My heart leaps up
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A 3-D perspective view of the Kondyor Massif intrusion in far eastern Russia. It is a important source of platinum.
Photo Credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team -
Remote Control | George Monbiot Change in any direction except further over the brink of market fundamentalism and planetary destruction requires the defiance of almost the entire battery of salaried opinion. ….
Despite the rise of the social media, the established media continues to define the scope of representative politics in Britain, to shape political demands and to punish and erase those who resist. It is one chamber of the corrupt heart of Britain, pumping fear, misinformation and hatred around the body politic.
That so many Scots, lambasted from all quarters as fools, frauds and ingrates, have refused to be bullied is itself a political triumph…..
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The Kink in the Human Brain | George Monbiot Much of the natural world is destroyed so that the very rich can fit their yachts with mahogany, eat bluefin tuna sushi, scatter ground rhino horn over their food, land their private jets on airfields carved from rare grasslands, burn in one day as much fossil fuel as the average global citizen uses in a year.
Thus the Great Global Polishing proceeds, wearing down the knap of the Earth, rubbing out all that is distinctive and peculiar, in human culture as well as nature, reducing us to replaceable automata within a homogenous global workforce, inexorably transforming the riches of the natural world into a featureless monoculture.
Is this not the point at which we shout stop? At which we use the extraordinary learning and expertise we have developed to change the way we organise ourselves, to contest and reverse the trends that have governed our relationship with the living planet for the past two million years, and that are now destroying its remaining features at astonishing speed? Is this not the point at which we challenge the inevitability of endless growth on a finite planet? If not now, when?
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“Her mother’s absence was like another language she’d had to learn, its full complexity and nuance emerging only after years of study, and even then, because it was foreign, a language never fully absorbed.” — Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (via distantheartbeats)(via teachingliteracy)
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“Alzheimer’s doesn’t kill someone’s personality, nor their capacity to feel emotions as keenly as a non-sufferer. In my granny’s last years, her most vulnerable traits – a fear of abandonment, a worry about the safety of children – were exaggerated, as all our deepest fears tend to bubble up when we are under pressure. But it was still her, a woman worthy of love and respect, who happened to be ill.” -
Mark Chadwick - Acrylic Fluid Painting 61, 2012 Paintings: Acrylics
(via whats-out-there)
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(via whats-out-there)
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The age of loneliness is killing us
When Thomas Hobbes claimed that in the state of nature, before authority arose to keep us in check, we were engaged in a war “of every man against every man”, he could not have been more wrong. We were social creatures from the start, mammalian bees, who depended entirely on each other. The hominins of east Africa could not have survived one night alone. We are shaped, to a greater extent than almost any other species, by contact with others. The age we are entering, in which we exist apart, is unlike any that has gone before.
Three months ago we read that loneliness has become an epidemic among young adults. Now we learn that it is just as great an affliction of older people. A study by Independent Age shows that severe loneliness in England blights the lives of 700,000 men and 1.1m women over 50, and is rising with astonishing speed.
Full Story: The Guardian
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“So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.”