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Scientific name: Leptobelus sp
Family : Membracidae
Treehoppers more precisely typical treehoppers to distinguish them from the Aetalionidae and thorn bugs are members of the family Membracidae, a group of insects related to the cicadas and the leafhoppers.
About 3,200 species of treehoppers in over 400 genera are known.
Treehoppers are small bugs that are very good at hiding with their sharp, pointed spine on their back, which makes them look like a thorn on a plant. They also called as thorn bugs due to their shape.
Olympus OM-D EM-5 Mark III
M.Zuiko Digital ED 60mm f2.8
Raynox DCR- 250
Malaysia
Created with ChatGPT
The Book of Katarina by Adrian Keeley (Feat Kat Verde-Dillingham)
THE DAUGHTER OF ROME 1841–1860
For nearly six years after leaving the Archive, Marius kept his promise.
He spoke of Katarina Verde to no one.
Not to Armand.
Not to Maharet.
Not even to Pandora.
There were moments when the name rose almost naturally to his lips. While discussing lost Roman manuscripts. While arguing over forgotten philosophers. While listening to Pandora lament another library consumed by war, neglect, or stupidity.
Always the thought returned.
Always he remained silent.
A promise, once given, possessed weight.
Especially among immortals.
Pandora, however, had lived too long to mistake silence for emptiness.
She noticed the change in Marius almost immediately.
Not in manner.
Not in speech.
Marius had always been careful.
The change lay elsewhere.
He remembered differently.
That was the only way she could describe it.
He quoted sources he had not possessed before. He corrected dates he had once admitted were uncertain. He referred to obscure provincial governors whose names had vanished from accepted histories. Most curious of all, he occasionally stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence.
Not because he had forgotten.
Because he had remembered too precisely.
Someone had restored pieces of his own past.
Pandora knew that look.
Memory returning is not the same as memory continuing.
She did not question him.
Not directly.
Direct questions were useful only with simple men.
Marius was not simple.
Instead, Pandora began to follow the evidence.
The trail began in Rome.
It always did, with Pandora.
A bookseller near the Piazza Navona remembered a blonde woman who had paid too much for a worm-damaged bundle of Latin correspondence.
A Dominican librarian recalled a foreign scholar who had identified a miscatalogued Byzantine fragment without opening the index.
A retired collector in Florence spoke of a woman with pale hair and storm-coloured eyes who had purchased three worthless notebooks later discovered to contain copied references to vanished Roman court records.
Pandora listened.
She travelled.
She compared.
Venice.
Prague.
Vienna.
Ravenna.
Again and again the same shape emerged.
A remarkably educated blonde woman.
Perfectly mannered.
Exceptionally difficult to follow.
Always appearing near endangered manuscripts.
Always leaving before gratitude became conversation.
The name changed.
The description did not.
Once, in a Bavarian inventory, Pandora found it written plainly:
Katarina Verde.
She sat with that name for a long time.
Then she remembered.
Florence.
Decades earlier.
A cold evening.
A small shop near a courtyard full of rainwater.
A blonde woman had stood before a shelf of neglected Latin texts, holding a volume everyone else had dismissed as devotional debris.
Pandora had glanced at her only briefly.
The woman had looked up.
Their eyes had met.
Not long.
Only a moment.
Long enough for two immortals to recognize one another and choose silence.
Pandora had forgotten the encounter.
Or rather, she had stored it in the great unlabelled chamber where immortals placed moments without immediate meaning.
Now the memory returned with perfect clarity.
The woman had not been browsing.
She had been rescuing.
Only after reconstructing the pattern herself did Pandora go to Marius.
She found him in Venice.
He was reading beside an open window while canal water lapped softly below.
Pandora placed eight copied documents upon the table.
Marius looked at them.
Then at her.
He recognized every page.
Of course he did.
Pandora smiled.
"I know you didn't tell me."
Silence.
"I found her."
Another silence.
Then Marius smiled for the first time that evening.
"No."
He gently rested his hand upon the papers.
"You found her shadow."
"Is she real?"
Marius considered the question with the seriousness it deserved.
Finally he answered.
"Yes."
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
He had broken no promise.
Pandora had earned the truth herself.
The invitation Pandora sent required no elegance.
Only accuracy.
She wrote:
I found your shadow before I found your name. Rome remembers you owe her a conversation.
Katarina received the message three weeks later.
Lucien read it over her shoulder.
"Pandora," he said.
Not a question.
Katarina folded the paper.
"You know everyone."
"No."
His eyes remained on the message.
"Only the dangerous ones."
They met in Rome.
Where else?
Rome was less a city than an argument with death.
Every empire believed itself eternal.
Rome had at least possessed the decency to leave ruins proving the arrogance.
Pandora waited inside the Library of Santa Maria sopra Minerva after the human scholars had gone.
Candles illuminated long tables.
Shelves vanished into darkness.
The silence possessed dignity.
Katarina entered alone.
Pandora stood beside a table covered with manuscripts, her dark hair framing a face shaped more by intelligence than vanity. Her eyes were amber and unsentimental. They missed nothing.
"You are younger than I expected," Pandora said.
"I've been told the opposite."
Pandora laughed softly.
"Good. I dislike reverence."
"So do I."
"No," Pandora said. "You distrust it."
Katarina paused.
Then smiled.
"Better."
Unlike Marius, Pandora did not test her.
She questioned her.
There was a difference.
A test seeks weakness.
A question seeks truth.
For three nights they walked Rome.
Not the Rome of tourists, priests, or politicians.
The buried Rome.
The Rome beneath churches.
Beneath palaces.
Beneath pride.
Pandora knew courtyards where fragments of imperial columns had become doorsteps. She knew crypts where pagan stones were hidden behind Christian altars. She knew houses where widows guarded letters no scholar had ever read.
"So much survives," Katarina whispered on the second night.
Pandora touched a worn marble inscription half-swallowed by a wall.
"No."
Her voice was quiet.
"So much has already vanished."
On the fourth evening, Pandora produced a small leather notebook.
Its binding had been repaired many times.
She handed it to Katarina without ceremony.
Katarina opened it carefully.
The handwriting was younger than Pandora's face.
Impatient.
Elegant.
Occasionally furious.
The entries described statues, scrolls, household shrines, family records, copied poems, minor genealogies, debts, recipes, prayers, names.
Many entries bore one notation.
Lost.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Katarina closed the volume gently.
"You were already building an archive."
Pandora looked away.
"I failed."
"No."
Katarina's answer was immediate.
"You began."
The silence that followed was not empty.
It was recognition.
Weeks became months.
Pandora and Katarina travelled through Italy, Greece, and southern France.
Neither dominated the other.
Neither became disciple.
Neither became teacher.
They argued instead.
Endlessly.
About Rome.
About art.
About memory.
About whether civilisation revealed itself more truthfully through monuments or domestic records.
"Kings commission monuments," Katarina said one night in Florence.
"Yes," Pandora replied. "And monuments outlive lies."
"A baker's diary reveals more."
"About bread."
"About hunger."
Pandora smiled.
"You are insufferable."
"Accurate."
"Also insufferable."
The argument continued across three countries.
Neither surrendered.
Both enjoyed it.
During the summer of 1851, Pandora accompanied Katarina north.
Katarina did not reveal the greatest repository.
Nor the oldest.
Not yet.
Trust, like history, required structure.
She chose the Rhine Repository.
The same one Marius had seen.
When the hidden door opened, Pandora showed no theatrical astonishment.
That was not her way.
She simply walked inside and became silent.
Her silence lasted a long time.
That was enough.
Rows of manuscripts stretched beneath the stone vaults. Lamps burned in niches. Catalogues lay open upon tables. Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Armenian, and forgotten regional hands lived beside one another in disciplined order.
Pandora moved from shelf to shelf.
Reading.
Not touching until invited.
At last she reached the Roman collection.
Her fingers rested near the labels.
"You corrected three accepted chronologies."
"They were wrong."
"Historians dislike that."
"They'll survive."
Pandora glanced at her.
"History usually does."
"No," Katarina said. "History survives only when someone inconveniences its murderers."
Pandora laughed then.
Not loudly.
But with pleasure.
For nearly a month they worked together.
Not as guest and host.
As colleagues.
Together they reorganized the Roman materials.
Eyewitness accounts apart from later commentary.
Domestic records cross-indexed with political documents.
Private grief placed beside public catastrophe.
For the first time, one entire section of the Archive became more than preservation.
It became argument.
Every document questioned another.
Every contradiction became evidence.
Every silence became meaningful.
Lucien watched from a distance with quiet satisfaction.
Late one evening Pandora asked the question she had withheld.
"How many repositories exist?"
Lucien answered before Katarina could.
"Enough."
Pandora smiled.
"I expected that."
"You expected correctly."
She never asked again.
That mattered.
Before departing, Pandora entered one final chamber.
It contained nothing splendid.
No imperial correspondence.
No illuminated manuscripts.
No famous hands.
Only ordinary journals.
Farmers.
Midwives.
Teachers.
Stone masons.
Pilgrims.
Children.
Widows.
Thousands of anonymous lives.
Pandora frowned.
"I don't understand."
Katarina removed one volume.
"A miller's daughter."
She opened another.
"A shepherd."
Another.
"A widow who witnessed plague."
"They changed nothing," Pandora said softly.
Katarina looked at her.
"They changed everything."
Pandora was silent.
Then slowly she understood.
History had always preserved rulers.
The Archive preserved humanity.
Without these voices, kings ruled empty worlds.
Without ordinary lives, empires became maps instead of civilisations.
Pandora closed the journal.
"I was wrong."
"About what?"
"I thought your Archive preserved vampire history."
She looked around the chamber.
"It preserves theirs."
Then she smiled.
"No."
Her hand touched the nearest shelf.
"It preserves everyone's."
On the last night they stood outside the monastery beneath a sky crowded with stars.
Pandora prepared to leave before dawn.
She removed three wax-sealed scroll cases from her travelling chest.
Katarina understood their value before Pandora spoke.
"My journals," Pandora said.
Katarina did not take them.
"They're originals."
"I know."
"I don't require originals."
"I know that too."
Pandora placed them gently in Katarina's hands.
"Copies preserve words."
Her voice softened.
"Originals preserve souls."
Katarina looked down at the cases.
The stains.
The corrections.
The pressure of the original hand.
Perhaps even grains of Roman dust still trapped between pages.
These things could never be copied.
She accepted them with both hands.
"I'll protect them."
Pandora nodded.
"I know."
After Pandora vanished into the dark, Lucien joined Katarina beneath the monastery gates.
He watched the stars for a long time.
"What happened tonight?" he asked.
"A friend trusted me."
"No."
Katarina looked at him.
Lucien's gaze rested on the hidden entrance below.
"The Archive became larger than us."
For once Katarina had no reply.
Far beneath them, behind stone and iron, rested the memories of emperors and shepherds, philosophers and millers, immortals and children.
The Archive no longer belonged to Lucien.
Nor to Katarina.
Nor to vampires.
It belonged to history.
And history had begun entrusting itself to her freely.
The responsibility was terrifying.
She accepted it anyway.
Because memory, once abandoned, rarely found its way home again.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Image Prompt - Ultra-photorealistic IMAX cinematic photograph, 16:9. Night beside the illuminated Colosseum in Rome during the late 1840s. Katarina Verde walks gracefully alongside Pandora through quiet rain-darkened cobblestone streets, both appearing effortlessly youthful yet carrying centuries of quiet wisdom. Katarina has long, voluminous golden-blonde curls, a heart-shaped face, luminous warm complexion, blue-gray eyes and wears an elegant lavender-and-black silk Victorian walking gown with fitted bodice, full skirt, black lace sleeves, matching gloves, bonnet and short velvet mantle appropriate to 1841–1860. Pandora is book-accurate: strikingly beautiful with dark chestnut-brown hair arranged in a refined Victorian chignon with soft curls, luminous pale olive complexion, expressive dark eyes, refined classical Roman features, slender graceful figure, wearing a deep burgundy and black silk walking dress with fitted jacket, lace collar, gloves and bonnet, understated jewellery reflecting ancient wealth rather than fashion. They stroll in quiet conversation beneath warm gas lamps. The Colosseum glows behind them, its arches dramatically illuminated against the night sky. Wet paving stones mirror the golden light. Sparse pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages remain distant. Romantic Gothic atmosphere, museum-quality historical accuracy, cinematic realism, razor-sharp detail, natural skin textures, no modern objects, no watermark.
Pic, Prompt and Story by Adrian
Norwegen / Buskerud - Hallingskarvet-Nationalpark
On the way back from Prestholtskarvet.
Auf dem Weg zurück vom Prestholtskarvet.
Hallingskarvet National Park (Norwegian: Hallingskarvet nasjonalpark) is a national park in central Norway that was established by the government on 22 December 2006. The park is located in the municipalities of Hol (Buskerud county), Ulvik and Aurland (both in Vestland county). More precisely, the park comprises the Hallingskarv plateau and the high mountain areas to the west of it. It includes the Vargebreen glacier as well as the valleys of Såtedalen, Lengjedalen, Ynglesdalen, and parts of Raggsteindalen.
The national park covers 450 square kilometres (170 sq mi) of the Hallingskarvet mountain range and hosts large stocks of wild reindeer, an important factor in the establishment of the park. The highest point in the national park is Folarskardnuten which reaches an elevation of 1,933 metres (6,342 ft) above sea level.
The landscape of Hallingskarvet was shaped by multiple ice ages. The park shows the geological history and the connection between this history and the variation in the species living there. It includes areas of special value and which are home to threatened or vulnerable species such as Draba cacuminum (whitlow-grass) and Botrychium lanceolatum (lance-leaf grapefern).
The Bergen Line runs along the southern boundary of the park. There is no road access to the southern side of the park, so Finse Station, a stop on the railway line, is one of the few ways that people can access this part of the park. The Norwegian County Road 50 runs near the northern boundary of the park.
Protection and use
The main objective of this national park is to preserve a large, unique, and largely untouched area in order to protect the landscape and the biome with its ecosystem, species and populations of, amongst others, the wild reindeer. The protection is designed to safeguard a characteristic element needed to understand the geological history of the Norwegian landscape. It is also designed to protect valuable elements of the cultural heritage.
The park is open to the traditional forms of outdoor activities which require little or no technical means.
Name
The first element is halling (inhabitant of the Hallingdal valley) and the last is the finite form of skarv (mountain or mountainous area without vegetation).
(Wikipedia)
Der Hallingskarvet-Nationalpark (norwegisch Hallingskarvet nasjonalpark) ist ein südnorwegischer Nationalpark. Er umfasst das Hallingskarvet-Hochplateau und erstreckt sich über das Gebiet der Gemeinden Hol (Provinz Buskerud), Ulvik und Aurland (Provinz Vestland) gehört.
Gegründet wurde der Park am 22. Dezember 2006, um die dortige große, unverwechselbare und nahezu unberührte Bergregion, die Artenvielfalt von Flora und Fauna und die dort heimischen Bergrentiere zu schützen. Der Park grenzt an das Naturschutzgebiet Skaupsjøen/Hardangerjøkulen und das Biotop Finse.
Im Süden des Parkes führen sowohl die Bergenbahn als auch die Reichsstraße 7 vorbei.
Geologie, Landschaft und Geografie
Der Nationalpark umfasst größtenteils das Hallingskarvethochplateau, welches aufgrund der Kaledonischen Orogenese entstand. Das vorherrschende Gesteinsmaterial der Bergkette ist präkambrisches Pluton.
Der höchste Berg ist der Folarskardnuten mit 1.933 m. Im Hallingskarvet befindet sich auch Norwegens höchster See, der Flakavatnet, welcher auf 1.453 m Höhe liegt.
Flora
Die Pflanzenwelt gestaltet sich mit über 300 verschiedenen Arten sehr vielfältig. Die am weitesten verbreiteten Pflanzen sind der Weiße Silberwurz, Knöllchen-Knöterich und Herbst-Löwenzahn. In den höheren Lagen kommen vor allem Dreiblatt-Binsen, Polarsimsen, Moosheide und Gletscher-Hahnenfuß vor.
Fauna
Im Park gibt es an größeren Säugetieren Bergrentiere, Elche, Rehe, Polarfüchse und Schneehasen. Nördlich des Parks leben zudem Vielfraße.
Die größten Greifvögel sind Steinadler, Gerfalke, Turmfalke und Raufußbussard. Der Kolkrabe ist im Hallingskarvet ebenfalls heimisch.
Kulturerbe
Im Nationalpark wurden verschiedene Jagdutensilien gefunden, die auf eine prähistorische/historische Nutzung der Berge als Jagd- und/oder Siedlungsgebiet schließen lassen.
Im 17. bis 19. Jahrhundert lag der Park entlang einer wichtigen Handelsroute. Einfache Übernachtungshütten, sog. lægre, zeugen noch heute davon. Im Jahre 1880 ließ der englische Graf Lord Garvagh eine steinerne Jagdhütte, die Lordehytta, errichten, um in der näheren Umgebung auf Rentierjagd zu gehen.
Verwaltung und Tourismus
Der Norwegische Wanderverein unterhält im Park die Hütten Finsehytta im Süden und Geiterygghytta im Norden. Private Unterkünfte gibt es im Raggsteindalen und bei Haugastøl. Zwischen den Hütten gibt es markierte Wanderwege.
Zwischen Finse und Ustaoset verläuft ein Stück des Skarverennet durch den Park. Im Süden des Parks verläuft zudem der Rallarvegen.
(Wikipedia)
Nauru island has been destroyed – do you know Nauru? one of the smallest island in the world. And once the richest and wealthiest countries in the world. maybe you are wondering where the country is located, is close to the country australia.
Nauru lay on the land area of 8000 hectares in the western Pacific ocean. The extent of only about one tenth of the oil palm plantation Astra, Eka Cipta Wijaya, Prabowo, Cargill, DL Sitorus, and tycoons Crude Palm Oil (CPO) in Sumatra there. Only about a quarter of its 50 spacious logged forests conglomerates concessionaires in Borneo there. Precisely, the area of the Republic of Nauru is almost equivalent to the Lake Toba.
21km square berarea country for 30 years been listed as one of the richest countries in the world. Income per capita in 1981 reached 17,000 dollars, compared with Indonesia, which is only 530 dollars per capita in the same year. With such a high income and a population of only 13 thousand inhabitants (still more spectators Indonesian league opponents Saudi Arabia the other day, which reached 90,000) Nauru transformed into a very rich country. They build tall buildings. Buy cars and luxury commercial aircraft. There are no poor people in there, let alone bum. State subsidizes the lives of all citizens. More than 80% of the workforce was appointed as civil servants. These employees are not tied to office hours. They may come and go as they pleased. The unemployed also subsidized by the state. In short, was so rich Nauru, without any of the working population can live in luxury. People are not taxed. Education and free health care, subsidized food, who want to study abroad were given scholarships. Even so spoiled, so reluctant to Nauru population of mobile workers. His government was forced to import labor from Australia, China, Kiribati and Tuvalu.
What makes Nauru be all that rich? not because of bird droppings. More than 70% of the land consists of sediment Nauru Guano bird droppings that had accumulated over hundreds and even thousands of years ago. This is because once Nauru is a place for large colonies of birds Guano. This bird droppings into phosphate, which serves as fertilizer for crops.
Phosphate was found in 1899 and began to be explored in 1907. At that Nauru is still a part of the country Australia. Once granted independence on January 31, 1968, phosphate mining areas controlled by men. Estimated that the number of high-quality phosphate across Nauru 41 million tons. This huge amount. Compare with Indonesia, which consists of thousands of islands, the total number of phospatnya estimated at only 2.5 million tonnes. Because it is only natural that the country would fall into the list of the world’s smallest country touted as the country’s phosphate, and targeted by many countries.
After the massive phosphate exploration for decades, Nauru is now reaping the consequences. According to Greenpeace’s investigation, 90% of Nauru was severely damaged and need to be rehabilitated. That means that only about 2 square km area Nauru only habitable. Greenpeace also found spreading poison of its mining activities in three places. Toxic substances that the polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), asbestos, Polyvinyl chloride plastic (PVC) and metal.
Tremendous damage this requires a very long rehabilitation period and cost prohibitive. Nauru should import fertilizer, humus, and other essential nutrients to rebuild the ecosystem. It costs about 200 million dollars, and the process took 30 years. The most crucial thing to do is reclaiming back the area of agriculture, clean water sources, livestock and plantasi trees. If this step is not performed, then the entire population of Nauru have to migrate to other areas. When kept in Nauru they will suffer from various diseases due to mining, hunger and lack of water. Migration area selection is empty islands in the Pacific Islands region.
Nauru government intends reclaiming back its territory. For the year 1989, they filed a lawsuit against Australia in the International Court. Nauru demanded Australia to pay compensation for the environmental damage done mining company. The company itself is actually a consortium of three countries, namely Australia, England and New Zealand. Australia circumvent these demands and accused Nauru as a party that should be responsible. Because the country gained independence from Australia in 1968. And since then, phosphate mining Nauru managed native son, no longer by the consortium companies.
In 1992, the International Court of Justice in favor of Nauru. According to them Australia and two other countries (the United Kingdom and New Zealand) must take responsibility for environmental damage Nauru, as they participate explore this mine before.
In 1993 the three countries were required to pay compensation. Australia have to pay compensation of 107 million Australian dollars, while the United Kingdom and New Zealand, respectively 12 million dollars.
So how? Are you curious about this country? if you want to visit to see it? it’s up to you. I hope what happened to Nauru could be a lesson to us all that exploit something excessively without any action about the future it will be bad. so do not get used to always live with a tasty and versatile plush yes, learn to appreciate life and learn to start thinking about the future.
by New Hotel Travel in ift.tt/1XHPf3p
Ratu Boko Palace located on the hilltop with a height of about 196 meters or more precisely 195,97 meters above sea level, occupies an area of 250,000 m2. Ratu Boko Palace is located on the Boko plateu, about 19 kilometers east of Yogyakarta city (toward Wonosari), and 2 km south of the Prambanan Temple.
From its location, Ratu Boko complex has a unique and special attraction, because of the complex which are located on hills can enjoy beautiful natural scenery and charming. On a hillside plateau, overlooking Prambanan temple complex and with a view to Mount Merapi behind Prambanan Temple complex. with a village atmosphere with green rice fields around it. In addition, the south, when the weather is sunny, in the distance, faintly visible to the South Coast.
Site Ratu Boko is the single largest classical period settlement site found in Java, especially Java middle section. This feature makes Ratu Boko as a specific site, a lot of mystery as well as a variety of interesting phenomena to be traced and revealed.
HISTORY
Historical background Keraton Ratu Boko can not be known for certain, but to be able to reveal not only used non-textual data (buildings, statues, ceramics, artifacts, etc.) are also used textual data due to findings of the inscriptions.
From inscriptions that can be concluded that the region is a region Ratu Boko heritage character of Hinduism and Buddhism, which was built around VIII - IX sentury. Ratu Boko complex was originally a monastery complex, which is a dormitory for the residence of the monks in the Buddhist religion.
In the year 856 AD, Ratu Boko complex functions turn into the residence of a ruler called the Rakai Wilang Pu Khumbayoni the adoption of Hinduism. It is therefore not surprising that elements of Hinduism and Buddhism looks at this building complex.
Elements of Hinduism can be shown through the yoni, three miniature temples, statues of Ganesh and Durga as well as gold and silver plate that read Hindu religious incantation, while the Buddhist elements visible from the discovery of Buddha statues, ruins of stupas and stupika.
This is precisely one of those moments when Tartuffe wishes he was an only child ;P!
No dog or human was harmed in the making of this shot!! At least, not physically, the mental trauma is another question ;). Hope you won't have any bad dreams...
This wasn't precisely the shot I intended of this train as I had planned to catch it off Old Oak Common Lane overbridge behind me, but to my utter surprise it overtook the Bristol - Felixstowe liner I was waiting at this spot for, at Acton. That means I have to go back to do it again!
OK, so I know that some of you on here are pretty savvy about enbs and I really have been at my wits end with them and need to figure out precisely WHY this happens. I could go onto the enbdev forums, and i probably will, but wondered if it might be better to ask here since I know a lot of enb veterans.
Everytime I install an enb (or any enb, after I tried to install others for testing), I have had trouble loading my save, even in an interior. Even after using the qasmoke loading trick, and get the game to run and play, my game will crash within the next 5 to 10 minutes. This is a problem I've been having off and on since the .264 binaries, and I literally tried every setting in enblocal.ini to try to figure out the issue, and for some enbs have had temporary success, but as soon as I go looking for a better preset, it happens all over again.
I know that you have to make sure the enblocal settings are appropriate for each enb, and I am painstakingly anal about doing so and keeping my settings while still retaining whats necessary for the new enb, but regardless of my caution, BAM! Constant CTDs. I've looked thoroughly at the step guide, but no matter what I tweak or change anymore it doesn't seem to matter. I'm at my wits end. Does anyone know what specific parameters cause this 5-10 minute crash issue? I'm sure it could be multiple things, but I wondered if anyone else who'd experienced the same figured out what worked best for them. I'll post my enblocal up here just in case anyone can point something out to me, but removed the proxy since I know that differs between enbs. I use the .279 binary on this setup.
Gtx 760 4GB Vram
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E31270 @ 3.40GHz 3.40 GHz
Cooler Master GXII 750W
16GB RAM
I only have a smattering of 2k textures on my skyrim and i have very few scripted mods, and I thoroughly clean and upkeep my mods using wryebash and tes5edit. Without enb I easily get 80fps.
Thanks you guys!!
[GLOBAL]
UsePatchSpeedhackWithoutGraphics=false
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IgnoreCreationKit=true
ForceFakeVideocard=false
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ForceVideoAdapterIndex=false
VideoAdapterIndex=0
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DisablePreloadToVRAM=false
EnableUnsafeMemoryHacks=false
ReservedMemorySizeMb=512
VideoMemorySizeMb=4000
EnableCompression=true
AutodetectVideoMemorySize=true
ExpandSystemMemoryX64=false
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ForceBorderless=false
ForceBorderlessFullscreen=false
[ENGINE]
ForceAnisotropicFiltering=true
MaxAnisotropy=16
ForceLodBias=false
LodBias=0.1
AddDisplaySuperSamplingResolutions=false
EnableVSync=true
VSyncSkipNumFrames=0
[LIMITER]
WaitBusyRenderer=false
EnableFPSLimit=false
FPSLimit=60.0
[INPUT]
//printscreen
KeyCombination=44
//home
KeyUseEffect=36
//num
KeyFPSLimit=106
//f12 / 106
KeyShowFPS=123
//insert
KeyScreenshot=45
//enter
KeyEditor=13
//f4
KeyFreeVRAM=115
[ADAPTIVEQUALITY]
Enable=true
Quality=0
DesiredFPS=20.0
[ANTIALIASING]
EnableEdgeAA=false
EnableSubPixelAA=false
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[FIX]
FixGameBugs=false
FixParallaxBugs=true
FixParallaxTerrain=true
FixAliasedTextures=true
IgnoreInventory=true
FixSsaoHairTransparency=false
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RemoveBlur=false
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BlendMax=0.0
Hermann Melville, Moby Dick, 1851
"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can"
Can't wait to get to the sea again, this year, somewhere, just to get lost in its beautiful vastity and contemplate my beloved clouds playing above it.
Hermann Melville, Moby Dick, 1851
"Chiamatemi Ismaele. Alcuni anni fa – non importa quanti esattamente – avendo pochi o punti denari in tasca e nulla di particolare che m'interessasse a terra, pensai di darmi alla navigazione e vedere la parte acquea del mondo. È un modo che ho io di cacciare la malinconia e di regolare la circolazione. Ogni volta che m'accorgo di atteggiare le labbra al torvo, ogni volta che nell'anima mi scende come un novembre umido e piovigginoso, ogni volta che mi accorgo di fermarmi involontariamente dinanzi alle agenzie di pompe funebri e di andar dietro a tutti i funerali che incontro, e specialmente ogni volta che il malumore si fa tanto forte in me che mi occorre un robusto principio morale per impedirmi di scendere risoluto in istrada e gettare metodicamente per terra il cappello alla gente, allora decido che è tempo di mettermi in mare al più presto."
Non vedo l'ora, quest'anno, di ritornare sul mare a perdermi da qualche parte nella sua affascinante immensità e contemplare le mie nuvole adorate mentre vi giocano sopra.
Then I saw when the Lamb broke one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures saying as with a voice of thunder, "Come." I looked, and behold, a white horse, and he who sat on it had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer.As the Antichrist
While for nearly nineteen centuries Christians had thought that the first horseman was a positive figure representing either Christ or the Gospel, a completely different interpretation of this character emerged in 1866[ when C.F. Wimpel defended the first hypothesis that he was the Antichrist
(and more precisely according to him Napoleon Bonaparte).
It was taken over from the next generation in the United States by R. F. Franklin in 1898 and W. C. Stevens in 1928 and was then very successful in evangelical circles until today, for example with Pastor Billy Graham, for whom it was the Antichrist or false prophets in general.
— Revelation 6:1–2 New American Standard Bible
White horses have a special significance in the mythologies of cultures around the world. They are often associated with the sun chariot,[1] with warrior-heroes, with fertility (in both mare and stallion manifestations), or with an end-of-time saviour, but other interpretations exist as well. Both truly white horses and the more common grey horses, with completely white hair coats, were identified as "white" by various religious and cultural traditions.
Contents
1Portrayal in myth
2Mythologies and traditions
2.1European
2.1.1Celtic
2.1.2Greek
2.1.3Norse
2.1.4Slavic
2.1.5Hungarian
2.2Iranian
2.3Hindu
2.4Buddhist
2.5Abrahamic
2.5.1Jewish
2.5.2Christian
2.5.3Islamic
2.6Far East
2.6.1Korean
2.6.2Philippines
2.6.3Vietnamese
2.7Native American
3Literature and art
4See also
5References
6External links
Portrayal in myth
The Hindu world saviour Kalki with his white Horse. Punjab Hills, Guler, c. 1765.
From earliest times, white horses have been mythologised as possessing exceptional properties, transcending the normal world by having wings (e.g. Pegasus from Greek mythology), or having horns (the unicorn). As part of its legendary dimension, the white horse in myth may be depicted with seven heads (Uchaishravas) or eight feet (Sleipnir), sometimes in groups or singly. There are also white horses which are divinatory, who prophesy or warn of danger.
As a rare or distinguished symbol, a white horse typically bears the hero- or god-figure in ceremonial roles or in triumph over negative forces. Herodotus reported that white horses were held as sacred animals in the Achaemenid court of Xerxes the Great (ruled 486–465 BC),[2] while in other traditions the reverse happens when it was sacrificed to the gods.
In more than one tradition, the white horse carries patron saints or the world saviour in the end times (as in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), is associated with the sun or sun chariot (Ossetia) or bursts into existence in a fantastic way, emerging from the sea or a lightning bolt.
Though some mythologies are stories from earliest beliefs, other tales, though visionary or metaphorical, are found in liturgical sources as part of preserved, on-going traditions (see, for example, "Iranian tradition" below).
Mythologies and traditions
European
Celtic
In Celtic mythology, Rhiannon, a mythic figure in the Mabinogion collection of legends, rides a "pale-white" horse.[3] Because of this, she has been linked to the Romano-Celtic fertility horse goddess Epona and other instances of the veneration of horses in early Indo-European culture.[4] In Irish Myth Donn "god of the dead" portrayed as a phantom horseman riding a white horse, is considered an aspect of The Dagda "the great God" also known as "the horseman" and is the origin of the Irish "Loch nEachach" for Loch Neagh. In Irish myth horses are said to be symbols of sovereignty and the sovereignty goddess Macha is associated with them. One of Cúchulainn's chariot-horses was called Liath Macha or "Macha's Grey"[citation needed]
Bellerophon riding Pegasus
The La Tène style hill figure in England, the Uffington White Horse dates back to the Bronze Age and is similar to some Celtic coin horse designs.
In Scottish folklore, the kelpie or each uisge, a deadly supernatural water demon in the shape of a horse, is sometimes described as white, though other stories say it is black.
Greek
In Greek mythology, the white winged horse Pegasus was the son of Poseidon and the gorgon Medusa. Poseidon was also the creator of horses, creating them out of the breaking waves when challenged to make a beautiful land animal.
A secondary pair of twins fathered by Zeus, Amphion and Zethus, the legendary founders of Thebes, are called "Dioskouroi, riders of white horses" (λευκόπωλος) by Euripedes in his play The Phoenician Women (the same epithet is used in Heracles and in the lost play Antiope).[5][6][7]
Norse
The Tjängvide image stone is thought to show Odin entering Valhalla riding on Sleipnir.
In Norse mythology, Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir, "the best horse among gods and men", is described as grey.[8] Sleipnir is also the ancestor of another grey horse, Grani, who is owned by the hero Sigurd.[9]
Slavic
In Slavic mythology, the war and fertility deity Svantovit owned an oracular white horse; the historian Saxo Grammaticus, in descriptions similar to those of Tacitus centuries before, says the priests divined the future by leading the white stallion between a series of fences and watching which leg, right or left, stepped first in each row.[10]
Hungarian
One of the titles of God in Hungarian mythology was Hadúr, who, according to an unconfirmed source, wears pure copper and is a metalsmith. The Hungarian name for God was, and remains "Isten" and they followed Steppe Tengriism.[citation needed] The ancient Magyars sacrificed white stallions to him before a battle.[11] Additionally, there is a story (mentioned for example in Gesta Hungarorum) that the Magyars paid a white horse to Moravian chieftain Svatopluk I (in other forms of the story, it is instead the Bulgarian chieftain Salan) for a part of the land that later became the Kingdom of Hungary.[citation needed] Actual historical background of the story is dubious because Svatopluk I was already dead when the first Hungarian tribes arrived. On the other hand, even Herodotus mentions in his Histories an Eastern custom, where sending a white horse as payment in exchange for land means casus belli. This custom roots in the ancient Eastern belief that stolen land would lose its fertility.[citation needed]
Iranian
In Zoroastrianism, one of the three representations of Tishtrya, the hypostasis of the star Sirius, is that of a white stallion (the other two are as a young man, and as a bull). The divinity takes this form during the last 10 days of every month of the Zoroastrian calendar, and also in a cosmogonical battle for control of rain. In this latter tale (Yasht 8.21–29), which appears in the Avesta's hymns dedicated to Tishtrya, the divinity is opposed by Apaosha, the demon of drought, which appears as a black stallion.[12]
White horses are also said to draw divine chariots, such as that of Aredvi Sura Anahita, who is the Avesta's divinity of the waters. Representing various forms of water, her four horses are named "wind", "rain", "clouds" and "sleet" (Yasht 5.120).
Hindu
White horses appear many times in Hindu mythology and stand for the sun.[13] The Vedic horse sacrifice or Ashvamedha was a fertility and kingship ritual involving the sacrifice of a sacred grey or white stallion.[14] Similar rituals may have taken place among Roman, Celtic and Norse people, but the descriptions are not so complete.
Uchchaihshravas
In the Puranas, one of the precious objects that emerged while the devas and demons were churning the milky ocean was Uchaishravas, a snow-white horse with seven heads.[14] Turaga was another divine white horse that emerged out of the ocean and taken by the sun god Surya.[15][16] Uchaishravas was at times ridden by Indra, lord of the devas. Indra is depicted as having a liking for white horses in several legends – he often steals the sacrificial horse to the consternation of all involved, such as in the story of Sagara,[17] or the story of King Prithu.[18]
The chariot of the solar deity Surya is drawn by seven horses, alternately described as all white, or as the colours of the rainbow.
Hayagriva the Avatar of Vishnu is worshipped as the God of knowledge and wisdom, with a human body and a horse's head, brilliant white in colour, with white garments and seated on a white lotus. Kalki, the tenth incarnation of Vishnu and final world saviour, is predicted to appear riding a white horse, or in the form of a white horse.[14]
Buddhist
Kanthaka was a white horse that was a royal servant and favourite horse of Prince Siddhartha, who later became Gautama Buddha. Siddhartha used Kanthaka in all major events described in Buddhist texts prior to his renunciation of the world. Following the departure of Siddhartha, it was said that Kanthaka died of a broken heart.[19]
Abrahamic
Jewish
The Book of Zechariah twice mentions coloured horses; in the first passage there are three colours (red, dappled, and white), and in the second there are four teams of horses (red, black, white, and finally dappled) pulling chariots. The second set of horses are referred to as "the four spirits of heaven, going out from standing in the presence of the Lord of the whole world." They are described as patrolling the earth and keeping it peaceful.
Christian
A 15th-century icon of St. George from Novgorod.
In the New Testament, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse include one seated on a white horse[20] and one on a pale horse – the "white" horse carried the rider Conquest (traditionally, Pestilence) while the "pale" horse carried the rider Death.[21] However, the Greek word chloros, translated as pale, is often interpreted as sickly green or ashen grey rather than white. Later in the Book of Revelation, Christ rides a white horse out of heaven at the head of the armies of heaven to judge and make war upon the earth.[22]
Two Christian saints are associated with white steeds: Saint James, as patron saint of Spain, rides a white horse in his martial aspect.[23][24][25] Saint George, the patron saint of horsemen[26] among other things, also rides a white horse.[27] In Ossetia, the deity Uastyrdzhi, who embodied both the warrior and sun motifs often associated with white horses, became identified with the figure of St. George after the region adopted Christianity.[28]
Gesta Francorum contains a description of the First Crusade, where soldiers fighting at Antioch claimed to have been heartened by a vision of St. George and white horses during the battle: There came out from the mountains, also, countless armies with white horses, whose standards were all white. And so, when our leaders saw this army, they ... recognised the aid of Christ, whose leaders were St. George, Mercurius, and Demetrius.[29]
Islamic
Islamic culture tells of a white creature named Al-Buraq who brought Muhammad to Jerusalem during the Night Journey. Al-Buraq was also said to transport Abraham (Ibrâhîm) when he visited his wife Hagar (Hājar) and son Ishmael (Ismâ'îl). According to tradition, Abraham lived with one wife (Sarah) in Syria, but Al-Buraq would transport him in the morning to Makkah to see his family there, and then take him back to his Syrian wife in the evening. Al-Burāq (Arabic: البُراق al-Burāq "lightning") isn't mentioned in the Quran but in some hadith ("tradition") literature.[30]
Twelver Shī'a Islamic traditions envisage that the Mahdi will appear riding a white horse.[31]
Far East
Korean
A huge white horse appears in Korean mythology in the story of the kingdom of Silla. When the people gathered to pray for a king, the horse emerged from a bolt of lightning, bowing to a shining egg. After the horse flew back to heaven, the egg opened and the boy Park Hyeokgeose emerged. When he grew up, he united six warring states.
Philippines
The city of Pangantucan has as its symbol a white stallion who saved an ancient tribe from massacre by uprooting a bamboo and thus warning them of the enemy's approach.
Vietnamese
The city of Hanoi honours a white horse as its patron saint with a temple dedicated to this revered spirit, the White Horse or Bach Ma Temple ( "bach" means white and "ma" is horse). The 11th-century king, Lý Công Uẩn (also known as King Lý Thái Tổ) had a vision of a white horse representing a river spirit which showed him where to build his citadel.[32]
Native American
In Blackfoot mythology, the snow deity Aisoyimstan is a white-coloured man in white clothing who rides a white horse.
Literature and art
The statue of the "fine lady upon a white horse" at Banbury Cross.
The mythological symbolism of white horses has been picked up as a trope in literature, film, and other storytelling. For example, the heroic prince or white knight of fairy tales often rides a white horse. Unicorns are (generally white) horse-like creatures with a single horn. And the English nursery rhyme "Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross" refers to a lady on a white horse who may be associated with the Celtic goddess Rhiannon.[33]
A "white palfrey" appears in the fairy tale "Virgilius the Sorcerer" by Andrew Lang. It appears in The Violet Fairy Book and attributes more than usual magical powers to the ancient Roman poet Virgil (see also Virgil#Mysticism and hidden meanings).
The British author G. K. Chesterton wrote an epic poem titled Ballad of the White Horse. In Book I, "The Vision of the King," he writes of earliest England, invoking the white horse hill figure and the gods:
Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass.[34]
The white horse is a recurring motif in Ibsen's play Rosmersholm, making use of the common Norse folklore that its appearance was a portent of death. The basis for the superstition may have been that the horse was a form of Church Grim, buried alive at the original consecration of the church building (the doomed protagonist in the play was a pastor), or that it was a materialisation of the fylgje, an individual's or family's guardian spirit.[35]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_horses_in_mythology
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (often referred to as the Four Horsemen) are figures in Christian mythology, appearing in the New Testament's final book, Revelation, an apocalypse written by John of Patmos, as well as in the Old Testament's prophetic Book of Zechariah, and in the Book of Ezekiel, where they are named as punishments from God.
Revelation 6 tells of a book/scroll in God's right hand that is sealed with seven seals. The Lamb of God/Lion of Judah opens the first four of the seven seals, which summons four beings that ride out on white, red, black, and pale horses. To Zechariah, they are described as "the ones whom the Lord has sent to patrol the earth" causing it to rest quietly. Ezekiel lists them as "sword, famine, wild beasts, and plague."
In John's revelation, the first horseman is on a white horse, carrying a bow, and given a crown, riding forward as a figure of Conquest,[1] perhaps invoking Pestilence, Christ, or the Antichrist. The second carries a sword and rides a red horse and is the creator of War.[2] The third is a food merchant riding upon a black horse, symbolizing Famine. He carries The Scales. [3] The fourth and final horse is pale green, and upon it rides Death accompanied by Hades.[4] "They were given authority over a quarter of the earth, to kill with sword, famine, and plague, and by means of the beasts of the earth."[5]
The Christian apocalyptic vision is that the Four Horsemen are to set a divine end time upon the world as harbingers of the Last Judgment.[1][6]
Contents
1White Horse
1.1As Christ, the Gospel, or the Holy Spirit
1.2As the Antichrist
1.3As Roman Empire prosperity
1.4As war
1.5As infectious disease
2Red Horse
2.1As empire division
3Black Horse
3.1As imperial oppression
4Pale Horse
4.1Destroying an empire
5Interpretations
5.1Christological interpretation
5.2Prophetic interpretation
5.3Historicist interpretation
5.4Preterist interpretation
5.5LDS interpretation
5.6Other interpretations
6Other Biblical references
6.1Zechariah
6.2Ezekiel
7See also
8References
9External links
White Horse
See also: White horse (mythology)
For other uses of the term "White Rider", see White rider.
The first Horseman, Conquest on the White Horse as depicted in the Bamberg Apocalypse (1000–1020). The first "living creature" (with halo) is seen in the upper right.
Then I saw when the Lamb broke one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures saying as with a voice of thunder, "Come." I looked, and behold, a white horse, and he who sat on it had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer.
— Revelation 6:1–2 New American Standard Bible [7]
Based on the above passage, a common translation into English is the rider of the White Horse (sometimes referred to as the White Rider). He is thought to carry a bow (Greek τόξο, toxo) and wear a victor's crown (Greek stephanos).
As Christ, the Gospel, or the Holy Spirit
Albrecht Dürer, Knight, Death and the Devil, 1513
Irenaeus, an influential Christian theologian of the 2nd century, was among the first to interpret this Horseman as Christ himself, his white horse representing the successful spread of the gospel.[3] Various scholars have since supported this notion,[8] citing the later appearance, in Revelation 19, of Christ mounted on a white horse, appearing as The Word of God. Furthermore, earlier in the New Testament, the Book of Mark indicates that the advance of the gospel may indeed precede and foretell the apocalypse.[3][9] The color white also tends to represent righteousness in the Bible, and Christ is in other instances portrayed as a conqueror.[3][9]
Besides Christ, the Horseman could represent the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was understood to have come upon the Apostles at Pentecost after Jesus' departure from Earth. The appearance of the Lion in Revelation 5 shows the triumphant arrival of Jesus in Heaven, and the first Horseman could represent the sending of the Holy Spirit by Jesus and the advance of the gospel of Jesus Christ.[10]
As the Antichrist
While for nearly nineteen centuries Christians had thought that the first horseman was a positive figure representing either Christ or the Gospel, a completely different interpretation of this character emerged in 1866[11] when C.F. Wimpel defended the first hypothesis that he was the Antichrist (and more precisely according to him Napoleon Bonaparte).[12] It was taken over from the next generation in the United States by R. F. Franklin in 1898[13] and W. C. Stevens in 1928[14] and was then very successful in evangelical circles until today, for example with Pastor Billy Graham, for whom it was the Antichrist or false prophets in general.[15]
As Roman Empire prosperity
Four horsemen, by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, 1860
According to Edward Bishop Elliott's interpretation, that the Four Horsemen represent a prophecy of the subsequent history of the Roman Empire, the white color of this horse signifies triumph, prosperity and health in the political Roman body. For the next 80 or 90 years succeeding the banishment of the prophet John to Patmos covering the successive reigns of the emperors Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian and the two Antonines (Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius), a golden age of prosperity, union, civil liberty and good government unstained with civil blood unfolded. The agents of this prosperity personified by the rider of the white horse are these five emperors wearing crowns that reigned with absolute authority and power under the guidance of virtue and wisdom, the armies being restrained by their firm and gentle hands.[16]
This interpretation points out that the bow was preeminently a weapon of the inhabitants of the island of Crete and not of the Roman Empire in general. The Cretans were renowned for their archery skills. The significance of the rider of the white horse holding a bow indicates the place of origin of the line of emperors ruling during this time. This group of emperors can be classed together under one and the same head and family whose origins were from Crete.[17]
According to this interpretation, this period in Roman history, remarkable, both at its commencement and at its close, illustrated the glory of the empire where its limits were extended, though not without occasional wars, which were always uniformly triumphant and successful on the frontiers. The triumphs of the Emperor Trajan, a Roman Alexander, added to the empire Dacia, Armenia, Mesopotamia and other provinces during the course of the first 20 years of the period, which deepened the impression on the minds of the barbarians of the invincibility of the Roman Empire. Roman war progressed triumphantly into the invader's own territory, and the Parthian war was successfully ended by the total overthrow of those people. Roman conquest is demonstrated even in the most mighty of these wars, the Marcomannic succession of victories under the second Antonine unleashed on the German barbarians, driven into their forests and reduced to Roman submission.[18]
As war
In some commentaries to Bibles, the white Horseman is said to symbolize (ordinary) War, which may possibly be exercised on righteous grounds in decent manner, hence the white color, but still is devastating. The red Horseman (see below) then rather more specifically symbolizes civil war.[19]
As infectious disease
Under another interpretation, the first Horseman is called Pestilence, and is associated with infectious disease and plague. It appears at least as early as 1906, when it is mentioned in the Jewish Encyclopedia.[20] This particular interpretation is common in popular culture references to the Four Horsemen.[21]
The origin of this interpretation is unclear. Some translations of the Bible mention "plague" (e.g. the New International Version[citation needed]) or "pestilence" (e.g. the Revised Standard Version[citation needed]) in connection with the riders in the passage following the introduction of the fourth rider; cf. "They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine, plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth." in the NASB.[22] However, it is a matter of debate as to whether this passage refers to the fourth rider only, or to the four riders as a whole.[1]
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, in his 1916 novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (filmed in 1921 and in 1962), provides an early example of this interpretation, writing "The horseman on the white horse was clad in a showy and barbarous attire. ... While his horse continued galloping, he was bending his bow in order to spread pestilence abroad. At his back swung the brass quiver filled with poisoned arrows, containing the germs of all diseases."[23]
Red Horse
The second Horseman, War on the Red Horse as depicted in a thirteenth-century Apocalypse manuscript.
When He broke the second seal, I heard the second living creature saying, "Come." And another, a red horse, went out; and to him who sat on it, it was granted to take peace from Earth, and that men would slay one another; and a great sword was given to him.
— Revelation 6:3–4NASB[24]
The rider of the second horse is often taken to represent War[2] (he is often pictured holding a sword upwards as though ready for battle[25]) or mass slaughter.[1][6][26] His horse's color is red (πυρρός, pyrrhos from πῦρ, fire); and in some translations, the color is specifically a "fiery" red. The color red, as well as the rider's possession of a great sword (μάχαιρα, machaira), suggests blood that is to be spilled.[3] The sword held upward by the second Horseman may represent war or a declaration of war, as seen in heraldry. In military symbolism, swords held upward, especially crossed swords held upward, signify war and entering into battle.[27] (See for example the historical and modern images, as well as the coat of arms, of Joan of Arc.)
The second Horseman may represent civil war as opposed to the war of conquest that the first Horseman is sometimes said to bring.[3][28] Other commentators have suggested that it might also represent the persecution of Christians.[9][29][full citation needed]
As empire division
Death on the Pale Horse, Benjamin West, 1817
According to Edward Bishop Elliott's interpretation of the Four Horsemen as symbolic prophecy of the history of the Roman Empire, the second seal is opened and the Roman nation that experienced joy, prosperity and triumph is made subject to the red horse which depicts war and bloodshed—civil war. Peace left the Roman Earth resulting in the killing of one another as insurrection crept into and permeated the Empire beginning shortly into the reign of the Emperor Commodus.[30]
Elliott points out that Commodus, who had nothing to wish and everything to enjoy, that beloved son of Marcus Aurelius who ascended the throne with neither competitor to remove nor enemies to punish, became the slave of his attendants who gradually corrupted his mind. His cruelty degenerated into habit and became the ruling passion of his soul.[31]
Elliott further recites that, after the death of Commodus, a most turbulent period lasting 92 years unfolded during which time 32 emperors and 27 pretenders to the Empire hurled each other from the throne by incessant civil warfare. The sword was a natural, universal badge among the Romans, of the military profession. The apocalyptic figure indicated by the great sword indicated an undue authority and unnatural use of it. Military men in power, whose vocation was war and weapon the sword, rose by it and also fell. The unrestrained military, no longer subject to the Senate, transformed the Empire into a system of pure military despotism.[32]
Black Horse
The third Horseman, Famine on the Black Horse as depicted in the Angers Apocalypse Tapestry (1372–82)
When He broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, "Come." I looked, and behold, a black horse; and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, "A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; but do not damage the oil and the wine."
— Revelation 6:5–6 NASB[33]
The third Horseman rides a black horse and is popularly understood to be Famine as the Horseman carries a pair of balances or weighing scales (Greek ζυγὸν, zygon), indicating the way that bread would have been weighed during a famine.[3][28] Other authors interpret the third Horseman as the "Lord as a Law-Giver" holding Scales of Justice.[34] In the passage, it is read that the indicated price of grain is about ten times normal (thus the famine interpretation popularity), with an entire day's wages (a denarius) buying enough wheat for only one person (one choenix, about 1.1 litres), or enough of the less nutritious barley for three, so that workers would struggle to feed their families.[3]
Of the Four Horsemen, the black horse and its rider are the only ones whose appearance is accompanied by a vocalization. John hears a voice, unidentified but coming from among the four living creatures, that speaks of the prices of wheat and barley, also saying "and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine". This suggests that the black horse's famine is to drive up the price of grain but leave oil and wine supplies unaffected (though out of reach of the ordinary worker). One explanation for this is that grain crops would have been more naturally susceptible to famine years or locust plagues than olive trees and grapevines, which root more deeply.[3][28]
The statement might also suggest a continuing abundance of luxuries for the wealthy while staples, such as bread, are scarce, though not totally depleted;[28] such selective scarcity may result from injustice and the deliberate production of luxury crops for the wealthy over grain, as would have happened during the time Revelation was written.[2][8] Alternatively, the preservation of oil and wine could symbolize the preservation of the Christian faithful, who use oil and wine in their sacraments.[35]
As imperial oppression
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According to Edward Bishop Elliott's interpretation, through this third seal, the black horse is unleashed—aggravated distress and mourning. The balance in the rider's hand is not associated with a man's weighing out bits of bread in scanty measure for his family's eating but in association with the buying and selling of corn and other grains. The balance during the time of the apostle John's exile in Patmos was commonly a symbol of justice since it was used to weigh out the grains for a set price. The balance of justice held in the hand of the rider of the black horse signified the aggravation of the other previous evil, the bloodstained red of the Roman aspect into the darker blackness of distress.[36]The black horse rider is instructed not to harm the oil and the wine which signifies that this scarcity should not fall upon the superfluities, such as oil and wine, which men can live without, but upon the necessities of life—bread.[37]
In history, the Roman Empire suffered as a result of excessive taxation of its citizens. During the reign of Emperor Caracalla, whose sentiments were very different from the Antonines being inattentive, or rather averse, to the welfare of the people, he found himself under the necessity of gratifying the greed and excessive lifestyle which he had excited in the Army. During his reign, he crushed every part of the empire under the weight of his iron scepter. Old as well as new taxes were at the same time levied in the provinces. In the course of this history, the land tax, the taxes for services and the heavy contributions of corn, wine, oil and meat were exacted from the provinces for the use of the court, army and capital. "This noxious weed not totally eradicated again sprang up with the most luxurious growth and going forward darkened the Roman world with its deadly shade".[38]
In reality, the rise to power of the Emperor Maximin, whose cruelty was derived from a different source being raised as a barbarian from the district of Thrace, expanded the distress on the empire beyond the confines of the illustrious senators or bold adventurers who in the court or army exposed themselves to the whims of fortune. This tyrant, "stimulated by the insatiable desires of the soldiers, attacked the public property at length". Every city of the empire was destined to purchase corn for the multitudes as well as supply expenses for the games. By the Emperor's authority, the whole mass of wealth was confiscated for use by the Imperial treasury—temples "stripped of their most valuable offerings of gold, silver [and statues] which were melted down and coined into money."[39]
Pale Horse
The fourth Horseman, Death on the Pale Horse.
Engraving by Gustave Doré (1865).
When the Lamb broke the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, "Come." I looked, and behold, a pale horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hades was following with him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth.
— Revelation 6:7–8 (New American Standard Bible)[40]
The fourth and final Horseman is named Death. Known as Θάνατος (Thanatos),[41] of all the riders, he is the only one to whom the text itself explicitly gives a name. Unlike the other three, he is not described carrying a weapon or other object, instead he is followed by Hades (the resting place of the dead). However, illustrations commonly depict him carrying a scythe (like the Grim Reaper), sword,[42] or other implement.
The color of Death's horse is written as khlōros (χλωρός) in the original Koine Greek,[43] which can mean either green/greenish-yellow or pale/pallid.[44] The color is often translated as "pale", though "ashen", "pale green", and "yellowish green"[28] are other possible interpretations (the Greek word is the root of "chlorophyll" and "chlorine"). Based on uses of the word in ancient Greek medical literature, several scholars suggest that the color reflects the sickly pallor of a corpse.[3][45] In some modern artistic depictions, the horse is distinctly green.[46][47][48]
The verse beginning "they were given power over a fourth of the earth" is generally taken as referring to Death and Hades,[28][49] although some commentators see it as applying to all four horsemen.[1]
Destroying an empire
See also: Crisis of the Third Century
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (by Arnaldo dell'Ira, neo-roman project of mosaic, 1939–1940.
This fourth, pale horse, was the personification of Death with Hades following him jaws open receiving the victims slain by Death. Its commission was to kill upon the Roman Earth with all of the four judgements of God—with sword, famine, pestilence and wild beasts. The deadly pale and livid appearance displays a hue symptomatic of approaching empire dissolution. According to Edward Bishop Elliott, an era in Roman history commencing within about 15 years after the death of Severus Alexander (in 235 AD[50]) strongly marks every point of this terrible emblem.[51]
Edward Gibbon speaks of a period from the celebration of the great secular games by the Emperor Philip to the death of Gallienus (in 268 AD[52]) as the 20 years of shame and misfortune, of confusion and calamity, as a time when the ruined empire approached the last and fatal moment of its dissolution. Every instant of time in every province of the Roman world was afflicted by military tyrants and barbarous invaders—the sword from within and without.[53][54]
According to Elliott, famine, the inevitable consequence of carnage and oppression, which demolished the produce of the present as well as the hope of future harvests, produced the environment for an epidemic of diseases, the effects of scanty and unwholesome food. That furious plague (the Plague of Cyprian), which raged from the year 250 to the year 265, continued without interruption in every province, city and almost every family in the empire. During a portion of this time, 5000 people died daily in Rome; and many towns that escaped the attacks of barbarians were entirely depopulated.[55]
For a time in the late 260s, the strength of Aurelian crushed the enemies of Rome, yet after his assassination certain of them revived.[56] While the Goths had been destroyed for almost a century and the Empire reunited, the Sassanid Persians were uncowed in the East and during the following year hosts of central Asian Alani spread themselves over Pontus, Cappadocia, Cilicia and Galatia, etching their course by the flames of cities and villages they pillaged.[57]
As for the wild beasts of the earth, according to Elliott, it is a well-known law of nature that they quickly occupy the scenes of waste and depopulation—where the reign of man fails and the reign of beasts begins. After the reign of Gallienus and 20 or 30 years had passed, the multiplication of the animals had risen to such an extent in parts of the empire that they made it a crying evil.[58]
One notable point of apparent difference between the prophecy and history might seem to be expressly limited to the fourth part of the Roman Earth, but in the history of the period the devastations of the pale horse extended over all. The fourth seal prophecy seems to mark the malignant climax of the evils of the two preceding seals to which no such limitation is attached. Turning to that remarkable reading in Jerome's Latin Vulgate which reads "over the four parts of the earth,"[59][60] it requires that the Roman empire should have some kind of quadripartition. Dividing from the central or Italian fourth, three great divisions of the Empire separated into the West, East and Illyricum under Posthumus, Aureolus and Zenobia respectively—divisions that were later legitimized by Diocletian.[61]
Diocletian ended this long period of anarchy, but the succession of civil wars and invasions caused much suffering, disorder and crime which brought the empire into a state of moral lethargy from which it never recovered.[62] After the plague had abated, the empire suffered from general distress, and its condition was very much like that which followed after the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Talent and art had become extinct in proportion to the desolation of the world.[63]
Interpretations
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The Horsemen of the Apocalypse, in a woodcut by Albrecht Dürer (ca. 1497–98), ride forth as a group, with an angel heralding them, to bring Death, Famine, War, and Conquest unto man.[64]
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Saint-Sever Beatus, 11th century.
Christological interpretation
Before the Reformation and the woodcut by Albrecht Dürer, the usual and more influential commentaries of the Book of Revelation thought there was only one horseman riding successively these four horses, who was the Christ himself. So did some medieval illuminations, and after that some modern commentators: Oecumenius, a Greek exegete writing in the sixth-century, Berengaudus a French Benedictine monk of Ferrières Abbey at the same period, Luis del Alcázar a Spanish Jesuit in 1612, Benito Arias Montano, a Spanish Orientalist, in 1622, Jacques de Bordes, a French capuchin in 1639, Emanuel Swedenborg a Swedish theologian in 1766[65]
Prophetic interpretation
Some Christians interpret the Horsemen as a prophecy of a future Tribulation,[8] during which many on Earth will die as a result of multiple catastrophes. The Four Horsemen are the first in a series of "Seal" judgements. This is when God will judge the Earth, and is giving the World a chance to repent before they die, and His new beautiful earth is created for all the people who are faithful to Him and accept him as their Savior.[citation needed]
John Walvoord, a premillennialist, believes the Seals will be opened during the Great Tribulation and coincides with the arrival of the Antichrist as the first horseman, a global war as the second horseman, an economic collapse as the third horseman, and the general die off of 1/4 of the World's population as the fourth horseman, which is followed by a global dictatorship under the Antichrist and the rest of the plagues.[66]
Historicist interpretation
According to E.B. Elliott, the first seal, as revealed to John by the angel, was to signify what was to happen soon after John seeing the visions in Patmos and that the second, third and fourth seals in like manner were to have commencing dates each in chronological sequence following the preceding seal. Its general subject is the decline and fall, after a previous prosperous era, of the Empire of Heathen Rome. The first four seals of Revelation, represented by four horses and horsemen, are fixed to events, or changes, within the Roman Earth.[67]
Preterist interpretation
Some modern scholars interpret Revelation from a preterist point of view, arguing that its prophecy and imagery apply only to the events of the first century of Christian history.[28] In this school of thought, Conquest, the white horse's rider, is sometimes identified as a symbol of Parthian forces: Conquest carries a bow, and the Parthian Empire was at that time known for its mounted warriors and their skill with bow and arrow.[3][28] Parthians were also particularly associated with white horses.[3] Some scholars specifically point to Vologases I, a Parthian shah who clashed with the Roman Empire and won one significant battle in 62 AD.[3][28]
Revelation's historical context may also influence the depiction of the black horse and its rider, Famine. In 92 AD, the Roman emperor Domitian attempted to curb excessive growth of grapevines and encourage grain cultivation instead, but there was major popular backlash against this effort, and it was abandoned. Famine's mission to make wheat and barley scarce but "hurt not the oil and the wine" could be an allusion to this episode.[28][45] The red horse and its rider, who take peace from the earth, might represent the prevalence of civil strife at the time Revelation was written; internecine conflict ran rampant in the Roman Empire during and just prior to the 1st century AD.[3][28]
LDS interpretation
Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe their first prophet, Joseph Smith, revealed that the book described by John "contains the revealed will, mysteries, and the works of God; the hidden things of his economy concerning this earth during the seven thousand years of its continuance, or its temporal existence" and that the seals describe these things for the seven thousand years of the Earth's temporal existence, each seal representing 1,000 years.[68]
About the first seal and the white horse, LDS Apostle Bruce R. McConkie taught, "The most transcendent happenings involved Enoch and his ministry. And it is interesting to note that what John saw was not the establishment of Zion and its removal to heavenly spheres, but the unparalleled wars in which Enoch, as a general over the armies of the saints, 'went forth conquering and to conquer' Revelation 6:2; see also Moses 7:13–18"[69] The second seal and the red horse represent the period from approximately 3,000 B.C. to 2,000 B.C. including the wickedness and violence leading to the Great Flood.[70]
The third seal and black horse describe the period of ancient Joseph, son of Israel, who was sold into Egypt, and the famines that swept that period (see Genesis 41–42; Abraham 1:29–30; 2:1, 17, 21). The fourth seal and the pale horse are interpreted to represent the thousand years leading up to the birth of Jesus Christ, both the physical death brought about by great warring empires and the spiritual death through apostasy among the Lord's chosen people.[70]
Other interpretations
Artwork which shows the Horsemen as a group, such as the famous woodcut by Albrecht Dürer, suggests an interpretation where all four horsemen represent different aspects of the same tribulation.[71]
American Protestant Evangelical interpreters regularly see ways in which the horsemen, and Revelation in general, speak to contemporary events. Some who believe Revelation applies to modern times can interpret the horses based on various ways their colors are used.[72] Red, for example, often represents Communism, the white horse and rider with a crown representing Catholicism, Black has been used as a symbol of Capitalism, while Green represents the rise of Islam. Pastor Irvin Baxter Jr. of Endtime Ministries espouses such a belief.[73]
Some equate the Four Horsemen with the angels of the four winds.[74] (See Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel, angels often associated with four cardinal directions).
Some speculate that when the imagery of the Six Seals is compared to other eschatological descriptions throughout the Bible, the themes of the horsemen draw remarkable similarity to the events of the Olivet Discourse. The signs of the approaching end of the world are likened to birth pains, indicating that they would occur more frequently and with greater intensity the nearer the event of Christ's return. With this perspective the horsemen represent the rise of false religions, false prophets and false messiahs; the increase of wars and rumours of wars; the escalation of natural disasters and famines; and the growth of persecution, martyrdom, betrayal and loss of faith.
According to Anatoly Fomenko, the Book of Revelation is largely astrological in nature. The 'Four Horsemen' represent the planets Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.[75]
Other Biblical references
Zechariah
The Book of Zechariah twice mentions colored horses; in the first passage there are three colors (red, speckled/brown, and white),[76] and in the second there are four teams of horses (red, black, white, and finally dappled/"grisled and bay") pulling chariots.[77] The second set of horses are referred to as "the four spirits of heaven, going out from standing in the presence of the Lord of the whole world."[77] They are described as patrolling the earth, and keeping it peaceful. It may be assumed by some Christian interpretation that when the tribulation begins, the peace is taken away, so their job is to terrify the places in which they patrol.[3]
Ezekiel
The four living creatures of Revelation 4:6-8 are written very similarly to the four living creatures in Ezekiel 1:5–12. In Revelation each of the living creatures summons a horseman, where in Ezekiel the living creatures follow wherever the spirit leads, without turning.
In Ezekiel 14:21, the Lord enumerates His "four disastrous acts of judgment" (ESV), sword, famine, wild beasts, and pestilence, against the idolatrous elders of Israel. A symbolic interpretation of the Four Horsemen links the riders to these judgments, or the similar judgments in 6:11–12.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Apocalypse#Whi...
The inspiration for Sacré-Cœur's construction originated on 4 September 1870, the day of the proclamation of the Third Republic, with a speech by Bishop Fournier. He considered the defeat of French troops during the Franco-Prussian War as a divine punishment following "a century of moral decline" since the French Revolution.
In the decades following the Revolution, a division in French society arose, between devout Catholics and legitimist royalists on one side, opposed to democrats, secularists, socialists and radicals on the other.[citation needed] In 1870, a French military garrison, which had been protecting the Vatican in Rome, was withdrawn and sent to the front of the Franco-Prussian War by Napoleon III.[4] This was followed by the secular uprising of the Paris Commune of 1870–1871, and the subsequent 1871 defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War.
Though today the basilica is asserted[when?] to be dedicated in honor of the 58,000 who lost their lives during the war, the decree of the Assemblée nationale 24 July 1873, responding to a request by the archbishop of Paris and voting its construction, specifies that it is to "expiate the crimes of the Commune."[5]
Montmartre was the site of the Commune's first insurrection, and the Communards executed Georges Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, who became a martyr for the resurgent Catholic Church. His successor Guibert, climbing the Butte Montmartre in October 1872, was reported to have had a vision as clouds dispersed over the panorama: "It is here, it is here where the martyrs are,[6] it is here that the Sacred Heart must reign so that it can beckon all to come."[7]
King Saint Louis
Saint Joan of Arc
Following the resignation of the government of Adolphe Thiers, 24 May 1873, François Pie, bishop of Poitiers, expressed the national yearning for spiritual renewal— "the hour of the Church has come".[8] This would be expressed through the "Government of Moral Order" of the Third Republic, which linked Catholic institutions with secular ones, in "a project of religious and national renewal, the main features of which were the restoration of monarchy and the defense of Rome within a cultural framework of official piety,"[9] of which Sacré-Cœur was the chief lasting, triumphalist[10] monument.
The 24 July decree voting its construction as a "matter of public utility"[11] followed close on Thiers' resignation. The project was expressed by the Church as a National Vow (Vœu national) and financial support came from parishes throughout France. The dedicatory inscription records the basilica as the accomplishment of a vow by Alexandre Legentil and Hubert Rohault de Fleury, ratified by Joseph-Hippolyte Guibert, Archbishop of Paris. The project took many years to complete.
Hollande was born in Rouen, to a middle-class family. His mother, Nicole Frédérique Marguerite Tribert (1927–2009), was a social worker, and his father, Georges Gustave Hollande, an ear, nose, and throat doctor who "had once run on a far right ticket in local politics.The family moved to Neuilly-sur-Seine, a highly exclusive suburb of Paris, when Hollande was thirteen. Hollande was raised Catholic, but became an agnostic in later life,and now considers himself as an atheist[8] (In December 2011, Hollande told the French Christian magazine La Vie that he respects all religious practices but has none of his own).He attended Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-la-Salle boarding school, a private Catholic school in Rouen, the Lycée Pasteur, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, then graduated with a bachelor's degree in law from Panthéon-Assas University. Then he studied at HEC Paris where he graduated in 1975, before attending the Institut d'études politiques de Paris and the École nationale d'administration. He graduated from ENA in 1980[10][11] and chose to enter the prestigious Cour des comptes. He lived in the United States in the summer of 1974 while he was a university student. Immediately after graduating, he was employed as a councillor in the Court of Audit.Early political career: Five years after volunteering as a student to work for François Mitterrand's ultimately unsuccessful campaign in the 1974 presidential election, Hollande joined the Socialist Party. He was quickly spotted by Jacques Attali, a senior adviser to Mitterrand, who arranged for Hollande to stand for election to the French National Assembly in 1981 in Corrèze against future President Jacques Chirac, who was then the Leader of the Rally for the Republic, a Neo-Gaullist party. Hollande lost to Chirac in the first round. He went on to become a special advisor to newly elected President Mitterrand, before serving as a staffer for Max Gallo, the government's spokesman. After becoming a municipal councillor for Ussel in 1983, he contested Corrèze for a second time in 1988, this time being elected to the National Assembly. Hollande lost his bid for re-election to the National Assembly in the so-called "blue wave" of the 1993 election, described as such due to the number of seats gained by the Right at the expense of the Socialist Party.First Secretary of the Socialist Party (1997–2008)François Hollande in 2004: Hollande with his former partner Ségolène Royal, at a rally for the 2007 elections. As the end of Mitterrand's term in office approached, the Socialist Party was torn by a struggle of internal factions, each seeking to influence the direction of the party. Hollande pleaded for reconciliation and for the party to unite behind Jacques Delors, the president of the European Commission, but Delors renounced his ambitions to run for the French presidency in 1995, leading to Lionel Jospin's resuming his earlier position as the leader of the party. Jospin selected Hollande to become the official party spokesman, and Hollande went on to contest Corrèze once again in 1997, successfully returning to the National Assembly.
That same year, Jospin became the prime minister of France, and Hollande won the election for his successor as first secretary of the French Socialist Party, a position he would hold for eleven years. Because of the very strong position of the Socialist Party within the French government during this period, Hollande's position led some to refer to him the "vice prime minister". Hollande would go on to be elected mayor of Tulle in 2001, an office he would hold for the next seven years.The immediate resignation of Jospin from politics following his shock defeat by far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen in the first round of the 2002 presidential election forced Hollande to become the public face of the party for the 2002 legislative election but, although he managed to limit defeats and was re-elected in his own constituency, the Socialists lost nationally. In order to prepare for the 2003 party congress in Dijon, he obtained the support of many notable personalities of the party and was re-elected first secretary against opposition from left-wing factions.
After the triumph of the Left in the 2004 regional elections, Hollande was cited as a potential presidential candidate, but the Socialists were divided on the European Constitution, and Hollande's support for the ill-fated "Yes" position in the French referendum on the European constitution caused friction within the party. Although Hollande was re-elected as first secretary at the Le Mans Congress in 2005, his authority over the party began to decline from this point onwards. Eventually his domestic partner, Ségolène Royal, was chosen to represent the Socialist Party in the 2007 presidential election, where she would lose to Nicolas Sarkozy.
Hollande was widely blamed for the poor performances of the Socialist Party in the 2007 elections, and he announced that he would not seek another term as first secretary. Hollande publicly declared his support for Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, although it was Martine Aubry who would go on to win the race to succeed him in 2008.
Following his resignation as first secretary, Hollande was immediately elected to replace Jean-Pierre Dupont as the president of the General Council of Corrèze in April 2008, a position he holds to this day. In 2008 he supported the creation of the first European Prize for Local History (Étienne Baluze Prize), founded by the "Société des amis du musée du cloître" of Tulle, on the suggestion of the French historian Jean Boutier. François Hollande awarded the first prize on 29 February 2008 to the Italian historian Beatrice Palmero in the General Council of Corrèze.2012 presidential campaign: French presidential election, 2012. Following his re-election as president of the General Council of Corrèze in March 2011, Hollande announced that he would be a candidate in the upcoming primary election to select the Socialist and Radical Left Party presidential nominee.[13] The primary marked the first time that both parties had held an open primary to select a joint nominee at the same time. He initially trailed the front-runner, former finance minister and International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn.Following Strauss-Kahn's arrest on suspicion of sexual assault in New York City in May 2011, Hollande began to lead the opinion polls. His position as front-runner was established just as Strauss-Kahn declared that he would no longer be seeking the nomination. After a series of televised debates throughout September, Hollande topped the ballot in the first round held on 9 October with 39% of the vote, not gaining the 50% required to avoid a second ballot, which he would contest against Martine Aubry, who had come second with 30% of the vote.The second ballot took place on 16 October 2011. Hollande won with 56% of the vote to Aubry's 43% and thus became the official Socialist and Radical Left Party candidate for the 2012 presidential election.[14] After the primary results, he immediately gained the pledged support of the other contenders for the party's nomination, including Aubry, Arnaud Montebourg, Manuel Valls and 2007 candidate Ségolène Royal.Hollande's presidential campaign was managed by Pierre Moscovici and Stéphane Le Foll, a member of Parliament and Member of the European Parliament respectively.[16] Hollande launched his campaign officially with a rally and major speech at Le Bourget on 22 January 2012 in front of 25,000 people.[17][18] The main themes of his speech were equality and the regulation of finance, both of which he promised to make a key part of his campaign.[On 26 January, he outlined a full list of policies in a manifesto containing 60 propositions, including the separation of retail activities from riskier investment-banking businesses; raising taxes on big corporations, banks and the wealthy; creating 60,000 teaching jobs; bringing the official retirement age back down to 60 from 62; creating subsidised jobs in areas of high unemployment for the young; promoting more industry in France by creating a public investment bank; granting marriage and adoption rights to same-sex couples; and pulling French troops out of Afghanistan in 2012.On 9 February, he detailed his policies specifically relating to education in a major speech in Orléans.On 15 February, incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy announced that he would run for a second and final term, strongly criticising Hollande's proposals and claiming that he would bring about "economic disaster within two days of taking office" if he won.Hollande visited Berlin, Germany, in December 2011 for the Social Democrats Federal Party Congress, at which he met Sigmar Gabriel, Peer Steinbrück, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Martin Schulz;[23][24] he also travelled to Belgium before the United Kingdom in February 2012, where he met with Opposition Leader Ed Miliband; and finally Tunisia in May 2012.Opinion polls showed a tight race between the two men in the first round of voting, with most polls showing Hollande comfortably ahead of Sarkozy in a hypothetical second round run-off.The first round of the presidential election was held on 22 April. François Hollande came in first place with 28.63% of the vote, and faced Nicolas Sarkozy in the second round run-off.[28] In the second round of voting on 6 May 2012, François Hollande was elected President of the French Republic with 51.7% of the vote.President of France (2012–present)[ François Hollande was elected President of France on 6 May 2012. He was inaugurated on 15 May, and shortly afterwards appointed Jean-Marc Ayrault to be his Prime Minister. He also appointed Benoît Puga to be the military's chief of staff, Pierre-René Lemas as his general secretary and Pierre Besnard as his Head of Cabinet. On his first official visit to a foreign country in his capacity as president of France, the airplane transporting him was hit by lightning.[31] The plane returned safely to Paris where he took another flight to Germany. The first measures he took were to lower the income of the president, the prime minister, and other members of the government by 30%, and to make them sign a "code of ethics".Budget: Hollande's economic policies are wide-ranging, including supporting the creation of a European credit rating agency, the separation of lending and investment in banks, reducing the share of electricity generated by nuclear power in France from 75 to 50% in favour of renewable energy sources, merging income tax and the General Social Contribution (CSG), creating an additional 45% for additional income of 150,000 euros, capping tax loopholes at a maximum of €10,000 per year, and questioning the relief solidarity tax on wealth (ISF, Impôt de Solidarité sur la Fortune) measure that should bring €29 billion in additional revenue. Hollande has also signalled his intent to implement a 75% income tax rate on revenue earned above 1,000,000 euros per year, to generate the provision of development funds for deprived suburbs, and to return to a deficit of zero percent of GDP by 2017.[33][34] The tax plan has proven controversial, with courts ruling it unconstitutional in 2012, only to then take the opposite position on a redrafted version in 2013.[35][36]
Hollande has also announced several reforms to education, pledging to recruit 60,000 new teachers, to create a study allowance and means-tested training, and to set up a mutually beneficial contract that would allow a generation of experienced employees and craftsmen to be the guardians and teachers of younger newly hired employees, thereby creating a total of 150,000 subsidized jobs. This has been complemented by the promise of aid to SMEs, with the creation of a public bank investment-oriented SME's, and a reduction of the corporate tax rate to 30% for medium corporations and 15% for small.Hollande's government has announced plans to construct 500,000 public homes per year, including 150,000 social houses, funded by a doubling of the ceiling of the A passbook, the region making available its local government land within five years. In accordance with long-standing Socialist Party policy, Hollande has announced that the retirement age will revert to 60, for those who have contributed for more than 41 years.LGBT rights: Further information: Law 2013-404; Hollande has also announced his personal support for same-sex marriage and adoption for LGBT couples, and outlined plans to pursue the issue in early 2013.[37] In July 2012, Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault announced that "In the first half of 2013, the right to marriage and adoption will be open to all couples, without discrimination [...]", confirming this election promise by Hollande.The bill to legalize same-sex marriage, known as Bill no. 344, was introduced to the National Assembly of France on 7 November 2012. On 12 February 2013, the National Assembly approved the bill in a 329–229 vote.The Right-wing opposed the bill. The Senate approved the full bill with a 171–165 majority on 12 April with minor amendments. On 23 April, the National Assembly approved the amended bill, in a 331–225 vote, and following approval of the law by the Constitutional Council of France, it was signed into law by President François Hollande on 18 May 2013, with the first same-sex weddings under the law taking place eleven days later.Labour reform: As President, Hollande pursued labour reform to make France more competitive internationally. Legislation was introduced in late 2012 and after much debate passed the French lower and upper house in May 2013. The bill includes measures such as making it easier for workers to change jobs and for companies to fire employees. One of the main measures of the bill allows companies to temporarily cut workers' salaries or hours during times of economic difficulty. This measure takes its inspiration from Germany, where furloughs have been credited with allowing companies to weather difficult times without resorting to massive layoffs. Another measure that aims to simplify the firing process. Layoffs in France are often challenged in courts and the cases can take years to resolve. Many companies cite the threat of lengthy court action – even more than any financial cost – as the most difficult part of doing business in France. The law shortens the time that employees have to contest a layoff and also lays out a scheme for severance pay. The government hopes this will help employees and companies reach agreement faster in contentious layoffs.Another key measure introduced are credits for training that follow employees throughout their career, regardless of where they work, and the right to take a leave of absence to work at another company. The law will also require all companies to offer and partially pay for supplemental health insurance. Lastly, the law also reforms unemployment insurance, so that someone out of work doesn't risk foregoing significant benefits when taking a job that might pay less than previous work or end up only being temporary. Under the new law, workers will be able to essentially put benefits on hold when they take temporary work, instead of seeing their benefits recalculated each time.Pension reform: As President, Hollande pursued reform to the vast and expensive pension system in France. The process proved to be very contentious, with members of Parliament, Labor Unions, and general public all opposed. Mass protests and demonstrations occurred throughout Paris. Despite the opposition, the French Parliament did pass a reform in December 2013 aimed at plugging a pension deficit expected to reach 20.7 billion euros ($28.4 billion) by 2020 if nothing were to be done. Rather than raising the mandatory retirement age, as many economists had advised, Hollande pursued increases in contributions, leaving the retirement age untouched. The reform had a rough ride in parliament, being rejected twice by the Senate, where Hollande's Socialist Party has a slim majority, before it won sufficient backing in a final vote before the lower house of parliament. French private sector workers will see the size and duration of their pension contributions increase only modestly under the reform while their retirement benefits are largely untouched.[43] Several scholars and economists argue the reform did not go far enough.[who?] Foreign affairs: See also: List of presidential trips made by François Hollande
Leaders of Belarus, Russia, Germany, France, and Ukraine at the summit in Minsk, 11–12 February 2015. As President, Hollande promised an early withdrawal of French combat troops present in Afghanistan in 2012.He also pledged to conclude a new contract of Franco-German partnership, advocating the adoption of a Directive on the protection of public services. Hollande has proposed "an acceleration of the establishment of a Franco-German civic service, the creation of a Franco-German research office, the creation of a Franco-German industrial fund to finance common competitiveness clusters, and the establishment of a common military headquarters". As well as this, Hollande has expressed a wish to "combine the positions of the presidents of the European Commission and of the European Council (currently held by José Manuel Barroso and Herman Van Rompuy respectively) into a single office...and that it should be directly chosen" by the members of the European Parliament.Hollande made a state visit to the United States in February 2014; a state dinner was given in his honor by U.S. President Barack Obama.On 27 February 2014, Hollande was a special guest of honor in Abuja, received by Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan in celebration of Nigeria's amalgamation in 1914, a 100-year anniversary. In September 2015, Hollande warned former Eastern Bloc countries against rejecting the EU mandatory migrant quotas, saying: "Those who don't share our values, those who don't even want to respect those principles, need to start asking themselves questions about their place in the European Union".Intervention in Mali: Hollande reviews troops during the 2013 Bastille Day military parade. On 11 January 2013, Hollande authorised the execution of Operation Serval, which aimed to curtail the activities of Islamist extremists in the north of Mali.[44] The intervention was popularly supported in Mali, as Hollande promised that his government would do all it could to "rebuild Mali".During his one-day visit to Bamako, Mali's capital, on 2 February 2013, he said that it was "the most important day in [his] political life". In 2014, Hollande took some of these troops out of Mali and spread them over the rest of the Sahel under Operation Barkhane, in an effort to curb jihadists militants.Co-Prince of Andorra: The President of the French Republic is one of the two joint heads of state of the Principality of Andorra. Hollande hosted a visit from Antoni Martí, head of the government, and Vicenç Mateu Zamora, leader of the parliament.Approval ratings: An IFOP poll released in April 2014 showed that Hollande’s approval rating had dropped five points since the previous month of March to 18%, dipping below his earlier low of 20% in February during the same year.[57] In November 2014, his approval rating reached a new low of 12%, according to a YouGov poll.[58] Following the Charlie Hebdo shooting in January 2015, however, approval for Hollande increased dramatically, reaching 40% according to an IFOP poll two weeks after the attack,[59] though an Ipsos-Le Point survey in early February showed his rating declining back to 30%. Personal life: For over thirty years, his partner was fellow Socialist politician Ségolène Royal, with whom he has four children: Thomas (1984), Clémence (1985), Julien (1987) and Flora (1992). In June 2007, just a month after Royal's defeat in the French presidential election of 2007, the couple announced that they were separating.A few months after his split from Ségolène Royal was announced, a French website published details of a relationship between Hollande and French journalist Valérie Trierweiler. In November 2007, Trierweiler confirmed and openly discussed her relationship with Hollande in an interview with the French weekly Télé 7 Jours. She remained a reporter for the magazine Paris Match, but ceased work on political stories. Trierweiler moved into the Élysée Palace with Hollande when he became president and started to accompany him on official travel.On 25 January 2014, Hollande officially announced his separation from Valérie Trierweiler[63] after the tabloid magazine Closer revealed his affair with actress Julie Gayet.[64] In September 2014 Trierweiler published a book about her time with Hollande titled Merci pour ce moment (Thank You for This Moment). The memoir claimed the president presented himself as disliking the rich, but in reality disliked the poor. The claim brought an angry reaction and rejection from Hollande, who said he had spent his life dedicated to the under-privileged.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Hollande
Today will be the happiest day of François Hollande’s term as president of France. In the least surprising surprise result of the year, Hollande has defeated incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, with whom much of France had become frustrated and fed up. Public sentiment is easy enough to understand. Sarkozy rode into office on a wave of expectations which he seemed tempted to inflate at every turn. But he, like France, was ill-equipped to handle the economic crisis that now threatens to pull France into Europe’s troubled bottom tier, down with Italy, Spain, and Greece. Sarkozy’s brand of center-right nationalism had met its match. Now it’s time for Hollande’s, shall we say, socialist nationalism. Despite his reputation as a would-be “Mr. Normal,” Hollande offers an ideology far more grandiose in its self-regard than any associated with Sarkozy. Sarkozy’s egotism suited a party that believed it knew the future. Hollande’s apparent personal humility is an all-too-poetic fit with the animating spirit of his political creed — a wilfull ignorance of its own futility and obsolescence. There are many illustrations to come of why socialism is dead on arrival in twenty-first century France, and François Hollande will find no shortage of disappointments and calamities waiting for him at the peak of power. But right now, we can already identify five key reasons why Hollande is destined to fail: 1. No mandate. Whatever else can be said about socialism or François Hollande, there is no disputing the fact that his public support comprises a soberingly small slice of the French electorate. As it stands, he has not cracked 52% of the vote. What you may not know is that one in four voters rejected every candidate, with 20% casting no ballot and 5% casting a blank one. France’s radicals may tolerate him in a resigned sort of way, but the French right will simply bide their time and drum up some challenger who reminds no one of Sarkozy. The far right, on the other hand, will drive Hollande to distraction. He will be pushed toward the terrible choice either of demonizing them or trying to ignore them. Both alternatives will strengthen them, so long as Hollande actually advances his policies. Anything trans-nationalist will give the Front National fits, while anything else will be occasion for a pitched battle with Hollande over what nationalism is for. Hollande’s support is shallow and weak, fueled largely by a combination of dismayed hope and relief that at least one needn’t endure Sarkozy’s variety of failure anymore. To strengthen his support, Hollande will have to demagogue and cut left. The more he does this, the narrower his appeal will become. No matter what kind of changes in policy he achieves, they will be transitory. France, and Europe, are already waiting for the other shoe to drop. It will.
2. Nationalist nonsense. Barack Obama’s foreign policy has proven itself to be incoherent but acceptable to many Americans. François Hollande’s foreign policy will prove unacceptably incoherent. The French left has always favored greater European togetherness, but now associates the European project with Germany’s economic domination of the Continent. Hollande wants to square the circle by spearheading a European push for ‘more growth’, but he associates pro-growth economic reforms with so-called austerity. (Simply not spending substantial new sums counts as austerity.) As Gideon Rachman observes, France “is a country where the state already consumes 56 per cent of gross domestic product, which has not balanced a budget since the mid-1970s, and which has some of the highest taxes in the world.” And Hollande’s vision of growth is a product of his leftist view of nationalism:Mr. Hollande has vowed to restore social equilibrium in France, in part by pushing back against the austerity championed by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and the European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi. Mr. Hollande’s plans include rolling back tax breaks that Mr. Sarkozy gave to the wealthy, and increasing state-sponsored investment, in part by creating tens of thousands of civil sector jobs. 4 Essential Tips To Becoming A Better Leader Hollande is correct to realize that Germany lacks the political authority to successfully impose its fiscal habits upon Europe. But he is a fool to believe he ought to do more of precisely what caused Germany to try in the first place. Massive government spending is actually not the problem (although if Paul Krugman is right, France and Europe would require a volume of deficit spending that Hollande hasn’t a chance in hell of securing). The problem is not the amount of money that Hollande takes in, from whatever source, but how he will spend it: on government jobs. The secret killer of Europe’s economy has been government jobs, which have grown to absorb so much of Europe’s economies because so many European governments have functioned as if the EU had done nothing to weaken nationalism. There is little more nationalist than a government job, and little more hostile to European togetherness. The more government jobs, the farther away a common labor market. Civil sector jobs strengthen nationalism just at the moment of its most startling failure, yet they are the centerpiece of Hollande’s vision of normalcy. It’s a view that puts him on a collision course with the viability of the Eurozone and the EU itself. Once the left really accepts this, Hollande will become a scapegoat for whatever doesn’t work, which eventually will be everything. Left nationalism is as useless in the face of this crisis as Sarkozy’s center-right Gaullism. Sarkozy got off easy. Hollande won’t. 3. More globalization. Globalization will not reverse itself out of deference to François Hollande. For now, France is itself a globalizer, not a victim of globalization. But by the time Hollande is done with France, that may well change. The markets do not like Hollande — and why should they? — but, try as Hollande might, France is a market, and a big one. If he impairs the vitality of French business in Europe — and he will — he’ll make firms from around the world an offer they’ll be unlikely to refuse. This time, Germany won’t be first in line, especially if Hollande gets his way. The European left’s resistance to Germany is stronger than its resistance to China. China, meanwhile, is busy developing a new approach to Europe that can capitalize on this attitude. Just as the French left will find itself more nationalist, yet more beholden to foreign powers, it will be more antagonistic to globalization, yet more dependent upon it. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3: take Europe’s economic situation, add French socialism, and stir. 4. Focused opposition. France’s political right may be fraying and fragmenting now, but by the time Hollande is up for re-election, France’s needs — and the right’s — will become clear. Long gone will be the days when only a few isolated American and British commentators advance opinions concerning the necessity of one or another kind of new Napoleon in France. The heavyweight argument on that count involves a recognition that French nationalism and European togetherness can only be reconciled through a kind of French-led continental unity for which Napoleon’s First Empire is the only available inspiration. But a more easily digestible argument, capable of reuniting the right, looks something like this:Given the inevitable collapse of a future Hollande administration – either through economic failure or political ineptitude – what will save France from this poisonous consensus of decline and disorder? To return to the Napoleonic/Gaullist model, it needs a strong man (or woman) to advance bold, wholesale reform. It doesn’t require a dictator: the rule is that every successive great leader adopts and preserves the best of the constitution that came before. But France surely needs a president who will a) reject sectional politics that pits one class or region against another, b) resist pandering to the mob, and c) do what must be done to deregulate the French economy. Once the right accepts these things, an intelligible, coherent answer to Hollande will come into focus. The key piece will involve spanning the nationalist-versus-transnationalist divide. It will come as a matter of logic — before, not after, Hollande is replaced. The big picture for the French right is a realization that France cannot be kept strong and proud unless it asserts its political leadership over the whole of Europe. If it does not, failed states and hostile interests will hem it in on all sides, and unmet longings will bring chaos to its politics and its streets. 5. The force of history. The objection will be raised that the French right will never unite to beat Hollande unless the right individual — a truly remarkable individual — steps forward. Circumstances, however, have a habit of thrusting to the forefront someone who will do. By the time Hollande’s term is up, France will, historically speaking, have tried everything but a far-right government led from Paris. And the far right is too factional to swiftly step into effective command. Europe’s shambles and France’s limbo will form a vacuum reminiscent of the one that Napoleon stepped forward to fill. The people will be ready for it. After Hollande, they will be exhausted by politics and sick of themselves. Socialism will have proven itself completely unable to reconcile nationalism and transnationalism, as we already know it to be. The task will fall to the French right. Today, Hollande’s opponents seem incompetent to fulfill this task. But whatever the institutional preparedness of the French right appears to be, France will face the kind of historic moment that makes great statesmen, not waits on them. France’s savoir won’t be Hollande, thanks to the one-two punch of his orthodoxy and his disposition. His administration will exacerbate the troubles that already dwarf him. Whether he is aware of this or not, the outcome will be the same.
www.forbes.com/sites/jamespoulos/2012/05/06/five-reasons-...
French unemployment rose to near a record high in the third quarter, the latest sign that President Francois Hollande is struggling to meet a pledge to create jobs.Unemployment climbed to 10.6 percent in the three months through September from 10.4 percent the previous quarter, national statistics office Insee said in an e-mailed statement. That’s in contrast to Germany, where the jobless rate fell to a record-low 6.3 percent in November.While jobless claims have been steadily climbing for the past four years to reach a record 3.6 million in October, Hollande has been able to point to France’s growing population as part of the reason. The unemployment rate, by contrast, has stayed below the all-time high reached in 1997.The third-quarter increase now leaves unemployment at its highest in 18 years and just shy of the the 10.7 percent record. While the economy is showing some signs of sustained growth for the first time since Hollande took power in May 2012, the labor-market numbers represent a political defeat for the Socialist president, who has said that job creation is a condition for his own re-election in 2017.Separately on Thursday, Markit Economics said its composite manufacturing and services gauge fell to 51 in November from 52.6 in October. While that’s above the key 50 level indicating expansion, it lower than the initial estimate and signals the slowest growth of private sector output since August.
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-03/french-unemplo...
During HalloweenTime at Disneyland, Space Mountain undergoes a spooky transformation to become Space Mountain Ghost Galaxy...Featuring state of the art projected images mapped precisely to the exterior, every few minutes the ghost inside tries its best to break out of the Mountain in several different amazing scenes. This particular scene shows a giant hand trying to push its way out from the inside accompanied by loud screeching metal sounds and eerie moaning and screams that can be heard all the way from the Hub...
On this particular evening Ryan Pastorino and I were on the upper loading deck of the queue photographing the Mountain as it went through its transformations. We have decided to post each of our different photos today so that different approaches to the same idea can be compared. For the record, this shot was extremely difficult to finalize in post-processing due to the radically changing lights and a dreary overcast that was horrific in a different way...
My presentation is a HDR image from three exposures, merged in Photomatix using both Enhancer and Fusion, combined in PP with elements of two other additional exposures masked in. Many adjustments were made in Photoshop using various tools including Nik Color Efex 4, and Topaz Adjust.
Check out Ryan's photo here:
Green snake
Macro .(pls take note this shot was taken by Tamron USD 70-300mm VC lens not precisely describe below as i was too afraid of been attack or bitten by such snake species with mere 50mm lens). I immediately terminate my search for insect n flew home instantly with such threatening encounter at Woodlands Admiralty Park not once but twice . The last time was a king cobra that measure at least 1.7m. No joke!
In Macro photography, nothing is too small to escape with an additional extensive magnification even any smallest creatures beside a size of near un-visible tiny droplet like this mini grasshopper shall be spare.
My recent Macromania workfun hands on with a Non Macro combination,a cheap Canon $125 bucks 50mm F1.8II lens +Raynox+Hoya +4 close up filter .
After all, I think the result still quite acceptable but fun.
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Technical Details:
Non HDR, single exposure process by CS5 software.
Basic Standard Gears I rely for Landscape
Canon EOS 5D Mark2 (a full frame ideal for interpolating landscape image).
Tokina 16-28mm F2.8 wide angle lens .
Tripod for landscape only (keep possible sharpness n ability to focus for most idealistic desire composition)
Release cable (reduce hand contact n fully manage desire exposure timing)
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It was our first time in Botswana or more precisely it was even our first time in Africa and we would have been more than happy to see any lion at all. So we did not expect such experience. And it was truly a special experience! It was just superb seeing these wild creatures laying in the tree and enjoying their time. We did too even we sat in an open safari jeep ;-)
Torrents; deluge of rain; darkness; Noah of primeval times comes to mind. But I have a safe, dry albeit rather damp haven open to the sea, and a Palm Roof overhead. And opportunity to read ancient botanical texts when the internet works.
Just before the fierce storms yesterday I shot this brightly orange Beach Cordia, Cordia subcordata, branches hanging over the black volcanic sands come down from the Rinjani and ground by the surging seas. It's named for Valerius Cordus (1515-1544), a worthy German physician and botanist. That name is modern, supplanting a spate of other designations among which Cordia rumphii. The latter was the way of fey Carl Ludwig Blume (1786-1862), one-time director of Bogor's fine Kebun Raya, to honor Georg Eberhard Rumphius (1627-1702), great naturalist of Ambon, Indonesia.
Rumphius had used Novella nigra or ebbenniformis and waxes eloquent and enthusiastic about our Tree in his utterly readable Herbarium amboinense. He precisely describes it and details its various kinds of wood, among which the inner heartwood, which is ebony black; hence, of course, that 'nigra'. He notes its durability in the face of its lightness, and gives examples of its use by local people. It's quite clear from his description that Rumphius is also looking to Cordia as a possible source of timber for his masters of the Dutch East India Trading Company (VOC).
In his descriptions generally and specifically in this one he also makes anthropological-linguistic notes. Thus Rumphius tells his readers that a local who had traveled widely told him that it was believed that a Cordia on one of the Kei Islands had existed from the Beginning of the World. Surely that can't be the case, writes Rumphius ironically. His informant must have meant 'from the time that this place was inhabited', because the Malays often call 'the beginning of habitation of a given place, the beginnning of the world' (Malaienses enim aliquanda initium inhabitationis certi loci initium mundi vocant.).
As I look up from my writing - in the distance my Cordia still gray - Noah leaps to mind again: darkness, deluge, torrents...
Now whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th' event—
A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward—I do not know
Why yet I live to say this thing's to do,
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do't.
Seen during the walk in the forest (look at previous photo) :)
Bilberry (Vaccinium myrtillus) is a species of shrub with edible fruit of blue color, more precisely called common bilberry or blue whortleberry. It is found natively in Europe, northern Asia, Greenland, Iceland, Western Canada, and the Western United States. It occurs in the wild on heathlands and acidic soils. Its berry has been long consumed in the Old World. It is related to the widely cultivated North American blueberry. The bilberry fruit is smaller than that of the blueberry and similar in taste. Bilberries are darker in colour, and usually appear near black with a slight shade of blue. While the blueberry's fruit pulp is light green, the bilberry's is red or purple, heavily staining the fingers and lips of consumers eating the raw fruit. Vaccinium myrtillus fruits has been used for nearly 1,000 years in traditional European medicine for treatment of disorders of the gastrointestinal tract and diabetes. In cooking, the bilberry fruit is commonly used for the same purposes as the American blueberry such as pies, cakes, jams, muffins, cookies, sauces, syrups, juices, and candies.
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Jagódki w lesie już kwitną, mam nadzieję, że potem zaowocują :)
Borówka czarna (Vaccinium myrtillus) – gatunek rośliny wieloletniej z rodziny wrzosowatych. Ma wiele nazw zwyczajowych, m.in. jagoda, czarna jagoda, czernica. Roślina jest szeroko rozprzestrzeniona w Azji, Europie i Ameryce Północnej na obszarach o klimacie umiarkowanym i arktycznym. W Polsce jest pospolita zarówno na nizinach, jak i w górach. Jest wykorzystywana szeroko jako roślina jadalna i lecznicza. Znaczenie gospodarcze borówki czarnej pozostaje wysokie mimo silnej konkurencji znacznie bardziej plennych borówek północnoamerykańskich, których owoce mają uboższy skład chemiczny od czernicy. Owoce borówki czarnej były od dawna bardzo istotne dla Słowian i ludów północnej Europy. Używano jej owoców jako lekarstwa przy biegunkach i krwawej dyzenterii. Zastosowanie takie utrzymało się w lecznictwie ludowym, przy czym często zalecano je także w większych dawkach przeciw owsikom. Ponadto owoce borówki czarnej oferowane i spożywane są w postaci świeżej, suszonej, mrożonej oraz jako składnik przetworów takich jak dżemy, ciasta, soki oraz ciekłe lub sproszkowane koncentraty, będące suplementem diety. Przetwory z jagód wyróżniają się długą trwałością.
A good two years between shoots with Randi, but nothing had really changed. Not between us, anyway. She'd gone and had a baby, so that was a wee change in her life, but other than that, everything was exactly the same!
My mom had always told me about good friends of hers, so good even if they didn't see each other for years, they could pick up precisely where they'd left off. Didn't really understand it until I got older, had those experiences for myself, with others, with Randi.
It's the difference between situational friendships, folks you meet at work, or in some activity, or online, say, and those you meet because you share interests, beliefs, values.
Fortunately for me, Randi and I fall into that second camp.
Technology image of the week looks like a giant version of a sound system, and that is precisely what it is. ESA’s Large European Acoustic Facility (LEAF) subjects satellites to the same noise a launcher produces as it takes off and flies through the atmosphere.
LEAF is an integral part of ESA’s test centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, a collection of spaceflight simulation facilities under a single roof. One wall of the chamber – which stands 11 m wide by 9 m deep and 16.4 m high – is embedded with a set of enormous sound horns . Nitrogen shot through the horns can produce a range of noise up to more than 154 decibels, like standing close to multiple jets taking off.
As a safety feature, LEAF can operate only once all the doors are closed. Steel-reinforced concrete walls safely contain its noise, coated with epoxy resin to reflect noise to produce a uniform sound field within the chamber. The chamber itself is supported on rubber bearing pads to isolate it from its surroundings.
Credit: ESA
Letchworth State Park, New York State
© Igor Borisenko Photography. All Rights Reserved.
As I promised in the last uploaded image that the next shot will be from that bridge and this is it! I took this precisely a year ago. This view was heavenly and I wanted to be on this bridge in this moment for the eternity... unfortunately just shortly after I got all the shots I wanted we were chased off by park rangers for trespassing! It was illegal and dangerous to be on that bridge but it was so worth it... it would almost be worth it to get arrested for this gorgeous view. For once I was pretty proud for slightly breaking the law. This is overlooking those Upper Falls also you can almost see the Middle Falls in the top portion of the image. What a sight it was! I want to go back so bad but I have not had a chance as of yet because of lack of time or crappy weather. The light was pretty tough here with harsh shadows but I managed to pull out the dynamic range and detail in everything! It was sort of challenging just from one RAW but I accomplished it pretty well I think between a trustworthy programs such as Dynamic Photo HDR ( which extracted my desired dynamic range the lazy way from my RAW file) and CS4 for finishing touches. I tried to represent this scene exactly the way my eye saw this! This is as real as it gets :-)
Letchworth State Park is New York state park located 35 miles (56 km) southwest of Rochester and 60 miles (95 km) southeast of Buffalo in Livingston and Wyoming Counties. The park is roughly 17 miles (24 km) long,[2] covering 14,350 acres (58 km2) of land along the Genesee River.[2] Within the park there are three large waterfalls on the river and perhaps as many as fifty waterfalls found on tributaries that flow into it; the gorge formed by the river, with rock walls rising up to 550 feet (170 m) in places and which narrow to 400 feet (120 m) across above the middle of the three falls, prompted the area's reputation as the "Grand Canyon of the East".
The Upper Falls of the Genesee River is one of three major waterfalls on the Genesee River in Letchworth State Park in Western New York. What really makes this 40ft waterfall quite scenic is the rustic-looking bridge serving as a backdrop.
The Erie Railroad Company built a wooden trestle bridge over the Genesee River just above the Upper Falls. Construction started on July 1, 1852 and opened August 16, 1852. At the time, it was the longest and tallest wooden bridge in the world.[8]
The bridge is 820 feet (250 m) long and 240 feet (73 m) high.[10] It is still in use today.
In 2007, Letchworth was named one of the top 100 campgrounds in the nation.
Stating point of view
Indicate precisely what you mean to say
Yours sincerely, wasting away
— "When I'm Sixty-Four" (1967) by The Beatles
This is portrait of a disreputable and corrosive political hack, Roger Stone, working behind the scenes on November 5, 2020, to install his undeserving golden "horse" into the White House.
Incidentally, Stone was 64 years old on Election Day, November 8, 2016.
Media:
* YouTube: "Trump vet Roger Stone caught in elector plot: Watch Ari Melber’s exclusive report," MSNBC, August 16, 2023
* YouTube: "Indicted Trump on edge as more Roger Stone tapes explode: Admits Trump lost amidst ‘stop the steal’," NSNBC, Aug 21, 2023
* Rolling Stone: "Roger Stone Recorded Details of Fake Electors Plot Days After 2020 Election: Report," by Nikki McCann Ramirez, August 16, 2023
* YouTube: "A Storm Foretold – Trailer," Sydney Film Festival, May 9, 2023
Stable Diffusion
The Hawker Hurricane Mk l replica US-X represents as precisely as possible the 56 Squadron aircraft in which 20-year-old Pilot Officer Geoffrey Page was shot down and terribly burned on 12 August 1940.
The Hurricane fighter had been designed under the control of Hawker’s Chief Designer, Sydney Camm. The first flight took place on 6 November 1935 and the first operational examples joined 111 Squadron at Northolt at the end of 1937. During the Battle of Britain the Hurricane was in service with Fighter Command in greater numbers than the Spitfire and shot down far more enemy aircraft. In the later years of the war, the Hurricane achieved further fame in its “tank buster” role and it was not until 1947 that the type left squadron service with the RAF.
Geoffrey Page developed a fascination with aircraft and flying as a child, but his ambition to attend the RAF College, Cranwell was thwarted by his father’s opposition. Instead Geoffrey went to Imperial College, London University and learned to fly at Northolt with the University Air Squadron. Called up in September 1939, Geoffrey served briefly with 66 Squadron in 1940 before moving to 56 Squadron.
The squadron was operating from North Weald on 12 August when, following a late afternoon scramble, an attack was made on a German formation reported as “70 plus”. Geoffrey’s Hurricane was hit by return fire.
In his book Shot Down in Flames (originally published as Tales of a Guinea Pig), Geoffrey described the struggle to leave the burning cockpit and then to open his parachute despite the agony of his burns.
“Realising that pain or no pain the ripcord had to be pulled, the brain overcame the reaction of the raw nerve endings and forced the mutilated fingers to grasp the ring and pull firmly,” he wrote.
Rescued from the sea by a tender, which transferred him to the Margate lifeboat. Geoffrey became a founder member of the Guinea Pig Club for RAF personnel who underwent plastic surgery at the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead. Geoffrey eventually returned to operations and became a wing leader before being badly injured again in 1944.
In later years Geoffrey developed a determination that the heroism of his comrades in 1940 should be marked by a National Memorial. The construction of the Memorial here, and its unveiling by Her Late Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother on 9 July 1993, was largely his achievement.
Wing Commander Geoffrey Page, DSO, OBE, DFC (and bar) died on 5 August 2000, aged 80, shortly after attending the Memorial Day at Capel le Ferne, marking the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. All the info credit to The Battle of Britain Memorial website.
...I was a little sceptical of whether to upload it as it hasnt turned out to be the way i wanted..but somehow,the first half of my mind convined the second half to upload it....and i might be just right or just wrong!!!...
>>A photograph is usually looked at,seldom looked into :: Ansel adams
This stood second at the Bsb-Transition contest.
This stood first at the PCA-Summer contest.
View this on black:
Cheers!!!
"Longuich ([ ˈlɔŋɡɪç ]) is a local community in the Trier-Saarburg district in Rhineland-Palatinate. It belongs to the municipality of Schweich on the Roman Wine Route. The place is on the right bank of the Moselle in the Moselle-Franconian language area.
Longuich is a Gallo-Roman (more precisely: Mosel-Roman) place name (pronounced: Long_gich), which is derived from a 1st-century foundation called Longus Vicus (long village, long district). The place has been inhabited since at least Roman times, as various finds indicate, in particular the Villa Urbana, whose reconstructed bathing wing can be visited.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the Prussian mayor's office of Longuich emerged from the French Mairie Longuich.
Mosel (German: [ˈmoːzl̩]) is one of 13 German wine regions (Weinbaugebiete) for quality wines (Qualitätswein, formerly QbA and Prädikatswein), and takes its name from the Mosel River (French: Moselle; Luxembourgish: Musel). Before 1 August 2007 the region was called Mosel-Saar-Ruwer, but changed to a name that was considered more consumer-friendly. The wine region is Germany's third largest in terms of production but some consider it the leading region in terms of international prestige.
The region covers the valleys of the rivers Mosel, Saar, and Ruwer from near the mouth of the Mosel at Koblenz and upstream to the vicinity of Trier in the federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate. The area is known for the steep slopes of the region's vineyards overlooking the river. At 65° degrees incline, the steepest recorded vineyard in the world is the Calmont vineyard located on the Mosel and belonging to the village of Bremm, and therefore referred to as Bremmer Calmont. The Mosel is mainly famous for its wines made from the Riesling grape, but Elbling and Müller-Thurgau also contribute to the production, among others.
In the past two decades red wine production, especially from the Spätburgunder (Pinot noir), has increased in the Mosel and throughout the German vignoble and has become of increasing interest to the international wine community. Because of the northerly location of the Mosel, the Riesling wines are often light, tending to lower alcohol, crisp and high in acidity, and often exhibit "flowery" rather than or in addition to "fruity" aromas. Its most common vineyard soil is derived in the main from various kinds of slate deposits, which tend to give the wines a transparent, mineralic aspect, that often exhibit great depth of flavor. In the current era of climate change much work has been done to improve and gain acceptance for completely dry ("Trocken") Rieslings in this region, so that most of the more famous makers have found acceptance for such wines, particularly in Europe." - info from Wikipedia.
Summer 2019 I did a solo cycling tour across Europe through 12 countries over the course of 3 months. I began my adventure in Edinburgh, Scotland and finished in Florence, Italy cycling 8,816 km. During my trip I took 47,000 photos.
Now on Instagram.
Bouguereau, William Adolphe
Nationality: French
(France, La Rochelle, 1825 – France, La Rochelle, 1905)
DATE: 1888
ACQUISITION: Uriburu, Francisco
GENRE: biblical
SUPPORT: On canvas
DIMENSIONS: 203 x 250 cm.
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina
The Museum's Web site offers the following commentary about this work:
During the last quarter of the 19th Century, every month of May would bring extensive accounts of the Salon de Paris that frequently appeared in the Buenos Aires press, written by Argentinean correspondents or translated from European newspapers, judging which works among the five thousand on exhibit were the most important.
In an art culture that was often literary first and only later visual, the Salon’s grandes machines (derisive label applied to academic paintings at the time) were the object of laudatory or negative reviews that could be corroborated at times once the works themselves had actually arrived in Argentina. This was precisely the case for Bouguereau’s Premier Deuil (The First Mourning).
In a public letter to his friend Manuel Láinez—the Director of El Diario newspaper—Carlos Gorostiaga spared no praise in emphasizing that this was a painting that one could not look at without “feeling the impact of a powerful sense of grief […] everything in it is natural: light and shadow. There is not one strong color; nothing, absolutely nothing. This is undoubtedly why it overflows with naturalness, and truth floods in” (1). In this way, the “photographic” skill, veracity and immediate legibility (2) that Bouguereau sought to capture were effective on this observer, who found an “expression of life” in the sorrow the painting contained.
On the opposite end of the scale, an anonymous critic from El Censor pointed out what many detractors were observing at the time with regard to academic painting, its artificial quality: “El primer luto (The First Mourning) resembles a group of mechanical figures, Adam and Eve weep over the lifeless body of Abel; they constitute a group without life, their nude bodies look more like ivory than human flesh”.
All this led Buenos Aires’ readers to prefigure the painting on the basis of the written word; its arrival took place a few years later, and it appeared before the public in a resounding exhibition in the context of a benefit show organized with works offered by the principal local collectors. In this situation, Eduardo Schiaffino, who was not particularly fond of academic art, couldn’t help pointing out the elegant manner in which the painter had resolved the theme’s presentation: “in this beautiful group there is foreshortening, torsion and detailing in which its sculptural grace is made evident”
The First Mourning was a well-loved theme during the 19th Century, since it allowed for a deployment of pained bodies in a significant drama from biblical history, and it was a long-term undertaking for Bouguereau.
Though it was signed in 1888, he had been involved in its development since 1885, as a sketch pertaining to the Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France attests, and at that date the positions of the bodies that make up this Pietà had already been established, almost identical to the final result.
The grande machine he exhibited, along with a Baigneuse (Bather) at the 1888 Salon, recalled the pyramidal composition utilized during the Renaissance by both Michelangelo and Raphael; in fact, the artist was frequently called the “French Raphael”.
The group’s suffering is contained and staged. The greatest focus of the pain is the weeping mother’s face, but this is also veiled, unseen behind her hands. The handling of flesh tones also alludes to the classical tradition: the man is darker skinned, the woman, lighter, almost ivory-toned. The body of the dead boy is handsome, with an idealized beauty that omits any sign of the violence perpetrated by Cain. The drama is evoked only by the blood stain seen on the ground. It is one of the few spots of contrasting color in a painting dominated by earth tones. In the background, the altar with the smoking offering made by Abel, the cause of his brother’s anger, remits to the events recently transpired (Gen. 4:1-16). The smoke mixes in with the storm clouds that cover the sky, evidencing the episode’s origin and its tragic outcome.
Bouguereau sent this work along with a group of paintings he had produced over the past few years to the 1889 Exposition Universelle.
Through his habitually life-size figures, each work represented a different facet of his production, such as scenes of the Virgin (L’Annonciation (The Annunciation), 1888), young women surrounded by little angels (Chansons du printemps (Songs of Spring), 1889), putti (L’amour vainqueur (Cupid Vanquished), 1886), bathers (7), biblical history (Jésus-Christ rencontre sa mère (Jesus Meets His Mother), 1888) and also large, complex mythological compositions (La jeunesse de Bacchus (The Youth of Bacchus), 1884).
At this moment, Bouguereau was one of France’s most celebrated artists. He also enjoyed unprecedented commercial success, which turned his case into a veritable market “phenomenon”, above all in the United States and England (9). His career was further solidified year after year at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which was an inevitable endorsement on top of the enormous fascination his paintings produced among bourgeois buyers in both the Old and the New Worlds. These may be a few of the keys to understanding why his work became an object of desire for his Argentinean buyer, Francisco Uriburu, during the final decade of the 19th Century.
Source: www.bellasartes.gob.ar/en/the-collection-highlights/2770
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En el último cuarto del siglo XIX, era frecuente en la prensa argentina encontrar cada mes de mayo extensos récits del Salón de París, escritos por corresponsales argentinos o traducidos de periódicos europeos, que juzgaban las obras más importantes entre las más de cinco mil exhibidas. En una cultura artística que muchas veces primero fue literaria y luego visual, las grandes machines del Salón eran objeto de laudatorias o negativas reseñas que a veces podían corroborarse cuando la obra efectivamente llegaba al país. Así sucedió con El primer duelo de Bouguereau.
En una carta pública a su amigo Manuel Láinez –director de El Diario– Carlos Gorostiaga no ahorraba elogios al destacar que este era un cuadro que no se podía mirar sin “sentir el choque de una fuerte impresión de dolor […] todo es en el natural: luz y sombra. Ni un solo tinte fuerte; nada, absolutamente nada. Es sin duda por eso que rebosa de naturalidad, que inunda de verdad” (1). De este modo, la destreza “fotográfica” y la verosimilitud y legibilidad inmediata (2) buscadas por Bouguereau habían sido efectivas en este observador que hallaba en el dolor contenido de esta pintura una “expresión de vida”.
Desde la vereda opuesta, un anónimo crítico desde El Censor señalaba lo que muchos detractores observaban entonces en la pintura académica, su artificialidad: “El primer luto, parece un conjunto de figuras mecánicas, Adán y Eva lloran sobre el cuerpo exánime de Abel; constituyen un grupo sin vida, sus cuerpos desnudos parecen de marfil más que de carne humana” (3). Todo hacía que los lectores de Buenos Aires prefiguraran esta pintura desde la letra escrita; su arribo se concretó unos años después, y tuvo una resonada exhibición pública en 1893 en el contexto de una exposición benéfica organizada en base a obras cedidas por los principales coleccionistas locales. En este medio, Eduardo Schiaffino, quien no era particularmente amante del arte académico, no pudo dejar de señalar el modo elegante en que el pintor había resuelto el tema: “hay en este hermoso grupo escorzos, flexiones y detalles en que la gracia escultural es evidente”.
El primer duelo, temática cara al siglo XIX ya que permitía el despliegue de los cuerpos dolientes en este significativo drama vinculado a la historia bíblica, fue una empresa de largo aliento para Bouguereau.
Firmado en 1888, desde fines de 1885 estuvo involucrado en su desarrollo, y tal como demuestra un croquis perteneciente a la Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, ya para esta fecha las posiciones de los tres cuerpos que forman esta Pietà estaban planteadas casi igual a su resultado final (6). La grande machine exhibida, junto a una Baigneuse, en el Salón de 1888 remitía en su composición al esquema piramidal utilizado en el Renacimiento tanto por Miguel Ángel como por Rafael, de hecho el artista fue frecuentemente llamado el “Rafael francés”.
El dolor del grupo está contenido, escenificado. El foco mayor de pesar, el rostro de la madre llorosa, está también velado, al ser cubierto por las manos. El manejo de las carnaciones alude asimismo a la tradición clásica: el hombre más moreno, la mujer más clara, casi marfileña. El cuerpo del muerto es bello, con una belleza idealizada que omite cualquier signo de la violencia perpetrada por Caín. El drama está evocado por la mancha de sangre sobre el suelo. Es uno de los pocos focos de color contrastante en una pintura dominada por los tonos tierra. En el fondo, el altar con la ofrenda humeante realizada por Abel, aquella que había causado la ira de su hermano, remite a la historia reciente (Gen. 4, 1-16). El humo se mezcla con las nubes de un cielo tormentoso dando cuenta del origen del episodio y su trágico desenlace.
Bouguereau envió esta obra, junto a un conjunto de pinturas realizadas en los últimos años, a la Exposición Universal de 1889. Cada una de ellas representaba, con sus habituales figuras de tamaño natural, las distintas vertientes de su producción como las escenas de la Virgen (L’Annonciation, 1888), las jóvenes rodeadas de angelillos (Chansons du printemps, 1889), los putti (L’amour vainqueur, 1886), las bañistas (7), la historia bíblica (Jésus-Christ rencontre sa mère, 1888) y también grandes y complejas composiciones mitológicas (La jeunesse de Bacchus, 1884).
Para este momento, Bouguereau era uno de los artistas más célebres de Francia (8). Gozaba además de un éxito de mercado sin precedentes que convirtió su caso en un verdadero “fenómeno” comercial sobre todo en Estados Unidos e Inglaterra (9). Su carrera, cimentada año tras año en la Academia, era un aval inapelable al que se sumaba la gran fascinación que despertaba su pintura entre las burguesías adquisidoras del Viejo y del Nuevo Mundo. Estas pueden ser algunas de las claves para entender por qué esta obra se transformó en un objeto de deseo para su adquisidor argentino, Francisco Uriburu, en la última década del siglo XIX.
Description: Chandra's image of M83 shows numerous point-like neutron star and black hole X-ray sources scattered throughout the disk of the galaxy. The bright nuclear region glows prominently due to a cloud of hot gas and a high concentration of neutron stars and black holes that were created during a burst of star formation that is estimated to have begun about 20 million years ago in the galaxy's time frame.
Creator/Photographer: Chandra X-ray Observatory
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which was launched and deployed by Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999, is the most sophisticated X-ray observatory built to date. The mirrors on Chandra are the largest, most precisely shaped and aligned, and smoothest mirrors ever constructed. Chandra is helping scientists better understand the hot, turbulent regions of space and answer fundamental questions about origin, evolution, and destiny of the Universe. The images Chandra makes are twenty-five times sharper than the best previous X-ray telescope. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Medium: Chandra telescope x-ray
Date: 2003
Persistent URL: chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2003/1154/
Repository: Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
Gift line: NASA/CXC/U.Leicester/U.London/R.
Accession number: m83_03
Mona Seif, Alaa's sister, stencils a t-shirt. Alaa is a British-Egyptian political prisoner in Egypt. This photo was taken during the ongoing encampment protest by Alaa's two sisters - Sanaa and Mona Seif - outside Britain's Foreign Office.
Alaa Abd El-Fattah has endured much of the last twelve years in some of the worst prison conditions anywhere in the world, on account of his brave work in promoting democracy in Egypt. He was last arrested in September 2019 while attending Cairo's Dokki Police Station and in December last year was sentenced to five years imprisonment for "spreading false news undermining state security." More precisely, he had shared social media posts explaining the hell-hole reality of Egyptian prison conditions.
PROTEST OUTSIDE THE FOREIGN OFFICE
When this photo was taken Alaa's two sisters, Mona and Sana'a Seif, were staging a protest in London's King Charles Street outside the British Foreign Office in the hope that the Egyptian government can be pressured to release him, as media attention began to focus on the upcoming COP27 conference at Sharm El Sheikh on Egypt's Red Sea coast.
UPDATE AS OF WEDNESDAY 9 NOVEMBER 2022
Starting from Sunday 6 November, Alaa escalated his hunger strike, and stopped taking water. His sister Sanaa Seif took a flight the same weekend to attend the COP27 conference at Sharm El Sheikh in a last-minute effort to save Alaa's life.
For the latest on Alaa's situation listen to his sister's Sanaa Seif's speech to journalists attending the conference on Tuesday 8 November - "They are very happy for him to die. The only thing they care about is that it doesn't happen while the world is watching."
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqXibJ7PUTY
TORA PRISON - "A DAY HERE, IS LIKE A YEAR IN BELMARSH"
In April, Alaa began his hunger strike in a cell in one of the most secure sections of Cairo's sprawling and notorious Tora Prison - a maze of grim high concrete walls and watch towers, which strike fear into even the thousands of commuters who have to pass daily.
In 2012, one young Londoner confined to one of the least uncomfortable and most survivable wings of Tora prison, contrasted it with his own previous experience at Britain's high security Belmarsh. I can never forget his exact words. "A day here, is like a year at Belmarsh!" A little over 12 months later, he died of TB - the prison authorities had refused to listen to the pleas of his aunt, who fell on her knees during a rare visit, begging that he be admitted to the prison hospital.
ALAA'S HUNGER STRIKE CONTINUES AT WADI EL NATRUN PRISON
More than 200 days have passed since Alaa started his hunger strike. He has now been moved to the Wadi El Natrun prison complex in the desert north of Cairo, dubbed by inmates as the "Valley of Hell."
He may not survive much longer. However, as he holds British-Egyptian nationality, one would hope that the British government would be doing everything they could to secure his immediate release and it would be reasonable to suppose that the Foreign Office could get an immediate pledge in this regard, especially given that the British companies, including the likes of British Petroleum and BP, are the biggest investors in Egypt.
NO CONSULAR ACCESS
However, the British government have failed even to get him any consular access - think about that. That's an outrage. Even a convicted mass murderer, if British, would be entitled to consular access while in prison. That meeting would obviously not take place in his cell - but in a designated room in the prison or the highly supervised prison visiting area.
British men and women convicted of drug smuggling and other crimes in Egypt have received consular visits, so why not Alaa? The answer is because Alaa's crime is that he dared to tell the truth about Egypt, and the injustice both inside and outside its many prison walls. Nobody knows exactly how many political prisoners Egypt now has, but the number is estimated to be at least 60,000.
ALAA WAS ONE OF THE LEADERS OF THE MOST INSPIRATIONAL DEMOCRATIC REVOLT THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN
Alaa Abd El-Fattah was one of the leaders of arguably the most inspirational democratic revolt the world has seen in the last hundred years. Although the first phase of the 2011 uprising in Egypt lasted just 18 days, and although it followed the toppling of the dictator Ben Ali in Tunisia - the streets and bridges around Tahrir Square became a deadly stage watched by the world, where protesters from every walk of life were pitted against Egypt's feared state security forces. Against all the odds, and at the cost of many lives, Egyptians refused to leave the square, sleeping in front of the tanks and fending off attacks from government militia.
The Egyptian people's initial success in toppling the dictator Mubarak led to further revolts not just across the Middle East (most notably in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria) - the highly organised Tahrir-Square sit-in provided the inspiration for strikes and workplace sit-ins against austerity across the United States and Europe and to the Occupy Movement of the same year. The people of Egypt showed that it does not matter how brutal, feared and authoritarian a government is, it can be toppled if people act collectively.
THE MILITARY BACKLASH
It's true that Egypt's flirtation with the path to greater freedom seemed to be only temporary - the Egyptian authorities deployed the usual divide and rule tactics - encouraging the less committed protesters to return home - and then rushed to elections without allowing time for genuinely democratic opposition parties to develop.
Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood won the presidential election in 2012 - the Brotherhood (contrary to the perception many people have here in the West) had genuinely progressive elements within it, but the chance for any transformative radical programme was prevented partly by the corruption and self-interest of some of the main political actors and partly by opposition to its democratic mandate from the deep state (the military, the Interior Ministry, State Security, the police etc.)
The army, seeing its chance, seized power in 2013, superficially in the name of the people, but in reality, to advance the interests of the generals. The new president, Abdel Fattah El-Sissi, moved quickly to crush all opposition, and ordering his security forces to attack Muslim Brotherhood supporters who had gathered in eastern Cairo at Rabaa al-Adaweya Square, killing at least 800 people - the bloodiest massacre of civilians in Egypt's modern history.
DON'T ALLOW EGYPT TO USE COP27 TO GREENWASH ITS REGIME - AND PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION TO SAVE ALAA
Now COP27 is scheduled to take place in Sharm El-Sheikh and Sisi has been given a golden opportunity to greenwash his murderous regime, which has also seen ever increasing levels inequality and corruption. While British representatives at COP27 will be given accommodation in the most luxurious five star hotels in Sharm El-Sheikh and fall asleep listening to the sound of the waves, another British citizen, Alaa Abdel El-Fatah is near death, on a painful hunger strike in the darkest of places - his dimly lit cell. The only thing he might hear at night is the desperate cry from some prisoner in another cell appealing for medical help which most likely never comes.
If we care for freedom, real democracy and justice, we can't allow the British Foreign Office to forget Alaa - especially if it's simply not to upset the highly profitable relationship British multinationals have with one of the world's most authoritarian and corrupt regimes - a relationship which only benefits the wealthiest of Egyptians.
If you live in London, please show your support at the protest at King Charles Street - and wherever you live please sign the petition -
www.change.org/p/help-free-my-brother-before-it-s-too-lat...
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click to activate the icon of slideshow: the small triangle inscribed in the small rectangle, at the top right, in the photostream;
or…. Press the “L” button to zoom in the image;
clicca sulla piccola icona per attivare lo slideshow: sulla facciata principale del photostream, in alto a destra c'è un piccolo rettangolo (rappresenta il monitor) con dentro un piccolo triangolo nero;
oppure…. premi il tasto “L” per ingrandire l'immagine;
www.worldphoto.org/sony-world-photography-awards/winners-...
www.fotografidigitali.it/gallery/2726/opere-italiane-segn...
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A story of Sicily: the Sicilian Gandhi (but he was not Sicilian ...).
This photographic story is connected, at least in part, with the previous one, whose link is represented by the nephew of the painter Robert Kitson, Miss Daphne Phelps: in life she was a psychiatric social worker (she collaborated with Anna Freud, daughter by Sigmund Freud), on the death of his uncle in 1948 he moved to Sicily to take care of Casa Cuseni, having inherited it: initially he wanted to sell it and then return to England, instead he ended up falling in love with Taormina and Sicily, deciding to stay there for the rest of his life. Daphne ran Casa Cuseni welcoming paying guests, there are many illustrious names of artists, writers, well-known personalities who have stayed there: Danilo Dolci was one of these guests, and it is precisely about him that I wish to speak. He was born in 1924 in Sesana (Trieste), after a somewhat eventful life, in 1952 he moved to Trappeto (between Palermo and Trapani), a country among the poorest and most disadvantaged in Italy: that same year the first of numerous fasts, going to bed and fasting in the bed of a child who died of malnutrition, a protest that will end only when the authorities undertake to build a sewer. Danilo Dolci continues with numerous initiatives, from the publication of a book ("Banditi a Partinico", which makes public opinion aware of the poor living conditions of western Sicily, to this book and many others will follow), to the "strike at reverses ”, when the workers went on strike, hundreds of unemployed began to work to reactivate an abandoned municipal road, an initiative that was then stopped by the police; Dolci also initiates an activity of denunciation of the mafia phenomenon and its relations with politics. There are numerous certificates of esteem and solidarity that he receives from important personalities from Italy and abroad, but despite this, for others Danilo Dolci is a dangerous subversive, to be hindered, denigrated, locked up in prison. Yet Dolci does not pose as a guru, boss, or teacher, his working method is based on the conviction that change is based on the involvement and direct participation of those concerned, his idea of progress enhances local culture and skills; he tries, working closely with the people and the most disadvantaged and oppressed groups of western Sicily, to free the dormant creativity in every person, calling this research "maieutic", a term coming from philosophy, precisely from Socratic maieutics: it is "the 'art of the midwife ", every educational act is to bring to light all the inner potentialities of the one who wants to learn, like a mother who wants to give birth to her own child from her womb, so no to notions imparted a priori, yes to help the student to bring their knowledge to light, using dialogue as a tool; however, Socratic maieutics is unidirectional, while in Danilo Dolci's "reciprocal maieutics", knowledge comes out of experience and its sharing, therefore it presupposes the reciprocity of communication. During meetings with farmers and fishermen, the idea was born to build the dam on the Jato River, which is important for the economic development of the area, but also to remove a powerful weapon in the hands of the mafia, an instrument of power which controlled the few available water resources; however the request for "water for all" will be heavily hindered, popular mobilizations and long fasts will be necessary to finally see the project realized: now the dam exists, and others have been built, thus modifying the lives of thousands of people, with the development of numerous companies and cooperatives. Among the many activities of Dolci, thanks to the contribution of international experts, the experience of the Mirto Educational Center, attended by hundreds of children, should be mentioned. Returning to Daphne Phelps and Casa Cuseni, here is a lithograph by Tono Zancanaro, dedicated to the birth of one of Danilo Dolci's daughters, but, among the most important, there is a correspondence between the pacifist philosopher Bertrand Russel and Daphne Phelps, in which the English thinker invited Robert Kitson's niece to participate in the gatherings of progressive intellectuals and literary and scientific personalities of the time, among them, besides Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Carlo Levi, there was Danilo Dolci, sociologist, educator, still recognized today as one of the most important figures of nonviolence worldwide.
post Scriptum:
- the images with Danilo Dolci come from the Casa Cuseni archive: they are cuttings from original periodicals, often full pages, from English newspapers, carefully preserved by Miss Daphne Phelp; these images were also taken by photographing some pages of James McNeish's book, "Fire under the ashes - The life of Danilo Dolci";
- the photographs taken in various countries of Sicily, are prior to the covid-19 pandemic;
- thanks to the surgeon colleague dr. Franco Spadaro and his kind wife, Mrs. Mimma Cundari, owners of Casa Cuseni (declared in 1998, Italian National Monument), for their hospitality and availability, having made the Danilo Dolci archive available to me.
Una storia di Sicilia: il Gandhi siciliano (ma siciliano non era…).
Questo racconto fotografico, è connesso, almeno in parte, con quello precedente, il cui anello di congiunzione è rappresentato dalla nipote del pittore Robert Kitson, la signorina Daphne Phelps: lei nella vita era una assistente sociale psichiatrica (lei collaborava con Anna Freud, figlia di Sigmund Freud), alla morte dello zio nel 1948 si trasferì in Sicilia per occuparsi di Casa Cuseni, avendola ereditata: inizialmente la voleva vendere per poi ritornarsene in Inghilterra, invece finì con l’innamorarsi di Taormina e della Sicilia, decidendo di restarvi per il resto della sua vita. Daphne gestiva Casa Cuseni accogliendo ospiti paganti, numerosi sono i nomi illustri di artisti, scrittori, note personalità che vi hanno alloggiato: Danilo Dolci è stato uno di questi ospiti, ed è proprio di lui che desidero parlare. Egli nasce nel 1924 a Sesana (Trieste), dopo una vita un po’ movimentata, nel 1952 si trasferisce a Trappeto (tra Palermo e Trapani), un paese tra i più poveri e disagiati d’Italia: quello stesso anno inizia il primo di numerosi digiuni, coricandosi e digiunando nel letto di un bimbo morto per denutrizione, protesta che terminerà solo quando le autorità si impegneranno a costruire una fogna. Danilo Dolci prosegue con numerose iniziative, dalla pubblicazione di un libro (“Banditi a Partinico”, che mette a conoscenza dell’opinione pubblica delle misere condizioni di vita della Sicilia occidentale, a questo libro poi ne seguiranno molti altri), allo “sciopero alla rovescia”, quando i lavoratori fecero sciopero, centinaia di disoccupati si misero a lavorare per riattivare una strada comunale abbandonata, iniziativa però poi fermata dalla polizia; Dolci avvia anche una attività di denuncia del fenomeno mafioso e dei suoi rapporti con la politica. Numerosi sono gli attestati di stima e solidarietà che egli riceve da importanti personalità provenienti dall’Italia e dall’estero, ma nonostante ciò per altri Danilo Dolci è un pericoloso sovversivo, da ostacolare, denigrare, chiudere in prigione. Eppure Dolci non si atteggia né a santone, capo, od un maestro, il suo metodo di lavoro è basato sulla convinzione che il cambiamento è basato sul coinvolgimento e diretta partecipazione degli interessati, la sua idea di progresso valorizza la cultura e le competenze locali; egli cerca, lavorando a stretto contatto con la gente e le fasce più disagiate ed oppresse della Sicilia occidentale, di liberare la creatività sopita in ogni persona, chiamando tale ricerca “maieutica”, termine proveniente dalla filosofia, precisamente dalla maieutica socratica: è “l’arte della levatrice”, ogni atto educativo è far venire alla luce tutte le potenzialità interiori di colui che vuole imparare, al pari di una madre che vuol far nascere la propria creatura dal suo grembo, quindi no a nozioni impartite a priori, si ad aiutare lo studente a portare alla luce la propria conoscenza, usando il dialogo come strumento; però, la maieutica socratica è unidirezionale, mentre nella “maieutica reciproca” di Danilo Dolci, la conoscenza viene fuori dall’esperienza e dalla sua condivisione, quindi presuppone la reciprocità della comunicazione. Nel corso di riunioni con contadini e pescatori, nasce l’idea di costruire la diga sul fiume Jato, importante per lo sviluppo economico della zona, ma anche togliere un’arma potente in mano alla mafia, che faceva del controllo delle poche risorse idriche disponibili uno strumento di potere, però la richiesta di “acqua per tutti” verrà pesantemente ostacolata, saranno necessarie le mobilitazioni popolari, lunghi digiuni, per vedere infine realizzato il progetto: ora la diga esiste, ed altre sono state poi realizzate, modificando in tal modo la vita di migliaia di persone, con lo svilupparsi di numerose aziende e cooperative. Da menzionare, tra le tante attività di Dolci, grazie al contributo di esperti internazionali, l’esperienza del Centro Educativo di Mirto, frequentato da centinaia di bambini. Ritornando a Daphne Phelps e Casa Cuseni, qui è presente una litografia di Tono Zancanaro, dedicata alla nascita di una delle figlie di Danilo Dolci, ma, cosa tra le più importanti, esiste un carteggio tra il filosofo pacifista Bertrand Russel e Daphne Phelps, nel quale il pensatore inglese invitava la nipote di Robert Kitson a partecipare ai raduni di intellettuali progressisti e personalità letterarie e scientifiche dell’epoca, tra di loro, oltre Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre e Carlo Levi, c’era Danilo Dolci, sociologo, educatore, ancora oggi riconosciuto tra le figure di massimo rilievo della nonviolenza a livello mondiale.
post scriptum:
- le immagini con Danilo Dolci provengono dall'archivio di Casa Cuseni: sono ritagli di giornali originali dell'epoca, spesso pagine intere, provenienti da quotidiani inglesi, accuratamente conservati dalla signorina Daphne Phelp; tali immagini sono state realizzate fotografando anche alcune pagine del libro di James McNeish, "Fire under the ashes - The life of Danilo Dolci";
- le fotografie realizzate in diversi paesi della Sicilia, sono antecedenti alla pandemia da covid-19;
- si ringrazia il collega chirurgo dott. Franco Spadaro e la sua gentile consorte, signora Mimma Cundari, proprietari di Casa Cuseni (dichiarata nel 1998, Monumento Nazionale Italiano), per la loro ospitalità e disponibilità, avendo messo a mia disposizione l'archivio relativo a Danilo Dolci.
Every day at PRECISELY 2.30 p.m. this 747 arrives a the Vancouver airport. Of course never late! Good old German precision. (If they were late they would get shot!). Lol Lol
Picked up in an internet auction, this precisely-dated Kodachrome image depicts US Navy VC-118B 128425 of VR-1 Squadron based at NAF Andrews, at Lisbon on 26 March 1963, with lots of naval gold braid in evidence. Note the TWA steps with "Royal Ambassador" titling.
The party was that of Admiral Robert Lee Dennison (April 13, 1901 - March 14, 1980). Admiral Dennison was the Commander in Chief of the United States Atlantic Fleet (CINCLANTFLT) and United States Atlantic Command (CINCLANT) from February 28, 1960 to April 30, 1963.
The Minor Seminary of Pabré was founded in 2025, precisely 100 years ago. To the north of the current site, some of the original buildings' ruins remain. These have now almost completely disappeared due to erosion, as the buildings were constructed of earth.
Le Petit Séminaire de Pabré a été fondé en 2025, il y a tout juste 100 ans. Au nord du site actuel, il subsiste quelques ruines des premiers établissements. Celles-ci ont actuellement quasiment disparu sous l'effet de l'érosion, étant donné que les bâtiments avaient été construits en terre.
Summertime, and the livin's easy
Bradley's on the microphone with Ras MG
All the people in the dance will agree
That we're well-qualified to represent the L.B.C
Me, me and Louie, we gonna run to the party
And dance to the rhythm, it gets harder
(Harder, yeah, harder, yeah)
So far Savannah is giving me major Lana vibes (I have many dolls giving me those vibes, I know :P ) and although she precisely reminds me of the 2014 Lana...this verse of Doin' Time mentions a shelf so it was perfect for her, lol!,
Richard Ratcliffe (husband of British-Iranian Nazanin Zhagari Ratcliffe) places painted stones on the pavement outside Britain's Foreign Office for Alaa.
Alaa Abd El-Fattah has endured much of the last twelve years in some of the worst prison conditions anywhere for his brave work in promoting democracy in Egypt. He was last arrested in September 2019 while attending Cairo's Dokki Police Station and in December last year was sentenced to five years imprisonment for "spreading false news undermining state security." More precisely, he had shared social media posts explaining the hell-hole reality of Egyptian prison conditions.
PROTEST OUTSIDE THE FOREIGN OFFICE
Alaa's two sisters, Mona and Sana'a Seif, are currently staging a protest in London's King Charles Street outside the British Foreign Office in the hope that the Egyptian government can be pressured to release him, as media attention begins to focus on the upcoming COP27 conference at Sharm El Sheikh on Egypt's Red Sea coast.
TORA PRISON - "A DAY HERE, IS LIKE A YEAR IN BELMARSH"
In April, Alaa began his hunger strike in a cell in one of the most secure sections of Cairo's sprawling and notorious Tora Prison - a maze of grim high concrete walls and watch towers, which strike fear into even the thousands of commuters who have to pass daily.
In 2012, one young Londoner confined to one of the least uncomfortable and most survivable wings of Tora prison, contrasted it with his own previous experience at Britain's high security Belmarsh. I can never forget his exact words. "A day here, is like a year at Belmarsh!" A little over 12 months later, he died of TB - the prison authorities had refused to listen to the pleas of his aunt, who fell on her knees during a rare visit, begging that he be admitted to the prison hospital.
ALAA'S HUNGER STRIKE CONTINUES AT WADI EL NATRUN PRISON
More than 200 days have passed since Alaa started his hunger strike. He has now been moved to the Wadi El Natrun prison complex in the desert north of Cairo, dubbed by inmates as the "Valley of Hell."
He may not survive much longer. However, as he holds British-Egyptian nationality, one would hope that the British government would be doing everything they could to secure his immediate release and it would be reasonable to suppose that the Foreign Office could get an immediate pledge in this regard, especially given that the British companies, including the likes of British Petroleum and BP, are the biggest investors in Egypt.
NO CONSULAR ACCESS
However, the British government have failed even to get him any consular access - think about that. That's an outrage. Even a convicted mass murderer, if British, would be entitled to consular access while in prison. That meeting would obviously not take place in his cell - but in a designated room in the prison or the highly supervised prison visiting area.
British men and women convicted of drug smuggling and other crimes in Egypt have received consular visits, so why not Alaa? The answer is because Alaa's crime is that he dared to tell the truth about Egypt, and the injustice both inside and outside its many prison walls. Nobody knows exactly how many political prisoners Egypt now has, but the number is estimated to be at least 60,000.
ALAA WAS ONE OF THE LEADERS OF THE MOST INSPIRATIONAL DEMOCRATIC REVOLT THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN
Alaa Abd El-Fattah was one of the leaders of arguably the most inspirational democratic revolt the world has seen in the last hundred years. Although the first phase of the 2011 uprising in Egypt lasted just 18 days, and although it followed the toppling of the dictator Ben Ali in Tunisia - the streets and bridges around Tahrir Square became a deadly stage watched by the world, where protesters from every walk of life were pitted against Egypt's feared state security forces. Against all the odds, and at the cost of many lives, Egyptians refused to leave the square, sleeping in front of the tanks and fending off attacks from government militia.
The Egyptian people's initial success in toppling the dictator Mubarak led to further revolts not just across the Middle East (most notably in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria) - the highly organised Tahrir-Square sit-in provided the inspiration for strikes and workplace sit-ins against austerity across the United States and Europe and to the Occupy Movement of the same year. The people of Egypt showed that it does not matter how brutal, feared and authoritarian a government is, it can be toppled if people act collectively.
THE MILITARY BACKLASH
It's true that Egypt's flirtation with the path to greater freedom seemed to be only temporary - the Egyptian authorities deployed the usual divide and rule tactics - encouraging the less committed protesters to return home - and then rushed to elections without allowing time for a genuinely democratic opposition parties to develop. Instead, the Muslim Brotherhood were elected in 2012 - the movement had progressive elements, but the chance for any transformative radical programme was prevented by the corruption and self-interest of the main political actors, and the army, seeing its chance, seized power in 2013, superficially in the name of the people, but in reality, to advance the interests of Egypt's generals. The new president, Abdel Fattah El-Sissi, moved quickly to crush all opposition, and ordering his security forces to attack Muslim Brotherhood supporters who had gathered in eastern Cairo at Rabaa al-Adawiya Square, killing at least 800 people - the bloodiest massacre of civilians in Egypt's modern history.
DON'T ALLOW EGYPT TO USE COP27 TO GREENWASH ITS REGIME - AND PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION TO SAVE ALAA
Now COP27 is scheduled to take place in Sharm El-Sheikh and Sisi has been given a golden opportunity to greenwash his murderous regime, which has also seen ever increasing levels inequality and corruption. While British representatives at COP27 will be given accommodation in the most luxurious five star hotels in Sharm El-Sheikh and fall asleep listening to the sound of the waves, another British citizen, Alaa Abdel El-Fatah is near death, on a painful hunger strike in the darkest of places - his dimly lit cell. The only thing he might hear at night is the desperate cry from some prisoner in another cell appealing for medical help which most likely never comes.
If we care for freedom, real democracy and justice, we can't allow the British Foreign Office to forget Alaa - especially if it's simply not to upset the highly profitable relationship British multinationals have with one of the world's most authoritarian and corrupt regimes - a relationship which only benefits the wealthiest of Egyptians.
If you live in London, please show your support at the protest at King Charles Street - and wherever you live please sign the petition -
www.change.org/p/help-free-my-brother-before-it-s-too-lat...
This photograph was taken in the magic of The Golden Hour around Sunrise, (Sunrise was at precisely 07:39am), at an altitude of Five metres, at 07:47am on Thursday January 28th 2016 off Botany Road and Marine Drive, on the sandy shoreline of Botany Bay in Broadstairs, Kent, England.
I set off at 05:00am on a clear morning, the moon and the stars out to dazzle in temperatures around five degrees, on a pleanst hour and half long journey to enjoy a lovely sunrise. The seven bays in Broadstairs consist of: (From south to north) Dumpton Gap, Louisa Bay, Viking Bay, Stone Bay, Joss Bay, Kingsgate Bay and Botany Bay.
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Nikon D800 200mm 1/8000s f/5.6 iso1600 RAW (14Bit) Nikon back focus button enabled. AF-C Continuous point focus with 3-D tracking. Manual exposure. Matrix metering. Auto white balance. Nikon AF Fine tune set to (+6).
Nikkor AF-S 200-500mm f/5.6E ED VR. Power UP 95mm HD UV filter. Nikon MB-D12 battery grip. Two Nikon EN-EL batteries. Nikon DK-17M Magnifying Eyepiece. Nikon DK-19 soft rubber eyecup. Manfrotto MT057C3 057 Carbon Fiber Tripod 3 Sections (Payload 18kgs). Manfrotto MH057M0-RC4 057 Magnesium Ball Head with RC4 Quick Release (Payload 15kgs). Manfrotto quick release plate 410PL-14.Jessops Tripod bag. Optech Tripod Strap.Digi-Chip 64GB Class 10 UHS-1 SDXC. Lowepro Transporter camera strap. Lowepro Vertex 200 AW camera bag. Nikon MC-DC2 remote shutter release. Nikon GP-1 GPS unit.
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LATITUDE: N 51d 23m 19.05s
LONGITUDE: E 1d 26m 19.41s
ALTITUDE: 5.0m
RAW (TIFF) FILE SIZE: 103.00MB
PROCESSED (JPeg) SIZE: 18.02MB
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PROCESSING POWER:
Nikon D800 Firmware versions A 1.10 B 1.10 L 2.009 (Lens distortion control version 2)
HP 110-352na Desktop PC with AMD Quad-Core A6-5200 APU processor. AMD Radeon HD8400 graphics. 8 GB DDR3 Memory with 1TB SATA storage. 64-bit Windows 10. Verbatim USB 2.0 1TB desktop hard drive. WD My Passport Ultra 1tb USB3 Portable hard drive. Nikon ViewNX2 Version 2.10.3 64bit. Adobe photoshop Elements 8 Version 8.0 64bit
Long tongue, long antennae, long-horned bee, Eucera longicornis. A European (or more precisely Eurasian) lover of legumes and things for which a long tongue makes sense to use upon. I look at distribution maps of bees like these and wonder about exactly how many of these bees emerge each year. Photo: James Poindexter II. Collector: T. Peeters. Collected in the Netherlands
Photo license: CC-BY-SA. This photo can be reused as you wish. When doing so, please credit the creator (USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab) and the source (Naturalis Biodiversity Center) and adaptations must be shared under the same terms.
The specimen in this photo is provided by Naturalis Biodiversity Center in The Netherlands. For inquiries please contact: Frederique Bakker, email: frederique.bakker@naturalis.nl.
This image is part of the photo series ‘Cool bees of The Netherlands’. For more information: marten.schoonman@naturalis.nl
~~~~~~~~~~{{{{{{0}}}}}}~~~~~~~~~~
All photographs are public domain, feel free to download and use as you wish.
Photography Information:
Canon Mark II 5D, Zerene Stacker, Stackshot Sled, 65mm Canon MP-E 1-5X macro lens, Twin Macro Flash in Styrofoam Cooler, F5.0, ISO 100, Shutter Speed 200
We Are Made One with What We Touch and See
We are resolved into the supreme air,
We are made one with what we touch and see,
With our heart's blood each crimson sun is fair,
With our young lives each spring impassioned tree
Flames into green, the wildest beasts that range
The moor our kinsmen are, all life is one, and all is change.
- Oscar Wilde
You can also follow us on Instagram - account = USGSBIML
Want some Useful Links to the Techniques We Use? Well now here you go Citizen:
Best over all technical resource for photo stacking:
Art Photo Book: Bees: An Up-Close Look at Pollinators Around the World:
www.amazon.com/Bees-Up-Close-Pollinators-Around-World/dp/...
Free Field Guide to Bee Genera of Maryland:
bio2.elmira.edu/fieldbio/beesofmarylandbookversion1.pdf
Basic USGSBIML set up:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-_yvIsucOY
USGSBIML Photoshopping Technique: Note that we now have added using the burn tool at 50% opacity set to shadows to clean up the halos that bleed into the black background from "hot" color sections of the picture.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bdmx_8zqvN4
Bees of Maryland Organized by Taxa with information on each Genus
www.flickr.com/photos/usgsbiml/collections
PDF of Basic USGSBIML Photography Set Up:
Google Hangout Demonstration of Techniques:
plus.google.com/events/c5569losvskrv2nu606ltof8odo
or
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c15neFttoU
Excellent Technical Form on Stacking:
Contact information:
Sam Droege
sdroege@usgs.gov
301 497 5840
Sanaa and Mona Seif, sister of Alaa Abd El-Fattah, an imprisoned Egyptian-British democracy activist on hunger strike, talk to the press outside Britain's Foreign Office.
Alaa is over 200 days into his 100 calorie a day hunger strike in prison in Egypt. A candle-light vigil is planned for this Sunday 6 November at 4 pm opposite 10 Downing Street.
Alaa Abd El-Fattah has endured much of the last twelve years in some of the worst prison conditions anywhere in the world, on account of his brave work in promoting democracy in Egypt.
He was last arrested in September 2019 while attending Cairo's Dokki Police Station and in December last year was sentenced to five years imprisonment for "spreading false news undermining state security." More precisely, he had shared social media posts explaining the hell-hole reality of Egyptian prison conditions.
PROTEST OUTSIDE THE FOREIGN OFFICE
Alaa's two sisters, Mona and Sana'a Seif, are currently staging a protest in London's King Charles Street outside the British Foreign Office in the hope that the Egyptian government can be pressured to release him, as media attention begins to focus on the upcoming COP27 conference at Sharm El Sheikh on Egypt's Red Sea coast.
TORA PRISON - "A DAY HERE, IS LIKE A YEAR IN BELMARSH"
In April, Alaa began his hunger strike in a cell in one of the most secure sections of Cairo's sprawling and notorious Tora Prison - a maze of grim high concrete walls and watch towers, which strike fear into even the thousands of commuters who have to pass daily.
In 2012, one young Londoner confined to one of the least uncomfortable and most survivable wings of Tora prison, contrasted it with his own previous experience at Britain's high security Belmarsh. I can never forget his exact words. "A day here, is like a year at Belmarsh!" A little over 12 months later, he died of TB - the prison authorities had refused to listen to the pleas of his aunt, who fell on her knees during a rare visit, begging that he be admitted to the prison hospital.
ALAA'S HUNGER STRIKE CONTINUES AT WADI EL NATRUN PRISON
More than 200 days have passed since Alaa started his hunger strike. He has now been moved to the Wadi El Natrun prison complex in the desert north of Cairo, dubbed by inmates as the "Valley of Hell."
He may not survive much longer. However, as he holds British-Egyptian nationality, one would hope that the British government would be doing everything they could to secure his immediate release and it would be reasonable to suppose that the Foreign Office could get an immediate pledge in this regard, especially given that the British companies, including the likes of British Petroleum and BP, are the biggest investors in Egypt.
NO CONSULAR ACCESS
However, the British government have failed even to get him any consular access - think about that. That's an outrage. Even a convicted mass murderer, if British, would be entitled to consular access while in prison. That meeting would obviously not take place in his cell - but in a designated room in the prison or the highly supervised prison visiting area.
British men and women convicted of drug smuggling and other crimes in Egypt have received consular visits, so why not Alaa? The answer is because Alaa's crime is that he dared to tell the truth about Egypt, and the injustice both inside and outside its many prison walls. Nobody knows exactly how many political prisoners Egypt now has, but the number is estimated to be at least 60,000.
ALAA WAS ONE OF THE LEADERS OF THE MOST INSPIRATIONAL DEMOCRATIC REVOLT THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN
Alaa Abd El-Fattah was one of the leaders of arguably the most inspirational democratic revolt the world has seen in the last hundred years. Although the first phase of the 2011 uprising in Egypt lasted just 18 days, and although it followed the toppling of the dictator Ben Ali in Tunisia - the streets and bridges around Tahrir Square became a deadly stage watched by the world, where protesters from every walk of life were pitted against Egypt's feared state security forces. Against all the odds, and at the cost of many lives, Egyptians refused to leave the square, sleeping in front of the tanks and fending off attacks from government militia.
The Egyptian people's initial success in toppling the dictator Mubarak led to further revolts not just across the Middle East (most notably in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria) - the highly organised Tahrir-Square sit-in provided the inspiration for strikes and workplace sit-ins against austerity across the United States and Europe and to the Occupy Movement of the same year. The people of Egypt showed that it does not matter how brutal, feared and authoritarian a government is, it can be toppled if people act collectively.
THE MILITARY BACKLASH
It's true that Egypt's flirtation with the path to greater freedom seemed to be only temporary - the Egyptian authorities deployed the usual divide and rule tactics - encouraging the less committed protesters to return home - and then rushed to elections without allowing time for genuinely democratic opposition parties to develop.
Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood won the presidential election in 2012 - the Brotherhood (contrary to the perception many people have here in the West) had genuinely progressive elements within it, but the chance for any transformative radical programme was prevented partly by the corruption and self-interest of some of the main political actors and partly by opposition to its democratic mandate from the deep state (the military, the Interior Ministry, State Security, the police etc.)
The army, seeing its chance, seized power in 2013, superficially in the name of the people, but in reality, to advance the interests of the generals. The new president, Abdel Fattah El-Sissi, moved quickly to crush all opposition, and ordering his security forces to attack Muslim Brotherhood supporters who had gathered in eastern Cairo at Rabaa al-Adaweya Square, killing at least 800 people - the bloodiest massacre of civilians in Egypt's modern history.
DON'T ALLOW EGYPT TO USE COP27 TO GREENWASH ITS REGIME - AND PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION TO SAVE ALAA
Now COP27 is scheduled to take place in Sharm El-Sheikh and Sisi has been given a golden opportunity to greenwash his murderous regime, which has also seen ever increasing levels inequality and corruption. While British representatives at COP27 will be given accommodation in the most luxurious five star hotels in Sharm El-Sheikh and fall asleep listening to the sound of the waves, another British citizen, Alaa Abdel El-Fatah is near death, on a painful hunger strike in the darkest of places - his dimly lit cell. The only thing he might hear at night is the desperate cry from some prisoner in another cell appealing for medical help which most likely never comes.
If we care for freedom, real democracy and justice, we can't allow the British Foreign Office to forget Alaa - especially if it's simply not to upset the highly profitable relationship British multinationals have with one of the world's most authoritarian and corrupt regimes - a relationship which only benefits the wealthiest of Egyptians.
If you live in London, please show your support at the protest at King Charles Street - and wherever you live please sign the petition -
www.change.org/p/help-free-my-brother-before-it-s-too-lat...
Today's random guest in Sofia and more precisely in trolleybus depot Nadezhda - Ikarus 250.59 from Ukraine. It is private owned by people who use it to travel around Europe. Documentarily it's production year is 1987th, but the owner told us that the bus had been in factory storage for at least 2 years (it's windows are produced in 1984th and 1985th).
I cannot recall precisely where I took this shot, but it was in a garden somewhere around Vancouver. Enjoy.
Precisely assembled, very beautiful stone wall of the castle.
Obi-castle, Miyazaki, Japan.
PENTAX MX, TAMRON SP AF 90mm F2.8, Fujicolor PRO400H.
All right, so they're not precisely ordered by size, but they have kind of a "Russan Nesting Drops" kind of thing going on, here.
Norwegen / Buskerud - Hallingskarvet-Nationalpark
On the way to Prestholtskarvet.
Auf dem Weg zum Prestholtskarvet.
Hallingskarvet National Park (Norwegian: Hallingskarvet nasjonalpark) is a national park in central Norway that was established by the government on 22 December 2006. The park is located in the municipalities of Hol (Buskerud county), Ulvik and Aurland (both in Vestland county). More precisely, the park comprises the Hallingskarv plateau and the high mountain areas to the west of it. It includes the Vargebreen glacier as well as the valleys of Såtedalen, Lengjedalen, Ynglesdalen, and parts of Raggsteindalen.
The national park covers 450 square kilometres (170 sq mi) of the Hallingskarvet mountain range and hosts large stocks of wild reindeer, an important factor in the establishment of the park. The highest point in the national park is Folarskardnuten which reaches an elevation of 1,933 metres (6,342 ft) above sea level.
The landscape of Hallingskarvet was shaped by multiple ice ages. The park shows the geological history and the connection between this history and the variation in the species living there. It includes areas of special value and which are home to threatened or vulnerable species such as Draba cacuminum (whitlow-grass) and Botrychium lanceolatum (lance-leaf grapefern).
The Bergen Line runs along the southern boundary of the park. There is no road access to the southern side of the park, so Finse Station, a stop on the railway line, is one of the few ways that people can access this part of the park. The Norwegian County Road 50 runs near the northern boundary of the park.
Protection and use
The main objective of this national park is to preserve a large, unique, and largely untouched area in order to protect the landscape and the biome with its ecosystem, species and populations of, amongst others, the wild reindeer. The protection is designed to safeguard a characteristic element needed to understand the geological history of the Norwegian landscape. It is also designed to protect valuable elements of the cultural heritage.
The park is open to the traditional forms of outdoor activities which require little or no technical means.
Name
The first element is halling (inhabitant of the Hallingdal valley) and the last is the finite form of skarv (mountain or mountainous area without vegetation).
(Wikipedia)
Der Hallingskarvet-Nationalpark (norwegisch Hallingskarvet nasjonalpark) ist ein südnorwegischer Nationalpark. Er umfasst das Hallingskarvet-Hochplateau und erstreckt sich über das Gebiet der Gemeinden Hol (Provinz Buskerud), Ulvik und Aurland (Provinz Vestland) gehört.
Gegründet wurde der Park am 22. Dezember 2006, um die dortige große, unverwechselbare und nahezu unberührte Bergregion, die Artenvielfalt von Flora und Fauna und die dort heimischen Bergrentiere zu schützen. Der Park grenzt an das Naturschutzgebiet Skaupsjøen/Hardangerjøkulen und das Biotop Finse.
Im Süden des Parkes führen sowohl die Bergenbahn als auch die Reichsstraße 7 vorbei.
Geologie, Landschaft und Geografie
Der Nationalpark umfasst größtenteils das Hallingskarvethochplateau, welches aufgrund der Kaledonischen Orogenese entstand. Das vorherrschende Gesteinsmaterial der Bergkette ist präkambrisches Pluton.
Der höchste Berg ist der Folarskardnuten mit 1.933 m. Im Hallingskarvet befindet sich auch Norwegens höchster See, der Flakavatnet, welcher auf 1.453 m Höhe liegt.
Flora
Die Pflanzenwelt gestaltet sich mit über 300 verschiedenen Arten sehr vielfältig. Die am weitesten verbreiteten Pflanzen sind der Weiße Silberwurz, Knöllchen-Knöterich und Herbst-Löwenzahn. In den höheren Lagen kommen vor allem Dreiblatt-Binsen, Polarsimsen, Moosheide und Gletscher-Hahnenfuß vor.
Fauna
Im Park gibt es an größeren Säugetieren Bergrentiere, Elche, Rehe, Polarfüchse und Schneehasen. Nördlich des Parks leben zudem Vielfraße.
Die größten Greifvögel sind Steinadler, Gerfalke, Turmfalke und Raufußbussard. Der Kolkrabe ist im Hallingskarvet ebenfalls heimisch.
Kulturerbe
Im Nationalpark wurden verschiedene Jagdutensilien gefunden, die auf eine prähistorische/historische Nutzung der Berge als Jagd- und/oder Siedlungsgebiet schließen lassen.
Im 17. bis 19. Jahrhundert lag der Park entlang einer wichtigen Handelsroute. Einfache Übernachtungshütten, sog. lægre, zeugen noch heute davon. Im Jahre 1880 ließ der englische Graf Lord Garvagh eine steinerne Jagdhütte, die Lordehytta, errichten, um in der näheren Umgebung auf Rentierjagd zu gehen.
Verwaltung und Tourismus
Der Norwegische Wanderverein unterhält im Park die Hütten Finsehytta im Süden und Geiterygghytta im Norden. Private Unterkünfte gibt es im Raggsteindalen und bei Haugastøl. Zwischen den Hütten gibt es markierte Wanderwege.
Zwischen Finse und Ustaoset verläuft ein Stück des Skarverennet durch den Park. Im Süden des Parks verläuft zudem der Rallarvegen.
(Wikipedia)
Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Mary%27s_Church,_Berlin
St. Mary's Church, known in German as the Marienkirche, is a church in Berlin, Germany. It is located on Karl-Liebknecht-Straße (formerly Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße) in central Berlin, near Alexanderplatz. The exact age of the original church site and structure is not precisely known, but it was first mentioned in German chronicles in 1292. It is presumed to date from earlier in the 13th century. The architecture of the building is now largely composed of comparatively modern restoration work which took place in the late 19th century and in the post-war period. The church was originally a Roman Catholic church, but has been a Lutheran Protestant church since the Protestant Reformation and a united Protestant church since the Prussian Union of churches in 1817.
Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin
Berlin is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3,723,914 (2018) inhabitants make it the second most populous city proper of the European Union after London. The city is one of Germany's 16 federal states. It is surrounded by the state of Brandenburg, and contiguous with its capital, Potsdam. The two cities are at the center of the Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region, which is, with 6,004,857 (2015) inhabitants and an area of 30,370 square km, Germany's third-largest metropolitan region after the Rhine-Ruhr and Rhine-Main regions.
Berlin straddles the banks of the River Spree, which flows into the River Havel (a tributary of the River Elbe) in the western borough of Spandau. Among the city's main topographical features are the many lakes in the western and southeastern boroughs formed by the Spree, Havel, and Dahme rivers (the largest of which is Lake Müggelsee). Due to its location in the European Plain, Berlin is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate. About one-third of the city's area is composed of forests, parks, gardens, rivers, canals and lakes. The city lies in the Central German dialect area, the Berlin dialect being a variant of the Lusatian-New Marchian dialects.
First documented in the 13th century and situated at the crossing of two important historic trade routes, Berlin became the capital of the Margraviate of Brandenburg (1417–1701), the Kingdom of Prussia (1701–1918), the German Empire (1871–1918), the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), and the Third Reich (1933–1945). Berlin in the 1920s was the third largest municipality in the world. After World War II and its subsequent occupation by the victorious countries, the city was divided; West Berlin became a de facto West German exclave, surrounded by the Berlin Wall (1961–1989) and East German territory. East Berlin was declared capital of East Germany, while Bonn became the West German capital. Following German reunification in 1990, Berlin once again became the capital of all of Germany.
Berlin is a world city of culture, politics, media and science. Its economy is based on high-tech firms and the service sector, encompassing a diverse range of creative industries, research facilities, media corporations and convention venues. Berlin serves as a continental hub for air and rail traffic and has a highly complex public transportation network. The metropolis is a popular tourist destination. Significant industries also include IT, pharmaceuticals, biomedical engineering, clean tech, biotechnology, construction and electronics.
Berlin is home to world-renowned universities, orchestras, museums, and entertainment venues, and is host to many sporting events. Its Zoological Garden is the most visited zoo in Europe and one of the most popular worldwide. With the world's oldest large-scale movie studio complex, Berlin is an increasingly popular location for international film productions. The city is well known for its festivals, diverse architecture, nightlife, contemporary arts and a very high quality of living. Since the 2000s Berlin has seen the emergence of a cosmopolitan entrepreneurial scene.
Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernsehturm_Berlin
The Fernsehturm (English: Television Tower) is a television tower in central Berlin, Germany.
Close to Alexanderplatz in Berlin-Mitte, the tower was constructed between 1965-69 by the government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It was intended to be both a symbol of Communist power and of Berlin. It remains the latter today, as it is easily visible throughout the central and some suburban districts of Berlin. With its height of 368 metres (including antenna) it is the tallest structure in Germany, and the third-tallest structure in the European Union. Of four tallest structures in Europe, it is 2 m shorter than the Torreta de Guardamar, 0.5 m shorter than the Riga Radio and TV Tower, and 8 m taller than the Trbovlje Power Station in 2017. The structure is also more than 220 metres higher than the old Berlin Radio Tower in the western part of the city, which was built in the 1920s.
In addition to its main function as the location of several radio and television broadcasting stations, the building – internally known as "Fernmeldeturm 32" – serves as a viewing tower with observation deck including a bar at a height of 203 metres, as well as a rotating restaurant. Also, the Berlin TV Tower can be booked as a venue for events. The distinctive city landmark has undergone a radical, symbolic transformation: After German reunification, it changed from a politically charged, national symbol of the GDR into a citywide symbol of a reunited Berlin. Due to its universal and timeless design, it has increasingly been used as a trademark and is identified worldwide with Berlin and Germany. In 1979, the Berlin TV Tower received monument status by the GDR, a status which was perpetuated after the German reunification.
The tower has become one of the most prominent symbols of the country and is often in the establishing shot of films set in Berlin, alongside monuments such as the Brandenburg Gate, the Berlin Victory Column and the Reichstag building. It is also one of the ten most popular attractions in Germany with more than 1,000,000 visitors every year. Due to its location near Alexanderplatz, it is occasionally called Alex Tower.