This photograph shows us two things. The position of the two main figures in the central arch of the south face of the Ross Bridge, and the serious state of affairs with the preservation of the bridge. That lichen and mould is slowly eating away at the sandstone. It is most prominent on the south side for two reasons: (1) It gets less direct sunlight, and (2) whenever there is a flood the waters come from this direction.

 

But I left you with a question in the previous photograph. Who is the person that Herbert wants us to see he is in opposition to? On the far left of this photograph (apologies as I never intended to use this one until making this discovery) we see the figure of Protestant Reformer John Calvin (1509-1564). Now we'll take a closer look at Calvin and the Celtic horned dog just to his right later - that juxtaposition in itself would drive the Calvinists mad.

 

One might ask, so what? What does a 16th century religious reformer from Geneva have to do with Van Diemen's Land and a convict stonemason? I think it is all about worldview and the distinction between Calvin's harsh doctrine of Predestination (some are destined for Heaven and others equally destined for Hell) and Herbert's own beliefs in the importance of individual will.

 

We'll come back to this clash of worldviews later, because it is both complex and deserves serious discussion, but at the moment I draw attention to it to highlight that fixed gaze that Daniel Herbert displays in his self portrait carved in stone.

 

But essentially this is the equation we have come up with:

 

Gov. Arthur v. Aborigine

John Calvin v. Daniel Herbert

 

Arthur's religious philosophy was distinctly Calvinistic (feel free to look this up because I won't discuss this religious philosophy in detail right now), and so he had a very strict moral code that was expressed in the harsh treatment of the convicts, and the deadly extermination of the indigenous people. Before Herbert Spencer's ideas of "Social Darwinism" were promulgated in the late 19th century, and used to justify beliefs that indigenous races would die out through an inability to adapt to the modern world, colonialists like Arthur used the doctrine of predestination to suggest it was merely God's will that the Aborigine die out. Such views were popular during the Victorian era.

 

So I hope you can see now why I've mentioned this before giving you the facts (as we know them) of Daniel Herbert's life. Because as I hope to show, Daniel Herbert was a man driven by ideas. He may well have unfairly demonised certain aspects of both Gov. George Arthur's beliefs and the doctrines of John Calvin, but we can be sure he most sincerely believed that these ideas of theirs had contributed to much misery in Van Diemen's Land. And he hated that!

I have a lot of thoughts about this. It's a quote from the new Narnia, which I loved by the way. I'm sitting at chili's in the Seattle airport right now. I am really proud that I got the focus right on this photo. It's film. I really really want my camera back. I really really want a salad, but chili's is only serving breakfast. I really want to watch Glee. I really love water. I love my God. I'm rambling but I don't care. It's 6am and I haven't slept since yesterday. I look like death and I am so excited to sleep, someday.. But anyways. We have nothing if not belief. I love the way that is put. Probably because it's C.S. Lewis. I just love his writings so much. We really don't have anything unless we have belief. We wouldn't have any sort of worldview without belief and we wouldn't have any sort of knowledge at all. You can't "know" something without believing it. It's kind of a strange concept to wrap your mind around. It's not something most people think about everyday. But it is our beliefs that shape who we are.

We are nothing without beliefs.

 

I was tagged to write a paragraph. haha...so.. do it?

 

Naples, FL

Hello...!

 

Yay, it's Brickshifter!*

All gold and shiny now!

 

That's not my name! My name is Sunshine!

 

We've been through this.

Yep, you keep coming back,** and we keep calling you Brickshifter because Brickshifter is a much cooler and more appropriate name than 'Sunshine'.

 

That's it! You're getting my origin!

 

GAH!!

They're using their origins as a weapon now!

 

Sunshine (サンシャイン) is a key antagonist towards Kinnikuman, considered by General Devil as the Leader of the elite team of the Devil Knights. Years later, in Kinnikuman Nisei, he became one of the key members of the d.M.p organization, as well as the mentor of Check Mate and Rex King.

 

Sunshine debuts as a member of the elite team of the Devil Knights, and after his defeat at the hands of a mere human, he was then absorbed by General Devil. Later he return alongside Ashuraman, planning to steal the Friendship Power of the Justice Chojin, but both of were defeated in the Tag Tournament.

 

In Kinnikuman 2011, he and the Devil Knights raid the Chojin Graveyard, and he face against one of the Perfect Origin, Thingman, who he manage to defeat. He later stays at General Devil's side for the rest of the matches.

 

After this, he retired from wrestling and was not seen again until Kinnikuman Nisei, in which he trains Check Mate and Rex King, and eventually comes to respect the Justice Chojin on his defeat. It is at this point he explodes the d.M.p base and eradicates all evil chojin, except for one that miraculously survives named Scarface. He is very rarely seen again within the anime or manga.

 

Personality

Overall, Sunshine is like the rest of his comrades: a rude, brute, and merciless fighter that use brutal and dirty tactics to defeat and kill his opponents. He is particularly vicious in this, since it is said that he believes that a match is only won by knocking and opponent while he's out, thus, he never won any championship. He considers himself to not be too smart, and that he tends to forget things a lot, thinking that's the best way to advance as a fighter and as a devil.

 

Despite his brutal and rude ways of fighting, he can also show a softer, more compassionate side, like when he trained with Rollerman in the Arabian Desert, forming a good friendship with him. Or when Kinnikuman opened his eyes during their fight, and saw that the Devil Chojin can have friendship too. This makes him consider Ashuraman as his friend, rather than just his partner-in-crime.

 

Appearance

He is a giant golem-like chojin often with a yellow/golden coloration due his body been made of sand/gold dust, giving him the ability to re-shape himself in different ways, such as a pyramid or a giant top. In his debut he has a rather simplistic body design, consisting in a giant block as his body, with limbs in shape of rectangles, ending in two big hands. His faces has a rather humanoid look.

 

After his defeat at Geronimo's hands, he returns with a slightly altered appearance, now sporting a more elaborate body-design, with the special ability to summon a concrete roller in his chest. By Nisei times, his body has become more slim, as well as loosing one of his "eyes". He also tends to wear some clothing to hide among humans.

 

Relationships

Ashuraman

Sunshine has a strong loyalty to his fellow Devil Knights, but his strongest relationship lies with his friend Ashuraman as he formed a tag team during the Dream Tag Tournament arc. Before Ashuraman's match against the Blood Evolutions in Nisei, Sunshine wants to be his tag partner, but Ashuraman refuses.

 

Rollerman

After finding and spending some time with Rollerman in the Arabian Desert, they become very close, to the point of doing the same routine the same way day after day. Their bond became so strong that Sunshine travels to a near town to rescue Rollerman from some Justice Chojin that were plaining on execute him.

 

Check Mate

Checkmate has a close relationship with Sunshine, who acts as a father-figure to him and a coach. Sunshine unofficially adopts Checkmate during Checkmate's youth, rescuing him from a life on the streets, and delivers strict training to help him become a Brutal Chojin capable of fighting in matches. Sunshine is willing to risk his life to save Checkmate, before taking him to teach him to be a better chojin, after his breakdown. They later meet again during the Demon Seed Arc, where they appear civil and on friendly terms, despite their worldviews now having diverged.

 

General Devil

Although General Devil doesn't show any affection nor respect for his followers, he has said in different occasions that he considers Sunshine like his successor, and the both of them spend time together during the fights at Yggrasil.

 

Abilities

Sunshine has the ability to manipulate and shapeshift into sand. To shapeshifting into other objects, he needs to study and learn the whole object that he wants to emulate. He can also fuse with his fellow Devil Knights to become General Devil's body.

 

Golden Mask Arc

Sunshine appeared as one of the Devil Knights, a group of Devil Chojin who had supposedly stolen the Golden Mask, a sacred relic on Planet Kinniku that was once the head of a god. He fought Geronimo during the Five Story Ring battle within Warsman's unconscious body.

 

A five-tier ring appears, with each ring holding a different opponent. Geronimo fends off The Ninja on the fourth floor, while Kinnikuman climbs the spine to reach the top ring. The Ninja switches places with Sunshine, forcing Geronimo to compete against him. At one point, he skewers the mat with his tomahawks so that Terry - in the ring below - could grab a hold of something during Asuraman’s Asura Buster.

 

In his fight with Sunshine, he started off hitting Sunshine with a fury of Tomahawk Chops.

 

Geronimo lands a Flying Boy Press, but Sunshine counters by bending his legs. Sunshine uses his Sand Hell techniques on Geronimo, and Geronimo uses a Tomahawk Tornado to sweep away the sand. After being pressed into the mat by Sunshine, Geronimo attempts another Tomahawk Chop, but the damage done to Sunshine is undone by his regeneration abilities. The sweat from Geronimo is also absorbed into Sunshine and makes his sand weigh even heavier, as he crushes Geronimo from above.

 

Sunshine prepares for a Back-Drop, and Geronimo breaks his hip attempting to counter with a Flying Maier. Geronimo tries a Guillotine Drop, but Sunshine stops him with a Giant Swing, and Geronimo manages to stop Sunshine with a headbutt, but sustains great damage in the process. Geronimo believes he has won when he chops Sunshine in half, but instead he found himself trapped inside Sunshine.

 

After forcing his way out of Sunshine's body, Sunshine begins to use his most brutal Sand Hell techniques. He uses a Canadian Back-Breaker, while Geronimo counters with a Reverse Suplex, and Sunshine attempts a Mexican Stretch. Geronimo uses a Toe-Kick to shatter Sunshine's body into multiple pieces, and Sunshine uses a Hell's Pyramid. Being severely injured - after having his gut stabbed by Sunshine’s Hell’s Pyramid technique - causes Terryman to realize that Geronimo is human. Geronimo uses a Brain Buster, despite the pyramid piercing his heart.

 

Sunshine rebuilds himself with his Hell Arc de Triumphe. Geronimo smashes Sunshine again, but Sunshine uses a sun-styled key to enter his sun-mark upon his chest, and this regenerates him. Geronimo keeps fighting and eventually grabs Sunshine's chest, where he removes the key that controls the Sand Hell techniques. As the key hits the canvas, Sunshine grabs his head and screams, causing Geronimo to realize that Sunshine’s weakness is loud noises. He used his trademark Apache War Cry.

 

This reduces Sunshine to dust, but - before Geronimo can finish - his heart stops. He remembers the bravery of the chojin who saved him and his sister, and he then sticks his hand into his chest and massages his heart. He finishes off Sunshine with the Apache War Cry.

 

Like the other Devil Knights, he was absorbed by Akuma Shogun before the fight with Kinnikuman.

 

Deep of Muscles 12

After his humiliating defeat at Geronimo's hands, and the defeat of General Devil, he and Ashuraman decide to get revenge on the Idol Chojin, stealing their friendship after hearing about the tag tournament that was going to happen. Then, in order to overcome his defeat at the hands of a human, Sunshine decides to travel across the world, to train from zero. After parting away from Ashuraman, he arrives at the Arabian Desert, where, after trying to find some water for his thirsty mouth, he came across a peculiar chojin with a roller in his chest, and saw him killing and squeezing the liquid out of those chojin.

 

Sunshine fights him, and after a quick match, the chojin known as Rollerman gave Sunshine a glass of water, and then Sunshine explains him about what is he doing in the desert, and what that he wants to learn Rollerman technique. Rollerman accepts, and the two of them start living together in the desert. Sunshine realize that learning the technique will take more than he suspected, but one day, he finds that Rollerman has been kidnapped by a vigilante corps of a near by town, so he went there, in rage.

 

After destroying the vigilante corps, he challenge their boss, and suddenly, Rollerman throw him his rollers, which Sunshine absorb, and use them against their leader, squeezing all his liquid, killing him. But Rollerman was beyond salvation, and dies at Sunshine's arms. After parting from the Arabian Desert, he return in time to participate in the tag tournament, were he finds his partner, Ashuraman, and show him his new technique. But while showing the rollers, a tear fell from one of Sunshine eyes, and Ashuraman asked him why did that happened, so Sunshine answer him that it was because the Arabian sand that was stuck in his eye...

 

Dream Chojin Tag Arc

Asuraman, as a part of the Stray Devil Chojin Combo with Sunshine, takes part in the Dream Chojin Tag Arc. The two demons, last survivors of the Golden Mask Arc concoct a plan to steal the Friendship Power of the Justice Chojin by using some cursed dolls. They manage to steal the very emotion of friendship among the Justice Chojin, greatly weakening them, as a Justice Chojin can't fight without friendship in his heart.

 

As such, Ahuraman and Sunshine are able to beat effortlessly the Big Bombers and the New Machineguns, in the process turning the former friends Kinnikuman and Terryman against each other.

 

During the fight against the New Machineguns, Sunshine begins to believe in the power of friendship, Ashuraman keeps holding to his ideal as an uncaring, evil fiend, and by observing how the attempts made by Kinnikuman and Kinnikuman Great to save Geronimo and Terryman ended up in their cursed doll being broken, he claims the breaks are parts of a prophecy, and uses Sunshine's Cursed Roller to injure his foes where the dolls were broken: Geronimo ends up with a badly shattered right arm, and Terryman is forced to surrender his Star Emblems, or get Geronimo killed and himself decapitated.

 

The prophecy comes to pass in a roundabout way: Prince Kamehame, the former Kinnikuman Great, succumbs because of the strain of helping the New Machineguns and decapitates Terryman, giving him the Kinnikuman Great to allow him fight with Kinnikuman even if he lacks the Star Emblems and Kinnikuman now despises him.

 

During the fight between the Muscle Brothers and the Stray Akuma Chojin Combo, Asuraman is exposed to the Friendship power: Asuraman witnesses Kinnikuman and Terryman starting to mend their friendship, and sees Sunshine caring for him and even apologizing when the Cursed Roller ends up tearing off his right arms. Asuraman tries to still act cold and uncaring, but when Prince Kamehame's arm, who used as a replacement, rebels to his will and leads to his defeat, starts believing in Friendship too, sharing with Sunshine the memories of Samson Teacher.

 

Once the Stray Devil Combo are defeated, and Ashuraman's faces are rip off by the Hell Missionaries, Sunshine tries to stand up, but is quickly attacked by Big the Budo, who after seen that he doesn't have a mask to steal, he was sentence to dead. Big the Budo throws him against Neptuneman, who used his Double Leg Suplex to knock him down, killing him.

 

Survivor Match for the Kinniku Throne

Sunshine would later appear during the Survivor Match for the Kinniku Throne Arc as one of the Chojins The Omegaman captured, killed, and therefore could now transform into.

 

Perfect Origin Arc

Prehistory

General Devil proceeds to rotate the Forbidden Mortar backwards, connecting the surface world to the Chojin Graveyard. To General Devil, life and death of a Chojin should only belong to themselves and the Perfect Chojin controlling that is a grave mistake. The Perfect Chojin have grown arrogant ever since they followed that foolish custom for a 1000 years. The leader of the Perfect Chojin is a monster now. General Devil's mission is to stop the leader and make sure he'll never return.

 

When he stops, General Devil says that no one will be coming back to life. As cracks appear in the ceiling of the Chojin Graveyard, he tells his elite minions, the Devil Knights, that they can enter. With a dynamic entry, the Devil Knights appear and start attacking. While the Graveyard Demons are occupied, General Devil plunges further into the Chojin Graveyard.

 

Sunshine vs. Thingman

The match takes place at the Statue of Liberty. [10] It appears as if the Ninja has returned, but it is revealed to be Sunshine. [10] Sunshine jumps in search of his opponent, but they catch him by surprise and get him in a lock, until Sunshine breaks free and they both land on different sections of the statue. Thingman summons a hurricane of sand, which erodes the Statue of Liberty and transforms it into a statue of a Perfect Chojin. They are to fight within the ring that exists on the palm of the transformed statue, and the two finally clash within upon the canvas.

 

The two start evenly matched, until Thingman delivers a blow to Sunshine's neck. Sunshine begins to turn to sand, which allows him to return to normal, and uses his sand to counter against punches to the chest and a middle-kick to his abdomen. Thingman attempts a power-bomb, along with a Thing Demolition Wave, and the latter releases a metallic sound that reduces Sunshine to a pile of sand, but Sunshine rebuilds his body.

 

Sunshine throws Thingman against the statue, who retaliates with an Extreme Shoulder Armory, which leads Sunshine to attempt a Cursed Roller. The attack fails, as Thingman's previous attack has turned Sunshine from sand into concrete, and Thingman is able to deliver a series of blows, as he gains the upper-hand. Thingman attempts a German Suplex, but Sunshine blocks the move with one arm, and retaliates with a body-scissors, before delivering many blows and finishing with a Death Valley Bomb.

 

Thingman reveals his body is made from a meteorite, as such he cannot be easily damaged, and uses a Shoulder Armory Disc Cutter. He uses the ropes of the ring to crack parts of Sunshine's body, and his Thing Demolition Wave then breaks open the cracks and sends Sunshine crumbling to the canvas. Sunshine's head proceeds to cry, as he struggles to regenerate his body, and - begging for death - allows Thingman to reduce him to nothing but sand, after destroying his head. Thingman gathers his sand up in the canvas, but - before he can toss Sunshine's remains into the see - the canvas appears to catch fire.

 

The iron and sand in the small canvas, which is spun around fast, creates a scientific effect that leads to a vast amount of heat. Sunshine recombines into a red-hot giant key, which he inserts into part of his body and restores himself to normality with a Sand Hell. Sunshine then turns into sand and reappears behind Thingman, where he destroys his Extreme Shoulder Armory with his bare hands. Thingman tries to retaliate, but Sunshine uses a Sand Cemetery Press. This defeats Thingman, who collapses onto the ring.

 

Sunshine takes Thingman's dumbbell. After a confession by Ganman about the origins of the Perfect Origin, Sunshine smashes the dumbbell into his head, before he knocks Thingman out of the ring and returns the Statue of Liberty to its previous state.

 

Post-Match

Sunshine, alongside The Ninja, return to inform General Devil about their victories, giving him Painman, Crowman and Thingman's dumbbells. Then, the two follow their general to Japan's National Stadium, were he stays at his side, watching all the battles. After getting all the remaining dumbbells, General Devil sends Sunshine to finish his mission, and erase the remaining Perfect Origins. With Black Hole's help, he travels to the Chojin Graveyard, and with great grief, he put one by one the remaining dumbbells, but, surprisingly, none of the Perfect Origins disappear...only Psychoman, who had manipulated the mechanism long ago to erase only him!

 

And now, with Buffaloman at his side, Sunshine travels with General Devil to watch his fight with The Man. And after the defeat of The Man, Sunshine, Buffaloman, and the "spirits" of the rest of the Devil Chojin, follow General Devil out of the ring.

 

Omega Centauri's Six Spear Arc

He was hanging out with the remaining of the Devil Chojin, when suddenly, a magic barrier seal them inside their HQ, making them unable to face off against the Omega invaders.

 

Unnamed Arc

When the Justice Chojin were arguing of who would travel to the Tower of Babel to face against the Chojin, Sunshine appears in a screen, saying that he was upset that they let him out of the fights, and wants to also enter the challenge, leaving the Devil Chojin HQ, and traveling with the rest of the team to the Tower.

 

There, while the rest of Chojin were telling Geronimo that he shouldn't be the first one fighting, Sunshine was the only one encouraging him to fight, since he was one of his strongest enemies, and was angry for seen how weak he was after their fight. Geronimo, moved by his words, enters the ring to face against the Choushin. There, he stays in the sidelines cheering for him, congratulating the young chojin once he defeated his opponent. After the revelation of The Executioner about the true intentions of the gods, he and Ashuraman decide to team up and cross one of the three opened doors.

 

d.M.p Arc

Sunshine appears first on a television set, after the Tokyo matches against the dMp members: Kevin Mask, Maxman and Tel-Tel Boy. He is with two mysteriously cloaked men, who are his two proteges, and he is also in Osaka after having defeated Gorgeousman and Barbarian. He is a founding member of the DMp and head of their Akuma Chojin division. In the past thirty years, he states he has grown bitter and angry at the Muscle League, and has found two of the strongest proteges to get revenge on his behalf. He declares his proteges are The Nightmares.

 

They meet again in an izakaya (bar), where Sunshine claims that he is neither friend nor foe until the matches, and treats Mantaro Kinniku and Alexandria Meat in a civil manner. He reveals he is now blind in one eye and lost much of his power, as well as feels abandoned by those of his team who sided with the Seigi Chojin, and - due to feeling alone - he doubled down on his quest for revenge. He notices that Terry the Kid has broken in the Osaka Dome via a portable television set, and orders his Nightmares to capture him. He leaves and reappears later to catch Mantaro in an adult establishment, despite him being underage, and so he blackmails Mantaro into being the referee for the following match.

 

Sunshine announces the "Osaka Battle at High Noon", as well as that Mantaro will be acting as the referee for the upcoming match, and Mantaro acts as a strict referee and often penalizes the Kid. Sunshine obtains a yellow card when Mantaro begins to help the Kid, as he steps into the ring, but he obeys and returns to observing the match from the side. Sunshine antagonizes the Kid to gain the upper hand, but soon Rex King is defeated and he infuses Check Mate with his spirit to make him stronger, so as to prepare for the second match against Mantaro Kinniku. Sunshine announces the following match.

 

It is revealed in flashbacks that Sunshine beat and tortured Checkmate, so that he would be impervious to pain and an invulnerable warrior. Checkmate then reveals he carries a photograph of his old team, which he holds dear, and that he founded the dMp with two other members in hopes of gaining his own faction to control. Sunshine then intervenes with the match when Mantaro is unable to fight, begging Check Mate to stop, but - disgusted by his tears and emotion - Checkmate attacks him and pins him to the ropes. He is devastated when Checkmate tears up his photo, which is his sole memento of the past, and follows this by preventing Check Mate from attacking a small child, saving the child's life. Checkmate proceeds to attack him, until he loses his eye-patch, and is eventually helped up by Mantaro.

 

After Checkmates crosses boundaries in battle, he starts to cheer for Mantaro. This inspires the crowd to rally behind Mantaro and provide him invaluable strength and inspiration to continue. Checkmate is then defeated. Sunshine refuses to allow anyone else to tend to his wounds, as he runs to his protégé who he still holds with great regards and affection, but his colleagues in the dMp send an arrow crashing through the roof of the stadium to kill Sunshine. His army back at base stages a rebellion, but loses in the fight, and so one creates an explosion that destroys all of the dMp and its base. Sunshine - in his bittersweet victory - carries a bleeding Checkmate out of the stadium with the promise to train him to be better.

 

Demon Seed Arc

Sunshine appears drunk in Osaka, where he laments nostalgically for the events of 36 years ago, where there were ‘real’ Devil Chojin: the seven Devil Chojin and Six Devil Knights. He sees the Demon Seed as mere imitations of their predecessors, and leaves in a drunken stupor to Ganryu Island where the last two Demon Seed are preparing to battle the Blood Evolutions. He swims across the sea to reach the General Rib in his attempt to reach the last of the Demon Seed.

 

Sunshine arrives as Ashuraman resurrects. He offers Checkmate the chance to return to the path of evil, as he explains that Ashuraman always regretted joining the Muscle League. Ashuraman rejects Sunshine's attempt to reconcile and form a tag-team. He periodically compliments Checkmate, while cheering on Ashuraman during his match. Sunshine later weeps to see Ashuraman angry, as he reminisces about the past. After Ashuraman wins the match against the B-Evolutions, he proceeds to attack Kevin Mask despite him being incapacitated and the match over, and Sunshine stops him.

 

He states that Ashuraman never shed blood needlessly, but Ashuraman says he's changed.

 

Sunshine later appears at the Demon Womb, as the final match commences. Kinnikuman realizes that Asuraman plans to resurrect General Terror, as he spots Sunshine about to enter the Demon Womb, and proceeds to tickle Sunshine until his stomach opens up, allowing Kinnikuman to hide inside his abdomen. Sunshine then enters the Demon Womb (unknowingly with Kinnikuman). Inside, Sunshine comments that Asuraman is even more ruthless than their time together in the past.

 

It is at this point that Kinnikuman bursts out of his stomach. Sunshine is commanded by Ashuraman to ring the bell that shall awaken the Demon Womb from its slumber. He bickers with Kinnikuman, before ordering Ashuraman to kill Mantaro Kinniku. Kevin Mask later drags Sunshine into the waters beneath the ring, where his sand merges with the electricity to gold-plate his body.

 

As Sunshine is made of gold dust, this allows him to defy the micro-waves of Voltman. Sunshine loses his legs in the process. After General Terror is revived and defeated, the Diamond Dust of Rebirth restores his legs and allows him to walk again. He swears friendship to Ashuraman, who - now elderly - is helped out of the Demon Womb by Sunshine, as they leave to safety together.

 

Kinnikuman Nisei ~All Out Assault~

d.M.p Arc

Sunshine first appears alongside Shimao and Qilinman.

 

He kidnaps Mantaro Kinniku, Gazelleman and Terry the Kid, after he kidnaps Meat Alexandria and holds him hostage within the DMp base. He reveals that they took Meat after he attempted reconnaissance at their base, and - if the others want him back - they need to fight three challengers in the base to earn him back.

Sunshine waits in the "Chess Room" of the final competitor.

He opens his jacket to reveal an Evil Chojin that bursts out from his body: Check Mate. Sunshine proceeds to watch from the sides.

 

A series of flashbacks reveal Checkmate was Sunshine's personal protégé, but treated very harshly and raised in strict conditions. When Checkmate is defeated, Sunshine cradles him on the ring. When the Justice Chojin try to rescue Meat, Qilinman and Shimao go back on their word, which prompts Checkmate - seeing the error of his ways - to dive before the Justice Chojin to protect them from an oncoming attack by an arrow. Sunshine dives in front of the arrow to save Checkmate, which impales him.

 

When Qilinman and Shimao start a self-destruct on the base, Sunshine reveals a secret exit to allow Checkmate and the Justice Chojin to escape. He chooses to stay behind, so as to not to slow down the others, and is seemingly crushed to death by the collapsing dMp base.

 

Top Chojin Festival Arc

At Yokohama Stadium, a new tournament is announced by Ikemen Muscle.

 

The tournament is between both Justice Chojin and Evil Chojin, and Ramenman acts as the representative for the Justice Chojin, while Sunshine acts as the representative for the Evil Chojin. The two shake hands on stage, but - when Sunshine squeezes Ramenman's hand too hard - the two start to fight. Sunshine goes on to announce the preliminary match to wheedle down the combatants to the eight finalists.

 

Sunshine confronts Ikemen when Mantaro Kinniku stays in the competition due to a technicality, but is ultimately placated. He sleeps at the stadium, until the finalists are announced the next day. Sunshine follows this by announcing the lottery for the match-ups.

 

He follows this by attending the match between Fiona and The Doomman, and helps Ramenman to ring the bell. After witnessing the Kevin Mask vs. Naankeeman, he proceeds to go with Ikemen Muscle to watch the Kinniku Mantaro vs. Tentacles match. Once the semi-finals are complete, he appears on stage in a matching suit alongside Ikemen Muscle and Ramenman to announce the finals.

 

Sunshine later is seen at the awards ceremony, where Mantaro is named winner.

 

💪M💪U💪S💪C💪L💪E💪

 

A year of the shows and performers of the Bijou Planks Theater.

 

M.U.S.C.L.E. No. 39, "Sunshine A"

 

Painted by CM, thus losing all collectible value forever.

 

* He was thus named in his first appearance, back in BP 2019 Day 337!

www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/49165867671/

 

** Sunshine has had continued encounters with the Bijou Planks audience.

 

In BP 2020 Day 84:

www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/49057761652/

 

In BP 2020 Day 252:

www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/49057759932/

 

In BP 2022 Day 18:

www.flickr.com/photos/paprihaven/51829790640/

 

As a photographer, I just went to see and capture images. What I found was a community of people from every generation and variety of worldview. This is some of what I found.

Looking back at those pictures from mountainous north of Italy, memories come flooding back to me of this amazing trip to the Italian Dolomites, replete with the delicious food paired with crisp local wines, friendly company, towns and cities steeped in history and culture, and so much more. It pains that I cannot travel and retrace my steps at these destinations, but I hope that fortunes turn in the future.

 

But this trip, and the many others I took during a two year break from work, taught me that gathering experiences by immersing yourself at a location, and expanding your worldview is perhaps as important, if not more, than the pedantic knowledge obtained through books and lectures.

 

When it comes to building a perfect camera setup I find myself having conflicting thoughts. One way to think about it is to lean back on traditional thinking where every photographer should search for a perfect camera setup with a trustworthy camera body and carefully chosen focal lengths with lenses that also have interesting rendering for his envisioned aesthetics. I dream of a quite compact setup that I could use for decades and which would add to my vision with its consistent drawing style. Something that I would know from inside-to-out and would define my style in years to come. This is a sort of traditional dream which implicitly connects one's inner vision of tools to classic photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson and such. Nothing wrong with that and perfectly justifiable approach to perfect camera setup. The only problem being that today's digital consumer culture doesn't exactly support this kind of idea of persistence and longevity. The Loxias with their full metal bodies are quite close to being perfect, but they also are dependent of the Sony camera bodies which don't last forever. And on the other hand I see many photographers to become stuck in 'everlasting upgrade continuum' where the best thing is replaced with the next best thing. In short, it's a difficult path to follow as our current consumer culture doesn't support it, but my current Sony/Zeiss setup would certainly be that setup no question about it – though I might cut it a bit smaller for this kind of purpose.

 

The other way to think about the perfect setup would be to intentionally keep on changing it, and doing it completely every year. I'm fascinated by the idea that I would replace my whole camera setup with different brand and lenses for every year. One year could be about the top end interchangeable setup – a sort of setup that I'm using right now. Then the next year could be, for example, a fixed 35mm lens compact camera. And the next with the analogue film camera, and so on. This kind of radical change of tools would force one to refresh and take a stand separately for every year. Sort of like reimaging your photographic eye regularly and being on the move. Again, a lovely idea but also a very expensive one, though I might find myself trying it out if I had the chips for it – and I am currently doing something like that with my Sony/Zeiss setup considering that my project is coming to its end soon and I need to figure out the next move.

 

The interesting thing with 'the perfect camera setup' is that always also an image of me there as a photographer and how I connect with the photography – even if I don't recognize it at first. The idea of the perfect camera setup is a kind of reflection of this inner need inside of me where I want to succeed with my photography. And here's the thing: the perfection doesn't happen in a worldview where 'the perfect camera setup' is approached from the perspective of instrumental rationality (rationally pursued and calculated). There will always be something that could be better and one is locked into upgrade path for not reaching the inner goal behind the original idea of the perfect setup. 'The perfect camera setup' is a value/belief-oriented thing that doesn't rest on technological choices but in ability to put your soul into your photography. One of course needs to be satisfied, even inspired, by his setup but it isn't as much about 'performance' and certainly not about having the best nor the certain brand. This is definitely something I've learned during this year when I've had a pretty amazing setup for my use – and ironically it's the fact that I haven't felt the need to be worried about the performance (I leave that to Zeiss optical engineers) has ultimately freed me from this kind of instrumental rationality. A kind of 'hello world' moment here!

 

Days of Zeiss: www.daysofzeiss.com

CONCENTRATION STATEMENT

 

I believe that the everyday moments that compose life deserve to be paused, captured, and observed. By considering the complexities of the common moment we realize the oddities of quotidian actions. My goal in my concentration is to portray the strange aspects of life by taking normal situations, manipulating them to create bizarre situations, and capture them forever. This formulaic nonsense evokes thought of a kaleidoscopic earth, the events of which occurring from small shifts of position.

 

As my initial plan to convey a kaleidoscopic world was simply to alter the subject matter of the photographs, my decision to further develop the idea through different shooting, developing, and hand-coloring techniques came after its conception. The more I thought about this new worldview - one of a fantastically random, unpredictably bizarre planet suspended inside of and susceptible to the motions of a kaleidoscope - the more openly I questioned the commonplace truths of the everyday. This skepticism aesthetically manifests in my concentration through various hand-coloring methods I employed to achieve an otherworldly and somewhat off-putting sense of reality. In #1, for example, the subject’s surroundings (already warped after being taken through a bus’s globular mirror) are true to life in their colors but altered in texture and saturation to both give the photograph a kaleidoscopic appearance and feeling and to enhance the composition and sense of space. I challenge the viewer to set aside any preconceived definition of “life” when viewing my concentration pieces to gain a new and unblemished glimpse into a new worldview. To aid the viewer in this experience, I explored different perspectives when shooting the photographs. Piece #9 uses a unique depth of field perspective to show the latent part of life.

Kelsey Montague Art "WhatLiftsYou" (Fanzara Graffiti)

Kelsey Montague is a New York-based artist, whose pen and ink drawings reflect a unique worldview. Each work is intuitively created, revealing multiple, intricate layers. Her ‘drawings within drawings’ are imbued with memories, dreams, emotions and, above all, the artist’s uniquely creative style.

Originally from Colorado, Kelsey Montague has lived in Florence, London, New York City and Los Angeles. She studied Art, Design and Media, with combined studies, at Richmond, the American International University in London, where she received an American Bachelor of Arts degree (summa cum laude), as well as a British Bachelor of Arts degree with First Class Honors.

 

Kelsey Montague es una artista con sede en Nueva York, cuyos dibujos a pluma y tinta reflejan una cosmovisión única. Cada trabajo se crea intuitivamente, revelando capas múltiples e intrincadas. Sus "dibujos dentro de dibujos" están imbuidos de recuerdos, sueños, emociones y, sobre todo, el estilo creativo único del artista.

Originaria de Colorado, Kelsey Montague ha vivido en Florencia, Londres, Nueva York y Los Ángeles. Estudió Arte, Diseño y Medios, con estudios combinados, en Richmond, la Universidad Internacional de Estados Unidos en Londres, donde recibió una Licenciatura en Artes Estadounidenses (summa cum laude), así como una Licenciatura en Artes británica con Honores de Primera Clase.

 

Thiago Goms "Gatos" (Fanzara Graffiti)

Thiago Goms was born in São Paulo in 1984. Faszinated by the Street-Art in the city in early years, he started to memorize and paint what he saw. Step by step he started to transform his own charakters and figures.

The brazilian artist refers his works to his latinamerican roots. He often connects it with different figures of animals.

 

Thiago Goms nació en São Paulo en 1984. Fascinado por Street-Art en la ciudad en los primeros años, comenzó a memorizar y pintar lo que vio. Paso a paso comenzó a transformar sus propios personajes y figuras.

El artista brasileño refiere sus obras a sus raíces latinoamericanas. A menudo lo conecta con diferentes figuras de animales.

 

Fanzara (Castellón/ Spain)

Nelo Teixeira make use of vernacular materials in order to highlight the simultaneous legacies of traditional, modern and post-colonial histories within contemporary Angolan society. Nelo Teixiera belongs to a long lineage of mask-makers, and his installation comprises a community of standing figural sculptures arranged in a circle facing inwards. Adapting the forms of ‘ritual’ objects, Teixiera’s work blurs the distinction between artifacts and art objects. The sculptures are fashioned from recycled and discarded materials found on the streets of Luanda, also raising questions about artistic and economic value.

 

The Angolan Pavilion for the 56th Biennale di Venezia is titled “On Ways of Travelling,” yet the exhibition more accurately invokes some of the barriers to the freedom of movement that are experienced by many in Angola, and elsewhere in Africa – visas, economic hardship, borders and road traffic. Yet “travel,” in this context, is not only meant to signify physical movement; it also refers to the meeting of disparate worldviews, lifestyles and temporalities, as well as to states of dreaming, desire and longing for change. The subject is nowhere more relevant than the present context in La Biennale di Venezia, an essential destination for international art tourism and an early precedent for the phenomenon of the ‘global exhibition’ of contemporary art.

 

Approaching the Pavilion itself feels like a form of travel through time and space: the exhibition is mounted on the second floor of the Palazzo Pisani, a Baroque Venetian palace on the Grand Canal that now houses the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello. In order to reach the installations, one traverses a richly decorated entrance hall to the sound of music students convening and rehearsing.

The 60-ton construction shows a house of cards made of nine concrete play cards and has a scale of thirty five feet high and nineteen and a half feet wide. The construction is literally as big as a house.

The traditional images on the cards are replaced by a selection of historical figures, world leaders and dictators. The selected images and the shape of the cards are being presented as a metaphor for the fragile construction of different political, philosophical and religious views on mankind and worldviews. The used materials and the “concrete walls” then refer to the historical and current political use of walls to ‘shield the indigenous population’ and to protect them for ‘foreign influences’. With these forms, the selected images and the material used, the artwork remind us of the great human suffering that arises from dogma and dictatorship and highlights the need for global cooperation and reconciliation.

Through a planetary prism we think, feel the reality, see the world around us and transfer these feelings to a world that is not visible to us, not accessible. It is an undeniable fact. To move away from the usual worldview, to accept other hypotheses, to study them in more detail, means one thing, this is a way out of the bounds of typicality, unidirectionality, to expand our own horizons, acceptance of current processes and how it could be in another world, which we are still try to learn.

Feelings are mixed up, truth is born in disputes, the course of time changes, and what was normal here will not apply to what will be there and vice versa. Accordingly and we will become different. Use someone else's prism does not mean that we have to move away from the usual understanding of things, it is only an additional way and opportunity to increase knowledge, to enrich experience and look at the old in a new way.

Swiss postcard by Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne / News Productions, Baulmes, no. 55468. Photo: Horst von Harbou / Collection de la Cinemathèque française, Paris. Caption: Fritz Lang during the shooting of Metropolis, 1926.

 

Fritz Lang (1890-1976) was an Austrian-German-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best-known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute. Lang's most famous films include the groundbreaking futuristic Metropolis (1927) and the influential M (1931), a film noir precursor that he made before he moved to the United States. His other notable films include Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler/Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen (1924), Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), Hangmen Also Die! (1943), The Woman in the Window (1944), and The Big Heat (1953).

 

Friedrich Christian Anton 'Fritz' Lang was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria), as the second son of Anton Lang, an architect and construction company manager, and his wife Paula Lang born Schlesinger. Paula was Jewish but converted to Catholicism when Lang was ten. His parents took their religion seriously and were dedicated to raising Fritz as a Catholic. Lang frequently had Catholic-influenced themes in his films. After finishing school, Lang briefly attended the Technical University of Vienna, where he studied civil engineering and eventually switched to art. He left Vienna in 1910 in order to see the world, traveling throughout Europe and Africa, and later Asia and the Pacific area. In 1913, he studied painting in Paris. At the outbreak of World War I, Lang returned to Vienna and volunteered for military service in the Austrian army. He fought in Russia and Romania, where he was wounded four times and lost sight in his right eye. While recovering from his injuries and shell shock in 1916, he wrote some scenarios and ideas for films. These were filmed as Die Peitsche/The Whip (Adolf Gärtner, 1916), starring Ernst Reicher as the detective Stuart Webbs, and Hilde Warren und der Tod/Hilde Warren and Death (Joe May, 1917). He was discharged from the army with the rank of lieutenant in 1918 and did some acting in the Viennese theatre circuit for a short time. Then he was hired by Erich Pommer as a writer at Decla Film in Berlin. Lang's writing stint was brief, but resulted in Die Pest in Florenz/The Plague in Florence (Otto Rippert, 1919), based on the story 'The Masque of the Red Death' by Edgar Allan Poe. Soon Lang started to work under Pommer as a director at the new German film studio Ufa, just as the Expressionist movement was building. In this first phase of his career, Lang alternated between films such art films as Der Müde Tod/The Weary Death/Destiny (1921) and popular thrillers such as the two-parter Die Spinnen/The Spiders (1919). He combined popular genres with Expressionist techniques to create an unprecedented synthesis of popular entertainment with art cinema.

 

In 1920, Fritz Lang met his future wife, the writer Thea von Harbou. She and Lang co-wrote all of his films from 1921 through 1933. In 1922 he became a German citizen. Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler/Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) ran for over four hours in two parts in the original version and was the first in the Dr. Mabuse trilogy. Then followed the five-hour Die Nibelungen/Die Nibelungen: Siegfried & Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild's Revenge (1924), starring Paul Richter and Margarete Schön. His most famous film, the Fantasy Metropolis (1927) starring Brigitte Helm and Gustav Fröhlich, went far over budget and nearly destroyed Ufa which was then bought by right-wing businessman and politician Alfred Hugenberg. Metropolis was a financial flop, as were his last silent films Spione/Spies (1928) with Willy Frisch, and the science fiction film Frau im Mond/Woman in the Moon (1929) with Fritsch and Gerda Maurus, produced by Lang's own company. In 1931, independent producer Seymour Nebenzahl hired Lang to direct M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder/M (1931) for Nero-Film. Lang's first talking picture is considered by many film scholars to be a masterpiece of the early sound era. It is a disturbing story of a child murderer (Peter Lorre in his first starring role) who is hunted down and brought to rough justice by Berlin's criminal underworld. M remains a powerful work. Wikipedia: "In the films of his German period, Lang produced a coherent oeuvre that established the characteristics later attributed to film noir, with its recurring themes of psychological conflict, paranoia, fate and moral ambiguity." At the end of 1932, Lang started filming Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse/The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), starring Rudolf Klein-Rogge. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, the new regime soon banned the film as an incitement to public disorder. Testament is sometimes deemed an anti-Nazi film, as Lang had put phrases used by the Nazis into the mouth of the title character. Lang was worried about the advent of the Nazi regime, partly because of his Jewish heritage, whereas his wife and co-screenwriter Thea von Harbou had started to sympathise with the Nazis in the early 1930s, and went on to join the NSDAP in 1940. They soon divorced. According to Lang, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called him to his offices to inform him that The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was being banned but, nevertheless, he was so impressed by Lang's abilities as a filmmaker that he offered him the position of head of the Ufa. did not accept the position and it was later accepted by filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Lang decided to leave for Paris.

 

In 1933, Fritz Lang divorced Thea von Harbou, who stayed behind in Berlin. In Paris, Lang filmed a version of Ferenc Molnár's Liliom (1933), starring Charles Boyer and Madeleine Ozeray. In 1934, he moved to Hollywood, where he signed with MGM. His first American film was the crime drama Fury (1936), which starred Spencer Tracy as a man who is wrongly accused of a crime and nearly is killed when a lynch mob sets fire to the jail where he is awaiting trial. From the beginning, Lang was struggling with restrictions in the United States. Thus, in Fury, he was not allowed to represent black victims in a lynching scenario or to criticise racism. Lang became a naturalised citizen of the United States in 1939. He made twenty-three features in his 20-year American career, working in a variety of genres at every major studio in Hollywood, and occasionally producing his films as an independent. Wikipedia: "His American films were often compared unfavorably to his earlier works by contemporary critics, but the restrained Expressionism of these films is now seen as integral to the emergence and evolution of American genre cinema, Film Noir in particular. His film Scarlet Street (1945) is considered a central film in the genre." One of Lang's most famous Film Noirs is the police drama The Big Heat (1953), noted for its uncompromising brutality, especially for a scene in which Lee Marvin throws scalding coffee on Gloria Grahame's face. As Lang's visual style simplified, in part due to the constraints of the Hollywood studio system, his worldview became increasingly pessimistic, culminating in the cold, geometric style of his last American films, While the City Sleeps (1956) and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956).

 

In the 1950s, Fritz Lang found it increasingly hard to get work, in part because the film industry was in economic decline and also because of Lang's long-standing reputation for being difficult to work with. His health also declined with age, and Lang contemplated retirement. Then the German producer Artur Brauner expressed interest in remaking Das indische Grabmal/The Indian Tomb (1921) a silent film that Lang had developed but had ultimately been directed by Joe May. Lang returned to Germany to make his 'Indian Epic': Der Tiger von Eschnapur/The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959) and Das indische Grabmal/The Indian Tomb (1959) with Debra Paget, Paul Hubschmid, and Walter Reyer. Following this production, Brauner was preparing a remake of Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse/The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) when Lang approached him with the idea of adding a new original film to the series. The result was Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse/The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960). The success of the film led to a series of new Mabuse films, which were produced by Brauner, including the remake of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. Lang did not direct any of the sequels. He was approaching blindness during the production of The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960) and it was his final project as director. In 1963, he appeared as himself in Jean-Luc Godard's film Le Mépris/Contempt (1963) with Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli. Fritz Lang died from a stroke in 1976 and was interred in the Forest Lawn – Hollywood Hills Cemetery in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. He was 85. Langs was married three times: In 1919 he married Lisa Rosenthal, who died in 1921. he was married to Thea von Harbou, from 1922 till 1933, and to Lily Latté from 1971 till his death in 1976. While his career had ended without fanfare, Lang's American and later German works were championed by the critics of the Cahiers du cinéma, such as François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. In 1964, nearly blind, he was chosen to be president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival.

 

Sources: Wikipedia, and IMDb.

 

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

Fuente Xochipilli in Chapultepec Park.

 

The Xochipilli Fountain is a 1964 work by the architect Leónides Guadarrama. The fountain was built taking as a reference the Mexican nationalist architecture of the early 20th century.

 

All the details are inspired by Tenochca architecture and are essential elements of his vision of the cosmos.

 

The fountain is located on the Paseo de los Compositores, the most significant street on the internal axis within the Second Section of Chapultepec Park.

 

This fountain was intended as a tribute to the "Prince of Flowers". Xochipilli whom in Mexica worldview, was the Prince of Flowers and the god of music, dance and love. Therefore, the fountain is surrounded by trees and benches.

 

The Eagle Knights that protrude from the side walls of the fountain refer to the legendary forces of the Mexica and Tenochtitlan armies.

 

165 fountains in the work expel water up to 20 meters high. At night, the experience is complemented by lights.

 

The work was fully restored and rehabilitated by the Bosque de Chapultepec board of trustees in 2015.

There's a story behind every leaf. There's an explanation for why it grows where it grows when it grows. It's just a really complicated explanation with a million factors, like the openings in the surrounding canopy that allow light to sneak in, the age of the surrounding trees, the nutrients in the soil, the surrounding fauna, the weather, etc. Somehow it all adds up and makes a leaf on a tree. Maybe my worldview is influenced too much by my math classes from school, but I am confident that if you take into account all the variables, there is some complicated formula that we can generate that will spit out the tree in front of me. My little human brain just can't do the math on its own, so it feels mysterious.

 

This type of mystery presents opportunities for discovery in nature. I love making these small discoveries with my camera. I am drawn to photos that display this mystery and hint at the loosely ordered chaos that suggests that underneath all of the disarray there is some semblance of structure. Not a neat and tidy structure, but something. With this image here, I was captivated by the chaotic mess of colorful beech leaves. They remind me of the photos I have seen of synchronous fireflies down in the Smokies. I tried to "tame" the madness of nature by framing the mess of yellow leaves with a tidy group of vertical tree trunks.

Transhumanism (abbreviated as H+ or h+) is an international and intellectual movement that aims to transform the human condition by developing and creating widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations, as well as the ethics[3] of using such technologies.The most common thesis is that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into different beings with abilities so greatly expanded from the natural condition as to merit the label of posthuman beings.The contemporary meaning of the term transhumanism was foreshadowed by one of the first professors of futurology, FM-2030, who taught "new concepts of the human" at The New School in the 1960s, when he began to identify people who adopt technologies, lifestyles and worldviews "transitional" to posthumanity as "transhuman".This hypothesis would lay the intellectual groundwork for the British philosopher Max More to begin articulating the principles of transhumanism as a futurist philosophy in 1990 and organizing in California an intelligentsia that has since grown into the worldwide transhumanist movement.

The year 1990 is seen as a "fundamental shift" in human existence by the transhuman community, as the first gene therapy trial,[8] the first designer babies,[9] as well as the mind-augmenting World Wide Web all emerged in that year. In many ways, one could argue the conditions that will eventually lead to the Singularity were set in place by these events in 1990.[original research?]Influenced by seminal works of science fiction, the transhumanist vision of a transformed future humanity has attracted many supporters and detractors from a wide range of perspectives including philosophy and religion.Transhumanism has been characterized by one critic, Francis Fukuyama, as among the world's most dangerous ideas,to which Ronald Bailey countered that it is rather the "movement that epitomizes the most daring, courageous, imaginative and idealistic aspirations of humanity".

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism

 

What does it mean to be human? Biology has a simple answer: If your DNA is consistent with Homo sapiens, you are human — but we all know that humanity is a lot more complex and nuanced than that. Other schools of science might classify humans by their sociological or psychological behavior, but again we know that actually being human is more than just the sum of our thoughts and actions. You can also look at being human as a sliding scale. If you were to build a human from scratch, from the bottom up, at some point you cross the threshold into humanity — if you believe in evolution, at some point we ceased being a great ape and became human. Likewise, if you slowly remove parts from a human, you cross the threshold into inhumanity. Again, though, we run into the same problem: How do we codify, classify, and ratify what actually makes us human?Does adding empathy make us human? Does removing the desire to procreate make us inhuman? If I physically alter my brain to behave in a different, non-standard way, am I still human? If I have all my limbs removed and my head spliced onto a robot, am I still human? (See: Upgrade your ears: Elective auditory implants give you cyborg hearing.) At first glance these questions might sound inflammatory and hyperbolic, or perhaps surreal and sci-fi, but don’t be fooled: In the next decade, given the continued acceleration of computer technology and biomedicine, we will be forced to confront these questions and attempt to find some answers.

 

Transhumanism is a cultural and intellectual movement that believes we can, and should, improve the human condition through the use of advanced technologies. One of the core concepts in transhumanist thinking is life extension: Through genetic engineering, nanotech, cloning, and other emerging technologies, eternal life may soon be possible. Likewise, transhumanists are interested in the ever-increasing number of technologies that can boost our physical, intellectual, and psychological capabilities beyond what humans are naturally capable of (thus the term transhuman). Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), for example, which speeds up reaction times and learning speed by running a very weak electric current through your brain, has already been used by the US military to train snipers. On the more extreme side, transhumanism deals with the concepts of mind uploading (to a computer), and what happens when we finally craft a computer with greater-than-human intelligence (the technological singularity). (See: How to create a mind, or die trying.Beyond the obvious benefits of eternal life or superhuman strength, transhumanism also investigates the potential dangers and ethical pitfalls of human enhancement. In the case of life extension, if every human on Earth suddenly stopped dying, overpopulation would trigger a very rapid and very dramatic socioeconomic disaster. Unless we stopped giving birth to babies, of course, but that merely rips open another can of worms: Without birth and death, would society and humanity continue to grow and evolve, or would it stagnate, suffocated by the accumulated ego of intellectuals and demagogues who just will not die? Likewise, if only the rich have access to intelligence- and strength-boosting drugs and technologies, what would happen to society? Should everyone have the right to boost their intellect? Would society still operate smoothly if everyone had an IQ of 300 and five doctorate degrees?As you can see, things get complicated quickly when discussing transhumanist ideas — and life extension and augmented intelligence and strength are just the tip of the iceberg! This philosophical and ethical complexity stems from the fact that transhumanism is all about fusing humans with technology — and technology is advancing, improving, and breaking new ground very, very quickly. Humans have always used technology, of course — our ability to use tools and grasp concepts such as science and physics are what set us apart from other animals — but never has society been so intrinsically linked and underpinned by it. As we have seen in just the last few years, with the advent of the smartphone and ubiquitous high-speed mobile networks, just a handful of new technologies now have the power to completely change how we interact with the the world and people around us..Humans, on the other hand, and the civilizations that they build, move relatively slowly. It took us millions of years to discover language, and thousands more to discover medicine and the scientific method. In the few thousand years since, up until the last century or so, we doubled the human life span, but neurology and physiology were impenetrable black boxes. In just the last 100 years, we’ve doubled our life span again, created bionic eyes and powered exoskeletons, begun to understand how the human brain actually works, and started to make serious headway with boosting intellectual and physical prowess. We’ve already mentioned how tDCS is being used to boost cranial capacity, and as we’ve seen in recent years, sportspeople have definitely shown the efficacy of physical doping.An early television: It would've seemed incredibly alien to our grandparentsIt is due to this jarring juxtaposition — the historical slowness of human and societal evolution vs. the breakneck pace of modern technology — that many find transhumanism to be unpalatable. After all, as I’ve described it here, transhumanism is almost the very definition of unnatural. You’re quite within your rights to find transhumanism a bit, well, weird. And it is weird, don’t get me wrong — but so are most emerging technologies. Do you think that your great grandparents weren’t wigged out by the first television sets? Before it garnered the name “television,” one of its inventors gave it the rather spooky name of “distant electric vision.” Can you imagine the wariness in which passengers approached the first steam trains? Vast mechanical beasts that could pull hundreds of tons and moved far faster than the humble — but state-of-the-art — horse and carriage.The uneasiness that surround new, paradigm-shifting technologies isn’t new, and it has only been amplified by the exponential acceleration of technology that has occurred during our lifetime. If you were born 500 years ago, odds are that you wouldn’t experience a single societal-shifting technology in your lifetime — today, a 40 year old will have lived through the creation of the PC, the internet, the smartphone, and brain implants, to name just a few life-changing technologies. It is unsettling, to say the least, to have the rug repeatedly pulled out from under you, especially when it’s your livelihood at stake. Just think about how many industries and jobs have been obliterated or subsumed by the arrival of the digital computer, and it’s easy to see why we’re wary of transhumanist technologies that will change the very fabric of human civilization.The good news, though, is that humans are almost infinitely adaptable. While you or I might balk at the idea of a brain-computer interface that allows us to download our memories to a PC, and perhaps upload new memories a la The Matrix, our children — who can use smartphones at the age of 24 months, and communicate chiefly through digital means — will probably think nothing of it. For the children of tomorrow, living through a series of disruptive technologies that completely change their lives will be the norm. There might still be some resistance when I opt to have my head spliced onto a robotic exoskeleton, but within a generation children will be used to seeing Iron Seb saving people from car crashes and flying alongside airplanes.The fact of the matter is that transhumanism is just a modern term for an age-old phenomenon. We have been augmenting our humanity — our strength, our wisdom, our empathy — with tools since prehistory. We have always been spooked by technologies that seem unnatural or that cause us to act in inhuman ways — it’s simply human nature. That all changes with the children of today, however. To them, anything that isn’t computerized, digital, and touch-enabled seems unnatural. To them, the smartphone is already an extension of the brain; to them, mind uploading, bionic implants and augmentations, and powered exoskeletons will just be par for the course. To them, transhumanism will just seem like natural evolution — and anyone who doesn’t follow suit, just like those fuddy-duddies who still don’t have a smartphone, will seem thoroughly inhuman.

www.extremetech.com/extreme/152240-what-is-transhumanism-...

Humanity+ is an international nonprofit membership organization that advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities. In other words, we want people to be better than well.Our Humanity+ conferences explore innovations of science and technology and their relationship to humanity. Recent conferences have been held at San Francisco State University, Polytechnic University in Hong Kong, Parsons The New School for Design in New York City, California Technology Institute, and Harvard University.

humanityplus.org/?gclid=Cj0KEQjwipi4BRD7t6zGl6m75IgBEiQAn...

Humanism is a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers critical thinking and evidence (rationalism, empiricism) over acceptance of dogma or superstition. The meaning of the term humanism has fluctuated according to the successive intellectual movements which have identified with it.Generally, however, humanism refers to a perspective that affirms some notion of human freedom and progress. In modern times, humanist movements are typically aligned with secularism, and today humanism typically refers to a non-theistic life stance centred on human agency and looking to science rather than revelation from a supernatural source to understand the world.[

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanism

Since I was a boy I have seen how our native peoples have been discriminated, not only the Mapuche culture, but also all the ancestral cultures of this country. Looked at less, harassed, razed, unprotected, without giving them the credit and respect they deserve. I believe that our duty is to recognize and appreciate our roots, much of the Chilean population has blood and ancestry from any of these cultures, they are our ancestors and we come from them. We must learn to know and respect these rich cultures, full of an incredible worldview and present in this land long before we set foot on it. Advancing on this path is everyone's job, for my part I feel deep respect and admiration for them, who despite the adversity they have suffered for centuries, are still standing there, stoic above all

Editor’s Note: This story was updated on 22 August 2019 to clarify our data source.

 

In the Amazon rainforest, fire season has arrived.

 

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured these images of several fires burning in the states of Rondônia, Amazonas, Pará, and Mato Grosso on August 11 and August 13, 2019.

 

In the Amazon region, fires are rare for much of the year because wet weather prevents them from starting and spreading. However, in July and August, activity typically increases due to the arrival of the dry season. Many people use fire to maintain farmland and pastures or to clear land for other purposes. Typically, activity peaks in early September and mostly stops by November.

 

As of August 16, 2019, an analysis of NASA satellite data indicated that total fire activity across the Amazon basin this year has been close to the average in comparison to the past 15 years. (The Amazon spreads across Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and parts of other countries.) Though activity appears to be above average in the states of Amazonas and Rondônia, it has so far appeared below average in Mato Grosso and Pará, according to estimates from the Global Fire Emissions Database, a research project that compiles and analyzes NASA data. (Note that while the chart label says 2016, the 2019 data is listed on all of the plots as a green line. Roll your cursor over the green 2019 block below the plot to isolate the 2019 numbers.)

 

NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview and VIIRS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview, and the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership. Caption by Adam Voiland.

 

NASA image use policy.

 

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.

 

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Durante este el corto pero emocionante viaje a Punta de Lobos en la ciudad de Pichilemu Chile, al observar a los Surfers cortar las olas con sus tablas me di cuenta que somos tan diminutos como inmensos a la vez, somos un universo individual infinito dentro de cada persona, pero fuera somos tan pequeños como una simple particula microscopica, mi vision del mundo ha cambiado nuevamente otorgandome el conocimiento y la conciencia de que somos pequeños pero juntos somos grandes, una frase tosca pero adecuada y con estas palabras doy vida a pequeño humano

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During this short but exciting trip to Punta de Lobos in the town of Pichilemu Chile, to watch the Surfers cut through the waves with their boards I realized that we are as small as huge as well , we are an infinite individual universe within each person , but outside are as small as a single microscopic particle , my worldview has changed again giving me the knowledge and awareness that we are small but together we are great , a rough but adequate sentence and these words give life a little human

*+Worldview of Crie Style+*

SLURL:

slurl.com/secondlife/Crie%20Style/128/128/22

Durante este el corto pero emocionante viaje a Punta de Lobos en la ciudad de Pichilemu Chile, al observar a los Surfers cortar las olas con sus tablas me di cuenta que somos tan diminutos como inmensos a la vez, somos un universo individual infinito dentro de cada persona, pero fuera somos tan pequeños como una simple particula microscopica, mi vision del mundo ha cambiado nuevamente otorgandome el conocimiento y la conciencia de que somos pequeños pero juntos somos grandes, una frase tosca pero adecuada y con estas palabras doy vida a pequeño humano

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During this short but exciting trip to Punta de Lobos in the town of Pichilemu Chile, to watch the Surfers cut through the waves with their boards I realized that we are as small as huge as well , we are an infinite individual universe within each person , but outside are as small as a single microscopic particle , my worldview has changed again giving me the knowledge and awareness that we are small but together we are great , a rough but adequate sentence and these words give life a little human

Please View Large Here

 

I'm afraid I've made so many missteps and errors that I'm not so optimistic in my personal life ... but my world view has never really changed .... it's full of goodness and change .... and that's why I'm looking again at this image of children at play that I made several years ago ... I was living just two blocks from Ground Zero in NYC .... and happened across this playgroup of kids in a nearby park .... The scene was just captivating ….their faces were filled with such joy and happiness that I couldn't help but try to capture those pure feelings I saw .... almost by instinct I shot off my camera and later worked to make an image that expressed the essence of the purity and joy and hope that I saw that day ….

 

I just don't understand all of the hate and suffering and divisiveness in this world ... I don't understand all of the anger and disunity and mistrust in our country right now .... It's just anathema to every value I believe in and hold dear .... mostly that we're all members of the same Human Family .... and that the mosaic of our differences only serve to make us more interesting and more beautiful .... Unfortunately there are too many folks around us here and worldwide that don't believe in and recognize that truth ... and it's that worldview blindspot that's causing all the anger and suffering in our midst .... but I see in the face of every child I photograph the hope for the future ... I see only pureness and good in them ... and that's how I can be optimistic for our future .... We see now only the narrow view filled with rancor and hate ... but the larger view is different and more promising ...

 

The arc of the world's maturing has always leaned towards justice and unity .... and although we can't see it clearly now .... I think all the strife and division and enmity will eventually cause a collapse upon ourselves and mankind will have no choice but to reflect and construct a new direction ... and that direction will be the understanding that we're all members of the same Human Family and citizens of the the same Planet ..... that all of our religions only teach love … and that when we drift too far away from the spiritual teachings of our Faiths we only disrupt and disregard of true course of our natures …. but I see only promise and hope in the face of each child I photograph .... and I just want to end my vision for the future with a Baha'i prayer for children ...

 

"O Thou Kind Lord! These lovely children are the handiwork of the fingers of Thy might and the wondrous signs of Thy greatness. O God! Protect these children, graciously assist them to be educated and enable them to render service to the world of humanity. O God! These children are pearls. Cause them to be nurtured within the shell of Thy loving-kindness."

 

Tuwe, of the Huni Kuin people of the Acre region of Brazil-the westernmost province that borders Peru. Tuwe is a spiritual and political leader of his people, a filmmaker, and a guardian of the forest. He works to strengthen and empower indigenous and 'uncontacted' people through artistic, cultural, and spiritual expression, so that they can maintain autonomy, preserve their surroundings and their way of life. His focus is local, but also global, as he understands that the survival of the forest and its people is directly linked to the survival of the planet and all human beings.

Picture is of the restored seminary against the backdrop of luxury condominiums. The restored seminary, is by the way, now a high end commercial wing...

Please Read on to understand where i am going with this :-)..

 

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Truth or Love: What’s Your Choice?

 

We live in a post-truth society—that’s what The Economist claimed two months ago. Two weeks ago, Oxford English Dictionary chose “post-truth” as its Word of the Year. Go back a bit further, and having 11 percent of America believe that you are “honest and trustworthy” was good enough to have a 9 percent lead in the race to be the next President of the United States. But of course even the polls were post-true.

We are very confused about the truth: There’s the truth, and then there’s the naked truth. There’s the truth, and then there’s the gospel truth (though the Gospel is taken to be obviously false). There’s the honest truth, and then there’s the God’s honest truth (but that has nothing to do with God).

We stretch the truth and bend the truth and twist the truth. We bury the truth because the truth hurts. When we want some¬thing to be false, we knock on wood. When we want something to be true, we cross our fingers. Which wooden cross are we trusting in?

 

Why do we have such a confused relationship with the truth? Fear. We are afraid of truth. Truth has so often been abused that experience has taught us the trajectory of truth—the trajectory of believing you are right and others are wrong—is from truth to disagreement to devaluing to intolerance to extremism to violence to terrorism.

And if that is the trajectory, then those committed to truth are in fact terrorists in the making. If that is the trajectory, then truth is an act of war, and an act of war leaves you with only two options: fight or flee.

Most of Western society is fleeing. Everything around us is structured to avoid disagreement about the truth: We spend most of our time on Facebook and Twitter where we can “like” and “retweet” but there is no option to “dislike.” Sports no longer teach us how to disagree. In professional sports, we replay every call to avoid disagreement. In youth sports, we don’t keep score and everyone gets a trophy.

When it comes to dating, we use online sites that “match” us with someone so similar in beliefs, background, and personality that as much disagreement as possible is avoided. We no longer meet people different from us at coffee shops because we go to drive-thru Starbucks. We no longer meet people while shopping because everything we could ever need or want is delivered to our door. Culturally, everything around us is set up to avoid disagreement.

The alternative to fleeing is fighting. I was walking around Oxford University a few months ago, and two guys walking just ahead of me were having a spirited conversation about how crazy they found certain Christian positions on ethical issues. One of them wondered out loud whether the only solution would be to shame Christians out of their positions.

His friend quickly responded, “Yeah, that’s what we should do! We should ridicule them mercilessly in the most insensitive ways we can think of.” That’s an exact quote. Then they both made a right turn and swiped their faculty cards to enter the University of Oxford Theoretical Physics building.

These were probably scholars at Oxford, a place that prides itself on intellectual freedom and the exchange of ideas, and ‘merciless, insensitive ridicule’ was the best they could come up with for resolving disagreement. I found myself wondering how many beliefs they hold in theoretical physics that one day will be considered ridiculous.

How does one get to this point? How does someone get to the point where ‘merciless ridicule’ seems like the best way forward?

I think it’s because you come to see Truth as more important than Love. If Truth is greater than Love, then you fight—then the end goal of Truth justifies whatever means necessary, whether the means of haughty academics or the means of ISIS. If truth is greater than love, then love is a temptation—a distraction threatening to avert our attention from what is truly important; then those who disagree with us are enemies, and warmth toward our enemies must be extinguished in favor of the cold, hard facts.

The alternative is that Love is greater than Truth. Then you flee. You flee from the dangers of Truth and adopt a pluralism that assures us “All truths are equally valid.” Does that include the claim that all truth claims are not equally valid? One college student recently told my colleague, Abdu Murray, that he doesn’t believe it is his place to disagree with anyone.

Abdu said, “Sure you do.”

The student said, “No I don’t”

Abdu said, “You just did.”

Philosophically, that’s how quickly pluralism runs into incoherence. But if truth starts you down a path that ends in extremism, violence, and terrorism, then philosophical incoherence might seem like a price worth paying.

Either Truth is greater than Love or Love is greater than Truth. Fight or flee. This is the cultural ultimatum we are living in. What’s your choice?

Maybe there’s another way. Jesus disagreed with us. His very coming was an act of disagreement with us—a statement that we require saving because our lives have disagreed so badly with what God intended for them.

But Jesus’s loving sacrifice for us was the very content of his disagreement; it was his very statement that we are sinners in need of a savior. God cut the link between disagreement and devaluing by making His communication of Truth one and the same as His communication of Love.

Not ‘Truth is greater than Love.’ Not ‘Love is greater than Truth.’ “God is love” (1John 4:8), and God is Truth (John 14:6). And therefore Love is Truth.

Only in Jesus does truth equal love, and therefore only Jesus can get us out of the cultural ultimatum we are stuck in: fight or flee. Every other worldview makes a choice between Love and Truth. Jesus refused to because in Him, and only in Him, Love and Truth are one and the same.

So the next time we have a choice between Love and Truth, let’s refuse to choose. Instead, let’s remember when the Truth—Jesus Himself—was stretched. Let’s remember when the Truth was twisted and bent, when the Truth was naked. Let’s remember when the Truth hurt, and when the Truth was buried.

Let us remember which wooden Cross we are trusting in. And let us remember that Love that is not Truth is not Love, and Truth that is not Love is not Truth.

 

Vince Vitale is director of the Zacharias Institute at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Love & Truth. Grace & Holiness. Mercy & Righteousness. 2 faces of the same coil. You can't have truth without love and the reverse as well. Jesus is the embodiment of both.

         

French postcard by Editions F. Nugeron, no. Star 136. Photo: Air France / Distribution VU. Caption: Federico Fellini, Giulietta Massina and Marcello Mastroianni, 13 April 1960.

 

Italian film director and screenwriter Federico Fellini (1920-1993) was one of the most influential filmmakers of all time. He was known for his distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness. In a career spanning almost fifty years, Fellini won the Palme d'Or for La Dolce Vita (1960), was nominated for twelve Academy Awards. He won an Oscar for La Strada (1954), Le notti di Cabiria (1957), 8½ (1963) and Amarcord (1973).

 

Federico Fellini was born in 1920 in Rimini in the Emilia-Romagna region. His native Rimini and characters there like Saraghina (the devil herself said the priests who ran his school) - and the Gambettola farmhouse of his paternal grandmother would later be remembered in several of his films. His traveling salesman father Urbano Fellini showed up in La dolce vita (1960) and 8½ (1963). His mother Ida Barbiani was from Rome and accompanied him there in 1939. Fellini's first passion was the theater, and at the age of 12, he briefly ran away from home to join the circus, later entering college solely to avoid being drafted. He enrolled in the University of Rome. Intrigued by the image of reporters in American films, he tried out the real-life role of a journalist. Additionally, Fellini worked as an artist on fumetti (Italy's illustrated magazines), and occasionally even made his living as a caricaturist at Roman restaurants. He caught the attention of several editors with his caricatures and cartoons and then started submitting articles. Several articles were recycled into a radio series about newlyweds 'Cico and Pallina'. Pallina was played by acting student Giulietta Masina, who became Fellini's real-life wife in 1943. They remained together until his death. The young Fellini loved vaudeville and was befriended in 1939 by leading comedian Aldo Fabrizi. Fabrizi recruited Fellini to supply stories and ideas for his performances; between 1939 and 1944. The two men worked in tandem on a number of largely forgotten comedies, among them No Me Lo Dire, Quarta Pagina, and Campo de Fiori. When young director Roberto Rossellini wanted Fabrizi to play Don Pietro in Roma città aperta (Roberto Rosselini, 1945), he made the contact through Fellini. Fellini worked on that film's script and is on the credits for Rosselini's Paisà (Roberto Rosselini, 1946). Dale O'Connor at IMDb: "On that film, he wandered into the editing room, started observing how Italian films were made (a lot like the old silent films with an emphasis on visual effects, dialogue dubbed in later). Fellini in his mid-20s had found his life's work."

 

Federico Fellini collaborated on films by Pietro Germi (including In Nomine Della Legge and Il Cammino Della Speranza) and Alberto Lattuda (Il Delitto di Giovanni Episcopo and Il Mulino del Po), among others. In 1948, Fellini completed the screenplay for Il Miracolo, the second and longer section of Rossellini's two-part effort Amore. Here Fellini's utterly original worldview first began to truly take shape in the form of archetypal characters (a simple-minded peasant girl and her male counterpart, a kind of holy simpleton), recurring motifs (show business, parties, the sea), and an ambiguous relationship with religion and spirituality. He further explored this in his script for Rossellini's Francesco, Giullare di Dio (Roberto Rosselini, 1949). In 1950, Fellini made his first attempt at directing one of his own screenplays (with help of Alberto Lattuda), Luci del Varieta (Federico Fellini, Alberto Lattudada, 1950), which further developed his fusion of neorealism with the atmosphere of surrealism. Fellini then directed the romantic satire Lo Sciecco Bianc. The film marked his first work with composer Nino Rota. Fellini's initial masterpiece, I Vitteloni, followed in 1953. The first of his features to receive international distribution, it later won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, the first of many similar honours. The brilliant La Strada followed in 1954, also garnering the Silver Lion as well as the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Picture. After helming Il Bidone (1955), Fellini and a group of screenwriters (including a young Pier Paolo Pasolini) began work on Le Notti di Cabiria (1956), which also won an Oscar. Then he mounted La Dolce Vita (1960), the first of his pictures to star actor Marcello Mastroianni. He would become Fellini's cinematic alter ego over the course of several subsequent collaborations, its portrait of sex and death in Rome's high society created a tremendous scandal at its Milan premiere, where the audience booed, insulted, and spat on the director. Regardless, La Dolce Vita won the Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and remains a landmark in cinematic history.

 

During the 1960s, many films by Federico Fellini were influenced by the work of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung and his ideas on the role of archetypes and the collective unconscious. The women who had both attracted and frightened him in his youth and an Italy dominated in his youth by Mussolini and Pope Pius XII inspired Fellini's dreams. In the 1960s, he started to record them in notebooks, and life and dreams became the raw material for such films as 8½ (1963) or Fellini - Satyricon (1969). With 1965's Giulietta Degli Spiriti, Fellini worked for the first time in color. After experimenting with LSD under the supervision of doctors, he began scripting Il Viaggio di G. Mastorna. Over a year of pre-production followed, hampered by difficulties with producers, actors, and even a jury trial. Finally on April 10th, 1967, Fellini suffered a nervous breakdown, resulting in a month-long nursing homestay. Ultimately, he gave up on ever bringing Il Viaggio di G. Mastorna to the screen, and his new producer, Alberto Grimaldi, was forced to buy out former producer Dino De Laurentis for close to half a billion liras. As the decade drew to a close, Fellini returned to work with a vengeance, first resurfacing with Toby Dammitt, a short feature for the collaborative film Tre Passi nel Delirio. Turning to television, he helmed Fellini: A Director's Notebook, a one-hour special for NBC, followed by the feature effort Fellini Satyricon. I Clown followed in 1970, with Roma bowing in 1972. Amarcord, a childhood reminiscence, won a fourth Academy Award in 1974. It proved to be his final international success. He later shot Il Casanova di Federico Fellini (1976), Prova d'Orchestra (1979), and La Citta delle Donne (1980), which were less successful. Fellini turned to publishing with Fare un Film, an anthology of notes about his life and work. E la Nave Va (1983) and Ginger e Fred (1985) followed, but by the time of L'Intervista (1987), he was facing considerable difficulty finding financing for his projects. His last completed film was La Voce Della Luna (1989). In the early 1990s, Fellini helmed a handful of television commercials, and in 1993 he won his fifth Academy Award for a lifetime of service to the film industry. In 1993, Federico Fellini died the day after his 50th wedding anniversary. He was 73 years old. Jason Ankeny at AllMovie: "One of the most visionary figures to emerge from the fertile motion picture community of postwar-era Italy, Federico Fellini brought a new level of autobiographical intensity to his craft; more than any other filmmaker of his era, he transformed the realities of his life into the surrealism of his art. Though originally a product of the neorealist school, the eccentricity of Fellini's characterizations and his absurdist sense of comedy set him squarely apart from contemporaries like Vittorio De Sica or Roberto Rossellini, and at the peak of his career his work adopted a distinctively poetic, flamboyant, and influential style so unique that only the term "Felliniesque" could accurately describe it. "

 

Sources: Jason Ankeny (AllMovie), Dale O' Connor (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.

 

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

This view looks northward from Eminönü toward Karaköy. The Galata Tower (Galata Kulesi), built by the Genoese and completed during 1348, is visible in the background.

 

The storied Galata Bridge (Galata Köprüsü) spans the Golden Horn (Haliç, "Estuary"). It is part of the amazing historic and cultural fabric of İstanbul. The first fixed link across the Golden Horn (i.e. the first known to history) was built during the 6th Century A.D., during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great. The first bridge across the mouth of the Golden Horn was built by the Valide Sultan, the mother of Sultan Abdülmecid I (b. 1823, enthroned 1839, d. 1861).

 

(“Valide Sultan” is not a name, but a title, held by the "legal mother" of the ruling Sultan. The Valide Sultan ruled over the Harem and therefore held a powerful position in the Sultan’s Court.)

 

The bridge connects the old city of İstanbul with (relatively) newer neighborhoods in the Beyoğlu district. The Sultân's Palace and the seat of the Empire were located in the old city. By contrast, the residents of quarters such as Beyoğlu, Galata and Şişli were foreign merchants and diplomats, and others (e.g. Christian subjects of the empire) who were not Muslims. One who crossed the bridge also crossed from one civilization and culture to another (to paraphrase the journalist, columnist and novelist Peyami Safa, 1899-1961). The bridge appears in various works of Turkish literature, novels, poetry and theater.

 

(In Peyami Safa's novel "Fatih-Harbiye," published 1931, Fatih, in the old city, represents the traditional, conservative "Eastern" worldview. Harbiye, across the Galata Bridge in Beyoğlu, represents the modern "Western" worldview. The novel was adapted as a television series, using the same title, which was broadcast during 2013-2014. Some episodes may be found on "YouTube;" there are even some with closed-caption subtitles.)

 

The structure shown here was built by by the German firm Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg (MAN) and was completed during 1912. It was heavily damaged by fire during 1992 and replaced by a new structure during 1994. This, therefore, is a "vanished scene."

 

UPDATE: I made the original scan of this image with the scanner set for too low of a resolution. I've made a "rescan" and uploaded it above (2021 October 28).

 

1976 August 4.

See Part 1 in my archives Peepz. And if you're in a hurry, you may want to read this later, or in bits...it's bloody long. It's a work in progress...

 

"The Diamond Ring"

 

As my gaze scanned the small, crowded bus depot in Adelaide that December morning, I had all but given up trying to find a lift with anybody from the bus, as I hadn't met anybody on the truck stops we'd made along the way. The ticket counter wasn't open yet, so I decided that I should just wait there until it opened, and figure out what to do next after that. In the meantime I could put out some feelers and try and sense whether anybody else there looked like they might be headed for the eclipse. At that point I was still convinced I should try to get on a connecting bus to Ceduna, where most of the eclipse watchers would be, but I was sure that the tickets were sold out. I hadn't ruled out hitching on the road, but hoped it wouldn't come to that. I was also a little dubious about the weather. It was seven thirty in the morning, and the clouds formed a thick blanket of grey above the city.

 

The day before, I'd checked the weather forecasts to see what the outlook was like and it was sketchy. There was going to be cloud cover in most of the places along the path of totality, but the forecast said that the clouds should clear to just a scattering by mid or late afternoon. It might have prevented me from going at another time, but because I felt so driven to go I trusted that wherever I ended up would be the right place, with the right people and the right conditions. Still, I couldn't help having a slight sense of trepidation over whether all my efforts would end up in travelling over a thousand miles to watch a total eclipse of a total eclipse.

 

So with all that and more whirring around my skull, I let my eyes skim the crowd while my otherware kicked in at the non-local levels, and before I knew it I couldn't help but notice these two guys who were standing in one of the aisles a few feet away from me. It was their wooden case that first caught my attention and it got me pretty excited when it looked liked it was just the right size for a telescope. When I looked for who might own it, I scoped them. They looked a little fatigued, but ready for action.

 

The tall one that looked like Tom Selleck was dressed in loose khaki shorts with cargo pockets, a matching polo shirt, chunky white socks and brown suede walking boots. Short blondish-brown hair peeked out from beneath a baseball cap that made his rugged features look slightly boyish, but he looked to me to be around forty. Standing next to him was a guy of similar age, who looked like your classic computer programmer or science genius. He was more slightly built, had a pale complexion and black rimmed glasses. He was wearing a black leather jacket over his knitted jumper and polo shirt (which was underneath and neatly tucked in to his jeans), a black belt and some well-worn brown leather shoes.

I was totally loving their look. I had to meet them.

 

I approached them and asked if they were going to see the eclipse.

I think they might have been a bit surprised to have been approached but they smiled and said yes. I found out that their names were Gerard and Alan, then they told me that they'd been on the same bus from Melbourne I'd been travelling on. I had been all the way up the front in seat 1D behind the driver, and hadn't seen them behind me in seats 11C and D.

 

I told them that I was going to try to get to Ceduna. They glanced at each other making me feel uneasy and they said that the weather forecast didn't look so good there. It was much better where they were going, the Wirraminna Rail Siding, in the desert, but first they had to go to Port Augusta where they would be picking up their car.

 

It became instantly apparent that going to the desert over the coast was a way better idea given the weather, so I figured that the best thing for me should be to try to get to Woomera with them (which is where I thought the Wirraminna Rail Siding was). I imagined this really cute country town where there would be balloons and streamers in the streets and lots of bakeries. I thought that we'd get there, mingle with the others who'd gathered, and then I could find accommodation and another lift back to Adelaide the next day. I asked that if I could get Port Augusta, would they let me hitch with them to Woomera? We all decided to have breakfast together and see.

 

As soon as we sat down they were pulling out all these crazy maps and charts that they'd downloaded off the net, one with a pencil line drawn by hand marking the path of totality. Others had bright highlighted sections where they'd made other notes. They had made all the calculations for latitude and longitude, timing down to the second, were a wealth of astronomical knowledge and they told me all about the amazing capabilities of the camera gear they'd brought. They were prepared for everything. I could not believe my luck. They even had spare eclipse glasses! They were able to tell me everything I needed to know and I really hoped it could all happen so that I could travel with them.

 

After breakfast I noticed that the ticket counter was about to open and I watched as about twenty people formed two queues in front of the two nearest windows. A third window had also opened but no-one seemed to want to go there and at first I stood at the end of one of them then figured it wouldn't hurt to ask, so I went over to the third window. When I asked if that was the right ticket counter for a bus ticket to Port Augusta I was told it was and got my ticket in about 30 seconds, beating everybody. It was a completely full bus, confirming to me again just how much we make our own luck.

 

The guys agreed to let me join them in Port Augusta and I felt this wave of gratitude leave my body and travel out into the cosmos. As I looked at them hanging out together with their impressive assortment of camera gear, tripods, bags and telescope, with their open, friendly faces, smart casual clothing and a tendency toward geekishness, they looked like my very own Batman and Robin. I smiled inwardly. My prayers HAD been answered! I DID find the right people to travel with right there on the bus!

 

It was a moment I'll never forget.

 

After that I found a pay phone and rang Bimbo Deluxe, a bar I had a residency at, and left a message letting them know I wouldn't be coming in for my set that night.

 

We got on the next bus, me alone behind the driver in 1A again, and them just a few seats behind. I spent a bit of time visualising a bright blue, cloudless sky for the eclipse, and reminding myself to be in the moment, trusting as much as possible that life would take me where I needed to go, as the frequencies of gratitude for all that had occurred up until then filled me and flowed outwards from me. All the seeds sown by reading the CWG series which had tied up so many loose ends for me in my esoteric studies, were beginning to sprout and I wanted to breathe as much life into them as possible. I wanted to see how they might grow, as I did. I thought about Time. Then I slept deeply.

 

"Alan and Gerard spent the trip working out the orbital distance of the Moon and the rotation of the Earth in order to finally understand the path taken by the Moon during the eclipse and the speed at which it travelled. This was facilitated by the calculator in the mobile phone. Alan also worked out how photo exposures and bracketing points using full and ½ stops."

 

This is what Gerard wrote about what he and Alan did on the bus to Port Augusta, in his own account of our travels called "Eclipse 2002". He has even named the subtitles in Chapter 1, which will give you a greater idea of what's to come.

 

Subtitle 1: Alan's, Gerard's and Liz's Big Time-Warp Adventure

Subtitle 2: Port Augusta or Bust!

Subtitle 3: The Kangaroo Did It

 

I believe all time is happening in one eternal now. Especially since studying the Maya's supreme understandings of cosmic timing cycles and mathematics. Whenever I begin to worry about anything "in the future", I ask myself, "Am I OK, in this moment?", and the answer is always yes, so it's a good way for me to quell my fears and anxieties, and to trust life more. I really started this practice on a regular basis during this trip. And I was more than ok, as I was soon to see..

 

When we arrived at Port Augusta, the sky had cleared and a few tufts of white dotted the sky, which was a relief, and a beautiful gleaming silver sedan met us at the terminal. It belonged to Gerard, and I asked how even though he lived in Melbourne, his car was quite conveniently waiting for us in Port Augusta, at the bus terminal. After we piled into the car I heard the first of many stories during that trip that would change me forever.

 

The guys had so much gear it was hard to believe they'd carried it all by themselves and for a few moments I had my doubts that we would fit everything of theirs into the car, let alone have room for me or my scant belongings. After some tricky packing though, a space was made available for me to squeeze into in the back seat, behind Alan who was in the passenger seat, and with Gerard expertly handling the wheel, we set off for last minute supplies.

 

The whole transition from the bus to the car couldn't have been timed more perfectly or executed with more ease. It was a good sign, but once we got in the car I really knew that the gods had smiled down on me. They could've had a big old pick up truck for all I knew, but instead I was able to relax in the luxury of black leather seats and enjoy the views from air conditioned comfort, gaze out at the sky through the sunroof and tinted windows and tell the outside temperature from a LED display in the wood dash. To top it all off, I had just met the two coolest, smartest straight guys I'd met in ages, and we were about to embark on a truly amazing adventure together. I was happy and grateful to be alive.

 

We stopped in Pt Augusta's main shopping drag for some lunch, supplies and fuel for the trip. After some bad cafe food Alan and I headed off to the supermarket while Gerard attended to some other business and we quickly dashed around picking up water, bags of fruit, nibbles, and chocolate (for me). I asked Alan if they'd like to have something to eat later, maybe for a picnic? This seemed like a good idea to him (I don't know if the guys, for all their planning, had considered the necessity for food at all), and I picked out a roast chicken and some salads. I completely forgot to buy a disposable camera in Adelaide so I tried finding one there only to discover they were sold out. There was a Woolies a block down too (also sold out of cameras), but I quickly purchased a cotton blanket as I had nothing warm with me, and hoped it would come in handy, seeing I already had my pillow and I had no idea where I was sleeping that night. All I knew was that the eclipse was in less than four and a half hours and when we met up with Gerard a short time later, it was agreed that there was no time to spare, so we, and the fully-laden car, swung back onto the road and headed for the outback. Alan had a collection of maps in the glove box that he would refer to from time to time as Gerard brought us up to a comfortable cruising speed of 130 kph. ETA was going to be 17:45 at our desired spot.

 

They were both great story tellers, although you could see that Alan's more outgoing personality was more suited to it, but Gerard certainly didn't seem concerned, and I realized later that even though Gerard had heard Alan tell most of his stories several times before, he obviously still liked to hear them, and he often helped coax a story out of Alan's memory banks by reminding him of some of the funny details.

 

I began to hear about how they had been driving through the South Australian countryside a month earlier, taking photos and generally enjoying a break from work for a few days when they had hit a kangaroo when it suddenly jumped out in front of the car and stopped them all in their tracks. Gerard's car had been in the shop at Port Augusta getting extensive repairs done ever since, and as the eclipse was occurring at the same time they could collect the car, they decided (at the last minute too) to come and get it and see the eclipse at the same time. At the end of their story we all fell silent for a moment as it dawned on us that their encounter with the kangaroo had actually created the conditions for us to meet as we did. The kangaroo was pivotal to the whole story and we knew it. I silently thanked the kangaroo for it's role in all this, and for the ripples that that moment created when it lost its life that night, as I marvelled at the way our lives had intersected.

 

Whatever green countryside there was around Pt Augusta soon made way for flat, dry earth covered in clumps of long grasses, low bushes and small trees as we sped towards Woomera. We passed a few old run down towns that looked like the only public outlet was the petrol station, and I wondered how people out there spent their time, and how children, if any, could cope with the sheer barrenness and isolation. Then we passed Pimba. It was so third world I was totally taken aback. I felt like I'd stepped into an alternate reality, into another version of Australia, one I would never want to dream into reality, but it already was. It was quite a sight. We all unanimously agreed that it was a "hole" of gargantuan proportions, a "standard reference hole" at that, as we passed the shabby weatherboard houses that all seemed to be just barely standing, with each and every backyard sporting massive piles of rubbish and broken down, rusting machinery. I thought I'd seen bad, after all, some of my poor Filipino relatives used to live in houses where to get there, you'd have to walk on wooden planks to avoid the mud, streams and little fishes everywhere, but this was BAD.

 

I could see why the area we were fast approaching was home to a detention centre for illegal immigrants, a former nuclear missile testing ground and hot spot for UFO sightings. There was nothing. For miles around, nothing. Just red earth, a bit of scrub, and the wind and sky. I must admit as well as watching for the clouds to clear up even more, I was constantly on the lookout for any unusual aerial phenomena as I'd thoroughly done my research and the probability for a sighting was in my estimation, high.

 

While we drove to our destination we all got to know each other a bit better which was easy as we all seemed to like one another. At first I was a little unsure about whether Alan was actually happy about me being in tow, as the two of them had conferred briefly before deciding to let me come, and I'd picked up on a vibe. I couldn't blame him if it he wasn't all too pleased, as my coming along had interfered with their plans and well, "guy time". I soon put those thoughts to rest though as it as it soon became apparent to all of us that that the extra pair of hands I now afforded them, might've actually come in quite handy.

 

We went over a few things about the way the guys wanted to set up their gear, and what we would do when totality arrived. Then they started describing to me how they would like me to help change a solar filter on "the Lens", this massive super-telephoto thing. They explained that When Gerard said "totality", I had to take the filter off and to put it in a special Tupperware container that they had brought with them. I was like, "Oh my God, are these guys for real? We're actually practicing a DRILL for taking photos!". Say what you will, I thought they were unreal.

 

I know that sort of daggy technical stuff about photography and math and astronomy that we talked a lot about is pretty boring for most people but I frickin love it! And I didn't even need a camera after all! It was almost too much, too good.

 

When we passed Woomera it dawned on me that we weren't going to stop there, and that I'd gotten my wires slightly crossed. But as we drove past it, I thanked my lucky stars I wasn't going. The town looked horrible, with a big vintage fighter plane mounted on a big metal brace near the "Welcome to Woomera" sign near the town's entrance, to show off our so-called military "might", right(?), and the selfish misuse-use of our country's resources by stupid white guys who are all dead now anyway. I didn't see one person anywhere. The whole town looked deserted and felt like a museum you'd never go want to go visit. It didn't look like anywhere I could find accommodation at either, that's for sure. The Wirraminna Rail Siding was another 73 km on from Woomera, as I quickly learned, as the guys handed me the map and asked me to calculate the distance.

 

When I realised that I had no plan of action for after the eclipse, or anywhere to stay, and that I was in the middle of nowhere, I decided to just go with the flow, and didn't worry too much about it, and drew comfort from the fact that at least I'd had the foresight to bring dinner.

 

When we started getting close, the energy in the car changed from quiet expectation to a more intense, hair prickling kind of anticipation. I'd been chatting quite animatedly with the guys from the back seat the whole way there, but now I was nearly bouncing up and down like a child with excitement as we passed the parked cars, then bus loads of Japanese tourists, four-wheel drives and camper vans. The Japanese tourists had lined up all their shiny camera gear in front of their respective buses and had about 30-50 telescopes per bus pointed at the Sun. We kept driving though, for another couple of k's, headed for as close to the centre line of the path of totality as possible. When they explained this to me, I nearly exploded with glee, although I didn't really grasp the enormity of this fact until the moment of the eclipse itself.

 

The sky had finally cleared to just a bit of late afternoon haze, and the temperature was up around 27 degrees, a far cry from the sombre 11 degrees that morning in Adelaide. I was being taken to a spot on the earth that would be precisely in line with the Moon and the Sun as the eclipse took place. I thought back to the day before when all of this had been just a dream. I knew I was experiencing life at a much a higher frequency than the one I normally did, and things that would normally take a lot longer to materialize, seemed to be taking form almost instantly.

 

We finally saw a place where we could park. There were a few people dotted around the brush nearby. Some guy was hanging out at his ute with his sheepdog about 30 metres away. He looked liked a local with his cut-off sleeves and messy shoulder length hair. There were a couple with a tent next to their car some distance away too, as well as a tourist bus parked on the other side of the road behind us. Although there were really only a few others in the close vicinity, the air still felt tantalisingly pregnant with expectation.

 

We began unpacking the car and setting up all the gear. Alan had cut some sheets of polystyrene back in Melbourne to make a viewing box and we set about putting it together. The tripods were set up and the telescope came out of it's handsome handmade box. Gerard took care of setting up his two cameras and the Super Lens and soon everything was done. He found himself afterward, aching for somewhere to relieve himself and decided the only gentlemanly thing to do was drive the car down the road a couple of k's and find somewhere totally private. I think he had to go quite a way though as he was gone for quite a few minutes...

 

I had mentioned to Alan and Gerard earlier that I was interested in UFO's and I was secretly hoping I might get to see one fly past as the only other time was a long time ago, and it was pretty far away. I kept my eyes peeled to the skies, which by now were absolutely clear of any haze and a vivid, bright blue. YAY.

 

During the 1991 eclipse in Mexico City, tens of thousands of spectators saw a huge metallic disc sitting stationary as it slowly spun in the air and emitted a reddish glow. It was captured by 17 different cameras at the time and you can get the videos online if you do a search. Anyway, it was in the air above the city for 30 minutes before, during, and after the eclipse. But that is something I have learned since.

 

We did the practice run of the drill for when totality struck, when Alan would have me change the solar filter on the camera lens. Gerard was supposed to alert us when totality came, which only lasted 32 seconds, by saying "Totality". I would quickly remove the filter and say "Off", and put it into the special Tupperware container, heh. When totality was nearly over I was to put the filter back on and say "On" and he would continue snapping. It was a pretty funny and well, beyond cute for me. We laughed a lot while we were practicing too, so you can see they don't take themselves too seriously. Along with their brain power, personalities, preparedness and 5 star transport, it was everything that worked for this li'l diva. It was so hard to believe how amazing this was all turning out, but I kept reminding myself to accept it, because it was exactly what I'd set out to create. I was ticking off all the things on my checklist of requirements effortlessly. They were the perfect eclipse companions.

 

It was getting close to the time when "first touch" was going to occur and both Alan and Gerard started getting really anxious and a bit fidgety. They made last minute checks of their gear, which turned out to be good thing, as Gerard realised that one of the lenses on his camera wasn't right and changed it. They checked their watches, which had been synchronised to the second (NO! Really? Yes...REALLY), and I got some of the prepared polystyrene board so Alan could project the Sun's image onto it from the telescope's eyepiece while they both took pictures. The wind was up and it was becoming increasingly difficult to hold it so that it was straight, but I managed, and they were able to capture all the crucial moments without too much trouble in the end, but how the hell they'd planned to do all that on their own, I have no idea. There was only about an hour to go until totality and I wondered when the sky would begin to grow dark.

 

We occupied our time by switching from eclipse glasses to looking through the Super-Lens and watching the projector board. After 40 minutes or so I noticed that the desert was beginning to look darker and redder. It was so beautiful with the contrast in colours so much more pronounced all around us. Then it became darker and darker very quickly. The soil, the rocks, the trees, everything now looked like a deep blood red. We looked at each other and knew that this is what we'd all come so far to see. The hairs began to stand on end on the backs of our necks. The Moon's disc was almost all the way across the Sun, and we couldn't wait for the last of it to be covered. As Alan was focussing through the camera, Gerard and I put the glasses on and watched. We grew more and more animated as the last couple of minutes ticked by, talking about how it was going to be great. They'd told me earlier that when the Sun was in totality, it was ok to remove the glasses due to the rays being blocked, which I didn't know, so now I was really hanging out for when I could look at the Eclipse with my naked eyes.

 

"All is ready. The sky is clear of any obstruction, the gear is set-up and as good as it can be. 14.5cm telescope, low power eyepiece and reflective board, Nikon 1200mm lens on a cinematographic tripod with a Nikon F100 behind it loaded with several feet of Fuji's finest 400 ASA film ready to go. All the planning has been for this moment. Researching the websites for eclipse locations, photographic exposure tables, rain and cloud-cover forecasts; the planning, the buying, the hiring, the building, the packing and the travelling have come down to this moment, which finds Alan, Gerard and Liz at the side of the Stuart Highway A87 halfway between Pimba and Glendambo in South Australia on Wednesday Dec 4 2002, at 19:40 and 43 seconds local summer time."

 

More from "Eclipse 2002".

 

Then Gerard yelled out "Totality!" and exactly what happened next is rather hazy. I know that at some point filters must have been changed and photos were taken, but what I do remember is Gerard saying, "Liz, you should take the glasses off". I turned my back to the sun, whipped them off my face and when I jumped back to look at the sky, my jaw fell. It was so incredible. Oh my God, OH MY GOD, the COLOURS!" And then I was suddenly going "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!" at the top of my voice and started pogo-ing up and down on the spot like an African Masai tribesman, not caring at all what Alan and Gerard must have thought about my rather vociferous, ebullient display. It was just so stunningly beautiful. Think of Jodie Foster's face in Contact when she travelled through the wormhole and saw the galactic core for the first time. Ok? Awesome. That was me. That was ME!!!!!

 

It was so ineffable, so untranslatable, so profound, to watch the perfect circle of the Moon's disc finally moving into place, and exactly covering the Sun's. The resulting diffuse flares of intensely-hued colours that began around the white-hot corona, and radiated trails that filled the entire dome of the sky overhead and as far as one could see. They formed in streaks of rich fire-orange, electrically charged gold, plasma-perking purples, reds of all shades, the deepest royal blues and St Germaine's violet flame. Small fiery orbs of intense orange, called Bailey's Beads, gathered and bubbled around the edges of the Moon's jagged mountain peaks and looked like liquid mercury. Stars became visible for those few moments, as did the planet Mercury, which hung like a small jewel in the sky beneath the Sun.

 

Nothing can prepare you for that moment. No photo can ever do it justice, no words can completely convey all the emotions that you experience or what your eyes actually see. It is like looking into the Eye of God.

 

Physically being a part of that alignment makes you understand just how synchronised this universe is. As I watched the Moon gliding over the Sun, as our planet turned, I felt like I was a both a witness to and a part of a great cosmic clock, and I was watching as the cogs were sliding perfectly into place. It stirred something so deep and ancient within me, my enduring connection to the Sun, and I knew that I could never be the same again. Looking back I realise that the rays of light I was exposing myself to were in fact carriers of particular frequencies that open usually inactive codes within our DNA, often referred to as "junk". What a crock. It's not junk, it's programs and codes that help re-install our Otherware, and we all have it in our DNA.

 

All across the desert, from all the different groups of people scattered around us and beyond our line of sight came cries out to the sky like mine. People cheered, hooted, honked, laughed, screamed, clapped, cried. Dogs howled. Their voices were carried by the outback winds high up into the air where they met and playfully merged with the sounds of others that had come from further away, then they dropped back down to earshot where my ears would catch them, and I could feel their wonder too. We all knew we were part of something infinitely greater than us, that we were seeing something incomparable, that we were part of some vast intelligence that permeates and synchronises the entire Cosmos.

 

The guys were similarly affected and started exclaiming things, which again are hazy. What is clear, is how we all just looked at each other at one point, and with crazed smiles across our faces, spontaneously hugged all at once, laughing. Then they both paced around our site afterwards saying things like, "No one can ever take this away from us. We can say WE WERE HERE", and "We saw it!" We really saw it!" and, "We can never say "Awesome" about anything else again!" I thought statements like these, especially from Gerard, were rather brave, as I couldn't imagine him having outbursts like this very often, and we all went "Yeah!" quite loudly in agreement...and laughing that excited laugh that is almost the same as the one you do when you drink too much red cordial.

 

I thought a lot about the unbelievable relationships of proportional size and distance that it takes to actually create a total solar or lunar eclipse from our vantage point on earth. It is not a coincidence that the sun is 400 times bigger than our Moon, or that it also happens to be 400 times further away from the Moon than the Moon is to Earth. Unsurprisingly, I've wanted to learn a lot about sacred geometry since then and from what the astronomers are saying about the layout of the Universe, it seems nothing has been placed anywhere by accident.

 

At the end of 32 seconds, after the Moon began to move again, the first rays of light emerged again and for the briefest time, we were treated to the dazzling "diamond ring" effect that results. It's what most of the eclipse watchers as their favourite moment and I now know why. We took more photos and continued to watch through the cameras or the on the projector board for at least another half an hour. The Sun had only been 14 degrees above the horizon when totality had occurred so the Sun set quickly as the last whiskers of the pinks and oranges of sunset trailed across the sky. We packed up and left there, as I continued to watch the sky out of the car's back window, for as long as any traces of light remained. By 9:15 they'd all disappeared, having been devoured by the by the encroaching darkness, and we were plunged into night once again.

 

Then I realised I could start looking for UFOs so I spent the next twenty minutes scouring the skies some more.

 

We were all still pretty high from the eclipse experience, but by that time we had settled into our own reveries and the car was silent. We decided to drive down the road a little further until we found a spot to stay at for the night. The guys figured they'd just sleep in the car, and that was fine by me. I was SO glad I'd bought that blanket, let me tell you, as it can get nippy out there in the desert, even in summer. We'd passed some lovely salt lakes on our way there during the day, but hadn't had time to stop so we decided to try and find one to make camp at. Gerard found a great spot down a dip off the road beside one of these giant salt lakes that was quietly shimmering as it reflected the starlight. As there was no moon or cloud, the stars lit up with sparkles over the black canvas of the sky. It had been awhile since I'd been out to the country and I'd forgotten just how many stars there were up there, but it was great to be reminded. I breathed in deeply and imprinted all I could about that moment into my DNA. The Milky Way was looking particularly milky, and when I remembered we had a telescope with us I nearly lost it. I completely forgot all about stargazing that day, which for me is unusual. I'd wanted to bring my own telescope but knew it wasn't practical, and I hardly thought I would get the chance for sky watching without having my own transport.

 

It was becoming more and more evident that our meeting was no accident. Every single thing that I had visualized was coming true, and I felt totally in the zone. The best part was that I could get an astronomy lesson too, something I hadn't even thought remotely possible when I left for Adelaide the night before. I'd only just begun studying backyard astronomy on my own for a few months at that stage, so I really appreciated the opportunity to learn some more from people who actually knew their stuff.

 

We set up a rug to sit on, a buffet was laid out on the boot of the car, and we had a fabulous starlight picnic, then Alan got to work putting the telescope back together. He'd not only painstakingly constructed the box for it, he's also done several clever modifications to the telescope itself. It was incredibly smooth to manoeuvrer and the viewfinder was mounted in such a way that made it permanently aligned to the eyepiece. Not bad compared to my clumsy thing, which was big and had a great lens, but needed constant adjusting.

 

Gerard had a red-light torch for perusing the star map, and between them both they had all the star maps you could wish for, including a current one. I'd brought my Mighty Bright light as well so we consulted the maps for awhile under the open hood of the boot, deciding finally that we should definitely try to get a rare glimpse of the Andromeda galaxy, which was going to be low on the horizon, but still visible for a little while from where we were. It's the closest spiral galaxy to ours, and part of our local system of stars, but it's still 2.2 million light years away!

 

So we began. We looked at binary star systems including Sirius A and B, the Great Square of Pegasus, found Andromeda (it looked amazing, though tiny - but who cares, I saw it with my own eyes), some pretty star clusters, a wild nebula in the Orion constellation, and loads more. We had a ball. I was completely enthralled. Alan turned to me after awhile and asked whether there was anything I would like to see, and I faltered for a minute. I tried to pull a star's name, a constellation, anything from my rather limited astronomical knowledge that I'd like to view. Then I remembered! It slipped off my tongue so easily like it was something I said all the time: "I'd like to see The Pleiades please". With a quick look at the sky map, he and Gerard quickly turned the scope into position and aimed. When Alan told me I could take a look, I put my eye up to the lens. I could not have been less prepared for the reaction that I had next. It all happened in the instant when the photons of light, carried across space for my eyes to see, entered my retina. I was greeted by the most gorgeous display of hundreds of shining points of light, like diamonds on black velvet, in a beautiful cluster formation, with the seven main stars of the constellation contained within my field of view. It was breathtakingly beautiful and I gasped audibly. Within nano-seconds every part of my being, down to my DNA, was resounding with the recollection that the stars I was looking at, were HOME. Yes home. H-O-M-E. What!?@!

 

Tears had welled up in my eyes and I just wanted to cry it was so beautiful, but I had to catch myself in front of the guys, as I didn't want to come across as a complete lunatic. I didn't even know what to think myself. I had to process this. It was happening so fast. So I composed myself and said something like, "Wow. That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen." (twice in one day, shit, what was happening to me?), and I found it very hard to tear myself away from the telescope after that .

 

We did however move away for awhile, and we all sat around chatting some more, and telling more stories. I didn't speak about what had just happened to me. I just sat with it and tried to make some sense out of it. I really knew very little about them, except that they were also known as the Seven Sisters and were a favourite for stargazers. The Pleiades weren't a part of my research or knowledge base at all. I don't even know how I even remembered the name. Whatever was unfolding though, I knew one thing was undeniable. I must be going insane. NO, just jerkin with ya, sorry, anyway, it was undeniable.

 

Everything in me knew that I was somehow deeply connected to this star system, but how? I resolved to do some investigating when I got home. But that night in the Australian Outback, in my planetary home, I knew that I had remembered another home, a galactic home, and that it was just as real. It thrilled me to the core. I was beginning to remember who I was!

 

Gerard retired early that night, and went to sleep in the driver's seat fully reclined, while Alan and I told a few more stories. I'd asked him earlier in the car if he'd ever seen any UFO's and had hinted at something but didn't really want to discuss it much. But when we were alone I asked him to tell me again and he did, reluctantly at first, but then much more engagingly, as he began describing some unusual sightings he'd had growing up on the coast in New Zealand.

 

These were not some pissy two second glances at a tiny little light in the sky type of sightings, his were skilfully detailed, varied, and in one case he watched some craft over a few hours. He eventually worked out that there must have been a flight path near his home because he would regularly see them all following the same course. Commercial and Air Force planes would also fly past but whenever he would ring Air Traffic Control at any of the Air Force bases or airports, he would be told that it was one of their regular flights, just a bit off schedule. Then he would say, "NO, I saw Flight Number so and so depart on time, this was something else," which always fucked them up. I heard some pretty amazing stuff and realised there was more to this funny computer guy cum action hero, than I thought. It didn't surprise me in the least that we could have something like that in common. I've always been attracted to people that, despite appearances, upon scratching their surface, you find that there's a whole lot more going on with them than you knew.

 

Alan declared he was sleeping outside on the rug, and I stayed up late into the night, just me, the telescope, and the stars. I finally had to go to bed when I looked directly up at the sky overhead a couple hours later, and the black void turned into a flat plasma screen and the stars became eyes, and they were all looking at, Me. That was the limit.

 

I was able to lie down quite comfortably in the back seat if I lay on my side in the Toblerone-shaped wedge that had formed under the reclined seats from the front. I adjusted my pillow, put the blanket over me and slept like a baby.

 

I found out later that the salt lake we were led to is named, quite appropriately, Lake Hart. Heart....geddit? Can you believe it? I actually couldn't. The gods have such a sense of humour.

 

Since then a lot has happened, and my kin in the Pleiades are now a big part of my life. They have taught me so much. I'll write a lot more about them in later posts, trust me.

 

And for the next two and a half days Gerard, Alan and myself ended up staying together. I gave them several opportunities to ditch me, but we were really having a lot of fun, and they would always invite me to stay on. We were well matched intellectually, but we all had quite different worldviews, so it was nice challenge for us to be mutually respectful of each other's ideas while trying to challenge one another as coherently as possible. We spent much time on the road exchanging ideas, trying on stuff for size, or sometimes throwing them in the 'too hard" basket. If Alan slept then Gerard and I would talk about stuff and vice versa. They both worked as computer technicians, which is how they met, and pretty early on it became obvious to me that some of my ideas about reality were pretty hard for them to hear. They were always open-minded enough to let me speak though, and they'd bounce things off me. We talked sporadically about some of the ideas in the CWG books that were relevant to that moment, or about a particular insight I'd had, or how you might apply some of the ideas to your daily living, and it sparked much interest and debate. I found out about a year later that Alan and Gerard had both decided to give the books a read a few months after our trip, which was brilliant.

 

It was always reciprocally enlightening, being in their company. They were an absolute mine of information about all sorts of things and we never ran out of topics to discuss. And it wasn't long before I threw away my return bus ticket and we leisurely drove me around some of the most beautiful South Australian countryside on a very scenic route back to Melbourne. We went through quaint little towns that they'd found on previous jaunts, and I saw the constantly changing landscape from high lookouts and wide open roads.

 

I've experimented with stretching time ever since I first discovered that when you fall in love, you can make a kiss last an eternity. You can also make a boring flight pass more quickly if you get good at it, or create an atmosphere at a party where a deep, lengthy, important conversation that seems to last for hours, passes in only twenty minutes. I've always liked bending and stretching time to suit my needs and on that trip it happened constantly, but it felt out of our hands for the most part, like we were caught in a strange time-warp so we just surrendered to it. "Is that the time?" was something we ended up saying more times than I can remember. And the best part was, it wasn't just me saying it, we all were.

 

We "parked" out the next night in a back street of a village. We got there quite late at night, and parked the car at what appeared to be a dead end street, with no neighbours to annoy. The next morning, we were mildly shocked to discover that we'd parked only a short distance away from the municipal dump! A few curious Jersey cows had congregated at the fence beside the car as well, and from beneath thick eyelashes, they were casually eyeing its sleeping inhabitants. The next night we were in the Barossa Valley, slightly more prepared, and we woke up to a gorgeous view of a hillside covered in rows and rows of lush green grapevines and blue sunny skies.

 

Once we got back to Victoria, we made for the Grampians, where time seemed to bend and take on a mind of its own again. No matter how we tried to stick to a schedule, or drive faster it just seemed to take a really long time to get back to the City. We saw wild deer in the mountains though, which I loved, and we used the drive to delve a little deeper into our exchanges. My cheeks welcomed the break too as they'd begun to ache a little due to all the laughing I'd done over the last few days, and especially that last day. Alan had let loose with some of his real life death-defying adventures at around lunchtime and he had me crying with laughter a few times. He really is Batman if all that stuff is true, and he told them like it was. So at around dusk, the tone changed slightly and I got to hear about a poltergeist that he'd lived with for over a year, and some other pretty far-out stuff that had happened to him. Gerard spent some time wanting to discuss the Akashic Field, so I fielded questions from both of them about that for awhile. We talked about reincarnation, dimensions of reality co-existing in the same space without knowing about each other, consciousness, the astral world, the Noetic Sciences Institute, a whole lot of stuff that I really love and it was a nice way to leave things.

 

We'd gone from being complete strangers to all being deeply transformed in some way by our meeting, in three and a half days. We'd trusted in our flexibility in each moment, and stretched ourselves beyond our normal comfort zones, creating or participating in large and small miracles, so it seemed, at every turn. We used our brains, which came as a great joy to me as I don't get to talk quantum physics with many of my disco friends. It's not their fault I know...but it was a nice change. I also knew that I'd helped to open up their perspective in many ways, as they did for me, in HUGE ways. My heart knew that I had been drawn to them because their soul's urge for change, and expansion, had already begun, by nudging them into unconsciously creating the conditions for me to enter their lives. I'd definitely sent out a call for them too, for the same reasons. The difference was that they had no idea I was coming along. I, on the other hand, had been certain that I would find them.

 

We finally made it back to Melbourne sometime around 9 pm that night. It was a lot later than we all thought we'd be back by, and we'd all been together non-stop for 3 and a half days. On our way home, I told them where I lived and it turned out that Alan lived just around the corner from me! It was nice, as dropping me off didn't pose any inconvenience at all. We swapped numbers and said our farewells amidst bear hugs and kisses goodbye. It was good to be home, back to my bed, but I could've kept going for at least another day if I'd had to. They dropped me off right to my front door.

 

We all knew it was meant to be, and it was.

We've all kept in touch too, Batman, Robin and I.

 

I'm forever in their debt for everything they shared with me, for their kindness and generosity and for behaving like perfect gentlemen the entire time. Men like these are really rare... but if you are one them, you should try going to an eclipse!

Iedereen, Prettige Kerstdagen en een gelukkig en gezond Nieuw Jaar.

 

I wish all my friends a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

taken @ Crie Worldview Crie Style

texture: JoesSistah flickr

Durante este el corto pero emocionante viaje a Punta de Lobos en la ciudad de Pichilemu Chile, al observar a los Surfers cortar las olas con sus tablas me di cuenta que somos tan diminutos como inmensos a la vez, somos un universo individual infinito dentro de cada persona, pero fuera somos tan pequeños como una simple particula microscopica, mi vision del mundo ha cambiado nuevamente otorgandome el conocimiento y la conciencia de que somos pequeños pero juntos somos grandes, una frase tosca pero adecuada y con estas palabras doy vida a pequeño humano

----------------------------------

During this short but exciting trip to Punta de Lobos in the town of Pichilemu Chile, to watch the Surfers cut through the waves with their boards I realized that we are as small as huge as well , we are an infinite individual universe within each person , but outside are as small as a single microscopic particle , my worldview has changed again giving me the knowledge and awareness that we are small but together we are great , a rough but adequate sentence and these words give life a little human

When I was a boy the word 'Yggdrasil' fascinated me. I'd heard of it as the Scandinavian World Tree, but actually I found the combination of letters much more interesting...

Now in the Sarawak Museum of Kuching, Borneo, I was fascinated by yet another word, the Kayo' Aya': the Big Tree, also called the Tree of Life of the indigenous peoples here.

In the culture of the Orang Ulu - the Upriver People - of Borneo (to use a term comprising both Malaysian Sarawak and Indonesian Kalimantan), especially among the Kenyah and Kayan tribes, this Tree of Life is a potent symbol which is closely connected to the well-being, indeed the origins of humankind. In their rainforest, jungle worldview an upperworld creeper impregnates an underworld tree and this delivers up the first human beings, man and woman. Thus also the form of the tree with a proper trunk and at the same time outwardly and upwardly spiralling tendrils. As a symbol of life, the hornbill ( the Burung Kenyalang) is always at its crown, signifying and pointing to the Celestial Upperworld. (This symbolism has been adopted by Christian Catholic communities in these tribal areas although not without controversy.)

The rendition of their legend in this photograph was painted in the early 1950s by Kenyah artists from the upper regions of the Kayan River. They were employed to that purpose by the Sarawak Museum. This museum was the brainchild in 1891 of the great second 'White Rajah' of Sarawak, Charles Brooke (1829-1917). Not only was Brooke an able administrator and legislator, but he also had a keen interest in the native cultures of his principality. A good indication of that love is the memorial obelisk erected for him in 1924 in front of the (former) Kuching courthouse, on the right bank of the Sarawak River. The four sides of the pedestal portray the main peoples of Sarawak: Chinese, Dayak, Kayan and Malay (sculpted by one Frederick John Wilcoxson (1888-????)). The Kayan and Kenyah groups are very closely connected. From Yggdrasil to Kayo' Aya'... what a privilege to take it all in.

This photo was taken on the first floor of the Sarawak Museum but the lighting is not as good as I would have wished it to be... Even a certain Pharmacist from V. is relatively unclear... The building was apparently constructed after the models of the town halls of medieval Normany - so I learned from an historic marker on the site. Hence the curious columns... at least for Borneo.

Hey guys,

 

another year comes to an end and i have to say it was a strange one for me. Lots of things changed for me personally. On the one I finished my studies and obtained my bachelor's degree and found a job shortly afterwards. On the other hand I still struggle a lot with maintaining friendships and had to learn quite a lot of crazy things about other people, some of whom certainly changed my worldview and made me questing quite a lot about myself and the person I want to be. Overall 2017 made me feel like I need to change quite a lot of things in my life from now on. Gladly, I already started doing exactly that. For example I got a lot more into drawing, another hobby of mine and I even displayed and sold some of my works at local conventions. While a lot is changing, my love for Lego stays the same, though. It might seem like I am loosing interest, but I am certainly not. In fact, even if I only managed to put out 10 photos of 8 finished builds, this year was still quite successful, as my works were features in Blocks Magazine, the local BrickManie convention and four times by The Brothers Brick (a new record for me). Attending the convention was a lot of fun and I feel honored by all the recognition I have gotten this year. So, all that is left to say is THANK YOU and may you have a happy new year!

 

Cheers,

 

Ordo

 

List of Builds:

 

1. At the Studio

 

2. Going down - Star Wars "Uncertain Ways" 1.14

 

3. Waiting for the storm

 

4. Life on Mars

 

5. XB-7 Airspeeder

 

6. XB-5 Airspeeder

 

7. Presents for the Sultane

 

8. Candykoma

 

PS: Stay tuned for more builds next year! I am far from done yet and I have big plans, especially for Uncertain Ways!

Ajmer, India

Kamera: Nikon F3 (1982)

Linse: Nikkor-S Auto 50mm f1.4 (1970)

Film: Kodak 5222 @ ISO 250

Kjemi: Rodinal (1:50 / 9 min. @ 20°C)

 

Wikipedia: Gaza Genocide

 

Double Down News: Jewish Journalist Exposes Israel’s DARKEST SECRET (Publ. 4. Sept. 2025)

 

- By Katie Halper (b. 1980/81)

 

Halper: It brings me no pleasure to compare what Israel's doing to what the Nazis did.

 

But how can we not?

 

Because you have things like ghettos. You have things like starvation. You have things like concentration camps. You have things like the planned systematic extermination of people.

 

Now, a lot of people talk about the banality of evil. There was a real cold detachment, industrialized murder of Jews and others during the Holocaust.

 

What's so disturbing about what Israel is doing and the IDF is doing is that they are doing it with glee. And unlike the Nazis, they're not hiding it, and we know this because they document this.

 

They document not just the war crimes, but they document their glee.

 

You even have Israeli soldiers themselves comparing themselves to Nazis.

 

One of them said: «I felt like a Nazi. It looked exactly like we were the Nazis and they were the Jews.»

 

They; of course, being Palestinians.

 

Another soldier said: «It is justified, and in fact essential, to learn from every possible source, even, however shocking it may sound, how the German army fought in the Warsaw Ghetto.»

 

So there we have Israeli soldiers literally learning from Nazi tactics and comparing themselves explicitly to the Nazis, and the Palestinians to the Jews.

 

Ironically, according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of antisemitism, it is antisemitic to, quote; «draw comparisons between contemporary Israeli policies to that of the Nazis.»

 

So I guess those soldiers are themselves antisemitic according to this definition.

 

Another point of comparison, although it's actually a point of departure, is the relationship between the genocide and public opinion:

 

Now, the Nazis tried as best they could to hide what they were doing, and in fact, the biggest concentration camps that they built were outside of Germany, and they didn't do them in public places.

 

And; even though it was illegal to resist the Nazis, you did have some resistance from people who were fighting against what the Nazis were doing within Germany.

 

In Israel, however, everyone knows what's happening. It's documented by legacy media, it's documented by social media, and yet the vast majority of Israelis think that the government is using either an appropriate amount of force or not enough force against the Palestinians.

 

You even have young people dancing to genocide:

 

[Israeli dance party video, chanting in hebrew]

 

- May your village burn!

- May your village burn!

- May your village burn!

 

Halper: Another thing that Israeli society seems to be A-okay with is the rape of Palestinians.

 

Now, western media spread a narrative of mass rape used as a weapon by Hamas.

 

Every single so-called witness to rape on October 7th has backtracked. No media, however, has corrected this.

 

But what has the western media totally ignored, which, ironically enough, the Israeli media has covered? The rape of Palestinians.

 

There's literal video footage of Israeli soldiers who pick up a Palestinian, raise their shields to hide what they're doing, but are obviously gang-raping him.

 

So what happened next? There were protests.

 

Protests against the rape? No.

 

There were protests that have been dubbed Right to Rape protests.

 

You have people - including members of government - you have soldiers, you have civilians; who protested the punishment of rapists. That's what they're upset about. It really is insane when you think about it.

 

Literally, the entire western media apparatus devoted itself to talking about rapes for which there is no evidence, and devoted itself to remaining silent about rapes which were documented by Israeli media.

 

One Israeli journalist in a Times of Israel blog post said:

 

«Lebensraum needed for Israel's exploding population.»

 

And if that sounds familiar, it may be because Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) used the word Lebensraum in Mein Kampf (1925) to describe what was needed to move the German population eastward.

 

Likewise; Israel is expanding - not just in Palestine, the West Bank, Gaza; but also Syria and Lebanon. And there are calls from up on high, from Israeli officials for creating a Greater Israel.

 

This plan for Greater Israel is so frightening that even Moshe Ya'alon (b. 1950), a former IDF commander, said:

 

Moshe Ya’alon: [in hebrew] «That worldview is based on Jewish Supremacy. Mein Kampf in reverse. My hair stands on end as I say this.»

 

Here are some other comparisons that one cannot help but draw between the Israeli government and the Nazi government.

 

Hitler, in 1939 - speaking to the German parliament - said; «If the world of international financial jewry, both in and outside of Europe, should succeed in plunging the nations into another World War, the result will be the extermination of the Jewish race in Europe.»

 

In 2016 during an interview, former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman (b. 1958) said, quote, «If they,» - the people of Gaza - «engage in a new war on Israel, it will be the final war for them because we will completely destroy them.»

 

The following is a quote from Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945), the head of the SS: «We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us.»

 

Now listen to this from Ezra Yakim, a veteran from the Deir Yassin massacre (April 9 1948) - one of the worst massacres of the Nakba - who, on October 13th 2023 talked to Israeli soldiers about the need to go into battle:

 

Ezra Yakim: [in hebrew] «Be triumphant and finish them off as quickly as possible until there is no memory of them. Erase them; their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live.»

 

[…]

 

Ezra Yakim: [in hebrew] «Tomorrow, Hezbollah could send airstrikes on us and all the Arabs in the land here may rise against us. We have no excuse, every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them. If you have an Arab neighbour, don’t wait until he comes into your house. Enter his house and shoot.»

 

Halper: Some of the things that were said and written by early founders of Zionism sounded like they could've been said and written by Nazis.

 

We can see this clearly with Theodor Herzl (1860-1904); the founder of political Zionism.

 

Herzl blamed Jews for creating antisemitism. He said that antisemitism was caused by, quote - «… our excessive production of mediocre intellects. In some point in our history, some inferior human material got into our unfortunate people and blended with it.

 

He also said; «We want to let respectable anti-semites participate in our project.»

 

«Our project» being the founding of Israel.

 

He also said; «The anti-semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-semitic countries our allies.»

 

Ze'ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940) [born as Vladimir Jabotinsky in present-day Ukraine; formerly part of Russia]; the father of revisionist or right-wing Zionism, said -

 

«The Jews are very nasty people and their neighbors hate them, and they are right. Our starting point is to take the typical Yid of today and to imagine his diametrical opposite. Because the Yid is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum, we shall endow the ideal image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty.»

 

[Personal note: Just like the ideal image of Kal-El, otherwise known as the american superhero cartoon character Superman - see: Roy Schwartz - The Jewish Origins of Superman [Pt. 1] (publ. 2 Aug. 2022).]

 

He was also open about the colonial nature of Zionism: «We shall try to spirit the penniless population, Palestinians, across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying it employment in our country. But the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.»

 

Uri Zvi Greenberg (1896-1981) [born in present-day Ukraine, formerly part of Austria-Hungary], an Israeli poet, journalist, and politician said:

 

«Those loathsome Jews are vomited out by any healthy collective and states, not because they are Jews, but because of their Jewish repulsiveness.»

 

David Ben-Gurion (1886-1976) [born as David Grün in present-day Poland, formerly part of Russia], the first Prime Minister of Israel, said Jews, quote:

 

«...have no roots. They are rootless cosmopolitans. There can be nothing worse than that. They are sterile Jewish masses living parasitically off of the body of an alien economic body.»

 

Lest you think that Israel was founded to save the Jews, listen to this fascinating quote by Ben-Gurion:

 

«If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England and only half by transferring them to the land of Israel, I would choose the latter.»

 

[Personal note: By the way, David Grün could not even speak proper made-up hebrew; an invented modern language]

 

So there you have famous Zionist and Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, saying he was willing to let hundreds of thousands of Jewish children die for a national project.

 

Creating a Jewish majority where there was none was obviously going to lead to, at the very least, ethnic cleansing.

 

And when there was resistance, it would lead to massacres and ultimately genocides.

 

And that's what we're seeing today.

 

An Israeli protester said in June 2025:

 

Amram Zahavi (Israeli protester): «I want to apologize to the World. To be a Jew and Israeli in a country that behaves like Germany; the Nazis, at 1940. Israel is now a complete copy of what happened in Germany.»

 

Halper: I never felt comfortable making comparisons between Nazi Germany and contemporary Israel.

 

But today, I find myself unable to remain silent about the similarities.

 

You can't help but comparing the emaciated skeletal bodies of Palestinians and Palestinian children to the emaciated and skeletal bodies of Jewish people during the Nazi Holocaust.

 

And when you see videos of people in concentration camps during the Holocaust clamoring for food; how can you not think of the Palestinians trying to get food from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation - which lures them by offering them food; only to kettle them or shoot them?

 

I, myself, lost family members during the Holocaust, and I've spent the last year and a half interviewing Holocaust survivors who are themselves speaking out against the genocide Israel is currently perpetuating.

 

How can we be bystanders to a genocide when genocide exterminated so many of our people?

 

Never again doesn't just require us not to commit genocide, it requires us not to be silent.

 

We must speak out.

 

We cannot be silent bystanders.

 

Never Again is NOW.

 

You never hear opinions like these in the mainstream media or on legacy media. Much of legacy media serves as a stenographers for Israel. That's why independent media is so important.

 

So please support places like Double Down News and the Katie Halper Show on Patreon.

After a fine Paella lunch I noticed in a wall of the Callejón de Agua this plaquette to the memory of Washington Irving (1783-1859). It commemorates his love for things Spanish. He's probably best known for his often macabre stories of Sleepy Hollow, but his Tales of the Alhambra (1832) is a good read, too; and his biography of Christopher Columbus (1828) is remarkable among other reasons for the fact that Irving claims that medievals believed the world to be flat. Thus he can posit Columbus as enlightened for thinking in 1492 that he might sail west to arrive in the east.

But Irving was dead wrong about medieval worldviews. Great Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), for example, author of the Comedia, could not have envisaged his poem without knowing the world was round. And Dante was not alone...

As luck would have it I was walking a bit later in the beautiful María Luisa Park. Among Judas-trees - Cercis siliquastrum - there's a small monument dedicated to Dante. It was a gift of the Dante Alighieri Society of Sevilla in 1969. Sculpted by Juan Abascal Fuentes (1922-2003) it provides for a pleasant, shady place for contemplating the World.

Durante este el corto pero emocionante viaje a Punta de Lobos en la ciudad de Pichilemu Chile, al observar a los Surfers cortar las olas con sus tablas me di cuenta que somos tan diminutos como inmensos a la vez, somos un universo individual infinito dentro de cada persona, pero fuera somos tan pequeños como una simple particula microscopica, mi vision del mundo ha cambiado nuevamente otorgandome el conocimiento y la conciencia de que somos pequeños pero juntos somos grandes, una frase tosca pero adecuada y con estas palabras doy vida a pequeño humano

----------------------------------

During this short but exciting trip to Punta de Lobos in the town of Pichilemu Chile, to watch the Surfers cut through the waves with their boards I realized that we are as small as huge as well , we are an infinite individual universe within each person , but outside are as small as a single microscopic particle , my worldview has changed again giving me the knowledge and awareness that we are small but together we are great , a rough but adequate sentence and these words give life a little human

回憶起小時候觀看各個動畫電影，《風之谷》給了我極大的震撼。無論是是它獨特的世界觀、或是流暢急速的飛行場景、抑或是感人至深的劇情，在我年幼的心靈中都留下了深刻的印象。

 

娜烏西卡肩膀上站著她的夥伴Teto，並駕駛的飛行器飛在三隻正在沙漠中奔跑的王蟲上方，王蟲在沙漠快速本跑之下，後面揚起來陣陣的沙塵。在飛行器的製作上非常的注重與原作相同，後方的擾流板可以往下搬動。在電影中滑翔翼在前方會發出藍光的地方，我也加了一個紅色的發亮Brick在裏頭，在按壓滑翔翼後方的推進器之後前方即可發出紅光!

 

在這個作品中，我不僅僅只想將電影的魅力展現出來，而是在電影啟發下，構思了一個關於電影後故事的概念。娜烏西卡駕駛著她熟悉的滑翔翼，此時環境中的瘴氣已經消失，她沒有戴著防毒面具，而王蟲們也不再是憤怒的紅色眼睛狀態，而是心情平靜的藍色眼睛狀態。她在空中滑翔，與王蟲們共同遨遊於沙漠中，珍惜著這用勇氣換來得來不易的自由。

 

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Recalling my childhood memories of watching various animated films, "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind" had a profound impact on me. Its unique worldview, the smooth and fast-paced flying scenes, or the deeply touching storyline, it all left a lasting impression on my young mind.

 

Nausicaä pilots her glider above three Ohmus running through the desert, their movements stirring up clouds of sand behind them. Attention to the original, with movable stabilizers at the rear. I added a red LED light brick inside, which emits red light when the rear of the glider thruster is pressed!

 

In this creation, I conceive a concept for a story after the movie. Nausicaä pilots her familiar glider, with the toxic miasma of the environment now dissipated. She no longer wears a gas mask, and the Ohmu are no longer in their angry red-eyed state but have calm blue eyes. She glides through the air, roaming the desert together with the Ohmus, cherishing the hard-earned freedom won with courage.

  

------------------------------------

ideas.lego.com/challenges/6e21d7aa-7751-4f19-9fed-f250001...

Let’s throw off the constraints of our bodies and create a better world. Through the use of technology, science and reason we will build a new world that doesn’t limit us in anyway. We will sell our souls to the machine in order to partake of transhumanism. We will become transhuman, we will become patented. We will become transhuman, we will become commodified. “Transhumanism: a worldview in which human nature has no special, cultural or political status.”

 

Welcome to the pseudo-enlightenment of techno-gnosticism. Welcome to the pseudo-enlightenment of techno-utopianism. Welcome to the pseudo-enlightenment of techno-globalism. Welcome to the pseudo-enlightenment of false consciousness. This antichrist enlightenment is at war with humanity. This antichrist enlightenment is at war with reality. This antichrist enlightenment is at war with truth. This antichrist enlightenment is at war with God.

 

Destroy the family; destroy parental rights; destroy men and women, they’re just a social construct; let’s destroy traditional marriage; let’s destroy childbirth, we’ll use artificial wombs/pods; let’s destroy dating, get your hookup apps and screw as many people as possible, even better: AI porn and sexbots; let’s destroy good old-fashioned social interaction; let’s destroy culture, let’s go woke and flip it upside down, let’s destroy it with mass migration; ultimately, let’s destroy humanity. Like babies in the womb, humans are parasitic organisms, so let’s abort them—it’s not murder, they’re subtranshumans. Indeed, our goal is to create a new transhuman society. The end goal: to create a society without families, parents, men or women, marriage, human procreation, dating, social interaction, culture, or humanity.

 

Let’s make humanity in the image of our imagination, let’s make it transhuman. Let’s make a garden for them, a metaverse. Eat the fruit of the serpent and indulge in your new digital senses. Numb your natural senses. Stimulate your digital senses. Enjoy your lusts. Build your tower to heaven and defy God. Come live in the serpent’s paradise. The serpent’s world is a twisted world, a deceptive world, an upside down world, a dystopian world—hell on earth.

 

Let’s make a new god, let’s build a golden calf. Let’s build an idol with technology. This is your new god who brought you out of the limitations of humanity. Let’s celebrate with feasting and drinking. Let’s bow down and worship the Image of the Beast. Let’s leave the human Dark Ages and enter the transhuman Renaissance.

 

My people: come out of Egypt, come out of the machine, come out of the antichrist system, come out of Babylon. “Come out of her (Babylon), my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues; for her sins are piled up to heaven, and God has remembered her crimes.” “Woe, woe, O Babylon! For in a single moment your judgment has come.”

 

... cette divinité associée à la vie, aux semences, et placée au centre de la cosmovision et des mythologies des peuples autochtones de la région.

 

ENGHLISH :

It is a space dedicated to the Indian goddess of the earth. Opened in 1996, this museum is organized as a sacred citadel as formerly. It is like an altar to Mother Earth (Pachamama in Quechua and Aymara),that divinity associated to life, to seeds, and placed in the center of the worldview and mythologies of the indigenous peoples of the region.

do the textures work with this shot...?

Friends, have you ever noticed 🤔 that in character, actions, behavior you are similar to your parents? Or maybe your friends, relatives told you about it? Or maybe over the years you have begun to notice the similarity more

and more?

⠀

I know many families in which children are the complete opposite of their parents, as well as vice versa.

⠀

Do you look like your parents? Or are you radically different and your worldview is different? What personality qualities did they convey to you and to what extent?

⠀

Ph: @safronoviv_photo

Md: @kseniazhdanova

Mua: @makeup_style_irina

Loc: @wonderstudio

⠀

#blackhair #blackandwhite #eyelash #fashiondesign #flashphotography #lip #lipstick #makeover #smile #style #moskvafotosession #instagramnedels #portrait_vision #portrait photography #NikonD800 #safronoviv_photo

December 22, 2015 - Morning of the Winter Solstice - Western Hemisphere (Rochester, New York US North America)

 

Sunrise 7:39 AM EST

Sunset 4:38 PM EST

 

++ ++ ++ ++ ++

 

The Winter Solstice

in Latin known as the 'Sun standing still' Day

or as I have read Day Of The Sunturn

 

this phenomena is well known

and observed/ noted/ celebrated

from ancient of days

 

when one lived closer to the natural world

these occurrences played a large part of ones life

we are removed from nature ofttimes

far removed

 

today we control our living conditions

live in an artificial created environment with

temperature/ light/ humidity/ degree of isolation

all adjusted for maximum comfort/ productivity

 

I'm thankful for my flat situated west to east

for the many windows that can open

for the trees - grasses - plants

the bird life and natural

occurrences nearby

 

the Judah-Christian worldview affirms that the

natural world = the creation: is a gift for humanities good

"given" to us as a race to use responsibly for the good of all folk

 

today on this winter solstice I celebrate nature

the natural world all around and commit to

respect and be a responsible part of the

"created" world

 

George

From The Front Room

 

++ ++ ++ ++ ++

 

image by Photo George

copyrighted: ©2015 GCheatle

all rights reserved

 

locator: GAC_8649