Trivia I Wanted to Know

"Lenticchie"

For those of us who need help with our eyesight in old age, we have two Italians from Pisa to thank for the invention of spectacles sometime in the 1280s. Although there is no definitive answer, it is believed that the two were Alessandro Spina and Salvino Armato, glass blowers. The lenses were convex, helping only farsighted individuals. It would be more than 100 years before concave lenses would be ground to help nearsighted people.In the mid-forteen century, Italians called these glasses, "lenticchie" or glass lentils because they resembled the legume "lentil." So "lentil" is the origin of the word "lens."
Cardinal Giovanni de Medici bought several pairs of concave-lens eyeglasses to correct his nearsightedness. When he became Pope, he hired Raphael to paint his portrait. It is the first depiction of a person wearing concave corrective lenses.

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Denis Papin steam digester
Photo: Wikipedia

The pressure cooker was invented by a Frenchman, Denis Papin, a pioneer of steam power. He called his invention the "steam digester." As an assistant to the Irish physicist Robert Boyle, formulator of the the laws governing gases, Papin had developed his steam digester in 1679. It was a metal container with a safety valve and tightly fitting lid, which increased internal steam pressure, raising a cooking liquid's boiling point. He cooked the first meal in his contraption for a London dinner party of the members of the Royal Society.






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Miracle plastics in the order in which they were developed: cellophane, acetate, vinyl, plexiglas, acrylics, melmac, styrene, formica, polyester, nylon, and polyethylene (a synthetic polymer, one of the most important household plastics as in Tupperware). (1912-1942)

Great Pacific Garbage Gyre (Patches of rotating trash)

Mostly plastics, chemical sludge, and other debris

Photo: Wikipedia

 

Unfortunately, today we are drowning the ocean's creatures in tons of plastics which float at the top or under the water, endangering and strangling marine life. Satellite images of major rivers emptying into oceans show an alarming sea of trash and plastics that grow each day; these plastics and trash should have been recycled or captured and burned to generate energy, not dumped into rivers. Lakes are equally abused, especially in third world countries.

Oceans, Climate Change Hysteria, and More Wealth Redistribution

Wikipedia photo

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) held a “side event” on June 6, 2017 during the “first-ever” United Nations Ocean Conference. This side event’s topic was “Ocean Health, Climate Change and Migration: Understanding the Nexus and Implications for People on the Move.”

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Permanent Mission of Madagascar and Ecuador partnered with IOM to promote the implementation of Sustainable Development, Goal #14 of U.N.’s Agenda 2030, “to conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.” https://www.iom.int/news/iom-highlights-ocean-health-climate-change-migration-inaugural-un-ocean-conference

The idea of all these U.N. sponsored conferences around the globe is that, if the United Nations is in control and is the ultimate decision-maker, all the goals of the Agenda 2030 can be easily implemented and the wealth redistributed to all third world nations while protecting Mother Earth from hysterical Armageddon.

The Permanent Mission of Fiji noted that “the ocean is part of everyday life in Fiji – they are not only linked to livelihoods but are also an integral part of our cultural heritage.”

The event was moderated by Rosiland Jordan, U.N. Correspondent for Al Jazeera, and the audience was composed of “member state representatives, civil society, academics, scientists, journalists, and NGOs.”

Presentations were made by John Tanzer (WWF), Jean Randriannatenaina (Regional Maritime Information Fusion Center, Madagascar), Francoise Gail (Scientific Advisor, Ocean and Climate Platform), and Mariam Chazalnoel (IOM) on “direct consequences that climate change-related modification to the global ocean have on island and coastal populations as the environment, economy and livelihoods of many of these communities depend on oceans” and examples were given of changes that influence the “migration patterns of affected communities as well as the daily lives of communities receiving migrants.”

Ashraf El Nour, Director to the IOM Office of the U.N., discussed displacement of communities and the impact on human settlements located near or who depend on the world’s oceans for their survival. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, 24.2 million people were displaced in 2016 due to natural disasters in the world, mainly floods and storms, clearly weather events, claiming that “many of them were made worse by the climate change impacts in oceans’ coastal areas.”

We do know that such claims of global warming/anthropogenic climate change effects are false and were debunked by scientific data, many studies that contradict U.N.’s IPCC computer modeling and fear-mongering.

This IOM side-event also noted that “slow environmental degradation in coastal areas, such as sea level rise or coastal erosion, are also expected to have long-term impact on migration, as people move preemptively to find alternative livelihoods or are forced to relocate inland.”

The topics discussed were specifically chosen to harmonize with the Partnership Dialogues of the Ocean Conference which must support Agenda 2030’s Goal 14:

-          Managing, protecting and conserving marine and coastal ecosystems (PD2)

-          Ocean acidification (PD 3)

-          Making fisheries sustainable (PD 4)

-          Increasing economic benefits to small islands developing states and least developed countries (PD 5) – more wealth redistribution schemes

There are many stakeholders in this environmental fearmongering. Additionally, the Ocean Conference was promoted as an opportunity to push migration and oceans in preparation for the COP23 climate change/fossil fuels negotiations in Bonn, Germany, in November 2017.

Instead of vilifying the gas of plant life, carbon dioxide (CO2), the discussion should have focused on the garbage pollution of the world’s oceans by the top eight countries in Asia, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, and Bangladesh.

Millions of tons of plastic trash float into the world’s oceans yearly. A 2015 study published in the Science journal found that “Population size and the quality of waste management systems largely determine which countries contribute the greatest mass of uncaptured waste available to become plastic marine debris. Without waste management infrastructure improvements, the cumulative quantity of plastic waste available to enter the ocean from land is predicted to increase by an order of magnitude by 2025. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6223/768

China, for example, with its heavily coastal population, dumps approximately 1.3 million to 3.5 million metric tons of plastic into the oceans per year, mostly because of its mismanaged waste. According to the study, if the top 20 countries would cut their mismanaged waste by half, the mass of floating plastic would drop by 41 percent.

Sea mammals, fish, and even smaller invertebrates can gulp pieces of plastic or become entangled in fishing nets or plastic debris. Eventually some of the broken plastic trash sinks to the bottom.

“Quantifying the precise amount that ultimately washes out to sea is problematic, though, since there is a dearth of reliable data.”

“Few of the top contributing countries have adequate infrastructure for handling trash disposal, the study authors noted. Even with a well-developed infrastructure to handle solid waste, the U.S. contributed 40,000 to 110,000 metric tons per year, and ranked 20th, they found.” http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-tons-of-plastic-trash-in-oceans-20150213-story.html

 

Our Disposable Society

Photo: Ileana Johnson

In our throwaway society, where nothing is sacred anymore and is discarded with the speed of an unwanted darkening banana peel or a lit cigarette butt out the window of a moving car, the miser in me keeps coming out periodically.

Animals, love, life, family, relationships, marriages, appliances, trash, things recyclable, valuables, and trash are thrown out or disposed of mostly on purpose with no remorse and with a faster speed than you can say “I do.”

I sheepishly admit that I was washing Styrofoam containers and plastic forks from McDonald’s back in 1978. Why throw away perfectly reusable items, I thought, when I just landed from the land of poverty, misery, and long lines for food? We had rusty flatware on our table and chipped mismatched plates. My Grandpa used to wash her plates in a little tub of hot water boiled on the gas stove. And sometimes they still had dried food stuck to them from the previous meal. I tried to scrape it off and wipe it with a towel when she was not watching. I could not afford to be choosy or hurt her feelings.

My husband at the time made fun of my miser side because he could not possibly understand even though he visited my childhood home. No matter how many times he took me to the grocery store to see the laden shelves of abundance, my miser inner self could not comprehend so much food and I was certain, it would be gone the next day.

To this day, I wonder when we might have to be without food, water, and electricity, or things that everyone takes for granted, like toilet paper and vitamins. So I used to go from room to room and turn the lights off that my husband had left on and I still do today. Why waste energy? What if we had to be in the dark again like we were often under the socialist/communist regime that planned enough for them while the rest of us had to struggle hungry, cold, and in the dark after sunset?

I recycle today every piece of paper, plastic, glass, and aluminum that crosses my kitchen and my pantry. I even cut the plastic circles that hold bottles in place for fear that some wild animal might get stuck in them if the plastic winds up in a dumpster.

It pains me greatly and I do not understand how someone can throw a live human being or puppy tied in a garbage bag on the side of a deserted road, miles and miles away from a city, and leaves them there like trash, to suffocate and die? Isn’t the way we treat our helpless, animals, children, and old people, an indication of how civilized our society is?

We discard aborted fetuses, humans who are perfect and want to live because progressive society views that as a “choice.” We dump the elderly in nursing homes and seldom visit them. We depend on strangers to be good to them. We visit at holidays out of sheer guilt. There’s an influx of visitors at the nursing home around holidays, I suppose they don’t want to be left out of grandma or grandpa’s will.

We dispose of marriage quicker than we planned the lavish weddings – we get divorced at the drop of a hat. Nobody tries hard to get along anymore; everyone seeks instant gratification and personal happiness. If you ask, nobody is able to give a cohesive definition of what that personal happiness is. But rest assured, it revolves around the “me, myself, and I.”

The “selfish-me generation” throws away everything that is old, including their country, their citizenship, their culture, and their Constitution. Anything they do not understand but has been drilled into their heads by socialist teachers as evil must be discarded. If it is repeated enough times, it becomes their “social justice and equality” playbook.

We discard and abandon children to foster care like a used-up toy because we are too busy or too unable to care for our own offspring.

We euthanize those among us we do not wish to bother with anymore, and we abort the result of loveless hookups because nobody wants to be inconvenienced by a human breathing inside them.

We dump our friends on a whim – they just don’t share the same politics and ideology of the moment and are therefore no good. People we disagree with are suddenly poisonous snakes.

Yet grown Americans keep that one collegiate t-shirt from years ago, with holes everywhere, or that ratty disintegrating blanket one used to drag around for comfort as a toddler, or a favorite dog’s or cat’s toy. Those are holy objects that cannot be thrown away.

We keep that first car, often on cinder blocks, rusted out, and covered with weeds, spiders, and cobwebs. Sometimes rabbits, coons, and the occasional rattlesnake make their nests inside.

We keep that old moldy dresser that belonged to great-grandma because it’s an antique and it might be really valuable someday and fetch a big penny at auction.

We could feed an entire small country daily with the amount of food thrown away in locked dumpsters around the country, perhaps composted, incinerated, or buried later in the landfill.

Beautiful books of wisdom are recycled or buried all the time, in the drive to become a paperless society and to save the trees and the planet from progressive Armageddon. Who has time to read and learn something useful when there is the Internet?

Electronics are discarded as well, perhaps recycled and some buried in the city landfill. Valuable metals, plastics, and glass tubes get buried with them as well.

We throwaway a perfectly running TV that nobody wants in order to make room for a flat screen and top of the line smart TV, so smart, it can report anything you do to the mother ship.

And nobody has landline rotary dial or key punch phones anymore. They worked even when power went out. Those are dinosaurs, thrown away long time ago with the trash, not even recycled. They are buried somewhere in the city dump. When the smart grid goes out and it will eventually do, nobody will have a phone to communicate and answer that 3 a.m. call.

This disposable society mirrors the trashing of our culture in general, of our borders, our language, and our national identity. “We went through darkness so you can find the light." Why are you extinguishing it?