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“Science can, if it chooses, enable our grandchildren to live the good life, by giving them knowledge, self-control and characters productive of harmony rather than strife. At present it is teaching our children to kill each other, because many men of science are willing to sacrifice the future of mankind to their own momentary prosperity.”
-Bertrand Russell on Nuclear Power
At first thought, it might seem that the richest and most powerful people would have the best chance of weathering the events of the coming century. With enough money, they could buy a hilltop fortress, or erect security fences, or build private solar power stations, or hire guards and gardeners, or do a hundred other things to maintain themselves. This reasoning is sound up to a point: wealthy individuals could in fact become local warlords, the power holders in a feudal ‘Mad Max’ society of the future.
However, wealth in and of itself will confer no guarantee of well-being. After a certain point, money is likely to lose value, and immediately useful goods will instead become the basis of trade. Moreover, many currently wealthy individuals are not equipped to do as well as industrial civilization collapses: they are even more dependent than most other people on electronic gadgetry, long-distance travel, and a smoothly functioning social system. Imagine, for example, the plight of the well-off Manhattan stockbroker, or the Hong Kong currency trader, when lights go out and food shipments to local supermarkets are interrupted.
— Richard Heinberg, Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World (via cultureofresistance)
(Source: mikroblogolas)
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Pablo Neruda
(via spinals)
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Dorian Solot, I Love Female Orgasm: An Extraordinary Orgasm Guide.
(via feministhistorian)
Derrida on “The Animal”
“The gaze called animal offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the human, the ends of man, that is to say the border crossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself. And in these moments of nakedness, under the gaze of the animal, everything can happen to me, I am like a child ready for the apocalypse. I am (following) the apocalypse itself, that is to say the ultimate and first event of the end, the unveiling and the verdict.”
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Anurag Sagar of Kabir, Volume Two
(via santmat)
George Grosz: “My Drawings expressed my despair, hate and disillusionment, I drew drunkards; puking men; men with clenched fists cursing at the moon… . I drew a man, face filled with fright, washing blood from his hands… . I drew lonely little men fleeing madly through empty streets. I drew a cross-section of tenement house: through one window could be seen a man attacking his wife; through another, two people making love; from a third hung a suicide with body covered by swarming flies. I drew soldiers without noses; war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms; two medical soldiers putting a violent infantryman into a strait-jacket made of a horse blanket… I drew a skeleton dressed as a recruit being examined for military duty. I also wrote poetry.”
image: Cain or Hitler in Hell, 1944
(gallery)
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Anne Siloy
(via agoodthinghappened
)