#historical sites in the world 2022

[nasa]

Calling Long-Distance: 10 Stellar Moments in 2022 for Space Communications and Navigation

Just like your phone needs Wi-Fi or data services to text or call – NASA spacecraft need communication services.

Giant antennas on Earth and a fleet of satellites in space enable missions to send data and images back to our home planet and keep us in touch with our astronauts in space. Using this data, scientists and engineers can make discoveries about Earth, the solar system, and beyond. The antennas and satellites make up our space communications networks: the Near Space Network and Deep Space Network.

Check out the top ten moments from our space comm community: 

1. Space communication networks helped the Artemis I mission on its historic journey to the Moon. From the launch pad to the Moon and back, the Near Space Network and Deep Space Network worked hand-in-hand to seamlessly support Artemis I. These networks let mission controllers send commands up to the spacecraft and receive important spacecraft health data, as well as incredible images of the Moon and Earth.

The Pathfinder Technology Demonstration 3 spacecraft with hosted TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) payload communicating with laser links down to Earth. Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center

2. Spacecraft can range in size – from the size of a bus to the size of a cereal box. In May 2022, we launched a record-breaking communication system the size of a tissue box. TBIRD showcases the benefits of a laser communications system, which uses infrared light waves rather than radio waves to communicate more data at once. Just like we have upgraded from 3G to 4G to 5G on our phones, we are upgrading its space communications capabilities by implementing laser comms!

3. The Deep Space Network added a new 34-meter (111-foot) antenna to continue supporting science and exploration missions investigating our solar system and beyond. Deep Space Station 53 went online in February 2022 at our Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex. It is the fourth of six antennas being added to expand the network’s capacity.

4. You’ve probably seen in the news that there are a lot of companies working on space capabilities. The Near Space Network is embracing the aerospace community’s innovative work and seeking out multiple partnerships. In 2022, we met with over 300 companies in hopes of beginning new collaborative efforts and increasing savings.

5. Similar to TBIRD, we're developing laser comms for the International Space Station. The terminal will show the benefits of laser comms while using a new networking technique called High Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking that routes data four times faster than current systems. This year, engineers tested and proved the capability in a lab.

6. In 2021, we launched the James Webb Space Telescope, a state-of-the-art observatory to take pictures of our universe. This year, the Deep Space Network received the revolutionary first images of our solar system from Webb. The telescope communicates with the network’s massive antennas at three global complexes in Canberra, Australia; Madrid, Spain; and Goldstone, California.

7. Just like we use data services on our phone to communicate, we'll do the same with future rovers and astronauts exploring the Moon. In 2022, the Lunar LTE Studies project, or LunarLiTES, team conducted two weeks of testing in the harsh depths of the Arizona desert, where groundbreaking 4G LTE communications data was captured in an environment similar to the lunar South Pole. We're using this information to determine the best way to use 4G and 5G networking on the Moon.

8. A new Near Space Network antenna site was unveiled in Matjiesfontein, South Africa. NASA and the South African Space Agency celebrated a ground-breaking at the site of a new comms antenna that will support future Artemis Moon missions. Three ground stations located strategically across the globe will provide direct-to-Earth communication and navigation capabilities for lunar missions.

9. Quantum science aims to better understand the world around us through the study of extremely small particles. April 14, 2022, marked the first official World Quantum Day celebration, and we participated alongside other federal agencies and the National Quantum Coordination Office. From atomic clocks to optimizing laser communications, quantum science promises to greatly improve our advances in science, exploration, and technology.

10. We intentionally crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid to test technology that could one day be used to defend Earth from asteroids. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, mission successfully collided with the asteroid Dimorphos at a rate of 4 miles per second (6.1 kilometers per second), with real-time video enabled by the Deep Space Network. Alongside communications and navigation support, the global network also supports planetary defense by tracking near-Earth objects.

We look forward to many more special moments connecting Earth to space in the coming year.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[mariacallous]

From the order in which members of The Beatles should be listed to the origins of the Pavlova dessert, “edit wars” have dominated Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, since its inception. Though many of these online discussions pertain to cultural icons and phenomena, some have taken a more sinister turn—especially when it comes to controversial or politically sensitive topics such elections, protests, or wars. This has become particularly apparent in the case of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, shaped by multiple competing and ever-evolving narratives.

Started in May 2001, the Russian-language Wikipedia is among the world’s top six Wikipedia sites and, until recently, has remained a popular source of information in and about the country. However, over the last two decades, it has become embroiled in controversy, largely due to the Kremlin’s state-sponsored disinformation plaguing the platform.

Reliant on government sources and edited by Russian editors, Russian-language Wikipedia pages have often featured pro-Kremlin narratives, especially in relation to Russia’s war against Ukraine. For example, while articles in English have clearly indicated the illegal and disputed nature of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and its occupation of Donetsk, the Russian-language pages have previously downplayed the role of the Russian military and portrayed Donetsk as a people’s separatist republic (though it has since been changed and is now consistent with the English version).

Another example is the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. While the English-language version acknowledges that the flight was shot down by the Russian military, which is the international consensus, Russian Wikipedia has called it a “catastrophe” without any attribution of guilt. There are also many inconsistencies having to do with famous historical figures appropriated by Russia, such as those of King Volodymyr the Great or Nestor the Chronicler, both of whom lived in Kyiv.

Over the last two years, Russian courts have fined the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, several times over content related to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, according to a 2022 report, multiple groups of “sock-puppet” editor accounts, which have coordinated their activity to rewrite pages relating to Russian-Ukrainian relations while using false identifiers. These groups have actively undermined Western and Ukrainian information sources and instead endorsed Russian narratives and state-sponsored media.

Though Russia briefly banned Wikipedia in August 2015, it has now taken its digital offensive campaign to the next level.

Earlier this year, Vladimir Medeyko, the former director of Wikimedia Russia, launched an alternative platform called Ruwiki. The new platform started out as a copy-pasted version of the original Russian-language Wikipedia, exploiting a technicality of Wikipedia’s open-source agreement. Today, the new platform contains up to 2 million articles in Russian, as well as 12 other regional languages spoken in Russia, and is not affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation.

Unlike the well-established Wikipedia model, in which any user with internet access can create, edit, or update articles, which then undergo rigorous community moderation, Ruwiki works in a different way. While any user can contribute content, it is subject to review by a narrow circle of undisclosed, likely government-sanctioned “experts” to avoid “mistakes” and adjudicate “complex issues.” But it is no secret which issues are considered “complex” by the Kremlin, whose disinformation machine has been working relentlessly to justify its invasion of Ukraine and vehemently deny the war crimes committed there.

Ruwiki is an isolated digital ecosystem that has created an alternate reality. In this version, Holodomor, the man-made famine under Stalin’s rule that killed up to 8 million Ukrainians by some estimates, never happened. Ukraine’s regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and, of course, Crimea are missing from the country’s internationally recognised administrative map. The 2022 Bucha massacre, in which more than 400 Ukrainians were tortured and killed by the Russian military, is explained as an unverifiable “provocation.” And of course, the platform promotes Russia’s official (wrong) narrative that NATO “provoked” the Russian invasion and that NATO soldiers have participated in the war on behalf of Ukraine.

Ruwiki is the perfect example of the “splinternet”—the fragmentation of the global internet into smaller, divergent, and disconnected spaces. Sometimes, splinters form organically on platforms due to cultural and linguistic preferences of their users. But more often, it is a result of targeted government policies that restrict access to certain websites and services in an attempt to curtail free speech. These measures are often undertaken by authoritarian regimes under the guise of digital sovereignty, ensuring the state’s autonomy and control over its communication and digital infrastructures.

In 2011, Iran’s National Information Network (NIN) project, which envisioned the creation of an absolutely independent online ecosystem back in 2011, is a famous case of digital authoritarianism. Another example is Turkey’s new amendments to the Press Law, which came into effect in 2022. The law increased government control over social media and news platforms and has been dubbed as a “draconian” censorship law by media rights activists and opposition leaders.

Similarly, Russia’s Sovereign Internet Law, adopted in 2019, grants the Kremlin the power to isolate the Russian internet from other countries. The law requires Russian internet service providers to hand over many of their powers to the state, including the ability to directly censor unwanted content and prevent users from accessing alternative ways of seeing banned websites.

While these measures to nationalize the internet might seem benign from the perspective of maintaining technological autonomy, such concentration of power in the hands of the state also comes with an unprecedented ability to surveil its domestic population. Since 2019, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) has direct access, complete with encryption codes, to access any messages transmitted via Russian social media platforms or stored on servers located within the country.

These splinternets undermine the idea of a unified and global internet. They create isolated pockets of content that is easy to censor and can only be accessed by users from within the state, thus cutting them off from internationally produced content. As numerous studies show, such fragmentation is a pathway to a rapid deterioration of democratic discourse on platforms that institute it.

Take, for example, Truth Social, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s social media platform, which routinely echoes radical right-wing narratives on immigration, gun ownership, and the 2020 election. Another example is Ukraine’s 2017 decision to ban Russian social media platforms, VK and Odnoklassniki, in the interest of national security, after the platforms had become a toxic cesspool of hate speech, racism, and xenophobia, with well documented calls to rape and murder Ukrainians.

Similarly, in 2022, Russian TikTok blocked all non-Russian content in Russia. Once splintered from the rest of the platform and left unchecked, it became a hotbed of Russian war propaganda.

However, Russian propaganda on TikTok is not limited to its borders alone. Recent research indicates that accounts affiliated with Russian state media, especially Russia Today and Sputnik, have enjoyed a wide international reach, with their content being shared in multiple languages. Once those accounts were flagged by the platform as Russian state-affiliated in 2022, they became inactive and switched to newly created, unlabelled accounts to avoid detection. Another action, which flew under the radar, was Russia’s use of political influencers to sway public opinion in the United States, ahead of its upcoming presidential election.

In light of these disturbing developments, we can reasonably expect to see Ruwiki move along the same historical pathway. Though other countries like China, Turkey, India, and Pakistan have either banned or threatened to ban Wikipedia, Ruwiki’s full control over facts will allow the Kremlin to retell history on its own terms—including denying its war crimes in Ukraine.

This—combined with the targeted destruction of Ukrainian books, the rewriting of Russian school curriculum, and the murder of Ukrainian public intellectuals in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories—will help Russia justify its expansionist goals and cement its colonial dominance over the region.

This digitally mediated historical revisionism is particularly dangerous in light of the increasing use of the internet as the ultimate source of information, especially among Russia’s youth. Splintered from the rest of the world, they will be coming of age in an alternative Kremlin-manufactured version of reality where “nothing is true, but everything is possible.”

[journeytothewestresearch]

JTTWR Story Idea Directory

I was influenced by @digitalagepulao's recent post to list my own collection of story ideas.

These are set in the Buddo-Daoist disc world system of the original novel.

1) The Origin of Sun Wukong

This provides three fictional origins for the Monkey King based on my past research. He is ...

The spiritual offspring of supreme ape immortals who have served as teachers of countless mortal and divine beings, the later including the Buddha and Master Subodhi. The couple rebels against the heavenly hierarchy for failing to keep an ancient promise.

The offspring of an ancient evil who intentionally bred him to destroy the gods.

A former hot-tempered, Vajra warrior-like Bodhisattva who is exiled from paradise for killing a being who seemingly offended the Buddha. He is punished to ten lifetimes as a figure of great strength who is continually bested and forced by circumstances to protect something or someone weaker than him.

Each origin has pros and cons.

2) Immortal Warriors and Shaolin Monks

Master Subodhi's mountain is the training ground for an immortal monastic army similar to Shaolin. Monkey gains combat experience as a monk soldier.

3) The REAL Reason Subodhi Expels Sun Wukong

Sun's much, much older spiritual brothers and sisters attack him out of jealousy for quickly climbing the ranks of the immortal monastic army. Forced to defend his position, Monkey's anger drives him to take on a monstrous, 100,000-foot-tall cosmic form to defeat his opponents. Subodhi fears Sun's limitless potential and great anger will lead him down the path of villainy, so he uses the pine tree incident as an excuse to expel him.

4) The Reason for Sun Wukong's Rebellion

Subodhi warns Monkey to protect himself when mastering the "Multitude of Terrestrial Killers" (i.e. the 72 changes) because said deities are considered baleful stellar gods who bring bad luck and disease. But the Terrestrial Killers exploit a chink in his spiritual armor and feed him small suggestions that have compounding effects on his personality, making him increasingly egotistical and combative. This eventually leads to his rebellion against heaven.

These are set on our Earth.

1) Sun Wukong vs Heracles/Hercules

Heracles, the Buddha's protector, is called in place of Erlang to end Monkey's rebellion. After the latter attains Buddhahood at the end of the journey, the Tathagata asks the son of Zeus to escort Sun through the Greek world system.

See the 07-08-22 update (refer also to section 3 for background info):

2) A Realistic Retelling of Journey to the West

The story follows the itinerary of the historical monk Xuanzang, and the various episodes from the original novel take place both on the way to and coming back from India. The disciples are acquired during the initial journey; however, their order is reversed—Sha, Zhu, and then Sun.

The past punishments of the disciples are still the same. But Monkey's history is changed because Taoism didn't exist in ancient India. Instead of becoming an immortal, he is a Hindo-Buddhist rishi who rebels against heaven.

See updates here and here.

[humanrightsupdates]

Deadly Russian Attacks on Lviv’s Historic District

Civilians Killed, Schools Damaged in Western Ukrainian City

In Ukraine’s western city of Lviv, today is a day of mourning.

On September 4 at about 6 a.m., Russian air attacks struck the city’s historic district, killing civilians and damaging civilian buildings and infrastructure.

Seven people were killed, Lviv Mayor Andryi Sadovyi reported on Telegram, including four members of the same family: a 43-year-old mother and her three daughters, ages 7, 18, and 21. Only their father survived. Sixty-six people, including 10 children, required medical assistance, and 12 were rescued from under the rubble, Sadovyi said.

Local authorities said the attacks damaged about 50 civilian objects, including homes, medical facilities, and local architectural landmarks, located in Lviv’s historic district, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The attacks also damaged seven educational facilities, including a primary school and three secondary schools, affecting 1,456 children. Because of the early hour, no children or staff were in the schools.

An official from the city council education department told Human Rights Watch that Lyceum No. 5 on Kokorudza Street suffered damage to dozens of windows and classroom doors, as well as the stairwell. The school remains closed. Lyceum No. 17 sustained damage to over 100 windows as well as doors and the main gate. It reopened the next day and some students from Lyceum No. 5 will temporarily attend classes there.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has had a devastating, lasting impact on Ukrainian children’s access to education. The Ukrainian government reported that nearly 4,000 educational facilities have been damaged or destroyed since the full-scale invasion in February 2022. In Russia-occupied areas, children are subjected to the Kremlin’s anti-Ukraine propaganda, in violation of international humanitarian law. Active hostilities put children at risk and disrupt education.

[contemplatingoutlander]

Putting chaplains in public school is the latest battle in culture wars

Here comes the American far-right "Christian Taliban," all set to indoctrinate a new generation of Americans into a warped, right-wing "Christianity."

Our Founders must be spinning in their graves.

Lawmakers in mostly conservative states are pushing a coordinated effort to bring chaplains into public schools, aided by a new, legislation-crafting network that aims to address policy issues “from a biblical world view” and by a consortium whose promotional materials say chaplains are a way to convert millions to Christianity. The bills have been introduced this legislative season in 14 states, inspired by Texas, which passed a law last year allowing school districts to hire chaplains or use them as volunteers for whatever role the local school board sees fit, including replacing trained counselors. Chaplain bills were approved by one legislative chamber in three states — Utah, Indiana and Louisiana — but died in Utah and Indiana. Bills are pending in nine states. One passed both houses of Florida’s legislature and is awaiting the governor’s signature. [color/emphasis added]

[See more under the cut.]

The bills are mushrooming in an era when the U.S. Supreme Court has expanded the rights of religious people and groups in the public square and weakened historic protections meant to keep the government from endorsing religion. In a 2022 case, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch referred to the “so-called separation of church and state.” Former president Donald Trump has edged close to a government-sanctioned religion by asserting in his campaign that immigrants who “don’t like our religion — which a lot of them don’t” would be barred from the country in a second term. “We are reclaiming religious freedom in this country,” said Jason Rapert, a former Arkansas state senator and the president of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, which he founded in 2019 to craft model legislation, according to the group’s site. Its mission is “to bring federal, state and local lawmakers together in support of clear biblical principles … to address major policy concerns from a biblical world view,” the site says. The group hosted House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) late last year at its gala at the Museum of the Bible in Washington. The chaplain bills, Rapert said, are part of an effort to empower “the values and principles of the founding fathers.” Critics who compare such efforts with theocracy, he said, are creating “a false flag, a boogeyman by radical left to demonize everyone of faith.” Rapert says he’ll push in the next round of chaplain bills to make the positions mandatory. Heather Weaver, senior staff attorney at the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, called allowing chaplains into public schools “a constitutional time bomb.” “It definitely would be a much more direct route to promoting religion to students and evangelizing them than we’ve seen in the past.” she said. [color emphasis added]

[edited]

[herohimbowhore]

The Eruption of Mount Vesuvius: An Allegory for Ferrari

Scuderia Ferrari holds the title as the oldest and most successful Formula 1 team, having competed in every season since 1950. Where others fell away, Ferrari has remained.

If you were to ask someone to say something about Ferrari, then there’s a few way it can go.

First, is perhaps the most common. Enzo Ferrari’s famous quote that was probably true for most of us. “Ask a child to draw a car, and certainly he will draw it red.” And Enzo Ferrari was correct. The first thought when asked about a red car or more specifically, a red sports car, is Ferrari. (And Lightning McQueen)

Then, maybe another well-known quote will come to mind. “Everybody is a Ferrari fan. Even if they say they’re not, they are Ferrari fans. Even if you go to the Mercedes guys and they say ‘Mercedes is the best brand in the world,’ they are Ferrari fan.” Sebastian Vettel said this in 2016 during one of Mercedes’ most contentious internal championship battles.

During the Monaco Grand Prix in 2022, Lewis Hamilton (the face of Mercedes in F1 himself) proved Sebastian’s statement true. During an interview with an Italian newspaper, Lewis said, “I would say one thing: if I could sit down with the fans on the bleachers over there, I would support Charles. I am a Ferrari fan.”

And if you’ve been watching Formula 1 for the past few years, then you’ll think of how the once great Scuderia has become a clown show. Questionable strategies, awfully hilarious pit stops, and great drivers with their potential wasted. All of it is a common occurrence within the Scuderia that we have grown to expect as fans and are shocked when their plans actually work out.

Contextualizing Ferrari with the song Pompeii by Bastille and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius seemed like the most coherent way to understand this downward spiral from a once great and lauded team to its current form.

Pompeii is one of the most well-known sites of a major volcanic eruption and a disastrous end to a once great city. Perhaps it is the perfect allegory for Scuderia Ferrari as we know it today.

Eh, eheu, eheu

Eh, eheu, eheu

Eh, eheu, eheu

“Eh, eheu, eheu,” at first may just sound like a vocally beautiful start to a song about a tragedy forever remembered and memorialized in ash. But it is a Latin phrase, roughly translating to, “eh, alas, alas.” The phrase is an exclamation of pain, grief, and fear. It is an exclamation that many fans of the Scuderia can relate to. With every race weekend, there is fear of what may go wrong this time and grief at how badly it does go.

I was left to my own devices

Many days fell away with nothing to show

The city of Pompeii, before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, was a wealthy city. The residents, or at least some of them, lived luxurious lives with little responsibilities.

Ferrari, on a similar note, has rested on its storied history and has enjoyed luxuries that the other teams in Formula 1 do not get.

Ferrari has competed in every season of Formula 1 since the 1950 World Championships. Due to this, they have over 1000 race entries and status as a long-standing team.

One privilege given to Ferrari is the "historic bonus" from prize money. Despite not winning the constructors' championship, Ferrari tends to get more prize money at the end of the season than the winners. Since the 2021 regulation changes, Ferrari has received $35 million. Before 2021, the LST payment was $70 million, half of which was deducted from the prize money pool.

Another privilege enjoyed by Ferrari is the power to veto rule changes that won't benefit Ferrari or the sport as a whole. Thus, giving Ferrari more power than any other team in Formula 1.

Ferrari obtained the power to veto regulation back in 1980 as a means to keep them in Formula 1. During the renegotiations of the Concorde Agreement in 2019, Ferrari was able to retain the veto power. However, a key thing to note is that the veto power is used sparingly by Ferrari. It was last used in 2015 when Ferrari vetoed the FIA's plans to introduce a €12 million engine price cap. The proposal at the time had gotten a majority vote by the teams before the veto was utilized by the Scuderia.

So, Ferrari has gotten these unique luxuries and privileges for being an integral part to Formula 1 and the history it has within the sport. But despite all of this, there is "nothing to show for it" these past few years. Since the days of Michael Schumacher at the team came to an end, the Scuderia has been on a downward spiral.

You could argue that 2007 was a good year, they won both championships, didn't they? But, were it not for McLaren's Spygate scandal and then McLaren drivers, Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso, more focused on beating one another, it's highly unlikely that the championships would have gone to Ferrari.

And the walls kept tumbling down in the city that we love

Grey clouds roll over the hills bringing darkness from above

Before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, there were signs signaling that the volcano's period of dormancy was coming to an end. Most notably, in 62 AD, 17 years before the eruption, there was a major earthquake that devasted Pompeii and the surrounding region. The earthquake caused damage to buildings, with some of them collapsing, and a disruption to the water supply in the city. Now, we know that it was the first indication of Vesuvius awakening. Seventeen years later, when Vesuvius erupted, Pompeii was still rebuilding from the earthquake in 62 AD and the ongoing tremors that it had endured since then.

Regardless of how much time residents of Pompeii spent rebuilding after 62 AD, they never really were able to because ongoing tremors and quakes kept the walls tumbling down.

These days, as fans and spectators of the sport, we expect to see some sort of Ferrari blunder when it comes to pit stops or strategies. Monaco 2022's double-stack pit stop that cost Charles Leclerc a win at his home race comes into mind, or maybe Austin 2023 when Charles Leclerc was put on a one-stop strategy that took him from pole position to sixth place before disqualification due to the plank, or any number of impeding penalties that Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz have gotten due to their team not relaying the information to them.

But just like the 62 AD earthquake in Pompeii and subsequent tremors, signs of Ferrari's downward spiral could be seen soon after the end of the Schumacher era.

We could think back to the Japanese Grand Prix in 2007 as Ferrari driver, Kimi Raikkonen, was in a championship fight with the McLaren drivers, Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso. The wet weather conditions of the Grand Prix required that extreme wet weather tyres be used. However, both Kimi Raikkonen and Felipe Massa were forced to pit so the tyres could be changed after the race had started under the safety car. While Kimi was able to finish 3rd, it did put him 17 points behind in the championship.

Another major blunder shortly after the Schumacher era that comes to mind, is the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix. A highly contentious race for many different reasons. You may recall Singapore 2008 for Nelson Piquet Jr. crashing, Fernando Alonso taking the win, and the entirety of the Crashgate saga with Renault. But as Crashgate was occurring, Ferrari was doing as Ferrari does.

In 2008, it was once more a McLaren driver and a Ferrari driver battling for the championship with Lewis Hamilton and Felipe Massa, respectively. When Nelson Piquet Jr. crashed and a safety car was brought out, many drivers chose to pit as there is less time lost during the pit stop. Felipe Massa, three seconds ahead of his championship rival, Lewis Hamilton, chose to pit. But unlike Lewis Hamilton and other drivers who had decent pit stops, Ferrari released Felipe too early with the fuel hose still attached to his car. A Ferrari mechanic was dragged along with the fuel hose and Felipe had to stop at the pit lane exit to release the hose. Thankfully, the mechanic was okay, but Felipe's race was compromised and the race ended with Lewis in the championship lead.

We were caught up and lost in all of our vices

In your pose as the dust settled around us

When Mount Vesuvius erupted, material from the volcano covered the residents of Pompeii who had not been able to escape the city. A common image that comes to mind when thinking of this is the stone bodies covered in lava that cooled and retained the shape. However, as the lava cooled around the dead, the bodies decomposed until there was a void left in those shapes. Since the 1860s, archaeologists and scientists have used the negative space in the rocks to recreate replicas of bodies with plaster.

The dead of Pompeii were left in this void and stasis. As are so many of the drivers who came to Ferrari with hopes of winning with the Scuderia, wanting to bring back glory to Maranello, and do as Michael Schumacher once did.

Felipe Massa, Fernando Alonso, Sebastian Vettel.

They all joined Ferrari with hopes of winning the championship with the red team and all of them left with their dreams unfulfilled. An empty void of their potential was decaying from the inside as Ferrari continued to make endless blunders and not deliver cars that could win the championship.

But regardless of it all, nothing ever changes in the Scuderia. They're still caught up in the historic past as the dust settles and drivers with great potential leave.

Oh, where do we begin?

The rubble or our sins?

Oh, oh, where do we begin?

The rubble or our sins

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius was devasting for the city of Pompeii and the neighboring city of Herculaneum, but there were some survivors who were able to escape and relocate. Archaeologists have traced some survivors and figured out that they relocated to other cities with social and economic opportunities.

After disaster strikes, there is a question of what do we do first? Do we focus on the the physical things we can see like the rubble? Or the root causes of the disaster that we can't easily see?

Ferrari constantly treads this line of deciding what to focus on. Should they focus on the obvious with the pit stops, strategy, and car. Or the power struggles within the team and personnel.

The inner struggles within the team are endless.

Possible tensions between teammates Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz (which have been denied by both drivers, but instances during race weekends kind of make it seem like there is some tension - especially when it comes to qualifying orders)

The Sainz camp beefing with Charles Leclerc: Carlos' mother liking tweets about Charles not having honor, Carlos' father declaring "war" on Charles by saying that it's always Carlos that has to follow team orders and team orders are non-existent when Charles is behind.

The Lapo Elkann tweet about Santander, the Spanish bank that joined as a sponsor after Carlos Sainz joined the team

Departures of staff and Team Principal Fred Vassuer saying that Ferrari is "miles away" from a perfect structure

Ferrari has internal and external problems that they have to deal with before they can have a successful season. It's very obvious that the car isn't fast, the pit stops tend to be awful, and the strategy is rarely good, but there are also so many internal problems with fights for power in the Scuderia.

But if you close your eyes

Does it almost feel like nothing changed at all?

And if you close your eyes

Does it almost feel like you've been here before?

How am I gonna be an optimist about this?

How am I gonna be an optimist about this?

If you close your eyes

Does it almost feel like nothing changed at all?

In the four days leading to the eruption, the city of Pompeii experienced small earthquakes that continued to increase in frequency. However, as stated above, small earthquakes and tremors were commonplace in the Campania region where Pompeii was. So, for the thousands of residents, it wasn't a sign of death and destruction and life continued on as it normally did. Until Vesuvius erupted and there was nothing to be optimistic about, giving into the grief and pain.

At this point, after nearly twenty years of watching as Ferrari fumbles and destroys the hopes of its drivers and fans, it has come to be commonplace to expect the least from Ferrari. Pole positions are things of dread, double-stack pit stops are nightmare fuel, and openly fans think that drivers should leave the team if they want any chances of winning.

But yet, there is hope.

A look back to Monza 2023, when the Tifosi surrounded Charles Leclerc. The crowd sang "Leclerc bring us the Championship," having complete faith in the driver who went through the ranks from the Ferrari Driver Academy and made his way to Ferrari after just one year in Formula 1.

And it's not just the Tifosi that have faith and resilience in the face of what should be a demoralizing downward spiral from the heights of greatness with Michael Schumacher. Charles Leclerc continues to push and put the car where it shouldn't be with 4 pole positions this season. Making it the second most pole positions for a driver this season, only behind Max Verstappen's 11 pole positions. Always striving for more and not settling for being in the midfield.

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius and Scuderia Ferrari are two Italian tragedies nearly 2,000 years apart. Echoes of one another despite only having an Italian background in common.

[southeastasianists]

Often described as the world’s largest Buddhist monument, Borobudur rises from the jungles of central Java: a nine-leveled step pyramid decorated with hundreds of Buddha statues and more than 2,000 carved stone relief panels. Completed in 835 AD by Buddhist monarchs who were repurposing an earlier Hindu structure, Borobudur was erected as “a testament to the greatness of Buddhism and the king who built it,” says religion scholar and Borobudur expert Uday Dokras.

Though Buddhists make up less than one percent of Indonesia’s population today, Borobudur still functions as a holy site of pilgrimage, as well as a popular tourist destination. But for the Indonesian Gastronomy Community (IGC), a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving and celebrating Indonesian food culture, Borobudur is “not just a temple that people can visit,” says IGC chair Ria Musiawan. The structure’s meticulous relief carvings, which depict scenes of daily life for all levels of ninth-century Javanese society, provide a vital source of information about the people who created it. Borobudur can tell us how the inhabitants of Java’s ancient Mataram kingdom lived, worked, worshiped, and—as the IGC demonstrated in an event series that ended in 2023—ate.

The IGC sees food as a way to unite Indonesians, but the organization also considers international gastrodiplomacy as a part of their mission. Globally, Indonesian food is less well-known than other Southeast Asian cuisines, but the country’s government has recently made efforts to boost its reputation, declaring not one, but five official national dishes in 2018. To promote Indonesian cuisine, the IGC organizes online and in-person events based around both modern and historical Indonesian food. In 2022, they launched an educational series entitled Gastronosia: From Borobudur to the World. The first event in the series was a virtual talk, but subsequent dates included in-person dinners, with a menu inspired by the reliefs of Borobudur and written inscriptions from contemporary Javanese sites.

In collaboration with Indonesia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other partner organizations, the first meal in the Gastronosia series was, fittingly, held at Borobudur, with a small group of guests. The largest event, which hosted 100 guests at the National Museum in Jakarta, aimed to recreate a type of ancient royal feast known as a Mahamangsa in Old Javanese, meaning “the food of kings.” The IGC’s Mahamangsa appeared alongside a multimedia museum exhibition, with video screens depicting the art of ancient Mataram that inspired the menu and displays of historical cooking tools, such as woven baskets for winnowing and steaming rice. Another event, held at Kembang Goela Restaurant, featured more than 50 international ambassadors and diplomats invited by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

But how does one translate 1,000-year-old stone carvings into a modern menu that’s not only historically accurate, but appetizing? “We have to have this very wide imagination,” says Musiawan. “You only see the relief [depicting] the food…but you cannot find out how it tastes.” The IGC designed and tested a Gastronosia menu with the help of Chef Sumartoyo of Bale Raos Restaurant in Yogyakarta, and Riris Purbasari, an archaeologist from the Central Java Province Cultural Heritage Preservation Center, who had been researching the food of Borobudur’s reliefs since 2017.

The range of human activities depicted in the reliefs of Borobudur is so wide that it has inspired research in areas of study stretching from music to weaponry. There have even been seaworthy reconstructions based on the “Borobudur Ships” displayed on the site’s lower levels, exquisitely rendered vessels like the ones that facilitated trade in ancient Southeast Asia. So it’s no surprise that Borobudur has no shortage of depictions of food-related scenes, from village agricultural labor, to the splendor of a royal Mahamangsa, to a bustling urban marketplace. Baskets of tropical fruit, nets full of fish, and even some modern Indonesian dishes are recognizable in the reliefs, such as tumpeng, a tall cone of rice surrounded by side dishes, which is still prepared for special occasions. Some images are allegories for Buddhist concepts, providing what Borobudur archaeologist John Mikic called “a visual aid for teaching a gentle philosophy of life." Uday Dokras suggests that these diverse scenes might have been chosen to help ancient visitors “identify with their own life,” making the monument’s unique religious messaging relatable. The reliefs illustrate ascending levels of enlightenment, so that visitors walk the path of life outlined by the Buddha’s teachings: from a turbulent world ruled by earthly desires at the lowest level, to tranquil nirvana at the summit.

Musiawan says that the IGC research team combined information from Borobudur with inscriptions from other Javanese sites of the same era that referenced royal banquets. While Borobudur’s reliefs show activities like farming, hunting, fishing, and dining, fine details of the food on plates or in baskets can be difficult to make out, especially since the painted plaster that originally covered the stone has long-since faded. Ninth-century court records etched into copper sheets or stone for posterity—some accidentally uncovered by modern construction projects—helped fill in the blanks when it came to what exactly people were eating. These inscriptions describe the royal banquets of ancient Mataram as huge events: One that served as a key inspiration for the IGC featured 57 sacks of rice, six water buffalo, and 100 chickens. There are no known written recipes from the era, but some writings provide enough detail for dishes to be approximated, such as freshwater eel “grilled with sweet spices” or ground buffalo meatballs seasoned with “a touch of sweetness,” in the words of the inscriptions, both of which were served at Gastronosia events.

Sugar appears to have been an important component in ancient Mataram’s royal feasts: A survey of food mentions across Old Javanese royal inscriptions revealed 34 kinds of sweets out of 107 named dishes. Gastronosia’s Mahamangsa ended with dwadal, a sticky palm-sugar toffee known as dodol in modern Indonesian, and an array of tropical fruits native to Java such as jackfruit and durian. Other dishes recreated by the IGC included catfish stewed in coconut milk, stir-fried banana-tree core, and kinca, an ancient alcohol made from fermented tamarind, which was offered alongside juice from the lychee-like toddy palm fruit as an alcohol-free option.

Musiawan describes the hunting of animals such as deer, boar, and water buffalo as an important source of meat in ninth-century Java. Domestic cattle were not eaten, she explains, because the people of ancient Mataram “believed that cows have religious value.” While Gastronosia’s events served wild game and foraged wild greens, rice also featured prominently, a key staple in Mataram that forms the subject of several of Borobudur’s reliefs. It was the mastery of rice cultivation that allowed Mataram to support a large population and become a regional power in ninth-century Southeast Asia. Rice’s importance as a staple crop also led to its inclusion in religious rituals; Dokras explains that in many regions of Asia, rice is still an essential component of the Buddhist temple offerings known as prasad.

The indigenous Southeast Asian ingredients used in Gastronosia’s Mahamangsa included some still widely-popular today, such as coconut, alongside others that have fallen into obscurity, like the water plant genjer or “yellow velvetleaf.” Musiawan acknowledges that modern diners might find some reconstructed ancient dishes “very, very simple” compared to what they’re used to “because of many ingredients we have [now] that weren’t there before.” But in other cases, ninth-century chefs were able to achieve similar flavors to modern Indonesian food by using their own native ingredients. Spiciness is a notable example. Today, chillies are near-ubiquitous in Indonesian cuisine, and Java is especially known for its sambal, a spicy relish-like condiment that combines pounded chillies with shallots, garlic, and other ingredients. But in ancient Mataram, sambal was made with native hot spices, such as several kinds of ginger; andaliman, a dried tree-berry with a mouth-numbing effect like the related Sichuan pepper; and cabya or Javanese long pepper. “It tastes different than the chili now,” Musiawan says of cabya, “but it gives the same hot sensation.” Chillies, introduced in the early modern era by European traders, are still called cabai in Indonesian, a name derived from the native cabya they supplanted.

Gastronosia is just the beginning of IGC’s plans to explore Indonesian food history through interactive events. Next, they intend to do a series on the food of ancient Bali. By delving into the historic roots of dishes Indonesians know and love, the IGC hopes to get both Indonesians and foreigners curious about the country’s history, and dispel preconceptions about what life was like long ago. Musiawan says some guests didn’t expect to enjoy the diet of a ninth-century Javanese noble as much as they did. Before experiencing Gastronosia, she says, “They thought that the food couldn't be eaten.” But afterward, “They’re glad that, actually, it's very delicious.”

[stephensmithuk]

The Illustrious Client

First published in the US in 1924 and the UK in 1925, the latter as a two-parter, this forms part of Case-book.

The first part in The Strand ends with Watson seeing the newspaper headline about the attack on Holmes.

Northumberland Avenue is a street running from Trafalgar Square to the Thames Embankment. It includes a pub called The Sherlock Holmes.

The Carlton Club was founded by the Conservative Party and was long its defacto headquarters. Originally on Carlton Terrace, it moved to Pall Mall in 1835, with the building rebuilt in 1856. A direct hit by a German bomb in 1940 destroyed the building and the Club moved to 69 St James's Street, former home of Arthur's Club. Women were not allowed to be associate members until the 1970s and not full members until 2008, with Margaret Thatcher getting honorary membership when she become Tory leader in 1975. She later become club president in 2009, although by his point she had dementia and died in 2013.

The general consensus is that the "Illustrious Client" is no less than Edward VII himself, who Holmes may have previously gotten the Beryl Coronet back for.

Prague was then under Austrian rule.

The Splügen Pass, used for travel since Roman times, connects Switzerland and Italy and with its great height, hairpins and spectacular views, is considered one of the greatest driving challenges on the planet, having featured in Top Gear. The San Bernandino tunnel has taken most of the non-tourist traffic and it is now closed in winter for safety reasons.

Kingston upon Thames, known as Kingston for short, is a town located 10 miles SW of Charing Cross. Until 1965, it was in Surrey before becoming part of Greater London and part of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames. Surrey County Council were based there until 2021, when their offices moved to Reigate.

The Hurlingham Club in Fulham is where horse polo's rules were established - it even hosted Olympic polo in the 1908 London Games, but the fields were compulsorily purchased by the local council after the Second World War for housing. It was also home to pigeon shooting and was home of world croquet, still holding major events in the latter. Edward VII was a keen patron of the site.

Charlie Peace was an English burglar and double murderer, executed in 1879. He ended up featuring in Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors, which was oddly enough replaced between 2016 and 2022 with an immersive Sherlock Holmes Experience... which at £66.50 a ticket was a bit too expensive.

HMP Parkhurst, a Category B prison located on the Isle of Wight, merged in 2009 with HMP Albany to form HMP Isle of Wight, although each part retains its own name. Notable inmates include the Kray Twins, Peter Sutcliffe, Ian Brady and currently Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadžić.

Hypnotism was rather in vogue by this time.

Apaches were the name given to various criminal gangs in Paris; named after the Native American tribe. There are various suggestions as to how that came about.

Montmartre, in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, was widely known for its artistic community during this time, with many a famous name living there due to the low rents. It's still there and development is restricted due to the historic character. Pigalle, Paris's red-light district, is next door.

Kitty Winter would feature as a character in Elementary, played by Ophelia Lovibond. Gruner turns up as well.

"Tinker’s curse" is Kitty saying, in the language of the time, that she does not give an [expletive deleted].

Ruritania is a fictional country first featured in the 1894 Anthony Hope novel The Prisoner of Zenda. It has become a byword for quaint small European countries in Central and Eastern Europe.

China was still an Empire in 1902, nominally ruled by the Guangxu Emperor, aka Zaitan, but an 1898 coup resulted in his loss of any real power; he was even in house arrest for a while. He died in 1908, probably poisoned by arsenic. His nephew, Puyi, would be the last Chinese Emperor and is beyond the scope of this article.

I cannot discuss Chinese pottery in any depth and so will not attempt to.

Some husbands might have questioned the gallantry of King Edward VII, who had a box for his mistresses at his coronation.

Armorial bearings are the "shield" part of a coat of arms. The British royal one traditionally depicted a bare-breasted woman as part of the harp on the bottom left, but this is no longer standard practice.

Edward VII, while having no actual political power, was able to exercise quite a bit of influence behind the scenes, especially in foreign and defence policy.

All criminal prosecutions are brought in the name of the monarch, rendered "R" (Rex or Regina) in text and "the Crown" when spoken). i.e. R vs. Winter. In addition, judicial reviews (i.e. is this government decision legal) are also brought in the name of the monarch, with the name of the actual plaintiff in brackets since a 2001 change to the format, e.g. R (Smith) vs. Secretary of State for the Home Department. It is common for initials to be used in those brackets to protect the identity of a plaintiff, such as the recent decision on flying migrants to Rwanda.

[kafkaesquegf]

Hey, everyone. On February 24, 2022, Russia commenced their illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine following six years of conflict between Russian-backed separatist groups and Ukrainian forces in Crimea and Donbas. one year later, the Russian offensive has not stopped, and Ukraine continues to face shelling, rocket fire, and bombardments on both military and civilian infrastructure. the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian people are on the line as Russia descends further and further into fascism and military dictatorship. 

Russia has continually used the excuse of “denazification” in Ukraine to justify their criminal and imperialist war in Ukraine. As a Ukrainian-American Jew whose grandparents fled a Ukrainian shtetl in Podillia during the 1920s, I say that this is a disgusting, perverse, and wholly cynical manipulation of Ukrainian-Jewish historical trauma for the gains of an imperialist power. My relationship to Ukrainian nationalism is complex, but I know one thing for sure: Russia doesn’t give a shit about Jews. If they did, they wouldn’t be using the Neo-Nazi-infested Wagner PMC, and they wouldn’t be shelling Jewish heritage sites. Hundreds of years of Jewish culture and history are in danger of destruction by Russian artillery fire. In March of 2022, the memorial at Babyn Yar ravine outside of Kyiv, which was the site of the single largest massacre of Jews during the Holocaust by the Nazis and their collaborators, was hit by Russian artillery. 

Russia does not care about Ukrainian Jews. Russia does not want Ukrainian Jews to see themselves as Ukrainian at all; it wants to undo the decades of bridge-building that have taken place between non-Jewish and Jewish communities in Ukraine. In the end, Russia wants to see the complete annihilation of both groups.

To every Ukrainian, Jewish and not, I wish you strength, hope, and courage in the beginning this second year of invasion. And to every Russian government official, vatnik and Z-fascist who supports the war, I wish you nothing more than oblivion.

If you can, please consider donating to the following charities:

Come Back Alive

United24

Ukrainian Recovery Funds

Jewish Relief Network Ukraine

World Jewish Relief

С��ава Україні! Нет войне!

[blueiscoool]

600-Year-Old English Gold Coin Found in Newfoundland

The discovery of a rare gold coin on the south coast of Newfoundland, Canada, may challenge traditional historical narratives about the timing of European contact in the region, as it predates explorer John Cabot's arrival on the island by at least 70 years.

In a press release last week, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador said that the English coin was found during the summer of 2022 by Edward Hynes, a local amateur historian, who reported it to officials as required under the province's Historic Resources Act. The 600-year-old coin predates the first documented European contact with North America since the Vikings, in a region with a 9,000-year-old history of human settlement and rich Indigenous traditions.

After consultation with Paul Berry, a former curator of the Bank of Canada's Currency Museum, the coin was identified as a Henry VI quarter noble, minted in London between 1422 and 1427. In the 1400s, the coin would have represented a significant sum of money, valued at 1 shilling 8 pence, or around 81 Canadian dollars ($61) today.

Prior to this discovery, a coin minted in the 1490s and found in 2021 at the province's Cupids Cove Plantation Provincial Historic Site was considered the oldest English coin ever found in Canada.

As Berry says that the coin was likely out of circulation when it was lost, there is much speculation about exactly how the gold quarter noble coin made its way to Newfoundland and Labrador. The precise location of the discovery is being kept secret to discourage treasure hunters.

The discovery of the coin underscores the intriguing archaeological record in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada's easternmost province. Stories of Viking arrival are contained in Icelandic sagas, citing visits by Leif Erikson over 1,000 years ago, and archaeological evidence of a Norse settlement, which was found in L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, and declared a Unesco World Heritage site in 1978.

Other unconfirmed accounts of European contact include tales from England's Channel Islands about a ship being blown off course in the late 15th century into a strange land full of fish; historical Portuguese maps depicting Terra do Bacalhau (or, the land of codfish); and the "Voyage of Saint Brendan," a legendary account of an early 6th-century sea voyage by an Irish abbot.

In 1583, Newfoundland became England's first possession in North America and the establishment of fishing operations on the outer coastline of the island cut off access to traditional food sources for the indigenous population.

"There's been some knowledge of a pre-16th century European presence here for a while, you know, excluding Norse and so on," Brake told CBC. "The possibility of perhaps a pre-16th century occupation would be pretty amazing and highly significant in this part of the world."

[burlveneer-music]

Ordnance Survey - Turas - music in the orbit of the Ghost Box/Clay Pipe binary sun, incorporating field recordings from ancient burial sites in Ireland

Turas (Journey) is the most ambitious Ordnance Survey record to date. The field recordings used on Turas were captured with both analog and digital devices at passage and wedge tombs across Meath, West Cork, Wicklow, Connemara and Roscommon. To make use of the tombs' acoustics, elements like percussion were recorded in the tombs and through the process of re-amplification (playing pre-recorded material back in the tombs), this 3000 year old reverberation became a major part of the sound world that the listener experience. Turas is an electronically mediated journey that allows these historical sites to become an important collaborative factor in the creative process. Guest collaborators include Roger Doyle (Piano), Garreth Quinn Redmond (Violin), and Billy Mag Fhloinn (Yaybahar.) Recorded and Produced by Neil O'Connor between May 2021 and July 2022 at the National Concert Hall Studios, Ballferriter, Co.Kerry, Willem Twee Studios, Den Bosch, Holland and at historical sites around Ireland. Instruments Piano, Bass, Drums, Shakers, Bells, Tambourine. Synthesizers Moog Voyager, Moog Opus Three, Korg Mono Poly, Roland Juno 60, Roland JX3P, Sequential Circuits Pro One, Sequential Circuits Prophet 4 & 5, EMS VCS3 Modular Synthesizers Make Noise Shared System Plus, Serge System, ARP 2500 Test Equipment Rhode & Schwarz Oscillators x 12, Rhode & Schwarz Octave Filter x 3, Hewlett-Packard 8005A Pulse Generator, Hewlett-Packard 8006A Word Generator, Hewlett-Packard 3722 A Noise Generator, Hewlett-Packard 3310B Function Generator, EG&G Parc Model 193 Multiplier/Divider. Recording Equipment Revox A70, Tascam Model 80, Uher Monitor Report, Sony TC-40, Zoom H4 Garreth Quinn Redmond (Violin) Billy Mag Fhlionn: Yaybahar Roger Doyle (Piano) Artwork & Layout: Gavin O Brien Supported by Final County Council & The Arts Council of Ireland

[eaglesnick]

“He is fiddling while Rome is burning, and, unlike the enormous majority of people who do this, fiddling with his face toward the flames.”― George Orwell

Two days ago many media outlets posted similar headlines to this in the Washington Post

“Sunday was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth, scientists say. The historic day comes on the heels of 13 straight months of unprecedented temperatures and the hottest year scientists have ever seen.”  (23/07/24)

The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said:

“… it will not be the last record-breaker, as planet-warming fossil fuel pollution drives temperatures to shocking new highs.”

Paradoxically, record heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and flooding go together. For every 1 c rise in temperature the atmosphere holds 7% more moisture. This causes heavier raindrops, often falling over a shorter space of time, leading to localised flash flooding. At the same time, small differences in average temperatures leads to big differences in heat extremes. The change in weather patterns also leads to longer droughts, not least because as the soil dries out greater demands are put on existing water supplies, which are often themselves depleted, and the drier the conditions the more likelihood there is of wildfires.

In January this year “hundreds of (UK) homes were evacuated after heavy rain.” (BBC News: 05/01/24) In July 2024 the Government paper  “ Water situations: May 2024” informed us that England received 141% of the long-term average rainfall for the time of year. In other words we were close to having nearly 50% more rain as was historically usual. At the same time groundwater levels “had decreased at almost all the sites" used as measuring points.

We have more rainfall but less ground water because the increased intensity of the rainfall means much of it runs off the land into rivers and out to sea before it has time to soak into the soil.

Many scientists and naturalist believe climate change is the “biggest threat modern humans have ever faced". Yet what do we do about it? In this country we lock up those who try to bring the enormity of the situation to our attention.

Priti Patel and the last Conservative government wanted members of environmentally concerned groups to be put on a terrorist list and sent to jail if they dared raise awareness to the threat we face. The Tory government  under Sunak passed the  ‘The Police. Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, whereby anyone “conspiring to cause a public nuisance" can be jailed for up to 10 years.

Last week 5 peaceful environmentalist protestors were jailed for a total of 21 years.  Yesterday, one day after we were told that last Sunday was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth, six more environmental protesters were arrested by the police under the new “conspiring to cause a public disorder" offence”.

The world record for the hottest day on Sunday was broken the very next day.  April saw “significant flooding” in the UK, with 44 flood warnings  being issued together with 201 flood alerts. A new heatwave map shows a 224-mile heat dome about to hit Britain, and we decide to lock up environmental protestors who are trying to alert us to the dangers we face if we do not drastically decrease our reliance on fossil fuels

Some might expect Starmer - once described as "a green activist to his core"- to amend or even repeal the draconian anti-democratic ‘Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act’ but that is highly unlikely. Starmer’s emphasis on “growing the economy” means he cannot do without the oil and gas companies. The oil and gas sector is worth £20bn to the UK economy and supports 200,000 jobs across its supply chain.

So even though Starmer knows the existential threat climate change and fossil fuel consumption means for our planet, he isn’t going to do anything to upset the fossil fuel industry. Couple this to Starmer’s authoritarianism and his total abhorrence of dissent, and you can expect many more peaceful protesters to be sent to our already overflowing prisons. 

[mariacallous]

It’s been one of the wettest years in California since records began. From October 2022 to March 2023, the state was blasted by 31 atmospheric rivers—colossal bands of water vapor that form above the Pacific and become firehoses when they reach the West Coast. What surprised climate scientists wasn’t the number of storms, but their strength and rat-a-tat frequency. The downpours shocked a water system that had just experienced the driest three years in recorded state history, causing floods, mass evacuations, and at least 22 deaths.

Swinging between wet and dry extremes is typical for California, but last winter’s rain, potentially intensified by climate change, was almost unmanageable. Add to that the arrival of El Niño, and more extreme weather looks likely for the state. This is going to make life very difficult for the dam operators tasked with capturing and controlling much of the state’s water.

Like most of the world’s 58,700 large dams, those in California were built for yesterday’s more stable climate patterns. But as climate change taxes the world’s water systems—affecting rainfall, snowmelt, and evaporation—it’s getting tough to predict how much water gets to a dam, and when. Dams are increasingly either water-starved, unable to maintain supplies of power and water for their communities, or overwhelmed and forced to release more water than desired—risking flooding downstream.

But at one major dam in Northern California, operators have been demonstrating how to not just weather these erratic and intense storms, but capitalize on them. Management crews at New Bullards Bar, built in 1970, entered last winter armed with new forecasting tools that gave unprecedented insight into the size and strength of the coming storms—allowing them to strategize how to handle the rain.

First, they let the rains refill their reservoir, a typical move after a long drought. Then, as more storms formed at sea, they made the tough choice to release some of this precious hoard through their hydropower turbines, confident that more rain was coming. “I felt a little nervous at first,” says John James, director of resource planning at Yuba Water Agency in northern California. Fresh showers soon validated the move. New Bullards Bar ended winter with plumped water supplies, a 150 percent boost in power generation, and a clean safety record. The strategy offers a glimpse of how better forecasting can allow hydropower to adapt to the climate age.

Modeling studies have long suggested that better weather forecasts would be invaluable for dam managers. Now this is being confirmed in real life. New Bullards Bar is one of a half-dozen pilot sites teaming up with the US Army Corps of Engineers to test how cutting-edge forecasting can be used to optimize operations in the real world. Early tests of the methods, called forecast-informed reservoir operations, have given operators the confidence to hold 5-20 percent reserve margins beyond their reservoirs’ typical capacity, says Cary Talbot, who heads the initiative for the Army Corps.

To Talbot, FIRO could mean a paradigm shift in how the Corps and others run dams. Historically, dam operators under the Army Corps umbrella had to ignore weather forecasts and respond only to rain and snow that was already on the ground. This rule traces back to the notorious capriciousness of traditional forecasts: If an operator takes a bad gamble on a forecasted weather event, the results can be dangerous. But in practice, this forces operators to react later than their gut tells them to, says Riley Post, a University of Iowa researcher who spent over a decade as a hydraulic engineer for the Corps. They might, for example, be expected to hold water in a nearly full reservoir even as heavy rains approach.

Recent developments, however, have sharpened the trustworthiness of forecasts, particularly for atmospheric rivers on the West Coast. Leaps in computing power have enabled ever-more-muscular climate and weather modeling. To pump these models with data, scientists led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have since 2016 launched reconnaissance flights over atmospheric rivers of interest, where they release dozens of dropsondes, sensor packs shaped like Pringles cans. The result is a detailed profile of a storm’s strength, size, and intentions, which can then feed into FIRO.

These reports aren’t clairvoyant; all weather forecasts involve a measure of uncertainty. But a dam operator with increased confidence in when, where, and how much water will strike their watershed can take a more “surgical” approach to holding or releasing water, Post says.

And if they know how much time they have, they can also make the most of their existing water. Take Prado Dam, a vintage 1941 facility that was built to shield Orange County from flooding but can also distribute water to 25 groundwater-recharge stations. This past winter, forecasts showed a well-spaced parade of storms tracking its way. So operators pulsed water from the dam into storage at an optimal cadence, giving it time to soak into the landscape. Adam Hutchinson of the Orange County Water District, which manages the groundwater-recharge system, said publicly in July that these actions delivered an “exceptional” boost to water supplies for “those dry years we know are coming.”

Jinsun Lim is an analyst with the International Energy Agency think tank who studies climate resilience in the energy sector. Lim says that this sort of specificity is exactly what hydro officials in many countries wish for: tools that can translate climate impacts at a local level for their unique watersheds and infrastructure. Talbot hasn’t seen anything quite like FIRO deployed abroad, but he says that curious parties from the UK, Chile, Southeast Asia, Australia, and other regions have contacted him. Meanwhile, other corners of the hydro world are applying similar logic to their own climate challenges.

For BC Hydro, which serves 95 percent of British Columbia’s population, heat waves have proven a bigger problem than drought. Rivers and rains remain strong, but the province’s historically mellow springs and summers have warmed up, prompting many people to switch on air conditioners, which jacks up power demand. To keep the ACs humming, BC Hydro keeps a close eye on its fuel supply, that is, its watershed. About 150 monitoring stations, equipped with snow, climate, and surface-water sensors, enable a near-real-time picture of water flows. This helps operators store up water for demand spikes in summer and winter alike.

Tajikistan, which gets fully 98 percent of its power from hydroelectricity, is adapting its fleet with a mix of hard and soft measures. Renovations at the 126-megawatt Quairokkum power plant, built in 1956, were screened against a range of climate scenarios—such as the diminution of its source glaciers. Just replacing its six Soviet-era turbines will hike output to 170 megawatts; the dam will also be reinforced for a 10,000-year flood whose intensity could exceed the previous design standard by anywhere from 15 to 70 percent. Meanwhile, investments by international funders in HydroMet, the country’s long-dysfunctional meteorology service, are paying off: The agency recently gave power generators early notice of a dry year, enabling forward planning.

Recent trends have underlined the need for such changes. Earlier this year, the International Energy Agency said today’s hydropower facilities are on average 2 percent less productive than dams were from 1990 to 2016. Droughts have weakened flows at many plants, the agency said, leaving fossil-based energy to fill a gap the size of Spain’s annual power use. Other dams have been exposed to extreme events for which they weren’t strictly engineered, as in north India in 2021, when a crumbling glacier sent forth a wall of water that wrecked dams and towns downstream. Last month’s disaster in Libya, due to the failure of two flood-control dams hit by a supersized Mediterranean storm, further underlines the risks of maladapted facilities.

Even hydropower’s harshest critics take no issue with nip-and-tuck improvements at today’s dams. But amid a massive expansion planned in the Global South, they warn against overconfidence that hydropower can adapt its way out of climate change. In July, an environmental group in Namibia urged the government to rethink a large dam proposed for the Kunene River, saying it’s prone to the same climate extremes that have sapped the energy of Namibia’s other dams.

As climate disruption sets in, solar and wind can provide equivalent power with less risk, says Josh Klemm, co-executive director of International Rivers, a human rights organization focused on river communities. “We need to really reexamine plans to develop new hydropower,” he says. “We’re only going to deepen our reliance on a climate-vulnerable energy source.”

The Army Corps, meanwhile, is in the early stages of studying whether FIRO can be attempted at 419 other dams under its umbrella. Scaling up FIRO isn’t entirely straightforward; other parts of the US have different kinds of precipitation events than California does, and some of these are currently a lot harder to predict than atmospheric rivers. But Talbot is optimistic that the ever-improving forecast science can find efficiency gains there for the taking. “It’s making your existing infrastructure work harder for you,” he said. “In the face of climate change, this sounds like a great way to position ourselves for buffering that.”

[piizunn]

“Knowing You Has Made Me a Better Settler Person”: Tokenizing the Métis Identity 

View my work: A Spectacle of Me for You 

By riel 

My name is riel, I am a Red River Métis artist descending maternally from the historic Métis families by the names of Berthelet, Caron, St. Germaine, Dubois, Dazé, and Larivière, who come from the communities of Pointe à Grouette, now St. Agathe, St. Norbert, and St. Vital, now modern-day Winnipeg, and the historic Batoche, Saskatchewan. My Berthelet ancestors, notably my third great grandfather Joseph Berthelet Sr. was a community leader of Pointe à Grouette, and my fifth-great uncle Jean Caron Sr fought at fifty-two years old in the battle of Duck Lake, Saskatchewan of the North-West Resistance of 1885. His house is now a historic site in Batoche. My mother is a Métis academic with a background in education and my father is a settler of British ancestry, and an archaeologist-turned-locksmith. I introduce myself in this way, in the traditional way of Métis authors, such as Chantal Fiola and Jean Teillet, to contextualize my knowledge and experiences, as well as my connection to this land.  

Earlier this year, 2022, as the winter semester wrapped up, and spring was beginning to rear its big green head, I finished building a Red River cart. It was four months of research and physical labour. I taught myself methods of wood joinery that my ancestors would have used, the hand tools they had access to pre-industrial revolution, as well as the power tools we as modern Métis have access to now. After the cart’s completion I installed it in the Ivan Gallery at school. That is when and where it happened. A classmate of settler colonial ancestry approached me. We had spent two semesters at odds. Her work focused on the climate crisis but came from a place of doomism and borderline eco-fascism. She regurgitated colonial narratives regarding our “doomed world” and the inherent violence of humans, and when she was corrected and shown the harm in her words she doubled down.  

She said to me “knowing you, has made me a better person.” I do not know this woman and she does not know me, but I believe I knew her in that moment. To her, I am an encyclopedia, a fountain of knowledge for her to drink from whenever she wants to feel a little less guilty. I realized what she meant. 

“Knowing you has made me a better settler person” 

What does it take to know a person? Who defines knowing? In that moment, I knew my classmate, but she could not have known me less. To her, and many others I have met in my life, my culture and I represented an outlet for settler guilt. I was the “real Indian” she took a photo with to prove her proximity and understanding of Indigeneity (James Luna). Because in settler minds, every Indian is every Indian, and every Indian is an encyclopedia to test knowledge against. I am a measuring stick for settlers to compare their thoughts and actions to. 

I began to really consider how settlers were tokenizing me; sexually, intellectually, culturally, spiritually, to settlers I am a fantasy Métis academic. I am an all knowing all sensing wise Indian who can track a man through all terrains, who can tell you your spirit name by just looking at you, who will save your life when you are caught unprepared on my land, and who will scalp an enemy with no mercy. That is what people want from me, not the stories of the Métis resistance leaders who tried to overtake your settler ancestors in the Northwest Resistance, who could spit bullets and toss gunpower directly into their guns all while on horseback. They do not want to hear about The Old Wolves who fought in the Northwest Resistance and years later met in St. Vital to lovingly and meticulously document our young nation’s history, who hated the word “rebellion” (Jean Teillet). 

A Spectacle of Me for You is an installation containing a series of sculptures, photographs, prints, and found objects arranged in a “spectacle” of the Métis identity. The work is the result of experimentation with materials and engagement with Métis theory on self-governance and our history. Being named after Louis Riel often feels like an invitation for settlers to give me their unsolicited opinion on whether my ethnic group should have rights, and if Louis Riel was a madman or not, with most of the conversations quickly becoming anti-Indigenous and/or ableist. To my people, however, it is an honour to be named after Riel, the man who, with Gabriel Dumont successfully won the Red River Resistance of 1869, and commanded my ancestors in the Northwest Resistance of 1885. In this work I employ Indigenous humour- our ability to make fun of ourselves, remaining in control of the joke in order to remove that power from settlers, who are suddenly uncomfortably aware of their perception of Indigenous peoples. I have been heavily influenced by artists like Jesse Ray Short who dressed as Louis Riel in a drag-esque performance, and James Luna’s performance Take A Picture with a Real Indian (2001) and Artifact Piece (1987), Dayna Danger’s Big ‘Uns series, specifically for their reclamation of explicit Indigenous sexuality, and their ways of incorporating Indigenous, specifically Métis and Salteaux material culture into representations of Indigenous sexuality. Finally, I also would like to reference Rebecca Belmore’s piece Artifact #671B from 1988, where Belmore implicates her own body as an artifact in similar ways that James Luna has.  

The viewer enters the room to find a table at the back of the room, seemingly an in-use workspace, with a sewing mannequin dressed in brown pants, a red and black flannel, a Louis Riel shirt, and a beaded leather strap on placed over the pants. There is also a half-deflated mask of Louis Riel placed on the table. On the table there are postcards- free for the viewer to take with two different designs to choose from. On one side of the room a log has been placed on the ground and another rests a few feet away, seemingly more haphazardly than the carefully placed log.  

A Spectacle of Me for You is a staged representation of what a beader’s workspace might look like. A series of props that vaguely reference the Métis but does not actually represent the workspace of the artist. It is a highly curated idea of the Métis identity, playing on well-known stereotypes. Among the workspace set-up there are two stacks of postcards, one with a shot of the artist posing with two logs they personally harvested in January of 2022, left over from building a Red River cart, one of the logs positioned suggestively between the legs of the artist. They are dressed in stereotypical lumberjack clothes as well as a t-shirt with Louis Riel’s face and a slogan that reads “keepin’ it Riel”. The artist also wears a latex mask of Louis Riel, tying the fantasy together.   

Otipemisiwak Voyageur Fantasy Husband is a series of postcards as well as a costume worn by the artist to comment on different aspects of tokenization. The leather strap on harness worn over their clothes is an overt reference to the fetishization of Indigenous people, specifically Indigiqueer and Two Spirit community members, and a comparison of Indigenous and settler masculinity. The harness is paired with a lumberjack style flannel and a shirt with an image of Louis Riel that reads “keepin it real”, and a latex mask of Riel, worn on the artist’s head, obscuring their face. The postcards and the mask are a reference to modern Métis material culture and our infatuation with objects with Louis Riel’s face. The mass-production of these items has both caused a massive inflation of Louis Riel-kitsch, but also a larger awareness of our presence as Métis people, and what Riel means to us. Akin to the presidents' masks used by the Ex-Presidents gang in the 1991 film Point Break, the artist uses their Riel mask to draw attention to the way real historical figures, particularly politicians become caricatures of their actual selves in the eyes of the public, allowing them to be immortalized in popular culture. On a smaller scale, something similar has happened to Louis Riel where many settlers deem him a violent mad-man, and reduce him to a caricature of himself, while the Métis have reclaimed this treatment, and have found ways to honour him in our material culture. 

References/Works Cited 

BELMORE, REBECCA. ARTIFACT #671B, 1988. 

BIGELOW, KATHRYN. POINT BREAK. TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX, 1991.  

BURNS, CLARISSA. VOYAGEUR GAMES DEMONSTRATION. https://metisgathering.ca/classroom-resources/classroom-voyageur-games/. MÉTIS GATHERING. 2022.  

LUNA, JAMES. TAKE A PICTURE WITH A REAL INDIAN, 2000.  

LUNA, JAMES. ARTEFACT PIECE, 1987. 

   RIEL, LOUIS. FINAL TRIAL STATEMENT. http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/riel/rieltrialstatement.html. JULY 31ST 1885.  

SHORT, JESSIE RAY. WAKE UP!, 2015. 

  TEILLET, JEAN. THE NORTH-WEST IS OUR MOTHER : THE STORY OF LOUIS RIEL’S PEOPLE, THE METIS NATION. PATRICK CREAN EDITIONS, AN IMPRINT OF HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS LTD., 2013. 

[anniekoh]

Seattle From the Margins: Exclusion, Erasure, and the Making of a Pacific Coast City

Megan Asaka (2022)

"From the origins of the city in the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of World War II, Seattle's urban workforce consisted overwhelmingly of migrant laborers who powered the seasonal, extractive economy of the Pacific Northwest. Though the city benefitted from this mobile labor force that consisted largely of Indigenous peoples and Asian migrants, municipal authorities, elites, and reformers continually depicted these workers and the spaces they inhabited as troublesome and as impediments to urban progress. Today the physical landscape bears little evidence of their historical presence in the city. Tracing histories from unheralded sites such as labor camps, lumber towns, lodging houses, and so-called slums, Seattle from the Margins shows how migrant laborers worked alongside each other, competed over jobs, and forged unexpected alliances within the marine and coastal spaces of the Puget Sound. By uncovering the historical presence of marginalized groups and asserting their significance in the development of the city, Megan Asaka offers a deeper understanding of Seattle's complex past.

This is EXCELLENT!

Other books referenced by Asaka.

The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era (Second Edition)               

By Quintard Taylor (2022)

Seattle's first black resident was a sailor named Manuel Lopes who arrived in 1858 and became the small community's first barber. He left in the early 1870s to seek economic prosperity elsewhere, but as Seattle transformed from a stopover town to a full-fledged city, African Americans began to stay and build a community. By the early twentieth century, black life in Seattle coalesced in the Central District, a four-square-mile section east of downtown. Black Seattle, however, was never a monolith. Through world wars, economic booms and busts, and the civil rights movement, black residents and leaders negotiated intragroup conflicts and had varied approaches to challenging racial inequity. Despite these differences, they nurtured a distinct African American culture and black urban community ethos. With a new foreword and afterword, this second edition of The Forging of a Black Community is essential to understanding the history and present of the largest black community in the Pacific Northwest.

American Workers, Colonial Power Philippine Seattle and the Transpacific West, 1919-1941

by Dorothy B. Fujita Rony (2003)

Historically, Filipina/o Americans have been one of the oldest and largest Asian American groups in the United States. In this pathbreaking work of historical scholarship, Dorothy B. Fujita-Rony traces the evolution of Seattle as a major site for Philippine immigration between World Wars I and II and examines the dynamics of the community through the frameworks of race, place, gender, and class. By positing Seattle as a colonial metropolis for Filipina/os in the United States, Fujita-Rony reveals how networks of transpacific trade and militarism encouraged migration to the city, leading to the early establishment of a Filipina/o American community in the area. By the 1920s and 1930s, a vibrant Filipina/o American society had developed in Seattle, creating a culture whose members, including some who were not of Filipina/o descent, chose to pursue options in the U.S. or in the Philippines. Fujita-Rony also shows how racism against Filipina/o Americans led to constant mobility into and out of Seattle, making it a center of a thriving ethnic community in which only some remained permanently, given its limited possibilities for employment. The book addresses class distinctions as well as gender relations, and also situates the growth of Filipina/o Seattle within the regional history of the American West, in addition to the larger arena of U.S.-Philippines relations.

[tomorrowusa]

In addition to bombing maternity hospitals, playgrounds, and apartment buildings, Putin's war criminals are now bombing cathedrals.

This was the second time that the vast, sand-yellow Transfiguration Cathedral, which sits in the heart of Odesa’s Unesco-listed historic centre, had been attacked: in the 1930s, it was torn down during Joseph Stalin’s atheism drive. On Sunday morning, the rebuilt version was hit during a Russian airstrike on the city. A missile blew a large hole in the roof, collapsed the altar and left several walls charred by fire. It was one of several strikes on the southern port city in the early hours. Schools, residential buildings and a revered 19th-century mansion also suffered damage. One person was killed and 14 were hospitalised, the regional governor said.

Central Odesa is a designated World Heritage Site.

Putin is having another major hissy fit. His three-day "special operation" to wipe out Ukraine as a country began on 24 February 2022 and marks its 17th month today. He is currently attacking the port city of Odesa because that is where most of Ukraine's grain is exported. If Putin can't have Ukraine, developing countries can't have grain.

Russia has been hitting Odesa relentlessly since Moscow last week pulled out of a deal allowing Ukrainian grain to be exported from the city’s Black Sea ports. The Russian defence ministry has also threatened to treat commercial ships attempting to dock in Odesa as military targets in order to ensure that no grain can leave the city. “Russia’s current strategy is to destroy Odesa. They would never really attack foreign-flagged ships coming to Odesa, so they are attacking Odesa to make it clear that it’s too dangerous here,” said Oleksiy Honcharenko, a Ukrainian MP from the city. He said Ukraine urgently needed more air defence systems. Even by the standards of Russia’s ruthless war strategy, a missile strike on a historic cathedral – one that was consecrated by the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, no less – was a shocking development. The priests at the scene were dumbfounded. “This is barbarism, it’s terrorism. The people who did this are not people at all,” said Myroslav Vdodovych, the cathedral’s chief priest, as he walked through the ruins in a fluorescent orange helmet, taking calls on his mobile phone and directing emergency workers to spots where there was still rubble to clear.

Of course it's terrorism. Russia has become a terrorist state under Putin. Putin runs the country like the head of a fascist mafia.

We need to send ATACMS and F-16s to Ukraine. Fortunately Ukrainian pilots are already in the process of being trained to fly F-16s.

A lot of the terrorist missiles used against Ukraine are fired from planes flying over the international waters of the Black Sea. Ukraine needs the ability to shoot down Putin's flying terrorists. Let them sleep with the fishes along with the Moskva.