Keith

“if you’re on a pristine beach in the Caribbean or Hawaii, the chances are that your feet are probably sinking into parrotfish excrement: the fish eat the corals, extract the nutrients, and poop the remaining calcium carbonate on to the seabed. For the most part, the whiter and warmer the beach, the more likely it is to have come out of the bottom of a parrotfish.”
― Ed Conway, Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

“No one knows for sure who first invented glass. The earliest and most famous origin story comes from Pliny the Elder, the Roman soldier-intellectual who died in the eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79. The tale goes that many centuries earlier, Phoenician sailors had landed on a beach in what is now Israel. The Phoenicians, the great traders of the ancient era, were importing blocks of natron, an early form of soap rich in sodium (natron is why sodium’s chemical symbol is Na). Before turning in for the night, the Phoenicians lit a fire on the beach, and in the absence of anywhere else to rest their pots, they perched them on some of the natron blocks. As they lit their fire and heated the blocks of natron, something extraordinary happened. Pliny writes: “Upon its being subjected to the action of the fire, in combination with the sand of the seashore, they beheld transparent streams flowing forth of a liquid hitherto unknown: this, it is said, was the origin of glass.”[5”
― Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

“A cop ascending a staircase in a white neighborhood who was so pre-terrified of the residents that he pulled the trigger at the first sound he heard would be derided as a paranoid lunatic.
Similarly, the idea that a fat white guy selling hot smokes on a street corner was a grave threat would be laughed at as absurd. But a 350-pound black man is plausibly described in the press as someone who scared pedestrians, a threat needing to be defused.
Try to imagine a world where there isn’t a vast unspoken consensus that black men are inherently scary, and most of these police assaults would play in the media like spontaneous attacks of madness. Instead, they’re sold as battle scenes from an occupation story, where a quick trigger finger while patrolling the planet of a violent alien race is easy to understand.”
― Matt Taibbi, I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street

“What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-option of elites. Their goal is self-enrichment; the corrosion of the rule of law is the necessary means. As a shrewd local observer explained to me on a visit to Hungary in early 2016, “The main benefit of controlling a modern bureaucratic state is not the power to persecute the innocent. It is the power to protect the guilty.”
No president in history has burned more public money to sustain his personal lifestyle than Donald Trump. Three-quarters of the way through his first year in office, President Trump was on track to spend more on travel in one year of his presidency than Barack Obama in eight—even though Trump only rarely ventured west of the Mississippi or across any ocean.”
― David Frum, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic