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5-Star Seychelles Island Resort – Four Seasons Seychelles

Posted on April 27, 2019 by Danzig

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5-Star Seychelles Island Resort - Four Seasons Seychelles

Seychelles – Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Posted on April 27, 2019 by Danzig

Seychelles is an African country in the Indian Ocean. Its capital city is Victoria. The official languages are Creole, English, and French.

The country is to the east of the African continent. The islands of Madagascar and Mauritius lie to the south. The republic is made up of 115 islands. The biggest part of the population is a mix of freed slaves from the African Continent and Madagascar and European settlers. They make up about 90%. There are small minorities of immigrants from Europe, China and India. Most people are Roman Catholics, about 90% of them. About 8% are Protestants.

Other nearby island countries and territories include Zanzibar to the west, Mauritius, Rodrigues, Agalega and Runion to the south, and Comoros and Mayotte to the southwest. Seychelles has an estimated population of 86,525. It is the smallest population of any African state.[4]

Seychelles is to the northeast of Madagascar and about 1,600km (994mi) east of Kenya. The number of islands in the archipelago is often given as 115 but the Constitution of the Republic of Seychelles lists 155.

According to the president of Nauru, the Seychelles has been ranked the ninth most endangered nation due to flooding from climate change.[5]

Some of the districts in Seychelles include: Anse Boileau, Takamaka and Cote DOr.

Seychelles is divided into twenty-five administrative regions. Eight of the districts make up the capital of Seychelles. They are called Greater Victoria. Another 14 districts are considered the rural part of the main island of Mah. There are two districts on Praslin and one on La Digue which also include satellite islands. The rest of the Outer Islands are not considered part of any district.

During the plantation era, cinnamon, vanilla, and copra were the main exports. In the 1960s, about 33% of the working population worked at plantations, and 20% worked in the public or government sector. In 1971, with the opening of Seychelles International Airport, tourism became a serious industry.

Like many fragile island ecosystems, the Seychelles had loss of biodiversity during early human history. This included the disappearance of most of the giant tortoises from the granitic islands. There was also the extinction of species such as the chestnut flanked white eye, the Seychelles Parakeet, the Seychelles Black Terrapin and the saltwater crocodile. However, extinctions were far fewer than on islands such as Mauritius or Hawaii. This was partly due to a shorter period of human occupation being only since 1770. The Seychelles today is known for success stories in protecting its flora and fauna. The rare Seychelles Black Parrot, the national bird of the country, is now protected.

The granitic islands of Seychelles are home to about 75 endemic plant species. There are a further 25 or so species in the Aldabra group. Particularly well-known is the Coco de Mer, a species of palm that grows only on the islands of Praslin and neighbouring Curieuse. The jellyfish tree is to be found in only a few locations on Mahe. This strange and ancient plant is in a genus of its own (Medusagynaceae). Other unique plant species include the Wright's Gardenia Rothmannia annae found only on Aride Island Special Reserve.

The freshwater crab genus Seychellum is endemic to the granitic Seychelles. There are a further 26 species of crabs and 5 species of hermit crabs that live on the islands.[6]

The Aldabra Giant Tortoise now lives on many of the islands of the Seychelles. The Aldabra population is the largest in the world. These unique reptiles can be found even in captive herds.

There are several unique varieties of orchids on the Islands.

The marine life around the islands, especially the more remote coral islands, can be spectacular. More than 1,000 species of fish have been recorded. Since the use of spearguns and dynamite for fishing was banned in the 1960s, the wildlife is unafraid of snorkelers and divers. Coral bleaching in 1998 has damaged most reefs, but some reefs show healthy recovery.

The main natural resources of the Seychelles are fish, copra, cinnamon, coconuts, salt and iron.

Seychelles – WorldAtlas.com

Posted on April 27, 2019 by Danzig

The Republic of Seychelles is an archipelago of 115 islands located in the Indian Ocean, northeast of Madagascar.

Pre-European colonization the islands were known by Arab navigators on trading voyages, but were never inhabited.

Eventually Seychelles was settled by France in the 18th century, but it wasn't long before the British fought for control. A lengthy struggle between France and Great Britain for the islands ended in 1814, when they were ceded to the latter.

Although the new governor to the islands was British, he governed according to French rules, and allowed previous French customs to remain intact. Slavery was completely abolished in 1835, and the island nation subsequently began to decline as exportation decreased.

The anti-slavery stance was taken very seriously by the British government, and conditions started improving when it was realized that coconuts could be grown with less labour.

In the late 19th century, Seychelles became a place to exile troublesome political prisoners, most notably from Zanzibar, Egypt, Cyprus and Palestine.

Independence for the islands came in 1976, after the Seychelles People's United Party was formed and led by France-Albert Rene, campaigning for socialism and freedom from Britain.

Socialism was brought to a close with a new constitution and free elections in 1993. President France-Albert Rene, who had served since 1977, was re-elected in 2001, but stepped down in 2004.

Vice President James Michel took over the presidency and in July 2006 was elected to a new five-year term.

Upon independence in 1976, economic growth has steadily increased, led by the tourism sector and tuna fishing. In the past few years, the government has also created incentives for foreign investments. Per capita, Seychelles is the most indebted country in the world and currently had a population of 90,024.

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Seychelles - WorldAtlas.com

Wage slavery – Wikipedia

Posted on April 27, 2019 by Danzig

Wage slavery is a term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor by focusing on similarities between owning and renting a person. It is usually used to refer to a situation where a person's livelihood depends on wages or a salary, especially when the dependence is total and immediate.[1][2]

The term "wage slavery" has been used to criticize exploitation of labour and social stratification, with the former seen primarily as unequal bargaining power between labor and capital (particularly when workers are paid comparatively low wages, e.g. in sweatshops)[3] and the latter as a lack of workers' self-management, fulfilling job choices and leisure in an economy.[4][5][6] The criticism of social stratification covers a wider range of employment choices bound by the pressures of a hierarchical society to perform otherwise unfulfilling work that deprives humans of their "species character"[7] not only under threat of starvation or poverty, but also of social stigma and status diminution.[8][9][4]

Similarities between wage labor and slavery were noted as early as Cicero in Ancient Rome, such as in De Officiis.[10] With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx elaborated the comparison between wage labor and slavery,[11][12] while Luddites emphasized the dehumanization brought about by machines. Before the American Civil War, Southern defenders of African American slavery invoked the concept of wage slavery to favorably compare the condition of their slaves to workers in the North.[13][14] The United States abolished slavery after the Civil War, but labor union activists found the metaphor useful and appropriate. According to Lawrence Glickman, in the Gilded Age "[r]eferences abounded in the labor press, and it is hard to find a speech by a labor leader without the phrase".[15]

The introduction of wage labor in 18th-century Britain was met with resistance, giving rise to the principles of syndicalism.[16][17][18][19] Historically, some labor organizations and individual social activists have espoused workers' self-management or worker cooperatives as possible alternatives to wage labor.[5][18]

The view that working for wages is akin to slavery dates back to the ancient world.[21] In ancient Rome, Cicero wrote that "whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves".[10]

In 1763, the French journalist Simon Linguet published an influential description of wage slavery:[12]

The slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him... They were worth at least as much as they could be sold for in the market... It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live... It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him... what effective gain [has] the suppression of slavery brought [him?] He is free, you say. Ah! That is his misfortune... These men... [have] the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need.... They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger. Is that to be free?

The view that wage work has substantial similarities with chattel slavery was actively put forward in the late 18th and 19th centuries by defenders of chattel slavery (most notably in the Southern states of the United States) and by opponents of capitalism (who were also critics of chattel slavery).[9][22] Some defenders of slavery, mainly from the Southern slave states, argued that Northern workers were "free but in name the slaves of endless toil" and that their slaves were better off.[23][24] This contention has been partly corroborated by some modern studies that indicate slaves' material conditions in the 19th century were "better than what was typically available to free urban laborers at the time".[25][26] In this period, Henry David Thoreau wrote that "[i]t is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself".[27]

Some abolitionists in the United States regarded the analogy as spurious.[28] They believed that wage workers were "neither wronged nor oppressed".[29] Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans argued that the condition of wage workers was different from slavery as laborers were likely to have the opportunity to work for themselves in the future, achieving self-employment.[30] The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job.[31] However, later in life he concluded to the contrary, saying "experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other".[32][33] Douglass went on to speak about these conditions as arising from the unequal bargaining power between the ownership/capitalist class and the non-ownership/laborer class within a compulsory monetary market: "No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper".[34]

Self-employment became less common as the artisan tradition slowly disappeared in the later part of the 19th century.[5] In 1869, The New York Times described the system of wage labor as "a system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed at the South".[30] E. P. Thompson notes that for British workers at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, the "gap in status between a 'servant,' a hired wage-laborer subject to the orders and discipline of the master, and an artisan, who might 'come and go' as he pleased, was wide enough for men to shed blood rather than allow themselves to be pushed from one side to the other. And, in the value system of the community, those who resisted degradation were in the right".[16] A "Member of the Builders' Union" in the 1830s argued that the trade unions "will not only strike for less work, and more wages, but will ultimately abolish wages, become their own masters and work for each other; labor and capital will no longer be separate but will be indissolubly joined together in the hands of workmen and work-women".[17] This perspective inspired the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1834 which had the "two-fold purpose of syndicalist unions the protection of the workers under the existing system and the formation of the nuclei of the future society" when the unions "take over the whole industry of the country".[18] "Research has shown", summarises William Lazonick, "that the 'free-born Englishman' of the eighteenth century even those who, by force of circumstance, had to submit to agricultural wage labour tenaciously resisted entry into the capitalist workshop".[19]

The use of the term "wage slave" by labor organizations may originate from the labor protests of the Lowell Mill Girls in 1836.[35] The imagery of wage slavery was widely used by labor organizations during the mid-19th century to object to the lack of workers' self-management. However, it was gradually replaced by the more neutral term "wage work" towards the end of the 19th century as labor organizations shifted their focus to raising wages.[5]

Karl Marx described capitalist society as infringing on individual autonomy because it is based on a materialistic and commodified concept of the body and its liberty (i.e. as something that is sold, rented, or alienated in a class society). According to Friedrich Engels:[36][37]

The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence.

Critics of wage work have drawn several similarities between wage work and slavery:

According to American anarcho-syndicalist philosopher Noam Chomsky, workers themselves noticed the similarities between chattel and wage slavery. Chomsky noted that the 19th-century Lowell Mill Girls, without any reported knowledge of European Marxism or anarchism, condemned the "degradation and subordination" of the newly-emerging industrial system and the "new spirit of the age: gain wealth, forgetting all but self", maintaining that "those who work in the mills should own them".[43][44] They expressed their concerns in a protest song during their 1836 strike:

Oh! isn't it a pity, such a pretty girl as IShould be sent to the factory to pine away and die?Oh! I cannot be a slave, I will not be a slave,For I'm so fond of liberty,That I cannot be a slave.[45]

Defenses of both wage labor and chattel slavery in the literature have linked the subjection of man to man with the subjection of man to nature arguing that hierarchy and a social system's particular relations of production represent human nature and are no more coercive than the reality of life itself. According to this narrative, any well-intentioned attempt to fundamentally change the status quo is naively utopian and will result in more oppressive conditions.[46] Bosses in both of these long-lasting systems argued that their respective systems created a lot of wealth and prosperity. In some sense, both did create jobs, and their investment entailed risk. For example, slave-owners risked losing money by buying chattel slaves who later became ill or died; while bosses risked losing money by hiring workers (wage slaves) to make products that did not sell well on the market. Marginally, both chattel and wage slaves may become bosses; sometimes by working hard. The "rags to riches" story occasionally comes to pass in capitalism; the "slave to master" story occurred in places like colonial Brazil, where slaves could buy their own freedom and become business owners, self-employed, or slave-owners themselves.[47] Thus critics of the concept of wage slavery do not regard social mobility, or the hard work and risk that it may entail, as a redeeming factor.[48]

Anthropologist David Graeber has noted that historically the first wage-labor contracts we know about whether in ancient Greece or Rome, or in the Malay or Swahili city-states in the Indian Ocean were in fact contracts for the rental of chattel slaves (usually the owner would receive a share of the money and the slaves another, with which to maintain their living expenses). According to Graeber, such arrangements were quite common in New World slavery as well, whether in the United States or in Brazil. C. L. R. James (1901-1989) argued that most of the techniques of human organization employed on factory workers during the Industrial Revolution first developed on slave plantations.[49]Subsequent work "traces the innovations of modern management to the slave plantation".[50]

The usage of the term "wage slavery" shifted to "wage work" at the end of the 19th century as groups like the Knights of Labor and American Federation of Labor shifted to a more reformist, trade union ideology instead of worker's self-management. Much of the decline was caused by the rapid increase in manufacturing after the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent dominance of wage labor as a result. Another factor was immigration and demographic changes that led to ethnic tension between the workers.[5]

As Hallgrimsdottir and Benoit point out:

[I]ncreased centralization of production... declining wages... [an] expanding... labor pool... intensifying competition, and... [t]he loss of competence and independence experienced by skilled labor" meant that "a critique that referred to all [wage] work as slavery and avoided demands for wage concessions in favor of supporting the creation of the producerist republic (by diverting strike funds towards funding... co-operatives, for example) was far less compelling than one that identified the specific conditions of slavery as low wages.[5]

Some anti-capitalist thinkers claim that the elite maintain wage slavery and a divided working class through their influence over the media and entertainment industry,[51][52] educational institutions, unjust laws, nationalist and corporate propaganda, pressures and incentives to internalize values serviceable to the power structure, state violence, fear of unemployment,[53] and a historical legacy of exploitation and profit accumulation/transfer under prior systems, which shaped the development of economic theory. Adam Smith noted that employers often conspire together to keep wages low and have the upper hand in conflicts between workers and employers:[54]

The interest of the dealers... in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public... [They] have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public... We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate... It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms.

The concept of wage slavery could conceivably be traced back to pre-capitalist figures like Gerrard Winstanley from the radical Christian Diggers movement in England, who wrote in his 1649 pamphlet, The New Law of Righteousness, that there "shall be no buying or selling, no fairs nor markets, but the whole earth shall be a common treasury for every man" and "there shall be none Lord over others, but every one shall be a Lord of himself".[55]

Aristotle stated that "the citizens must not live a mechanic or a mercantile life (for such a life is ignoble and inimical to virtue), nor yet must those who are to be citizens in the best state be tillers of the soil (for leisure is needed both for the development of virtue and for active participation in politics)",[56] often paraphrased as "all paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind".[57] Cicero wrote in 44 BC that "vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery".[10] Somewhat similar criticisms have also been expressed by some proponents of liberalism, like Silvio Gesell and Thomas Paine;[58] Henry George, who inspired the economic philosophy known as Georgism;[9] and the Distributist school of thought within the Catholic Church.

To Karl Marx and anarchist thinkers like Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, wage slavery was a class condition in place due to the existence of private property and the state. This class situation rested primarily on:

And secondarily on:

Fascist economic policies were more hostile to independent trade unions than modern economies in Europe or the United States.[60] Fascism was more widely accepted in the 1920s and 1930s, and foreign corporate investment (notably from the United States) in Italy and Germany increased after the fascists took power.[61][62]

Fascism has been perceived by some notable critics, like Buenaventura Durruti, to be a last resort weapon of the privileged to ensure the maintenance of wage slavery:

No government fights fascism to destroy it. When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto their privileges.[63]

According to Noam Chomsky, analysis of the psychological implications of wage slavery goes back to the Enlightenment era. In his 1791 book The Limits of State Action, classical liberal thinker Wilhelm von Humboldt explained how "whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness" and so when the laborer works under external control, "we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is".[64] Because they explore human authority and obedience, both the Milgram and Stanford experiments have been found useful in the psychological study of wage-based workplace relations.[65]

According to research[citation needed], modern work provides people with a sense of personal and social identity that is tied to:

Thus job loss entails the loss of this identity.[66]

Erich Fromm argued that if a person perceives himself as being what he owns, then when that person loses (or even thinks of losing) what he "owns" (e.g. the good looks or sharp mind that allow him to sell his labor for high wages) a fear of loss may create anxiety and authoritarian tendencies because that person's sense of identity is threatened. In contrast, when a person's sense of self is based on what he experiences in a state of being (creativity, love, sadness, taste, sight and the like) with a less materialistic regard for what he once had and lost, or may lose, then less authoritarian tendencies prevail. In his view, the state of being flourishes under a worker-managed workplace and economy, whereas self-ownership entails a materialistic notion of self, created to rationalize the lack of worker control that would allow for a state of being.[67]

Investigative journalist Robert Kuttner analyzed the work of public-health scholars Jeffrey Johnson and Ellen Hall about modern conditions of work and concludes that "to be in a life situation where one experiences relentless demands by others, over which one has relatively little control, is to be at risk of poor health, physically as well as mentally". Under wage labor, "a relatively small elite demands and gets empowerment, self-actualization, autonomy, and other work satisfaction that partially compensate for long hours" while "epidemiological data confirm that lower-paid, lower-status workers are more likely to experience the most clinically damaging forms of stress, in part because they have less control over their work".[68]

Wage slavery and the educational system that precedes it "implies power held by the leader. Without power the leader is inept. The possession of power inevitably leads to corruption... in spite of... good intentions... [Leadership means] power of initiative, this sense of responsibility, the self-respect which comes from expressed manhood, is taken from the men, and consolidated in the leader. The sum of their initiative, their responsibility, their self-respect becomes his... [and the] order and system he maintains is based upon the suppression of the men, from being independent thinkers into being 'the men'... In a word, he is compelled to become an autocrat and a foe to democracy". For the "leader", such marginalisation can be beneficial, for a leader "sees no need for any high level of intelligence in the rank and file, except to applaud his actions. Indeed such intelligence from his point of view, by breeding criticism and opposition, is an obstacle and causes confusion".[69] Wage slavery "implies erosion of the human personality... [because] some men submit to the will of others, arousing in these instincts which predispose them to cruelty and indifference in the face of the suffering of their fellows".[70]

In 19th-century discussions of labor relations, it was normally assumed that the threat of starvation forced those without property to work for wages. Proponents of the view that modern forms of employment constitute wage slavery, even when workers appear to have a range of available alternatives, have attributed its perpetuation to a variety of social factors that maintain the hegemony of the employer class.[42][71]

In an account of the Lowell Mill Girls, Harriet Hanson Robinson wrote that generously high wages were offered to overcome the degrading nature of the work:

At the time the Lowell cotton mills were started the caste of the factory girl was the lowest among the employments of women.... She was represented as subjected to influences that must destroy her purity and selfrespect. In the eyes of her overseer she was but a brute, a slave, to be beaten, pinched and pushed about. It was to overcome this prejudice that such high wages had been offered to women that they might be induced to become millgirls, in spite of the opprobrium that still clung to this degrading occupation.[72]

In his book Disciplined Minds, Jeff Schmidt points out that professionals are trusted to run organizations in the interests of their employers. Because employers cannot be on hand to manage every decision, professionals are trained to "ensure that each and every detail of their work favors the right interestsor skewers the disfavored ones" in the absence of overt control:

The resulting professional is an obedient thinker, an intellectual property whom employers can trust to experiment, theorize, innovate and create safely within the confines of an assigned ideology.[73]

Parecon (participatory economics) theory posits a social class "between labor and capital" of higher paid professionals such as "doctors, lawyers, engineers, managers and others" who monopolize empowering labor and constitute a class above wage laborers who do mostly "obedient, rote work".[74]

The terms "employee" or "worker" have often been replaced by "associate". This plays up the allegedly voluntary nature of the interaction while playing down the subordinate status of the wage laborer as well as the worker-boss class distinction emphasized by labor movements. Billboards as well as television, Internet and newspaper advertisements consistently show low-wage workers with smiles on their faces, appearing happy.[75]

Job interviews and other data on requirements for lower skilled workers in developed countries particularly in the growing service sector indicate that the more workers depend on low wages and the less skilled or desirable their job is, the more employers screen for workers without better employment options and expect them to feign unremunerative motivation.[76] Such screening and feigning may not only contribute to the positive self-image of the employer as someone granting desirable employment, but also signal wage-dependence by indicating the employee's willingness to feign, which in turn may discourage the dissatisfaction normally associated with job-switching or union activity.[76]

At the same time, employers in the service industry have justified unstable, part-time employment and low wages by playing down the importance of service jobs for the lives of the wage laborers (e.g. just temporary before finding something better, student summer jobs and the like).[77][78]

In the early 20th century, "scientific methods of strikebreaking"[79] were devised employing a variety of tactics that emphasized how strikes undermined "harmony" and "Americanism".[80]

Some social activists objecting to the market system or price system of wage working historically have considered syndicalism, worker cooperatives, workers' self-management and workers' control as possible alternatives to the current wage system.[4][5][6][18]

The American philosopher John Dewey believed that until "industrial feudalism" is replaced by "industrial democracy", politics will be "the shadow cast on society by big business".[81] Thomas Ferguson has postulated in his investment theory of party competition that the undemocratic nature of economic institutions under capitalism causes elections to become occasions when blocs of investors coalesce and compete to control the state.[82]

Noam Chomsky has argued that political theory tends to blur the 'elite' function of government:

Modern political theory stresses Madison's belief that "in a just and a free government the rights both of property and of persons ought to be effectually guarded." But in this case too it is useful to look at the doctrine more carefully. There are no rights of property, only rights to property that is, rights of persons with property,...

[In] representative democracy, as in, say, the United States or Great Britain [] there is a monopoly of power centralized in the state, and secondly and critically [] the representative democracy is limited to the political sphere and in no serious way encroaches on the economic sphere [] That is, as long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful.[83]

In this regard, Chomsky has used Bakunin's theories about an "instinct for freedom",[84] the militant history of labor movements, Kropotkin's mutual aid evolutionary principle of survival and Marc Hauser's theories supporting an innate and universal moral faculty,[85] to explain the incompatibility of oppression with certain aspects of human nature.[86][87]

Loyola University philosophy professor John Clark and libertarian socialist philosopher Murray Bookchin have criticized the system of wage labor for encouraging environmental destruction, arguing that a self-managed industrial society would better manage the environment. Like other anarchists,[88] they attribute much of the Industrial Revolution's pollution to the "hierarchical" and "competitive" economic relations accompanying it.[89]

Some criticize wage slavery on strictly contractual grounds, e.g. David Ellerman and Carole Pateman, arguing that the employment contract is a legal fiction in that it treats human beings juridically as mere tools or inputs by abdicating responsibility and self-determination, which the critics argue are inalienable. As Ellerman points out, "[t]he employee is legally transformed from being a co-responsible partner to being only an input supplier sharing no legal responsibility for either the input liabilities [costs] or the produced outputs [revenue, profits] of the employer's business".[90] Such contracts are inherently invalid "since the person remain[s] a de facto fully capacitated adult person with only the contractual role of a non-person" as it is impossible to physically transfer self-determination.[91] As Pateman argues:

The contractarian argument is unassailable all the time it is accepted that abilities can 'acquire' an external relation to an individual, and can be treated as if they were property. To treat abilities in this manner is also implicitly to accept that the 'exchange' between employer and worker is like any other exchange of material property ... The answer to the question of how property in the person can be contracted out is that no such procedure is possible. Labour power, capacities or services, cannot be separated from the person of the worker like pieces of property.[92]

In a modern liberal capitalist society, the employment contract is enforced while the enslavement contract is not; the former being considered valid because of its consensual/non-coercive nature and the latter being considered inherently invalid, consensual or not. The noted economist Paul Samuelson described this discrepancy:

Since slavery was abolished, human earning power is forbidden by law to be capitalized. A man is not even free to sell himself; he must rent himself at a wage.[93]

Some advocates of right-libertarianism, among them philosopher Robert Nozick, address this inconsistency in modern societies arguing that a consistently libertarian society would allow and regard as valid consensual/non-coercive enslavement contracts, rejecting the notion of inalienable rights:

The comparable question about an individual is whether a free system will allow him to sell himself into slavery. I believe that it would.[94]

Others like Murray Rothbard allow for the possibility of debt slavery, asserting that a lifetime labour contract can be broken so long as the slave pays appropriate damages:

[I]f A has agreed to work for life for B in exchange for 10,000 grams of gold, he will have to return the proportionate amount of property if he terminates the arrangement and ceases to work.[95]

In the philosophy of mainstream, neoclassical economics, wage labor is seen as the voluntary sale of one's own time and efforts, just like a carpenter would sell a chair, or a farmer would sell wheat. It is considered neither an antagonistic nor abusive relationship and carries no particular moral implications.[96]

Austrian economics argues that a person is not "free" unless they can sell their labor because otherwise that person has no self-ownership and will be owned by a "third party" of individuals.[97]

Post-Keynesian economics perceives wage slavery as resulting from inequality of bargaining power between labor and capital, which exists when the economy does not "allow labor to organize and form a strong countervailing force".[98]

The two main forms of socialist economics perceive wage slavery differently:

Quotations related to wage slavery at Wikiquote

Wage slavery - Wikipedia

What is Cloud Computing? – Amazon Web Services

Posted on April 27, 2019 by Danzig

Whether you are running applications that share photos to millions of mobile users or youre supporting the critical operations of your business, a cloud services platform provides rapid access to flexible and low cost IT resources. With cloud computing, you dont need to make large upfront investments in hardware and spend a lot of time on the heavy lifting of managing that hardware. Instead, you can provision exactly the right type and size of computing resources you need to power your newest bright idea or operate your IT department. You can access as many resources as you need, almost instantly, and only pay for what you use.

Cloud computing provides a simple way to access servers, storage, databases and a broad set of application services over the Internet. A Cloud services platform such as Amazon Web Services owns and maintains the network-connected hardware required for these application services, while you provision and use what you need via a web application.

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What is Cloud Computing? - Amazon Web Services

On Censorship – The Catholic Thing

Posted on April 26, 2019 by Danzig

We must do things, I have been sometimes told, because everyone is doing them.

At an early age, I was first exposed to this sort of reasoning, and the reverse of the coin: we must not do things because nobody is doing them. It struck me as a weak argument. I made a mental note, never to use it.

But it is stronger than first appears. If the great majority in any society were to do entirely as they pleased, we would have anarchy: genuine anarchy, not the kind that Hollywood celebrates in movies. Ones life would be worth little, and anyone who wished to survive to the end of the day would go about heavily armed.

Perhaps thats why God made most of us conformists, why the world is discernibly ordered, and man is able, however vaguely, to distinguish up from down, good from evil, the beautiful from the ugly and so forth. But God also gave us freedom, and the consequences of our choices, not only to ourselves but to others.

Gentle reader may suspect that I am making an argument for censorship. I am.

It is in the nature of any culture, society, civilization (choose your weapon) to introduce signposts. Focus our eyes, and we may see them everywhere, even along paved roads. We have laws, too, not always hung in signs, but available for public inspection. And there are unwritten laws.

Consider the law, Thou shalt do no murder. This has been spelled out in detail, with exceptions, and acts of murder may be tried in our courts, but we didnt actually invent the law. It was written into our hearts; it was inscribed on a tablet to Moses long before we were born.

We use the criminal code merely to finesse this natural law; we use lawyers and legislators to get around it, should it turn out to be inconvenient in certain circumstances. Abortion, euthanasia, and whatever will come next, are now among our exceptions.

Freedom is our watchword. Freedom from children, freedom from grandparents always assuming they are unwanted are now among our man-made goods. Freedom from such constraints as being a man or a woman, or being rich or poor, or from any other accident of our being, have been added to the watch list.

It is true there are some traditionalists like me, who regret the overthrow of the moral order, and sometimes even those who support it have twangs of conscience that need to be suppressed. But in the main, society is progressive. We go along to get along.

In the olden time I refer here to very deep ancient history, going back to my childhood we went along with ideas wed inherited, and kept our little murders to ourselves. Today, we have begun to put them on Facebook.

Why not?

Recently a younger acquaintance decided to have herself killed. She had cancer; things were not looking up. Her case shocked me in two especial ways. One, she was a brave soul, who was doing a sterling job of facing down adversity. Two, she was what we call a conservative, who had cheerfully taken heat for various politically incorrect views. She even had Christian tendencies.

Yet she suddenly opted for the exit plan, and quickly found support among her friends, who gathered round the execution bed with smiles of encouragement. When Id queried her life/death choice privately, her argument was in effect, Everyone is doing it.

The stigma had lapsed, gone. The advocates for killing off the old and the ill, even the young and depressive, had overturned the stigma. This made overturning the law a cinch. And by the time the law had been changed, demeaning human life becoming an important step forward, the bulk of society had come round.

Everyone is doing it, in a certain sense. It is convenient. They dont all have themselves executed, for some human instincts have survived, but this everyone would like to have the option should they ever find themselves desiring it.

Pain is no fun. I admit that. The notion that it could have not only a physical, but a moral purpose, has been extinguished. The idea that suicide is self-murder is now taken to be ridiculous. The old laws that banned it could not be enforced (the person who commits suicide has gotten away with it, from a glib point of view). They could only punish those who assisted.

Many things once unthinkable were thinkable all along. Murder is a good example. Infanticide, for instance, is something that must have occurred to many mothers, in moments of child rearing. But one throws a fit instead, perhaps breaks something, or makes a joke of it. You wouldnt actually do what was unthinkable.

It was unthinkable, narrowly, because the laws of God were reinforced by the laws of the State, and of the culture. You did not go there because, Nobody goes there. Except those who do, and become infamous as a consequence.

Among the travesties of the Right (well leave the Left alone for a brief moment) is that censorship is the enemy of freedom. Those on this side are inclined to argue that everyone has the right to his opinion, except those who cry Fire! in cinemas. Let any who disagree with anything make their argument, and then we will vote.

We should have learned, in our wild ride since the sixties (or from the Garden of Eden, should we wish to trace it back), that this view is nave. Some things ought to remain as unthinkable as they were in those old, oppressively Christian times, when dissent was censored.

There is nothing wrong with censorship. Even those on the Left take pride in what they censor: racism, sexism, transphobia, whatever. Unfortunately, by their perverse definitions, they give censorship a bad name.

The real question is not whether censorship is a good thing, but what we should censor.

*Image:An Unhappy Family or Suicide(Une famille malheureuse ou le Suicide) by Octave Tassaert, 1852[Muse Fabre, Montpellier, France]

2019 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

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On Censorship - The Catholic Thing

How Media Censorship Affects the News You See

Posted on April 26, 2019 by Danzig

Although you may not realize it, media censorship takes place in many forms in the way you get your news. While news stories are often edited for length, there are many subjective choices that are made which are designed to keep some information from becoming public. Sometimes these decisions are made to safeguard a person's privacy, others to protect media outlets from corporate or political fallout, and yet others for concerns of national security.

This is probably the least controversial form of media censorship. For instance, when a minor (someone under age 18) commits a crime, his or her identity is concealed to protect them from future harm -- so he or she isn't turned down from getting a college education or a job. That changes if a minor is charged as an adult, like in the case of violent crime.

Most media outlets also conceal the identity of rape victims, so those people don't have to endure public humiliation. That was not the case for a brief period at NBC News when it decided in 1991 to identify the womanaccusing William Kennedy Smith (part of the powerful Kennedy clan) of raping her. NBC later reverted to the common practice of secrecy.

Journalists also protect their anonymous sources from having their identity exposed for fear of retaliation. This is especially important when informants are highly placed individuals in governments or corporations that have direct access to important information.

Every day, someone commits a heinous act of violence or sexual depravity. In newsrooms across the country, editors have to decide whether saying a victim "was assaulted" suffices in describing what happened.

In most instances, it does not. So a choice has to be made on how to describe the details of a crime in a way that helps the audience understand its atrocity without offending readers or viewers, especially children.

It's a fine line. In the case of Jeffrey Dahmer, the way he killed more than a dozen people were considered so sick that the graphic details were part of the story.

That was also true when news editors were faced with the sexual details of Pres. Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky and the accusations of sexual harassment Anita Hill made about then-U.S. Supreme Court justice nominee Clarence Thomas. Words that no editor had ever thought of printing or a newscaster had ever considered uttering were necessary to explain the story.

Those are the exceptions. In most cases, editors will cross out information of an extremely violent or sexual nature, not to sanitize the news, but to keep it from offending the audience.

The U.S. military, intelligence, and diplomatic operations function with a certain amount of secrecy. That confidentiality is regularly challenged by whistle-blowers, anti-government groups or others who want to remove the lid on various aspects of U.S. government.

In 1971, The New York Times published what's commonly called the Pentagon Papers, secret Defense Department documents detailing the problems of American involvement in the Vietnam War in ways the media had never reported. The Nixon administration went to court in a failed attempt to keep the leaked documents from being published.

Decades later, WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange are under fire for posting more than a quarter million secret U.S. documents, many involving national security. When The New York Times published these U.S. State Department papers, the U.S. Air Force responded by blocking the newspaper's website from its computers.

These examples show that media owners face a difficult relationship with the government. When they approve stories containing potentially embarrassing information, government officials often try to censor it.

Media companies are supposed to serve the public interest. Sometimes that's at odds with the conglomerate owners who control traditional media voices.

Such was the case when The New York Times reported that executives from MSNBC owner General Electric and Fox News Channel owner News Corporation decided it wasn't in their corporate interests to allow on-air hosts Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly to trade on-air attacks. While the jabs seemed mostly personal, there was news that came out of them.

The Times reported that O'Reilly uncovered that General Electric was doing business in Iran. Although legal, G.E. later said it had stopped. A cease-fire between the hosts probably wouldn't have produced that information, which is newsworthy despite the apparent motivation for getting it.

Cable TV giant Comcast faces a unique charge of censorship. Shortly after the Federal Communications Commission approved its takeover of NBC Universal, it hired FCC commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker who had voted for the merger.

While some denounced the move as a conflict of interest, a single tweet is what unleashed Comcast's wrath. A worker at a summer film camp for teenage girls questioned the hiring through Twitter. Comcast responded by yanking $18,000 in funding for the camp.

The company later apologized and offered to restore its contribution. Camp officials say they want to be able to speak freely without being hushed by corporations.

Critics often lambast media for having a political bias. While viewpoints on the editorial pages are clear to see, the link between politics and censorship is harder to spot.

The ABC news program Nightline once devoted its broadcast to reading the names of more than 700 U.S. servicemen and women killed in Iraq. What appeared to be a solemn tribute to military sacrifice was interpreted as a politically-motivated, anti-war stunt by Sinclair Broadcast Group, which didn't allow the program to be seen on the seven ABC stations it owned.

Sinclair is the same company that a media watchdog group says called more than 100 members of Congress "censorship advocates" for raising concerns to the FCC about Sinclair's plans to air the film, Stolen Honor. That production was blasted for being propaganda against then-presidential candidate John Kerry.

Sinclair responded by saying it wanted to air the documentary after the major networks refused to show it. In the end, bowing to pressure on several fronts, the company aired a revised version that only included parts of the film.

Communist countries that once stopped the free flow of information may have largely disappeared, but even in America, censorship issues keep some news from reaching you. With the explosion of citizen journalism and internet platforms, the truth will now have an easier way of getting out.

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How Media Censorship Affects the News You See

Censorship – Definition, Examples, Cases – Legal Dictionary

Posted on April 26, 2019 by Danzig

The term censorship refers to the suppression, banning, or deletion of speech, writing, or images that are considered to be indecent, obscene, or otherwise objectionable. Censorship becomes a civil rights issue when a government or other entity with authority, suppresses ideas, or the expression of ideas, information, and self. In the U.S., censorship has been debated for decades, as some seek to protect the public from offensive materials, and others seek to protect the publics rights to free speech and expression. To explore this concept, consider the following censorship definition.

Noun

Origin

380 B.C. Greek Philosopher Plato

The word censorship is from the Latin censere, which is to give as ones opinion, to assess. In Roman times, censors were public officials who took census counts, as well as evaluating public principles and moralities. Societies throughout history have taken on the belief that the government is responsible for shaping the characters of individuals, many engaging in censorship to that end.

In his text The Republic, ancient Greek philosopher Plato makes a systematic case for the need for censorship in the arts. Information in the ancient Chinese society was tightly controlled, a practice that persists in some form today. Finally, many churches, including the Roman Catholic Church, have historically banned literature felt to be contrary to the teachings of the church.

Many of Americas laws have their origins in English law. In the 1700s, both countries made it their business to censor speech and writings concerning sedition, which are actions promoting the overthrowing of the government, and blasphemy, which is sacrilege or irreverence toward God. The idea that obscenity should be censored didnt gain serious favor until the mid-1800s. The courts in both countries, throughout history, have worked to suppress speech, writings, and images on these issues.

As time went on, contention arose over just what should be considered obscene. Early English law defined obscenity as anything that tended to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and anything that might suggest to the minds of the young of either sex, and even to persons of more advanced years, thoughts of a most impure and libidinous character. This essentially meant anything that might lead one to have impure thoughts. This definition carried over into early American law as well.

However, that definition was vague enough to raise more questions than it answered in many circumstances. These included:

Censorship in America took a turn in 1957, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared that adults cannot be reduced to reading only what is fit for children, ruling that it must be considered whether the work was originally meant for children or adults. Still, the Court acknowledged that works that are utterly without redeeming social importance can be censored or banned. This left another vague standard for the courts to deal with.

Censorship in America is most commonly a question in the entertainment industry, which is widely influential on the young and old alike. Public entertainment in the form of movies, television, music, and electronic gaming are considered to have a substantial effect on public interest. Because of this, it is subject to certain governmental regulations.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits suppression of an individuals right to free speech, stating Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press This is a principle held dear by those protesting censorship in any form. In the U.S., censorship of obscene materials in entertainment is allowed, in order to protect children from pornography and other offensive things. The problem with government sanctioned censorship is the risk of violating the civil rights of either those producing the materials, or those wishing to view them.

The issue of censorship in the film industry has, at times, been quite contentious. In an effort to avoid the censorship issue, while striving to protect children and conform to federal laws, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) instituted a self-regulating, voluntary rating system in 1968. In the 1990s, the MPAA updated its rating system, making it easier for parents to determine what is appropriate for their children, based on the childrens ages.

The MPAA rating system has a number of ratings:

Rather than censoring movies or their content by exclusion of content, MCAA ratings are assigned by a board of people who view the movies, who consider such factors as violence, sex, drug use, and language when assigning ratings. The board strives to assign a rating that a majority of parents in the U.S. would give, considering their needs to protect their children.

An X rating was part of the MCAAs original rating system, and signified that no one under the age of 16 would be allowed, regardless of parental accompaniment. The X rating was replaced by the NC-17 rating in 1990.

Internet censorship refers to the suppression of information that can be published to, or viewed on, the internet. While many people enjoy unfettered access to the broad spectrum of information racing across the information highway, others are denied access, or allowed access only to government approved information. Rationales for internet censorship range from a desire to protect children from content that is offensive or inappropriate, to a governments objective to control its peoples access to world news, opinions, and other information.

In the United States, the First Amendment affords the people some protection of their right to freely access the internet, and of the things they post to the web. Because of this, there is very little government-mandated filtering of information that originates in the U.S. The issue of censorship of certain content, especially content that may further terrorism, is constantly debated at the federal government level.

As an example of censorship, the following countries are known for censoring their peoples internet content:

In the mid-1960s, Sam Ginsberg, who owned Sams Stationery and Luncheonette on Long Island, was charged with selling girlie magazines to a 16-year old boy, which was in violation of New York state law. Ginsberg was tried in the Nassau County District Court, without a jury, and found guilty. The judge found that the magazines contained pictures which, by failing to cover the female buttocks and breasts with an opaque covering, were harmful to minors. He stated that the photos appealed to the prurient, shameful or morbid interest of minors, and that the images were patently offensive to standards held by the adult community regarding what was suitable for minors.

Ginsberg was denied the right to appeal his convictions to the New York Court of Appeals, at which time he took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, on the basis that the state of New York had no authority to define two separate classes of people (minors and adults), with respect to what is harmful. In addition, Ginsberg argued that it was easy to mistake a young persons age, and the law makes no requirement for how much effort a shop owner must put into determining age before selling magazines intended for adult viewing. The Court did not agree, holding that Ginsberg might be acquitted on the grounds of an honest mistake, only if he had made a reasonable bonafide attempt to ascertain the true age of such a minor. The conviction was upheld.

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Censorship - Definition, Examples, Cases - Legal Dictionary

Censorship | Encyclopedia.com

Posted on April 26, 2019 by Danzig

Dissident historical views on Western colonialism were regularly censored, and historians and others holding such views were often persecuted. In the following entry, a representative sample of these dissident views is discussed. The examples are taken from a continuously updated worldwide database of the censorship of history covering views produced between 1945 and 2005. To demarcate this survey more precisely, it is worth noting that it is not on censorship of views prior to 1945; nor on Eastern colonialism; nor on precolonial history; nor on powers that annexed other territories; nor on minorities or majorities whose past is labeled (semi)colonial by some of their members; nor on independent states whose past is labeled (semi)colonial by opposition members or as subject to imperialist influences by the government; nor on independence as a result of partition instead of colonialism; nor on occupation during a war.

After a look at the evidence for archival destruction, cases of censorship of professional and popular history will be reviewed. Three groups of censors are considered: colonial powers, former colonial powers, and former colonies. Discussion of these groups is centered around three themes: colonialism in general, its start (the conquest and accompanying crimes), and its end (anticolonial resistance and nationalism).

Archives form the infrastructure of historical research. There is a longby its very nature poorly documentedhistory of archival destruction by colonial powers. Although they fall outside the chronological scope of this entry, it is tempting to recall first two early examples from Mexico and Congo.

In the fifteenth century the Aztecs of Mexico destroyed documents not in line with their view of the past, which endorsed continuation of the revered Toltec civilization. One century later, Spanish conquistadores burned the pagan Aztec and Mayan archives.

In the mid-nineteenth century Portuguese colonists set fire to the archive of the kings of Congo, built up since the sixteenth century. When this territory (together with other regions) became the Congo Free State (18851908) and the private possession of the Belgian king, Leopold II (18351909), the possible transfer to Belgium of sovereignty over Congo was discussed twice, in 1895 and in 1906 to 1907. Leopold II gave detailed instructions to destroy or transfer to the royal palace the archives of the Congo. "Je leur donnerai mon Congo, mais ils n'ont pas le droit de savoir ce que j'y ai fait" ("I shall give them my Congo, but they have no right to know what I have done there"), he said. It is estimated that probably half of the population died in Leopold's Congo. The surviving archives were examined by German forces occupying Belgium during World War I, but the archives were subsequently treated carelessly until the late 1940s.

Within the survey period of this entry, cases of colonial mismanagement of archives are documented for Africa and the Caribbean. In Kenya, many official records on the Mau Mau rebellion (19521956) were destroyed by the British before independence. When in 1962 Algeria became independent, the French government exported all the official documents they could to France, thus taking with them vital sources of Algerian history. In what was to become Zimbabwe, much material relating to African history and to the activities of Africans was removed from the files open to the public at the national archives after the emergence of the Rhodesia Front government in 1962, an act glossed over by recataloguing. From 1979 to 1980 the Rhodesian government destroyed documents produced by its security and intelligence services.

Switching to the Caribbean, a recent case was the postponement in late 2000 of the publication of an official history of Dutch decolonization policy in the Caribbean between 1940 and 2000, written by Gert Oostindie and Inge Klinkers. Quoting too abundantly from the post-1975 Dutch Council of Ministers minutes and other top-level documents, the authors had to delete certain data, particularly data concerning the personal policy views of politicians and civil servants, before the volumes could be published in mid-2001.

Evidence that former colonies destroyed colonial archives is sporadic. Under Equatorial Guinea's first president, Francisco Macas Nguema (19241979), for example, school textbooks of the colonial period and large parts of the national archive were condemned as "imperialist" and publicly burned.

Colonial powers did not welcome unfavorable interpretations of their rule, as the following examples about the British and Portuguese show.

In India, the British banned Marxist-inspired "economic-nationalist" interpretations of Indian history, such as pleas for economic independence based on historical arguments and criticism of "landlordism" and nineteenth-century deindustrialization, at schools and universities. The 1946 edition of W. C. Smith's Modern Islam in India: A Social Analysis, published in London and describing the transformation of the traditional Muslim community into a modern society during the preceding seventy-five years, was not allowed into India because of its alleged communist approach, despite the fact that an earlier edition had been published in Lahore in 1943. A pirated version appeared without the author's consent in 1954, after Pakistan's independence, again in Lahore.

Interestingly, two of India's leaders wrote histories while staying in British prisons: Future prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru (18891964) wrote The Discovery of India, and future president Rajendra Prasad (18841963) authored India Divided. Both works were published in 1946. The latter book, arguing from an Indian nationalist viewpoint but emphasizing unity between the historical traditions and political ideals of Hindus and Muslims, went through three editions before India's partition in 1947. Before his Discovery, Nehru had also written a world history in prison.

In 1962 Portugal declared British historian Charles Boxer persona non grata for drawing attention to Portugal's record of control in its colonies in a series of lectures in the United States. Boxer denied the frequent assertion of Prime Minister Antnio Salazar (18891970) that the Portuguese had always had good relations with black Africans and that the latter were themselves Portuguese; Boxer showed that most colonizers believed in white superiority and that race prejudice prevailed. In an earlier paper, he described seventeenth-century Portugal as a "disintegrating power." Portuguese historian Armando Corteso suggested that Boxer return his (many) Portuguese honors. The Portuguese press labeled Boxer dishonest, and his books were no longer sold. His 1969 classic, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 14151925, was not translated into Portuguese until 1977. In 1954 British journalist and historian of Africa Basil Davidson experienced an episode similar to Boxer's.

Colonial conquests were very sensitive events, especially when accompanied by atrocities, as demonstrated by examples from the United States and Belgium. As a student, the future dissident and revisionist Philippine historian Renato Constantino was briefly arrested in 1939 and interrogated by the American colonial authorities at Fort Santiago in Manila because he had written an article exposing American atrocities perpetrated against the Filipino population during the "pacification campaign" of 1899 to 1902. Constantino was released after he declared that his source was The Conquest of the Philippines by the United States, 18981925 (1926), a book published uncensored in New York by Moorfield Storey and Marcial Lichauco in 1926. This incident made Constantino determined to reexamine Philippine history.

In 1959 (a year before the independence of the Belgian Congo) the Belgian Royal Academy of Colonial Sciences refused twice to publish papers of its member, historian and missionary Edmond Boelaert, because they contained evidence of abuses committed in the early phases of Congo's colonization. The papers were eventually published long after Congo's independenceand the author's deathin 1988 and 1995 respectively.

Research into anticolonial resistance and nationalism had the power to demonstrate that the colonized possessed historical agency, and such research therefore demolished part of the ethnocentric legitimation upon which colonial power rested. In Australia, a dissertation by Allan Healy critically approaching the history of Australian colonial control over Papua New Guinea (which lasted until 1975) and presenting the case for more rapid political devolution of power was put under lock and key in the library of the Australian National University between 1959 and 1962. In the French Maghreb, a region in northwestern Africa, research in contemporary history was ignored for being too sensitive. In 1952 the sale of French historian Charles-Andr Julien's new book, North Africa on the March: Muslim Nationalism and French Sovereignty, was blocked by the colonial administration after it aroused controversy for its anticolonialist stance. Julien's first book, History of North Africa: From the Arab Conquest to 1830 (1931), which supported demands of North African nationalists for colonial reform, had already earned him the hostility of many French in the Maghreb.

In 1967 Terence Ranger, a British historian deported from Rhodesia in 1963, published Revolt in Southern Rhodesia 189697: A Study in African Resistance. It became a classic history of the Chimurenga revoltthe Shona name for the 1896 to 1897 uprisings of the Ndebele and Shona people against the imposition of British colonial ruleand inspired blacks to compare the revolt with their own uprising against the Rhodesian regime after its 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain. Ranger's book was banned until independence in 1980. Ironically, the Rhodesian army reportedly used it as a textbook in counterinsurgency.

After independence was granted to their colonies, Western countries remained sensitive to statements about their former colonial role. For example, Years of the Century, a 1979 Portuguese television series that included a personal view of the Estado Novo (New State; the Portuguese dictatorial regime from 1932 to 1974) by a left-wing historian, was canceled after complaints from the Catholic Church about the first episode. The film explicitly attacked the Catholic hierarchy's support of the Estado Novo repression of black nationalists.

The first stages of colonization proved to be problematic in Australia, Germany, and Belgium. In June 1992, in Mabo and Others v. State of Queensland, the Australian High Court recognized that the concept of terra nullius (Australia as "a land of no one" before European settlement began in 1788) was a fiction, thereby strengthening Aboriginal claims to ancestral lands. This "Mabo judgment" (after Aboriginal leader Eddie Mabo [19361992]), called historic, reversed a historical view of Australia's past in which the role of Aboriginals was downplayed. The ruling led to protracted debatesknown as the "History Wars" and yet unfinishedabout British colonialism in Australia and the fate of the Aboriginals.

In Germany, a journalist who in 1965 attacked the Koloniallegende (the emphasis on Germany's achievements in its pre-1918 colonies without mentioning the violence) on television received death threats. Another person living abroad had to cope with censorship threats by the German foreign office after pointing out parallels between the genocide of the native Herero in German South-West Africa (present-day Namibia) in 1904 and that of the Jews and the Poles in Europe during World War II.

For the Belgians, the crimes against humanity committed in the Congo Free State remained a sensitive subject until well into the 1980s. Beginning in 1975 diplomat Jules Marchal published several books in Dutch and French on those crimes under a pseudonym. For eight years he could not gain access to the archives of the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In another case, retired Lieutenant-General mile Janssens, chief of staff of the Force Publique (the army in the Belgian Congo) until 1960 and president of the patriotic committee Pro Belgica (established in 1980 to commemorate the 1830 foundation of Belgium) wrote a letter in 1986 to the minister of national education about historian and anthropologist Daniel Vangroenweghe. Janssens accused Vangroenweghe of libeling King Leopold II in his 1985 Dutch-language book Red Rubber: Leopold II and His Congo by writing about the crimes committed in the Congo Free State. Janssens also questioned Vangroenweghe's position as a secondaryschool history teacher. When members of parliament supporting Pro Belgica asked questions about the affair, the minister established a commission of school inspectors, which concluded that the charges were unfounded.

Janssens also wrote to the publisher who translated Vangroenweghe's book into French, as a result of which a publisher's note was printed in the 1986 French-language edition to warn readers of its controversial nature. Vangroenweghe was asked to sign a statement that he would take all responsibility in the eventuality of a lawsuit. Although the French-language edition sold out in a few months, it was not reprinted. Pro Belgica also published rebuttals of Vangroenweghe's "lies." In the course of the affair, Vangroenweghe was threatened in anonymous letters, and his public lectures on the subject were interrupted by former colonials and attended by the secret police.

The final stages of colonialism proved to be delicate subjects in the Netherlands and France. In the Netherlands, the 1984 publication of a volume in the official war history, Kingdom of the Netherlands in World War II, dealing with the Dutch East Indies and the later Indonesia, led to a protracted lawsuit. The suit was finally decided against the petitioners (representatives of part of the community of those who formerly lived in the East Indies, organized as the Committee for the Historical Rehabilitation of the Dutch East Indies) in April 1990. They had accused the author, historian Loe De Jong, of portraying too negatively the role of the colonial administration. They also objected to passages about war crimes committed by Dutch troops against Indonesian nationalists from 1945 to 1949, and they asked the state to commission "a less prejudiced historian" to rewrite the history of colonial relations.

The 1987 manuscript of De Jong's next volume, also about Dutch-Indonesian relations from 1945 to 1949, was leaked to the press by two military reviewers and evoked strong protests from veterans because it contained a forty-six-page section entitled "War Crimes." Some veterans demanded nonpublication of that part, sued De Jong for libel, or published denials of his claims. The defamation case, including the demand for nonpublication, was dismissed in 1988, chiefly because the controversial statements were made in a manuscript, not a published book. When the volume was finally published, the title of the provocative section was changed to "Excesses." A few years later Dutch war veterans sued novelist Graa Boomsma on similar charges; the case was dismissed.

In France, the violent Algerian independence struggle (19541962) proved traumatic. Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 film The Battle of Algiers treated the theme and was banned. Shot on location in Algiers in 1965 with the assistance of the Algerian government, the film gave a sympathetic account of the Algerian fight and criticized the use of torture by colonial authorities. The French ban lasted five years; the film's eventual release was delayed because cinema managers were intimidated. The Battle of Algiers was also banned in Uruguay in 1968 because it was seen as indirectly condoning the Tupamaro guerrilla, a National Liberation Movement very active at the time.

A 1996 issue of the Algerian daily Libert was seized by the French police because it included an article commemorating the anniversary of a pro-independence demonstration by Algerians in Paris on October 17, 1962. The demonstration had ended in a bloodbath. The article mentioned a death toll and the disappearance of as many as two hundred people instead of the official tally of three deaths and sixty-four injured. In 1998 Maurice Papon, the chief of the Paris police at the time, sued historian Jean-Luc Einaudi for libel because the latter had written in the newspaper Le Monde that the 1962 events constituted a "massacre perpetrated by the police on Papon's orders." In addition, Einaudi denounced the removal or destruction of several relevant archives. In 1999 the court ruled that the statement had been defamatory; damages were not awarded, however, because the court also ruled that Einaudi's method had been careful. Only in the same year did the French National Assembly officially acknowledge that France had fought a "war," rather than "an operation for keeping order," against Algerian nationalists from 1954 to 1962.

In former colonies, colonialism was widely condemned, with little reason for substantial differences of opinion. One example reveals, however, that the role of locals could be thorny. In 1977 the Indonesian Film Censorship Board banned Saija dan Adinda, a Dutch-Indonesian film directed by Fons Rademakers. The 1976 film, an adaptation of the nineteenth-century novel Max Havelaar, told the story of the corrupt and exploitative practices of the local gentry under Dutch colonial rule. The board declared that the ban was imposed because the film created the impression that colonialism was good and that the people were exploited by the local gentry rather than the Dutch.

If evidence for censorship of colonialism in general was understandably scarce, the reverse was true for its beginning and end. In some cases, episodes of colonial conquest were extremely difficult to interpret, as examples from Mexico and South Africa prove.

From 1950 to 1951 a Mexican scientific commission devoted thirty-seven sessions to verifying the authenticity of the bones of Cuauhtmoc (the last Aztec emperor and a national symbol of resistance to European imperialism), which had been "discovered" shortly before. When the commission found no proof of the bones' authenticity, and thus was unable to satisfy national pride, it was confronted with extreme hostility in the press. In 1975 a new commission came to the same conclusion as the 1951 group.

In the run-up to the 1992 quincentenary marking the arrival of Christopher Columbus (14511506) in the Americas, an intense debate raged in Mexico about whether it was legitimate to describe this "discovery" as the start of an encounter between the Old and the New World. In South Africa, two books published in 1952 criticized the celebration of three hundred years of white settlement and looked at South Africa's history as a struggle between oppressors and oppressed. The books, Three Hundred Years: A History of South Africa by Mnguni (Hosea Jaffe) and The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest by Nosipho Majeke (Dora Taylor), had to appear under pseudonyms and were banned. Both books anticipated the work of radical historians in the 1970s.

The early stages of colonialism were sometimes problematic. In February 2005, a 6-meter (19.5-foot) statue of the Leopold II was reerected in Congo after it had been removed on the orders of President Mobutu Sese Seko (19301997) in 1967. It was taken down again just hours later, reportedly because several ministers opposed having a memorial to a man who had caused so much exploitation and death.

The last stages of colonialism, however, were by far the most sensitive in the former colonies.

Latin America. There are many examples in Latin America, where independence from Spain and Portugal came in the early nineteenth century for most colonies. In 1976, during the military dictatorship, Uruguayan historian Alfonso Fernndez Cabrelli was arrested and held without trial. He was accused of "an attempt to subconsciously influence the reader of his book The Uruguayans" (Boletn informativo 1979, p. 6) by drawing parallels between Uruguay's hero of independence, General Jos Artigas (17641850), and the revolutionaries Camilo Torres (19291967) and Che Guevara (19281967). The book was called excessively critical of "the measures taken by the authorities to preserve the values of our nationality against the penetration of Marxism" (Boletn informativo 1979, p. 6).

In the 1980s the Colombian Academy of History directed comparable criticism to some authors of history textbooks. The author Rodolfo Ramn de Roux was accused of omitting or ridiculing the most important figures of the independence period and of overemphasizing contemporary history. His New History approach was labeled Marxist and unpatriotic. A similar approach used in a textbook by Silvia Duzzan and Salomn Kalmanovitz was equally condemned. An academy member declared in a newspaper that the textbook depicted Spaniards and Creoles unfavorably, thus inciting hatred against them. Despite the academy's attitude, the text-books continued to be used in schools.

Elsewhere, analogous cases were noted. In Peru, historian Heraclio Bonilla was criticized in the 1970s for his revisionist interpretation of the Peruvian independence movement. Bonilla's work was attacked for unpatriotically debunking the nation's traditional heroes and overemphasizing socioeconomic factors.

Under the Argentinean dictatorship (19761983) of General Jorge Videla and others a historical study, From Montoneros to Caudillos, was banned because its title contained the forbidden word Montonero (adopted by left-wing Peronists in memory of the irregular armies of gauchos who fought against Spanish troops during Argentina's independence wars of 1810 to 1816).

In 1983 in Mexico, the National Autonomous University of Mexico planned a production of Martyrdom of Morelos (1981), a play by Vicente Leero. Leero's portrayal of Mexican independence hero Jos Mara Morelos (17651815) as someone who under torture betrayed the names, strategies, and troop strengths of other rebel commanders caused a great stir, especially because President Miguel de la Madrid (b. 1934) had "adopted" Morelos as his spiritual mentor from the past. Some rehearsals were reportedly interrupted, a controversial actor playing the part of Morelos was replaced, and precautions against violent protests were taken on opening night.

In Cuba, finally, prominent independence leaders such as Jos Mart (18531895), Mximo Gmez (18361905), and Antonio Maceo (18451896) formed part of the pantheon inspiring and legitimizing the government of Fidel Castro (b. 1927) and were, as such, sensitive subjects.

Asia. In Asia, problems were comparable. In 1952 the Indian Ministry of Education appointed an editorial board to compile an official history of the Indian freedom movement, to be published in conjunction with the centenary celebration of the 1857 revolt of Indian soldiers (sepoys). In 1954 board director and historian Romesh Chandra Majumdar presented a draft of the first volume to the other editorial board members; after a delay he learned from the minister of education that some board members had criticized his draft as exaggerating the role of Bengal in the freedom movement.

Equally controversial was the starting date of the freedom movement in India, situated by Majumdar in 1870. Others preferred to designate the 1857 revolt itself as the beginning of the movement, or even the thirteenth centuryimplying that Muslims were foreigners in India, an assumption undermining the Congress Party's ideal of India as a secular democracy.

A third point of conflict was the nature of the 1857 revolt (was it a national war of independence or not?). Majumdar resigned and the editorial board was dissolved in 1955. The government entrusted the work to National Archives director Surendra Nath Sen, whose book Eighteen Fifty-Seven appeared in 1957. The same year Majumdar published his own findings as The Sepoy Mutiny and the Revolt of 1857.

In Indonesia, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, a nominee for the Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote persuasive anticolonial novels. Imprisoned at Buru Island, Pramoedya was not allowed to write in the 1970s. In the evenings, he told his fellow inmates stories about the incipient nationalist movement in the early twentieth-century Dutch East Indies entirely from memory. When Pramoedya was finally allowed to write in 1975, the other inmates gave him paper and did his duties while he transformed the stories into a set of four historical novels.

When the quartet was published after Pramoedya's release in 1979 and proved immensely popular, each of the volumes was banned. Susandi, the head of the investigation team at the office of the Indonesian attorney general, claimed that the books represented a threat to security and order and that the author "had been able by means of historical data to smuggle in Marxist-Leninist teachings." The ban was also partially inspired by fear that analogies would be drawn between the abuses committed by the Dutch colonial power and those of the regime of President Suharto (b. 1921), who ruled Indonesia from 1967 to 1998.

The son of a school headmaster, Ananta Toer Pramoedya was born February 6, 1925, in Blora, East Java, Indonesia. Imprisoned by each of Indonesia's three twentieth-century governments for alleged subversive political activities and writings, he is widely considered Indonesia's most estimable writer.

In his fictional works, Pramoedya has created insightful and forward-looking characters who challenge traditional political doctrines through thought and action. The complex political history of the Indonesian islands serves as the context for many of Pramoedya's works, which are also marked by his experiences during World War II.

After Japan's surrender at the end of World War II, the Dutch tried to regain the islands of the East Indies. However, Indonesian nationalist sentiment led several paramilitary rebel groups to engage the Dutch in a four-year struggle for control of the country. While serving as a soldier in this nationalist movement, Pramoedya was captured and jailed in 1947.

While serving in a Dutch forced labor camp, Pramoedya wrote The Fugitive, which was published several months after his release in 1949. The book, which earned him an Indonesian literary prize, marked Pramoedya's emergence as a politically influential author. In 1990, some forty years after it was originally published, The Fugitive became Pramoedya's first novel widely available to English-speaking audiences.

Once out of prison, Pramoedya developed several leftist affiliations, though he never became a communist. He served as a leading figure in Lekra, a socialist literary group, and visited Beijing in 1956, expressing support for that country's communist revolution. Among his significant publications of the period was a defense of Java's Chinese minority community. In 1965, after the failure of a coup aimed at overthrowing the by-then independent Indonesian government, Pramoedya was deemed an enemy of the state on account of his earlier leftist associations. The author's library, notes, and manuscripts were burned, and he was held without trial for fourteen years on the prison island of Buru in eastern Indonesia.

For the first seven years of his incarceration, Pramoedya was denied access to paper and pencil. Lacking these rudimentary tools of his trade, he composed stories in his head. Upon his release in 1979, Pramoedya turned those prison stories into a historical tetralogy, based loosely on the life of Tirto Adisoerjo, an early Indonesian nationalist.

The Indonesian government has suppressed Pramoedya's works, citing alleged Marxist-Leninist leanings and elements of class conflict that pose a potential threat to society. Some observers have viewed these bans as an attempt to quell liberalism and debate among Indonesians.

Pramoedya's work has been circulated in the form of "illegal" photocopies, at great personal risk to Indonesian readers, and has remained largely inaccessible to foreigners. In addition, journalists have often been denied permission to interview him and the Australian translator of the Buruquartet was expelled from Java. When asked to describe his feelings about his works being banned, Pramoedya told the Washington Post: "I consider it an honor. To do creative work you must be prepared to pay, and this is one of the costs" (North, p. D5, April 1988).

Africa. In Africa also, independence struggles left their uncertain legacies. In Kenya, the interpretation of the independence movement, and especially of one part of it, the Mau Mau rebellion (19521956), was a predominant subject of debate among historians because the conclusions of the debate had direct implications for the legitimacy of the authoritarian leadership. Mau Mau was an uprising of members of the Gikuyu, Kenya's largest ethnic group, against British colonial rule to obtain land and freedom. Writers with a Marxist-inspired interpretation of the rebellion risked persecution.

Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiongo, who wrote fiction on the Mau Mau, spent the last year (1978) of the presidency of Jomo Kenyatta (18911978) in prison because one of his recent plays had dealt with Kenyans who collaborated with the colonial administration by serving in the Home Guard during the Mau Mau rebellion. Ngugi's play also treated the struggle over land between a peasant farmer and a rich landowner. In the words of Eliud Njenga, the Kiambu district commissioner, "it promoted the class struggle." The play was "too provocative, would make some people bitter and was opening up old graves." After his release and much further harassment, Ngugi eventually went into exile until his temporary return to Kenya in 2004.

Another Kenyan victim, this time under the government (19782002) of President Daniel arap Moi (b. 1924), was Marxist historian Maina wa Kinyatti, known for his controversial work on Mau Mau. It cost him six years of imprisonment under severe duress (19821988), an eye disease, and exile afterwards.

At the other side of the interpretation spectrum, neoconservative historian William Ochieng, who viewed Mau Mau as an internecine struggle among the Gikuyu, stayed relatively aloof from criticism until a group of Mau Mau veterans in 1986 demanded that his writings be banned from the schools. The veterans also decided to commission the "correct" historiography of the Mau Mau rebellion. In an official reaction, President Moi declared that he could not allow history to be written in a way that might divide the Kenyans and that any history of the Mau Mau rebellion should provide a correct account of independence. As late as October 2001, dozens of members of the Kenyan nongovernmental group Release Political Prisoners were detained for several days on charges of holding an illegal meeting because they had commemorated Mau Mau day.

Elsewhere in Africa, books about left-wing leaders who were assassinated during or as a result of decolonization, like Ruben Um Nyob (19131958) in Cameroon or Patrice Lumumba (19251961) in Congo, were confiscated and banned, partly because the books implicated their country's rulers. Such was the fate of Patrice Lumumba: The Fifty Last Days of His Life (1966), a book written under a pseudonym by Belgian scholars Jules Grard-Libois and Jacques Brassinne, and Cameroon's National Problem (1985), edited by historian Achille Mbembe.

In Namibia, the crimes committed by the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO), a black African nationalist liberation movement, before the 1990 independence caused controversy. In 1996 president and former SWAPO leader Sam Nujoma (b. 1929) attacked German Lutheran Church pastor Siegfried Groth, who for many years had actively supported SWAPO's antiapartheid struggle, in a television broadcast to the nation. The reason was Groth's NamibiaThe Wall of Silence: The Dark Days of the Liberation Struggle, a 1995 book that included eyewitness accounts of the torture and disappearance of detainees in the SWAPO preindependence exile camps in Zambia and Angola. The detainees had been accused of internal dissent or of spying for South Africa. Although the book sold out quickly, some two thousand people called for its banning and for public burning at a rally celebrating the sixth anniversary of Namibia's independence.

From this survey, five conclusions can be drawn. First, popular history channels were watched as closely as academic history. Second, reasons for archival destruction, removal, and secrecy by colonial powers can be subsumed under three factors: political (legitimation of abusive power), military (erasure of traces of crimes and rebellions), and cultural (ethnocentric depreciation of the historical sources of subjected peoples).

Third, colonial powers censored historical works about colonial violence written by both national and "indigenous" scholars; those works were banned at home and in the colony. More surprisingly, colonial powers also attempted quite often to attack criticism by foreign scholars.

Fourth, for former colonial powers, precarious subjects that were liable to censorship or taboo status mainly related to wars in the earliest and last stages of colonialism. Unofficial interest groups were players as important as governments. Frequently, conflicts had to be decided in court. In the long run, violent conquest and violent decolonization came to be seen as adversely affecting the democratic legitimation of power and the construction of a national identityin short, they came to be seen as sources of shame.

Finally, in former colonies, the last stage of colonialism was the most explosive period. Remarkably, censorship attempts were often not directed at representations of the role of the former colonial power, but at portrayals of former anticolonial resistance leaders. Left-wing explanations for this crucial period were seldom cherished. Historians had to portray the country's heroes of independence very carefully: praising them could powerfully suggest comparison with, and criticism of, present leadership, and blaming them could provoke retaliation by veterans and the establishment.

see also Anticolonialism; Lumumba, Patrice; Portugal's African Colonies.

Boletn informativo (Newsletter of Amnesty International) (February 1979): 6.

De Baets, Antoon. "Censorship and Historical Writing." In A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing, edited by D. R. Woolf, 149150. New York and London: Garland, 1998.

De Baets, Antoon. "History: Rewriting History." In Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, Vol. 2, edited by Derek Jones, 10621067. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001.

De Baets, Antoon. "History: School Curricula and Textbooks." In Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, Vol. 2, edited by Derek Jones, 10671073. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001.

De Baets, Antoon. Censorship of Historical Thought: A World Guide, 19452000. London and Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002.

De Baets, Antoon. "Defamation Cases against Historians." History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 41 (2002): 346-366.

Jones, Derek, ed. Censorship: A World Encyclopedia. 4 vols. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001.

Simpson, J., and J. Bennett. The Disappeared: Voices from a Secret War. London: 1985.

The rest is here:

Censorship | Encyclopedia.com

5-Star Seychelles Island Resort | Four Seasons Resort …

Posted on April 26, 2019 by Danzig

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Rationalism – History of rationalism | Britannica.com

Posted on April 26, 2019 by Danzig

The first Western philosopher to stress rationalist insight was Pythagoras, a shadowy figure of the 6th century bce. Noticing that, for a right triangle, a square built on its hypotenuse equals the sum of those on its sides and that the pitches of notes sounded on a lute bear a mathematical relation to the lengths of the strings, Pythagoras held that these harmonies reflected the ultimate nature of reality. He summed up the implied metaphysical rationalism in the words All is number. It is probable that he had caught the rationalists vision, later seen by Galileo (15641642), of a world governed throughout by mathematically formulable laws.

The difficulty in this view, however, is that, working with universals and their relations, which, like the multiplication table, are timeless and changeless, it assumes a static world and ignores the particular, changing things of daily life. The difficulty was met boldly by the rationalist Parmenides (born c. 515 bce), who insisted that the world really is a static whole and that the realm of change and motion is an illusion, or even a self-contradiction. His disciple Zeno of Elea (c. 495c. 430 bce) further argued that anything thought to be moving is confronted with a row of points infinite in number, all of which it must traverse; hence it can never reach its goal, nor indeed move at all. Of course, perception tells us that we do move, but Zeno, compelled to choose between perception and reason, clung to reason.

The exalting of rational insight above perception was also prominent in Plato (c. 427c. 347 bce). In the Meno, Socrates (c. 470399 bce) dramatized the innateness of knowledge by calling upon an illiterate slave boy and, drawing a square in the sand, proceeding to elicit from him, step by step, the proof of a theorem in geometry of which the boy could never have heard (to double the size of a square, draw a square on the diagonal). Such knowledge, rationalists insist, is certain, universal, and completely unlearned.

Plato so greatly admired the rigorous reasoning of geometry that he is alleged to have inscribed over the door of his Academy the phrase Let no one unacquainted with geometry enter here. His famous forms are accessible only to reason, not to sense. But how are they related to sensible things? His answers differed. Sometimes he viewed the forms as distilling those common properties of a class in virtue of which one identifies anything as a member of it. Thus, what makes anything a triangle is its having three straight sides; this is its essence. At other times, Plato held that the form is an ideal, a non-sensible goal to which the sensible thing approximates; the geometers perfect triangle never was on sea or land, though all actual triangles more or less embody it. He conceived the forms as more real than the sensible things that are their shadows and saw that philosophers must penetrate to these invisible essences and see with their minds eye how they are linked together. For Plato they formed an orderly system that was at once eternal, intelligible, and good.

Platos successor Aristotle (384322 bce) conceived of the work of reason in much the same way, though he did not view the forms as independent. His chief contribution to rationalism lay in his syllogistic logic, regarded as the chief instrument of rational explanation. Humans explain particular facts by bringing them under general principles. Why does one think Socrates will die? Because he is human, and humans are mortal. Why should one accept the general principle itself that all humans are mortal? In experience such principles have so far held without exception. But the mind cannot finally rest in this sort of explanation. Humans never wholly understand a fact or event until they can bring it under a principle that is self-evident and necessary; they then have the clearest explanation possible. On this central thesis of rationalism, the three great Greeks were in accord.

Nothing comparable in importance to their thought appeared in rationalistic philosophy in the next 1,800 years, though the work of St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 122574) was an impressive attempt to blend Greek rationalism and Christian revelation into a single harmonious system.

Continued here:

Rationalism - History of rationalism | Britannica.com

The Voluntaryist

Posted on April 26, 2019 by Danzig

If one takes care of the means, the end will take care of itself. -GandhiStatement of Purpose: Voluntaryists are advocates of non-political, non-violent strategies to achieve a free society.We reject electoral politics, in theory and in practice, as incompatible with libertarian principles. Governments must cloak their actions in an aura of moral legitimacy in order to sustain their power, and political methods invariably strengthen that legitimacy.

Voluntaryists seek instead to delegitimize the State through education, and we advocate withdrawal of the cooperation and tacit consent on which State power ultimately depends.

Quote of the DayHappiness and DesiresIf you have enough money to satisfy your desires ... you are rich. But there are two ways to be rich: You can earn, inherit, borrow, beg, or steal enough money to meet expensive desires; or, you can cultivate a simple lifestyle of few desires; that way you always have more than enough money. ... The secret of happiness ... is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.- Dan Millman, WAY OF THE PEACEFUL WARRIOR (1984), pp 167-168.

We have to prove them wrong! Our stories and histories must be told and preserved.

To this purpose, we have created a section on our voluntaryist.com website titled How I Became A Voluntaryist. Already a number of autobiographies have been posted, but we would like more.

Please submit your articles in any format you wish (preferably in an email or as an email attachment). Essays will be screened for editorial purposes, and the most interesting of them will be published, as well, in our newsletter.

Commit your history to paper and the web. Please send your story now to editor (at this site) or snail to Box 275, Gramling, SC 29348.

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The Voluntaryist

Thailand says US man’s seasteading home violates sovereignty

Posted on April 25, 2019 by Danzig

BANGKOK (AP) Thai authorities have raided a floating home in the Andaman Sea belonging to an American man and his Thai partner who sought to be pioneers in the seasteading movement, which promotes living in international waters to be free of any nations laws.

Thailands navy said Chad Elwartowski and Supranee Thepdet endangered national sovereignty, an offense punishable by life imprisonment or death.

It filed a complaint against them with police on the southern resort island of Phuket. Thai authorities said they have revoked Elwartowskis visa.

Elwartowski said in an email Thursday that he believes he and Supranee also known as Nadia Summergirl did nothing wrong.

This is ridiculous, he said in an earlier statement posted online. We lived on a floating house boat for a few weeks and now Thailand wants us killed.

The couple, who have gone into hiding, had been living part-time on a small structure they said was anchored outside Thailands territorial waters, just over 12 nautical miles from shore. They were not there when the navy carried out their raid on Saturday.

The Thai deputy naval commander responsible for the area said the project was a challenge to the countrys authorities.

This affects our national security and cannot be allowed, Rear Adm. Wintharat Kotchaseni told Thai media on Tuesday. He said the floating house also posed a safety threat to navigation if it broke loose because the area is considered a shipping lane.

Seasteading has had a revival in recent years as libertarian ideas of living free from state interference such as by using crypto-currency including Bitcoin have become more popular, including among influential Silicon Valley figures such as entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Elwartowski, an IT specialist, has been involved in Bitcoin since 2010.

Several larger-scale projects are under development, but some in the seasteading community have credited the Andaman Sea house with being the first modern implementation of seasteading.

The first thing to do is whatever I can to help Chad & Nadia, because living on a weird self-built structure and dreaming of future sovereignty should be considered harmless eccentricities, not major crimes, Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer who heads The Seasteading Institute, said on his Facebook page.

The floating two-story octagonal house at the center of the controversy had been profiled and promoted online by a group called Ocean Builders, which touted it as a pilot project and sought to sell additional units.

The group describes itself as a team of engineering focused entrepreneurs who have a passion for seasteading and are willing to put the hard work and effort forward to see that it happens.

In online statements, both Elwartowski and Ocean Builders said the couple merely promoted and lived on the structure, and did not fund, design, build or set the location for it.

I was volunteering for the project promoting it with the desire to be able to be the first seasteader and continue promoting it while living on the platform, Elwartowski told The Associated Press.

Being a foreigner in a foreign land, seeing the news that they want to give me the death penalty for just living on a floating house had me quite scared, Elwartowski said. We are still quite scared for our lives. We seriously did not think we were doing anything wrong and thought this would be a huge benefit for Thailand in so many ways.

Asked his next step, he was more optimistic.

I believe my lawyer can come to an amicable agreement with the Thai government, he said.

___

Associated Press journalist Tassanee Vejpongsa contributed to this report.

Read this article:

Thailand says US man's seasteading home violates sovereignty

Thailand says US man’s seasteading home violates sovereignty …

Posted on April 25, 2019 by Danzig

Thai authorities have raided a floating home in the Andaman Sea belonging to an American man and his Thai partner who sought to be pioneers in the "seasteading" movement, which promotes living in international waters to be free of any nation's laws.

Thailand's navy said Chad Elwartowski and Supranee Thepdet endangered national sovereignty, an offense punishable by life imprisonment or death.

It filed a complaint against them with police on the southern resort island of Phuket. Thai authorities said they have revoked Elwartowski's visa.

Elwartowski said in an email Thursday that he believes he and Supranee also known as Nadia Summergirl did nothing wrong.

"This is ridiculous," he said in an earlier statement posted online. "We lived on a floating house boat for a few weeks and now Thailand wants us killed."

The couple, who have gone into hiding, had been living part-time on a small structure they said was anchored outside Thailand's territorial waters, just over 12 nautical miles from shore. They were not there when the navy carried out their raid on Saturday.

The Thai deputy naval commander responsible for the area said the project was a challenge to the country's authorities.

"This affects our national security and cannot be allowed," Rear Adm. Wintharat Kotchaseni told Thai media on Tuesday. He said the floating house also posed a safety threat to navigation if it broke loose because the area is considered a shipping lane.

Several larger-scale projects are under development, but some in the seasteading community have credited the Andaman Sea house with being the first modern implementation of seasteading.

"The first thing to do is whatever I can to help Chad & Nadia, because living on a weird self-built structure and dreaming of future sovereignty should be considered harmless eccentricities, not major crimes," Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer who heads The Seasteading Institute, said on his Facebook page.

The group describes itself as "a team of engineering focused entrepreneurs who have a passion for seasteading and are willing to put the hard work and effort forward to see that it happens."

In online statements, both Elwartowski and Ocean Builders said the couple merely promoted and lived on the structure, and did not fund, design, build or set the location for it.

"I was volunteering for the project promoting it with the desire to be able to be the first seasteader and continue promoting it while living on the platform," Elwartowski told The Associated Press.

"Being a foreigner in a foreign land, seeing the news that they want to give me the death penalty for just living on a floating house had me quite scared," Elwartowski said. "We are still quite scared for our lives. We seriously did not think we were doing anything wrong and thought this would be a huge benefit for Thailand in so many ways."

Asked his next step, he was more optimistic.

"I believe my lawyer can come to an amicable agreement with the Thai government," he said.

Associated Press journalist Tassanee Vejpongsa contributed to this report.

Read this article:

Thailand says US man's seasteading home violates sovereignty ...

Seasteading bitcoin couple charged with violating Thai …

Posted on April 25, 2019 by Danzig

Posted April 21, 2019 14:16:17

The Thai navy has boarded the floating cabin of a fugitive couple who are prominent members of the "seasteading" movement and may face the death sentence for setting up their offshore home.

Thai authorities have revoked the visa of bitcoin trader Chad Elwartowski and charged him and his partner, Supranee Thepdet, with violating Thai sovereignty by floating the cabin 14 nautical miles off the west coast of the Thai island of Phuket.

The cabin had been promoted as the world's first seastead by the group Ocean Builders, part of a movement to build floating communities beyond the bounds of nations as a way to explore alternative societies and governments.

"I was free for a moment. Probably the freest person in the world," Mr Elwartowski posted on Facebook on April 13, days before the Thai navy raided his vessel.

The 46-year-old and Ms Supranee, whose Facebook page describes her as a "Bitcoin expert, trader, chef, seastead pioneer", were not on board when the navy boarded, having apparently fled after a surveillance plane flew overhead the previous day.

The US embassy in Bangkok said Mr Elwartowski had engaged a lawyer and was being provided with appropriate assistance.

The Royal Thai Navy had planned on Saturday to seize the structure and tow it back to shore for use as evidence.

In a video posted last month detailing the construction of the floating home, Mr Elwartowski said 20 more similar homes would be up for sale to form a community.

Mr Elwartowski and Ocean Builders said the vessel was in international waters and beyond Thailand's jurisdiction, but Thai authorities said the structure was in its exclusive economic zone and therefore a violation of its sovereignty.

A Thai navy task force inspected the floating home on Saturday as it prepared to tow the structure back to Phuket.

"We will invite technical units and officials who have inspected the object to consult on the methods of towing to minimise damage," Captain Puchong Rodnikorn, chief of staff of the Operations Squadron of the Third Naval Area Command, said.

"Once the sea house reaches the shore, the owner of this house can come to inspect it, as well as come forward to the Thai authorities in order to prove themselves in the legal process."

The navy said it had evidence the floating home was built in a private boatyard in Phuket and the couple wanted to establish a "permanent settlement at sea beyond the sovereignty of nations by using a legal loophole".

It said the action "reveals the intention of disobeying the laws of Thailand and could lead to a creation of a new state within Thailand's territorial waters", adding this would undermine Thailand's national security as well as the economic and social interests of maritime nations.

Mr Elwartowski referred all questions to the Seasteading Institute and pointed to online statements from the Ocean Builders website in response to questions over the charges.

Mr Elwartowski and Ms Supranee are members of Ocean Builders, which has denied they were planning to set up an independent state or "micronation".

The group said the pair did not build, invest in or design the floating home themselves, but were "volunteers excited about the prospect of living free".

According to Ocean Builders, the concept of seasteading has been discussed for years, but the cabin Mr Elwartowski and Ms Supranee lived on was the first attempt at living in what it described as international waters.

Other groups, such as the Seasteading Institute, which was originally backed by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, have sought to build floating cities with the cooperation of host nations.

Reuters

Topics:law-crime-and-justice,community-and-society,currency,thailand

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Seasteading bitcoin couple charged with violating Thai ...

Bitcoin Couple’s Seastead Dreams Sunk by Thai Navy

Posted on April 25, 2019 by Danzig

By CCN: The Thai Navy has dismantled the floating sea cabin of U.S. bitcoin investor and seasteading advocate Chad Elwartowski. His Thai girlfriend Supranee Thepdet was living with him in the seastead. The Thai Navy boarded the boat over the weekend and returned its pieces to shore in three boats. The Thai government plans to use the dismantled floating home as evidence in a case against Elwartowsi and Thepdet.

The two are on the run and have engaged the U.S. embassy. The couple says that the Royal Thai Government is pressing to have them tried and killed for violating the Southeast Asian countrys national sovereignty. Its a crime that carries the death penalty in Thailand. Luckily, when the authorities moved to seize the vessel, the two had fled; Elwartowski had spotted a surveillance plane flying overhead the day before.

Although the government of Thailand maintains the seasteaders violated its national sovereignty, the couple most certainly did not. They did not engage in sedition against the government. They did not attempt to overthrow it, nor did they encourage anyone to break its laws. They simply chose to peacefully withdraw from its territory.

In the style of historys millions of homesteaders who left their countries and built something for themselves in unexplored and unsettled lands, this couple is a pair of explorers and pioneers. They are obviously not criminals.

In a statement released Monday, Patri Friedman,the chairman of the Seasteading Institute, urged compassion for the pair. Friedman insists their actions were no threat to Thai sovereignty.

The Thai governments response to the seasteading couple has sent shock waves throughout the international community and media. These events have likely spurred the most mainstream media coverage that the burgeoning seasteading movement has ever received. It is unfortunate that this publicity has come at so great and unfair a personal cost to two of the movements pioneers.

Seasteaders seek to settle humanitys next frontier this planets vast and abundant oceans.

The seasteading movement received a huge boost in 2008 when billionaire libertarian and tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel invested nearly $2 million in the Seasteading Institute. The rise of seasteading certainly introduces questions about national and individual sovereignty, but these challenges should be met with reason and understanding by the worlds sovereign states, not naked aggression.

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Bitcoin Couple's Seastead Dreams Sunk by Thai Navy

Michigan man faces death penalty in Thailand for building …

Posted on April 25, 2019 by Danzig

A Michigan man is on the run and hiding from Thailand police as he and his girlfriend are wanted by the Thai government for violating that countrys sovereignty by building a floating home off the nations coast.

According to the Associated Press, Chad Elwartowski and his girlfriend, Supranee Thepdet, - also known as Nadia Summergirl - have been charged by the Thailand Navy after they had been living on a small floating house anchored outside Thailands territorial waters. The seasteading home was approximately 12 nautical miles from shore.

Seasteading is a movement popular among those who wish to live free from the laws of countries by living in international waters. Elwartowski was living in a home built by a company known as Ocean Builders, which also picked the location.

I was volunteering for the project, promoting it with the desire to be able to be the first seasteader and continue promoting it while living on the platform, Elwartowski told the AP.

The company hoped to use the first house as proof that it worked and to sell more units based on that success.

However, Thailand officials say Elwartowskis home threatened national security.

Rear Adm. Wintharat Kotchaseni told Thai media last week the floating house also posed a safety threat to navigation if it broke loose because the area is considered a shipping lane, the AP reports.

Elwartowski has documented part of the issue on his Facebook page, saying he did nothing wrong and asking for help. However, those pages have been removed. Elwartowski spoke with the AP last week about the issue.

He went on to say he hopes his lawyer can hash out an agreement with the Thai government.

Elwartwoski graduated from Tecumseh High School in Tecumseh, MI and attended Michigan State University. In an interview with the Detroit Free Press, one of Elwartowksis sisters said her brother made a significant amount of money by being an early investor in Bitcoin.

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Michigan man faces death penalty in Thailand for building ...

Classic Maya collapse – Wikipedia

Posted on April 25, 2019 by Danzig

decline of classic Maya civilization

In archaeology, the classic Maya collapse is the decline of the Classic Maya civilization and the abandonment of Maya cities in the southern Maya lowlands of Mesoamerica between the 8th and 9thcenturies, at the end of the Classic Maya Period. The Preclassic Maya experienced a similar collapse in the 2nd century.[citation needed]

The Classic Period of Mesoamerican chronology is generally defined as the period from 250 to 900 CE, the last century of which is referred to as the Terminal Classic.[1] The Classic Maya collapse is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in archaeology. Urban centers of the southern lowlands, among them Palenque, Copn, Tikal, and Calakmul, went into decline during the 8th and 9thcenturies and were abandoned shortly thereafter. Archaeologically, this decline is indicated by the cessation of monumental inscriptions[2] and the reduction of large-scale architectural construction at the primary urban centers of the Classic Period.[citation needed]

Although termed a collapse, it did not mark the end of the Maya civilization but rather a shift away from the Southern Lowlands as a power center; the Northern Yucatn in particular prospered afterwards, although with very different artistic and architectural styles, and with much less use of monumental hieroglyphic writing. In the Post-Classic Period following the collapse, the state of Chichn Itz built an empire that briefly united much of the Maya region,[2] and centers such as Mayapn and Uxmal flourished, as did the Highland states of the Kiche and Kaqchikel Maya. Independent Maya civilization continued until 1697 when the Spanish conquered Nojpetn, the last independent city-state. Millions of Maya people still inhabit the Yucatn peninsula today.[3]

Because parts of Maya civilization unambiguously continued, a number of scholars strongly dislike the term collapse.[4] Regarding the proposed collapse, E. W. Andrews IV went as far as to say, "in my belief no such thing happened."[5]

The Maya often recorded dates on monuments they built. Few dated monuments were being built circa 500 around ten per year in 514, for example. The number steadily increased to twenty per year by 672 and forty by around 750. After this, the number of dated monuments begins to falter relatively quickly, collapsing back to ten by 800 and to zero by 900. Likewise, recorded lists of kings complement this analysis. Altar Q at Copn shows a reign of kings from 426 to 763. One last king not recorded on Altar Q was Ukit Took, "Patron of Flint", who was probably a usurper. The dynasty is believed to have collapsed entirely shortly thereafter. In Quirigua, twenty miles north of Copn, the last king Jade Sky began his rule between 895 and 900, and throughout the Maya area all kingdoms similarly fell around that time.[6]

A third piece of evidence of the progression of Maya decline, gathered by Ann Corinne Freter, Nancy Gonlin, and David Webster, uses a technique called obsidian hydration. The technique allowed them to map the spread and growth of settlements in the Copn Valley and estimate their populations. Between 400 and 450, the population was estimated at a peak of twenty-eight thousand, between 750 and 800 larger than London at the time. Population then began to steadily decline. By 900 the population had fallen to fifteen thousand, and by 1200 the population was again less than 1000.[citation needed]

Over 80 different theories or variations of theories attempting to explain the Classic Maya collapse have been identified.[7] From climate change to deforestation to lack of action by Maya kings, there is no universally accepted collapse theory, although drought is gaining momentum as the leading explanation.[8]

The archaeological evidence of the Toltec intrusion into Seibal, Peten, suggests to some the theory of foreign invasion. The latest hypothesis states that the southern lowlands were invaded by a non-Maya group whose homelands were probably in the gulf coast lowlands. This invasion began in the 9thcentury and set off, within 100years, a group of events that destroyed the Classic Maya. It is believed that this invasion was somehow influenced by the Toltec people of central Mexico. However, most Mayanists do not believe that foreign invasion was the main cause of the Classic Maya collapse; they postulate that no military defeat can explain or be the cause of the protracted and complex Classic collapse process. Teotihuacan influence across the Maya region may have involved some form of military invasion; however, it is generally noted that significant Teotihuacan-Maya interactions date from at least the Early Classic period, well before the episodes of Late Classic collapse.[9]

The foreign invasion theory does not answer the question of where the inhabitants went. David Webster believed that the population should have increased because of the lack of elite power. Further, it is not understood why the governmental institutions were not remade following the revolts, which happened under similar circumstances in places like China. A study by anthropologist Elliot M. Abrams came to the conclusion that buildings, specifically in Copan, did not require an extensive amount of time and workers to construct.[10] However, this theory was developed during a period when the archaeological evidence showed that there were fewer Maya people than there are now known to have been.[11] Revolutions, peasant revolts, and social turmoil change circumstances, and are often followed by foreign wars, but they run their course. There are no documented revolutions that caused wholesale abandonment of entire regions.[citation needed]

It has been hypothesized that the decline of the Maya is related to the collapse of their intricate trade systems, especially those connected to the central Mexican city of Teotihuacn. Preceding improved knowledge of the chronology of Mesoamerica, Teotihuacan was believed to have fallen during 700750, forcing the "restructuring of economic relations throughout highland Mesoamerica and the Gulf Coast".[12] This remaking of relationships between civilizations would have then given the collapse of the Classic Maya a slightly later date. However, after knowing more about the events and the periods when they occurred, it is believed that the strongest Teotihuacan influence was during the 4th and 5thcenturies. In addition, the civilization of Teotihuacan started to lose its power, and maybe abandoned the city, during 600650. This differs greatly from the previous belief that Teotihuacano power decreased during 700750.[13] But since the new decline date of 600650 has been accepted, the Maya civilizations are now thought to have lived on and prospered "for another century and more"[14] than what was previously believed. Rather than the decline of Teotihuacan directly preceding the collapse of the Maya, their decline is now seen as contributing "to the 6th-century 'hiatus'".[14]

The disease theory is also a contender as a factor in the Classic Maya collapse. Widespread disease could explain some rapid depopulation, both directly through the spread of infection itself and indirectly as an inhibition to recovery over the long run. According to Dunn (1968) and Shimkin (1973), infectious diseases spread by parasites are common in tropical rainforest regions, such as the Maya lowlands. Shimkin specifically suggests that the Maya may have encountered endemic infections related to American trypanosomiasis, Ascaris, and some enteropathogens that cause acute diarrheal illness. Furthermore, some experts believe that, through development of their civilization (that is, development of agriculture and settlements), the Maya could have created a "disturbed environment", in which parasitic and pathogen-carrying insects often thrive.[15] Among the pathogens listed above, it is thought that those that cause the acute diarrheal illnesses would have been the most devastating to the Maya population, because such illness would have struck a victim at an early age, thereby hampering nutritional health and the natural growth and development of a child. This would have made them more susceptible to other diseases later in life, and would have been exacerbated by an increasing dependence on carbohydrate-rich crops.[16] Such ideas as this could explain the role of disease as at least a possible partial reason for the Classic Maya Collapse.[17]

The drought theory holds that rapid climate change in the form of severe drought (a megadrought) brought about the Classic Maya collapse. Paleoclimatologists have discovered abundant evidence that prolonged droughts hit the Yucatn Peninsula and Petn Basin areas during the Terminal Classic. Large droughts likely caused a decline in agricultural fertility due to regular seasonal drought drying up surface waters,[18] as well as causing thin tropical soils to erode when deprived of vegetation and forest cover.[19]

Climatic factors were first implicated in the collapse as early as 1931 by Mayanists Thomas Gann and J. E. S. Thompson.[20] In 1995, Hodell, Curtis and Brenner published a paleoclimate record from Lake Chichancanab on the Yucatn Peninsula that showed an intense, protracted drought occurred in the 9th century AD and coincided with the Classic Maya collapse.[21] In The Great Maya Droughts, Richardson Gill gathered and analyzed an array of climatic, historical, hydrologic, tree ring, volcanic, geologic, and archeological research, and suggested that a prolonged series of droughts likely caused the Classic Maya collapse.[22] The drought theory provides a comprehensive explanation, because non-environmental and cultural factors (excessive warfare, foreign invasion, peasant revolt, less trade, etc.) can all be explained by the effects of prolonged drought on Classic Maya civilization.[23]

According to Gill in The Great Maya Droughts:

[Studies of] Yucatecan lake sediment cores ... provide unambiguous evidence for a severe 200-year drought from AD800 to 1000 ... the most severe in the last 7,000years ... precisely at the time of the Maya Collapse.[24]

The role of drought in the collapse of Classic Maya civilisation has remained controversial, however, largely because the majority of paleoclimate records only provide qualitative data, for example whether conditions were simply "wetter" or "drier". The lack of quantitative data makes it difficult to predict how climatic changes would have affected human populations and the environment in which they lived. In 2012, a study attempted to quantify the drought using four detailed paleoclimate records of the drought event.[25] Semi-quantitative rainfall estimates were achieved by correlating oxygen isotopes measurements in carbonate cave formations (speleothems) with modern seasonal rainfall amounts recorded in the nearby city of Mrida, northern Yucatn, which were then extrapolated back to the time of the Terminal Classic Period. The authors suggest that modest rainfall reductions, amounting to only 25 to 40 percent of annual rainfall, may have been the tipping point to the Maya collapse.[26][27] Although this analysis referred to the estimated decrease in rainfall as "modest", subsequent studies suggest that the same data could represent a 20 to 65 percent decrease in rainfall.[28]

A study published in the journal Science in 2018 provides the most robust estimate of the magnitude of rainfall reduction to date.[29] Evans and co-authors developed a method to measure the different isotopes of water trapped in the hydrate mineral, gypsum, a mineral that forms in lakes of the Yucatn Peninsula during times of drought when the water level is lowered. When gypsum forms, water molecules are incorporated directly into its crystalline structure, and this water records the different isotopes that were present in the ancient lake water at the time of its formation.[30] The "fossil water" inside the crystals allowed Evans and his co-authors to analyze the properties of the lake water during each drought period.[31][32] Based on these measurements, the researchers found that annual precipitation decreased between 41 and 54 percent during the period of the Maya civilisation's collapse, with periods of up to 70 percent rainfall reduction during peak drought conditions, and that relative humidity declined by 2 to 7 percent compared to today. This quantitative climate data can be used to better predict how these drought conditions may have affected agriculture, including yields of the Maya's staple crops, such as maize.[30]

Critics of the drought theory question the spatial patters of drought and its relation to the timing of the degradation of Maya city-states. Archaeological research demonstrates that while many regions of the Maya Lowlands were indeed abandoned during the eighth to eleventh centuries CE, others regions only experienced minor disruption, or even flourished .[33][28] Although the spatial patterns of societal collapse are complex, population centers continued in many coastal regions and in the northern Yucatn Peninsula, including as Chichen Itza, Uxmal, and Coba, whereas most states in the central regions collapsed and landscapes were depopulated. The reasons for this spatial heterogeneity in societal disintegration are largely unknown, but researches have hypothesised that central regions may have been more affected because of a very deep water table (which would have exacerbated the effects of drought), or that the longevity of the northern regions was likely facilitated by access to the coast, and thus trade routes.[28]

Other critics of the megadrought theory, including David Webster, note that much of the evidence of drought comes from the northern Yucatn and not the southern part of the peninsula, where Classic Maya civilization flourished. Webster states that if water sources were to have dried up, then several city-states would have moved to other water sources. That Gill suggests that all water in the region would have dried up and destroyed Maya civilization is a stretch, according to Webster,[34] although Webster does not have a precise competing theory explaining the Classic Maya Collapse. Since publication, further records from the more southerly states have strengthened the argument of a synchronous drought occurring across the Yucatn Peninsula.[28]

Climatic changes are, with increasing frequency, found to be major drivers in the rise and fall of civilizations all over the world.[35] Professors Harvey Weiss of Yale University and Raymond S. Bradley of the University of Massachusetts have written, "Many lines of evidence now point to climate forcing as the primary agent in repeated social collapse."[36] In a separate publication, Weiss illustrates an emerging understanding of scientists:

Within the past five years new tools and new data for archaeologists, climatologists, and historians have brought us to the edge of a new era in the study of global and hemispheric climate change and its cultural impacts. The climate of the Holocene, previously assumed static, now displays a surprising dynamism, which has affected the agricultural bases of pre-industrial societies. The list of Holocene climate alterations and their socio-economic effects has rapidly become too complex for brief summary.[37]

A number of causal mechanisms for droughts in the Maya area have been proposed, but there is no consensus among researchers regarding a single causal mechanism. Instead, it is likely that multiple mechanisms were involved,[28] including solar variability,[38] shifts in the position of the Intertropical Convergence Zone,[39] changes in tropical cyclone frequency[25] and deforestation.

The Maya are often perceived as having lived in a rainforest, but technically, they lived in a seasonal desert without access to stable sources of drinking water.[40] The exceptional accomplishments of the Maya are even more remarkable because of their engineered response to the fundamental environmental difficulty of relying upon rainwater rather than permanent sources of water. "The Maya succeeded in creating a civilization in a seasonal desert by creating a system of water storage and management which was totally dependent on consistent rainfall."[41] The constant need for water kept the Maya on the edge of survival. "Given this precarious balance of wet and dry conditions, even a slight shift in the distribution of annual precipitation can have serious consequences."[18] Water and civilization were vitally connected in ancient Mesoamerica. Archaeologist and specialist in pre-industrial land and water usage practices Vernon Scarborough believes water management and access were critical to the development of Maya civilization.[42]

Some ecological theories of Maya decline focus on the worsening agricultural and resource conditions in the late Classic period. It was originally thought that the majority of Maya agriculture was dependent on a simple slash-and-burn system. Based on this method, the hypothesis of soil exhaustion was advanced by Orator F. Cook in 1921. Similar soil exhaustion assumptions are associated with erosion, intensive agricultural, and savanna grass competition.

More recent investigations have shown a complicated variety of intensive agricultural techniques utilized by the Maya, explaining the high population of the Classic Maya polities. Modern archaeologists now comprehend the sophisticated intensive and productive agricultural techniques of the ancient Maya, and several of the Maya agricultural methods have not yet been reproduced. Intensive agricultural methods were developed and utilized by all the Mesoamerican cultures to boost their food production and give them a competitive advantage over less skillful peoples.[43] These intensive agricultural methods included canals, terracing, raised fields, ridged fields, chinampas, the use of human feces as fertilizer, seasonal swamps or bajos, using muck from the bajos to create fertile fields, dikes, dams, irrigation, water reservoirs, several types of water storage systems, hydraulic systems, swamp reclamation, swidden systems, and other agricultural techniques that have not yet been fully understood.[44] Systemic ecological collapse is said to be evidenced by deforestation, siltation, and the decline of biological diversity.

In addition to mountainous terrain, Mesoamericans successfully exploited the very problematic tropical rainforest for 1,500years.[45] The agricultural techniques utilized by the Maya were entirely dependent upon ample supplies of water, lending credit to the drought theory of collapse. The Maya thrived in territory that would be uninhabitable to most peoples. Their success over two millennia in this environment was "amazing."[46]

Anthropologist Joseph Tainter wrote extensively about the collapse of the Southern Lowland Maya in his 1988 study The Collapse of Complex Societies. His theory about Maya collapse encompasses some of the above explanations, but focuses specifically on the development of and the declining marginal returns from the increasing social complexity of the competing Maya city-states.[47] Psychologist Julian Jaynes suggested that the collapse was due to a failure in the social control systems of religion and political authority, due to increasing socioeconomic complexity that overwhelmed the power of traditional rituals and the king's authority to compel obedience.[48]

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Classic Maya collapse - Wikipedia

Sick Bees Part 18F8: Colony Collapse Revisited …

Posted on April 25, 2019 by Danzig

Beekeeping Economics

The Truth Is The First CasualtyBack To RealityBee-pocalypseBeekeeping EconomicsChasing The BloomBiologically Productive LandThe DakotasCotton And Citrus In The SouthPutting Plant Protection Above PollinatorsNextUpdateAcknowledgementsReferences

Mark Twain, a keen observer of human nature, noted long ago that there is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such trifling investment of facts. And thus it is yet today with the release of any scientific facts relating to colony collapse, pesticides, or GMOs.

The publication of the most trivial research result has a similar effect as that of kicking a hivethere is a roar of response. The media, eager to sell sensationalism, and bloggers ready to spin the most trifling findings to fit their biases or agenda, clamor for the fearful public to do something to stop the horrendous decline of the honey bee before it causes the collapse of our entire food supply.

People work backwards from their values, filtering the facts according to their pre-existing beliefs [1]. This is certainly the case for the well-publicized elevated colony losses that weve been experiencing of late. They have all been wrapped under the moniker of CCD (for which the media have proclaimed a dozen times to have found the cause). And everyone wants to blame CCD on some egregious thing that we humans are doing.

There is nothing like a good image or compelling story to convince others to your point of view. Some of these images, like the innocent child eating a toxic ear of GMO corn on the cob, really stick in peoples minds, no matter the actual truth of the matter. And there is nothing like the resonance of a good story, which like childhood fables, become part of the popular mythology.

One of the most beguiling and persuasive stories is that of the unfortunate pear growers in Chinas Sichuan province, who are nowadays forced to pollinate their trees by hand due to all the bees being killed off by pesticidesan alarming example of how badly we can screw things up. Alas, this story also appears to be more fable than fact. Mark Grossman [2] explains that although pesticides are clearly an issue to bees in Sichuan, in reality, the hand pollination, as well as the demise of Sichuans bees, was due to economic reasons (I wont spoil his story). He explains:

Many articles about declining bee populations have a theme and tone that reminds me of those old sci-fi movies from the 1950s. Somehow, human technological tampering with nature is punished in some awful (and bizarre) way. You can almost read this theme between the lines of more than a few articles an echoed suggestion that some technological tinkering has angered Mother Nature And we are being punished by the disappearance of our bees. Then, domino-like, all of modern civilization will fall to ruinsThe inaccurate impression of the Sichuan Province as the scene of a bee extinction fits almost too neatly into an increasingly pervasive, though less than articulate, mythology the mythology of the bee apocalypse.

The fact is that colonies die for many reasons, exposure to toxins being one of them. The question is to what degree pesticides contribute to our current rate of winter losses. Lets start by putting pesticide exposure into perspective, following the truism that all beekeeping is local. Any effect of pesticides upon bee health would be expected to be correlated with the degree of actual exposure.

Bees placed in agricultural settings are typically exposed to dozens of pesticides, often at high levels. I was curious as to the degree of exposure for U.S. bees, compared to that of bees in other countries. Unfortunately, theres not much actual pesticide residue data from other than a few countries. But the FAO does keep data on the total amount of pesticides applied per hectare of cropland throughout the world, which Ive plotted out below (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. Pesticide use on croplands (arable land and permanent crops). Note that pesticide use in the U.S. is below the world norm. One would certainly expect pesticides to be more of a problem to pollinators in the countries to the left. I left out the highest figure, for Costa Rica, which due to its lucrative melon, tomato, potato, pineapple, and sugar plantations, applied 51 kg/ha in 2010over 20 times the rate used in the U.S.! Source of raw data [3].

Looking at the above chart, it is not surprising that pesticides are likely far more of a problem to bees (and beekeepers) in a number of other countries, including China, which applies six times as much pesticide per unit of farmland than does the U.S.

A popular myth is that of the imminent extinction of the honey bee (as compared to the more worrisome decline of native pollinators worldwide). As a managed form of livestock, the numbers of bee hives at any time is driven by economicsif beekeeping is profitable, hive numbers go up; if unprofitable, numbers go down. So how about the precipitous drop in hive numbers that weve all seen plotted out so graphically (Fig. 2)?

Figure 2. Weve all seen chilling graphs such as this, which suggest that honey bees will reach extinction before long. The actual data is accurate; it is the presentation that is distorted.

But as my buddy Pete Borst points out, its all about cherry-picking your dates. So I created a more complete graph (Fig. 3), using data from various sources [4] for a view that better reflects reality.

Figure 3. Estimated numbers of managed bee hives in the U.S. over the long terma picture that is a bit less grim. The peak was reached near the end of WWII, during which farmers were encouraged by the government to keep bees, and honey prices had skyrocketed due to the shortage of sugar [5]. Note that the decline of the bees began long before most of the alleged causes of CCD, driven largely by the lack of economic profitability due to low honey prices [6].

When we look at colony numbers over the long term, the imminent extinction of the honey bee doesnt seem to be as much of a concern, and the reasons for the ups and downs appear to be more related to economics than to other causes. The uptick at the end is likely due to todays wonderfully high prices for honey and almond pollination services.

Update Dec 2013: see end of article for discussion on hive numbers in the U.S.

Simply put, when its profitable to keep bees, the number of managed colonies goes up; when it is unprofitable, numbers go down. This is because the vast majority of colonies are kept by professional beekeepers in business to make a profit.

So any discussion of honey bee decline must take into account the profitability of commercial beekeeping. Of late, many of those beekeepers are hurting, their profit margins evaporating due to the need to keep replacing dinks and deadouts, and the lack of good summer forage. This makes any contribution to the problem by pesticides ever the more important. But it is devilishly difficult to tease out exactly which pesticides (or adjuvants) are actually causing the most problems (other than in the case of acute bee kills), and pesticide exposure is different from crop to crop, region to region, and country to country.

And although some campaigners think that banning one thing or another will solve all our problems, the reality is that the interaction between bee biology and agriculture is far more complex. We are still coming to terms with the environmental consequences of the Green Revolution, which revolutionized food production with modern day technology, thus allowing a great increase in the human population, and leading to todays chemically-dependent intensive farming. Such practices certainly produce more food, but at a severe cost to the environmentnotably the loss of pollinator-friendly habitat.

What confuses the issue is that the technologies of reduced-tillage herbicide-intense farming of vast monocultures of high-yielding cultivars, the massive increase in the acreage of soybeans, the move away from pasture and legume rotation, the adoption of genetically-engineered cultivars, the treatment of seeds with insecticides, and the introduction of new classes of insecticides came concurrently with the worldwide shift in colony health due to the varroa/virus complex and Nosema ceranae. The problem is to tease out which factors are actually most contributing to the increased colony morbidity and mortality that we observe today [7].

The answers dont come easy. Many beekeepers report thriving apiaries surrounded by corn and soy. Others suffer from major losses despite keeping their hives in wildlands far from agriculture. But it is common knowledge among commercial beekeepers that colonies go downhill after being placed in some agricultural areas.

This problem, as documented by recent research by Matthew Smart [8], it that the combination of poor nutrition and pesticide exposure associated with some croplands leads to poorer colony performance. A recent and excellent review by Sinnathamby [9], which analyzed data on crop yield, pollinator populations, and economic value of pollinators for the time period of 1945 through 2010, concluded that:

Results show a significant decline in the number of managed pollinators (specifically honey bees) in most regions of the US; on average, 42,000 colonies of managed pollinators were lost each year from 1945 through 2010. Crop yields increased significantly over the same period [by their calcs, 72% of total U.S. agricultural income for 2010 came from only four cropscorn, soybeans, alfalfa hay, and wheat, none of which are directly dependent upon pollinators]. Agricultural intensification and increased use of inorganic fertilizer and pesticides, which has increasingly replaced crop rotation for both nutrient and disease management and has led to increasing presence of monoculture-type cropping systems, were likely the primary pressures that led to pollinator decline. Recommendations are to enhance both managed and native pollinator management options at all scales, including improving policy decisions, increasing diversity of cropping systems, and enhancing management of natural habitat.

So lets look at this interaction between intensive agriculture and intensive commercial beekeeping.

The large migratory beekeepers typically chase paid pollinations and/or certain honeyflows, as well as look for safe places to park their hives when they arent generating income. Although some have suggested that the physical transportation of colonies is the problem, I dont buy itIve chased the bloom for years, and my bees clearly benefit from it. I suspect that the answer is that that bloom has changed in recent yearsless of it, less nutritious, more crowded with other beekeepers, and with more pesticides.

Many beekeepers see their colonies fall apart after going to certain croplands. It appears that the combination of poor nutrition coupled with the cocktail of pesticides is simply too much for the bees to handle. Any number of long-time migratory beekeepers have told me that you cant move bees from one pesticide exposure to the next and expect them to thrive in the long term. This is a sad indictment of our agricultural systemsomething clearly is amiss in a system that kills off its pollinatorsbut thats the way it is. The most successful beekeepers look for safe pasture upon which they can place their hives to recover from previous pesticide exposures. In recent years, those safe pastures are disappearing.

The large migratory beekeepers tend to seek open, biologically productive lands upon which to place their hives, since thats where their bees will generally find the best forage (Fig. 4).

Figure 4. Biologically productive lands of the U.S., as measured by the soil organic matter content [10]. The darker the color, the more productive the land.

This biologically productive land has historically been used for various forms of agriculture, including bee-friendly pastureland, but that is changingbetween 2011 and 2012, more than 398,000 acres of grasslands, forests and other lands were plowed, cleared or otherwise converted to cropland [11]. This means that that many acres will now be treated with additional pesticides. This correlation is easy to see if we look at another mapthat of the use of the insecticide most commonly detected in beebread: chlorpyrifos [12, 13](Fig. 5):

Figure 5. Note that pesticide exposure is part of the deal in those areas favored by commercial beekeepers, as demonstrated by the applications of the insecticide chlorpyrifosthe most commonly detected insecticide residue found in beebread. Chlorpyrifos is highly toxic to both adult bees and larvae, and has a 10-14 day residual half life on foliage. The column chart shows that the use of chlorpyrifos is slowly being phased out on corn and cotton, but increasing in soybeans.

So lets compare the intensity of pesticide application to the actual distribution of managed hives on the continent (Fig. 6).

Figure 6. The distribution of honey-producing hives during the summer. According to the NASS [14], over 60% of honey-producing hives spend the summer in only six of the fifty United States (by order): North Dakota, California, South Dakota, Florida, Montana, and Minnesota (with nearly a third in the Dakotas alone).

It appears from the above maps that commercial beekeepers (other than those being paid to pollinate crops) seek out summer pasture on biologically-productive lands away from the most intense pesticide exposure. The problem is that such wildlands are rapidly disappearing to the plow.

Commercial beekeepers are no dummies, and look for any fertile lands that are not completely planted to corn and soy or otherwise hit with pesticides. One of the last good places for good summer pasture was the Dakotasespecially North Dakota. The 1985 Farm Bill included the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), established to pay private landowners (N.D. is 95% privately owned) to remove land from agricultural production for periods of 10-15 years. The program was initially conceived to increase commodity prices, but was continued largely and for its positive environmental benefits to soil and water quality, the conservation of wildlife habitat, and its offsetting of atmospheric carbon. No program in history has done more for landscape-level conservation of soil, water and wildlife habitat on farmland, while offering producers a significant and stable source of income. The program expired in September of this year; reauthorization or another possible extension is being debated by Congress as part of the larger Farm Bill reauthorization debate.

The North Dakota CRP lands created a beekeepers dream, so the big boys flocked there (Fig. 7). There was less pesticide risk, and abundant alfalfa and sweet clover which could produce large crops of high-value white honey [15].

Figure 7. Commercial beekeepers flocked to North Dakota after the adoption of the CRP program. In recent years, nearly a third of all honey-producing hives in the U.S. reside in the Dakotas during summer. Note how colony numbers have climbed since almond pollination and honey prices tripled in the early 2000s [16] (no USDA data was collected for the missing years).

Practical application: The only thing thats kept many commercial operations afloat in recent years is the income from almond pollination. The $4 billion almond industry is completely dependent upon beekeepers. That also means that the almond industry is indirectly supported by government payments to CRP landowners in the Dakotas, since the Dakota CRP lands provide free feed for the colonies that will be going to almonds the next year!

The value of the Midwestern CRP program to the almond industry should be taken into account. Many California beekeepers move their bees to Montana and Dakotas, since its more profitable for them to do so (provided they make a honey crop and dont get hit too hard with pesticides) than to leave them at home and feed them through our long dry. The forage provided by the CRP lands feeds a large proportion of the bees that later pollinate almondsa poor crop in the Dakotas often foreshadows a short supply of bees for the almonds.

But all is not well in Bee Paradise. CRP lands are being rapidly withdrawn from the program due high commodity prices that generate better returns than the CRP subsidies, and to the Farm Bill crop insurance that guarantees that even marginal land planted to corn will put money into the landowners pocket. The current Beekeepers Lament is that the disappearing CRP lands (Fig. 8) are leaving them no place to go for safe summer pasture.

Figure 8. Enrollment in the Conservation Reserve Program for the Prairie Potholes Region. The declining enrollment is hurting beekeepers and wildliferead K. McDonalds blog at [17]. Graph courtesy Eric Lindstrom of Ducks Unlimited [18]. Data source Farm Service Agency [19].

Another problem in the Dakotas is the pesticide use in sunflowers. There are over a million acres of sunflowers planted in the Dakotas, and since the flowers are often sprayed during bloom with chlorpyrifos, pyrethroids, and other nasties, colonies suffer. The North Dakota Department of Agriculture is aware of the problems that beekeepers are having in the State. Unfortunately, they have made it clear that protecting pollinators comes second to protecting landowners crops.

Beekeepers in more southerly areas often move bees to cotton or citrus for honey production. Neither crop is dependent upon pollination, so there is less incentive for the growers to protect bees. Cotton has traditionally been one of the most insecticide-intense crops, and since it produces extrafloral nectar, it can be dangerous to bees even when not actually in flower. Things improved with the eradication of the boll weevil and the adoption of Bt GMO cotton and insecticide-treated seed, the combination of which greatly reduced insecticide use. But this has now allowed lygus bugs (tarnished plant bugs), which were previously controlled as a collateral result of the spraying of broad-spectrum insecticides, to proliferate:

Historically during the flowering and boll maturation periods, tarnished plant bugs were inadvertently controlled by organochlorine, organophosphate, carbamate and pyrethroid insecticides targeting boll weevil and heliothines. The success of the boll weevil eradication programs and wide-scale adoption of Bt cotton eliminated many of those applications. In addition, the use of more selective insecticides that target Lepidopteran pests (i.e., spinosad, indoxacarb and emamectin benzoate) increased survival of tarnished plant bugs. Finally, tarnished plant bug resistance to a variety of insecticides (organophosphates, carbamates, pyrethroids) in the mid-south US has contributed to the elevated status of this insect pest [20] an informative read].

This is a good example of the complexity of pest control. When the cotton growers adopted eco-friendly practices to reduce insecticide applications, tarnished plant bugs were able move into cotton from nearby alfalfa, almonds, tomatoes, and safflower. A Mississippi beekeeper tells me that cotton may now be sprayed up to 14 times a season to control them and other pests. More sustainable IPM of lygus uses attractive strips of alfalfa to draw them away from cotton and to promote the growth of beneficial predators [21], and new lygus-specific GM cultivars are being developed [22].

Citrus is another highly attractive crop to bees and beekeepers. In recent years, excessive use of systemic Temik (aldicarb) made the nectar toxic to bees in some areas of Florida (its use is now disallowed). In order to protect bees, in some California citrus counties there are restrictions on the spraying of certain insecticides during the bloom period [23]. Currently, Florida citrus growers are getting hammered by citrus greening, transmitted by the Asian Citrus Psyllid, which is now also showing up in California. The economic impact to Florida has been over 6 billion dollars, and growers are desperately trying to save their orchards by applying systemic neonicotinoids to nonbearing trees, making areas of Florida officially off limit to bees. In bearing orchards, wide-spectrum insecticides are recommended, but not while bees are present. Unfortunately, the State does not appear to be willing to levy meaningful fines against those who ignore application regulations and manage to wipe out some poor beekeepers operation [24].

The citrus industry is now in a quandarythe only salvation on the horizon appears to be the adoption of orange trees genetically modified to specifically resist citrus greening disease. The question is whether the public will accept GM orange juice. An informative and sober discussion of this issue can be found at [25].

Lets face itno farmer is willingly going to allow a pest explosion to consume the crop that he worked so hard to grow. And many will also apply unnecessary pesticides out of habit or as risk insurance. No one wants to kill pollinators, but when push comes to shove, pollinators often lose. If a grower is renting pollination services, he has an incentive to minimize damage to the bees that hes paying for. But how about the grower of crops that dont require bees, but are nonetheless attractive to them, such as hay alfalfa, citrus, cotton, and soybeans?

The grower could argue that the bees (and the beekeeper) are freeloaders, profiting from the production of his land without his permission. It is understandable that if he is facing a sudden pest explosion that he may care less about some out-of-sight hives than in applying an insecticide to save his crop. The hard reality is that the best that beekeepers can do is to work with the growers and applicators to minimize pesticide problems, and to push the State Lead Agency to enforce compliance with label restrictions.

So long as farmers plant monocultures of particular crops, pests will always be an issue. The sole reliance upon synthetic pesticides is like playing whack-a-mole, with new pest problems constantly popping up. The more forward-looking agronomists are seeing that in order to move toward more sustainable practices, that we will need to approach agricultural production in the agro-ecological context [26], which includes integrated pest management as well as providing habitat and protection of beneficial insects and pollinators.

The honey bee/pesticide complex.

11/17/2013 update: We were discussing the breakdown of colony numbers on Bee-L. I thought that some of my calculations might be of interest:

In the 2007 Census of Agriculture, there were only 28,000 farms reporting having bees, with a total of just under 3 million hives. The average number of hives per reporting farm was 104.

For South Dakota, the average was 1716.

For North Dakota, 2257.

California 1073.

Montana 649

Texas appears to have more recreational beekeepers at an average of 100 hives.

For the first four states above (all with average hive numbers above 600), the total number of reporting beekeepers was 1802. So Im thinking that there are likely more than 600 commercial beekeepers managing large numbers of hives.

For the six states that account for over half the hives in the U.S., the total number of hives is 1,659,000; the total reporting beekeepers was 2856, for an average of 580 hives each. If we use the equation

T = R x Mr + C x Mc,

where T = total number of hives, R = # of recreational beekeepers, C = # of commercial guys, Mr = mean number of recreational hives (10), and Mc = mean number of hives for a commercial guy (2500), we can then solve for C, since we know that C + R = 2856.

The result is 669 commercial guys running 1,672,500 hives and 2790 recreational beekeepers running 27,900 hives.

The commercial guys would account for 23% of the beekeepers in those states.

The commercial guys would be running 98.5% of the hives.

If instead we set the average number of hives per recreational beekeeper at 5, and for the commercial guys at 3000, then we get a slightly different result:

549 commercial, and 2316 recreational. Commercials would make up 19% of all beekeepers, and run99.2% of the hives.

In either case, if we extrapolate to the entire U.S. population, there would be about 1000 1300 commercial beekeepers, running 99% of the hives. Obviously, these figures underestimate the total number of hives in the U.S. (accounting for only a bit over 3 million hives). But its likely safe to assume that the additional numbers are run mainly by recreational beekeepers with only a few hives.

That adjustment, plus an adjustment for the sideline beekeepers, would bring the percentage of commercial beekeepers down to a lower percentage.

Lets look at the figures for the whole country. If there were 1000 commercials averaging 3000 hives, that would be 3 million hives. Then add 125,000 recreationals averaging 5 hives each = 635,000 hives.

Total 3,625,000 hiveslikely very close to the ballpark figure if we count all recreational hives.

If those figures hold, that would mean that less than 1% of beekeepers managing 83% of the countrys hives.

>But I simply dont see how you can insist on an average of 5 hives per.

Heck Pete, you know that I never insist on anything. I was figuring that the sideliners with a few hundred hives would be run into the commercial group, bringing down that average somewhat.

As far as the 5-hive estimate, that was simply a number to plug into the equation as a possible example. But not arbitrary. Ive met a great number of recreational beekeepers. An average of 5 live colonies does not seem too far off the mark. And based upon the repeat sales of nucs and packages to them, a lot of time their average unfortunately approaches zero.

Ive been curious about the actual breakdown for some time. Obviously, the USDA figures greatly underestimate the total number of beekeepers (or at least those who have pine boxes on their property). The incredible increase in the membership of bee clubs in the past few years suggests that the number of recreational beekeepers is quite largebut even 2000 per state would only total 100,000.

About the only firm figure that we have is the number needed for almond pollinationabout 1.6M, few of which are supplied by recreational and out-of-state sideline beekeepers. And this does not count the commercial guys who forgo almond pollination.

So perhaps we should begin by trying to estimate total hive numbers. If we assume 100,000 recreationals at 5 hives, thats 500,000. Then add an arbitrary 1/5th that many as sideliners averaging 50 hivesthats 1 million. Then add say another million commercial hives not going to almonds. And finally the 1.6M in almonds. The total would be 4.1Mperhaps not far off the mark.

The breakdown would then be 63% commercial, 24% sideliner, 13% recreational.

Again, Id love to hear from anyone who can improve on these estimates.

As always, I appreciate the invaluable assistance of my research collaborator Peter Loring Borst.

[3] I used data from the following sources. The NASS changed their accounting of hive numbers in the mid 1980s, which I adjusted for. Unfortunately, the NASS website was down during the government shutdown, during which I wrote this piece, so I couldnt double check some numbers.

Morse, RA & R Nowogrodzki (1983)Trends in American Beekeeping, 1850-1981. ABJ May 1983.

Muth, MK, et al (2003) The fable of the bees revisited: causes and consequences of the U.S. honey program. The Journal of Law and Economics. http://www.personal.kent.edu/~cupton/Senior%20Seminar/Papers/bees.pdf

Hoff, FL and JK Phillips (1989) Honey: Background for 1990 Farm Legislation. USDA Staff Report No. AGES 89-43

NASSwith data after 1986 adjusted to account for the NASS no longer counting operations with fewer than five colonies after that date.

[4] After this article was published, James Fischer posted to Bee-L:

Honey was never the issue. Beeswax still had tactical value in WWII.

During World War II, lots of beeswax was needed as a stabilizer for RDX, anearly form of plastic explosive. When it was mixed with beeswax in theWoolworth Method, it was very stable, and it could be used in mines,torpedoes, and other munitions that might have to sit for months of exposureto the elements without degrading or randomly exploding for no goodreason. A petro-chemical replacement for the beeswax was developed, but itwas tricky to make and use, while beeswax was a known-reliable ingredient.After the war, RDX plants went back to making bakelite and other plastics,so the bulk beeswax market went kaput.

I have a thin hardbound book printed during the war instructing ladies inthe basics of beekeeping. I am sure it does not mention explosives at all,but it certainly did mention the war effort.

[5] Daberkow, S, et al (2009) U.S. Honey Markets: Recent Changes and Historical Perspective. ABJ Dec 2009.

[7] Matthew Smart, in prep, presented at the Monsanto Honey Bee Health Summit.

[8] Sinnathamby, S., Assefa, Y., Granger, A. M., Tabor, L. K., & Douglas-Mankin, K. R. (2013) Pollinator Decline: US Agro-Socio-Economic Impacts and Responses. Journal of Natural and Environmental Sciences, 4(1), 1-13. http://www.asciencejournal.net/asj/index.php/NES/article/view/430/pdf_111

[14] Erlandson, GW & JL Hauff (1981) Marketing North Dakota honey. Agricultural Economics Report No. 148

[15] vanEngelsdorp and Meixner (2010) op. cit.

[21] Baum, JA, et al (2012) Cotton plants expressing a hemipteran-active Bacillus thuringiensis crystal protein impact the development and survival of Lygus hesperus (Hemiptera: Miridae) nymphs. J Econ Entomol. 105(2):616-24.

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Sick Bees Part 18F8: Colony Collapse Revisited ...

Manifesto of Futurism – Wikipedia

Posted on April 24, 2019 by Danzig

The Manifesto of Futurism (Italian: Manifesto del Futurismo) is a manifesto written by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and published in 1909. Marinetti expresses an artistic philosophy called Futurism that was a rejection of the past and a celebration of speed, machinery, violence, youth and industry. It also advocated the modernization and cultural rejuvenation of Italy.

Marinetti wrote the manifesto in the autumn of 1908 and it first appeared as a preface to a volume of his poems, published in Milan in January 1909.[1] It was published in the Italian newspaper Gazzetta dell'Emilia in Bologna on 5 February 1909,[2] then in French as Manifeste du futurisme (Manifesto of Futurism) in the newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909.[3][4]

The limits of Italian literature at the end of the so-called Ottocento (19th century), its lack of strong contents, its quiet and passive laissez-faire, are fought by futurists (see article 1, 2 and 3) and their reaction includes the use of excesses intended to prove the existence of a dynamic surviving Italian intellectual class.

In this period in which industry is of growing importance in all Europe futurists need to confirm that Italy is present, has an industry, has the power to take part in the new experience and will find the superior essence of progress in its major symbols like the car and its speed (see article 4). Nationalism is never openly declared, but it is evident.

Futurists insist that literature will not be overtaken by progress, rather it will absorb progress in its evolution and will demonstrate that such progress must manifest in this manner because man will use this progress to sincerely let his instinctive nature explode. Man is reacting against the potentially overwhelming strength of progress and shouts out his centrality. Man will use speed, not the opposite (see articles 5 and 6).

Poetry will help man to consent his soul be part of all that (see articles 6 and 7), indicating a new concept of beauty that will refer to the human instinct of aggression.

The sense of history cannot be neglected as this is a special moment, many things are going to change into new forms and new contents, but man will be able to pass through these variations (see article 8), bringing with himself what comes from the beginning of civilization.

In article 9, war is defined as a necessity for the health of human spirit, a purification that allows and benefits idealism. Their explicit glorification of war and its "hygienic" properties influenced the ideology of fascism. Marinetti was very active in fascist politics until he withdrew in protest of the "Roman Grandeur" which had come to dominate fascist aesthetics.

Article 10 states: "We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice".

This manifesto was published well before the occurrence of any of the 20th-century events which are commonly suggested as a potential meaning of this text. Many of them could not even be imagined yet. For example, the Russian Revolutions of 1917 were the first successfully maintained revolution of the sort described by article 11. The series of smaller scale peasant uprisings that had been known as the Russian Revolution previous to the occurrences of 1917 took place in the years immediately before the manifesto's publication and instigated the State Duma's creation of a Russian constitution in 1906.

The effect of the manifesto is even more evident in the Italian version. Not one of the words used is casual; if not the precise form, at least the roots of these words recall those more frequently used during the Middle Ages, particularly during the Rinascimento.

The founding manifesto did not contain a positive artistic programme, which the Futurists attempted to create in their subsequent Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (1914).[5] This committed them to a "universal dynamism", which was to be directly represented in painting. Objects in reality were not separate from one another or from their surroundings: "The sixteen people around you in a rolling motor bus are in turn and at the same time one, ten four three; they are motionless and they change places. ... The motor bus rushes into the houses which it passes, and in their turn the houses throw themselves upon the motor bus and are blended with it".[6]

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Manifesto of Futurism - Wikipedia

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