wollemia nobilis

Via Super Punch, we learn about the clandestine, successful mission pulled off by botanists, park rangers, conservators and New South Wales’ brave firefighters to save the only known wild population of Wollemi pines.
The trees, which may be up to one hundred thousand years in age, number about two hundred individuals and prior to their discovery in 1994 (akin to finding a living dinosaur), were believed to be extinct and only known through the fossil record. The operation was kept secret so as to not disclose the grove’s location as caretakers fear that visitors could bring contamination that could harm the critically endangered species. Clones have been propagated worldwide and have distinct broad needles and knobbly bark.

interbellum or roaring twenties

Framed during the Paris Peace Conference six days earlier, the League of Nations (Société des Nations, previously) held its first council meeting on this day in 1920. With an executive body comprised of Italy, the United Kingdom, Japan and France (the victors of World War I) and charged with not only maintaining peace but also championing social justice for native inhabitants of colonial holdings, fair labour standards, global health and combatting human trafficking, the organisation lacked the authority and means to enforce its mandate through sanctions or military interventions.

With the outbreak of World War II, it became clear that the supranational body had not been invested with the powers it required to prevent the revanchment of hostilities, and though unable to carry on with its functions except in a wholly nominal sense with the headquarters in Geneva unoccupied for nearly six years after the onset of war, the League of Nation was not formally dissolved until 19 April 1946, the Tehran Conference three years prior recommending it being disbanded and reconstituted into a new, stronger institution. The finally assembly was mostly a housekeeping session, transferring assets to its successor organisation, the United Nations, and the remittance of reserve funds that member nations had furnished. Chaired by the Right Honourable Viscount Cecil of Chelwood (*1864 – †1958), Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, one of the chief architects of the League of Nations and ardent adherent to its ideals and concept it stood for, he concluded the meeting:


“Let us boldly state that aggression wherever it occurs and however it may be defended, is an international crime, that is the duty of every peace-loving state to resent it and employ whatever force is necessary to crush it, that the machinery if the Charter, no less than the machinery of the Covenant, is sufficient for this purpose if properly used, and that every well-disposed citizen of every state should be ready to undergo any sacrifice in order to maintain peace … I venture to impress upon my hearers that the great work of peace is resting not only on the narrow interests of our own nations, but even more on those great principles of right and wrong which nations, like individuals, depend.

The League is dead. Long live the United Nations.”

birb's the word

Via Everlasting Blört, as happy hosts to our own flock of fluffy, round friends (though ours are notoriously camera shy and flit around far too quickly to capture their cheer and adorableness in an appreciable way) that particularly like to huddle around a leggy, bare tree directly in view from the window by the dining table, we very much enjoyed the Audubon Society’s guide for birbing. In the main, the ones we’re fortunate to have visit (that fulfill all of the criteria set forth in the article are black-capped chickadees (tits, Blaumeise) that become exceptionally globular during the winter yet still agile and aerodynamic.

l’habitat et à l’infrastructure

Via the always engrossing Maps Mania, we are invited to contemplate land use by the Swiss and take notice how for instance, geography and terrain considered, the dominant percentage for Switzerland is found in managed and untamed forests.

In contrast this survey of the American landscape reveals that the majority of its built environment is given over to livestock with the majority of arable land dedicated to growing feed for said cattle and pigs. One wonders how land use might shift in the future and how we might take a more hands-off approach to our empty spaces.

res publica

On this day in 1777 delegates from twenty-eight settlements convened in a town called Winsor to declare their independence from disputed and competing territorial claims by colonial Quebec and the breakaway states of New York and New Hampshire and established the Republic of Vermont.
Though it was eventually admitted into the Union in 1791 as the fourteenth state after the original thirteen colonies, in the intervening years, it was a fully-formed and constituted government with a postal system, a militia (Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys—from les verts monts), flag, anthem, legal system (which abolished slavery), credentialed diplomats and currency, the coinage called Vermont coppers. Coins struck after the British surrender when it seemed more guaranteed that the US would be a stable political entity bore the motto on their observe Stella quarta decima—meaning the fourteenth star and signaling the republic’s aspiration to join them. It was not until 2015 that the state dictum officially became “Stella quarta decima fulgeat,” secondary after the “Freedom and Unity” of the state seal.

5x5

scorched earth: ornithologists in Australia have observed opportunistic birds that use the bush fires to flush out prey—via Kottke

midden mound: one beachcomber is sharing her found treasures

robertson head driver: an interesting look at the history of screws and other tools

the rich get richer and the poor get children: proletaneous defines one aspect of economic disparity

bucket-brigade: Sydney Opera House thanks the firefighters

klimahysterie

The Unword of the Year (Unwort des Jahres, see previously)—selected by a jury independent since 2011 Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache—is the above term for climate-hysteria, a rhetorical ploy invoked by some businesses, news outlets and politicians to discredit and defame those who forward the discussion and urgency of the environmental emergency of our own making as having some sort of collective psychosis. The runner-up was “Umvolkung,” a Nazi-era term used to describe assimilation as a way for the Volk to shed their national identities and join the Reich, which is sadly being reinserted into common-parlance.

missioners

In a rather revolting display of presumption and trouncing the principal of separation of church and state, the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion that’s receiving deserved condemnation, the Episcopal bishop suffragan of the US Armed Forces accepted a Bible donated from the Museum of the Bible (I think this opportunity for self-promotion and the prayvaganza for Trump were the big take-aways for this ceremony) to sanctify as the official one for the newly constituted Space Force at the altar of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC.  Notwithstanding that the oath of office for any military branch is not sworn on any religious text, to privilege one narrative or worldview above another is completely antithetical to good order, discipline and cohesion. “Almighty God, who set the planets in their courses and the stars in space,” the chaplain beseeched, “look with favour, we pray you, upon the commander-in-chief, the forty-fifth president of this great nation, who looked to the heavens and dared to dream of a safer future for all mankind.”