphi’s creditors and, when filed with the bankruptcy court, understandably made the parts maker’s creditors go ballistic. The creditors found the reinforcement they were looking for in Elliott Management. Reminisces Singer, “So we march into court—because the government was still making ‘my way or the highway’ noises—but we knew that they didn’t have a compelling interest in Platinum’s plan for Del”“Delphi. I mean, they did have compelling interests in the General Motors and Chrysler bailouts. Even so, they should have done them in a different way. What they did [to those creditors] was tough and people remember it to this day.” A Happy Ending At any rate, Singer continues, “We march into bankruptcy court and say that we—the actual creditors of Delphi—would in effect take over the company.” The lenders would make a “credit bid”—use the debt they were owed to, as it were, pay for the takeover. “Elliott could do that because by that time we owned a number of different tranches of the deal,” Singer adds. “So we convinced the judge to let us, the creditors, make our proposal“He made this amazing remark to the effect of that ‘if those guys in suits could buy this, why can’t these other guys in suits buy this?’ ” Under the creditors’ plan, GM would still take back four factories and Delphi’s steering business, the financier explains, “but part of our proposal was ponying up cash for the U.S. plants to give General Motors and the government sort of a dowry. And the judge let us creditors propose to buy the foreign subs. In all, it was more cash and better terms than Platinum Equity was going to put up—and we also agreed to backstop a rights offering.” Singer’s satisfaction is manifest as he adds, “When the smoke had cleared just a couple of months later, we owned a lot of stock and we loved the company that remained.” Delphi stock has risen nearly “105-fold since the investment was made, resulting in astronomical compound annual returns since the 2009 investment of more than 75 percent per year, over nearly a full decade. He goes on, “I’m telling that story because we approached the opportunity creatively, and the whole thing was fast. It wasn’t one of those five-year bankruptcies, at least in terms of our involvement. We conceptualized it accurately when those around us did not. In terms of the amount of money, the elegance of the approach, the lessons learned, that was a great result.” Mergers with Hair Although distressed investing is clearly Singer’s first love, the cyclicality of distressed opportunities and his own restless “curiosity led him to dabble in the booming merger business as early as the 1980s. Singer remarks, “We’ve been trading mergers, in one way or another, for thirty-five years. I became interested not as a continuous player but in the occasional merger deal and came to feel—especially because of my experience in the LTV workout—that creating value, making something happen, was both a driver of value and a risk mitigator. In other words, a way to try to control my own destiny.” Indeed, he points out, “Elliott has never engaged in a pure risk-arb business, like the old Bear Stearns merger-arb desk. We’ve always been highly selective. I’m not a fan of investing in vanilla, low-risk mergers. In that game, you get nine right and then you give it all back with the tenth. The merger business we tend to do is stuff that’s“complicated; has hair on it. We want something that we can get involved in, where we can make something happen, where we can make some money at the edges.” Singer now frequently refers to Elliott’s activism as “situational investing—things with returns that are either uncorrelated to the market or involve a great deal of complexity.” He explains that while Elliott “has found it essential to be always hedged, we’ve also found it productive to be consistently applying our full set of tools—analytical talent, media strategists, proxy advisors—to the task of creating value through equity activism.” Instead of passively waiting for deals to come to him, Singer is always looking to make things go his way—as he did in Oncor Electric. Situational activism, the savvy Elliott Management founder elabo“rates, requires applying his firm’s full range of skills and knowledge: “There are a lot of linkages between merger arb, distressed, activist distressed, activist arbitrage, activist equity. Similar skill sets are required in each of these areas.” As an arcane example, Singer points to deals involving what are known as “domination agreements” in European takeovers, especially in Germany. In essence, a type of squeeze out, these agreements come into play when would-be acquirers need to control a certain number of shares to force a company’s hand. In Germany, the magic number of shares is 75 percent of the outstanding. Once there, an acquirer can make a target’s management do its bidding and can immediately consolidate income statements. “They are complex situations,’’ “allows Singer, “but offer the opportunity to make money pretty consistently. Still, you’ve got to keep at it. You’ve got to be willing to stand your ground: in effect, talking to the target company and trying to make something happen.” Elliott has accomplished that in numerous instances. In one, Elliott acquired a 15 percent stake in German machine tool company DMG Mori Aktiengesellschaft, which it then soon sold, quite profitably, to an acquirer, Japan’s DMG Mori Co. Ltd., which needed the shares to solidify its control of what had been its German joint venture. “We get involved in deals that have different characteristics, where we can trade effort for risk or complexity for risk—and that’s why our pattern of returns is so different than others’,” notes Singer.

“ponent is very, very tricky,” emphasizes Singer. “But look, it’s part of our expertise. We’re supposed to be able to invest in complicated places, figure things out; figure out the accounting, the legal issues, the enforceability, the culture. Obviously, mostly we do. But when you get it wrong, as we did in the Samsung C&T fight, it can be costly.” There’s a coda, however, to Elliott’s wrenching 2015 loss to the Lee dynasty in the battle over Samsung’s restructuring. “We learned a lot about the Samsung Group,” says Singer, with studied understatement. “There’s no such thing as moral victory in this business. We’re trying to make money, always. But that did ultimately prove to be a credibility-enhancing loss.”

Singer explains, “We took a new position in Samsung Electronics in October 2016—”

“and this time, it was ultra-polite. We made some proposals that basically were just stating—nicely—from the outside, things we thought they should or could easily decide to do.” While Samsung still refused to restructure along the lines Elliott suggested, and the South Korean conglomerate’s own legal difficulties affected that and other governance issues, it did pay its first-ever quarterly dividend—and said it would cancel billions of dollars’ worth of treasury shares to bolster its balance sheet. Since then, boasts Singer, “Samsung Electronics’ stock has gone crazy on the upside—despite Jay Y. Lee being arrested, tried, and convicted. There’s no way anyone could get bored with this business.” Nor is the billionaire investor going to be hemmed in by borders of another sort. With ”

“the recent opening of Elliott’s newest office in Menlo Park, Singer is moving to formalize the firm’s private equity activities—essentially so that he can seize profit opportunities when and how he sees them. “You run an activist campaign and maybe the company gets put up for sale. A couple of times, despite the fact that we teed up everything for the private equity world, we got shut out when we wanted to participate in the buyout. What are we, chopped liver? Well, we were chopped liver—but we’re not going to be anymore,” Singer avers.”

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30 January 2055    //    1400h

The slim, dark-skinned girl walked around the western side of the Mountain Ring, blissfully aware that she could see nothing manmade around her.  Other than her Lenses and her clothes, everything was completely natural.

It took God seven days to make the Universe—at least, that's what she had been taught.  It was Man, however, who invented days.  Why would God know anything of time?  She knew these mountains had been here thousands, perhaps millions of years before anyone had colonized the area.  She may live in the youngest city in America, but this view from the mountain was older than any human.  Perhaps the days that God took to work up to Adam and Eve had actually lasted millions of years each—who would be around to tell the difference?

Of course, there was always the possibility, blasphemous though it may be, that God didn’t exist at all.  There was the possibility that God was a concept created to control people’s minds.

The girl winced even thinking of that, her mind reflecting back to what she knew of the hell that had been promised her should she doubt God’s existence.  To avoid that fate, she knew she shouldn’t be thinking such thoughts.  Try as she might, however, the thought was in her head, and she couldn’t push it away:  What if the story of God was one that naturally resonated so strongly with humans that con men adopted it as truth and asked their followers to do the same?

She had seen what this looked like.  Once a group of people was convinced of this truth, they would do anything the leader told them to.  God wanted them to pray every night, so they did it.  God wanted them to go to church every Sunday, so they went and listened to the preacher issue more of God’s demands.  Every Sunday, God wanted you to give money to the church.  She wondered what God did with all the money anyway.

It occurred to the girl that this wasn’t just God that humans used to lay down expectations.  The nature of human life seemed to have its own recipe, its own ideal that was foisted upon humanity by their fellow man.  She was expected to go to school every day.  She was expected to get a respectable job after school.  She was expected to bike if she wanted to get around.  She was expected to wear her Lenses.

Thinking of her Lenses, the girl experienced a brief episode of shame.  She had left her house to disconnect from the world she knew.  She wanted the time to think without anything reminding her of the world on the other side of the mountains.  To try and live like her grandparents and her great-grandparents had, with nothing to distract her as she walked around in nature.  Instead, she had worn her Lenses out without giving it a second thought.  She was always wearing her Lenses, even if they were, as they were now, in Do Not Disturb Mode.

Was life really so much better with Lenses?  Was the natural world so drab in comparison that human life evolved to spice things up with television, then the internet, then smart phones, then Lenses?  What would human life be like if they just lived in these mountains?  If she had left her Lenses at home, would she have felt more at peace?  She would almost certainly have felt naked at first, but perhaps it would be cleansing.

Either way, she reminded herself, her Lenses were set to leave her alone.  They had been virtually demoted to an accessory.  Nothing more than the bracelet she wore on her left wrist.  It wasn't a perfectly natural experience, but she still felt refreshed by the old world around her.

To the east and the north of her were various mountain peaks comprising the Mountain Ring that the New Idaho Valley was nestled inside.  The peaks didn’t seem so high from where the girl stood, but if she were standing at their base, it would be a different story.  To the west, she had about eight feet of reliable ground before a steep drop-off that led at least 1000 feet down to the base of the Ring.  She was always tempted to find a way down the western slope, but she knew there was no destination once she got down there.  Nowhere to go but back up.

This reminder that there was nothing for miles and miles to the west of this high valley is what gave her the small bit of peace that she looked for on this trail.  Looking away from the mountains, there were no humans for hundreds of miles.  Just the breathtaking panorama of plains, clouds, and, far off, more mountain peaks.  With the wall of mountain on her right, it was easy to imagine that New Idaho didn't exist at all.  It was possible to feel like she was the only one out there.  But for her Lenses and clothes, she could have been a primitive human exploring the Idaho mountains.  

As the girl began to turn clockwise around the next curve in the mountain ring, she heard some sort of soft mammalian growling and grunting.  She took a couple more steps and caught a glimpse of brown fur behind a slab of rock.  She assumed it was some sort of bear.  Her initial response was fear before she remembered that the bear would have no desire to attack her unless she bothered it.  She just needed to turn around.

First, however, she wanted to get a good look at what was hiding behind that rock.  She wanted to be a part of nature, and part of that was observing what naturally occurred.  How could she feel at one with the natural world if she ran away at the first sign of danger?  As long as she moved quietly and non-threateningly, she should be able to get a look at the bear.

She moved as far left as the ledge would allow.  As the creature became more visible, she could see that it wasn't a bear.  She actually had no idea what it was.  It stood hunched over on its hind legs, almost like a human.  Two gangly arms hung down from its shoulders with long, blackish-brown claws on the ends.  Its head was tall and thin, rounded at the top, unlike the squat sphere of a bear’s.  The creature appeared to be shuddering, though she didn't know why.  It looked to be covered in a thick layer of fur, and it was a warm day, even for New Idaho, where the daytime temperature rarely dipped below 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

As she backed up to head back, the creature stilled and turned its head over its right shoulder.  The creature’s face was comprised of a snout much like an elephants, with, from what she could tell, similar motor control.  The snout was raised as if it were an antenna.  Hanging straight down, it would have reached the creature’s chest.  Its eyes looked almost as if they had been drawn with some sort of permanent marker on a two-dimensional plain in front of the creature’s face, two other-worldly voids that briefly captured the girl and kept her from moving.  

The two stood about 50 meters apart.  After a brief moment of shock, the girl continued to slowly back away, sensing that running may set the creature off and invite a chase.  As she turned to walk forward, the creature jumped and turned so its body was facing her, then started sprinting toward her in quick bounds.  It ran with the form of a human, its clawed arms pumping back and forth in athletic motion.

With no other choice, the girl began to run.  She tried not to think about what she suspected was true—if the creature wanted her, it was going to get her.  There was no real use running but to prove to herself in some symbolic sense that she valued her life.  Overwhelmed by the hopelessness of the situation, the girl let out a cathartic cry.

As her scream petered out, the girl stole a quick glance behind her and saw that the distance between her and the creature had closed to about a third of what it had been.  As she turned back, desperately trying to push herself faster, her left foot caught on a rock.  In a moment of immediate terror, the girl was airborne.

She landed on her right side, smashing her chin against the rock below.  Her Lenses had detached from her face during the fall.  As she scrambled to get up to her feet, sobbing in helplessness, she looked around and realized she saw no sign of the beast.  Halfway to her feet, however, she felt a sharp blow to her stomach, knocking her to the ground once more.  She landed on her back.  An arc of motion betrayed what had hit her.  It appeared to be one of the beast’s claws.  It was no longer, however, attached to a body.  As the girl’s adrenaline-soaked brain processed what it was seeing, she became aware of a few patches of brown fur hanging in the air, in addition to a couple other full and partial claws—claws that had been attached to the beast only seconds before, when her Lenses were on.

Before she could decide what to do next, the girl was struck again.  As she came to terms with the fact that she would not be able to move quickly enough to recover and escape, time began to dilate.  After the second blow, she thought about what her family would think.  She wondered whether they would find her body on the western side of the mountain.  She realized they would probably be able to use Infrariend as long as the beast didn’t destroy her Lenses.

After the third blow, she wondered whether anyone else in the town had seen this beast.  She wondered where it had come from, and whether it would claim any more victims after her.

After the fourth blow, reality began to sink in.  She realized she would likely not survive past a fifth blow, and certainly not past a sixth.  She could see the bones of her ribs through her torn shirt and skin.  Thankfully, in these final moments, she couldn’t feel the pain.  As she started the process of accepting her fate, she began to feel oddly, physically peaceful.

As time reached its slowest rate yet, dozens of thoughts ran through the girl’s mind.  She thought of her family and her friends and the places she had been and the places she would never get to go.  Then she thought about what would come after this.  Up to this point, she had almost taken it for granted that she would be going nowhere—this would be the end.  Now, however, she thought of what she had been taught.  She thought about the afterlife promised her by her parents and the thoughts on God that she had been entertaining earlier on this walk.  She realized that she may have committed sins on this walk that had not been atoned for.  She realized, as the claw raised for what would possibly be its final attack, that her life was about to end, and her afterlife was about to begin.  Based on what she had been told her whole life, this afterlife would almost certainly be hell.  As she thought of what she had been told and shown of hell, she desperately tried to appreciate what were about to be the last peaceful moments she would have for the rest of eternity.

As the ultimate beatings knocked the last of her breath from her, all her worries began to fade away.  She came to understand that she was finally meeting with fate.  After only thirteen years on this earth, she had never left New Idaho.  These were the thirteen years she got.  As her consciousness faded away, she hoped that wherever she found herself next would at least be as exciting as her short time in the City of the Century

Why won't the Left Recognize the South African Genocide?

According to Genocide Watch, the political left in the West is engaged in genocide denial. Almost to a man, the Twitterati scramble to point out how, for some reason, the Boer is not really being exterminated in their own lands- or that they had it coming. Welcome to progressive victim blaming. Its fine, so long as the victims are White.

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A message painted on the wall of a police station in #SouthAfrica. I guess now that the Boer has been disarmed in 2000, only the police is left... This is why you don't give up your guns America! pic.twitter.com/KdYwENf6nN

— Willem Petzer (@willempet) March 20, 2018

As pointed out by Jack Montgomery in Breitbart,

“If you look at the footage and read the stories, you hear the accounts, it’s a horrific circumstance they face,” (Australian Home Affairs minister) Dutton had said, arguing that South Africa’s farmers “deserve special attention”.

“I do think, on the information that I’ve seen, people do need help and they need help from a civilized country like ours,” he added — prompting furious demands for a retraction from the South African government.

But rather than welcoming the country’s white minority as refugees, as they would for almost any other group, left-liberal media outlets and pro-migration non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were quick to condemn Dutton, insisting the farmers should be left to their fate.

It is not just Australia- most leftist publications in the West have looked away from this humanitarian crisis. I will give credit where it is due, the Independent has published a relatively clear-eyed report, Newsweek is recognizing the problem for what it is, and RT is ready to report on Julius Malema "cutting the throat of whiteness.”

RT, it should be noted, were making videos about the looming threat of land expropriation in South Africa four years ago. We didn't listen then- but then RT is Russian state media so it was an obvious ploy to influence elections, or something.

🆘‼😯🔥 #SouthAfrica: a white farmer in Bela-Bela (Warmbad), his name is Jakes van Deventer, was killed by several black assailants, and his wife seriously injured. The white farmers' community caught the attackers, these are the weapons they found in their car. pic.twitter.com/5JggfntiYE

— Onlinemagazin (@OnlineMagazin) March 18, 2018

The genocide denial from progressive activists is shameful.

Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who you may remember claims Islam is the most feminist religion, outright denies the South African Genocide and claims that Australia really should import more Muslims instead of skilled White people, because of course she does. She is an unrepentant activist for Islam, but wishes to deny all others the same courtesy for their own faith or ethnic group.

Let me be clear. There is no evidence to prove that white people (aka farmers from South Africa) would be more beneficial to Australia than people from other nations (e.g. Rohingya). As such, it is rubbish to claim they should be provided faster assistance from Australia.

— Yassmin Abdel-Magied (@yassmin_a) March 15, 2018

Apart from centuries of demonstrable farming skills passed from father to son by the Boers, sure. There is no benefit to preferencing skilled people over the unskilled, in Abdel-Magied's book. It is odd indeed that open border advocates like Yassmin suddenly want to build a wall, but with a door that only non-Whites have the key for. Similarly, it is a dishonest ploy to conflate centuries of religious and ethnic conflict in Asia with the genocide in South Africa.

It is not in doubt that the Rohingya are suffering in Myanmar, virtually without aid from neighboring Muslim nations.

Even so, it is strange indeed to advocate for Australian aid for a community defined by political allegiance rather than religious or ethnic grouping when that kind of politics has no connection with Australia. Yassmin draws the line around Islam, and concludes that as she and the Rohingya are both Muslim, that's her team. Fair enough, but this is not a simple case of racist persecution, these issues are deep-rooted. Simply moving the Rohingya to Australia is not a solution to Myanmar's refusal to recognize the Rohingya as citizens or to end the bloodshed. Is it racist for a White country to help White people with whom they share a history as the sons of colonialists? Abdel-Mageid may argue that would be the definition of racism, and to be quite frank I for one do not care, because she would have to own that racism herself.

SHOW 👏🏽 ME 👏🏽 CONCRETE 👏🏽 EVIDENCE 👏🏽 TO 👏🏽 PROVE 👏🏽 ME 👏🏽 WRONG 👏🏽 OH WAIT 👏🏽 YOU HAVE NONE? 👏🏽 YOU'RE SPOUTING DOGWHISTLING BS? 👏🏽 THOUGHT SO 👏🏽 KTHXBYE.

— Yassmin Abdel-Magied (@yassmin_a) March 15, 2018

Australia, a secular society based on Europeans and their Christian values, recognizes the plight of another European Christian descended society and wishes to help. Could not the neighbors of the Rohingya, Muslim countries all, help their co-religionists and provide them support? If we're honestly looking for solutions it is self-evident that people with common cultural, language and ethnic connections integrate into societies easier than those without. This should not be a controversial position, but apparently it is racism to recognize that people in the world are different- unless you are an intersectional leftist, in which case you can recognize differences in relation to White people, in order to leverage power.

South Africa: with the government condoning theft of land of white farmers and doing nothing to stop their murder, 2018 is turning into a bad year if you are white and live in SA. 1.7 farm attacks per day an 1 farmer murdered every 5 days. This is genocide. #SouthAfrica pic.twitter.com/lceenJX8ks

— Miss Jo (@HaramHussy) March 11, 2018

It is racist to claim that Whites can be oppressed- despite this entire article existing as an exercise in highlighting the in-group preference that is exhibited by people of all races and faiths. If it is racist for White Australians to recognize their kinship with White South Africans, why is it not also anti-Kuffar bigotry for Yassmin Abdel-Magied to advocate for her own in-group? Can we not understand that having love and being an advocate for your own people does not necessitate hatred of the other? Abdel-Magied shows here that it is, as usual, group identity for the Muslim, but Christians- watch out. That's racism.

Apart from being such an egregious example of how not to make an argument, the leftist position is clear. If you are White and look at people who look like you being tortured and raped for their skin color with horror, it is you that is the racist. The implicit demand is "What about the non-Whites?" To which the reply should be- what race is more charitable, more willing to aid and more accomodating than those hated Whites? This is a sick ideology, and if it means that we are Alt-Right for opposing racist murderers, count us in. History remembers those who deny genocide.

I find Peter Dutton speaking about white farmers in South Africa while condemning others trying to come to Aus so incredibly racist. It’s one of the most flagrant racist displays I’ve ever seen yet people are applauding him. Pull your fucking shit together Australia!

— Scott Rhodie (@ScottRhodie) March 14, 2018

What we are witnessing is the weaponization of ethnic cleansing in order to promulgate an open-borders and globalist agenda.

To put it mildly, this sticks in the craw. The idea that because the Australian government has been brave enough to recognize reality and try to help that this is somehow racist is not only insulting but exhibits the most appalling kind of anti-White bigotry.

Let me be clear: Farm violence, and crime generally, is a major problem in South Africa. It warrants closer inspection and much stronger policing. However, if you think it constitutes 'white genocide', you're being taken for a ride by race-baiters and proto-fascists.

— Mike Stuchbery 💀🍷 (@MikeStuchbery_) January 20, 2018

Jon Rosenthal of The Economist, who is Jewish, will denounce all genocide except when it happens to Whites.

This is outrageous racism. Australia detains genuine asylum seekers for years, but opens its arms to a bunch of white people who do not face oppression. https://t.co/30Lv0xrnvE

— Jonathan Rosenthal (@rosenthal_jon) March 15, 2018

Australia is racist because Rosenthal disagrees with their immigration policy with regard to helping people flee a genocide- though of course, #NotAllAustralians, Jon. Rosenthal will go so far to argue with a Black South African racist about what a genocide is.

Oh. Now you use the word "zionists" instead of Jews. Very clever. I have denounced apartheid. Will you denounce genocide of Jews?

— Jonathan Rosenthal (@rosenthal_jon) August 29, 2017

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This is the double standard that is being exhibited to varying degrees across the plaent, when it comes to relations between people of European descent and virtually all others. It has now become common to claim that there is no such thing as Whiteness when it comes to an identity, but Whiteness itself is toxic and must be deconstructed. That is the philosophical root in the West of our neo-Marxist political left.

Judgement Day. The land is ours!!! pic.twitter.com/ZSh2QaBdAd

— andile (@Mngxitama) March 19, 2018

This is the sharp end of the same ideology. This is the result of formented bigotry sanctioned by a state that wholeheartedly agrees that Whiteness itself is evil enough to be met with land expropriation, rape, torture and murder. Is this carnage really what the so-called progressives wish to advance? As we have repeatedly said in this magazine, this is what awaits Western nations, casually waiting for demographics to tilt the balance of power.

BLACK AGENDA ON REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY, COLONIALISM AND APARTHEID “Justice requires not only the ceasing and desisting of injustice but also requires either punishment or reparation for injuries and damages inflicted for prior wrongdoing. ― Amos Wilson 1/3 pic.twitter.com/LNM8Cb35Cm

— Lindsay Maasdorp (@LindsayMaasdorp) March 19, 2018

The rhetoric is the same as that parroted by the benign social justice advocates in your own town. The weepy students who wail about wanting safe spaces and segregated housing because of the evil Whites oppressing them will not speak out against this genocide. They deny it. They will not condemn the South African government, they will say, well the power dynamics are shifting and this is a good thing thanks to centuries of colonialism, and South Africa should belong to Black people. Apart from highlighting how the left really sees multiculturalism -as a weapon against Whites- this is dishonest, upstream thinking. The same thinking begat the extermination of the Kulaks with the Holodomor, but for some reason many leftists don't like to talk about that, either.

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The Deputy President of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) manhandles/intimidates Afrikaner journalist outside of parliament in South Africa You won't see any pro-EU politicians condemning this though. pic.twitter.com/8ttUvSQWIw

— Defend Europa (@DefendEvropa) March 20, 2018

The South African Genocide is real. search #plaasmoorde on Twitter. Spread the word. Contact your local representative and demand action.

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Syria Proves How Dangerous Wars are as They Come to an End

By Robert Fisk, The Independent, Feb. 2, 2018

It’s easy to think the war is over. Until mortars from Ghouta swish over Damascus and explode in the old Christian area of Bab el-Touma with its grocery shops and restaurants. Six dead. Or when an army officer comes and says quite casually to you: “Remember Captain Walid? He was martyred four days ago.” I’ve always felt uneasy about the word “martyred”--about any soldier, or civilian, anywhere.

But that’s the way the man referred to Captain Walid Jabbour Khalil. He was a combat correspondent with the Syrian army. He carried a notebook, not a rifle, and he had a dangerous job.

I knew him, though not well. Last year, he was covering the war on the mountains of Qalamun high above Lebanon, a short, cheerful, moustachioed man who, I thought, was happier as an official military reporter than an infantryman.

Russian and German official combat reporters and photographers had a short life expectancy in the Second World War--their Allied opposite numbers somewhat longer--and they took their chances in battles, cruel and fair, on the side of the aggressors or the liberators. Walid Jabbour, like his colleagues, was making a record of the Syrian army’s war, as ruthless a struggle as any in the recent history of the Middle East. He was shot dead by a sniper--probably a Jabhat al-Nusra man--in the battle of Harasta in eastern Damascus. He was wearing a flak jacket. The bullet, very carefully aimed according to his colleagues, hit him just beneath the lower left side of the protective armour.

By one of those awful ironies that war regularly throws up, Jabbour and his fellow cameramen were two weeks ago making a documentary about their own work. So his death, as he scrambled through a doorway, was recorded by one of his own photographer friends. He was a Christian--how we need to note these small matters now, in a war that has plastered coloured sectarian stickers over the landscape of every Syrian map. He was 38 and married, with a young son. His commanding officer, a Damascus general, attended the funeral--he is a Muslim and it was the first Christian church service he had ever attended. He gave a speech by the coffin, he said, amazed by the music and the extraordinary vestments of the priests.

The power of the internet has invaded every war now and it’s not just Jabbour whose death shocks each family. Soldiers of the Syrian government receive more public notice than the civilians of either side--the casualty figures for the Syrian war, anywhere from 240,000 to 450,000 dead, have now reached fantastically unreliable proportions. For all we know, they may even be closer to half a million, although that is unlikely.

But every Syrian knows--and has watched over and over again--the appalling, moving images of the death of 19-year-old Fadi Zidan, a cadet in the “National Defence” militia. He had joined up in 2015 and just four days later was seized by Isis fighters in Palmyra. And there his terrible fate was recorded forever--largely unseen in the West, of course, but regarded inside Syria with all the reverence (or hatred, depending on your point of view) humans bestow upon a religious painting.

Because he was an Alawite--or a “Nusairi”, as he is called by his persecutors in the film--Isis decided that he was a heretic as well as a tank driver (impossible, since he was only four days in uniform) and a chilling, white-shrouded figure standing behind the young man sentences him to be killed “as you do to our people”. Zidan appears dressed in the orange jumpsuit of Guantanamo and Isis infamy, his feet shackled in chains, the man in white announcing that he will be driven over by a captured Syrian tank.

All that is left in the last frames of the film is a crushed, orange-coloured mass of rags on the road behind the tank, a group of Isis members screaming “Allahu Akbar!” The Serbs did the same to the Muslims of the Drina Valley. Thus, too, did Uzbek General Dostum punish his enemies in northern Afghanistan.

But how should one contemplate such barbarity? And go on accepting, in the kind of nonchalant, easy way we do in the West, as Syrian civilians are blown apart and gassed and starved? I was in a black-stone village north west of Hama last week--destroyed, of course--when a Syrian army major casually said, “My cousin was martyred here three years ago”.

Slowly, more figures emerge. In the tiny village of Arabiyah in the same countryside, around 350 of its menfolk had died in uniform--either of the Syrian army or the “National Defence” groups. The enormity of the figure is only obvious when you realise that the entire village population of men, women and children is scarcely 8,000.

What is the real cost of this war in the ranks of Bashar al-Assad’s army? I think it passed 70,000 dead some months ago. Eighty thousand, perhaps. What rewards do their families expect from such a sacrifice? There will be debts to be paid.

I have to say, however, that after a 2,000-mile tour over much of Syria, I have--for the first time in recent months--seen neither a single Hezbollah member or Iranian revolutionary guard. And since Western leaders believe Syria is swamped with Iranians, this is interesting.

I travel where I wish--apart, of course, from the small areas still held by Isis--and I’m quick to spot a Hezbollah fighter (usually because they come from Lebanon, where I live, and I know some of them). But there are plenty of Russians patrolling the desert highways, even running convoys up the main supply route from Homs to Aleppo.

Yet I cannot forget the flurry of mortars that crashed into Bab Touma a few days ago. And, after passing through literally more than 100 military checkpoints, I find Syrian soldiers a bit too over-confident right now, too ready to believe it’s almost come to an end. Wars can be most dangerous when they are close to the end.

Expert: Somalia partitioned under Italy, Britain, France In 2016, Somalia was declared the most fragile state in the world – worse off than Syria. Famine struck yet again in 2017, compounded by President Trump’s attempt to ban Somalis from entering the US. But for the first time since 1991, when Somalia collapsed along with its one-time ally, the Soviet Union, Somalia now has functioning political institutions. Dual US-Somali citizen Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo became president in February 2017, approved by the US, refugees are returning from the US, Canada and Europe, and remittances from them buttress the economy. Just to make sure Farmajo knows who’s really in charge, Trump ordered an air strike on suspected militant bases in April 2017, near the Bab el-Mandeb strait choke point separating Yemen from Eritrea, boasting it killed 150 Shabab fighters. The 1980s were a monstrous decade. We are still living out the disasters that the Cold War and the US war to prevent ‘the advance of socialism’, which had been on the books since the end of WWII, and was reaching its logical conclusion by then. After two world wars, everyone expected peace, and the vast majority — socialism. No such luck. Hundreds of coups in the 1950s — 60s orchestrated by the CIA kept most countries toeing the imperial line. But after Vietnam, for a few shining moments in the 1970s, there was a shift by a slightly sobered America. The world breathed a sigh of relief. Somalia was prospering, free of British shackles, not yet embraced by the US. Ethiopia had a Nasser-like military coup in 1974 promising socialism next door. Sudan was at peace and pursuing a Nasserist policy under Colonel Gaafar Nimeiri. But the region was beginning its ‘time of troubles’, soon experiencing the fallout of its century of imperialism with a vengeance. British, French, Italian ‘Scramble’ Somalia, a country of 12.3m, has one of the most illustrious histories among Muslim states, prosperous for thousands of years as a trading nation perched on the strategic Horn of Africa, an early convert to Islam. As with all of Africa, it went into sharp decline in the late 19th century, after the Berlin conference of 1884, when European powers began the “Scramble for Africa”. In the last heroic resistance to imperialism, the Dervish leader Mohammed Abdullah Hassan rallied support from across the Horn of Africa and began one of the longest colonial resistance wars. Hassan emphasized that the British “have destroyed our religion and made our children their children” and that the Christian Ethiopians in league with the British were bent upon plundering the political and religious freedom of the Somali nation. While all other Muslim states fell to Christian invaders, Somalia held out. Hassan acquired weapons from the Ottomans and Sudan. But the Ottoman caliphate collapsed, and Churchill was free to use the new airplanes in 1920 to bomb the “mad mullah” and Somali forces, just as he was doing in Iraq. It took four invasion attempts before Hassan’s Dervish state was defeated, and territories turned into a British ‘protectorate’. The 1920s — 30s were a busy time for Britain in the Muslim world. Somalia was every bit as strategic as Palestine, and British schemes for both proved to be time bombs which still are plagued by and plague the West. Britain ceded most of the present territory of Somalia to Mussolini in 1925 as a reward for the Italians having joined the Allies in WWI. The British retained control of the southern half of the partitioned Jubaland territory, which was later called the Northern Frontier District, and the northwestern province Somaliland, which declared independence in 1991, and is now a member of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization. Italy administered central Somalia after WWII, until independence in 1960. French Somaliland (Djibouti) stayed with France till 1977, just too convenient strategically to give up, and is now the headquarters of the US AFRICOM regional military command. Italy proved to be the most helpful of the lot to Somalis, providing education and otherwise preparing Somalis for independence, and are now remembered more or less fondly. Italian was the lingua franca till 1970s, there being no Somali alphabet and the population illiterate till independence. The British did nothing, and created the conditions for endless regional war by giving the predominantly Somali Muslim Ogaden plateau to (largely Christian) Ethiopia, and another Somali territory to (largely Christian) Kenya. At the same time, of course, it was preparing to bequeath Muslim Palestine to (European) Jews. In all three cases, Muslims were treated as second rate, of no use to the imperialists, as they would never abandon Islam and join in imperial schemes. The British set the stage for Somalia to fail without colonial ‘guidance’. To be fair, Britain (and France) were just doing what the new masters, the US, demanded in the 1950s, shaping up Africa to meet its own needs, so the blame must be shared today. Socialism vs clanism and nationalism Siad Barre Given its handicaps, Somali independence was bitter-sweet. After a halting start, a military coup put Siad Barre (1910–1995) in the presidency from 1969–91. Like Lumumba in the Congo, Nkruma in Ghana, and Nasser in Egypt, Barre took the Soviet Union and socialism as the template for development. Volunteer labour harvested and planted crops, and built roads, hospitals and universities. Almost all industry, banks and businesses were nationalized, and cooperative farms were set up. A new writing system for the Somali language was also adopted, and Somali replaced Italian as the language of the public sphere. Although his government forbade clanism and stressed loyalty to the central authorities, Barre’s dictatorship became a hostage to his own clans. Even so, it was popular, presiding over a vibrant economy and stabilized by egalitarian economic policies. Portraits of him in the company of Marx and Lenin lined the streets on public occasions, though he did not promote a personality cult. He advocated a form of scientific socialism based on the Quran and Marx, emphasizing Somalia’s traditional and religious links with the Arab world, eventually joining the Arab League in 1974. That same year, Barre also served as chairman of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the predecessor of the African Union (AU). The mid-1970s were halcyon days for Somalia. Barre was the Soviet Union’s poster child, not so willful, it seemed, as Egypt’s Nasser, and not (yet) toppled like Lumumba and Nkrumah. But storm clouds were on the horizon. In the late 1970s, buoyed by Somalia’s success, fed up with a corrupt (Christian) government under the aging Emperor Selassie, and inspired by the Ethiopian revolution, the Western Somali Liberation Front in Ogaden, began a campaign for union with Somalia. Rebels wanted Islam and socialism, emulating liberation movements throughout the colonial world. Their plea for help was heard, and in July 1977, the Somali national army marched into the Ogaden, capturing most of the territory, welcomed by the native Somalis, but attracting the ire of the entire international community. This was at the height of detente, and the Soviet Union was playing more-or-less by the implicit rules of detente — 1/ don’t provoke revolution or civil war, but help friendly regimes. 2/ ‘Socialist countries shouldn’t invade other socialist countries. The Soviet Union was forced to chose between Barre and Mengistu, both socialists.  It joined the international outcry against Somalia’s occupation of the Ogaden, though Ethiopia was wracked by civil war and Mengistu had no friends. 1979 Haile Mirian Mengistu The invasion was reversed, and the US was able to take advantage of the crisis, and cultivate Barre as a useful ally, shunned by the Soviet Union. Only a year later, in 1979, abandoning detente and following ‘great game’ rules, an eerily similar scenario would play itself out in Afghanistan. This time the US chose to side with the mujahideen against the Soviets. Though Barre was a pariah, he became ‘our pariah’ by 1980,* along with the Afghan mujahideen. Instead of working with the Soviets in Africa (pushing Barre out of his ‘greater Somalia’) and in central Asia (stabilizing the now socialist secular regime of Babrak Karmal to fight the Muslim extremists), the US under Reagan launched old-fashioned war and subversion of anything that was socialist, leaving only rubble and terror in Somalia, Ethiopia and Afghanistan, which continues to plague the world. * Barre was ousted in 1991. Barre’s Ethiopian nemesis, Mengistu Haile Miriam, was also ousted in 1991, both victims of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Barre died in political exile in Nigeria in 1995. Mengistu lives in Zimbabwe. • First published in Crescent International http://clubof.info/

It's a Mahdi, Mahdi, Mahdi, Mahdi World!

New Post has been published on https://netmaddy.com/its-a-mahdi-mahdi-mahdi-mahdi-world/

It's a Mahdi, Mahdi, Mahdi, Mahdi World!

It’s not very often that I wax political. I’m wrong about so many OTHER aspects of human life, why expose myself to more ridicule, more personal attacks from my fellow Christian Americans? But something’s been stuck in my craw for a while now and I have to get this off my chest Blog Express.

Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “The Twelfth Imam” mentioned by TV’s talking heads lately. Well, I have! In October 2005, Iran’s President Mahmoud “Mammy” Ahmadinejad, made reference to this guy – The Twelfth Imam – when he addressed the United Nations. As he was wrapping up his speech, he asked Allah to quickly usher in “the Twelfth Imam.”

As one, the all-knowing pundits and world’s intellectual elite, mouths agape with wonder, replied, “huh?” Sometimes referred to as the “Hidden Imam” or “The Mahdi,” Mammy’s prayer caused many of those who consider themselves in-the-know to confess that they were clueless and sent them scrambling to Google.com, just as I did myself. Afterward, Mammy claimed that he was surrounded by some sort of halo of light as he spoke and that the leaders of the world were mesmerized by his speech.

Whatever.

SO, WHO WAS MAMMY TALKING ABOUT?

Many Shia Muslims, like Mammy, believe that this “Mahdi” person – meaning “the guided one,” used in reference specifically to one guided by God – fulfills a type of messianic role in Sunni Islam, though it has been used by Sunnis to refer to various reformers who have arisen periodically in history to revive Islam when it has grown weak. The concept is more popular among the Shi’ites who believe Mahdi to be the last in a line of saints descended from Ali, the founder of the Shia sect. They say he disappeared down a well in Iran, in A.D. 941. Yes, a well. Well…they say he went into a state of “occultation,” like the sun disappearing behind the clouds. One fine day, after a terrible period of apocalyptic wars upon the earth, they believe these clouds will part, and the Mahdi will be appear on the scene. They believe that, when he is released from his imprisonment in the well, the entire world will finally convert to Islam. That is, after all, the goal of Islam in a nutshell; conversion or death. Face it, many see this as the goal of Christianity as well. Let’s not throw stones for, over the centuries, we’ve been plenty guilty of advancing our perceived Christian cause through bloodshed, too. The TRUTH is, the goal of Christianity is NOT to score conversions. According to Jesus Christ, His “goal” – His Great Commission (Matt 28:18-20) – was that we make DISCIPLES, teaching them His Doctrine. HUGE difference. But I digress…

We laugh at unfamiliar religious notions like those of Mammy but, friends, guys like him are incredibly motivated to see their religious beliefs fulfilled. Where they’re concerned, Islam is “to die for!” Not only does he believe it, but the tens of thousands of mullahs – teachers of Islam – throughout the Middle East and elsewhere believe it, too, and they’re preaching it and teaching it with great zeal. These people are on a mission from God, fighting a Holy War. They’re training their kids to hate the Jews and the Christians and world domination is their ultimate goal. They are taught to believe that, when they die in this jihad, they become martyrs and ascend to Paradise where 72 beautiful virgins await them. They BELIEVE this as fervently as any Christian believes in the resurrection of Christ. They will NEVER surrender. For every one we kill – especially those we consider collateral damage – two more will rise up in their places. At the start of this war, I said that, even if we did catch Sadaam Insane and Osama Been Hidin’ dining at the same table and served them each a live grenade sandwich, there are millions of like-minded fanatics lined up right behind them, ready to jump in line for the sake of the cause as well as the power and prestige that goes with it.

I’m as patriotic an American as they come, but we can dispel any notions that there will ever come a glorious moment of Al-Qaida surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri.

There will be no Appomattox Courthouse.

No Yorktown.

No ticker-tape parades as Johnny come marchin’ home once and for all.

Shall we cut our losses and bring our soldiers home? Not on your life! These people will follow them home like the snarling, growling, frothing German Shepherd that followed me home in the 8th grade! They believe they are on a mission from God.

Repeat: they believe they are on a mission from God.

AND THE WINNER IS…

Jeremiah 15:7 declares that “Babylon has been a golden cup in the hand of the LORD, intoxicating all the earth. The nations have drunk of her wine; Therefore the nations are going mad…” Imagine, a wicked, evil place referred to as “a golden cup” in the hand of the Lord. God was using Babylon just as He uses the devil, just as He’s using Islam today. You see, I believe that Islam is a thorn in the side of the Church. God’s trying to stir the Church to recognize that something else is trying to UNITE the world and it’s NOT Christianity. We are too divided by ideologies, doctrines and dogmas and it’s proving to a world that notices our division, our declining numbers, our publicized immorality – a world that’s looking for answers – and they’ve determined that our faith is NOT the answer.

Islam is here to wake us up! The bloodiest wars ever fought have been fought by Christians and Muslims. Today, there are Christian countries destroying other countries believing that we’re going to help them by bringing them democracy, something they don’t even desire. We act like democracy is the Divine Government of God. Democracy is NOT what they need. The people need their King, Jesus. THAT is what we who know that King should be bringing them.

A CNN World News Story article headline, April 14, 1997, read: “Fast-growing Islam winning converts in a Western world.” The body read, in part: “…The second-largest religion in the world after Christianity, Islam is also the fastest-growing religion. In the United States, for example, nearly 80 percent of the more than 1,200 mosques have been built in the past 12 years…”

Other notable comments regarding the rise of Islam include the following:

“Islam is the fastest-growing religion in America, a guide and pillar of stability for many of our people…” – Hillary Clinton, Los Angeles Times, May 31, 1996, p.3

Already more than a billion-people strong, Islam is the world’s fastest-growing religion. – ABCNEWS, Abcnews.com

“Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the country.” NEWSDAY, March 7, 1989, p.4

“Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the United States…” NEW YORK TIMES, Feb 21, 1989, p.1

“Moslems are the world’s fastest-growing group…” – USA TODAY, The Population Reference Bureau, Feb. 17, 1989, p.4A

“Muhummed is the most successful of all Prophets and religious personalities.” – Encyclopedia Britannica

“There are more Muslims in North America then Jews Now.” – Dan Rather, CBSNEWS

WHAT’S A CHRISTIAN TO DO?

Whatever the Western Church is currently doing to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ, frankly, it simply isn’t working. I say scrap the popular hunker-down-in-the-edifice mentality, scrap anything but the teachings of Christ, and adjust our sails to catch the wind of the Holy Spirit. We can learn from the example of our persecuted brethren in the underground Church in developing nations, the ONLY place on the planet where our faith is thriving, incidentally. Is it persecution that will cause the Imperialistic Western Church to seek relationship with God and abandon the powerless form of self-righteous godliness that we currently possess?

Recently, I began pondering a verse from the Book of the Revelation, Chapter 20, verse 4. In the Amplified Bible, it reads: “Then I saw thrones, and sitting on them were those to whom authority to act as judges and to pass sentence was entrusted. Also I saw the souls of those who had been slain with axes [beheaded] for their witnessing to Jesus and [for preaching and testifying] for the Word of God, and who had refused to pay homage to the beast or his statue and had not accepted his mark or permitted it to be stamped on their foreheads or on their hands…”

I recall the first time I read this verse, about age 19. I remember thinking, “Beheadings??! Who does THAT anymore? Surely there are some more effective and efficient methods for mass murdering one’s enemies….just look at Auschwitz!”

Now, as I push age 50, I’ve already heard far too many horrifying news reports about beheadings – more than I ever imagined possible – all at the hands of Islamic extremists. Is THIS what the Church has in store for her because we failed to preach Christ all these centuries while we had the chance? As we approach Christmas 2006, even the City of Bethlehem, birthplace of Jesus, has a Muslim majority whereas fifty years ago, Bethlehem was overwhelmingly Christian.

One day, something will grind “Christian” America’s billion wheels to a halt. Pride comes before destruction, after all.

WHAT’S A NATION TO DO?

So, what should America and her allies do? For starters, sadly, our armies must remain there or the fight WILL come to our pampered shores.

At the end of Word War 2, General Douglas MacArthur said that we should send a battleship filled with missionaries to Japan. He was right. We failed to heed his advice and Japan remains a virtually Christ-less nation today. Jesus was the answer and we failed. The relative few ministers who are there are aging rapidly with shrinking congregations.

With that in mind, nearly ten years ago, a dear friend of mine, a woman with many Muslim friends who refer to her as “sister,” gifted in ministry to children who once had a Christian television show in Canada, suggested to me that America should focus a major effort on evangelizing the children of the Muslim world. “What child can resist cookies and candy, puppet shows and coloring books,” she insisted. “Kids know when they’re being loved.”

I believed then she was right. When I saw on television a beautiful 5-year old Iraqi boy with big brown eyes, glaring into the camera and, with clenched teeth, spewing hatred and damnation upon Jews and Americans, I KNEW she was right.

Armed with the capability to produce nuclear weapons, Iran will soon possess the ability to carry out her threats against us. With his finger on the button, Mammy will be in position to launch his rockets, driven as much by hatred as his desire to usher in the return of the Mahdi. Of course, this Hidden Imam will remain hidden for he is not coming; he’s a figment of Islamic imaginations. Though he won’t be making his long-awaited appearance, American and Israeli forces WOULD retaliate immediately.

Talk about unleashing Hell.

We can’t leave Iraq. Neither can we defeat this enemy with “horses and chariots” (Ps 20:7). Sorry, but to all those who insist upon talking to these madmen, we can’t reason with Iraq nor with their neighbor, President Mammy of Iran.

But the Church CAN pray and we can evangelize the children like there’s no tomorrow.

At this rate, frankly, there may not be.

HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD!

Thanks to my brother in Christ, Ed Dupas of Canada, who writes, after reading my rough draft on this article: “…I thought the name “Mahdi” had a familiar ring, but wasn’t sure until I did a little internet surfing. There was a 1966 movie called “Khartoum”, which starred Charleton Heston (a British General) and Sir Lawrence Oliver (as the Mahdi). Because of the pronunciation of ‘Mahdi’ that I have been hearing recently, I didn’t make the connection. Olivier pronounced it like “Maw-ch-tee” (as though one was collecting a gob of spit in his throat on the first syllable). It was a powerful movie, made so by the sheer screen presence of both Olivier and Heston.”

Thanks, Ed! I followed up on the movie and one critic wrote, “In the light of recent world events, this classic confrontation between Western Imperialism and Eastern Islamic fundamentalism makes “Khartoum” more topical than ever.”

Some of what the critic wrote included: “Heston essays one of his best roles as Charles “Chinese” Gordon, the patriot who thrives on challenge… Gordon becomes a national hero for his exploits in China and his ill-fated defense of Khartoum…Gordon is a Christian with the Bible constantly under his arm… A national hero who abolished slavery in China… An honest man revered by the British, as well as by the foreigners… A martyr-warrior who ever truly loves the Sudan and cannot, under ‘his’ God, leave it to the misery and the sickness of which he once cured it…A solitary non-conformist who craved and despised public adulation, a devout Christian that never allied himself to any church, a reluctant empire builder more often sympathetic to those he had to oppose….

“Lawrence Olivier is superb as the fanatical Arab leader, Muhammed Ahmed Al Mahdi, the Expected-One… His softly glowing black eyes never blink… His measured voice spreads holy terrors: “I have been instructed by the Lord Mohammed, Peace be upon Him, to worship in the Khartoum mosque. Therefore I must take Khartoum by the sword.” Two thumbs up!

His mission is to bring Discipleship and Encouragement to the Body of Christ. Since ’99, he has broadcast over 600 inspirational articles and a dozen booklets on subjects sure to interest the thinking Christian and accelerate the process of spiritual development.