Podcasts about Anat

ChatGPT est entré dans nos vies universitaires, un soir de novembre, sans y être invité. Et si, collectivement, on disait: «non», «c'est assez», «je n'en peux plus», «c'est toi qui t'écarte de mon chemin»!Dans cet épisode :  Réflexions et analyses critiques des thèmes abordés lors de notre précédent (épisode 113) sur l'IA, l'enseignement et la pédagogie universitaire, avec Marie-Ève Vachon Savary, Alexandre Laflamme, Andréane Sicotte.  Au programme: ChatGPT à l'université - « Pu capable d'endurer ça! C'est une plaie! »Le moment Akira – Implosion intérieur d'une intelligence naturelle... surchargée!Déterminisme technologique: Peut-on remettre la pâte à dent dans son tube? Non? Vraiment?De la possibilité d'interdire les LLM dans la formation universitaire!Se libérer «enfin» de «la tyrannie d'enseigner à ceux qui ne veulent pas apprendre » (saisir svp l'ironie).Le pillage d'une intelligence collective au profit d'intérêts privésLe développement de compétences complexes et de la pensée critiqueL'écriture académique, les LLM et le processus de révision par les pairsLes compétences d'écriture et de lecture : pelleter par en avant!L'accroissement des inégalités et injustices numériques Le retour du monastère académique et des avôts (du roman Anatèm, de Neal Stephenson) L'institutionnalisation de la science – un modèle propulsé par les forces du marchéLe contrôle de la puissance (nucléaire!) de l'IALa « découvrabilité » de la recherche plus localeLa réutilisation perpétuelle des mêmes sources et la pollution du puit de la science et de la rechercheLes IA agentiques, les risques de sécurité et la perte de contrôle des moyensUne tête bien faite au service du bien commun!Bonne écoute! Production et animation: Jean-François Sénéchal, Ph.DCollaborateurs et collaboratrices (BaristIAs):  Frédérick Plamondon, Benjamin Leblanc et Sylvain Munger Ph.D.Collaborateurs et collaboratrices:  Véronique Tremblay, Stéphane Mineo, Frédérick Plamondon, Shirley Plumerand, Sylvain Munger Ph.D, Ève Gaumond, Benjamin Leblanc.Support the show

Today, Hunter was joined by investigative journalist Anat Rubin to discuss her recent reporting on Public Defender Investigators in California. At times, investigators are the single most important person in a criminal defense case, and yet around the country, nearly all public defenders do not have access to necessary investigative resources. Today, Anat joins the show to discuss how the systemic underfunding of public defense investigators increases the risk of wrongful convictions by highlighting the story of an investigator who unsolved a murder.   Guest Anat Rubin, Investigative Journalist, CalMatters   Resources: Anat's Reporting https://calmatters.org/investigation/2025/06/public-defense-investigators-takeaways/ https://calmatters.org/investigation/2025/06/public-defense-investigators/   Contact Hunter Parnell:                                 Publicdefenseless@gmail.com  Instagram @PublicDefenselessPodcast Twitter                                                                 @PDefenselessPod www.publicdefenseless.com  Subscribe to the Patreon www.patreon.com/PublicDefenselessPodcast  Donate on PayPal https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5KW7WMJWEXTAJ Donate on Stripe https://donate.stripe.com/7sI01tb2v3dwaM8cMN Trying to find a specific part of an episode? Use this link to search transcripts of every episode of the show! https://app.reduct.video/o/eca54fbf9f/p/d543070e6a/share/c34e85194394723d4131/home  

The Challah Mom (Anat Ishai) candidly shares her personal Jewish journey of making aliyah to Israel from Toronto, Canada. She speaks about being born in Israel and growing up in Toronto as the daughter of Russian Jews. The Challah Mom describes the process of how she and her family made the decision to come to Israel for a year during Covid, how they moved back to Toronto afterward, and then officially moved back to Israel, making aliyah just 30 days before October 7. Her story is beautiful, soulful and authentic. It highlights the importance of listening to our inner voice, and it encourages people to embrace their light and potential. Don't be afraid of succeeding! Anat shares how she felt a return to self in Israel. Throughout our conversation, you can tangibly feel her deep, soulful connection to Israel and to Torah. As she navigated the ups and downs of life, Anat progressed on her Jewish journey. Instead of asking, "Why?" when things happened, The Challah Mom learned to ask, "What am I supposed to learn from this?" It's such a powerful shift in perspective. It's not so much that we need to know why something is happening, but more importantly, we need to know the hidden message inside of what is happening, and how we can grow from it.This is a very powerful message!The Challah Mom also shares her story about how she began covering her hair and why she wears her beautiful scarves.You can follow The Challah Mom on Instagram and Facebook.Vera Kessler (host of America's Top Rebbetzins) is a certified life coach. She specializes in transformational life coaching and accountability coaching. She is also a motivational speaker. Vera's mission is to help women get out of survival mode and start thriving. She works with women who are committed to stepping into their own self-worth and creating the life they want to live--one that is full of joy, empowerment, meaning, and purpose. To learn more, visit:https://innerlifecoachingwithvera.com/

Neste episódio, olhamos para a carreira de Nuri Bilge Ceylan e os seus contos sobre a Turquia profunda, feita de uma paisagem desoladora e imensa, tantas vezes reflectindo estados de espírito das suas personagens que lutam contra a solidão, o isolamento e a sua própria desilusão com a vida. Mais episódios em universosparalelos.net.

In this eye-opening episode of Coaching In Session, Michael Rearden sits down with inner child expert and transformational mentor Anat Peri. With over 20 years of experience in personal development and leadership, Anat shares profound insights on how childhood experiences shape adult behaviors, emotional responses, and personal growth.The conversation explores the emotional landscape of men, shedding light on societal norms that suppress male emotional expression and the crucial role of mentorship in developing emotional resilience. Anat also dives deep into the transition from boyhood to manhood, emphasizing how parents play a significant role in shaping emotional intelligence.Listeners will gain valuable tools for self-actualization, emotional validation, and resilience—learning how to break free from survival patterns and step into their true potential. This episode is packed with insights that will help you navigate emotions, develop healthier relationships, and embrace personal transformation.Key Takeaways:✅ The inner child holds the emotions and beliefs formed in early life.✅ Many adults unknowingly operate from childhood scripts.✅ Survival strategies can create success but also emotional gaps.✅ True self-actualization means going beyond societal expectations.✅ Emotional validation is crucial for mental well-being.✅ Unprocessed emotions can hold people back from growth.✅ Men struggle with emotional expression due to cultural conditioning.✅ Emotional resilience is key to navigating life's challenges.✅ Trusting the right people is essential for sharing vulnerabilities.✅ Recognizing when it's time for a life change is crucial for growth.Guest Links:

Tret de sortida a les PAU 2025: com han anat els primers exàmens?

Daf Yomi Shevuos Daf 34 by R' Eli Stefansky--00:00 - Good Morning00:14 - Guests01:58 - Emails05:49 - MDYsponsor.com07:05 - Questions of the Day09:16 - Introduction12:13 - Amud Beis13:51 - Amud Aleph42:14 - Amud Beis58:08 - Have a Wonderful Day!Quiz - http://Kahoot.MDYdaf.com ----Mesechta Sponsors:Anonymous: Hatzlacha bruchnius U'vgashmius----Monthly Sponsors:ActualEyes: IHO David (Duvie) Merkin of Eastern Union and all Silver Spring daffersEli Dyckman:For the Refuah sheleimah of תינוק בן רבקה and רבקה בת גילה----Sponsor of the Week:Anonymous: In honor of Reb Eli, his family and the whole MDY staff to continue to spread Torah Anonymous: In honor of Mark Ashkenazi (I wanted to donate Gemaras but this is the first link I see)----Sponsor of the Day:Anonymous: Refuah shelaima Anat bas Simcha. Having surgery this morning. Appreciation for R' Eli ----MDY Kids Monthly:Kidnovations: Zechus for Fishel, Elchanan, Akiva  |  Rivky & Mrs Stefansky----Art of the Month​:Refuah Shleima for יהונתן איתן בן בת שבע ברכהFor a zechus for Reb Eli and the whole MDY staff to continue to make Torah so enjoyable for so many In honor of Yossi Klein & Mark Ashkenazi for all the work they do----Turning of the daf:Kidnovations LLC: In honor of our sons; Kalmo (12yr) & Yisrael (9yr) for learning Sanhedrin & Makkos with Reb Eli ♥Adar Global:Going "Global" to be mechazeik the MDY chevrah on the East Coast! C U there!Anonymous: In honor of Mark Ashkenazi, 'Nuff said________________________________

In this episode we delve into the transformative power of inner child work and the various patterns that shape our relationships. Anat an inner child expert, shares her journey and insights on how unresolved childhood experiences manifest in adult relationships. The conversation explores the 5 different protective patterns: such as leaving, merging, enduring, aggressive, and rigid behaviors and how they impact emotional well-being. They discuss the importance of understanding the nervous system's role in emotional responses and the necessity of somatic healing to reconnect with oneself. The episode emphasizes the significance of nurturing the inner child and building resilience through emotional awareness and expression. In this conversation, Carly Pinchin and Anat Peri explore the intricate relationship between emotions, healing, and personal growth. They discuss the importance of awakening the nervous system, the limitations of talk therapy, and the necessity of feeling emotions to facilitate healing. The conversation also delves into breaking generational trauma, finding love after personal healing, and navigating relationships while pursuing personal growth. Throughout, they emphasize the importance of self-discovery and the role of safety in emotional expression.TAKEAWAYS- Inner child work is essential for emotional healing.- Patterns formed in childhood affect adult relationships.- The nervous system reacts faster than the mind.- Self-abandonment leads to disconnection in relationships.- Emotions are energy that needs to be expressed.- Healing is a lifelong journey of tending to oneself.- Understanding protective patterns can lead to growth.- Somatic healing helps reconnect with the body.- Building resilience is crucial for navigating life's challenges.- Nurturing the inner child unlocks personal gifts. Awakening the nervous system is crucial for emotional healing.- Emotions are just energy that can be metabolized in 90 seconds.- Talk therapy has its limitations; feeling is essential for healing.- Creating safety in the body allows for emotional exploration.- Healing requires learning to tend to oneself and express emotions.- Generational trauma can be broken through self-awareness and healing.- Finding love often comes after significant personal growth.- In relationships, one person's growth can inspire the other.- It's important to communicate needs in relationships for fulfillment.- Self-discovery is key to understanding what truly makes you happy.---CONNECT WITH ANATIG - https://www.instagram.com/anat.peri/?hl=en Website: www.trainingcampforthesoul.com My June 11-17th retreat - www.trainingcampforthesoul.com/june-retreat Cultivating Safety Meditation ( FREEBIE) - https://trainingcampforthesoul.com/cultivating-safety-meditation/ Unlock the Power of the 5 Personality Patterns - https://trainingcampforthesoul.com/5pp/ ---CONNECT WITH ME:INSTAGRAM - ⁠https://www.instagram.com/carlypinchin/ TIKTOK - ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@carlypinchin YOUTUBE - ⁠https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChhOERGYhv-0s-KZtp9HosQ/ Become Empowered + Powerful as EFF by tapping into your feminine with this 6 week course I created to help women who feel they're constantly living in their mind tap back into the wisdom of their bodies and their hearts to attract their deepest desires toward them: ⁠Empowered Feminine Course.⁠ https://carly-pinchin.mykajabi.com/offers/FVEdM52q/checkout

No penúltimo episódio desta nova temporada, conversamos sobre como políticas públicas como a implementação de moeda social podem aquecer a economia local e se tornarem fundamentais para o sucesso dos pequenos e médios empreendedores.

How many times have you convinced yourself you were healing—reading the books, attending the workshops, repeating affirmations—only to find yourself stuck in the same cycles? In this episode of Wickedly Smart Women, host Anjel B. Hartwell interviews Anat Peri, inner child expert. Anat dismantles the illusion of surface-level self-development and invites us into a deeper, more embodied path to transformation.  Anat's story is a masterclass in surrender, resilience, and leadership. She pulls back the curtain on why mindset alone isn't enough and how emotional resiliency is the true foundation of freedom.  If you've ever felt like you're “doing the work” but not actually changing, this episode might just be the wake-up call you need. What You Will Learn: How growing up with a “just think positive” mindset can unintentionally lead to emotional suppression and anxiety. Even a seemingly trauma-free childhood can create hidden wounds that shape adult behavior and relationships. The impact of emotionally unavailable parenting on future romantic patterns and the development of codependency. How traditional healing methods like mindset work and NLP often fall short without addressing the body and nervous system. What it means to live in your head versus being fully embodied. The difference between awareness and actual healing. What it's like to rebuild your life guided by intuition instead of external validation or cultural expectations. How working at the Chopra Center supported Anat's reconnection with herself through meditation and holistic practices. Why transformation can feel like walking through fire and why it's worth every uncomfortable step. The origin story of Training Camp for the Soul and how Anat turned her healing into a powerful business. Emotional resilience and nervous system capacity are important in being an effective coach or healer. How Anat's Mastery Certification Program equips coaches with more than tools. Why you can't just coach from your own healing story and what makes a sustainable coaching method. Connect with Anat Peri Training Camp for the Soul Connect with Anjel B. Hartwell Wickedly Smart Women Wickedly Smart Women on X Wickedly Smart Women on Instagram Wickedly Smart Women Facebook Community Wickedly Smart Women Store on TeePublic Wickedly Smart Women: Trusting Intuition, Taking Action, Transforming Worlds by Anjel B. Hartwell Listener Line (540) 402-0043 Ext. 4343  Email listeners@wickedlysmartwomen.com

In this episode, Anat Bardi and Laura Parks-Leduc join Rebekka Weidmann to discuss their research on values. They delve into their unique and shared definitions and research approaches to the topic of values, explaining how values can change and their associations with personality traits. The conversation also highlights well-established evidence about values and identifies areas that remain unexplored.

2025 WAW - Anat and Kayra from Israel - Episode 200 - At the Table With Darlene by Women Around the World

TRES MIL AÑOS DE HISTORIA JUDIA, CLASE 9, LIBRO DE SHOFETIM, Epoca de los jueces, Ehud Ben Guera, Shamgar Ben Anat, Pesel Mija y Debora Hanevia by Eli Suli

In this episode, Ms. Black reviews Money Out Loud: All the Financial Stuff No One Taught Us by Berna Anat.Book reviewed Money Out Loud by Berna Anat Other Books Mentioned Girl, Get Your Money Straight by Glinda BridgforthMind Over Money by Brad Klontz Success Runs in Our Race by George Fraser Zero Debt by Lynnette Khalfani-Cox Get Good with Money by Tiffany Aliche Ms. Black, the host of Staying in the Black, is a single mom, homeowner, and public-school educator in NYC. She owns two properties and is one mortgage away from being totally debt-free. She loves traveling the world with her family and has over $1M in her retirement accounts beyond her pension.Learn more about Ms. Black:Website: http://www.stayingintheblk.comInstagram:@stayingintheblk

We speak with Dan Petrenko, the Artistic Director of Winnipeg Jewish Theatre and the director of the upcoming production of The Band's Visit, as well as with actor Anat Kriger.

Special guest Anat Shenker-Osorio joins Joe and Alex for one of our favorite shows to date. You won't want to miss the energy. What is the entire Democratic political ecosystem getting wrong? What's broken about "testing?" And how do we take the fight more directly to Trump - with what Anat calls "the only thing that truly fells an autocrat?" Plus: How do we avoid "process words" and unintentionally defending the status quo? How we can break through with the voters who really need to hear it? Follow Anat on Bluesky at @anatosaurus.bsky.social. Check out the "Freedom over Fascism" toolkit: https://bit.ly/FreedomOverFascism Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Uma largada complicada em João Pessoa, mais números da Maratona de Paris, o destino de Julian Wanders, um triste óbito na Maratona de Manaus e uma lambança lá em Juazeiro do Norte-CE

The last days before the Great Hunt.Book 3 in 18 parts, By FinalStand. Listen to the ► Podcast at Explicit Novels.“Can the scorpion ever stop being a scorpion? “"Do we get our legally permitted weaponry back?" The bishop still held my hand."Sure. If it makes you feel better.""I would like to meet your people then," he gave my paw one last shake then released me. "Shall we go?""I will have someone take you to your car. I want to briefly meet with the President, of Havenstone, then I'll join you in the garage. We'll drive over to JIKIT and I'll make the introductions. Good enough?""That is acceptable," he nodded."What about you two?" I regarded the nun and the Swiss Super-soldier. The nun remained vigilant, and silent. The Swiss' eyes flickered to his boss before settling back on me."It is what I volunteered for," he stated firmly."Okay. Please never say I didn't give you a chance to take the sane way out. Also, Bishop Nicolö, circumstances have conspired to up my prospective wedding date to January 1st.""That will be more difficult. Why the change?" he remained grim."We are having twins. By March, this will be very visible.""That is, unfortunate," he shook his head."You have no idea," and then a brainstorm. "And I am curious about resurrecting the Order of the Dragon, the Societas Draconistarum." Technically that meant 'Society of the Dragonists' which was more appropriate than the literal Ordo Draconis."Precisely how do you plan to recreate a crusading Christian Order which was the purview of the Hungarian monarchs?" he didn't sound the least skeptical, just curious."I have billions of euros to fund such a thing," I winked. "Of far greater critical importance, I know where I can find the supernatural guidance and spiritual imperative for such an organization.""You are going to produce a dragon?" his eyes grew larger even as he fought down his fear. Good man. He was adaptive. He'd need to be."I never said such a thing. That would make me sound crazy," I smiled broadly. "Besides, when I say 'dragon', you think 'devil' and that's way too pedestrian for where we are going.""I am not a moral relativist.""Neither am I. I'm out to save lives and nurture the drive in the human spirit to reach for freedom, love and liberty. As you might imagine, I'm pretty freaking outnumbered.""I think you are crazy," he re-evaluated things."I just might be. In all honesty, you should back out now. Take your two compadres back to 25 East 39th Street (the Holy See's Permanent Observer Offices to the UN in NYC) and report 'Mission Failure'. You'll most likely live longer," I reasoned."I am not afraid to die," Sister Rafaela Sophia finally voiced an opinion."That's idiotic," I scoffed before the bishop could reprimand her for opening her mouth. "You should be.""My soul is in God's hands," she set her jaw."Does he talk to you?" I countered."His message is clear.""Not what I asked. I asked if he specifically directed you to toss your life fruitlessly away as an object lesson for the reckless, or careless?""This is uncalled for," Nicolö intervened."Nope. I bet you a phone call to my Brother to physically restore your bishopric that there are four people in this room who have murdered in cold blood," I kept eye contact with the nun, "and she's the odd one out. Right Juanita?""Yes, Ishara," Juanita slipped up. Her spycraft, like mine, needed work."You were in the military?" the bishop asked my bodyguard."Was? I am. Right now," she related. "I will be until I die."That earned me looks from the three Catholics."She is loyal," Nicolö nodded slightly toward her, referring to Juanita's declaration."Huh? To me? Nope. She's loyal to my office, which we shan't get into right now. Back to you, Sister Rafaela Sophia. Are you out to be a martyr, or has some saint, or angel, given you a directive the other two seem to be unaware of which causes you to devalue your life?""I am devoted to the One True God, Christ, our Savior," and Juanita snorted, "and the Virgin Mary," the nun stated firmly. "I don't hear voices in my head.""Juanita, that was rude. Apologize to our guest," I kept looking forward."No." Well, fuck you too."Gun," I commanded. I held out my left hand."What? No. I will not give you one of my guns," she resisted."Juanita, give me your primary weapon, or I will ask Pamela to beat you up the moment I depart for the Great Hunt. After yesterday's stunt, you know she will," I threatened. Fair, I was not. She drew a Glock-20 and handed it to me. I went through the routine, dropped the magazine then ejected the round before opening the door.Oh look, there were four SD chicks outside, ready to escort my visitors downstairs. I didn't even need to waste a phone call. It wasn't like the conference room wasn't being monitored."Excuse me," I took a half step out the door then hurled all three items down the hall. Looking back at Juanita. "Go fetch.""Fuck you," she snapped."And insulting her faith was as degrading to both her faith and her as me doing this to you is degrading to you right now," I lectured her. "It is important to her, therefore it is important to me because she is my guest in the same way it is important to me that I let my bodyguard do her job without being a total asshole all the time. Now go get your God-damn weapon," I barked. Off she went. I left the door open."Now Sister Rafaela Sophia, the point of all this is: I don't give a crap if you are willing to die for God. In fact, that makes you less than worthless to me and the team. I want to know if you are willing to put other motherfuckers in the ground so that Bishop Nicolá, or Mathias, might get to keep doing their jobs.""Murder is a sin," she declared."Go home," I sighed while shaking my head."She answers to me, the Church and God, not you, Mr. Nyilas," the bishop stepped forward."Then you can go home too," I shrugged. "I'm not asking for remorseless killers. I'm asking for people willing to kill to get the hard work done and best of all, for people who know the difference.""Everyone on JIKIT is a professional soldier, or killer?" he asked."No, but the ones who aren't don't carry guns and know to get down when things get funky," I bantered."I vouch for her," he insisted. Juanita came running back into the room."Cool beans. I don't know you either.""You apparently know my service history," he volleyed."Yeah. Ten years a foreigner in the service of France, then you went straight into a university which turns out Jesuits," I riposted."What turned your life around?" he evaded. That was okay. I'd gotten what I wanted. I was willing to bet he had read every bit of public information about me and it was rumored the heavy Catholic membership in the FBI had its benefits to the Church as well. Not so much as to give them insight into JIKIT, but,"Someone risked their life for me. It's been pretty much downhill from there," I confessed. It was the truth. After Katrina gave me the life line on Day Two, it had all spiraled to the revelation of my heritage, Dad's death, Summer Camp, the Hamptons, Romania and Aya's kidnapping."A person, a soldier, died saving my life," the bishop empathized. "Her story is similar. She seeks redemption. She is not suicidal. I am staking both our lives on it."Did he mean him and Mathias, or him and me? I wasn't certain. Still, it was good enough for now. I'd gotten a look at their emotional make up, even the relatively quiet Swiss."Very well," I agreed. "I have to go see the President about my new job description. I'll catch up with you at your car." To the SD team leader, "Take them to the garage. I will join the group of you very soon.""Yes Ishara," she nodded. I exited the room, Juanita in tow. Two SD entered. I was gone before the Papal team left. Upstairs we went, with one last chore to discharge. I had to check on Ms. French to be absolutely freaking sure it was Shawnee, because anyone else would spell disaster.{8:30 am, Monday, September 8th. Last day}A Room full of asistants:Well, there it was, the office of the Executive Director to the President, and not 'Executive Assistant', because this was Katrina's final 'fuck you, no, just her final 'fuck you' before the Great Hunt got underway. I shouldn't assume things, dang it!Anyway, according to the gray-haired matron running gatekeeper to the Office of the President, this was where I was supposed to show up. I shot Juanita a worried look. She glanced my way and shrugged, momentarily willing to not give me shit about the past 24 hours because where I was situated would determine how easily she could do her job.In we went. In the suite were three desks, the 'big' desk situated at the far end of the office space and two far more modest ones on either side of the entryway. The room expanded beyond the chokepoint formed by the two closest desks into a cluttered area. The walls were cluttered with inset bookshelves and portraits of women. Facing one another were a loveseat on my left with bookend plush chairs in an 'L' facing and a full sofa on the right. There were end tables at the ends of the sofa and the corners between the loveseat and each chair.As the door opened, I hadn't knock as this was my office, or so it seemed, the occupants, who had all been sitting in quiet conversation in the central section, began reacting. Oh look ~ Constanza! I nearly had a heart attack before I realized there were three other Amazons also in the room. Sadly, none were behind the 'big desk', so I couldn't tell who was in charge. Two of the other three choices weren't too much better. First off,"Ishara," Marilynn Saint John stood to greet me. I'd last seen her when I'd dedicated her grandmother's (Hayden's) spirit to the halls of my ancestors, not hers, after forcing the political crisis leading to Hayden's suicide ~ her taking herself to the cliffs and in doing so, destroying the Amazon Cult of Blood Purity. Marilynne was clearly still bitter with me. Umm, I could still incite passion in women I hadn't slept with, yet, woot?"Cáel," the senior-most and only friendly face in the room spoke next. Thank goodness it was Beyoncé Vincennes, Head of House Hanwasuit and House Ishara ally."Cáel Ishara," the third individual was deferential which I wasn't sure how to take as the last time I'd encountered her, yeah, things hadn't gone well either."Beyoncé," I started off with a smile. From there, I had to figure out, ah, Beyoncé's eyes flickered to Constanza then Sabia. I knew Marilynn, with her young age, had the least seniority, "Constanza, Sabia, Marilynn. How's tricks?"Glum faces by everyone except Beyoncé. I didn't ask about Sabia's particular well-being. It had been months since I'd beaten her into the mats of the Full-blooded gym. She'd attacked Yasmin, the Brazilian Hottie and my Brazilian Jujutsu sparring buddy, and I'd retaliated by ambushed her when she turned her back on us. Besides, she'd been giving me shit before I even could see straight.Constanza was minus her left eye because of her dire insult to me. If she wasn't capable of working, she wouldn't be here. If she appreciated my 'mercy' in sparing her life ~ her insult was worthy of her death ~ Constanza hid it well. I hadn't spared her expecting a change of heart. I hadn't felt words alone warranted anyone's death. I was a big boy and could take a few insults. House Ishara, as represented by me, could care less. These days, my sisters would be less understanding despite them knowing my heart."Constanza Landau of House Jaya and Marilynn Saint John of House Anahit are Assistants to President Shawnee French," Beyoncé eased things along, "so will be working closely with us, at least for the short term. Sabia Noel of House Guabancex, who I now think you know as well, has joined you as the other 'Assistant' to the 'Executive Director to the President', (that would make me an 'adept', but adept at what?), and since two of the three Regents are unfamiliar with the workings of Havenstone proper, Shawnee has asked me to perform in that role."Beyoncé was, or had been, Havenstone HQ's CFO (Chief Financial Officer). From what I was quickly piecing together, she would essentially be making all the day-to-day decisions concerning the running of Havenstone (how the Host made the majority of its money) until the Regents got up to speed.Only Buffy had actual experience with the New York office and, from what she had told me, solely within Executive Services. While ES knew 'who' did what inside Havenstone, they weren't aware precisely how those Amazons got their jobs done. That would have been an impossible task. Katrina could do it, but she knew it was beyond the ability of most of us 'mere mortals'. Since we were currently at war, the Host needed Katrina completely focused on her duties as Chief Spy-mistress, not baby-sitting the adults.Shawnee indeed had much gravitas among the other House Heads. Not only had she risen up to lead a First House, she had performed heroically during the final days of the last Secret War. Afterwards she had moved into the realm of Amazon jurisprudence and mediation. Until yesterday, she had lived in a House Arinniti freehold in Minnesota's Great Lakes region thus her desire for the 'Training Wheels' period.The Regency would not rule through telecommunication (the upper echelons feared being eavesdropped upon beyond the standard Amazon (read: paranoid) levels) and Havenstone: New York was the center best situated for the current war-fighting operations, so here she lived. I was sure a team from Executive Services was buying, outfitting/spy-proofing and fortifying a dwelling suitable for the President of a Fortune 500 company. Hayden's home would remain the domicile of Sydney thus Marilynn.The same rigmarole would be done for Rhada and Buffy (though I imaged Buffy would bitch endlessly). Publically, they were VP's of a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars and they had to present the public trappings of such leaders.Why did the Amazons do this ~ unmask their leadership to public exposure? Legal-simple: they could request and expect all levels of public and private security for their executives who happened to also be important officials of the Host. Certainly not all executives at Havenstone were officeholders, House Heads, or House Apprentices, but the high level of competence which permitted one often led to the other.Beyonce:As an example: Beyoncé wasn't the most 'bad-ass' lethal chick in House Hanwasuit. As she was preparing to be casted, her intelligence, creativity and diligence at her future craft, finances, was noted by the Host and the members of her House. In due time her name was circulated as Apprentice and the elders approved. When her elder cousin, the prior House Head, took herself to the cliffs, Beyoncé assumed the top spot. Beyoncé wasn't even one of that woman's three daughters.Mirroring her advancement in her House was her advancement in Havenstone's Accounting, Acquisitions and Banking Divisions until she was appointed CFO Havenstone HQ ~ the supreme financial authority inside Havenstone, though the individual regional branches had a greater degree of autonomy than you might normally expect from a 21st century conglomerate, or a Bronze Age autocracy.I had to constantly remind myself, despite the near-constant feuding, Amazons exhibited a phenomenally higher level of trust than I'd ever found in any other society I'd ever witnessed, or read about, before. Though technically Beyoncé could have gone to President Hayden to enforce her decisions ~ or now the Regency ~ she was far more diplomatic in her approach in dealing with the other 'continental' CEO's and CFO's.That meant she had to wrangle the aspirations and resources from:North America (including Latin America, the 'Canadian Arctic' and the North Pacific Ocean),South America (includes both the South Atlantic and South Pacific as far as Samoa),Europe (mostly Central Europe these days plus Antarctica, the 'Russian' Arctic and the North Atlantic),Africa (mostly West-central Africa),India (the subcontinent plus the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean) and,Southeast Asia (which includes Australia)All of which suggested Havenstone hadn't redrawn the Amazons' geographic demarcations since the late 19th century. As an example, an East African venture, say in Tanzania, was as likely to be under the purview of Havenstone: India (due to its control over the Indian Ocean) as Havenstone: Africa (which traditionally had no East Coast holdings due to their constant struggles versus the Arabic slave trade).Returning to Beyoncé: initially she had held the proper 'conservative' (aka man-hating) mindset. My behavior during that first Board Meeting began to change her opinion of me and the New Directive. After the Archery Range incident, Beyoncé became a vocal proponent of the New Directive and faced challenges within her ranks. House Heads do not have to accept challenges and Beyoncé didn't, reasoning with her detractors they had no alternatives save the 'Old Ways' which spelled doom for the Amazon Race.Bing-bang-boom ~ I became the Head of a resurrected House Ishara by the Will of the Ancestors and Beyoncé was vindicated. Not necessarily in the New Directive, but in her support of me thus the rebirth of a sister First House. The purge following High Priestess' Hayden's death was her ultimate absolution. The Ancestors and Destiny had spoken and shown Beyoncé had been piloting House Hanwasuit along the proper course all along.Back to my current circumstances:Oh, why was I Assistant to the Executive Director to the President? It gave me direct access to the finances of Havenstone which was a critical leg of the war-fighting stool ~ people, morale, money and equipment. As Chief Diplomat, I helped with all four of those in varying degrees, allied troops, allied victories, allied bank accounts and allied armaments.The Great Khan, my spiritual 'Blood-Brother', was ramping up his logistic support for my Amazons in Africa, Asia and the Americas. We were 'Allies in the Struggle' and he wasn't going to wait for the Condottieri to begin coordinating with the Seven Pillars to declare them to be his enemies. They were already fighting the Amazons and 9 Clans, his allies, so their fates were sealed.In Japan, my Amazons provided small yet highly effective strike groups which the Ninja families furnished all the support services for. Everything from food to bullets to medical attention as needed. Without reservation, we shared their death-grapple with the Seven Pillars.From the dispatches I was getting back from my family members and envoys in Japan, we were making serious diplomatic inroads with the Ninja. Once again, it was the Amazons shocking capacity for violence as well as their fanaticism, professionalism and proficiency which all impressed our hosts and terrified our enemies, and this from people of a philosophical mindset which had them historically battling samurai.The Black Lotus were running around like rhesus monkeys on crack cocaine unleashed in a China Shop and given RPG's. While the Amazons couldn't help them in China, Indochina & Thailand ~ the Khanate could and was. The Amazons were of more help in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, where the Black Lotus and Amazons were going everywhere on the offensive against the Seven Pillars while the normal tight cohesion and iron-clad confidence, traits which made the 7P's so dangerous ~ were shaken by their horrendous losses in the 'Homeland' aka Mainland China.Less we forget, the 'military intelligence' wing of their organization had been decimated by the Khanate's Anthrax attack due to members of the Earth & Sky sacrificing themselves by being injected with the toxin then allowing themselves to be captured, which always ended in torture and death.Furthermore, the People's Republic of China, while having a scary 18% of the population either captured, imprisoned, dead, or displaced due to the Khanate invasion, that had come with the loss of 63% of their landmass (they had lost all of Nei Mongol, Ningxia & Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Regions, Qinghai and Gansu as well as 90% of Yunnan, 80% of Sichuan and 20% of Shaanxi provinces) to the Khanate and the 'abomination' that was a free Tibet.Then came the Russian 'stab in the back' which entailed the loss of another 10% of their people falling under foreign dominion as well as losing 8% of their most industrialized territory, Manchuria (Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning provinces ~ the Nei Mongol portion of 'Manchuria' was in the Khanate's greedy clutches, from the viewpoint of a Seven P's warrior).Don't get me wrong, they weren't about to throw in the towel. If anything, they were becoming more dedicated to trying harder, digging deep into their knowledge of every atrocity, inhumanity and perversion now deemed necessary to re-chart history back onto its 'correct' path. It was this willingness to act in an even greater sociopathic manner which was being used against them. After all, the 7P's had plenty of proxy allies, who were starting to get really nervous about what their paymasters were now asking them to do,We Amazons were getting some extra special help too. The Booth-gan (Do not call them Thuggee ~ the confederate 9 Clan member based out of India though long since ensconced within various Hindi enclaves across the Globe) had created an all-female group of ultra-fanatical Kali-devotees ~ a gift for the upcoming battle fomented by the Will of the Goddess herself.While Aya was our Queen and the Regency would rule until she wished to assume command of the Amazon People, the nuts-and-bolts of the Host's activities were handled by Saint Marie as Golden Mare (our Minister of War) (technically she held the top spot due to our State of War, though no Golden Mare had ever exercised such authority over a Queen (and she definitely believed Aya was our Queen)), Katrina (as Minister of Intelligence and Security), Beyoncé (as Havenstone (the multinational corporation) ~ our Treasurer/Economic Tsarina) and me (our Foreign Minister).Saint Marie had decided to forgo a public face in order to better facilitate her moving around to various battle fronts and holding clandestine meetings with her junior regional commanders. Her Havenstone corporate title was 'Chief of Security Training and Certification'. As an extra level of deception, the head of Security Services wasn't even a Director-level position, instead being folded into the duties of the Office of the President.To my current circumstances ~ I had been given Constanza's house name which could only mean she wasn't currently assigned to the Security Detail; a fact that couldn't have made her bad attitude any better. Marilynn had completely lost her way as an Amazon when I first met her, burying her pain and confusion in endless partying and intoxicants. I believed only her grandmother's status as High Priestess kept her from the severest of reprimands, or death. I didn't even know what Marilynn's caste was. Sabia,"While I'm sure you are both far more qualified than I, precisely how did you two get these jobs?" I had to ask my two non-coworkers. Constanza glowered. Marilynn flinched."I have an in depth knowledge of Havenstone security procedures and resources," Constanza replied."Shawnee requested me," was Marilynn's comeback. "I also have intimate knowledge of the City of New York and its environs.""Actually, Buffy Ishara recommended you both to Shawnee," Beyoncé corrected their misconceptions. I knew the score. I'd be working intimately with the tight community around the President (Shawnee) and Vice Presidents (Buffy & Rhada). Buffy wanted me to be surrounded by women who hated my guts, so I wouldn't end up boinking them. It rarely worked that way. All too often ladies who hated my still-beating heart ended up punishing me with sex. I wasn't sure why that happened, but it did."Beyoncé, didn't the Chief Diplomat of the Host have her own office? I'm pretty sure Troika had one before her unfortunate collision with Saint Marie," I felt entitled to inquire."Do you feel you've earned that office space?" she riposted."Oh, fuck no!" I waved my hands one over the other to accentuate my denial. "I was just wondering where I could stick Juanita while I'm hanging around, here.""She has the desk right outside the door, Cáel," Beyoncé smiled knowingly. "So there is no way you can sneak past her.""Oh," I grunted. "Buffy again?""No. Pamela Pile put in that particular request.""Oh, Sweet Mother of God, now she is conspiring against me too?""Yes. Some of us realize the greatest hazard to your health is yourself, Ishara," Beyoncé chided me. "We'd like to keep you around, so we listen to those charged with that nigh impossible task.""Is she going to be hanging around the office often?" Constanza asked, either myself, Juanita, or Beyoncé; I wasn't sure. She = Pamela."Please, Constanza," I attempted to intervene, "don't make Pamela kill you. It will upset Mona." Constanza's scowl was accentuated by the eyepatch covering her ruined left socket, the one Pamela had carved out when Constanza had insulted me and House Ishara on our first day of rebirth. I didn't tell Juanita this, because Juanita might just shoot Constanza over the insult before Pamela got a chance to finish the job.The tension was palatable."Mona and I have talked, about Romania, and other things," Constanza grudgingly allowed. It took me a second to realize there was a hidden meaning to what she said. Mona was part of my personal Security Detail bodyguard unit. If she felt Constanza, the woman who had raised her after her birth-mother had died, was a threat to me, she'd feel duty-bound to snuff Constanza first. Amazons were hard-ass bitches alright and I think Mona had made that clear."I hope things can improve between us," I offered to Constanza. "Beyoncé, I just stopped in to say 'hey'. I'm off to JIKIT and I've got three of the Pope's people waiting on me in the garage so,""Vice President Varma requested a moment of your time," Beyoncé smirked. "She is in 2604.""Who?""Vice President Rhada Varma, a moment of your time, alone?" she clarified."Sure thing," I backed out of the office. Once I had some space, I turned to Juanita. "Give me three minutes then bust in and say, I don't know, a tsunami is about to overwhelm the city, or something. Otherwise, I won't get out for at least an hour and I think I've put the Bishop and his people through enough delays as it is.""Are you actually asking me to stop you from having an in-office liaison?" she studied me intently as we walked in the direction of Rhada's office."Yes. It's not likely to happen often, believe me.""Oh, I do, in that you won't ask me to do it often," she grumbled. I'd deal with Juanita's morale problem later. Right now, I had to gird my loins so they wouldn't do anything else with Rhada. I had work to do, damn it!Rhada was sitting at her desk, working on something, stylus raised up so she could chew on the end. Her hair was pulled back in a half-ponytail, the type that captured the rear half of the hair in a ponytail while leaving the front and bangs free to flow down. Rhada's blouse was white & billowy and, as I was soon to discover, her pants were ultra-tight and contour hugging."Mr. Nyilas," she greeted me. "I would like a moment of your time," she relayed what I already knew. She was more than a tad nervous to boot."Vice President Varma," I started off."When in private you may call me Rhada," she interrupted."Rhada, you look more ravishing than ever."That got up her and coming around her desk, which revealed her ultra-tight pants with no sign of her wearing underwear. Yikes! My cock was preparing to do what a cock was meant to do and I just didn't have the time, Really!"Do you have any time?" she let her bosom heave."Not today, ugh," I groaned. See, Rhada took the stylus and dragged it down her chin, throat and in between her bountiful mounds.All of which exposed the top of her black bra."Are you sure, Master?" she enticed me by turning around and then leaning over her desk, point that ass in my direction. My mouth began salivating and my groin ached. I found myself quick-stepping to her and giving those buttocks two firm slaps, one on each cheek."No, damn it, though I'm going to make you pay for this when I get back," I rumbled."Master will make me wait?" she taunted me."That will cost you even more," I growled. "I have business which simply won't wait and here is my captive teasing me with the treasures of her flesh. Bad, war captive," I spanked her yet again, hard. "Bad!" and I spanked her a fourth time. With each beating, Rhada gasped in pain and then exhaled in pleasure."If I've been bad, Master must be extra harsh with me when he returns in triumph from the Great Hunt," she gloated. Rhada had gotten what she wanted, which was another affirmation of my lust for her and our 'game'. I could provide her the release she so desperately craved while allowing her the safety of remaining in the Amazon fold. It was a perfect pairing, for her.I had other problems, such as all the other baby mamas in my life plus the extra-marital affairs I was contemplating. I still took the moments we had to snuggle with Rhada, her grinding that tush into my rod while I held both her arms tightly to her side while raining kisses down onto her neck and head."Sir! A giant tsunami is approaching the city!" Juanita exploded through the door."What?" I coughed. I had a face full of hair."Huh?" Rhada pushed up and away from me. I let her go."Right now," Juanita insisted. She really needed to stop taking me so seriously when I gave her such advice."Really?" from Rhada. She shot me a curious look so I shrugged. What else was I supposed to do with such a flimsy lie forcing our separation? At least I got out of there on time?{9:50 am, Monday, September 8th ~ Last day}(JKIT HQ)"Is this a common occurrence?" Sister Rafaela Sophia whispered to the closest woman, who happened to be Wiesława, the Polish Amazon. Since she hadn't arrived with us from Havenstone, the nun might have assumed she was with the 'Americans', or British."What?" Wiesława responded evenly."Weapons combat, they look real," the nun clarified."They are real. We always practice with real weapons.""Really?""Of course," Wiesława smiled at her. "We believe a few cuts and scrapes now will save lives when the true tests come.""Oh, you are with, Havenstone?" Rafaela clued in."Yes. I am Wiesława of House Živa. I am currently assigned to Unit L, Cáel's unit within JIKIT," she offered her hand to shake. Despite being a full-blooded Amazon from a freehold, her 'human' skills were progressing nicely. The nun shook it."I am Sister Rafaela Sophia of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, that is a Roman Catholic Religious Order." Pause. "Do you hate Catholics too?""Yes. We have lived beside your people for many centuries and found your clergy to be much more dangerous than your pagan predecessors. Still, Cáel thinks you can be relied on and he's proven we can trust outsider women, which I was raised to believe was unlikely, and outsider men, which was basically anathema, so I'm willing to set aside my prejudices and judge you as an individual," the Pole imparted."Outsider men?" Rafaela mumbled."Well, yes," Wiesława smirked. "You are a nun, right?""Yes.""So you set aside the World of Men to live mostly among women, right?""Not entirely," the nun chose her words carefully. "We still rely on priests for religious rights and of course obey the life teachings of Christ and follow the leadership of his Holiness, the Pope, a man.""No one is perfect," the Amazon bantered back."Do you know the teachings of our Lord, Jesus Christ?" Rafaela ventured into dangerous waters."Yes. He was the semi-historical Son of your supposed One True God. We are not monotheists. We are Polytheists. Živa is my House's matron Goddess. It is also the name of the first woman to lead the House, her birth name surrendered to Destiny so all the daughters who came afterwards would be equals.""Oh, is Mr. Nyilas also pagan?" she inquired."I am unsure. From what I have been told, he has commended the spirit of his fallen father to your Jesus in a sacred ceremony then, in the presence of your Trinity and the Goddess Ishara, brought in new members to his House. I suspect he may be both," Wiesława reasoned. "Why don't you ask him?""Because he's fighting for his life?" Rafaela looked my way.See, the entire time their discussion had been going on, I had been sparring in a spare room at JIKIT HQ with Estere Abed, the Hashashin assassin (rather redundant ~ like saying the Sahara Desert). I had two tomahawks while she had a scimitar and curved dagger. While we sparred using the furniture as obstacles, Agent-86 was briefing me on various World events to get my input.Addison Stuart (CIA) and Lady Fathom Worthington-Burke (MI-6) were having a chat with Bishop Nicolé de Santis, verifying for themselves he was worth adding to the team. Juanita was having a similar discussion with Rikki Martin (US State Department) concerning my earlier encounter with the Papal team. Nicolé's buddy, Wachtmeister Mathias Bosshart of the Swiss Guard, was getting acquainted with the other security personnel.In comparison, those two had it easy. Both men were in their elements. Nicolé was a spook who pretended to be a diplomat for the Pope and was well acquainted with terms like 'deniable assets', 'plausible deniability' and your direct superior referring to requests concerning your identity/diplomatic status by saying 'I never heard of him and if I had, I have no idea what he was doing when you caught him doing what I don't know what he was doing', or something like that.Mathias was in the company of military-security specialists, brother professionals who were introducing him to his 'sister' professionals. Our Homeland Security gang were almost entirely former military by now. They got along with our JSOC folks and both had gained a limited acceptance with the Amazon security contingent.They bonded over the fact they were forced to work with really shady characters ~ the 9 Clans menagerie ~ who didn't always appreciate JIKIT operational security. Without going into particulars, the Wachtmeister was given the impression the abnormal was the norm and if you didn't think there was a 'down-side' to being able to carry your personally favorite bang-bang (the SG 552-2P Commando in his case) with some serious attachments (read: grenade launcher) around in downtown Manhattan, you probably didn't belong on this team.Back in the room,"He's not fighting for his life," Estere laughed. "He is fighting for mine.""Right," I responded sarcastically. We went through a flurry of exchanges, ending up with me kicking a chair at her. Estere stepped over it, colliding with me.I blocked her dagger, disarmed her scimitar and,"You are dead," she panted down at me, smiling. I was on my back, her straddling me. She had a belt-knife to my throat. I hadn't see her draw it. The scimitar 'disarm' had been a distraction."Woot!" I exhaled."But you're dead," Sister Rafaela misunderstood my good humor."He survived a minute and thirty-four seconds more today than his previous record," Estere responded. She slithered off of me, doing my arousal no good whatsoever, then offered me a hand up."And that's better?""He's a rank amateur with a few months on the job. I've been training to kill people for nearly two decades," Estere smiled. "Care to have a go?""With him, or you?""Either," Estere offered."I don't have a knife, or any hand weapons," she stated."We'll need to remedy that," Wiesława stated. "You should at least carry a knife.""Really? Why?""It is a nearly universal tool," I verbally stepped up. "Even if you are disarmed, you should be able to find one relatively easily, people are less likely to miss a stolen knife than a purloined gun, and a concealed blade could come in handy.""Do you train in knife-work?" Rafaela eye-balled me."Absolutely. It is part of my culture," I grinned."Okay. Can we spar, hand-to-hand?""Sure," I nodded. I put my tomahawks in their harnesses then put my harnesses aside. Estere gave me a wink before giving us the fighting space."So," Rafaela began to circle, "are you Christian?""By your definition, or mine?""By the definition of the Catholic Church."Oh cool, she went for a Savate stance. This was going to get ugly.My "no," was followed by her kick and my block, lunge and grapple. She wasn't nearly as good as Felix. I had her down and in a choke hold within fifteen seconds.Perhaps she thought I'd take it easy on her. She tapped out. I released her, retreated and flowed back to my boxing stance. It took her a moment to realize this was 'practice', not 'an interview'. She hadn't failed in anyone's eyes. We were both doing this to get better."See, I really, truly believe I have talked to supernatural entities ~ some who are considered divinities," I continued. This time she was more careful, trading jabs and blocks with me. "They don't claim to be the One True God. I believe in such a thing, but I also believe having been given the Message, Humanity has been left to muddle things out for ourselves."Whoops, she popped me one."The Woman-Thing this morning?""Yep," I evaded another flurry. She got cocky and I landed three blows, dropping her to the ground. I didn't help her up. Instead, I withdrew and let her get back up on her own before deciding if she wanted to continue. She did."I believe I've seen dragons and ghosts. I have felt legions of my ancestors give me quiet encouragement when I needed it. I know the dead have been brought back to life," I came at her. This time we both went for body blows, knees, elbows and fists. She was not SD-caliber and she needed to be. I grappled and she was forced to tap out again. After she regained her feet, she held up a hand for a pause."Do you believe any of that?" she addressed Estere."I am an adherent of Ismaili Islam yet nothing Cáel has encountered is contrary to my belief system. The Universe is a complex place and the Divine Light is often seen through a fractured lenses," she counseled the nun."Among the escapees were lawyer Francisco Luemba, Catholic Priest Raul Tati, economist Belchior Lanso Tati and former policeman Benjamin Fuca who are serving jail sentences of between three and six years each for supposed links to the rebel group FLEC (Frente para a Libertaé'o do Enclave de Cabinda), which carried out the attack on the Togolese football team at the start of the Africa Cup of Nations in January, 2010," Agent-86 read off yet another bit of global minutia."We need to get to them," I half turned. Sister Rafaela punched me in the gut and I folded up."Oh!" she gasped. "I'm sorry.""Okay," I mumbled. I had to keep with the plan. "Those men. We need to contact our Coils people in Kinshasa and the Warden of the Mountain Ways ('she' was the Amazon Host's leader of Africa ~ in the ancient times, the mountain ways had been the routes of southern vulnerability for the Amazon tribe thus the name).""Okay," both Agent-86 and Estere answered."Why?" 86 added."The Coils and the Host have had a serious problem with no nation in Africa giving them even back room recognition so we are going to take over our own country, Cabinda. It's been struggling to be free of Angola since 1975 and, by latest estimates, we've got strike elements of over 2,000 Amazons ready and waiting next door in Cameroon, Gabon and the Republic of Congo.""So you are going to go to war with Angola?" Estere frowned. "Don't we have enough enemies?""Au contraire," I grinned wickedly. "The resistance movement is genuine," I ticked off my points, "they have tons of offshore oil, and after we set off some spectacular explosions in the two main Angolan ports which are just down the coast, we allow global panic to bully the UN into intervening before the Angolan military launch an effective counter-offensive ~ considering the Angolan Armed Forces (I'd been reading up on a ton of CIA & MI-6 briefings) will most likely involve attrition warfare since they can't beat us in a stand-up fight.""They, the Angolans, have no overland access, they are separated by 60 kilometers of territory belonging to the Democratic Republic of Congo over some sad ass roads Plus the Congo River itself which is freaking huge by the time it gets that close to the Atlantic, Cabinda rests on the Atlantic Ocean by the way. No bridges. The Angolan Navy is anemic. Let me think."I began pacing."Hmm, they have no paratroopers though they have some Special Forces, we will need to hit as many of them in the barracks as we can. Their last invasion was from the north, overland, from the Republic of the Congo, in 1975, not likely to happen this time, though I may have my 'Brother' weasel up a battalion of Indian paratroopers to act as convincing peacekeepers after the initial take over.""Perhaps we can recruit some Vietnamese. I'm sure they'll love fighting in someone else's jungle for a change. We'll need some of 'our' guys to seize the port of Soyo, it is on the wrong side of the river, but has the major refinery the Cabindans will need. Since the entire surrounding province are the same ethnic make-up as the Cabindans, we'll have to take that too.""Man-o-man, I bet by the time this is over they'll really wish they'd given little Cabinda independence back in 1975. As for their other refinery, it is in their capital, Luanda, a few big explosions there too will get the markets jittery. Check that ~ the complete and utter destruction of their major petroleum facility will create a stampede for Peace," I continued. I walked over as our resident computer intelligence genius worked his magic."Blowing things up, you mean killing people," the nun blanched."Yes. This is what I do," I spared her a sympathetic glance. "I've got a madman roaming around in my head who provides me truly epic military advice which normally, but not always, means blowing shit up and killing folks. Welcome to the team," then as the data appeared, "Holy Shit! Did they build their oil refinery in the midst of their ghetto?" I was staggered. The refinery in Soyo was isolated from the town so it could be easily (and safely) seized. It was the one in Luanda which was the 'Holy Shit' site."It looks that way," Agent-86 agreed nonplussed. "Hmm, yeah, here is the port facility then your neighborhood of shoddily constructed one- and two-story dwellings between the refinery and the inland storage tanks, the perimeter barrier appears to be a chain link fence. I'd hate to be their Chief of Security.""Oh yeah," I choked. Estere slipped around to get a look."Whoops," she snorted."What are these people thinking?" I continued. "The whole shebang is exposed to the northern quarter of the city. The storage tanks have residential dwellings on all four sides with numerous side streets. Two teams with RPGs and four rounds apiece, Holy Crap. Sorry Sister.""But I want to save lives," she sputtered."Limiting the collateral damage could be pretty tough," Estere frowned. She toggled throw a series of maps to multiple pictures."Oh, look (dripping sarcasm); they light up the refinery at night. You can sit off the coast in a speed boat under cover of darkness and attack from there," she noted."Damn. Those are a lot of lights," Agent-86 agreed."24-7 operation," I suspected."We will need some experts," the government agent nodded."Or we are going to kill a fuck-load of innocent people. Not just the workers, but can you imagine a fire spreading to those neighborhoods? Shit," I muttered."You can't seriously be contemplating doing something like this," the nun sputtered. "It is inhumane. Think of the families, the children.""Lady, yes I am. Do you have any idea what the Human Rights record of the Angolan Army in Cabinda is? It is truly horrific and in case you missed it, one of the guys in dire need of rescuing by me, due to him being a huge rebel leader who has managed to escape, is also a Catholic priest. He's going to be part of the new government we are going to install once we kill a few hundred Angolans ~ mostly soldiers (more like well over a thousand).""We are going to kill a few hundred so a few hundred thousand can live free, democratic lives without worrying about the local police and political establishment torturing and murdering them. It is all part of the plan.""I think I need to talk with the Bishop.""Hang on. Let me finish," I forestalled her. "He'll get briefed along with everyone else. After all, it is a majority Roman Catholic country as is Angola, so I'm sure your guy can be of immense help.""The people you are putting at risk don't deserve this," she protested."They never do," I nodded in agreement with her. "It rarely stops terrible crap from happening to them though."I felt sorry for the Sister. She thought the Bishop was going to put a stop to this. Poor girl; he was going to do the exact opposite. See, the two competing forces at play here were a communistic kleptocracy (currently ruling Angola) and Catholic liberation theology united with a Cabindan national identity dating back to 1885. At stake was 900,000 barrels a day of petroleum. That was a bunch of funding for somebody. Last I checked, the state run energy conglomerate had misplaced $32 billion, in just three years.Mind you, the Coils of the Serpent and the Amazon Host didn't want to help the People of Cabinda out of the goodness of their hearts either. They wanted cover for the importation of weapons and other war-fighting material so they could kill the Condottieri in Africa. If the rebel leaders-turned-legitimate government didn't play ball well, the Coils were in the 'assassinating people' business and somewhere along the line the survivors would figure out keeping 'us' happy kept them alive. Problem solved.It was Bishop Nicolé de Santis' job to facilitate that understanding. If certain people with Vatican credentials explained the 'facts of life' to the new regime a lot more lives could be saved, Catholic lives. In turn, he could work to make sure the new group in power wasn't nearly as corrupt as the gang we were tossing out. Better education and quality of life, improved infrastructure & security and a nice shiny cathedral, or two.We, as in JIKIT and our component members, didn't want to rule the country and dominate the people's lives. We needed the ports and the airfields with a blind eye turned to our skullduggery. Sure, there would be future considerations. Amazons and Coil members would be fighting and dying for these people's freedom ~ public recognition definitely not required. No; the Amazons wanted to be left alone in their deep jungle homes which was an isolation they basically already had. This was a future chit which said 'don't come looking'.The Coils? Let's just say in the future Cabinda would have embassies around the globe and if occasionally they wanted someone to slip through under diplomatic cover ~ they were good for it. And if the Cabindans ever needed help in the future they knew they had friends in dark places who were now invested in Cabinda's survival. It was a win-win-win, unless you were an Angolan big-wig, or one of their foot-soldier currently serving in Cabinda. Amazons weren't big on taking prisoners, or even giving the opposition the option of giving up.For me, it wasn't lunch yet and here I was plotting to overthrow yet another government in yet another country ~ though in only two, small provinces this time. Thank the Goddess I had the rest of the week

Our guest today is Anat Admati, professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business and co-author of The Bankers' New Clothes. In this episode, she takes a critical look at trust in powerful institutions—arguing that, when misplaced, trust can be not only naive but dangerous. Anat explains that much of the financial system operates on the illusion of oversight and accountability. While many believe that governments, regulators, and boards are safeguarding the public interest, the reality is often one of regulatory capture, corporate self-interest, and systemic opacity. She challenges listeners to rethink assumptions about “checks and balances” in modern capitalism. She also reflects on the role of academics and public intellectuals in holding power to account. While research often stays behind paywalls or within elite circles, Admati calls on scholars to engage more directly with public discourse—and describes the resistance they often face when challenging the status quo. The conversation covers trust, leadership, corporate governance, and the failures of financial reform. Anat argues that effective change requires more than technical fixes—it requires moral courage, transparency, and a willingness to challenge institutional convenience.

Babila, Susanne www.deutschlandfunk.de, Tag für Tag

We're back with a brand-new episode of Sake On Air and this week, we're bringing you behind the scenes of a special event - a sake-themed photo exhibition hosted by the Japan Sake and Shochu Information Center. For one week, starting February 12th, the Japan Sake and Shochu Information Center showcased the work of three international photographers: Anat Parnass, Anna Petek, and Cindy Bissig. Their stunning images highlighted the beauty of sake breweries and the craftsmanship behind Japan's iconic drink. We took this opportunity to speak with Anat and Anna, along with some of the visitors who attended the exhibition. Unfortunately, due to heavy snowfall, Cindy was unable to join the conversation, but Miho Ota sat down with the other two photographers to discuss their passion for photographing sake breweries, their sources of inspiration, and what makes the world of sake so fascinating through their lens. Tune in to hear their stories and gain a new perspective on the artistry of sake! We'd love to hear from you! Let us know at questions@sakeonair.com or send us a message on our Instagram, Facebook, or Substack! We'll be back very soon with plenty more Sake On Air. Until then, kampai! Sake On Air is made possible with the generous support of the Japan Sake & Shochu Makers Association and is broadcast from the Japan Sake & Shochu Information Center in Tokyo. Sake on Air was created by Potts K Productions and is produced by Export Japan. Our theme, “Younger Today Than Tomorrow” was composed by forSomethingNew for Sake On Air. 

Send us your thoughts! The members of all-star family jazz band The 3 Cohens — featuring Anat Cohen (clarinet), Avishai Cohen (trumpet) and Yuval Cohen (soprano saxophone) — have always taken time out from their ever-burgeoning careers as soloists and bandleaders to reconvene for music-making together. The siblings developed a deep musical bond growing up in Tel Aviv, with improvising together becoming second nature for them. The 3 Cohens recorded four studio albums over a decade: 2003's One, 2007's Braid, 2011's Family and 2013's Tightrope, with the last three released by Anzic Records, the indie label founded by Anat with kindred-spirit producer-collaborator Oded Lev-Ari. DownBeat put The 3 Cohens — with Anat the middle child to the elder Yuval and younger Avishai — on the cover of its January 2012 issue, hailing the trio's “chemistry, alchemy, telepathy.” Ten years on from that milestone, the 3 Cohens reunited for a live collaboration with Germany's lauded WDR Big Band (a Köln-based ensemble that has been performing jazz on West German Radio since 1957); the program showcased tailormade arrangements by Lev-Ari of compositions by himself and each member of The 3 Cohens, as well as two of their favorite classics: Gerry Mulligan's “Festive Minor” and the Louis Armstrong hit “Tiger Rag.” The performance was recorded for a very special live album, Interaction. Support the show

In this episode, Bill talks with Anat Shenker-Osario. She is a strategist, pollster and messaging consultant for progressive politicians. organizations and causes in the United States and around the world. Shenker-Osorio argues that progressives are not even "losing" the messaging war but rather failing to participate effectively. She attributes this to: An over-reliance on the idea that "good policies sell themselves." A lack of consistent, repeated messaging. Flawed message testing that doesn't reflect real-world communication. A lack of a "fight" mentality. She emphasizes the importance of controlling the narrative through language. She uses the example of "deportation" versus "abduction," and how conservatives have successfully redefined terms like "critical race theory." To counter MAGA messaging, She advises progressives to: Frame issues around shared values. Clearly identify the "villain" (e.g., "MAGA Republicans"). Offer a positive vision for the future and use the phase"MAGA is a death cult."She stresses that the Democratic party is seen as weak, and that the voters want to see a fight. You can follow Anat Shenker-Osario on Blue Sky at @Anatosauras.bsky.socialToday's Bill Press Pod is supported by the Iron Workers Union. More information at Ironworkers.org.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

SHOW NOTES: https://jewishbooks.blogspot.com/2025/03/night-owls.html TRANSCRIPT: https://otter.ai/u/NeK1Grf7bTzi-TYHpbLocZlEbH4?utm_source=copy_url Night Owls is an paranormal YA romance adventure about Clara and Molly, two estries who run an art house cinema in the Village in New York City. In case you're wondering, estries are Jewish owl-shifting bread-eating female vampires! This book is my new favorite, and I'm not the only one. This debut novel won gold from the Sydney Taylor Book Award AND the National Jewish Book Award! The story is fun and fast paced, it's eery and emotional, and it's got characters I want to hang out with even if they would probably be dangerous to know.  LEARN MORE: A.R. Vishny's website Buy or borrow Night Owls Conversation about American Girl dolls: A.R. Vishny's Hey Alma article, Dolls of Our Lives podcast, and The Book of Life's 2009 interview More about the plays "Indecent" and "God of Vengeance" Fantasy cast: Julie Benko as Clara, Micaela Diamond as Molly, Itay Tiran as Ashmedai, Swell Ariel Or as Anat, and Ninet Tayeb as Gila (Boaz is uncast). See images of the fantasy cast! CREDITS: Produced by Feldman Children's Library at Congregation B'nai Israel Co-sponsored by the Association of Jewish Libraries Sister podcast: Nice Jewish Books Theme Music: The Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band Newsletter: bookoflifepodcast.substack.com Facebook Discussion Group: Jewish Kidlit Mavens Facebook Page: Facebook.com/bookoflifepodcast Instagram: @bookoflifepodcast Twitter: @bookoflifepod Support the Podcast: Shop or Donate Your feedback is welcome! Please write to bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com or leave a voicemail at 561-206-2473.

Yesterday, we spoke with one of the most brilliant minds in politics in America, and one of the most brilliant in the world: Anat Shenker-Osorio. She's a messaging guru, who I met when I was reporting my book, The Persuaders — there's a whole chapter about her in it — and ever since at The Ink we have often turned to her whenever we need the best advice.But she's so much more than a messaging guru. She's a comedian. She is a person who, in spite of her messaging prowess, will always say something that really pokes and inflames people, but she does it intentionally, to provoke them into seeing what they might not otherwise have recognized. And in a moment when so many people do not know what to say, or how to say it — or seem to have lost the use of their vocal cords and spines — she is someone we can ask to tell people what they should be saying, because she knows just how to frame the most important questions of this time, and has answers for so many of them.For those who've been looking for leadership from above, she made it very clear that nicely asking Democrats to do something has never brought about real change. So stop doing that. Stop trying to get Chuck Schumer to do something.This conversation is an incredibly practical guide to what you need to — and can — do. Anyone and everyone can lead: we make the future, and it's time to do it by stepping up. If you want to, you are a leader!Congrats! Sorry. But congrats!You can start by creating social proof locally — which is to say, create a perception in your community that lots of people feel the way you feel. You might start with signs, hats, talking to people, or, as she put it, the painting of a barn. Just pick something, and get started. And soon enough you'll be leading.If you're not sure where to jump in, Anat's team keeps track of actions across the country, so visit her ever-evolving list of Ways to Resist. And read her Freedom over Fascism toolkit for tons of ideas and insight into how to communicate all of the ideas you'll find below.We know some of you prefer reading to watching, so we're publishing text excerpts of the conversation below. If you missed our live conversation, we encourage you to watch the entire video above.In the public interest, we are opening this video and transcript to all. But we're also asking candidly that folks support the half dozen or so people who now write for and edit and otherwise support the work of The Ink by becoming a paying subscriber today.Take a moment to support fearless, independent reporting, and to help us keep bringing you conversations like this one. Or give a gift or group subscription.Your support allows us to open these ideas to as many people as possible, with no paywall.I wanted to start maybe on a positive-ish note by asking you who is telling the right story right now? Who do you see in the pro-democracy movement? And I know that your answer to this may not take a lot of time because it may not be a very long list of people, but who is telling the right story?Well, let's start with a story that you helped bring to light, in your Live with Senator Chris Murphy. I thought he was absolutely spot-on in many ways. I don't know whether we'll come back to this, but I thought his response in particular when you held his feet somewhat to the fire about why other Democratic leaders are not stepping up. That was probably him at his most diplomatic. But I thought his description of reality was really spot on.Unsurprisingly, he's an MVP, is always there, always prescient, always saying the thing, speaking truth, not just to power, but ensuring we're speaking truth to each other.AOC, Jasmine Crockett, obviously. Governor Pritzker's responses yesterday were extraordinary. Exactly what's needed. And then outside of the elected official space, there's a lot going on. There are burgeoning protest movements, both from known organizations like Indivisible and Move On and Working Families Party, but also from brand newbies that just self-assembled on Substack, like the 50501 movement, and the burgeoning general strike movement.And because there's no up without a down, as they say, who is getting it most dramatically and maybe for you infuriatingly wrong?Do you want to open this Pandora's box? You know, the list is very, very, very long.One might say infinite.Most infuriatingly, it's the siren song of the authoritarian that they are fomenting a counterrevolution against a revolution that never occurred. This has always been their story, time and place immemorial, that you're being attacked, you're being put upon by some usurping minority, whether that be immigrants, whether that be Roma people in Hungary, whether that be people seeking asylum in Australia, whether that be Southern Europeans in the case of Brexit, whether that be trans people. It's always some other who is coming to get you and they have amassed too much power.And so I think what is most infuriating beyond just the absolute unwillingness to locate a single vertebra let alone a spine is the layering on of the misdiagnosis of why we are here when we blame when we make believe that the people with too much power in our society are undocumented immigrants and trans people. If it weren't so pathetic and sad it would be funny. So I think that that is what is particularly infuriating.Talk to me about specific moments in the last month where you've seen someone give a press conference, you've seen someone give a floor speech — give me the hall of shame because I consider you one of the only people, frankly, who I could ask to do that and you'll just do it.I mean, who am I most disappointed by? I think I'm extraordinarily disappointed by many of our senators. I'm thinking in particular, really sadly, because of all the extraordinary work that I know movement groups like Lucha in Arizona went to, putting him into power. But Ruben Gallego, not only refusing to stand up to this administration but also actively sponsoring the Laken Riley bill, which let's not kid ourselves, is about eliminating due process rights. It is about creating an unjust — even more unjust — legal system in the name of genuflecting at the altar of immigrants are the problem.I think that Amy Klobuchar has said things that are really infuriating and incensing. I think obviously Chuck Schumer's stance of, “We'll just rap about the price of eggs.” Hakeem Jeffries, in a very similar vein, and just a lot of, “Well, we can't do anything. We don't have any power.” Excuse making.It's so interesting when you see a lot of the folks on TV and when you're under a Biden presidency or an Obama presidency maybe you don't notice the mediocrity as much because it doesn't like risk the republic — and now to see some of those same people, they're not evil or awful the way that we're talking about on the right, but they are so profoundly mediocre and not up to the task of responding to a once-in-a-century emergency.You know, I referenced earlier before the conversation that you had with Senator Murphy and I was reflecting, because obviously I spend a lot of time listening to people because if you want to be decent at messaging, you have to spend a lot of time listening to people.And by listening to people, I mean in focus groups where we are asking them deep questions, we are extracting metaphors, we are uncovering their underlying assumptions and beliefs about what is going on. What is the origin story behind it? What are their desired solutions?And so I think a lot about what people's underlying motivations are, and the psychology of how they came to be where they are and doing what they're doing. And I think when I think about these folks who have risen to the halls of power, it kind of makes sense because to be honest, that they're behaving in these milquetoast ways.Is that what it takes to get there?Well, partly it's what it takes to get there, but also it is an accurate fact that that has worked for them. The things that they have done in their life have brought them to The New York Times newsroom, because — let's just widen the net of culpability a little bit here — has brought them to the pinnacle of journalism, has brought them to the pinnacle of politics, has brought them to the pinnacle of whatever it is I assume they desired to do once they became old enough to have a thing that they really wanted to do.And so… If taking certain steps and engaging in certain ways and refusing to upset people has been successful or at least successful within a trajectory that you define for yourself, then it actually kind of makes a lot of sense that random lady with big hair being like, “What the actual f**k are you doing? There's a hostile takeover of our government happening on your watch, friend.”It feels like, well, this has worked for me and it has achieved the things that I desire to achieve. So why would I change course?So here's something I'm struggling with. I think part of what explains the election loss going back to November is this problem you and I have talked about before of a tendency to kind of misappraise what is really, really salient with people. And you are someone who studies this and measures it. There are things you and I are worried about. There are things you've been screaming about that it turns out, way more people should be worried about it than are.If you were right about the election, if I was right about the election, a lot more people should have been concerned about things that, maybe did not reach the top rank.And so even now, now that we're in this presidency, I struggle with my own sense of how grave this is, how serious this is.This is a coup. This is that. And then sometimes I just, I live in New York City. Like I've walked down the street. I see people living their lives. These are people, 90 percent of them vote for Democrats, but you can just tell, if you sit in a restaurant, you hear conversations or you watch a normal TV show, the Jennifer Hudson talk show, you see normal life. And normal people living their lives are not living as though, as Senator Murphy says, this is the most serious crisis since the civil war and we may be a few months from irreversibly losing democracy.So my maybe difficult question for you is, is this thing that you and I share, this concern that everybody watching this shares. Is this concern out of touch in some way, maybe accurate, but is it out of sync with how regular people read things? Are we too ahead of the curve? Is it not landing with people?Talk to me about that disconnect.Yeah, it is not landing with people.So I want to say two things about that. The first is that in the lead-up to the election, I coined this phrase, the credulity chasm. And what the credulity chasm means is that when we look at the fundamental attitude that was most predictive of voting for Harris versus doing something else, and by something else I mean voting for Trump, staying at home, voting third party, etc.It wasn't, “Wow, that Project 2025 agenda, that sounds real sweet. That's like a Baskin Robbins tasty level of flavors. I'm excited.” It was whether or not people believed the agenda would come true. So this notion that the country has shifted rightwards is actually not supported by data.What has actually happened — and what happened through the election — was what the people who got it were saying: “No, it's for realsies. This is not hyperbolic. This threat is real. And all of this will come to pass and come to fruition.”And in fact, there's a Project 2025 tracker that shows that already within this first month of being in a hostile takeover, they have made good on one-third of the Project 2025 agenda. Just a little side note.So that credulity chasm, which I would argue we are still in — it is a basic facet of human psychology, and we see this among respondents in many, many parts of the world.This is not a uniquely U.S. phenomenon, but there's a U.S. layer on top of it that John Jost, the psychologist at NYU, calls system justification theory. Basically, there's kind of a fundamental human need to feel like I can predict what's going to happen. Tomorrow is going to be somewhat like today. Things are more or less okay. Things happen for a reason. Good things happen to good people. Bad things happen to bad people. There's a fundamental explanation for the universe because to question that and to really truly be living within that — the badness or the recognition of the badness, I should say — it requires a level of upset and a level of agitation and a level of awareness that is understandably very difficult for most people, because for most people, the basic facets of life, like being able to see a doctor, being able to help out your parents when their water heater breaks and being able to send your kid to university, et cetera, is pretty challenging.And so to ask people to layer on another thing is a lot. And I think that what we are experiencing over and over again, and it's been happening for a while. It's the frogs in boiling water problem, where we truly think this is a hot tub. And a little toasty, get a little cozy. But, you know, it's winter and a hot tub is nice and winter in most parts of the country. And I'm joking, but not by much.Anticipating this is actually why it is absolutely so fundamental that we be crystal clear and that our leaders be crystal clear that what's happening is in fact what's happening because not every problem that is named can be faced, but zero problems that we refuse to name and refuse to recognize can actually be faced. And this is where I think the strategy of hat in hand, please, sir, may I have a tuppence begging Democrats to locate a spine is wrong. And we need to stop pushing in that direction.Okay, but I guess what I'm wondering is, and I wonder this very personally, because I'm afraid that I'm doing it wrong.When I see Elon Musk shadow presidenting his way through these agencies. It basically gets rid of Congress. I mean, it's as grave a series of things as you know. And I talk about Elon Musk's anti-constitutional coup. I feel like I am describing reality as clearly as I can. I feel like I'm saying things that, given what I understand about this country and what people claim to care about, should be ringing bells.And I also feel like I can almost hear with that double consciousness, people are not going to care about that. Everybody watching this is going to care about this, right? But not all the people not watching this, who actually outnumber the people watching this. And so, is that even just doing it wrong? Like, should it just be, “Your grandma's social security check is in danger?” Like, just the practical things?Because this kind of parallels the whole thing in the election about crime and eggs and democracy, all that stuff. Am I doing it wrong when I really fixate on the anti-constitutional coup by Elon Musk?You're right to fixate on it. You're wrong in voter-facing and public-facing messaging to call it that. And it's for the reasons you've already intuited. The Constitution is an abstraction, even though it is actually a physical document, I am aware. Whenever we are in the language of protecting institutions, protecting norms, protecting democracy — democracy never bought anyone dinner.And in point of fact, the way that most people, the way that the average American thinks about democracy, if they think about it at all, is the system as it is presently construed. The thing that we have now. And by the way, the thing that we have now, I'm not loving. I'm not very fond of it.So anytime our language, our messaging implies that what we are asking for is a return to January 19th, 2025, meaning right before inauguration, people weren't psyched about that day either. And so the answer is, As you've already intuited, is how do we make it person-facing, voter-facing, American-facing? How do we make it tangible?So what do we say? We say: “This is a government of the bullies for the billionaires.” Trump and the billionaires who bought him, Musk — you can name both of them, you can name either of them — are coming for your life and your livelihood. He is coming for your freedom. He is coming for your privacy. He is coming for your information. And he is conducting a hostile takeover of our government so he can take our money.”That's the simplest way of expressing it.But do you think that is working? Right now?It's not happening enough. But, you know, I can tell you from experimentation, both within focus groups and within our own internal polling that we continuously do. Yes, the most the highest impact way that we can characterize what Musk is doing is, “a hostile takeover of our government and an armed robbery of our money and our and our very deliberate there.But ultimately, there is absolutely nothing that we can say that will ever be as loud as what we can do.Yes, we should be calling our representatives. And yes, we are rightly incensed about the fact that these people who purportedly have sworn an oath to govern in our name apparently can't be bothered to work on Fridays and, you know, don't want to use the mechanisms at their disposal to throw sand in the wheels of government in order to stop this hostile takeover.Infuriating. Rightly so. Call them. Call the Republicans, too. But understand what has stopped autocracy in other places and within our own history, when we think about the civil rights movement, when we think about ACT UP, when we think about the movement to get the Americans with Disabilities Act, and women's suffrage.Imagine if the Montgomery bus boycott folks were like, “I know, here's an idea. Let's ask the Democrats if they would pretty please end this whole completely unjust, horrifying segregation thing.”Or when folks newly in the throes of the HIV AIDS crisis, dying en masse from this disease that apparently came out of nowhere, watching their loved ones suffer and struggle, if they were like, “You know what we should do? We should ask the Democrats if they would pretty please do something about this.”No, that isn't what they did. They broke into the New York Stock Exchange, as you may know, and they hung a banner from where the bell gets rung saying, “Sell Burroughs Wellcome” which is the pharmaceutical corporation that was making AZT at the time.And sure enough, by the end of the month, the price had dropped. And not that much later, there had been an appropriations bill, the Ryan White bill, to actually bring money into this fight and force research and so on.And so what we do is so much louder than what we say, because what we do, people being out in the world saying, physically opposing this and speaking about it and writing songs about it and making parodies and making TikToks and painting “F**k the Fascists” on the side of their barn.That is actually what sways public opinion. What sways public opinion is what we call social proof. People do the things they think people like them do.And so it's this chicken-and-egg problem where you're walking around New York or I'm walking around the Bay area or someone's walking around in the middle of America and you don't see anyone else freaking out. You don't see anyone else angry. You don't see anyone else upset. And so you're like, I guess really nothing's happening. And so it's about the doing more than it is about the saying.This is so important what you're saying. And it's reframing something for me.It's almost like when we talk about protest, mass mobilization right now, resistance, I think the frame in people's mind is, the object of that is the right. You're protesting against the right, you're resisting the right. And you're hoping for maybe Democrats to be part of this. You're the subject opposing that object and you're kind of inviting them to be part of the subject.And you're reframing this like, no, no, no, the Democrats are like a second object. They're not here. They're there. They're another thing you are mobilizing against for different reasons. It's a different kind of mobilization. But you are mobilizing against their passivity and then against the things the right is doing.Does that sound right?I mean, yes and no. I think… and feel free to lob the charge of hypocrisy at me. Bring it on, because I'm about to perform a big old hypocrisy on you.I'm obviously extraordinarily pissed off at Democrats. I have spent the last many years of my career helping elect Democrats. And so you can understand how it feels especially galling to me and many of you. However, it is the fact that when our public discourse — this is where you're going to come at me, come at me because I'm guilty. Do as I say, not as I post, I would say.When we are loudly saying, “Democrats aren't doing this, Democrats aren't doing that, Democrats are weak here, Democrats are weak there, Democrats refuse.” Then that is the narrative. That is the discourse that is in the public. And insofar as people continue to view the Democrats as the rightful centerpiece of the opposition — which is a reasonable conclusion, they're purportedly the opposition party in a duopoly — it looks like the regime is unopposed. What the regime is doing is fine. People are largely O.K. with it.And so because in life you cannot actually make other people do things — it is very, very unfortunate. It's one of the hard lessons of parenting. You can't actually physically make people do things. You can only really focus on what you're doing.I'm not saying stop pressuring them, but I'm saying what would actually cause a sea change among the calcified leadership — and yes, hashtag not all Democrats, there are extraordinary Democrats who are doing the right thing, as we said earlier — is when there is a mass movement.Actually they're not leaders, they don't go first, literally, to lead means to go first. That's really all it means. And so that means that every single one of you listening right now: If you want to, you're a leader. If you want to, you're a leader.Let's look, for example, at the Black Lives Matter resurgence that happened in 2020. During that protest, during that June, public opinion of BLM moved ahead by 12 points. It was only when the protests stopped And the right-wing coordinated backlash happened that opinion swayed back, which was an intentional thing.The same thing with the Muslim ban. When Trump was first promising the Muslim ban during his first run, it polled popular.But when it actually happened, and people took the extraordinary step of driving to the airport. And you live in New York. Nobody drives — your wife doesn't drive you to the airport. I don't know your business, but I'm telling you that. Who drives to LAX? Who drives to SFO? Nobody drives to these airports. That is not a thing that happens to everyday Americans.It's showing, not telling — showing, not telling — that they are against this. That is actually what altered people's perceptions of whether or not the Muslim ban was okay or not.So that's really it. And that is what drags Democrats along. It's ordinary people showing that they disagree.So this is so helpful and you are always so helpful. Even though I've spent so long engaging with your work, there's like a particular unlock here. And a lot of people are responding to that also. I'm just going to try to summarize.I hear your point on managing the correct level of infighting or criticizing Dems. You talk about calling your representative, pressuring them to do things.Your idea about painting the barn really struck me because a lot of people — everyone who subscribes to The Ink, all their comments are like, “I call everybody, I do this, nothing's happening.”And I don't think a lot of people have thought of it as what you said, which is, yes, you're trying to pressure some leaders, but a very tangible thing you can do is increase the perception of people around you about the number of people who feel this way.Exactly. Because that is something you can do and you can measure. I'm not saying don't do the calling your reps and stuff, but that stuff just feels so remote to people I know.And people are so frustrated, like changing the perception about the number of people who feel that way around you. That is like a marching order.And the other thing to recognize and to realize, and we have a running list that we just keep for ourselves for our team of the actions that are happening right now. It is by no means comprehensive. It couldn't possibly be comprehensive — stuff is popping up everywhere. It's just the stuff that comes across our radar.Do you know how many people go to the average school board meeting in most towns? Do you know how quickly and easily you and two, three, four of your friends will be the only people at the school board meeting?A lot of what has happened in our politics is that we actually stopped organizing. And a lot of the heroic, extraordinary, wonderful organizations that I admire and respect and like count as colleagues, we all became so fixated on channeling ourselves through the electoral process. And that means that instead of organizing, everybody moved to field and called it organizing. And by field, I mean getting people registered, getting people to vote. Fine, do that. I'm not knocking it.But that's not organizing. That is not organizing. And we need to stop kidding ourselves. Organizing is finding out who runs the PTA in your town? Who runs the biggest church? Who are the Boy Scout leaders? Who are the Girl Scout leaders? Are you actually talking to people and radicalizing them in the original definition? You know, radical just means “to the root,” right? Are you actually radicalizing them in a new political understanding of what is happening? Why is it happening? And what is the origin of it? Where does it come from?So that they can withstand all of these constant right-wing drumbeats that say it's the immigrants or it's the Black people or it's the trans people or it's whomever, it's the Muslims. So that they actually have an authentic consciousness and that they themselves then are talking to other people.That's organizing.And so go local. I cannot emphasize enough, especially if you live in a smaller place, especially if you live in a red state, in a purple district, whatever.You show up at your school board meeting and the two of you or the three of you or the four of you, you show up at your city council, you're the only people there. These fascist policies, yes, they are being constructed at the national level. Of course, they are. But they have to be implemented at the local level. And it is at the local level.Let's just take, for instance, Aurora, Colorado. That is where they want to massively expand a detention facility. In order to continue with their evil draconian plan of concentration camps for people who happen to not have been born here and, you know, speak English with the wrong accent, apparently.So Aurora is not Manhattan. It is not Los Angeles. It is not D.C. It is a particular town with a particular city council with a particular set of folks. And right now there is a battle going on to define Aurora, to massively expanded detention facility there.People in that town and surrounding communities could go and say, “We are Aurora.” They could do food trucks of every ethnicity, and nationality. They could do giant dance parties saying, “We are Aurora. This is what we believe.”I'm going to go to Aurora as they do all this. I mean, as God is my witness, I will. This is my pledge: I am going to make a 10,000 or however many food truck caravan from every contiguous state to D.C, in order to have the largest bhangra, K-pop, salsa, samba, polka — I'm not intentionally leaving out any kind of music fill in all the musics — dance party to show not tell that immigrants are awesome.Because we can not live, we can not survive in a dual narrative or a three-part narrative in which immigrants are either villains, which is of course what the right says, or they're victims, which is all too often, sadly, where we have been in advocacy. What I call the ay pobrecitosnarrative. You know, with due respect to the Statue of Liberty, give me your tired or your poor. Most people feel tired and poor. They're not really out seeking that. Or the third narrative, that being immigrants are our valets. You know, they do the jobs that no one wants. They help us.Immigrants are awesome. Immigrants are joy. Immigrants are life. Immigrants are interesting. They're entrepreneurs. You know, America is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. And that's a good thing. And so let's make it that way, as you recently wrote.One of the only silver linings for me of this whole era is that the thing that I wrote about before I met you, before I did Persuaders, was a book about billionaires. And it was very difficult to convince people to care. A lot of liberal and even progressive people were like, “Why are you going after these people? Like, sure, they're not the best, but like, really? These are your enemies? You know, Bill Gates or whoever?”It was actually hard in 2018 when that book came out. It was hard. I was often on the back foot, right? I really had to make a case. People were very, very skeptical of why anyone would say anything negative about the ones who give money away and do all this stuff.It is really different. Seven years later, like everybody gets it. Everybody understands what oligarchs are, you know?Thanks to you.Well, I don't think that's the case. It's thanks to AOC and Bernie and Elizabeth Warren and others. But I wonder whether you think, again, with Elon, the oligarch frame, the warning of oligarchy — is this as salient and helpful with the mass public as we seem to think it is?Having people truly understand that this is a government by the bullies for the billionaires, that concept.I guess just the wrinkle is in a country where still a lot of people kind of want to be billionaires, is it as cool a message as I think it is?Yeah.It is, in fact, the case, as people often report, that in America, no one is poor. They're just pre-rich, right? We're all just temporarily embarrassed. You know, we just haven't made our billions. Oprah hasn't given us the car or whatever she's supposed to give us. So there is still that very, very, very deep kind of yearning and with it an admiration and a cultishness around the extraordinarily wealthy.But wow, are people pissed at the rich. I mean, that may be the only thing that has bipartisan agreement in this country is just how extraordinarily furious people are, because I think the fundamental difference is that in the olden times, this cult of people are rich because they're made out of awesome, because they're uniquely smart, because they're uniquely capable and hardworking and so on. That's largely been punctured. And people understand.So it's not just that they're rich. It's how they're rich, why they're rich. And the fact that the reason that they're rich is because they've stolen from you. It's that connection.Because sure, people can aspire to have their own, you know, whatever their dream is. In my case, an extensive shoe collection. But, you know, you do you.But the notion that the reason why people have so much money is because you don't — that is increasingly salient. And that's really the crux of it.Now, where this gets hard — and this brings us back to the earlier conversation of you can't just articulate the problem for people, although that is absolutely extraordinarily essential — they also have to feel that the articulation of the problem lends itself to something that they can do.And so in the universe in which what people are “supposed to do” is petition their government in some way or another. And I say that broadly, right? So vote, register to vote, get other people to vote, call their member of Congress, ask for policy change.It's extraordinary the degree to which people, even low information, low engagement folks, think the jig is up on that particular theory of change.And so I think we are now in a place in which people need to be directed, their anger and their ire need to be directed into what I am calling the “Mangione without murder” strategy. Without murder. Hear that whole phrase.You really do know how to coin a phrase.Yeah, we don't need to be murdering people. I just want to say on the record here that I'm telling you. Anti-murder. I'm anti-murder, whatever you heard, whatever they told you. Sharp messages, no sharp weapons.That's right.Imagine if we actually had people doing, you know, die-ins where corporate CEOs are. If we actually had people going to the places, it's easy to look up. These motherfuckers are all hypocrites. They all go to church. Why aren't we showing up in the parking lots of their churches? And this could both be MAGA Republicans and CEOs. Singing hymns that are actually about what Jesus preached. When they get out of church, say it to their faces.And so I think that the challenge with the billionaire articulation is not that it is not landing. You are correct in your supposition that it is absolutely landing. It's that it quickly becomes, well, every election is a contest between their billionaires and our billionaires. And so the solution, which presumably has been, well, that's why you should vote for Democrats.I know people are really responding to how clear your advice is. And I think it's making a lot of people feel like they know what to do more clearly than they did before. So thank you. I want to go back to that and compile all of your advice. Let's focus on marching orders for everybody here.People are in agreement with you about how grave this is and how serious it is. People feel incredibly undefended by elected Democrats in general and are not expecting them to change very soon. People are doing things already, like calling Congress, but maybe don't know the third, fourth, and fifth things to do.Can you just give us some very, very, very tangible marching orders?So the first thing I would say is in the preservation of your own mental health and wellbeing. Pick a thing that you care about and can be motivated to stay the course with.For some folks, that's going to be education. For some folks, that's going to be immigrant rights. For some folks, that's going to be policing, whatever. There are so many things happening at once that we can all become like cats with a laser pointer and make ourselves nuts.So you pick the thing. You go as local as possible about that thing. And so if it is education, just take that for instance, then you decide with yourself and a handful of your friends, you have a potluck beforehand, you do you. Do something fun and entertaining and get together beforehand. You look up in the public record when the next school board meeting is in your local community. And you go there and you make statements about ensuring that all children have the freedom to learn the truth of our past, and that all children have the freedom to belong and be who they are within their schools. And you oppose any kind of effort to implement the draconian fascist agenda in your own community.So that is one thing. You can do that within the context of immigrant rights. You can do that in the context of disability justice, racial justice, et cetera.The next piece of advice is to wear your beliefs. Get yourself a “Fabulously Fighting Fascism” t-shirt. One of the things that is most important to the right and to any authoritarian force is to suck our joy, is to suck our uniqueness, is to suck our our being. I say all the time, put up a billboard in the middle of nowhere that shows people across the gender spectrum just having themselves the best possible time, and say “Fabulously fighting fascism.”You will get so much local media and local attention, even if it's in the middle of nowhere because it is a saucy message. Show, not tell that you do not agree with this, that you refuse it.So I think the name of the game is really resistance. refusal, and ridicule. And ridicule is a key and essential element that I have danced around.Join a union, if you can join a union. Support union efforts. That is a place where deep and authentic organizing actually happens and needs to happen much, much more expansively. One of the most important keys to fighting autocracy is a strong, integrated, active, in-your-face labor community.Before we go, to leave people on a note of hope, in a lot of the messaging that you do and the formal proper messages you draft for TV ads or other communication, there's a certain structure, which I wrote about in my book. It's often the beginning and the end where more hope and uplift come in and in the middle is where you explain the obstructions to that promiseA lot of people really can't see the after of this. It's very hard to see anything. I find it very difficult to visualize 2026. I find it very, very difficult to visualize 2035. I could see a scenario where it's totally fine, this thing blew over, it imploded, and my kids are just living a normal life, vaguely remembering this. And I could imagine a scenario in which most people I know don't live in this country anymore. It's so hard to picture the after.Can you help us picture the after in a hopeful way if we get this right, if we do all the things you're talking about?The fact that you can't picture 2026. I can't either. And that is either extraordinarily terrifying or fantastic. The reason why it is potentially fantastic is because it takes a fundamental rupture, a big rupture that we think that we have already had, but we have not — because we are still waking up in the morning and going to the store and answering our telephones and checking our social and getting our kids to school and all the things that, of course, we need to continue to do.That rupture has not happened for most people. And it is only in a fundamental rupture that we get a period — and obviously, the decimation of it is one of the most tragic and horrible things in American history. But Reconstruction wouldn't have happened without the Civil War. The New Deal wouldn't have happened without the decimation of the Gilded Age and God forbid, the Depression.Moments of extraordinary rupture are moments of extraordinary possibility where, as my colleague, Mike Podhorzer points out, pre the Revolution, when people were hanging out in the colonies, and trying, you know, to do the Boston Tea Party and to petition the king, “Hey, yo, like, we're not fond of this. We're not keen.”And I'm not discounting the fact that things were pretty bad for most people and enslavement and no women's rights and so on. I'm not making believe that that period was a beautiful era in American history.The only point that I'm making is that there has to be a rupture so fundamental that people are like, “Oh no, how about we just don't have a king? How about we just don't be a colony anymore? How about we decide that we are going to invent a new country from scratch?”Obviously not really from scratch because of the destruction and usurpation and genocide of Native people — again, I am not trying to say this was like a beautiful era.All I'm trying to say is that in the unknowing, in the what-the-f**k-is-going-to-come-next, is actually where invention comes. And it requires us recognizing that. To give you a tautology, the problem is made out of the problem, as we were discussing at the top of our conversation. To think that a system that is working largely as designed, to bring us representatives who, with notable and noteworthy and laudable exceptions, are not actually serving our interests and are not stepping up to the plate. To think that they would behave any differently is to not understand that the entire progressive movement is begging the master for money to buy tools to take down his house, and it always has been.And because we've continued to limp along in this, “But maybe we'll win this election, but maybe we'll get people to vote, but maybe we'll pass this one little policy,” is not to recognize the fact that actually within U.S. politics, there is no correlation between majority support for a policy and that policy passing. And so we have to stop thinking that tinkering at the edges of the old ways, as we have done, is going to yield a new result.And I don't know if this isn't sounding hopeful, but to me, it is always the case. The most fundamental truth of life is that the future is made out of the decisions that we take collectively.We make the future. What comes next will be decided on the basis of what we do. And that's up to us.Readers like you make The Ink possible and keep it independent. 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In today's episode of Healthy Mind, Healthy Life, we're breaking down one of the biggest myths in personal development: the idea that positive thinking alone is the key to happiness and success. While the world tells us to "just think positive," my guest today, Anat Peri, is here to tell us why that approach doesn't actually work—and what we should do instead. Anat, an inner child expert and founder of Training Camp for the Soul, has spent over 20 years helping people heal deep emotional wounds and break free from toxic patterns. In this conversation, she shares why true healing comes from feeling, not just thinking, and how suppressing emotions can lead to anxiety, disconnection, and self-sabotage. We also explore how childhood experiences shape our emotional responses, the role of the nervous system in processing emotions, and the 90-second rule for moving through feelings instead of avoiding them. If you've ever wondered why affirmations, gratitude lists, or "just staying positive" haven't created real change for you, this episode is a must-listen.

A Time WarpBy FinalStand. Listen to the Podcast at Explicit Novels.What follows is a diversion from the central storyline, but it is crucial to understanding why certain members of the supporting cast are behaving the way they are.808 BCE near Halab in what is today's Northern Syria:For me, Cael Nyilas, it was a return to last night's horrifying scene that engulfed me. The screams of dying horses and moribund men crying the pantheon of life's final regrets. Blood, piss, voided bowels and the stench of comingled sweat and leather filled my nostrils. The true cacophony of battle was all about. The battle shock faded into an innocuous background distraction.In my heart of hearts, I felt at ease, even content. We were cut off and surrounded yet hardly hopeless. Men, my brothers-in-arms and the younger noble sons of Assur and Nineveh combined to put a press of shields, armor and flesh encircling us. Those 'pampered' aristocrats stank with fear and well they should. Death was still possible before their relief arrived.I hurt, Shara (my deity?), I was wounded, but it meant nothing. I laughed; a primitive version of 'atheists and foxholes' passing through my mind. This body had lived through much worse. The closest man, her deceased husband's cousin, and I lifted the shattered wooden chariot off the person our circle was centered on. My arm was extended to her.She was glorious, fierce and half-drunk with battle lust. I could feel her talon-like fingers through the leather and 'parzillu' scales guarding my bicep. She half jumped and was half pulled to her feet. Her kinsman presented her 'misplaced' sword, hilt first. In her eyes, I saw the burning intensity of the Shamash (Sun God, consort of Aya?) at the height of the Burning Season.Her martial mirth exceeded any other noise as it passed her lips."You took your time getting here," Shammuramat taunted me, not a true reproach. "I was so bored, I decide to take a nap in the shade of my conveniently overturned chariot." She defied all fortunes that conspired toward her demise; her own breed of madness."You looked so peaceful in your sleep, I didn't want to wake you," I bantered back. Her 'kinsman' scowled at my familiarity with his monarch. My champions, more like brothers to me than any kin born of my blood, had carved a gory swath to her stranded bodyguard. Mounted on Median steeds, we had pressed back the entourages of two Aramean kings bent on her violent passing.A barricade of overturned, or unattended chariots gave us space to dismount and perform our very visible rescue mission. All the pieces were right where she wanted them; everything unfolding according to her plan. Focus the enemy in the center with her person and the banner of Assur while the rest of her chariots and all of her cavalry swept through an unguarded wadi and fell upon them from behind.Brilliant. Somewhat less brilliant when faced with the desperate energy of our enemies, but her victory was already a certainty. The allied Western Kings were sure my command was attempting to snatch the Queen back to the safety of her infantry. Those hardy, foot-bound souls were still holding their own against the greater mass of the enemy footmen.The children of rebellious nobles bent every bit of their remaining energy, squandered their last reserves to ensure Shammuramat didn't escape. If the positons were reversed, they would have eagerly abandoned their troops and sought safety to the rear. The idea of Shammuramat being overwrought with terror was absurd.Our opponents' bellows for our blood turned into wails of despair. The charging, plumaged steeds of Assyria had appeared behind them. Our enemies had nothing left to slow the new arrivals down, much less stop them. For those who dared defy Shammuramat, Queen of all the Akkadians, the slaughter was just beginning."Come 'Alal' (that was me); I promised 'Atarshumki' I would kick his head over his own city walls before sunset and I always keep my promises," she shoved one of my horse-holders aside and took one of my steeds. 'Alal' was not the name my father gave me. It meant destroyer and it was blasphemy to lay claim to it."Killing kings will cost you extra," was my impious response.Assyrians nobility barely tolerated mercenaries most of the time. My men and I didn't care. I hadn't taken up the killing business to make friends and my troops felt the same way. What mattered to us was that their coin was good and delivered on time. That was a good thing because whores and merchants were loath to advance 'our kind' anything on credit."I'll meet you half way," she grinned manically at me while my fighters and I raced for our mounts. (Saving the junior nobility wasn't what she were paying us for.) "I'll let you take any prince you capture as a hostage." I nodded. My men cheered hungrily, despite the choking dust. As long as I didn't get too greedy, the Kings would pay for their sons. Now we had to capture the bastards."Tūbātu," I reminded them. 'Goodwill'. It was a polite way of saying 'stop your chariot, rest your arms and your mother won't have to come begging for your corpse'. It was best to let opposing nobility keep their dignity in our business. Today's enemy might be tomorrow's paymaster.I blinked and things changed.Planting followed harvest and harvest followed planting. It had long ago become a blur. Shammuramat had grown older. Her first son became king when he was of age. I had long exceeded my welcome and my desire to stay. I was fixed to this small patch of the greater world by a rare emotion, empathy.It had come out of nowhere. We were campaigning against the Scythians raiding over the Zagros Mountains and followed them into Urartu. Night had fallen and I walked the camp as was my habit; being killed a few times in your sleep will make you err on the side of caution. Shammuramat was gazing out over the river Arkas."I though all the scouts have returned," I asked as I stepped to her side. A cool, early autumn breeze blew down the valley, tossing a few loose locks of her greying hair. She always had one patch shorn short which made her left-side braids prone to unwind."They have. We head back for Nineveh with the dawn," she murmured, her mind elsewhere."Do you ever dream of home?" she asked me out of the blue."No. I don't dream anymore. I rarely sleep and if I did, I would hope to dream of something less boring," I snorted in amusement. She had never talked about her home, to anyone as far as I knew."You will be going to Lydia when winter comes," she stated tensely."King Gyges needs someone with experience beating Cimmerians," I answered. The true reason was that I was no longer welcome on the Assyrian payroll because I insisted on recruiting only non-Assyrians into the ranks of my ferociously effective little band of one hundred; never more and rarely less."Shemtsu is a fool," she grumbled."That is unfair," I countered. My willingness to argue with her was one of my charms in her eyes. "He is an excellent Treasurer and he makes sure your vassals pay their tribute on time and in its full amount."The silence was hurtful to me because Shammuramat was never one to obfuscate her thoughts, especially around me. It was one of her charms, to my way of thinking."Salmu Eretu, the northern night sky has no answers for what ails you. Get some sleep. Tomorrow is going to start out cold before it bakes us." I called her 'Black Cloud' in Akkadian.I had first used that name twenty years ago to insult her, highlighting her tempestuous nature. In the Assyrian court, having just received recognition for my quick thinking, Shammuramat had belittled my accomplishment, throwing my body between her, her unborn child (the man who was now not-so-gently ushering me to the border) and a Kassite noble and his retainer bent on killing them both.Had my deed not been witnessed by half a dozen reliable sources, I wouldn't even have received that tawdry token."He sought glory without risk," she spat out her insult in a Hittite tongue alien to this court. Unfortunately for us both, I had worked for a Babylonian family for a few generations and they had been kind enough to turn me from an illiterate commoner to a man of some education.Ironically, they even taught me my native cuneiform long after my birthplace was barely a memory."Well aren't you a black cloud on an otherwise waste of a day," I replied somewhat bitterly. Her eyes widened, then narrowed and then I heard her laugh for the first time."Should I tell them what you said?" she mocked me and my predicament."But of course," I grunted in Akkadian. I'd screwed up. My inner thoughts were 'please not decapitation, please not decapitation' because getting my head on straight after that was a real bitch."You've been nothing but a black cloud bent on turning the choking dust at my feet into a grasping, muddy morass. Why stop now?" I announced loudly. If you are going to die, die well. Having died too many times to count, remembering my last words were all I had left to look forward to.The guards, familiar with the Queen's temper and stunned into inaction by me clearly embracing a long, messy death, stood around uselessly. Had I been allowed a weapon in the royal presence, I might have thought which one to kill first."I gift you, a lowborn man of the South (Sumerian), with honors and you respond by insulting my wife?" King, Shamshi Adad V growled as he rose from his throne."Husband," she stood to join him. I thought it was a pity she rarely smiled. "You asked that I too give a gift to my savior and the savior of our son (all unborn babies were sons back then until roughly half had the audacity to gender switch while exiting the womb). I have chosen." I was expecting my life for the moment and a day's head start to the border."It is your choice to make," the King allowed."From this day, until my passing, this man may always speak his mind in our lands," she demanded. She had a habit of fatally correcting anyone who saw her as less than co-ruler. The hesitation was deafening."As you will," Shamshi Adad V acquiesced to yet another of his wife's odd 'requests'. From that day forth we had been fast friends. She never asked about my immortality, where I was from, or how I ended up with my elite band of professional killers. I returned the favor. It was an unspoken understanding that in a few years, or decades, she would die and I would leave, not necessarily in that order. We had shared more years than I had given to any one person in quite some time."There is nothing left for me but ash," she declared with morbid certainty."Should any of us expect any better?" I did my best to offer words of comfort she would accept."Oh no," her noise was too bitter to be a laugh. "I had my own 'Life beyond Death' and it was stolen from me, along with my birthright.""We are chasing the thieves?" I asked."Yes and no," her face grew grim once more. "These were not the ones I was looking for. They share some bonds with some of the Scythian tribes who live on the far side of the Sea of Death (the Black Sea). These raiders weren't from those tribes.""Why are you turning back?" I questioned. "You know your Assyrians are loyal. They will follow wherever you lead. Your son won't begrudge you these few hundred. I'll come too.""Why?" she turned and looked into my eyes. She still had that blazing fire in her eyes. She was teasing me. If she asked, I too would follow and my men would follow me."The Scythians have been raiding the Lands of the Two Rivers from, well, before I graduated from 'spear for hire' to a 'seeker of a mastery of war'. The rich plunder of their camps will provide plenty of incentive for my men plus we can sell the horses when we come back," I stated."I do not have the years left to spend on such a campaign," she sighed. I had never heard a hint of defeat in her speech before. It was unsettling and rather tragic."I have squandered my years in marriage, being Queen and raising my boys. I tried to make Assyria my new family and I am revealed to be a fool. You had it right. We will always be outlanders. No matter how brave, loyal, just and smart, we would never be allowed in their sanctimonious circle," she said. "You. I should have ridden off with you after my first born was acknowledged (the present King Adad-nirari the 3rd).""We could have gathered up some more fighters, ridden over shattered Phrygia, to the narrows (Bosporus) and into the lands of the Thracians. There is a legend of a great river that pours out from the western shore of the Death Sea. What I seek is up that river.""How many would we face?" I grew equally serious."One," she coughed. "Me." My confusion was obvious. "I am not asking you to fight me, Alal. I want you to come back for me.""I can't. That is not how it works," I stated."How does it work then?" she looked into my eyes. The fire was there, but banked and waning. I didn't say anything. "I have never seen, or heard of you entering a temple.""Your men go. You do not stop them, but you have given up any pretense of worship," she pressed. "Do you not believe that anything exists beyond your senses?""I believe," I sighed. "I believe people are fools for giving offering, pledging their fidelity, pleading for mercy, or extending thanks to any deity. Those Shar-an (gnats) do as they will, unless it is to punish us for treating them like the spoiled children they are."Shammuramat regained her long-stilled laughter."I have always felt a kinship with you through our mutual bitterness.""Bitterness comes with familiarity," I snorted in amusement. Lovers had passion. We shared a simmering anger that came from being irredeemably wronged."I was born Baraqu, the first son of a potter in some city that no longer matters. I was a failure as a potter and an embarrassment to my house and my clan," I began a story I hadn't told another soul in, I couldn't recall. "In those days, the Priest-Kings declared wars and demanded each clan of the city give forth a certain number of males to fight. My family volunteered me and two rowdy cousins.Outside the gates, my clan elder gave each of us a cowhide shield and a spear with a small spindle of copper at the tip so we wouldn't think it was a staff. We marched, I forget which city we were fighting that time. Three days later we found the enemy behind a deep irrigation ditch that had dried out for the season. Our orders were simple, 'There they are. Attack!'My elder was at the back of our mob, making sure none of us ran away. My older cousin made it across the ditch first, but was speared twice; once in the right kidney, I can still remember my first sight of blood, and once, piercing the shield and lodging in his ribcage. My second cousin and I were pushed from behind into the fighting. I stabbed at one shield, doing no harm.Then my surviving cousin's morale broke and he tried to claw his way back into our ranks. He was stabbed in the back, his dying body tangling with mine and bearing us both to the ground. I saw this howling mad face over me. He was a commoner, like me, driven to violence by the terror of battle. His shoddily crafted spear plunged first into my right lung. The second stab found my heart. I died.From there, my spirit fell down toward the wretched dank caverns where all pitiful lowborn dregs are doomed to end up without hope of parole. Instead of endless misery, the Goddess Sarrat Irkalli appeared before me, barring my descent. With icy claws, she trisected my soul. I cannot begin to describe that agony. She snatched up my tattered bits and dragged me back into the world.Sarrat Irkalli is Goddess of the Netherworld, whispered a word that penetrated my brain through the left ear of my cooling corpse. It was an utterance so catastrophic to the fabric of the Veil I dare not repeat it even now.Baraqu? she blew a dark wind upon the first bit of my essence and it flew away.Cael, she whispered to the second portion and off it went in another direction. You are Baraqu no more. The second name was meaningless to me at the time but my name. Do you know that if you have your true name, your spirit can not find its way to your reward, no matter how foul, or pleasing? To the third part of my soul. I name you Alal, he who stands witness to the end of all he desires; their destroyer. Powerful yet powerless.}With that, she left me. My body was stiff from being dead so long. The next few hours were extremely painful. The Sun had set and the Moon was not in evidence. Jackals barked and hyenas laughed as they fought and feasted on the dead. I pushed the body of my cousin off me then crawled down into the ditch to hide. Hardly the reaction of a hero.""Not the actions of the man I know," Shammuramat smirked. "So, your name is Baraqu.""Was and I never much liked the name," I countered. "The priests gave it to me because right before my naming ceremony, a bolt of lightning from a spring storm struck the temple of Shara. So they named me Baraqu, which means 'struck by lightning'.""That sound likes a good name," the Queen Dowager regarded me."That is the noble meaning. The common meaning is less eloquent, it means 'idiot'."Another deep laugh from my treasured compatriot. So few had ever mattered so much to me."Struck by lightning, stricken dumb," she guffawed. "Still not the 'you' I know.""What does the other name mean?""I have no idea. In all my travels I have never found a people familiar with it," I shrugged. She looked out over the low waves lapping against the stony shore."No explanation?" she grudgingly inquired. She had wanted me to continue."No. I have never again come face to face with Sarrat Irkalli, been visited by a messenger, divine, or demonic, received an omen, or any otherworldly presence of any kind," I shrugged. I was long past any resentment. "After the battle I made my way back home, we'd lost, and resumed my life for a few years. My father took the excuse of me 'letting' my kinsmen die to place my younger brother over me.I didn't care. I always hated being a potter, so I ended up being a piddling nuisance all the time and a drunken brawler whenever I had wrangled some beer. I was always the first choice of my clan to send into battle. Despite my lack of training, I began surviving more battles than I died in. At some point, the priests began getting suspicious that I was still hanging around my great-grandnephew's house, so my house Elder suggested I leave the city.I was given a nice copper-headed mace that I had taken in a recent skirmish. Tradition dictated I offer it to the Elder, so he could give it back to me as a sign of my value to the clan. He had taken it for his own. Now he was giving it back out of fear that it held some part of my taint. I had no idea how to live on my own. Two days out, I was robbed and murdered for the first, but not last, time. That inaugural event, I got really angry and hunted those two farmers down.I got my mace back. I also relieved them of an onager, three slaves and a few ingots of silver. I guessed they had been rather successful robbers until they met me."

Summer Camp Mayhem.By FinalStand. Listen to the Podcast at Explicit Novels.The miracle is not a person jumping into a torrent to save another. It is the dozen who form a chain to pull them both out.(Midnight in the Grotto of Good and Evil)We were in one of the underground pools at the bottom of the mesa. Our tour guide had informed us there were nine known caves and the complex had never been fully explored due to the remaining waterways being totally submerged. It was well past midnight, all my little friends had crashed out and I had wisely ditched my security after Miyako silently woke me up with her hand over my mouth.She pulled my hand to her lips and sucked deeply on two of my digits. I took this to be an indicator to me she was in dire need of loving. The grotto was my idea. I was inspired by my desire to see her naked and I couldn't risk a light source any place but underground. The tool shed and garage lacked a certain appeal. The fuel depot and septic tank were also ruled out."Is the chaos in your mind still raging, Cáel?" Miyako asked in Nipponese, with enough worry to doubly enhance her cuteness."Which of the twenty-seven unexplained languages rolling around in my head do you want me to answer you in?" my toothy grin barely visible in the darkness.Around half way through my sexual enlightenment in college, I had a revelation. The two guys I had gone road-tripping with took me to a bar in Portsmouth. I caught a woman looking us over. I already had my one-night stand lined up and she was looking most agreeable to my nefarious skullduggery (i.e. she had come with some other guy who preferred beer and darts with his buddies over keeping his attention on what mattered).And then my awakening."Nah, she's too fat," he remarked. For one thing, my friend who said that could have stood to lose ten to fifteen kilograms himself. Next, we were dressed like middle class college kids, jeans, shirts that were most likely clean when we picked them out of the laundry basket, light jackets and the shoe thing.This girl was dressed up for a good night out. Nice makeup, her clothing choices were, eh, not stunning, but this wasn't a stunning nightclub/bar. She looked fun, she smiled and yes, she was overweight. It dawned on me that not only did I not care, I never cared. I was a sexual omnivore and that meant any lady interested in sex with me was fine in my book.So, I turned the tables on him."If you can score her number, I'll give you my watch," I dared him. The wristwatch was really nice, one of those $500 handmade German ones. One of my Ex's great-granddad had swiped it off some Nazi pilot in World War II, and the same girl gave it to me twice. See, by accident, as I was exiting the (thankfully) first floor window of the Natural Sciences building, she threw a pitcher at me.It had been sitting in an ornamental display case close by. I caught it, nodded to the flabbergasted female professor-type gawking at the semi-naked me, handed her the projectile, then fled like the responsibility-dodging coward that I was. It turned out that that bit of crockery was from the mid-1600's; the woman I'd surprised was the item's owner.That older lady wasn't a teacher. She was a major benefactor in charge of one of the school's larger endowments. Had it shattered, the Ex most likely would have been expelled. Instead, after watching me round the Chancellor's residence, the mature chick turned to the totally naked chick leaning out the window, still screaming at me."Is he on the track team?" she inquired as she handed the artifact back. They talked, agreed I was a miserable human being, a cad and had firmly developed buttocks. Well, I guess that makes me a pig with nice hams. The next day, I showed up to return the watch, it was just an excuse for one more round of sex.She explained the whole incident to me, took back the watch and sent me on my way. I hurried back to my dorm room, changed the sheets and picked up a bit. An hour later she was quietly knocking at my door. Rather epic make-up sex followed, she gave me the watch as a keepsake and I swore off intercourse in classrooms for two whole months. I'm a tower of resolute willpower, I know.Back at the bar, my buddy snorted, made some comment about her being obviously desperate and promised me he'd nail in her in one of the back rooms. They talked a little, he got 'friendly', then said something that really hurt the girl's feelings. She looked our way, steadied herself with a shot of bourbon and came over to me and my other bud."Did you tell that guy you would give him fifty bucks if I put a lipstick ring on his cock?" she confronted us."No, I told him you were too good for him and if he could get your phone number, I would give him this watch," I showed her the watch. The girl's face flashed back to 'cautiously curious'."Is it a nice watch?" she asked."It is a family heirloom. My great-grandpa brought it back from World War II after taking it off some high ranking kraut officer," I embellished. "I knew he didn't have a chance with you.""Thanks," she grinned. "I agree. Let me get my sister and we can get a bite to eat." Sex.Two guesses of who her sister was. If you guessed the girl I had been cultivating since I got there, you would be right. I am too damn lucky. Lads, the next time you blow a sure thing, blame me for sucking all the good karma away from you, and nine of your friends. I got a three-way. The guy I made the challenge to, got his revenge. He bailed and I had to hitchhike back to school. You know, female truckers, oh, back to Miyako.After stashing our clothing and weapons (all of mine anyway), I took a small fluorescent lantern and slipped into the water. Cold, but doable. Miyako joined me and then, by moonlight, we swam to the point where the guide had said we'd find a passage to a secluded grotto. Down we went. My motivation wasn't sex.That was coming no matter what. Seeing my Nipponese sweetie completely nude directed my course of action. Security protocols meant no lights after 11 p.m. My solution was to cut on a light that couldn't be seen from outside, the grotto. We felt our way along the rather wide submerged passage emerging well before air became an issue. I raised the lantern and cut it on.Our tour guru had forgotten to mention that the algae patches along the sides and bottom as well as the quartz veins on the roof and walls reflected the light over what must have been an eight by ten meter cavern. Gorgeous. We glided to a shelf that met our needs, climbed up and shared a high school 'nervous virgin' moment. She broke the spell by pulling herself out of the water and, standing on her tippy-toes, touched one of the roof veins.I drank in every inch of my little ninja babe's lithe, finely tuned body. Once she got over the newness of my voyeurism, she became playful, giving me a variety of silhouettes and poses. I stripped and returned the favor, which earned me a giggling fit. As I took a minute to sit down and stare into the tranquility of the still surface, she snuck up on me.She said it all with her eyes. I tried to speak, but she put a forefinger to my lips. 'Hold me forever,' her eyes relayed her intentions. 'Love me for all eternity and think of no one else but me.' My elbows were locked, supporting my upper torso as she hovered over my lap. She was a lone feather falling upon the unyielding stone.With one hand behind her, she guided my cock into the wet, luxurious vice that was her cunt. We took it in increments. A sigh more at home in whispered Nirvana than on mortal tongues escaped her lips as she nestled all the way down. We didn't fuck. We rocked back and forth in a timid motion.As Miyako became accustomed to me once more, she would lean farther back with each pulse until an in and out rhythm was achieved. I took the occasion of her victory to pluck her left nipple into my mouth. Experience had taught me that was her more sensitive one. For several seconds, she fought it before knowledge caught up with instinct, then she loosed her passion.After her vibrations subsided, she rested her body tightly against mine. I still impaled her and she was returning a fraction of that warmth."Do you ever think you will find true love?" she whispered into my ear, in Nipponese. I was drawing my finger through her damp hair as it trailed down her back."As in love one over all others, no," I confided. "Even if I did, I could never admit it.""Why not?" she asked in Mandarin.In French I explained; "My life is a mad race through the forest and I don't know if I am a hound or the stag. I don't dare slow down until I know, and that is no way to repay such devotion.""When do you think the race will end for you?" she moaned softly, in English."I would really like to hold a child of mine. I don't regret my life's path up until now, yet I leave so very little of me behind if it ends soon," I muttered in Nipponese, and then chuckled. "It used to be at the first sign of a pregnancy test, I would panic. The World turns very rapidly."A minute passed as she went from warm to heatedly sensuous."Less talk, more babies," she sacrificed her emotions for my well-being with her oh so naught Baby Metal band voice and questing fingers. How could I say 'no' to that?"I don't think it works that way," I teased."Let's find out." She implored me in NipponeseSometime later, I was lying on my back, Miyako's body extended over mine so that not one precious inch of her touched the cool slick rock surface. Considering our position and location, it took me a bit longer to notice the intruder. I thought she was all kinds of strange. Twin memories and perception joined forces for once.The woman moved through the water, yet she was only hip deep in a place I knew the bottom was three meters below. As she entered our isolated love nest, I noticed she had sent forth not a single ripple in the water. Memory filled in the rest. Her eyes, when her gaze met my own, had that void that comes from a tortured life punctuated by horrors you witness as well as ones you are forced to perform.That was from "me". The electron swarm inside my mind provided another crucial piece of the puzzle. Utukku, phantoms, dead denied entrance to the Nether Realms, trapped between, until some sin had been lifted. The spirit gave me a look of shock, then turned and fled."We are in danger," I hissed to Miyako in Nipponese, before cutting off the lantern.I dove in, angling for the tunnel we'd entered by. I was close enough not to jab my fingers into the stone surface as I clawed my way through. I didn't burst noisily to the surface on the other side. My approach was that of an alligator, slowly letting my head crest the surface so I could look around. No one was in evidence. Miyako was soundless at my side as we scramble to the hiding place of our gear.Miyako held my hand back until she was sure our belongings hadn't been booby-trapped. I had to make quick judgment call: how time critical was this? I went the 'clothes and weapons' route."What is going on?" Miyako spoke quietly."Back there, I saw a feminine Asian ghost and the last time I witnessed such a pained, hopeless look, I was confronting the Seven Pillars," I told her. "Their slave had that same doomed stare.""There are only two things here of value," Miyako made her assessment. "You and the children. You are far more accessible in New York City, so it must be the children." We pressed ourselves tightly to the cave sides when we heard the sound of footsteps coming our way. It was Charlotte, my minder for evening, with her bow notched and ready.Firearms were kept to a minimum after hours, so bows were the order of the day, except for the snipers on the mesa top. My movements must have alerted her. I sat down and continued dressing."Charlotte, the Seven Pillars know we are here, they know the camp is here," I told her."How imminent is the threat?" Charlotte knelt beside me. I didn't know."They must be close, to be making a reconnaissance of the caves," Miyako said with tactical certainty."It was drawn to you, Charlotte, you were out of place, so this thing looked further. Otherwise these caves are irrelevant," she added. Miyako had the mindset of a seasoned professional spy."The cavern and spring have a night guardian," Charlotte countered. "I saw her when I was following you two here."I had on my light bulletproof vest (no shirt), shorts (no underwear) and shoes (no sox)."Let's go check on her to see if she's seen anything," I suggested/ordered.What I had assumed was some sort of bedroll brought by Miyako turned out to be a Ninja Survival pack. This allowed me to weapon up while she dressed up. The amount of time we were taking still ate at my nerves. Charlotte stopped me from heading out first, only to be stopped by Miyako. The ninja slipped out like a cool desert breeze.(Friend, Enemies and those In Between)Thirty seconds later, a plastic BB bounced off my right shoulder. This time, I was leading Charlotte out. No one spoke. We couldn't see Miyako anyway, now dressed in her black pajamas and her face being reduced to just one slit for her eyes. We found the Amazon dead at her post. She was in a cunningly crafted blind not easily spotted from any direction.A quick sweep for 'gifts' left behind revealed nothing, but the corpse yielded plenty. She was shot multiple times with two separate flash and sound suppressed submachine guns. The woman had been alive when we came down and if there had been a firefight, Charlotte would have heard the shots, if not seen them; thus the suppression. The bullet holes suggested a small caliber weapon.Miyako stepped up, held up three fingers. Every piece of the Amazon's gear was still on her. The attackers had shot up her phone box. Wireless communications were deemed too risky so all the outposts had buried land lines. At this point, a few seconds of extra effort stood between the Seven Pillars and success; that and the Goddess Paranoia.Had the assailants yanked up the box and cut the phone line, it would have been rendered useless. Instead, they shot up the device and moved on so that when Charlotte pulled out the cache of concealed goodies, including the spare phone box, we were back in business. As Charlotte got to work switching out the busted for the back-up, I studied our situation.Advanced teams taking out the perimeter guards, and most likely the snipers, didn't make much sense. The camp had 300 highly motivated Amazons. Cutting them off temporarily from their armory and vehicles didn't make any sense, since all Amazons were armed anyway. That left timing. But timing meant nothing if I didn't have the goal of their attack.It came as a double-whammy. The Chinese place a high premium on family and the Seven Pillars had mastered a sadistic art form of turning young foreign women into their concubine/assassins. The Condotteiri would have slaughtered the entire camp. The Seven Pillars would want to kidnap the children, both as current bargaining chips and as future tools.500 girls, 400 could be kidnappable. The oldest would go down fighting with their sisters. How did you get 400 kids out of here? Helicopters? That would be a fuck load of helicopters taking out their team and the children. Besides, helicopters alone couldn't dig them out of their cave and cliff-face strongpoints.Desert, no waterways. That left the road. You couldn't use ATVs, not enough carrying capacity. The smart move would be to have tractor-trailers parked alongside the hard top state road. They would use smaller, more rugged trucks to ferry their captives out to the semis. That suggested some sort of 'cover/support' vehicles.2 half ton trucks with weaponized Hummers providing fire support a la 'Blackhawk Down' and that meant the bridge and the BBQ pit. That objective would solve both of the Seven Pillars problems, moving the main assault group into close contact with the Amazons so the Amazons couldn't organize a defense, and removing their hostages in a prompt manner so they all could be gone before anyone else could react.The Seven Pillars had to have secured the bridge and were mostly likely replacing the missing piers. It was the choke point of their battle plan. Worse for them, it wasn't part of a barricade where they could attrition the Amazon numbers with vehicle mounted heavy weapons. The ditch ran north-south, bow shaped with the arch to the west and was over a kilometer from the camp.The flanks were purposefully strewn with huge boulders that limited traffic to horse and motorcycles, no four-wheelers. They had to have control of the bridge, so that's where I went."Charlotte, I'm going to the bridge," I whispered before slipping out of the blind. I didn't order Miyako to follow me and I was sure Charlotte wanted strangle me for departing from her protective custody.There are four kinds of fights, be they between armies, or individuals. Set-piece (sparring), assaults, ambushes and meeting engagements. I was about to be in the latter one. Meeting engagements happen when opposing forces are set on goals that unknowingly intersect one another. One of the most famous battles in US history, Gettysburg, was a meeting engagement.I was using the bone-dry culvert because we feared the Seven Pillars had replaced our snipers. Miyako was, somewhere else. The enemy commandos used the same conduit to avoid having the remaining Amazon pickets spot them and raising the alarm. I had little doubt that the three men speedily moving south were heading for the grotto and its three inhabitants (Charlotte, Miyako and me).Not knowing that I could both see ghosts and guessed who its demonic masters were, they assumed we were still in the caverns. Me not knowing how this whole ghost-scout thing worked, I assumed that I had a chance of surprising them at the bridge if I moved fast enough. In a final prick of irony, they misinterpreted the role their snipers played in our engagement.They believed that their snipers would alert them if anyone moved on the bridge, ignoring the fact that the snipers didn't have a complete view of the gulch. I was only using the big ditch because I was afraid they had taken out the Amazon snipers and now had the high ground, which turned out to be true. Thank you, Goddess Paranoia.My first tomahawk was in my left hand and my Glock-22 was in my right. My fear of snipers and the bend in the gully saved my life. We literally ran into each other, me and the first 7P soldier. His long barreled Type-05 was pointing past my left, his torso slammed into my pistol, ramming his front armored plate against it as it discharged.The proximity muffled the sound of the gunshot. The bullet failed to punch through his impressive body armor, but the resulting force knocked him down and out. Unfortunately, our shared momentum knocked my gun out of my grasp. My right hand went for tomahawk two. The flattened man's team mates swung their submachine guns my way.Halfway through his shift, a black dart flew out of the western darkness, past the first one, then snapped back. The action caused the hardy thread to wrap around the barrel of his weapon. I couldn't see her, but I knew it was Miyako with her flying wedge with the thread attached. The middle guy was startled and not moving as his training dictated.That allowed me to use him as a shield against the third guy. Right as 7P #2 decided to release his weapon, I kicked him hard into the confused man behind him. Neither man went down, but I still got what I wanted.Guy number three's main weapon was trapped to his right as I rushed his left. Vainly he tried to get an arm up to defend himself. My right tomahawk shattered his forearm at the elbow joint. Only the body armor on the inside of the blow stopped the appendage from falling off. My rational mind was catching up with my instincts.These men had on head-to-toe ballistic body suits with knee guards and solid ballistic inserts for the front and back of the torso. They had on some sort of dull, dark-grey respirator mask which was why the armless guy wasn't screaming his head off. They also had matte black circular ear protections and a type of high tech visor on the ears and eyes respectively.The sole survivor was falling back, drawing his silenced pistol while trying to put some distance between us and find Miyako at the same time. Dummy, tomahawks are designed for throwing. A bit of Amazons indignation was behind that toss. His visor was cut in two as my anger drove the blade 6 cm/2+ inches into his skull.I heard a sharp crack of a rock being shattered. Miyako's graceful flip landed her at my side. I ran to the last victim, put my foot on his chest and put my right hand on the tomahawk's shaft. The guy reached up and grabbed the thigh of the foot on his chest with both hands. Shit, the fucker wasn't dead!

Tilts starp Rietumiem un Austrumiem – no trokšņainajām Stambulas ielām līdz mierpilnajām Kapadokijas ainavām. Šī valsts apbur ar dabas skaistumu un kultūras bagātību, taču aiz tā slēpjas sarežģīta politiskā realitāte. Turcijas politiskā vide pēdējos gados ir strauji mainījusies, un ir cilvēki, kuri uzskata, ka Turcija virzās uz diktatūru, un ir cilvēki, kuriem šī valsts asociējas ar atpūtas kūrortiem un iespēju par salīdzinoši lētāku naudu nopirkt zeltu un dažādu zīmolu viltojumus. Tieši tik dažāda ir šī valsts, kurā, protams, dzīvo arī latvieši. Lai gan informācija par diasporu Turcijā skopa - 2016. gadā plašsaziņas līdzekļos Latvijā parādās ziņa, ka uzsākts darbs, lai tuvākajā laikā Turcijā nodibinātu pirmo latviešu biedrība, kā arī izveidotu skolu; nākamā ziņa, ko var lasīt portālā LSM.lv, ir 2019 gadā. Tā vēsta, ka diaspora ir izveidojusies, ka Turcijā dzīvo ap 100 iebraucēju no Latvijas. Lielākā latviešu koncentrācija ir Stambulā, tur jau ceturto gadu darbojas latviešu skola “Pipariņi”. Kāda situācija ir 2025. gadā, to skaidrojam raidījumā Globālais latvietis. 21. gadsimts.  Sarunājas Kristīne Savicka, kura 10 gadus dzīvoja Kijivā, tad Krievijas iebrukuma laikā viņa bija ceļojumā Turcijā, tomēr tur arī sanāca palikt, un Anatālijā viņa ir nodzīvojusi jau trīs gadus; Zanda Garanča-Devrana šobrīd dzīvo Latvijā, bet laikā, kad dzīvojusi Turcijā, darbojusies latviešu skolā “Pipariņi”; Santa Graikste, viņu uz Turciju aizveda darbs, bet tur viņa ir kļuva par aktīvu Turcijas latviešu kopienas dalībnieci, un kā pati saka –  “cenšas saturēt kopā Alānijas reģionā dzīvojošos latviešus”; un no Rojas ir pieslēgusies Skaidrīte Dzene. Arī viņa bijusi ilgus gadus saistīta ar Turciju, jo Skaidrītes vīrs ir turks, ārsts, abiem ir trīs bērni un, pateicoties dzīvei Turcijā, Skaidrīte, kurai ir pārtikas tehnoloģijas un agrārās ekonomikas grāds, savulaik izveidojusi eko kosmētikas zīmolu, jo Turcijā tolaik  šādi ķermeņa kopšanas līdzekļi bijuši maz pieejami.

Today, the Spotlight shines On clarinetist Anat Cohen.Anat's been bringing her joyful spirit to jazz venues worldwide for two decades, blending swing, Brazilian rhythms, and melodies from her native Israel. Her 2024 album Bloom pairs her musical warmth with that of her quartet Quartetinho - Portuguese for "little quartet" - creating intimate conversations between clarinet, piano, bass, and percussion.Anat will mark her 50th birthday this spring with four special nights at Lincoln Center's Appel Room, sharing the stage with her equally talented brothers, Avishai and Yuval Cohen.Today, we'll hear about Anat's musical journey, from family jam sessions in Tel Aviv to becoming the first Israeli artist to headline the Village Vanguard and plenty of stories in between.(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Anat Cohen's album with Quartetinho, Bloom)–Dig DeeperVisit Anat Cohen at anatcohen.comPurchase Anat Cohen and Quartetinho's Bloom from Bandcamp or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choiceFollow Anat Cohen on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTubeAnat Cohen: Journeys A 50th Birthday CelebrationAnat Cohen: 'Clarinetwork' At The VanguardAnat Cohen Quartetinho - Live from Jazz St. LouisDig into this episode's complete show notes at spotlightonpodcast.com–• Did you enjoy this episode? Please share it with a friend! You can also rate Spotlight On ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.• Subscribe! Be the first to check out each new episode of Spotlight On in your podcast app of choice.• Looking for more? Visit spotlightonpodcast.com for bonus content, web-only interviews + features, and the Spotlight On email newsletter. You can also follow us on Bluesky, Mastodon, YouTube, and LinkedIn.• Be sure to bookmark our new online magazine, The Tonearm! → thetonearm.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today, the Spotlight shines On clarinetist Anat Cohen.Anat's been bringing her joyful spirit to jazz venues worldwide for two decades, blending swing, Brazilian rhythms, and melodies from her native Israel. Her 2024 album Bloom pairs her musical warmth with that of her quartet Quartetinho - Portuguese for "little quartet" - creating intimate conversations between clarinet, piano, bass, and percussion.Anat will mark her 50th birthday this spring with four special nights at Lincoln Center's Appel Room, sharing the stage with her equally talented brothers, Avishai and Yuval Cohen.Today, we'll hear about Anat's musical journey, from family jam sessions in Tel Aviv to becoming the first Israeli artist to headline the Village Vanguard and plenty of stories in between.(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Anat Cohen's album with Quartetinho, Bloom)–Dig DeeperVisit Anat Cohen at anatcohen.comPurchase Anat Cohen and Quartetinho's Bloom from Bandcamp or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choiceFollow Anat Cohen on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTubeAnat Cohen: Journeys A 50th Birthday CelebrationAnat Cohen: 'Clarinetwork' At The VanguardAnat Cohen Quartetinho - Live from Jazz St. LouisDig into this episode's complete show notes at spotlightonpodcast.com–• Did you enjoy this episode? Please share it with a friend! You can also rate Spotlight On ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.• Subscribe! Be the first to check out each new episode of Spotlight On in your podcast app of choice.• Looking for more? Visit spotlightonpodcast.com for bonus content, web-only interviews + features, and the Spotlight On email newsletter. You can also follow us on Bluesky, Mastodon, YouTube, and LinkedIn.• Be sure to bookmark our new online magazine, The Tonearm! → thetonearm.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chelsea Fagan of The Financial Diet and Berna Anat of New Dimes join us for our last Rich Girl Roundtable of the year. We cover everything from women and first-gen communities' relationships with money in 2025 and beyond, to building coalitions in "real life" for the futures we want to see. Tune in to this episode...then head offline. Rich Girl Roundup is Money with Katie's weekly segment where Katie and her Executive Producer Henah answer your burning money questions. Each month, we'll put out a call for questions on her Instagram (@moneywithkatie). New episodes every week. Transcript, show resources, production credits, and more can be found at: https://moneywithkatie.com/community-action. Money with Katie's mission is to be the intersection where the economic, cultural, and political meet the tactical, practical, personal finance education everyone needs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alicia Sometimes is a poet and broadcaster passionate about art and science. She has performed her poetry at many venues, festivals and events around the world. Her poems have been in Best Australian Science Writing, Best Australian Poems, Meanjin, Westerly and many more. Alicia is director/co-writer of the art/science planetarium shows, Elemental and Particle/Wave. In 2023 she received ANAT's Synapse Artist Residency and co-created an art installation for Science Gallery Melbourne's exhibition, Dark Matters. Her new poetry book, Stellar Atmospheres, is out via Cordite Books. She is passionate about art-science projects.www.aliciasometimes.com(link is external) Production and Interview: Tina Giannoukos

Host Gary J. Ross discusses BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) and its relation to private equity and venture capital with Anat Alon-Beck, associate professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. Gary and Prof. Alon-Beck discuss the BDS movement and its goal of applying economic and political pressure on Israel and any company doing business with Israel. Prof. Alon-Beck highlights the reputational and financial risks to companies in all fields, including technology, defense, and academia, the latter evidenced in protests demanding universities withdraw funds from companies with business ties to Israel.

Anat Cohen is an acclaimed jazz clarinetist, saxophonist and band leader. She's performed at the Newport, Montreal and North Sea Jazz festivals. She's been voted Clarinetist and Multi-Reedist Of The Year multiple times. She's won the DownBeat readers poll. Hailed as a “Master” by the New York Times. And she's been nominated for several Grammys.My featured song is “Heat 2007” from the album Play by my band Project Grand Slam. Spotify link.---------------------------------------------The Follow Your Dream Podcast:Top 1% of all podcasts with Listeners in 200 countries!For more information and other episodes of the podcast click here. To subscribe to the podcast click here .To subscribe to our weekly Follow Your Dream Podcast email click here.To Rate and Review the podcast click here.“Dream With Robert”. Click here.—----------------------------------------ROBERT'S SINGLES:“SOSTICE” is Robert's newest single, with a rockin' Old School vibe. Called “Stunning!”, “A Gem!”, “Magnificent!” and “5 Stars!”.Click HERE for all links.—---------------------------------“THE GIFT” is Robert's ballad arranged by Grammy winning arranger Michael Abene and turned into a horn-driven Samba. Praised by David Amram, John Helliwell, Joe La Barbera, Tony Carey, Fay Claassen, Antonio Farao, Danny Gottlieb and Leslie Mandoki.Click HERE for all links.—-------------------------------------“LOU'S BLUES”. Robert's Jazz Fusion “Tone Poem”. Called “Fantastic! Great playing and production!” (Mark Egan - Pat Metheny Group/Elements) and “Digging it!” (Peter Erskine - Weather Report)!Click HERE for all links.—----------------------------------------“THE RICH ONES”. Robert's sublime, atmospheric Jazz Fusion tune. Featuring guest artist Randy Brecker (Blood Sweat & Tears) on flugelhorn. Click HERE for all links.—---------------------------------------Audio production:Jimmy RavenscroftKymera Films Connect with Anat at:www.anatcohen.com Connect with the Follow Your Dream Podcast:Website - www.followyourdreampodcast.comEmail Robert - robert@followyourdreampodcast.com Follow Robert's band, Project Grand Slam, and his music:Website - www.projectgrandslam.comYouTubeSpotify MusicApple MusicEmail - pgs@projectgrandslam.com

Deze week in Buitenhof: Oud-Bondskanselier Angela Merkel, journalist Anat Saragusti, voorzitter Universiteiten van Nederland Caspar van den Berg, gedeputeerde Limburg Elianne Demollin,  Presentatie: Twan Huys  Wil je meer weten over de gasten in Buitenhof? Op onze website vind je meer informatie. Daar kan je deze aflevering ook terugkijken en je vindt er natuurlijk nog veel meer gesprekken:   https://bit.ly/buitenhof-1-dec-24  De ondertitelde versie van dit gesprek vind je op YouTube en NPOStart:  https://youtu.be/1hAOuubjz_g  https://npo.nl/start/serie/buitenhof/seizoen-19/buitenhof_313/afspelen   

Around 3,000 Israelis and counting have signed a letter demanding sanctions against Israel and condemning its war crimes.It's an act of real moral courage - and I'm honoured to interview one of the signatories, the Israeli academic Anat Matar about what it means. This is sobering stuff.Here's the letter: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/24/israel-immediate-ceasefire-open-letter Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/the-owen-jones-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

En el segmento Salud de El Gran Musical conversamos con Grecia Ochoa, Patóloga Anatómica de Ecua American, sobre las causas, síntomas y tratamiento del Helicobacter pylori.

Let's chat about your financial health here: https://teriwellbrock.com/request-a-quote/ I truly resonated (as you will hear) with Anat Peri's message. She is CEO and Found of Training Camp for the Soul (TCS), and renowned Creator and Master Facilitator of the TCS Method. Please join us as we discuss: Anat's insights on somatic and inner-child reparenting techniques … Read More Read More

Del segundo disco de la clarinetista Anat Cohen con su Quartetinho, 'Bloom', los instrumentales 'The night owl', 'Paco', 'Coco rococo' y 'Tango para Guillermo'. Y 'Reconvexo', el disco de Anat a dúo con el brasileño Marcello Gonçalves (guitarra de 7 cuerdas), la canción de Caetano que le da título, 'Paula e Bebeto', 'Anima' y 'Maria Maria', de Milton Nascimento, 'Correnteza', de Jobim y Bonfá, y 'O que é que a baiana tem', de Gilberto Gil.Escuchar audio

Today I talked to Anat Geva about The Architecture of Modern American Synagogues, 1950s-1960s (Texas A&M UP, 2023). There is no one mandate on how to build the exterior of a synagogue - something that I don't think I ever thought about, yet it was something that Professor Anat Geva focused on. Famous architects of different backgrounds built the synagogues across the USA and no two really look the same. It made me reflect on recognizing a synagogue as distinct from the outside, and the concept of a community being created through their synagogues. Focusing on the post WWII era of synagogue creation adds another layer, and the discussion went into how the art, light, and even sustainability were key elements in these creations. It seems to have interested others as well as there were some interesting reviews in the WSJ and the Journal of Architects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Today I talked to Anat Geva about The Architecture of Modern American Synagogues, 1950s-1960s (Texas A&M UP, 2023). There is no one mandate on how to build the exterior of a synagogue - something that I don't think I ever thought about, yet it was something that Professor Anat Geva focused on. Famous architects of different backgrounds built the synagogues across the USA and no two really look the same. It made me reflect on recognizing a synagogue as distinct from the outside, and the concept of a community being created through their synagogues. Focusing on the post WWII era of synagogue creation adds another layer, and the discussion went into how the art, light, and even sustainability were key elements in these creations. It seems to have interested others as well as there were some interesting reviews in the WSJ and the Journal of Architects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Today I talked to Anat Geva about The Architecture of Modern American Synagogues, 1950s-1960s (Texas A&M UP, 2023). There is no one mandate on how to build the exterior of a synagogue - something that I don't think I ever thought about, yet it was something that Professor Anat Geva focused on. Famous architects of different backgrounds built the synagogues across the USA and no two really look the same. It made me reflect on recognizing a synagogue as distinct from the outside, and the concept of a community being created through their synagogues. Focusing on the post WWII era of synagogue creation adds another layer, and the discussion went into how the art, light, and even sustainability were key elements in these creations. It seems to have interested others as well as there were some interesting reviews in the WSJ and the Journal of Architects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Today I talked to Anat Geva about The Architecture of Modern American Synagogues, 1950s-1960s (Texas A&M UP, 2023). There is no one mandate on how to build the exterior of a synagogue - something that I don't think I ever thought about, yet it was something that Professor Anat Geva focused on. Famous architects of different backgrounds built the synagogues across the USA and no two really look the same. It made me reflect on recognizing a synagogue as distinct from the outside, and the concept of a community being created through their synagogues. Focusing on the post WWII era of synagogue creation adds another layer, and the discussion went into how the art, light, and even sustainability were key elements in these creations. It seems to have interested others as well as there were some interesting reviews in the WSJ and the Journal of Architects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Today I talked to Anat Geva about The Architecture of Modern American Synagogues, 1950s-1960s (Texas A&M UP, 2023). There is no one mandate on how to build the exterior of a synagogue - something that I don't think I ever thought about, yet it was something that Professor Anat Geva focused on. Famous architects of different backgrounds built the synagogues across the USA and no two really look the same. It made me reflect on recognizing a synagogue as distinct from the outside, and the concept of a community being created through their synagogues. Focusing on the post WWII era of synagogue creation adds another layer, and the discussion went into how the art, light, and even sustainability were key elements in these creations. It seems to have interested others as well as there were some interesting reviews in the WSJ and the Journal of Architects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

durée : 00:59:44 - Anat Cohen, quand la vie fait "Bloom"... - par : Nicolas Pommaret - La clarinettiste et compositrice Anat Cohen vient de sortir “Bloom”, le deuxième album de son quartet Quartetinho (prononcé « quartet-CHIN-yo ») sur son label Anzic.

Anat is an Inner-Child Healing Expert and the Creator of the TCS Method where she certifies coaches and healers to get their clients the deepest results. She has devoted her life to empowering people to heal past traumas, overcome major life obstacles, build confidence, and create lasting change. She blends traditional healing arts and modern psychology, with somatic and inner child reparenting practices to solve the root cause of your major life challenges and condition you for the life you truly want to lead. Her approach to healing and personal growth isn't just informative, it's profoundly experiential and leads to true transformation. With over 19 years of experience and 10,000+ hours of focused training she has become a master at supporting people like you to break through their limiting beliefs and reclaim their personal power in order to create the lives they've always dreamed of. Links:  Cultivating Safety Meditation Mood Meter Mastery Certification Program Training Camp for the Soul

In this lively episode, Anat Admati (Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford) explains what she believes to be wrong about banking, and how it should be changed. Anat is co-author (with Martin Hellwig) of The Bankers' New Clothes, originally published in 2013, then expanded and re-published this year to encompass the era of increased regulation. Interviewer Russell Napier challenges Anat on some of her opinions, and Anat challenges Russell back, making for a fascinating listen.•The Library of Mistakes runs an outstanding course called the Practical History of Financial Markets. To find out more, go to: www.libraryofmistakes.com/course

In today's conversation, we explore the importance of tending to the ways that our needs didn't get met as children, and becoming aware of how our inner child informs our behavioral patterns as adults. We also discuss a powerful methodology for moving through your emotions in just 90 seconds, as well as working with your nervous system instead of against it.  IN THIS EPISODE, WE TALK ABOUT:  Sensation as the language of the nervous system  How being precise with the language describing our feelings can help us process them Supporting clients through the process of showing up for their inner child  Today, we're joined by our return guest, Anat Peri. Anat is an Inner-Child Healing Expert and the Creator of the TCS Method where she certifies coaches and healers to get their clients the deepest results. She has devoted her life to empowering people to heal past traumas, overcome major life obstacles, build confidence, and create lasting change. Tune in to this episode to learn new tools to move through old patterns that are holding you back!  RESOURCES MENTIONED:  Mood Meter  SPECIAL OFFER: Apply for the Multidimensional Woman Mentorship (save $500 before September 10th!!) GUEST INFO & OFFERINGS: Connect with Anat on Instagram: @anat.peri Visit Anat's Website: Trainingcampforthesoul.com Mastery Certification Program 5 Keys Masterclass 5 Personality Patterns Guide FOLLOW ME:  Find me on Instagram: @amynatalieco  To sign up for the Feminine Wisdom newsletter, head to www.amynatalieco.com and scroll to the bottom! Download: Empowered Feminine Morning Ritual Have an episode topic request? Submit it here! 

In today's episode, we're excited to have Anat Shenker-Osorio as our guest. Anat is the principal and founder of ASO Communications and the host of the "Words to Win By" podcast. As a messaging expert, Anat shares powerful insights on using storytelling and narratives to create impact on issues ranging from abortion rights to drug policy reform.  We dive into Anat's strategies for engaging in difficult conversations—you'll hear how she emphasizes the power of individual action and offers advice on finding common ground without compromising core values. This is a thought-provoking discussion you won't want to miss. Stay tuned as we Break the Bias with Anat Shenker-Osorio!