[blind-democracy] Re: Evoking the Wrath of Nature

  • From: "R. E. Driscoll Sr" <llocsirdsr@xxxxxxx>
  • To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2015 10:25:31 -0500

Carl:
Most likely the hypnotic effects of dulcet tones and words!
R. E. (Dick) Driscoll, Sr.

On 8/10/2015 9:59 AM, Carl Jarvis wrote:

why is it that I'm so enchanted with Cris Hedges thinking, but come
away from reading his thoughts feeling morbid?

Carl Jarvis

On 8/10/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Evoking the Wrath of Nature
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/evoking_the_wrath_of_nature_20150809/
Posted on Aug 9, 2015
By Chris Hedges

Mount Washington in New Hampshire. (Ben Ferenchak / CC BY 2.0)
MOUNT WASHINGTON, N.H.—The wind on the peak of Mount Washington—the East
Coast’s highest point, where some of the most erratic and treacherous
weather in the world occurs—reached 60 miles an hour the day I was there
with my family. Backpackers huddled in the biting chill next to large
boulders or congregated in the lobby of a snack bar and gift shop that
extract money from the thousands of tourists who ride the cog railroad or
drive up the auto road from the base of the mountain each summer.
This strange confluence, where those who hike to the peak and those who
ride
in cars and trains meet in uneasy silence, is emblematic of the clash of
cultures that threatens to doom the planet and the human species. One group
knows and respects the power of nature, is able to feel its majesty and is
aware of our insignificance and smallness before the cosmos. The other,
enamored of the machines that obliterate distance and effort, and that
insulate us from the natural world in a technological bubble, is largely
dead to the rhythms that sustain life.
The narration given during the rail trip up the mountain is about the
technological glory of the rack-and-pinion rail line, in place since 1868.
This narrative presents the weather and steep slopes as ominous elements
that human engineers defeated. In truth, the lacerations caused by the rail
tracks and the automobile road—along with the tawdry tourist attractions on
the summit that include a small post office from which visitors can mail
picture postcards—desecrate the mountain.
The backpackers at the summit were resting, many after climbing up
Tuckerman’s Ravine, where parts of the rocky ledges are at 45 degrees, a
trek that can take five hours. Some had been hiking for days or weeks. Half
a dozen thru-hikers, instantly recognizable by their spartan backpacking
gear, motley clothing, layers of dirt and bedraggled hair, had started in
Georgia last spring at Springer Mountain. By the time they finish this fall
atop Mount Katahdin in Maine, they will have walked 2,181 miles at a pace
of
about 15 miles a day and largely cut themselves off from the outside world
for almost half a year. They and the other hikers watched the gaggle of
tourists, many of whom rushed a few steps to the official summit of Mount
Washington to get their pictures taken, buy sweatshirts at the gift shop or
eat hot dogs, chips or plastic-wrapped sandwiches in the snack bar.
Those whose lives pay homage to the sacred are considered by many in the
modern world to be eccentrics and cranks. On the other hand, those who live
disconnected from the sources of life, who neither fear nor honor nor
understand the power of nature, who place their faith in human technology
and human power, are celebrated and rewarded with power as they propel the
planet and the species toward extinction. The natural world, if we do not
radically reconfigure our relationships with each other and the ecosystem,
will soon teach us a severe lesson about unbridled hubris.
“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and
intellectualization, and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world,’

Max Weber wrote. “Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have
retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic
life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations.”
Hannah Arendt called our malaise “world alienation.” She warned that it
leads to contempt for all forms of life.
We do not have the power to make a new world. We only have the power to
destroy or preserve the world we inhabit. We will either recover the sacred
or vanish from the Earth. Those who do not respect the force of nature, who
do not intimately know and understand its power, are doomed by it. The
Native Americans got this right.
The Abenaki (pronounced OBB-uh-nan-hee and translated as “people of the
dawn”) lived for thousands of years in the shadow of what we know as Mount
Washington. The tribe called the mountain Agiochook, or “Home of the Great
Spirit,” and named the life force Manitou. The Abenaki believed that when
one violated or desecrated the natural world, Manitou unleashed destructive
fury. Within the tribe, the mountain and the rest of the natural world were
infused with spirits for good and spirits for evil. The Abenaki knew the
destructive power of hurricane-force winds, subzero temperatures, floods
and
avalanches and the inevitability of death, which could arrive without
warning. They had the capacity for awe. They did not venture above the tree
line onto the tundra and rock near the summit of Agiochook. This space was
reserved for the gods.
But the arrival of the Europeans, driven by an avarice that blinded them to
all but profit, saw in the mountain potential riches—they mistook crystals
in the rock formations for diamonds. Darby Field, an Irishman hoping these
“diamonds” would make him wealthy, climbed the summit in 1642 despite
warnings from his Indian guides, who refused to go with him. Later, farms,
homesteads and settlements sprouted. Armed Europeans—aided by the diseases
they brought, such as smallpox, tuberculosis and syphilis, as well as
alcohol—obliterated native communities. The few Abenaki who remained were
often kidnapped and enslaved domestically or sent in chains to work in the
sugar plantations of the West Indies. Land, timber, minerals, animals and
mountains—as well as human beings—had no intrinsic value to the Europeans.
Nature existed only to make money.
The Abenaki engaged in three armed rebellions—King Philip’s War, Queen
Anne’s War and later Father Râle’s War, the last named for a French Jesuit
priest, Sébastien Râle, who spent 30 years with the Abenaki. The priest was
murdered and scalped by the British militia in a nighttime raid on an
Indian
settlement along the Kennebec River in what is now southern Maine. The
attack also left 80 Indians dead, many of them women and children. The
attack was not part of a war. It was, like other raids on Indian
settlements, part of a massacre. The Massachusetts provincial assembly had
placed a 100-pound scalp bounty on Râle’s head, along with bounties for any
Abenaki scalps. By the Revolutionary War, there were fewer than 1,000
Abenaki left. They had once numbered in the tens of thousands.
The Europeans of the era ridiculed the beliefs of the American Indians,
along with their communal structures, in which everything was shared and
all
had a voice in tribal decisions. They routinely referred to them as
“savages” or “heathens.” They painted the militiamen who terrorized and
slaughtered Indian communities as military heroes and agents of Christian
civilization and progress. They scoffed at legends and beliefs like the one
that the remarkable stillness of the lake at the base of Mount Chocorua was
sacred to the Great Spirit and should not be violated by the sound of the
human voice. The Europeans did not believe that nature could seek
vengeance.
They were sure they could domesticate and control the wilderness.
Mount Chocorua is named for the great chief Chocorua, one of the last of
the
Abenakis, who was killed around 1720. He was hounded to the summit of the
mountain that now bears his name by white settlers and either shot or
pushed
off its precipice. He is reputed to have damned the Europeans before he
died, saying: “May the Great Spirit curse you when he speaks in the clouds
and his words are fire! May lightning blast your crops and wind and fire
destroy your homes.”
Chocorua’s grim curse is now reality. Greenhouse gas concentrations,
including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, continue to rise. Last
year was the hottest since we began scientifically tracking weather, and
2015 is expected to top 2014. Glaciers and ice sheets are melting at an
accelerated rate, causing the oceans to rise. Even if we stop all carbon
emissions today, some scientists say, sea levels will rise by 10 feet by
2065 and as much as 70 feet over the next couple of centuries. Major
coastal
cities such as Miami and New York will be underwater. Droughts plague huge
swaths of the planet. Wildfires, fueled by parched forests, have been
burning out of control in Southern California, Canada and Alaska. Monster
cyclones and hurricanes, fed by warming air currents, are proliferating,
ripping apart whole cities. Massive species extinction is underway. And we
could face a planetary societal collapse due to catastrophic food shortages
within the next three decades, according to Anglia Ruskin University’s
Global Sustainability Institute. Food shortages are being driven by the
warming of the planet, an ever-burgeoning population and “widespread shifts
in consumption patterns as countries develop”—code for the growing and
unsustainable global demand for animal protein as developing countries
urbanize and income levels rise.
The blind, self-destructive exploitation that lies at the heart of
capitalism, the placing of monetary profit above the maintenance of life,
the refusal to understand and accept limits, have turned the victimizers
into the victims. Ignoring the warnings of native communities, we have
evoked the deadly wrath of nature. And I fear we may not be able to find
our
way back.
“These differences in theology, in myth and ritual, in politico-economics,
and in psychological theory produced entirely different conceptions of the
place of man in the natural world and of the divine scheme of the cosmos,”
Richard Slotkin wrote in “Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of
the American Frontier.” “To the Indian the wilderness was a god, whether
its
face at the moment was good or evil; as a god it deserved and received
worship for both its good and its evil, its beauty and its cruelty.
Similarly, all the gods and the earth itself were referred to as members of
one’s own immediate family, as close blood relations. For the Puritan the
problem of religion was to winnow the wheat from the chaff, the good from
evil, and to preserve the former and extirpate the latter. The evil was of
the world, of nature; the good was transcendent and supernatural. Hence it
was quite appropriate to destroy the natural wilderness in the name of a
higher good—and quite inappropriate for anyone to worship, as the Indians
did, the world or the things of the world, such things being evil by
nature.”
There were a handful of Europeans and Euro-Americans who understood the
sanctity of the natural world, including the Unitarian minister Thomas
Starr
King, whose 1860 book, “The White Hills: Their Legends, Landscapes &
Poetry,” called on the reader to respect natural beauty and power and drew
on poems on nature by writers such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. King,
like
Ralph Waldo Emerson, believed that humans cut off from nature and the
plight
of the oppressed—he was a fierce abolitionist and advocate for the
poor—could not grasp the power of the divine, that morality was formed
primarily by empathy and intuition, not religious doctrine. Respect for the
natural world, he argued, connected human beings with the sacred and the
interdependence of life.
King’s book remains the best work about the White Mountains. He wrote:
The world, as the almighty has made it, is not such a world as a monk, a
mystic, a broker or a Calvinist would have made. They would have left out
the pomp of sunsets and the glory of dawns, the delicious tints and
harmonic
hues of flowers and meadows, the grace of movements, the witcheries which
moonlight works, the spiritual fascination which the gleam of stars
produces. The broker would say it is a useless waste of Heavenly chemistry;
and would have gone for the cheapest furnishings; the Calvinist that it
injures the religious faculty of man and would have robed the earth and
hung
the heavens in black and grey. But God thinks differently. His universe is
not only an algebra for mathematicians, and a sermon for theologians, but
also and equally, a poem for the taste and heart of man. And I cannot
interpret beauty in any other way than as one evidence, and a splendid
revelation, of God’s love.
I spent last week backpacking in New Hampshire’s White Mountains with my
wife and two youngest children. One night, before the moon rose to a height
that dimmed the constellations, I stood in an open meadow with one of the
children. The dark silhouettes of the peaks at the southern end of the
Presidential Range loomed with a reassuring comfort above us. He and I
searched out constellations—Orion, Ursa Major—and stars such as Polaris. We
held our fingers up to the night sky. In the space covered by just one of
our thumbnails were 100,000 galaxies. We reminded ourselves we were specks
that lived on the tip of an ever-expanding universe, the surface of a vast
and constantly inflating balloon.
“To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as
from
society,” Emerson wrote. “I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though
nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.
The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him
and
what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with
this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of
the sublime.”
We peered out to where the supermassive black hole at the center of our
galaxy is supposed to be, somewhere near the constellations Sagittarius and
Scorpius. This supermassive black hole has perhaps 4 million times the mass
of the sun and is 25,000 light-years from Earth. It is a place where space
and time bend until time stops, where all our equations and understanding
of
the physical universe no longer make sense, where what we perceive as
reality is overthrown. Light, trapped inside, cannot escape. No physicist
can explain the internal dynamics of a black hole. Yet it seems probable
that 13.8 billion years ago a black hole exploded and caused the universe
to
be created. At the core of a black hole, from all we can determine, lies
the
infinite or perhaps portals to other places in the universe. No one knows.
The world does not fit into the rational boxes we construct. It is beyond
our control and finally our comprehension. Human beings are not the measure
of all things. Existence is a mystery. All life is finite. All life is
fragile. The ecosystem on Earth will die. It will be slain by our failure
to
protect it, or it will succumb to the vast array of natural forces, from
colliding asteroids to exploding stars—including, one day, our sun—which
turn into supernovas and throw out high-energy radiation that have doomed
countless planets in the 100 billion galaxies beyond ours. We have lost the
capacity for reverence. We slew those who tried to warn us. Now we slay
ourselves.



http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
Evoking the Wrath of Nature
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/evoking_the_wrath_of_nature_20150809/
Posted on Aug 9, 2015
By Chris Hedges

Mount Washington in New Hampshire. (Ben Ferenchak / CC BY 2.0)
MOUNT WASHINGTON, N.H.—The wind on the peak of Mount Washington—the East
Coast’s highest point, where some of the most erratic and treacherous
weather in the world occurs—reached 60 miles an hour the day I was there
with my family. Backpackers huddled in the biting chill next to large
boulders or congregated in the lobby of a snack bar and gift shop that
extract money from the thousands of tourists who ride the cog railroad or
drive up the auto road from the base of the mountain each summer.
This strange confluence, where those who hike to the peak and those who
ride
in cars and trains meet in uneasy silence, is emblematic of the clash of
cultures that threatens to doom the planet and the human species. One group
knows and respects the power of nature, is able to feel its majesty and is
aware of our insignificance and smallness before the cosmos. The other,
enamored of the machines that obliterate distance and effort, and that
insulate us from the natural world in a technological bubble, is largely
dead to the rhythms that sustain life.
The narration given during the rail trip up the mountain is about the
technological glory of the rack-and-pinion rail line, in place since 1868.
This narrative presents the weather and steep slopes as ominous elements
that human engineers defeated. In truth, the lacerations caused by the rail
tracks and the automobile road—along with the tawdry tourist attractions on
the summit that include a small post office from which visitors can mail
picture postcards—desecrate the mountain.
The backpackers at the summit were resting, many after climbing up
Tuckerman’s Ravine, where parts of the rocky ledges are at 45 degrees, a
trek that can take five hours. Some had been hiking for days or weeks. Half
a dozen thru-hikers, instantly recognizable by their spartan backpacking
gear, motley clothing, layers of dirt and bedraggled hair, had started in
Georgia last spring at Springer Mountain. By the time they finish this fall
atop Mount Katahdin in Maine, they will have walked 2,181 miles at a pace
of
about 15 miles a day and largely cut themselves off from the outside world
for almost half a year. They and the other hikers watched the gaggle of
tourists, many of whom rushed a few steps to the official summit of Mount
Washington to get their pictures taken, buy sweatshirts at the gift shop or
eat hot dogs, chips or plastic-wrapped sandwiches in the snack bar.
Those whose lives pay homage to the sacred are considered by many in the
modern world to be eccentrics and cranks. On the other hand, those who live
disconnected from the sources of life, who neither fear nor honor nor
understand the power of nature, who place their faith in human technology
and human power, are celebrated and rewarded with power as they propel the
planet and the species toward extinction. The natural world, if we do not
radically reconfigure our relationships with each other and the ecosystem,
will soon teach us a severe lesson about unbridled hubris.
“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and
intellectualization, and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world,’

Max Weber wrote. “Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have
retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic
life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations.”
Hannah Arendt called our malaise “world alienation.” She warned that it
leads to contempt for all forms of life.
We do not have the power to make a new world. We only have the power to
destroy or preserve the world we inhabit. We will either recover the sacred
or vanish from the Earth. Those who do not respect the force of nature, who
do not intimately know and understand its power, are doomed by it. The
Native Americans got this right.
The Abenaki (pronounced OBB-uh-nan-hee and translated as “people of the
dawn”) lived for thousands of years in the shadow of what we know as Mount
Washington. The tribe called the mountain Agiochook, or “Home of the Great
Spirit,” and named the life force Manitou. The Abenaki believed that when
one violated or desecrated the natural world, Manitou unleashed destructive
fury. Within the tribe, the mountain and the rest of the natural world were
infused with spirits for good and spirits for evil. The Abenaki knew the
destructive power of hurricane-force winds, subzero temperatures, floods
and
avalanches and the inevitability of death, which could arrive without
warning. They had the capacity for awe. They did not venture above the tree
line onto the tundra and rock near the summit of Agiochook. This space was
reserved for the gods.
But the arrival of the Europeans, driven by an avarice that blinded them to
all but profit, saw in the mountain potential riches—they mistook crystals
in the rock formations for diamonds. Darby Field, an Irishman hoping these
“diamonds” would make him wealthy, climbed the summit in 1642 despite
warnings from his Indian guides, who refused to go with him. Later, farms,
homesteads and settlements sprouted. Armed Europeans—aided by the diseases
they brought, such as smallpox, tuberculosis and syphilis, as well as
alcohol—obliterated native communities. The few Abenaki who remained were
often kidnapped and enslaved domestically or sent in chains to work in the
sugar plantations of the West Indies. Land, timber, minerals, animals and
mountains—as well as human beings—had no intrinsic value to the Europeans.
Nature existed only to make money.
The Abenaki engaged in three armed rebellions—King Philip’s War, Queen
Anne’s War and later Father Râle’s War, the last named for a French Jesuit
priest, Sébastien Râle, who spent 30 years with the Abenaki. The priest was
murdered and scalped by the British militia in a nighttime raid on an
Indian
settlement along the Kennebec River in what is now southern Maine. The
attack also left 80 Indians dead, many of them women and children. The
attack was not part of a war. It was, like other raids on Indian
settlements, part of a massacre. The Massachusetts provincial assembly had
placed a 100-pound scalp bounty on Râle’s head, along with bounties for any
Abenaki scalps. By the Revolutionary War, there were fewer than 1,000
Abenaki left. They had once numbered in the tens of thousands.
The Europeans of the era ridiculed the beliefs of the American Indians,
along with their communal structures, in which everything was shared and
all
had a voice in tribal decisions. They routinely referred to them as
“savages” or “heathens.” They painted the militiamen who terrorized and
slaughtered Indian communities as military heroes and agents of Christian
civilization and progress. They scoffed at legends and beliefs like the one
that the remarkable stillness of the lake at the base of Mount Chocorua was
sacred to the Great Spirit and should not be violated by the sound of the
human voice. The Europeans did not believe that nature could seek
vengeance.
They were sure they could domesticate and control the wilderness.
Mount Chocorua is named for the great chief Chocorua, one of the last of
the
Abenakis, who was killed around 1720. He was hounded to the summit of the
mountain that now bears his name by white settlers and either shot or
pushed
off its precipice. He is reputed to have damned the Europeans before he
died, saying: “May the Great Spirit curse you when he speaks in the clouds
and his words are fire! May lightning blast your crops and wind and fire
destroy your homes.”
Chocorua’s grim curse is now reality. Greenhouse gas concentrations,
including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, continue to rise. Last
year was the hottest since we began scientifically tracking weather, and
2015 is expected to top 2014. Glaciers and ice sheets are melting at an
accelerated rate, causing the oceans to rise. Even if we stop all carbon
emissions today, some scientists say, sea levels will rise by 10 feet by
2065 and as much as 70 feet over the next couple of centuries. Major
coastal
cities such as Miami and New York will be underwater. Droughts plague huge
swaths of the planet. Wildfires, fueled by parched forests, have been
burning out of control in Southern California, Canada and Alaska. Monster
cyclones and hurricanes, fed by warming air currents, are proliferating,
ripping apart whole cities. Massive species extinction is underway. And we
could face a planetary societal collapse due to catastrophic food shortages
within the next three decades, according to Anglia Ruskin University’s
Global Sustainability Institute. Food shortages are being driven by the
warming of the planet, an ever-burgeoning population and “widespread shifts
in consumption patterns as countries develop”—code for the growing and
unsustainable global demand for animal protein as developing countries
urbanize and income levels rise.
The blind, self-destructive exploitation that lies at the heart of
capitalism, the placing of monetary profit above the maintenance of life,
the refusal to understand and accept limits, have turned the victimizers
into the victims. Ignoring the warnings of native communities, we have
evoked the deadly wrath of nature. And I fear we may not be able to find
our
way back.
“These differences in theology, in myth and ritual, in politico-economics,
and in psychological theory produced entirely different conceptions of the
place of man in the natural world and of the divine scheme of the cosmos,”
Richard Slotkin wrote in “Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of
the American Frontier.” “To the Indian the wilderness was a god, whether
its
face at the moment was good or evil; as a god it deserved and received
worship for both its good and its evil, its beauty and its cruelty.
Similarly, all the gods and the earth itself were referred to as members of
one’s own immediate family, as close blood relations. For the Puritan the
problem of religion was to winnow the wheat from the chaff, the good from
evil, and to preserve the former and extirpate the latter. The evil was of
the world, of nature; the good was transcendent and supernatural. Hence it
was quite appropriate to destroy the natural wilderness in the name of a
higher good—and quite inappropriate for anyone to worship, as the Indians
did, the world or the things of the world, such things being evil by
nature.”
There were a handful of Europeans and Euro-Americans who understood the
sanctity of the natural world, including the Unitarian minister Thomas
Starr
King, whose 1860 book, “The White Hills: Their Legends, Landscapes &
Poetry,” called on the reader to respect natural beauty and power and drew
on poems on nature by writers such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. King,
like
Ralph Waldo Emerson, believed that humans cut off from nature and the
plight
of the oppressed—he was a fierce abolitionist and advocate for the
poor—could not grasp the power of the divine, that morality was formed
primarily by empathy and intuition, not religious doctrine. Respect for the
natural world, he argued, connected human beings with the sacred and the
interdependence of life.
King’s book remains the best work about the White Mountains. He wrote:
The world, as the almighty has made it, is not such a world as a monk, a
mystic, a broker or a Calvinist would have made. They would have left out
the pomp of sunsets and the glory of dawns, the delicious tints and
harmonic
hues of flowers and meadows, the grace of movements, the witcheries which
moonlight works, the spiritual fascination which the gleam of stars
produces. The broker would say it is a useless waste of Heavenly chemistry;
and would have gone for the cheapest furnishings; the Calvinist that it
injures the religious faculty of man and would have robed the earth and
hung
the heavens in black and grey. But God thinks differently. His universe is
not only an algebra for mathematicians, and a sermon for theologians, but
also and equally, a poem for the taste and heart of man. And I cannot
interpret beauty in any other way than as one evidence, and a splendid
revelation, of God’s love.
I spent last week backpacking in New Hampshire’s White Mountains with my
wife and two youngest children. One night, before the moon rose to a height
that dimmed the constellations, I stood in an open meadow with one of the
children. The dark silhouettes of the peaks at the southern end of the
Presidential Range loomed with a reassuring comfort above us. He and I
searched out constellations—Orion, Ursa Major—and stars such as Polaris. We
held our fingers up to the night sky. In the space covered by just one of
our thumbnails were 100,000 galaxies. We reminded ourselves we were specks
that lived on the tip of an ever-expanding universe, the surface of a vast
and constantly inflating balloon.
“To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as
from
society,” Emerson wrote. “I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though
nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.
The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him
and
what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with
this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of
the sublime.”
We peered out to where the supermassive black hole at the center of our
galaxy is supposed to be, somewhere near the constellations Sagittarius and
Scorpius. This supermassive black hole has perhaps 4 million times the mass
of the sun and is 25,000 light-years from Earth. It is a place where space
and time bend until time stops, where all our equations and understanding
of
the physical universe no longer make sense, where what we perceive as
reality is overthrown. Light, trapped inside, cannot escape. No physicist
can explain the internal dynamics of a black hole. Yet it seems probable
that 13.8 billion years ago a black hole exploded and caused the universe
to
be created. At the core of a black hole, from all we can determine, lies
the
infinite or perhaps portals to other places in the universe. No one knows.
The world does not fit into the rational boxes we construct. It is beyond
our control and finally our comprehension. Human beings are not the measure
of all things. Existence is a mystery. All life is finite. All life is
fragile. The ecosystem on Earth will die. It will be slain by our failure
to
protect it, or it will succumb to the vast array of natural forces, from
colliding asteroids to exploding stars—including, one day, our sun—which
turn into supernovas and throw out high-energy radiation that have doomed
countless planets in the 100 billion galaxies beyond ours. We have lost the
capacity for reverence. We slew those who tried to warn us. Now we slay
ourselves.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/evoking_the_wrath_of_nature_20150809/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/evoking_the_wrath_of_nature_20150809/
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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/one_year_on_what_weve_learned_from_black
livesmatter_20150809/
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