Anand

@calmerfuture.bsky.social

1488 Followers 1906 Following

calmerfuture.org dreaming of practical better futures @dosima_org on the other place

millet flour rotis I made last night, 8-12% protein apparently but mostly just delicious, and an incredibly small environmental footprint
The urgent question Das must now grapple with is whether a national strategy changing how these beloved gardens look can be married with the individual and historical aesthetic of each, and whether she can bring the harshest critics of one of the country’s biggest landowners along for the ride. “I don’t understand why everybody loves to bash the National Trust,” says Das. “All I have come across is really passionate, committed people who want to help people and planet.”
a bottle of South African Monkey Gland Sauce
a large indoor sandy beach within a shopping centre
an alien spacesuit in an overhead window next to a large banner saying 'National Film and Sci-Fi Museum, I feel like I took a wrong turn somewhere
two good dogs on a colourful carpet look up
Wings of Desire movie still picture, showing an angel with huge wings looking down from a high building
Mary Robinette Kowal the human and Elsie the cat make eye contact while sitting on the floor with their button boards and my microphone.
Concepts and Prototypes : British Leyland SRV5 (1974) - AROnline a very wedge shaped vehicle
We were acutely sensitive to human feelings and needs—indeed, the New Left might be called, to its credit, a politics of sensitivity—and we understood how American institutions trampled on these feelings and needs. But although we knew what things needed to be stopped, and how to stop them, we had no idea how to start things. We had very little capacity to even imagine, let alone plan and organise and build, structures that could put our sensitivity into effect.
Even while invoking Marx, with his at times substantial awe for the very bourgeoisie whose destruction he ardently criticised, Berman makes clear where he stood. Moses, he writes, was like a colonial official: an apt simile for a British-educated elite who sat at the helm of New York’s imperial 1964 World’s Fair. But Berman nonetheless had the humility to acknowledge—and here it is hard to disagree—that “what made Robert Moses so special was the largeness of his visions and ideas, his intellectual and organizational power to grasp the whole.” Against this he chided his fellow New Leftists, with their “strange slogan THINK SMALL”. “Between our visions and our plans fell a very large shadow.”
Yet something tells me that continuities may persist even then. Political cultures stick around. Stalin’s exit did not erase Stalinism. Its elements persist even in contemporary Russia, endlessly recycled to serve the needs of the current regime. Smith might object that what’s left of Stalinism today is no longer “progressive.” Like the Nazis, Putin’s Russia arguably “looks to the deepest reaches of the past for inspiration.” And yet it incessantly regurgitates Soviet cultural norms so that even the Russian youngsters who never experienced the USSR seem to have developed a nostalgia for that alien, or perhaps not so alien, planet where people squatted upon greeting one another and said: “ku.”
Hot air balloons have a fairly serious technical limitation, however: to wit, you can’t actually steer the bloody things, merely move up and down to access air currents moving in different directions. That imposes a fairly strict limit on their usefulness. So those who took the technology forward in the 19th century were concerned mainly with trying to make an airship you could control, rather than merely bob about in. In 1852, a Frenchman, Henri Giffard, created what he called a ballon dirigeable – a “steerable balloon”, with a ship hanging beneath it equipped with rudder, steam engine, and exhaust pointed downwards to minimise the risk of it igniting the big bag of hydrogen supporting its flight. The craft successfully flew 17 miles west from the Arc De Triomphe; alas it lacked the power to fly against the wind and come back.
imposing dour looking Temperance Hall in Newbury (opposite a handy pub)
gentle floppy white labradoodledragon looks at a boy screen from Neverending Story
brat on a lime green background
a long ladder hanging in a storage space with a cartilaginous protruding fin
Yuen Yuen Ang of Johns Hopkins University drew a sharper conclusion. The “polycrisis,” she argued, is paralysing only for those attached to the old order. No society has ever escaped poverty through aid or randomised controlled trials. The era of aid dependence is ending, and the spread of universal institutions has ground to a halt. For the global majority, which has never been the producer of the dominant development paradigm, this represents what she calls a “polytunity”: an opening to redefine development itself, away from assimilation and mimicry and toward what she terms an adaptive, inclusive, and moral political economy.
two small dark weevils in a hairy plant flower, I assume enjoying a piggy back ride
Arabic calligraphy of a line from the poetry of Muhyi al-Din Abu Bakr ibn Muhammad ibn al-'Arabi. The word 'al-hubb' ('love') is isolated and enlarged in blue pigment. The entire verse is at the bottom of the painting in red in kufic script. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_2005-0715-0-2
“That,” replied Hardin, “is the interesting thing. The analysis was the most difficult of the three by all odds. When Houk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications—in short all the goo and dribble—he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out. Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn't say one damned thing, and said it so that you never noticed. There are the assurances you had from your precious Empire.” from Isaac Asimov's Foundation
“When I started guiding in this area, we were successful with newborns. We were not having these problems,” he says. Gawiseb says elephants are now frequently surrounded by tourist vehicles. “There are always cars around them and the viewing distance is very close. They have no privacy,” he says. He also expresses concern about the growth of tourism infrastructure and off-road driving in elephant habitats. “There are too many lodges and camps in the area, which means too many vehicles. Off-road driving has also damaged the area. The guides don’t worry about the sensitivity of the soil,” he says.
‘I’m afraid this country needs a bloody good kick up the arse,’ said Paul Thompson. Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian a man sits on a mobility scooter looking into the camera, in front of a road with a seaside fun park with a big wheel in the distance
map of the Northern Line
Strawberry Angel Delight mix package
Harry Kane looking worried
Winston Churchill looking very globular, with a raised eyebrow
Bruce Lee airborne mid flying kick
old map showing the original isolated islands of Mumbai
Mark Francois stands in a group of Marines looking more tadpole than Penfold
The Land Of Giants Icelandic power transmission pylons shaped like giant people