Amalia S. Levi@amaliasl·Jun 8, 2020The gap we see between April 13 and April 30, 1816, in #TheBarbadosMercury gazette does not signify lack of material. It reflects the slave revolt between April 14 to April 16 that shut down the island for nearly two weeks (printing house included). 6/ https://dloc.com/AA00047511/00001/allvolumes…12Amalia S. Levi@amaliasl·Jun 8, 2020(It is interesting that when the April 30 issue came out, there is no mention of the revolt. Only on the second page do we find information about the “perfidious league of slaves” that went around pillaging and destroying the island, and about their fate). 7/

April 15, the day when you pay your taxes, gives you a good index of how democracy is functioning. If democracy were functioning effectively, April 15 would be a day of celebration. That’s a day on which we get together to contribute to implementing the policies that we’ve decided on. That’s what April 15 ought to be. Here it’s a day of mourning. This alien force is coming to steal your hard-earned money from you. That indicates an extreme contempt for democracy. And it’s natural that a business-run society and doctrinal system should try to inculcate that belief.

The central problem of human beings isn’t religion, as the New Atheists insist. It’s tribalism.

The annual drop in Maine wood demand since 2014 would fill that imaginary 1,770-mile caravan. The loss equals about 350 fewer truckloads of wood a day, every day of the year.

"Using visible wavelengths of light, it is difficult to tell if an asteroid is big and dark, or bright and small, because both combinations reflect the same amount of light," said Carrie Nugent, a NEOWISE scientist at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena. "But when you look at an asteroid in the infrared with NEOWISE, the amount of infrared light corresponds with how big the asteroid is, and with some thermal models on a computer, you can figure out how big the asteroids are."