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為得碳權實際剝削的心得

 In the Amazon rainforest, certain companies, referred to as "carbon cowboys," are taking advantage of the carbon credit system for financial profit. These companies claim to help the environment by generating carbon credits, which are sold to corporations seeking to offset their emissions. While the concept of carbon credits is designed to encourage environmental protection, carbon cowboys often neglect the rights and well-being of local communities , particularly the quilombola people, who rely on the forest for their livelihoods. These carbon cowboys frequently deceive local communities by not fully informing them about the long-term consequences of carbon credit projects. Many communities are pressured into signing agreements that allow companies to control their land in exchange for promises of environmental protection. However, these agreements are often vague, and the local people are not fully aware of how their land will be used or how they will benefit. In many cas...

俄羅斯與烏克蘭背後戰役的思想脈絡心得

Putin leans here on a strange theory advanced by the 20th-century historian and ethnographer Lev Gumilev. The son of two of Russia's most famous poets, Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev maintains that every people' possesses a distinct life force: a "bio-cosmic" inner energy or passionate substance that he calls passionarnost. Putin may have known Gumilev in St Petersburg at the start of the 1990s. At any rate, he has embraced his ideas and never misses an opportunity to refer to them. In February last year, he said: " I believe in passionarnost. In nature as in society, there is development, climax and decline. Russia has not yet attained its highest point. We are on the way". According to him, Russia carries the power and potential of a young people. "We possess an infinite genetic code", he has said.   In addition to Gumilev, Putin relies on another thinker - a minor figure in the history of Russian thought. Last October, he spoke of...

種族關係本質的心得

      Most schoolchildren are taught the Declaration of Independence's most famous lines: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." But relatively few children or adults today are as familiar with the right to revolt that follows: "Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.... When a long train of abuse and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."         When Thomas Jefferson penned those words, he owned hundreds of enslaved people. Yet he was acutely aware that Black people yearned for freedom no less than the white col...

傳統語言非自然消失的心得

        There is a pervasive idea, in popular discourse about language endangerment, that languages just slip away, becoming obsolete or falling out of use. In this view, languages are like fashions, that pass with time, or technology, that is replaced by the more advanced. Those clinging to the old languages are seen as quaint at best, and conservative, or even luddite, at worst. But this conception is wrong. It benefits the powerful at the expense of the powerless, reassuring the colonizer that they are not to blame. Languages are not lost, they are taken. They are uprooted by malice or neglect, their speakers assimilated into a new tongue, or left to struggle in the space between the fading old and the out of reach new.         Language endangerment has continually accelerated, as the rise of nation-states and centralized, powerful governments, along with inventions such as the printing press and mass media, have created a handful of sup...

奧斯丁小說中女主角特質的心得

      Good health and a healthy appetite go hand in hand in Austen's novels. Her heroines when flourishing eat in moderation and without worrying too much about what they are eating and what they are not. Catherine Morland, the youthful, zestful heroine of Northanger Abbey, is blessed with "a good appetite and eats just what she wants to, when she is hungry.       The heroines' good constitutions and well-regulated appetites are also conjoined with a taste for fresh air and exercise. Often, they are determined walkers, visiting friends and neighbors on foot, enjoying scenic strolls (Catherine) or traipsing, like the best of the Romantics, through the natural world (Marianne Dashwood). Elizabeth Bennet thinks nothing of walking three miles "in [] dirty weather" to see her cold-ridden sister marooned at Netherfield, "crossing field after field at a quick pace, jumping over stiles and springing over puddles with impatient activity, and finding herself at...

真實戰爭-殘酷與平凡的心得

       I am most interested in the kinds of true war stories and war memories capacious enough to include the blood and guts as well as the boring and the quotidian. True war stories acknowledge war's true identity, which is that while war is hell, war is normal, too. War is both inhuman and human, as are its participants. Photographer Tod Papageorge's American Sports, 1970: Or How We Spent the War in Vietnam portrays war in exactly this fashion. The book features seventy photographs, all but one capturing American sporting events: the players and the fans, the press conferences and the team buses, the dugouts and the locker rooms, with the participants being men, women, young, old, black, white, ugly, beautiful. The last photograph is the one that does not depict a sporting event or its participants. It is of the War Memorial in Indianapolis, with these words on the facing page: "In 1970, 4,221 American troops were killed in Vietnam." This is horror as an appendi...

咖啡豆漲價的心得

     Global coffee prices have soared to their highest in nearly 50 years due to poor weather in Brazil and Vietnam, forcing roasters such as Nestle to raise prices and consumers to hunt for cheaper brews amid the cost of living crisis. Production problems linked to bad weather in Brazil and Vietnam have seen global supplies lagging demand for three years. That has left stocks depleted and driven benchmark ICE exchange prices to a peak of US$3.36 per lb.       Last time coffee traded that high was in 1977 when snow destroyed swathes of Brazil's plantations. However, the shock to consumers was much bigger back then. If adjusted for inflation, US$3.36 per lb in 1977 would be equivalent to US$17.68 today.       Brazil, which produces nearly half the world's arabica , high-end beans used primarily in roast and ground blends, experienced one of its worst droughts on record this year. Although rains finally arrived in October, soil moistu...