For those who ask: “Why does Ukraine matter? “

For veracity, I checked Snopes before reposting this meme in full.

Snopes.com fact-check why-does-ukraine-matter

Snopes summary: 

Conclusion

Much of the data included in the viral “why Ukraine matters” posts were true. Some of the items on the list had become outdated, but more recent numbers still showed that the country had a strong standing in various categories of reserves, production, and exports. However, we were unable to find figures to confirm a few of the claims, and a small number of them were flat-out false. For all of these reasons, the social media posts were neither definitively true, false, outdated, nor unproven, but rather a mixture of all four. That’s why we chose the rating of “Mixture.”

So on balance, we can say Ukraine is still pretty important and we should be mindful of how badly Ukraine's fall would be if Vladimir Putin succeeds.

This is why Ukraine matters.

It is the second largest country by area in Europe by area and has a population

of over 40 million - more than Poland.

Ukraine ranks:

1st in Europe in proven recoverable reserves of uranium ores;

2nd place in Europe and 10th place in the world in terms of titanium ore reserves;

2nd place in the world in terms of explored reserves of manganese ores (2.3 billion tons, or 12% of the world's reserves);

2nd largest iron ore reserves in the world (30 billion tons);

2nd place in Europe in terms of mercury ore reserves;

3rd place in Europe (13th place in the world) in shale gas reserves (22 trillion cubic meters)

4 fact checked false

7th place in the world in coal reserves (33.9 billion tons)

Ukraine is an important agricultural country:

1st in Europe in terms of arable land area;

3rd place in the world by the area of black soil (25% of world's volume);

1st place in the world in exports of sunflower and sunflower oil;

2nd place in the world in barley production and 4th place in barley exports;

3rd largest producer and 4th largest exporter of corn in the world;

4th largest producer of potatoes in the world;

5th largest rye producer in the world;

5th place in the world in bee production (75,000 tons);

8th place in the world in wheat exports;

9th place in the world in the production of chicken eggs;

16th place fact checked false

Ukraine can meet the food needs of 600 million people.

Ukraine is an important industrialised country:

Fact checked false 1st in Europe in ammonia production;

Europe's 2nd’s and the world’s 4th largest natural gas pipeline system;

3rd largest in Europe and 8th largest in the world in terms of installed capacity of nuclear power plants;

3rd place in Europe and 11th in the world in terms of rail network length (21,700 km);

3rd place in the world (after the U.S. and France) in production of locators and locating equipment;

3rd largest iron exporter in the world

4th largest exporter of turbines for nuclear power plants in the world;

4th world's largest manufacturer of rocket launchers;

4th place in the world in clay exports

4th place in the world in titanium exports

8th place in the world in exports of ores and concentrates;

9th place in the world in exports of defence industry products;

10th largest steel producer in the world (32.4 million tons).

Ukraine matters. That is why its independence is important to the rest of the world.

Brent Knoll Thigh Burner

An early morning walk up Brent Knoll to take in the views, and deposit some of my dad's ashes on the western face of the Knoll so he can bask in afternoon sunshine until the hill has eroded away, or the land sinks beneath a future sea or is subsumed by glaciers in some distant epoch ... I myself will be long since gone whatever. I've walked this walk a dozen times or more over the years, in all seasons and at all times of the day. It's a liberating walk, hard enough to get the blood pumping and the bellows blowing but not so hard that you can't do anything else for the rest of the day.

Wikipedia Brent Knoll

Wikipedia Brent Knoll Camp

Wikipedia Bellows (Colloquial ... lungs).

 

Star Treking Across the Memeiverse ... always going forward because we can't find reverse ... etc

Something a little more lighthearted, I love these Picard and Riker memes, endlessly adaptable to the one-liner. And it's the same for Kirk and Spock, and then we have a little crossover meme, Douglas Adams imagined galaxy sending a message to Spock's Tri-Corder. And in a final flourish Colm Meaney's `Miles O'Brien' from various Star Trek iterations taking Riker's place at the table, and the Firms 1987 hit Star Trekkin.

The Mental Toolkit

I think in some ways, the lack of company compels me to talk to myself. I think talking to yourself only becomes a problem when the thoughts end up on a repeating loop. In there lies danger, beware of creating mental loops.

Jordan Peterson would explain that conversation is the way in which we order our thoughts and make sense of the world. 

I think these videos where I walk and talk are in some ways a combination of talking to myself and having a wider conversation, with the aim of ordering my own thoughts, which I can tell you are sometimes like a blizzard of hail. 

However, if you put the video on mute you can just wader with me silently, and in some ways vicariously see some of the things I see. There is no obligation to listen, it is a choice.

 

Memes The Dark Arts

Memes used to just be funny by and large. But over time the meme; a combination of precis coupled with pictures has become more than the sum of its parts. So, if a picture paints a thousand words … a picture with two dozen words actually paints a picture with ten thousand words. 

From the Atlas Society Page on Face 

This first one is a reference to both the pandemic that has savaged liberties and freedom as well as killing millions (though probably not as many millions as directly as the doom-mongers would like you to believe). For us in the northern hemisphere at least (the free west ... I think) it points to how quickly the Russian invasion of Ukraine swept the pandemic news away ... Abracadabra!

I guess it all falls back to the dark art of marketing, it’s not exactly a new discovery, but it is an adaption that is freely accessible to anyone who wants to make a particular point barbed for maximum penetration using very few words. And as we saw with the first set posted, you can take classic themes, character quotes from classic characters, real or imagined and recombine them to your own ends. Or as below just take the words already written and amplify them with a sub-definition.

The interesting part of the process is that when you take an imagined character’s attributes from a fictional narrative (Morpheus from the Matrix in the previous example), then the amplification of the message is exponential in effect. As the emperor clearly demonstrates below. Anyone who doesn't have a `penny drop' moment looking at the meme is likely to be clinically dead or lived in a cave on a desert island since the mid-1970's.

Beyond that is the diversity of uses that an image can be used for, but we will look at that another day … and probably on a lighter note.