most people know the theory as
"the Butterfly effect"
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.
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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.
The Rose
God, in spite of the skeptics,
caused spiritual gardens with sweet flowers to grow
in the hearts of His friends.
Every rose that is sweet-scented within,
that rose is telling of the secrets of the Universal.
Their scent, to the confusion of the skeptics,
spreads around the world, rending the veil."
--Rumi
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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.
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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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Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/12/19/3149584/castros-plan-to-reduce-cubas-population.html#storylink=cpy
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