The Mule Skinner Blog

Mule Skinner is a blog on notes of a world that didn´t happen, doesn´t happen or/either is still yet not to have not happened. We like to encourage the freedom of speech in a world that is yet to tear down its imperial chains. Situated in the remote corner of Cyberspace. Most likely we will comment on Cyberdreams (not much diaries here). The knownledge is never free, information is. In the real world truth is never so simple. In the Mule Skinner World it is.

Flowers

"All the names I know from nurse:
Gardener's garters, Shepherd's purse,
Bachelor's buttons, Lady's smock,
And the Lady Hollyhock.

Fairy places, Fairy things,
Fairy woods where the wild bee wings,
Tiny trees for tiny dames.
- These must all be Fairy names !"

(from Child's Garden of Verses
by R.L. Stevenson)

"Anyone can write a short-story.
A bad one, I mean."
(R.L. Stevenson)
----------------

"Science without conscience is the Soul's perdition."
- Francois Rabelais, Pantagruel

- Acc to/above is citated from: Medical Apartheid. The dark history of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, by Harriet A. Washington (Doubleday ; 2006 ; p. 1.)

----------------
"In the high society of the first half of the century, marriage, despite it's bestowal status upon the wife, was the most absurdity. Marriage, conferring instanteous rank or money, ... lost most of its prestige and moment right after the wedding. ...By the end of the century, spurred by Rousseau's moralistic Nouvelle Hèloíse, a contrary cult, that of virtue, arose. After 1770 conjugal and maternal love became not merely admissible, but, for some, moral imperatives. ...

[...]
...Rousseau, who sought for himself the crown of morality in ostensibly defending marriage, presents in his Nouvelle Hèloíse the most enticing and extended defense of illicit love ever penned. The root of the problem is that as the century progressed sensibility became confused with morality: passionate feeling, if expressed in a highly civilized mode with grace and nuance, makes us forgive the Rousseau of The Confessions, for example, his pettiness, his jealousies, his betrayals. This moral-amoral byplay, present already in the novels of Richardson, was to be more intense as the century unfolded."
- Madelyn Gutwirth : Madame De Staèl, Novelist. The emergence of the Artist as Woman (10,15.)

;
"...As the social contract seems tame in comparison with war, so fucking and sucking come to seem merely nice, and therefore unexciting. ... To be 'nice', as to be civilized, means being alienated from this savage experience - which is entirely staged. [...] The rituals of domination and enslavement being more and more practiced, the art that is more and more devoted to rendering their themes, are perhaps only a logical extension of an affluent society's tendency to turn every part of people's lives into a taste, a choice; to invite them to regard their very lives as a (life) style." - Susan Sontag , on 'Fascinating Fascism' (-74; p 103;104-5 at Under the sign of Saturn)
; "Anyone who cannot give an account to oneself of the past three thousand years remains in darkness, without experience, living from day to day." (Goethe) - as cited by Sontag (on same compile; p. 137.)

;
"It is widely accepted that we are now living in the 'Anthropocene', a new geological epoch in which the Earth's ecosystems and climate are being fundamentally altered by the activities of humans. I loathe the term, but I can't deny that it's appropriate."
; (Goulson), Silent Earth : Averting the Insect Apocalypse (2021; p 47.)
;
"It is sometimes said that humanity is at war with nature, but the word 'war' implies a two-way conflict. Our chemical onslaught on nature is more akin to genocide. It is small wonder that our wildlife is in decline."
; (Goulson, 2021 ; 118.)
;
----------------

"If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities." (Voltaire)

- Citated from; (Joy, Melanie), Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows : An Introduction to Carnism(2010; p. 95.)
;

"In the presence of the monster, you have eyes and ears for nothing else."
; (Flora Tristan) : London Journal of Flora Tristan: the Aristocracy and the Working Class of England ; 1842-edit. (tr: 1982. ; p. 71.)

;
"Every minority invokes justice, and justice is liberty.
A party can be judged of only by the doctrine which
it professes when it is the strongest."
Mdme de Staêl
(on) 'Consideration sur le Révolution de la Francaise' [1818]

Mule Skinner Citations

”I see you´ve misunderstood me,” said the supervisor who was already at the door. ”It´s true that you´re under arrest, but that shoudn´t stop you from carrying out your job. And there shouldn´t be anything to stop you carrying on with your usual life.”
Kafka: Der Prozess

" Love is a severe critic. Hate can pardon more than love. They who aspire to love worthily, subject themselves to an ordeal more rigid than any other.
... Love must be as much a light as a flame.
[...]
Comparatively, we can excuse any offense against the heart, but not against the imagination.
...Love is the profoundest of secrets. Divulged, even to the beloved, it is no longer love. ..."
- (Thoreau) : Love [1852]

"Clearly, taking up office in this indigenous democracy required personality traits very different to those we take for granted in modern electoral politics. On this latter point, it is worth recalling that ancient Greek writers were well aware of the tendency for elections to throw up charismatic leaders with tyrannical pretensions. This is why they considered elections an aristocratic mode of political appointment, quite at odd with democratic principles; and why for much of European history the truly democractic way of filling offices was assumed to be by lottery." ; Graeber and Wengrow, 2021: The Dawn of Everything. A New History of Humanity ; p. 356.) [...I can't avoid for recalling, at this place, (that) Thoreau's opinion on elections - cited smwhr below at this - amusingly does resemble the same.]

"...But as we have seen, indigenous North American ideas... - certainly had the impact on European Enlightenment, ... No doubt it would be too much to suggest that the Enlightenment itself had its first stirrings in seventeenth-century North America. But it's possible, perhaps, to imagine some future non-Eurocentric history where such a suggestion would not be treated as almost by definition outrageous and absurd." ; "...we are generally taught to think of the French political philosopher Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu as the first to build an explicit and systematic body of theory based on the principle of institutional reform with his book The Spirit of the Laws (1748). By doing so, it's widely believed, he effectively created modern politics. The Founding Fathers of the United States, ...attempted to create a constitution that would preserve the spirit of individual liberty, and spoke of the results as a 'government of laws and not of men'. As it turns out, precisely this sort of thinking was commonplace in North America well before European settlers appeared on the scene. ... The connections may well run deeper than we think." (Graeber and Wengrow) ; p. 437; 480-1.

"Gradually, the observer realises that these organisms are connected to each other, not linearly, but in a net-like, entangled fabric." ; [Alexander von Humboldt] - ...citation is via: Sheldrake's (2020): Entangled Life: How fungi make our Worlds, change our Minds and shape our Futures (; p. 165.)

"It is remarkable to sense the presence of those long passed at the locations where their adventures took place. Spirits range without boundaries of any sort, and spirits can be called back in any number of ways. The method used in the calling also determines how the spirit manifests itself. I think a spirit may or may not choose to remain at the site of its passing or death. I think they might be in a number of places at the same time. Storytelling can procure fleeting moments to experience who they were and how life felt long ago. What I enjoyed most as a child was standing at the site of the incident recounted in one of the ancient stories that old Aunt Susie had told us as girls. ... Because the storytellers did not just tell the stories, they would in their way act them out. The storyteller would imitate voices for vast dialogues between the various figures in the story. So we sometimes say the moment is alive again within us, within our imaginations and our memory, as we listen. ... The myth, the web of memories and ideas that create an identity, is a part of oneself. This sense of identity was intimately linked with the surrounding terrain, to the landscape that has often played a significant role in a story or in the outcome of a conflict." , "...And the description of what that landscape looked like before the uranium mining began will always carry a considerable impact." ; (Silko), 'Interior and Exterior Landscapes: The Pueblo Migration Stories' ; Orig. publ. at 1986. - Cite is via collected essays, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (1996; p. 42-3, 44.)

"An interesting aspect of these declines is that most of us have not noticed. The evidence suggests that insects, and also mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians, are all now much less abundant than they were a few decades ago, but because the change is slow it is difficult to perceive. Among scientists it is now recognized that we suffer from 'shifting-baseline' syndrome, the phenomenom whereby we accept the world we grow up as in normal, although it might be quite different from the world our parents grew up in. ..." ; (Dave Goulson) - Silent Earth (2021; p. 68.)

"...In an age of lies and illusion, the garden is one way to ground yourself in the realm of the processes of growth and the passage of time, the rules of physics, meteorology, hydrology and biology, and the realms of the senses"

; "...['In 2017,'] Georg Feulner theoretized that the cold itself slowed or stopped the cycle of vegetation growth that was drawing down carbon from the air and freezing the earth. He ended by noting that we are reversing that process. Think of the Carboniferous as a sixty-million-year inhale by plants, sucking carbon dioxide from the sky, and the last two hundred years as a monstrous human-engineered exhale, undoing what the plants did so long ago. You could imagine coal miners shoveling the carbon out of the bowels of the earth directly into the upper atmosphere, but that would not be fair to them,... Miners supply it. Others burn it - and the oil and gas that are likewise the product of ancient plants, likewise sequestered carbon, likewise catastrophically changing the carbon dioxide levels of the earth. ... Perhaps if we were not burning so rapidly, in the span of a few hundred years, the result... ,it would not be so devastating, but we have outpaced the capacity of plants to recapture the carbon."

; "... It has been a war against the earth and atmosphere. But looking back at 1936, what is most striking is how long ago it was in ecological terms. ...
There had, of course, been many kinds of damage: the Tasmanian emu, the African bluebuck, the North Atlantic great auk, the mysterious starling of the South Pacific, and numerous other species in numerous other places had become extinct. The earth was far from pristine. Much of western Europe had been deforested long ago and many of its species hunted out; the Near East overgrazed before that; mining had already broken the landscape and polluted the air and water around the world. In the nineteenth century, the North American prairie had been chopped up into real estate and bisected by wood-burning and then coal-burning railroads for which wars against the Native tribes of the plains had been fought in part decimating the great bison herbs there; the Great Plains had become the Dust Bowl earlier in the 1930s, as agriculture created massive soil erosion and wind picked it up. Engels describes the black rivers of the industrial north, and unregulated pollution of air and water, with few exceptions, was the norm in the postwar era. Even so, it was far more intact and sustainable than the world we inhabit today. It looks like Eden from 2021." - (Rebecca) Solnit : Orwell's Roses (2021.; p.44,60,70-1.)
(...To all 'Orwellist readers', warmly appreciated. - In a very 'proper way' text mostly 'avoiding' overusing the italics and'paraphrasing'. ; Both smght, I now noticing all too much used here, :)

"In 2015, English Heritage, the governmental entity preserving and presenting Britain's historic landscape, published the anthology Slavery and the British Country House, whose introduction notes, 'It is only in the last 20 years that the relationship between landed wealth, British properties and enslaved African labour began to emerge.' ... One of its authors notes, 'Across Britain as a whole, the slave compensation data suggests that in the 1830s 5 to 10 percent of all British country houses would be expected to have been occupied by slave owners and that in some localities and even some regions the figure would be much higher.' ... "
;
" Orwell's father, ...was born in 1857, christened Richard Walmesley Blair, and raised mostly in Dorset in southern England. Richard Blair also... ...worked in opium production in India until his retirement in 1912, mostly as a subdeputy opium agent for the British government. Orwell was born in the small farming town of Motihari in the state of Bihar at the center of the north Indian opium industry. Not much is known about how his family lived during the time he, his mother, and his older sister resided with his father. A photograph of him as a disgruntled-looking but plump baby being held up by a dark-skinned woman swathed in white is a reminder that colonial posts were appealing to Britons of modest means partly because they offered a chance to lead a more luxurious, elite life, complete with cheap and abundant servants, than did the mother country. Richard Blair oversaw the farming of poppies and production of the drug in a process that impoverished, coerced and sometimes brutally punished the Indian peasant doing the growing and refining. ... 'Englands national flower is the Tudor rose. But the prickly is that the English owe much of their wealth to another blood-red flower; the poppy', a contemporary writer [Garry Littman] notes. ... " ; (Solnit) - p.163, 167.
; 'Supposin that source [on above, Littman] discussin' also the EITC on whose emergence I sometimes read some bits. ; ...Matter fact, priorly never felt any needs for reads on Orwell's backgrounds. - But of course, that gives furthermore some ideas WHY (was) his not a little mystified public image, so soon emerged in during the 1970s, -80s. (...bit similarly or w. resemblance by intent to it's popularisation, than were the UFO's's and a Roswell-myth, at 1950s.)

"The fungicide chlororathalonil has been in use since 1964, and is one of the most widely used pesticides in the world. Until 2018 it was the single most-used pesticide in the UK, and it is very commonly found in honey samples. Its harmful effects on bees were not picked up during its initial registration, and seem to have escaped notice for more than fifty years. In 2019 this chemical was banned by the EU, primarily, over concerns that it was contaminating groundwater - and hence getting into rivers and drinking water - rather than anything to do with bees. As with neonicotinoids, the rest of the world continues to use it without restriction. One has to wonder how many other chemicals of the hundreds that are currently in use will eventually turn out to be harmful to something, be it bees, humans or great crested newts. ... How can we have any faith in a system that has misled us so many times in the past ?" ; (Goulson; 113.)

; A 'Vision' [, World in the 2080's] : "In the same year, a group of German entomologists, ...published a data showing that insects on German nature reserves had declined in biomass (weight of insects) caught in traps by 76 per cent over a twenty-six year period to 2016. The authors of this study warned that, if insects were to continue to decline then ecosystems would begin to unravel, for insects perform a myriad of important roles. ... Why did we fail to act? ... ...most scientists warned against it [but], some tried to fix our ailing climate with geoengineering, by clouding the atmosphere with chemicals intended to reflect the sunlight and seed cloud formation. It turned out that the climate was far too complex to control in this way...making the weather even more unpredictable. ...My father told me that, back in the '20s, scientists even tried to replace the disappearing bees with little flying robots to pollinate crops, but they were expensive and clumsy compared to the real thing, and eventually abandoned. They also tried to genetically engineer honeybees to make them resistant to pesticides, but an unanticipated side-effect was that these 'super bees' proved to be less resistant to disease: they did not last long. [...] The natural enemies of the insect pests, predatory insects such as ladybirds, hoverflies, lacewings and carabid beetles, had long since been exterminated in the farmed landscape. ... [...] Countries put their own interests before those of humankind or those of our shared planet. ...Some said that we had moved into a post-truth world, whatever that meant; the word became so popular that in 2016 the Oxford English Dictionary made it 'word of the year'. ... [...]

...There are no pesticides and chemical fertilizers any more, no factories belching out fumes. This year I was able to show my grand-daughter her first peacock-butterfly - it had been several years since I had seen any butterfly. The tigers, rhinos, pandas, gorillas and elephants are all long gone, now nothing more than mythical beasts, storybook creatures that she will never see, but perhaps, in time, she will live to see the bees return ?" - Goulson: Silent Earth ( 2021; p.217, 218-9, 220, 222, 225.)

"...approach to rejigging the subsidy system [...currently, in uses at agricultures,] that should be considered by governments everywhere should be to introduce pesticide and fertilizer taxes. Both pesticides and fertilizers pollute and damage the environment, and it seems reasonable that the farmer using them should pay for this. ... Norway and Denmark have introduced pesticide taxes, levied at the point of sale of pesticides to farmers, and these have successfully reduced pesticide use. The Danish system is based on applying higher taxes to the more toxic and persistent chemicals, which seems eminently reasonable." ; "Governments could also consider more taxes on particularly unhealthy foodstuffs, like the existing 'sugar tax' currently levied on soft drinks in the UK. One could reasonable propose extending this to cover any highly processed food of little nutritional value, although that might end up including most of the food on sale in your local supermarket." (Goulson; p. 273, 275)

"Along with aerial mobility comes coexistence with ambient winds. ..."
; Biomechanics of Insect Flight (Dudley; 2002)

"Plastic only came into mass consumer use in the 1950s, but in the Pacific Garbage Patch it is already thought to be more common than plankton." ;
"... Since the China ban [ie, means post 2017-], America's plastic waste has become a global hot potato, ping-ponging from country to country.", ; from the Guardian-article , 'Where does your plastic go ? Global investigation... ' [viewed: 08.10.21]

“...As the preceding MIS 6 [MIS = Marine Isotope Stages] glacial ended, temperatures rose rapidly, peaking around 123 ka as the sub-stage MIS 5e, known as the Eemian [Italics added.]. This remains – so far - the warmest period hominins experienced across Eurasia. It lasted roughly 10,000 years, short on geological scales but equivalent to some 500 generations.
So what was this balmy world like ? At least early on,...Earth's position to sun was slightly different... average temperatures 2 to 4 C higher, with palpable effects. ...Most dramatically, melting polar caps and glaciers sent sea level rise up some 8m (25ft).

As it got hotter and hotter, beaches crept higher and a kaleidoscope of tree species replaced each other. Pollen records show that birch and pine gave way to oak-rich woodland, speckled by elm, hazel, yew and linden, eventually maturing into dense hornbeam forest. These lasted until the arrival of spruce, fir and pine, heralding the start of the succeeding MIS 5d cooler stadial....”,
“As resolution in palaeo-climate and environmental research has increased, it's been discovered that even the Eemian contained brief but drastic climate change. The warmest temperatures and highest sea levels existed for just 4 millenia between 126 and 122 until gradual cooling began, but this was calm before the storm. What came next is known as the Late Eemian Aridity Pulse (LEAP) [italics added] and was a time of crisis. ... Drastic loss of vegetation led to huge soil erosion and massive dust storms [italics added] tore through the air. Other sources record this immense climate shock. ... : it was so dry, bushfires were igniting.”

; “Visions of Neanderthals struggling through deep snow, breath puffing in frozen air, have been remarkably persistent since their discovery. Yet our ice age blinkers have concealed their innate adaptability [italics added]. Polar desert was never their true home, ...Mostly they...appear to have been most successful in more temperate climes, ...
Even cold-adapted animals such as woolly mammoths were ecologically malleable, originating during the MIS 6 glacial but found later alongside warm-loving straight-tusked forest elephants. It's our own pigeon-holing tendencies that limit Neanderthals to glacial worlds, when the reality is far more diverse. ...” ; (Sykes, Rebecca Wragg) : Kindred. Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art. (2020 ; p. 85-6,89; 95)

"...'Perhaps you imagine that they freed their slaves in the same that in Christian countries freed their serfs, by allowing them to settle on the land ? Oh no! The Jamaican negroes are less wretched than the English factory worker or the Irish peasant because the fruits of their labour are more valuable, but they are not more free ; they have been turned into proletarians on the English model; they are forbidden to own land; they are forced to pay an exorbitant rent for the cabins they live in; they contribute to the upkeep of the roads by forced labour and taxes. White officials punish them for stealing banana in the same way that the English Justices of Peace punish men for stealing a handful of potatoes - with the lash. ... The abolition of arbitrary punishment has unquestionably improved the slave's lot; but this improvement which will bring about an increase in the population, is calculated to serve the interests of the landed proprietors as well.' 'I see that this form of emancipation is one of those acts of apparent generosity which turn out entirely to the advantage of their authors - but do not forget that the government devoted the sum of twenty million pounds to this measure.'
'The Government ministers who advocated this form of emancipation were assured of the support of English commercial interests because the colonial landowners were indebted to London financiers to the tune of two-thirds of the value of their properties and the only way they could afford to free their slaves was if the government paid them compensation. A much more economical - and beneficial - system was suggested whereby the slaves would be freed gradually, and their freedom paid for with the labour of those waiting to be freed; this would also have ensured that the emancipated slaves received moral instruction and a period apprenticeship. But the Government could never have got this system accepted, because only by liberating all the slaves simultaneously and paying compensation could it guarantee that the English creditors would recover their money.'
"So the great act of humanity that the English have boasted about for thirty years was nothing but a carefully calculated financial transaction - and for the thirty years the whole of Europe has been deceived ! The fraudulence of the honourable members of the English Parliament has persuaded us to put our trust in the philanthropy and altruism of a pack of traders ! ... "

; "In France, and any country which prides itself on being civilised, the most honoured of living creatures is woman. In England, it is the horse; in these fortunate islands, the horse is king, and takes precedence not only over woman, but over man as well.
... Here I expect to find myself in opposition to an accepted opinion, but... I must say that I find the English horse supremely unattractive. The horse is indisputably the one of the finest animals in creation, but domesticity has as good as destroyed the beauty of its live, and it is the English more than any other people who are responsible for interfering with its natural grace. Take note, gentlemen I speak as an artist, ... Nobody who sees these English racehorses with their long, thin, narrow bodies, their lean flanks, their disproportionately long legs, their outstretched necks and thrusting heads, sniffing the air like great hunting dogs; nobody who sees their habitual sad, dull, stupid expressions, however rudimentary his instinct for harmony and line, can refrain from saying, 'This is downright ugly animal!' "

;
"Fifty years ago the people of France were burning down the cháteaux, and twenty times over the armed might of Europe was powerless to prevent the triumph of their cause. Oh, lords! Repent, fear the vengeance of the people, appease their wrath, and be mindful of the saying, as old as the world; 'Vox populi, Vox Dei!'
; - Flora Tristan: The London Journal.The aristocracy and the Working Class of England [1842] - from 1982-transl (Hawkes), p. 160, 161.; 178, 183.; 304.
; ...I should suppose that opinions/view Tristan brought aforth in an above quoted 'discussion' (on slavery's ending, the 'mercyful' traders...), were rather well known amongst keen observers and followers by the time, 1840s. As well, noticeably she puts in that 'conversation' - 'w. the friend', on whom she offers no other specifications - also how the English commercial 'ventures'/trade were already directing the foreign (colonial) production 'shifted' on to it's Indian possessions. And, how consequently then, the West Indian manufacture already was at it's decline. (In expl.; Tristan also cites quite lenghty at her notes, the 'Marshal Pillet' - by 1815-writing 'bout [how, 'Europe'], "...will, a few years hence, be able to obtain all the sugar and coffee she needs at prices much lower than any the West Indies can offer." [as] "In India they cost little more to produce than do most common garden vegetables, because the cost of labour is nothing, ...even less compared with the costs in the West Indies,..." etc.)
; As well, she (fx, also) cites Pillet's remarks that the loss from England's American colonies having influenced the described.

...While not going very far in it's (by then) precedent histories, the 'discussion' of course, still bears some interest. ; Cons for, fx, how those World trade 'mechanisms', originated at the colonial era. And how, by today are known to still play a part, ao, in the increase from present ecologic havoc. And also of historically, even while (that) lacks some for the specifics to it's pre-1800ian colonial 'background'. ..but already well lots on here, at this place.

"The scramble for Africa, and the most active period of colonization, lasted less than a century. These events, which involved the greater part of the African continent, occurred between the late nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. Although in African history the colonial experience represents but a brief moment from the perspective of today, this moment is still charged and controversial, ... One might think that this new historical form has meant, from its origins, the negation of two contradictory myths; namely, the 'Hobbesian picture of a pre-European Africa, in which there was no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continued fear, and danger of violent death' ; and 'the Rousseauian picture of an African golden age of perfect liberty, equality and fraternity' (Hodgkin, 1957; 174-5.)
Although generalizations are of course dangerous, colonialism and colonization basically mean organization, arrangement. ..." ;
"... The outcome of these policies was the process of underdevelopment initiated everywhere colonialism occurred. First, the capitalist world system is such that parts of the system always develop at the expence of the other parts, either by trade or by the transfer of surpluses. Second, the underdevelopment of dependencies is not only an absence of development, but also and organizational structure created under colonialism by bringing non-Western territory into the capitalist world. Third, despite their economic potential, dependencies lack the structural capacity for autonomy and sustained growth, since their economic fate is largely determined by the developed countries. ...." (Mudimbe) ; The Invention of Africa Gnosis, philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. ('African systems of thought' - Brit. Lib. Catlog. Publication Data.), (1988; p. 1, 3.)

"As the consequence of what he had seen and analysed early in his expedition, Humboldt was able to argue, in his Geography of Plants, that cutting down forests causes climate change. His delineation of the consequences of deforestation... and the damage caused by Europe's exploitation of its tropical colonies... can be considered important early steps in the field of environmental science."
; (Rebok; 2014) - Humboldt and Jefferson.
A Transatlantic Friendship of the Enlightenment

"The belief in life after death and the desire for earthly happiness are not irreconcilable, but they pull in opposite directions." (Orwell) ; (on) 'The Christian Reformers' (1946)

"In summary, therefore, taking into account all of the above, the situation seems to be that the Denisovan signal remains at a constant and fairly low level throughout present-day indigenous populations so far sequenced in both North and South America. The Australasian signal, by contrast, is definitely and notably much stronger among populations in the Amazon, such as the Surui, and much weaker among other Native Americans such as ... While never reaching the high levels found among Amazonian populations, the signal among Aleutian Islanders and Athabascans is relatively stronger than in other Native North American groups and relatively stronger in Aleutian Islanders than it is in Athabascans - ..."
; "...the most peculiar character of the signal, so clearly present in South America yet 'somehow leaping over all North America in a single bound.'
For the purposes of my own quest, however, that anomalous, unexplained signal had the effect of opening up a new and fruitful avenue of inquiry. With the archetypically North American Clovis culture now known to have South American genetic roots, it was becoming increasingly obvious that to explore the mysteries of one half of the megacontinent I could not be oblivious to what had happened in the other half."
; "... Our entire understanding of this vast region is being transformed by new discoveries and, indeed, as we've seen, the notion of complex societies in the pre-Columbian Amazon is no longer anathema to archaeologists, some of whom now even dare to describe these societies as 'civilizations.'" (Hancock; 2019) : America Before : The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization (; p. 128 ; 133 ; 212.)

; "In summary, therefore, just 3 years of research between 2009 and 2012 witnessed a profound change in archaeological understanding of the geoglyphs of the southwestern Amazon. Previously they'd been thought to be just 750 years old; now, without any real attention being drawn to implications, they'd become 2,000 years old. To put this in context, an error and subsequent correction on a similar scale would certainly attract a great deal of attention if it concerned Western architecture - indeed it would be like discovering that the great gothic cathedrals of Europe such as Chartres and York Minster were not, in fact, works of the late medieval period but had actually been built by the Romans. What are we to conclude concerning mistakes of such magnitude, and ... similarly at Serpent Mound in Ohio, where in 2018 a date of around AD 1000 was still being touted in official notices despite firm C-14 evidence, on the public record since 2014, that the structure is more than 1,000 years older than that? ... In particular, I am not persuaded by the new consensus that the geoglyphs of the southwestern Amazon are 2,000 years old. Other C-14 dates mentioned in the 2012 report already hint at a more complicated picture." ; (Hancock; p. 194.)

"In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics - the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of the reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other - the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. ... ", "...The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. This is it's illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star wars. ...Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. ... The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. ...The cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. ...The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offpsring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential." ; (Haraway, Donna) : 'A cyborg manifesto', on Simians, Cyborgs, and Women The Reinvention of Nature (1991 ; p. 150, 151.) ; (an earlier version of the text is said originate for y.1983.)

"Meat and dairy products from industrial farms have especially large water footprints due to the water-intensive feed required to raise the animals. The amount of water used in producing a kilo of beef would keep a person in daily baths for three months. A kilo of chicken takes twenty-four bathtubs of water.
Feeding animals on grass can hugely reduce the toll on rivers and underground water surfaces. Rearing them on factory farms where they are fed grain is over fifty times more water-intensive. ..."
;
"...The Turner's make much of their credentials for feeding their cattle only grass, so I ... asked if they ever fed cows concentrates like corn, soya or other grains.
'Never,' they said in unison.
'Not a single grain?'
'Never,' they insisted. 'Its not a natural diet for the animal and they're not particularly efficient at converting it to meat. It can cause stress and pressure on the animal, taking them beyond their natural capacity to cope, which has impact on their welfare. The quality of the meat and milk too is far better when they're not on concentrates.'
[...]
They decided to set up their own 'Pasture for Life' label to distinguish...from...much looser understanding for terms such as grass-fed: ... Fed primarily on grass from the field is a step in the right direction, of course, but not the same as solely on grass. Studies have shown that even small amounts of grain fed to an animal at the end of her life can have a big negative impact on the quality of the eventual food."
(Lymbery, Philip) : Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were (2017); of chpts 14; 15 ('Homo Sapiens'; 'Living Landscapes' - in the first 'section' from, italics was added by us.)

" ('They Die Piece by Piece') ; In 2001, the Washington Post printed an article... how, though cattle were supposed to be dead before reaching the cutting room, this was often not the reality. ... slaughterhouse worker who'd spent twenty years as a 'second legger' - cutting hocks of carcasses sped past at the rate of 309 per hour - described the process to Warrick: 'They blink. They make noises, he said softly. 'The head moves, the eyes are wide and looking around.' ... On bad days, he says, dozens of animals reached the station clearly alive and conscious. Some would survive as far as the tail cutter, the belly ripper, the hide puller. 'They die,' said Moreno, 'piece by piece.' "
;

"(Wittnessing the Zeitgeist) Despite the extensive reach of carnivism, there is reason to believe that the system will destabilize, and the timing is ripe to push for transformation. There are several reasons that challenging carnism is timely: increased awareness of the environmental crisis, a growing concern with animal welfare, the increasing credibility and popularity of vegetarinism, and the unequaled availability of information on both carnism and vegetarinism. Widescale meat production is a leading cause of environmental destruction. Methane gasses emitted from thousands of pounds of manure deplete the ozone layer. Toxic runoff from tons of chemicals used on the animals - synthetic hormones, antibiotics, pesticides and fungicides - pollute the air and waterways. Thousands of acres of woodlands are clear-cut to allow for the planting of food crops, leading to topsoil erosion and deforestation. More fresh water is usurped from reservoir than can be replenished. And chemical fertilizers seep into rivers and streams, enabling the proliferation of microorganisms that destroy aquatic life. Leading scientists agree that the system of mass meat production cannot continue without causing a breakdown of the ecosystem. ...",
[...]
" A final reason that the timing is ripe to challenge carnism is that the primary defense of the system, invisibility, has been weakening. It is becoming increasingly difficult for carnistic industries to hide their secrets from the public; the animal agribusinesses that depend on controlling information to sustain the myths of meat are now challenged by a ubiquituous, unregulated information source: the internet. Carnism is like the Wizard of Oz: once the curtain is pulled back from the system, its power virtually disappears." ; (Joy; 2010) - Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows : An Introduction to Carnism (; p. 52-53; 144-6.)

"...In a truly symbolic gesture that television cameras often capture during the inauguration of a new president, the aide carrying a football visibly shifts his gaze from the departing president to the new one at the moment of his swearing in. That shift signifies not only that the new president has acquired the full authority of his office but also that the existence of a civilian commander in chief of the nuclear forces of the United States - with, supposedly, exclusive control of these almost godlike powers of destruction - must not be and has not been interrupted for a single moment.

Now I was hearing this impression and all the official statements that led to it were false. ... "
,
"It seemed obvious once I thought about it. The public's impression of exclusively presidential or even high-level military control, which I'd shared up until that moment, could not be valid. That applied all the more to the notion that only the president himself could 'push the button.' Could a single assassin's bullet, or temporary separation of the 'football'... (as has for several times, including, ...the shooting of President Reagan) open a window of total inability to respond to a nuclear attack?
Not really. The theoretical device... with its supposedly unique authorization codes, has always been exactly that theater - essentially a hoax. Whatever the public declarations to the contrary, there has to be delegation of authority and capability to launch retaliatory strikes, not only to officials outside the Oval Office but outside Washington too, or there would be no real basis for nuclear deterrence."
;
"I thought I was discovering a parochial bias in the Pacific Command that should be brought to the attention of planners and decision makers at the national level. I was wrong. It was very next year that I learned, in the Pentagon, that President Eisenhower and the Joint Chiefs of Staff shared the admiral's views entirely. ...
[...]
Out of a list of tens of thousands of targets throughout the Sino-Soviet bloc that intelligence had identified as important, the Pentagon ordered lower levels to make plans to hit around a thousand of the most valuable of these in the case of general war with the Communistic bloc. ...
... - the planners were doing extermely intricate calculations, mostly by hand, to devise routes into the target timed so that the planes wouldn't be blown out of the air by nearby explosions. (In this era, nuclear warheads were to be delivered primarily by planes. When, decades later, delivery systems mostly switched over to missiles, planners discovered the same problem: the blast from one missile would knock other missiles of course or destroy them.) They were dealing with thousands of targets with multiple weapons on most of them, so they had plans for the planes to weave through a virtual minefield of detonations, timing it perfectly to miss an explosion on this side of the plane, and then one on the other, on and on.
[...]
How did the planners deal with the fact that you wouldn't even know which way the wind would be blowing on the various paths to the targets at the actual time of the Execute order? ...

I pointed these two problems to a planner once. 'Yes. I've thought of these problems before,' he said.
'Well, doesn't that make you question the value of making all these calculations and plans?'
'These men are risking their lives flying out there. We've got to do what we can to save their lives.'
'But it doesn't seem that this plan has any chance to save any lives at all. It would save lives only if the execution followed the plan down to the second, and there's not even the remotest possibility of that happening.'
'Well, we're ordered to make these calculations, so that's what we'll do.' " [... ; For a side-mention: acc the graph Ellsmere provides on his book's Introduction, the number total deaths from direct after or within six Months, in the imagined nuclear war against Soviet Union and China, solely in those countries, was at that time estimated to raise, ca, from 275 to 325 Million victims. ; p. 2-3.]
,
"...Few people had access to more than a couple of levels of nuclear planning , and those who did didn't take the time to review far lower level plans or to observe actual implementation provisions in the field. They left these tasks to lower-level commanders (who generally didn't have access to the higher-level plans.)
But... As I came to see the highest-level planning in the Pentagon - not available at PACOM [ie; 'Pacific Command'] and not supposed to be seen by civilian offials - the president and CINCSAC ['Commander in Chief, Strategic Air Command'] were no more inclined than the Pacific Command to contemplate a war with Russia alone that spared the Chinese."
"(Ellsberg) : The Doomsday Machine. Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (2017; p. 68,69 ; 85-6, 87, 89 - the italics, by Ellsberg.)

"In 1961 there were about seventeen hundred SAC [Strategic Air Command] bombers, including over six hundred B-52s and a thousand B-47s. In the bomb bays of the SAC planes were thousands thermonuclear bombs much larger than those I had seen in Okinawa. Many were from five to twenty-five megatons in yield. Each twenty-five-megaton bomb - with 1,250 times the yield of the fission bomb that destroyed Nagasaki - was the equivalent of twenty-five million tons of TNT, or over twelve times the total bomb tonnage we dropped in World War II. Within the arsenal there were some five hundred bombs with an explosive power of twenty-five megatons. Each of these warheads had more firepower than all the bombs and shells exploded in all the wars of human history.
[...]
...There were at least one warhead allocated for every city of 25,000 people or more in the Soviet Union. ...
In 1960-61 it was in reality quite possible - though USAF and CIA 'missile gap' estimates implied otherwise - that not a single nuclear warhead would land on U.S. territory after such an American first strike. Worldwide fallout from our own strikes would certainly kill Americans, but over so long a time, with radioactivity decaying in the atmosphere on the way over and deaths from cancer long-delayed, that the increase in mortality in any one year might not be statistically perceptible. But our Western European allies in NATO would be quickly annihilated twice over: first from the mobile Soviet medium-range missiles and tactical bombers targeted on them, which our first strike couldn't find and destroy reliably, and second from the close-in fallout from our own nuclear strikes on Soviet bloc territory." ; (Ellsberg 2017: p. 98, 99. The italics - again, Ellsberg's.)
;

"The radars of the Arctic Distant Early Warning Line (DEW Line) had more than once, I soon learned, been fooled by a flock of high-flying geese into warning that Soviet bomber planes were coming toward us over the North Pole. In the pre-ICBM era that still allowed hours in which to discover the error, and meanwhile to get our planes on alert off the ground. But just a year after I joined RAND, the higher-tech radar and computer system Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS), designed to detect incoming ICBMs, in its first week of operation reported that a missile attack was under way. That called for decisions in under fifteen minutes." (; p. 43.)
;

"The body of U.N.Resolution 36/100 declares: 'States and statesmen that resort first to nuclear weapons will be committed the gravest crime against humanity. There will never be any justification or pardon for statesmen who take the decision to be first to use nuclear weapons.' Eighty-two nations voted in favor of this declaration. Forty-one, under heavy pressure from the United States, abstained; nineteen opposed it, including the United States, Israel and most NATO member nations." (; 325)

- ..It being, very difficult, to think of a more important book than Ellsberg's ('The Doomsday Machine') - From the view of the needs for complete (or even from 'partial') nuclear disarmament, of globally, from to finally take place. Most from the tellings are actually so urgent that one does not suspect the book wouldn't been read, widely and w. keen learnings from. ; And (these) few selections (on here, above/following), only offer some 'tips from the iceberg', all in all. - Indeed, no other question at the 'humanity's 'failings' would've to represent itself as so urgent for being solved. Or even for to be 'of minimized'. (Even as an expression, that too, plainly does sound from...horrifying.) ; Indeed - such as Snowden does write on books back cover, this history: '...reaches deep into the safe to reveal the United States government's mad plan for "a hundred holocausts. ...is an urgent warning and a call to arms to a public... habituated to the idea that the means of our extinction will forever be on hair-trigger alert." ; Read it through.

"...It should be commonly recognized that no stake whatever, no cause, no principle, no consideration of honor or obligation or prestige or maintaining leadership in current alliances - still less ...can justify maintaining any risk whatever of causing the near extinction of human and other animal life on this planet.

Omnicide - threatened, prepared, or carried out - is flatly illegitimate, unacceptable, as an instrument of national policy; Indeed, it cannot be regarded as anything less than criminal, immoral, evil. In the light of recent scientific findings, of which the publics of the world and even their leaders are still almost entirely unaware, that risk is implicit in the nuclear planning, posture, readiness, and threats of the two superpowers. That is intolerable. It must be changed, and that change can't come too soon.

The steps I have indicatd are only a beginning toward the ultimate delegitimation of nuclear weapons and nuclear threats. ..." (p. 347. ; the Italics - again Ellsberg's)

"Citizenship was explicitly juridically marked for 'whites only' through a litany of governmental actions from Fugitive Slace Act to the Chinese Exclusion Act. Each of these domestic moves signaled a desire to build an American nation in which only whites were citizens and national expansion, protectionism, and indigenous industry were federal priorities. ... Overtly and inferentially racist claims in public culture shaped the nation's understandings of who ought to be protected by intellectual property law and who ought to have access to the American Dream, which in turn shaped copyrights, patents, and trademarks.
[...]
I am less interested in demarcating specific changes in the period from the late 1700s to the mid 1800s with respect to race, citizenship and intellectual property law than I am establishing that despite the considerable racial democratization of creatorship that occurred from the 1830s onward, the 'inner energy,' ... of intellectual property law and political economy remained white and continuously racially exclusionary. ...Copyright discourse treated creativity as a raced endeavor through the continual invocation and bounding of the concept of imagination. Patent discourse treated innovation in the same way through its raced conceptions of human progress. And trademark discourse, which increased rapidly as the nation's industrial economy grew, supported intellectual property law as racial project by protecting racist images as product identifiers."
;
"More specifically, the concept of true imagination operated as a vehicle for making raced judgements about the nature of creativity. Even when authors of color won their copyright cases, they were doing so through a doctrinal lens implicated by citizenship that prefigured them as lacking creative capacity. ...
Copyright's protectionist tendencies can be read as moves to police belonging, particularly through xenophobic attachment to whiteness. ...",
"... As Rayvon Fouché and Sharra Vestral argue, '[E]ven into the mid-twentieth century, racial segregationists and women's rights opponents used the paucity of patents by women and people of color as evidence of their inability to think creatively and contribute to the evolving technological nation.' This catch-22 severely and cruelly constrained the manner in which people of color could push for equal rights in the area of intellectual property ...
... Patents are certainly artifacts of technological society. They are also - as Fouché and Vostral, among others - demonstrate artifacts of a racialized society. Brian Frye's recent essay 'Invention of a Slave' notes how decisions to patent or not to patent the inventions of enslaved persons implicated larger conversations about slavery, abolition and territoriality in the nation. For instance, protecting the inventions of enslaved persons could be read as an endorsement of abolition, upsetting the balance between slave states and free states in the young nation." ; (Anjali Vats) : The Color of Creatorship. Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans (2020 ; p. 28-9; 31, 33.)

"From the 1960s on, creatorship evolved into an increasingly important imagined engine for national growth, one that also stoked the fires of economic protectionism, xenophobic nationalism, military adventurism, and neocolonial extraction. Copyright, trademark, and patent law evolved not in the spirit of radical equality espoused by the civil rights movement but from a perpetrator perspective, which protected white property interests in knowledge while disciplining people of color for their creatorship."
; "...With the expansion of GATT and the eventual creation of the WTO, ... A general lack of reflectiveness - or perhaps lack of interest - with respect to intellectual property's effects on systemic racial inequality combined with discourses about Black criminality, obscenity, originality, expertise, citizenship, and national identity in ways that entrenched white supremacist regime of knowledge ownership.
The year 1966 marked an important turn in intellectual property's commitments to racial liberalism. That year, Jack Valenti, former aide to president Lyndon Johnson, became president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Valenti's tenure was notable not only because it brought politics and the film industry together but also because it heralded the beginning of important policy and rhetorical changes in regulating intellectual properties, many of which were deeply racialized and sentimentalized in the service of economic nationalism.
The beginning of Valenti's tenure coincided with a number of evolutions in political economy and intellectual property rights. ...While nationalistic xenophobia persisted, the once protectionist impulses of those protecting intellectual property law evolved into a desire to profit from the export of domestic products, through intellectual property maximalism. ..."
; "...Claims that America had entered an era of colorblindness did not halt the racialization or (neo)colonization of knowledge production."
(Vats) : p. 68; 69-70; 71.

"Finally, the silencing of the Haitian Revolution also fit the relegation to an historical backburner of the three themes to which it was linked: racism,slavery, and colonialism. ..." ; "This corpus has taught generations of readers that the period from 1776 to 1843 should properly be called 'The Age of Revolutions.' ...
In the United States, for example, with the notable exceptions of Henry Adams and W.E.B. Du Bois, few major writers conceded any significance to the Haitian Revolution in their historical writings up to the 1970s. ... Likewise, historians of Poland have paid little attention to the five thousand Poles involved in the Saint-Domingue campaigns. The silence also persists in England in spite of the fact that British lost upward of sixty thousand men in eight years in an anti-French Caribbean campaign... The Haitian Revolution appears obliquely as part of medical history. The victor is disease, not the Haitians. The Penguin Dictionary of Modern History, a mass circulation pocket encyclopedia that covers the period from 1789 to 1945, has neither Saint-Domingue nor Haiti in its entries. Likewise, historian Eric Hobsbawm, one of the best analysts of this era, managed to write a book entitled The Age of Revolutions, 1789-1843, in which the Haitian Revolution scarcely appears. [...]"
; (Trouillot, Michel Rolph); 'An Unthinkable History. The Haitian Revolution as a Non-Event' - on Haitian History. New Perspectives. (2013; p. 46, 47)

"The reality, however, is more complex. For while drones make it easier to kill some bad guys, they also make it easier to go to war.
[...]
So Congress was able to keep allocating money for war, year after year, against the wishes of the majority.
...The public is barely even aware of these conflicts. It's like a low-grade fever that the body politic has learned to live with and basically ignores."
(Medea Benjamin) ; on Drone Warfare. Killing by Remote Control (2013; p. 150-2.)

"...Even the most rudimentary perusal of a handful of contemporary articles and books that mention nineteenth-century Haitian historical writing will reveal uncritical references (without any sense of irony and even tinged with just a hint of self-righteousness) to 'noirist' and 'mulattoist' or 'mulatrist' ideologies, the "mulatto" and "black" versions or 'legends' of history, and pithy references to the biased scholarship of a 'Haitian elite' or 'light-skinned intellectuals.' ...
Is there a reason why we should preface a gloss of Ardouin's works by clarifying that he was a 'mulatto historian,' if we do not also feel it necessary to first note that Jules Michelet was a "white" one? ..." ;
"... The argument that "mulatto" writers associated with Pétion developed the narrative that free people of color were the first authors of the insurrection in Saint-Domingue, for example, is simply not borne out by the evidence. ..., such claims were made as early as the start of the insurrection by nearly all of the French colonists, who, according to Raimond, used this narrative to distract from the real cause of slave rebellions, which was the rampant abuses the slaves had suffered under the colonial yoke. ...", "...The narrative of "mulatto/a" vengeance is a vocabulary, a kind of 'implicit racial grammar' (Stoler, 1995, 12 [ie, this refers/source is: Race and the education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial order of Things]), which underwrites nearly all writing about the Haitian Revolution. ..." ; (Daut, Marlene L.) : Tropics of Haiti. Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865. (2015) ; p. 24-5 ; 27, 29. (Italics at the quoted passages, Daut's.)

"Thinking about the epistemic uncertainty and genocidal imaginings that the life of Louverture evoked in the course of the revolution in Saint-Domingue, per Dubroca, Rigaud, and Edwards, allows Girard to present him in much more cerebral rather than evocative terms of "racial hybridity" as well. Girard writes, 'the inscrutable , towering Louverture was a hard man to befriend; his peculiar position at the juncture of African, Creole, and European influences further isolated him, leaving him a white man in a black man's skin, feared but not loved, alone and lonely' (2011, 25). It is Buscaglia-Salgado, however, who connects interpretations of Louverture's life more directly to the language of "racial hybridity." Buscaglia-Salgado makes the tragedy of Louverture a potent symbol for a vocabulary of "racial mixing":

He owed his authority both to his African father and to this European master ... [...] conciliator and translator, liberator and enforcer, father, brother, and son. Could anyone but the mulatto, in all his subjective disposition to metaphoricity, wear so many disguises? (206-07 [,of a 2003-book.])

The 'mulatto' as a pervasive icon of 'social camouflage' and 'agent provocateur of social instability' (Buscaglia-Salgado, 183, 184), ...suggest across great divide of time, ...examples of the anxiousness of revolutionary discourse about Haiti. ...
...It is precisely because the idea of "monstrous hybridity" was so widespread and nearly ubiquitous in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic discourse that it could so easily be repeated in the transatlantic print culture of the Haitian Revolution as an uncontested and even inconsequential fact rather than as a myth or stereotype. The troping upon a which the entire narrative of "mulatto/a" vengeance depends, like mythology, might be considered a form of what Patrick Brantlinger has called 'depoliticized speech' in the sense that it 'treats its subjects as universally accepted, scientifically established, and therefore no longer open to criticism' (168) [...Daut's listed sources seem lack an entry of a book by B.] In an era in which copyright was practically nonexistent and plagiarism did not constitute nearly the intellectual and even legal crime that it does today, the ideas about "race" that we find in various representations of the Haitian Revolution were reproduced, copied and repackaged over and over again to the extent that they not only became accepted as truths, but have become immune to criticism."

;
"...If images of women of color as the very emblems of 'concupiscense' and 'corrupt feminine desire' dominated in the print culture of colonial Saint-Domingue, they are also ever present in the literary history of the Haitian Revolution. There is a distinct connection between the highly sexualized mythology of women of color found in colonial writing from Saint-Domingue and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial European descriptions of these same women as not only degraded and corrupt, but violent and vengeful during the Haitian Revolution.
[...] ...At times in the literary history of the Haitian Revolution, as in much of eighteenth-century naturalist travel writing, all women of color were defined as being capable of inspiring or committing vengeful acts because of their "race." This is because the act of "miscegenation" itself was often viewed as responsible for the internal feelings that would inevitably lead to racialized vengeance.
[...] ...the colonists' obsession with the sexuality of women of color has often served to cover up an anxiety about the possibilities, real or imagined, for these women to transgress colonial authority and contribute to anti-slavery efforts."
; (Daut) - p. 71-2; 200,203, 205. (, Italics - Daut's)

"...What we have begun, I will finish." ; (...Toussaint, on proclamation by 1793. - Acc. to, Hazareesingh, Black Spartacus. The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture., 20...20) ; p. 50.

"... The system vomits men, but in Latin America industry sacrifices labor more than it does in Europe. ...
[...] What the United States set out to achieve for itself, and did achieve, is certainly different. Seven years after their independence, the thirteen colonies had doubled their territory, already extending beyond the Alleghenies to the banks of Mississippi, and four years after that they had forged their unity by creating a common market. Purchase of Louisiana Territory from France in 1803 again doubled the land area; then came Florida and, at mid-century, the invasion and amputation of half of Mexico in the name of 'manifest destiny'. Then the purchase of Alaska and the usurpation of Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. ...
...We are entering times of rebellion and change."
(Eduardo Galeano) ; Open Veins of Latin America. Five Centuries of Pillage of a Continent ('1971/-73'; p. 269, 283)

"...for all the promise of this golden child of climate seemed to have, its course was cut short. Most ages last at least a few million years, but a mere 11,700 years after it began, the Holocene had been declared dead. ...evidence has converged on who killed the Holocene. Culprit: Humans. Date of death: 1950." ;
"Waste is just another word for wealth. ...If we squander this moment of energy wealth, creating heat waste instead of structure, we will all be back in the junkyard soon enough."
(Summer Praetorius) ; 'Dawn of the Heliocene' - Article, at Nautilus (a 'webmag')

"... In 1778 , a law was passed in metropolitan France that required all 'blacks' in the metropole to carry identification card or risk being shipped back to the colonies (Peabody, 1996, 129). The Police des noìrs, as it was known under the ancien régime, was abolished in 1789 after the French Revolution, but was quickly re-established, along with slavery in the colonies, under Napoleon in 1802. (Peabody , 1996, 138). In addition, on May 29, 1802, a new law forbade free people of color from residing in Paris and in June of the same year another law forbade both 'blacks' and 'mulattoes' from even entering the country ...Kadish adds that 'the memory of violence [in Saint Domingue] also produced profound mistrust... abolitionism virtually disappeared in France in the early years of the nineteenth century (Kadish, 1995, 669-70)."
...
"..., much of the transatlantic abolitionist movement could be deemed racistic by today's standards, even though it would be hard to question the commitment to anti-slavery of most its activists. ... As Miller has written of a later moment in the nineteenth century, 'To argue against slavery and the slave trade ... was to be a part of a certain, small elite movement, but to go further and militate against all prejudices based on skin color ... was a far lonelier position' (2008, 51). ..."
; Daut (2015) - p. 245-6, 247-8 (italics, Daut's.)

"Chuck said: God is an indian giver, I don´t trust nothing but the Mississippi River"
Bob Walkenhorst

"In his 1829 Appeal, David Walker, for example, assumed that the 'person' to lead the U.S. equivalent of the Haitian Revolution would be male, because in this time period persons were almost always grammatically referenced as men:

Read the history particularly of Hayti, and see how they were butchered by the whites, and do you take warning. The person whom God shall give you, give him your support and let him go his length, and behold in him the salvation of your God. God will indeed, deliver you through him from deplorable and wretched condition under the Christians of America. I charge you this day before my God to lay no obstacle in his way, but let him go. (23)

Furthermore, and with far more dire implications for women, Walker blamed female slaves and, by extension, all women of color for the lack of revolutionary prowess to be found among the slaves in the United States. Walker told the tale of 'servile' 'black' slave woman who gave in to her 'natural fine feelings' when she helped a white slave-driver escape certain death at the hands of escaped slaves (28, italics in original). Walker concludes:

But I declare the actions of this black woman are really insupportable. For my own part, I cannot think it was any thing but servile deceit, combined with the most gross ignorance: for we must remember that humanity, kindness and the fear of the Lord, does not consist in protecting devils. (29)

Peterson says of Walker's rendition of this story that 'in Walkers text it is the black woman who serves as the emblem of black disunity' (1995, 65). ... For the militant Walker, however, woman's position as a member of the 'gentler sex, naturally more moral, more loving, more caring than men' was not the virtue or ideal that it would appear to be throughout the majority of the early black press (Horton, 55); instead, these gendered distinctions were nothing more than a weakness that made 'black' females obstacles to freedom rather than allies. The characterization of this 'servile' 'black woman' whose innate weepy sentimentality is portrayed..., was part of a broad myth concerning women's (in)ability to participate in the necessarily depersonalized violence of the Revolution. Maria Stewart not only understood this, but dared to refute it." ; (Daut; p. 323-4.) -...Quite so, apparently - It feels not very difficult to think Walker of had shared the particularly eighteenth/nineteenth-centurist masculine 'value-system', and that for reflected on his (black) females blaming example given in text, such as described in above quote.
; ...But, for the more 'multisided' view to it, feels it fair also cite from a bit more of text, on this. Fx, cons that (on Walker's 'Appeal', 1829), the first cited remark - ie, one that contains reference for the Hayti, and the pronounced masculine 'identification' for Walker's imagined 'chosen one', the "saviour" to be supported ("The person whom God shall give you,...") - that said 'declaration' also is then followed w. paragraph showin' well-expressive of his provocative anti-slaverist tone, and also of the religious 'emphasizes' at text (Both often arise forth also elsew. on it, during it's times a highly inflammatory 'pamphlet'): "The whites want slaves, and want us for their slaves, but some of them will curse the day they ever saw us. As true as the sun ever shone in its meridian splendor, my colour will root some of them out of very face of the earth. They shall have enough of making slaves and butchering, and murdering us in the manner which they have. No doubt some may say that I write with bad spirit, and that I being a black, wish these things to occur. Whether I write with a bad or a good spirit, I say if these things do not occur in their proper time, ... I should like to see the white repent paradventure God may have mercy on them, some however, have gone so far their cup must be filled." ; In other words...It's quite interesting how, in unity w. 'pure' 19th centurian manner, Walker's shared 'masculine zeal' seems from relative unproblematically to encontain both the emphasizes from the 'true' christian morality - instead of the proslaverist (and also, 'Northern' US) hypocrasies - and then also for urging his 'colored brethren' to a rebellion - ie, to that widely feared insurrection from the U.S. slaves.
; ...The very next paragraph in text then returns for praising Haitian revolution, but - in the same sentence - as well contains: '...I am sorry to say it, plagued with that scourge of nations, the Catholic religion; but I hope and pray God that she may yet rid herself of it, and adopt in its stead the Protestant faith; also, I hope that she may keep peace within her borders and be united, ...' ' ; italics added.

; But, furthermore then remarked, that few paragraphs after (that point) in text follows the 'refutation', or condemning from the current U.S. institutions and a white 'morality' in general, passages underlining that existent hypocrisy of the (white) oppressors, and, also where he somewhat then reproaches his black 'brethens' from their 'tameness'. ...Plus, it then also seems had for referred the Jefferson's at the time, more or less widely read, polygenistic surmises at that Notes on Virginia. ...All of what seems fitted for, somewhat amazingly, in one paragraph, 4-5 pages in lenght. ; In the midst all that (one passage), Walker also returns bit more onto his presented example 'bout the colored woman's "ignorances" (or, for the disaproval from her 'fine feelings', as that seen by Walker); "...The actions of this deceitful and ignorant colored woman, in saving the life of a desperate wretch, whose avarious and cruel object was to drive her, and her companions in miseries, through the country like cattle, to make his fortune on their carcasses, are but too much like that of thousands of our brethren in these states: if any thing is whispered by one, which has any allusion to the melioration of their dreadful condition, they run and tell tyrants, that they may be enabled to keep them the longer in wretches and miseries. Oh! coloured people of these United States, I ask you, in the name of that God who made us, have we, in consequences of our oppression, nearly lost the spirit of man, and, in no very trifling degree, adopted that of brutes? ..."
; ie, Walker also somewhat expands on the meaning he offers by (his) given example, at that particular part the text. ; Thinkin', it not changes the fact that for followed a standard 'gendered distinctions' of the time...a 'typical male'. (But that latter section then also combines together several other main themes on text, in parallel/also 'developed' at his 'Appeal'.) - Quotes from acc. Wilentz's 'David Walkers Appeal' (fp 1965, rev. ed. 1995) ; ...And, now that I got on the 'approximate' manner from commenting on it, might not exceed an 'appetite' if I further cite few lines from Wilentz' 'Introduction', also. Now past the 20 y. later it supposable that of Walker's persona ("mystery), or about his "startling" writing (a'ka Wilentz' termings...), somewhat more may have in the mean time from surfaced - But as I'm not very well aware of the details (I've mostly, only read the pamphlet), the following few selected word having to suffice: "This was once a dangerous pamphlet. ... ' ; '...Only twenty years after Walker published the first edition of his Appeal, the once-marginal slavery question had become the central issue in American politics. A dozen years later, white Americans would go to war against each other - and Walker's prophecy would be fulfilled." (; vii, xxi)

"It is well known that Eric Williams argued that slavery created modern capitalism before modern capitalism killed slavery. ... While he readily admitted that the slave trade, in aggregate, generated seemingly 'small and insignificant' returns in comparison to Dutch and British East India trades, he argued that the profits from British slave trade played a prominent role in the industrialization of England by concentrating capital in the hands of the specific merchants and providing an African vent for British manufactured goods. More critical to his argument, however, was the contention that the Atlantic slave trade also indirectly stimulated the demand for British exports, in light of the fact that the Africans sold to planters created a New World economy and a New World market for British manufacturers. ...
Williams' provocative coupling of the Atlantic slave economy to Britain's industrialization did not go unchallenged and continues to be debated by economic historians. This literature is massive, but the interpretive framework that divides recent scholarshiop was laid out in the 1960s and 1970s. [....'and', fx, Engerman] ...and other neoclassical economists insist that it is the difference between the alternative economy and the historical reality that shows the true contribution of the Atlantic slave trade to economic growth.
[...] ...Key to Capitalism and Slavery argument is the notion that the entire Atlantic network of colonial trade was built on British slaving. It was not simply the capital generated from the African trade, but the profits from British exports and imports, to and from the American colonies. ...
...identifying manufactured exports as the cause of the effect of industrial growth is something O'Brien and Engerman consider indeterminate. ...
[...]
The neoclassical economists are at best unconvinced by the mercantilist arguments in support of Caribbean trade and are apparently suspicious of the claim that Atlantic trade was responsible for the Britain's economic growth. But during the past three decades there have been other business and economic historians who..."
David Beck Ryden: West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 1783-1807. (2009 : p 24-5; 26; 27; 28.)

"Place may be the first of all concepts; it may be the oldest of all words."
N. Scott Momaday

"Allowing the entry of alien species of any kind is the ecological equivalent of Russian roulette. How many cylinders spin in the barrel of the extinction gun? And what precentage of the cylinders are loaded? ...
The accommodation of invasives into novel ecosystems is not cheap. By 2005, the economic costs due to invasive species in the United States alone had risen to an estimated $137 billion annually, ..."

; "A dilemma facing each one of the delegates lies in the division of loyalties. Called by the late ecologist Garrett Hardin the tragedy of the commons, it originates when individuals, or organizations or nations, share a limited resource - in this case global clean air and water - because each will obtain as large a share as allowed by the rules or an even larger share by outright cheating.

A textbook example of the tragedy of the commons is the depletion of living resources in the open sea. Within territorial waters the harvesting of fish and other seafood is weakly regulated in many parts of the world, if at all. ...The downward spiral has been hastened by habitat destruction, spread of invasive species, climate warming, acidification, pollution with toxins, and eutrophication from excess nutrient runoff.
... The numbers of larger food and sports species, such as tuna, swordfish, sharks, and larger groundfish ..., have fallen 90 percent since 1950. Cod, ...have declined by over 99 percent."

; "Not everyone claiming to be a conservationist agrees that biodiversity should be protected intact. A small but growing minority believe that humanity has already changed the living world beyond repair. ...
[...] It has been my impression that those most uncaring and prone to be dismissive of the wildlands and the magnificent biodiversity these lands still shelter are quite often the same people who have had the least personal experience with either. I think it relevant to quote... Alexander Humboldt on this... 'The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world.' "
Wilson, Edward O.
(from) The Half-Earth. Our Planet's Fight for Life (2016 : p. 37,38 ; 67; 71,79.)

"News for today will be the movies for tomorrow"
Arthur Lee

"... It is often said that the human brain is the most complex system known to us in the universe. That is incorrect. The most complex is the individual natural ecosystem, and the collectivity of ecosystems comprising Earth's species-level biodiversity. Each species of plant, animal, fungus, and microorganism is guided by sophisticated decision devices. Each is intricately programmed in its own way to pass with precision through its respective life cycle." ;

"... History without the wildlands is no history at all."
Wilson (2016, On above,) - p. 206; 211.

"Look, a tiny baby-aeroplane, flyin' high in the sky."
Hunch-Muscle Jones

"... Other notable findings of the Report [IPBES - Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services] include:

...More than a third of the world's land surface and nearly 75 percent of freshwater resources are now devoted to crop or livestock production.
...agricultural crop production has increased by about 300 percent since 1970, raw timber harvest has risen by 45 percent and approximately 60 billion tons of renewable and nonrenewable resources...extracted globally every year... nearly doubled since 1980.
Land degradation has reduced the productivity of 23 percent of the global land surface, ...global crops are at risk of pollinator loss and 100-300 million people are at increased risk of floods and hurricanes...
In 2015, 33 percent of marine stocks were being harvested at unsustainable levels; ...
Urban areas have more than doubled since 1990.
Plastic pollution has increased tenfold since 1980, ...
...[The 'varia' of 'wastes', having from...] produced more than 400 ocean 'dead zones, totalling more than 245,000 Km2...
Negative trends in nature will continue to 2050 and beyond in all of the policy scenarios...

...a key element of more sustainable future policies is the evolution of global financial and economic systems to build a global sustainable economy, steering away from the current limited paradigm of economic growth."
Strange Sounds
- article by 29.5.2019: "Environmental degradation and Species decline is deadly serious: Nature's dangerous decline 'unprecented' and species extinction rates 'accelerating' " ; (Italics - added on this by us ;bold - as on the article.)

"Reading always beneficial."
Jörn Donner

"The ecological effects of this regional deforestation were profound, extending even to the climate itself. Although clearing changed little or nothing about the larger atmospheric movements of the wind, clouds or rain, it brought substantial changes at ground level in the way ecological communities experienced atmospheric phenomena. Microclimates, hydrology, and soil mechanics were all altered by the clearing process. It is difficult to quantify these changes with any precision, given the data are available to us: ...
Most New England naturalists agreed by the 1790s that deforestation and agricultural cultivation had the effect of warming and drying the soil, making the surface land hotter in summer and colder in winter. Temperatures in general fluctuated more widely without the moderating effects of the forest canopy to shade the ground and protect it from the winds. ..." ; "... If seasons were defined as much by an ecosystem's cycle of biological rhythms as by the movement of winds and storms, then on one special but important sense destroying the forest changed the very seasons themselves."
(Cronon, William) ; Changes in the Land (1983 ; 122, 123.)

"... Moving away from traditional accounts of Puritanism as the exceptional origin point for US culture, in the past decade scholars have offered a more nuanced portrait of the nation's religious landscape and worked to better situate that landscape in a global frame. Such work has been deeply intertwined with scholarship addressing the parameters of secularism and its complex relationships with (rather than simple opposition to) religion. It has explored the many division within American Protestantism, the role of Catholicism and Judaism in the hemisphere, the United States' complex and varied engagements with Islam, and the fraught relationships between slavery and religion. ...issues as diverse as evangelism, trade policies, national expansion, and scientific endeavor. ..." ; "...As Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett's work [ie: Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas (2014)] has shown, the western hemisphere operated as both a site of religious desire in the colonial era, as sects competed for dominance within it, and as a space of religious change, as European colonists adapted to meet the demands of a 'New World'. ... From the earliest Spanish incursions into the region to later voyages by the English, European colonial efforts were couched in religious rhetoric and often configured as efforts to spread Christianity - Catholic or Protestant - to the furthest corners of the earth. ... [survival, of] first Protestantism... then Puritanism... [was] depicted as the engine driving settlers across the Atlantic, while the conversion of Native populations was offered to as the force that kept them in the Americas once they arrived. This rhetoric of religious imperative persisted even as settler colonists engaged in genocidal conflicts over land and introduced African slavery into the hemisphere. The notion that American settlement marked the fulfillment of a divine order, in other words, justified all manner of colonial horrors.
... The gap between intent and interpretation, Guyatt demonstrates [Providence and the invention of the United States, 1607-1876 (2007)], has produced a structure in which atrocities could be justified by recourse to providential history. This is especially clear in the context of Indian Removal and genocide, as well as New World slavery. ..." (Fenton) : Old Canaan in a New World. Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel [2020]; p. 12-13; 13-14.

"De Coincidentia Oppositorum"
Nicolaus Cusanus
(as claimed by biographer)

"Scientists estimate the contaminated area will not be safe for 24,000 years, give or take a thousand."
; ...sentence/lines of the Guardian-article by Kim Wilsher, [...16.09.19...] on the Chernobyl-miniseries (and, on it's 'concealments' not always adequate from revealed...)

"In Cooper's novel, bee hunting establishes a colonial geometry that both requires and produces the disappearance of Native peoples. ...
[...]
...Bees and Native peoples alike exist in Cooper's text at the vanishing point, forever receding into distance, only to be further chased by those laying claim to their dwellings. ..."
; "The honeybee is not indigenous to the Americas. There is archeological evidence [that, the honeybee]...is recent addition to the western hemisphere, having arrived with settler colonists in the seventeenth century. ...
Bees from England thrived in North America, probably because they were already accustomed to cold and shifting temperatures, especially after weeks at sea [I slightly wonder how reliable this last claim is (,meaning the last sentence)...While I find no else to criticize about this - in the ecological literatures it's common described a historical 'issue'; The described changes on the N.American 'landscape' btw, ca, 1600-1900, and cultural 'thematics' which followed, or 'accompied' that process.] The American landscape provided an excellent supply of food and shelter for bees: there were ample opportunities to feed on local flora, and new swarms could make homes in the hollow trees that were ubiquitous in the continent's vast forestlands. In these favorable conditions the honeybee acclimated quickly and spread throughout the hemisphere. Honey became the popular sweetener not only for colonists but also among existing populations. ... The honeybee thus had a sudden and lasting impact on both the physical and the social landscapes of the Americas.
...bee and its hive long have stood as potent symbols for human modes of social order and sovereignty. ... Charles Butler's 1609 work, The feminine monarchie, a paean to the late Queen Elisabeth I, describes bees as living 'under the government of one Monarch, of whom above al [sic] things they have principal care and respect, loving, reverencing and obeying her in al things.'
The queen was not the only appealing bee in the period: ... the drone ... stood as a sign for everythig from beggars to sick people to, eventually, colonists. The drones forced exit from the hive at the beginning of winter (a sentence of death by exile) seemed a harsh but necessary warning to unproductive members of society. [Etc...]" - Fenton [2020] (p. 142, 143 ; 145-7.)

"Industrial infrastructure can be taken away in any moment given and people should be capable to steal parts of it to keep machines rolling in the ruins of destroyed society."
Lee Felsenstein

"Federal and tribal government blood rules such as 'blood quantum' have helped to constitute unique formations of the Indian and the tribe for more than a century. Where the federal policy project of the nineteenth century was to detribalize, what has happened in effect is a rearticulated tribalization of Native American in blood fractions and through bloodlines. A key mechanism meant to dilute Indians out of existence has reconfigured them and, in the particular form of lineal descent, propagates them. If the material properties of blood - the red fluid itself - are no longer legitimate for the study of race, symbolic blood remains very much at play in twenty-first-century sociopolitical formations of the Indian. ...

For much of human history, actual and symbolic blood permeated discussions about and experiences in the social and political realms. ... Blood was let flow for medical and religious reasons, in tortureous executions in some lands and eras, in sacrifices in others. Nonhuman animals were butchered and hung in the open, and their blood was drunk raw or cooked. In what is today western Europe, during the rise of the medical sciences, there were live human dissections of criminals sentenced to death. Menstruating women, considered both taboo and powerful, preoccupied people around the world. ... menstural blood also nourished. It represented fecundity and has been used as fertilizer. Blood signified moral and physical purity and social solidarity. The color and condition of blood preoccupied the minds of thinkers and represented the essence of life and personhood. Some believed it to be 'the seat of the soul.' ...

Against a backdrop in which blood signifies contamination and purity, ... race emerged as a tool for the state and for science to categorize and trade in human bodies and body parts. Blood types illustrate the point. When ABO blood types were uncovered, in 1900, they were investigated by scientists as indicative of race. ...Nearly all populations exhibit all three blood types, A, B, and O, but proportions of each blood type within different populations differ, sometimes dramatically. ...

...Marks writes that research that attempted to track race to blood group neglected 'the fact that blood' is a metaphor for heredity, not heredity itself."
; (Tallbear) : Native American DNA. Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of the Genetic Science (2013) ; p. 47-8 (italics, Tallbear's)

"...Natural resources, including both black bodies and labor and Native American land and resources, constituted important forms of property in earlier centuries that drove nation-state's civilizing project. In our twenty-first century 'knowledge society,' ... ... Both DNA and the knowledge produced of it constitute important forms of property today and drive the current civilizing project. ..." ;
"... Both law and the biosciences then confront the same fundamental question; what constitutes the 'members of the same group' for the purpose of understanding the transfer of properties? In law one must determine who is a group member in order to determine who inherits material property. In the biosciences, the order of cause and effect is reversed. Who inherits biological property determines who is a group member.

Paralleling white-supremacist law and presaging twenty-first-century biotechnoscientific claims, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropological theories - Lewis Henry Morgan's theory of cultural evolution being exemplary - facilitated anthropologists' claiming as their inheritance (and the inheritance of the nation) Native American material and cultural patrimony. ... Thus, the 'institutions, arts, inventions and practical experience' of the indians formed 'part of the human record,' and as peoples the Indians possessed 'a high and special value reaching far beyond the Indian race itself.' The (white) human sciences needed to study american indian in order to progress and, as Morgan argued, in order to 'recover some portion of the lost history of our own race.'
[...]
In addition to aiding claims to Native American patrimony, the (potential) absorbtion of 'red' into the white body affected another key shift in U.S. history. ...it helped to consolidate the black/white national binary, ... Indeed, Native American race [, as a concept or 'signifier'; or, such as the 'defining for' in the text cited; 'race category of "red" '] was largely neglected in seminal twentieth-century U.S. racial-formation analyses, ... Understanding the consolidation of the black-white binary is critical for understanding histories of race and power in the United States. But then are the relationships between red and white, and red and black, for that matter. ..."
;
"...'genetic articulations of indigeneity' rest on assumptions of certain forms of physical and social death. And those assumptions contradict the analyses and work of indigenous peoples who view their presence as peoples, cultures, land stewards, and sometimes governmental entities as still vital. ... In indigenous peoples' articulations, that distinctiviness is much more than biological, and it is not a marker of inevitable defeat. ... It is unsurprising then, that indigenous critics of human genome diversity research resist terms that objectify indigenes as historical-biological curiosities whose raw material must be captured and studied for posterity before they most certainly vanish. DNA sequences - like baskets, bones, pots, and ceremonial objects - become artifacts of soon-to-be-extinct populations. Such a disconnection between genetic and indigenous articulations of indigeneity is not easily bridged." ; (Talbear; p. 136; 137-8. ; 150-1.)

"...Actions which appeared to be childish, most of them were exhibitions of bravado, not unlike humming a jazztune while walking into a gathering of a Ku Klux Klan."
Maya Angelou

"...It is a strange fact, characteristic of the incomplete state of our present knowledge, that totally opposing conclusion are drawn about prehistoric conditions on our planet, depending on whether the problem is approached from the biological or geophysical view-point." ;
" Since it was previously taken for granted that the continental blocks - whether above sea level or inundated - have retained their mutual positions unchanged through the history of the planet, one could only have assumed that the postulated land bridges existed in the form of intermediate continents, ...The well-known palaeontological reconstructions arose on the basis of such assumptions, one example of them, for the Carboniferous, is given in Figure 2. [below...]

This assumption of sunken intermediate continents was in fact the most obvious so long as one based one's stand on the theory of the contraction or shrinkage of the earth, a viewpoint we shall have to examine more closely in what follows. The theory first appeared in Europe. ...
[...]
It is probably no accident that the permanence theory has it's most numerous adherents in America: geology developed late there - thus simultaneously with geophysics - and this necessarily led to more rapid and complete adaption by geology of the results advanced by its sister science than in Europe. There was absolutely no temptation to make the contraction theory, which contradicts geophysics, one of the basic assumptions. It was quite otherwise in Europe, where geology already had a long period of development behind it before geophysics had produced its first results, and had, without benefit of geophysics, already arrived at an overall view of the earth's evolution in the form of contraction theory. It is quite understandable that it is difficult for many European scientists to free themselves completely from this tradition and that they view the results of geophysics with a mistrust that never completely fades.

However, where does the truth lie? ... There clearly remains but one possibility: there must be a hidden error in the assumptions alleged to be obvious."
(Alfred Wegener) : The Origin of Continents and Oceans - on 1929 publ. ed (Quots. are via it's 1966 repr. : p. 5; 8-9, 16-7 .)

"Practice is a technique, aiming to force body in different repetitive tasks that have been ordered to happen on variety of levels."
Michel Foucault
(Surveiller et Punir. Transl. here WG)

" We are perhaps too ready to believe that, because colonisation by force is no longer a real danger, the substance and tendencies of empire have therefore ceased entirely to exist. This book deals with the relationship between size and power, and with the penalties and paradoxes of the pursuit of global dominance, not just for those encroached upon and invaded, but also for the invaders themselves, the warriors who so easily became captives in one fashion or another. It would be nice to believe that such issues could be safely consigned to the realm of history. It would also be unwise."
Colley, Linda : Captives. Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850 (2002; on 'Introduction', p. 19-20.)

"...Paradoxically, piracy was often co-opted and exonerated as a tolerated abuse, even though at its high point in the 1690s and 1710s, it posed a major threat to mercantile shipping on the principal British trade routes to the West Indies and India. Pirates posed crucial challenges to law enforcement by preying on merchant shipping and escaping punitive action. On the other hand, state-sponsored privateering expeditions that were issued 'letters of marque' encouraged the seizure and destruction of competitive merchant shipping by other European countries. ... , pirates were in the dangerous and profitable position of opportunistically playing various legal and political minefields to their advantage. The issuance of frequent pardons and royal proclamations, as piratical activity could not always be stopped by force, also presented unique occasions when blanket absolutions could be obtained for previous piratical acts.
... A number of illegal and violent maritine activities, such as buccaneering, privateering, and wrecking, existed alongside piracy. ... Buccaneers were vigilante settlers and only occasional seafarers who acted violently on their own initiative in ways that enhanced the colonial presence of the British. Like Sir Henry Morgan, governor of Jamaica, a noted buccaneer who sacked Panama, they were frequently rewarded for their prescient services after the fact. Privateers operated against rival shipping with governmental approval through secret letters of marque... Of course, as in the 1701 case of the trial of the Captain Kidd, a privateer turned pirate, this could embarrass the state considerably. ...Pirates, however, ...formed a renegade subculture recruited from insubordinate elements of the seafaring milieu and struck out for themselves in remarkable fashion, to the extent that historians have speculated that they were remnants of the radical elements from the English Revolution. Piracy was especially significant as a virtualizing activity on the colonial periphery. Some aspects of piracy represent a proletarian, anticapitalist challenge to the bourgeois economic and political institutions that Defoe supported. ... "
; (However...) "Piratical discourse should be treated with some caution, as its relation to piracy as a historical practice is still somewhat unclear. Although Defoe's General History of the Pyrates has become an ur-text for studies of piracy, its imaginative power derives from a deliberate confusion of real and fictional pirates. Piratical articles often revealed a collectivist origin behind the fraternal contract. ..."
(Aravamudan, Srinivas) ; Tropicopolitans. Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (1999; p. 82-3; 84.)

"If, ..., we are to trace shifting attitudes in Britain towards Islam in the Mediterranean (and anywhere else), we need to look beyond the standard and formulaic language of denunciation, suggestive though it can sometimes be. Contemporary reactions must be explored more broadly...
, for after 1600 they multiplied rapidly.

One of the paradoxes of Barbary captive-taking was that it not only exacarbated pre-existing hostility to Islam, but also increased the volume and variety of information available about it in Britain, and transformed both the extent and complexity of Muslim-British contacts. ... this same decade, the 1630s also saw the establishment of the first ever chairs in Arabic at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, in part so that officials and interpreters could be trained up to deal with Barbary and the Ottoman empire in the future. ... The 1640s saw...also the first publication of the Qur'an in English...
This went through several editions before being entirely superseded in 1734, when the London-based orientalist George Sale (himself ' half a Mussulman' in Edward Gibbon's later opinion) produced a new and remarkable version of the Qur'an. ...
[...] There was also an element of awe involved, which never entirely went away. By the seventeenth century, the great Islamic empires together probably contained between one third and one quarter of the world's population, and sprawled across the globe on a geographical scale that dwarfed western Europe as a whole, never mind the England..."
;
"[The imperial city of Meknès, 'in Moroco today'] ...was a project roughly contemporaneous with the buildings of Versailles by Louis XIV of France, and it was inspired by a comparable regal hubris and territorial ambition. The sultan's palace at Meknès was simply the 'largest he had ever seen', reported an envoy dispatched to redeem Britain's Moroccan captives in the 1720s. ... Set against this..., Versailles was unduly compact; while William III's extensions to Hampton court near London would have seemed almost toy-like in comparison.

This indeed, was a crucial point. To the extent that Islamic societies did appear different to Britons at this early stage, it could still be because they seemed bigger, stronger or richer."
(Colley); Captives (p. 105-106; 110.)

"As in the aftermath of Pequot war, trade centers that New Englanders already dominate or wished to enter became the destinations of Indian captives. Despite the prohibitions on New England Indians issued in Barbados and Jamaica, owners ... found buyers there, especially for small lots that formed part of the constant traffic between the two regions. [...]

Iberia, North Africa, and the Portuguese Wine islands formed another node of trade and slavery. The Wampanoag, Pocasset, and Christian Indians condemned in the 1675 summer campaign were among the first shipped abroad into slavery. Plymouth and Massachusetts consigned the 187 captives aboard captain Thomas Spragg's vessel Sampson to be sold at Cadiz, a port on the Atlantic side of the southernmost tip of Spain. ..."
, "A polyglot town where English, Dutch, and French merchants maintained trading houses, Cadiz had been regional center of the slave trade since 1300. Traditionally its slave markets included Africans and South Asians, as well as 'Loros,' or 'Browns,' a group that included 'Berbericos' (Muslim captives from the Barbary states and elsewhere in North Africa), Indians from the Americas, and people of other ethnicities from southern and eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Religion was the main dividing line between slave and free peoples, although phenotype - that is, racial appearance - began to carry increasing weigth. European renegades who had converted to Islam while captive could be enslaved. Dark-skinned Europeans could be at risk of illegal enslavement by privateers, although English officials did apparently free the occasional Greek or Spanish slave who could prove European and Christian affiliations. ... The New England Indians' enslavement met with little surprise or legal challenge in a place where ethnicity and color did not define slave status. ..."
;
"Madagascar was part of the East India Company's monopoly territory, but the company had not yet exploited it. Instead, the island offered captains a chance to buy slaves while evading national slave trade monopolies, such as the one held by the Royal Africa Company. About twenty-five English or English-American ships traded there between 1675 to 1692. Madagascars muslim rulers also welcomed trade with North Africa, with the Dutch from bases in South Africa, Mauritius and Java, and with the Portuguese in Goa and West Africa, sending approximately six thousand slaves per year into these and other markets. English and American ships generally headed to Barbados to sell their human cargo after stopping at Madagascar. In addition to Malagasy slaves, Madagascar markets included captives from Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Mozambique, and North Africa, all of whom could be purchased much more cheaply than slaves in West Africa. Muskets and ammunition provided the main currency in exchange.

Other New England Indians entered Atlantic slave markets via Fayal, one of the Azores, a chain of volcanic islands that together with the Madeira and the canaries are often called the Wine Islands or Western Islands. ..."
(Newell) ; Brethren by Nature. New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (2015 ; p. 175, 176-7; 180.)

"Equiano's most important precursor was the Defoe... A general affiliation to Defoe was noticed as early as 1808 by Abbé Grégoire in his fascinating tract, De la littérature des nègres. Reinflecting in racial terms a picaresque trope from Robinson Crusoe, Equiano says, 'my life and fortune have been extremely checkered, and my adventures various' (2:254). Equiano echoes Crusoe's solitary penitence: 'How strange a Chequer-Work of Providence is the Life of Man! and by what secret differing Springs are the Affections hurry'd about as differing Circumstances present! ...for I whose only Affliction was, that I seem'd banished from human Society, that I was alone, circumscrib'd to what I call silent Life.' ... It is remarkable that the last six chapters of the autobiography each end with Equiano fulfilling different shape-shifting fantasies: as a naval captain, a parson, an Arctic explorer, an evangelical poet, a colonizing missionary, and as a colonial projector. These additions to Equiano's curriculum vitae jostle with a list of other qualifications, including shipboard powder monkey, domestic servant, trader, accountant, barber, labor organizer, abolitionist activist, and Parliamentary lobbyist.

Equiano's conscious imitation of Defoe is clear enough, even as he slyly complicates the racial metaphor by averring that his life 'was written by one who was unwilling as unable to adorn the plainness of truth by the colouring of imagination' (2: 254). ...

...In his...listing of the conventions of slave narrative, James Olney points out that an allusion to a 'plain, unvarnished tale' was one of the most enduring critical reflexes when slave narratives were reviewed or introduced by amanuenses, even if Othello was not alluded to by the teller. ...

In the manner of Oroonoko, and Othello before him, the voiced African's royal antecedents come to the forefront alongside the narrative of Christianization. It is this aspect, of voicing African royalty, that makes up the other half or a peculiar bourgeois-aristocratic composite. Othello took his 'life and being from men of royal siege,' and Oroonoko was an anomalous royal slave. The cliché of the royal black captive recurs incessantly in British literary representation from Oroonoko to Rasselas. " ; (Aravamudan) - 1999 (; p. 249, 250-1.)

; "No attempt has been made to create heroes or heroines, or to appeal to the imagination or the heart." (William Wells Brown, Boston, May, 1880.)
(on Preface for My Southern Home,
or, The South and it's People.)

"Ethics[...] can have no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and would not for my life ridicule it"
Ludwig Wittgenstein

"To all those who wish to talk about man[...] who, on the other hand, refer all knowledge back to the truths of man himself[...] who refuse to mythologize without demystifying, who refuse to think without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking, to all these warped and twisted forms of reflection we can answer only with a philosophical laugh - which means, to a certain extent, a silent one."
Michel Foucault
(Order of Things)

"Pay. No Pay? ´O´ Bay"
WG

"In the alteration between news of pollution and unemployment, one can study today how these two scenarios replace and subvert one another, [...] Here it is as if there was a performance of a mixture of Marx and Macbeth, or the collective bargaining talks in the public sector and Goethe's of 'sorcerer's apprentice'.'"
Ulrich Beck
(Reflexive Modernization. Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the modern Social Order)

"[...]
Operating on stock exchanges became a matter of dark dealing and of dark fibre. ... A 2015 report by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) estimated that dark pool trading accounted for one-fifth of all trades in stocks that also traded on the public exchanges - a figure that doesn't account for many other popular forms of financial instrument. ...Initially advertised as places to trade securely, many dark pool operators have been censured for quietly inviting in the same high-frequency traders their clients were trying to avoid - either to provided liquidity to the market, or for their own profit. ...
The combination of high-frequency trading and dark pools is just one way in which financial systems have been rendered obscure, and thus ever more unequal. ..."

;
"Technology is in fact a key driver of inequality across many sectors. The relentless progress of automation - from supermarket checkouts to trading algorithms, factory robots to self-driving cars - increasingly threatens human employment across the board. There is no safety net for those whose skills are rendered obsolete by machines; and even those who programme the machines are not immune. As the capabilities of machines increase, more and more professions are under attack, with artificial intelligence augmenting the process. ... The complacent of the Right against communism - that we'll all have to buy our goods from a single state supplier - has been supplanted by the necessity of buyin everything from Amazon. And one of the keys to this augmented inequality is the opacity of technological systems themselves.
[...]
The reason Amazon workers need hand-held devices to navigate around the warehouse is because it is otherwise impenetrable to humans. Humans would expect goods to be stored in human-type ways: the books over here, DVDs over there, racks of stationary to the left, and so on. But to a rational machine intelligence, such an arrangement is deeply inefficient. Consumers don't order goods alphabetically or by type; ... As a result, Amazon employs a logistics technique called 'chaotic storage' - chaotic, that is, from a human point of view. By locating products by need and association rather than by type, it's possible to construct much shorter paths between items. ... Arranging the world from the perspective of the machine renders it computationally efficient, but makes it completely incomprehensible to humans. And moreover, it accelerates oppression.
[...] Reducing workers to meat algorithms, useful only for their ability to move and follow orders, makes them easier to hire, fire, and abuse. Workers who go where their wrist-mounted terminal tells them to don't even need to understand the local language, and they don't need an education. Both of these factors, together with the atomisation produced by technological augmentation, also prevent effective organization. ..."
(James Bridle) : New Dark Age. Technology and the End of the Future [2018: 108-9 ; 113, 114-6.]

"Don't believe in riches,
but you should see where I live."
U2/Bono
(God, part II)

"...I will not undertake to explain; sure I am, that whoever knows Rome, will not condemn this ébauche of it."
(Hester Piozzi) : Observations and Reflections. Made in the course of a Journey Through France, Italy, and Germany, 1788.

"What a story and how they fight
Let's gamble and guess who will win.
[...] Information – in between"
Accept : T.V. War (- 86)

"In white suprematist capitalist patriarchy, black males and white females are uniquely positioned to compete with one another for the favors white 'daddies' in power can extend to them. If the individuals from these groups should fail to understand either their connection to one another or their position in relation to white patriarchy, they are bombarded by mass-media images within the pedagogy of popular culture that constantly remind them that their chances of receiving rewards from the patriarchal mainstream and their hopes for salvation within the existing social structure are greatly enhanced when they learn how to 'do it for daddy'."
(bell hooks), from 'Doin it for daddy: black masculinity in the mainstream' - on Reel to Real. Race, sex and class at the movies (1996; p. 84)

"Scrupulous histories are always written (by man), not made."
MS Jones

"It's your world. Change it."
No Sweat-sneakers (advert text).

"BANANA (Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything)."
- A term used by opponents refering to the(claimed ecopopulist) 1980's enviromentalism movements and community groups

"Instead of 'climate change' the preferred terms are 'climate emergency, crisis or breakdown' and 'global heating' is favoured over 'global warming', although the original terms are not banned.
' We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, ...
The phrase 'climate change', for example sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.' "
(Guardian, 17.5.2019) on 'Why guardian is changing the language it uses about the environment'
- Exceptionally...We make note about this aspect, because,
it's from a greatest importance: (the) Language, terms do matter.

[...And, by-the-way: I disagree on that other change-of-term: Global warming should be preferred to the Global heating, simply 'cause it, by now, gives a lot better idea about it, on about the whole phenomena. (Those moderations, alterations and lies 'around' the issue, in during period for few decades time, past.) ...Personally changed even for using, when necessary, the'-hell' addix too. (It, sort of, catches from more 'layers' on this Warming/Climate-'issue.' ;W-G.]

"The need for accumulating (stuff) is one of the first symptoms of the death in individual life as well as in the society."
Walter Benjamin
(Das Passagen Werk. [Der Sammler] - Transl. here WG)

"...the probability of truly catastrophic cyber-attack, like a meltdown of the world's financial system or a broad-based attack on electric grid, is certainly not negligible. An attack of this magnitude will likely remain the province of professional intelligence services for some time to come. ...
And, of course, the possibility of cyberwarfare involving nuclear power plants was vividly on display in the case of the so-called Stuxnet worm, revealed in 2010 to have attacked the Iranian uranium-enrichment program by speeding up specific centrifuge models, and in other attacks of a similar nature dubbed 'Olympic games,', both reportedly launched by the United States and Israel.

While the highest-profile cybersecurity incidents of recent years have generally been state-to-state affairs, the power to conduct low- to medium-grade attacks and exploitation on a wide scale has clearly migrated to actors far below the level of sovereign states. The most famous example is the hacker group known as Anonymous, whose diffuse and largely uncoordinated membership has launched attacks on a range of targets - from Sony, to companies that refused to host WikiLeaks, to government vehicles, to the Church of Scientology. But it is not the only example. ..."
; The Future of Violence. Robots and germs, hackers and drones. (2015; B.Wittes - G.Blum ; p. 23-4.)

"For most things there's explanation:
Nice, Neat and Wrong."
H. L. Mencken

"It is abundantly clear that increased consumption and economic growth from within the existing paradigms will harm the environment. This is a recipe for disaster of unprecedented magnitude."
Ryan King
(War, Waste, and Moneylenders: factoring social and economic instability into ecological catastrophe and the decline of western civilization - Article at Mongabay.com)

"...Evolving more recently, so that no one would mistake a human for our predecessors of even a couple of million years back, seems like a virtue, as if we improved ourselves while other organisms stuck with the same old styles their parents wore.
Regardless of the shaky ground on which that impression lies, we don't even win the prize for most recent evolution; in fact, lose by a wide margin. Strictly speaking, according to the textbook definition... , many of the most rapidly evolving species, and hence those with the most recent changes, are not primates but pathogens, the disease-causing organisms like viruses and bacteria. Because of their rapid generation times, viruses can produce offspring in short order, which means that viral gene frequencies can become altered in a fraction of the time it would take to do the same thing in a population of humans, zebras, or any other vertebrate.
...evolving quickly is not necessarily a good thing. Often the impetus of rapid evolution in nonhuman organisms is a strong and novel selective agent: a crop is sprayed with a new insecticide, or a new disease is introduced to a population by a few individuals who stray into its boundaries. Those who are resistant, sometimes an extremely tiny minority, survive and reproduce, while the others perish. These events are not confined to crops, or even to nonhumans. Some estimates of death rates from the medieval out-break of bubonic plague called the Black Death in Europe have gone as high as 95 percent."
; "...According to the old conventional wisdom, Neandertals were those brutish hairy characters that lost out in evolution to the more cunning and - not coincidentially - more attractive Homo Sapiens, who went to make better tools, develop language and generally evolve into, well, us. But ever since the 2008 finding of complex stone tools made by Neanderthals, ...the 2010 discovery by Svante Pääbo and his colleagues that 1-4 percent of the genome of non-Africans today seems to have come from Neanderthals, all parties have been hastily revising their stories."
; "The suspicion that humans might not be evolving may stem from the misconception, ...that evolution is progressing toward a goal. A related fallacy is that all of life has been aimed at the production of humans, the pinnacle of evolution. ...Humans are no more of an end point to evolution than they are its most recent product.

...But to many people, ...that we are evolving because, our genes have changed, often through random forces, is unsatisfying. What they really want to know is whether natural selection, the remaining evolutionary mechanism, is still in force.
Here, too, the answer is yes."
(Zuk, Marlene) ; Paleofantasy. What Evolution Really tells us about Sex, Diet and How we Live (2013 : p. 15-6. ; 34-5. ; 253.)

"I do not say the story is true, for I did not witness
the happenings which it portrays, but the fact that in the telling of it to you I have given fictitious names for the principal characters quite sufficiently evidences the sincerity of my own belief that it MAY be true. [...and follows...] the story as I painstakingly pieced it out from these several various agencies."
E.R.Burroughs
(Tarzan of the Apes ; 1912)

"The question that the tension between these divergent new strands of environmentalism raises, then, is whether and how it might be possible to move environmentalism beyond the stereotypical narrative of the decline of nature without turning it into progress boosterism. What affirmative visions of the future can the environmentalist movement offer, visions that are neither returns to an imagined pastoral past nor nightmare of future devastation meant to serve as 'cautionary tales' ?..."

; "...Environmentalists currently face the challenge of reenvisioning conservation in terms that enable the imagination not so much of the end of species as of their future. It may be interesting ... one of the first critical works to engage questions of ecology and literary form, Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival [1974] ... argued that tragedy, ... has an inherently anthropocentric bias. ...taken as a suggestion that might shed light on certain cultural contexts rather than as a general principle, Meeker's claim helps to explain the persuasive force of extinction stories in which the charismatic animal, in a loose sense, comes to replace the human of high social standing who undergoes a tragic fall. It thereby also raises the question whether a comic narrative about species extinction might be possible."
; Heise, Ursula - Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (2016: p. 12; 50-1.)

"[...] Look into the truth that is still. Look into the land of the prophet. Look past the living streets of Boston. Look, finally, into the eyes of the Beacon Street Union."
Robert Pomerene
(The Eyes of the Beacon Street Union)

"A 2017 study in Australia, home to some of the world's high-tech farming, found that 'wheat productivity has flatlined as a direct result of climatic change.' ...In June 2018, researchers found that a two-degree Celsius rise in temperature - which, recall, is what the Paris accords are now aiming for - could cut U.S. corn yields by 18 percent." ;
"...The paper [...by 2017(?)], in the journal Environmental Research, said that rising carbon dioxide levels, by speeding plant growth, seem to have reduced the amount of protein in basic staple crops, a finding so startling that, for many years, agronomists had overlooked hints that it was happening. ...In the developing world, where people rely on plants for their protein, that means huge reductions in nutrition: India alone could lose 5 percent of the protein in its total diet, putting 53 million people at new risk for protein deficiency. ... 'The idea that food becomes less nutritious was a surprise,' said one researcher. 'Its not intuitive.' But I think we should continue to expect surprises. We are completely altering the biophysical conditions that underpin our food system. And not just ours. People don't depend on goldenrod, for instance, but bees do. When scientists looked at samples of goldenrod in the Smithsonian that date back to 1842, they found that the protein content of its pollen had 'declined by a third since the industrial revolution - and the change closely tracks with the rise of carbon dioxide.'

Bees help crops, obviously, so thats scary news. ... But [Aug, 2018, (?)] ...new study found something as frightening: crop pests were thriving in the new heat. ... Even if we hit the UN target of limiting temperature rise to two degrees Celsius, pests should cut wheat yields by 46 percent, corn by 31 percent, and rice by 19 percent. ...Even fossilized plants from fifty million years ago make the point: 'Plant damage from insects correlated with the rising and falling temperatures, reaching a maximum during the warmest periods." ;

"... Scientists have even theorized that AIs following their own impulses might explain why we haven't found other civilizations out in space. Forget asteroids and supervolcanoes, says Bostrom- ...But what if there is some technology 'that (a) virtually all sufficiently advanced civilizations eventually discover and (b) it's discovery leads almost universally to existential disaster'? That is to say, perhaps the reason we don't hear from the other civilizations is because interstellar space is dotted not with sentient life but with orbiting piles of paper clips.

No one, I think, has a particularly good answer for this set of practical challenges. ...
Still,... Practical problems are by definition theoretically soluble - that's why we call them 'problems.' For the moment, lets assume that we won't create Frankenstein's monsters and that we will make sure that all people have equal access to the fertility lab. ...
And then let's ask a more metaphysical, and maybe more important question: What does that do to the human game? What it does, I think, is begin to rob it of meaning."
; (McKibben) - Falter (2018; p 36, 38-9. ; 161-2.)

"There should be a word for when you commit a treason against an entire planet.
In July 1977, one of Exxon's senior scientists, ...addressed many of the company's top leaders. Speaking at the oil giant's New York City headquarters, he flipped through slide after slide showing some of the earliest research under way on what was then called the greenhouse effect. ...

Fossil fuel corporations had worried at least a little about climate change for a long time. As early as 1959, at a symposium called 'Energy and man', ..., the physicist Edward Teller told the industry's most important executives, 'Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth.' The temperature, Teller predicted, would rise, and when it did, ' there is a possibility that the icecaps will start melting and the levelof the oceans will begin to rise.' ..."
; "We know that Exxon executives took these warnings seriously. Internal documents show that the company (and other oil giants) built their new oil drilling platforms with higher decks to compensate for the sea level rise they now knew was coming. In the Arctic, a team assigned to investigate the effects or warming concluded that 'global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs' in the Beaufort Sea. ..., the team predicted, drilling season in the Arctic would lenghten from two months to as much as five months, which is in fact what happened.

It wasn't just Exxon that knew. In the autumn of 2018 new documents emerged that Shell scientists had predicted in the late 1980s that carbon dioxide levels could double as early as 2030, and predicting an increase in 'runoff, destructive floods, and inundation of low-lying farmland.' All in all, Shell's experts said, 'the changes may be the greatest in the recorded history.' Take a minute to think through the implications of these exposes. By 1988, when James Hanson made global warming a public issue, the oil companies knew that he and the other researchers were right. They were, in fact, using Hansen's NASA climate models to figure out how low their drilling costs in the Arctic would eventually fall. So, imagine what would have happened if they had merely told the truth. ..."
; (McKibben, 2018; p. 72-3, 74-5.)

"The reasons are clear."
Investing in Development. A practical Plan to Achieve the Millenium Development Goals. United nations Development Programme (2005)

"Urban multispecies justice can also productively inflect planning, architecture, design. ... , city authorities in a time of biodiversity loss find themselves facing the quite different challenge of how to make visible the nonhuman inhabitants of urban spaces and architectural structures in such a way that they enhance rather than harm biodiversity. How can we plan traffic flows in such a way that they accommodate not just cars but also the movements of animals? How can we design buildings so that they become not death traps for birds but habitat for insects, reptiles, birds, and bats? Which rodents should we plan to include and exclude, in what numbers, and for what reasons? If we assume we will never get rid of rats, for instance... - how might we design sewers, gardens, and waste disposal procedures in such a way that the rats' behaviours become useful rather than harmful? How do we ensure that increased urban biodiversity does not increase health risks for the poor? By proposing multispecies justice as a framework for considering such questions, I am not suggesting that these questions will be easy to answer or that there will not be disagreement about them. ... But I am suggesting that the values, cultural perceptions, emotions, and traditions that inflect our perceptions and interactions with nonhuman species always have to be an explicit part of conversations about conservation, and that thinking about the construction of new, functional multispecies habitats may be a more productive and democratic goal to invest our energies than the attempt to recreate the habitats of the past. "
; Heise (2016; p. 236-7.)

"If it was for luck, the luck had no if at all."
(Writing on the wall at MSW)

"...Large Blue butterfly populations are thus not a scalable effect of the butterflies' DNA. They are nonscalable sites of interspecies encounter. This is a problem for the modern synthesis, because population genetics was from the early twentieth century at the core of evolution without history. ...

Reintroducing history into evolutionary thinking has already begun at other biological scales. The cell, once an emblem of replicable units, turns out to be the historical product of symbiosis among free-living bacteria. Even DNA turns out to have more history in its amino-acid sequences than once thought. Human DNA is part virus, viral encounters mark historical moments in making us human. Genome research has taken up the challenge of identifying encounter in the making of DNA. Population science cannot avoid history for much longer.

Fungi are ideal guides. Fungi have always been recalcitrant to the iron cage of self-replication. Like bacteria, some are given to exchanging genes in nonreproductive encounters ('horizontal gene transfer'); many also seem averse to keeping their genetic material sorted out as 'individuals' and 'species,' not to speak of 'populations.' When researchers studied the fruiting bodies of what they thought of as a species, the expensive Tibetan 'caterpillar fungus,' they found many species entangled together. ..."
(Tsing, Anna) : The Mushroom at the end of the World. On the possibility of life in Capitalist Ruins (2015; p. 142-3.)

;
"The story of landscape is both easy and hard to tell. Sometimes it relaxes readers into somnolence, making us think we are not learning anything new. This is a result of the unfortunate wall we have built between concepts and stories. We can see this, for example, in the gap between environmental history and science studies. Science studies scholars, unpracticed in reading concepts through stories, don't bother with environmental history. ... Distilling general principles, theorists expect that others will fill in the particulars - but 'filling in' is never so simple. This is an intellectual apparatus that shores up the wall between concepts and stories, thus, indeed, draining the significance of the sensitivive science studies scholars try to define. ...

Telling stories of the landscape requires getting to know the inhabitants of the landscape, human and not human. This is not easy, and it makes sense to me use all the learning practices I can think of, including our combined forms of mindfulness, myths and tales, livelihood practices, archives, scientific reports and experiments. ..." ; (Tsing) (; 2015: p. 158-9.)

"It's as simple as reducing packaging and moving towards alternative, biodegradable materials and recycling."
Dr (Mike) James

"... Since the wealthy would be able to afford the procedure more often, and since any beneficial genetic modifications made to an embryo would be transmitted to all of that person's offspring, linkages between class and genetics would ineluctably grow from one generation to the next, no matter how small the disparity in access might be. Consider the effect this could have on the socioeconomic fabric of society. If you think our world is unequal now, just imagine it stratified along both socioeconomic and genetic lines. Envision a future where people with more money live healthier and longer lives thanks to their privileged sets of genes. It's the stuff of science fiction, but if germline editing becomes routine, this fiction could become reality.
Germline editing may inadvertently transscribe our societies' financial inequality into our genetic code - but it may also create a different kind of injustice. As disability-rights advocates have pointed out, using gene editing to 'fix' things like deafness or obesity could create a less inclusive society, one that pressures everyone to be the same - and perhaps even encourages more discrimination against differently abled people - instead of celebrating our natural differences. ... While some disease-causing gene mutations produce defective or abnormal proteins on a biochemical level, the individuals that live with disease are certainly not defective or abnormal, and they might live perfectly happy lives and not feel any need for gene repair." ;

"...Given the deplorable history humans have when it comes to programs aimed at improving our gene species' pool, perhaps it's not surprising that CRISPR's potential to endow individuals with healthier genes earns it comparisons to these sad chapters in our past.

But while it's certainly attentive-grabbing to equate gene editing with these dark precendents, the comparison doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Technically, the use of CRISPR in embryos to combat human disease would be an eugenic practice, but so is preimplantation genetic diagnosis, ultrasound technology, prenatal vitamins, and even a mother's abstinence from alcohol during pregnancy. That's because eugenic, as it was originally defined, means 'well-born' and so could apply to any action intended to lead to the birth of a healthy child. Our current, looser interpretation of the term reflects beliefs and practices that emerged in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century and that were aimed at improving the genetic qualities of the entire population by encouraging breeding between people with desirable characteristics and discouraging or preventing reproduction by people who were deemed undesirable."
; Doudna, J. - Sternberg, S.: A Crack in Creation. The New Power to Control Evolution (2017; p. 232-3, 233-4.)
[...By the way; From selecting just this part of the text, compels us (,necessarily) for adding slight remark: Acc my opinion, the 'abstinence from alcohol during pregnancy' can't be identified in the same w. those other mentioned modern-day technologies. (Some that appear keenly eugenistic.) ...Because from, practically obviously: That abstinence being merely just some common sense.
; ...Also, we'd probably, otherways find it for quite as logical including into same 'historical eugenisms', as well, fx, any (imaginable) prehistoric 'momma' smoking cannabis and practising some herbal medicinery to oneself. - I mean, there's difference between a 'targeted' effect and 'co-effect'. Quite as notable, indeed, then is that the words often carry the meaning and contents beyond their most apparent interpretations from. (Consequently, at least what comes for the social context of this, we actually can't exclude the noted more notorious chapters for human eugenistic practices, of the past. At least, that shall remain present at some level of a 'connotation'.) ; Quite as recognizable, from this example, also that the line 'in between' easily gets...from 'blurred'.]

"If you wanna know a secret, you got to promise not to tell.
...If you want to see an angel, you got to find it where it fell."
Ozark Mountain Daredevils ('If you wanna get to heaven')

"The [degrowth-] scenario only becomes feasible through a process of democratisation whereby the interests of the majority of humanity, including future generations, will begin guiding the behaviour of the elites. When this happens [...] the advantages of sustainable living will appear as an attractive option." ; on Sustainable Futures - Replacing Growth Imperative and Hierarchies with Sustainable ways (ed. Ulvila-Paananen)

"Our understanding of the Earth we inhabit is undergoing a radical change. [...]

This new conception of the Earth System is inconsistent with the understanding of a nature victimized and colonized by humans that has emerged since the 1960s. It is an understanding captured in phrases from the 1990s like 'the end of the nature,' 'nothing but us' and 'the Earth's cry for rescue,' and morphing into more recent renderings like 'a humanized Earth,' 'the kind of nature we wish to have,' 'Nature no longer exists apart from humanity,' and 'It is our choice what happens here,' Whether the mood is one of lament or triumph, in all of these expressions nature is our victim or servant.

Yet Earth System science now tells us that, rather than dying, nature as the Earth System has in fact come alive or (perhaps a better metaphor) is waking from its slumber. It's true that wherever we look we see human influence, but at the same time we see stirring an 'angry,' 'ornery,' 'vengeful' Earth that is more detached from us than it has been for 10,000 years. Contrary to the comforting expectation that in the Anthropocene we can have 'the kind of nature we wish for have,' as we enter the new epoch we will meet an Earth that is further and further from the Earth we might want. And against the belief that 'the world we will inhabit is the one we have made,' the world we will have to live with is the Earth we have turned against us.

In other words, ... This all follows from the primary fact that Anthropocene is a rupture, whereas all of these views about the death of nature and so on do not recognize that a rupture has occurred but write as if there is continuity, a continuous process of human colonization going back thousands of years, albeit one that has intensified in recent decade." ; "...Nature is no longer (as Pope Francis writes) 'a magnificent book in which God speaks to us and grants us a glimpse of his infinite beauty and goodness', but a grim report in which scientists speak to us and grant us a glimpse of disrupted natural patterns and a chaotic climate. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is both, a sublime Earth that presents itself to us as beautiful when becalmed and terrifying when enraged, an intimate planet and an alien one, Mother and Other."
(Hamilton, Clive) ; Defiant Earth. The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (2017 ; 47-8, 48-9.)
[...Much as I agree on large part that previous (,that Hamilton), finding it lot less argumentable that a humanity would appear had made to itself for so much lasting, distinguishable, 'significant' imprint on an Earthly history - Even when considering that geostratigraphic 'markings' from that then, already, are to so apparent.
After all, at least such a claim, it then must also owe itself to as much for the faults in the conception - Some generated by this 'present' science, faults that I think logical trace for the histories 'till well recent, in that science, esp. Or, to the histories how that came for emergence to a 'dominative view' - and therefore (,at least partly) responsible to the caused present harm. ...I don't either find it for any 'existential defeatism' if one would, fx, little plays w. that (nowadays often remarked) enthreatening scenario about a future of the Earth 'devoid of humans'. Present-day problems considering, only seems perfectly sensical imagine smght like. And if we think it somehow necessary take in uses the name for such period, Anthropocene, ...feels it quite as logical imagine that such period ultimately would have to have it's end too. (Another 200 thousand years; only 10 000 years; a hundred years...)

; Likewise, I'm not at all so sure that it to correct estimate, when it stated (that Hamilton, p 115.): "If in a hundred million years' time an alien civilization writes the history of the Universe, the Earth will be known as the Planet of the Humans." (Sounds all too much for plainest 'science-faiths', on my any finding...) ]

"It's a perverse company you work for
They build the past
It just can't last
It's obsolete by design"
Buffy Sainte-Marie
(Coincidence and Likely Stories)

"...The National Academy of Sciences estimates that between 1,700 and and 1,850 billion tons of carbon is trapped in the permafrost, which is more carbon than is present in the Earth's atmosphere and all vegetation combined. But Max Holmes, who studies the permafrost's carbon contents, tells me the deposits are little close to 1,500 billion tons. ..."
; "...Holmes says, 'It is something I worry about. I wouldn't use the term 'doomsday', but I certainly imagine carbon from permafrost making it a whole lot harder for us to get a handle on stuff. I mean, right now, humans are putting 9 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year, mainly from fossil fuel combustion, secondarily from tropical deforestation. Both of those things, if we really put our mind to it, we could stop or slow. But with the permafrost, once it starts thawing, it's not directly under our control, and I think that's quite likely to start happening."
;
"Gene drive [ital. added] may sound like a solid solution to wiping out vector-borne diseases and even some invasive species, but it could have serious adverse effects. For starters, once a gene is driven into population, its effects could be hard to or even impossible to reverse. What if the gene that is programmed to be inherited with almost absolute certainty somehow spread beyond its bounds, wiping out gene pools that it wasn't meant to?
[Stewart Brand]...Referring to the birds of the Hawaiian archipelago that were rendered extinct by avian malaria, he tells me that bringing those birds back now might require intervention beyond the techniques used to get them back, creating an entirely new crop of ethical issues. 'Well, you're mucking around with the genes of these animals anyway, ' he tells me, 'and if you can bring back the Hawaiian 'ô'ô and we can tweak it so that it's not suspectible to avian malaria, is that okay?' ...If it were up him, he would 'tweak the damn birds,' but he recognizes that the uncertainties about unintended effects require a great deal of research before the technique is used."
(Britt Wray) ; Rise of the Necrofauna. The Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction. (2019; p. 114-5, 116.; 220-1.)

"All voting is a sort of gaming, like the checkers or
backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it,
playing with right and wrong, with moral
questions; and betting naturally accompanies it."
Thoreau
(On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
- Orig. titled Resistance to Civil Government)

"[Wray - Asking V. Dooren]: What exactly do you mean by saying that we can keep 'faith with the dead' ?

"[Van Dooren]: Keeping faith with an extinct animal is about not resurrecting them; it's about making the difficult choice to learn from their extinction to mourn... and as a result change the way that we live. It is the attempt to not rush to overcome death and instead prevent it from happening again. Given the current context, as we're letting endangered species go extinct, resurrecting them doesn't represent the beginning of a new ethical relationship with them. It could just begin another phase of extinction for them." (; Wray, 2019 ; p. 243-4.)

“From at least 220 million years ago, the ancestors of all living mammals exploited the darkness. This has been named 'the nocturnal bottleneck' – a rather negative-sounding name for something quite extraordinary. Some scientists suggest this mammal night-time activity pattern could have lasted the entire Mesozoic, but there is no way to know for sure how varied their activity patterns really were; some species may have returned to being active during the day. In the modern world most mammals are still at their most active at night. ... [; Although - this also makes me wonder 'bout...that there too is several exhibiting the life-styles 'in-between'...The Squirrel at least seems be, principally, daily-active of course. Yet, fx the hares – and apparently resultant the Fox(es), perhaps, from following their main prey – seem be active both at day, and night. (Although by the day clearly less...) - More generally, acc. the Wohlleben reasons to that are (at least partly) due because from a vast human activity – during by day. ; Anycase, both good reasons for to restrain of the further, (nowadays constant) increase in a human constructed night-time light...] [...]

Mammalian hearing is also a super-sense. There are species that detect sound at super-high and low frequencies, from the tiny conversation of rodents and pinpoint moth-detection of bats, to belly rumbles between savannah elephants and the ocean-spanning songs of lonely whales. None of this would be possible without the refinement of the mammal ear, a process we now know could only take place thanks to the miniaturisation of our Triassic ancestors.”,

“Perhaps the most intriguing venomous mammal alive today is the Solenodon. This creature can grow to nearly half a metre (22in) from nose to tail-tip, and looks like a shrew on steroids. It has a coat ranging from almost black to hay-yellow... They only live on the Islands of Cuba and Hispaniola, and represent one of the oldest branches of the modern placental mammals still alive today, having diverged from the rest around 70 million years ago in the Cretaceous. Exactly when they diverged, and how they reached the only two islands they now call home, is still a matter of debate. They may have been carried there across the sea on a raft of vegetation, or reached it when the islands were connected to the mainland. ...
[...]
If they manage to survive being hunted, we think of small mammals as living fast and dying young. ... But recent research suggests this wasn't the case for the very first mammals.” : (Elsa Panciroli) ; Beasts Before Us : The Untold Story of Mammal Origins and Evolution (2020; p. 164-5, 168-9.)

"Insects were the evolutionary Wright brothers, and... Birds and bats are the only powered flyers among modern tetrapods. ...the origin of bats remains a mystery. The first bat fossils are about 52 million years old; they were already able to echolocate and were 100 per cent batty in form. Hopefully one day someone will find a proto-bat, and the mystery of their evolution will become clear." - (Panciroli) ; (footnote, on p.217.) ...Indeed. - Or, at least a (very) quick glance on a net for that, seems affirm (to me) that still 'by this day' (20.11.21) was no newer 'evidence' discovered(...perhaps). ; Acc. Wikip. (on bats flight, ao...) there's that : "...A 2020 study proposed that flight in bats might have originated independently at least three times..." ; And, acc. the Smithsonian-article, on a present year (...'app.') : "...of the better-preserved specimens...scientists know that the first bats couldn't echolocate [?]." ; Whatever the case (, specifically from to that) - No question, a following (on it) araises more my interest, fromafter these few 'glances' only: "...bones of...[some] earliest know bats are...as thin as a human hair. The only reason we know about these bats is that they lived around lakes that favored exceptional preservation,..." ; So...indeed interesting.

"...With the number of days on Earth over 35 Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) expected to triple in the coming decades, hyperthermia [ie; overheating from the body - in direct contrast to a (currently) more familiar opposite term, hypothermia] , is a real danger not just to humans, but to all animals.", "...A study published in 2020 looking at the distribution of mammals since the 1970s found that declines in range correlated with large body mass, increased air temperature, loss of habitat and high density of humans. ..."
; "Habitat destruction is the most insidious driver for extinction. [italics to these added - by us.] ...Our use of land for agriculture is the major driver of biodiversity collapse, as we try to feed 7.8 billion people and more each year. Around 70 per cent of that agriculture is related to meat production, which also gobbles vast volumes of water and grain. This is part of the reason that becoming vegetarian...one of most powerful ways an individual can act to save the world. Around 60 per cent of all mammals alive today are kept by humans for food. There are over 1.4 billion cows, 1.8 billion sheep and goats and 980 million pigs, which alongside humans account for 34 per cent of all mammals on Earth. Our pet cats total 600 million, our dogs 470 million. Wild mammals, meanwhile, now represent only 4 per cent of all mammals alive today." ; "We are a walking disaster taxon. ..."; (Panciroli ; p. 293, 294; 295, 296; 297.)

"The knowledge of an effect depends on,
and involves,
the knowledge of the cause."
Baruch Spinoza (Ethics)
- Cited via Phemister (2006), The Rationalists. Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz.

"... This thoroughness is what makes gene drives so powerful - and so alarming. It's been estimated that, had a fruit fly escaped the San Diego lab during the first gene drive experiments, it would have spread genes encoding CRISPR, along with the yellow-body trait, to between 20 and 50 percent of all fruit flies worldwide.
Scientists pursuing CRISPR gene drives have been outspoken about the need to carefully weigh the risks before conducting further experiments and about the importance of developing guidelines that ensure future research proceeds safely. Perhaps the most obvious safeguard to prevent accidentally unleashing a gene drive into the world is stringent containment, such as physical barriers separating organisms from the environment and ecological barriers between the animal's habitable range and the geographical location of the laboratory. ...scientists have proposed a variety of strategies that could theoretically inactivate gene drives that run amok. One of these is the so-called reversal drive, a gene drive that essentially functions as an antidote by overwriting any changes in the genome created by the original gene drive.
Even with the most cautious experimental design and planning, we can't predict all of the environmental effects that a gene drive might have, and we can't completely eliminate the possibility of a gene drive getting out of control and disrupting an ecosystems's delicate balance. ...

There's also no way to guarantee that this incredibly powerful tool won't wind up in the hands of people who have no compunction about using gene drives to cause harm - and who may, indeed, be attracted to them for exactly that purpose. The ETC group, a bio tech watchdog organization, worries that gene drives - what they call 'gene bombs' - could be militarized and weaponized to target the human microbiome or major food sources." (; Doudna - Sternberg, 2017 ; 151-2. [emphz added].)

"There are great, frowning precipices and much falling water, and the Nature seems have sometime held here her carnival."
-Memorandum by Abraham Van Helsing
(From Bram Stoker's Dracula, 1891)

"There's no greater a feeling."
- Crow-Goddess
From Sorceress, by Michael Scott (2009)

"... Another prominent African American leader before the Civil War, Martin R. Delany, struggled even more than Douglas to find his political footing after the war. Like Brown, Delany went South, but his vision to reconstruct the South met with considerable resistance. ... '... Without realising it he took a class position that soon put him at odds with large number of blacks.' Later, Delany would campaign for southern Democrats, unaware that 'being Democrat meant even more being pro-Confederate and pro-planter in the low country; it meant being a scab as well.' Delany met with angry crowds of blacks who 'beat their drums and refused to listen to what they called a damned nigger Democrat,' hardly the title Delany had worked for when he spoke years earlier of a nation within a nation." ;
"It is, indeed, difficult to locate a stable center by which African American history and identity can be located in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. It was a time of extensive mobility and new modes of white supremacist containment, a time when people found themselves or placed themselves in significant new locales, ... Many African Americans who were prominent leaders before the Civil War found themselves, like Douglas and Delany, facing the challenge of a new political landscape and undefined public roles. ...African Americans were reminded again and again that they lived in a culture characterized by 'terror, organized and random.' Perhaps the most pressingly continuous narrative connecting past to present was the reappearancce of systemic slavery and racial oppression in new forms, and this time without a clear center, legalized slavery, for rallying the cooperation of white allies. When the Supreme Court's ruling in Unites States v. Stanley helped to facilitate the proliferation of Jim Crow laws, Douglas observed, 'It is the old spirit of slavery, and nothing else.' Many others agreed, and some, like Brown, realized this spirit would haunt any attempt to represent black life and thought."
- From 'Introduction' (John Ernest; 2011 ed.)
at William Wells Brown's My Southern Home,
or, The South and it's People (xxxix-xl ; xli.)

"So when I hear scientists say, 'The data speak for themselves', I cringe. Data never speak. And data generally and most often are politically and socially inflected."
(From a blog-post/writing viewed in passing...)

"...that's about (estimated) 160 000 litres oil
consumed in the world on each second..."
- Excert from a BBC-Document,
(emphasis added)

"It was inevitable that these issues would come up in cabinet discussions. Churchill's ministers had met on numerous occasions to review various aspects of their ongoing war in Kenya and specifically addressed issues related to detention without trial and forced labor. In one meeting in February of 1954, for example, the cabinet minutes recorded that Churchill and his men realized, 'This course [i.e., detention without trial and forced labor] had been recommended despite the fact that it was thought to involve a technical breach of the Forced Labour Convention of 1930 and of the Convention of Human Rights adopted by Council of Europe. ' They then went on to recommend finding legal-appearing means for circumventing the constraints of these treaties. Nearly a year later Churchill's cabinet would discuss the public relations problems caused by the blanket amnesty, ultimately agreeing to it despite its implications.

That insiders in both official and unofficial circles knew about British crimes in Kenya was an open secret, as a 1953 row between Churchill and Lady Mountbatten would illustrate. ...

As charge after charge was leveled at the colonial government, neither of the colonial secretaries nor Governor Baring nor Churchill nor his successors Anthony Eden and Harold MacMillan ever wavered from their course. ...But there were alternatives. In retrospekt, the most obvious was immediate decolonization. At any point Britain's prime minister and colonial secretary could have put an end to the violence by pulling out of the colony altogether and granting Kenya its independence. ...Officials in the British colonial government also believed they were fighting a moral war for Western civilization over the forces of dark savagery. There would be no contemplation of an imperial retreat from Kenya before Mau Mau had been crushed. In their minds, the colony had to be rendered governable, if only to protect the long-term British interests. Yet, paradoxically, Britain's very presence in Kenya and the brutality of its forces were the real root of the turmoil. Withdrawing was never considered, though, at least not until the end of the Emergency when Mau Mau had been destroyed and with it much of the Kikuyu population. Even then, there were colonial officials, particularly in Kenya, who believed the colony would remain part of the Empire for at least another generation."

"There are demographic figures. The British colonial government undertook a census of the Africans in Kenya in 1948 and 1962, years on either side of the Emergency. The population figures reveal that the growth rate of the Kikuyu was notably below that of the neighbouring Kamba, Luo, and Luhya populations, something that should not have been the case. ...adjusted using growth rates comparable to other Africans, we find that somewhere between 130,000 and 300,000 Kikuyu are unaccounted for. I believe the lower growth rate was likely to two factors: actual deaths and a slower birth rate due lower female fertility. ...malnourishment, disease, miscarriage, the absence of regular male partners, and the psychological stress resulting from war trauma, ...at the very least it is safe to assume that the official figure of some eleven thousand Mau Mau killed is implausible given all that has been uncovered." ;
"...The version of history for which I found little corroborating evidence is that which depicts camps as a benign system, and colonial officials, camp commandants, and guards as paternalistic reformers. In the official written record as well as in later interviews the testimonies of British colonial agents are littered with omissions, half-truths, and lies. ..."
(Elkins, Carolyn) : Britain's Gulag. The Brutal end of Empire in Kenya. (2005 ; p. 304-5., 366 ; 374.)

"There is questions that demand an answer and there is answers that don't grant much weight on question."
(Aphorism from/via W.I.T.C.H.)

"We are all censors at heart. If I don't tell her the internet surely will." - Suzanne Moore
(From column at Guardian)

"Though the song of the nightingale is admittedly impressive, I personally think that you cannot better the song of a blackbird on an early spring morning." (; p. 215, fn no 53.)
...If ever havin had the luck for hearing blackbird sing, one might readily agree - It sounds, indeed, very peculiar, is even exceptional. (...from any other birds.) ; Besides, the males let one surprisingly close, at least those adapted for 'urbanized' land. ; 'Though, noticing those bird to have quite plenty sounds and melodies from, I'm not sure if the bird even uses just those same 'tunes' in during the night-time.

; "There is a fascinating website, farmsubsidy.org, which tells you exactly how much subcidy every 'farmer' in the EU gets each year. You'll be perplexed to hear that the sugar producers Tate & Lyle are the biggest UK recipient, having received no less than £594,270,084 of 'farming subsidy' over the last fifteen years (yes, that is the correct number of digits). They don't actually do any farming whatsoever - they simply buy sugar cane from tropical countries and process it into refined sugar. We also give similar astronomic sums to companies who grow and process suger beet, a crop that is grown in intensive monocultures with the application of many pesticides, all to produce a substance that is fundamentally bad for us, ... Perhaps this is not the wisest expenditure of the taxpayers' money." (; p. 216, fn no 55.)
- From (Goulson, Dave) : Bee Quest. In search of Rare Bees. (2017 - pgns at citates.)

"Scientists once tried to build a sealed living world - nicknamed Biosphere 2 - from scratch in a big greenhouse in the Arizona desert. They failed."
Mark Lynas
(Six Degrees. Our future on a hotter planet)

"Knepp is a wonderful example of what can happen if we just stop. Stop doing anything at all - stop trying to conserve, stop trying to interfere, stop trying to manage - just let the nature catch up, absorb the changes that went before, and then do its own thing. Who knows what will happen next at Knepp, what new species will arrive? What will it look like in a year, a decade, a hundred years? The truth is that we really don't know, we cannot anticipate - and although I am a scientist, and it is my job to seek to understand and predict these things, I rather like that." ; (Goulson 2017 ; p. 219.)

"Efficiency could reduce consumption, but humanity has a poor track record of doing so."
Rex Weyler
(Why De-Growth? - A post on Deep Green-blog)

"The fruits do not yield their true flavor to the purchaser of them, nor to him who raises them for the market. There is but one way to obtain it, yet few take that way [...] It is a vulgar error suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked them. A huckleberry never reaches Boston; they have not been known there since they grew on the three hills."
Thoreau
(Walden, or Life in the Woods, 1852)

"Demi-Fools, carried away by the revolution that is changing everything in France, began twenty years ago to allow that women are capable of something. But they must give themselves up to occupations becoming their sex: educate flowers, make friendships with the birds, and pick up plants. These are called innocent amusements.
...
All such reasoning can be reduced to this: a man likes to be able to say of his slave: 'Shes too big a fool to be a knave.'"

; "...Nevertheless love is only a passion in so far as it makes one forget one's self-love. Thus they do not completely know love, these women, who like Léonore, ask of it the pleasures of pride. Unconsciously, they are on the same level as the prosaic man, the object of their contempt, who in love seeks love plus vanity. And they too, they want love and pride; but love goes with the flaming cheeks; [...] is the proudest of all despots; [...] will be all or nothing." - Stendhal ; On Love [De L'Amour]
(Chpt 55, 'Objections to the Education of Women'
; Chpt 59, footnote no 1.)

"When at strange places it's better keep your own books along."
(From Tintenblut by Cornelia Funke)

"...It was decided that a squadron of twelve Hawker Hurricanes could indeed be spared - a generous gesture on the face of it, given the possible imminent pressure on the Western Front, but not entirely. ...These aircraft were not a gift, however, they were sold - under protest from the Air Staff - at an eye-watering £9,000 apiece. ...

...[later]Chamberlain was remembering [that] with advantage. The Finns bought, and were to buy, almost everything. And, further, like the deliberations on intervention itself, which was now at the forefront of British foreign policy, there was absolutely no sense of urgency involved in supply, a matter that had already vexed Gripenberg hugely. This was not aid, it was, in effect, business. ...
The Hurricane squadron, uncomfortably decorated with their hakaristi markings, were prepared and sent in convoy in late February. They would arrive in theatre in the very last few days of the war."

; "Given that the political-military model for the Red Army was essentially industrial - the Red Army as a great khaki factory - some allowance was now made for the essential difference between an industrial worker and a soldier, or a factory manager and an officer - in effect upgrading the status of the soldier as opposed to the worker who was not risking his life. This would develop further after the war." ; (Edwards, Robert): White Death. Russia's War on Finland, 1939-40 (2006; p. 221-2, 231., italics Edwards'.)

"Late twentieth-century humans played dice as never before with the systems that support life."
Hughes, J. Donald
- An Environmental History of the World. Humankind's Changing role in the Community of Life (2001 - emphz, added.)

"..., very intense radioactivity with long-lived isotopes had been allowed to accumulate beneath the cointainment, and the continued operation of the facility did not make economic sense. On the basis of the preliminary data, the cost of the cleanup was estimated at $40 million. [fn., 'The cleanup at Chernobyl cost 8 billion rubles'] The reactor was shut down for a long time. A commission was set up to inquire into the causes of the accident." ...Such as noted - the referred accident (,on preced.) not later one at Chernobyl - But of the US Three Mile Island, on 28.3.1979.
;
"The reader may find it useful to know that the only way to control nuclear reactor is by controlling the proportion of slow neutrons, designated by the Greek letter [here simply: b](beta). The nuclear safety rules stipulate that the power of nuclear reactor may be safely increased at a rate of 0.0065 effective b per second. Once the proportion of slow neutrons rises to 0.5 b, a prompt neutron power surge begins."
;
"...The radiometer ran 500 roentgens per hour. As they opened the door, they felt a surge of heat from below; it was carrying radioactive gas, ionized neutrons and gamma rays. No one was wearing a respirator, nor was helicopter protected underneath by lead plating. This was added later, after hundreds of tons of sand had already been dumped. The crew looked out of the open door and, staring down into the nuclear volcano and aiming with the naked eye, dropped the bag. And countless bags thereafter. There was no other way to do it.
...At an altitude of 360 feet (110 m) radioactivity rose to 1,800 roentgens per hour after the bags had been dropped. The pilots were taken ill in the air.
... All of that ['fission fragments and radioactive ash from burnt graphite'] ended up in people's lungs. Uranium and plutonium salts had to be flushed from the blood of these heroes for several months, in fact, they had to have their blood replaced several times. "
;
"I should like to finish this chronicle by quoting a distinguished Soviet scientist, a member of the Soviet Academy of Medical Science and a major specialist on leukemia, Andrei Ivanovich Vorobyov. Here are his comments on the Chernobyl tragedy:
'[citate:] You can imagine what would happen to the planet if nuclear power stations were bombed, even with conventional warheads, with no nuclear charges. The mere thought of mankind existing in such a mutilated state is surely intolerable to any civilized person. It seems to me that after this accident mankind must abandon its medieval mentality.
...' "
; (Medvedev, Grigori) : The Truth About Chernobyl (1991[1989] ; p. 15; 60; 194; 266-7. - ...Medvedev's book seems, now from read, quite much reflect impressions, or say, the felt anxieties from soon after that tragedy. (And the state of the world, by then. How incomprehensible was the general global shock, how it've felt by the timing. The text seems dated to 1987, almost exactly the year after accident. However, year of publication seems by -89.)
; But simpliest, most in the description feels still well knowings worth. (Like the remark that resulted could've lead even for worse disasters, had the operators not been able extinguish fires from the turbine hall and the devastation spread for other reactor units of the plant.) ; Or, on how devastatingly everywhere the radioactive contamination was soon found to spreading, fx; '...all those cars and other vehicles would have to be buried, because a month or two of operations in this area would suffice to fill the interior of each with as much as 5 roentgens per hour or even more' (p. 222.)

"Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads (without improvement), are the roads of Genius."
William Blake
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
- (Cited) via R.L.Stevenson's Roads (1873)

"Gorbatchev's first reaction was to ask how the explosion could have happened. 'After all, the scientists had always assured, the countrys leaders, that the reactor was absolutely safe,' he recalled. 'Academician Aleksandrov said, for example, that an RBMK reactor could be installed even on Red Square, since it was no more dangerous than a samovar.' "
;
"In the fall of 1987, ...

The first village in the Narodychi district that Yaroshinskaya visited...was under constant radioactive monitoring. The local school was closed when radiation levels in the building exceeded 1.5 rem per hour. But the authorities kept their construction program going, expecting people to keep living there. The workers...were tiring easily and developing headaches. They were paid supplements of thirty rubles per month, allegedly for better nutrition. The workers called it 'coffin money.' Neither they nor the locals could tell why a new kindergarten was being built in the radiation-affected village, where there were hardly any children. A new bathhouse was also going up, apparently to make it easier for the locals to cleanse themselves of radioactive dust.

Yaroshinskaya was appalled. ...The situation was the same in all of them [villages, in that region]: there was new construction, and radiation levels were being kept secrect, endangering the health of both the locals and the evacuees who were being resettled there from the exclusion zone. ...80 percent of the children in the region had enlarged thyroid glands - a sign of abnormally high levels of radiation exposure. ..."
;
"In September 1988, the month in which Adamovich's article was published, Yurii Shcherbak brought a small group of filmmakers to Narodychi , the subject of Yaroshinskaya's utmost concern. The documentary film produced with his help showed calves born without eyes and with other deformations caused by high radiation levels at local farms - in one case, levels 150 times those of the city of Kyiv. Over the course of the year after the accident, sixty-four deformed animals were born at that particular farm, compared to three during the previous five-year period. But the twenty-minute documentary would not be shown... ...The authorities were still doing their best to keep the truth under wraps, but their monopoly on information was crumbling.

In the late summer of 1988, ..."
; (Plokhy, Serhii) Chernobyl. History of a Tragedy (; p 121, 308-9, 311. )

"The factory farm , which allows ranchers to make sickly animals highly profitable through the use of antibiotics, other pharmaneuticals, and controlled confinement, has created new, sometimes monstrous creatures."
Jonathan Safran Foer
Eating Animals (2000s)

"International diplomats stonewalled and blocked Chernobyl research because leaders of the big nuclear powers had already exposed millions of peoples to dangerous radioactive isotopes during the Cold War in producing and testing nuclear weapons. Awakening to this fact in the 1990s, Americans and Europeans were taking their governments to court. In this global context, Chernobyl wasn't the largest nuclear emergency in human history. It was just a waving of red flag pointing to other disasters hidden by Cold War national security regimes."

; "Nadia's hunch was correct. Nuclear bomb target maps suggest that distance is the main factor in nuclear accidents, but radioactive fallout from the smoking reactor swept along in a patchwork fashion. Rain laced with fallout fell on April 27 on several regions of northern Ukraine and southern Belarus. The day before, these regions had normal background levels of contamination. Of the ...people who left Pripyat the day after the accident, most were resettled to two regions that registered levels of contamination greater than Pripyat by the time they got there.
An employee at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Nadia knew she had been dropped in a place extrem
ely ill-equipped to protect against radioactivity. ...
Nadia shot me a look. 'I decided we better get out of there.' ..."
; "...Citing a 1980 pollution law, Chekherev did something no one had done at the wool factory in Chernihiv. He issued a stop work order, shutting down the tannery and holding up the processing of 19,000 hides. He refused to let the cleaned skins leave the factory. ...
...Experts in Moscow had drawn up a plan that called for warehousing the hides for several months so that the most powerful , short-lived isotopes decayed and the processing the leather in extra baths of water of water and chromium. ...Radioactive isotopes can only be moved from one place to another, while they decay on their own schedule. The cleaner the leather emerged from the factory, the dirtier the water flowed from the factory's drainpipes."
;
"...It didn't take many curies of radioactivity in the soil for it to show up in the food chain. Scientists had known that for decades. ..."
;
"...The results were more than predictable. In Gomel and Mogilev provinces, meat and milk in 1987 were more radioactive than in 1986, hotter again in 1988. It took about fifteen curies per square kilometer for nearly all the milk be over permissible levels. Mushrooms, meat, and wild boar also become more, not less, contaminated in subsequent years. The same dynamic played out in Ukraine. Even in 'clean' areas, 30-90 percent of milk came in hotter than permissible. 'Despite restrictions,' a regulator wrote, 'most of this produce is consumed by the population. The rest is given over to the state for sale.' The too-radioactive food slipped into the food chain. It traveled widely to large cities and towns. Sometimes farmers in contaminated areas purchased clean food that was delivered to them but then sold their homemade radioactive produce in neighbouring communities where no one was checking for radiation. ...
...Why in 1990 were people still living in areas measuring over a hundred curies of cesium-137 per square kilometer? Why write up orders if lower-level managers had no choice but to disregard them?
There are several answers to these questions, none of them very satisfying. ... "
(Kate Brown) ; Manual for survival. A Chernobyl Guide to the Future. (; p. 5; 27; 95-6; 114; 115.)

"...Frodo learned now enough to content him,
indeed more than enough,
for it was not comfortable lore.
Tom's words laid bare the hearts of trees and their thoughts,
which were often dark and strange, and filled with a hatred
of things that go free upon the Earth, gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning: destroyers and usurpers."
Tolkien
The Fellowship of the Ring

"One road was paved with gold,
one road is just a road."
Patti Smith
('My blakean year')

"Just as humanity did at the time
of our Agricultural Revolution,
the ants independently invented the town."
R.Dawkins
Ancestor's Tale (2004)
(The Leaf's Cutters tale)

"...From the particles, Lozytska deduced that the reactor did not blow up from a steam or chemical explosion, as Soviet authorities asserted. Rather, she determined there had been a localized nuclear blast in a thin layer of fissionable materials. Only a nuclear detonation would release the spectrum of radionuclides, she reasoned, that she found in the hot particles. Lozytska typed up her findings, but she could neither publish nor speak about them until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. ...
[...] Still tracking the story in 2000, De Geer learned that Russian scientists in the town of Cherepovets, a thousand kilometers from the Chernobyl plant, had detecked Chernobyl-issued xenon isotopes in the days following the accident. That evidence astounded him. It showed a mysterious deviation from the known path of fallout. De Geer calculated that only a jet of radioactive gases ascending three kilometers into the air could have delivered xenon isotopes as far as Cheropovets. No steam explosion could send gases that high. De Geer computed that a nuclear explosion occurred in a part of the reactor where a two-meter thick steel floor had vaporized in heat so tremendous that only a nuclear explosion could generate it. De Geer published his article in November 2017, resolving a dispute that had quietly played out for decades. ..."

; "Looking back on it now, it is clear that Soviet officials staged the Kyiv conference on Chernobyl health effects to drum support for a change of course. They were growing weary of the Chernobyl accident. ...At the Kyiv meeting, public officials presented their results to an international audience who they hoped would endorse their view that the Chernobyl chapter had closed.
[...]
Most of the American delegates to the Kyiv conference depended on funds from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which was in charge of producing the American nuclear arsenal. At the time, worrisom reports had leaked out about how DOE scientists had exposed thousands of people in secret experiments during the first decades of the Cold War. Lusbaugh supervised a clinic at the Oak Ridge Associated Universities, where researchers covertly placed radioactive cesium and cobalt in the walls of hotel-like rooms and irradiated over two hundred patients who were suffering from leukemia, lymphoma, arthritis, and other ailments. After patients died, Lusbaugh carefully autopsied them. Lusbaugh was not alone. Curious about the properties of radiation, American scientists during the Cold War sprayed neighborhoods with deadly radioactive material, injected and fed Americans radioactive substances, and zapped prisoners with neutron rays. They carried out human radiation experiments with nearly every kind of American: whites, blacks, Latinos, children, pregnant women, patients, wards of hospitals, prisoners, students, scientists and soldiers. The researchers functioned behind a wall of secrecy and with generous public funding. ...
In the mid-seventies, the secrecy, funding and power began to deteriorate. Victims requested the release of records and sued for reparations. ...

[...] The career trajectories of the foreign scientists at the Kyiv conference suggested that they would not ask uncomfortable questions or raise objections. Though there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of their scientific opinions, these men had a pointed interest, given their past and the tarnished legacies of the agencies they represented, in endorsing the view that radioactivity in any but high doses causes no harm. For the officials who had carefully curated the image of nuclear safety, the conference was an opportunity arising at an especially tense moment. If Soviet scientists could prove that large-scale exposures to 'low' doses of Chernobyl radiation harmed only a few dozen firemen, then they could show that even the worst nuclear accident in human history had no effect on human health. And if that were true, then the fallout from nuclear testing, the weeping radioactive waste from bomb factories, the civilian reactors that daily emitted radioactivity, the widespread use of radiation in medical treatments, and the exposed bodies of workers, patients, and innocent bystanders in secret medical tests could be forgotten. ..."
;

"...Sixty-six nuclear accidents occurred in Ukraine alone in the year after Chernobyl blew. More nuclear mishaps transpired after the Soviet Union collapsed, including the fires in the Red Forest in 2017.
Calling Chernobyl an 'accident' is a broom that sweeps away the larger story. Conceiving the events that contaminated the Pripyat Marshes as discrete occurrences blurs the fact that they are connected. Instead of an accident, Chernobyl might better be conceived of as an acceleration on a time line of destruction or as an exclamation point in a chain of toxic exposures that restricted the landscape, bodies, and politics. ..."
; (Brown) - p. 147-8; 149-150, 151, 152-3. ; 142.

"... In part because of the tremendous physical computing power and human expertise that resulted from nuclear weapons research, informatics development in the U.S. Human Genome Project began under the auspices of GenBank at the U.S. National Laboratories at Los Alamos, New Mexico. It was there also that the expertise and machines existed that built the matrix for the flourishing of artificial-life research at the nearby Santa Fe Institute.
A database is an information structure. Computer programs are the habitats of information structures, and an organism's genome is a kind of nature park among databases. Just as racial hygiene and eugenics were committed to science and progress, and populationist doctrines of the human universals were unambiguously on the side of development and future, the genome is allied with all that is up-to-the-minute. Yet something peculiar happened to the stable, family-loving, Mendelian gene when it passed into a database, where it has more in common with LANDSAT photographs, Geographical Information Systems, international seed banks, and the World Bank than with T. H. Morgan's fruit flies at Columbia University in the 1910s or UNESCO's populations in the 1950s. Banking and mapping seem to be the name of the genetic game at a accelerating pace since the 1970s, in the corporatization of biology to make it fit for the New World Order, Inc. If the modern synthesis, ideologically speaking, tended to make everyone his brother's keeper, then, in its version of kin selection and inclusive fitness maximization strategies, the sociobiological synthesis runs to making everyone his or her sibling's banker.
Biotechnology in the service of corporate profit is a revolutionary force for remaking the inhabitants of planet Earth, from viruses and bacteria right up the now repudiated chain of being to Homo sapiens and beyond. ..."
;
"...Pursuing the symptomatic logic of this essay, my technique is resolute overreading. I know no better strategy to deal with the vermin-infested normality of rational discourse. Just state the obvious. Say what should not be said.
Du Pont's wonderful advertisement for OncoMouse [tm], the first patented animal in the world, in Science magazine in 1989-90 provides my first text. OncoMouse[tm] contains a cancer-causing bit of DNA, called an oncogene, derived from the genome of another creature and implanted by means of genetic engineering techniques. A model for breast cancer research, the redesigned rodent is like a machine tool in the workshops for the production of knowledge. OncoMouse[tm] is transgenic animal, whose scene of evolution is the laboratory. ...For that very reason, the mouse has been at the center of controversy since its production. ...What interests me here, however, are the stories that are crusted like barnacles onto the striking advertising image."
(Donna Haraway) - 'Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture; It's all in the Family: Biological kinship categories in the Twentieth-Century United States', on
Uncommon Ground. Toward Reinventing Nature (1995 ; p. 349; 356. - italics: Haraway's.)

"(The) Genius loci... is."
M-S jones)

"These standardised reports were unlike anything I've ever seen. One chart showed that in hard-hit regions of Gomel Province, the populations had dropped in half between 1985 and 1987. Poof, in one region 15,000 people had voluntarily relocated. That was bad, but what sent a chill down my spine was the text under the chart: 'As apparent from thetable above, considerable demographic and migratory changes in the structure of the population have not occurred in Krasnopole Region.'
What? How could the author determine there were no demographic changes when 50 percent of the residents were gone? I suppose the bureaucrats who filed that report never imagined it would be read. I found more documents that also unhitched facts from conclusions. An analysis of cerebral-vascular and neurological health in contaminated areas showed a tripling of illness between 1985 and 1988, but then, as if no count had ever been taken, the official concluded they had found 'no essential changes or a significant increase.'
[...]
Sovok is a lovingy derisive word for an unreflectingly loyal Soviet citizen, bound by ideology and lacking independent thought and action. It describes bureaucrats aimlessly filing contradictory documents between long coffee breaks, somnambulists going through motions. ..."
; "Seeking to calm the unruly public, Soviet minister of Health Evgeny Chanov called for backup. He asked the World Health Organization (WHO) to send a delegation of 'foreign experts' to assess the 350 mSv safe lifetime dose. Wasting no time, WHO officials put together a commission of physicists - not physicians - who were already on record minimizing the Chernobyl accident. ... [...]
After their whistle-stop tour, the WHO consultants came to the conclusion that any association between the reported rise in noncancerous diseases and Chernobyl fallout was a mistake of 'scientists who are not well versed in radiation.' They suggested instead that health problems were due to 'psychological factors and stress.' They wrote that 350 mSv 'would present only s small risk to health, comparable with other risks to human life.' Using as a baseline the findings of the Life Span Study of Japanese bomb survivors, ...The WHO consultants were proposing a threshold ten to fifteen times higher than the recommendation of IAEA and the International Committee for Radiation Protection.
[...]
The world's leading health agency's hasty assessment greatly disappointed Soviet green parties, citizens' groups and activists. The World Health Organization report was also an embarrassment for international science. ...",

"After Hiroshima, American propagandists glossed over the deaths and acute radiation illness suffered by Japanese bomb survivors. Soon after the war ended, Hollywood distributors sent MGM films Madame Curie to occupied Japan, a biopic about the first scientist to distill radium. The film shows the Curies in their ramshackle lab at the moment of discovery. In a soft-focus shot, Pierre Curie looks at the empty space behind Marie's shoulder and evokes the limitless metaphysical horizon. 'If we can prove the secret of this new element, then we can look into the secret of life.'
In 1953, ...President Dwight Eisenhower unveiled the 'Atoms for Peace' program, dedicated to using nuclear power for medicine and to generate electricity 'too cheap to meter'. ...
Soviet leaders gamely joined the race with Americans. In 1954, engineers plugged in the world's first nuclear power generating reactor in Obninsk, a closed city near Moscow. The reactor produced all of five megawatts for grid, but the propaganda value of juxtaposing the peaceful Soviet atom against the martial American A-bomb was immeasurable. ...
[...]
For Americans, selling the idea of nuclear power in Japan was not seamless. In 1954, the wind shifted during the Bravo test of a hydrogen bomb in the Bikini atoll and contaminated a Japanese fishing vessel, the Lucky Dragon, with a thick coating of black fallout. By the time the vessel reached port, the crew was suffering from radiation poisoning. Japanese panciked on learning that Lucky Dragon's radiation catch was making its way through the fish market. A few months later the antinuclear film Godzilla hit Japanese theaters. Nine million Japanese paid to see the sci-fi horror film depicting a deep-sea, prehistoric monster wakened by oceanic nuclear tests. The confused and angry beast pulverinized Japanese cities with his radiactive breath. As protests erupted in Japan against nuclear testing, Japanese and American leaders quickly settled in closed-door meetings on a deal to transfer U.S. nuclear designs and fission products to Japan. Among Japanese leaders, who were eager to secure an independent power source form industrial expansion, the choice between the two competing visions of nuclear power - that of Madame Curie and Godzilla- was easy. The antidote to nuclear fear was the beacon of nuclear power.
...The UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) started as a relatively toothless branch of international governance. It had no power to inspect or control the bomb-producing superpowers and could only regulate countries seeking to build nuclear reactors. ...",
"...Officers, especially, in nuclear navies, where sailors live in close proximity to submarine reactors, requently refer to 'hormesis,' the idea that exposure to radiation in small doses has favorable biological effects. Scientists tried for decades to prove this notion in studies. They poured lots of money into the endeavor to no avail.
The debate between scientists promoting hormesis and geneticists' warning that no dose is safe echoed in 1989 more loudly than ever before. ..."
;(Brown) - p. 184-5 ; 211-2, 218-220, 223.

"I'm a Duck. The Duck I am.
Da-da Da-Da, Duck.
(The Duck I am.)"
(W-G.)

"The Earth is loaded with plants and, nothing impedes their free development."
Alexander von Humboldt
(On Personal Narrative... ; 1799-1804).

"Of all the stops on the nuclear weapons assembly line, plutonium production is the dirtiest. Each kilogram of final product generates hundreds of thousands of gallons radioactive waste. In four decades of operation, the Hanaford plutonium plant near Richland and Mayak plant next to Ozersk each issued at least 200 million curies of radioactivity - twice what Chernobyl emitted - into the surrounding environment. The plants left behind hundreds of square miles of uninhabitable territory, contaminated rivers, spoiled fields and forests, and thousands of people claiming to be sick from the plants' radioactive effluence.
... Ozersk and Richland were government owned and managed by corporate bosses. Richland was unusual on the American landscape because it had no private property, no free market or local self-government. Ozersk was one of ten nuclear cities in the Soviet Union that existed secretly, off the map, behind fencing; every resident required a special pass to live there. Strangely, residents appeared to like these restrictive arrangements. ..."
;
"...Histories subdivided into 'science,' 'environment,' 'culture,' and 'architecture' also fail to unwrap the larger story of how scientific research, cultural currents, urbanization trends, territorial zoning, policy, and finance created the landscapes we call home at the same time they produced warheads, missiles, and defense budgets increasingly impossible to shoulder.
The nuclear weapons complexes created militarized landscapes that blossomed far beyond the immediate territories of the plutonium plants. In the American case, Tri-Cities boosters lobbied for and won highways, bridges, dams, schools, housing, and farm subsidies to ensure national security and self-sufficiency. These allocations also provided financial security for citizens who felt increasingly entitled as a result of Cold War promises of universal affluence. Across the militarized American terrain rolled multiple wars: the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on cancer, and the war on terror. ...
Taken as complex, the militarized landscape also helped produce health epidemics. In the United States from 1950 to 2001, the overall age-adjusted incidence of cancer increased by 85 percent. Childhood cancer, once a medical rarity, has become the most common disease killer of American children. Cancer rates are just the end of a continuum of American health problems that include diabetes, heart disease, asthma and obesity. These socio-cultural-economic problems written on the body are also etched across American communities, one-quarter of which are within four miles of a Superfund site filled with plastics, chemical solvents, pesticides, nuclear waste, and all the other unwanted detritus of consuming societies. This is the house plutonium built.
Russia scores no better. From 1960 to 1985, cancer rates in the Societ Union grew from 115 to 150 per 100,000 people. ..."
; Kate Brown : Plutopia. Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, 2013 - p. 3-4 ('Introduction') ; 337.

"When politics, bereft of relevant stories, cannot connect with the lives of those it claims to represent, it contributes to the dominant condition of our age: alienation.
Alienation means many things. ..." ;

" 'Altering human nature' may sound frightening, in view of developments in the twentieth century. But all political movements, consciously or otherwise, attempt this. As Margaret Thatcher, who instinctively understood such matters, explained, 'Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.' What she was talking about, though she did not express it in these terms, was shifting people along their value spectrum. The likely impact of her policies was to promote extrinsic values at the expense of intrinsic values. The likely impact of the fellowship societies established in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to draw people in the other direction.
There were similar initiatives in 'Red Vienna' after the First World War, in Spain before and during the Civil War, in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, and among contemporary or recent movements such as Occupy, the Movimento Sem Tierra in Brazil, the Zapatistas in Mexico, Nuit Debord in France, the Indignados and Podemos in Spain, and the People's Science Movement in the Indian state of Kerala.
[...] It is striking, reviewing this history, to see that even organizations now viewed as highly statist understood the importance of reviving community life. ..."
(Monbiot) ; Out of the Wreckage. A New Politics for an Age of Crisis (2017; p. 54; 73-4.)

"Politicians indulge in the same sophistry about the love of liberty as philosophers about the state of nature. They judge, by what they see, of very different things, which they have not seen; and attribute to a man natural propensity to servitude, because the slaves within their observation are seen to bear the yoke with patience; they fail to reflect that it is with liberty as with innocence and virtue, the value is known only to those who possess them, and the taste for them is forfeited when they are forfeited themselves."
Rousseau
(Discourse on Inequality ; 1754).

"Some places have gone further: a neighbourhood in Suwon, a city in South Korea, widened the pavements, created 'pocket parks', then banned cars for a month. The local authority handed out bicycles and electric scooters (and taught people how to ride them). Cafes and restaurants spilled into the streets, and people began to connect in ways that were impossible before. Though cars were allowed back after the experiment, the community's attitude towards them had changed: the speed limit was cut by half, reducing the number of vehicles passing through, and street parking was restricted. The district now organizes a car-free day every month."
;

"Here is an example of a fair political funding system. Every party or independent candidate would be entitled to charge the same small fee for membership (independents would be encouraged to form a supporters' club) - perhaps $20, £20, or its equivalent in other currencies. ...Any other political funding of parties or candidates, whether spent by the parties and candidates themselves or by others on their behalf, would be illegal. ...The funding of referendums is even simpler: the state should provide an equal amount for those campaigning on each side of the question.

This issue has been supremely complicated in the United States by perverse judicial rulings: a constitutional amendment would be requited to negate them. ...

The cost of the current system is the destruction of democracy in anything but the name: financial crises, caused by the ability of the financial sector to buy its way our of democratic constraints; the environmental crisis, exacerbated by the political power that destructive industries have purchased; the wages crisis and the collapse of working conditions, caused by the freedom to exploit that employers have purchased; and innnumerable bad, destructive and irrational policies, arising from the generalised corruption of politics, as well as the rise of an extremist anti-politics in response to a broken and unresponsive system. In other words, it runs into many billions. It runs beyond billions, into costs that money alone cannot represent."
(Monbiot) ; p. 78, 145-6. (Italics added, on above.)

"These, however, were all slight matters
to a man who had escaped
from Durham's fertilizer mill."
Upton Sinclair
(The Jungle ; 1906)

"...their mouths fringed with nails so they resembled steel-toothed carnivores..."
Ray Bradbury
(Martian Chronicles / The Silver Locust ; 1953).

"It is generally believed, outside Germany, that the entire judicial system of the country collapsed without a struggle after Hitler's takeover. This was not so, partly because any long-established, organically developed legal system has tremendous staying power and partly, of course, because the very character of such a system, based as it is upon justice and impartiality - the exact opposite of tyranny - offers passive resistance at the very least.

In 1935, I learned...
[...]
...that the pictures did not represent the true conditions on Wedemeyer's estate, [that] I had known all along; but I must admit that I was rather startled to find that they had been taken on an estate ran by Reichsbauernfuehrer - the top Nazi official in charge of peasant affairs. "

; ...Schlabrendorff's post-war book also contains some Appendices. Those have selections of the writings of Hitler's pre y. -33 adversies (mostly are, from prior to that year.). Among them is Ernst Niekisch' y. -32 written essay ('Hitler -A German Catastrophe'), ...of which the following passages:
" 'The measure of confidence enjoyed by Hitler is unprecedented. He has not yet performed any deed which would show him worthy of such trust; instead, it is given to him blindly. He is a past master in the art of making people believe in him, without first having had to answer the question about his ability and qualifications. ' [under sub-titling as 'On Hitlers secret of political success']

'The National Socialist movement has become a monstrous credit structure, but up to now nothing has come of it. Credit has accumulated in vast amounts, but not a single creative task has been accomplished...'
'National Socialism belongs in this category, it is the most daring structure of credit fraud that has ever been erected on political ground...' [...under subtitling: 'On the future of the National Socialist movement']"
(Shlabrendorff, Fabian von):
The Secret War Against Hitler (publ. 1965), p. 60-1, and; 370, 372(Niekisch)
[; Can't avoid from the mention...that this 'selection' was added purely due because it of closely seemed like some 'mirror-image' of the present reality. Perhaps, from only superficially, but...]

"...The Belarussians had an IBM computer with a registry of individual doses of over 100,000 people, including evacuees, liquidators, and 34,000 children. The foreigners asked for the registry once, twice, many times. They were put off.
And then something strange happened. Soon after the first IAEA [ie; International Atomic Energy Comission] scientists began arriving in the summer of 1990, 'hooligans' broke into the offices of the Institute of Radiation Medicine in Minsk. In what looked like professional job, the thieves knocked out a security guard with a blow to the head, took his keys, stole two computers and a pile of floppy disks, and sped off in a waiting car. The computer files contained the data on radiation exposure for 134,000 Belarussians. ...
..., the only database of its kind in the world, was never recovered. And that wasn't the only incident. ..."
;

"...The World Health Organization, overtaken by infighting, proved a disappointing leader in the crowded Chernobyl field. In 2003, WHO scientist Keith Baverstock attempted to put together an international Chernobyl Research Board to try again to ask open-ended questions on Chernobyl health impacts. Gonzalez preempted Baverstock's initiative by creating the Chernobyl Forum, an umbrella organization representing seven UN agencies, with the IAEA again at the helm. Instead of a major investigation of health effects, the Chernobyl Forum reviewed investigations in Western literature - most of them repetitive examinations of pediatric thyroid cancer - and issued a 'comprihensive report' that ran in the same well-worn track of earlier IAEA/UNSCEAR [UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiation] reports of 1987, 1988, 1996, 2001 and 2002. With an insistent repetition, the Chernobyl Forum blamed the rise of health problems on psychological trauma and called estimates of fatalities in the thousands 'exaggerated and incorrect'.
Fred Mettler, the author of the 1991 IAEA assessment ...also took charge of the Chernobyl Forum report published in 2006. Mettler was arguably the single most influential voice in producing judgements of Chernobyl-related health damage that are today cited in the media as fact (fifty-four fatalities and six thousand cases of childhood thyroid cancers). ..." ; "...Lost in the risk estimate's wonderful magic trick of making dozens of other harmful radioactive elements disappear are the bodies that ingested them and an accounting of how they fared. I too wanted to believe in the charts, to dissolve into them and make those sick kids in the contaminated regions go away."

"For Westerners, Soviet medicine was like the bloodless, late socialist economy, which was like Soviet hotels and Soviet restaurants. They were bad and poorly organized with incompetent and corrupt stuff. Soviet science long had a poor reputation abroad. Western commentators often focused on Trofim Lysenko, a Stalin-era geneticist who rejected evolutionary science and argued that plants and animals acquired characteristics in their lifetimes that could be passed on to their offspring. Historians judged that Lysenko slandered famed Russian geneticists to climb to the top of the scientific hierarchy. ...

Historian Hiroshi Ishikawa argues that Soviet science was not entirely undone by the politics of Lysenko. Geneticists who were purged from biology moved into physics departments in the early fifties where colleagues welcomed them as they puzzled over questions of radiation and health. Rather than view the genes, as geneticists did in the west, as impervious to ecological influence, Soviet scientists influenced by Lysenko's ideas came to understand intergenerational transfer of induced genetic abnormalities caused by environmental factors. With this science, Soviets gained a sensitivity to exposures to radioactivity and other toxins. They grew critical of Western risk estimates about radioactive fallout. ..." ; "...The period of nuclear testing qualifies as the most unhinged, suicidal chapter in human history. In the name of 'peace' and 'deterrence,' military leaders waged global nuclear war.
The damage of a half century of nuclear bomb testing appears to have left a perceptiple footprint on human health. Rates of thyroid cancer in the United States tripled between 1974 and 2013, and better detection did not account for all the increases. ..."
; Brown (Manual for Survival) - p. 234; 259, 262., - 273; 311.

"Digital democracy is no magic wand. It risks empowering one group...at the expense of others. It is vulnerable to hacking by money and undemocratic power.",
"The most obvious application of digital technologies is to provide us with the information we need to make intelligent political choices. When we vote, or participate in any other way, we should do so as informed and thoughtful citizens, rather than arriving at the polling station in a haze of ignorance and confusion and stabbing our pencils at a name we vaguely recognize while muttering, 'They're all as bad as each other.'"
;
"The people of Switzerland vote in around ten referendums a year, clustered into three or four polling days. Some of these are initiated by the parliament, some by citizens. Any law passed by parliament can be challenged by the people. If, within one hundred days, someone can furnish 50,000 signatures from people opposed to the law, the gorvernment is obliged to put the question to the country. These referendums are binding: if the people vote against it, the law is struck down. ...
...
It is true that some Swiss referendums have approved illiberal measures, such as a ban on the construction of new minarets. Other immoderate proposals, however, such as the expulsion of foreign criminals and an attempt to ban samesex couples from marrying, have been rejected, whilein 2016 a law granting asylum seekers free legal assistance was approved. ...
Rather than fostering extremism, the system tends to encourage caution (sometimes excessive caution) among political parties: they hesitate to introduce disruptive laws for fear of triggering a referendum. While direct democracy might limit innovation by governments, it stimulates innovation by citizens. ..."
(Monbiot) ; p. 156, 157. ; 152-3.

"Meanwhile, because semi-skilled jobs will become automated, leaving only high- and low-paid ones, global inequality will rise by 40 per cent. By 2060, countries such as Sweden will have the levels of inequality currently seen in the USA: think Gary, Indiana in the suburbs of Stockholm. There is also the very real risk that climate change will begin to destroy capital, coastal land and agriculture, shaving up to 2.5 per cent off world GDP, and 6 per cent in south-east Asia.
But the bleakest part of the OECD report lies not in what it projects but what it assumes: a rapid rise in productivity due to information technology. Three-quarters of all the growth to 2060 is expected to come from increased productivity.
However, that assumption is, as the report states euphemistically, 'high compared with recent history'.

In fact... ,there is no certainty at all that the information revolution of the past twenty years will turn into the kind of growth and productivity that can be measured in market terms. In that case there is substantial risk that the meagre 3 per cent annual growth projected by the OECD over the next fifty years will be closer to 0.75.

Then there is the migration problem. ..."

; "In addition, capitalist planning and modelling are typically unaccountable: by the time a major infrastructure project starts delivering results, ten or twenty years after its impact was first predicted, there is no person or organization still around to draw conclusions. Thus, most economic modelling under market capitalism is actually close to speculation.",

"[...] We would ask our supercomputer lateral questions: do young men get depressed because the Nike brand dies? Does the global sports industry suffer because Nike marketing spend is gone? Does quality decline when there is no brand value to maintain in the production process? And what would the climate impact be? To promote its brand, Nike has worked hard to reduce carbon emissions. We might decide keeping the price of Nike trainers high [...on preceding paragraph, given as '$190 and their production price...likely to be lower than $20'] is a good thing. Or not.

This, ...is what a postcapitalist state would use petaflop-level computing for. ..."
(Mason, Paul) : Postcapitalism (2015 - p. 28 ; 271,272.)
[...Indeed, one often quite astonishes from what a major advantage of some brand producing decent quality jogging shoes, hyped upward to ridiculous and unreal of its market-price - Meanwhile, practically all the medium-cost 'competitors' turning out inferior and non-endurable alternatives to, and, w. a near same production cost. For the consumer and environment (ecology, 'climates'...) the current form of the 'market' is actually just...some absurd, hideous 'jest'. Think about it.]
;

"...The Soviet gulag contained 1.4 million prisoners, about 200,000 of whom were killed each year. At least 6 million Jews were murdered in the Nazi concentration camps, and an estimated 3.3 million Russian prisoners of war died in German camps between 1941 and 1945. The Spanish war itself accounted for maybe 350,000 dead.

The scale of death during the Second World War makes it difficult to comprehend. So its impact on the politics and the sociology of the working class has been the subject of a horrified silence. But let us puncture it. The majority of the Jews killed in East Europe were from politicized working-class communities. Many were adherents either of pro-Soviet, left Zionist parties or the anti-Zionist Bund. The Holocaust wiped out an entire political tradition in the global labour movement in the space of three years.
In Spain, the unions, co-ops and militias of the left were destroyed by mass murder - and their traditions suppressed until the 1970s. Meanwhile, in Russia the working-class political underground was exterminated by the gulag and executions.
[...]
...Where workers' uprisings threatened the Allied plans - as they did both in Warsaw and Turin in 1944 - generals simply halted the military advance until the Wehrmacht had done its job. After that, the communist parties stepped in to limit all action to the restoration of democracy only.
There was no repeat of 1917-21. ..."
;
"Neoliberalism was designed and implemented by visionary politicians: Pinochet in Chile; Thatcher and her ultra-conservative circle in Britain; Reagan and the Cold Warriors who brought him to power. They'd faced massive resistance from organized labour and they'd had enough. In response, these pioneers of neoliberalism drew a conclusion that has shaped our age: that a modern economy cannot coexist with an organized working class. Consequently, they resolved to smash labour's collective bargaining power, traditions and social cohesion completely.

Unions had come under attack before - but always from paternalist politicians who had proffered the lesser of two evils: in place of militancy, they'd encouraged a 'good' workforce, defined by moderate socialism, unions run by agents of the state. ...
The neoliberals sought something different: atomization. Because today's generation sees only the outcome of neoliberalism, it is easy to miss the fact that this goal - the destruction of labour's bargaining power - was the essence of the entire project: it was means to all the other ends. Neoliberalism's guiding principle is not free markets, nor fiscal discipline, nor sound money, nor privatization and offshoring - not even globalization. All these things were byproducts or weapons of its main endeavour: to remove organized labour from the equation.

Not all the industrialized countries followed the same path, nor at the same pace. ..."
(Mason),2015: p. 196-7 ['The massacre of Illusions'] ; 91-2 ['The Attack on Labour']

"If the submission demanded be founded on justice - there is no appealing to a higher power - for God is Justice itself. Let us then, as children of the same parent, if not bastardized by
being the younger born, reason together, and learn to submit to the authority of reason - when her voice is distinctly heard. But, if it be proved, that this throne of prerogative only rests on a chaotic mass of prejudices, that have no inherent principle of order to keep them together, or on an elephant, tortoise, or even the mighty shoulders of a son of the earth, they may escape, who ..."
Wollstonecraft
(A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ; 1792)

12/30/08

Interlude 3; The New Year

"The music sailed out into the night then upward towards the skies,
travelling on that thin border between reality and imagination."
- Thin Lizzy: Jailbreak (-76) album sleeve notes.

A Brand New Year ; Or the same old one ?
In MSW you're never too sure from that...

--------------------

”...They might have chosen that particular planet to use as the junkyard camp and garrisoned imprisonement area for all that they've had not been able to dump elsewhere, mainly because its distant location. But when the resistance movement started to arise and The Mule denied historical continuity of events in that artificially created chaos, whole thing started to seem merely a mistake than successful effort of Divide and Conquest tactics...”

(Galactic Cyclopedia, Vol. A-D)

12/17/08

the MSW Cooking Companion

Some (Christmas) Dinner Receipts ;
(Veggie) Pot on, Gas on low

As for an inspiring alternate receipts and also for some brief pause in-between our otherways pretty 'heavy' matter-of-fact writings, we now present some cooking advices. These receipts are mainly veggie foods; easy to prepare as soups and salads. Not solely for vegetarians and they can serve as main dishes (for lunch especially) but since its December we suggest these also as some additionals servings in the main (X-mas) menu.

Also, knowing that fx Livestock, Environment and Development Initiative (LEAD) has identified the livestock sector (= rancheries devoted to meat production, cattles maintenance and other such participants in the meat-chain, mostly) responsible for 18 per cent of global GHS-emissions (percentuages acc. to IFPRI-report Impact of Climate Change and Bioenergy on Nutrition(2007), measured in CO2-equivalent. The actual numbers may vary in reports and statistics but also other reports usually show meat markets responsible for something like 10-20 per cent from combined GHS-total.). So it would be not at all a bad idea to consider these (hopefully less common) veggie-pot cookings and mixed meals as compared to much beef-oriented diet. Besides, these are lot healthier.

Receipts are here presented in pics (along with other pics), they're not containing very many ingredients, but one can always use some imagination in preparation...

Beetroot Soup

(for 2 personnel)

This one's sometimes dismissed in synonymity of bortsch, but it's really based on Polish soup (I guess they call it barszcz...), though the original version may differ greatly from our own home-made soup...One can also use other vegetables in it, but the actual taste is best when made purely from beetroot, I think. Parsley as additional spicey goes fine with it.

(preparation:)

Peel and slice the beetroot, then grate them (to thin slices), next slightly few minutes fry slices in pan with butter (add sugar).

Use spices in amount according to taste. The suitable amount of black pepper is important for taste. Then pour along broth and let cook for 10 to 15 Minutes.

Vinegar should also be added according to own preferances (but it adds novelty in taste.) Pour off the (possible) extra water and serve warm. Cream / yoghurt(indian, fx) can be used to soften the taste of vinegar, fx.

(Green) Lense-Pot

(This is best perhaps as served with an accompanying food - as an additional extra for fish or chicken. But can be offered as main meal, too.)

First let the (dry) lenses lay in cold water (in fridge fx) for couple hours.

Then add in the pot a little olive oil. Cook pepper and/or onion in it. Next strain the water away from lenses and pour them to the pot.

Shortly after pour broth in the pot (+ add garlics in) and let cook in slow heat for about 20 minutes. Lastly add spices for few minutes to mix within and then just in before serving slice tomatoes in small pieces along with the lenses. Ready to serve as hot/or let cool first.

Green Beans Salad

First cook the green beans and maize (or use ready-made and defrost them). Leave them aside after draining the water off.

Slice onion and (if prefer to use) eggs for suitable pieces. Then take a bowl and add all these ingredients(+ olives) to it.

With a small bottle fx, shake (crushed) spices mixing them with olive oil. Then pour over salad and serve the resulting straight or keep some half an hour to coollen in refrigerator first.

Receipt:

200-400 g green beans

200 g maize grains

1/2 dl olive oil

4-8 olives (halved)

1/2 red onion

(1-2 eggs; if wish)

green and black pepper

(salt)

(1-2 cherry tomato)

Since we don't here offer any whole table sitting, the cook (of the house) is free to mix these experimental servings with other foods, if prefered. Also, these can be prepared in no time, with minimal effort to be served with (well, perhaps not bean-salad...) the most typical Christmas foods.

Also, because these don't contain any meat, chicken (excluding the eggs one can use in salad) or fish they can be easily added in part of the 'purely veggie' meal. For starters is preferable, but I suppose, solely vegetarian diet should also contain little larger portions in total. Anyone in favor of vegetarian diet can also of course select used ingredients according to tastes (we don't recommend stricktly veggie diet, but don't see that as any problem either). Some researches have noticed certain amounts of protein-rich meat in diet necessary for human evolution in needs of increasements in brain-capacity. Since it appears obvious that considering the planets current state, any further 'evolution' and such increasages would be of harmful kind, not beneficial ...besides, considering this from any reasonable point-of-view, no adult necessary needs to eat meat. However, for the children and growing ups we think certain amount of meat loaf recommendable (And it also has to be mentioned: your kids propably won't appreciate these meals very much...)

Happy X-Mas !

Muleskinner Book Recommendations #10:

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus
^{(written Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley;
possible text-editor/co-writer Percy Bysshe Shelley)}
(1818 version)

"God in pity made a man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid from its very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and detested." (Frankenstein novel, p. 175)

Having in passing touched the thematics of Frankenstein-novel and actually used it as source of some allusions in background to our recent Mammophant-article, it seems quite outright following if we here now also review book in question. However, this task fills us with plenty of uncertainties. 'Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus' easily counts among the most reused and most original horror-stories of all time. In addition to its many influences on later (romantic ) fiction, there's all this innumerable later references in the movies, comics, other popular fiction and even more secondary material available. Can we possibly say anything original in this recommendation?

Well, let's try anyway... Normally we don't much read other reviews from books chosen in recommendations here (on blog). If needed, something from fx writers biographies may be checked, but in general, we consider it better to avoid any criticism as these might have some influence to our own interpretations. However, on this case the usual zero-tolerance concerning the other reviews wasn't possible to maintain and we are also of course pretty well aware that there's number of later rewritings and discussions from books main content. Also, fx that famous Boris Karloff popularized filmographic image from the creatures outer looks(not much even described in the book itself) can't be left unmentioned. Continuing, there's as well many humorous 'pulp' characters based on Frankenmonster, like this similar well-known character from (recent) the Adams Family-serie. Among these later rewritings from monsters image, of course, one could ao include the many mixed species born from fictional inter-breedings of humans and robots, humans and aliens, and even more clearly the many birth-giving monsters and their descendants like some presented in the Alien-movie series. But if we think of original ity and imagination in this horrondous human-like creation, not later movie fiction has ever been able to invent anything similar, not even close.

So, considering all this renown co-existing stuff, it shouldn't appear too surprising that the book itself feels mostly rather typical gothic-romantic novel. Nothing especially enchanting in the style its written with; the story-telling is rather continously too much weighed on details not necessary important for the main story, too much romantically overdone sentencing and sometimes it gets even boring in all these typically romantic moods and phrases used in characterization or personnels inner feelings. Also, in backgrounds 'frames' for the story, the letters in the beginning of novel, diary-pages in the end, are rather conventional methods, typical in romantic fiction of the time like ghost-stories and similar. For some reason H.P. Lovecrafts later short-stories feel like a close comparison, though in Frankenstein the narration doesn't ever reach same the intensiousness. Ultimately, I conclude the text propably benefited a lot from Percy's additions in text, fx. the more poetic use of language and the passionate expressions.

What still makes this book an uncomparable classic, is of course the Frankenstein itself (creature, though in the book only person called by this name is the creator himself, Viktor Frankenstein). The nature of that strange human built creation(the revived 'monster') appears to be somewhat nature of the beast: ambigous like his masters, just enough unpredictable and as such, impossible to be ordered and used according to ones wishes. Sometimes, especially in the chapters where Frankenmonster recalls the first days after 'waking up in alive' its true nature is shown as deeply human and capable for feelings of caring and compassionate emotions. At this point in story, its innocence is actually already gone and it has caused and fulfilled some horrondous acts already. During some later parts the creature is seen as straightforward evil in nature, mostly viewed from Viktors opinion and as result (the main point in thematics as this ambivalence rest on criticism of the natural sciences at the time) he disagrees to be in debt to the creation resulting from his own deeds and causing therefore its eventual fate as an outcast among humans.

During Shelley's times as well as today the main strength of the book appeared possibly in that originality of the idea. There's been much (and ever more is) discussions and speculations from its real exemplaries; precursors and influences. Actually, often noted, the creature appear as some symbolical image from modern mans doomed efforts to change the sadness of his existence and the unchangeable laws of nature, exactly like a bad dream (Mary Shelleys dream it is mentioned to have originated) about the imaginable experiments the science should not even consider to make real.

As fictional character, the Frankensteins(creature's) fate and role in novel are eventually quite similar to later outsiders from existentionalist novels, typically Camus or Sartre's. He is without any power to change circumstances, doomed to stay as such outsider. But surely, he is also kind of Prometheus like depicted in books name. And in that the Frankenmonster originates actually from a lot older tradition. Its most closest relatives from the past – not necessary often mentioned, since this book is claimed to be some kind of starter and forerunner for stories from modern mans (and sciences) fears – the alchemists and wizards from the 'darker centuries' in the past. In spite of that Viktor in the beginning shows his keen interests on modern sciences realm and shows his clear rejectance for the depths of Fausts demonic visions, they are still there from the very beginning. And so the creature, like Prometheus who stole the fire for humans from gods up above, stands there on the edge of times, representing for the people some frightening 'dark sides' in the history of mysticisms and at the same time on-coming futuristic mad illusions arising from developments of science.

Conclusively, one can also say, the idea and literal form (of the book) must have had a much stronger impression to the readers of the romantic period (early 1800s) than it has for the present day reader, familiar with Frankensteins many later reincarnations. But, also noteworthy to mention, at the time of writing, Darwin's theory from evolution wasn't yet published and probably also the originality and novelty of human existence weren't that much indisputed. So, those are the main thematics which easily raise from reading the Frankenstein-novel. It isn't, even in its conventional style, easy to challenge from its place among the most horrondous books ever written. The role of Viktor Frankenstein (the creator), as an archetype from human scientists faults and miseries, appears just as secondary in importance concerning the books main contents. In later creations of the story it has also been so, though since the films more deeply need 'easy' heroes, usually Frankenstein (the hero) has been romanticed further and Frankenstein (the creature) nourished in characteristics (fx. compare that in the novel it even reads Goethe's Werther and Milton's Paradise Lost). Luckily, in the original book, (most) of the brilliance raises from the creatures apparent capability for human tensions, not from the creators lack of human feeling.

12/9/08

Newspost#111208

December hindered far longer than we expected it to, almost mid, and so we are now to turn on these 'stuff-and-happenings' posts for a change. So, this time we mainly have some hi-tech prods and progs from those ever faster-and-speedier growing markets; phones, players, devices. Perhaps so because our recent posts mostly were dedicated to completely different variety of topics. On the second thought, considering these news, latest wonders oriented especially...it may appear as time to letting go from 'em. Possibly, we could devote more effort on specified stories on certain topics that raise aforth and make them for more comprehensive articles. It seems that these are always 'running' in lenghty sentences, can't help that as natural consequence. As following, then it would mean quitting (the news) area in the future ...But this time, in passing the latest wonders we here first just mention; they've noticed considerable growth underwater noise at seas (doubled every 10 ten years since 1950s). Due to increase in overseas transcontinental traffic? Or just increases of traffic, all in all? Or just traffic? Or...just good business?

So we first turn on to Nokia's new high-techs phone, N97. It is already contended as an Iphone rival, and there is (ao) social localization, 3'5 inch touch-screen, 32 GB mem ...the price has raised some moans, and we neither find it as competitive...and so it appears quite conventional hi-tech, not anything remarkable inventive, but probably pretty stable choice. Anyway, taking it to close look mainly because Nokia scored best on recent Greenpeace's list of manufacturers to having taken (or not taken...) greenish steps. So, we also notice them having 'evalued' in that area and there's now 'Evolve' a phone made in respectable amount (around 50 per cent) from renewable materials. However, the price again, isn't quite just what you could expect from such device but not totally over the-top either. So, a very welcomed development and we are just proposing the manufacturer to really take on this direction in starting to offer greenery products in larger scope as well. All the parts cannot possibly be manufactured sustainably (especially, just because more functionalities including devices there's possibly more usages that cannot yet be made that easily environmental friendly way...) but for a start this does pretty nicely. And there will be markets for more models from the cheapest to more expensive ones...

Then there's...Another media player? Oversupply on the market or not,we find this Bird of Joy, OS-project Songbird based on Mozilla Firefox-engine, which definitely makes best of both worlds. It has a far nicer and simpler viewing panel than most we've seen so far (and you can use the mini player too) and I especially like the division of panels on UI; you can most easily scroll to songs on basis of main categories like music-style, artist, album name...the outer appearance may seem 'puritanist' but is just functional and pretty easy to use. In addition, there's this availability of user-generated add-ons (some 70 to choose from...) in collapsible side-panels (fx for music lyrics viewing, the feature you could suppose having 'til now become more of standard, and perhaps they are more common, but we've not seen such before...Songbird has also other benefits like integrating lyrics to meta data of music-files, nice...). Continuing on praises, this Bird of Prey really catches (and easily digests) most formats you'd expect, like MP3, FLAC, Vorbis, Windows-version also AAC. Video playback they're still working on (at least xvid and x264 we could hope for, since the next windows is said to support those too). Other functionalities include integrated browser, so plenty support for all these popular developing 'music-cloud services' for a Bird-on-a-wire. Then there's also Shoutcast radio, Mash tape (add-ons), flexible playing lists, LastFM support for streaming, scrobbling and so on. One might also appreciate these functionalities quick and easy when looking album info fx from that Zombie Birdhouse or that old obscure outfit you just noticed having existed (like Joe Byrd and the Field Hippies). Also support for integration with more devices coming (now there's mostly just Ipod), so conclusively we just answer the question in beginning; sure, another music player most welcomed to make its nest. Best in this project, it just makes me imagining the (close?) future where one gathers the feathers from Birdcage – that is, ask this (not yet) Migratory bird to wrap-up ones music-library (or at least part from it) to ultra-compressed package, copying the-whole-of-it to the futuristic device of choice (music player, stick, perhaps phone) and then take that all on-the-go, having the player and songs along even more nicely... Sounds like cheap sales of chicken and tuna sandwiches straight from sales desk, not quite like anything the Notorious Byrd Brothers would prefer mainly, but actually I was just supposing the quite possible directions these apps could develop towards...

….newly built uTorrent UDP-protocol threatens to (this time...) sink internet? ...Or, ar least causes lots speculation whether it will suck all the band(width) with it's file transfer trafficking via UDP instead of earlier more common TCP(and this causes concerns mainly because UDP is also favored by VOIP and other such communication transfers). We notice these discussions having started from newly raised and popularized old phrases from 1980s like 'congestion collapse' and also still remains unanswered whether torrents actually are improving nets effective usage, or causing overloads of traffic...So we just pass these by and wonder if the IPv6-question, more probable internet bottleneck, is soon going to cause more worries ...Instead, we find more interest on Google's (not so recent any more) Clean Energy 2030 plan for U.S. Electricity production. All of this seems indeed ambitious if not the most realistic concerning goals set; there's fx targets like renewing the vehicles in traffic merely to plug-in electrics, that is hybrid or PEV(purely electric vehicles) until 2030, which means increase of some 90 per cent in sales, from some modest 100 000 to about 16 M, totalling basically the whole of new (auto)-mobiles taken in use. Also, one notices ao in this renewables favoring plan, (whose one main goal seems to be getting rid of coal produced electricity, currently consisting some 40 per cent of total), fx the usage of Photovoltaics - in which case the numbers of current usage of California's production capacity, are perhaps(?) not comparable to every other area. Whether these plans as whole, or at least partially are to be fulfilled depends, of course (mostly) from decisions by state. Probably they have better chances to make it work (at least partially) in practice than in some other parts of globe. And also notwithstandingly, it's been noticed that companies to start on this path in time are to have better chances to carry on with that in future. So, because somebody's have got to show the way on these unconquered and rejected final frontiers of green energy fields and production, we give full points for these innovative plans and place the company past Nokia to the top of our own greenery-list. Whether and when the actual fulfillment of these plans are to be seen...remains to be seen, though we notice they've recently granted more money for transportation vehicles, I guess (well ...actually for the big companies in economic downturn on that area of business. Whether that(a lot from it?) goes for the renewable cars production...remains to be seen.) -Later addit; Just read from latest briefings, they've rejected the whole support packet...but we also have this article to speculate on whether the bio-fuelled vehicles are most recommendable solution in the first place...remains to be seen.

Wish(?) to check the news(feed), motherlode of all the important information.

12/5/08

MuleSkinner Book Recommendation #9

The Shock Doctrine. Rise of the Disaster Capitalism

(By Naomi Klein)
Metropolitan Books 2007

”Everywhere the Chicago School crusade has triumphed, it has created a permanent underclass of between 25 and 60 percent of the population. It is always a form of war. But when that warlike economic model of mass evictions and discarded cultures is imposed in a country that is already ravaged by disaster and scarred by ethnic conflict, the dangers are far greater. There are, as Keynes argued all those years ago, political consequences to this kind of punitive peace – including the outbreak of even bloodier wars.” (Shock Doctrine, p. 405)

Our next book in recommendation on these series appears quite exceptional to earlier ones reviewed; the real faces of corporate world trade markets(from recent decades) as subject and also to a certain amount political histories related to them. These are perhaps not our best field of expertise, and in general we don't have much interest on politics, but one could then add: the more important that we here include such books in our recommendations too. These reviews, as usual, may of course be a little delayed like everything in MSW, and Klein's book probably having already achieved a wide renown status like her earlier 'gospel' No Logo - Taking aim at the Brand Bullies (2000). But we think it has a lot to tell, so we're including it here anyway.

So, this as next recommendation, though we've in general mostly included reviews of fiction literature. One another thing we could also mention; our earlier (paper books) reviewed, 4 (Burroughs, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Brink) out of 5 were by male writers, so perhaps we should give a place in the following 3 for the women. That said, just to keep these somewhat balanced, obviously there's not any real argument on behalf of choosing reviewed books on the basis of authors sex.

As the book (Shock Doctrine) will likely be considered, to some level at least, as a following for No Logo, it raises the temptation to think the latter as most obvious comparison. And the books have a lot of similarities, not least in the way she uses the material sourced to prove her points. In general, one could say, that the main theses in the Shock Doctrine are more grounded on the backgrounds of globalization markets and the fuelling and maintenance of the 'doctrines' linked to them. Also, the book achieves less documenting tone but aims to have even more to tell from the current historical and economical momentum in the light of these past histories 'revealed'. So, on the basis of topics discussed we suppose that perhaps Shock Doctrine may not be read as widely and not gain just as generally acknowledged status than her earlier book, but it has all the criteria to settle down for even longer lasting place in the long run. Remembering that No Logo may possibly have been the most influential book in spreading the knowledge from things like sweat-shops, brand-washing and corporate tactics, we predict that these 'untold stories' in the path of free market economics will continue popularizing the story's backgrounds to the masses as well. But, it won't probably sell quite as numerously.

Anyway, it can be noted that the reader possibly also finds many episodes, that remembers having heard, seen or otherways come to knowledge during recent years. At least in passing newspapers. What the book in particular offers is a wider context to place these events at, the main reason why we find it as most recommendable here (not excluding our curiosity arising from the introduction of term 'disaster capitalism'). Personally, we may think (and are quick to point out) that many of the stories told actually have a far longer historical roots and backgrounds than necessary presented here. But, I guess this kind of story must be limited to a certain overall time gap, and in here it seems to be from 1970 to the years prevalent its publication.

Notwithstanding, it must also be said for the books praise; Klein's sources are again as numerous as the branches of this story, there's some 60 pages of notes only, which naturally makes persuasive basis for the conclusions presented. Although one might feel she sometimes uses intentionally striking sentences and merely aggressive words for their own shock-value, it is also as understandable as the addressed topics are just as gruesome. Her main criticisms, naturally is directed towards free market capitalism and the followers of Milton Freedman's theorems, in U.S. and elsewhere. Because we have no intention to carry out here a complete reading from the total of 558 pages (indexes and end-notes including), but to recommend the reader to do so by him/herself, (we think some of) the arguments shown can here be briefly referred with the following citation from early part in text:

”[...] During this dizzying period of expansion, the Southern Cone began to look more like Europe and North America than the rest of Latin America or other parts of the Third World. The workers in the new factories formed powerful unions that negotiated middle-class salaries, and their children were sent off to study at newly built public universities. The yawning gap between the region's polo club elite and its peasant masses began to narrow. By the 1950s, Argentina had the largest middle-class on the continent, and next door Uruguay had a literacy rate of 95 percent and offered free health care for all citizens. Developmentalism was so staggeringly successful for a time that the Southern Cone of Latin America became a potent symbol for poor countries around the world: here was a proof that with smart, practical policies, aggressively implemented, the class divide between the First and third World could actually be closed.” (p. 55)

According to Klein the halting of that development was just the first part in the many similar cases of violent and economic 'shocks' to follow. Whether one is willing to agree with her views is a matter of whether one thinks the reasons presented and emphasized to be most significant, but like noticed, many of her conclusions are based on material that sounds uncomfortably familiar. The reader needs just to recollect the recent decades economic crises, human rights reports, international politics (and the list could continue far longer: catastrophe and disaster events aftermaths, social sector reductions, stock markets, vanishing middle-class, Voelcer Shocks and World Bank politics, etc.) To tie these recent histories to the present, she also has a lot to say from the well-known developments often linked with the Iraq war, like 'Big Government and Big Business' and 'bottomless spending on security'. So, for some conclusive remarks here, we can say this could very well be nominated as the black book of capitalism (the books cover is grey in color, though...).

In addition to that, we just wonder, perhaps it is a bit uncertain whether Shock Doctrine, will actually be received and read as widely as it should. This because, being written in the era of increasing knowledge from climatic disasters and environmental threats. Although both are in connection to and additionally to a remarkable amount direct followings from these past developments discussed, the book may actually be swiped away from most public eye too soon... But, I guess it won't probably turn out to be that way. Conclusively it's main strenghts are in the way it shows and resurfaces the renowned (and less renown) incidents from the past in behind current events.

12/2/08

Second Interlude

X-Mas close sight ahead...

In the middle of these stories and for the refreshing change for all these reviews and foresights we've recently been offering, here's now a musical recommendation (since we don't often have place and time for them...)

It's a forgotten rock/pop masterpiece, from decades past; The disc in question is Mallard debut album (Mallard -75, ^{detail from cover on pic to the right here->}). This magnifient piece of music was actually a result of work by Captain Beefhearts musicians from the Magic Band (at the time). It didn't ever make much headlines, not to mention the sales, but is a groovy and highly recommendable combination of blues rock, professional playing and ambitious tunes. Tracks include the opening Back on the Pavement and Winged Tuscadero, also worth mention are fx couple instrumentals (like Road to Morocco and Yellow). Also, what makes this so good is the live sound, possibly the whole thing was recorded pretty straightforward.

The 2nd album by group was more complex in musical form and even more ambitious, likely that we'll recommend it later on, someday. Since we don't much read record reviews or music-sites, can't include here more from discs recording histories. But, all in all, a most recommendable and relaxed effort, anyway.

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”...The MuleSkinner World did not evade the global economic decline. Being financially backwards area, the stock market drops and the criss-crossing exchange rates did not cause any remarkable harm to foundations of either side. Eventually it was more of question whether the shortage from replacements and material funds benefited the resistance movement or the ratified depravity bureaucracies better. However, as consequence, both sides were forced to diminish their functions and infrastructure...” (Galactic Cyclopedia, Vol. A-D)

11/30/08

Mammophant, the Modern Frankenstein¹

We can't but wonder and observe how fast everything evaluates these days... Recently we here on blog expressed our bitter criticisms on the extinctions predicted to result from climate changes advance, mentioning the genetic engineering in connection with some futuristic resurrection dreamings, not long passes, and then we find: They've already thought the whole thing out and on genetics field there's even a project dedicated to mapping Neanderthal genome. However, since they've only got but tiny fragments of the DNA from fossilised bone remains, no human related resurrections in close sight, possibly; not even considering this in longer futuristic timescales (like a 100 years). Instead, they've noticed plenty of frozen DNA preserved from another inhabitant of the latest ice age period, the Mammoth (so the story goes – propably a pure modern myth, but they always have some sort of origins – that the frozen mammoths found from siberia, mostly, have been such numerous that scientists were sometimes rumoured to actually having had feasts with pure prehistoric meat, melted from deep frozen mammoths).

Whatever the possible taste of couple thousand years aged frozen mammoth steak, the (resurrection) task would still be very difficult, they speculate, as having taken the liberty of”... commissioning an evaluation of what it would take to rebuild the mammoth using that blueprint. The challenge is enormous: each one of the mammoth's chromosomes are likely to be over 100 Megabases; the average surviving fragment of DNA is under 200 bases long.” Also, undeniable as fact, it had to be confessed: ”...resurrecting the mammoth faces some technological obstacles that we haven't yet even started to try to overcome.” But, what a man can't fix, he can (possibly) circumvent; and so they aim to be able to do that by taking the most differing parts from mammoth and elephants (which have only half of the differences in their DNA as compared to humans and chimpanzees) and subsequently re-engineer the elephant to its ancient relative, resulting at least in ”physically indistinguishable” outer appearances of the mammoth as known to us, and so the result would turn out to be – the Mammophant.²

This (possible) oncoming resurrection (possible to happen in latter part of this century, say) naturally raises similar ethical questions as any other genetical engineering of animals and nature. Is it by any manner justifiable to change the biological continuation, or perhaps more exactly, the evolutionary line – even subsequently in aim to 'resurrect' certain earlier extinct species? Can (humans) really know how such alteration of nature's ways could affect to the current eco-system and so on? But, since there's Dolly the sheep and there's these examples of GMO-food (no wonder they sometimes call them as the 'frankenfood'), and since there's also already plenty of other GEO; mouses, horses and whatever, it seems likely the mammophant will someday walk on Earth – almost like resurrected mammoth, if wanted to consider as such.

Since this question raises almost similar horrid impressions as some scifi-like speculative possibilities like human cloning, also often mentioned within the unforeseen situations modern genetics can create, we think they are, not just questions of biology or genetics, but of respect. Therefore, one should also understand, like Dalai-Lama in his book points out that:

”If we establish the human dignity only to the level of his genetic composition, we inevitably impoverish the humanity, since there's plenty more in humans than their genetic inheritance”³

Same questions can be enlarged concerning the mammophants case as well. Continuing, on the same basis, one finds the prospective possibility of mammophant(s) genetically engineered resurrection quite contradictory when observed from ethical angle. Wouldn't it for real be an act of human lack of respect (towards that species long ago vanished) and, therefore, wouldn't it actually reduce the species in same level as the pigs or chickens grown for food (by humans) more effectively with the GMO plants and so? Or more specifically expressed: on ethical basis it would be on the same level as keeping endangered animals in zoo's to show that we've done something to preserve them (and at the same time closing eyes from the destruction of their natural territorial- and living areas)? Not to say that the zoo's are all that bad, just that their histories as show-stages under human watching eye has a lot similarities with the peculiarity galleries, presenting human and animal oddities as some sort of abnormalities that are allowed to make an exception - in circumstances controlled and guarded. A practise that originates from about some mid 19^th century. There can be, of course other justifications and reasons for the project; In a world ever faster developing, biologists are among other things worried from the fact that so far only some 70-80 per cent of animal/plant species are known to scientists, and some living species may actually get extinct (as result of warming, fx) even before them have been counted and catalogued. Soforth, the mammophant would be an example of extremely contradictional case (perhaps the 1st, but propably also not the last in its kind?)

Continuing, from ethical perspective, the imaginary mammophant-case would be also as much problematic as any (human) caused resurrection/rebirth. It would bring to reality the everlasting dreams and hopes of humans, but at the same time, would be an example of the anomalities modern genetics can realize. But, considering the question from literal and fictionsal perspectives, the genetically resurrected life-form doesn't actually appear in especially different context than its imaginary predecessors in fiction. As seen from ontological level, the questions it would face would practically appear as nothing new and unthinkable, but instead similar to some presented at futuristic human-inhuman ethics; these would be similar (at least a little) to the android-human related questions, I think best presented in an older book/film Blade Runner, like: where does it origin? Would it be more in debt to its creator (and subsequently be supervised under his wishes)? Or, would it by its true nature, originating from times immememorial (to its creators) turn against its masters (humans), like the original 'prometheus', Frankenstein (the creation) and, like the android(s) in Blade Runner book/movie?

Again, reminding in mind the most striking fictional archetype, Frankenstein, we might notice that these questions, from responsibility point of view, should be properly understood by the creators of this strange organism, and not the creature(mammophant in this case). But, a question that this incidentally raises too, is; who would be eager to take that role of creator (of mammophant)? More precisely, who would 'father' this modern day Frankenstein⁴? To speculate on this further, we could possible take for granted that there would propably be as many as the participants in the project, perhaps even some who wouldn't have had anything to do with it in the first place. But because we already have several examples of similar kind, especially from the fields of genetically manipulated animals and plants, we can suppose this wouldn't raise much of arguments in headlines concerning the 'ownership', since most space would be devoted for the scientific inventions leading to these examples of progressive genetics (and of course, the opposition of them). As for the responsibility from results and the creatures future, the situation may appear slightly different, especially, as the comparative example here(Victor Frankenstein/the creature in Shelley's novel) teaches us, that these also fall solely in the hands of the original inventors of the (anomaly) creation...

Since we know that there's other aspects concerning this projects goals, like the possibility of gaining knowledge from the factors and causes for Mammoths extinction, we can leave (the mentioned) speculations aside and just suppose that someday they propably will fulfil it, anyway. However, few other things concerning the ethical basis of the imagined mammophant should be addressed as well: First, similarly to the cyborgs (or androids as well), it would be engaged to the certain controversial changing and redefinition of borders and boundaries of material (and ethical, we think) realities. Briefly said (to loan a sentence most joyosly describing this):

"[the cyborg] is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics - [...] the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. This is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction."⁵

Same holds for the Mammophant, although it would more closely be related in characteristics similar to Frankenstein (the creation) as an actual out-come from altering the 'biological borders' of nature than the cyborgs, which are (always) more or less combination of flesh and mechanics⁶. In cyborgs cases, the 'border' being shifted completely away from reconstructing the organic body, in favor of it's non-biological additions.

Second question raises purely from the very unstable basis of socially constructed definition for gender. As this 'monstrous' human engineered creation, like Frankenstein (the creature) is (made) existant in the category of the 'other', it also bears to the fore the unstable, tenuous 'nature ' of the genre itself⁷. Human re-engineering (of nature) also shows that the normal and generally accepted wouldn't necessary have to be the only possible ways gender (and also the continuation of life) could exist. However, differing from its 'fictional and mechanical counterparts'(as some comparisons for this mammophant), it would necessary have to be a biological species, otherways it wouldn't be able to reproduce, that is breed (in manner prerequisited from its original starting point, the mammoth). Obvious requirement for its sex, then, is that the first mammophant would have to be female. Ultimately, as consequentive this question of reproduction, then has to be left unanswered, mainly because we cannot be for sure if this mixture of species would be able to have descendants (most such 'mixed marriages' can't, some closely related can, but their followings, then again, often aren't able to reproduce.)

Perhaps, just on this speculative basis, we can suppose that the original species, mammoth and elephant are such close relatives to each other that the mammophants would be able to have descendants (We can also consider the possibility of completely laboratorial form of births, each creature being 'test tube child'. In any case, this would mean unforeseen manner of birth control carried out on a complete new species and also principally be against any earlier nature's governing laws of biological reproduction. We consider this alternative as humiliating and not acceptable choice, not least because this species existence would then have to be resurrected and maintained completely by human lab techs.) The preceding also soon opens a new field of unanswered (ethical) questions: Which would be the living conditions granted for these new species? Would there, in the continuosly diminishing areas of wild nature, be enough space for such gigantic animals? And if, where? Would the new species be just thrown out in the wild, to see what happens? Or, would there be some other imaginable usages for them? In connection to latest question two possibilities seem most propable: the new meat markets, maintained similarly like the cattle (mammophants would likely need even wider grazing areas, but as result one single animal would produce a lot more meat). The other obvious usability (answering the original need by human for this kind of experiment) could be as an 'show around examples', reminding us (the spectators) from the ancestral times, not even remembered by any living man. In this case, the number of individual animals would have to be limited to not undervalue them, but as result it quite likely would appear pretty profitable business, at least for some years.

Conclusively, from all the aspects considered, it's very difficult to think in which manner this newly resurrected ice age inhabitant would fit into existing environment. There wouldn't be any precursor for its artificially created existence, similarly like in the case of Frankenstein (the creature). From biological perspective its 'resurrection' would also seem obscure since environmental conditions (similar to those that once existed when the original species, mammoth walked on earth) no longer exist. There's examples of adaptation, fx species being thought extinct and later found from unknown areas, but...

Also, from ethical view-point its quite problematic, even knowing the projects original aim as mapping the mammoth genome, to think any real needs the 'resurrection' would serve. In practice this (whole thing carried to realization) would mean something similar like isolating certain species (the hippo's say) to managed areas, and maintain them as living resemblance from the other variabilities of life, otherways exterminated in favor of the need for new crop fields, industries and so on. Even succesfully resurrecting the original mammoth wouldn't be the same. Of course, all this is just speculative and theoretical, as much as is the mammophant, as we don't suppose to see it happen, but similarly like noticed in the article inspiring these thoughts, neither would we have supposed to see Dolly the sheep. Now, how about 'Wooly Molly' the Mammophant, would it serve as contender for futuristic genetic dreaming? In reality, the resulting out-come could become as much real as travels to the moon in Verne's novels, video-phones and/or the Holovision (3D TV, expected to be realized as succesful market product some time in close future)? Because, what can be imagined can actually also be executed. But, somehow I don't feel like I would ever wish them to succeed in that (mammophant)...

---------------------------------------

Notes:

1. For those unfamiliar with 'the play of words' in the headline of this text, this appears as a free loan from complete name of the book Frankenstein, or, the modern Prometheus (orig. p. 1818). As for the topics discussed in this text, what (perhaps) appears interesting, is that the name of Mary Shelley's book originally refers to the creator of that horrondous creature, Victor Frankenstein, not the creature. The popular image which identifies the Frankenstein to that artificially and surgically built flesh-bag derives merely from the later movies and other subsequent popular fiction. See Howard, Jennifer,“The Birth of 'Frankenstein'. A new edition of the novel sheds light on Shelleys' collaborative relationship.” ChronicleReview.com, November 7, 2007. http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i11/11b01201.htm Viewed 23.11.2008

2. Timmer, John, “Resurrecting the mammoth? New research raises the prospect.” Ars Technica, November 19, 2008. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081119-new-genome-data-raises-prospect-of-resurrecting-the-mammoth.html Viewed 20.11.2008

3. Dalai-Lama, 2005, The Universe in a Single Atom. The Convergence of Science and Spirituality. Random house. (transl. to english by writer)

4. To some humorous level, this also makes some (accidental) comparison to the 'original' fictional creation, the Frankenstein novel, which according to most studies has been credited to Mary Shelley. However, it is also sometimes considered originating from shared effort (by both Shelley's). When published it was generally credited to Percy Bysshe Shelley because Mary's lack of fame compared to his husband. Later literature study has traced Percy's influences mostly having consisted of acting as an 'feedback editor' of text and likely his affluences to the final edition were limited to(at least) for worth some 5000 words from the total of 72 000 (some changes in the ending, however, are often regarded as pretty important considering the books main themes). In this context it is also possible to speculate whether the Shelley's wished to avoid the question of originator by publishing the 1818 version of the text anonymously. Howard, 2007.

5. Haraway, Donna J.: Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. NY, 1991. [cited via: Anderson, Robert W. “Body Parts That Matter: Frankenstein, or The Modern Cyborg?,” May 10,1999. http://www.womenwriters.net/editorials/anderson1.htm] Viewed 23.11.2008

6. Answers.com definition for cyborg is: 'A human who has certain physiological processes aided or controlled by mechanical or electronic devices' ; In a wider article on topic at Wikipedia there is stated (ao) that, 'A cyborg is a cybernetic organism (i.e. An organism that is self-regulating integration of artificial and natural systems).' [And also:]'The cyborg is often seen today merely as an organism that has enchanced abilities due to technology, but this perhaps oversimplifies the category of feedback' Whether we consider either of these more accurate, the concensus seems to hold that (mostly the fictional) cyborgs are creatures which contain some non-organic features (by origin or as later additions to a preceding organism).

7. Anderson, 1999, “Body Parts That Matter[...]"

11/19/08

Mule Skinner Book Recommendation #8:

An Instant in the Wind

(Andre Brink)

This next selection for book recommendation perhaps surprises our readers less than it does ourselves. This said, mainly because our fiction/belles lettres literature recommendations have so far mostly consisted of reviews from 19th century realism classics. Brinks novel in certain level fits to the same genre and to the contrary, on an other level certainly not (Because of the 'time-gap' in between these).

For a modern fiction, Instant in the Wind is perhaps relatively conventional, it's not especially modern in what comes to the forms of narration and principally appears as (popular) history fiction. Like said in preceding, the book is some one and half century newer novel (p. 1976) than the ones previously presented here (in this blog), Dostoevsky's The Idiot and the Dead Souls (by Gogol) from around mid 1800s. In continuation, perhaps we've even chosen it intentionally, the author being South-African and the text pretty much considering (ao) the social thematics of racism, at the time of writing still an official policy of country's government. This said, just to pay attention to the social construction in the background of events and story.

In Brink's historical novel (in prewords by a book club retailer, the book is mentioned as having been possibly the most favored of Brinks novels by readers...), the story is situated in mid 1700's to the north of Kap (Johannesburg). The plot goes quite as following: Boer Henrik Larsson heads for a journey through the wilderness of surrounding mountainside and savannahs with his newly wed wife Elisabeth and group of companions, slaves among them. In the beginning, the husband disappeared and the servants having fled, alone in the camp, Elisabeth encounters a former slave, named as Adam Mantoor. From this begins their common journey through the wilderness in purpose of safe return to the (pre-urban) Kap. During travel, along with the unavoidable social (and racial) conflicts in their mutual discussions and actions, lights also sexual romance in between tehm. This then carries on, guiding them through the threats and hardships of deserts and mountains, until the very end.

So, the subject of the book is, a romantic story, told from 2 people traveling through almost perfect pristine wilderness (only few people they encounter during the journey), temporarily free from society's pressuring order. It appears also as kind of paradise like natural depictorial (this is even emphasized in the names chosen – Adam and Elisabeth). The reader, at least implicitly, has some pre-feeling from how the ultimate ending would turn out which also makes him to hope their common travel wouldn't end at all. Also knowledge from the novels historical background and the roots of apartheid, makes these parallels to the early christian 'mythologies' pretty convincing (also some extra weight is gained from the prevailing words Brink has written for the story: These give an impression of this story being based on true archival files, found from Elisabeth Larssons late papers - which we suppose is just an authors technique for intensifing the message told, but sort of keeps the reader not familiar with the subject, a bit in 'dim' and enchanted from the possibility of this romance having existed in real life, which actually is quite likely, at least plausible). Also, the form of narration used is mostly descriptive, devoting much for their inner feelings and mutual conversations, making this also such an enjoyable psychological roman. It is not as much easy romantic and not as much simplified micro-historic tale, one could at first sight expect.

The metaphoric and symbolical importance of the nature - in background and also in sync with the eventual fate of this forbidden romance – somehow grows along with development of the story. Their common efforts through the dry deserts are parallel to the romantic beauty of all this and the reader follows from distance this unconventional struggle placed in the middle of nature's quiet loneliness, neutral and accepting but yet pitiless as the mother Earth itself. And this is, what quite much makes the story such trustable, such convincing. So, what comes to our superfluous curiousity concerning the frames of the story, possible factual existence and origins of the events told - we have to accept writers words in the beginning as the only interpretation (this) tale needs: "When there's nothing else left but continuation of the journey, (it appears) not as a matter of imagination, but of faith." [- Kind of freeform translation back to english(by us), not exact sentences in the original text, most propably.]

Newspost#211108

As the (unprecedingly) warm November day turns towards the nightfall, we pick this week a bit of berries (with energy savers in mind, mostly), speculate on the possible environmental threats arising from the nuclears lost or dumped to the seas, and also renew our knowledge about the oil, we've recently written about. In addition to last one mentioned, and as our earlier postings on oil economics were mostly focused on prices than the environmental aspects, we'd like to make some more detailing remarks and notions. This far, however, you'll have to satisfy with this paradise-like imaginary view; 'A distant country/island with no asphalt (on roads), no plastics (at all), no crude oil (as form of heating)' – perfect (eco-laboratory) model/considerable solution for unreal/fantasizing visions from the economics completely free from dependence on crude oil/biofuel utopias...

As for the global food markets we have at least two different topics touched and readers may also find these as areas of interest: 1) Corn scientist's have realized that the archaic indians pre-genetically engineering the food-chain and consequently creating the current maize(read all about it from C.Mann's exceptional book¹) were indeed miles ahead (in choices of which species to mix) when compared to these days master minds playing with all kinds of lambs, guinea pigs and several GMO-plants/fields: ”Maize contains more genetic diversity than any other model organism, making it an ideal plant for gene exploration (…) in fact, two lines of corn are more different from one another than humans are from chimpanzees...”. As we are of knowledge, corn is favored biofuel source as well as among mostly used in GMO production, so we have no reason to suspect that this wouldn't even further fuel the studies on subject. 2) Then again, we just have to mention this article on global fisheries futuristics (see from months posts under title 'We have fished down the food web', and yes, we've cited this blogs articles quite often recently...). The fisheries-article, as for the prospective future, tells among other things from the ironic likely consequences that in decades subsequent to ours, people in developing lands will overfish the (mostly healthy 'organic' and tasty) global oceans, whereas most people in the developed part, are likely to increasingly be fed by the 'McDonaldized'-fisheries production line. The latter meaning, naturally fish breeding and the farmed fisheries. Some perfect irony (keeping in mind that the proposed side-effects, malnutrion and global mass-decline of fisheries aren't really really ironic at all, but realistic threats...) in this case comes from the fact that the seas, last 'really' existing part of the world wilderness will likely get annihilated by people who in the first place would like to get to same level of food-chain than people eating from these 'farmed'-fisheries. And we agree with the writer of the article, that there's possibly not many as untasty forms of provisions as the farmed /cultivated fisheries...(just compare to their original alternates, these diets of McHaddocks and ready-to-micro-oven cods most of us are in future expected to maintain...). From the more worrying point-of-view to these aspects, also the IFPRI-report² raises questions of similar importance as climate change will also affect heavily on many fisheries of the world.

And since our main(not only, but principal) intention on these reviews of the technoid latest front-end-wrap-ups is flogging that immortal invincible horse, namely the capitalistic world market and consumer economics, we take quick tour and view (briefly) these latest 'highbrow' wonders. However, no deeper looks on these Vista-powered light (weight), heavy(price) mini-carriages...why the hell would one need such a device that 'isn't really designed to replace your laptop but used as an additional companion for it', looks unpractical in use and whose battery even can't last more than some 7+ hours(will get improved, yes), and ...which uses Vista? So, we find more inspirating the new Crapberries (or was that the correct spelling, as I'm not quite sure...), competitor for I's and G's phones even without G3-support...as for other areas of interest, USB3 now honored with the name Super-Speed, we are likely to favor the Extreme-Speed as name of the later resurrections (the USB4, eventually appering some day...) ...And since the energy efficiency should be the word of the day, we learn that: ”companies that have been early to the game are going to reach the point where they have done all the easy stuff, and they're going to need technology to have advanced to where there's a new crop of low hanging fruit.” No wonders to be expected, so instead (then again) why not buy those minilaps, with the '2 for the price of one'-solution(one for buyer, one for the 'god-child' in developing world) as all this stuff according to most advisers, needs to be bought (no questions asked...) ...And that's all from our 'blueberries' this week.

Living on borrowed time...Since we don't have exact official (or say mainstream) knowledge of the quantities of endangering nucleotids, sunken and forgotten around the ecosystems, mainly in the largest seas, we borrow at first some sentences from an Cnn-article (article-page wasn't available at the moment, check fx Wikipedia if wish to check the information) ; ”The United States lost 11 nuclear bombs in accidents during the Cold War that were never recovered, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. An estimated 50 nuclear warheads, most of them from the former Soviet Union, still lie on the bottom of the worlds oceans, according to the environmental group Greenpeace” Whether these are the most acurate numbers is not for sure, but as possible threats for eco-systems these most obviously remain. However, as in many cases the presence of them not necessary couldn't have been confirmed or denied in occurrence of accidents but only some times later, and/or the following searches having ended unsuccesfull, the lost nuclears having become indefinite menaces both in manner of (supposed) locations and in timescales in question. On the other hand, knowing the corrosion effects in salt waters, we suppose it would be as risky trying to lift these up for dissolution, which therefore hasn't propably in most cases been carried out. Luckily(?), most of the (known) nuclear weapons are sunken seemingly relatively safe depths. though. Still, on the second thought, the farmed fisheries doesn't sound that bad anymore...

As for numbers earlier presented, one can check the list of known military nuclear accidents from Wikipedia (we only counted some 49 confirmed, possible additional numbers may depend also on the vessels in question). However, it seems also that the U.S. repeatedly did lost those mainly in aircrafts crashes/droppings, most sunken submarine's instead were from Soviet-origin, as consequences from possible reactor faults, conventional weapons explosions and/or other accidents. And, one could also suppose that the presented list contains only the publicly known cases, as there may be even more of these around seas, say fx at the deeps of the Pacific. Also, in addition to the dreadful military doomsday-weapons, there's plenty more accidents/other nuclear contamination happened on seas³, and for the complete radiation amounts released to seas, no-one possibly is for sure.

--------

Notes:
1. Mann, Charles C., 2005, 1491. New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Random House, New York.

2. Impact of Climate Change and Bioenergy on Nutrition. IFPRI/FAO. Fx: "Brackish water species from delicate estuarine eco-systems are particularly sensitive to temperature and salinity changes. [...] ...local extinctions will occur at the edges of ranges, particularly in freashwater and diadromous species such as salmon or sturgeon. Increases in atmospheric CO2 are raising ocean acidit, which affects calsification processes, coral reefs bleaching and the balance of the food web.", p. 34. From International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

3. In decades following the begins of usage of nuclear as power of sub-marines and ships, fx, the low level radiation waste were often released directly to seas. Also, the largest known singular contamination resulted from (accidental) leakage of radiation from vessel(submarine). For the radiations measured/estimated from cases of sunken nuclear weapons and other nuclear contamination accidents/pollution on worlds oceans one can search the databases from IAEA - pages , fx see the 'Inventory of Accidents and Losses at Sea Involving radioactive material' (IAEA September 2001) - though, we're not sure if thats the best available source of information, possibly there's newer reports nowadays.

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12/30/08

Interlude 3; The New Year

12/17/08

the MSW Cooking Companion

Muleskinner Book Recommendations #10:

12/9/08

Newspost#111208

12/5/08

MuleSkinner Book Recommendation #9

12/2/08

Second Interlude

11/30/08

Mammophant, the Modern Frankenstein¹

11/19/08

Mule Skinner Book Recommendation #8:

Newspost#211108

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Ocimum basilicum

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[Fig 2.; p.9]

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...Crepax (selections, combined, from 1969 Valentina)

12/30/08

12/17/08

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11/19/08

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