The Mule Skinner Blog: Gardening Post II (2020) ; Or, “Hello, Big One !”, ...And more (from), 'with Love an Promotion'.

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)

9/16/20

Gardening Post II (2020) ; Or, “Hello, Big One !”, ...And more (from), 'with Love an Promotion'.

“Many years... , I'd had an idea for a short story about a young Indian student who is sent away to Indian boarding school when she learns to cultivate and even hybridize gladiolus. The short story was going to focus on the conflict she encountered when she returned home and tried to plant gladiolus farm land and water in the desert are too precious to waste on flowers, her elders would have scolded. ...

Nearly all human cultures plant gardens, and the garden itself has ancient religious connections. For a long time, I've been interested in pre-Christian European beliefs, and the pagan devotions to sacred groves of trees and sacred springs. My German translator gave me a fascinating book on the archeology of Old Europe, and in it I discovered ancient artifacts that showed that the Old European cultures once revered snakes, just as we Pueblo Indian people still do. So I decided to take these elements – orchids, gladiolus, ancient gardens, Victorian gardens, Native American gardens, Old European figures of Snake-bird Goddesses – and write a novel about two young sisters at the turn of the century.” ; Silko (,Leslie Marmon), of Author's Note on Gardens in the Sun (novel; -99)

;

“...Bioplanning involves taking organic gardening one step further and creating the multitude of habitats necessary for beneficial predation. The world as a biosphere has undergone unique changes in the past 50 years. Agricultural technology has removed wildlife habitats by enlargening fields into vast areas of monoculture with an accompanying desertification of species, and suburban sprawl has likewise destroyed these habitats in large areas. Yet the gardener expects the balance of nature to be somehow self-correcting and is surprised when this balance shifts to leave large numbers of otherwise beneficial organisms, such as earwigs, tent caterpillars, cut-worms, fungi, bacteria and viruses, to decimate precious plantings.

...bioplanning. To bioplan a garden, a much more harmonious system will be in place, which in turn will be healthier and more beneficial for the residents, man included. Bioplanning involves restoring equilibrium among soil, water, fauna, and flora. Success is when the summer tanager, the butterfly, and the toad come to reside again in the garden with man. The balance is restored, the cycle of nature begins again.

[...]

Plants, all plants, are silent organisms. They take the energy of sunlight and trap it into chemical bonds that amass to create a rather extraordinary body of living tissue. All of these structures are made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sometimes sulphur and nitrogen in different chemical combinations. Knowledge of these chemical structures is the basis of ancient and modern medicine: 50 percent of all medicines used all over the world come from plant origins and are made of one or another combination of these chemicals. These are the chemicals lurking in plants which are so important to our well being and whose importance to the natural world I have called ecofunction. As a scientist and as a gardener I have studied the chemistry and ecofunction of the species described in this book, ...” ; Beresford-Kroeger : A Garden for Life (1999,2005; p. 14-5)

: Picture, on above: From Nemi (of comics by Lise Myhre) ; ...here continuing our series of posts 'blessed' w. this gothic 'heroine'. Nemi can appear rather amusing, 'entertaintive', funny 'commonplace' stories for 'mostly'. But often there's also more serious 'appeal' is present. ; So obviously, I really think these few panels from succesfully 'captures' the many issues characteristic to this present World/ It for an 'age' of extinctions. (Which often too little is from noticed.)

(...due from there so plenty pics to this post otherways too, I had to leave a few 'panels' from an original story aside. That wouldn't change main essentials at this. ; ...Also, I've a little 'rewrote' text - As the source was from the mag by my native language. Hope it not, doesn't, too much differ from original sentences - If does, purely by my fault...)

- Would mean, this meant for to make you think...

;

“I think that each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, either in one body or several, where a stick should never be cut... - a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation.”

- Thoreau (selection at begins from a 'recent' published original manuscript, known by name for Wild Fruits.

The days are starting to turn shorter, already. (It being Sep., from now). ; The Autumn 'arising', and all growth unavoidably seems soon destined to fall to it's winter rest. So far, we've still had a few more sunshiny days - permitting apparent adequate amounts a light to keep the perennials still in some 'emergence' (And also those occasional Biennials, which we did by this year cultivate...) The nights already are from rather cold, however.

It been of the constant raining also, at least on during the few latest weeks. We might still well expect from see some weeks/week from returning sunshine days by tis ongoin' Month (Sep.). Or in during the next too. (Yet, it must be noted, most characteristic weatheric condition to this past Summer here was – the Rain.)

Seems it indeed apparent, that the continued colds then not much favored my inspirations on for the gardening, this year.

But...despite everything, kept remaining from as enthusiasted on the task I'd 'set' for to my target', held the firmer grasp of a shovel w. my both hands - also for occasionally (felt like) to had my legs “knee-deep” in the dirt ; ...And w. 'heavy breath' from puffin'on arranged some spaces for the perennials into their new places. (That kept me buzy, until these latter parts Summer.) Yet, nothing much (else) that could make a person more happier, I also often thought. ; Had not just the 'sweat on my brows', but also the nose-hairs from as sweaty too, tried still - despite the aching muscles and escaping thoughts - to keep the same mad gleam 'flickerin on', while had the flame and the 'eternal burning' from raisin' up of the bottom from my very, ...raisin' straight up from deeps of my eye-sockets.

; Pic above: from (Crepax's) Valentina - Of playing her most frivolous and uncompromising 'trump card' ; At this place, presented in form of a reverse image.

And it worked, pretty well. (If I'd be the one to 'judge' for, of the worth for my these successes, and 'achievement'.)

Was often rewarded by my many efforts and "conversations" from w. the land, I can tell you. All in all, despite the generally quite bad weathers - Me and the garden insects also had for the many good moments. (But the most of that is comprised here, just of a few passages below...So let's the leave the rest of my self-merit and -praise until that. After all, finding myself most times for quite modest a person.)

--------

Don't know if I'm to later recall this Summer from just as nostalgically than from about some before years. But it also fx succeeded to show (me) that patience a some necessity in gardening tasks too: Along w. other happy findings, my Echinaceae paradoxas (Yellow Coneflowers) finally flowered. (Supposedly) I didn't feat those already in the preceded post, so here then is some photo.)

; To another side-mention...That one about the Yellow Sweet Clover, which was on former post mentioned – and which I kept for grow inside that garden greenhouse. – It ultimately grew so 'huge' (!) that I had to wonder from whether it was even too good an idea. It might've now also enshadowed and enslowed other cultivations at that 'patch'. (Not very unexpectable to theconsequence, of course. ; I finally then had to cut short it's any extra 'stems', twigs , most part, just for be able pass aside myself.) ...wasn't a big deal, all in all, had the next to it nothin' much grown in this year. Only a few herbs, some other perennials 'secured' there - w. an idea that they'd then shall better last over a first winter. ; Also observed number of bees visiting for that. Some that were planted on outside flowered several weeks later, and not on this first year near so much. – For, by now apparently some regular 'abnormality'(?) after the mid-Summer, it was pushin' the 'unfavorable' weathers (, more or less rains and from relative colder too). So of the early July onwards you couldn't much count for there would been the two subsequent weeks of the steady weather (and a good sunshine). Well, at least that not kept to so constant 'aridity' as on a few years earlier...it was.

Also wonderin' whether the early Summer heated 'season', and the followed steadily followed colds did any good for agriculture farming, either. To be truthful, it still didn't rain exactly like of 'the Cats, Dogs, and Buckets'- such as the popular phrase says for about bad weathers; from acc. some song, poem - or was it then an idiom(?), can't say....

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

(Pic) , on above : Nemi. ...About that on above (,in the first panel) noted 'problem to a planetary 'magnitude'. ...Or, in fact, (is) the stark realistics from about what the 'Wishful thinkin' in our existent economic 'system'(s) mostly tends for to treat as...the 'side-consequense'. (Think about it.)

; ...'Along w.' what on prior here is written, 'till this point - and on below onwards to continuing - simultaneous w. my described 'gardening parties', at my enthusiasms then had time for some reads on (global) forests - like fx this (; https://news.mongabay.com/2020/06/forests-are-a-solution-to-global-warming-theyre-also-vulnerable-to-it/)

[Addit.; 24.9.20] ; 'win-win possibilities' - contra - continued 'Net loss(es)' equal to/with the global Collapse... ; ...with an only brief look, one also finds that the global forests decline (,from continuing) is now, for some time, been linked to the more worrisome possibility for them becoming the sources to carbon increase - instead from the 'sinks' to it. In other words: The forests logging(s), wildfires, the old woods clearance, all that lead for them starting change from enfasten the global warming, - and (soon, after 2030s) not anymore so effective as carbon sinks, not nearly same manner from enslowing the Climate Change's further advances.

; Several recent studies seem had researched the issue, that most recent one (apparently), from observed data of past the latest 30 years time. Acc to that, ao findings, the decline in global 'carbon intake', by the forests, declined of the 'roughly 46 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide...to the estimated 25 billion tonnes in the 2010s.' ; That not all, or if you'd not find that from so alarming, it ('Tropical forests' carbon sink is already rapidly weakening') also has:

"...decline is because these forests were less able to absorb carbon by 33 percent and the area of intact forests declined by 19 percent, while global carbon emissions soared by 46 percent." ; Former studies seemed also from predicted, or 'established' the likehood to this described 'net loss', by already a few years back...Such as from acc this at Carbon Brief (of 2017). (...The alarming p-o-w, as usual, seems been in the discovery that much of the noted change was taking place for already now, some decades prior than any former climate-models had estimated it to. Or, where it's 'rate', from only this far shouldn't from appear be; That 'level' for not had been previously 'predicted' from achieved...as yet.)

---------

(Photo) ; ...btw, along w. little below described garden plants, I also have some standard garden roses (rosaceae) - Them generally need not much care for. Little fertilizes, watering when necessary, and them tend from flower about twice in during any one Summer.

; And also - this (at 'Nature') seemed well-worth provided here to some 'food of thought', for the interested. (It fx has that important remark; '...restoring degraded habitat and protecting undisturbed natural areas would benefit both public health and the environments.')

; ...Along my noticing/of the many new published book (,by apparently, recent); there seems to worth the reads well, some on here reviewed ('Nature') - Although having not actually read that, article, by myself, before writing from it to this post. – But from the book in question (reviewed at) - Wished I'd had any chance reads of that, even a little, to it's 'stories', tellings from. Seems it quite unlike, by this moment, not on any sight to have some good 'gap' , when I'd have a possibility for. (; However, read far enough to notice the sentencesto remark of the evidence that '...dispute asssumption that all the approved drugs and medical devices are safe and effective.' ; So have your own mind not for 'corrected', make noise, whenever you think it not, perhaps, appears 'safe'.

; There seems as well referenced to the few former 'studies' on same 'issues': The Truth About the Drug Companies (Angell, 2004), and, Bad Pharma (2012, by Goldacre)

; So, well - you all can possibly consult your 'family doctor' on about it's tellings instead, thenafter. If you got concerned on aspects adressed. (Whether the topics might been of any/some interest.) ; It's really, actually, not for my any preferred 'habit' to mention about smght that I'd not myself for viewed about, at least from and if only somewhat 'cursorily'. Hence this lack for comment on most these, and why this of so scarce for words, any further remark... But, overally, at least this now provided the names from those few other earlier published books, of the sinister back pages of the modern 'Pharma-industry'. A remarkably little disreputable a business still 'today', from despite that there years been the steadily appeared 'flow' of articles that 'd for revealed the lotsa connections between the 'Big dollar' - and, the Bad healths.

; Not read either from those books above listed, so happily having to 'flee' now without so much more said on about this remarkably persistent a 'topic', topic in the public (medical) health care...

[Another Addit. ; 24.9.20] ; '...doesn't save even the family dog (of the blame)...' ; ...Much as I'd perhaps wished to not to offer anything further from cons the 'Population Bomb', and that past 'discussion' and 'concern' from it - 'suppose, I make at least some useful knowledge available via citing the fewsome further informative selections from the Monbiot's article on that 'issue' (at Guardian; 'Population panic lets rich people off the hook for the climate crisis they are fuelling')

; ...Thinkin' (by myself), that population is an issue, at this present world - such as I in the earlier post here wrote. But it seems the further 'enlearnings' in place...as I did not so much pay the attention on these following fewsome histories relating, from to it, of it. ; From mention about (Goodall, 'appearing' in) the advertisement by the British Airways (by 2019), he seems inspired to noting that Air-company's "...customers produce more greenhouse gas emissions on one flight than many of the world's people generate in a year. If we had the global population of 500 years ago (around 500 million), and if it were composed of average UK plane passengers, our environmental impact would probably be greater than that of the 7.8 billion alive today." ; Also - I don't know how correctly, havin' not very 'thoroughly' read for all past 'episodes' cons that period of the 'population panic' (...ie, it's main "success years" from between 1970s 'till the mid-1990s - And btw; that 'roughly' covers the years from the 'vaning' of the eugenistic belief, around that 1970, to the period from a wider (popularistic) 'emergence' from the genetics as a science 'devoted' for the study 'about' for how the 'inherited' 'qualities' (or 'traits') may pass/be passed, and how them might be "evolving", of a one generation to the next.) - But anyway; he then writes that (Ehrlich, 'once') "...argued that the US should 'coerce' India into 'sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children', by making food aid conditional on this policy. This proposal was similar to the brutal programme that Indira Gandhi later introduced, with financial support from the UN and the World Bank. Foreign aid from the UK was funding crude and dangerous sterilization in India as recently as 2011." (", on the grounds that this policy was helping to 'fight' climate change. ...")

...However about the level of that 'population blame' by present 21st century; In other words, whether there is still anything similar, comparabale, for those 'murky' programmes 'envisioned' (by some) and then 'passed' to the impoverished 'masses' (peoples) for to bear. Probably, in the world where an intense competition still 'prevails', some similar "strategies" adverted (still?) easily go as defended (by some), instead of choosing from take real climate action(s). At least their purpose is usually largely the same: Not for to take any action in favor of the dismantling from the enriched and prosperous consumeristic 'life-styles' in these 'Global Northern' economies, in these present already 'very advanced' societies, states.

; ...But suppose I say no more on this dilemma btw the population "question", and the 'climate-paradox' in our consumer economics. (The global 'wealth' having expanded since that. - But so has also the inequality, like it being from the commonest noted.)

; ...In short, thinkin' also that of 'highlighting' (, at present World) 'population question' for some "cause" (...for the climatic problems, hunger, fx,) - is about the similar thinkin' as would be saying, from the sort like ; 'you seem to have a couple of dogs - they eat too much - neither from, or more rather so (that) the both in combined, shouldn't eat as much as my kitten does'. (The double standard and an actual bias in that 'calculation' is pretty obvious.)

- It's also usually noted that people more rarely miss the environments, or from the individual species, but only after they're gone. But the characteristic issue in the present ecologic decline is that the lots of the life-supporting systems is already fallin' apart as well. For it's causes, some real reasons why so - several from the now often noticed, recognized ideas about that, can be seen in their 'visualised' narrative at the Nemi-comics beside. (Those alongside w. this posting's texts.)

; But, the population becomes an issue - and most all of the densely populated countries will find difficulty to having to answer, from 'solving' it's brought problemas, in the (soon) futures. (And more so, as long as the life-supporting systems, the 'original' ecology, isn't from valued - over the 'global' consumerism. Valued enough for to be...from...'repaired' (the good word?) ; False excuses wont help - the '19 percent'-reduction in the (global) forest cover, in during few decades - the Heat, climatic imbalance, less of the fresh water...)

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

And then...Unhappily, came along, then also of this: 'Invasion of the frankenbees: the danger of building a better bee' (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/16/frankenbees-genetically-modified-pollinators-danger-of-building-a-better-bee )

: 'Unhappily', at least of the two reasons - (First:) Because I'd not by formerly read from these aspects, from rel. to the 'pervert' ideas of the genetical modifications invented cons the bees (- or, of the honey bees that it mainly discusses from, about.) Due that not viewed this (Guardian; from 2018 already) text prior to this finding, I had the most from this post already for written, and the 'passages' then can't anymore be inserted on 'midst' from what shall follow. ...So, the fewsome quotates on below, only - But they should then cover some to the most important issues from:

Nicotinids (...I presume, that the 'terming' does mean the same as, or at least contains as well the Neonicotinoids - variety chemial insectoides, orig. manufactured by Bayer, Shell ; and acc. that Wikip. neonicotinoids shown from linked: '...in a range of studies to adverse ecological effects, including the honey-bee colony collapse disorder (CCD) ...' ; Also, 'in 2018', '...the EU banned the three main neonicotinoids...', and, 'Several states in the United States have also restricted usage of neonicotinoids out of concern for pollinators and bees.') ; the understandable threat in the possibility of creating any/some 'superbee'; and the ecologic impoverishment, already realized w. 'big agri'-methods only by this far (,on the worldly level.)

So, read the whole of it. Warmly recommended by this 'friend for the bees'.

- (Secondly:) Having had read about those developments would've from had the issues also encontained in what on former - posting(s) - was presented. 'Cause it/those were more so concerned on the herbicides and other chemial- /and, the GMO-threats for the wild bee-populations, 21st century. ; While it not much, here's a few selections from (gives some idea 'bout):

"It is not yet legal to release genetically engineered bees into the wild, [...what kind of a stupid, of the people's and life's survival in general disinterested/neglecting, towards the ecology's better from scornful, a jurisdiction would actually allow releasin' the 'engineered bees', "in the wild"...?? I emphasize this, a bit, 'cause our recent writings did 'remind' that in an atomic 'faiths' of the past decades, they were willin', even without 'legal' permissions - mostly without that - ready to create the plutonium-polluted 'zones', (as 'testing fields'), the high-radioactivity 'dumping grounds', also the post-WW II concentration/-torture camps, and in the name of the science the 'medicinal' kills from the monkeys, mices, dogs and cats, of the prisoners; plus others to 'subjects' ; the 'colored', white, etc., ...so it, indeed, seems that more than realistic have the concern about for a 'fate of the bee'. The wild, and the 'domesticated'. (,Cont.:) ] but the private sector is already watching closely. ...The monochrome sameness of our farmlands - that vast, neat cherkerboard of green and brown that feeds us mammals so well - can be a desert for foraging pollinators. The shocking yellow brilliance of rapeseed in blossom each spring can be a reservoir of pesticides. [and] ...the genetically modified bee, which can breed with the other species and looks just like bees hand-raised from carefully chosen strains, is an altogether more dangerous challenge." ;

" ...'agrichemial companies' business model is to dominate both ends of the market. They sell the farmer the chemical that kills the pests, and then they sell them their patended seeds, genetically engineered to withstand those very chemicals. (Monsanto's top-selling line of Roundup Ready herbicide-resistent seeds are marketed as the best defense against the Roundup, Monsanto' stop-selling herbicide.) ...Beekeepers fear genetic engineering of honeybees will introduce patents and privatisation to one of the last bastions of agriculture that is collectively managed and owned by no one."

; ...That also seemed to mention that the described history from the intensified agricultural expansion, the human use of 'lands' and - one reads from 'context' - the vast herbicides' past use in the 'agri, having even lead for areas where the crops are pollinated by human effort. (In lack by/from because of the pollinator's decline. It mentions China, as an example.) ; So indeed, what's bad for the bees is automatically at least as bad for - the man.

---------

; ...And then, on about for some other 'enthusiasms' I by lately did cultivate; A larger parts the recent reading time was spent on w. this one massive volume for the study. (One about the old - the 18^th and the 19th-century, of some examples also newer 1900ies - literary “offspring”, which having had emerged from 'by/with and after the events for the Haitian (then St Domingo) Revolution. (Suppose the historical 'process' can be timed on btw years from 1795-1804; from covering the time from when island seems 'passed' for the French colonial possession until the year from announement to an Independent republic.)

; That book, Tropics of Haiti, by Marlene L. Daut (2015.)

The book, shortly described, mostly discusses the many literary creations and recreations, or say “transforms”, about the various narratives that almost instantly (simultaneus along the events) were developing. - And how that then having had influenced (,and 'affected') to a historical view of the said particular Revolution, and also the later conception about Haitian histories (/revolution) still well long after. (Past through the 19^th-century, till 'recent'...'periods'/decades.)

(Pic/painting, beside) : A cover from novel by Alexandre Dumas, Sr - Georges [publ. y. 1843] ; The original painting, of which that from, has on foreground the wreck from a Briton sail/battle-ship, (supposedly) 'Nereide' (a frigate - Or, perhaps, that destroyed frigate is instead the 'Magicienne' - I've not a too precise idea from how 'accurate' Dumas' depiction, it so much 'appeals' for his contemporary reader's nationalistic 'feeling'.) ; Painting by Pierre-Julien Gilbert. It's name is 'La Combat du Grand Port', 1837.]. ; Dumas's novel situates on Mauritius (/Isle de France), but Daut mentions that story was commonly connected to the Haitian events.

; ...Another intressant aspect that in the novel the above described historical 'sea'-battle is given place in the earliest pages of the story. - It situates to a 14 years before the main plot, Dumas showing to his description about at least as much patriotic feeling, the nationalistic 'sentiment' than Hugo on his own contemporary writings from. Which is not very surpsing, from Dumas' adventuristic stories and the 'paternalising' plots, often. But it, sort of, to it's modern readings, feels like representing the ("striking") opposite 'tensions' to his anti-slavery view and 'critizisee' for the racial inequality at colonial isles. In the novel, many parts prevailing. (; In short; pretty resemblant, in similitude, w. how Voltaire or Hugo seems for had written on how high the 'toll of death' on victories by Charles the XII, or Napoleon was - corpses in piles, the bloodpath and fields of 'mass-murder' - and then, on subseq. sentences, 'enflawed' all that said, w. the seemingly endless 'praises' of the same incidents to the moments of national glory, and, 'pride'. ; It by now feels to...very contradictional. But that just 'part of the story'.)

; ...And, of course, after bit closer look/read, the 'Dumasian' 'oppose' towards racial prejudice(s), as well as his anti-slaverism, seem to reflect quite fluctuating impressions (or, attitudes). I assume as the main reasons for, to his adjustmentings of this sort, the pleasing for an imaginable 'expectation horisont' shared by his French (and other) readers, during the time. (Meaning by that the 'napoleanic code noir', re-effected for the colonial isles fx.) Additionally, Dumas's conceptions about the slavery seem, in their any 'consistency', foremost, rather conservative. One could say that for the slavery's part it is mostly noticeable in the 'categorically' expressed - ie, on the undirect expressions from, via the character's speech, or thoughts - and that way seems largely fall back to the 1700s recurring ideas, views on about natural inequality. (Pretty 'ambulatory' way to give place for some opinion, to offer some 'sympathy' behalf that colonial 'system', when it's 'basis' was increasingly becoming to a 'flammatory' issue.) ; In short, I think, at Georges (1843) Dumas advocates the racial inequality, while he condems it's - and the slaverys - maintenance w. the violent means, oppression, by punishments, etc.

; ...Anyway, Daut from mentioning that novel 'fits' for 'mulatto/a vengeance'-narratives, I also think quite accurate defined. At least it not challenges the racialised, fictionalised "imaginary" of that sort - typical to the many/is most usual in much from the 1800ian eurocentric serials and fiction...esp. on this sort 'adventuristic', 'popular' fictions that situated at the tropical pelagics. ; The eroticized early passage in the book, about the 'natural paradise', evoking the impressions of pastoralistic tropical-isles 'idyll', seems actually written to offer reader some clues that what will follow is not going to upset any 'nationalistic' (,"pro-slavery") rhetorics. That nothing too confusing cons that colonialistic 'hegemonism' not for to be expected. - After all, mostly, Dumas is seen to an entertaintive author. (Though, in the comparison much better writer to most others from that kind.)

Acc to that (Daut), the particularly lot flourished 'European-american' literary and cultural narrative was (smght) that Daut calls by name/'category' to the 'mulatto/a vengeance'-narrative. (Of briefest defined, at the early pages from that book, where she explains the 'terming' – and the described form of narratives it 'produced'.) The narrative(s) that'd got over time from emerged as a concealing, mythologized (say again...) 'histories' 'written over' the revolutionary events, and over it's 'original' cause. (The colonial slavery, w. all it's cruelties)

; ...As I don't particularly feel the need from 'covering', for this, the lots on what said from those various ('literary') 'narratives' (, or the 'sub-types' of, how they'd preceded/co-existed that 'mulatto/a vengeance'-'trope') - It seems simpliest to cite a bit from Daut's text , on a few lines at below:

”...first three tropes in early narrative descriptions of Saint-Domingue and the Haitian Revolution led precisely to the mid-nineteenth century development... [where the said “trope”(?), was developed and, say 'evolved' for the narrations of the 'racial' interpretation of the revolutionary events - and of it's "meaning".] ...the putatively inherent desire for “mulattoes” and “negroes” to dominate one another, not only physically, but politically and discursively as well. All of these tropes, while not necessarily dependent upon literal acts of “miscegenation” of on “mulatto” identity itself, rely upon the same language of incongruity, “hybridity,” and uncertainty found in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conversations about “racial mixing” in the “tropics” to narrate the history of the Haitian Revolution as a “racial” Revolution.” ; p. 6 on Daut's Introduction.

So, like one can 'grasp', even of this (very) that cropped quotation: Turned it out to quite an intressant 'story' from read about, in many ways. At my any estimation.

(Of course, mainly is for some who'd interest themselves, fx, ao, from the about the 1800s "colonial" literatures. And those 'many lives', in parallel, of the fictionalized and 'historic' - some that are, often, found to be at least by an equal amount for the 'fictionalized' - narratives. Writings that got for the created by many writers, on both sides from that 1800ian 'Atlantic World'. (And of which we also find a characteristic examples in the noted counterfeit from the Humboldt's earlier published 'travel'-book (/-text) Formerly presented here as bk rec No 53, that 'Island of Cuba'. ; ...Like the names says that about Cuba, by 1800s, but in the text there's characteristical referencings for a Haiti/St Domingo - in the contemptive language and racial fears Thrasher had for that cultivated, by the mid-century. A rather typical example from an European-American disparagement of the Haitian events, the more wider 'silencing' from real (global) importance to it's revolutionary events, by the time. ; And also characteristical, thinkin' that after long 'established' historical 'hierarchy', hierarchies in the historical writing for to maintain an unrecognition about that. - Such as we, quite 'comprihensively' learn of this reading.)

However, like was said, the books pretty 'massive'. (Around some over 600 pages.) And as I'm still reading that by now, not more here offered to any further..."particulars" from.

; (Mostly) of the reason that considering my generally (relative) limited pre-knowledge for the most part, from the most to it's source texts concerning - My these remarks are having to be left only at these few brief sentences. ; But, I did add a few quotations more, several passages 'selected' on a "Left-margin" of this blog. (Prob. on right beside this point, adjacent to this.) - Well, actually, seems that (the selected quotes) are on little below this (a fewsome lines after).

; But now, from a fewsome lines above added (on the 'Dumas-part'), ...It seems that the said selections are just beside this point. A happy 'coincidence'...

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

...Yet, for the sake of the interest – From mine or anyone's: Now I've read that voluminous research for book, from it's frontpage until the very last one.

; Daut seems, fx, also write, some amount of how the noted narrative(s) might be recognized and discoverable in the 1800ian 'Trans-Atlantic Abolitionist Movement'. Fx, in the writing and contemporary speeches from such renown – at least for the interested - black 'mid 1800s' abolitionist figures such as James Redpath and William Wells Brown. (Again, I'm having to only suffice my any enlearnings to that, w. noticin' that by my occasional readings of the Brown's novel and his other writings, nothin' so surprisin' in the (claim) for Brown's noted participation in the '...casual but deliberate effort by transatlantic abolitionists to exclude nineteenth-century haitian participation in making the true history of the Haitian Revolution...' (; Daut, p. 495). I've kind of noted – but again, emphasized that only basis my limited readings from – some level the resemblant 'tendencies' in Brown's writing. (Redpath I not recall to had read.) ; ...Daut's addressing on that'topic', however, doesn't actually limit on for Brown's early writings or speeches – She fx seems from, say, 'anticipate' some more 'careful' close-reading from Brown's texts, 'from that view-point'. (As the follow-up for the preceded, as well, contains the sentences: '... Paying attention only to the ideas about 'race' found in Clotel that Brown derived from The life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, then, I want to ask (but perhaps not to answer) how we should think about Brown's relationship as an author to the ideas of “racial” supremacy that he would invariably imply and even seem to endorse in both Clotel and 'St. Domingo'. These are ideas that may have begun as the result of his copying from Beard, [ ...and Brown, even 'to repeat' (those)] ...with unequivocal force in The Rising Son, [etc...]' (; the same page, italics Daut's.)

...But, 'ultimately', myself here finding grounds also mention at this the other US (abolitionist, but 'white') writer, whom I happened of by some reads. (And whom not so much discussed at Daut's book.) – Or, she mainly appears by the few briefer 'references to'. ; Yet, she was also very renown writer, by that time, and mainly due to her many publications on the slavery's sins, and as well, perhaps, early timing, in 'particulars' for those that discussed the Haitian Revolutionary events. Ie, meaning by this the Lydia Maria Child (Lydia Maria). - Although, Daut does at those few occasions make some mention on her (LMC's), say, 'lasting fame' or role for what comes to the discussed; for what is noted on the early US abolitionist press, fictions and from the portraying of 'black characters' and the 'mixed' marriages on that. On pages 276 (footnote), 330, and perhaps the more particularly at p. 278 (also footnote).

; As I think her writings relevant to mention, here, if only by – now a bit distant – recollections about. And cons anyone's araised interests, cons that close connection/the centrality by the Haitian Revolutionary 'events', and from it's varying 'reception' – perhaps the 'neatest' term to use – complex influences and 'divergences' in the history from a US abolitionist movement. (During the 1800s.) Not a bad guess, if there'd probably be some more to it, more to discover perhaps. Might even gather the dusts on some archive, some neglected place...or so.

Can't say, should've happened to read for “more far”, wished we for here to say any more on. (But maybe later, if I get a somewhat more clear idea 'bout, cons that.)

; However, by now 'devoured' that book discussed, and would recommended the same on anyone w. some interest to. ; The 1800s, the literatures, the revolutions of that century, the colonistic past - or 'origin' in a background from this (present) century global capitalism...

(Pic), above ; (From) Chabouté's Herman Melville's Moby Dick (a comics-adaptation of that famous novel, 2014,2017) ; ...Happens that a good movie from that 'White Whale'-chase sea voyage never has seen the day - And, I presume, never will. (The 'Foreword' in the comics-version has explanation on that, says in brief; '...Moby Dick just does not lend itself to adaptation. Everything the movies are, The Whale is not. ...' ) Moby Dick appears rather exceptional 'classic' novel in another way too: From soon after it's publication (,I think by 1851) it fell to general 'oblivion', along w. Melville's career - Who stopped writing prosaic fiction on, about, 1855-6. While the author lived for another 30 years (dying 1891), the novel's actual modern 'finding' happened sometime, during some decades of the 1900s. ...Doesn't bring on mind, at this moment, any comparable 'resurfacing' in the so called world classics. - While from the books that'd originally been very popular, a 'lot read' and then gone 'forgotten' - "officially" (,by the critics 'decided neglect'), or from due for the usual decline in the reading publics interest - there's, of course, plenty examples on that sort later rediscovery. (Staél's Corinne, to just one example in the many.)

; Moby Dick's failure from catch the 'tastes' by its times I've seen (often) quite plausible explained - But the reason(s) to it's 'reappearance' seem been the lot more difficult 'trace for', explain from ...

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

So, thenafter we'd better to return for our garden/gardening topics – w. these some following examples (and photos). (And the fewsome more remarks on the books, fictions only afterwards...these)

Because of that (relative) coldness during the weeks in that June-July Month, wasn't actually very disappointed of not had squashes to cultivation by this Summer. After all, reasoned in the Spring that I'd already well enough for to grow, by this year, at my several new flower-plantings. (Although, one then thinks that of the plentiest waters that we had, it might've even been to still relatively good harvest of the squashes to these Autumn weeks.) As I have not the real open space (ie, 'field'), for their growing in the garden, not to grow was still, likely, the right decision. But I did grow a fewsome ornamental squashes and the one planted on a best 'spot' now seems producing some plenty. In the beside pic.

...Here's another one from those Squashes (Cucurbita pepo - The species is same as of Summer Squash) Featured mainly due that one 'fruit', that depicted, resembled to so much a 'watermelon'. (...the view gives a little misleading impressions, as them for the ornamental ones, whose final fruits are actually much smaller than of the palatable Summer Squashs.) ; But hanging on the same spot kept Sunflowers from very nicely - and it's 'runners' now seem climb towards the very high twigs from those. ; Hope that it not gets for the frost-cold any too early. Or, by the second thought - If that to happen, hope it stays so !

All in all, like was said, the Summer must've not appeared to most generous in conditions – for what comes for the cultivated plants. Or maybe not so bad, can't say. Even my harvest of the tomatoes appeared 'minimal', as did not practically grow many those either. ; Anycases, the weathers could be described for the 'unreliable', mostly, by this year.

; However, despite the much of the rains we had (or perhaps just from because that), and from the winter (disappointingly) so warm, my herbs in their established 'small spot' did pretty well. For the 'minus-sides', I then also noticed that my original planting for those was in all too limited a space – So I, in around late July, actually I was, by somewhat, relocating some those for different places. (And releasing some available spaces, 'in between' the ones that weren't.) ------

The downsides of having so little place for the garden herbs, having become pretty clear to me now: At first they seemed nicely for 'fit' together - But now some more effectively growing (Origanum vulgare, fx) succeeded, already on the Spring, to cover all the sunlight from more slowly growing. Of course, one can easily cut down that mentioned, to free some 'growth spaces' – But that 'not enough', I still recognized to have planted them too densely, and from all too little space available to any newer additions, fx.

Besides that...the 'task' led for some other subseq. findings; I only recently discovered of succesfully planted the Breckland thymes along my other herbs. (...'Cause it had been grown for the next to my regular Thyme!) As the other one of those always tends to flower some time/weeks earlier, I usually always was wondering for what the reason to that the adjacent twigs in the plant – ie, on separate plants – seemed from just slight different in colouration, by shape ot the leafs... Well...'it happens'.

; Additionally, I was then also obliged from admit that for have any native “herb-like” plant in the midst of one's 'culinary' herbs not always in every manner best of choices. While the native 'herbs' and 'cultivated' ones (few herbs actually need any cultivating...) may look very prospering together, next to each other, that not necessary quite so well 'functioning' as I imagined it to be.

(Explained; After noticing that my Wild Basils had seeded the plentiest begins of new seedling around my most near open areas in my 'herbal spot' – in spite of the covering small grit, sands - I spent those latter Months actually transplanting those Wild Basil's (C.vulgare) for some different spots in garden – Just of to save myself more trouble , not having have in the subseq. Summers from weed off those. Besides I not use that native plant to any culinaristic purposes.)

I didn't plant much any 'novel' additions to my herbal garden. Not in addit to some seasonals, in the previous chapter mentioned. I did grow some Parsley. It seems said to belong, perhaps, on some from three or four the most common cultivated culinary herbs (in the World.) Surprising notice; I hadn't by any earlier years grown that at my gardens.

The noted 'setbacks' asiding – The local bees seemed to be very fond on all/most for my mentioned herbal-choices in the garden. They seem get the more numerous only from after some latter weeks by the June. As the weather was what it was I didn't very many from the more less common one, suppose'. (But by the numbers, I think, those bees visiting my garden flowers were the more plentyful than on any earlier Summer. – Visiting as long as there was any really warm weeks. Fromafter the best sunshine periods, late Summer (and due there now mainly was these 'showering' rains), not seen near same amounts, anymore. ...And the bees, were, of course, my most rewarding and pleasant discovery in the gardening by this year.

...Guess', I'm now having this herbs-yard of mine in garden for the third Summer. It doesn't seem from demand too much effort anymore – excluding the described 're-arrangements' I now had to make.

(Pic, above) : Nemi (the series, panel III.)

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

the 'Garden-Part' :

- On Plants and Insects...

; (The) Bees in concerning, during our late (August) Summery days I had the most happy encounter, 'luxury' for seeing this one. ; By some estimate, this particularly large specimen of the Bumble-Bee (the queen, most apparently), here landed on my Bergamot(/Bee Balm)-flower (, of those last year sowed ones, them also flowered, 'by the plenty'), might've been by species the B.subterraneus. If my guess for any correct.

(Not so sure, but at least it lot seems for resemble that.) ...The species range seems cover said from cover much of the Fennoscandia's southern 'coastal' areas. Making the identifiction then for more likely, as we are within that 'range'. ; But it indeed quite large one. ...Think I've by earlier only once seen this big and that was on the forested ranges. Maybe it was the same species (Although, in some contrast to that guessin', the .subterraneus seems by it's general description said for a species more typically found in the open - can nowadays be seen, fx, on visiting some cultivated fields from Red clovers. Or, for the garden flowers, from quite as well.) ; Sighting left quite an impression - It also for very characteristical lookin', well recognizable species (If I'm by any correct, on this identification... :) Yet, the bumble also not seems even represent the largest species to these 'regions', actually.

In the Laplands, they seem say, to exist the biggest bumble-bee 'in country'. From it's latin naming that is Bombus hyperboreus. (Little surprisingly, didn't discover any common name for it.) ; Along that mentioned, proper add that it now also classified for the threatened. Partly that is/might be due that on this side of the border they have very scattered, scarce presence - But then also is said that the Climate Change for major threat to all the palearctic populations of that. (And for the 'near same' species, recently discovered.)

; An interesting little 'detail' - is that the .hyperboreus described for a Brood Parasite (on Wikip.) That not exactly means the same sort 'parasitism' than which characteristic for the Cuckoo Bumble-bees. ; Parasitism, by itself, is to rather 'flexible' term - simpliest said, does cover various different strategies via which some species rely on, 'steal from', or say, also do 'take benefit' from others in an 'unvoluntaristic' exchange. (If that by 'voluntaristic', perhaps more questionable whether that then is any parasitism.) Various forms of that exist at insect life...examples are from 'innumerable'. Makes that (Brood parasitism), to a 'close category' in the forms of 'nest parasiting'.

...From after short glance on the Wikip., these findings seemed also obliging me also from remarking that seeing this 'visitant' (...On another pic, on the right - if it really to the B.subterranean, ie, apparently, the Short-Tailed Bumblebee), perhaps, indeed then would've for been the more important an 'encounter'. Whether or not (it) by lately on here declined (from any badly) - The species seems as well said of gone extinct in the Great Britain. (That says as well that 're-introduction' efforts with the 'broods' selected of the Swedish populations maybe having met w. some successes now. But the original ones for 'goners', local sub-species - by any 'prob.' - from lost, of course been the major loss, despite anything or everything.)

; ...I often wonder, nowadays, how the global warming - these unreliable weatheric seasons might affect the 'bumbles' more overall, on any imagined future. Pretty much it seems to follow same 'pattern' as anywhere else from the threatened insects/other animals, the most specialized species appear also most vulnerable. And with the now advanced warming, those adapted to colder climates/seasonal conditions are said of loose in that their (already) diminished living environments also might be 'the first' for to go. ; But that would be a longer story by any 'detail', if goin' to that here, at these writings...

Yet that also another reason for having the above pic, in addit, alongside here. Was so well-rewarding, a real discovery when found from the garden. (Whether or not to that one I assumed it for.)

; ...(That) then seems of to give me some cause/a pretext for had viewed a little more informations on from these aspects, esp. for this species concerning. I fx found on the Goulson's Bumbles-"Bible' (2003, repr. 2012) it stated that those G.B.-populations gotten extinct, from accurely timed, to as early as 1988. - For, the searches by around y. 2000 failed from find any populations surviving. Acc. to that, "...The last known population in the United Kingdom...was on the coastal shingle and marshes at Dungeness." ; ...However, also, on that is then remarked (that) ; "...in the past this species was not confined to shingle (a very rare habitat in Europe), for in the united Kingdom it was once distributed throughout the south, the Midlands and East Anglia on various other habitats including saltharshes, sand dunes, calcareous grasslands and neutral unimproved meadows..." (; p. 184)

; At this point it would be of use to select, in addit to this, from various other enlearnings to the bumble-bee foraging practises, the modern conservation 'measures' and of their nowadays common often mentioned widely recognized (global) decline(s)...To some fuller picture and of some comparing of the all knowledges gained within/during these years 'fromafter'. (Maybe also from some other sources, books and studies made about.) But it has to do with the mentioning 'bout that Goulson fx, repeated seems emphasize that the Red Clover (Trifolium pratense)-fields maintenance to appearing rather beneficial also cons many of the 'more demanding' species of bumbles. (ie some which are for more 'restrictive' at their choices for the food plants.) ; For examples, one table (p. 213; 13.2) seems to list stats from the pollen collecting bumble-'visits'made by all species. And on that purpose, over one quarter (28.8 per cent) was for a T.pratense (Red Clover).

Also, at the most visited plants there seems been 6 from the Clovers ,'in combined', of the 8 that situate were of most 'valued'. (; When/ basis of '...Data based on 3,029 visits to flowers across 172 sites in United Kingdom and New Zealand.')

As well as that noted, we'd for to think here still some space to another briefer selection (quote from) - Which would follow, on a few sentences after.

; ...For, no matter of which view-point(s) one thinks about the often heard 'statement' that the mechanisation in agricultural methods is the main driver for most ecological impoverishment(s) - It must hold from 'much of the truth' to it. (Although, I think the herbicides and other chemial 'release' more often, nowadays, recognized from the discovered negative impact that having had on insects.) ; The (now) long-gone mechanization, in agricultures, having happened in the most Northern developed economies during some latter period of the 20th century. (Along w. the masses usually increasingly, continuos 'dumping' for the city-centers, and onto these equally nurturing 'suburban areas' nearby those, which are fed by the food mostly produced on a more thinly populated countrysides. W. the more 'efficiency' on that production, in the now more mechanized methods at farms. ; As by itself city produces, practically, little or 'nothing'. Still much the present 'situation', despite that there now was/is emerging the various efforts, some meant enshortening the said long routes in foods production, it's distributing, transports, etc...) ; But not probably very fruitful to go on 'scraping off' it's longer histories until this day, from how we've arrived on this (ecologically) stressing systems in the foods production. Advanced mechanization in a'gri' may have been seen for led, or at least enfastened from, the declines of many other animals species too.

; So; about this in particular, and for the bumble-bees concerning - on a followed page (p. 185) we then find for quoting:

"...almost all of the sites with high bumblebee species richness in the United Kingdom are now coastal, and it is unclear why this should be. ... [...yet, ...on those; 'marches, dunes, calcareous grassland, shingle'] ... It seems probably that they all have a higher floral density and diversity than the intensively farmed countryside that comprises most of the British landscape. A particular change likely to have had a major impact on bumblebees is the switch from hay to silage production (Rasmont 1988). Fabaceaea are among the favored food sources of almost all UK bumblebee species (Goulson, et al 2005), and hay meadows are rich in Fabaceae such as Trifolium and Lotus. Large tracts of the farmed lowlands of the United Kingdom probably once supported high densities of wildflowers in hay meadows, unimproved pasture and hedgerows, so that currently rare bumblebee species were once widespread. ... "

; "In addition to reducing the availability of food, modern farming practices are likely to have had other impacts on bees. Bumblees need suitable nesting sites, the precise requirements for which vary between species. The carder bees such as B.pascuorum tend to nest in dense grassy tussocks, while other species such as B.terrestris nest underground in cavities. Both groups often use abandoned rodent nests. Studies of solitary bees show that underground-nesting species have declined in disproportionately in Europe, suggesting that a lack of of undisturbed nest sites may be a major factor in driving declines in bee numbers. ... Those species that nest above ground frequently have their nests destroyed by farm machinery, particularly by cutting for hay or silage. The scarcity of weeds and field-margin flowers on modern intensive farms means that there are fewer seeds for voles and mice to eat, and lower populations of these mammals will lead to fewer nest sites for both below and above-ground nesting bumblebee species."

(Also, fx, seems it worth some mention that unlike from the numbers other insect-species, the parks and gardens are (sometimes) said of capable to maintain even more of the 'bumbles' than what was in some researches found on the nearbies to those. - W. the steady decline from the 'old time', traditional low-fertile hay- and flower-meadows, in due the (modern) agricultural practices, the said then would make the 'second best' foraging ground, for the many bumble-spec. considering. (After the 'undisturbed', natural environments most favorable for 'em.); Yet, then it being also fx studied that the said secondary 'bee-heavens' - those parks and gardens - not so much supportive as the 'alternative' choice for environments, to the many others from Hymenopteran-species there are.

---------

...Reminds me from about these 'details', for the mention, also; (That) contrary to my some earlier estimate/estimating, thinkin' now of seen the several species of 'bumble' in the garden that I didn't suppose, from any actual likehood, to 'wandering around' to there. ; Albeit from w. some 'sightings' only, not even had for photographed those, most. But at least from the Bombus schrencki, .sporadicus, and maybe also few others to the 'less usual' - such as .rudenarius, for examples - I may now have seen there. Occasionally, w. one or two specimens, during any clear day there was. (Of the .schrencki there was probably several sightings, in subseq. days.)

...Of the .schrencki the noted sightings have, actually, from become only more likely during by any previous decade, year. Of reasons that it a recent arrived species to this 'geographical range'. (From the SE.) : First discovery was no earlier than by the 2000, seems it. During the 2010s it's range seems from expanded, steadily, to the more 'interland', and more far North. Or so I read - And indeed, not recollecting those seen at my youthful years, in more distant memory from the bee(s). So it seems most characteristical for had spread within the climate's change. Quite 'rapidly', actually.) Along by the observed advanced warming. (; ...And actually, btw, that B.subterranean neither isn't of so long had the presence here, on these latitudes - In fact, the first finding for it, 'in this country', seems said from no further in the past than by 1950s.)

; You select for the favorable plants, and in some time there will, no questions from, appear some. (To how many from - And from how much the 'natural gardening' can have the greater importance in the halting of their negative declines, is an issue far less self-evident. Various factors involved such as on above was for observed.) ; However, this experiment w. my 'bee-garden' already been so rewarding to many other levels too...Always was a pleasure, on every recent Summer day.

; ...Along w. these bit less common ones, obviously from more often I've then seen fx B.lucorum ('White-tailed bumble-bee') or, also was the .pratorum.

Yet, from that last mentioned, I think, the sighting must've been to the more scarcely than at fewsome previous years. (Having followed the bees in my garden not so much before, but for during 'a few years' time now.) Possibly, the more rainier periods in the high-summer might've lapped on with it's flyin time. Or from whatever the reason - Didn't find those quite so plentysome as them for 'usual are.'

; And then of course was - among one other (very) commonest of, often sighted was/is that .lapidarius, ie the 'Red-tailed ('-bumble') ; All those must appear still, apparently, seeming to appear w. the quite stable populations. And are among some that to the most usually one tends encounter - just on any gardens, w. some proper variety of flowers for their liking.

(But who knows how long - at least the populations to any for the less of a 'generalist', here by this southern 'edge' from the country, must've suffered already some time, from that continued human overuses of the natural environments. And now increasingly, also the constant environmental change.)

Beside photo: Some from those 'commoners' for bees, on roadside flower. (Some clover.) Perhaps it - the plant - is a T.pratense...or maybe it instead from some for the resemblant close species, Trifolium hybridium, or the Trifolium medium. (The latter one has also a funny common name in English; 'Zig Zag Clover'. Whatever the more correct on this case, the last mentioned as well does belong for the native native flora. ; Albeit, by originally the T.pratense (ie that; Red Clover) also having arrived during early of prehistory. But of it's history for much used as a cultivated fodder-plant, any found had spread from fields to those roadsides, often more likely originated from planted seeds.)

-------

....Of the preceded, you'd perhaps noticed of how exiting I've found observing the various bumbles on garden...Although, they're not very easy to differentiate (from each other) - And I'm of course not any professionalist on that, neither. But even without, it's from very interesting...the separate species seem for arrive on during their specific periods, weeks, into garden for harvesting from it's offerings. (Doesn't perhaps make any miracles, a garden never could atually replace the natural 'variety', environment - But, like noted, some species of course do find of the flower garden the lot of benefits.)

; Plus that, all these 'encounters' taught me a bit more of the insects. Of the 'bumbles' mostly (Since it now being 'designed' for those.) But from other species too.

; Then is...also this other (quite) large a species, which I by late Summer spotted of the garden. Observed (that) for feeding on my Ligularias (Summer Ragworts) and, I do recall, to have taken that photo from, just to check about it's specifics. For what species (was) after little later, fromafter studying my books and 'guides' from...

But now...actually, I'm more for the recollection that this particular photo was actually from some yet another (species) - And that I photographed it on a week, or two later. (To little importance for anything on this writing, but matters cons what I'd make for estimating which variety species there to visit my flowers, on any separate years from. ; It was feeding on those Ragworts, such as one can see, that 'for certain' at least... :) So, I'm assuming – while I've of course, this case neither, not the much better 'proofs' to claim that by any 'authority', but for supposin'– it could appear been, possibly, for the B.sporadicus. (The 'bumble' that seems best recognizable from number other "similar" looking - those many, several species having the 'yellow striped'-decoration on their furs - ie, it perhaps was identiable so from the darker hue at it's lenghty wings.)

Maybe I'm here just confusing that for some other - might actually well mistaken on that identification. Hence I dare not say much more on about that... ; Yet, if correct seems said to fly, rather typically for bee, most parts on the meadows, fields, and gardens. Similarly as in the case of the first presented one (assumed for the B.subterranean; on above photos), this too sort for, seemed just 'bopping on' for sight, in the garden. (From the midst of some 'plenty' to more regular seen bumbles there.) ; The Summer Ragworts tend be very much visited by numbers of the bees too, when them flower. Since them are at flower in the proper timing to most species here emerging. Usually, on about the early/late July weeks. By any 'lately' years, depending most from how were the weathers.

; ...And then, a Peacock (Aglais Io) here too - pictured just from an example that the Ligurias particular attract the many colourful butterflies too. This year I recall of seen at those also some Red Admirals, plus the Tortoises (The 'Small Tortoiseshell', Aglais urticae - In 'plenty', as it's one for commonest 'Nymphalidae' here - that in a fewsome more pics below...) Plus a some variety species of day/night flyin' moths. ; This year didn't see any Painted Lady(s), (Vanessa cardui) - Which not so much surprises, given the much of the colds and rains.

; ...That said, it (,almost) covers all from 'larger species' I've regularly seen here, during latter periods Summer. When those mentioned tend from fly, on here at least. Although the Tortoises (.urticae) seems to have the two generations in a regular Summer. Maybe 3 even, nowadays - the ones flyin' in late Months seemed, even on considered that this years weathers not too good, to surprising small. ...Can't say, if that merely from colds and rains only. Or, whether there's by 'standard', even three generations now. Guess', should've check about that to refresh my any memory. ...Supposed', that on the .urticae(s) the third gen. on any good Summers never was any rarity for - But on generally to this 'bad' ones, too...(?)

(Or, whether that then mostly just accompanies the overall warming. But, that perhaps from the unsettled weather conditions during this Summer, the specimen of that 2nd generation just may have germinated at the more disconnected timings, there in between several 'weeks'.) Not quite an idea 'bout that; ...but apparently they don't seem to grow of to very large, or at least not very quickly in these weathers.)

; Of the explained: the Peacock, Brimstone, Small Tortoise (...plus Comma, and few others more scarce seen 'Nymphalidae' for garden fliers) - All those some whose 'early' Spring-gen. has overwintered. (ie, the adult 'hibernates' past cold Months). And then on later weeks by the Summer the second generation is born. -------------

A (relative) nice variety butterflies then.

But it also then is very apparent - that in overall the number from these neither isn't quite so many than it was formerly (some 30 - 50 y. ago.) That, a lot, because of the often remarked decline in any actual good meadows. By their 'extent', also nowadays - those are to much less. And, obviously, some 'remaining ones' that there still are, ain't too closeby.

(; Yet, also having fx noticed that on outside these 'Suburbias' the butterfly diversity increased, in parallel w. the human habitation, builds becoming less dense. That sense too, the bees are for "less demanding" - from the insect gardener's view-point. Some typical species also can be found when it's bit more windy, or at temporarily harder weathers. The butterflies mostly not.) ; In some levels the ecology to not so much 'declined' for the butterflies, the more common ones concerning. - But of the species mostly dependent on certain, few plants, therefore most vulnerable ones - of their part the 'supporting' habitats seems from more continuous of decreased.

; ...Of the butterflies, here still some more of the Aglais urticae. I counted three on the photo - But that was on some warmest of days and on when there were actually, well, 'the plentiest from'. (In contrast the Peacock, Red Admiral, by individuals were significant fewer in number from seen. Of 1 to 3 on any one day.)

The photo here mostly because from the Purple Coneflowers, ('though, , them do look Pink by the actual color), ie the 'regular' Echinaceaes from my garden. Must've taken the photo - no sooner - around closer for midst August. In time from the Coneflowers emerged for to make the majorest late Summer sights in garden. ; If you look 'sharply' also the bees on 'hats' from these plants can be recognized, of the pic. The commonest species seemed to populate Coneflowers as much as they are fond for the Knapweed(s), during by some earlier weeks.

Quite naturally, as all of these mentioned do live of the flowers...

; Like said, to this year I was then also to see my Echinaceae paradoxas to flower. (On above, the several paragraphs/passages earlier.) Actually them flowered already from the midst of June...suppose. ; ...Otherways wouldn't so much necessitate this further mentioning. - But them also seem need (here at least) as much a fertilization as the 'regular' (Purple-) Coneflower. Preferably somewhat the more plenty, even, maybe. And a good soil, to grow from well large. Of course, like from the all perennials, plants do develop within the few years... ; Here not very many insects seemed populating them, but think I saw in the early Months at least a Brimstone on one. And maybe a few bees too, also. Now where did 'hide' that photo...can't find it, not on this moment.

Assuming that from relocating my (E.paradoxa-)plants during the previous Summer probably prevented their flowering in (that) second year. However, now them did emerge for the blooms rather early, already of June – and that then lasted for well long weeks, from some planted. ; Somewhat surprisingly, the 'regular' Echinaceaes took very long to emerge by this season – Actually they are only flowering by now (Aug.), ie later than those usually do. ; To that case the main reason seems been in lack of the well good sunshines – Although from having dug the soil nearby w. some my Summer plantings, incl. one those ornamental squash, could've also affected. But along w. the Ligularias them are now the most flourishing of late Summer plants, as usual.

The Yellow Coneflower - ie, the 'E.paradoxa', not (near) so 'catchy' for bees and alike. From concluding of the fewer to our local the insects them gathered...But that I quite expected. Look very nice, despite that.

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

...For the truth not being left 'unsaid' - the butterfly life consisting of the several separate 'phases'. (The impressive lookin, colourful adults feeding on Summer garden are just their life cycle's 'ultimate goal', sort of.) The common 'characteristics' on that (cycle) are: the egg - caterpillar - adult. (and, the 'imago' from btw the 2nd and last, at some cases) ; But...oooops :) - seems it that w. the 'imago' actually meant the adult, (which) the most usual meaning for that 'term.' ...Let us for the clearness sake just recognize that what we were seekin' was the 'pupal stage' (, or simply: Pupa) - Smght which does belong to the life-line of practically all butterflies.

; To give some ideas of how interesting ('peculiar') the caterpillars too can often look, took a photo of a one seen, one day (On elsew., not in my gardens.) The larger moths, especielly, tend often exhibit the impressive looks too as caterpillars. - You actually often have the better chances of seeing one in during day-time, than from the adults even by night.

(Where then is some proper habitat existant, proper vegetations not got from too scarce, converted on to smght else. I mean...by present climatic 'issues', the noted ecologically poor modern 'urbanhoods' - that often for a most apparent cost in the 'urban sprawl'. ) ; ...Thought that (the caterpillar) at first sight for a Bedstraw Hawk-moth, Hyles galli (Which one, also, surely also from quite decorative one....)

; But it's some else - Should've we from discover for what, shall add the correct name here.

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

Bergamots (M. didyma), such as well often the earlier mentioned was, also good choice for a (Bee-)gardener - as them too attract the numbers of bees in any clear late summer day. A good attractant for those indeed, along that any single flower also lasts relative long - So here's an overall picture of my cultivated 'bunch' to this season, planted to that self-prepared flower-bench. ; As them also perennials, the Bergamots should then remain for similar 'attractants' to the on-coming future years.

Definely some to my favorites.

Flowers change their colour from their early White to (at first) for the Red, then finally achieve the (deep) Purple. If you have many, on a one place, them also makin' a very decorative scenery. You can't well plant other plants into their 'midst', as the roots do develop 'bysides' - but I've fx from grown one Ligularia next to them. And while did from plenty fertilize my Bee balm (ie these M.didymas, that Bergamot is actually a little misleading name...), it didn't seem to much bothered 'bout that. ; If you want them to decorate the garden past 'whole season', can also relocate some on new places, early Summer. (As the plants spread, a bit, also via from theit 'rootings'.)

Another photo - from those Bee Balm/Bergamot-flowers, in some 'close-up'. Them are so very enchantin', beautiful flowers. As I've perhaps also mentioned, by priorly - I did fertilize most of my flower-bench(es) with some well "doses" now - unlike on that last Summer. (The lots of rains, colds seemed from necessitate that.)

; Even thinkin', by the way, that did recently heal myself of the little catched cold w. the bergamot-flower tea ('Oswego'-tea, for one it's usual name.) ...Nothing particularly exceptional or wonderful at that (it's also renown herbal 'remedy'), but there then another reason for me to like that flower - Not to mention the most pleasant discovery from the 'rare' (or at least scarce one, here too) bumble on it. So, splendid a flower...that is. --------------------

; However, to return for that herbs-garden...It was also a happy 'discovery' that my Narrowleaf mountainmint (/or, 'Virginia thyme'; on lat. Pycnanthemum tenuifolium) actually didn't make it to flower during the last year – While I by then had the wrong assumption from it's flowers to not so impressive. (The early 'buddings' that I asssumed for it's actual flowers to be seen on another pic, right next below.)

But on this year, I was to recognize that in full bloom it has very nice flowers – And also, such as what noticeable of the photo - that from quite somewhat did surprise me even – as well seemed to most days much populated by many, variety insects. (Bumbles mostly, but also by Syrphid flies and honey bees, ao.) Although, on here latitudes that seems happen only to well late of season. To this year, no sooner than from after the 2^nd week of August. But of course these weathers been far from...the 'normative', any average.

Plus, here is then (on left,) the said another photo. Of it's early buds, just before the flowers for emergin'..; Indeed, the developing flower-'balls' look pretty much like the actual flowerings at some other plants - So no wonder I by last year erred those to it's actual flowers... ; Well, actually, so far seen the bees and other insect only on this one plant from my Mountainmints - on the one that wasplanted at best place (and at the full sunlight.) But I fx then have the other 'sapling' in further growth on greenhouse now, still. Wouldn't otherways be necessary, but I'm now in lackin' for the well adequote sunshiny spots at garden to those...A familiar 'obstacle', do ya find (that for) ?.

; ...Plus, hey - Here (beside) then - still another photo from the Mountain Mints/that Virginia Thyme. (It some sorts confusing that the plant/herb actually has not for so much a relation to the Thyme, nor even really for what goes generally known for the 'Mints'.)

Seems it that, a wide variety natural herbs to some time taken for gardening may bear to their some naming the synonym from one or another of the more 'standard' cultivated herbs and 'culinary weeds'. (That a bit boring , actually.) ; But here it just from to show that butterflies prefer on feeding at that, too. Small Tortoise in that case. Brimstone dropped on it's nectars on some late Summery day, too. Stayed from not near so long, though. ; ...While it's flowering is of so late, at least by this season was, it lasts from well over a Month's time. The late blooming time actually a good thing, as for the Breckland Thymes and Origanum(s), to the best part from, it already has ended by this late.

------

; ...This year I didn't cultivate the Basil – Except - This one of the decorative 'variety'. Now it's finally emerging for the blooms too. From given the weather's having chilled so much, I actually keep that in a vase indoors past the nights, already.

Acc my any understanding it would also appear just as eatable as are the regular 'breeds' of a usual Basil – But like mostly, often from the herbs in concerning, after the blooms develop it's not very tasty anymore. Soforth, I'll try to keep those for the 'decorum' by indoors as long as the now declining sunlight gives me any chance for. ...Even from without 'pastas and salads, it's one of the most useful herbs in the garden. The scent by Basil repels off vermin and pesters fx.

Now it grown to resemble, a little, like small bushy-tree, as can be observed from photo. Nothing for particulars, but I've really learned for enjoy of having one or two Basils grown every Summer. Garden/herbyards feel like lacking an important 'element' if not. After all, t hey call that as the “king of herbs”. I wonder which to the queen then should be... Thyme(s)? (Concluding from the bees it gathers, as was noticed earlier.) Or,...Hyssop? (Due of the same reasons.) Well...nevermind

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

“...Children are attracted by the beauty of butterflies, but their parents and legislators deem it an idle pursuit. The parents remind me of the devil, but the children of God. Though God may have pronounced his work good, we ask, 'Is it not poisonous?'

Science is inhuman. Things seen with a microscope begin to be insignificant. ... With our prying instruments we disturb the balance and harmony of nature.”; (Thoreau), from his Journal (1 May 1859; XII:170-1. - Citate is via; Material Faith: Thoreau on Science., ed. Walls, -99 )

; (Thoreau's) remark of the 'toxicity' refers not for a poisononity. (Ie, not about the poisonousness by any 'butterfly-specs.' – if there is even some to sort in the wide world of the Lepidopterans 'toxic' to human contact - At least I can't think of ever had read on any for, on any instance from the memory.) ...In the selected (text), the reference is for the report which he'd in a few sentences before that from mentioned. Some that Massachusetts ('state') had by then recent from published; 'Insects injurious to vegetation'.

; Can't also say of actually sharing Thoreau's expressed (,in that connection) distaste toward a scientific observation from insect's qualities, or of their more specific biologics from (some that often impossible seen w. the 'bare eyes'. Although, I don't, never made such 'study' from my any special interest, largely due for the same reasons than what Henry David seems wrote cons insect and the science's 'caveats'. But, despite that, and particularly cons that, some of my most revealing moments about the butterfly specifics, were helped by the observation w. the sort modern technical 'instrument' by.(That means; through the modern camera-lens.)

; Well it another story, not necessary here related, not...And nevermind 'bout then, for that too.

; Also...I cultivated some number those Vines this year, on earlier posts mentioned. ; ...But the growths wasn't too good – Or at least the absense from the best sunshine at July greatly hindered their emergence, and by this late the flowering been to significantly less plentyful. Here in the garden greenhouse – As I then considered it to the best alternative for their keepin'.

I could've perhaps planted those direct on the garden-soils instead, and the result might've turned to the more luxurious growths. For an afterthought...

; ...The fewsome baskets at which I tried of grow the Butterfly-plants this year also failed miserably. Only a fewsome flowers at one from my preparations finally flowered, this year. Quite the same of words on those can be said. Although I also didn't too much take care/caution for any their good pregrowing. (Having from assumed that the meant good growth would turn out as easily as on the preceding year. Fool's hope.)

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

; ...Along my gardenings then had a some time for berry-picking – hence here a photo from the local blueberry-'bush' (Vaccinium myrtillus, 'Bilberry'). This year the harvest didn't seem of a very...extraordinary. Although, I didn't go picking very much. Wish I'd had more time to – berry-picking does good for the mental health.)

; Thoreau says on american blueberries – on that case, of course meaning the N.American ones – that there exist a plentyful more varieties in the 'Whortleberry'-family. (A total of 14 spec. - Or perhaps 15, such as kindly informative modern endnote by the Bradley P.Dean seems for mentioning.) That 'bunch' from including the bilberries, cranberries and of course the several huckleberry-/blueberry-varieties. ; Anyway, he (Thoreau) writes on said harvestables, ao, the following words:

“It is remarkable how universally, as it respects soil and exposure, the whortleberry family is distributed with us – almost we may say a new species for every thousand feet of elevation – one kind or another, of those of which I am speaking, flourishing in every soil an locality. There is the high blueberry in swamps; the second low blueberry, with the huckleberry, on almost all fields and hills, the Pennsylvania and Canada blueberries, especially in cool and airy places, in openings in the woods, and on hills and mountains, while we have two kinds of confined to the alpine tops of our highest mountains – the family thus ranging from the lowest valleys to the highest mountaintops and forming the prevailing small shrubbery of a great part of New England.” (; p. 45) - at the Wild Fruits: Thoreau's rediscovered last manuscript (mod. ed., by 2000)

Yes indeed - the berry-picking served for the my foremost 'path' on understandings of the Thoreau's nature 'philosophy'. Think I never saw a more truthful an expression than some where he states that city-people to whom the berries are brought to their sales market, never actually "tasted the fruit". The idea maybe a little difficult to 'digest' by anyone not picking one's own berries – But appears represent the actual truth. --------

; Beside - Some spider-web. (Photographed at woods.)

...You don't actually see this kind larger cobwebs in any environments that disturbed with the constant human activity. Or, more precisely there of course is always some places - everyone might've seen some movie, even if not oneself visited any, depicting an old attic 'filled' by the cobwebs But in the actual forest(s) the cobwebs are more often being 'erased' by the thunders, 'heavy' weathers, rains and so on; And so, when the better improving circumstances follow (the 'storms'), they're also being re-weaved. Often w. the surprising speed.

Once, years ago by now (,and when at the cabin) I awoke in one slight misty morning - around the June, nearby mid-Summers I guess it might've been, ; Went thenoutdoors...And discovered that all from the small pine- and and rowan(Sorbus aucuparia)-sapplings, and also on the lower twigs by the spruces scattered, which scattered nearby the same 'path' - From 'all around', there were gossamers. Much of them. All what seemed from had 'turned up', in during just a one night. So, I naturally then tried for to 'tune up' to by myself, breathed the fresh air isn "mist" from that morning, and, observed the cobwebs.

From reading (later) about the characteristics for Northern boreal forests (From some natural book I had on loan) ...Noticed thenafter that those gossamers, mostly, apparently, are made by a certain species of spider. (Some that are usual for weave their those 'traps' in the midst of the bilberry-bushes. As that dwarf shrub on low level of the forest floor, provides an ideal hunting grounds - w. a many little flyin insects to be catched.) ; Of course, that's merely a guess, but I then thought, maybe, of to know the particular species that'd made the mysteriously appearing webs. (It's very common one at least, think I've numerous times observed some on during my berry-picking walks.)

; However, it seems from mentioned that any reason to such 'mass amount' by their cobwebs, the spiders weavin' those to so hastily, in the 'excess' for the actual (any practical) 'needs to' - Isn't too well known. The biologists 'explanate' the phenomena, fx, that due fromafter the moisturic conditions changin' for a new morning dawning, there would be more small insects as well. I-o-w; That there would be the more of the 'prey' in the air. (And the spiders then would aim for take the all benefit of what that would make available and weave lots of cobwebs.)

...But that not really convincing a view (Among other explanations for invented). Not seems to explain it completely. Also, it said, in the said 'circumstances', which in some 'random timing', tend to emerge, in those morning the spiders seem to be of 'nowhere near'. Just like I also recall of had noticed, by that morning. (No singular spider was visible to the sight, at those weavings, or from anywhere at the place.)

; ...So, maybe the forest that way keeps it's mystery. (Some things are not needed to too much explained.) --------

But where there's gossamers, there then - obviously - also tends be: the Spiders.

...Not by any knowledge if this one species in pic does weave any web. It not at least being from the same to which I referred in the preceding paragraph(s). Could as well represent, fx, a species of Wolf spider - instead of any to the gossamer-making some. (Though I think that unlike, supposin' they usually do havethe lenghtier legs.)

Whatever the 'ecological niche' by this species, or however about it's hunting 'tactic'...Seemed it to have quite impressive decoration(s) - Smght that a closer look at most of the spiders often does for reveal.

Was also a quite decent-sized one (For the N.Scandivian variety, I mean. Less than a 'finger-nail' by lenght, still.) Our species often aren't near as coloured as the more tropical ones - none is neither very poisonic - but typically the 'coat' can sometimes have the lots of pattern and they exhibit as much a variety than any insects ...in the sizes and'shapes. (Albeit, not all are, not so often look to this nice...)

; A common 'knowledge' seems also to tell us (also) that that in a typical urban garden there can live in only square-metre area in numbers up to hundred spiders. (Some 'bigger' and many tinier, small...)

However, even w. the little that I've ever observed (to that), you don't come by from very many varieties of such 'decorous' ones, to any typical urban area. The same concerns for the cobwebs, of course. While the spiders are multitudes in numbers, any places, due of their very, very distant anciety in ecosystems - that they get much scarcer in the most open 'spots' for the human built environment. Which are more often tramped and 'cleaned', etc. (Not as some 'alarming' finding, of course...But to the simple, apparent noticeable.) Spiders make so essential part in all the natural food-chains and life-systems, you're likely to find some by anyplace. Yet, all the more 'big' ones that I've seen - here in the Norths, where the temperatures limits the sizes by the most insects found - and also, those to most 'handsomely' patterned (when it visible by plain eyes): All those I've typically found at the forested area(s). Or on 'swamps', the biggest one to these Northern regions to live on peat-lands.

As there are in the forests also more of the food for 'em, and the more of a cover, thick vegetations, good 'cracks' in the old trunks, etc...In fact, I also think, can trace back my own ecological understandings for started develop of the timings I had the discovery from a particular interesting looking spider in the woods.

; It not the less correct say that whenever there a spider, there is a story.

The real woods, the undisturbed ones, are always filled w. the stories. Even every path, wherever it leads for, has a story 'of it's own'. Often several from. And their neither so 'static', as what the case of the human created story-plots. (Where the structure follows the form of a 'plot-and-the-end'.) Perhaps that part of the fascination - You can always also get a litle lost in the forest.

; In the very old woods, it is sometimes said, even the paths are to vary their routes. (Nothing too surprising on it, as those often are also far less trodden by the human foots. That why they're also so much more Alive - Wherever the natural forests still surviving.)

And people had better learn of to respect that - Before too late.

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

; Back to the garden...This year, my Springly-sowings also featured:

Festuca glauca (ie, the Blue Festue). A decorative 'hay', can be of relative ease grown and planted to most any places in the outside. (Perhaps it's even possible to grow indoors at vase, should anyone from wished for to.)

; Originally for an S.American grass (If I did recall about that by correctly) it's said for grow best on sunshiny dry spots. Having w. my all perennials now some lack of that sort places, I actually decided to grow one of the seedlings on this metal container (w. the inner container.) - And it quite easily did, being a grass. Supposin' still that it's best from planted on ground as on pot that demands some amount fertilizing. Not much.

; Nothing particular to say on. Is relative usually cultivated since it can tolerate an amount from freezing. Acc my finding it seems to grow almost as effectively at any open/semi-open. (But the leafs said achieve their nicest gray only when it receives enough of the sunlight.) Most practical when used on a corner spot of the open garden. Or in an open, for some 'covering' and from to bring variation at the flower-benches. Myself decided plant the other ones on edges of that herbs-garden.

Further on; Here's then a one more for the Clover(s), some that I also had for sowed by this year. ; Albeit...from 'technically', acc. the Wikip., the Lotus not anymore is classed at the 'Bean-family', - ie; It not part of the same taxonomic order (,Fabaceae) than are the Clovers (Trifolium). Due because the Lotus('-genus') said to be '...currently undergoing extensive taxonomic revision.' ; Well, who cares, for most minor of importance at this. (Them also are much liked by many bees.)

A nice natural species – easily familiar to most whom ever glanced more concerned on some (still existant) 'sunburnt' sandy 'spots' (fx, on the roadsides)...Or, can be found typically on the drier 'meadowy'fields, etc. – It's name a nice one too, that the Bird's-foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus).

But see; Those have some small lovely yellowy flowers. They always catch one's attention, though this now 'occasional common' rarity doesn't grow them for very large. (I hardly can catch some idea of their particulars, impressions without the eyeglasses...)

...A fewsome of those I planted on outdoors, at garden of course. ...Already sometime early June. And now almost each of the plants I added had flowered fromafter midst-July. ; Mainly dropped those seedlings I'd cultivated to 'here and there' in the garden – it could've easily been planted direct of the seed too – As it felt a good choice cultivated on any available dry places. (It don't develop to any too excessive heights.) So, I have them mostly on the edges, 'by-sides' from that small herb -garden. Another question, then is, from how effective those would show themselves to multiplying in during subsequent Summers.

So, the original idea of my uses on those (clovers) was little different than w. the Crimson clovers - those I this year planted within the Sunflowers – With the expectation that'd them to serve both as an additional fertilize and from to perhaps enfasten the Sunflower-growth. (Perhaps the unsuccesfull idea.) I then also planted an ornamental Squash in the same small area w. those both. ; But we'll see, the Sep by the early them could even still make it 'in time'. The Squash at least favored the plentiest (organic) fertilize and watering I though necessity to use for this “small field” of mine – It grew in the spot 'gregariously' and now a number those fruits having developed. Even to that took for quite long, though, it developed at first a great number 'male-flowers', before the ones for fruits emerged.

; So I've now picked those, when 'ripen', for the plate. Are practical for, fx, even as children's toys. Sometimes they are also lacquered. (A squash fruit can then last indoors for more than a year, usually, easily.)

; Garden nasturtium...or, the 'Indian cress'. For it's lat. name being Tropaelum majus. (; var by common name 'Ladybird Rose')

...Grown at first in same diminute spot than those Sunflowers (and the Squash), I observed that my nasturtium actually did not take for growth during first Month from Summer. ; Thenafter I dug that off, and planted to this adjacent larger vase (in the photo. The results remained 'meagre', from the weathers having turned for less favorable - But at least some flowers did emerge, as can be seen.

Some reason, the pregrowth from the cresses in Spring also was surprisingly unsuccessfull - only this one seedling germinated. Perhaps the 'traditional' varieties I experimented w. just need the more of the warmth, good suns. Or maybe I just watered the base too much. ; Despite the setbacks, it's a good choice having some Summer cress at the garden. As we've mentioned before, planted nearby the berry-bushes they also tend gather most of the aphids. (Thereby reducing the stress on leaves. For those bushes of plentyful berries carrying, harvestable plants.) ; Practical also from that it doesn't want any fertilizing. ----------

; ...'Cause this was begun w. the Squash, Let's also end this 'story-part' w. the Squash.

Not just for; Oh yeah, here is then yet another 'bloomingdale', from this strangely scented...a 'fruit'. - It's another pic from the Squash-flower. (On the earlier posts might've presented...an uncounted number from those.)

Don't know much of the Coleopterans (beetles) that can be seen to 'stacked' at the upper corner and inside/middle part of the flower. I only have come to noticing that in during some days by 'high Summer', them tend appear at Squashes.

Often only are present at one or few singular flowers - not on ones over their best bloom - it goes off in during one day, for any - but them actually not the sole species that I've seen to populate squash blooms, 'in masse'. Some bugs, ants (a fewsome, or by some 'ten' in 'good day'), and other beetles(?), maybe...seen to similar numbers on it.

...Why it's here (selected, from lastly) - Is for that a reminder about (that) a healthy garden maintains also numbers tiny insects. Essentially, there's numerous such little species that make an important part in the food-chains, as well do have other equally important tasks to 'care for'. (Pollination, even, just one from those task.)

; Insects exhibiting perhaps the greatest variety in sizes and shapes, more variation by proportion than on any other animal orders from. ' - Assuming that one wished to achieve that one's garden is in some ecological balance, these sort 'appearances' are actually the principal findings for proving 'bout that. ; You also get the feelin' that on the constant yearly cycle there is, always seem be, something for happening.

(Although the depicted small coleopterans undoubtedly the very usual, typical sighting to that time of the season.) --------

And well, that maybe was quite a bunch of the plants – And the focus on any further added ones, on here this post - then on fewsome of which planted by this Summer (Should they then still from flower to during these remaining weeks of the Late Summer...)

; I mean, at the moment it still not quite unpossible, if my fewsome Sunflowers still would from to make it... (While it to the less likely, w. our now more 'chilled', cloudier days seen...)

(Pic, above) : Nemi (the last one on series, here a panel IV.)

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

; Cons what else for from expected; on the following, from 'subsequently' - Only shall make then a some 'chapters' added on to this post...

; ...To some 'foretaste', for it's 'topics', these fewsome pics (below...)

The first one feats this classic comics-advert from that now distant 1970s.

"The oldies but goldies", we sort for have here...Since, for due because, I actually have the several number old mags where I notice this particular advert from having appeared. (No use asking which by any collectorial interest - Mostly are in such a bad condition that any value, 'price tag' as the 'collectables' would be quite...minimal.) ; The advert must've originated from around the turn of the 1970s, as it by the details, and style, closely resembles the works by Crumb. (Robert Crumb, the inventor for the underground comix, at the 1960s. Could've actually been drawn by him, don't know from it's background.) So, this gives our (any) younger readers bit of a 'glimpse' on that golden age of the comics.

; From which timing, actually much of the accompanying pics and cartoon, at these lateliest posts were been found of.

; ...Perhaps it also not too difficult to guess(ed) - The drawing here as the part/next sequel at our BIg WOmmen -series.

(Quite biiiig...that she is, indeed,)

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

“It was at Mabille ['outdoor cafe', at Paris 1813-57] that Céleste acquired her famous name of Mogador. Mogador, a city in Morocco today called Essaouira, was the site of a notable French victory. The event so captured the imagination of the French that numerous mementos were sold with the name Mogador on them. So when Céleste's dancing partner had to fend off other suitors to dance with the beautiful young woman, he remarked that it would be easier to defend Mogador than his partner. And thus, Céleste Venard was christened Céleste Mogador, queen of the Bal Mabille. ...

The author of memoirs is silent on her means of support in those days, but we can assume she found young suitors only too delighted to provide her with a livehood in return for her favors. She is not so silent, although subtly discreet, on the more well-to-do or famous suitors who would enter her life later. Once she acquired notoriety at the Bal Mabille, and later a fearless equestrienne at the circus, her name was on everyone's lips, she was recognized in public and was therefore the ideal adornment for a young, or not so young, dandy.

There were many men in Céleste's life, and the majority of them were nothing more to her than a means to an end. ...“ ; (of) 'Translator's Introduction' by Monique Fleury Nagem (2001 ed.; xvi-xvii) to Memoirs of a Courtesan in Nineteenth-Century Paris - ie, the Memoir orig. seems been published by 1854, under the name from Adieux au monde, mémoìres de Celeste Mogador.

;

(Photo; below/down) ; ...An intressant/funny mention in addition to what above was presented of my gardenings - Can be seen on the pic from this vase. It has that most regular herb (Origanum vulgare; the plant also is most frequent visited by bees, such as well-known is.) ; ...Happens that during Summery tasks and 'hastes', I dropped the vase , accidentally, and it got broken (a poor quality vase, by the way - Even the paint on it seems to chip off.) I then left that in the greenhouse, for some later replacing, hardly remembered to water the plant, but by occasionally - But anything of that, didn't much bother the plant and by the late weeks of Summer, it was flowering to this nicely. Some of the best things, in gardening, is - That herbs (/plants) often don't need so much - and they 'strive on', often best, when left for 'on their own'. (Of course, some care usually is necessary...)

;

"The Anthropocene may seem like the right name now, but it is tethered too tightly to our present circumstance, defining our epoch by what is below us rather than ahead of us. Other names have surfaced to capture how we're remaking our environment. They include the Homogenocene - the age of homogenization of plant and animal species due to invasion and global spreading. Myxocene - the age in which the oceans will become dominated by jellyfish and microbial slime. Plasticene - the age of plastics; and Pyrocene - the age of fire. While all hold truths and warnings, most conjure images of the worst of what might lie ahead: plastic and jellyfish-clogged oceans, firestorms whipping up their own weather systems, invasive species decimating biodiversity and igniting zoonotic pandemics, while humans stand at the helm, steering us toward a hothouse wasteland, wavering on the horizon like Fata Morgana." ; (of) Summer Praetorius's 'Dawn of the Heliocene' - Article at web (Nautilus)

(Photo) ; ...Beside (right), then, is the first to bloom of my Sunflowers (Helianthus annuus, variety of these regular common cultivated spec.) ; Like said, sowed several from that 'dense', that the flowering took for so late - Or maybe I just fertilised the spot to little too much, hence that so 'late'. But it's really a nice 'spot' to look now, the Squashes have grown twigs all the way up the flowering blooms, and although I don't think they'd make any fruits on that high, anymore at least, it's like having a little low-growth (flowering) 'vegetatious' forest at the garden by one's own. Well, almost like... (These Sunflowers grow for, ca, 170-200 cm tall.)

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

'...wealth, that great ruler of us all, ...' ; So, let's wait a still bit more of a time, a few moments 'till the 'rest from' to this post's offerings shall 'arrive'.

; At the garden it having felt pretty 'wealthy' during these mid-Autumn weeks. Always does, fromafter the Summer's 'ripen', as the fruits and late bloomings still growin'...and the Summer's warmth still by occasionally tempts us to devote some efforts for the garden-work. (On days when it wasn't raining, obviously...)

(Photo) ; ...An' yet another garden-pic ; Of those Parsleys (regular Garden Parsley, Petroselinum crispum - as I now seem to find from the lat name to it.) ; (Actually the fungi might now catch the more of an attention in the pic...) But a funny mention, whether I already did mention(?): I didn't originally think it for the two-year plant. So now we only wait, 'till the returning Summers, next season of growth.

(Photo) ; Here's then another look to those Sunflowers. - For a better view of their 'grandeur'. Such as noticeable is, some of these did grow (indeed) to quite tall, and say, 'majestetic' from the appearance, presence in the garden. (Some remainings of the flowers, in those spikes from the Basil, are visible at below foreground.)

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

...Slouching towards the 'next chapter'...

; A massive 'hunk' like Conan, heroic-type to the sort of 'all-muscle' and (very) 'one-directional brain', might not seem for the most obvious choice for our writing here. (Cons what is usually for discussed on these posts of ours. And cons what comes to the 'hunk's most characteristical 'traits', or features, or...whatever, however.)

Besides, didn't plan this much on, not for the 'main inspirations' on this last section, of this 'postume'-sequel, in this posting.

More to the point, this now from how we seem find the easiest 'way out' of these 'endings'.

(Photo) ...From lastly, but not leastly; That one Yellow Sweet Clover (Melilotus officinalis),which kept in the greenhouse, also decided for to continue flowering, still. Just to show how nice the small 'spikes' by it, too.

; However, the 'co-information' seems then also remarking it recognized to an invasive in the regions for where the plant has been introduced. Where that originally not grew (N.America, Australia, Africa)

; I see little of the bees, anymore. Guess the most from are already to their over-wintering 'phase', and at their hides. But the blooms by the (many) plant seem still continue, a good prediction that we have at least couple weeks left for that. Ie; for the earliest days by this Month now lived, that being the Oct...

-----

; By originally, indeed, we had thought these Howardian Conan-tales just for some good (,briefer) closing-chapter on to this post.

; Then, during the meanwhile, came to change my mind 'bout it completely – and read, in that meanwhile, bunch from various other books – Some I was for to consider, quite much, as for the alternative ending(s) to this 'final chapter'. But as the time 'passed' (the 'clock was ticking...') - Then, ultimately decided to reject all from those, at the more particular consideration. Maybe their time should arrive at some other place.

(One thinks, maybe, them instead just represented only some 'roads not taken'. Or alternatively, it might be - as anyone would know – almost all roads tend to lead for the crossroad. ; So maybe I'll just find some uses to those in some complete different 'connection'. Weren't really for this, as it was all too rocky road, apparently.)

; So after all that wasted thinkin', steamin' and 'rejecting, therefore, it seems...Us from ultimately having returned to this half-finished 'chunk' of a section, these writings. (Luckily I don't smoke, otherways would've have wasted lot of cigars on this noted 'meanwhile'...)

; ...Guess' it then appears better if we just “bank” these sequels from the 'prehistoric' hunk's adventures - and - as the very next step, to our next direction from, head for the 'bunk by means for from 'straightening up'. By somewhat. ; I meant the limbs from w. that, naturally – for straightened. For to enjoying some well-earned X-mas rests. Some not too brief 'gaps and snorts'. After all these “troubles” to have some good sleeps, for a while. ; Preparing and waiting for the Santa Claus from lifting us up from our periodic exhaustment, from this sort un-inspiring, uncreative yearly momentum – from this 'gutter of the mind'. ...Awaiting, from 'armed to teeth', wish-list kept safe under the waist-belt, the 'shopping list' dispatched to the trashbin.

Along w. my other frustrations, by nowadays, also hating the X-mas. Can't help that...

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

; Howard (Robert E. Howard

, 1906-36), to an author, not does appear near so unintressant as my (some) earlier (quite) pointed arguments might maybe given for an idea.

(Pic) ; Of some comics-compile to Conan-adventures (Forgot the name of it, or, when the story might've by originally publ. Around 1980s.)

While, of course, was to the most renown as a creator from that Conan. And, probably because of that, still this day remains from less 'trapped' to his own era than most others would be. (From the contemporaries of his, the fiction writers) .

; And such as we may find the noting, that creation from his fictions – or, that 'creature' - then seems having lived well-successfull from beyond his own years. Indeed, it usually noted that there was afterwards the countless flow to it's many repetitions, a plenty later stories been written for the same style. Or w. the small 'variations' in the setting, and ideas. The role-games and computer adventures perhaps where that might be expected to flourish still longer momentum. (The stories concerning, a very few ever to survive nearly as well or from still later as readable as that Conan.) In that 'realm' now renown to a Sword & Sorceries. It principally appears that much to it's origins came from Howard's written fiction.

; Not exactly rivalling the Tolkien's popularity in phantasy – But not exactly falls to too much below cons it's major influence for some other types of the “popular trash”, by the past decades. (While by this day, after it's original 'golden era', the former popularity from that 'genre' may have sunk within the years. Sunk as far as also any beliefs that once felt captivating ideas 'bout for 'one time' so “barbaric” past. ; But that 'pace' in the cultural time not actually emerges really too not important for this writing...)

He (Howard) also wrote the similar sort story-plots around some other (barbaric) heroes by his inventing. ; Several from those, one also notices, also seem from bear the similar quite well-memorable names: There are, or were, at least the following: (King) 'Kall'; 'Solomon Kane'; 'Turlogh O'Brien' etc... A feature at which I think those creations – or creatures – to bear lot resemblance w. those by one other (Howard's) contemporary “youth fiction” author. (That phantasy-writer to my some favorite, often-times, E.R.Burroughs.)

Actually the names in fiction not at all too unimportant a feature. Perhaps I already remarked 'bout it on some chapter. But them fx almost demand being easy to remember – And, descriptive too, for the character them given. As such, actually, fx, that helps both the author and the reader on their 'tasks'. Sometimes writers of course by intentionally try for to break from that 'rule'. To choose as the exception, smght, that'd appear also make all for the 'less simplified' sounding. ; But, 'Kars-Arambuel-TonoNikko-el-Kobeel-na-Whoom'...That would appear for quite exhaustive choice if for written – or read - around by some 6 to 10 times on just a one page. Soforth, best names are often simple, short. Emreges still from a more demanding a task to invent a good one.

So we have, in fiction, amounts well-memorable names that not just pass as 'names', but give 'life and 'breath' to their carriers in fiction. Emerge from to tell something essential 'bout the traits that their carriers are meant posses. (Or, just make the characters to the more easily accepted by readership – as their 'companions'.). - Such as are, fx, names like: 'Anna Karenina'; 'Katnish Everdeen' (Was that by correctly ?) ; 'Frodo Baggins' ; 'Melkor' (or 'Melchior'?, Can't quite recall...) ; 'Carmilla' ; 'David Copperfield' ; 'Grog' ; 'Clark Kent' ; 'Pandora' ; 'Miss moneypenny'...list easily grows, of course. Quite as vast as the literature itself.

And, 'Conan', successfully fills anything 'bout that what seen necessities in the above presented 'criteria'. Very well invented a choice – Very barbaric, very self-evident as his name.

It appears that Howard as well seems for written an 'overall' historical backgrounds to his Conan-adventures. The 'essay', named for 'The Hyborian Age', seems resulted or was been written after the Weird Tales'-readers had been asking him to. The 'essay' seems wrote by the y. 1936. ; Therefore, it then apparently written not too many Months prior for the Howard's own self-destruction. (He suicided in during that same year.) The later biographers seem presented the various considerations and psychologics as to the reasons of it. ...But I leave any of that outside this. One might find the more at some bio (And of his Wiki-page, fx. - I didn't view that either, not anymore...)

From the closer look to that 'Hyborian age', it would seemed – by impression – to have contained lots what, maybe, rather persistent still remained by the time characteristic in theories 'bout those prehistoric pasts. As well of the early 1900ian cultures prevailed racial belief(s). And also, like one would guess, he seems to applied the evolutionary theory's then “beliefs” on formulation his (fictional) prehistory. ; However, it for not like anything from too one-sided or even as racialised than one would easily have the assumption. Or, as the first estimate would be. Maybe that idea from those past 'formative ages', viewed as periods when the constant migrations and 'conquering' dominative races followin' one other is even from quite modern, some ways. The civilizations unavoidable ultimate 'decay' and the barbarism's always returning 'triumph' some dominant ideas...on it.

Perhaps that still now only best to neglected, and on from w. this writing... ; But let us still mention that of Howard for 'sketching' it – seems it was originally meant, suppose, to only appear in that former mentioned magazine (Weird Tales). Covers only by some 10 pages lenght. (Actually wondering whether it even was said for been published at that... Probably was. But perhaps only from postumely. Not interested myself on it's specific histories...)

-----------

What then comes for the Howard's writing – the main interest at this – Brings first on mind that his use of an expressions is mostly just effective as it is rather 'simple'. Functions well – As long as anything most beyond that isn't needed. (I also think it said that he, alongside large number those stories, wrote one novel – and that it practically failed.) But the stories also often get rather enjoyable reads. Most of all, that seems largely be due that his language, despite often lacking the humor, I think, isn't anywhere too boring. Neither not for too repetitive. In short, makes that (his) barbaric phantasy-world to still, somehow...from reflect a certain amount any good authentism. In a the literary levels – Obviously not at anything what would be the impression of the historical 'authentic'. Funny thing, didn't happen check of whether he'd himself then believed on something like the 'imaginative authentity' (Of his created phantasy 'world') ...In all his speculated mental derange and (perhaps) the manic depressions.

(Pic, above) ; ...from Vampi-story, 'Runnin Red' (ca...1973, was that...)

; Howard also seems to devoted some effort from create even some romantique at his (Conan-)stories, and, by some amount that maybe succesfull. ; While, for the usual from it's 'regular', that still only follows in story when there are rarer moments of a 'non-action'. Wherever the feasts and the drunken parties, the rape and horror of described 'prehistoric' battle-scenes, happen leave some 'space' for. (Naturally the treacherous 'harps' and the 'fragile virgins' represent the more regular contrast of female characters. Most part.) ; However, the 'hunk' doesn't even seem for really have a very much time for being wasted on to that part.

One could apparently say an amount for that – I wrote a few 'passages' – but now findin' the rest from that, probably, 'off the limits' from this. ; In a way, one would say that it merely follows the same criteria as other minor details on Howard's 'phantasy'-world – There's fx quite little any actual “self” on his heroes. (Obviously then still less in the 'heroines'.) ; Even when the 'hunk' is given some time to thinkin his 'own' thought...that mostly returns for the 'task' in the hands. (Of course, it being, the stories wrote to mag's publishing. Not even usually are to some mini-'novellas' lenght. That considered...Might ended up the worse creations were the 'hunk' devoted on some more on thought at them.) ; But, anyway, via that Conan emerges also then for a quite old-fashioned example of a swordsman (in the fiction). What he does best, he indeed does. And what is not necessary to the outcome, result – ie, for make the readable story - That indeed isn't encontained.

-------

; Reading from the Howardian short-stories one after another soon can get from little tiresome. Mostly the plots are rather conventional and follow, almost by no expections, always the same basic narrative 'structure'; The adventure is 'introduced' – Conan joins/leads a group of 'lesser mortals', while enemy decides to plan for their destruction and aims on (attack) a kingdom or it's treasures (this w. some variations) – capture/hide-out, escapees, 'conflicts' – a hideous Monster of some sort enters – Conan slays the Monster – 'Victory'. Along to these 'plots' is then (usually) woven the accomp. necessary female 'princess'/villains, the sorcerer/magics, battles...After a few stories read it indeed becomes, soon, pretty boring.

However, one can't deny that that 'idea' plays at his writing, from very well.

; In all it's apparent simplicity from. Despite anything (said, before) the language and the structure from plots mostly are indeed well-made. Becomes still more notable, as Howard seemed as well said to had for his 'usual' written the stories without much from later correcting their content. Not much added or removed fromafter their first writing.

(Also, like said, in their original publications at magazines the 'schematism' from the story-plots wouldn't been quite similar a 'burden' – As the stories appeared only from Monthly, or from after every 'two weeks', maybe. Also there then was the other stuff that was being published at those mags. ) ------

; But yes...About the few stories we'd selected to more of a concern:

Some for very earliest from (Conan-) short-stories appears been: 'The Tower of the Elephant'. Whether it then actually was the very earliest, didn't again too much check for. (One imagines that at least some sketches or other material could've from preceded that. Or not.)

That (story) seems been written by 1933. (; Finding it at least somehow bit 'relevant', that just by that same timing, year, Hitler rose for power. Or confirmed his 'coup' over the still democratic government. It seems for a renown (minor) detail that the occultism, astrology, the 'eastern' religions...and perhaps also alchemism and other resemblant 'ancieties' were by enthusiasted 'studied' by some nazis.) ;

...Anyhow (that) story, 'Tower of Elephant' also felt – which is a little surprising - to reflect lots of resemblance, similarity for some of the H.P.Lovecraft-tales. ; No doubt that also, mostly, due it featuring that un-Earthly creature, from an alien 'race', having come across the other universe(s), and then told from existed past the distant human pasts – through from the immemorial ages. Which makin' the story lot similar for some of Lovecraft's horrifications. Often those belong on his best tales, too.

(Pic ; below) ...Nella Larsen (1891-64), a writer, novelist - from cover of the 'The Passing' (publ. 1929. ; ...Photo around the times of, so called, 'Harlem renaissance'.)

; ...If one thinks 'bout those timings from more carefully, the 1920 – after the Ist world war – emerges to a first 'modern' decade. Of the century. The 1930s directly follows. Despite the economic depression, the first real decades in a century's global 'mass-culture', roots for the century's popular culture: Jazz ('Harlem'); films ('Hollywood'); Communism ('Revolution'); airplanes, cars... But, Howard's hero 'steals' to a mystic, occultistic tower, where the alien creature is from kept from imprisoned – A rather interesting beginnings, indeed. And well written.

; In short, gave me the impressions like that the latter parts in the story could've been wrote by that other author instead. Howard also is said for had a (somewhat?) regular correspondence w. Lovecraft. (Perhaps there even was some 'co-work' relating to this story, don't know about...) ; More importantly, that story indeed differs in several ways to the others, some later wrote. – Makin' it quite 'unique' when compared w. most others. -----

; Then is...(,fx) that 'Queen of the Black Coast', from -34, which might be the most famed Conan-adventure – Yet I don't think it for any that so (very) exceptional, than what it's usual 'appraises'. Such as one could, almost, guess from the name of the story, an early century racial stereotypes and 'standards' quite much 'fuel' it's plot; ...the white (barbarian) 'queen', from leading her uncivilised 'blackies'. Conan, by the 'haphazard circumstances' to joining along, w. his 'queen' and the bunch causin' havoc w. their unmerciful robberies on the coastals.

Follows their common journey toward a mystified wilderness. Towards an unseen ancient 'jungleland', at some heart from the African savage mysteries. And - of course - there awaiting horribles, too.

; ...At begins it also pays some note for the more usual sea-faring 'romantical' imaginations. Some 'desires' and temptations of the tropic heats too - while one finds them only for barely to get the mention, at text; “...castellated point of land, and naked dusky women, with great red blossoms in their hair, stood and called to his sailors, and posed and postured brazenly.“ Anything more on from that ? Perhaps not.

For a plot that...or, from what comes to it's content, the story's again not very inventive. (But like noted before, the fine expressions, the language and narrative 'elements', again 'save the day'. Even it contains some poetics at the begins for each of the chapters. Howard might've appreciated the story over some others.)

Joseph Conrad's famous journey-plot the river, search for the hidden unknown evil also comes unavoidably for mind – While the similarity is mostly in the 'tensions' of the approaching towards the unknown evil. ; Aspect which makes Conrad's river-journey more readable (Or from more memorable) – Is probably that on it the finally reached evil gets to more humanely personified (At the character from the Kurtz. All the 'felt' evils, sort of, lead towards him.) ; But in Howardian travel to the evil 'origins', to meet the 'ultimate monster' – it's evils from identified – is again more from the usual 'Lovecraftian type'. Has not any similarly recognizable human 'faces' – Nor, then, obviously does it belong at any human 'race'. (Unlike, fx, those desires, 'naked women dancin' and tempting the voyagers. As them merely tempting 'passer-bys' to the far less incomprihensible deaths – an ambush.)

So, in some further noting about that 'Black Coast': On that Conan is more like, for change, at some 'fishing trip'. The evils are found – But himself isn't choosing really find out from their natures. The entrance to that evil-territory, all it's sufferings and burdens, then ultimately turn out been only part of some endurance-test. Even the exterminable monster turns out from an easy prey. ; A fictional evil, whose loathed monstrous presence threatens the journey's successes – the 'last one of it's kind', remaining at that 'remote' corner from junglelands – That also, somehow, tends for evoke a some strong associations to real-life, wild-life 'monsters'. (All those large, impressive species that we nowadays find for endangered, also more or less, threatened by the same fate - the extinction.) ; The association isn't very pleasant. (Although more superficial than else what for an above noted. Yet, that monstrocity, in it's describing, 'that way', seemed still of have something in common w. those timing's racial schematism.)

However, in the story, unsurprisingly the 'hunk' passes all the mentioned “tests” of his journey - 'unshaken' as usual (one would think.) Let the regular mortals face the 'trouble' from fearing, do the dying. - Vengeance taken, not bothering for counting the losses, even less to grieving them. Funeral pyre. Pretty poor country, missing home. Not a proper place for taking too much 'trophies', even.

------

; ...One could also point out numbers more apparent examples to similar racial normatives. (As they're so typical feature of the Conan-stories. Similarly as much else by the timing. Conrad, for examples, is not so different 'case in point' – despite so more usual seen. Conan's adventures of course relate not for any real existed geographic 'places', which then is the other major difference between those prior compared 'journeys'.)

(Addit; 10.12.) ; That said (“however”...), it being actually more intressant from to notice that the said (white) suprematism', so commonplace during those decades – has perhaps lot less prevalence on some for Howard's earlier stories. (...To avoid the impression 'bout for the Howard's 'racial beliefs' for a complete one-sided, or to a solely that kind, he seems as well, fx, said from had hated at those years rised dictatorships from the Mussolini and Hitler. But that not perhaps so relevant cons this view.) ; ...P-o-w only that to most part what Howard 'emphasizes' seem the more 'weighed' at side from said the conceptions concerning - or then held - from an evolutionary past. Them not near so much seem emerge just to some expressions of the 'racial hates'.

; ..So, for examples, the main impression from some Howard's earlier Solomon Kane-short stories, 'The Hills of the Dead' (1930), and 'Wings in the Night' (1932) being that in them the things such as “primitivism” and 'superstition' (/”Voodoo”, zombies, etc...) being more of a source to the fictionalized interest than just some encontainers from the similar 'schematic'. (Of course, naturally the said aspects also make some major building elements at the story-plots.) ; The natives in the stories appear mainly represented as 'primitives', quite expectably. (Both stories, or the 'sequels' in a continuing Kane-'plot', appear from situate in Africas.) ...Often the described characters at those (stories) not appear for too 'flattened', mostly not wrote to just as simplified 'racial types'. ; At several cases them seem written w. the more characteristics, for as persons - While of course mostly serving only to a cast of supporting characters. ; ...That 'Hills of the Dead' even shows Howard w. some animal-”sympathies” - in form of a huge gorilla entering at just a moment for story's 'climax', and seekin' from it's vengeances of the gorilla-hunter who's enslaughtered it's partner. (The gorilla-hunter not escapes a more typical 'africanizations' at his characterisations.) But the main p-o-w 'bout...guess it emerges that at his 'African setting' Howard seems succeed from reflected the more variation than what for a more usual was. From the most part.

; Besides, also Kane's character – as the 1700ian centurian English 'puritan' - emerges to somewhat more rich as the 'personnel study'. He fx can even be 'out-fooled', and can even make the mistakes...etc. ; Also, to the hero's main strenghts, therefore, does't arise so much his any superiority – but his endurance. [Addit closed.]

; The more usual prevailed 'evolutionary belief', those by the early 1900s, seems represented rather characteristically fx in the 'Rogues in the House' (-34). While (that) otherways not so exceptional, or at least felt quite unintresting from what comes for it's story-plot - makes a good example about that.

; So, selected this passage from that aspect in mind: “... 'This is Thak,' answered the priest, caressing his temple. 'Some would call him an ape, but he is almost as different from a real ape as he is different from a real man. His people dwell far to the east, in the mountains that fringe the eastern frontiers of Zamora. There are not many of them, but if they are not exterminated, I believe they will become human beings, in perhaps a hundred thousand years. They are in the formative stage, ...”

(Pic, above) ; ...from the Lee's Dr Strange. (Of a story named 'Shadow Queen', mag Oct. /1980.)

Indeed, that quite descriptive of how uncomplicated viewed (was) held the idea for about the workings of an evolutionary 'change'. (Or changes. For how the ultimate goal unquestionably would be, should be seen – leading to an ideal man, that for the 'real man'.)

From how that by itself a rather simplifying concept , the natural “selection”, was accepted for to give some undisputed definition to the existence by some perpetual racial 'barriers', and the beliefs from about definitions to the qualities – or 'faculties' – that'd necessary and needed of to make the human. Resultant, also then it could be judged about something else to a 'non-human'.

; ...Doesn't need the explaining that (that) 'Thak' appears by description for a some 'hybridized' monstrocity. In the story's narrative 'it'/he mainly serves as the usual ultimate opponent. But from thinkin' the social context by that timing, the 1930s, one much can't avoid the impression that it's monstrocity little similarly an 'indeterminant' as from that more obscure 'ancient evil' of that Queen of the Black Coast. (In some difference that sly, clever, a 'man-like' being, on a 'formative stage', is at this story given there given a clear place on an evolutionary progress. It's certainly pre-human, should the reader then believe there is some common origin-'point' to all humanity.)

What all the cultivated narrations on a prehistoric 'pre-humanity' seem to tell about, by now, is of course quite obvious. ; Among others, Jack London, Conan Doyle wrote earlier that century some prehistoric 'plots' w. the similar leaning between the felt excitement and distaste from an imagined brutality seen/believed at the evolutionary 'begins.' On Howard's less 'realistic' prehistoric “realm” the racialism(s), always accompanying uncertainties 'bout that past (some would say, fears) are of course less pointing – some would say, are more flexible, even 'liberal' in views - but their apparent whiteness not (so) much differs.

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

; Finally, I found the last tale in this serie ('Beyond the Black River', 1935) perhaps from more successful than most others. Largely that so because it breaks apart of that cultivated rather schematic narrative structure. (For the 'standard'). Although, the ending at that again by somewhat 'flattens' that as for the general impression. ; As the story's details itself aren't, from very complicated or interesting – From judging by it's described events.

It's 'plot' in brief - if there is even anything like, actually, really developed - describes the 'border war', somewhere at the forests next from a 'Pictish wildernesses'. The familiar narrative about the settlers for confronting threats by some 'savage' and barbarous tribes', now found pushing beyond their 'set' safe 'ranges' – might've perhaps served from to inspiring Howard to write plot that avoids for getting subjugated by the repeatings from the earlier mentioned regular elements. - The story's 'cat and mouse'-play actually is the only part worth any interest on it's narrative. Ie, best parts contain the chases in midst from those impenetrable woods. Where an enemy hides from concealed, could be 'anywhere'.

While there indeed is nothing much else for it (,at the story), like usual - the best part again is that story's advancin' works well - indeed that is rather - captivating. The few characteristic 'selections' then - this case without anything more devoted, or remarked 'bout them;

“...The Cimmerians were barbarians and ferocious as the Picts, and much more intelligent. Evidently Conan had spent much time among civilised men, though that contact had obviously not softened him, nor weakened any of his primitive instincts. Balthus' apprehension turned to admiration as he marked the easy cat-like stride, the effortless silence with which the Cimmerian moved along the trail. The oiled links of his armor did not clink, and Balthus knew Conan could glide through the deepest thicket or most tangled copse as noiselessly as any naked Pict that ever lived.”

;

“Civilized men laugh', said Conan. 'But not one can tell me how Zogar Sag can call Pythons and tigers and leopards out of the wilderness and make them do his bidding. They would say it is a lie, if they dared. That's the way with civilized men. When they can't explain something by their half-baked science, they refuse to believe it.' ”

-----------

(Pic, below) ; ...Of Modesty Blaise -story, 'The Green-eyed Monster' (-71)

'Zoo....oom-bie' (, Doo...oom-bie) ; Despite some my noted 'critizees', I think Howard's Conan not near so 'worn out' to a character than from the first idea would be impression. It's just that as in all the sort 'superhuman' heroic-plots, it tends soon get boring, 'cause most part Howardian plots aren't near so 'brilliant'. (Often only mediocre, like I think already did say before.)

And also, by some amount, their level from any 'horrifics' may have in time – quite similarly as on Lovecraft's case - got for the more 'diluted', appears less exciting anymore. By now, after some hundred years from the constant cultural and social changes. Same probably largely concerns the stories occasional (but apparent) racialisms. That not so much considered anymore as the sources to some 'awe', or of the 'fears' – if one then assuming that during an early century those still were, in the fictions, or at horror-mag's stories.

But both (authors) seem still had enough popularity that'd made them lasting at the popular fiction and lead for the stories steady reprints.

; So, for my conclusive judgement lastly...is that by a final impression from - This ancient 'hunk', foremost, apparentliest, like a some ('lord') Greystoke who did not book in the boarding school. (And took his main lessons from mostly the popularistic authors. Something gained...something lost in that.) ; As much, that same seems characterising the lot from the Howard's writings.

All in all, (most on that) nowadays maybe still is becoming, 'hopelessly' out-dated.

; From the Conan's part, I think also worth said, that actually the comics to appear most successfull from the later (re-)creations. Them seem more effectively use the main idea(s), while also tended maintain some better parts of the original story-plots. Seems any divergences from that Howardian 'standard-plot' even could've been for the better.

(Not all comics-versions might been any so good, obviously.)

---------

(Pic) ; ...That cloak suits for the man (, the one in the pic, not for every man)...Don't ya think ?

...And that lately made (maybe 10 years past) Conan-filmatisation, quite bad indeed, gave some 'cause still for a few following additional paragraphs on.

What seems hounted all those (plenty) lately re-filmatisations from the 1980s ('and beyond',) popular films, etc... – It being obviously quite difficult for to 'flog the dead horse' back alive. Esp. becomes the source for usual 'failing', on those remakes, if it also so that horses legs already were quite 'tied up' already before the (re-)making.

Notice...I happen by occasional like the described sort popular 'rubbish', films that generally are ('mostly') in the genres from the adventuric-, 'historic', 'swords and sorceries'... But I can't forgive the bad quality. The point-of-view, that more often these adventuric-films when made around some new plot tend usually at least not fail to quite that badly. For even if them not very original either - At least you don't find in their realisation 'the action' to not diminishing for something quite unbearable, the repeating usual, conventional. (The 'Jurassic Worlds' and those several space-scifistic 'retro'-films might've perhaps been for most striking bad examples on this 'latest trend' – like the Blade Runner, Galactica, Planet Apes's...amongst those many others to this far made. ; Mad Max at least was not solely recirculating the original ideas – Matter a fact, I think it was better than the originals. Subjective judging, of course...)

; 'Cause it also so that usually in a “new” plots (on films) some effort tends for been given to makin' the resulted from turn out - if not for an 'immerorable', 'amazing good', as some 'minor classic' - fx, take to example from some, that 1980s Chinese Ghost Story - but, at least...on those more recent 'independent', 'low-budget' movies, them tend still feel to somewhat 'decent' for the watching. (I-O-W, by the ending that not ultimately leavin' one w. the thought 'bout how bad, boring, merely for the 'cheap cheat' that actually was.) ; ...While, also, nothing much by these days not anymore maybe seems expectable from 'live up' in these (popular) movies 'beyond' the very next years from it's arrival in theaters. Or after the 'reappearance', which was noted as the 'equatum' to the 'usually bad' at these latest chapters of a (popular) cinematographic decay. (All thumbs down for it's 'logic'...)

And So: No wonder if all of that actually seem nowadays, also, meant already when made for becoming to totally forgotten after – say - maybe the five years? Of that noted, why bother from go films anymore...indeed, why 'on Earth'. Such bad movies.

. ; (G.U.J.)

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

(Photo) ; ...Colette, on the bastions of Verdun (in the y. 1918.) ; ...Forgotten the source for this, - maybe it was at some biography.

...And:

The Final 'Section'

(; Added on 14.01.2021.)

-----------

(at...) "(Thursday, 15 february [-45]) ...By now we have about thirty American pilots in our hospital. ...Some of them look very nice, but most are so badly injured that they are almost totally hanged up. Nearly always they suffer from severe burns.

The patients in any department are all in more or less bad shape. Most are over fifty or under twenty years of age. Usually they have just been called up and it's up to our Dr Thimm to figure out whether they are truly sick or just malingering. Because of his rather perverse sense of humour, this leads to sometime pathetic, sometimes hilarious dialogues." ; "(Saturday, 24 February[-45] ) Dr Tillich has suggested that I become his assistant , as the nurse I was replacing in the Internal Dispensary is about to resume her duties. I am not too happy about this. He is very pleasant and attractive but he is also our Politischer Leiter [political officer] and, as such, is responsible for staff morale. Every Monday in the chapel there are lectures of political subjects which we are all supposed to attend, however busy we may be elsewhere. The day I arrived, he gave us a brief lecture about 'the duties of a nurse in this fifth year of the war'. The gist: not too much compassion since many of the patients are malingers, doctors had to be stricter, as the front needed every able-bodied man; on the other hand, if we ever observed unduly treatment, we were to intervene. By way of a deterrent, 'in strictest confidence', he also mentioned the case of one nurse who had given a young wounded soldier – a friend of her son, who had been killed – an injection that had temporarily disabled him, thus saving him from being sent back to the front. 'She was given ten years!' We were standing with our backs to the wall, he added. There was no alternative but to fight to the last man! Etc., etc. All this sounded so grim that I have not been back, making my excuse the neverending flow of fresh patients. I have been expecting trouble for some time but Dr Tillich has never once said a word."

; "The Allied radio makes no sense to us: they keep naming people who, they claim, took part in the plot. And yet some of these have not yet been officially implicated.

I remember warning Adam Trott that this would happen. ...

It turned out...difficult to obtain exact information about these Allied broadcasts, ... All those responsible for or involved in British wartime broadcasts to Germany whom this editor approached, denied any knowledge of them. ... The closest anyone has come in admitting their existence is Michael Balfour in Propaganda in war: 1939-1945 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970) [Ie; that remark should be read; as the case by the/until 1985 - when this quoted note, assumably, has been written...] ...Both Soldatensender Eins and Soldatensender Calais used formerly German-controlled wavelenghts to beam 'black' i.e. Demoralizing propaganda in Germany. They were run by the Ministry of Information in London.

Apart from more sinister motivations that come to mind... ,the resisters themselves may have partly responsible for these destructive broadcasts by exaggerating the numbers and prominence of their alleged sympathies in order to impress the Allies.

... Whereas already on 23 July the Soviet-sponsored 'National Committee for a Free Germany' appealed to the Wehrmacht and civilian population to support the movement even though it had already failed, the British continued to steer clear of any positive stand. In due course the B.B.C. Was instructed to interpret the affair not as the beginning of civil war (as it had started by doing), but merely as evidence that the German generals, faced with the inevitability of defeat, considered further fighting senseless. ..." [; ...what on italics (here, the preceding) is for the 'editors' co-information along that 'day-by-day' entries on Marie ('Missie') Vassiltchikov's diary. ; ...Cons that (,at this edition here used - Mandarin paperbacks, publ. y. -90) it only seems from mentioned at that (that, the) 'Foreword, annotations...' were provided by George Vassiltchikov, Marie's brother, by 1985.) ; ...So, I naturally assuming that a same would concern these added historical 'inserts' at text, too. Some that appear, btw, of pretty practical short 'enbriefings' on various accomp. War-time details, historical situation, and 'other aspects' related...) ] ; (of) The Berlin Diaries 1940-1945, by Marie Vassilitchikov (; The diary orig. was, apparently, publ. by late 1970s/1980 – here cited via the later repr. of 1990) (; p. 250,252 ; ,218-9.) -----------

;

"Sometime in mid-September 1942, Claude Arnould... an M16 agent in Paris, received a most unusual message from London instructing him to go to a certain spot in the Forest of Fontainebleau on the meeting of 18 September and make a report on what happened when he got there.

...Arnould did not have to wait long.... a small man with white hair and light-blue eyes stepped out, ...

To Arnould's stupefaction, the man said in perfect French 'I am Admiral Canaris. What are your instructions ?'

'To come here, to listen and to report back.'

The two men spoke for over an hour and a half. We do not have a detailed account of their conversation, but from information recounted by Arnould after the war, Canaris, made it clear that he knew the Frenchman was an M16 agent, [and] went to some lenghths to stress that [he] '[...] wished to work with the 'Anglo-Saxon allies' against the Nazi regime...' As the two parted, the admiral said, 'We are working together for the same ideals.'

We have frustratingly little further information about this puzzling meeting, the first details of which were recounted by Arnould during his final illness, thirty-two years after the event.

Some presumptions, can reasonably be made. First, it is clear from the chronology that it was Canaris who asked for this meeting. Second, one of his purposes seems to have been to reassure London that he was on its side – though it is perplexing that he had to find yet another channel to assure them of this, given he had already had plenty through which he could have done so (not least Halina Szymariska in Bern). It may be that he was passing through French channels as much to General De Gaulle's people in London as to M16.

[...]

A final speculation needs also to be considered. We know that in the early winter 1942 Canaris started sending messages to his opposite number, Stewart Menzies, that he would like to arrange a personal meeting between the two of them. Was this an early pre-echo of that approach?

Wilhelm Canaris was only too aware of that, following the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and the exposure of Paul Thûmmel, events were now moving decisively in favour of Himmler and the Sicherheitsdienst, as the expense of Canaris and Abwehr. The Abwehr had already lost its monopoly of counter-espionage to the SD, and the SD leadership, dominated by fanatical Nazis, now made it abundantly clear that their intention was to further undermine and then take over Tirpitzufer's central role as the Wehrmacht's intelligence arm and Germany's main foreing spy service. Canaris knew that his room for autonomous action to undermine Hitler's intentions was about to become increasingly limited. ... If he was to change the course of the war, it would have to be done soon."

; ...(from) Ashdown : Nein! Standing up to Hitler 1935-1944 (p. 2018 ; p.188-9)

(; ...at his end-note accompanying the above quotate (p. 346; note 188), Ashdown seems as well wrote that acc. Arnould's memory the said event had '...took place in August, but there is no record from the Bletchley decrypts of the Abwehr administrative net that Canaris was in Paris in August. We know he was there from 16 to 19 September 1942, ...and I have therefore placed this event during the period.' ; ...Whatever the precise timing, guess' it does not so much change anythinhg for the 'mains' of this. Of the 'meeting' itself, despite from it said exist "...frustratingly little further information" ...is to quite regularly related in the number other war-'histories', that been written post that late 1970s. Or so I've also noticed, now just recalled to this...)

(Photo ; beside) ; ...of a post-war/'cold war' years made 'mainstream' (/Hollywood) movie situating in the late 1940s/early 1950s Berlin. In the film - whose name I unfortunately can't to this moment from recall - Marlene Dietrich plays the role of an actress whom is suspected for her war-preceding years 'dealings' with the nazi-elite. (She seems, apparently, quite enjoyed of her part in movie. The 'detail' is from the played brief video, presented as an 'evidence'.)

; By some other ways that flick is quite intressant - fx the 'ruins of Berlin' are on it's begins quite realistically staged (While of course 'clumsily', w. the techniques - scale model - by that decade possible for use.) -------------

; ...and for a bit more on the (aspect), or more on about that 'Abwehr'...

"A post-war CIA assessment delivered a judgement of Canaris and the Abwehr which is typical of the prevailing sense of superiority, buttressed by near total ignorance of what had gone on in the Tirpitzufer. [ie; meaning Canaris' 'headquarters', his intelligence 'office'.] Canaris, it said, had 'an incapacity for organisation and an inability to choose good men. The Abwehr was filled in its higher ranks with personal friends and dependents of Canaris and they (in general) idle and corrupt ... The Abwehr was thus a loose and irresponsible collection of worthless characters whom refused to dismiss.'

Perhaps this failure properly to understand the enigma of the double face of the Abwehr is best expressed in the divided post-war assessment of its chief. 'Inefficient, intriguing, traitorous, lisping queer' was the uncompromising verdict...of colonel Sam Lohan, a high-level member of the UK defence and intelligence establishment. Hitler loyalist Otto Skorzeny, on the other hand, condemned Canaris as having 'betrayed his country's secret services directly and wittingly from the beginning of his career to the end'. The post-war historian John Wheeler Bennett stressed his cunning, ..." (; Ashdown: the above book, p.299.) -----------------

;

"...The record of United States of America v. Kurt Andrau et al., commonly known as the Dora-Nordhausen War Crimes Trials, tells of crimes committed in the production of Wernher von Braun's A-4/V-2 rocket. ...

...The shameful story of the Mittelwerk and Dora war crimes began in September 1943, after the RAF bombed Peenemunde. ... The factory's location [the new factory, replacing at -43 destroyed and evacued Peenemunde] was in an expanded mine under the scenic Harz Mountains of central Germany and was covered by a company named Mittelwerk, G.M.b.H, ... The SS would also exercise substantial control over the factory and supply labor for construction and operation of Mittelwerk.

The digging of tunnel system that housed the Mitterlwerk, the building of the factory in it, and the actual cosntruction of the V-weapons were all done by forced inmate labor, slave labor controlled and directed by the SS. The slaves worked, slept and lived – if that word can be used – in the tunnels. For the inmates, the tunnels quickly became a gallery of the twin terrors of slow death resulting from insufficient nutrition and nonexistant sanitation and from sudden death at the murderous hands of the SS.

...The Allies discovered Dora [the overground concentration camp, built for 'to supply slave labor to the Mittelwek and associated factories'...] and the Mittelwerk when United States Army troops entered the area on April 11, 1945. ... Hundreds of victims had been dumped on the ground adjacent to the crematorium, a low building part way up to a hill. ... Bodies were fed into the ovens four at a time, day and night, but piled up faster than the ovens could consume them. ... By one estimate, [the Nordhausen, an 'associated camp', also] it held 6,000 bodies in varying stages of decomposition. During their two years of operation, ... ; at least 25,000 died there." ;

"For a man who professed to be not involved in the activities of the Mittelwerk, Wernher von Braun knew a greal deal about its operation. ...[in war trials,] Von braun's involvement in and responsibility for war crimes never came up, but his position as an officer of the SS, ... left him in a very awkward position. Von Braun needed to identify villains, which he did in the persons of Albin Sawatzki, production director of the V-2 missile, and SS Gen. Hans Kammler, who directed construction of the underground rocket factory, exercised significant control over v-2 production, and directed field operatios of the missile. Sawatski and especially Kammler demonstrably culpable for war crimes at the Mittelwerk, but they were also ideal scapegoats: their whereabouts in 1947 were unknown.

Albin Sawatski was in American custody in Nordhausen, Germany, on April 14, 1945, when he gave a deposition of his activities at the Mittelwerk. ... He pointed the finger of guilt for the atrocities committed there at the SS. While there were several reports of his whereabouts afterwards, none were confirmed. Likewise, Hans Kammler disappeared amid numerous stories of his glorious death in the defense of the Third Reich or in suicide after its defeat.

...After Project Paperclip completed its security clearance report on Wernher von Braun in 1947, the records were sealed and classified by the United States Army until November 1984, six years after von Braun's death. ... [the file from the] Dora-Nordhausen War Crimes Trials...it appeared in the National Archives in 1981." ; "It has been said that history is written by the victors. In the case of the German rocket program, history was written by the defeated. In 1947, the United States Army knew only what von Braun and his fellow Germans told them in their depositions, and the Army was not interested in digging deeper. ...von Braun wrote extensively about his life in Nazi Germany in artic,les and books, as author and coauthor. In only one work did he mention the Mittelwerk as the site of V-2 production. He never wrote about Dora, the use of concentration camp slave labor, or the crimes committed in the production of his rockets."

(Photo, beside) ; 'An A-4 [better renown as the V2-rocket] test missile launches from Test Strand VII in 1943' ; pic-txt, and photo, are via: Petersen, 2009, Missiles for the fatherland: Peenemunde, National Socialism, and the V-2 Missile (; p. 121.)

;

"...It should not be too surprising that the Mittelwerk and Dora are absent from most histories of rocketry. These accounts were written by Wernher von Braun, Walter Dornberger, and members of von Braun's German rocket team. One of the big questions never answered by these authors is how and where Germany built six thousand V-2s, half of which were fired in combat. One might have expected Jewish activists like Simon Wiesenthal, to have kept alive the memory of Dora. But... Few Jews ever got to Dora; they were sent to the extermination camps in the East. Dora's prisoners were more often than not political prisoners who had technical skills that were useful in building rockets. Knowledge of the Dora concentration camp, the Mittelwerk, and the crimes committed there were suppressed by factions in the United States Army; ...in 1964, American historian...James McGovern published his book Crossbow and Overcast, which recounted some of the V-2 history and the hiring of von Braun and the German team. McGovern told of the...hundreds of emaciated corpses waiting their turn in the crematoria. ... The Friends of Deportees of the Dora-Ellrich camps protested in print in 1963 and 1966. But that was in France, where it was invisible to most Americans, and Wernher von Braun denied aby involvement or responsibility. ...Charles Lindbergh [that 'aviation pioneer', on his 1970 book] ...wrote with great moral outrage about the inhumane conditions he saw ['there', in Mittelwerk and Dora] ... The puzzle here is that Lindbergh knew von Braun and had met him at the Kennedy Space Center at the time of the Apollo 11 launch in July 1969. ..., but there is no evidence that he asked von Braun about the factory that built his V-2 rocket. It was the pattern that everyone followed, the path everyone took. ..."

, "While America took leisurely and late steps toward justice, ...Frenchman named Jean Michel who had been a member of a Resistance and who had been imprisoned in the Dora..., wrote Dora, his memoirs about the camp. ...book was first published in France in 1975; ...translation was not released in the United States until 1979. ...text on book's cover expanded on the apparently benign title: 'The Nazi concentration camp where modern space technology was born and 30,000 prisoners died." , "Early in 1980, Harward law student, Eli Rosenbaum, who later worked for the OSI, picked up a copy of Dora in Cambridge bookstore. 'I was stunned,' Rosenbaum said later. 'I had never seen camp Dora mentioned in any Holocaust literature.' ... " , "[von Braun's...] ...FBI dossier was declassified on February 28, 1985. The documents..., gave a a whole new perspective on the German American hero. They told of his membership in the Nazi party, his rank of major in the SS, his associations with the Dora concentration camp, and the cover-up of these facts to facilitate his entry into the United States.

Other bits of information have surfaced from other sources..." ; Piszkiewicz: Wernher von Braun. The Man Who Sold the Moon (1998); of p. 48-9, 52-3; 54; and 197-8,199, 200, 202. ---------------

'...So, you're a rocket scientist ? That don't impress me much...' ; It took us somewhat the longer 'momentum' before I decided it time to adding these last section(s) to the post. ...Took this while, merely because I wasn't to quite too sure for how much one would find necessary for reads to have some any good backgrounds on w. our here (only shorter) additioned notings. Notings alongside w. the above quotes.

(Turned it out; From a pretty much...one would had uses for somewhat lot from reads, on to these topics. Or, there's obviously also much else in relating w. that. So I discovered, if for to somewhat the more comprihensive understandings, for the more "complete picture" about it all. – If then something like that, ever even is possible from acquired. Or for 'gathered'.)

That so, mainly because from the reason(s) that the WW II-era situates to so much closer the present era than anything else we've here been (mostly) discussin', previously. (The 1800s, the main subject on much of the 'posts', is by any impression more 'distanced' past already, far older in time and less connected to present history. ; Alongside (that), on the latest World War(s) from so much has been written that one quite easily could get a bit...'overwhelmed' by that plenty. (And additionally, w. that plentifulness of the all material available - and like always been the case when reading from the wars and the 'riots', the 'plottings', rebellions, etc's. - All that what one tends come by from and about, it not necessarily always representing the most trustworthy stories even. In fact to the more often so... that it doesn't.)

But anyway; I then selected to the 'mains' on this the fewsome above quotes. As our main offerings on this part. (Of course came for to consider some other alternatives to/for those – All in all, that what on above just some selections of the books is what I found for most interesting. Had a few other sources from read too. But then, those (perhaps) felt not from quite similar relevant for here, at these topics.)

Like noticeable, my own 'interests' to these topics happened to cover quite a number 'separate' topics: That Stauffenberg-'plot' (and the German nazi-era resistance; Usual seen for had 'culminated' on that attempt to Hitler's assassination, carried by Claus Schrenk von Stauffenberg[,1907-44] at Wolfsschanze.) ; the Abwehr (and that Canaris obviously - I now fx noted by earlier, kind of, much dismissed all the lots from that there must've been written about him, within the years. Or so I'm supposin'...) ; and then, for the latest, I read to these fewsome books mentioned from about the said more notorious histories at the creation and production of the German V2-rockets during war-years. Production w. the slave workforce (the concentration camp prisoners). ; ...Along that, it then automatically lead for the 'story-plot' from the now equally notorius dealings/'co-workings' by the US-Army w. those same German rocket-scientists – Ie, their postwar recruiting in the development and later production of the intercontinental ballistic missiles. After the late war-period 'capture' and immigration from the von Braun and his close 'comrades' in the Peenemunde rocket-team.

...Of the latest mentioned part, briefest said, one might notice that (that) 'close proximity' of the post-war years 'realm of fear', and it's 'birth' - or recognition from it's one 'root' (/origin) in the nazi-German holocaust-histories - that wouldn't to so much surprise. (Despite von Braun's some time former decades wider fame. Him having appeared for a one amongst, or to the foremost 'founding father' at the 1950-60's space-program and the Apollo-flights, ao.) ; But let us not go for all that – or for the most pasts of it. Should anyhow appear from a more public knowledges than still by around that late 1990s, by anyways.

Besides, there seems - of course, the plenty else material nowadays available about it. I only mention, that Pisckiewicz and that Petersen (2009), fx, I noticed, seem both rather often quoting from a prior appeared one: (Neufeld's) The Rocker and the Reich: Peenemunde and the coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (-95) – Which perhaps a book that might've by the time 'fuelled' a better knowledge on these 'chapters'. Or led for it's afterwards emerged wider recognitions. - During this 'lately years', fromafter that 1990s onward.

; And probably there's nowadays the more available, the more recent appeared books still in addit to. (Almost always there are, always does, one would find appropriate to say...)

; For some, (of the older 'materials') there seems on Dora concerning often referred fx to Yves Beon: Planet Dora : A memoir of the Holocaust and the birth of the Space Age (-97). Also, post-after the von Braun from passing (early 1980s) the investigation on the 'project Paperclip'-case histories from the then de-classified files is collected at Linda hunt: Secret Agenda: United States Government, the Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1944 to 1990. (1991)

-------

(Pic ; beside above) ; Guido Crepax's drawing on the later 'resurrections' from (the Italian) fascism. A 'Poster for the political demonstration proclaiming the innocence of the anarchist Pietro Valpreda, 1972.' - via from Complete Crepax, (Vol 4, 'Private Life', publ. by 2019)

That Petersen, though, seemed far less concerned on the character from von Braun's (or from about his 'co-engineers' and emigrated 'rocketeers'). – And also, at least, it pays the less of the concerns for those above described post war-era 'involvements' of his'. Instead seemed it to discuss by more detail, fx, the circumstances about prior and after the establishment of that 'Dora'-concentration camp (...from the Wiki-sources, feat description at Holocaust-documentation project - it is actually quite compact - not takes very long from read.) and of the 'Mittelwerk-complex' (various 'sub-factories' under Mittelwerk Gmbh.) - That newer production 'facility' whose underground tunnels were dug w. the SS's guarded slave labor use. ; Although, also that Petersen then does seemed of mentioning that von Braun is known visited by the 1943 and -44 the more renown Buchenwald-concentration camp - W. the means from w. seeking the skillful workers from amongst it's prisoners. Ie, writes that: "...[he] had actually traveled to the camp himself in order to evaluate the skilled labor there, were he met Sadron. [...who, a 'French physics professor', by the time a 'prisoner in Buchenwald'] While at Buchenwald, von Braun informed Sawatzki that he had arranged for the transport of prisoner labor to Mittelwerk." (;p. 218)

; Furthermore, also (Petersen), fx, does briefly remark in the prior pages to that (that) despite his short-time arrest by Gestapo in 1944 (...some usual 'tactics' that Himmler or in practice those working on his 'organization' preferred to use in guaranteeing the 'loyalities' by several others known only 'moderately' devoted for nazism...), on [von Braun's] war-time record(s) ... 'there is no evidence' that he'd;

"...failed to put his best effort to build a missile that could be used in wartime. Throughout his time at Peenemunde, he made it clear to his subordinates that he expected their utmost effort to make their instrument work reliably.' ; And also (that) 'at least' "...in his written correspondence, he betrayed no sign of being troubled by the introduction of slave labor to the program in the early summer 1943, and he was long an advocate of the use of forced labor to help development and production achieve its goals." (; p. 212)

-----------

(Photo, beside) ; From (via) Petersen (; p201) - pic text: 'These two prisoners were sent from Dora to the subcamp of Boelke Kaserne in Nordhausen. Boelke Kaserne was one of the many subcamps to which prisoners were relegated if they could not work on the assembly line in Mittelwerk.'

; ...On this probably sufficient is if I'm to only further mentioning from the reasons why I discovered that Pisckiewicz (-98) for a so informative. Indeed a rather intresssant read due because that 'bio' also deals w. the said post-war 'connexions' of von Braun's. (Actually it mostly develops to tell about that. Despite that the Pisckiewicz's book does reflect a certain...say, has a somewhat, slightly 'old-fashioned appeal' from.) ; But, for examples, it also mentions from the many who by that 1950s seemed from expressed their great gratitudes for an expertise them received from that von Braun. Those - like now renown - included, ao, fx Walt Disney. In the design and help at building of his 'space centers', or for the realisation from those sections devoted for that, in his (earliest) amusement-parks. (Disney, from his praises to is quoted at the page 83 in book, fx.) ; And it contains the similar remarks made by several other 'celebrities' from that said period, as well. ...While those by fx Kennedy and Eisenhower, perhaps, not for so much 'raise the eyebrows'. Not at least fromafter any prior 'learnings' about how much also there was the similarity in between the described late World War years nazi- and in the post-war years (massively) grown US-weapons industries.

(Smght that what one can't much avoid of to recognize when reading - by now – about these early 'phases' in the rocket-, 'space-' and war-industries. Their common 'early origins' from before and after those war-years.) ---------

Anyway, the impression is that because of the said apparent 'near proximity' in time – Also there a comprable similarity in those many ('alarmingsfull', potentially disasters-filled), risks that were taken by both 'super-powers' in their 'convergent' competition-fronts at that era. Ie the huge risks in an early developments of their constant built nuclear war-arsenals. – And, in the 'space-projects', that'd also started to their rapid advance onwards from the 1950s.

(Some among the above referred, nowadays mostly "forgotten" accidents meaning the Sovjet/Russian failed 'test launch' of a space rocket/earth satellite, which happened in the 'BaikonorCosmodrome at Tyuratam' [...read /view also for it's sub-heading; under #environmental impact] by 1960 – the rocket's resulted explosion and burning of it's highly-flammable liquids having caused the 165-personnel 'death count' acc. that Pisckiewiczs.; p. 138-9). ; And, then is mentioned for that the '...United States had its share of pointless tragedy' too, in the obviously nowadays lot better publicly known Apollo-program – As it soonafter some years led then for that successfull most renown Moon-flight. But in the y. 1967, the planned 'first manned flight of an Apollo spacecraft' also failed function properly in it's 'test-pad' which then costed the life's of three astronauts that it was meant carry on the space-orbit. (On the pages btw 165-6 at the book.)

(These too just from mention, or to the anone's interests about.)

; And...well, indeed, that Pisckiewicz makes for quite pointed but still to reads-worth remarks about that described 'neat' co-existence of the two 'high-tech' fronts during the said years. ; Cons from their...somewhat convergent 'evolution', from in being developed 'competitively' by the both super-powers, in that time. It too now feels from almost too resemblant to the more recent newsings of a more lately decades developments in the drone-armamentry and the AI's. I mean, that easily surfaces for the most apparent impressions, from, on about.

-------

Cons those other books (From some quoted at the begins to this section), just a fewsome words should then now suffice on.

(Pic ; beside) ; Of Vampirella-comics (1970s) - Forgotten of which story exactly. I'll add those details later on...(Okey, that from 'The Blood-Gulper', by José Ortix and Flaxman Loew ; orig. on Vampi 35/-74)

That Ashdown (2018...?) I actually read almost earliest to any of these – So it sorts from araised my interest much from the aspects referred. No doubt it too discussin' much what - still nowadays, more or less – might from remained the 'quieted parts' from any World War (the second) war-histories. ; I actually already (from briefly) mentioned most aspects that emerged from my any attentions.

...'Though, (Ashdown), fx then also writes somewhat on the William Shirer's histories in during the post-war decades from 'suppressing' the more favorably view on the German war-years resistence ever from emerging. ; Always interested to know more, I then also devoted some time for some sources cited on it. ...And, Schlabrendorff (,Fabian von, in a book published at 1964; the Secret War Against Hitler; p. 298) seemed written on that other former mentioned ('Allied'/British?) postwar-era historian, Wheeler-Bennett, that from his 'judgement' the 'worth' by the 'plotters' – ie in overall, his estimate about the value of a German war-time resistence – was to equally negative. (At least acc. his book The Nemesis of Power.) On which Wheeler-Bennett seems to have expressed, or from;

"...had described what he calls the 'pitiable performance' of these men before the 'Peoples Court'. He charges that they 'did not present even that degree of courageous riposte which was permitted to them.' This charge is unjust, and, as we shall see, untrue. It is, however, a good illustration of the tremendous part success plays in the lives of men. Nothing, indeed, 'succeeds like success.' The successfull man is forgiven even the most questionable action anf behavior while the man who fails is subject to contempt and merciless criticism. The men of July 20 [1944] were failures, and were widely judged and condemned on that basis alone. " (Schlabrendorff; 298)

Which, by after these previous reads felt from like for quite 'just' an estimate. (Fromafter that Stauffenberg-plot failed – that from to assassinate Hitler, by the now famous day from July 20^th, -44 – in the "trials", or to the direct consequent arranged accompanying purges, acc. the usual estimate there was some '5,000' put on for their deaths. Of the 'involved' civilians and army personnels. Amongst the involved were some involved the less, and some from more. Obviously some not necessarily at all.)

But from most parts to that, in overall, one seems to get the quite comprihensive coverings via reading of that Ashdown, too.

; Also (Ashdown) writes, by somewhat, on the destructibility of those late war-years mass-bombings, over Germany's interland. - And also from, how an 'impenetrable' 'Wall of Silence', was then during the latter war-years engineered w. the demand to a country's 'unconditional surrender', from condemning it's inhabitants resultant "to die in masses" to those bombings. - By which 'process' was by earliest established the Europe's post-war 'divide'. At least one does think that it, indeed, must've represented the first 'phases' at the felling from later more infamous 'Iron curtain'. - In the meetings where from post-war Europe 'borders' was first decided by a 'few old men, w. the wine glasses in hand' (Ie, by the Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill.) ; But all else from cons that, then, would appear beyond our any means and spaces to this writing. (Or from any writings about, actually...) -----------

'Antediluvian Berlin...And, Wien' ; ...That 'Missie' (Marie) Vassiltchikov's [1917-1978] 'Berlin-diaries' also, of course, proved for an equally good a reading. Or more from, due because from it's cultural value as a 'contemporary' source, originally written during that 2^nd world war.

Or, by anycases, despite my few (above) notings cons those parts that seem excluded/missing of the time-line it covers: The diary is as well said to appear/representing the sole (surviving?) source that was written in the near circle from the 'plotters'. So is noted from it's contained 'first hand' descriptions of the background from that "Stauffenberg"-attentage. (The 'problematic' issue, like I perhaps formerly said, being that the 'entries' sre in lacking from as much as from the midst of the year -41 until to as far as for middle by -43.) ; Can still give one a much 'better ideas about', than any modern 'Valkyrien'-movies do – So I noted. (Whether in the latter mentioned that even then ever was even meant from. If to only to say the least, from concerning that aspect.)

...However, to these ends I then here make any remarkings 'bout the diary's contents for shortly. Could've basically selected for the above citations of the several various other places, entries from. - It's relative wordysome, like most diaries. ; Guess, that apparent, even without any of the said emphasizes on the 'plotters' inner circles, for it's also usual found out most rewarding as well from the cultural and historical importance. Vassiltchikov's ('Missie') observations also are most part rather balanced in tone...while there's sometimes also some 'intensified' scenes, as often expectable due the typical horror from war-descriptions, conditions is. One would guess. But mostly it succeeds to trasnsmit the impressions of the period, I'd say, rather 'authentical'. On the ruins, the hunger, escapees, air raids – etc. While on fx about jews is, like also usual is, often is quite little said.

Words like 'ghastly', or even 'antediluvian' sometimes make the appearance. Which is, actually a very descriptive...for as a 'phrasing'. Anything from those prior-war, and even more so, from the late and 'middle'-war years - Much in the plain 'incomprehensibility' of those times, by their present 'finding', gives that sort like impression. Already during that rapidly advancing 1950s those periods had become for the little "nostalgic" decades. Despite all the horrors that then still were 'freshly' felt, and for well-remembered.

No doubt from the very exhaust of the war years – But perhaps, also, at some levels from a post-after need for (inconscious) emphasize on some aspects, there is also some 'briefer' gaps in the entries. Or by occasionally merely only describing to the more regular 'incidents'. (After all, it still covers the longer period in time. In the somewhat varying living locations, past some to the most anxied and disturbing years from.)

; Also often she captures the very essentials to her 'notings.' (About anything. Such as at the following few sentences: 'Today I went to the Polizeipräsidium to pick some pictures of the bombing damage. As the sight of the mangled bodies is considered the demoralizing of all, these are not available to he general public. ...'; p. 134.) ----------

...But soforth, as I already said, it well worth the reads too - decided this followed as the further addtional quotation only because there some example to those 'ghastly' contents on it. While not so characteristic to the diary itself, rather characteristic for a collapse of the 'order', smght that the contents from latter pages also lot do reflect.

(...The entry's timing reads: '12. March [-45] A dark day for Vienna');

"...Not only is here the shortage of coffins, but friends and relatives must dig graves themselves, as all the gravesiggers have been called up. As it is, in many places there are piles of improvised coffins waiting for burial. As long as the winter lasts, this is merely weird, but God knows what it will be like when spring comes and the snow melts. The other day a solemn funeral of a defunct colonel took place. There was even a military band. Just as the coffin was being lowered into the grave, the lid slipped and the face of a gray-haired woman appeared. The ceremony continued !" (; p. 258)

...And by anyhow, soforth, suppose now it for the very place to us ending this particular 'chapter' in the post.

Ultimately. Decisively.

(Finally.) [; G.U.J.]

-------------------
( The latest posts! - @ Mulskinner Blog @ )

----------
Powered by ScribeFire.

The Mule Skinner Blog

Flowers

Welcome!

Tags

Search This Blog

Banchee

Dejah Thoris

Blog-texts

Elsewhere...

We also recommend:

Ocimum basilicum

Purple-Edged Copper

...Street art /a small Poster ;

Mule Skinner Citations

[Fig 2.; p.9]

Notification:

About Me

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

9/16/20

Gardening Post II (2020) ; Or, “Hello, Big One !”, ...And more (from), 'with Love an Promotion'.

No comments:

('Footer')

The Mule Skinner Blog

Flowers

Welcome!

Tags

Search This Blog

Banchee

Dejah Thoris

Blog-texts

Elsewhere...

Subscribe (Rss)

We also recommend:

Ocimum basilicum

Purple-Edged Copper

...Street art /a small Poster ;

Mule Skinner Citations

[Fig 2.; p.9]

Notification:

About Me

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

9/16/20

Gardening Post II (2020) ; Or, “Hello, Big One !”, ...And more (from), 'with Love an Promotion'.

No comments:

('Footer')