DW: There have been over 400 cases of press freedom violations in the United States since late May, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). What do these violations look like?  

Dr. Courtney Radsch: We've been working closely with the US Press Freedom Tracker, which is doing all of the investigations and documentations. The Committee to Protect Journalists is a founding partner of the tracker and we have been investigating more than 400 incidents since the outbreak of the protests over racial injustice and police brutality on May 26.

Those incidents include arrests by police, assaults by police and protesters, the targeting of protesters with projectiles, stealing of equipment and a range of different attacks which we are documenting and making available on the US Press Freedom Tracker website.

One of those incidents involved a Deutsche Welle reporter named Stefan Simons. He was shot at with rubber bullets and threatened with arrest in Minneapolis several weeks ago. How typical is his experience based on your research?

Unfortunately, Stefan's experience of getting shot at by the police with non-lethal projectiles is not uncommon. During the past few weeks, we have recorded at least 89 rubber bullet or projectile incidents, 27 pepper sprayings is 49 tear gassings.

Not all of those were necessarily directed at the journalists because they were journalists. Sometimes it's simply an issue of being in a protest in a crowd. But there were numerous incidents in which the police targeted journalists. We are deeply concerned about this and we are requesting that the police open investigations into these incidents.

 

Read more:

https://www.dw.com/en/us-sees-over-400-attacks-on-press-freedom-in-under...

 

 

See also:

of democratic civilisations and tweaking cheeks...

 

Aleksey Maximovich Pyeshkov (1868-1936), Russian writer, born Nizhny Novgorod (named Gorky), is considered the father of “Soviet” literature — as separate from “Russian” literature — and the founder of Socialist Realism.

Inspired by his grandmother with the love of romanic tales and a great sympathy for humankind, Gorky went on a nomadic wander in the Volga area, barely aged 12. Since the tzar’s schools were closed to peasants, he educated himself, referring to this experience  in My University, published in 1923. He practiced dozen of menial jobs, publishing his first story in 1892. Gorky became a journalist, then married a colleague of the Samarskya Gazeta. His articles exposing local corruption made sure he lost his job. In 1898, his collection Sketches and Stories was published by a radical press and he became an overnight sensation. The stories romanticised the vigour and nobility of the Russian peasants and workers. Around 1900 Gorky started to write novels of social realism. Of these Mother (1906) had the greatest impact. Describing the revolutionary awakening feeling in an ill-treated peasant woman, it became the prototype of the revolutionary novel.

Gorky donated most of his income to the revolutionary movement. He was arrested several times but was treated carefully because of his popularity. The tzar rescinded  his election to the Academy of Sciences in 1902, though, whereupon Chekhov and Korolenko resigned in protest. 

Gorky wrote 15 plays, two of which were heavily censored but were very successful at the Moscow Art Theatre. The Lower Depth (1902) — about the wretched lives of derelicts — remains a classic. His plays first modelled on Chekhov, also emphasised the characterisation over the plot.

After the failure of the 1905 revolution, in which Gorky took part, he sought to raise funds for the movement abroad. He had a triumphant reception in the USA (1906) but was soon dismissed there because his travelling companion, a woman, was not his wife. He set up a Bolshevik propaganda school on the island of Capri from 1906 till returning to Russia in 1914.

Philosophically opposed to Lenin, Gorky managed to get from him some help for intellectuals and artists in time of intellectual restriction. Tired from working as head of the State Publishing House and suffering from recurring tuberculosis, he went abroad to rest in 1921 and returned to Russia in 1928. His last unfinished work, The Life of Klim Samgin, is considered his best. It is a four-volume novel about the Russian social conditions from 1880 till 1917. His death at 68 was possibly due to poisoning from an anti-Soviet group.

Gorky’s work has vitality and optimism. With a devotion to realism, it revealed a deep poetic strain and a strong passion for justice. He exerted a profound influence on Soviet thought…

Yet…

… Arriving in Moscow on June 14, 1936, four days before Maxim Gorki’s funeral, André Gide, the French writer, delivered a great eulogy about Gorky, the “official writer of the Soviets” on June 18th, on Red Square. Gide also visited Nikolai Ostrovsky and showed his admiration for this writer. Ostrovsky (1904-1936) was also a Soviet realist writer, of Ukrainian background. He is best known for his novel, How the Steel Was Tempered…

Yet… Gide’s illusions soon vanished. Instead of the “new free man”, he had only found totalitarianism in the USSR. Gides gradually came to accept this reality bitterly — a disappointment shared by his traveling companions. Gides published Retouches on My Return from the USSR, by the end of 1936. He no longer contented himself of making observations but went squarely against Stalinism. “Let the working people understand that they are being duped by the communists as they are today by Moscow.”

“From top to bottom of the reformed social ladder, the highly praised people are the most servile, the most cowardly, the most corrupt, the most vile. All those who deign to challenge get broken down or deported one after the other. Why is the Red Army still protected? Let’s hope not.  Soon, of this heroic and admirable people who deserve our love so well, there will only be executioners, profiteers and victims.”

The game of kings/presidents/despots/queens/countries — the war of supremacy to be top monkey is still as human as it has ever been. Many of our rulers are con-artists, psychopaths and sadists who will do anything to stay on top… as much as the “next in line” and their advisors are as bad as rats flattering the Lion King. The new Realism would have to eliminate this trait from politicians and governments — and from ourselves… Good luck.

Religion and capitalism are not going to give up the apple they stole from god. And this is where a loony guy like Donald Trump has been a great chance for change. As idiotic as he is, he has shown us how much the system is corrupt far more than he is. Yet the Democrats who have been so duded as to let Obama get away with glorious shit, have now chosen the path of least resistance to the Deep State that runs the US military machine and the US in general. They picked Biden, an old codger who is demonstratively corrupt and RCed (remotely guided) by the DS (Deep State). With him, we’re going to see more of the same as before Trump, with a different style of bullshit.

We can only hope that something is going to act as a circuit breaker, before someone presses the final red button, under pretences that will be false — and can only be false.

A new realism through educated awareness? Intellectualism goes above the head of most people and only stirs the mud at the bottom.

What we need is a Renaissance of Styles at the forefront of ideas to give most people something to emotionally relate with, rather than think about it. Imagine the style of the “business” suit is more than 100 years old! My great-grandfather was making these before 1900! Same style with variation of lapels width from time to time… It’s time to reinvent the colours and the flamboyant for all, not just for the Mardi-Gras. A distraction? Sure! But while we feel the new, we would forget the old drab. Let people be pleasantly silly rather than nasty…

Individualism needs to be cultivated without selfishness. This is a major key of sharing. And we’re half way there. We should encourage personal home (strata) recycler-digesters Most plastics and artificial fibres need to be banned, especially those that are “breakable” and “bio-degradable” (because they are not). Individual transport will have to use recyclable energy. Same for public transport. Major clever changes need to be made and many car manufacturers have already entered the future, including with flying cars.

The miniaturisation of powerful brushless electric engines and clever AI electronics have already revolutionised the market. Most of us have not noticed because the present way of dumbing ourselves is still to press buttons to kill Mortor or Gammur in a war game. It’s a hard groove to get out of.

At this stage, unless Rome is rebuilt in one day, the only thing that would send everyone bananas, looking for true answers as to why we lost the original Garden of Eden, would be the reelection of the Donald. The alternative is a welcome back to a retrograde reactionary bidet plodding, in which everyone would quietly go back to their big and small dark-grey prejudices — with thumbs twitching to zap Poppor, the alien deemed to be nasty, while the Deep State (or whoever holds the puppet strings) continues to press our own buttons… and go to wage real devastating wars.

With more of the Donald, the future could be weirdly bleak for a while, but like during the Renaissance from the 15th century, we’d be forced to invent a better stylistic intellectual wheel... and through the DS bastards out...

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LoonyGus...

 

From Peter Bazalgette

 

In 2018, 20 months before Black Lives Matter forced us to reappraise the way we commemorate our history, a young architectural practice in London showed us the way. Studio Mash won a prize for A Long Shadow Over London. Taking the statue of Robert Clive, venerated outside the Foreign Office, they designed a bronze shadow for it, to be fixed in the pavement. This penumbra would chronicle how Clive had locked up the East India Company’s grain during the famine of 1770 and allowed millions of Bengalis to starve (as William Dalrymple has unearthed so devastatingly in The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company). All so Clive could pay a fat dividend to East India stockholders in London. At a time of social disruption, where we’re rightly forced to question our national identity, we look to creative designers and historians to help us both understand and accurately represent our past.

 

Take tackling Covid-19, which we’re constantly told is a matter of science. But not just science, surely. The critical data, which tells us how humans are responding, is what shapes key policy decisions. And this comes from the discipline of social science. The trusted news that informs our citizenry and gives us resilience in a time of crisis is itself the product of sustained investment in trained journalists. The government furloughing and loan schemes, designed to save jobs and companies, are conceived by economists. The television entertainment, the JK Rowling children’s story released online and the digital theatre that all lift our spirits in lockdown – these are the product of our thriving creative arts. Science, we hope, keeps us alive. But the arts and humanities keep us sane.

Yes, yes, but what’s my point? It is that the arts and the humanities are sometimes undervalued compared with the Stem subjects, and now a new coalition is going to do something about it. This is not a whinge, it’s a piece of self-help. If these disciplines are undervalued, it’s partly because their leaders have not clearly articulated the value of what they do sharply enough. So stand by for a bit of rebranding…

The British Academy, the Arts Council and the London School of Economics have got together with others to remarket their endeavours as Social Sciences, Humanities & the Arts for People & the Economy – or Shape, in short. In future, they hope, you’ll be as likely to talk about the Shape subjects as you will the Stem equivalents. It’s not just an acronymic sleight of hand, because what will flow from this, they intend, is a reappraisal of the role and importance of the Shape disciplines with debates, essays and research projects. But always with the caveat that it’s not a competition. Shape will always sit alongside Stem in a complementary relationship.

I have written before about the worth of the creative industries to Britain: not only around 6% of the economy – and growing much faster than other sectors – but of even greater cultural value in terms of our developing national conversation and sense of self. Shape nurtures this with courses that deliver the necessary talent , whether in journalism, graphic design or drama.

But there is a growing trend in government to judge the success of a course by the salaries earned on graduation. On this measure, many of the courses our creative industries rely on would be discontinued. Many of these jobs at trainee level are undertaken for love, not money. But they’re important and I despair when I see such reductionism: must we be a nation that knows the price of everything but not its value? Shape is something we do well. Just as Britain pioneered the delineation of a creative sector, so too did we give the world English, economics and international relations as academic disciplines.

Sixty years ago, CP Snow, a scientist and novelist, bemoaned what he saw as the two cultures and the gulf between science and the arts. But when Stem and Shape come together, as they increasingly do in well-organised governments and intelligently run companies, we find a healthy symbiosis that would astonish Snow. In his book Originals, Adam Grant cites a study of this century’s brilliant, Nobel prize-winning scientists. These breakthrough innovators are significantly more likely to be involved in the arts than their peers. Imagination, self-expression and sheer humanity inspire their discoveries. A cross-disciplinary marriage made in heaven. And it was an engineer, Lord Browne, who pointed this out to me.

In the mid-20th century, when Shape subjects were still establishing themselves, John Maynard Keynes wrote: “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.” When we remember that Keynes also founded the Arts Council, we can definitely put him down as a confirmed Shapist. He saw the Shape of things to come.

Peter Bazalgette is chair of ITV and former chair of Arts Council England

 

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/21/why-the-arts-must-...

 

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We've been surveying the synergy of arts and sciences on this site since its inception in 2005. Eventually governments will wake up to the necessity of both... Note: Economics, religions and politics are art forms, that is to say that the parameters are decided, not observed. Landscape, portraiture, music, and abstract art involve arbitrary choices of visualising, though some can be "political" and didactic in subject choices. All are forms of deceit, including satire (though it comes closer to truth by exposing the deceit). Sciences are based on observations — and are much closer to reality, even in their most abstracted interpretations through mathematics.

 

 

The many similarities in the unfolding narrative of Covid-19 to that of September 11, 2001 — the mass hysteria, the banker bailouts, the insider trading, the censorship of dissent, the apparent foreknowledge (Lockstep, Event 201, PNAC, Catastrophic Terrorism, A Clean Break etc), the rollout of mass surveillance measures and more — make the two seem like parallel conspiracies. Covid-19 could also be compared to 9-11 in that it seems to be a ‘controlled demolition’ of the world economy by the global financial powers, one that was either planned, or at very least allowed to happen.

One of the initial red flags surrounding the events of 9-11 was NORAD’s failure to scramble a single interceptor in response to the attacks. It was later claimed that they were conducting a ‘training exercise’ at the time which created confusion. Strange how these training exercises always seem to take place during major crises. Event 201, a joint venture of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum hosted by Johns Hopkins University in October 2019 was billed as a simulation response to a novel disease pandemic. Was this also a training exercise which went live? Mike Pompeo’s remarks during a White House press conference in March would seem to suggest so:

Pompeo: “This matter is going forward — we are in a live exercise here to get this right.”

Trump (under his breath): “You should have let us know.”

The case for conspiracy in the events of 9-11 is easily made when we allow our reasoning to be guided by the principle of cui bono. Who has benefited from two decades of regime change wars in the Middle East and North Africa? Arms manufacturers and their many private investors? Big Oil? International finance? The Zionist occupation state?

The question of who was responsible for 9-11 doesn’t hinge on whether or not jet fuel can melt steel beams (it can’t.) It hinges on the fact that the US had been planning a war in the Middle east for a decade prior to the event. The US decision to invade and occupy Afghanistan and to depose Saddam Hussein was made during Western liberal democracy’s ‘uni-polar moment’, a fleeting window which Francis Fukuyama would describe as ‘the end of history’ — the period following the collapse of the Soviet Union during which the US was the world’s only superpower. 9-11 was a staged event which provided the pretext for maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military force in the new century. There are several key policy documents which spell this out if you could be bothered reading them. They even talk about the need for a Pearl Harbour like event to galvanise public opinion. At least two of the authors of these documents had specifically mentioned attacks on the World Trade Centre prior to September 11, 2001.

With the benefit of hindsight, how can policy directives such as Richard Perle’s “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”, and PNAC’s “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century” be seen as anything less than manifestos by the conspirators themselves? Similarly the article by Ashton B. Carter, John Deutch, and Philip Zelikow entitled Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger which appeared in Foreign Affairs November/December 1998 edition presents chilling circumstantial evidence of foreknowledge of the events.

Most incriminating of all, however, is the Patriot Act. Passed into law soon after the 9-11 attacks, this draconian bill expanded terrorism laws to include ‘domestic terrorism’ and subjected US citizens, journalists, whistle blowers and political organisations to surveillance, wiretapping, harassment, and potential criminal action.

Within seven weeks, October 24th 2001, the House of Representatives was presented with the Patriot Act and passed it the next day. After the Senate passed it President Bush signed it the following day. Later it would be revealed that not one congressman read the 900 page Patriot Act before voting for it, nor does anyone know who wrote it, which makes many believe the Patriot Act was sitting in some right-winger, globalist’s desk just waiting for something like 9-11 to happen.

— Randolph Polasek, Powers Behind JFK Assassination (Expanded Edition, October 8, 2009)

The World Economic Forum’s COVID Action Platform is a comprehensive plan for world governance, covering every aspect of life, from employment, to food production, to mobility, to management of oceans and forests — everything from the biggest issues — ‘great power politics’, right down to the micro-management of our daily lives — religion, ethics, human rights, mental health, and even ‘human enhancement’, aka, transhumanism. The platform is presented as a manifesto for the new era into which we are being thrust; an era of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘impact investment’ through human capital bonds. Much like the Patriot Act, it is difficult to believe that such an incredibly dense, user-interactive online document could have been written start-to-finish during the initial weeks of the unfolding Covid pandemic. It is simply too comprehensive. Was this document also sitting around in some globalist’s desk just waiting for the right moment?

The Covid Action Platform presents a blueprint for the hostile takeover of every aspect of human decision making; a undertaking which is being accomplished right now, through blockchain technologies, image recognition and mechanised translation; through deep learning algorithms which make use of our smartphones and computers and employ cutting edge technologies such as facial recognition and speech translation to assimilate whole libraries of information about us — a vast neural network capable of making accurate predictions about our behaviour — in particular, our purchasing habits. In this late stage of capitalism our value to the ruling class is increasingly as consumers rather than producers. Ever wondered how it is that products and services are advertised on our screens immediately following a phone call or private conversation? Even now artificial intelligence is plotting our behaviour and making predictions based on the data it collects. The more information we feed it, the more it is able to predict and control us.

[The human population is controlled] via digital identity systems tied to cashless benefit payments within the context of a militarized 5G, IoT [Internet of Things], and AR [augmented reality] environment. The billionaire class has built and is rapidly putting the finishing touches on infrastructure to run human capital social impact markets that will securitize the lives of most people as data streams. The technology that underlies this 4IR automation will hasten the death of the planet. The World Economic Forum is advancing a technocratic system of control and domination of humanity and the planet… Why should we agree to this? It is a profound sickness of Western culture. Hubris. Sick. And totally ignoring the impact our actions have on the natural world around us.

— Alison Hawver McDowell, Wrench in the Gears

 

It is the need for increased surveillance and data gathering capability that is currently driving the roll out of 5G technology. Our new augmented reality lifestyles are going to require a great deal more speed and bandwidth, not to mention all those new driverless trucks on the road. Is this perhaps also why the horse shit peddlers are claiming that 5G itself is spreading the virus? Leaving aside the potential harmful effects of electromagnetic radiation in confined spaces, blaming 5G for the pandemic is about as nuanced as blaming ‘the Jooz’ for 9-11. And yet 5G does play a crucial role in this conspiracy. It will provide the extra capacity needed to micro-manage our lives when we are eventually released from lockdown into a world of digital surveillance, biometric I.D. and social credit.

The layoffs and retrenchments of workers by the million also present new opportunities to bring online automation on a scale hitherto imagined. We should not be surprised that figures like HRH the Prince of Wales and other illustrious world leaders are now calling this a golden opportunity to reshape the world. The ruling class are literally calling for a new social contract. Would you let your employer ‘renegotiate’ your contract without your union representative present? There is no historical precedent for the ruling class giving up their power and privilege. Why would they do so now?

We are indeed entering Huxley’s Brave New World; a digital panopticon where our every move will be tracked and traced; where Universal Basic Income will function as behavioural scrip; where our Covid Passes will provide access to public spaces. All of these things will be packaged and sold as the solution to our current predicament; the way we ‘reopen’ our economies and return to normal. All thanks to Covid-19.

This is a social engineering on steroids. It is not, however, unprecedented. Our rulers have made no secret of their plans to implement technocracy, couched in terms from the sublime “the systems approach to complex global challenges” to the brazenly unabashed “the self direction of human evolution”. From Julian Huxley’s foundational philosophy of Unesco to the managerial technocracy described by Carroll Quigley and Edward Bernays; from David Rockefeller’s work on global governance to Jacques Attali’s Brief History of the Future, the conceptual framework has been spelled out clearly for more than a century for anyone willing to pay attention. Texts once dismissed as works of speculative fiction now look more like the blueprints of mad scientists, social Darwinists and Malthusian eugenicists. These are the manifestos of the elite. We are living in HG Wells Open Conspiracy; in Aldous Huxley’s Ultimate Revolution. Covid 19 is simply providing the theatrical smoke and fog between acts.

Technocracy is no more compatible with human happiness than Ayn Rand’s theory of rational self interest, but this, we are told, is what progress demands, and history shows there is little we can do to stop revolutionary change. Do we become Luddites? Do we join the masses with their pitchforks and go out and set fire to the 5G ‘cancer towers’? Or do we recognise Robert Frost’s truism that “the best way out is always through”?

It’s clear that technology is here to stay. Alas, the shape of our future will depend entirely on those who control it. Failing a return to fashion of the guillotine, power is likely to remain concentrated in the hands of an increasingly small and elite group. We might find comfort, however, in the fact that hubris seldom has the final word in human affairs, and we can be reasonably assured that Huxley’s ultimate revolution will be every bit as fleeting as Fukuyama’s End of History.

 

Read more:

https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/07/the-end-of-history-lasted-2-years-ill-give-the-great-reset-18-months/

 

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Lord Robert May, groundbreaking ecologist, died in Oxford, England, on 28 April. He was 84. In addition to ecology, Bob made substantial contributions to a wide variety of fields, including epidemiology and economics. A towering figure in British and international scientific life, he served as both chief scientific adviser for the United Kingdom and president of the Royal Society. Slight of build with a formidable intellect, Bob changed the way we investigate the dynamics of the living world.

Born in Sydney, Australia, on 8 January 1936, Bob attended Sydney Boys High School, where he excelled both academically and athletically. In 1956, he received his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Sydney. He stayed on to earn his Ph.D. in superconductivity in 1959 and then conducted further research in theoretical physics as a faculty member.

In the late 1960s, Bob learned of a movement in ecology, associated with George Evelyn Hutchinson and Robert MacArthur, that aimed to put the subject on a more rigorous and quantitative footing. At the time, some of the simplest models in ecology, such as those describing predator-prey dynamics, were often unstable, leading to predictions of the extinction of some or all of the modeled species. It was tacitly assumed that when these simple systems were embedded in more complex ecosystems, stability would inevitably emerge, but there was no way to assess this assumption.

In his 1973 monograph, Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems, Bob showed that stability was not inevitable. He introduced new mathematical techniques to ecology and initiated a research program that to this day continues to investigate what aspects of natural communities allow their persistence. So impressive were Bob's immediate contributions to ecology that, upon MacArthur's tragic and untimely death in 1972, Bob was offered his position in ecology at Princeton University.

Models of a single species competing for access to food often predict a transition from stable to cyclic population dynamics as birth rate increases. Bob studied these models and found that as birth rate continues to increase, more complicated patterns of cycles occur, culminating in what is now called chaotic dynamics. The ecological difference equation models that Bob studied, together with the differential equations that meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz had previously analyzed, spurred the mathematical development of chaos theory and placed limits on our ability to make predictions about systems governed by non linear dynamics. At his Princeton going-away party in 1988, the celebrants serenaded Bob with a song called “Kid Chaos,” composed by his colleague Henry Horn. Bob was quietly proud of this song and enjoyed Henry's reprise at Bob's 70th birthday celebration at the University of Oxford.

Through most of the 1970s and 1980s, Bob spent his summers at Imperial College London's Silwood Park campus near Windsor, England. There, he initiated a series of long-term collaborations with far-reaching consequences. For example, he and epidemiologist Roy Anderson transformed the field of epidemiological dynamics, and with biologist Michael Hassell he reshaped insect predator-prey dynamics. Summers at Silwood Park were characterized by intense work with a large and changing cast of collaborators, punctuated by equally intense competitive sport in which winning was more important than strict adherence to the rules. The order of authorship for several papers was decided by the outcome of croquet games played on a lawn sculpted by the local rabbits, whose effect on the game only Bob really understood.

After taking a position at the University of Oxford in 1988, Bob quickly became influential in U.K. scientific life and in 1995 was appointed government chief scientific adviser (GCSA). Among Bob's many achievements as GCSA was codifying the role of science advisers, a move that remains critically important today during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. In this role and later as president of the Royal Society, Bob worked actively, and often behind the scenes, to promote greater inclusivity and encourage early career scientists.

Throughout his life, Bob remained a proud Australian and would often play up to the image of the plain-spoken Aussie. He claimed that his favorite film was the Australian classic Mad Max. A British civil servant once tried to summarize Bob's dismissal of a daft idea by saying he “expressed himself in a somewhat…‘Australian way’!”

Bob was a master of the witty put-down. With a smile, he once told a very senior botanist, “In my experience, the intellectual capability of any biologist is directly proportional to the speed of locomotion of the organisms with which they work.” In scientific debate, he could be cutting, although always with reason. He was immensely kind and loyal to friends and colleagues and enormously encouraging to people at the start of their careers, something we both experienced personally as young academics at Imperial College London and the University of Oxford.

Bob loved being in the wild. For nearly 50 years, he organized an annual hiking trip with colleagues, and he spent most of his holidays walking with his wife, Judith. At the end of one hiking trip, just before the final descent, Bob asked the rest of us to go on ahead so he could have a final moment alone to soak in the mountain ambience. It was this deep attachment to the natural world that we believe motivated his great concern for the future of the environment.

Bob May was knighted, awarded the Order of Merit, and made a peer in the U.K. House of Lords as well as a Companion of the Order of Australia. He received the Crafoord Prize, the Balzan Prize, and many other prizes and honors for his scientific research. He is survived by his wife, Judith, and their daughter, Naomi. Bob leaves the field of ecology stronger and more rigorous than it was when he joined it in the early 1970s, a transformation in great part due to the combined force of his leadership and his intellect.

 

 

Source:

Science  12 Jun 2020:

Vol. 368, Issue 6496, pp. 1189

 

Gus : I need to find Bob famous uttering about "what happens when...." in a famous equation which led to the chaos theory. Tomorrow... 

 

Now, who is correct about Bob May's date of birth? Is this Chaos?

 

Robert McCredie May was born on 8 January 1938, in Sydney, Australia. He spent a solitary childhood playing puzzles and problem solving games. May attended Woollahra Primary School and Sydney Boys High School (1948–1952). There he became a champion in the school debating team and was greatly influenced by several excellent teachers, especially in science.

Read more:

https://www.science.org.au/learning/general-audience/history/interviews-australian-scientists/lord-robert-may-physicist-and

 

Anyway, the link of Chaos, ecosystems and civilisation should be made according to Gus along the lines explained by May:

 

To cut a long story short, I proved a rather nice theorem. That is, a generalisation of a physics theorem due to Wigner. I am delighted that my name is now coupled – it is the May-Wigner theorem. He proved it for special kinds of symmetrical matrices. But I said, ‘Let’s imagine an ecosystem in which each species by itself would be stable. So, I’ll put minus one down the diagonal to say that in unit time, left alone, each species would recover from a disturbance. Now I’ll start connecting them at random and putting other elements in the matrix. I’ll put plus or minus to give predator­prey, competitors or mutualists. I’ll let them be of different strengths but, on average, some strength – let’s call it alpha’. I proved an interesting generalisation of Wigner’s theorem that said: ‘Such a system will remain stable, stabilised by the intraspecific effects, provided that the average number of species a species is connected to, times the square on the strength, is less than one. One is the normalising time to recover. Otherwise the system will collapse, if “N” is big’. That turns the whole thing on its head and resets the agenda for ecology. I was connecting at random, and ecosystems are the winnowed product of evolution and are not random. So it says: ‘In the real world we see a lot of complicated systems. What are the special, non-random structures that they have, to reconcile exploiting more niches, having more species and being more complicated, with robustness against disturbance?’ We are still working on that, although we have made a lot of progress, particularly with the experimentalists. That was the first thing I did, which was one of the most important, the centrepiece of the monograph on “Stability and complexity in model ecosystems”.

 

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