Thank you ZC for the plain words and plain talk about a projected 200 million persons to be displaced – not by some amorphous public relations slogan – “#climate #change” (actually proscribed, even in a million schools for the love of sanity, or its public usage so circumscribed in official circles so as to surprise when heard AND EVEN NONSENSISED IN POPULAR CULTURE and #social #media to convey positive value as we hear bewildered young people say they are Working for Climate Change) that’s in early 2023 so past its social, economic and cultural use-by date that we can all “smell it” – the term has become “universal (what??)” branding for nutters, the clinically depressed and jibbering ministers of religion – BUT coastal inundation by sea water and the glacial-meltwater devastation and literal collapse of lands by avalanching, undermining, earthquake, tsunami and volcanic ash-cloud/ heat & carbon dioxide transferred to the stratosphere 10-30km up.. are real things.
..we can all hear taste smell feel touch hunger asphyxiate dehydrate drown or get heat-struck by (or on sorry account of) them.
Readers greatly appreciate your summaries ZC [see 6 paras immediately below], your 👀-wide-open reflections on the worldwide geophysical & essential macroeconomic conceptual econometrics we MUST NOW begin to model assiduously and honestly, no longer for the fun & profit & fancy bright-coloured graphics of meteorology bureaus, law and accountancy conglomerates or the politicians of crude liberal majoritarianism’s electoral autocracy run by ad agencies, public-menace culturally vitiating individually targeted consumer product- marketing artificial intelligence and Elon Musk’s imploding public square.
•On current forecasts, more than 200 million people are likely to be #displaced around the world by 2030, by a variety of factors including the climate crisis. Most of them are likely to stay within their country borders, but the impact will be vast.
•The impact of the climate crisis on human mobility is significant, and that must be recognised,” said Daniels.
•The plight of women also needed more attention, she added. “There are particular impacts on women and children. Women are often in a vulnerable situation, and have less access to resources, whether that’s money, land, education or health, and they are often in care-giving roles or bear the burden for their families.”
•Andrew Harper, the special adviser on climate action at the office of the UN high commissioner for refugees, said rich countries must start taking seriously the need to help poor countries adapt to the effects of extreme weather, of which the consequences were now obvious. “Ignorance is no excuse any more; we are seeing disasters now on a daily basis,” he said. “One person was displaced every second last year. At what point do we start taking this seriously? When it’s two people a second?”
•Climate-related disasters last year included devastating floods in Pakistan that left more than 20 million people dependent on humanitarian aid, and severe droughts in the Horn of Africa, where close to 150 million people are facing extreme hunger.
•Climate change has turbocharged extreme weather events,” said Harper. “And those extreme weather events are in turn displacing people.” “
Now my input – it’s about the busted contemporary journalism genre, a professional backwater with ever more funding, encouraging and neo-absurdist lionising from the global billionaire cabal.
It grows ever more ECONOMICALLY irrelevant and ECOLOGICALLY dangerous with every passing week – such that 7 billion ordinary working, intelligent & world-aware people in full command of their own senses and sensibilities – these are actually grown-up humans (adults) – demand its repair…
As I reflect, I’ve been writing in the same mode for five years, always contextualising, confronting “It’s their economy stupored,” writing as anchored in one’s own regional, hemispheric and global milieu, NOT IN AN ARTIFICIAL-REALITY NEWSMEDIA ELITES STUDIO OR UPLINK BUBBLE, fiercely rejecting the utterly offensive both-sidesism, that takes the 1970s hippie Carter era Values-Free social, economic, cultural AND environmental posture & gesture as politically & socially de rigeuer,* vapid cliches, vacuous mixed metaphors, the ‘baby-talk’ of other nations being called “family,” the deliberate** neoclassical Ox-bridge English ruling elites mispronunciation of names-people-places-institutions (eg màfia, eg cop, eg the sound ‘j’ showily spelled ‘g’ as gibberish or vice versa Menin-jee ..SA town w flood threat presently) and EVER in corporate-state #journalism’s endless bilge-flow of childish narrative reports the deracinated b, the gluggy, turgid, officially vetted (even by national spy & security services for Christ’s Sake) m rounded off with the obligatory resounding but vapid bathetic e – always advancing the sum of human knowledge by a negative quantum & psycho-culturally (psychiatrically) pushing the patient consumers of this stuff inexorably towards an actually “dumbed down” state of mind, that is into cognitive impairment & in the macro, or Big Picture, an actual meltdown of health & personal support services and ultimately what is now correctly identified as the rule of lawlessness by the UN.
Here’s my resonant ending-bit, Ms Cohen: you and me both will work our t..s off for the needs & hopes of ordinary people
John, 🇦🇺
In French, de rigueur means “out of strictness” or “according to strict etiquette”; one definition of our word rigor, to which rigueur is related, is “the quality of being strict, unyielding, or inflexible.” In English, we tend to use de rigueur to describe a fashion or custom that is so commonplace within a context
** in the entirely vexed malicious pursuit of ethnocentric cultural hegemony for the billionaire class’s precious City of London no less
“When we started, there was no regulatory path,” she said. “No one has ever developed an insect vaccine — they’re wild animals who fly around,” compared to domesticated livestock and pets with vaccine protocols. She added, “We’re really hoping we’re going to change the industry now.”
Dr. Delaplane, the entomologist at the University of Georgia, agreed.
“Someday,” he said, “we could have a cocktail that solves a lot of bee problems — that would be the holy grail.”
U.S.D.A. Approves First Vaccine for Honeybees
With our thanks to the New York Times..
“Dalan Animal Health’s vaccine for American foulbrood, an aggressive bacterial disease, is the first for any insect in the United States”
A conditional license for a vaccine to protect honeybees against American foulbrood disease has been approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.Credit…Steve Pfost/Newsday, via Getty Images
A biotech company in Georgia has received conditional approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the first vaccine for honeybees, a move scientists say could help pave the way for controlling a range of viruses and pests that have decimated the global population. It is the first vaccine approved for any insect in the United States.
The company, Dalan Animal Health, which is based in Athens, Ga., developed a prophylactic vaccine that protects honeybees from American foulbrood, an aggressive bacterium that can spread quickly from hive to hive. Previous treatments included burning infected colonies and all of the associated equipment, or using antibiotics. Diamond Animal Health, a manufacturer that is collaborating with Dalan, holds the conditional license.
Dalail Freitak, an associate professor in honeybee research at the Karl-Franzens University of Graz in Austria and chief science officer for Dalan, said the vaccine could help change the way scientists approach animal health.
“There are millions of beehives all over the world, and they don’t have a good health care system compared to other animals,” she said. “Now we have the tools to improve their resistance against diseases.”
Before you start imagining a tiny syringe being inserted into a bee, the vaccine — which contains dead versions of Paenibacillus larvae, the bacterium that causes American foulbrood — comes in the form of food. The vaccine is incorporated into royal jelly, a sugar feed given to queen bees. Once they ingest it, the vaccine is then deposited in their ovaries, giving developing larvae immunity as they hatch.
Scientists long assumed that insects could not acquire immunity because they lacked antibodies, the proteins that help many animals’ immune systems recognize and fight bacteria and viruses. Once scientists understood that insects could indeed acquire immunity and pass it to their offspring, Dr. Freitak set about answering the question of how they did so. In 2015, she and two other researchers identified the specific protein that prompts an immune response in the offspring and realized they could cultivate immunity in a bee population with a single queen.
Their first goal was tackling American foulbrood, a bacterial disease that turns larvae dark brown and makes the hive give off a rotting smell. The disease ran rampant during the 1800s and the early 1900s in bee colonies in parts of the United States. While American foulbrood is not as destructive as varroa mites, the bacterium can easily wipe out colonies of 60,000 bees.
The introduction of a vaccine comes at a critical moment for honeybees, which are vital to the world’s food system but are also declining globally because of climate change, pesticides, habitat loss and disease.
“There is no silver bullet, but there is a toxic stew of causation, and some of that includes diseases that are new and some that are old and familiar,” said Keith Delaplane, a professor of entomology at the University of Georgia and the director of its honeybee program, which provided research grounds for Dalan. “It’s death by a thousand cuts.”
By pollinating food as they feed on pollen and nectar, honeybees pollinate about one-third of the food crops in the United States and help produce an estimated $15 billion worth of crops in the United States each year. Many beekeepers lease their hives across the country to assist in pollination of almonds, pears, cherries, apples and other types of produce.
Chris Hiatt, who keeps bees in North Dakota and California and is the president of the American Honey Producers Association, participated in the vaccine trial over the summer with about 800 queen bees in North Dakota.
“For beekeepers, you just don’t want to be reliant on antibiotics,” which most beekeepers give once a year or when there are flare-ups, he said. “Antibiotics can wipe out some of the beneficial microbes. This has the potential to add other things, too.”
Annette Kleiser, the chief executive of Dalan, called the vaccine “a huge breakthrough.”
“Bees are livestock and should have the same modern tools to care for them and protect them that we have for our chickens, cats, dogs and so on,” Ms. Kleiser said.
The conditional approval provides a mechanism that allows companies to accelerate approval for vaccines if they demonstrate there is a high, unmet need in the market, Ms. Kleiser said.
“The agency realizes that these new tools are needed in the market to help change practices,” Ms. Kleiser said, adding that the U.S.D.A. had recommended that the company pursue a conditional path “to get this out onto the marketplace as quickly as possible.”
Ms. Kleiser said that the company had to show proof of “safety, purity and certain degrees of efficacy” to gain approval and that it planned to continue collecting data while it applied for full approval. Dalan also hopes to use the American foulbrood vaccine as a map to produce vaccines for other diseases that affect honeybees.
“When we started, there was no regulatory path,” she said. “No one has ever developed an insect vaccine — they’re wild animals who fly around,” compared to domesticated livestock and pets with vaccine protocols. She added, “We’re really hoping we’re going to change the industry now.”
Dr. Delaplane, the entomologist at the University of Georgia, agreed.
“Someday,” he said, “we could have a cocktail that solves a lot of bee problems — that would be the holy grail.”
*concerns the global virus Varroa destructor.. https://www.outbreak.gov.au/current-responses-to-outbreaks/varroa-mite/ summary: Pest situation On 8 July an industry agreed Response Plan was initiated, with the intent to eradicate varroa mite and minimise the impact on businesses, communities, ancillary industries and the environment.
greeneconomyaction.com acknowledges with thanks the ongoing contributions of Nature. This writer, a bona fide 30-year #climate scholar, knows and cares less than nothing about documents gathered under the rubric or preposterous post-fact legal aegis of @Nature_eco: self-respect, personal dignity & integrity and the limited number of working hours available to any of us who give a damn about the state of the world in my view DEMAND that economists and philosophers almost completely bypass the facile, turgid, cloying-beyond-absurd if not deranged anodyne Attenborough & Disney & National Geographic era junk environment information-product and rich-tourist greenwash spurting-from-the-proverbial-existential-ground of affluent~ Global North countries’ contemporary billion-dollar per year ooh-and-ahh publishing bonanza. Look, over there, a dead child-destroyer Pope, unicorns, kids-in-Yemen and General Mark Milley.. Look over here: Australia.
~ meaning in possession of surplus disposable income and therefore, in turn, ruthlessly targeted and/ or fleeced by corporations, banks and organised crime operatives analogous with the fictive medieval self-devouring priapic serpent-beast (Sigmund Freud eats his own heart out, yet again)
@nature-magazine CAREER FEATURE: “Classroom assistance: the scientists turning the tools of their trade to education” : ‘A small but growing number of scientific faculty positions are focusing on the science of teaching’
Education-focused researchers explore the most effective ways of teaching science.Credit: Getty
As a doctoral student at the University of Washington in Seattle, biologist Michelle Smith spent a lot of time sorting fruit flies under the microscope. But she often found her mind wandering to her teaching activities: assisting with undergraduate laboratory and writing courses, and instructing schoolchildren in physics and biology.
“I felt this real draw towards teaching, but I also liked research,” she recalls. She felt lost, until 2007, when she took up a postdoctoral position in education research with Carl Wieman, a Nobel-prizewinning physicist with a deep interest in science education, then at the University of Colorado Boulder. She’d found her dream position: using her research skills to investigate how peer discussions help undergraduates to learn basic genetics concepts. She published her results in Science1.
When she started her postdoc, Smith recalls, there weren’t many faculty positions available for education-focused researchers in biology departments. That’s changing, and she is now a tenured professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, researching learning in ecology field courses, and senior associate dean for undergraduate education.Stop describing academic teaching as a ‘load’
Tenure-track faculty members with expertise in education research are starting to pop up in science departments at leading research universities — although this remains the path less taken. Their presence, position and prestige also varies widely by nation, institution and field of study2.
“There has been a growth in these types of position, both for tenure-track and long-term contract faculty members,” says Emily Miller, deputy vice-president for institutional policy at the Association of American Universities in Washington DC.
Precise data on the trend are scarce, but researchers from around the world point to the United States as a leader. The US National Science Foundation funds extensive research into science pedagogy, much of it through its Directorate for STEM Education, which doles out US$5 million to postdoctoral fellowships in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. There has also been a modest rise in a handful of other nations, including Canada and Australia, but they tend to have less money to support such studies, says Kimberly Tanner, a biologist at San Francisco State University in California, who focuses on biology-education research and co-edits the journal CBE—Life Sciences Education. The field has gained stature from the participation and support of big-name scientists such as Wieman and Tanner’s mentor Bruce Alberts. Alberts is a biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco, past president of the US National Academy of Sciences and author of the prominent textbook The Molecular Biology of the Cell.
Researcher Michelle Smith, who studies learning in ecology field courses at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, guides students in an activity that models evolutionary principles.Credit: Cornell University
Faculty members in this speciality might largely teach, or they could maintain a strong research programme that focuses on education. “Within this field, you can think about the balance that you want, and you can have options,” says Smith.
Some researchers, such as Wieman, transitioned into education research after becoming established in their initial discipline. As the number of positions grows, early-career researchers will be able to enter education-focused positions directly. Faculty members who focus on education not only support their own students, but also help their colleagues to adopt the latest, science-based teaching methods, which in turn improves universities’ reputations with applicants.
Sideways steps
The discipline of physics has a long history of engaging with education research, says Wieman. His interest in education was sparked after starting his atomic-physics lab several decades ago, when he noticed that some graduate students who excelled at physics courses in the classroom were not as successful when they embarked on research in the lab. They were book smart, but lacked the problem-solving skills to debug scientific equipment or interpret experimental results. “There was just this fundamental puzzle,” he says. “Why were these things so disconnected?” So, for the next 15 years or so, he led parallel research programmes in atomic physics and physics education.Better teachers are needed to improve science education
The atomic-physics programme earned him a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001, and that also gave him a “bigger soapbox to stand on” to advocate for improvements in education. In 2007, he moved to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where he set up a Can$11-million (US$8-million) initiative to transform undergraduate science education with evidence-based methods, while managing a similar initiative in Colorado.
Wieman says that, rather than relying solely on lectures, teachers should facilitate “learning to think in a different way, and there’s real expertise in how to guide people to do that”. Many education experts promote active-learning techniques, such as getting students to work together to solve problems. More than 100 courses at the University of British Columbia were altered as a result of Wieman’s initiative3.
Wieman now has a joint appointment in the physics department and at the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University in California. Today, his research focuses exclusively on education, and specifically on undergraduate education of ‘technical expertise’ in physics, engineering and medicine.
Biology is another field with a history of education research, but it has taken time for many departments to prioritize educational innovation. In 1999, when evolutionary ecologist Raoul Mulder was interviewed for his first faculty job, a standard teaching and research position at the University of Melbourne in Australia, he recalls being asked only one question about lecturing.
As Mulder’s studies of bird ecology progressed, he, too, became intrigued by educational methods. “I think teaching is an absolutely natural outlet for this curiosity we all have as researchers,” says Mulder.
He began to turn the tools of science on education. He describes his initial education research, which began in the early 2000s, as “kind of a side hustle, I suppose. I wasn’t sure whether it was an accepted part of my identity”.
One of these side interests was student assessment. He noticed that students often didn’t pick up their final papers after grading. His careful feedback came too late to help them to improve their grades. So he experimented with a system wherein students received feedback from each other ahead of final submissions. Not only were the final papers improved, but students often couldn’t tell the difference between comments from their peers and their teachers4.
As these side projects continued, Mulder accumulated education-focused grants adding up to nearly Aus$1 million (US$675,000). Although his education studies account for only about 10% of his papers, they fuel more than 20% of his citations and make up nearly half of his top-ten most-impactful citations. “What was a side hustle has actually become more important than I thought,” Mulder says.Improve undergraduate science education
It also marked him as someone interested in education studies, and in 2021 resulted in him taking on a leadership role at the Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education, which focuses on evidence-based practices for higher education and professional development. Part of Mulder’s job includes handing out grants for others to do education research.
Those interested in the science of science education can start with questions inspired by their own classrooms, Mulder says, then dig into the “rich and growing” literature. He also suggests striking up conversations with other faculty members, who might be open to collaborating on studies of their own teaching practices.
But young researchers on a standard faculty track would be wise to speak with their department chair before focusing too much attention on education, says Neil Haave, a biologist at the University of Alberta in Camrose, Canada. “If they don’t see scholarship of teaching and learning as being research, that might not get you to full professor,” he warns.
Education-focused from the start
Another option is to enter an education-focused position directly as a new faculty member, as did Natasha Holmes, a physics-education researcher at Cornell who studies the efficacy of laboratory courses. “There are more and more graduate students coming up the pipeline now,” says Holmes, another Wieman protégé.
During her graduate studies at the University of British Columbia, Holmes assisted a postdoctoral fellow with an education research project, and was inspired to switch her PhD thesis to physics-education research. “It just tapped into my passions and curiosities,” Holmes recalls.
Researcher Natasha Holmes studies the efficacy of physics laboratory courses.Credit: Serge Petchenyi/Cornell University Center for Teaching Innovation
She focused on what she calls “a really extreme form of active learning”, when students invent solutions to problems before being taught the standard methods. It results in “much richer and deeper understanding”, Holmes says.
Tanner’s path, by contrast, started in the biology lab. She earned a PhD in neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco, in 1997. She then did a postdoc in education research, studying partnerships between scientists and school classrooms. Tanner, who started her professor post at San Francisco State University in 2004, is particularly interested in how teachers and scientists can work together to make classroom biology more like actual biology research.
As her career has advanced, so has the community of researchers who share her passion. At a meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research last July, she saw her former postdocs and graduate students who now have teams of their own.
There are many journals, professional organizations and conferences at which people can start learning about education research (see ‘Resources for science-education researchers’). Social media is beneficial, too, says Manuel João Costa, deputy rector for student affairs and innovations in teaching and learning at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal. He advises following the social-media accounts of teaching and learning centres, which often post content of interest.
Resources for science-education researchers
Scientists interested in pivoting to the science-education field can get started by reading the literature, attending conferences and joining relevant organizations.
Gordon Research Conferences are small, international meetings at which scientists can discuss research that has not yet been published. Upcoming US events include:
• Undergraduate Biology Education Research in Lewiston, Maine, 25–30 June 2023
• Chemistry Education Research and Practice in Lewiston, Maine, 9–14 July 2023
• Visualization in Science and Education in Lewiston, Maine, 16–21 July 2023
“It’s important to get some professional qualification in this space,” advises Susan Rowland, deputy executive dean for the faculty of science at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. She gained a graduate certificate in teaching in 2007 as she pivoted towards an education-focused career, and says it helped her to become the first teaching-focused faculty member in the biochemistry department, in 2009. Teaching-specific training also schools researchers in the vocabulary that educators and education scholars use when they communicate and publish their work.
Being the first teaching-focused researcher in her department also meant that Rowland had to work out how to angle for tenure. To prove her worth, she says, it was crucial to operate in the ‘currency’ that other faculty members valued: papers, grants and visible public impact.
Eager educators should also be aware, Rowland adds, that by taking a teaching-focused position, they could be closing the door on a more conventional research-based career.
Seeking status
Perceptions of education and teaching vary, and Tanner has found that many academic deans in California exhibit some bias against education-focused researchers — although they appreciate the grant money these faculty members bring in5. Tanner recalls that numerous people told her that her career path was a waste of her neuroscience training. She says she was “pretty great” at neuroscience research, and that there is no reason to think that other education-minded scientists failed at the bench, either. She has obtained grants, awards and success by following her passions.
In fact, both students and faculty members benefit when education-focused academics are embedded in science departments. These specialists understand their science discipline better than do scholars who trained in education only, and they can serve as formal or informal resources for colleagues who want to improve in the classroom.
“We drive curriculum renewal and best practice in the classroom and online,” says Terry Mulhern, a biomedical-science educator at the University of Melbourne. “We innovate and improve, and in doing so we bring our [department] colleagues with us.” For example, in 2019, he and a colleague revamped their university’s introductory biochemistry course using individualized feedback to students, lessons based on common misconceptions and several online elements. The latter proved useful when the institution had to pivot to full online learning in 2020 as a result of COVID-19 lockdowns.
Manuel João Costa teaches biochemistry to medicine students at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal.Credit: Rui Oliveira
Changing colleagues’ attitudes towards education can take time, as Rowland knows well. When she was first hired to change the culture of teaching in the University of Queensland’s School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, her first move was to choose the undesirable office next to the men’s toilets. Most of the department’s faculty were men, and she knew they’d all have to walk past her door eventually. That’s when she’d call out a cheery “Hi!”
After a while, colleagues started coming in, sitting in her comfortable chairs and talking about their students. Then they’d ask her questions — “You’ve published in PNAS? And in Nature journals? And you’re teaching-focused?” Yes, yes and yes, she’d respond.
Eventually, Rowland says, she earned her peers’ respect. Faculty members would come to her with teaching ideas, and she would help them to choose new approaches to try in their classrooms. “My presence legitimized the idea that they could talk about their courses as works in progress,” she says. The biochemistry department now has 6 teaching-focused academics amid a faculty of 70.Ban the lecture
At Cornell, Holmes says that she isn’t formally expected to help her peers in the physics department to improve their teaching, but she serves as a resource just like any other faculty member with specific expertise. She knows cutting-edge teaching techniques she can implement and share with colleagues. For example, peer instruction is a technique in which lecture students answer a multiple-choice question, confer with their classmates, then answer it again, usually with improved understanding. The method often spreads between faculty members by word of mouth6.
Holmes also brings a fresh perspective to education research, using techniques such as machine learning. For example, a graduate student in her group applied theoretical statistical physics to model the messy data on student behaviours in physics lab courses. Using this technique, the researchers uncovered a gender divide in enquiry-based lab projects, with men more likely to use equipment and women more likely to analyse data7.
All this effort in improving education eventually feeds the research enterprise, says Rui Oliveira, a biochemist and education researcher at the University of Minho. Well-taught undergraduates become capable graduate students and postdocs with critical-thinking skills — just what Wieman was after when he started investigating teaching 35 years ago.
“In the long run,” says Oliveira, “you will get better scientists to work with, and do better science.”
2nd Section GEA 11/1/23: After the likes of Anne Frank, Baruch Spinoza & John Locke let’s get to work now.
“Active learning interventions improve achievement for all students; those with disadvantaged and ethnic-minority backgrounds gain the most6. Administrators and faculty members have a responsibility to ensure that introductory classes do not push students away from STEM courses but promote critical thinking, problem solving, engaged learning and knowledge retention for all students, whether they intend to major in STEM fields or not. Effective STEM teaching is crucial to developing a science-literate population that can address the complex and interdisciplinary health, energy, security and environmental challenges of our time.”
https://rdcu.be/c287J, also Nature, with thanks, this source, Australian readers note it has extensive Australian input
Philosophy of Science students please “unpack” the above statement (as they go in Socratic/ Leninism-Marxism industrial era teaching-methodology or siloised, say, 18th Century neoclassical pedagogy – artificially compartmentalised to maximise pecuniary gain and societal prestige for practitioners – not primarily capital owners but aspirational fiscal accumulators – 18th Century neoclassical pedagogy – or Second Millennium rapine coloniser aristoi “global north” economy generally): deracinated, marketed for cash, kudos and expert-celebrity status, eviscerated, etherised/ evaporated and “stored” at enormous fiscal & global environmental cost as data in the dying days of global dereguatory governance-blind neoliberalism: still early in this third decade of the 21st century
..this the literary-cultural “Big Bang Theory” (USA clever young men demeaning, seconding, sexually capturing & lampooning all females) and “time-travel” era accumulation & compilation of disembodied facts of imagination or conjecture comprehensively, utterly and totally divorced from ecological, even non-household communal reality – a social universe oxymoronic extravaganza that is supposed to pass as entertainment for my grandchildren and yours, reader.
..I’m reminded of the living human culture Jeanette Winterson essays, “Love Objects” 1995, providing me at least with a rather chilling insight into the lives of children in mental-illness manufacturing, disjunctive~~ and frankly psychotic households now proliferating almost exponentially (r-number at least 1.1 likely?) all over the middle- and upper income consumer society world~~
..numbed and nonsensised by historical narrative, celebrity, mythos, hubris, solopsism and exponentially “metastasing” (that is to write in non-emotive non-rhetorical terms proliferating) solecisms, not logos re names, numbers, geolocations & things, let alone considered reflection upon their quantum relations in say fourto five set series (my original reads-any-way sequentia quantum-maths I first called trialectics in the context of the historically, technically, morally and intellectually busted post WWII Dialectics of the Damned – Workers vs Capital and Monetary vs Fiscal and Atheists vs Opus Dei to nominate three of the world’s worst-ever psycholinguistic trainwrecks) 1996 – 99 JB SA
Meanwhile here’s your European and American Deep South 1930’s zeitgeist Australian Broad & Bloke Casting Corporation radio seance shoah – we’re here to blow any new technology out of the water – it’s disruptive for goodness sake old chap – and clamp down on the arts, humanities, sociology and your actual marine coastal and terrestrial environmental #science – they’re disruptive of our fabulous earnings from toxic #FossilFuels-burning enterprises that employ thousands, who in turn revel in trickled-down Adam Smith 1776 opulence and go off to live in Denpasar old chap – focussing resolutely on making compendious notes and videos about fairy penguins/ cute anthropomorhised fishies & piggies & stuff ‘cos kids love it, collecting krill and spending 100s of millions on iBeacons & RFIDs instead of doing any critical global heating research (or indeed saying a damned word about it) because this TV & #tourism detritus helps the economy and the kickbacks, junkets, preferments, sinecures, wink-winks, knight-/ damehoods and state awards are fantastic.
Never let it be said we just make stuff up. We’re the fabulists, grinches and electoral autocracy champs Saatchi & Saatchi, Burston Marsela, Crosby Textor, Deloitte, KPMG, @pwc, McKinsey & Co, Jim Reed’s Resolve Strategic, the egregious Steve Bannon – Sarah Ferguson, Englishwoman’s, Cambridge Analytica friend, King & Wood Mallesons, Clayton Utz, the internationally embarrassing 43% carbon emissions reduction in EIGHT years Bellyflop RepuTech, Goldman Sachs, the Institute for Economic Affairs (Britain), the Prince’s Trust (ANU-chancellor Chair Julie Bishop), the wild and raunchy Australian Taxation Office, the 1948 Oxford Union Debating Club with Norman Mailer tackling that wicked woman Julian A.., whoops Germaine Greer, we the hard men & dizzy ladies of #Econometrics and the #Global #Derivatives #Markets and we’re making a complete killing.
So call Lifeline, suckers.
John Blundell. South Australia 11012023
~~ ~~ RD Laing “The Divided Self” originally published 1960 globally popularised among enquiring readers 1971, especially students intent on finding alternatives to basically medieval pills, potions, syringes, surgery Germ & Dettol theory and unquestioned prestigious allopathic medicine in general – our health is ours to nurture, nourish, heal and grow, we were all learning – only the half of it could be supplied by expert services, we knew
“Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with the mid-twentieth century, research done in the 2000s was much more likely to incrementally push science forward than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed the same trend.”
“The rate of decline is also puzzling: CD indices fell steeply from 1945 to 1970, then more gradually from the late 1990s to 2010. “Whatever explanation you have for disruptiveness dropping off, you need to also make sense of it levelling off” in the 2000s, he said”
Jeez, so much tricky homework there boss. Just keep on slinging us those $100m – multi-billion-dollar grants cleverly creamed from the bank accounts of those suckers the low- and middle-income taxpayers.
– We’ll be busy for years to come recording, noting down and loading up servers with data collected on historical lines,* with those pesky protest-group ecology and human rights issues noted as STEM-irrelevant narrative, anecdote and opinion, as we doggedly stick with good old mechanics, thermodynamics, Space-X rocketry, re-mapping Mars 92,000,000 away,** generally discovering and counting biospheric, microorganic and human prehistoric stuff and making videos for schoolkids about colourful telegenic animals, plants, birds, fish, fungi, crustaceans, er, cetaceans and phytoplankton – but no yucky greenie plastic in intestines – dogged faithful servants of the mid 18th century northern England industrial revolution until we inevitably croak.. for man that was born of woman.. oh do shut up, Kevin.. yeh righto Mum.. I said shut up.. nghnph
“Study finds Earth’s Ozone Layer is on course to be healed in decades” – Ita Buttrose & Scottie Morrison’s Australian Broad & Bloke Casting Corporation Tue 10th Jan 2023 (Ngus’ Radio?)
*clearly the universities’ and the godfather-billionaire autocracy’s strategy and intention
**yes i know we’ve ‘been’ there & done that but it’s on a cluncky if not already obsolete 50-metre global positioning scale and what else are we going to do with all this money – it’s the economy
“The #global #loss #of #pollinators is already causing about 500,000 early deaths a year by reducing the supply of healthy foods, a study has estimated
“Three-quarters of #crops require #pollination but the populations of many #insects are in sharp decline. The inadequate pollination that results has caused a 3%-5% loss of fruit, vegetable and nut production, the research found. The lower consumption of these foods means about 1% of all deaths can now be attributed to pollinator loss
“The researchers considered deaths from heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and some cancers, all of which can be reduced with healthier diets. The study is the first to quantify the human health toll of insufficient wild pollinators
“The study was based on data from hundreds of farms across the world, information on yields and diet-related health risks and a computer model that tracks the global trade in food
“A critical missing piece in the biodiversity discussion has been a lack of direct linkages to #humanhealth,” said Dr Samuel Myers, at Harvard …“This research establishes that loss of pollinators is already impacting health on a scale with other global health risk factors, such as prostate cancer or substance use disorders.”
“But there is a solution out there in pollinator-friendly practices,” Myers said. These include increasing flower abundance on farms, cutting pesticide use, especially neonicotinoids, and preserving or restoring nearby natural habitats. “When these have been studied, they pay for themselves economically through increased production.” Nonetheless, the researchers said “immense challenges remain” in restoring pollinator populations globally.
“The study, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, assessed dozens of pollinator-dependent crops using data from the global farm study. It found that insufficient pollination was responsible for about a quarter of the difference between high and low yields.
“The farm data was used to determine the drop in yield due to too few pollinators. “We estimated that the world is currently losing 4.7% of total production of fruit, 3.2% of vegetables, and 4.7% nuts,” the researchers said.
“They then used an economic model to track how these losses would affect the diets of people across the globe. Finally, they used well-known data on how reductions of fruit, vegetables, legumes and nuts affect health to estimate the number of early deaths
“The researchers found the biggest impact was in middle-income countries, like #China, #India, #Russia and #Indonesia, where #heartdisease, #strokes and #cancers were already prevalent due to poor diets, smoking, and low levels of exercise. In rich nations, more people could still afford to eat healthily even if the price of the foods went up due to lower production, although the poorer people in those countries would still suffer”…”
Journalists at this time of terrible and terrifying existential threat to all* have a greater moral obligation than ever not to simply regurgitate government and corporate announcements with no explanation as to the technical, industrial and above all public health and safety ramifications.
Below – 2, 3 paras down – for example is basic information about “green methane” – which typically in a lavishly public-funded contemporary global accountancy-firm managed-, controlled- and censored world, as ALL governments have run down, even trashed or virtually closed down bureaucratic, public or civil service expertise since the marginalising, virtual trivialising, nonsensising, ravaging and sell-off of public administration on account of M Friedman-GW Bush-A Greenspan 1990s Friedmanism is NOT considered worthy of public airing – LET ALONE the fundamentally important economic management facts of cost, efficiency and carbon emissions cost in production.
The world’s apparent last surviving public enemy of education, science, the rule of law and civil order this side of Afghanistan and the Chinese gangsters’ Burma/ Myanmar, still evading arrest because he enjoys a baffling and bewildering immunity from prosecution by the United States of America federal government is Stephen Kevin Bannon (born November 27, 1953) is an American media executive, political strategist, and former investment banker. He served as the White House‘s chief strategist in the administration of U.S. president Donald Trump during the first seven months of Trump’s term.[4][5] He is a former executive chairman of Breitbart News and previously served on the board of the now-defunct data-analytics firm Cambridge Analytica.[6]
“Can you make methane from hydrogen?
“The Sabatier reaction or Sabatier process produces methane and water from a reaction of hydrogen with carbon dioxide at elevated temperatures (optimally 300–400 °C) and pressures (perhaps 3 MPa) in the presence of a nickel catalyst.”
Thx 2 Wickipedia & all our 💚 to Mr Assange & family
John Blundell, Australia 🇦🇺
* for the indifferent, the globally developmentally delayed or the g-d demented
– literally the DEGROWTHED – all you theorists, polemicists, copywriters, meme-artists, bored-and-lonelies, doodlers and aspirational middle-class-kids-from-Work-Experience out there please try harder! Grow the Language and the Economy Will Follow Green Economist newsletter in that fateful year of 1996..
– who have not noticed, our fear is due to the collapse & scrambling of 6 – 8 year-old/ hot-cold/ diurnal/ seasonal #weather #systems, the smashing of ice-driven overturning circulations (ocean currents) and the radical disruption, both chemical & pressure variation-wise, of mid- and upper-atmosphere airstreams
If anyone can tell me not about Cap’n Janzsoon the map guy (who my generation of South Australian state primary school kids heard about) but of the same boat Dufyken’s Captain Thuyssens pulling into the shallow bay (then an extraordinary marine & pioneer zone spawning ground) at Chihduna far-west SA in say 1609?
The SA Netherlands Society put up a brass plaque at the grain seaport Thevenard.
– This story particularly upsets the Moses-strikes-the-stone, manna for breakfast daily & lotsa-great-sex menfolk of Utah. But funny? So not funny. It’s THEIR barking- or gobbling-mad engineered neoliberal apocalypse unfolding here for us all.
I have love(d) visiting the Mountain West and Utah for decades, I went to college in Boulder, but the Mountain West’s success is apparently catching up to it with the consequences that sometimes accompany unconstrained success.
The West is, well, just plain running out of water. Lake Powell and others are at 1/3 of their historic levels threatening power generation and water for agriculture and drinking, Mad Max anyone?. Now the Great Salt Lake (GSL) is apparently 5 years from running dry. This is a problem on multiple fronts as well. For decades industry and farms that surround the lake have been allowing arsenic to leach into the GSL and as it dries out the winds that blow over the lake will start spreading Arsenic and other toxins across the Salt Lake City basin. Water is a major issue and the western states and cities have long ignored the fact that they are located in a desert. New residents and industries use more and more water and there isn’t enough water. Will this stop the building boom? Will residents move away? Will the ski industry collapse? What are your thoughts? #CRE#RealEstate#CommercialRealEstate#CREFinance#RealEstateFinance#CommercialRealEstateFinance#CREInvesting#RealEstateInvesting#CREDevelopment#CommercialRealEstateInvesting#RealEstateDevelopment#CommercialRealEstateDevelopment#CREWater#RealEstateWater#CommercialRealEstateWater
Planning andscheming to throw all the humanisers & reformers into prisons???
.. or capture those who will NEVER STOP giving voice to equity, justice & human liberty to be drugged virtually to death in state funded nursing homes????
HEAR THAT VOICE TRY AND UNDERSTAND IT WHHA WHA WA 1970**
OUT IN THE PATIO WE DEFECATE 1980**
Well blow me down with say a depressive racist sexist fascist anti-green romantic Arthur Schopenhauer Friedrich Nietzsche Martin Heidigger Flight of the Valkyries Wagnerian feather.
Just imagine if you were Schickelgruber’s 14 year-old cousin?, a late 1930s Brechtian cabaret act??, a very silly mentally self-obsessed if not rich white person psycho-affectively touched-in-the head (if not a rapidly dementing mental veggie not long for this world) in mental Trump GOP-Biden DNC delusional exceptionalist global economic hegemony Theodore Roosevelt 1890s Manifest Destiny mode??? or a Twentieth Century Enlightenment Philosophic head-kicker like Australia’s own famed romantic intellectual minnows Scott Stephens & Waleed Aly (not to mention in this immediate context a ravening, chattering, blubbering and embarrssingly dribbly – but not that their good selves would acknowledge any of these peccadilloe of course – legion of teacher-, journalist-, dingbat MP-, and #businessman- & businesswoman-victims of a frankly busted neoclassical European on-historical-lines post 1990 @Google-#Search #education system and pedagogy – as these morons fondly refer to their seemingly endless recruitment-of-the-young fabulous-profit generating Perpetual Motion Machine & Self-fulfilling Prophecy Fake #science Jeremy Bentham Panopticon student.. with High-ROI #adaptation, #resilence, consumer spending profligacy and a mind-blowing indifference as to how economy, society and human industry actually work, enraptured by the prospect of higher wages (which haven’t risen in Japan since 2014 – I thought it necessary to throw that point in from yesterday’s Japan Times because the whole global economic newsmedia shooting-match runs on obfuscation, disinformation and public confusion), oblivious to the only #global #growth #industries this side of stealing people’s #savings and murdering other people, in point of #econometrics #Fact is soaring average ambient temperatures & a sneakily dwindling amount of Oxygen in the air we breathe..
In Norse mythology, a valkyrie (“chooser of the slain”) is one of a host of female figures who guide souls of the dead to the god Odin ‘s hall Valhalla. There, the deceased warriors become einherjar (Old Norse “single (or once) fighters”). When the einherjar are not preparing for the events of Ragnarök, the valkyries bear them mead.
During a speech he made in 1936, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels said:
Today arises in young and old, high and low, poor and rich, the will that the German nation must again be a world people. All of us are convinced of it: we must participate in the ruling of the world. We must become a master race, and therefore we must educate our people to be a master race. This must begin with the smallest child, who must be educated in this master-ethic.[56]
I understand only too well if my Australian readers are starting to worry a lot about the frankly off-the-air, if not whacko, sprays from the mouths of our “Fight China” nutters and public officials who reckon the best use of a prime minister at this globally existentially cataclysmic moment is to have him actually fly out of the country to talk to a barking-mad Pentie in Port Moresby. About bang-bangs? JFW.
You typically feel gut-churning loathing every time you walk down a supermarket aisle laden with imported (hidden-labelled or fancy-labelled product) most of it targeting the hard-working harried family carers and the rest the “luxurious” or “gourmet” exploding niche-market the cognitively impaired wealthy, literally costing the earth in terms of the depredations of centralised industrial global-fiscal-hegemon banks, corporations and organised crime cartels because of their mode of its production, distribution and exchange, chosen for profit maximisation by the oligarchs and billionaires.
You are of course all for low food- & hardware-kilometres and REGIONAL trade-development, not transporting stuff thousands of kilometres OR powering this market economics extravaganza for the benefit of no Australian on less than $120,000 a year with the lowest available grade of filthy diesel sludge.
Post Bretton Woods & Marshall Plan monetarism – as a writer of some gift and talent I’m left with failed words, buggered-up syntax and what are manifestly a vertiable blockchain algorithmic mathematical sequentia of death sentences on the human race.
EARLY 2023 ESSAYS TO MEND ALL THE BROKEN HEARTS by John Blundell, ex Human Sciences (Prof Ken Hancock’s School of Social Science) Flinders University of South Australia 1968-9
Economics, statistics, history, sociology, psychology, Euro-USA philosophy, logic, sociology, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of science, and oh, politics.
Some years later, #journalism***
** ..these the anthems of a broken national culure
***..nh-nh I wrote my first two news articles when i was 14 although it sure wasn’t 7/52 then as it has been for my last five exc growing healing learning teaching years J
Oh you crooks and clowns of late, late neoliberalism, what are you on?
No, we s-o-o-o-o-o don’t want any.
,,,,,,,,,,,, ………… ,,,,,,,,,,,,, ……….. 🙄
WE might ponder Jeanette Winterson’s semiotics of sex(uality/ isation) raising critically urgent questions about the 1990 – 20.. (?) Marshall Samuelson Bourlag Friedman (each of these men is of course long dead) lawyers’ orgy of intellectual property, branding and billionaire-/ government-backed milking, churning & bankrupting of #smegrowth worldwide ..See Jeanette Winterson, “Imagination and Reality” in “Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery” Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1995
On April 3, 1948, President Truman signed the Economic Recovery Act of 1948. It became known as the Marshall Plan, named for Secretary of State George Marshall, who in 1947 proposed that the United States provide economic assistance to restore the economic infrastructure of postwar Europe.
Shown here are the first and last pages of the resulting law, most commonly known as the Marshall Plan.
Public Law 472 (The Marshall Plan – page 1) General Records of the United States Government Record Group 11 National Archives and Records Administration
Dedication of this document: Kellyanne Conway’s Alternative Facts**..
In the psycholinguistics coup of the 21st century Ms Conway spectacularly drew together Gramsci’s false consciousness, Foucault’s post-fact discourse (+society, economy and most disturbing of all 3 pillars of active human interpersonal consciousness or transactions – the study of which now lies at the heart of revived functionalist sociology and now of 21st century economics – I must add culture – thus depressive mental illness, suicidal behaviour and acts of coercion, capture & lethal violence against weaker persons and children, even babies, mostly females, have proliferated, other-manipulation, exploitation, depersonalisation and otherising spawning psychotic dehumanising objectification of persons – all humans – obviously including old & slow people as mere opportunities for the enterpriser’s profit or sexual gratification and ultimately as objects to be bought, sullied and sold), post structuralist theory, post constructionism & our present negatively cascading bake, fry, go-hungry, flood, freeze & get very very sick postmodernist neoliberal Reverse Robin Hood/ Aus-trail-yanns/ All Let Us Rejoice/ I-yamm Ewe-are Wiya Horse… Let-Us-Further-Enrich-Those-Jolly-Good-Chaps-the-Super-Rich frenzy!
A mere twenty-four million of us. We Who-oo-oo–oo.
What a cracker🥸🤠😵💫🤢
“Alternative facts” was a phrase used by U.S. Counselor to the President, Kellyanne Conway, during a Meet the Press interview on January 22, 2017, in which she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s false statement about the attendance numbers of Donald Trump’s inauguration as President of the Inited States of America 🇺🇸 …Wickipedia
YE shall learn the true names of things is a biblical injunction. A well-functioning society cannot endure city newsreaders who insult regional audiences by mispronouncing or even recasting the names of people or places for the supposed phonetic grasp of obviously bewildered new immigrant speakers of English as a second, third fourth landguage.. whoops spelling not. Or maybe it’s just pedants on the #ABC’s cockamamie “committee on spoken English,” obsessing about commercial content (introducing the 1969 Volkswagen station wagon!) as they do. TRUE NAMES are so fundamental to the integrity and indeed ontological security of working people and students as to siloise and usually ethnically isolate them, even exposing them to violent assault if the regional-culture names are not understood or correctly articulated. It is Written in the Old Testament or Torah, many of yours professed sacred text, and I’d condidently guess similarly configured in The Koran.
I’d actually predict not guess because what are each ot the Middle Eastern Abrahamic texts but a raft of stories about people and places (supposedly originating in an idylliic garden nestled at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers) in an area of approximately 1m square kilometres representing approximately 1/ 510th of Earth’s surface between Iraq and the Mediterranean Sea, say 2,000 – 5,000 years ago, that so animated George Herbert Bush and his “crusader” son and a cause celebre for murderous European Islamophobes between 1095 and 1291 when Roman Catholic armies attempted to recover the city of Jerusalem from Islamic rule.
Alternative facts: Lord Have Mercy on Us Your Obedient Servants. Essentially the crying truth is we MUST give our kids a chance to learn the language that grew out of their own community, region and ancestors’ lives: beats living hell out of driving them into engineered confusion, disaffection, deep dis-associative distress, sadness, trauma, social withdrawal, depressive mental illness, self harm or suicide..
Billionaire-🙈🙊🙉🐒s with Olivettis 