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That’s the logic underlying the following joke that I was told by a Montana farmer. Question: “What would you do if you were given a million dollars?” Answer: “I love farming, and I would stay here on my money-losing farm until I had used up the million dollars!”
I have often asked myself, “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?”
In effect, the hungry gold miners were eating dried rat urine laced with rat feces and rat garbage.
History is so interesting.
Remains of complete headless mice in human coprolites (preserved dry feces) suggest that people were catching mice in the fields, beheading them, and popping them in whole.
Yum!
even in difficult environments, collapses of human societies are not inevitable: it depends on how people respond.
“The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.”)
Those laconic accounts of burning at the stake, insanity, and marriage are just the usual goings-on for any medieval European Christian society and give no hint of trouble.
For Peyton.
The European explorers and settlers who succeeded best in the Arctic were those most extensively adopting Inuit ways, like Robert Peary and Roald Amundsen.
In particular, numerous leaders of Rwanda’s Catholic Church either failed to protect Tutsi or else actively assembled them and turned them over to killers.
Terrible!
“The 1994 events provided a unique opportunity to settle scores, or to reshuffle land properties, even among Hutu villagers… It is not rare, even today, to hear Rwandans argue that a war is necessary to wipe out an excess of population and to bring numbers into line with the available land resources.”
First, any “explanation” of why a genocide happened can be misconstrued as “excusing”
Similarly, there are people who have chosen to devote their lives or careers to understanding the origins of the Nazi Holocaust, or to understanding the minds of serial murderers and rapists. They have made that choice not in order to mitigate the responsibility of Hitler, serial murderers, and rapists, but because they want to know how those awful things came to be, and how we can best prevent recurrences.
“The people whose children had to walk barefoot to school killed the people who could buy shoes for theirs.”
“Adolf Hitler loved dogs and brushed his teeth, but that doesn’t mean that we should hate dogs and stop brushing our teeth.”
Haitians remember Trujillo’s worst single atrocity, his ordering the slaughter (by machete) of all 20,000 Haitians living in the northwestern Dominican Republic and parts of the Cibao Valley between October 2 and October 8, 1937.
That's horrible.
China is the world’s most populous country, with about 1,300,000,000 people, or one-fifth of the world’s total.
YIKES!
Great Leap Forward,
About 75% of Chinese lakes, and almost all coastal seas, are polluted.
Terrible.
Britain has now fallen to a ranking in eighth place among Australia’s export markets, behind Japan, China, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan.
Ha! Ha!
In fact, as every open-minded teacher discovers, education is also about students imparting knowledge to their teachers, by challenging the teachers’ assumptions and by asking questions that the teachers hadn’t previously thought of.
Yes!
First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives. Second, when the problem does arrive, the group may fail to perceive it. Then, after they perceive it, they may fail even to try to solve it. Finally, they may try to solve it but may not succeed.
Conversely, failures to solve perceived problems because of conflicts of interest between the elite and the masses are much less likely in societies where the elite cannot insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions.
The United States has retreated substantially (but hardly completely) from its former values of legalized racial discrimination, legalized homophobia, a subordinate role of women, and sexual repression.
The car manufacturer Henry Ford was in fact successfully sued by stockholders in 1919 for raising the minimum wage of his workers to $5 per day: the courts declared that, while Ford’s humanitarian sentiments about his employees were nice, his business existed to make profits for its stockholders.
Wow!
billions of Third World citizens, constituting about 80% of the world’s population, still live in poverty, near or below the starvation level.
Even in the United States, an increasing fraction of the population is at the poverty level and lacks affordable medical care, and all proposals to change this situation (e.g., “Just provide everyone with health insurance paid by the government”) have been politically unacceptable.
Fucking republicans.
