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Oct. 14th, 2019 06:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. Found via social media friend on FB: Malawain Teen Taught Himself to Build an Energy Saving Windmill
William Kamkwamba was born August 5, 1987, in Dowa, Malawi, and grew up on his family farm in Masitala Village, Wimbe, two and half hours northeast of Malawi’s capital city. The second eldest of Trywell and Agnes Kamkwamba’s seven children, William has six sisters, Annie, Dorris, Rose, Aisha, Mayless, and Tiyamike.
William was educated at Wimbe Primary School, completing 8th grade and was then accepted to Kachokolo secondary school. Due to severe famine in 2001, his family lacked the funds to pay the $80 in annual school fees and William was forced to drop out of school a few months into his freshman year. For five years he was unable to go to school.
Starting at 14, rather than accept his fate, William started borrowing books from a small community lending library located at his former primary school. He borrowed an 8th-grade American textbook, Using Energy, which depicted wind turbines on its cover. He decided to build a windmill to power his family’s home and obviate the need for kerosene, which provided only smoky, flickering, distant and expensive light after dark. First, he built a prototype using a radio motor, then his initial 5-meter windmill out of a broken bicycle, tractor fan blade, old shock absorber, and blue gum trees. After hooking the windmill to a car battery for storage, William was able to power four light bulbs and charge neighbors’ mobile phones. This system was even equipped with homemade light switches and a circuit breaker made from nails, wire, and magnets. The windmill was later extended to 12 meters to better catch the wind above the trees. A third windmill pumped greywater for irrigation.
Subsequent projects have included clean water, malaria prevention, solar power and lighting for the six homes in his family compound; a deep water well with a solar-powered pump for clean water, a drip irrigation system, and the outfitting of the village team Wimbe United with their first-ever uniforms and shoes. Since receiving their sun and wind-themed uniforms, the team has been on a winning streak that has brought the village together with pride.
The windmill project drew many visitors from kilometers around, including Dr. Hartford Mchazime, Ph.D., the deputy director of the MTTA, the Malawian NGO responsible for the community library. Mchazime brought press, including The Malawi Daily Times, who wrote a long story. Soyapi Mumba and Mike McKay, engineers at Baobab Health Partnership in Malawi blogged about the article, and news of William’s inventions reached Emeka Okafor, program director for TEDGlobal, a prestigious gathering of thinkers and innovators. Okafor searched quite diligently to find William and invite him to the conference as a fellow. William’s presentation led to additional mentors, donors, and companies supporting his education and further projects.
William graduated from Dartmouth College in 2014 and started his tenure at Ideo.org as a Global Fellow. William’s time at Ideo focused on Human-Centered Design and sent him around the world working on projects ranging from sanitation in India to gender-based violence prevention in Kenya. He is now working with WiderNet to develop appropriate technology curriculum that will allow people to bridge the gap between “knowing” and “doing”. WiderNet will distribute the content through eGranaries around Malawi and across the continent.
And it's apparently a book and a movie on Netflix now... The Boy Who Harnassed The Wind
Go guerilla marketers.
2. Interesting... A Gentle Corrective for the Epidemic of Identity Politics Turning Us on Each Other and on Ourselves
Paradoxically, in our golden age of identity politics and trigger-ready outrage, this repression of our inner wildness and fracturing of our wholeness has taken on an inverted form, inclining toward a parody of itself. Where Walt Whitman once invited us to celebrate the glorious multitudes we each contain and to welcome the wonder that comes from discovering one another’s multitudes afresh, we now cling to our identity-fragments, using them as badges and badgering artillery in confronting the templated identity-fragments of others. (For instance, some of mine: woman, reader, immigrant, writer, queer, survivor of Communism.) Because no composite of fragments can contain, much less represent, all possible fragments, we end up drifting further and further from one another’s wholeness, abrading all sense of shared aspiration toward unbiased understanding. The censors of yore have been replaced by the “sensitivity readers” of today, fraying the fabric of freedom — of speech, even of thought — from opposite ends, but fraying it nonetheless. The safety of conformity to an old-guard mainstream has been supplanted by the safety of conformity to a new-order minority predicated on some fragment of identity, so that those within each new group (and sub-group, and sub-sub-group) are as harsh to judge and as fast to exclude “outsiders” (that is, those of unlike identity-fragments) from the conversation as the old mainstream once was in judging and excluding them. In our effort to liberate, we have ended up imprisoning — imprisoning ourselves in the fractal infinity of our ever-subdividing identities, imprisoning each other in our exponentially multiplying varieties of otherness.
This inversion of intent only fissures the social justice movement itself, so that people who are at bottom kindred-spirited — who share the most elemental values, who work from a common devotion to the same projects of justice and equality, who are paving parallel pathways to a nobler, fairer, more equitable world — end up disoriented by the suspicion that they might be on different sides of justice after all, merely because their particular fragments don’t happen to coincide perfectly. In consequence, despite our best intentions, we misconstrue and alienate each other more and more.
O’Donohue offers a gentle corrective:
Each one of us is the custodian of an inner world that we carry around with us. Now, other people can glimpse it from [its outer expressions]. But no one but you knows what your inner world is actually like, and no one can force you to reveal it until you actually tell them about it. That’s the whole mystery of writing and language and expression — that when you do say it, what others hear and what you intend and know are often totally different kinds of things.
A generation after James Baldwin asserted that “an artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian [whose] role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are,” O’Donohue considers the singular artistry of composing a human life, suspended between the doom and the glory of the interior truths that comprise our identity:
Each one of us is privileged to be the custodian of this inner world, which is accessible only through thought, and we are also doomed, in the sense that we cannot unshackle ourselves from the world that we actually carry… All human being and human identity and human growth is about finding some kind of balance between the privilege and the doom or the inevitability of carrying this kind of world.
Today, we seem to serve not as custodians of our inner worlds but as their terrified and terrible wardens, policing our own interiority along with that of others for any deviation from the proscribed identity-political correctness. And yet identity is exclusionary by definition — we are what remains after everything we are not. Even those remnants are not static and solid ground onto which to stake the flag of an immutable personhood but fluid currents in an ever-shifting, shoreless self — for, as Virginia Wolf memorably wrote, “a self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.” To liberate ourselves from the trap of identity, O’Donohue implies, requires not merely an awareness of but an active surrender to the transience that inheres in all of life and engenders its very richness:
One of the most amazing recognitions of the human mind is that time passes. Everything that we experience somehow passes into a past invisible place: when you think of yesterday and the things that were troubling you and worrying you, and the intentions that you had and the people that you met, and you know you experienced them all, but when you look for them now, they are nowhere — they have vanished… It seems to me that our times are very concerned with experience, and that nowadays to hold a belief, to have a value, must be woven through the loom of one’s own experience, and that experience is the touchstone of integrity, verification and authenticity. And yet the destiny of every experience is that it will disappear.
To come to terms with this — with the impermanence and mutability of our thoughts, our feelings, our values, our very cells — is to grasp the absurdity of clinging to any strand of identity with the certitude and self-righteousness undergirding identity politics. To reclaim the beauty of the multitudes we each contain, we must break free of the prison of our fragments and meet one another as whole persons full of wonder unblunted by identity-template and expectation.
I don't know if I agree or disagree.
3. Who Really Killed Blockbuster?
4. 11 Questions about Brexit that You Were Too Embarrassed to Ask
In case you don't have anyone on your news feed from either the UK or Europe who has been posting about Brexit for the past four years.
“Brexit” is the term we’ve all decided to use to describe Britain’s exit from the European Union. The EU is a political and economic organization of 28 European countries, or member states, with its own bureaucracy and legislative body — the European Parliament — which is headquartered in Brussels.
The EU’s predecessor, the European Coal and Steel Community, was founded in the aftermath of World War II with the idea that economic cooperation would prevent another devastating European conflict.
The union has had different iterations and evolved since, adding members and introducing its own common currency, the euro. Central to the EU is its single market, which allows for the free and frictionless movement of goods, services, capital, and people within its borders. They’re known as the “four freedoms.”
The UK joined the European Economic Community in 1973, which became part of the European Union when it formed in 1993.
But the UK has always had a degree of distance from the EU. It maintains its own currency, the sterling pound, and never joined the Schengen agreement, which eliminates internal border controls within the EU. But the UK is still required to embrace the movement of people, as part of those four freedoms.
And, as my colleague Zack Beauchamp has written, “British politics has always included a faction that’s skeptical of deeper integration with the rest of Europe.”
This intensified in the past decade with the 2008 financial crisis and the eurozone economic crisis that followed it. The influx of immigrants from poorer EU states and, later, fears over refugees and migrants from Syria and other parts of Africa and the Middle East helped galvanize voters in the UK and tapped into a larger skepticism about EU membership.
In 2013, Britain’s then-Prime Minister David Cameron promised that if his Conservative Party won elections, he would hold a referendum on whether the UK should remain in the EU or leave. Cameron partly caved to pressure from the right flank of his party and the UK Independent Party (UKIP), the right-wing party that was peeling away some Conservative voters.
Cameron won, and kept his promise. The UK held the Brexit referendum on June 23, 2016. There were two choices: Leave (the EU) or Remain.
There is certainly a case against the EU and its regulations, but emotion and nostalgia largely fueled the referendum campaign, especially among Leave proponents. Prominent Leave campaigners played up immigration fears and made promises about the UK reclaiming its sovereignty, taking control of its borders, laws, and trade, and securing more money for domestic programs like the National Health Service.
The Leave campaign won by a close 52 to 48 percent vote, largely because of England. Wales also voted to leave, while Northern Ireland and Scotland both voted to remain.
Cameron, who supported the Remain campaign, resigned after the referendum. Theresa May won the Conservative leadership contest to succeed him as prime minister in 2016. She was a Remainer, though not exactly an enthusiastic one. In a divided party, she was able to position herself between hardline pro-Brexit Conservatives and more moderate members of her party by promising to fulfill the results of the referendum and deliver on Brexit.
What “deliver on Brexit” meant in practical terms, though, turned out to be far more complicated.
And here we all thought that US politics was a confusing clusterfuck. I'm thinking the Brits may have outdone the US on this point.
5. Games Blamed for Moral Decline and Addiction Throughout History
Hmmm...apparently it wasn't just video gamers. Good to know.
One of the earliest known written descriptions of games dates from the fifth century B.C. The Dialogues of the Buddha, purport to record the actual words of the Buddha himself. In them, he is reported to say that “some recluses…while living on food provided by the faithful, continue addicted to games and recreations; that is to say…games on boards with eight or with 10, rows of squares.”
That reference is widely recognized as describing a predecessor to chess – a much-studied game with an abundant literature in cognitive science and psychology. In fact, chess has been called an art form and even used as a peaceful U.S.-Soviet competition during the Cold War.
Despite the Buddha’s concern, chess has not historically raised concerns about addiction. Scholars’ attention to chess is focused on mastery and the wonders of the mind, not the potential of being addicted to playing.
Somewhere between the early Buddhist times and today, worries about game addiction have given way to scientific understanding of the cognitive, social and emotional benefits of play – rather than its detriments – and even viewing chess and other games as teaching tools, for improving players’ thinking, social-emotional development and math skills.
Games and politics
Dice, an ancient invention developed in many early cultures, found their way to ancient Greek and Roman culture. It helped that both societies had believers in numerology, an almost religious link between the divine and numbers.
So common were games of dice in Roman culture that Roman emperors wrote about their exploits in dice games such as Alea. These gambling games were ultimately outlawed during the rise of Christianity in Roman civilization, because they allegedly promoted immoral tendencies.
More often than not, the concerns about games were used as a political tool to manipulate public sentiment. As one legal historian puts it, statutes on dice games in ancient Rome were only “sporadically and selectively enforced … what we would call ‘sports betting’ was exempted.” The rolling of dice was prohibited because it was gambling, but wagering on the outcomes of sport were not. Until of course, sports themselves came under fire.
The history of the “Book of Sports”, a 17th-century compendium of declarations of King James I of England, demonstrates the next phase of fears about games. The royal directives outlined what sports and leisure activities were appropriate to engage in after Sunday religious services.
In the early 1600s, the book became the subject of a religious tug of war between Catholic and Puritan ideals. Puritans complained that the Church of England needed to be purged of more influences from Roman Catholicism – and liked neither the idea of play on Sundays nor how much people liked doing it.
In the end, English Puritans had the book burned. As a Time magazine article put it, “Sport grew up through Puritanism like flowers in a macadam prison yard.” Sports, like board games of the past, were stifled and the subject of much ire in the past and present.
Oh embedded in the article is a video on why "Pinball" of all things, was banned for decades.
6.What it Feels Like to Swim in Subzero Waters -- now why anyone would want to is another question entirely.
The swim took place in November 2017. I spent the week preceding it on the Falkland Islands, acclimatising. The water there is warmer: around 6°C. I started off doing ten minutes in the water, then 20, 30 and 40 to build up stamina. You’re only good in the cold if you spend time in the cold. Fat is a good insulator but so is muscle. Physically I try to look like a heavyweight Greco-Roman wrestler. I try to change my body to match the temperature. The colder it is the bigger I need to be, so I eat more and bulk up.
They say never do anything different on race day, that you have to do exactly what you’ve been training for, down to the finest detail. But this time I did something new. Most of the time, I’d dive straight in, but plunging into water this cold would be equivalent to parachuting onto the summit of Mount Everest. You need the steady climb up the mountain to get used to the lack of oxygen. So before the swim I paddled the route in my kayak. I got to know the contour of the bay, and where all animals were, while slowly getting used to the water. Then I dived in.
As I reached the last 150 metres of the swim, I went past a group of elephant seals basking on the shore. Six times the size of a polar bear, they’re slow on land but in the water they’re as slick as they are powerful. They could easily have killed me. All I could think was, “Oh Lord, please, please stay where you are.” I was going to stop if my safety kayaker, Dawid Mocke, yelled “out” because he’s spotted one lurking underneath. But Mocke had to keep calm. Fear is contagious and if he showed he was scared, I would have doubted myself.
I always say the bravest person is my wife because she watches me diving into such dangerous waters. When I reached the end of the swim I was bright purple - you could see my veins throbbing. I was disoriented and could barely speak because my tongue was frozen. It must have been scary for everyone watching, especially her.
In water that cold your blood rushes to your vital organs to protect them, but afterwards it flows back to your extremities, returning to your heart at dangerously low temperatures. This is why your core body temperature continues to drop long after you get out of cold water.
It’s not conventional practice, but when I get out of freezing water I try to get warm as quickly as possible. The first thing the crew did was rush me onto the ship where they put me in the shower. Not a warm shower, but as hot as I can handle. It feels heavenly. During every ice-cold swim I wonder if I’ll ever be warm again. As I sat in the shower, with my doctor watching, I began the process of warming up. It took half an hour to get out of the danger zone and about 50 minutes before I reached normal body temperature.
The whole expedition took four weeks of travelling from my home in South Africa for just 19 minutes in the water. From Johannesburg I went to São Paulo, then Buenos Aires then Chile: Santiago down to Punta Arenas. From there I flew to Stanley in the Falklands Islands, before a final three days of sailing to reach South Georgia. Returning took even longer: the boat had to sail back via Antarctica.
But I am willing to do it all again. When I did my swim only 2% of these islands were fully protected from the overfishing that threatens to tip the balance of this delicate ecosystem, which is already experiencing some of the fastest climate change on the planet. Now it’s 23%. But that means 77% is still vulnerable and I won’t stop until the entire region is safe.
7. Well, reminded of why I stay on FB tonight. To keep in touch with extended family members. Found out my Aunt (mother's living sister) has invasive surgery. Called Mother, who didn't know -- and mother reached out to her brother-in-law to find out what happened. Seems Aunt's Hiatal Hernia ended up with her stomach coming up to far into her esophagus, causing a hole in her stomach. They rushed her to the hospital and after several hours of surgery fixed it. (My great Aunt J died from a similar condition -- except they didn't find the hole in the stomach in time.)
She's doing better. But it was serious.
Other Aunt, Aunt K (father's second to youngest sister) was tying off her varicose veines -- they used a glue to stop them. Only to discover after the procedure was completed on one leg -- that Aunt was allergic to the glue. This resulted in a severe rash all over her body that was three feet deep above and below layers of skin. And the only thing that worked was a triple dosage of benedryle.
Mother told me I didn't want to know how bad it was -- that Aunt had gone into detail and this had traumatized my mother. Considering the health care issues that my mother has regaled me with over the past year, without blinking an eye, that's saying something.
My mother is very forthright. She has no issues talking about the human body, bodily functions, sex or anything else. No shame at all. The woman could have been a nurse. She was a speech pathologist for a bit.
William Kamkwamba was born August 5, 1987, in Dowa, Malawi, and grew up on his family farm in Masitala Village, Wimbe, two and half hours northeast of Malawi’s capital city. The second eldest of Trywell and Agnes Kamkwamba’s seven children, William has six sisters, Annie, Dorris, Rose, Aisha, Mayless, and Tiyamike.
William was educated at Wimbe Primary School, completing 8th grade and was then accepted to Kachokolo secondary school. Due to severe famine in 2001, his family lacked the funds to pay the $80 in annual school fees and William was forced to drop out of school a few months into his freshman year. For five years he was unable to go to school.
Starting at 14, rather than accept his fate, William started borrowing books from a small community lending library located at his former primary school. He borrowed an 8th-grade American textbook, Using Energy, which depicted wind turbines on its cover. He decided to build a windmill to power his family’s home and obviate the need for kerosene, which provided only smoky, flickering, distant and expensive light after dark. First, he built a prototype using a radio motor, then his initial 5-meter windmill out of a broken bicycle, tractor fan blade, old shock absorber, and blue gum trees. After hooking the windmill to a car battery for storage, William was able to power four light bulbs and charge neighbors’ mobile phones. This system was even equipped with homemade light switches and a circuit breaker made from nails, wire, and magnets. The windmill was later extended to 12 meters to better catch the wind above the trees. A third windmill pumped greywater for irrigation.
Subsequent projects have included clean water, malaria prevention, solar power and lighting for the six homes in his family compound; a deep water well with a solar-powered pump for clean water, a drip irrigation system, and the outfitting of the village team Wimbe United with their first-ever uniforms and shoes. Since receiving their sun and wind-themed uniforms, the team has been on a winning streak that has brought the village together with pride.
The windmill project drew many visitors from kilometers around, including Dr. Hartford Mchazime, Ph.D., the deputy director of the MTTA, the Malawian NGO responsible for the community library. Mchazime brought press, including The Malawi Daily Times, who wrote a long story. Soyapi Mumba and Mike McKay, engineers at Baobab Health Partnership in Malawi blogged about the article, and news of William’s inventions reached Emeka Okafor, program director for TEDGlobal, a prestigious gathering of thinkers and innovators. Okafor searched quite diligently to find William and invite him to the conference as a fellow. William’s presentation led to additional mentors, donors, and companies supporting his education and further projects.
William graduated from Dartmouth College in 2014 and started his tenure at Ideo.org as a Global Fellow. William’s time at Ideo focused on Human-Centered Design and sent him around the world working on projects ranging from sanitation in India to gender-based violence prevention in Kenya. He is now working with WiderNet to develop appropriate technology curriculum that will allow people to bridge the gap between “knowing” and “doing”. WiderNet will distribute the content through eGranaries around Malawi and across the continent.
And it's apparently a book and a movie on Netflix now... The Boy Who Harnassed The Wind
Go guerilla marketers.
2. Interesting... A Gentle Corrective for the Epidemic of Identity Politics Turning Us on Each Other and on Ourselves
Paradoxically, in our golden age of identity politics and trigger-ready outrage, this repression of our inner wildness and fracturing of our wholeness has taken on an inverted form, inclining toward a parody of itself. Where Walt Whitman once invited us to celebrate the glorious multitudes we each contain and to welcome the wonder that comes from discovering one another’s multitudes afresh, we now cling to our identity-fragments, using them as badges and badgering artillery in confronting the templated identity-fragments of others. (For instance, some of mine: woman, reader, immigrant, writer, queer, survivor of Communism.) Because no composite of fragments can contain, much less represent, all possible fragments, we end up drifting further and further from one another’s wholeness, abrading all sense of shared aspiration toward unbiased understanding. The censors of yore have been replaced by the “sensitivity readers” of today, fraying the fabric of freedom — of speech, even of thought — from opposite ends, but fraying it nonetheless. The safety of conformity to an old-guard mainstream has been supplanted by the safety of conformity to a new-order minority predicated on some fragment of identity, so that those within each new group (and sub-group, and sub-sub-group) are as harsh to judge and as fast to exclude “outsiders” (that is, those of unlike identity-fragments) from the conversation as the old mainstream once was in judging and excluding them. In our effort to liberate, we have ended up imprisoning — imprisoning ourselves in the fractal infinity of our ever-subdividing identities, imprisoning each other in our exponentially multiplying varieties of otherness.
This inversion of intent only fissures the social justice movement itself, so that people who are at bottom kindred-spirited — who share the most elemental values, who work from a common devotion to the same projects of justice and equality, who are paving parallel pathways to a nobler, fairer, more equitable world — end up disoriented by the suspicion that they might be on different sides of justice after all, merely because their particular fragments don’t happen to coincide perfectly. In consequence, despite our best intentions, we misconstrue and alienate each other more and more.
O’Donohue offers a gentle corrective:
Each one of us is the custodian of an inner world that we carry around with us. Now, other people can glimpse it from [its outer expressions]. But no one but you knows what your inner world is actually like, and no one can force you to reveal it until you actually tell them about it. That’s the whole mystery of writing and language and expression — that when you do say it, what others hear and what you intend and know are often totally different kinds of things.
A generation after James Baldwin asserted that “an artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian [whose] role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are,” O’Donohue considers the singular artistry of composing a human life, suspended between the doom and the glory of the interior truths that comprise our identity:
Each one of us is privileged to be the custodian of this inner world, which is accessible only through thought, and we are also doomed, in the sense that we cannot unshackle ourselves from the world that we actually carry… All human being and human identity and human growth is about finding some kind of balance between the privilege and the doom or the inevitability of carrying this kind of world.
Today, we seem to serve not as custodians of our inner worlds but as their terrified and terrible wardens, policing our own interiority along with that of others for any deviation from the proscribed identity-political correctness. And yet identity is exclusionary by definition — we are what remains after everything we are not. Even those remnants are not static and solid ground onto which to stake the flag of an immutable personhood but fluid currents in an ever-shifting, shoreless self — for, as Virginia Wolf memorably wrote, “a self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.” To liberate ourselves from the trap of identity, O’Donohue implies, requires not merely an awareness of but an active surrender to the transience that inheres in all of life and engenders its very richness:
One of the most amazing recognitions of the human mind is that time passes. Everything that we experience somehow passes into a past invisible place: when you think of yesterday and the things that were troubling you and worrying you, and the intentions that you had and the people that you met, and you know you experienced them all, but when you look for them now, they are nowhere — they have vanished… It seems to me that our times are very concerned with experience, and that nowadays to hold a belief, to have a value, must be woven through the loom of one’s own experience, and that experience is the touchstone of integrity, verification and authenticity. And yet the destiny of every experience is that it will disappear.
To come to terms with this — with the impermanence and mutability of our thoughts, our feelings, our values, our very cells — is to grasp the absurdity of clinging to any strand of identity with the certitude and self-righteousness undergirding identity politics. To reclaim the beauty of the multitudes we each contain, we must break free of the prison of our fragments and meet one another as whole persons full of wonder unblunted by identity-template and expectation.
I don't know if I agree or disagree.
3. Who Really Killed Blockbuster?
4. 11 Questions about Brexit that You Were Too Embarrassed to Ask
In case you don't have anyone on your news feed from either the UK or Europe who has been posting about Brexit for the past four years.
“Brexit” is the term we’ve all decided to use to describe Britain’s exit from the European Union. The EU is a political and economic organization of 28 European countries, or member states, with its own bureaucracy and legislative body — the European Parliament — which is headquartered in Brussels.
The EU’s predecessor, the European Coal and Steel Community, was founded in the aftermath of World War II with the idea that economic cooperation would prevent another devastating European conflict.
The union has had different iterations and evolved since, adding members and introducing its own common currency, the euro. Central to the EU is its single market, which allows for the free and frictionless movement of goods, services, capital, and people within its borders. They’re known as the “four freedoms.”
The UK joined the European Economic Community in 1973, which became part of the European Union when it formed in 1993.
But the UK has always had a degree of distance from the EU. It maintains its own currency, the sterling pound, and never joined the Schengen agreement, which eliminates internal border controls within the EU. But the UK is still required to embrace the movement of people, as part of those four freedoms.
And, as my colleague Zack Beauchamp has written, “British politics has always included a faction that’s skeptical of deeper integration with the rest of Europe.”
This intensified in the past decade with the 2008 financial crisis and the eurozone economic crisis that followed it. The influx of immigrants from poorer EU states and, later, fears over refugees and migrants from Syria and other parts of Africa and the Middle East helped galvanize voters in the UK and tapped into a larger skepticism about EU membership.
In 2013, Britain’s then-Prime Minister David Cameron promised that if his Conservative Party won elections, he would hold a referendum on whether the UK should remain in the EU or leave. Cameron partly caved to pressure from the right flank of his party and the UK Independent Party (UKIP), the right-wing party that was peeling away some Conservative voters.
Cameron won, and kept his promise. The UK held the Brexit referendum on June 23, 2016. There were two choices: Leave (the EU) or Remain.
There is certainly a case against the EU and its regulations, but emotion and nostalgia largely fueled the referendum campaign, especially among Leave proponents. Prominent Leave campaigners played up immigration fears and made promises about the UK reclaiming its sovereignty, taking control of its borders, laws, and trade, and securing more money for domestic programs like the National Health Service.
The Leave campaign won by a close 52 to 48 percent vote, largely because of England. Wales also voted to leave, while Northern Ireland and Scotland both voted to remain.
Cameron, who supported the Remain campaign, resigned after the referendum. Theresa May won the Conservative leadership contest to succeed him as prime minister in 2016. She was a Remainer, though not exactly an enthusiastic one. In a divided party, she was able to position herself between hardline pro-Brexit Conservatives and more moderate members of her party by promising to fulfill the results of the referendum and deliver on Brexit.
What “deliver on Brexit” meant in practical terms, though, turned out to be far more complicated.
And here we all thought that US politics was a confusing clusterfuck. I'm thinking the Brits may have outdone the US on this point.
5. Games Blamed for Moral Decline and Addiction Throughout History
Hmmm...apparently it wasn't just video gamers. Good to know.
One of the earliest known written descriptions of games dates from the fifth century B.C. The Dialogues of the Buddha, purport to record the actual words of the Buddha himself. In them, he is reported to say that “some recluses…while living on food provided by the faithful, continue addicted to games and recreations; that is to say…games on boards with eight or with 10, rows of squares.”
That reference is widely recognized as describing a predecessor to chess – a much-studied game with an abundant literature in cognitive science and psychology. In fact, chess has been called an art form and even used as a peaceful U.S.-Soviet competition during the Cold War.
Despite the Buddha’s concern, chess has not historically raised concerns about addiction. Scholars’ attention to chess is focused on mastery and the wonders of the mind, not the potential of being addicted to playing.
Somewhere between the early Buddhist times and today, worries about game addiction have given way to scientific understanding of the cognitive, social and emotional benefits of play – rather than its detriments – and even viewing chess and other games as teaching tools, for improving players’ thinking, social-emotional development and math skills.
Games and politics
Dice, an ancient invention developed in many early cultures, found their way to ancient Greek and Roman culture. It helped that both societies had believers in numerology, an almost religious link between the divine and numbers.
So common were games of dice in Roman culture that Roman emperors wrote about their exploits in dice games such as Alea. These gambling games were ultimately outlawed during the rise of Christianity in Roman civilization, because they allegedly promoted immoral tendencies.
More often than not, the concerns about games were used as a political tool to manipulate public sentiment. As one legal historian puts it, statutes on dice games in ancient Rome were only “sporadically and selectively enforced … what we would call ‘sports betting’ was exempted.” The rolling of dice was prohibited because it was gambling, but wagering on the outcomes of sport were not. Until of course, sports themselves came under fire.
The history of the “Book of Sports”, a 17th-century compendium of declarations of King James I of England, demonstrates the next phase of fears about games. The royal directives outlined what sports and leisure activities were appropriate to engage in after Sunday religious services.
In the early 1600s, the book became the subject of a religious tug of war between Catholic and Puritan ideals. Puritans complained that the Church of England needed to be purged of more influences from Roman Catholicism – and liked neither the idea of play on Sundays nor how much people liked doing it.
In the end, English Puritans had the book burned. As a Time magazine article put it, “Sport grew up through Puritanism like flowers in a macadam prison yard.” Sports, like board games of the past, were stifled and the subject of much ire in the past and present.
Oh embedded in the article is a video on why "Pinball" of all things, was banned for decades.
6.What it Feels Like to Swim in Subzero Waters -- now why anyone would want to is another question entirely.
The swim took place in November 2017. I spent the week preceding it on the Falkland Islands, acclimatising. The water there is warmer: around 6°C. I started off doing ten minutes in the water, then 20, 30 and 40 to build up stamina. You’re only good in the cold if you spend time in the cold. Fat is a good insulator but so is muscle. Physically I try to look like a heavyweight Greco-Roman wrestler. I try to change my body to match the temperature. The colder it is the bigger I need to be, so I eat more and bulk up.
They say never do anything different on race day, that you have to do exactly what you’ve been training for, down to the finest detail. But this time I did something new. Most of the time, I’d dive straight in, but plunging into water this cold would be equivalent to parachuting onto the summit of Mount Everest. You need the steady climb up the mountain to get used to the lack of oxygen. So before the swim I paddled the route in my kayak. I got to know the contour of the bay, and where all animals were, while slowly getting used to the water. Then I dived in.
As I reached the last 150 metres of the swim, I went past a group of elephant seals basking on the shore. Six times the size of a polar bear, they’re slow on land but in the water they’re as slick as they are powerful. They could easily have killed me. All I could think was, “Oh Lord, please, please stay where you are.” I was going to stop if my safety kayaker, Dawid Mocke, yelled “out” because he’s spotted one lurking underneath. But Mocke had to keep calm. Fear is contagious and if he showed he was scared, I would have doubted myself.
I always say the bravest person is my wife because she watches me diving into such dangerous waters. When I reached the end of the swim I was bright purple - you could see my veins throbbing. I was disoriented and could barely speak because my tongue was frozen. It must have been scary for everyone watching, especially her.
In water that cold your blood rushes to your vital organs to protect them, but afterwards it flows back to your extremities, returning to your heart at dangerously low temperatures. This is why your core body temperature continues to drop long after you get out of cold water.
It’s not conventional practice, but when I get out of freezing water I try to get warm as quickly as possible. The first thing the crew did was rush me onto the ship where they put me in the shower. Not a warm shower, but as hot as I can handle. It feels heavenly. During every ice-cold swim I wonder if I’ll ever be warm again. As I sat in the shower, with my doctor watching, I began the process of warming up. It took half an hour to get out of the danger zone and about 50 minutes before I reached normal body temperature.
The whole expedition took four weeks of travelling from my home in South Africa for just 19 minutes in the water. From Johannesburg I went to São Paulo, then Buenos Aires then Chile: Santiago down to Punta Arenas. From there I flew to Stanley in the Falklands Islands, before a final three days of sailing to reach South Georgia. Returning took even longer: the boat had to sail back via Antarctica.
But I am willing to do it all again. When I did my swim only 2% of these islands were fully protected from the overfishing that threatens to tip the balance of this delicate ecosystem, which is already experiencing some of the fastest climate change on the planet. Now it’s 23%. But that means 77% is still vulnerable and I won’t stop until the entire region is safe.
7. Well, reminded of why I stay on FB tonight. To keep in touch with extended family members. Found out my Aunt (mother's living sister) has invasive surgery. Called Mother, who didn't know -- and mother reached out to her brother-in-law to find out what happened. Seems Aunt's Hiatal Hernia ended up with her stomach coming up to far into her esophagus, causing a hole in her stomach. They rushed her to the hospital and after several hours of surgery fixed it. (My great Aunt J died from a similar condition -- except they didn't find the hole in the stomach in time.)
She's doing better. But it was serious.
Other Aunt, Aunt K (father's second to youngest sister) was tying off her varicose veines -- they used a glue to stop them. Only to discover after the procedure was completed on one leg -- that Aunt was allergic to the glue. This resulted in a severe rash all over her body that was three feet deep above and below layers of skin. And the only thing that worked was a triple dosage of benedryle.
Mother told me I didn't want to know how bad it was -- that Aunt had gone into detail and this had traumatized my mother. Considering the health care issues that my mother has regaled me with over the past year, without blinking an eye, that's saying something.
My mother is very forthright. She has no issues talking about the human body, bodily functions, sex or anything else. No shame at all. The woman could have been a nurse. She was a speech pathologist for a bit.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-15 09:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-15 10:50 pm (UTC)but the people behind it stand to lose money if we stay in the EU (due to new regulations) make a lot of money from a no deal Brexit.
So it is basically in the financial self-interest of a few assholes to get out of the EU and not have a deal?
Oh my god. I'd be furious. So many people hurt for money?
no subject
Date: 2019-10-16 08:03 am (UTC)