The city of Shibam in Yemen shows how a high-rise rammed earth/adobe city might look. It's possible to adapt this technique to wet climates with appropriate plasters and maintenance:
> I don't see what's the link between his origins and his sins in life. Both can be studied independently regardless of the other.
I agree! Historians who went quiet on this when “evil Columbus” became the dominant interpretation don’t seem to share that same view. Nor do those who downvoted and flagged my post, apparently.
Sand and basalt-based thermal batteries sound promising. Essentially just heat up rocks in insulated containers, then run Rankin- or Stirling-cycle generators off the stored heat. Power-to-weight's probably awful, but that doesn't matter for grid applications, just cost per kWh:
So you wouldn’t mind white Wakandans? One or two Vanilla Panthers? How about caucasian voodoo gods, or demons of Japanese myth? They’re fictional too.
Of course that would be silly, and we both know why. Tolkien’s work is explicitly based on Norse myth and the peoples of Northern Europe, who were and are quite real. He wrote about these intentions and influences at length.
There’s no need for writers to rely on European culture as a crutch. I’d personally love to see more epics set in the Mali Empire, Ghana Empire, or Kingdom of Dahomey. Sub-Saharan Africa has lots of its own rich mythology, too. It seems bizarre that besides Black Panther, the most I’ve seen these stories represented on TV is still the 1990s PBS series “Wishbone”.
Male life expectancy at birth in Russia fell by six years between 1991 and 1994. A drop that fast was practically unprecedented in developed economies. It’s not fun being a Millennial, as I know firsthand, but nothing comparable to 90s Russia in the aggregate.
The state of law and order in Venezuela is thin evidence? How many countries’ justice systems would need to collapse to convince you of this concept’s validity?
The “anarcho-tyranny” idea is orthogonal to Francis’s other and later views, and has become a mainstay topic in mainstream conservatism. Here it used in a Newsweek article by Hispanic conservative writer Pedro Gonzalez:
I briefly shopped on Walmart.com because Amazon had marketized, destroying my trust in reviews, brands, and product quality, and Walmart had not. That time is past. Now I find myself sticking to manufacturer websites or buying things in the store again.
BBC quoted a Pakistan government official as saying 1/3 of the country is currently underwater. Even if that’s hyperbole, and I’m not sure it is, the scale of devastation is immense.
Anarchy-tyranny in 1980s New York (see “Context and Background”) led to this famous act of vigilantism and subsequent acquittal via what was essentially jury nullification: