Books on the topic 'Central Maine Belt'

This book analyzes the Central Asian economies of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, from their buffeting by the commodity boom of the early 2000s to its collapse in 2014. The book examines the countries' relations with external powers and the possibilities for development offered by infrastructure projects as well as rail links between China and Europe. The transition of these nations from centrally planned to market-based economic systems was essentially complete by the early 2000s, when the region experienced a massive increase in world prices for energy and mineral exports. This raised incomes in the main oil and gas exporters, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan; brought more benefits to the most populous country, Uzbekistan; and left the poorest countries, the Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan, dependent on remittances from migrant workers in oil-rich Russia and Kazakhstan. The book considers the enhanced role of the Central Asian nations in the global economy and their varied ties to China, the European Union, Russia, and the United States. With improved infrastructure and connectivity between China and Europe (reflected in regular rail freight services since 2011 and China's announcement of its Belt and Road Initiative in 2013), relaxation of UN sanctions against Iran in 2016, and the change in Uzbekistan's presidency in late 2016, a window of opportunity appears to have opened for Central Asian countries to achieve more sustainable economic futures.

Superior orders is probably the best known defence in ICL; in case law as well as in scholarly debates. As the UN War Crimes Commission observed, ‘the plea of superior orders has been raised by the Defence in war crime trials more frequently than any other’. The legal debate on superior orders has produced three main schools of thought: the respondeat superior doctrine; the absolute liability or full responsibility doctrine; and the conditional liability or limited responsibility doctrine that exists in different versions. These three views are central to the analysis in this chapter of superior orders. Much has been written on the defence of superior orders. The discussion is limited to the main points in the superior orders debate.

This is the fifth volume of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. Since its revival in the 1970s political philosophy has been a vibrant field in philosophy, one that intersects with jurisprudence, normative economics, political theory in political science departments, and just war theory. OSPP aims to publish some of the best contemporary work in political philosophy and these closely related subfields. The chapters in this volume address a range of central topics and represent cutting-edge work in the field. They are grouped into two main themes: power and legitimacy; and political, legal, and moral relations.

These lectures in macroeconomics explain the theory and policy implications of macroeconomics in a systematic and logically consistent way. Central to this analysis is the principle of aggregate demand as formulated by the Polish economist Michał Kalecki, who is best known as the originator, along with Keynes, of the Keynesian Revolution in macroeconomics. The lectures cover the main components of aggregate demand, showing the key importance of firms’ investment for total output, employment, and economic growth in both closed and open economies. The main influences on investment are explained and how, through the circular flow of income and expenditure, investment generates profits in the economy. However, investment is unstable and the government therefore has a central role in stabilizing such an economy at high rates of employment. Along with investment, the labor market and wages then determine the distribution of income. This leads on to an examination of the role of money and finance in the contemporary capitalist economy. The analysis is illustrated with statistics and a survey of the evolution of capitalist economies since World War II, along with critical observations on the neoclassical approach to economics.

This introduction presents the central problematic of the book, justifies the comparative approach that is employed in later parts of the project, and outlines the main arguments developed throughout the work. The problematic is referred to as the lingua franca thesis on sustainable democratic systems (LFT), which predicts problems for democratic legitimacy and political identity formation for political communities that operate without a common language. As multilevel and multilingual political systems with claims to democratic legitimacy, Belgium and Switzerland are identified as two of the best available cases to test the validity of the LFT, with a view to informing the nature of and prospects for democratic legitimacy in the EU.

The post-1945 exile from East Central Europe was characterized by extreme ideological pluralism and political fragmentation, ranging from post-fascist to radical leftist streams. Given this initial diversity and the permanent reconfiguration due to the arrival of new waves, it remained an extremely variegated phenomenon with limited ideological coherence. However the specific exile experience produced a certain type of political thought offering a choice between interventionist, gradualist, or passivist stances. Whereas in the first post-war decades the exile’s main drive was to preserve the “authentic” cultural and political traditions, in the course of the 1960s and the 1970s they became the transmitters of the local dissident discourses. These developments validated the ideas of the best strategic minds in emigration arguing that it was the pressure from the domestic public and opposition, not the émigré groups or Western powers, which could become a main catalyst of democratization.

The legal theorists, jurists, judges and administrators of the late Ayyubid and early Mamluk period tackled a central question in their political thought: how best to govern their communities. This book proposes a taxonomy of the main themes and concerns of this political thought under the three ideals of the rule of law, limited government and legitimate delegation of power. Further, it recommends a contextualist approach for interpreting Islamic political texts based on their narrow social, intellectual and political contexts. The book studies both Ibn Jamaʿa’s (639/1241–733/1333) well-known works and previously unstudied treatises and, additionally, presents a fresh interpretation of a distinctive Sufi political thought and uncovers its interrelatedness with Ashʿari-Sufism and Shafiʿism.

This chapter presents a brief history of Corby and its Scottish connection as a backcloth to the work of the Pen Green Centre since 1983. The main focus is on the values of parents and staff and the resulting research on involving parents in their children’s learning from 1997 to 2000 and subsequent developments in practice. An important starting point was the ‘Local Action Group’ against the proposed centre as a service for ‘problem families’, and the appointment of Margy Whalley, who had experience of community projects in Brazil and Papua, New Guinea, as Head of Centre to create something more positive. Freire’s concept of ‘dialogue’ is used to describe the two-way conversation that workers and parents can engage in to build understanding and agreement of how best to support children’s development and learning.

This article deals with the history of eugenics, which started as a science-based movement to combat threatening degeneration. It was initiated by idealistic scientists and was inspired by a humanistic Enlightenment ideal of science as the servant of human welfare. The general goal was to improve the biological heredity of human populations. The article considers the main scientific input to the birth of eugenics and looks at the Darwinian theory of evolution. Furthermore, it deals with the distinction between positive and negative eugenics that is central to eugenic policy discussions. It further discusses the dispute between eugenics and genetics that raised the possibility that race crossings could produce genetically unbalanced and thus inferior hybrids. Finally, it concludes with some implications that make the best out of eugenics by establishing effective democratic political control of its practical applications.

In one way or another, crisis has always been a part of our lives and it is still a central aspect of contemporary world, ridden by recurring economic, environmental, and health threats. Faces of Crisis in 20th- and 21st-Century Prose. An Anthology of Criticism offers a unique overview of the motif of crisis tackled by 20th- and 1st-century writers. The main value of this anthology lies in its unique array of perspectives. The contributors focus on literary works which may have been analysed by other scholars, but never before have they been examined from the perspective of crisis and its different forms. Many of the discussed works were written, or rediscovered, in the last two decades. To the best of my knowledge, there is no other study like this volume. From the review by Professor Aleksandra Kędzierska, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin

In this chapter two Buddhist moral psychological categories are analysed: the brahmavihāras (the four Boundless Qualities), which are the main moral affective states in Buddhist ethics, and the kleśas, or the afflictive mental states. Based on this analysis, two general claims about moral psychology in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist ethics are argued for. First, that Buddhist moral psychology is centrally interested in the psychology of moral improvement: how do I become the kind of person who can respond in the best possible way to the moral needs of myself and others? Second, and related, Buddhist moral psychology focuses on the skills of moral perception and attention. Moral philosophical arguments, it is argued, are generally offered in the context of self-cultivation exercises and not, as they often are in Western ethics, as models of moral deliberation.

Transparency in politics—in particular with regard to political finance—lies at the core of every democracy. The availability of accessible, detailed information about the funding of political parties and candidates enables scrutiny by civil society organizations and the wider public, and ensures that all political actors can be held accountable. In Albania, transparency in political finance is enshrined in the fundamental principles of the Constitution. Despite the modest progress on party and campaign finance regulation achieved in recent years, however, lack of trust in politics and the risk of political corruption continue to be high. The digitalization of political finance has been one of the priorities of the Central Election Commission in Albania and can build on previous initiatives to digitalize the electoral process, such as digital voter identification, and electronic voting and counting. This report examines the existing disclosure systems in Europe, highlights best practices and identifies the main challenges for the development and implementation of such a system in Albania, taking account of the specific political and institutional context of the country.

This chapter argues for Phenomenal Rationalism about perceptual experiences: the claim that our basic awareness of reasons for perceptual belief is phenomenal and non-conceptual. The main idea is that, from the inside, perceptual experiences seem to be reason-giving insofar as they seem to be relations to, and determined by, external objects and their features. The argumentation centres partly on the claim that assuming the phenomenal presence of the relationality and determination of perceptual experiences provides the best explanation of why so many good philosophers were convinced of the soundness of the argument from hallucination. That we enjoy phenomenal access to reasons prior to any normative beliefs also helps to reconcile the Humean insight that infants (who lack concepts like ‘reason for’) can be motivated to act or form attitudes with the Kantian insight that motivation is a matter of recognizing and responding to reasons.

This chapter explains the legal and institutional framework for banking in Hong Kong. It discusses the regulation of financial intermediaries, products, and services in the context of a framework based largely on the Banking Ordinance, the Exchange Fund Ordinance, and the Clearing and Settlements Systems Ordinance, supported by ordinances derived from international best practice. The chapter summarizes the main functions of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA). Established in 1993, the HKMA maintains Hong Kong as an international financial centre and ensures that Hong Kong’s legal and regulatory framework for banks is comprehensive and of an international standard. At the same time, the chapter argues, the system’s many divisions allow certain risks to remain unaddressed. A specific area of concern applies to financial conglomerates, in that there is no clear division of regulatory responsibility in the case of the insolvency of a financial conglomerate.

This chapter begins by introducing the three institutions under whose auspices treaty-based investor-state arbitration proceedings have most commonly been conducted: the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), and the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce (SCC). Following a general overview of the three institutions, it examines certain procedural issues that may be considered by parties in deciding among them, assuming that consent exists. The intention is to highlight certain provisions in their arbitration rules that best demonstrate the main differences between them. Finally, the chapter examines the Rules of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law under which the majority of ad hoc investor-state arbitrations have so far been conducted and draws certain contrasts between them and the rules of the institutions earlier discussed.

Frederick Douglass (1818–95) was not the only fugitive from American slavery to visit Scotland before the Civil War, but he was the best known and his impact was far-reaching. In 1846 his stunning oratory drew enthusiastic crowds from Ayr to Aberdeen who came to hear him promote his new autobiography and deliver the abolitionist message. Although the main part of the book is framed by accounts of the racist discrimination Douglass faced on both his outward and return sea voyages, it does not offer a chronological narrative of his speaking engagements in Scotland. Rather, each of the three central chapters focus on a different set of encounters with notable Scots in order to demonstrate the vital role they played in the transformation of Douglass from a subordinate envoy of a white-run abolitionist society to an independent antislavery campaigner in his own right. In particular, they prompted far-reaching changes in his styles of speaking and writing, in his choice of heroes and how he identified with them, and in the new fervour with which he attempted to control the way he was represented verbally and pictorially. Situated at the intersection of biography, history and literature, it applies literary techniques of close reading to materials normally treated as historical documents, such as letters and newspaper reports, in order to draw out the subtleties of Douglass's changing attitudes, ideas and affiliations.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.