I’m not sure what I expected of Amazon, but it certainly wasn’t this.
- Shoes deliberately hidden in an ancient Egyptian temple leave archaeologists baffled.
- The Holocaust just got more shocking.
- The true-life horror that inspired Moby Dick.
- The lost tribes of the Amazon.
- Amazon rainforest tribe at centre of new cultural storm.
- The shocking savagery of America’s early history. The Barbarous Years by Bernard Bailyn is available at Amazon US/Kindle & UK/Kindle.
- In the 1890s, an Illinois naturalist collected 109 species of wild bees. Today’s scientists can only find 54.
- Could disappearing wild insects trigger a global crop crisis?
- Crawl space: Invasive ant armies clash on US soil.
- World’s sexiest octopus – and its 1991 discoverer – ostracized by biologists.
- Hearing voices.
- Most common psychiatric disorders share genetic roots.
- Melbourne researchers uncover HIV’s genetic hiding place.
- The US spends more on health care than the next 10 biggest spenders combined: Japan, Germany, France, China, the U.K., Italy, Canada, Brazil, Spain and Australia. Why exactly are the bills so high?
- Cosmic Fuggedaboudit: Dark Matter May Not Exist At All.
- Asteroid behind Russian blast crossed Earth’s orbit regularly for thousands of years, but its most-recent approach couldn’t have been detected by ground-based optical telescopes.
- Spyware installed on computers leased from furniture renter Aaron’s Inc. secretly sent 185,000 emails containing sensitive information — including photos of nude children and people having sex — back to the company’s corporate computers.
- Amazon’s human robots.
Quote of the Day:
‘The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.’ He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: ‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’
Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer,’ he said.
‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.’
George Orwell, 1984
