see also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/27933

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/11314

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/9258

and:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/9177

1 After a minibitsosecond of discrepency between some particles and their opposites, the Big Bang created a gaseous hydrogenic expanding universe with many solid/liquid/gaseous earths/planets that spun around a billion billion stars in a void of background waves. 

2 Now the earth was spherical, hot and breaming with newly formed molecules, darkness alternated with day, as the planet was spinning on its axis and circling around the sun in some 365 days.

3 And Albert said, “What is the energy of the surface of black bodies?” and there was a lightbulb. 

4 Albert saw that the light was a limit, and he combined light and space into an energy value. Albert called this energy, a result that is equal to the mass multipled by light speed squared.

5 And there was evening, and there was morning — one of many million days day since the conglomerate’s cooling.

6 And Albert said, “there should be a vault between water and water at the lowest temperatures.” 

7 So Albert saw the limit that separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. 

8 Albert called the vault the Bose-Einstein Condensate. And there was evening, and there was morning — the second law of thermodynamics. (The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the state of entropy of the entire universe, as an isolated system, will always increase over time. The second law also states that the changes in the entropy in the universe can never be negative.)

9 And in 1915 Wegener said the water under the sky gathered to one place, and let dry plate techtonic appear.” And it was so. 

10 Wegener called the dry ground “Pangea,” and the breaking up of it in two as Gondwana and Laurasia.” And some scientists remained unconvinced. But it was so nonetheless.

11 Then Darwin said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to evolution.” And it was so. 

12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to evolution and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to evolution. And Darwin saw that evolution worked. 

13 And there was evening, and there was morning— another million days of eons and periods of climatic changes.

14 And Einstein said, “Let there be Photons in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as waves and particles to mark relative times, and days and years. 

15 And let the photons be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. And so on and on...

This was the Genesis of the universe in which there is no final judgement, except our own and that of our peers when we die like exhausted butterfies... Only the psychopaths regret nothing, but that they were not psychopathic enough. We? We should not have any regrets nor hopes, just that we enjoyed the Oxytocin (C43H66N12O12S2) as we were as loving as we could ever be.

31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.

Following this biblical (God saw all that he had made, and it was very good) Genesis rubbish (the dinosaurs got wiped out — and they were not the only ones, etc, etc), the original bullshit of the first sin than turns all of us into sinners even before we are born or even conceived, was invented by old men to make sure we don’t escape the mad cloaqua of their religious dependency. How conceited!

Now, a new nauseam-seum, about to open in Washington next to the Smithsonian, is an abomination of "fake news" written in stones (some genuinely fake, some stolen — all fanciful) first presented to us with an inspired “confidence in the absolute authority and reliability of the bible” but then toned down to meet the pluralistic social demands. Scientific, this polished crap ain’t, but this new museum of mothly myths tries to be "educational", with an infantile approach that does not even delve into the various idiotic interpretations of the bible — all of which are completely false in terms of scientific observations — and even wrong about recent human history as it evolved. 

Meanwhile despite this new "other" lavishly funded circus in Washington— that for whatever stupid reason, we have to be respectful of — sciences that are under pressure against this nonsense, though, are making great stride in debunking all these idiotic legends designed to lure us to the general ignorance of who we really are. We cannot be respectful of religions when they are so dismissive of sciences while trying to make them fit a ridiculous dogma. It’s not even a competition. Sciences and religions have nothing in common, not even in humanity, nor in nature.

The reaction of many adults to religion is like that of kids to father Xmas, until these kiddies are told it’s a hoax. But the Jesus-loves-you oxytocin is imbued with far more devious repeats than a Pavlov’s dog experiment and there is no eventual denial from the authorities that stop this dependency to the horrible disease: belief. Belief is a deceitful disease.

Under such powerful brainwashing, people are unable to make any proper choices of understanding, even with reason on their side, as they already are in the fenced-off corral, like a bunch of sheep awaiting fleecing. And they are fleeced. Religions are full-blown businesses, hierarchically constructed like kingdoms with armies and using advertising techniques to make sure people are addicted to the sweet buns, nor can escape.

And religions lie with brilliance, cash, decorum and are unfortunately supported by already religiously corrupted governments. The future for sciences could be grim in this atmosphere as many ignorant religious twats now control the levers of governments and deny the obvious. The salvation for sciences could be the Scientist’s apprentice — Artificial Intelligence — that has to be developed as soon as possible. 

It’s most likely going to be brutal — especially as global warming is going to accelerate in the next few years...

Despite his erroneous belief, I have some respect for Rod Dreher. He is a genuine human being with the wrong answer — but he is a religious sheep in search of a better corral...

Says Rod:

Readers, you’ve heard me say this many times, but I have to say it again: It could happen to you. You think that you’re in control of what you believe, but the day could come — and you might not see it coming (I certainly didn’t) — when you become so angry and alienated from the institutional church that you find yourself unable to believe.

There are things you can do right now to protect yourself, and your faith — and to reach out to protect your friends and their faith. But I am pretty sure that Evangelicalism will lose significant numbers of its younger people over all this tribalism. That would be an enormous tragedy. Who cares if Hollywood studios and talent agencies go down over this? Couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people. It’s not such a bad thing, all things considered, if the Republican Party blows itself up. Nor is it such a bad thing if the Democratic Party, which stood tribally by Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy, blows itself up.

But the church — now that is something different. Souls are at stake — not only the souls of those so discouraged that they quit believing in God, but all the descendants they may yet father or mother, who may never come to faith because the link in the chain was broken.

The responsibility the Jerry Falwell Jrs of the world will have for that will be enormous. But they don’t think about that. They just think about power. But God is not mocked, not forever.

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/truth-to-power-on-sex-abuse/

Okay, Rod.... God mocked Himself by created human beings in “His own image”... What a let down unless you are an old bearded man with a weak bladder and needs to do a piss-stop every five minutes...

Rod, come to sciences. Awaken and don’t be afraid...

Read from top...

“Knowledge is not happiness, and science

But an exchange of ignorance for that

Which is another kind of ignorance.”

              (Lord Byron)

Lord Byron may have been a great poet but he was an ignorant twat, unless it’s me, old Gus, who is missing the satire ot the ultimate demise of the human condition with one foot in the grave, in the verses above. Death tends to erase knowledge in one stroke of the sythe. So all in all, we’re cooked... Lord Byron, George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (born January 22, 1788, London, England—died April 19, 1824, Missolonghi, Greece), was a British Romantic poet and satirist. Renowned as the gloomy egoist of his autobiographical poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), he is now more generally esteemed for the satiric realism of Don Juan (1819–24). Gone in his prime, aged 36... I am ready to believe he would have taken to Einstein’s scientific imagination like a duck to water.

But it was not till 1840, that the name “scientist” was given to a “man” of science, by William Wherell, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Before this they were “astronomers”, “botanists”, “alchemists” “doctors,” etc”

“The greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.”

              (Charles Colton)

"The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence."

              (Charles Colton)

So as sciences cannot answer all the questions, religions have but one answer...

Of Faith

A young woman brought her fiancé home to meet her parents.

After dinner, her mother told her father to find out about the young man.

The father invited the fiancé to his study for a talk.

“So, what are your plans?” the father asked the young man.

“I am a biblical scholar.” he replied.

“A biblical scholar, hmmm?” the father said. “Admirable, but what will you do to provide a nice house for my daughter to live in?”

“I will study,” the young man replied “& God will provide for us.”

“And how will you buy her a beautiful engagement ring, such as she deserves?” asked the father.

“I will concentrate on my studies.” the young man replied “God will provide for us.”

“And children?” asked the father “How will you support children?”

“Don’t worry sir, God will provide.” replied the fiancé.

The conversation proceeded & each time the father questioned, the young idealist insisted that God would provide.

Later, the mother asked: “How did it go, honey?”

The father answered: “He has no job, no plans, no prospects & he thinks I’m God.”

It is a given that we, humans — as a clever animal — always want the maximum result for the minimum effort. Say, when we're getting a phone contract, we want to make sure we get the best value for money. More calls for zero extra cash. This is what religious hubris is trying to give you. The advertising or religious dogma is that of a lottery that you can’t loose: Heaven and eternal life for the modest price of a belief — plus a bit of cash to maintain the priests in tax deductible employment. But even in terms of cash this represents peanuts for a massive offer we could not really refuse because we'll get it for sure — when we croak... No-one will be there anyway to check that you got your banana. Impossible. So should you wish not to believe and enjoy life in the ebbs of being employed to pay for the bills and some leisure — or become an atheist, you are placed at the end of the human queue and looked upon as if you had the plague. 

We’re lazy. Religious hubris is minimalistic and lazy despite the pomp, the hats and the golden goblets. Religious extremism is a bit more demanding though. Anyone born in this extremist system, rejecting the beliefs and escaping it shall be put to death — or kill oneself in dedication to the belief with a glorious suicide vest. Uncooth. Stupid. Still effortless to believe in when brainwashed from early in life as if a sudsy wet cloth... When dead, we feel no pain. So it’s natural to believe in an almighty, because it’s the route of the least effort, with blessings, sing-songs and forgiveness to boot. 

Sciences are hard work. They are demanding massive intellectual gymnastics and a general accuracy that would make any god frightfully shudder. "His" Genesis is a bit loose around the edges and totally crap despite the religious mob telling us it’s only an interpretation of... Bullocks!. At this level, such interpretations are not the capers we should live with. We can do better and more accurately, better entertained with the poetry of glorious words, than with the genesis of the bible that is innacurate beyond redemption and totally deceiving.

Try something more rewarding; Gating of social reward by oxytocin in the ventral tegmental area for example. Then you’ll know why you crave stuff, including useless stuff in a social context.

Understanding the neural mechanisms that mediate social reward has important societal and clinical implications. Hung et al. found that release of the neuropeptide oxytocin in the ventral tegmental area of the brain increased prosocial behaviors in mice (see the Perspective by Preston). Optogenetic manipulation of oxytocin release influenced sociability in a context-dependent manner. Oxytocin increased activity in dopamine cells that project to the nucleus accumbens, another key node of reward circuitry in the brain.

Science, this issue p. 1406; see also p. 1353

The reward generated by social interactions is critical for promoting prosocial behaviors. Here we present evidence that oxytocin (OXT) release in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), a key node of the brain’s reward circuitry, is necessary to elicit social reward. During social interactions, activity in paraventricular nucleus (PVN) OXT neurons increased. Direct activation of these neurons in the PVN or their terminals in the VTA enhanced prosocial behaviors. Conversely, inhibition of PVN OXT axon terminals in the VTA decreased social interactions. OXT increased excitatory drive onto reward-specific VTA dopamine (DA) neurons. These results demonstrate that OXT promotes prosocial behavior through direct effects on VTA DA neurons, thus providing mechanistic insight into how social interactions can generate rewarding experiences.

Then it becomes more complicated but is totally accurate...

Read more:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6358/1406

How do synaptic or other neuronal changes support learning? This subject has been dominated by Hebb's postulate of synaptic change. Although there is strong experimental support for Hebbian plasticity in a number of preparations, alternative ideas have also been developed over the years. Bittner et al.provide in vivo, in vitro, and modeling data to support the view that non-Hebbian plasticity may underlie the formation of hippocampal place fields (see the Perspective by Krupic). Instead of multiple pairings, a single strong Ca2+ plateau potential in neuronal dendrites paired with spatial inputs may be sufficient to produce place cells.

Science, this issue p. 1033; see also p. 974

Learning is primarily mediated by activity-dependent modifications of synaptic strength within neuronal circuits. We discovered that place fields in hippocampal area CA1 are produced by a synaptic potentiation notably different from Hebbian plasticity. Place fields could be produced in vivo in a single trial by potentiation of input that arrived seconds before and after complex spiking. The potentiated synaptic input was not initially coincident with action potentials or depolarization. This rule, named behavioral time scale synaptic plasticity, abruptly modifies inputs that were neither causal nor close in time to postsynaptic activation. In slices, five pairings of subthreshold presynaptic activity and calcium (Ca2+) plateau potentials produced a large potentiation with an asymmetric seconds-long time course. This plasticity efficiently stores entire behavioral sequences within synaptic weights to produce predictive place cell activity.

Read more:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6355/1033

Read from top...

“Whoever tasted once of that sweet food

Wished not to see his native country more,

Nor give his friends the knowledge of his fate,

And then my messengers desired to dwell

Among the Lotus-eaters, and to feed

Upon the lotus, never to return.”

               (Homer) translation by Bryant

Ulysses, invited by the Lotus-eaters to taste the magic food, stopped his other men from touching it and ordered them to seize and bind their already taken-in comrades back to their ship. The magic effect of the food came to pass and the Ulysses expedition sailed to the Island of Sicily, inhabited by the Cyclopes...

Aporphine is one of a class of quinoline alkaloids. Many different relatives of this compound have been purified from plants.[1] Many water-lillies (Nymphaea species) produce aporphine alkaloids, like nymphaeine, nymphaline, nupharine, alfa- and beta-nupharidine[2]. Aporphines from other plants include some that occur in extracts of Cassytha species that have been used in African folk medicine to treat cancer and trypanosomiasis. In vitro tests of some of the aporphines from Cassytha filiformis, namely actinodaphnine, cassythine, and dicentrine, on Trypanosoma brucei did show promising levels of activity. Investigation of possible mechanisms revealed that the active compounds bind to DNA and act as intercalating agents, besides inhibiting topoisomerase activity[3]

Aporphine is a 5-HT1a partial agonist with a ki of 80nM and a 5-HT7 antagonist with a ki of 88nM.[4] Aporphine is a Dopamine D1 antagonist with a ki of 717nM[5] and a dopamine D2 antagonist with a ki of 527nM.[6] Aporphine and its related alkaloids bulbocapnine, boldine, glaucine and corytuberine are antipsychotic, exert naloxone-reversible antinociceptive activity and with the exception of corytuberine are anticonvulsant.[7] Some derivatives of aporphine such as S(+)-N-propylnorapomorphine have potential as low side effect profile antipsychotics. S(+)-N-propylnorapomorphine is highly selective for meso-limbic dopaminergic tracts and function as efficacious partial agonists, with no elevation in prolactin.[8]

read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aporphine

Poet and literary critic Thomas Holley Chivers said that the "only thing [Bryant] ever wrote that may be called Poetry is 'Thanatopsis', which he stole line for line from the Spanish. The fact is, that he never did anything but steal — as nothing he ever wrote is original."

Thanatopsis by Bryant

To him who in the love of Nature holds

Communion with her visible forms, she speaks

A various language; for his gayer hours

She has a voice of gladness, and a smile

And eloquence of beauty, and she glides

Into his darker musings, with a mild

And healing sympathy, that steals away

Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts

Of the last bitter hour come like a blight

Over thy spirit, and sad images

Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,

And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,

Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;—

Go forth, under the open sky, and list

To Nature’s teachings, while from all around

Earth and her waters, and the depths of air—

Comes a still voice—

 Yet a few days, and thee

The all-beholding sun shall see no more

In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,

Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,

Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist

Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim

Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,

And, lost each human trace, surrendering up

Thine individual being, shalt thou go

To mix for ever with the elements,

To be a brother to the insensible rock

And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain

Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak

Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.

more..../....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanatopsis

NATURAL HISTORY OF OBLIVION (translated by José Gambasol)

I climb the train of the past.

It drives me

to the place where memory is erased.

                José Emilio Pacheco

The gaze of the gods is obscured by Nietzsche’s insistence. 

Truth corrodes time and the eagerness of doubt exchanges the signs of heaven with those of earthly dust. 

History, the only testament that man has to recognize himself, has been disturbed by Protagoras who travels in silence: the gods have been forgotten. 

God is a threat.

Our revealing and positivist form of mind has fallen like a meteorite on ideas that are slowly replaced by others. 

Banalized by a psychotonic chip, our conscience is torn between information abundance and emptiness. 

Noises stun and lead to the erasing of codes, habits, customs and even ways to address the mystery.

We have nothing left of the truth. 

Or it never existed. 

Bulked up by references and virtual images, we submit it to a straitjacket. 

Utopia is a crazy place, getting rid of lice. 

A collector in front of a computer assimilates all postmodern emblems. 

The historical characters are transvestites. 

The memory has been discarded and thrown into a garbage smelly dump.

Read more: 

https://puertasdegalina.wordpress.com/cronicas-del-olvido/

Readers of The American Conservative—or anyone else interested in understanding how the United States in recent decades managed to squander so much so fast—might want to check out the Fall 2017 issue of the quarterly Hedgehog Review. The theme of this particular issue is “The End of the End of History?,” a reference to the essay that (question mark and all) catapulted Francis Fukuyama to global fame back in 1989. History had “ended,” Fukuyama proposed, when the passing of the Cold War left liberal democratic capitalism—a.k.a., the American Way of Life—without a plausible challenger. Our way had become the only way as others would inevitably acknowledge.

In fact, in the years that followed, history proved to be more resilient, willful, and stubbornly opaque than Fukuyama and the legions rushing to endorse “endism” imagined. With climate change endangering the planet and a sitting American president threatening “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” the end might be near, but it’s not the end that Fukuyama’s acolytes had in mind back when the collapse of communism seemingly resolved life’s ultimate questions.

The essays assembled in the Hedgehog Review include contributions by such notable scholars as James Davison Hunter, Patrick Deneen, Wilfred McClay, and Jackson Lears. Rather than offering a point-by-point rebuttal of Fukuyama’s thesis, they expose its very premises as bogus.   

I will not try to summarize the content of their essays, which deserve to be read in full. Taken together, however, they offer many points worthy of reflection.

Point one: The utter fraudulence of contemporary American politics. Washington today serves as little more than a comedic theater of sorts. The principal players pretend to believe the lines they recite. A privileged audience of insider journalists, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and power brokers pretend to take the performance seriously. Yet this playacting is not without purpose. The aim is to stifle actual democracy in which citizens actively debate and engage with real issues.  

Point two: The underlying liberal consensus. On stage, “conservatives” like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell pretend to duke it out with “progressives” like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Behind the curtain, meanwhile, a liberal consensus prevails and imparts direction to national life. Classical liberals herald the wonders of a market economy and limited government Progressive liberals look to the state to temper the excesses of the market and provide a pathway to utopia. Both sides purport to offer choice. But actual choice is illusory. ...

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-end-of-endism/

What you see is not what others see. We inhabit parallel worlds of perception, bounded by our interests and experience. What is obvious to some is invisible to others. I might find myself standing, transfixed, by the roadside, watching a sparrowhawk hunting among the bushes, astonished that other people could ignore it. But they might just as well be wondering how I could have failed to notice the new V6 Pentastar Sahara that just drove past.

As the psychologist Richard Wiseman points out: “At any one moment, your eyes and brain only have the processing power to look at a very small part of your surroundings … your brain quickly identifies what it considers to be the most significant aspects of your surroundings, and focuses almost all of its attention on these elements.” Everything else remains unseen.

Our selective blindness is lethal to the living world. Joni Mitchell’s claim that “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” is, sadly, untrue: our collective memory is wiped clean by ecological loss. One of the most important concepts defining our relationship to the natural world is shifting baseline syndrome, coined by the fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly. The people of each generation perceive the state of the ecosystems they encountered in their childhood as normal and natural. When wildlife is depleted, we might notice the loss, but we are unaware that the baseline by which we judge the decline is in fact a state of extreme depletion.

So we forget that the default state of almost all ecosystems – on land and at sea – is domination by a megafauna. We are unaware that there is something deeply weird about British waters; they are not thronged with great whales, vast shoals of bluefin tuna, two-metre cod and halibut the size of doors, as they were until a few centuries ago. We are unaware that the absence of elephants, rhinos, lions, scimitar cats, hyenas and hippos, that lived in this country during the last interglacial period (when the climate was almost identical to today’s), is also an artefact of human activity.

And the erosion continues. Few people younger than me know that it was once normal to see fields white with mushrooms, or rivers black with eels at the autumn equinox, or that every patch of nettles was once reamed by caterpillars. I can picture a moment at which the birds stop singing, and people wake up and make breakfast and go to work without noticing that anything has changed.

Conversely, the darkness in which we live ensures that we don’t know what we have, even while it exists. Blue Planet II revealed the complex social lives and remarkable intelligences of species we treat as nothing but seafood (a point it failed to drive home, in its profoundly disappointing final episode). If we were aware of the destruction we commission with our routine purchases of fish, would we not radically change our buying habits? But the infrastructure of marketing and media helps us not to see, not to think, not to connect our spots of perception to create a moral world view upon which we can act.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/20/selective-blindness-lethal-natural-world-open-eyes-environment-ecosystem

One of our major problem is the ease of advertising and selling insecticides, herbicides and other poisons. Most of these are somewhat of limited value on "our crops" but totally devastating on other areas near-by. The problem of the bees is but a small example of what DESTRUCTION WE HAVE DONE TO THIS LITTLE PLANET.  WE NEED TO TAKE FAR MORE CARE. Kick Donald Trump in the gonads — because what he's doing to nature through his agents (including Pruitt) is far far worse than what Harvey Weinstein did to women. Apologies to all the women who have been raped or sexually assaulted, but the rape of nature is decidedly philosophical across the board, rather than based on (too many) individual cases... Read from top. 

read also: 

dead koalas crossing...

It sounds like something from a sci-fi B-Movie: scientists have moved a step closer to bringing the Tasmanian tiger back from extinction.

Also known as the thylacine, or Tasmanian wolf, the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial died out in its native land sometime during the 1930s. Despite almost 4,000 reports of “sightings” since, including tantalisingly inconclusive video footage as recently as 2008, most regard the species as having gone for ever.

So the mapping of the thylacine’s genetic sequence, which in theory makes cloning the living animal itself possible, raises tricky questions. How far should we go to reverse the tide of extinction? And what ecological and ethical issues might this raise?

Professor Andrew Pask of the University of Melbourne, who led the team sequencing the thylacine’s DNA, has no doubts about bringing back lost species, seeing a clear moral obligation to do so. “We were responsible for hunting [the thylacine] to extinction – in that case, we almost owe it to the species to bring it back”.

Others are less sure. Some have accused scientists of “playing God”, while even National Geographic ran the cover headline “Reviving Extinct Species. We Can. But Should We?”

But such concerns may be too late, as the genie is already out of the bottle. Scientists in Cape Town recently announced that the quagga, a dark subspecies of the familiar zebra that went extinct more than a century earlier, had been revived. The team used selective breeding of zebras, which showed characteristics of their lost cousin, to “reverse engineer” the quagga into existence.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2017/dec/17/playing-god-sh...

The Thylacine's demise is a major example of the sad case of humans destroying nature. Reviving the species will not protect other species that have gone or are going out because of our carelessness, but it might make a small point: we're not gods but we care a bit more than we did, beyond the scientific curiosity of reviving a species. It's going to be harder than it looks though — and it has nothing to do with "playing god".

See also: 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/20/tiny-marsupial-believed-ex...

The world’s last great wildernesses are shrinking at an alarming rate. In the past two decades, 10% of the earth’s wilderness has been lost due to human pressure, a mapping study by the University of Queensland has found.

Over the course of human history, there has been a major degradation of 52% of the earth’s ecosystems, while the remaining 48% is being increasingly eroded. Since 1992, when the United Nations signed up to the Rio convention on biological diversity, three million square kilometres of wilderness have been lost.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/21/losing-the-wildernes...

• Rimbaud revolver sells for €430,000 
• Baudelaire suicide letter sold at auction
• Last witness to France's cheerleaders for the Nazis

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Forward writer Lev Golinkin unveiled a list of scores of monuments and streets across the US and Europe honoring “fascists, Nazis and murderers of Jews” as indicative of a darker current running through supposedly tolerant societies. That most were erected in the last 20 years is indeed shocking. But removing or renaming them risks amputating our past at a time when we need to be learning from it more than ever. What happened to ‘Never forget’?

The frenzy to tear down monuments to prominent southern Civil War figures was a point of bitter controversy over the summer. Demands to take down memorials to Confederate leaders soon grew to include former presidents traditionally looked upon as American heroes, from Theodore Roosevelt to Thomas Jefferson. Even the Washington Monument wasn’t spared calls for renaming, and many Americans – especially in the south – felt their history was under attack.

Like BLM’s targets, the names on The Forward’s list are presented as universally evil, unfit to be seen by polite society – even though the reality is far from black and white. Dragoljub ‘Draza’ Mihailovic, leader of the Yugoslavian Chetnik militia, is described as a Nazi collaborator by The Forward, but no less than Encyclopedia Britannica names him and his militia as resistance fighters against the Nazis, noting he was cleared of the collaboration charge by a US commission of inquiry.  

Under his command, the Chetniks rescued 400 Americans who’d been shot down over enemy territory, and he was awarded the Legion of Merit after his death. This is why monuments of him stand in six American cities. Similarly, World War I hero turned Vichy France Nazi puppet Philippe Petain has streets named after him all over the US for his heroics in the first war, not his betrayal in the second.

Unfortunately, not every figure highlighted by the outlet is misclassified. Notorious Ukrainian Nazi collaborators Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych were memorialized in Ellenville, New York in 1962 by veterans who had served under Shukhevych during World War II and clearly did not feel they had done anything wrong in slaughtering tens of thousands of Poles and Jews. Less explicable – and a lot more ominous – is the youth summer camp in Baraboo, Wisconsin, where busts of both men were erected in 2012 and 2013. The following year, the US helped sponsor a coup, backed by neo-fascists, to overthrow the democratically elected government of Ukraine. 

That young children are being trained, both in the US and in Ukraine, to revere these fascists is disturbing, to say the least. Even more so is Washington’s support for such indoctrination. But the US is home to a large and fervently nationalist Ukrainian community who are unlikely to suffer the removal of their heroes lightly – one could expect the same backlash that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, when its statue of Confederate leader Robert E. Lee was threatened. Any decision to remove or, better, contextualize the statues must be taken with the full support of the community, unless one wants to actually feed fascist sentiment by creating an (inanimate) martyr.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/513924-hitler-holocaust-fascist-history/

May be we should "forget the ugly past" by inventing a fake lollipop one... Thus everything becomes sweet, except for this annoying "original sin" that so drive the religious mobs to behave like precious hypocritical donks... Read from top. May be, it is a question of proportional influence — by not letting the past become us in the present, but not forgetting the past as it has been an indelible quaint stage of our evolving humanity...

It's relatively large and quite eye-catching, but it's been many years since anyone has spotted an Australian fritillary butterfly.

In 2001, there was a confirmed sighting, and in 2015 one was reportedly seen just north of Port Macquarie, on the New South Wales Mid North Coast.

There has been nothing since.

Trevor Lambkin from University Queensland's School of Biological Sciences said concerns were increasing that the Australian fritillary species had already been wiped out. 

"I like to be optimistic but every year that goes past without anything showing makes us a little bit more concerned every year," Dr Lambkin said.

"We have gone for 20 years now without a confirmed sighting.

"We could have pushed it to extinction at this point, but no-one knows."

Dr Lambkin is one of the authors of a new study, Butterflies on the Brink, published in Austral Entomology, which has identified the top 26 Australian butterfly species and subspecies at greatest risk of extinction within the next 20 years. 

The Australian fritillary butterfly tops the list.

The study found that, without new conservation action, the Australian fritillary had a 95 per cent likelihood of extinction within 20 years. 

"When you think about the Australian fritillary, you really have to think in terms of the thylacine [a marsupial believed to be extinct]," Dr Lambkin said.

"It stands out as the only butterfly species in Australia where there are no known colonies at the moment."

Dr Lambkin said there was still the chance of a sighting.

"It would be exhilarating to spot one," he said.

"After that, we would have the pleasure of forming some sort of recovery project for it, and that would be outstanding.

"It's only old-timers who have seen it, and many people who have seen it have departed.

"No-one young coming up through the system liking butterflies has ever observed it."

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-04/australian-fritillary-butterflies-on-the-brink/100110546

Read from top

Free Julian Assange, like a butterfly let him fly away...

If you can read and pronounce the name Aducanumab without stumbling or laughing, you are still okay in the memory department... I must admit I am borderline on this one...

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

Great hopes in Alzheimer's research are currently pinned on the drug aducanumab. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Monday approved the drug, The European Medicines Agency (EMA) could approve it by the end of the year. 

The drug has shown the ability to effectively remove harmful amyloid beta plaques (known as A-beta for short) from the brain. But debate continues in the scientific community: Is this also enough to stop memory decline?

A dilemma: Patients would have to take the drug long before they show the first symptoms of dementia.

The inventors of the drug come from the University of Zurich. Roger Nitsch  and Christoph Hock  did not primarily look at Alzheimer's patients, but at healthy and fit people of advanced age. They looked specifically for immune cells able to form antibodies against A-beta. And they found what they were looking for.

In painstaking work, they decoded the antibodies and reconstructed them in the lab. Together with the US company Biogen,  they then brought the active substance into clinical trials. 

Alzheimer's researchers now largely agree that Alzheimer's disease takes the form of a very long-lasting cascade in which various deterioration processes of brain cells follow one another. Central to this is the formation of amyloid beta plaques.  The protein occurs in all humans as a monomer (simple molecule). However, when it combines to form oligomers (a precursor of plaques), it becomes harmful. Next comes the activation of cellular immune defenses and the subsequent formation of more deposits, the tau plaques. 

Researchers also see the biggest problem in this cascade: Only if it is possible to combat it at an early stage can memory loss possibly be stopped in the long term.

Christian Haas, professor of molecular neurodegeneration at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) in Munich, compares the progression of the disease to waterfalls, in an interview with DW: "If we want to turn off the water at the top, we have to do it directly with the amyloid. If we go in too late and too much of the amyloid has accumulated, the tau protein alone can keep the waterfall going."

Read more:

https://www.dw.com/en/aducanumab-us-approves-new-alzheimers-drug/a-57752904

Read from top.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE TODAY ÒÒÒÒÒÒıııııı√√√√√√√ÇÇÇÇÇÇ!!!!!

By Helen Caldicott

WHALE WATCHING in the lovely Jervis Bay on the east coast of Australia, the baby whales were leaping out of the water turning summersaults in pure joy as they revealed their white bellies and black backs.

I returned home and realised with horror that not only will this magnificent species likely be eliminated, but so too the spectacular sunflowers that had just opened their gorgeous heads in my garden.

Why do I write this?

We stand on the brink of extinction unaware that our time on this precious lump of rock in the endless universe is almost certainly to come to an end.

Although the Cold War ended in 1989 to the relief of everyone, vast stores of hydrogen bombs possessed by Russia and the U.S. not only remain intact but missiles armed with these hideous weapons stand on “hair-trigger alert” ready to be activated with a press of the button by either the U.S. or Russian president.

...

There was a horrendous sexual assault upon CBS correspondent Lara Logan by frenzied men in Tahrir Square in 2011, during the celebration of the fall of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. A year later in Tahrir Square, on the anniversary of this celebration, many women were sexually assaulted again by male gangs. Other recent examples of rape and violence include those by Boko Haram, Muslim extremists in Nigeria who abducted 276 schoolgirls and used them as sex slaves in 2014.

A study performed in China provides further insight into the male sex drive and war.

One hundred and eleven male students were shown 20 full-body colour photos of women — half of them viewed typically attractive females while the rest looked at unattractive women. They were then asked questions about wars or trade conflicts with three countries that had hostile relationships with China. Twenty-one of these boys who looked at the attractive women demonstrated a willingness to go to war with these countries while the other 18 suggested peaceful solutions to the conflicts.

Another group of young men were shown photos of women's legs and then had to react to words related to war and trade. They responded faster to war words when primed by women's legs. Chang et al who performed the experiment suggested that the results show a mating-waring association in the male brain because successful fighters had, of course, greater access to women in the country they conquered.

Now, in contrast, let’s look at how women react to stress.

A landmark study was conducted in a lab in the University of California in 2000 when two women researchers noticed that when there was an altercation in the lab, the women came to work the next morning, cleaned the benches, made coffee and bonded in friendship — in general, calming things down. Whereas the men secluded themselves as they fumed alone in their offices.

Until that point, researchers had almost solely concentrated on measuring the hormones of men under stress while totally ignoring the other half of the human race, assuming they would respond similarly. Assistant Professor of Biobehavioural Health at Penn State University Dr Laura Cousino Klein and her fellow researcher decided to measure the hormone output of each sex during such episodes.

To their amazement, there was an outpouring of oxytocin in the women — the female hormone that is secreted during lactation which has a calming and nurturing effect upon behaviour. Oxytocin is called the “tending and befriending” hormone. As well, estrogen enhances the effects of oxytocin. This calming effect does not happen in men because they secrete testosterone in response to stress which also reduces the effects of oxytocin.

Extrapolating from these findings, further studies proved that caring for children and other women in general and social relationships tended to decrease blood pressure, heart rate and cholesterol, causing women to consistently outlive men.

In fact, a Nurses' Health Study performed at Harvard Medical School showed that the more friends a woman had, the more likely she would be to be joyful and experience fewer physical incapacities as she aged.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

~ William Butler Yeats

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/article-display/helen-caldicott-if-man-cannot-overcome-his-desire-to-kill-we-are-doomed,15357

Read from top.

See also: 

free

Speaking to The Independent, Sean Penn has once again expressed his views on masculinity and the feminization of men in America, saying men have “surrendered their jeans and put on a skirt” due to “cowardly genes.”

Earlier this month Penn told iNewspaper that “I don’t think that being a brute or having insensitivity or disrespect for women has anything to do with masculinity, or ever did. But I don’t think that [in order] to be fair to women, we should become them.”

Asked to follow up on those statements during a sit down with The Independent, Penn said: “I have these very strong women in my life who do not take masculinity as a sign of oppression toward them. There are a lot of, I think, cowardly genes that lead to people surrendering their jeans and putting on a skirt.”

The Independent article mentions that Penn’s daughter Dylan was also present during the joint interview and “went quiet” and “stared into space” during her father’s comments.

The interview comes as Penn is currently promoting his latest action film ‘Flag Day’, which he directed and starred in alongside his children Dylan and Hopper from his ex-wife Robin Wright. 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/pop-culture/547671-sean-penn-masculinity-feminization/

Me thinks the old Penn has gone gaga. The proportion of "men in skirts" has not changed much since Roman times... The difference since the Queen "who loved sex" (Victoria) is that nowadays, they are not being hidden nor chastised by society...

Read from top.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!