In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions, where a small change at one place in a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences to a later state. The name of the effect, coined by Edward Lorenz, is derived from the theoretical example of a hurricane's formation being contingent on whether or not a distant butterfly had flapped its wings several weeks before.---------------------------------------
Princess Lilian, the divorced commoner loved by a Swedish prince, has died.
Unlike "Mrs. Simpson", they put duty before their own desires, and didn't marry until many years after they fell in love.
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Because not everything is war and politics: Environmental activist awards in Iran.
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How Pope Alexander saved...Islam?
When the Mongols threatened Egypt, the leader refused to budge. But it was the Pope who urged the Crusader Kingdoms in the Levant to oppose the Mongols.
the French king Louis IX's envoy to the Mongols, William of Rubruck, returned from Mongolia with a complete report on the invaders. After reading it Pope Alexander IV sent word throughout Christendom. The Mongols were pagan, brutal savages who were not to be trusted he declared. Anyone making an alliance with them would be excommunicated. The matter of a Mongol alliance was settled for the Latin Christians.Article about the Battle of Ain Jalut here.
rule: In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man...
The havoc the Mongols wrought was not limited merely to the cities and townspeople. The complex irrigation systems of places like Khurasan (north of Persia), Persia itself, and Iraq (Mesopotamia) -- the product of up to 5,000 years of collective efforts that turned desert and grassland into probably the most productive agricultural lands on earth -- sustained extensive damage. In many places the irrigated area has still not returned to pre-Mongol level. Aerial photography, indicates that Iraq today probably irrigates and farms no more than 60% of the agricultural land in use under the Abbasid caliphs ca. 800.of course, the French were the big force behind the idea that Europe should have allied with the Mongols...
and modern "Greens" call him the greatest eco warrior, because
The Mongol invasion scrubbed nearly 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere, according to surprising new research....
Over the course of the century and a half run of the Mongol Empire, about 22 percent of the world's total land area had been conquered and an estimated 40 million people were slaughtered by the horse-driven, bow-wielding hordes. Delpopulation over such a large swathe of land meant that countless numbers of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests.
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ah, but making people poor continues to be an admirable action in today's world:
PBS heart poverty and human misery: Cuba the Accidental Eden.
While many islands in the Caribbean have poisoned or paved over their ecological riches on land and in the sea in pursuit of a growing tourist industry, Cuba’s wild landscapes have remained virtually untouched, creating a safe haven for rare and intriguing indigenous animals, as well as for hundreds of species of migrating birds and marine creatures. Coral reefs have benefited, too. Independent research has shown that Cuba’s corals are doing much better than others both in the Caribbean and around the world.and the UN and greens love the fact that Cuba is depopulating from a low birth rate...
The Miami Herald explains it this way:
-----------------------------------------Cuba, which had a net population loss of 83,991 this year, is about to lose more residents starting next month. Most of them will end up living in South Florida.
Cuba now has 11,163,934 inhabitants; at the end of 2011, it had 11,247,925.
The two main reasons for the decrease are that fewer people want to give birth to babies on an impoverished island that has no prospect of improvement, and that some 38,000 Cubans on average have been moving out of the island each year.
California's descent into serfdom?
Well, the takeover of small family farms by corporations in the Midwest is nothing new, but the rise of the government elites, the collapse of the middle class, the collapse of the infrastructure, and the failure to keep ordinary families safe is a new phenomenon...
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Belmont Club compares President Obama's backing of the Muslim Brotherhood with those in the UK who though it would be more pragmatic to back the Confederacy than Lincoln.
Sounds familiar...There were a lot of folks back in the 1960's and 1970's who were pragmatic about living with communism, including a lot of folks in the Vatican.
Luckily for the world, the cowboy, the actor, and the grocer's daughter thought differently...
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Payback's a bitch story of the day.
Some guy who thinks he is the sultan of Sulu invaded Borneo,, to the annoyance of both PNoy and the Malaysians.
But now it seems he is being joined by the MNLF filghers who Malaysia once trained to fight against the Philippine government, and who are now fighting the Malaysian gov't...using weapons sent from Omar Khadaffy...
Note: The area would be great for ecotourism, if they could get these bozos to stop fighting everyone in sight (each other, other clans, the government etc)...
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China's farm land pollution...deforestation, arsenic in the soil from unregulated mining.
and an article on trying to restore the Loess plateau, where bad farming practices centuries ago destroyed the land's productivity, and the soil blew away.
Heh...sounds like the Oklahoma dust bowl of the 1930's...
Wikipedia article here discusses the area, including the restoration project.
Side note: cave houses are not just for hobbits: 40 million people in this area livein Yaodong, earth sheltered or cave dug homes, including Mao and his army during WWII...
The bad news? Many thousands of people died in collapsed yaodongs in the 1556 Shaanxi earthquake.
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