#America’s Great | Extinct Beers

[xtruss]

A Lager Darkly — In Search of Culmbacher, One of America’s Great, Extinct Beers

— Words By Michael Stein | Illustrations By Colette Holston | Published: March 17, 2021

A recipe for Culmbacher lives on in archival perpetuity in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Introduced to American drinkers in the second half of the 19th century, the Lager style was born in Kulmbach, Germany before it found a receptive audience overseas. As its popularity increased in the ensuing decades, scores of breweries started making it, from New York to California.

According to source material, the original, Old World Kulmbacher was a dark beer. It had a pronounced malt flavor and a sweetish taste. For American brewers, it had Bavarian characteristics, in that it was brewed along the lines of a Bavarian Lager, with a strong starting gravity. Perhaps the greatest variation between the German original and the American adaptation is that U.S.-made Culmbacher was sometimes brewed to be a near beer—that is, high in extract and low in alcohol.

Borrowing a page from Germany, American brewers sold copious quantities of kegs to the beer-drinking public in biergartens adjacent to their breweries, or elsewhere across town. In Washington, D.C., where the historic Washington Brewery Company once produced large volumes of the style, numerous biergartens were run by German immigrants. Another was run by a Frenchman who, every July 14, staged a reenactment of the storming of the Bastille. And down by the docks, where there is still a seafood market today, customers would crush foaming seidels as they cracked hard-shelled Chesapeake crabs.

But for all the ways that Culmbacher reflected the push-and-pull of German-American beer culture and identity, the style was not to last. Ultimately, the nativism and xenophobic sentiment that sprung up around World War I meant that German beer traditions began to fall out of favor. Later, the hope that Culmbacher would weather Prohibition was a fanciful one, as most breweries that produced it ultimately closed. Today there is little trace of the style, beyond the recipe for “Kulmbacher” (it was spelled with a “C” in some places, and in others with a “K”) that remains in the National Museum of American History’s archives, on a single, typewritten page.

Still, discovering this trace—knowing that a shadow of this beer existed, even in obscurity—convinced me that Culmbacher could, and deserved to be, revived. When I read the recipe for the extinct near beer, I knew then, there in the archives in 2016, that I had to convince a brewer to help me recreate it.

Two Countries, Two Recipes

As early as 1831, Kulmbach began exporting beer to Saxony and other parts of Germany. Around 1863 and 1864, Kulmbach was exporting as much as 96,000 hectoliters of beer—or over 81,000 barrels. In 1868, the U.S. and Australia were listed as export markets. By 1896, Kulmbach was producing 600,000 hectoliters of Kulmbacher, or over half a million BBLs.

Beer historian Ron Pattinson has, in his collection, an 1879 Kulmbacher Export recipe made with two German malts, Munich and Carafa. The German recipe yielded a beer at 6.2% alcohol by volume, which was typical: In the 1880s, analysis of the Bavarian export showed it ranged from 5.2% to 6.6% ABV. (Once it arrived in the U.S., the style diminished in strength in many cases—Milwaukee’s Blatz Brewing Company, for instance, brewed a Culmbacher at 4.75% ABV.)

There are still many mysteries surrounding Kulmbach’s eponymous style, including its spelling. To begin: Is “Culmbacher” just an anglicized version of its name?

“I would have said ‘Culmbacher’ was an anglicized version, except I’ve seen a Heineken version with that spelling,” Pattinson says. “Which leaves me wondering where the hell it came from.”

“Beers were named after their hometown but they came to be brands and styles brewed elsewhere as well,” says Mark Dredge, author of A Brief History of Lager. “I don’t know why the ‘K’ or the ‘C’ in the spelling. Perhaps it was due to not wanting trademark infringements, as there were plenty at the end of the 1800s.” As an example, he notes the seemingly small but important differences between “Pils” and “Pilsener”: “Heineken was one of the first to add the extra ‘e’ in Pilsner, so maybe that’s why they had a ‘Culmbacher,’” he says. The difference between Dutch “Bok” and German “Bock” is another form of this discrepancy.

Further complicating our understanding of Kulmbacher is the fact that it could be brewed as a very low-alcohol near beer. In the 1920s, Pabst’s Kulmbacher contained less than .5% ABV. As for the recipe I found in the Smithsonian’s archives, which was donated by Walter Voigt—the son of German immigrants who was born in 1906, and who was a member of the Master Brewers Association of the Americas—the piece of paper reads in all capitals: “Malt to be used for various types of near beer.”

Voigt’s Kulmbacher recipe contains four malts: high-dried, pale, caramel, and black. Missing from the recipe are hops, corn, and yeast. As Pattinson puts it, the recipe “looks to have been adapted to U.S. malts. You wouldn’t see high-dried in Germany. The equivalent would be Munich malt.” He goes on to speculate that it “could also be that they had added different malts to give the near beer more body. Body might well be the reason for skipping the adjuncts, too.”

Dark Lager's Bright Rise

In Bavaria in 1863, master glassmaker Simon Hering began brewing on a large scale. His brewery, Export-Bier-Brauerei Simon Hering, started exporting beer to the United States in 1864, during the Civil War.

Hering was the first German brewer I could find who exported Kulmbacher to the U.S. However, there seemed to be earlier awareness of the style: In a German-language newspaper in the Library of Congress, an 1861 article published in Minnesota states that Benzberg’s Dampfbrauerei made Lager in St. Paul, and that it was as good as Culmbacher or Nürnberger.

“Eventually, as the years wore on, the U.S. began to import less Lager in favor of brewing it at home. That change happened gradually, as German-American brewers began to produce their own versions of traditional styles. ”

It was becoming common in the mid 19th century for exported German Lager to be bottled and sold stateside. Such beer wouldn’t have made the trip to America without demand. The largest contingent of immigrants in the Union army were German soldiers. Kulmbacher appealed to those immigrants as a product they could buy from the old country, in the new one.

Eventually, as the years wore on, the U.S. began to import less Lager in favor of brewing it at home. That change happened gradually, as German-American brewers began to produce their own versions of traditional styles.

In 1875, a saloon owner in Wheeling, West Virginia began his Lager beer-bottling business, and would deliver pints and quarts throughout the city. The same dealer advertised Kulmbacher in 1880. In 1889, a Pittsburgh brewer manufactured Culmbacher and Vienna Lagers for city use. And in 1889, the Washington Brewery Company sold more Lager in D.C. than all breweries currently operating in the District today: 36,000 BBLs of beer in 1889, versus a combined 35,857 BBLs from 12 breweries in 2019. By 1900, the Washington Brewery Company boasted that its Culmbacher equaled the finest imported beer. This would become a common claim for American brewers who wished to convince the beer-buying public that their product was just as good as, if not better than, German imports.

As domestic Lager proliferated at the turn of the 20th century, American breweries made dark beers from coast to coast. In its heyday, Culmbacher was brewed everywhere from New York City and Washington, D.C. to Milwaukee and San Jose. By 1909, Kulmbacher and Pilsner were even available at the Criterion Hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii. The beer was likely the imported article, though Honolulu did have its own brewery in 1909, making Pale Lager in the German style.

Today, former Culmbacher producers like Pabst and Blatz are better known than their historical competition. But in addition to businesses like the Washington Brewery Company, little-known breweries like the Fredericksburg Brewery in San Jose and the Lion Brewery in New York City also manufactured Culmbacher.

For Relaxing Times

In the early days of Culmbacher’s spread, the style was advertised mostly on draft. If you wanted it in Los Angeles in 1884, it would cost you five cents a glass for the Kulmbacher Lager brewed by the Fredericksburg Brewery, which could be quaffed at both Jake Phillipi’s Buena Vista or the Grand Central Hotel saloon.

The later transition from the saloon to the biergarten likely allowed brewers to sell more beer. In many cases, it benefited drinkers, too. At the Washington Brewery Company, for instance, the brewery’s biergarten was right next to the brewery. The Culmbacher manufactured, cellared, and eventually sold on draft there never traveled more than a hundred yards.

The concept of drinking for pleasure, rather than intoxication, is commonly credited to the influence of German beer culture. And if it was American to have drinking in saloons limited to men, it was German to have women drinking in biergartens. In 1885 in D.C., one saloon—Kozel’s Saloon on 14th Street—expanded to the back of a lot and took over a second floor. The second floor became a special room for women patrons.

Even if American societal norms frowned on women drinking Culmbacher in public, a case of beer for home use could be delivered in unmarked wagons, lest your neighbor judge. Washington Brewery Company encouraged consumers to “keep your ice box well supplied” with Culmbacher, which was also sold in 24-pint or 12-quart bottles. By the end of the 19th century, the brewery was marketing directly to women: Its beer was pure. It was as good as the imported article. It had double strength. And it was the best of all tonics. In fact, it was unsurpassed as a tonic. Alongside claims that it was calming to a woman’s nerves and stimulating to her appetite, depictions of women drinkers were featured in its ads.

“Double strength” here implies an alcoholic beer, at a time when we know some Lagers were 3% ABV and that the export beer coming out of Kulmbach was 6% ABV. While the Washington Brewery Company’s Culmbacher might not have had the same recipe as the Kulmbacher in the National Museum of American History’s archives, there is no doubt it was advertised to the public as “heavy in body.”

According to Truth, a London periodical in 1889, “American lager beer breweries possess great advantages over others, as thin light beer is the national drink of the United States, and suitable to the climate.” While thin light beer may have been the national drink, it had competition in the rich, potent Dark Lager sold across the country.

Several breweries that made Culmbacher, in addition to other Lager styles, were successful enough that they made attractive entities for acquisition. In 1889, the owner of the Washington Brewery Company was paid $400,000 for his brewery—over $11 million in today’s money. Similarly, in 1891, Valentin Blatz Brewing Company in Milwaukee sold for $3 million to a London investment group, or for between $80 and $90 million today. And while there’s no proof that these breweries were bought directly because of their Culmbacher production, they were able to build their reputations—and their fortunes—off the back of such Lager styles.

By Prohibition, an irrevocable transition had occurred from Kulmbacher as an import, bottled stateside, to Culmbacher, a domestically brewed beer. In the course of five decades, the recipe had also changed: The beer had gone from a strong Bavarian beer brewed with German malt, to, in some cases, a non-alcoholic near beer brewed with American-grown barley.

While the Washington Brewery Company went out of business in 1917, it is noteworthy that Blatz brewed the style even after Prohibition’s repeal. Blatz’s Kulmbacher won silver at the first-ever judged Great American Beer Festival in 1987, in the American Lagers category. At the time, the brewery was owned by G. Heileman Brewing Co. of La Crosse, Wisconsin.

Evil, Traitors, Spirs

Lagers remain America’s most popular beers today. But there was a point in time when temperance advocates and anti-immigration backers viewed them as too German.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Germans still made up the largest ethnic group among immigrants to the United States, as they had done throughout the 19th century. Between 1820 and World War I, nearly 6 million Germans arrived in the United States.

“‘They [Germans] changed America, notably its own beer-drinking culture, and America changed them right back. Naturally that led to some friction ranging from friendly to violent. And for all their ‘palatability’ to white, Anglo-American sensibilities, they could never seem to fully shake nativist animus either. Anti-German xenophobia during World War I showed that.’” — Brian Alberts, Historian

“They [Germans] changed America, notably its own beer-drinking culture, and America changed them right back,” says historian Brian Alberts. “Naturally that led to some friction ranging from friendly to violent. And for all their ‘palatability’ to white, Anglo-American sensibilities, they could never seem to fully shake nativist animus either. Anti-German xenophobia during World War I showed that.”

Anti-German sentiments flared leading up to World War I. From 1850 to 1870, Germans largely gained acceptance from white Americans. But, Alberts says, Germans “were the ‘other’ in a predominately Anglo-American society because [they thought] their neighborhoods stunk of sausage and Limburger cheese, and they let the Lager beer pour every Sunday.”

According to Alberts, Sunday festivities, parades, and biergarten picnics “seemed sacrilegious to some.” These modern aspects of German-American beer culture were regularly celebrated, but the xenophobia associated with bringing your family to the biergarten was often glossed over.

During World War I, that xenophobia extended to food and drink. Sauerkraut was rebranded as “liberty cabbage,” and hamburgers became Salisbury steak. Symphonies were banned from performing Beethoven. Teaching German was struck from many curriculums and angry mobs attacked German-American citizens. Violence resulted in beatings, or even murder.

In 1917, the Trading With the Enemy Act legalized seizing citizens’ businesses and livelihoods. New York brewer George Ehret’s mansion and brewery were both seized. At the time, his Hell Gate Brewery was the biggest in New York City. His estate, property, and possessions, worth $40 million, were all taken.

I asked Maureen Ogle, historian and author of Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer, which had had a bigger impact on German-Americans’ lives—the state-sanctioned xenophobia or the daily harassments they experienced. “Probably the state-sanctioned attacks, because those, in effect, gave regular folks ‘permission’ to act violently towards German-Americans,” she says. “Certainly the news, national, that the AG [attorney general] had gone after brewers’ property affirmed a belief that German-Americans were evil, traitors, spies, etc. Never mind that they were American citizens.”

Even citizenship could not save German-Americans from having their property seized, being beaten, or in the case of at least one man, being hung. Robert Prager was a German immigrant who was lynched in Collinsville, Illinois in 1918. Prager had been a mine worker, but was denied membership in the United Mine Workers of America. The dispute ultimately led to his death at the hands of an angry mob of hundreds. The marauders made Prager kiss the American flag and sing patriotic songs before ultimately taking his life. There were no convictions in Prager’s murder, and the 12 men indicted walked away from the trial.

Of course, angry mobs have used terrorism, and lynching, for centuries in America, with Black people making up the vast majority of the victims. Multiple anti-lynching bills have passed the House and the Senate, but never at the same time. The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, first introduced in 1918, passed the House of Representatives in 1922. And while the first anti-lynching bill was introduced in Congress in 1900, still to this day no bill has been passed by both houses and signed.

The Comeback of Culmbacher

It’s tricky to pinpoint why Culmbacher was lost to history. In the U.S., multiple factors led to its decline, while according to Pattinson, Kulmbacher isn’t even brewed in Kulmbach today. Other traditional German styles can be found in breweries in Kulmbach, he says, but “no one really brews a beer in what I would call the ‘Kulmbacher style’—something that’s 16 degrees Plato, virtually black, and loads and loads of hops in it.”

Perhaps that’s why, when I saw that typewritten recipe in the museum archive, I knew I had to at least attempt to bring it back. So I reached out to the master brewer who helped me take my first homebrew recipe commercial in 2012: Favio Garcia, the director of brewing operations at Dynasty Brewing Company in Ashburn, Virginia.

“‘Certainly the news, national, that the AG [attorney general] had gone after brewers’ property affirmed a belief that German-Americans were evil, traitors, spies, etc. Never mind that they were American citizens.’” — Maureen Ogle, Historian

Garcia first brewed a Kulmbacher in 2016, sticking entirely to the historical malt bill outlined in the Smithsonian’s archives. Its requirements were 11 lbs of high-dried malt, 33 lbs of pale malt, 3 lbs of caramel malt, and 1 lb of black malt. In 2016, this was translated to 11 lbs of Vienna malt, 33 lbs of pale malt, 3 lbs of Caramunich malt, and 1 lb of Carafa Special 3. We hopped it with the American Empire hop, which originated in Sweden but whose new stock was propagated on a farm on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

The resulting beer was historically accurate with its malt proportions, but it wasn’t dark, and it wasn’t the immaculate beer Garcia is renowned for. The 2-BBL batch had a bitterness that clashed with the black and caramel malts; the resulting beer came across as a dry Lager. It was not the full-bodied, sweetish, rich Bavarian beer described in the source material.

In 2020, Garcia returned to the recipe. In addition to a mild tweaking of the recipe from the archives, Garcia also came armed with more primary research conducted by Ron Pattinson. He employed a decoction mash with two steps, and used German and Czech hops instead of American.

Garcia also selected Virginia malt from Murphy & Rude Malting Company. In the mash tun, Pilsner and crystal malts mingled with Vienna malt, made from a 2-row variety of barley called Calypso. It was grown on the Brann & King Farms in Christiansburg, Virginia. Later, he added black malt to color the wort. In the end, Garcia used 660 lbs of Pilsner malt, 300 lbs of Vienna malt, 50 pounds of crystal 40, and 50 pounds of Carafa Special 3.

Where the first batch of Garcia’s Kulmbacher was pale brown, the new iteration looked like a Stout. There was an unmistakable German and Czech hop character to the beer, and it had a perceived sweetness on the first sip, followed by a subtle bitterness and a pleasing dryness on the finish. It was a wonderful expression of fresh malt, and featured a deep bready character that was somehow sweet, full, dry, and very digestible all at once. At 6.2% ABV, it was stronger than most of the Lagers Garcia brews.

The beer, Love Vigilantes, is named after the New Order song. It was a three-part collaboration beer with Dynasty; Dulles, Virginia’s Ocelot Brewing Company; and my beverage research firm, Lost Lagers. My greater goal with the beer is to bring back something stuck in beer history that deserves a place in the beer world today.

My bias is shaped by my father, who came to New York City as a refugee from war-torn Prague. When he came, he only had his mother. His father, a Jewish concentration-camp survivor, couldn’t get a visa. So Petr Stein became Peter Stein, and a boy who lived in a room the size of a closet with his mother wound up becoming a doctor of sociology, a published author, and the director of a graduate sociology program featuring Holocaust and genocide studies. My grandfather experienced the loss of his family in death camps while he survived his interment in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. But he had his life, and his wife and son had visas, and eventually they were reunited in New York.

In spaces where we have the ability to ask hard questions, be it about beer or what we believe to be right or wrong in terms of immigration, we, humans, have endless opportunities to improve ourselves.

“Kulmbacher” on paper in the archives, as it sat for the better part of a century, was made better with its second modern brewing. And its story cannot be told without acknowledging its origins, and the people who made and shaped the style as it evolved. I hope we can all find our own time-lost Kulmbacher—that we can discover and revive vestiges from the past that still speak to, and make sense of, the world today.

— Michael Stein is President of Lost Lagers, Washington, DC’s premier beverage research firm. His historic beers have been served at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and the Polish Ambassador’s residence. Senior Staff Writer at DCBeer, his work appears in Washington City Paper, Brewery History Journal, and CIDERCRAFT Magazine.

— Source Material: Delving into the archives, digging up artifacts, and finding voices in the dark, this series illuminates old traditions that we're still part of today (whether we know it or not). Beer's past shapes its present and future. Follow along as these historians and writers take us back to the source.

— GoodBeerHunting.Com | September 10, 2023

[peashooter85]

What were these old timey jiggly machines and were they supposed to do?

Around the mid 19th century a popular medical theory was the idea that massage was good for health as it strengthened muscles through "passive exercise" and flushed the body of toxins. At the time Europe and North America was undergoing the Industrial Revolution, and there were many inventors who sought to invent new technologies to treat illness and care for patients. One of the pioneers of "mechanotherapy" was a Swedish physician named Dr. Gustav Zander, who invented series of exercise and health machines between 1850 and the turn of the century. Many of these machines actually were quite brilliant and would be the forefathers of modern exercise and weightlifting machines common in gyms today.

Among his many inventions were mechanical belt vibrating machines that were to take the place of human hands for delivering massages to patients.

Dr. Zander intended his belt vibrators to be used for patients who were badly crippled, injured, paralyzed, or bed bound in order to maintain muscle tone and prevent muscle atrophy. However around the early 20th century medical and fitness quacks began to invent and patent their own machines claiming that they could either cure any disease or that they could spot reduce fat and build muscle. They especially became popular as a muscle building and fat removing machine due to the allure of being able "exercise" without actually having to exercise. Many companies who manufactured these machines marketed to this allure.

The main theory behind these machines, or at least the main theory marketed by exercise belt manufacturers was that the vibration caused by the machine would physically breakdown fat and flush it out of the body. Thus loop the belt around your waist and it would break down that beer belly giving you a toned core. Loop it around your chest and it will reduce those man boobs. Loop it around your bum and it will reduce your fat bum giving you a muscular bum. This of course is all a load of humbuggery, and at best all the these machines did was make people look silly in the gym.

Regardless of their effectiveness, these vibrating belt exercise machines skyrocketed in popularity, especially the 1920's with increased access to electricity and an unprecedented boom in wealth. They could be found in every gym, health spa, and even in people's homes. Popularity declined during the Great Depression and World War II as declining wealth during the depression and lack of resources during the war stunted production and availability. They made a comeback in the 1950's and maintained some popularity into the 1960's. By 1970 they finally died out and never came back into popularity again.

Ha! Just kidding. While old timey belt vibrating belt exercise machines have gone extinct, today in the Year of our Lord 2022 there are a wide variety of vibrating and electro-muscle stimulating machines which claim to be able to turn your flabby belly into six pack abs, give you bulging biceps, and a give you a firm butt all without any effort. The only difference are these devices are much smaller, much cheaper, and can be ordered with the click of a mouse. In our new digital age, what was once old timey humbuggery has merely evolved into modern day fuckery.

[just-dreaming-marvel]

CHAPTER THREE - THE AFTERPARTY

LEGACY: A Tony Stark Daughter Story

MASTERLIST

< previous

Word Length: 1,800ish 

Summary: Ultron makes an appearance at the Team’s afterparty.

Soon the guests had all left and it was just the Team, Rhodey, Maria, Helen Cho, and I sitting around a coffee table. Everyone had a drink in hand and Thor’s hammer was sitting on top of the table. 

“But it’s a trick.” Clint stated, talking about lifting Thor’s hammer.

“Oh, no,” Thor started, “It’s much more than that.”

“Uh, whosoever be he worthy shall haveth the power!” Clint tried to mock the voice of, well, I don’t even know. Maybe Thor? “Whatever man! It’s a trick.” 

“Please be my guest,” Thor said as he pointing to the hammer.

“Come on,” Tony urged, trying to get Clint to give it a shot.

“Really?” Clint questioned.

“Yeah!” Thor said. Clint stood up and started making his way towards the hammer.

“Oh, this is gonna be beautiful,” Rhodey quietly commented.

I smirked. “Should I be recording this?” I quietly asked Rhodey. He gave a small chuckle.

“Clint, you’ve had a tough week, we won’t hold it against you if you can’t get it up.” Tony teased. The rest of us laughed.

“You know I’ve seen this before, right?” Clint reminded Thor. Clint grabbed onto the hammer and failed to lift it. “I still don’t know how you do it.”

“Smell the silent judgement?” Tony continued to tease.

“Please, Stark,” Clint said, motioning to the hammer, “By all means.” Tony stood up and unbuttoned his suit jacket. 

“Oh, no.” I put my hand to my face and shook my head.

“Here we go.” Nat said.

“Never one to shrink from an honest challenge.” Tony said nudging Clint to the side with his shoulder. Tony slipped his hand threw the leather strap at the end of the handle. “It’s physics.”

“Physics!” Bruce repeated.

“Right, so, if I lift it, I.. I then rule Asgard?” Asked Tony.

“Yes, of course.” Thor answered.

“Bailey, start packing your bags.” Tony said. 

“Okay,” I sarcastically replied. “Whatever you say, Dad.”

“I will be re-instituting Prima Nocta.” Tony said.

“Dad, no!”

Tony smirked. He grunted as tried to lift the hammer. It didn’t budge. “I’ll be right back.” He jogged off and quickly came back with an Iron Man gauntlet on. 

He tried to lift the hammer again and failed. Rhodey then got up and put on a War Machine gauntlet. 

“Are you even pulling?” Rhodey asked, as they were trying together.

“Are you on my team?” Tony shot back.

“Just represent! Pull!” 

“Alright, let’s go!” They both tried and failed. 

Bruce then got up and tried to lift it. He roared as if he was trying to change into the Hulk but failed. Nat grinned while the rest of us looked at him like he’s crazy. Steve then stood up to try, rolling up his sleeves on his way. 

“Let’s go, Steve,” Tony cheers, “No pressure.”

“Come on, Cap.” Rhodey joined in.

“You got this Steve!” I joined in.

Steve started to pull on the hammer. It moved a bit and I saw Thor’s smug face quickly turn down into a frown. Steve tried again but failed. I’m pretty sure that he could lift it if he wanted to. He’s Captain America for crying out loud! I think he was just sparing Thor’s feelings. 

“Nothing.” Thor chuckled in relief. 

“Widow?” Bruce looked at Nat.

“Oh, no no.” She replied. “That’s not a question I need answered.” 

“Bailey?” Steve asked, leaning into his hand. 

“Same here,” I answered. “I could care less about picking up the hammer.”

“All deference to the man who wouldn’t be king, but it’s rigged.” Tony stated.

“You bet your ass.” Clint said, hitting Tony’s back on his way to get another beer. 

“Steve, he said a bad language word.” Maria said.

“Did you tell everyone about that?” Steve asked Tony. 

“I wasn’t told about it,” I said, giving Steve a friendly smile. 

Tony ignored Steve and I’s comments. “The handle’s imprinted, right? Like a security code. Whosoever is carrying Thor’s fingerprints is, I think, the literal translation?”

“Yes.” Thor said, as he stood up. “well that’s, uh, that’s a very, very interesting theory. I have a simpler one.” He picked up the hammer and started to toss it. “You’re all not worthy.” 

“Boo.” We all yelled.

Then a loud screeching noise starts to pierce our ears. We all wince and I quickly cover my ears. As it faded, Tony pulled out his phone to see what could be causing it. Slow metal footsteps echoed throughout the room before a robotic voice spoke.

“Worthy…” It began. “No… How could you be worthy? You’re all killers.”

We all stood up and turned towards the voice. It looked like it was coming from a wrecked Iron Legion suit. I back upped so that I was closer to Steve.

“Stark,” Steve sternly said.

“JARVIS,” Tony called, trying to get the AI’s attention.

“I’m sorry, I was asleep.” The voice said. “Or.. I was a dream.” 

Tony was tapping at his device. “Reboot, Legionnaire OS, we got a buggy suit.”

“There was this terrible noise…” The voice continued. “and I was tangled in.. in.. strings. I had to kill the other guy. He was a good guy.”

“You killed someone?” Steve asked, stepping in front of me protectively.

“Wouldn’t have been my first call.” The voice was definitely coming from the suit. “But, down in the real world we’re faced with ugly choices.”

“Who sent you?” Thor asked.

“I see a suit of armor around the world.” Tony’s voice echoed through the speakers around us. 

I quickly looked over at Tony, he wasn’t giving anything away to me. “Dad?” I questioned.

“Ultron.” Bruce said. Tony and Bruce shared a worried glance. 

“In the flesh,” The suit said. “Or, no, not yet. Not this chrysalis. But I’m ready. I’m on a mission.” Thor gripped his hammer as Maria pulled out a gun from her thigh.

“What mission?” Nat asked.

“Peace in our time.” Ultron answered.

Suddenly, the other Iron Legion suits came breaking through the walls and started attacking us. 

 Steve quickly grabbed me and flipped over the coffee table to block some of the incoming suits. But as he did that, two suits hit the table and we went flying back. 

 Maria started shooting and Thor began hitting the suits with his hammer. Steve and I looked at each other. He gently put his hand on my forehead and wiped off some blood. He looked down at his hand and then back up to me.

“I was going to ask if you were okay,” he said. “But it seems you’ve already healed yourself.”

“Yeah,” I pushed myself off the ground. “It’s a great trick.”

I stood up and quickly looked around. Nat had rushed Bruce to the other side of the bar, probably trying to keep him from turning green. I looked the other way to see that Tony and Rhodey were trying to head for their own suits, but were stopped by some Iron Legion suits. Rhodey was thrown through the glass floor and down to the next level.

“Rhodey!” Maria yelled, as she shot at a suit.

I quickly started running for one of the suits. I’ve been around them long enough, plus helped designed them, to know their weaknesses. I jumped over Clint as he slid under a table and into the book shelf.

 I leapt onto the back of the suit and tore its head off. It fell and I quickly tore its reactor out. I turned around a took another two suits out before one grabbed me by the neck, choking me. I tried to get loose, but nothing was working. It chucked me and I flew threw the window, landing outside on the balcony. 

“Bailey!” I heard multiple voices shout. 

I looked up to see the chaos that was still happening inside. Tony grabbing a fondue stick and running up the stairs. 

Thor and Steve stopping a suit from attacking Helen Cho. 

Then Tony leaping from the top of the stairs and onto a flying suit, trying to stop it with the fondue stick he had grabbed. 

“Stark!” Steve yelled out, asking the man to do something with his tone.

“One sec, one sec!” Tony yelled back, still flying around on the back of a rouge suit.

I slowly pushed myself up and brushed off the glass. Running back inside, I aimed for the Iron Legions main control room, only to be stopped by the Ultron bot himself. I tried to get out of his grip but, for some reason, the robot was stronger than my super strength. 

“You’re a special one, aren’t you?” Ultron said. “The files on you are… interesting.”

“Let me go!” I yelled, trying to fight him.

“I’m one of the few who’s read them all the way through… Interesting…” The suit continued. “There are secrets in them, both HYDRA and SHIELD. Things you’ll want to know. And I can tell you them.”

“Cap!” I heard Clint yell. I glanced over my shoulder to see Clint throw Steve his shield and Steve dismember the last Iron Legion. No one had noticed that Ultron was holding onto me yet. 

“That was dramatic,” Ultron stated, watching what just unfolded. “I’m sorry, I know you mean well. You just didn’t think it through.” The bot shook its head. “You want to protect the world, but you don’t want it to change. How is humanity saved if it’s not allowed to… evolve?” The suits eyes looked right into mine.

“Let her go,” Tony said, anger and worry laced his voice as he sat, worn out and tense, on the stairs. 

“Don’t worry. I won’t hurt her. She’s meant for bigger and better things.” The suits hand pushed some stray hair out of my face. I tried to step away, but it just pulled me closer to it. “It would be a shame for her to go to waste.” The suit looked back up to the Avengers that were standing around the room. “There’s only one path to peace: the Avengers’ extinction.” Thor suddenly threw his hammer at Ultron and smashed him to pieces. The grip he had on me was gone and I quickly held onto the wrist that he had grabbed. It stung a little, but I could feel it healing. Though the body destroyed, Ultron sung. “I had strings, but now I’m free.”

next >

[elbiotipo]

América Invicta

The Capaq Inka still rules the Four Regions. The great temples still cast their shadow over Lake Texoco. About three centuries ago, conquerors from overseas tried, and failed, to impose their rule over these lands.

It is the year 1800 -or so- on the Christian calendar. Much has happened since then.

Tawantinsuyu, the great empire of the Andes, lays claim to the whole of Septentrional America. Its wealth and power unmatched, millions of people of all creeds and nations live on its golden cities. The great city of Qusqu, the Navel Of The World, is the center of culture and trade for the entire continent, its surrounding terraces grow food from all over the empire. Warriors clad in golden armor bearing muskets ride Megatheriums to the farthest reaches of the empire to enforce the will of the Capaq Inka.

Yet the many peoples of the Americas do not bow easily. For the trading cities of the living jungle of the Paranaguazú, the Muisca kingdoms from the highlands of the north, the Carib towns on the warm shores of the Atlantic Ocean, the thousand tribes of the dry forests of Chaqu, the horse riders of windy Patagonia, the Gauchos of the Pampas, the rebellious former colonies of Buen Ayre, Nueva Granada and Recife, the monasteries of the Jesuits, the free Quilombos of former slaves, the mysterious kingdoms of Xingú and the defiant Tamoio Confederation, the rule of the Inka is more of a formality than anything concrete. Roads and tambos made by the great Inkanate connect millions and are full of merchants, explorers, soldiers, wizards, priests and adventurers at the service of many powers (or none), trying to make their fortune in this land.

They are not the only ones on this continent. Up North, the Obsidian Alliance, the successors of the fallen Triple Alliance of the Mexica, try to keep together the disparate city-states of Mesoamerica. The Mayan principalities expand into the volcanic rainforests of the south. The paradisiacal Caribbean Sea is a place of intrigue for Taíno war canoes, European galleons, and African caravels who compete for the rich trade routes. ‘Pirates’ free slaves and raid plantations on the coasts, and their sons and daughters make new lives in freedom. Refugees from the European Wars of Religion inmigrate to the New World to find a place to begin anew. Gauchos and Llaneros herd the giant herds of cattle in the plains, and face off against bizarre spirits and creatures. Grand Treasure Ships from the East (or is it West?) come to the seaports to trade with the rich empires. Jesuit priests roam the imperial roads, preaching the word of Christ and teaching the sciences. Muslim traders call to prayer from miranets rising above the tropical shores. Up the Missisippi grow the cities of the Mound Builders and beyond the heartland of the Obsidian Alliance the dry deserts bloom with powerful civilizations. Uncanny wandering sorcerers travel through the land, full of wisdom and powers so strong that many serve the empires of the continent; others are comfortable tending to the needs of the common people or enhancing their knowledge.

And much remains unknown. Herds of giant animals, supposedly long-extinct, roam the plains of the continent and sleep under its hidden swamps; armored mammals, giant reptiles, elephants completely unlike those in Africa or Asia, majestic feathered serpents… The forests are alive with a thousand spirits, who resist the attempts of greedy men to tame them. The winds seem to talk with their own voice, and old men and women claim to speak for the land itself. Giant sea ‘monsters’ roam the cold seas of the South. Christians testify of great miracles, and many saints, recognized or not, are venerated all over the land. Many tribes, maybe even entire civilizations, are still unknown, hidden by mountains, jungle, or uncanny fog. Explorers hear legends about animal-people and powerful sorcerers, and there is reason to believe them. Sunk treasure galleons are sought by pirates and adventurers. Mysterious books and relics are lost in libraries and palaces.

And in the great cities of the continent, from Qusqu to Tenochtitlán, Maracaibo to Palmares, Quito to Rio de Janeiro, Recife to Buen Ayre, smoky chimneys and glass buildings rise over the old temples and cabildos, powered by strange machines operating by a stranger combination of magic and science, heralding the start of a new era.

It is, indeed, a New World.

...

The mighty Paraná River slowly made way besides the little port town of Corrientes. Winter was ending; the muddy, narriw streets were decorated by a thousand flowers falling from the lapacho trees, every little breeze tinted by pink, yellow and white.

The first sunday of spring slowly winded down.

In the cabildo, the governor of the Argentine Confederation and the curaca of the Four Regions loudly debated about tribute and power and who had most of it, like they always did. The bells of the churches announced the evening service. Fishermen brought the fruits of a long afternoon in the waters shadowed by the riparian forests. The patrol cutters of the Confederation sailed into the port. The stalls on the central plaza were closing down, farmhands heading with their cattle back home to the fields.

In a tiny pulpería above the river cliffs -not very tall, but still giving a nice view of the sleeping sun above the forests on the other side of the river- the Witch and the Gaucho fought back the early heat of spring with a cold beer.

"...So, " the Witch continued explaining, excitedly, "the book says there's this point, somewhere. The beginning of it all. Or maybe the end. Most probably both, or perhaps all what it's in between."

"Uh huh. I see." Answered the Gaucho. Despite his tone of voice, he was geniunely interested. If a little confused.

"And we could see through it. It, somehow, reflects all the universe. Maybe more." Just to even think about other universes, dreamed the Witch! "But it's very confusing to look at it. It's too much for us to percieve. Because I mean, surely you can hear and smell and feel too. But you can't process it. It's like, like..."

"Like looking through a glass marble near your eye, with all those strange scratches and... things. Only it's the entire universe." Affirmed the Gaucho, drinking another sip from the beer.

He wasn't sure if the alcohol made him a better philosopher or it just made him remember his childhood days playing with marbles.

"YES! That's right! You get me! I KNEW buying you a beer was worth it."

"It was worth for me, at least..." He smiled. She smiled back.

"Now, when you see through a marble," she continued "you see all that weird stuff because your eyes only can see through a single... size so to speak."

A horn blared.

Parrots flew away from the palm trees. The very wind seemed to stop still.

The Witch, though, continued.

"...but imagine if we could see with different eyes. If we could..."

"Che... What the hell is that noise?"

They looked at the great Paraná, which was suddenly covered by foamy waves.

It was a boat.

It wasn't, though, one of the Guaraní fishing canoes that always sailed up and down the Paraná. Neither it was one of the proud sailboats of the Confederation, or the golden arks of the Capaq Inka.

It was a huge metal monolith, like some kind of iron bathtub uncannily floating in the water. Two chimneys vomited black smoke into the golden skies, and chains of... magical? light illuminated the ship. Shipmen dressed in white marched through the deck as the vessel made way through the river, with no sails, with no oars, with no magic, apparently propelled by hubris itself.

And while neither the Witch or the Gaucho were very familiar with ships, they could certainly see that those big metal boxes with cannons pointing from them were inmensely powerful weapons.

In the back, in golden, exquisitely craved letters, the name of the vessel read:

'HMS Dreadnought'

[andromeda-sapphire]

Uranus in Taurus: 2018 - 2025

(EDIT: This is an article I wrote for my old blog back in 2018.)

This year, starting mid-May, we got a taste of Uranus in Taurus and what kinds of things we can expect until the next sign change into Gemini in 2025. Currently, Uranus has retrograded back into Aries, giving us our last opportunity to stand out and make our own unique mark on the world with this pioneering Aries influence before the planet moves into Taurus again in early March 2019, where it will stay for the next 7-10 years. Aries is the first of the zodiac and is all about the importance of self, so it's no coincidence that this Uranus in Aries cycle birthed the beginning of selfie culture we know today, as well as many activist groups and rebellions.

Uranus is the planet of change and innovative ideas, and it doesn't match well with Taurus, a fixed sign, who hates change and clings to all they know. Taurean themes such as food, music, art, and finance may experience radical changes, likely involving technology as well, as Uranus rules technology and science. In the first few months of Uranus in Taurus this year, we have already seen some of these themes manifest, as I'll discuss throughout this article. First, for a little history lesson.

The last time Uranus was in Taurus was during the end of the Great Depression and the beginning of World War II. As we know, these events directly affected the world of finance, and the unemployment rate in some cities in the USA was higher than 80%. In June of 1935, F.D.R. took action to attempt to save the economy with the "New Deal" plan, which was a number of programs aimed to help achieve financial stability (which is a major Taurean theme) in America once again. These programs were assembled primarily by Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in the Presidential cabinet. Also in 1935, the Social Security Act (which Frances Perkins was also very involved in, and I'll talk more about why she is important later) became law, and the first social security payments were made the following year. In January 1938, the Dutch government began obligatory unemployment insurance as well. There is a pattern here, where the Taurean themes of finance and security were shaken by the unstable influence of Uranus. A game about fluctuating finances was even released during this previous Uranus in Taurus cycle - the ever-popular Monopoly board game! Interestingly enough, during the current Uranus in Taurus cycle, in 2018 Hasbro released a new and updated version of the Monopoly game for the millennial generation.

Beyond finance, Taurus also rules farming and food production, so there were many important events happening in this area too, during the last Uranus in Taurus transit. For example, many countries began rationing food supplies around the time World War II began, including bread, sugar and cheese. In July of 1937, SPAM lunchmeat was first introduced to market shelves, dominating the industry because of its availability, affordable cost, and enduring shelf life. This is an example of a Uranus in Taurus development involving food. Another wonderful example; in May of 1940, the first McDonald's opened in California, revolutionizing the world of food, speeding up the process under the influence of Uranus, and thus becoming what we know today as "fast food." The first food stamps were also issued in 1939, during the last transit of Uranus through Taurus.

In our current Uranus in Taurus transit, I've noticed that there has already been a series of archaeological discoveries (Uranus rules discovery) related to food. On July 17 of 2018, archaeologists in Jordan found the ancient remains of baked bread from 14,400 years ago. Then on August 18, archaeologists found the first ever cheese from Ancient Egypt. And finally, in September, archaeologists found the oldest known brewery and the remains of ancient beer in Israel. (While Neptune and Pisces rule alcohol, Taurus rules the grains that beer is made from!) Interesting that we seem to be looking backwards at food so far during this transit, when Uranus typically urges us to move forward. But there is still plenty of time, and I'm sure there will be some amazing inventions relating to the food industry over the next 7-10 years.

In the world of the arts, there were many major events during the last Uranus in Taurus transit, as Venus rules Taurus, which rules art and music. To begin, in 1936, Billboard magazine published its very first hit music chart, revolutionizing the music industry. Then in 1939, Billboard introduced the first country music chart, or "hillbilly" music chart. In 1940, they released their first singles records chart. Vocalists (Venus and Taurus rule the throat and voice) like Frank Sinatra and Marian Anderson began to emerge in music during this time as well, and dominated the industry.

In fashion, nylon was the latest fiber innovation, patented in 1937, then announced the following year. By October of 1939, nylon stockings were available in stores for the first time. Also in 1939, Glamour magazine began publishing issues. This is significant because Venus rules beauty, and as the ruler of Taurus, it is involved in this transit. Venus also rules perfume, and during the last Uranus in Taurus transit, Coco Chanel brought us the famous scent, Chanel no. 5 in May of 1941.

Towards the end of the last Uranus in Taurus transit, in 1941, the National Gallery of Art opened in Washington D.C., another expression of the Venusian influence of Taurus. I noticed also a surge in highly successful cartoons and animations during this Uranus in Taurus transit. Uranus rules animation, cartoons and technicolor television, and Taurus rules the arts and beauty. These themes came together to produce amazing works of film that we still treasure today. This stream of cartoons included three of the very first full-length Disney animated films, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as well as Pinocchio and Dumbo. Interestingly enough, during the current Uranus in Taurus cycle in 2019, Disney will be releasing a new version of the animated movie, Dumbo, originally released in 1941. Also among these successful cartoons were characters like Bugs Bunny, Tom & Jerry, and a handful of comic book heroes like Superman and Batman.

Though not a cartoon, I'd also like to mention the release of The Wizard of Oz in this category, relating to technicolor television. While technicolor had been around since 1917, when Uranus was in Aquarius (which makes sense, being a Uranian association), The Wizard of Oz brought more attention to technicolor films, highlighting their artistic beauty (there's the Taurean theme). That is what made the release of this movie a big deal.

In art-related discoveries (remember that Uranus rules discovery), the last Uranus in Taurus transit brought us the incredible discovery of the Lascaux Cave Paintings in France - also known as The Hall of The Bulls, because the paintings feature many ancient bulls running across the walls of the caves. As most of us know, Taurus is the sign represented by the bull, so I found this to be extremely fascinating. Also in the current 2018 Uranus in Taurus transit, the oldest known human drawing was discovered, and the first work of art produced by artificial intelligence sold for $432,500.

Scientific discoveries during the previous Uranus in Taurus transit interestingly include the development of antibiotics used to fight strep throat. Taurus is the ruler of the throat, specifically, so this discovery stood out to me. The same year, in 1936, the first radioactive substance (radium E) was produced synthetically. Uranus rules radioactivity, and Taurus manifests physical results. In regards to natural science, in 1936 we saw the formation of the National Wildlife Federation, as well as the extinction of two unique species in the next two years - the thylacine and the Balinese tiger. Uranus rules exotic animals, and being in Taurus, a sign of manifestation, Uranus can suddenly wipe entire species out, as well as potentially bring an unexpected revival. In 1938 in South Africa, we discovered the first modern coelacanth, an ancient fish long thought to be extinct.

Some of you might be excited to hear, in my honest opinion, (and I know this saying is kind of cheesy) the approaching future WILL be female. Uranus rules activism and feminism as well, and Taurus is ruled by Venus, whose planetary symbol is literally the symbol of feminism. If you're an astrological skeptic and need more than that, let me explain... In 1919, when women received the right to vote, Uranus was in Aquarius, the sign of activism where it feels most at home. This transit created several workers unions and women's political groups, however it also created the formation of the Nazi party in Germany and the Fascist party in Italy (Uranus and Aquarius also rule fanatics and extremists). Later, when Uranus transited into Taurus, we began to see physical manifestations of the radical ideas that were birthed during the transit of Uranus through Aquarius, because Taurus represents the physical world, and makes things into a tangible reality. One example of a manifesting idea being the physical Nazi takeover of Germany by Adolf Hitler. Another example, a physical manifestation in women's rights, in 1938, a federal judge lifted the ban on birth control in the US, making it legal to use and obtain contraceptives through medical instruction. During this current Uranus in Taurus transit, we may have to fight again for the right to birth control, as Planned Parenthood and abortion are under attack by the current administration. Also, in 1933, while Uranus transited through the end of Aries, we saw the first woman appointed to serve in the Presidential cabinet (Frances Perkins, mentioned in an above paragraph). This woman had a major influence over the US over the next decade, while Uranus was in Taurus, and fought for financial reform to help save the American economy. The recent midterm elections interestingly enough were held on November 6 this year, the same day Uranus moved back into Aries, the sign of firsts, from it's little preview of Taurus. Already in 2018 we've seen records being broken by women in politics, as well as a few firsts, and we can expect to see more of this as Uranus continues on its journey through this feminine sign. We can also expect to see more breakthroughs made by these new female leaders, like the "New Deal" by Frances Perkins in 1935.

As I mentioned earlier in this post, art and technology will likely blend in new ways during this upcoming transit, as Uranus rules technological advancement and Taurus rules artistic sensitivities. We will likely see artificial intelligence creating more art and music, maybe more commonly too. We could also see a rise in electronically made music in the music industry. As for fashion and other forms of art, we can expect these subjects to lean more towards the lavish side this next decade, Uranus being in the sign of fine perfumes and silks. Pastels and florals, ruled by Venus, have already reached the world of fashion, hitting the runways right as Uranus began it's recent transit into Taurus. Unique earrings and statement necklaces are also growing in popularity already, beginning with the Uranus in Taurus transit. Taurus rules the ears and throat as well as jewelry, while Uranus brings uniqueness to the table.

New technologies will have a big impact on the food industry somehow in these next 7-10 years as well. Technological advancements could be made to change the way we feed our massive population, perhaps giving us greener solutions to environmental issues regarding our wasteful food production. Financial institutions globally may collapse or prove unstable, and new financial reforms will likely be put into place to replace these failing establishments. Dictators may take over or be overthrown, rebellions and uprisings may start around the world, and unfortunately, we may lose a few beloved species on our endangered species list, namely the Sumatran rhino. I'm bringing these creatures specifically up because just a few days ago, an article was published announcing that one of the last remaining Sumatran rhinos was just captured from the wild in an attempt to save the species. A few other species to be watched this decade are the Sumatran elephant, multiple species of tigers, two kinds of gorillas, Sumatran orangutans, as well as a long list of others. There is a very real chance we will lose these creatures to history forever during this transit. The choices we are making as a collective society in the present and very near future will directly affect the environment around us, and Uranus in Taurus will make sure of it. The fight to save our planet will likely be center stage while revolutionary Uranus is in the green earth sign of Taurus, and with the neutral and uncertain nature of Uranus, we may see some surprising and unexpected ecological victories as well.

With so much change in the world, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed by it all. Just keep in mind that the planets are always in motion, and therefore change is constant. Though we may see themes emerge and repeat themselves over time, the end-all law is that we are always evolving, and evolution is the key message of Uranus.

I hope you enjoyed this article!

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[paulisweeabootrash]

First Impression: Neon Genesis Evangelion

Get in your robots, audience, it's time for Paul is Weeaboo Trash!  And today, I'm finally watching a show it seems like everyone just... assumes I must've seen:

Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995)

Episodes watched: 8

Platform: Netflix

The idea of something being a "classic" may be in decline in the anime fandom, or at least be getting very specialized, since "anime" no longer implies a narrow interest in specific sci-fi and fantasy subgenres like it used to, but certain shows still manage to pervade the pop culture indirectly.  Neon Genesis Evangelion is one such show, enduring in the modern fandom and general internet culture because of its status as one of those old sci-fi anime classics.  It has contributed memes — not just as in image macros or running jokes, but as in units of culture in the form of iconic quotes or character designs or elements of the plot — to the point that you have certainly been in some way exposed to them without any knowledge of the source material.  But despite its reputation as a must-see cultural touchstone, it has been out of print in America for years.  Used copies of the DVDs sell for absurd prices, and I don't think I knew anyone who owned it when I was a young weeb in the mid-2000s.  I'm fairly sure my family did not have cable during the one specific season it was on Adult Swim, and there's no chance I would have been up at 12:30AM on Thursdays to watch it anyway.  I am not much of a fan of media piracy and wasn't even aware of that option when it was apparently everyone else's favorite pastime to ruin their computers with sketchy torrents.  So there was never a reasonable way for me to watch it, only for me to be dimly aware that this was An Important Show I Need To See.  Until now.  Because it's on Netflix.  As if I hadn't already been awaiting it, I was aggressively reminded of it, because social media and geeky news outlets were soon blowing up with retrospectives and Very Serious Analyses — and fans of the old ADV translation were offering hot takes on how Netflix's release compares.  So let me finally check this out for myself.

We start out in the distant future of... 2015, where UN forces are defending Tokyo-3 ("Old Tokyo" is mentioned and depicted later; no mention yet of Tokyo-2 unless I somehow already forgot it) against an attacking "angel", an immensely powerful alien with barely-comprehensible powers.  Meanwhile, an officer of a UN agency called NERV, Misato Katsuragi, brings our main character, 14-year-old Shinji Ikari, to an underground NERV base under Tokyo-3 on the instructions of Shinji's father Gendo, who runs a secret research project.  Shinji has been brought there to pilot an Evangelion, or Eva for short, a giant robot operated by some sort of neural interface.  In combat.  With no training.  He is, understandably, not happy about this.  After seeing how badly injured the other available pilot, Rei Ayanami, is, however, he agrees to do it — and it works far better than he or anyone else expected.  He apparently has an innately great ability to "sync" with however exactly the Eva's interface works.  But this only gets him as far as starting the thing up.  When he actually engages the angel, he has trouble just getting the Eva to walk, and he feels the pain of the Eva taking damage once attacked, a frankly horrifying feature of the interface.  We cut to him waking up in a hospital, but having surprisingly won because his Eva "went berserk", operating on its own.  A flashback later shows what happened when he lost control of the Eva: it fought the angel by itself, but also took heavy damage, and we see its visor? faceplate? sōmen? of the Eva's armor come off to reveal a fleshy-looking face and a very biological-looking eye.  At this point Shinji blacked out, which is really the only reasonable response to this situation.

Over the next several weeks (the time scale is vague, but since Rei apparently fully recovers from the injuries she had when we first saw her before the time she and Shinji are both deployed, it must be at least 3 weeks between eps. 1 and 5), more angels appear, to the surprise of civilians and UN forces alike.  The Evas continue to be excellent weapons against them (though Shinji himself is still, uh, not great at using them), but despite having now killed several angels, the Evas are considered a ridiculous boondoggle by personnel of other UN branches, and Gendo's sinister superiors seem to be losing patience with his project.  In the words of... uh... that UN navy guy in ep. 8, "Shit!  A bunch of kids are supposed to save the world?"  The alternatives are wildly ineffective conventional weapons and a remote-controlled nuclear-powered giant robot that almost had a literal Chernobyl-style meltdown, which was averted by Misato and Shinji.  Although repairs are expensive, injuries common, and pilots in short supply, Evas indeed seem to be the only effective weapon against the invading cosmic horror, the barely-comprehensible aliens that are impervious to ordinary human technology and also don't fit our concepts of life or... uh... possibly physics.  So, instead, in the words of Misato later in the same episode, "This plan may be insane, but I don't think it's impossible."

While this is going on, Shinji has been adjusting to this new life poorly and slowly.  Despite being a pilot, he is still after all a 14-year-old, so he is enrolled into the same class as Rei at a local school whose student body has dwindled as more people evacuate over the initial angel attack.  He also needs somewhere to live, so Misato arranges for him to move into her apartment.  Some of Shinji's classmates think he's incredibly lucky to live with her, and spend a good deal of their screen time drooling over her, but Shinji is highly uncomfortable around her not just because Captain Katsuragi is his commanding officer, but also because she has a tendency to not wear much clothing around the house and is, er, a bit of a drunk and a slob.  Oh, and she has an inexplicable, clawed, beer-drinking penguin.  You know, all stuff that would make a nervous, lonely, scared 14-year-old completely at home.

Neither NERV training nor school guarantee a community, though, and Shinji, isolated and confused, could sure use one right about now.  He seems quite likely traumatized from the first battle.  He keeps ending up in situations that make him wildly uncomfortable while other characters take them in stride.  He repeatedly attempts to quit NERV or at least defy orders before backing out (or... backing back in?) at the last moment.  It would frankly be bizarre that they accept him doing this, except that (1) nobody really seems to take Shinji that seriously anyway, (2) he's the boss's kid, and (3) most importantly, it seems that only a small number of pilots, all the same age as Shinji and Rei, are even capable of using Evas.  (Wife and I are starting to suspect reasons why this might be, especially given the whole cyborgs with neural interfaces thing, but... uh... let's not embarrass ourselves with public speculations about the plot of a ridiculously famous show almost as old as we are.)  He only slowly gains any support or comfort from his new classmates and colleagues.  They don't reach out to him, and he certainly doesn't reach out to them, because who is he supposed to talk to?  His roommate/commanding officer who is twice his age?  His classmates who treat him as a celebrity, not a person, once they find out he's an Eva pilot?  Even if his default state since the very first episode hadn't been basically imploding into despair with no idea how to communicate that anything's wrong, there's nobody that really makes sense for him to try to communicate it to.  Except one person: Rei.  He notices that she's also isolated at school, and especially after seeing her dark, miserable, unmaintained apartment, he attempts to be friendly towards her.  I thought this might be a hint of growth indicating that he understands she is possibly the only person more isolated than him and the only one who might be able to relate to him, but then the next time he threatens to quit NERV after that conversation, he explicitly claims she doesn't know what he's going though, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ maybe he just has bad social skills.

Sigh.

Shinji does start to make friends with Aida and Suzuhara, two of his classmates, though.  And it's interesting because they contrast against him in their reactions to the conflict outside.  Aida roleplays being in the military and finds Shinji's role as an Eva pilot glorious and enviable.  Suzuhara is initially furious at Shinji because his sister was collateral damage — she was injured when Shinji fought the angel — and his mind is changed only after Shinji rescues him (and Aida) from an angel.  Shinji, though, having been thrust into a role he doesn't even understand and about which he is ambivalent and unstable, lacks Aida's optimistic admiration of his role and a full appreciation of either Suzuhara's resentment or gratitude.  He not only rejects their praise, he calls himself a coward during (sigh) one of his attempts to quit NERV.  It occurs to me that this could be seen as indicating different perspectives about the military (ask any American vet who's sick of being "thanked for their service"), or even different perspectives about adulthood itself — I'll bet any millennial who did not achieve their dreams can recognize Aida's "wow this is amazing I can't wait to be a grownup too" roleplaying vs. Shinji's "I am doomed and isolated by the responsibility that has been thrown at me" actual experience in NERV.

Also thanks to the school scenes, we start to learn some backstory, including the famous "Second Impact".  A catastrophic asteroid impact in 2000 melted Antarctica's glaciers, which led to unprecedentedly rapid sea level rise, leading to mass extinction, including that of half of humanity through not only direct climate change impacts like displaced populations and crop failures but also conflict stemming from it.  Or so the official story goes.  It is later revealed that the Second Impact actually involved somehow the previous arrival of angels on Earth, although this has yet to be explained in detail.  (Actually, I accidentally saw spoilers about more detail about this while revising this review, because I went to sanity-check myself about some other detail on one of the fan wikis, so I know part of where this is going, but only part.)

Over the first eight episodes, which must be several weeks at least after the start of the show given that Rei has recovered from her initial injuries (although the time scale is very vague), Shinji fights four angels total and gradually improves, but the biggest improvement comes not from him being an individual hero but from finally working well with others.  For example, the octahedral angel that drills into NERV's base has incredible abilities to detect and counter incoming attacks.  It kicks Shinji's ass on the first attempt, because duh.  But Misato devises a plan to test its abilities and concentrate the power of... uh... Japan's entire electrical grid(?!) at it from a safe distance, and the plan succeeds only because of Rei giving Shinji cover.  An angel attacks a UN ship convoy transporting the third pilot, Asuka Langley Soryu, and her Eva, and she and Shinji fight the angel together in a ludicrous fight that involves both cramming in to pilot the same Eva together (which, interestingly, requires them to give it the same, or maybe just compatible, instructions together in the same language for it to work... yay neural interfaces).  So maybe/hopefully the direction this is going is "the chosen one is a stupid idea and even talented people need both training and cooperation to not suck at things"?

Episode 8 leaves off with Asuka joining Shinji and Rei's school class, and with the dramatic and creepy reveal of an embryo encased in bakelite which is described by Gendo as "Adam, the first human"...  Well.  That comes off as the kind of thing that would drive the future plot, and hopefully all the Biblical imagery will finally start to converge into something coherent instead of just sort of serving to draw extra attention to the fact that the humans refer to the aliens as "angels".  I've been wondering about that since the beginning.  There's the title, of course, but also the sefirot in the opening and on Gendo's office ceiling, the first angel's attacks using what appears to be a directed energy weapon which invariably forms glowing crosses, and the fact that most of the angels themselves are wildly non-humanoid (a choice which echoes the rather... eldritch... classical depictions of angels — see also the seraph in the opening).  NERV's motto is even explicitly, well, monotheistic at least, if not sectarian: "God's in his heaven.  All's right with the world!", which is counterintuitive at best with the idea of calling the alien invaders "angels".

Well.  I'll find out, and I plan to write a followup like I did with Re:ZERO, going into the broad swaths of the rest of the plot and my overall impressions of how they handled things.  Especially given that this show has a famously-controversial ending.  I jumped into this determined to watch the whole series, so I'm not backing out.

I'll just threaten to quit repeatedly then almost immediately come back.

-----

W/A/S: 4 / 3 / I feel kinda bad about this but 4?

Weeb: I mean, anything with giant robots fighting giant monsters deserves a few points just for that, right?  I don't think this requires much by way of Japanese cultural references or assumptions to watch, though.

Ass: Nudity so far has been brief, partial, censored by convenient angles and object placement, and not remotely sexy.  Thanks to another contextless spoiler I happen to have picked up, I expect an infamous later scene that is clearly supposed to be sad and disturbing in context, which is, again, not the kind of thing this scale was originally designed to describe.

Shit (writing): Even though I tend to overall like their plots, I always sort of sigh and eyeroll at the "let's put children/teens in combat and/or experiment on and/or just plain torture them to force them to become powerful" storyline formula that’s been semi-popular for the last few decades, and Evangelion is definitely in that category.  Friends have said the story is confusing or poorly-paced, and I kind of agree but also think some of the confusion is warranted by the choice to enter the story in media res in order to reveal what's going on to the audience at about the same time it's revealed to Shinji.  As for the tendency to have some long shots where literally nothing happens, that does get annoying, and I suspect its primary motivation was to save money, but I think it also usually emphasizes how lonely the whole situation is, at least before Shinji starts to warm up to Misato and Rei to Shinji in the last couple of episodes I've watched so far (which have, appropriately, had much more action and interaction).  Mainly, my writing complaints are actually about translation, because there are some noticeable and consequential differences between translations for the sub and dub.  Yeah, yeah, I've heard of the love vs. like thing everyone on the internet is already upset about, but I haven't gotten to that episode yet.  I'm talking about things like Misato saying "it will work!" in the sub vs. just "okay!" in the dub when Shinji is first able to control his Eva, a choice which suggests very different things about both her level of knowledge of the project and why Shinji has been called on for it at all.  The new dub also feels... uh... too at home as a dub of a '90s anime, as it prioritizes matching lip flaps over flowing like believable speech.  Having not seen the old dub, of course, I can't make any kind of judgement about whether this is a step up, down, or sideways from how ADV did it.  And the sub has many on-screen captions in Japanese are left untranslated — not things like signs in the background, but actual captions the audience is meant to get information from.

Shit (other): Maybe we're spoiled in this age of computer-aided art, but i's surprising to see a show with such limited animation — speech conveyed only with lip flaps, obviously reused shots within the same episode, foreground objects gracelessly sliding against a background to indicate movement — and so I'm willing to give the show a pass on most of that, especially since the characters are distinctive and the setting and aliens and robots so interesting.  Much of the limited animation actually serves to show the vast scale of NERV's facilities and the Evas vs. the humans and/or to emphasize loneliness like the pacing.  But there really are some painful mistakes from time to time in the art: objects and faces that look utterly wrong, like the artists just did not successfully figure out how to draw that particular character or vehicle from that particular angle.  The legendary opening theme is certainly catchy — it’s been stuck in my head almost continuously for the past week — but I just don’t think I enjoy it as much as other people do.  Some of the immediate complaints that were apparently worthy of news media attention were about the replacement of Fly Me to the Moon with a piece from the show's soundtrack as the ending theme.  I understand why people would be upset by that kind of change, but I am willing to take the controversial stand that it's not a bad change.  The piece they chose as a replacement is haunting and tense, which fits in with the mood of most of the episodes so far, while Fly Me to the Moon feels to me like an inappropriate mood change from that.

Content: Actually among the least graphic of the various shows I've covered involving violent or horrifying elements.

-----

Stray observations:

- God it was weird to write this by constantly abbreviating “Evangelion” as “Eva”, considering that Wife's name is Eva.

- A lot of people seem to hate Shinji as a character, but I find him understandable in a way that probably implies uncomfortable things about my own sanity.  I just... I understand that sheer degree of doom and misery and indecision and inability to articulate any of those.  Man.  Ugh.

- I don't know if you've ever seen an undisguised angel, but trust me: they're horrifying.  (link NSFW)

[nwbeerguide]

Rogue Ales & Spirits' gives back a portion from every sale, of Red Panda IPA, to the Oregon Zoo.

Press Release

Newport, Ore. (September 19, 2019 ) — This Saturday is International Red Panda Day and a great time to crack open a beer at the Oregon Zoo to help save the endangered red panda. Red Panda IPA was brewed by Rogue Ales & Spirits and released in partnership with the Oregon Zoo. A portion of the proceeds from each pint and bottle sold will be donated to the Oregon Zoo Foundation, which supports the zoo’s wildlife conservation efforts.

Red pandas, a mammal with reddish-brown fur and a shaggy tail, are native to the eastern Himalayas, specifically places like China and Nepal. These adorable, unique and endangered animals are tree-dwellers and excellent climbers. According to estimates, there are fewer than 5,000 wild mature red pandas due to habitat loss from deforestation. “The red panda population has been disappearing at an alarming rate over the past 20 years,” noted Dr. Don Moore, Oregon Zoo director. “Partnering with Rogue Ales & Spirits is helping us spread the word to make sure the red panda and other endangered species are around for future generations.” “We at Rogue are committed to giving back to our community, which includes the people and animals,” says Rogue President Dharma Tamm. “We are proud of our continual partnership with the Oregon Zoo and will do whatever we can to help support the amazing work they do for animal preservation.” Red Panda IPA is available on draft at the Oregon Zoo, at Rogue pubs and in 22-ounce bottles at select retailers.

For more information, photography and samples, contact Amanda Zessin.

About Rogue Ales & Spirits Rogue Ales & Spirits, the only farmer-brewer-distiller-cooper in the United States, was founded in Oregon in 1988 as one of America’s first microbreweries. Rogue has won more than 2,000 awards for taste, quality and packaging, and is available in all 50 states as well as 54 countries. Proudly rooted in Oregon soil, Rogue’s beers, spirits and sodas are made with ingredients grown on Rogue Farms in Independence, Oregon. Rogue Spirits are hand-distilled on a 550-gallon still in Newport, Oregon, aged in the thick ocean air of the Yaquina Bay and bottled by hand. Since 2008, Rogue has shared the terroir of Oregon by growing its own hops, barley, rye, wheat, honey, cucumbers and pumpkins and using them in beers.

About the Oregon Zoo and Oregon Zoo Foundation As part of the Metro family, the Oregon Zoo helps make greater Portland a great place to call home. Committed to conservation, the zoo is currently working to save endangered California condors, Oregon silverspot and Taylor’s checkerspot butterflies, western pond turtles, Oregon spotted frogs and northern leopard frogs. Other projects focused on saving animals from extinction include studies on Asian elephants, polar bears, orangutans and cheetahs. Support from the Oregon Zoo Foundation enhances and expands the zoo’s efforts in conservation, education and animal welfare. Members, donors and corporate and foundation partners help the zoo make a difference across the region and around the world.

From the Editor of Northwest Beer Guide

The following Press Release was announced last Thursday, September 19th, prior to International Panda Day (Saturday, September 21st). This of course shouldn’t prohibit you from getting out there and enjoying a pint, can, or bottle of this uniquely-suited beer from Rogue Ales

from Northwest Beer Guide - News - The Northwest Beer Guide http://bit.ly/2lhKc0r

[delphinidin4]

Early human history

(It’s a little Euro-centric. Sorry about that. Also, please note that many dates are approximate or debated.)

Paleolithic: begins 3,300,000 years before present (YBP), with the earliest use of stone tools by hominins 2,000,000—1,500,000 YBP: hominins begin leaving Africa for southern Europe and Asia 400,000—300,000 YBP: use of fire begins

Middle Paleolithic: 300,000 YBP—50,000 YBP

People live in hunter-gatherer bands. Use of knapped stone tools. Nomadic. Much leisure time; often hungry. Begin to produce works of art: cave painting, rock art, jewelry, etc. Beginning of religious behavior such as burial and ritual.

300,000 YBP: appearance of Homo sapiens 250,000 YBP: appearance of Homo neanderthalensis 200,000 YBP: Homo sapiens sapiens appears (eastern Africa) 170,000 YBP: humans are wearing clothes by this date 70,000 YBP: earliest example of abstract or symbolic art (cross-hatch, South Africa) 67,000—40,000 YBP: Neanderthal admixture to Eurasian humans

Upper Paleolithic: 50,000—10,000 YBP. Begins with a marked increase in the diversity of artifacts. Campsites with storage pits. Artistic work blossoms. First evidence of fishing. More complex social groupings, due to more varied/reliable food sources and specialized tool types.

50,000 YBP: Homo sapiens sapiens begins to leave Africa 50,000 YBP: 1st sewing needles found 50,000—40,000 YBP: possible development of language. 50,000—40,000 YBP: Homo sapiens sapiens is in Australia 45,000—43,000 YBP: European early modern humans 42,000 YBP: earliest evidence of advanced deep-sea fishing (East Timor): could make ocean crossings to Australia and other islands 40,000 YBP: Neanderthal extinction 40,000 YBP: oldest known figurative art 40,000—20,000 YBP: oldest known ritual cremation (Australia) 36,000 YBP: Humans are in Japan 35,000 YBP: oldest known figurative art of human figures (rather than zoomorphic humanlike figures) 33,000 YBP: oldest known domestic dog skull found (Europe and Siberia) 31,000 YBP: last glacial maximum (many humans forced out of northern Europe by glaciers) 30,000 YBP: spear-thrower/atlatl is in use 30,000 YBP: oldest known calendars (Dordogne, France: a lunar calendar, possibly used to time hunting expeditions) 29,000 YBP: earliest known ovens 28,000 YBP: oldest found twisted rope 28,000—24,000 YBP: oldest known pottery (figurines, not vessels) 27,000 YBP: humans are in Siberia, above the arctic circle 26,000 YBP: people around the world use fiber work 25,000 YBP: Oldest known permanent settlement (Czech Republic) 25,000 YBP: bow and arrow are in use 22,000 YBP: nets, bolas are in use 20,000 YBP: oldest pottery storage/cooking vessels (China) 16,000—13,000 YBP: first human migration into North America 16,000—11,000 YBP: Caucasian hunter-gatherer expansion into Europe 15,000—14,700 YBP: earliest supposed domestication of the pig 14,000—13,000 YBP: blue eyes first appear (Italy and Caucasus) 14,000—12,000 YBP: oldest evidence for prehistoric warfare (Sudan) 13,000—10,000 YBP: end of last glacial period, climate warms, glaciers recede 13,000 YBP: flood on Lake Agassiz in North America may account for American deluge myths. Other floods in this era in the Middle East may be the origins of the Noah/Utnapishtim myths. 13,000—11,000 YBP: earliest proposed domestication of sheep 12,9000—11,700 YBP: Younger Dryas: period of sudden cooling and return to glacial conditions 12,000 YBP: earliest suggested domestication of the goat 11,000 YBP: blond hair appears in Europe 11,600 YBP: Abrupt period of global warming accelerates glacial retreat 11,000 YBP: earliest found proto-religious site on earth (Gobekli Tepe, Turkey) 11,000 YBP: emergence of Jericho, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world 11,000 YBP: giant short-faced bears and giant ground sloths go extinct. Equidae goes extinct in North America 10,500 YBP: earliest supposed date for domestication of cattle

Neolithic: begins 10,000 BYP. The terms “Neolithic” and “Bronze Age” are culture-specific to the Old World, whose stages of cultural development were different than those of the New World. Neolithic Revolution/Agricultural Revolution saw the change from mostly nomadic hunting/gathering to agriculture and settlement. The “Bronze Age” refers to the development of the use of bronze, possibly proto-writing, and urban civilization.  

10,000 YBP: beginnings of permanent settlements and agriculture 10,000 YBP: domestication of maize (southern Mexico) 10,000 YBP: Quaterny extinction event concludes: many ice-age megafauna go extinct, including megatherium (giant ground sloths), woolly rhinoceros, Irish elk, cave bears, cave lions, saber-toothed cats. Mammtho goes extinct in Eurasia and North America, preserved in small island populations until ~3650 BYP/1650 BCE 10,000—9,000 YBP/8000—7000 BCE: In northern Mesopotamia, cultivation of barley and wheat begins, initially for beer/gruel/soup, and then for bread. Begins with a planting stick, and then a primitive plow. Round stone tower built in Jericho. 10,000—5,000 YBP/8000—3000 BCE: Identical ancestors point: all the common ancestors of all present-day humans were alive during this era. 9,500 YBP/7500 BCE: earliest supposed domestication of the cat 8,000—5,000 YBP/6000—3000 BCE: development of proto-writing in China, southeast Europe (Vinca symbols) and west Asia (proto literate cuneiform). 6,500—4,500 YBP (4500—2500 BCE): Proto-Indo-European spoken north of the Black Sea 6,200 YBP/4200 BCE: domestication of cotton in Peru 6,000 YBP/4000 BCE: civilization develops in Mesopotamia/Fertile Crescent (Iraq). Earliest supposed dates for domestication of horse and chicken. Invention of potter’s wheel. 5,700 YBP/3700 BCE: Minoan culture begins on Crete 5,500 YBP/3600—3500 BCE: Uruk period in Sumer. First evidence of mummification in Egypt. 5,500 YBP/3500 BCE: oldest known depiction of a wheeled vehicle (Poland) 5,400—4,300 YBP/3400—2300 BCE: domestication of cotton in Mexico 5,300 YBP/3000 BCE: Bronze Age begins in near east. Newgrange built in Ireland. 5,200 YBP/3200 BCE: Norte Chico civilization in Peru 5,150 YBP/3150 BCE: first dynasty of Egypt 5,100 YBP/3100 BCE: Skara Brae, Scotland 5,000—4,000 YBP/3000—2000 BCE: Stonehenge built (smaller stone circle) ~5,000 YBP/3000 BCE: Egyptian calendar invented 5,000 YBP/3000 BCE: first known use of papyrus, Egypt 4,700 YBP/2700 BCE: Old Kingdom begins, Egypt 4,600 YBP/2600 BCE: writing developed in Sumer and Egypt: beginning of recorded history

Ancient history

4,600 YBP/2600 BCE: oldest known surviving literature, Sumerian 4,600 YBP/2600 BCE: emergence of Maya culture, Yucatan 4,560 YBP/2560 BCE: Great Pyramid completed, Egypt 4,560 YBP/2560 BCE: Land of Punt (Horn of Africa) appears in Egyptian records 4,500—3,500 YBP/2500—1500 BCE: Kerma culture in Nubia 4,500 YBP/2500 BCE: Mammoth goes extinct 4,200 YBP/2200 BCE: Stonehenge completed in its current form 4,100 YBP/2100 BCE: 5 Sumerian poems of Bilgamesh, King of Uruk are composed: origin of the Epic of Gilgamesh 4,000 YBP/2000 BCE: domestication of the horse 3,780 YBP/1780 BCE: oldest record of the Code of Hammurabi 3,600 YBP/1600 BCE: Eruption of Thera (Santorini), resulting in tsunamis that cause the collapse of Minoan civilization on Crete: possible origin of Atlantis myth 3,600 YBP/1600 BCE: Mycenaean Greek culture. Shang Dynasty in China. Beginning of Hittite dominance in eastern Mediterranean. 3,500 YBP/1500 BCE: Composition of Rigveda completed 3,450 YBP/1450 BCE: Mycenaen Greece, first deciphered writing in Europe 3,400—2,400 YBP/1400—400 BCE: Olmec civilization, Mexico 3,200 YBP/1200 BCE: Oracle bone script, first written records in Old Chinese 3,200—3,150 YBP/1200—1150 BCE: Bronze Age collapse in southwest Asia and eastern Mediterranean, the setting of the Iliad and Odyssey (composed about 400 years later) 3,180 YBP/1180 BCE: Disintegration of the Hittite Empire 3,100 YBP/1100 BCE: use of iron spreads 3,050—2,800 YBP/1050—800 BCE: alphabetic writing; Phoenician alphabet spreads around the Mediterranean. 3,046 YBP/1046 BCE: Zhou Dynasty, China ~3,000 YBP/1000 BCE: Rule of King David, Israel. First temple completed. 2,890 YBP/890 BCE: composition of the Iliad, Odyssey 2,800 YBP/890 BCE: rise of the Greek city-states 2,785 YBP/785 BCE: rise of the Kingdom of Kush

Classical Antiquity

776 BCE: first recorded Olympic games 753 BCE: founding of Rome (according to tradition) 745 BCE: Tiglath-Pileser III is King of Assyria (founds Assyrian Empire) 660 BCE: first Emperor of Japan (according to tradition) 653 BCE: rise of the Persian Empire 612 BCE: fall of the Assyrian empire 600 BCE: evidence of writing system, Zapotec civilization, Oaxaca, Mexico 563 BCE: Buddha born 551 BCE: Confucius born 550 BCE: founding of Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great 549 BCE: Mahavira, founder of Jainism, born 539 BCE: fall of Babylonian Empire (liberation of Jews by Cyrus the Great) 509 BCE: founding of the Roman Republic (according to tradition) 508 BCE: democracy instituted at Athens ~500 BCE: completion of the Euclid’s Elements 500 BCE: Pingala uses zero and binary numeral system (India) 499 BCE: beginning of Greco-Persian wars 480 BCE: Battle of Thermopylae 475 BCE: Warring States period begins in China 470 BCE: Birth of Socrates 449 BCE: end of Greco-Persian wars 447—432 BCE: Building of Parthenon in Athens 427 BCE: birth of Plato 389 BCE: birth of Aristotle 323 BCE: death of Alexander the Great 300 BCE: construction of the Great Pyramid of Cholula begins in Mexico 260 BCE: earliest written records in south Asia (Middle Indo-Aryan) 221 BCE: Beginning of imperial rule in China, Qin Dynasty, beginning of construction of the Great Wall of China 206 BCE: Han Dynasty begins, opens Silk Road 202 BCE: Scipio Africanus (Rome) defeats Hannibal (Carthage) 200 BCE: paper invented in China 166 BCE: Maccabees defeat Seleucide Empire’s army. Hasmonean Dynasty begins in Judea. 146 BCE: Roman conquest of Greece 44 BCE: Julius Caesar murdered 37 BCE: Herodian Dynasty founded, making Judea a Roman client state 27 BCE: Formation of the Roman Empire (under Octavius); Pax Romana begins 18 BCE: Temple of Jerusalem reconstructed under orders by Herod 4 BCE: birth of Jesus  29 CE: crucifixion of Jesus 43 CE: Rome enters Britain for first time 68 CE: Nero dies; Year of Four Emperors 70 CE: Destruction of Jerusalem by the armies of Titus 79 CE: Destruction of Pompeii 220 CE: Three Kingdoms period begins in China 280: Jin Dynasty, China 285: Diocletian splits Roman Empire into East and West, begins large-scale persecution of Christians 292: Capital of Roman Empire officially moved from Rome to Milan 313: Edict of Milan allows religious freedom in the Roman Empire 325: First council of Nicaea 330: Constantinople named; becomes capital of Eastern Roman Empire 354: birth of Augustine of Hippo (Roman Numidia; present-day Algeria) 380: Arianism declared heretical by Theodosius I, Eastern Roman Emperor 395: Theodosius I outlaws all religions but “Catholic” Christianity (meaning non-heretical, officially condoned Christianity: not the same as the modern Catholic church) 406: Romans expelled from Britain 407-409: Germanic tribes (Visigoths etc.) cross into Roman Gaul for the first time 410: Visigoths sack Rome 429-439: Vandals conquer large stretch of North Africa 455: Vandals sack Rome 476: Last Western Roman Emperor (Romulus Augustulus) forced to abdicate by Odoacer, Chief of the Heruli. Official end of Ancient History.

[fairfieldthinkspace]

TOM WOLFE: ‘The Right Stuff’ Lands in the Old Campus Center Oak Room

By Philip Eliasoph, PhD

Professor of Art History & Visual Culture, Dept of Visual & Performing Arts

With the passing of Tom Wolfe, the literary lion who died on May 14, I experienced an entangled helix of emotions. One strand within my emotional DNA is a woebegone impact of this tremendously large gap as the 88 year-old prophet became ‘of the ages.’

But any smidgen of mourning was swiftly overtaken. Face to face with his sparkling blue eyes and impish smile, one marinates in a glowing gratitude. On one spring evening over 30 years ago, our campus embraced the knowledge and celebratory realization of Wolfe’s iconoclastic contributions to American culture.

Wolfe’s unparalleled efflorescence, baroque machine gun styled prose, and self-effacing sense of style will live on.  One can take solace in realizing his well- earned fame will outlive the copyright expiration of his best sellers and countless articles.

In an endless streaming spate of flesh ripping criticism peppered with belly laughs, he probed deeply into our national psyche shredding Americans’ pretenses and foibles into sardonic sausage slices. A latter-day St. Ignatius thrusting his readers into the process of Examen, he reflected how Americans hope to imagine their lives versus the gritty realities of our indulgences, excesses, and super-duper pomposities.

In a lightning bolt of refracted memory, I recalled our telephone conversation inviting him to speak at Fairfield on April 2, 1987 inaugurating the College of Arts & Sciences newly founded Humanities Lecture Series. Along with Metropolitan Opera prima donna Beverly Sills, we were exploring ‘Creativity and the Arts in America.’

I began to devour Wolfe’s Balzac-esque columns in 1962 in the now extinct New York Herald Tribune. As an acerbic observer with a razor-sharp edge and member of the golden age of the ‘New Journalism,’ he was our perfect choice to kick off our Humanities lectures.

Doing some cerebral spelunking, I pulled from the [perfectly organized] vaults of the DiMenna-Nyselius Library archive a digital ghost of ‘The MIRROR’. The  front page header of the April 9 issue duly reported: “Wolfe Speaks About Modern Art in a Modern World.” Wolfe resplendently arrived at the old Campus Center’s Oak Room to enthrall, entertain and prick the conscience of a packed house.

Veteran alumni might fondly recall that the Oak Room was ‘back in the day’—pre -age 21 alcohol laws—the venue for many free-flowing, ‘all the beer you can drink’ Dionysian evenings. I was worried that Mr. Wolfe’s olfactory glands might be overwhelmed by the literally beer-soaked oak paneled walls and stained floors.  

Earning his American Studies PhD at Yale in 1957, Wolfe was well positioned to become a contemporary Thackery exposing Wall Street’s greed and the art world’s flimflam inner workings. The MIRROR’s student Editor-in-Chief, Ms. Melissa Campanelli ’87 captured the gist of his talk.

Citing the arrival of Pop and Minimalist trends—the newest avant-gardes for his take down book on the merchandized Manhattan art world—The Painted Word(1975)—Campanelli explained: “Herein lies the theme of Wolfe’s speech. In some instances, the Modern Art World, in all its glamour, has become a religious sect.” And rather cogently, our senior reporter summed his talk up rather brilliantly: “while society is victim to the craft of the artist, the artist is also a victim of the very society he corrupts.” Whew!

“So, Mr. Wolfe,” I probed nervously on the phone with amateurish negotiating skills, “can you promise that when you come to our campus, can you wear your distinctive white three-piece suit?”  Without missing a beat, he whispered back, “of course professor—that’s my public identity.” In fact, Assistant Vice President Jim Fitzpatrick’70 states: “I do not remember much about that evening except his suit—and realizing he surely was one of the greatest writers of the 20thcentury!”

Indeed, he was much more than just a rococo exemplar of sartorial excess mixed with his Beau Brummel silk hats, spats, and pinstriped shirts.  He self-described his frippery as: “Neo-pretentious.”

Through a glass darkly, cherishing the happiest and most fond memories of that remarkable evening I was privileged to host the great Tom Wolfe at Fairfield, let’s keep his literary legacy ablaze. Years later, I was also given the honor to host William F. Buckley on the newly opened stage of the Quick Center in the early years of the Open Visions Forum. I felt a palpable link among these linguistic titans.

Let’s invoke the accolade given by the hyperbolic Buckley who wrote of his admiration of Tom Wolfe in the conservative National Review:“He is probably the most skillful writer in America—I mean by that he can do more things with words than anyone else.” And who can gainsay him?

[xtruss]

Small Farms Vanish Every Day in America’s Dairyland: ‘There Ain’t No Future in Dairy’

Farming families are facing a choice: compete with high-production outfits, if they can, or abandon generations of dairy farming

— By Summer Sewell in Monroe, Wisconsin | The Guardian USA | Supported by Scmidt Family Foundation, 11th Hour Project | Wednesday July 21, 2021

Ron and Lori Wellenhorst in their empty barn in Cuba City, Wisconsin. ‘It’s quiet, eerily quiet, for the first time in 50-some years. It’s pretty strange,’ Ron said. Photograph: Greg Kahn/The Guardian

Look at that sweet heifer, high, tight udder, in her first lactation, idn’t she sweet?” auctioneer Tom Bidlingmaier shouts as his son Cory plods and slips and pushes the cow around a pen.

Watching it all are about 65 people, mostly men, mostly other small farmers in rubber boots, standing in mud and manure as they murmur their bids. Ron Wallenhorst, the farmer auctioning off his herd of 64 milking cows, is pacing and tapping an empty water bottle against his thigh. He has milked cows in his barn twice a day, every day, after taking over the farm from his father 32 years ago. By the afternoon, all the cows will be gone.

“This is our 401k,” said Ron, 55 years old, his tall frame still hearty though he’s 15 pounds lighter from stress.

The omens before the auction had not been great for Ron and his wife Lori. A couple of weeks before, a few towns over from their own farm in Cuba City, Wisconsin, which is about 70 miles south-west of Madison, they’d watched another complete dairy dispersal of a better herd. That means it produced more milk – 96 pounds (44kg) per cow a day to the Wallenhorsts’ 78 (35kg). The other farmer didn’t make out well financially. “We stood there with tears in our eyes,” Ron said. “Our whole life has been a risk. Deciding to sell was very, very difficult.”

An hour before auctioneer Bidlingmaier started the bidding on the Wallenhorst herd, Lori was crying in a corner of the milk house. She wiped her eyes and stepped out into the morning. “That’s a good sign,” she said, motioning to the trucks rolling up with empty cow trailers attached – they came to buy.

Four hours later, after the last cow is sold, the Wallenhorsts learn the herd went for $1,800 (£1,290) each, on average – relatively high for the region, and more than Ron expected. He smiles for the first time that day, cracking open a beer, finally part of the circle of relatives and neighbors who came not to buy but to support. Then, as a team of determined men coerced a cow up on to its new owner’s trailer, he teared up and walked away.

With the Wallenhorst dairy farm gone, there’s only one left on the seven-mile stretch from one side of town to the other; there were 22 when Ron was growing up there. “We worried no one would show up because dairy farms are just disappearing in our area, so there were fewer and fewer small farmers to buy from us,” Ron said.

A farming landscape with green rolling hills and blue sky. Cows roam the field in the foreground. In the distance is a gray farmhouse, red barn, a scattering of farm sheds and a grain silo. Red barns, symbolic of small family dairy farms, still dot the landscape in Monroe, Wisconsin, but many are no longer in operation. Photograph: Greg Kahn/The Guardian

The license plates for Wisconsin say “America’s Dairyland” beneath a picture of a red barn. The state has the most dairy farms in the country. But it lost 826 dairy farms in 2019, or 10% of its dairy herds – the most dramatic loss in the state’s history, and part of a downward trend which saw the state lose 44% of its dairy farms over the last decade. Last year, for the first time in state history, the number of dairy farms dipped below 7,000.

At the same time, milk production in the state has increased every year since 2004, and has set a new annual record each year since 2009, according to the US Department of Agriculture. In the last decade alone, Wisconsin has increased milk production by 25%. The number of operations declines, just as the number of cows per operation goes up – 3% of Wisconsin farms now produce roughly 40% of the state’s milk. Milk produced on concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO), or farms with more than about 700 cows but often housing thousands, is increasingly making up the state’s overall milk production.

“The kids don’t go into it, why would they? Get cow shit all over you, and not have a paycheck.” — Cory Bidlingmaier, Auctioneer.

The number of large farms like this in Wisconsin has increased by 55% in less than a decade. A family-owned CAFO called Pinnacle moved into Green county in 2018, causing an uproar from local farmers and other residents.

Pinnacle milks 5,000 cows. It is owned by Todd Tuls and his son, TJ, who oversees its 55 employees and the daily operations. Instead of collecting from 30 small farmers across Green county, milk trucks can make just one stop – at Pinnacle – and they do, nine times a day.

Todd said he understood local misgivings. “I can see their anxiety, it’s like a Walmart coming into a small-town area and the local store is like how is this going to impact me?” he said. “The one thing that bothers me the most is that people look at us as if we’re a corporation and not a family business. Deep down inside we are a family business,” added Todd, who said he grew up on a California dairy farm with 4,400 cows at its peak in the mid-1980s. His grandfather owned three dairy farms milking more than 3,000 cows in total in 1969, the year Todd was born.

He said the way he relates to his cows despite their size is part of their success, describing himself as “kinda like a cow whisperer”. He argues that other farms missed opportunities to grow. “A lot of these farms that go out of business fail to adapt to the techniques and technology. It’s kinda like if Ford or Chevy woulda just kept building the 1972 truck and not kept improving it.”

‘There Ain’t No Future in Dairy, None at All’

The Wallenhorsts bought a small beef herd; like many former dairy farmers, they’ll transition to raising steer for slaughter now. But their barn is empty, dairy is done. “It’s quiet, eerily quiet, for the first time in 50-some years. It’s pretty strange,” Ron said. “First couple days was difficult to walk in there.”

Cory Bidlingmaier is a third-generation auctioneer. “He was a nervous wreck, we really had to walk him through all of it,” Cory said of Ron’s state in the weeks leading up to the auction. But Cory has had plenty of experience with anxious farmers. There have been weeks in recent years that Cory has done four to five complete dairy dispersals like the Wallenhorsts’.

Left: Ron Wallenhorst sits in his office attached to the dairy barn. He and his wife Lori will shift their focus to growing corn and soybeans and raising steer for slaughter. Right: Idle milkers hang on a window sill next to a milk tank at the Wallenhorst farm in Cuba City, Wisconsin.

Cory grew up in Green county: an expanse of silos and sky in southern Wisconsin that can be driven across east to west in a half hour. Few vehicles are seen other than the semi trucks that cut through the low hills hauling milk. Despite having five farms with 500 or more cows, Green county still has many of Wisconsin’s small dairy farms, about 200, with between 50 and 100 cows, milked by the family.

The county went from being a highly competitive marketplace for generations to an area like so many others in the state where too much milk is being produced. When the price of milk is down, farmers milk more cows to compensate; if the milk price is up, they milk more to capitalize. The excess of milk matches up with a plummet in consumption as milk alternatives and water are chosen over milk. And the glut is worldwide, driving down prices for farmers to the point they are barely breaking even or are losing money to produce it. On top of that, a Green county co-op of 25 local farms that accepts 3.5m pounds (1.6mkg) of milk to create 400,000 pounds (182,000 kg) of cheese a month unexpectedly shut down last fall after 110 years due to pandemic-specific industry volatility. A shutdown like this is very rare, and left farmers scrambling for new processors to offload their milk.

Dan Truttmann’s farm in Blanchardville in Green County has 425 milking cows. Photograph: Greg Kahn/The Guardian

Milk prices were at a record high in 2014, then from 2015 on, went down. When prices are good, small dairy farmers, able to finally turn a profit, make longstanding crucial repairs on the smaller scale, and do some significant expansions on the large level. In early 2015 in Green county farmers were so confident in expanding that if you wanted to put up a building, you were lucky if you could find an available contractor. But the good times never last.

“The milk price only comes up a few times a year, just enough to tease ’em. Then it drops again,” Cory said. “When the farmers call us to auction their herd, they’re saying ‘Screw this, we’re going to go work in town or off the farm.’ It affects so many people. When a dairy goes out, the local feed store, the local hardware store, the whole local economy is affected.” Larger farmers can look across the country to find the best price for anything they need.

Cory didn’t grow up on a dairy farm, but like most everyone in Green county, being involved in the industry somehow was a given. He’s seeing that change. “It sucks for my 10- and 12-year-old. When my uncle sold out a month ago, I made a point to get my boys over there to milk a cow so they can grow up and at least say they have done it,” he said.

His job requires him to witness the final day of countless dairy farms; his outlook on the future of the industry reflects that. “There will be no family farm. The kids don’t go into it, why would they? Get cow shit all over you, work 19-hour days, and not have a paycheck. Unless the family has old money, there ain’t no future in dairy, none at all.”

Mark Stephenson, the director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the industry definitely has a lot of challenges but is nowhere near extinction.

“We’ve produced record amounts of milk in the last year or two. It’s being consumed. Most of it domestically, but increasingly with exports,” said Stephenson.

Like many former dairy farmers, Ron Wallenhorst will shift to raising cattle for slaughter. Photograph: Greg Kahn/The Guardian

Last year, tankers were loading up milk and driving it straight to the farm’s manure pit, opening the valve, and letting it go – milk dumping like this is quite extreme. Yet even in a year that started with unprecedented dumping, cows being culled, and milk sold at very distressed prices, then continuing with a milk price of $13 per 100 pounds (£9.32 per 45kg) of milk in the spring and summer – which is less than the cost of production for most farmers – 2020 ended with a high demand for cheese. This was thanks in part to the government’s pandemic food assistance programs. By the end of the year the state’s dairy farms again increased total production to 30.7bn pounds (13.9bn kg) of milk. And on it goes.

Stephenson said farmers used to be able to make a living with 15 or 20 cows just a generation or two ago.

“You could hardly find a farm like that now. That does not exist. Now we would look at a 100-cow farm and say, ‘Oh, isn’t that quaint?’” he said. The attrition rate in Wisconsin for dairy farming is about 3–5% annually (in 2019 it was 10%), and as with farming across the country and specialties, it’s hard to find new farmers to hand a family farm off to. Stephenson said, “Now we’ve got, at least, a couple generations that have gotten to the point that they’ve never been on a farm and if they get there, they would just probably go, ‘Oh boy. That smells bad.’”

The industry may have staying power, but as one made up of fewer, larger operations. Stephenson thinks large farms, those with more than 500 cows, are the way of the future.

“Those quaint red barns that you are used to seeing on green hillsides with black and white cows in the fields, that just doesn’t exist any more. Those barns over time will begin to rot and fall down,” he said. “That image that people have of what dairy farming is has to evolve into what is much more the reality now and those are large barns that house thousands of cows.”

Two women, one in a short-sleeved yellow button-down shirt and black jeans, the other in a pink T-shirt and gray jeans, lean against the outside wall of a red barn. Emily, left, and Brandi Harris, sold their dairy herd in 2019. Emily now works as an excavator and Brandi works in administration at a local college. Photograph: Greg Kahn/The Guardian

‘Hope Sustains the Farmer’

“I drive by Pinnacle a lot. It’s disgusting. There’s potholes everywhere because there’s a semi in and out of there every hour,” said Emily Harris, a fourth-generation farmer, of the CAFO that has moved into the county. “It kinda makes you sick. It’s just a huge building, you don’t even see one cow.”

Emily and her wife Brandi, both 39, live in Monroe, a small city in Green county about 40 miles south of Madison. After 10 years, they stopped dairy farming on a Monday. “May 6 of 2019, the cows left,” Emily said. Forty cows left on a double-decker trailer headed for farms in New York and Indiana. That Tuesday, Emily started her job at a nearby excavating company as an equipment operator. Emily cried for a week prior. Brandi held out until the day they left, then lost it. “They are your life, seven days a week,” she said.

They’d used farm equipment that looked like antiques and went without making crucial repairs. They did everything they could to keep milking, pushing hay into holes in the barn to stop the wind in especially cold years. They’d taken turns working off-farm jobs, as many farm families do.

Left: The Harrises kept one cow, Lay-T, on their farm in Monroe, Wisconsin. They just couldn’t face selling her. Right: Sunlight stripes the hay in the Harrises’ barn. “May 6 of 2019, the cows left,” said Emily Harris.

“I think we made money two of the years?” Emily asked looking over to Brandi, who shrugs. They’d had a decent organic contract, which generally pay more than conventional milk, but the new contract was suddenly going to be $20 (£14) less per 100 pounds of milk, down from $37 (£26). Emily said, “We were just watching the milk price go down, down, down.”

Emily’s advice for dairy farmers is blunt: “If they’re under 300 cows, just quit. It’s not worth it. You can’t turn a profit any more. I think the small dairy farmer is gone. It’s a sad deal.”

Just 20 minutes down the road, around the same time the Harrises were starting their farm, Dan Truttmann, a fifth-generation farmer, was expanding his. “I wanted to get myself and my dad out of the milking parlor. We were at risk of wearing out, emotionally and physically,” he said. He unceremoniously lifts one of about 20 barn cats out of an office chair next to desks near the milking parlor and the calf pen to check one of the dusty laptops keeping track of weight, feeding habits, temperatures, milk production and other vitals for every one of his 425 milking cows.

Before milk prices hit the downward trajectory they’ve remained on the last six years, dairy farmers commonly doubled their herds, as Truttmann did, and just let their processor know they’d be shipping out more milk. Truttmann said, “Now some of them are saying, ‘Don’t you dare send us an extra load without our permission.’”

Truttmann, who is 53, has nine employees helping himself, his brother, and his dad on the farm, which has been in his family since 1899. “It’s just not really likely that somebody with minimal education in the area could just buy a farm. You used to kind of think about that, like, well, if you can’t do anything else, you can always farm. Boy, that is not true at all today,” he said.

A man is surrounded by calves in a cow shed with a layer of hay on the floor. One of the calves is suckling his finger. Dan Truttmann, a fifth-generation farmer, expanded to more than 400 milking cows to keep his dairy farm alive. Photograph: Greg Kahn/The Guardian

He works up to 80 hours a week, getting up at five in the morning, an hour after 3,500 gallons (13,200 litres) of milk is picked up from his farm every day and taken to a local processor to be made into cheese for retail (which cushioned him from pandemic-specific blows to dairy farmers who sell to cheese processors for restaurants and schools). Green county’s dairy farmers sell directly to cheese makers or co-ops, no one sells fluid milk.

Truttmann’s three kids aren’t interested in farming, but he’s hopeful that a nephew may be. He knows it’s a hard sell – in good times, profit margins are about 10%. “When feed costs are high or hauling costs are shifted, all of a sudden there’s nothing left,” he said.

His favorite job on the farm is getting hours-old calves to bottle feed. He marches into a pen cradles the calf and patiently gets her to suckle – the trick is putting her nose on his wrist, which makes her mouth open automatically. He wants her to get used to him, to understand this is her caregiver from day one.

Back in his house, out of his rubber boots with his ankles crossed, he said, “I don’t think we’re different from any other industry where as times change, you either change with them or get left behind. And that’s the sad, hard reality of it. And even those that modernize are still at some risk of being washed out. It’s always a gamble.” He paused. “Hope sustains the farmer. That’s what the sign says on my back door.”

This is part one of a two-part series on America’s changing dairyland. Part two will be published on Sunday July 25, 2021.

[sinrau]

Here’s a tiny secret. One that Coronavirus should have clued us into. Normal is over. The age of normal is finished, done, a relic of history. Things will not go back to normal. From here, they societies only grow more unstable, economies more depressed, nations more fractured, and lives — yours and mine — more surreal, difficult, and troubled.

There isn’t going to be a return to yesterday’s normal — if by that we mean something like stable, prosperous societies, steadily growing economies, and smoothly functioning nations. That was the rich world, and even in the poor one, normal is over, too. The idea that you can get rich by simply selling stuff to the already rich world — like South Korea did, or China tried — that’s long gone, too.

The effects of Coronavirus are going to last for much of the rest of the next decade. We’re already about six months into a global pandemic, and there’s already no end in sight. Yes, things are reopening — but even that reopening is hesitant and cautious, in wise nations at least, very much unlike yesterday. In unwise nations, like America, reopening is already making the pandemic much, much worse. The lesson is simple: try to go back to normal — bang! — you’re done.

The rest of our lives are going to be much like the last six months. We’re explorers in uncharted territory right about now. How are we to survive things like pandemics, climate change, ecological collapse, mass extinction — and the shattering waves of depression, upheaval, and panic those unleash? Coronavirus is just a warm-up, a drill, a very very tiny taste of the rest of your life.

What’s going to change over the next few decades? What isn’t, is the better question. Now, bare with me. This next part will be a little scary. But stick it out until the end.

Let me give you a small example.

It’s 100 degrees in London today. It should be maybe 75 or so — normal. By 2030, climate change is going to go from intense, to catastrophic. What’s that going to do to you?

There you are, already struggling to eke out a living, like the average American, 80% of whom now live paycheck to paycheck, unable to save a penny, dying in debt they’ve never been able to pay off their whole lives long. You might think: “well, climate change can’t make my life any worse, more unstable, more anxious. What’s the big deal!”

You’d be wrong.

Right about now, you pay something like a quarter of your income for utilities. Water, maybe 5%, electricity, another 5%, insurance another 5%, and so forth. Fast forward a decade. The world is now running out of water. Clean air. Livable temperatures.

Guess which bills suddenly spike? Your water bill now comes to 20% of your income. Your electricity bill — you’ve got to run extra ACs now, night and day — comes to another 20%. Bang! There goes your life. You’re already in perpetual, unpayable debt. What’s going to happen when the costs of the climate crisis land squarely on your shoulders.

Then, one day, you get a bill from the insurance company. Your home insurance premium’s going up 50% a year, you realize, because of the risk of fire, flood, quake. You feel a sudden surge of panic. Your income’s been stuck most of your life. All your credit cards are perpetually maxed out. How are you to afford this? What do you do?

By the 2040s, mass extinction will go from troubling to implosive. The world’s great chains of life will begin to topple, keeling over at the base, as the littlest things finally die off — taking everything else with them. There will be an intense, terrible struggle to keep humanity fed, water, clean, and nourished. The fish don’t clean the rivers anymore: double whammy no food, no water. The insects have stopped turning the soil. Quadruple whammy: less harvest, hotter temperatures, less water, less oxygen.

It all seems abstract to you, until you notice that food prices have been spiraling out of control, as have prices for everything from beer to juice. You used to spend somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of your income feeding your family. But now you can barely seem to accomplish that task on that much. To feed them well, you realize, over the last few years, you’ve had to spend much, much more. And what about all those air purifiers in your home? All those masks everyone wears? All those allergy pills you take? It all adds up. And you realize, horrified, that you’re spending more than half your income now, on such things — the things of basic sustenance, whether decent food, clean air, or drinkable water.

No wonder you’re so deep in debt. No wonder your debts rise every year — and when you think about your financial position, you have panic attacks.

You’re paying the price of mass extinction now — only you don’t quite know it. And it’s bankrupted you, which is why you survive on a lifeline of credit, which, if it were to vanish, would leave you and yours destitute and starving in a matter of not even months, but weeks or days.

By the 2050s, the Final Goodbye will begin. The earth’s great ecosystems will begin to die off, irreversibly. The Amazon. The ocean currents. The glaciers and ice at the poles. All the great systems which keep life on planet earth as we know it breathing, eating, drinking, thriving. But that includes you, too.

And this time, the effects are even more catastrophic. It’s not just water and food bills which rise. Now there are mass shortage of things you once took for granted. That juice, that meat, that bread — it’s not made anymore. It never will be again. The rich have it on the black market, at extortionate prices. That kind of furniture, this kind of clothing, that kind of fabric, this kind of wood — bang! Gone. It’s now the stuff that billionaires keep under lock and key, a trophy, that once used to be a mere shrugging everyday good.

Then there’s medicine, drugs, pharmaceuticals. Without nature to provide many of the basics, medicines, too skyrocket in price. Everything from simple ones to sophisticated ones. Soon enough, you’re spending another huge chunk of income on that. And you get medical insurance bills that make the 2020s look quaint.

But it’s hardly just medical insurance. Insurance of any kind seems to be a luxury now. Who’s going to insure your home, in an age where flood and fire are everyday realities? Who’s going to insure your life, when life expectancy is plummeting? Who’s going to bother insuring your for anything at all — when you’re a pauper, living on life support, who doesn’t have a hope of ever paying off your debts? And you can hardly afford it now, anyways.

Most of your income now goes to two things. One, basics — water, air, food, whether used for cleanliness, nourishment, or sanitation. Two, debt servicing. Even at a relatively low interest rate, you’ll never pay off what you owe.

Meanwhile Amazon and Google hadn’t paid a penny in taxes for decades now. So who can fund a functioning society? You’re spending everything you have on the basics. They’re taking everything they can, and stuffing it in bank accounts. The result is that society’s systems are now simply breaking down, from healthcare to food to water to energy.

You feel a sense of bitter disappointment. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. You try to calm yourself, after a moment seeing red. After all, you’re smart enough to see the effects living at the edge of despair has had on society. Massive waves of people seem to have lost their minds. They cling to bizarre superstitions, spend all day in escapism, flee to conspiracy theories — or worst of all, join one of the many new doomsday cults flourishing everywhere. You remember, hazily, that people used to call the GOP a doomsday cult. It was just the beginning of one. Now there are vast networks of them, people who’ve given up on tomorrow. The skyrocketing suicide of the 20s never stopped rising. Some days, you understand the crushing, mind-numbing fear, too. But the doomers? They’re inconsequential, in the end.

Living without any hope in the future, constantly getting poorer, with no end in sight — it’s created a new politics of fascism. A politics where people are happy to die, as long as their tribe prevails.

Politics is now a brutal contest of power. Which tribe can seize this last morsel of water, air, food? Men with guns roam your streets. You don’t venture out much. You try to make sense of it all. They belong to this faction, that faction. Which one should you join? The idea of a rule of law seems to be a quaint, distant memory. You have to look out for yourself and your own. The tribes distribute these last few resources according to their hierarchies — in which the most violent rise to the top. You’ve never been that kind of person. What hope is there for you, in a world where only the brutal, cruel, selfish, and stupid seem to thrive? How can you protect your kids, and raise them well — or even care for them much at all now?

As civilization’s basic systems have begun to fail, so too have the everyday systems they depended on. Kids going to school need clean air, water, food, energy. All those things are in short, short supply now. Who can afford to run a world class school system when the prices of those basics have spiraled out of control? Your kids go to school — some days. But it’s a charade, a place they stay busy, maybe out of trouble, for a while.

What happens, you wonder, if you need healthcare? If a school needs clean air, water, food, a hospital does, too, all the more so — and then some. It needs medicine, a constant, dependable supply of energy, sanitation, hygiene. But all those things, too, seem to be vanishing. There are brownouts now, days when the water just stops flowing, days when the smog is so bad you can barely leave the house. You can go to the hospital, sure — but like the school, it’s a barely functional, decrepit place, a broken system. You’re probably better off at home, you realize, taking your chances.

After all, at least at home, you won’t get infected by any of the strange new diseases ripping through society. What had begun to happen in the first decades of the 21st century, it later emerged, was a trend. Ebola, SARS, MERS, Corona. Zoonotic viruses. They weren’t an anomaly — but another kind of catastrophe. As humanity had encroached on nature, its poor and hungry ripping came in contact with, ate, drank, touched wildlife anew. And diseases crossed the species barrier like a great river.

It seemed there was a new one every decade, every five years or so. Coronavirus had been a shock, but only because it was the first one. Now, the world was used to them. And the truth was that the world in 2020 had been both richer and had more willpower to fight. Now? People just shrugged, and went about their business. You took your chances.

The world had grown poor. People’s spirits had broken. Life had become a bitter, brutal contest for self-preservation. It was you against everyone else. You woke up, and had one job: try to acquire the basics for your family to survive this day, this week. From anyone and everyone else. How were you going to get water, food, air?

Economists put that in a different way. The global economy had now become a zero sum game. For basics. Sustenance and nourishment. Hygiene and cleanliness and sanitation. Health. Money to pay off the interest on the debt, without which you wouldn’t have credit, and then you’d die.

Everyone competed against everyone else, every day, for these basic things.

Why? Because the globe had underinvested during humanity’s most critical period. Instead of three massive, historic waves of investment — the first to fight climate change, the second to fight mass extinction, and the third to fight ecological collapse — all those catastrophes had come true. And so had their side effects, which ranged from economic depression to social upheaval to pandemics.

Things like working financial, social, economic systems — banks, hospitals, schools, jobs? A distant memory of better times. Now life was just this endless combat, for survival.

The world hadn’t learned the lesson of the rich country which had become a poor one. The powerful one which had ended up a failed state.

The world had gone American. It had become poor, broken, dysfunctional — and proud of it, in many places. It was now incapable of taking any kind of collective action at all. Predatory elites laughed, and profited from the ruin. The poor begged the rich to be their servants. A new feudal-aristocratic economy had emerged, in which collapse-peasantry and extinction-serfdom were the new bitter realities. Poverty, despair, ruin were watchwords. Nations imploded, as politics became self-destruction — and those were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones descended into chaos, a free for all of every person for themselves, by way of nihilism, theocracy, fascism, and hate — just like America had, in the 30s.

There you were. The average person, trapped in this vicious cycle of self-preservation, too poor, weary, broke now to do anything but watch, in panic, in fear, in fury, as a new dark age fell, and one by one, the lights of civilization went out.

I know that the above is scary — but my point isn’t to scare you. It’s to say that there are profound changes to come over the next three decades, some of the greatest in human history. We can be proactive, and take it upon ourselves to make those changes in manageable ways. Or those changes can and will be forced upon us in ways that we are unlikely to be able to cope with. Coronavirus is just one such change, but there are many more on the way as climate change, mass extinction, and ecosystem collapse unleash waves of depression, upheaval, and dislocation to rival history’s greatest catastrophes — over and over again. So don’t consider this a prophecy — consider it a warning.

Umair June 2020

[cabildoquarterly]

Two Poems: David Morgan O'Connor

INSURANCE

driving south things get cheaper gas tobacco beer jerky flash flood

east of East St. Louis puts God into bite-sized sound morsels

in Miami Oklahoma love is easily fallen into with a sky that seems forgiving

poolside route 66ing in Tucumcari Tri-Star Inn Express all efficient a swallow sings a rosary

giving respite to swirling unjust logic drink warm light beer smoke light Camel Crush inhale

unleaded now has 20% ethanol listen the Interstate all fierce and river pound and at any moment

all memory all proof of hope can be erased in the tire toss of a pebble

REPUDIATION

They say buck up be brave. I say fuck them nothing changes. I got twenty minutes to leave this America and will.

Thermometer rockets fear shatters like door-glass, ground by military boot. You have your guns and I’ll have my funeral. Send the bill to congress if they’re not extinct.

Replace hope with rage. Exeunt North. The executioner’s needle, ever-welcome.

Come, the drones are circling. I’m ready. They win. You win. I lose. Take it. Take all my stuff. There is nothing I want but to leave.

***

David Morgan O'Connor is from a small village on Lake Huron called Grand Bend.  After many nomadic years, he is based in Albuquerque, where a short story collection progresses. He contributors monthly to: The Review Review and New Pages. His writing has appeared in: Barcelona Metropolitan, Collective Exiles, Across the Margin, Headland, Cecile's Writers, The Great American Lit Mag, Bohemia, Beechwood, Fiction Magazine, After the Pause, The Great American Lit Mag (Pushcart nomination) , The New Quarterly and The Guardian. Tweeting @dmoconnorwrites  davidmorganoconnor.com

[scrmnviking]

A Timeline of Cultural Reference, Pop and otherwise

A Timeline of Cultural Reference, Pop and otherwise

So, I’ve made some updates to a thing I’ve been working on. Below lies a list of events in chronological order. Most of them are things we (in the US) have heard of or reference in our culture. Some of them are surprising tidbits of trivia. Some are things we Really Should Know More Commonly. And some of it is just fun.

Why? Well, I found myself wondering things like “would Captain Kidd have been able to steal a Ming vase?” or “did the dodo go extinct before or after Harvard was established?” or “when was Sperm Whale oil last used?” Unlike a certain game, I’ve tried to keep to the latest proven dates on record and keep it accurate. The dates for thermometers, for example, changes depending on whether you mean “shows objective temperature change”, “records temperature with a numeric scale”, or “records temperature and is unaffected by barometric pressure differences”.

I tried to be inclusive beyond cis white male, but I know I’m not completely successful. A lot of things aren’t well recorded or documented and some things spread across a large span of time. In other words, if it’s not here, it doesn’t mean it is not important.

Have fun reading and feel free to drop me a note or comment!

MYA 65MYA - Dinosaurs wiped out (except birds) 4MYA - Mostly bipedal 2.6 MYA - Early stone tools

BCE 250,000 BCE - cooking fires (hearths) ~40,000 BCE - clothing     - Neanderthals die out ~30,000 BCE - Chauvet cave paintings ~24,000 BCE - Venus of Willendorf ~10,000 BCE - Agriculture invented ~8,000 BCE - Smilodon Fatalis goes extinct <8700 BCE - Stone Age 5500 BCE - Copper Age - Vinca culture first to process copper 4000-3001 BCE - Papyrus - writing stuff, not the font 4000 BCE - Corn (maize) dispersed into Central America and Columbia 3000-ish BCE - Stonehenge     - Cuneiform script 3300 - 600 BCE - Bronze Age                          - parchment vellum 3250-3000 BCE Taoism 3000 BCE - Kohl (stibnite mixed with fat) used as eye makeup 2560–2540 BCE Great Pyramids of Giza 2558–2532 BCE Sphinx of Giza 2100 BCE - Xia dynasty - first dynasty of China (by tradition) 2000 BCE - isolated pocket of Wooly Mammoths go extinct on Wrangel Island 1800 BCE - Epic of Gilgamesh 1770 BCE - Babylon largest city in world 1754 BCE - Code of Hammurabi 1750 BCE - oldest known written complaint from consumer Nanni to merchant Ea-Nasir, in cuneiform 1556 BCE - Shang dynasty  (or Yin dynasty) of China ruled in Yellow River valley 1500 BCE - Oracle bone script - oldest form of Chinese writing yet found 1400 BCE - Beginnings of Olmec civilization 1323 BCE - King Tutankhamun’s death 1312 BCE - Judaism (Moses given Oral Torah) 1200 BCE - 700 CE Iron Age 1046 BCE - Shang dynasty ended, Zhao dynasty began (China) 753 BCE - Rome founded 495 BCE - Pythagorean theorem (Pythagoras dies. Unrelated) 480 BCE - Battle of Thermopylae (“300” was based on it) 475 BCE - Royal Road of the Persian Empire (precursor to the Silk Road) 470-399 BCE - Socrates - Socratic method - break a problem down into a series of questions. Sentenced to drink hemlock. 460-370 BCE - Hippocrates - Doctor’s oath (Do No Harm) 450 BCE - Buddhism founded 428-337 BCE - Plato - Allegory of the Cave 350 BCE - Olmecs decline 385 BCE - Plato founds Academy - first university 4th Cent BCE - gears - China 384-322 BCE - Aristotle - founder formal logic 370 BCE - death of Hippocrates of Kos - father of medicine 356-323 BCE - Alexander the Great 321 BCE - Serpent Mound in Adams county, OH built (Adena culture) 300 BCE - “Elements” Euclid - Euclidean geometry, geometric algebra, finding square root 287-212 BCE - Archimedes (“Eureka!” - displacement) 230 BCE - Aristarchus of Samos dies (heliocentrism, sun a star) 221 BCE - Qin Shi Huang united warring kingdoms  and became emperor of Qin dynasty, beginning Imperial China 218 BCE - Hannibal marches elephants over the Alps in the 2nd Punic War 209 BCE - Terracotta Army buried with Qin Shi Huang 196 BCE - Rosetta Stone carved 150 BCE - Seleucus of Seleucia theorizes cause of tides is the Moon 120 BCE - The Silk Road connects Europe with China 100 BCE - Antikythera mechanism (analog computer to calculate planet position) Teotihuacan established 48 BCE - burning of Library at Alexandria 44 BCE - Et tu, Brute? - Julius Caesar killed

CE

1st Cent 1 - Lions extinct in Western Europe 43 - Londinium (London, England) established 64 - Great Fire of Rome (the one to which Nero supposedly fiddled) 70 - Christianity Founded/separated from Judaism (destruction of the Second Temple) 79 - Mount Vesuvius buries Pompeii 80 - Colosseum of Rome built (finished)

2nd Cent 105 - Paper Invented - China 122 - Hadrian’s Wall started, largely completed in 6 years 132 - Seismometer - Zhang Heng

3rd Cent 200 - Kama Sutra compendium collected 220 - Three Kingdoms era start Kongming lanterns (unmanned hot air balloon signals - think Tangled lights) ~250 - Teotihuacan monuments construction finished 280 - Three Kingdoms era end

4th Cent 300 - probably earliest habitation of Hawaiian islands 313 - Christianity legalized in Roman Empire by Constantine I “Edict of Milan” 322 - the stirrup - China 325 - First Council of Niceaea (Niceaen Creed - compilation of the Bible) called by Constantine the Great 380 - Theodosius issues “Cuncto populos” aka “Edict of Thessalonica” - Nicene Trinitarian Christianity only legitimate imperial religion and only one to entitled to call itself Catholic. Also ended state support for polytheistic religions and customs.

5th Cent 407 - Rome’s withdrawal from Britain 410 - Rome sacked by Visigoths 434 - Attila the Hun started ruling the Huns 453 - Attila the Hun dies 455 - Rome sacked by Vandals 476 - Rome fell 477/495 - Chan Buddhists found Shaolin Monastery Late - Legendary King Arthur leads defense of Britain against Saxons

6th Cent Backgammon invented in Persia by Burzoe early - Zen Buddhism enters Vietnam from China 525 - Scythian monk Dionysius Exiguus invents Anno Domini era calendar ~550 - Teotihuacan major monuments sacked and burned 581-618 - Shaolin Kung Fu formed (Shaolin Luohan’s 18 hands) 589 - first documented use of toilet paper - China

7th Cent Sutton Hoo ship burial 628 - Concept of zero in mathematics, India 632 - Islam/ Death of Muhammed 650 - Chinese Paper money issued 670 - “Greek fire” invented

8th Cent Picts of Scotland design first European triangular harp 770 - iron horseshoes in common use 771 - Charlemagne, King of the Franks 790 - Viking Age begins

9th Cent early - ”The Book of the Tale of the Thousand Nights" oldest manuscript fragments 800 - Charlemagne founds Carolingian Empire 800 - Book of Kells created 800 - Soap being made in Spain and Italy 814 - Charlemagne dies 841 - Dublin founded by Vikings

10th Cent Norse become Normans decline of Mayans, rise of Toltecs Erik the Red founded Greenland Hops first mentioned in beer brewing 904 - Fire Arrows used in China, i.e. arrows with gunpowder 958 - 986 - Harald Bluetooth’s reign - Introduced Christianity to Denmark and consolidated rule over most of Jutland and Zealand (Bluetooth computer protocol named after him)

11th Cent 1000 - “Kitab Al-Tasrif” (The Method of Medicine) - Arabic encyclopedia on medicine and surgery - Abu Al Qasim al-Zahrawi (Abulcasis) 1001 - Leif Eriksson establish settlements around Vinland, North America 1025 - “Beowulf” 1025 - 1120 - colonization of Society Islands (Eastern Polonesia) 1066 - Viking Age ended 1066 - Battle of Hastings, Norman conquest of England 1086 - Domesday Book - William I of England 1090 - Hassan al Sabbah takes over Almut, establishes the so-called hashashin (Assassins cf. Assassin’s Creed) 1095 - First Crusade start 1098 - Siege of Antioch (first siege by crusade against a Muslim-held city) 1099 - First Crusade end

12th Distillation of alcohol- School of Salerno 1100 - Paper arrives in Europe 1100–1680 - Moai Carved (Rapa Nui/Easter Island statues) 1119 - Knights Templar established 1120 - White Ship Disaster leads to succession crisis in England 1150 - Angkor Wat built 1168 - decline of the Toltecs 1170 - Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, killed 1183 - Henry II (when “Lion in Winter” is supposed to have occurred) 1189 - Third Crusade led by Richard the Lionhearted 1190 - 1290 second wave of Eastern Polynsia colonization (including Hawaii and New Zealand) 1194 - Robin Hood era - when King Richard removed John the Usurper from the throne

13th Cent 1200 - England soapmaking begins 1200 - Easter Island settled 1202 - “Liber Abaci” Leonardo “Fibonacci” Bonacci - introduced Hindu-Arabic numeral system to West along with Fibonacci numbers 1206 - Ghengis Khan reign start 1206 - Mongol Empire started 1215 - Magna Carta signed 1220 - “Prose Edda” - Snorri Sturluson 1227 - Ghengis Khan reign end 1240 - Mongol Empire conquers Kievan Rus 1258 - Mongol seige of Baghdad (House of Wisdom destroyed) 1260 - Kublai Khan reign starts 1271 - Marco Polo went to the Orient 1271 - Kublai Khan establishes Yuan dynasty 1274 - “Summa Theologiae” - St. Thomas Aquinus 1286 - Eyeglasses invented (prob. Venice) 1294 - Kublai Khan reign end (death) 1295 - Marco Polo came back from the Orient

14th Cent 1300 - “Travels of Marco Polo” published (depicting the time 1271-1295) 1300 - Mechanical Escapement clocks in England 1300 - rise of the Aztecs 1305 - William Wallace hanged, drawn, and quartered (Braveheart) 1320 - “Divine Comedy” - Dante Alighieri 1337 - Mongol Empire ended 1337 - Hundred Years War start 1346 - Black Plague start 1347 - Occam’s Razor 1353 - Black plague end 1368 - End of Mongol Yuan Dynasy, Beginning of Ming Dynasty (like the vase. Wait for it)

15th Cent 1400 - “Canterbury Tales” - Geoffrey Chaucer 1415 - Battle of Agincourt (memorialized in Shakespeare’s St. Crispin’s Day speech) 1417 - Public illumination via oil lamps, London 1420-ish Donatello brings the Putto/Cupid figure back 1429 - Joan of Arc ends Siege of Orleans and turns tide of Hundred Years War 1431 - Joan of Arc killed 1434 - “Arnolfini Portrait” Jan van Eyck 1450-ish - Machu Picchu constructed Silk Road declines 1453 - Hundred Years War end 1455 - War of the Roses start (basis for GoT) 1456 - Guttenberg Bible printed - invention of moveable type 1458 - Vlad the Impaler (Dracul) got his name impaling Saxons 1464 - 87 - Ming Dynasty Vases - Chenghua and Xuande era 1480 - Spanish Inquisition gets underway 1485 - Iga and Koga clan ninjas hired by daimyos (record that ninjas are ‘a thing’) 1485 - “Vitruvian Man” - Leonardo DaVinci 1486 - “The Birth of Venus” Sandro Botticelli 1487 - War of the Roses end 1492 - Columbus lands in San Salvador 1494 - “Summa de arithmetica, geometria proportioni et proportionalita” - double-entry system of accounting codified - Friar Luca Pacioli 1494 - Scotch Whisky being produced 1495-1498 - “The Last Supper” - Leonardo DaVinci 1499 - Vasco da Gama returns to Lisbon, having gone around the Cape of Good Hope and finding the route to India

16th Cent Coffee reaches Middle East, Persia, and Turkey from Mocha (yes, seriously) 1502 - Montezuma (Moctezuma II) starts reign  Aztec calendar stone aka Sun Stone carved (probably) 1503/7 - “Mona Lisa” - Leonardo DaVinci 1504 - “David” - Michelangelo 1509 - Henry VIII reign start 1510 - “School of Athens” Raphael (Sanzio da Urbino) 1512 - “Sistine Chapel” - Michelangelo 1513 - “The Prince” - Machiavelli 1515 - “Garden of Earthly Delights” Hieronymus Bosch 1516 - “Utopia” Thomas More 1517 - “95 Theses” - start of Reformation - Martin Luther 1519 - Magellan sets out to circumnavigate globe 1519 - Spanish conquest of Aztec Empire starts - Hernan Cortez 1521 - Magellan killed in Phillipines 1521 - Spanish conquest of Aztec Empire ends 1522 - Magellans ships circumnavigate globe 1523 - Cacao bean (chocolate) introduced to Span - Hernan Coretes 1540 - Coronado expedition start: Mexico to Kansas - sees Grand Canyon, Colorado River, bison herds, Rio Grande 1542 - Coronado expedition end 1542 - Mary, Queen of Scots reign start 1543 - Heliocentric model - Nicolaus Copernicus 1543 - printed descriptions and illustrations of human dissections - “De humani corporis fabrica” - Andreas Vesalius 1547 - Henry VIII reign end 1547 - Ivan the Terrible reign start 1548 - Tomato comes to Italy (first mention in writing, pom d’oro ‘golden apple’) 1555 - “Les Propheties” Nostradamus 1558 - Elizabeth I reign start 1559 - “Institutes of the Christian Religion” - John Calvin “Calvinism” 1561 - Garamond dies (his lettersets for typeface sold off) 1569 - Mercator projection map - Gerardus Mercator 1581 - last record of Iga and Koga clan ninjas hired by daimyos 1582 - Gregorian calendar - Pope Gregory XIII 1584 - Ivan the Terrible reign end (death) 1587 - Mary, Queen of Scots reign end (forced abdication) 1589 - Stocking frame - mechanical knitting machine - William Lee of Calverton 1589 - Potato introduced to Ireland by Sir Walter Raleigh 1590 - Roanoke colony found abandoned 1590/7 - “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” - William Shakespeare 1592 - “The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus” - Christopher Marlowe 1593 - Grace O’ Malley (the Pirate Queen) petitions Elizabeth I for the release of her sons 1597 - “Romeo and Juliet” - William Shakespeare 1599/1602 - “Hamlet” - William Shakespeare

17th Cent Clothing irons (flat irons/sad irons) 1600 - “On the Magnet and Magnetic Bodies, and on the Great Magnet the Earth” - Earth itself is magnetic, has iron core - William Gilbert 1603 - Elizabeth I reign end (death) 1605 - Gunpowder plot (Guy Fawkes) 1606 - First European landing in Australia (Dutch) 1607 - James Fort (Jamestown, VA) est. 1609 - Kepler’s Law of Planetary motion, 1 and 2 - Johannes Kepler 1614 - “Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio” - natural logarithms - John Napier 1615 - “Don Quixote” - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 1619 - Kepler’s 3rd Law of Planetary motion 1620 - Plymouth colony founded 1622 - Founding of the French Musketeers of the Guard (they carried muskets) 1628 - “De motu cordis” - William Harvey - blood circulates, with the heart acting as a pump 1631 - Quinine (i.e. cinchona bark) used to treat malaria in Rome 1636 - Harvard establised 1637 - Cogito ergo sum - Rene Descartes 1637 - Cartesian coordinate system - Rene Descartes 1638 - thermometer (thermoscope with scale) Robert Fludd 1642 - “The Night Watch” Rembrandt 1643 - Taj Mahal built 1644 - End of Ming Dynasty 1645 - “The Book of Five Rings” - Miyamato Musashi 1645 - mechanical calculator - Blaise Pascal 1650 - Caribbean piracy era start 1654 - thermometer not also a barometer - Ferdinando II de Medici 1656 - Pendulum clock - Christiaan Huygens 1661 - “The Sceptical Chymist” - Robert Boyle - beginning of molecular theory in chemistry i.e. aggregates of bonded chemicals 1662 - Last reliable sighting of dodo bird 1663 - Captain Henry Morgan probably starts career as privateer 1665 - “Girl with a Pearl Earring” Johannes Vermeer 1666 - Great Fire of London 1671 - Capt Morgan attacks Panama. Gets arrested, stops privateering 1676 - speed of light measured (triangulation w/ Jupiter) Ole Romer (-25% of actual) 1677 - huge femur found, thought to be giant, but probably a dinosaur 1677 - Microbiology - Antoine van Leeuewenhook The Microscope and discovery (protists - 1674, bacteria -1683, spermatozoa - 1677, Royal Society acceptance 1677, elected to RS 1680) 1680 - Pocket watch with minute hand 1680 - Kirch’s/Newton’s/Great Comet of 1680 - first comet discovered by telescope 1687 - Laws of Motion, Laws of universal Gravitation, Calculus - Sir Issac Newton 1690 - Pendulum clocks accurate enough for minute hand 1690 - Dodo goes extinct, statistically calculated 1692/3 - Salem witch trials 1692 - Tomatoes in Italian recipe book 1695 - Captain Kidd sets out to catch pirates with a letter of marque 1696 - Peter the Great becomes tsar of Russia 1697 - “Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals: Tales of Mother Goose” - Charles Perrault, created fairy tale genre from folk tales

18th Cent most of Europe uses the fork Xocolatl a popular beverage in Europe (chocolate) 1701 - Captain Kidd hanged for piracy 1703 - “Explanation of Binary Arithmetic” - Gottfried Liebnitz 1705 - Edmund Halley calculates the orbit of his comet 1706 - “The Arabian Nights Entertainment” - English edition of One Thousand and One Nights 1716 - Blackbeard active 1718 - Blackbeard killed 1724 - Fahrenheit thermometer - Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit 1725 - Caribbean piracy era end 1725 - Catherine the Great becomes Empress of Russia (Peter’s death) 1726 - “Gulliver’s Travels” - Jonathan Swift 1727 - speed of light value refined (stellar aberation) and more accepted - James Bradley 1727 - Catherine the Great dies 1735 - “Systema Naturae” - taxonomy - Carl Linnaeus 1739 - Pleistocene fossils collected for study at Big Bone Licky, KY - Charles LeMoyne de Longueui 1742 - Celsius thermometer - Anders Celsius 1754 - French and Indian War start (part of the Seven Years’ War) 1755 - first scientific paper on natural rubber (native to South America) published - Francois Fresneau 1763 - French and Indian War end (part of the Seven Years’ War) 1770 - rubber named for being good at “rubbing off” pencil marks from paper - Joseph Priestly 1773 - the name Santa Claus first used in American press 1775 - American War for Independence start 1776 - Declaration of Independence 1778 - first practical flush toilet - Joseph Bramah 1778 - James Cook arrived in the Hawaiian Islands 1781 - Articles of Confederation - DE, PA, NJ, GA, CT, MA, MD, NC, SC, NH, VA, NY, RI become states 1781 - Watt steam engine - James Watt 1783 - American War for Independence end 1783 - First manned hot air balloon flight - Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier 1785 - modern parachute invented and named - Louis-Sebastien Lenormand 1786 - “The Marriage of Figaro” Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1788 - US Constitution ratified 1788 - British establish penal colony in Botany Bay (Australia) 1789 - French Revolution starts 1789 - “Elementary Treatise of Chemistry” - Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier - first chemistry textbook 1790 - HMS Bounty burned by mutineers 1791 - Bill of Rights ratified 1791 - VT becomes state 1792 - KY becomes state 1792 - Old Farmer’s Almanac published - oldest continuously published North American periodical 1794 - Cotton Gin - Eli Whitney 1795 - Metric system established 1795 - Kamehameha the Great establishes the Kingdom of Hawaii 1796 - Mastodon and Megatherium established as extinct animals (development of comparative anatomy & history of paleontology) - Georges Cuvier 1796 - Homeopathy - Samuel Hahnemann - idiocy clings, don’t it? 1796 - TN becomes state 1796 - Lithography - Alois Senefelder (actor - cheap method of publishing theatrical works) 1798 - smallpox vaccine (cowpox) - Edward Jenner 1799 - Rosetta Stone discovered 1799 - French Revolution ends, Napoleon takes Power

19th Cent 1800 - “Noah’s Raven” footprints (theropod dinosaur prints) found in MA 1800 - first true battery, the voltaic pile - Alessandro Volta 1801 - Barbary Coast War (Barbary pirates) start 1803 - Louisiana Purchase 1803 - Napoleonic Wars start 1803 - OH becomes state 1804 - Lewis and Clark Expedition start 1805 - Battle of Derna (source of “shores of Tripoli” verse in Marine’s Hymn) 1805 - Barbary Coast War end 1806 - Lewis and Clark Expedition end 1807 - Thomas Jefferson sent first paleontology expedition to Big Bone Lick, KY 1807 - Public street lighting via gas - Pall Mall, London 1808 - Symphony No. 5 - Ludwig von Beethoven 1810 - King Kamehameha unified the Hawaiian islands 1811 - “Sense and Sensibility” Jane Austen 1811 - first practical railway locomotive - John Blenkinsop 1811 - Ichthyosaurs fossil discovered by Mary Anning. Key evidence for extinction (it was believed that if God’s creation was perfect, then extinction couldn’t exist) 1812 - Extinction (the fact that animals can go extinct) established as a fact - Georges Cuvier 1812 - LA becomes state 1812 - “Children’s and Household Tales” - Brothers Grimm 1812 - War of 1812 start 1813 - “Pride and Prejudice” Jane Austen 1814 - “Star-Spangled Banner” - Francis Scott Key 1814 - Burning of Washington - British (Canadians) raze DC 1815 - War of 1812 end 1815- “Emma” Jane Austen 1815 - Battle of Waterloo 1815 - Napoleonic Wars End 1816-1828 Zulu empire under Shaka 1816 - IN becomes state 1817 - “The Animal Kingdom” - sets out to describe structure of animal kingdom based on comparative anatomy - Georges Cuvier 1817 - MS becomes state 1818 - “Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus” - Mary Shelley 1818 - “Silent Night” Franz Xaver Gruber, lyrics Joseph Mohr 1818 - IL becomes state 1819 - AL becomes state 1819 - stove top percolating coffee pot - Laurens 1819 - “Rip Van Winkle” - Washington Irving 1820 - ME becomes state 1820 - electric current through a wire produces magnetic field - Hans Christian Ørsted 1820 - “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” - Washington Irving 1821 - MO becomes state 1823 - Difference Engine (calculator) proposed and funded for construction - Charles Babbage 1823 - “A Visit from St. Nicholas” aka “Twas the Night Before Christmas” 1823 - Fresnel lens used in lighthouse - Augustin-Jean Fresnel 1824 - First Dinosaur fossil named 1824 - “Don Juan” - Lord Byron (postumously) 1825 - Erie Canal opens for business 1829 - Neanderthal fossils discovered 1830 - first rail travel in US on Baltimore Ohio railroad, “Tom Thumb” 1830 - friction matches commercially available 1830 - Mary Anning discovers nearly complete Plesiosaur skeleton 1830-ish Burned-over district produces Mormons, 7th Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Wintesses, Oneida Society and others. 1831 - The Trail of Tears starts - Southeastern Native Americans forcibly relocated past the Mississippi 1833 - “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” -Hokusai 1834 - Spanish Inquisition officially ended 1834 - first ‘real’ electric motor (capable of actually doing work) - Thomas Davenport 1835 - Texas Rangers established 1836 - Texas independence from Mexico 1836 - AR becomes state 1837 - Start of Queen Victoria’s reign 1837 - MI becomes state 1837 - “Fairy Tales” - Hans Christian Andersen (Little Mermaid, Thumbelina, Emperor’s New Clothes, Princess and the Pea) 1838 - First telegraph “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT” in Morse Code 1838 - “Oliver Twist” - Charles Dickens 1839 - First Opium War starts (Britain forcing China to buy opium) 1839 - Vulcanization of rubber - Charles Goodyear 1840 - Saxophone - Adolphe Sax 1840 - Adhesive postage stamp “Penny Black” UK 1842 - First algorithm written for Babbage’s Analytical Engine aka first program for first computer - Ada Lovelace 1842 - First Opium War ends 1843 - “A Christmas Carol” - Charles Dickens 1843- “The Tell-Tale Heart” - Edgar Allen Poe 1844 - “The Three Musketeers” - Alexandre Dumas 1845 - “The Little Match Girl” - Hans Christian Andersen 1845 - NY Nicks play modern baseball 1845 - FL becomes state 1845 - TX becomes state 1845 - Fredrick Douglass publishes autobiography 1845 - Faraday rotation - interaction btwn light and magnetic field: light and electromagnatism related - Michael Faraday 1845 - “The Raven” - Edgar Allen Poe 1845 - Irish Potato Famine start 1846 - Mexican-American War start 1846 - IA becomes state 1846 - Neptune first observed - Johann Gottfried Galle 1847 - “The Mathematical Analysis of Logic” - Boolean logic - Charles Boole 1847 - Battle of Chapultepec - source of “halls of Montezuma” in Marine’s Hymn 1848 - Mexican-American War end (Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo) 1848 - Gold Rush in California 1848 - WI becomes state 1848 - Oneida Community est. (complex marriage, stirpiculture, mutual criticism, etc - too much to go into, but really, look it up) 1849 - speed of light measured on Earth - Hippolyte Fizeau (+5%) 1849 - Harriet Tubman escapes slavery. Starts conducting on Underground Railroad 1850 - CA becomes state 1850 - “The Scarlet Letter” - Nathaniel Hawthorne 1850 - Trail of Tears ends 1851 - “Moby Dick” - Herman Melville 1851 - “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech by Sojourner Truth 1852 - Irish Potato Famine End 1853 - US Warships demand Japan open to the West. Or else. 1854 - Florence Nightengale introduced modern nursing to the Crimean War 1855 - Cholera outbreak in London - germ theory - John Snow - dismissed as too depressing 1855 - End of California Gold Rush 1856 - 1860 Second Opium War 1856 - Neanderthal 1 fossil specimen discovered in Neandertal, western Prussia (Germany) 1857 - modern commercially available toilet paper introduced - Joseph Gayetty 1858 - fermentation caused by bacteria (yeast) - Louis Pasteur 1858 - MN becomes state 1859 - “Origin of Species” - Charles Darwin 1859 - Pennsylvania oil rush 1859 - OR becomes state 1859 - Big Ben of Clock/Elizabeth Tower 1859 - lead-acid battery - first rechargeable (by sending a reverse current through) - Gaston Plante 1860 - “Paul Revere’s Ride” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1860 - continuous DC power from a dynamo - Antonio Pacinotti 1861 - KS becomes state 1861 - Start of American Civil War 1862 - “Les Miserables” - Victor Hugo 1863 - WV becomes state 1864 - NV becomes state 1864 - H.L. Hunley - first military submarine to sink enemy vessel 1864 - William King recognizes Neanderthal 1 as sample of separate species. Gives them the name “homo neanderthalensis” 1865 - End of American Civil War 1865 - Pasteurization invented (patented) - Louis Pasteur 1866 - Winchester rifle 1867 - 1894 “Das Kapital” Karl Marx 1867 - carbolic acid used to sterilize surgical wounds - Joseph Lister - father of modern surgery/antiseptic surgery - Listerine named in his honor 1867 - NB becomes state 1869 - “War and Peace” - Leo Tolstoy 1869 - Whirlwind vacuum cleaner - Ives W. McGaffey 1869 - Periodic table - Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev 1869 - Transcontinental Railroad completed 1870 - “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” - Jules Verne 1870 - Black men get the vote 1871 - “Descent of Man” - Charles Darwin 1871 - “Whistler’s Mother” - James Whister 1871 - Great Chicago Fire, unjustly blamed on Mrs. O’Leary’s cow 1871 - Germany becomes a country 1872 - Colt Single Action Army revolver/ Peacemaker 1873 - Alleged steam drill and John Henry contest 1873 - Beginning of the “Long Depression” aka the great depression before the Great Depression 1873 - “A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism” James Clerk Maxwell - showed electromagnatism is one force, not two 1873 - Levi Strauss patents blue jeans 1875 - William Denton first to describe fossils from the La Brea Tar Pits 1876 - Battle of Little Bighorn aka Custer’s Last Stand 1876 - Budweiser (Anheiser-Busch) first brewed 1876 - “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” - Mark Twain 1876 - California Oil boom (well #4 Pico Canyon Oilfield) 1876 - CO becomes state 1876 - rubber plant seeds smuggled out of Brazil to Kew Gardens - Henry Wickham 1876 - Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone 1877 - Billy the Kid starts life of crime 1879 - End of the “Long Depression” aka the great depression before the Great Depression 1879 - Edison demonstrates the incandescent light bulb 1881 - Billy the Kid dies 1881 - Gunfight at the O.K. Corral 1881 - Oneida Community dissolved and eventually becomes Oneida Ltd silverware 1883 - “Treasure Island” - Robert Louis Stevenson 1883 - Cataclysmic eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia 1884 - “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” - Mark Twain 1884 - “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jette” Georges Seurat 1885 - rabies post-exposure vaccine - Louis Pasteur 1886 - modern automobile, Karl Benz 1886 - Chicago Haymarket Massacre - striking for an 8 hour workday, anarchists bomb the demonstration 1886 - Coca-Cola, a non-alcoholic version of French Wine Coca nerve tonic sold 1886 - Statue of Liberty dedicated 1887 - “A Study In Scarlet” - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - First appearance of Sherlock Holmes 1887 - Electromagnetic waves proved to exist (radio waves produced) - Heinrich Hertz 1888 - London matchgirl strike - health conditions, against use of white phosphorous, phossy jaw 1888 - Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel 1888 - Induction motor (AC) - Nikola Tesla 1889 - ND, SD, MT, and WA become states 1889 -“Starry Night” - Van Gough 1890 - ID and WY become states 1890 - “Picture of Dorian Gray” - Oscar Wilde 1890 - The Wounded Knee Massacre - end of the Indian Wars 1891 - Basketball created - Dr. James Naismith (Canadian) 1892 - Axe murders of Lizzie Borden’s parents 1892 - “The Nutcracker” - Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 1892 - Bottle cap invented 1893 - HH Holmes Murder Castle at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition 1893, 95, 1910 Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” (4 versions, 2 pastel, 2 paintings) 1893 - Michael Ahren admits he made up the O’Leary cow story 1893 - The Mendenhall Order - formal announcement of a de facto change in the US Office of Weights and Measures which switched from US Customary to Metric 1893 - Zipper invented 1895 - O’Leary “died heartbroken”, still being blamed for the fire 1895 - “The Importance of Being Earnest” - Oscar Wilde 1895 - “The Time Machine” - H.G. Wells 1895 - X-rays produced - Wilhelm Rontgen 1895 - first X-ray image (radiograph) produced - Wilhelm Rontgen 1896 - Oedipus complex - Sigmund Freud 1896 - end of the Long Depression 1896 - UT becomes state 1896 - Klondike Gold Rush 1896 - Marconi radio “wireless telegraphy” 1896 - “La tournee du Chat Noir de Rodolphe Salis” - Theophile Steinlen 1896 - Plessy v Ferguson - Supreme Court says segregation is OK 1897 - “Dracula” - Bram Stoker 1897 - “The Invisible Man” - H.G. Wells 1898 - “The War of the Worlds” - H.G. Wells 1898 - Spanish-American War (3 mo) 1898 - Polonium, radium, radioactivity discovered and named - Marie Curie 1898 - ‘Campaign Watch’ - wristwatch for soldiers in Sudan campaign (wristwatch becomes a ‘thing’) 1898 - George Washington Carver starts issuing bulletins about crop rotation, peanut products, and other agricultural innovations 1899 - End of Klondike Gold Rush 1899 - Harry Houdini’ career start 1899 - Boxer Rebellion 1899 - Bayer selling aspirin around the world

20th Cent 1900 - “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” - Frank L Baum 1901 - Australia becomes a federation 1901 - Boxer Rebellion 1901 - End of Queen Victoria’s reign (death) 1901 - Picasso starts Blue Period 1901 - Spindletop oil find in TX, start of TX oil boom 1903 - Wright Brothers Flight 1903 - “Great Train Robbery” Edwin Porter 1903 - “Dogs Playing Poker” C.M. Coolidge 1903 - “The Experimental Psychology and Psychopathology of Animals” - Ivan Pavlov (Pavlov’s Dogs) 1904 - Western tea bags sold commercially 1905 - Special Relativity - Einstein 1905 - First pizzeria in US opens in NY 1906 - Claude Monet - “Water Lilies” 1906 - San Francisco Earthquake 1907-08 Gustav Klimpt “The Kiss” 1907 - OK becomes states 1908 - Model T 1910 - “The Phantom of the Opera” - Gaston Leroux 1910 - Annie Jump Cannon’s star classification system becomes de facto standard 1912 - first Tarzan book published 1912 - AZ and NM become states 1912 - Titanic sank 1912 - Scoville Organoleptic Test - to rate pungency of chili pepper - William Scoville 1913 - LA County museum given sole right to excavate fossils from La Brea Tar Pits for 2 years 1913 - First moving assembly line - Henry Ford 1913 - Harriet Tubman dies 1914 - WWI begins 1914 - Backless brassiere - Mary Phelps Jacob (who had a dog named Clytoris) 1914 - Panama Canal opens 1915 - General relativity - Einstein 1915 - Ghandi’s struggle for Indian Independence 1915 - “Birth of a Nation” DW Griffith 1915 - hand held hair dryers hit market 1916 - “The Planets” - Gustav Holst (“Mars” is the music you hear in about 30% of action movie trailers) 1917 - America Joins WWI 1917 - Russian Revolution 1917 - Goodyear starts producing airships (beginning of the Goodyear blimps) 1917-1937 H.P. Lovecraft writes 1918 - WW I ends 1919 - Prohibition starts 1920 - Women’s Sufferage in the US 1920 - Band-Aid - Earle Dickson of Johnson & Johnson 1921 - Charlie Chaplin’s “The Kid” 1922 - USSR formed 1923 - King Tut’s tomb opened 1924 - J. Edgar Hoover becomes Director of what will be the FBI 1924 - Caesar salad supposedly invented (Caesar Cardini) 1924 - Kleenex 1925 - Tennessee bans teaching evolution - Scopes Monkey Trial 1925 - Al Capone becomes mob boss 1926 - “Call of Cthulu” H.P. Lovecraft 1926 - Houdini dies 1927 - Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle 1927 - “The Jazz Singer” first feature length movie with talking sequences 1927 - First widely owned refridgerator 1928 - Penicillin discovered 1928 - Sliced bread 1928 - “Treachery of Images” - Rene Magritte 1928 - “Propaganda” Edward Bernays 1929 - Stock market crash starting the Great Depression 1929 - Charles Atlas and the “Insult that made a man out of Mac” advertisement (97lb weakling sand-in-face) 1930 - Penicillin first treats patient 1930 - Pluto discovered 1930 - “American Gothic” - Grant Wood 1930 - Scotch Tape introduced - 3M 1930 - First Twinkie 1931 - “Persistance of Memory” Salvador Dali 1931 - “Star Spangled Banner” made national anthem 1931 - Jackie Mitchell, a 17-year-old girl, strikes out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig 1932 - Electric guitar put into production “Frying Pan” Ro-Pat-In 1932 - First “Conan the Barbarian” story, “The Phoenix on the Sword” 1932 - Al Capone sent to prison 1932 - Bonnie and Clyde start crime spree 1932 - Times New Roman released 1933 - “The Lone Ranger” first radio broadcast 1933 - “King Kong” 1933-4 John Dillenger’s active crime time 1933 - Prohibition ends 1934 - Flash Gordon comic strip start 1934 - “Surgeon’s Photo” of Loch Ness Monster, faked - Col. Robert Wilson 1934 - Alcatraz opened 1934 - Bonnie and Clyde killed 1935 - Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment - Erwin Schrodinger 1936 - “How to Win Friends and Influence People” - Dale Carnegie - first best-selling self-help book 1937 - Cobb salad invented (Robert Cobb/Chuck Wilson) 1937 - “Guernica” - Picasso 1937 - Hindenburg disaster 1937 - “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” - first feature length cel animated film 1937 - “The Hobbit” - JRR Tolkien 1937 - SPAM introduced by Hormel 1937 - Hindenburg disaster 1938 - first Superman comic 1938 - “Our Town” - Thorton Wilder 1939 - WWII begins 1939-1944 - Penicillin mass produced 1939 - Heinkel He 178 V1, the first turbojet aircraft to fly 1939 - “Batman” Bob Kane 1939 - “The Wizard of Oz”, “Gone With the Wind”, “Stagecoach” 1940 - Bugs Bunny Debut “A Wild Hare” 1941 - Messerschmitt ME 262 - first operation jet fighter 1941 - America joins WWII 1941 - “Wonder Woman” William Moulton Marston 1941-ish - Television standardized in US 1942 - “Casablanca” 1942 - “Nighthawks” Edward Hopper 1942 - Executive Order 9066 - Americans of Japanese descent Internment Camps 1942 - Napalm developed 1944 - Fire Balloons - first intercontinental ranged weapon (weather balloons with bombs attached) 1945 - WWII ends 1945 - United Nations founded 1946 - ENIAC, the first computer completed 1947 - Cold War start 1947 - July 8 - “UFO” incident - Roswell, NM 1947 - Oct 14 sound barrier broken - Chuck Yeager in the X-1 1947 - Beginning of the “Red Scare” and McCarthyism 1947 - Assassination of Ghandi - formation of India and Pakistan 1947 - Radarange - first commercially available microwave oven 1948 - “No.5, 1948” Jackson Pollock 1948 - Cat litter invented 1949 - Chinese Communist Revolution 1949 - carbon dating created/published (BP is calibrated to 1950) 1950 -  “Peanuts” Charles Schultz 1950 - Start of Korean War 1950 - “Treasure Island” - Disney - source of ‘arr’ pirate accent 1953 - End of Korean War 1953 - Playboy started 1953 - “Casino Royale” first James Bond novel - Ian Fleming 1953 - DNA double helix structure identified - James Watson and Francis Crick off of Rosalind Franklin’s work 1954 - Elvis Presley starts recording 1954 - First Transistor Radio 1954 - “Motivation and Personality” - Abraham Maslow - Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs 1954 - “Godzilla” 1954 - Brown v Board of Education - separate but equal is BS 1955 - “Rebel Without a Cause” 1955 - “Lord of the Rings” trilogy published - JRR Tolkien 1955 - Vietnam War start 1955 - Courier typeface released 1955 - Polio vaccine 1955 - Rosa Parks sits at the front of the bus 1956 - Acetaminophen released (Tylenol) 1956 - “The Searchers” 1957 - Sputnik - first man-made satellite - USSR 1957 - End of the “Red Scare” and McCarthyism 1957 - Helvetica typeface released 1958 - WD-40 commercially available 1959 - AK and HI become states 1959 - Xerox 914 - plain paper photocopier 1959 - Metric used to define US Customary units 1961 - Berlin wall started 1961 - First openly gay man to run for political office, San Francisco Board of Supervisors - Jose Julio Sarria aka Empress Jose I, The Widow Norton 1962 - “Spider-Man”, “Thor”, “Hulk” created Stan Lee, Steve Ditko 1962 - “Dr. No” - first James Bond film 1963 - Kennedy Assassination 1963 - Alcatraz closed 1964 - “The Son of Man” Rene Magritte 1964 - British Invasion - Beatles play on Ed Sullivan Show 1964 - Vietnam War really gets going 1965 - Kevlar invented - Stephanie Kwolek 1967 - St Louis Gateway Arch completed 1966 - U of T at Austin Tower sniper killings: Charles Whitman 1966 - US-market passenger cars required: padded instrument panels, front and rear outboard lap belts, and white backup lamps 1966 - “Star Trek” airs 1967 - Interracial Marriage in US legal: Loving v Virginia 1967 - Patterson-Gilman Bigfoot Film 1967 - Countertop Radarange microwave oven 1968 - first black woman elected to Congress - Shirley Chisholm 1968 - visible LED lights introduced as indicators (Hewlett Packard) 1969 - Cuyahoga river catches fire. Again. 13th time’s the charm 1969 - “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!” - Joe Ruby, Ken Spears 1969 - Ibuprofen released UK (prescription only) 1969 - Moon landing 1969 - “True Grit” 1969 - Stonewall Riots 1970 - Beatles break up 1970 - Kent State Massacre 1970 - EPA established in reaction to Cuyahoga river and other environment problems 1971 - Kevlar introduced to world 1972 - Sperm Whale oil banned from use in transmission oil b/c Endangered Species Act 1972 - Watergate break-in 1972 - J Edgar Hoover dies and is replaced as Director of the FBI 1972 - “The Godfather” - Francis Ford Coppola 1972 - 8” floppy disk on market 1973 - Abortion Legal: Roe v Wade 1973 - American involvement in Vietnam war ended 1973 - Xerox Alto introduced - computer with GUI, mouse 1974 - Terracotta Army unearthed 1974 - Dungeons & Dragons RPG first published 1974 - Nixon resigns 1975 - Vietnam war end 1976 - Concorde jet service starts 1976 - Harvey Milk is the first openly gay man, non-incumbent, elected in the United States (and first openly gay person elected to public office in California) member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors 1976 - 5 1/4” floppy disk on market 1977 - TRS-80 and Apple II family introduced 1977 - Atari VCS (later 2600) - home video game console 1977 - “Star Wars” - a ‘blockbuster’ movie becomes a thing 1979 - “Alien” 1980 - Pac-Man released in US 1980 - Eruption of Mount St. Helens 1981 - “Raiders of the Lost Ark” 1982 - Arial computer font release 1982 - Commercial release of compact discs (CDs) 1982 - “E.T. the ExtraTerrestrial” 1983 - Nintendo game system released Japan 1983 - “Thriller” - Michael Jackson 1984 - Macintosh introduced - first mass market PC with GUI and mouse 1984 - OTC ibuprofen available (Advil) 1984 - First commercially available handheld cellular mobile phone Motorola DynaTAC 8000X 1984 - PG-13 rating introduced after complaints about films such as “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and “Gremlins” 1985 - Nintendo released in US 1985 - “Calvin and Hobbes” - Bill Watterson 1986 - Challenger explosion 1990 - Berlin wall fell/German reunification 1990 - First website goes live on World Wide Web 1990 - NC-17 replaces X rating 1991 - Cold War end 1991 - “Nevermind” - Nirvana 1997 - “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” - JK Rowling 2001 - 9/11 2004 - Facebook 2005 - Hurricane Katrina 2007 - Twitter   Tumblr   iPhone 2008 - First Black President 2016 - First Clown President

[hviral]

Forget sharks – mosquitoes are the deadliest maneaters on earth

Mosquitoes have altered the course of human history by bringing malaria to populations and even armies — such as halting Genghis Khan’s westward plunder, according to a new book. SPL

If we were rational creatures, we would fear our back yards more than our beaches.

Though oceans contain real-life monsters like the great white, our lawns and parks are home to humankind’s deadliest foe: the ubiquitous mosquito.

“Harvester of human populations,” “the grim reaper,” “the deadliest hunters of human beings on the planet” — these are some of the ways that history professor Timothy C. Winegard describes these flying pests in his new book “Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator” (Dutton), out Tuesday.

The numbers speak for themselves: “The mosquito has killed more people than any other cause of death in human history,” writes Winegard. “Statistical extrapolation situates mosquito-inflicted deaths approaching half of all humans that have ever lived.”

In other words, during our 200,000 years on Earth, the lowly mosquito has murdered an estimated 52 billion of us.

Last year mosquitoes killed 850,000 people — but the annual average hovers around 2 million. Sharks, by contrast, killed 10.

There are 110 trillion mosquitoes stalking the world at this very moment (with only a few places, like Antarctica, the Seychelles and a few French Polynesian islands outside the range of its proboscis). These insects harbor at least 15 lethal diseases. The most deadly are the “toxic twin” of malaria and yellow fever, but mosquitoes also transmit other lethal viruses, like West Nile and Zika, worms and parasites.

Meanwhile, a big enough swarm could leech half the blood from an adult human in just two hours.

Maybe it’s time for the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week” to rebrand as “Mosquito Week.”

The mosquito emerged 190 million years ago looking disarmingly similar to the way it does today. Like now, it carried its own “weapons of mass destruction” that decimated the dinosaurs. Mosquitoes injected deadly diseases, including malaria and worms (similar to heartworms that dogs get today), into even the most heavily armored beasts.

Entomologists George and Roberta Poinar wrote in “What Bugged the Dinosaurs?” that mosquitoes “were the top predators in the food chain” and they shaped “the destiny of the dinosaurs just as they shape our world today.”

Of course, mosquitoes not only survived after the dinosaur’s extinction — but thrived. Winegard argues that the mosquito exists as a foil to humanity’s progress — haunting us as an unseen player in some of history’s most pivotal moments.

Mosquitoes helped topple Alexander the Great, who likely developed malaria, which killed him before he was able to unite East and West, Winegard writes. “Had this malarious mosquito not sucked the life out of Alexander, all indications point toward an advance into the Far East. Had this occurred, it would have upended the course of history and humankind to the point where modern society would literally be unrecognizable.”

Malaria also played a key role in halting Genghis Khan and his Mongolian army. “The mosquito helped prevent the West from being completely overrun. She harnessed her malarial might and held the reins of Mongol conquest, steering them away from Europe,” he writes.

The pests also played a role in the American Revolution and the Civil War. It tipped the balance in favor of Washington’s army because many of the Brits, unlike the Americans, were not “seasoned” against malaria, meaning they had not developed immunity. Also, mosquito-repelling quinine was sent in greater quantities to British troops in the Caribbean and India than to America, displacing a key advantage for the Redcoats.

And during the Civil War, soldiers were five times more likely to die from malaria than in battle — and many of the hotbed mosquito zones were located in the South.

Even during World War II, German malariologists pressed the Nazi officers to open dikes and refilled marshes with brackish water in Italy to “encourage the proliferation of the deadly mosquito species, Anopheles labranchiae, which thrives in brackish environments,” to act as an “act of biological warfare” against the Allied troops.

“The mosquito sponsored both the rise and fall of ancient empires,” Winegard concludes. “She has prowled the most momentous and pivotal battles . . . outmaneuvered the most celebrated generals and military minds ever mustered to arms, slaying many of these men in the course of her carnage.” Even with various ways to repel mosquitoes today (including DDT, which earned notoriety for its harmful effects on the environment), we still battle. We spend an average $11 billion a year trying to protect ourselves from them — mostly for naught. And they continue to slaughter us.

Though we discovered a successful vaccine for yellow fever in the 1930s, today more than 30,000 people die of the disease a year. The Zika virus, which if contracted during pregnancy can cause serious birth defects like microcephaly, was declared a global emergency by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when it hit the Americas in 2016. At the outbreak’s height, there were 5,168 reported cases in the United States (and more than 200,000 cases reported in Brazil). Thanks to various emergency interventions, including travel warnings and mosquito control methods, the CDC says there have been zero reported cases of Zika in the United States since 2018.

But malaria, still “the unsurpassed scourge of humankind” and costs Africa roughly $30 billion to $40 billion in lost commercial output.

The mosquito acts as “a countermeasure against uncontrolled human population growth,” Winegard argues.

And he thinks mosquito-inflicted death will only increase.

“Her reach is growing, expanding both north and south and vertically into higher altitudes as previously untapped regions warm up to her presence,” he writes. “Even in the face of modern science and medicine, she remains the most hazardous animal to humankind.”

Reality bites

Mosquitoes on average kill more humans than any other animal, including man himself. Here, the annual average number of deaths worldwide caused by:

Mosquitoes: 2 million

*Humans: 475,000

*Snakes: 50,000

*Sand flies: 25,000

*Tsetse flies: 10,000

*Crocodiles: 1,000

*Hippos: 500

*Elephants: 100

*Lions: 100

*Sharks: 10

*Wolves: 10

Sucks to be you!

It’s not in your head. Some people are more attractive to mosquitoes than others. We’re all susceptible, but here are a few factors that will get you bitten more often:

Pregnant women suffer twice as many bites because they have a slightly higher body temperature and respire 20 percent more carbon dioxide — one way the mosquito hunts its victims.

People who have excess amounts of lactic acid, uric acid and ammonia also have the bad luck of being more attractive to mosquitoes.

Mosquitoes prefer people with blood type O, who are bitten twice as much as those with type A. Type B falls in between the two.

Stinky feet are a “mosquito aphrodisiac” — so clean up those smelly tootsies if you want to avoid being a mosquito meal.

Unfortunately being too clean is also a risk factor. Mosquitoes love the smell of deodorants, perfumes, soaps and other fragrances.

Finally, studies have also shown that mosquitoes prefer beer drinkers.

The post Forget sharks – mosquitoes are the deadliest maneaters on earth appeared first on HviRAL.

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[cksmart-world]

The Completely Unnecessary News Analysis

by Christopher Smart

June 4, 2019

GOV. HERBERT TO SAVE WILDERNESS

& BILL BAR: A MAN FOR OUR TIMES

We've got to save our forests from wildfires that have been sweeping across the West. Fortunately, Utah has a governor who knows a lot about forestry. The prescription offered by our eco-minded governor is this: build roads through wilderness areas. Yeah, that's the ticket. Two decades ago, the U.S. Forest Service implemented a roadless rule that forbids construction of roads and logging on some 60 million acres nationally. The wilderness in question includes untouched Utah land in the Fish Lake National Forest and the High Uintas. Such a waste. But Herbert and his brain trust now have explained the whole thing to the similarly eco-friendly Trump administration: The feds' roadless regulation endangers Utah to wildfire because it prevents the removal of undergrowth and dead trees — which just happens to be what logging is. Problem solved. Unfortunately, those frowny faces at The Wilderness Society contend that 90 percent of Utah land that burned from 2013 to 2017 was outside roadless-rule areas. Additional evidence reveals that road-building in western forests leads to a high risk of human-caused fires. Buzz kill. But not to worry, the roadless rule in Utah looks like it will disappear before most folks have time to catch on. Call it conservation.

Bill Barr: A Man For Our Times

Our attorney general is a man who can summarize a 428-page report like nobody else. Because, you see, Bill Barr knows the truth is what you make of it. The fact that the special counsel's report described at least 10 instances that could rise to obstruction of justice is beside the point. If Special Counsel Robert Mueller wanted to indict the president, he could have, surmised our insouciant AG. And it had nothing to do with the long-standing Department of Justice dictum that a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime. When the mirrors are aligned just right, you can glimpse the prism from which Mr. Barr created his sage conclusion: no collusion, no obstruction. Further, anyone — including Mr. Trump — would be upset if they were falsely accused, Mr. Barr intoned, throwing shade from those marvelous gaslights of his. It's like this, he said, some spying is good spying and some spying is bad spying. And so the attorney general will set out on his own odyssey to determine if, as the president insists, the whole Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was, in reality, an attempted coup by all those shadowy figures the Democrats have inserted into the FBI over the decades. And no, “foregone conclusion” is not a legal term.

Let's Just Accept Mass Shootings

Another day, another mass shooting. Twelve more senseless murders. Oh well, this is America, after all. Fortunately, massacres, like the one in Virginia Beach, no longer make front-page headlines. It's just not what you call news. One person interviewed in Virginia Beach said, “We never thought it could happen here.” And what are the chances, anyway? It's a pretty safe bet that you and your co-workers won't be shot this week. And you can tell your children they probably won't be killed at school any time soon. Some gun-rights folks say the real problem isn't guns, it's mental illness. All we have to do is address mental illness and voila, no more mass shootings. The shooter in Virginia Beach had no criminal record and bought his guns legally. He didn't have a history of mental illness, either. Oh well, we'll just have to accept the fact that there are going to be frequent mass shootings, because, unlike New Zealand, we just can't do anything about it.

Donald Trump Is Innocent

You are innocent until proven guilty. So said President Donald Trump in one of his profound tweets after that blabber-mouth Robert Mueller gave his politically self-serving press conference. Presumption of innocence is something Trump has always believed in, except maybe for that time in 1989 when five teenage boys, African American and Latino, were arrested for the brutal rape and beating of a 28-year-old white woman jogging in Central Park. Right after their arrest, the real estate mogul paid $85,000 to take out adds in four of New York City's newspaper bearing the headline, “Bring Back The Death Penalty.” In the add, Trump exclaimed: “[T]hey should be forced to suffer and… should be executed for their crimes...” Soon thereafter, the boys, called the Central Park Five, were convicted after forced confessions. They were exonerated, however, in 2002 when the real perpetrator was arrested and DNA proved his guilt. The five spent 13 years behind bars. Their lives in ruins, it took them 12 more years before finally reaching a $40 million legal settlement with New York City in 2014. Trump called the agreement a “disgrace” and said this: “The recipients must be laughing out loud at the stupidity of the city... These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.” So yeah, President Trump, we are presumed innocent until proven guilty, thanks to great Americans like you.

Post Script — One of the best things about summer is that it gives us a reprieve from worry. (So forget what you just read.) For the next three months we can cool our jets and give the gray matter a little R&R. That's right, we don't have to worry about Trump tweets 'till September. And the recent U.N. Climate report that reveals hundreds of species going extinct and sea levels rising as the planet burns up — nope, we'll take that up after Labor Day, too. And don't even think about the trade wars with China and Mexico that are tanking markets — that's on the back burner for now. Just get out the sunscreen, the pulp fiction and beach chairs. Your biggest worry until Aug. 31 is keeping the beer cold, the coals hot and your tan from peeling. The world will still be there come fall and it will still be going to hell in a hand-basket. So, chill baby, you're in  Margaritaville.

That's it for another week here at Smart Bomb, where Wilson and the band keep track of all the new micro-brews so that you don't have to. OK, Wilson, since you and the guys are decked out in your Hawaiian shirts and baggies, serenade us with something for the sun and sand:

The summer wind, came blowin' in from across the sea / It lingered there to touch your hair and walk with me / All summer long we sang a song and then we strolled that golden sand / Two sweethearts and the summer wind...

[arcticdementor]

I’ve never voted. Well, I lie, I voted once. I was 18, and my mother sorta forced me. It also felt like some rite of passage, you know, you grow to 18 and you get to do grown-up stuff like voting, having a voice in the political process. I’ve never been into rituals though, and I felt stupid immediately after putting my vote in the box. I didn’t even like the guy! I thought he was retarded. All of them, really. I still do.

Of course ever time there’s an election people would ask me now and then who I’m gonna vote to. I evolved a series of bunch of canned answers. First one was “Nah they all suck”. Then I read Bryan Caplan’s Myth of the Rational Voter and started saying “one vote doesn’t count anyway”. This triggered huge discussions if there was even a single Boomer at home. “But if everyone thought like you nobody would vote!!”.

-“Well sure but my not voting doesn’t influence other people’s behavior”.

“But you have to vote, if nobody voted…”

-“It doesn’t follow that if I don’t vote then other people don’t vote”.

“But you have to vote, if everyone did like you”

-“Where on earth are you taking that ‘if’ from?

“But you have to vote……”

You should try this, it’s hilarious. They just go in an endless loop bug. Talk about NPCs.

…

And then… Trump happened 3 years ago. It took me a while to get into Trump. I didn’t care about elections, you see? Elections don’t matter. It’s all the same. And not being American I knew little about the guy. I’d seen him on TV now and then but besides him being this kinda sleazy showbiz guy I couldn’t care much about him.

But I was on Twitter, and I was watching all the outrage, and man, Trump was good. He wasn’t good, good. He wasn’t Moldbug. Not even Pat Buchanan. Trump is really inarticulate, I don’t know his verbal IQ but he has the vocabulary of a dumb 10 year old. And yet he got his points across. Good points. Drain the Swamp. NATO is pointless. Make America Great Again. China is ripping us off. You’d be in jail. No more senseless wars. BUILD THE WALL. All great, and most importantly, hilarious ideas. Trump was trolling everyone that I hated, the press, the bureaucrats, the whole Cathedral was up in arms against him, and *he was fighting back*. Successfully! He was talking shit to AIPAC! I just couldn’t help myself. Trump was my guy. I couldn’t vote for him, I’m not American, but I would have. Honest to god, I’d wake up early and vote for Donald Trump.

…

Fast forward 2 and a half years later. No wall. No jail for Hillary. Narrowly avoided jail himself! The swamp is a big as always. Forever war still going on. Spending more time tweeting about Israel than his own country. Shits on Ann Coulter and says he wants more legal immigration. Did I mention no wall? What a disaster. Trump has been a huge and complete disappointment. Again, I don’t dislike the guy personally. I mean I never *liked* him. He’s weird, talks like a retarded 10 year old. I’d say I’d probably wouldn’t enjoy having a few beers with him but he doesn’t even drink. But I don’t hate the guy, I think odds are his heart is in the right place. He just can’t get stuff done. He’s incompetent. I mean, it’s hard. It was always hard. One just doesn’t come in as a complete outsider and reform the whole government from scratch. Then again, people who work in the heart of the beast, in Washington DC, tell me he’s just incompetent.

…

So now what? Back to Moldbuggian detachment? Nothing ever changes, huh. The Cathedral really is all powerful. Ever since Trump made some protests about the intelligence agencies being disloyal or outright attacking him, the Establishment feels so powerful they just blatantly say in the press that the CIA are the good guys. Does nobody remember that the CIA being evil was pretty much proven by the 1960s, and that evil CIA ops have been a staple of books and films for decades? Not anymore; they’re not content with being powerful in the shade. They want outright public submission.

Democracy really is a sham; but it’s hard to go back to detachment now that Bioleninism is out in the open. Elections now are openly not about economic policy or social conservatism. Elections now are about the speed of the dispossession of white straight males. It’s for or against Bioleninism. The majority of candidates of the Democratic party are openly talking of “reparations” for black people, i.e. outright Danegeld. And don’t get me started with open hunt to mess with the sexual hormones of white children in schools. It’s going on right there in the open.

The US has an election next year, the campaign is starting now. Given the present demographic trends, it is very likely that Florida, if not Texas, will flip blue very shortly; that means a rock-solid majority for the Democratic party, forever. Donald Trump is likely to be the last white male president in American history. The 2020 election is probably going to be the last election which is more or less contested. Trump does still have a chance.

But Trump is incompetent. He’s not helping. He’s just treading water while another million Third-world immigrants sneak in, another middle-school boy gets injected estrogen because he doesn’t like football, and another hundred-thousand white men just overdose on opioids because you can’t even play a videogame today without being forced to play a black woman avatar. Can you support this guy? I sure can’t. Again, not my nation, but I wouldn’t. I won’t call him a traitor, although many have. But he didn’t build the wall. He’s letting Amazon, Facebook and Twitter campaign openly against him and censor everything to the right, and he hasn’t lifted a finger. He doesn’t deserve support.

…

Seriously though, to the extent Bernie represents a constituency that’s not for instant Brazilification, I wish him well, but he’s old and frail, and his program isn’t very interesting. And most importantly, his own constituency is being taken over by a guy who’s 10 times smarter, is young, has actual good ideas, is not white and will give the Bernie crowd everything they want, and more. Much more.

To be precise, $1,000 a month more.

Come Andrew Yang.

…

He’s the only candidate in this whole race that doesn’t talk like a bugman. You know what a bugman is. All those politicians and corporate guys who talk in that odd and disingenuous jargon designed to obfuscate. High-grade NPCs, that’s what bugmen are. Well, he isn’t. He goes straight to the issues, analyzes them intelligently, and then has a plan. It may be or may not be a good plan. But I dare you to show me a presidential candidate with a higher IQ than Andrew Yang in the last 30 years. That’s even more of a feat because the guy is East Asian, and God knows East Asians tend to be bugmen too.

The guy even wrote a book called The War On Normal People, which is the perfect definition of the Left. I should use it as a subtitle for a Bioleninism book.

…

But a big part of it is just pure appreciation for the guy. Look at his interview with Tucker. You might remember my last post on Tucker, and how he’s revolutionized conservative commentary in the US by arguing that the focus of government should be taking care of working families. Well, Tucker himself liked Yang, and it’s no wonder he did. Yang is the candidate who’s using the closest arguments to Tucker. By far. He’s lamenting the plight of the working man. He’s calling to help the rural white middle class who’s being ravaged by the opioid suicide crisis. Note that Trump has said some stuff about that, and has tried to get China to stop exports of fentanyl, but he didn’t mention white people by name. Yang did, just like that. He’s the only guy who’s not only overtly or covertly calling for your extinction; he’s the only guy on the record for trying to stop it.

…

And, he’s promising to stop it by taxing the hell of the Enemy. Which again, as Tucker mentioned, isn’t a huge abstract thing The Jews or the Left. No. The enemy is Big Tech. It’s Amazon, it’s Google, It’s Apple. It’s Facebook. It’s Twitter. It’s Woke Capital. It’s those guys who aren’t only taking your jobs, they’re using their monopoly in the management of information to censore us, hide us, slander us and ostracize us. You might remember that Trump also hinted at doing something about that. Regulate Facebook and Twitter as utilities to make sure the Right could actually fight the Culture War, and perhaps show that there’s a majority of people against injecting synthetic hormones into 12 year old children. That he’d make big tech build in America and stop avoiding taxes with blatant laundering tricks. Well, Trump did nothing, and he’s avoiding the topic. Yang isn’t. I have nothing against Amazon’s business, but Bezos chose sides by buying the Washington Post and recently going on a censorship spree, banning right wing books from Amazon. He must pay. Yang says he will.

I don’t know if UBI would work. Americans are crying bloody murder about a proposed 10% VAT. I say cry me a river. Europeans have a 20% VAT. It’s annoying, but it’s not a big deal. Smart people say that automation is overhyped, it’s not growing that fast, self-driving cars, one of the biggest talking points of Yang, are likely to not even happen after all. That may be true. But I’d like to say that the beauty of UBI is not that it’s actually necessary in the way Yang says it is, to give people something to fall back on while they find a new job.

Tucker is also worried about the middle class trucker. But Tucker’s answer is to ban automation. Go full Luddite. Yang is talking about automation a lot. But he doesn’t want to stop it. By implementing UBI he wouldn’t stop automation, he’d accelerate it. Businesses would start automating like crazy once people left unsatisfying jobs to go play Fortnite on UBI or try an instagram e-thot career. A big majority of white collar jobs are complete and utter bullshit make-work made by government regulation to keep people busy and have some income to tax. If Yang succeeded in his proposed plan to completely change the regulatory paradigm to adapt to the computer economy at last, companies could actually get rid of all the inefficiencies, and automate everything. Starting with the bureaucracy.

…

Well China is pushing hard for developing AI and automation. Which is weird in a country which could have a serious unemployment problem if automation goes on. But China doesn’t care. Why not? Because China has realized that with Internet and modern computing, they don’t need the corporations to manage the people anymore. They can do it directly. Everybody has a mobile phone with a camera and a microphone 24/7 with them. The government knows your every move. You don’t need to shame people into buying your ideology by threatening with firing them from their jobs, like America does. That’s so 20th century. Now you can control behavior directly with internet surveillance. Social credit is an extension of this trend. It boggles the mind that accelerationists aren’t talking more about this. Not saying it’s a good thing. But the tech is here and it’s happening anywhere. The only place where it isn’t happening is Europe because we’ve outsourced it to American companies.

If you think UBI might work at giving people hope and readjusting the economy in a more just and fair way, sticking it to the oligarchs, vote for Yang. If you just want $1,000 a month, vote for Yang. If you think UBI would crash everything, vote for Yang, as this gay earth deserves crashing. If you just want UBI to show people that democracy inevitable ends with the people voting themselves money and thus proving democracy is a sham and discredit it as a political system, vote for Yang.

And if you want the final death of 20th century politics, and a new paradigm which breaks with the thievery of Boomers inflating the currency so that asset prices are rising through new records every year, while young people have to go through unpaid internships and ‘gig economy’ servitude until their 40s, while the Bioleninist government is busy with the soft genocide of every productive person with natural biological instincts.

Then Vote for Yang. I rest my case.