Unknown

"The implications of the foregoing discussion, for insects and other invertebrates, need to be considered with caution. Clearly, it is not possible to provide a conclusive answer to the problem of pain in lower animals, as any subjective experience of an organism cannot be directly experienced by another and a means of communicating with lower organisms is not available to us."

"If I died and was offered to be born again as an insect or cease to exist, I would definitely choose not to exist [...] There is enormous inequality among the fates of insects. Some die very young, either as larvae, pupae, or just after having emerged from the pupa stage as adults, and it is difficult to see how most such lives can be good on balance. Death often seems very painful so, because their lives are so short, they do not include enough positive wellbeing to compensate their suffering."

"We have literally no idea at what level of brain complexity consciousness stops. Most people say, "For heaven's sake, a bug isn't conscious." But how do we know? We're not sure anymore. I don't kill bugs needlessly anymore. [...] Probably what consciousness requires is a sufficiently complicated system with massive feedback. Insects have that."

"Once, indeed, Harry was caught twirling a cockchafer round, which he had fastened by a crooked pin to a long piece of thread, but then this was through ignorance and want of thought: for as soon as his father told him the poor helpless insect felt as much, or more than he would do, were a knife thrust through his hand, he burst into tears, and took the poor animal home, where he fed him during a fortnight on fresh leaves; and when he was perfectly recovered, turned him out to enjoy liberty and fresh air. Ever since that time, Harry was so careful and considerate, that he would step out of the way for fear of hurting a worm, and employed himself in doing kind offices to all the animals in the neighbourhood."

"Those, however, who do not emit in intercourse and in a day and a night have relations with several tens (of women) without losing their semen, completely cure all ailments and daily are benefited in longevity."

"Before one is ready to have sex with a partner, he must practice Taoist physiological alchemy. He must train his breathing for a hundred days. His breathing should become as smooth and well-balanced as possible."

"There is the view that during the Cold War, Pakistan was the most allied ally and then, within the space of just a few months, we became America's most sanctioned friend."

"Anxiety was a philosophical concept before it taken up by psychology and psychiatry. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard (1813-1855) argued that anxiety is part of human nature. Anxiety arises where possibility and actuality come into contact and the present touches the future. Anxiety is a product of having the freedom to make choices and act, and by doing so make a commitment to one’s identity, ways of being in the world, and standing in relation to other people. For Kierkegaard, anxiety can be an avenue to stand in relation to God. This is why he wrote, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.” One can bracket out the God dimensions and still learn something valuable from Kierkegaard, namely that anxiety can cause inaction, which is, in its most basic sense, a loss of freedom. What is possible may never actualize and one may lose the present by tending to an imagined future. One becomes immobilized and unable to meet needs and realize goals and aspirations."

"I became a vegetarian 3 years ago. … The best thing about being a vegetarian for me is, number one is I know I'm not harming any animals. … The number two thing is increased strength. I'm a lot stronger than I was when I was eating meat. … Most of your most powerful animals in the wild are vegetarian, so I'm trying to get my strength to that level. I don't know if I'll make it or not, but elephants are vegetarians. They're pretty big, so..."

"Having the chance to watch … ', it was probably one of the first punches. Once I made that connection between loving an animal and eating an animal is when things clicked in my brain. Latinos have this obsession with everything fried, with a lot of animal protein, and, yeah, it’s true—we have a lot of problems with obesity, we have a lot of problems with diabetes, we have a lot of problems with asthma. We have a lot of problems with a lot of things that come from it. And I couldn't believe that to create a toothpaste, or to create a shampoo, there are a lot of animals that have to suffer for that. As you become a vegan, you start learning that everything in your life has to become cruelty free."

"Ça vaut pas la peine De laisser ceux qu'on aime Pour aller faire tourner Un ballon sur son nez. Ça fait rire les enfants... Ça dure jamais longtemps. Ça fait plus rire personne Quand les enfants sont grands."

"The Indo-European homeland has to be localized at the area where the wild horse did not live."

"For nearly two centuries the investigations went on, and voluminous works were written on the subject. The net result of their investigations ended in failure, and nothing definite was settled either in the sphere of language or race. What they finally left behind is the fiction of Ursprache [original language] with a false Urvolk [original people], who are found located in an equally nebulous Urheimat [homeland]."

"European scholars have been trying to prove that the Aryans came to India from outside and their guesses have extended to all sorts of places like Scandinavia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Turkey, Central Asia and Armenia. But any of these places cannot yet be said to really be the homeland of the Aryans. We are still in the realm of speculation and are likely to remain so."

"It is probable that one of the earliest homes (if not the first seat) of the members of the great Aryan family was in the high land surrounding the sources of the Oxus, to the north of die point connecting the Hindu Kush with the Himalayas . . . the Pamir Plateau."

"It is a basic tenet of migration and homeland theory that the geographical location of a language family’s proto-homeland is to be sought in the vicinity of the root of the family tree (i.e. in the region where the deepest branches come together on a map); or, more generally, that the homeland is to be sought in the region of present greatest genetic diversity of the family."

"Instead of letting us know definitely and precisely where the so-called original home of the Aryans lay, they drag us into a maze of conjectures clouded by the haze of presumptions. The whole subject of the Aryan problem is a farrago of linguistic speculations or archaeological imaginations complicated by racial prejudices and chauvinistic xenophobia. It is high time we extricate ourselves from this chaos of bias and belief."

"We have different sub-regions of an early IE world, scattered in space from the Baltic to Anatolia and east across the European steppe. . . . To unify these disparate geographical elements together into a single 'unified theory' seems to be as distant to those seeking such a goal in Indo-European studies as it is for physicists."

"From a common Proto-Aryan speech we infer also a common Proto-Aryan homeland. . . . Where was this primitive home from which the Aryan blood went out in so many streams over the earth?"

"The Indo-European homeland need not be identical to the area of horse domestication, but should be connected to it. The ways in which names and technical knowledge . . . spread should be explored."

"Apart from the linguistic issue, however, we have here another subtle aspect. Since there are all these different claims for the Urheimat... then any one location is controversial. Why mainstream scholarship should single out and ostracize only N-W-India-and-Pakistan is incomprehensible—particularly when archaeology and anthropology since the early 1980s stressed that there was no trace of mass invasion in this area."

"The cynical have been tempted to describe it as the phlogiston of prehistoric research."

"The shift from India to Europe as the preferred Urheimat was formally due to new linguistic insights.. but it was coincidentally also well-tuned to new political concerns. Apart from rising nationalism which explains the scramble among scholars to grab the Urheimat status for their own country, the main factor was European colonialism, then at its apogee. It seemed natural that the continent whose manifest destiny was the domination of the world, had also brought forth its own proto-historic Indo-European culture and language. Conversely, it seemed illogical that a backward country like India, badly in need of the White Man's civilising mission, could have brought forth the superior European culture."

"One does not ask 'where is the Indo-European home- land?' but rather 'where do they put it now?'"

"Skepticism in scholarly circles grew rapidly after 1880. The obvious impossibility of actually locating the Aryan homeland; the increasing complexity of the problem with every addition to our knowledge of prehistoric cultures; the even more remote possibility of ever learning anything conclusive regarding the traits of the mythical "original Aryans"; the increasing realization that all the historical peoples were much mixed in blood and that the role of a particular race in a great melange of races, though easy to exaggerate, is impossible to determine, the ridiculous and humiliating spectacle of eminent scholars subordinating their interests in truth to the inflation of racial and national pride—all these and many other reasons led scholars to declare either that the Aryan doctrine was a figment of the professional imagination or that it was incapable of clarification because the crucial evidence was lost, apparently forever."

"From the linguistic data alone... it is not possible to draw definite conclusions about the homeland of the speakers of PIE, or even the age of the language family."

"The 'problem' is primarily in the head of Indo-Europeanists: It is a problem of interpretative logic and ideology. We have seen that one primarily places the lE's in the north if one is German, . . . in the east if one is Russian, and in the middle if, being Italian or Spanish, one has no chance of competing for the privilege."

"Where would one have placed the homeland if the areas where all the Indo-European languages are spoken were to be eliminated by the logic used to eliminate the North-west of the subcontinent? While this may well be an unwarranted flight of fancy, it seems fair to point out that the homeland candidacy of the Volga Valley steppes, for one, is actually advantaged by the absence of ancient textual sources in the Indo-European languages spoken in that area (such as Balto-Slavic) that might well have proved detrimental to their case were they to have been preserved and discovered. The same holds true for other postulated homelands."

"Homelands are to be reconstructed in such a way as to minimize the number of migrations, and the number of migrating daughter branches, required to get from them to attested distributions."

"Nive Nielsen - Lady Silence"

"Ciarán Hinds - Captain Sir John Franklin"

"It is opposed to their foreign origin that neither in the code [of Manu], nor, I believe, in the Vedas, nor in any book that is certainly older than the code, is there any allusion to a prior residence."

"When the IE family had been discovered and scholars sought the land of origin, they initially thought of India because of Sanskrit’s ancientness."

"Tobias Menzies - Commander James Fitzjames"

"Paul Ready - Dr. Henry Goodsir"

"Jared Harris - Captain Francis Crozier"

"Adam Nagaitis - Cornelius Hickey"

"The common origin of the Sanscrit language with those of the west leaves no doubt that there was once a connection between the nations by whom they are used; but it proves nothing regarding the place where such a connection subsisted, nor about the time, (…) To say that it spread from a central point is a gratuitous assumption."

"Ian Hart - Thomas Blanky"

"Where, also, could the central point be, from which a language could spread over India, Greece and Italy, and yet leave Chaldaea, Syria and Arabia untouched? The question, therefore, is still open. There is no reason whatever for thinking that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present."

"The situation inside Gaza is dire. Not only is there no food, there is no water, electricity, or fuel. And that combination is not only catastrophic but can lead to more starvation and disease as well. We’ve got to get more trucks in."

"UN humanitarians expressed deep concern on Friday for all civilians in the Gaza Strip following Israel’s order for the entire population there to leave the north, amid ongoing airstrikes and a deepening humanitarian crisis. The development follows an announcement by UN Spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, just before midnight Eastern Standard Time on Thursday, that UN representatives in Gaza had been “informed by their liaison officers in the Israeli military” that everyone living north of Wadi Gaza should relocate to southern Gaza within 24 hours. Some 1.1 million people would be expected to leave northern Gaza, Mr. Dujarric said, adding that the same order applied to all UN staff and those sheltered in UN facilities, including schools, health centres and clinics. The UN considers it “impossible” for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences and appeals for the order to be rescinded, Mr. Dujarric said. Echoing that message, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) joined the call for Israel to rescind the relocation order, which amounted to a “death sentence” for many, said WHO spokesperson Tarik Jasarevic."

"Israeli forces’ repeated use of lethal force in the Gaza Strip since March 30, 2018, against Palestinian demonstrators who posed no imminent threat to life may amount to war crimes, Human Rights Watch said today. Israeli forces have killed more than 100 protesters in Gaza and wounded thousands with live ammunition... The killings... highlight the need for the International Criminal Court to open a formal investigation into the situation in Palestine. Third countries should impose targeted sanctions against officials responsible for ongoing serious human rights violations"

"Palestine is a state and the International Criminal Court has jurisdiction involving its cases, the ICC prosecutor ruled Thursday, which could pave the way for a war crimes investigation against Israel. A three-judge panel of the ICC Pretrial Chamber must now affirm the decision by Fatou Bensouda. Israel has been accused of committing war crimes in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip... Under Bensouda’s 60-page decision, the ICC may exercise its jurisdiction in “territory” that “comprises the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza.”"

"While skepticism, critique, and simple questions have only multiplied in the wake of outrageous Zionist atrocity propaganda, one thing appears certain: that the Holocaust—which some believe has been used dishonestly as a “warning” to prevent so-called genocide for years—was now being evoked as a justification to conduct actual genocide on a race of people trapped within the Gaza Strip."

"This vicious circle will not be solved by power, not be solved by tanks, and not will be — nor will it be solved by troops, only by political agreement and, above all and first of all, lifting this criminal siege, for God’s sake, after 17 years. This siege, what it was about, to guarantee the security of Israel. So, what happened out of the siege except of the suffer of — unbelievable inhuman suffer of 2 million people? What did it contribute to the security of Israel, this siege? You see the outcome."

"Even before the and the annihilation of almost all the territory's infrastructure, the situation there was much worse. According to the World Bank, the water supply in Gaza has been at "crisis levels" since 2005. UNICEF reported that in 2020 only 10 percent of the population in Gaza had direct access to clean and safe drinking water. Palestinians in Gaza were prevented from drilling wells and importing materials such as cement and iron needed to repair water infrastructure. At the same time, the chronic electricity deficit also heavily impaired functional water management. These past years have shown that economic dependency can easily be transformed into a genocidal instrument. After October 2023, Israel cut off electricity to Gaza, making the of water dependent on fuel, which was also subjected to repeated blockades of one hundred days for longer. This catastrophic man-made drought has meant that thousands of children have died of thirst and suffered from diarrhea, scabies and polio."

"I recently posted about Oculus/Facebook and their data collection. Let me go more in depth and this isn’t just about today this is about the future of XR. At the heart of the matter are these points where their and actions differ from other XR companies. FB tracks and stores all device movement and location. They also have wording to allow them to track all communication and interaction with their services. They have been caught capturing call and sms data on android phones through their FB app using similar language. FB doesn’t have a Hardware guy in charge of Oculus Hardware – instead, they have Boz – an ad guy, a data guy who recently made thoughts on your value as a FB user very clear. And if you are still confused, FB isn’t a social media company, it is a data tracking company. Why care that they track this data? Think the future, not just today. When there are XR apps and devices that you use regularly outside your home. Where natural feature tracking means cameras and microphones strapped to your head recording and saving everything. ... So it isn’t just Facebook and what they will do with this data, but this data’s existence is a threat to our privacy and freedom."

"What do animal rights advocates want? For most avowed rightists, that's easy: The complete liberation of animals from human exploitation as quickly as possible. Yet while we work diligently to achieve such a status for animals over the long term, we also have a duty to respect the "rights" of those individuals who are currently suffering to a life less miserable. To dismiss opportunities to ameliorate their pain and distress is to treat those animals as mere abstractions rather than as sentient beings inherently worthy of consideration now—a position, ironically, often held by the very exploitive institutions we seek to overturn."

"Sir Handel, Peter Sam and Duke were set to appear in this episode."