A soon to be former McDonald's at Village Plaza along 1065 Easton Avenue, pictured here in June 2020.

 

This oddly mint-capped McDonald's was likely once red-roofed and opened at Village Plaza in 1975, though official town records remain mostly obfuscated.

 

This location was planned to close in June 2024, after several decades of familiar operation, will now extend its long overdue expiration for a few weeks longer as its newer location puts finishing touches at its nearby Rutgers Plaza, nearly across the street.

 

The newly-built gray box will replace an equally aged and vacated, former 70's era Burger King, was demolished for its construction, which was approved in November 2022.

 

Very few "vintage" capped McDonald's that haven't submitted to gray kiosk hell can now be counted on one hand in the state of New Jersey.

 

Tribute to Cesco Dessanti

 

Il mare di Rovigno sicuramente ha rappresentato uno dei punti importanti nella sua già difficile infanzia ed adolescenza. Rovigno con la sua bellezza naturalistica prorompente non poteva non essere presente in lui . E proprio l’essere strappato da quella terra ,non certo per sua scelta, ha contribuito al suo malessere esistenziale. Nel suo studio romano ha sentito il bisogno di circondarsi di quei ricordi e profumi persistenti della sua infanzia.

  

“Ritroviamo il tema anche nella raccolta di pensieri, “Così nel tempo” dove le parole affiorano in immagini pittoriche, graffiti , opera grafica insieme, e a volte zampate affondanti nella vita. Il loro contenuto è un continuo interrogarsi, una memoria di cui le parole-colore dicono dell’infanzia,dolorosa,delle radici non mai tradite, dell’esistenza in travaglio”

Francesca Boesch

 

Un esempio sul tema lo ritroviamo in “Mare sottile”

 

Mare sottile

lungo tua verticale

scorgo

sculture arcane

di fondale

 

quando t'impenni

e sbavi mi urli

che la trasparenza

per rinnovarsi

si deve offuscare

 

Cesco Dessanti

  

The Rovinj sea has definitely been one of the important points in his already difficult childhood and adolescence. Rovinj with its exuberant natural beauty could not but be present in him. And just it is ripped from the ground, not by choice, has contributed to its existential malaise. In his studio he felt the need to surround yourself with those memories and persistent aromas of his childhood.

  

"We find the theme also in the collection of thoughts," So in time "where words come out in pictorial images, graffiti, graphic work together, and sometimes paws sinking in life. Their content is a constant questioning, good memory from childhood say the words-color, painful, the roots have never betrayed, existence laboring "

Francesca Boesch

 

An example on the subject we find in "Thin Sea"

 

Thin sea

along your vertical

I see

arcane carvings

the seabed

 

when you

wheelie

I scream and drool

that transparency

to find themselves

you have to obfuscate

Cesco Dessanti

 

“NEW SATELLITES WILL BE DESIGNED FOR EASE OF MAINTENANCE & REPAIR”

 

I used to think the orbiter depicted was a possible high cross-range McDonnell Douglas Corporation “Phase-B” orbiter configuration, possibly the “-176 C”. That based on what I gleaned from the following sites:

 

Thanks to user flateric’s June 4, 2007 post, as extracted from AIAA paper 78-1469, “Space Shuttle Orbiter Configuration Case History”, presented at the AIAA AIRCRAFT SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE, Los Angeles, California, August 21-23, 1978. At:

 

www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/us-space-shuttle-project...

 

And/or:

 

space.nss.org/the-space-shuttle-decision-chapter-8/

 

Specifically:

 

space.nss.org/wp-content/uploads/p335-mcdonnel-douglas-de...

Both above credit: National Space Society website

 

However, the ‘redacted’ white block obfuscates the “Space Shuttle Program” logo used by North American Rockwell during at least Phase-B” (double prime) of the shuttle developmental program, visible in the last photo linked to below.

 

Finally, the satellite is like nothing I’ve seen before, with that basket-like lampshade thing. Although the octagonal bus to me suggests that it’s a ‘Mariner’. Finally, note that the tether is only for conveyance of the package, and neither of the Astronauts’ PLSS appear to be capable of propulsion. Pretty cavalier ‘spacewalking’.

 

Unfortunately, the artist remains unknown. Whoever it is, I believe it’s the same person’s works I’ve linked to below.

Holga GFN with Portra 400 film

“An Air Force B-70 Valkyrie takes off, in this artist’s conception, with a six engine surge of power. To be built by North American Aviation, the delta winged bomber is designed to fly at three times the speed of sound and permit “shirt sleeve” environment for its crew. The B-70 will use runways presently accommodating Strategic Air Command B-52s.”

 

Awesome, although the artist’s signature has been obfuscated. Thanks to the wonderful Aerospace Projects Review website, the artist is confirmed to be John T. McCoy, along with a gorgeous posting of it in COLOR…along with a WHOLE LOT more, at:

  

www.aerospaceprojectsreview.com/blog/?s=B-70&searchsu...

 

Specifically:

 

www.aerospaceprojectsreview.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2...

 

I keep meaning to become a Patreon, I know it will be WELL WORTH it.

 

Disappointingly, very little is available regarding John T. McCoy, other than he was born in 1905. Fortunately, the following, buried in the September 1967 issue of “THE AIRMAN”, it being the Air Force “Anniversary Issue” of the magazine:

 

“On page 1, under the table of contents, you will find a listing of special credits for this special issue. Listed there is the name of Col. John T. McCoy, who provided us his painting used on page 22. Colonel McCoy is a Reservist. He is also a nationally acknowledged aviation artist and historian. Many of his old photographs, historical facts and anecdotes in this issue are from his most extensive files. During a short tour of active duty, he made these available to THE AIRMAN, and provided helpful advice on significant historical subjects. He recently had a one-man art showing in the Smithsonian Institution.”

 

A WIN! Continue to Rest In Peace Sir, thank you for your multifaceted Service.

OK - a bit fanciful - it's not an especially good saw, but I was drawn to the serrated edge of this ice/salt/water area at the edge of a lagoon in southern Bolivia.

 

I've uploaded the full size, original version of this, for anyone interested tot look, as it's all about texture and detail and I'm just guessing that Flickr at normal size is going to 'suppress' that more than a little! (Yep - I just checked and the 4097x4097 original size is waaayyyyy better than the above, teeny size after upload!)

 

Musings on: obfuscating scale in photographs

Riguardo al decreto sicurezza e all'utilizzo di militari nelle città il ministro ha detto: "i cittadini non hanno paura dei poliziotti, dei carabinieri o dei militari, ma sono i malintenzionati ad averne"

Ignazio La Russa, ministro della Difesa della Repubblica Italiana, 29 Luglio 2008

 

A proposito della sentenza sui fatti di Bolzaneto, il ministro della Difesa ha affermato: "Da qualcuno è stata definita mite, io dico che è stata probabilmente giusta ed ha dimostrato che ogni teoria su una immagine negativa delle forze dell'ordine era politica, propagandistica e ideologica, destinata a vacillare ed è crollata"

Ignazio La Russa, ministro della Difesa della Repubblica Italiana, 19 Luglio 2008

 

Così Nick Davies, pluripremiato giornalista del Guardian, racconta i fatti accaduti durante il summit del G8 di Genova nel 2001; un'immagine chiaramente negativa, propagandistica, ideologica e destinata [sic] a crollare:

 

The bloody battle of Genoa

When 200,000 anti-globalisation protesters converged on the Italian city hosting the G8 summit in 2001, all but a handful came to demonstrate peacefully. Instead, many were beaten to a pulp by seemingly out-of-control riot police. But was there something more sinister at play? And will the victims ever see proper justice? Nick Davies reports.

 

It was just before midnight when the first police officer hit Mark Covell, swiping his truncheon down on his left shoulder. Covell did his best to yell out in Italian that he was a journalist but, within seconds, he was surrounded by riot-squad officers thrashing him with their sticks. For a while, he managed to stay on his feet but then a baton blow to the knee sent him crashing to the pavement.

 

Lying on his face in the dark, bruised and scared, he was aware of police all around him, massing to attack the Diaz Pertini school building where 93 young demonstrators were bedding down on the floor for the night. Covell's best hope was that they would break through the chain around the front gates without paying him any more attention. If that happened, he could get up and limp across the street to the safety of the Indymedia centre, where he had spent the past three days filing reports on the G8 summit and on its violent policing.

 

It was at that moment that a police officer sauntered over to him and kicked him in the chest with such force that the entire lefthand side of his rib cage caved in, breaking half-a-dozen ribs whose splintered ends then shredded the membrane of his left lung. Covell, who is 5ft 8in and weighs less than eight stone, was lifted off the pavement and sent flying into the street. He heard the policeman laugh. The thought formed in Covell's mind: "I'm not going to make it."

 

The riot squad were still struggling with the gate, so a group of officers occupied the time by strolling over to use Covell as a football. This bout of kicking broke his left hand and damaged his spine. From somewhere behind him, Covell heard an officer shout that this was enough - "Basta! Basta!" - and he felt his body being dragged back on to the pavement.

 

Now, an armoured police van broke through the school gates and 150 police officers, most wearing crash helmets and carrying truncheons and shields, poured into the defenceless building. Two officers stopped to deal with Covell: one cracked him round the head with his baton; the other kicked him several times in the mouth, knocking out a dozen teeth. Covell passed out.

 

There are several good reasons why we should not forget what happened to Covell, then aged 33, that night in Genoa. The first is that he was only the beginning. By midnight on July 21 2001, those police officers were swarming through all four floors of the Diaz Pertini building, dispensing their special kind of discipline to its occupants, reducing the makeshift dormitories to what one officer later described as "a Mexican butcher's shop". They and their colleagues then illegally incarcerated their victims in a detention centre, which became a place of dark terror.

 

The second is that, seven years later, Covell and his fellow victims are still waiting for justice. On Monday, 15 police, prison guards and prison medics finally were convicted for their part in the violence - although it emerged yesterday that none of them would actually serve prison terms. In Italy, defendants don't go to jail until they have exhausted the appeals process; and in this case, the convictions and sentences will be wiped out by a statute of limitations next year. Meanwhile, the politicians who were responsible for the police, prison guards and prison medics have never had to explain themselves. Fundamental questions about why this happened remain unanswered - and they hint at the third and most important reason for remembering Genoa. This is not simply the story of law officers running riot, but of something uglier and more worrying beneath the surface.

 

The fact that this story can be told at all is testament to seven years of hard work, led by a dedicated and courageous public prosecutor, Emilio Zucca. Helped by Covell as well as his own staff, Zucca has gathered hundreds of witness statements and analysed 5,000 hours of video as well as thousands of photographs. Pieced together, they tell an irrefutable tale, which began to unfold as Covell lay bleeding on the ground.

 

The police poured into the Diaz Pertini school. Some of them were shouting "Black Bloc! We're going to kill you," but if they genuinely believed they were confronting the notorious Black Bloc of anarchists who had caused violent mayhem in parts of the city during demonstrations earlier in the day, they were mistaken. The school had been provided by the Genoa city council as a base for demonstrators who had nothing to do with the anarchists: they had even posted guards to make sure that none of them came in.

 

One of the first to see the riot squad bursting in was Michael Gieser, a 35-year-old Belgian economist, who subsequently described how he had just changed into his pyjamas and was queuing for the bathroom with his toothbrush in his hand when the raid began. Gieser believes in the power of dialogue and, at first, he walked towards them saying, "We need to talk." He saw the padded jackets, the riot clubs, the helmets and the bandanas concealing the policemen's faces, changed his mind and ran up the stairs to escape.

 

Others were slower. They were still in their sleeping bags. A group of 10 Spanish friends in the middle of the hall woke up to find themselves being battered with truncheons. They raised their hands in surrender. More officers piled in to beat their heads, cutting and bruising and breaking limbs, including the arm of a 65-year-old woman. At the side of the room, several young people were sitting at computers, sending emails home. One of them was Melanie Jonasch, a 28-year-old archaeology student from Berlin, who had volunteered to help out in the building and had not even been on a demonstration.

 

She still cannot remember what happened. But numerous other witnesses have described how officers set upon her, beating her head so hard with their sticks that she rapidly lost consciousness. When she fell to the ground, officers circled her, beating and kicking her limp body, banging her head against a near-by cupboard, leaving her finally in a pool of blood. Katherina Ottoway, who saw this happen, recalled: "She was trembling all over. Her eyes were open but upturned. I thought she was dying, that she could not survive this."

 

None of those who stayed on the ground floor escaped injury. As Zucca later put it in his prosecution report: "In the space of a few minutes, all the occupants on the ground floor had been reduced to complete helplessness, the groans of the wounded mingling with the sound of calls for an ambulance." In their fear, some victims lost control of their bowels. Then the officers of the law moved up the stairs. In the first-floor corridor they found a small group, including Gieser, still clutching his toothbrush: "Someone suggested lying down, to show there was no resistance. So I did. The police arrived and began beating us, one by one. I protected my head with my hands. I thought, 'I must survive.' People were shouting, 'Please stop.' I said the same thing ... It made me think of a pork butchery. We were being treated like animals, like pigs."

 

Officers broke down doors to the rooms leading off the corridors. In one, they found Dan McQuillan and Norman Blair, who had flown in from Stansted to show their support for, as McQuillan put it, "a free and equal society with people living in harmony with each other". The two Englishmen and their friend from New Zealand, Sam Buchanan, had heard the police attack on the ground floor and had tried to hide their bags and themselves under some tables in the corner of the dark room. A dozen officers broke in, caught them in a spotlight and, even as McQuillan stood up with his hands raised saying, "Take it easy, take it easy," they battered them into submission, inflicting numerous cuts and bruises and breaking McQuillan's wrist. Norman Blair recalled: "I could feel the venom and hatred from them."

 

Gieser was out in the corridor: "The scene around me was covered in blood, everywhere. A policeman shouted 'Basta!'. This word was like a window of hope. I understood it meant 'enough'. And yet they didn't stop. They continued with pleasure. In the end, they did stop, but it was like taking a toy away from a child, against their will."

 

By now, there were police officers on all four floors of the building, kicking and battering. Several victims describe a sort of system to the violence, with each officer beating each person he came across, then moving on to the next victim while his colleague moved up to continue beating the first. It seemed important that everybody must be hurt. Nicola Doherty, 26, a care worker from London, later described how her partner, Richard Moth, lay across her to protect her: "I could just hear blow after blow on his body. The police were also leaning over Rich so they could hit the parts of my body which were exposed." She tried to cover her head with her arm: they broke her wrist.

 

In one corridor, they ordered a group of young men and women to kneel, the easier to batter them around the head and shoulders. This was where Daniel Albrecht, a 21-year-old cello student from Berlin, had his head beaten so badly that he needed surgery to stop bleeding in his brain. Around the building, officers flipped their batons around, gripping the far end and using the right-angled handle as a hammer.

 

And in among this relentless violence, there were moments when the police preferred humiliation: the officer who stood spread-legged in front of a kneeling and injured woman, grabbed his groin and thrust it into her face before turning to do the same to Daniel Albrecht kneeling beside her; the officer who paused amid the beatings and took a knife to cut off hair from his victims, including Nicola Doherty; the constant shouting of insults; the officer who asked a group if they were OK and who reacted to the one who said "No" by handing out an extra beating.

 

A few escaped, at least for a while. Karl Boro made it up on to the roof but then made the mistake of coming back into the building, where he was treated to heavy bruising to his arms and legs, a fractured skull, and bleeding in his chest cavity. Jaraslaw Engel, from Poland, managed to use builders' scaffolding to get out of the school, but he was caught in the street by some police drivers who smashed him over the head, laid him on the ground and stood over him smoking while his blood ran out across the Tarmac.

 

Two of the last to be caught were a pair of German students, Lena Zuhlke, 24, and her partner Niels Martensen. They had hidden in a cleaners' cupboard on the top floor. They heard the police approaching, drumming their batons against the walls of the stairs. The cupboard door came open, Martensen was dragged out and beaten by a dozen officers standing in a semicircle around him. Zuhlke ran across the corridor and hid in the loo. Police officers saw her and followed her and dragged her out by her dreadlocks.

 

In the corridor, they set about her like dogs on a rabbit. She was beaten around the head then kicked from all sides on the floor, where she felt her rib cage collapsing. She was hauled up against the wall where one officer kneed her in the groin while others carried on lashing her with their batons. She slid down the wall and they hit her more on the ground: "They seemed to be enjoying themselves and, when I cried out in pain, it seemed to give them even more pleasure."

 

Police officers found a fire extinguisher and squirted its foam into Martensen's wounds. His partner was dragged by her hair and tossed down the stairs head-first. Eventually, they dragged Zuhlke into the ground-floor hall, where they had gathered dozens of prisoners from all over the building in a mess of blood and excrement. They threw her on top of two other people. They were not moving, and Zuhlke drowsily asked them if they were alive. They did not reply, and she lay there on her back, unable to move her right arm, unable to stop her left arm and her legs twitching, blood seeping out of her head wounds. A group of police officers walked by, and each one lifted the bandana which concealed his identity, leaned down and spat on her face.

 

Why would law officers behave with such contempt for the law? The simple answer may be the one which was soon being chanted outside the school building by sympathetic demonstrators who chose a word which they knew the police would understand: "Bastardi! Bastardi!" But something else was happening here - something that emerged more clearly over the next few days.

 

Covell and dozens of other victims of the raid were taken to the San Martino hospital, where police officers walked up and down the corridors, slapping their clubs into the palms of their hands, ordering the injured not to move around or look out of the window, keeping handcuffs on many of them and then, often with injuries still untended, shipping them across the city to join scores of others, from the Diaz school and from the street demonstrations, detained at the detention centre in the city's Bolzaneto district.

 

The signs of something uglier here were apparent first in superficial ways. Some officers had traditional fascist songs as ringtones on their mobile phones and talked enthusiastically about Mussolini and Pinochet. Repeatedly, they ordered prisoners to say "Viva il duce." Sometimes, they used threats to force them to sing fascist songs: "Un, due, tre. Viva Pinochet!"

 

The 222 people who were held at Bolzaneto were treated to a regime later described by public prosecutors as torture. On arrival, they were marked with felt-tip crosses on each cheek, and many were forced to walk between two parallel lines of officers who kicked and beat them. Most were herded into large cells, holding up to 30 people. Here, they were forced to stand for long periods, facing the wall with their hands up high and their legs spread. Those who failed to hold the position were shouted at, slapped and beaten. Mohammed Tabach has an artificial leg and, unable to hold the stress position, collapsed and was rewarded with two bursts of pepper spray in his face and, later, a particularly savage beating. Norman Blair later recalled standing like this and a guard asking him "Who is your government?" "The person before me had answered 'Polizei', so I said the same. I was afraid of being beaten."

 

Stefan Bauer dared to answer back: when a German-speaking guard asked where he was from, he said he was from the European Union and he had the right to go where he wanted. He was hauled out, beaten, given a face full of pepper spray, stripped naked and put under a cold shower. His clothes were taken away and he was returned to the freezing cell wearing only a flimsy hospital gown.

 

Shivering on the cold marble floors of the cells, the detainees were given few or no blankets, kept awake by guards, given little or no food and denied their statutory right to make phone calls and see a lawyer. They could hear crying and screaming from other cells.

 

Men and women with dreadlocks had their hair roughly cut off to the scalp. Marco Bistacchia was taken to an office, stripped naked, made to get down on all fours and told to bark like a dog and to shout "Viva la polizia Italiana!" He was sobbing too much to obey. An unnamed officer told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that he had seen brother officers urinating on prisoners and beating them for refusing to sing Faccetta Nera, a Mussolini-era fascist song.

 

Ester Percivati, a young Turkish woman, recalled guards calling her a whore as she was marched to the toilet, where a woman officer forced her head down into the bowl and a male jeered "Nice arse! Would you like a truncheon up it?" Several women reported threats of rape, anal and vaginal.

 

Even the infirmary was dangerous. Richard Moth, covered in cuts and bruises after lying on top of his partner, was given stitches in his head and legs without anaesthetic - "an extremely painful and disturbing experience. I had to be held down." Prison medical staff were among those convicted of abuse on Monday.

 

All agree that this was not an attempt to get the detainees to talk, simply an exercise in creating fear. And it worked. In statements, prisoners later described their feeling of helplessness, of being cut off from the rest of the world in a place where there was no law and no rules. Indeed, the police forced their captives to sign statements, waiving all their legal rights. One man, David Larroquelle, testified that he refused and had three of his ribs broken. Percivati also refused and her face was slammed into the office wall, breaking her glasses and making her nose bleed.

 

The outside world was treated to some severely distorted accounts of all this. Lying in San Martino hospital the day after his beating, Covell came round to find his shoulder being shaken by a woman who, he understood, was from the British embassy. It was only when the man with her started taking photographs that he realised she was a reporter, from the Daily Mail. Its front page the next day ran an entirely false report describing him as having helped mastermind the riots. (Four long years later, the Mail eventually apologised and paid Covell damages for invasion of privacy.)

 

While his citizens were being beaten and tormented in illegal detention, spokesmen for the then prime minister, Tony Blair, declared: "The Italian police had a difficult job to do. The prime minister believes that they did that job."

 

The Italian police themselves fed the media with a rich diet of falsehood. Even as the bloody bodies were being carried out of the Diaz Pertini building on stretchers, police were telling reporters that the ambulances lined up in the street were nothing to do with the raid, and/or that the very obviously fresh injuries were old, and that the building had been full of violent extremists who had attacked officers.

 

The next day, senior officers held a press conference at which they announced that everybody in the building would be charged with aggressive resistance to arrest and conspiracy to cause destruction. In the event, the Italian courts dismissed every single attempted charge against every single person. That included Covell. Police attempts to charge him with a string of very serious offences were described by the public prosecutor, Enrico Zucca, as "grotesque".

 

At the same press conference, police displayed an array of what they described as weaponry. This included crowbars, hammers and nails which they themselves had taken from a builder's store next to the school; aluminium rucksack frames, which they presented as offensive weapons; 17 cameras; 13 pairs of swimming goggles; 10 pen-knives; and a bottle of sun-tan lotion. They also displayed two Molotov cocktails which, Zucca later concluded, had been found by police earlier in the day in another part of the city and planted in the Diaz Pertini building as the raid ended.

 

This public dishonesty was part of a wider effort to cover up what had happened. On the night of the raid, a force of 59 police entered the building opposite the Diaz Pertini, where Covell and others had been running their Indymedia centre and where, crucially, a group of lawyers had been based, gathering evidence about police attacks on the earlier demonstrations. Officers went into the lawyers' room, threatened the occupants, smashed their computers and seized hard drives. They also removed anything containing photographs or video tape.

 

With the courts refusing to charge the detainees, the police secured an order to deport all of them from the country, banning them from returning for five years. Thus, the witnesses were removed from the scene. Like the attempted charges, all the deportation orders were subsequently dismissed as illegal by the courts.

 

Zucca then fought his way through years of denial and obfuscation. In his formal report, he recorded that all the senior officers involved were denying playing any part: "Not a single official has confessed to holding a substantial command role in any aspects of the operation." One senior officer who was videoed at the scene explained that he was off duty and had just turned up to make sure his men were not being injured. Police statements were themselves changeable and contradictory, and were overwhelmingly contradicted by the evidence of victims and numerous videos: "Not a single one of the 150 officers reportedly present has provided precise information regarding an individual episode."

 

Without Zucca, without the robust stance of the Italian courts, without Covell's intensive work assembling video records of the Diaz raid, the police might well have evaded responsibility and secured false charges and prison sentences against scores of their victims. Apart from the Bolzaneto trial which finished on Monday, 28 other officers, some very senior, are on trial for their part in the Diaz raid. And yet, justice has been compromised.

 

No Italian politician has been brought to book, in spite of the strong suggestion that the police acted as though somebody had promised them impunity. One minister visited Bolzaneto while the detainees were being mistreated and apparently saw nothing or, at least, saw nothing he thought he should stop. Another, Gianfranco Fini, former national secretary of the neo-fascist MSI party and the then deputy prime minister, was - according to media reports at the time - in police headquarters. He has never been required to explain what orders he gave.

 

Most of the several hundred law officers involved in Diaz and Bolzaneto have escaped without any discipline or criminal charge. None has been suspended; some have been promoted. None of the officers who were tried over Bolzaneto has been charged with torture - Italian law does not recognise the offence. Some senior officers who were originally going to be charged over the Diaz raid escaped trial because Zucca was simply unable to prove that a chain of command existed. Even now, the trial of the 28 officers who have been charged is in jeopardy because the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is pushing through legislation to delay all trials dealing with events that occurred before June 2002. Nobody has been charged with the violence inflicted on Covell. And as one of the victims' lawyers, Massimo Pastore, put it: "Nobody wants to listen to what this story has to say."

 

That is about fascism. There are plenty of rumours that the police and carabinieri and prison staff belonged to fascist groups, but no evidence to support that. Pastore argues that that misses the bigger point: "It is not just a matter of a few drunken fascists. This is mass behaviour by the police. No one said 'No.' This is a culture of fascism." At its heart, this involved what Zucca described in his report as "a situation in which every rule of law appears to have been suspended."

 

Fifty-two days after the attack on the Diaz school, 19 men used planes full of passengers as flying bombs and shifted the bedrock of assumptions on which western democracies had based their business. Since then, politicians who would never describe themselves as fascists have allowed the mass tapping of telephones and monitoring of emails, detention without trial, systematic torture, the calibrated drowning of detainees, unlimited house arrest and the targeted killing of suspects, while the procedure of extradition has been replaced by "extraordinary rendition". This isn't fascism with jack-booted dictators with foam on their lips. It's the pragmatism of nicely turned-out politicians. But the result looks very similar. Genoa tells us that when the state feels threatened, the rule of law can be suspended. Anywhere.

 

Nick Davies, The Guardian, Thursday July 17 2008

Park Life Gallery is proud to present Through the Blinds, an exhibit of new paintings from Eric Shaw.

    

The show opens Friday, June15th, 2012 and runs through July 15th. Opening Reception June 15th from 7 to 9pm.

    

Eric Shaw is a self-taught artist who currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. His bold and often disquieting paintings, executed exclusively in gouache, depict a world of totemic grotesquery where disaffected biomorphs lounge seductively among the detrital emblems of early modern abstraction; the waiting room of a new-age dentist in which Miró, Bosch, and Patrick Nagel sit discussing the advent of the Internet. Through the use of a self-restrictive visual vocabulary, Shaw explores the creative potential of semi-blindness and the almost pathological intrigue of obsessive reduplication. One’s eyes are one’s blinds, and only achieve second sight through the partial obfuscation of the real.

  

Obfuscated mind

Social distancing, or physical distancing, is a set of non-pharmaceutical interventions or measures taken to prevent the spread of a contagious disease by maintaining a physical distance between people and reducing the number of times people come into close contact with each other. It involves keeping a distance of six feet or two meters from others and avoiding gathering together in large groups. By reducing the probability that a given uninfected person will come into physical contact with an infected person, the disease transmission can be suppressed, resulting in fewer deaths. The measures are combined with good respiratory hygiene and hand washing. During the 2019–2020 coronavirus pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) suggested the reference to "physical" as an alternative to "social", in keeping with the notion that it is a physical distance which prevents transmission; people can remain socially connected via technology. To slow down the spread of infectious diseases and avoid overburdening healthcare systems, particularly during a pandemic, several social distancing measures are used, including the closing of schools and workplaces, isolation, quarantine, restricting movement of people and the cancellation of mass gatherings. Social distancing measures date back to at least the fifth century BCE. The biblical book of Leviticus contains one of the earliest known references to the practice, likely as response to leprosy. During the Plague of Justinian, emperor Justinian enforced an ineffective quarantine on the Byzantine Empire, including dumping bodies into the sea, blaming the widespread outbreak predominately on "Jews, Samaritans, pagans, heretics, Arians, Montanists, and homosexuals".[11] In modern times, social distancing measures have been successfully implemented in several previous epidemics. In St. Louis, shortly after the first cases of influenza were detected in the city during the 1918 flu pandemic, authorities implemented school closures, bans on public gatherings and other social distancing interventions. The case fatality rates in St. Louis were much less than in Philadelphia, which despite having cases of influenza, allowed a mass parade to continue and did not introduce social distancing until more than two weeks after its first cases. Social distancing has also been used during the 2019-20 coronavirus epidemic. Social distancing measures are more effective when the infectious disease spreads via droplet contact (coughing or sneezing); direct physical contact, including sexual contact; indirect physical contact (e.g., by touching a contaminated surface); or airborne transmission (if the microorganism can survive in the air for long periods). The measures are less effective when an infection is transmitted primarily via contaminated water or food or by vectors such as mosquitoes or other insects.Drawbacks of social distancing can include loneliness, reduced productivity and the loss of other benefits associated with human interaction. Since January, Taiwan, India and Thailand, all of which also make face masks, have banned their export, although, to help China, India later temporarily revoked its restriction. South Korea also banned the export of masks, as will Indonesia soon. Outside Asia, Russia, Germany and the Czech Republic also stopped exports in early March. So did Kenya, where the first case of coronavirus was confirmed on March 13.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released straightforward guidance in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic: Everyone in the US should wear a cloth mask or face covering while in certain public settings. The recommendation marks a shift from the federal government. Less than six weeks ago, Surgeon General Jerome Adams tweeted that members of the general public should “STOP BUYING MASKS!” He added that masks “are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!” The CDC is still advising against the general public wearing traditional medical masks, such as surgical variants and N95 respirators, to preserve them for health care workers. The shift in messaging on cloth masks, the agency said, came in light of evidence that people with few or no symptoms of Covid-19 can still transmit the virus. The CDC now recommends everyone use cloth masks in public. The upshot: Masks can help stop the spread of coronavirus not just by protecting the wearer, but by preventing the wearer — who could be an asymptomatic spreader — from breathing and spitting their germs everywhere. Some studies in households and colleges “show a benefit of masks,” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have described social distancing as a set of "methods for reducing frequency and closeness of contact between people in order to decrease the risk of transmission of disease".[10] During the 2019–2020 coronavirus pandemic, the CDC revised the definition of social distancing as "remaining out of congregrate settings, avoiding mass gatherings, and maintaining distance (approximately six feet or two meters) from others when possible". Previously, in 2009, the WHO described social distancing as "keeping at least an arm's length distance from others, [and] minimizing gatherings".[7] It is combined with good respiratory hygiene and hand washing, and is considered the most feasible way to reduce or delay a pandemic.Raina MacIntyre, head of the Biosecurity Research Program at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, told me, “so it would be plausible that they would also protect in lower-intensity transmission settings such as in the general community.” But masks do not make you invincible. They can’t replace good hygiene — Wash your hands! Don’t touch your face! — and social distancing, both of which have been key to stemming the coronavirus even in Asian countries where widespread mask use was already common. Epidemiological models also suggest coronavirus cases will rise if social distancing measures are relaxed, potentially causing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths in the US alone. That’s true whether people are gathering wearing masks or not. People wear masks in midtown New York City on April 6. Kena Betancur/Getty Images. Still, the CDC’s about-face has left many people with plenty of questions: What does it mean to use a mask correctly? When should they be used and washed? Do you need them for all public situations? Can they really keep you safe? If you can’t find a mask, how can you make one? Knowing that a disease is circulating may trigger a change in behaviour by people choosing to stay away from public places and other people. When implemented to control epidemics, such social distancing can result in benefits but with an economic cost. Research indicates that measures must be applied rigorously and immediately in order to be effective. Several social distancing measures are used to control the spread of contagious illnesses. And why aren’t there more medical masks to begin with? Here’s a guide to some of the most common questions. Avoiding physical contact: Social distancing includes eliminating the physical contact that occurs with the typical handshake, hug, or hongi; this illustration offers eight alternatives. Keeping at least two-metre (six-foot) distance from each other and avoiding hugs and gestures that involve direct physical contact, reduce the risk of becoming infected during flu pandemics and the coronavirus pandemic of 2020. These distances of separation, in addition to personal hygiene measures, are also recommended at places of work.Where possible it may be recommended to work from home. Various alternatives have been proposed for the tradition of handshaking. The gesture of namaste, placing one's palms together, fingers pointing upwards, drawing the hands to the heart, is one non-touch alternative. During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic in the United Kingdom, this gesture was used by Prince Charles upon greeting reception guests, and has been recommended by the Director-General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Other alternatives include the wave, the shaka (or "hang loose") sign, and placing a palm on your heart, as practiced in parts of Iran.

 

1) When should I wear a mask?

According to the CDC, you should wear a mask in public, particularly while in “settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies)” and “especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.” Think of circumstances where it’s going to be harder to keep at least 6 feet away from other people, especially in closed, poorly ventilated places. It’s in those kinds of situations that coronavirus-containing droplets are more likely to spread by air or surfaces. There are some exceptions to the mask guidance, the CDC stated: “Cloth face coverings should not be placed on young children under age 2, anyone who has trouble breathing, or is unconscious, incapacitated or otherwise unable to remove the mask without assistance.” The evidence for everyone wearing masks, explained. And be warned: If you use a mask incorrectly, or start acting recklessly because you’re wearing a mask, it could actually hurt you more than it helps.

If you fidget with your mask, and especially if you touch your face in the process, you can infect yourself with virus-containing droplets your mask caught. If you reuse a mask without cleaning it, you can breathe in or otherwise expose yourself to droplets the mask captured last time. If you generally ease up on good hygiene or social distancing because you’re wearing a mask, you’re putting yourself — and your community — at greater risk.

The CDC offers some tips for how to properly use a mask. Above all, don’t touch the mask and then touch other parts of your face, especially your eyes, mouth, and nose. The entire point of this fabric is to shield you from outside germs. So you don’t want to touch the part of the mask doing the shielding and then the parts of your face that are vulnerable to infection. You should also wash your hands before and after taking off a mask — before to avoid getting anything on your face and mask, and after to get rid of anything that was on your mask. Remove the mask with the loops, not by touching the front. If possible, throw away disposable masks after using them. And if you can’t throw a mask away, make sure to thoroughly disinfect it with ultraviolet light sterilizers — not something most people have around — or, if using a cloth product, throw it in the wash or clean it with soap and water. For some people, it might make sense to have multiple masks around if you have to go out multiple times on a particular day. The important thing, though, is to throw a recently used mask in the laundry or in the wash as soon as possible and avoid touching it at all until it’s clean. Do not keep dirty masks around your house, where people can easily touch them and potentially infect themselves.

 

2) What kind of mask should I use? The CDC recommends a cloth mask or face covering, whether a professionally made mask or a homemade variant. The CDC explicitly advises against the general public using a surgical mask, which is the standard mask you’ve probably seen doctors and nurses wear. It also advises against the public using N95 respirators, which are more complex, expensive masks meant to fit more tightly on the face.

Surgical masks and N95 respirators, the agency noted, “are critical supplies that must continue to be reserved for healthcare workers and other medical first responders, as recommended by current CDC guidance.” New York City nurses and health workers gather to demand safer working conditions, more personal protective equipment (PPE), and free virus testing during the Covid-19 outbreak on April 6. Giles Clarke/Getty Images As it stands, there is a serious shortage of PPE, including masks, for health care workers. There are reports of doctors, nurses, and other health care workers using bandanas and scarves for masks and trash bags for gowns. Hospitals are considering do-not-resuscitate orders for dying Covid-19 patients out of fear that such intensive, close-up procedures could get doctors and nurses without PPE infected with the virus. The CDC, acknowledging the shortage, previously recommended homemade masks for health care workers when no other options are available. “I am worried that telling people to wear masks will strain already weak supplies that are needed by doctors and nurses,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “If we are able to fix that supply chain, I’d feel less worried about this. But some of the shortages initially were due to members of public and medical staff raiding medical offices’ and hospitals’ supplies for home use.” Private companies and public officials are racing to fix the PPE shortage. But until it’s fixed, it’s critical that the existing supplies of surgical masks and N95 respirators are left for health care workers who are literally saving people from this pandemic.

 

3) Will a mask protect me from getting Covid-19? The CDC’s guidance — and the best argument for wearing a mask, according to the experts I spoke with — is primarily to stop the wearer from infecting other people. That’s especially important for Covid-19, since at least some spread happens when people are asymptomatic, when they have few symptoms, or before they develop symptoms. Universal mask use could stop these asymptomatic carriers, many of whom might not even know they’re sick, from inadvertently infecting other people. Masks also can offer some protection from others by putting a physical barrier between them and your mouth and nose. But we don’t know how much, because it’s unclear how much the virus spreads through airborne droplets or aerosols. Masks can’t replace all the other approaches needed to fight the coronavirus, like washing your hands, not touching your face, and social distancing. Still, when paired with all these other tactics — and when used correctly — masks offer an extra layer of protection.

The quality of the research on this topic is weak, with a lot of small, underpowered studies. But the studies that do exist generally favor more people wearing masks. A 2008 systematic review, published in BMJ, found medical masks halted the spread of respiratory viruses from likely infected patients. In particular, studies on the 2003 outbreak of SARS — a cousin to the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 — found that masks alone were 68 percent effective at preventing the virus. By comparison, washing hands more than 10 times a day was 55 percent effective. A combination of measures such as hand-washing, masks, gloves, and gowns was 91 percent effective.

A 2015 review, also published in BMJ, looked at mask use among people in community settings, specifically households and colleges. Some studies produced unclear results, but the findings overall indicated that wearing a mask protected people from infections compared to not wearing a mask, especially when paired with hand-washing. A big issue was adherence; people were often bad at actually wearing masks, which, unsurprisingly, diminished their effectiveness. But if masks were used early and consistently, the authors concluded, they seemed to work. MASKS CAN’T REPLACE ALL THE OTHER APPROACHES NEEDED TO FIGHT THE CORONAVIRUS, LIKE WASHING YOUR HANDS, NOT TOUCHING YOUR FACE, AND SOCIAL DISTANCING A more recent study published in Nature Medicine found that surgical masks appear to block droplets and aerosols containing some viruses, including the flu and coronavirus. Other studies have produced similar results, typically finding at least some protective value from masks as long as they’re used consistently and properly. The results vary depending on the mask. N95 respirators are, in theory, the best possible masks. But they require a bit of skill and fitting to use — to the point that a 2016 review in CMAJ couldn’t find a difference among health care workers using N95 respirators versus surgical masks for respiratory infection, likely due to poor fitting. That’s another reason these masks should be reserved for the professionals. Cloth masks, meanwhile, are much less effective than surgical masks or N95 respirators, as a 2015 study in BMJ found. And they can be extra risky, since they can trap and hold virus-containing droplets that wearers can then breathe in. But they still, in general, offer more protection than no mask at all, several studies concluded. There’s no good research on how wearing a mask could affect people’s behaviors, but the experience of some Asian countries suggests it’s possible to adopt social distancing, good hygiene, and masks in the midst of an outbreak. Taiwan and South Korea, for example, have done a better job containing Covid-19 than the US while embracing masks and all the other evidence-based measures. To emphasize: Yes, masks can help. But they’re not an excuse to ease up on social distancing, good hygiene, and all the other things public health officials are recommending right now. Do all of those things too.

 

4) Do I need a mask if I’m walking or running in the open air?

Probably not — but if used properly, wearing a mask probably can’t hurt, and might help encourage others to wear one too.

The CDC specifies that it’s recommending cloth face coverings where social distancing isn’t possible. A solitary walk or run outside is typically not going to fall into one of those categories.

In general, masks become more helpful as the risk of infection increases. If you’re having closer, more prolonged contact with potentially sick people, using a mask is more likely to protect you. And if you’re potentially sick and having closer, more prolonged contact with others, a mask is more likely to protect them from your germs as well. “Are people having those prolonged, close-contact interactions with people?” Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist focused on hospital preparedness, told me. “Because that’s what’s more considered high-risk. … It’s that face-to-face for a significant chunk of time.” That’s why the CDC had already recommended masks for people who know they’re sick or interacting with someone who’s sick. People who frequently interact with others as part of their jobs, like a first responder or a grocery store clerk, are more likely to get good use out of masks too. That especially includes health care workers, who spend more time with sick people than anyone else — which is why they need masks and other PPE more.

Certain populations also may want to especially consider masks in less risky environments, such as people who are older or have underlying health issues, like a compromised immune system, that put them at greater risk if they’re infected. Besides the health benefits, there’s also a potential social value to wearing a mask everywhere: It could push more people to do so as well. If more people are out in public wearing face coverings, that could help remove the stigma that only sick people wear masks. So if you go out with a mask in more situations, it could not only help you and those around you, but it might help instill a healthier norm for the rest of society too.

 

5) How do I make a mask? There are a lot of options! But keep in mind guidance, from the CDC, about a proper mask: It should fit snugly but comfortably around the face, be secured around the ears with ties or loops, include multiple layers of fabric, allow for breathing without restriction, and be readily washable without damage. If you have the time and can sew, the CDC recommends a face covering that can be made with two 10-inch by 6-inch rectangles of cotton fabric, two 6-inch pieces of elastic or rubber bands, string, cloth strips, or hair ties, a needle and thread or bobby pin, scissors, and a sewing machine. Here’s the agency’s four-step tutorial: If you’re like me and the idea of sewing anything sounds like a total nightmare, the CDC offers a non-sewing option. It just requires a T-shirt and a pair of scissors. Here’s the three-step tutorial: A three-step tutorial for a mask made from a T-shirt. If you’re even more like me and that mask is still too much, the surgeon general posted a 45-second video guide on Twitter for an even easier mask that can be made solely with a T-shirt or just about any other cloth fabric and two rubber bands: Chances are the less skill-intensive, less time-consuming masks will be, at the very least, less comfortable, and maybe harder to wear for long. But if you’re in a pinch, or if you’re unable to do more complicated tailoring, the easier alternatives offer more protection than nothing.

 

6) Why aren’t more medical masks available? The simple answer is that supply hasn’t kept up with demand. Prior to the coronavirus outbreak, China made half the world’s face masks. When the outbreak took off there, China started to use its supply and hoard what remained. This problem has only spread since, as more and more countries hoard whatever medical supplies they can get — with some, like Germany, even banning most PPE exports. So as demand increased due to Covid-19 — not just from health care workers but from a general public increasingly scared of infection — there was less supply to go around. On a deeper level, though, the shortage in masks and other PPE reflects America’s — and, really, the rest of the world’s — poor preparedness for a pandemic. The mask and broader PPE shortage, in fact, was well-known to the US government before the Covid-19 outbreak, yet the US did not prepare. “When we have done exercises in the past for pandemic preparedness, supply chain issues were a well-documented challenge,” Popescu said. “This is something we’ve known about — maybe not to this extent, but this isn’t a shocker. It’s more surprising that we let it get this bad.” One of those simulations held by the federal government, as the New York Times reported, covered a pandemic that looked a lot like the one we’re facing now: a respiratory virus that started in China and made its way to the US and the rest of the world. Among the many problems, the Times found, were “deficiencies ‘in personal protective equipment use.’” The exercise found that the US didn’t have the means to quickly produce more PPE. When states turned to the federal government for help in the exercise, there was “confusion” and “bureaucratic chaos” as requests and submissions hit multiple agencies at once. This was far from the only simulation to produce these results, experts told me. Jeremy Konyndyk, senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, argued a previous outbreak should have acted as a warning for the world: the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak. While working in President Barack Obama’s administration at the time, Konyndyk quickly realized that the US — and much of the world — was simply not ready for a major disease outbreak. “I came away from that experience just completely horrified at how unready we would be for something more dangerous than Ebola,” he said, noting Ebola was, thankfully, relatively hard to transmit. Indeed, experts and advocates argue that the US generally underfunds disease outbreak preparedness and public health programs more broadly. It’s these concerns that led the Obama administration, after the Ebola outbreak, to attempt to scale up preparedness by establishing a White House office dedicated solely to the issue and producing a 69-page playbook in case of an outbreak. But President Donald Trump’s administration neglected and rolled back these efforts, eventually disbanding the White House office.

We’ve seen the results in the botched rollout of coronavirus testing, but PPE offers another example. America could have shored up its supplies of PPE in its strategic stockpile. It could have ensured that there would be surge capacity to boost production in case of emergency. And it should have been doing this all before the coronavirus pandemic. But it didn’t, even after it became clearer, around January and February, that the coronavirus was a looming threat. By early March, federal officials acknowledged the Strategic National Stockpile had just 1 percent of the medical masks the country needed in a full-blown pandemic. “The US … was not prepared,” Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. “A good preparedness plan would have helped address this and had things in place to allow for that increased need to be met.” So the US is playing catch-up with different public and private interventions to boost PPE production. Until that’s fixed, we simply don’t have enough medical masks to go around.

 

7) If medical masks are better, why shouldn’t I get some for myself? Because health care workers need them more, since they’re constantly in contact with those who are sick — in a way not many other people, if any, in the general public are. And even if you take a totally selfish perspective on this, there are good reasons to want health care workers to get these medical masks first. As coronavirus has spread, experts have talked up “flattening the curve.” The idea is to spread out the number of coronavirus cases — through social distancing, testing, contact tracing, and other protective measures — to avoid overwhelming the health care system. Here’s what that looks like in chart form:

An infographic that shows the goals of mitigation during an outbreak with two curves. The X-axis represents the number of daily cases and they Y-axis represents the amount of time since the first case. The first curve represents the number of cases when no protective measures during an outbreak are implemented and displays a large peak. The second curve is much lower, representing a much smaller rise in the number of cases if protective measures are implemented. Christina Animashaun/Vox

The PPE shortage could make it harder to flatten the curve of new cases if doctors and nurses get sick. But the line representing health care system capacity also isn’t a constant. If we develop more capacity, it can handle more cases at once. If capacity falls — if doctors and nurses get sick because of a lack of protective equipment, or refuse to work without conditions that can ensure their safety — even a flatter curve will be hard for the system to handle. That’s why experts, even those who acknowledge that the public would benefit from using masks, say that doctors and nurses should get priority: This isn’t just about keeping people on the front lines safe; it’s about keeping all of us safe. To put it in selfish terms: If you do get sick with the coronavirus or anything else during this pandemic, and you want to make sure that there are doctors and nurses available to treat you, you should let them get the masks they need first.

It’s true that we might all be better off wearing surgical masks in an ideal world. But that’s not the world we live in right now. For all our sakes, we should act accordingly.

 

8) If masks are so great, why is the CDC just telling us this now?

Officially, the CDC has said it changed its stance with the changing evidence. As it became clearer that asymptomatic transmission was happening with the coronavirus, the CDC argued, the benefits of everyone wearing a mask increased, since they could help stop transmission from people who don’t even know they’re sick. Unofficially, the answer is a little more complicated. In my discussions with public health officials and experts before the CDC changed its guidance, it seemed many people were afraid of saying anything that could exacerbate the PPE shortage for health care workers or get members of the general public to think — incorrectly — that they could ease social distancing measures if they just wear a mask. “I fear that if we tell everyone they should go out and buy masks, it will not only contribute to the PPE shortage,” Jaimie Meyer, an infectious disease expert at Yale University, told me, “but it will give a false sense of a ‘quick fix’ for protection, whereas people still need to be practicing social distancing strategies that are much more effective, though perhaps socially, psychologically, [and] logistically challenging.” Trump ordered more N95 masks. 3M says his tactics could make the shortage worse. Part of the issue is the CDC also operates on a different evidence level than a lot of the public. The agency tends to follow the best reviews of the scientific evidence with very rigorous standards for what’s a good study and what’s not. So what may sound like good enough evidence and reasoning to you and me may not be good enough for the CDC. Since the scientific evidence for public mask use isn’t great — even if it’s generally positive — the CDC, as an agency filled with scientists, was just more skeptical of taking a leap than many laypeople were. Regardless of the reasoning, the CDC’s messaging backfired. As health care workers clamored for masks, it became increasingly harder to tell the public that masks wouldn’t benefit everyone else. By obfuscating and failing to fully explain the issue, officials likely sowed distrust toward their guidance. And the public rushed to buy masks anyway.

 

9) How can I donate masks to health care workers?

The dire shortage of masks and other PPE has led to several options for donations: If you want to make and donate cloth masks, WeNeedMasks.org provides options for most states and Puerto Rico. If you have surgical masks, N95 respirators, and other PPE around, #GetUsPPE is another option. (Although note that many places will only take unopened supplies.)

If you’re a manufacturer or supplier, the N95 Project is trying to connect companies that make or have masks with the hospitals and clinics that need them. At this point in the pandemic, health care workers and facilities all over the country will gladly accept the help they can take. Some places, like New York and Louisiana, are dealing with much worse coronavirus outbreaks right now and really need the supplies today. But it’s also worth being realistic about just how far donations can go. Given the research, cloth masks are simply not suitable replacements for actual medical masks. With medical masks, N95 respirators are widely regarded as more effective than conventional surgical masks when properly fitted. So even with donations, it’s on the federal government to set up more production and coordination of supply lines to make sure places in need get PPE. It’s on private producers to step up and do what they can. (Some car, clothing, and pillow companies, among others, have already done so.) And it’s on us — to make sure that the existing supplies of masks and other PPE are made available to health care workers. Americans can accomplish that, in part, with donations, but we can also do that by not buying surgical masks or N95 respirators until the shortage is fixed, and instead relying on cloth and homemade coverings. So, yes, health experts recommend wearing a mask in public. Just don’t take one from health care workers. And keep doing all the other things public health officials recommend, like social distancing and washing your hands, as we deal with this pandemic. Support Vox’s explanatory journalism Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today. Since the beginning of March and the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe, Chinese companies have sold nearly 4 billion face masks overseas, according to authorities. For Beijing, this is a perfect way to change the narrative: China is now offering its assistance to virus-hit countries while trying to leave the mistakes of the early outbreak in the past. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, face masks have become a hot commodity and international competition is fierce. Last week, a number of French politicians accused the US of buying up Chinese face masks ordered by France. In one case, the Americans allegedly outbid the French on the airport tarmac in China. China is the biggest producer of masks on the planet and is getting orders from around the world. With the Covid-19 pandemic now under control in the country, factories have been mobilised to boost production. Since early April, China has been able to produce 200 million masks a day. In the case of a second wave of infections, will China continue to send masks to the entire planet? With a population of 1.5 billion inhabitants, the country would need to protect itself too. Mathematical modeling has shown that transmission of an outbreak may be delayed by closing schools. However, effectiveness depends on the contacts children maintain outside of school. Often, one parent has to take time off work, and prolonged closures may be required. These factors could result in social and economic disruption. Modeling and simulation studies based on U.S. data suggest that if 10% of affected workplaces are closed, the overall infection transmission rate is around 11.9% and the epidemic peak time is slightly delayed. In contrast, if 33% of affected workplaces are closed, the attack rate decreases to 4.9%, and the peak time is delayed by one week. Workplace closures include closure of "non-essential" businesses and social services ("non-essential" means those facilities that do not maintain primary functions in the community, as opposed to essential services). Cancellation of mass gatherings includes sports events, films or musical shows. Evidence suggesting that mass gatherings increase the potential for infectious disease transmission is inconclusive.[30] Anecdotal evidence suggests certain types of mass gatherings may be associated with increased risk of influenza transmission, and may also "seed" new strains into an area, instigating community transmission in a pandemic. During the 1918 influenza pandemic, military parades in Philadelphia and Bostonmay have been responsible for spreading the disease by mixing infected sailors with crowds of civilians. Restricting mass gatherings, in combination with other social distancing interventions, may help reduce transmission.Border restrictions or internal travel restrictions are unlikely to delay an epidemic by more than two to three weeks unless implemented with over 99% coverage.Airport screening was found to be ineffective in preventing viral transmission during the 2003 SARS outbreak in Canada[35] and the U.S.[36] Strict border controls between Austria and the Ottoman Empire, imposed from 1770 until 1871 to prevent persons infected with the bubonic plague from entering Austria, were reportedly effective, as there were no major outbreaks of plague in Austrian territory after they were established, whereas the Ottoman Empire continued to suffer frequent epidemics of plague until the mid-nineteenth century. A Northeastern University study published in March 2020 found that "travel restrictions to and from China only slow down the international spread of COVID-19 [when] combined with efforts to reduce transmission on a community and an individual level. [...] Travel restrictions aren't enough unless we couple it with social distancing."[39] The study found that the travel ban in Wuhan delayed the spread of the disease to other parts of mainland China only by three to five days, although it did reduce the spread of international cases by as much as 80 percent. A primary reason travel restrictions were less effective is that many people with COVID-19 do not show symptoms during the early stages of infection.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_distancing

Nietzsche addresses the concept of simulacrum (but does not use the term) in the Twilight of the Idols, suggesting that most philosophers, by ignoring the reliable input of their senses and resorting to the constructs of language and reason, arrive at a distorted copy of reality. Put me in mind of neo-censorship and accompanying texts written to obfuscate, overpower, confuse and baffle while boasting of the writer's self importance.

Model by David Mitchell, diagram on his website here:

www.origamiheaven.com/pdfs/enigmabowl.pdf

 

Featured at the monthly folding challenge on the francophone origami forum.

 

Very good model. However, the folding sequence requiers a 12x12 grid and some 45° creases, the beauty of the result is obfuscated by that scaffolding.

 

So I devised the above express precrease method, hope it helps.

Just as it is important to temper any account of the Great Library of Alexandria with sobering details of the pervasive poverty experienced by countless generations over the centuries of antiquity, I would be remiss if I failed to mention any of the fairer criticisms which have been raised of Bibliotheca Alexandrina before, during and since its completion. Among the most fundamental critiques, are concerns that the overall monumental quality of design obfuscates much of the intended mission in favor of the broader political agenda of pre-Revolution Egypt. Indeed, much of the publicity surrounding the library between its 2002 inauguration and the 2011 Revolution were controversial at best; ranging to everything from criticism of introducing an on-site, commercial “food court,” to the Snøhetta design being criticized over its goal to stand out among the surrounding homogenous buildings with its stark modernity.

 

At the end of the day, the idea that Bibliotheca Alexandrina may well be a White Elephant is not mutually exclusive to the idea of its stated mission and the kind of scholarship it serves to one day produce. After all, the Great Library of antiquity itself took centuries to achieve the status for which it is now lionized. While those who make a point to acknowledge the vast discrepancy between the library’s shelf space for eight million books and its current collection size of just over a million would indeed have a point, I would argue that providing a space for a community to come together in the pursuit of knowledge is vital to the gradual progress and bettering of the quality of life for each and every individual in such a community. In this way, and in this context, Bibliotheca Alexandrina can indeed serve the fundamental purpose of its predecessor, though it may take (as some estimates suggest) about eighty years to fill its vast repositories at the current rate. If nothing else, one fundamental success to the library’s design is the precedent it serves among the bookshelves of contemporary library design; not only to those who simply seek access to the knowledge inscribed on its granite walls via the countless pages held within them, but also to students like myself who seek to learn from the built environment of the world in which we live today, as well as those of the past over which countless sunrises have heralded new ideas and inspired novel concepts.

 

A soon to be former McDonald's at Village Plaza along 1065 Easton Avenue, pictured here in June 2020.

 

This oddly mint-capped McDonald's was likely once red-roofed and opened at Village Plaza in 1975, though official town records remain mostly obfuscated.

 

This location was planned to close in June 2024, after several decades of familiar operation, will now extend its long overdue expiration for a few weeks longer as its newer location puts finishing touches at its nearby Rutgers Plaza, nearly across the street.

 

The newly-built gray box will replace an equally aged and vacated, former 70's era Burger King, was demolished for its construction, which was approved in November 2022.

 

Very few "vintage" capped McDonald's that haven't submitted to gray kiosk hell can now be counted on one hand in the state of New Jersey.

 

All images and textures are my own.

 

Photoshop CS4

 

Created for Award Tree "Art Tools and Materials Challenge"

(rejected)

Back into lockdown! A new set of guidelines and laws and slogans to obfuscate the simple message that it's a numbers game and you should keep yourself to yourself as much as possible.

© Copyright John C. House, Everyday Miracles Photography. All Rights Reserved. Please do not use in any way without my express consent. As always, this is better viewed large.

 

This was taken from the top of Clingman's Dome, the highest point in the Great Smoky Mountains at 6,643 feet (2,025 m). When clear, it is possible to see for some ways, but that is an important caveat, since it is very often the case that the mists of the Smokies and the clouds themselves obfuscate the view. When seeking a sunset, it is a roll of the dice, with conditions often changing rapidly for the hour or so before the sun sets and the 30 minutes or so afterwards. Clouds roll in and engulf the peak only to move out and leave the promise of a little color. Color looks promising only to have clouds blot it out last minute.

 

This shot was taken during the waiting time, less than an hour before actual sunset. The clouds and mists had totally moved in and blocked out the sun, leaving the mountains to the south bathed in blue, not unusual for the Smoky Mountains. I have been on this mountain when clouds blew in so thick that you could only see about 50 feet, but this was not nearly like that.

 

The Fraser Firs have been decimated by the Balsam woolly adeligid, a non-native insect that has killed over 80 percent of the mature trees. The younger trees survive only until they get large enough for the bark to develop the fissures that allow the adeligid to attack it. The skeletons of the larger trees still fill the landscape. Even so, they contribute to a strange beauty in this smoky blue light.

 

Explored at #385 on 7-13-11.

Le Bohemian.

(Linoleum Cut).

Bound'd explorationem dramatizing incertitudes threaten'd,

artistique virtues corrupting perspectives poussière,

drinking libertà independence contributes stimulat'd komponist,

bourgeois distance border'd immisceretur and criminals,

individuals nespolečenský barriers art,

επαναστάσεις insights figures forgotten in insaniam,

burning candles vaporizzazione of imagination dares,

avant garde modernization συντηρητικοί dissolution airs,

ирационалан experimenten determination psychic explosions,

forbidden constraints sindsforvirring on phrases wishes,

vanguard temperamento paradigmatic creating,

explicitly založništvo anti- literary journals sell,

cultural artisans традиции poétique hostility,

πολιτισμών transport'd characters blague unausweichliche,

варварин qualities respond flatly to specific ingenium,

intelligente mixture passione acquaintances despairs,

obfuscation universeel obscure identifications dress,

symptoms samtida unkempt Побуњеници gaining,

poco lusinghiero caricatures haphazardly paint'd light,

bohemians passage a capital of unlimitless lustbære 窮状 .

Steve.D.Hammond.

Question: Whose opinions and guesses are better than yours?

 

Consider below before inserting your

Answer: ________________

 

Macho Mentality Persists, Says Pope

Notes Attitude Ignores the Novelty of Christianity

 

VATICAN CITY, FEB. 10, 2008 (Zenit.org).- A discriminatory macho mentality continues to persist in cultures that ignore the novelty of Christianity to recognize the equal dignity of men and women, says Benedict XVI.

 

The Pope said this Saturday upon receiving in audience participants from the international conference titled "Woman and Man, the 'Humanum' in Its Entirety," which marked the 20th anniversary of the publication of Pope John Paul II's apostolic letter "Mulieris Dignitatem."

 

The conference, sponsored by the Pontifical Council for the Laity, ended Saturday.

 

"From the second half of the 20th century until today," said the Pope, "the movement for women's rights in the various settings of social life has generated countless reflections and debates, and it has seen the multiplication of many initiatives that the Catholic Church has followed and often accompanied with attentive interest."

 

In the apostolic letter "Mulieris Dignitatem," the Pontiff said John Paul II saw the need to "delve into the fundamental anthropological truths of men and women, the equality in dignity and their unity, the rooted and profound difference between the masculine and the feminine, and their vocation to reciprocity and complementarity, collaboration and communion."

 

The Holy Father continued: "In the face of cultural and political currents that attempt to eliminate, or at least to obfuscate and confuse, the sexual differences written into human nature, considering them to be cultural constructions, it is necessary to recall the design of God that created the human being male and female, with a unity and at the same time an original and complementary difference.

 

"Human nature and the cultural dimension are integrated in an ample and complex process that constitutes the formation of the identity of each, where both dimensions -- the feminine and the masculine -- correspond to and complete each other."

 

Mom and dad

 

Benedict XVI, however, insisted that discrimination continues: "There still persists a macho mentality that ignores the novelty of Christianity, which recognizes and proclaims the equal dignity and responsibility of women with respect to men. There are certain places and cultures where women are discriminated against and undervalued just for the fact that they are women.

 

"In the face of such grave and persistent phenomena the commitment of Christians appears all the more urgent, so that they become everywhere the promoters of a culture that recognizes the dignity that belongs to women in law and in reality."

 

"God entrusts to women and to men," said the Pope, "according to the characteristics that are proper to each, a specific vocation in the mission of the Church and in the world. I think here of the family, community of love, open to life, fundamental cell of society.

 

"In it, woman and man, thanks to the gift of maternity and paternity, together play an irreplaceable role in regard to life."

 

The Pontiff affirmed the right of children to have a father and a mother, and the state's role to "sustain with adequate social policies all that which promotes the stability of matrimony, the dignity and the responsibility of the husband and wife, their rights and irreplaceable duty to educate their children."

 

EXPLORE # 159 on Sunday, March 2, 2008; # 460 on S03-01-2008

Russia, Kola Peninsula, Tersky Coast, tonya Ludka

 

________________________________

Bronica EC-TL | Nikkor-P 75.28| Kodak Portra 160

Developed Sreda

 

//Since 1997 the ANC government has used various methods to fend-off criticism. These have run from attacking motive to bullying, obfuscation, bullshitting, lying, and outright denial. Over time civil society and media became inured to these tactics. So it was something of a welcome surprise when senior government officials - including the president and his deputy - started admitting responsibility for South Africa's energy shortages.

 

The basic line pushed by President Thabo Mbeki (and others) was that government underestimated the likely rate of economic growth and wrongly ignored Eskom's warnings that it needed to start building new capacity. For this they were very sorry.

 

These apologies have not silenced criticism, but they have been very effective in drawing attention away from where it should have been focused. This is known, in other fields, as misdirection. A Wikipedia entry notes how "The magician choreographs his actions so that even the critical and observant spectators are likely to look where the magician wants them to. More importantly, they do not look where they should not." One way of doing this is through movement, whereby "A larger action covers a smaller action."

 

Similarly, it is to the government's advantage to admit to failing to approve the building of new generating capacity on time. At worst they can be accused of ideological prevarication. Meanwhile, our gaze is shifted away from places where the ANC would prefer it not to wander. One of these is the way in which the ANC funding vehicle - Chancellor House - has been cut-in on massive contracts for the building of the Bravo and Madupi power stations. The other relates to the way in which the Eskom's racial obsessions were responsible for last week's massive black outs.//

 

www.politicsweb.co.za/iservice/eskom-the-real-cause-of-th...

China is secretly building a naval facility in Cambodia for the exclusive use of its military, with both countries denying that is the case and taking extraordinary measures to conceal the operation, Western officials said.

The military presence will be on the northern portion of Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base on the Gulf of Thailand, which is slated to be the site of a groundbreaking ceremony this week, according to the officials, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

The establishment of a Chinese naval base in Cambodia — only its second such overseas outpost and its first in the strategically significant Indo-Pacific region — is part of Beijing’s strategy to build a network of military facilities around the world in support of its aspirations to become a true global power, the officials said.

 

A map locating Ream Naval Base in Cambodia (The Washington Post)

China’s only other foreign military base right now is a naval facility in the East African country of Djibouti. Having a facility capable of hosting large naval vessels to the west of the South China Sea would be an important element of China’s ambition to expand its influence in the region and would strengthen its presence near key Southeast Asian sea lanes, officials and analysts said.

“We assess that the Indo-Pacific is an important piece for China’s leaders, who see the Indo-Pacific as China’s rightful and historic sphere of influence,” one Western official said. “They view China’s rise there as part of a global trend toward a multipolar world where major powers more forcefully assert their interests in their perceived sphere of influence.”

 

Beijing, the official said, is banking on the region being “unwilling or unable to challenge China’s core interests,” and through a combination of coercion, punishment and inducements in the diplomatic, economic and military realms, believes it can get countries to bend to its interests. “Essentially, China wants to become so powerful that the region will give in to China’s leadership rather than face the consequences [for not doing so],” the official said.

[Biden takes aggressive posture toward China on Asia trip]

The Wall Street Journal reported in 2019 that China had signed a secret agreement to allow its military to use the base, citing U.S. and allied officials familiar with the matter. Beijing and Phnom Penh denied the report, with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen denouncing it as “fake news.” A Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman at the time also denounced what it called “rumors” and said China had merely been helping with military training and logistical equipment.

Over the weekend, however, a Chinese official in Beijing confirmed to The Washington Post that “a portion of the base” will be used by “the Chinese military.” The official denied it was for “exclusive” use by the military, saying that scientists would also use the facility. The official added that the Chinese are not involved in any activities on the Cambodian portion of the base.

The official said the groundbreaking, scheduled for Thursday, was taking place and that Chinese officials would attend. The Chinese ambassador to Cambodia is expected to be present.

Asked for comment, the Cambodian Embassy in Washington said in a statement that it “strongly disagrees with the content and meaning of the report as it is a baseless accusation motivated to negatively frame Cambodia’s image.” It added that Cambodia “firmly adheres” to the nation’s constitution, which does not permit foreign military bases or presence on Cambodian soil. “The renovation of the base serves solely to strengthen the Cambodian naval capacities to protect its maritime integrity and combat maritime crimes including illegal fishing,” the statement said.

 

China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry did not reply to a request for comment.

 

The Chinese military is secretly building a naval facility for its exclusive use on the northern portion of Ream Naval Base in Cambodia, according to Western officials, who say Cambodian and Chinese officials have sought to conceal China's military presence. (Obtained by The Washington Post)

The Western officials said they expect there will be an acknowledgment at the ceremony of Chinese involvement in financing and construction of the expansion of Ream Naval Base, but not of plans for its use by the People’s Liberation Army. The expansion plans were finalized in 2020, and, significantly, called for the Chinese military to have “exclusive use of the northern portion of the base, while their presence would remain concealed,” a second official said.

The two governments have taken pains to mask the presence of the Chinese military at Ream, the official said. For instance, foreign delegations visiting the base are permitted access only to preapproved locations. During these visits, Chinese military personnel at the base wear uniforms similar to their Cambodian counterparts’ or no uniform at all to avoid suspicion from outside observers, the official said. When Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman visited the base during a trip to the region last year, her movements were “very heavily circumscribed,” the official said.

While she was in Cambodia, Sherman sought clarification over Cambodia’s razing in 2020 of two U.S.-funded facilities on Ream Naval Base, according to a State Department news release. The demolition took place after Cambodia declined a U.S. offer to pay to renovate one of them, according to a Pentagon report on Chinese military developments last year. That move, the report said, “suggests that Cambodia may have instead accepted assistance from the [People’s Republic of China] to develop the base.”

 

“What we’ve seen is over time is a very clear and consistent pattern of trying to obfuscate and hide both the end goal as well as the extent of Chinese military involvement,” the second official said. “The key thing here is the [PLA’s] exclusive use of the facility and having a unilateral military base in another country.”

Last year, the “Joint Vietnamese Friendship” building, a facility built by the Vietnamese, was relocated off Ream Naval Base to avert conflicts with Chinese military personnel, the officials said. China and Vietnam have long had a tense relationship, with Hanoi and Beijing clashing over competing territorial claims in the South China Sea for half a century.

The secrecy around the base appears to be driven primarily by Cambodian sensitivities and concern about a domestic backlash, the second official said. There is strong domestic opposition to the idea of a foreign military base, said the official, noting the constitutional ban on the presence of foreign military in the country. As the chair of the 10-member regional Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) this year, Cambodia is keen to avoid the perception it is, as the second official said, “a pawn” of Beijing.

[Biden hosts Southeast Asian leaders at U.S.-ASEAN summit held for the first time in Washington]

Cambodia has been walking a fine line between accommodating and distancing itself from Beijing. It was an “enthusiastic supporter” of the U.S.-ASEAN special summit in Washington last month, the second official said. In March, it joined 140 other countries in voting at the U.N. General Assembly to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Beijing abstained from the vote and has publicly affirmed a “no limits” partnership with Moscow that includes opposing further NATO enlargement. At the same time, Chinese influence in Cambodia has grown rapidly in recent years, with China providing substantial aid and investment, a trend that has also caused some concern in Phnom Penh about overreliance on Beijing.

 

Beyond its base in Djibouti, opened in 2017, Beijing is pursuing military facilities to support “naval, air, ground, cyber, and space power projection,” the Pentagon report said. It has “likely considered a number of countries,” it said, listing more than a dozen, including Cambodia, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and the United Arab Emirates. A global network could “both interfere with U.S. military operations and support offensive operations against the United States,” the report said.

The report also said that Chinese military academics have asserted that such bases can enable deployment of military forces in theater, and intelligence monitoring of the U.S. military.

The Chinese official told The Post that ground station technology for a BeiDou navigation satellite system was located at the Chinese portion of Ream Naval Base. BeiDou is China’s homegrown alternative to the U.S. Space Force-managed Global Positioning System, and has military uses including missile guidance. The official did not have direct knowledge of how this system was being used.

China’s military uses BeiDou’s high-accuracy positioning and navigation services to facilitate force movements and precision-guided munitions delivery, according to a March report by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency.

China’s global basing effort is “not just about power projection but about global tracking and space assets,” said a third Western official. Cambodia’s Ream is “one of their most ambitious efforts to date.”

 

China’s navy is already the world’s largest by numbers of vessels. The U.S. Navy has 297 battle-force ships — carriers, destroyers, submarines, etc. — according to the Congressional Research Service, while China has 355 and is projected to have 460 by 2030, according to last year’s Pentagon report.

But, said Andrew Erickson, research director of the China Maritime Studies Institute at the Naval War College, “as impressive as those numbers are, without a significant network of robust overseas facilities, their ability to use them falls off rapidly with distance from China.”

China is nowhere close to matching the network of military bases the United States has around the world, a major U.S. military and strategic advantage, said Richard Fontaine, chief executive of the Center for a New American Security. But, he said, a base in Cambodia “gives them a force-projection capability that they would otherwise not have in the region. That’s intrinsic to the Chinese aspiration of having a more dominant military presence throughout the Asian rimland and in the South China Sea, allowing Beijing to hold at risk — and have political influence over — countries quite far from the Chinese shore.”

Djibouti was a logical first step for a military outpost in that it is in a region far from China in which Beijing wants to have a presence, in this case to secure its growing Middle Eastern energy interests, Erickson said. Also, the United States, France and Japan have long had military bases there, he noted. “The question then becomes, how do you start filling out the board?”

 

Cambodia is “a no-brainer” in that Hun Sen, prime minister since 1985, is “extremely amenable,” Erickson said, noting that the Cambodian leader has had a long strategic partnership with Beijing.

“But the problem is Cambodia is a small country in a tough spot,” he said. “It’s trying to have it both ways: maximum strategic collaboration with China with minimum regional pushback. That contradiction is going to be exposed by the undeniable development of this facility.”

China also has reportedly sought to establish a facility in the UAE. Last year, U.S. intelligence agencies learned that Beijing was secretly building a military installation at a port in near the Emirati capital of Abu Dhabi, the Wall Street Journal reported. After meetings and visits by U.S. officials, construction was halted, the Journal reported. The current status of the project is unclear.

China’s secret building of a Cambodian base “resembles the playbook” it used in reclaiming and militarizing the Spratly Islands in the disputed South China Sea beginning in 2015, said Eric Sayers, a former adviser to the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command who is now a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “It started quietly,” he said, “with Beijing claiming its building of artificial islands on coral reefs and atolls was for peaceful purposes and promising the features would not be militarized. Then when it was far too late, we saw permanent and irreversible militarization.”

He said he expected to see the trend also play out in the Solomon Islands, a South Pacific nation that recently signed a security agreement with China. In April, after a draft copy of the agreement was leaked on social media, Beijing confirmed the pact, which neither government has released. According to the leaked copy, China will be permitted to send armed police and military personnel to the Solomon Islands to help maintain order. The government there has denied it would lead to China establishing a military base.

 

But Western officials are skeptical. “There’s evidence that China is developing plans and has sent technical teams to the Solomons to explore possibilities for basing facilities that would contradict some of the assurances that the government has made to allied governments,” a third Western official said.

[China fails on Pacific pact, but still seeks to boost regional influence]

The Solomons agreement is part of a broader Chinese effort — not always successful — to build influence in the region. Last week, China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, completed a 10-day tour of the South Pacific but failed to achieve a desired 11-nation pact on security and development. Instead of repeating the Solomons diplomatic coup, China’s proposal was shelved at a meeting in Fiji, after some countries questioned whether the deal would spark greater confrontation between China and rivals in the region.

But it would be a mistake to take the rebuff of Wang as a sign that Beijing’s influence is waning, the third official said. “There is a relentless quality to what the Chinese are involved in and they’re just going to keep coming. So anyone who thinks this is a signal that they’ve been blunted or blocked, that’s not accurate.”

Alice Crites in Washington and Eva Dou in Shenzhen, China, contributed to this report.

  

Ellen Nakashima is a national security reporter with The Washington Post. She was a member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams, in 2018 for coverage of Russia's interference in the 2016 election, and in 2014 and for reporting on the hidden scope of government surveillance.

 

Cate Cadell is a Washington Post national security reporter covering the U.S.-China relationship. She previously reported for Reuters News, where she was a politics correspondent based in Beijing.

One hip hat... 450 years ago.

 

This is a sneak peak at prop #9 - a Tudor Flat Cap, without doubt my most ambitious sewing project to date.

 

It's loosely based on a rather rough drawing I found on the internet (which I vaguely followed) and a painting of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester - a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I.

 

Fashioned from a remnant of costume "velvet", the top is lined with flannel to give it some body and the brim is lined with felt to make it a bit stiffer. It's impossible to see in the picture, but the top is pleated into the crown.

 

It was sewn entirely by hand - mostly because I didn't know what I was doing, so by the time I got done basting the bits together it was just as easy to keep going as to get out the machine.

 

Which probably would have whined about the thick layers, anyway.

 

While the hat is technically done (as of today!) I want to find a fancy ribbon or chain to go around it to replace this simple piece of ribbon.

 

FWIW: The top is help up by a reused, crumpled up, thin plastic bag, which brought home some new goodies from the fabric store this evening. The hat could also be worn completely flat, poofed up like a bowler, or with the top stretched over a plastic mesh circle to look somewhat mad-hatter-esk (yes, I tried it!)

 

(Prop #8, while completed, has yet to have its moment to shine.)

 

Our Daily Challenge - Feb 19, 2017 - "Hip"

 

Daily Dog Challenge 1937. "Hip To Be Square"

 

100x - 19 : Renaissance Dog #1 - yes, I know I said 100 unique "roles", but I'm thinking this is a pretty broad topic that can be be unique treated more than once. :)

 

Note to self: stop being lazy and iron creased backdrops before using. It takes me longer to obfuscate the creases in Lightroom than it would to do the ironing!

 

Today's Post (Renaissance Dog) : www.bzdogs.com/2017/02/renaissance-dog.html

 

Stop on by Zachary and Henry's blog: bzdogs.com - The Secret Life of the Suburban Dog

The Empire Trilogy

Heather Bennett

 

November 14th – December 23rd

Opening Reception

Friday November 14th 2008 7-9pm

 

Luxe Gallery

53 Stanton St.

New York, NY

Luxegallery.net

 

For immediate release, New York, NY

 

Luxe Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of The Empire Trilogy featuring artist Heather Bennett's latest body of work. Bennett who is known for her cinematic large-scale photographs has taken her aesthetic to time based media.

 

With a nod to Warhol's, 1964 opus, "Empire", this trilogy of videos resists any typical temporal, action-based narrative, and yet simultaneously suggests it. Each piece centers around a lone woman, all of whom almost slyly encompass a panoply of reflecting fictions. The amalgamated 'characters' take substance from childhood fairytales, contemporary fashion, female genre roles and a healthy dose of nostalgia and somehow coalesce into a peaceful, almost quieting image. The enmeshing of an anti-narrative and obvious reference to the bold fiction of children's fairytales complicate the calm hold of these images with humor; slithering alloys placing ironies. While we can see no real action over the duration of these works, at the intersection of cliché, there is a poignancy, a piquancy. Slight movements are not deliberations but more akin to a misty dream, an action of the unconscious; slow, flowing, even meandering and pointless but undeniably pertinent as iconic and soulful. These are portraits of control, of mastery. Almost in subterfuge, there is a complexity, a riot, a life replete with pressure, valuation, desire, memory, association, limitation and possibility, bubbling under the surface of a lullaby. Original soundtracks of tonal washes and subtle, circular, harmonies paint clues to the welled chaos of our valiant mistresses. Impregnated with emotion, these imperial sometimes haunting tracks illuminate and obfuscate their tenants, giving rise to their essential contradiction. We see traps of assumption escaped with grace. The prisons laying in wait within contemporary society, especially in a female body, are refracted through distorted prisms of past and present associations which affect our reality sometimes with serendipity, as well as, inappropriateness.

 

"Holly Holy" is a collision of Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and a bit of Eve, bathed in red velvet and monastically reading Faulkner. "Locks and Hocks" conflates Goldilocks and a restrained 50's housewife, entombed in a sun-drenched, yellow kitchen listlessly stirring a pot of beans and hammocks. And "Babe" collapses male and female with a school girl, Paul Bunyan combo of metamorphosed blue plaid where our heroine dully wields a two-sides axe, knocking dirt from her boots, while swathed in one of the most sexualized articles of clothing in recent history. The resulting unions blend our knowns, alarm us with their misplaced intimacies and create an inextricably raveled whole which humbly asks us to believe in something we are not quite sure we understand.

 

Music by Joe Raglani

 

Image: Heather Bennett, Locks & Hocks, 2008, production still

 

China is secretly building a naval facility in Cambodia for the exclusive use of its military, with both countries denying that is the case and taking extraordinary measures to conceal the operation, Western officials said.

The military presence will be on the northern portion of Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base on the Gulf of Thailand, which is slated to be the site of a groundbreaking ceremony this week, according to the officials, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

The establishment of a Chinese naval base in Cambodia — only its second such overseas outpost and its first in the strategically significant Indo-Pacific region — is part of Beijing’s strategy to build a network of military facilities around the world in support of its aspirations to become a true global power, the officials said.

 

A map locating Ream Naval Base in Cambodia (The Washington Post)

China’s only other foreign military base right now is a naval facility in the East African country of Djibouti. Having a facility capable of hosting large naval vessels to the west of the South China Sea would be an important element of China’s ambition to expand its influence in the region and would strengthen its presence near key Southeast Asian sea lanes, officials and analysts said.

“We assess that the Indo-Pacific is an important piece for China’s leaders, who see the Indo-Pacific as China’s rightful and historic sphere of influence,” one Western official said. “They view China’s rise there as part of a global trend toward a multipolar world where major powers more forcefully assert their interests in their perceived sphere of influence.”

 

Beijing, the official said, is banking on the region being “unwilling or unable to challenge China’s core interests,” and through a combination of coercion, punishment and inducements in the diplomatic, economic and military realms, believes it can get countries to bend to its interests. “Essentially, China wants to become so powerful that the region will give in to China’s leadership rather than face the consequences [for not doing so],” the official said.

[Biden takes aggressive posture toward China on Asia trip]

The Wall Street Journal reported in 2019 that China had signed a secret agreement to allow its military to use the base, citing U.S. and allied officials familiar with the matter. Beijing and Phnom Penh denied the report, with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen denouncing it as “fake news.” A Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman at the time also denounced what it called “rumors” and said China had merely been helping with military training and logistical equipment.

Over the weekend, however, a Chinese official in Beijing confirmed to The Washington Post that “a portion of the base” will be used by “the Chinese military.” The official denied it was for “exclusive” use by the military, saying that scientists would also use the facility. The official added that the Chinese are not involved in any activities on the Cambodian portion of the base.

The official said the groundbreaking, scheduled for Thursday, was taking place and that Chinese officials would attend. The Chinese ambassador to Cambodia is expected to be present.

Asked for comment, the Cambodian Embassy in Washington said in a statement that it “strongly disagrees with the content and meaning of the report as it is a baseless accusation motivated to negatively frame Cambodia’s image.” It added that Cambodia “firmly adheres” to the nation’s constitution, which does not permit foreign military bases or presence on Cambodian soil. “The renovation of the base serves solely to strengthen the Cambodian naval capacities to protect its maritime integrity and combat maritime crimes including illegal fishing,” the statement said.

 

China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry did not reply to a request for comment.

 

The Chinese military is secretly building a naval facility for its exclusive use on the northern portion of Ream Naval Base in Cambodia, according to Western officials, who say Cambodian and Chinese officials have sought to conceal China's military presence. (Obtained by The Washington Post)

The Western officials said they expect there will be an acknowledgment at the ceremony of Chinese involvement in financing and construction of the expansion of Ream Naval Base, but not of plans for its use by the People’s Liberation Army. The expansion plans were finalized in 2020, and, significantly, called for the Chinese military to have “exclusive use of the northern portion of the base, while their presence would remain concealed,” a second official said.

The two governments have taken pains to mask the presence of the Chinese military at Ream, the official said. For instance, foreign delegations visiting the base are permitted access only to preapproved locations. During these visits, Chinese military personnel at the base wear uniforms similar to their Cambodian counterparts’ or no uniform at all to avoid suspicion from outside observers, the official said. When Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman visited the base during a trip to the region last year, her movements were “very heavily circumscribed,” the official said.

While she was in Cambodia, Sherman sought clarification over Cambodia’s razing in 2020 of two U.S.-funded facilities on Ream Naval Base, according to a State Department news release. The demolition took place after Cambodia declined a U.S. offer to pay to renovate one of them, according to a Pentagon report on Chinese military developments last year. That move, the report said, “suggests that Cambodia may have instead accepted assistance from the [People’s Republic of China] to develop the base.”

 

“What we’ve seen is over time is a very clear and consistent pattern of trying to obfuscate and hide both the end goal as well as the extent of Chinese military involvement,” the second official said. “The key thing here is the [PLA’s] exclusive use of the facility and having a unilateral military base in another country.”

Last year, the “Joint Vietnamese Friendship” building, a facility built by the Vietnamese, was relocated off Ream Naval Base to avert conflicts with Chinese military personnel, the officials said. China and Vietnam have long had a tense relationship, with Hanoi and Beijing clashing over competing territorial claims in the South China Sea for half a century.

The secrecy around the base appears to be driven primarily by Cambodian sensitivities and concern about a domestic backlash, the second official said. There is strong domestic opposition to the idea of a foreign military base, said the official, noting the constitutional ban on the presence of foreign military in the country. As the chair of the 10-member regional Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) this year, Cambodia is keen to avoid the perception it is, as the second official said, “a pawn” of Beijing.

[Biden hosts Southeast Asian leaders at U.S.-ASEAN summit held for the first time in Washington]

Cambodia has been walking a fine line between accommodating and distancing itself from Beijing. It was an “enthusiastic supporter” of the U.S.-ASEAN special summit in Washington last month, the second official said. In March, it joined 140 other countries in voting at the U.N. General Assembly to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Beijing abstained from the vote and has publicly affirmed a “no limits” partnership with Moscow that includes opposing further NATO enlargement. At the same time, Chinese influence in Cambodia has grown rapidly in recent years, with China providing substantial aid and investment, a trend that has also caused some concern in Phnom Penh about overreliance on Beijing.

 

Beyond its base in Djibouti, opened in 2017, Beijing is pursuing military facilities to support “naval, air, ground, cyber, and space power projection,” the Pentagon report said. It has “likely considered a number of countries,” it said, listing more than a dozen, including Cambodia, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and the United Arab Emirates. A global network could “both interfere with U.S. military operations and support offensive operations against the United States,” the report said.

The report also said that Chinese military academics have asserted that such bases can enable deployment of military forces in theater, and intelligence monitoring of the U.S. military.

The Chinese official told The Post that ground station technology for a BeiDou navigation satellite system was located at the Chinese portion of Ream Naval Base. BeiDou is China’s homegrown alternative to the U.S. Space Force-managed Global Positioning System, and has military uses including missile guidance. The official did not have direct knowledge of how this system was being used.

China’s military uses BeiDou’s high-accuracy positioning and navigation services to facilitate force movements and precision-guided munitions delivery, according to a March report by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency.

China’s global basing effort is “not just about power projection but about global tracking and space assets,” said a third Western official. Cambodia’s Ream is “one of their most ambitious efforts to date.”

 

China’s navy is already the world’s largest by numbers of vessels. The U.S. Navy has 297 battle-force ships — carriers, destroyers, submarines, etc. — according to the Congressional Research Service, while China has 355 and is projected to have 460 by 2030, according to last year’s Pentagon report.

But, said Andrew Erickson, research director of the China Maritime Studies Institute at the Naval War College, “as impressive as those numbers are, without a significant network of robust overseas facilities, their ability to use them falls off rapidly with distance from China.”

China is nowhere close to matching the network of military bases the United States has around the world, a major U.S. military and strategic advantage, said Richard Fontaine, chief executive of the Center for a New American Security. But, he said, a base in Cambodia “gives them a force-projection capability that they would otherwise not have in the region. That’s intrinsic to the Chinese aspiration of having a more dominant military presence throughout the Asian rimland and in the South China Sea, allowing Beijing to hold at risk — and have political influence over — countries quite far from the Chinese shore.”

Djibouti was a logical first step for a military outpost in that it is in a region far from China in which Beijing wants to have a presence, in this case to secure its growing Middle Eastern energy interests, Erickson said. Also, the United States, France and Japan have long had military bases there, he noted. “The question then becomes, how do you start filling out the board?”

 

Cambodia is “a no-brainer” in that Hun Sen, prime minister since 1985, is “extremely amenable,” Erickson said, noting that the Cambodian leader has had a long strategic partnership with Beijing.

“But the problem is Cambodia is a small country in a tough spot,” he said. “It’s trying to have it both ways: maximum strategic collaboration with China with minimum regional pushback. That contradiction is going to be exposed by the undeniable development of this facility.”

China also has reportedly sought to establish a facility in the UAE. Last year, U.S. intelligence agencies learned that Beijing was secretly building a military installation at a port in near the Emirati capital of Abu Dhabi, the Wall Street Journal reported. After meetings and visits by U.S. officials, construction was halted, the Journal reported. The current status of the project is unclear.

China’s secret building of a Cambodian base “resembles the playbook” it used in reclaiming and militarizing the Spratly Islands in the disputed South China Sea beginning in 2015, said Eric Sayers, a former adviser to the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command who is now a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “It started quietly,” he said, “with Beijing claiming its building of artificial islands on coral reefs and atolls was for peaceful purposes and promising the features would not be militarized. Then when it was far too late, we saw permanent and irreversible militarization.”

He said he expected to see the trend also play out in the Solomon Islands, a South Pacific nation that recently signed a security agreement with China. In April, after a draft copy of the agreement was leaked on social media, Beijing confirmed the pact, which neither government has released. According to the leaked copy, China will be permitted to send armed police and military personnel to the Solomon Islands to help maintain order. The government there has denied it would lead to China establishing a military base.

 

But Western officials are skeptical. “There’s evidence that China is developing plans and has sent technical teams to the Solomons to explore possibilities for basing facilities that would contradict some of the assurances that the government has made to allied governments,” a third Western official said.

[China fails on Pacific pact, but still seeks to boost regional influence]

The Solomons agreement is part of a broader Chinese effort — not always successful — to build influence in the region. Last week, China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, completed a 10-day tour of the South Pacific but failed to achieve a desired 11-nation pact on security and development. Instead of repeating the Solomons diplomatic coup, China’s proposal was shelved at a meeting in Fiji, after some countries questioned whether the deal would spark greater confrontation between China and rivals in the region.

But it would be a mistake to take the rebuff of Wang as a sign that Beijing’s influence is waning, the third official said. “There is a relentless quality to what the Chinese are involved in and they’re just going to keep coming. So anyone who thinks this is a signal that they’ve been blunted or blocked, that’s not accurate.”

Alice Crites in Washington and Eva Dou in Shenzhen, China, contributed to this report.

  

Ellen Nakashima is a national security reporter with The Washington Post. She was a member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams, in 2018 for coverage of Russia's interference in the 2016 election, and in 2014 and for reporting on the hidden scope of government surveillance.

 

Cate Cadell is a Washington Post national security reporter covering the U.S.-China relationship. She previously reported for Reuters News, where she was a politics correspondent based in Beijing.

Mugbil Al-Thukair was likely photographed in his bedchamber at his house in Manama, sitting on a prayer rug with a pious wistful countenance in a dapper embroidered silk Jubbah (open coat) and an ornate Cashmere Ghutra Shawl (headdress) fastened with the obsolete thick Najdi Agal (headband) these were some of the distinctive formal attire worn by wealthy Arab merchants and tribal chieftains in Central Arabia and the northern Arabian Gulf in the early twentieth century as Al-Thukair supposedly was facing a Victorian colonial Anglo-Indian Raj four-poster teakwood bed surrounded by all the trappings of wealth typifying the lifestyle of a Gulf-rich pearl merchant and his household at the time, such as the open Indian teakwood wardrobe cabinet with an inside mirrored door on the left where a visible Cashmere Ghutra Shawl hangs from an open wardrobe drawer, a Victorian glass-shaded gas lamp in the right corner next to a pendulum clock in the back of a reclining wooden cane chair with its vertically striped cushion and several sitting chairs stacked high with books together with a variety of Persian rugs and carpets strewn across the floor during Jacques Cartier's second extended visit to Bahrain (from the 14th to the 26th of March 1912) the focal point of his Arabian Gulf pearl purchasing trip on Thursday, the 16th of March, 1912.

 

(Mugbil Bin Abdulrahman Al-Thukair was born in 1844 in the rural town of Unaizah in the Al-Qassim region in northern Najd, Central Arabia as Al-Qassim has always been considered the agricultural heartland of the Arabian Peninsula known since pre-Islamic times as the "Alimental Basket" or granary of Arabia for its abundant agricultural assets into a prestigious erudite family of merchants widespread across Arabia and the Fertile Crescent with a trading history that could be traced back to the early eighteenth century from a young age Al-Thukair was endowed with natural business acumen combined with deep intellectual and literary interests following in the footsteps of generations of his family's enterprising male offspring which drove him first in 1867 at the tender age of 23 to the prosperous port town of Jeddah on the Red Sea coast of Arabia with its bustling market and cosmopolitan outlook the obvious first choice for any ambitious young man from the hinterlands of Arabia mainly Najd in those days where he started to establish himself as a budding young merchant at the same time exploring any available business opportunities in the port cities and towns of the Near East (Middle East) and those in the neighbouring Indian subcontinent principally in the newly British-founded port city of Bombay (Mumbai), the quickly burgeoning commercial hub on the Arabian Sea, the main western gateway to India and the key gathering place for Arab merchants and their families from Arabia in the subcontinent forming a dynamic expatriate Arab community that would continue to exist from the mid-nineteenth century until India's independence from Britain in 1947 Bombay also provided a good head start for scores of young Arabian Peninsula merchants at the time some of whom went on to become well-known household business names across the region most notably Alireza of Jeddah, Alghanim, Al-Kharafi and Alshaya of Kuwait among others, spurring young Al-Thukair to learn Hindi, the pre-oil seafaring age's business lingua franca in the Arabian Peninsula since the majority of Arabia's trade passed through Indian entrepôts and in due course he became proficient in the essential business language, the port city of Basra in southern Iraq was yet another desirable alternative business opportunity for Al-Thukair, a familiar business destination for his family for many decades and a second adopted domicile for several family members as Iraq's gateway to the rest of the world, frequently visited by him in the early to mid-1870s while en route to Iraq's only port on the Arabian Gulf his ship would stop at Bahrain one of the three major ports of the Arabian Peninsula in the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries (the other two were Aden and Jeddah) allowing him during the few hours interval between passengers and cargo disembarkation and embarkation to wander around the town of Manama the cosmopolitan commercial hub on the main island of the Bahraini archipelago examining closely along the way Manama's ethnically diverse purveyors of bountiful goods from all over the world meanwhile assessing the business possibilities of the Bahraini market especially its booming pearl trade prompting him to dabble in the lucrative commodity with great success as part of his general trading business interests and after spending ten years in the coastal town of Jeddah now as a seasoned well-established general merchant Bahrain beckoned as the centre of the pearl trade in the Arabian Gulf and beyond a pioneering position consolidated by possessing in its northern waters the richest pearl oyster beds in the Gulf renowned worldwide for producing the finest quality pearls for their iridescent lustre, size and variety of colours making it the place of choice for anyone wishing to try his luck in the pearl business back then which was the mainstay of the Arabian Gulf economy prior to the discovery of oil similarly sundry of his Central Arabian Najdi merchant counterparts from the austere Arabian inland such as Algosaibi, Al-Ajaji, Al-Qadi and Al-Bassam were lured to Bahrain by the country's newfound political stability following the accession of the young, astute and literarily inclined Sheikh Isa Bin Ali Al Khalifa (1848-1932) to the throne in 1869 ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity after decades of turmoil and instability as reflected in the renewed confidence and heightened profitability prospects of the Bahraini pearl market driven by increasing international demand particularly in the West for high-quality natural pearls from the Arabian Gulf as rapidly soaring demand propelled pearl prices to unprecedented heights against such a heady backdrop Al-Thukair decided in 1877 at the age of 33 to relocate to Bahrain with his immediate family consisting of his wife and two young sons Abdullatif and Abdulmuhsin, a decision that would change his life forever Bahrain with its lush date palm groves and freshwater springs proved to be more suitable to his agrarian temperament than arid Jeddah though comparable to its vibrant multicultural and multi-ethnic society as it was the closest thing to a second home for the mature aspiring assiduous merchant after his beloved birthplace of Unaizah within a matter of years after arriving in the small island country he managed to become a leading pearl merchant and a highly esteemed public figure well-known for his philanthropic disposition, honest dealings, impeccable integrity and intellectual prowess so much so that he was dubbed "The Pride of Merchants" by the Bahraini business community he also took on the role of honorary chairman of the Manama business community and titular head of the Najdi diaspora community in Bahrain as a natural progression of his tremendous entrepreneurial successes and admirable character traits due to this exalted social status and the extensive network of highly influential personages he cultivated throughout the region Al-Thukair became increasingly sought-after as an arbiter of disputes including those of a political nature in Bahrain and elsewhere in the region but among the many scattered instances of his arbitration cases in the declassified annual Gulf reports from the British Archives, the following case from the latter stage of his life in Bahrain is one of the most striking examples of his high-level arbitrations where a family of illustrious clerics and judges resorted to his conscientious arbitration when asked by Ibrahim one of the two younger brothers of Bahrain's highest religious Muslim authority for nearly half a century the eminent cleric and unofficial supreme judge Sheikh Qasim Al Mehza (1847-1941) dubbed the "chief judge" unanimously by adherents of both Sunni and Shiite cross-sectarian Muslim denominations of Bahraini society for his scholarly knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence to intercede between the two younger siblings one of whom Ahmed was a highly respected cleric in his own right the first Bahraini graduate of the Al-Azhar of Cairo in 1887 and ironically their elder brother the highly learned cleric and judge Sheikh Qasim, here is the next slightly edited citation from the British Gulf residency report of 1912 concerning local Bahraini affairs from 1st to 30th September, exact date unspecified (A difference over the ownership of a plot of land and a shop recently arose between Sheikh Qasim Bin Mehza and his two brothers Ahmed and Ibrahim and the two parties were not on speaking terms. At the request of Ibrahim, Sheikh Mugbil and Yusuf Kanoo intervened and succeeded in arranging a comprise) correspondingly he was acting as an unpaid adviser, interlocutor and mediator to some of the Arabian Peninsula's rulers as attested by one of the earliest documented references to Al-Thukair in the British Archives in late 1888 and early 1889 where he was linked to a series of accounts dealing with the recurring violent hostilities between the neighbouring Sheikhdoms of Qatar and Abu Dhabi in which he acted as a go-between on behalf of Sheikh Qasim Bin Muhammad Al-Thani (r. 1868-1913) the first British-recognised Qatari ruler independent of Bahraini suzerainty and founder of the Al-Thani ruling dynasty to help broker a peaceful settlement between the two parties and other key players in the conflict including the Al Rasheed the then rulers of Arabia's northern region of Ha'il and their Ottoman backers both of whom intervened on behalf of the Qatari side, from early on as a middle-aged man Al-Thukair had established himself as an ethical impartial figure and a reliable confidant to the majority of the rulers in the Arabian Gulf as demonstrated in numerous instances in this mini-biography of the man, the following two edited extracts are part of a comprehensive report on the latter stage of the long-drawn fitful hostilities between Qatar and Abu Dhabi covering the period from March 1888 to June 1890 by the British Gulf residency in Bushehr Persia (Iran) on the bloody conflict which involved lengthy correspondence between the British political agent in Bahrain and his superior the political resident in Bushehr where Al-Thukair is frequently mentioned, a conflict that began as a random mid-sea raid by Qatari corsairs on an Abu Dhabi-owned pearl fishing vessel in Qatari waters killing all of its crew presumably around the year 1880 escalating into a prolonged fierce enmity between Sheikh Zayed Bin Khalifa Al Nahyan (r. 1855-1909) ruler of Abu Dhabi and Sheikh Qasim Bin Muhammad Al-Thani (r. 1868-1913) ruler of Qatar spiralling into uncontrollable atrocious carnage and depredation reprisals manifested in the thrice sacking of the Qatari capital Doha during the third of which Qatar ruler's son Ali was killed and the multiple sackings of the sedentary communities of Abu Dhabi's western region of Al Dhafra and other towns between 1880 and 1892 the first extract is a full-text letter while the second consists of the last two paragraphs of a longer letter the first of which is as follows (No. 10, dated the 20th January 1889. From-The Residency Agent, Bahrain. To-The Political Resident, Arabian Gulf. After compliments. I beg to send herewith a copy of a letter sent by Qasim Bin Thani (ruler of Qatar) to the Chief (ruler) of Bahrain with a special messenger who has also brought a number of other letters giving welcome tidings to Muhammad Bin Abdulwahab (Al-Faihani), Mugbil (Al-Thukair) and (Abdulrahman) Bin Aidan; and mentioning the number of people who were slain out of the inhabitants of Liwa (the Al Dhafra region is centred on the large Liwa Oasis in Abu Dhabi's westernmost domain); viz., 520 persons; and that they took from them large booty and numerous camels and that Sheikh Qasim returned safely with his army. I hear from reports that Sheikh Qasim lost 8 men killed. Others say 48, others again 110. But as yet there is no correct report as since the arrival of this messenger no one has come from Qatar owing to heavy "shemall" (northern gusty) winds. It is stated that Sheikh Qasim has not yet reached Al-Bidda (Doha). I hear that Isa Bin Ziyab a cousin of Sheikh Zayed Bin Khalifa (Al Nahyan) has arrived in Bahrain from Abu Dhabi and interviewed the Chief (ruler of Bahrain). According to what he says there are not so many people at Liwa and that Sheikh Zayed had not received any report of Sheikh Qasim's proceedings from Qatar to Liwa or any other place. I shall make further reports when I receive any fresh news) the second extract is as follows (No. 52, dated the 28th of March 1889. From-The Residency Agent, Bahrain. To-The Political Resident, Arabian Gulf. I have seen a letter from Qasim (ruler of Qatar) to Mugbil (Al-Thukair) in which the writer says that he is prepared to meet Zayed (ruler of Abu Dhabi) and that he is not afraid of his advance; on the contrary that he will himself march out to attack Zayed in case the latter should not advance against him. In that letter he also wishes Mugbil to believe that Ibn Rasheed (ruler of Ha'il in northern Arabia) will not fail to fulfil his promise. The date of this letter is 17th March. It is apparent that Qasim wrote that letter before the arrival of Nafi (Ibn Rasheed messenger) My own opinion is that if the news about Zayed's advance be true and also that if Qasim be supported by the Turkish soldiers, Zayed's forces will have hard work before them; for Qasim is regardless of expense and the Turkish soldiers are greedy as is known. Their number at Al-Bidda (Doha) is 250) the previous references were among several in this special report to Al-Thukair's top-level intermediation in this particular bloody conflict a small sample of his early political intermediation in regional affairs that would last until he unwillingly left his second adopted homeland Bahrain in mid-1917 but in connection with his frequent interactions with the rulers of the Arabian Peninsula the most significant of those were Sheikh Isa Bin Ali Al Khalifa (r. 1869-1932) of Bahrain, Sheikh Qasim Bin Muhammad Al-Thani (r. 1868-1913) of Qatar and Abdulaziz Ibn Saud (r. 1902-1953) ruler of Najd and its dependencies who was styled as such from the 13th of January 1902 onwards after the subtle young industrious scion of the House of Saud succeeded in recapturing the ancestral seat of power of his forefathers, the then small town of Riyadh from the bellicose Ottoman-backed Al Rasheed ruling clan of the northern Arabian region of Ha'il in an audacious dawn attack, the future king of what would become the sprawling Kingdom of Saudi Arabia perceptibly in the course of time Al-Thukair became such a revered sage that the ruler of Bahrain Sheikh Isa Bin Ali Al Khalifa asked him to be one of the signatories of a solemn pledge of allegiance deed to his eldest surviving son the 24-year-old newly appointed heir apparent to the throne and future ruler Sheikh Hamad (r. 1932-1942) on 8th October 1896 following the untimely death of his eldest son and heir apparent Salman near Riyadh in Najd Central Arabia three years earlier on his exhausting perilous long land journey home from the Hajj pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca during the formal investiture ceremony for the crown prince an honour reserved for only a select few high-ranking merchants from the highest echelons of the Bahraini business community who were recognised as pillars of society outside the ranks of senior members of the ruling family, tribal chieftains and clergy leaders amongst whom were Hussain Bin Salman Matar (1817-1911) and Ahmed Bin Muhammed Kanoo (1835-1905) as for Al-Thukair's aforementioned special relationship with Ibn Saud the marriage of his niece Lulwa the daughter of his brother Yahya to Ibn Saud solidified that relationship enabling him to negotiate on behalf of Ibn Saud a favourable agreement with the Ottomans on the withdrawal of their garrison from the Al-Hasa Oasis and its environs in eastern Arabia which would become part of the future eastern province of Saudi Arabia as Ibn Saud was poised to take control of the oasis in mid-1914 soon before the outbreak of World War One by the year 1890 Al-Thukair began to pursue in earnest his profound and ardent passion for spreading knowledge and learning which would become an indelible lifelong characteristic of his initially by starting a literary salon at his house in Manama similar to that of his friend and first cousin of the ruler of Bahrain classical poet and intellectual Sheikh Ibrahim Bin Muhammad Al Khalifa's literary salon in Muharraq and those of several educated and well-travelled merchants and ruling family members in both Manama and Muharraq Bahrain's former political capital from 1810 to 1923 however the literary salon of Al-Thukair was rather different from its local counterparts in that it was more educationally oriented than the others by allocating a well-furnished spacious room in his house as a permanent location for the salon equipped with a relatively sizable varied library whose contents were kept in its wall alcoves as it was the antecedent of his most ambitious cultural and educational project ever the "Bahrain Literary Society" twenty-three years later it must be acknowledged that those literary salons (clubs) collectively played a discernible educational role as they were haunts for the knowledge-hungry local literate young men prior to the establishment of formal education following the end of the First World War furthermore Sheikh Ibrahim requested Al-Thukair to be the principal supplier of Arabic periodicals in Bahrain by making use of his network of regional business agents to acquire popular newspapers and magazines from the Levant and Egypt, therefore he took it upon himself to supply all of the needs for published materials of other literary salons as a courtesy moving in the same direction he also vigorously sponsored the publication of seminal literary and theological works from the Arab Islamic mediaeval heritage as well as non-formal charity schooling and public libraries well-stocked with a wide range of books and respected periodicals largely from the Levant and Egypt (such as Al-Muqtataf, Al-Mu'ayyad, Al-Hilal, Al-Manar and so on) in both Bahrain and his birthplace Unaizah in addition to his educational and cultural dissemination efforts he was acutely sensitive to the daily hardships of ordinary impoverished and marginalised people as evidenced by the next edited excerpt from the 1910 British Gulf residency report (Almas, Negro the Confidential Adviser of Sheikh Isa (ruler of Bahrain) died on 11th January and was replaced by Ali Bin Abdullah (Al-Obaidli) on the advice of Ali Bin Abdullah, Sheikh Isa called upon house owners to produce the sanads (Arabic singular title deed: سند, Romanised English plural: sanads) in virtue of which they held their property on their failing to do so they were evicted and no consideration was paid to the period of possession, Sheikh Mugbil Bin Abdulrahman Al-Thukair protested to Sheikh Isa against this measure as it pressed hardly on the poor the protest had the desired effect and the Sheikh (ruler) promised to refrain from such actions in the future) the rescinding of the ruler's decree in the past incident is the definitive indication of the unflinching deference accorded to Al-Thukair by everyone who came into contact with him from those in power to the ordinary man in the street he was also involved in a wide range of philanthropic activities that were not confined to the conventional charity act of almsgiving since he was a practical man who took a number of practical steps to assuage human suffering in any way he could defying common human prejudices among his various practical philanthropic contributions in Bahrain and elsewhere in the Gulf was the commissioning of a water well next to his house in Manama around the year 1900 akin to the undertakings of prominent fellow local pearl merchants Salman Bin Hussain Matar (1837-1944) and Muhammad Bin Rashid Bin Hindi (1850-1934) of Muharraq who attempted to alleviate some of the freshwater supply predicament that plagued Bahrain's urban dwellers predominantly those of Manama and Muharraq the two main densely populated towns in the small island nation at the turn of the twentieth century where the majority of the population had difficulty securing their daily domestic supply of freshwater owing to the lack of potable drinking water infrastructure in Bahrain and much of the Near East as in many other parts of the globe including some of the underdeveloped regions of the Western world in the early part of the twentieth century despite the fact that Bahrain had abundant freshwater resources unlike some of its Arab Gulf neighbours a small example of the central socioeconomic roles that rich mercantile elites played throughout Arab polities in the Arabian Gulf before the discovery of oil and the subsequent establishment of the modern welfare state Al-Thukair also tended to the spiritual needs of the inhabitants of his neighbourhood in Manama at roughly the same time he commissioned the water well he financed the renovation of an old dilapidated bijou Mosque within the vicinity of his house dating back to the late seventeen hundreds placing a nearby shop he owned as a charitable endowment for the Mosque which the locals of the area after him affectionately called Mugbil Mosque even though he was not its original builder he was also instrumental in locally funding the construction of Bahrain's second hospital after the opening of the "American Mission Hospital" in Manama on 26th January 1903 at the request of the British to fulfil their envisaged "Victoria Memorial Hospital" between 1902 and its formal opening on 9th November 1906 to commemorate the late Queen Victoria (defunct since 1948) situated in the Ras Rumman area in Manama south of the British political agency (present-day British Embassy) by rallying other leading merchants to contribute to this vital medical project as Bahrain was in desperate need of a quarantine medical facility to combat the rampant spread of recurring deadly epidemics specifically plague, cholera and typhus as reported in the British Gulf residency report of 1902 this is a slightly edited excerpt from the detailed report dated 23rd August 1902 by J. C. Gaskin, Esq, Assistant Political Agent, Bahrain where Gaskin was delegated by his superiors in the British Indian government the task of securing funds for the proposed hospital locally by taking the pulse of the local mercantile elite through cosying up to rich local merchants chief among them Al-Thukair to enlist their financial assistance in building the hospital, stated as follows (I would venture to report that since the receipt of your communication I have spoken on the subject to some of the leading native merchants and from their replies to me I got the impression that they would give liberal donations towards the hospital: and subsequently Haji Mugbil Al-Thukair the leading Bahraini merchant called on me and offered to subscribe R1,000. (One thousand rupees) Haji Mugbil's handsome offer will influence the native merchants who usually follow his lead) in recognition of his role in securing local funding for the hospital British colonial authorities invited Al-Thukair along with other donors to the hospital opening ceremony, the following edited excerpt from the British Gulf residency report for the year 1906-1907 formulated by the British political agent in Bahrain Captain F. B. Prideaux sheds light on the event (on the 9th November 1906 advantage was taken of the presence of the Political Resident (Major P. Z. Cox) in the Arabian Gulf to hold a public meeting for the opening of the Victoria Memorial Charitable Hospital nearly all the contributors to the Rs. 21,000 which the construction had cost were present on the occasion as were also the Chief (ruler) of Bahrain and his sons after the Resident had delivered a short extempore speech, the leading Arab merchant Haji Mugbil Al-Thukair read a reply expressing gratitude to the British Government for their interest in and protection of Bahrain and wishing long life to the Ruler Sheikh Isa Bin Ali) for some the antagonistic stance of Al-Thukair towards the British as expounded in detail further in the text seemed contradictory as he gladly collaborated with them in their efforts to secure funding for the construction of the said hospital in tandem with their other measures to improve public sanitation and hygiene to help curb the spread of virulent diseases in Bahrain's two major towns Manama and Muharraq as he saw his sporadic cooperation with the advanced British in a different light as he would endorse any attempt to better the lives of ordinary Bahrainis even if it meant occasionally cooperating with a foreign colonial power he vehemently opposed in that sense he was a modern practical man, it could not be denied that the least tangible of his philanthropic efforts but perhaps the most life-changing for those affected by it was the hidden assistance he rendered in paying off the debts of struggling insolvent merchants in Bahrain and across the Arabian Gulf with a special priority given to his own debtors who either had their debts temporarily reprieved or cancelled altogether as in this revealing slightly edited citation from the 1913 British Gulf residency report asserting the regional scope of his business interests dated 5th of May 1913 stating as follows (Sheikh Qasim Bin Thani (ruler) of Qatar has asked Yusuf Kanoo to use his influence with Sheikh Mugbil Al-Thukair in bringing about an amiable settlement between the latter and his Qatar debtors who are unable to pay their debts on account of the dullness of the pearl market) surpassed only by Bahrain's preeminent pearl merchant of all time dubbed by the Bahraini people "Father of orphans and protector of widows" for his unequalled altruism and magnanimity Salman Bin Hussain Matar, yet his most important legacy was the founding in mid-1913 of the first officially recognised Literary Society in Bahrain as touched upon earlier located in close proximity to the American Mission Bible Bookshop in Manama on what is now Sheikh Isa Al Kabeer (Isa the Great) Avenue in its own special-purpose premises inaugurated under his patronage and with the full endorsement of the ruler of Bahrain Sheikh Isa Bin Ali Al Khalifa and the moral support of a number of local literary figures and dignitaries led by Bahrain's foremost literary figure in the early twentieth century the acclaimed classical poet Sheikh Ibrahim Bin Muhammad Al Khalifa (1850-1933) in conjunction with Al-Thukair's younger and trusted energetic friend, the influential comprador merchant and shrewd entrepreneur founder and sole owner of Bahrain's first Western-style Bank in 1890 a true man of the world the maverick Yusuf Bin Ahmed Kanoo (1861-1945) this society was not merely an ordinary Literary Society but a modern educational institution in the true sense of the word a wellspring of radiance for the Bahraini people at the time comprising a comprehensive library, a school for teaching Arabic, English, mathematics and Islamic theology and a lecture hall ably managed by the gifted 33-year-old Al-Azhar graduate educator Muhammad Bin Abdulaziz Al-Mana (1882-1965) who would become the first chairman of the Directorate of Knowledge (Ministry of Education) in the newly established Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the future judge and Grand Mufti (jurisconsult) of Qatar handpicked by Al-Thukair to undertake the onerous task of transforming this institution into a beacon of enlightenment and forward-thinking in a short period of time one of the many cultural contributions of the educated and enlightened Bahraini business elite who were at the vanguard of modernity and progress in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through their previously mentioned literary salons and also through their lesser-known but no less important financing of numerous free of charge non-formal local schooling initiatives as those were among the earliest semi-modern organised educational institutions to tackle the prevalent illiteracy in Bahrain other than the existing traditional Quranic schools strikingly among the several non-formal schools of the time one stood out as the first female-founded charity school in Bahrain and most likely the entire Gulf established on the island of Muharraq the former capital of Bahrain in 1887 by the noblewoman and philanthropist heiress Sheikha Saida Bint Bishr (1834-1892) who defied all expectations of traditional domestic roles for women in the highly patriarchal society of late-nineteenth-century Bahrain by allocating the revenue of a date palm orchard she owned in Manama as an endowment for the school eponymously named after her nevertheless some of the independent charity schools date back to the early part of the nineteenth century since the earliest recorded charity school in Bahrain was that of Sheikh Isa Bin Rashid in Muharraq in 1829 an eminent cleric of the Island of Muharraq predating the reign of Sheikh Isa by forty years however this proliferation of educational initiatives noticeably in the last third of the nineteenth century was the fruit of the long-lasting stability of Sheikh Isa's reign the role of the Bahraini business elite was not limited to just paving the way for the establishment of modern education but also was directly involved in the development of Western-influenced formal education leading to the opening of the first elementary school for boys in Muharraq in 1919 followed by another for girls in 1928 also in Muharraq with a nine-year gap where some of the senior members of the said elite (such as Matar, Algosaibi, Al-Zayani and Fakhro) served on the first governmental educational regulatory body in the modern history of the country the education supervisory committee (the forerunner of the Ministry of Education) which oversaw the development of the nascent government's educational system chaired by Sheikh Abdullah (1883-1966) the youngest son of the ruler of Bahrain in the honorary position of minister of education, the first and only local state official to hold such a position under British colonial rule in Bahrain this exception was made due to the high status of its occupant considering he was the son of the ruler since the office of a minister was a symbol of sovereignty in an independent sovereign state which was not the case with Bahrain an office he would continue to occupy until his death in 1966 the education committee continued as the main financial backer of education in Bahrain by financing the construction of schools across the country since its formation in 1919 until the mid-1930s when the Bahraini government became financially self-sufficient as a result of stable oil export revenues lastly allowing the government to replenish its empty coffers permanently resolving the protracted financial problems that had beset the Bahraini government for many decades rendering it a thing of the past simultaneously with the establishment of formal education in 1919 another milestone was the creation of the first partially elected municipal councils in both Manama and Muharraq which were dominated by elected and appointed senior members of the Bahraini business elite who played a crucial role in sponsoring a number of infrastructure projects in the country including the Manama port project in 1919 as happened in the pre-oil era throughout the Gulf as the 1920s and 1930s saw the gradual emergence of the modern Bahraini bureaucratic centralised state and good governance replacing the existing centuries-old obsolete mediaeval fiefdom system an inexorable obstacle to human development in its entirety anywhere in the world of the early twentieth-century industrial age, it would be misleading not to mention the facilitating quintessential role of Britain in bringing those reforms to fruition as represented by the four most influential British colonial administrators and officers in the British colonial history of Bahrain whose contributions to the establishment of modern Bahrain could not be ignored or underestimated under any circumstances serving consecutively one after the other starting with the delicate and focal preliminary task of the wily Arabist and orientalist military commander and intelligence officer Captain N. N. E. Bray (1885-1962) as a political agent in Bahrain from November 1918 to June 1919 with clear directives to "seek the amelioration of the internal government by indirect and pacific means and by gaining the confidence and trust of the Sheikh" ruler," followed by Major H. R. P. Dickson (1881-1959) with a brief yet extremely productive tenure from 1919 to 1920 he would also serve as a political agent in Kuwait from 1929 to 1936 then his disgraced successor, demoted from Colonel to Major for his recklessly violent behaviour in post-World War One Iraq, inadvertently responsible for single-handedly igniting the first spark of what would become "The Iraqi revolt against the British" also known as the 1920 Iraqi Revolt or the Great Iraqi Revolution, the Anglo-Irish Clive Kirkpatrick Daly (1888-1966) with his divisive and controversial tenure from 1921 to 1926 and finally Charles D. Belgrave (1894-1969) who served as an administrator and financial adviser to the ruler of Bahrain in the newly created office of the "Adviser" to purposefully overshadow the increasingly unpopular post of the political agent for its association with Daly's heavy-handed colonial rule, Belgrave's long tenure from 1926 to 1957 is seen by historians as a consolidation of the modernising reforms of his predecessors particularly Daly, whom Belgrave held in high esteem where the reforms gained more momentum following the steady flow of oil revenues after the discovery of the essential commodity in 1932 as all four carefully selected highly competent Arabist hardy tricenarian officers were assigned by the British Government with specific instructions to introduce all required administrative reforms based on their own discretion in line with the broader British regional strategy of placating the growing social discontent among the disenfranchised lower classes by redressing the pressing multigenerational injustices in Bahraini society specifically in the semi-feudal systems of pearl fishing indentured workers and agricultural farmers coordinating their reforms with the financial and moral support of the cooperative Bahraini business elite under such circumstances the first batch of reforms in education, municipal and fiscal sectors was implemented almost immediately after Bray's assisting initiative by Dickson, whereas customs, judiciary, police and land reform fell to the authoritarian Daly while Belgrave is credited with creating several new government departments including the "Directorate of Religious Endowments" in 1927 his first significant reform after assuming office as a financial adviser to stem the chronic unfettered corruption of some of the local clergy whom the government entrusted to administer religious endowments (waqf) without any supervision or legal accountability followed by the slow process of his decades-long vital initiative to develop modern public utility infrastructure for electricity, water and telephone service which commenced effectively in early 1928 he was also instrumental in securing the oil concession that led to the discovery of oil in 1932 but his everlasting achievement was the founding of the "Minors Funds Directorate" in 1932 to protect the inheritance rights of orphans and widows, a life-changing cross-sectarian institution in the service of the Bahraini people operating without interruption since its inception the first governmental institution of its kind in Bahrain and Belgrave's most enduring legacy however Belgrave faced fierce and persistent opposition from deeply conservative reactionary and corrupt elements within the Sunni and Shiite cross-sectarian main religious composition of Bahrain who sought to obfuscate and obstruct the introduction of such a governmental institution as those elements had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, deeming such a move as tantamount to heresy but Belgrave's dedication and perseverance prevailed in the end, sadly for many Bahrainis this remarkable feat of his remains a little-known historical fact the upcoming excerpt is one of numerous recurring instances in Belgrave's diary on this motion from 20th February 1931 until it was ratified on 15th January 1932 by the deputy ruler Sheikh Hamad less than a year before his accession to the throne on 9th December after being put forward for public debate by the government involving the wonted religious and mercantile elites of Bahraini society as alluded to earlier illustrating the great lengths Belgrave went to for the creation of this totally new governmental regulatory body with no precedent at least in Bahrain (Sunday 17th Jan 1932 Called on Yusuf Kanoo in the morning and discussed with him the question of the Proclamation which we are issuing ordering all wills to be registered with the Government and no persons to administer estates without getting permission from Government. It will to a certain extent safeguard the rights of widows and orphans who at present are being robbed wholesale) but the timing of the urgency in implementing the reforms cannot be overlooked as it coincided with the execution on the ground of the 1916 secret Sykes-Picot agreement on dividing the legacy of the vanquished Ottoman Empire between the two main World War One victorious powers, Britain and France giving birth to the ubiquitous British coined term "Middle East" recognising the fact that the Hejaz western region of the Arabian Peninsula where the holy cities of Mecca and Medina are located was under direct Ottoman rule and the Peninsula as a whole was and still is an extension of Iraq and the Levant in addition to achieving sustainable political stability in the Gulf as the advanced western Arabian frontier of the British Raj in the Indian subcontinent the jewel in the crown of the British Empire in the final analysis, the seemingly avowed altruistic goals of the reforms in Bahrain were part of the colonial "grafting process" reform assimilation policy of Britain through tactfully transplanting British hegemonic ideas into the newly formed Middle East as in other parts of the British Empire in contrast to its fellow draconian and pompous French to ensure the long-term strategic interests of Britain in the aftermath of World War One, thus everything the British undertook was to this end, Al-Thukair was concerned not only with the spread of modern learning and science but also with the introduction of modern technology in the region as he was either the first or second local to own a motor car in Bahrain in 1908 ten years before the supposed official arrival of the first motor vehicle in the country as depicted in the travel diary of international jeweller Jacques Cartier of the iconic Parisian Cartier jewellery house during his second visit to Bahrain in March 1912 moreover it is worth mentioning that among his numerous noble deeds was the utilisation of his high social status as a business doyen, arbiter of disputes and man of letters both locally and regionally in mustering financial and moral support for the Libyan resistance in the wake of the Italian invasion of Ottoman Libya in October of 1911 and Mussolini's subsequent genocidal fascist regime settler colonialism of this vast sparsely populated semidesert North African Arab nation where Al-Thukair successfully raised twenty thousand rupees in relief aid donations in Bahrain and elsewhere in the Gulf with the effective collaboration of the motivated cleric and merchant Sheikh Abdulwahab Bin Heji Al-Zayani (1863-1925) who travelled to Lengeh (an Arab coastal town in modern-day Iran) and Dubai as part of a Gulf-wide fundraising campaign for the embattled Libyans of Tripoli to be forwarded after the end of the subscription on the steamship SS. "Patiala" on 8th July 1912 to the Ottoman Red Crescent Society in the Iraqi city of Basra to be sent from there via Egypt to Tripoli, Libya as stated in the following are slightly edited excerpts from the 1912 British Gulf residency report concerning the Turco-Italian war and local and regional reactions to it from February and July respectively the first describes Sheikh Abdulwahab Al-Zayani's tireless zeal for collecting donations for the Libyan cause while the second describes Al-Thukair's delivery of those donations, it was clearly a collaborative effort rather than a single individual endeavour however this is not meant to diminish the efforts of Al-Thukair as he was either the driving force behind all of those initiatives or an integral member of the majority of them the first excerpt is as follows (The Arabs of Muharraq incited by an influential Mullah Sheikh Abdulwahab (Al-Zayani) have opened a subscription list for The Red Crescent Society in order to help it in bringing succour to the wounded in Tripoli. So far about Rs. 5,000 have been collected. This sum will be largely increased if the Arabs of Manama, Budaiya and Hidd join in as they have promised to do. The same Mullah is stated to have paid visits to Lengeh and Dubai about a month ago. At Lengeh he succeeded in collecting some 5,000 rupees but met with no success at Dubai where the people were sceptical as to the probability of the money ever reaching its ostensible destination) while the second as with the first shows the British meticulous documentation of the conclusion of the initiative (Sheikh Mugbil Al-Thukair forwarded on the 8th of July per SS. "Patiala" the sum of Rs. 20,000 being the total amount of subscription raised in Bahrain for the Red Crescent Society to Basra for transmission to Tripoli via Egypt) leading to the incensing of the British colonial authorities in Bahrain against him he also played a significant role in the Bahraini relief campaign to provide financial aid to the displaced Muslim refugees of the Balkan war precipitated by the raging Turco-Italian War over Ottoman Libya the "Balkan League" was formed in 1912 under the auspices of the Russians with the aim of putting an end to the Ottoman presence in the Balkans once and for all resulting in the ethnic genocide of nearly one and a half million Balkan Muslims with more than four hundred thousand refugees fleeing to Anatolia as news of the harrowing atrocities reached Bahrain cleric and pearl merchant Sheikh Abdulwahab Bin Heji Al-Zayani referred to earlier one of Bahrain's most revered national figures in the early twentieth century the leader of the first Bahraini independence movement from Britain at the turn of the twentieth century set up a fundraising refugee relief committee with the full backing of the ruler of Bahrain Sheikh Isa Bin Ali Al Khalifa who launched the donation fundraiser with the generous sum of ten thousand rupees appointing Al-Thukair as secretary-treasurer of the committee who rose to the occasion by exerting immense efforts to garner financial aid for the displaced Muslim refugees by exhorting the Bahraini populace to donate to their stranded Muslim brethren through his eloquent oratorical motivational skills, thus by the end of the fundraising the accumulated amount had risen to well over a hundred and four thousand rupees a sizable sum for a tiny country the size of Bahrain in the early twentieth century Sheikh Abdulwahab Bin Heji Al-Zayani and Yusuf Bin Ahmed Kanoo were entrusted by the committee with the task of faithfully delivering the donations to the representative of the Ottoman Governor of Iraq in the Iraqi port city of Basra on 28th December 1912 according to the 1912 report of the British political agency in Bushehr compiled by a number of political agents in the region including Captain D. L. R. Lorimer and Major A. P. Trevor both of whom served in Bahrain the following edited excerpt is part of Major Trevor's section of this thorough report who succeeded Lorimar from the 1st of November 1912 as political agent in Bahrain (The subscription raised by the Arabs of Bahrain for the Turkish Red Crescent Society having reached the handsome figure of Rs. 1,04,100 the amount was taken to Basra by SS. "Bahrain" (of the Arab Steamers, Limited) on 28th December by Sheikh Abdulwahab Al-Zayani and Yusuf Kanoo for despatch to the Sultan. Yusuf Kanoo stated that it was their intention to land at Bushehr and send a telegram to the Sultan stating the amount of the sum raised for the Red Crescent Fund and mentioning that it had been subscribed by the Sheikhs and people of Bahrain for the sick and wounded. The object of this telegram of course was to prevent hanky-panky on the part of the Wali (Ottoman Governor) of Basra) it should be pointed out that Sheikh Abdulwahab Al-Zayani was exiled to the Indian port city of Bombay by the British colonial authorities in Bahrain in 1923 along with several of his comrades in the Bahraini independence movement where he died and was buried in less than two years in 1925 on a similar note an oblique account related to a letter dated 11th April of the same year sent by an anonymous Indian Muslim leader requesting Al-Thukair to organise an unspecified cause relief aid campaign for the Muslims of an unnamed Indian province was included in the 1913 report of the British political agency in Bahrain demonstrating the widely acclaimed reputation he achieved through the efficacy of his fundraising campaigns however by the middle of the Great War Al-Thukair had suffered considerable losses in his pearl business wrought in part by the dire effects of war particularly on the luxury goods market but mainly attributed to British interventions aimed at undermining his business interests primarily in Bahrain as some Bahraini historical researchers concluded as a consequence of his active role in supporting the Libyan resistance movement against Italian colonialism as previously stated, needless to say from the British point of view the uncompromising character of Al-Thukair and his unequivocal stance against Western colonialism in all of its forms constituted a threat to British colonial economic hegemony in the region that needed to be addressed decisively by thwarting any attempt to achieve any form of economic independence no matter how insignificant or trivial it might seem as in Al-Thukair's participation as a founding major shareholder with a five percent stake with a number of other wealthy pearl merchants from Bahrain and Kuwait together with the rulers of the said countries and those of Qatar and Oman led and chaired by the regionally famous Kuwaiti pearl merchant Jassim Bin Muhammad Al-Ibrahim (1869-1956) and his fellow leading Bahraini pearl merchant Muhammad Bin Abdulwahab Al-Mishari (1864-1922) in the position of general manager in establishing the first truly regional Arab shareholding firm and the first fully Arab-owned ocean liner shipping company in the Arabian Gulf on 30th April 1911 "The Arab Steamers, Limited" made up for the first time in the modern history of the Gulf of a medium-sized fleet of Western-built passenger steamships the moderately edited following extract from the 1912 report of the British Gulf residency in the Persian (Iranian) coastal city of Bushehr gives an inkling of the size of the company's fleet (The Arab Steamers, Limited-This company started a service to the Arabian Gulf in July 1911 and during the past year, 18 of their steamers have called at Lengeh outwards from Bombay while 10 steamers called on the return journey from Basra) it should be noted that the fleet included the passenger and cargo ship "Tynesider" renamed "Faris" in early 1912 on which the Parisian jeweller Jacques Cartier (1884-1941) travelled to India and the Arabian Gulf the same year as the company's board named the previously mentioned respected Bahraini banker and merchant Yusuf Bin Ahmed Kanoo as its agent in Bahrain since he was friends with most of the board members incidentally it was Yusuf Kanoo's first shipping agency in 1911, thus launching his shipping agency business which would become the posthumous cornerstone of the eponymous regional multinational Y.B.A. Kanoo conglomerate in the post-World War Two Arabian Gulf oil economy, the following excerpt from the 1912 report of the British Gulf residency describes the sense of jubilation and pride of the Bahraini people at the arrival of the first passenger steamship of "The Arab Steamers, Limited" to bear the name Bahrain on its maiden voyage (SS. Bahrain a new acquisition of the Arab company, arrived at Bahrain on 1st March, fully dressed with flags. It was explained that the decoration was in honour of the first visit of the ship to its name-place. The name is a source of great delight to the local Arabs) apart from the legitimate premise of economic independence the real reason for the establishment of this firm was a response to the monopolistic exploitative practises and racially discriminatory colonial policies of the "British India Steam Navigation Company" (B.I.) against non-European passengers in general and Arabs in particular as attested by the exorbitant ticket prices of Arab travellers not to mention the additional cargo charges exacted on Arab-owned goods exacerbating the whole situation by barring affluent Arab first-class passengers from eating in the dining rooms and halls of its ships rightfully regarded as a disparaging and demeaning hierarchical colonial policy that posed an egregious affront to human dignity irrespective of race, colour, ethnicity or creed commonly practised by Western colonial powers of divesting non-white peoples of their humanity in order to legitimise their subjugation on the other hand unfortunately the fate of this pioneering highly successful company was tragically sealed unceremoniously in 1915 when it was sold to the "Bombay & Persia Steam Navigation Company" (The Mogul Line) as a direct result of insurmountable British pressure after less than five years of operation a pressure that began by dissuading Gulf Arab rulers from investing in such a venture while the company was still in formation under the usual infantilising colonial mendacious pretenses of catastrophic financial losses and no practical feasibility for themselves and their peoples whether in the near or distant future but their spurious discouraging attempts were in vain with the British-owned (B.I.) resorting to an all-out price war immediately after the start of the company's operations all these flagrantly malicious actions by the British helped stoke the flames of Arab patriotic sentiments to the fullest against them in the Gulf by causing Gulf Arabs including Iraqis to travel almost exclusively on the ships of "The Arab Steamers, Limited" still the company managed to command the substantial sum of three-quarters of a million British Indian silver rupees as a sale price exactly threefold the paid-in capital just over four years earlier given the geopolitical situation of the Great War adverse international economic conditions, sending the pearl-based mono-cultural economies of the Gulf into a tailspin along with wartime restrictions on sea travel, to compound matters further, the British Admiralty requisitioned one of the company's vessels, the passenger and cargo ship SS. "Budrie" originally named SS. "Golconda" for the war effort where it ended up being scuttled as a blockship at Scapa Flow in northern Scotland on 3rd October 1915 a clear testament to the enormous success that this ill-fated company enjoyed in its short-lived existence, the following excerpt is from a thoroughly detailed report on the trade movement of Oman by Major S. G. Knox the British consul in Muscat, Oman and its de facto ruler dated 13th April 1912 on sea trade and shipping movement in and out of the country, refers to the effect of the launching of "The Arab Steamers, Limited" on freight shipping rates (The British India Company who have got the contract for the carriage of mails from and to India provide one weekly fast mail service up and down and 1 fortnightly coasting slow mail service both ways. The vessels of the Arab Steamers, Limited have also maintained a weekly service. In consequence of the weekly service maintained by the Arab Steamers, the freights to India, etc., were greatly reduced during the year and those for United States of America enhanced) the doomed fate of this company became a cautionary tale for anyone attempting to challenge British colonial economic hegemony in the region for many decades to come until the defining watershed historical moment of Britain's future role as a global power in the outcome of the new harsh bipolar world order realities of the 1956 Suez crisis (known as the "tripartite aggression" in the Arab world) marking the beginning of the end of the British imperial presence in the Middle East incrementally superseded by American influence in all aspects nevertheless on the positive side racial discrimination, unwarranted prices and mistreatment of Arabs and non-Europeans on British passenger ships came to an end as the British realised though belatedly that such discriminatory practises could impinge on their long-term economic interests in the region epitomising British pragmatism at its finest one of the most contributing factors to the British Imperial enterprise's resounding successes over the centuries in comparison to its other European counterparts and finally culminating in the straw that broke the camel's back Al-Thukair's staunch allegiance to the sworn enemy of Great Britain in the region the Ottoman Turks on the eve of World War One demonstrably embodied itself in his spearheading of a very large Gulf-wide fundraising campaign comparable to, if not larger than his previous ones to raise financial aid for the Ottomans with a special emphasis on enlisting the financial assistance of Arabian Gulf heads of state, leading merchants and clerics where it attained a resounding success under the watchful eye of the British colonial authorities in the region confirmed by a concise reference in the British Archives to the recently deceased ruler of Qatar Sheikh Qasim Bin Muhammad Al-Thani who died on 17th July 1913 in relation to the worrying antagonistic fundraising activities of Al-Thukair the British in anticipation of the looming global conflagration of World War One (as it would be known in the West as the Great War or perhaps more idealistically as "the war to end war" the paradoxical catchphrase created by prolific English author H. G. Wells) as an inevitable conclusion in light of the fraught international situation of the escalating crisis in Europe among the newly allied powers of Britain, France and Russia since the turn of the twentieth century in the face of rising militaristic and economic power of Germany as leader of the central powers mainly the Austro-Hungarians and the beleaguered Ottomans in the same previously referred to 1913 report of the British Gulf residency stated as follows (Sheikh Qasim Bin Muhammad Al-Thani has sent 25 thousand rupees to Sheikh Mugbil and Yusuf Kanoo here with instructions to send the amount to Basra. It is the subscription of the Qatar people for the Turkish relief) a war of the kind that the ailing Ottoman Empire dubbed "The Sick Man of Europe" in the West would be playing its definitive role in deciding the future of the Middle East after four centuries of imperial dominance just as war-weary Britain would be playing itself forty years later in the face of the growing new American influence in the region in the aftermath of the Second World War though in a peaceful conciliatory mode as should be the norm between close strategic partners ultimately Al-Thukair's relentless and far-reaching fervour on all fronts caught up with him forcing the venerable septuagenarian merchant to reluctantly relinquish his most rewarding and cherished achievement the "Bahrain Literary Society" resulting in its permanent closure in 1917 due to the unfortunate fact that he was the sole benefactor of this progressive institution where he spared no expense on his beloved creation during its fruitful albeit brief existence followed soon thereafter by the selling of almost all of his assets in Bahrain starting with the sale of virtually all his Manama properties including his commercial buildings and four houses in early 1917 to his friend and equal in character and exalted social stature prominent pearl merchant Salman Bin Hussain Matar (1837-1944) and ending with his most prized possession his huge date palm orchard named "Tinar" on the outskirts of Manama near the historic Al-Khamis Mosque which he sold to his fellow countryman and successor in heading the Najdi community of Bahrain and Ibn Saud's representative notable pearl merchant Abdulaziz Bin Hassan Algosaibi (1876-1953) shortly before his final departure to his birthplace Unaizah where he would die less than six years later in 1923 at the age of 79 this is undoubtedly the clearest manifestation of his unwavering loyalty to his Central Arabian Najdi roots in spite of making Bahrain his home in every sense for forty years however some of his descendants chose to remain in Bahrain namely his Bahraini-born youngest son Abdulrahman who spent the best part of his life moving back and forth between Bahrain and the birthplace of his ancestors Unaizah and whose descendants still live in Bahrain remarkably those last few years of his life were not spent idly on the contrary notwithstanding his financial woes Al-Thukair rose above it all by erecting a charity school complex with free lodging for teachers in his beloved hometown of Unaizah he also funded the publication of two classical Islamic theological works to be distributed gratuitously among its literate residents as a last token of gratitude to the place that played a pivotal role in shaping his formative years the ultimate proof of his noble unfaltering magnanimous nature in the face of overwhelming vicissitudes of fortune in other words for Al-Thukair moral agency and altruism took precedence over expediency, personal gain and selfish interest this idealised narrative might be viewed by some with incredulity however the veracity of the preceding portrait of Al-Thukair was corroborated by an independent foreign source free of any cultural affiliation to the region represented in the travel diary of the young French jeweller Jacques Cartier who painted a more poignant portrait of him than even some of his local and regional contemporaries devoid of duplicity and guile (such values and principles as some commentators suggested were detrimental to Al-Thukair's business activities of course from a pragmatic unscrupulous perspective) as expected at the death announcement of Al-Thukair at dawn on the 13th of May 1923 in his then small sleepy rural hometown of Unaizah thousands of mourners of all genders and walks of life thronged to join the sombre funeral procession of one of Unaizah's most illustrious natives while paying their respects to the family of this noble pious benevolent man the least honour they could afford for someone who gave so much to his people as word of his passing spread beyond Unaizah, cables and letters of condolence started to pour in from regional potentates, political leaders, notables and leading merchants from around the Arabian Peninsula he was also mourned and deservedly eulogised in Iraqi, Levantine and Egyptian journals and periodicals by clerics, writers and intellectuals from the Gulf to Iraq and all the way to Egypt some of whom were personal friends such as the loyal Muhammad Bin Abdulaziz Al-Mana (1882-1965) the published author, judge and future Grand Mufti of Qatar and at one time the semi-adopted son and business assistant of Al-Thukair who wrote a heart-wrenching eloquently effusive obituary for Al-Thukair titled "The death of a great man and a famous philanthropist" in the respected Egyptian Magazine Al-Manar on 9th June 1923 less than a month after his death the unique closeness of Al-Mana to Al-Thukair in all respects including their shared birthplace allowed him to serve as a key link between Al-Thukair and all of his regional friends another personal friend was Sheikh Muhammad Saleh Khonji (1880-1967) the esteemed Bahraini multi-talented cleric, poet, writer, intellectual, historian, administrator and educator the second Bahraini to graduate from the reputable Al-Azhar Islamic University of Cairo, Egypt in 1902 a worthy member of the 1919 prestigious education supervisory committee and a regular patron of the "Bahrain Literary Society" the brainchild of Al-Thukair before and after its official inauguration in 1913 a prolific correspondent with Sheikh Muhammad Rasheed Rida the owner of Al-Manar Magazine in Cairo who also happened to be an epistolary friend of Al-Thukair as noted further down in the text curiously enough Khonji's upcoming literal translated description of Al-Thukair was the least ornate of his contemporaries written in a plain stoic unrhetorical spare style displaying the typical ascetic attributes of his writings (Mugbil was a well-educated big merchant who had correspondence through his many agents in India, East Africa, Arab countries and Europe may God Almighty rest his soul) Al-Thukair also formed abiding epistolary friendships throughout his adult life which began as a means to quench his lifelong thirst for intellectual knowledge by forming long-standing literary correspondents that evolved into genuine epistolary friendships as in the case of Mahmud Shukri Al-Alusi (1856-1924) the revered multidiscipline Iraqi Islamic thinker, linguist, historian and reformer editor-in-chief of the first Iraqi periodical the renowned weekly newspaper Al-Zawra'a and once professor and mentor to Al-Mana during his student days in Baghdad however there is strong evidence that the friendship of Al-Alusi and Al-Thukair was not solely epistolary as it was perfectly possible for both gentlemen to meet several times during Al-Thukair's numerous business trips to Iraq particularly in the 1890s there was also occasional specific correspondence between the two concerning the latter's generous and varied assistance to Al-Alusi including the forwarding of several batches of books each containing hundreds of copies of a newly printed first edition of an Islamic theological work by Al-Alusi printed and shipped to Iraq from India one batch at a time at Al-Thukair's expense in addition to financial assistance this was the main topic of a series of letters between the two parties dating back to the year 1893 but for the sake of historical accuracy some of the batches in question were consigned by the ruler of Qatar Sheikh Qasim Bin Muhammad Al-Thani to be delivered to Al-Alusi by Al-Thukair a trusted friend of the ruler as was the case with other Arabian Gulf rulers mentioned earlier the other distinguished epistolary friend of his was Sheikh Muhammad Rasheed Rida (1865-1935) the eminent Levantine-Egyptian Islamic theologian reformer, Quranic exegete, author and journalist founder and owner of Al-Manar Magazine in Cairo, Egypt to whom he regularly wrote seeking his scholarly counsel on Islamic jurisprudence issues who was alerted to the demise of Al-Thukair by their mutual friend Al-Mana, eliciting a brief yet meaningful obituary by Rida in his own Al-Manar Magazine; the following text is a literal translation of the obituary (we beseech thee Almighty God to bless the life of our mourning brother the just judge of Qatar and to bestow his mercy and blessings upon our departed brother and to unite us with him {In an Assembly of Truth, in the Presence of a Sovereign Omnipotent} (The Moon Surah (chapter) "verse 55" Quran) and to mitigate the grief of his family and offspring and to guide them in following his righteous path) the first impression of this final example of his lasting correspondence is that it was arguably the only one of his consequential epistolary friendships that remained exclusively epistolary since there is no record of any meeting between Al-Thukair and Rida that had ever occurred since their first correspondence at the end of the nineteenth century until the death of Al-Thukair a premise reinforced by an excessive degree of formality and reserved mutual respect a constant feature mirrored in their writings for each other over the years these are the most noteworthy examples to name a few of the monumental veneration that Al-Thukair received upon his death, an explicit attestation of the high standing that he enjoyed at all levels)

Me, modeling a swimsuit that I made, June 24, 1977, In Hayward, three and a half months before I really entered the "Gay World."

 

For 15 days, from March 16 to my birthday, March 31, I am planning to answer questions given to me by the viewers of this photostream. I am copying my friend Todd, who is doing it on Flickr and his blog on live journal. I think it’ll be fun, and interesting, hopefully others will think so, too.

 

Question #9: Have you suffered prejudice or violence because you are gay?

 

I have to say, no, not really, or not that I know of, anyway. Maybe because I chose a profession that obviously has gay people in it, or maybe because I was masculine enough to “pass” in my earlier years (I did not come “out” to anyone except a few college friends who found out until I was 26).

 

Back in the 1970s, though, when gay issues were just being addressed in a sensitive way, even at a school as liberal as UC Santa Cruz many people made snide gay jokes, and in my small college of 450 or so students, faculty and staff, your business could be everyone’s business. So I learned to stay asexual and fantasize about the guys I liked from afar (of the most part). That ended up in a series of broken hearts, which were only truly healed each time the next guy appeared in my world.

 

But there have been a few times when I have encountered prejudice- here are some I remember tonight:

 

In my freshman and sophomore years of high school, because I liked books and hated sports and hung out with lots of girls (and nerdy guys), “cool” guys would sometimes make fun of me. One particular moment that has lasted with me was when I was a sophomore, and a really cool and popular junior named “Dave” (the older brother of two of my closest friends in school, when I was a senior, as it happened, but that’s another story), was asked, in our Spanish class, to describe, in Spanish, someone else in the class. He picked me, and called me a “sissy” or “pansy” or something, and I got beet red and wanted to die. I had never done anything to him and I was shocked that he picked me out or even knew my name. The class laughed, and the teacher scolded Dave, but he wasn’t sent out of the classroom (today he might even be suspended for such a slur), and I wanted to hide under my desk. And I have never forgotten.

 

In college (well, just after, but we were both employed by the college at the time and had become roommates- see the entry on my friend Jay) my roommate Jay and I decided to have a Halloween party, and we had maybe a 100 or so people down to our little house on Walk Circle, most of whom were dressed in makeshift costumes. The guy I was in love with at the time, Rich was devoted to me and I was almost his only friend (by his choice) on campus, at least the only person he was close to or could confide in. I talked him into wearing a costume that I had gotten from my costume teacher, which had originally come from the MGM auction in 1970, a brown velvet Tudor wonder that had been used in the 1930s film The Private Lives of Henry VIII. He had the perfect athletic body to wear it, and he looked great. Even he had to admit he looked good, but it required wearing tights and though he didn’t mind, when he and I decided to escape the crush of the party and walk the two blocks or so to the beach, we were discovered by a car full of guys, who blocked our way back home and followed us for a bit. We were both a little drunk, so I don’t think we realized how much danger we were in- they started taunting us and called us “faggots,” and (thank God!) drove away. We talked late into the night, but it was about a month later that I had to confess to him that I was in love with him. He told me the basic “I love you but I am not in love with you and am not gay” line, and told me that gayness was not in the best interests of biology or DNA transmission (I was in a science college, remember), so it had to be an aberration, and I had better “get help and get cured” if I wanted him to stay in my life. We were roommates until he left UCSC in June of 74. I haven’t seen him since September of 1977.

 

At my first costume job, down in the costume shop in the South Bay, there was another employee, a salesman, Don, who was a great guy, liked by everyone, and probably smarter than the cliches and repetitive catch phases he would often use in conversation. After I had worked there for several months, he invited me to meet his roommate, a woman, and we had a nice dinner together. I assumed that they were living together, as that was what everyone at work believed. They were a nice couple, I thought. I was in the throes of my first real relationship, with my partner Mark, and I was very excited about sharing that with everyone I could, so soon all of the employees who weren’t part of the family who owned the business knew. The family was fundamentalist Christian, and though they did not proselytize, they were not welcoming to other forms of opinion or “lifestyle.” Anyway, eventually Don took me aside one day and confessed that he, too, was gay, that his roommate was just that, but his best friend, and he had been using her as a cover for the family. We became closer friends after that, and I introduced Don to some of the many friends I had made through my partner Mark. One time, at work, Don and I were discussing going up with friends to a special party at Studio One in West Hollywood (the major gay disco, but some straight, hip, people went there, too, if they could get in). We were overheard by one of the owners, and she asked us why we could possibly want to “be in that crowd of tutti-frutties.” Experts at lying and covering up our whole lives, we made some excuse. Don died of AIDS in 1991.

 

Easter weekend, 1986,Tucson, AZ: My ex-partner Mark and I were walking down Speedway from our motel (he was treating me to a trip for my birthday, which was near the same time). We were headed for downtown, to look around. Needless to say, on a Sunday, there wasn’t much pedestrian traffic. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a car sped by and pelted us with eggs, calling us “faggots!!” None got me, but Mark got a couple that broke and messed his clothes and legs- he had a huge black and blue patch on his leg for weeks. We hobbled back to the motel.

 

This is the last one: one time, in the early 1990s, when I was president of the Gay Chamber of Commerce-like organization known as BAPA, I was organizing something for the organization and getting a lot of calls at work. Someone called for me and I was either out or on the phone, and the person left their number but did not say what it was about. The clerk thought it was amusing that they guy would not reveal what was “obviously” another BAPA phone call, and I told the employee that the man was protecting me. He had no idea what kind of work situation I had, or if anyone knew about my sexuality at work, and the employee, for the first time, realized what an “underground network” we had to build for ourselves in all of the years of intolerance. The name BAPA, even, was an obfuscation, since it stood for “Business and Professional Association of Los Angeles” with no mention of sexuality. Even in an age of supposed tolerance, there was a lot of fear, hiding, and covering up to protect ourselves.

 

Thank heavens I have not suffered worse, nor known of anyone who was gay bashed. I rode in on the wave of the Gay Golden Age of the late 1970s and managed to avoid the worst.

I'm going to have to stop naming images after letters of the alphabet, if only because I suspect 'R' is going to be a tricky one to find.

 

This shot is a good example of why, at least for me, it's a good idea to wait a while between capturing things and making images from them.

 

The original composition was square (imagined square) and at the top of the curve there's a small, natural cairn (probably a pretty large natural cairn, come to think of it - this is a long way away from where I was standing at the far side of a lagoon). When I first processed the image it was pointed out to me that it would be better without the cairn; and it is (I think). I'd not left long enough after capturing it to be objective about the best way to use it and I'd naturally put the cairn in.

 

There are lots of nice, curvaceous details on the slopes of the Andes but this was one of my favourites.

 

Musings on: obfuscating scale in photographs

 

1. #studiowall #studioview #kunst #kunstkino #masking #test #canvas #atelier #artstudio #study #whatwasleft #michaeltoke #contemporaryart #followart, 2. cr-2, 3. obfuscation, 4. a girl of many talents, 5. landscape1, 6. Troubling thoughts. #drawing, 7. change, 8. Untitled, 9. Waiting In The Paris Cafe., 10. My studio today, 11. 17x22.5-lt, 12. Reference picture: Matthew Roth, 13. ivy, 14. Micro Myling is only 11 cm tall! Tiny, tiny porcelain doll. #hemligdolls #myling #porcelain #doll #handmade #allbisquedoll, 15. upload, 16. Untitled, 17. myself kneeling, 18. IMG_8162, 19. autumn fern, 20. sign and alley, 21. Fassade - face of a building, 22. Untitled, 23. Studio, 24. The "OVERLOOK" Woodcut Print, 25. .

 

Created with fd's Flickr Toys

After a few hours of fiddling, this turned into what you see here. I'm not 100% on the chair armor, so those might go. But I'm really happy with the torso.

 

Still a WIP.

Mount Buzhou (不周山), a pillar holding up the sky. The pillar collapsed and caused the sky to tilt towards the northwest and the earth to shift to the southeast. This caused great floods and suffering to the people....

The characters 伏羲 Fu Xi lit. mean “lie prostrate” & “sacrifice”. In 女媧 Nü Wa, Nü 女literally means ‘female’, whereas ‘Wa’ 媧 has no meaning. Contrary to Shen Nong and Huang Di, Fu Xi and Nü Wa are a rather obscure and distant couple in the misty fog of Chinese antiquity, and only very little is known about them.Fu Xi and Nü Wa pictured with dragon tails intertwined. (Picture by Hughes Songe)..Every school-child in China, Taiwan, and other Chinese places, learns already early on about their original Chinese patriarchs and their histories. But the most ancient Chinese history has become quite embellished over 4 1/2 thousand years and changed into mythology. As a result, the 21st Century Chinese are quite confused about their earliest primo-genitors, and if it weren’t for a very interesting discovery that this article reveals, their earliest patriarchs would have stayed obscure until the end of time.The earliest records speak of “Sān Huáng Wǔ Dì”, meaning the “Three August Ones, Sovereigns or Kings” and the “Five Emperors.” These 3+5= 8 god-kings or demi-gods purportedly used their magical powers to improve the lives of their people. Because of their lofty virtue, they lived to a great age and ruled over a period of great peace.The three Sovereigns are generally denoted as Fu Xi, Nü Wa, and Shen Nong Shi, but in other literary sources Nü Wa is often replaced by Huang Di, one of the five Emperors. Actually, depending on the source, there are six to seven known variations of who classifies as the “Three Sovereigns & the Five Emperors”. Many of these sources were written long after the actual events, during much later dynasties. Hence the distortion.These Three + Five = Eight Chinese primo-patriarchs, concur with a global occurrence of eight Flood survivors in ancient legends.

India: Manu and his 7 ‘Rishis’ = 8. (picture above)

S-India: Satyavratha (Noah) + 3 sons Sharma, Charma, Yapheti +their 4 wives = 8.

Egypt: The ‘Ogdoad‘ [octo=8], Nun {Noah} Heh, Kuk, & (h)Amun + 3 wives = 8.

Sumeria: Uan or Oannes and 7 ‘Apkallu’ (wise men) = 8. OR the 4 post-diluvian Apkalluh with 4 wives would also make 8.

Hebrews: Noah, Shem, Ham, Yapheth + their 4 wives= 8.

Others: Also 8, as we’ll show about the Miao Zu people.The ‘Ogdoad’ also puts to rest the mistaken idea that the Egyptians did not have a Flood story! See how Nun upholds the boat with 7 survivors.In yet another version of the more than 700 global flood stories, the Chinese legend tells how the world was swept by a Great Flood, and only Fu Xi and his sister NüWa survived. They then retired to Kunlun Mountain where they prayed for a sign from the Emperor of Heaven — God — or as he is called in Chinese Shang Di.The Divine Being approved their union and the siblings set about to procreate the human race all over again. It was mythically told of them that in order to speed up the natural procreation of humans, Fu Xi and Nüwa found an additional way by using clay to create human figures, and with divine power entrusted to them, they made these figures come alive. The Han period book Fengsu tongyi 風俗通義 says that in the beginning, just when Heaven and Earth had separated, Nü Wa formed humans out of mud, giving birth to the human race.The new father of humanity Fu Xi then came to rule over his descendants, although reports of his long reign vary between sources. He is supposed to have lived mid 29th century BC, or 2.900 BC, which is very close to the timing of the Biblical flood of about 2.500 BC. Nü Wa after surviving the great flood, “fixed the broken sky/heaven (Tian) with either five or seven colored stones.” “女媧補天 = Nü Wa Bu Tian!”Now the three earliest Chinese historians mentioned Nü Wa. The fourth, the noted Chinese historian Si Ma Qian (in the Shiji, Chapter Benji or prologue) clearly identifies Nüwa as a man with the last name of Feng.“Herbert James Allen erroneously translated Tang dynasty historian Sima Zhen’s interpolated prologue to the Han dynasty Sima Qian’s Shiji. In one of his more serious flaws, Nüwa was described as male even though the Nü (女) in the name means female and the wa (媧) also contains the female radical. ]”Why does obfuscating W.P. dislike Allen’ s translation? Read on and get the full picture why!Some scholars consider Nüwa a tribal leader (or emperor); others consider the name Nüwa a title. Only after the fourth (Si Ma Qian) Nü Wah was suddenly cast into a woman’s role, and became known as Fu Xi’s wife! Over time these histories grew into even more bizarre myths, as the two of them are still proudly reported by Chinese people today, as being half dragons! Their early depictions as a couple shows both of them with intertwined reptilian tails. (see picture at the top) The legend goes as follows:The earliest literary role seems to be the upkeep and maintenance of the Wall of Heaven*, whose collapse would obliterate everything. [Note the association with Flood traditions.] There was a quarrel between two of the more powerful gods, and they decided to settle it with a fight. When the water god Gong Gong saw that he was losing, he smashed his head against Mount Buzhou (不周山), a pillar holding up the sky. The pillar collapsed and caused the sky to tilt towards the northwest and the earth to shift to the southeast. This caused great floods and suffering to the people. Nüwa cut off the legs of a giant tortoise and used them to supplant the fallen pillar, alleviating the situation and sealing the broken sky using stones of seven different colours, but she was unable to fully correct the tilted sky. This explains the phenomenon that sun, moon, and stars move towards the northwest, and that rivers in China flow southeast into the Pacific Ocean. (this account is similar to the Huainanzi account; it was added as The Upkeep and Maintenance of Heaven).Other versions of the story describe Nüwa going up to heaven and filling the gap with her body (half human half serpent) and thus stopping the flood. According to this legend some of the minorities in South-Western China hail Nüwa as their goddess and some festivals such as the ‘Water-Splashing Festival’ are in part a tribute to her sacrifices.Other versions of the story describe Nüwa going up to heaven and filling the gap with her body (half human half serpent) and thus stopping the flood. According to this legend some of the minorities in South-Western China hail Nüwa as their goddess and some festivals such as the ‘Water-Splashing Festival’ are in part a tribute to her sacrifices.As the ancient Chinese also originated from Sumeria, they were most likely familiar with the early Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh adopting its symbolisms.Seeing the similarity between dragontail Nüwa and fishtail Vishnu (next picture) also holding instruments in their hands, there is evidence that perhaps also the early Xia in proximity to the sea, as the Jomon had naval contacts not just with America where the Chinese left 3000 yr. Old stone sea anchors, and the Jomon with Ecuador, seeing the Jomon similarity with Valdivan pottery (Betty Meggers Smithsonian!), but also with seafaring ancient Indians or Dravidians and their versions of the ubiquitous 700 ethnic Flood legends, where Noah was called MaNu (plus his 7 Rishis make 8), or in South India Satyavratha and his three sons Charma, Sharma and Phra Yapeti! (As Biblical Noah, Ham, Shem, Japheth) plus 4 wives also make 8!).Seeing that Ham named the “Land of Cham” in Vietnam and Chambodia and other places in between like India Cambay, after himself, perhaps Ham was one of the very “Oannes sailors of the sea wizards” who personally came as far as the Yellow Sea in his astronomical surveys to map the stars and measure the new post-Flood Earth! Because whether it is politically correct with historical (qu)academia or not, it is a fact that the ancients DID travel the entire earth and its oceans, seeing the ubiquitous spread of pyramids (25 in China!) and Bronze Age megaliths in almost every part of the world!Like Nüwa the Indian god Vishnu who guided Manu also sports a fishtail. Manu was instructed by the god Vishnu who came from the ocean as a fish with a fish tail, (Fish Nu!) to save himself from an impending global deluge! We find a similar symbolism in the early Sumerian demi-god Oannes, who emerged from the sea half fish/half man and taught humans civilisation and culture! Man obviously likes to embellish history!

NOW WHO COULD ‘FU XI’ BE?If we look at the meaning of the characters Fu and Xi, as its sound does not coincide at all with any of the other historical records, unless it is a bastardisation of Vishnu?, we get the following meanings: “Fu” means “lying prostrate” and “Xi” has the meaning of “sacrifice.” The picture arises of a man lying prostrate in front of an animal sacrifice.

 

According to both the Miao and Hebrew records, after Noah’s Ark had landed, he ordered that his family should present a great thanksgiving sacrifice to God, and so they offered and barbecued some animals. Is it possible that Noah’s original name in Chinese, was the honorable “Fu Xi Nü-Wa“, meaning the “Prostrating Sacrificer Noah”?

 

Is it perhaps also possible that originally Fu meant Father Noah? Was the character Fu changed perhaps from Fu meaning “father” to Fu meaning “prostrate”, around the same time when Nü-Wa was turned female, and that Fu Xi Nü-Wa was suddenly spliced into two people? Only God knows what really happened. Is that perhaps also the reason why their tails were entwined?

 

But the most interesting and IMHO most likely explanation for the names Fu Xi Nü-Wa, is when you consider the Chinese accent and its bastardisation of non-Chinese accents. A “bus” in Chinese (& Japanese) becomes “Ba Se” or “Ba Su” for example. Now the Chinese may have been aware of the name NüWa through the Han legends coming overland like Noah, Noe, Nuh, Nu-Uh, Nur, or Noach from the Middle East and Babylon originally. But the Xia (dynasty) who settled closer to the ocean than Huang Di, most likely introduced the concept of fish tailed Vish-NU into China from their contact with the seafaring sons of Ham like Dravidian Cushites from India, where Noah is called Manu under god Vishnu.

 

And when those early Chinese tried to pronounce Vish-Nu, it probably came out very similar to Fishi-Nüwa or FuXi-NüWa. And that makes a whole lot of sense in the light of Chinese pronunciation. Perhaps the Dravidian/Indian name VishNu was itself a bastardisation of NuAh or Noah, the common patriarch of us all mixed with some of that fish-man Oannes influence! We’ll find out in the Heavenly Museum of REAL History! Ha!

 

Ararat-Ximu-Nuwa-Huangdi-Xia

 

And why did Fu Xi & Nü-Wa live such long lives, as Shen Nong did too? Because, according to the most detailed and accurate Biblical account in Genesis, Noah, his wife, and three sons, lived to amazing old ages. According to the Greek ‘Sibylline Oracles’, even the wives of Shem, Ham & Japheth also enjoyed fantastically long life-spans, living for centuries! Noah lived almost a thousand years, totally 950 years in fact! 600 years until the Flood began, and 350 after!

 

Shem (Miao: Lo-Shen, or Shen Nong Shi?) lived a total of 600 years, according to Genesis. If you divide 600 years by a generation of 35-40 years, you easily arrive at a total of 15 or 17 generations. Huang Di was purportedly a distant descendant of Shen Nong, while also his friend and fellow scholar! Well, if he was 7-18 generations removed from Shem or Shen Nong, that would have been very possible being Shem’s great (17 times) -grandchild.

 

Shem is considered the forefather of most Arabs and of some Asian tribes. The following are the haplo DNA groups found in nations all over the world. You see that the (orange D) South Asians/South Chinese/Tibetans, and (blue O) Han Chinese belong to different groups. (And most originating in the Middle East where Noah landed his ark in Eastern Turkey on the mountains of Ararat!). (NB: The C3 and Q3 “going across the Bering Street” is pure Darwinist propaganda, because the Bering street was frozen until quite recently. It could not have happened!)

 

DNAmap

 

There are many legends about Fuxi and Nü-Wa recorded in several ancient Chinese books such as ‘Book of Changes’, ‘Elegies of Chu’, ‘Writings of Prince Huai Nan’ and the ‘Book of Mountains and Seas’. These legends were all passed on orally until written down, but sadly not via rhyming stanzas, yet their impact is very wide and profound. Now the leading aspects and basic facts of these myths become very meaningful in this new Miao and other inter-ethnic context.

 

BaGua8Story has it, that Fu Xi is not only the clan leader in the East and the chief of the three sage kings and five virtuous emperors of China at the dawn of human civilization, but also an omnipotent wise man capable of various kinds of skills. He is told to have created the Eight Diagrams and simulated the spider to weave fishing net. He was not only able to make musical instruments, but also good at cooking tasty food. Moreover, he contributed a lot to the traditional Chinese medicine and was the forefather of Chinese civilization. He also formulated etiquette’s and regulations for people, reducing the barbaric marriage by plundering. All that could easily be said of the Patriarch Noah as well!

 

Was Fu Xi Father Sin of the Chinese?

hittiteshoeHITTITE SHOE with upturned toes

 

OR was Fu Xi the most ancient patriarch of the Chinese “Father Sin” — son of Canaan & grandson of Ham — the patriarch of the Sinites? Sin was the brother of Heth, the patriarch of the Hittites who lived in Anatolia (now Turkey) but after the Bronze Age Collapse they were defeated and dispersed mixing with conquering tribes. Hittites had long pony tails and turned up shoes!

 

However Sin and his Sinites were totally lost from history. There are no ancient Middle Eastern records or memorials left of them. Many think that they left the Sumerian homeland already very early, traveling across the Silk Route Eastward and fathered the ancient Chinese and other tribes. Study of ancient China and its language is still called ‘Sinology‘ today, while the ancient Arabs called the Chinese the people of “Sin” & the Greeks called them ‘Sinae’.

 

Nü-Wa Chinese Name for Noah

Nü-Wa, during the remote legendary period of China, had powerful abilities. It is said that when a great flood took place that the heaven collapsed, and the earth sank under water, while wild beasts cruelly killed common people. Then Nü-Wa repaired the heaven/sky (same character Tian!) with five or seven colored rocks and killed the brutal beasts.

 

All this coincides nicely with the Hebrew scriptures, where the windows of heaven were broken open! After the flood reached its peak they were closed up, and after the water had retreated God showed Noah a beautiful seven-colored rainbow in that broken sky! It seemed to have appeared for the first time in history, the earth being newly covered with clouds!

 

Most likely some special ante-diluvial condition prevented clouds or water vapour projecting a rainbow, as well as a clear view of the sun which for some odd reason suddenly became much more visible! So much so that Noah’s global descendants, mostly those fathered by the family rebel Ham even began to worship it, and him as “Hamon Ra the Sun God!”

 

Instead of worshipping the saving God of their Grandfather Noah, they became ardent Sun worshippers! Egyptians, Canaanites, those early megalith builders in Peru, Mexico, Atlantis, Dwarka, China, and in many other places all over the globe, they all began to worship “that magnificent red sun” shining between the horns of their beloved “mother of all life!” The Holy Cow! Now you know where India got that idea via their early Indus Valley civilisation, and Dravidians? From Ham and his Pharaohs!

 

whitecow

 

They even had special sun boxes in many megalithic structures and the solar Temple of Amon-Ra at Karnak (Thebes – at present, Luxor city) in Egypt built some time after 2000 B.C. near the present day Luxor was located in such a way as to align with the summer solstice sunrise and is considered the day of the “manifestation of Ra”.

 

Yet for all she tried Nü-Wa could not fix the “tilt of the sky” and winter, spring, summer, and fall became permanent! Obviously there was no tilt in the Earth’s axis before the Deluge, as witnessed in the wood-sample found in the mysterious ship-shape in Armenia many believe to be the 5000 year old remains of Noahs’ Ark. That wood has no rings in it!

 

Nü-Wa and Fu Xi also used clay to create humans and human society by simulating their own appearance. That makes sense when you consider that all of us are the offspring of Noah and his wife, their children created in their likeness!

 

Nü-Wa also invented a kind of musical instrument called reed pipe wind instrument so that she is esteemed as a musical goddess. Moreover, she created the marriage system to enable humans to multiply offspring, so she is called the marriage goddess, which is very likely, because of her being the mother of all resultant humans. I’m sure they all wanted to be married by Noah and his wife!

 

And so, all this taken into consideration, everything certainly starts to make a lot more sense than some of the myths and embellishments that sprung up in the minds of the early Chinese storytellers long ago. You can hardly blame them, not having any other comparative historical records to consult with, as we have today.

 

Again, evidence has come to light that Noah, Shem, Ham & Japheth were real historical people, who built a real historical boat, and survived a real genuine global flood, no matter what skeptic intellectuals are saying against it in the name of “science” falsely so-called. Certainly not my kind of science!

 

But there is one even more important thing we can conclude from all this, and that is that we need to remember that we are all one family! And that we, as Chinese or Westerners, should all reverence and respect our great great great great great grandfather “Fu Xi Nü Wa” and his Father God! And each and every one of us as well, for we all turn out to be brothers and sisters! True or not?

 

God bless you brother! God bless you sister!

 

Love and Peace! Lu.

 

ancientpatriarchs.wordpress.com/2016/02/08/chinese-mythol...

 

中國神話的苗族說明證實了諾亞洪水的歷史

每一位在中國、台灣以及大中華地區的學子們很早就已經學過中國的始祖和歷史。 但大部分的中國古老歷史都被修飾美化超過近4500年而且演變成了神話。因此現今21世紀的中國人對於他們最早的祖先相當模糊，若不是這篇文章裡揭露這有 趣的發現，直到末日前，他們可能對自己最早的祖先仍然是模糊不清的。

三皇五帝

 

最早記載的 ”三皇五帝” 就是指 ”三位尊者” 或是三位君主或王，以及 ”五位皇帝” 。 這些3+5神般的王或半仙人據稱他們運用法力來提昇人類的生活，也因為他們崇高的品德讓他們得以長壽並統治世界帶來長久的和平。 這三位王者分別為伏羲、女媧和神農氏。但在別的文獻記載中女媧通常是被五皇之一的黃帝取而代之。實際上依據資料的來源，有6~7種已知的說法列出到底誰才 是三皇五帝。很多這些資料來源都是在實際事件之後的好幾個朝代所寫的，因此多少會被扭曲

黃帝

那誰會是伏羲呢?

 

假如讓我們來看伏和羲這兩字，他們的發音雖然和其他歷史記載中的名字不太接近，但我們知道”伏”意謂著”屈身”以及”羲”代表著”犧牲”的意思，我們便可以聯想到一個人屈身於動物貢品前面。

 

根據苗族和希伯來兩者的記載，在諾亞的方舟停下後，他便告訴他的家人應該要對神感恩，所以他們烤了一些動物來祭拜神，那諾亞原來的中文名字會有可能是”伏羲女媧”嗎? 意謂著”諾亞向神朝貢”?

 

或者也有可能是”伏”指的是”父親”諾亞? 從”父”的”父親”意思轉變到”伏地”，且在差不多同一個時間，女媧變成了女性而伏羲女媧從一個人分成兩個人? 真相只有神知道! 這或許也解釋了為什麼他們的尾巴會交纏在一起?

 

再者為什麼伏羲和女媧還有神農都可以那麼長壽呢? 因為根據聖經創世紀裡所記載的，諾亞的妻子和3個兒子也都非常非常的長壽，而根據希臘” Sibylline Oracles”記錄，就連Shem、Ham 和 Japheth的妻子都活的非常久超過一世紀! 諾亞就活了近1000年(事實上是960年)!

 

Shem(神)(lo-shen神農 or Shen Nong shi神農氏)活了整整600年，根據聖經所記載，假如你將35-40年訂為一代，那600年就將近是15到17代，據稱黃帝是神農的後代,也是他的朋友及之後學者，那黃帝有可能就是神農的(第17代)曾孫子。

 

神(shem)被視為大部分亞洲人及部分的歐洲部落的先父，以下是一些在世界各地發現的單一DNA族群，藍色D為南方的中國人和橘色O為漢人，兩者分別為不同的族群。

HuangDi-YellowEmperor1-201x300皇 帝或黃帝(姓黃)，認為如此比較像傳奇人物而非神話，也因為他被視為真實歷史人物以及在夏朝前的第一位皇帝，因此伏羲、女媧和神農氏被視為神話中的人物因 為較不為人所知。 黃帝又名軒轅氏，是五位傳奇皇帝中的領袖。黃帝和他的兄弟炎帝一同被認為是中國人的祖先，所以後代的中國人也被稱之為炎黃子孫。(炎帝和黃帝的子孫) 目前中國學術界普遍主張，黃帝是出生於有熊(現今湖南省新鄭)並安葬於陜西的橋山(現今黃陵縣)。黃帝及炎帝兩者都是中國兩大族的祖先，也在之後再度融而 為一。 早期的歷史學家”司馬遷”則記載黃帝事實上是神農氏(簡稱神農)的後裔，雖然只約8到17代的血統，儘管在這中間相隔久遠，黃帝仍被視為是神農的朋友和學 者，很明顯地據說非常的長壽。

在很多中國古老的書籍裡都有記載著伏羲及女媧的傳說，如易經、楚辭集注、淮南子以及山海經，這些傳說有著深遠的影響力且一直被流傳著，這些神話的有部分觀點對這個新苗族及不同族群間是非常有意義的。

 

故事裡有說到，伏羲不只是東方部落或三皇五帝的領袖，同時也是樣樣精通非常聰明的人。他創造了八卦和模擬蜘蛛網而演變出的魚網，他不只會做樂器也很 會做好吃的飯菜，更對中藥上做出了許多貢獻，身為中國人民文明的始祖，他更替人民規劃出了禮儀規範，變革婚姻習俗，倡導男聘女嫁的婚俗禮節，使血緣婚改為 族外婚，這些和諾亞都很相似。

 

女媧在古老的中國傳奇裡有著強大的法力，傳說中大洪水時天崩塌，地球被下沉到水裡面，各式猛獸都跑出來虐殺人類，女媧用七彩石補天及捕殺這些猛獸。

 

這和希伯來文聖經裡的創世紀都有些雷同的地方，上面說到”天堂之窗裂開”! 當大洪水淹到最高點時窗就關起來了，當水乾的時候，神讓諾亞看到了天上的七色彩虹，因這是歷史上的第一次。地球被雲給蓋住，很可能因為天空上面外殼的水的 遮蓋這些紫外線防老化，所以人類可以活得更久一點且還沒有雲彩!

 

女媧和伏羲也同樣用泥土以他們的外表來造人類社會，那這樣就會很合理如果我們都是諾亞和他妻子的子孫，他們的孩子都很像他們的爸媽，女媧也發明一種樂器叫簧管吹奏樂器，所以她也被稱為音樂女神，因為她作為所有人類的母親，我敢肯定他們都希望能嫁給諾亞和他的妻子!

 

綜合以上我們所提到的，所有事情似乎比那經過修飾過後的古老神話更加合理。我們也無法怪罪當時這些傳說為何沒辦法像我們現在可以找到其他歷史記載來做比對。

 

再者，所有證據都指向諾亞、神(Shem) 、漢(Ham)和賈費斯(Japheth)都是那些曾蓋過方舟和真的從大洪水中生還的真實歷史人物，無論說什麼所謂的知識分子在科學的角度上仍還是持懷疑的態度。

 

ancientpatriarchs.wordpress.com/2016/04/24/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9...

  

This splendid sage lived for 197 years, a number of presumably tremendous significance. Now he is in Heaven where he looks after Cosmic Harmony and Contemplation, which makes him very popular in DAOist circles.FU-XI is very strong on home improvements, and also spiritual improvements. He’s often seen with a carpenter’s square — which symbolizes both as he created the Eight Trigrams for Divination.Fu Xi 伏羲, also written 伏犧 or 伏戲, also called Mi Xi 宓羲 (also written 宓犧), or Pao Xi 包犧, (also written 包羲, 炮犧 or 庖犧), is one of the mythical Three Augusts 三皇 or Five Emperors 五帝. He is therefore known as Xi Huang 犧皇 or Huang Xi 皇羲 "August Shepherd". His cognomen is Tai Hao 太皞 (also written 太昊) "Great Brightness", his tribal name Huang Xiong 黄熊氏. He was the brother and husband of Nü Wa 女媧. The couple was, according to legend, the creators of the world. Han period 漢 (206 BCE-220 CE) stone bricks therefore depict Fu Xi and Nü wa with a human body ending in intertwining dragon tails, each of them holding an instrument of architects, namely scissors (ju 榘) and rulers (gui 規). The story of the couple was very widespread in southern China, where the Miao people 苗 saw themselves as descendants of Fu Xi and Nü Wa. The two of them were, in other words, the parents of mankind. Fu Xi is also the deity representing the east and reigning the element wood (mu 木). According to the books Huainanzi 淮南子 and Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏春秋, he is assisted by the spirit Gou Mang 句芒 who pull out the sprouts of all plants in spring. A story in the Shanhaijing 山海經 says that the mother of Fu Xi was Lady Huaxu 華胥氏 who conceived when she tread on the footpint of the God of Thunder (Leishen 雷神). Fu Xi is credited by several inventions, like the Eight Trigrams (bagua 八卦) used for prognostication. Each one of the trigrams represented a formation of the cosm, like Heaven and Earth, mountains and rivers, wind and thunder, and so on. According to the book Baopuzi 抱朴子 Fu Xi is also credited with the invention of the fishing net. In the song collection Chuci 楚辭 he is called the inventor of music. The book Yishi 繹史 says he invented matrimonial rites that are otherwise attributed to his sister Nü Wa. The Hetu ting fuzuo 河圖挺輔佐 praises him as the one who told men how to use the fire.

Emperor Tai Hao is not always identified with Fu Xi. According to other legends, Tai Hao had the surname Feng 風. His officials had the designations of dragons. His residence was Chen 陳 (modern Huaiyang 淮陽, Henan), and he reigned over the lower course of the Yellow River. The families of this region with the surnames Ren 任, Su 宿, Xugou 須句 and Zhuansou 頊臾 (rather the ruling houses of these minor fiefs of the Spring and Autumn period 春秋, 770-5th cent. BCE) are said to be his descendants. Tai Hao or Fu Xi are also called Green Emperor (Qing Di 青帝 or Cang Di 蒼帝) and ruled over the East.

www.chinaknowledge.de/History/Myth/personsfuxi.html

 

"In the sign on the right hand, the etymologists know how to read a precept, and the right hand is used for eating. The right hand is therefore appropriate to the things of the earth, and the element D is found in the sign adopted for the Left This square is the symbol of all the arts, especially the religious and magical arts, and is the insignia of Fuxi, the first sovereign , The first soothsayer, Fou-hi is the husband or brother of Niu-koua, whose compass is the insignia. This primordial couple invented marriage also to say good morals. The pictures represent Fou-hi and Niu-koua holding each other by the lower part of the body, and Niu-koua, who occupies the right, holds the compass with his right hand. Left, holds the square with the left hand The square, which produces the Square, emblem Earth, can not be insigned to until after an exchange hierogamic of attributes; , the square rightly deserves to be the emblem of the sorcerer is , and especially of Fuxi, a scholar in the bones of heaven as in those of the earth . Fou-hi can therefore carry the square of the left hand, and the left hand (with the square) evoke the Royal Work, the first hierogamy, the magico-religious activity. The Chinese do not strongly oppose religion to magic, any more than pure to impure. The sacred and the profane do not themselves form two distinct genres. The Right can be devoted to secular works and earthly activities without becoming the antagonist of the Left. Chinese thought is concerned not with contraries, but with contrasts, alternations, correlatives, and hierogamic exchanges of attributes."

Marcel Granet

The war with Zhurong tRAh, banged his head against Mount Buzhou RR Ill the pillar of the sky and the terrestrial a until it broke d 25 There are numerous examples showing how excessive anger, or even joy, can be delete- rious. In another example, the viscount of Zhu furious that one of his employees could inadvertently fell into a brazicr and was burnt alivc xie Hogwei on the other hand, died in a fit of rage while playing weigi, when his oppo nent, on the point of losing, was given a hint by a guest watching the game broad meaning of also encompasses the concepts of fury and rage, as is made clear in the phrase "unable to control one's rage" HIB), to contain one's fury" (8 RBJiA), and "in a towering rage (s HUR). It is also used to refer to the fury of elements, as in "the howl of the vio- ent wind's blowin (1EH89t). In various chéngyii it is described as rage (ili&Z& US), fierce and frightening ourning rage (L & E). Indiscriminate arbitrarily complain about what is here and there U8 illi B), and "venting one's anger on others" TN. It can be hidden (i Tri nursing one's anger and rancour"; to be furious but not dare to speak out), manifested ("showing one's rage th), or modulated ("restraining one's anger at home and venting it outside.

books.google.fr/books?id=lQ55CgAAQBAJ&pg=PA466&lp...(%E4%B8%8D%E5%91%A8%E5%B1%B1&source=bl&ots=28Vw4K4HLv&sig=BSxz_Zn8jm88IhvIhaKdOEeI4GM&hl=fr&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjigJ7h357TAhUBvBQKHQfyAZoQ6AEILDAC#v=onepage&q=Mont%20Buzhou%20(%E4%B8%8D%E5%91%A8%E5%B1%B1&f=false

Whilst the Sun was very harsh at midday by the Laguna Blanca, Bolivia when this was captured, I thought that the multiple highlights from the fractured ice made a good, textural scene and the simplicity of this melting area cutting into the ice from one side suited what is essentially an image about surface texture rather than shape. That said, I like the inverted letter C too :-)

 

I've uploaded the full size version as this is way better viewed as large as possible.

 

Musings on: obfuscating scale in photographs

 

join the discussion at

onbeingbecoming.com/2017/11/04/on-beyond-the-subject/

This was the view from the ferry to Vancouver Island, as we were leaving Vancouver, British Columbia this past summer. The fog/smog was from semi-local forest fires. I enjoyed how the obscuring atmosphere emphasized the various layers of hills.

#3742 - 2018 Day 89: People keep talking about hints of spring, and I know it's there but ...

all travel books

paint

pretty pictures

of the nations

they depict

irregardless of the pathetic conditions

that exist in that nation.

 

FIND A BOOK ABOUT THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

AND ON THE COVER YOU'LL SEE

A BEACH

PALM TREES

BLUE SKIES

that pretty much sums it up!

 

what a FARCE

what an OBFUSCATION

what a LIE

what a PITY

what a FAKE BOOK

 

life in the third world is

harsh, painful,

its people do not

have MATERIALISM

as their goal

Their goal is to eat,

and escape from the

immense adverisiites

that they face.

  

ALEJANDRO BAEZ

2 PM

110 degrees

 

a few kilometers

outside of

 

SAN PEDRO de MACORIS

my old home

 

Photography’s new conscience

linktr.ee/GlennLosack

linktr.ee/GlennLosack

  

glosack.wixsite.com/tbws

Drawing is a form of visual art in which a person uses various drawing instruments to mark paper or another two-dimensional medium. Instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, various kinds of erasers, markers, styluses, various metals (such as silverpoint) and electronic drawing.

 

A drawing instrument releases small amount of material onto a surface, leaving a visible mark. The most common support for drawing is paper, although other materials, such as cardboard, plastic, leather, canvas, and board, may be used. Temporary drawings may be made on a blackboard or whiteboard or indeed almost anything. The medium has been a popular and fundamental means of public expression throughout human history. It is one of the simplest and most efficient means of communicating visual ideas.[1] The wide availability of drawing instruments makes drawing one of the most common artistic activities.

In addition to its more artistic forms, drawing is frequently used in commercial illustration, animation, architecture, engineering and technical drawing. A quick, freehand drawing, usually not intended as a finished work, is sometimes called a sketch. An artist who practices or works in technical drawing may be called a drafter, draftsman or a draughtsman.[2]

Drawing is one of the major forms of expression within the visual arts. It is generally concerned with the marking of lines and areas of tone onto paper/other material, where the accurate representation of the visual world is expressed upon a plane surface.[3] Traditional drawings were monochrome, or at least had little colour,[4] while modern colored-pencil drawings may approach or cross a boundary between drawing and painting. In Western terminology, drawing is distinct from painting, even though similar media often are employed in both tasks. Dry media, normally associated with drawing, such as chalk, may be used in pastel paintings. Drawing may be done with a liquid medium, applied with brushes or pens. Similar supports likewise can serve both: painting generally involves the application of liquid paint onto prepared canvas or panels, but sometimes an underdrawing is drawn first on that same support.

  

Madame Palmyre with Her Dog, 1897. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

 

Galileo Galilei. Phases of the Moon. 1616.

Drawing is often exploratory, with considerable emphasis on observation, problem-solving and composition. Drawing is also regularly used in preparation for a painting, further obfuscating their distinction. Drawings created for these purposes are called studies.

 

There are several categories of drawing, including figure drawing, cartooning, doodling, free hand and shading. There are also many drawing methods, such as line drawing, stippling, shading, the surrealist method of entopic graphomania (in which dots are made at the sites of impurities in a blank sheet of paper, and lines are then made between the dots), and tracing (drawing on a translucent paper, such as tracing paper, around the outline of preexisting shapes that show through the paper).

 

A quick, unrefined drawing may be called a sketch.

 

In fields outside art, technical drawings or plans of buildings, machinery, circuitry and other things are often called "drawings" even when they have been transferred to another medium by printing.

 

History[edit]

Drawing as a Form of Communication Drawing is one of the oldest forms of human expression, with evidence for its existence preceding that of written communication.[5] It is believed that drawing was used as a specialised form of communication before the invent of the written language,[5][6] demonstrated by the production of cave and rock paintings created by Homo sapiens sapiens around 30,000 years ago.[7] These drawings, known as pictograms, depicted objects and abstract concepts.[8] The sketches and paintings produced in prehistoric times were eventually stylised and simplified, leading to the development of the written language as we know it today.

 

Drawing in the Arts Drawing is used to express one's creativity, and therefore has been prominent in the world of art. Throughout much of history, drawing was regarded as the foundation for artistic practise.[9] Initially, artists used and reused wooden tablets for the production of their drawings.[10] Following the widespread availability of paper in the 14th century, the use of drawing in the arts increased. At this point, drawing was commonly used as a tool for thought and investigation, acting as a study medium whilst artists were preparing for their final pieces of work.[11][12] In a period of artistic flourish, the Renaissance brought about drawings exhibiting realistic representational qualities,[13] where there was a lot of influence from geometry and philosophy.[14]

 

The invention of the first widely available form of photography led to a shift in the use of drawing in the arts.[15] Photography took over from drawing as a more superior method for accurately representing visual phenomena, and artists began to abandon traditional drawing practises.[16] Modernism in the arts encouraged "imaginative originality"[17] and artists' approach to drawing became more abstract.

 

Drawing Outside the Arts Although the use of drawing is extensive in the arts, its practice is not confined purely to this field. Before the widespread availability of paper, 12th century monks in European monasteries used intricate drawings to prepare illustrated, illuminated manuscripts on vellum and parchment. Drawing has also been used extensively in the field of science, as a method of discovery, understanding and explanation. In 1616, astronomer Galileo Galilei explained the changing phases of the moon through his observational telescopic drawings.[16] Additionally, in 1924, geophysicist Alfred Wegener used illustrations to visually demonstrate the origin of the continents.The medium is the means by which ink, pigment or color are delivered onto the drawing surface. Most drawing media are either dry (e.g. graphite, charcoal, pastels, Conté, silverpoint), or use a fluid solvent or carrier (marker, pen and ink). Watercolor pencils can be used dry like ordinary pencils, then moistened with a wet brush to get various painterly effects. Very rarely, artists have drawn with (usually decoded) invisible ink. Metalpoint drawing usually employs either of two metals: silver or lead.[20] More rarely used are gold, platinum, copper, brass, bronze, and tinpoint.

 

Paper comes in a variety of different sizes and qualities, ranging from newspaper grade up to high quality and relatively expensive paper sold as individual sheets.[21] Papers can vary in texture, hue, acidity, and strength when wet. Smooth paper is good for rendering fine detail, but a more "toothy" paper holds the drawing material better. Thus a coarser material is useful for producing deeper contrast.

 

Newsprint and typing paper may be useful for practice and rough sketches. Tracing paper is used to experiment over a half-finished drawing, and to transfer a design from one sheet to another. Cartridge paper is the basic type of drawing paper sold in pads. Bristol board and even heavier acid-free boards, frequently with smooth finishes, are used for drawing fine detail and do not distort when wet media (ink, washes) are applied. Vellum is extremely smooth and suitable for very fine detail. Coldpressed watercolor paper may be favored for ink drawing due to its texture.

 

Acid-free, archival quality paper keeps its color and texture far longer than wood pulp based paper such as newsprint, which turns yellow and become brittle much sooner.

 

The basic tools are a drawing board or table, pencil sharpener and eraser, and for ink drawing, blotting paper. Other tools used are circle compass, ruler, and set square. Fixative is used to prevent pencil and crayon marks from smudging. Drafting tape is used to secure paper to drawing surface, and also to mask an area to keep it free of accidental marks sprayed or spattered materials and washes. An easel or slanted table is used to keep the drawing surface in a suitable position, which is generally more horizontal than the position used in painting.

 

Technique[edit]

 

Raphael, study for what became the Alba Madonna, with other sketches

Almost all draftsmen use their hands and fingers to apply the media, with the exception of some handicapped individuals who draw with their mouth or feet.[22]

 

Prior to working on an image, the artist typically explores how various media work. They may try different drawing implements on practice sheets to determine value and texture, and how to apply the implement to produce various effects.

 

The artist's choice of drawing strokes affects the appearance of the image. Pen and ink drawings often use hatching—groups of parallel lines.[23] Cross-hatching uses hatching in two or more different directions to create a darker tone. Broken hatching, or lines with intermittent breaks, form lighter tones—and controlling the density of the breaks achieves a gradation of tone. Stippling, uses dots to produce tone, texture or shade. Different textures can be achieved depending on the method used to build tone.[24]

 

Drawings in dry media often use similar techniques, though pencils and drawing sticks can achieve continuous variations in tone. Typically a drawing is filled in based on which hand the artist favors. A right-handed artist draws from left to right to avoid smearing the image. Erasers can remove unwanted lines, lighten tones, and clean up stray marks. In a sketch or outline drawing, lines drawn often follow the contour of the subject, creating depth by looking like shadows cast from a light in the artist's position.

 

Sometimes the artist leaves a section of the image untouched while filling in the remainder. The shape of the area to preserve can be painted with masking fluid or cut out of a frisket and applied to the drawing surface, protecting the surface from stray marks until the mask is removed.

 

Another method to preserve a section of the image is to apply a spray-on fixative to the surface. This holds loose material more firmly to the sheet and prevents it from smearing. However the fixative spray typically uses chemicals that can harm the respiratory system, so it should be employed in a well-ventilated area such as outdoors.

 

Another technique is subtractive drawing in which the drawing surface is covered with graphite or charcoal and then erased to make the image.[25]

 

Tone[edit]

 

Line drawing in sanguine by Leonardo da Vinci

Shading is the technique of varying the tonal values on the paper to represent the shade of the material as well as the placement of the shadows. Careful attention to reflected light, shadows and highlights can result in a very realistic rendition of the image.

 

Blending uses an implement to soften or spread the original drawing strokes. Blending is most easily done with a medium that does not immediately fix itself, such as graphite, chalk, or charcoal, although freshly applied ink can be smudged, wet or dry, for some effects. For shading and blending, the artist can use a blending stump, tissue, a kneaded eraser, a fingertip, or any combination of them. A piece of chamois is useful for creating smooth textures, and for removing material to lighten the tone. Continuous tone can be achieved with graphite on a smooth surface without blending, but the technique is laborious, involving small circular or oval strokes with a somewhat blunt point.

 

Shading techniques that also introduce texture to the drawing include hatching and stippling. A number of other methods produce texture. In addition to the choice of paper, drawing material and technique affect texture. Texture can be made to appear more realistic when it is drawn next to a contrasting texture; a coarse texture is more obvious when placed next to a smoothly blended area. A similar effect can be achieved by drawing different tones close together. A light edge next to a dark background stands out to the eye, and almost appears to float above the surface.

 

Form and proportion[edit]

 

Pencil portrait by Ingres

Measuring the dimensions of a subject while blocking in the drawing is an important step in producing a realistic rendition of the subject. Tools such as a compass can be used to measure the angles of different sides. These angles can be reproduced on the drawing surface and then rechecked to make sure they are accurate. Another form of measurement is to compare the relative sizes of different parts of the subject with each other. A finger placed at a point along the drawing implement can be used to compare that dimension with other parts of the image. A ruler can be used both as a straightedge and a device to compute proportions.

 

When attempting to draw a complicated shape such as a human figure, it is helpful at first to represent the form with a set of primitive volumes. Almost any form can be represented by some combination of the cube, sphere, cylinder, and cone. Once these basic volumes have been assembled into a likeness, then the drawing can be refined into a more accurate and polished form. The lines of the primitive volumes are removed and replaced by the final likeness. Drawing the underlying construction is a fundamental skill for representational art, and is taught in many books and schools. Its correct application resolves most uncertainties about smaller details, and makes the final image look consistent.[26]

 

A more refined art of figure drawing relies upon the artist possessing a deep understanding of anatomy and the human proportions. A trained artist is familiar with the skeleton structure, joint location, muscle placement, tendon movement, and how the different parts work together during movement. This allows the artist to render more natural poses that do not appear artificially stiff. The artist is also familiar with how the proportions vary depending on the age of the subject, particularly when drawing a portrait.

 

Perspective[edit]

Linear perspective is a method of portraying objects on a flat surface so that the dimensions shrink with distance. Each set of parallel, straight edges of any object, whether a building or a table, follows lines that eventually converge at a vanishing point. Typically this convergence point is somewhere along the horizon, as buildings are built level with the flat surface. When multiple structures are aligned with each other, such as buildings along a street, the horizontal tops and bottoms of the structures typically converge at a vanishing point.

  

Two-point perspective drawing

When both the fronts and sides of a building are drawn, then the parallel lines forming a side converge at a second point along the horizon (which may be off the drawing paper.) This is a two-point perspective.[27] Converging the vertical lines to a third point above or below the horizon then produces a three-point perspective.

 

Depth can also be portrayed by several techniques in addition to the perspective approach above. Objects of similar size should appear ever smaller the further they are from the viewer. Thus the back wheel of a cart appears slightly smaller than the front wheel. Depth can be portrayed through the use of texture. As the texture of an object gets further away it becomes more compressed and busy, taking on an entirely different character than if it was close. Depth can also be portrayed by reducing the contrast in more distant objects, and by making their colors less saturated. This reproduces the effect of atmospheric haze, and cause the eye to focus primarily on objects drawn in the foreground.

 

Artistry[edit]

 

Chiaroscuro study drawing by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

The composition of the image is an important element in producing an interesting work of artistic merit. The artist plans element placement in the art to communicate ideas and feelings with the viewer. The composition can determine the focus of the art, and result in a harmonious whole that is aesthetically appealing and stimulating.

 

The illumination of the subject is also a key element in creating an artistic piece, and the interplay of light and shadow is a valuable method in the artist's toolbox. The placement of the light sources can make a considerable difference in the type of message that is being presented. Multiple light sources can wash out any wrinkles in a person's face, for instance, and give a more youthful appearance. In contrast, a single light source, such as harsh daylight, can serve to highlight any texture or interesting features.

 

When drawing an object or figure, the skilled artist pays attention to both the area within the silhouette and what lies outside. The exterior is termed the negative space, and can be as important in the representation as the figure. Objects placed in the background of the figure should appear properly placed wherever they can be viewed.

  

Drawing process in the Academic Study of a Male Torso by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1801, National Museum, Warsaw)

A study is a draft drawing that is made in preparation for a planned final image. Studies can be used to determine the appearances of specific parts of the completed image, or for experimenting with the best approach for accomplishing the end goal. However a well-crafted study can be a piece of art in its own right, and many hours of careful work can go into completing a study.

 

Process[edit]

Individuals display differences in their ability to produce visually accurate drawings.[28] A visually accurate drawing is described as being "recognized as a particular object at a particular time and in a particular space, rendered with little addition of visual detail that can not be seen in the object represented or with little deletion of visual detail”.[29]

 

Investigative studies have aimed to explain the reasons why some individuals draw better than others. One study posited four key abilities in the drawing process: perception of objects being drawn, ability to make good representational decisions, motor skills required for mark-making and the drawer's own perception of their drawing.[29] Following this hypothesis, several studies have sought to conclude which of these processes are most significant in affecting the accuracy of drawings.

 

Motor function Motor function is an important physical component in the 'Production Phase' of the drawing process.[30] It has been suggested that motor function plays a role in drawing ability, though its effects are not significant.[29]

 

Perception It has been suggested that an individual's ability to perceive an object they are drawing is the most important stage in the drawing process.[29] This suggestion is supported by the discovery of a robust relationship between perception and drawing ability.[31]

 

This evidence acted as the basis of Betty Edwards' how-to drawing book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.[32] Edwards aimed to teach her readers how to draw, based on the development of the reader's perceptual abilities.

 

Furthermore, the influential artist and art critic John Ruskin emphasised the importance of perception in the drawing process in his book The Elements of Drawing.[33] He stated that "For I am nearly convinced, that once we see keenly enough, there is very little difficult in drawing what we see".

 

Visual memory has also been shown to influence one's ability to create visually accurate drawings. Short-term memory plays an important part in drawing as one’s gaze shifts between the object they are drawing and the drawing itself.[34]

Marfa, Texas

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Marfa, Texas

— City —

Location of Marfa, Texas

Coordinates: 30°18′43″N 104°1′29″W / 30.31194°N 104.02472°W / 30.31194; -104.02472Coordinates: 30°18′43″N 104°1′29″W / 30.31194°N 104.02472°W / 30.31194; -104.02472

Country United States

State Texas

County Presidio

Area

- Total 1.6 sq mi (4.1 km2)

- Land 1.6 sq mi (4.1 km2)

- Water 0.0 sq mi (0.0 km2)

Elevation 4,685 ft (1,428 m)

Population (2000)

- Total 2,121

- Density 1,354.6/sq mi (523.0/km2)

Time zone Central (CST) (UTC-6)

- Summer (DST) CDT (UTC-5)

ZIP code 79843

Area code(s) 432

FIPS code 48-46620[1]

GNIS feature ID 1340942[2]

 

Marfa is a town in the high desert of far West Texas in the Southwestern United States. Located between the Davis Mountains and Big Bend National Park, it is also the county seat of Presidio County. The population was 2,121 at the 2000 census.

 

Marfa was founded in the early 1880s as a railroad water stop, and grew quickly through the 1920s. Marfa Army Airfield (Fort D.A. Russell) was located east of the town during World War II and trained several thousand pilots before closing in 1945 (the abandoned site is still visible ten miles (16 km) east of the city). The base was also used as the training ground for many of the U.S. Army's Chemical mortar battalions.

 

Despite its small size, today Marfa is a tourist destination. Attractions include the historical architecture and classic Texas town square, modern art at the Chinati Foundation and in galleries around town, and the Marfa lights.

 

Amateur etymologist Barry Popik has shown[where?] that Marfa is named after Marfa Strogoff, a character in the Jules Verne novel Michael Strogoff and its theatrical adaptation; the origin was reported in the Galveston Daily News on December 17, 1882, after the Marfa railroad station was established but before Marfa received a post office in 1883.

 

The Handbook of Texas states that the wife of a railroad executive reportedly suggested the name "Marfa" after reading the name in the Fyodor Dostoevsky novel The Brothers Karamazov.[

  

Marfa is in the Chihuahuan Desert

 

Marfa is located at 30°18′43″N 104°1′29″W / 30.31194°N 104.02472°W / 30.31194; -104.02472 (30.311863, -104.024779)[4]. According to the United States Census Bureau, Marfa has a total area of 1.6 square miles (4.1 km²), all of it land, the city is located in the Chihuahuan Desert, a notably underdeveloped region of about 140,000 square miles (~362,600 km²). There is less than one person per square mile in the area.[citation needed]

[edit] Modern art and minimalism

Hotel Paisano and the Presidio County courthouse

 

In 1971, Donald Judd, the renowned minimalist artist, moved to Marfa from New York City. After renting summer houses for a couple of years he bought two large hangars, some smaller buildings and started to permanently install his art. While this started with his building in New York, the buildings in Marfa (now The Block, Judd Foundation) allowed him to install his works on a larger scale. In 1976 he bought the first of two ranches that would become his primary places of residence, continuing a long love affair with the desert landscape surrounding Marfa. Later, with assistance from the Dia Art Foundation in New York, Judd acquired decommissioned Fort D.A. Russell, and began transforming the fort's buildings into art spaces in 1979. Judd's vision was to house large collections of individual artists' work on permanent display, as a sort of anti-museum. Judd believed that the prevailing model of a museum, where art is shown for short periods of time, does not allow the viewer an understanding of the artist or their work as they intended.

 

Since Judd's death in 1994, two foundations have been working to maintain his legacy: the Chinati Foundation and Judd Foundation. Every year The Chinati Foundation holds an Open House event where artists, collectors, and enthusiasts come from around the world to visit Marfa's art. Since 1997 Open House has been co-sponsored by both foundations and attracts thousands of visitors from around the world.

 

The Chinati Foundation now occupies more than 10 buildings at the site and has on permanent exhibit work by Carl Andre, Ingólfur Arnarson, John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, Roni Horn, Ilya Kabakov, Richard Long, Claes Oldenburg, Coosje van Bruggen, John Wesley, and David Rabinowitch.

 

In recent years, a new wave of artists has moved to Marfa to live and work. As a result, new gallery spaces have opened in the downtown area. Furthermore, The Lannan Foundation has established a writers-in-residency program, a Marfa theater group has formed, and a multi-functional art space called Ballroom Marfa has begun to show art films, host musical performances, and exhibit other art installations.

[edit] Marfa lights

Main article: Marfa lights

Official viewing platform, east of Marfa

 

Outside of Donald Judd and modern art, Marfa may be most famous for the Marfa lights, visible on clear nights between Marfa and the Paisano Pass when one is facing southwest (toward the Chinati Mountains). According to the Handbook of Texas Online, "...at times they appear colored as they twinkle in the distance. They move about, split apart, melt together, disappear, and reappear. Presidio County residents have watched the lights for over a hundred years. The first historical record of them recalls that in 1883 a young cowhand, Robert Reed Ellison, saw a flickering light while he was driving cattle through Paisano Pass and wondered if it was the campfire of Apache Indians. He was told by other settlers that they often saw the lights, but when they investigated they found no ashes or other evidence of a campsite.[5]

 

Presidio County has built a viewing station nine miles east of town on U.S. 67 near the site of the old air base. Each year, enthusiasts gather for the annual Marfa Lights Festival.

 

These objects have been featured and mentioned in various media, including the television show Unsolved Mysteries and an episode of King of the Hill ("Of Mice and Little Green Men") and in an episode of Disney Channel Original Series So Weird, however the producers/writers had made the countryside of Marfa as a forest area instead of a desert area which Marfa is actually located in. A fictional book by David Morrell, 2009's "The Shimmer", is inspired by the lights. The metalcore group Between the Buried and Me make a reference in the song "Obfuscation" (2009).

[edit] Filming of Giant and other films

Marker of Marfa

 

The famous 1956 Warner Bros. film Giant, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Sal Mineo, Carroll Baker and Dennis Hopper, was filmed in Marfa for two months. Director George Stevens did not have a closed set and actively encouraged the townspeople to come by, either to watch the shooting, or visit with the cast and crew, or take part as extras, dialect coaches, bit players and stagehands.

 

In August 2006, two movie production units used locations in and around Marfa: the film There Will Be Blood, an adaptation of the Upton Sinclair novel Oil!, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, and the Coen Brothers' adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel No Country for Old Men.[6][7]

 

The 1976 play Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, and its 1982 film adaptation, were set in and around Marfa. The film, however, was not shot there.

 

In 2008, Marfa held the first annual Marfa Film Festival, which lasted from May 1–5.

 

The music video of 'Home' by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros ends in Marfa with a sign reading 'GOODBYE MARFA, TX!!'

 

The music video of 'Obfuscation' by Between the Buried and Me is set in Marfa.

[edit] Demographics

Downtown view of Marfa from atop the Courthouse

 

According to the latest U.S. census[1] of 2000, there were 2,121 people, 863 households, and 555 families residing in the city. The population density was 1,354.6 people per square mile (521.6/km²). There were 1,126 housing units at an average density of 719.1 per square mile (276.9/km²). The racial makeup of the city was 91% White, 0.28% African American, 0.38% Native American, 0.05% Asian, 7.50% from other races, and 0.75% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 69.9% of the population.

 

There were 863 households out of which 29.3% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 47.4% were married couples living together, 13.1% had a female householder with no husband present, and 35.6% were non-families. 31.4% of all households were made up of individuals and 17.3% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.35 and the average family size was 2.99.

 

In the city the population was spread out with 24.9% under the age of 18, 7.9% from 18 to 24, 24.2% from 25 to 44, 24.5% from 45 to 64, and 18.5% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 39 years. For every 100 females there were 101.8 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 100.9 males.

 

The median income for a household in the city was $24,712, and the median income for a family was $32,328. Males had a median income of $25,804 versus $18,382 for females. The per capita income for the city was $14,636. About 15.7% of families and 20.6% of the population were below the poverty line, including 24.6% of those under age 18 and 26.9% of those age 65 or over.

[edit] Education

Marfa High School

 

Marfa is served by the Marfa Independent School District. Marfa Elementary School and Marfa Junior/Senior High School, a part of the district, serve the city.

[edit] Law enforcement

 

As of October 1, 2009 the city no longer has a local police department. The Presidio County Sheriff patrols the city as well as the county as a whole.

[edit] Media

 

Marfa is home to NPR-affiliated station KRTS.

 

Marfa Magazine is a yearly publication distributed out of Marfa Texas, founded and operated by Johnny Calderon, Jr. Marfa Magazine focuses on current issues and general information about Marfa, Alpine, and Fort Davis.

[edit] Transportation

 

Marfa operates the Marfa Municipal Airport, located north of the city in unincorporated Presidio County and serving general aviation. Commercial air service is available at either Midland International Airport, 180 miles (290 km) northeast, or El Paso International Airport, 190 miles (310 km) northwest.

 

Greyhound Lines operates an intercity bus service from the Western Union office.[8]

 

The Amtrak Sunset Limited passes through the city, but does not stop. The nearest stop is located in nearby Alpine.

Late afternoon sun accentuates the multiple scales of sand textures- ripples, waves, ridges, dips, and grains. Footprints across the bottom of the dune towards the middle provides some scale to the scene. (see mikegreenimages.com/2012/10/03/musings-on-obfuscating-sca... for interesting musings on scale in landscape shots)

 

Press "L" to view with a dark background in lightbox.

 

The dunes are the result of sand blown from an ancient lake bed in the rift valley to the west (left of the photo), and occasional strong winds blown from mountain passes in the Sangre de Cristos from the east. The combination of these opposing winds has built up the dunes to heights of over 700 feet (200 m) above the valley floor.

 

Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado

historywillabsolvemike.blogspot.com/

EAST SIDE CONFIDENTIAL

part two: Confusion on the Heels of Chaos

 

"I was once, if I remember correctly, present at a gathering of madmen."

- Roberto Bolaño

 

Conjoined twins sharing a vital organ are destined to die simultaneously. Frank "Turk" Jaworski and the Open Kitchen took the same exit. Their departure marked the end of an era, one that was an anachronism by the time of its disappearance. The Open Kitchen was a small space unaffected by linear time. Within the confines of its walls, time sputtered and stalled somewhere in the mid-fifties due to a defect in the time/space continuum. The Open Kitchen was a unique experience. It could never be duplicated. No one in their right mind would even attempt such a folly. The bar was the three dimensional manifestation of Turk's personality. Bill Curry opened the Copabanana not long after the Open Kitchen closed. Change was inevitable after so many years of stasis. Only one element remained the same. All hell continued to break loose at the same address.

 

The Copabanana was entirely different from the Open Kitchen. It featured a fully stocked bar, not just cans of Schmidt's and cheap booze. Every element of Turk's bar was completely erased by the new owner. The Copa yanked the clock violently into the present. Unlike the dictatorial reign of Turk, Bill Curry preferred a laissez faire approach toward running his bar. As long as the behavior of his clientele didn't jeopardize his liquor license, he was quite tolerant of borderline behavior. It was easier and more profitable to ignore everything but major transgressions. All Curry required from his customers was a modicum of discretion and no blatant acts of lawlessness. Considering the clientele and the staff, even this small concession was a challenge. Society was changing in the late seventies and early eighties. These changes were responsible for a more open sexual atmosphere. The birth control pill was in widespread use and sexually transmitted diseases were not yet identified as being permanent or fatal As a result the sexual revolution was in full swing. South Street swung a bit further than other neighborhoods. The area had a reputation for embracing creative, eccentric and marginal behavior. It consequently attracted a diverse range of humanity, all bent in some fashion. Styles that attracted attention uptown or in the suburbs were met with a jaundiced eye on South Street. The bizarre was not only accepted, it was embraced on South Street. Normal became weird. In the words of Hunter S. Thompson, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." If we weren't professionals, we were damn good amateurs.

 

No one went to the Open Kitchen to meet women. There were none. Turk didn't ban them, he just did nothing to encourage their patronage. He didn't really encourage anyone to frequent the place. He was more interested in making sure that irritating people stayed out. If they irked him he kicked them out with alacrity. These exclusions had nothing at all to do with race. Most of his clientele was black. He banished people from all walks of life with equanimity. The limited drink selections offered, Turk's brusque manner and the fact that the kitchen was never open at the Open Kitchen discouraged errant tourists. It attracted a loyal clientele of cynical and grizzled veterans, all male. Anyone that frequented the place played by Turk's rules or went elsewhere. It is only logical that women would avoid a bar owned by a proprietor with a reputation for jamming a chrome-plated 45 in someone's face on a fairly regular basis. The Open Kitchen was an acquired taste. It was Turk's personal fiefdom and he didn't seem to be interested in profit. Bill Curry was primarily interested in running a profitable business. He realized that tolerance was profitable in this fringe neighborhood.

 

This specific evening exceeded the standards of chaos in a chaotic time period. A large group of us attended an art opening that night. I forget the exhibition and the name of the gallery but it doesn't matter. We all agreed to meet at the Copabanana afterwards. In hindsight it was a questionable decision. Some of us had to work the next day, me for example, but immediate gratification almost always overruled good sense. The entire crew was on the charming side of drunk by the time we left the gallery. That state would prove impossible to maintain as the night wore on. Collectively we lacked basic impulse control on a good day. The odds were against this unfolding as an evening of quiet reflection considering the cast of characters and the quantity of alcohol consumed. Although we operated in the shadows of the culture industry, this was not a group of gentile aesthetes and dilettantes. Drunk, our behavior was reminiscent of orangutans on unauthorized leave from the zoo. Any gains we made within the art system were immediately erased by transgressive acts. We repeatedly snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory. If good behavior was the price of success, it was much too high a price to pay given our disinterest in the game and our contempt for rules.

 

Our tactics were more street than salon. One night in the Khyber I was at the urinal taking a piss and some fucking idiot said to me, "Oh, you're Michael Macfeat, the guy who paints the crazy things and does the crazy things." I punched him in the mouth, zipped up and returned to the bar.

 

Most of the exhibiting artists and our friends went to the Copabanana that evening. My father and his friend Rocco were at the exhibition and they decided to join us for cocktails. It was not unusual for Al to socialize with us. He was always up for a few drinks and the pursuit of pleasure. In fact pleasure was his sole motivation in life. To their credit, none of my friends' fathers behaved like Al. He was a unique individual and often not in a good way.

 

My father was fun to go out with although growing up with him was a nightmare. He was good company and charming. It made it easier to forgive his faults. On the other hand he was also a larcenous bastard. If it wasn't screwed down he would steal it. If it was he brought a screwdriver. He could be quite entertaining and he was generous when he had the means. Al would never let any of us pay for anything when we went out. Considering the limited funds at my disposal it would have been self-defeating to refuse his largesse. He wouldn't come around if he didn't have cash. As is often the case with gamblers, his finances were tied to his luck so he wasn't around much. His absences lasted long enough to ensure he would be welcomed back.

 

His friend Rocco was no stranger. Rocco always carried a pistol with him although I was never sure why he felt the need. He was a rather large man and quite capable of handling himself without it. He made no display of the weapon but the gun sometimes created an unmistakable bulge under his clothing. Hanging around with Rocco taught me to look for signals that a man was armed. Despite the firearm, Rocco was gregarious and a fun to be around. His gun was an accepted fact, like his size. Certainly no one had the balls to question him about the pistol.

 

Once inside the Copa, Rocco and my father insisted on paying for everyone's drinks. It became an expensive night for those two spendthrifts. A rather large entourage followed us to the bar and took full advantage of the offer. From experience, I knew that these displays of wild extravagance usually meant that a scam or a bet had born fruit. Apparently they both reaped the benefits of some lucrative caper since they were squandering money like drunken stock brokers with expense accounts. I knew that these windfall profits often came at some else's expense. Some unseen loser was probably back in New Jersey, licking his wounds and cursing his bad luck. Fuck it. Free drinks were free drinks. I learned to ignore the source of Al's funds. It wasn't worth wasting time thinking about it.

 

Funded by their (presumably) ill gotten gains, multiple cocktails began piling up on both floors for our pleasure. Free cocktails might sound lovely in the abstract but in reality they almost always prove to be a mistake. Paying for drinks sometimes helps one keep excessive spending in perspective; not always but sometimes. Considering the Rogues Gallery in the Copa that night, excess was preordained. The drinks were free but they certainly did nothing to promote good behavior in this group of errant primates.

 

Fueled by the seemingly endless flow of alcohol, the evening began its slow descent into anarchy. People went between floors in search of some anticipated but indefinable amusement. Both floors had multiple cocktails at our disposal so these migrations weren't for entertainment purposes only. Fortunately I had a good relationship with the manager of the bar so she left us to our own devices. She had incredible eyes, large and mesmerizing. Granted, I was easily mesmerized back then.

 

One of the women from our group took umbrage to something or another (either real or imagined) and noisily stormed out of the bar. She had a reputation for pulling a Houdini when drunk. We had all seen this routine before and knew that pursuit was an exercise in futility. I wish I could forget who she was. She later claimed to walk back to New Jersey over the Ben Franklin Bridge. An attractive woman surviving an evening stroll through the city of Camden was unimaginable. Camden led the nation in per capita murders. At the time it was one of the most lawless cities in America and it remains so. Whether this trek actually happened or not was irrelevant. Fact and fiction blurred on evenings such as these. At any rate, no one batted an eye about the sudden departure. It was old hat and it meant more free alcohol for the rest of us.

 

My father, quite inebriated by this time, got it into his thick skull that one of our friends was pregnant. Unfortunately that wasn't the case. She was just a big-boned girl. Understandably, my father's comments horrified her. At an early age men are trained to avoid asking about a woman's weight and age. It wasn't as if Al didn't have extensive experience with the opposite sex. His success with women was legendary. Unfortunately his common sense and discretion went south this particular evening. Either he forgot or he just didn't give a fuck, I am not sure which. Al didn't stop at one comment about her perceived delicate condition. Oh no, he went on and on about it. If only he made these comments behind her back it would have been less embarrassing for everyone. He was quite direct in his interrogation and he was relentless. Al spent an excruciating amount of time trying to get her to confess to being pregnant. It was the height of absurdity for a man who would confess to nothing, even when caught red handed, would have the audacity to demand a confession from anyone else. Whatever his motivation, he was tenacious. With the singularity of mind that drunks often exhibit he was fixated on the subject. This horror-show went on for what felt like an eternity. Graced with the attention span of a two year old, Al tired of the game and moved on to the other equally absurd delusions.

 

To deflect the poor girl's attention away from my father's abuse, a close friend asked the girl for her telephone number. Her mood brightened at the prospect of potential romance with this handsome rake. I knew that this bastard had no intention of ever calling her (in fact he never did) but she felt a bit better about herself, however fleetingly.

 

Cocktails flowed without end, an alcoholic version of the nearby Delaware River. Whatever decorum we could muster was simply to ensure that it continued unabated. Kevin, our friend Mike and I retired to the upstairs bar. It was less crowded up there and I needed a break from my father's lunacy. It was obvious that our luck couldn't hold out forever. As inevitable and unwelcome as my hangover the next day, my father and Rocco were bound to notice our absence. In much too short a time they did.

 

At the opposite end of the bar was an attractive woman sitting by herself and wearing a white fur coat. She was a few years older than Kevin and I but that was irrelevant. Her style wasn't right, it was much too flashy. Her wardrobe was all shiny and sparkly, like a human disco ball. Her clothes identified her as a South Philadelphia native. Their style signified a certain attitude and told us that we couldn't get there from here. From across the bar it was obvious that it was a clash of sensibilities. The stylistic soundtrack was the Clash's White Riot at our end of the bar and It's Raining Men at the other. She looked like a materialistic pain in the ass. Never one to fight battles that I couldn't win I settled into my Tanqueray and tonics and let sleeping dogs lie.

 

Unfortunately not everyone followed my prudent example. Rocco and Al gravitated to her. They still lived some low rent Rat Pack version of the past. Contemporary clues held little meaning to them. Even if they understood the clues, as far as they were concerned they were free to ignore them. In that sense they were anarchists. They did whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted as long as their funds held out. They began chatting her up as if either of them had a chance with her. The fucked up thing is that from a cursory glance it appeared that they might. Either she enjoyed the company which was hard to imagine or she was plying them for drinks, a more likely scenario. It was impossible for me to care. These two clowns were on a mission and it was best to leave it alone. I kept one eye on the conversation as one does passing an accident on the other side of the highway. I didn't really want to see the carnage but it was fascinating on some morbid level. I was disinterested in hearing the actual conversation. It was bound to be all lies and I had heard enough of the sound of my father's voice for one evening. She was physically fit so at least Al wouldn't ask her if she was pregnant. That provided me some small comfort.

 

My father could be exceptionally charming when he saw fit to make the effort. His guile with women was legendary and taken for granted. It was unthinkable to leave my girlfriends with him for any length of time. Even if he didn't snake me it was in the realm of the possible. He was that charming, that devious and his wiles with women were unaffected by any wide age discrepancy. The woman had as much chance as a wounded zebra run to ground by a hyena. Al could never be trusted with women or money. He was treacherous on both fronts.

 

Kevin, our friend Mike and I were at the near end of the bar still practicing our drinking. It was going pretty well if oblivion was the goal. We were regulars at the bar so we were familiar with the bartender. He and I had a mutual interest in Soldier of Fortune magazine. We had little else in common so the discussion usually began and ended on that topic. He wasn't a bad guy but he was wound a bit too tight. If I remember correctly he was also in a twelve step program, which at the time I perceived as a symptom of insanity. His interest in the magazine far exceeded my own, however. He was short but he actually aspired to become a mercenary. That seemed nuts to me but it didn't matter. He took care of us, we took care of him and if the conversation lagged we could always discuss the engineering merits and dependability of the AK47. Even drinks on the house have a price. My curiosity about Soldier of Fortune concerned the international politics that kept mercenaries employed. I also used the magazine as source material in my artwork. Occasionally an article about the Irish Republican Army would appear but I had no fucking desire to join them. It never hurt to have a friendly bartender in your corner so I finessed the conversations as best I could. I did suspect that he was nuts and that one day he might explode into a one man orgy of violence so I kept a respectful distance.

 

He came over to our end of the bar but not to bring us drinks or talk about Soldier of Fortune. As an avid gun enthusiast he probably noticed the tell-tale lump under Rocco's shirt. He said quietly, "You know the woman that those two older guys are talking to? She isn't what they think she is." We weren't entirely sure what he meant. In my case I was drunk and my powers of deduction were as impaired as the rest of me. She looked presentable from a distance if you could ignore her sense of style. If the implication was that she was a prostitute, I doubted that either Rocco or my dad would perceive that as a negative. Perhaps things would be less complicated for the three of them if they had crime in common. "Is she a working girl?" He replied in a whisper, "No, she's a transvestite." Kevin and I swiveled our heads to our right in unison. A more critical analysis of this changeling confirmed his assessment. Curiously, these two drunken reprobates seemed completely oblivious to the situation at hand, despite having a closer view of her. This could not end well. As was often the case with Mike, he was in the Men's Room at the crucial moment and missed the bartender's warning.

 

In the process of writing this, I considered the possibility that Kevin and I had overreacted and had misread the threat assessment. That doesn't explain the two pirates chatted her up but God knows what the fuck they were talking about. It didn't look to us like they knew the score but maybe they did. Perhaps Al and Rocco found the conversation comical. It seemed plausible. I am so often wrong that I never discount the possibility. The situation seemed to us to have all of the ingredients of a perfect storm.

 

I brought the subject up with Kevin recently for the first time in years. I asked him for his general impression of the evening. He said, "Fuck, I was just glad that no one got shot." My later and more benevolent analysis of the situation began to crumble with his answer but I pressed on. "Kevin, is it possible that we were overreacting and that Al and Rocco knew that they were talking to a transvestite?" "No man" he said, "not a fucking chance." I asked him a question that I knew, if answered contrary to my revisionist theory, would collapse the whole theoretical house of cards that I hoped to construct. "You don't really think that they would have shot her, do you?" "As drunk as those two idiots were that night? I'm certain of it. There is plenty about that evening I don't remember but I do remember being relieved that no one got shot." His view reinforced my original fear that we had been staring into the dark abyss of violence.

 

Despite being hedonists, both Al and Rocco were old school and ignorant of the subtler developments in contemporary social mores. We decided that it would be wrong to withhold the truth. There was a possibility that nothing would happen if we left them to their own devices but we didn't trust fate. I hoped that no one would get shot but on the other hand they were quite drunk. Getting hit over the head with a gun or thrown down a flight of stairs would be enough of a disaster. Rocco was always sociable but an underlying violence lurked beneath his affable demeanor. He was a criminal, after all, or he would not have been running around with my father. He was also quite large, drunk and armed. If the shit hit the fan with Rocco there was fuck-all Kevin and I could do about it. We were experienced at fighting in tandem but there was nothing two hyenas could do against a drunk and armed mastodon.

 

Our friend Mike was useless in violent situations. He had a quick tongue, a bad attitude and nothing to back either quality up. He was also a functional junkie. His indiscretions may have been the result of his habit or an inability to maintain it at times. It wasn't unusual to get drawn into fights due to Mike's rapier wit and his inability or unwillingness to fight. Just a few weeks before he stood idly by and watched a close friend of ours take a hellacious beating at the hands of four men. Michael could watch his friends get pummeled but his friends couldn't, even knowing that he was wrong and deserved a severe ass kicking. It ran contrary to code, whether he ascribed to it or not. Although he was smart and funny, he was a liability at worst and no help at his best. He couldn't be trusted so our only option was to leave him out of it.

 

My father's temper was inescapable growing up. He never hit me until I was sixteen and I returned the favor by hitting him over the head with a lamp. He did act violently toward others, however. He was 6' 1" tall and rangy. Once he dove across the bar at Hannigan's (at 69th and Ludlow, across from the Tower Theater) and strangled a customer until the man croaked an apology. Al was in his fifties at the time. His speed and brutality amazed me. I never heard what precipitated the attack but it may have been a gambling debt. The poor bastard had no chance. He was probably as shocked as I was. I couldn't trust Al not to be violent if he felt provoked.

 

Kevin and I were aware that our intervention might have a negative effect. They were behaving themselves at present but the truth could potentially upset this convivial equilibrium. Al and Rocco were very drunk and past the point of reason. Two drunken reprobates, a pistol and a transvestite seemed a recipe for disaster.

 

We got a lucky break. Rocco and my father lacked focus in their drunken state. They eventually headed downstairs in pursuit of new and improved entertainment. Had the transvestite had lost her luster? There was no way of knowing. Kevin and I weighed our options and we decided that they all sucked. We felt that the situation needed to be addressed before they reversed field. With any luck they would be too drunk, too complacent and too lazy to go back upstairs after getting the news. By the time we located the two bastards their condition had noticeably deteriorated. They were talking and laughing loudly and it was hard to get a word in edgewise. We eventually found an opening and explained the situation as diplomatically as possible. To our horror they rebuffed us. They acted like we were nuts! They told us to fuck off and dismissed us like insolent children. Is it possible that they knew that they were dealing with a shape-shifter? These two hooligans were inscrutable at the best of times so it was difficult to determine what they knew or didn't know. People whose professions demand deception learn to present a blank expression.

 

We truly had no qualms concerning the sexual predilection of the transvestite. We lacked morals ourselves so her morality was not in question. No one faulted her for running her game for free drinks if that's what she was doing. Each to their own. Live and let live. The problem was that these two drunks were capable of losing their minds and we were unable to influence them. The other problem was my own inebriated state. It made my threat analysis (and everything else) a bit suspect.

 

After our failed attempt at disaster control we returned to the upstairs bar. Perhaps we would have better luck with the third party in this bizarre triangle. Once upstairs, the first thing that we noticed was that our buddy Mike had changed seats. He was now at the far end of the bar and engaged in witty repartee with the transvestite. We did not fucking need another complication at that moment. Now we had to explain the situation to this ass-clown before we approached Miss Thing with a plan. We went to the far end of the bar and shoehorned ourselves into their conversation. At close quarters her artifice of deception paled considerably, maybe it was the Adam's apple. One of us distracted the transvestite while the other debriefed Mike. He took the news surprisingly well. He took it too well in fact. He said he didn't care what she was, he was having fun and that we should leave him the fuck alone. That was the third person to tell us to fuck off in ten minutes and it was getting a bit tedious. Imparting the truth to these three fools was a thankless job. It was not unusual for a quiet evening on the town to turn into a three ring circus. This night had no hopes of being a quiet evening from jump street considering the personnel. Kevin and I were not very experienced at calming situations down. We were much better at escalation. Everyone else in the equation had by this time made it very clear that they thought we were assholes. Of course they were right. We were assholes, just not for the reasons that they thought we were assholes. We had good intentions even if our analysis and strategy sucked ass.

 

With Mike (somewhat) sorted or at least informed, we turned our attention to this obscure object of desire. We explained that her lifestyle choices were of no concern to us. We applauded her courage to pursue her dreams. We had no issues with transvestites whatsoever. Our only concern was that the two mature gents might not act so maturely if push came to shove. All we wanted was to avoid trouble, trouble that could result in the expulsion from a favored watering hole and/or arrest. She smiled slyly and cooed, "I can take care of myself." We retorted, "Uh…no you fucking can't." We explained that these two old gents were not exactly docile and at least one of them had a concealed weapon. They were much too drunk to expect even semi-rational behavior from them. Rocco and Al weren't exactly enlightened individuals. We strongly advised her a change of venue, at least temporarily. After a brief period of resistance she agreed to leave after we offered her cash. How much cash it took to get rid of her is lost in the black hole of memory. She exited through the door on the first floor, still resplendent in fur and glitter. She was a spectacle, an artificial Christmas tree walking in high heels. Despite the small size of the bar, Al and Rocco were too plastered to even notice her flamboyant exit.

 

We had no further contact with the Al and Rocco that night and the subject was too bizarre to bring up later. They were so drunk that it is possible that they forgot by morning. I am surprised that I remember as much as I do about the incident. After our objective was reached I lost interest in the matter. Problem solved. It was as if she never existed. At least we thought that was true until we spoke to Mike again.

 

He berated us for causing her to leave. "I liked her," he whined about his loss like a Catholic school girl with skinned knees. Kevin and I just looked at each other in disbelief, shook our heads and walked away. Actually, we didn't give a fuck if Mike left with her or not. That was his business. He was an odd bird anyway. We were simply trying to protect her from the other two fools. Their breed of dinosaur was nearly extinct but they were still dangerous. Neither of them were particularly forward thinking in the realm of sexual politics or any other politics for that matter. We solved the problem by paying her off but now Mike was bitching. Fuck him. I fought enough fights for that little bastard that he should have been more appreciative of our efforts, even if he disagreed with the results or our approach. I repressed the urge to backhand him.

 

There was nothing left for us to do now but resume our cocktail consumption. Memory abandons me beyond this point. The trip home is a complete mystery. I am quite sure that I didn't walk. It was enough of a challenge to remain upright in that state. I was so drunk that I had as much chance of flying as I did driving home. I would have crashed the car before I ever got in it.

 

Defying even my own optimistic and delusional expectations I reported for work the next day, late and hungover as fuck. If I wasn't still drunk I might have called out sick. I was usually in trouble on this job for various serial indiscretions. It must have been pretty damn important for me to show up or I doubt I would have made it. Although drunk on the morning drive I negotiated it without incident.

 

When I got near the job I stopped at a roadside stand for a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich on a long roll. It was my Saturday morning ritual. My boss always brought his shit-bag dog to work, an untrained an intact male Vizsla. It was red and it had a pronounced knot on the top of its head that made it look as stupid as it actually was. I love dogs but I couldn't stand this fucking cur. If you didn't protect yourself it would jump up on you and smack you right in the balls. I spent the majority of every working day with my hand covering my crotch. It isn't a good look and it makes a lousy first impression. People familiar with the dog understood. Most of our regular customers came in holding their packages as a defensive tactic. It must have looked weird seeing everyone standing around clutching their yarbles. The dog was relentless and would jump up if you made eye contact. It happened all day long. I smacked it on multiple occasions. With no one else reinforcing the discipline and partly due to the dog's sub-par intelligence it had no affect. Training the useless piece of shit would have helped but my boss felt that training and spaying a dog violated its freedom. He preferred his dogs in a near feral state. I can only think of one other dog that I hated this much. I preferred dogs that bit me to dogs that punched me in the testicles on the regular. But the dog was the least of my problems that morning. I was hungover and insanely hungry. I proceeded to unwrap my sandwich and attack it voraciously. While taking an order from a customer, I foolishly dropped the hand holding the sandwich to my side. The Vizsla swiped it right out of my hand! I lost it!

 

I am not proud of it now but I punched the dog as hard as I could, right on its bumpy noggin. It fell to the floor as if shot. It remained unconscious for a few seconds. Until that moment I had no idea that it was possible to knock a dog out. Fortunately my boss was in his office when this happened. He eventually came out to investigate the clamor but he was on the phone with a customer at the time of the incident. When he finally got to the counter the dog had recovered enough to stand up but it was wobbling on its long, skinny legs. Although vertical it was still on queer street. I admitted that I smacked the dog but I didn't tell him that I knocked it out. He knew that my version of the story lacked credibility but, to the Visla's credit, the dog never ratted me out and I did not get fired. Not two minutes after things had calmed down the dog jumped up and tried to smack me in the nuts. I was beginning to feel besieged. As the day droned on the hangover escalated. It was unbearable. I was too hungover to even eat lunch. Unlike large chunks the previous twenty-four hours, the memory of the hangover remains quite vivid.

 

Around 11:00 the business phone rang and I reluctantly answered it. I had no interest in speaking to anyone, let alone our bone-head customers. It wasn't a customer though, it was a collect call from a jail in Atlantic City. I accepted the charges. It was difficult to predict the morning getting any worse but it did. My father was on the phone. He was still so fucked up that it was impossible to understand a word he said. It literally sounded to me like he was speaking Chinese. Al was laughing maniacally through the entire unintelligible conversation. There was no laughing on my end of the phone at all. I was hungover, irritable, hungry and I had just knocked a fucking dog out. I didn't need any more challenges to my patience. These two clowns were a pain in the ass. The old man really pissed me off by speaking in tongues. Gibberish was totally unacceptable in my fragile condition. Without pointing out his linguistic failure, I asked him if Rocco was available to speak. Fortunately Rocco got on the phone and was slightly more coherent than my father. He said that they had been arrested in Atlantic City. I shuddered to imagine their long drive there. They were both post-verbal before they left the bar! How could either of them have driven for an hour in that condition? Now they had a plan and to my horror the plan involved me. They wanted me to leave work, drive to Atlantic City and post bail for them. The idea was ludicrous. I had no desire to see either them anytime soon let alone be responsible for their release from jail. I felt sick. I also had no ready cash after the previous night of debauchery, despite the fact that the drinks were free. Either I was a very sporty tipper the night before or I gave all of my money away in tips and bribes or I lost all of it on the barroom floor. The reason for my poverty was a moot point. It didn't matter why. I was flat broke. I spent my last few dollars on a sandwich that had been scarfed up by a dog as useless as tits on a bull.

 

There was only one option as far as I was concerned. I told them to go fuck themselves, sleep it off in the drunk tank and come up with a plan that did not involve me. I had neither the desire nor the wherewithal to pick them up. I had no compassion for them whatsoever. I was penniless. They got arrested on their own merits. They could get themselves bailed out the same way. Jail seemed like a swell place for those two jerk-offs. Fuck you. No.

 

Later I asked my father about the arrest. Neither he nor Rocco would talk about it. To this day I don't know what happened. It didn't make sense that they would stonewall me over a simple DUI. They were quite open about far more scandalous matters. The only thing they volunteered was that Rocco's uncle bailed them out. Whatever the reason for their incarceration, there was never any talk of a court appearance and neither of them ever became long term guests of the state of New Jersey. Perhaps Rocco's uncle had connections. It is useless to speculate. They are both dead and the truth died with them.

 

Every once in a while I would ask Al about it, just to see if he if he would let his guard down and come clean. Sometimes I brought it up just to break his balls. My father discussed the events preceding the arrest but never directly about the arrest itself. It amazed me that he had any memories of the night at all. Over a period of years he steadfastly refused to give me a straight answer. This was no surprise, Getting the truth out of my father was like collecting rain water with a sieve. It was an act of abject futility.

 

Obfuscation and evasiveness were my father's forte. He was impossible to pin down. It was useless to pursue a topic with him once the nonsense started. He would give you irrelevant answers as long as you had the stamina to ask pertinent questions. Lying was a tool to him, like a weed-whacker or a hammer. I am sure that the Atlantic City police quickly tired of his machinations and found his bullshit annoying but their contact with him was relatively brief compared to mine. I grew up with him and share his DNA. Both of these concepts are sobering.

 

Michael Macfeat 12/24/12

 

//Since 1997 the ANC government has used various methods to fend-off criticism. These have run from attacking motive to bullying, obfuscation, bullshitting, lying, and outright denial. Over time civil society and media became inured to these tactics. So it was something of a welcome surprise when senior government officials - including the president and his deputy - started admitting responsibility for South Africa's energy shortages.

 

The basic line pushed by President Thabo Mbeki (and others) was that government underestimated the likely rate of economic growth and wrongly ignored Eskom's warnings that it needed to start building new capacity. For this they were very sorry.

 

These apologies have not silenced criticism, but they have been very effective in drawing attention away from where it should have been focused. This is known, in other fields, as misdirection. A Wikipedia entry notes how "The magician choreographs his actions so that even the critical and observant spectators are likely to look where the magician wants them to. More importantly, they do not look where they should not." One way of doing this is through movement, whereby "A larger action covers a smaller action."

 

Similarly, it is to the government's advantage to admit to failing to approve the building of new generating capacity on time. At worst they can be accused of ideological prevarication. Meanwhile, our gaze is shifted away from places where the ANC would prefer it not to wander. One of these is the way in which the ANC funding vehicle - Chancellor House - has been cut-in on massive contracts for the building of the Bravo and Madupi power stations. The other relates to the way in which the Eskom's racial obsessions were responsible for last week's massive black outs.//

 

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