EPautos Drama

10
2397
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

We’re still trying to get the “EPautos” domain up and running again. Meanwhile, we have “ericpetersautos” mirroring and redirecting – so it’s more a minor irritant than a catastrophe. Most of the regulars appear to have found their way here. But it’s still a big drag that what ought to be a simple two-minute fix is being held up for days and days on end.

Meanwhile, we’re close but not quite there, pie chart-wise.

UPDATE: Thanks to EPautos stalwarts Jeff and Guisseppe and Alex, we just made the Great Leap Forward to 84 percent of goal for the month! Thanks, guys!

With about 12 hours left in August, we need to make up about 12 percent to avoid ending in the red.

So, Last Call:

Please help, if you can. 

Our donate button is here.

 If you prefer to avoid PayPal, our mailing address is:

EPautos
721 Hummingbird Lane SE
Copper Hill, VA 24079

PS: EPautos stickers are free to those who sign up for a $5 or more monthly recurring donation to support EPautos, or for a one-time donation of $10 or more. (Please be sure to tell us you want a sticker – and also, provide an address, so we know where to mail the thing!)EPautoslogo

 

10 COMMENTS

  1. Pre-socratic philosophers foretold the cause of the demise of the Earth over 2,500 years ago.

    It’s going to dry out.

    The earth has only been oxygen rich enough for humans to breathe for a limited time. The number two source of atmospheric oxygen, after ocean micro-organisms, is water vapor in the upper atmosphere yielding oxygen via sunlight.

    Mexico City, largest city in the world, was once an island in the middle of an immense lake. All major cities begin in a water-rich locale, and every year they are dried out further and further.

    All inhabited land in America is tiled and drained before being populated.

    If you want to place something above capitalism that helps the earth, why not preach about Hydroarchy.

    Why not work to bring back the beavers, who were ruthless turned into currency by short-sighted Europeans with no regard for the long term condition of the lands they conquer.

    Eventually you run out of land to colonize, unless you make it into space in time, where there is an abundance of water. If man is to master the Earth itself, then it should first master the hydrological cycle.

    For mammals, water is life. If you’re going to deify nature and matter. If you must pursue mere belief and care not for empirical reality. At least choose the true natural God, to exalt above all others and not any false idols such as pollution, temperature, or depopulation.
    – – –
    Full Text of “The Pre-Socratic Philosophers”
    https://archive.org/stream/presocraticphilo033229mbp/presocraticphilo033229mbp_djvu.txt
    – – –

    ANAXIMANDER

    Anaximander, in an appendix is distinguished as having stated that…

    The earth is drying up

    Aristotle Meteor.
    Alexander must mean the attribution by Theophrastus to apply to the whole, not merely to the last sentence, since a little later he associates Anaximander and Diogenes again with the idea that winds cause the turnings of the sun.

    It is helpful to have Theophrastus’ attribution, although it must be noted that the only name mentioned by Aristotle in connexion with the drying up of the sea is that of Democritus.

    Aristotle had previously mentioned that those who believed the sea to be drying up were influenced by local examples of this process (which, we may note, was conspicuous around sixth-century Miletus) ; he himself rebuked them for their false inference, and pointed out that in other places the sea was gaining; also, there were long-term periods of comparative drought and flood which Aristotle called the ‘great summer’ and ‘great winter’ in a ‘great year’.

    Here Aristotle may be aiming particularly at Democritus, who thought that the sea was drying up and that the world would come to an end.

    Anaximander need not have thought this any more than Xenophanes did; in fact Aristotle might have been rebuking Democritus in terms of the earlier cyclical theory. There may well be a special reference to Anaximander:

    For fast of all the whole area round the earth is moist, but being dried by the sun the part that is exhaled makes winds and turnings of the sun and moon, they say, while that which is left is sea; therefore they think that the sea is actually becoming less through being dried up, and that some time it will end up by all being dry.

    Of this opinion, as Theophrastus relates, were Anaximander and Diogenes.

    Anaximmander in Aristotle’s words: ‘those who say that when the world around the earth was heated by the sun, air came into being and the whole heaven expanded. . .

    It is clear that if Anaximander thought that the sea would dry
    up once and for all this would be a serious betrayal of the principle
    enunciated in the extant fragment, that things are punished
    for their injustice:

    for land would have encroached on sea without suffering retribution. Further, although only the sea is mentioned, it is reasonable to conclude that, since rain was explained as due to the condensation of evaporation, the drying up of the sea would lead to the drying up of the whole earth.

    But could our whole interpretation of the fragment as an assertion of cosmic stability be wrong; could the drying up of the earth be the prelude to re-absorption into the Indefinite? This it could not be, since if the earth were destroyed by drought that would implicitly qualify
    the Indefinite itself as dry and fiery, thus contradicting its very
    nature; and, in addition, the arguments from the form of the
    fragment still stand.

    The principle of the fragment could, however, be preserved if the diminution of the sea were only one part of a cyclical process: when the sea is dry a ‘great winter’ (to use Aristotle’s term, which may well be derived from earlier theories) begins, and eventually the other extreme is reached when all the earth is overrun by sea and turns, perhaps, into slime.

    That this is what Anaximander thought is made more probable by the fact that Xenophanes, another Ionian of a generation just after Anaxi-
    mander’s, postulated cycles of the earth drying out and turning
    into slime:

    Xenophanes was impressed by fossils of plant and animal life embedded in rocks far from the present sea, and deduced that the earth was once mud. But he argued, not that the sea will dry up even more, but that everything will turn back into mud; men will be destroyed, but then the cycle will continue, the land will dry out, and men will be produced anew.

    For Anaximander, too, men were born ultimately from mud.

    The parallelism is not complete, but it is extremely close : Xeno-
    phanes may have been correcting or modifying Anaximander.
    Anaximander, too, was familiar with the great legendary periods
    of fire and flood, in the ages of Phacthon and Deucalion; impressed
    by the recession of the sea from the Ionian coast-line he might well
    have applied such periods to the whole history of the earth.

      • I don’t know what the Mediterranean they were observing is doing. I do know the already shallow Persian Gulf will be completely dry not too far into the future geologically. Everywhere is in flux of course.

        The arctic is melting, so the water from there will probably help balance everything out.
        – – –

        Watch California Dry Up Right Before Your Eyes In 6 Jaw-Dropping GIFs
        http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/18/california-drought-gifs_n_5843534.html

        5 facts you need to know about Lake Mead’s (currently 38% full) water crisis
        http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/planetpolicy/posts/2015/05/02-water-crisis-lake-mead-mulroy

        Lake Mead now only 28 feet above drinking water intake. (1078)
        http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/06/24/lake-mead-low-water-shortage/29202475/
        – – –

        Ocean water is not worth much to us of course. It’s fresh water that we need. When Europeans arrived in America, there were 200 million beavers about, and their handiwork of creating the Great Lakes, was one of the engineering marvels wonders of the world.

        But then they were nearly extirpated in North America and almost completely wiped out in Europe.

        King Midas is a natural phenomenon it appears. At a certain point, monetizing nature stops making sense and starts to lower the quality of life. If you keep on going, you could theoretically turn everything to gold and have nothing left but a gold-plated desert world.

        • Tor, there’s no doubt what the water in west Tx. will do since it’s been nearly 100 years in the robbing of our aquifers and now, even though wells are deeper than ever, the govt. pays well enough for cotton, soybeans and corn in this part of the world that drilling those deeper wells is well….well worth it.

          Last week I got an e from an old college bud that shows this new technology, developed mainly in the UK, that can show the Antarctica in 3 D. Some of the ice was something like 3800 metres deep. You could also see the land mass underneath.

          This isn’t news to those who keep up with it but Antarctica has gained a great amount of ice in it’s last stage of history. Algoreans probably say it’s due to the rest of the planet warming…..uh, I mean changing climate. Phew, nearly said the wrong thing there. Climate change, climate change, I’ll go write it on the board 100 times. We’ve had a godawful hot summer. I’ll be so glad for some climate change.

          • It’s a false dialectic for sure. That there can be either commerce, or conservation.

            Claiming to foresee the climate we’ll have in the future is a pseudoscience at this point.

            I have no issues with discussing things. But force and aggression have to be taken off the table. Caging and killing people to “help the planet” ends up making the environment the worst possible case, if you’re a human being.

            Texas Parks & Wildlife – Beavers
            https://tpwd.texas.gov/publications/nonpwdpubs/introducing_mammals/beavers/

            Going back in time a million years or so, we discover the beaver is the descendant of an 800-pound prehistoric rodent.

            Adult beavers, which average between 30 and 60 pounds, may seem rather puny by comparison, but they still rank as the second largest rodents in the world, right behind the South American capybara.

            A record beaver found in 1921 weighed 110 pounds, and heavyweights that tip the scales between 80 and 100 pounds still are caught occasionally.

            Mammals of Texas
            http://www.nsrl.ttu.edu/tmot1/castcana.htm

  2. More “It Begins” comments…

    2 Well said. Ive been saying all my life that the behavior of police towards civilians was going to turn into this. And rather than understand the problem the government is going to try and disarm the people to save oppressor pig lives. But few really care about the lives of police. Most of us want them gone or massively reformed along with the rest of our corrupt and messed up government.

    3 “You pull a gun on someone who hasn’t pulled a gun (or some other weapon) on you first, you go down for criminal brandishing/assault with a deadly weapon.

    You shoot someone with that gun and it turns out your life was not in peril – you go to prison for murder. You kick in the wrong door in the middle of the night and the terrified occupants defend themselves, they don’t get charged. You do.

    The taxpayers don’t foot the bill in the civil suit, either. The cops – and the people who signed off on the warrant do. Out of their personal pockets.”

    This would be a marvelous change.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here