#And how that means living with a much smaller very conservative community with almost no large scale secular Jewish presence at ALL

[thegrandimago]

This time last April, on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, the world was coming to grips with the isolation of quarantine and the economic and travel slowdowns that defined the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. Even now, with the rollout of vaccines, the virus continues to affect our daily lives. And the toll keeps growing: 3 million dead and more than 140 million cases worldwide.

If anything, the worst public health crisis in a century has brought our understanding of our planet, and our place in the fragile yet resilient web of life throughout it, into stark relief.

Amid so much grief and loss and uncertainty, the biodiversity crisis paced ahead over the past year, becoming a much bigger theme on the world stage. The climate crisis worsened, too. Wildfires blazed. Ecosystems became even more fouled up than they already were.

At the same time, the marked reduction in human activity spurred by the pandemic — what some experts have dubbed the “Anthropause” — has afforded scientists and researchers opportunities to observe the natural world like never before. Coinciding with these unique observational windows has been an increase in attention on Indigenous knowledge and land stewardship as a way forward in combating ecological catastrophe.

In true Vox tradition, here are the 10 most concerning, intriguing, and — dare we say — hopeful things we learned about our planet since the last Earth Day.

1) We saw just how quickly ocean noise pollution can drop, and how much that can help marine life

For a moment last spring, things got very quiet in the oceans.

The drop in human activity that came with the pandemic resulted in drastic and voluntary sound reductions that ran the underwater gamut: from a drop in shipping noise, the predominant source of man-made ocean noise pollution, to decreases in recreation and tourism. All of it suddenly ceased.

In Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park, the foraging grounds of humpback whales, the loudest underwater sounds last May were less than half as loud as those in May 2018, according to a Cornell University analysis. A May 2020 paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America found that underwater noise off the Vancouver coast was half as loud in April as the loudest sounds recorded in the months preceding the shipping traffic slowdown.

Chronic underwater ocean noise had been rising over the past few decades, to the detriment of marine life that have evolved to use sound to navigate their world. “There is clear evidence that noise compromises hearing ability and induces physiological and behavioral changes in marine animals,” reads an assessment of marine noise pollution research published in the journal Science in February.

The majority of ocean noise pollution is a byproduct of economic activity. But compared with massively complex issues like climate change, noise is relatively easy to turn down, at least a little. Silencing it at its source has an immediate positive impact: Famously, researchers studying right whales on the East Coast measured a drop in the animals’ stress hormones in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, after shipping traffic abruptly dropped. Even tiny fish larvae are better able to locate the coral reefs where they were born, which themselves emit sound, when the oceans get quiet.

Man-made ocean noise has since ramped back up and is now stabilized near pre-pandemic levels. But it fell silent for long enough last March, April, and May that a global team of scientists is actively scrubbing through audio recordings gathered by around 230 non-military hydrophones — underwater microphones — that monitor ocean noise around the world. They aim to study the “year of the quiet ocean” in the context of ocean sounds before, during, and after the pandemic.

2) A new study found that the Amazon is likely warming — not cooling — the planet

The world’s largest and most species-rich tropical forest, the Amazon, is home to billions of trees that not only provide refuge to a diverse assemblage of organisms but also store and absorb a huge amount of carbon dioxide.

That’s what makes the conclusion of a study published this spring so alarming: Due to human activity, the Amazon is likely contributing to — not offsetting, as one might expect— global warming. “The current net biogeochemical effect of the Amazon Basin is most likely to warm the atmosphere,” the researchers wrote in the paper.

While the Amazon is still absorbing loads of CO2, human activities in the basin, such as deforestation, are driving up emissions of CO2 and other more potent greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide across the basin.

Deforestation, for one, deals a double punch: It both releases gases into the atmosphere and removes CO2-absorbing trees from the equation. That equation now sees the Amazon generating more greenhouse gases than it emits, the study suggests. (It’s worth noting, though, this is all really complicated. For more, check out Craig Welch’s story in National Geographic or read the full study here.)

3) We discovered a bunch of new species

While humans have made a mark on all corners of Earth, we’ve only discovered a small fraction of the species that occupy it. In fact, that fraction could be smaller than 1 percent. And remarkably, not all of those species are tiny microbes and insects. They’re also fish, lizards, bats, and even whales. That’s right: Even giant mammals can elude scientists.

In January, researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said they discovered a new species of baleen whale in the Gulf of Mexico. (You can find the paper describing the discovery here.) Other teams of scientists are also on the trail of what could be yet another new whale species.

Last year, researchers documented scores of new plants and animals, from geckos and sea slugs to flowering plants and sand dollars, as Vox’s Brian Resnick reported. Our favorite? Brookesia nana, a thumbnail-sized chameleon native to northern Madagascar. It may be the smallest reptile on Earth; it’s certainly the cutest.

4) We got a much clearer picture of just how much wildlife we’re losing

The numbers aren’t good.

In September, the World Wildlife Fund published a report showing that the global populations of several major animal groups, including mammals and birds, have declined by almost 70 percent in the last 50 years due to human activity.

A separate report, published in Nature this year, found that populations of ocean sharks and rays have plummeted by more than 70 percent in roughly the same period. And one-third of freshwater fish have been found to be at risk of extinction.

A number of species were also declared extinct over the last year. Those include the smooth handfish, a bottom-dweller that rests atop human-like appendages on the seafloor. It was the first marine fish species to be declared extinct in modern history. (Environmental journalist John Platt has a list of recent extinctions in 2020 at Scientific American.)

5) Protecting plants and animals hinges on a thriving ecotourism industry

In the early days of the pandemic, the popular “Nature is healing” meme overshadowed a darker reality in many parts of the world: As travel ground to a halt, so did revenue from wildlife tourism, putting some wildlife conservation efforts at risk.

The fallout was most severe in Africa. According to a new collection of research from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a government and civil society group, more than half of the continent’s protected areas had to pause or limit field patrols and other operations to stop poachers in the wake of the pandemic.

“Parks have emptied out to a large extent and there’s no money coming in,” Nigel Dudley, a co-author of one of the IUCN papers, told Reuters last month.

Some communities are deeply reliant on wildlife tourism. Late last year, Vox’s Brian Resnick spoke to veterinarian Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, who is working to keep coronavirus-susceptible gorillas alive in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park.

When tourism dropped, “everybody was struggling,” she said. “The local economy suffered and poaching went up.” (You can read more of Resnick’s conversation with her here.)

6) Researchers uncovered more proof that a key system of ocean currents is weakening

Graphics that show changes in ocean temperature over time generally reveal one trend: The ocean is heating up. But there’s one critical exception. Just below Greenland lies a large patch of water that’s cooling off. And that patch has scientists concerned that we could be nearing a tipping point for the climate.

The cold patch, scientists say, signals that a network of currents that bring warm water to the North Atlantic — known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC — is slowing down, and the melting of ice on Greenland is likely a culprit. One paper, published in the journal Nature in March, suggests that the current AMOC slowdown is “unprecedented in over a thousand years.”

The AMOC shapes weather across multiple continents, so any major slowdown will carry major consequences that could include faster sea-level rise in some regions, stronger hurricanes, and other changes in weather, to say nothing of the impacts to marine ecosystems.

But to be clear, the science on this is new and complex. For a great run-down, check out this recent visual feature in the New York Times.

7) The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs gave rise to the Amazon rainforest

The massive asteroid that struck Earth 66 million years ago may be best known for driving non-avian dinosaurs to extinction, but it also transformed entire ecosystems.

It may have even given rise to the Amazon rainforest, according to a study published in Science earlier this month. The finding is based on an analysis of about 50,000 fossil pollen records and 6,000 fossil leaf records in Colombia from before and after the asteroid crashed into what is now Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

The data reveals two vastly different forests. Before the event, the forests were stocked with conifers and ferns, and the trees were spread out, with plenty of room for light to stream through the canopy. After the asteroid event, however, flowering plants started to dominate the landscape and the canopy became much more tightly packed, resembling the forest we know today.

“If you returned to the day before the meteorite fall, the forest would have an open canopy with a lot of ferns, many conifers, and dinosaurs,” study co-author Carlos Jaramillo of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama told New Scientist. “The forest we have today is the product of one event 66 million years ago.”

The idea here is that the asteroid impact somehow triggered a series of events that led to the modern Amazon rainforest. What were those events? One theory the researchers offer is that, before the asteroid, herbivorous dinosaurs prevented the forest from becoming dense by eating and trampling plants.

8) A review of more than 300 studies showed that the rate of deforestation is lower on Indigenous lands

The global conservation movement is pushing forward a plan to conserve 30 percent of the Earth by 2030 — an initiative known as 30 by 30 — and increasingly calling for Indigenous communities to be central to that effort.

These groups have historically been uprooted from land in the name of wildlife conservation. There is also greater evidence that forests fare better when they are governed by Indigenous and tribal territories.

A recent UN review of more than 300 studies found that forests within tribal territories in Latin America and the Caribbean have significantly lower rates of deforestation where land rights are formally recognized.

“In just about every country in the region Indigenous and tribal territories have lower deforestation rates than other forest areas,” wrote the authors of the report, which was published by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the Fund for the Development of Indigenous Peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean. “Many Indigenous territories prevent deforestation as effectively as non-Indigenous protected areas, and some even more effectively.”

9) Wildfire smoke can turn the sky an apocalyptic orange

If there was one day in 2020 that defined the climate emergency, it could have been September 9, when the sky above San Francisco turned completely orange.

Strong winds had carried smoke from fires burning across California to the atmosphere above the city. Particles of soot absorbed or reflected blue light from the sun, letting only orange-ish light through. (Wired has the details.)

But what made the image go viral wasn’t so much the science but what it symbolized: a growing climate catastrophe.

Climate change is making wildfires more frequent and severe, and 2020 provided more devastating evidence. Last year was California’s worst wildfire season on record. By the end of the year, nearly 10,000 fires had burned over 4 million acres — an astonishing 4 percent of California’s total land, according to the state.

10) Scientists finally solved the mystery of why wombats poop cubes

Sure, it may not have kept you up at night, but the mystery of the bare-nosed wombat’s poop puzzled scientists for decades. Why do these adorable, chunky marsupials, native to Australia and Tasmania, leave behind feces with six sides?

Thanks to a new study — published in the journal Soft Matter — we now have the answer.

Building on research published a few years earlier, a team of scientists found that wombat intestines have regions of varying thickness and elasticity that contract at different speeds: The stiffer regions contract relatively quickly, while softer sections squeeze more slowly, together forming a cube-like shape.

But there’s still a bit of mystery left: Why is their poop shaped like this? The jury’s still out, but some researchers believe it’s because wombats climb up on rocks and logs, and the cube-like shape prevents the feces from rolling away. This is key for wombats because they use piles of feces to communicate with other wombats.

What a difference a year makes, truly.

#science #nature #animals #biodiversity #conservation #environment #wildlife #climate change #earth day #ecology #zoology #california fires #wombat #deforestation #rainforest #amazon #pollution #noise pollution #ocean currents #earth science #ecotourism #extinction #endangered species #indigineous people #pandemic #covid 19 #wildfires #global warming #ecosystem #plants

[ethanlivemere]

Half-Life²: Anticitizen - Chapter 3

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

_____________________

Chapter 3

Trespass

The true citizen knows that duty is the greatest gift.

The true citizen conserves valuable oxygen.

The true citizen cooperates with his Civil Protection team.

The true citizen’s job is the opposite of slavery.

The Consul’s brief messages echo across the pavement, each one followed by a hollow chime. It has an almost hypnotic effect, as I find myself staring up at the cluster of screens hanging over the intersection. It’s an Orwellian sight to behold: the citizens going about their day while the Consul’s watchful gaze looks down from above.

The true citizen embraces the Universal Union.

I think back to my encounter with the Vortigaunt. It had been a shock to hear English words coming from the mouth of the alien. Its voice was guttural and rough, and it continually made insect-like hissing and clicking sounds, but it spoke English nonetheless. Quite eloquently, even. Vastly different from Black Mesa, where the hisses and clicks had been the only components of their communication. But perhaps the bigger shock in seeing the Vortigaunt was not what it said, but the way it spoke to me. Like I hadn’t killed dozens of its kind in Black Mesa after seeing them slaughter my coworkers. After such hostility, I expected this Vortigaunt to charge up a bolt of green energy and attack me, and my instincts wanted me to reach for a weapon I didn’t have. The last thing I expected was for it to greet me as an ally.

“Your presence gives us hope, Freeman,” it had said. “As you saved my kin in the border world, so shall you save us again on this miserable rock. For now that the lesser master lay defeated, the greater must also fall in time.” Ah, so that’s how it is, I thought. When I killed the Nihilanth, I freed the Vortigaunts from their enslaver, and now they expected me to do the same once more. I remembered the slave camps and factories on Xen, where, for just a brief moment, they didn’t attack me – until the Nihilanth’s Controllers arrived and forced them to fight. They must have realized I was their one hope for freedom. A freedom which, ultimately, was very short-lived.

The Vortigaunt then walked to the contraption that held another one of its kind in its dark liquid. It placed its two-fingered hand against the glass and, despite its alien features, I could see sadness fall across its face. “The Vorti-cells drain power from my kin to support the Combine’s machinery. Those who enter them seldom emerge. The few who do are weakened almost to the point of collapse. Truly, it is a fate far worse than the shackles I bear.” The shackles were different from the ones worn by the Nihilanth-enslaved Vortigaunts. Instead of shining green, they were a dull gray. Their design remained very similar, though. Wrist bracelets, a collar, but also a sort of codpiece that I didn’t remember seeing on the Nihilanth’s slaves. Apparently the Combine deemed it necessary to cover the Vortigaunts’ loins – even though they housed no visible organs of any kind.

The Vortigaunt proceeded to grab a broom from against the wall and told me it had to resume its duty or suffer punishment. It seemed rather ironic, almost comedic even, that an alien race powerful enough to power factories was also being employed to sweep the streets. Recalling the instructions Jeremy had given me, I asked the Vortigaunt if he knew how I could get to the Manhack Arcade, where Barney was supposed to meet me. “Ah,” he responded pensively. “The Manhack Arcade. The hall of the unwitting executioners.” He proceeded to give me clear directions. I was to go to a place he called the Stenographer’s Chasm and then continue in a straight line. I wondered what he meant by ‘unwitting executioners’, but before I knew it, he had already said his goodbyes and disappeared around the corner.

The strange encounter had left me confused and a bit shaken, but I resolutely continued my journey and followed the Vortigaunt’s directions. I had a hard time imagining what this ‘Stenographer’s Chasm’ could be, but I could never have imagined what it turned out to be. An enormous, Combine-modified warehouse consisting of one long room that extended far into the ground, filled with rows of workers perched on stools behind desks, frantically typing on typewriter-like machines. But the stools and desks weren’t on the ground: they were mounted onto single, suspended rails that ran across the room. There were multiple levels of these rails and desks reaching all the way to the ceiling and down into the chasm. The workers had nowhere to go. My guess was that at the end of their shift or when their quota was fulfilled, the rails transported them to a place where they could safely dismount their stools. Until then, they could do nothing but work. I didn’t know what it was they were doing. What kind of paperwork could the Combine have? They didn’t seem like the type to bother with those kinds of things too much. Then again, an intergalactic empire is bound to have some unavoidable paperwork. Probably keeping track of resources and the like.

More disturbing sights awaited me, though. It all began at a building that produced a continuous sound of whirring and chugging, like a giant steam engine. Looking through the window, I saw a black and white tiled hall that was filled with enormous, diagonal pistons moving back and forth. At their base, people were working on the large engines that seemed to drive the pistons. I then realized that the engines weren’t just large, the figures knelt at their base were also small… they were children. Children, no older than twelve, were working on heavy machinery under the watch of Metrocops. And that wasn’t the only factory where children were being forced into labor. A bit further down the street was a smaller brick building that housed a large furnace. More children were stationed at a conveyor belt that lead into the furnace. They took white, ellipsoid objects from barrels and placed them onto the conveyor. They weren’t being burned in the furnace: they reemerged out of the side, attached to the ends of poles, and were transported into another machine. I had seen the white objects before on the brown-robed, flamethrower-wielding beings in the station and on posters that Jeremy had referred to as ‘Cremators’. These were Cremator heads. I tore myself away from the windows and continued my way through the industrial area. I never looked through another window again.

The factories eventually made way for a busier commercial district, which is where I find myself now. It’s the busiest place I’ve seen in this city, apart from the military parade. This must once have been a street with many successful shops, but now most of the display windows stand empty. One of the buildings still in use houses the same ration dispensers I also saw in the station. Another one showcases multiple television screens, all of which display the Combine logo.

“Can you believe it? Free TVs!” says a citizen gazing through the window.

“Don’t get too excited,” his companion replies in a cynical tone. “Those things only have one channel: the Consulcast.” He points over his shoulder at the cluster of screens overhead, where the Consul’s many faces are still naming the values of a true citizen.

But the Consulcast nor the free TVs are the reason why there is so much traffic on this street corner. In fact, I’d wager the Combine strategically placed those here so that as many citizens as possible would be exposed to the propaganda. The real eye-catcher everyone seems to be here for is across the street: the Manhack Arcade. It’s a large building that forms the corner of the street. Completely Combine-made, no recycling of old buildings. The people in the street flock towards the wide entrance on the corner, which is flanked by two Metrocops. Above it hang a number of yellow posters and banners and even more screens, all showing Combine logos and imagery.

I wonder if I should go in. Jeremy told me Barney would meet me at the Manhack Arcade, but it’s unclear if that means outside or inside. It seem risky going into a Combine facility, but it doesn’t seem like the citizens get scanned like they did at the checkpoints, and I could probably slip by the two guarding Metrocops unnoticed by hiding in the crowd.

I wait a little longer, hoping Barney will show himself. The clouds have gotten darker still, and before long a light drizzle starts pouring from the sky. Not only am I not dressed for rainy weather, I also want to avoid getting into too much contact with this water, which, judging from the greenish color of the clouds it originates from, could have all kinds of toxins or undesirable pH values. And so, when an exceptionally dense group of people approaches the entrance to the Arcade, I join them and walk past the Metrocops without either of them giving me a second glance.

Inside is a corridor that leads to the main room. Like the Stenographer’s Chasm, it’s long, tall, and extends down into the ground. Instead of rails with desks and tired workers, this room is filled with catwalks leading to strange machines. Citizens queue in front of them and when it’s their turn, they step onto a pedestal in front of the machines, grab hold of two control handles and lean forward to place their heads in some sort of virtual reality display built into the arcade.

A screen above the player allows bystanders to follow the game. A citizen near me has just started: at first, the screen shows only a grid of red lines in a black void. Then, the grid bends and reshapes itself into a three-dimensional environment that resembles a ruined building. Several humanoid shapes appear in yellow and orange tints, like heat vision, but with a clear red outline to them. The player navigates the environment, seemingly flying, and moves towards the outlined targets. The targets start moving around, trying to evade the player, but eventually he catches up to one. It’s not clear what happens, but when the player bumps into the target, the red outline disappears and a score of one hundred appears in the bottom right corner of the screen. “Ha ha, got one!” the player exclaims. Another nearby player is already at a score of eight hundred, when one of the targets suddenly rushes at him, holding up some kind of long object. The screen goes black and the words ‘GAME OVER’ appear on the screen. “Damn it!” the man shouts. “I was almost at my high score!”

Something’s not right. The way the targets move – it doesn’t look like a video game character. Much too erratic and lifelike. And from what I’ve seen of the Combine so far, I doubt they would put effort into providing ground-breaking AI technology for their panem et circenses. The Vortigaunt’s words echo through my mind: ‘the hall of the unwitting executioners’. I can put two and two together, but I don’t want to. I refuse to believe that what I fear is true. People slaughtering their own, cheering while they do it – and without ever realizing what they did. Or, at least, I deeply hope they don’t.

I don’t want to stay here any longer. Watching these innocent people enjoying the Combine’s twisted games turns my stomach. I have to find Barney. But how can I simultaneously hide from the real Metrocops and try to get Barney to see me?

As I pace through the room, I notice a Metrocop eyeing me. It’s hard to tell with the gas masks, but it seems like his gaze is following me. Is he Barney or a suspicious guard? I try to act inconspicuous and wait for a signal. Suddenly, the Metrocop turns away and walks towards a door. He interacts with the locking mechanism and it opens before him. He throws another prolonged glance in my direction before stepping through, out of sight. I wait. The door doesn’t close behind him. I cautiously make my way to the door. It leads to some sort of backstage corridor, clearly a ‘staff only’ area. I can’t see the Metrocop. I look around the Arcade one last time, but none of the remaining guards seem to notice me, so I enter the corridor. It’s cold and dark, and my footsteps are loud on the metal floor. I arrive in a small room with one of those Combine consoles. The wall is lined with a rack containing dozens of small, deactivated drones whose purpose I can’t discern. I hear the door I entered through close.

“Hey, you!” I hear from one of the neighboring corridors. A Metrocop – the one I followed in here – enters the room. “Do you have your identification?” He menacingly steps towards me. Seems it wasn’t Barney after all. Tough luck. “You are not supposed to be in here. I need to see your identification.”

Well, I seem to have gotten myself into a sticky situation. The Metrocop is trying to drive me into a corner, drawing his stun baton. “Overwatch, restricted incursion in progress in sector 8. Permission to enact civil judgement?” he says to seemingly no one. There’s a short blip and a burst of static following his question. I’m not thrilled about the prospect of ‘civil judgement’, so I decide not to wait until he gets his answer from whoever Overwatch is. I place my hands on my head, feigning surrender, while I scan the exits. The corridor back to the main Arcade hall is sealed and I can’t tell where the others lead, so I’ll have to trust my instincts.

Either the Metrocop has received his permission from Overwatch, or my eyes darting around the room have made him suspicious, because he suddenly swings his stun stick at my head. I try to duck and the blow lands against my elbow, sending a shock through my entire arm as blue sparks fly from the weapon. In response, I kick at his shin as hard as I can. He grunts and loses his balance, and I take the opportunity to dart down the nearest corridor. I hear the Metrocop’s heavy boots give chase behind me as he mumbles a status report to Overwatch. I round a corner, praying I won’t run into a dead end. I see a T junction ahead. Suddenly, I hear a deafening bang behind me, and the sound of a bullet hitting metal. Damn. He has a gun. I have to reach the junction as fast as possible. No time to look which way to go. As the echo of the gunshot fades out, I speed off into the left corridor just before another bullet plunges itself into the wall.

Suddenly, my surroundings open up into a larger room that’s two thirds Combine architecture and one third concrete rubble, remainders of whatever building was here before they installed their Arcade. I could get out through the collapsed walls and floors, but I’d be an easy shot. There’s also what looks like a Combine elevator with a bright red button inside it. I have milliseconds to make a decision. How far behind is he? Can I pull it off?

I slam my fist into the red button, rush back out of the elevator and then dive behind a half-collapsed wall. The doors close and the elevator starts to rise as I flatten myself against the concrete, bent rebar poking into my shoulder. My left arm is numb from the shock of the baton. I hear the Metrocop charging into the room. I hold my breath and pray he falls for my trick. It’s a trick as old as time. He stands still and I wait, my heartbeat ear-deafening.

“Subject is headed for top floor, secure perimeter around elevator.” I have to keep myself from sighing in relief. He isn’t gone yet. In fact, he seems to just stand still in front of the elevator. He must be waiting for the elevator to reach its destination. If he waits for the top floor units to report an empty elevator, my cover is blown.

“Copy,” he says. My functional right hand grabs hold of a loose chunk of concrete near me. I hear him walk a few steps, and then a couple of beeps. “Elevator power disengaged. Heading to your location.” With that, he walks out of the room, and I can finally breathe again. They don’t know the elevator is empty yet. They think they have me trapped in an unpowered elevator. Now to finally get out of here.

Easier said than done, as it turns out. The ruins are a concrete maze, and I constantly have to watch my step. It doesn’t help that the rain that seeps down through the broken ceilings makes everything slippery. The downpour has changed into an outright storm: the water beats down loudly on the concrete and every now and then a roaring thunderclap tears through the sky. Meanwhile, I guess the Metrocops discovered I wasn’t in the elevator after all, because I suddenly hear the cold, disembodied female voice – Overwatch, I assume – echo through the air once more: “Individual, you are charged with anti-civil activities: 63 criminal trespass, 148 resisting arrest, 243 assault on Protection Team. All local Protection units: code alert: locate, contain, prosecute.”

I spot one of the lambdas painted by the resistance group on a pillar. It leads the way down a slope of collapsed floor into a sub-street level area. Knowing the Metrocops are looking for me again, I try to speed up my pace a little while heading down – a mistake. The wet rubble gives way and I lose my footing. The world spins around me as I slide and tumble down the slope. I try to shield my head with my arms. I roll over the floor after reaching the bottom before coming to a stop.

I lie on my back as my surroundings come back into focus. I’m in some sort of underground sewer chamber: I see a ladder on the wall leading up to a manhole cover and there’s a grate in the ceiling through which light and rain pours down in a small waterfall, though the ground I lie on is thankfully dry. I do a quick damage report: my palms are chafed and I’ll undoubtedly have a few bruises, but no lasting damage. I’m lucky I didn’t hit my head on any of the protruding edges of the concrete.

I become aware of a sound, just barely audible over the storm. It sounds like a fire – no, more like a flamethrower. At the same moment, I notice the dancing orange light on the brick wall, and my nostrils are assaulted with the stench of burning flesh. I immediately jolt up. Pain shoots through my back at the sudden movement. I look around and immediately spot the source of the sound: there’s a Cremator standing on the opposite side of the room. The two lanky, leathery-skinned arms sticking out of its brown robe carry a heavy flamethrower which, I notice for the first time seeing one up close, is connected to a spherical fuel tank in the middle of its stomach with a thin tube. ‘Flamethrower’ might be an incorrect word, however. Instead of producing flames, it shoots the green particle jets I also noticed being used to clean trains in the station. It must be some sort of corrosive liquid that only affects organic matter. The source of the orange light on the walls turns out to be a burning pile of charred flesh being sprayed by the Cremator. The flesh is being set ablaze by the green particles, but not only that: where the jets hit the flesh directly, it seems to blacken and disintegrate. Despite the fact that the corpses have turned black as coal and have been turned into an amorphous, ever-shrinking pile, I can still make out just enough to see that these were once people.

The Cremator stops what it’s doing and turns its white, oval head towards me, alerted by my sudden movement. Its tiny, expressionless eyes lock onto me. I hear mechanical breathing from the Cremator’s mouth-tube as it steps closer. It tilts its head like a curious animal before it points the nozzle of its weapon towards me. I could try to run, but I doubt I could get far enough to evade the scorching cloud. I briefly wonder if I should not have moved an played dead. It probably wouldn’t have saved me from being disintegrated.

“Cremator! Stand down!” A Metrocop charges in and stands between me and the Cremator. “This prisoner is property of Civil Protection and is to be transferred to Nova Prospekt for processing.” The Cremator tilts its head again, then turns around and returns to its previous work. The Metrocop turns around to face me. I should be worried, but I’m not. Despite its distortion, I have already recognized his voice. I once again hear the click of the mask detaching and am greeted by Barney’s smug grin. I’ve never been happier to see that stupid grin.

“So Gordon, is this what you call ‘not drawing any attention to yourself’? You’ve got practically every Metrocop in the sector looking for you!” He reaches out and grabs my arm to pull me onto my feet. The numbness from the stun baton is almost gone, though it now hurts from the fall instead. As I rub my elbow, I glance at the Cremator. It seems to be minding its own business, but I don’t feel comfortable hanging around near it much longer, and I wonder if it’s a good idea for Barney to unmask himself and be so friendly with me in its presence. Barney follows my gaze and says “Don’t worry about him, he won’t bother us again. They’re not too bright, these Cremators. Mindless synths. They were made to be janitors, primarily. Destroy biological waste, contain the Xen infestation…” He looks down at the charred corpses grimly. “… clean up after the Civil Protection patrols.” He beckons me and starts walking. “The reason he was about to disintegrate you is because you are not a registered citizen or Combine unit. So to him, you would have to be either a Xenian creature or a very lively corpse. Either way, you were considered ‘unauthorized biological mass’ and had to be disposed of.”

We enter an underground utility tunnel. The sounds of the storm fade away as we follow the cables and pipelines down the dimly lit corridor. “You’re lucky I found you,” Barney remarks. “Those Immolators of theirs can give you a nasty burn. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to meet you at the Arcade, I was held up by unforeseen complications on my shift. I had just gotten back to Dr. Kleiner’s lab when I heard the local CP units go crazy over some guy causing trouble at the Arcade.” He flashes me a smirk. I tell him what happened at the Arcade, with the Metrocop I had thought was him. “You got baited,” he replies. “Some CPs will bait citizens into breaking rules, like trespassing, just so they can enact some civil judgement.”

We march through the underground network in silence for a while before I cautiously bring up Jeremy. Barney sighs sadly and lightly shakes his head. “Yeah, I heard what happened.” He doesn’t say anything for a moment, seemingly choosing his next words carefully. “Listen, Gordon… don’t worry about it, okay? I can probably pull some strings to make sure he turns out okay.” He doesn’t sound all that certain. “Either way, don’t blame yourself. Each of us knows the risk in what we’re doing. We’re all prepared to... go all the way for our cause.” I get an uneasy feeling in my stomach. Barney is being uncharacteristically serious and grim. This is not the same man I knew before Black Mesa. Then again, the same goes for myself.

His face lightens up again and he slips back into his usual grin when we go down a side tunnel with another lambda, at the end of which is a short staircase with a metal door. “Well Gordon, looks like we’re finally here.” He opens the door and the sound of machinery pours out. Not harsh, loud and aggressive, like the Combine factories, but light beeps and clicks over a soft hum. A familiar sound that invites me inside. The sound of science.

_____________________

Consul screens

Stenographer's Chasm

Piston hall

Cremator factory

Manhack Arcade exterior + Citadel

Manhack Arcade interior

Cremator

Underground

And for the first time, there aren't just images for reference, but also sound: here is the original Vortigaunt voice.

As always, really excited to share this new chapter of Anticitizen with you. We've finally reached Kleiner's lab, so from now the story will start picking up pace. And as always, please let me know what you think :)

#anticitizen #half life #half life 2 #half life 2 beta #my writing #fanfiction #gordon freeman

[obxlife]

Empanadas and Alfajores (JJ x Latina!Reader)

A/N: Yes finally a Latina reader. I am so excited about this! I’m going to be writing with a lot of Spanish in between but the most important parts are going to be in English. Also I got super carried away with this but I just love it!

Pairing: JJ x Latina!Reader

Word count: 5,843

Request: Heyy!! Could you do one with JJ where she id new yo de obx and she talks spanish and ks very sassy? I don't know If It makes sense. Ty♥️

Warnings: Swearing (both English and Spanish) and a lot of FLUFF

EMPANADAS AND ALFAJORES

The Outer Banks did not have many Latino families. You had investigated this before moving, and you were sure that, due to the fact that there weren’t many of them, discrimination towards your family was sure to come. 

You were moving to the Outer Banks from South California due to your father’s job. He worked as a lawyer, and he had heard about a job opportunity on the islands. 

This was what brought you here. To Kildare County. 

You hated it. Leaving your friends behind and submerging yourself into a community that was sure to not treat your family well. From what you had seen during the drive to your new house, most of the island’s residents looked pretty conservative. 

You were worried about your parents, mostly. You and your siblings could speak English almost perfectly, but your parents still had accents that proved that they were immigrants. 

Along with the fact that your family was bilingual, you were pretty sure you looked Latino as well. All of you had skin that was naturally tan, and dark brown hair that was long. You just felt as if people could tell you weren’t truly from the United States, and that would often make you nervous. 

You envied the Latinos with white skin. The ones that were descendants of Europeans and had adopted the Latino culture. They were just as Latino as you and your family were, but they didn’t suffer from even half of the harassment you had to endure. 

Despite all of the discrimination you had lived because of your origins, you liked being Latina. It defined you. And it was something you would never change about yourself. 

The car parked, and your younger siblings, which were triplets and a nightmare, hopped out of the car in front of the one you were seated in. They had been excited to move, and couldn’t wait to explore the new house you were all going to live in. Your father had been the one to sacrifice himself and drive them, while you and your mother were driving behind him, alone in the smaller car your family owned. 

Your mother sighed, not wanting to deal with the three small children yet. So, she turned to you. “Mi amor, I know this isn’t what you wanted, pero te prometo que it will be okay.”

You only nodded, pursing your lips together and twiddling your thumbs. “Can I go out and just walk around or something? Puedo volver before it’s late.”

Knowing how much the move was taking a toll on you, your mother nodded her head. Then she exited the car and began to scold your siblings, yelling at them in fluent and angry Spanish. 

“¿Cuántas veces les tengo que decir que se comporten? ¡Lucy, vuelve ahora! ¡Diego, Lucas, no la empujen!”

Rolling your eyes, you reached for the handle of the car and left. You pulled your hair into a ponytail before heading down your driveway and towards a restaurant you had seen on the way. 

********************************

‘The Wreck.’

That was what the sign of the restaurant said. You imagined it was a hit with the tourist, seeing as it was strategically placed between two beaches which were filled with people. You spared a look inside and noticed that the restaurant was also packed. However, there was an empty seat at the counter. 

Opening the door, you walked in with as much confidence as you could muster. Your confidence fell when you crashed into a body and tumbled to the floor. 

“Mierda,” you muttered out while standing up. You rubbed your hand over your butt and looked down to find that before you lay a dark-skinned boy. 

“Ay, Dios mío, I am so sorry,” you told him, extending your hand out for him to take. He did, and with your help he stood up. 

He shook his head. “Don´t worry, it was my fault.”

“Are you kidding? I literally rammed into you. I don’t know who I thought I was, stumbling in here like that.”

The boy just laughed. “It’s fine, really. By the way, are you new here or something? I’m pretty sure there’s no one in Kildare that speaks Spanish.”

You nodded softly, expecting the classic questions to follow from his lips. Where are you actually from? How long have you lived here? 

“Oh, cool. So you moved here?”

You nodded again. “Yeah, I moved into the yellow house on Gordon Street.”

“Oh, really? I live right around the corner from there! And my dad owns the market by the docks, just two streets over from Gordon.”

“Oh, nice. So have you lived here for a while?” you were trying to make small talk, as you had liked the boy standing before you and he had been nice enough to speak to you. 

“Try my whole life. But it’s fine. I love it here.”

You smiled at him as you both moved to the side, allowing someone else to exit through the door you had been blocking. He suddenly stretched his hand out. “I’m Pope.”

You smiled. “I’m Y/N.”

While still being connected by your hands, Pope almost fell onto you because of a boy that had jumped on his back. The boy was blond and white and had spiky teeth that reminded you of the stories your mother would tell you about the Chupacabras. His blue eyes were shiny and alight with mischief, reminding you of Diego and Lucas. 

Pope let go of your hand and tried to push the boy off. “JJ! What is wrong with you?”

JJ laughed, getting off Pope and wrapping a hand around his shoulder. “Just came to see why you were taking so long in the bathroom. We were waiting for you, bubba.”

JJ then turned towards you and his jaw fell slack. You didn’t take notice of this, as you were looking at Pope, who said, “Yeah, I was held up by Y/N here. She’s new in the OBX.”

JJ shook his head lightly, trying to act normal. “Pleasure to meet you, baby.”

You didn’t like that. At all. You hated when guys were just the biggest flirts, and this guy seemed to fit right into that category. 

You rolled your eyes a bit, not trying to come off as rude, and took the outstretched hand he placed in the space between you. You held onto it, shaking up and down before trying to let go. He wouldn’t let you. 

“Aren’t you going to introduce yourself?”

“Ay, por favor. I’ll do what I want,” your sassiness broke out. You covered your mouth with your hands and widened your eyes. You couldn’t believe you had already been sassy to someone. In the place where you lived before you had gotten into a lot of problems for being sassy, and you had promised your parents that you were going to control yourself here in the Outer Banks. 

Pope pressed a balled-up hand to his mouth trying not to laugh as JJ’s expression fell. Pope couldn’t contain his laughs any longer and broke out, while JJ shoved him and smiled towards you. 

“Sassy and you speak Spanish? You’re a dream, Mamacita,” he tried to flirt with you once again. You groaned out loud this time. The boys seemed to enjoy your sassiness, so you decided not to hold back. 

“Look here, Papi,” you spoke, sarcasm dripping from each word. “If I wanted to flirt with you I would have done it by now. Y por favor, don’t call me ‘Mamacita’ ever again.”

JJ was bewildered. He had never met anyone that had flat out rejected him before. Staring at you, he tuned out the world around him and ignored the conversation that was going on between you and Pope. He watched Pope grab onto your arm and drag you to where the rest of the Pogues were. And JJ stood there, staring at you go along with his best friend. 

He decided that he really liked the view. 

Catching up to the two of you, JJ ran to be by your side. He reached your arm just as Pope was done presenting you to Kie and John B.

You smiled at them and began to speak to them casually, getting to know them better. They were making you laugh, even JJ, and you were happy that they were there to cheer you up. If they became your friends, you wouldn’t really mind moving away from your previous home as much as you imagined. They seemed fun and adventurous and nice and loyal. And they seemed a lot more diverse than other groups of teens you had seen. 

You had decided that they would be your friends.

*************************************************

Diego, Lucas, and Lucy were a mess. A mess meaning that they were a royal pain in the ass. And sometimes you were the one that had to take care of them, especially when your parents went out for business dinners or dinner dates. 

You had been living in the OBX for about three months now, and your father was trying to sign a business deal with some real estate companies that ruled the rich side of the island. That was why you were staying home tonight instead of heading out with one of the Pogues like you usually would. They had asked you to babysit.

You were happy in the OBX, much to your surprise. Discrimination towards your family didn’t happen often, and you were always defended by your friends. It was mainly the rich that were offensive, but it became easier and easier to ignore them once you realized that everybody else on the island did that as well.

“¡Callense!” you screamed out at the triplets who were screaming at the TV screen. “I’m trying to concentrate over here.”

Your homework lay before you on the table, and you could barely concentrate on it with all of the screams in your house. School had started recently, and it was a lot harder than your previous one. The Pogues would sometimes help you (mostly Kie and Pope), but you liked trying to do things on your own first. If you couldn’t do it then you would call one of the brainiacs over to help you. 

Another scream left Lucy’s mouth and you groaned again. You were going to need help with them.

You fished your phone out of your bag that was resting on the table. You opened the messenger app and sent a message to your group chat.

Y/N: HELP! I’m babysitting for my parents and the three devils are driving me insane. Can someone please come over?

Pope: Sorry, Y/N. I’m working with my dad tonight.

Kie: I’m working a shift! Sorry babes.

The hottest boy ever: I’m coming over!

You glared at the name JJ had put to his contact and changed it back to what you originally had saved it as: Imbécil. 

You sighed now having to deal with JJ too. Whatever, at least maybe he could distract your siblings and leave you alone so that you could study. 

Not even twenty minutes later you heard a knock on your door. JJ stood there grinning from ear to ear. 

“Hey, Mami,” he said. ‘Mami’ had become his new nickname for you, even though you hated it. You felt like one of those stereotyped Latinas on TV. 

“Hey, loser.”

He frowned but then brought his hand up to your hair and ruffled it. You swatted his hands away and opened the door wider for him to come in. He brushed past you, your arms coming into brief contact. Tingles rose from the contact.

You hated the fact that you were attracted to JJ. He was funny and hot, you had to admit, but he was also the most infuriating person ever. He liked to push your buttons and bother you to no end. The worst part of it all was that Kie said that he was trying to flirt with you. 

You had scoffed. “Como si de verdad te creyera.”

You closed the front door and walked to catch up with JJ. He was almost at the living room door before you held onto his hand and pulled him around. 

“What?” he asked you. 

“I just want you to know that they’re extremely annoying and loud. So just -- be ready.”

He nodded before joking, “I’m all of those things too, Mami.”

You rolled your eyes. “Yeah, how could I forget? I was just warning you, idiota, but whatever.”

With that, both you and JJ walked into the room where your siblings were. The loud seven-year-olds were still screaming. They stopped when they saw JJ at the door. 

“¡Un cabeza de pipí!” Diego exclaimed. Your face dropped with mortification at what he said, and you hoped that Lucy and Lucas would not translate what their triplet had screamed a few moments ago.

“Diego!” you screeched out.

“What does that mean?” JJ asked under his breath, turning towards you. He hadn’t met your siblings ever, and he was surprised to find them laughing at him. “Did he say something funny? Should I laugh?”

You smiled at him, trying to pretend as if your brother had said a joke for everyone. “Yeah, just laugh along with him.”

JJ began to laugh, not very sure of his actions, and this only egged your siblings to continue laughing at the blond boy by your side. 

When you sobered up you scolded your brother in Spanish, making sure that JJ did not understand a thing about what was going on. You made your siblings promise to speak English and to be nice to JJ (you knew your mother would be mad if she heard a word about this).

“¿Lo prometen?”

They only nodded. With that, you turned towards the table you were working at but noticed your stomach grumble. Looking at the time on your wristwatch, you turned to the kitchen instead, realizing that it was almost dinner time. At least for you, it was. Your parents had always disliked how people in the States ate extremely early, and they had maintained the custom of eating at around eight o’clock (which would have been early if you still lived in your country of origin). 

“JJ have you had dinner yet?” you called out to him. You could hear him talking to your siblings and asking their names. 

“No! Why?” you stayed silent as you began to cook. Empanadas sounded great about right now, so that was what you decided to make. You placed your phone on the counter, playing some of Morat’s, a Colombian band’s, songs. You whispered along to the lyric and danced a little as you continued to hear JJ talk and joke around with the kids. He suddenly appeared in the kitchen with Lucy on his shoulders and one boy hanging on each of his legs. 

“I need help,” he spoke out. You set the dough you were kneading down and spun around to face them. 

“A ver, sueltenlo. Vayan a ponerse pijama por mientras. Y vengan en veinte minutos para comer.”

With that, the boys had sped off to their rooms, and Lucy wiggled to get off JJ. He reached up and set her on the ground. As she followed behind Lucas and Diego, JJ asked, “What are you making?”

He turned his back to the counter and stretched his legs before him. His hands were rested on the tabletop, making his elbows bend back. His green hat was blocking the kitchen’s light from his eyes and his blue shirt was tight against his body from his position. His face was looking in your direction, as you began to spread the dough and roll it out. 

“Empanadas.”

JJ frowned. “What are they?”

You laughed a little before replying. “They’re fried dough with filling inside. The filling can be sweet or salty, but where I’m from, we normally eat them with cheese or pino, which is meat with some seasoning. But we’re not frying it cause I’m too lazy.”

JJ nodded. His eyes were trained on your fingers, looking at you leave the dough to rest as you began to work on the filling. Only then did he notice you were slightly dancing to the music coming out from your phone. He tried to strain his ears to listen to it until he caught on to the fact that he didn’t understand anything at all. It was in Spanish. 

“What are you listening to?”

You kept on swaying around, almost done with the meat filling for the empanadas. You placed it in a bowl before turning to him. “It’s a Colombian group called Morat.”

JJ raised his eyebrows at you, surprised that for once you were responding to him in the same manner you would usually reply to Pope. 

You kept on preparing dinner, not even realizing what he had realized about you. However, you felt JJ staring at you, so you decided to ask, “Do you want to help?”

The blond boy was surprised. He was bad at cooking but you seemed to be working on the easiest part of the process. He had noticed you scoop up some of the fillings onto the circular cuts of dough and folding them in half. He nodded at you. 

“Okay, so you have to scoop only one spoonful of the pino onto the dough. Then you fold the dough in half after putting a bit of water onto the edges of the dough. Like this.”

You showed him how to dip his finger into the little cup with water before rubbing the water onto the whole circular edge of the dough. You looked back at JJ, his eyes concentrated on your finger. 

“After that, you fold the dough in half. But make sure that the stuffing is far away from the edge. And then, using a fork, you press the edges down so that the empanada is sealed and complete.”

JJ nodded, finding the instructions easy enough. He began to help you, shooting glances at you every once in a while. You didn’t seem to notice at all, completely concentrated on the music (which you were singing under your breath) and on the food. Once you had both finished, JJ helped you place the empanadas onto a tray so that you could put them in the oven. 

Closing the door of the oven you headed towards your phone, deciding to change the music up a bit. You played one of your old playlists, which contained some of Reik’s old music, as well as some Juanes and Miguel Bosé. Shifting around the kitchen, you moved JJ aside to clean the counter and to wash the items you had used to prepare the empanadas. JJ was enchanted by you, watching you dance around and sing to the music he couldn’t understand at all. All he could understand was that he was slowly but surely falling for you.

Just as you were done washing, Lucy came into the kitchen. She was wearing her pajamas and she had clearly showered. Her wet hair was enough fo you to know that. 

“¿Me puedes cepillar el pelo?” she asked you holding up her hairbrush. You shook your head saying, “Iba a hacer el postre. Pero JJ te lo puede cepillar, si quieres.”

Lucy nodded at your suggestion. You turned towards the blond boy that was still staring at you, transfixed on your mouth that always seemed to look kissable. 

“JJ? Would you mind brushing Lucy´s hair?”

Even if JJ didn’t want to do it, he couldn’t say no to you or to your sister’s puppy eyes. He nodded his head as Lucy pressed her brush into his large hand and turned towards him. He didn’t know what he was doing but he tried his best, basing his actions on what he had seen in movies and TV shows. He tried to be as gentle as possible, not wanting to pull her hair out or anything. 

In the meantime you analyzed what you could prepare for dessert. You noticed that you had some butter cookies and some dulce de leche. If you had chocolate then you could prepare alfajores. Checking the pantry you noticed that there was chocolate. Excitedly you pulled out the ingredients. 

“Where’s Diego and Lucas?” JJ asked Lucy as he was halfway done with her hair. Her curly hair was long, and it took him a lot longer than he had expected to brush her hair. 

“They started watching a movie.”

“Why didn’t you watch it with them?”

“Because I need to comb my hair,” Lucy stated. The tone of voice she used made it seem as if it was the most obvious answer in the world. JJ laughed, being reminded of the sassy tone you would usually use with him. 

“You’re so sassy, Lucy. Just like Y/N,” JJ confessed. This earned an offended gesture from both of the girls in the kitchen. He only laughed harder. 

You put the chocolate in a bowl and in the microwave. Lucy realized this and asked, “¿Estás haciendo alfajores?”

You nodded, causing her to smile. You smiled back at her, glad that she was just as excited for dessert as you were. Right at that moment JJ said, “All done, princess.”

Lucy beamed at what he called her before running off with her hairbrush in her hand. JJ stood from his spot and walked to you, noticing how you opened the cookies and the dulce de leche. 

“What are you making now?”

“Alfajores. It’s dulce de leche between two butter cookies and dipped in chocolate.”

JJ’s eyes widened at how good they sounded (even if he really wasn’t sure what dulce de leche was) and grabbed two cookies. He began to help you. 

Little feet could be heard running through the house, and Lucy returned to the kitchen. She pulled a chair right between you and JJ and stood on it. Her little fingers latched onto two cookies, wanting to help. 

“JJ, put some dulce de leche on Lucy’s cookies,” you told him as the microwave began to beep. You put some kitchen gloves on knowing that the bowl was going to be hot, and pulled it out. Setting it onto the counter you began to mix the chocolate around. “C’mere, Lucy, you can dunk the alfajores in the chocolate.”

Lucy gave the cookies she was holding to JJ and grabbed onto one of the already made cookie sandwiches. She dumped it into the chocolate and then pulled it out, placing it on a plate that would go into the freezer later. You helped her through the process, making sure that her chocolate-covered fingers didn’t touch the counter or her clothes. 

JJ paused his actions halfway. He was on the last pair of cookies, but he couldn’t help but stare at you and your sister. You were both singing the lyrics to whatever song was coming from your phone, only stopping to speak to each other in Spanish. Your hair was in a bun on the top of your head and Lucy’s was tied back. Both of you would scrunch your nose up at the same time when dipping the cookies into the chocolate, and you would both laugh together when the cookie would slip from your grasps. 

Shaking his head, JJ decided to finish the last cookie sandwich. Ever since you had arrived at the OBX, he had tried to get over the fact that you were clearly not into him, but that didn’t seem to work at all. The more he tried to push you out of his head, the more he felt he liked you. 

Once you had finished preparing the alfajores, you passed the plate to Lucy for her to put into the freezer as you began to wash the bowl you had used. JJ approached you and began to dry the dished that were already washed from before, when you had finished the empanadas. 

“You know? You’re a good sister,” JJ said suddenly. Your cheeks grew warm and you smiled at the compliment. It was true. Even though you would often deny it, you loved your siblings more than anything. 

Trying to ignore the feelings that rose from JJ’s compliments you replied, “What? No ‘Mami’ this time?”

JJ laughed but shook his head. He continued to help you around the kitchen, setting the table with you and pulling the empanadas out. 

“Can you go get the triplets, please?” you asked him. 

JJ went into the living room where Diego and Lucas were staring at the TV screen. “Your sister says it’s time for dinner.”

The two younger boys turned towards the blond, curiosity in their eyes. “Are you our sister’s boyfriend?”

JJ’s eyes widened, as Lucy walked into the room. “Yes, he is!”

“No, I’m not, Lucy.” He turned to the boys. “I’m not.”

The boys just giggled along with their female triplet, before jumping over the sofa and pounding into the kitchen. JJ simply pressed his hands to his blushing cheeks, ordering them to go back to normal before stepping into the kitchen. 

When he stepped back into the room that was now filled with Y/L/Ns, he noticed you were serving the empanadas onto everybody’s plates. Two for each of the triplets and three for him and you, each. He smiled before sitting down in the seat next to. 

“No coman con las manos. Mamá se enoja si hacen eso,” you reminded your siblings as they reached for the food with their hands. Begrudgingly they took hold of their cutlery. 

JJ cut the first empanada into smaller pieces and brought one of them up to his mouth. It was amazing. His eyes were wide as Diego laughed at his reaction. You turned to look at him and smiled. 

“You like them?”

JJ moved his head up and down, shoving more empanada into his mouth. He couldn’t wait to try the alfajores.

*****************************************

Once the triplets were in bed you moved to the couch to work on your homework as JJ watched a movie. He had his legs perched on top of the coffee table before the couch and your legs were thrown across his lap. His right hand rested on one of your calves, moving from left to right, distracting you from your homework. You were too tired to do it anyway, so you placed it onto the coffee table. 

Turning towards the TV you noticed that it was in Spanish and frowned.

“Why are you watching it in Spanish?” you asked JJ.

JJ shushed you, before whispering, “So I can learn.”

You furrowed your eyebrows and sat up, removing your legs from his lap. He pouted at the loss of contact but his eyes never left the screen. You pushed your body closer to him so that your legs were touching. 

“Why do you want to learn Spanish?” you asked, genuinely curious as to what he would answer.

Your voice was almost a whisper, and suddenly the air around the both of you seemed to thicken. JJ finally broke his stare away from the TV to your eyes, before smiling. “So that I can understand you.”

You blushed but didn’t turn away from him. “Why would you want to do that?”

Now JJ blushed. “Because I want to get to know you better. Believe it or not, I think you’re really cool and sassy and different from everybody I know. And I want to know you. All of you. And your culture and being able to speak Spanish is a part of you.”

Your smile widened to the largest JJ had ever seen it. You wrapped your arms around JJ, almost wanting to cry. Nobody had ever cared enough about you to learn about your culture and to learn Spanish or to even show an interest in learning those things. You felt a single tear escape your right eye, not even realizing it until JJ had pulled you back and swiped his thumb under your eye. JJ smiled at you, his hands on your waist.

“No one’s ever done that for me before,” you told him.

“Then I’m happy I’m the first.”

You hugged him again. With his arms still around your body, you said, “If you want I can teach you how to speak Spanish.”

“Nah,” JJ said while shaking his head. “I bet you’re too sassy to be a teacher.”

You pulled back and lightly punched his chest. “Shut up.”

JJ only continued to laugh and pulled you towards him again. 

*************************************************

“Yo me nombro JJ.”

“Wrong.”

“Yo soy nombre JJ.”

“Wrong.”

“Yo tengo nombre JJ.”

“Still wrong,” you sighed. 

“I give up! Spanish is too hard for me,” JJ replied as he fell down onto your bed. 

It had been a two weeks since you had offered to teach him Spanish, and you had spent almost every afternoon after school together trying to teach him. But he wasn’t good at all.

“You got this JJ. I swear it’s only practice,” you told him, rubbing a hand up and down his arm to comfort him. He latched onto the fingers of that hand and pulled you down on top of him. He enveloped you in his arms and said, “Let’s just nap together.”

You groaned and laughed at the same time. “You’re never going to learn if you convince me to nap every afternoon.”

“I don’t care,” he said in his usual sleepy voice. “Just speak to me in Spanish for a couple of minutes and I’ll be out.”

As you began to talk about random things in your room (JJ would occasionally stop you at words he knew), you began to move your hands up and down his chest in small circles. Over the past week, the amount of body contact between you two had exponentially grown. You went from not touching each other ever to cuddling and napping together. The Pogues had felt this shift in your relationship, as well, and would often tease you and JJ. 

“What happened between you guys?” Kie had asked one afternoon you had gone with her to the Wreck. You shrugged your shoulder, as you truly didn’t know. 

Something had changed between the two of you the day he had helped you take care of your siblings, and now he was over at your house all the time. Your parents loved him (even though they teased you because he couldn’t speak Spanish and you had always said you would date someone who could speak Spanish), and he spent almost as much time with you as he did messing around with the triplets. You loved that he got on amazingly with your family, and you loved how he would ask everybody in your house about your customs and traditions and culture. 

You continued to speak in Spanish until you were certain he had fallen asleep. Then, you slipped out of his arms and began to work on your homework. You concentrated on it for an hour, until you grew way too frustrated with it to continue. 

“¡Pero que estupidez!” you exclaimed while shoving it in your backpack. You heard JJ chuckle behind you, startling you. “I thought you were asleep.”

“I woke up a while ago,” he said, stretching. “You wanna go downstairs and cook something?”

That had become your activity together. Cooking something traditional of the Latino culture. He had loved the empanadas and the alfajores so much that he had wanted to try everything there was to eat in your culture. 

“We could try making cocadas,” you told him. “But I’ve never made them before.”

JJ hummed and closed his eyes again. He was still tired for some reason. He stretched his hands out for you to take only to pull you down on top of him. “Then let’s stay here. I don’t want to cook with your mom right now.”

You frowned. “I thought you loved my mom.”

JJ nodded. “I do, but your dad told me that you always giggle about me with her. He said you were being mean.”

That was true. You blushed and hid your face in his hands. “Sorry. We just find you cute, though.”

JJ smirked, opening his eyes and looking down at you. “You find me cute, Mami?”

You groaned. “I hate that nickname.”

“I know,” JJ laughed out, breathily. “That’s exactly why I use it.”

You stayed in silence, staring at each other. Your fingers danced across his feature, tracing the outline of his nose and of his cheekbones. JJ did the same to your features but with his eyes. You leaned a little closer to him, wanting to brush your fingers by his hairline, but the movement had surprised him and caused one of his hands to move to your waist. 

“Hey,” he brought you out of your actions, making you separate your hand from his face. You looked down at his eyes and put your hand to your side. He quickly grabbed it and placed it on his face again. 

“Hola,” you said while continuing to trace his features. 

“How do you say ‘I love you’ in Spanish?”

His voice was soft and velvety. You liked how it reached your ears, and his statement made your cheeks blush. 

“Well, there’s two ways to say it. The first is ‘Te quiero’ and you mainly use that in a platonic way. It’s for your family and friends. Or for someone you’re dating but aren’t ready to actually say ‘I love - love you’ yet.”

JJ nodded in understanding. “What about the other way?”

“The other way is ‘Te amo’ which is more romantic,” you said as your fingers fell down the bridge of his nose. 

He stared at you, trying to imagine what you would say and react if he said what he wanted to say to you right now. He didn’t know if you would want him to say what he wanted to say, or if you would even understand him through his bad pronunciation.

“Y/N,” he called out. You hummed in response, your finger tracing his right eyebrow. “Te amo.”

Your finger froze right in the middle of his right eyebrow. You looked down from your finger into his eyes. 

“Really?”

JJ’s cheeks were flushed. More than you had ever seen them. “I - I don’t actually know. All I know is that I feel great with you and that you make me happy and that I want to learn Spanish for you. No other girl has made me want to learn something for them.”

You smiled at what JJ said. “You make me happy, too.”

JJ didn’t even hesitate when he connected your lips. He pressed his hand to your neck and the other to your waist as you moved your hands to the back of his neck. He brought you a feeling of tranquility and of excitement all at the same time. Your heart seemed to speed up and slow down at the same time. Your lungs seemed to inhale and exhale at the same time. Your stomach seemed to swallow itself and explode at the same time. You loved every moment of the kiss, and you could feel both of your smiles pressed together. 

Once you both pulled away, you sighed and continued to trace his face as if nothing happened. 

“How do you say kiss?” he asked you a few seconds later. His voice was a bit deeper than before and you giggled. 

“Beso.”

“Can I ‘beso’ you again?” JJ asked, making you stare down at him. 

“Wrong!”

“I don’t care, just kiss me already.”

And so you did.

#outer banks #obx #obx netflix #jj maybank #rudy pankow #jj maybank x reader #jj maybank x y/n #jj maybank x latinareader #jj x reader #jj x y/n

[abrakophile]

I was looking through a bunch of junk and found some letters from my dad when he was in the army. I’m afraid I'll accidently toss them, so maybe I’ll put them here?

OPs Name JUNE 02 03

I LOVE YOU

THIS IS MY NAME IN KURDISH

*my dad wrote his first and last name, and under it, in Kurdish*

ILL TRY AND FIND OUT HOW TO WRITE YOUR NAME AND MOMS TOO.

ITS STILL HOT. I WORK AND READ BOOKS TO PASS THE TIME AWAY.

HOW ARE YOU DOING? GOOD I HOPE. WHAT DO YOU DO FOR FUN? DO YOU EVER HANG OUT WITH YOUR FRIENDS? TELL THEM I SAID “WASSUP?” NAH, DONT TELL THEM. TELL ME WHAT YOUR THINKING. I’M TRYING TO SEND YOU SOME MORE OF MY DRAWINGS. WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DRAW YOU? DID YOU LIKE THE DRAWING I SENT YOU OF YOU NAME? ITS ALRIGHT IF YOU DIDNY. JUST TELL ME WHAT YOU DO WANT ME TO DRAW YOU.

(Flip Page)

THIS IS WEIRD! (The page does not have lines on the left side of it) i WONDER WHAT HAPPENED TO THIS PIECE OF PAPER. HaHa

I MISS YOU ALOT. PLEASE SOND ME SOME MORE OF YOUR DRAWINGS, YOU CAN DRAW ME ANYTHING YOU WANT TO.

ARE YOU BEING GOOD FOR YOUR MOM? ITS NICE IF YOU HELP HER OUT WHILE I’M AWAY.

HAVE YOU BEEN ANYPLACE NEW? HOW IS SCHOOL GOING FOR YOU? IS MOMMY GOING TO SCHOOL? I KNOW I WANT TO GO TO SCHOOL WHEN I GET BACK. HOPEFULLY I GET THE CHANCE TO LEARN EVERYTHING THAT THERE IS TO KNOW. THAT WOULD BE GREAT.

ALSO, ID LIKE TO DO SOME FISHING? HOW ABOUT YOU? I GUESS ILL END HERE. BE GOOD AND STAY IN SCHOOL. AND JUST SAY NO TO DRUGS.

THEYRE BAD.

I LIVE YOU OP

*hearts and x’s* DADDY

---

(I don’t know if all these pages are in order or if it’s missing any, but this was the letter in the same stack as the last but this one was for my mom. In some places his indents indicate passage of time.)

I HAVENT HAD ANY TIME TO WRITE SINCE WEVE BEEN ON THE ROAD, NOT TO MENTION THAT WE CAN’T SEND MAIL WHEN WE’RE MOVING ALL THE TIME.

WEVE BEEN ON THE ROAD FOR ABOUT FIVE OR SIX DAYS, I HAVENT REALLY BEEN COUNTING. I KNOW I TOLD YOU THAT WE’D BE IN KUWAIT FOR A WHILE, BUT THAT WAS SO YOU WOULDNT BE WORRIED. I’M GOING TO KEEP THIS LETTER THOUGH, TILL I GET HOME.

ABOUT TWO NIGHTS AGO, WE DROVE THROUGH BAGDHAD, SOMEBODY SAID THAT THERE WERE PILED BODIES, I DONT KNOW IF IT WAS TRUE.

AND I GUESS YESTERDAY, A COUPLE OF PEOPLE SAID THEY SAW A MISSILE OR SOEMTHING SHOT AT US. I WAS TRYING TO FIX A TRUCK SO I DIDNT SEE IT.

ITS NOT AS DUSTY HERE IN IRAQ. IT REMINDS ME OF THE CONVOYS IN KOREA.

MOST OF THE PEOPLE WILL WAVE “HI”. SOME OTHERS DONT.

I SAW A KID OPEN HIS HAND ONCE WHILE MOVING, AND IT SAID “BUSH” THAT WAS KIND OF COOL.

OH YEAH. HERES A STORY. WHILE OUT DOING A MISSION, ONE OF OUR “BRADLEY” TANKS FIRED ON AN ENEMY AMMO TRUCK AND CLIPPED A KID. THE ROUNDS BLEW ONE OF HIS LEGS OFF AND SOME OF THE OTHER, FROM THE KNEE DOWN. SO THE MEDICS PICKED HIM UP AND BROUGHT HIM TO OUR RECONCOLIDATING POINT FOR MEDICAL TREATMENT. I GUESS HE EVENTUALLY DIED FROM LOSS OF BLOOD THE NEXT NIGHT AND YESTERDAY THEY TOOK HIM OUT AND BURIED HIM.

ALSO WE PICKED UP ABOUT 25-30 P.O.W.s AND SENT THEM SOUTH.

IT GETS PRETTY COLD AT NIGHT. AND THE DAY’S ARE VERY HOT.

SINCE WE LEFT KUWAIT ITS BEEN ME AND MENDOZA IN THE FIVE TON WRECKER AND I HAVE TO ADMIT THAT ITS BEEN EXCITING. WE KEPT GETTING SEPERATED FROM THE CONVOY AND BREAKING DOWN. BUT I THINK THAT WERE BETTER NOW. HOPEFULLY.

IM STILL WAITING TO BE AMBUSHED TO MAKE ALL THIS SEEM REAL TO ME. A PART OF ME WANTS IT AND ANOTHER DOESNT.

AND IT SEEMS LIKE ONLY OUR UNIT HAS TO STAY IN UNIFORM, EVERYONE ELSE WEARS T-SHIRTS AND BANDENA’S AND RAGS ON THEIR HEAD

WERE STILL GOING NORTH. NOBODY KNOWS HOW LONG WE’LL STAY. ITS NOT THAT BAD HERE. MEANING, IT COULD BE WORSE. 

I USED A “SHIT-CHAIR”. ITS JUST A METAL CHAIR WITH A HOLE CUT IN THE MIDDLE AND THE SEAT FROM A TOILET BOLTED TO IT, GROSS.

HELICOPTERS CAN BE HEARD ALL DAY AND NIGHT. I GOT TO SEE THEM DROP BOMBS ALL DAY ABOUT 3 DAYS AGO, FROM A DISTANCE OF COURSE.

ILL BE DRIVING AGAIN, IN A MINUTE. PROBABLY RE-FUEL AND BACK ON THE ROAD AGAIN. IM ENJOYING IT.

I HAVE 8 MAGAZINES FULL OF ROUNDS. NO GRENADES, BUT I LIKE IT LIKE THAT.

SOMETIMES IT SMELLS LIKE SHIT.

I GUESS ILL END IT HERE FOR NOW

I LOVE YOU AND MISS YOU TWO TWICE IF NOT THRICE AS MUCH AS YOU MIGHT MISS ME TOO.

HELLO AGAIN. WERE SOMEWHERE NEAR TIKRI + MOSUL. YESTERDAY, ME + MENDOZA WENT LOOKING FOR MOMENTO’S. WE BROKE A LOCK TO A NEAR BY BUNKER AND FOUND 6 A.K.47s! BUT ON OUR WAY BACK TO TURN THEM IN, MAJOR TATU GOT THEM FROM US. I WAS SO PISSED. BUT I GOT A GAS MASK w/ FILTER, A FULL MAGAZINE CLIP FROM ONE OF THE A.K.s AND A BERET WITH IRAQ 1 RANK ON IT.

I MADE A STENCIL FOR THE TRUCK WERE RIDING IN. ITS CALLED THE “GAMBLER.” YESTERDAY MENDOZA DROVE, SO TODAY ILL BE DRIVING.

IM NOT POSITIVE, BUT, I THINK WERE GOING TO TURKEY. NIETO SAYS THAT HE OVERHEARD SOMEBODY FROM S1 (or SI, I’m not sure) SAYING WE MIGHT GET PAID EXTRA FOR GOING THROUGH BAGHDAD.

I THINK NIETO’S MAD AT ME. CANT EXPLAIN WHY. MAYBE ITS BECAUSE IM RIDING WITH MENDOZA AND HE DOESNT LIKE MENDOZA TOO MUCH. OH WELL, WHATEVER REASON, HOPE THINGS GET NORMAL AGAIN. HAVE TO GO,

*hearts and xs*

TODAY IS THE 25th OF APRIL, I RECEIVED FIVE OR SIX (OR SEVEN) LETTERS YESTERDAY. THE LATEST WAS DATED 07 OF APRIL. THAT TELLS ME THAT ITS GOING TO TAKE A WHILE TO COMMUNICATE.

WE HAVENT RECEIVED MAIL BECAUSE WEVE BEEN MOVING NEVER STAYING IN ONE PLACE MORE THAN A DAY, OR TWO, UNTIL NOW. WE’VE BEEN IN THIS SPOT GOING ON FOUR DAYS TOMORROW?!

GIVE ME A MINUTE...

FOR THE LAST COUPLE OF DAYS IVE BEEN HELPING MENDOZA PULL THE ENGINE OUT OF A 5 TON TRUCK AND SWITCH IT w/ ANOTHER ONE. IT WOULD HAVE BEEN EASY BUT THE FLY WHEEL SEIZED UP INSIDE THE BELL HOUSING. ITS FINISHED NOW AND THE RUMOR IS WE’RE LEAVING  (OR MOVING) AGAIN TOMORROW.

ITS 10:33 THURSDAY MORNING. YOUR TIME IS 12:32 JUST TURNING THURSDAY.

I ALMOST CRYED WHEN I SAW ELIS PICTURE. I REALLY MISS BOTH OF YOU. LET ME BACK TO BEFORE I GOT DISTRACTED. I HAVENT BEEN ABLE TO SEND MAIL BECAUSE WE’VE BEEN MOVING. BUT I GUESS THAT WHATEVER THREAT THERE WAS (IF ANY), ISNT SO THREATFUL ANYMORE, WE CAN START RECEIVING AND SENDING MAIL. NO PHONE TO CALL FROM, AND NO INTERNET TO E-MAIL FROM.

THE WHOLE UNIT IS SCATTERED, SO EVEN IF I GET WHAT YOU NEED IT’LL TAKE FOREVER TO GET IT TO YOU. LET ME PULL THOSE LETTERS BACK OUT. OH WAIT. I DID LAUNDRY AND SOME UNDERWEAR THATS DRY, FELT HARD, OH WELL, WAIT A SECOND, K

I HAD TO FOLD SOME T-SHIRTS. ALL MY SOCKS ARE STILL DAMP. 

YOU CAN USE MY CONTRACT TO SHOW THAT I ENLISTED IN TEXAS AND HOWS THIS

*On a separate sheet my dad wrote a detailed note for my mom to give to someone to confirm that he did want to buy a house. He writes “I AM ALIVE AND WELL.” and “PLEASE ACCEPT THIS PAPER”, then he signed it with his scribble signature, and underneath it wrote his name in print and added “1st SQUADRON 10th CAVALRY HEADQUARTERS TROOP (I have no clue what this means)*

HOW’S THAT? HOPE I SPELLED EVERYTHING CORRECTLY. IM ALMOST READY WITH A DESIGN TO COVER THE OTHER TATTOOS ON MY LEFT FOREARM.

I JUST FINISHED LOOKING OVER ALL THOSE LETTERS YOU SENT FOR ME

IM BACK! I GOT SLEEPY SO I TRYED TO LAY DOWN FOR A LITTLE BIT. NO SLEEP. I DONT THINK. I DIDNT HAVE ENOUGH WATER TO WASH MY DCV’S AND A PAIR OF BDV’S. BESIDES FOR DRINKING WATER, BUT WE HAVE TO CONSERVE IT.

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE RUMORS. TOMORROW WE’LL BE LEAVING FOR THE IRAN/IRAQ BORDER TO DO “PEACE KEEPING” FOR 3 TO 6 mths. OTHERS SAY THAT THE 4ID (i think is what this says) GENERAL WANTS TO KEEP US HERE TILL NOV., THATS WHEN 1 CAV WILL COME TO REPLACE US. WHILE OTHERS SAY WE MIGHT LEAVE BY JUNE. NOTHINGS FOR SURE.

SMALLER RUMORS FLOATING AROUND THE SITE ARE; RAMSEY AND SFC BACON ARE SLEEPING TOGETHER. SGT SIREK HAS PLANS TO TAKE NIETO AS HIS APPRENTICE AND PADIWAN LEARNER OF THE DARK SIDE. LITTLE BLACK ARNOLD IS MILITARY INTELLIGENCE FOR SPECIAL FORCES OPERATING UNDER COVER A SURVEILLENCE AS PART OF

*the rest of the page is blank*

IM BACK. TODAY IS THE 27th. I GOT BACK TO THE LITTLE CAMP AREA ABOUT AN HOUR AND A HALF AGO. I LEFT YESTERDAY MORNING TO, WELL, AS PART OF DE-CON (DE-CONTAMINATION) MISSION. HERES THE INFORMATION THAT I GATHERED.

A SITE HAD BEEN FOUND THAT WAS THOUGHT TO HAVE CHEMICAL WEAPONS AND 1-10 WAS APPOINTED TO GO TO THE SITE AND DE-CON THE CIVILIANS THAT WERE GOING TO OPEN THEM. AS IT TURNS OUT THE CIVILIANS HAVE BEEN DE-LAYED AND WOULD BE SET BACK 1 DAY.

THE NBC TEAM THAT I WAS WITH WERENT PREPARED TO STAY OVER NIGHT AND AS FORCASTED BY SSG MINOR WE MIGHT HAVE HAD TO STAY 3 TO 4 DAYS. EVERYBODY WAS PISSED.

LATELY ITS BEEN GETTING REALLY COLD AT NIGHT AND WE JUST HAPPENED TO BE NEAR A RUNNING RIVER. SO THE, ITS ABOUT 9 O’CLOCK AND IM BEAT, NO SLEEPING BAG OR ANYTHING TO COVER UP WITH AND I DECIDE TO TRY AND SLEEP. I GET AS COMFORTABLE AS POSSIBLE AND I GET ATTACKED BY MOSQUITOS. NOW IM PISSED SO I DECIDED TO JUST TO STAY UP ALL NIGHT. ABOUT 10PM ONE OF THE HEMTT (this might just say “hemi”, I don’t know) FUELERS SHOWS UP AND SGT TORRES SAYS HE HAS EVERYBODYS SLEEPING BAG! THE SITES ABOUT 45 MINS AWAY AND THEY LEFT SOMETIME MID AFTERNOON TO GET OUR SHIT, I HATE THESE PEOPLE.

RIGHT NOW ITS 9:01 PM AND ITS 11:02 AM YOUR TIME. I MISS YOU.

RIGHT NOW IM GOING TO ADDRESS AN ENVELOPE AND HAVE IT READY TO SEND TOMMOROW THE 28th. IM SORRY IF IT SEEMS THAT IM NOT WRITING VERY OFTEN. FOR A WHILE WE COULDN’T. AND NOW THAT IT SEEMS WE MIGHT BE HERE A LITTLE WHILE, THEYVE KEPT ME REALLY BUSY. LET ME ADDRESS THE ENVELOPES (he drew a star here)

ALL DONE. I THOUGHT ABOUT THE HOUSE A LOT TODAY AND YESTERDAY. IM SURE BY THE TIME THIS LETTER REACHES YOU, YOU’LL HAVE EITHER GOTTEN IT OR GAVE IT UP. IM O.K. WITH EITHER DECISION YOUVE MADE.

YOUVE KEPT THIS FAMILY TOGETHER, AND THAT MAKES ME PROUD. YOUR SMART, ATTRACTIVE AND FUNNY. AND YOU DONT TAKE ANY SHIT FROM ANYBODY. I LOVE YOU.

I HOPE THAT OUR DAUGHTER TURNS OUT TO BE LIKE YOU.

I GUESS ILL MAIL THIS TOMORROW, FIRST THING, SO

EVER YOURS

EVER MINE

*my dad signed it with his scribble, and wrote his name under it. under that are hearts and x’s with my mom’s name and then my name under hers.*

#very personal but where the fuck am i gonna put them? you know where i kinda cant lose them? #letters from the guy that was my dad #pt 1 #long post

[newstfionline]

Headlines

UN calls for global cease-fire (Foreign Policy) United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for a global cease-fire in order for countries to focus on the coronavirus pandemic. “End the sickness of war and fight the disease that is ravaging our world,” he said. “It starts by stopping the fighting everywhere. Now. That is what our human family needs, now more than ever.”

Lost jobs, income, and mortgages (Wall Street Journal) Mortgage companies are bracing for a severe cash crunch when Americans who lose jobs and income because of the coronavirus pandemic stop making payments on their home loans. The companies expect a wave of missed payments from borrowers as early as next month that will force them to come up with tens of billions of dollars on short notice.

US airline shutdown coming? (Wall Street Journal) Major U.S. airlines are drafting plans for a potential voluntary shutdown of virtually all passenger flights across the U.S., according to industry and federal officials, as government agencies also consider ordering such a move and the nation’s air-traffic control system continues to be ravaged by the coronavirus contagion. No final decisions have been made by the carriers or the White House, these officials said.

Trump Weighs Rollback of Lockdown Measures as Economy Worsens (Foreign Policy) At a White House briefing yesterday, U.S. President Donald Trump said that normal economic activity would resume in weeks, not months. “Our country was not built to be shut down,” Trump said, “This is not a country that was built for this. It was not built to be shut down.” His comments highlighted the growing friction between public health experts keen to halt the spread of the coronavirus and White House advisors who see the economy as the priority. “The president is right. The cure can’t be worse than the disease,” Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council said on Fox News on Monday, “And we’re going to have to make some difficult trade-offs.” Such sentiments are not limited to the White House. There is a growing chorus among conservatives and in mainstream publications calling for a rethink.

Britain Placed Under a Virtual Lockdown by Boris Johnson (NYT) Facing a growing storm of criticism about his laissez-faire response to the fast-spreading coronavirus, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on Monday that he would place Britain under a virtual lockdown, closing all nonessential shops, banning meetings of more than two people, and requiring people to stay in their homes, except for trips for food or medicine. People who flout the new restrictions, the prime minister said, will be fined by the police.

With live sports gone, announcer offers play by play of the everyday (NYT) Freelance rugby announcer Nick Heath is filling a sports-sized void with short videos where he provides a running commentary on regular life in London. In one clip, four women walking with strollers are suddenly competing in the “international four-by-four pushchair formation final.” Pedestrians using a crosswalk are in the “2020 crossroad dash.” Each clip is an absurd delight that’s both funny and very British.

As Coronavirus Surveillance Escalates, Personal Privacy Plummets (NYT) In South Korea, government agencies are harnessing surveillance-camera footage, smartphone location data and credit card purchase records to help trace the recent movements of coronavirus patients and establish virus transmission chains.

In Lombardy, Italy, the authorities are analyzing location data transmitted by citizens’ mobile phones to determine how many people are obeying a government lockdown order and the typical distances they move every day. About 40 percent are moving around “too much,” an official recently said.

In Israel, the country’s internal security agency is poised to start using a cache of mobile phone location data--originally intended for counterterrorism operations--to try to pinpoint citizens who may have been exposed to the virus.

As countries around the world race to contain the pandemic, many are deploying digital surveillance tools as a means to exert social control, even turning security agency technologies on their own civilians. Health and law enforcement authorities are understandably eager to employ every tool at their disposal to try to hinder the virus--even as the surveillance efforts threaten to alter the precarious balance between public safety and personal privacy on a global scale.

Pakistan moves toward lockdown (Al Jazeera) Pakistan has moved closer to a countrywide lockdown to attempt to control the accelerating spread of coronavirus cases across the country, as cases hit more than 850 and doctors complain of dwindling personal protective kits. On Monday, a full lockdown went into effect in the southern city of Karachi, home to more than 20 million people, while Punjab province--home to almost half of Pakistan’s 207 million people--also announced widespread restrictions on public movement.

India orders 21-day lockdown (Foreign Policy) India, South Asia’s largest economy, has ground to a halt since the weekend. Authorities urged people to take curfew orders seriously, shutting down domestic commercial flights and rail services. In a televised address to the nation on Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a strict 21-day nationwide lockdown. “If we are not able to manage the next 21 days, we will be pushed back by 21 years,” he warned. “For 21 days, forget what it means to step outside your home.”

Documents Show Modi Govt Building 360 Degree Database To Track Every Indian (Huffington Post) The Narendra Modi government is in the final stages of creating an all-encompassing, auto-updating, searchable database to track every aspect of the lives of each of India’s over 1.2 billion residents, previously undisclosed government documents reviewed by HuffPost India establish.

Reducing Afghan aid (NYT) The State Department said it was cutting $1 billion to Afghanistan this year, and potentially another $1 billion in 2021, after rival Afghan leaders failed to support a unified government. It’s a condition that U.S. diplomats consider crucial for peace talks.

China ends Wuhan restrictions (NYT) Officials in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak started, said today that public transportation would resume within 24 hours and that residents would be allowed to leave the city beginning April 8, as infections appeared to be dwindling.

Tokyo Olympics postponed to 2021 (AP) The IOC announced a first-of-its-kind postponement of the Summer Olympics on Tuesday, saying that the Tokyo Games “must be rescheduled to a date beyond 2020, but not later than summer 2021, to safeguard the health of the athletes, everybody involved in the Olympic Games and the international community.”

Libya becomes theatre for drone combat (Guardian) The blind eye the western world is turning to Libya has allowed it to become the world’s main theatre of drone combat, with the UAE and Egypt introducing Chinese-made drones to the field of Middle Eastern warfare. Not only does this undercut America’s short-lived monopoly on military drone technology, it has also shown the world that Chinese drones, as well as other equipment such as guided artillery, are the cheap and effective alternative for proxy warfare. It is a foreboding symbol of the future of arms proliferation and the technological upgrade that smaller, regional conflicts are set to experience.

African finance ministers call for debt waiver (Foreign Policy) In a joint statement, African finance ministers called for $100 billion in stimulus to allow the continent to weather the dual storms of coronavirus and falling oil prices. The statement calls for a waiver on interest payments on public debt and sovereign bonds--a move that would free up $44 billion and “provide immediate fiscal space and liquidity to the governments in their efforts to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic,” the ministers said.

South Africa imposes lockdown (South China Morning Post)​​ South Africa will impose a nationwide lockdown for three weeks as it tries to contain a surge in coronavirus cases, which on Monday jumped from 274 to 402 in a day. President Cyril Ramaphosa said it was “a decisive measure to save millions of South Africans from infection and save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.” The country’s 56 million people have been told to “stay at home” from midnight on Thursday until midnight on April 16 “to prevent a human catastrophe of enormous proportions in our country.”​

#headlines #news

[awed-frog]

Idk much about uk/eu politics but I have a question.. is this correct: us "left-wing" = uk "left-wing" = eu "left-wing." What about right wing

That’s an extremely complicated question, and I’m not sure I can do it justice, but I’m going to do my best, because it’s a really important issue.

The joke answer is: the US left is not like the European left because the US doesn’t have a left.

The tl;dr answer is: politics depends on people and how they view the world, and those things are shaped by history and geography, so every country’s going to have a slightly (or very) different version of left and right.

For a longer and possibly boring answer, see below.

Leaving aside the fact academics fight about what left and right even are (personally, I think it’s like pornography: you recognize them when you see them) and that there’s tons of theories out there on what makes people left-wing or right-wing - in a nutshell, the main characteristic of a ‘traditional’ left like the European left is opposition to the status quo and a wish to distribute wealth more equally. After all, in their modern sense, political parties were born around the time of the French revolution, when those people who supported the king and the Church deliberately placed themselves on the right-side benches of the Assembly (right being, of course, a synonym for ‘honest’, ‘just’ and everything else) so that those standing with ‘the people’ and demanding change were forced to sit on the left.

Now - as far as I can tell, one big difference between the US left and the European left is that the European left was shaped by the unions and Communism in a way the US left wasn’t. 

See, in Europe you get two waves of ‘opposition to the status quo’: the first revolutions, like - arguably - the French revolution, were mainly middle-class people being fed up and demanding the same privileges the aristocracy had. Nobody really cared about ‘the people’; the question was, “How come we - the merchants, the clerks, the lawyers - the generally hard-working and generally educated and wealthy-ish people of this fine country, are still seen like second-class citizens because we haven’t got the right blood?”. Meanwhile, the ‘real people’, those at the very bottom of society, were too uneducated, politically unaware and scattered about to demand anything for themselves. 

All that changed when factories became a thing. Suddenly, instead of a bunch of exploited farmhands grumbling about their fate and being reprimanded in some village church, you had hundreds - or thousands - of workers crammed together and chatting about how miserable their lives were. That’s how you have the conditions to truly change something - bring about a lasting revolution instead of the disorderly, ultimately useless revolts farm labourers sometimes staged. All you need is a savvy political leader, and for various reasons, it was Communism who provided that.

That’s how the modern European left was born: in the factories, among the workers, supported and nurtured by union leaders, and later inspired and funded directly by the Soviet Union. In most countries, politics became a three-way street - privilege-defending right-wing parties which gradually shifted to fascism, a combative left with a minor split between anarchists and communists, and a Christian ‘middle’ desperately trying to stay afloat and losing its soul in the process.

(Religion is by nature conservative, but while many Church leaders sided - openly or implicitly - with Nazism and Fascism, many priests fought on the other side, forming an uneasy truce with communists. Today, this inner conflict is far from over, especially in the Catholic Church.)

And then, after the war, when the European left seemed so strong the US firebombed Greece and formed a plan to invade Italy if voters decided on a Communist government, disaster struck: the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, and we started to learn what the Soviet Union really was. 

It’s impossible to underestimate what a shock that was for left-wing voters, and particularly for those who’d fought in the Resistance during WW2 and had been calling themselves communists - with great pride - for generations. For decades, the Soviet Union had been an ideal - a nation built on the refusal of a murderous war, a nation of slaves butchering a corrupt and cruel royal family, a nation of new rights for everyone, of equality, of tremendous scientific and social progress. It was only in the late 60s that people in the West started to learn about the rest of it: about Stalin’s crimes, about the gulags, about the regime’s violence - everything. And at that point, everything just - collapsed. 

Roughly speaking, left-wing parties split between a majority of people who wanted nothing to do with Communism anymore and a minority who still defended it (and later turned to violence). There were many, however, who simply walked away, or started to vote for other parties.

The second death blow for the European left, which, as I said, had been heavily linked to the unions and the factory workers, was the closing of those factories. This was partly inevitable, I suppose, because globalization made it much cheaper to move production out of Europe, but right-wing politicians like Margaret Thatcher were publicly and privately over the moon about it, and the entire process happened in such a way that entire communities were literally destroyed. The left, of course, tried to fight back - in the UK, strikes went on for weeks - but for a bunch of reasons, they lost; and slowly but surely, they also lost their voters, many of whom never found a job again.

(In the UK and elsewhere, many of them took a sharp turn to the right when parties on the extreme right found an easy answer to their problems: those ‘bloody foreigners’ who’d taken their jobs.)

Finally, the European left got all but obliterated when some influential left-wing politicians decided the only way back was to move ‘to the centre’ (ie, to the right) and surrender to extreme capitalism. Left-wing parties had already lost most of their traditional base (factory workers) and when people like Tony Blair took over and preached the Milton Friedman Gospel, they mostly lost the other, smaller part of their supporters (students and intellectuals) without gaining all that much in return. That’s how in many countries today you find a left wing that can still command a sizable portion of the vote but is splintered among dozens of small parties. In some cases, like France and now Italy, voters are so fed up with the lack of clear values the left is almost gone.

In the US, on the other hand, things happened very differently. 

For one thing, the unions decided not to play a part in politics. For another, parties inspired by Soviet Russia were definitely a no-no. Then you’ve got the geography of the place - hundreds of small communities scattered here and there, all with different cultural values and political goals, the light of their ‘manifest destiny’ guiding them in a difficult and alienating environment. And the fact political parties in the US were born top-down instead of bottom-up. And, of course, slavery and its aftermath. 

(In a nutshell: since there are always more workers than bosses, the only way for bosses to control workers is divide them into prvileged and less privileged sections so they fight among themselves instead of collaborating and asking for better working conditions. This is particularly easy to do when the less homogenous your staff is. That means that in Europe, workers solidarity was much easier to achieve - though we still got tensions, even violence, because that’s nationalism and racism for you - while in the US it was much more difficult to integrate African workers with white workers and convince them to stand together, with people on various sides, and with different motivations, insisting that what divided these groups was too significant to be overlooked.)

That’s basically why you can’t exactly compare the Democratic party, which traditionally served the interests of rich land-owners in the South, supported slavery and was born more as a lobby than what Europe would understand as a party, with the European left. They’re two different animals. One of my university professors used to say Democrats and Republicans are not about left and right at all - they were shaped by other things, and serve more as geographical and historical markers than as parties - to the point were the left wing of the Democratic party would have more in common (and vote with) the left wing of the Republican party than with the right wing of the Democratic party. And while the Democratic party slowly became more similar to the European left (for instance by aligning with the workers and supporting civil rights) the transition was never complete. In fact, a new wave of fresh tensions is happening right now: there’s very little in common between people like Joe Biden and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and in Europe they’d probably belong to different parties. From what I read, many people (especially young people) are trying to pull the party to the left, but party leaders absolutely do not want that. That’s a huge problem, especially in a country with a two-party system, and may very well cost the Democrats the 2020 election.

As for the right: as I said in some earlier post, while the left splinters, the right simply - moves more to the right. That’s been a common trend for decades, and something you can see very clearly, especially in the US and the UK, but also in France or in Italy. 

(Germany seems immune - for now - but we’ll have to wait and see.) 

This happens, in part, because people on the right are generally motivated by concrete goals and are ready to stomach tons of unpleasantness to get there. The millionaires funding the Republican party may not like the prospect of a trade war with China, but they’re going to keep donating because they get tax cuts in return; and Christian extremists are not enthusiastic about a President who sleeps around with prostitutes, but if he makes abortion illegal, they’ll still show up for him.

The problem with all of this is that most people, everywhere, are sort of in the middle. And now the middle is disappearing - well, the big question is, where are they going to go? Every scenario is very dangerous, because from what we’ve seen so far, there’s only four bad choices:

People keep voting for their traditional party, but do it unenthusiastically and consider it the lesser of two evils. This way, party leaders are encouraged to stay on their path, and things get steadily worse (example: the Italian left).

People vote for ‘the new face’ because they’re fed up with ‘business as usual’. This is generally a disaster, because ‘the new face’ is either someone with a precise and hidden agenda (like Berlusconi or Macron) or someone with zero experience who’s going to fuck things up, because politics is complicated (like the Italian 5* Movement) or a combination of both (arguably, Nick Clegg and the LibDems in general).

People vote for the most radical thing they find, which is usually a party on the extreme right possibly masquerading as ‘the centre’ or ‘the sensible choice’. This is the ‘protest vote’ and partly how you get Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen.

Finally, lots of people just stop voting, which empowers the extremes because if you take those with doubts or uncertainties out of the equation, you’re left with the obsessed, the stans and the nutters. In fact, considering how many people don’t vote, extreme right parties like Salvini’s Lega don’t have a lot of support, but is this good news? They’re still at the head of the government.

So there you go. I’m sorry it got so long - I hope it made sense? In short, left- and right-wing parties of different countries are likely to have stuff in common, to the point where they often work together without too much friction (as they do in the European Parliament, for instance), but it’s problematic and incorrect to say there’s a ‘universal left’ and a ‘universal right’ based on the same exact values and goals. 

If you’re trying to understand whether you yourself are right-wing or left-wing, this test is always a good place to start - but you’ll need to have an opinion on a number of issues in order to answer it so that it’s truly useful to you. My advice would be to read up on the history of your own country, if possible from unbiased sources; to keep up with the news (from different sources); to discuss important issues with friends, teachers and family members - keeping an open mind and interacting even with people you don’t agree with; to accept political opinions are fluid and will change with age, or when you learn new facts; and take the time to listen to the candidates before elections so you know where they stand on stuff that matters to you (education? the climate? immigration? more jobs for young people? foreign policy? women’s rights? and so on).

#ask #politics #left and right #europe vs the us #history #political parties #long post for ts #answers and comments welcome #as i said #i'm really not an expert #especially when it comes to us politics

[thinkingiswishful]

On Being Half White (or anything at all)

I was born and raised in Orange County, California in 1995 to a white father and a first-generation Vietnamese mother. The first 10 years of my life I lived in a comfortable middle-class suburb called Fountain Valley and was raised by my Vietnamese-only speaking grandmother while both my parents worked.

In many ways, I was culturally raised with Vietnamese traditions of food, religion, language, and manners. Every day I ate my grandmother’s cooking which usually consisted of hastily prepared meals like com tam I’d drench in nuoc mam but occasionally included more time-consuming traditional dishes like pho, goi cuon, and banh cuon. Every night my grandmother would teach me how to recite Vietnamese prayers until I mastered them verbatim. Although I never personally took interest, you’d always hear faint Vietnamese music or TV playing from my grandmother’s bedroom. To this day I get agitated when people don’t take off their shoes in homes (especially mine.)

My upbringing revolved around a generally conservative Vietnamese mother compounded by Catholicism which led to things that may be considered abuse by some family’s standards but was pretty normal in Asian culture (especially for a first-generation family that came from extreme poverty.) I won’t get into details, but years later after seeing how some of my white friends in healthy households were raised by their parents, it probably wasn’t the best for my mental wellbeing and maturation.

My school was so Vietnamese that the last name Nguyen and Tran spanned many pages, for both students and faculty. Orange County is home to the largest Little Saigon in the United States, so South Vietnamese influence is rampant in the community where I grew up. Every week my mother used to make me fetch her ca phe da from a local shop, where I always very anxiously ordered coffee in stumbling Vietnamese. The folks behind the counter knew me and would always smile amusingly at this strange-looking white boy shyly attempting to speak their native tongue.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back, all adults that didn’t know me were always amused at my primal understanding of Vietnamese. My grandmother (almost bragging) would flaunt my understanding to people by commanding me in Vietnamese to do trivial tasks like picking up a random nearby item. They shared the same applauding smile as the coffee shop owner and the same amusement as if I were an aberration. Did they just view me as a white boy who knew Vietnamese? Because certainly they did not view me as one of their own, since I was not like them.

Race was never something I thought about deeply, even when I moved to Texas and was surrounded by more Black people in school than I had ever seen in my life. I followed many social justice blogs when I had a Tumblr back then, and knew racism existed and was bad, but never really understood the complex history behind race in America. Even then, when I was 13 – 18, the concept of race was never a defining factor of my life because I was shielded by my skin. When I moved to Texas, more people mistook me for being Hispanic or [Insert Literally Any Ethnicity Here Except Vietnamese]. But it wasn’t discriminatory. It was more of the same amusement of me not looking completely white and people’s inability to guess my ethnic background. I now acknowledge the privilege of living my whole life passing as a white man in the public perspective. And perhaps in many ways, I am a white a man. No thanks to the failure of public education, I never thought about structural racism (especially for African Americans) and the history behind racism until I was in my 20s and stumbled upon books like, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The New Jim Crow, Are Prisons Obsolete?, The Hate U Give, Lies My Teacher Told Me, and The Fire Next Time to name a few. My lackadaisical perception on issues like race, gender, socioeconomics, and capitalism were warped by my ignorance, and the more I try to learn about others, the more I also discover about myself.

What does it mean to be biracial in America? Certainly, it carries more weight to a biracial African American growing up in the 60s than it does to a biracial Vietnamese American growing up in the 2000s. Is it even correct to call myself Vietnamese American, or am I just American? I feel as if parts of my Vietnamese culture that were so ingrained in my psyche have fleeted.

I’ve been in Texas for a majority of my life (about 12 years). In those 12 years:

• I no longer lived with my grandmother.

• I no longer lived in a Vietnamese community.

• Most of family lived hundreds of miles away in California.

• Being an only child, I spent much of my time alone.

That’s a long time to grow and lose a part of your identity. Adopting Vietnamese culture when I was a child didn’t feel like a choice but more a part of life. Given the choice in Texas, I shed myself from that life and embraced the lifestyle granted to a mostly white boy living in an upper middle-class suburb. Filling out ethnicity forms went from being 90% “Asian” or 5% “Other” to now where I am unequivocally 100% “Caucasian.”

How did my sense of identity change so drastically in all these years and have I lost a vital part of my heritage because of it?

I’ve never been to Vietnam, but I want to.

I regret not keeping up with the language, which I’ve forgotten completely (other than greetings and counting to 10.)

I regret not visiting my grandmother more often.

(I do not regret abandoning my religion, but that is a journal for another time.)

I feel like I lost the connection I had with being Vietnamese growing up. The closest I can get to rekindle that feeling is through food. I don’t bother ordering food in Vietnamese at restaurants anymore, just to avoid the ethnicity question and the barrage of interrogations that follow. Yes, my mother is Vietnamese. No, I’ve never been to Vietnam. No, I do not speak the language. Yes, I want to visit someday. My parents are still together… It gets old, like having to perform the same tricks for my grandmother in front of random adults.

Still, I wonder. Who would I be without my mother’s side of the family’s influence on my life? Yet, I have no Vietnamese pride. White pride is a joke. And with the current cultural climate and the stigma behind white folks, I almost feel embarrassed to be lumped in with that demographic. It’s hard to identify as anything but biracial, and maybe as the world shrinks smaller, that’s where we are heading anyway. Although racism is still very pronounced all throughout the world, continuing to embrace monoracial status perpetuates stereotypical cycles that I struggle to identify with today being only White or only Vietnamese.  

“It’s natural to ask one’s ethnic mix and I accept that—but I sometimes wonder if people who aren’t half-bloods realize the weight of the stone they’re lifting. If they comprehend the deeper conflict that may arise in those being questioned; if they realize there might be things nobody wants to talk about under there, things that bite and sting and can’t really be understood.”

#personal #my-post #vietnamese #biracial

[learningrendezvous]

Environmental Issues

GLOBAL FOOTPRINTS ON THE ENVIRONMENT: ECOLOGICAL INTELLIGENCE - HOW TO BE A RESPONSIBLE SHOPPER IN A WORLD OF OVERCONSUMPTION

Learn how to be a responsible shopper. Did someone say green retail therapy? Go shopping for ecological intelligence and discover what it means to be a responsible shopper in a world of over consumption. Reducing your footprint begins with your shoes. Energy saving products are the mainstream as consumers become more concerned with their health, air quality, water quality and available resources. So its time to say no to plastics! Going back to glass bottles, organic cotton diapers and buying clothes made from recycled fabrics are big changes we can make as we become more aware of the products we are eating, wearing and sleeping on.

DVD / 2017 / 26 minutes

GLOBAL FOOTPRINTS ON THE ENVIRONMENT: GOING GREEN ROOM BY ROOM - HOW TO LIVE AN ECO FRIENDLY LIFE

Can you really go green in every room of your home? Yes you can! Find out how to save money in your laundry room, bedroom, bathroom, living room and even your garden with these tips and tricks on how to live a more eco-friendly life. Conservation is the way to go. Simple tips like only running your dishwasher when its full and showering for only 5 minutes a day could save us 1000 of gallons of water per week. Unplugging unused appliances and choosing energy saving light bulbs can save in energy costs.

DVD / 2017 / 26 minutes

GLOBAL FOOTPRINTS ON THE ENVIRONMENT: NATURAL PLAYGROUNDS & URBAN WILDERNESS - PLAY, LEARN & CONNECT WITH NATURE

Discover a few of our favorite green thing's from eco hangers and natural playgrounds to Segways and a tour of an urban wilderness, this program is an ecological tour like no other. Natural playgrounds are designed by incorporating nature, music and art to stimulate children in a natural holistic way to play. These playgrounds are essential for all cities and give a community a unique way to engage in nature and as a place for social, creative and theatrical play. Smart hangers! Learn why its so important to stop using wire hangers and to create smart hangers by using recycled paper. Find out what has two wheels, runs on electricity and is lots of fun while having a small carbon footprint with zero emissions! The Segway is environmentally friendly while transporting us in a very healthy ecofriendly way! Natural swimming pools are a new environmental approach designed without chlorine, filtered by plants and bacteria without toxic chemicals. These types of pools can cost much less than a tradition concrete pool. Discover why wetlands are so important to the ecosystem? They are a critical part of our natural environment, absorb pollutants, improve water quality and provide habitat for many animals and plants.

DVD / 2017 / 26 minutes

GLOBAL FOOTPRINTS ON THE ENVIRONMENT: ORGANIC FARMERS & THE ECOLOGICAL FARMING MOVEMENT

Do you know where your food comes from? Head behind the scenes with organic farmers and the urban farming organization, Not Far From the Tree to find out where your food comes from. Urban people take a field trip and go country to better understand the origins of their food. Find out what community share agriculture is and discover a garden of hope which teaches city dwellers the importance of good food. The food we choose impacts the environment in many ways. The food production industry has undertaken radical changes in recent years. Everything from what we grow, to how we grow it, to biological engineering has forever altered the food production business. Learn about soil management, how to run an organic operation, where our food comes from and just how simple healthy eating can be.

DVD / 2017 / 26 minutes

GLOBAL FOOTPRINTS ON THE ENVIRONMENT: RAINFORESTS & DEFORESTATION, PALM OIL & SAVING THE ORANGUTAN

This program explores the earth's forests, from the effects of deforestation and palm oil production, to forestry gardening and sustainable business practices. Trees are the lungs of our planet but we keep cutting them down? Find out the effects of deforestation. Did you know that a chocolate bar is responsible for the near extinction of the Orangutan? Find out why. We will also teach you how to garden the forest, introduce you to cosmetic company who are washing their hands of palm oil and an urban tree salvage company that saves trees. 50 years ago about 15% of the planets land surface was covered by a rain forest. Today, more than half of that has gone up in smoke. 12-15 million hectares of forest are lost every year. That is the equivalent of 36 football fields per minute. If that trend continues the Amazon will be gone in 50 years. So what is deforestation and why should we care?

DVD / 2017 / 26 minutes

GLOBAL FOOTPRINTS ON THE ENVIRONMENT: RECYCLE YOUR TRASH

It is time to recycle your thinking & change your habits. Did you ever wonder where your old tires, cars and computers end up? Go behind the scenes at a local recycling facility to find out. Why has our planet become a garbage dump? Learn how our garbage is extracted, produced, distributed, consumed and disposed of. There are lots of different kinds of recycling. When recycling is done well it is an essential part of the solution, when done poorly it is an obstacle and part of the problem. The most important component to reducing our waste is to recycle and changing our habits is key.

DVD / 2017 / 26 minutes

GLOBAL FOOTPRINTS ON THE ENVIRONMENT: SMALLER, GREENER, MORE FLEXIBLE HOMES & WATER CONSERVATION

Smaller, greener & more flexible homes are popping up everywhere. Find out what the mini home is. We'll make you sea sick with shipping containers, get a tour of the Now House Project, a War time home that is now a mean, green, energy producing machine. When it comes to building our homes bigger is no longer better. New homes after doubling in size in the 1960s are shrinking. Smaller, greener, more flexible homes are the new norm. After transport and agriculture, housing is the most resource intensive industry in the Western World. A smaller home leaves a smaller footprint on the Earth in every measureable way. Fewer trees cut down, less earth bulldozed, less petroleum burned, less steel mined and less use of every natural resource. As sustainability becomes more prevalent in our society, so too are eco-friendly living and working spaces. This program explores the rise of smaller, more flexible and most importantly greener homes and shows you how to get the most out of your household water by reusing it.

DVD / 2017 / 26 minutes

GLOBAL FOOTPRINTS ON THE ENVIRONMENT: SUSTAINABLE FURNITURE & DESIGN - RENEWING WASTE

How can we better conserve and live sustainably? Learn how to find sustainable furniture, find green items on EBay and even how to green your website. Get a behind the scenes look at how we define waste and value. Making environmentally good choices when furnishing your home is easier than you think and can make a big impact on the planet. This program teaches the value of repurposing salvaged materials into original furniture and how it is an essential choice to help solve problems caused by excessive consumption. Learn where the raw materials we sit, eat and sleep on come from and how they impact the natural world. Renew, revive and restore!

DVD / 2017 / 26 minutes

GLOBAL FOOTPRINTS ON THE ENVIRONMENT: TRANSPORTATION, GREENER CARS, BIODIESEL & DESIGNING CITIES LESS DEPENDENT ON FOSSIL FUELS

This program explores the automotive industrys move towards greener cars and the need for cities to balance cycling, public transport and cars within their overall infrastructure. So lets take a look at the transportation industry. Find out how to build a city around public transportation and the importance of the bicycle. Is there such a thing as a Green car? Have you heard cars can run on veggie oil, we'll show you how and take a look at biodiesel fuel. Increased levels of Carbon Dioxide are being expelled into the air from our tail pipes. Designing more sustainable transportation systems and being more thoughtful of how we design our cities is key by integrating walkability, bikeability and public transit. Building a city based on reduced carbon dependency by finding ways of redesigning or retro fitting neighborhoods and designing cities less dependent on fossil fuels is the way of the future.

DVD / 2017 / 26 minutes

GLOBAL FOOTPRINTS ON THE ENVIRONMENT: URBANIZATION & THE NATURAL WORLD

For the first time in history, more than half the population lives in cities. Because of urbanization every year we destroy untold amounts of plants and fertile soil. With this in mind, how can we make cities more sustainable? This program takes a special look at green roof gardening, the expansion of solar panels and thinking inside the box with food container gardening. Big cities leave big trouble for the natural world. The good news is we have the ability to change. There are currently innovative technologies in place that will help combat climate change in big cities.

DVD / 2017 / 26 minutes

GLOBAL SCIENTIFIC & ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES: LAKE UNDER LOCKDOWN - LAKE ONTARIO AN AQUATIC ECOSYSTEM UNDER LOCKDOWN

For almost 60 years, Lake Ontario has been under lockdown, surrounded, controlled and managed more than any other large lake in human history. But what happens when the ebb and flow of such a vast aquatic ecosystem is replaced by the cool efficiency of a swimming pool? A fascinating documentary that shines a light on global scientific and environmental issues.

DVD / 2017 / 52 minutes

GLOBAL SCIENTIFIC & ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES: SAVING THE MUSTANG - NORTH AMERICAS HORSE ON THE BRINK OF EXTINCTION

Wild mustangs have long been an icon of native peoples and early settlers of North America. Yet their fate today is uncertain. Saving The Mustang explores the state of wild horses today through the efforts of three individuals. Canadian horseman Randy Bird who adopted eight mustangs from a crowded facility in Wyoming. Endurance rider and song-writer Jean Albert Renaud and Roger William, past chief of the First Nation Xeni Gwetin, who created a 200,000 hectare wild horse preserve in the pristine and rugged wilderness of the Nemiah Valley in British Columbia. All three stories interweave a compelling tale of perseverance and determination, one that offers hope for these amazing animals.

DVD / 2017 / 52 minutes

GLOBAL SCIENTIFIC & ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES: WHAT IS KILLING LAKE - WINNIPEG & HOW TO SAVE IT

A fascinating documentary that shines a light on global scientific and environmental issues. Can we save one of the worlds largest freshwater lakes? This program reveals how a perfect storm of agriculture, hydro practices, sewage run-off, flooding and marsh destruction have devastated Lake Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, the 10th largest lake in the world. Lake Winnipeg is a 25,000 square km inland sea. It is bigger than Lake Ontario and about the same size as Lake Erie and it is in deep trouble. This once pristine lake has the worst blue-green algae problem of any major lake on the planet. In a distorted cycle that is a direct result of human activity, an excess of chemical nutrients in the lake has caused massive algae blooms. The green sludge washing up on the lakes shores threatens not only the lakes beauty, but also the natural ecosystems underlying it. If we dont intervene to restore the natural nutrient balance, one of Canadas largest lakes could choke from the bottom up. This film examines why the lakes ecology has changed so dramatically in just three decades and what needs to be done to restore the natural nutrient balance of one of Canadas largest lakes.

DVD / 2017 / 52 minutes

INFESTATION - THE INVASIVE SPECIES AND PESTS WHO THREATEN OUR ENVIRONMENT: CITIES UNDER SIEGE

Our cities are being attacked, overrun and overwhelmed with pests and invasive species bent on decimating our homes and threatening our well being. What happens if these urban invaders continue to expand their territory and occupy our safe haven? Is it just a matter of time before an emerging deadly disease carried by one of those urban invaders creates havoc in our big cities?

DVD / 2014 / (Grade 6-Adult) / 48 minutes

INFESTATION - THE INVASIVE SPECIES AND PESTS WHO THREATEN OUR ENVIRONMENT: THE FIGHT FOR FOOD

Every single day there is a growing number of people to feed and in the next thirty to forty years we will need to double our food production to sustain the increase in population. In this episode author Julian Cribb examines the infestations that are threatening our food supply.

DVD / 2014 / (Grade 6-Adult) / 48 minutes

INFESTATION - THE INVASIVE SPECIES AND PESTS WHO THREATEN OUR ENVIRONMENT: UNDERWATER INVASION

Water covers 71% of the Earth's surface and is the medium of life. All life forms and their surrounding ecosystems are dependent upon water, without it we would cease to exist. Director of Notre Dame's Environmental Change Initiative, Dr. David Lodge examines the infestations that are spreading throughout our fresh and salt water systems and clogging our precious waterways.

DVD / 2014 / (Grade 6-Adult) / 48 minutes

http://www.learningemall.com/News/Environment_202104.html

[pinkspaceclub]

Worst and Most Dangerous Gay Countries in the World

This week we are pleased to present a guest post by Talon Windwalker, a contract writer traveling the planet together with his son. Talon is an expert in longterm family travel and LGBTQ travel. His website, 1Dad1Kid, chronicles their journey, and his food blog Travels4Yum will cause you to drool.

I’ve been traveling full time, as a queer single dad, with my son for five years thus far . I’m often asked: “Where’s his mom?” I usually just respond with the safest explanation that there's no mom. However, that, understandably, generally results in some confusion and more questions. So many times I’m tempted to only respond “I’m gay.” Unfortunately, that isn’t always the safest thing to announce. People within the LGBTQ travel community have some unique challenges the typical person doesn’t need to consider. While there has been a surprising increase in rights for the community over the last decade, that's only the reality during a relatively small a part of the planet . One country removes the last legal vestiges of inequality and another promotes a bill to “kill the gays.” A queer couple, especially a gay one, has got to wonder if posing for a bedroom with one bed will get them into trouble. Can they walk down the road while holding hands without worrying of being subsequent headline? Do they desire they have to “act more straight” during a locale? If something happens to a part of a marriage , will that relationship be legally recognized? The recent case of the married British gay couple who were on their honeymoon in Australia reaffirmed this as a legitimate concern. one among them, tragically, died, and since Australia doesn't recognize couple the death certificate listed his husband as “never married.” Imagine the nightmare of not only losing your spouse, especially as a newlywed, but not having the ability to navigate the varied legal obstacles because your marriage isn't recognized. In order to list the simplest and worst places for LGBTQ travel, I considered various factors including: Existing laws and up to date court decisions Experiences of fellow queer travelers Reliable travel alerts specifically focused on the LGTBQ community Results of social experiments Travel resources indicating “welcoming” countries. It is important to notice that even in queer-friendly regions, there could also be areas that are less welcoming and open-minded. for instance , large cities tend to be more accepting of diversity than small rural communities. additionally , some cities have “gay villages” which are LGBTQ-majority neighborhoods that are much safer than other areas of the town . Gay males tend to experience more problems than lesbians. Some laws explicitly target males while saying nothing about lesbian-related acts. In many cultures, it isn’t considered odd for 2 women to share a bed or to be affectionate publicly . Generally speaking, women will have fewer concerns as a same-sex couple. Of course, they will produce other issues to affect . Best Places for LGBTQ Travel gay travel Spain This was, at first, a touch of a surprise for me; considering how heavily Catholic the country is. However, equality may be a big concern for Spaniards, and in 2005 the govt legalized couple against the strong protestations of the Vatican. This move was supported by a minimum of 66% of the population. Spain is home to some well-known queer hotspots like Sitges and Ibiza. However, Barcelona and Madrid even have thriving LGBTQ communities and activities. In 2012, the ecu Union conducted a survey across all of its member states regarding attitudes toward LGBTQ issues. Spain ranked alright . Last year, a social experiment was conducted in Madrid with encouraging results. Queer couples should feel comfortable being like all other couple while visiting most of Spain. Iceland This country is usually rated because the most egalitarian nation on the earth . The capital’s annual Pride events are attended by an outsized number of the straight community. In a minimum of one year, the mayor (who is heterosexual) even wearing drag to open the festival. At least one prime minister was an “out” lesbian who married her partner shortly after the law changing the definition of marriage to gender neutral went into effect. Violent crime may be a rarity in Iceland, and hate crimes are even more rare. South Africa Once an area known for horrendous racism and intolerance, South Africa has adopted a really liberal constitution and was the 5th country within the world to legalize couple (and the 2nd country outside of Europe). LGBTQ travelers routinely speak of feeling safe within the country, and Cape Town has become a well-liked destination for same-sex weddings. Mexico City and Oaxaca, Mexico The Mexican culture features a strong “live and let live” attitude; however, Mexico City and Oaxaca are known for being welcoming cities. Recently, the Mexican Supreme Court ruled that couple may be a constitutionally protected right which helps to point out that things are changing during this wonderful country. While smaller cities/less-known destinations might not offer many legal protections, generally speaking LGBQT people are pretty safe. Public displays of affection (PDA) are often frowned upon, but that applies to heterosexuals also . Hate crimes toward members of the queer community are quite unusual. Canada This North American country was among the primary within the world to legalize couple . While there are some areas that are more conservative, generally speaking LGBTQ people can feel safe traveling throughout this massive nation. Many large cities have gay villages, and Canadians are famous for being kind and welcoming. Toronto and Vancouver especially are noted as being extremely queer friendly. New Zealand Kiwis are a number of the friendliest and most welcoming people within the world, but they were a touch slow to hitch the opposite nations recognizing couple . When their parliament passed the law, though, they collectively began singing a Maori love song to commemorate the instant . As if people needed more reasons to like New Zealand! It is one among the safest countries to go to for everybody , including LGBTQ people. A queer couple walking while holding hands might encounter some people congratulating them but generally won’t need to affect homophobia. Portugal This wonderful country doesn’t often receive the eye it deserves, which is particularly true for LGBTQ travelers. The Portuguese people are fairly friendly and welcoming, and it warmed my heart to ascertain people actually encouraging a gay couple during another recent social experiment. Personally, i might like to see more people include Portugal in their travels. Worst Places for LGBTQ Travel gay travel2 This list might be really long, unfortunately. rather than listing all the countries that would pose potential problems for the queer traveler, I’ve focused on the foremost unsafe ones. Russia This country has taken homophobia to extremes. After enacting a law labeled as an “antipropaganda” measure against promoting homosexualty as a “normal” lifestyle, the Russian LGBTQ community experienced a drastic upswing in violent hate crimes. For the foremost part, police have appeared to be supportive of those crimes, rarely intervening even during attacks. Not satisfied with their level of overt hatred, the legislature recently tried to pass laws against same-sex couples showing any public displays of affection and/or “coming out” publicly. Surprisingly, those attempts (which specifically excluded females) failed, but it might be almost stunning if the law isn’t revisited at a later date. People have also been attacked for merely “appearing gay.” Uganda This African country is excessively homophobic. an effort to pass a law calling for members of the LGBTQ community to be executed was changed from “kill the gays” to “jail the gays.” Fortunately, that was annulled by the courts; however, lawmakers haven’t given up trying to pass legislation that might provide punishments for “unnatural acts” which might include homosexuality. Nigeria Nigeria seems to be in an unspoken battle with Uganda on which country are often more homophobic. There are multiple news stories covering mob attacks on suspected queers, even pulling them from their homes and beating them within the streets. On many of those occasions, the police have joined in on the attacks. Jamaica This island is documented for being laid back and enjoying a celebration lifestyle. However, when it involves LGBTQ people, all bets are off; particularly if you’re male. Sex between men is against the law during this country, and therefore the laws are often firmly enforced. The government is understood for supporting violence against gays, so if you’re a victim of a violent hate crime don’t expect to receive any assistance from local officials. Lithuania As a part of their European Union membership, this Baltic nation had to entrench some protections in their laws. However, the overall attitude toward LGTBQ people remains poor. Any sort of public event, like Pride, is usually amid violent protests. Legal protections here shouldn’t be considered as encouraging to queer travelers. While those protections could also be “on the books,” it doesn’t mean they're enforced, and police are generally known for being very lackadaisical and uncaring in their response to victims. Egypt Gay sex isn't specifically outlawed in Egypt; however, people are often arrested and convicted under morality laws which give for up to 17 years of imprisonment (with, or without, hard labor and fines). It is not uncommon for people of an equivalent gender to carry hands or walk arm-in-arm, numerous same-sex couples find these sorts of PDA to be relatively safe. However, as a foreigner you would possibly draw unwanted attention, so caution would be advised. Arrests at suspected gay gatherings aren't uncommon. While Muslim males are more likely to receive harsher treatment, all visitors are often subjected to an equivalent laws and punishments. Should I Avoid These Countries? This is a standard question with no, solid, one-size-fits-all answer. It really comes right down to individual choice. One has got to consider the potential risk factors, also as personal ethics. a number of us feel that giving our mighty tourist dollar to a rustic that encourages violence towards us may be a rather foolish, or unethical, decision. However, there's also a legitimate argument to be made that, by visiting and spending time in these places, we help “normalize” being LGBTQ. The best advice I can give is to be informed about the place you’re considering for travel and to honestly evaluate the risks versus benefits. Also consider the mood you would like for your trip. for instance , is that this a romantic getaway? Well, perhaps specialise in one among the simplest places to go to where you'll relax and be yourselves. TL;DR When it involves travel, like many things in life, only you recognize what works best for you. When considering LGBTQ travel, the subsequent countries stand out: Safest & most welcoming: Spain Iceland South Africa Mexico Canada New Zealand Portugal Most dangerous & unwelcoming: Russia Uganda Nigeria Jamaica Lithuania Egypt

Iran

Morocco

[iknowthismuchistrue2017]

My FTM Detransition

This is the story of my own transition and detransition.  This is my experience only.  I’m not speaking for anyone else.  

I’m in my midlife now, and up until about six months ago I knew I was trans. My top surgery and hysterectomy were done almost two decades ago.  My name change was legal almost a decade ago.

I’ll start at the beginning.  I was born in the sixties in a conservative town at a time when gender roles for men and women were extremely rigid.  I know these roles are still rigid, but believe it or not they are less extreme than they were. Growing up it was apparent to me even as a child that I was less than just for being born female.  Fathers were proud of their son’s in a way no one was of their daughter’s.  When son’s were born it was celebrated, when daughter’s were born it was just another day.  Additionally sons had power, they were allowed to be vocal and have opinions. Daughters were seen and not heard.

My mother wanted nothing more than a girl when she had me.  She’s told me that by 3 years old she could no longer keep me in dresses, that she would put me in a dress and within minutes she would find me stripped down and dressing myself in my fathers clothing.  This was the beginning of the clothing wars with my mother, and I give her a lot of credit for finally letting me win that war to a large extent.  She did eventually allow me to wear t-shirts, jeans and sneakers most of the time, though I still had to wear dresses for holidays and events.  Those days involved a lot of screaming fights and crying.  I was not allowed to cut my hair short until high school, which was another battle and a huge relief when the day finally came.

My friends were all boys.  I liked their toys, their games, and playing sports. I felt like one of them, but I couldn’t understand why I didn’t have a penis.  So every night I would ask god to please let me wake up with a penis.  I don’t recall how long I made this request, but I remember waking up disappointed for a significant period of time.  I never had any interest in girls, their toys, or their games.  And I found their conversations boring.

Over and over I heard the same things from the adults around me, even some I didn’t know:

“Girls don’t do that”

“Why are you wearing boys clothes?”

“Why are you wearing boys shoes?”

“You’re a girl you know”

And later, “Why do you have a boys haircut?”

Looking back I can see the beginnings of my internalized misogyny.  And why would I want to be a girl? Girls didn’t get to wear comfortable clothing or shoes. Girls didn’t have any of the freedoms afforded boys. Boy Scouts went camping while Girl Scouts sold cookies and did what I considered to be boring, and in a skirt!  A girl’s future involved getting married and having children, which I had no interest in.  Girls didn’t grow up to have careers, they grew up to be housewives doing laundry and making meals and I had no interest in that either.  There was no room for me in any of this, so from the beginning I was separating myself from girls and identifying with boys.  

At 11 when I got my first period I honestly felt like my life was over.  I became very distressed, and cried every month for years, begging my mother for a way to make it stop.  My mother would try to comfort me telling me that this was something all girls/women went through, and that just made it worse for me.  All I could think was that 12 times a year, for what seemed like the rest of my life I would be bleeding from my vagina.  And while I never liked my vagina to begin with because I felt I should have a penis, I now despised it, and it was the start of intense dysphoria which would last for many years.  To make things worse my breasts started noticeably developing quite suddenly and my mother decided it was time for me to wear bra’s.  My periods were distressing but I would at least get a 3 week break from them.  Bra’s were everyday.  From the very beginning I felt encumbered bra’s. They felt like a harness around my body, and I longed for the freedom I had when my skin felt free under my t-shirts before I had breasts.  

Once I started puberty I was around boys less because I was isolating, due largely to the distress of a changing body and the realization that I was trapped in a body that did not feel like mine and that I did not want.  I was not comfortable in my own skin, and I had a lot of self-hatred because of my body.  

I also discovered the love I had for women was here to stay.  When I was younger I had crushes on girls, but I didn’t give them too much thought because my friends were boys who also had crushes on girls.  The only talk of gay men, or lesbians (shims as they were called in my town) I ever heard growing up was mocking and negative, so I kept this secret to myself.  In high school I was determined to make peace with my body and spent my junior year wearing make-up and dressing like a girl.  I had no friends because I had already be judged a freak by my peers and I became more depressed than I already had been.  In my senior year I went back to dressing in a way that felt right to me, back to men’s clothing, with big button shirts over t-shirts to hide my breasts.  I had learned to wear sports bra’s in a smaller size to flatten myself.

After high school I went away to college in a major city and for whatever reason ended up quickly becoming friends with lesbians and the lesbian friendly women, without even being aware that this is who they were initially.  Then for the first time I began dating woman.  I enjoyed this new group of friends, and girlfriends too.  I got a fake ID and began going to gay and lesbian bars and a new world was opening up to me.  I had transformed into a butch lesbian and it felt like maybe I was coming into my own, sort of.  

I did begin to notice not long after was that I still didn’t feel right in my own skin. I was with a group of friends I loved, and had a girlfriend that I loved and yet I didn’t feel a part-of within the lesbian community.  I was with women, who were proud of being women.  But my body still felt foreign to me.  I still had dysphoria.  I still felt distress with every single period I had, not only that my periods were heavy, and painful, and a full week long.  And I still wore tight sports bra’s to hid my breasts.

It’s important to remember that this was the mid 80’s, long before the internet, and long before the word transexual was used to mean anything other than a pejorative.  The only time I heard the word “trans” was in reference to transvestites and prostitutes at that time, and it was used in the most derogatory way.

After 4 years of college in a major city where being a butch lesbian was largely accepted (in the right parts of the city), I moved to another major city.  This new city was a big wake up call for me because while there was a large lesbian community, it did not include butch lesbians. I had a buzz cut and wore jeans, t-shirts, Doc Marten’s, and a black leather motorcycle jacket and I was not welcome within this lesbian community.  I’m sure somewhere in this new city there must have been butch lesbians, but with no internet I never found them.  I tried for a couple of years to make friends within this group and no matter what I did I couldn’t make friends, and couldn’t find a girlfriend for quite a long time either.

I decided to throw myself into my work and became a workaholic.  I worked long hours, and 95% of the people I worked with were straight.  Once again I became more comfortable with the men I worked with, and generally talked only to the women I had crushes on, some of which I had relationships with.  I still had dysphoria, still hated being in my body, and still did not identify with being female.  I began distancing myself from being female even more, my internalized misogyny came crashing back, and I was incredibly depressed. Life went on like this for years.

Eventually the word trans became part of the vernacular, and when I was about 35 I had top surgery. This was one of the happiest days of my life.  It was the beginning of a journey that was going to help make me comfortable in my own skin.  Within a couple of years I had a hysterectomy.  The hysterectomy was for medical reasons and not related to my being trans, but that was the other happiest day of my life.  Now life was really looking hopeful for me.  I still had some bottom dysphoria, but without breasts and periods my life instantly became easier to deal with.  I very much wanted to start T, but at the time I had a great job in a somewhat conservative industry that I wasn’t willing to lose at that time.  I had already been passing well enough to use men’s rooms and get called “sir” pretty consistently without T, provided I didn’t talk much. But I was leading a double life for years as a female at work and male outside of work, and I was getting tired of that.

In 2012 I started a low dose a T because I was still concerned about losing my job.  When my voice started to change I decided to come out to my boss.  I lost my job about a month later.  A couple months after that I started getting a lot of cystic acne and I was seeing my dermatologist 2 to 3 times a week to have cysts drained.  The longer I was on T the more acne I had, and I still was not at a full dose.  Other than the severe cystic acne, the other changes I was getting were relatively minor as I already looked fairly male, though I did love the big energy bump I got from it.  After another few months both my dermatologist and endocrinologist said as long as I continued taking T, I would continue to have cystic acne.  Cystic acne had plagued me through my teenage years and there was no way I could live with it in my 40’s and beyond. I stopped T.  

While it was incredibly disappointing at the time to have to stop T, at the same time I felt relief.  I can’t exactly pinpoint why because I still didn’t feel or identify as female, but I wasn’t going to actually be 100 percent male even with T. Something didn’t feel right about it.  

It’s been 5 years since I stopped taking T, and in most of that time I still considered myself trans until my thinking slowly started to shift without me being completely aware of it. The more I thought about what my identity is, the more I felt like I’m just me.  Sure, I was born female, but I’m still just me, and that me is gender non-conforming. Then about 6 months ago I was on YouTube, and I discovered there were other people who had people who had transitioned, but had then detransitioned.  And on Tumblr I found more people who had detransitioned.  And none of us detransitioned for the same reasons, we are all unique.

And here’s something else, all my life I considered myself a feminist but I wasn’t, I was a misogynist for decades until the pieces started coming together. I was unknowingly lying every time I called myself a feminist. How could I distance myself from being female in every way possible and not be a misogynist??  Wouldn’t it make more sense to be a different kind of woman?  I didn’t and don’t have to buy into this antiquated patriarchal system of what is male and female.  For me, by transitioning I was buying into that system and I don’t want to perpetuate that rigid binary model.  And more importantly, for me that is, is that had I understood at a young age that is was possible to be whatever kind of female/girl/woman, and that I didn’t have to follow the narrow path I was presented with.  Maybe I could have been spared a lot of discomfort, anxiety and stress I felt about being born female.  It’s not to say I still wouldn’t have been distressed over my breasts because I did feel entirely confined and trapped by bra’s.  But it is hard to quantify whether my periods would have caused so much distress for decades because they were abnormally heavy from the start, and I had excruciating cramps from my first one until the last one.  And by my mid 30’s before my hysterectomy I was having extremely painful periods twice a month.  Just maybe if I had had a normal cycle I would have outgrown the distress, but I’ll never know.  And as for my bottom dysphoria it’s possible that had I not felt so trapped by my gender, had I known there was more than one way to be female, had I had more access to sports and parents who wholeheartedly accepted me as different, maybe that would have eased that dysphoria.  

This is what I’ve come to take away from my experience.  Gender roles are bullshit.  Yes I was born female, but I can be anyone I want to be.  I don’t have to fit into any kind of rigid role I don’t want to.  And I don’t have to take T to try to turn myself into something I will never be. I also don’t regret my top surgery, because who says I can’t modify my body in any way I want to.  I can do whatever I want to my own body.  And here’s something else that happened on it’s own, somewhere between the ages of 40 and 45 I woke up one day and realized I no longer had bottom dysphoria.  I wasn’t working on it, and the only thing I can think of is I just didn’t care anymore.  I didn’t care in the same way I don’t care how people read me.  I know who I am, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.

Maybe all of us who are AFAB could start to embrace our differences and build a better community for ourselves.  If we work together and accept each other, we could begin to close the gap in the difference between the way men and women are treated in society.  We could stand up for each other and not tolerate being “less than”, and we can demand the respect we deserve.

I’d like to add that I am NOT part of the right wing Christian movement.  I am not a republican. I am not against people transitioning because we are free to do whatever we want with our own bodies.  This post is my own experience and nothing more. 

#detransition #gnc #detransitioning #lesbian

[tomfooleryprime]

Was Spock the first human/Vulcan hybrid?

First contact between humans and Vulcans occurred in 2063. Spock was born in 2230. If you listen to some Star Trek fans, that means 167 years passed before both our species decided to bear some sex fruit. Let’s be real though, 167 years is a long time for two civilizations to interact with each other without at least someone from one group deciding to bone someone from the other group, particularly when you consider the populations of both civilizations numbers in the billions.

We might say, “Maybe interspecies sex was just too big of a taboo! Maybe it took that long for barriers to finally start coming down.” Yeah, maybe. Or maybe it’s like Hagrid once said of Dobby the house elf: “Yeh get weirdos in every breed.” Even if 9,999,999,999 humans thought the idea of having sex with an alien was weird or unnatural, there would always be at least one exceptionally progressive person who could see beyond everyone else’s prejudices and pre-conceived notions, and I’m certain the same is true for Vulcans. I would almost be willing to bet that at least one of the first Vulcans who rolled off the T’Plana-Hath on that April morning in 2063 in Bozeman, Montana saw one of the locals and thought, “That human is aesthetically pleasing.” And all it takes is a spark, right? Besides, who wouldn’t want to hear a Vulcan pickup line?

And all the panties fell off as if by magic.

Moreover, in 1957, 106 years before official First Contact between humans and Vulcans, a small Vulcan survey ship crash-landed near Carbon Creek, Pennsylvania. There were only three survivors, and of those three, one of them just couldn’t stop himself from falling for the single mom who ran the local bar. Granted, Maggie didn’t know Mestral was Vulcan, but he definitely knew she was human, and a trivial thing like species didn’t seem to matter to him.

Smitten personified.

But wait, just because a few amorous, adventurous, or convention-hating humans and Vulcans might be willing to stand up and proudly (or maybe more discreetly) proclaim, “Love is love, fuck the haters” and get naked with each other, that doesn’t mean they were making babies because after all, humans and Vulcans are genetically incompatible and it would take a feat of medical engineering to swap gametes, right?

Argue if you want, but human/Vulcan sexy time dates back to at least 2153.

People who believe Spock must have been the first hybrid usually stake this claim on one or more of four arguments:

1.     Humans and Vulcans didn’t shack up routinely enough 2.     The science of making a hybrid baby didn’t exist until Spock came along 3.     Gene Roddenberry said so 4.     Spock clearly felt isolated as a child, but he wouldn’t have if there were more hybrids like him

I’ve already poked enough holes in the first claim. Maybe there weren’t a ton of interspecies couples, but I feel confident in saying there were at least some and some is all we need. And once people decide they like each other enough to form relationships, it’s usually not long before at least some of them start thinking, “You know what would make this better? A smaller version of us!”

As for the science behind making a hybrid baby, it existed in the mid 22nd century. Spock wasn’t the first. That’s a fact. Elizabeth, the hybrid child of Charles “Trip” Tucker and T’Pol, existed in 2154.

Pointy ears and pinchable cheeks.  

Elizabeth sadly died as a result of the improper cloning techniques used to conceive her, so there are many who would take the statement of “Spock was the first human/Vulcan hybrid” and simply add the caveat of “to survive.” Perhaps. But in the Star Trek: Enterprise episode “Terra Prime,” Trip says:

I spoke with Phlox. It turns out there was a flaw in the technique that Paxton’s doctors used in the cloning process. Human DNA and Vulcan DNA, Phlox says there’s no medical reason why they can’t combine. So if a Vulcan and a human ever decided to have a child, it’s probably be ok. And that’s sort of comforting.

So a Denobulan doctor knew a way to make hybrids a full 75 years before Spock was conceived. Maybe the technology was untested and required some refining, but by even a modern a technological timeline, 75 years is an eternity.  

There’s an interview between Gene Roddenberry and Mark Lenard which claims Spock was the first, and so a lot of people might be happy to believe whatever Roddenberry said was the gospel. In the interview, Roddenberry is interviewing Mark Lenard as Ambassador Sarek, asking him questions about humanity and his life when the subject of Spock comes up.

Mark Lenard: Spock’s mother Amanda is an extraordinary woman. Gene Roddenberry: And Spock was the result? The first human/Vulcan mixture? Mark Lenard: No, not the first, but the first to survive. As you must know, an Earth/Vulcan conception will abort during the end of the first month; the fetus is unable to continue life once it begins to develop its primary organs. The fetus Spock was removed from Amanda’s body at this time: the first such experiment ever attempted. His tiny form resided in a test tube for the following two Earth months while our physicians performed delicate chemical engineering, introducing over a 100 subtle changes we hoped would sustain life. At the end of this time, the fetus was returned to Amanda’s womb. At the ninth Earth month, the tiny form was again removed from Amanda, prematurely by Vulcan standards, and spent the following four months of Vulcan term pregnancy in a specially designed incubator. The infant Spock proved surprisingly resilient. There seemed to be something about the Earth/Vulcan mixture which created in that tiny body the fierce determination to survive.

So for some fans, maybe that counts as proof. But Gene Roddenberry had a lot of conceptual ideas about his beloved Star Trek that conflict with actual canon and modern science. For a prime example, just look at the treatment of star dates. So maybe it’s me, but I don’t think something is canon just because Roddenberry said it in an interview once. Furthermore, if we take that interview as canon, how do we explain this scene from The Final Frontier where Spock is delivered from Amanda (not a “specially designed incubator”) and presented to Sarek?

Then Sarek went and uttered one of the most dick lines in Trek history.

Lastly, there’s the isolation that Spock feels. How can we explain how lonely he is if it’s not because he’s the only hybrid? Quite easily, actually. Every single person in existence has felt misunderstood and alone at times. As children, our worlds are very small and our social circles consist of our immediate families, school mates, and our parents’ associates. That’s pretty much it. When we aren’t exposed to people like us, it’s very easy to imagine Rocket Raccoon might have been onto something when he said, “Ain’t no thing like me, except me!”

But that’s very rarely literally true, as every kid who’s ever been the only minority at their school or any teen who’s ever been the only gay person in their tiny conservative town will tell you. As we get older and achieve the freedom to strike out and meet people on our own terms, we often learn we weren’t quite as unique as we thought and there are whole groups of people out there who are black or gay or disabled or whatever it was that left us feeling so alone in our formative years. I think that’s why Spock’s character resonated so much with viewers – he was a symbol for all the misfits out there who knew just how much it sucks trying to fit into the fabric of a society that seems so different than they are.

 Proof that regardless of species, kids can be fucking awful. 

Vulcan was a big planet. By the time Nero destroyed it in Star Trek: 2009, it had more than 6 billion inhabitants. Even if there were only 100 human/Vulcan hybrids by that point in time, the odds of an average Vulcan encountering one would still be incredibly small. It’s entirely possible Spock may have felt like he was the only hybrid because he might have been the only one in his community, but the universe is a big place with plenty of room for other human/Vulcan hybrids he and those vicious bullies never met. 

Spock was clearly pretty special. Even people who hate Star Trek and know almost nothing about it know who Spock was and recognize the Vulcan salute Leonard Nimoy made famous in his portrayal of the character. But just because Spock’s human ancestry made him unusual doesn’t necessarily mean his conception was some completely novel, groundbreaking, pioneering leap for interspecies relationships either. 

I can’t say I know many Vulcans, but I think I have a pretty firm grasp on humanity. Despite homosexual, interracial, and interfaith relationships being taboo and even illegal in many countries until relatively recently (and sadly still are in some places) there have always been people who decided they didn’t care and took a chance on love. So I don’t buy the idea that humans and Vulcans could live and work together even in a limited capacity for more than a century and a half before making the jump into starting families.

#star trek #star trek enterprise #star trek the original series #star trek the final frontier #spock #sarek/amanda #trip/t'pol #mestral/maggie #human/vulcan #human/vulcan hybrid

[ultratesterthings]

Canada considering forcing social media companies to remove extremist content - National | Globalnews.ca

Canada is considering whether to force social media companies to remove hateful and extremist content online.

That comes after a spate of terrorist attacks in New Zealand, Quebec City, Pittsburgh and other places where right-wing extremists have used the internet to spread hate speech and incitements for others to commit similar violence targeting minorities who they wrongly assert are part of a broader effort to “replace” and subjugate white people.

“We will look at that very, very carefully,” said Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale when asked specifically if the government is considering legislation to force social media companies to remove hateful and extremist content.

“This has been a subject of discussion among ministers at the Five Eyes meetings and at the G7 meetings where ample discussion has been held on how we encourage the social media platforms to move quickly and efficiently to deal with toxic communications like this that incite violence and hatred and obviously do great damage to social cohesion.”

Goodale said the details of how such a plan could work still need to be worked out and he hopes companies will take initiative to act on their own.

But what they are doing now is not enough, he said.

“We’ve got to find a way to identify those rapidly, even before they have the chance to be posted in the public domain, and bring them down.”

WATCH BELOW: Canada condemns ‘act of terrorism’ in Christchurch

Last week, a white supremacist opened fire in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 50 Muslims at prayer.

Dozens of others were injured and remain in hospital.

Prior to the shooting, which the gunman streamed live on social media, the 28-year-old white man posted a so-called “manifesto” online in which he said he had been radicalized on the internet and made repeated references to the conspiracy theory known as the “Great Replacement,” on which right-wing extremists have long been fixated.

But the facts that the shooter made repeated references to other right-wing extremists such as the shooter who killed six Muslim men in a Quebec City mosque in 2016 and admits to having been radicalized online are raising questions about whether the time has come for governments to step in.

While Australian internet service providers also were able to almost immediately block users from accessing websites hosting the shooter’s video, which began being circulated online by extremists during and after the massacre, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is calling for a global crackdown on social media in the wake of the shooting.

He has said he wants the companies forced to adjust their algorithms to screen out hateful content.

In Germany, for example, social media platforms and search engines are banned from showing Nazi content to users with a German IP address.

On Monday, Canadian political leaders offered condolences on the floor of the House of Commons for the victims of the mosque shootings and in his speech, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hinted that more needed to be done to crackdown on those spreading hatred and violent content.

“The path that we’re going down is dangerous and unsustainable. People are tired of fighting this alone, without the full backing of their leaders,” he said.

“But we can take a stand, here and now, in Canada and around the world, and say that enough is enough. That the days of spewing hatred and inciting violence without consequences are over. We owe it to the people of Christchurch.”

While the government this month announced $366,985 in funding for new research into the beliefs, motivations, activities, and connections of right-wing extremism in Canada, Goodale also said there is more than needs to be done.

Goodale said it is clear the public is losing patience with social media companies.

“I think the public is beginning to lose some patience with the ‘we’re doing our best’ argument. They want to see effective action and I think we need to examine all of the tools,” he said.

Goodale added that bigger companies with more research and technological capabilities will be expected to share that with smaller companies to make sure they all can act much more quickly and effectively to block extremist content online.

“Hopefully the platforms will be prepared to move quickly enough to do it simply as a matter of good public policy and basic human decency,” he said. “If they aren’t prepared to move as quickly as the public will demand, then we’ll have to consider all the other tools we have available to ensure that it happens.”

Getting legislation through the House of Commons could be a tight fit given there are just 10 sitting weeks left until the end of the session.

WATCH BELOW: Ardern says agencies aware of rise in right-wing extremism

When the House of Commons rises at the end of June, it will not resume until after the election in October.

“We want to think our way through this very carefully but that does not mean taking a long time to do it,” he said.

“I would think on a topic like this one, with the kind of statement that we heard in the House of Commons last Monday, there would be a common will even in this very difficult Parliament to get it done at the earliest possible moment.”

Amira Elghawaby, a board member with the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, said funding for research and a tougher crackdown on platforms is needed.

“We need more focus on how we’re going to hold the social media platforms to account. So number one we need the research — we need the investigation we need to prioritize this public safety threat. You know at the same par as they have been looking at religious extremism,” she said.

“Number two they need to be looking at the social media platforms and finding ways to hold them to account for allowing or allowing the proliferation of hate to go you know unchecked.”

She also added that there needs to be more effort at countering the misinformation spread by right-wing extremists about immigration.

“We need to be much more heavily investing in awareness campaigns around issues of multiculturalism diversity immigration to counter the misinformation and hate that these groups are propagating and which you know has been seeping into mainstream discourse,” she said.

“So we really need Canada to step up to addressing these issues on all levels of government because at the end of the day this type of ideology and hate is really not only a threat to minority communities it’s a threat to our society as a whole. ”

What would it take for internet service providers to do more too?

Telstra, Vodafone and Optus all confirmed Tuesday they are actively blocking Australian customers on their networks from accessing websites that show the video of the March 15th shooting in New Zealand that killed 50 people.

Here in Canada, experts say telecoms could technically do the same — but there is far too much red tape.

Platforms such as platforms 4chan, 8chan and LiveLeak were some of the targeted websites, according to Australian media.

The video of the massacre on Facebook for about 17 minutes using a head-mounted camera until police told the social media company to remove the video.

After the attack, the video was shared on Twitter, YouTube, Whatsapp, Instagram and Reddit. The social media platforms took steps in the hours after the attack to remove copies of the video.

The Australian telecom companies did not block these social media companies, according to The Guardian.

We've started temporarily blocking a number of sites that are hosting footage of Friday’s terrorist attack in Christchurch. We understand this may inconvenience some legitimate users of these sites, but these are extreme circumstances and we feel this is the right thing to do.

— Telstra News (@Telstra_news) March 18, 2019

In a statement, Vodaphone said it had blocked dozens of sites still hosting the footage, and although it may be an inconvenience for users, the company believes “it’s the right thing to do in these extreme circumstances to help stop the further distribution of this video.

“In Australia, blocking requests are generally made via the courts or law enforcement agencies, however, this is an extreme case which we think required an extraordinary response,” Vodafone said.

WATCH: New Zealand PM says country attempted to remove video of mosque shootings

Major Canadian telecommunications companies could “technically” do the same, according to David Gerhard, an associate professor at the University of Regina’s department of computer science.

“In fact, these telecom companies have been arguing with the CRTC for the right to block certain websites, which the CRTC has denied because it would violate the principle of net neutrality,” he said.

For example, last year, large Canadian media companies asked the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to help protect their ownership and licensing rights by setting up an independent agency to help locate websites with pirated material.

The companies wanted the CRTC to require internet providers to block access to pirated material. But the CRTC denied the request.

David Skillicorn, a professor at Queen’s University School of Computing, said this CRTC ruling meant there currently isn’t any wiggle room for Canadian telecom companies to block websites, even in event of shootings.

“Austalia and Canada are similar in so many ways, but this is an area where they are so different,” Skillicorn explained. “Australian ISP’s are more sensible, and Canadians seems to be more conservative.”

WATCH: The rules of net neutrality in Canada

“In Australia, they did for a defence reason, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness rather than permission,” he said, adding that this approach would not fly in Canada.

He said many telecommunication companies in Australia have strict control over some content, so blocking several websites after a terrorist attack is not a big step for them. But the CRTC has a more hands-off approach due to net neutrality.

“This is the case in point where you would like an ISP to act, but they can’t here. After the CRTC ruling last year, it would be too much of a drastic step,” he said. “There would be a lot of push back from net neutrality folks.”

Gerhard agreed, saying Canadian carriers are not allowed to block content of any kind, as this is the foundational argument for net neutrality.

Under net neutrality, internet providers are supposed to treat all content equally. So if an internet service provider (ISP) owns the content, it cannot favour its own users.

But Gerhard said there are situations like this, and others (like online predatory websites targeting children), in which case the public good would benefit from selective blocking of web content.

“In this case, it would be up to the CRTC to allow exceptions to net neutrality, and define what those exemptions might be,” he said.

WATCH: Role of social media in Christchurch shootings

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This content was originally published here.