The Frogs Have More Fun...

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]


11/19/08

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.

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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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