Monthly Archives: May 2021

Karen Weekes has her 2021 Christmas Day plans already boxed off. She will be single-handedly rowing across the Atlantic Ocean.

ver since her parents sat her in a kayak when she was just two years of age, a sense of adventure has anchored her life.

It began when she and a friend, Karen Kennedy, circumvented Ireland in a kayak. Later, there were kayaking trips between the Lofoten Islands of Norway, along the coast of Croatia and around the islands off Scotland.

Then she switched to cycling, undertaking a solo trip across Canada as well as bikes rides in Alaska and along the west coast of the United States.

Karen has twice sailed across the Atlantic. But her latest adventure, a 3,000-mile solo ocean journey in a rowing boat, is her most challenging trip.

A lecturer in the Cork-based Munster Technology University, Karen lives in Kinvara, Co Galway. I was born in Dublin and have lived in a lot of places, but I call Kinvara home, she says.

Her parents loved the outdoors and family outings centred on camping, fishing and sailing trips. Those early adventures had a profound influence on Karen, who has been contemplating her solo attempt across the Atlantic for several years.

Karen holds a doctorate in sports psychology and she has worked with rowers who have crewed boats on ocean trips.

I know what they have been through. I had anticipated waiting for a few years before I did it. Instead, I had been planning to do more solo cycles in places like Mongolia and Uzbekistan.

But due to Covid-19 restrictions I had to put these plans on hold.

Last August I decided to do the row and I have been training and planning for the trip since.

Karen is attempting to become the first Irish woman to complete a solo row of the Atlantic. Only 19 females worldwide have completed the 3,000-mile trip, which she estimates will take at least 75 days. But as a precaution, she will pack enough provisions for 100 days.

Planning the adventure is a mammoth task and Weekes is seeking corporate sponsorship to offset some of the expenses. She has sourced a boat which is currently being serviced in England and will be delivered to Galway later this month. Before long she will be taking it for spins in Galway Bay and along the west coast.

There is a huge amount of logistics involved, such as getting the right navigational and communication equipment. Recently I spent a weekend at the Maritime Naval Base in Cork doing a sea survival course.

During some of the kayaking trips weve been hit by some very high seas and you are always getting close to danger. Weve had situations which weve had to get ourselves out of.

But I suppose this builds up my coping toolbox. It builds up mental strength. Dealing with adversity on the high seas also gives one a great respect for the sea.

Home comforts will be in short supply on the boat.

Well, I wont have a three-hob cooker, she says with a laugh. I will have a jet boiler and will eat a lot of hydrated food, which means pouring hot water into a packet and eating its contents. So I will check what suits my stomach before I go. I will also bring a lot of protein drinks and snack bars and I will have a water-maker on board to desalinate the sea water.

Rowing the Atlantic is a foolproof way to lose weight.

Typically, you will burn between 4,000 and 4,500 calories a day and because you are not eating heavy duty carbs and stuff like that, you will lose weight because you are expending so much energy.

Ultimately, she aims to row for up to 16 hours a day.

I have spoken to a lot of solo rowers who all said that as the trip progresses you become more accustomed to the rowing and become fitter, which enables you to spend more time rowing. The rest of the time is divided between tending to the boat, cooking, eating, navigating and sleeping.

The mental challenge of being alone on the high seas for at least two-and-a-half months fascinates Karen.

When I was doing my PhD, I looked at the cognitive coping strategies of K2 mountaineers. I lived in their base camp in Pakistan for six weeks and interviewed them. I also interviewed elite runners who had competed in 100 mile plus races.

I tested the skills they shared when I cycled across Canada. I really pushed myself hard for 4,000 miles on the bike. So I think that gave me a good insight into how my mind works under pressure and stress. This is going up to another level in terms of pushing the body and mind.

But I am really looking forward to exploring my own head space and seeing where the mind goes. If you think about it and a lot of rowers will say this as well it is only 70 days of your whole life, so it is probably no harm.

The underlying philosophy governing the trip is a desire by Weekes to encourage women to participate in adventure sports and push themselves outside their comfort zone.

She also wants to highlight the UNs Sustainable Development Goals, specifically gender equality and life under the water, which focuses on the conservation of oceans and marine life.

Apart from the obvious threat posed by storms and shipping, there are other dangers lurking in the Atlantic.

Three of the boats in the annual race between Gran Canaria and Antigua got punctured by marlin. They didnt attack the boats but brushed underneath them and damaged their hulls. The crews had to do a quick fix but when youre on your own it is a different ball game.

Her only luxury on the trip will be a robust sound system. I love music and I will have music pumping from the sound system and hopefully I will have a chance to listen to podcasts and audio books as well.

For more information on Karens trip log on to shecando2021.org

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Karen Weekes aims to be first Irish woman to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean - Sunday World

Gwenyth Paltrow has shown she's not only a stunning actress but she is also a successful businesswoman. After dominating the skincare realm with her beauty and wellness company Goop, she's decided to take her and her brand on a new venture: cruise lines.

We're always trying to find the best way to take care of our skin and since celebrities seem to always have an ageless appearance, any tip or beauty secret from them is coveted. Everything from how to wash your face to what moisturizer celebrities use (hello Jennifer Roberts) is praised and admired by us fans.

Well, now that Gwenyth has dominated the beauty and wellness realm, her most recent announcement on Instagram is certainly making waves.

"I am always happiest by, in or on the sea! In 2022 my @goopteam and I are going to join @celebritycruises on their new ship, Celebrity Beyond," she captioned her photo by the sea.

The brand will be taking on cruise lines and while we don't have much information to go on for now, Gwenyth made sure to tease how she'll be approaching this new venture.

This will be her latest hands-on approach with the company and she added that "I'll be behind the scenes, working on some special projects, as Celebrity's newWell-beingAdvisor," she continued."My team @goopis curating programming and fitnesskits to add toCelebrity's wellnesstheexperience.I'm sworn to secrecy on the rest keep an eye out for the details coming soon."

It's sure to be a memorable experience that we can't wait to discover. Goop is known for being a company that doesn't stick to traditional conventional beauty standards. Rather, it invents its own perspective on what wellness and beauty for women should look like.

With a leader like Gwenyth though, it's no surprise that Goop will be taking the high seas. The beauty guru is known for being a clean beauty advocate and has aimed to help her customers find their inner wellness. Before Goop expanded into the empire it is today, she started out her brand by simply sending out a newsletter with advice for those going through the aging process. Now, she's continuing to redefine how beauty and wellness brands operate and we can't wait to see how she takes on the high seas.

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Gwenyth Paltrow's latest gig is taking her out to sea - Woman & Home

Eleven fishermen from Thaengaaipattinam, who were rescued by the Coast Guard after going missing in the high-seas on April 28, returned home on Saturday afternoon.

As the Coast Guard ship escorted Mercedes boat with the 11 fishermen to the Thaengaaipattinam fishing harbour, a group of people ventured into the sea along with officials, including fisheries inspector Sivakumar, his deputy Kani Selvan and marine police inspector Arul Rose to receive them at 4 nautical miles from the harbour.

The fishermen were accorded an emotional reception by their family members while Congress MLA Rajesh Kumar and Congress candidate for Kanniyakumari Lok Sabha by-poll V. Vijay Vasanth felicitated them. After being taken to Vallavilai in a bus, the fishermen, along with their family and the villagers, participated in a Thanksgiving Holy Mass at St. Marys Church.

The 11 fishermen went missing when another boat rammed their mechanised boat 600 nautical miles off the Goa coast on April 23. While the wheelhouse was tossed up into the sea, the fishermen were thrown into the sea. They managed to board the boat again.

The crew of another mechanized boat Periyanayagi also from Vallavilai, saw the capsized wheelhouse of Mercedes and inferred that the boat had sunk after the mishap and informed their families over the satellite phone about it. After the district administration got the message from the family members, the Centre was alerted which launched a search operation.

Meanwhile, S. Joseph Franklin, owner of Mercedes, and who steered the boat contacted his family on April 28 morning via the satellite phone to inform them that all of them were safe.

On information from the State government, the Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Center (MRCC) of the Coast Guard in Mumbai activated international safety net to alert merchant vessels transiting near the reported position.

Simultaneously, Samudra Prahari of the Coast Guard was diverted for search. MRCC (Mumbai) coordinated with merchant vessel Maersk Horsburgh to join the search operation along with fishing boats operating in the area.

As the reported position was located in Pakistan Search and Rescue Region, MRCC Karachi was requested for assistance as per International Marine Organisation (IMO) norms in vogue.

Also having received information about the location of the boat, Coast Guard ship Vikram located the boat on April 29, around 25 nautical miles from Suheli Par, Lakshadweep Islands.

It provided first aid to the crew of Mercedes and confirmed the safety of all the crew. Vikram escorted the fishing boat to its base port at Thengapattanam fishing harbour.

We thank the Union government for the swift measures taken to locate the missing fishermen, said Sunil Sabariar of Vallavilai.

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Rescued by Coast Guard, 11 fishermen return home - The Hindu

Seaspiracy, the Netflix documentary premiered in March 2021 which exposes the darker side to the fishing industry, has caused much controversy since its release. One of the more dramatic claims made in the film was that, due to fishing, all of the fish in the sea will have disappeared by 2048.

To check this fact, we asked 8 experts in fisheries sciences, marine sciences, and ecology:Will the oceans be empty of fish by 2048?. Sevenout of eight answered'extremely unlikely'.

Ali Tabrizi, Seaspiracy's director and narrator, says in the documentary that "if current fishing trends continue, we will see virtually empty oceans by the year 2048". This claim has been echoed across manynews articlesand blogs since it was made in 2006, but where does it come from?

Ascientific paperpublished inScienceby Boris Worm and colleagues in 2006 which looked at the decline of marine populations and species. They found that loss of marine biodiversity has important effects on the ecosystem.

In one sentence in the concluding paragraph, they alsosaid thatthe "current trend is of serious concern because it projects the global collapse of all taxa currently fished by the mid-21stcentury".

Dr Michael Melnychuk, an expert in fisheries sciences from Washington University, highlights some of the issues with the 2006 prediction. Hesaysthat "the definitions of 'collapsed' by the authors are based on catch data, but these do not necessarily reflect abundances of fish populations".

He alsopoints outthat the method used by the authors to extrapolate data into the future was not realistic.

Dr Robert Steneck, an expert in oceanography from Maine University,highlightsthat "three years after the initial publicationWorm et al 2009(also published in Science) pointed out that many fish stocks are rebuilding globally".

Since 2006, the authors have also tried to emphasize the broader conclusions of their findingsinstead of this prediction.

There have also beennumerous scientific publicationsheavily criticizing the 2048 prediction for the reasons highlighted by Dr Melnychuk, but unfortunately this claim has stuck.

Dr Melnychukhighlightsa final reason why the 2048 prediction is inaccurate, it "assumes that our hands are tied and these trends will continue indefinitely".

Seapiracy claimed that oceans will be empty of fish by 2048 even though this prediction has been strongly refuted for over 10 years. Othersimilarly contentious claimswere made throughout the film in order to expose the darker side of the fishing industry and suggest that the only way to save the oceans is to stop fishing altogether.

Some of the experts believe that this overly negative image of the fishing industry could do more harm than good to the oceans.

Dr Alec Christie, an expert in marine biology from the University of Cambridge,says"the way this movie used data from scientific papers was a good example of questionable research practices - cherry-picking and unjustifiable and opaquely extrapolating data beyond the bounds of the study."

Dr Holden Harris, an expert in Fisheries Sciences from Florida University,addsthat Seaspiracy omitted some of the achievements in sustainable fishing.

"The convenient oversight of not including the many, many success stories of good management guided by science and community (e.g., US fisheries) provides an extremist view of the issue," says Harris.

"I also personally know some of the interviewees in the film, who have spent their life work in ocean conservation, and do not deserve the false light cast on to them.This is not how progress is made."

However, not all the experts agreed that the inaccuracies of Seaspiracy mean it does more harm than good. Dr Simon Allen, an expert in marine science from Bristol University,points outthat "at the end of the day, love it or loathe it, Seaspiracy has got some tongues wagging and people asking questions."

All the experts agreed with one claim made by Seaspiracy: overfishing is a serious issue.

Dr Harrissaysthat "today, it's likely that 1/3 of the world's fish stocks worldwide are overexploited or depleted. This is certainly an issue that deserves widespread concern."

Dr Allenaddsthat "overfishing is still the biggest problem on the global high seas".

Dr Christie's concluding opinion on Seaspiracyis that"we all agree that its message of the ecological harm of industrial fisheries is a major urgent issue, but we need to present facts not fiction and unite, build consensus, and use rational arguments to convince people to change."

It is unlikely that the oceans will be empty of fish by 2048. Although experts disagreed on the effectiveness of the Seaspiracy documentary to help protect the oceans, they all agreed that overfishing is a major issue.

Article based on 8 expert answers to this question: Will the oceans be empty of fish by 2048?

This expert response was published in partnership with independent fact-checking platform Metafact.io. Subscribe to their weekly newsletter here.

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Fact Check: Will The Oceans Be Empty of Fish by 2048, And Other Seaspiracy Concerns - ScienceAlert

Saturday and Sunday, young entrepreneurs will have lemonade stands set up throughout the Fort Hood area to include Harker Heights, Killeen, Fort Hood, Copperas Cove and Belton in celebration of Lemonade Day.

Lemonade Day Weekend is a rain or shine event.

This weekend marks 12 years of Lemonade Day in the Fort Hood area. Lemonade Day participants have spent the last few months learning how to start, own and operate their own business a lemonade stand. Some youth will be set up in front of their homes, while others have asked permission of a local business to use their store front. On Lemonade Day, the cities of Harker Heights, Killeen and Copperas Cove allow Lemonade Day participants to set up in city parks as well. With their profits, participants are encouraged to spend a little, save a little, and give a little of their profits, according to a news release from Lemonade Day.

Lemonade Day is a free, community program dedicated to teaching children, pre-K through high school, how to start, own and operate their own business a lemonade stand. Lemonade Day is presented by First National Bank Texas and Fort Hood National Bank, along with Fort Hood Family Housing and local sponsor H-E-B. For more information about Lemonade Day, visit http://forthood.lemonadeday.org.

The community can view lemonade stand locations posted by participants on the Stand Locator Map. Visit forthood.lemonadeday.org and click the red Stands on the Map button. Potential customers can hover over each dot to view location details. The map is updated daily.

Here are some of the locations:

Bushs Chicken Cove, 112 W. Highway 190, in Copperas Cove

Hours: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday

Catching the Rainbow & LEGO Against Bullying, 1437 Lubbock Drive, in Copperas Cove

Hours: 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday & Sunday

Dr. Seuss on the Loose Lemonade

Copperas Cove Leader Press, 2210 E. Business Highway 190, in Copperas Cove

Hours: 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Oceans Bounty Lemonade, High Seas for Heroes

Walgreens, 527 U.S. Highway 190, in Copperas Cove

Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday

PX Exchange on Clear Creek, BLDG 4250, Clear Creek Road, in Fort Hood

Hours: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday

PX Exchange on Clear Creek, BLDG 4250, Clear Creek Road, in Fort Hood

Hours: 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sunday

Samuels Real Dill Pickles, 51512-1 TAOS St., in Fort Hood

Hours: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday

Songhai Youth Entrepreneurs

Twice as Funny Comedy Lounge, 4505 E. Veterans Memorial Blvd., in Killeen

Nutree Fitness, 503 N 38th St., in Killeen

Hours: noon to 5 p.m. Saturday

Miss B Lemonade & The 3 Bs Lemonade

Petco, 201 E Central Texas Expy., in Harker Heights

Hours: 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday

Triple Es Lemonade, 100 Mountain Lion Road, in Harker Heights

Hours: 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday

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12th Lemonade Day in the Fort Hood area this weekend - The Killeen Daily Herald

At least ten bodies were found near the Libyan coast next to an inflatable boat that sank around 130 migrants on board in the Mediterranean Sea, according to information released Thursday by the NGO SOS Mditerrane (22).

Since our arrival on the site, we have not found any survivors, despite the fact that we saw at least ten bodies near the wreckage of the boat, explained in a note Luisa Albera, search and rescue coordinator on board. from Ocean Viking, the NGO humanitarian ship.

We have no hope of finding any survivors, said Emmanuelle Chaze, journalist part of the ships crew, in a telephone interview with the AFP news agency.

SOS Mditerrane received on Tuesday (20) an alert on the presence of three ships in international waters near the Libyan coast. The warning was sent by a group of volunteers who reported on migrants in difficulty on the high seas. Then, the Ocean Viking and freighters approached the area, despite the difficult sailing conditions, with heavy waves. six meters.

One of the merchant ships found three bodies of dead migrants, then a device from Frontex, the European border control agency, found the remains of the inflatable boat.

The routes from Africa to Europe via the Mediterranean have been strengthened in recent years, which does not prevent attempts on this route or across the Atlantic to the Canary Islands, for example.

In this case, the crossings can be as good or more dangerous as they are expensive. Fisherman Djiby Dieng, 21, told AFP news agency that the crossing generally costs between 150,000 and 300,000 CFA francs (1,400 to 2,800 reais) per person, an amount equivalent to more than two months income of a fisherman. In some cases, family and friends make a kitty to collect the money.

For his crossing, Dieng did not pay, as he made a deal to be one of the pilots. Travelers left the coast in small boats, which passed unnoticed among the dozens of fishing boats.

Then, on the high seas, they went to a large canoe, about 20 meters, where they would make the crossing. However, they are not always able to reach their destination. There were 131 of us. There were people of all ages, young, old. But we ran out of water and food. We had about 15 dehydrated people. So, near the Moroccan coast, we decided to stop, says Dieng.

This year alone, at least 453 migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea, most on the central route connecting the coasts of Tunisia and Libya to those of Italy.

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Boat of 130 migrants sinks in the Mediterranean 22/04/2021 World KSU | The Sentinel Newspaper - KSU | The Sentinel Newspaper

Statue of Liberty in the Champ-de-Mars. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Getty)

Give us liberty and give them death, said David Duke at a rally for the Ku Klux Klan in Baton Rouge, La., in 1975. His thunderous words were a play on the famous quotation from Patrick Henry, Give me liberty or give me death. Henrys statement was intended to express his commitment to the well-known American ideal of freedom, which he and his peers took to be at stake in their forthcoming revolutionary struggle with the British Empire. But when Duke gave this speech as the Grand Dragon of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, he had in mind another ideal with deep roots in American history: racial domination.Books in Review

The two men could hardly have more different legacies. Henry is venerated as a founding father, while Duke is reviled as a disgraceful bigot. But any attempt to delegitimize Dukes appropriation of Henrys words and the ideal they represent must also contend with an uncomfortable and inconvenient truth: The freedom that Henry, a plantation and slave owner, and his fellow founders took to be worth defending was also linked to the racial domination that organized life and labor in the American colonies. The revolution was a struggle for self-rule, but it also sought this self-rule in order to control the land conquered from Native Americans and the labor extorted from abducted Africans. It was a politics of freedom entwined, from the outset, with a politics of enslavement and exploitation.

Tyler Stovalls new book, White Freedom, attempts to answer the questions raised by this juxtaposition of Duke and Henry. How, he asks, can we square the acme of Western civilization, the ideal of liberty celebrated in the US and French republics, with its nadir, that of racial slavery, colonialism, and genocide? In plainer terms, How is it, as the English writer Samuel Johnson sardonically asked in 1775, the same year as Henrys address, that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of [enslaved] negroes?

Through painstaking and comprehensive historical research, Stovall addresses these questions by means of the concept named in his books title: white freedom. For centuries, he argues, writers, intellectuals, and politicians have tried various strategies to reconcile the United States and Frances brutal histories of racial domination, settler conquest, and slavery with their stated commitments to freedom. Many of these strategies have hinged on an attempt to use one to explain away the other. Those who defend the historical legacies of both countries insist that liberty is their true moral foundation; racism, colonialism, and slavery were transitory imperfections that the march of progress eventually brought to an end. Those who view them as irredeemable often contend the reverse: that racism is, as Stovall puts it, the true inescapable reality of Western culture and society. But as he demonstrates, at the heart of the two nations were both a commitment to liberty and a vision of society in which this liberty was unequally distributed and deeply racialized. The result was freedom for those at the top of the racial hierarchy, supported by and premised upon the unfreedom of those at the bottom.

According to Stovall, then, the dueling realities of freedom and slavery, liberty and domination, master and slave, are not just a clash of opposites; instead, they have been and continue to be counterparts in the making of modern history. To be free, Stovall notes, has long meant to be white, and to be white has conversely long meant to be free.

To explain the symbiotic relationship between racism and freedom, Stovall begins by charting the history of liberty and domination in modern North Atlantic history. His first chapter recounts the fascinating history of piracy, particularly in the Caribbean, including how the French and US republics sought to restrict the practice. Among the Caribbean piratesmany of whom had formerly been enslaveda rough racial democracy prevailed. Electing and removing their captains by the principle of one man, one vote, many of the pirate outfits were in fact more democratic than the republics from which they stole. But the pirates self-government and their freedom at sea also threatened French and US sovereignty: They attacked shipping lanes key to transatlantic commerce; they made coastal territories vulnerable; and their sense of democratic equality posed a challenge to the republics racial hierarchies both at home and abroad. For the US and French republics to ensure their reigns, the pirates and their savage freedom had to be eliminated.

The drive to develop navies and eliminate piracy on the high seas also came home to roost. Much as the United States and France sought to suppress the pirates, Stovall contends, they sought to dominate and control the children in their own countries, and they did so in the name of a new form of freedom: one defined not by bucking formal power structures (as the pirates did) but by respecting them. Resistant to authoritarian control, the teenager and the pirate alike needed to be introduced to new forms of disciplinesystems of domination that American and French society insisted enabled new forms of liberty.Current Issue

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Out of this new definition of freedom also came, Stovall notes, a racialization of those deemed not worthy to receive it. On the one hand was a freedom defined by savagery and subalterns; on the other was a set of natural liberties and rights owed only to adult white Europeans, whether they lived in America or in Europe. As colonization and the Atlantic slave trade both expanded, they became even more integral to justifying the regimes of domination and violence erected by those republics in the pursuit of freedom.

This new notion of freedom was not only racialized but gendered and then also domesticated. While the French revolutionary symbol known as Marianne is famously depicted in Eugne Delacroixs painting Liberty Leading the People as a bare-chested woman wielding a musket and bayonet in the violence against the old regime, her descendant the Statue of Libertygiven to the United States by Franceoffers a contrasting depiction of liberty: a serene, robed woman holding a torch rather than a weapon. Freedom, yes, Lady Liberty tells us, but a pacified form of it.

Stovall then turns to the way this new domesticated and racialized mode of freedom fit into the peculiar double movement of world politics over the 18th and 19th centuries. While liberal democracy and expanded social freedoms began to extend throughout the domestic spheres of American and European republics like the United States and France, these same powers expanded their authoritarian colonial control over much of the rest of the world.

How could these nations reconcile their valorization of self-government with their actual practices of slavery and colonialismthe ultimate forms of government by others? This is where Stovalls earlier story about how freedom became racialized in the 18th and 19th centuries intersects with his story about how freedom became the province of the few and not the many. Racism helped square the circle: The right and privilege of self-government was linked to what was perceived as Europeans unique capacity for rational thought. As John Stuart Mill put it in On Liberty, the doctrine of liberty ought to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. Despotism, on the other hand, was a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement.

In France, the tensions between the new republics commitment to freedom and its actual violence and domination were well represented by the Marquis de Condorcet. The fiery French radical was one of slaverys most vociferous European foes, yet he also opposed the immediate emancipation of the enslaved. As with the American founding fathers, slavery as a metaphor for unfreedom was a clear and present evil, but on the actual social institution that structured the lives of Africans throughout the French Empire, Condorcet and his fellow abolitionists demanded a bit of nuance. The Society for the Friends of the Blacks, of which he was a member, attempted to get the National Assembly to pass a motion to end French participation in the slave trade, but it stopped short of an attempt to end the slave trade itself. Stovall reports that Condorcet also insisted that enslaved Black people were unprepared for emancipation and that he ultimately foresaw freedom coming to blacks when they merged with and disappeared into the white population through miscegenation.

Condorcet and the French radicals were not alone. Most of the Enlightenments intellectuals, from Immanuel Kant to the physician Franois Bernier, offered elaborate theories that affirmed the right to freedom for white Europeans while simultaneously producing cutting-edge racial science. Kant, for instance, wrote that there was only one innate right, freedom, which meant independence from being constrained by anothers choice. Yet he also wrote approvingly of a critique of a proposal to free Black slaves, since they lacked the mental capacity to be good laborers without being coerced into activity. Likewise, he regarded Native people in North America as incapable of any culture and far below even the Negro in their adaptability and strength. The embrace of freedom and the embrace of racism were complementary positions, not contradictory ones: The case for freedom for Europeans was also the case for unfreedom for the rest of the world.

In the United States, Thomas Jefferson perhaps best embodied this vision of freedom, even if there were many other contenders, such as Patrick Henry. In 1776, Jefferson famously wrote the Declaration of Independence, which held that all men are created equal and endowed with an inalienable right to liberty, even though he owned more than 600 human beingssurely some sort of conflict, should we take his words literally. He also wrote, in 1781, Notes on the State of Virginia, which held that Black Americansfree or enslavedshould be removed beyond the reach of mixture. It is not against experience to suppose, Jefferson argued, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.

Whether in Condorcets France or Jeffersons America, racism servedrather transparentlyto justify those political institutions that were sharply and clearly opposed to the letter of the principles being invoked to legitimate them. By naturalizing European superiority, Stovall shows, Jefferson, Condorcet, and other thinkers could justify a system of freedom for some while complacently accepting the domination of many othersand the white in white freedom was societys way of organizing who played which role.

Some may argue that the examples of Jefferson, Condorcet, and the rest imply that racial domination boils down to errors in thinking about race and justice, or that white freedom is merely an inconsistency in reasoning from abstract ideals and principles to concrete political questions. But what drove the formation of republican freedom and its racialized forms of enslavement and colonization was material more than ideational. These thinkers were explaining an economic, political, and military stratification of society that already existed and that had not waited for such justifications. After all, by the time they were writing, the European empires had been amassing wealth through enslaved labor for several generations. These men were offering highbrow justifications of this system of exploitation only to make it palatable to polite society. As Aim Csaire explained in his classic Discourse on Colonialism, killing and plunder tend to come first and the slavering apologists later. The conquistadors spent vastly more effort justifying themselves with sword and bullet; putting a flattering rhetorical cloak on naked plunder was a pressing concern only for later generations.

Despite Stovalls focus on cultural and intellectual history, this primacy of violent domination proves to be a central theme in White Freedom, and in his final chapters he pays close attention to how the Wests pursuit of political power and profits has proved more historically decisive than the doctrines of liberty and racism that its intellectuals devised to justify this pursuit. Britain and France saw World War I, for example, not as a struggle to end imperial domination but as an opportunity to expand itso long as they were the ones doing the dominating. In the midst of fierce battles in France and what is now Iraq, they signed the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement to divide the Ottoman Empire between them at the wars end. This did not stop many nations from seeking to free themselves from this domination after the war, as national liberation struggles and revolts erupted from India to Ireland. Nevertheless, the conclusion of World War I marked a return to a politics that saw freedom as an ideal for some but not all. In 1919, in the Punjabi town of Amritsar, British colonial troops raked protesters with machine gun fire, killing hundreds, rather than allow a demonstration against their rule. In Korea, millions of people organized against Japanese colonialism, prompting a similarly violent response that claimed thousands of lives, while in France, the government resorted to the mass deportation of exotic Chinese laborers from its colonies throughout the Caribbean and Africa, replacing them with workers from southern and eastern Europe. During the same year in the United States, there was widespread racial violence and terrorism, especially against returning Black veterans, who were more assertive of their right to self-rule than white freedom could countenance. The summer after the wars conclusion was known in the United States as the Red Summer for its massive wave of violence nationwide, as white mobs looked to restore the racial order.

For Stovall, this march of white freedom continued into World War II and the Cold War years. Nazi Germany sought to expand its empire while also racially purifying its society at home, and it did so under the banner of freedom for the German Volkproviding one of the books most powerful and persuasive demonstrations of the complementary relationship between freedom and race.

Looking to the model of racial domination developed by the United States, the Third Reich passed the Nuremberg Laws, which installed racialized tiers of legal protections, stripping German Jews of their citizenship and barring sex and marriage between Germans and non-Germans. This program of racialization and marginalization eventually culminated in the death campswhich also drew on techniques of genocide the German Empire had used in Namibiawhere millions of Europes Jews, a half million of its Romani, and others targeted for their sexual or gender identity or physical or mental disabilities perished. In this way, the Nazis brought home to Europe the violence and racial subjugation that the European powers had practiced in their colonies, in what Hannah Arendt called the boomerang effect of imperialism.

The defeat of the Third Reich represented a powerful blow to this nakedly racist and authoritarian conception of white freedom. As Stovall shows, however, the postwar consensus that arose out of the Allies victory posed another challenge to realizing a vision of freedom cut loose from racism. President Harry Truman presided over the ascendant nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which cast themselves as representatives of the free world against the captive nations of the Soviet sphere. But this program of freedom curiously failed to include the captive nations of the British and French empiresnations that, as Stovall points out, were not referred to as nations at all.

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These captive nations, however, had their own conception of freedom and were willing to fight for it. Figures like Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere challenged the Wests continued embrace of racial domination with a demand for freedom from empire. This led, Stovall writes, to one of the most dramatic series of events in modern world history, as the number of member states of the United Nations swelled from 55 in 1946 to more than double that by 1965, the vast majority of them former colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. World War II and its political aftermath challenged the idea of white freedom to an unprecedented degree in modern history, he concludes. A new conception of freedom, cut loose from its racialized origins, began to proliferate, even if it remained threatened by both the former imperial powers of Europe and the ascendant one in the United States.

While the concept of white freedom is Stovalls, the subject of how freedom and race are entwined is not new. Carole Patemans insightful analysis of the gender domination inherent to the liberal social compact in The Sexual Contract inspired a similar analysis by Charles Mills in his 1994 book The Racial Contract, which considered how the social compact that safeguards liberal freedoms is also composed of several other compacts that protect the freedom of white people to dominate and exploit the nonwhite peoples of the world. Radical political theorists like Neville Alexander, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Oliver Cox made their own cases for how liberal freedom had become racialized, insisting that, contrary to what many claim, the social structure and political ideals of liberal democracies can coexist with racial domination.

Outside the academy, the critical notion of white freedom has influenced much of the Black activism of the past century to the present day. Ida B. Wells, for instance, outlined many of the same connections between freedom and race. In her turn-of-the-century speech Lynch Law in America, she rejected a description of lynching as the sudden outburst of an insane mob, characterizing it instead as the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an unwritten law, above and beyond the written law, that allows and even demands violence against Black and Indigenous people, while reserving the freedom-preserving written law for whites.

Half a century later, Aim Csaire and an ascendant generation of anticolonial activists leveled similar accusations at the French Empire and the broader constellation of Western powers that enabled it, with Csaire writing that the great thing he held against such pseudo-humanism is that its very concept of human rights is sordidly racist.

While Stovalls account of freedom and race is a compelling one, he might have done more with this deeper critical tradition, if only because so many of its advocates put forth visions of a freedom liberated from the shackles of racism. For example, along with the Caribbean pirates and Frances Marianne, he might have considered how maroon society and the liberated colonies offered alternative conceptions of emancipation. While Stovall provides a thoughtful answer to the question What does it mean for freedom to be white?, the reader may also want one to the question What does it mean for freedom not to be white?

Nonetheless, White Freedoms strengths resonate far more than its weaknesses. The book is a treasure trove of historical detail, but its also written clearly and persuasively, such that the overarching themes of race and freedom consistently ring louder than the minutiae. Its focus also helps Stovall to provide a coherent narrative about a political history of multiple countries spanning multiple centuries. His history of American and French racial politics outside of their domestic sphere is commendable, making these empires accountable for their total domains of control and influence, including their oft-ignored colonial endeavors and effects on global politics.

White Freedom is also a worthy addition to the recent surge of work rethinking the connection between race and other fundamental aspects of our social system, from the discussions of The New York Times 1619 Project and critical race theory to leftist debates about racial capitalism. The recent global protests against racism and police violence suggest that these issues may continue to powerfully shape politics for quite some time.

Stovall concludes with a juxtaposition of two US presidents: Ronald Reagan, who demanded in 1987 that the Berlin Wall be torn down in the interest of freedom, and Donald Trump, who demandedalong with the House Freedom Caucusthat the United States build a wall along its border with Mexico. In both cases, freedom represented a specific vision: a social order dominated by the United States. Reagans speech called for the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the rise of a new world order of unregulated capitalism upon which white freedom was built. In the ensuing era of unchallenged capitalism, Trump sought to build a wall that would free Americans from the burden of sharing their zones of wealth and domination with the Global South.

White freedom, Stovall reminds us, has a history, but it is no mere historical idea: Its defenders inherit a balance of power and the political advantages that centuries of white freedom have helped shape. But we inheritors of a different legacythe efforts of those who forced white freedom into key retreats over the past centuries, thereby increasing the political freedoms of most of the people on this planetare also alive and well. As the late Nipsey Hussle once said, You build walls, we gon prolly dig holes.

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The Entwined History of Freedom and Racism - The Nation

The mystery surrounding the elusive giant squid has fed popular folklore stories for centuries such as that of the famous kraken, the colossal sea creature that attacked ships on the high seas. However, the reality is quite different, since these cephalopods such as Architeuthis dux, the largest known species, are very difficult to observe.

Research recently published in the journal Deep Sea Research tries to explain why these giants of the deep sea are so elusive and shows how a team of scientists managed to film the first images of this species in its natural habitat in 2012 in Japan and later in 2019 in the Gulf of Mexico.

The study authors, some of whom were present at the 2019 sighting, argue that these creatures are elusive due, in part, to their huge eyes.

In the depths of the ocean where these squids live, hardly any sunlight penetrates, so this cephalopod developed the biggest eyes of the animal kingdom, the size of a basketball, reports Live Science.

These eyes, apt to roam the darkness of the ocean, also make them more sensitive to lights that marine researchers incorporate into their submersibles and cameras, which is why it is so difficult to find giant squid in their natural habitats.

In order to capture this animal, the researchers who participated in the successful experiments of 2012 and 2019 they turned off the lights on their submersible upon reaching the desired sea depths, which allowed these squid to approach the apparatus.

In addition, the team illuminated his camera with a dim red light instead of the white one that is usually used for expeditions of this type. The use of red light may therefore be a less obtrusive method of illuminating deep-sea species, the authors indicate in the study.

The scientists also decided to use a lure with blue light nicknamed E-Jelly that mimicked the movement and glow of a bioluminescent jellyfish to further attract squid to them.

The researchers conclude that this method of combining low-light equipment with bioluminescent baits has been shown to the most effective to get the giant squid out of hiding and can be filmed.

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This is how they managed to capture images of the 'kraken' after centuries of searching Explica .co - Explica