Word: evens
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...next 33 years, he led three major crusades to undermine the power and moral defenses of the British Raj. In 1919-22 he mustered widespread nonviolent strikes, then a campaign of peaceful noncooperation, urging Indians to boycott anything British--schools, courts, goods, even the English language. He believed mass noncooperation would achieve independence within a year. Instead, it degenerated into bloody rioting, and British soldiers turned their guns on a crowd in Amritsar, massacring 400. Gandhi called his underestimating of the violence inside Indian society his "Himalayan blunder." Still, villagers mobbed him wherever he went, calling him Mahatma...
...followed the Gandhian strategy for as long as I could, but then there came a point in our struggle when the brute force of the oppressor could no longer be countered through passive resistance alone. We founded Unkhonto we Sizwe and added a military dimension to our struggle. Even then, we chose sabotage because it did not involve the loss of life, and it offered the best hope for future race relations. Militant action became part of the African agenda officially supported by the Organization of African Unity (O.A.U.) following my address to the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East...
What are we to make of all this in practical terms, philosophical terms, even spiritual terms? How to comprehend an age in which, suddenly, we find ourselves enmeshed in a huge information-processing system, one that seems almost to have a life of its own and to be leading us headlong into a future that we can't clearly see yet can't really avoid...
...from hand ax to ax with handle suggests that as of 50,000 B.C., during the Middle Paleolithic, the social brain was not humming very vibrantly. There were only 2 million or 3 million "neurons"--a.k.a., people--scattered across the whole planet, and lacking fiber optics or even postal service, they weren't exactly in constant contact...
...Still, even back then, the social brain, through positive feedback, was maturing. With each advance in subsistence technology, survival grew more secure, hastening population growth; and as population grew, the advances came more quickly. By the Mesolithic Age, around 10,000 B.C., with the neuronal population up to around 4 million, the rate of advance had moved from one major innovation per 20,000 years to a sizzling one per 200--including such gifts to posterity as combs and beer...