>Oprah….(?)
The new Oprah movie about Henrietta Lacks reopens a big scientific debate
Your cells may be used in research without you knowing. That may be good for science — but how do you feel?
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/4/21/15275514/oprah-henrietta-lacks-hbo-consent-biospecimens
-(Watch the Water)
Recently I happened to pick up an old book, and reread it, by Carl Schmidt: Land and Sea. In this essay, Carl Schmitt starts a reflection on the geographical, historical and legal evolution of our planet, starting from the thesis according to which the history of the world would be the history of powers of the sea against those of land and vice versa. The jurist's speech crosses the history of the Maritime Republic of Venice, the role of Spain, Portugal and England in the appropriation of the American continent starting from 1492, up to the entrance of aviation and the air element in the Second World War .
His essay recalling the existential foundations of man: he is a being of earth who treads the ground, who derives his vision, his point of view from the ground. Man, therefore, names Earth the star on which he lives, although the surface of the planet is mostly covered with water. Of the traditional four elements (water, earth, fire, air), earth is the element destined to determine the existence of man. However, in the deepest memories, man recognizes the sea as the primary cause of all life. Just think of Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, born from the waves of the sea; or to Thales of Miletus, who identifies the archè in the water.
"The history of the world is the history of the struggle of seafaring powers against land powers and of earth powers against seafaring powers". From the most remote times this elementary opposition is observable and, still in the nineteenth century, it was used to characterize the tensions of the time between Russia and England as the clash between a bear and a whale. The medieval kabbalists spoke of world history as a struggle between Leviathan and Behemoth, where the former obstructs the airways of the latter to prevent him from breathing: this is the mythical representation of the naval blockade, with which a seafaring power cuts off supplies to the country. opponent to starve him.
It is not possible to speak of the history of the sea without praising the whale (Leviathan) and its hunters: the most powerful of all living and the most daring of all humans. Melville, author of Moby Dick, is to the oceans of the world what Homer was to the eastern Mediterranean. The largest and most powerful water animal in the world, it is a mammal and breathes with its lungs; however, for the element in which it lives, the whale must be considered a fish. And his hunters were not mere fishermen, but really hunters in a big way; at least at the beginning.
With the development of steam locomotion and artillery, the battle became unequal, pelagic fishing became an extermination made of grenades, electric machines, cannons. Between 1937 and 1938 the first international agreement to regulate the killing of the whale was reached in London. Before that had to be achieved, whaling was a deadly dangerous struggle between two living beings who, without being fish properly, moved in the element of the sea. Every tool the man used was moved by simple muscular strength: the oars, the harpoon, the sail.
The man was trying to defeat the whale, which could destroy its boat in an instant, with cunning. Following the secret paths of the whales, which moved from the Pacific to the Atlantic, these hunters discovered islands and continents without boasting. Without the whale-fish the fishermen would have remained along the coasts; thanks to the whale, the currents and the passage to the north were discovered. The whale and the whale hunter unveiled the globe, independent of Columbus and the other gold diggers.
Globalism is a liquid society in which everything is entrusted to technology, to continuous chaotic movement, to displacement; it has no roots; it is the planetary growth of the civilization of the Sea - the triumph of the Power of the Sea; and this can be read as the Great Flood. The Earth against the Sea means, in Schmittian terms, the Tradition against Modernity, the Spirit against Matter, the patriotic partisan against the cosmopolitan globalist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt
>Just mentioning that things could have easily been very different.
but they weren't: globalism (the water) has been advancing for at least 400 years…what can stop the inexorably advancing tide?
Sometimes Bots are very useful, or at least some of them. Plus they know how to be nice …