Why did the twentieth century produce so many—and such vivid—dystopias, works of fiction depicting not an ideal future but a future as terrible as could be imagined?
“After all, never had material progress been greater; never should man have felt himself freer of the anxieties that, with good reason, had beset him in the past. Famine had all but disappeared, except in civil wars or where regimes deliberately engineered it; and for the first time in history, the biblical span—or longer—was a reasonable hope for many. Medicine had conquered the dread infectious diseases that once cut swathes through entire populations. Not to enjoy luxuries that Louis XIV couldn’t have imagined now was evidence of intolerable poverty.
“Yet even as technology liberated us from want (though not, of course, from desire), political schemes of secular salvation—communism and Nazism—unleashed a barbarism that, if not unique in its ferocity, was certainly so in the determination, efficiency, and thoroughness with which it was practiced. The attempts to put utopian ideals into practice invariably resulted in the effort to eliminate whole classes or races of people. Many, especially intellectuals, came to regard the utopian condition, in which earth is fair and all men glad and wise, as man’s natural state; only the existence of ill-intentioned classes or races could explain the fall from grace. Where hopes are unrealistic, fears often become exaggerated; where dreams alone are blueprints, nightmares result. — Theodore Dalrymple, “The Dystopian Imagination”
Bidi-Bidi: a city of refugees the size of Blagoveshchensk Bidi Bidi was established in 2016, shortly after the outbreak of civil war in South Sudan, which borders Uganda. In 2017, 270 thousand refugees already lived here, almost all of them are representatives of various South Sudanese peoples. By 2019, the number of inhabitants of the settlement dropped to 225-228 thousand, but this, of course, is impressive. In terms of population, Bidi-Bidi is comparable to Veliky Novgorod, Korolev, Engels or Blagoveshchensk, in area (100 sq. miles.) – to Orenburg or Bratsk. This is not a camp in the usual sense, when an endless number of tents are closely spaced across the field and all this is surrounded by a fence. This is exactly the settlement. Instead of tents, there are clay houses with thatched roofs, which people build for themselves. There is no fence – people here are free to leave their homes, work and move freely around the country.
There is an ebonics version of sign language.
I submit that people really are born differently.https://t.co/SJUNQOqvf9— HappyAcres (@HappyHectares) January 23, 2021
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“Petals produce a blue halo that helps bees find flowers.” — Nature knows only order and order is Holy. https://t.co/e7Kwi8585P pic.twitter.com/hQhRgg6blr
— Wrath Of Gnon (@wrathofgnon) October 19, 2017
The Fried Egg Jellyfish -aka Phacellophora camtschatica, commonly known as the fried egg jellyfish or egg-yolk jellyfish, is a very large jellyfish in the family Ulmaridae. It has a bell up to 60 cm (2 ft) in diameter and 16 clusters of up to a few dozen tentacles, each up to 6 m (20 ft) long.
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Archaeologists Just Discovered Tens of Thousands of Ultra-Realistic Ancient Rock Paintings in the Colombian Amazon The pre-Columbian rock art at Cerro Azul in Guaviare state, Colombia dates back around 12,000 years
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FirstSounds.ORG Au Clair de la Lune – By the Light of the Moon (April 9, 1860) [#36] Scott recorded the French folksong “Au Clair de la Lune” on April 9, 1860, and deposited the results with the Académie des Sciences in 1861. It remains the earliest clearly recognizable record of the human voice yet recovered. The words have been a matter of controversy, but the latest playback unveiled in May 2010 establishes them as “Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot, prête moi “, rather than “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit,” as originally announced. The latest work also reveals that Scott had allowed the cylinder to slow down –possibly to a complete stop –between the words Pierrot and prête, perhaps indicating a pause to check how much unrecorded space was left on the sheet.
Origins of Sound Recording: Edouard-Lon Scott de Martinville – I cover a plate of glass with an exceedingly thin stratum of lampblack. Above I fix an acoustic trumpet with a membrane the diameter of a five franc coin at its small end—the physiological tympanum (eardrum). At its center I affix a stylus—a boar’s bristle a centimeter or more in length, fine but suitably rigid. I carefully adjust the trumpet so the stylus barely grazes the lampblack. Then, as the glass plate slides horizontally in a well formed groove at a speed of one meter per second, one speaks in the vicinity of the trumpet’s opening, causing the membranes to vibrate and the stylus to trace figures.

Fenn’s treasure is in an ornate, Romanesque box that might be filled with gold nuggets, gold coins and other gems.
A Statement on the Disclosure of My Identity | by Jack Stuef I do not see myself as being better than anyone else who searched for Fenn’s treasure because I found it. I do not think more or less of anyone based on how close they were to its location, and I don’t think anyone else should either. This treasure hunt was not a referendum on anyone’s intelligence or abilities. Rather, it was a fun challenge based on figuring out what the words of a poem meant to the elderly man who wrote them, and nothing more than that.
San Francisco has an “Office of Cannabis” (I kid you not) with an “Equity Division” (I kid you not) to favor blacks for pot store licenses.
Karim got extra points for a drug conviction and for having a criminal brother killed by the police.https://t.co/5Y7Ce3F7ZK
— HappyAcres (@HappyHectares) January 23, 2021
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Looks like the rock painting was a second draft.
“Idiot! It’s i before e except after c…..”
Nice, Lance!
Gerard, After a quick scan of the offerings today I must, once again, give high praise for the Greatest Show On Earth’s Interwebs and beyond. American Digest covers the entire universe and there is smoky nothing like it anywhere! Amazing.
“smoky nothing”?! WTF kind of spellcheck was that?
simply **. not smoky.
12 yrs ago, I almost took a contract in South Sudan, big big money. Luckily I had to have a hip removed replaced, while healing. My old associate called me,,said he his gurka’s were on the run, don’t bother coming over.
I laughed until I clearly heard the automatic gunfire in the background. Seems the brothers from North Sudan were very unhappy with his meddling , well his company in their bid-ness. Tony eventually made it home, not so for some of his, beloved gurka’s.
But for the grace of God.
Bidi Bidi, returned this memory, can’t seem to locate what it was, in my minds eye. Age!
DW
Dalrymple was a psychiatrist employed in the UK prison system, and interviewed thousands of inmates. he said there was always a point in the interviews where the inmate would say something to the effect, “and then I began to associate with the wrong kind of people.” Dalrymple followed with, “I never heard an inmate describe himself as ‘the wrong kind of person’.”
Wow, black sign language. I wonder if a deaf person who is proficient in signing will be able to understand what some black goof will have to say with black signing any better than those of us who can hear are able to understand anything they have to say audibly?
And there may be a problem of getting the new black communication signing skills mixed up with throwing gang signs. Whatever, it will still look like an all black rheumatoid arthritis convention and be just about as informative except people will get shot.
I wonder how you’ll say: Whatitisfmuthafucka? in black sign language.
That confirms nearly everything I’ve already surmised about
pantyToastSniffer.Those ancient rock paintings are pretty darn cool.
But “ultra-realistic” is a bit of a stretch.
JWM
Looks like one of the Russian Barbies is testing out Flick’s triple dog dare scenario, except with PVC.
Loved the song, Gerard, and the obituary written by
Jack Steuf about Forrest Fenn. Thank you so much and
God bless