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)

10/12/08

The Muleskinner Clairvoyant Part 1.2

:Predictions on close future web trends

(By WhAcKo-GeCkO)

”If you want to know how important you are to the world,
stick your finger in a pond and pull it out.
Will the hole remain?” (An African saying)

Our soothsayings reaching the second part we're now mainly discussing the recent most evident new developments at Word Wide Web. Everything moving on fast, new apps and devices developed constantly one rarely stops to ask if there´s anything else you might need to be worried than of being left behind that techno-cultural tornado. Our basic futuristic presuppositions in the 1st part gave us some hindsight, that there is, has been and continuosly does. However, the first part also left us wondering the questions on expectable increases in demand for storage space and the simultaneus decrease in the size of electronic devices, both most expectable during the next ten years to come. So now we are to make some techno-social criss-crossings on these aspects (originally we were to discuss things here on much broader scale but the scope of web-concerned stuff is frustratingly large, so...)

In this 2^nd part one main topic will be the recently flourishing development of web trends, namely the web 2.0-sites and applications for home and public communication/entertainment networking. This is perhaps not our main area of expertise, we must confess. In fact, people with more up-to-date knowledge from internet and computers these days can without harm skip these 1.2 presuppositions completely (although, don't skip the last chapter). Mostly we are here just noticing the current trends and our own futuristic visions are actually limited on some comments and presuppositions. Generally it would be hopeless task to predict the net for any longer time limit than ten years forward. Besides, our visions would possibly ideally be at best as some ideological and thematical thougts similarly as Roszaks early visionaries discussed in first part of our predictions^1.

Our important presupposition concerning some 15-20 years onwards are based on some overall views of changes in geolocative importance (on computers/software manufacture): So far the main center on home computer development has been the geographical area of Silicon Valley. Most likely, technologically presumable at least, that development is starting to reach its limits within some ten years, as alternative areas shall start really flourish elsewhere in the world as well. This will happen, according to our soothsayings, mainly because of broader competition but also for the need on more variabilities and local solutions. Also simultaneously with this trend, the role of the single machine will change more towards single access-point, merely a bare panel as tool for viewing the variabilities of the ever-enlargening "net-experience". The process doesn't necessary mean the demise of Home PC as it nowadays exists, neither the end for the governing companies (in markets), but a wider variability of choices available for users, we suppose.

We also suppose that the areas where new equally influensive technology centers will be born and situated are expected around the globe, some examples as Asian-Pacific, India, perhaps South-America, most likely in the same areas already known as local hi-tech places (Just as an interesting point-of-view, view the Wikipedia list of places named with Silicon prefix around the world, to see where similar hi-tech flourishing most possibly develops.) Yet, the actual results of this trend will most likely become effective after the limits of the ten years devoted to this part(1.2.) of our soothsayings. So far, theres not any real signs of technological main center shifting away from California as many renown web-related companies have been for decades now US-based/owned.

If there is one most influential short-term expectable development affecting the home-computing, that would most likely be the long-awaited triumph of Linux (or similar) OSs, Linux having been recently much campaigned in markets within minilaptops and fx in context of Android-smartphone. But, actually supposed breakthrough of Linux has taken so far taken lot longer time than was often predicted and remains a trend still waiting to gain real influence (but intensively waited to happen by many).

Not necessary adherent to the things discussed in previous paragraphs, but similarly important as an longer time trend in nets continuation is the question of internet privacy. This has long been (and is), mostly the same old question, or say divide, inherited from the Win 95-times mid-1990s, whether the openness or so called traditional closed systems are better to make you safe and sound. According to Jonathan Zittrain the openness has been the driving factor behind the internet we all surf at now, but its been questionized from the beginning and the process (for a new single program or net application) most often overally goes (fx) like:

”...a generative platform that invites contributions from anyone who cares to make them. The contributors start among amateurs, who participate more for a fun and whimsy than for profit. Their work, previously unnoticed in the mainstream, beguns to catch on, and the power of the market kicks in to regularize their innovations and deploy them in markets far larger than the amateurs´domains. Finally the generative feature that invite contribution and that worked so well to propel the first stage of innovation begin to invite trouble and reconsideration, as the power of openness to third-party contribution destabilizes its first set of gains.”²

We are not as much worried from Zittrains fears of technology losing generativeness, as our basic belief in nets potential to overcome such intentional aims of control is still strong. However there is reasons for such concern, as can be noticed fx from repeating debates on the question of limiting the net traffic by ISPs and other such demands for supervisory roles show. Also, typical trend which often happens on at certain level the most innovative phenomenoms, often catching popularity on the net in short periods like months (might have been developed years earlier) is that they are consequently bought by big players and soon brought into public use with more forethought tactics(as has been recent trend for some years). Still, we feel thats merely a matter where most (advertisement) money goes, nets communicative and ”cyber-revolutionary” powers most likely cannot be controlled. We believe so, as any demands for that kind of control have proven actually a hopeless task (as examples from some totalitarian countries show).

In spite of actual efforts of control on nets free development, there's always some co-existing important trends that mostly cannot be "chained". Another interesting thing is, besides, that the fastness of development will continuously make a lot of stuff useless in a matter of months even, and overally most likely on couple years periods. Generalizing on this we can suppose that it not only means products will automatically go out of usability in even quicker in the future but that most propably it creates a certain gaps between users wishes and product makers hoping to cash from ever new generations of models. As an example of surprising intermarriage of both has been the phones market we discussed in the first part article, where mobile phones continue to sell every year new models equipped with some latest on-developed applications and services. Still, as side-by result of that has been that the prices of most phones with newest capabilities and services have remained relatively high level for a long time (at least some ten years).

The Torrano Family ; basics, development, future

When considering the ongoing factors of change nowadays in our first part of articles, we found certain most significant developments as the development of social websites and 'new mobile wireless platforms' in form of new generation smart-phones like Iphone and Android. Preceding the modest ongoing mobile networking development, one of the most significant factor on development of net (say from within some 4 to 6 years) has been Bittorrent. That software, or more actually a protocol, is mostly used for downloading media and entertainment content (like ´pirated´ movies and pc-games) and is most typical example of web 2.0 application; its relying on content sharing, and was able to gain huge following in short time. Originally developed as open-source program for sharing Linux-distiributions to users, the code was quickly adapted in the use of rising file-sharing world.

Nowadays, most apparent wars from copyright-concerns being the recent past history, Bittorrent is developed to be in use for every imaginable piece of emerging hardware, software and platform. There´s bittorent handling browsers like Opera, there´s an endless list of clients for bittorrent protocol; fx the most popular like uTorrent, Azureus, BitComet. [For a list of clients currently available, one can see fx p2p-Newssite Slyck ]. Not to mention the ' combined' clients for bittorrent as well as other sharings networks, not to mention the natively bittorrent using devices, not to mention its clients modifications for smartphones (we are not much aware to name certain solutions, so lets just suppose that...its the ongoing prospective future as well). Also, BT was taken in active use commercially as means of distibuting the new space-hungry content like Hdef-video. Even much of the new hardware developed as so called ´closed systems´ (as oppositing the ´generative´platforms, to quote Zittrains terminology) can be hacked to use bittorrent compliant software. From recent such projects one can mention TorrentRelay, a service that allows BT-downloads on Iphone, PS3, WII + other web-enabled devices that don´t natively offer the support. Though in early state of development, service is being mentioned as having a met with a great demand already.³

It seems likely to suppose that BT will remain as the most widely accepted platform on videodistributing-services for at least the next 5 years (´til 2013). After that its quite possible that some other influence has emerged and drive past, but we are not foresight with wisdom if there will be some and which. Surely there is demand oncoming: In Spring 2008 the HD content was starting to gain accentance in typical home-users machines. That meaning not just the discs but also on especially TV-shows available at several P2P-networks, which were the most downloaded choice of the content available. However, at the time most people were not yet having suitable capacity in Broadband, also as the storage spaces were not at the level of demands of extremely space-consuming HighDef video. With new improvements like USB 3.0 flash drives, broadband and processor speeds improved the new format was supposed to quickly come in wide use as typical file-sharers preferred format. Still, downloading of 1080i/p movie would at the time with common 2 Mbits/sec speed take overnight time. So it seems reasonable to suppose that impatient customers, gotten used to quick network transfers, would most likely adopt in change with new hardware to gain from the benefits of new format.4 After some years, most typical user would soforth have in use at least some 5 Mbits/sec connection, some couple Tb Harddrives and perhaps some 32 Gb stick in need for localtransfers (ten years: presume exponential growth...).

However...As we remember from Roszaks teachings, information does not equal to ideas. The increased sharing isn´t any way meaning the shared information is somewhat more inventive, or, generative and unavoidably prosperous wealthy feast of innovativiness. It most likely (already has) overwhelms the online space with the available content so succesfully that typical user hardly has the time think about if there should be as selective as when choosing tomatoes from the groceries. However, consequences from that sharing(-culture) are that the value of media-content is somewhat diminished. Sharing(-culture) has also been helping to create a most user-modified structure where (in time) should personal creations become as appreciated as the 'pirated'-content5 from commercial markets. The democratization on media shows also most obviously in creation of the more independent forms in consumption of the media, that imerely seeks to freed from traditionally given time-scheduels and devices. Think about TV-channels and digital television as aged forms of media delivery. Think about personal, selectively ordered program lists and watch times as well as portable devices used for receiving the media (traditional TV by no means disappearing, but forms of use are becoming more and more various, living room slowly loosing its podium as the only place of homes main media center...). Simultaneously, as TV-shows have become increasingly popular form of torrents, new services for them have also been developed. One of most popular, TIOTI (Tape-it-off-the-Intenet) was (officially) started in 2007 and quickly got similar competitors. Not surprisingly, the feedback from the industry wasn't much appreciating, at least in the beginning.6 Soon (propably already now) many TV-programs are streamed to online distribution as torrents simultaneosly when broadcasted on channels with similar services. I mean, thats just a logical step forward.

Also, returning on the technical aspects more of concern here, the recent new developments on bittorrent architecture give us a hindsight of the coming predictable new improvements in the platform. As bittorrent is decentralized platform in nature, its basis has tradionionally relied on centralized searching via trackers, which means files created on WWW to gather individual users client-programs in transmission of certain file. This is supposed to change, likely in a way what the developmental ´Cubit´-protocol proves to do; to make keyword searching available directly through bittorrent network and such way it would eliminate the need for trackers(on the www) used:

”P2P applications can perform searches but are not very good at it. Distributed hash tables (DHT) are one common approach, but these generally good only at finding exact matches due to the nature of hashes...they are concerned with building robust and truly decentralized P2P networks and they see approximate keyword search as being crucial to that effort...´We do hope that this type of system can be used in place of a centralized aggregator.´”7

Whether this will actually happen is also a question of other developments as well, but its propably one most likely scenario. Actually ´Cubit´ is in developmental state and most users propably would (even if Cubit happens to succeed) propably remain faithfull users of trackers. Yet, capability to pass the time-taking tracker searching would possibly be most wellcomed improvement for the phones uses of bittorrent (increasing trend as we did suppose). So lets hope that will affect on mobile platform most deliquently. No reason to suppose that there wouldn't be bittorrent ´heavy users´ on webphones users as well if the speeds and services are in satisfactory level. And they will most likely be, at least in some modest ten years time-scale...all in all, like any other area connected to the exitement and trendyness of the web, the torrent-scene seems to have but gathered more popularity and become also a mainstream phenomenom. In the next five years this development will also finally see its continuing breakthrough on commercial uses like games and series distribution, so most every form of content becomes available via BT, officially and unofficially.

Conclusive remarks

Finally, as an ending for our internet-weighed part of the futuristics, we will offer some frank foresights on various areas: Taking a simple guideline from an old saying that computing powers will grow somewhat exponentially and we won´t be much misguided. As a brief comparison to that we can mention the worlds population growth, but one can keep in mind that there´s not any supposed highest peak or turn of the trend downwards in foresight as computers concerned.

Gaming

Gaming is expected to be the most driving economic succes factor in the ”new” entertainment industry. Growing (in sales most obviously) are consoles, online-games, and perhaps not surprisingly most influentially the mobile games. Advertising inside games is also becoming propably the norm as staying manner.8 Simultaneusly as ads continue to become increasingly integrated to gaming, localised mobile advertising spreads in the markets. As we notice that already a couple years ago there were fx technologies in development that push adverts directly to phone handsets of by-passers with small servers situated on shops9, and remember that similar techniques on tracking users buying habits and preferences have long been around, we can expect that this will hit the mainstream markets within 5-10 years. Most likely as much arguing will raise as has been the case 'traditionally' on questions internet privacy.

Movies and music are predicted to be outrunned by gaming in close future, but we don´t predict so ground-breaking revolution. No reason to believe that anything would anyway remarkably diminish fx movies sales, be there real revolution on entertainment media-distribution ways, or not. Our visions suppose that most influential improvements will still propably be in the picture quality and graphics effects, as well as on harware the paper-flat screens taken into use in both movie viewing and gaming. Perhaps some 3D-viewing forms will finally become more popular in some newer devices.

As for the home-entertainment media future, Sony's new improved PlayStation system can be mentioned as an typical example: the device is intended to be developed to include most connectivity and shareability as home media center; along with gaming it is to be of use for streaming Bluray's and other content to external devices as fx laptops and cellphones. Online-gaming is to be the main juice but the user can also take advantage of other kind of uses involving streaming, etc.10 The concept propably becomes in time more common in gaming area as well as home networking, though propably not most PS3 customers will eventually use internet mainly with it. Consoles, also without doubt will still dominate the gaming markets as main gaming devices as family users main choices. Virtuality and role-playing as most popular 'new' forms of netgaming propably are expected to represent fastest rising trends.

On basic needs for the computer-power gaming might be considered as some kind of forerunner, so...if we consider the now frontline basic gaming technology as some hint from the coming we might easily suppose that in couple of years (Say 2-5 year scale), the basic norm for the common home-PC needs would be somewhat same as the ”gamer”-intended high-tech machine now (though we must not forget that yet recently laptops were used for other needs as gaming and the coming market of flash-memory using small laptops was also in the beginnings). In spite of that, relatively efficient machines in close future would then have the basic capacities now advertised as in use at hi-tech gaming machines, so compare the relatively recent gaming machine capabilities to most common now: at least core 2 3Ghz processor with internal 12 mb cache (no idea on which level these are to develop, we´re not expertise on these...), 4 Gb (or more) high-speed memory, some 1 Tb HD-space.11 Such capacities have been predicted a long time ago already (B.G. Said some years ago, if I remember this correctly, that in 2010 basic machines would have something like such capacities we´ve just mentioned). In ten year scale the growth should be exponential so one can count from that...in 2012-14 the cheap minilaptop for quick viewing of e-mails and little tasks should easily hold something like the above mentioned capacity(and more, as new techniques are introduced...).

Storage needs

Remembering our picture about storage space developments at the end of first part in our article-series, we can also discuss a little further what comes to advances (needs of any common Joe) in storage needs, easy comparison on using Moorean law as within my own gainings of USB-devices(sticks) tells this much: 2002 I got along with 128 mb, six years later its 2Gb. With similar logic, at 2018 the basic stick(or whatever device used then) will hold some 128 Gb (Just for the case; lets double that prediction for 256 Gb, cause thats just for the basic needs, like e-mails and usable programs + the e-booked British Library small undersection (like physics fx) of content you just can´t live without those days...:) Newer HD´s capacities are harder to suppose; According to an article some 500 Tbytes (50000 Gb! - if I guessed right in decimals...) data-capasity could be available on similar devices to Mp3- and other media-players at 2030.12 Supposedly, that kind of storage amounts would be available only in the newest hi-techs devices, but any common sense tells us that its not impossible to this kind storage spaces being developed also within more traditional solutions. We don´t predict such a devices for a common consumer market being available generally (what's the use? Though if the market trend goes as so far has, its just as expectable...), and also as first rumoured developments of nanotechs are supposed to be extremely expensive (dubious if there will any available for common man even 2030). However its, more than resonable to suppose that anybodys Laptop (or whatever home-PC those days) could then possibly hold some hundreds of Tbytes, or to be more understandable one could theoretically easily hold fx all the textual and/or statistical data of the world (say; all from 1900´s) or millions and millions of MP3´s, all that in your personal computer.

Oss – Will there be Windows anymore?

If that remarkable next generation OS will be Windows, is a question itself...On some next 5 years scale next windows generation named Vienna is promised to be the next MS developing platform. On other hand, Linux is propably more widely used on consumer market than is generally acknowledged13, as nowadays people also may have in use several OS´s carried on sticks. But theres not anything prosperous in close sight to bring down Windows from its place as the ”governing”-system. Meanwhile the open-source development efforts have also actually improved its usabilities to a level that the inter-connectivity between different systems has also improved remarkably.

However, the new improved PC-architectures in close future demands such amounts of power increases that the old x86-basings can no longer provide. According to rumours the project named Midori is claimed to became Microsofts ”post-windows” operating system. The benefits in question of movement away from windows-environment are improvements in between MS´s and other systems and web-applications, but also support for parallelism as some technical improvements in asynchronous processor platforms(or something like that, tasks speeds performances fastening as the main point we suppose...) Current windows code has its limits, but a lot of benefits, not least that its been tested on various configurations of machines in real use. So the fear of losing that is propably more problematic burden in the case of completely new OS-development than technical details in question. Still, there seems to be predictions on partial inclusion of asynchronous technics for the oncoming programming platforms at least. As a new form of OS, then ultimate result will most likely be something in combination of newest creations (like, say cloud-computing) and more traditional forms. 14 Also it is said that the actual focus on proposed new OS architecture by the company is all but clear:

”Microsoft has formally admitted only that Midori is an ´incubation project´- an internal project that may or may not result in an eventual commercial product. As such, Midori could be anything from a complete dead-end, to the OS 95 percent of the world will be running in five to ten years.” 15

So we predict a similar timescale on moving to next level of computing platforms. Whether there will still be another master system or the ring of systems to take the crown we are not blessed in wisdom to know beforehand. Similarly, we don´t dare to predict whether some of the governing companies nowadays will rule, even less whether some of them (and which?) will perish. Most likely in 2018 there will still be fx Microsoft, Google, Nokia, and ...what else? After that period, the path is at least prepared: begins the bright new age with the transmutant devices, nanotechs, scifi-communication systems and ...what else? Just wait and see..:)

Anyway, we suppose that the transition period to completely into the age of asynchronous processors, communicative platforms over certain OSs limits and all that synced to a new generations of products will (in its entity) take most of the aforementioned ten year period. Besides, most likely Windows systems will last in use even after that ten year period in homes at least (by people who don´t bother anymore to see the trouble of investing on the technological wheel of fortunes.) Also, most likely the integration of new web techniques in the same time will most likely affect the development and the gaps (in inter-connectivity) between Windows and other OSs will likely lessen in importance (at least for the more advanced users).

Blogging

Blogs have been an area of extensive growth in recent years, so we suppose that will continue to be a rising trend. This should also be ever-more enlargening phenomenom as even more people annually are able to have their share of computers and internet (mainly in developing countries). So, we don´t predict its fall out of fashion or quickly disappearance in any time soon. Naturally not everybody will ever be interesting fx in writing (to blogs), but similarly there will be always people willing to.

As within the development of marketing, cash-in and similar practices within, blogs (in their most innovative forms and also, overally) will become increasingly integrated within typical social webbing services; they will also remain mostly fuelled by voluntary hobbyists. Blogs will also be used to advertise new, trendy software and hardware products to earn markets quickly among certain specific users. Still, the blogs making it to really cashable channels of marketing will remain as rare as any other similar web-inventions.

However, which are the forms it will develop into? We suppose that increases in social webbing and content developing tools will change blogging possibilities towards even more easier and richer forms of media-weighed web-pages, but also that there will appear unlimited number of variabilities (for blogging). Text will possibly remain as main bone, but other forms can as well become popular channels of expression in them (say fx video-content, or them creating/forming towards new kind of discussion forums of some kind). At least on some some modest ten year scale, the whole concept of net will be more or less revolutionized (again) and the forms of blogging will possibly have changed towards similar directions. Or, alternatively finished as such form it nowadays flourishes.

The main important power in blogging, their nature as democrating communicative channel of common people shouldn´t be underestimated either. In time, they might become even more effective (fx in addition/integration of alternative news-channels like webcasts and new kind of communicative media integrated within). That possibly helps them to gain ever more audience from traditional news-medias. And, not surprisingly results from recent statistics in annual meter in blogging, Technocrati's State of Blogosphere 2008 seem to prove our predictions: blogging was still on increase in 2008. In addition to that one can notice from the results that globally there were some 184 million people who had started keeping a blog (but, only 7.4 M of blogs started were posted during recent 3 months period), 59 per cent had been blogging more than a year (in Europe the average blogging tenure was 33 months, in US/Asia, quite similar), 48 per cent of blogs were from US (27 per cent from Europe, 13 from Asia; propably little unreliable estimate, as the survey was fulfilled on english), from European bloggers 48 per cent were under the age of 34 (from Asians 73 per cent!). On personal blogs maintained, women (83 per cent) were more numerous, men on professional blogs (76 per cent). Also, branding was increasingly becoming popular (as one third had been approached to be brand advocate), most bloggers were spending from 3 to 10 hours blogging per week and most popular topics were news, music and videos. 16

Social webbings

Together with blogging, in recent years social webbing practices have spread like mushrooms in the rain and there´s available every kind of service for sharing, commenting, chating, bookmarking etc. Peoples overall web-profiles have started to become ever more important matter in their everyday life (at least on U.S. We've noticed, and that quite likely predates overall trend) Consequently, we can suppose that in close future your Cyberspace profile might be as important part of your social image as real life contacts. Fx in the development of smartphone uses, the trendy way of social webbings is making these kind of uses more of necessity than rarity. Typically, many of the uses first created for Android-phone as extra apps were somehow using the new social webbings; or as expressed in market-oriented language:

”We´ve learned from computers that its really nice to have complete connectivity, to able to connect anything in a kind of open way. We´ve also learned that its really nice to be able to run any application you want to run, also in an open way. For a lot of people and a lot of time during your life, the phone is your main computing platform..."17

That means practically, the new social connectivity and possibilities for sharing notes, contacts, short flicks and is not just limited to trendy smartphone platforms or Facebooks and MySpaces, which are similarly just the tip of iceberg. There´s dozens of web-sites offering and aiming to improve their usabilities for that manner, one can mention some recent like fx Last.FM (music), Flickr (pics and vids). Some services, like Googles Friend Connect make possible to gather and share content from users different web-sites or accounts. Sharingbility and popularity of social webbing sometimes seems even drive over privacy concerns in ways where users will be willing ro reveal their account information to service provider (like in the example of firefox-extension XOOPIT shows, that being a service offering possibility to making the pic and video content shared straighly available to other users of extension. As was noted, the shareability was preferred to privacy as the extension was quickly gaining success among users.)18

Similar services can be expected to be available (many are already) in mobile use, and their rising popularity has been without doubt one of the most rising trends recently, so again, we suppose that will remain so also on coming ten years. Similarly as similar social- and media concerned services gain ever more audiences (and also as unavoidable result: content) these will be even more evidently fused to other services generated. The trendiness of these services only lttle in time falls out of mode and they become more conventional as forms of "web-experience". After that – we suppose that the new techniques make possible for the people to add in their favored services almost anything available from similar spesified databases, ultimately creating the real ”multimedia haven” where most content is freely (alternatively priced by some low participation fees or advert-including systems) used and shared. Keeping that in mind one can also notice that in 2018 a lot more popular old-dated media will be free digital copyright concerns, even if similar copyright systems and practises still remain in use until that date.

Security, parasites, pests

Concerning the role of Malware, crackware, phishing et similar threats we rely on the following paragraphs mostly on F-secures relatively recent security report. According to it, in recent times there has been enormous raise in the numbers of new and especially modified earlier malware in numbers. Most typical recent (not as well publicly well-known) types of intentional threats were rootkits(new versions), Storm-botnets using of hacking techniques to inject SQL-databases in web-sites (to spread the harmful programs). On mobile front, jailbreaking (using alternative, self/commonly developed programs, placed in a folder other than original developed software) and hacking phones to more openly communicative uses were seen as most security endagering practices.19 Jailbreaking also quickly became common practise in the case of Apple´s popular Smartphone(Iphone)20, much of flag-carrier/fore-runner in the brand new generation of smartphone revolution.

Also, according to another study, significantly high percentage of the users(some 40%) were still using out-dated browsers, which is often main security threat as in the case of on-line surfing. Though web security was in the focus of several companies, the most useful tactics to improve that security were suggested as adding certain ´Best-before´-type labels to browser versions so that users might update them more often.21 So, in the short time level, nothing much new. The user is propably still most common typical security weakness, though computers as platform have become more protected from traditional attacks, web in the same time having been found more hackable in variety of ways.

Besides, also the hardware was now found containing the possibility for security threat, as can be learned from the article on U.S. Military finding its machinery counterfeited (originally chinese manufactured parts, not necessary officials but third party providers). Most typical cases found were the computers parts being an older model than supposed to be when provided. On such cases the machinery itself was found possible to contain trojan/backdoor (doesn´t really much surprise us here at MSW, remembering the early theoremas, mainly Roszaks, which we've discussed on these article-series earlier...) Typically, on common consumer level this kind of security concerns seem less typical and quite unpropable, but actually earlier similar cases had been found on U.S. consumer PC-market too.22

As some combining remarks (from all the aforementioned) we can notice that on information available we are to rely mostly on supposition that most malware is developed in the traditional uses as online spying, theft and botnetting. Nothing much predicts that to change in close future. What makes it diffcult to predict if there will some new kinds of threats is that these are most often developed simultaneusly or as targeting to find weaknesses on new programs and apps security improvements. Most malware is written for Windows-systems, as it still remains worlds most popular OS. Still, at least on a short time trend, we predict that the Ipv6 and new ´safer´ browser developments will most likely lessen the most direct security threats. Also same can be noted from new browser-models, like the recent Google Chrome-project basing on separating the different web-apps driven on browser to different tasks that have no connectivity to each other.23 Be that a new improvement or not, there's yet several reasons to suppose that growth of wireless technologies will spread more security problems in the handsets as well as publicly used other devices.

As some forms of new generation of net-threats one can notice the so called Dos-attacks, which in recent years have gotten increasing publicity, often related to some international conflicts and/or arguing between some nations. These forms of 'cyberattacks' were either nothing new as similar have been seen earlier, and on the other hand their possible effectiveness to other ways than keeping the 'attacked' web-sites down for some time is not generally made known. Also, idenfying the attackers is not so far been found possible (or: not publicised generally). Most likable any nation/or group with capabilities can use Dos-attack effectively, but on basis seen so far we won't predict their development in future to serious cyberwarfare. Even if that would be the case, in the ten years period there's propably still not any sophisticated Matrix/Cyberfiction-stylish sensationable bugs attacking each other in virtual platforms to be seen (wouldn't it be exciting, though). More likely its new forms of regular spying, theftt, identity and bankcard number stealths – not necessary changing the overall uses of net as seen so far. But, its not impossible either that new kind of malware techniques will in time permit typical users to witness some real cyberwarfare (between nations and/or different groups). Also, in my most imaginable moments I can foresee a world where with relavitely low expertise one can indeed start tracking other peoples movements via connectivity devices and use that for some purposes. And, not surprisingly, that is already actually quite possible within the developed 3G-networks (by bluetooth apps, fx). However, in transparent society of positive kind, it should also be no overwhelming trouble for mobile user to track the footprints of such shadower found on trails.

The Environmental concern

In the next (and final) part of our visions, we also hope to be able to discuss more from the other developing areas in close future like biofuels, nanotechs, genetics that, in fact are already affecting our lives. Politics is not within MuleSkinner perspective, ´cause its propably most uncertain and useless area of futuristics to predict. However, in the coming 50 years we predict at least couple major changes in world political area. One affecting factor will, propably be the new economical order, more based on new 'risky' food-economics and the question of how to cope with increasing populations and increasing unequality. However, predicting which nations or unions will vanish, which prosper, we simply find too difficult and boring. Also, the capitalism stabilized as the main governing economical model of the world, we don´t suppose any major changes in that situation. The harmful results of that, for there will be plenty, are much connected to the question whether the environmentally disastrous effects can be slowed or circumvented on one way or another.

No matter how effectively everything is developed, nothing ever comes for free. The unavoidable question raised as consequence from the unforeseen driving economics is: will the nature cope with all this ever-increasing need for power, fastness and commerce? Most likely answer: It won´t. If one is to believe latest reports from climate change and overall warming, results will be devastating and affect all peoples life in every seven continent, with variabilities of course. The IPCC-report (2007) predicts overall warming until 2050, even if the green house emissions can be lowered, and that will suffice to cause floods, disasters, food scarcity, depopulation, etc.24 Although, alternatively it has also been claimed that the whole process of warming is in fact an overscarying scenario, and can be explained more or less just a stemporal variabilities in climate periods25. Even if we believe in changes during oncoming periods and yet don´t think the warming will be as overwhelming as expected, theres still a good deal of evidence already that nature is not adapting to human acrions as easily as conventionally has been believed. Warmer winters, floodings, ice sheets meltings...Just a coincidence?

Whether or not we take the global warming(as has been quite well proven to be happening...) theory as trustable scenario, it seems reasonable to believe that at least most of the IPCC-reports remarks26 should be seen as real warnings and them must be considered as environmental threats of the future. The enviromental changes, taken for granted or not, most likely will affect peoples lives significantly in the coming ten year period predicted already (directly or secondary via changing world economics, etc.)

From the other influential factors and results, we can take a quick look on FAO´s report Agricultural Outlook 2008-2017, which even more fits into to the period we are hoping to predict here. According to FAO the prices of provisions are more likely to rise in the coming ten year period, after which they will propably slightly decline, but will remain on generally higher levels than prevailing period (1998-2007). Globally, predictions are that; beef and pork may be some 20 percentage higher; raw and white sugar around 30; wheat, maize and skim milk powder 40 to 60; butter and oilseeds more than 60, vegetable oils even over 80 percentage. Also, prices are noted to be more volatile than during earlier period. High prices may be beneficial for some, negative for others. Most notable suffers from that will be farmers of the developing countries and especially the poorer people of the Third World.27 As some of the main causes for negative impacts (like raising food prices) are mentioned (ao.) growing needs for Biofuel sources and also (again), climate change28.

So the Brand New Cybersociety will be the main evil child, one of most significant reasons for deforestated, overpopulated, overpolluted, food scarce and over-globalized world, created by the most dominant force in the forms of 200-year (unstoppable) development: Capitalism? Perhaps, perhaps not and most likely something in between. Overally developments in the web, discussed in this part of the article, are also changes of preferences, changes in manners of life in digitalized society towards new class-economics. Consequently, the coming new generations will be basing their choices on different situations and circumstances. As has been noted, the competition for more effective solutions in the web mostly enlarges the variable available choices for individual user. Same could be the case concerning environmental decisions, choices available for each individual person could be much wider if certain ecological questions would be really taken seriously (by producers, mostly). Whether the commercial drive or the environmental concern will weight more in the future is to be seen.

But to complete our visions covering the lenghtier 50 year period takes propably another vast number of pages full of text, as in the beginning this(1.2) part of article was to contain about half the lenght it is now. So it seems reasonable now to call it off and leave rest of our visions to the next part. Most likely the final chapter will be realized merely in a form of time-line, where the most significant inventions and/or changes on human-nature environments will be placed on propable timings. The time-scale extending further, we will be relying mostly on the presuppositions that have been already mentioned here and also on our science-fictive imagination concerning possible futuristic developments. The actual sources of news, reports, or say, actually verified information/data will serve mostly kind of roadposts in our foresights. Lets hope that will shorten the latter part a little...

SoURCES and NoTES:

(Wikipedia et sim. linked directly in text)

1. 'The MuleSkinner Clairvoyant Part I. A brief look at the close Future Web development.' [On this blog -> indexed under tags: futuristics, clairvoyances]. We, of course not suppose futuristic visions would last as well as Roszaks, nor that them would be as comprehensively based on, say, the archaic history of computerization (90s prevailing decades from todays perspectives). In spite of that, we are also aiming to predict a far larger areas of developments in entity; that is, not just the computers and the transhumanistic oncoming changes within, but also the environmental changes and fx the affects of climate change on humans in global scale. Also, our complete time-scaling aims to reach for a far further period onwards (until 2050s).

2. Anderson, Nate, 2008, ”Book Review: Jonathan Zittrain´s ´The Future of the Internet – And how to stop it”, http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/book-review-2008-06-2-admin.ars viewed 23.6.2008 We´re using Zittrains paragraphs cited in the book review, not directly from the book (which we're not familiar with, must confess...)

3. ´Enigmax´, 2008, ”Download torrents on PS3, Iphone and Web-enabled Devices”, http://torrentfreak.com/download-torrents-on-ps3-iphone-and-other-web-enabled-devices-080610/ viewed 22.6.2008

4. Mennecke, Thomas, 2008, ”Blu-Ray Wins, the Internet Doesn´t Care” Slyck 24.2.2008 http://www.slyck.com/story1668_BluRay_Wins_the_Internet_Doesnt_Care viewed 16.6.2008

5. As result, the concepts of 'pirated', 'copied' and 'copyright' have also become increasingly blurred on internet-based activity, in fact so effectively, that within time they are expected to diminish completely and ultimately force the entertainment markets to follow the unavoidable change of form on web-markets. For further comments on that one can view the P2P-documentary 'Steal This Film' (pts 1 & 2), available in freely. See fx Wikipedia article on Steal This Film.

6. Roettgers, Janko, 2007, "TIOTI to launch Tuesday" 1.10.2007, http://newteevee.com/2007/10/01/tioti-opens-to-the-public/ viewed 11.9.2008

7. Anderson, Nate, 2008, ”´Cubit´ P2P search protocol could one day sink The Pirate Bay”, http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080617-cubit-p2p-search-protocol-could-one-day-sink-the-pirate-bay.html viewed 22.6.2008

8. Caron, Frank, 2008, ”Gaming expected to be a $68 billion business by 2012”, http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080618-gaming-expected-to-be-a-68-billion-business-by-2012.html viewed 22.6.2008

9. [Winder, Dave], 2007, "What's hot in Britain's Silicon Fen", PCPRO March/2007, Issue 149. The article tells (ao) about that kind of project on Cambridge hi-techs; "...the control software can even change the content according to the time of day, or only send information to someone who has been standing outside a shop window for five minutes." , alternatively: "...if you simply walk past, you´re not pestered." (p. 136) According to article no personal data (like telephone numbers) is collected to servers and users can as easily reject from receiving the ads messages.

10. Kuchera, Ben, 2008, ”They say it got smart: a 2008 review of the PS3”, http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/playstation-3-blu-ray.ars viewed 16.6.2008 (contains several web-pages, Pdf available for registered users of Ars Technica -website)

11. What MMO, Issue 01/June 2008. Our information is from this advertisement-magazine for gaming computers, whose content sounds a bit outdated already, as such capacities on memory and hard disk level were also common on regular laptops at the time of writing. Most recent polishings from hi-tech front can of course be checked from web (however, we didn´t bother for that...).

12. Lehto, Tero, 2008, ”500 teratavun muisti mobiililaitteisiin tähtäimessä. Nanotekniikan läpimurto Britanniassa”, http://www.tietokone.fi/uutta/uutinen.asp?news_id=33621&tyyppi=1 viewed 30.5.2008

13. (Acc. to information available for us) Linux market-share noticeably was 0.91 per cent from used net OSs when recently checked on 11.10.2008, see http://marketshare.hitslink.com/( -> Operation systems)

14. Bright, Peter, 2008, ”Midori musigns: Thoughts on a ´post-windows´ OS.”, http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080804-midori-musings-thoughts-on-a-post-windows-os.html viewed 9.8.2008

15. Bright, Peter, 2008, ibid.

16. "State of the Blogosphere", 2008, http://www.technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere, (Technocrati 2008 blog statistics summary, includes several web-pages), viewed 14.10.2008 The actual numbers of bloggers/blogs come from different sources that may vary a bit, still the trend seems to be still increasing, although a bit slower recently. As some points of interest we can also mention (some of) Internet Content Producer Chris Pirillo's views on future of blogging also cited in report mentioned: "...the process by content is created for one blog or a series of blogs will continue to undergo radical upheavals. This past year, we saw the introduction of countless "microblogging" platforms, to the point where they (themselves) have become a commodity —further pushing individual voices to the Blogosphere’s melting pot. Brand will continue to decentralize, and micro-communities will form within any one of the loosely-structured services (like FriendFeed, which values the continuation of conversation as much as it does the initiation portion).”, "Video will also become increasingly important to convey complex messages that are often lost in text - [...]"

17. Roth, Daniel, 2008, ”Google´s Open Source Android OS Will Free the Wireless Web ”, http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-07/ff_android (article contains several web-pages, Wired Magazine), [Sentences cited Larry Pages saying according to Roth] viewed 27.6.2008

18. ”Xoopit Transforms Your Gmail Inbox into a Multimedia Haven”, 2008, http://lifehacker.com/374651/xoopit-transforms-your-gmail-inbox-into-a-multimedia-haven viewed 22.6.2008 The service, offering people availability for media saved on others accounts using it and have their own inbox content including all media there available,like pics and vids, demands people voluntarily relieving their passwords to service provider to be able maintain service. That (according to article) didn´t seem to lessen its popularity.

19. ”F-Secure IT Security Threat Summary for the First Half of 2008: More malware than ever before, Targeted attacks, New ways to infect PCs, and Jailbreaking”,

http://www.f-secure.com/2008/1/ viewed 30.6.2008

20. Jewell, Dave, 2008, ”The iPhone's love/hate relationship with hackers. A year in the making”, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/30/iphone_birthday/ viewed 2.07.2008

21. Hruska, Joel, 2008, ”40% of surfers don´t bother with browser security updates”, http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080701-40-of-surfers-dont-bother-with-browser-security-updates.html viewed 2.07.2008

22. Hruska, Joel, 2008, "Chinese counterfeit chips causing military hardware crashes", http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081006-chinese-counterfeit-chips-causing-military-hardware-crashes.html viewed 8.10.2008

23. Patton, Tony, 2008, "What does Google Chrome offer Developers?", http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-development/?p=729 viewed 16.9.2008 [On Chrome each tab-window in browser is handled like a single distinct session. If one tab goes down for one reason or the other, it shouldn´t affect the other connections user might have open simultaneously. In this manner, Chrome lets user create desktop shortcuts to web pages that can be maintained individually. Though the concept much plays in within Google's own ambitions in favor of using their own applications straight at web, it also shows path for the more flexible and propably safer usabilities for these applications (that being so, we find it less likely that the future will focus around Googles solutions solely or even mostly...) Also, Mozilla was developing basicly similar desktop web-app, also available as Firefox-extension, see: ”Major Update to Prism, First Prototype of Browser Integration”,3.7.2008, http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/03/major-update-to-prism-first-prototype-of-browser-integration/ viewed 9.10.2008 ]

24. IPCC WGII Fourth Assessment Report. Working Group II Contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report. Climate Change 2007: Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. (This should be available as pdf from IPCC-site however I couldn't locate it at the moment. A shorter, more recent document containing similar information on climate change and its is co-effects is "Key IPCC conclusions on climate change impacts and adaptations WMO Bulletin, April 2008", pdf also available at IPCC-site.)

25. Lino, Geraldo Luis, 2008, ”Global Warming: Facts and Factoids”, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9199, Global Research ca. Center for Reseach on Globalization. Lino fx states in his article that the whole CO2-question of human created warming is just smokescreen for overall ”new enviromental colonialism”. We are not concerned on Lino's opinions about IPCC, whether them being correct or not, but its unavoidable to take some interest in noticing his opinions on the enviromental dilemme between rich and poorer countries. Certainly among the most actual troubles in developing world are the ones he mentions (not limited to of course): lack of water and sanitation infrastructure, hunger, financial ´globalization´ affecting the deepening political divide between people and possible lack of access to most modern energy sources(or should we say: the inequality in those resources sharing).

26. IPCC WGII Fourth Assessment Report, 2007, p. 7-13. In IPCC-report the overall propability of the climate change results mentioned are divided in three main levels of confidence: 1^st of very high confidence, 2^nd high confidence and 3^rd medium confidence. We' ve only considered worth taking into consideration the ones belonging to the 1^st level. The predictions contained are naturally selective for that reason. As well as that it is also notable that they are weighed on results from where enough researched information existed during publication of the 2007 report, that being, we suppose, reason why there´s not any 1^st level affects mentioned on South-America or Africa (which, although, can also be seen as intentional means in Report). Most alarming 1^st level effects noted are (combining and shortening of sentences done by us): (If) 1-3 C Increase in sea surface temperature, most corals are predicted to face an increasing mortality (unless there is thermal adaptation by corals), Coastal wetlands negatively affected by sea-level rise on certain areas, millions of people at the areas already vulnerable to tropical storms or coastal subsidence are likely to be affected by flooding (until 2080 predicted in report), In Australia significant loss of biodiversity in some ecologically-rich sites as well as risks of storms and coastal flooding, In Europe increased risks of inland floods, coastal flooding and increased erosion, extensive species losses, In North America similar results as flooding and also cities might experience the risks of intensifying heat waves, affects of forest in means of diseaseas, pests extended periods of high fire risk, even more impacts when climate changes combined to pollution and population development, in small islands (esp. on Caribbean and Pacific) increased erosion and reduced water sources.

27. 'OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2008-2017', 2008. p. 11-12. [UN Report, PDF available (ao) from FAOs website, www.fao.org.]

28. 'OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2008-2017', 2008. [The report concludes also that weak USD typically leads to higher USD-dominated prices of traded goods, which has earlier resulted as them being not as expensive priced in other currencies. As a result one can expect slowering of the price risings, though report notes that prices of most commodities are more expensive than two years before. The factor is considered as permanent in the period predicted. As biofuels are the main new demand for uses of grains and vegetable oils, they are also seen as permanent factor lifting the (food) prices to higher average level. After the ten-year period taken under examination the new demand for sources earlier stated primarily for food commodities market may also predict the new and again, permanent element in future price volatility. , p 44.] (Italics used also in report cited]

MuleSkinner Book Recommendations # 5:

The Sword-Project "E-booked"-Bible

Our 5th book recommendation is - the Bible. This may sound a bit surprising as compared to our usual topics and books of interest so far, but it is by no means random choice. There's plenty of reasons to recommend this text, not least that Bible stands as worlds second most printed book. (in Christian parts of the Globe, at least) In spite of that, our intentions(personally, I must confess that I've never bothered to read it thoroughly, but satisfied for an occasional paging) to recommend are somewhat opposite: they are based mainly in wish to decrease the numerical volumes of any further printed editions of Bible. Therefore, we now are taking the electronic edition under brief examination.

The Sword-project has been turning bible to an electronic version since 2001(we suppose that was the year, as recently checked...). It is maintained by CrossWire Bible Society, an organization devoted in an effort to create cross-platform open-source tools for programmers and Bible societies to write new Bible software more quickly and easily. Naturally, the Sword is a GNU Open-source project. The electronic bible is available in some 50 languages, and the best thing in it - I think - is that you can easily place as many translations as you wish within single Sword program. With Sword, easily goes also the copying of sentences; You can for example select the adjustable lenght and/or number of verses by single click, also if to include the source-notes and other co-information.

Sword-program itself can be installed on any Windows, Linux, Mac, and you can also place it on stick with some carriable software like Portable-apps to, like they say - have your Bible along on the go. From crosswire.org there's available a wide selection of translations and different editions (some old, some newer) simply to dl as compressed file. These can then be directly taken into use at Sword-program. In surplus there's also a variety of other helpful texts for study and/or for any theological, religious, whatever means. Those meaning the dictionaries, commentaries and some extra texts you can use within Bible. Non-canonical texts aren't covered as extensively, but the reason for that is not teological but practical - they say that these are simply not as much available in electronic form, because there's hasn't been as many helpful hands in conversion (of them). Other available additions are (ao) maps (but on quick look, we couldn't find them available to dl..) Anyway, if one considers how much all these additional books by themselves would add to total weight of paper edition, the usability of Sword E-book becomes even more evident.

Second most obvious reason to use the electronic form, is the searchability. Any section, pararaph in discussion can be most effortlessly located and compared (fx to 'original' greek/hebrew translations). That helps, at least on occasions when you end up with arguing which somebody who exactly said those famous words in certain chapter.

Lastly, few words more from our main reason to recommend the Sword-bible; it's simply ecological and economic choice. If one considers all the efforts devoted (say, since Gutenbergs great invention) to compiling, editing, examining, printing, distributing, selling and pricing of Bible, one comes into a single unavoidable conclusion: could there be any way to lessen the amounts of paper used? This isn't of course a most striking concern on ecological level, there's plenty of heavier elsewhere. On the other hand, Bible's every new modernized edition published annually (most often there's new one in some 20-40 years on each language) would easily be printed in a lot less numbers and citizens would then (fx) acquire the most recent edition online for free(or by charge, alternatively). Those who still merely wish to own paper book version would then possibly be given choice to ask for printed copy. Printing and binding, we suggest , could be carried out print-on-demand, paperback or hard-cover depending on users wishes.

Thats the recommendation, when trying SWORD, don't forget reading the book. Its actually general knowledge, not only ethically and religious, but every other phrase has its roots on Bible. Examples are too numerous to count, so I'll mention just one: "Bless you!"

Newspost#12102008

Our newsfeed being less orderly maintained during last month, we're almost short of new information. However that doesn't prevent us from giving our opinions on some of the ongoing trends. As the techs sector has reached forward during our holiday seasons we focus on catching the missed progression and Gargantuan steps taken meanwhile, and therefore this sunday sermon is devoted to the technological frontends of home-computing. Most space is given to Google's Chrome-browser, though.

The innumerable pedias: Having got so used to the handiness of Wikipedia(WP), you don't always remember that there's plenty of companion alternatives and Wiki-Offshoots (just to save time, we're briefly citing other instances here:): Scholarpedia ”...is written by, you guessed it, scholars. Experts must be either invited or elected before they are assigned certain topics and, although the site is still editable by anyone like a wiki, updates must first be approved before they are made final.” Conservapedia ”...is a conservative, Christian-influenced wiki encyclopedia that was created as a response to Wikipedia's alleged left-wing bias. The information found on this site is free of foul language, sexual topics and anything else deemed offensive by the site's editorial staff.” (sounds humorous? Read further:) Uncyclopedia ”...is an ambitious spoof of Wikipedia. It could be seen as an over-the-top response to Wikipedia users, also knows as "Wikipedians", who seem to take everything too seriously.” (...But wait, it gets better:) Micropedia Microsofts own internal WP, cataloging every person and project within company (there's also a Polish project by same name which is about Micronations, from Redmonds Micropedia see this article). Naturally there's similar pedias at almost every smaller or larger (net-)companies. More a norm than exception these days. Then there's at least Animalpedia...from the animals of course, seems to be updated somewhat infrequently and there´s plenty more text from animals in original WP ...Chickipedia...from chicks, mostly...Music pedia, smaller project, possibly fading and no wonder as every other artist seems to be reviewed at WP too...and who knows what other encyclopedic projects. (...But wait, it gets even better:) You can also actually pay real amounts of cash for the joy of building your own (company's) WP's with the help PBWiki. For a medium and/or larger entrepreneur this can be even real useful solution considering the time and effort the maintainance of any pedia takes. Luckily, these days all is at net, otherways they would offer help for gathering your own (company's) encyclopedias with indexing and printing services too... but wasn't it quite recently when you were told to make the leadership understand that actually its for company's benefit if the worker decides to start writing internal blogs and wiki's?

Unavoidable for us to avoid commenting Googles Chrome, but we don't make this for full article as might have been the temptation at first glance. Instead here's a quick commentary mainly because the browser seems to be very well reviewed and discussed elsewhere and we don´t propably have much to add (and, strangely little information on its development and later fixes seems to be available for us here at MSW). If wish to read more, check out the links included below our comments at end of this text.

At first look, the window and panel feels comfortably similar to Firefox, with some new spices added. Notably, the web-address bar is taken in use as searchbar also (can be changed to use other engines than Googles own, too). Useful, but not that amazing. Also the incognito mode, we find as usable but not much revolutionary invention. Then there's the Task manager, and that we find more than improvement as user can now check the actual consumption of resources by different tabs (web apps) open at the time. Somewhat curiously, bookmarks and rss-features have been omitted from Chrome, obviously as though unnecessary. The most important improvement, however, is the handling of tabs; Chrome uses each tab as individually opened web-window separately (and safely apart) from each other. This is real improvement which might likely get adopted by others too.

Then again, noticing the apparent similarities to Firefox, one also stops to think that actually much of this modestyness is propably only some glittering loan. But also, Googles apparent main target, the mobile phones interferences might have been taken into consideration as Chrome's overall details have been polished for a little lighter appearance. This makes sense, and actually the browser seems to perform very fast and very smoothly (yet, Ffox oncoming versions are promised to perform JScript as fast; again, see the links below). Still, we cannot but wonder if these qualities are worth the features missing: that is, the many so efficient and delicate little extensions that make Mozillas main flag-carrier the ultimate winner (and they promise you can get the mobile version these days too), the balanced beauty of general appearance and the many little improvements. The latter will necessary have to be carried on Chrome before it could be noted as notable challenger on browser markets. But, in simplicity and with developing it might gain a following at least among Google's die-hard fans. And besides, there's certain quality in the simplicity of Chromes outlook.

So, as we understand the situation, the only real question is, whether Google is ready to give up from tactics of trying to push its own web-services into every place (fx via browser), instead giving green lights for alternative available choices for every imaginable uses like Firefox does. Most likely, in time Chrome will get free from beginnings childish diseases and perhaps there's still place for another browser on markets, so ...lets see. But, mentioning other similar trendy projects at the same deal, there's also Mozilla's Prism (the Ffox extension version became recently available too). And it does quite the same what is drummed as Chrome's most charming improvement: Serves as an straight web-window to wanted web-address/-program, directly from users (PC:s) desktop. But they say its available only on Windows which sounds but strange...

Not much familiar with Google's Gears, we are not to say if Chrome makes better usability for (Google's) so called cloud-applications, but that could be. In any case, it makes way for the new attitude and ways for webbing. Whether this is sufficient reason to take a ride on Chrome, depends on users needs and likings. But we suggest people also check carefully the articles listed below, too. Just for curiosity.

Finally, Can browser really change a world? Not in my lifetime, but it helps to make it better. So, lets just be satisfied with that (so far).

-------

(Normally, there's at least three main subjects on our news, but due to MSW -world situation, this week the last one is filled with silence :(

-------

(For more detailed analyses on Chrome, see links below:)

Chrome: A new force for web applications? Promise trough the froth

by Tim Anderson (The Register) – 4.9.2008

Google browser's tracking feature alarms developers, privacy advocates

(But web surfers can opt out, sort of)

by Ackerman, Elise (Mercury news.com) - 19.9.2008

Hands-on with Chrome: Google's browser shines (mostly)

by Paul Ryan (Ars Technica) - 2.9.2008

New Firefox JavaScript engine is faster than Chrome's V8

by Paul Ryan (Ars Technica) - 3.9.2008

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