#effects of modern agriculture

[farmerstrend]

How Big Should Your Farm Be to Make a Profit?

Many new agripreneurs believe that the size of their farm will determine how profitable they’ll be. However, you can be profitable whether you’re farming 1 hectare or 100 hectares; it all depends on how you farm. When it comes to land, the most important thing to consider is not the number of hectares at your disposal, but rather the commodity that you farm and how you manage and control costs.…

[najia-cooks]

[ID: A group of pastry pinwheels on a blue plate next to a bowl of yoghurt garnished with parsley. End ID]

صفيحة يافاوية / Safiha yafawiyya (Yaffan pinwheels)

The dish

صَفِيحَة يَافَاوِيَّة ("ṣafīḥa yāfāwīyya") is a type of safiha, or flatbread, believed to have originated in the coastal city of يافا (yāfā; "Yaffa," sometimes "Jaffa"). While other versions of safiha consist of a flat piece of dough topped with meat, Yaffan safiha are made by rolling dough out to a transparent thinness, folding it to enclose a filling of meat or spinach, and then whirling it around into a pinwheel shape. More highly valued in Yaffa than flat safiha, Yaffan safiha inspires proprietary feelings amongst residents and emigrants. The technique has, however, spread to other areas in Palestine, as well as to Alexandria, Egypt, where a large number of Yaffan exiles have resettled.

Yaffan safiha may also be called "حواية" ("ḥawāya"), after a kind of towel that is stitched into a spiral and placed on top of the head to cushion it while carrying jugs of water, or trays that are hot from the oven. One Yaffan woman remembers her mother assembling these pastries at home and then bringing them, in a large copper tray, to the baker, so they could be cooked in a shared oven for a small fee. The baker's wife would have to wait to use the oven another day. The usage of communal ovens by those who do not have an oven in their home is still common practice in rural areas of Palestine.

Traditionally, the dough used to make Yaffan safiha includes only flour, salt, oil, and water. Some modern Palestinian recipes leaven the dough with baking powder; or include milk powder as a way to use food aid from NGOs, which seek to alleviate the effects of the Israeli occupation's extreme restriction of transport, travel, and agricultural activities on Palestinians' diets. With a spinach filling and without milk powder, the safa'ih may be described as "صيامي" ("ṣiyāmī): a word derived from "صِيَام" ("ṣiyām"; "fast") but which, due to the abstention from meat mandated during the Lenten fast, is colloquially used to mean "vegetarian."

Golden brown and fragrant with olive oil, these safa'ih combine layers of crisp, flaky dough with a savory, well-spiced filling. Recipes for both a 'meat' and a spinach filling are provided. A side of yoghurt and a garnish of mint round out the flavors of the filling and add tanginess and textural contrast.

[ID: Close-up of two pinwheels cut open to reveal a spinach filling and a 'meat' filling between thin layers of pastry. End ID]

The Bride of Palestine

Yaffa is a port city with an ancient history which, until the 20th century, was the largest Arab city in, and the cultural and economic capital of, Palestine. For this reason it has sometimes been called عروس" "فلسطين ("'arūs filasṭīn"); "The Bride of Palestine." With the 1909 founding of the nearby Tel Aviv, Yaffa began to be considered its "twin" or "sister" ("האחיות") city; it had a distinctly Arab character where Tel Aviv was almost entirely Jewish. Yaffa was thus considered in disctinctly racialized terms: both attraction and threat; a source of authentic rootedness in the land which could be tapped, but also a potentially contagious bastion of Oriental "weak[ness]" ("חליש").

Yaffa had been a popular destination for culinary tourism in Mandate Palestine, with young settlers heading to the seaside to escape from religious studies and religious dietary restrictions—associated with diaspora Judaism and a lack of connection to a homeland—and to eat earthier Arab foods such as hummus, falafel, kebab, and ful.

In 1948, Zionist paramilitary organization Irgun dropped several tons of British bombs on major civilian areas of Yaffa in order to overwhelm resistance and empty the city of its Arab population; they destroyed the much of the Old City in the process. The neighborhood of المنشية (Manshiya) was destroyed shortly thereafter. Beginning in December of 1948, Yaffa was, part by part, annexed to Tel Aviv.

Today, despite the annexation and the Hebraization of the street signs, Yaffa maintains an Arab character in popular discourse. The call to prayer is heard in the streets, and the أبو العافي (Abulafia) bakery and أبو حسن (Abu Hassan) hummus restaurant and remain where they have been since the 1760s and 1970s, respectively. But increasing gentrification, rising rent prices, cafes and restaurants which cater to tourists and settlers, and the construction of Jewish-only residential projects threaten to continue the ethnic cleansing of the ancient city.

Yaffan Cuisine

Israeli occupation has tended to collapse some of the regional distinctions within Palestinian cuisine, as Palestinians are forced into exile or else crowded into Gaza and into smaller and smaller enclaves within the West Bank. Some dishes, however, still have variations that are associated with particular cities. Stuffed red carrots (محشي الجزر الأحمر; "maḥshi al-jazar al-'aḥmar"), cored and filled with rice and spiced meat, are a dish common throughout Palestine but cooked differently everywhere: in a sauce of lemon juice, pomegranate molasses, and red tahina in Gaza; in tamarind paste in Al-Quds and Ramallah; and in orange juice in the orange-rich Yaffa region. Abu Hassan restaurant serves مسبحة (msabbaha), a Yaffan classic in which chickpeas and tahina are mixed with green chili pepper, and lemon juice.

Donate to an evacuation fund

Buy an eSim for use in Gaza

Help Anera provide food in Gaza

Ingredients:

For the dough (makes 32):

500g flour (4 cups + 1 Tbsp)

1 tsp table salt

2 Tbsp olive oil

Enough water to form a soft, tacky dough (about 1 3/4 cup / 500mL)

For the meat filling (makes 16):

125g vegetarian ground beef (as a substitute for minced lamb)

1 small yellow onion, minced

1 Tbsp olive oil

1/2 tsp ground allspice

1/2 tsp ground black pepper

1/2 tsp ground cardamom

1/2 tsp table salt, or to taste

1/2 Tbsp ground sumac

1/2 Tbsp pomegranate molasses (optional)

For the spinach filling (makes 16):

500g spinach, washed and chopped

1 tsp kosher salt, for removing water

1 small yellow onion, minced

1 Tbsp olive oil

1/4 tsp ground black pepper

1/4 tsp table salt, or to taste

Squeeze of lemon juice

1 tsp shatta (hot red pepper paste)

1/2 Tbsp pomegranate molasses (optional)

Some recipes include sumac in the spinach filling, but this is not considered traditional.

Instructions:

For the dough:

1. Measure dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl. Add oil and mix briefly. Add water, a little at a time, until the dough comes together into a slightly tacky ball. Knead for five minutes, until smooth and elastic.

2. Divide dough into 16 balls of about 50g each. Roll it out into a cylinder and cut it in half repeatedly; or weigh the dough using a kitchen scale and divide by 16.

3. Pour some olive oil in a tray or baking sheet and coat each dough ball. Leave them on the tray, covered, to rest while you prepare the fillings.

For the meat filling:

1. Heat 1 Tbsp olive oil on medium-high. Add meat and fry, stirring often, until nearly cooked through.

2. Add onions, salt, and spices and fry until onion is translucent.

3. Remove from heat. Stir in sumac and pomegranate molasses. Taste and adjust. Let cool.

For the spinach filling:

1. Mix spinach with salt and let sit 10-15 minutes. Squeeze to remove excess water.

2. Heat 1 Tbsp olive oil in medium-high. Fry onion, salt, and pepper for a minute until translucent.

3. Combine all ingredients. Taste and adjust salt.

To assemble:

1. Oil a clean work surface, as well as your hands. Spread a dough ball out into a very thin, translucent circle by repeatedly patting with your fingers while pushing outwards. Be sure to push outwards from the center so that the circle does not become too thin at the edges. A few small holes are okay, since the dough will be folded and rolled in on itself.

2. Cut the circle in half with a sharp knife. Spread 1/16 of either filling in a thin line along the cut edge, leaving a margin of 1 cm (1/2") or so.

3. Roll the edge of the dough (the cut edge) over to encase the filling. Continue rolling, trying as much as possible to exclude air, until you have a long rope of dough.

4. Roll the rope around in a tight spiral. Tuck the very end of the dough underneath and press to seal. Place on a preparing baking sheet.

5. Repeat until the filling and dough are used up. Meanwhile, preheat an oven to 375 °F (190 °C). Bake the safiha in the top third of the oven for 25-30 minutes, or until golden in color. 

Serve warm with yoghurt.

[determinate-negation]

“This raises the question: if industrial production is necessary to meet decent-living standards today, then perhaps capitalism—notwithstanding its negative impact on social indicators over the past five hundred years—is necessary to develop the industrial capacity to meet these higher-order goals. This has been the dominant assumption in development economics for the past half century. But it does not withstand empirical scrutiny. For the majority of the world, capitalism has historically constrained, rather than enabled, technological development—and this dynamic remains a major problem today.

It has long been recognized by liberals and Marxists alike that the rise of capitalism in the core economies was associated with rapid industrial expansion, on a scale with no precedent under feudalism or other precapitalist class structures. What is less widely understood is that this very same system produced the opposite effect in the periphery and semi-periphery. Indeed, the forced integration of peripheral regions into the capitalist world-system during the period circa 1492 to 1914 was characterized by widespread deindustrialization and agrarianization, with countries compelled to specialize in agricultural and other primary commodities, often under “pre-modern” and ostensibly “feudal” conditions.

In Eastern Europe, for instance, the number of people living in cities declined by almost one-third during the seventeenth century, as the region became an agrarian serf-economy exporting cheap grain and timber to Western Europe. At the same time, Spanish and Portuguese colonizers were transforming the American continents into suppliers of precious metals and agricultural goods, with urban manufacturing suppressed by the state. When the capitalist world-system expanded into Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, imports of British cloth and steel destroyed Indigenous textile production and iron smelting, while Africans were instead made to specialize in palm oil, peanuts, and other cheap cash crops produced with enslaved labor. India—once the great manufacturing hub of the world—suffered a similar fate after colonization by Britain in 1757. By 1840, British colonizers boasted that they had “succeeded in converting India from a manufacturing country into a country exporting raw produce.” Much the same story unfolded in China after it was forced to open its domestic economy to capitalist trade during the British invasion of 1839–42. According to historians, the influx of European textiles, soap, and other manufactured goods “destroyed rural handicraft industries in the villages, causing unemployment and hardship for the Chinese peasantry.”

The great deindustrialization of the periphery was achieved in part through policy interventions by the core states, such as through the imposition of colonial prohibitions on manufacturing and through “unequal treaties,” which were intended to destroy industrial competition from Southern producers, establish captive markets for Western industrial output, and position Southern economies as providers of cheap labor and resources. But these dynamics were also reinforced by structural features of profit-oriented markets. Capitalists only employ new technologies to the extent that it is profitable for them to do so. This can present an obstacle to economic development if there is little demand for domestic industrial production (due to low incomes, foreign competition, etc.), or if the costs of innovation are high.

Capitalists in the Global North overcame these problems because the state intervened extensively in the economy by setting high tariffs, providing public subsidies, assuming the costs of research and development, and ensuring adequate consumer demand through government spending. But in the Global South, where state support for industry was foreclosed by centuries of formal and informal colonialism, it has been more profitable for capitalists to export cheap agricultural goods than to invest in high-technology manufacturing. The profitability of new technologies also depends on the cost of labor. In the North, where wages are comparatively high, capitalists have historically found it profitable to employ labor-saving technologies. But in the peripheral economies, where wages have been heavily compressed, it has often been cheaper to use labor-intensive production techniques than to pay for expensive machinery.

Of course, the global division of labor has changed since the late nineteenth century. Many of the leading industries of that time, including textiles, steel, and assembly line processes, have now been outsourced to low-wage peripheral economies like India and China, while the core states have moved to innovation activities, high-technology aerospace and biotech engineering, information technology, and capital-intensive agriculture. Yet still the basic problem remains. Under neoliberal globalization (structural adjustment programs and WTO rules), governments in the periphery are generally precluded from using tariffs, subsidies, and other forms of industrial policy to achieve meaningful development and economic sovereignty, while labor market deregulation and global labor arbitrage have kept wages extremely low. In this context, the drive to maximize profit leads Southern capitalists and foreign investors to pour resources into relatively low-technology export sectors, at the expense of more modern lines of industry.

Moreover, for those parts of the periphery that occupy the lowest rungs in global commodity chains, production continues to be organized along so-called pre-modern lines, even under the new division of labor. In the Congo, for instance, workers are sent into dangerous mineshafts without any modern safety equipment, tunneling deep into the ground with nothing but shovels, often coerced at gunpoint by U.S.-backed militias, so that Microsoft and Apple can secure cheap coltan for their electronics devices. Pre-modern production processes predicated on the “technology” of labor coercion are also found in the cocoa plantations of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, where enslaved children labor in brutal conditions for corporations like Cadbury, or Colombia’s banana export sector, where a hyper-exploited peasantry is kept in line by a regime of rural terror and extrajudicial killings overseen by private death squads.

Uneven global development, including the endurance of ostensibly “feudal” relations of production, is not inevitable. It is an effect of capitalist dynamics. Capitalists in the periphery find it more profitable to employ cheap labor subject to conditions of slavery or other forms of coercion than they do to invest in modern industry.”

Capitalism, Global Poverty, and the Case for Democratic Socialism by Jason Hickle and Dylan Sullivan

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #3

Jan 26-Feb 2 2024

The House overwhelmingly passed a tax deal that will revive the expanded Child Tax Credit, this will effect 16 million American children and lift 400,000 out of poverty in the first year. The deal also supports the building of 200,000 housing units over the next two years, and provides tax relief for communities hit by disasters.

The Biden Administration has begun negotiations on drug prices for Medicare. Earlier this year the administration announced it would negotiate for the first time directly with drug manufacturers on the prices of 10 common medications. This week they sent their opening offers to the companies. The program is expected to save Medicare and enrollees billions over dollars over the long term and help push down drug prices for everyone.

The Department of Transportation has green lit $240 Million to modernize air ports across the country. Air Ports in 37 states will be able to get much needed updates and refurbishment.

The Biden Administration announced 10 sites across America as sites for innovation investment. They will receive up to 2 billion dollars each over the next 10 years. The goal is to stimulate economic growth and innovation in semiconductor manufacturing, clean energy, sustainable textiles, climate-resilient agriculture, regenerative medicine, and more.

The State Department reviews options for recognizing Palestinian Statehood. While as of yet there's been no policy change this review of options is a major shift in US diplomatic thinking which has long opposed Palestinian Statehood and shows a seriousness of reported Biden plans to push for Statehood as part of a post-war Israel-Saudi normalization deal.

President Biden imposes sanctions on Israeli settlers who have engaged in violence against Palestinians and peace activists. This marks the first time the US has leveled sanctions against Israelis and sets up a standard that could see the whole settlement movement cut off from the US financial system

the Department of Energy has tentatively agreed to a $1.5 Billion dollar loan to help reopen a Michigan nuclear power plant. This would mark the first time a closed nuclear plant has been brought back online. Closed in 2022 it's hoped that it could reopen in time to be generating power in late 2025. This is part of Biden's plan to decarbonize the electricity grid by 2035.

the Internal Revenue Service launched a program to allow tax fillers file for free directly with the government. In 2024 its a pilot program limited to 12 states, but plans for it to be nation wide by tax day 2025

The Department of Health and Human Services announced $28 million in grants to help with the treatment of substance use disorder, including a program aimed at pregnant and postpartum women, and expanded drug court aimed at directing people into treatment and out of the criminal justice system.

The Department of Energy announced $72 million for 46 hydroelectric projects across 19 states. This marks the single largest investment in Hydropower in US history.

The Senate confirmed President Biden's 175th federal judge. Biden has now appointed more federal judges in his first term in office than President Obama did in his, however still lags behind Trump's 186 judges. For the first time in history a majority of a President's nominees are not white men, 65% of them are women and 65% are people of color, President Biden has appointed more black women to judgeships than any administration in history.

[apas-95]

Couldnt it be argued that the US is still a slave republic? Domestically, there is slave labor through the prison system, human and labor trafficking, and only a few decades ago, if at that, systems such as convict leasing, share cropping, and debt peonage. Internationally, there is also the fact that for conflict minerals, coffee, chocolate, and other commodities, a portion if not the majority of it is sourced from slave labor.

The use of slavery in and of itself doesn't constitute the slave-society stage of production. Slavery continues to exist under feudalism and capitalism, but not as the driving force of society as in the ancient slave republics. Politically, in the modern USA, it is the bourgeoisie that are in power; and economically, it is the exploitation of waged labour (much of it overseas) that is the basis of production.

Further, slaves in the US are owned either by the state, in state prisons, and leased to private companies; or owned by large companies directly in private prisons. The individual or smallholder ownership of slaves was done away with in the USA's previous civil war: carried out between the industrial haute-bourgeois of the developed north, and the agricultural petty gentry of the southern hinterland. Slaves in the US today are the exclusive property of the bourgeoisie, through their corporations or bourgeois state.

While large amounts of raw materials are sourced through slave labour, as are agricultural goods, slave labour in the broadest sense is not applicable to industrial production of the type required by modern capitalism - if for nothing else than reasons of profitability. The slave labourer is effectively themselves human capital, part of the machinery bought wholesale - while they still effectively carry out labour, they fundamentally do not produce surplus value in the same manner as a wage-worker; it is necessary for their food and other reproductive labour to be given to them without cost, in the same way one carries out maintenance on equipment - whereas a wage-worker is only purchased and employed as capital for the duration of the workday, and then is responsible for their own food, housing, and reproductive labour. The principal exception to the use of slave labour in industrial production (which already has an exceedingly high fixed-capital cost compared to agriculture) is in the historical case of fascism, where primitive accumulation and war industry led to conditions favourable to industrial slave labour, which was carried out en-masse by e.g. German industrial syndicates using concentration camp labourers.

While the earlier USA, as a settler nation, made heavy use of both slavery and primitive accumulation, this was necessarily a historically-contingent process, one carried out by the European empires precisely because the Americas had not been 'brought up to' the level of social contradiction they had. Slavery's profitability necessarily fell as the USA industrialised, and remains now only in certain key industries like agriculture and military production. Historically, again, the movement to make slavery a profitable general venture in the era of capitalism is the fascist movement, which attempts generally to replace the proletariat at large by mobilising the higher strata upwards, into petty-bourgeois smallholders (e.g. wehrbauern), converting the middle strata into slaves, and exterminating the lower strata - a movement that fundamentally requires both large swathes of cleared land as well as mass depopulation, due to the lower population density such an essentially backwards mode of production can support. Ultimately, it is a project doomed to failure, due to the impossibility of turning back history - but one the bourgeoisie are inevitably driven to attempt when capitalism starts nearing the end of its profitability.

In the USA, historically, the exploitation of indigenous nations and external colonies has provided a source of profit and primitive accumulation that has rendered a genuine fascist movement effectively unnecessary, despite the middle-class yearning for it, but these systems are themselves drying up, and the US, while not a slave republic, will soon start attempting to fashion itself into one by carving up its population.

I hope this has answered your question, thank you for writing in!

[suppotato123]

Screw Hogwarts Houses (and JK Rowling) tell me what degree you would be taking at a magical university:

Thaumaturgical Artificing- The scientific study and application of magic as it pertains to Alchemy (the creation of of potions) and Arcana (the engineering of magical devices).

Necromantic Studies- A degree for those looking for the most modern and ethical methods of raising the dead.

Arcanic Anthropology- This degree walks students through the history of magical artifacts, how to find them, and their proper uses to aspiring Sorcerers and non-magic users alike.

Linguistic Incantology- The study of the properties of magical languages as well as the characteristics of those languages in general ascertained in order to gain mastery over the magical art of incantation.

Magiphysical Sciences- The study of Humanoid systems, anatomy, and physical health and fitness as it pertains to magical gestures and more physically involved magic systems.

Mystic Virology- The study of magical diseases and curses, their effects on the humanoid form, and the treatments and counterhexes for such magical conditions.

Enchanted Horticulture- A branch of Enchanted agriculture that focuses on cultivation of magical gardens for the purposes of spells, medicine, and consumption.

General Studies- This degree covers the most basic information on various magical studies and provides a great opportunity for students to discover their magical passions and/or complete their prerequisite courses before moving on to a more advanced degree.

[todayontumblr]

Wednesday, June 28.

Trees!

Let's face it, we simply do not deserve trees. We have everything to thank them for, quite literally. After all, they reduce the 'greenhouse effect' by removing harmful carbon dioxide from the air and releasing oxygen. Each and every year, a single mature tree will produce adequate oxygen for ten entire people. They are also an effective sound barrier, capable of limiting noise pollution, and recent research has revealed that they can also help reduce the stress of modern life. Well, we are happy to offer some more evidence from a primary research source, from us to you. There is simply nothing we like better than to nestle beneath a tree on a bright, colorful day, relax into the trunk, and relax, fingers between blades of grass.

Alone? It's great. With people? Also excellent. With a book? Exquisite. With music? What could be better. With none of the above, just the endless pleasures of looking and listening? Yes please. There are few pleasures as simple, yet profound, as watching the interplay of light and shadow beneath the leaves of trees. It's a little like watching the flow of a green river. We could go on, but time spent waxing lyrical is time you should be sitting beneath a big green bad boi.

Here's crunch time: people, being the sh*theads we are, clear millions of forested acres every year. Often for short-term rewards, like silly money, despite the long-term risks like desertification, wildlife declines, and climate change. Earth now has 46% fewer trees than 12,000 years ago, when agriculture was in its infancy. All is not lost, however. Here's a handful of links to tree conservation charities, and if you like what you see, here is a more comprehensive list.

The National Forest Foundation (NFF)

One Tree Planted

Trees for the Future (TREES)

Plant With Purpose 

Eden Reforestation Projects (Eden)

[elbiotipo]

Finally read All Tomorrows last night and I know why people recommended it to me all the time, it was a very interesting piece of *biopunk* speculative evolution with a fascinating overarching story. It was also a breeze to read, I expected it would be long and a bit tiring (like Man After Man) but no, it was very illustrated and in fact it left you hungry for a bit more, I love the way it lets you fill in the gaps.

Of course, like always, it falls in the same old trope that biotechnology = bad and gross. It doesn't fall straight into saying biotechnology is evil, but the element of body horror is very, very, very much present in all the book. The fact that being warped into abominations is shown as the big event of human evolution reminds me of Man After Man, where "human evolution" doesn't occur "naturally" or as a result of, well, human selection, but as a result of a higher power messing with humans. All those strange beings we see in the book were not the ultimate result of environmental pressures, "artificial" selection or people bioengineering themselves. They were the result of fucked-up eldritch beings who wanted to make fucked-up humans. Which is kind of dissapointing if you are looking for a book that actually talks about future human evolution.

Which brings me to a discussion of the future of human evolution. Because, obviously, humans are evolving today. But I don't think we can see the real effect of biological evolution in the timescale we are managing as current humans. From a quick search, there have been only 500 generations since the arrival of agriculture and thus of all recorded or remembered history as we know it. That's not nearly enough biological time to see any major changes. Yes, there have been changes. And the development of human intelligence and brain size was quick and monumental, with many things we still don't really understand (like the origin of language and abstract thought). But do notice that the body plan of a modern human does not radically depart from Homo erectus, 2 million years ago.

Some authors like Olaf Stapledon (one of the great grandfathers of science fiction) in Last and First Men (which could be considered the 1930s version of All Tomorrows, in fact All Tomorrows to me is the modern Last and First Men) thought that we would continue to have evolutive pressures like natural selection and our species will continue evolving over millions of years. This is true as all species are still evolving including us, but in just a few decades we have discovered genetic engineering, and it won't be too long before, somehow, it is used in the path of our evolution. All Tomorrows of course talks about this with the Star People and later the Asteromorphs, but I believe it leaves out the prospect of humans guiding their own evolution for the (admitedly interesting) plot twist of the Qu changing them themselves.

What would have happened (or rather, what WILL happen) if humans are left to evolve by themselves? I'm sure that we will find somewhen. And I think that cosmetic genetic modification will be part of it, which is why I personally found the depiction of the Star People so boring. Now, I don't think every human will genetically modify themselves into supermodels, for starters, our parameters of attractiveness are based on culture and material conditions, and people will always seek variety, but I do think "sexual selection" would be a major part of human evolution, and that some forms like the Star People, as practical(?) as they are, just don't have the appeal. The utopia of the Star People should have been just as interesting as the dystopia of the Qu, with people experimenting new ways to adapt their bodies and self expression. Not to mention people adapting to the many strange environments of space by themselves (an old sci-fi trope). And of course, there would always be humans who don't want any of that, preferring to stay as they are, or return as they were. None, none of the Asteromorphs desired that at all?

Even in my own biopunk setting, however, the future of human evolution is something I only can see as far as a couple centuries on the future. Anything more than that, with the infinite possibilities of genetic engineering, makes me dizzy to contemplate. So I think All Tomorrows, for daring to do this billions of years in the future, is an amazing book.

[ghelgheli]

According to Marx, metabolic rift appears in three different levels and forms. First and most fundamentally, metabolic rift is the material disruption of cyclical processes in natural metabolism under the regime of capital. Marx’s favourite example is the exhaustion of the soil by modern agriculture. Modern large-scale, industrial agriculture makes plants absorb soil nutrition as much as and as fast as possible so that they can be sold to customers in large cities even beyond national borders. It was Justus von Liebig’s Agricultural Chemistry (1862) and his theory of metabolism that prompted Marx to integrate an analysis of the ‘robbery’ system of agriculture into Capital. [...]

Liebig harshly criticized modern ‘robbery agriculture’ (Raubbau), which only aims at the maximization of short-term profit and lets plants absorb as many nutrients from the soil as possible without replenishing them. Market competition drives farmers to large-scale agriculture, intensifying land usage without sufficient management and care. As a consequence, modern capitalist agriculture created a dangerous disruption in the metabolic cycle of soil nutrients. [...]

Marx formulated the problem of soil exhaustion as a contradiction created by capitalist production in the metabolism between humans and nature. Insofar as value cannot fully take the metabolism between humans and nature into account and capitalist production prioritizes the infinite accumulation of value, the realization of sustainable production within capitalism faces insurmountable barriers.

This fundamental level of metabolic rift in the form of the disruption of material flow cannot occur without being supplemented and reinforced by two further dimensions. The second dimension of metabolic rift is the spatial rift. Marx highly valued Liebig in Capital because his Agricultural Chemistry provided a scientific foundation for his earlier critical analysis of the social division of labour, which he conceptualized as the ‘contradiction between town and country’ in The German Ideology. Liebig lamented that those crops that are sold in modern large cities do not return to the original soil after they are consumed by the workers. Instead, they flow into the rivers as sewage via water closets, only strengthening the tendency towards soil exhaustion.

This antagonistic spatial relationship between town and country – it can be called ‘spatial rift’ – is founded upon a violent process of so-called primitive accumulation accompanied by depeasantization and massive urban growth of the working-class population concentrated in large cities. This not only necessitates the long-distance transport of products but also significantly increases the demand for agricultural products in large cities, leading to continuous cropping without fallowing under large-scale agriculture, which is intensified even more through market competition. In other words, robbery agriculture does not exist without the social division of labour unique to capitalist production, which is based upon the concentration of the working class in large cities and the corresponding necessity for the constant transport of their food from the countryside. [...]

The third dimension of metabolic rift is the temporal rift. As is obvious from the slow formation of soil nutrients and fossil fuels and the accelerating circulation of capital, there emerges a rift between nature’s time and capital’s time. Capital constantly attempts to shorten its turnover time and maximize valorization in a given time – the shortening of turnover time is an effective way of increasing the quantity of profit in the face of the decreasing rate of profit. This process is accompanied by increasing demands for floating capital in the form of cheap and abundant raw and auxiliary materials. Furthermore, capital constantly revolutionizes the production process, augmenting productive forces with an unprecedented speed compared with precapitalist societies. Productive forces can double or triple with the introduction of new machines, but nature cannot change its formation processes of phosphor or fossil fuel, so ‘it was likely that productivity in the production of raw materials would tend not to increase as rapidly as productivity in general (and, accordingly, the growing requirements for raw materials)’ (Lebowitz 2009: 138). This tendency can never be fully suspended because natural cycles exist independently of capital’s demands. Capital cannot produce without nature, but it also wishes that nature would vanish. [...]

The contradiction of capitalist accumulation is that increases in the social productivity are accompanied by a decrease in natural productivity due to robbery [... i]t is thus essential for capital to secure stable access to cheap resources, energy and food. [...]

The exploration of the earth and the invention of new technologies cannot repair the rift. The rift remains ‘irreparable’ in capitalism. This is because capital attempts to overcome rifts without recognizing its own absolute limits, which it cannot do. Instead, it simply attempts to relativize the absolute. This is what Marx meant when he wrote ‘every limit appears a barrier to overcome’ (Grundrisse: 408). Capital constantly invents new technologies, develops means of transportation, discovers new use-values and expands markets to overcome natural limits. [...]

Corresponding to the three dimensions of metabolic rifts, there are also three ways of shifting them. First, there is technological shift. Although Liebig warned about the collapse of European civilization due to robbery agriculture in the 19th century, his prediction apparently did not come true. This is largely thanks to Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who invented the so-called Haber-Bosch process in 1906 that enabled the industrial mass production of ammonia (NH3) by fixing nitrogen from the air, and thus of chemical fertilizer to maintain soil fertility. Historically speaking, the problem of soil exhaustion due to a lack of inorganic substances was largely resolved thanks to this invention. Nevertheless, the Haber-Bosch process did not heal the rift but only shifted, generating other problems on a larger scale.

The production of NH3 uses a massive amount of natural gas as a source of hydrogen (H). In other words, it squanders another limited resource in order to produce ammonia as a remedy to soil exhaustion, but it is also quite energy intensive, producing a lot of carbon dioxide (CO2) (responsible for 1 per cent of the total carbon emission in the world). Furthermore, excessive applications of chemical fertilizer leach into the environment, causing eutrophication and red tide, while nitrogen oxide pollutes water. Overdependence on chemical fertilizer disrupts soil ecology, so that it results in soil erosion, low water- and nutrient-holding capacity, and increased vulnerability to diseases and insects. Consequently, more frequent irrigation, a larger amount of fertilizer and more powerful equipment become necessary, together with pesticides. This kind of industrial agriculture consumes not just water but large quantities of oil also, which makes agriculture a serious driver of climate change. [...]

[T]here remains a constant need to shift the rift under capitalism, which continues to bring about new problems. This contradiction becomes more discernible in considering the second type of shifting the metabolic rift – that is, spatial shift, which expands the antagonism of the city and the countryside to a global scale in favour of the Global North. Spatial shift creates externality by a geographic displacement of ecological burdens to another social group living somewhere else. Again, Marx discussed this issue in relation to soil exhaustion in core capitalist countries in the 19th century. On the coast of Peru there were small islands consisting of the excrement of seabirds called guano that had accumulated over many years to form ‘guano islands’. [...]

In the 19th century, guano became ‘necessary’ to sustain soil fertility in Europe. Millions of tons of guano were dug up and continuously exported to Europe, resulting in its rapid exhaustion. Extractivism was accompanied by the brutal oppression of Indigenous people and the severe exploitation of thousands of Chinese ‘c**lies’ working under cruel conditions. Ultimately, the exhaustion of guano reserves provoked the Guano War (1865–6) and the Saltpetre War (1879–84) in the battle for the remaining guano reserves. As John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark (2009) argue, such a solution in favour of the Global North resulted in ‘ecological imperialism’. Although ecological imperialism shifts the rift to the peripheries and makes its imminent violence invisible in the centre, the metabolic rift only deepens on a global scale through long-distance trade, and the nutrient cycle becomes even more severely disrupted.

The third dimension of metabolic shift is the temporal shift. The discrepancy between nature’s time and capital’s time does not immediately bring about an ecological disaster because nature possesses ‘elasticity’. Its limits are not static but modifiable to a great extent. Climate crisis is a representative case of this metabolic shift. Massive CO2 emissions due to the excessive usage of fossil fuels is an apparent cause of climate change, but the emission of greenhouse gas does not immediately crystallize as climate breakdown. Capital exploits the opportunities opened up by this time lag to secure more profits from previous investments in drills and pipelines. Since capital reflects the voice of current shareholders, but not that of future generations, the costs are shifted onto the latter. As a result, future generations suffer from consequences for which they are not responsible. Marx characterized such an attitude inherent to capitalist development with the slogan ‘Après moi le déluge!’ (Capital I: 381).

This time lag generated by a temporal shift also induces a hope that it would be possible to invent new epoch-making technologies to combat against the ecological crisis in the future. In fact, one may think that it is better to continue economic growth which promotes technological development, rather than over-reducing carbon dioxide emissions and adversely affecting the economy. However, even if new negative emission technologies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) are invented, it will take a long time for them to spread throughout society and replace the old ones. In the meantime, the environmental crisis will continue to worsen due to our current inaction. As a result, the expected effects of the new technology can be cancelled out.

Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene

[probablyasocialecologist]

Textbooks on biology and forestry make it clear that large parts of Europe would naturally be covered by dense forests. The textbook narrative is that our ancestors felled the forests, drained the swamps and cultivated the heathland. In other words, they created the varied landscapes of meadows, heaths and grasslands that characterized our cultural landscapes before the advent of modern agriculture. But new research from Aarhus University suggests that this is not the case. Elena Pearce, postdoc at the Department of Biology at Aarhus University, and the lead author of the study explains. “The idea that the landscape was covered by dense forest across most of the continent is simply not right. Our results show that we need to reassess our view of what European nature is," she says, and her colleague and co-author Professor Jens-Christian Svenning continues: “Nature during the last interglacial period – a period with a mild climate similar to today, but before modern humans arrived - was full of variation. Importantly, the landscapes harboured large amounts of open and semi-open vegetation with shrubs, light-demanding trees and herbs alongside stands of tall-growing shade trees.”

[...]

According to calculations from the new study, somewhere between 50 and 75 per cent of the landscape was covered by open or semi-open vegetation. And this is most likely due to the large mammals that lived at that time, explains Jens-Christian Svenning. "We know that a lot of large animals lived in Europe at that time. Aurochs, horses, bison, elephants and rhinos. They must have consumed large amounts of plant biomass and thereby had the capacity to keep the tree-growth in check," he says and continues: "Of course, it’s also likely that other factors such as floods and forest fires also played a part. But there’s no evidence to suggest that this caused enough disturbance. For example, forest fires encourage pine trees, but mostly we did not find pine as a dominant species.” Although the research group cannot be 100 percent certain about the extent to which large animals were behind the open areas, there are strong indications that they were. Firstly, large animals such as bison have exactly that effect in areas where they are still found in European forests. Furthermore, beetle fossils from the last interglacial period also show that many large animals lived at that time. “We have looked at a number of finds of beetle fossils from that time in the UK. Although there are beetle species that thrive in forests with frequent forest fires, we found none of them in the fossil data. Instead, we found large quantities dung beetles, and this shows that parts of the landscape have been densely populated by large herbivores," he says.

[fatehbaz]

Because tuatara are very long lived - between 100 and 200 years by most estimates […] - the founding of Aotearoa/New Zealand as a modern nation and the unfolding of settler-wrought changes to its environment have transpired over the course of the lives of perhaps just two tuatara [...].

---

[T]he tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) [...] [is] the sole surviving representative of an order of reptiles that pre-dates the dinosaurs. [...] [T]he tuatara is of immense global and local significance and its story is pre-eminently one of deep timescales, of life-in-place [...]. Epithets abound for the unique and ancient biodiversity found in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Prized as “Ghosts of Gondwana” (Gibbs 2008), or as denizens of “Moa’s Ark” (Bellamy et al. 1990) or “The Southern Ark” (Andrews 1986), the country’s faunal species invoke fascination and inspire strong language [...]. In rounded terms, it [has been] [...] just 250 years since James Cook made landfall; just 200 years since the founding of the handful of [...] settlements that instigated agricultural transformation of the land [...]. European newcomers [...] were disconcerted by the biota [...]: the country was seen to “lack” terrestrial mammals; many of its birds were flightless and/or songless; its bats crawled through leaf-litter; its penguins inhabited forests; its parrots were mountain-dwellers; its frogs laid eggs that hatched miniature frogs rather than tadpoles [...].

---

Despite having met a reassuringly temperate climate [mild, oceanic, comparable to western Europe], too, the newcomers nevertheless sought to make adjustments to that climate, and it was clear to them that profits beckoned. Surveying the towering lowland forests from the deck of HMS Endeavour in 1769, and perceiving scope for expansion of the fenland drainage schemes being undertaken at that time in England and across swathes of Europe, Joseph Banks [botanist on Cook's voyage] reported on “swamps which might doubtless Easily be drained” [...]. Almost a century later, in New Zealand or Zealandia, the Britain of the South, [...] Hursthouse offered a fuller explication of this ethos: The cultivation of a new country materially improves its climate. Damp and dripping forests, exhaling pestilent vapours from rank and rotten vegetation, fall before the axe [...]. Fen and march and swamp, the bittern’s dank domain, fertile only in miasma, are drained; and the plough converts them into wholesome plains of fruit, and grain, and grass. [...]

[The British administrators] duly set about felling the ancient forests of Aotearoa/New Zealand, draining the country’s swamps [...]. They also began importing and acclimatising a vast array of exotic (predominantly northern-world) species [sheep, cattle, rodents, weasels, cats, crops, English pasture grasses, etc.] [...]. [T]hey constructed the seemingly ordinary agronomic patchwork of Aotearoa/New Zealand's productive, workaday landscapes [...]. This is effected through and/or accompanied by drastic deforestation, alteration of the water table and the flow of waterways, displacement and decline of endemic species, re-organisation of predation chains and pollination sequences and so on [...]. Aotearoa/New Zealand was founded in and through climate crisis [...]. Climate crisis is not a disastrous event waiting to happen in the future in this part of the world; rather, it has been with us for two centuries already [...].

---

[T]he crest formed by the twinned themes of absence and exceptionalism [...] has shaped this creature's niche in the western imagination. As one of the very oldest species on earth, tuatara have come to be recognised [in Euro-American scientific schemas] [...] as an evolutionary and biodiversity treasure [...]. In 1867, [...] Gunther [...] pronounced that it was not a lizard at all [...] [and] placed the tuatara [...] in a new order, Rhynchocephalia, [...] igniting a frenzy of scientific interest worldwide. Specifically, the tuatara was seen to afford opportunities for "astonished witnessing" [...], for "the excitement of having the chance to see, to study, to observe a true saurian of Mesozoic times in the flesh, still living, but only on this tiny speck of the earth [...], while all its ancestors [...] died about one hundred and thirty-five million years ago" [...]. Tuatara have, however, long held special status as a taonga or treasured species in Māori epistemologies, featuring in a range of [...] stories where [...] [they] are described by different climates and archaeologies of knowledge [...] (see Waitangi Tribunal 2011, p. 134). [...]

While unconfirmed sightings in the Wellington district were reported in the nineteenth century, tuatara currently survive only in actively managed - that is, monitored and pest-controlled - areas on scattered offshore islands, as well as in mainland zoo and sanctuary populations. As this confinement suggests, tuatara are functionally “extinct” in almost all of their former wild ranges. [...] [Italicized text in the heading of this post originally situated here in Boswell's article.] [...] In the remaining areas of Aotearoa/New Zealand where this species does now live [...], tuatara may in some cases be the oldest living inhabitants. Yet [...] if the tuatara is a creature of long memory, this memory is at risk of elimination or erasure. [...] [T]uatara expose and complicate the [...] machineries of public memory [...] and attendant environmental ideologies and management paradigms [...].

---

All text above by: Anna Boswell. "Climates of Change: A Tuatara's-Eye View". Humanities, 2020, Volume 9, Issue 2, 38. Published 1 May 2020. This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Humanities Approaches to Climate Change. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text within brackets added by me for clarity. The first paragraph/heading in this post, with text in italics, are also the words of Boswell from this same article. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[thebibliosphere]

Hello Joy! If you're up for it, I've got a question for you. I've started writing a new story that I set in a world based on 1500's Scotland and I wanted the main characters to have Scottish accents, but alas I am from the American Midwest. Do you know of any resources or any people who could help me write my dialogue more accurately?

There are some resources for Scots English (like the the DSL), but I’m going to give you the advice I wish a lot of non-Scots people would use when it comes to writing historical Scottish accents: don’t.

The Scots language is not a monolith, and accents and dialect to this day vary greatly depending on region.

Most of the time even with research, what happens is a butchery of our language which borders on parody (sometimes even amped up by publishers because they want the Outlander effect) and is neither correctly spelled nor even phonetically accurate. A better way of writing accents/dialogue (and the way I tend to do it myself even when writing this sort of thing) would be to use regional and tone indicators.

So things like “he spoke with the broad, sweeping brogue of the lower west coast” or “her manner of speaking quickened with excitement, thickening her accent.”

If you want to use some Scots words, you can do so. Just make sure you look them up in the DSL and spell them correctly instead of making up your own.

A common phrase I like to use as an example for how to inject some Scots words into the dialect without murdering it would be the often very sarcastic “oh aye, so you think so?”

It’s a phrase often used when someone is blustering or maybe being a wee bit rude. Sort of like saying “oh really?” As you invite someone to keep digging their own grave.

I’ve seen it spelled every which way from “och aye, di’ye ‘ink sew?” (Pure jibberish, don’t do that) to the slightly more legible if not entirely accurate, “oh aye, dae ye think soe?”

Another could be something like, “oh aye, he’s muckle canny” to mean “oh yes, he’s very smart.” I’ve seen all of those words misspelled at one point, the most memorable being “och aye ‘e’s mochel cannae” which is just…

Canny is smart/capable while cannae means you can’t do something. (And muckle can be spelt mochell if you want to but some modern Scots readers will squint at it)

I tried explaining that what the author had written was the equivalent of “yes. he’s very can’t” but she wouldn’t listen and it went to print anyway. Agony.

Anyway, I mentioned the DSL up top so I suppose I should link to it.

Most of the recorded words there are from 17th century onward. There is an option to search prior to that, though it is limited.

There are surviving texts from the 1500s, though unless you want your work to be readable by a limited few, I wouldn’t try to imitate it. It’s mostly written in archaic Scots that’d be illegible to even modern Scottish readers.

If it’s something you intend to go to print with, I’d also suggest hiring a Scots sensitivity reader. They can make sure there’s nothing glaringly obvious with misspellings and also if they know their history, point out where something is off.

My favorite is when Scottish historical stories have potato scones in the 11th century, which begets the concept of agricultural time travelers, but alas, it’s never that interesting and just a factual error.

Anyway, I hope that was helpful and not discouraging. Please do write your story. Just don’t fall down the Outlander trap of writing nonsense and trying to pass it off as a language that still exists and for which there is recognized meanings and spelling. Which it sounds like you want to do, so yay! Thank you for wanting to be considerate and as accurate as can be.

[blackcrowing]

Important Facts about Lughnasadh from an Irish Celtic Reconstructionist

Spelling and Pronunciation

OI. Lughnasadh (Loo-na-sa), sometimes spelled Lughnasa or Modern Irish Lúnasa. Not to be confused with other harvest festivals like Lammas.

Dates

Most reconstructionists celebrate Lughnasadh on July 31st - August 1st from sundown to sundown by the Gregorian calendar, while others choose to celebrate the transitional period between the months as they would have been by the Julian calendar (about 13 days later by the Gregorian calendar).

Traditionally this festival likely would have happened as the grains were ready for harvesting or possibly even when the wild bilberries were ripe (as some scholars mention that if the grains were not ripe they would still preform a ritualized ‘first harvesting’ but it is possible this tradition came after the festival was firmly tied to a calendar date.)

Importance in the Mythos

In the mythologies it is well documented that this festival coincides with Lugh’s funeral games in honor of his foster-mother Tailtiu, known as Aonach Tailteann. In the mythologies she is said to have died of exhaustion after clearing the plains of Ireland for agricultural needs. The first documented instance of Lughnasadh in the mythologies was in the Wooing of Emer, Tochmarc Emire, which makes sense given the importance of marriages at this time of the year. It is not known specifically but widely speculated that the curse of the Ulstermen by Macha took place at a horse race for this festival.

In later time periods it is common to see a form of struggle, normally between the ‘protective’ forces and ‘destructive’ forces. The modern equivalent being the struggle between Saint Patrick and Crom Dubh but this is likely a reflection of an early struggle between Lugh and Balor (which I previously mentioned in my info-dump on Bealtaine).

Celebration Traditions

Aonachs, funeral games, have (to the best of our knowledge) been a custom in Ireland since the bronze age and were practiced on and off into the middle ages. They had both personal and community functions and occurred in three stages. Stage one was the funeral proceedings themselves. They would last one to three days, likely depending on the importance of the individual in question. Mourning songs and chants were participated in by both the attendees and the Druids. The second stage was for proclaiming of laws. Aonachs were a time when universal peace between túaths was declared. The third stage was that of Cuiteach Fuait, games that tested mental and physical abilities. These games included the well known horse and chariot races, wrestling games, boxing, high jumps but also competitions in strategy, singing, story telling and between various skilled craftsmen.

It was incredibly common for marriages to be arranged and preformed during this festival. More well known ‘trial marriages’ (lasting a year and a day) were still preformed at this festival up until the 13th century. It is likely that the coupling occurring at this time of year had an effect on the relationship to births seen at Imbolg (which falls 9 months later).

MacNeill, a leading scholarly expert on the festival, notes that a ritualistic bull sacrifice was made at this festival and the bull would then be eaten. I could not find any definitive evidence to support the idea, but I think it was likely that bulls in general would be culled from the herd at this point in the year to supply the feast.

Art credit @ire-ethereal

[just-1-scorpio]

A look at the Constructivism in Concept skins

Long post warning. And please fell free to corect me, if I'm wrong about anything.

So these skin line's aesthetic, and basis draws heavily from the Constructivism movement.

The Constructivism was an art movement that started in the 1913 by by Soviet painter and architect Vladimir Tatlin. The art movement was a rejection of the idea of autonomous art. It was in favour of art as a practice for social purposes. The Constructivism movement had a great effect on modern art movements during the 20th century, two of the movement that it had a major influenc on was the Bauhaus, and the De Stijl movements.

Here are a few art works from it:

Monument to commemorate the Third International by Vladimir Tatlin, from 1919 - 1920.

Illustration to "For the voice" by Vladimir Mayakovsky by El Lissitzky, from 1920.

Proun by El Lissitzky, from 1923.

Now that we know what Constructivism is let's look at the skins from the skin line.

1. Eternity - A Visit to the Arctic

Eternity's skin probably is based on the Arktika, a retired nuclier powerd icebreaker. It was one of the first surface ships to reach the North Pole. The writing on the splash art roughly translates to "Glory to the hero of the Arctic with a boundless thirst for knowlge!", but take this with a grain of salt, dou to I used imige translation.

2. Baby blue - On the Sparrow Hills

Baby blue is wearing a traditional Russian ethnic costume called Sarafan. And the Sparrow Hills is a hill in Moscow. For a time it was called "Lenin Hills".

3. Oliver Fog - See you at the workers' Club

So this garment is probaby based on, or refrences to the 8 hour working regulations. Basicly after the October Revolutin, the decree " Decree on the Hours of Laber" was published, which decreesed the working hours to 8 hours for all professions. This or it's a refrenc to the 1912 UK miners strike. But I would say it's probably the first one.

4. Medicine Pocket - The Cosmos Photographer

Last but not least. The gesture is a tribute Marie Salomea Skłodowska-Curie, Polish physicist and chemist, and the first woman to win a Noble prize. The building in the background is probably the bulding of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which made contributions to the Soviet space program. The wheat is probably a refrence to Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, a Russian agronomist, botanist, and geneticist, who identified the centers of origin of cultivated plants. The apple tree is posibly a refrenc to Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, a Russian practitioner of selection to produce new types of crop plants, and was one of the founding fathers of scientific agricultural selection.

Sorces: - WikiArt

-Google

[treethymes]

With the exceptions of North Korea and Cuba, the communist world has merged onto the capitalist highway in a couple different ways during the twenty-first century. As you’ve read, free-trade imperialism and its cheap agricultural imports pushed farmers into the cities and into factory work, lowering the global price of manufacturing labor and glutting the world market with stuff. Forward-thinking states such as China and Vietnam invested in high-value-added production capacity and managed labor organizing, luring links from the global electronics supply chain and jump-starting capital investment. Combined with capital’s hesitancy to invest in North Atlantic production facilities, as well as a disinclination toward state-led investment in the region, Asian top-down planning erased much of the West’s technological edge. If two workers can do a single job, and one worker costs less, both in wages and state support, why pick the expensive one? Foxconn’s 2017 plan to build a U.S. taxpayer–subsidized $10 billion flat-panel display factory in Wisconsin was trumpeted by the president, but it was a fiasco that produced zero screens. The future cost of labor looks to be capped somewhere below the wage levels many people have enjoyed, and not just in the West.

The left-wing economist Joan Robinson used to tell a joke about poverty and investment, something to the effect of: The only thing worse than being exploited by capitalists is not being exploited by capitalists. It’s a cruel truism about the unipolar world, but shouldn’t second place count for something? When the Soviet project came to an end, in the early 1990s, the country had completed world history’s biggest, fastest modernization project, and that didn’t just disappear. Recall that Cisco was hyped to announce its buyout of the Evil Empire’s supercomputer team. Why wasn’t capitalist Russia able to, well, capitalize? You’re already familiar with one of the reasons: The United States absorbed a lot of human capital originally financed by the Soviet people. American immigration policy was based on draining technical talent in particular from the Second World. Sergey Brin is the best-known person in the Moscow-to-Palo-Alto pipeline, but he’s not the only one.

Look at the economic composition of China and Russia in the wake of Soviet dissolution: Both were headed toward capitalist social relations, but they took two different routes. The Russian transition happened rapidly. The state sold off public assets right away, and the natural monopolies such as telecommunications and energy were divided among a small number of skilled and connected businessmen, a category of guys lacking in a country that frowned on such characters but that grew in Gorbachev’s liberalizing perestroika era. Within five years, the country sold off an incredible 35 percent of its national wealth. Russia’s richest ended the century with a full counterrevolutionary reversal of their fortunes, propelling their income share above what it was before the Bolsheviks took over. To accomplish this, the country’s new capitalists fleeced the most vulnerable half of their society. “Over the 1989–2016 period, the top 1 percent captured more than two-thirds of the total growth in Russia,” found an international group of scholars, “while the bottom 50 percent actually saw a decline in its income.” Increases in energy prices encouraged the growth of an extractionist petro-centered economy. Blood-covered, teary, and writhing, infant Russian capital crowded into the gas and oil sectors. The small circle of oligarchs privatized unemployed KGB-trained killers to run “security,” and gangsters dominated politics at the local and national levels. They installed a not particularly well-known functionary—a former head of the new intelligence service FSB who also worked on the privatization of government assets—as president in a surprise move on the first day of the year 2000. He became the gangster in chief.

Vladimir Putin’s first term coincided with the energy boom, and billionaires gobbled up a ludicrous share of growth. If any individual oligarch got too big for his britches, Putin was not beyond imposing serious consequences. He reinserted the state into the natural monopolies, this time in collaboration with loyal capitalists, and his stranglehold on power remains tight for now, despite the outstandingly uneven distribution of growth. Between 1980 and 2015, the Russian top 1 percent grew its income an impressive 6.2 percent per year, but the top .001 percent has maintained a growth rate of 17 percent over the same period. To invest these profits, the Russian billionaires parked their money in real estate, bidding up housing prices, and stashed a large amount of their wealth offshore. Reinvestment in Russian production was not a priority—why go through the hassle when there were easier ways to keep getting richer?

While Russia grew billionaires instead of output, China saw a path to have both. As in the case of Terry Gou, the Chinese Communist Party tempered its transition by incorporating steadily increasing amounts of foreign direct investment through Hong Kong and Taiwan, picking partners and expanding outward from the special economic zones. State support for education and infrastructure combined with low wages to make the mainland too attractive to resist. (Russia’s population is stagnant, while China’s has grown quickly.) China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, in 2001, gave investors more confidence. Meanwhile, strong capital controls kept the country out of the offshore trap, and state development priorities took precedence over extraction and get-rich-quick schemes. Chinese private wealth was rechanneled into domestic financial assets—equity and bonds or other loan instruments—at a much higher rate than it was in Russia. The result has been a sustained high level of annual output growth compared to the rest of the world, the type that involves putting up an iPhone City in a matter of months. As it has everywhere else, that growth has been skewed: only an average of 4.5 percent for the bottom half of earners in the 1978–2015 period compared to more than 10 percent for the top .001 percent. But this ratio of just over 2–1 is incomparable to Russia’s 17–.5 ration during the same period.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, certain trends have been more or less unavoidable. The rich have gotten richer relative to the poor and working class—in Russia, in China, in the United States, and pretty much anywhere else you want to look. Capital has piled into property markets, driving up the cost of housing everywhere people want to live, especially in higher-wage cities and especially in the world’s financial centers. Capitalist and communist countries alike have disgorged public assets into private pockets. But by maintaining a level of control over the process and slowing its tendencies, the People’s Republic of China has built a massive and expanding postindustrial manufacturing base.

It’s important to understand both of these patterns as part of the same global system rather than as two opposed regimes. One might imagine, based on what I’ve written so far, that the Chinese model is useful, albeit perhaps threatening, in the long term for American tech companies while the Russian model is irrelevant. Some commentators have phrased this as the dilemma of middle-wage countries on the global market: Wages in China are going to be higher than wages in Russia because wages in Russia used to be higher than wages in China. But Russia’s counterrevolutionary hyper-bifurcation has been useful for Silicon Valley as well; they are two sides of the same coin. Think about it this way: If you’re a Russian billionaire in the first decades of the twenty-first century looking to invest a bunch of money you pulled out of the ground, where’s the best place you could put it? The answer is Palo Alto.

Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto

[mask131]

Just a quick reminder of something, because I saw people talk about this on recent posts...

So, I made a TON of posts explaining why it is important to remember that the Roman gods are not the Greek gods per se - as in, the Romans had a different view and perception of the Greek gods, and so ended up creating yes, mostly equivalents and counterparts to the Greek gods, but with their own religious and cultural significance slightly different from the Greek deities - each culture having its focus on a different thing. (Aphrodite became more of a motherly and national goddess, Hermes became suddenly very merchant and commerce obsessed and not much of a thief anymore, Poseidon's rule extended to all waters not just the sea, Ares became a god of peace and agriculture?) Etc, etc.

However I now see people taking this way further than it should. I am not surprised because that's what people do on the Internet, you tell them one thing and they extrapolate it all.

But so you know, the difference between Greek and Roman gods is only valuable and interesting by the times of the Ancient Greek and Romans themselves.

When you go by the Renaissance, or by the modern eras that followed it, you'll notice that all paintings and books and sculptures are about the Roman gods - Jupiter, Juno, Neptune, Venus, Mercury, Vulcan and whatnot. Does it mean they are about the Roman gods? NOT AT ALL! They're all about the Greek gods mainly, but mixed with some Roman elements.

That's something some people are apparetly not aware of, so I'll try to briefly summarize it for ya... By the Middle-Ages, people knew of what we call today the "Classical mythology" mostly and mainly through the Roman texts and authors. Later by the Renaissance some of the Greek texts and authors were rediscovered, shared around and used a lot - not all though, as the rediscovery of Ancient Greece would be slow and steady, and we still find new fragments of Greek texts today! But here's the gist: the Roman texts and legends having been there before the Greek ones in people's cultures and heads... By the Renaissance and forward, the Roman names of the gods were the one used by default. For them these names were the famous and recognizable ones, and almost the "truest" of their names... Even when depicting entirely Greek myths and legends.

Because that's the subtle trick of Renaissance and all that would follow: the Greek texts and legends being THE big piece everybody was talking about and discussing about, the gods depicted in the arts and fiction by these eras were mostly and mainly their Greek versions. But, due to the "I was here first" and pre-eminence of the Roman literature and culture in Europe, these Greek identites and personas of the gods were refered to by their Roman names, and the Greek myths coexisted with the Roman legends. And that's the whole point: throughout the history of modern Europe, the difference between Roman and Greek god does not matter because they were conflated and unified into one and same set of entity, and people didn't care about the difference.

Which is what led to today's belief that "Roman gods are just the Greek gods by a different name" - and also led to stuff like this horrible thing I experienced as a teenager when the teacher supposed to teach us about Latin, when talking about the Roman gods, just handed to us a description of the Greek gods and told us to just swap the Greek names with the Roman ones (this teacher was an AWFUL awful teacher, not mean, but very bad at her job).

Because yes, that's the irony: you'd think that because people were more familiar with Roman mythology and the Romans personas of the gods during the Middle-Ages and the Renaissance, the Roman gods would have overshadowed the Greek ones, but in effect that's the reverse. The Roman gods being erased by the Greek gods: which is why people still think today Mars is a bloodthirsty war god, or that Minerva has all the attributes of Athena, or that Mercury was just as much a god of thieves as of legal business. The main problem today isn't to highlight the purely Greek things - because the Ancient Greeks have won this historical battle. The problem is pointing out how the Roman gods had their own unique thing on the aside that the Greek gods did not.

In conclusion: yes, you can use paintings of Jupiter to illustrate an article about Zeus, because at the time they were made, the artist probably was thinking about Zeus but just used a different name.