Gwindor:

Bad news: Finrod locked his keys inside the building.

Good news: We didn’t have to wait around for a locksmith.

Bad news: Finrod finds it very concerning that I know how to pick locks, and tried to unlock my Tragic Backstory. I was too embarrassed to admit that the reason I learned was because, at a young age, I figured that was the kind of skill that would impress cute girls.

Good news: A cute girl saw me do it.

Bad news: It was Finduilas, and since she’s already seen me fall out of several trees, cry because I saw a fawn that was just too small, and knows I can ride a unicycle, she’ll never think I’m cool no matter what I do. It’s too late. She knows.

Edrahil: There are million-dollar blockbuster theater productions that were less entertaining than the rollercoaster that story just took me on.

Weekend! Replies!

Man, what a week! My mood was already low, thanks to the Post+ crapfest, like omg Tumblr’s really tryna get people sued. But the cherry on top was the braincells I wasted watching the EA Play 2021 event, like I give a crap about Dead Space 4--WHERE TF IS DRAGON AGE 4, EA/BIOWARE!? Who do I kill?

________________________________________________

REPLIES

simsmono replied to your post “C2077 Clouds INSP Set”

Thank you for these!!

cavernsofdarkness replied to your post “C2077 Clouds INSP Set”

Thank you for feeding my cyberpunk obsession one piece of cc at a time 🖤

You’re both very welcome! I’ll be so glad to be done converting from C2077; this is one of the hardest games I’ve ever converted from, ISTG.

simsdestroyer replied to your post “Check In Tag”

Lol!!!!!  Hilarious!!!

cavernsofdarkness replied to your post “Check In Tag”

I died at "and I still get people showing up on my front lawn" 🤣

I’m gonna be a freaking menace when I get old; I can tell.

solori replied to your post “Check In Tag”

omg yessss!!! I DO WANT ts1-ts2 remake! that's literally my sims-dream 😍😍😍

IKR!? That would be the coolest thing ever--TS2 has aged extraordinarily well, considering it’s a 20+ year old game. All it needs is modern meshes/textures and graphics, and updated pop culture references--the gameplay is arguably better than TS3; its neighborhoods are pretty great; the lore is iconic, and the TS2 community is still thriving to this day. A TS1/TS2 remake would be the best thing for The Sims franchise, rather than making TS5. The Resident Evil 2 remake was outstanding. Unfortunately, Final Fantasy 7′s remake wasn’t all it was hyped up to be, and they took it in what many feel is the WRONG direction. So simmers would have to hope EAxis wouldn’t eff up and like, remove any of TS2′s features; just add to what’s already there (TS3′s CASt & Story Progression, TS4′s build mode, Freeplay’s venues, etc).

pixelatedlawnflamingos replied to your post “TS4 to TS3 Strangerville CAS Miniset”

Thank you!!!!

catbrokensims3 reblogged your post “TS4 to TS3 Strangerville CAS Miniset”

Thank youuuuuu!! ❤💙💜

You’re very welcome! 🛸👽🖖

solori replied to your post “CQL/MDZS INSP - Gusu Arc Pt2c: The Gift  CAPTIONS...”

cuuute :D

Thank you! 🐰

Sheep

nornities replied to your post “Farm Sweet Farm - Part 3 Nagron’s back in...”

Haha, the amount of sheep on my dash has exploded! That’s awesome :)

The second I saw those sheep I dropped everything I was doing. Freaking astounding work, creating a new animal completely from scratch. EFF EA, seriously! @greenplumbboblover​​ is THE G.O.A.T.! 🐐

poisonfireleafs replied to your post “Farm Sweet Farm - Part 3 🐑🐐  Nagron’s back in...”

Such a beautiful farm. It reminds me of the farms in my country

Thank you! I’m pretending Aurora Skies is in Germany, but it really screams the Netherlands, Denmark, Scandinavia, LOL.

technicallyswagpizza replied to your post “Farm Sweet Farm - Part 3 Nagron’s back in...”

I need a goat horse in my life so badly

Same! Mules and tigons and zebroids are cool or whatever, but it’s high time natural selection created some satyrs and centaurs and fauns already; it’s getting boring.

solori replied to your post “Farm Sweet Farm - Part 3 🐑🐐 Nagron’s back in...”

now we have your bunnies and sheeps. who need ts4 farm?? :D

PREACH! Greenplumboblover singlehandedly proved that simmers can create whatever the heck we want, given the know-how. I can’t wait to see what else the community comes up with (I want peacocks, just saying 🦚). It just goes to show that EA is lazy AF--ONE PERSON created a farm animal from scratch in their free time, for free, and I bet it didn’t take GPL 6 whole years to make them, the way it took EA 6 years to convert the chickens and cows from TS3 to TS4 for $40. 🙄 #EAYouSuck

Dragons

solori replied to your post “Baby Dragons as Pet Birds - WIP Last year I...”

awesome!! :D

kosmokhaos replied to your post “Baby Dragons as Pet Birds - WIP Last year I...”

Ooooh that's so cool

doka-chan replied to your post “Baby Dragons as Pet Birds - WIP Last year I...”

What a nice idea ! :D

Thank you all! I hope I can figure out how to fix them!

rainyunknownllama replied to your post “Baby Dragons as Pet Birds - WIP Last year I...”

Maybe try making custom made bird cages to fit their bodies? Maybe that solve the size issue? Cool idea regardless tho.

This is actually a neat solution, thank you! Using even the regular log-perch would definitely look better, agreed. My main concern is the clipping when sims interact with the dragons though. They’re huge when sims hold them, and constantly clip right through their heads.

Granted, even my bunny rabbits clip through heads when sims snuggle them, but it’s not 100% of the time (more like 75%, pfft).

But my dragons are downright unplayable at the size they are, which makes no sense, cuz I didn’t resize the meshes at all! They snap back to their regular size in-between every animation, and I have no clue why, cuz all I did was swap the meshes/textures--this makes no frikkin sense. 😩

bbcopperdaisy replied to your post “Baby Dragons as Pet Birds - WIP Last year I...”

GASP! Oh NO you didn't!!! :D (Oh YES you did!!!) I want so badly to put my baby dragons somewhere other than the floor. (But yeah, those morphing bodies sure look freaky.)

I wish I didn’t! 😅 The eldritch horror is real, I tell you. (－‸ლ)

_________________________________________________

Happy simming!

Knights of the Night (chapter 1)

Chapter 1

Ch 1, ch 2, ch 3, ch 4, ch 5

https://archiveofourown.org/works/29139240/chapters/71536491

pairing: Jungkook x oc

genre: vampire au, college au, twilight, romance

word count: 2,426

warnings: blood (obviously), kidnapping, child kidnapping, needles, France

notes: vampires, vampire au, college, college au, so many twilight references, blood, needles, kidnapping, children, homelessness, dance, ballet, flashbacks, romance, slow burn, probably no smut, idk yet tho, France, French things, attempted genocide, inaccurate French history, bisexual main character

summary: Catalina starts college in a small town all the way across the country. She doesn’t know anyone and isn’t exactly looking for friends. She just wants to focus on dance. But when she meets fellow dance major, Jimin, and adventurous, fellow freshman, Jungkook, Catalina ends up discovering a whole new side to the small college town; one that is dangerous but oh so enticing... 

              Catalina gazed out of the window as the city flew by. Full Moon, by the Black Ghosts was playing on the radio. She wondered what her apartment was going to look like. She should have listened to her mom when she told Catalina to take a trip out here to set it up before school started, but she never found the time. She had been too busy saying her goodbyes to friends who didn’t care about her leaving.

               The taxi finally entered the small town of St. Briggs. The sky was dark and bleak; when Catalina pictured California, she didn’t imagine this. She was hoping to see a different environment, but it kind of looked just like Michigan. It would still be a change though. Hopefully a good change. This was one of the most highly recommended performing arts schools in the country and Catalina was looking forward to a fresh new chapter of her life.

               She was dropped off at her apartment building and the taxi driver asked if she wanted him to help her carry her bags up the stairs. She said no and hurried to pay him. Catalina somehow managed to drag her bags up the stairs on her own, breaking out in a sweat and making her twenty-year-old back hurt. The apartment was lightly furnished already, the bare furniture from the last student still there. So Catalina started unpacking her clothes, toiletries, and bedding. Once everything was unpacked, she looked around at her new living space. It was small, only three rooms: the bedroom, a tiny bathroom, and a kitchen connected to an empty living room. She’d have to get a couch, and maybe a TV. Or she could just save her money. Yeah, that sounded better. She would usually just watch Netflix on her laptop anyway.

               Speaking of her laptop, she pulled it out of her backpack and flopped onto her bare mattress, opening it up. Classes started in a week and she needed to review her schedule and figure out what materials she needed. Her dance class stared back at her from her schedule on the computer screen. She was most excited for that one.

               Catalina sent the schedule to her phone and then closed her laptop. She decided now was a good time to explore the campus, if only to check out the dance studio.

                 It was chilly here, the wind coming off the water brisk and wet. Her hair frizzed up and she mourned the fact that she only packed light clothes, expecting the typical California weather. She should have realized that Northern California would be pretty much the same as where she lived before in Michigan.

               Despite the gloomy weather, the campus was beautiful. It was bustling with students and their families, taking tours and lots of pictures in front of the old buildings. She glanced at the wrinkled campus map in her hands, which she had printed out back at home. The dance studio was closer to the back of the campus, so she trekked through all the freshman and found herself in an emptier part of campus. The buildings here were very old. Big willow trees grew between the buildings, their leafy curtains giving those spots a sense of privacy on the lawn. The dance studio was in a building that looked like it was a refurbished, converted old house. Catalina walked up to the porch and tried the door. It was unlocked.

               Inside the house, it was a bit more modern. There was a tiny lobby and then a hall where there were bathrooms. Then past that was the studio. The door was closed. Catalina reached for the doorknob but paused when she heard music coming from inside. The music stopped, then started again from a previous spot. It continued like this for several minutes, Catalina standing there listening to the same part of the song over and over. Finally, she decided to put whoever was inside out of their misery and she opened the door.

               The guy inside stumbled on the move he was practicing, startling and spinning around towards the door. His chest was heaving and he was sweating, staring at Catalina with wide eyes.

               “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said. The guy seemed to snap out of it and he went over to his phone, which was hooked up the speakers, to pause the song.

               “No, it’s okay,” he said. “I just wasn’t expecting anyone to come in here. Usually it’s pretty quiet in the dance hall when there aren’t classes.”

               “Well, I wouldn’t count on that today,” said Catalina. “There’s a million freshman and their entire families out there. It’s only a matter of time before they find you.”

               He giggled and said, “I forgot it was orientation day. My name is Jimin, by the way.”

               “I’m Catalina. This is a really pretty campus.”

               “Yeah, I guess,” said Jimin. He went over to his dance bag and pulled a towel out, wiping his face.

               “I guess?” asked Catalina.

               “I mean, I grew up here. Everything in this town is old,” he said.

               “Oh,” Catalina then realized that she had interrupted him in his practice. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I know how it is when you’re in the zone. I’ll get going-“

               “No, it’s okay! Honestly, I was about to pass out or something if I kept going,” said Jimin. “I just couldn’t get this one move, and it was driving me crazy…”

               “What was the move?” asked Catalina, stepping further into the studio. “Can you teach me?”

               “I mean… I don’t know if you can…”

               “Try me,” said Catalina. Jimin led her to the center of the floor, facing the mirror. He walked her through a complicated move, which led into a jump turn. He broke it down and Catalina followed, nailing it on the second try. Jimin then did it at full speed, perfectly.

               He turned to her with wide eyes.

               “That was the first time I did it right!” he cheered. Catalina clapped along with him.

               “Sometimes all it takes is breaking it down again,” said Catalina. Jimin narrowed his eyes.

               “So, you tricked me?” he asked in a playful tone.

               “Into getting the move right, sure,” Catalina grinned.

               “Well, thank you. You’re pretty good,” he said.

               “I’m majoring in dance, so I should hope so,” said Catalina. “I’ve only been doing it since I was four.”

               “You’re majoring in dance? Me too!” he said. “I’ve never seen you here though. Are you a freshman?”

               “Yeah, this is my first year here,” said Catalina. “I heard the dance program is really good.”

               “It is. It has a good variety too. I’m taking a hip hop class this semester. You should take it with me, if you have room in your schedule.”

               “I’ve been dancing ballet all my life, I don’t think I’d be very good at hip hop…” Catalina scratched the back of her head. Jimin shook his head.

               “No, that’s a myth! Teachers only say that about ballerinas who don’t care about learning other things. I’ve also been doing ballet my whole life but I’m learning a lot of new things here, and I really love it,” said Jimin.

               Catalina laughed and said, “I guess you’re right. I should…broaden my horizons, as my mother would say.”

                 Catalina left the studio that day with a new number in her phone and a more hopeful outlook on her upcoming journey through college.

                 The next week passed in a haze as Catalina readied herself for classes and thought about furnishing her apartment some more. She never did furnish it, but at least she made the bed and filled the fridge. She also got into the hip hop class with Jimin, which she was excited about. She was ready.

               Finally, the first day of classes came and Catalina woke up bright and early. She got dressed; she knew these first few days were going to be the only days she would bother with anything other than pajamas, so she actually made an effort to look cute. Her first class was French, which, honestly, was going to be torture. She needed to learn French to reach her ultimate goal, so it was a necessary evil. It sounded pretty, so maybe it wasn’t the worst language to learn.

               When she got to her French classroom, it was already pretty full. She found a few vacant seats in the back of the room, which she took. There was still one behind her, so she wasn’t actually all the way in the back. That was something her academic advisor had told her – don’t sit in the back. It was supposed to be a subconscious thing where the closer you sit to the front, the better you do in the class. Catalina didn’t know if that was actually true, but the front seats were all taken and she was used to sitting in the back, so here she was. Second to last row. It was a start.

               Catalina pulled out her notebook, a pen, and her phone. She had a text from her mom.

 Mom: Are you settled down okay at the apartment? How is campus? Did you make it to class okay this morning?

Cat: The apartment is good. Campus is pretty. I’m in class right now. Everything is going great. I even made a friend.

Mom: a friend?

Cat: yeah, he’s in the dance program too. We’re taking a hip hop class together.

Mom: This is great news! Is he cute?

               Just then, the professor walked in and introduced herself. Catalina let out the breath she was holding, glad she didn’t have to answer that. That was one of many reasons she was so excited to move across the country. Ever since she came out as bisexual, her mother had been trying her hardest to get Catalina a boyfriend. Sure, Jimin was plenty cute, but that’s not what Catalina was here for. She’d just really rather not talk about her love life, or lack thereof, with her mother.

               The professor mostly just went over introductions and the syllabus, which she passed out copies of to the class. Then she took attendance. A few names in and the door opened. A boy walked in, his eyes wide as he scanned the room for empty seats. He spotted the one behind Catalina and sped towards it. The professor eyed him.

               “I guess you came just in time, since I just started attendance. I do not take absences lightly in this class young man,” she said.

               “Sorry,” he mumbled. The professor grumbled and handed another syllabus to the person in the front row before continuing with roll call. When Catalina handed the packet back to him, she caught a glimpse of the new guy. He looked only half awake, his hair a mess, bags under his eyes and rumpled sweats. He didn’t have a backpack, only a notebook. Catalina winced in sympathy. He was going to have a hard time in this class. He reminded Catalina of herself in high school. She was a new woman now though. Things were going to be different in college.

               “Catalina Cruz” was called and she raised her hand in acknowledgement. The guy behind her answered to “Jeon Jungkook”. After class, Catalina turned around in her seat and smiled at Jungkook, who still looked frazzled.

               “First impressions are important,” she said.

               “Ugh, I know,” he moaned, sliding down in his seat. “I slept in…”

               “Yeah, she probably hates you,” said Catalina. “You’re doomed.”

               Jungkook covered his face. “Don’t say that!”

               Catalina laughed and said, “Dude, I’m kidding. You’ll be fine.”

               Jungkook let his hands fall. “I just think it’s stupid that I need a language class for my major.”

               “Everyone needs a language class. What are you majoring in?” asked Catalina.

               “Film. What about you?” he asked.

               “Dance,” she said. The two of them got up and made their way out of the classroom. “I came on a scholarship too, so I can’t really afford to fail any classes.”

               “Yeah, no scholarship for me, but my parents will have my head if I fail anything,” said Jungkook. “They’re paying out of pocket for me and my brother.”

               Catalina giggled. The two of them walked over to an empty patch of grass under a tree, where they sat. “Do you live on campus?” she asked.

               “Nah, my parent’s house is right around the block, I’m just gonna live with them until I graduate,” said Jungkook.

               Catalina hummed and nodded. “You’re lucky. I have an apartment that’s going to drain me. I can’t even afford furniture,” said Catalina. “Actually, I should probably try to find a job…”

               “Oh! My aunt owns a tourist shop up in the mountains and she needs weekend employees for tourist season,” said Jungkook.

               “Tourist season? Summer is almost over,” said Catalina.

               “There’s a big ski resort up there. It gets pretty busy once the snow comes,” said Jungkook. “You should take the job with me! It’ll be so fun, we can explore the mountains.”

               “Ehh, I don’t know how much mountain climbing I’ll be doing, but the job is kind of perfect,” said Catalina. “How far away is it? I don’t have a car.”

               “I mean, I have a car, but there’s also a hiking trail that gets you there, which I’ll probably be doing, cause’ it’s more fun,” he said. “It’s not that far, like, a few miles?”

               “A few miles? That’s far! That’s a long walk!” said Catalina.

               “Oh, come on! I backpacked for five days once, that’s about fifty miles. And I’ve heard stories about people who backpack for weeks,” said Jungkook.

               “Okay well, you may be super fit and sporty, but I’m not-“

               “What were you majoring in again? Dance?”

               Catalina shoved him. He fell over, laughing hard. Catalina scrunched her nose to contain her laughter. “Oh shut up! Okay, I get it. Hiking might be fun, but not every time,” she said.

               “No, I’ll totally drive us to work every now and then,” he said. “I’ll call my aunt tonight about the job. Here, give me your number so I can tell you what she says.”

               Catalina typed her number into Jungkook’s phone and then handed it back.

               “Anyway, I’d better get going. I don’t want to be late for another class,” said Jungkook. “I’ll text you.”

               He got up and walked away, waving. Catalina waved back. Two new friends. And they were both so much nicer and more genuine than her friends back in Michigan.

The Best and worst changes for the Original Trilogy

Been wanting to do this for a while, so here are what I think are the best and worst changes that George made to the Original Trilogy

The Good

The special effects enhancement. This is an obvious choice, but the re-releases do improve most of the effects in the film, with just a few exceptions. One might argue that the film’s original effects were part of what made it so good – after all, at the time of release the visuals were one of the major selling points of Star Wars. But most fans agree that there’s nothing wrong with bringing the original films up-to-date with modern special effects, and that certainly shows when you compare scenes like the Battle of Yavin where the older effects do somewhat break immersion, particularly if you are used to the newer releases. The improved laser blasts and lightsaber effects make the action scenes appear less scratchy, and improve continuity between this trilogy and the ones that come before and after it in the timeline. It would certainly be

Aurebesh replacing english. The Star Wars universe is vast, containing hundreds of aliens from different worlds speaking a variety of languages. However, in the original trilogy, just about everyone on screen spoke English - or as it's referred to in canon, Galactic Basic Standard. The Basic language is just that, the most basic language that most residents of a galaxy far, far away (and us, the audience) can understand, and for the most part it's indistinguishable from English. Except when written. Basic does not use the Latin alphabet of English and countless other Earth languages, instead Basic is written using Aurebesh. But Aurebesh didn't appear on screen until Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, and even then, the Aurebesh symbols used were completely random. It wasn't until Stephen Crane of West End Games chose to add meaning to the random symbols when working on several Star Wars miniature and role-playing games that Aurebesh was officially "born." And in the 2004 DVD release, Aurebesh finally replaced any and all English writing that still appeared in Episode IV: A New Hope, most notably on consoles within the Death Star. The change is minor, to be sure, but it's one that gives a cohesiveness to the Star Wars universe and adds to its otherworldly vibe.

Biggs Darklighter added scenes. In an earlier cut of Star Wars, Luke was introduced much earlier in the film, with scenes of his life on Tatooine spliced with the capture of Princess Leia and C-3PO and R2-D2's escape. These scenes primarily showed Luke hanging out with friends, giving us a sense there was at least a little more to his social life than power converters and Tosche's Station. But these scenes also introduced us to a minor though pivotal character: Luke's best friend, Biggs Darklighter. However, I wouldn't be surprised if you do recognize the name (or hear Mark Hamill in your head saying, "Blast it Biggs! Where are you?") and that's because though these earlier scenes on Tatooine were cut, Biggs still appears in the theatrical release of Episode IV - albeit very briefly. During the attack on the Death Star, it's Biggs flying alongside Luke and Wedge Antilles when they make the final and successful trench run to destroy it. Biggs doesn't survive that trench run and we see the effect his death has on Luke, but we aren't told why Biggs was important to Luke (as opposed to the countless other Rebel pilots who died). Without any earlier scenes setting up the childhood friendship between Luke and Biggs, the impact of his death is lost. That was until the Special Edition release when at least one of Biggs scenes was added back in. It's a scene that now comes right before the assault on the Death Star, inside the Rebel Base, and it features Luke and Biggs reuniting and reminiscing like old friends. It's a short scene, but it practically doubles Biggs' screen time and gives us a least some idea that he and Luke go way back, making his death yet another in a long string of tragedies Luke suffers throughout the trilogy.   

Ian McDiarmid's Palpatine, but using the original dialogue would've been better as Vader was already hunting Luke for destroying the Death Star

Cloud City’s enhanced scenery. The Empire Strikes Back has the least major changes of any of the original trilogy in the Special Edition. The Special Edition added enhancements and additional aerial shots. Expanded scenes and new backgrounds in Cloud City made the location lovelier and added depth. I can't picture Cloud City as it used to be.

Enhanced Lightsabers. For the original films the lightsaber effects were done with the actors holding white spinning three-sided rods covered with reflective material. Korean animator Nelson Shin drew saber effects onto the film. They also added the glowing effect and the colors were put onto the film by hand. It was a complex feat of engineering for its time but it left many problems behind. There are many scenes where you can see the white rods or the colors were wrong. Lucas went through and corrected the mistakes with the lightsaber using CGI.   

Boba Fett's voice change. Boba Fett was a fan-favorite for decades before he was revealed to actually be a clone. So when it came time for the original trilogy’s 2004 DVD release, it made sense for actor Temuera Morrison — who played Jango Fett and various clones in the prequels — to return to the franchise as the new voice of Boba Fett, the cloned version of his original character. Luckily, Morrison has a fitting voice, allowing the continuity fix to help rather than hinder the classic films.

Oola’s Death. It’s strange to consider when you watch it now, but in the original cut of Return of the Jedi Oola’s death scene was much more brief – she simply falls down the trap door into the Rancor pit in Jabba’s Palace, and the Rancor reveal is saved for later. Amazingly, the actress who played Oola filmed the extended death scene over a decade after first appearing in Jedi, with no difference to the visuals whatsoever. The Rancor isn’t revealed completely, meaning that the impact of its later appearance isn’t spoiled, but it does create a menacing scene showing more of the mercilessness of Jabba The Hutt  

Battle Of Yavin. Star Wars revolutionized film making and ushered in a new era of special effects. But some effects get outdated. And even though there is a magical charm to the practical in-camera effects that the original Star Wars trilogy were made with, digital and CGI effects would be become the modern norm. And when its used correctly, CGI can look amazing. Hence, the climactic ending space battle in A New Hope. Tossing away the bluescreen, matte film and super imposed ships and replacing them with digital X-Wings and Tie Fighters. This recreation of the attack on the Death Star and galactic dogfight finale is a thrilling piece of cinema. Seeing spacecraft flying and zooming in and out of impossible camera angles is just as dazzling as the original scene. Lucasfilm actually did the impossible, they took one of the most classic epic battles in movie history and actually made it better.

The Death Star Explosions. The explosions of the Death Star and Alderaan were one of the most striking changes in the Special Edition movies, enhanced with brighter colors and expanding rings of matter. But one of the most exciting things about the original Star Wars films is that the groundbreaking special effects were being invented as the films were made. The newly-formed Industrial Light and Magic spent years building models, inventing cameras to shoot them, and occasionally blowing them up. So when the Death Star is destroyed (both times), the explosions look and feel real, because they were created using footage from actual explosions.   

The victory celebration The change to the music at the end of Return of the Jedi is, in my opinion, one of the best decisions George Lucas ever made. The original song that played during the celebrations on Endor was ‘Yub Nub’, a nonsensical and comically puerile ditty that doesn’t do the finale justice, but the replacement, John Williams’ aptly-titled ‘Victory Celebration’, seems a much more fitting tune to end the original trilogy. For comparison, one needs only to look at the ending of A New Hope – the tune used there fits the tone and gravitas of the scene, and ‘Yub Nub’ simply does not.

The Worst

Darth Vader saying No in ROTJ. There was absolutely no need to have Darth Vader say “No” in this moment. We were looking at a still mask. Yet we could still sense his feelings and thoughts. He was clearly conflicted and you could tell he was about to do something. This is good film making. You can tell he is making the hardest decision of his life, choosing between his master and his son, the conflict was visible on his face. There was no need for Vader to say anything. Vader saying “No” lacks any sort of nuance and has him verbally stating those feelings. "NOOOOOOO". This scene was shot so perfectly that you could see Vader's internal struggle to do the right thing despite being unable to show any facial expressions. There was no need for a "nooooooo" to indicate what he's going to do, we know what he's going to do because of how the scene is shot. This takes away from the scene and it makes it so obvious that it takes the viewer out of the moment. The silence was a powerful moment.

Jabba’s appearance in A New Hope. I feel like the scene takes away the menace from Jabba The Hutt. The horrible CGI did not help either. The appearance is a complete downgrade from his appearance in ROTJ. And it really did not help that it’s a shot for shot of the same dialogue with the Han and Greedo scene. The added scene with Jabba was completely unnecessary. Han and Greedo’s�� scene ALREADY showed us Han’s debt to Jabba. And really, Jabba is a powerful and influential figure in the galaxy. He is the boss. He uses Bounty Hunters as play things to do his bidding. He was capable of ensuring that Han could not be in a civilized star system without being hunted. Jabba is someone who feeds slave girls to his pet monster if they screw up a dance routine, but he's apparently okay with a deadbeat lowlife smuggler who owes him money stepping on his tail in front of all his men. Hell, Jabba would not care if Han fried Greedo, Tatooine is a hive of scum and villainy, Jabba can easily replace Greedo.   It took away the menace from Jabba. Not to mention, this change takes away some of the suspense people originally had about Jabba the Hutt. It just takes away some of the mystery of Jabba as a character. Jabba is the boss, he should not be doing grunt work and it just takes away the impact of seeing Jabba in ROTJ.

Greedo shoots first. Here’s why Han shooting first matters.  Greedo was hunting Han Solo and found him in Mos Eisley Cantina who wanted what Han owed Jabba, which Han didn’t have it with him just then, so Greedo ready to shoot Han, is then killed by Han. In the original theatrical version, Han shoots Greedo dead, but in all the film alterations, Greedo shoots first.  Lucas  wanted Han to be a good role model so he editied out but that was pointless because at that point already Han was still a smuggler out for himself. Lucas wanted kids to think he was a hero Except he’s SUPPOSED to be a cold blooded killer in the beginning. That was the whole POINT of his story arc. A selfish smuggler who is COMPLETELY fine with letting other people die if it meant his own survival and goes through an internal and external journey to not only give a damn about his fellow person but also grow as an individual to be a hero that is willing to risk his own safety for a much larger cause than himself. Him shooting last takes away the beginning part of a GREAT story arc and reduces it to “This bad ass is a bad ass. The end.”. Killer to hero is a much more interesting story than bad ass to still being a bad ass.

Pointless CGI in Mos Eisley. Mos Eisley was the home of scum and villainy and also the home for wayward CGI creatures that escaped their digital pens. The thought was more roaming creatures would add color and vivacity to the bustling desert town, but unfortunately, they looked like lost sideshow attractions. The CGI stuff in the background doesn’t blend in with the rest of the film and just draws attention away from the action in the foreground. It’s like an irritating five-year-old onscreen screaming, “Look at me look at me."

Editing the Jabba’s Palace Sequence. Jabba's palace was another opportunity to put a vast array of unique and interesting aliens on display, much like Mos Eisley's cantina. And also like the cantina, a gangster's hangout deserves a house band. In the original release that was the Max Rebo Band and the number they performed was "Lapti Nek." The original scene was short and feels like it belongs. This scene doesn't feel intrusive and out of place like the special edition, it feels like in Jabba's Palace there is a band playing some alien music. The added CGI was awful and became unwatchable. It detracts from the grit of the scene that’s created, in part by the aliens in the background, that in this case are actually portrayed by actors or puppeteers. It didn't need the whole new scene and terrible CGI dancing. To call the scene distracting would be an understatement. Visually, it's incongruous with the dingy, smoky atmosphere of Jabba's Palace, largely in part because of how badly the CGI aliens mesh with the real actors and sets. The new song also doesn't fit with the mood of the setting, it’s just tonally offensive and just kills the mood of Jabba The Hutt. Jabba’s Palace was so uncomfortable and full of dread. All we needed to see was a short music scene, Oola displeasing Jabba and Jabba sending Oola to the Rancor. That’s all you need to establish that everything about the palace is a nightmare and just adding the horrid abomination known as Jedi Rocks just killed it for me.

Replacing Sebastian Shaw with Anakin Skywalker. I understand the in-universe reasoning behind  changing Anakin’s Force Ghost to Hayden, but to me it is completely and utterly disrespectful to replace a now dead actor’s only appearance in Star Wars. It ALREADY made sense for Anakin to appear old. I love Hayden and I love the Prequels, but he should not have replaced Shaw as Anakin. It both contradicts Vader’s redemption and disrespected the memory of Sebastian Shaw. It’s not that they shot a whole new scene with Hayden, Hayden Christensen’s head was pasted on over Shaw’s body and that is really disrespectful to Sebastion Shaw since he passed away a few years before the special editions. The whole idea was that there was still some good left in the old man version of Anakin and that’s what we’re seeing here. It was the old Anakin who made the choice to save Luke so it makes more sense to have him as the Ghost. Luke wouldn’t even recognize the young Anakin which makes the change even more of a fail. Anakin appearing as he did in ROTS invalidates the fact that he was redeemed at all in the end. I mean, the first thing he does in that movie is behead Dooku, then immediately admit that it’s “not the Jedi way.” He then goes on to slay a ton of Jedi and then murder a bunch of little kids, before going to murder Nute Gunray/other Separatist leaders etc. That’s why it’s such a baffling decision to show Hayden at the end of ROTJ… it completely undermines the payoff of ROTJ: Vader still had good in him (like Luke said) even as an old man. Why would you turn back to the person who murdered children and betrayed everyone you loved? The entire point of the ending of Return of the Jedi was that after years of having been corrupted as Darth Vader, Luke’s adherence to the Jedi principles and refusal to strike down his father in anger is what causes Anakin to realize that he’s been consumed by the dark side. He then atones as best as he can by sacrificing himself to kill Palpatine and asks Luke to remove his mask in a final act symbolizing his freedom from Darth Vader. Anakin has mere minutes as a jedi before he succumbs to his wounds, but it’s extremely important to note that he died a jedi. This is why Luke gives him a traditional jedi funeral, and why he is able to apparate as a force ghost. This is why the movie is called Return Of The Jedi. This is what makes the ending scene significant. Anakin appears not as the intimidating figure of Lord Vader, but as a mild old Jedi knight, like he would have appeared if he had never been corrupted by the dark side. This is why Anakin as an old man works, it shows what the dark side can do to you, but it beautifully shows that Anakin can still find redemption and die as a Jedi and return to the light. He nods to Obi-Wan, who smiles at seeing his friend finally free of the Dark Side, and the film ends with them standing side by side as old friends once more. Having Anakin appear as he had looked when in his 30’s would discredit his sacrifice in the final scene. It would imply that the last time he was truly a jedi was when he was the young hotheaded general who saw the jedi code as a hindrance, and not a healed version of the wisened old man who finally understood the importance of peace. Additionally, it removes the symbolism of Anakin and Obi-Wan standing side by side as old friends once again. With Anakin appearing as an apprentice to Obi-Wan rather than an equal. And Luke recognizes him. He already saw the father behind the mask. Anakin appears as the wise old Jedi and father figure to Luke that he would and should have been have been and who he died as. Shaw is more aesthetically pleasing in that shot. Seeing him portrayed as Alec Guinness’ contemporary, as a father to Luke, he just looks like he belongs in the original shot. I grew up with the Original Trilogy on VHS, so seeing Sebastian Shaw as both the unmasked Anakin and the ghost of Anakin was wonderful to see, when both Anakin and Obi-Wan look at each other here, it seems they are finally at rest after decades of war thanks to Luke, Leia and the rest of the Rebels who believe in the Old Republic, when we got to the prequels, it all changed and did not make complete sense, I enjoy the prequels, but it did not work to change, there was ALREADY an in-universe explanation as to why Shaw works as Anakin’s Force Ghost. Shaw fitted a much better vision of Anakin, an Anakin who did not intend to fall but raised up when he realized his true self in his son. And finally he looks at his children with so much love in his eye which is really emotional. Anakin Skywalker is finally at peace with his old friends and looking on his children with so much happiness.

Language localization

For many regular people, translation is something they take for granted, or don’t even think about at all. If they don’t work with translators directly themselves, people often have no idea of what translation actually involves or what different types of translation are there. In today’s article, we’ll take a more detailed look at one particular language profession, closely connected with translation: language localization.

What is localization

Language localization is the process of making a text or any other language material (audio, video) more suitable for a particular country or area. It is most frequently used to adapt different types of multimedia content: websites, software, video games.

Localization often involves translation, but it is a much more complex process. Here are some examples of what else can be a part of localization:

1.         Addressing cultural, historical, economic, and other references

2.         Taking into account local regulations, laws, and legal requirements

3.         Changing dates, addresses, phone numbers, etc. to the appropriate local format

4.         Converting to local currencies and units of measure

5.         Modifying the content to suit the tastes and consumption habits of local markets

6.         Changing images, icons, colors, and more to fit the local tastes and culture

Localization vs translation

Localization and translation often go hand in hand, but they are not the same process.

Translation is possible without localization. For instance, you can translate a text from American English to Spanish without converting Fahrenheit to Celsius, or feet to meters.

The opposite — localization without translation — is also possible. When people speak varieties of the same language that are quite distinct (British vs. American English, Brazilian vs. European Portuguese, etc.).

How can language localization benefit your business

In general, localization makes content more understandable for consumers. For example, there are no confusing references or images, no need to convert anything into local units of measure.

Nowadays, if you want to expand your e-commerce or any other business to a new overseas market (or sometimes even a new region in your country), localization is not an option — it is a must. In the modern hi-tech world, your content is the face of your business, and localization makes it a friendly one for the new market.

HERE ARE A FEW EXAMPLES OF HOW LOCALIZATION CAN BENEFIT YOUR BUSINESS:

1.         It makes entering a new market easier. Language and cultural barriers are some of the hardest to overcome when entering a new market. Proper localization of your website, advertising campaign, and other content will do most of the job of removing them.

2.         It increases customer satisfaction. Localization helps avoid any confusion that can be caused by unfamiliar references or foreign units of measure. It also shows your commitment to your new customers. Localizing all parts of the consumer journey, including payment methods and customer support, makes it easier for customers to make a decision. And, it also makes them more likely to choose your business over others.

3.         It reduces risk. Culture is a tricky aspect, and certain things acceptable in one culture can be unacceptable or even insulting in another. Not knowing the local culture doesn’t excuse you when you make such a mistake and can cost you your reputation. Proper localization helps avoid that.

4.         It increases revenue. By making your product or service more accessible to local consumers, you make them more likely to buy it. This will, of course, result in sales growth. Good localization is not cheap, but it is a worthwhile investment that will pay for itself in the long run.

Music History (Part 9): Music in the Early Church

The earliest recorded musical activity of Jesus and his disciples was hymn-singing:

When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. (Matthew 26:30 and Mark 14:26)

Paul encouraged Christian communities to sing:

Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery.  Instead, be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit.  Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Ephesians 2:18-19)

Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. (Colossians 3:16)

In around 112 AD, Pliny the Younger (governor of a Roman province in Asia Minor) wrote of the Christian custom of singing “a song to Christ as if to a god.”  Christians often met in the evenings for communal meals, and they would sing songs & hymns during them.

During the 300's, the number of Christian converts increased and official recognition of the religion grew.  These small, informal gatherings now became public meetings in basilicas, large rectangular buildings.  In the basilicas, the Christians would chant Scripture and prayers – this made the sound carry better within a large space.

The most devout Christians chose a life of constant prayer; they lived in monasteries, or as hermits in isolation.  They chanted/recited prayers many times a day, and during their nightly vigils.  For them, it was a form of prayer or meditation.

Their philosophy was that they could use psalm-singing to discipline the soul, turn the mind to spiritual matters, and build the Christian community.  As such, it became a central focus of monastic life.

By the late 300's, Christian meetings were starting to conform to a standardized format, with regular singing, using texts from Psalms and non-Biblical hymns.  The rites of the medieval church, later on, codified the practice of singing psalms and hymns.  Today, churches use music in much the same way.

However, some early church leaders rejected other aspects of ancient music practices.  The “church fathers” were early influential Christian writers, such as St. Basil, St. John Chrysostom, St. Jerome and St. Augustine (late 300's – early 400's).  They interpreted the Bible, and set down principles to guide the early Church.

Like the Ancient Greeks, they believed that music had the power to influence people's ethos, for good and for bad, and this made it important.  St. Augustine was greatly moved by singing psalms, but he feared the pleasure it gave him, while also approving of its ability to encourage devotion.

Most of the church fathers stuck with Plato's attitude that beautiful things exist to remind us of divine beauty; they didn't agree with music merely for the sake of enjoyment.  Church leaders, and later theologians of the Protestant Reformation, had much the same sort of attitudes about music.

Most church fathers believed that instrumental music was incapable of opening up people's minds to Christian teachings and holy thoughts, and so condemned it.  Psalms (and other Hebrew scriptures) has many references to instruments, but the church leaders handwaved them away as allegories.  Christians may have used instruments to accompany psalms & hymns in their own homes, but not in church.

Therefore, for over 1000yrs, the Christian musical tradition in churches was entirely vocal.  Early Christian converts associated elaborate singing, large choruses, instruments and dancing with pagan displays, so that was another reason to shun such things.  Avoiding this sort of music helped them to distinguish themselves from the pagan society surrounding them, and helped them proclaim the message of focusing on the eternal soul above the pleasures of the world.

A Christian Observance in Jerusalem (c. 400 AD)

In around 400 AD, a Spanish nun called Egeria made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and described the services there.  This is her account of the Sunday morning Vigil, which eventually became the service called Matins:

As soon as the first cock crows, straightway the bishop comes down and enters the cave in [the church of] the Anastasis.  All the gates are opened, and the entire throng enters the Anastasis, where already countless lamps are burning, and when the people are within, one of the priests sings a psalm and all respond, after which there is a prayer.  Then one of the deacons sings a psalm, similarly followed by a prayer, and a third psalm is sung by some cleric, followed by a third prayer and the commemoration of all.  When these three psalms have been sung and the three prayers said, behold censers are brought into the cave of the Anastasis, so that the entire Anastasis basilica is filled with the smell.  And then as the bishop stands behind the railings, he takes the Gospel book and goes to the gate and the bishop himself reads the Resurrection of the Lord.  When the reading of it has begun, there is such moaning and groaning among everybody and such crying, that even the hardest of hearts could be moved to tears because the Lord has suffered so much for us.  When the Gospel has been read, the bishop leaves and is led with hymns to the Cross, accompanied by all the people.  There, again, one psalms is sung and a prayer said.  Then he blesses the people, and the dismissal takes place.  And as the bishop goes out, all approach to kiss his hand.

St. Basil (c. 300 – 379) was the bishop of Caesarea (central Turkey), and a strong advocate for communal monasticism.  He approved greatly of the use of psalm-singing to convey a religious message & sense of community through the pleasure of music:

When the Holy Spirit saw that mankind was ill-inclined toward virtue and that we were heedless of the righteous life because of our inclination to pleasure, what did he do?  He blended the delight of melody with doctrine in order that through the pleasantness and softness of the sound we might unawares receive what was useful in the words, according to the practice of wise physicians, who, when they give their bitter draughts to the sick, often smear the rim of the cup with honey.  For this purpose these harmonious melodies of the Psalms have been designed for us, that those who are of boyish age or wholly youthful in their character, while in appearance they sing, may in reality be educating their souls.  For hardly a single one of the many, and even of the indolent, has gone away retaining in his memory any precept of the apostles or of the prophets, but the oracles of the Psalms they both sing at home and disseminate in the marketplace.  And if somewhere one who rages like a wild beast from excessive anger falls under the spell of the psalm, he straightway departs, with the fierceness of his soul calmed by the melody.

A psalm is the tranquility of souls, the arbitrator of peace, restraining the disorder and turbulence of thoughts, for it softens the passion of the soul and moderates its unruliness.  A psalm forms friendships, unites the divided, mediates between enemies.  For who can still consider him an enemy with whom he has sent forth one voice to God?  So that the singing of psalms brings love, the greatest of good things, contriving harmony like some bond of union and uniting the people in the symnphony of a single choir.

...Oh, the wise invention of the teacher who devised how we might at the same time sing and learn profitable things, whereby doctrines are somehow more deeply impressed upon the mind!

St. Augustine (c. 354 – 430) in Confessions, considered to be the first modern autobiography:

When I recall the tears that I shed at the song of the Church in the first days of my recovered faith, and even now as I am moved not by the song but by the things that are sung – when chanted with fluent voice and completely appropriate melody – I acknowledge the great benefit of this practice.  Thus I waver between the peril of pleasure and the benefit of my experience; but I am inclined, while not maintaining an irrevocable position, to endorse the custom of singing in church so that weaker souls might rise to a state of devotion by indulging their ears.  Yet when it happens that I am moved more by the song than by what is sung, I confess sinning grievously, and I would prefer not to hear the singer at such times.  See now my condition!

How Has F1 Changed Since The Last Turkish Grand Prix?

It’s been nine years since the last Turkish Grand Prix at the Intercity Istanbul Park in Turkey and the sport has changed considerably compared to 2011.   But, just how much have the cars and technology evolved in that timeframe? There are clear visual differences, largely down to regulation changes, with the cars being wider and longer in 2020, with larger wings, lower noses and the addition of the halo. But the differences go much deeper than that – so we’re taking a look underneath the bodywork to find out how much F1 has changed in less than a decade.

How much has the engine technology evolved in these cars, since 2011?

They’ve changed completely. The engine of 2011 was a naturally aspirated 2.4-litre V8 that revved to 18,000 rpm and weighed at least 95kg. It included early hybrid technology with the KERS unit, which harvested kinetic energy from the car under braking. This gave the driver an additional 80hp for 6.7 seconds per lap, which he could deploy when needed. KERS boosted the engine’s peak power output to around 815hp.   Fast-forward to present day and an F1 car’s source of power is remarkably different. Since the introduction of hybrid regulations in 2014, the sport has used turbocharged 1.6-litre V6 Power Units which hit the scales at 145kg (minimum regulation weight) and rev up to 15,000 rpm. Peak power is considerably higher with today’s PUs producing well over 100 hp more than those in 2011 – while being way more efficient at the same time. An F1 Power Unit in 2020 achieves a thermal efficiency – the amount of fuel energy converted into useful work – of more than 50 percent, compared to around 30 percent in 2011.   The increase in power, the higher efficiency and the higher weight are largely down to the sophisticated hybrid system used in F1 today – made up of the Energy Store (ES), Control Electronics (CE) and two sources of additional power, the Motor Generator Unit Kinetic (MGU-K), generating power from brake energy, and the Motor Generator Unit Heat (MGU-H), producing power from the exhaust gases. The additional electric power from the ERS system is deployed through the lap, giving the driver more hybrid power for longer compared to the quick boost from the KERS unit in 2011.   The modern hybrid system also improves the drivability of the car as the electrical system can deliver instantaneous torque. This can be used to smoothen the power curve from the ICE, for example during upshifts.   Today’s engines also have to be much more reliable: In 2011, each car had eight engines to use across the 19 races; today, teams are limited to a much smaller allocation of each Power Unit component across a season, with three Internal Combustion Engines, Turbochargers and MGU-H units and two MGU-K, ES and CE units.

ISTANBUL, TURKEY: Sebastian Vettel of Germany and Red Bull Racing leads the field into the first corner at the start of the Turkish Formula One Grand Prix at the Istanbul Park circuit on May 8, 2011 in Istanbul, Turkey. (Photo by Paul Gilham/Getty Images)

What else has changed under the skin of the cars?

Something that isn’t so obvious is the electronics on the car, where technology has gone through a major advancement in the last decade. One example of how much the electronics on the car have evolved is looking at data. In 2011, F1 cars logged around 500 channels of data. In 2020, cars are limited to 1,500 high-rate channels and many thousands of background channels, too. The increased data logging also has an impact on the amount of data a single car collects over a race weekend. In 2011, the Turkish Grand Prix weekend would amount to around 18GB per car. Today, this will be closer to 70GB.   The car’s electronic layout has changed a lot, too, with an increased use of small sensor nodes around the car. These are each capable of acquiring data from many sensors and communicating back to a central datalogger. Wireless sensor technology has undergone a vast improvement, allowing an increased use of small, wireless nodes for data gathering and wireless offloading of data generated on test or practice days. One example is the tyre pressure monitoring systems, which were quite bulky in 2011 and transmitted in the 400MHz range. Today, the sensors are smaller, with higher frequency transmission and lower battery use – an evolution that our Electronics department compare with going from a walky-talky to a smartphone!   Another example is the way in which the teams gather tyre temperature information. In 2011, we ran large, external infrared cameras. Now, the sensors are completely integrated and give drivers access to multipoint tyre temperature information at all times.

How do the cars stack up and compare, when it comes to pure numbers?

Regulation changes over the years have created the considerably chunkier F1 cars raced in 2020. They now measure in at over 5,000mm in length, compared to 4,800mm in 2011. Present-day cars are wider, too, taking up more track width at 2,000mm compared to 1,800mm in 2011. They’re also heavier, in part due to the higher weight of the Hybrid Power Units. F1 cars hit the scales at 640kg in 2011, whereas 2020-spec cars now weigh at least 746kg.   But the cars haven’t just grown in size, they also produce considerably more downforce. That means that the tyre loads have increased a lot. Around a lap of Istanbul Park, we’re expecting the front and rear tyres to see around 50% more load compared to 2011. And when you focus specifically on Turn 8, the front-right and rear-right tyre will have a 30 to 40% increase in load.   It’s also worth noting that the tyres have changed considerably, too. The last Turkish GP took place in Pirelli’s first season as F1’s sole tyre supplier, so the construction and structure of the tyres has changed since then. The tyres are also wider now, having increased around 25 percent in size through the introduction of the 2017 regulation change. With a bigger contact patch on the ground, the tyres can generate more grip and thus quicker lap times.

ISTANBUL, TURKEY: Sebastian Vettel of Germany and Red Bull Racing leads the field at the start of the Turkish Formula One Grand Prix at the Istanbul Park circuit on May 8, 2011 in Istanbul, Turkey. (Photo by Mark Thompson/Getty Images)

What does this all mean in terms of lap times?

In 2011, Sebastian Vettel took pole position for Red Bull at the Turkish GP with a 1:25.049. We expect that the 2020 cars with their increased power and higher downforce, will be around four seconds quicker in Qualifying trim. And while the session format itself hasn’t changed much since 2011, some of the rules and technology around Qualifying has.   For example, Vettel’s lap time at Istanbul Park in 2011 was set with unlimited DRS use, whereas today there are only two designated DRS zones at the track. However, drivers had less energy deployment from KERS (only 6.7s per lap) in 2011. Fast forward to 2020 and the energy deployment from the ERS system is being utilised through the entire lap.

What can we expect from the Turkish GP track, in 2020?

The higher cornering speeds and the subsequent higher lateral g-forces will make the track a more physically demanding challenge this year for the drivers. Braking and cornering can reach up to 5g whereas nine years ago, it was around 4g, and those stronger g-forces really add up.   With the current spec of Pirelli tyre, where we’ll have the three hardest compounds in the range in Turkey, we’re expecting it to be tricky to get the tyres up to temperature with these modern cars – which is the opposite issue to what we experienced in Turkey back in 2011.   Due to the increased downforce levels, the iconic Turn 8 will be less of a focus than before. It was pretty much flat-out in the 2011 cars, but it will become even less of a challenge in these 2020 machines. So, teams don’t need to compromise the setup so much for it.   Unlike some of the other unfamiliar races on the 2020 F1 schedule, we do actually have some historical data for the Turkish Grand Prix. However, because the cars have changed so much and the track has recently been resurfaced, the historic data is only useful as a reference.

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Who Are the Gods? Part 1- Monotheism, Polytheism & Archetypes

by Christopher Penczak | Aug 1, 2013

(Originally appearing in The Second Road)

The hardest thing about learning witchcraft is understanding the gods and goddesses. Most who get involved in Wicca, witchcraft, and paganism are looking for a spiritual path that makes sense. We come to the Earth based religions because they are practical, non-dogmatic and self-reliant. Independent thought, personal freedom and timeless wisdom are the watchwords of this resurrected faith, but some mythological concepts are hard to grasp for the modern person.

The difficulties arise in understanding the ancient pagan mythologies and how they apply to us today. Wicca is a modern revival of the old pagan religions, focusing on the craft of those ancient priests and priestess. Paganism, or more accurately neo-paganism, is a revival of similar practices, with less focus on the role of the clergy. As children of the twenty first century, we are all a part of the global village, with access to sacred text and myths from across the world. Wicca draws primarily on European mythology, but European myth is a large subject, spanning several cultures and time frames. The myths of Greece, Rome, Celts, and Teutons, along with their various subdivisions, are now the foundation of Wicca, though individual traditions can favor one culture over another. Modern witchcraft also draws from the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, along with some material from India, Africa, Asia and the Americas. Although the same spiritual truths can be found all over the world, each culture and time had specific stories to tell. Learning them all, and how they fit together, is a momentous task. Polytheism & Monotheism The tallest stumbling block for the twenty-first century initiate is the concept of polytheism. Most witches I know were not raised as witches or pagans, but in traditional Judeo-Christian homes. Perhaps that will change with a new generation of pagan parents out there, but at the moment, most of us were most likely raised in a monotheistic tradition. Even if you were not taken to church services on a regular basis, most families have a default mainstream religion, even if they don’t practice it. Monotheism is a belief in one God. Pagan religions are polytheistic, meaning a belief in many gods. It is hard to go from a viewpoint of one supreme God to a view of many different gods and goddesses, with many different stories and motives. Some stories have very human acting gods and goddesses, somewhat petty and vengeful. It can be hard to relate to them as divine creative beings. For a former monotheist, it’s all very confusing. It leads an aspiring pagan to ask, “Who are the gods, really?”

We ask no easy questions. Every practitioner has a slightly different opinion on the nature and will of the gods. Such questions are the foundation for the spiritual quest. We spend our lifetimes contemplating the divine, and our place in the greater scheme of things. Hopefully this article will demonstrate some common ground.

In my opinion, both monotheist and polytheist are correct. The biggest error we make is thinking one way is superior to the other. Both views are just that, views. Everyone has a different perspective, and we need to find the one that works for us. Very few traditions are strictly one or the other. Both camps unconsciously incorporate elements that suit their view point, even if they hold onto a label.

The Judeo-Christian faiths are considered monotheistic, believing in one God, often called Yaweh. Catholics look to the same God as the Holy Trinity, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit – giving the one being three definitive expressions. Catholics have also honoured Mother Mary and the saints. Although they are not God, they are representatives, acting as bridges to God. Each saint is given a particular province, an area of expertise. Similarly we have the angels. Those of Jewish tradition, and other Christian faiths usually believe forms of angels and archangels. The Bible has several references to these divine messengers and representatives, issuing the will of God on Earth. They are extensions of God’s power. Angels do not originate in the Hebrew Bible. They can be found in the ancient cultures of Sumer, Egypt and Chaldaea. All were pagan and polytheistic by our definitions. Angels were expression of the divine, acting as extensions of divine power. The Egyptians called them neters. To many of these ancient cultures, like the Egyptians, there was very little distinction between some of the gods and these angelic forces.

The original word for God in Genesis was Elohim, a plural word meaning both male and female and roughly translated by our modern scholars as “creator gods.” The Jewish people, as a nation were quite often subjugated and enslaved by their Middle Eastern neighbours, and sought to distinguish themselves from many of the Goddess reverent and pagan cultures around them. Idols were outlawed because the pagan religions used idols and icons.

Homosexuality was outlawed because it was found in the temples of Inanna and Astarte. They focused on the male fire and storm god Yaweh as not only their supreme tribal god, but declared him creator God of all. Prior to this, he was one god of many in the Middle East. Here began a great division between the one and the many, carried on by all the Christian and Muslim faiths that used Judaism as a foundation stone.

Pagans are not strictly polytheist either. The whole concept behind polytheism, at least as interpreted by modern practitioners, is the concept that everything is alive. Everything is divine. Everything expresses life force and consciousness on some level. One of the first Hermetic teachings, reportedly given to us by the god Thoth-Hermes, is the Principle of Mentalism. We are all thoughts in the divine mind. We are all creations of the divine spirit. We are all one. Sounds very monotheistic, doesn’t it? The gods and goddesses of mythology consciously represent different aspects of the divine. The Earth has the Earth Mother. The grain has the harvest gods. The Sun is personified by one deity and the Moon another, because all these things are alive to the pagan. But they all have one unifying spirit running through them. You can call that God, Goddess, Great Spirit, all with capital “G’s,” or anything else. The polytheists look to the individual expressions of this one Great Spirit, as represented by the different gods and goddesses of mythology, with little “g’s.” These are the aspects people can relate to, because they embodied the forces more intimately in contact with hunter/gatherer and later agrarian society.

Unfortunately the recorded myths taught in most school books do not get the point of one spirit with many faces across to the reader. Most modern mythologists look to this work as story and fable, not scripture. Most people who translate and comment on the Bible historically were of the faith, but as pagans were converted to Christianity, there was not many left of the Old Religion for a first hand account and personal representation of the faiths. We are lucky they were recorded at all. Even the most valiant efforts of modern pagans are re-constructions and interpretation of past belief and ritual. No wonder neo-paganism borrows from so many sources.

Did these beings, these pagan gods walk the Earth, as we believe the Catholic saints did? Were they humans who achieved mystical enlightenment, ascended to the next level of consciousness, but remaining behind in spirit to aid humanity because of their love and compassion for us, like the eastern Bodhisattvas? Many Bodhisattvas are often considered Eastern goddesses, like Quan Yin. Did they walk the Earth as gods made flesh, as did the Hindu avatars such as Krishna, incarnated into the mortal plane to teach us, somewhat like Jesus? Did they never walk the Earth, and simply speak to us through our dreams, visions and artist, always residing on the spiritual planes? Or are they simply symbols, ways humanity uses to understand the divine? All are wonderful ideas, and part of the spiritual journey is to discover the answers for yourself, and more importantly your own personal relationship with the divine. There is no one completely correct answer. A truth can be found in each idea, but that doesn’t make the gods any less real or personal.

C.G. Jung called these individual forces archetypes, all dwelling in the collective consciousness of humanity. While he may have believed they were representations of human experience found the world over, many pagans prefer to think of the collective consciousness as a meeting ground for communicating with these vast beings of consciousness. Each one represents a face, a facet of the one Great Spirit or Divine Mind.

The Diamond I describe divinity like a diamond, beautifully cut and shining brightly. Everyone looks at the diamond a bit differently. You can look at the whole thing, but the reflection can be so bright, its hard to understand and accept it as a whole. You know its there, but it seems unknowable. Details are hard to grasp. This is a strict monotheist view. You look at the whole and nothing else.

Sometimes a particular facet of the diamond will grab your attention, to the exclusion of everything else. You feel that facet is the only one, and there are no others. You do not see the whole diamond or any faces. You feel the rest are illusions. This is a particularly zealous brand of monotheism, excluding all other possibilities and viewpoints.

You can be attracted to a few of the faces, a patch of them, and focus all your attention on them. They represent a series of archetypes, the gods and goddesses from a particular pantheon. You may focus on them exclusively, but most realise there are other faces of the diamond. This is why many pagan cultures borrowed from each other, seeing other expression of their own gods in other lands. This is also why mixing and matching in the eclectic focus of modern witchcraft works so well. Even the early voodoo practitioner learned to adopt the saints as mask for their gods, because the archetypes are so similar.

Hopefully seekers recognise the faces of the diamond, and the whole diamond itself, and understand it is all a point of view. They are both right, and both have their truth. Native American traditions have a wonderful story. The world is a dream, dreamt by the Dreamer, the Great Spirit. The Dreamer realised he/she could not dream it alone, that other must create, and created many dreamers, each in charge of their own dream. One dreamer dreams of rocks, another of trees and another of love and romance. Each has their own realm of responsibility. The Dreamer is like the diamond, while the dreamers are the facets, the gods and goddess.

Another great expression is that all gods are shadows cast from the same light. The important thing to remember in any of these analogies is that we, too, are part of the whole. We are all faces in another layer of the diamond. We are dreamers. We are shadows cast by the divine light.

Godforms Modern witches look to the archetypes as divine beings, as the dreamers. Each can take many different forms throughout the world, manifested differently to the various cultures. Each one wears different masks, though they represent the same fundamental forces in that culture. These different expressions are called godforms. An individual archetype’s many godforms may be connected through history, or may be exclusive to a particular culture. Godforms are the masks of the archetypal beings.

We have the very popular archetype of the Goddess of Love. Known most popularly as Aphrodite or Venus, from Greek or Roman myth. She actually evolved from the Middle Eastern goddesses Astarte, Ishtar and Inanna. Although all are goddess of love and pleasure, Inanna was also a goddess of war and Queen of Heaven. The Norse Goddess Freya is also considered a love goddess, but she is also a patron of magic, fertility goddess and the force of the Earth itself. She has no discernable link to the Middle Eastern goddesses. The Goddess of Love can assume many different forms, and assume other responsibilities, as the dreamers, the archetypes mix and mingle on the spiritual planes. Each godform represents a single being, or vibration. When you call upon Venus in ritual, the energy is different then when you call on Astarte or Inanna or Freya even though they are all aspects of the Goddess.

Think of the individuals deities, the godforms, as one level of divinity. Here we have the most personality and human like qualities. That’s why they can be more easily identified with and understood. Here we can relate best through the stories and the myths.

All gods lead to the God. All goddesses lead to the Goddess. The God and Goddess lead to the one spirit, though personifying spirit as male and/or female, mother or father, helps our connection. The individual archetypes are a bit more nebulous to us. They are less defined in shape and form, taking masks of the godforms to make themselves known, so we can see them better. The archetypal beings lead back to the primal spirit, the Great Spirit, who shows even less form and shape, for the Great Spirit contains all forms and no form, being the sum of all life on every level of existence.

In part 2, we will look at several different archetypes and how they are expressed as gods and goddesses of the pagan faiths.

https://christopherpenczak.com/2013/08/01/who-are-the-gods-part-1-monotheism-polytheism-archetypes/

'Lost and Found’ Part 1—Objects as Type

As part 1 of the 3-part ‘Lost and Found’ workshop series, the aim of this session is to produce a type specimen which looks to promote and sell a typeface. The type specimen, however, will showcase a typeface made solely using strange objects. In this case, I partnered up with a peer (Alex) to help make each character using some garden wire. Before getting into the production though, I was briefed about what makes a successful typeface along with some of the theories of type.

Construction of a Typeface

A typeface will typically include 26 letters (either lowercase, uppercase or both) and punctuation. Because of the limited time we had, it wasn’t a realistic expectation to produce all 26 letters in both lowercase and uppercase along with numbers and all punctuation, so we chose what we thought to be the most common punctuation: 

Full stop [.]

Comma [,]

Colon [:]

Question Mark [?]

Exclamation Mark [!]

Quotation Marks [”]

Brackets [ ( ) ]

Ampersand [@]

Octothorp/Hashtag [#]

When a typeface is being used, if there are symbols missing then whoever is using the typeface will be stopped from using these symbols, so it’s important to have as many as possible included within the typeface. Similarly, both lowercase and uppercase characters must be accounted for. More so with read type, as capitals are a form of punctuation; display typefaces still function with only one case.

What Makes a Good Typeface? 

Although there are no strict rules to how you should make a typeface, there are qualities which separate the good from the bad. Some of these include: 

Style: A typeface with a unique style will become recognisable which is why customised typefaces are popular in brand identity. 

Consistency: With no consistency, the typeface when applied to words and sentences will be perceived as various unmatched letters rather than one group of letters. Consistencies amongst type can be in line weight, angles, serifs, kerning and much more.

Readability: Especially for read type, the typeface must always be clearly understood as a whole piece of text.

Legibility: How each individual letter is perceived is just as important as how it reads as a whole. As well as this, legibility refers to the relationships each letter has to other letters.

As well as these, when making my typeface, I should follow a cap height to ensure all of my letters are the same height. This relates to the consistency of the typeface in its size/scale. A cap height is the height in which the upper case characters of a typeface should be. The X height is the height for lower case letters (excluding tall letters such as ‘t’ or ‘h’). 

Considering all of the requirements for a successful typeface, Alex and I chose to create a display typeface with only uppercase and punctuation. Because of the limited amount of time we had to produce this, we felt like aiming to include both upper and lower cases of the alphabet was an unrealistic goal. We had the choice between a set of soldier figurines or some garden wire. We chose to use the garden wire as our material as it would be easier to create letterforms due to its malleability. 

Process

Firstly, we made sure to measure a cap height to use for all of the letters we would make. Considering we were using garden wire, we knew the typeface would have a less structured look, so the cap height was just a rough guideline for us to follow. Then, we started constructing the typeface. Allocating each other alternating letters, making sure to stay with the same style throughout. For instance, a style choice we kept consistent was avoiding overlapping where possible. 

What I personally found to be the hardest about this part was carrying the same aesthetic across every single letter. Especially as two of us were making the letters, at the start it became hard for us to reach an understanding of a look to follow. As we produced more letters, Alex and I both picked up the aesthetic of the typeface and used this to correct some of the earlier letters we felt didn’t match with the rest. 

Once we had all of the characters, afterwards was converting them letterforms to a digital typeface and eventually making a type specimen. To do this, Alex photographed each letter before transferring them to the Mac, where I opened them as separate layers in a Photoshop document. From here, in a similar method to the creation of the letters, Alex and I split the workflow between us to speed up the process. We added a ‘Levels’ adjustment to each letter to remove the background and just leave the characters. One thing which was an issue at this stage was certain shadows being left behind. However, after some discussion with other peers as well, we felt the shadows gave the characters an extra layer of depth which wouldn’t be present when they are vectorised. 

Following the image adjustments, we laid out all of the characters in alphabetical order (with punctuation at the end) to showcase it in its entirety. Along with this, we made various quotes and demonstrations of the typeface in context so these could be used for the type specimen. 

What is a Type Specimen? 

A type specimen has a sole purpose of promoting/demonstrating a typeface. They are often used to help sell a typeface by showing how it works in different scenarios or even how versatile the look of it is. They can be presented in countless ways. Some more simple typefaces can be presented on one piece of paper, whereas those with more characters, character styles, line weights, cases, punctuation, numbers or in some case symbols/icons often require more presentation to fully showcase the flexibility of the type.

Above is an example of what I think is an effective type specimen sheet. I chose this because, in a similar way to my garden wire typeface, it is showcasing a display font and shows a good contrast of size for different ways it can be applied. I also think the use of just black and white works well to emphasise the characters. It’s easy for colours and layout to become distracting when displaying a typeface, but I think this example has the legibility of the typeface as the main priority. 

For more modern typefaces, digital presentations are more popular and allow for more diverse ways of showing the type in use. The main difference is through the use of animation. 

I chose this ‘Sew’ typeface as an example because it is also made with an unconventional object, but also offers an example of how I could display my own typeface in more detail. This presentation shows: 

Textured variants

Digital vectorised variants

Construction of the typeface

Different sizes

Quotations

Ligatures

Patterns

In this case, I think going into more depth helps to sell the typeface, so it is a potential for me looking forward. 

When creating my own specimen, I found it hard to design something visually appealing without sacrificing how the type was read. Because my typeface (which I called ‘Garden Wire’ for the type specimen) is a display font, it’s important to have a design which is exciting for the audience; this shouldn’t mean the type has to become harder to read.

Extension—Type Zine

Having looked at various examples of other ways typefaces can be displayed, I wanted to experiment with another way to present a type specimen. For this, I created a small 8-page zine. I preferred this method because it split the presentation into separate pages. This meant that I didn’t have to consider how all of the elements of the type specimen could be laid out onto one page. I also thought the Zine made the typeface easier to understand to the audience.

Looking Back

This workshop got me to work with unconventional methods of creating work and pushed me out of my comfort zone. I can link this to the rotational workshops, which used the 10 curious objects as fuel for my outcomes. Using garden wire challenged the method of creating type that I am already comfortable with, and posed it with a challenging new way to think. By doing so, I understand the importance of the curious objects and how they act in a similar way in regards to the ideas I currently have for my project.

Moving Forward

The next workshops I will take part in will be part 2 and 3 of the ‘Lost & Found’ series. I am unsure what these will include, but I aim to carry the mindset I learnt from this workshop forward into future ones. I think this will encourage me to be more experimental with my outcomes, which is something that in past projects I have shied away from. 

Politics of Hate in the USA, Part III: Posse Comitatus, Grassroots Rebellion, and Secret Societies by John Miller

The following text, which is the final of three installments, traces back to a conversation I had with Mike Kelley in 1994, “Too Young to be a Hippy, Too Old to be a Punk.”1 Christophe Tannert at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin had invited us to discuss underground political and aesthetic culture in the US for the first issue of Bethanien’s Be Magazin. One year later, I followed this up with a narrative account and analysis of the subject, “Burying the Underground.” Meanwhile, a series of sieges, armed standoffs, and bombings made Americans increasingly aware of a growing polarization between the US federal government and what was hardening into a grassroots militia movement: Ruby Ridge (1992), Waco (1993), Oklahoma City (1995) and Fort Davis, Texas (1997). I began to see this as a right-wing counterpart to militant leftism. In fact, the right seemed to be mirroring tactics that had previously belonged to the leftist underground. This led me to write a complementary essay, “Heil Hitler! Have a Nice Day!, the Politics of Hate in the USA” By 2001, the militia movement had run out of steam. When al-Qaeda terrorists staged the September 11 attacks, however, these so closely resembled events described in The Turner Diaries that I had initially suspected the radical right. Although unemployment and economic dislocation drove the militia movement, the Great Recession has not provoked a similar response. Instead of overturning—or seceding from—the federal government, the far right, now exemplified by the Tea Party, wants to work from within the political system by downsizing government and converting it to a states’ rights model. This shift is evident in the current Republican debates leading up to the next presidential election, where candidates have tried to turn “moderate” into a pejorative term. —John Miller

***

Posse Comitatus

The Jew run banks and federal loan agencies are working hand-in-hand foreclosing on thousands of farms right now in America. They are in essence, nationalizing farms for the jews [sic], as the farmer becomes a tenant slave on the land he once owned….The farmers must prepare to defend their families and land with their lives, or surrender it all. —James Wickstrom,2 Christian Identity minister and radio talk show host

Of all the far right factions, the Posse Comitatus may be the largest. A true grassroots movement, it is also the most amorphous and the hardest to pin down. James Ridgeway compares its organizational flexibility with that pioneered by the SDS, yet it also takes the anti-Federalist logic of states’ rights to a topical extreme. “Posse Comitatus” literally means “power of the county” in Latin. The name refers to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 which forbids the use of US military and national guard forces as civilian police forces.3 Congress passed this legislation after the Civil War to prevent President Grant from using soldiers to guard ballot boxes against election fraud in southern states.4 The Posse Comitatus believes this law empowers a sheriff to call a posse into being or to disband it as necessary. A posse is simply “all the men that a sheriff may call to his assistance in the discharge of his official duty, as to quell a riot or to make an arrest.”5 The Posse Comitatus sees the law as a wellspring of radical decentralization, granting the sheriff ultimate authority. Accordingly, its members consider income tax, social security payments, drivers’ licenses and even license plates as violations of the Constitution. The Posse claims that, when necessary, it may usurp even the sheriff’s authority. According to a doctrine set forth by Christian Identity minister William Potter Gale, the Posse claims its authority comes straight from God.

Although the Posse Comitatus is freeform by definition, Lyman Tower Sargent traces its origin to the Citizens Law Enforcement and Research Committee, founded by former Silver Shirt and Identity Christian Henry L. Beach in 1969.6With the spate of family farm foreclosures beginning in the late 1970s, ranks of the Posse expanded as farmers withheld taxes and fought to save their property. Amidst the greater period recession, high interest rates combined with a severe drop in demand for crops to touch off a farm crisis. After a major US-Soviet grain deal fell through, rising inflation forced underdeveloped countries to redirect their budgets from grain purchases to debt maintenance. In the US, the small farmer was left holding the bag. What made the crisis even worse was farmland itself sometimes dropped to a third of its previous value. A congressional report estimated that almost half the nation’s 2.2 million farmers would lose their farms by the end of the century.7 Unable to make ends meet, some turned to community activism, some to alcohol and spousal abuse, and others to anti-Semitism. Just as Nazis once blamed Jews for the dislocations of modernization, bankrupt small farmers wanted to pin their troubles on a Jewish banking conspiracy. Few, however, bothered noting that Jews own none of the big, international banks.

The idea of the family farm as a wellspring of American identity runs deep in the United States. It derives in part from Thomas Jefferson, who viewed big cities with distaste and envisioned the United States as a vast array of independent farms:

Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.

They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country, and wedded to its liberty and interests, by the most lasting bonds. 8

Jefferson’s philosophy reflected the political economy of the southern plantation system in which each plantation produced much or all of what it needed. (The autonomy of the plantation, of course, depended on slave labor.) Jefferson himself owned a Virginia plantation—though, ironically, a not very successful one. Unlike George Washington, he did not free his slaves after the Revolutionary War.9 Conversely, Washington was a land speculator in the trans-Appalachian region and therefore less aligned with small property interests. Jefferson vigorously championed small farming yet, by establishing a liberal political culture within a capitalist economy, his policies paved the way for America’s transition to industrial capitalism.

The small farmer’s aspirations for independent production and land ownership constitute as much an ideal of civic virtue as they do a means of livelihood. Even so, the supposed autonomy of the small farm has always been tenuous at best, subject to the vagaries of good and bad crops, variable interest rates and supply and demand. In other words, the autonomy of the small farmer was always a relative state—one rested on a precarious economic foundation. During bad times, small farmers have often resorted to wage labor to keep their farms intact. Nonetheless, their aspirations mark them as petit-bourgeois and have rarely shown solidarity with labor movements. Moreover, they resent federal farm subsidy programs—not only because policy makers attach them to big agricultural conglomerates, but also because they render the small farmer a dependent consumer instead of a virtuous producer.10 This tension is not new. Frontier farmers often found themselves at odds with a centralized government unwilling—or unable—to protect their interests. Rural vigilante justice and its attendant gun culture are legacies of that history. Taking the law into one’s own hands thus survives as a cherished rural tradition. And yet that civic independence has been frustrated in recent years. American farmers have been forced into the painful admission that the small farm has become inefficient and wasteful relative to conglomerate “agribusinesses.” Here, their sense of civic deprivation, plus very real material losses, goes back to a promise held out by homesteading: land ownership. James Corcoran has described its importance:

Land doesn’t only serve as a farmer’s collateral for operations loans, the ability to buy the seed, fertilizer and chemicals to plant his fields—land is a farmer’s identity. It is his connection to God; it is his religion, his nationality, his family’s heritage, and his legacy to his children. Land is a farmer’s way of life, and in the early 1980s he was losing it. Like the people he replaced on the land—the American Indian—the farmer became a modern exile, forced to migrate to strange cities and states in search of a new life.11

Driving people from the land is part of the process of long-range accumulation that Marx identified as a structural feature of capitalist development. The farmers’ resistance to dispossession does raise the radical question of who is entitled to land ownership. But claiming a holy right to the land—as do the Posse and Identity Christians—is a self-serving ideology; not only does it justify the farmer’s existence against abstract economic forces, it also represses the historical memory of how frontier farmers violently drove their predecessors, the Native Americans, off the very same soil. This manifest destiny of the small farmer simply transmutes the divine right of kings into the rural populist homestead. Even the ideal of independent production can, at times, undercut the small farmer’s sense of social responsibility. Thus, to consider small farming an inalienable and God-given way of life entails reactionary identifications with blood and soil.

Alarmed by an anti-Semitic flare up in the farm belt, in 1986 the Anti-Defamation League commissioned the Lois Harris organization to poll Iowa and Nebraska residents on these issues. Seventy-five percent of the respondents blamed “big international bankers” for farm problems, with 13 percent specifically blaming Jews. 27 percent agreed, “Farmers have always been exploited by international Jewish bankers.” Among people older than sixty-five, that number leapt to 45 percent.12 The growth of the Posse closely followed this trend.

Typical Posse tactics include highly effective forms of “paper terrorism” such as tax resistance and filing nuisance liens and lawsuits, which tie up courts and make life miserable for Posse targets. When these fail, they sometimes turn to guns. In 1980, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) identified 17,222 individuals who, as a form of tax protest, either refused to file returns or filed and refused to pay what they owed. By 1983 that number jumped to 57,754 and subsequent efforts by a special IRS task force have hardly made a dent in this figure.13 In Wisconsin the aforementioned James Wickstrom, onetime candidate for governor and US Senate, openly espoused tax revolt and violence.14 Some groups, like Charles Shugarman’s Virginia Patriots Network, conduct special seminars in tax resistance, stating that wages are a special form of barter between employer and employee and, therefore, not subject to taxation.15 With a similar barter idea, Denver Posse member John Grandbouche initiated a system of warehouse banks where depositors could convert their money to gold or silver to avoid taxes. Grandbouche called his organization the National Commodities and Barter Association (NCBA). The Wall Street Journal reported that the NCBA laundered up to half a million dollars a day for as many as 20,000 depositors. Federal agents raided Grandbouche’s offices in 1985, recovering thousands of documents and an estimated $250,000 in gold bullion. A federal judge, however, ordered the return of this property.16 Other warehouse banks have turned out to be simply old-fashioned bilking schemes in which otherwise skeptical farmers have lost their life savings to con men. In June 1986, for example, authorities convicted Roderick Elliot in one such an embezzlement operation. Elliot was the publisher of the movement’s key tabloid, The Primrose and Cattleman’s Gazette (its name insinuating that Jewish bankers had led farmers “down the primrose path”).17 More recently, Roy Schwasinger’s organization, We The People, sold about 3,000 bogus “information kits” at $300 each to gullible farmers. These explained how to claim one’s portion of a supposed $600 trillion class action suit against the government brought by ranchers and farmers. In 1995 Schwasinger received a nine-year prison sentence for his part in the scam.18

In 1983 the death of the sixty-three-year-old tax resister Gordon Kahl created the Posse’s first martyr. Kahl was a decorated World War II veteran who kept his farm afloat by working winters in Texas as an auto mechanic. He joined the Posse in 1974, stopped paying taxes and appeared on television two years later urging others to follow suit. Going public landed him in Leavenworth prison for one year. Authorities then released him on probation with the proviso that he stay away from the Posse. Unrepentant, Kahl still refused to pay taxes and still urged others to do the same. Although he owed only a pittance, his very public defiance made him a thorn in the side of government officials. On February 13, 1983, federal marshals tracked Kahl, his son and some friends as they were leaving a Posse meeting in Medina, North Dakota. Kahl stopped at the marshals’ roadblock and a gunfight began. The marshals wounded his son. A crack shot, Kahl killed two marshals and wounded three others in retaliation.19 He went on the run for four months, then holed up in the Smithville, Arkansas “earth home” of his Posse friends, Leon and Norma Gintner. This dwelling was a survivalist bunker stockpiled with weapons and food. Federal agents and local Sheriff Gene Matthews surrounded the bunker on June 3. Outside, they captured Leonard Gintner. Shortly thereafter, Gintner’s wife came out to surrender. Neither would confirm whether Kahl was hiding inside. Matthews entered the bunker, hoping that, as sheriff, he could convince the fugitive to surrender peacefully. Kahl fatally wounded Matthews with one round from his Ruger Mini-14. Police experts believe that, in the exchange, Matthews killed Kahl as well. Unsure whether the fugitive was dead or alive, agents proceeded to spray the bunker with gunfire. The assault ended only after a commando detonated the bunker’s more than 100,000 rounds of ammunition with a grenade. Death left Kahl a longstanding hero in the movement.20 It also set the stage for a siege/shootout syndrome that would be tragically repeated as the struggle between right-wing dissidents and the federal government continued to escalate.

Other Posse figures include Arthur Kirk, who died in a 1984 firefight with a Nebraska SWAT team, and the eccentric Michael Ryan. Ryan presided over a polygamous, survivalist compound in Rulo, Nebraska where he forced his male followers to sodomize each other and a pet goat.21 Once considered a leader chosen by God, Ryan was convicted by jurors for torturing and killing two of his followers, twenty-seven-year-old James Thimm and five-year-old Luke Stice. For refusing to sodomize the goat, Ryan shoved greased rake handles up Thimm’s rectum, then literally skinned him alive. When police raided the Rulo compound, they discovered more than $250,000 in stolen farm equipment, an arsenal of full- and semiautomatic weapons and 150,000 rounds of ammunition.22 By anyone’s standards, Ryan was certifiably insane. His example illustrates the individual extremes that become available once the social contract is jettisoned. Conversely, Ryan’s case—among others—raises the question of how violence and irrationality become legitimized, both within extremist cults and within the mainstream.

The Turner Diaries

The great danger of democracy, of course, is the same danger that exists with any other form of government; namely, that the wrong minority will be in the driver’s seat. That’s the problem we must overcome now—or perish as a race.

Before the advent of television, it wouldn’t have been feasible to run a truly progressive nation democratically; the process of control was too awkward. That’s why the United States drifted the way it did, subject to various pressure groups, until the worst of all possible groups elbowed the others aside and took over. These days the process of control is reasonably efficient, and if we ever manage to break the grip of the present media bosses we can look forward to the use of the same process to speed America along the upward path again. —William L. Pierce 23

The Turner Diaries is an influential right-wing tract written by former physics professor William Pierce. Pierce published it, however, under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald. Critics call the book the Mein Kampf of American neo-Nazism. Before starting his own National Alliance, Pierce had, in fact, been a member of George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party and the John Birch Society. Society president Robert Welch introduced Pierce to an apocalyptic story called The John Franklin Letters that Pierce used as a model for his own book.24 In the guise of a futuristic novel, The Turner Diaries is part propaganda, part primer for guerilla war and part juvenile blood lust. Its publisher Stuart Lyle described it as “an underground classic,” selling more than 185,000 copies outside bookstores before its above ground publication and distribution in 1978. Pierce himself gloats:

It offends almost everyone; Afro-Americans, feminists, gays and lesbians, liberals, communists, Mexicans, democrats, the FBI, egalitarians, and Jews. Especially Jews: for it portrays them as incarnations of everything that is evil and destructive.25

Former liberal William Gayley Simpson laid the ideological foundation for Pierce’s book in his own Which Way Western Man? After working as an integrationist, Simpson became obsessed with the idea that white Christians risked forfeiting their identity through policies of desegregation and affirmative action. These, moreover, he viewed as part of a sinister Jewish plot: a divide-and-conquer strategy of miscegenation that would leave only Jewish racial integrity intact. Consequently, he argued vehemently for eugenics, segregation and the deportation of Jews.26 Even so, Pierce sharply distinguishes between these beliefs and those of Christian Identity which he dismisses as a “lowbrow” theology incapable of attracting anyone but “hicks.”27

The narrative conceit of The Turner Diaries is the belated discovery of a unique record of “the Great Revolution,” the diaries of one Earl Turner, which historians have republished on the revolution’s one-hundredth anniversary. Pierce envisions this event in apocalyptic—rather than political—terms. The struggle occurs in 1999, at the outset of the millennium. Copying the French Revolution, Pierce even sets out a new dating system, with time divided BNE (Before the New Era, analogous to prehistoric time) and the years following it. Nevertheless, Pierce’s revolution is totalitarian, not democratic; the rights of man evaporate before a phantasm of racial purity. He also adds “editors’ notes” as additional commentary to Turner’s firsthand account. This “historicizes” the fantasy, a posture not dissimilar to Kruschev’s boast “History is on our side. We will live to see you buried.”

The plot begins when the federal government passes an anti-gun law called, suggestively enough, the Cohen Act. Blacks begin raping white women in great numbers (one of Pierce’s deep obsessions) and, as special deputies, round up all those who refuse to turn over their guns. Jews, of course, have masterminded this turn of events. Only one group stands ready to resist “the System,” a small network of underground cells called only “The Organization.” Earl Turner belongs to one such cell of four people operating in Washington, DC. Long before the Cohen Act, his group had buried a cache of guns in a remote Pennsylvania woods. Once they retrieve their weapons, they turn to robbery and murder simply to survive; as gun owners, they can neither work nor identify themselves in public. Meanwhile, Congress passes more stringent laws requiring all citizens to carry “internal passports” –used for all transactions from banking to medical care to purchasing gasoline. This pushes the Organization to more extreme measures, culminating in bombing a new supercomputer (for processing internal passports) housed in the FBI’s Washington headquarters. To carry this out, The Organization uses a truck filled with explosive chemical fertilizer. To finance its intensified level of operations, it starts counterfeiting as well. Trained as an engineer, Turner becomes responsible for bombs, communications and counterfeiting.

Soon, Turner’s superiors invite him to join “the Order,” an elite mystical cadre within the Organization. Its grey-hooded members reveal to him that white supremacy is divinely ordained and that Aryan terrorists are “the instruments of God.” As the struggle continues, the Organization’s leaders realize that only the System can win a war of attrition and accordingly step up their approach. In an all-or-nothing effort, they concentrate their entire force in Southern California and, through inside agents, trigger an insurrection within the armed forces stationed there. In the resulting chaos, the Organization manages to establish regional sovereignty, fending off the System by seizing nuclear warheads and threatening to use them. After setting up free zones in major American cities, it nukes Tel Aviv, saving a few remaining missiles for the Soviet Union. This, in effect, kills two birds with one stone, devastating communism and subverting the System’s control in America. The story ends with an inadvertent allusion to Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”: Turner flying a suicide mission to the Pentagon with a nuclear warhead strapped to his crop-duster. The editorial notes confirm that, because of Turner’s noble sacrifice, the Aryan race successfully purges every other race from the face of the planet. Thus begins the New Era—a cartoon version of xenophobia with pointed consequences for the American political landscape of the 1990s.

Pierce’s hatred of other races is tautological. He accuses others of conspiracy and degradation, when he himself is the worst offender. The Turner Diaries depicts both Jews and African-Americans as stereotypes; Pierce even writes in dialect to further ridicule them. In lieu of social or historical analysis, Pierce invokes God to justify his beliefs. His stance toward the social movements of the 1960s and 70s is wholly reactive:

I remember a long string of Marxist acts of terror 20 years ago, during the Vietnam war. A number of government buildings were burned or dynamited, and several innocent bystanders were killed, but the press always portrayed such things as idealistic acts of “protest.”

There was a gang of armed, revolutionary Negroes who called themselves “Black Panthers.” Every time they had a shootout with the police, the press and TV people had their tearful interviews with the families of the Black gang members who got killed -- not with the cops’ widows. And when a Negress who belonged to the Communist Party [a reference to Angela Davis] helped plan a courtroom shootout and even supplied the shotgun with which a judge was murdered, the press formed a cheering section at her trial and tried to make a folk hero out of her.28

“Women’s lib” was a form of mass psychosis which broke out during the last three decades of the Old Era. Women affected by it denied their femininity and insisted that they were “people,” not “women.” This aberration was promoted and encouraged by the System as a means of dividing our race against itself.29 ...the knee-jerk liberals have forgotten all about their “radical chic” enthusiasm of a few years ago, now that we are the radicals.30

As a tactician, however, Pierce is coldly logical and utterly clearheaded. For starting a terrorist cell, he advises in the essay “A Program for Survival” (1984) published under his own name, a general three-phase program for Aryan supremacy comprised of:

1. cadre building; 2. community building; 3. community action; 4. make propaganda as militant as possible to attract only the most committed element; 5. operate on a “need to know” basis; 6. communicate either by meeting face-to-face or through short coded messages; 7. separate into “legal” and underground units (like Shin Féin and the I.R.A.); 8. “...[O]ne of the major purposes of political terror, always and everywhere, is to force the authorities to take reprisals and to become more repressive, thus alienating a portion of the population and generating sympathy for the terrorists.” 9. “...[T]he other purpose is to create unrest by destroying the population’s sense of security and their belief in the invincibility of the government.” 31

If the term “community action” sounds benign, however, The Turner Diaries shows just what Pierce means by that.

Pierce’s tactics and ideology would be adopted both by Robert Mathews’ group, The Order, and by Timothy McVeigh. Among other things, they anticipate baiting law enforcement officials to use excessive force and exploiting the overkill as movement propaganda.

Bob Mathews founder of The Bruders Schweigen confronting an anti-racism protester.

The Bruders Schweigen

We just want to be a nameless, white underground. —Robert Mathews32

Bob Mathews was a man with a mission. As an eleven-year-old boy in Phoenix, Arizona, he joined the John Birch Society. Later he became interested in Robert DePugh’s Minutemen. Mathews then started a group of his own called the Sons of Liberty. He also converted to the Mormon faith.33 Under the guidance of fellow Mormon Marvin Cooley, Mathews became a tax resister. In his 1973 W-4 tax form he claimed ten dependents as a single, unmarried man—by that reducing his tax burden to zero. This improbable claim quickly alerted IRS agents, who soon brought him to trial. There, Mathews had a rude awakening when only one of his militia friends agreed to vouch for him as a character witness. Shortly after this, a second friend killed himself, his wife and another couple in a bitter domestic dispute. Disillusioned, Mathews left Phoenix and resettled in Metaline Falls, Washington.34

After taking an apartment, the industrious Mathews soon managed to earn enough money to purchase and clear his own 60-acre plot of land. He found a wife and seemed to settle down. Eventually, his parents and two brothers, once estranged by his extremist views, moved up to Washington as well. Then, in 1978, after four years of relative calm, Mathews read William Galey Simpson’s Which Way Western Man? which left a deep impression. He learned about William Pierce’s National Alliance. By 1981 Mathews discovered William Butler’s Church of Jesus Christ Christian/Aryan Nations in nearby Hayden Lake. Although he had reservations about Butler, he nonetheless attended Aryan Nations events. Around this time, he conceived the “White American Bastion” by which Aryans would become the racially self-conscious political force of the Pacific Northwest. This idea echoed Butlers “10 percent solution,” except that Mathews felt numbers alone would be enough; he did not, at this time, envision the need for a separate government. To this end, he began advertising his “Bastion” plan in the Liberty Lobby’s magazine, The Spotlight. Ultimately, the ads did not pan out; after all his efforts, only one couple moved there. He increasingly resented the apparent docility of most whites and condescendingly called them “sheeple”—sheep people. He also read and absorbed the lessons of The Road Back, an instruction manual for running an underground terrorist group; Essays of a Klansman by Louis Beam, which laid out a point system of awards for Aryan Warriors; and The Turner Diaries. After this, Mathews established his leadership by confronting rowdy counter-demonstrators at Spokane, Aryan Nations rally. Before long he had assembled a small, but hard-core circle of friends and Aryan Nations members around him. He stressed that the time for talk was over. Now was the time for action. In a bizarre ceremony, each swore a loyalty oath before a six-month-old baby, pledging to secure the future propagation of the Aryan race. Before long, the group was planning armed robberies and counterfeiting schemes.35

On October 28, 1983, World Wide Video, Spokane’s only XXX-rated pornography store, became the group’s first target. After days of talks and building up their nerve, they netted a grand total of $369.10. If serious, they were going to have to play for bigger stakes. That Thanksgiving, unbeknownst to Richard Butler, Mathews’ friend Gary Yarbrough began printing their first counterfeit $50 bills on the Aryan Nations printing press. He had a hard time getting the color right, though. Police picked up Mathews’ right-hand-man Bruce Pierce (no relation to William Pierce) on December 3 when the group tried to pass the phony money. With Pierce in jail, on December 18 Mathews pulled a one-man bank heist in desperation. During his getaway, a dye-pack exploded in the loot bag, staining him and the cash red. He managed to clean most of the $25,952 with turpentine and bailed Pierce out of jail. The gang continued to rob banks and restaurants, but soon graduated to armored cars. They set up a system under which they would “tithe” most of the stolen money to other racist groups, setting aside part for their own operation and dividing the remainder as “salaries.” Several men quit their day jobs and began to think of themselves as revolutionaries. With their stolen money, they began to build up an arsenal.36

Meanwhile Pierce had, on his own initiative, ineffectually bombed a Boise synagogue. This breach of security enraged Mathews, but their troubles were just beginning. Aryan Nations member Walter West had begun to spout off in local bars about a new white guerilla group. West also had a reputation for beating his wife, Bonnie Sue, and Order member Tom Bentley had taken a romantic interest in her. Mathews directed Bentley and three others—James Dye, Randy Duey and Richard Kemp—to kill West. Sunday, May 27, 1984 Kemp and Duey brought the unsuspecting West to a remote logging road in the Kaniksu National Forest where Dye and Bentley waited hiding, having already dug a grave. Coming from behind, Kemp struck West’s skull with a three-pound sledgehammer. When this failed to kill him, Duey finished him off with his own Ruger Mini-14 automatic rifle. After that, Bentley moved in with Bonnie Sue; Mathews also began keeping a mistress of his own, Zillah Craig.37 West was neither black nor Jewish, but his murder marked a turning point. The Order had crossed over into lethal violence.

Outspoken radio talk show host Alan Berg specialized in agitating racist listeners. He could be rude, arrogant and insulting, but he was a man of conviction. With his program commanding more than 10 percent of the Denver audience, he nonetheless regarded his provocations as mostly show business. Not so Bob Mathews. He made Berg Number Three on his hit list—after Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Norman Lear, acclaimed television producer and liberal political activist.38 When Mathews stated that the time had come to “take out” Berg, opinion was split within the group. Some felt they were not yet ready, but Mathews refused to wait. His goal was to start a race war; if he were martyred in the struggle, the propaganda would be invaluable. When Mathews asked for volunteers, Bruce Pierce demanded to be the triggerman. Pierce pictured himself as “a true Aryan Warrior.” According to Louis Beam’s “point system,” one needed a full point to become this. Killing a Jew (i.e., Berg) was worth one-sixth of a point; killing the US President was worth one full point. At 9:20 p.m. Monday, June 18, 1984, Pierce gunned down Berg in his driveway as he was climbing out of his Volkswagen Beetle. David Lane and Mathews watched from a Plymouth parked nearby. Detectives quickly found .45 caliber shells from the 12 rounds that riddled the victim’s body. This was no ordinary slaying: the killer clearly wanted to “send a message” to the public. Based on the shells and slugs, investigators quickly identified the murder weapon as an Ingram MAC-10 machine pistol, a weapon of choice for right-wing gun buffs.39 Investigative Division Chief Don Mulnix therefore wasted no time in calling the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the FBI and the BATF in on the case.40

Again desperate for cash, Mathews planned the Order’s next heist. Thanks to a disenchanted Brinks Company employee, he learned of a regularly scheduled truck—often loaded with millions of dollars—that took an especially vulnerable route north of Ukiah, California. Mathews put together a crew and thanks to careful planning by newly recruited Richard Scutari, pulled off the heist without a hitch. This time they netted $3,800,000. The only problem was that Mathews left behind a pistol registered to his follower Andrew Barnhill. Before long, federal investigators had tied the robbery to the Berg slaying. Their prime suspects belonged to the Order. Meanwhile, Mathews promptly tithed much of the take to his favorite charities: Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations, William Pierce’s National Alliance, Frazier Glenn Miller’s Carolina Knights of the KKK, Louis Beam, Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance, Bob Miles’ Mountain Kirk and Dan Gayman’s Church of Israel.41 With the FBI closing in, he set his sites on the next target: Morris Dees. His preliminary plan called for kidnapping and interrogating Dees, then flaying him alive.42 He also tried to contact the Syrian government to fund his war against the Jews.43 Finally, he gave his group a provisional name, taken from a book about Hitler’s Waffen SS: Bruders Schweigen, which refers to “the Silent Brotherhood.”44

On October 1, 1984, Tom Martinez went on trial at the US District Court in Philadelphia. Martinez was charged with helping pass the Order’s counterfeit bills. Shortly before the hearing, his attorney warned him that the FBI had already linked the Order to the Berg slaying and the Brinks heist. Martinez lost his nerve and turned state’s evidence.45 Based on his tips, the FBI stepped up its manhunt, nearly apprehending Mathews and key member Gary Yarbrough twice. Mathews found safe houses for the Order on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. On October 23 Martinez led FBI agents to the Capri Motel in Portland where he was to meet Mathews and Yarbrough—ostensibly to discuss the Dees kidnaping. They caught Yarbrough, but Mathews got away, his right hand wounded.46

The Order regrouped on Whidbey Island. Knowing things were at an end, Mathews drafted a declaration of war on ZOG and an Aryan Declaration of Independence, which newspapers in every state were to receive. The Bruders Schweigen would no longer remain underground. The end, however, was nearer than Mathews could have ever known. On December 4, the FBI received an anonymous tip that Mathews and a dozen others had gone to Whidbey. Alan Whitaker, special agent-in-command at the Seattle FBI office, quickly assembled SWAT teams, a Hostage Rescue Team and reserve agents. By Friday, December 7, he deployed them around the Order’s three safe houses and evacuated nearby local residents. In the first house Randy Duey gave up without a fight. Next, counterfeiting expert Richard Merki surrendered with his wife Sharon and an older woman, Ida Bauman. Merki had taken care to burn as much evidence as possible before giving up. Meanwhile, in the third house Mathews refused to respond to negotiators. The FBI then brought in Duey and Merki who urged him to surrender. Mathews, however, demanded that Idaho, Washington and Montana be set aside as an Aryan homeland before he would talk. Meanwhile, his partner, Ian Stewart, gave up, but refused to confirm whether Mathews still had women or children inside with him. Next SWAT teams forced their way in, but Mathews sprayed them with machine-gun fire from above, shooting through the floorboards. They retreated. The following day the FBI brought a helicopter to hover above the house; Mathews sprayed it through the roof. At 6:30 p.m., the FBI command post issued orders to lob M-79 Starburst flares into the besieged building. Within twenty minutes the house went up in a firestorm. Sunday morning, investigators, sifting through the debris, found Mathews’ charred remains next to a blackened bathtub.47

The federal government’s case against the Order had become the government’s biggest since the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnaped Patty Hearst. In the wake of Mathews’ death, the group itself dissipated, but its influence did not. Seattle US District Attorney Gene Wilson put together a massive racketeering case against the remaining members, consisting of sixty-seven separate counts. On April 12, 1985, a federal grand jury indicted twenty-four members on racketeering and conspiracy. When the trial began that September, twelve pleaded guilty. Prosecutors convicted ten more that December 30. After police captured Richard Scutari in March 1986, he too pleaded guilty. In spring 1988, the government sued ten of the movement for sedition, including the leaders Richard Butler, Bob Miles and Lois Beam. This jury, however, acquitted everyone.48 After these events, William Pierce declared that America was not yet ready to embrace the revolution he had outlined in The Turner Diaries. He instead bought up enough American Telephone and Telegraph (ATT) stock to force a corporate phase-out of ATT’s affirmative action policy.49 Pierce’s renunciation of terrorism, however, was disingenuous, simply part of his strategy to separate the movement into underground and aboveground wings.

In the end, Robert Mathews succeeded in becoming the kind of martyr figure that Pierce deemed necessary for a popular revolution. Gordon Kahl had come first, but he was a lone individual. There had been other paramilitary groups too, like the Covenant, the Sword and Arm of the Lord (CSA) or Frazier Glenn Miller’s Confederate Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.50Yet these functioned more like gangs of thugs, while Mathews’ Order quickly developed into, a model terrorist cell. Although Mathews had even drawn recruits from these other groups, he was the one who managed to take them from talk to action.

The Weaver family and Kevin Harris make the cover of a Spokane newspaper after winning a wrongful death and civil rights lawsuit against the federal government for the Ruby Ridge shootout.

Ruby Ridge

In 1989 at an Aryan World Congress meeting, a biker identifying himself as Gus Magisono befriended former Green Beret Randy Weaver. Since his time in the military, Weaver had adopted Christian Identity beliefs and moved his family to an isolated cabin near Naples, Idaho. Overlooking Ruby Creek, the news media later came to call this place Ruby Ridge.

That fall, when Weaver was almost broke, Magisono encouraged him to sell sawed-off shotguns to right-wing militants.51After Weaver sold his first two, “Magisono,” a.k.a. Kenneth Fadeley, identified himself as a federal operative and threatened to turn him in unless he agreed to spy on Aryan Nations meetings. The FBI had promised Fadeley a reward if Weaver either complied or was arrested. In short, the US government had entrapped Randy Weaver.

Weaver, however, refused and warned Aryan Nations of the plan.52 In turn, the federal government indicted Weaver on firearms charges in December of 1990 and arrested him the following January. He posted a $10,000 bond and was released. The BATF set a court date for February 20 but sent Weaver a summons dated March 20. Six days before he thought he was supposed to appear in court, Assistant US Attorney Ron Howen issued a warrant for his arrest.53 March 20, however, came and went; Weaver ignored the summons and stayed holed up in his cabin.

August 21, 1992, six US marshals, part of a SWAT-like team called the Special Operations Group, surrounded the cabin on Weaver’s isolated twenty-acre property. They kept clear of the house itself for fear of being seen. One marshal threw pebbles near the cabin to distract Weaver’s dog. It started barking. Weaver, his fourteen-year-old son Sammy and a friend, Kevin Harris, grabbed their guns, thinking the retriever had found game. They followed him as he chased the marshals. Randy Weaver split from the others and, spotting a figure in camouflage gear, shouted a warning and ran back to the cabin. As the others began to follow, Marshal Art Roderick shot the dog. Sammy Weaver shot back. Then he continued running. After another burst of gunfire from the concealed marshals, Sammy Weaver fell to the ground dead, shot in the back. Harris returned fire. That exchange left veteran Marshall William Degan dead. It remains unproven exactly who shot whom in this exchange, but clearly Ron Howen had prematurely authorized use of excessive force to arrest Randy Weaver.54

The remaining five officers immediately contacted the US Marshals Service in Washington, DC, which in turn called in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI mobilized its crack Hostage Rescue Team, headed by Richard Rogers. It brought in agents from around the country. By the day’s end, Idaho governor Cecil Andrus had called a state of emergency, by that authorizing the use of both the National Guard and state militias to capture Weaver. The next day, about four hundred military and police specialists had converged on Ruby Ridge with a helicopter, “humvees” (a military vehicle used in “Desert Storm”), armored transport and personnel carriers, and communications equipment. This force blockaded the Weaver’s property. Rogers had drawn up special “Rules of Engagement” for the operation, authorizing agents to shoot any adults carrying weapons on sight.55

About 6:00 p.m. that day, Weaver finally decided to venture out to reexamine his dead son, whom he had carried to a small shed near the cabin. Harris and Weaver’s daughter Sarah came with him. As he tried to enter the shed, a bullet ripped through the soft flesh under his arm. All three ran back to the cabin. Vicki, Weaver’s wife, held open the door, a baby in her arms. As they raced inside, a federal sharpshooter’s bullet passed through Vicki Weaver’s head, killing her instantly and severely wounding Harris.56 Fearing for their lives, Harris and the remaining Weavers refused to go outside for the next nine days. During this time Harris’s condition grew critical. By the barricades, a hundred local residents kept a vigil for those trapped inside and began to protest the paramilitary assault. Finally, Weaver agreed to surrender only after another former Green Beret, Bo Gritz, and a local Baptist minister, Chuck Sandelin, assured him that he and his family would go unharmed. 57

About one month later, Randy Trochmann, Chris Temple (publisher of a Christian Identity newspaper, The Jubilee) and several others who stood vigil during the siege formed a group called United Citizens for Justice. They proposed to expose government abuse of power and to form chapters in every state to protect fellow “patriots.” The organization, however, fell apart after only a few months.58 Another, more ominous organizing effort followed. This meeting, called “the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous,” took place on October 22 at Estes Park, Colorado. Besides Trochmann and Temple, Louis Beam, Richard Butler and other prominent members of the patriot movement attended.59 Their purpose was to mobilize the far right in the wake of Ruby Ridge. To do so, they decided to focus on anti-government sentiment and to downplay racism, which had been too divisive. As they re-prioritized Jews and blacks as “secondary” enemies, euphemisms replaced racist epithets in movement propaganda. In this, they took their cue from David Duke’s successful campaign for the Louisiana legislature. Identity pastor Pete Peters observed:

Men came together who in the past would normally not be caught together under the same roof, who greatly disagree with each other on many theological and philosophical points, whose teaching contradicts each other in many ways.60

All agreed that they must take extreme measures to check the tyranny of the federal government. Beam stated:

When they come for you, the federals will not ask if you are a Constitutionalist, a Baptist, Church of Christ, Identity covenant believer, Klansman, Nazi, home schooler, Freeman, New Testament believer, [or] fundamentalist….those who wear badges, black boots, and carry automatic weapons, and kick in doors already know all they need to know about you. You are the enemy of the state.61

They concluded that small, unorganized armies would be the most effective countermeasure. Thus, the contemporary militia movement was born. As Morris Dees notes, “At Estes Park, the movement changed from a disparate, fragmented group of pesky—and at times dangerous—gadflies to a serious armed political challenge to the state itself.”62

Ron Howen later tried to prosecute Weaver and Harris. The jury, however, in what The New York Times called “a strong rebuke of force during an armed siege,” acquitted the two of all the serious charges: murder, conspiracy and aiding and abetting. They found Weaver guilty only of failing to appear in court and violating the terms of his bail.63 The Weaver family and Kevin Harris later filed a wrongful death and civil rights lawsuit against the federal government. On August 16, 1995, Attorney General Janet Reno announced that the Justice Department had reached a $3.1 million settlement with the Weavers. Yet the government, as customary in such cases, admitted no wrongdoing.64 Under a government probe, however, E. Michael Kahoe, who supervised the siege for the FBI, admitted shredding documents detailing the shoot-to-kill orders.65 Clearly the FBI and the BATF, under the Clinton administration, had overstepped their authority to such an extent that extremist warnings of a nascent police state began to seem credible. Tactically, the encounter furnished the far right with invaluable propaganda. Even so, just as the Weaver case was being tried, the BATF blundered again—with even more horrible consequences.

Second part of the video "Waco, the Big Lie" by Linda Thompson.

Waco

On April 19, 1993, the FBI and the BATF launched a concerted, paramilitary assault on a heavily armed and fortified compound in Waco, Texas. They used gas, tanks, and helicopters to incinerate and destroy a complex that belonged to the Branch Davidian religious group and had been under siege for 51 days. When the government ended the siege, they had killed Branch Davidian leader David Koresh and seventy-five of his followers. Of these, all but nineteen were women and children.66

Branch Davidians grew out of Victor Houteff’s Shepherd’s Rod Church in the 1960s. Shepherd’s Rod was a Seventh Day Adventist church; Adventists believe in the “Second Coming” of Jesus, which entails the fiery, apocalyptic destruction of the earth from which only true believers will be spared. After her husband and Branch Davidian founder, Ben Roden, died in 1978, Lois Roden became the new prophet, pronouncing that the Holy Spirit was female.67

David Koresh was born as Vernon Wayne Howell on August 17, 1959. He joined the Davidians in 1981, moving to the Mount Carmel Center. Howell became popular with the other Davidians and by 1984 began to emerge as the sect’s new spiritual leader. This led to a dispute with Lois Roden’s son George who ejected Howell from Mount Carmel. Many other Davidians followed him and set up a community on rental property in Palestine, Texas. In 1985 Howell visited Israel where he claimed to have a visitation from God who instructed him to study and to teach the prophecy of the Seven Seals from the Book of Revelations. During the same period, he also claims God told him to create a “House of David,” in which many wives would bear his children. His offspring would become the rulers of a new, purer world. Although the Davidians were apocalypticists, they were not racists like Christian Identity adherents; the congregation was racially and ethnically diverse.

After his mother’s death, George Roden challenged Howell’s leadership of the new group. He went so far as to dig up a coffin at Mount Vernon, daring Howell to raise the corpse inside from the dead. A gunfight resulted after Howell snuck onto the property to photograph the coffin. US District Judge Walter A. Smith sentenced Roden to six months in jail after Roden had threatened to infect him with herpes and AIDs. With Roden out of the way, Howell urged the country to put a lien on Mount Carmel for sixteen years of unpaid back taxes. By paying these off, Howell legally regained possession of Mount Carmel on March 22, 1988. In 1990 he changed his name to David Koresh, after the Old Testament King David and Cyrus, the Persian king who freed the Jews in Babylon.68

When Koresh declared in 1989 that God had commanded him to take the sect’s married women as his wives, follower Marc Breault became angry and left the group. In a 1990 affidavit he described Koresh as “power-hungry and abusive, bent on obtaining and exercising absolute power and authority over the group.” He took up the role of “a cult buster” and encouraged over a dozen Davidians to sign affidavits against Koresh. The charges included statutory rape, tax fraud, immigration violations, illegal weapons possession and child abuse. In 1991 Breault informed David Jewell that his young daughter Kiri would soon be eligible to become one of Koresh’s many wives. Jewell sued for custody in January 1992 and Jewell’s estranged wife surrendered the child voluntarily.69 In October of that year a Waco Herald-Tribune reporter contacted Assistant US. Attorney Bill Johnson about an exposé he was writing about Koresh, called “The Sinful Messiah.” It would detail the Davidian’s alleged child abuse and arms buildup.70

The BATF felt pressured to take action at Waco. On one hand, Jewell and the local media had raised charges of child abuse within the compound; on the other, due to charges of inefficiency, racism and sexism—not to mention the Ruby Ridge debacle, the BATF faced possible budget cuts and reorganization. Clear and decisive action at Waco might clear up both problems at once. Instead what resulted was a fifty-one-day siege that cost the lives of four BATF agents and that culminated in the death seventy-six Branch Davidians. As in the Ruby Ridge incident, the FBI failed to follow standard agency rules of engagement. Instead, after Davidians shot one marshal, agents received orders to shoot on sight. Reports suggest that although the Davidians were heavily armed, they would have complied with regularly served search warrants—as they indeed had done in the past. By beginning with a siege, the FBI and the BATF may have unnecessarily escalated the entire confrontation. FBI Director Louis J. Freeh later suspended Larry Potts and reprimanded dozens of other federal employees for the botched standoff at Ruby Ridge.71 Potts had overseen both Ruby Ridge and Waco. After this outcome, popular resentment ran deep. In a fund-raising letter, the otherwise mainstream NRA characterized BATF agents as “jack-booted government thugs” who wear “Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms.” That letter caused President George Bush to resign his NRA membership, stating, “Your broadside against federal agents deeply offends my own sense of decency and honor, and it offends my concept of service to my country.”72 In response to both Waco and Ruby Ridge, in October 1995 Janet Reno set forth new rules of engagement procedures for all federal law enforcement. These directives restrict the use of deadly force to a last resort and prohibit changes, even under extenuating circumstances.73

Right-wing propagandists were quick to exploit Waco—notably Linda Thompson. Calling herself “Assistant to the US Commanding General NATO” with a “Cosmic Top Secret/Atomal Security Clearance,” Thompson produced an inaccurate and misleading two-volume video set on the massacre called “Waco: the Big Lie.”74 Ironically, because of “race mixing” many of Thompson’s supporters would have otherwise targeted the Davidians themselves. White supremacist Timothy McVeigh nonetheless used Waco to justify the Oklahoma City bombing.

U.S. Air Force personnel from Tinker Air Force Base work alongside civilian firefighters to remove rubble from the explosion site of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, 1995. Photo: Staff Sergeant Mark A. More/Wikimedia Commons

Oklahoma City

On April 19, 1995, a truck bomb exploded at Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 people and wounding about 500 others. As for loss of life and sheer destruction, this was by far the worst terrorist action in US history to date. Nineteen of the victims were children, most from the building’s day care center. In the wake of the World Trade Center bombing, the Clinton administration was quick to blame Arab terrorists, but then had to retract this accusation as it became clear the perpetrators were, after all, American. As in The Turner Diaries, the bomb consisted of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil; the target was a building used by the FBI. One Aryan Nations group had already targeted the Murrah building in 1983. A key member of that group, in fact, was Richard Wayne Snell, executed in Arkansas on the very day of the 1995 bombing.75 Before his death, Snell warned, “Look over your shoulder, justice is coming!”76

Shortly after the bombing, a state trooper stopped a yellow Mercury sixty miles outside Oklahoma City to check a missing license plate. He arrested the driver after finding a Glock semiautomatic pistol and a five-inch hunting knife inside the car. The driver turned out to be Timothy McVeigh, a twenty-seven-year-old veteran who had received a Bronze Star in operation Desert Storm. With an identification number from a mangled axle found in the wreckage, investigators soon linked McVeigh to the bombing. They traced the axle to a Ryder truck from Elliott’s Body Shop in Junction City, Kansas. Shop owner Eldon Elliott identified McVeigh as the man who had rented the truck on April 17. The FBI found McVeigh’s fingerprints on fertilizer receipts as well. Other evidence suggested that the brothers James and Terry Nichols may have been involved as well. Once in police custody, McVeigh said little, conducting himself like a prisoner of war.77

The radical right, in fact, had earmarked April 19 as a symbolic date. The Militia of Montana (MOM) called for a “national militia day” to commemorate not only Snell’s execution but also the Waco tragedy.78 Telephone records show that McVeigh called William Pierce’s unlisted telephone number in West Virginia one week before the bombing.79

McVeigh went to trial on April 24, 1997 in Denver, Colorado. Michael and Lori Fortier, the prosecution’s chief witnesses, recounted how McVeigh had diagrammed his plan on their kitchen floor with soup cans six months before the bombing. On June 3 the jury found McVeigh guilty of conspiracy, two bombing charges and eight counts of murder for the federal agents killed in the blast. During the penalty phase of the trial, McVeigh’s defense team changed its tactics. Instead of insisting on McVeigh’s innocence, they stressed his outrage at the Waco massacre, as a justification for taking 168 lives. Morris Dees, however, disputes the far right’s putative “eye for an eye” logic:

The fact that lives were lost during both the Waco debacle and the Weaver incident does not make those tragedies morally equivalent to the Oklahoma City bombing as the militias have suggested. Viewing the Waco incident from the perspective of the government’s complicity, the deaths were by accident. Viewing the Oklahoma City disaster from the perspective of the bomber’s responsibility, the deaths were by design. And even if one were to buy the thoroughly discredited militia line that the government started the blaze that engulfed the Davidians, a crucial distinction would still remain. The FBI pleaded with Koresh and the Davidians to come out of their compound for fifty-one days. The Oklahoma City bombers struck without warning.80

McVeigh received the death penalty on June 13. He remained stoic as he heard the verdict and, leaving the courtroom, flashed the “victory sign” to his family. He was executed on June 11, 2001. Terry Nichols went to federal trial on September 29, 1997. Unlike McVeigh who received a sentence of life imprisonment after the jury deadlocked on the death penalty. For this reason, Nichols was tried again by the state of Oklahoma—which had declined to prosecute McVeigh—in 2004. That jury also balked during the death penalty phase and, for 161 counts of murder, Nichols received an equal number of consecutive life sentences without possibility of parole.

Armed militia member portrayed as patrolling the U.S. border.

The Militia Movement

Before the Oklahoma City bombing, few Americans knew of the militia movement. Suddenly, Ted Koppel’s Nightline, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Time magazine all featured stories about it. For the first time, the mainstream public heard eccentric figures clad in camouflage gear warn of black helicopters, an invading strike force of Nepalese Gurkhas, secret tracking devices installed in their car ignitions, and the construction of massive crematoria in Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Kansas City and Oklahoma City. All of this was supposedly the work of a global secret government that had even orchestrated the Oklahoma City bombing as a pretext to crack down on Patriot groups. Richard Abanes assessed the movement shortly thereafter:

This loosely knit network of perhaps 5 to 12 million people may be one of the most diverse movements our nation has ever seen. Within its ranks are college students, the unemployed, farmers, manual laborers, professionals, law enforcement personnel and members of the military….Interesting, patriots have no single leader. The glue binding them together is a noxious compound of four ingredients: (1)an obsessive suspicion of the government; (2) belief in anti-government conspiracies; (3) a deep-seated hatred for government officials; and (4) a feeling that the United States Constitution…has been discarded by Washington bureaucrats.81

Reporters have described the militia trend as paranoid. It is largely an expression of middle-class rage—not of the broad middle class itself, only a tiny, disaffected extreme. Since the onset of the Reagan Revolution, .5 percent of the population has consolidated its hold over almost 40 percent of total national assets. With the gap between rich and poor turning into a gulf, the middle class has seen its incomes shrink and its prospects for a higher standard of living disappear. It is further enraged by economic agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the Mexican “bailout.” It views gun control and environmental restrictions as government “meddling” in their private affairs. Many militia members are “weekend warriors” who simply enjoy dressing up and marching around; others, of course, fully intend to use their weapons.82

Robert DePugh’s Minutemen, formed in the early 1960s, were the first contemporary, paramilitary group. Nonetheless, it was Ruby Ridge which gave birth to a national militia movement. During the standoff, sympathizers and local citizens had gathered outside the Weaver property to protest the government’s handling of the case. The resulting negotiations threw Bo Gritz into the limelight; after the Weaver incident, his Specially Prepared Individuals for Key Events (SPIKE) program took on a bigger role in training militia groups. Meanwhile, Louis Beam introduced the idea of leaderless resistance at the Rocky Mountain Rendezvous in Colorado. Beam argued that the patriot movement imitate “the communists”; it should discard traditional, military “pyramid structure” in favor of small, independent cells, impervious to infiltration by federal agents.83 Other protesters formed the United Citizens for Justice in October 1992 to protect citizens from “overzealous government.” That organization soon fizzled, but one member, Randy Trochmann, moved back to Noxon, Montana to form the Militia of Montana (MOM) with his father, Dave, and his uncle, John. The Trochmanns all have ties to Christian Identity. Unlike other militia groups, MOM concentrates on publishing training and propaganda material.84 Its titles include the M.O.D. Manual (a home guide to guerilla warfare), The Road Back (reclaiming America from the New World Order) and the instructional video Invasion and Betrayal (a survey of New World Order conspiracies). MOM members have had armed encounters with local police, but their primary significancy has been to spread the “militia gospel.”85

The Michigan Militia, founded by Norman Olson and Ray Southwell, is one of the movement’s best known. Six months after it was founded in 1994, brigades had sprung up in sixty-three of the state’s eighty-three counties. National attention focused on the Michigan Militia when investigators learned that suspects in the Oklahoma City bombing may have attended the group’s meetings. University of Michigan janitor Mark Koernke (“Mark from Michigan”) is the militia’s chief propagandist. He inveighs against the Federal Management Agency (FEMA) as a wing of the “shadow government” and has produced a two-hour video America in Peril: a Call to Arms that outlines the whole gamut of current conspiracy theories. In keeping with “need to know” tactics, most other militia groups prefer to operate in relative secrecy. Daniel Junas described how militia ideology differs from region to region in Covert Action Quarterly:

the militias vary in membership and ideology. In the East, they appear closer to the John Birch Society. In New Hampshire, for example, the 15-member Constitution Defense Militia reportedly embraces garden variety U.N. conspiracy fantasies and lobbies against gun control measures. In the Midwest, some militias have close ties to the Christian right, particularly the radical wing of the anti-abortion movement. In Wisconsin, Matthew Trewhella, leader of Missionaries to the Preborn, has organized paramilitary training sessions for his church members.86

Claiming that the New World Order controls 50 percent of the United States, US Representative Helen Chenoweth (Idaho) has lent official credence to such otherwise crackpot theories. In line with so-called Wise Use doctrine she also declared “spiritual war” on environmentalism and introduced a bill requiring all arms-bearing federal agents to obtain permission from local sheriffs before entering a state.87 Tactical anti-environmentalism began in Catron County, New Mexico with the Country Rule program. Here, attorney James Catron succeeded in passing an ordinance that declared that the country government supersedes federal law, including such questions as whether cattle may graze on federal lands. With this precedent, some 100 more western counties have followed suit.88

The biggest militia confrontation to date came in March 1996 when members of a group calling itself the Montana Freemen planned to kidnap and execute a judge and a second government official. Previous Freeman actions had included tax resistance, counterfeiting and impersonating government officials. FBI agents intercepted two members who were bringing a truckload of weapons from North Carolina to a compound they called “Justus Township” near Jordon, Montana. After this, sixteen other members, lead by Russell Dean Landers, holed up in this community for what would become an 81-day siege, the longest in American history. During that time, a total of 633 agents worked in twelve-hour shifts with sometimes as many as 150 agents surrounding the compound. After Ruby Ridge and Waco, FBI director Louis J. Freeh had decided to exercise extreme caution. Only after seventy-one days, did the FBI cut electrical power to the compound. Some criticized the agency for wasting time and money, but this approach paid off on June 13 when the FBI ended the armed standoff with no loss of life. Freeh declared, “The message that comes out very clear to everybody—if you break the law, the United States government will enforce the law. It will do it fairly but firmly.” Attorneys Kirk Lyons and David Holloway from the CAUSE Foundation in North Carolina will represent the Freemen in court. The CAUSE Foundation calls itself a civil rights organization for right-wing activists. Randy Trochmann declared that the trial would provide an ideal platform for militia propaganda.

Although the federal government made egregious mistakes at the Ruby Ridge and Waco sieges, these were exceptions. Nonetheless, the far right has aggressively exploited these events, turning its criminals into heroes. This might tempt Americans to forget that law enforcement officials have routinely risked and lost their lives to keep otherwise unregulated paramilitary groups in check. No one has turned the dead BATF or FBI agents into martyrs. Morris Dees notes that no other country in the world tolerates private armies that build bombs and train with assault weapons; local police seldom enforce state laws that forbid these armies.89 Moreover, he warns of a racist component in the tolerance extended to these groups:

It would be interesting to see the reaction of the state attorneys general if the militia groups operating today were all located near large metropolitan cities like Detroit and Philadelphia, and were comprised only of blacks. If law enforcement’s violent reaction to the Black Panthers of the 1960s is any example, I seriously doubt if black militia units training with assault weapons, distributing recipes for building bomb, and preaching hatred for the government would be tolerated.90

Any analysis of the constitutionality of the militia movement entails two questions: i) the right to bear arms and ii) the right to form private militias. While the constitutional right to bear arms is unclear and subject to debate, the Constitution expressly prohibits forming private militias. A militia may consist of the citizenry at large, just as the patriot movement claims. It fails to note, however, that only Congress can call up a militia, which, in turn, remains subject to government regulation:

Private citizens cannot simply band together, saying “Okay, we’re a militia. We’re here to protect our rights against what we believe is a tyrannical federal government.” The militias of today’s patriot movement are functioning outside constitutional boundaries. They are unconstitutional militias. The Constitution stipulates, “Congress shall have the power…To provide for calling forth the militia…To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia…reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of officers, and the authority of training the militia.91

Alarmed by the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, the Clinton administration tried to pass the Omnibus Counter-Terrorism Act of 1995. It intended this legislation to allow the FBI more leeway to collect information and to conduct surveillance without prior court authorization. The act did not pass. Appearing before the Senate, Morris Dees advised lawmakers simply to enforce existing laws; the FBI did not need such sweeping powers. Most important, Dees reminded his audience, although they should never accept misconduct by federal law enforcement agencies, they should never take effective law enforcement for granted. It forgets that even before Ruby Ridge the government had peacefully resolved dozens of standoffs. Since then, it acknowledged its mistakes and has taken steps to insure that they will not happen again.

Tea Party protest at the National Mall on September 12, 2009. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0

Afterword

The Clinton Administration’s decision to limit deadly force significantly helped defuse the militia movement in the short term. The long-range impetus behind the militias waned for other reasons as well. The first, and most obvious, is that overturning the Federal government was never an achievable goal from the outset. However much ideological heat can be produced by stoking such fantasies could never drive a full-blown, right-wing revolution. Second, the logic of globalization, once so tempting for extremists to condemn as a conspiracy, has inexorably come to be accepted as part of twenty-first century social reality. Nonetheless, the extremist right continues to exert a disproportionately large ideological influence both domestically and internationally, though no longer in the form of an underground movement. The Tea Party represents the most recent expression of its disaffection, the roots of which can be traced back to the ongoing decimation of the middle class and the economic and social dislocation wrought be global capitalism. The progressive left has responded to these conditions as well, most notably through the Occupy Movement, which re-asserts the principle of communal public space and property against the logic of ongoing privatization. It is notable that how wealth is allocated is what fundamentally moves the populist right and left. Domestically, an ever-smaller elite lays claim to ever-more profits. Internationally, the distribution capital is beginning to include Third World economies rising out of the conditions of neo-colonialism. These are the underlying conditions of the Great Recession of the 2000s, which has so dramatically reduced the size and political clout of the middle class. The mandate, then, for the Tea Party has become to transform government, not overthrow it. It casts the proposed transformation as returning to the values of the founding fathers, even when such proposals blatantly contradict fundamental Constitutional principles. Embedded in the idea of such a return is the assumption that this will lead to a restoration of a once vibrant middle class. For example, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s recent assessment of John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech to Baptist ministers in Houston, a speech that reaffirmed Constitutional separation of church and state is one such “return.” Santorum said the Kennedy’s speech made him want to “throw up.” What is perhaps most alarming in this is, apart from its vehemence, that it signals a perceived feasibility of merging church and state. For the immediate future it seems that the battle over such issues will be waged by debate within the ranks of the Republican Party – and not with weapons from remote and isolated survivalist compounds.

×

John Miller is an artist and writer based in New York and Berlin. He received the Wolfgang Hahn Prize in 2011 and teaches in Barnard College's Art History Department as a Professor of Professional Practice. JRP/Ringier will publish a new selection of his writing, titled The Ruin of Exchange, in March.

© 2012 e-flux and the author

1. “Too Young to be a Hippy, Too Old to be a Punk (Discussion with Mike Kelley),” Be Magazin, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, vol. 1, no. 1, 1994, 119–123.

2. James Wickstrom, The American Farmer: 20th Century Slave (1978) quoted in Richard Abanes, “Oh, What a Tangled Web,” America’s Militias: Rebellion, Racism, Religion (Downers Grove: Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 1996), 171. (Hereafter abbreviated AM.)

3. Carol Moore, “The BATF’s Ruthless Raid Plan,” The Davidian Massacre: Disturbing Questions About Waco Which Must Be Answered(Franklin, Tennessee and Springfield, Virginia: Legacy Communications and the Gun Owners Foundation, 1995), 99. (Hereafter abbreviated DM.) Moore further points out that the Posse Comitatus Act has been recently amended to sanction non-reimbursable US. military and National Guard support of civilian police in counter-drug operations.

4. James Coates, “Posse Comitatus,” Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist Right (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988),105. (Hereafter abbreviated AD.)

5. Lyman Tower Sargent, “Posse Comitatus,” Extremism in America: A Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 343-44.

6. Ibid, 343.

7. Morris Dees with James Corcoran, Gathering Storm” American’s Militia Threat (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 10. (Hereafter abbreviated GS)

8. Catherine McNicol Stock, “The Politics of Producerism,” Rural Radicals: righteous rage in the American grain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 18.

9. As a southerner, Jefferson naturally opposed the Federalists (Hamilton, Madison et al.) who, playing upon anti-Catholic sentiments, in turn disparaged his close ties with France. Jefferson, however, viewed immigration as a threat to American democracy.

10. Stock, “The Politics of Producerism,” 15-86.

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Dees and Corcoran, GS, 11.

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Coates, “The Politics of Hatred,” AD,197.

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Coates, “Posse Comitatus,” AD, 111.

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Ibid, 118.

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Ibid, 112-13.

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Ibid, 112-15.

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Ibid, 116.

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Abanes, “Misinformation Specialists,” AM, 118.

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James Ridgeway, “Posse Country,” Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads and the Rise of a New White Culture (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1995), 138-42. (Hereafter abbreviated BlF)

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Coates, “Posse Comitatus,” AD 104-09.

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Coates, “Posse Comitatus” and “The Compound Dwellers,” AD, 120-6.

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Coates, “The Compound Dwellers,” AD, 121;132.

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William L. Pierce, “The Lesson of Desert Storm,” Extremism in America, 187

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Coates, “The Order,” AD, 48.

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Lyle Stuart, “Introduction by the Publisher,” William Pierce (as Andrew McDonald) The Turner Diaries: A Novel (New York: Barricade Books, 1996) unpaginated.

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Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, “Establishing the White American Bastion,” The Silent Brotherhood: The Chilling Inside Story of America’s Violent, Anti-Government, Militia Movement (New York: Signet, 1990), 105-06. (Subsequent chapter references are followed by the abbreviation SB. )

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David Bennett, “Reshaping of the New Right, Rise of the Militia Movement,” The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the MilitiaMovement, (New York: Vintage, 1995), 419. (Hereafter abbreviated PF.)

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Pierce (as MacDonald) The Turner Diaries, 43.

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Ibid, 45.

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Ibid, 63.

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William L Pierce, “A Program for Survival,” Extremism in America, 176-182.

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Flynn and Gerhardt, “Enter the Zionist Occupation Government,” SB, 174.

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Mormons believe that women’s sacred calling is to provide physical bodies for God’s spiritual children and that the second coming of Christ is near. In preparation for the millennium, like the survivalists, they stockpile food and other provisions.

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Flynn and Gerhardt, “Robbie, the All-American Boy,” SB, 27-57.

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Ibid, “Establishing the White American Bastion,” SB,105-127.

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Ibid, “The Turn to Crime,” SB, 128-167.

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Ibid, “Enter the Zionist Occupation Government,” SB, 203-208.

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Dees had founded the Southern Poverty Center’s Klanwatch Project. Through Klanwatch, he effectively used the criminal justice system to battling racism. In 1981 he obtained a court order to stop Louis Beam’s Texas Emergency Reserve from harassing Vietnamese immigrant fishermen in Galveston Bay. In 1984 he sued Glen Miller’s Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which led to the dissolution of that group. Miller, in the end, turned state’s evidence. In 1986 he obtained a $7 million judgment against the United Klans of America for lynching a black college student in Mobile, Alabama. This put the group out of business. In 1987, he bankrupted Georgia’s Invisible Empire with a $12.5 million court judgment. In 1989 he won a class action lawsuit against Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance group for their part in the beating death of an Ethiopian immigrant in Portland, Oregon. This, too, bankrupted the organization. See Dees and Corcoran, “The Seditionist,” GS, 37-41 and “Recipe for Disaster,” GS, 98-103. Celebrity TV producer, Norman Lear, is best known for his character Archie Bunker, who epitomized bigotry as ignorance. Lear also founded a liberal lobby group with a conservative-sounding name: the American Family Foundation.

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Flynn and Gerhardt, “Alan Berg: the Man You Love to Hate,” SB, 233-250.

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Ibid,“Brink’s and the $3,800,000 War Chest,” SB, 255.

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Ibid,” 271-290; “Survivalism: the Man Who Ate the Dog,” SB, 291-6.

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Ibid, 349.

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Ibid,“Judas Arrives on American Airlines,” SB, 379.

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Ibid, “Survivalism: the Man Who Ate the Dog,” SB, 348-9.

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Ibid, 354-55

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Ibid, “Blood, Soil and Honor,” SB, 407-449.

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Ibid, “Blood, Soil and Honor,” SB, 407-449.

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Ibid, “Epilogue: Blood Will Flow,” SB, 450-51.

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Ibid, 469-70

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Former Green Beret Frazier Glenn Miller is the onetime leader of the Confederate Knights and the White Patriot Party. He was present at the Greensboro slayings of communist anti-Klan demonstrators in 1979 and ran for governor of North Carolina in 1984. That same year, attorney Morris Dees succeeded in barring Miller from further paramilitary organizing through a North Carolina civil suit. This effectively brought an end to his Confederate Knights. Miller went underground and declared war on ZOG. After his May 1987 capture, he turned state’s evidence and received a reduced sentence of five years in prison. See Flynn and Gerhardt, “Enter the Zionist Occupation Government, SB, 203-3 and “Epilogue: Blood Will Flow,” SB, 467. The minister James Ellison began the CSA as the Zarephath-Horeb Church near Bull Shoals, Arkansas. During the 1970s, Ellison took on a survivalist orientation and embraced Christian Identity theology. He set up a survivalist training center that included an obstacle course and Silhouette City, an urban mockup for street warfare. Randall Rader, later a key member of the Order, had been Ellison’s “defense minister.” By the early 1980s Ellison grew more extreme and more erratic. He declared himself to be “King James of the Ozarks” (tracing his lineage back to King David) and proclaimed that theft (from non-Identity people) and polygamy were sanctioned by the Lord. This, coupled with extreme poverty within the CSA compound, led to a general exodus by 1983. Order members Richard Scutari, Ardie McBreaty and Andy Barnhill also had CSA connections. See Flynn and Gerhardt, “Survivalism: the Man Who Ate the Dog,” SB, 304-308. The FBI laid siege to the CSA compound in April 1985 and Ellison was convicted of racketeering that same year. See Flynn and Gerhardt, “Epilogue: Blood Will Flow,” SB, 464.

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US federal law prohibits the sale of shotguns with barrels less than eighteen inches long, except where special permits have been granted.

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Alan Bock, “The Weavers’ Road to Ruby Ridge,” Ambush at Ruby Ridge (Irvine: Dickens Press, 1995), 52-3. Subsequent chapter references followed by the abbreviation ARR.

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Ibid, 55.

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Bock, “August 21-22, 1992: The Siege,” ARR, 7-9.

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Ibid, 12-13.

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Ibid, 20-21.

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Ibid, “The Standoff,” ARR, 101-10.

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Ibid,, “The Aftermath,” ARR, 240.

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Larry Pratt is the executive director of both Gun Owners of America and the Committee to Protect the Family Foundation (the anti-abortion group which raised funds to protect Randall Terry). He is also founder of English First, a lobby opposed to bilingual education. Dees and Corcoran, “Rocky Mountain Rendezvous,” GS, 54.

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Ibid, 53.

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Ibid.

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Ibid, 69.

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Bock, “The Lawyers Close, The Jury Decides,” ARR, 227.

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Ibid, “Update and Postscript,” ARR, 308.

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Abanes, “The Saga of Ruby Ridge,” 49.

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Moore, “Why the BATF and the FBI Massacred the Branch Davidians,” DM, 1-4.

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Ibid, 14-15.

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Ibid, 14-21.

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Ibid, 19-21.

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Ibid, 39-40

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Bennett, “Reshaping of the New Right, Rise of the Militia Movement,” PF, 449.

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Dees and Corcoran, “Bonds of Trust,” GS, 197.

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Abanes, “The Saga of Ruby Ridge,” AM, 48.

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Bennett, “Reshaping of the New Right, Rise of the Militia Movement,” PF, 457-59.

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Ridgeway, “Introduction to the 1995 Edition,” BlF, 20.

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Bennett, “Reshaping of the New Right, Rise of the Militia Movement,” PF, 440.

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Ridgeway, “Introduction to the 1995 Edition,” BlF, 9-10.

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Dees and Corcoran, “Winds of Rage,” GS, 135.

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Ibid, “The Almost Perfect Soldier,” GS, 165.

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Dees and Corcoran, “Bonds of Trust,” GS, 197.

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Abanes, “Introduction,” AM, 2.

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Bennett, “Reshaping of the New Right, Rise of the Militia Movement,” PF, 446.

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Ibid, 440-41

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Bock, “The Aftermath,” ARR, 240-241.

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Bennett, “Reshaping of the New Right, Rise of the Militia Movement,” PF, 450-451,

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Daniel Junas, “The Rise of the Militias,” Covert Action Quarterly, April 24, 1995 See →.

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Bennett, “Reshaping of the New Right, Rise of the Militia Movement,” PF, 468-469.

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Junas, “The Rise of the Militias.”

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Dees and Corcoran, “Bonds of Trust,” GS, 188.

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Ibid, “The Last Best Hope,” GS, 224-225.

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Abanes, “Guns, Government and Glory,” AM, 68.

Source: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/35/68410/politics-of-hate-in-the-usa-part-iii-posse-comitatus-grassroots-rebellion-and-secret-societies/

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Connecting constraints: According to Google: If the main function of your material is to drive individuals off of YouTube and onto an additional website, it will likely violate our spam policies". Almost everywhere we transform online, we are all inundated with a lot information therefore many individuals wanting our attention in all times.|Starting an affiliate business online entails concentrating on 3 critical yet easy areas in order for your launch to be effective. Doing this assists draw in consumers and increases your possibilities of getting them to visit the website and also not just watch its material, however possibly avail of the services and products offered. They commonly come to be pupils of online marketing by default, yet as their commission checks expand, they find brand-new ways to promote even more services as well as items.|Affiliate advertising school is a wonderful tool available that few individuals understand about. The high quality as well as significance of the product itself exceeds just what affiliate program powers the sales process. 2) Pay Per Each Effectiveness: In this sort of approach, the vendor pays the affiliate only when his referral converts into a motion that is each time the client is really bye the something in the vendor's.|Our worldwide affiliate advertising network encourages advertisers and also publishers of all dimensions to grow their businesses online. Concerning taking part in the ebay.com Partner Network in addition to various other affiliate programs. After picking up to 2-3 products, locate its demands whether its a warm product or otherwise and if people are looking online for this. 1. Rather than a sales pressure of 1 or 2 people, by using Associate Advertising and marketing a vendor could have a sales force of thousands or more.|Associate marketing is one branch of the net earnings tree. Easy Search Engine Optimization (often): Videos show up in 55% of keyword searches on Google 82% of these video clips are from YouTube. I locate they will advertise my items over others a lot more conveniently. The hardest feature of affiliate marketing is knowing ways to get started and exactly what are the most effective products and companies to work with; to ensure that's specifically what I'm mosting likely to educate you ways to do.|You may have heard or been associated with a recurring earnings service chance in some way. An affiliate marketing expert has to pre-sell the products. So if getting started in affiliate marketing want to promote numerous affiliate programs in your site, make sure that they jive with the style and also subject of the rest of the material on your particular niche. There are a lot of dependable as well as trustworthy firms that supply affiliate advertising programs with on-line residual income opportunities.|If you've been to the Clickbank website and also have investigated a book you would love to promote, you might have seen nearly all of the author programs have an affiliate assistance web page. Misconception: The even more affiliate programs I have, the better. The Business's exchanges located in Europe as well as the USA trade equities, futures, choices, fixed-income, as well as exchange-traded products. In affiliate advertising and marketing, you're either a Vendor, someone who has items to market, or and also Associate, somebody who wishes to promote another person's things.|You may locate that joint endeavors as well as associate advertising are used nearly mutually in the advertising and marketing industry if you've started looking into the globe of JV advertising and marketing. 2. Many conventional retail organisations are called for to maintain significant stocks of the items that they offer. 4. On-line programs or software program that can now be used to check statistics, current fads and also client needs at no cost whatsoever.|Affiliate advertising is a program that offers great loan making possibilities to all involved. For a brand-new website proprietor or blogger, Google AdSense is the most convenient method making cash online. You'll spend the large majority of your time WRITING if you adhere to the tested approaches I have actually utilized to construct my associate advertising business.|In today's cordless world, it's less complicated compared to ever before to release an Internet-based service. It appears so basic at first to establish your Clickbank associate advertisement links and also banners on your site or blog site, but unless your normal readers or site visitors desire exactly what you are marketing, it is hard to obtain any earnings on your own.|Nowadays, the Internet has actually gotten an extraordinary globally appeal, thanks especially to the thousands of lucrative opportunities that cyberspace offers. Advertise that item on your internet site, Blog site or any kind of Social Media Network (NOTE: Facebook does not enable you to post your associate link directly. Many very associates make six numbers merely advertising the products and services of others. One of the fastest methods to make loan online with simply a very little financial investment is running your own associate service.|Do not think him if someone tells you that you can not make cash anymore on affiliate advertising. For the seller's side, a lot of cash could be conserved if advertising and marketing initiative is focused on affiliate advertising and marketing instead of on handling advertising firms. Blog writing is not the very best option for those who remain in search of fast and also instant earnings, it could use a lot of economic flexibility with time with hard word.|New Delhi India, Apr Easy Blogs R Us is passionate about aiding on the internet marketers as well as various other bloggers learn, save money and time, and most importantly, do well. Some instance of being a reseller consist of joining an affiliate program, taking part in pay per head program and beginning a white tag firm.|You probably understand exactly what affiliate advertising is about, why entrepreneur use it and just how it has actually aided a lot of on the internet service. Where many individuals stumble, nevertheless, is in thinking that success in affiliate advertising is simple as well as fast. First, comprehend the distinction between specific associate programs as well as affiliate networks. No unwanted advertising of affiliate programs.|Throughout the coming weeks, I am mosting likely to completely cover the details of generating income online with associate programs. Talking about the brand-new bargains penciled by his company Give Johnson, Chief Executive Officer of Esports Amusement Group claimed: The enhancement of these ten eSports groups to our associate program, in addition to the 26 revealed over the past month, is yet one more significant milestone for the Company.|Just recently some affiliate programs made a decision to cancel their organization with particular states because of a suggested state sales tax obligation on associate commissions. There are no costs certifications as well as this program is open to all clients despite how they pay. As an Amazon.com affiliate you have hundreds of products to pick from because Amazon is so big it continuously includes new products every day.|Affiliate Advertising and marketing is among the Legit online jobs readily available today. An associate marketing training program will certainly also teach you reliable approaches of marketing such as search engine optimization, advertisement words, designing an eye-catching site and even more. Our services could provide you with image banners, in addition to message web links, which you could subsequently supply to those associated with your associate advertising program.|They have no understanding about the products they advertise. They begin their business via affiliate programs as a result of two vital reasons: it's easy to establish and it is totally totally free to establish as well as run. If so, that is fine, as long as the associate programs belong to, or come from the exact same particular niche.|Multi level marketing and also affiliate advertising are 2 of the very best methods to earn cash online today. The issue of web traffic is one of one of the most main and essential issues in making any type of cash online. Make an additional list of items that you can promote for every passion on the checklist. Extra traffic ways much more eyeballs and also therefore more individuals who will possibly acquire the product( s) you advertise. By spending for clicks with Google as well as Overture, you'll have the top three positions on the online search engine that matter one of the most. The best part is, ANYBODY, despite their experience, understanding as well as computer abilities, could begin a rewarding online business from house. Some marketers run their own associate programs. Adeel Chowdhry is a popular net marketing professional that has actually verified his success with online business, being considered as among one of the most extremely paid digital consultants online. Exactly, you must market other individuals products. While a lot of individuals have the wrong idea regarding associate advertising, some points are true. With mobile check out, we are speeding up things up. Customers can check a product with the Macy's app, pay with a store credit card and afterwards most likely to a committed counter to get rid of safety and security tags. What's best for you depends upon your particular niche and also the products you want to advertise. This method is called content advertising and also it's the best way to be a successful affiliate online marketer. As the sector developed, material blog owners involved take a much more popular location in lots of programs. Lots of people link affiliate advertising with the selling of diet plan pills, teeth whiteners, and various other controversial items. Whether you write about way of life, travel, finance, household, style, DIY, anything, business, or food else, you have the ability to use whatever to your affiliate marketing technique. Associate advertising and marketing college will reveal you how you can achieve success online. Make certain it offers adequate payment per sale to make it worth your while once you do discover an item that people can as well as will buy online. While all of this was occurring, Chris Guillebeau was launching his latest item called the Realm Structure Set Among other things, it featured an email a day for a year as well as was developed in order to help you construct a service throughout that time. You could research associate marketing in no period; all you destitution to do is pay a few transactions of your example procurement it. Beyond of the coin, you do not reach take advantage of by yourself team of affiliates if you are in associate marketing. Blogs, sites, forums, email blasts, short article directory sites as well as social networking sites are great areas to market services and products.

While you could technically promote an on the internet course someone has actually developed and simply set up a straight earnings show to them, letting a network such as ClickBank or Compensation Junction manage the repayment and product delivery puts a more severe note on your associate advertising. Unlike a traditional service you do not have to open a store to sell items. All you need to do is to pre-sell the affiliate merchant's products and also hope that the individual you have reached would eventually buy from your affiliate link. It's the simplest as well as most convenient way of generating income online by earning commission with advertising and also advertising product and services of other organisations. After we established your account and establish ideal regards to solution for your affiliates, it's time to get imaginative as well as deliverables all set for your associates to make use of. This in-depth overview of the HBS MBA program includes comprehensive information on Harvard's educational program as well as case method of instruction, proving ground and experiential learning programs, school centers and also pupil clubs.

HoverBoards Take The Globe By Tornado

The History of HoverBoards Showing up on our screens in the 1980s, the hoverboard has been the dream of kids almost everywhere. Seeing Marty McFly float over a pond on a kids converted scooter triggered something in everyone, individuals began to consider it as possible. In 2015 (for actual), hoverboards do really exist! Lexus famously made a hoverboard for their advert, as part of an advertisement series to do with innovation. The various other hoverboard being functioned on (which in fact floats above the ground, anyway) is a bit much better, requiring just a metal skatepark to run above. The hoverboards I am referring to is the 2 rolled, self balancing kind. They wased initially seen at work at the Canton Fair in China, a preferred modern technology fair which has lots of brand-new and amazing gadgets being flaunted by their manufacturers/ creators. Granted, it obtained a great deal of focus, however plainly no-one rather knew what it was mosting likely to end up being. In the early months of 2015, they struck the Western world and blew up to popularity with a few clever item positionings. Justin Bieber and also Chris Brown were seen with the boards, et cetera is history! IO HAWK, one of the initial importers of the hoverboard, had actually sent a board or 2 to Justin as well as his clan totally absolutely free, which has actually because paid itself off rather well. Justin Bieber had one, so every person else had to. Normally, the viral nature of the Segway Board caused the popularity of it to escalate. It got on everybody who was any individual's snapchat story as well as Instagram web page. If you didn't have a hoverboard, you were lagging behind, which naturally suggested good ideas for the importers of the high popular, brief in supply individuals carriers. It was simple help them, getting them in the country was the hardest task they dealt with. As it was such easy benefit such a terrific gain, hoverboard sales internet sites and also pages sprung up anywhere. You can fill a dictionary with the names people were providing - Scoot Boards, SwayBoards, BalanceFoots as well as many commonly, hoverboards, in spite of the clear fact that the wheels of them are firmly planted to the ground. The factor the name hoverboard became it's given name is because of the really feeling an individual obtains when riding it, a 'floating' sensation. Where can I buy one? If you were to ask into every vendor of hoverboards you are in for a lengthy night! In fact, every board is the very same. You need to aim to get as close to $300 as you can for the basic hoverboard, any kind of lower it is feasible you are being scammed (especially listed below $250) and any greater you are paying also much! The best outcomes I have actually had is with seller comparison sites, as they check out all the costs as well as safety and security of the hoverboard vendors, making sure the area is relied on and also safe as well as looking out for the very best bargains. My suggestion is this most inexpensive hoverboards finder, as they have strong social media sites visibility on Twitter and also Instagram with a lot of history. A lot of their web links go to Amazon sellers, which are exceptionally well trusted. You could buy boards on there for as low as $300 as well as they have great deals of various designs to choose from.

In the event you Thought You Missed The Web Profit Revolution Strive CryptoCurrency

There is a big economic storm that is coming to a breaking point, and other people holding on to dollar associated belongings are going to endure the lack of monetary security. Until you want to be a dinosaur, you must convert all your assets to the Bitcoins, Ethereums, and comparable coins. 6. Use sensible mining(mechanically mine currency that has the best trade charge last hours) or select cryptocurrency that you just wish to mine and assign thread(relies upon on your cpu energy) then begin. Mr. Pouliot acknowledged the variety of fascinated parties doubling over the course of the final week, resulting in the utility presently contemplating 70 potential mining initiatives. That quantity is measured in Quadrillions! Champagne corks did not pop and there have been no fireworks but there was a smile and a pat on my own back as this was a major milestone for this self-confessed procrastinator. Hold on right there! Shopping for Gold and Silver Coins proper now may very well be the very best decision you ever make during this economic meltdown. Writer: EagleNationalMint Ancient Coins, including gold coins and bronze and silver, continue to rise in popularity with collectors.

After you might have out leveled the Wrathguards, move on to Funggor Cavern. The excellent news is that making the decision to purchase is the hardest part - with that selection out of the way in which, now you might be nearer than ever to a new stage of financial security for yourself and your family. It's evidently very tempting to construct "protected senior tranches" of non-public curiosity-bearing debt to compete with these low-return barren property--a follow that sometimes gets out of hand--and with disastrous consequences. Right, now the kicker: these holdings imply larger, not lower, constructive correlations between Bitcoin and other asset courses in shock-experiencing markets. After benefiting from gross sales of graphics processors for mining Bitcoin, Superior Micro Units (AMD) and Nvidia (NVDA) are now seeing a lift from mining a unique cryptocurrency, Ethereum, funding financial institution Morgan Stanley mentioned Tuesday. In addition to lining the pockets of miners, mining serves a second and very important purpose: It's the one technique to release new cryptocurrency into circulation. Since Chinese officially retired from the cryptocurrency market, the forces or they goal Koreans. It is understood commonly as a cryptocurrency.

In precept, the Korean government regards trading cryptocurrency on the trade as unlawful. Hedging overseas exchange danger is dear--a value that's absent when the trade price is fastened. - Untraceable - Issuance of Bitcoin is not regulated by any government, so the risk of seizure is nil. Other cryptocurrencies are also attracting attention in India, but bitcoin is the pronounced chief with 68% of Indian respondents putting it first, when requested "Which cryptocurrencies have you learnt? Being "conservative" doesn’t as we speak embody any inclination to stability any finances (all of us comprehend it sport over already). If you do not know a lot in regards to the Numis community, you might be forgiven— in spite of everything this Multilevel marketing company is barely a yr outdated as I write this. To take this one step additional and perceive the markets from an excellent wider perspective, the following factor to do is to place in your market manipulator hat.

As all the time, all monthly publications of the Day by day Chronology of global Markets and World Economics are available from the hyperlinks in the margins of the K E Stone blog sites or simply looking on Amazon or Google. One could see that in the modern, digital world the banking business may begin to be seen as a typical provider. Bitcoin seems to be having a tough time as of late, shedding greater than ninety% of its worth since it's June peak; see right here (h/t Fernando Martin). Bitcoin has dominated the financial news cycle, however in the long term, this particularcryptocurrency is perhaps extra bark than bite. Bitcoin news show itself is one thing referred to as a "cryptocurrency," which implies that it's 100% digital and is protected and maintained by a very advanced set of military grade public key algorithms that require solving complex mathematical equations. Bitcoins are created as a reward for fee processing work in which customers offer their computing power to confirm and record funds into the public ledger. The doc is small and almost definitely would require further work. Every small and big trader will attempt to make cost by for saving their time and money.

If the demand for 'Bitcoin' will increase, then the value will even improve. The rule for both is that the entry route, on this case up, will be the same because the exit direction. In this article your self will perspective if your VPN marriage is busy. Given the importance of the subject material though, I felt it essential to share my perspective for those fascinated. What these two examples present is that if a unit of money has an identifiable history related to it, it can be 'completely different' from different items that don't share that historical past. For instance, in the case of the Federal Reserve, it has brought about the U.S. $12,201.67 at press time. 37. What's the time needed to confirm the transaction in GCC? This usually comes in form of transaction charges which can be either paid or burned. At the most basic stage, it's a record of information stored on a network of computer systems. Don't make random unsolicited and/or controversial feedback with the intent of baiting or provoking unsuspecting readers to engage in hostile arguments.

My Road to Pro: A guide to getting up and running with ArcGIS Pro in a ‘Redlands Minute’

Learning any new software can be a daunting task, especially in a field as technical as GIS – “With great power comes…. a certain level of complication.” After years of practice perfecting your workflows in ArcMap, initially hearing about Esri’s latest in GIS tech, ArcGIS Pro, may not have piqued your interest. However, over the past few years as more and more people have started using and evangelizing this new and improved desktop GIS, you may have found yourself, like many others, with a slightly altered opinion!

This blog post is meant for anyone wanting to get a jump start on their ‘migration to ArcGIS Pro.’ As you will soon realize upon embarking on this journey, ArcGIS Pro is intuitive and really easy to learn. Its context-driven UI (User Interface) is designed to streamline workflows and lower learning curves. Esri has also created a ton of tutorials and other training materials to enable you to take advantage of the benefits of Pro in no time.

Below is a summary of the steps I took to make the transition to ArcGIS Pro and some advice and resources I have accumulated over that time.

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My Background

When I began my internship here at Esri, on the ArcGIS Pro team, I had never actually used Pro before! As counterintuitive as that may seem, it was by design. As a Civil and Environmental Engineering student, I had quite a bit of experience with ArcMap – running geoprocessing tools and making, at least for a non-cartographer, relatively aesthetic maps. The team wanted me to come in and experience ‘the migration’ from ArcMap to ArcGIS Pro first-hand in order to gain insight on how to best help others make the transition.

You may not have the time to set a game plan on how to most efficiently convert your workflows but its ok, I did it for you! My experience was a little different because I didn’t have to postpone current work that clients depend on in order to learn the new program. However, I firmly believe that it is possible to set aside a couple hours a day (or week) to learn ArcGIS Pro and begin using this amazing software every day! You’d be surprised at how fast you can get into the groove of things if you do it the right way.

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It’s all About the Mindset!! 

As I stated above, before my internship I had done all of my coursework in ArcMap (and had my own struggles there), but I was super excited to start exploring this new and cutting edge software!  I couldn’t wait to begin.

A good attitude goes a long way when learning any new skill. If you are excited about the prospect of using Esri’s new technology to enable your work to reach new heights, you’ll make quick work of mastering Pro.

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At a Glance

Right when you open ArcGIS Pro, it looks like progress! It looks like a program that is technologically advanced and ready to greatly improve the quality of your work and optimize your workflows. And even though the UI is fairly different than ArcMap, it is familiar and intuitive with its context-driven tab and pane format, similar to other modern software that we all use and depend on. (I personally like the ‘Dark’ theme, which can be accessed through Options->General->Personalize)

Not letting the new layout scare you and damper your spirits is important! Don’t think too hard about it; let ArcGIS Pro do some of the thinking for you. Like I said, it really is intuitive and easy to figure out.

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Find the Balance

The method that I chose to ‘make the migration’ was a mixture of doing some basic tutorials and trial and error. My strategy with the basic tutorials was to quickly familiarize myself with the new layout and simple workflows, then use my own knowledge of ArcMap and general GIS to do the rest of the work. This to me seemed like the fastest way to get back to full GIS mode in ArcGIS Pro.

The hardest thing is finding a balance of the two. If you spend more time than you need on tutorials when you could have managed quicker on your own, you’re wasting time. On the other hand, spinning your wheels trying to figure out Pro all on your own isn’t effective either. That being said, I believe there is still great value in learning through experience – trial and error.

Taking a minute to evaluate your own ArcMap/GIS skills and general aptitude for technology and then making a plan on how to balance your learning will save you a lot of time and effort on your road to Pro.

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Start Simple

When you are first making the migration to Pro, especially if your main job is GIS and your employment depends upon your efficiency, start with the basics.  Most professionals that use GIS at least semi-regularly deal with a range of workflows. Some may be extremely complicated geoprocessing, and others simple data visualization.

Choose a few of your more simple workflows and replicate them in Pro. In no time you will quickly realize the power of Pro and transitioning to your more complicated workflows will be even easier.

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Resources

The ‘Get Started‘ tab from the ArcGIS Pro reference site is basically a one stop shop if you are using Pro for the first time.

Within the tab, I’d like to highlight:

About ArcGIS Pro (a quick overview of terminology and the UI)

For ArcMap users (includes adding mxds and common workflows)

ArcGIS Pro quick-start tutorials (I recommend going through at least a few of these. Most tutorials have a summary video at the beginning. Watching these short videos can often be enough to learn the material contained within the tutorial. Watch the videos in 1.5x and 2x the speed to go through them even faster!)

Frequently asked questions

The site offers even more than what is listed here. Take a few minutes to look through the learning tools and find out what would be most useful to your work specifically.

Besides these listed above, here are some other useful resources:

ArcGIS Pro Terminology Guide

Google it! There are a bunch of resources out there on GeoNet, the ArcGIS Pro reference site, and other sites. Googling is often the quickest way to find an answer to a specific question.

Learn ArcGIS (a good resource to learn the whole ArcGIS platform, of which ArcGIS Pro is a very important and well-integrated part.)

Esri Training Catalog (a great place to do even more tutorials of varying technicality – from Getting Started with ArcGIS Pro and Going Pro: ArcGIS Pro Essentials for ArcMap Users to Performing Line of Sight Analysis and Go Deeper with Data Analytics Using ArcGIS Pro and R)

Instructor-led courses (in person or web courses), such as Migrating from ArcMap to ArcGIS Pro, can also be found in the Esri Training catalog. If you are having a hard time following/learning from other tutorials or you really enjoy an interactive classroom type learning environment, Instructor-led courses are a great option. These classes go step-by-step through similar tutorials and workflows with an experienced GIS Instructor (either in person or online). You can ask them questions if you are stuck on a certain part or if you want deeper understanding for certain concepts. You can also network with other’s like yourself who are migrating to Pro and using the software in their particular field of work.

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For Your Consideration

I would advise anyone to do at least one ‘ArcGIS Pro quick-start tutorial‘ before learning Pro with a ‘trial and error’ plan. Due to the new Project->Maps organization, even the most basic task, ‘adding a basemap,’ is different. Doing one of the tutorials will insure that you don’t frustrate yourself with the simplest tasks.

ArcGIS Pro is available to anyone on current maintenance.

Mxds are readable by ArcGIS Pro but aprx files are not compatible with ArcMap. A good workaround for this is sharing a web map to AGOL, which is super easy to do in ArcGIS Pro, so your ‘non-Pro’ colleges and clients can still view your maps.

95% of the ArcMap tools are in ArcGIS Pro already (get the full list here). However, there are a lot of new and exciting tools in ArcGIS Pro that are not in ArcMap.

The ArcGIS Pro ‘Catalog View‘ is very similar to ‘ArcCatalog.’ With multiple instances of Pro and the ability to drag panes and views to other monitors you can already get a more traditional Catalog feel. Esri has been making improvements to the catalog pane and catalog view and will continue to do so to fulfill the traditional ArcCatalog workflow requirements.

The Going Pro: ArcGIS Pro Essentials for ArcMap Users live training seminar is also a great and free resource for quickly gaining your bearings in Pro.

With the 2.0 release of ArcGIS Pro we are even more confident that most, if not all, of your workflows are not only possible in ArcGIS Pro, but will be better and easier. Make sure to stay current with your version of Pro in order to get the best performance and functionality. Check the ‘ArcGIS Pro Roadmap‘ for functionality that will soon be implemented.

If you are considering starting the migration to ArcGIS Pro or transferring even more of your workflows, do it! And if you run into any problems that you can’t figure out, leave a comment below, or contact Esri Technical Support.

There are so many new possibilities enabled by ArcGIS Pro’s awesome technology. Continue to explore them and let us know about the cool things you are doing via any of our social media channels and the comments below.

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You’ll be a ‘Pro’ in no time – Happy Mapping!

-Tylor the ArcGIS Pro Intern

from ArcGIS Blog http://ift.tt/2vFkg1V

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Are there any excellent Windows 10 drugs to replace an antique Floor RT?

Microsoft released the Floor RT in 2012 when the pill market appeared promising. It turned into the primary pill to run Windows on an ARM chip, which furnished long battery life. It also made it incompatible with all of the conventional software written for Intel x86 versions of Windows, including viruses.

The Floor RT capsules included Microsoft Workplace, which was properly, however it wasn’t optimized for touch-display screen use, which changed into awful. Otherwise, users had to be content with Windows Store apps and internet-primarily based applications.

Whilst Floor RT customers cherished their machines, there had been not lots of them, and Microsoft deserted the ARM line in favor of the success Intel-based totally Surface Seasoned versions. However, ARM-primarily based variations will return to the market later this yr.

Rushing up a Computer Your wife’s Surface RT need to no longer have bogged down that lots, and a reset might pace it up again. To do this, take a backup of the cutting-edge system – or at the least, all of the private statistics – and repair it to manufacturing facility circumstance. Run the Settings app (cogwheel icon), choose Update & protection, click on Restoration and then hit the “Get commenced” button underneath “Reset this Laptop”.

Windows has a whole lot of visible consequences: as an example, things slide into view rather than instantly popping into view. To exchange this, kind in “superior gadget settings” to discover the gadget Homes sheet from the vintage Manage Panel. Inside the Overall performance segment, click the Settings button and then choose “Modify for first-class Overall performance”.

After that, go through the listing of results and repair any you continue to want. “Permit Peek”, “Show shadows underneath mouse pointer”, “Show window contents Whilst dragging” and “Smooth edges of display screen fonts” are really worth retaining.

Regrettably, the Surface RT is a sealed container, like maximum pills. You couldn’t get the easy development that works with a computer and a few laptop Computers: simply add RAM.

capsules and 2-in-1s The entire tablet market is in decline – Apple iPad sales are more or less half what they have been at their top – and manufacturers are transferring assets to AR (augmented reality, consisting of the Microsoft HoloLens) and VR (virtual truth, which includes the Oculus Rift). Home windows Pc manufacturers switched to 2-in-1s after which convertibles, where sales are nonetheless developing strongly.

Unfortunately, the higher merchandise is usually extra high priced, which include the Microsoft Floor Pro four, the HP Spectre x2, HP Elite x2, and Dell Range eleven 5175. There’s a big hole among Pro capsules and convertibles with Intel Middle processors, 8GB of reminiscence and right SSDs and the cheap, casual models with Intel Atom processors, 2GB of reminiscence and 32GB of eMMC Flash garage.

It can be difficult to discover lower priced machines In the “candy spot” between the 2 extremes. Those may also have Intel Middle M processors together with the Core m3-6Y30 and 4GB or 8GB of memory. The nice compromise is a Cherry Trail (x3, x5 or x7) Atom-powered system with 64GB of eMMC storage.

The main opportunity is the Asus Transformer Ebook T100HA, which has a Cherry Path x5-Z8500 processor, 2GB of reminiscence and both 32GB or 64GB of the garage. Presently, eBuyer has the 2GB/64GB model for £229.ninety seven with free shipping. The T100HA has been around for a while, and the Miix 310 has twice the reminiscence and a better keyboard.

In each instance, the electronics are in the back of the display screen, so you can detach the screen from the keyboard and use it as a tablet. (The virtual keyboard is built into Windows 10.) The alternative is to maintain the electronics under the keyboard and fit a 360-degree hinge. Folding the keyboard behind the display provides an incredibly thicker pill. The Lenovo Yoga variety pioneered this method, and your wife should have a examine one to see if the idea is appropriate. Yogas come in dozens of configurations however a Yoga 300 with an Intel Pentium N3710, 4GB of memory and 64GB of garage prices £279.99 from Computer World. The N3710 is quicker than the x5-Z8500, even though now not by means of a lot.

The Reality About Home windows

I can’t inform you how typically I have met with homeowners handiest to pay attention that they’d replaced all their Windows with electricity green Home windows and that they simply couldn’t understand why they weren’t saving any cash. The Fact is, each window manufacturer wishes you to agree with that placing more energy green Windows in your house goes to save you heaps of money. Well it’s not! You may argue with me all you need, however when you have ever heard Charlie Wing speak About unmarried pane Home windows you’ll recognise that you are not getting all the information you want to make an knowledgeable selection on upgrading the Windows in your home. So let’s talk a bit bit About why upgrading the Windows in your own home is one of the ultimate matters on my list of strength improvement pointers.

First matters first, they’re high-priced. Not often does a window substitute pay for itself earlier than the quiet of the useful existence of the window, that is regularly 20-25 years! If you have not studied my preceding blog publish About R-price I suggest you try this now earlier than you maintain with this article.

Home windows are just one a part of a device that we call the “envelope” of your home. The envelope includes partitions, Windows, doors, roof, and some form of flooring Within the manner of dirt, concrete, rock, or different basic fabric. According to the united states Branch of electricity, 14% of electricity goes thru the envelop of buildings.

Like every architect, I recognize the value of a Well-placed window that offers scale, dimension, light, and fashion to a constructing. All people crave mild and need so that you can see out from their houses. but replacing the double pane Windows you have on your property isn’t going to prevent the most cash, although they had been hooked up greater than 20 12 months in the past. The hardest aspect About power upgrades is that the stuff that makes the most important difference is constantly the belongings you cannot see.

There are two forms of heat loss. Air transported warmth loss (how drafty your home is) and Surface transported heat loss (how Properly insulated your home is). Windows truly fall into both classes. house owners regularly tell me they want to replace their Home windows due to the fact they may be drafty or antique. Well it could no longer be the window itself this is drafty, however the way it’s miles set up. the biggest distinction maximum homeowners see with a window replacement is Within the installation. Contractors at the moment are caulking across the Windows, reducing airflow, and growing a much tighter building envelope. We not stuff fiberglass around the shims in Windows due to the fact we know it just filters the air coming in, it would not forestall it. old single pane Home windows with counter weights are simply large open channels for outdoors air to enter the home. So if you have Windows with counter weights it’s to your first-rate hobby to replace them. If the window has failed and has condensation inner, it is first-rate to update it. however when you have double hung Home windows, in decent form, upgrading to more modern Windows ought to be the last item to your listing of home improvements.

The usual double pane window has an R-fee of two. A number of the pleasant, effectively to be had, Home windows available on the market have an R-cost of 5. This is excluding Windows particularly made for passive residence programs, which could have better R-values, but additionally have a good deal better fee tags. Windows are normally indexed in U-fee. U-cost is the inverse of R-fee and for the reason of the instance under we’re going to use Maine. Maine is placed in Zone 6, Inside the cutting-edge 2009 strength Code, adopted maximum places. The current requirement for new production Windows is U-0.35 or R- 2.9, infrequently better then the R-2 Windows you Currently have in your home, due to the fact they just do not make glass You could see out of that has high insulating Residences… yet.

let’s take a look at an example. If I had been to replace one three’ x five’ window, a reasonably not unusual length window, what will be the consequences? Let’s say the original window become a fashionable R-2 double pane window and I have decided to update it with a new triple pane R-5 window. Just for reference the primary warmness loss equation I used become (Vicinity X Heating degree Days X U-value X 24 hours a day). Without stepping into heating diploma days and what a British thermal unit (Btu) is, the facts I got out of the calculation turned into that it would use 9.ninety seven gallons of oil to warmness the prevailing window in Mid-coast Maine for 1 yr. it might use three.98 gallons of oil to heat the brand new window for 1 yr. And if you decided rather to improve your attic hatch, the usage of the equivalent 15 square feet, to an R-49, it’d use 0.38 gallons of oil according to year. At a mean of $three.50 consistent with gallon that would be $35 for the exiting window, $4 for the brand new window, or $1.34 for the attic hatch. And also you wonder why I throw in attic hatch? Nicely I bet, much like mine, yours does not have any insulation, isn’t always air sealed, and is either a chunk of plywood or sheetrock painted to look the same coloration because the relaxation of the ceiling and costing you $35 in keeping with 12 months to preserve warm rather than $1.34!

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