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gusu-emilu · 3 years

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miscellaneous MDZS/CQL fic recs (AO3)

broken into sections: Character Study (-esque), Wangxian, Jiang Cheng ships, Yi City (or Yi City-adjacent), Humor/Crack, and Other

Character Study (-esque)

Wei Wuxian

my eyes got used to the darkness by @curiosity-killed (M, Sunshot Campaign era, 4.4k): The funny thing, the thing that makes his lips curl in a grin and his hands shake with laughter, is that all these cultivators with their lofty principles and noble ambitions can’t even notice the ghost among them. Sure, they shiver at his presence and flinch from his cold hands, but not one of them puts it together. Lan Wangji chases him with healing music and Nie Mingjue frowns solemnly at his dancing corpses—and he laughs and laughs and laughs because they just don’t get it. Emilu's commentary: CW for mild body horror.

Jiang Cheng

in our respective ways by @veliseraptor (T, Sunshot Campaign era, 5.7k): Jiang Cheng has his golden core back. But he seems to have lost Wei Wuxian.

You Know I've Fallen, but I Know How High by villainais (M, Post-WWX's death, 2.7k): Jiang Cheng loses both of his siblings in Nightless City. Minutes apart. He trudges home to Yunmeng with one body, holds a private funeral with a single coffin, and allows himself to wear his mourning robes for ten days—permits himself not a single day more. He is still too young and inexperienced, an unfledged boy to the cultivation world, and he is rebuilding Lotus Pier on his own. He will not gift the other sect leaders the satisfaction of seeing him vulnerable. Propriety be damned. Hanguang-jun emerges from his seclusion wearing white. He does not stop.

Nie Huaisang

it deepens like a coastal shelf by @wolffyluna (M, Post-WWX's death, 21.6k): When Nie Huaisang meets Mo Xuanyu, he realises two things quickly. One, this kid is so doomed. Two, this kid would be a great unwitting spy in his plans to bring down Jin Guangyao. It would be so easy to get into Mo Xuanyu's confidences, and so easy to get him to tell him anything he needs. ...only thing is, that wouldn't be very good for Mo Xuanyu's life expectancy. But he'll do it anyway, if it helps him avenge his brother. A fic about man handing on misery to man, the parallels and cycles in the relationships between Jin Guangyao and Nie Huaisang and Mo Xuanyu, and the lengths these characters will go to meet their goals and if there are lines they won't cross.

Lan Xichen

an old man in dried mouths by @tenacious-minds (T, Post-Canon, 3.3k): Xichen thinks. The tea had always stained the crockery red. Emilu's commentary: Lan Xichen and Jin Ling talk about Jin Guangyao.

can you be a quiet man? by @basket-of-loquats (Unrated, Post-Canon, 70.7k+) But something inside him snapped at Guanyin Temple-- and Lan Wangji watched it happen, saw the exact moment that Lan Xichen went from broken to shattered, when he buried his sword into Jin Guangyao’s chest, when his sworn brother stared up at him with wide eyes, blood dripping from his mouth, when he pulled himself closer and closer and closer-- When he whispered "Why don’t you die with me?", and Lan Xichen hadn’t argued. Emilu's commentary: Lan Xichen / therapy with a side of Wangxian.

Wen Ning

breathless (but i'll pretend to breathe for you) by swordsainted (T, Burial Mounds Settlement era, 4.1k): Wei Wuxian is silent for a long minute, and then he looks at Wen Ning, something raw and open and hurting behind his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says again, softer this time, and Wen Ning shakes his head, still smiling. “You’ve protected everyone. How could I hate you for that?”

Mo Xuanyu

stand at the pit's mouth by @eldritch-elrics (M, MXY's death, 9.3k): The dreams and regrets of a man on the edge of oblivion. Emilu's commentary: Surrealist/absurdist screenplay.

Wangxian

I would wait for a thousand years by bleuett (T, Immortality Post-Canon, 10.4k): During the worst of winter, a traveler comes to stay at Lan Wangji's inn. He wears a red ribbon in his hair. “Do you see the rabbit?” Wei Ying asks and points at the moon. “That’s the moon rabbit, he helps make Chang’e more immortality elixir. He keeps Chang’e company.” “I do not wish the rabbit for company,” Lan Wangji says tightly. “You are the one I want by my side.” “And I’m here, Lan Zhan. If you go to the moon, I’ll follow you, I’ll always be here now.” Emilu's commentary: Lan Wangji meets Wei Wuxian centuries later and does not remember the past. There is also an excellent podfic by @forgotten-envies

Look Not With The Eyes by Spodumene (G, Post-Canon, 28.1k): Wei Wuxian returns from his travels to join Lan Wangji on a routine night hunt, but when things take an unexpected turn, Wei Wuxian will have to fight for what he's really looking for. Emilu's commentary: Case fic.

All In A Good Time by bigboobedcanuck (E, Post-Canon, 8k): Lan Zhan is struck by a curse that brings him intense physical pain unless he's being touched. He is stoic and tries to hide his suffering. Wei Wuxian is worried and protective. Perhaps they will finally admit their feelings?

Across a Lake of Glass by Zizzani (E, Figure Skating AU, 92.2k+): Each year, Gusu Skating Club runs a camp for only the most elite athletes of each region. This year brings a new skater from the Yunmeng Club who wears skates lined with red and a smile made for war. He skates like a demon. Figure skating au featuring lots of healthy rivalry, pre and post-competition bonding, and an inexplicable fall from grace through the eyes of the media.

Jiang Cheng Ships

Chengqing

display my heart for you to see by @souridealist (M, Post-Canon Wen Qing Lives AU, 5.5k): Jiang Cheng has his own secrets. Some of them are part of the unburied past; some of them are about how long it's been since anyone has touched him.

while I'm in this body by @souridealist (E, Post-Lotus Pier Massacre, 3.9k): For just a few minutes, alone in her office, Wen Qing allows her self-control to slip enough to cry. It's just her luck that that's when Jiang Cheng comes looking for her. Emilu's commentary: Femdom.

Chengning

it may be that it doesn't matter by @wildehacked (T, Post-Canon, 6.6k) “Are you crying?” Jiang Wanyin asks him, and Wen Ning frowns. Pats his cheek with one hand. “No.” Emilu's commentary: Holy Grail of Chengning.

Whatever It Is by morau (E, Post-Canon, 20.5k): It starts, as with a lot of things, with a very poorly thought out prank, courtesy of Wei Wuxian. Emilu's commentary: A LOT of sex and even more emotions lol

won't run away (we're here to stay) by @qi-ling (T, Post-Canon, 3.5k): "Please don't feel any pressure to accept this, and you can take as much time as you need to think about it." It's a set of robes, in shades of deep purple, complete with leather bracers. Cut in a different style than that of the disciples or household staff, closer to the understated robes Wen Ning typically wears. He reaches out to feel the fabric. His deadened nerves can't sense delicate textures well, but even he can tell it's of a quality on par to Wanyin's own wardrobe. This is startling enough coming from Jiang Wanyin, but then Wen Ning notices the belt. In particular, the silver bell in the shape of a lotus affixed to it. Only recognized members of the Jiang sect may wear the clarity bell. Or, Jiang Cheng has an invitation for Wen Ning.

Zhancheng

By Proxy by @veliseraptor (E, Post-WWX's death, 12k): Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji, looking for comfort in all the wrong places. Emilu's commentary: Hate sex that made me cry

Yi City (or Yi City-adjacent)

Songxuexiao

Heaven Has A Road But No One Walks It by @silvysartfulness (M, Post-Yi City arc Canon Divergence, 123k+): One of the most complex spells of demonic cultivation the world has seen is brought to fruition, and Xiao Xingchen draws his first shaking breaths in over seven years. This, it turns out, is only the start of his problems. Emilu's commentary: Pretty sure everyone already knows about Silvy's happy songxuexiao road trip fic but it has to be here.

Xue Yang & Lan Xichen

Hours On Empty series by @lady-of-the-lotus (M to E, Post-Canon, 57.8k+): AU where Wei Wuxian never came to Yi City and Xue Yang is still running around post-canon disguised as Xiao Xingchen. "Fractured Ice" - Xue Yang whisks a nihilistic Lan Xichen off on a murder roadtrip to raise Xiao Xingchen and Meng Yao from the grave. Because that will solve all of their problems, right? "Control" - "Fractured Ice" retold from Xue Yang's pov. "A Thousand Miles In Its Light" - Alternate ending to "Fractured Ice" and "Control"

Songxiao with Xuexiao Flashbacks

Nothing Beside Remains by @eldritch-elrics (T, Post-Yi City arc Canon Divergence, 21.9k): And Xiao Xingchen is dressed in dark clothing that is not his, and his sight is all of a sudden sharp in a way that it has never been before, and Xue Yang is not here. “He wouldn’t,” he breathes. “No, he wouldn’t do that. He’s too—” “He’s too what?” Wei Wuxian steps a foot closer, face hard-set. “Too cruel? Or too kind?” Or: Xue Yang uses the Sacrifice Summon on Xiao Xingchen. Xiao Xingchen lives with the consequences.

Humor/Crack

The Hangover: A pre-wedding Dramedy series by natcat5 (M, Modern AU, 51.6k): It is not a bachelor party. That was made clear on all the invitations. It is a congratulatory get together for Jin Zixuan, attended by his family, the family of the bride, and the young masters of the other two families in their circle. The gathering is not to go later than midnight, everyone must drink in moderation, and no one is allowed to be hungover tomorrow. Wei Wuxian had promised Yanli, three fingers in the air. Jiang Cheng had rolled his eyes, but promised as well. Saturday morning, Nie Huaisang and Jiang Cheng wake up alone in a hotel room, missing shoes, phones, and almost all their memories of what in the world happened last night. Also missing: Wei Wuxian, brother of the bride, Lan Wangji, esteemed guest, Lan Xichen, esteemed guest, Jin Zixun, cousin of the groom, Jin Guangyao, brother and best-man, Jin Zixuan, THE GROOM, who is due at his bride-to-be's house in six hours. That's plenty of time to find everyone...right?

Jiang Cheng Loves Jar Jar Bombad Mui by @lady-of-the-lotus (G, Post-Canon, 1.7k) Jar Jar Binks washes up on the shores of Lotus Pier. Can he win the lonely Jiang Cheng's proud heart? Neb neb answer is yesa. Emilu's commentary: There's also a podfic by @aowyn. Yes, with a Jar Jar voice.

Other

Nie Huaisang & Wen Ning

By Name by nirejseki (G, Post-Canon, 1.3k): After the traumatic events in the now-collapsed temple, Wen Ning lingered behind and unexpectedly saw Nie Huaisang, the undisputed victor of an all-around terrible evening, sitting on the steps of the temple, looking exhausted and miserable, as if he’d won nothing at all. Wen Ning found himself drifting over to him.

Jiang Yanli & Nie Mingjue

utility by magicites (G, Arranged Marriage AU, 2.3k): Jiang Yanli and Nie Mingjue's wedding is a political one — a gesture of unity between their Sects. A way for her parents to finally get some use out of the plain-faced sham of a cultivator they call a daughter. “Jiang-guniang,” Nie Mingjue says, and the formality in such a setting as intimate as their wedding chambers startles her, “I don’t wish to bed you. Or any other woman, for that matter. It isn’t fair for you to live alone because of my own preferences.” She rests her hand on his arm, cool relief flooding her body like water on a summer afternoon. “If it helps, I don’t feel desire for men,” she whispers.

Jin Guangyao / Nie Huaisang

Pulling Strings by @eldritch-elrics (E, Post-WWX's death, 5k): Nie Huaisang, quite drunk, turns up at Jin Guangyao’s door one night with an unexpected request. Emilu's commentary: Nie Huaisang knows Jin Guangyao killed Nie Mingjue. This interaction is more symbolic than anything else...

#mdzs #cql #the untamed #mdzs fanfiction #cql fanfiction #the untamed fanfiction #mdzs fanfic #cql fanfic #the untamed fanfic #fic recs #emilu talks #emilu creations

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Sunday, August 15, 2021

Canada to require air travelers to be vaccinated (AP) The Canadian government will soon require all air travelers and passengers on interprovincial trains to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said Friday that includes all commercial air travelers, passengers on trains between provinces and cruise ship passengers. “As soon as possible in the Fall and no later than the end of October, the Government of Canada will require employees in the federally regulated air, rail, and marine transportation sectors to be vaccinated. The vaccination requirement will also extend to certain travelers. This includes all commercial air travelers,” his office said in a statement. France announced this week that it will require people have a special virus pass before they can travel by plane, train or bus across the country.

Debt: So long to the savings glut (The Week) “Americans are borrowing again,” said AnnaMaria Andriotis at The Wall Street Journal. After a year in which many consumers reduced spending, stashed savings, and used stimulus checks to pay down debt, more people have gone back to “splurging on cars, vacations, and eating out”—and seeking loans to pay for it. “Lenders originated some 3 million auto loans and leases in March, the highest monthly figure on record,” with the balances for those new originations topping a record $73 billion. A record 6 million new general-purpose credit cards were also issued the same month. The balances on our cards are still “about $140 billion lower than at the end of 2019,” said Alexandre Tanzi and Katia Dmitrieva at Bloomberg. But household debt—which includes mortgages, credit cards, and other consumer loans—rose in the second quarter “at the fastest pace since 2013.” Much of that was driven by the hot housing market—and Americans scrambling to refinance while mortgage rates remained low.

More US cities requiring proof of vaccination to go places (AP) Hold on to that vaccination card. A rapidly growing number of places across the U.S. are requiring people to show proof they have been inoculated against COVID-19 to teach school, work at a hospital, see a concert or eat inside a restaurant. Following New York City’s lead, New Orleans and San Francisco will impose such rules at many businesses starting next week, while Los Angeles is looking into the idea. The new measures are an attempt to stem the rising tide of COVID-19 cases that has pushed hospitals to the breaking point, including in the Dallas area, where top officials warned they are running out of beds in their pediatric intensive care units.

Western fires threaten thousands of homes, strain resources (AP) A month-old wildfire burning through forestlands in Northern California lurched toward a small lumber town as blazes across the U.S. Western states strained resources and threatened thousands of homes with destruction. Crews were cutting back brush and using bulldozers to build lines to keep the Dixie Fire from reaching Westwood east of Lake Almanor, not far from where the lightning-caused blaze destroyed much of the town of Greenville last week. To the northwest, the Monument Fire continued to grow after destroying a dozen homes and threatened about 2,500 homes in a sparsely populated region. They were among more than 100 large wildfires burning in a dozen Western states seared by drought and hot, bone-dry weather that has turned forests, brushlands, meadows and pastures into tinder. The U.S. Forest Service said Friday it’s operating in crisis mode, fully deploying firefighters and maxing out its support system.

500 years later, Mexico recalls Spanish conquest (Los Angeles Times) The final resting place of one of Mexico’s signature historical figures is easy to miss. A simple red plaque—just a name and the years he lived—marks the spot where his tomb is embedded in a wall to the side of the altar in a dilapidated downtown church. The name alone, however, recalls centuries of conflict and a never-ending debate about the essential identity of Mexico: HERNAN CORTES 1485-1547. The legendary Spanish military commander may be hidden away in death, but a few blocks away, authorities are readying a remembrance of his momentous triumph—the conquest of the Aztec Empire. Friday marks the 500th anniversary of the fall in 1521 of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, now the site of Mexico City. The bloody siege culminating in its surrender launched three centuries of Spanish dominion in Mexico. “We were all born from the conquest, no longer Aztecs, no longer Spanish, but Indian-Hispanic-Americans, mestizos,” wrote Carlos Fuentes, the late Mexican author. “We are what we are because Hernán Cortés, for good or for bad, did what he did.”

7.2 magnitude earthquake hits Haiti; at least 304 killed (AP) A powerful magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck southwestern Haiti on Saturday, killing at least 304 people and injuring at least 1,800 others as buildings tumbled into rubble. Prime Minister Ariel Henry said he was rushing aid to areas where towns were destroyed and hospitals overwhelmed with incoming patients. The epicenter of the quake was about 125 kilometers (78 miles) west of the capital of Port-au-Prince, the U.S. Geological Survey said, and widespread damage was reported in the hemisphere's poorest nations as a tropical storm also bore down. Henry declared a one-month state of emergency for the whole country and said some towns were almost completely razed.

Belarus floods the European Union with migrants (CNN) Desperate, frightened and begging for help, they emerge from the darkness: a group of Yazidi migrants, lost in the forests of eastern Europe. It’s a surreal sight—and one that has been repeated over many recent nights. Having survived persecution by ISIS at home in Iraq, here on the Belarus-Lithuania border the Yazidis find themselves caught up in a breathtakingly cynical plot. Belarus’s authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, has been accused of using these desperate souls as pawns in his high-stakes game with the European Union. Over the course of 24 hours from July 27 to 28, a record 171 people were caught on the border—many of them Iraqis. A total of more than 4,000 have been caught so far this year. European officials say Lukashenko’s bureaucracy is extracting thousands of euros from each traveler then “weaponizing” them—according to Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis—in order to burden Belarus’s neighbor Lithuania. Officials say the migrants are flown from the Middle East to Minsk, and then guided to the Belarus-Lithuania border by unspecified facilitators, where they are allowed to cross, unimpeded by Belarusian border police. Lithuania has called it “petty”—“mass revenge” for sanctions imposed by the EU after Belarus forced a Ryanair plane to land in Minsk so they could arrest an opposition blogger on board. A Western intelligence official told CNN the scheme could not function without the permission of the Belarusian state, and that Lukashenko was likely using the migrants as a way to pressurize the EU into negotiations on lifting the sanctions against him.

Heat wave edges higher in southern Europe (AP) Intense heat baking Italy pushed northward towards the popular tourist destination of Florence Friday while wildfires charred the country’s south, and Spain appeared headed for an all-time record high temperature as a heat wave kept southern Europe in a fiery hold. Italy saw temperatures in places upwards of 40 C (104 F), and Rome broiled. By late afternoon Friday, the heat in Florence reached 39 C (102 F). That city and Bologna also were issued alerts for Saturday by the health ministry. Many southern European countries have suffered days of intense heat, accompanied by deadly wildfires in Algeria, Turkey, Italy and Greece. Wildfires on the Italian island of Sardinia were reported largely contained, but a blaze early Friday near Tivoli in the countryside east of Rome forced the evacuation of 25 families.

At least 40 killed in Turkey flood as search for missing continues (Reuters) Families of those missing after Turkey’s worst floods in years anxiously watched rescue teams search buildings on Saturday, fearing the death toll from the raging torrents could rise further. At least 40 people have died from the floods in the northern Black Sea region, the second natural disaster to strike the country this month. Drone footage by Reuters showed massive damage in the flood-hit Black Sea town of Bozkurt, where emergency workers were searching demolished buildings.

Marine vanguard lands in Kabul as US speeds up evacuations (AP) The first forces of a Marine battalion arrived in Kabul at week’s end to stand guard as the U.S. speeds up evacuation flights for some American diplomats and thousands of Afghans, spurred by a lightning Taliban offensive that increasingly is isolating Afghanistan’s capital. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said “elements” of a battalion were now in Kabul, the vanguard of three Marine and Army battalions that the U.S. was sending to the city by the end of the weekend to help more Americans and their Afghan colleagues get out quickly. The Taliban, emboldened by the imminent end of the U.S. combat mission in the country, took four more provincial capitals Friday, heightening fears they would move soon on the capital, which is home to millions of Afghans.

‘Why did my friend get blown up? For what?’ (Washington Post) After enlisting in the U.S. military against his family’s wishes, Chicago native Tom Amenta said he found himself in “middle-of-nowhere,” Afghanistan, in 2002 as an Army Ranger in a remote area some 15 minutes from the border with Pakistan. He was fighting the initial battles of a war that few knew would stretch on for 20 years. Now 40 and retired from the military, he felt anger foam inside as he watched the evening news. Headline after headline broadcast the latest gains by Taliban fighters, who have seized control of more than a dozen of the country’s provincial capitals as the Afghan government inches closer to collapse in the final days of the U.S. withdrawal. Friends who had been killed there came to mind, including NFL star Pat Tillman. Fond memories of former Afghan colleagues, such as interpreters, who remained in the country and whose fates he didn’t know, also resurfaced. “It makes me angry, really angry,” Amenta said of the U.S. withdrawal, lamenting the billions upon billions of dollars spent on the war effort—not to mention the emotional, financial and human toll suffered by thousands of Americans who served or sent their loved ones to fight in Afghanistan. “I mean, why did my friend get blown up? For what?” said Amenta. “No one’s saying, ‘Hey, you know, at least we did something.’ There’s just nothing to really show for it,” former Army medic Frank Scott Novak said. “And so, everyone’s kind of angry and wondering, why? Why were we even there?”

Nobody running Lebanon, says central bank boss (Reuters) Lebanon’s central bank governor said nobody was running the country as he defended his decision to halt fuel subsidies that have drained currency reserves, saying the government could resolve the problem by passing necessary legislation. In an interview broadcast on Saturday, governor Riad Salameh pressed back against government accusations that he had acted alone in declaring an end to the subsidies on Wednesday, saying everyone knew the decision was coming. The move is the latest turn in a crippling financial crisis that has sunk the Lebanese pound by 90% in less than two years and pushed more than half the population into poverty. Salameh said Lebanon could recover but it was not possible to say how many years that would take. “So far you have nobody running the country,” he said in the interview with Radio Free Lebanon. Lebanon’s sectarian politicians have failed to agree on a new government since Prime Minister Hassan Diab quit last August after the catastrophic Beirut port blast.

#headlines #news

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tomasorban · 4 years

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5G: The Final Assault

The reason why millimetre waves are to be used for 5G is that much larger bands of spectrum are available in the Extremely High Frequencies than at lower frequencies. This means that there can be much broader “bandwidth.” Broader bandwidth means that larger quantities of data can be transferred and the speed of transfer of the data will be significantly faster. One of the effects of this is that it reduces what is called “latency,” or time-lag, in the system, improving the quality of video streaming. But in so doing, it also enables a greater seamlessness between the data accessible from virtual sources and our perceptions of objects in the real world, as is required, for example, in Augmented Reality applications. Greater seamlessness means that we more effortlessly inhabit the natural and the electronic worlds as if they were a single reality.

One of the technical problems of using frequencies in the millimetre region of the spectrum is that because the waves carrying the data are so tiny, being only millimetres long, they are less able to pass through physical barriers, like walls and trees, than are the longer waves of lower frequencies. This is why it is necessary to have so many more new “micro-cells” or “base stations.” They will need to be spaced at 100 metres apart in cities because beyond this distance their signals weaken and are therefore less able to penetrate buildings and connect with the devices inside. As well as being more closely spaced, the 5G micro-cells will operate at much higher power than current phone masts in order to ensure that the signals are sufficiently strong.

Because the wavelengths are so much smaller, the antennas transmitting and receiving them will also be much smaller than those of current phone masts and electronic devices. A single 5G transmitter/receiver will have a large number of tiny antennas, grouped together in one unit. An array of just over a thousand such antennas measures only four square inches, so will easily fit into a small base station on a lamppost, while the smartphone in your pocket will probably have sixteen

The following article, published in New Dawn 173 (May-June 2019), presents important information on the 5G networks currently being erected across urban landscapes in Australia, Britain, Europe, the USA, Asia, and eventually everywhere.

In November last year (2018), the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) authorised the rocket company SpaceX, owned by the entrepreneur Elon Musk, to launch a fleet of 7,518 satellites to complete SpaceX’s ambitious scheme to provide global satellite broadband services to every corner of the Earth. The satellites will operate at a height of approximately 210 miles, and irradiate the Earth with extremely high frequencies between 37.5 GHz and 42 GHz. This fleet will be in addition to a smaller SpaceX fleet of 4,425 satellites, already authorised earlier last year by the FCC, which will orbit the Earth at a height of approximately 750 miles and is set to bathe us in frequencies between 12 GHz and 30 GHz. The grand total of SpaceX satellites is thus projected to reach just under 12,000.

There are at present approximately 2,000 fully functioning satellites orbiting the Earth. Some beam down commercial GPS (or ‘SatNav’), some provide TV, some provide mobile phone services, and some bounce radar back and forth to produce images for meteorologists and military surveillance. The Earth is thus already comprehensively irradiated from outer space. But the new SpaceX fleets will constitute a massive increase in the number of satellites in the skies above us, and a correspondingly massive increase in the radiation reaching the Earth from them. The SpaceX satellite fleet is, however, just one of several that are due to be launched in the next few years, all serving the same purpose of providing global broadband services. Other companies, including Boeing, One Web and Spire Global are each launching their own smaller fleets, bringing the total number of projected new broadband satellites to around 20,000 – every one of them dedicated to irradiating the Earth at similar frequencies.

Why this sudden flurry of activity? The new satellite fleets are contributing to a concerted global effort to ‘upgrade’ the electromagnetic environment of the Earth. The upgrade is commonly referred to as 5G, or fifth generation wireless network. It has become customary in tech circles to talk about the introduction of 5G as involving the creation of a new global “electronic ecosystem.” It amounts to geo-engineering on a scale never before attempted. While this is being sold to the public as an enhancement of the quality of video streaming for media and entertainment, what is really driving it is the creation of the conditions within which electronic or “artificial” intelligence will be able to assume an ever-greater presence in our lives.

The introduction of 5G will also require hundreds of thousands of new mini mobile phone masts (also referred to as “micro-cells” or “base stations”) in urban centres throughout Australia, and literally millions of new masts in cities throughout the rest of the world, all emitting radiation at frequencies and at power levels far higher than those to which we are presently subjected. These new masts are much smaller than the masts we currently see beside highways and on top of buildings. They will be discreetly attached to the side of shops and offices or secured to lampposts. The 20,000 satellites are a necessary supplement to this land-based effort, for they will guarantee that rural areas, lakes, mountains, forests, oceans and wildernesses, where there are neither buildings nor lampposts, will all be incorporated into the new electronic infrastructure. Not one inch of the globe will be free of radiation.

Given the scale of the project, it is surprising how few people are aware of the enormity of what is now just beginning to unfold all around us. Very few people have even heard about the 20,000 new satellites that are due to transform the planet into a so-called “smart planet,” irradiating us night and day. In the national media, we do not hear voices questioning the wisdom, let alone the ethics, of geo-engineering a new global electromagnetic environment. Instead, there is a blithe acceptance that technology must continue to progress, and the presence in our lives of increasingly “smart” machines and gadgets that each year become cleverer and more capable is an inevitable part of this progress. And who doesn’t want progress? Almost everyone loves their sleek and seductively designed phones, iPads and virtual assistants, and regards them as an indispensable part of their lives.

The question we should ask is whether we also want increasingly intense exposure of the natural environment and all living creatures, including ourselves, to more and more electromagnetic radiation. Is it likely that this does not entail any adverse health consequences, as both government and industry claim? If the electromagnetic waves that connect our smartphones to the Internet travel through brick, stone and cement, then what happens when these same waves encounter our bodies? Be assured that they do not just bounce off us! They travel into the human body. The degree to which they are absorbed can be precisely measured in what is called the Specific Absorption Rate, expressed in Watts per kilogram of biological tissue. When we fill our houses with WiFi, we are irradiating our bodies continuously. When we hold a smartphone to our ear, electromagnetic waves irradiate our brains (figure 2). Do we really believe this could be completely harmless?

Waves and Frequencies

At present, mobile phones, smartphones, tablets, WiFi and so on all operate at under 3 GHz in what is called the “microwave” region of the electromagnetic spectrum. If you could see and measure their wavelengths, you would find that they are many centimetres (or inches) long. A smartphone operating at 800 MHz, for example, sends and receives signals with wavelengths of 37.5 centimetres (just under 15 inches). Operating at 1.9 GHz, the wavelengths are 16 centimetres (just over 6 inches). WiFi uses the 2.4 GHz frequency band with 12 centimetre wavelengths (just under 5 inches long).

The introduction of 5G will entail the use of considerably higher frequencies than these, with correspondingly shorter wavelengths. Above 30 GHz, wavelengths are just millimetres rather than centimetres long. The millimetre waveband (from 30 GHz to 300 GHz) is referred to as Extremely High Frequency, and its wavelengths are between 10 millimetres and 1 millimetre in length.3 Up to the present time, Extremely High Frequency electromagnetic radiation has not been widely propagated, and its introduction marks a significant step change in the kind of electromagnetic energy that will become present in the natural environment.

Both 5G satellites and 5G land-based masts will use a system called the “phased array.” In phased array, groups of antennas are co-ordinated to radiate pulses in a specific direction and in a specified time sequence. This allows a concentrated beam of radio waves to be exactly aimed at designated targets, to enable signals to be sent or received. Because the beams are concentrated in this way, this adds to their power, which means they are able more easily to penetrate buildings. But it also means that any living creature that gets in the way of such a concentrated beam will be subjected to a powerful dose of extremely high frequency radiant electricity.

A study published earlier this year demonstrated that certain insects, because of their small body-size, are particularly vulnerable to the millimetre waves of the higher frequencies to be utilised by 5G. Other studies have shown that bacteria and plants are vulnerable, and so also (as one might expect) are the skin and the eyes of animals including, of course, human beings.

As well as its ability to concentrate power in focused beams, phased array technology has a further complicating factor. Either side of the main beam, the time intervals between the pulses are different from the time intervals between those of the main beam, but they may overlap each other in such a way as to produce extremely rapid changes in the electromagnetic field. This can have a particularly detrimental effect on living organisms, because instead of the radiation decaying when it is absorbed into living tissue, it can be re-radiated within the body. The moving charges streaming into the body effectively become antennas that re-radiate the electromagnetic field and send it deeper into the organism. These re-radiated waves are known as Brillouin precursors, named after the French physicist Leon Brillouin, who first described them in 1914. Research suggests that they can have a significant and highly detrimental impact on living cells.

>read full article<

#5g #technology #ecology #environmental #genetics #consciousness

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ekosystem · 4 years

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Self-Isolation : Tips from 108

Today’s message by Guido Bisagni aka 108 who is probably one of the first ten person I had a contact with via ekosystem.org about 20 years ago !

108: "This is the 4th weeks of “quarantine” at home, I go outside just one or two times every week to buy food at the supermarket, the situation here is not as bad as it is in Lombardy, but we are very close, the province is on the border and the Hospitals here are collapsing too. Luckily we live in a country were the health system is public, maybe it's not perfect, but they are doing everything they can, at least on this area, but the situation is so bad that places inside hospitals are not enough and they are working to make new places everyday, even masks and gloves are not enough. I can't imagine how terrible must be this situation in countries with a weaker health system or in the USA. People don't understand how bad this virus is until they don't see it coming closer: there is no more space for coffins at the cemeteries and crematoriums and they are stocking dead people inside the churches, now, near home. What shocked me is to see people everywhere saying: “ it kills just old people” or things like that, like if your parents and grandparents dies is not important. The fact is also that if you are young and you can't find a place at the hospital with very important cures, you die anyway. You die completely alone and you have no funeral. Now I stop with this horror, it's different when it's near home and that's not a scifi movie, I just wanted to say that because people seems not to understanding it, even in Italy where the situation is not too bad.

There are some “good” side anyway: there are almost no cars outside, no noises, I live in the centre of the city in the most polluted area in Europe and I never felt the air so clean. I can hear birds singing in the morning. I hope we can learn something from this situation, in many ways, but obviously I don't know, the economic crisis will be the biggest problem after this.

108+CT (2020) Ok, what I'm doing now? To be honest I do what I usually do in the 90% of times when I'm not travelling and to be honest I was a little bit tired of travelling recently. I work alone in my studio, luckily inside my home, with my cats. Usually I see my girlfriend few days in a week, because during the week she works in Milan, but luckily she can works from home (for more than one month now) so, I'm not alone. Here it's still cold outside, this morning it was 2°c on my balcony, so staying at home is not so bad, I don't miss too much going out for drinking stuff, I save some money and I don't miss too much social contacts, in fact I avoid video meetings too. It was a long time I wanted to stop a bit drinking beer and stuff, so I haven't a drink since the first day of quarantine. I'm enjoying a lot green tea and other infusion, I'm cleaning myself a lot. What I miss too much is going to hike, to ride bike on the countryside and a real contact with nature outside, this is the part I really miss. I can't wait to go back in some old factory around here with friends like CT or Eleuro, but, after years I finally have some rest too, I can read some of the thousands of books I bought during the years, watching movie, working on stuff just because I want to do it.

I'm listening to a lot of music, as usual, but this period changed my playlist a bit. I almost stopped with heavy/fast stuff, I'm listening to a lot of traditional japanese stuff, koto for example, I always liked that stuff, but now I can really listen to it for all day long. I'm making a lot of research on youtube, the only social I like, to find new things: shinto-imperial music, it's very hard to find, because I don't know japanese language, but with a lot of patience I can learn something. Also indian ragas, sitar stuff, and a lot eastern classical music. Than I listen to some classical stuff too, Purcell is always my favourite, tons of stuff, a lot of Jazz. When I cook and we eat we listen a lot to the classics like Miles Davis or Coltrane, but my absolutely favorite now are Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra, unfortunately I'm ignorant about Jazz in general, so I'm listening to it in a very spontaneous way. I'm listening to a lot of ambient music, some old traditional stuff of my region that's very very hard to find (sometimes it sounds like irish stuff, crazy!) and obviously to the usual music I like: post punk, new wave, experimental... but less. When I'm working I watch, or better I just listen, to a lot of documentaries. Expecially historical stuff, anthropological stuff.

We are watching a lot of movies and some series. I see everyone is 100% on Netflix, I must say some series are fine, I totally like the new one about Freud few days ago. But to be honest I prefere other stuff, I prefere non-american stuff, old tv series and films. Untill the 80s public italian TV produced some of the greatest masterpieces ever, so I can give you some advices, if you find them: The Odissey, by Franco Rossi (1968, 8 episodes), if you like that kind of visionary/oniric things (and a bit creepy) you should watch Pinocchio (by Comencini 1972, 5 episodes) or, in a way related to the actual situation, I promessi sposi from (1989) with a nice part about the pestilence in Milano.

Last tip, very important to me, for these days is to try mediation and relaxation techniques. I have problems with anxiety, the worst time was 11 years ago, I had to deal with it for years and this kind of techniques helps a lot to exit from those dark times and to stop with pills. Obviously when you are fine you may stop, like me, but right now, in some days anxiety is growing again very high, so I started again, we have a lot of time at home and you can try it. You may think that's sometimes for hippies, but you must be patient and sometimes you can't really believe how powerfull it can be and how it makes your life better."

If you want to learn more about 108 visit his website, his Instagram page and/or his photo gallery on ekosystem.org.

#108 #Italy #self isolation

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beesloosewithcanon · 5 years

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11 Questions Meme

Rules: answer the questions of the person who tagged you, come up with 11 new ones, and tag 11 new people.

I was tagged by @natsora! Thanks, lovely! this was fun!

1. What’s your favourite food?

It’s a dead tie between maki rolls and mushroom risotto. Both have rice… so should I just say rice?

2. What’s the most dangerous thing you’ve done?

Heh. Story time.

I was in technical theatre all through high school (building sets, managing sound levels, creating props, and, my specialty, lighting). My high school had a massive auditorium that sat a over a thousand people. Not only was it used for our school productions and events, but it was also consistently used by the city for things like the Symphony and traveling professional ballet performances. Anyway – so this massive theatre had catwalks about three stories up where we hung 80% of our lighting instruments. Normally when you have a theatre with a lighting rig like that, you wear a safety harness while you’re working. Not me (or the other technical theatre students). We used the buddy system: one of us would lie on the catwalk floor and pretty much dangle over the edge while we worked to adjust lights or change out colors while our buddy would hold ankles and sit on our feet. And I did this all the time. While I was doing it, it never seemed dangerous. But looking back on it, if the buddy wasn’t strong enough, I would have definitely fallen to my demise on more than a dozen occasions, like two phones of mine had.

I also grew up in Alaska and came face to face with a least half a dozen bears when wondering around the mountainside alone as a kid. So... my definition of what is or isn’t dangerous is a bit skewed I suppose.

3. What’s your guilty pleasure?

I haven’t watched it in ages but I’d have to say the TV show Lost Girl. It’s awful, like – all around awful (acting, premise, story, directing, etc.) but I enjoy it.

4. What’s your dream job?

Character/dialogue writing for a triple-A game franchise or simply being a writer in the gaming industry.

5. What’s your favourite song or music?

My music tasks are super eclectic (like I’ll go from listening to EDM to top 40 to classical symphonies to rock, and then dubstep in the same car ride. It’s wild), but the one song that always makes me stop and listen is a piano piece called The Heart Asks Pleasure First.

6. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would that be?

A cabin in the woods a few miles outside of a small town. It’s not that I dislike people (I’m an extrovert who really enjoys people and enjoys hosting people at my house), but my mental health is better when I’m surrounded by nature instead of concrete. A specific place that fits the bill is a tiny fishing town in Alaska, called Gustavus.

Or I’d love to live in Northern Japan, in the Hokkaido region of Japan.

7. How many pets do you have?

I have two! An eleven-year-old corgi named Piper and an almost one-year-old border collie lab mix rescue named Twig.

8. Do you have other creative outlets beyond the one you are engaging in most often?

Yes! On Tumblr it’s all fanfiction, but I also run a review site for queer media called thequeerblr.com (which I haven’t posted to in two months because I’ve been busy with other things); I write original queer fiction but haven’t finished anything yet or have tried to have it published; I am the Game Master (GM or DM depending on your tabletop RPG experience) for my D&D group that plays every weekend and have created a completely original world setting and story for my players; I slowly crochet blankets for friends (but mostly for my dogs); I draw and paint on occasion; and on even rarer occasions, I play guitar and piano if I have them available to me.

9. Recommend me a book or a fanfic

Oh, do I have a book recommendation for you! I love the Princess Series by Jim C. Hines (The Stepsister Scheme, The Mermaid’s Madness, Red Hood's Revenge, and The Snow Queen’s Shadow). The first book is a little slow on the uptake, but it’s a four-part book series that is a vague retelling of several popular fairy tale stories with like a… Charlie’s Angles twist? Basically, there are three princesses who work as the Queen’s special task unit and I know that sounds cheeky as hell, but the characters are amazing. Each princess has her own unique character arc and character development. And there is a lesbian main character in it who I love to pieces.

10. Can you go one week without your mobile phone and internet?

Absolutely. Just put me in nature with a journal and a tent.

11. How many WIPs do you have at the moment?

Hahahahaha …. Ha… haaaa. Fuck. Um… fanfiction alone I have 7 (only three of which are currently posted), and for my original fiction, I have… 10? 12 if you include a game concept and a podcast concept? So almost 20 altogether.

Fuuuuuuuuuuck.

Alright, tagging: @natsora @sredmund @ieatlazers @renwritesstuff @caniusproductions @adventurewithtea @korra-of-the-south @wolf-heart1197 @rpgwarrior4824 @theoreticallye @raedmagdon

Obviously no obligations. <3

Your questions:

1. If you could rewrite one game, which one and why? 2. What is one thing you like about reading fanfiction over published fiction? 3. What is one thing you like about reading published fiction over fanfiction? 4. What is one piece of media that you love but have yet to dive into its online fandom? 5. What fandom consumes most of your Tumblr feed? 6. Given the opportunity to live in another country, would you? Or would you stay in your current country? Why? 7. If you were given the opportunity, by like a wizard or something, to suddenly be a master at your preferred craft (writing, drawing, painting, sewing, etc.), would you take that offer? Or would you continue to learn the skill and grow on your own? 8. What period setting do you enjoy the most for the media you consume (historical, modern, futuristic, etc.)? 9. What type of artwork (if any) do you have hung in your living space? 10. What is your favorite genre to write? (If you’re not a writer, what is your favorite genre to read?) 11. What is your favorite type of nature (forest, beach, plains, etc.)?

#11 questions meme #holy shit coming up with questions was way harder than answering them #ask me stuff #ask me things #this was fun

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quakerjoe · 5 years

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50 years ago today, a photograph was taken that would reframe how we humans saw our planet. As I reflect on the year that’s been, I am thinking of all the news reports on the damage being inflicted on our fragile Earth.

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There is an image you’ve probably seen of a bright marble set against complete blackness. The marble sits in a shadow. It is mostly blue and swirling white, with a hint of green and brown. In the foreground of the photograph is a swath of barren gray. This picture is considered one of the most iconic images in human history. It altered our sense of ourselves as a species and the place we call home, because that marble is our planet seen from the vastness of space, and the gray horizon we see in the foreground is the moon. The photograph has a name: Earthrise.

The image was captured by astronaut William Anders of Apollo 8 on the first manned mission to orbit the lunar sphere, and the photograph can be seen as a mirror image for every vision humans had ever experienced up to that point. From before the dawn of history, our ancestors looked up in the night sky and saw a brilliant moon, often in shadow. But in that moment on Apollo 8, three men from our planet looked back and saw all the rest of us on a small disk with oceans, clouds, and continents.

This image, so peaceful and yet so breathtaking, was taken at the end of a turbulent year. It was Christmas Eve 1968, but from up there you would never know that a hot war was raging in Vietnam or that a Cold War was dividing Europe. You wouldn’t know of the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or Bobby Kennedy. From that distance, people are invisible, and so are cities, countries, and national boundaries. All that separates us ethnically, culturally, politically, and spiritually is absent from the image. What we see is one fragile planet making its way across the vastness of space.

There was something about that photograph that struck deep into the souls of many people about our place in the heavens, and a year later it appeared on a postage stamp (six cents at the time) with the caption “In the beginning God . . .” The photograph is also widely credited with galvanizing a movement to protect our planet. Over the course of the 1960s, people increasingly spoke of a Spaceship Earth, a notion eloquently voiced by United States ambassador Adlai Stevenson in a speech he gave to the United Nations in 1965. “We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.” With the Earthrise photograph, suddenly Spaceship Earth was no longer a metaphor. It was there for all of us to see.

The 1960s and 1970s were times of such social upheaval that the environmental movement is often overlooked. But real action was happening. In 1962, Rachel Carson, a trained marine biologist, published one of the most important books in American history, Silent Spring. It focused on the dangers of synthetic pesticides like DDT, showing how these chemicals could insidiously enter an ecosystem and wreak unintended havoc on the health of a wide range of animals, including humans. The book hit like a thunderclap. The reaction from the chemical industry was fierce and unrelenting, but the public uproar was even more substantial.

The moral weight of Carson’s argument changed the equation for how we measured our actions; the health of the earth became part of the discussion. That book contributed to the rising pressure on government officials to act to protect our planet, and in 1970 we saw both the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency (signed into law by President Richard Nixon) and the first Earth Day (organized by Wisconsin’s Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson). The year also saw an important expansion of the Clean Air Act (first passed in 1963). The Clean Water Act would come in 1972. The environment was now an important national priority, and support for it was bipartisan.

For all the talk of Spaceship Earth and Earth Day, however, there was a belief at the time that environmentalism was a series of local battles. When it came to air and water pollution, we worried about the health of the smog over Los Angeles and the chemical runoff into the Hudson River. Over time, we saw environmental threats become more regional, with acid rain and the depletion of the ozone layer. It was hard to imagine, though, that we could harm the planet on a global scale. But all the while, ever since the start of the industrial revolution, an odorless and invisible pollutant was being pumped into our atmosphere with increasing volume — from our tailpipes, smokestacks, and the clear-cutting of forests. We now know that carbon dioxide and the resulting climate change is a threat of a magnitude unlike anything we have ever seen before. Those are the stakes we face today.

In the summer of 2007, I traveled 450 miles north of the Arctic Circle to the Canadian tundra to report on a development that was shocking for any student of history. For centuries, famed explorers had searched for a shipping route from Europe to Asia through the frigid north. It was dubbed the Northwest Passage, and it proved to be a deadly and illusory dream, as many ships and men went in to never return. So when my colleagues and I heard reports that melting sea ice was possibly unlocking the passage, we set about to document the dramatic climate change at the end of the earth. Some of my crew spent days aboard a Canadian Coast Guard research icebreaker, and I met them in the Inuit village of Arctic Bay, population about 700 hardy souls.

What both the scientists and the local inhabitants understood was that a world of ice was undergoing rapid and unpredictable change. I remember taking a walk along a rocky shoreline with an elderly Inuit woman, who pointed at the open water and explained how, even in the summer, it had once been largely ice. She talked of seal pelts that were not as thick because of the warmer water and her worries that her people’s way of life was in danger of being irrevocably lost. Meanwhile, on the research boat, scientists were rushing to understand how this changing climate was affecting marine life and whether they could find clues to the arctic environment of the past by dredging the bottom of the sea.

It is an awesome realization that Earth, which has always seemed boundless, is so susceptible to the negative byproducts of human activity. Perhaps that is what makes it difficult for some to accept climate change. As we walk through nature, it seems so robust and permanent. And for the vast majority of the history of our species, we did not have the power to destroy the planet.

But if you look back to the beginning of the environmental movement, you will see that it sprang from a dawning realization of how damaging humans could be. In the late nineteenth century, the mighty bison of the American West, estimated to once have numbered in the tens of millions, were slaughtered over just a few decades to the brink of extinction. Hunting parties would shoot indiscriminately from train windows as sport, leaving thousands of carcasses to rot in the sun. A seemingly limitless resource suddenly was on the verge of disappearing. By then, a growing spirit of naturalism was capturing the nation’s attention, personified by writers like Henry David Thoreau. And leading citizens in the United States, men with political power like Theodore Roosevelt, decided to act.

They formed conservation clubs that began to have an effect on the federal government. Yellowstone National Park, considered the first national park in the world, was founded in 1872. Yosemite was added in 1890. A movement had been born. But meanwhile, a very different revolution had begun half a world away. The first modern internal combustion engine was built in the 1870s, and in 1886 German engineer Karl Benz patented the first motorcar. Over the ensuing century and decades, as the environmental movement grew in its scope and importance, Earth was getting sicker.

None of this was known when I was growing up. The Texas economy of my youth was literally being fueled by oil, and there seemed to be nothing incompatible with black gold and the health of the wide world outside my door. Some of my earliest memories were of running through the wild meadow that bordered my neighborhood on the outskirts of Houston, looking at bugs, lizards, and, it being Texas, a lot of snakes. There was a creek a little farther out, and when I was young, my mother made it known to me that it was a boundary I dare not cross. Beyond the creek lay deep woods, and as I grew older, I was allowed to wander alone beneath the strong oaks and towering pines, turned loose in nature. In the midst of the woods was the Buffalo Bayou, and I learned how to swim in its languid waters. In truth, the bayou had already been polluted by the oil refineries and chemical plants around Houston. But we boys, frolicking in the water, didn’t know that. We were living out our fantasies of being latter-day Tom Sawyers and Huck Finns.

In that great meadow and the forest beyond, the world seemed exciting and alive. It was teeming with rabbits, squirrels, and the occasional coyote. There were birds in the skies and all those snakes on the ground. Most were harmless, but there were poisonous ones as well — rattlesnakes, water moccasins, coral snakes, and the spreading adder, what we called the “spreadin’ adder.” My mother worried about snakes, but she knew that they were part of the Lone Star way of life. You had to be alert, knowledgeable, careful, and a bit lucky — just like in life.

My father was the kind of hunter who believed that you shouldn’t hunt something you don’t know a lot about, and he instilled in me a deep respect for the natural world. As we walked together on warm summer evenings, his hunting rifle in hand, he would explain the life cycle of rabbits and that the best place to find squirrels was where the “hardwoods met the pine trees,” because squirrels liked the height of the pine trees and the nuts of the hardwoods. Whether this was provable from scientific study, or even whether someone has ever chosen to study such a thing, I do not know. But it was the kind of wisdom that came from a lifetime of observation, and nature tends to make all of us open our eyes and think.

My father also believed that you ate what you killed, and so my mother had a number of recipes that fit both rabbit and squirrel interchangeably. Sometimes we just ate the meat broiled with a side of sliced tomatoes or homemade pickles. Other times it was stewed. More often, it was fried. It might not sound like much, but it was pretty good. My father would also usually get a couple of deer during the hunting season, which was the legal limit. We would eat every bit that was edible, and that could take quite a while. Dad was terrific with a shotgun, so we spent many a time cleaning, then eating, ducks and quail.

In the nature around my house I learned life lessons — an overworked phrase, I grant you, but an apt one. When I was nine years old, my friends and I came across a giant softshell turtle in the Buffalo Bayou. It was the biggest one we had ever seen, and we spent the entire day tracking it. After many foiled attempts, we finally snared it, bound it up, and walked back the mile or so to my parents’ house. We filled a tub with water in the backyard and put it in. We felt like conquering heroes, but that only lasted until my father came home from work. When he saw what we had done, he was furious and explained to me how such behavior could harm a wild animal like this turtle. Even though it was after dark, he insisted that I carry the turtle back to where we’d found it. Now, this wasn’t the equivalent of a valiant effort to save an endangered species, but my father’s instinct was the same: Nature was not there for us to exploit or toy with. It is a lesson I have never forgotten.

Going into the forest with my dad was a backdrop to my young life. It was just what people did. I was expected to be able to identify the species of trees and to know how to avoid getting lost. Nature wasn’t something that you drove to, or planned on seeing, or for which you bought a fancy outdoor wardrobe. I worry that now it is an activity that must compete with soccer practices, homework, piano lessons, and all the other responsibilities that fill up the calendar of a family with children. All those are surely wonderful and rewarding, but so too is just letting your legs wander through the trees and meadows, and having your mind wander as well.

Today most of us encounter few animals and plants in our daily lives, and most of what we do see are either the ones we have domesticated or the vermin and weeds that can thrive in the cracks of modernity. Growing up I was enthralled by the night sky. But now most of us can see only a few faint stars at night, the ones bright enough to make it through the domes of light that enclose our metropolises. For all of human history, the night sky told stories, delineated time, and guided voyagers. Now 30 percent of the people on the planet can’t even see the Milky Way from their homes. And in the United States, 80 percent of us can’t.

We as a nation have done much to exploit the land, despoil it, and pollute it. From wildlife to wildfires, we have been shortsighted in our management. For too long the cost of doing business ignored the cost of that business to the environment. Still, we have been world leaders in conservation, preservation, and environmentalism. And that is what makes this moment in time so baffling and worrisome. Somehow the environment has become yet another point of contention between Democrats and Republicans. It is striking that those who live in urban centers and are more isolated from the natural world tend to vote for Democratic candidates who mostly favor stricter environmental regulations. Meanwhile, those in rural areas tend to vote for Republican candidates who more often advocate for laxer oversight of land, water, and pollution. I am not exactly sure how this came to be. Some of it likely has to do with the coarsening of dialogue between the two major parties on almost every issue, and ultimately the environment gets sorted along those binary lines as well. Research also suggests that those states whose economies are built on oil, gas, coal, and mining tend to be less likely to support environmental regulations, and understandably so. But whatever the cause, it is important to note that these political and social divides over the environment were not always this way.

It was an odd experience watching the heated debate as a cap and trade bill for carbon dioxide emissions and climate change made its way through Congress in 2009. The opposition from Republicans was fierce, with only a handful voting for final passage in the House of Representatives. Dozens of Democrats in conservative districts also voted against the bill. In the end, the legislation barely passed the House and was never even brought up in the Senate. And yet the very idea of cap and trade as a way to deal with environmental problems, where you set limits and allow polluters to trade in credits, had been the brainchild of Republicans. President Ronald Reagan had used cap and trade to phase out lead in gasoline, and President George H. W. Bush had used it to cut the pollutants causing acid rain.

When I sat down recently with George Shultz, who had served as secretary of state under President Reagan, he spoke with pride of the Republican legacy on the environment, stretching back to President Theodore Roosevelt. Secretary Shultz has become a vocal advocate for protecting the planet against climate change, and he reminded me that major environmental progress — from the founding of the EPA to tackling the ozone and acid rain problems, to strengthening clean water and air acts — had happened under Republican administrations.

Questions of the environment boil down to acts of leadership. Most people would say that they want clean air and water. The concerns that you hear about pitting economic growth against environmental protections are legitimate; we need a balanced approach. Our modern lives require that we mine, till, fish, generate electricity, and discard refuse. We will never return to some mythic state of environmental purity. Nor would we want to. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be wiser about how we use our limited resources and protect our planet. I believe that if there was leadership on this issue in both political parties, the American people would rally to action.

We humans seem to have a hard time measuring risk. We can see the dangers in the moment, but threats that stretch over the course of generations are hard for us to judge, let alone act to remedy. Climate change is just such a problem. Even though we already see very worrisome fluctuations in Earth’s functions — extreme weather, vanishing sea ice, rising temperatures, and rising oceans — the most dire effects will not strike with full force until well after I am gone. We can hide from the truth for now, but it will not last. In my interview with Secretary Shultz, he described climate change as a clear and present danger even if many of his fellow Republicans do not see it that way. I asked him how he felt about this state of affairs. He said those who deny climate change now will ultimately be “mugged by reality.” Mugged by reality. It is a strong phrase. The danger is that when the climate deniers are finally mugged, it will be, by definition, too late. Already we are seeing the glaciers melt in Greenland and massive ice sheets breaking off Antarctica.

Often I find myself thinking back to my boyhood out in the forests and meadows and how those experiences spurred in me a love of our natural world. One of the joys of my later life has been the summer days I spend in quiet contentment fishing in the upper Beaverkill River in the Catskill mountain range of western New York State. My eyes are mostly focused on the action in the stream, watching the currents and eddies, casting flies, looking for trout willing to bite. But I often glance up to contemplate the flora and fauna of the riverbank — particularly the birch trees that are rooted just on the edge of the water. They favor the embankments in many northern climes, and sometimes, as I take in the scene, an old African American spiritual comes to mind. I begin singing slowly, “Just like a tree planted by the water, I shall not be moved. I shall not be, I shall not be moved. . . .” The hymn may say I shall not be moved, but I often am, in that strange and mystical way engaging in nature often moves us.

There is an elegance to birches, tall and slender, with their distinctive white bark. I’ve always liked them because my long-departed mother loved them so. Born, raised, and buried on the semitropical Texas Gulf Coast, she never saw a live birch, only pictures in a book. Mother’s favorite tree, however, was the native magnolia, which flourishes all along the Texas Gulf Coast and adjacent piney woods. She loved their strength and the fragrance of their large white blossoms. That scent permeating and enveloping in the heavy humidity of Texas nights is among the fondest memories of my childhood. I smell it often, even when a magnolia is nowhere in sight.

I like to sit out there on the river for a long while, and take a deep breath and close my eyes. Nature doesn’t please only our sense of sight. I can hear the soothing sounds of running water and swaying leaves in the background. Nature has the power to inspire one’s mind and move one’s soul like great music or poetry. It can fill you with humility when you encounter the otherworldliness of the Grand Canyon. It can fill you with awe when you tilt your head back and try to tease out the top of a towering redwood. It can spark your imagination as you try to visualize a time when the entire continent was as wild as Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. And it can fill you with sadness when you see how much the glaciers in Glacier National Park are receding. What are we doing? What have we done?

I am an optimist by nature, and I believe we can find a will to save the planet. We have a strong and growing environmental sensibility in this country and around the world — especially among the young. But there are hurdles, not the least of which come from many of our elected officials. We have seen the undue influence of big money from the fossil fuel industry, along with their allies in government, actively undermine climate science. We have seen crises like what has taken place in Flint, Michigan, call into question our national commitment to equal access to clean water and air. To the countless generations yet to be born, what world will we leave for them? We have seen that we can make progress and repair damage to the environment. But now, when it is needed with an urgency we haven’t really seen before, we are blinking. How can we open our eyes once again to the notion of a fragile planet, our only home?

Apollo 8 was on its fourth pass around the moon when the commander, Frank Borman, initiated a scheduled roll of the spacecraft. On the audio recordings, you can hear William Anders, who was the lunar module’s pilot, react to a sight no human had ever seen before: “Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! There’s the earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty.” Anders called out to the third crew member, Jim Lovell, asking if he had color film. There was a scramble inside the spacecraft to get the picture taken before it was too late. They got their shot.

The astronauts were not looking for Earth when they went on their mission. The space historian Andrew Chaikin said Anders told him later, “We were trained to go to the moon. We were focused on the moon, observing the moon, studying the moon, and the earth was not really in our thoughts until it popped up above that horizon.” We need this vision of a unified and cohesive Earth to pop up once again over the horizon of our global complacency. We need to consider, with awe and humility, the future of our fragile home.

- Dan Rather

(Above is the "Environment" essay from my book What Unites Us)

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goloyieng · 3 years

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Brown Hair

By Apioth Mayom Apioth

Angok Juach is a fourth year, civil engineering student at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. He arrived in the United States on April 16th, 2001, along with his half-brother, Matiop, through the US Department of State Refugee-sponsored program of the so-called Lost Boys of Sudan. They were called the Lost Boys because they travelled unaccompanied for thousands of miles from the then Sudan (now South Sudan) to Ethiopia, and then to Kenya. Along the way, they fought off hunger, thirst, wild animals, and many war-induced humanitarian upheavals. He has a blurred memory of the first time he met his brother Matiop, because he was a seven-year-old then, when he was brought over by his father. Five years earlier, his father was remarried after Angok’s mother divorced him when she discovered his promiscuous ways. She first caught him in bed with another woman when she was coming back from the grocery shop, which was one street down the road. The second time she caught him she was coming from a traditional dance festival, which was held just two blocks away. All these betrayals happened while she was a mouth-call away from her husband. Before she packed her things and left, this was what she said: “How long do you plan on continuing following this wicked path?” She asked. “The last time you betrayed my trust, I forgave you and said, ‘maybe that witch caught you off guard during your weak moment.’ Now, what is even worse I caught you with a different woman this time. And all these things happened while I was just a few blocks away from the house. If you are like this, while I am within the corridors of the community, imagine, what you will do while I am vacationing in far-flung places like Malakal.” She said. Juach Sr. didn’t bother to say anything. He only bowed to change his bad boy image, and promised himself to never let another good woman slip away. And that was how Angok went to live with his mother and her new husband, his stepfather. Angok was three months old.

Matiop’s mother, Samira, on the flip side of the coin, was the daughter of a wealthy Iranian businessman, who had moved to Juba fifteen years earlier to find pastures anew. Juach first met Samira at Shirdel Supermarket when he went to solicit to let his future father-in-law to come and lecture one of his business classes on the principles of business management at a local Awado Secondary School, where he was the leading principal. Since Matiop’s grandfather was a prominent businessman in town he seemed like the right person to approach on how to generate wealth for your business. Matiop’s grandparents would prove to Juach as the hardest people to please. After Juach’s first encounter with Samira, it took him quite a few months to win her over. They seemed to be made for each other. Samira was a beautiful, well-behaved girl, who seemed to like everything about Juach. Besides, what was not to like about Juach: He was handsome, he had the height (he was standing at a whopping 6 feet, 8 inches), and had a slippery tongue, which at times, when he started cracking jokes, he would sent her laughing down the floor to walk on all fours; by then, he would just marvel at the wonders of his smart mouth. He didn’t have a long, hybrid face that sort of looked feminine; his was short, handsomely molded to look like a stubborn teenage face that refused to age. Samira felt that with Juach’s hulking towering figure, which sent a message of authority, and his slippery tongue, she would feel protected under his care.

Things by now had become clearer to Juach: he was riding a bobsled on cloud nine with Samira, and he was hitting an impenetrable fortress with Samira’s parents, who were highly disapproving of their marriage. Her parents’ objections were this: She had never known poverty and under this circumstance, she could survive the few years of marriage since she seemed to enjoy being around him, but how would she survive the whole life full of pitiful living hand to mouth? Juach’s income as a principal was barely enough for himself, let alone, another mouth to feed. One year would pass before Juach decided enough was enough. He coaxed Samira to elope with him. They went to Yambia, in the Southwestern part of the country, close to the international borders of Zaire, now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Yambio wasn’t popular in those days, except for its promising timber production. They settled down quickly, and barely a year later, Matiop was welcomed into the world. With Samira having given birth to Matiop, Juach felt Samira’s parents wouldn’t have too much objection to his prior proposal to take Samira’s hand in marriage. The thought of this triggered them to come rushing back to Juba; Juach, in particular, was becoming fed up with the suffocating small town’s environment: There were no bars, no clubs; places where he usually went to pop open a beer, or go on date nights with female friends to relief himself of the daily grind of work stress.

Upon returning, Samira’s parents finally gave up and allowed the couple to tie a knot. Samira’s parents felt there was no need to let their daughter lead a single life when there was someone to take care of her; as single mothers were looked down with contempt in those conservative days. On the other side of the town, Angok was adding on years at his mother’s and stepdad’s homestead. Five years went by rather quickly. Angok was now seven years old, and Matiop was five. Meanwhile, the thought of allowing his son to be raised by a family he hardly kept in touch with, made Juach felt at an unease. “What kind of man will he grow up to be?” He questioned himself knowingly. Juach went to greater lengths to convinced Angok’s mother about the prospects of finding peace if he was given the chance to raise him. Before long, Angok came to live with his father, Matiop, and Samira, his new stepmother. As Angok tried to make himself comfortable in his new home, Juach would sent the two boys to Werkou Cattle Camp in Jonglei Province, as it was the Dinka custom of that era. Young boys coming of age were expected to go through this mentoring process in order for them to pick up some valuable independent life skills. The boys having known the city life in their short lives, were now going to test their strengths against the natural world and against themselves. First, while they have known to live in houses all their life, now they were sleeping in the open and that meant going head to head with mosquitoes all night long; thwarting off fleas all day; and manning up against the rain whenever it decided to visit them. Second, whereas they were used to a healthy diet in the city, now they had to test themselves against the diet mainly composed of milk, fish, sorghum, and millet. This second test would prove to be the hardest thing they had ever faced in their entire lives thus far. It took them two gruesome weeks to be free of diarrheal infections. Everyone thought they would never survive that ordeal, but they put up a relentless fight to prove their doubters wrong.

As they began to settle in nicely with the lads, the unexpected happened: The Sudanese government’s reinforcement troops who were passing in the area, going in the direction of the town of Bor, started launching artillery into their cattle camp; four years earlier the Sudanese People Liberation Army/Movement – mainly opposition forces of the Southern Sudanese people who took up arms in rebellion against the discriminatory marginalizing policies of the Northern-affiliated government. Now as bullets and mortars had replaced mosquitoes and fleas as the only flying bodies in the air, everyone ran for their dear life. Not before long, the boys would find themselves being joined by other straying boys who were also fleeing the destruction of their villages and homes because Southern Sudan had automatically become a war zone. Their numbers were swelling up in their thousands, and their ultimate destination: Pinyudo Refugee Camp in Ethiopia. Unlike Werkou Cattle Camp, they left behind two months earlier, here, they were left to fend for themselves; there were no guidance mentors to show them quite a few tricks here and there. Food rations came every four months; this meant, they would ran out of the rations two months before the next round of the food dispensation came up. The only people they looked up for salvation was their Southern Sudanese Opposition Forces (the SPLA), they were in a league with. In three years between 1987 to 1990, the SPLA was triumphantly gaining ground in Sudan, capturing eleven towns to the dismay of the Khartoum government who wrote them off as just hordes of unorganized militia, who would fell into disarray sooner or later. Once the SPLA liberated a town, they would bring in captured booty to the camp: food, clothes, you name it, anything valuable to support their always needy friend “life.”

In the first few months of 1991, the Ethiopian government would be overthrown by Tigray Liberation Forces, which SPLA didn’t have any affiliation with whatsoever; so the camp was emptied to look for new alliances elsewhere. The boys would set out again, along with their camaraderie band of brothers dubbed the “Lost Boys of Sudan,” back to Sudan, stopping sporadically at places such as Pochalla, Magoth, and Narus, before trekking to Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. In Kakuma, if anything, life would hit down low into the deepest layers of the abyss. Yes, they were given food rations by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which was supposed to last a month. But these rations would barely last fifteen days; so they had to be shrewdly extra careful to avoid starvation. There was no SPLA to dispense them their exploits. There was absolutely no one to turn to. The regional governments in the Eastern African block were stretched thin catering to the needs of their constitutional citizens. Droughts and famines were occasional battles to stay vigilant of. Turkana, the natives in the region, occasionally came at night armed with their rifles to pillage the camp, worsening the hunger crisis. And combined these with the hot temperatures which made them felt as if it was frying their brains in the cauldron. Centuries of inhospitable semi-aid climatic conditions had turned Kakuma into uncultivable land. Even if there were abundant of crops to farm, the slippery sandy soil and scarcity of water wouldn’t allowed the endeavor to take place. Amid the deplorable inhumane circumstances they were facing, the boys would turn to education to relief themselves of their life frustrations. It was in Kakuma that their academic pursuits started to take shape. They would keep on progressing up to the sophomore year in secondary school. A decade earlier, in the late 1980s in Pinyudo, they had started their elementary school going all the way to second grade.

The boys would put up with these deplorable inhospitable conditions for eight more years, before they were airlifted by the United States Department of State in 2001. Angok and Matiop have been living together since their first encounter in 1986. They have had some good times, and some unforgettable times. Had they not been living side by side, they would not have reached this far. Memories are abound in their past. Thinking of one memory to generalize all their memories would do less justice to their harmonious relationship. Over the years, they had grown closer and became more than brothers; yes, it is true, they had different mothers, but what forced them to meet in the first place was the blood of their father which flow in their veins. One would think of one memory and there they are fighting together for their dear lives, for example, what about that time when they were fleeing the Tigray Liberation Forces, and they were forced to cross the Gilo River, just before arriving in the Sudan? Didn’t they stay close to each other to form extra cushion to avoid being swept away by the current, and to intimidate hungry crocodiles who were mauling away those who were so unfortunate? And that time in Pochalla, when food droppings from the airplanes were barely enough to go around for everyone? Didn’t they share the few scraps they had to see another day? They have had a good relationship up until now.

For the last three years, Angok often found himself with few alternatives to finance his education. His financial aid, a federal assistance from the US government for low income students, garners him to receive federal grants and student loans. Even with his own personal scholarships added to the fold, he is always clutching for outside help to cover all financial expenses. His annual’s total cost of attendance comes to 37 K. His financial aid and personal scholarships add up to cover about 25 K of the total. He also works part-time as an office assistant at Kim & Kim Certified Public Accountants (CPA), Inc. Once again, his office assistantship only covers about 9 K annually. This dilemma forced him to become a client at Spherion Clinical Trials three years prior. Here, they test new drugs on humans before they are readied for public consumption. He is summoned to come to Spherion once every two weeks. Angok had thus been successful in taking no risks with these drugs. One could say that lady good luck played its part in thwarting off danger from him. The reason for his successful evasion to actually participate in taking drugs was the procedure itself. The procedure only involved in finding their effects in urine. So, once he was given the drugs, he came right back home and trashed most of them, leaving only a scant portion of the drug in question. Then, on the day of the testing, he would take his scant portion of the drug, numbering only about two or three pills or tablets, to the office. He had to be extra careful with this too: he would hide these pills in the internal pockets of his pants. They used to ask him to empty his external pockets before testing. These internal pockets were only accessible by opening the zipper. He went to the tailor to have these pockets patched inside his trousers especially for this purpose. The drugs came in liquid, powdered, or tablet form. Once inside the testing room, and if it were a liquid, he would just mix the liquid with urine; and if it were in powdered or tablet form, he would ground it, put it on a thick clothing, pour the water into it, and let the water sieve into urine, leaving the solid powdered portion sitting on the clothing. This methodical process had been all easy and fun up until last week when they switched the testing for effects from urine to saliva.

One would default him for the ill effect that is about to happen to him, for he could have thwarted the danger away from him had he been in his right mind. But he wasn’t. He could have produced the right amount of saliva without putting himself in harm’s way by avoiding in putting the drug in his mouth, mixed it up with whatever drug he had, and there he could have gotten the right effect of the drug. The name of the drug on the pill bottle read: Mexir. A drug to be prescribed to those experiencing hair loss. Right after he was asked to come to the office, he took the pill, put it in his mouth, took about two minutes to let the pill dissolved juicily in his mouth, spat the little bugger out, and then took the testing sample. In the process, he just doesn’t remember how much of the pill he swallowed. On Wednesday, this week, the effects started to kick in. He began to feel constant headaches, slight fevers, and he was also sweating a lot every few hours in his sleep. By Friday, his hair began to change to dark red. By Sunday, it had settled to just plain brown. It was Sunday morning when the boys began to gather in front of the television set in their apartment in the Spokane Valley. The game was between Chelsea and Arsenal. Chelsea has been riding high since their Russian’s sugar daddy, Roman Abramovich, started pumping millions into the club in 2003. It has been the grandest stage for big stars to come and showcase their talents. For this game, Chelsea had Eden Hazard, Cesc Fabregas, John Terry, and Didier Drogba. Arsenal, on the other hand, had only Mesut Ozil. Arsenal played beautifully, but Chelsea’s big guns sealed the fate of the game. The match ended 2 – 0 in Chelsea’s favor.

After the game, the boys continued their conversation for a few more hours. Angok, who is a devoted Chelsea fan was now brimming with pride of Chelsea victory over Arsenal. Matiop, who was on the losing end of the stick this time around is a committed Arsenal fan. His fanhood spanned over two decades longer than Angok’s. Arsenal and Manchester United used to be the top two franchising clubs in the Premier League in the 1990s up until the early 2000s. Perhaps the reason why Matiop had stood around rooting for Arsenal for far too long is because of its history. It is not that Angok is not a big football fan, contrary to that, it was just that after moving to the United States in the early 2000s, he started receiving few football matches on Television. The reason? Football is not a popular sport in the US. However, he started picking up on the game after the 2006 World Cup fever started kicking in. The conversation began quite remarkably well as it is always known that victory add more weight to any event. Angok started rattling off by saying, “Bro, you see, how Chelsea owned Arsenal, man, your team need some work! The days when Arsenal used to be the top guns in the Premier are long gone.” Instead of congratulating the victors, Matiop asked “Since when did Orangutans know how to play football?” referring to the brown coloring of his hair. “Come again, what was that?” Angok asked. “You have heard what I said, Matiop replied. “I said, “Orangutans don’t know how to play football.” “Okay, let me get this straight, I have suddenly become an Orangutan after I received a slight coloring on my hair.” “Matiop, what has suddenly gotten into you?” Angok asked. The conversation continued for several hours without anyone backing down. Angok, upon realizing that he had some class projects he direly need to work on, asked, “Dude, do you mind to turn the volume down just a little bit, I have a few projects to go to battle with?” “Why do I have to do all of that? Matiop shot back. Besides, Orangutans don’t have the brains to design buildings, roads, and bridges. Their main preoccupation is to build their nests up the branches of the rainforest,” he continued. Angok in turn responded by, “Piecing together all the pieces of this clashing standoff, what I have realize is this: You have resorted in thinking that the color of my hair gives you a fair advantage over me because it is an area you have seen I have a weakness with. And because it is something you can’t identify with, it is all of a sudden a psychological weapon you think you can use to lower my confidence.” “It is a free world, you are entitled to think what you want. But facts are facts. Orangutans belong in the Jungle. They don’t mix with people. Spokane is far away from the rainforests of Asia and South America” Matiop responded in kind. Having realized this conservation was going nowhere, Angok stood up and said, “We have pour our hearts out and we are still not making any progress. I am going to leave you in peace, it seems I was trespassing on your marked territory. I feel sorry for your sudden change of opinions about me.” Having said that, he headed straight to his room, packed all his belongings and move to Hillyard, another Spokane neighborhood located in the eastern part of the city. He left Matiop watching HBO “Game of Throne.”

Angok was now midway through his fourth year. He didn’t become too depressed after his brother suddenly turned against him. He knew he was a responsible chap, capable of keeping his things straighten up. All the worries of him turning to a degenerating person was unheard of. Every once in a while, he kept thinking about what always makes people to use other people’s differences as a psychological warfare. He concluded that there is no easy fix to dehumanization tactics. In the world, and in every society, in particular, there are always good and bad people. But the line is blurred between good and bad people when it comes to competition for resources. Take, for example, Matiop, who had never said any derogatory remark to Angok before the Sunday game; all of a sudden after finding himself on the losing end of the stick, he raucously became defensive and used whatever means he had to make sure he stayed on a square level with Angok.

The boys didn’t stay in touch after Angok rushed out of their shared apartment. They never heard from their parents after leaving them in Juba in 1986. The boys didn’t expect much from that city anyway since it was under the Khartoum government until 2005. The Sudanese government was fond of committing many heinous crimes against the Southern Sudanese. Angok, on the other hand, continued visiting Spherion until the eve of his graduation. One year later, he was free of the brown coloration in his hair.

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lhs3020b · 3 years

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The Fugitive Worlds, by Bob Shaw

The Fugitive Worlds is the last novel in the Land/Overland trilogy. Since I’ve commented on the other two, here are my thoughts. And beware! here there (may) be Ropes! possbly even intersecting ones!

OVERVIEW

It's two generations or so after the Migration from Land. If you squint, society on Overland may have improved - apparently it has got a bit more meritocratic, there certainly has been some progress on gender issues, and this time the novel doesn't open with a random peasant being dragged off to be executed on some noble's arbitrary whim. Technology and infrastructure are changing - Cassyll Maraquine's industrial empire seems to be overseeing a pivot toward a metal-and-steam based economy, and in fact they seem to be in the early stages of an industrial revolution. On the plus side, this presumably means Overland isn't faced with another ptertha crisis in the near future, though a cynic may wonder if they've just swapped one environmental crisis for another one in a few centuries' time, when the seas start rising and the deserts begin to expand. But not to fear - there's every chance that the whole of society will be swept away by cataclysm long before that ominous possibility can occur!

You see, change is afoot in Overland's domain. Because, to the consternation of everyone except the government (who remain supremely complacent), a fourth planet has suddenly appeared in their star system. Attempts are made to bring this to the attention of the queen; unfortunately she's utterly fixated on a demented scheme to extend her reign back to Land itself.

At the opening of the novel, Toller Maraquine II, grandson of the star of the first two books, is discontent. As Cassyll's son, he could have had a life of wealth, privilege and social influence. Instead he spends his time mooning after his supposedly-heroic grandfather - yes, the same one who managed to simply forget that his first wife existed! Toller II, unfortunately, has inherited his grandfather's impetuousness and basic lack of any common sense. He's certainly not a monster, but he is an idiot. This is shown in the book's opening scenes, where he falls blindly in love with the Countess Vantara, despite the fact that she's an obvious schemer and bully.

Seeking to impress Vantara, Toller involves himself with the planned re-expansion onto Land. This swiftly gets disrupted, though, by the appearance of an expanding crystalline disk, growing across the zero-g datum plane that exists between the two twinned planets. The disk's rapid expansion cuts off travel between Land and Overland - it expands beyond the region of breathable air where the two planets' atmospheres meet - and to make matters worse, the Countess vanishes while trying to traverse said region! Oh no! Toller, of course, immediately resolves that he must go and rescue her. (She has treated him with nothing except derision and contempt by this point, and he of course fails to read the very obvious message in there.)

The predictable result of this is that Toller gets himself and his crew abducted by aliens, because of course the people of Land and Overland are actually currently bystanders in someone else's plans. Fortunately for Toller, the Dussarrans show no interest in probing him. Unfortunately for him, the expanding crystalline disk is actually a complex machine intended to relocate Dussarra itself away from the galaxy they all currently live in.

You see, the aliens believe that they are imminently threatened - their researchers have found evidence pointing to a collision between so-called "Ropes" somewhere astronomically nearby. (Ropes appear to be similar to the class of hypothetical topological defects that we call "cosmic strings" - fortunately for us, there's no evidence that cosmic strings actually exist in our universe.) This collision, they believe, will have produced an explosion somewhere between a gamma ray burst and a cosmological phase change. They fear that a wave of destruction is currently zooming toward them, at or close to the speed of light. If they are right, there is certainly no chance of Dussarra surviving it, hence their decision to begin relocating their planet.

Unfortunately there's a smaller problem. The Xa, the relocation engine they're constructing across the datum plane? When activated, it will destroy Land and Overland. The Dussarrans may be about to finish what the ptertha started around fifty years previously - the complete destruction of all civilisation on either Land or Overland!

A LEVER TO MOVE THE WORLD

Before we go any further, I'll give the Dussarrans credit for one thing: whatever their other faults, at least they're willing to think big. They are, after all, trying to address the Rope problem at source. If it were us in their situation ... well, half the newspapers would insist that Ropes don't exist, another third would claim they're leftist conspiracies to steal our precious body fluids, the remaining handful would write something mealy-mouthed about how Ropes might exist but maybe we shouldn't "overreact" for fear of a "pro-Rope" backlash. Centrists would call for a grand bargain with the Ropes - they can toast only HALF the planet in return for a top-up pupil premium on private school fees! Youtube user MagaCrypto2024 will tell you to invest your life savings in their newly-minted RopeCoin ("if it's golden enough for the quantum vacuum, it's gold enough for YOU!") and then a Tory would take 52% of the vote on a platform about how Ropes are great beacuse they'll eradicate the benefits claimants. 10 seconds after that, the shockwave demolishes the entire planet, and of course no-one ever admits that perhaps, just perhaps, they may have got it a bit wrong.

I'll say it again, whatever their other faults, at least Dussarra has managed to react to the crisis, and their behaviour isn't completely-insane.

That said, the Dussarrans' solution does suck.

Apparently the Xa requires weightlessness and a large supply of free oxygen to grow. It's not really clear why the Dussarrans couldn't have simply built a large bubble, say at one of their Lagrange points, pumped that full of air, and grew their Xa in there. There is a suggestion that the planetary alignment between Land and Overland is important too, the book does flip-flop this a bit too. Anyway we're left with the impression that the Dussarrans didn't have a lot of choice in where they built the Xa and they do genuinely believe that they are fleeing a cosmologically-apocalyptic event. Also, it's a plot point that Dussarra isn't an ideologically-coherent monolith; in fact the plan faces substantial internal dissent, and this actually boils over into something as close as the Dussarrans can have to a civil war. This is doubly-significant as the Dussarrans' telepathy also stops them from fighting each other in the usual manner - bluntly, when someone dies nearby, the telepathic backlash is utterly-paralysing to any exposed Dussarran. Killing someone yourself would thus be near-impossible for a Dussarran, though as is common in Shaw novels, the Dussarran elite has found a way to do an end-run around this problem. (Non-lethal weapons don't have the same paralysing impact!)

On a slight tangent, one interesting twist in "The Fugitive Worlds" is that Toller and co are basically NPCs in the Dussarrans' story, and they don't realise it.

The place, I think, where the Dussarrans' scheme becomes morally-unacceptable is their failure to evacuate Land and Overland. The population of Dussarra is at least thirty million - that's their capital city alone! - and in fact is implied to be in the billions. They're a modern industrial society with modern technology, after all. By contrast, even if the Landers have been breeding like bunnies for the last two generations, the population of Overland still can't be more than a few hundred thousand at absolute most. My guess is that a more plausible number would be more like 50-75,000. Perhaps 250,000 if you stretch it (a low death rate and every family putting out 4, 5 or 6+ kids could just about get you there in this timescale).

The Dussarrans have remote teleportation tech, and the denouement shows that said tech can reach anywhere on Overland, even at a distance of millions of miles. In principle, they could remove everyone from Overland, and given the vast difference in population, they could certainly accomodate a few thousand more people on Dussarra. The point I'm making here is that an evacuation was possible; there was no technological, infrastructural or economic barrier that would have precluded it. Granted the Overlanders probably would have reacted badly to being hoovered off their homeworld - who wouldn't? - but, they're not 100% immune to reason either. As Divvidiv's interations with Toller show, Overlanders are capable of understanding the Rope problem, especially when telepathy is used to help said understanding along.

(Also, for that matter, there was nothing to stop the Dussarran government from trying to open diplomatic relations with Queen Dasseene's regime, and maybe saying "Uh, guys, sorry to be a nuisance but we've got some news you might want to hear about...")

Under normal circumstances, of course, abducting everyone off of their own homeworld would be bad. It's still not great, even in context. But, the Dussarrans do have genuine reason to believe that The End Of All Things is barrelling toward them at nearly speed of light. When the Rope-intersection event lights up Land/Overland's skies, we can reasonably assume that it will destroy both of those planets too. In fact, Divvidiv confirms this possibility in as many words. Relocating everyone to Dussarra, then using the Xa and the Land/Overland binary to relocate the planet somewhere safe would, in context, strike me as a morally-defensible solution to the crisis. While it would be sad to lose Land and Overland, it would at least allow both societies to survive.

(The question of Farland is never addressed in this. As far as we can tell, the Farlanders are on their own during this particular cosmological emergency.)

Perhaps unfortunately for everyone, Dussarra's leadership have apparently decided to pull a Thanos instead. Why they skipped over the obvious non-genocidal solution is never directly addressed, though there are hints. The Dussarran leadership patronisingly describes Overlanders as "Primitives" - it's implied that their racism is a factor in their failure to do anything for their new neighbours. Also, thinking about it, the callousness is thematically-consistent with the rest of the series. Throughout this trilogy we see leaders making decisions that are at-best based on expediency alone - witness how quick King Prad was to abandon Ro-Atabri in the first book - or sometimes, decisions are based actively on malice and spite (see the Sgt Gnapperl subplot from the second book). From that point of view, the behaviour of Director Zunnunun and the Dussarran authorities is not particularly-unusual.

The scheme also ends up entirely-backfiring. You see, the wrong planet gets displaced. Ooops.

We never learn the fate of Land or Dussarra for an absolute fact; Toller's post-event speculations are bleak, but the narrative may imply that Dussarra at least could have survived. (The Dussarran rebels return there after the confrontation on Overland - I don't think they would have done that if they thought that their Xa-disrupting box was going to destroy their homeworld in the process!) I'm less optimistic for Land - the planet is probably toast - but that said, there is no "on-screen" death and what happened during the Xa's activation was definitely 100% Off The Rails, so who knows? I suppose it's at least possible that Land could have survived the Xa's activation.

One does wonder how it would cope with the abrupt removal of Overland's tides, though.

That said, Overland seems to experience weirdly few direct consequences for its displacement. The main effect is an abrupt change in the sky, followed later by the confusing discovery that Pi no longer exactly equals 3, but instead is somehow closer to 3.14. There are no storms or earthquakes - it's not clear how the tidal relaxation of Overland's crust had no geological consequences at all. The only thing I can think of is that perhaps the new solar tides are exactly equal to the ones Overland previously experienced?

Oh yes, I mentioned "solar" tides, didn't I? This is because the last few pages of "The Fugitive Worlds" are even more head-bending then they sound. While the galaxies and daylight stars and comets and meteors all vanish, and the number of stars in the sky decline sharply, the Overlanders are surprised to discover that they have a lot more planetary neighbours that they did even hours ago. In the course of one night of observations, Cassyll and Bartan find five distinct planets, and quickly postulate that more could exist. The cream coloured gas giant with the big ring catches their attention, and they're confused about how to count the binary between the blue planet and it's one-quarter-sized greyish companion? moon? neighbour?

Yes, a cream-coloured gas giant with a prominent ring system, Pi quite possibly equal to 3.141592654..., a blue planet with a greyish moon that's about one quarter its diameter ... hmmm, I wonder where Overland could have gone? Such a mystery, no possible clues, amirite? Oh yes, the blue one is described as being quite bright, so apparently Overland's new orbit is fairly near to it. Given how relatively-empty Overland is, you do does find yourself wondering just how long before their heavily-populated new neighbour decides that they're next on the menu for Manifest Destiny...

(Just in case anyone's confused about what the ending implies, the descriptions suggest that Overland has been displaced not only out of its own universe, but into our solar system. The cream-coloured ringed planet is clearly Saturn, and the blue/grey binary is the Earth-Moon system. The five planets Cassyll and Bartan find are presumably most of the ones from classical antiquity - Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Earth-Moon system. Presumably they missed out Mercury, but in fairness its closeness to the Sun makes it the hardest of the classical planets to observe, so this is reasonable. But needless to say, this ending does come firmly out of the left field.)

BUT WHAT OF THE PEOPLE?

In terms of characterisation this novel continues the threads of the previous two. Shaw does do a good job of painting believable people - their flaws, errors and misjudgements are all very human. No-one does anything that real people wouldn't, or haven't. Toller's hero-worshipping his wife-amnesiac grandfather (have I mentioned the airbrushing that Fera Rivoo got halfway through the first book?) is believable. People do behave like this, idolising idiots and putting others on pedestals. His infatuation with Vantara is depressingly-believable too. People fall for people they shouldn't all the time. This sort of meltdown is arguably one side of the romantic coin, after all.

Vantara - well, there are plenty of status-obsessed bullies out there who are also secretly cowards. She's the monarchical version of every bad middle manager you've ever met. One of the book's subplots is how she gradually falls from Toller's esteem, though it takes until the denouement before he finally sees her for what she is. Also, interestingly, the romance plot gets subverted at this point. Toller manages to find someone else, someone who is both a better person and who will hopefully balance his more self-destructive tendencies with basic common sense.

Also, Vantara's entire career basically hangs off of the fact that a close relative is also the Queen. With Queen Dasseene's health in sharp decline and a clear suggestion that her reign will soon end, one suspects that Vantara's star will go down with her. Also this won't be helped by the fact that Vantara was physically there, on the field with the Dussarran rebels' Xa-disrupting box and she did - not a lot? It was almost the end of Overland, and heroic deeds were notable largely by their absence on her part.

The Dussarrans feel less real. That said, Divvidiv's combination of complacency, careerism and partly-sublimated guilt at the necks he knows he's stepping on in his job - yes, it does feel consistent with your average out-of-their-depth middle manager. We see less of Director Zunnunun and we know of the Palace of Numbers only indirectly, but their general superiosity and smugness are consistent with what I know of senior-management-as-a-group. However, Dussarra does remain slightly out-of-focus even in the second half of the book, when Toller and co are literally stood on it.

Cassyll and Bartan pop up every now and then in the narrative, but they're not so directly-involved. They're mainly there to try to explain events to the Queen, who is clearly severely ill and also severely in denial about being ill.

Another niggle aboout this book is that it carries on dropping plot threads, much like the other two. What happened to the people the Queen sent to Land? Did Dussarra survive? What happened to the rebels? Was the Rope-intersection really real? We never get clear answers or, in some cases, any answers at all. It almost feels like this novel was intended as a sequel-hook for a fourth book, or perhaps some new trilogy, but said trilogy never arrived. Honestly, that might be for the best. (Do we really want to read a novel about Overland being plowed up for luxury executive mansions while the surviving population are herded off to reservations, or all die from the flu or other imported terrestrial diseases? Given the Kolcorronian monarchy's behaviour in the first book, being on the wrong end of a colonial expansion would have a certain bleak irony, but it wouldn't be fun to read.)

So again, like the previous two, this one is a page-turner. It's hard to put down. But like the previous two, it suffers from dropped plot-threads and perhaps also a few too many out-of-the-left-field WTF? moments. That said, I did enjoy re-reading it, and I can see why it made such an impression on younger!me all the way back in the 1990s, when I first read this trilogy.

#LHS reads #books 2021 #Bob Shaw #The Fugitive Worlds

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saraseo · 4 years

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ladystylestores · 4 years

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Coronavirus in Nigeria: The child beggars at the heart of the outbreak

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Many poor children enrol in Koranic schools in northern Nigeria

Powerful politicians in northern Nigeria are pushing for the scrapping of controversial Koranic schools after some pupils found themselves at the centre of the coronavirus outbreak, write the BBC’s Nduka Orjinmo and Mansur Abubakar.

Tens of thousands of Koranic school children were recently crammed into open vans and sent back home from cities and towns across northern Nigeria in a controversial move by state governments to prevent the spread of coronavirus within their territories.

There was a ban on travel, but the vans, with children sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, were allowed to criss-cross the country’s highways to get the boys to their homes in villages, often thousands of miles away.

All of Nigeria’s 19 northern states had two-way movement – some children were leaving for home while others were returning home.

It was probably one of the biggest ever state organised mass movements of minors in Africa’s most-populous state, whose population of around 200 million is divided roughly equally between Muslims and Christians.

Image copyright AFP

Image caption Large numbers of child beggars used to roam the streets of Kano

No-one knows how many of the children – known in the local Hausa language as almajirai (singular almajiri), which is derived from the Arabic word al-Muhajirun, or emigrant – were sent home but Kaduna state alone said it had repatriated 30,000.

What no-one knew was that hundreds of the children already had coronavirus, so officials had inadvertently contributed to spreading the virus rather than containing it.

‘Time bomb warning ignored’

As the children arrived in their home states, some of them were quarantined and tested.

The results caused widespread consternation – of the 169 tested in Kaduna, 65 were positive, as were 91 of the 168 tested in Jigawa.

Image copyright Jigawa state government

Image caption It is unclear how the children got infected

In Gombe, eight of the 48 children tested had Covid-19. In Bauchi, the number was seven out of 38.

Hundreds of test results are still being awaited, while many thousands more have not been tested – Nigeria has faced criticism for its low testing rate.

The head of Nigeria’s presidential task force on Covid-19, Boss Mustapha, had warned that the repatriations could cause a “time bomb”, but northern state governors ignored him.

They saw the pandemic as an opportunity to scrap the almajirai-based Koranic schools that have long been part of the Islamic education system in the mainly Muslim north.

Getty

In Kaduna state, the almajiri system is dead”

“We’ve been looking for ways and means to end this system because it has not worked for the children. It has not worked for northern Nigeria and it has not worked for Nigeria. So, it has to end and this is the time,” said Kaduna state governor Nasir el-Rufai.

He added it was better to give the almajirai “some kind of modern education than to allow them to waste their lives away, roaming about the streets begging for what to eat”.

“In Kaduna state, the almajiri system is dead,” Mr el-Rufai said.

The almajirai are mostly children from poor homes who go to live for five to 10 years in a boarding-house style setting to memorise the Koran under a teacher, known as a mallam.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Muslims believe those who memorise the Koran will go to heaven

About 10.5 million Nigerian children aged between five and 14 years are not in school, according to the UN children’s agency, Unicef.

Unicef does not consider the almajirai as being in school so they make up a large part – if not the majority – of this number.

Children sent to beg on streets

The almajirai-based schools admit children as young as five, and they are expected to give their teachers the token sum of 100 naira ($0.30; £0.25) every Wednesday, which is the end of the week for the pupils with Thursday and Friday – a religious day for Muslims – being their weekend.

The mallams say the money is for the maintenance of the schools, and they do not pocket it.

Most almajirai have no means of paying and resort to begging on the streets to get the money. Sometimes they carry out menial jobs for families, in exchange for food or clothes.

They often live in squalid conditions with poor hygiene, and can go without a bath for weeks, despite the fact that Islam puts huge emphasis on cleanliness.

The mallams themselves are mostly poor, untrained, and unregulated. They tend to teach, and do subsistence farming. Some children help out on the farms, without getting anything in return.

Islamic teachings on hygiene:

Cleanliness is half of faith

Wash hands before and after eating

Wash hands after going to the toilet

Wash hands, face and feet before each of the five daily prayers

Bathe before main weekly prayer on Fridays

Wash a person after death; some clerics say it is fine if this cannot be done in current circumstances

Media playback is unsupported on your device

Media captionCoronavirus in Africa: How to save water so you can wash your hands

The schools were shut when state governments announced the closure of places of learning in late March, but with nowhere to go, thousands of almajirai continued begging on the streets.

It was at this point that state governors – fearing that the children could be infected, and could spread it to the hundreds of people they come in contact with daily – decided to send them home.

Image caption Former almajiri Imrana Mohammed chose to become a businessman

But it was too late.

No-one knows how the children became infected with the virus but Imrana Mohammed, a former almajiri, said they most likely “got it through meeting strangers while begging for alms”.

Mr Mohammed, who now runs a small business selling petroleum products, said that as an almajiri 14 years ago, he did domestic work for about $6 a month, and also got food to eat.

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There have been discussions in the past about ending the system but in a region where religion is an extremely sensitive issue, defenders of the schools accused those who wanted them reformed of attempting to stop Islamic education.

Hopes of a father

Former President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian from Nigeria’s south, invested billions of naira in building almajiri schools in the north that incorporated Islamic and secular education.

But his successor, Muhammadu Buhari, a northern Muslim who is popular in the region and has called for a ban of the almajiri system, handed over the schools to state governments and Islamic scholars for management. Most of the schools are now abandoned and the pupils back on the streets.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Most children use plastic bowls to beg for food

Some parents, like Shafiu Yau, do not want the system scrapped “because it is the way to heaven”.

He told the BBC that his 15-year-old son is currently an almajiri in Kano state, seen as Nigeria’s Islamic heartland. Not all the students have been sent home, especially in Kano.

“This is his second year as an amajiri and hopefully after five years he will come back with vast knowledge of the Koran and his religion,” Mr Yau said.

But that view is not shared by all.

Sheikh Abdullahi Garangamawa

The almajiri system, as it is today, is nothing but slavery”

Sheikh Abdullahi Garangamawa, the chief imam of the Jafar Adam Mosque in northern Nigeria’s main city Kano, told the BBC that the almajiri system was being abused.

“The almajiri system, as it is today, is nothing but slavery and governments should stop their dragging feet and act fast on it.

“These boys sent from the villages no longer seek Islamic knowledge – many of them become criminals and thugs for politicians,” he said.

This is a harsh view of an ancient system of Islamic education in northern Nigeria, and it is unlikely to end until the government tackles poverty and offers the children – and their parents – a better alternative.

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Fire Season Comes Early To California (CNN) Fire weather is coming early to California this year. For the first time since 2014, parts of Northern California are seeing a May “red flag” fire warning due to dry and windy conditions. The warning coverage area extends from Redding in the north to Modesto in the south, and includes portions of the Central Valley and the state capital of Sacramento. The warning also extends to the eastern edges of the Bay Area. A brush fire that started Friday in Pacific Palisades flared up Saturday due to gusty winds, burning more than 1,300 acres and threatening homes in Topanga Canyon. Topanga State Park in the Santa Monica Mountains is about 20 miles west of downtown Los Angeles. The Palisades fire caused about 1,000 people to be evacuated from their homes early Sunday, with other residents on standby to leave.

Pandemic Refugees at the Border (NYT) The Biden administration continues to grapple with swelling numbers of migrants along the southwestern border. Most of them are from Central America, fleeing gang violence and natural disasters. But the past few months have also brought a much different wave of migration that the Biden administration was not prepared to address: pandemic refugees. They are people arriving in ever greater numbers from far-flung countries where the coronavirus has caused unimaginable levels of illness and death and decimated economies and livelihoods. If eking out an existence was challenging in such countries before, in many of them it has now become almost impossible. According to official data released this week, 30 percent of all families encountered along the border in April hailed from countries other than Mexico and the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, compared to just 7.5 percent in April 2019, during the last border surge. The coronavirus pandemic has had far-reaching consequences for the global economy, erasing hundreds of millions of jobs. And it has disproportionately affected developing countries, where it could set back decades of progress, according to economists. About 13,000 migrants have landed in Italy, the gateway to Europe, so far this year, three times as many as in the same period last year. At the U.S.-Mexico border in recent months, agents have stopped people from more than 160 countries, and the geography coincides with the path of the virus’s worst devastation.

The U.S. conversation on Israel is changing, no matter Biden’s stance (Washington Post) In Washington, support for the Palestinian plight is getting louder in Congress. On Friday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote a widely circulated New York Times op-ed pulling the spotlight away from Hamas’s provocations to the deeper reality of life for millions of Palestinians living under blockade and occupation. He pointed to the havoc unleashed in recent weeks by rampaging mobs of Jewish extremists in Jerusalem, as well as the questionable Israeli legal attempts to forcibly evict the Palestinian residents of a neighborhood in the contested holy city. “None of this excuses the attacks by Hamas, which were an attempt to exploit the unrest in Jerusalem, or the failures of the corrupt and ineffective Palestinian Authority, which recently postponed long-overdue elections,” Sanders wrote. “But the fact of the matter is that Israel remains the one sovereign authority in the land of Israel and Palestine, and rather than preparing for peace and justice, it has been entrenching its unequal and undemocratic control.” In another era, Sanders would have cut a lonely figure among his colleagues. But he is not alone. A number of Democratic lawmakers, including solidly pro-Israel politicians, issued statements indicating their displeasure with the casualties caused by Israel’s attacks in Gaza. Others were more vocal, accusing Israel of “apartheid.” Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) tweeted: “This is happening with the support of the United States....the US vetoed the UN call for a ceasefire. If the Biden admin can’t stand up to an ally, who can it stand up to? How can they credibly claim to stand for human rights?” Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a center-left pro-Israel advocacy organization that increasingly reflects the mainstream position of American liberals, said in a briefing with reporters last week that the “diplomatic blank check to the state of Israel” given out by successive U.S. administrations has meant that “Israel has no incentive to end occupation and find a solution to the conflict.”

Mexico City is sinking (Wired) When Darío Solano‐Rojas moved from his hometown of Cuernavaca to Mexico City to study at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the layout of the metropolis confused him. “What surprised me was that everything was kind of twisted and tilted,” says Solano‐Rojas. “At that time, I didn't know what it was about. I just thought, ‘Oh, well, the city is so much different than my hometown.’” Different, it turned out, in a bad way. Picking up the study of geology at the university, Solano‐Rojas met geophysicist Enrique Cabral-Cano, who was actually researching the surprising reason for that infrastructural chaos: The city was sinking—big time. It’s the result of a geological phenomenon called subsidence, which usually happens when too much water is drawn from underground, and the land above begins to compact. According to new modeling by the two researchers and their colleagues, parts of the city are sinking as much as 20 inches a year. In the next century and a half, they calculate, areas could drop by as much as 65 feet. Spots just outside Mexico City proper could sink 100 feet. That twisting and tilting Solano‐Rojas noticed was just the start of a slow-motion crisis for 9.2 million people in the fastest-sinking city on Earth. And because some parts are slumping dramatically and others aren’t, the infrastructure that spans the two zones is sinking in some areas but staying at the same elevation in others. And that threatens to break roads, metro networks, and sewer systems. “Subsistence by itself may not be a terrible issue,” says Cabral-Cano. “But it's the difference in this subsistence velocity that really puts all civil structures under different stresses.”

Today’s the day: British holidaymakers return to Portugal as travel ban ends (Reuters) Sun-hungry British visitors descended on Portuguese beaches once again on Monday as a four-month long ban on travel between the two countries due to the COVID-19 pandemic ended, in a much-needed boost for the struggling tourism sector. Twenty-two flights from Britain are due to land in Portugal on Monday, with most heading to the southern Algarve region, famous for its beaches and golf courses but nearly deserted as the pandemic kept tourists away. Visitors from Britain must present evidence of a negative coronavirus test taken 72 hours before boarding their flights to Portugal and there is no need to quarantine for COVID-19 when returning home. Back at home, most British people will be free once again to hug, albeit cautiously, drink a pint in their pub, sit down to an indoor meal or visit the cinema after the ending of a series of lockdowns that imposed the strictest ever restrictions in peacetime.

Afghans who helped the US now fear being left behind (AP) He served as an interpreter alongside U.S. soldiers on hundreds of patrols and dozens of firefights in eastern Afghanistan, earning a glowing letter of recommendation from an American platoon commander and a medal of commendation. Still, Ayazudin Hilal was turned down when he applied for one of the scarce special visas that would allow him to relocate to the U.S. with his family. Now, as American and NATO forces prepare to leave the country, he and thousands of others who aided the war effort fear they will be left stranded, facing the prospect of Taliban reprisals. “We are not safe,” the 41-year-old father of six said of Afghan civilians who worked for the U.S. or NATO. “The Taliban is calling us and telling us, ‘Your stepbrother is leaving the country soon, and we will kill all of you guys.’” At least 300 interpreters have been killed in Afghanistan since 2016, and the Taliban have made it clear they will continue to be targeted, said Matt Zeller, a co-founder of No One Left Behind, an organization that advocates on their behalf. He also served in the country as an Army officer. “The Taliban considers them to be literally enemies of Islam,” said Zeller, now a fellow at the Truman National Security Project. “There’s no mercy for them.”

A Desperate India Falls Prey to Covid Scammers (NYT) Within the world’s worst coronavirus outbreak, few treasures are more coveted than an empty oxygen canister. India’s hospitals desperately need the metal cylinders to store and transport the lifesaving gas as patients across the country gasp for breath. So a local charity reacted with outrage when one supplier more than doubled the price, to nearly $200 each. The charity called the police, who discovered what could be one of the most brazen, dangerous scams in a country awash with coronavirus-related fraud and black-market profiteering. The police say the supplier—a business called Varsha Engineering, essentially a scrapyard—had been repainting fire extinguishers and selling them as oxygen canisters. The consequences could be deadly: The less-sturdy fire extinguishers might explode if filled with high-pressure oxygen. A coronavirus second wave has devastated India’s medical system. Hospitals are full. Drugs, vaccines, oxygen and other supplies are running out. Pandemic profiteers are filling the gap. In many cases, the sellers prey on the desperation and grief of families.

Full-blown boycott pushed for Beijing Olympics (AP) Groups alleging human-rights abuses against minorities in China are calling for a full-blown boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, a move likely to ratchet up pressure on the International Olympic Committee, athletes, sponsors and sports federations. A coalition representing Uyghurs, Tibetans, residents of Hong Kong and others issued a statement Monday calling for the boycott, eschewing lesser measures that had been floated like “diplomatic boycotts” and further negotiations with the IOC or China. “The time for talking with the IOC is over,” Lhadon Tethong of the Tibet Action Institute said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press. “This cannot be games as usual or business as usual; not for the IOC and not for the international community.” The push for a boycott comes a day before a joint hearing in the U.S. Congress focusing on the Beijing Olympics and China’s human-rights record, and just days after the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee said boycotts are ineffective and only hurt athletes.

Grief Mounts as Efforts to Ease Israel-Hamas Fight Falter (NYT) Diplomats and international leaders were unable Sunday to mediate a cease-fire in the latest conflict between Israel and Hamas, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel vowed to continue the fight and the United Nations Security Council failed to agree on a joint response to the worsening bloodshed. The diplomatic wrangling occurred after the fighting, the most intense seen in Gaza and Israel for seven years, entered its deadliest phase yet. At least 42 Palestinians were killed early Sunday morning in an airstrike on several apartments in Gaza City, Palestinian officials said, the conflict’s most lethal episode so far. The number of people in killed in Gaza rose to 197 over the seven days of the conflict, according to Palestinian officials, while the number of Israeli residents killed by Palestinian militants climbed to 11, including one soldier, the Israeli government said.

Israel, Hamas trade fire in Gaza as war rages on (AP) Israel carried out a wave of airstrikes on what it said were militant targets in Gaza, leveling a six-story building, and militants fired dozens of rockets into Israel on Tuesday. Palestinians across the region observed a general strike as the war, now in its second week, showed no signs of abating. The strikes toppled a building that housed libraries and educational centers belonging to the Islamic University. Residents sifted through the rubble, searching for their belongings.

Israel’s aftermath (Foreign Policy) In Israel, the aftermath of days of violence in mixed Arab-Israeli towns has led to a one-sided reaction from state prosecutors: Of the 116 indictments served so far against those arrested last week, all have been against Arab-Israeli citizens, Haaretz reports. Meanwhile, Yair Lapid, whose centrist Yesh Atid party’s chances of forming a coalition government has crumbled since the violence broke out, placed the blame on Netanyahu. If he was in charge, Lapid said on Sunday, no one would have to question “why the fire always breaks out precisely when it’s most convenient for the prime minister.”

Long working hours can be a killer, WHO study shows (Reuters) Working long hours is killing hundreds of thousands of people a year in a worsening trend that may accelerate further due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization said on Monday. In the first global study of the loss of life associated with longer working hours, the paper in the journal Environment International showed that 745,000 people died from stroke and heart disease associated with long working hours in 2016. That was an increase of nearly 30% from 2000. “Working 55 hours or more per week is a serious health hazard,” said Maria Neira, director of the WHO’s Department of Environment, Climate Change and Health. The joint study, produced by the WHO and the International Labour Organization, showed that most victims (72%) were men and were middle-aged or older. Often, the deaths occurred much later in life, sometimes decades later, than the shifts worked. It also showed that people living in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific region were the most affected.

#headlines #news

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writerspink · 5 years

Text

K-12 Words

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9.2

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K-12 Words was originally published on PinkWrite

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teeky185 · 4 years

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As residents of Washington and New York battled the two largest clusters of the 2019 novel coronavirus in the United States, new restrictions on public assembly meant to ease the deadly crisis raised the question: Just how aggressive might authorities get?U.S. cases of the new coronavirus had, as of Wednesday, topped 1,000, while Republicans in Congress have been briefed on the likelihood that most Americans will eventually be exposed to the infection, and the World Health Organization finally declared the outbreak a global pandemic. President Trump on Wednesday also used a 9 p.m. Oval Office address to announce a confused, partial travel ban between the United States and Europe, along with a variety of measures geared at steadying the economy.But on Thursday, specifically in the Seattle area and in a suburb of New York City, life was about to get considerably more eerie.Gov. Jay Inslee announced Wednesday that he would use emergency powers to prohibit large-scale public gatherings of 250 people or more in three counties through March in Washington state, where at least 29 people have died from the disease. Such events include social, spiritual, recreational, and work activities. Seattle’s public schools will also close.King County Executive Dow Constantine added that for his jurisdiction, authorities have ordered that even gatherings of fewer than 250 people “should not happen unless very clear public health steps are taken” beforehand.‘First World Problems’: Google Employees Endure Coronavirus DamnationNew York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the coronavirus had infected at least 121 people in suburban New Rochelle alone by Wednesday evening, putting the nation’s second-largest cluster of the virus about 20 miles north of New York, America’s largest city. Cuomo called in National Guard troops to enact a one-mile containment zone in New Rochelle, which was set to go into effect on Thursday and remain in place for two weeks, through March 25. Troops would assist in distributing food and cleaning public spaces, Cuomo explained. Experts told The Daily Beast that it was too early to consider an Italy-style lockdown in the United States. New York and Washington haven’t imposed restrictions on movement so much as assembly, and the federal government has publicly and controversially struggled to even test enough Americans for the virus. But given the current trajectory, officials may end up pushing people close to their limit.“The U.S. is not China, and our people would not tolerate the kind of social control and intrusive surveillance that we saw in China,” said Lawrence Gostin, who directs the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University and the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. He called such a plan on American soil “both legally flawed and unethical.”Gostin added that he believed a mass quarantine wouldn’t even be constitutional in the United States. But he said he could envision the U.S. limiting movement in or out of, say, large apartments or dormitories.“We certainly did do that with the cruise ship, which was a debacle, so we would have to be far more prepared to protect the people that were quarantined,” said Gostin, referring to the Diamond Princess, where hundreds were infected in Japan last month, ultimately leading to at least six deaths. “I would hate to see that repeated in a university dormitory or public housing. It would be very, very troubling.”Dr. William Haseltine, president of the global health think tank ACCESS Health International who recently chaired the U.S.-China Health Summit in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak originated, said he believed the United States was “close to” authorities implementing such lockdowns.“Once you do something like in New Rochelle and stop people attending gatherings, I think it’s a real possibility,” he told The Daily Beast. “If the infection really gets out of control, and, if they’re accompanied by rigorous testing, I think China proved that it works. Everyone who moves at all in China has to report where they’ve been and where they’re going and then gets tested when they arrive.”The outbreak in New Rochelle ostensibly began when a Manhattan lawyer who lives in Westchester County contracted the coronavirus on a trip and brought it home, where his wife, son, daughter, rabbi, and several neighbors became infected, too. The lawyer, Lawrence Garbuz, has since been hospitalized at the New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center in Manhattan, according to health officials.Ken Ovitz, a longtime friend and cousin of Garbuz, told The Daily Beast that Lawrence is “the best, finest person you would ever know” and that he was told by the patient’s wife that his condition was “improving slightly.” Ovitz declined to provide more details about his cousin’s condition, except to say that he was “wise, kind, a gentleman, [has a] great heart,” and is “very smart.”The one-mile “containment zone” was set to be structured around the Young Israel of New Rochelle synagogue, the temple attended by Garbuz before he was diagnosed. But Cuomo has stressed that the zone was not a travel lockdown and that anyone not quarantined was free to leave their homes, and local businesses could remain open. But all schools, houses of worship, and other large gathering spots in the area were to be shut down for two weeks.“New Rochelle is the hottest spot in the country, the most dense cluster,” Cuomo said on Wednesday. “Our action in New Rochelle is just no large gatherings. People can come, people can go. There’s no limitation on movement, but no large gatherings because the large gatherings are where it spreads.”“It sounds more dramatic than it is,” he added.Still, those trying to live their lives in New Rochelle told Gothamist this week, before the order even took effect, that “it feels like there’s a toxic haze over us,” while others questioned how helpful the National Guard could even be during an epidemic.“What are they going to do? Shoot the virus?” Raj Shaikhar, the owner of Jessica Newsstand, asked in an interview with the outlet.The precedent set by Italy, which has seen hundreds of deaths caused by the virus, also loomed.Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte this weekend signed an unprecedented coronavirus containment decree, to disastrous effect, as Italians jumped in cars and on trains to flee an impending travel lockdown, and authorities sent and received mixed signals about whether they should even stop anyone. While movie theaters, museums, gyms, schools, and beauty parlors have been closed in the south, officials across the country instituted a “one meter rule,” requiring three feet of personal space everywhere from sidewalks to coffee bars. All 60 million people in the country are now affected by either the expanded lockdown or other travel and social-distancing restrictions. Anyone defying a ban on “unnecessary movement”—into and out of the virus-battered northern region, which includes the cities of Venice, Milan, Parma, and Modena—could be subject to criminal charges.The country’s worst cluster emerged in northern Italy on Feb. 21. As of Wednesday, there were 12,462 cases and 827 deaths nationwide.Meanwhile, in China, the outbreak was largely confined to the Hubei province, where it first originated. The lockdown in Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus, is still in effect, though the rate of new cases has come way down, and President Xi Jinping even visited the city this week.But Gostin said he did not buy the Chinese precedent as the only—or best—way forward.“There’s very little evidence that these large lockdowns worked,” he said. “Japan and South Korea have not used them—and used traditional public health measures—and had dramatic drops in cases.”Social separation, on the other hand, may not stop an epidemic, “but it flattens the curve and slows it down, which buys us time,” said Gostin, who noted that he expects Americans will likely see increased self-isolation at home in the coming of weeks, possibly into the millions.“Quarantine and isolation is a social contract where citizens agree to stay separated from the community for the common good, and, in exchange, the government promises them that they will keep them safe with good healthcare and humane conditions,” he said. “I think citizens will comply, but I’m not sure if the government can hold up its end of the bargain.”“If you’re unemployed, uninsured, elderly, disabled, in a rural area, you’re not going to have the ability to take care of yourself and you may be very vulnerable,” said Gostin.Will Coronavirus Make America Finally Care About the Homeless?Those concerns have already been discussed by city leaders in affected areas, at least in Seattle, where City Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda on Wednesday called on her state’s elected officials to act “with one purpose: to protect the health of the community and front line workers.”“That includes maintaining protections for civil liberties, housing and care for our most vulnerable and acting swiftly to implement public health prevention and containment strategies,” she told The Seattle Times. But Gostin cautioned: “Lockdowns without testing are minimally effective. To be effective, you have to know who is infected and who is not. You have to know who to treat and how to contact-trace.”To that end, Gov. Cuomo on Wednesday joined several other local and state leaders who have pointed fingers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over its troubled rollout of working diagnostic kits, which experts and elected officials have said deflated the number of confirmed infections in the United States. Only about 5,000 tests had been conducted in the U.S. by Wednesday, compared to the tens of thousands in other developed countries.“What’s happening in New Rochelle is a joke” compared to the rigorous tracking and testing in China, Haseltine argued. “It isn’t a joke for those people, but in terms of what’s effective—it’s not effective. They need tests, and they need to make sure that there’s really effective containment.”“Our testing is so far behind the reality that there probably is no connection between the two,” Cuomo said on MSNBC Wednesday. “I have no doubt that people have coronavirus and are walking around.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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kennethherrerablog · 4 years

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How to Determine Your Car Value and Get What You Deserve

I still have the pickup I got in college. And I’m dreading getting a new car.

What should I do with my old one? Can I trade it in? How much is it worth?

If I walk into a car dealer blind, I’ll likely get screwed. They hold all the cards and know this stuff a lot better than I do.

As it turns out, there are several options to easily determine my car value. This is the first step to getting a good trade-in when buying my next car.

If you want to learn the same secrets I have, read on.

Use Pricing Guides and Compare to Get a Baseline Value

Start by getting a value estimate from several different guides. That gives you a better sense for the overall range that you can expect.

The more data you have in hand, the better you’ll be able to negotiate a fair value for your car.

You will need to enter information about the vehicle:

Make

Model year

Model name

Mileage

Extra features

Estimated condition

Additionally, you will need to enter your ZIP Code. This allows the online car pricing guide to give you a value that’s appropriate for vehicles in your area.

Fair warning: you will have to provide your email address before you receive the information you want. I’d expect to get a bunch of followup emails and offers. Use a burner email if you don’t want this spam.

Best Used Car Pricing Guides

Here are the four best pricing guides for cars, and all of them will give you the basic information you want for free.

Kelly Blue Book: This is a trustworthy guide that has appeared in print form for decades and now is available online. The KBB site gives you a price range you can expect to receive for the car. It also gives you cost estimates for new car models.

Edmunds: The Edmunds site is another trusted car pricing guide. You can find prices for cars you want to buy or sell. You can search by make and model or by a specific car’s VIN.

NADA: The NADA site is not quite as reliable as the other two sites, as it tends to overinflate the prices versus what you’ll find in the real world. But it at least gives you an idea of the value.

CARFAX: You can obtain a CARFAX report on a specific car at this site for a price. But for free, you can receive estimated value for the car. This site is easier to use when you know the VIN or license plate number for a specific vehicle. If you’re just searching for a price for a general make and model, this site doesn’t work as well.

Be careful with these pricing guides, as some of them have ads that look a lot like the forms in which you’ll be entering information. If you end up clicking on an ad inadvertently, you may end up at a site that doesn’t give you accurate information.

Find Similar Cars That Have Been Sold In Your Area

You can use a couple of online tools to help you find prices for cars similar to yours that have sold in your city or region. These numbers can be helpful as you try to estimate the price of your car in a real world setting.

Guides may give you an estimated “value” but the real value is what the car is being sold for currently. Cars are only worth as much as someone is willing to pay.

Understand that the condition of your car may be significantly different than the sold used car that the site is using for data.

TrueCar Price Report: The TrueCar site uses a price report that averages the prices that others in your area paid for a particular make and model. Although this is a nice feature, if you are looking at an uncommon car or if you live in a medium to low population area, you’ll probably receive an error message, telling you there isn’t enough sales data to generate the report.

Edmunds TMV: The Edmunds site has a True Market Value feature that bases its data on actual cars sold in your area.

Values Depending on Who Is Buying

When looking at the value for your car on the web sites we have listed, you’re going to find a few different types of figures listed. It is extremely important to pay attention to these different figures, so you don’t make a mistake in valuing your car.

These values tell you what you should expect to receive based on how you plan to sell the car. Here are the four primary values to understand and how they compare to each other.

Trade-in

A trade-in occurs when you’re selling your car to a dealership as part of a transaction where you are purchasing a different car from the same dealer.

With a trade-in, you will receive a price toward the lower end of the range of values you’ll find for your car.

Remember, the dealer is going to be selling your traded in car on his or her lot. So the dealer will attempt to give you as little as possible for the trade-in, maximizing the profit the dealer can make on the resale.

Using a trade-in is popular, though, because it is a very easy process.

Cash Offer

If you find the process of a trade-in to be confusing, you’re not alone. Dealerships do this on purpose to make it appear as though you’re receiving a large amount for your car. But they just use the math to charge you more for the car you’re buying.

To eliminate these games, you can ask the dealership to give you a cash offer for your car. Then, if you purchase a different car from the same dealer, request that the two transactions occur separately, so you can see the true price you’re receiving and paying for the two vehicles.

You also can use the cash offer to just sell your car to a dealership without purchasing a car from the dealer. A cash offer will be worth a little more than a trade-in, but it will not be as high as selling to a private party.

The benefit of accepting a cash offer from a dealership is that it is easy and hassle-free.

Many of the car value websites we listed earlier allow you to request a cash offer from dealerships.

Some sites list the price you could expect to find your car listed for on a dealer’s lot. You will not receive this price when selling it yourself, though, so don’t base your hopes on this number.

Private Party Sale

If you choose to sell the car on your own to a private party, you’ll receive a much higher amount than you’ll receive with a trade-in or a cash offer. It will begin to approach the price a dealership would have the car listed for on its lot.

Private party sales can be a hassle, though. You have to worry about title transfers and creating a bill of sale. If the car has several thousand dollars of value, accepting the large payment by check is worrisome, as is accepting such a large amount of cash.

You’ll also have to post ads for the car, meet prospective buyers, and follow up with people that are interested. There’s a lot more time involved that getting an offer from a dealer.

Factors That Most Impact Value For Used Cars

Your particular used car’s value likely won’t precisely match what a website says. The look and condition of the car is important.

If you’ve kept your car in pristine condition, cleaning it religiously and keeping potential disasters out of the car, your vehicle has a higher value than the person who hasn’t maintained their car.

Beyond cleanliness, these items have the biggest effect on the value of the car:

Mileage: A car that has 100,000 miles on it has a significantly lower value than the same model with 50,000 miles on it. After all, every car only has a certain number of miles it will travel before breaking down for good. A car with fewer miles should last longer than one with more miles.

Condition: We touched on condition a bit already when talking about cleanliness. However, condition also refers to items like scratches, rust, or dents on the exterior of the car and tears, cracks, or stains on the interior of the car. A car that smells like cigarette smoke or wet dogs will drop in value because of poor condition as well.

Options: A car that has multiple add-ons may have a higher value. Things like backup cameras, seat warmers, a sun roof, or a larger engine place it at the higher end of the price range for its make and model versus a basic car with few or no add-on options.

Color: You may have thought buying a lime green car was a cool and fun idea at the time you purchased it. But when it’s time to sell the car, you’re going to find that the majority of buyers do not want a lime green car, which drops its value.

Location: Certain car designs are more popular in some areas of the United States than others. Pickup trucks may have a higher value in the Midwest, because they’re more in demand than in New York City. Sports cars with convertible tops should yield a higher value in southern California than they will in Montana, especially in January.

Beat the Car Dealer

If the thought of shopping for a car and dealing with a smarmy car salesperson gives you a feeling in the pit of your stomach that’s equal to visiting the dentist for multiple root canals, you’ll find that having data on your side during negotiations over the car is a significant relief.

No longer do you have to wonder if the salesperson is lying half the time about what your car is worth. With a bit of research, you’ll walk into that dealership knowing what you deserve for your vehicle. The cards will be in your favor now.

How to Determine Your Car Value and Get What You Deserve is a post from: I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

How to Determine Your Car Value and Get What You Deserve published first on https://justinbetreviews.tumblr.com/

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andrewdburton · 4 years

Text

How to Determine Your Car Value and Get What You Deserve

I still have the pickup I got in college. And I’m dreading getting a new car.

What should I do with my old one? Can I trade it in? How much is it worth?

If I walk into a car dealer blind, I’ll likely get screwed. They hold all the cards and know this stuff a lot better than I do.

As it turns out, there are several options to easily determine my car value. This is the first step to getting a good trade-in when buying my next car.

If you want to learn the same secrets I have, read on.

Use Pricing Guides and Compare to Get a Baseline Value

Start by getting a value estimate from several different guides. That gives you a better sense for the overall range that you can expect.

The more data you have in hand, the better you’ll be able to negotiate a fair value for your car.

You will need to enter information about the vehicle:

Make

Model year

Model name

Mileage

Extra features

Estimated condition

Additionally, you will need to enter your ZIP Code. This allows the online car pricing guide to give you a value that’s appropriate for vehicles in your area.

Best Used Car Pricing Guides

Here are the four best pricing guides for cars, and all of them will give you the basic information you want for free.

Edmunds: The Edmunds site is another trusted car pricing guide. You can find prices for cars you want to buy or sell. You can search by make and model or by a specific car’s VIN.

NADA: The NADA site is not quite as reliable as the other two sites, as it tends to overinflate the prices versus what you’ll find in the real world. But it at least gives you an idea of the value.

Find Similar Cars That Have Been Sold In Your Area

Guides may give you an estimated “value” but the real value is what the car is being sold for currently. Cars are only worth as much as someone is willing to pay.

Understand that the condition of your car may be significantly different than the sold used car that the site is using for data.

Edmunds TMV: The Edmunds site has a True Market Value feature that bases its data on actual cars sold in your area.

Values Depending on Who Is Buying

These values tell you what you should expect to receive based on how you plan to sell the car. Here are the four primary values to understand and how they compare to each other.

Trade-in

A trade-in occurs when you’re selling your car to a dealership as part of a transaction where you are purchasing a different car from the same dealer.

With a trade-in, you will receive a price toward the lower end of the range of values you’ll find for your car.

Using a trade-in is popular, though, because it is a very easy process.

Cash Offer

The benefit of accepting a cash offer from a dealership is that it is easy and hassle-free.

Many of the car value websites we listed earlier allow you to request a cash offer from dealerships.

Private Party Sale

You’ll also have to post ads for the car, meet prospective buyers, and follow up with people that are interested. There’s a lot more time involved that getting an offer from a dealer.

Factors That Most Impact Value For Used Cars

Your particular used car’s value likely won’t precisely match what a website says. The look and condition of the car is important.

Beyond cleanliness, these items have the biggest effect on the value of the car:

Beat the Car Dealer

How to Determine Your Car Value and Get What You Deserve is a post from: I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

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