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"On December 25, 0 BC, Jesus was born in a little stable in a town called Bethlehem." This is a summation of the traditional story we often hear around this time of the year, but is not entirely based in Scripture. Jesus was likely not born in December, and was not born in 0 BC, as such a year is non-existent. While Scripture conveys that Jesus Christ was born to Mary in Bethlehem, also known as the City of David, it does not state exactly when Jesus was born. But some have suggested that Christmas itself, particularly the date of December 25, is not of Christian origin, but of pagan. The word pagan can be defined as "a member of a group professing a polytheistic religion or any religion other than Christianity, Judaism, or Islam; a person without any religion; irreligious." Does Christmas actually have pagan origins? If so, how do these origins apply to the modern celebration of Christmas? *Note: This is not intended to be a comprehensive, in-depth examination of the origin of certain traditions, merely an overview. (No copyright infringement intended, photo credit: Saturnus, Caravaggio 16th century; Alex Petrov, St. Nicholas "Lipensky," orig. AD 1294) Christmas is the annual celebration of the birth of Jesus, and is traditionally celebrated on December 25. In Old English, it is Crīstesmæsse, which literally means "Christ's mass." Interestingly, research has suggested that it is celebrated by an increasing number of non-Christians. Historically, the birth of Jesus is estimated to have occurred sometime between 7-2 BC. The BC/AD system of dating, although the BCE and CE designation is seemingly becoming more utilized, even by some Christians, came about in AD 525 by a monk named Dionysus Exiguus (c.AD 470-544). It is widely thought that Dionysus was incorrect in his estimation of the birth of Christ, so that Jesus was actually born in BC (Before Christ) times, according to the Anno Domini dating system. Rather ironic, and there is no zero year in this system, with the year 1 BC being followed by the next year as 1 AD. Anno Domini itself does not stand for After Death, as Christ is believed to have been crucified c. AD 30-33. The term itself, Anno Domini, is Medieval Latin, translated as "In the year of the Lord" and "In the year of our Lord."[3-4] Sometimes, it is translated as "In the Year of Our Lord Jesus Christ," or "Anno Domini Nostri Iesu (Jesu) Christi." |Saturn (16th century)| It has come to the attention of some that around the time which we celebrate the birth of Christ was also the celebration of an ancient pagan holiday. Is there any credence to this idea? Actually, "This celebration was the pagan holiday Saturnalia, which was the Roman festival for their god Saturn. It ran from about December 17–23. Saturn is the Roman god analogous to the Greek god 'Cronus' or 'Kronos.'" To note, in Greek mythology, Cronus was the father of Zeus, Hera, Demeter, Hades, Poseidon, Hestia, and Chiron. Cronus (or Cronos) was the offspring of Gaia (mother earth) and Uranus (sky), also spelled Ouranos. Now, Greece itself was inhabited by the descendants of Noah's grandson, Javan. Javan was the fourth son of Japheth. The Hebrew name for Greece is still Javan. "Alexander the Great is called the 'king of Javan' (rendered 'Grecia,' Dan. 8:21; 10:20; compare 11:2; Zech. 9:13). This word was universally used by the nations of the East as the generic name of the Greek race." Javan's sons were Elisha, Tarshish, Kittim (Cethimus) and Rodanim (Dodanim). Greek landscape and surrounding areas retain these names in many forms. According to Bodie Hodge, "Eliseans was the old name of the ancient Greek tribe now called the Aeolians. Cethimus inhabited the island Cethima, from which the name of the island Cyprus was derived. (Josephus, a Jewish historian about 2,000 years ago, elaborated on these relationships in more detail.) Many of the characters of Greek mythology are based on real historical figures who were raised up to godlike status. One example here is 'Hellen,' the alleged mythological patriarch and god of the Aeolians (or Elisians). Hellen (Ἕλλην) is likely a variant of Elishah. Even in other cultures, ancestors were often deified; for example, in Germanic and Norse mythologies there is Tiras (Tyras, Tiwaz, Tyr), who was the king of the gods and also happens to be one of Noah’s grandsons (Genesis 10:2)." There are several other examples, yet the intended point is that although the pagan holiday is rooted in both Roman and Greek mythology, it traces back to a biblical figure. This figure is Cronos. "Cronus/Kronos (Κρόνος), a variant of Cethimas/Kittem, could have been raised up to godlike status. Considering that Noah and his early descendants were living such long lives, it should be obvious why many of these ancestors were raised up to be 'god-like.' Not only did they live long lives, but they were obviously the oldest people around and would seem to be the people (gods, demigods) that started civilization. Noah would have been roughly 500 years older than anyone else and his sons approximately 100 years older. We know this was because of the Flood, but the true message would quickly be changed to fit the pagan ideas. Thus it is interesting that this pagan festival was likely born as a result of a suppressed view of a biblical character." It is also worth noting, and indeed rather telling, that in Plato’s Euthydemus, he referred to Zeus, Athena, and Apollo as his "gods" and his "lords and ancestors." If Saturnalia was celebrated December 17-23, and in some cases December 17-24, this does not yet answer why we celebrate the birth of Jesus around the 25. What did the early church fathers say about the notion? Some of the early church leaders did not wish to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Their reasoning was that he was not merely a pharaoh, a pagan god, or Herod. We see this in use by Origen in the AD 200s. Others, however, disagreed with this and as a result provided their own dates. Hippolytus (c. AD 170-236) pitched January 2, a Latin essay (c. AD 243) contended that it was March 21, which the writer(s) insisted was when God created the sun, and May 20, as proposed by Clement of Alexandria (c. AD 150-215). By AD 336, as far as we can tell, when Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman empire, December 25 was used as the celebration of Jesus' birthday. "Many scholars say that church leaders picked this date to bump aside a trio of winter solstice holidays that were popular among Romans. Winter solstice is when the sun starts to make its comeback, when the long nights of winter begin to shorten and move toward the long days of summer." Psychologically, during the winter months, "depression seems to set in during the winter months and goes away with the coming of spring and summer. Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a mood disorder that is caused by the body's reaction to low levels of light present in the winter months." Another reason which we have Christmas in the winter months is to give people something to look forward to during the long winter months, where SAD can set in. Celebrations seem to promote a general "good feeling" in people. Concerning the "trio of winter solstice holidays," the first is Saturnalia, aforementioned. Interestingly, on this holiday, "Businesses, schools, and public offices closed to allow people to party hearty and exchange gifts. Here's how Seneca, a Roman philosopher writing in AD 50, describes the flurry of activity: 'It is now the month of December, when most of the city is in a bustle... Loose reins are given to the public for their wild parties; even where you may hear the sound of great preparations." Second of these three winter solstice holidays is the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun. In Latin, it is called Natalis Solis Invicti. It marked the start of the end of winter and the coming of spring and summertime. The third of the holidays is the Birthday of the Sun of Righteousness. This holiday is referred to in a past article, "Is Christianity Derived From Mithraism?", and is the celebration of the birthday of Mithras, the sun god born with a knife, who later rode and killed a great cosmic bull, whose fertilized blood is responsible, according to the mystery religion, for giving vegetation to the earth. Members of this cult worshiped the god by slaughtering a bull and bathing in its blood by standing in a pit below the corpse, literally washing themselves in the blood of bulls. Eventually, Christians contended that the celebration on December 25 of Christ's birth was not an attempt to "Christianize" pagan sun worship or the other festivals. An anonymous Christian in the AD 300s once said, "We hold this day holy, not like the pagans because of the birth of the sun, but because of him who made it." It has been claimed by some that the Christmas tree has its roots in pagan origins. Despite attempts to connect pagan traditions to this Christmas tradition, the modern custom does not come from paganism. During Saturnalia, bearing in mind that Saturn was the god of agriculture, Romans decorated their houses with greens and lights, and exchanged gifts, as aforementioned. "Late in the Middle Ages, Germans and Scandinavians placed evergreen trees inside their homes or just outside their doors to show their hope in the forthcoming spring. The first Christmas tree was decorated by Protestant Christians in 16th-century Germany. Our modern Christmas tree evolved from these early German traditions, and the custom most likely came to the United States with Hessian troops during the American Revolution, or with German immigrants to Pennsylvania and Ohio." The modern custom of putting up a Christmas tree and decorating it is derived from this. While there are Christians who believe that the Bible teaches against putting up a Christmas tree during the season, it does not state that we cannot put up a tree - but it does state that it is sinful to worship the tree. Decorating and worshiping are two separate things. Other Christmas traditions, such as ringing bells, do harken back to certain pagan celebrations and traditions. Ringing bells is generally believed to have its origin in a winter pagan festival where ringing bells would drive out evil spirits. In latter times, ringing bells on Christmas Eve symbolized the welcoming of Christmas with a joyful noise, a form of celebrating Jesus' birth. In like manner, there was an ancient pagan tradition of lighting candles to drive out forces of cold (which is simply the absence of heat) and darkness (which is simply the absence of light). As for the tradition of gift-giving, while it is true that Druids would offer up his goat as a type of pagan ritual, we give not because of this, but we give because He gave. At the same time, it is important to bear in mind that the wise men (magi) brought gifts to Jesus. Matthew 2:11 records, "On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh." What of Santa Claus? The modern Santa Claus legend is actually based on a fourth century Christian. He is known as Saint Nicholas, or Nikolaos of Myra (AD 270-343), a Greek bishop of Myra, which is part of modern-day Turkey. He is also known as Nikolaos the Wonderworker (Νικόλαος ὁ Θαυματουργός, Nikolaos ho Thaumaturgos), as he is alleged to have performed certain miracles. For example, during a famine that Myra experienced, there was a ship in the port which had been loaded with wheat for the Emperor in Constantinople. Nikolaos asked the sailors to unload part of their wheat to help in the time of need. While at first the sailors did not like the request, after Nikolaos promised that they would not take any damage for their consideration, they agreed, and unloaded wheat. After later arriving at the capital, the found that the weight of the load had not changed (having previously weighed it), even though the wheat they had unloaded in Myra was enough for two years, and could also be used for sowing. Some call this the miracle of the multiplication of wheat. Other legends exist concerning Nikolaos. During a famine, three children were lured by a butcher into his home, where he murdered them and butchered them, putting their remains in a barrel to cure, intending to sell them as ham. Nikolaos was visiting the region, caring for the hungry, saw through the butcher's gruesome crime. He sought the butcher's cottage for rest. The butcher asked Nikolaos if wanted some ham, and judging by his reply, the butcher understood that Nikolaos knew what he had done, and turned to flee. Nikolaos prayed, and the three children were resurrected. Other versions exist, but this gruesome legend demonstrates the kindness of Nikolaos and caring for others, a familiar characteristic of the modern Santa Claus. Perhaps the most infamous legend concerning Nikolaos is that of a poor man and his three daughters who could not afford a proper dowry for them ("the money, goods, or estate that a wife brings to her husband at marriage"). In other words, the poor man's daughters would remain unmarried, and, having to earn money, would likely become prostitutes. As a result, having heard of the situation, Nikolaos decided to help the man. However, he did not wish to help the man in public, as he wanted to remain modest and save the poor man from having to take charity, so he waited until nighttime, when he took three money purses filled with gold coins and tossed them through the window into the man's house. Variants of this legend exist. For example, one version has him throwing a purse into the house for three nights in a row. In another, the poor man wants to find the identity of the man, confronting Nikolaos, who said to give glory to God, and not him. In yet another, Nikolaos learns of the man's plan to confront him, and instead drops the money down the chimney, with one variant saying that one of the daughters had hung her stockings to dry, having washed them, and the gold fell into the stocking. Where did the name Santa Claus come from, however? |Saint Nicholas (c.1294)| "Santa Claus" comes the Dutch Sinterklaas, which itself is a corruption of transliterations of "Saint Nikolaos." In Dutch, he is also referred to as Sint Nicolaas. Some have claimed that there are parallels between the Dutch Sinterklaas and the Norse god, Odin. For example, Sinterklaas rides on rooftops with his white horse, and Odin rides the sky on his grey horse. Sinterklaas carries a staff and has mischievous helpers who have black faces, and Odin has a spear and black ravens as helpers. However, similarity does not prove that some of the Sinterklaas traditions are derived from Norse mythology. There are various explanations as to how Sinterklaas become the North American Santa Claus, one of which is that, during the American Revolution, a former Dutch colony (New York City) reinvented the Sinterklaas tradition. Not everyone agrees with this, and advocate other theories, but the fact remains that the Santa Claus legend is derived from Sinterklaas, which in turn is derived from the historical figure, Nikolaos of Myra, a fourth century Christian. Where various Christmas traditions come from, scholars and historians sometimes disagree on, yet many of our traditions are original, Christian traditions. While some have been derived in part from pagan traditions, others have purely Christian origins. Historically, Jesus is indeed the "reason for the season," and it is important to remember our roots, but if it is claimed that Christmas is a pagan holiday and Christians should not celebrated, bear in mind that while certain traditions have pagan roots, we do not celebrate those pagan ideas or deities now, but the birth of Jesus Christ, the Creator in the flesh (John 1; Philippians 2:6-11; Colossians 1:15-19, 2:9; 1st Timothy 3:16). Roots are important, but it is also important to understand why we celebrate today. We do not give gifts because a Druid somewhere, at some time offered a goat to his god, but because the Savior of Mankind was born in human form, being both man and divine: the God-man. The Truth Ministries would like to thank you for taking the time to read this article of "The Truth." Feel free to email us at email@example.com or firstname.lastname@example.org, visit our facebook page, or visit our ministry website. It is the mission of this ministry to "demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ" (2nd Corinthians 10:5). We understand that many will disagree with our position, our claims and our ministry, and we recognize the individual's right to believe what he or she wills, and that some will disagree on our position regarding this particular topic. However, understand that we stand firm upon the Bible as God's Word, which we believe to be historically accurate and reliable, and hold to our conviction that this conclusion was arrived at based on what His Word tells us, and through a Biblical worldview, and hope that if you have not already, will come to faith in Jesus. Take care, and God bless you reader. Troy Hillman "pagan." Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition. HarperCollins Publishers. 08 Dec. 2011. "Christmas as a multi-faith festival." BBC Learning English. BBC World Service, 29 Dec 2009. Web. 08 Dec 2011.; Tood, Liz. "Why I celebrate Christmas, by the world's most famous atheist." MailOnline. Associated Newspapers Ltd, 23 Dec 2008. Web. 08 Dec 2011.; Hytrek, Nick. "Non-Christians focus on secular side of Christmas." Sioux CIty Journal. Sioux City Journal, 10 Nov 2009. Web. 08 Dec 2011. "Anno Domini". Merriam Webster Online Dictionary. Merriam-Webster. 2003. Blackburn, Bonnie; Holford-Strevens, Leofranc. The Oxford companion to the Year: An exploration of calendar customs and time-reckoning. Oxford University Press, 2003. 782. Print. Hodge, Bodie. "Feedback: The Origin of Christmas." Answers In Genesis, 19 December 2009. Web. 11 December 2011. "Javan." WebBible Encyclopedia. Christian Answers Network, n.d. Web. 11 Dec 2011. Ibid, . Plato, Euthydemus, from: The Dialogues of Plato, Jowett, B. (Translator), 3rd ed., Vol. I, Oxford at the Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press, Humphrey Milford Publisher, 1892. 302d. Print. Miller, Stephen M. The Jesus of the Bible. 1st ed,. Uhrichsville, Ohio: Barbour Publishing Inc., 2009. 48-49. Print. Saundra K. Ciccarelli and J. Noland White. Psychology. 3rd ed. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2009. 548. Print. Ibid, . "Should we have a Christmas Tree? Does the Christmas Tree have its origin in ancient pagan rituals?." Got Questions.org. Got Questions Network, n.d. Web. 13 Dec 2011. "Do some Christmas traditions have pagan origins?." Got Questions.org. Got Questions Network, n.d. Web. 13 Dec 2011. The Holy Bible, Today’s New International Version. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2005. Print. Cunningham, Lawrence. A brief history of saints. Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. p. 33. A companion to Wace, Françoise Hazel Marie Le Saux. Cambridge Brewer, 2005. Print. "Saint NICOLAS." St. Nicholas Center. St. Nicholas Center, 2011. Web. 15 Dec 2011. "dowry." Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 15 Dec. 2011. William J. Bennett. The True Saint Nicholas. Howard Books, 2009. 14-17. Print. McKnight, George Harley. St. Nicholas - His Legend and His Role in the Christmas Celebration, 1917. Print. Lendering, Jona. "Saint Nicholas, Sinterklaas, Santa Claus". Livius.org, 20 Nov 2008. Web. 15 Dec 2011.

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Pamphlet reprinted from Socialist Worker, August 1970. Second printing June 1975. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. In May 1940 Leon Trotsky wrote an article entitled Stalin Seeks My Death. It was an accurate forecast. Three months later, on 20 August, the Stalinist agent Ramon Mercador, alias Frank Jacson, drove an icepick into Trotsky’s brain in Coyoacan, Mexico. The assassination was the last of the wholesale murders by which the Stalinist bureaucracy destroyed the Bolshevik old guard. Rykov, Lenin’s successor as Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, was shot. Zinoviev, President of the Communist International in Lenin’s day, was shot. Bukharin and Piatakov, “the most able of the younger members of the Central Committee”, according to Lenin’s Testament, were shot. Rakovsky and Radek both perished. Tens of thousands of old party members disappeared for ever in Arctic “labour camps”. The militants who made the October Revolution were practically annihilated. Only one of the leading figures of the years of revolution and civil war survived. Joseph Stalin, the man Lenin proposed should be removed from office as General Secretary, now ruled Russia more despotically than Ivan the Terrible had ever done. Trotsky’s final verdict on these events was written in the year before his death. Stalinism had first to exterminate politically and then physically the leading cadres of Bolshevism in order to become that which it now is: an apparatus of the privileged, a brake upon historical progress, an agency of world imperialism. The hopes of the October Revolution had been buried by the Stalinist terror. There had been no simple counter-revolution. The landowners, capitalists and courtiers of Tsarist times had not recovered their possessions. Stalin founded no dynasty and the leading members of the bureaucracy acquired no legal title to the “public” property. Yet the working people, the officially proclaimed “ruling class”, were deprived of all political rights, even such minimal rights as they had won under Tsarism. The trade unions had become a machine for disciplining the workforce. And what a discipline. On 28 December 1938, Stalin signed a decree which laid down that “workers or employees who leave their jobs without permission or are guilty of grave offences against labour discipline are liable to administrative eviction from their dwellings within 10 days without any living quarters being provided for them”. The conditions of a 19th century company town were imposed on the workers in the “workers’ state”! The same decree abolished the right of a worker to a paid holiday after five and a half month’s employment and dealt with bad time-keeping as follows: “A worker or employee guilty of coming late to work, of leaving for lunch too early or returning too late or idling during working hours is liable to administration prosecution.” Managers failing to bring prosecutions “are themselves made liable to dismissal or prosecution”. All this, of course, applied to “free” workers. For the really obstinate offenders there were the labour camps. Big inequalities in wages were introduced. There was no question of negotiation, of course. Incentive payment schemes became general. The privileged bureaucrats and managers got bigger and bigger differentials plus the familiar fringe benefits – cars, houses in the country, free holidays in the Crimea and so on. As Stalin said, “We must not play with phrases about equality. This is playing with fire.” Out of the first successful nationwide workers’ revolution had grown a society that reproduced the inequalities and oppression of capitalism and was ruled by an iron dictatorship, a dictatorship not of the working class but over the working class. The whole of the latter part of Trotsky’s political life was spent in fighting this reaction, in analysing it and explaining its causes and in struggling to keep alive the revolutionary socialist tradition against the crushing pressure of Stalinism in Russia and internationally. Trotsky was born in the Ukraine in 1879, the son of a Jewish farmer. At that time the labour movement did not exist in the Tsarist empire. In fact an industrial working class hardly existed. There were a few great nobles, a more numerous lower nobility who officered the army and the state machine, a middle class of merchants, lawyers, doctors and so on and a vast mass of peasants. That was the Russian Empire of the time, and over it the Tsar ruled as absolutely as Louis XIV had ruled France. There was no parliament, no free press, no freedom of movement, no equality of citizens before the law. Until 1861 the great mass of the Russian people – the peasants – had been legally unfree serfs, unable to leave the estate they were born on, bought and sold by their masters along with the land. Russia was backward, medieval, so backward that in many ways it was more like France before the great revolution of 1789 than the capitalist countries of western and central Europe. But a great change was coming. In the years of Trotsky’s boyhood and youth industry was developing fast in Russia, fuelled by foreign loans and foreign technicians. New classes were developing, a capitalist class, still much weaker than in the west, and a real industrial working class. The growth of these classes meant, in the long run, that the Tsarist regime could not last. As late as 1895 the Tsarist minister of finance could write: “Fortunately Russia does not possess a working class in the same sense as the West does; consequently we have no labour problem.” He was already out of date. By 1887 there were already 103,000 metal workers in Russia, by 1897, 642,000. By 1914 there were 5,000,000 workers out of a population of 160,000,000. This young working class developed a militancy and record of mass struggle unparalleled since the heroic period of the British working class in the 1830s and 1840s. In the early years this century a wave of mass strikes shook Tsarism to its foundations, leading to the explosion of 1905. A new form of working class self-government, the “Soviet” or workers’ council, was invented by unknown Russian working men. For a time there was a “dual power”, the power of the workers organised in Soviets confronting the panic-stricken government of the Tsar. The whole regime tottered. But in the end it was able to re-establish its power. The revolutionary workers confronted the peasant army and the peasants were still loyal to the Tsar. A murderous repression followed. Trotsky grew up with the movement. While still in his teens he joined a revolutionary group in Nikolayev, the South Russian Workers Union. In 1898 he was arrested and kept in various jails until, in 1900, he was deported to Siberia. In the summer of 1902 he escaped and by the autumn he had joined Lenin in London. By this time Trotsky had become a marxist and a writer of some fame. Lenin welcomed him and proposed that he join the editorial board of Iskra (The Spark), the socialist party paper which was printed in London and smuggled into Russia. The proposal was vetoed by the senior member of the board, Plekhanov, one of the founders of the party and a future Menshevik. For the split in the Russian socialist party was only a few months ahead and relations between Lenin and some of his co-editors were already tense. The party at that time consisted of a handful of emigrés in London, Zurich and other European cities and a number of illegal groups of workers and students in some of the Russian industrial centres and in Siberian exile. The split, which came at the second congress, held in Brussels and then London in 1903, was on the face of it about a comparatively unimportant organisational question. In fact the underlying differences were of vital importance. Lenin and his group (who became the Bolsheviks, or majority) stood for a tightly organised revolutionary party, able to survive illegality and repression. They believed that only the working class, in alliance with the peasantry, could overthrow Tsarism and “supplant it by a republic on the basis of a democratic constitution that would secure the sovereignity of the people, i.e., the concentration of all the sovereign power of the state in the hands of a legislative assembly composed of the representatives of the people.” (Lenin’s Draft Programme of the Social Democratic Party of Russia, 1902). The minority (Mensheviks) were moving towards the view that the Russian capitalist class could lead this struggle and consequently tended to favour a looser organisation oriented to semi-legal work. Neither side supposed that a socialist revolution was possible in a country as backward and under-developed as Russia. That would come later after a period of capitalist economic development under a democratic republic. In 1903 the differences were not as clear cut as they became later. Not everyone fully understood the implications of the choice they were making. Plekhanov, later leader of the extreme right wing of the Mensheviks, sided with Lenin. Trotsky opposed Lenin. It was a decision he was later to call “the greatest error of my life”. In 1905 the revolutionary exiles were able to return. Trotsky, now a Menshevik, played a big part in the unsuccessful 1905 revolution. Towards the end of the year he became President of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers Deputies, then the most important workers organisation in Russia. Its liquidation by the reviving Tsarist military and police machine marked the turning point in the revolution. Trotsky was imprisoned again. Put on trial for his life, he defied the Tsar from the dock: “The government has long since broken with the nation ... What we have is not a national government but an automaton for mass murder.” The still smouldering revolutionary movement made the government cautious. The main charge – insurrection – was dismissed. But Trotsky and 14 others were sentenced to deportation to Siberia for life with loss of all civil rights. In the years of reaction after 1906, the revolutionary organisations, harassed by police spies and unremitting repression, withered and decayed. The Menshevik organisations in Russia virtually disappeared. Even Lenin’s Bolshevik group, now split in to two, a left and a right (with Lenin on the right), shrank into a shadow fits former strength. In the emigré circles bitter factional disputes developed. Trotsky escaped again from Siberia in 1907 and soon found himself nearly isolated. Repelled by the Menshevik drift to the right and unable to overcome his hostility to the Bolsheviks, he became a lone wolf. His one positive achievement in these years was the elaboration of his theory of “permanent revolution”. Its central idea was that the coming revolution in Russia could not stop at the stage of a “democratic republic” but would spill over into a workers’ revolution for workers’ power and would then link up with workers’ revolutiowitrthie more advanced capitalist countries or be defeated. It was not so very different from Lenin’s later conception, but Trotsky’s distrust and dislike of Lenin prevented him from joining forces with the only real revolutionary organisation – the Bolsheviks. On 4 August 1914 the world was transformed. The long predicted imperialist war broke out and the leaders of the big social democratic parties forgot about their marxism and internationalism and capitulated to “their own” governments. The Socialist International broke into pieces. In every belligerent country, the movement split between the renegades and the internationalists. In September 1915,38 delegates from 11 countries met at Zimmerwald in Switzerland to reaffirm the principles of international socialism. Trotsky wrote the internationalist manifesto issued by the conference. There were both revolutionaries and pacifists at Zimmerwald. They were soon to split. The revolutionary nucleus became the forerunner of the Third (Communist) International. Revolutionary opposition was growing in all the warring states but it was in Russia that the break came. In February 1917 mass strikes and demonstrations overthrew the Tsar. It was the working-class militants of Petrograd – many of them Bolsheviks – that led the movement. From the beginning the leaders of the Soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers deputies were in a position to sweep away the crumbling facade of the “Provisional government” and take power. But they did not do so, because they were, in the majority, Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries (the peasant party) who believed that a “democratic republic” was necessary to permit the growth of capitalism so as to lay the basis for socialism in the distant future. This meant continuing the war and “disciplining” the workers and peasants. Even some of the Bolsheviks wavered, notably Kamenev and Stalin, the two central committee members who had escaped from Siberia to take charge of the party in Petrograd. But when Lenin returned in April he would have none of this. “Down with the Provisional government”, “Peace, Land and Bread” were his slogans. At first a minority in his own party, Lenin won first the party and then the majority of the Soviets for his revolutionary position. It was essentially the same as Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” and in July Trotsky, together with a group of ex-left wing Mensheviks, entered the Bolshevik Party. By the autumn the majority of the workers were supporting the Bolsheviks. Under the slogan of “All power to the Soviets” the Provisional Government was overthrown. In Petrograd hardly a hand was lifted to support it. The next years were the years of Trotsky’s greatest fame. First as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs and then as People’s Commissar for War, he was second only to Lenin as the moving spirit of the revolution. These were the years of revolutionary optimism. Everything seemed possible. Though the Soviet government had to fight desperately against massive foreign intervention – the armies of 14 powers fought against the revolution – and against foreign armed and financed White armies, the whole of Europe seemed on the verge of revolution. Revolutionary Soviet regimes were actually established in Hungary, in Bavaria, in Finland, in Latvia. The German Kaiser, the Austrian Emperor, the Turkish Sultan were all overthrown. The whole of Germany seemed on the brink of red revolution. In Italy mass strikes and violent demonstrations paralysed the capitalist state. Even the sober Lenin could write in 1918: “History has given us, the Russian toiling and exploited classes, the honourable role of vanguard of the international socialist revolution; and today we can see clearly how far this revolution will go. The Russians commenced; the Germans, the French and English will finish and socialism will be victorious.” For Trotsky there were no doubts. The “final conflict” was now. When the Third International was founded in 1919 he wrote in his first manifesto: The opportunists who before the world war summoned the workers to practice moderation for the sake of gradual transition to socialism ... are again demanding self renunciation of the proletariat ... If these preachments were to find acceptance among the working masses, capitalist development in new, much more concentrated and monstrous forms would be restored on the bones of several generations-with the perspective of a new and inevitable world war. Fortunately for mankind this is not possible. In fact the success of the German revolution hung in the balance. The opposing forces were nearly equal. Success would have changed the course of European and world history. Failure meant the eventual triumph of reaction not only in Germany but also in Russia. For the civil war ruined the already backward Russian economy and dispersed the Russian working class. The White counter revolution was beaten because the great majority of the Russian people – the peasants – knew that the revolution had given them the land and that a restoration would take it back again. Yet by the end of the civil war the workers had lost power because, as a class, they had been decimated. By 1921 the number of workers in Russia had fallen to 1,240,000. Petrograd had lost 57.5 per cent of its total population. The production of all manufactured goods had fallen to 13 per cent of the already miserable 1913 level. The country was ruined, starving, held together only by the party and state machines developed during the civil war. It was a situation that had not been foreseen. At the time of the Brest Litovsk peace with Germany in 1918 Lenin wrote: “This is a lesson to us because the absolute truth is that without a revolution in Germany we shall perish.” For, of course, there could be no question of the Russian working class, a small minority with a weak economic base, maintaining a workers’ state for any length of time without integrating the Russian economy with that of a developed socialist country. Later at the third Congress of the Third International in 1921 Lenin returned to the point: It was clear to us that without aid from the international world revolution, a victory of the proletarian revolution is impossible. Even prior to the revolution, as well as after it, we thought that the revolution would occur either immediately or at least very soon in other backward countries and in the more highly developed capitalist countries, otherwise we would perish. Notwithstanding this conviction, we did our utmost to preserve the Soviet system, under any circumstances and at all costs, because we know we are working not only for ourselves but also for the international revolution. By 1921 the international revolution had been beaten back and the communist regime in Russia faced another desperate crisis. The peasant masses, freed from the fear of landlordism were moving into violent opposition. Peasant riots in Tambov, the Kronstadt rising and the strikes in support of it showed that the regime no longer enjoyed popular support. It was becoming a dictatorship over the peasantry and the remnants of the working class. A retreat was essential. The New Economic Policy, from 1921 onwards, recreated an internal market and gave the peasantry freedom to produce for profit and to buy and sell as they wished. Private production of consumer goods for a profit was also permitted and the publicly-owned large-scale industry was instructed to operate on commercial principles. The result was a slow but substantial economic recovery, together with mass unemployment – never less than a fifth of the slowly reviving industrial working class – and the development of a class of capitalist farmers, the kulaks, out of the ranks of the peasantry. By the middle 1920s the economic output levels of 1913 had been reached and in some cases passed. By that time the balance of social forces had altered fundamentally. What sort of society was emerging? As early as 1920 Lenin had argued: Comrade Trotsky talks about the “workers’ state”. Excuse me, this is an abstraction. It was natural for us to write about the workers’ state in 1917 but those who now ask “Why protect, against whom protect the working class, there is no bourgeoisie now, the state is a workers’ state” commit an obvious mistake ... In the first place, our state is not really a workers’ state, but a workers’ and peasants’ state ... But more than that. It is obvious from our patty programme that ... our state is a workers’ state with bureaucratic distortions. Since then the “bureaucratic distortions” had grown enormously and the ruling party itself had grown enormously and the ruling party itself had become bureaucratised. In the absence of a working class with the strength, cohesion and will to rule, the party had had to substitute for the class and the party apparatus was increasingly substituting for the party membership. A new group of “apparatchniks” had grown up alongside the kulaks and the “nepmen” (petty capitalists). Trotsky, in one of his most striking phrases, described politics as “the struggle for the surplus social product”. Between these three groups such a struggle developed over the heads of the mass of the poorer peasants and against the working class. The struggle was reflected in the ranks of the now bureaucratised party, especially among its leaders. Trotsky, by now thoroughly alarmed at the rightward trend, became the chief spokesman of a tendency that took up the fight, started by Lenin in the last months of his life, for the democratisation of the party and the revival of the Soviets as real organs of the workers and peasants. An essential part of the programme of the Left Opposition (as Trotsky’s group was called) was the more rapid and planned development of Russian industry. For marxists it was out of the question for democratisation to succeed without an increase in the numbers, self confidence and specific weight’ of the working class. Opposed to the left was a right wing tendency for which Bukharin became the spokesman. This argued for stability, for accumulation “at a snail’s pace”, and for giving priority to keeping the peasantry happy, including the kulaks. There was a third tendency, the “centre”, representing the apparatchniks, the bureaucracy. It was then allied to the right. Its leading figure was J.V. Stalin, an old Bolshevik, a capable organiser and a man of unbounded ambition and iron will. Stalin was welding the bureaucracy into a class, conscious of its own interests and with its own ideology – “Socialism in a single country”. The perspective of the opposition was one of peaceful reform. The pressure of events and of the opposition could reform the party and the country, it thought. In the event, the extent of the bureaucratic degeneration was shown by the ease with which the opposition was defeated. Though it included some of the most distinguished members of the party and was joined, after 1926, by the group around Zinoviev, Lenin’s closest collaborator in exile, and Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow, as well as by the “ultra-left” democratic centralist group, it was overwhelmingly voted down in party meetings packed by Stalin’s yes-men. In October 1927 Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party. Soon they arid thousands of other oppositionists began the journey into exile. The opposition had been smashed and from their places of exile its leaders predicted a dire danger from the right. The Soviet “Thermidor”, the overthrow of the party by the representatives of the kulaks and nepmen, was imminent. And indeed the regime did face a danger from the right. In 1928 the kulaks, encouraged by the liquidation of the left, engineered a “grain strike”, a hoarding operation which faced the cities with starvation. The sequel showed how grossly they – and the opposition – miscalculated the strength of the rival forces. The bureaucracy executed a violent change of course. After years of appeasing the rich peasants they resorted to forced collectivisation, to the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class”. Under the guise of one-party rule, a narrow clique of bureaucrats ruled Russia. And they were soon to become the puppets of one man. By 1930 Stalin was the new Tsar, in fact if not in form. With the forced collectivisation came a frenzied programme of forced industrialisation. Schemes far exceeding the most ambitious plans of the most optimistic members of the opposition were put in train, only to be superceded by others still more far-reaching. “Fulfil the five year plan in four years” became the slogan. The man who yesterday ridiculed the moderate plans of the opposition as utopian now wished to “catch up and outstrip” the advanced capitalist countries in a few years. The first five year plan did succeed in laying the basis for an industrial society. It did so on the basis of the most brutal exploitation of the workers and peasants. Real wages fell drastically. The draconically regimented “free” workers were supplemented by an army of slave labourers, mostly ex-peasants, employed on large scale construction jobs under appalling conditions. All vestiges of democratic rights disappeared. A fully fledged totalitarian regime emerged. These events disintegrated the exiled opposition. Many of its most prominent members made their peace with Stalin. At the other extreme, many rank and file oppositionists came to agree with the “democratic centralists” that a new revolution was necessary. “The party,” wrote Victor Smirnov, a democratic centralist leader, “is a stinking corpse.” The workers’ state had been destroyed years earlier, in his opinion and capitalism restored. Trotsky would accept neither of these positions. Against the capitulators he insisted on the need for Soviet democracy. Against the left he insisted on the possibilities of peaceful reforms. It was an unreal assessment and Trotsky was to abandon it 18 months later. The impetus for the change came from events in Germany. The left opposition had been concerned at least as much with the International as with Russia. The Third International in its early years had been far from being the tool of Moscow. But with the receding of the revolutionary mood in Europe the parties became more attached to the one surviving “Soviet” regime and more dependent on it. Advice from Moscow became the most important source of their political ideas. Increasingly the Russian, and hence apparatchnik, dominated executive of the International began to interfere with the national life of the parties. The myth of the “Soviet Fatherland” became more and more important to European and Asian Communists. Gradually the more independent spirits and the more serious marxists were eliminated from the leaderships. It took 10 years to reduce the world movement to the position of Moscow’s foreign legion. By 1929 the process was complete. While the right-centre bloc ruled Russia the policy of the International was pushed to the right. Semi-reformist policies were promoted and they led to a number of avoidable defeats. The opposition sharply criticised the Comintern policies and sought to develop contacts with dissident members of the foreign parties. But after Stalin had eliminated his former “rightist” allies in Russia, the Comintern was swung violently to the left, to the lunatic left in fact. A period of “general revolutionary offensive”, the “third period” was proclaimed. The theory of “social fascism” was invented. The social democratic and labour parties were “social fascists”, groups to the left of them like the ILP were “left social fascists”. In Germany, where the danger of fascism was very real, this led to the rejection of any joint anti-fascist resistance with the social-democrats and the trade unions under their influence. For these were themselves fascists! In fact everyone who was not a loyal Stalinist was a fascist: “Germany is already living under fascist rule”, said the German Communist daily. “Hitler cannot make matters worse than they already are.” Against this insane policy Trotsky, from 1929 an exile in Turkey, wrote some of his most brilliant polemics. If reason could have moved the Stalinised leaders of the German Communist Party, Hitler would have been beaten, for the opportunity was there. A victorious united front was possible. But they were beyond reason. The only voice they heard was tat of Stalin intoning “Social democracy and fascism are not opposites: they are twins.” The German workers’ movement was smashed. The Communist Party surrendered without a fight. Hitler came to power and preparation for the Second World War began. This terrible defeat caused Trotsky to break with the International. “An organisation which has not been awakened by the thunderbolt of fascism ... is dead and cannot be revived.” Soon after this he abandoned his reformist position on Russia. A new revolution was necessary to remove the bureaucratic dictatorship. Yet he did not modify his view that Russia was a “degenerated workers’ state”. For the few years left to him he clung to that abstraction – a “workers’ state” in which the workers were not only not in power but were deprived of the most elementary political rights. It was an error that was to have a lasting and pernicious influence on the revolutionary left. Trotsky was now nearly alone. Soon after the German catastrophe the great purges began in Russia. Stalin consolidated his personal rule by the mass murder of the former capitulators, of the former rightists and of most of his own early supporters. All alike were denounced, along with Trotsky, as agents of Hitler, counterrevolutionaries, spies and saboteurs. A series of grotesque “show trials”, at which prominent leaders of the revolution in Lenin’s time were made to confess their guilt – and that of the monster Trotsky. A climate of opinion was created in which it was impossible for Trotsky to influence left wing workers. “The Stalinist bureaucracy had actually succeeded in identifying itself with marxism ... Militant French dockers, Polish coalminers and Chinese guerrilla fighters alike saw in those who ruled Moscow the best judges of Soviet interests and reliable councillors to world communism.” The Comintern was now swung rightwards again. Stalin’s foreign policy required an alliance with the “western democracies”. The “popular front” – the subordination of the workers’ parties to liberals and progressive’ Tories – was the new line. It enabled Stalin to strangle another revolution – Spain. Trotsky called the Spanish defeat “the last warning”. All his energies in the last years of his exile, in France, Norway and then Mexico, were spent in trying to create the nucleus of a new International, the Fourth. Its founding conference took place in 1938 under the shadow of multiple defeats for the working class. Trotsky now had less than two years to live. It was his imperishable achievement to keep alive the tradition of revolutionary marxism in the decades when it was all but extinguished by its pretended supporters. Trotsky was far from infallible. Lenin had written in his testament of Trotsky’s “too far-reaching self-confidence” and it was his misfortune, in his last years, that few among his adherents were capable of independent thinking. That he towered over his associates was at once his strength. and his tragedy. Perhaps no other man could have withstood isolation and attack as. he did. His contribution to revolutionary socialism and to the working class movement was unsurpassed. He was one of the handful of truly great figures the movement has produced. My high (and still rising) blood pressure is deceiving those near me about my actual condition. I am active and able to work but the outcome is evidently near. These lines will be made public after my death. I have no need to refute here once again the stupid and vile slanders of Stalin and his agents: there is not a single spot on my revolutionary honour. 1 have never entered, either directly or indirectly, into any behind-the-scenes agreements or even negotiations with the enemies of the working class. Thousands of Stalin’s opponents have fallen victims of similar false accusations. The new revolutionary. generations will rehabilitate their political honour and deal with the Kremlin executioners according to their deserts. I thank warmly the friends who remained loyal to me through the most difficult hours of my life. I do not name anyone in particular because I cannot name them all. However, I consider myself justified in making an exception in the case of my companion, Natalia Ivanovna Sedova. In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness. For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist: for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth. Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of alt evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full. 27 February 1940, Coyoacan. Last updated on 4 February 2017

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In the history of cinema, few villains have captured the imagation of audiences’ as Hannibal Lecter did in “Silence of the Lambs.” Anthony Hopkins’ chilling portrayal of a cannibalistic serial killer earned him an Oscar, as well as a place in the nightmares of many. A king among cannibal killers, audiences could rest with the comfort that the character was only fiction. Unfortunately, this is not entirely true. When Thomas Harris wrote the Hannibal story, he borrowed elements from a real life cannibal killer, Albert Hamilton Fish. Much like Hannibal Lecter, Albert Fish appeared soft-spoken, fragile, and harmless – yet, behind the facade hid a monster who boasted of his molestation of hundreds of child, expressed disappointment at his inability to rape a girl before devouring her, and carried his instruments of hell with him in the form of a meat cleaver, a butcher knife, and a saw. Even with his elder exterior, Albert Fish’s perversions and sadism strengthened with age until his execution. Psychiatrists accentuate that when investigating psychological disorders, the most important formative stage is childhood. From this perspective, the development of Albert Fish becomes unsurprising. Born in 1870, his father was a 75 year old riverboat captain who passed when Fish was five. His family suffered a long history of alcoholism, abuse, and disorders. Compound that with the sadism Albert Fish claimed to experience when he was placed in an orphanage, and the lack of childhood innocence Fish was afforded explains much about his later disturbing compulsions. Many of the myths and truths of Albert Fish’s horrific tale as a cannibal killer merge in his adult life. Fish’s own testimony confessed that his molestation of children began when he moved to New York City in 1890, including raping and torturing children with his distinct paddle laced with sharp nails. Even though boasting of having “children of every state”, his claims never were verified. Only his later murders were proven to be connected to him. To the age of 50, Albert Fish worked primarily as a handyman and painter. Viewed as a turning point, his wife left him suddenly with John Straube, a fellow handyman. Personality of Albert Fish began deteriorating. His children later testified recalling him forcing them to participate in his masochist behavior by beating him and carrying folders of articles on cannibalism. But, his grandfatherly appearance allowed him to deceive more than his own children. The number of deaths he was responsible for remain a mystery. His original mutilations and torturing, he confessed, were to African-Americans and mentally-disabled children across the country, figuring they were less likely to be noticed than Caucasian children. However, his hazy memories of details created a source of uncertainty of his claim’s validity. In 1928, Albert Fish’s more infamous cannibal story took place involving 10-year old Grace Budd. Albert Fish, using a pseudonym ‘Frank Howard’, answered a classified ad of Edward Budd promising to hire Budd at his farm in the country. Albert Fish became friends with the family, even offering to take their daughter, Grace Budd, to a birthday party. Predictable with hindsight, Grace never did return. In 1934, Albert Fish wrote to the family detailing the horrific details of her death, including her struggle to break free, how he cut her up, and ate her body over nine days. His letter was ultimately traced back to him, and he was arrested and put to trial – ultimately given the electric chair. [ad#downcont]Grace Budd was not the only rape, murder, and feast on human flesh he was responsible for. His testimonies recalling devouring other children, such as Billy Gaffney in 1927, continue to shock. His tenure as a house painter to rape children continue to horrify. Albert Fish was an American cannibal killer that has inspired the cannibal films that have shaken whole audiences. Those cannibal films, however, were fiction. There are famous women serial killers in history as well as men. The women serial killers are cooler than men and can kill many people for decades without being caught. They are also more talented in playing their roles of innocent. One of the most famous women serial killers is the blackwidow Frau Elfriede Blauensteiner, who killed people because ‘they deserved’ or ‘to help them’. Frau Elfriede Blauensteiner was a very tenderhearted woman. Even, she helped her upper floor neighbor commit suicide in order to save his wife and child being abused by him. When her neighbor said, “I can’t refrain from beating my wife and child. I tried to jump in front of a moving train but I couldn’t,” Frau Elfriede said, “Wait, I’m coming.” Of course no one saw how the poor man fluttered after he drank the ‘special cocktail’ Frau Elfriede prepared for him. A note saying, ‘I am sickened with this life. Goodbye.’ helped policemen to decide that it was a suicide. Frau Elfriede cried too much during the funeral of Mr Erwin, as much as she cried during the funeral of her stepfather Otto Reinl. Blackwidow- Serial Killer Frau Elfriede Otto was an old, lonely man, suffering from diabetes, he needed for care. He was using a medicine called Euglucon which contains sulfonylurea. Euglucon increases the insulin secretion of pancreas and decreases blood sugar. When Elfriede said, “I can take care of you, move to my home,” poor man was very happy. However Elfriede was happier when she read the patient information leaflet. She was careful enough to give his medicine everyday on time and she was sneaky enough to increase the dose of Euglucon each day. Occasionally Otto was losing his consciousness due to low blood sugar level. One day, Otto died. An autopsy was performed but nobody checked Euglucon or insulin amount in his body. In 1986, Elfriede learnt two things: First, excessive amount of Euglucon cause death and secondly, Euglucon is not checked during autopsy. Elfriede was 55 years old when she married Rudolf Blauensteiner. She prepared his coffee every morning and his tea every evening. He was unaware that she was adding Euglucon to his drinks. Within six years of his marriage, he went into coma 13 times. In 1992, Elfriede was fed up with this situation and at the end, she made his last coffee, a deadly one. She wanted to bury him next to her dear stepfather. And she cried madly while her husband’s ashes were buried. Her next victim was 84 years old lonely neighbor, Mrs Fransizka Köberl. Elfriede complaint about loneliness after her husband’s death and wanted to move to Mrs Köberl’s home. She proposed taking care of her. It is not difficult to guess how she took care of the old woman. After transferring all her money to her own account, Elfriede made her sign her will. Thus, Elfriede guaranteed to inherit all her possessions after her death. However, it was not so easy to kill the old lady. She inceased the dose of Euglucon in her coffee gradually but she was surprised that it had no effect on Mrs Köberl. Then she noticed that the old lady was eating too much chocolate and candies that increased her low blood sugar level. She cried too much at her funeral, too. Two years later, she was one of the regular customers of Esterhazy Palace in Vienna, which was turned into a gambling house. She was wearing expensive clothes and jewelries. But she was worried about what to do after spending all her money. Therefore, she prepared a newspaper ad, “A widow, faithful spouse and a nurse looking for a peaceful aging with a well-of widower.” Through this ad, she met 64 years old Friedrich Döcker and married him within three days. Her new husband transferred the ownership of his house to Elfriede right after their marriage. Friedrich Döcker died in 11th of July, 1995. However, a newspaper published an ad four days before his death, saying that a widow is looking for a man over 80. Elfriede, knowing that her husband would have died in a few days, had begun to look for the next victim. Elfriede chose Alois Pichler who was well-off and had no relatives except his 91 years old nun sister. In October 1995, she moved to his house and around two weeks later there was an ambulance at the door. Alois, who had no health problem until that day, had suddenly low blood sugar level problem. One month later, Alois was still alive. Therefore, Elfriede gave him Anafranil, an antidepressant, as well as Euglucon. However she could not success. She asked her lawyer to write a false will of Alois to collect his $100,000 inheritance. They made exhausted, old man sign the falsified will and then they left him in a cold bath with all the windows open although it was snowing outside. That night, Elfriede and her lawyer went out to the gambling house. Her plans were destroyed by the poor old man’s nun sister who visited her brother Alois with a few of her friends and found him stock-still in the bathtub. Elfriede was dressed elegantly as usual during his funeral. She left a red rose in the same color as her lipstick on the coffin and cried. After thee funeral, she prepared her nex newspaper ad. However she did not take two points into account: Alois had a real will and all his possessions passed to his nephew according to his will. Secondly, traces of Anafranil was easily found during autopsy. [ad#downcont]Elfriede was sentenced to lifetime prison in 1997. Her lawyer and the young doctor, who supplied 1100 tablets of Euglocon and 200 tablets of Anafranil within a month, were also sent to prison. At the trial, Elfriede, dressed in an elegant beige suit, said that she was innocent. She was charged with the murder of poor Alois only. As she visited Esterhazy Palace 1600 times in three years until she was arrested and spent 18 million Austrian Schillings at the gambling house, she was on trial once more in 2001. However, she had already been sentenced to lifetime prison. Elfriede Blauensteiner was 72 when she died due to a brain tumor in 2003 in an hospital in Vienna. The blackwidow, the serial killer said that she had done nothing evil, but helped her husbands. And proclaimed: “Death is only the beginning of eternal life.” Killers come in all forms. Some killers do it on large scale, some on small; some do it for hate, some for pleasure; some accredit it to mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, some to disenchantment of their social environment. Legally speaking, there are three dimensions by which to measure the murder’s offense: the methodology, the scope of the murder, and its motive. Depending on the combination between these three criteria allows for a standard of punishment to be assigned, and for killers to be given a label in the history book. First, one has to look at the micro or individual level killers. Spree killers, for example, are killers that embark on a murder rampage in a short period of time. The scope of their location is unimportant; the ambition is to maximize the damage in such a way that the goal of the spree killers is rarely to escape alive or be subtle about their murders. The Virginia Tech massacre in 2007 where Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 in a shooting rampage at the university is an example of a rampage killing. It is random, the motives of spree killers often bred out of revenge, and characterized by individuals suffering from a history of mental illness. Murders and Killers The most common form of individual murderer title is the serial killer. At its most rudimentary definition, the FBI defines a serial killer as a person who kills three or more people over a month period. Unlike mass murderers, a serial killer is more strategic and quiet about their murders. As Albert Fish, himself a cannibal killer, said, many of his victims were African-American or mentally-challenged because he figured they would be less noticeable. The serial killer wants to extend his killing spree and is more systematic in that sense. Even within these types of killers, another dimension that is investigated are motivations. Spree killers, for example, are commonly associated to kill out of anger and revenge. It is a quick and damage maximizing strategy that is not looking for an escape. By contrast, the motives of serial killers vary drastically: Some serial killers do it out of anger at the world, but that is actually the minority of cases. Many do it out of hedonistic urges; sexual arousal achieved by the torturing and absolute dominance over others. Some are mission oriented killers. These killers convince themselves that external or internal voices in their heads command mission oriented killers to murder. These hallucinations are often a symptom of schizophrenia or other mental illnesses. On a more macro level of killers are the mass murderers. Mass murderers can range from very effective spree killers to those responsible for genocide. The perpetrators are commonly associated with the political – the Killing Fields in Cambodia are viewed as mass murder, for example. However, the technical definition limits ‘mass murder’ to signify the death of four or more in a particular event – a level above more isolated serial killers or small-scale spree killers. The motives for mass murders vary from the political to revenge to the thirst for fame. [ad#downcont]Though killers are not uniform, each is equally reprehensible in its own way. However, it is impossible not to internally weigh different actions against one another even if each is individually heinous. Can a drive-by shooting for revenge be equated to torture and death for sexual pleasure? Can a massacre of a village truly be equal morally and legally to a working place shooting? Mass murderers, serial killers, spree killers, mission oriented killers or cannibal killer… All of these are horrifying in their own way, but it demonstrates defining a killer as only a killer is only part of the equation. While the name “cannibal nerd” may appear to be a term of endearment, it is assigned to an individual that became Japan’s most reviled cannibal serial killer. When the cannibal killer Tsutomu Miyazaki was hanged in June 2008, it brought closure and resolution to a most horrifying chapter in Japanese history. While niches of Japanese society have strange fixations on schoolgirl panties and sadistic game shows, manga strips, these perversions are viewed by outsiders to be more comical than horrifying. This is only because these odd perversions are taken at face value. The story of Tsutomu Miyazaki demonstrates when these perversions are perverted; his story has elements of the universal regarding cannibal killers, but also something very distinctly Japanese. Tsutomu Miyazaki and his cannibal stories continue to horrify even in death. The background of Tsutomu Miyazaki reads like a manual of how the habits of serial killers are cultivated and developed. Born prematurely with a deformity to his hands, Tsutomu Miyazaki was a loner and exhibited antisocial behavior throughout his life. Discovered only following his arrest was his addiction to hardcore pornography – chiefly, graphic cartoons known as Hentai and manga strips characterized him as a “cannibal nerd” by the media. However, his desires and fetishes reveal a common trend universally involving serial killers, and especially cannibal killers – they do not kill or eat human flesh out of hate or malice. Psychologists argue that cannibal killers lose their control in channeling their sexual fetishes that only become compounded and exaggerated the more repressed and isolated they become from society. Tsutomu Miyazaki is not the first serial killer to fit this description, and, unfortunately, he likely will not be the last. Miyazaki’s sadistic murders took place between 1988 and 1989, where his actions shot a massive blow to Japanese self-perception of being a harmonious society. During this brief period, blood lust Tsutomu Miyazaki mutilated and murdered four girls, which included two four year olds, one five year old, and one seven year old. After murdering them, he sexually molested their corpses, ate portions of their bodies, and reportedly drank their blood, which earned him a nickname of “Dracula.” His murders were not systematic or strategic – they were dictated by opportunity and impulses he claimed he had to listen to. When he was captured engaging in an act of molestation, he was put on trial in 1990. His trial offered unique, yet oddly familiar, characteristics of cannibal stories. During his trial, Tsutomu Miyazaki showed signs of suffering from severe schizophrenia. One psychiatrist argued that Tsutomu Miyazaki confessed that he drank blood of children to resurrect his deceased grandmother – an excuse of suffering from delusions and acting out of necessity seen in other cannibal killers, such as the “Vampire of Sacramento” Richard Chase. During his trial, he often sketched cartoons of his alter-ego – Rat man – that he claimed forced him to do such things. While his defense rested on insanity and schizophrenia, other statements and psychiatrists assert that there are signs that he was very aware of his blood lust actions and was absolutely remorseless about them. As a result, he was hanged in 2008, to which even the staunchest critics of capital punishment remained silent. [ad#downcont]Tsutomu Miyazaki was shattering to Japanese society. He was a breed of serial killer seen in other places, but not Japan. Blood lust Tsutomu Miyazaki and his cannibal murders represented the worst in serial killers – random yet systematic; hedonistic yet vengeful; insane yet aware. These contradictions offer a window into why someone like Tsutomu Miyazaki has never been understood by society, and likely never will. Though their actions may suggest otherwise, serial killers and cannibal killers often do not murder out of malice. The habits of serial killers are dictated more often out of pleasure they derive from the hunt than out of any animosity towards the prey. Understandably, that explanation is little comfort to those who have had loved ones taken away by their lunacy. But, the tale of Richard Chase and his brief, but horrifying, killing spree suggests that the reasons for their actions are often not obvious. The absurd tale Richard Chase wove that drove him to commit six murders- and subsequently be characterized as the Vampire of Sacramento – combines many mundane elements of serial killers profile with their most sensationalist. Richard Chase, much like many serial killers and cannibal killers before and after him, claims to have suffered from abuse as a child. As childhood became adulthood, the antisocial characteristics prevalent in many would-be killers began to show – from massive drug and alcohol abuse as a teenager to claims by friends of self-imposed isolation. In perhaps a foreshadowing into his psychological descent, he even injected himself with rabbit blood. His parents sent Richard Chase to a clinic where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. During his stay in the clinic, tales of zoosadism were linked to his increasing schizophrenia. His obsession with the blood of animals and their organs as a means to preserve his own body, as he would explain in later testimony, was a neon sign of his worsening mental health. Still, denial leaves room for excuses. His mother sought to take him off anti schizophrenia medications, and Richard Chase was deemed sane enough to leave the clinic in 1976. As is characteristic of serial killers, their urges often escalate if left unchecked. Removed from medication and an increased distrust of others made for a terrible combination. Thus, Richard Chase began his random murder spree. In December 1977, he shot 51 year-old Ambrose Griffin dead in a drive-by shooting. The murder of three-month pregnant Teresa Wallin weeks later was more calculating. After shooting Teresa Wallin dead, he engaged in perverse behavior, notably involving scenes of blood soaked cups from which Chase was said to have drunk her blood from. Days later, three dead bodies of his victims were discovered at a scene where Evelyn Miroth was, alongside friend Dan Meredith, minding her son and baby niece. The baby’s body was discovered dead elsewhere days later, while the others were discovered on the scene. Evelyn’s body was disemboweled with similar blood marks as Teresa Wallin. Richard Chase was soon captured as evidence from the scenes, combined with descriptions provided by those who knew him, cornered him. Vampire of Sacramento was sentenced to death in a gas chamber for 6 murders but he was found dead in his prison cell overdosed with antidepressants. [ad#downcont]His testimony and beliefs made his murders more chilling. Blood lust Richard Chase justified his cannibalistic urges by explaining that his blood was turning into powder and that a Nazi crime syndicate and his mother were out to murder him for being Jewish – which he was not. Thus, killing and consuming blood were the only way to replenish his blood. Richard Chase was not overtly calculating as a serial killer, but in other ways he was. He was disorganized and did not go out of his way to clean up the messes he created following his murders. His victims, he explained to prosecutors, were chosen if their “door was unlocked because that meant he was welcome.” But, what is important about the aptly-named “Dracula” is that rarely are the actions of serial killers truly systematic or based on revenge. There are serial killers who have been more subtle about their perversions than Chase; there have been killers who have been more conscious about their behavior than Richard Chase. What makes the case of blood lust Richard Chase, his cannibal stories, and his appetite for human and animal flesh the most disturbing is that it could have been prevented. But, it wasn’t. The age-old chicken-or-the-egg riddle applies when trying to understand mind of a killer: Is it the serial killer psychological makeup affirming itself through murder, or is it their environment that creates the capacity within them to kill others? Complicating the issue further is the various typologies of murderers – does a certain psychological condition make an individual more prone to become a mass murderer, as opposed to a serial killer? Psychologists research the differences of a normal brain and a mind of a killer and offer patterns explaining why killers express themselves the way they do: killers often suffer from depression or psychosis; they suffer from alcoholism or drug abuse creating delusions; they murder out of malice, for profit, for lust, or misguided compassion. The combinations and permutations of how and why killers do as they do suggests that killers are not uniform – that the mind of a killer is a delicate balance between their internal and external demons expressing themselves in the most repugnant way. The mind of a killer maybe shows the top point of the complexity of human mind. Mind of a Killer Popular imagination illustrates killers with broad strokes. It says that killers are alienated from society and, consequently, murder out of disenchantment with the ways of society. Certain types of killers do support this hypothesis that murder is derived from malice. Mission oriented killers are those who feel salvation is attained by eradicating the world of the impure. They murder with unswerving certainty that their virtuous mission to rid society of a certain group or demographic is justified. This form of killer is the result of a strange combination between their distorted interpretation of the world with the etiquette and ethics of popular society. For example, a popular choice of victims in this category of killers is prostitutes. Cultural lore suggests that prostitutes are often viewed as the embodiment of impurity. It is a strange combination of biological and sociological factors that create this hate within mission oriented killers. A lust murder, by contrast, is killing out of erotic stimulation. More than out of hate, they murder to satisfy their fetishes. Lust murder can take the form of an obsession with one particular victim, or serial lust murder can be more a matter of opportunity. For example, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s strategy involved luring victims who were strangers from gay bars back to his apartment where he would torture them, murder them, and engage in cannibalism and necrophilia with their corpses. Another famous serial killer, Ted Bundy’s mode of operation involved feigning requiring help from female passersby, who he would then rape, murder, and engage in necrophilia. Necrophilia is a popular expression by lust killers because it is a reflection of their absolute control over others to act out their fetishes. Despite all of this, lust killers are often considered to be in touch with reality; understanding the consequences of their arousals if caught, but still engaging in their hedonistic urges nonetheless. The mind of visionary-motive killers offers a more deep-rooted psychological disorder than other forms of serial killing. These killers convince themselves that external or internal voices in their heads command them to murder. These hallucinations are often a symptom of schizophrenia. Unlike hedonists or mission oriented kilers, all of the visionary serial killers caught have been diagnosed to suffer from severe mental disorders. The tale of Herbert Mullin demonstrates how powerful these voices can be: Mullin murdered people with the belief that voices were telling him to kill to prevent California from suffering a great earthquake and sinking. Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde shows the dual lives of the serial killers. Those serial killers have normal lives with their families, friends, jobs,, etc. and on the other hand they are evil murderers. Most of the serial killers are very successful in having a normal life together with their evil lives. Think about Hannibal Lecter; he is a gentleman and a brilliant man, yet a brutal serial killer. It means that it is possible to have many Hannibal Lecter or Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde characters around us. Serial killers may kill many victims for years without getting caught. It is almost impossible for the families, neighbors and friends to understand mind of a killer in their lives. Another point about the mind of a killer is that a serial killer generally does not develop empathy with his victims and considers the victims as non-human objects. The cannibal killers are mostly homosexuals at the same time. The cannibal killers usually eat those who they admire to get their strengths, mostly the masculinity they lack. Some cannibal killers eat to overcome loneliness or to demonstrate their love. For example the German cannibal Armin Meiwes explained his motive as a desire for a younger brother and ate his victims because he wanted someone to be a part of him. Most of the cannibal killers have bad childhood stories. They feel more powerful when they consume the bodies of their victims. [ad#downcont]The mind of killers tells different stories. Considering this, it becomes self-evident that murderer’s motives, actions, and behavior are not uniform. There are definite shades of grey even within one individual killer. That is why forecasting the capacity for evil is impossible – it is impossible to understand the mind of a killer.

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How Can We Discover Better Antibiotics? The problem is antibiotic resistance: Infectious diseases are outpacing the ability of current drugs to fight them. Part of the challenge is in finding new antibiotic sources. Most current antibiotics come from bacteria found in the soil, but Kim Lewis, who directs Northeastern University’s Antimicrobial Discovery Center, says only about 1 percent of soil microbes can be cultured easily in petri dishes. “But then you hit upon the remaining 99 percent, also known in microbiology as the microbial dark matter, that does not readily grow in the lab,” he says. “And that is a big problem.” As of last fall, 40 new antibiotics were in clinical development for US markets, according to data from the Pew Charitable Trusts. But Lewis says these new drugs are mainly analogs of existing antibiotics — and while useful, the reprieve they provide will only be temporary. “Resistance develops much faster, of course, to analogs of existing compounds,” he explains. “If you look at completely new classes, there’s almost nothing in the clinic right now. So, the pipeline is really pretty dry.” But Lewis is part of a group of scientists that’s trying to change that — mining new methods and other crevices for better infection-fighting agents. So is Jon Thorson, who directs the University of Kentucky’s Center for Pharmaceutical Research. His team has even hunted microbes in Kentucky coal mines. “There’s a long tradition for microbes being a source for antibiotics,” Thorson says. “Drugs like tetracycline, macrolides like erythromycin, aminoglycoside antibiotics are all produced by bacteria. But one of the challenges in our field, really, is, how do you reduce the percentage of rediscovery?” “So, the way to do that is to go into areas where people haven’t explored. And that’s what brought us into coal mines and other environments that really have not been explored in this regard.” In the mine, Thorson and his team discovered an enzyme that could make an existing antibiotic more potent. “So, the source of these antibiotics, or these small molecules, are again bacteria,” Thorson explains. “And they produce not only molecules that have biological activity, but they also have enzymes that are responsible for making them. And sometimes, we can take advantage of those enzymes to do chemistry.” Meanwhile, Lewis’ research expands the field in another direction: the 99 percent of soil microbes that, so far, have proved too tough to culture in a lab. “My colleague, Slava Epstein, from Northeastern had a very simple idea: We will grow bacteria in their natural environment, where, of course, they do grow,” he explains. Scientists still aren’t quite sure why certain bacteria are so hard to cultivate in the lab. Lewis says some bacteria depend on growth factors from other bacteria to get iron and other nutrients from the environment. “But that explains about 10 percent of the ‘uncultivability,'” he says. “We still don’t know why 90 percent of the microbial dark matter doesn’t grow.” Needless to say, Lewis and Epstein developed a workaround. They built a box, called a diffusion chamber, to sequester the bacteria inside its native soil. “Essentially, we take a sample of bacteria from soil, we sandwich it between two semipermeable membranes, and then that diffusion chamber goes back into the soil,” Lewis says. Nestled cozily inside their home dirt, bacteria in the diffusion chamber don’t know they have been tricked into growing in a lab environment. “And so they start forming colonies,” he says. The diffusion chamber is already giving up secrets: In 2015, Lewis and his colleagues announced that bacteria from a grassy Maine field yielded an antibiotic they called teixobactin. Still in development, the antibiotic is active against deadly infections like MRSA and tuberculosis. But Lewis says that in the ever-changing battle against bacteria, we need to stay nimble — and we still have a lot left to learn. “Our best antibiotics, like penicillin, for example, they bind several related targets,” Lewis says. “But if you’re developing a new compound, and it binds only one target, then that will be a problem.” “And the other very big problem is penetration. So, bacteria evolved a terrific penetration barrier, their cell envelope, that restricts penetration of compounds that look like drugs. So, some antibiotics, of course, are molecules that evolved to penetrate. But we still do not have a very good understanding of which molecules will and which will not penetrate.” Kim Lewis is University Distinguished Professor and director of the Antimicrobial Discovery Center at the Department of Biology at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. Joe Larsen is director of the Biomedical Advanced Research Development Authority in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, D.C. Jon Thorson is director of the Center for Pharmaceutical Research and Innovation and a professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky. IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. A bit later in the hour, seven newly discovered exoplanets, all in the sweet spot. We’ve been hearing about it all week. We’ll get the details. But first, in January, a woman in Las Vegas died from a superbug, an infection that antibiotics were powerless to treat. The bacteria were resistant to the 14 different antibiotics available at the hospital. That’s the latest report of a superbug, but not the first time you’ve heard that we’re heading into a post-antibiotic world. Bacteria are outpacing the roster of drugs that we currently have. The obviously simple question is, why don’t we make more antibiotics? If only the answer was that simple. It involves more questions like, where should we look for these new drugs? And what is the trick to formulating a drug that can get past the defenses of a bacterium? Of course, there’s always the money. My next guests are here to talk about that. Kim Lewis is the director of the Anti-microbial Discovery Center at Northeastern University in Boston. John Thorson is the director of the Center for Pharmaceutical Research and Innovation at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. Welcome to Science Friday. JOHN THORSON: Good to be here, Ira. IRA FLATOW: John, you hunt for antibiotics in places that people wouldn’t even think to visit. You go to coal mine fires, right? JOHN THORSON: That’s right. IRA FLATOW: What about the environment made you think there might be valuable antibiotics down there, for example? JOHN THORSON: Well, microbes, or bacteria– there’s a long tradition for microbes being a source for antibiotics, drugs like tetracycline, macrolides like eurythromycin, the aminoglycocide antibiotics are all produced by bacteria. But one of the challenges in our field really is how do you reduce the percentage of rediscovery? And so the way to do that is to go into areas where people haven’t explored, and that’s what brought us into coal mines and other environments that really have not been explored in this regard. IRA FLATOW: And what you found in the coal mine wasn’t a new antibiotic, was it? It was kind of an add-on? JOHN THORSON: That’s right. So the source of these antibiotics are these small molecules– again, bacteria. And they produce not only molecules that have biological activity, but they also have enzymes that are responsible for making them. And sometimes we can take advantage of those enzymes to do chemistry. And that’s really the basis of the study that we recently published. IRA FLATOW: So it actually improved how the antibiotic worked? JOHN THORSON: That’s right. That’s right. So it really enabled the chemistry and led to an improvement to an existing antibiotic. IRA FLATOW: Kim, for how complicated these drugs are, we’re still searching for them in pretty basic places in a pretty basic way. We’ve only isolated– I think this is one of the most interesting statistics I’ve been following over the years– we have only isolated a really tiny amount of bacteria from soil bacteria, right? You and your colleagues developed a device that helps with that problem. First, tell us how difficult it is to get bacteria out of soil. KIM LEWIS: Right. So it is very easy to get to about 1% of bacteria from soil to grow in our Petri dishes. But then you hit upon the remaining 99%, also known in microbiology as the microbial dark matter that does not readily grow in the lab. And that is a big problem. IRA FLATOW: And you found a way around that, a unique way. Tell us about that. KIM LEWIS: So my colleague Slava Epstein from Northeastern and I had a very simple idea. We will grow bacteria in their natural environment where, of course, they do grow. So we came up with a gadget, which is called the diffusion chamber. Essentially we take a sample of bacteria from soil, we sandwich it between two semi-permeable membranes, and then that diffusion chamber goes back into the soil. So now everything diffuses through this chamber, meaning nutrients, signaling molecules, and bacteria don’t know that we tricked them. And so they start forming colonies. So that is the basic principle of our device. IRA FLATOW: Do we know why they need to be in their native environment for them to grow? KIM LEWIS: We know a little bit about it. So one thing that we discover is that at least some uncultured bacteria require growth factors from their neighbors. And so we isolate it, at least one class of such growth factors, and found that they are necessary for bacteria to acquire iron from their environments. But that explains about 10% of the uncultivability. We still don’t know why the 90% of the microbial dark matter doesn’t grow. IRA FLATOW: That’s fascinating. I know there are 40 antibiotics in clinical development, compared to 700 cancer drugs. Is this really harder than cancer? I mean, why are bacteria so difficult to defeat? KIM LEWIS: Well, Ira, first of all, these 40 is an overestimate. These are mainly analogs of existing antibiotics. And while that is useful, it only gives us a temporary reprieve, because resistance develops much faster, of course, to analogs of existing compounds. If you look at completely new classes, there’s almost nothing in the clinic right now. So the pipeline is really pretty dry for that. And to address your question why, well, there is an interesting paradox in our field of anti-microbial discovery is that we did have once a golden era, as we already discussed. We once had an ability to discover new antibiotics from soil microorganisms, and then that was overmined, and that source dried up. And so now the question is where to go and look. And we also look for things that people have not seen before. But we like to look around Boston in our backyards, and then places in New England in general. So we’re working with a start-up company, NovaBiotics, collecting soils and growing uncultured bacteria from them. And it is then those bacteria that come from very common environments but have been uncultured, so have not been seen before, that are producing interesting new chemical compounds. IRA FLATOW: John, when you take an antibiotic, are you just releasing out millions of molecules, hoping that one will encounter a bacterium? I mean, do they have surface proteins to help the antibiotic recognize it? JOHN THORSON: We’re doing a number of focused screens, looking for targeted activities. We’re also doing general antimicrobial activity measures as well. We’re looking at these new bioactive molecules to try to understand their function. IRA FLATOW: But so it’s sort of like– I’m trying to understand the fascinating mechanism of how drugs work. You take a drug. You take an antibiotic. You release it into the blood. It’s just like, do you flood the blood, hoping that it links up with the bacterium, and it’s sort of hit or miss you get enough antibiotic in there? JOHN THORSON: Well, the fundamental mechanism and the reason why most antibiotics work is they have a mechanism that specifically targets machinery in the target bacterium and don’t have any effect on human processes, right? That’s what gives you the safety, that gives you the effectiveness of these types of molecules. IRA FLATOW: Mm-hmm. And John, why is a bacterium– well, let me ask either one of you. Why is it so hard? Why are they so strong at resisting? What’s going on inside the bacterium that’s so strong in resisting these drugs? JOHN THORSON: Well, bacteria, they have a– go ahead. KIM LEWIS: So there are two aspects to this. One is that bacteria very rapidly acquire resistance. So if, let’s say, you have a wonderful drug that hits a particular protein, then that is going to mutate and your protein is not going to bind the antibiotic any longer. So our best antibiotics like penicillin, for example, they bind several related targets. But if you’re developing a new compound that binds only one target, then that will be a problem. And the other very big problem is penetration. So bacteria evolved the terrific penetration barrier, their cell envelope, that restricts penetration of compounds that look like drugs. So some antibiotics, of course, are evolved molecules that evolved to penetrate, but we still do not have a very good understanding of which molecules will and which will not penetrate. IRA FLATOW: Now, Kim, I understand the bacterium have like pumps. They just pump out the stuff once they get in there, right? KIM LEWIS: That’s right. So those compounds that leak through this barrier of permeability, then those will be picked out by pumps and pumped out. And the pump will recognize chemically-unrelated compounds. That was a big surprise for us when we found such pumps. IRA FLATOW: What about the idea of instead of killing the bacteria we trigger our own immune system to do that for us, Kim? KIM LEWIS: Well, in principle, that is a good idea. That’s a promising direction. But our immune system is enormously complex, of course. The immune system, as you know, Ira, if you over-excite the immune system, you’re going to get either septic shock or auto-immune conditions. So it’s a very dangerous tool. We really need to know what we’re doing to do that. But another aspect of that is, of course, vaccines. Well, vaccines have been around for a long time. Vaccines and therapeutic antibodies are the things that we are using right now. IRA FLATOW: Mm-hmm. And so what about, John, about new ideas about how we could administer antibiotics differently? Could we give them differently? JOHN THORSON: Well, I think one could take a lesson from the approaches we’re taking in anti-viral therapy, and that would be to combine drugs with different mechanisms. One of the points that wasn’t addressed previously is that bacteria rapidly grow, and that contributes to the resistance mechanism. And so when you put them under selective pressure, they have a way to– you know, you kill off a large portion of the organisms, but there is a small population that has mutated to get around a particular drug. But if you’re hitting them with multiple agents at one given time, that could be advantageous. IRA FLATOW: All right. Well, there’s a lot more to talk about with Kim Lewis, director of Anti-microbial Discovery Center at Northeastern, and John Thorson, director of the Center for Pharmaceutical Research and Innovation, University of Kentucky in Lexington. If you want to join us, please. Our number, 844-724-8255. And Twitter– you can tweet us @scifri. We’ll come back and talk lots more about this after the break. So stay with us. This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. We’re talking about the science behind discovering and developing new antibiotics with my guests Kim Lewis at Northeastern University, John Thorson, University of Kentucky in Lexington. Now, to develop and distribute a new drug takes a lot of money. To find new antibiotics, we may need a new way to put money behind these drugs. There is a small government agency called Biomedical Advanced Research Development Authority– we’ll call it BARDA– which came together after the anthrax attacks in 2001. The agency is taking a different approach when it comes to funding. Joe Larson is director of BARDA at the US Department of Health and Human Services in Washington. Welcome to Science Friday. JOE LARSON: Thanks for having me. IRA FLATOW: Would it be fair to say that BARDA is sort of the DARPA for antibiotics? KIM LEWIS: You could say that. I think another way to put it is that we’re almost like a government-backed investment firm who makes investments in products that help us deal with public health emergencies on behalf of the American public. IRA FLATOW: Ah ha. So the agency started CARB-X which is like an X-prize for antibiotics. How does that work? KIM LEWIS: So CARB-X is a novel– basically a global innovation fund that we established to promote innovation in anti-bacterial drug, vaccine, and diagnostic development. And you know, what we recognized was that this is a global problem that has a very far reach. And in order for us to be able to adequately address it, we needed globally coordinated solutions. And so CARB-X brings together two funders of biomedical research in the US, BARDA, as well is the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. And it also forms a trans-atlantic partnership with the Welcome Trust, which is one of the premier funders of biomedical research, both in the UK and in the EU. And together, we’ve pooled resources to be able to invest, basically, $450 billion projected over the next five years at developing early stage antibiotic candidates so that they’re able to enter into clinical development. But in addition to just providing funding, we also have put together a network of life science accelerators that, in addition to providing funding and technical support, also provide business and entrepreneurial support to help these kind of early stage startup companies become more sophisticated enterprises. IRA FLATOW: So you sort of have a private-public partnership raising this money, from the government you and from venture capital firms, to get the research funded, I mean, the basic research. What areas most concern you now, and where you’re looking to fund? KIM LEWIS: Right. So our model is innovative public-private partnerships, and we started this program back in 2010. Since then, we’ve supported nine different companies. We’ve been able to advance six different candidate antibiotics into Phase 3 clinical development. Our first BARDA-supported antibiotic candidates are projected to enter into the market into 2017, as well as 2018. Historically, the way that we’ve invested is we invest where there’s the greatest unmet medical need. And to date, right now that’s gram-negative bacterial infections, which are these type of superbugs that you described before. Many of our products that we’re developing are analogs of existing antibiotics that overcome the known resistance mechanisms. And through our investment through programs like CARB-X, we’re hoping to inject some new innovation and some new ideas for new and novel antibiotics, because, to be frank, there is a significant dearth of innovation in this space. And you ask the question is this really harder? It is harder from a technical perspective. But the underlying basis behind that is really an economic problem. IRA FLATOW: Kim Lewis, what are your thoughts about– would BARDA have helped you? KIM LEWIS: The short answer is no. Although of course it’s terrific that there is money being poured into this general area, and I’m sure that BARDA supports useful work. But having said that, I participated in several of workshops. One was called by the National Institutes of Health, the other by Pew Charitable Trust, where a group of experts were asked to identify the bottleneck in the overall process of developing an antibiotic. And there was a consensus, a rare consensus– the bottleneck is not in development. The bottleneck is in discovery. We do not have enough leads to develop. So first, we need to figure out how to discover new antibiotics, and then there will be things to develop. So I would really be hopeful that the money will be put into discovery. And there are very specific science challenges and gaps that we identify that need to be solved to provide us with a long-term solution to the problem of discovering new antibiotics, such as figuring out the rules that govern the penetration of molecules in the bacterial cell, or how to better access antibiotics or monocultured bacteria and the silent operands that they harbor, where the genes code for antibiotics but we cannot easily turn them on in the lapse. And these are some of the examples that we identified as key areas, where investment would be very helpful. IRA FLATOW: John Thorson, where do you think the major bottleneck is developing new ones, new antibiotics? JOHN THORSON: I think– so I agree with Kim that investment in discovery is an important component. I believe that also on the academic research side, we have to be realistic about thinking once you discover a molecule, you have a putative hit. You have to advance that to a certain component, and not all academic research labs, or even institutes, are sort of set up in thinking in that regard. You know, the end goal here is to position a potential early stage lead for support by a program like BARDA so that you can put together a compelling data package that says these molecules have suitable in-vivo properties and show suitable efficacy in an animal model. And you can really lay out a case that if a funding agency like BARDA were to invest, it’s going to have legs to actually get to the point of entering into the clinic. IRA FLATOW: Joe Larson, we’ve talked many times about how expensive it is to get a drug to market, and one of the great bottlenecks– or is the resistance by drug companies to make new antibiotics because they are expensive to test also? How do you get through that bottleneck? $400 million in your budget might be good for the basic research, but it’s not going to get $100 million clinical trial going. JOE LARSON: Right. Well, a lot of the work that BARDA does is actually supporting the clinical development of these molecules. And so as I mentioned, we’ve advanced three of these programs into Phase 3 clinical development. We are supporting the cost of those trials to help get these products into the market. But it’s important to note that all that we’re doing is we’re lowering the R&D costs of these companies to be engaged in this space. And that basically is keeping the companies that have remained in developing antibiotics at the table doing that. If we really want to promote innovation in this space, if we really want to fix the market failure for antibiotics, we need to be rewarding the innovation that comes with bringing a new antibiotic to market. And we need a totally different market models for the ways that we incentivize this industry base to want to participate in this. You take the last six antibiotics that were FDA approved and project– the first two years of projected sales ranged between $30 to $80 million. And that may sound like a lot of money, but if you put that toe to toe with drugs like Lyrica for diabetic nerve pain, or Spiriva for the treatment of COPD, their first two years sales were in excess of a billion dollars, or approaching $750 million. And so if you’re a private investor, you know, which company are you going to invest in– the company that’s developing the billion dollar blockbuster, or the company, the antibiotic company, that may make $40 million in its first two years? And so we need to be rethinking the way that we reward these companies, and the way to do that is ensure that we have a market model that rewards innovation, promotes conservation of these products, and then also allows access to the patients that need these products when they’re experiencing a drug-resistant infection. IRA FLATOW: With the new administration in a cost-cutting mood, do you think that BARDA is going to survive in the next budget round? JOE LARSON: Well, we have a lot broader of a mission space than just antibiotic resistance. We deal in protecting the American public from mass public health emergencies, and that involves bioterrorism agents. It involves pandemic influenza. It involves emerging infectious diseases like ebola and Zika. And you know, I hope that Congress and the American public view our role as a pretty critical one to keeping our nation safe and would want to sustain that investment. And we’re hopeful that that’s the case. IRA FLATOW: We’ll find out. Budgets are coming up in the next few days. Thank you, Joe Larson, director of biomedical advance research development at the US Department of Health and Human Services, Kim Lewis, director of the Anti-microbial Discovery Center at Northeastern University, John Thorson, director of the Center for Pharmaceutical Research and Innovation, University of Kentucky in Lexington. Thank you for taking time to be with us today.

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Praying for an Energy Miracle Every clean-tech startup these days claims to have a breakthrough that will finally make renewable and clean energy sources cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels. But are we really on the brink of a clean-energy economy? The company’s breakthrough is strictly off-limits to outsiders. Work on the technology goes on in an unseen part of the sprawling one-story building, beyond the machine shop, the various testing and fabrication instruments, the large open office space stuffed with cubicles. What a visitor gets to see instead is a thin wafer of silicon that would be familiar to anyone in the solar-power industry. And that’s exactly the point. The company’s advance is all about reducing the expense of manufacturing conventional solar cells. In its conference room is a large chart showing the declining cost of electricity produced by solar panels over the last three decades. The slightly bumpy downward-sloping line is approaching a wide horizontal swath labeled “grid parity”—the stage at which electricity made using solar power will be as cheap as power generated from fossil fuels. It is the promised land for renewable power, and the company, 1366 Technologies, believes its improvements in manufacturing techniques can help make it possible for solar power to finally get there. It’s an ambitious target: even though silicon-based photovoltaic cells, which convert sunlight directly to electricity, have been coming down in price for years, they are still too expensive to compete with fossil fuels. As a result, solar power accounts for far less than 1 percent of U.S. electricity production. And 1366 founder Emanuel Sachs, who is the company’s chief technology officer and an MIT professor of mechanical engineering, says that even though solar might be “within striking distance” of natural gas, existing solar technology won’t be able to compete with coal. “To displace coal will take another level of cost reduction,” says Sachs. That’s where 1366’s breakthrough comes in. The company is developing a way to make thin sheets of silicon without slicing them from solid chunks of the element, a costly chore. “The only way for photovoltaics to compete with coal is with technologies like ours,” he says. Once photovoltaics can compete with coal on price, “the world very much changes,” says Frank van Mierlo, the company’s CEO. “Solar will become a real part of our energy supply. We can then generate a significant part of our energy from the sun.” In a number of ways, 1366 (the name refers to the average number of watts of solar energy that hit each square meter of Earth over a year) reflects the ambition of a whole generation of energy startups. These companies often refer to “game-changing” technologies that will redefine the economics of non-fossil-fuel energy sources. Many were founded over the last decade, during a boom in venture capital funding for “clean tech”—not only in solar but also in wind, biofuels, and batteries. Many have benefited from increases in federal support for energy research since President Obama took office. Though the companies are working on different technologies, they share a business strategy: to make clean energy sources cheap enough, without any government subsidies, to compete with fossil fuels. At that point, capitalism will kick into high gear, and investors will rush to build a new energy infrastructure and displace fossil fuels—or so the argument goes. The problem, however, is that we are probably not just a few breakthroughs away from deploying cheaper, cleaner energy sources on a massive scale. Though few question the value of developing new energy technologies, scaling them up will be so difficult and expensive that many policy experts say such advances alone, without the help of continuing government subsidies and other incentives, will make little impact on our energy mix. Regardless of technological advances, these experts are skeptical that renewables are close to achieving grid parity, or that batteries are close to allowing an electric vehicle to compete with gas-powered cars on price and range. In the case of renewables, it depends on how you define grid parity and whether you account for the costs of the storage and backup power systems that become necessary with intermittent power sources like solar and wind. If you define grid parity as “delivering electricity whenever you want, in whatever volumes you want,” says David Victor, the director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at the University of California, San Diego, then today’s new renewables aren’t even close. And if new energy technologies are going to scale up enough to make a dent in carbon dioxide emissions, he adds, “that’s the definition that matters.” Field of Mirrors Few people have more faith in the power of technology to change the world than Bill Gross. And few entrepreneurs are as familiar with the difficulty of turning clever ideas into commercial technology. In the dot-com era, he and his company Idealab, an incubator that creates and runs new businesses, started up several of the era’s hottest firms, only to struggle when the bubble burst. Gross latched onto the clean-tech craze, founding a company called eSolar in 2007 to work on solar thermal technology (see Q&A, March/April 2010). These days, Web, social-computing, and energy projects are intermingled in Idealab’s tightly packed offices in downtown Pasadena, California. In keeping with its dot-com-era heritage, the offices occupy a large loftlike space full of various companies or hope-to-be companies, some of them consisting of no more than a few desks dominated by large computer screens. Somewhere in all the brushed metal, exposed ventilation systems, track lighting, and designer desk chairs is Bill Gross’s office, a small glassed-in cubicle. Like almost every other founder of a renewable-energy startup, Gross gets right to the numbers. Pulling up a screen that compares the costs of energy from various sources, he points out how a technology being developed by eSolar could make solar thermal power less expensive and help it become competitive with fossil fuels. Solar thermal plants produce electricity by using a huge field of mirrors to focus sunlight on a tall central tower, where water is heated to produce steam that generates electricity. Large power plants using the technology can produce electricity more cheaply than ones using silicon solar panels, although the thermal approach is still more expensive than power derived from coal or even wind. Several such plants are operating around the world, and more are being built (see “Chasing the Sun,” July/August 2009). In 2006, when the giant California utility PG&E put out a bid for a 300-megawatt solar thermal plant (now being built by a company called BrightSource), Gross got excited and began working with his employees to improve the economics. Not surprisingly, Gross’s solution is based on software. Large solar thermal plants cost more than a billion dollars to build, and one reason for the high cost is that tens of thousands of specially fabricated mirrors have to be precisely arranged so that they focus the sunlight correctly. But what if you used plain mirrors on a simple metal rack and then used software to calibrate them, adjusting each one to optimize its position relative to the sun and the central tower? It would take huge amounts of computing power to manipulate all the mirrors in a utility-scale power plant, but computing power is cheap—far cheaper than paying engineers and technicians to laboriously position the mirrors by hand. The potential savings are impressive, according to Gross; he says that eSolar can install a field of mirrors for half what it costs in other solar thermal facilities. As a result, he expects to produce electricity for approximately 11 cents per kilowatt-hour, enticingly close to the price of power from a fossil-fuel plant. Still, it’s not good enough—at least in the United States, where natural-gas plants can produce power for around 6 cents per kilowatt-hour. In Lancaster, California, at the edge of the Mojave Desert, eSolar has built a facility with 24,000 mirrors; it is capable of producing five megawatts of power. But eSolar has gotten no new deals to build utility-scale projects based on the company’s technology in the United States. Instead it is doing business in parts of the world where electricity prices are higher or subsidies for renewable energy are greater; it is building a 2.5-megawatt plant in India and has signed an agreement for a large facility in China. The problem in the United States is the same one facing all alternative-energy dreams: cost. Prices for natural gas have fallen to historically low levels, which means that solar thermal must get even cheaper to compete. To stand a chance in the United States, Gross acknowledges, eSolar needs its electricity to cost no more than 7.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. Getting there will take yet another advance in the technology. One disadvantage of solar power is that it produces electricity only during part of the day. Photovoltaic panels efficiently produce power for about five and half hours a day, when the sun is most directly overhead. Solar thermal systems can operate a bit longer, because the heated water can drive turbines later into the afternoon; eSolar’s technology makes power for about seven hours daily without storage. And Gross says that using molten salts instead of water to transport the heat from the central tower to the steam generator will enable a solar thermal facility to store the heat for much longer and produce electricity for up to 16 hours a day. That will bring down the cost of its electricity to the targeted 7.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. He predicts that eSolar will have a commercial plant with the molten-salt design running next year. If the goalposts keep moving just beyond the reach of new energy technologies, Gross doesn’t seem fazed. Eventually, he says, eSolar’s technology won’t need subsidies to compete with natural gas, and the sky will be the limit. “Solar is perfect for a huge swath of the planet,” he says, happily showing a world map with a large belt around the middle in red and dark orange, indicating high levels of solar radiation. Even in this country, Gross says confidently, solar power will account for half of all electricity production by 2050—with at least 50 percent of that produced by solar thermal plants. While Bill Gross tries to squeeze a few critical pennies out of the cost of solar power, researchers at Caltech, a few miles up the road, are working on a different solution. They are trying to invent a fundamentally new way of producing liquid fuels directly from sunlight, inspired by the way green plants convert sunlight to sugars. If this quest for “artificial photosynthesis” succeeds, it will address one of solar energy’s fundamental challenges: how to store the power until it’s needed. The potential of this vision seems to animate the director of the effort, Nate Lewis. He speaks at times in bullet points punctuated by a mix of excitement and impatience. “No bugs, no wires,” he says. “No bugs, no wires. I mean what I say: no wires. Leaves have no wires. In come sunlight, water, and CO2, and out come fuels.” This research—a joint project of Caltech and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab—will be supported by $122 million over five years from the U.S. Department of Energy, pending Congressional appropriation of the funds. “We have pieces. Making fuels from sunlight with photoelectric chemistry works,” says Lewis, a professor of chemistry at Caltech. But a practical device needs to be cheap, efficient, and robust. “Right now, I can give you any two of the three at the same time,” he says. “Our goal is all three.” Basic scientific problems stand in the way. Among them: the researchers need to find cost-effective catalysts for the chemical reactions that break water into oxygen and hydrogen. After 100 years of research, “you can count on one hand the classes of compound that are good catalysts for water oxidation,” Lewis says; we “don’t have another hundred years” to find better ones. Employing the kind of high-throughput experimental methods and automated techniques increasingly used in drug discovery, the center will screen a million compounds a day for catalytic activity. “We will evaluate, discover, and quantify the activity of more catalysts in one day than have been collectively documented throughout history,” he says. Meanwhile, a team of system designers and hardware experts will begin to design and build prototype devices. “Their job is to build prototypes from day one,” Lewis says. “We expect to have [the prototypes] within the first two or three years.” Those first prototypes will “nearly absolutely fail,” he says, but they’re the only way to arrive at a practical system: “We don’t know what it should look like. Where does the water come out? Where does the sunlight come in? If you don’t build the thing, you can’t build the thing.” The challenge of finding cheaper and cleaner energy has often been compared to the race to put a man on the moon. But there’s at least one key difference: success at getting humans into space was not judged according to its cost. Regardless of how clever Lewis’s technology might be, it won’t solve the problem unless it can serve as the basis of a sustainable business. “We’re not NASA going to the moon,” says Lewis. “If you can’t compete on cost, it’s ultimately not worth doing.” And, he adds, given the fluctuating price of oil, you’ve “got to have something that looks like it is really disruptive” in terms of cost: “If you’re just close, it’s no good for anyone.” World of Austerity In the last decade, many U.S. energy experts and economists have argued that the government must establish a price for emitting carbon dioxide. They say that a carbon price—in the form of either a tax or a cap-and-trade system—would be an economically efficient and technologically fair way to reduce our use of fossil fuels. It would drive up the cost of energy derived from those fuels, allowing cleaner technologies to challenge them in the market without requiring the government to back particular choices. The European Union implemented a cap-and-trade system in 2005, but the United States—until recently the world’s largest user of energy and, arguably, still the leading center of energy innovation—has failed to do so. That has left energy policy experts debating how to go forward—especially now that subsidies and other benefits for clean energy in the 2009 federal stimulus bill are winding down. Some see an opportunity to focus on inventing new ways to make clean energy cheaper than fossil fuels. Such innovation, they contend, is the only way to achieve massive reductions in fossil-fuel use. Microsoft founder Bill Gates is one of the investors who hope to stimulate such energy “miracles” (see Q&A, September/October 2010). Critics of that view, however, believe it’s more important to focus on increasing the use of clean energy technologies as soon as possible through government subsidies and other incentives. It’s dangerous to believe that “all these amazing technologies will come along and solve the problem,” says Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based think tank. The truth is, he says, breakthroughs “don’t happen very often.” In fact, most technologies get better and cheaper as they are commercialized and used, not in the lab. That means we need both research into new energy technologies and government policies that support deployment, use, and improvement. There’s an intimate connection between these efforts. “Until you start deployment, you don’t know the challenges,” says Romm. “So many great ideas happen in the lab but don’t succeed in the market. It is the back-and-forth between deployment and R&D that gets you rapid innovation.” One of the most successful of the recent energy startups is A123, a battery company based in Watertown, Massachusetts. A123, which had a public offering of its stock in 2009, makes lithium-ion batteries that are designed to be safer and longer lasting than the more conventional versions; its secret is electrodes made of nanoscale composite materials. Remarkably, the company went from lab tests of its technology to commercial production in less than three years. It has benefited from strong demand from carmakers desperate to introduce electric vehicles and from a government grant of $250 million to help fund construction of its manufacturing facilities (see Demo). But three years ago, even as A123 was still moving to commercialize its products, cofounder Yet-Ming Chiang, an MIT materials scientist, was already looking for his next breakthrough. Working initially at A123 and later with colleagues at MIT and Rutgers University, he set out to invent a technology that would be far cheaper and easier to manufacture than existing lithium batteries. He wanted a battery that would allow electric cars to drive much farther on a charge, and one that would offer a practical way to store power on the electric grid. The solution: a completely new type of battery, again based on nanomaterials. Last year A123 spun off 24M, a startup that will test and, possibly, commercialize the technology. The company wants to meet the Department of Energy’s goal of developing electric-vehicle batteries that can supply energy for around $250 per kilowatt-hour, as opposed to today’s standard of around $500 to $600. The result would halve the cost of a battery for an all-electric vehicle. It would, Chiang says, “enable the widespread adoption of electric vehicles.” Even if Chiang’s newest battery creation proves impractical, its invention and the founding of 24M illustrate the benefits that come from the commercialization of energy technologies and the iterative nature of innovation. A123’s batteries helped establish a market in which newer advances can compete, and they clarified the limits of the first-generation technology. None of that would have happened without federal support. Government policy is “absolutely critical,” Chiang says, both to researching new battery technologies and to scaling up existing ones. Although some alternative energy technologies might eventually achieve grid parity, few, if any, can survive without subsidies now, as they improve their cost and efficiency. Even with subsidies, including tax incentives and cash grants, most are struggling to narrow the cost gap with fossil fuels. As Caltech’s Lewis says, getting close is not good enough. The danger is that if we focus on energy “miracles” and exaggerate the potential of breakthrough technologies, the need for a coherent government policy in favor of energy change will be forgotten. “All the darling energy technologies—essentially all the renewables and all the grid-powered electric vehicles—depend on huge subsidies,” says David Victor of UC San Diego. “And no one really knows what a world of fiscal austerity will look like for these technologies.” Clean energy options still have a long way to go, especially when it comes to storing electricity, lowering the cost of renewables, and improving the performance and cost of batteries. Companies like 1366 and eSolar are addressing these challenges. But depending on breakthroughs alone to solve our energy problems is unrealistic. Such advances must take place in the larger context of a coördinated effort to deploy these energy sources. That demands international government strategies that support not just research but testing, building, and commercialization. Deploying energy alternatives will be far more expensive and, in some ways, far more difficult than inventing new ones. Given today’s political climate and the lack of a coherent energy policy around the world, it might truly take a miracle.

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Protecting Your Privacy and Security When You Make Mobile Payments Did you know that now you can use a smartphone, tablet, or other mobile devices to pay for some purchases? Mobile payments can be convenient – no need to write a check or to pull out your wallet for cash or plastic. No need to type in your payment information to buy something online. But are mobile payments safe? What about your privacy? Those are good questions to ask when you consider using any new technology. Because you usually carry your phone or other mobile device with you, it’s on most of the time, and it may contain very sensitive personal information, it’s especially important to keep it, and its contents, safe and secure, especially if you want to use it to make mobile payments or conduct other financial business. Press Release: Advice for Consumers About Making Mobile Payments Ready-to-Use News Articles - How to Preserve Your Privacy When Making Mobile Payments - Facts and Tips on Keeping Mobile Payments Safe A Guide to Protecting Your Privacy and Security When Making Mobile Payments - Payment Apps - What Information Can An App Get? - Know Your Privacy Rights - Tips for Protecting Your Mobile Payment Privacy - Lock Your Device - Beware of Malware - Use Public Wi-Fi Carefully - Security Features Built Into the Payment Process - Tips for Keeping Your Mobile Payment Secure It’s using your mobile phone or other mobile device, online or in person, to provide information electronically to make a payment. There are many different technologies and processes used to make mobile payments and new ones are always around the corner. - Near Field Communication (NFC) mobile wallet payment. NFC enables you to tap or wave your mobile device close to a “reader” next to a cash register or on a vending machine, turnstile, parking meter, etc. Your mobile device sends the account information that you are going to use for the payment through a radio signal with a short range of about four inches. The mobile wallet app stores your account number in a secure chip in the phone or in a secure file server linked to the mobile wallet app. Examples include Apple Pay and Google Android Pay. - Mobile web payments (WAP). Use the web browser on your mobile device or a mobile app to make a purchase on the Internet and charge it to your credit, debit, prepaid or bank account. - QR code (quick response) scans. Your mobile device produces a QR code on the screen to be scanned at the register. The QR code provides the link to the payment information. Usually you download a mobile app for the merchant (such as Starbucks) or a mobile wallet (such as LevelUp) that allows you to create the QR code on your mobile device. - Mobile text payments (SMS). Send a code by text message to the seller using your mobile device to approve the payment. The purchase is charged to your wireless service bill or a pre-paid account held by the mobile operator. Personal information, such as payment account number, should not be sent via SMS. - Direct mobile billing. Provide your mobile phone number as your account number to the merchant. The purchase is charged to your wireless service bill. These are normally low-dollar digital payments for items such as ring tones, screen savers, or apps, with most mobile operators establishing a transaction and consolidated dollar limit. How you can make mobile payments depends on what your device is equipped to do and the service in which you have enrolled. For example, billing to your phone number may not require Internet access on your device, but most other types of mobile payments do. Your ability to make mobile payments also depends on whether the merchants are equipped to take them. In most cases, the accounts that you use now to make payments will be same ones that you use to make mobile payments (for instance, your bank account or debit card, a credit card or a prepaid account). Some mobile payment systems even enable you to use gift cards and loyalty points to pay. And many of the same precautions that you take now to protect your privacy and security when you make payments apply to mobile payments. Making any kind of payment electronically usually requires revealing a certain amount of your personal information. What information that is, who gets it, and what’s done with it depends on many things, including the type of account you use and how you provide the account information to the seller. Using coupons and loyalty cards to get discounts or points when you’re making a payment can also disclose information about you. Mobile payments often involve using an app (a software program that you download to your mobile device). Your bank or credit union may offer an app to make mobile payments from your account. There are “mobile wallet” apps offered by nonbanks in which you can store information for your payment accounts and sometimes for gift cards, coupons, loyalty cards, rewards points, credits and other things that you may want to use in making a purchase. Mobile payment services may offer payment apps that work on different mobile operating systems on your device (for example, iOS or Android). There are apps for payment services such as PayPal and Western Union. Some apps will work on certain operating systems and not others, and some let you use any account you wish, while others may limit your payment options. Most applications require you to assign a default or primary card that will be automatically selected as the payment card unless you change to another card. This scenario is often referred to as the card that is “top of wallet”. Apps may require you to provide personal information in order to download them and, once installed, they can access information from your mobile device. In some cases you may be asked for permission for the app to obtain specific information, such as your location or your address book. - Your contact information such as your name, mailing address, email address, and mobile phone number. - Records of your calls and texts. - Your contacts. - Your calendar. - The unique ID number of your mobile device. - Account information. - Websites you go to using your mobile device. - Your location and where you go or shop with your mobile device. - In the case of mobile payments, an app may also be able to collect information about where you shop, what you buy, how much you spend, and what coupons or loyalty programs you use. Some mobile payment apps will only collect and share the information that is required to make the payment; others may collect more information about you. Apps may use your personal information for purposes unrelated to making a payment, such as to sell you in-app features or advertise to you on behalf of other companies. They might also share your personal information with other companies. Who else could collect information from your use of a payment app? It could be the app store, an advertising network, a data broker that collects information about people from a variety of sources and packages it for sale, the manufacturer of your mobile device, the payment provider (such as your credit card issuer), a payment processor, your wireless carrier and broadband service provider, and the businesses that you are paying. - What information does the app collect? - Who gets that information? - How is the information used? - What choices do you have about the collection or use of the information? Under federal law, your bank, credit union and other financial institutions that you used must notify you about their privacy policies at the time that you open your account and then annually and give you the ability to “opt out” – to say no – to their sharing the non-public personal information that they collect about you with companies that aren’t affiliated with them unless that information is necessary for a transaction that you are making. There is no general federal privacy law, however, so the merchant and others who may be involved when you make a mobile payment can collect information about you from the transaction and from other sources and do what they want with it. Some states have privacy laws. Ask your state or local consumer protection agency what privacy rights you have under state law. - Read the privacy policies of the companies whose services you are using to make mobile payments and the companies that you are paying. - Don’t voluntarily provide information that is not necessary to use a product or service or make a payment. - Take advantage of the controls that you may be given over the collection and use of your personal information. - Since mobile payments, like all electronic payments, leave a trail, if there are transactions that you would prefer to make anonymously, pay with cash. Smartphones and other mobile devices that can access the Internet are basically personal computers that you carry around with you. You can store your contacts, passwords and other personal information on these devices. In the case of mobile payments, you may be storing financial account information on them – information that someone else could use to make purchases or use for other fraudulent purposes. Even with a mobile phone that doesn’t have Internet access, if it has texting capability it could be used without your permission to charge purchases to your wireless account. Guard your mobile device as you would your checkbook or wallet. There are many things that you can do, and that industry is doing, to keep your personal information secure when you make mobile payments. The first line of defense is to lock your device, requiring a password or other security mechanism, such as a fingerprint scan, to unlock it, and to keep it locked when you’re not using it. It’s as simple, and as important, as locking the door to your house or your car. Many smartphone and tablet manufacturers are also installing “kill switches” that send signals to deactivate the devices if they’re lost or stolen, and there are apps that can help locate your device, disable it and/or “wipe” the contents off of it. When you download a payment app —or any app – to your mobile device, take care. It could contain “malware,” which is short for “malicious software.” Malware can steal personal information from your device such as passwords and account numbers. It can also be used to send spam emails or text messages that look like they’re coming from you. And it can damage your device. In addition to apps, malware can be planted in other types of software. One thing to watch out for is the “tech support scam.” A common problem for computer owners, people who have mobile devices are now being targeted by this scam. Here’s how it works: you get a call or message from someone claiming to be from a well-known software company or another tech support firm, informing you that your device has a virus or some other problem and asking you to download software to give them remote access so that they can fix it. Some of these scammers even place ads online for tech support that will appear if you search for help for problems with your device. Usually the goal is to install malware to steal the personal information that’s on your device and/or to infect it and then demand payment for the “repair.” New variations of this scam are constantly emerging, but the bottom line is that no legitimate tech service is going to contact you out of the blue and tell you that there is a virus on your device. Only download apps and other software from sources you trust. Reading reviews about software programs can alert you to any problems that other people have discovered in using them. Malware can also be hidden in pop-up ads and in attachments and links in emails that look like they are from someone you know. Anti-virus and anti-malware programs can help to protect your device and the information that you store on it, but understand they often don’t detect new and sophisticated malware. It’s also important to have a “firewall” to prevent hackers from getting into your mobile device. These security features may come pre-installed; look for information about security in the description of the operating system when you shop for mobile devices. Learn more: www.onguardonline.gov/articles/0011-malware Be careful when you use free public WI-FI. It’s convenient but it’s usually not secure. Crooks can use technology to “eavesdrop” on your email or communications on social networks and read what you’re typing on your device. If you are making mobile payments through the web, it’s possible that your sign-on credentials (user ID and password) and account numbers could be exposed, despite the security features in use. It’s more secure to use public WI-FI if you disable file sharing, only go to websites that are encrypted (you’ll see https in the address bar) and use a virtual private network (VPN). There are many websites where you can learn about these protections. If you’re unsure that it’s safe to use public WI-FI when you’re making a mobile payment, wait until you’re home or somewhere with a secure connection. There are many kinds of security features that may be built into the mobile payment process. Look for the answers to some basic questions when you consider using mobile payment applications or wallets. - What authentication credentials (i.e. password, PIN number, biometric, etc.) does the payment service require to make payments? - Are your financial account numbers and other sensitive information stored on your device, or remotely, and how are they secured? Are the payment account numbers tokenized? - What account information is transmitted to make the payment? - Is encryption used to protect your personal information in transmission and storage? Most mobile payment services require a password or, PIN number to open the application. Don’t share this information with anyone who doesn’t have your permission to make payments using your accounts. Some mobile applications have added the option of using a biometric such as a fingerprint or facial scan to increase the level of protection against an unauthorized person making transactions. Others may email or text message confirmation of payments to double-check and ensure that they were legitimately made. Your payment account information might be stored in a secure chip on your mobile device or on the server of the payment service itself. In some cases what’s stored on your device is not your actual account number but a substitute for it, either another account number or a “token” that represents your account. This adds another level of security, not only against intruders trying to get your account numbers but from data breaches at points along the payment chain, such as payment processors and retailers, because they only get the substitute numbers. As mobile payments evolve, so will these security features. When account information is transmitted to make the payment, it is usually encrypted – turned into a code that can only be read by parties along the payment chain that need it and who have the “key” to unlock the code. Retailers and others are also using encryption and security tokens to make account numbers, passwords and other sensitive information that they store unusable if someone illegally accesses it. There may be additional security features provided by the mobile device operating system, the mobile payment service, the payment provider (such as your payment card issuer) or the merchant. - Have your mobile device automatically lock when not used within a designated period of time. - Keep your passwords and PIN numbers to yourself. - Only download payment apps and other software from sources that you trust, such as your financial institution, a retailer that you do business with, or a trusted app store. - Protect mobile devices that can access the Internet from hackers and malware by using security software and keeping it updated. - Be extremely careful when you use free public WI-FI. - NEVER jailbreak or disable the security features of your phone. - Beware of messages from criminals pretending to be from your financial institution or someone else you trust asking for your account number or other personal information. - If you receive an email unexpectedly asking you to click on a link or open an attachment, beware. If it’s from an unknown source, delete it; if it looks like it’s from someone you know, check with the person directly before you do anything. - Never give access to your device to anyone who contacts you unexpectedly and only deal with tech support companies that you know or whose reputations you have checked out. - Look for mobile devices and payment services that offer good security features. If there is a problem with a mobile payment, your rights are basically the same as they would be if you made the payment without the use of your mobile device. But because there may be several different companies involved in the mobile payment process, it may be confusing to figure out who to contact. The first step is to contact the merchant. At the same time, it’s a good idea to alert your payment provider about the problem. This would be your credit card issuer if your credit card was used, your bank or credit union if the charge was debited from your account, the company with which you have a prepaid account if that was used, or your wireless service if the charge was billed to that account. If the merchant does not take care of the problem, your legal rights depend on the kind of account that was used for the payment. If you used cash to make a mobile payment (some mobile payment apps let people pay bills by going to convenience stores or other locations near them; the mobile device displays a bar code which is scanned, the clerk takes the cash, and the payment is sent electronically to the creditor), be sure to keep the receipt and notify the payment service promptly if there is any problem. Generally, you have the right to “dispute,” which means to challenge, a credit card charge if it is for the wrong amount, you didn’t agree to make the purchase, you never received the product or service, or you were misled about what you were buying. Once you have notified the seller and your credit card issuer about the problem, you don’t have to pay the charge that you are disputing while it’s being investigated (be sure to pay the rest of your bill on time). Your dispute rights when the payment is debited directly from your account at a bank or credit union (by using a debit card or providing your account information) are a bit more complicated. You can dispute a debit that you didn’t agree to or that is for the wrong amount, but you don’t have dispute rights if you never got the goods or services or they were misrepresented. Your financial institution may, however, voluntarily allow you to dispute a debit in those situations. In some cases, a network and its card issuing members may provide for liability protection in addition to that provided by regulations. Notify your credit card or debit card issuer as soon as you realize that there is a problem, since you could lose money and your ability to dispute the charge or debit if you wait too long. Additionally they have robust fraud departments that can quickly prevent further fraudulent activity. If you make payments using a prepaid card store in your mobile wallet or a prepaid mobile or online account that you have set up with a payment service, there is generally no federal regulatory protection, with some exceptions (for instance, if you are using a prepaid card that your employer has provided to put your pay on, called a payroll card, you can dispute a debit for the wrong amount or for a payment you never agreed to). But the card issuer or payment service may offer you protection if something goes wrong based on the card’s/account’s terms and conditions so be sure to read and understand them. If you have any questions, contact them immediately to ask. Be aware that if you’re using a general-purpose reloadable prepaid card (the kind that can be used a variety of merchants) you must register it with the card issuer to qualify for the protections that it offers, be able to load additional funds to the card, and use it for remote payment transactions. There are advantages to using your mobile device to bill purchases to your wireless account – you don’t need to have a credit card or a bank account, and the only account number that is exposed is your phone number. But it can also be risky and there are limited merchants that support this option. PIN numbers, which provide some security, are not always required, and with some mobile payment systems you don’t have to provide your phone number; it is captured automatically and touching the screen is all that’s needed to confirm the purchase. If there are charges on your wireless bill for transactions you never agreed to with companies other than your wireless service provider (these are called “third parties”), your ability to challenge them depends on your service provider’s policies (unless you live in California, where consumers have a right by law to dispute unauthorized third party charges on telephone bills). Contact your wireless service provider as soon as you discover the problem. Sometimes wireless providers will even go beyond their stated policies to resolve problems, but there may be limits to how far they’ll go or how many times they will remove these kinds of charges. If you don’t want to bill purchases to your wireless account or let anyone else who might have access to your device be able to do so, ask your wireless carrier if it can put a block on your device to prevent third party charges. Third-party mobile payment services such as PayPal and Amazon may also provide some type of assistance if there is a problem. The laws concerning consumers’ payment dispute rights may change over time, and even when you don’t have dispute rights or there aren’t voluntary protections with the payment provider or service, it doesn’t mean that there is nothing you can do if there is a problem with the transaction. You may have rights under other consumer protection laws. Ask your state or local consumer agency about your rights and if it can help you resolve the problem or refer you to another agency for assistance. - Contact the merchant and the payment provider (your credit card or debit card issuer, your bank or credit union, phone company if the charge is billed to your wireless service, etc.) as soon as you discover the problem. - Know your payment dispute rights and what voluntary protections your payment provider may offer. - If you are using a third-party mobile payment service check to see if it provides any assistance with problems.

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Category:Book of War Belegarth Book of War A Rules System for Medieval Combat with Foam Weapons 1.1. Marshal – Person responsible for rules enforcement and weapons inspection. - 1.1.1. A Marshal has the authority to remove anyone from the field of battle. - 1.1.2. A Marshal determines Equipment classifications according to the guidelines outlined in Appendix A. - 1.1.3. A Marshal is responsible for safe conduct of battles, and therefore has the power to stop battles whenever a safety concern occurs. - 1.1.4: Solid yellow tabards or baldrics are to be worn exclusively by Marshals and non-combatants on the field who have been approved by a Marshal (i.e. photographers). 1.2. All Equipment must be inspected and properly marked if appropriate, according to the guidelines outlined in Appendix A, before it is used in combat. 1.3. The target of an attack makes combat hit determinations. 1.4. Creative interpretation of the rules to gain any advantage is discouraged. These rules are intentionally sparse to allow for ease of use. The Marshal, according to these rules, and medieval foam combat precedent, settles all disputes. 2. Equipment Classifications and Definitions 2.1. Offensive Equipment is any item that can score one or more combat hits. There are five classifications of Offensive Equipment, hereafter called Weapons. All Offensive Equipment must meet the requirements outlined in Appendix A. - 2.1.1. (Class 1) One-handed swung Weapon. - 2.1.2. (Class 2) Two-handed swung Weapon. - 2.1.3. (Class 3) Thrusting Weapon. - 2.1.4. (Class 4) Missile Weapon. - 2.1.5. (Class 5) Head-only missile Weapon. 2.2. Defensive Equipment is any item that gives combat advantage to its wielder by preventing Injury, and is unable to inflict damage on opponents. There are two types of Defensive Equipment -- Shields and Armor. All Defensive Equipment must meet the requirements outlined in Appendix A. - 2.2.1. Shields and Bucklers are rigid objects that are padded on the front and sides, and are equipped with handles or straps. A Shield may not be constructed in a manner that would confer the advantage of unbreakable armor. - 2.2.2. Armor is protective body covering, consisting of period materials. 2.3. Miscellaneous Equipment includes, but is not limited to, items such as: belts, pouches, boots, and non-Armor clothing and headwear. While conferring no special rules advantage, miscellaneous equipment may be checked for combat safety and period appearance at the Marshal’s discretion. The minimum non-armor clothing requirements are outlined in Appendix B. 3.1. Target Area Definitions : 3.1.1. Body – Area bounded by the base of neck (inclusive), shoulder-arm joint (inclusive), hip-leg socket (inclusive), groin, and buttocks (inclusive). 3.1.2. Arm(s) – Area bounded by the wrist (inclusive) and the shoulder-arm joint (exclusive). 3.1.3. Leg(s) – Area bounded by the ankle (inclusive) and hip-leg socket (exclusive). 3.1.4. Head – Area above the base of neck (exclusive). 3.1.5. Hand(s) – Area below the wrist (exclusive). An empty Hand is a legal Target Area. Any Injury to the Hand is considered Injury to the Arm. A Hand on a Weapon or Shield is considered part of that Weapon or Shield. 3.1.6. Feet – Area below the ankle (exclusive). A Foot is a legal Target Area if it is off the ground. Any Injury to the Foot is considered Injury to the Leg. 3.2.1. Weapons which strike with sufficient force can score a hit and/or Injury to the Target Area. 3.2.2. Weapons yield various amounts of damage according to the classification of the Weapon and the armor/damage status of the target. - 220.127.116.11. Class 1 (one-handed) Weapons cause one hit of Injury to a Target Area. Any Weapon swung with one hand no matter the size is a Class 1 Weapon, including equipment that qualifies as Class 2 Weaponry. Class 1 weapons swung with two hands causes one hit of injury to a Target Area. - 18.104.22.168. Class 2 (two-handed) Weapons cause two hits of Injury to the Target Area. - 22.214.171.124. Class 3 (thrusting) Weapons wielded one-handed cause one hit of damage to an unarmored Target Area. Class 3 Weapons also cause two hits of damage when wielded two-handed against a Target Area, ignoring any Armor the Target Area may have. If the Target Area is armored, the Weapon must be wielded two-handed to cause damage to the Target Area. A one-handed strike causes no injury to an Armored Target Area. - 126.96.36.199. Class 4 (missile) Weapons cause two hits of Injury to a Target Area. A Class 4 Weapon striking an Armored portion of the Head causes no Injury. - 188.8.131.52. Class 5 (Head only missile) cause 1 hit of Injury to an unarmored Head area. A Class 5 Weapon striking an Armored portion of the Head area causes no injury. 3.2.3. The Head is an illegal Target Area for Class 1, 2, and 3 Weapons. The Head is a legal Target Area for Class 4 and 5 Weapons. 3.3.1. Armor confers one additional hit to the Target Area covered by the Armor. Multiple pieces of Armor on the same Target Area only confer a single hit. A single piece of Armor covering multiple areas confer a hit on each Target Area covered. 3.3.2. Armor only protects areas covered. 3.3.3. Armor must be of a size to cover a significant portion (approximately one-third) of a Target Area. Armor extending continuously from another Target Area is not required to significantly cover neighboring Target Areas to count as Armor. 3.3.4. Weapons that strike both Armored and unarmored Target Areas are considered to have hit the unarmored Target Area. 3.3.5. The presence of Armor must be easily discernible to count as Armor. 3.4.1. Effects of Injury: - 184.108.40.206. One or more hits of Injury to an unarmored Target Area disables that Target Area. - 220.127.116.11. Two hits of Injury to an Armored Target Area disable that Target Area. - 18.104.22.168. A disabled Body causes Death. - 22.214.171.124. A disabled Head causes Death. - 126.96.36.199. Two disabled limb Target Areas (Arms and/or Legs) cause Death. Limbs injured with Class 3 and Class 4 Weapons do not count towards this total. 3.4.2. All Injury effects must be accurately portrayed and reported. - 188.8.131.52. Death – Lay down immediately. Do not move unless instructed by a Marshal. - 184.108.40.206. Disabled Arm -- A disabled Arm may not hold anything. If the Arm is disabled by a Class 1 or 2 Weapon then place Arm behind back. If the Arm is disabled by a Class 3 or 4 Weapon, leave Arm dangling limply at side. - 220.127.116.11. Disabled Leg – kneel on ground with the non-injured Leg up. 3.4.3. Subsequent hits to the same location: - 18.104.22.168. All subsequent strikes with Class 3 or 4 Weapon on the same Target Area previously injured only by a Class 3 or 4 Weapon are ignored. - 22.214.171.124. All subsequent strikes to an Arm disabled by a Class 1 or 2 weapon pass through to the Torso. - 126.96.36.199. All subsequent strikes to a Leg disabled by a Class 1 or 2 weapon are ignored. - 3.4.4. A hit that strikes both the Body and either an Arm or a Leg is assumed to have hit the Body. 3.4.5. A single strike can only damage one Target Area. 3.5.1. Shields can be destroyed by two solid strikes from a Class 2 Weapon. Subsequent strikes to a destroyed Shield continue into the Target Area on which the Shield is worn. 3.5.2. Shields may be used in any reasonable manner and still be considered a Shield. 3.5.3. Only one Shield may be used by a person at a time. 3.5.4. Shield Bashing, Checking, and Kicking is allowed. - 188.8.131.52. A Shield Bash is defined as using a Shield to strike an opponent from a distance further than two steps away. - 184.108.40.206. A Shield Check is defined as using a Shield to strike an opponent starting from a distance less than two steps away - 220.127.116.11. A person may not Bash, Check or Shield Kick an opponent's rear quadrant. Shield pushing or incidental contact in an opponent’s rear quadrant is allowed. - 18.104.22.168. Shield kicking of small Shields and/or Bucklers is discouraged. - 22.214.171.124. The head may not be the intentional target of any shield maneuver. 3.6. Grappling is allowed. 3.6.1. Combatants may initiate Grapples with opponents according to the following rules. - 126.96.36.199. A Combatant wearing no Armor may Grapple all opponents. - 188.8.131.52. A Combatant wearing Leather Armor may Grapple any Armored opponent, but not unarmored opponents. - 184.108.40.206. A Combatant wearing Chain Armor may Grapple opponents wearing Chain or Plate Armor. - 220.127.116.11. A Combatant wearing plate Armor may not initiate a Grapple. 3.6.2. A Combatant wearing plastic safety equipment is treated as leather Armor for grappling purposes only. 3.6.3. No throws, unarmed strikes, or joint/nerve holds. Grappling to the head/neck is not allowed. 3.6.4. Combatants with Missile Weapons (Type 4, bow/arrows) may not initiate Grapples or be Grappled. 3.7. Melee Conventions 3.7.1. If during a battle an unsafe situation occurs, it is the responsibility of all Combatants (and Marshals) who see the situation to call “HOLD” and stop the battle. A HOLD stops the battle while the Marshal assesses the situation. The battle resumes only at the Marshal’s discretion. 3.7.2. Combatants attacking an opponent from behind with a two-handed strike from a Class 2 or 3 Weapon MUST shout “TWO”. This informs the opponent that the attack was a two-handed strike, and caused two points of Injury. If “TWO” is not called, the opponent should consider a successful strike to cause a single hit of Injury. 3.7.3. Blocking a Weapon strike by laying a Weapon against a Target Area and/or Shield is illegal. 3.7.4. Sheathed or otherwise worn Weapons cannot block attacks. 3.7.5. Gripping the striking surface of an opponents Weapon results in the disabling of that limb. 3.7.6. If an opponent has both knees on the ground, a strike to either Leg is considered to have struck the good Leg. If the opponent is lunging or rolling around and has a disabled Leg and is hit in either, it is considered a hit to the uninjured Leg. 3.7.7. A Combatant who has their Leg disabled must either crawl on his/her knees or be realistically supported. 3.8. Missile Weapon Conventions 3.8.1. If a bow is struck by a Class 1 or 2 Weapon, it is considered broken and cannot be used. 3.8.2. A half draw or throw for Class 4 Weapons under a range of 20 feet is required. 3.8.3. A missile Weapon must travel its entire length to score a hit. 3.8.4. A missile Weapon is considered to have hit if there is significant deflection of the missile head (>30 degrees). Once the missile head has significantly deflected off a target, the missile is rendered harmless. 3.8.5. As an exception to rule 1.3, an archer who attacks with an arrow may determine and call a combat hit when attacking with such a Weapon. 3.8.6. Blocking Missiles - 18.104.22.168. All Class 4 or 5 missiles besides arrows may be blocked by any means that keeps the missile away from a Target Area. - 22.214.171.124. An arrow may only be blocked by a Shield. An arrow blocked by a Weapon is considered to have continued to travel in the same direction and strike the Target Area behind the Weapon. - 126.96.36.199. Intentional blocking of an arrow with a Weapon causes Death to the blocker. 1.1.1. Striking Surface – Padded surface of a Weapon designed to make contact with an opponent during combat. Only the Striking Surface of a Weapon may score a hit. 1.1.2. Non-striking Surface – Any padded surface of the Weapon that is not a striking surface. 1.1.3. Handle – Non-padded portion of the Weapon designed as a handhold. 1.1.4. Pommel – Non-striking Surface that covers the end of the Handle. 1.1.5. Sword – Any Weapon approximating a medieval sword, constructed using either an edge/flat or cylindrical design. 1.1.6. Flail – Any hinged Weapon. 1.1.7. Double-ended Weapon – A Weapon approximating a medieval staff. 1.1.8. Javelin – Thrown Class 4 Weapon. 1.1.9. Archery – Class 4 Weapons including bows, crossbows, arrows, and bolts. 1.1.10. Rocks – Class 5 Weapons. 1.2. Marking - Weapons must be marked with the appropriate color(s) of tape to denote their classifications. This marking tape must be placed in a manner so that Combatants and Marshals may easily see it. 1.2.1. Class 1 Weapons are marked with blue tape on either the pommel or handle. 1.2.2. Class 2 Weapons are marked with red tape on either the pommel or handle. 1.2.3. Class 3 Weapons are marked with green tape on either the pommel or handle. 1.2.4. Class 4 and 5 Weapons are marked in a manner to indicate a Marshal has inspected them. 1.3. General Weapon Checking Conventions - All Weapons must conform to all of the following, as applicable: 1.3.1. All striking surfaces of Weapons must be padded adequately to prevent personal injury when striking an opponent with full force on that surface. 1.3.2. All non-striking surfaces must be padded adequately to prevent personal injury from incidental contact. 1.3.3. Two and one-half inch rule—No surface on a striking edge (sword tip, arrow head, spear head, javelin head, etc.) whether designed for stabbing or not, may readily pass more than 0.5 inch (1.25 cm) through a 2.5 inch (6.5 cm) hole; swords with a semicircular tip, with a minimum 1.5 inch (3.75 cm) radius are exempt from this rule. See Appendix A, 188.8.131.52. 1.3.4. The Weapon pommel may not readily pass more than 0.5" (1.25 cm) through a 2" (5 cm) diameter hole. 1.3.5. The maximum allowed flex of any Weapon except Javelins is 45°. See Appendix A, 184.108.40.206. 1.3.6. All striking surfaces must have a cloth covering. 1.3.7. Tape is allowed on the striking surface as long as it does not compromise the weapon's ability to deliver a safe hit. 1.3.8. All handles of wood Weapons must be taped, including bamboo and rattan. 1.3.9. A Weapon may not have a metal core. 1.4. All weapons must be built to the following specifications: 1.4.1. Class 1 - All Class 1 Weapons must conform to the following, as applicable: 220.127.116.11. A Class 1 Weapon under twenty-four (24) inches (60 cm) in length has no weight minimum. 18.104.22.168. A Class 1 Weapon twenty-four (24) inches (60 cm) in length or longer must weigh a minimum of twelve (12) ounces (350 g). 22.214.171.124. With the exception of double-ended weapons, a Class 1 Weapon must be shorter than forty-eight (48) inches (120 cm). 126.96.36.199. The maximum handle length for a Class 1 Weapon is twelve (12) inches (30.5 cm) or one-third (1/3) of the overall length, whichever is greater. This cannot exceed one-half (1/2) of the overall length. 188.8.131.52. The minimum overall length of a Class 1 is 12 inches (30 cm) plus the length of the handle and pommel. 1.4.2. Class 2 - All Class 2 Weapons must conform to the following: 184.108.40.206. The minimum length is forty-eight (48) inches (120 cm). 220.127.116.11. The minimum weight is twenty-four (24) ounces (700 g). 18.104.22.168. The maximum handle length for Class 2 Weapons is eighteen (18) inches (45 cm) or one-third (1/3) of the overall length, whichever is greater. This cannot exceed one-half (1/2) of the overall length. 1.4.3. Class 3 - All Class 3 Weapons must conform to the following: 22.214.171.124. If the Weapon is Class 3 only, it has no weight restriction. 126.96.36.199. The maximum handle length for Class 3 Weapons is 2/3 of its overall length. 188.8.131.52. If the Weapon is Class 3 only, it may not have a yellow cover. 1.4.4. Swords must conform to the following: 184.108.40.206. If the Weapon has a semicircular tip with a minimum 1.5 inch (3.75 cm) radius, it is exempt from rule Appendix A, 1.3.3. 220.127.116.11. Single-edged Weapons must have their non-striking edge clearly marked for at least 12 inches with tape, paint, fabric, or other material in a way that clearly contrasts with the striking surface cover and does not wrap onto the flat of the blade. 1.4.5. Flails must conform to the following: 18.104.22.168. The striking surface must haves a minimum circumference of fifteen (15) inches (40 cm) measured on separate axes. 22.214.171.124. The maximum chain/hinge length is six (6) inches (15 cm). 126.96.36.199. The maximum overall length is forty (40) inches (100 cm). 188.8.131.52. The hinged part of the flail must be padded with foam to keep the chain from easily entangling a Weapon or body part. No more than 1 ½ inches (3.75 cm) of chain may be exposed. 184.108.40.206. Only one hinge per flail is allowed. 220.127.116.11. Only the head of a flail is a striking surface. 1.4.6. Double-ended Weapons must conform to all of the following: 18.104.22.168. Double-ended Weapons must not be more than 7 feet (210 cm) long. 22.214.171.124. Double-ended Weapons must have a minimum of 18 inches (45 cm) in length of padding covering each end in a cylindrical fashion. Both striking surfaces of this weapon must follow Class 3 Weapon standards for a Double-ended Weapon to be legal. 126.96.36.199. Regardless of length, a Double-ended Weapon is a Class 1 Weapon when swung and Class 3 when thrust. 1.4.7. Javelins must conform to all of the following: 188.8.131.52. Must also pass as a Class 3 Weapon. 184.108.40.206. The maximum weight is sixteen (16) ounces (450 g). 220.127.116.11. The minimum length is four (4) feet (120 cm). 18.104.22.168. The maximum length is seven (7) feet (210 cm). 22.214.171.124. Padded along the entire length. 126.96.36.199. Must flex less than 90°. This is an exception to Appendix A, 1.3.5. 188.8.131.52. Must have a yellow cover. 1.4.8. Archery Restrictions: 184.108.40.206. No compound bows or compound-crossbows. 220.127.116.11. The maximum poundage allowed on a bow is 35 lbs (16 kg) pull at 28 inches (70 cm) of draw. 18.104.22.168. The maximum poundage allowed on a crossbow is 15 lbs (7 kg) at its loaded draw. 22.214.171.124. A draw stop is required to prevent an arrow from being drawn more than 28 inches (70 cm). 126.96.36.199. Arrow striking surfaces may not easily pass more than 0.5 inches (1.25 cm) through a 2.5 inch (6.5 cm) diameter hole. No part of the arrow’s striking surface may be less than 2.5 inches (6.5 cm) in any direction. 188.8.131.52. All arrows must contain a penny, or solid metal blunt of an equivalent gauge and circumference, perpendicularly secured at the end of the shaft. - 184.108.40.206.1. All arrows using modular technology must create a semi-permanent connection point through the means of threaded screws, epoxy, glue, or strapping tape; the head must be secondarily secured at the end of the shaft with tape. - 220.127.116.11.2. All arrows that are altered in any way during a day of combat will be treated as new arrows and must be rechecked as such before being put back into use. 18.104.22.168. The arrow’s striking surface must be constructed of open-cell foam. 22.214.171.124. All arrows must have at least two full fletchings. 126.96.36.199. The striking surface of an arrow must be tape free. 188.8.131.52. The arrowhead should not have excess axial or lateral movement and must be secured at the end of the shaft in such a way that they will not come off if firmly twisted or firmly pulled. 1.4.9. Class 5 Weapons have a minimum diameter of 4 inches (10 cm) and are constructed entirely of foam, cloth and tape (coreless). 1.5. Prohibited Weapons: 1.5.1. Entangling Weapons (nets, lassos). 1.5.2. Unmanned Weapons (traps). 1.5.3. Non-compliant double ended Weapons (nunchaku, double ended daggers). 1.5.4. Punching Weapons (punching daggers, tonfas). 1.5.5. Any Weapon when used as intended violates the rules stipulated in the Book of War. 2.1. Shields must be padded on the edges and face so as not to cause injury when struck with a forceful blow of an arm/hand. 2.2. The maximum width of a shield is 3 feet (90 cm). 2.3. The maximum height of a shield is 18 inches (45 cm) less than the height of the wielder. 2.4. The minimum dimension on the face of a shield is 12 inches (30 cm). 2.5. Shield spikes are allowed for decoration. 3. Armor Checking 3.1.1. Leather – Armor constructed of tanned animal hide. 3.1.2. Metal – Armor constructed of metal. Includes chain and plate. 3.1.3. Rigid Metal – Armor constructed of discrete or continuous metal plate. 3.1.4. Chain – Metal Armor constructed of interlocking metal rings. 3.1.5. Helmet – Armor for the Head and Neck. 3.1.6. Cops – Rigid metal knee and elbow Armor. 3.1.7. Composite – Armor constructed of both metal and leather. 3.1.8. Penny Round – Armor checking standard where the edge of rigid metal Armor is compared to that of a penny: - 184.108.40.206. The edge of rigid metal Armor shall have the smoothness of the edge of a penny. - 220.127.116.11. The edge of rigid metal Armor shall have less cutting ability than the edge of a penny. - 18.104.22.168. The radius of any rigid metal corner must be greater than the radius of a penny. 3.2. Armor must be passed by an event-designated armor checker. 3.3. Armor must not catch appendages. Fingers should not catch in Armor. This includes articulated plates and large diameter chain. 3.4. Armor may not have protrusions that rise more than ½ inch (1.25 cm) from the surface. 3.5. The minimum thickness for leather Armor is 3/16 inch (.45 cm). The minimum thickness requirement can be achieved by layering up to two pieces of thinner leather. 3.6. Metal Armor 3.6.1. Metal Armor must be made from period metals and alloys such as iron, bronze, brass, or copper. Modern steel alloys are also allowed. 3.6.2. Metal Armor must conform to both of the following: - 22.214.171.124. Must not be easily deformable by hand or by weapon strikes. - 126.96.36.199. Using a material with a thickness of at least 20 gauge (1 mm). 3.6.3. Rigid Metal must conform to the Penny Round standard. 3.7. Composite Armor 3.7.1. Studded, scaled, or brigandine Armor can only be counted as Armor if 2/3 of the target area is covered by metal or leather, or the studs/rings/plates can not be more than 1/2 inch (1.25 cm) apart. 3.7.2. Composite Armor must be identifiable as Armor by appearance. 3.8. Prohibited Armor: 3.8.1. Rigid Metal knee or elbow Armor (cops). 3.8.2. Rigid Metal full Helmet. Partial Rigid Metal Helmet as well as full Helmet made of any other Armor materials are allowed. 3.8.3. Rigid Metal hand armor. 1.1. Garb is defined as the clothing to be worn by all participants of Belegarth. 1.2. Minimum garb is the basic requirements for all participants. Minimum garb is defined as: 1.2.1. A tunic or tabard covering the torso. - 188.8.131.52. Neutral colored t-shirts, with no visible printing, may be worn underneath a tunic or tabard. - 184.108.40.206. Wearing nothing on the torso is acceptable for men. - 220.127.116.11. Wearing a neutral colored sports bra with no visible logos or modern prints is acceptable for women. 1.2.2. Baggy pants or trousers covering the legs. 1.2.3. Skirts, Kilts, and Dresses are acceptable substitutes. 1.2.4. Footwear should be muted colors, boots are preferred athletic shoes should be of a dark color and not unnatural. Barefoot or Sandals are acceptable. 1.2.5. Any piece of modern equipment or clothing required out of medical necessity overrules the minimum garb requirements. 1.3. Forbidden items: - 1.3.1. T-shirts that are brightly colored, white, with visible logos, with visible collars, and or visible pockets. - 1.3.2. Camouflage or military issued cargo pants. - 1.3.3. Modern jeans of any color. - 1.3.4. Modern hats. - 1.3.5. Any fabrics with modern prints. - 1.3.6. Any realistic weapons. Copyleft © 2002 Belegarth Medieval Combat Society and Gregg Larson. Revision by Matthew R J Anderson. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the GNU FDL can be found trailing this page and at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html - Book of War on Belegarth.com - Book of War (July 16, 2012) - Word2010 format - general, single page, and booklet layouts. Pages in category "Book of War" The following 38 pages are in this category, out of 38 total.

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