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xtruss · 9 months

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A bulldozer works to maintain Chicago's underground. More frequent and intense storms pose danger to aging infrastructure like these tunnels. Photograph By Keith Ladzinski, National Geographic Image Collection

Here’s What Worries Engineers The Most About U.S. Infrastructure

Water and sewer systems built in the mid-19th century weren't meant to handle the demands of modern cities, and many bridges and levees have aged well past their intended lifespan.

— By Alissa Greenberg | July 17, 2023

Christine Kirchhoff’s family were preparing to move into a new house when Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017. Then the massive storm dumped 50 inches of rain on the area in just a few days, leaving two nearby reservoirs so full that their operators were forced to open the floodgates. Kirchhoff’s family had to be evacuated by boat. Both their original and new houses were inundated.

As an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Pennsylvania State University, Kirchhoff spent a lot of time thinking about water even before it swallowed her family’s livelihood. She is part of the legion of professionals behind the complex, often invisible systems that support American life: dams, roads, the electric grid, and much more.

For the last 25 years, the American Society of Civil Engineers has been sounding the alarm on the state of that infrastructure across the country. In their most recent assessment, for example, transit scored a D- and hazardous waste a D+. It’s an expensive problem to ignore. The ASCE estimates current infrastructure conditions cost the average family $3,300 a year. “Everyone is paying whether they know it or not,” Kirchhoff says.

Train derailments, highway and bridge collapses, and dam failures have become increasingly common. But which areas are civil engineers most concerned could cause imminent catastrophe, and what can we do about it? Kirchhoff and other infrastructure experts weigh in.

Water Contamination Crises are Already Here

The engineers we talked to agreed: our water systems are in trouble. Both those that protect us from water as a hazard (stormwater, dams, levees, bridges) and those that help us manage water as a resource (drinking water, wastewater, inland waterways) are in grim shape.

Streets were flooded after Hurricane Harvey hit Houston in 2017. Photograph By Ilana Pancih-Linsmam, The New York Times/Redux

The United States’ 2.2-million-mile drinking water and 800,000-mile sewer system was developed in part in response to the widespread waterborne diseases of the mid nineteenth century, Kirchhoff says. Maintenance has lagged woefully behind since then; some older areas, including some cities in the northeast, still use century-old wooden pipes. And many more of our pipes nationwide are still made of lead.

A water system designed for yesterday’s climate and to filter yesterday’s contaminants is especially problematic in a world of increasing demand, fiercer and more frequent storms, and “forever” chemicals. The result: boil orders, water main breaks, and sewer overflow, plus 15 percent of our water treatment plants working at or over capacity. These issues, combined with the toxicity of lead pipes, lead to water crises like the one that continues to plague Flint, Michigan.

Amlan Mukherjee, the director of sustainability focusing on infrastructure at WAP Sustainability Consulting, recommends focusing on these pipes—swapping lead for PVC or other materials and fixing the leaks that spill some 6 billion gallons of treated water a day—as one high priority fix.

Our coastline is also dotted with facilities storing hazardous oil and other chemical waste cocooned in donut-shaped earthen structures, adds Bilal Ayyub, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Maryland at College Park—structures that, he notes, could be made of concrete. Because of soil’s vulnerabilities, he worries that dramatic rainfall or a storm surge could destroy these structures, resulting in a release of toxic chemicals “bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill by orders of magnitude.”

His worst-case scenario has already happened at least once, when floodwaters from Hurricane Harvey ate through the earthen container at the San Jacinto River Waste Pits, releasing noxious waste into a nearby river.

Physical Collapse is Happening Now

Meanwhile, the number of high-hazard-potential dams in the United States now tops 15,000. Many were built during or before the WWII era and have been widely neglected since then. And when it comes to bridges, “there are cautionary tales all over,” says Maria Lehman, president of ASCE and vice chair of the Biden Administration’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council. “Every county in the country has a list of bridges that, if they had money, they would replace tomorrow.”

Our 617,000 bridges include not just those spanning mighty rivers but also every highway overpass and minor link across a stream—and close to one tenth of them are significantly compromised. “If you have to think in terms of catastrophe, we’re already there,” Mukherjee says. In 2007, the collapse of an I-35W bridge in Minnesota killed 13 people and injured 145. More recently, a six-lane bridge over the Mississippi was closed for three months in 2021, disrupting interstate travel and shipping because an inspector missed a significant crack. Americans drive 178 million trips on structurally deficient bridges each day.

Every day, millions of Americans travel across bridges and overpasses, like the Marquette Interchange in Milwaukee, that may be structurally deficient. Photograph By Keith Ladzinski, National Geographic Image Collection

Yet the US spends only 1.5-2.5 percent of its GDP on infrastructure, proportionately less than half of what the European Union spends, Lehman says. This long-term lack of funding has run out the clock on many solutions. Many of our bridges were built to last 30-50 years, but nearly half are at least half a century old. The average age of our levees is also 50; our dams average 57.

Now, extreme weather is intensifying just as structures fail. We’ve already seen consequences in the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, for example, when collapsing levees inundated 80 percent of New Orleans, killing hundreds, or in the failure of an under-inspected dam in Edenville, Michigan, which flooded the region and destroyed thousands of homes in 2020. The trend is set to continue: after Superstorm Sandy engulfed New York City transit, Ayyub helped study similar risks in Washington, D.C and Shanghai. His models showed widespread flooding that could swamp D.C. metro stations and in severe cases even reach “the backyard of the White House.”

The Future of U.S. Infrastructure

Mukherjee is optimistic about the use of new technology to solve some of these issues, though adoption has been slow. Drones can provide human inspectors with up-close views of areas they can’t reach themselves and reduce chance of human error; a drone on an unrelated project captured footage of the Mississippi bridge crack two years before its discovery.

Ayyub has also worked with North American freight railroads to find weak links using computer modeling, combing through thousands of stations to “identify exactly which point if it fails will have the biggest impact,” he says. Why not do the same with our power grid and waterways?

One piece of good news: in 2021, Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which provides $1.2 trillion over five years for the ailing systems that help American society run, the largest federal investment in US history. It was a major victory. “Every president for the last eight presidents said we should spend a lot of money—like a trillion dollars—on infrastructure, and none of them delivered,” Lehman says.

Unless it is renewed regularly, though, this funding will barely stop the bleeding. And meanwhile, across the country, families like Kirchhoff’s (who after a difficult year were able to rebuild both the destroyed houses) struggle to recover from a relentless march of disasters, many of them preventable. It’s time for the US to learn the lessons drawn from of a century of neglect, Lehman argues, and begin maintaining the systems that makes so much of American life possible while they’re still in working condition.

“If you have a leak in your roof, you go up there, find it, replace the shingles, put on a little tar” she says. “If you let it go, it’s not going to be a little fix: it’s going to be a replacement.”

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thepastisalreadywritten · 2 months

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A ship crossing the Panama Canal. 🚢

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The Panama Canal is an artificial 82-kilometre (51-mile) waterway in Panama that connects the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific Ocean, cutting across the Isthmus of Panama and is a conduit for maritime trade.

An average of 200,000,000 L (52,000,000 US gal) of fresh water are used in a single passing of a ship.

The Panama Canal shortcut greatly reduces the time for ships to travel between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, enabling them to avoid the lengthy, hazardous route around the southernmost tip of South America via the Drake Passage or Strait of Magellan.

It is one of the largest and most difficult engineering projects ever undertaken.

The American Society of Civil Engineers has ranked the Panama Canal as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World.

#Panama Canal #Atlantic Ocean #Pacific Ocean #maritime trade #ship #American Society of Civil Engineers #Seven Wonders of the Modern World #Panama #South America #engineering #waterway

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lewbornmann · 1 year

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Our Failing Infrastructure

It seems to me…. “Infrastructure development is economic development.” ~ Kay Ivey[1]. When infrastructure works, most people never think about it. The problem in the U.S. today is exactly that – it has been much too long since most people have thought about it. The U.S. is the wealthiest nation in the world, yet it ranks 13th when it comes to the overall quality of its infrastructure[2]. …

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kuramirocket · 2 years

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Juan Méndez, Naomi Jiménez y Alejandro González

With an original model of 10 small, fully sustainable homes designed to temporarily accommodate homeless families, a group of UNAM students in the United States won first place in the Sustainable Solutions Competition, organized by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

The pumas students in Louisiana beat the 15 finalists from various academic institutions around the world, and placed themselves in the first place above the University of California and Zhejiang, China.

Of the total group, 12 members are students from the Faculty of Engineering (FI), one from the Faculty of Architecture (FA) and another from the Faculty of Chemistry (CF), reported team captain Juan Josué Méndez Espina, a sixth semester student of Civil Engineering at FI.

Small dwellings are called transitional houses because they are sites for temporary accommodation in a small community, he explained.

“A transitional house is a social project for homeless people who arrive in one of these houses, integrate into the community of several houses, and later reintegrate into the economic sector of society,” he said.

It is not a hostel, which is a large place where several people and families meet to shelter, but a small, single-family home of up to four people, so that individuals can be independent within the community. “It is a great process of social reintegration,” he said.

In the competition they presented the project of 10 small round houses with solar panels on the ceilings and conditions to save water, which must be very economical in addition to the community being totally sustainable, Méndez Espina said.

Alejandro Gonzalez Olvera, from FI, from the sixth semester of Civil Engineering, narrated that the contest took place in two stages: One regional (which they won last May in Texas and where they faced more than 20 universities in the United States and Mexico), and now it is international, in which they competed with another 15 finalists.

“The triumph in the regional phase gave us the pass to attend the international competition, in Louisiana, where we faced universities from several countries, such as China, India and the United States,” he said. “It’s a worldwide recognition,” he said.

Mendez Espina said that they joined students of Architecture and Chemistry to have and apply a complete concept of sustainability, which involves other knowledge besides engineering, such as the application of mycorrhizal fungi, which are in symbiosis with the root of plants outside the houses, which improve soil characteristics, make it trap more water during rain and capture more carbon dioxide from the soil, and generate healthier vegetation.

The pumas students also won the Fan Favorite Award, in which they were above the 15 finalists in terms of popularity of the project.

The team participants, in addition to the three above, are: Laura Mosquada Brizuela, Luis Eduardo Gonzalez Mosquada, Oscar Daniel Ortiz Martinez, Jesus Collantes Rios, Ingrid Guzman Montijo, Alejandro Santiago Silva, Jose Manuel Soberanes Sanchez, Osmar Valdes Gachuz, Jesus Garcia Quintero, Juan Jose Ramos Texta, Jose Rodrigo Silverio Retana and Brenda Eugenia Monroy Coria.

For students, winning this award means setting the tone for more Mexican students to compete and participate in sustainable engineering, as it is the first time a Mexican university participates in this competition, reaches the finals and wins the competition.

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newsfrom-theworld · 2 months

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On international women's day let me introduce you to some of the victims of ''Isr@el''

1. Shireen Abu Akluh

On 11th of May 2022 around 6:30 the prominent American Palestinian Journalist was killed by Isr@eli snipers; they also attacked her funeral.

The shaky video, filmed by Al Jazeera cameraman Majdi Banura, captures the scene when Abu Akleh, a 51-year-old Palestinian-American was killed by a bullet to the head at around 6:30 a.m. on May 11.

She had been standing with a group of journalists near the entrance of Jenin refugee camp, where they had come to cover an Israeli raid.

While the footage does not show Abu Akleh being shot, eyewitnesses told CNN that they believe Isr@eli forces on the same street fired deliberately on the reporters in a targeted attack.

All of the journalists were wearing protective blue vests that identified them as members of the news media.

2.Farah Omar

A Lebanese correspondent of Al-Mayadeen TV, was killed by an Isr@eli strike on Tayr Harfa, south Lebanon, on November 21, 2023, according to Al-Mayadeen.

4. Heba Sami

Dr. Heba Sami Al-Jourani who was known for her intelligence and determination lived elsewhere she could have been working in a very important hospital as a physicians to help those people who were wounded in wars and accidents, But unfortunately Heba had to put her dreams aside and stand face to face with death.

Heba’s family home in Rafah was targeted by Isr@eli warplane, minutes ago before she lost her life, Heba was sending messages and checking telegram groups to know where is the bombing she’s hearing, unfortunately that was her last scene,

Heba’s family became the breaking news at 11:48 am, on November

5. Walaa Saadah

A passionate filmmaker, writer, and blogger normally work day and night, travel, sometimes receiving awards but not if its a Palestinian woman in lives in Gaza and that’s the story of "Walaa Saadah, who was born in Beit Hanoun, Northern Gaza, in 1990.

Walaa since 2010, with too much passion worked in cinema and filmmaking, starting as a screenplay writer, she also worked in civil society organizations as a coordinator who directed several films that shed light on the suffering of the people of Gaza to the world.

Walaa was killed on March 2, 2024, in an Isr@eli airstrike on displaced people in Deir al-Balah city. walaa dream ended before having any chance to raise and shine as prominent filmmaker

6. Asmaa Hamdan

Asma a beloved 22-year-old, brought joy with her infectious smile. In high school, she was the heart of our large group. After a beautiful love story, she married Shadi and welcomed Sham, the light of her life. As an engineer, she graduated days before war disrupted everything.

Despite the hardships, Asmaa's resilience inspired us. Tragically, on December 25th, Asmaa and her daughter Sham were martyred in a massacre caused by Isr@eli occupation rockets, which claimed the lives of 100 martyrs in Al-Maghazi refugee camp, leaving behind a painful void.

7. Nagham Abu Samra

Nagham Abu Samra, 24 years old, was a professional karate player before Isr@el deprived her of that. She suffered from a critical head injury, and her leg was amputated after her home in Gaza was bombed by Isr@el.

Her uncle was pleading with the world to intervene and help Nagham travel abroad for treatment, but no one responded. Nagham was martyred, succumbing to her injuries from the Israeli bombing on January 12, 2023.

8. Talal Baalusha

A high school student, creative in traditional dance (dabke), and a member of the "Asayel Watan" group She also owned a clothing store.

She bid farewell to her family after they were martyred, then others mourned her.

She was martyred with her mother.

9. Hind Rajab

After she appealed to the world for help to save her, 12 days passed without communication.

On the 10th of February, the body of the martyr, the child Hind Rajab, and 5 members of her family were found.

Her Grandfather said: “We found the body of Hind and the rest of the family decomposed”.

10. Ayat Khadoura

Ayat, a Palestinian freelance journalist and podcast presenter, was killed along with an unknown number of family members in an Isr@eli airstrike on her home in Beit Lahya in northern Gaza, according to the Beirut-based press freedom group SKeyes, the news website Arabi 21, and London-based Al-Ghad TV.

Ayat shared videos on social media about the situation in Gaza, including a November 6 video, which she called “my last message to the world” where she said, “We had big dreams but our dream now is to be killed in one piece so they know who we are.”

Ayat was killed on November 20, 2023, at the hands of the Isr@eli occupation.

They aren't just numbers.

The UNRWA said 9.000 women where killed in this genocide.

Your feminism is trash if you aren't speak up for the women of Gaza, who are using pieces of tends as sanitary pads.

And always,

Free Palestine

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remusinfurs · 6 months

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[emphasis mine]

“The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity. It holds that Israel is an “imperialist-colonialist” force, that Israelis are “settler-colonialists,” and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors. (On October 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as “white” or “white-adjacent” and Palestinians as “people of color.”

This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the “oppressed” to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an “oppressor” to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as “white” and “privileged”; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of “exploitative capitalism” and in the Middle East through “colonialism.”

This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities—and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigor—has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians. When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts.

Indeed, it requires an astonishing leap of ahistorical delusion to disregard the record of anti-Jewish racism over the two millennia since the fall of the Judean Temple in 70 C.E. After all, the October 7 massacre ranks with the medieval mass killings of Jews in Christian and Islamic societies, the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1640s Ukraine, Russian pogroms from 1881 to 1920—and the Holocaust. Even the Holocaust is now sometimes misconstrued—as the actor Whoopi Goldberg notoriously did—as being “not about race,” an approach as ignorant as it is repulsive.

Contrary to the decolonizing narrative, Gaza is not technically occupied by Israel—not in the usual sense of soldiers on the ground. Israel evacuated the Strip in 2005, removing its settlements. In 2007, Hamas seized power, killing its Fatah rivals in a short civil war. Hamas set up a one-party state that crushes Palestinian opposition within its territory, bans same-sex relationships, represses women, and openly espouses the killing of all Jews.

Very strange company for leftists.

Of course, some protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” may have no idea what they’re calling for; they are ignorant and believe that they are simply endorsing “freedom.”

[…]

I should also say that Israeli rule of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank is different and, to my mind, unacceptable, unsustainable, and unjust. Settlers under the disgraceful Netanyahu government have harassed and persecuted Palestinians in the West Bank: 146 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were killed in 2022 and at least 153 in 2023 before the Hamas attack, and more than 90 since. Again: This is appalling and unacceptable, but not genocide. The Palestinians in the West Bank have endured a harsh, unjust, and oppressive occupation since 1967.

Although there is a strong instinct to make this a Holocaust-mirroring “genocide,” it is not: The Palestinians suffer from many things, including military occupation; settler intimidation and violence; corrupt Palestinian political leadership; callous neglect by their brethren in more than 20 Arab states; the rejection by Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, of compromise plans that would have seen the creation of an independent Palestinian state; and so on. None of this constitutes genocide, or anything like genocide. The Israeli goal in Gaza—for practical reasons, among others—is to minimize the number of Palestinian civilians killed. Hamas and like-minded organizations have made it abundantly clear over the years that maximizing the number of Palestinian casualties is in their strategic interest. (Put aside all of this and consider: The world Jewish population is still smaller than it was in 1939, because of the damage done by the Nazis. The Palestinian population has grown, and continues to grow, at a substantial and healthy rate. Demographic shrinkage is one obvious marker of genocide. In total, roughly 120,000 Arabs and Jews have been killed in the conflict over Palestine and Israel since 1860. By contrast, at least 500,000 people, mainly civilians, have been killed in the Syrian civil war since it began in 2011.)

If the ideology of decolonization, taught in our universities as a theory of history and shouted in our streets as self-evidently righteous, badly misconstrues the present reality, does it reflect the history of Israel as it claims to do? It does not. Indeed, it does not accurately describe either the foundation of Israel or the tragedy of the Palestinians.

According to the decolonizers, Israel is and always has been an illegitimate freak-state because it was fostered by the British empire and because some of its founders were European-born Jews.

In this narrative, Israel is tainted by imperial Britain’s broken promise to deliver Arab independence, and its kept promise to support a “national home for the Jewish people,” in the language of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. But the supposed promise to Arabs was in fact an ambiguous 1915 agreement with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who wanted his Hashemite family to rule the entire region. In part, he did not receive this new empire because his family had much less regional support than he claimed. Nonetheless, ultimately Britain delivered three kingdoms—Iraq, Jordan, and Hejaz—to the family.

The imperial powers—Britain and France—made all sorts of promises to different peoples, and then put their own interests first. Those promises to the Jews and the Arabs during World War I were typical. Afterward, similar promises were made to the Kurds, the Armenians, and others, none of which came to fruition. But the central narrative that Britain betrayed the Arab promise and backed the Jewish one is incomplete. In the 1930s, Britain turned against Zionism, and from 1937 to 1939 moved toward an Arab state with no Jewish one at all. It was an armed Jewish revolt, from 1945 to 1948 against imperial Britain, that delivered the state.

Israel exists thanks to this revolt, and to international law and cooperation, something leftists once believed in. The idea of a Jewish “homeland” was proposed in three declarations by Britain (signed by Balfour), France, and the United States, then promulgated in a July 1922 resolution by the League of Nations that created the British “mandates” over Palestine and Iraq that matched French “mandates” over Syria and Lebanon. In 1947, the United Nations devised the partition of the British mandate of Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish.

[…]

The concept of “partition” is, in the decolonization narrative, regarded as a wicked imperial trick. But it was entirely normal in the creation of 20th-century nation-states, which were typically fashioned out of fallen empires. And sadly, the creation of nation-states was frequently marked by population swaps, huge refugee migrations, ethnic violence, and full-scale wars. Think of the Greco-Turkish war of 1921–22 or the partition of India in 1947. In this sense, Israel-Palestine was typical.

At the heart of decolonization ideology is the categorization of all Israelis, historic and present, as “colonists.” This is simply wrong. Most Israelis are descended from people who migrated to the Holy Land from 1881 to 1949. They were not completely new to the region. The Jewish people ruled Judean kingdoms and prayed in the Jerusalem Temple for a thousand years, then were ever present there in smaller numbers for the next 2,000 years. In other words, Jews are indigenous in the Holy Land, and if one believes in the return of exiled people to their homeland, then the return of the Jews is exactly that. Even those who deny this history or regard it as irrelevant to modern times must acknowledge that Israel is now the home and only home of 9 million Israelis who have lived there for four, five, six generations.

Most migrants to, say, the United Kingdom or the United States are regarded as British or American within a lifetime. Politics in both countries is filled with prominent leaders—Suella Braverman and David Lammy, Kamala Harris and Nikki Haley—whose parents or grandparents migrated from India, West Africa, or South America. No one would describe them as “settlers.” Yet Israeli families resident in Israel for a century are designated as “settler-colonists” ripe for murder and mutilation. And contrary to Hamas apologists, the ethnicity of perpetrators or victims never justifies atrocities. They would be atrocious anywhere, committed by anyone with any history. It is dismaying that it is often self-declared “anti-racists” who are now advocating exactly this murder by ethnicity.

[…]

The open world of liberal democracies—or the West, as it used to be called—is today polarized by paralyzed politics, petty but vicious cultural feuds about identity and gender, and guilt about historical successes and sins, a guilt that is bizarrely atoned for by showing sympathy for, even attraction to, enemies of our democratic values. In this scenario, Western democracies are always bad actors, hypocritical and neo-imperialist, while foreign autocracies or terror sects such as Hamas are enemies of imperialism and therefore sincere forces for good. In this topsy-turvy scenario, Israel is a living metaphor and penance for the sins of the West. The result is the intense scrutiny of Israel and the way it is judged, using standards rarely attained by any nation at war, including the United States.

But the decolonizing narrative is much worse than a study in double standards; it dehumanizes an entire nation and excuses, even celebrates, the murder of innocent civilians. As these past two weeks have shown, decolonization is now the authorized version of history in many of our schools and supposedly humanitarian institutions, and among artists and intellectuals. It is presented as history, but it is actually a caricature, zombie history with its arsenal of jargon—the sign of a coercive ideology, as Foucault argued—and its authoritarian narrative of villains and victims. And it only stands up in a landscape in which much of the real history is suppressed and in which all Western democracies are bad-faith actors. Although it lacks the sophistication of Marxist dialectic, its self-righteous moral certainty imposes a moral framework on a complex, intractable situation, which some may find consoling. Whenever you read a book or an article and it uses the phrase “settler-colonialist,” you are dealing with ideological polemic, not history.

[…]

The Israel-Palestine conflict is desperately difficult to solve, and decolonization rhetoric makes even less likely the negotiated compromise that is the only way out.

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Olso Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. In the same way, the decolonization ideology, with its denial of Israel’s right to exist and its people’s right to live safely, makes a Palestinian state less likely if not impossible.

The problem in our countries is easier to fix: Civic society and the shocked majority should now assert themselves. The radical follies of students should not alarm us overmuch; students are always thrilled by revolutionary extremes. But the indecent celebrations in London, Paris, and New York City, and the clear reluctance among leaders at major universities to condemn the killings, have exposed the cost of neglecting this issue and letting “decolonisation” colonize our academy.”

Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of Jerusalem: The Biography and most recently The World: A Family History of Humanity.

#israel #palestine #decolonization #anti racism #wokeness #woke #antisemitism

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covenawhite66 · 5 months

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Africa is a continent of more than 50 countries, and home to thousands of languages and cultures. Africans lived in complex societies, from small villages to large bustling cities, that contained universities, mosques, and libraries.

Africa has great civilizations that flourished in Africa included Egypt, Kush, Axum, Mali and Great Zimbabwe.

Africa's history is complex and stretches back through centuries of dynasties. Africa contributed to our knowledge and understanding of ancient writings, languages, agriculture and engineering. Its extensive trade system connected the continent with Asia and India, producing a lively exchange of goods such as grains, metals, and gold.

Black History instruction in K-12 education, 65% of the 401 educators interviewed said that their state does not mandate Black History instruction. Only 12 states require some form of Black history curriculum.

Africans were free before they were enslaved. Enslaved Africans relied on their knowledge and beliefs to survive slavery, and their contributions to U.S. culture, society, and economy are evident in every aspect of American life and enterprise. Agriculture, music, art, and culinary.

#history #african history #african american #education #Africa #axum #mali empire #great Zimbabwe #world history #public school #ancient

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weil-weil-lautre · 20 days

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So far tens of millions of Americans can understand Ahab. They have worked under such men. A smaller but not insignificant number have gone through his experiences. The Diesel engine and now atomic energy face the vast majority with the same problem that he faced: the obvious, immense, the fearful mechanical power of an industrial civilization which is now advancing by incredible leaps and bringing at the same time the mechanization and destruction of human personality. Men who are thinking like that, classes of people in a nation who are thinking such thoughts, are being steadily prepared for desperate action. If now there descends upon them a violent catastrophe that ruins them and convinces them that the life they have been living is intolerable and the grave doubts that have previously tormented them are justifiable, then they are going to throw aside all the traditional restraints of civilization. They are going to seek a new theory of society and a program of action and, on the basis of this theory and this program, they are going to act.

CLR James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In

#clr james #james #herman melville #melville #moby-dick #literature #american literature #quote #archivist

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transparentgentlemenmarker · 21 days

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75 years ago, the NATO "Defensive" alliance was created to counter a perceived fear of communist expansion into Europe. Regardless of the fact that there was no plausible evidence that the Soviets ever planned to invade "Europe," When the Soviet Union ceased to exist, so did NATO's marginal rationale for existence. However, the "defensive" alliance kept expanding against the advice of many western voices and those of the Russians. These protests and warnings were, of course, ignored as the Alliance continued to peddle a North American world view to Europe and its expanding Eastern European membership. NATO today has proved itself to be a fractious weapons sales scam and political platform, not a military alliance. It has energetically participated in numerous illegal and brutal unilateral military actions serving the political rationale of the Washington, London, and Brussels elite. From Belgrade to Tripoli, NATO has delivered its brand of "freedom" by bombing civilians, their homes, and societies. The coming collapse of the Ukrainian misadventure represents such an existential threat to the viability of this paper tiger that it will contemplate almost any avenue other than acceptance of failure. Rather than defending Europe from War, NATO looks destined to become part of a self designed self-fulfilling prophecy of War and destruction. Rember, nothing of the Machine ever works against the machine, and NATO is, despite what we are told, a giant profit Mill and ponzi scheme, peddling fear to sell weapons while the citizens of Europe face poverty and societal discontent. Russia and the Russians have no designs or desire for a War with NATO, no serious academic or political analysts outside of the echo chamber of Atlantasist fantasy believes that. Remember, if there's a people on earth that understand the devastation of war, it's the Russians. If you actually want to examine the engine of the Ukraine war (and all other post WW2 conflicts) and any conflict thay flows from it, lift the bonnet on the Washington and London elites and their greasy association with the corporations profiting from the War. Neither they nor their bureaucratic appointees will see their children, brothers, or fathers doe in a War with Russia or indeed wIth China. That is an honour they will bestow on the ordinary taxpayers of the EU and US, and while they're at it, they'll also convince you to pay for it all too.

Il y a 75 ans l’OTAN était créée pour contrer la peur perçue d’une expansion communiste en Europe. Indépendamment du fait qu’il n’existait aucune preuve plausible que les Soviétiques envisageaient d’envahir « l’Europe », lorsque l’Union soviétique a cessé d’exister, la justification marginale de l’existence de l’OTAN a également disparu. Cependant, l’alliance « défensive » a continué à s’étendre contre l’avis de nombreuses voix occidentales et contre l’avis des Russes. Ces protestations et avertissements ont bien sûr été ignorés alors que l’Alliance a continué à colporter une vision nord-américaine du monde à l’Europe et à son adhésion croissante à l’Europe de l’Est. Aujourd’hui, l’OTAN s’est révélée être une escroquerie de vente d’armes et une plate-forme politique, et non une alliance militaire. Il a participé énergiquement à de nombreuses actions militaires unilatérales illégales et brutales servant la logique politique des élites de Washington, de Londres et de Bruxelles. De Belgrade à Tripoli, l’OTAN a défendu sa « liberté » en bombardant les civils, leurs maisons et leurs sociétés. L’effondrement prochain de la mésaventure ukrainienne représente une telle menace existentielle pour la viabilité de ce tigre de papier qu’il envisagera presque toutes les voies autres que l’acceptation de l’échec. Plutôt que de défendre l’Europe contre la guerre, l’OTAN semble destinée à faire partie d’une prophétie auto-réalisatrice de guerre et de destruction. N’oubliez pas que rien de la Machine ne fonctionne jamais contre la machine, et que l’OTAN est, malgré ce qu’on nous dit, une gigantesque usine à profit et une chaîne de Ponzi, colportant la peur pour vendre des armes alors que les citoyens européens sont confrontés à la pauvreté et au mécontentement sociétal. La Russie et les Russes n’ont ni l’intention ni le désir d’une guerre avec l’OTAN, aucun analyste universitaire ou politique sérieux en dehors de la chambre d’écho du fantasme atlantasiste ne le croit. N’oubliez pas que s’il y a un peuple sur terre qui comprend les ravages de la guerre, c’est bien les Russes. Si vous voulez réellement examiner le moteur de la guerre en Ukraine (et tous les autres conflits de l’après-Seconde Guerre mondiale) et tout conflit qui en découle, levez le chapeau sur les élites de Washington et de Londres et leur association graisseuse avec les entreprises qui profitent de la guerre. Ni eux ni leurs représentants bureaucratiques ne verront leurs enfants, leurs frères ou leurs pères participer à une guerre avec la Russie ou même avec la Chine. C’est un honneur qu’ils accorderont aux contribuables ordinaires de l’UE et des États-Unis, et pendant qu’ils y seront, ils vous convaincront également de payer pour tout cela également.

Otan = Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique nord

Nato = National Association of Theatre Owners

#nato #otan #National Association of Theatre Owners

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mivolasvivi · 8 months

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This is a legitimate poll promoted by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) on LinkedIn. The foremost organization for the field. And people wonder why civil engineering is experiencing severe shortages of new and mid-level engineers… I cannot wait until the current generation of boomer engineers retire. They’ve gotten too bold and unwilling to accept the realities of the 2023 workplace. This industry is so embarrassing sometimes…

#civil engineering #me

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artbyblastweave · 9 months

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What do you think about the whole Institute brotherhood as foils of each other thing ?

Because I feel like Bethesda did set up some interesting stuff with that? The Institute as a paragon of "progress" that destroy any chance of rebuilding society around them ,then the brotherhood as champions of regression who foister environments that allow "new" societies to form.

I think you could make that argument. One clear way in which the two are foils, right, is that both of them are legacy groups descended from pre-war American institutions- U.S Army for the Brotherhood, Ivy-League Academia for the Institute- but there's an underremarked-upon further similarity in that the founding stock of both factions aren't the best and brightest preserved as part of a considered plan, but instead a tiny pocket from each larger body who got reeaaaal fuckin' lucky and let it go to their heads. The Institute got started by a bunch of CIT faculty and students who hid in the basement when the bombs dropped- which’ll net you a higher-than-average engineering/r&d acumen than any other basement, and it would certainly select for the self-importance that crops up in those spaces, along with the MIT-specific funny student prank neurosis, but they are, fundamentally, still just A Bunch Of Guys In A Basement. The state of their complex 200 years later feels like an performative effort to justify to themselves that they really are the best and the brightest, but you find out from the maintenance guy that it’s a patina over old-world systems they have to keep repaired, and you can find elements of the old-world architecture and office complexes that they didn’t have the spare plastic to makeover. (The FEV lab is notably and pointedly in this style- and from this I think you can extrapolate that most of the institutes fun toys are probably pre-war research projects that they picked up and ran with vs something they were soooo uniquely intelligent to think of and produce post war. I do think SOME level of actual thought went into the Institute and how it happened and What It Is Thematically but not enough of that made it into the game in actual spoken words the player hears.)

In conclusion, the secret good fallout 4 that lives in my head would have been much more aggressive about drawing a through line to pre-war academia, and would have also made pre-war academia’s presence in Boston (college town of college towns) much more salient in the environmental storytelling and narrative- making it clear the extent to which the institute is essentially the still-walking zombie of the-pre-war governments research and development division, making their tussle with the Brotherhood closer to a civil war between fragments of the same beast. I have a lot of thoughts about how I’d rework the institute but this is getting long.

#fallout #fallout 4 #the institute #thoughts #asks

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old-type-40 · 10 months

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Trek from the very beginning has offered powerful commentary about prejudice and the fear, anger, and hate associated with it. And the recent episode was very much in keeping with the Trek tradition of commentary on these issues.

But what occurred to me after watching this episode was an important truth about fear, anger, and hate and how both Una and Spock are victims of prejudice because of these attitudes.

The Earth suffered a devastating war because of tyrants who were created via genetic engineering. Vulcan civilization was almost destroyed because of wars and conflicts due to passionate emotions. As a result, Earth (and later the Federation) banned genetic engineering of people. And on Vulcan, there is a strong cultural taboo against emotion. (BTW, the case could be made that the puritanical prohibition against emotion in Vulcan society is both illogical and driven by fear but that's a whole other story.)

Having fear, anger, and hate of something which is abstract is difficult. Having fear, anger, and hate against people is far too easy. Una testified on how Illyrians were subjected to prejudice and threats of violence when she was young. It's because the Illyrians were the easy personification of something citizens of the Federation were taught to fear and hate.

Spock, being part human, is the personification of the Vulcan fear of emotion. And he was subject to bullying and prejudice throughout his youth. Growing up facing prejudice in such a rigidly puritanical society is why Spock spent so much of his life having difficulty about his identity and how he should handle emotions.

In our current times, blue collar jobs have been disappearing from industrialized countries due largely to automation. This fear of job loss was featured in the TOS epsiode The Ultimate Computer. But directing fear, anger, and hate against something abstract is not easy. By the 80s, media figures, pundits, and politicians were personifying the fear of job loss via Asians. The anti-trade rhetoric at that time contributed to the murder of Vincent Chin (whose killers were prosecuted but never punished). And plenty of media figures, pundits, and politicians across the political spectrum have been pushing anti-trade rhetoric since 2008 even though I'm certain a good number of them know this inspires racism against Asian Americans and immigrants. (There's a good reason why anti-trade beliefs have been embraced historically by racist and nationalist ass hats.)

And in recent years, vile and opportunistic media figures, pundits, and politicians have sought to personify people's fear of social change via the LGBTQ community.

Don't fall for these things. Don't be similar to the humans or Vulcans who directed prejudice at Una and Spock because they were the personifications of what those people feared.

#star trek #strange new worlds #snw #snw spoilers #ad astra per aspera #una chin riley #spock

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lewbornmann · 2 years

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Traveling By Rail

It seems to me…. “The first trip I remember taking was on the train from Virginia up to New York City, watching the summertime countryside rolling past the window. They used white linen tablecloths in the dining car in those days, and real silver. I love trains to this day. Maybe that was the beginning of my fixation with leisurely modes of travel.” ~ Billy Campbell[1]. Passenger rail is…

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n2qfd · 4 months

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Civil Engineering

As a survey tech/engineering tech in utility companies, highway departments, energy sector work, and construction I have seen the beautiful and marvelous things we can create to better society. I'm writing after reading more and more about the extensive and sophisticated tunneling that has been engineered under Gaza by Hamas. I'm writing to ask if the American Society of Civil Engineers would publicly denounce this perversion of the trade. As someone who takes enormous pride in the capacity to engineer systems to improve life I'd like to see ASCE and sibling organizations publish statements calling out the gross misuse of civil engineering in order to disrupt, terrorize and harm society by Hamas. Engineering and resources that could have helped make Gaza a healthier, more livable place, less conducive to extremist ideologies and doom. Engineering that could have laid water and sewer lines, gas pipes and electrical connections, better roads and walkways. Engineering that would have uplifted the masses of people now displaced or killed in fighting that didn't have to happen.

ASCE code of Ethics, Preamble:

Engineers govern their professional careers on the following fundamental principles:

+ create safe, resilient, and sustainable infrastructure;

+ treat all persons with respect, dignity, and fairness in a manner that fosters equitable participation without regard to personal identity;

+consider the current and anticipated needs of society; and

+ utilize their knowledge and skills to enhance the quality of life for humanity.

#ASCE #CECA #ASEE #ACI #SWE #IAENG #CSCE #ASEAN #JSCE #FEANI #VDI #RAEng

#asce #csce #ceca #asee #aci #iaeng #asean #jsce #feani #vdi #raeng #civil engineering #surveying #tradeschool #israel hamas war #gaza

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eternal-echoes · 5 months

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One of the odder aspects of present-day politics is the assumption that if you are antiwar you are on the left, and if you are conservative you are “pro-war.” Like labelling conservative states red and liberal states blue, this is an inversion of historical practice. The opposition to America’s entry into both World Wars was largely led by conservatives. Senator Robert A. Taft, the standard-bearer of postwar conservatism, opposed war unless the United States itself was attacked. Even Bismarck, after he had fought and won the three wars he needed to unify Germany, was staunchly antiwar. He once described preventive war, like the one America is being pressured to wage on Iran, as “committing suicide for fear of being killed.” Conservatives’ detestation of war has no “touchy-feely” origins. It springs from conservatism’s roots, its most fundamental beliefs and objectives. Conservatism seeks above all social and cultural continuity, and nothing endangers that more than war. In the 20th century, war brought about social and cultural revolutions in the United States, including a large-scale movement of women out of the home and into the workplace. Nineteenth-century reformers had labored successfully to make it possible for women (and children) to leave the dark satanic mills and devote their lives to home and family, supported by a male breadwinner. The Victorians rightly considered the home more important than the workplace. A man’s duties in the world of affairs were a burden he had to carry to provide for his household, not something women should envy. This happy situation was overturned in both world wars as men were drafted by the millions while the demand for factory labor to support war production soared. Back into the mills went the women. The result was the weakening of the family, the institution most responsible for passing the culture on to the next generation. The threat war poses to the cake of custom is exacerbated by one of its foremost characteristics: its results are unpredictable. Few countries go to war expecting to lose, but wars are seldom won by both sides. The effects of military defeat on social order can be revolutionary. Russia’s involvement in World War I gave us Bolshevism. Germany’s defeat made Hitler possible. As the First World War shows, if a conflict is costly enough, the victors’ social order can suffer nearly as badly as that of the vanquished. Not only did the British Empire die in the mud of Flanders, but postwar Britain was a very different place from Edwardian Britain. The plain fact is, conservatives loathe unpredictability. They also know that vast state expenditures and debts can destabilize a society, and no activity of the state is more expensive than war. America’s adventure in Iraq, driven in no small part by the quest for oil—which will now mostly go to China—has already cost a trillion dollars, with another trillion or two to come caring for crippled veterans. Even the peacetime cost of a large military can break a country, as it broke the Soviet Union. American conservatives used to be budget hawks, not warhawks.

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One gain that comes out of war is as disturbing to conservatives as any of the losses: an aggrandizement of state power. The argument of “wartime necessity” runs roughshod over all checks and balances, civil liberties, and traditional constraints on government. In the 20th century, American progressives knew they could only create the powerful, centralizing federal government they sought by going to war. It was they, the left, who engineered America’s entry into World War I. Nearly a century later, 9/11 gave centralizers in the neocon Bush administration the cover they needed for the “Patriot Act,” legislation that would have left most of America’s original patriots rethinking the merits of King George. Just as nothing adds more to a state’s debt than war, so nothing more increases its power. Conservatives rue both.

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I don’t particularly believe that all women should be stay-at-home moms. Each woman is different so God is going to call them to where He see fits to provide her feminine gifts there that men can’t provide. And I don’t necessarily think that it’s intrinsically evil for women to work; I think it’s more of how it’s done. Personally, I think corporations expecting both sexes to devote so much of themselves for the sake of company’s profit that employers don’t give their employees adequate time off to spend time with their families and the fair wage to support that contributes to family decay. But I believe that the article is right; family is one of the ways where the culture (and faith) is passed onto the next generation. If the family isn’t healthy, so goes the nation.

#politics #war #history #american conservative #conservative

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