Human Geo Quotes

As ally and benefactor, Washington turned a blind eye to Zia’s domestic politics and his pursuit of nuclear weapons for Pakistan. Pakistan’s religious minorities suffered without much protest in the world’s capitals, where Zia was feted as a frontline ally against Soviet expansion. But it is unclear how much influence international protest might have had in diminishing the effects of Zia’s bigotry in any event. Given his stranglehold on power in Pakistan and the geo-political climate of the era, international pressure against Zia’s treatment of the country’s minorities would have been confined to moral appeals and petitions for human rights. And these would have fallen on deaf ears, for Zia’s prejudices were deeply ingrained. Upon being told that his ordinances against Ahmadis had violated global human rights norms, Zia expressed his views toward such matters in a characteristically trenchant manner: ‘Ahmadis offend me because they consider themselves Muslim … Ordinance XX may violate human rights but I don’t care.’80

Sebab inilah, sebagai satu contoh, kita dapat menyaksikan betapa pertubuhan-pertubuhan antarabangsa yang tertentu telah melemparkan tuduhan kepada Malaysia sebagai kononnya tidak punya kebebasan mencukupi, semata-mata kerana kita tidak membenarkan rakyat kita secara terbuka menyalahi akan nilai-nilai dan tatasusila keagamaan yang pokok. Ini tidak bermakna Malaysia tidak mempunyai kelemahan dalam beberapa segi dasar, undang-undang atau pelaksanaannya; tetapi cemuhan Barat ke atas Malaysia atau negara-negara lain, tidak berdasarkan keprihatinan ikhlas terhadap prinsip keadilan, kebajikan atau kemanusiaan, melainkan sebagai alat dan senjata bagi memenuhi kepentingan ekonomi, geo-politik dan kebudayan mereka. Kebudayaan dan tamadun Barat sentiasa mencipta peralatan dan senjata baru yang lebih menarik dan canggih untuk senantiasa berada di puncak kekuasaan dan keagungan mereka dari segi sains, teknologi dan kebendaan. Mereka juga mencipta pelbagai wawasan dan istilah baru yang menakjubkan seperti modenisasi, pembangunan, demokrasi, hak-hak asasi manusia, pluralisme, globalisas dan lain-lain untuk tujuan yang sama.

A world without police would be a world without poverty and hunger, in which everyone would have enough, and no one would need to look over their shoulder. It would be a world without white supremacy, in which no one is viewed as dispensable or as deserving anything last enough fully human life. It would be a world without the violence of patriarchy, in which women, children, and those gendered otherwise are not seen as objects for possession—economic or sexual. Without capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, why on earth would we need the police? And since the police exist to govern and reinforce barriers, boundaries, and borders, to fight the police is to fight those divisions racking our world as well.

The worst extreme existential risk for humanity is not a nuclear war, the impact of a mega killer cosmic rock, nor a catastrophic disaster or a pandemic. The worst existential risk is humanity loosing its attraction towards risk. Without it, the stimulation to innovate would disappear, along with the progress of our civilization.

The pull of the organic towards the inorganic, of the animate towards the inanimate, of the living towards the unliving - the pull towards something "old." In these moments, the human being is turned inside-out, revealing the entirety of human civilization as a bg-brain neurosis, beneath which a deeper, multi-layered geo-trauma manifests itself in a myriad of ways, from frenetic protozoa to the torpid, stumbling forth of human self-awareness.

Of the early founders, the most eminent proponent of physical geography as a scientific entity was undoubtedly the German polymath Alexander von Humboldt. On his many travels, he combined observations with measurements of temperature, pressure, and the Earth’s magnetic field, and made generalizations about the geographical distribution of vegetation, global-scale patterns of temperature (depicted by isotherms on maps), the ways in which temperature falls and vegetation varies with increasing altitude (on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, for example), the alignment of volcanoes, and the course of ocean currents. In his major works, written around the middle of the 19th century, such as Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe , published in 1849, he emphasized not only relationships within the natural geo-ecosphere but also linkages to human societies. A year earlier, Mary Somerville, based at the University of Oxford, published Physical Geography and defined the subject as ‘a description of the Earth, the sea and the air, with their inhabitants animal and vegetable, of the distribution of these organized beings and the causes of that distribution’.

Since the beginning of neanderthal man, personal branding has existed. Many choose to believe that personal branding is a new concept and is something that globalization and the expansion of the internet and new technologies have created. Because it is not new, it means we have hundreds of years, as a matter of fact, thousands, to learn and study.

What started off as this hobbyist movement became the basis for disrupting the entire space infrastructure. Suddenly, Moore’s Law came rushing into the space industry and completely changed to how people think about it. Instead of spending a billion dollars to put a satellite in GEO—instead of spending twelve years on building and designing it, and then buying a multi-hundred-million-dollar rocket to get it there, and having a mission that’s going to last for thirty years—for a tiny, tiny fraction of that cost you could build these little CubeSats out of cell phone components, and you can put up ten or a hundred or a thousand of them in low Earth orbit and just replenish them.2 David Cowan

We have an ability to recognise our consciousness and conscience. Using our senses and rational faculties of inference, we come to know that the lifeless matter and living beings owe their existence to someone else due to their inability to explain their existence by self-creation. Matter has not created itself. Life in its complex and intelligent form in humans can also not be explained by self- creation. Matter is malleable in our hands and we can convert it into different ways to make aero planes, skyscrapers and pyramids. Using geo-engineering, we are striving to even transform climate of entire planet. We, having this ability or potential have also only come into existence in this world few hundred years ago. Thus, even after gaining tremendous advances in artificial intelligence, we cannot claim to explain our existence through self-creation and creation of consciousness from unconsciousness. In a mindless universe, we find ourselves as sentient beings in search of the origin and meaning of life.

Things had been different when Garveyism and Ethiopianism rather than afro-centrism and occultism set the tone. To contain modernity, to appreciate its colonial constitution and to criticise its reliance on racialised governmental codes all required finding an autonomous space outside it. A desire to exist elsewhere supplied the governing impulse. It was captured in compelling forms in the period's best songs of longing and flight, like Bunny Wailer's anthem ‘Dreamland’ 5. However, there is no longer any uncontaminated, pastoral or romantic location to which opposition and dissent might fly, and so, a new culture of consolation has been fashioned in which being against this tainted modernity has come to mean being before it. Comparable investments in the restorative power of the pseudo-archaic occur elsewhere. They help to make Harry Potter's world attractive and are routine features of much ‘new age’ thinking. They govern the quest for a repudiation of modernity that is shared by the various versions of Islam which have largely eclipsed Ethiopianism as the principal spiritual resource and wellspring of critique among young black Europeans. Their desire to find an exit from consumerism's triumphant phantasmagoria reveals them to be bereft, adrift without the guidance they would have absorbed, more indirectly than formally, from the national liberation movements of the cold war period and the struggles for both civil and human rights with which they were connected. Instead, an America-centred, consumer-oriented culture of blackness has become prominent. In this post-colonial setting, it conditions the dreams of many young Britons, irrespective of their ancestral origins or physical appearance. This brash and celebratory imperial formation is barely embarrassed by the geo-political fault-line that re-divides the world, opposing the overdeveloped north to the suffering south. That barrier provides the defining element in a new topography of global power which is making heavy demands upon the overwhelmingly national character of civil society and ideal of national citizenship. It is clear that the versions of black politics that belonged to the west/rest polarity will not adapt easily to this new configuration.

The Great Oxygenation Event was contemporaneous with one of the most severe ice ages this world has ever known, an event known to geo-nerds as the Paleoproterozoic Snowball Earth episode.* This was probably no coincidence. At the time, Earth’s climate was likely being kept above freezing by a methane greenhouse. Methane is such a powerful infrared absorber that a very small amount of it can significantly warm a planet. It is also, however, an organic molecule that is easily and eagerly consumed by oxygen. So when all that oxygen released by the cyanobacteria built up in the atmosphere, it quickly destroyed the methane greenhouse, the atmosphere suddenly became more transparent to infrared radiation, and the temperature plummeted, plunging our planet into a complete global freeze. Such a deeply frozen condition could even potentially become a permanent dead-end state for a planet like Earth.