Books on the topic 'Laser tag'

The literature of the Song dynasty was engaged with earlier literature, primarily that of the Tang, far more intensely than any earlier period had been engaged with the literary past. Scholarly editing and eventually widespread printing made past texts available on an unprecedented scale. They were relatively uninterested in pre-Tang literature, with the exception of the poetry of Tao Qian (Tao Yuanming, 365–427), but developed their own poetics through changing interpretations of the Tang literary legacy. The major change came in the early thirteenth century with Yan Yu’s Canglang shihua (Canglang’s Remarks on Poetry), which tied poetic composition to a literary historical curriculum of reading that did include pre-Tang poetry, with each period judged in relation to the whole. This set the model for the poetics of later dynasties.

This chapter explores fiscal squeeze under the World War II coalition government, comprising a severe tax squeeze (including the development of mass income taxation and confiscatory top tax rates) with major cuts in civilian services together with soaring defence spending and a command economy, and the fiscal squeeze under the Attlee Labour Government elected by a landslide in 1945. The latter squeeze, taking place against the backdrop of currency crisis, massive overseas debt, and early steps towards a post-war mixed economy, comprised a continuation of high wartime levels of taxation with huge cuts in defence spending and, later, attempts to check the growth of spending in civilian public services (including the fledgling National Health Service) which led to a further split in the Labour Party, and growing electoral challenge from the Conservatives calling for spending cuts to fund lower taxes.

This chapter explores how an environment of persistent low returns influences saving, investing, and retirement behaviors, compared to what in the past had been conceived of as ‘normal’ financial conditions. Using a calibrated life cycle dynamic model with realistic tax, minimum distribution, and social security benefit rules, we can mimic the large peak at the earliest claiming age at 62 that is seen in the data. Also in line with the evidence, our baseline results show a smaller second peak at the (system-defined) Full Retirement Age of 66. In the context of a zero-return environment, we show that workers will optimally devote more of their savings to non-retirement accounts and less to 401(k) accounts, since the relative appeal of investing in taxable versus tax-qualified retirement accounts is lower in a low return setting. Finally, we show that people claim social security benefits later in a low interest rate environment.

‘Rebellion in the colonies’ begins with the destruction of 92,586 pounds of tea in 1773—later knows as the Boston Tea Party—to prevent a payment of tax to the British Government. A Contintental Congress was called in 1774 with all colonies except Georgia in attendance. Would the colonies side with Boston? Or would they advise the Bostonians to pay for the tea and to stop being so troublesome? By the end of 1775, British authority in America had crumbled. During the fighting, neither side, rebel or British, had a clear end in sight. Was the aim reconciliation? Or subjugation? Or was it independence?

Large-vessel vasculitis includes giant cell arteritis (GCA) and Takayasu's arteritis (TAK). GCA affects patients aged over 50, mainly of white European ethnicity. GCA occurs together with polymyalgia rheumatica (PMR) more frequently than expected by chance. In both conditions, females are affected two to three times more often than males. GCA mainly involves large- and medium-sized arteries, particularly the branches of the proximal aorta including the temporal arteries. Vasculitic involvement results in the typical manifestations of GCA including temporal headache, jaw claudication, and visual loss. A systemic inflammatory response and a marked response to glucocorticoids is characteristic of GCA. GCA usually remits within 6 months to 2 years from disease onset. However, some patients have a chronic-relapsing course and may require long-standing treatment. Mortality is not increased, but there is significant morbidity mainly related to chronic glucocorticoid use and cranial ischaemic events, especially visual loss. The diagnosis of GCA rests on the characteristic clinical features and raised inflammatory markers, but temporal artery biopsy remains the gold standard to support the clinical suspicion. Imaging techniques are also used to demonstrate large-vessel involvement in GCA. Glucocorticoids are the mainstay of treatment for GCA, but other therapeutic approaches have been proposed and novel ones are being developed. TAK mainly involves the aorta and its main branches. Women are particularly affected with a female:male ratio of 9:1. In most patients, age of onset is between 20 and 30 years. Early manifestations of TAK are non-specific and include constitutional and musculoskeletal symptoms. Later on, vascular complications become manifest. Most patients develop vessel stenoses, particularly in the branches of the aortic artery, leading to manifestations of vascular hypoperfusion. Aneurysms occur in a minority of cases. There are no specific laboratory tests to diagnose TAK, although most patients have raised inflammatory markers, therefore, imaging techniques are required to secure the diagnosis. Glucocorticoids are the mainstay of treatment of TAK. However, many patients have an insufficient response to glucocorticoids alone, or relapse when they are tapered or discontinued. Immunosuppressive agents and, in refractory cases, biological drugs can often attain disease control and prevent vascular complications. Revascularization procedures are required in patients with severe established stenoses or occlusions.

Large-vessel vasculitis includes giant cell arteritis (GCA) and Takayasu’s arteritis (TAK). GCA affects patients aged over 50, mainly of white European ethnicity. GCA occurs together with polymyalgia rheumatica (PMR) more frequently than expected by chance. In both conditions, females are affected two to three times more often than males. GCA mainly involves large- and medium-sized arteries, particularly the branches of the proximal aorta including the temporal arteries. Vasculitic involvement results in the typical manifestations of GCA including temporal headache, jaw claudication, and visual loss. A systemic inflammatory response and a marked response to glucocorticoids is characteristic of GCA. GCA usually remits within 6 months to 2 years from disease onset. However, some patients have a chronic-relapsing course and may require longstanding treatment. Mortality is not increased, but there is significant morbidity mainly related to chronic glucocorticoid use and cranial ischaemic events, especially visual loss. The diagnosis of GCA rests on the characteristic clinical features and raised inflammatory markers, but temporal artery biopsy remains the gold standard to support the clinical suspicion. Imaging techniques are also used to demonstrate large-vessel involvement in GCA. Glucocorticoids are the mainstay of treatment for GCA, but other therapeutic approaches have been proposed and novel ones are being developed. TAK mainly involves the aorta and its main branches. Women are particularly affected with a female:male ratio of 9:1. In most patients, age of onset is between 20 and 30 years. Early manifestations of TAK are non-specific and include constitutional and musculoskeletal symptoms. Later on, vascular complications become manifest. Most patients develop vessel stenoses, particularly in the branches of the aortic artery, leading to manifestations of vascular hypoperfusion. Aneurysms occur in a minority of cases. There are no specific laboratory tests to diagnose TAK, although most patients have raised inflammatory markers, therefore, imaging techniques are required to secure the diagnosis. Glucocorticoids are the mainstay of treatment of TAK. However, many patients have an insufficient response to glucocorticoids alone, or relapse when they are tapered or discontinued. Immunosuppressive agents and, in refractory cases, biological drugs can often attain disease control and prevent vascular complications. Revascularization procedures are required in patients with severe established stenoses or occlusions.

Exploring opera from the perspectives of media studies and technology studies, this pioneering book examines how composers since the late eighteenth century have increasingly integrated specific audiovisual details into their creative visions, thereby furthering the development of stage machineries as well as the means of their codification. In particular, composers fostered what the author calls “Wagnerian technologies”: multisensory devices intended to veil both the artificiality of illusionist stage representation and their own mechanicity. Building on Richard Wagner’s theories of the total work of art and exposing its reliance on technology, the book looks in detail at the uses and effects of curtains, the gong (or tam-tam), and steam. Designed to appeal directly to the audience’s sensorium like media interfaces, these technologies not only mediated between the sound and sight of a production but also smoothed over its heterogeneous materialities. Drawing on scores, performance documents, treatises, reviews, and cultural discourses, the book traces the practical, hermeneutic, and artistic implications of each titular technology in a wealth of European operatic works—both well known and obscure—by Wagner and the generations of composers around him. Each technology was temporarily absorbed into common notions of the relevant operas but gradually transformed in later productions, in its own mechanical evolution, and its resurgence across performance genres of the last half century. With its interdisciplinary angle on the history and materiality of staging, Curtain, Gong, Steam thus expands the concept of the operatic work.

This chapter follows on from Chapters 8 and 9, which were devoted to Buddhist and Confucian texts, and applies a similar analysis to a variety of other texts with a focus on those that were subjected to a process of vernacularization. The first genre discussed is that of primers, which initially existed solely to teach the young the elements of Sinitic. Second, medical texts are examined in some depth, for the botanic and linguistic diversity of East Asia necessitated the production of glossaries giving the local names for plants appearing in Chinese pharmacopoeia and later the development of local pharmacopoeia based on locally available plants. Third, conduct books for women are taken up, for the different expectations of women in East Asian societies made Chinese imports unsuitable. Subsequently, a Tang-dynasty manual of statecraft, a manual of forensic medicine, Chinese vernacular fiction, and books about the West are discussed.

The early R&B vocal group the Orioles are often credited with launching the musical style later known as doo-wop, especially with their 1949 hit “It’s Too Soon to Know” and their last charting number, “Crying in the Chapel” (1953). Their smooth romantic ballads became some of the first crossover hits of the postwar era, and were an alternative to more aggressive masculinities emerging out of the jump blues. This chapter illustrates this choreography of gender through live stage shows, recordings, interviews, and period reviews in the African American press. The short-lived periodical Tan Confessions adds particular nuance, featuring interviews with stars like Sonny Til alongside housewares advertisements targeted at African American women. This masculinity should be understood as a strategy linked with Cold War discourses of consensus and consumption, and the anxieties over masculinity expressed in Franklin Frasier’s Black Bourgeoisie in the historical moment of postwar desegregation.

The chapter covers Edith’s research into the oil industry and multinational companies, and the rise of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, including publication of The Large International Firm in Developing Countries (1968), which challenged the traditional theories of international trade and investment as they applied to the oil industry. She was the first to discover the significance of transfer pricing and tax avoidance. She started seminars on the international petroleum industry with Peter Odell and later with Robert Mabro, at St Anthony’s College, Oxford. Edith travelled extensively, analysing the impact of multinationals on the economic welfare of the countries in which they operated, focusing on the efforts made by governments to retain as much as possible of their economic and political sovereignty, while still benefiting from the resources and capabilities of foreign investors. By the time of the ‘oil crisis’ of 1973 she was considered one of the top oil economists in the world.

If Soviet atheism is a variety of secularism, it more resembles eliminationist movements viewing religions as obstacles to the political integration of citizens into the state. Before World War II, the Bolshevik government issued decrees to disentangle the state from the church. Later, Khrushchev emphasized atheism and closed churches as part of a general populist, mobilizational approach to promoting communist values. By the 1970s, religious practices were not precluded but were assigned a marginal space outside of public engagement. The post-Soviet era has seen self-reported religiosity increase, while self-reported atheism has diminished, although remaining significant. Russia’s 1997 law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations requires a denomination to exist in a region for fifteen years to enjoy the full legal and tax status. Today, Russia differentiates between “good” religions that help to promote particular moral visions and “bad” religions that create social strife, promote violence, and endanger public health.

Adrian Rollini (1904-1956)was as a child prodigy, playing piano when he was four. This book describes how job opportunities came to him easily at first and that his versatility helped him when they became rare.At the age of 16 he became a professional musician and, in New York, recorded piano rolls. In 1922, at the start of the jazz age, he joined the California Ramblers. He moved to the bass saxophone and gave it its definite place in early jazz. He had no serious competition and was highly appreciated by his colleagues. His style became the instrument's standard and his new sound was one reason why the band became a success. At the top of his fame Rollini became leader of his own band, with a.o. Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Trumbauer, Eddie Lang, and Joe Venuti. It was star-studded but short-lived. In late 1927, he moved to London to join Fred Eizalde's progressive dance band. A year later he became the band's practical leader. Back in the USA in 1930, Rollini joined Bert Lown's hotel band, but the bass saxophone was phasing out, so he moved to the vibraphone. Bands such as Lown's and, later, Richard Himber's did not satisfy him, and he decided to start a club, Adrian's Tap Room, as well as an instrument shop. He was one of the first to go for a jazz trio, consisting of himself,a guitarist, and a bass player. During the 40s, Rollini added another venture, a fishing lodge in Florida.

This chapter first theorizes as if each system leader has been similar in terms of the resource foundations it has brought to the arena and what it has been able to do with those foundations. Earlier leaders were much weaker than later leaders. What accounts for the difference? Our answer is that system leaders have had variable claims to leads in commerce, technology, and energy. When they combined all three, they became very powerful. The chapter then addresses one of the central issues of Big History: the swinging of the socioeconomic, military, and political lead from western Eurasia to eastern Eurasia and back to western Eurasia and North America in what is sometimes referred to as the “Great Divergence.” This oscillation was put in motion by the discovery of agricultural techniques that gave the West a lead to innovate all sorts of things. Gradually the East caught up, until at one point Rome and Han China were roughly equal. After Rome declined and the Han Empire fragmented, China came back in the Sui–Tang–Song dynasty period, while western Europe remained fragmented. However, the medieval Chinese lead did not persist. Ultimately, the West was able to forge ahead by combining new energy sources and technology. Now, China may be catching up once again.

This book covers major issues of constitutionalism in the American Revolution. It begins with the imperial debate over taxation and representation between the colonists and the British government. That debated climaxed with the Declaration of Independence. Each of the former colonies became republics and drew up written constitutions with several of them including bills of rights. These constitutions established patterns that later influenced the federal Constitution created in 1787, including bicameral legislatures, independent executives, and independent judiciaries. But because the Confederation of the states lacked the power to tax and regulate trade and the state legislatures were abusing their considerable power, the revolutionaries sought to solve both problems with a new federal Constitution in 1787. In addition to having to recognize the equality of each state in the Senate, the Convention faced the problem with slavery. Although most Americans thought that slavery was gradually dying, South Carolina and Georgia wanted to import more slaves and forced the Convention to guarantee twenty more years of slave importations and some protections for slavery in the Constitution. The institution that benefited most from the Revolution was the judiciary. It became very important in monitoring the demarcation between the public and the private realms that emerged from the Revolution.

Texas and California are the leaders of red and blue America. As the nation has polarized, its most populous and economically powerful states have taken charge of the opposing camps. These states now advance sharply contrasting political and policy agendas and view themselves as competitors for control of the nation’s future. This book provides a detailed account of the rivalry’s emergence, present state, and possible future. First, it explores why, despite their many similarities, the two states have become so deeply divided. The explanations focus on critical differences in the state’s origins as well as in their later demographic, economic, cultural, and political development. Second, the book analyzes how the two states have translated their competing visions into policy. It describes how Texas and California have constructed opposing, comprehensive policy models—one conservative, the other progressive. It describes how these models operate and how they have produced widely different outputs in a range of domestic policy areas. In separate chapters, the book highlights the states’ contrasting policies in five areas: tax, labor, energy and environment, poverty, and social issues. It also shows how Texas and California have led the red and blue state blocs in seeking to influence federal policy in these and other areas. Finally, the book assesses the two models’ strengths, vulnerabilities, and potential futures, providing a balanced analysis of their competing visions.

Deserted Villages: Perspectives from the Eastern Mediterranean is a collection of case studies examining the abandonment of rural settlements over the past millennium and a half, focusing on modern-day Greece with contributions from Turkey and the United States. Unlike other parts of the world, where deserted villages have benefited from decades of meticulous archaeological research, in the eastern Mediterranean better-known ancient sites have often overshadowed the nearby remains of more recently abandoned settlements. Yet as the papers in this volume show, the tide is finally turning toward a more engaged, multidisciplinary, and anthropologically informed archaeology of medieval and post-medieval rural landscapes. The inspiration for this volume was a two-part colloquium organized for the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in San Francisco. The sessions were sponsored by the Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeology Interest Group, a rag-tag team of archaeologists who set out in 2005 with the dual goals of promoting the study of later material and cultural heritage and opening publication venues to the fruits of this research. The introduction to the volume reviews the state of the field and contextualizes the archaeological understanding of abandonment and post-abandonment as ongoing processes. The nine, peer reviewed chapters, which have been substantially revised and expanded since the colloquium, offer unparalleled glimpses into how this process has played out in different places. In the first half, the studies focus on long-abandoned sites that have now entered the archaeological record. In the second half, the studies incorporate archival analysis and ethnographic interviews—alongside the archaeologists’ hyper-attention to material culture—to examine the processes of abandonment and post-abandonment in real time. Edited by Rebecca M. Seifried and Deborah E. Brown Stewart. With contributions from Ioanna Antoniadou, Todd Brenningmeyer, William R. Caraher, Marica Cassis, Timothy E. Gregory, Miltiadis Katsaros, Kostis Kourelis, Anthony Lauricella, Dimitri Nakassis, David K. Pettegrew, Richard Rothaus, Guy D. R. Sanders, Isabel Sanders, Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory, Olga Vassi, Bret Weber, and Miyon Yoo. Rebecca M. Seifried is the Geospatial Information Librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Deborah E. Brown Stewart is Head of the Penn Museum Library at the University of Pennsylvania.

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.