Old Prague...
Before the car, cities were dirtier. Those who could afford it built passages like this one, in Prague's Tyn Alley, to cross the streets without crossing them.
The rest had to walk on the filthy sidewalks... Or, in Ottoman-dominated Lebanon, they had step into the filthier streets if they belonged to the non-state religion... Christians, Chiites, Druze would be told to had to "shammil" by Ottomans and walk with the donkeys, horses, and their manure.
You could smell a city long before you saw it. Even cities with sewers had streets filled with horse manure, and sometimes open sewers. And even then; in spite of the cholera outbreaks, it took the 1858 "Great Stink" of London for the city to equip the city with water treatment... but it is the gas-powered car and electric-trolleys that liberated the city and cleaned up its air.
The COP30 phased out language about "phasing out" all "fossil fuels"; here's to the return of scientific objectivity
The more we progress, the greater the risk of a devolution into a #DimAge Already, our own #technology is growing too complex for us to understand or manage, and scales up faster than our own understanding can keep up.
The struggle for Suwayda as the Stalingrad of the Arabs. It is about the future of the Levant & the economic independence of the Arabian peninsula, lest we see a return of Turkish supremacy. The Druze hold Stalingrad or the Arabs lose the Peninsula
