#so while it’s important to note that BOTH countries have serious issues in both departments the way they manifest is different | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

luvdsc · 3 years

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Hey Cat!! I hope you're doing well as always ! 💖 AHHHH huhu I closed the form last Sunday since I've collected enough responses dy! (NOOOOOOOO ToT) I got a total of 221 responses at the end of the week, which is 3x the amount I initially needed! :o I'm beyond grateful and appreciative ToT I've cleaned the data and have proceeded to run some data analysis, but I ran into an issue whereby the scores on the subscales are equal (it has never been reported in past studies! :O) so I'm waiting for my supervisor's feedback on how to proceed. Hopefully it's nothing too serious ToT

Hehe finance is interesting indeed! I just started reading a book on finance for young adults (Rich Dad Poor Dad) and I look forward to learning more from the author's tips! The Coursera introductory course has also made financial terms a lil more familiar, even though it's just the basics and it's really helped w my financial literacy 🥺 I can push myself to study but it's also the numbers and calculations I'm worried of cuz I am rly a nong (idiot) when it comes to numbers * - * it runs in the genes I guess AHAHAHAHA my mom and sister aren't good at numbers either keke

Aww I'm glad yr professor made financial accounting enjoyable and a fruitful experience for you! Some lecturers / professors rly just have that spark in them to inspire ppl and I'm blessed to be surrounded by a bunch of em in the psych department!🥺😭 it truly makes a difference and I'm sure we both are living proofs of that!

After debating for a while, I've decided not to take a minor mainly because I'm so tired HAHAHAHAHAHA and I'll just do my own self-studying and exploration whilst working! Go out and explore the world, live life! Whilst ironically still staying in my room because of the COVID-19 situation in our country (cases are abt 20+k every day :') ) My proposal has been finalized and it's been accepted! It's just that some elements of my proposal is also part of my actual report, so I have some guidance to refer to in terms of structure! :3 and yes don't worry! I got plenty (sometimes a lil too much) rest during the sem break whilst remaining productive! Plus, I got to catch up w some friends and had game nights (maybe too much of game nights hehe) and movie nights w my friends which was truly refreshing! Also cuz I might not see a lot of them again after we graduate so we gotta cherish every moment 🥺😭

I'm a freelance graphic designer for my uni's newsletter! Occasionally, they'd ask us to create both the content and design! I'll place the link to my recent work below if you wanna check it out! UwU I'm trying to incorporate the same practices during sem break in my last sem (current sem) too! cuz yes mental health is so so important and I'm just tired of being academically tired you get me? :(

What makes me most trilled abt learning abt psychology is how to apply it in daily life too! I find it so fascinating and awestruck at how relatable and within reach these things are like wow we can be influenced in such ways?? :o can be both good and bad but imma stick w seeing it as the development and evolution of us humans UwU

Also, the vaccine has fixed my sleep schedule HEHE (another perk of getting vaccination :3) I got some rly good rest and managed to reset my usual sleeping time, thank you science ToT oooo I see I see, we've had cases of nurses injecting empty syringes hence the recording :( but GHIOGHWEOGIOHW I could never do that, I can feel the liquid entering me as it is so that's good enough ToT (* plays Love Talk * I can feel it coming)

OMG YOUR ART PIECES ARE SO BEAUTIFUL, ADORABLE AND ELEGANT! 💖🥺🥰 it must've required a lot of hard-work and effort AHHH thankiew for showing me yr work!! it's truly unique in its own manner despite it's simplicity UwU is there a reason or backstory to yr chosen theme and objects? :3

I just Googled Somi Somi and omg that's such an UwU ice cream AHHHH 💖🥺😭 ice cream is my fav food of all time and it looks like an ice cream haven omg imagine eating it after a loooong hard day's of work ToT and OMG THE SATISFACTION OF EATING THAI MILK TEA ICE CREAM ON A HOT DAY YASSS 😋🤤 hehe if you get the chance to try milk & biscoff, do try it! It's amazing !😍 and ooo i haven't tried alcoholic ice cream before but I will one day!! :3 my alcohol tolerance is rly low though, will I get tipsy over alcoholic ice cream? We shall see UwU (i can only drink half a bottle of apple cider before my face gets red and I start getting a lil tipsy + headache)

and lovie....knowing yr school schedule now...OURS IS DEFINTELY BRUTAL OMG a 3 month long sem break huhu that's only the total amount of sem breaks we get in a year ToT i thought uni was hard but not that hard ToT

Always glad and honored to have you onboard! and AHAHAHAH the contractions about to start soon 👀 I enjoy talking to you huhu you're such a sweet and supportive person 💖🥺🥰😙 huhu for my period cramps, I've been having them since I was 12 ToT my doctor prescribed me some panadols but sometimes I can't even swallow them cuz I'd puke them out ToT I've settled w heatpacks to reduce my reliance on medicine, but I finally got some upgraded and safe to eat medicine from my gynae! She said it's fine to take it every month to keep my womb healthy and apparently my ms. lil uterus is suffering from inflammation, hence the super crazy bedridden cramps :( the upgraded medicine worked for a while, but after time it kinda didn't help either :/ but I realised that exercise rly does wonders to reduce the cramp too (gynae also recommended exercising) so i take walks and do my back stretches more frequently now! my period in the previous months (2 months ago) have been almost painless and bearable, it's so weird not seeing my bedridden ._. when I was in high school, there would always be a day in every month in which I don't attend classes, and that's solely because of my cramps. It just isn't worth suffering in school, plus we don't have a sick room :/ I hope the pain continues to subside! ToT

And ayy internship is also working experience, yr advice would be of great help to me regardless! 🥺 oh yes, I always remind myself that interviews are similar to the speaking test I took for my Cambridge English exams! That kinda help calm my nerves down a lil, but w nerves comes bigger smiles, so I guess it takes on a rather practical form of coping mechanism (sublimation) AHAHAHAHA

WAAAA WHAT A QUEEN you got an offer from every interview?? I aspire to be like you! 💖🥺🥰 huhu skill wise I believe I have lots to prepare esp in terms of case studies, and I perform rly poorly on certain assessments (*ehem * esp those concerning numbers) so I took the chance to study a lil during sem break too ToT but noted on that! I will work on that too and try to maintain that me element in interviews and overall just be myself keke

That's all from me for now! Imma wait for my supervisor's feedback and journey on w my last semester. Bon voyage! Link to my recent work: https://www.instagram.com/p/CTBqGzjr6sN/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link Other works: https://www.instagram.com/p/CPpv-IyM7Gi/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link https://www.instagram.com/p/CL55EG-MbL2/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

hi hello honey bee !!! 💓 omg i'm so sorry for the belated response, i finally got on my laptop 😭 i'm gonna put my response under the cut since it got a little long 🤧

omg 221 responses !!!!! that's so many 🙀 congratulations aaaaa it's amazing that you were able to get 3x the data you needed !!! was it difficult to run data analysis? were you able to solve the issue with the equal scores on the subscales? i hope it didn't create too much additional work for you ):

omg yes finance is really interesting! i enjoyed the classes i took for it :') how is rich dad poor dad? did you learn a lot from it? i know it was a book my prof recommended, but i never got around to reading it 😶 did you learn any helpful tips? and ooo i'll have to look into coursera! yeah, there's quite a lot of terms for finance, and it can be a little intimidating paired with all the math formulas and such, but it's pretty useful imo! how are your financial studies going so far? 💕 omg nong is such a cute word?? i would never think it meant idiot asdkfhlkajsdf omg my whole family is good at numbers and really like math, but i didn't like it 😭 my mom made me study it a lot everyday though rip are the financial calculations getting easier for you as you practice more hopefully?

yessss omg i absolutely agree with this!!!! like you can just feel when a professor loves to teach and is genuinely so excited to talk about their subject, and it just makes the most boring horrible subject into something you learn to enjoy and hate less :') and i'm really happy to hear you have tons of professors like that in the psych department 🥺💗

that's great to hear!!!! 🌷🌷 i'm glad that you're prioritizing yourself and your health, which is so much more important than taking on a minor. what fun subjects have you decided to explore and self study so far? 💞 oh my gosh, the rising cases are so high?? i hope it's gotten better there for you ): are you able to go outside yet?

big congratulations on your proposal being finalized and accepted, lovebug !!!! 🥳🥳 i'm very proud of you and hoping one day i can read your published studies in a scientific journal :') aaaa i'm so glad to hear that you got to rest and enjoy your time with your friends!! i definitely feel that omg i regret all the times i skipped out on movie nights or game nights with my friends because now we're all scattered across the country and the only way we can have them again is over zoom calls 🤧

I SAW YOUR DESIGNS AND THEY'RE GORGEOUS OMG I LOVE THEM SO MUCH !!!! 💖 I'M IN AWE AAAA IF PSYCH DOESN'T WORK OUT, I HOPE YOU BECOME A GRAPHIC DESIGNER 🤩🤩💖 and yes i totally get it ): i really felt the academic burn out when i was in college and it was really difficult at times 🤧 but i hope it's going better for you nowadays, sweetpea 💝💝

omg yeah i absolutely agree !!!! whenever i read about psychology, i keep it in the back of my mind and then when i see something irl that relates to it, i'm like :O amazing. it's so cool to learn about different psych tricks too and see how it works when you test them out yourself and whatnot. and it's really crazy to see how the human brain is so easily influenced at times ??? it truly is an amazing subject !!!

ah what a great side benefit of the vaccine - a better sleep schedule 🤩 i'm happy to hear that your schedule has been fixed 💘 and omg what ??? they're injecting empty syringes wth ????? 😭 that's absolutely horrible, are they getting sued?? lmaooooo that love talk reference askdfhlaksjd

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR ALL YOUR KIND COMPLIMENTS 😭😭💗💗 there were many late hours spent in the art studio to finish them, but i'm really happy with the end products :') i thought light bulbs are an interesting subject to do, and my prof said that cutting out circular objects or sculpting them is the most difficult since they're made up curves and not straight lines and i was like ok bet i'm gonna do it aND I'M SO GLAD I DID BECAUSE I REALLY LIKE THEM 🥺 and i love honey bees !!! that's why i decided to paint them and we were supposed to paint them in a combined style of two artists so i tried monet's impressionist style with the short brush strokes and pop art triptych style like marjorie strider 💕

somi somi is sooo good and i just had it again a couple weeks ago :') omg ice cream is your favorite food? :o and YES ice cream is so satisfying after a long day of hard work, like it's such a nice reward to look forward to at the end of day ✨ aaaaa i have to try thai milk tea ice cream one day now !!!!! it sounds amazing 🤩 and YES i must look for places that sell milk & biscoff ice cream !! i have milk ice cream from somi somi, but i need to try to combined flavors 💘 i don't think you'll get tipsy over it !!! it's a really faint taste of alcohol, like i didn't even notice it at first, and i don't think they put very much of it in there! aksljdfhals omg you're a lightweight :o at least that means you save money on alcohol LOL i need like nine shots to get drunk 🤧

your school is too hard 😭 you need more than just 3 months of break !!! 😡 we get a week off for thanksgiving in fall semester and a week off for spring break in spring semester too and then the month long winter break and three month summer break. and we have the one day holidays off too like labor day, memorial day, etc. i can't believe they give you so little time off after working so hard???

asdfhlkajshdlksja loool are the contractions over yet? has it been born? what's the current status, doctor? 👀 i really enjoy talking to you too !!! i'm very sorry for the late responses, work is really taking over all of my time, and i never have enough time to get on my laptop to reply to my asks 😭 and thank you for saying such kind things about me 🥺🥺💝 oh my gosh, i'm so sorry to hear that you have such terrible cramps 😭 i can't even imagine going through that - mine are nowhere near as horrible 😖 do the heatpads help a lot? i'm relieved to hear that you were prescribed better medication though! but yeah, your body does eventually get used to the medication and you have to continue taking stronger meds for it to work, but that's not a very healthy solution /: but i'm really glad to hear that exercise has been helping out a lot!! 💖 hurray for almost painless and bearable periods 🥳 i'm sorry to hear that you had to go through that in high school ): that sounds absolutely horrible 😭 periods are just awful, but it's like i'm grateful that i have my period because that means i'm not pregnant, but also please go away aslkhdfaklsj

omg what was the speaking test for the cambridge english exams like? :o it sounds so formal and a lil intimidating askdjfhalsd do you know of any psych tricks that can possibly help calm your nerves? :')

aaaa yes i did !! i was really surprised that i got an offer from them all because at the time, i was not in the right major and i think i was one of the most underqualified applicants 🤧 one person who interviewed me asked why i withdrew from my engr physics class and i explained it in a kinda funny way but in my head, i was like "oof i'm not gonna get this offer anymore" but then he laughed at my response and told me about how his prof told him he should drop a guitar class he was taking because he was doing very poorly and we bonded over that aklsjdhfkals omg how do interviews for psych jobs go? do you have to discuss a lot of case studies? do they give you a list of possible case studies they'll ask about? :o what sort of assessments do you have to do? good luck on all of your interviews, honey bee 💛 i'm rooting for you, you're gonna do amazing !!!! 💘

omg what did your supervisor say about your case study? and how is your last semester going? are you almost done now? 🌸 (also how have you been? what have you been up to? thank you for taking the time to leave such detailed messages for me, i'm really excited to see all the fun updates in your life, lovebug 🌷🌷)

#asks #jaeismytamtation

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ramen540k · 3 years

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“Terrorism”: Inequities of Association

Sai Hudspeth

S5126293

Media Production

Level 4 Terrorism has many different yet similar definitions and as such is not wholly defined legally in many areas (Al Jazeera, 2014). Due to the lack of consistent definition, terrorism has often been assosiated with foreign forces, especially post-9/11. A series of attacks were committed by a terrorist organisation known as “Al-Qaeda” on September 11th, 2001 (Bergen, 2020). These attacks went down in history as the single largest act of terrorism in history being live broadcasted all over the world and leaving a lasting fear in the hearts of American Citizens. Since, and to a lesser degree prior to, the attacks of 9/11 the world has experienced a heightened sense of Islamophobia. With heightened fear and a common enemy, an anti muslim rhetoric was adopted in the media and soon after, the “War on Terror” (Bergen, 2020). Even though it has been almost a decade since the the 9/11 attacks, anti muslim sentiments continue to grow while acts of terror committed by white supremacy groups are utterly disregarded, and racial equality organisations are labeled as domestic terrorist organisations (Al Jazeera, 2010).

Post 9/11 showed a 90% increase from 1,171 to 2,227 deployments by federal tactical teams between 2005 and 2014 based on research done by the Congressional Research Service (Grabianowski, 2007). It was SWAT’s initial purpose to be a higher powered response to increases in bank robberies in Philadelphia but later was expanded to cover a range of high risk situations including; hostage situations, search warrants, anti terrorism, and riot control (Grabianowski, 2007). As previously shown in the CRS research, SWAT’s expansion has put in place a large amount of high powered forces across the usa, accounting for around 1,200 teams in total countrywide (Federal Tactical Teams, 2015). It is important to note this as the way the USA and other countries’ media defines terrorism may warrant use of high powered forces on unwarranted situations. By observing race politics, the media’s rhetoric, and the ethics behind the use of the word “terrorism”, we are able to discern when the word “terrorism” should be used.

The war on terror was not confined to the USA, a major defining contributor to islamaphobia were a series of bombings in London that shook the foundation of “British Liberality”. Known as 7/7 these attacks on July 7th, 2005 launched the UK into severe paranoia just as 9/11 had in the USA (Sky News, 2014). Due to two proliferators of this act of terror being under surveillance for two years prior to 7/7, the public was in serious unrest over the lack of decisive action taken by the British Intelligence Service, which many thought could have prevented two of the attacks (Sky News, 2014). In addition to the lack of action, and the fact that the bombers were born and raised in Leeds, UK further instigated anti-immigrant/muslim ideologies of the British public (Al Jazeera, 2014).

As stated in The impact of counter-terrorism measures on Muslim communities, a study done by the research department of Durham University, “There is a danger that Muslims in contemporary Britain may become the new suspect community. Policymakers and operatives are grappling with the old dilemma: it is an inescapable fact that the majority of those suspected of terrorist activities are Muslim, and that counter-terrorism measures are likely to target Muslims.” (Choudhury and Fenwick, 2011) With the rise of hostility the freshness of a home grown attack provided space for people to vocalise and bring physical attacks against both immigrants and muslims alike due to fear. As a caller on LBC said “The population of the third world widens by 5% every year...there are 23000 people among us who are plotting to kill our families” (Ferrari, 2018) referring to people of interest to the British Intelligence Service, representing both the concern for the public's safety and the connotation between people of interest and islamic terrorists. By piggybacking off this fear legislation was pushed by both the USA and UK in an attempt to prevent future acts of terror. This however led to more frequent stop and searches of racial/religious minorities as well as higher levels of police presence in the USA and the UK.

As we move further and further from 911 and 7/7, the definition of terrorism has been used more loosely used and not allocated to some blataint acts of terror. In the USA, there is no “...statute that applies to domestic ideology inspired extremisms...” (Former Acting Assistant Attorney General, Mary Mccord) and as they are not associated with foriegn terrorist organisations they cannot be charged with terrorist crimes (ITV News, 2019). This effectively omits one of the most prolific terrorist ideologies in the USA, white supremacy. A combined disregard for white domestic terrorism combined with hightened conservative media spokes people, tentions have risen contributing further to the race rift as well as provide a normalised culture around white terrorism. Conservative news outlets took up the call to action, during Obama’s presidency, spreading defamatory statements such as “This president I think has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep seeded hatred for white people…” (Fox and Friends) and commentary on the economic depression that was “caused by immigrants” further hightening both conservative and white supremacist ideologies (Al Jazeera, 2010).

With the onslaught of antiterrorism rhetoric, and a widening race gap, the USA would face its biggest turning point yet with the inauguration of Trump in 2016. Following his inauguration, incidents in Charlottesville known as “Unite the Right” in 2017 where the largest white supremacy gathering occured, resulting in an act of terror in which a white supremacist drove their car through an anti fascist protest killing one and injuring 20 others (PBS, 2019). Thus, the birth of media’s buzz word “antifa” would become interchangable with terrorism. After this act of terror, Trump would take to live broadcast and condemn “this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence, on many sides…” (PBS, 2019). Following this press conference, the former leader of the KKK tweeted saying he was grateful for Trump to “condemn the leftist terrorists in antifa and Black Lives Matter.” (PBS, 2019) sparing national outrage and further social unrest. Simultaneously with acts of terrorism against minorities, combined with more acts of police brutality caught on video and distributed throgh various media outlets, the single party and democratically fascist government consciously decided to negate any mention of the word “terrorism” in association with white supremacy.

With continued social unrest the ethicality of the use of the word “terrorism” in mass media, is an important conscideration to take. If a country is not willing to define domestic acts of terror as “terrorism” yet uses the word to amplify their own political views as Trump has done by attempting to label antifa (an ideology not an organisation) and BLM as terrorists on national news (France 24 News, 2020). As we take into account the current and past events that led to the condition both the USA and UK are in, associating “terrorism” with minorities and immigrants must be reconscidered when part of the rising threat of terrorism is contributed to by white supremacy as preducated by National Police Chief’s Council lead for counter terrorism policing, Neil Basu in a Channel 4 Interview. In this interview, Basu says 7 of the 22 plots foiled since 2017 have been in association with white supremacy. The only effective way to deal with this and other racial and religious biases, is to elect people into power who provide fair and equal ideas for the betterment of our global society. In doing so, we will be able to provide a clear definition for terrorism and an equal understanding that the treat of terror can not solely be attributed to minorities or immigrants without running into ethical issues as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has stated in her question to the FBI over the double standard that goes into labeling organisations and people as terrorists (Guardian News, 2019). When a topic such as terrorism is spoken about on mass media outlets, we must understand our words have consequences legally, socially, and ethically. Using words such as terrorism in connotation with minorities can have long lasting affects on the legislation of a country, and the ability for the general public to coexist in a multicultural society.

Bibliography

Al Jazeera, 2010. People & Power - White Power USA. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8PsZwlv0Uk> [Accessed 31 September 2020].

Al Jazeera, 2014. War On Terror, War On Muslims?. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkJGd22W55o> [Accessed 21 October 2020].

Bergen, P., 2020. September 11 Attacks. [online] Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: <https://www.britannica.com/event/September-11-attacks/The-attacks#ref301276> [Accessed 4 November 2020].

Choudhury, T. and Fenwick, H., 2011. The Impact Of Counter-Terrorism Measures On

Muslim Communities. [ebook] Manchester: Durham University, p.iii. Available at: <https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/research-report-72-the-impact-of-counter-terrorism-measures-on-muslim-communities.pdf> [Accessed 5 October 2020].

2015. Federal Tactical Teams. [ebook] Congressional Research Service, pp.1-3.

Available at: <https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44179> [Accessed 20 October 2020].

Ferrari, N., 2018. Nick Schools Caller Who Said 7/7 Bombers Weren't British Natives.

[video] Available at: <https://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/nick-ferrari/caller-who-said-7-7-bombers-werent-british/> [Accessed 3 November 2020].

France 24 News, 2020. Trump To Designate ‘Antifa’ As Terrorist Organization After

Unrest Over George Floyd's Death. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrGWjMnHBp8> [Accessed 1 October 2020].

Grabianowski, E., 2007. How SWAT Teams Work. [online] HowStuffWorks. Available at: <https://people.howstuffworks.com/swat-team.htm#pt5> [Accessed 10 October 2020].

Guardian News, 2019. 'Is White Supremacy Not A Global Issue?' Ocasio-Cortez

Dissects FBI’S Terrorism Definition. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HeLL6WC8k0> [Accessed 2 October 2020].

ITV News, 2019. Why Does America Struggle To Call White Supremacists Terrorists?.

[video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsKFpJ-cyJY> [Accessed 10 October 2020].

Jenkins, J., 2020. Terrorism. [online] Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: <https://www.britannica.com/topic/terrorism> [Accessed 30 October 2020].

PBS, 2019. Documenting Hate: Charlottesville. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPLvWO_SOgM> [Accessed 30 September 2020].

Sky News, 2014. 7/7 Attacks On London. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFb-gV-6uDo> [Accessed 19 October 2020].

#politics #blm #terrorism #usa #uk #equality #trump #biden #polysci #sociology

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bluebird722 · 5 years

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Demon Bride

Summary: When he was eight, he met a girl. By twenty, they were engaged. Demon Bride AU.

Rating: T

Author’s Note: The inspiration came from @sallychanscraps ’s “Demon Bride” storyline, but this is my take on the events leading up to the arranged marriage and consummation, using elements from Royal elements across different historical cultures and how far we’ve come.

When he was eight, he met a girl.

His father, the Emperor, requested that his son and wife prepare themselves for a “royal visit”. He did not know what his father meant, but he saw in this mother’s face that this was a rather serious event, and his own stomach filled with dread. Apparently it was too grave an issue to discuss via letters of exchange. Better to meet face to face than to communicate via paper and unintentionally begin a huge misunderstanding.

Still, the Emperor and Empress insisted that their Shinjiro spend most of the “royal visit” in his room, playing with his toys and practicing his lettering, without explaining why. He did not disobey, but he asked his former nursemaid if they could stop as soon as they heard the trumpets blaring the royal arrival. She lifted him over the balcony, looked down at the approaching figures down the red aisle, and gasped.

“What?” he asked. The man below seemed harmless–black robes with “squiggly” tails and red and green cuffs, a six-horned headpiece, and a red beard. Even from a distance, he could see the man’s eyebrows stood up, like flames. Trailing behind him was a young girl, wearing clothes identical to his, but on her back, unlike the folded clothes on the women and girls in the empire, were red, black, and green things that looked like fire. He did not know what that was or what it was made of, but it must have been the stash around her waist that held it in place.

“That’s Aku, Shogun of the Underworld Empire,” his nursemaid whispered.

Shinjiro immediately felt ill. Aku, his father’s greatest enemy, here in the Empire of Japan? They, according to his tutors and astronomer, have been warring nations since Aku came to his throne, when Shinjiro’s own parents became emperor and empress. Many have died in battle, wives and mothers and sisters and daughters absent for months or wearing full mourning clothes for years. Even boys born after he were learning to fight and use swords to carry their fathers,’ grandfathers’, brothers’, uncles’ names at war. Shinjiro glared at the demon–they say his ancestors were born from a meteor and produced offspring unusually–with confidence that he as emperor would slaughter this creature and put an end to this misery.

But what was he doing here?

Once Aku and the girl walked under the balcony, the nursemaid carried Shinjiro back to his room, but he could not go back to playing anymore. Mother and Father were down below with evil. He could not feel anything but pure terror.

It had been later in the day when the guards escorted him down to the master room, where only the Emperor and his councilmen met and he was not allowed in. Aku was there, kneeling at the table with the Emperor and Empress. The little girl had her back to them, facing a corner.

Shinjiro looked at his parents’ faces, his father annoyed and lightly pale, his mother’s eyes wide and her face slightly green. She saw her son and reached for him. “Shinjiro, come here.”

He stood by her side and got a closer look at Aku’s face. The features–curled nose and fiery red eyebrows and beard–were sharper and made him shiver. He slowly lowered himself onto his knees and knelt with his arms and hands in the “appropriate” position. Then he stood up and looked to his parents.

The Emperor took deep breaths before he spoke: “My son, as emperor in the future, when I depart this life”–Shinjiro didn’t like that idea, a life without his father, or mother as well–“it is important that you will be married and have produced at least one heir. The time has come to prepare you for this…um, delicate matter.”

Shinjiro’s eyes widen. He had to be married, already, at age eight? He had not yet even finished his schooling; he was still learning astronomy, and he had much more to learn, as his parents had told him. Aku cleared his throat and turned his upper body to the girl in the corner. “Ashi, I require your presence.”

The girl stood up, and Shinjiro saw her hair was rather odd–spiky on top and a long spike down to between her eyes, and sideburn-like spikes a little past her ears. She did not smile; rather, she looked annoyed and affronted. As she crossed her arms, pressing her tiny red lips together, Shinjiro picked up a vibe from her that she wanted to ask, “What are you looking at?”

Shinjiro stood there in silence and wondered, “Does she ever smile?” He’s never met a child that didn’t smile, nor did he ever see a girl with short hair.

“Shinjiro,” his father said in a shaky voice. It was clear he didn’t want to say whatever he was about to. “This is Ashi. Someday she will be your wife.”

Shinjiro’s stomach, once so ill with fear, nearly ripped apart in shock. He was to marry this girl, this child of his country’s greatest enemy?

Even though he didn’t want to listen, he reluctantly absorbed his mother’s explanation: “As you know, we are warring nations. Shogun Aku”–Shinjiro was surprised at her composure– “has proposed an arranged marriage between our children–you and the eldest of his daughters who are not yet betrothed, in hopes to establish peace and perhaps unify our nations.”

Shinjiro felt paralyzed with shock. A marriage to stop a war that has gone on longer than he had been alive, a marriage to a girl he just met, who didn’t smile, who looked angry to even see him? He was only in his eighth year of life, and his parents had told him whom he was to marry.

He wondered if his own parents had married for love or for any other reasons. Then he wondered if the girl in front of him was even capable of love or even laughing.

“Guards,” his mother said, “please escort my son and…Ashi outside. Shinjiro…you can…get to know your future wife.”

Shinjiro felt dizzy. Half the guards in the palace walked him and…Ashi out of the room and then outside the palace to the fields. On his own, he liked to play amongst the tall grasses, chase crickets and ladybugs, and make toys with long grass. Sometimes village children would be in the fields and get to play with him. Now, although it was a warm day, he shivered as the sunlight hit him. He looked nervously at the girl he would someday wed. “So…do you know how to play?” he asked.

Her nose slightly wrinkled, her arms still crossed. She was either a mute or instructed not to speak. After two minutes of silence, he pointed with his thumb to a pathway. “Can I show you something?” he asked. She briskly followed him, her footsteps like stamping feet. Shinjiro walked ahead of her while the guards, as he could tell, spread out to ensure the safety of the next emperor and empress…Shinjiro felt sick again. He actually had to marry this…creature for political reasons.

Suddenly, he saw a grasshopper fly in front of him. Determination overcame his dread. He had struggled for weeks to capture one to then free, yet for some days none would ever cross his path. He turned excitedly towards Ashi, her face red and swinging her arms even though nothing was in her way. She crossed her arms again at him.

They stood in awkward silence until to both their surprise another grasshopper jumped between them. Though her mouth did not change, her eyes lightly widen, and it hit him that she had probably never seen a grasshopper before. He smiled, put his finger to his lips, and pointed to where the insect had fled.

It took twenty minutes for them to find a grasshopper, one resting on a leaf of grass. He helped her push away the longer strands to stare at it. Perhaps it was sleeping, or waiting for the right time to jump again. They stared until it stood up and jumped away. His smile widen. “Come on,” he whispered, instantly grabbing her arm and leading her to follow him. It sent a shock through her system, his hand touching her, but she had to keep a straight face despite this newfound excitement.

When they saw the grasshopper again, it was in a spacious clearing, and again they pushed aside the grass to watch it rest. Ashi stared at its pale-green body and wondered what its use was. The boy poked her again, and she trembled when she turned to him. To her surprise and confusion, he had something black and red on his finger. “Ladybug,” he said. Ashi watched as it spread its wings, flew from his hand, and landed on his nose. He lightly smiled in a way that she understood that meant it tickled and he had done this activity before. Ashi looked down and saw the grasshopper hadn’t moved.

Chasing insects was new to her, and for the first time in her life, despite her parents’ training to keep a stoic face even in joy, anger, or grief, her mouth twisted into a smile.

Just then, Shinjiro whined and annoyed her for distracting her from the grasshopper. “Aw, it flew away!” She saw he was right, and the ladybug had gone. Behind him, she saw a flicker of red and pointed. He looked over his shoulder and asked with his eyes, to which she nodded with a smile. His own eyes slightly widen–so she did smile–and he kindly took her wrist under her wide sleeve. They spent the afternoon running around in the grass, chasing grasshoppers in both hands and letting them go, letting ladybugs crawl up her arm and his forehead until his mother gently called out for him and Ashi. Running back to the palace was also the first time he heard her giggle, if not for the first time in her life.

He replayed these memories in his sleep for the next several years and thought of seeing her again soon. Although he still played with other girls, and boys, during the day, all of whom were more lively than their someday empress, he missed teaching her to have fun but wondered if she herself remembered what it was like to laugh.

By thirteen, they met again.

The Emperor and Empress requested from his current combat teacher, a wrestler from a land where often times men and wild animals fought to the death for the amusement of others, two days’ rest for Shinjiro’s attendance in a serious meeting. Shinjiro was upset, for he was so close to being done and then learning to shoot a bow and arrow with a “master green archer.”

Again, his parents had him hide in his room while the trumpets blared, but he knew what was going on; his parents told him last night that Aku and Ashi–the future empress–were arriving so the men could discuss battle procedures for when their nations would unite, and in preparation for a potential war with another nation. Ashi, it became clear, was to receive basic training and skills required of an empress. Before the Empress could lead her away, however, Aku insisted his daughter pay attention to what the adults were saying; it was his wish that she remain aware of the troops that protected her and how they would continue to do so should anything happen in the future.

When he saw her at the corner in which he first laid eyes on her, she was struck with how she changed. Her hair was still the same–short with spikes in the same directions, and the robes were similar to hide her feet and most of her hands, but her body had changed. She had curves down her sides, her jaw sharper, and her chest was no longer flat. He could see under the cloth that wrapped around her torso with a collar tight around her neck that she had started developing, though not as much as the other women he had seen in the village and palace.

She was at an age in which she would cease to play outside and her formal schooling; she would have to learn the duties of a royal wife. Much to his displeasure, she looked as if she had not smiled at all ever since their day playing in the field.

They knelt and bowed to each other. Since they had not yet earned the right to sit with the adults, they had to kneel at a distance so that they could hear everything, as the Emperor had motioned. Shinjiro did not listen to the adults as they discussed what a future emperor clearly needed to know. Instead, he kept his eyes on his still-faced future bride, staring at her father and someday in-laws. She had beautiful curves that he might be able to embrace someday, in the privacy of his room. Her chest was blooming; he wondered if they would one day be big enough to hold in his hands. Would she allow him to kiss her neck, her jaw, her cheeks when they were wed?

Might he convince her to let her hair grow out, for him to let hang down her back, to give her face a more flattering frame? He wondered if she had started some “cycle”, as he overheard his mother worriedly express to one of her attendants, that meant she was ready to hold children in her womb. Though the words were new and strange to him, he knew that he would not force her to carry a child yet; he wanted enough time to know and understand his new wife, to love her and make her feel loved.

Suddenly, her eyes dangerously flickered in his direction, and he looked away in terror. He hoped she could not see in his eyes or face what he was thinking about her. Worse, what if she could look into his mind, like a power she had for being half-demon?

They say the Shogun of the Underworld Empire did not have a traditional marriage ceremony as here. Once a new shogun came to be, his councilmen inspected all of the young women who had not reached their twenty-fifth year for the healthiest of them. Once they selected the one of the best health, regardless of whether or not she was married, she became the High Priestess–not only the woman in charge and conductor of worship services, but also his mate and producer of his offspring.

From what Shinjiro heard, the current High Priestess–Ashi’s mother–had produced seven daughters at once, in a childbirth ceremony with all the men and women present–that nearly killed her. Aku, who was in his palace, had her deliver in the cave where all the adults worshipped him, but the councilmen urged him not to attend; the Shogun of the Underworld Empire had to focus on other matters.

It took the High Priestess months to recover, by the time her daughters started to get their first teeth. Shinjiro worried about Ashi herself, if she would deliver seven children and end up dying? What would happen to the peace treaty and their current momentary ceasefire before the wedding?

His mother eventually led Ashi out of the room–perhaps to teach her music–but he continued to pretend listening to the men, for his thoughts were on his beautiful betrothed…and how to make her a more beautiful wife.

When he was eighteen, she was in full bloom.

His parents requested that Ashi arrive one last time before the wedding so she could spend two weeks concentrating on everything she needed to know as empress. He felt slightly satisfied that she did not have to learn everything back in her country, for he wanted to see how much she had changed in five years.

As five years before, he saw her knelt in a corner away from where his parents sat. “Ashi,” her father said.

His future son-in-law could not believe what he saw. Her hairstyle had not changed, but her body had–more curves, more decorative clothing that flattered her figure, and darker eye paint. He had never noticed before that she painted her lids, as some of the wealthier women and girls in the village had.

Shinjiro hurried to his father–the parent closest to him–and forgot about the appearance required of a prince. “Father, Father! She’s beautiful!” he exclaimed while bouncing on his feet. “She’s so beautiful–oh, Father, I love her–”

The more he said it, the more he believed it, that she would make a beautiful wife. His mind soared with thoughts about her and–

His father’s firm hands on his shoulders stopped him, and he did not have to turn to see the look of shock and embarrassment in his mother’s face, horrified with his prince-like behavior. Then he remembered that also presented was his someday father-in-law. He turned red and faced his bride in years to come, who still looked bored. They knelt and bowed to each other, and the Empress walked between them. “Ashi, please follow me,” she said.

Her son’s heart sank. He forgot about her “training” to become the next empress and everything needed of a wife in the empire. Instead, he had to remain at their father’s presence and learn about how the Underworld Empire and Japan would unify following the marriage–marriage to Ashi. He hoped that he would see her during the midday meal, which they would not allow of him before.

At last, his head aching from so much he had to learn about trade and communication interwoven with her, the bell tolled, and the men stood up to walk to the tearoom. The women were already there, and he was shocked to see Ashi’s hair down, barely touching her shoulders and ending in spikes.

Shinjiro noticed how Ashi carefully watched his mother prepare and serve each cup of steaming tea before helping herself. She was slow to drink and set down her cup, still studying how the Empress drank. Shinjiro hoped that his mother treated Ashi well and made her feel at ease with what she was learning.

Ashi, on the other hand, wished he would stop staring at her like that, like an animal pondering its prey before attacking. Her hands and back ached from relearning the tea ceremony, instruction on weaving hats, lessons to play musical instruments, and other duties required of an empress. The worst of it began when she arrived in the room where she was to sleep after her wedding. There had been a large tub and a screen, but she didn’t see the futon or dressing closet.

Two servants extended the screen, but she could see the silhouette of her someday mother-in-law watching her. “This is how we will prepare you for your wedding day, unlike how they bathe you back home,” she said.

Though her mouth was still stoic, Ashi was terrorized. The servants whispered for her to lift her arms so they could undress her piece by piece until she was left to hide her breasts and crotch with her hands. Mother and Father always said that one needed a white gown to bathe in, for nudity was acceptable only at birth and wedding nights.

Her face burning, Ashi entered the tub that was freezing, like melted snow. She couldn’t stop shivering, and her teeth were chattering. “Please put your head under the water, my lady,” the older one said.

It was worse to wet her entire body, and Ashi hid her face under her hand. Then someone’s hands were on her head and apparently tried to wash her hair. It was difficult, Ashi knew. Every six months, a hairdresser styled her and her sisters’ hair in the same style since they first learned to walk and used wax to hold it in place. It used to to hurt so much, but Ashi eventually endured it. The hardest part was washing it all out.

Once her hair was free of the wax, for the servant had coiled as much onto the top of her head, they had her sit on the edge of the tub while they scrubbed her until her skin was red. It gave her pain, and it became harder for her to remain emotionless.

Afterwards, she rinsed off in the cold water and looked away as they patted her dry, but they were kind enough to help her redress into her clothing. The Empress looked displeased to see her hair down, barely touching her shoulders. She rubbed her fingers over the handful of back hair she held. “As empress, as a woman of Japan, you will have to let your hair grow to be styled as I have. Only women without morals have hair this short.”

Ashi hoped the Empress could sense how hurt she felt. Her bitterness helped her remain stoic as she followed the Empress to her lessons.

She had learned rather terrifying expectations to be an obedient wife, to do as he says no matter how unwell or unwilling she was. Her mother had already taught her how a baby came to be, but the Empress expanded her knowledge: To prove she had come to her husband for him alone, on their wedding night, he had to make her bleed as they consummated the marriage. If she did no shed blood, she would have to return to her father in shame, with little to no chance of remarriage. Also, unlike the Underworld Empire, it was expected of her to immediately produce an heir–by this, the Empress meant, a son, for no daughter could inherit the throne. It did not matter how long it would take; she could bear as many as seven daughters until she produced a son. Ashi was too scared to ask what might happen if she died before producing a son.

Upon arrival home, she informed her father that she was now to let her hair grow, as expected of her future people. She tried to envision a life with her hair down her shoulders in her sleep and forever twisted over her head.

Age 20

It felt strange to walk to the palace alone, without her father. She glanced at her future commoners, who still looked as if she was a wild creature from a dirty lake. It was worse that Father was not there. He would have given these people more reason to fear her. Ashi stared ahead and tried not to think of the parents she would never see again, the sisters who could now communicate with her only via letters, the way the sun rose and set from her old bedroom.

Some young girls stepped forward and handed her fistfuls of wildflowers, which she gingerly took. The Emperor and Empress were waiting for her; she knew it was inappropriate for the bride and groom to encounter one another before the wedding.

When she reached the couple, she lightly bent at her waist and stood up straight to follow them inside. The doors closed behind her, making her feel more cut off from the life she used to know.

As taught, she followed the Empress to where she would sleep from now on. There, the woman turned to her. “I hear you have allowed your hair to grow out,” she said, “even after that horrible lice infestation since we last saw you.”

Ashi remembered the pain of blades shedding her hair to nearly birth length and nodded. When the Empress motioned for her to free her hair, she removed the pin that held her locks in its bun and let her black strands fall over her shoulders, reaching towards the middle of her back.

“You look beautiful,” the Empress said. Then she turned and nodded to the ladies-in-waiting.

They pulled out the screen shielding her from the still-watching Empress, and Ashi held out her arms for the servants to undress her, this time knowing what to expect but also sad for the last clothes she ever had from her homeland. As the bride could not retain anything from her birth country, she wished they could just send back her old clothes instead of just burn them. The only thing they could not burn were the horn hair ornaments every daughter of the Shogun of the Underworld Empire had to wear at their weddings, no matter whom she married into. Once the ceremony was over, she was to send the horns to her parents as a sign that their daughter was no longer their own. Now everything she wore had to be like what the Empress wore.

Once she was naked, she resolved that she had to get used to this if this was how to bathe from now on. She was surprised that the water was warmer this time and was quick to wet her head. Also, there was no scrubbing, but rather gentle shampooing and full-body rubs not as harsh as the years prior. Perhaps once they accepted her as their current Empress’s successor, they had to act nicer to her. She took her time rinsing herself and did not feel embarrassed when they patted her dry.

The servants led her into the adjacent room, where, to her surprise, the robes strongly resembled that of her home country’s, with the green, red, and black. Perhaps she would dress more like the Empress only after the ceremony. The plate that shielded her torso and had an arrowhead-shaped point over her breasts was tight but not as much as her hair curled into a shorter twist. She was quick to take control and not show any discomfort until they were done. She was so focused on them applying lip color that she did not feel something being wrapped around her waist. Ashi pressed her lips together and saw they had somehow constructed flames similar to what she wore at home, flames made from the finest wood. She stared sadly at the flames, which they would certainly burn later.

Then the Empress came in, after she stepped into her geta, and Ashi swore the woman had never smiled so much wider. “You look absolutely beautiful,” she spoke as if she was going to cry. Then she saw the younger woman look towards her own back. “Yes, it is customary for any foreign bride to dress in her country’s colors until she becomes a wife.”

Ashi wondered why the Empress had not said that to her earlier. “You must be ready,” the older woman said. She led the bride out of the room to the palace entrance, where the red aisle led to the altar. While the Empress and her servants lined up behind Ashi, she closed her eyes as the men servants opened their umbrellas to shield her from the sun until the doors opened, and the red aisle came into view.

Commoners and people of different garb and skins–they must have been from the nations where Shinjiro learned to fight and use weapons–watched her approach the men in black at the altar. She saw him smile sweetly at her, his mouth only growing the longer he stared. When she reached the altar, she struggled to lift the corners of her mouth, but his smile never faltered as he took her hands.

I pray to protect my father’s people and to serve as a good wife to my new husband and a good mother of the next heir, she thought to herself as the priest began to speak.

They stared at the pristine white sheets over his futon. Her heart pounded when she remembered her mother-in-law’s words to present these sheets in the morning as proof of the marriage consummation. Ashi wondered if the Emperor had informed his son that the bride had to bleed after he entered her. Of course, Ashi had experienced pain before–stubborn hair knots, the shaving her hair, tripping and falling onto her face and knees–but she did not know what it mean to shed blood…other than, of course, when the moons changed, and all demons’ daughters cleansed their bodies to carry children.

The newlyweds bowed before she moved first and lied on her back, still wearing her wedding garment. Although he was still smiling, as he had at the altar, she could see in his eyes the hunger and nervous anticipation for what he had to do as groom. This was it, she thought. She pretended not to think of what his mother told her, but what her own mother said: He would be merciless, touching and squeezing parts of your body so unlike his, enough to give you pain, and he would use you for his own pleasure and give you enough pain to stop you from walking for days.

He had untied what they called her kimono, but she could not contain her emotions anymore. After years of resistance, she gave up and started to cry. She was scared, of this marriage, of this new life, of her in-laws’ expectations and fears of her. She wished her own parents, as cruel as they could be could have attended the wedding, to be with her as she entered her new life, so she wouldn’t have to see them for the last time in a country that was no longer her home, that she would never see again. Now she had to bleed and ignore pain, and to serve as her new husband’s servant for sexual services and to provide an heir–a male heir, the Empress had said–as quickly as possible.

Shinjiro stopped undressing her and stared at her face. “Ashi?”

She wiped her face and shook her head. Not knowing what to do, he slid her hands under her back–she didn’t like it but was too overcome with emotions to fight him off–and pulled her to his chest. Surprisingly, she curled in his arms and sobbed over his heart. He guessed that she was frightened of what they had to do, so he stroked down her hair and kissed her forehead. “It’s all right, Ashi.”

It’s not all right, she wanted to scream. I can’t do this! I can’t do it! This is just too fast! I have to marry someone as a peace treaty for my father’s people, he’s going to value me for my body and has the right to hurt me, maybe even take me against my will, my in-laws are afraid of me, I have to produce a son and they clearly don’t want a grandson of demon heritage, but I can’t control if I have a son ever, I have to wear my hair up and suffer through horrible headaches for the rest of my life, I…

What stopped her thoughts was a thumb wiping her cheek, but it wasn’t hers. She also felt a set of lips on top of her head, and his hand stroke up her back. “I know you’re scared,” he whispered. “I can tell, but–”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I–I should–shouldn’t even be crying…I’ll–I’ll just…” The words, however, left her throat, and she timidly broke free from his embrace. She rested her head on the end of the futon, flattened her back, and closed her eyes. He was probably annoyed at her enough to brutally ravage her.

But then…why would he hold her, wipe her tears, try to soothe her? Did he really care about her and want to show her he cared, or was he pretending to, trying to calm her down only to use her for his sick pleasures?

She could hear him move and visibly twitched when she sensed him hover over her, but then his hand–so big, so warm–cupped her face, and she didn’t have the heart to scream for him to leave her alone. “Ashi,” he whispered, “I don’t know what they’ve told you…but I know I will not force you into anything.”

When that didn’t ease her, he sighed. “Ashi, could you, you know, do me a quick favor?”

Ashi swallowed but nodded. Then he asked her, oddly, to keep her eyes closed and sit up. Confused, she obeyed but listened to the shuffle of removed clothing. Oh, what was he going to do to her?

“Give me your hand.”

She slowly held up her right arm, which he took in both hands. Would he make her touch or do something sickening with the body part he had to put in her? Her heart fluttered until she felt something bare, smooth, and…fluttering. “Open your eyes.”

Slowly, she lifted her lids and blushed. He had removed his gi and wore only a wrapping around his waist. She had never seen a man nearly naked up close, nor one as muscular. Her hand was on his chest…his heart. He put her hand to feel his heart.

“I can tell you’re scared,” he whispered, and he smiled at her deepening flush; she was clearly struggling to look at his face, but her eyes roamed over his arms, chest, and abdomen. His free hand held her jaw tenderly. “I do not know what to say to make you feel better, but I vow to you that I will be a loving husband to you. Even as children, so young, playing in the fields, I promised myself that as long as we were married, I would make sure you felt loved and comforted as my wife.” He did not mention the first time they met, when he wondered if she ever smiled, that she scared him. That was something he would never tell anyone else.

To his relief, the corners of her mouth slowly lifted into what had to have been the first smile since they played in the fields. “All right,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

He kindly curled his thumb under her bottom lip. “Do you want to wait until the morning or–you decide,” he added gently.

Though her eyes were still flickered with worry her features looked softer. “May I kiss you?” he asked.

She lightly nodded and quickly bit her lower lip. He stared into her eyes as he slowly leaned forward. The first kiss was messy, as he would kiss her cheek by accident or she would push her teeth against his lips, but once they managed, they each felt small senses of accomplishment. They lightly smiled and felt each other do the same. She moved her hands down his bare arms and neck, and he kindly traced up her backbone. She broke away and whispered, “Could we move back a little?”

He felt surprised but gently lowered her onto her back. Her hair looked so pretty fanned around her head. He kissed her with the same gentleness until she motioned for his hands to lower her sleeves off her shoulders. To her relief, he did not look down at the rest of her but kissed every inch of her shoulders, collarbone, and neck. He loved her gasps and moans, her fingers smoothing over his hair. Something slowly poked her between her legs, but he didn’t seem to notice. “How do you feel?” he whispered.

“G-Good,” she said. Her lips ached from the kissing and she loved it. “Do-Do you want to…tonight…”

“Only if you want to,” he said despite the desperate sensation under his ribs and between his legs. What stopped their kissing session was him breaking away to yawn over her head.

She laughed a little. “Maybe morning,” she said. “For now, let’s sleep.”

He kissed her nose and lips one last time. “I love you,” he whispered. Then he moved to her side and pulled the blanket over them, where he wrapped his arm around her waist and positioned his chest against her back. When she turned to sleep against his shoulder, he fell asleep smiling.

When morning came, they took their time kissing and exploring naked bodies. Contrary to what her mother said, he did not paw at her breasts like a feral animal but instead used his lips, teeth, and tongue to give her a sensation she never before felt but could not get enough of. She held the certain body part in both hands and smirked with every shudder and hiss he released. He kissed from her lips down her body to between her legs, but he told her that someday–perhaps even tonight–he would use more of his lips and tongue there.

After they agreed to do it, her eyes paralyzed with fear again, he wrapped his arms under her back with her own around his neck. “I love you,” he whispered one last time before he sealed his mouth over hers and pushed between her legs and into her. She screamed into his mouth and scratched at his upper back with her fingernails, drawing blood. Shame tore at his heart, that he gave his new wife horrible pain even though they both knew it had to be done. He let her adjust to the pain for several minutes, he kissed her trails of tears and jaw, and was slow until she urged him to quicken the pace. She stopped crying and was now begging for more speed, her arms tightening around his back and shoulders. He kept kissing her mouth and neck, complying as best as he could with her requests. Sometimes he kissed and suckled on her breasts to give her more pleasure.

“Are you close?” he asked her when her face contorted and her hands tightened their grip on his back. He moved a little faster until she screeched and smacked her head against the futon, her arms slipping to her sides. Once he saw his stars, and cried out, he stopped himself from collapsing onto her and moved to her side. They panted, stared at the ceiling, taking their time caressing themselves, feeling more beautiful for her and much stronger for him. He turned his head and saw her already staring at him.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

Although he was tired, he cracked his back and pushed himself up to kiss the dried blood between her thighs. “As long as you are,” he said. “I love you.”

Two graceful hands, bloodied at the fingernails, lifted his head to look into her eyes, which were less broken, as if his reassurance of his love mended the pieces together. “I love you, too.”

#samurai jack #fanfiction #ashi #jashi #demon bride

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theculturedmarxist · 5 years

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By Barry Grey

26 September 2019

On Monday night, the New York Metropolitan Opera opened its 2019-2020 season with a new production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. This production has a particular distinction in that it is the first ever based on a critically researched and authoritative performance edition of Gershwin’s score, the product of 20 years of work led by musicologist Wayne Shirley, who is currently at the University of Michigan’s Gershwin Initiative.

There is no doubt that the poignant love story of the crippled beggar Porgy and the beautiful but abused and addicted Bess, and the suffering and struggle of the African American working class community of Charleston’s Catfish Row, is among the world’s most beloved operas and Gershwin’s masterpiece.

Yet the fact that the current production is the first in 29 years to be staged by the country’s most prestigious opera house is indicative of the trials and tribulations that have confronted the work since it premiered on Broadway in October 1935. These have come not from the broad public, which has embraced the opera (and many of its numbers) since its inception, thrilled by its glorious and complex music and moved by its deeply democratic ethos, but from within certain more privileged constituencies—the American classical music establishment, academia, sections of the black professional upper-middle class, including certain African American artists, composers, writers and actors.

Gershwin, the prolific composer—along with his lyricist brother Ira—of hit Broadway musicals and dozens of memorable songs that have become part of the Great American Songbook, rejected the artificial separation of popular music from “serious” or “classical” music. He wrote concert classics that incorporated elements of jazz such as Rhapsody in Blue, the Concerto in F and An American in Paris, which have become part of the symphonic repertoire the world over. He called his Porgy a “folk opera” and deliberately had it debut on Broadway in order to appeal to a broader audience. But what he wrote was a musically dense and dramatically powerful opera in the full sense of the word.

One example of the dismissal of Porgy by much of the American music establishment was a savage review of a production at the New York City Opera written in March of 1965 by the then-music critic of the New York Times Harold C. Schonberg. He wrote:

“Porgy and Bess”—Gershwin, you know—seems to have taken root as an American classic, and everybody accepts it as a kind of masterpiece. It turned up last night as given by the New York City Opera Company. All I can say is that it is a wonder that anybody can take it seriously.

It is not a good opera, it is not a good anything, though it has a half-dozen or so pretty tunes in it: and in light of recent developments it is embarrassing. “Porgy and Bess” contains as many stereotypes in its way as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

In more recent decades, with the domination of racial and identity politics on the campuses and within what passes for the American intelligentsia, its promotion by the Democratic Party and elevation as an ideological bulwark of bourgeois rule, the opera has been repeatedly accused of denigrating and exploiting black people. It is, according to the terminology of African American Studies departments and a well-funded industry that—with the aid of pseudo-left organizations—churns out racialist propaganda, a prime example of “cultural appropriation.”

We will deal with the retrograde concept of “cultural appropriation” further on. First let us examine how this racialist approach to Porgy and Bess is reflected in the media reception to the new Met production.

The table was set, so to speak, by the New York Times, which led its Sunday arts section with a full-page photo of the two leads, Eric Owens and Angel Blue, and the headline “The Complex History and Uneasy Present of ‘Porgy and Bess.’”

Taking pains to raise the standard racialist arguments against the opera and its composer, while simultaneously acknowledging the greatness of the work, the author, Michael Cooper, wrote:

More urgently, is “Porgy” a sensitive portrayal of the lives and struggles of a segregated African-American community in Charleston, SC? (Maya Angelou, who as a young dancer performed in a touring production that brought it to the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1955, later praised it as “great art” and “a human truth.”)

Or does it perpetuate degrading stereotypes about black people, told in wince-inducing dialect? (Harry Belafonte turned down an offer to star in the film version because he found it “racially demeaning.”)

Is it a triumph of melting-pot American art, teaming up George and Ira Gershwin (the sons of Russian Jewish immigrants) with DuBose Heyward (the scion of a prominent white South Carolina family) and his Ohio-born wife, Dorothy, to tell a uniquely African-American story? Or is it cultural appropriation?...

Or is the answer to all these questions yes?

The first wave of reviews published Tuesday (the WSWS will publish its own review of the Met production at a later date) have generally been highly favorable. All of the reviewers, however, feel obliged to qualify their enthusiasm for the performance by cataloging the opera’s supposed “baggage,” viewed from the standpoint of race. It seems they allow themselves to be moved by the piece only reluctantly, and sense its humanity and truth despite themselves.

George Grella, for example, writes in New York Classical Review:

Since its debut, Porgy and Bess has been consistently hectored by two questions: is it an opera and is it some combination of condescension and racial exploitation (lately termed cultural appropriation)?

The debut of a new production of Porgy and Bess, which opened the season at the Metropolitan Opera Monday night, could leave no objective listener with any doubt as to the answer to the first question. And based on the excited responses from the audience during the performance, and the rapturous applause and shouts at the end—from the kind of patron mix one sees in everyday life in New York City but rarely in a classical music venue—the work has gone quite a ways toward settling the latter in a heartening and beneficent way.

There are charges of stereotyping and caricature of the inhabitants of Catfish Row, but the real problem of the opera, the irredeemable original sin of Porgy and Bess that every reviewer is duty-bound to raise, is the fact that its creators were white. (Even worse, three of the four—George and Ira Gershwin and Dubose Heyward—were men.)

Thus, the Washington Post ’s Anne Midgette writes: “Like so many operas, ‘Porgy’ is dated: written by white men and rife with stereotypes of its time.”

Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times writes: “But ever since its premiere in 1935, the work has divided opinion, and the debate lingers. … ‘Porgy’ was created, after all, by white people. … That ‘Porgy and Bess’ is a portrait of a black community by white artists may limit the work.”

Justin Davidson of Vulture.com notes: “True, the only depiction of African-American life that makes it to the opera stage with any regularity was written by three white guys.”

The very fact that the race, gender or nationality of the artist is today uncritically presented as a central issue in evaluating a work testifies to the degeneration of bourgeois thought in general and the terrible damage inflicted over many years by identity and racial politics. The use of such criteria in past periods was associated with the political right, which employed them to promote anti-democratic and racist agendas.

While today the attack on Porgy and Bess on grounds of the “whiteness” of its creators is cloaked in the supposedly “left” trappings of Democratic Party politics and post-modernist (that is, anti-Marxist) criticism, the earlier practitioners of such an approach were more frank in giving vent to its ugly sources and implications.

Reviewing the premiere of Porgy and Bess in 1935, the prominent American composer and music critic Virgil Thomson wrote:

The material is straight from the melting pot. At best it is a piquant but highly unsavory stirring-up together of Israel, Africa and the Gaelic Isles. … [Gershwin’s] lack of understanding of all the major problems of form, of continuity, and of serious or direct musical expression is not surprising in view of the impurity of his musical sources. … I do not like fake folklore, nor fidgety accompaniments, nor bittersweet harmony, nor six-part choruses, nor gefilte fish orchestration.

Most critics and professors who attack the opera for the “whiteness” of its authors are not anti-Semites, but, whether they like it or not, there is an objective link between their approach and that of Richard Wagner, one of the pioneers of anti-Semitism in the field of music. In 1850, he authored the infamous tract “Das Judentum in der Musik” (“Jewishness and Music”), in which he denounced Jewish composers in general and Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer in particular.

A racial approach to art has a definite logic. It leads in the end to abominations such as the Nazis' Aryan art, with its book burning and banning of Jewish- and black-infected “degenerate art.”

It is a historical fact that the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who fled tsarist persecution composed an opera that expressed in a powerful and beautiful way both the poverty and oppression of blacks in the segregated South and their nobility of spirit and burning desire for genuine freedom and equality. What is so strange or problematic about that?

George Gershwin was a genius and without doubt the greatest American composer of his time. That is an important factor to reckon with. There were and are many talented black composers—Duke Ellington and William Grant Still, to name just two—who produced great music, but none has to date produced a musical piece about the black experience in America that compares to Porgy. Unfortunately, in the attacks on the opera by some black artists—initially including Ellington, although the great jazz composer later changed his opinion—there was an element of jealousy. The same applies to composers of the academy who dismissed Gershwin’s work as technically deficient and low-brow.

How many jazz greats have performed and improvised on Gershwin tunes, including his opera? Miles Davis produced an entire album based on it. The list includes Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday and many more. It also includes country and pop artists such as Willie Nelson and Brian Wilson.

More than 80 years after its premiere, history itself has demonstrated the universality of Porgy and Bess. It is about black people, but, more fundamentally, it is about the human condition. Its basic themes are universal. It is a love story. It is a story about oppression, community, struggle, loss and the will to fight.

Do not songs such as “Summertime,” “I Got Plenty of Nothing” and the exquisite love duet “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” express the most profound and universal of human aspirations and emotions? Those who attack the opera for its “whiteness” generally avoid discussing the music.

Nor can there be any doubt that Gershwin’s own background, in the context of the convulsive social and political conditions of the Depression 1930s—the spread of fascism in Europe, revolutionary upheavals internationally and mass struggles of the American working class, and the approach of the Second World War—played a significant role in inspiring him to write Porgy.

During the summer of 1934, Gershwin stayed on Folly Beach, located on a barrier island near Charleston, South Carolina, collecting material and ideas for his opera and visiting revival meetings of the Gullah blacks who lived on adjacent James Island. He wrote to a friend: “We sit out at night gazing at the stars, smoking our pipes. The three of us, Harry [Botkin], Paul [Mueller] and myself discuss our two favorite subjects, Hitler’s Germany and God’s women.”

Dubose Heyward, who spent part of the summer with Gershwin on Folly Beach, published an article in 1935 in Stage magazine in which he described Gershwin’s interaction with the people who became the prototypes for the characters of his opera. “To George it was more like a homecoming than an exploration,” he wrote. “The quality in him which had produced the Rhapsody in Blue in the most sophisticated city in America, found its counterpart in the impulse behind the music and bodily rhythms of the simple Negro peasant of the South.

“The Gullah Negro prides himself on what he calls ‘shouting.’ This is a complicated rhythmic pattern beaten out by feet and hands as an accompaniment to the spirituals, and is indubitably an African survival. I shall never forget the night when at a Negro meeting on a remote sea-island, George started ‘shouting’ with them. And eventually, to their huge delight stole the show from their champion ‘shouter.’ I think that he is probably the only white man in America who could have done it.”

Gershwin himself was not overtly political, at least in his public life, but his sympathies and associations were with the liberal and socialist left. He penned Broadway shows of a broadly anti-war and socially dissident character, such as Strike Up the Band, Of Thee I Sing and Let ’Em Eat Cake. The impact of the Russian Revolution, only 18 years prior to the debut of Porgy, contributed to the generally optimistic and democratic impulse behind his music. The sister of Ira Gershwin’s wife Leonore, Rose Strunsky, translated Leon Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution into English.

The singers who worked closely with Gershwin on Porgy, including the original Porgy and Bess, Todd Duncan and Anne Brown, spoke with affection of their interactions with the composer, insisting he never evinced the slightest prejudice or condescension. They were always among the most ardent defenders of the opera.

The Gershwins insisted that the singing roles go only to black performers, in part because they wanted to break down the exclusion of African American artists from the concert hall and because they did not want the opera to be performed in blackface.

As for the element of caricature in Porgy and Bess, what opera does not have caricatures? The vengeful dwarf in Rigoletto, the seductive gypsy in Carmen, the tubercular seamstress in La Boheme, the rascally but clever servant in The Marriage of Figaro. One could go on and on. The issue is: Do the inhabitants of Catfish Row transcend their “types” and express genuine humanity? The opera’s audiences all over the world have answered in the affirmative.

And what of the charge of “cultural appropriation?” Could there be a more banal, reactionary and anti-artistic concept? What is art, if not the interaction of multiple influences of many origins, conditioned by social and historical development and distilled in the creative imagination of the artist to produce works that have universal significance?

Should we denounce Shakespeare, a male, for inventing Ophelia? Should we reject Verdi for writing operas about Egyptians? Should we ban blacks from playing white characters? What about that racist Mark Twain who had the impertinence to create the escaped slave Jim?

The balkanization of art is the end of art.

Here is how Gershwin, who aspired to create a genuine American idiom, described his own development. In an article titled “Jazz is the Voice of the American Soul,” published in 1926, he wrote:

Old music and new music, forgotten melodies and the craze of the moment, bits of opera, Russian folk songs, Spanish ballads, chansons, ragtime ditties combined in a mighty chorus in my inner ear. And through and over it all I heard, faint at first, loud at last, the soul of this great America of ours.

And what is the voice of the American soul? It is jazz developed out of ragtime, jazz that is the plantation song improved and transformed into finer, bigger harmonies. …

I do not assert that the American soul is Negroid. But it is a combination that includes the wail, the whine, and the exultant note of the old “mammy” songs of the South. It is black and white. It is all colors and all souls unified in the great melting pot of the world. …

But to be true music it must repeat the thoughts and aspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans. My time is today.

#wsws #porgy and bess #opera #american opera #gershwin #george gershwin #wagner #broadway #broadway musicals #identity politics #racism #racialism #cultural appropriation #gullah

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arcticdementor · 5 years

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Be afraid. Be very afraid.

That’s a natural reaction to the revelation of Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy FBI director, that top Justice Department officials, alarmed by Donald Trump’s firing of former Bureau director James Comey, explored a plan to invoke the 25th Amendment and kick the duly elected president out of office.

…

But to understand what kind of constitutional crisis this would unleash and the precedent it would set, it’s necessary to ponder the rest of this section of the 25th Amendment. The text prescribes that, if the president, after being removed, transmits to the same congressional figures that he is indeed capable of discharging his duties, he shall once again be president after four days. But if the vice president and the cabinet majority reiterate their declaration within those four days that the guy can’t govern, Congress is charged with deciding the issue. It then takes a two-thirds vote of both houses to keep the president removed, which would have to be done within 21 days, during which time the elected president would be sidelined and the vice president would govern. If Congress can’t muster the two-thirds majority within the prescribed time period, the president “shall resume the powers and duties of his office.”

…

For the past two years, the country has been struggling to understand the two competing narratives of the criminal investigation of the president.

One narrative—let’s call it Narrative A—has it that honorable and dedicated federal law enforcement officials developed concerns over a tainted election in which nefarious Russian agents had sought to tilt the balloting towards the candidate who wanted to improve U.S.-Russian relations and who seemed generally unseemly. Thus did the notion emerge, quite understandably, that Trump had “colluded” with Russian officials to cadge a victory that otherwise would have gone to his opponent. This narrative is supported and protected by Democratic figures and organizations, by adherents of the “Russia as Threat” preoccupation, and by anti-Trumpers everywhere, particularly news outlets such as CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

The other view—Narrative B—posits that certain bureaucratic mandarins of the national security state and the outgoing Obama administration resolved early on to thwart Trump’s candidacy. After his election, they determined to undermine his political standing, and particularly his proposed policy toward Russia, through a relentless and expansive investigation characterized by initial misrepresentations, selective media leaks, brutal law enforcement tactics, and a barrage of innuendo. This is the narrative of most Trump supporters, conservative commentators, Fox News, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page, notably columnist Kimberley Strassel.

The McCabe revelation won’t affect the battle of the two narratives. As ominous and outrageous as this “deep state” behavior may seem to those who embrace Narrative B, it will be seen by Narrative A adherents as evidence that those law enforcement officials were out there heroically on the front lines protecting the republic from Donald J. Trump.

And those Narrative A folks won’t have any difficulty tossing aside the fact that McCabe was fired as deputy FBI director for violating agency policy in leaking unauthorized information to the news media. He then allegedly violated the law in lying about it to federal investigators on four occasions, including three times while under oath.

Indeed, Narrative A people have no difficulty at all brushing aside serious questions posed by Narrative B people. McCabe is a likely liar and perjurer? Doesn’t matter. Peter Strzok, head of the FBI’s counterespionage section, demonstrated his anti-Trump animus in tweets and emails to Justice official Lisa Page? Irrelevant. Christopher Steele’s dossier of dirt on Trump, including an allegation that the Russians were seeking to blackmail and bribe him, was compiled by a man who had demonstrated to a Justice Department official that he was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and…passionate about him not being president”? Not important. The dossier was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party? Immaterial. Nothing in the dossier was ever substantiated? So what?

…

Porter notes that a particularly sinister expression in May 2017 by former CIA director John O. Brennan, a leading Trump antagonist, has precipitated echoes in the news media ever since, particularly in the Times. Asked in a committee hearing if he had intelligence indicating that anyone in the Trump campaign was “colluding with Moscow,” Brennan dodged the question. He said his experience had taught him that “the Russians try to suborn individuals, and they try to get them to act on their behalf either wittingly or unwittingly.”

Of course you can’t collude with anybody unwittingly. But Brennan’s fancy expression has the effect of expanding what can be thrown at political adversaries, to include not just conscious and nefarious collaboration but also policy advocacy that could be viewed as wrongheaded or injurious to U.S. interests. As Porter puts it, “The real purpose…is to confer on national security officials and their media allies the power to cast suspicion on individuals on the basis of undesirable policy views of Russia rather than on any evidence of actual collaboration with the Russian government.”

That seems to be what’s going on here. There’s no doubt that McCabe and Rosenstein and Strzok and Brennan and Page and many others despised Trump and his resolve to thaw relations with Russia. They viewed him as a president “who needed to be reined in,” as a CNN report described the sentiment among top FBI officials after the Comey firing.

#the american conservative #robert w. merry #deep state #democracy in action #the people who can 'rein in' a president who refuses to obey #figurehead #iron law of oligarchy

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sakurauchiha2018 · 6 years

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“I locked the keys in the car.” for BoruSara

This is set in the same AU as “I’m not wearing a dress.””I’m not wearing a tie.” It came out longer than I thought, which surprised me lol These two may turn into a short AU story later on.

Closing the door on my car, I run to the elevator and begin my long ride to the top floor. Today I have a meeting with Papa, Uncle Itachi and Uncle Naruto on the next step for the company. All last night I was looking over spreadsheets and trying to see where we could improve and cut costs. Mama had to physically pull me away from the library so I would go to sleep. Part of me wishes my mother would be in this meeting, even though my father and uncles love me so much, they are very intimidating.

The ping of the doors opening break me from my thoughts and I realize I’ve made it to my destination. Juggling my notebook, purse and coffee I make my way to the conference room with all eyes on me. Whispers come from the staff around me and I can’t help but give some of them death glares, especially my father’s personal assistant. The redheaded woman is beyond annoying, I honestly don’t know how my mother puts up with her hanging around my father. When I was about to graduate from college I remember her causing a bid ordeal between my parents, trying to accuse my father of sexual harassment. I’ve never seen my mother that angry before and I never want to again, she punched a hole straight through the wall in Papa’s study.

Shivering at the memory I walk into the room and see the three men sitting equally around the large table, an open seat facing my father is reserved for me. My nerves start to get the better of my but I notice the small smile on my Uncle Itachi’s lips, he’s always told me to have confidence in my work.

“Right on time Sarada. Please take a seat so we can begin.” I usher to my spot and place all of my personal items down letting my phone sit beside the stack of paperwork. As I sit I flatten the fabric of my skirt and sit with perfect posture, a smirk forms on my father’s lips for just a second. Someone clears their throats and the meeting begins, just as I’m about to take notes I see my screen light up.

‘Boruto- I need help!’

This cannot be happening now! Boruto knows how important this is for me, there has to be someone else that can bail him out. Rolling my eyes I silently reply to my blonde idiot.

‘In case you forgot, I’m in the meeting. Call someone else.’

The harshness behind my text isn’t necessary but there’s no other way around it. Three sets of eyes look my way as my father asks me a question.

“Sarada, what are the numbers for the medical branch corporation?” Technically this is Mama’s department. Uchiha and Uzumaki Corporation has three different hospitals and all are ran by my mother. She established a children’s mental health clinic that’s the best in the country, patients travel from all around the world to be treated. Her hospitals are just as renown, much to my great grandfather’s dislike.

“The children’s clinic is up 24% compared to last year, while Leaf General is up 15% and Suna General is up 18%. We need to restructure the nursing staff for the hospitals, the director and I both agree that some improvements need to be made.” My voice shakes slightly for a moment as I see my screen light up not once, but three separate times during my little speech.

‘Boruto- No I need YOUR help.

Boruto- Sarada 911.

Boruto- I’m supposed to be at the meeting too.’

He wasn’t supposed to be here, this is between the CEO’s and myself well minus my mother.

“What improvements do you mean?” Itachi asks with slight curiosity in his voice. Clearing my throat I stand and pass out the three folders I prepared with Mama over the weekend.

“Inside these packets are a few changes that need to be made. Our hospitals are known for being cutting edge, but in order to be considered cutting edge we need the latest technology. We’ve lost hundreds of patients because another city has something we don’t. I believe if we update our physicality and restructure our staff we will not only gain profit but also recognition.” I smirk as the three read through my folders, a prideful look in my father’s dark eyes. It seems that I did learn a thing or two from him.

Hours later we have finished our meeting and a huge weight is lifted off my shoulders. I scroll through the dozen text messages Boruto sent me as my Uncle Itachi walks me to the elevator. My father and mother have lunch plans to discuss the purchase of new equipment, honestly she will get whatever she wants. My father isn’t able to tell my mother no.

“Good job today Sara, you impressed all three of us.” Blushing at my childhood nickname, I press Boruto’s picture and smile at my uncle.

“About time you called me! My dad is going to kill me for missing this meeting!!” I can’t help but laugh at his panicked voice.

“Why did you miss the meeting? I didn’t even think you were supposed to be here?” A chuckle comes from my Uncle and I can’t help but do the same. The elevator doors close and we start our descent into the garage.

“Uncle Sasuke wanted me there even though my dad didn’t. I just need your help! Are you leaving the office yet?”

“Do you want me to bail you out with Papa? That’s really not going to happen.” I snicker and look up at the other Uchiha, he seems to be reading through emails not paying attention to my conversation anymore.

“Look, I locked the keys in the car when I went to get coffee. It’s super embarrassing.”I can’t contain the laughter that erupts from my small being. Tears form in my eyes and I can see that Uncle Itachi overheard the confession.

“What car did you drive Boruto?” I question as I exit the elevator, my uncle escorts me over to the car and I see my mother pull into her parking spot next to mine. These were the fun perks of being head of the company, no looking for a parking spot.

“I drove dad’s car.” I stop walking and feel the vein in my forehead pop out as my mother makes her way to us.

“You idiot! Did you even try to open the doors? There’s no way you locked the keys in that car. It’s designed to unlock the door is the key fob is still inside.” The line goes quiet and I hear the opening of a car door and I click end on the screen. Boruto can be such an idiot at times.

“Mama why are men stupid?” I see that my uncle hasn’t taken offense to my question but I earned a heartfelt laugh from my mother.

“It’s a mystery. What did he do this time?” Her green eyes shine at me but then they look over to the elevator where my father walks out to join us. He stops right beside me and places a hand on my shoulder, silently telling me good work.

“Where’s Boruto?” As if on cue a car comes screeching into the garage and a blur of blonde is seen from the driver seat, great. Boruto comes running from the car holding a large briefcase and a smug look on his face.

“Sorry, I had an issue.” He scratches the back of his head and my father scoffs beside me.

“I’m taking my wife to lunch. Be in my office at exactly noon if you want me to overlook this.” Papa’s tone is serious but I can see the smirk on his face as he leads my mother to his car. Uncle has disappeared leaving the blonde and I alone.

“I’m guessing you were amazing as always.” He moves closer and I smile with confidence up at him before placing a small kiss on his cheek.

“Of course, you know the reason why Papa didn’t snap on you is because of me.” I laugh as I make my way to the car to place my folders inside. My heels click against the concrete and he follows closely.

“How will I ever make it up to you?” He wiggles a brow at me and I cross my arms across my chest. Smiling up at him, I sigh and take the briefcase from his hand and tossing it in my passenger seat.

“Lunch at the café across the street sounds like a good start.” Our fingers find each other and intertwine as we walk out of the garage, the sun making his eyes sparkle even more than normal.

“I can do that.” A huge smile crosses his face, he may be an idiot some days but he’s my idiot.

I blame you @kairi-chan for getting me hooked on BoruSara! lol

#borusara #sasusaku #au #ff #ffwriting

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paylolorens-blog · 6 years

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Infection With Ascaris Eggs Relieves Symptoms Of Ulcerative Colitis

Infection With Ascaris Eggs Relieves Symptoms Of Ulcerative Colitis. The occurrence of a humankind who swallowed parasite eggs to treat his ulcerative colitis - and in truth got better - sheds light on how "worm therapy" might help heal the gut, a original study suggests. "Our findings in this case report suggest that infection with the eggs of the T trichiura roundworm can alleviate the symptoms of ulcerative colitis," said learning leader P'ng Loke, an aid professor in the department of medical parasitology at NYU Langone Medical Center vimax agen brunei. A individual parasite, Trichuris trichiura infects the large intestine. The findings could also lead to supplemental ways to treat the debilitating disease, a form of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) currently treated with drugs that don't always task and can cause serious side effects, said Loke supplements. The swatting findings are published in the Dec 1, 2010 issue of Science Translational Medicine. Loke and his pair followed a 35-year-old man with severe colitis who tried worm (or "helminthic") analysis to avoid surgical removal of his entire colon testosterone pills found in jamaica. He researched the therapy, flew to a physician in Thailand who had agreed to give him the eggs, and swallowed 1500 of them. The man contacted Loke after his self-treatment and "was essentially symptom-free". Intrigued, he and his colleagues decisive to follow the man's condition. The study analyzed slides and samples of the man's blood and colon accumulation from 2003, before he swallowed the eggs, to 2009, a few years after ingestion. During this period, he was effectively symptom-free for almost three years. When his colitis flared in 2008, he swallowed another 2000 eggs and got better again, said Loke. Tissue captivated during operative colitis showed a large number of CD4+ T-cells, which are immune cells that produce the inflammatory protein interleukin-17, the duo found. However, tissue taken after worm therapy, when his colitis was in remission, contained lots of T-cells that give rise to interleukin-22 (IL-22), a protein that promotes wound healing. Further, after worm therapy, the man's colon produced significantly more mucus who illustrious that a lack of mucus in the colon is linked with fastidious symptoms. "We think the worms increase or restore mucus manufacturing in the colon. Basically, the gut is trying to expel the worms. This increase in mucus may play a part in relieving the symptoms. This is not the usual clinical trial, but you take your opportunities for unique observation where you can," said Dr Gerald W Dryden Jr, manager of the clinical research sector of gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition at the University of Louisville, in Kentucky. Before this study, IL-22 had not been associated with salubrious effect in IBD, said Dryden. "While it doesn't determine cause-and-effect, the study does seem to illustrate an important, previously unknown association between IL-22 and response to helminthic therapy". Causing abdominal pain, diarrhea and other symptoms, colitis affects about 700000 Americans, according to the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America. Scientists don't be informed what causes the disease, but guess that immune-system dysfunction plays a role. Colitis is bourgeois in developed countries such as America - where parasitic worm infections are rare - and in Asia, Africa and Latin America, where almost the entire population is infected, the study noted. Clinical trials with the pig whipworm Trichuris suis have improved the symptoms of both ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, and carnal studies suggest that various parasitic worms can check inflammation, the study noted. The ponder also suggests new, worm-based treatments for both ulcerative colitis and IBD. Research might single out molecules derived from worms that suppress inflammation, or pathways activated by worms that can be targeted by more usual approaches. Right now, however, worm therapy is still not well-understood and could potentially backfire, the study warned. "The quandary is that these worms themselves can cause harm and damage the gut. The individual in this study is charmed to have responded so well, but for other people the worm infection may exacerbate bowel inflammation" malegood.icu. Studies that use the pig worm, which should postulate less risk to humans, are under way.

#colitis #study #worms #therapy #symptoms #ulcerative #colon

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kathleenseiber · 3 years

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The road ahead for driverless cars in Australia

Seemingly only just over the horizon, autonomous vehicle trials in Australia seem stuck in first gear. What needs to happen to get them back on track?

The phrase “driverless cars” likely conjures up images of sleek vehicles cruising city streets, ferrying passengers around as part of a futuristic ride-share system. But adjust your mental picture, because Australian researchers are currently trying to make sure these cars can also be driven on the dusty backroads of regional areas.

For over a decade, driverless cars have shimmered on the horizon of possibility, promising to revolutionise the transport system. But although they’ve been invented and manufactured, they still have a bumpy road ahead.

If an expert had been asked about the future of autonomous cars five years ago, Milford notes that “most of them would say we’re going to have 10 million cars in 2017”. But it’s more complicated than anyone imagined – the timeline is now almost impossible to define.

“The whole race to try and create autonomous vehicles has taken much longer than most people thought,” says robotics researcher Michael Milford, from the Queensland University of Technology’s Australian Centre for Robotic Vision.

Milford specialises in navigation and perceptions systems in artificial intelligence – and is fascinated by testing this technology in less-than-ideal conditions.

The companies developing driverless cars are profit-driven, and there’s a financial incentive to first roll out the tech as ride-shares in cities, where there are plenty of passengers 24 hours a day.

vimeo

It may also be easier to deploy in cities. According to Milford, most companies are trying to make the vehicles good enough so that cities will not have to make any modifications; instead, the vehicles will interact with existing infrastructure like signs, traffic lights, and lane markings on the road to make in-the-moment decisions, as well as combine GPS and mapping technology to navigate.

But what about if you want to head off the beaten track, to a place with rudimentary roads or lack of reception?

In 2019, Milford and team took multiple road trips to Queensland’s regional areas in an electric car fitted with autonomous sensors and computer systems. But CHAD (the Cooperative and Highly Automated Driving pilot program) wasn’t allowed to drive – not yet.

“We had an expert human driver to act as a guide,” Milford says. “We were developing and running the state-of-the-art artificial intelligence algorithms that autonomous vehicles have, using the data the car was gathering.”

The trips, which added up to a total of 1200 kilometres of driving, were a result of a partnership between the Queensland Department of Transport and QUT.

In 2016, South Australia became the first state to put laws in place allowing on-road trials of driverless cars. Today, every Australian state is participating in at least one autonomous vehicle trial.

“The whole aim was to experience as representative and wide range of conditions as possible,” Milford explains. “So we drove during the day, at night, in different types of weather, on all different types of roads ranging from freeways or highways, down to sort of small rural roads, and we tried to make sure we had significant coverage of rural areas.”

Their takeaway? Using AI for driverless cars isn’t feasible on regional Australian roads – not without detailed maps.

“The bar in autonomous driving is really high,” Milford says. “There’s zero margin of error of the safety – and so we found that the state-of-the-art AI systems were by no means perfect.”

Since these systems are primarily developed and tested overseas, they weren’t adapted to Australian conditions – from simple things like driving on the ‘other side’ of the road to different signage and environmental conditions. Even after the system was retrained in these conditions, its performance wasn’t good enough.

Companies such as BHP, Fortescue and Rio Tinto are currently implementing hundreds of autonomous mining vehicles. Rio Tinto also has a fully autonomous train fleet, transporting iron ore from mines to ports in the Pilbara – with a price tag of $940 million. Credit: Rio Tinto

Milford says that these cars will likely need to rely in high-resolution maps, giving them “prior knowledge of what the environment is like and what to expect down the road”.

The team did, however, find that the AI system dealt well with issues like lack of lane markings.

“To some extent, the car was able to infer or guess where the lines would be, had they been added to the road, which is basically what a human does,” Milford says. This suggests that in the long-term, the lines may not be critical, potentially saving hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure changes.

This kind of research important to figure out how to implement autonomous cars both equally – so it’s not just wealthy people in cities who have access, while others miss out – and efficiently, so the technology doesn’t end up slowing down traffic instead of speeding it up.

“All new technologies have issues of equity,” Milford says. “If a new technology comes along and it’s only available in the city, it just makes inequity between rural and urban areas even worse.”

He thinks that if the technology is available – and it works – there would be just as much demand in rural environments. Since regional and remote areas account for 65% of road deaths in Australia, driverless cars even have potential health benefits.

The Queensland city of Ipswich is equipping 500 resident vehicles with sensors and communication devices allowing them to “talk” to other cars, as part of a four-year “intelligent vehicle” pilot program – the biggest of its kind in the country.

But while city-dwellers may opt to book a ride-share in a driverless car, people living in rural areas would be more likely to privately own a vehicle.

The trillion-dollar question, Milford says, is whether we can produce a driverless vehicle that can actually operate in any environment.

“The only honest answer is it could go either way,” he admits. “I’m not certain that it will happen, and I’m definitely not certain that it won’t happen.

“That’s this grey zone that we’re in now. Five years ago, everyone was really optimistic and thought we’d have them three years ago. Now everyone has a much better idea of how hard the problem is, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.”

German multinational Bosch has trialled self-driving cars in rural Victoria; in 2019 they received AUD$2.3m in funding from the Victorian government to test its technology. Credit: Bosch

Right now, the race towards driverless cars has narrowed significantly, with about half a dozen major, cashed-up companies – all overseas – as the serious players.

“Australia is a very good nation in terms of basic fundamental research,” Milford says. “We’re not so good at translating that fundamental research into applications where end users get the benefit.

“In autonomous vehicles and AI, the US is still the centre of the universe.”

Many talented Australian researchers are working in the US. To help translate our research into homegrown technology, a more harmonious relationship needs to be developed between industries and universities – particularly mining, agriculture and defense industries.

Currently Milford is working on fundamental research in computer vision and artificial intelligence, to help robots and autonomous vehicles sense their environments.

But this is a tricky challenge.

According to a 2020 index of “autonomous vehicle readiness” across 30 countries, Australia ranks 15th. Singapore and the Netherlands hold the top positions due to their supportive policy and legislations, along with the eagerness of government and private companies.

“You can’t just solve it through good engineering,” he says. “It’s likely that the cars, to be as good or better than humans, will actually have to genuinely have some level of intelligence, some level of understanding of a very complex world around them.”

This research is largely biologically inspired. It involves learning from natural systems and applying this knowledge to technological problems, by working with biologists and neuroscientists to model how animals – from rats to insects to primates – navigate and understand the world.

Murray, the driverless bus being trialled in Renmark, South Australia. Credit: SA Department for Infrastructure and Transport.

“There’s so much to be learned from the natural world, which is pretty amazing at what it does,” Milford says. “There’s a reason we have human drivers still and not autonomous drivers everywhere.”

But of course, we still don’t have a perfect grasp of how these fabulously complex neurological processes work, and so some creativity is required to apply it to a task such as robotic navigation.

Milford says that when they test the resultant technology on a robot, for example, “it fails catastrophically almost all the time – and then there’s this wonderful iterative process where you go back and forth, talking to the neuroscientist, trying something different. And then if everything works well, you eventually get to a high performing robot navigation system.”

Along with this foundational grounding, Milford’s team is also focused on other the development of types of driverless vehicles, beyond cars for individual transportation. While in the US much research is going into autonomous trucks – which by necessity will need to operate on highways and rural roads – Milford’s group is exploring off-road vehicles. These must operate in places where there’s no road as a guide, such as on mine sites.

FLEX — Flinders Express — is a French-designed Navya Arma electric shuttle that can carry up to 15 passengers at speeds of up to 30 km per hour. Credit: Flinders University.

Milford reckons that we’ll know in the next year or so how close we are to a commercial reality for autonomous cars.

“It’s an overwhelming time but also extremely exciting,” he says.

“If the field progresses, the biggest benefits of autonomous vehicle technology will not be in autonomous vehicles – it will be all the flow-on effects,” he adds.

“You can think of it as the 2020s equivalent of the [1960s] space race in some respects. The technologies will have potentially far more benefits outside of the core area that they’re applied in.”

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stephenmccull · 3 years

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Pandemic Highlights Need for Urgent Care Clinics for Women

SAN JOSE — Last spring, only weeks into the pandemic, Christina Garcia was spending her days struggling to help her two young sons adjust to online schooling when she got such a heavy, painful period she could barely stand. After a few days, her vision began to blur and she found herself too weak to open a jar.

This story also ran on Los Angeles Times. It can be republished for free.

Garcia’s regular OB/GYN — like most medical offices at the time — was closed, and she was terrified by the prospect of spending hours waiting in an emergency room shoulder to shoulder with people who might have covid.

By the time she stumbled into the newly opened Bascom OB-GYN urgent care clinic at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, clutching a pillow to her belly, Garcia was pale and dehydrated from blood loss and certain she was dying.

“If I didn’t get to the clinic when I did, I think, things could have ended up very different,” said Garcia, 34, who underwent an emergency hysterectomy for uterine fibroids.

Her story illustrates a long-standing gap in women’s health care. For years, many women with common but urgent conditions like painful urinary tract infections or excessive bleeding in the aftermath of a miscarriage have faced a grim choice between waiting weeks for an appointment with their regular OB-GYN or braving hours in an ER waiting room.

Urgent care OB-GYN clinics have begun popping up around the country in recent years, and the covid pandemic has increased demand. While no data is available on the number of urgent care clinics for women, they are part of a surge of interest in urgent care clinics in general and other alternative models like retail clinics and so-called digital-first health care startups. One of these, the New York-based women’s health startup Tia (“aunt” in Spanish), won $24 million in venture capital funding last spring and is opening physical clinics nationwide.

“It’s clear that access and convenience are increasingly more important to consumers than seeing a specific provider,” said Rob Rohatsch, chief medical officer at Solv, an app that books urgent care appointments.

The Urgent Care Association has reported steadily increasing visits by people who use its members’ walk-in clinics as an alternative to hospital emergency departments. Traffic to these clinics has surged during the past year, according to Solv.

The Bascom clinic had been a nearly decadelong dream of Drs. Cheryl Pan and Anita Sit, two obstetrician-gynecologists at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, a sprawling public hospital that serves as the regional trauma center, treating critical cases like car accident and gunshot victims and relegating people suffering less life-threatening problems to long waits.

“Women — perhaps pregnant or bleeding — could be sitting there 12 to 14 hours, depending on the time of day,” Pan said.

After the onset of the pandemic, doctors worried that women with serious or even deadly issues like Garcia’s might avoid seeking treatment for fear of contracting covid. ER visits plummeted an unprecedented 42% in the early months of the pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A June CDC report noted that, while the number of ER visits for heart attacks had increased, visits for nonspecific chest pain had decreased, suggesting that people might be risking their lives by avoiding the ER.

“You can imagine that a woman with three kids at home might be even more scared,” Sit said. “We just couldn’t keep sending women having miscarriages to wait hours in the covid tent.”

Instead, women can now be triaged over the phone and seen within a day or two at the Bascom OB-GYN urgent care clinic — much the way they would at their local Planned Parenthood branch for contraceptives or a sexually transmitted disease screening. Bascom is equipped to treat conditions from severe morning sickness to ectopic pregnancies that require emergency surgery. In its first year, the clinic has treated some 1,300 women and served as a backup to local clinics that provide basic reproductive health services in counties hundreds of miles away.

It’s still in its pilot phase, however, operating weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., which “leaves a big chunk of off-hours that we cannot serve women,” Sit acknowledges.

A handful of other clinics have taken the concept of urgent care for women a step further. Dr. Miriam Mackovic runs Complete Women Care, a chain of four clinics in the Los Angeles area that also has an emergency care center in Long Beach, which is staffed 24/7 with a nurse practitioner and equipped with a lab and a pharmacy. Women who walk in are typically seen within 30 minutes, according to Mackovic, and every patient receives a follow-up call the next day.

One woman who turned up at a Complete Women Care clinic said that, after desperately seeking treatment at an ER one Saturday night for a nasty yeast infection, she got a bill in the mail for $1,500.

“In the middle of the night, urgent care centers are closed. OB-GYN offices are definitely closed. So, what is her option except the ER?” asked Mackovic, an obstetrician-gynecologist who also has an MBA.

Mackovic ticked off cautionary tales of patients who’ve arrived at her clinics from as far away as Arizona and Nevada after suffering for weeks while trying to schedule routine operations for uterine cysts or twisted ovaries.

“The medical advances are here. Most emergencies can be resolved on an outpatient basis — a woman can have a hysterectomy with just a fine incision and be home the same day,” Mackovic said. “But a woman who has a miscarriage calls her OB, who says there’s no openings for weeks, so she goes to the ER, and the physician says: Are you dying? No? Then follow up with your OB-GYN.”

Fees for the uninsured — around 20% of Mackovic’s clientele — run from $100 to around $600, she said.

Women in the United States have for years lagged behind those in other rich countries in both their access to health care and their health status. America has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed nations.

Some women see a doctor only in an emergency.

“We have diagnosed so many cancers in the last few years because women walked in for another reason,” said Dr. Adeeti Gupta, founder and CEO of a chain of open-daily clinics in New York City called Walk In Gyn Care that provides comprehensive care without appointments.

Gupta’s three clinics have grown steadily since she opened them seven years ago, largely out of frustration with the months-long wait for an appointment at her own Queens OB-GYN practice. But after the coronavirus hit the city hard, she has seen an uptick in patients — 40% in one location.

The country needs more accessible, comprehensive women’s health care to treat everything from the menstrual pains of adolescents to the hot flashes of postmenopausal grannies, Gupta said.

“The thing about women,” she said, “is their problems never stop.”

This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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gordonwilliamsweb · 3 years

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Pandemic Highlights Need for Urgent Care Clinics for Women

This story also ran on Los Angeles Times. It can be republished for free.

“If I didn’t get to the clinic when I did, I think, things could have ended up very different,” said Garcia, 34, who underwent an emergency hysterectomy for uterine fibroids.

“Women — perhaps pregnant or bleeding — could be sitting there 12 to 14 hours, depending on the time of day,” Pan said.

“You can imagine that a woman with three kids at home might be even more scared,” Sit said. “We just couldn’t keep sending women having miscarriages to wait hours in the covid tent.”

It’s still in its pilot phase, however, operating weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., which “leaves a big chunk of off-hours that we cannot serve women,” Sit acknowledges.

One woman who turned up at a Complete Women Care clinic said that, after desperately seeking treatment at an ER one Saturday night for a nasty yeast infection, she got a bill in the mail for $1,500.

Fees for the uninsured — around 20% of Mackovic’s clientele — run from $100 to around $600, she said.

Some women see a doctor only in an emergency.

The country needs more accessible, comprehensive women’s health care to treat everything from the menstrual pains of adolescents to the hot flashes of postmenopausal grannies, Gupta said.

“The thing about women,” she said, “is their problems never stop.”

This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

Pandemic Highlights Need for Urgent Care Clinics for Women published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

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