The English writer Rose Macaulay published What Not: A Prophetic Comedy in 1918. What Not depicts a dystopian future where people are ranked by intelligence, the government mandates mind training for all citizens, and procreation is regulated by the state. Macaulay and Huxley shared the same literary circles and he attended her weekly literary salons.
George Orwell believed that Brave New World must have been partly derived from the novel We by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin. However, in a 1962 letter to Christopher Collins, Huxley says that he wrote Brave New World long before he had heard of We. According to We translator Natasha Randall, Orwell believed that Huxley was lying. Kurt Vonnegut said that in writing Player Piano (1952), he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We".
Ursula von der Leyen loves cameras, and excels in the art of storytelling - and that's what we should expect for her. She delivers her speech in three languages with equal ease. She presents herself as a European, who was born and raised in Brussels: "I was born in Brussels as a European, finding out only later that I am German with roots in Lower Saxony. And that is why there is only one option for me: to unite and strengthen Europe."
there are probably not many leading European politicians who have experienced Europe, in such a way that this daughter of a senior European civil servant who studied at the London School of Economics did. Nor are there many who have an equivalent international experience, since she lived four years in California from 1992 to 1996. Expatriates know that it is only by leaving Europe that we begin to understand how much it exists. "The world is calling for more Europe. The world needs more Europe.": this is a woman who knows what she is talking about.
Indeed, pro-Russian media have said the leaders of the Azov Battalion are yet to surrender.
This controversial unit of the Ukrainian armed forces is a bête noir of the Russians, featuring prominently in Kremlin propaganda. Russia accuses them of being Nazis, something Ukraine has always denied.
Meanwhile, some Russian law makers have said they should be treated as war criminals rather than prisoners of war. Vyacheslav Volodin, the Speaker of the Duma, Russia’s Parliament, said "Nazi criminals should not be exchanged".
Azov Battalion is reportedly a unit of the NGU, backed by Ukraine's Ministry of Internal Affairs. Despite its possible official background in Ukraine, Azov Battalion is known in the West for its extreme neo-Nazi stance, and for its suspected involvement in a number of terrorist attacks and separatist incitement incidents in various countries and regions, including the riots in China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in 2019.
Ironically, despite being widely regarded as a threat to world security and an enemy of human civilization, Azov Battalion was found to have ties not only with the Ukraine authorities but also with the US.
One can condemn Putin’s actions and even cheer on Ukraine’s military resistance without fostering a false image of Ukraine’s political system. The country is not a symbol of freedom and liberal democracy, and the war is not an existential struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. At best, Ukraine is a corrupt, quasi-democratic entity with troubling repressive policies.
Given that sobering reality, calls for Americans to “stand with Ukraine” are misplaced. Preserving Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity most certainly are not worth the United States risking war with a nuclear-armed Russia. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/whitewashing-ukraines-corruption/
A challenge to God is likely to be punished. However I suspect there may be dare-devils who will put their life at risk by drinking Atomik.
A company that produces Atomik - a vodka made in Chernobyl's exclusion zone - is releasing two more premium drinks and donating profits to Ukraine's refugees.
The move comes as Russian troops occupy the land where the fruit is grown and harvested to make the drinks.
Scientists who set up the Atomik project have studied crops grown in the Chernobyl exclusion zone for 30 years.
Their work has enabled people living on contaminated land to distil slightly radioactive fruit down to a spirit that is no more radioactive than any other.
Linguists try to steer away from Default thinking unlike other people.
Default thinking is technically the way to describe immediately telling someone something that came to mind first.
If you don't mean to be critical of your advice you could call it "commonsense" or "intuitive"; if you do mean to criticize it, you could characterize it as being offered "on autopilot." –
Confronting Your Default Thinking
For many years we have known that the brain is a great pattern maker. In fact, the only way for it to process all the data it receives is to drop information into pre-prepared pathways or patterns. It needs a ‘default’ method for processing information to cope. Our best guess is that the brain handles around 11 million bits of data per second and that we are capable of consciously processing only around 50 of these. Our default processes handle the rest. This can be regarded as our default thinking, even though most of it happens unconsciously.
The implications of the first sentence covers a manipulation aimed at putting pressure on Ukraine: 1) Ukraine is stupid not to attack "a sitting duck". 2) Russians are stupid to turn their convoys into sitting ducks.
Everyone is baffled as to why Ukraine has not done more to attack the Russian convoy as it is a sitting duck for drone and airstrikes.
There are several possible explanations, Ukraine may be running out of armed drones and its small, outnumbered air force may be wary of being shot down by Russian air defence batteries.
Ben Barry from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) suggests the Ukrainians may well be safeguarding what resources they do have in readiness to counter-attack when the Russians get closer to Kyiv.
With more than 200 million speakers, Swahili, which originated in East Africa, is one of the world's 10 most widely spoken languages and, as Priya Sippy writes, there is a renewed push for it to become the continent's lingua franca.
"It's high time we move from the coloniser's language."
This is not part of a rousing speech by a pan-African idealist but rather the sentence is uttered quietly and calmly by Ghanaian Swahili student Annabel Naa Odarley Lankai.
But her words echo declarations by the continent's visionaries down the decades.
Africa should "have something that is of us and for us", the 23-year-old adds.
In its heartland, Swahili and its dialects stretch from parts of Somalia down to Mozambique and across to the western parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But Ms Lankai's classroom at the University of Ghana in the capital, Accra, is some 4,500km (2,800 miles) west of Swahili's birthplace - coastal Kenya and Tanzania.
Bombogenesis - meteorology
: rapid intensification of a storm caused by a sudden and significant drop in atmospheric pressure: the development or intensification of a bomb cyclone
A cyclone is a low pressure system and a bombogenesis occurs when a storm intensifies, rapidly losing 24 millibars of pressure in 24 hours.— David Epstein
First Known Use of bombogenesis
1989, in the meaning defined above
History and Etymology for bombogenesis
BOMB ENTRY 1 (in BOMB CYCLONE) + -O- + GENESIS
Biden wrapped up a marathon news conference, in which he said Russia would be held “accountable” for invading — though he added that the U.S. response would depend on the nature of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions. National Security Council spokesperson Emily Horne took to Twitter during the news conference to clarify that Biden was talking about the difference between “military and non-military/para-military/cyber action by the Russians.”
“Russia will be held accountable if it invades, and it depends on what it does,” Biden said, when asked how he would hold Russia accountable for an invasion.
“It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion, and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do, et cetera. But if they actually do what they’re capable of doing with the force amassed on the border, it is going to be a disaster for Russia.”
