Ultimate Master of Warriors
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Post by Ultimate Master of Warriors on Dec 31, 2010 15:13:59 GMT -5
Since early in the twenty-first century, by combining Western satellite navigation technology with sophisticated Polar Sea icebreakers, the Russians had managed to keep the Northeast Passage open for up to nine months of the typical year, and sometimes all through the winter. Between 1918–1920, when Amundsen made his voyage through the Passage, and 1993, the route was closed to all but Soviet shipping. In August of the latter year, however, a French Arctic research ship, the L'Astrolabe, made the trip as the first foreign vessel for over seventy years, using only occasional icebreaker assistance and convincingly demonstrating the usefulness of satellite radar reconnaissance of the ice situation. Since then, aided by the steady retreat of the arctic ice due to global warming, the Russians had been perfecting their methods, with the result that going through the Northeast Passage became faster and expended less fuel than taking the alternative route, twice as long, from the Far East to northern or western Europe, or vice versa, through the Suez Canal. The ships to be used on the route had to be extra strong, of course, but enough foreign shipping preferred this alternative to make the enterprise profitable for Russia.
Nevertheless, I was facing a sea journey of 6,000 nautical miles, most of it through pack ice. Having procured a few additional items of warm clothing, I boarded the Kapitan Fedosov and installed myself in my cabin. One of my concerns had been how to pass my time during three weeks of sea voyage, but if Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia didn't do the trick nothing would—the battered old volume I had found in an antiquarian bookstore in Tokyo was nearly three inches thick, and promised some fascinating reading. Laura had the same book in paperback and had asked me to read it, but I hadn't had the time before I had left.
One of the advantages of travel by freighter is that you get to dine at the captain's table, an honor bestowed only on the select few on passenger liners, where such are still in use. Come dinnertime, I put on my best clothes and joined my fellow passengers in the officers' mess on poop deck, with a splendid view of the darkening Tokyo Bay.
To my surprise, the captain of this Russian ship was African. His name was Joel; he was a Hausa from Nigeria, a professional seaman who had obtained his Master's degree from none other than the Australian Maritime College at Launceston, Tasmania. A sincere, intelligent man in his early thirties, he described his current job as a step along his career: the Nigerian merchant fleet hadn't had an opening at the level of master at the time, and here was an opportunity both to learn Russian and to gain experience of Arctic navigation, while commanding a good, strong, new ship with a reliable, international crew. It was his second season sailing the Northeast Passage, and Joel assured his passengers that we'd have a safe, routine trip; a little noisy, perhaps, but we'd soon get used to traveling through ice.
This early in the year, there still was room to spare on board: we were only eight passengers in all. To my left were seated Mrs. Dana Frost, her daughter Evelyn, and her husband, Dr. James Frost, a newly retired American professor who had ended up his career teaching computer systems design at Macquarie University near Sydney. Between James and the captain sat Sheila Johnson, a middle-aged English spinster who was on annual leave from her place of work, an international organization on the US East Coast. Her modest looks belied an adventurous spirit: the year before, she had "nearly climbed" Mount Everest on a trip to Nepal, and she seemed to be in a habit of dividing her vacations between visiting her elderly mother in Devon and going off on the most unusual treks the world had to offer.
On my right was Dieter Braun, a German economist. He was a bachelor, in his mid-thirties, on his way back home from an assignment in Indonesia. He worked for a large multinational corporation and had decided to spend some time between projects on a relaxing sea voyage rather than going straight home by air.
On the captain's left sat Katherine Davis, newlywed wife of Michael Davis, a young American investor who praised modern communications technology for affording him and his bride this opportunity for a honeymoon in the form of a trip around the world, while he could continue managing his portfolio using his satellite-enhanced all-wireless notebook computer. A grimace from Kathy at the mention of the computer gave me the impression that she'd have preferred more of Mike's attention for herself and less of it given to her electronic rival.
The chief engineer, Ilya Sergeievich Yakovlev, completed our party; he was a jovial, gray-haired man with the most intensely blue eyes I had ever seen, and a loud, booming voice never far from laughter. He had only praise for the Kapitan Fedosov: her builder, the old Navy shipyard in St. Petersburg, was, in the opinion of Ilya Sergeievich, fit to compete with any shipbuilder anywhere in the world. The company had weathered the post-Soviet turmoil well by specializing in submarines and Arctic ships.
Our discussion eventually turned from pleasantries to the deeper things in life. A random collection of strangers who never expected to meet again following the end of our trip, we found it easy to bare our thoughts to each other and share things you never hear mentioned, say, in the workplace.
Predictably, I got everyone started by telling Dieter about my talks with Mikio in Tokyo. Dieter confirmed Mikio's description of human society as a flock of sheep with owners, shepherds, and wolves.
"It's an unconventional way of putting it, but in essence it's precisely what you're taught in the economics class at college. It seems, however, that your Japanese friend didn't want to put any other system in its place. So what was he trying to prove?"
I was still having a hard time answering that question in my own mind, but I welcomed the opportunity to think out loud.
"Mikio's main point was that the system lends itself to many different purposes, depending on the leadership. Today, the only discernible motive of those in power is greed, and greed filters down to every layer in society. During some brief periods in past history, there seem to have been leaders who were motivated by nobler ideals.
"But another cause for concern is the sheer complication of this society. Humanity has been around for several million years, and during nearly all of that time, almost every family lived on the land and wrenched its living from that same land. Now, during what's just a brief instant in history, we've attained a population larger than anything the earth has ever supported before, and nearly everyone is far removed from the process of producing food and providing shelter. We have no historical indication that such a society can continue for any length of time.
"The social mechanism for maintaining this population is utterly complex and inherently unstable: not only is it dependent on the whims of the weather, but it's also at the mercy of the hunches and fears of millions of speculators with their computerized trading systems. Our society is very much like a military airplane with a canard up front instead of the traditional tail plane at the rear. It's very agile, but it can fly only under computer control: it was built unstable in order to be able to maneuver faster, and it changes direction so fast that only a computer can steer it.
"I think Mikio would like to see a society where each person and family would be more immediately responsible for feeding, housing, and clothing themselves, and, therefore, less susceptible to being controlled. More of the 'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle' sort of thing, I guess."
"But there again," Dieter retorted, "it's precisely because there are so many people, and in the wrong places, that we need this commercialized society. Up until a few generations ago, starving masses could be given land through revolutions or land reforms, and, eventually, they would prosper as smallholders or members of cooperatives or kolchoses, providing social stability and a reliable tax base. But today, they live in megacities and have to have money to buy their food and water and to pay for their housing and other needs. They need a way to support themselves, but they have no skills, and, in particular, no survival skills. If there were land to give them, at least ninety percent of them would be dead within the first few months, because they wouldn't know what to do with themselves out in the countryside.
"When modern hunger riots erupt, they are aimless and destructive, not targeted at land and land politics. The rioters are simply seen as demanding something for nothing. The police aren't concerned with giving anybody paid work or handouts, only with suppressing the unrest. With current surveillance technology, they can do that in the most effective way possible: they identify leaders with the help of cameras, microphones, and computers, and take them out on the spot using snipers and robots.
"The recycling idea, of course, is very nice, and it has helped conserve some of our scarce resources. But recycling hasn't reduced our dependence on business. Germany has the strictest recycling laws anywhere, and the only thing they've cut down on is the amount of landfill produced. Costs and the general complication of life are only up, up, and up."
Mike Davis had his own view of recycling. Holding up a bottle of Russian mineral water, he stated, quite categorically, that it did nobody any good just to clean the bottle out and reuse it.
"Any fool can wash a bottle and refill it. If that's all you do, you haven't created any employment, and certainly no opportunities for making a profit. I'm all for recycling plastics, for example. Plastics can be sorted at a conveyor belt and sent to industry for raw material. If it's cheaper than using new plastic, why not. As for glass bottles, you can crush them and send them to the glass works. Recycle, if you have to, but the bit about reducing and reusing I don't buy. All you'll get out of that is unemployment and recession."
Sheila Johnson had another interesting comment to my tirade.
"You know, I've been watching the workings of what we call official development aid for quite some time now. It strikes me that what we've been doing to Africa, Asia, and South and Central America for the past several decades, has had the effect of turning their entire populations from subsistence farmers and fishermen into urban consumers. The statistics say that their living standards have grown tenfold, as measured by the amount of money they turn over. But where once there were a lot of poor people fending for themselves and spending little money because they didn't need to buy much, now there are urban slums full of discontented consumers, some unemployed, some being worked to death. However, they have to spend money to survive, and the money, of course, goes to business."
Mike didn't see anything wrong with that.
"Whenever there's an increase in business income, the wealth trickles down to the people. That's how the West got prosperous in the first place. Without profitable businesses, there are no jobs and no getting anybody out of the slums!"
"There's a difference, though," Jim Frost cut in. "The West and Japan got rich at a time when national markets were strictly protected and regulated. Foreign competition rarely was allowed to damage domestic production. Colonial empires helped build up the wealth of the owning class, and labor unions and social legislation ensured that more income was diverted to the people than what the capitalists would have let them have on their own. Once the industrialized world had strong enough businesses to go global, it began dismantling trade barriers, purely in its own interest. The developing countries weren't ready for trade liberalization, but it was forced on them through Structural Adjustment Programs, as a precondition for continued aid and more loans.
"These SAPs, as they were called, took away from the poor countries every one of those protective factors that had helped the West and Japan become so strong, just when they'd have been needed the most. It isn't overly cynical to say that the SAPs enabled the rich of this world to reintroduce colonialism. They also resulted in a 'trickle up' effect rather than the 'trickle down' of economic theory, and they were designed that way."
"In Indonesia," Dieter took up Jim's thread, "I saw many effects of what you just said. Tens of millions of people, who once got a fair livelihood on their own land, from growing and hunting their own food and making their own things, now work at minimum wage for large employers. They own nothing, especially not their homes. The employers are companies owned by a few rich Indonesians, usually together with multinational corporations.
"In Europe and America, regular people became prosperous only after the aristocracy's absentee ownership of all land and resources had been abolished. Today, in the developing world, we have a situation of absentee ownership of everything, like in feudal and colonial times. But now the colonial masters are multinational corporations and their local allies, not foreign governments."
Not that much earlier, Costa Rica, with a long tradition of democracy and social justice, had attempted to reintroduce some of the laws that her SAP had forced her to abolish. At the time, Costa Rica had managed to pay off most of her debts, and her democratic institutions had thought the time had been ripe to better people's lives again. But the country had soon found out differently. Traditionally, the US Marines would quickly have invaded such a rebelling country and brought it back to order. But no such clumsy methods had been needed this time: the handful of multinationals controlling Costa Rica's exports had applied some subtle financial pressure, and within months, everything had been back to normal again.
The captain, Joel, referred with a few words to this well known incident, and added, "The world, as we see it from the perspective of regular Nigerians, has become one huge profit-making mechanism. Our villages have lost their ability to support their people. Ogoniland is covered in crude oil pouring out of badly maintained pipelines. Health care has become too expensive for regular people, so we're back to using witch doctors. But our rich and our military leaders live very comfortably, indeed."
Jim Frost had mentioned his interest in history early on during our meal, and now he drew on some of his insights.
"It's a long-standing conflict we're talking about, and the rise of big-time capitalism hasn't always been smooth sailing. What makes the rich so much stronger today is that their power has been institutionalized. We're no longer dealing with individual owners, who once could be made personally responsible for their actions, at least in theory. Now, as soon as somebody is rich and powerful enough, their holdings are turned into corporations. Other large companies and funds have no predominant owners, and are still harder to pin down.
"It's interesting to observe how, during the past century, our language was manipulated for the purpose of safeguarding the power of the institutions. During the nineteenth century, capitalism meant unrestrained private enterprise. Democratic government then derived most of its power from free individuals; not, as now, from the manipulation of public opinion by advertising agencies on behalf of political parties and other institutions, and from lobbying and bribery by the business community.
"In those days, the term 'Public interest' meant the good of the many individuals and families forming the governing public. 'Private interest,' on the other hand, was that which was profitable for the few, rich and powerful capitalists.
"Public and private interests were, by necessity, in conflict with each other. Through the efforts of concerned politicians and activists like US Presidents Theodore and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, many laws were passed that limited the abuses practiced in the private interest, at the expense of that of the public.
"That way, eventually, a new, liberal capitalism emerged, where the unabashed greed of the few had been replaced by the more responsible concept of the institutionalized profit motive. To ensure that private enterprise respected all the social and environmental obligations society had now imposed on it, a number of new public bodies were established.
"Naturally, with institutions increasingly dealing with and controlling each other, the influence of both private entrepreneurs on the one hand, and of individual activists on the other, was replaced by a much more harmonious interaction of bureaucratic minds on all sides.
"To protect their newly gained territory in society, the bureaucratic minds set about changing our way of thinking. A foolproof way of doing so is to retain accepted values and attitudes, while switching around the names we call things by. So in the case of institutions vs. individuals, the 'public interest' became that of the institutions, ostensibly representing the public, and 'private interest' became the incidental concerns of regular individuals and families.
"We'd all come to accept the concept of public interest as something good, and private interest as something dubious, if not outright bad. And now, in the name of us, the people, all those institutions—business, government, and so on—have usurped the right to define a standardized public interest, which uses every available excuse to increase the institutions' control over us, while decreeing that your and my individual needs and demands, by definition, are antisocial and bad.
"By now, most of the health and safety regulations built up during the twentieth century have been abolished in the name of "streamlining government' and 'self-regulation by industry,' and the public is again at the mercy of big business, just as during the 1800s.
"What we have today is a resurgence of unrestrained capitalism on a global scale, where the only regulation comes from unelected international agencies that represent the so called 'public interest.' Worse, many multinational corporations and even individual speculators are so rich and powerful that they're more influential than most national governments. That's why all trade barriers have been broken down: it gives the multinationals free access to all markets, for goods, services, and labor. It's illegal for local authorities to produce their own drinking water and run their own schools and hospitals, if some corporation can show that they can do it at a lower cost to the taxpayer—higher user fees don't affect the outcome. The world is, basically, one big sweatshop, where only the largest enterprises can compete, and an individual's only choices are to become an employee on their terms or find a niche where being local still matters.
"We also have better communications and transportation systems than ever. Communications have always been a means of exploitation. Early on, roads, canals, shipping, and railroads enabled large manufacturers to undercut and bankrupt small, local ones and then use their labor more cheaply afterwards. The Information Revolution only furthered the same trend. Those who know most about people also wield the greatest power over them."
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Post by Bear on Jul 30, 2012 12:11:55 GMT -5
Hi! I'm Lavastream.
First, I'd like to give credit to whoever made these types of kit games before.
In this kit finding game, you'll have to enter a place (I will have ten total) and search for a kit in a certain place. There are five kits in each place. Every once in a while, I will give you a clue as to were a kit is. You can find as many kits as you want in a day, and once all five kits have been found in a certain place, I will hide five new ones.
Here's the first place:
Chesnut Hill
Kits left: 4/5
In Chesnut Hill, there are three trees where kits can be found. In the trees, the kits can be in the branches or the roots. In two of the trees, the kits can be in a hollow in the tree.
There are also three leaf piles they could be hiding in.
Beach Cave
Kits left: 2/5
In Beach Cave, there are six sand dunes, one pile of seashells, three patches of seaweed, two small islands, and three holes.
Apple Woods
Kits left: 3/5
In Apple woods, there are 7 Apple trees where the kits can be hiding in the branches or the roots. Three of the trees also have small hollows. Also, there are three piles of apples.
Bubbling Stream
Kits left: 3/5
In Bubbling Stream, there are five lily pads kits could be hiding under. Also there are three reed bushes, two clumps of cattail, three patches of grass, four bushes, a pile of sand, and a pine tree that kits could be hiding in the branches or the roots.
Cotton Feild
Kits left: 5/5
In Cotton Feild, there are seven patches of cotton, three brambles, five grasses, four patches of daisies, two brair bushes, and four piles of leaves.
Midnight Forest
Kits left: 5/5
In Midnight Forest, kits can be hiding in eight pine trees, branches or roots. Four of the trees have hollows. There are four blackberry bushes, five brambles, and a bush.
Sand Bay
Kits left: 5/5
In Sand Bay, there are ten sand dunes, eight piles of shells, five clumps of seaweed, six lily pads, three holes, and three islands.
Amber Clearing
Kits left: 5/5
In Amber Clearing, there are twelve caves, five piles of amber, three trees where kits could be hinding in the branches or the roots, one hollow, eight grasses, and three daisy patches.
Brair Patch
Kits left:5/5
In the Brair Patch, there are ten brairs, ten rosebushes, ten thornbushes, five patches of grass, three daisy patches, and two rocks.
Bramble Plain
Kits left: 5/5
In Bramble Plain, twelve brambles, ten brairs, ten thornbushes, eight rosebushes, three rocks, and two grasses.
Here's an example of what to post:
Firetail entered Chesnut Hill and looked in the second leaf pile.
Also, the first person to find a kit on every page gets to choose if it is a normal kit, a power kit, or a disabled kit.
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