When the Duchess of Sussex stepped off the plane in Dubbo wearing a pair of Gold Coast-designed, ethically sourced jeans, she created a storm for one Australian business.

Mount Tamborine couple James and Erica Bartle started Outland Denim in 2011.

The business trains and employs Cambodian women who have been rescued from human trafficking.

They aim to create sustainable and ethical fashion while helping their employees break the cycle of abuse.

Mr Bartle said they felt blessed for the exposure that the Duchess of Sussex had brought them.

"Because they were coming to Australia they were looking for a good Australian denim brand," he told ABC Gold Coast.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-17/meghan-markle-wears-sustainably-produced-gold-coast-jeans/

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The royal pair immediately kicked off their shoes and were given pink and blue floral leis to wear, as they sat in an "anti bad vibe" circle with 20 members of OneWave, a non-profit surf community that raises awareness for mental health.
After 15 minutes of discussing mental health issues, the surfers on the sand with Meghan and Harry put their arms around each other for a group hug.

The royal couple then stood up in their leis and started chatting on the beach with the colourfully-dressed surfers.

Members around the circle were donning bright colours for Fluoro Friday, a OneWave event where people share their experiences with mental health issues and interact with others while surfing and doing yoga.

The royal pair looked relaxed and happy as they sat with locals, both rocking a casual, more summery look than they did in rainy Melbourne yesterday.

Meghan Markle wore a full-length striped Martin Grant dress, while Prince Harry wore a sky blue button-up shirt loosely tucked into beige chino pants.

SNIPERS ON THE ROOF FOR ROYAL BONDI VISIT

Security is out in full force for the event.

Royal fans lining the iconic beach yelled "There's a sniper on the roof!" as two police dressed in black and holding guns appeared on a high rise apartment block overlooking the southern end of Bondi Beach.

Read more:

https://www.whitsundaytimes.com.au/news/royal-tour-day-4-meghan-and-harr...

Bondi Beach is usually invaded by the Poms on Xmas day and Nooyear's day... But this is Mad Bondi (Fri)Day... The Royals fitted in perfectly. The weather was cool. 

Long live The Aussie Republic! Get rid of ScoMo!

Several of the parts begin with opening chapters in which the narrator directly addresses the reader, taunts the reader, or simply recounts the work thus far. For example, an early passage[c] warns the reader not to continue:

"It is not right that everyone should read the pages which follow; only a few will be able to savour this bitter fruit with impunity. Consequently, shrinking soul, turn on your heels and go back before penetrating further into such uncharted, perilous wastelands."

Apart from these opening segments, each chapter is typically an isolated, often surreal episode, which does not seem at first to be directly related to the surrounding material. For example in one chapter,[d] a funeral procession takes a boy to his grave and buries him, with the officiant condemning Maldoror; the following chapter[e] instead presents a story of a sleeping man (seemingly Maldoror) who is repeatedly bitten by a tarantula which emerges from the corner of his room, every night. Another representative example of the work's strange episodes occurs in an early chapter: the narrator encounters a giant glow-worm which commands him to kill a woman, who symbolizes prostitution. In defiance, the narrator instead hurls a large stone onto the glow-worm, killing it:

"The shining worm, to me: 'You, take a stone and kill her.' 'Why?' I asked. And it said to me: 'Beware, look to your safety, for you are the weaker and I the stronger. Her name is Prostitution.' With tears in my eyes and my heart full of rage, I felt an unknown strength rising within me. I took hold of a huge stone; after many attempts, I managed to lift it as far as my chest. Then, with my arms, I put it on my shoulders. I climbed the mountain until I reached the top: from there, I hurled the stone on to the shining worm, crushing it.

However as the work progresses, certain common themes emerge among the episodes. In particular, there is constant imagery of many kinds of animals, sometimes employed in similes. For example in one case, Maldoror copulates with a shark, each admiring the others' violent nature, while in another, the narrator has a pleasant dream that he is a hog. These animals are praised precisely for their inhumanity, which fits the work's misanthropic tone:

The swimmer is now in the presence of the female shark he has saved. They look into each other's eyes for some minutes, each astonished to find such ferocity in the other's eyes. They swim around keeping each other in sight, and each one saying to himself: 'I have been mistaken; here is one more evil than I.' Then by common accord they glide towards one another underwater, the female shark using its fins, Maldoror cleaving the waves with his arms; and they hold their breath in deep veneration, each one wishing to gaze for the first time upon the other, his living portrait. When they are three yards apart they suddenly and spontaneously fall upon one another like two lovers and embrace with dignity and gratitude, clasping each other as tenderly as brother and sister. Carnal desire follows this demonstration of friendship.

I dreamt I had entered the body of a hog, that I could not easily get out again, and that I was wallowing in the filthiest slime. Was it a kind of reward? My dearest wish had been granted, I no longer belonged to mankind.

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Chants_de_Maldoror

Sanity has its counterpoints... We (not me) believe in the royals because? Is it because we have lost the sense of being our own motivator and are worried of "not belonging" — unless we are afraid of our own motivator so we invent fairy tales and religious dictums to deliberately misunderstand reality?

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See:

This gets us back to the actual point of Maniac.

Dr Myles says he finds the psychoanalytical perspective of the show actually quite useful — the idea that what happens at some crucial point in the past gives foundation to a certain meaning in the present.

He says this would have been true for the gospel writers too.

"The way in which they constructed or remembered Jesus had a particular importance for authorising certain beliefs, ideas and outlooks," he said.

It should also be pointed out that the views expressed in Maniac were those of a character, not the creators, and that the aim of the scene in question wasn't necessarily strict historical accuracy. (And nor is the show about Christianity; instead, it's a trippy exploration of memory, identity and the past.)

Dr Myles says the show's reference to early Christianity tapped into something that people already believed anyway, even if it lacked the nuance of a scholar.

He sees the scene as characteristic of Western culture's current obsession with subversion.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-19/what-maniac-gets-right-about-the-...

Read also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comte_de_Lautréamont

Comte de Lautréamont (French: [lotʁeamɔ̃]) was the nom de plume of Isidore Lucien Ducasse (4 April 1846 – 24 November 1870), a French poet born in Uruguay. His only works, Les Chants de Maldoror[1] and Poésies, had a major influence on modern arts and literature, particularly on the Surrealists and the Situationists. Ducasse died at the age of 24.

Among the works plagiarized were Blaise Pascal's Pensées and La Rochefoucauld's Maximes, as well as the work of Jean de La Bruyère, Luc de Clapiers, Dante, Kant and La Fontaine. It even included an improvement of his own Les Chants de Maldoror. The brochures of aphoristic prose did not have a price; each customer could decide which sum they wanted to pay for it.

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Gus is a fierce atheist, possibly mad as god....

Google also advertises the U.S.-government funded Polygraph.info as a reputable source, a site launched by the C.I.A.’s Radio Free Europe/Free Liberty and Voice of America “news” organizations. RFE/FL is currently based in Prague but was previously headquarted in West Germany during the Cold War where it broadcast its anti-communist propaganda to undermine the Soviet Union. Polygraph.info now serves a similar purpose of information warfare in cyberspace for the revived Cold War 2.0 while presenting itself as a fact-checking source to counter “Russian propaganda” outlets. The CIA openly admitted the true character of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and its origins on its own website:

On June 1, 1949, a group of prominent American businessmen, lawyers, and philanthropists — including Allen Dulles, who would become Director of Central Intelligence in 1953 — launched the National Committee for Free Europe (NCFE) at a press release in New York. Only a handful of people knew that NCFE was actually the public face of an innovative “psychological warfare” project undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). That operation — which soon gave rise to Radio Free Europe — would become one of the longest running and successful covert action campaigns ever mounted by the United States.”

Meanwhile, the most dubious of all the advocated verification sites is the popular domain Snopes.com. Snopes was founded in the mid-90s originally as Urban Legends Reference Pages, a site started by an apparently ordinary California couple, David and Barbara Mikkelson, to ‘debunk’ urban folklore. Its moniker comes from a fictional family in the Snopes trilogy of novels by renowned modernist writer William Faulkner. In the series, the Snopes family consists of disturbed relatives who commit murder, pedophilia, bestiality, pornography, racism, theft, corruption and other misdeeds. Thus, anyone ‘exposed’ by the site making claims it determines to be false are likened to a seedy member of the Snopes family.

Despite its bottom-up outward appearance, the site never breaks from mainstream news accounts of events. For example, Snopes maintains that the well-documented allegations of ties between the volunteer rescue organization Syrian Civil Defense, AKA the White Helmets, and terrorist groups participating in the Syrian Civil War is “false.” It does not address that there are multiple videos of White Helmets members facilitating and participating in executions, celebrating with militants of Al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate Al-Nusra Front, and dumping the bodies of Syrian Arab Army soldiers.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/10/31/fact-checking-the-establishments-fac...

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Buckingham palace is reportedly about to turn to a specially employed team of financiers for consultations over financial tensions fuelled by the strict American revenue agency, the IRS with regard to the newly-minted Duchess of Sussex, who is still an American citizen.

The Royal Family faces a tax ‘nightmare,’ for the next five years until Meghan ultimately ditches her American citizenship and becomes a full-fledged British subject, every penny she spends or earns, and every gift she is presented with will fall under the watchful eyes of the United States’ demanding Internal Revenue Services, according to a fresh report by The Sunday Express.

The scrutiny is notably extended to anyone she receives money or other support from, one way or another, including her husband Harry and the rest of the Royal Family, with the tax complications feared to cripple the royal finances in the UK and virtually render null her own estimated $5 million US fortune.

"We're looking at a level of financial exposure the Royal Family has never had to face before. It's the royal household's worst nightmare," the edition cited an aide as saying.

According to US regulations, citizens are liable to pay taxes not only on something they personally own, but anything that is made ‘available’ to them at the hands of other people, with the latter’s income and possessions also having to be declared. To sort things out, the royals are reportedly set to hire a team of US financial consultants.

Firstly, Meghan is obliged to give the US taxman the full details of her finances if she and her husband have joint assets, bank accounts or offshore trusts worth over £143,100. Separately, the IRS may demand access to even the Queen’s accounts, as she allows the couple to live rent-free in the grace-and-favour Nottingham Cottage, on the grounds of Kensington Palace.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201811191069929147-us-duke-duchess-sussex...

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Sir Elton John has defended the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's use of private jets - and said he paid to carbon offset their trip to his French home.

The singer said he provided Prince Harry, Meghan and their son Archie with his private plane to "maintain a high level of much-needed protection".

The royal couple have faced criticism after newspapers claimed they took four private jet journeys in 11 days, including to Sir Elton's home in Nice.

Buckingham Palace declined to comment.

Private jets usually carry fewer passenger than commercial planes, meaning they burn much more fuel per person per hour.

In a message posted on social media, Sir Elton said: "I am deeply distressed by today's distorted and malicious account in the press surrounding the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's private stay at my home in Nice last week.

"Prince Harry's mother, Diana Princess of Wales was one of my dearest friends. I feel a profound sense of obligation to protect Harry and his family from the unnecessary press intrusion that contributed to Diana's untimely death.

...

Prince Harry has previously spoken about the importance of tackling climate change.

In September's edition of Vogue - edited by Meghan - the prince spoke about environmental issues and his love for nature, saying: "We are the one species on this planet that seems to think that this place belongs to us, and only us." 

And in a post on the @SussexRoyal Instagram page last month, he wrote: "Environmental damage has been treated as a necessary by-product of economic growth.

"Only now are we starting to notice and understand the damage that we've been causing. With nearly 7.7 billion people inhabiting this Earth, every choice, every footprint, every action makes a difference."

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-49398852

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