Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged volcano

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
5More

Covid Has Killed Over 5 Percent of Congo's Parliament - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-congo-parliament.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 04 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The coronavirus has now claimed the lives of 32 lawmakers in the Democratic Republic of Congo — more than 5 percent of its Parliament — the authorities say, a reflection of how the coronavirus continues to pose a widespread threat in some parts of the world even as others increasingly resume pre-pandemic behavior.
  • The toll of the outbreak in Congo is also rising as the country struggles to roll out Covid-19 vaccines, fight off other deadly diseases and grapple with the eruption of one of the world’s most dangerous volcanoes.
  • The central African state has also struggled with its vaccination campaign. In early March, it received 1.7 million AstraZeneca shots from Covax, the global vaccine-sharing partnership.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Along with concerns about the rare blood clots, vaccine hesitancy has been fueled by misinformation spread on social media, longstanding suspicion in government systems and a belief that diseases like Ebola and measles constitute more of a threat than Covid.
  • Since the beginning of the pandemic, several African leaders have succumbed to the coronavirus. In the Republic of Congo, the opposition presidential candidate Guy-Brice Parfait Kolélas died of Covid-19 in March just hours after voting ended. Abbay Kyari, a former chief of staff to Nigeria’s president, and the South African minister Jackson Mphikwa Mthembu both died of complications related to Covid-19.
9More

NASA Picks Twin Missions To Visit Venus, Earth's 'Evil Twin' : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...o-visit-venus-earths-evil-twin
shared by anonymous on 06 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • NASA has decided to send two new missions to Venus, our closest planetary neighbor, making it the first time the agency will go to this scorching hot world in more than three decades.The news has thrilled planetary scientists who have long argued that Venus deserves more attention because it could be a cautionary tale of a pleasant, Earth-like world that somehow went horribly awry.
  • Venus has been called Earth's "evil twin" because it is about the same size as Earth and probably was created out of similar stuff; it might have even had at one time oceans of liquid water.
  • But Venus appears to have suffered a runaway greenhouse effect. Temperatures at its surface now exceed 800 degrees Fahrenheit, and its atmosphere is toxic to humans.NASA's new administrator, Bill Nelson, announced that after considering four different proposals for its Discovery Program, including proposed trips to moons of Jupiter and Neptune, the agency went all in on Venus.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • These Venus missions could be ready to launch in 2026, but the exact timing is still to be determined. "The best case, if possible, would be if they could launch on a single rocket," Gilmore said.
  • The VERITAS mission will have an orbiting probe with instruments that will let scientists create detailed 3D reconstructions of the planet's landscape, and will reveal whether Venus has active plate tectonics and volcanoes.
  • The DAVINCI+ descent probe would sniff in atmospheric gases to measure their composition precisely, and it would be equipped with cameras that could take photos of the surface on the way down.
  • Much remains mysterious about Venus, even though it was the first planet that NASA explored, in the groundbreaking Mariner 2 mission that flew by Venus in 1962. It was the first time a spacecraft had ever successfully reached another world at a time when the planets were only known by peering at them through telescopes.
  • While rovers on Mars have sent back lots of vivid panoramas showing the stark beauty of the red planet, images of the surface of Venus are hard to come by. The heat and intense pressure simply obliterate spacecraft.
  • The last NASA spacecraft sent on a Venus mission was Magellan, which launched in 1989 to map its surface. Its work showed that much of the planet was covered with volcanic flows. The spacecraft burned up in the harsh Venusian atmosphere about 10 hours after being commanded to plunge toward the surface.
9More

US officials ground drones over espionage fears - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-51100759 politics US culture
shared by anniina03 on 17 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • After a volcano exploded in Hawaii in May 2018, US scientists used drones to save a man from the lava: "Follow the drone," they said. He made it through the jungle.Drones save people. They also map terrain, survey land and inspect pipelines. The scientists use drones for these and other purposes on a daily basis, and they have bragged about their successes in the field.Many of the aircraft are made by Chinese companies, though. They are now grounded because of concerns about espionage.
  • the head of the federal agency, David Bernhardt, is apparently now worried that the drones could be used for espionage.
  • He is examining the agency's civilian drone programme in an effort to determine whether or not it should be continued. During this time, many of the drones are grounded, according to an agency spokeswoman, Melissa Brown.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Mr Bernhardt's review of the drone programme reflects a growing concern among US officials about Chinese technology and espionage.President Donald Trump has spoken in dark terms about China, saying that its leaders have "cheated" the US and that its intelligence agents spy on people here. Chinese officials deny the accusations.
  • Rules and norms are different for private companies in China than they are in the US. Business executives in China stay in close contact with government officials. US officials worry about the information that Chinese drones could collect and what might be done with the data.
  • The drones are now at the centre of the US-China dispute.Many of the drones that are used by US scientists are made by a Shenzhen-based company called Da Jiang Innovations Science and Technology Company, or, DJI. The company dominates the drone market, according to a research company, Skylogic.
  • US officials have said in the past that Huawei, the telecommunications company, and other Chinese companies could pose a security threat. Some Chinese analysts say the fight is not over national security but market share. The Chinese are better at making products, they say, and Americans are jealous. The Chinese analysts see the US policies as a form of protectionism.
  • Executives who work for DJI say their drones are trustworthy. Michael Oldenburg, a spokesman for DJI Technology Inc, tells the BBC there is no "credible evidence to support a broad country-of-origin restriction on drone technology".Many US analysts agree with Oldenburg's assessment. "I doubt the Chinese government is using the drones to conduct massive surveillance," says David Fidler, an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
  • The real assessment, the one from the secretary of the interior, is yet to be announced, however. In the meantime, scientists and others wait - and wonder - about the fate of the drones.
8More

What Is "Legitimacy" Good For? - 0 views

mailchi.mp/...what-is-legitimacy-good-for legitimacy government effects power
shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • I want to say a word in favor of the idea of legitimacy.
  • The law almost always follows reality and public opinion. Laws that don't have the support of the governed get contested, ignored, or changed. This isn't a value judgment. It's just the truth. Deserve's got nothin' to do with it.
  • I think we undervalue the idea of legitimacy at our peril.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • My buddy Kevin Williamson had a line yesterday kind of poo-pooing the idea of legitimacy, saying “legitimacy” is magic.
  • Except that I think this is true. Legitimacy is magic.
  • "Smoke from the volcano, divine right of kings, democratic elections all come down to the same thing," Lockwood had said to Julian one night, out on the campaign trail. "One man gets anointed and everybody else says, 'Right! He's got the Magic.'" .
  • He made decisions and let Julian make sure that the cabinet and the rest of the hierarchy took care of the details. What was important in the presidency were the very things Julian dismissed as superfluous: ceremony, symbolism, tone, ritual appearance--in short, the Magic.
  • I think this is right. And the Magic is, like any other norm or tradition, so obvious that we can be fooled into thinking it doesn't matter. Right up until the moment it's broken, at which point we realize how important it was.
18More

The New History Wars - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...671853 history wars crisis culture politics US education
shared by Javier E on 31 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • Critical historians who thought they were winning the fight for control within the academy now face dire retaliation from outside the academy. The dizzying turn from seeming triumph in 2020 to imminent threat in 2022 has unnerved many practitioners of the new history. Against this background, they did not welcome it when their association’s president suggested that maybe their opponents had a smidgen of a point.
  • a background reality of the humanities in the contemporary academy: a struggle over who is entitled to speak about what. Nowhere does this struggle rage more fiercely than in anything to do with the continent of Africa. Who should speak? What may be said? Who will be hired?
  • One of the greatest American Africanists was the late Philip Curtin. He wrote one of the first attempts to tally the exact number of persons trafficked by the transatlantic slave trade. Upon publication in 1972, his book was acclaimed as a truly pioneering work of history. By 1995, however, he was moved to protest against trends in the discipline at that time in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:I am troubled by increasing evidence of the use of racial criteria in filling faculty posts in the field of African history … This form of intellectual apartheid has been around for several decades, but it appears to have become much more serious in the past few years, to the extent that white scholars trained in African history now have a hard time finding jobs.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • The political and methodological stresses within the historical profession are intensified by economic troubles. For a long time, but especially since the economic crisis of 2008, university students have turned away from the humanities, preferring to major in fields that seem to offer more certain and lucrative employment. Consequently, academic jobs in the humanities and especially in history have become radically more precarious for younger faculty—even as universities have sought to meet diversity goals in their next-generation hiring by expanding offerings in history-adjacent specialties, such as gender and ethnic studies.
  • Yet this silence has consequences, too. One of the most unsettling is the displacement of history by mythmaking
  • The result has produced a generational divide. Younger scholars feel oppressed and exploited by universities pressing them to do more labor for worse pay with less security than their elders; older scholars feel that overeager juniors are poised to pounce on the least infraction as an occasion to end an elder’s career and seize a job opening for themselves. Add racial difference as an accelerant, and what was intended as an interesting methodological discussion in a faculty newsletter can explode into a national culture war.
  • Much of academia is governed these days by a joke from the Soviet Union: “If you think it, don’t speak it. If you speak it, don’t write it. If you write it, don’t sign it. But if you do think it, speak it, write it, and sign it—don’t be surprised.”
  • ne obvious escape route from the generational divide in the academy—and the way the different approaches to history, presentist and antiquarian, tend to map onto it—is for some people, especially those on the older and whiter side of the divide, to keep their mouths shut about sensitive issues
  • mythmaking is spreading from “just the movies” to more formal and institutional forms of public memory. If old heroes “must fall,” their disappearance opens voids for new heroes to be inserted in their place—and that insertion sometimes requires that new history be fabricated altogether, the “bad history” that Sweet tried to warn against.
  • If it is not the job of the president of the American Historical Association to confront those questions, then whose is it?
  • Sweet used a play on words—“Is History History?”—for the title of his complacency-shaking essay. But he was asking not whether history is finished, done with, but Is history still history? Is it continuing to do what history is supposed to do? Or is it being annexed for other purposes, ideological rather than historical ones?
  • Advocates of studying the more distant past to disturb and challenge our ideas about the present may accuse their academic rivals of “presentism.”
  • In real life, of course, almost everybody who cares about history believes in a little of each option. But how much of each? What’s the right balance? That’s the kind of thing that historians do argue about, and in the arguing, they have developed some dismissive labels for one another
  • Those who look to the more recent past to guide the future may accuse the other camp of “antiquarianism.”
  • The accusation of presentism hurts because it implies that the historian is sacrificing scholarly objectivity for ideological or political purposes. The accusation of antiquarianism stings because it implies that the historian is burrowing into the dust for no useful purpose at all.
  • In his mind, he was merely reopening one of the most familiar debates in professional history: the debate over why? What is the value of studying the past? To reduce the many available answers to a stark choice: Should we study the more distant past to explore its strangeness—and thereby jolt ourselves out of easy assumptions that the world we know is the only possible one?
  • Or should we study the more recent past to understand how our world came into being—and thereby learn some lessons for shaping the future?
  • The August edition of the association’s monthly magazine featured, as usual, a short essay by the association’s president, James H. Sweet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Within hours of its publication, an outrage volcano erupted on social media. A professor at Cornell vented about the author’s “white gaze.”
12More

Searching for Our Urban Future in the Ruins of the Past - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-newitz-four-lost-cities.html cities archaeology urban culture history
shared by Javier E on 15 Sep 22 - No Cached
  • Though Annalee Newitz began work on “Four Lost Cities” long before the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s impossible to read it today without periodic is-this-where-we’re-headed? musings. The book functions as a travel guide to places that no longer exist
  • The chapters on Pompeii, the volcano-buried city in the orbit of ancient Rome, famous for its exquisitely preserved ruins, its brothels and taverns and graffiti, and on Angkor, a metropolis of medieval Cambodia, didn’t fire my imagination so much, perhaps because I already knew something of their histories.
  • Nine thousand years ago, the people of Catalhoyuk, maybe 10,000 of them, lived in cuboid clay houses packed against one another above the Konya Plain of south-central Turkey. Their dwellings were uniform, suggesting a highly regulated society: one or two rooms, painted in white or with red ocher designs. You exited not via a front door but by climbing a ladder to the roof. Much of life was lived up there: cooking, socializing, ambling along sidewalks that ran across the top of the city.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The oldest of the books of the Hebrew Bible date to roughly 3,000 years ago; the pyramids of Egypt go back about 5,000 years. These were not prehumans or near relatives. They were like us: complex, organized, alive to meaning and living at a time beyond reckoning.
  • Ruth Tringham of the University of California, Berkeley, who has devoted years to humanizing the remnants of this city of the dim past by focusing on one skeleton, of a woman she has dubbed Dido. Dido replastered her walls regularly, kept her home swept clean, covered the floor in reed mats and decorated the place with art: clay figures of animals and stylized human females. In other words: much like us.
  • Catalhoyuk was founded by pioneers of urban living. “When the earliest construction began,” Newitz writes, “many people coming to live at Catalhoyuk were only a generation or two removed from nomadism.” It was brand-new, this fixed settlement thing, but it proved remarkably successful. By the time Dido was born, the city was about 600 years old
  • A thousand years ago, meanwhile, East St. Louis, Ill., was the site of an urban sanctuary that archaeologists today call Cahokia. With a population of 30,000, it was larger than Paris was at the time. Like Paris, with its Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame, it had distinguishing physical landmarks in the form of black earthen pyramids. It sprawled across both sides of the Mississippi River, beckoning visitors from all over the present-day Southern United States.
  • Cahokia seems to have been a place of spiritual pilgrimage, which drew diverse groups of Native American peoples, who spoke different languages and worshiped in various ways but came to share a reverence for this city and its ceremonial customs, which included human sacrifice. Its multiethnic, year-round population apparently serviced the religious pilgrims and, in the off-season, went about their own affairs.
  • Cahokia died not as a result of sudden catastrophe, like Pompeii, but seemingly because it lost its spiritual significance over time. Its people didn’t perish. The pilgrims just stopped coming; the local residents merged with other tribes. There is linguistic and other evidence that the Sioux are their descendants.
  • Newitz devotes space to debunking the popular notion that civilizations of the past “collapse” and become “lost,” pointing instead to indications of gradual change.
  • The operative lesson from the past, at least from this curated offering of former metropolises, seems to be that human culture is a plastic thing. Rather than lamenting the fragility of our current urban structures, we might do better figuring out how to bend and shape society for the future.
  • the effect of reading “Four Lost Cities” was more meditative. This is a long, long, long ride we are on. Much is beyond our control. Humanity trundles on.
12More

The world has become a toxic prison - and a volcanic winter lurks on the horizon | The ... - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...ic-winter-lurks-on-the-horizon environment history crisis culture global
shared by Javier E on 26 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Peter Frankopan’s story of our relationship to the world across all planetary space and human time is necessarily vast – 660 pages of text, with footnotes relegated to 212 pages online – in which the grand cycle is enacted again and again
  • The stability and good weather of the 18th century had allowed Qing, Mughal, Bourbon and Hanoverian regimes all to thrive, but China and India, more settled and less anxiously aggressive than Europe, did not take off in the way that the Continent’s empires did.
  • From the very beginning, human beings have been actors in their own drama and responsible for large parts of their fate. Elasticity and inventiveness always win. Rigidity always fails, and so, for example, when the Qing dynasty began to collapse in late 18th-century China, beset by climate-induced crop failures, hunger and massive popular discontent, the contemporary administration in Japan, experiencing the same physical conditions, survived with no such difficulty.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Riding the waves of mutability has always been possible if the frame of mind in government and society is adequately supple and responsive. Reliance on ancient nostrums, and expectations that old solutions will remain good enough, are almost inevitably fatal.
  • Civilisations that become dependent on large, widespread and complex supply networks and reciprocal markets usually generate their own fragilities. If one part of such a network fails, the effects cascade in a series of chain reactions through all apparently powerful participants in the system
  • The end of the Bronze Age c.1200 BC, perhaps triggered by drought in Anatolia, may have precipitated one such domino collapse, as the Hittite empire, the Mycenaeans, the Mesopotamian states and Pharaonic Egypt all either fell apart or shrank to an unrecognisable impotence.
  • Volcanoes are the unexpected killers. Their spewing of ash into an atmosphere whose winds distribute it around the globe has repeatedly destroyed summers, devastated crops, induced famines and collapsed societies
  • In his hands, the triumph of the West, with the unconscionable horrors of the Atlantic slave trade at its heart, takes on the appearance of an alarming fusion of Faust and Midas. For centuries, Europeans felt they could do no wrong. They could use the world, its people and beauties. They could transform it as they wished, shifting its plants, animals and populations where they wanted, and there would be no consequences. Or at least, as in those two myths of the cult of ‘entitlement’ – a word Frankopan repeatedly uses of the transforming empires – the consequences were hidden from the perpetrators.
  • His story of destruction over the past two centuries is one of arrogant myopia which led in the 20th century to ‘a sequence of catastrophes unparalleled both in human history and in that of the natural world. The suffering of the past 100 years has been by far the greatest in recorded history in terms of its scale and its horror’.
  • The assumption that man must conquer nature was allied to the capital and industrialised capacity to bring it about. Humanity became its own climate. Its own actions created the world in which it lived
  • The value of this book is as an act of deep understanding, recognising not only scientifically but culturally and philosophically that we are epiphenomena – not dominators of the Earth but products of it
  • Bleakly and soberingly, Frankopan recognises from the long line of precedents that the prospects are for a world of war and suffering. The destructive changes are already ‘baked in’. Success does not breed success, he says, but more often than not ‘sows the seeds of ruin’.
19More

How 'Surf City USA' became California's MAGA stronghold - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...h-maga-conservative-california local politics US crisis culture partisan polarization
shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • Huntington Beach, one of Orange County’s largest cities, has long been associated with conservative beliefs, but its evolution in recent years shows how the bitter polarization of national politics has crept into even the most mundane municipal matters.
  • “It’s the tipping on its head of the old notion that all politics is local. Now, all politics are national, and I think the overall effect of that is really destructive,” said Jim Newton, a public policy lecturer at UCLA and editor of Blueprint magazine. “It takes a sharply divided country at the national level and drags that down into local disputes.”
  • Spurred by those early oil booms, the city embraced development and corporate interests, said Chris Jepsen, the president of the Orange County Historical Society, earning it “a reputation for being pro-business and ardently pro-property rights.”
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • “Politics, Democratic or Republican, were not particularly important,” said Tom Harman, a former Republican state senator who got his start on the city council in the 1990s. “People didn’t run on party preference. They ran on what they could do in the community and how they could make the city a better place to live.”
  • It had long been a destination for surfing, but officials in the ’90s began leaning into that reputation to court the tourism industry. Huntington Beach became “Surf City USA,” a moniker pulled from a chart-topping song.
  • Two high-profile acts of white-supremacist violence — the shooting of a Black man in 1994, and the stabbing of a Native American man two years later — prompted the city to crack down on the groups who had flocked from across Southern California.
  • City police stepped up patrols, the council passed a human dignity policy condemning hate crimes, and officials started a human relations commission to combat bigotry. Ken Inouye, the founding chair of that task force and a 51-year resident of Huntington Beach, said residents from across the city “came together because we knew we were better than that.”
  • Both efforts were reversed when the current Republican majority took over the council.
  • In recent decades, sweeping demographic change has pushed Orange County to the left. But those shifts have been more subtle in Huntington Beach, and the city has retained its rightward lean. Unlike the county’s other largest cities, most residents are White and Republicans still account for the plurality of Huntington Beach’s registered voters.
  • During Donald Trump’s presidency, residents bridled at California’s pandemic restrictions, much as Trump did. Fierce protests became common, with crowds clogging the pier and Pacific Coast Highway to shout down coronavirus precautions or cheer Trump. Some of the rallies were organized by white-supremacist groups and turned violent.
  • Another inflection point came in 2021, when former mixed martial arts fighter and hard-right council member Tito Ortiz resigned from his post and the remaining members appointed a Democrat, Rhonda Bolton, in his stead. The move infuriated city Republicans, who wanted Ortiz replaced with an ideological equal.
  • “The tone of political rhetoric has gotten coarser and sillier as time has worn on,” she said. “And Huntington Beach is a reflection of what’s happening nationally.”
  • Carol Daus, who has lived in the city nearly three decades, said the council’s focus on contentious cultural debates has divided the community, pitting neighbors against neighbors. One example of the acrimony: Protect HB has hung posters across the city urging a “No” vote on the March ballot measures, but some 40 of those signs were recently vandalized with large green “Yes” stickers.
  • “This city during the past several years, following the Trump administration and covid lockdown, was like a volcano ready to explode,” Daus said. “And now it has.”
  • “I feel duped,” said Sue Welfringer, a longtime Huntington Beach resident and registered Republican. She voted for the four-person conservative slate because she liked their stances on homelessness and limiting development, but mostly she appreciated that they got along with each other.
  • “I almost don’t even want to vote at all because I don’t want to make another terrible mistake I regret,” said Welfringer, who opposes the council’s stances on issues like LGBTQ rights and voter ID. “I feel like they had a hidden agenda. And now I’m also worried what else is on their hidden agenda. I’m afraid to know what big issue is next.”
  • “Ideally, it would be wonderful if we could just focus on the roads and infrastructure,” he said. “But I think we’re in a time now where there really isn’t any such thing as a nonpartisan local focus anymore.”
  • But this dynamic has turned city council meetings into routine spectacles, where public comment drags on for hours and speakers hurl invectives at the seven members sitting on the dais.
  • Butch Twining, a candidate for city council, is one of three conservatives looking to build on the Republican majority, campaigning as a slate to replace Bolton and the council’s other two liberal members in November. A victory would give conservatives a 7-0 vise grip on the council.
‹ Previous 21 - 29 of 29
Showing 20▼ items per page