Buster Keaton’s Climate Change

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Fay
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
World War I ◽  
Storm Surges ◽  
Weather Conditions ◽  
Detailed Knowledge ◽  
World War ◽  
Precise Control ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
Peter Sloterdijk ◽  
Slapstick Comedy

Much of Buster Keaton’s slapstick comedy revolves around his elaborate outdoor sets and the crafty weather design that destroys them. In contrast to D. W. Griffith, who insisted on filming in naturally occurring weather, and the Hollywood norm of fabricating weather in the controlled space of the studio, Keaton opted to simulate weather on location. His elaborately choreographed gags with their storm surges and collapsing buildings required precise control of manufactured rain and wind, along with detailed knowledge of the weather conditions and climatological norms on site. Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) is one of many examples of Keaton’s weather design in which characters find themselves victims of elements that are clearly produced by the off-screen director. Keaton’s weather design finds parallels in World War I strategies of creating microclimates of death (using poison gas) as theorized by Peter Sloterdijk.

scholarly journals Astronomical causes of climate change. Milanković–Bacsák cycle and the last ice age

2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-16
Author(s):  
András Hágen
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
World War I ◽  
Hungarian Academy ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
World War ◽  
Theoretical Support ◽  
History Of ◽  
Letter Exchange ◽  
Last Ice Age ◽  
Academy Of Sciences

György Bacsák, a Hungarian polyhistor, was born 150 years ago and died 50 years ago. He played an important role in refining and further developing the Milanković cycle. Milanković's theory describes the effect of changes in Earth's movements on the climate. The theory came from its creator, Milutin Milanković, a Serbian geophysicist and astronomer. The Serbian scientist was imprisoned in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy during World War I as a citizen of a hostile state. He developed his theory in the library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Understanding the essence of the theory, György Bacsák enjoyed the theoretical support of Milanković in the form of regular correspondence between 1938 and 1955. In total, György Bacsák wrote 56 letters to Milutin Milanković, while the Serbian scholar wrote 10 letters, all of which can be found in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The language of the letters was German, since both Bacsák and Milanković spoke German fluently. Three articles from György Bacsák, from the year 1940, were published in the Magazine “Weather” and a part of his book “Earth’s history of the last 600,000 years” was published in 1944 both of them were based on this letter exchange.

scholarly journals Editorial | Climate change - Facts, Uncertainties and Myths

2008 ◽  
Vol 87 (3) ◽  
pp. 195-196
Author(s):  
W.J.E. van de Graaff
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
World War I ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Human Society ◽  
World War ◽  
Impact Of Climate Change ◽  
An Inconvenient Truth ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
Potential Impact ◽  
The Military

Clemenceau, the prime minister of France in the final stages of World War I, is reported to have said, “War is much too serious a thing to be left to the military”. Along these lines, one might say that “Climate change is much too serious to be left to climate scientists”. The point being that the views of technical specialists may be very important when a nation’s future is at stake, but that a purely technical perspective is too limited to decide on the best course of action. Leaving the issue of climate change, or war for that matter, solely to politicians is not wise either. Far too much is at stake for humanity as a whole to either accept uncritically or, alternatively, reject out-of-hand the doomsday message in Al Gore’s An inconvenient truth. This movie presents a dramatic view of the potential impact of climate change on our environment and hence human society.

Through the prism of Spain. Socio-economic causes of different outcomes of Russian and Spanish civil wars

2017 ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
I. Rozinskiy ◽  
N. Rozinskaya
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Economic Well Being

The article examines the socio-economic causes of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1936), which, as opposed to the Russian Civil War, resulted in the victory of the “Whites”. Choice of Spain as the object of comparison with Russia is justified not only by similarity of civil wars occurred in the two countries in the XX century, but also by a large number of common features in their history. Based on statistical data on the changes in economic well-being of different strata of Spanish population during several decades before the civil war, the authors formulate the hypothesis according to which the increase of real incomes of Spaniards engaged in agriculture is “responsible” for their conservative political sympathies. As a result, contrary to the situation in Russia, where the peasantry did not support the Whites, in Spain the peasants’ position predetermined the outcome of the confrontation resulting in the victory of the Spanish analogue of the Whites. According to the authors, the possibility of stable increase of Spanish peasants’ incomes was caused by the nation’s non-involvement in World War I and also by more limited, compared to Russia and some other countries, spending on creation of heavy (primarily military-related) industry in Spain.

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

The Anarchist Press in Egypt before World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Gorman
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Public Education ◽  
World War I ◽  
State Power ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
World War

This chapter traces the development of the radical secular press in Egypt from its first brief emergence in the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I. First active in the 1860s, the anarchist movement gradually expanded its membership and influence over subsequent decades to articulate a general social emancipation and syndicalism for all workers in the country. In the decade and a half before 1914, its press collectively propagated a critique of state power and capitalism, called for social justice and the organisation of labour, and promoted the values of science and public education in both a local context and as part of an international movement. In seeking to promote a programme at odds with both nationalism and colonial rule, it incurred the hostility of the authorities in addition to facing the practical problems of managing and financing an oppositional newspaper.

Press Propaganda and Subaltern Agents of Pan-Islamic Networks in the Muslim Mediterranean World prior to World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Odile Moreau
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World War ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
The Press ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.

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