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stupidbookstupidbook

making me feel things

I can’t believe I forgot ;-;

“Eighteen years to the day after Uncle Earl accepted Bigfoot into his life, my marriage ended.”

Godddd I forgot how much I love her writing.

“…And think about it, Cristi, he starts with toddlers. The little ones are just four years old when they’re indoctrinated.”

Falcons of the Fatherland. That’s what the communist toddler group was called. And in second grade, children became Pioneers and wore a red neck scarf. No one questioned it.”

“Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

I read They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals and have since recently seen an article with updates on the West Virginian part of the book. After 8 years, the lawsuit against DuPont and Chemours will be settled out of court. Three states will be affected by the lawsuit: North Carolina, West Virginia, and New Jersey. (1)

Oh. My. God. EVIL!!! Like dang!

Absolutely entranced by the story of Agassiz, Professor Scudder, and the fish.

My heart gets so overjoyed every time I see a Sand County Almanac mention. The icon that book is **happy heart noises**

This crash course of history and Western public lands and public domain helps put into perspective why Trump wanted to tamper with BLM land and put it in the hands of private owners — it costs the fed gov a pretty penny to manage it. So much knowledge to be scooped up here.

"A revolutionary. [John Wesley Powell] might have spared the West the dust bowls of the 1890s, 1930s, and 1950s, as well as the worst consequences of river floods."

Learning that there were more "dust bowls" then just the 1930s. Searching for more information online yields little (it's tricky finding anything w/ Google anymore) but he's likely referring to haboobs in connection with overworked agricultural land.

“You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale.”

Going west through Minnesota, through the plains of South Dakota, to Wyoming, to that great, vast space… that Western world is a different kind of beauty, great open expanse, and this book is its memory, bringing it all to life again for me again. True wild beauty.

“Mom, listen. In three months I will be eighty years old, thirty years older than you were when you died, twenty years older than my father was when he died, fifty-seven years older than my brother was when he died.”

Such a good way to start a chapter and I’m absolutely into it. Really liking his writing style.

“…Afrikaans – the version of Dutch spoken by the Boer settlers. They were self-sufficient and isolationist, with a narrow view of the world. They held austere Protestant Calvinist beliefs and thought they had a duty to ‘civilise’ their black neighbours, just like Christians in the Confederate states of the US used a ‘religious’ imperative to justify their dominance over and enslavement of black people.

“The tight political grip of white settlers was maintained until relatively recently: Zimbabweans and South Africans had to wait until 1980 and 1994 respectively to enjoy full citizen rights and black majority rule.”

Read an article today that the Trump admin has a refugee program designated for white South Africans because of “racial discrimination” caused by black majority rule. The lack of knowledge…

“The advocates for abolition had argued that if there were no buyers then the trade would immediately cease to exist. The slavers on the other hand insisted that it was the regular supply of enslaved people from Africa that sustained the external demand for them, so according to this counterintuitive argument the Africans themselves were primarily to blame for the persistence of the trade…”

“Yaa Asantewaa… being in her late sixties (elderly by the standards of the time), gathered Asante men around her and admonished them… ‘I will not pay one predawn [8£] to the governor. If you, the chiefs of Asante, are going to behave like cowards and not fight, you should exchange your loincloths for my undergarments…if you the men of Asante, will not go forward, then we will. We, the women, will.’”

“But the Anglo–Asante Wars continued for decades and although the Asante emerged victorious in some of these conflicts, the wars eventually reached a horrific conclusion in February 1874 when British troops marched into Kumasi and sacked the city. The treasury in the king’s stone-built palace was emptied, after which the royal compound was blown up. The remainder of the city was burned to the ground.”

“Father Conceição called Dombo a ‘most skilled wizard’ and wrote: ‘He was so wily and cunning that after being defeated by our arms he vanquished us with stratagems.’Changamire Dombo forced the Portuguese to acknowledge him as the ruler of Rozvi and pay him tributes, and his control of his mineral-rich lands became absolute.”

“The Rhodesian Front Party, an all-white party led by Prime Minister Ian Smith, censored all books and material on Great Zimbabwe from 1965 to 1980… Ian Smith’s government instructed its employees ‘that no official publication may state unequivocally that Great Zimbabwe was an African creation.’”

“…study commissioned by the French government in 2018. Its authors… estimated that a colossal 90 per cent of Africa’s cultural heritage is in the West, and they added their voices to calls for France to return objects it had acquired during the colonial era.”

“African elephants were larger… and provided ivory of a softer quality, which was more suitable for carving and making jewelry. Elephants had become extinct in China around 200 CE, so the Chinese were also keen to get their hands on ivory.”

There were originally elephants in China?? :ooo

“The only museum in an Arab state that examines the Arab slave trade is Bin Jelmood House in Qatar, where incidentally slavery was only abolished officially in 1952, and where the continual reliance on migrant labor in a system open to abuse has attracted much international criticism. The museum… opened in 2015…”

Okay this whole section on jihadism is interesting but this maybe is the best quote: “As the emir put it to me: ‘Certain social and economic conditions are fertile ground for breeding violent movements — be they religious extremists, ethnic militias or just criminal gangs. Religion simply becomes a rallying point and ideology, but the real discontent lies in politics.’”

“The terror group Boko Haram, based in northern Nigeria, made international headlines when in April 2014 militants stole into a boarding school in Chibok and kidnapped nearly 300 teenage girls in the Christian community. Dozens remain unaccounted for.”

So before the divide of Africa by Europeans Islam and Non-Muslim could mostly coexist but later the rise of jihadism changed all of that…

Mansa Musa, worth the equivalent of 400 billion today, who spent so much he destabilized economies and took decades to repair… his spending caught the attention of Europeans and his image — “maps like this one [1375 Catalan Atlas] may well have encouraged later Europeans to invade Africa in pursuit of the riches they depicted.”

Getting the sense that Timbuktu of the Mali Empire was like the Arabic Library of Alexandria for its fame and renown. Super cool!

“They [The Capsians] ate enormous quantities of land snail and built large structures formed from thousands of snail shells — a unique form of prehistoric shelter, hence the Capsians are sometimes referred to as the escargotières… Today, land snails are still consumed throughout North Africa even though many Muslims elsewhere prefer not to eat them.”

That’s a lot of snails to eat to make a house! So cool!

“According to legend, he was marked out for greatness when a swarm of bees surrounded him at his birth around 1162. This was an omen that he would one day be a strong and prosperous king. The name Lalibela means ‘bees obey him’ in the local language.”