‘Hold on, young lady, I can hear you. There’s a protest going on right now,’ Colbert said

'want to know who’s trying to influence presidential candidates'

On August 16, 1945, 20 miles southeast of San Antonio, New Mexico, Reme Baca and Jose Padilla literally stumbled across the remains of what they believed to have been an alien spacecraft. Their personal account of the case displays many of the key ingredients of crashed UFO lore:In August of 1945 Jose Padilla and Reme Baca said they were sent out on horseback from the Padilla Ranch in San Antonio, New Mexico tasked to check on Jose’s father’s herd of new cows.What they were sent to do and what they claimed to have experienced was nothing short of what actually occurred to them that frightening afternoon.With their horses tethered as they hid behind a rock in the distant reaches of the New Mexico desert – Jose 9 and Reme 7 years of age at the time – were awe-struck by the sound of thunder and the grinding thud of something strange that came to earth on the Padilla Ranch in San Antonio, New Mexico.Illustration by James Neff - based on the description by Reme & JoseWith trepidation tendered by child-like watchfulness, they approached the crash site to within 200 yards to witness a craft stuck in rock and sand; its charred 30-foot hull shrouded in dust and burned ash had skidded to rest at the end of a wide plough-like furrow the length of a football field.Using binoculars they saw strewn wreckage, strange creatures, and military activity that would haunt them for days to come and – for the rest of their lives.All of this occurred two full years before the archetype of all UFO crashes on the Foster Ranch outside the small town of Corona, New Mexico a mere 67 miles from Roswell.These astonishing claims, made by Jose Padilla and Reme Baca, have been researched and recorded by Denver author/researcher Paola Harris who – in conversation with ZlandCommunications – detailed how these two young Hispanic children: saw at least three creatures in the unusual oval-shaped craft, had, some days later, climbed into the craft itself to retrieve pieces of the wreckage after guards had vacated the area and, how they were told by State Police to be quiet about what they had seen. - exopoliticsinstitute.org-----Debris claimed to be from the crash siteTwo little Hispanic children experienced an extraordinary event that occurred in August of 1945.Jose Padilla, age 9, and Reme Baca, age 7 witnessed a saucer crash on Padilla's land in the town of San Antonio, New Mexico. They were witness to one of the most spectacular events in UFO history.The book entitled Born on the Edge of Ground Zero: Living in the Shadow of Area 51 describes Jose Padilla’s and Reme Baca’s detailed account of what happened in their childhood. They explain what they saw in the actual crash, the creature’s appearance, the pieces they took, the military clean up, and an in-depth analysis of the significance of this case.First printed in The Mountain Mail, Soccorro, New Mexico on November 2, 2003, by journalist Ben Moffet, the case was passed to me, journalist/researcher, Paola Harris on May 4, 2009. The desire to finally disclose the details and the kind invitation of Reme Baca, led me to fly to Gig Harbor in Washington State in the Northern part of the United States to interview witness Reme Baca and his wife, Virginia in July 2010. Consequently, because he now lives in California, I interviewed Jose Padilla by telephone from the Baca house. During my two-day stay, I was able to see and photograph the piece that Jose extracted from the craft and study the detailed analysis of its composition done in Europe.It is one of the most astounding cases I have ever covered in my career and it helps complete the puzzle of why there have been so many crash retrievals in New Mexico. As journalist Ben Moffet who so beautifully describes the cover-up, we can begin to see where it fits in UFO history:"It was in this crucible of suspicion and disinterest bred by familiarity that a small contingent of the U.S. Army passed almost unnoticed through San Antonio in mid-to-late August, 1945 on a secret assignment.Little or nothing has been printed about the mission, shrouded in the "hush-hush" atmosphere of the time. But the military detail apparently came from White Sands Proving Grounds to the east where the bomb was exploded. It was a recovery operation destined for the mesquite and greasewood desert west of Old US-85, at what is now Milepost 139, the San Antonio exit of Interstate 25.Over the course of several days, soldiers in Army fatigues loaded the shattered remains of a flying apparatus onto a huge flatbed truck and hauled it away. That such an operation took place between about Aug. 20 and Aug. 25, 1945, there is no doubt, insist two former San Antonioans, Remigio Baca and Jose Padilla, eyewitnesses to the event.Padilla, then age 9, and Baca, 7, secretly watched much of the soldiers' recovery work from a nearby ridge."NOTE: Other than their interviews with Ben Moffett and Paola Harris, the witnesses were fairly tight-lipped over this incident. Because of the amount of time it took for the witnesses to finally come forward with the information, I feel their claims need to be examined much further. Lon-----A more recent video and account from Jose Padilla, who is now 87 years old:He's the only living witness to what he calls a one-of-a-kind UFO encounter.Jose Padilla was 9 years old in 1945 when he says he and his friend witnessed something they'd never forget. But it's not just the details of his story that set his close encounter apart. He says he has a piece of the ship.Jacques Vallée with Jose Padilla in 2020. Mr. Padilla said he witnessed a U.F.O. crash as a child in the New Mexico desert in 1945.Credit...**********PHANTOMS & MONSTERS VIDEO LIBRARYPOLL: WHAT DO YOU THINK? Vote & comment on paranormal, cryptid & unexplained mysteries!NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES - CLOSE TO THE SCYTHE | LIVE CHAT | Q & A (PROFOUND REAL-LIFE PERCEPTIONS)LISTEN TO NARRATIONS OF PHANTOMS & MONSTERS REPORTS & CASES - PLEASE SUBSCRIBE, LIKE & SHAREPHANTOMS & MONSTERS RADIO Podcasts on SpotifyPHANTOMS & MONSTERS READING LISTCHICAGO MOTHMAN / O'HARE BATMAN YouTube PlaylistHave you had a sighting or encounter?Contact me by email or call the hotline at 410-241-5974Thanks. LonJOIN AMAZON PRIME - Unlimited Movie/TV Streaming& FREE 2-Day ShippingRegister a SNAP EBT CardTry Audible PlusBigfoot and Other Cryptid Videos on YouTubeLYCANS! - PENNSYLVANIA'S CRYPTID CANINES UPDATE'KILLER BIGFOOT' HUNTED BY U.S. SPECIAL FORCES / GLIMMER MAN / MANTIS HUMANOIDSCRAWLER HUMANOIDS - GRUESOME INVADERS! (REAL EYEWITNESS ENCOUNTERS!)WEREWOLVES: DO THEY EXIST?'DOGMAN IN OUR YARD!' - AN OHIO FAMILY'S 12-YEAR SAGA WITH CRYPTID CANINESHey, folks. Thanks for the congrats on 'The Mothman Revisited' episode on Unsolved Mysteries. As a result, we are receiving more sighting reports and are very excited and grateful for the new information!I sincerely thank the Unsolved Mysteries team and Netflix for allowing us to tell the world about this phenomenon.If you have information about this or any other cryptid or unexplained sighting or encounter, please feel free to contact me by email or at 410-241-5974. Thanks again! LonCHICAGO MOTHMAN / O'HARE BATMAN YouTube PlaylistChicago / Lake Michigan Winged Humanoid Regional Interactive Map----------Become a Phantoms & Monsters Radio member - just $2.99 monthly, and receive these perks. Thanks for your support!-Members-only live chats-Exclusive members-only videos-Priority reply to members' commentsHave perks suggestions? LMK-----YOUR SUPPORT IS APPRECIATED! THANKS

There has been a renewed interest in the 'wildmen' of Asia, probably the best known is the Yeti. But there have been expeditions into the more tropical areas of south-central Asia as well.In this post, I want to concentrate on mountainous central Asia, specifically those hominids or 'snowmen' that are said to exist in the Pamir Range of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, and northern Pakistan. These hominids go by several monikers...the Barmanu, the Tajik Yeti, the Almysty, the Golub-Yavan, or simply the Gul.In August 2001, the Russian magazine Karavan + I published an article about the killing of a wild man on the old Soviet-Afghanistan border. According to the author, border guards of the Kevran unit in the Pamir Mountains saw a "Snowman" during the winter of 1967/68. They reported their observation to their superior, Kuzkov, the officer in charge of the unit. He did not, at first, pay any attention to it.The soldiers of the next watch again saw a creature and reported the fact. Subsequently, the duty officer accompanied the soldiers to the spot and personally observed the creature. Kuskov informed his superior officer, a colonel in Khorog – a settlement on the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border. News about this reached the Central Asia Command where, in February 1968, a high-ranking officer gave the order, ‘Catch him or, if that isn’t possible, eliminate him!’. Thereupon, the border guards shot the creature and took it to the border post. The body was stored in a woodshed. A subsequent article 3) in Karavan + I in September 2001 on the happening disclosed that the body was taken to Moscow in great secrecy.The magazine questioned two scientists to establish what had happened to the remains of the "Snowman". One of these was Georgy Skvorzov, director of the program Animals in inhabited settlements and, according to Karavan, for many years a collector of information about the ‘Snowmen’.[Karavan:] Georgy, do you believe in the existence of the Snowmen?[Skvorzov:] Of course. The Snowman has not only just been seen once in the mountains of Tibet, in the Pamir Mountains, Siberia, and the northern Caucasus. In recent times these sightings have been fewer. Probably these very cautious creatures are hiding from the advancing human civilisation.[Karavan:] Do you know about the affair at the end of Winter 1968 when our border guards killed a Snowman in the Pamir Mountains and brought his body to the capital? Did scientists get their hands on this specimen?[Skvorzov:] We have slightly different information if we are talking about the same event. According to my information, the body of a Snowman was found by a shepherd in the Pamir Mountains in the autumn of 1968. But at that time our scientists only received pieces of the fur and the eye-teeth.The magazine confided that their editor had been visited by an ex-border guard called Andrej. He had served in the Pamir Mountains during the 1960s and had confirmed the killing of a "Snowman" at the place mentioned. Further information about what happened to the body or about the fur and eye teeth was not given.In the Russian Newspaper Simbirskij Kur'er (Simbirsk Courier), Arsenij Korolev reported in 2002 among others about a 1982 expedition of the Tajik Academy of Science in the Hissar Mountains in the western Pamirs. The academy was equally involved in the 'snowman' problem. According to Korolev, in the 1980s, many adventure lovers came to Tajikistan in search of snowmen. During their holidays, media workers organized themselves into groups and came to the Hissar Mountains. A great number of publications followed as a result and the local press was full of stories concerning the Gul' He writes: “Only a few, however, knew that this puzzle would be solved by the scientists of the Tajik Academy of Science." Tatjana Vasileva, at that time a scientist at the academy, is quoted as follows: “Despite all that, the scientists were not inactive. Of course, we were inquisitive to follow the traces of the snowman, particularly so when this legend was just close to us. But the leading staff of the Academy was against an official expedition. The only thing that we could do was to organize an expedition that was dealing with soil profiles. At the same time, we could also search for traces of the snowman."Cryptozoologist George M. Eberhart's description of the 'Wildman'At the beginning of May 1982, a ten-member expedition left for the Hissar Mountains. Flora and fauna-related materials were collected and examined to find possible eyewitnesses of the snowman. The expedition team noted that the locals themselves would reluctantly talk about the Gul. Often, they changed the subject quite abruptly. In most cases, no personal experiences would be reported except for encounters with another person. The expedition found no traces of "Snowmen".Furthermore, Korolev reported about an encounter with a police chief of Tadshikabad who spent the weekend with friends in the mountains: “After lunch, the friends went to the river for a bath. The policeman was tired and fell asleep. He only woke up because someone was shaking his car. He looked back and saw a Gul beside his Shiguli. The Gul was pushing the Shiguli forward. Then, the creature placed its hands at the rear windscreen of his car. Full of fear, the policeman shot up and the Gul ran away. But the prints of his hands on the rear windscreen of his car have remained. A Tajik detective has taken these prints and has forwarded them to the police department of criminal investigation."A guide Surob stakes his honor on the wild man's existence. “I saw his footprints, bigger than the man’s, in the snow.”The road slides upwards from Dushanbe and starts to disintegrate. Surob gestures towards a sad-looking town to our right. “That’s a town where I was born, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, people started banging, stealing, breaking everything, proving they are the Yetis.” He bristles when I suggest the Yeti may be a peasant mirage. “They swear on the Koran. Why should they lie? They know nothing, they have nothing, they swear by Allah they have seen it.” I back down.We pull up at a shack for a pit stop. This is where the valley begins. I am peckish. Soviet-style sweets are displayed in plastic bags. “What’s the best one?” I ask in Russian. The proprietor dashes to a side room and brings me a Snickers bar. My guide wants to hurry, but an old man with an unwashed beard and one strikingly yellow tooth asks for a ride up toward his village. Surob asks him if he is from here. “He from here. Now I will gather the information.”The peasant knows about the Yeti. “Ten years ago, I saw him. I was climbing a hill to gather firewood and I saw somebody. I go hey, hey, but then he started running towards me. It was the Yeti, covered in black wool, with breasts like the woman’s…”I ask him to swear on the Koran that he saw the Yeti. Raising his hand to heaven the old man insists and gives me his Islamic word. “I don’t know about other people, but I saw it. It was shouting with anger, rarghh, I was shouting with fear, eeee, and I run.” The countryside changes dramatically as we talk. The road has become a dirt track. The car is swerving and sidling as it climbs up the barren gullies. The old man insists he saw the Yeti. Everyone knows somebody who is in the nearby villages. “When I got back to the village, my father started reading the Koran to me, as protection.”Nature is starting to blossom in rich abundance. Cherry blossom hangs off the crags. Shoots of wild onions sprout out of the dark earth. “Look,” says Surob. “Look at the herbals, the Yeti is eating the herbals, this is why he lives here.” Colored tips of wildflowers, blues, reds, and purples, grow among the jagged browns, reds, and greys of the mountains. Another curve. A stark, barren river valley. “Hey, they saw him too.” Surob stops the car and gives traditional greetings to two middle-aged men driving the traditional clapped-out Lada.“Yeah, I had a fight with him,” says the hunter. “He has wool, black wool, and these breasts…” And he wolf-whistles. His companion, a chubby man in a sizeable skullcap, butts in. “Oh yes, I was up in the glade, and he attacked my donkey. It was very frightening. He looked like a wild man — or a clever monkey.” The sightings occur in the same places. Regularly.In 1983 Dimitri Bayanov of the Darwin Museum led an expedition to Tajikistan. He visited the site near Lake Pairon where two women, Geliona Siforova and Dima Sizov, had reported seeing a wild woman sitting on a boulder 10 yards (9 m) from their tent. It surveyed them for a long time, making munching sounds. They did not dare to approach it, and in the morning there were no traces of footprints or hairs.Bayanov also visited the area of Sary Khosor and talked with Forest Service workers, who said they often had reports of wild men. Two years previously, a shepherd had driven his sheep back down from the mountains two months early because he had seen a big black 'gul' or wild man near his pasture. It had frightened his dogs and he had not dared to stay. Another Tajik had told the officers of an encounter five years earlier with 'a giant hairy man, very broad in the shoulders, with the face like that of an ape'.The Forest Service takes these reports seriously enough to prohibit its employees from spending the night alone in the mountains, for fear of these wild men.Bayanov had no personal encounter with wild men, but he concluded his 1982 expedition report by saying:"The abundant signs I witnessed of local fauna, particularly omnivores such as bears and wild pigs, indicate enough food resources for the presumably omnivorous hominids the year round. The 93 percent of the Tajik Republic's territory taken up by mountains is virtually devoid of permanent human population, so the latter poses no special danger to wild hominids. The long and continuing record of purported hominid sightings, supported by these new accounts, leads me to the conclusion that such creatures do exist there."The newspaper Vechernaja Kazan, from Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, Russian Federation, shared the following in August 2001: “A hunter from the Narynsk province [Kyrgyztan] discovered tracks of an unknown being in the mountains. Scientists were able to take a photo of these tracks - length: 45 cm, width: 35 cm. Experts assume that the hominid (if it was one) came here from the neighboring Pamir, where Tajik rebels have caused him to shy away.”As well in 2006, Vladimir Smeljanskij reported in the Russian newspaper Rabochaja Gazeta about a business trip to Tajikistan. In the village Sary-Chashma close to the Afghani border, a teenager told him about an encounter. He claimed it happened to his father in the early 1990s. At the time, his father was working as a cowherd. One evening, he noticed that a cow was missing. As he was searching for the cow in the dark, he came across a ravine, fell, and caught himself on a vine. He called for help. Suddenly, he heard a snort. At first, he thought it was the missing cow. Then, in the light of the moon, he saw a figure: “… large head, short torso, unbelievably long arms, bent yet strong legs, and very large feet. And the entire body was covered with dark brown fur.”The being came to the edge, held a stick down for the man, and easily hoisted him up. The two stood there a few seconds face to face. The man saw huge hands with thick fingers, ears close against his skull, and small eyes. The being was a little taller than 1.5 meters and with his broad shoulders seemed almost square. The being apparently reached for the knife on the herder’s belt and ripped it away. As an exchange, he gave him his stick. The being then turned the man around by grabbing his shoulders and giving him a light shove. In the village, at first, everyone was skeptical of the herder’s story. But then the elders remembered: “In the Pamirs, you really do meet these half-man, half-animal beings. Sometimes it helps the herders, who think of it as a mountain spirit. But only a few have been lucky enough to see it.”The newspaper Vechernaja Cheljabinsk published the following report in 2001. The author was visiting locals in the southern part of Kyrgyzstan, near the border of Tajikistan. A local hunter, Aslanbek (his last name is not given), told the following story: “Early in the morning, I was on the lookout for ducks in a gorge, close to the lake. Suddenly, I felt a strong fear. It was foggy, but I felt like someone was close by. There was something in the wind, the fog parted, and I saw an Almysty. He was big, about two meters, and bent over like an old man. He was completely covered in dark gray hair and stared at me. I stared back for a few minutes and was afraid to move. I expected him to kill me. The elders tell how an Almysty can kill from a distance. But this one turned around and disappeared into the canyon after a few minutes. I ran away from there. Since then, I don’t want to go hunting anymore…” The encounter is said to have taken place in 2000.In the winter of 2002, Pakistan newspapers reported that the 'Russian UFO Digest' (Rossiskij Ufologicheskij Daidjest) reported a new wildmen event in Pakistan. A 20-year-old citizen of the Pakistan village of Kharipur, Radschu, left his house and heard strange sounds from the bushes in front of it. Suddenly an apelike male creature, about 1,20m high, covered with a thick black coat, came out of the bushes and attacked and scratched him. Radschu cried and ran back into his house. The 'wildmen' fled from the apple garden when other men using torches began to search around Radschu´s house. Eyewitnesses reported the high shrill cries of the creature. Old villagers remembered they had seen such "strangers from the mountains" many times in the past, particularly in winter, when they came into the villages in search of food.Another 'wild man' hominid is thought to live in portions of eastern Afghanistan as well as the Shishi Kuh Valley in the Chitral region of North Pakistan. The Barmanu, which translates as “The Hairy One”, is often thought to be related to early hominids and descriptions generally resemble the Neanderthal. As is the case with other sightings of man-like hairy hominids, accounts of this creature are often accompanied by tales of a horrible stench, a trait that is attributed to the creature’s wilderness lifestyle and hair-covered body. Legends of this creature have been told by the locals for centuries, but it was not until the early 1990s that the legend would receive international attention.During the early 1900s several Spanish expeditions into the Shishi Kih Valley region of North Pakistan learned of the Barmanu through the retelling of the legend by local people. The tales of the Barmanu eventually caught the ear of zoologist Jordi Magraner who traveled to the region with medical doctor Anne Mallasse and another team member. Between 1992 and 1994 Magraner and his team detailed not only eyewitness reports but personal experiences including grunting noise thought to have been made by a primitive voice box as well as discovering ape-like footprints. Magraner was killed by one of his Pakistani guides on August 2, 2002.Sources:unknownexplorers.com"Again the "Snowman" - Rossiskij Ufologicheskij Dajdjest (Russian UFO Digest) - January, 2003Gurov, Boris - "Snowman Against the USSR" - Karavan + I - August 19, 2001Gurov, Boris - "On the Tracks of Snowman" - Karavan + I - October 10, 2001The Pamirs and the Source of the OxusKhakhlov, Vitaly - "On the "Wild Men" in Central Asia" - The Commission for the Study of the "Snowman" Question - 1959Eberhart, George M. - "Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology, Volume 1" - 2002Hidden History of the Human Racestandpointmag.co.ukandras-nagy.comSmeljanskij, Vladimir - "Mountain Spirit" - Rabochaja Gazeta - May 24, 2006tajinfo.ruBigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend**********PHANTOMS & MONSTERS VIDEO LIBRARYPOLL: WHAT DO YOU THINK? Vote & comment on paranormal, cryptid & unexplained mysteries!NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES - CLOSE TO THE SCYTHE | LIVE CHAT | Q & A (PROFOUND REAL-LIFE PERCEPTIONS)LISTEN TO NARRATIONS OF PHANTOMS & MONSTERS REPORTS & CASES - PLEASE SUBSCRIBE, LIKE & SHAREPHANTOMS & MONSTERS RADIO Podcasts on SpotifyPHANTOMS & MONSTERS READING LISTCHICAGO MOTHMAN / O'HARE BATMAN YouTube PlaylistHave you had a sighting or encounter?Contact me by email or call the hotline at 410-241-5974Thanks. LonJOIN AMAZON PRIME - Unlimited Movie/TV Streaming& FREE 2-Day ShippingRegister a SNAP EBT CardTry Audible PlusBigfoot and Other Cryptid Videos on YouTubeLYCANS! - PENNSYLVANIA'S CRYPTID CANINES UPDATE'KILLER BIGFOOT' HUNTED BY U.S. SPECIAL FORCES / GLIMMER MAN / MANTIS HUMANOIDSCRAWLER HUMANOIDS - GRUESOME INVADERS! (REAL EYEWITNESS ENCOUNTERS!)WEREWOLVES: DO THEY EXIST?'DOGMAN IN OUR YARD!' - AN OHIO FAMILY'S 12-YEAR SAGA WITH CRYPTID CANINESHey, folks. Thanks for the congrats on 'The Mothman Revisited' episode on Unsolved Mysteries. As a result, we are receiving more sighting reports and are very excited and grateful for the new information!I sincerely thank the Unsolved Mysteries team and Netflix for allowing us to tell the world about this phenomenon.If you have information about this or any other cryptid or unexplained sighting or encounter, please feel free to contact me by email or at 410-241-5974. Thanks again! LonCHICAGO MOTHMAN / O'HARE BATMAN YouTube PlaylistChicago / Lake Michigan Winged Humanoid Regional Interactive Map----------Become a Phantoms & Monsters Radio member - just $2.99 monthly, and receive these perks. Thanks for your support!-Members-only live chats-Exclusive members-only videos-Priority reply to members' commentsHave perks suggestions? LMK-----YOUR SUPPORT IS APPRECIATED! THANKS

Books How Brandon Sanderson’s Yumi and the Nightmare Painter Captures the Artist’s Need to Create and Share The story of two artists discovering that art doesn’t need to serve a practical purpose to be deeply meaningful. By Ratika Deshpande | Published on August 21, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Last year, I wrote an essay about Sazed the Keeper from Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn, in which I argued how everything you create matters because someone out there is looking for that very book you’re writing or the song you’re composing. I still believe this to be true, but I also believe that there are times when we must look beyond the utility of our art and make things because we want to. While many see Sanderson’s Yumi and the Nightmare Painter as his response to ChatGPT and the negative impacts of AI on artists (even though the book was written before the chatbot’s release), what I saw in the book, instead, were two artists learning to separate art from utility. Too often we look to usefulness and service to justify our art—this poster will inspire climate action, this book will help people build better relationships, this movie with these tropes will become a hit, these aesthetic product videos will get us more sales, and so on and so forth. In our current side-hustle, personal brand-driven world, everything is done with some (capitalistic) goal in mind. (And tools like ChatGPT became popular/hated for this very reason.) As a result, eventually, inevitably, many of us find that baking cakes or drawing portraits or whatever we’re creating is no longer fun or satisfying. As we see in the book: Nikaro—Painter—devoted his entire life to his art, secretly sketching even during classes, and became the best in his year. He dreamed of being able to do something for others and derived joy from sharing his art with his friends. Then, unfortunately, when he started working as a nightmare painter, he found that the work didn’t live up to the expectations school had given him. It was “just a job.” People took him for granted and complained if he failed, so much so that when the father of the boy he saves at the beginning thanks Painter, he’s actually surprised. At work, he paints nothing but bamboo because it’s efficient. He doesn’t feel the need to make anything else. But when he paints the frightened boy’s mother to ward off the almost-stable nightmare, he finds a little of the joy of painting returning to him. He feels it again when he sketches the residents of Yumi’s village, allowing himself to look beyond the utility of his skills—painting is his meditation. Yet the hold of efficiency is strong on him. For a moment, when he starts teaching Yumi, he loses himself in explaining what it means to be an artist, but then immediately snaps back and instead shows her how to paint bamboo, focused—again—on simply getting the job done. Yumi, on the other hand, is reminded repeatedly of the honor she’s been given, of the fact that she’s a “resource.” She gets no compliments and feels guilty for wanting them. While Nikaro asks Design if what he does is important, Yumi knows her art is useful, yet she doesn’t allow herself to feel proud of her creations because stacking stones is supposed to be a service, not a source of joy. Despite being the best at her art and putting thought and creativity into each of her intricate stacks, she tells Painter she’s “merely a vessel” and not an artist. Both she and Nikaro have attached their self-worth to their art. Yumi is shocked when Tojin tells her he doesn’t build his muscles in order to accomplish something; the bodybuilding itself is an accomplishment. When Painter makes the villagers’ portraits, Yumi asks him why he would paint something that wouldn’t help him fight nightmares. As I read the book, I wanted to tell them both that not everything we do has to be useful, a lesson that took me a long time to learn and which I still sometimes forget. Deep down, Nikaro knows it too. His training was “very pragmatic,” teaching him how to control his thoughts. Yet when Yumi tries to teach him how to stack rocks with precision, he argues against her approach. “Art is about feelings and emotion. It’s about letting them escape, so they can be shared. It’s about capturing a truth about yourself. Like you’re ripping a hole in your chest and exposing your soul,” he says, even though every day at work he pretends to be the lone hero, nonchalant, unaffected by what others think of him. Yumi, too, feels better when she creates her spiraling towers of stones. One of the first things she does when she finds herself in Painter’s world is to build stacks of bowls and plates to calm down, never considering that she’s doing it for herself—any suggestion of that sort would make her guilty about being selfish. She finds some freedom from the trap of utility when she has the idea to stack stones by copying their souls. No one can see her in her world. She’s not performing a role; the stacking won’t attract any spirits. But those things don’t matter much, she realizes. She’d missed stacking because it was her art. Even Nikaro enjoys it because of how long it had been since he’d made something just for the sake of it, for the sheer joy of creating. Where discussion of creating art is concerned, the role of pain comes up more often than not. Modern culture tends to do a very good job of romanticizing life’s difficulties, especially when faced by an artist. Growing up, I loved reading nonfiction and dreamt of writing beautiful essays of my own, yet the more stuff I read the more I noticed how often essays spoke about death, abuse, trauma, and grief. Bereft of such pain (gratefully), my younger self took the prevalence of these themes to mean that I wasn’t equipped to write meaningful nonfiction. Determined to make art, however, a few years later I embraced the opposite perspective with stubbornness—I’d become an essayist by writing about the good things in life, because I’d learned that art can come from sources other than pain too. Answering a fan question, Sanderson once noted how we have this narrative that “sadness is artistic.” Very rarely will the word artist conjure the image of a happy person. Nikaro explains this to Yumi when the show they’re watching doesn’t end on a happy note—making something sad means “people find it more realistic.” She doesn’t like the idea—if you’re an artist, why make something depressing on purpose? After all, Nikaro and Yumi create art when they’re happy too. Painter’s portfolio, for example, is filled with masterpieces he’d made when he was training with his group of friends—the happiest time of his life. The mural he paints on the warehouse wall at the end—his greatest work—depicts the exhilarating moments he shared with Yumi, soaring on a tree high up in the air, running from the scholars. Her gift to him is a painting of them holding their hands as they watched the carnival and the city spread below them. The spirits of Yumi’s world don’t demand pain or suffering either. What attracts them, in addition to “the mixing of math and art,” as Design explains, is “the human aspect—the concentration, the satisfaction, the emotion.” Not negative emotion. Just emotion. During the Battle of Kilahito, seeing and painting the humanness of the nightmares is what frees the souls trapped in the shroud. Creating art out of pain is cathartic—and to many, essential— but despite the romanticized narrative that our culture and media often celebrates, pain isn’t required to make art. (At the same time, not all suffering results in art. As author Kate Jacobs wrote in Comfort Food, “Sometimes suffering is just suffering […] It doesn’t make you stronger. It doesn’t build character. It only hurts.”) In addition to Sanderson’s rejection of the “sadness is artistic” narrative, I was also glad to see him address the belief that “true artists create, even if nobody is watching,” a perspective that causes Painter to speak of his passion in the past tense. He thinks he’s not a true artist because he craves an audience. But art is meant to be shared; it gains meaning from those who react and engage with it. It’s “meaningless without those to admire it,” Hoid says, rejecting the argument that true artists don’t care for what others think of their creations. Art is made by people for people, regardless of how they’re separated in time and space. This was art. Something the machine, however capable in the technical details, could never understand. Because art is, and always has been, about what it does to us. To the one shaping it and the one experiencing it.For Yumi, on the transcendent day, she was both. Artist and audience.—Yumi and the Nightmare Painter, Chapter 41 Hoid repeatedly argues that things have the value that we assign them. I see it as a call to let go of expectations about the things you make, wondering if they’re art or not—or if they have a use. Nikaro realizes this towards the end when he tells Yumi that art is about creation. The mere process of making something from nothing is meaningful. Art serves a purpose even as it is being created, because that process is what brings joy. Everything else that results after the creation—communication, connection, praise, money—is a bonus. The effect starts from us—inside us—and then reaches others when we share our work with them. Over the course of the book, Painter becomes an audience for her work, observing her process, and can see that there’s a difference between the stacks Yumi makes and the stacks the machine makes. They look the same, but, as he explains, “Art is about intent […] I don’t care how well a machine piles rocks. The fact that you do it is what matters to me.” This is an echo of something Yumi says earlier to Painter, trying to get him interested in his art again: “It matters,” she said, “that you’ve stopped painting. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t get accepted by the Dreamwatch.”—Yumi and the Nightmare Painter, Chapter 28 In the blogosphere are many people whose writing I love (these two, for example), writers who explain that they blog because they love doing so and not because they seek an audience. Social media tends to make us all hungry for validation and personal blogging  can be a way to fight against algorithms that make us greedy for higher metrics. Feeling disgusted by how much time I was spending online, staring at various screens, I readily internalized the idea that wanting an audience for my writing—especially when I didn’t have anyone to share my work with in my personal circles—was wrong. That to create for oneself was a virtue, while creating to share my work with others wasn’t. But after trying to write only for myself, denying myself the joy of blogging online in an attempt to prove (to whom, really?) that I was above the need to have my work enjoyed by others, I’ve come to realize that while being dependent on external validation to feel worthy is a problem, seeking an audience for our art is a reflection of our need to connect—not a sign of vanity. It doesn’t matter if that audience includes friends, strangers, or only a single person, as Yumi was for Nikaro when he painted his warehouse mural. It matters that there is someone. It matters that we create. Because what’s worse is not creating, as Yumi says. What’s worse is the world not having any art in it at all, because we thought our art wasn’t useful or that we were vain and selfish and not, instead, human.[end-mark] Buy the Book Yumi and the Nightmare Painter Brandon Sanderson A Cosmere Novel Buy Book Yumi and the Nightmare Painter Brandon Sanderson A Cosmere Novel A Cosmere Novel Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleIndieBoundTarget The post How Brandon Sanderson’s <i>Yumi and the Nightmare Painter</i> Captures the Artist’s Need to Create and Share appeared first on Reactor.

We interview veteran comic book inker, John Livesay about his career working for Top Cow, Extreme Studios, Marvel, DC Comics and more all throughout the 90’s and beyond. Plus, we learn about his lifelong comic CONTINUE READING... The post The WIZARD Files, Ep. 44: John Livesay appeared first on The Retro Network.

Vice President Kamala Harris is looking to raise the corporate tax rate to 28% if elected president, NBC News reported on Monday. The federal corporate tax rate in the U.S. is currently 21%, as enshrined in former President Donald Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. But Harris seeks to move the tax rate to 28% to draw in funding for plans she would have as president, mirroring a proposal made by President Joe Biden in March, according to NBC. A 28% corporate tax rate would be “a fiscally responsible way to put money back in the pockets of working people and ensure billionaires and big corporations pay their fair share,” Harris campaign spokesperson James Singer told NBC in a statement on Monday. “As President, Kamala Harris will focus on creating an opportunity economy for the middle class that advances their economic security, stability, and dignity.” If passed, the law would bring in roughly $700 billion dollars worth of taxes over the next decade, according to projections provided by the Congressional Budget Office. It is lower than what Harris initially proposed during the 2020 presidential race, which would have raised the corporate tax rate from 21% to 35%, where it originally was before Trump’s 2017 tax cuts were passed, according to NBC. The 2017 law is set to expire in 2025, and Trump has said that Democrats will be “under tremendous pressure” to renew the cuts, warning that failing to do so or making “it impossible to renew” will “destroy the economy,” according to NBC. Trump has also vowed to slash taxes even further should he be elected president in November. “Instead of a Biden tax hike, I’ll give you a Trump middle class, upper class, lower class, business class big tax cut,” Trump told a crowd at a rally in New Jersey in May. Singer told NBC that Trump’s policy ideas would “drive up the deficit” and “increase taxes on the middle class,” linking him to the “extreme Project 2025 agenda.” Trump and his campaign have repeatedly said that they were not involved in the creation of Project 2025, a set of sweeping policy proposals put forward by the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based think tank. Harris’ proposed tax hike is among the first of her policy proposals put forward by her campaign since she announced her candidacy in late July. She laid out her vision for American economic policy in a rally speech on Friday, but specifics or cost estimates for some of her ideas have yet to be provided. Harris is likely to be appointed at the Democratic National Convention this week as her party’s nominee. The convention will take place from Aug. 19 to Aug. 23. The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Kamala Harris Looks to Jack Up Corporate Tax Rate as President appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Kamala Spends Day Two of the Democratic National Convention Going In Circles

But Trump...

Thank-cuke for the information!