“End nuclear insanity before nuclear insanity ends humanity”
LLAW’s COMMENTARY: Republished from October 13, 2023 . . .
The Doomsday Clock remains set at its most critical level in history by the “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists” . . .
“The clock hands are set by the “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists”, a group formed by Manhattan Project scientists at the University of Chicago who helped build the atomic bomb but protested using it against people. The time of the clock is currently 90 seconds to midnight”. Midnight represents “Doomsday.
You can follow the world news concerning “ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” at my daily Posts on both my website at LLAW’s WORLDS @albertlloydwilliams.com and/or at Substack to keep abreast of the world-wide nuclear situation, trends, threats, issues, and what could be done to prevent nuclear radiation from creating a dystopian world – or worse yet, a man-made 6th Extinction on planet Earth. Time is of the Essence. ~llaw
ACCESS TO MEDIA: Whenever there is a link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated inks is listed below by nuclear Category. There are two bonus Yellowstone Caldera stories available in this Post. The latest Sky News coverage of the Russia/Ukraine war is available at the end of the other categorized Posts.
(Just a reminder: When linked the access to the media story will be underlined. If there is no link to a media story of interest you can still copy and paste the headline and lead line into your browser to find the article you are seeking. Hopefully this will rarely happen.)
“End nuclear insanity before nuclear insanity ends humanity”
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LLAW’s COMMENTARY: So the Biden Administration and the U.S. Military wants to manufacture a nuclear bomb that is 24 times more powerful than the two we used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, to end WWII in 1945. There is really no way to compare “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” to today’s nuclear weapons because they are two different kinds of bombs. We already have bombs that are hundreds and even thousands of times more powerful than the atomic bombs we dropped on Japan. So it seems to me the media ought to do what real journalists used to do and that is to check out the ‘facts’ before writing a story that should embarrass the whole media industry with its ignorance, not to forget the inane words of our government. If that’s what Biden or some military general or anyone in his cabinet actually said, then what they said is okay from a journalistic viewpoint – but we need to point out that whoever said such a thing is laughably wrong, and take the time to tell us why.
But that’s not the most important issue, or so it seems to me. The real issue is: “Why on Earth is anyone anywhere building more nuclear weapons?” There is already enough nuclear weaponry to destroy everything on the planet several times over. We have learned, during the Russia/Ukraine war that nuclear power plants will make incredibly powerful nuclear weapons as well. All we have to do is drop a nuclear bomb on a nuclear power plant and we’ve go two weapons of mass destruction for the price of one. What the hell is wrong with humanity?
We ought to be well on the way toward destroying ‘all things nuclear’ rather than moving closer every day to destroying ourselves, which we are evidently absolutely bent on doing. For what reason do we want to do that? As a long-time employee in the nuclear industry, I am in the process of writing a ‘blueprint’ that provides a way for us to come together as a species by destroying everything nuclear and dumping and burying it all back in the open pit mines where uranium originally came from, including not only the nuclear fuel and nuclear waste, but also all of the world(s)’ weapons and power plants and storage facilities together with every other product that belongs to the family of uranium and the nuclear buildings and facilities that exist as soon as physically possible so that no one will ever again be allowed to have anything to do do with anything nuclear.
It can be done, and it must be done, or sooner or later humanity will commit world-wide genocide (it doesn’t matter whether it’s because of nuclear war with bombs designed to be weapons of mass destruction or the failure to understand that our nuclear power plants are nuclear weapons of mass destruction as well. What do we do with the nuclear waste? Dump it all in the oceans as Japan is being allowed to do right now? We can’t let that happen.
We are all essentially freshmen to the idea of understanding nuclear energy and how to clean up the global mess we have already made and each day it gets worse and more prolific while we clamor for more of it without even understanding what to do with the left overs or how to avoid accidents that are actually unavoidable because anything can cause a nuclear accident whether such accidents are man-made or Acts of Nature. A clue for us all is what we’ve done to cause climate change and global warming and all those ridiculous ways about how to save ourselves from CO2 that we continue to insanely pump into the atmosphere while knowing that greenhouse gasses, left unchecked will eventually kill us in a similar way as radiation poisoning. The writing is there profanely written on the walls of every power plant and every refinery – not just fossil fuel (uranium, by the way, is a fossil fuel as well) but every nuclear power plant and every nuclear reactor, too.
It is my hope that, since we are too proud, ignorant, or stupid to take it upon ourselves to do away with ‘all things nuclear’ that there will be intervention from somewhere by someone or something with enough common sense to not allow us to destroy planet Earth right along with ourselves, even though there is another way, if there is enough time left before the ultimate day arrives, to do it ourselves. But it would require the voluntary cooperation of all humankind around the human world(s).
Such is the purpose of this daily Post. We seek a unique world(s)-wide borderless effort for humanity to come together as a planet Earth community in order to save our ken from self-destruction and inevitable extinction if we fail to unite in a single direction peacefully and purposefully. Stay tuned as we make a diligent effort to convince war-mongering world(s) to trade in their weapons for a world of unity and felicity. It will only happen if we can bury the hatchet from now into the undefined infinite future. We all need to join the cause to save ourselves from each other. ~llaw
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ACCESS TO MEDIA:
Whenever there is a link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with links is listed below by nuclear Category. There are three bonus Yellowstone Caldera stories available in this post. The latest Sky News coverage of the Russia/Ukraine war is available at the end of the other categorized Posts.
(Just a reminder: If there is no link to a media story of interest you can still copy and paste the headline and lead line into your browser to find the article you are seeking. Hopefully this will rarely happen.)
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All Things Nuclear
NEWS
From Gaza to the Pacific, All Oppression Is Connected – Inkstick Media
“End nuclear insanity before nuclear insanity ends humanity”
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LLAW’s COMMENTARY: The following opinion piece is from LLAW’s “ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” #425 (10/20/2023), intended to provide background commentary to those who follow our new media outlets unrelated to our former daily Posts (more than a year of them, but only a few will be reposted for this purpose). They will be helpful for new subscribers to follow some of the issues and opinions. There are also several technical Posts that describe how uranium mining, milling, refining, and finally reactor fuel, and waste that will provide new subscribers with a high level understanding of how the nuclear power plant industry operates. Oddly enough it is not significantly different than the military process of building a nuclear bomb, except instead of a nuclear reactor, the military builds a nuclear bomb.
The commentary from October 20 begins here:
What possesses us humans, who in truth know nothing about (or don’t care about) the mayhem and weaknesses of the major nuclear industries – principally known as 1) creators of nuclear weapons of war and 2) as commercial providers of costly, dangerous, and unreliable nuclear generated electricity. We continue to lie to ourselves (or at least listen to and accept the propaganda) that anything nuclear is of sound technology, good for us, cheap, safe, clean, and will last forever, when it is none of the above?
And now we are apparently considering moving (or adding to) ‘All things Nuclear’, of introducing nuclear warheads into outer space. Does that mean when one country’s leaders decide to ‘nuke’ another all it has to do is let the earth do the flying and when the target country is directly beneath them, simply electronically open the satellite’s Bombay doors and drop their bombs with no danger of retaliation – at least from the ground. Wow, that would make the ICBM (missile) obsolete as well as military aircraft! Also, obviously, then, once one country is busy planning on doing that, the rest of the nuclear capable ones will follow instantly in an arms race, many of which we have been going through for eons. It is a ridiculous joke we have played on ourselves since the stone age!
So it is the grand effort of ‘do unto others before they do unto you’ technology that goes right along in typical human warlike stupidity. What if we could just learn to love (or at least honor) one another, shake hands, destroy and bury all of this genocidal nuclear technology, and spend our resources (money) on taking care of the entire human race and our only home instead of trying to eliminate us and our Earth.
Do these ‘pillars of political and corporate power’ know something we don’t know about our future or of planet Earth’s? llolloll! Of course not, unless they, too, are being directed and advised by a higher and more powerful life form! But I doubt such a ‘higher’ life form would deal with humanity in such a potentially violent way. All we are doing is playing a foolish and childish game of playground tag that will end up in what we are referring to in advance called, “The 6th Extinction”.
The last extinction was caused by a meteorite colliding with planet Earth (65+ million years ago) long before humans entered the picture, and after Earth regenerated Herself with living organisms (and eventually humans) She returned to a special place in the cosmos where living things could live, reproduce, and prosper, and we humans became a part of it all.
But, now, looking back just a few centuries, it is plain to see that we cared, not about our only home, but only about what we could take for ourselves, and now the process of ‘playing god’ is instilled in us to the point that we seem to believe that we are superior to Mother Nature, and that we can plunder, pillage, rape, kill, as humans, human parasites or animalistic epiphytes, leaving only a vast wasteland behind even unto the precious oceans and our priceless atmospheres. We are, as Pogo inferred, our own worst enemies. And the hell of it is, we seem to have no presence of mind to change our ways by turning away from approaching oblivion. ~llaw
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ACCESS TO MEDIA:
Whenever there is a link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with links is listed below by nuclear Category. There is one Yellowstone Caldera story available in this post. The latest Sky News coverage of the Russia/Ukraine war is available at the end of the other categorized Posts.
(Just a reminder: If there is no link to a media story of interest you can still copy and paste the headline and lead line into your browser to find the article you are seeking. Hopefully this will rarely happen.)
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All Things Nuclear
NEWS
America’s strategic nuclear posture review is miles off the mark | The Hill
to supply nuclear fuel for the Dukovany nuclear plant, eliminating dependence on Russia for such fuel. Tags. Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All …
October 31: Pentagon pursues new nuclear bomb. Rockets strike Israeli hospital 4 times.
NewsNation
Happy Halloween, the celebration of all things spooky and the semi-official beginning of the 2023 holiday season. The Federal Open Market …
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Nuclear Power
NEWS
3 energy companies compete to build a new nuclear reactor in the Czech Republic – WOKV
By Philip Ingram MBE, former colonel in British Military Intelligence and NATO planner
In July, the then Ukrainian defence minister Oleksii Reznikov said that he “believes that Ukraine will win the war by next summer and could be admitted to NATO in July 2024”.
The reality of what Ukraine has really achieved on the ground would suggest this was an overly optimistic assessment – but who is winning?
In early June, Ukraine launched its long-expected counteroffensive against the Russian defences having had some significant successes in late 2022 taking back huge areas of ground around Kherson in the northeast and then Kherson in the east of the country. They had tied Russia up around Bakhmut, exhausting the Wagner fighters to the point where they had to be withdrawn from the front line.
With the delivery of fresh Western-trained troops, equipped with Leopard and Challenger tanks, Bradley and Marder infantry fighting vehicles, HIMARS and 155mm artillery, the expectation was they would punch through Russian defences like a hot knife through butter and reach the coast with the Sea of Azov in a few short months.
HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System)
HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System)
However, they lacked air superiority, attack helicopters, sufficient air defence and, most significantly, enough combat engineering assets to enable the extensive Russian defences to be breached in any significant way. In reality they lacked sufficient troops, tanks, artillery, missiles, and infantry fighting vehicles as well. The went too early against the delivery timetables of Western equipment.
The Russian defences delayed and slowed the Ukrainians down. The Russian use of attack helicopters and well-planned defences showed the vulnerability of Western armour and stopped the Ukrainians making significant progress, meaning that at the start of the autumn mud season, the conditions for Reznikov’s winning remain a long way off.
An emboldened Russia even counterattacked the Ukrainians near Avdiivka in the Donetsk Oblast, but only after receiving 1,000 containers of ammunition and equipment from North Korea.
The current territorial picture in Ukraine has not changed much since June.
Today’s Image of Interest:
EXPRESS.CO.UK
Supervolcano could be ‘gearing up to explode’ with consequences explained
“End nuclear insanity before nuclear insanity ends humanity”
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LLAW’s COMMENTARY:
We are almost finished with the nightly Post format changes and media outlet access improvements to “LLAW’s All Things Nuclear”. The next step is to add more free subscribers, concerned readers, issue-active clients, and knowledgeable news affiliates to carry this much-needed anti-nuclear commentary (read on to get the idea) in order to educate our readers concerning the never-ending destructive, Armageddon-like, dangers of all things nuclear until the last living breath of life on planet Earth is inhaled.
However, the media nuclear news we present every day here is entirely unbiased so that you can decide what needs to be done to and you can do to help protect humanity from continuing to proceed without interference toward creating planet Earth’s 6th Extinction all by ourselves with no need for a collision with another cosmic body like the previous extinction 65+ million years ago – long before the human species arrived on the planet.
Presently there is a race to the final end-zone of death between uranium (U235) and the other fossil fuels whether nuclear war and radioactivity or climate change/global warming carbon dioxide (CO2). Should we doubtfully but fortunately find a solution to the CO2 problem (about which nuclear energy will never be a savior no matter who says it will), uranium and all of its products will still be scattered around the planet in the form of nuclear fuel and reactors or as nuclear waste, both of which are here to stay because there is no way to control or rid ourselves of their destructive qualities short of burial of it and all of their various and sundry products back to where it all came from deep in the earth, never to be dug up again. At least CO2 can be controlled, but with enormous difficulty, if we would only set our collective minds to it.
The choice is ours to make, but if we make the wrong choice and continue to use nuclear energy for weapons of mass destruction and for electricity generation, the day will come, sooner or later, that our self-aggrandizing game of believing that we are smarter, more clever, and efficient than Mother Nature will be over. We have made a mess of our beautiful blue-green planet that thrives with all kinds of life, but we have already killed off thousands upon thousands of other living species for our own selfish purposes. Why should we change our ways? Like I said above, the choice is ours to make – but it must be made by all of us, not by a few power-crazy men sitting at the top of our world(s) of political, financial, and military communities, large and small.
I clearly remember one man at the top of the nuclear industry in early 1979 responding to protestors and a nervously concerned planet of human world(s) during the 3-Mile Island nuclear accident, standing up before a meeting of nuclear industry executives and opening his speech, saying, “Let the Bastards freeze to death in the dark!” And you know? If these nuclear industries of all kinds continue to exist along their present path, he will have been exactly right. ~llaw
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ACCESS TO MEDIA:
Whenever there is a link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with links is listed below by nuclear Category. There is one bonus Yellowstone Caldera story available. The latest Sky News coverage of the Russia/Ukraine war remains available at the end of the other categorized Posts.
(Just a reminder: If there is no link to a media story of interest you can still copy and paste the headline and lead line into your browser to find the article you are seeking. Hopefully this will rarely happen.)
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All Things Nuclear
NEWS
All Things Investigations: Episode 39 – Submarines and Gag Orders with Kevin Carroll
FANR reviews Barakah Nuclear Power Plant progress; signs agreement with French …
wam.ae
… Emergency Operations Centre to test its readiness to address a nuclear emergency in cooperation with its national and international stakeholders. https://wam.ae/en/details/1395303215479
Japan P.M. Participates in Drill Assuming Serious Accident at TEPCO’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa …
Postings from Amy’s own delightful and unique Goddess Thoughts, including charming selections from her hundreds of appealing and inspiring poems published in her large book of the same name, along with short-story accounts of many of her delightful and hilariously fantastical relationships, run-ins, and the remarkably humorous reactions of her own, as well as her muse-like critical “Editor” of Amy Dio’s tales and conversations with her personal world of ancient (and often not so old) gods and goddesses, angels and fairies, of mythology and fantasy and how to this day we are influenced by the “reality” of a wonder-filled world of magic, mystery, and memories from the pantheons of the gods and goddesses from the days of yore.
Amy Dio in her garden with Aphrodite
Amy Indira Dio Ramdass is a mythology/goddess poet and an author of mystery/romance novels, including not only her big beautiful book of “Goddess Thoughts”, but also her delightfully enchanting, but chillingly sinister, debut novel “River Bound Secret Swept”, a magical yet mysterious tome of a story, full of romance and intrigue, set in the tropical beauty of her own native Guyana, and on to Houston, Texas, and her own adopted Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is working on her second novel, draft titled “Avatara”
Previously Published by Amy I. Ramdass. . .
Amy is a highly respected and well-followed expert on the ancient deities and pantheons of Greek and Roman philosophy and mythology.
When I was drafted into the U.S. Army in the spring of 1961 at age 19, I, having grown up in Wyoming, had maybe laid eyes on a black person a half dozen times in my entire life, and certainly I’d never had occasion to speak with one with the exception of a couple of black kids from Rock Springs, Wyoming, who were also involved in the state’s competitive high school sports programs.
The Army sent me to Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri, for basic training. There I met a few black recruits and got to know and befriend some of them who were assigned to the Post’s baseball team as I was, plus a couple of barracks-mates. After basic training I was sent to “Advanced Infantry Training” in Ft. Gordon, Georgia, where I found some “gung-ho” blood in me and decided I wanted to join the “Special Forces Rangers”, and was soon scheduled to be transferred to Ft. Benning for that training.
One day at Ft. Gordon I walked over to the base PX alone, entered, and saw two uniformed young black men sitting together at a table enjoying a beer. I thought about grabbing a beer and sitting down at their table with them, since the three of us were the only visitors to the PX at the moment. But then I noticed their name tags, and that they both had the same last name as I did, plainly printed in black letters on a white background on their uniform shirts. I was shocked, to say the least, and I had no idea what to do. Obviously they had seen my very rare northern British Isles’ name as well, and they were staring at me, too, probably much like I was at them. I don’t know how long the staring contest went on, but I sensed that there was no animosity between us, yet I still was at a total loss about what to do next — like introduce myself? Go grab that beer and then introduce myself? I was embarrassed beyond words at my silent and staring behavior, and eventually I just turned around and walked out of the PX, shaken beyond sensibility, realizing somewhere in my distracted mental confusion that somewhere, sometime, the heritage of my related family must have included southern American slave owners.
From the personal shame of that moment, as I came to understand later, was what it was that caused my confusion of that accidental meeting and my thoughtless decision to walk away without so much as a hand-wave or even an acknowledgement of their presence. That feeling of embarrassment over a racial issue that should never have occurred has never left me, and, given my age today, never will. But, during the long span of my life, I have always honored and appreciated all the minorities who became intertwined with me during my lifetime and all of its adventures, and many of them (black, brown, yellow, and red) became very good and close friends, even though after my military days, back in Wyoming there weren’t many of any minority to choose from. But as I moved on in life and met minorities in more motley surroundings around the country, my cordiality, comfort with, and love for minorities has never waivered.
EUSA 4th Cav Division (Korea)
It turned out that I never went to Ft. Benning because the Korean War was winding down, essentially over, and my administrative talents and other white-collar abilities, even at nineteen, where I had already worked for a couple of years at a Wyoming bank during high school and after graduation, the Army decided I was more urgently needed in Korea to specialize in the interviewing and evaluating process of rotating all kinds of Army military personnel back to posts and bases in the United States, and that after a year-long tour in Korea, I could go back to Ft. Benning if I wanted to. I never went back.
But, far more importantly, at the headquarters company of the 4th Cavalry division in Korea, I met a balding black Army administrator who I thought of in those days as my personal “Uncle Remus”, a gentle man perhaps twice my age, who constantly smoked an old bent briar-root pipe. He would eloquently fill me with a plethora of valuable axioms of life that personally benefitted me throughout my personal and professional life for years later. Every evening after work he and I would meet at the bar for a welcome beer or two, or even three, and we would discuss the world-wide subject of human life and how to bear it. I knew him, and only remember him today, as “Smitty”.
South Korea, 1961, just South of DMZ with North Korea
To this day I think Smitty was, in many ways, the best friend I’ve ever had, even though I only knew him for that one long year in South Korea, just a couple of miles south of the North Korean border. Also to this day, I know he is the only man (or woman, I believe) until now who I ever told about my thankfully short, but awkward, meeting up with two black brothers who bore my own exact surname. Smitty was the guy who made me realize and reconcile in my mind that I simply was not yet mentally prepared in my young life to understand the momentous shock of that uniquely rare and strange experience. Smitty was right. Yet, still, I wish I had had the courageous wherewithal to get that beer, another round for them, and walk over to their table, introduce myself, and have a friendly conversation. ~llaw
If, in a future dystopian world, there arises an unavoidable crisis between Gaia’s nature (Earth) and human’s (World) technology, which in my view is inevitable, nature will prevail in every conceivable way where mankind’s present unnatural materialistic way of life, including our ‘cleverly’ self-imposed evolving technocratic languages, thoughts and ill-conceived deeds are concerned. Language is the root, the very beginning of our underdog fight for survival. ~llaw
To clearly understand what this is all about, be sure to read the entire article below as well as those related articles of interest, also below:
Calliope, the Olympian Muse of epic writing and poetry
20 inspiring nature words you didn’t know you needed
Hundreds more are documented in Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks.
In Landmarks, Robert Macfarlane revives hundreds of nearly-forgotten words to remind us of our relationship with nature.
New dictionaries are deleting nature words while adding technology terms, which Macfarlane states further separates us from the environment.
The words we speak shape the reality we understand, making it essential to aptly describe what is happening on the planet.
A’ Ghnùig (Gaelic)
The steep slope of the scowling expression.
Human nature is part of nature too.
Adnasjur (Shetland)
Large wave or waves, coming after a succession of lesser ones.
Surfers know the danger of being caught in one of these cycles.
Blinter (Northern Scots)
A cold dazzle.
Bobbles (North Sea Coast)
Choppy, short waves roused by wind.
Caitein (Gaelic)
First slight ruffling of the water after a calm.
Dringey (Lincolnshire)
Light rain that still manages to get you soaking wet.
The perfect word to yell out when you leave your umbrella at home.
Èit (Gaelic)
Practice of placing quartz stones in moorland streams so that they would sparkle in moonlight and thereby attract salmon to them in the late summer and autumn.
While this holds little practical utility for most of us today, it’s an example of the complex relationship between humans and nature and our attempt at condensing seemingly disparate realms—vision; nighttime; hunting; seasons—into one word. Also, pay attention to Macfarlane’s “user-value framework” explained below. To have a language that describes a world that doesn’t include us in its workings is essential.
Feetings (Suffolk)
Footprints of creatures as they appear in the snow.
Flinchin (Scots)
Deceitful promise of better weather.
Weathermen have gotten better, but not that good…
Glassel (Britain)
A seaside pebble which was shiny and interesting when wet, and which is now a lump of rock.
Hot-spong (East Anglia)
Sudden power of heat felt when the sun comes from under a wind-shifted cloud.
Nothing like that feeling.
Kimmeridge (Britain)
The light breeze that blows through your armpit hair when you are stretched out sunbathing.
Lunkie (Scots)
Hole deliberately left in a wall for an animal to pass through.
Skiddle (Galloway)
To throw flat stones so that they skim on the surface of water.
I wrote an entire song to describe the feeling I had when doing this as a kid. Little did I know it was already named!
Slogger (invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins)
Sucking sound made by waves against a ship’s side.
Squatted (Kent)
Splashed with mud by a passing vehicle.
Stravaig (Scots)
To wander aimlessly, unguided by outcome or destination.
Is this even practiced in a world with GPS?
Summer Geese (North Yorkshire)
Steam that rises from the moor when rain is followed by hot sunshine.
Terra nullius (Latin)
“Nothing-place,” uninhabitable land.
Ungive (Northamptonshire)
To thaw.
To create what he termed a “psychedelic society,” the ethnobotanist Terence McKenna declared that we must completely remake “our fundamental ontological conceptions of reality.” In order to accomplish this, he suggested a new language to address the new reality we are embarking upon. “A new reality will generate a new language,” he wrote in his essay, “Psychedelic Society.” “A new language will make a new reality legitimate and a part of this reality.”
Humans structure reality by how we name things. A language is not only a means for transferring ideas and directives to others; it serves as a guiding philosophy for how you understand reality. McKenna was imagining a new future, yet he also knew that the archaic techniques of ecstasy provided by shamanism was a means for looking back to reconstruct our present reality. In some ways he was suggesting the resurrection of an old language for new purposes.
Likewise, British writer Robert Macfarlane (recently featured on the Think Again podcast) has devoted his career to understanding and, at times, translating the natural world (for us novices, at least). His book, Landmarks, is an attempt to create a dictionary of forgotten languages that describe the world in ways that help us to understand reality differently and, perhaps, more perceptively.
“We inhabit a post-pastoral terrain, full of modification and compromise,” he writes, noting that we now have difficulty imagining reality outside of a “user-value framework.” Indeed, environmental decimation would be impossible if we had a better way of discussing what is actually happening to the planet. The problem is the language of technology has displaced discussion of nature. A recent edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary added words such as broadband, chatroom, and voice-mail while deleting actor, dandelion, and heron—words the gatekeepers decided were no longer relevant to the experience of childhood.
Yet, as Macfarlane writes, “language does not just register experience, it produces it.” We educate children by the words we teach them. Australian environmental philosopher, Glenn Albrecht, coined the term solastalgia to describe “the pain or distress caused by the loss or lack of solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory.” That’s a word millions of his countrymen are feeling at this very moment.
When I asked Albrecht about Landmarks—Macfarlane offered an overwhelmingly positive blurb on Albrecht’s book, Earth Emotions—he replied,
“One of the major things is the recovery of language, which is being lost in a world which is transforming so rapidly that the old words for the way that humans have culturally and bio-physically evolved are being lost. He’s reviving them and putting them back into the language.”
We can only see what we name. A culture deficient in terminology is incapable of registering what is being destroyed in terms of environmental as well as personal awareness. The above 20 words from Landmarks remind us of what is possible to imagine—and experience—when we have names for it.
Landmarks (Landscapes)
List Price: $18.00
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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His next book is Hero’s Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy.
This is an update to my original post in September concerning critical questions about the future of America and the world, which is now looking more perilous today than ever before. Bolton is gone now, but he is not silenced, and Trump, along with Pompeo, and probably Pence and Barr as well, have implicated themselves in one of the most incredible political scandals in the history, not only of America, but world history. Even Shakespeare’s tales pale in comparison.
So what will the “Stable Genius” with his “great and unmatched wisdom” do next now that he is solely responsible for Syrian genocide, betraying our Kurdish allies, allowing the Turkish invasion of territory they want to steal from northern Syria, and, yes, freeing ISIS, leaving our American and Kurdish troops suddenly caught between two enemies? Not to mention that his bonehead order includes the possibility of America’s military losing control of fifty nuclear bombs located at a military base in Turkey.
Russia and Turkey are the only two countries on the planet who are pleased with Trump’s traitorous act of sedition against America’s Democracy, but both Syria and Iran are smiling. So I have to ask Republican Americans one more time: Whose side do you believe our mentally ill and dimwitted American President is on? Former Secretary of State Tillerson was absolutely correct when he called Trump a “fucking moron.” Trump must be forcibly removed from office NOW!
The attached hyperlinked interview by the highly respected think tank “Foreign Policy in Focus” of Lawrence Wilkerson, (the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and currently the Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Government and Public Policy in the Government Department of the College of William and Mary) by Emanuel Pastreich, (who is the director of the Asia Institute (asia-institute.org) and a senior scholar at FPIF, is a detailed and desperate warning to America and the world about what has already happened to our great experiment of living in a democratic republic and what the rapid chameleon-like metamorphosis of our government into a fascist empire led, for now, by a moronic sociopathic amoral and cruel narcissist who is supported by the lazy and apathetic incompetent and compliant political leaders in other branches of our government who have have enabled Trump and, to some degree, several presidents going back to and including Reagan, gradually consolidating power around the sitting president and his executive branch. Trump is taking full advantage of this deplorable situation during his presidency, leaving the power of the congress and the judiciary reduced to soggy milquetoast at this stage. Yet Trump, if allowed to remain in office, still has nearly a year and a half to completely seal his autocratic deal.
We are faced at this very moment with the disturbing concept of changing the meaning of a “dystopian world” from one of the fictional fantasy of novels into a catastrophic world-ending reality. Reading this clearly spoken, straightforward and pointedly honest interview will explain exactly why the future of global death and destruction of authors’ imaginations today, may become the horrible reality of tomorrow.
Nuclear energy and bombs are not subjects for the faint of heart, nor are they to be discussed lightly as if we are discussing the results of the last NFL football game on Monday night. The very idea of world-wide nuclear proliferation is like a sixth extinction death wish.
The United States, China, and Russia already have enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life on this planet, and then there are the stationary but prolific nuclear power plants around the world that can easily be turned into in-place weapons of mass destruction through little more than cyber attacks among warring nations. Like all powerful human concepts and inventions once believed to be eternally used for good and beneficial objectives, nuclear power plants (and even their waste depositories) can easily be used for catastrophic evil destructive purposes in times of human dissension. Those times are staring us right in our faces right now.
Three men in the present White House have taken control of our war powers, which were once constitutionally controlled by congress. These men do not have America’s–nor the world’s–best interests at heart, and they also despise the concept of diplomacy and policy agreements among nations, removing America from almost every international pact designed to protect and preserve the sovereignty among our allies around the world.
These three men, Donald Trump, John Bolton, and Mike Pompeo, (who lead our nation’s entire national security operation) are busy making unilateral decisions that affect our military strategy throughout the world, and they are all three incompetent, capitalistic, war mongering fanatics who would like nothing better than to start a war with Iran as soon as tomorrow. But in lieu of that, until the time is right, they are in league with every major defense contractor in our country to expand our already bulging nuclear arsenal.
What this maniacal approach to our national security does is panic the rest of the world’s nations and shoves down our collective throats a new and unimaginatively colossal international nuclear arms race among world powers as well as every nation on earth that has never felt they needed nuclear bombs before because the concept of “nuclear restraint” was protection enough. That concept has now been shot all to hell by America and Russia.
There is historical archaeological evidence that humans may have blown up the world once before with nuclear power, and of course, we never learn from our past mistakes, but even if that never happened before, we ought to understand that once is once too often.
H. L. Mencken on electing a moron for president (1920)
Quoting H.L. Mencken from way back in 1920, “Downright fools and complete narcissistic morons,” like Trump, et al, just don’t get it. How long are we going to allow this insanity to continue? Because if we don’t stop it today it will be too late tomorrow. ~llaw.
To understand what Trump is in the process of doing to America and the world, read the referenced must-read article here.
The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant near Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County, California.
I have begun serious research on my first extensive work of journalistic non-fiction, disguised as fiction until it is published, about the immense dangers of nuclear energy production and those plants related to the reality of adversarial cyber attacks to the power grids where nuclear energy is produced and distributed, especially as weapons of mass destruction in times of war. I have recently posted a blog article here, concerning my fears about this vital problem with nuclear energy and its vulnerability to such lethal attacks, titled “Nuclear Power Plants and Their Relevance to Nuclear War“. The draft title of the book is fittingly called “El Diablo”. ~llaw
A child walks past graffiti depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, on the walls of a bar in the old town in Vilnius, Lithuania, Saturday, May 14, 2016. (AP Photo/Mindaugas Kulbis)
The more we allow Trump to get away with Constitutional non-compliance (like with the emoluments clause ignoring court orders and subpoenas, and violating his oath of office every day) and continues to run roughshod over everything else in our American way, the less chance we have of saving our democracy. Congress must quit dragging its feet NOW, before it’s too late. Trump’s stonewalling, refusing to comply with congressional and court subpoenas, creating inane frivolous lawsuits, all serve to intentionally extend Congress’s foot-dragging and we are fast running out of time to get rid of him.
By the time the 2020 election rolls around, just a short year-and-a-half away, he may well have broken so many laws and violated the Constitution so successfully that he will be in a position to not even allow an election, or just as bad, refuse to leave office if he is defeated at the polls, and uses his authoritarian “presidential” powers to force America into a civil war and WWIII at the same time. He is already searching for a conflict with Iran in the Middle East, which could be only a bombing run away from starting a global war.
Of course that’s a worst case scenario, but looking back at the severe damage he’s already wrought upon our country and got off scot-free with over the past two-and-a-half years, and with the complicit Justice Department saying he cannot be indicted for his crimes, no doubt gives him and Putin, the GOP, et al, the power to simply bully their way into entirely destroying our American way of life within the next year-and-a-half.
I, for one, personally refuse to live under the shadow of a dictator, and life in Trump’s version of America is more than bad enough already. ~llaw
LLAW’s “ALL THINGS NUCLEAR”
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