Maybe I should prime the pump?!


The chime of midnight was fast approaching and just as KNUZ's Burt Masters had said on the radio, the blizzard had arrived
in Benbrook on Christmas Eve. The eleven year-old boy gazed out of the bedroom window at the swinging blinking lights
strung out across Main Street and marvelled at the single flakes of snow battling against the gusts of wind on their way to
form a drift beside Mister Hidell's store's doorway across the way.

Harvey shivered inwardly and wondered if the old man who repaired shoes would be clearing his residence of business on
the morning when everyone else would be gaily ripping open wrapping-paper and under a pine-smelling decorated tree.
Of course, Harvey was thinking about the rich kids on the other side of the tracks, the ones with a real father... children
that didn't include himself.

Another blast of air hurled a flurry of snow at Harvey's window as if to warn him about his wool-gathering, his vigil was
for the bringer of those gifts and the lad nibbled his bottom lip as he wondered if this year he'd be on a certain list the
crimson-robed fat man carried on his person.

Santa Clause was supposedly on his way to Texas and in a snowstorm that promised to rival any television setting Bing
Crosby could conjure up and meanwhile, decisions of a future were being constructed in an sparsely-furnished bedroom
and in a head of a boy who wanted more.

The small world of the boy at the window had become absent of colour and in that kingdom of buffeting winds and icy
shards, Harvey's attention turned away from scanning the starless night sky and frolicked in the strange story the
shoemaker had told him. Mister Hidell had spoken of many things during Harvey's time working in the cobbler's ramshackle
premises, a strange woman called Aura Rhanes, puzzling ramblings of a clandestine takeover within the Government by
shady people and flying saucers avoiding something called radar.

A fleeting sparkle in the maelstrom outside caused the boy to abandon his musings and peer upwards for further verification
of tonight's parcel-laden visitor. Harvey's unblinking eyes surveyed the cyclone's chaos and glimpsed seemingly composed
patterns, odd runes of arrangement and mizmazes of rebus cipher within the randomness of the squall. To one of the
wealthy male-scion dreaming of red bicycles and Ichiko Space Patrols, the riddle in the snow would go unnoticed.
But Harvey saw the symbols easily.

The twinkle came again and without taking his contemplation from the moving glint of light, the boy from an impoverished
upbringing reached for the only true gift that he'd really appreciated. The rifle given to him from Mister Hidell for his supposed
protection from the shady-ones. "When they come for you, they'll know what you're thinking..." the old man had warned as
he'd passed the wax-paper-wrapped package over the counter of his store. "...A friend I know is over at Landers and reckons
Rhanes' people will try another arrival", this statement was accompanied with a wink of the canny.

The rotund man on the flying sleigh swooped down through the blizzard and with a wave of his hand, the reindeer executed
a landing that any pilot of the craft Mister Hidell had described would be proud of. Harvey quickly clasped the cold barrel of
the weapon and dashed to his bed, the turmoil of his thoughts equivalent to the anarchy of nature outside.
Santa Clause was coming to town.
..............................................................

The freezing breath of the Texas snowstorm dragged the temperature of Harvey's bedroom down to parallel that of the algific
kingdom of the man now slumped in the deep snow. The boy squinted to avoid the icy flakes streaming into the open window
as he peered out to see Santa's tunic coloured with a different style of red. Noticing a dim illumination in the shadows of
Mister Hidell's establishment, faint half-baked theories bustled for room as to what his own role may be in Hidell's weird
suspicions that the USA was being invaded.

But he was just an eleven year-old boy at the beginning of nineteen fifty, a son of a dead man and a struggling mother. If it
hadn't been for the dusty lightbulb in the Cobbler's shop, Harvey would've pulled the paint-peeling window closed and get to
the spilt sack of presents near his bed.

But the youngster's attention went back to the well-fed altruist who'd feebly attempted a snow-angel during his dying and
the herd of harnessed engines sniffing and snorting impatiently. He might remember the names of the reindeer if he was
urged, but the uninterested caribou emulated the boy's sympathy for the porcine Kriss Kringle laid in the snow.

Once more, Harvey was more interested in the dull light across the street. What was the old cordwainer doing up at this
hour...? the shivering kid pondered as he determined his goal had been met and glancing back at the bag of goodies,
Mister Hidell's worries of spaceships and sensual off-worlders would have to be placed on the back-burner for now.

"You've been a good boy this year" Harvey Oswald whispered to himself as he plucked a Christmas present from the sack
and excitedly began to peel the wrapping open. He was on the right side of the tracks -he thought, just  as the Benbrook
town-clock struck twelve.

The End.

This is an OFFICIAL ROGUE NATION SHORT STORY CONTEST thread.
(*The VERY FIRST ONE, for our first Christmas, in our "brand new home" awww.)

The Theme?

CHRISTMAS SCHISTMAS! [CS22]





YES fellow Rogues.... it is THAT time of the Year again!

Your Mission, should you choose to accept it... is to write a NEW and ORIGINAL Short Story which contains or relates to the theme:

"CHRISTMAS SCHISTMAS!"


Think of it as... "Christmas gone wrong", "Stuff your Christmas not your Turkey!" or "Bah Humbug!".

It's Christmas season... what could possibly (or did) go wrong?

It could end up Happy, Sad, Disasterous or anything else in between... that is of course, up to YOU!






RULES:
There is no word count but PLEASE bear in mind that this is a SHORT STORY Contest.

You should write your own, brand new, original short story and place it in a New Thread within this (Rogue's Writer Contests) forum HERE.

It can be serious, funny, scary, rhyming, crazy, dull... ANY style that you choose... but a (bad) CHRISTMAS theme is a must!


Please include [CS22] in the title, so that we know it is an official entry.
(e.g. "The Ghost of Christmas Crap!" [CS22] )

You may include (copyright/royalty free) images, short video clips, sound or music etc if it relates to, or enhances your story, but this is by-no-means compulsory.


The contest will run from Now until Thurs 22nd December.




The Judging will be done in secret, by our very own Super-Secret-Santa judging panel and behind closed doors or up a Chimney... to deliberately induce feelings of paranoia and delusions of persecution in the minds of the entrants!!!

The Judges decision is final.


PRIZE:
As well as a "warm fuzzy glow", The Winner of our Contest will inherit the Honorary Title of "XmasBard" until such times as a young upstart seizes the Title in a future Christmas Contest!

Any questions, queries, bribes etc.... just wrap them in tinsel and place them under my desk in the break-room, in a Christmassy  envelope, (**available from @BIAD 's Christmas supplies shed).

Under Starters Orders.....

“Away Splasher, Away Dan Sir, Go Prancid, and Dixon, Fly Shovet, Go Stupid, Have a Donner, Put yer Mitzon, and Run Run Rudolph!”

The Best of Festive Luck!
G

This might open some 'emergent' doors.

Quote:Physicists Create ‘the Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You Can Imagine’

“What we have here in its construct and structure is a baby wormhole,” Maria Spiropulu, a physicist at Caltech, said. “And we hope that we can make adult wormholes and toddler wormholes step-by-step.”

In an experiment that ticks most of the mystery boxes in modern physics, a group of researchers announced on Wednesday that they had simulated a pair of black holes in a quantum computer and sent a message between them through a shortcut in space-time called a wormhole.

Physicists described the achievement as another small step in the effort to understand the relation between gravity, which shapes the universe, and quantum mechanics, which governs the subatomic realm of particles.

“This is important because what we have here in its construct and structure is a baby wormhole,” said Maria Spiropulu, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and the leader of a consortium called Quantum Communication Channels for Fundamental Physics, which conducted the research. “And we hope that we can make adult wormholes and toddler wormholes step-by-step.”

In their report, published Wednesday in Nature, the researchers described the result in measured words: “This work is a successful attempt at observing traversable wormhole dynamics in an experimental setting.”

The wormhole that Dr. Spiropulu and her colleagues created and exploited is not a tunnel through real physical space but rather through an “emergent” two-dimensional space. The “black holes” were not real ones that could swallow the computer but lines of code in a quantum computer. Strictly speaking, the results apply only to a simplified “toy model” of a universe — in particular, one that is akin to a hologram, with quantum fields on the edge of space-time determining what happens within, sort of in the way that the label on a soup can describes the contents.

To be clear: The results of this experiment do not offer the prospect anytime soon, if ever, of a cosmic subway through which to roam the galaxy like Jodie Foster in the movie “Contact” or Matthew McConaughey in “Interstellar.”

“I guess the key question, which is perhaps hard to answer, is: Do we say from the simulation it’s a real black hole?” Daniel Jafferis, a physics professor at Harvard, said. “I kind of like the term ‘emergent black hole.’”

He added: “We are just using the quantum computer to find out what it would look and feel like if you were in this gravitational situation.” He and Alexander Zlokapa, a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are the lead authors of the paper.

Physicists reacted to the paper with interest and caution, expressing concern that the public and media would mistakenly think that actual physical wormholes had been created.

“The most important thing I’d want New York Times readers to understand is this,” Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing expert at the University of Texas in Austin, wrote in an email. “If this experiment has brought a wormhole into actual physical existence, then a strong case could be made that you, too, bring a wormhole into actual physical existence every time you sketch one with pen and paper.”

Daniel Harlow, a physicist at M.I.T. who was not involved in the experiment, noted that the experiment was based on a model of quantum gravity that was so simple, and unrealistic, that it could just as well have been studied using a pencil and paper.

“So I’d say that this doesn’t teach us anything about quantum gravity that we didn’t already know,” Dr. Harlow wrote in an email. “On the other hand, I think it is exciting as a technical achievement, because if we can’t even do this (and until now we couldn’t), then simulating more interesting quantum gravity theories would CERTAINLY be off the table.” Developing computers big enough to do so might take 10 or 15 years, he added.

Leonard Susskind, a physicist at Stanford University who was not part of the team, agreed. “They’re learning that they could do this experiment,” he said, adding: “The really interesting thing here is the possibility of analyzing purely quantum phenomena using general relativity, and who knows where that’s going to go.”

The two faces of Einstein

Wormholes entered the physics lexicon in 1935 as one of the weirder predictions of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which describes how matter and energy warp space to create what we call gravity. That year Einstein and his colleague, Nathan Rosen, showed in a paper that shortcuts through space-time, connecting pairs of black holes, could exist. The physicist John Wheeler later called these connectors “wormholes.”

Originally it seemed that wormholes were effectively useless; theory held that they would slam shut the instant anything entered them. They have never been observed outside of science fiction.


A month earlier that same year, in 1935, Einstein, Rosen and Boris Podolsky made another breakthrough, one they thought would discredit the chancy nature of quantum mechanics. They pointed out that quantum rules permitted what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” Measuring one of a pair of particles would determine the results of measuring the other particle, even if the two were light-years apart. Einstein thought this prediction was absurd, but physicists now call it “entanglement” and use it every day in the lab.

Until a few years ago, such quantum tricks weren’t thought to have anything to do with gravity. As a result, physicists were left with no theory of “quantum gravity” to explain what happened when the realms of inner space and outer space collided, as in the Big Bang or inside black holes.

But in 2013 Juan Maldacena, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Dr. Susskind proposed that these two phenomena — spooky action and wormholes — were actually two sides of the same coin, each described in a different but complementary mathematical language.

Those spooky, entangled particles, by this logic, were connected by equally mysterious wormholes. Quantum mechanics could be enlisted to study gravity, and vice versa. The equations that describe quantum phenomena turned out to have analogues in the Einsteinian equations for gravity.
“It’s mostly a matter of taste which description you use because they give exactly the same answer,” Dr. Jafferis said. “And that was an incredible discovery.”

Escape hatches

The recent wormhole experiment sought to employ the mathematics of general relativity to examine an aspect of quantum magic, known as quantum teleportation, to see if some new aspect of physics or gravity might be revealed.

In quantum teleportation, physicists use a set of quantum manipulations to send information between two particles — inches or miles apart — that are entangled in a pair, without the physicists knowing what the message is. The technology is expected to be the heart of a next-generation, unhackable “quantum internet.”

Physicists like to compare the teleportation process to two cups of tea. Drop a cube of sugar into one teacup, and it promptly dissolves — then, after a tick of the quantum clock, the cube reappears intact in the other teacup.

The experiment became conceivable after a pair of papers by Dr. Susskind and, independently, by Dr. Jafferis, Ping Gao of M.I.T., and Aron Wall, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge. They suggested a way that wormholes could be made traversable, after all. What was needed, Dr. Gao and his collaborators said, was a small dose of negative energy at the exit end of the wormhole to prop open the hatch long enough for information to escape.

In classical physics, there is no such thing as negative energy. But in quantum theory, energy can be negative, generating an antigravitational effect. For example, so-called virtual particles, which flit in and out of existence using energy borrowed from empty space, can fall into a black hole, carrying a debt to nature in the form of energy that the black hole must then pay back. This slow leak, Stephen Hawking calculated in 1974, causes the black hole to lose energy and shrink.

When Dr. Spiropulu proposed trying to recreate this wormhole magic on a quantum computer, her colleagues and sponsors at the Department of Energy “thought I was completely nuts,” she recalled. “But Jafferis said, Let’s do it.”

Harnessing uncertainty

In ordinary computers, including the phone in your pocket, the currency of calculation is bits, which can be ones or zeros. Quantum computers run on qubits, which can be 0 or 1 or anywhere in between until they are measured or observed. This makes quantum computers super powerful for certain kinds of tasks, like factoring large numbers and (maybe one day) cracking cryptographic codes. In essence, a quantum computer runs all the possible variations of the program simultaneously to arrive at a solution.

“We make uncertainty an ally and embrace it,” Dr. Spiropulu said.

To reach their full potential, quantum computers will need thousands of working qubits and a million more “error correction” qubits. Google hopes to reach such a goal by the end of the decade, according to Hartmut Neven, head of the company’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence lab in Venice, Calif., who is also on Dr. Spiropulu’s team.

The Caltech physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once predicted that the ultimate use of this quantum power might be to investigate quantum physics itself, as in the wormhole experiment.

“I’m excited to see that researchers can live out Feynman’s dream,” Dr. Neven said.

The wormhole experiment was carried out on a version of Google’s Sycamore 2 computer, which has 72 qubits. Of these, the team used only nine to limit the amount of interference and noise in the system. Two were reference qubits, which played the roles of input and output in the experiment.

The seven other qubits held the two copies of code describing a “sparsified” version of an already simple model of a holographic universe called SYK, named after its three creators: Subir Sachdev of Harvard, Jinwu Ye of Mississippi State University and Alexei Kitaev of Caltech. Both SYK models were packed into the same seven qubits. In the experiment these SYK systems played the role of two black holes, one by scrambling the message into nonsense — the quantum equivalent of swallowing it — and then the other by popping it back out.

“Into this we throw a qubit,” said Joseph Lykken, leader of the Fermilab Quantum Institute and an author on the Nature paper; he was referring to the input message — the quantum analog of a series of ones and zeros. This qubit interacted with the first copy of the SYK qubit; its meaning was scrambled into random noise and it disappeared.

Then, in a tick of the quantum clock, the two SYK systems were connected and a shock of negative energy went from the first system to the second one, briefly propping open the latter.

The signal then reappeared in its original unscrambled form — in the ninth and last qubit, attached to the second SYK system, which represented the other end of the wormhole.

One clue that the researchers were actually recording “wormholelike” behavior, Dr. Lykken said, was that signals emerged from the other end of the wormhole in the order that they went in.

In a Nature article accompanying Dr. Jafferis’s paper, Dr. Susskind and Adam Brown, a physicist at Stanford, noted that the results might shed light on some still-mysterious aspects of ordinary quantum mechanics. For instance, after the sugar cube dissolves in the first teacup, why does it reappear in the other cup in its original form?

“The surprise is not that the message made it across in some form, but that it made it across unscrambled,” the two authors wrote.

The easiest explanation, they added, is that the message went through a wormhole, albeit a “really short” one, Dr. Lykken said in an interview. In quantum mechanics, the shortest conceivable length in nature is 10⁻³³ centimeters, the so-called Planck length. Dr. Lykken calculated that their wormhole was maybe only three Planck lengths long.

“It’s the smallest, crummiest wormhole you can imagine making,” he said. “But that’s really cool because now we’re clearly doing quantum gravity.”

This idea comes from @"NightskyeB4Dawn"#10  who mentioned that Christmas must look a little different, depending on where we live, and Rogues are all over the world.

I invite you to take pictures of what Christmas looks like, where you live, from your part of the world.

Real pics from your camera or cell phone camera, not pictures from the net or from a google search.

We will insert those pictures in the Holidays Banners that will start going up a week before Xmas.

It can be pictures of:

• Your Christmas tree
  
• Your indoor deco
  
• Your outdoor deco
  
• Your windows deco
  
• Your neighborhood deco
  
• A mall deco
  
• Your city's deco
  
• Something you'd find original
  

Given my confusion on this whole subject matter, I wasn't sure which forum best fit, so landed here.

Almost everyone in the US has seen photos at some point of Nazi book burnings, burnt into our national psyche as the quintessential expression of fascist tyranny. But, do you know what books they were burning, beyond the fact that many of the books authors were Jewish, pacifists and other books not considered sufficiently fascist.?? I'm sure some of you do know, but I'll admit I did not. It seems so much of our war/genociding/isolation/ideology history, including the occult side, and aside from religion & skin color is about sexual orientation. That seems so crazy to me. Now we're in an era where it's becoming harder & harder to believe anyone or almost anything from mass media to independent talking heads to so-called academia experts to even the quiet corners of the Internet that are one-sided. I'm not sure what to call it, but there has been a paradigm shift of mindset inversion going on due to forgotten history? Perhaps the only way to try and make sense of it is to look back in history.

Not that long ago, actually, there was...



This I did not know...

The books in question are from the archives of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (“Institute for Sexology/Sexual Science”) in Berlin, a pioneering center for research into gay and trans experiences, gender-affirming treatment including surgeries & early advocacy for gay/trans rights.

Quote:For some context, the Institute was a private research organization, founded by Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin in July 1919. Its research centered around the study of sexology and what we would today call “LGBTQIA+ rights”. The origins of the Institute are rooted in the more liberal climate of the Weimar Republic, prior to the rise of the Third Reich’s censorship of anything not deemed “proper” for the empire. During the first years of the Institute, its archive was home to thousands of academic and artistic works, as well as clinical consultations for individuals who could not otherwise have access to healthcare due to their identity.

...
West Germany determined under Paragraph 175 (the sweeping criminal regulation on homosexual relations that existed from 1871 to 1994) that the seizure of property by the Nazi party was legal, denying the community any sort of restitution after the fact (Steakley 1975).
...
Resources like the Institut are targeted to this day. Particularly in today’s political climate, when the word “Transgender” can be banned from the CDC’s official documents by the Trump Administration (Sun, Eilperin 2017), censorship and gender are in constant struggle. Before this, even, the Reagan Administration did something similar with the AIDS crisis (Barnes 1989), leading many to die or be ostracized. Just this past month, there has been a movement against Mermaids Gender, a nonprofit organization designed to help trans people in the UK. Not only is the information about transness censored, the resources we desperately need are also assailed. Don’t even get me started on the trans military ban.

There are big ways and little ways to disrupt information about trans people. We can’t always fix them, but we can do our best to try to chip away at them. It’s why I started Trans Narrative in the first place: people–trans and cis alike–need to hear trans voices. We need to learn our histories so we can protect ourselves better in the future. We need to make sure that what the Nazi Party wanted–the erasure of trans people, for one–doesn’t succeed.

So if you’re cis, I wish you take all of this to heart. I hope you go off and research more about the Institut and about Paragraph 175, and about so much more. Trans people have been around for a while, and we’re not going anywhere. What can you do to help us?

Trans Narrative, L. A. Lanquist blog

Power is out for ~40,000 customers in Moore County, North Carolina near Fort Bragg after someone shot up a substation on the same night as a drag show. Wait till you learn who organized the protest below!

Quote:‘Intentional Vandalism’ Leaves 40,000 Without Power in N.C.

Several substations across Moore County were reportedly shot up.

A major power outage in North Carolina that left almost 40,000 people in the dark on Saturday night was caused by “intentional vandalism” at numerous substations, police said.

Moore County Sheriff Ronnie Fields said in a statement that the blackout that began just after 7 p.m. was “being investigated as a criminal occurrence.”

Chief Mike Cameron of the Southern Pines Fire and Rescue Department told the local newspaper, The Pilot, that the substations had been damaged by gunfire.

A reporter from the paper who visited one substation smelled oil leaking from it and saw an access gate snapped off its pole. Workers were scouring the area for bullet casings.

The sheriff did not suggest what the motive might be, but a local conservative activist who organized a protest against a drag show said on Facebook that she was visited by deputies.

“I welcomed them to my home. Sorry they wasted their time,” Emily Grace Rainey wrote.

“I told them that God works in mysterious ways and is responsible for the outage. I used the opportunity to tell them about the immoral drag show and the blasphemies screamed by its supporters. I told them God is chastising Moore County, thanked them for coming and wished them a good night. Thankful for the LEOs service, as always.”

Two hours earlier, Rainey had posted the message: “The power is out in Moore County and I know why.” And around the same time, she posted a picture of the Sunrise Theater, which was putting on the sold-out drag show, with the caption “God will not be mocked.”

Several dozen protesters gathered outside the theater Saturday evening, and the show, “Downtown Divas,” a fundraiser for Sandhills Pride, went on under tight security.

It was unclear whether investigators think the vandalism that caused the power outage had any connection to the event.

Post your favs from the 40s or 50s era. Any genre.



Lena Mary "Calhoun" Horne (June 30, 1917 – May 9, 2010) - Stormy Weather (1943)




Johnny Cash & The Tennessee Two: I Walk The Line (1956)

The "Just About No Rules" Forum Rules

 

• Be civil. Don’t personally attack another member.
  

• Don’t post anything that promotes or contains pornography, pedophilia or hardcore sexual contents.
  

• Don’t spam.
  

"One of America’s largest cancer centers tested a non-patentable cancer therapy and found that it stopped the spread of cancer 80% of the time, and they were forced by the US Government and other cancer agencies to cover up their own positive results. This is that story, with a frontline whistleblower, documents, and never-before-seen footage showing this profound cover-up."

I knew of Laetrile/Amygdalin, but did not know the conspiracy details behind the Sloan-Kettering coverup. Good docu even though the whole story is from one PhD science writer.

LMAO when I came across this latest CIA circus.



Funny how they made this announcement on Facebook, but not on their Twitter account.

Quote:The Central Intelligence Agency is bringing a “chief wellbeing officer” onboard as part of a push to increase mental health resources and provide additional support to its workforce.

The CIA today announced Jennifer Posa as the agency’s first-ever chief wellbeing officer. Posa started at the agency last month. She was most recently the Global Head of Employee Mental Wellbeing and Workplace Effectiveness for Johnson & Johnson. She also spent 17 years at the Mayo Clinic.

“Building a healthy and resilient workforce is one of my most profound responsibilities,” CIA Director William Burns said as part of the announcement. “It is absolutely critical to our success as an agency. That’s why I’m delighted that Dr. Posa has joined our team and will bring her unique set of experiences and skills to this crucial role.”

Posa and her team will charged with overseeing wellbeing programs for CIA officers both domestically and in locations across the globe.
...
Burns pointed to the new “state-of-the-art” fitness center at CIA headquarters as an example of the investments the agency is making in employee.

“We’re investing in new childcare options and trying to develop as many flexible work models as our secret work allows,” he added.

Federal News Network

Quote:Jennifer is the Global Head for Employee Mental Wellbeing & Workplace Effectiveness within Global Health Services at Johnson & Johnson. In this role, she is responsible for the development of the mental wellbeing strategy and workplace effectiveness programs for Johnson & Johnson employees worldwide.

Jennifer holds a BA in Psychology from Denison University, an MS in Health Fitness Management from American University, and a PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Capella University.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation

Quote:Jennifer Posa Flynn's scientific contributions

Objective: To identify and evaluate the evidence base for culture of health elements. Data source: Multiple databases were systematically searched to identify research studies published between 1990 and 2015 on culture of health elements.