Impending Collapse Research Articles

Productive Forces and Chinese Relations

The concept ‘garbage period’ has become viral and can influence the future of China. Emotional reasoning about the impending collapse is fraught with self-fulfilling prophecy. The ideological mainstream has got used to fighting strange slander. Inside the country, tested methods are losing their effectiveness.

Afrofuturist Horror on the Western Frontier: Capitalism’s Reckoning and Queer Possibilities in Jordan Peele’s Nope

Abstract: As in all his films to date, Jordan Peele deftly weaves metaphor in Nope , his latest film, to critique capitalism and its white supremacist foundations. The film’s monsters include an abstracted alien and a domesticated chimpanzee gone violent and come to signify capitalism’s recalcitrant reckoning. Drawing from Black feminist studies, Afrofuturism, and queer theory’s work on utopia and potential in queer failure, Peele compels viewers to consider Black Americans’ centrality in the formation and destruction of American capitalism. What other worlds become possible in the process of the Black and queer protagonists’ survival against the Lovecraftian monster? This study examines how horror becomes a useful lens—for rethinking the role of Black people in horror, for its contribution towards more critical discussion on capitalism’s legacy and its impending collapse(s). And, most importantly, for centering and imagining decolonial futures led by queer people of color.

Narrating Constitutional Dis/Order in Post-1994 South Africa: A Critical Response to Theunis Roux

This comment takes up the invitation to critically engage Theunis Roux’s paper “Grand Narratives of Transition and the Quest for Democratic Constitutionalism in India and South Africa”, focusing only on the latter of his two subject countries. Like Roux, I am interested in examining the impending collapse or fading of liberal constitutionalism as an emancipatory horizon for postcolonial futurity and regard this predicament as one of the major questions for legal, political and social theory today. As both the promises and premises of the South African constitution sustain deep fractures under the pressure of the intractable afterlife of colonial-apartheid and growing dissent against the founding myths of the post-apartheid legal order, we enter a problem-space that demands reckoning. Roux’s approach to this question is to stage an interlocution between what he regards as the two prominent competing grand narratives of postcolonial transition and democratic constitutionalism, which he respectively names the “liberal progressive” (mainstream) narrative (“LPN”) and the “culturalist” or “decolonial” (critical) narrative (“CGN”).

CMOS-compatible electro-optical SRAM cavity device based on negative differential resistance

The impending collapse of Moore-like growth of computational power has spurred the development of alternative computing architectures, such as optical or electro-optical computing. However, many of the current demonstrations in literature are not compatible with the dominant complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology used in large-scale manufacturing today. Here, inspired by the famous Esaki diode demonstrating negative differential resistance (NDR), we show a fully CMOS-compatible electro-optical memory device, based on a new type of NDR diode. This new diode is based on a horizontal PN junction in silicon with a unique layout providing the NDR feature, and we show how it can easily be implemented into a photonic micro-ring resonator to enable a bistable device with a fully optical readout in the telecom regime. Our result is an important stepping stone on the way to new nonlinear electro-optic and neuromorphic computing structures based on this new NDR diode.

The Impending Collapse of Primary Care: When is Someone Going to Notice?

For 2 years, the Larry A. Green Center conducted weekly to monthly surveys among a national sample of primary medical care practices on how they were faring during the on-going COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. As both a family physician and as one of the analysts of these surveys and the thousands of detailed comments accompanying them, I witnessed a courageous, professional, and deeply distressing saga. The most recent surveys hint at an impending collapse of primary medical care as we have known it. This Commentary reflects what I heard, from remarkable efforts to rapidly implement virtual care platforms and reach out to vulnerable patients in the face of workforce losses and inadequate assistance including lack of personal protective equipment to a sense of betrayal when vaccines finally arrived but primary medical care was, too often, left out of the distribution efforts. The last surveys highlighted a loss of primary care workforce and the potential collapse of relationship-centered primary medical care. One of the respondents asks, "When is someone going to notice?"Three areas for change are recommended. Build a larger, more diverse primary medical care workforce. Emphasize capitation as a foundation for payment reform in primary medical care. Establish primary health care extension services that focus on supporting practices and in helping them integrate with public health and their communities. Listening to each other, let us rise together with our patients and be noticed.

“The Battle of the Bridges”: Temporal Modernity in the Reimagining of Interwar London's Cityscape

AbstractThe impending collapse of Waterloo Bridge (built 1811–1817) in 1923 led to wide-ranging debate among professional and political elites about the need for preserving or replacing the bridge and about London's inadequate river crossings in general. Over a fifteen-year period, cabinet-level discussions on the problem of the Thames bridges occurred every year; the government struck a number of committees and a royal commission on solving cross-river traffic issues. A powerful elite lobby formed to fight for the preservation of old Waterloo Bridge, and the building of a new bridge at Charing Cross, a constitutional squabble arose over the respective authorities of Parliament and of London municipal government over the bridges, and a rancorous debate among politicians, town planners, architects, engineers, and the general public raged over the issue of the existing and proposed new bridges. A number of issues were at play and are discussed, but ultimately this article argues that it was competing, temporally connected conceptions of modernity that divided the two camps into preservationists and rebuilders.

Against settler sustainability: California’s groundwater as a vertical frontier

California has been heralded as a beacon of agricultural production and productivity, yet its groundwater crisis is a warning of its impending collapse. In this paper, we argue that policies like California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act reinscribe the settler state, even as they aim toward environmental sustainability. Drawing from Indigenous feminist scholarship on water and frontier processes, our methodology traces settler colonialism materially and discursively through the movement of water. First, we analyze hydraulic engineering discourses at the turn of the 20th century to illustrate how racial logics were key to producing irrigation—and the broader project of white settlement—as ostensibly benevolent processes of improvement. We then highlight how turn-of-the-century legislation was central to producing agriculture as a site of accumulation by dispossession through the production of settler forms of property and relations with land and water. Finally, we consider groundwater overdraft as a vertical frontier. Thinking with water as an analytic, we study the nexus of relationships that inscribe settler water infrastructures as normative, demonstrating their role as frontier processes within a settler colonial present. Our analysis shows the necessity of dismantling settler modes of sustainability and centering and supporting Indigenous sovereignty.

Religion, Animals, and Contemplation

Animals teach each other. For humans open to trans-species and inter-species dialogue and interaction, animal-others offer important insights into, invocations of and models for diverse and alternative modes of perceiving, experiencing, relating, and being. They in turn challenge anthropocentric conceptions of consciousness and offer glimpses of and perhaps inspiration for increased awareness and presence. Might the current academic vogue of “equity, diversity, and inclusion” (EDI; or whichever order you prefer) even extend to “non-human” animals? Might this also represent one essential key to the human aspiration for freedom, wellness, and justice? The present article explores the topic of “religion and animals” through the complementary dimension of “contemplation”. Developing a fusion of Animal Studies, Contemplative Studies, Daoist Studies, and Religious Studies, I explore the topic with particular consideration of the indigenous Chinese religion of Daoism with a comparative and cross-cultural sensibility. I draw specific attention to the varieties of Daoist animal engagement, including animal companionship and becoming/being animal. Theologically speaking, this involves recognition of the reality of the Dao (sacred) manifesting through each and every being, and the possibility of inter/trans-species communication, relationality, and even identification. In the process, I suggest that “animal contemplation”, a form of contemplative practice and contemplative experience that places “the animal question” at the center and explores the possibility (actuality) of “shared animality”, not only offers important opportunities for becoming fully human (animal), but also represents one viable contribution to resolving impending (ongoing) ecological collapse, or at least the all-too-real possibility of a world without butterflies, bees, and birdsong.

Segregation dynamics driven by network leaders

Network segregation—a critical problem in real-life networks—can reveal the emergence of conflicts or signal an impending collapse of the whole system. However, the strong heterogeneity of such networks and the various definitions for key nodes continue to pose challenges that limit our ability to foresee segregation and to determine the main drivers behind it. In this paper, we show that a multi-agent leader–follower consensus system can be utilized to define a new index, named leadership, to identify key leaders in real-life networks. And then, this paper explores the emergence of network segregation that is driven by these leaders based on the removal or the rewiring of the relations between different nodes in agreement with their contribution distance. We finally show that the observed leaders-driven segregation dynamics reveals the dynamics of heterogeneous attributes that critically influence network structure and its segregation. Thus, this paper provides a theoretical method to study complex social interactions and their roles in network segregation, which ultimately leads to a closed-form explanation for the emergence of imbalanced network structure from an evolutionary perspective.

»The sun was darkened for seventeen days« (AD 797). An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Celestial Phenomena between Byzantium, Charlemagne, and a Volcanic Eruption

The blinding of the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VI in Constantinople in August 797 and his overthrow by his mother Eirene, who then until 802 ruled as first female emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, was used as legitimation for the coronation of the Frankish King Charlemagne as emperor of the Romans on December 25, 800, by contemporaries in Western Europe. Some observers in the West may have even interpreted the downfall of the Eastern Roman emperor and his replacement by a woman as sign of an impending collapse of the Roman Empire and the entire world order as already expected, based on chiliastic calculations. We equally find indications of apocalyptic expectations in Constantinople, where the blinding of Constantine was linked with a spectacular celestial manifestation of divine disapproval, a darkening of the sun for 17 days. In this paper, this obfuscation of the sun is compared with the description of other atmospheric and climatic phenomena in the 8th and 9th century as well as before and after this period. In addition, natural scientific data is used to disprove earlier hypotheses on the physical background to this event and to present a more probable scenario, i. e., the impacts of one or more volcanic eruptions, for the darkening of 797 and other phenomena, which provided a peculiar atmospheric framework for the interpretation of the events between the downfall of Constantine VI and the coronation of Charlemagne by contemporaries.

Two Constitutional Cultures, Technological Enforcement and User Creativity: The Impending Collapse of the EU Copyright Regime?

In Pelham, the Court of Justice of the European Union and the German Federal Constitutional Court reached diametrically opposing conclusions on the relevance of freedom of art in copyright law. The different stances permit a speculative prediction – they can have immediate consequences for the predictable challenges against the new platform liability regime, and its associated dangers of widespread filtering and blocking. The article discusses the numerous constitutional implications, with specific attention given to the respective interests affected by the new regime (authors, exploiters, users, platforms) in light of the divergent approaches from the perspective of what appears to be two rather conflicting constitutional cultures: specific perceptions of fundamental rights and proportionality under German law versus an approach tending to emphasise market integration under the EU legal order. Recent assertions by the German Federal Constitutional Court redistributing the division of competences between national and EU law permit the prediction of a disturbing future collision course between the two systems, with potentially massive implications for EU copyright law by and large.

The liberal international trading order (LITO) in an era of shifting capabilities

Abstract There is much debate about the impending collapse of the liberal international order. It is provoked by the shifts in material and military capabilities from emerging peer and near-peer competitors, some of whom were not part of the original grand bargain and others that are in a stronger position to renegotiate the bargain. As one critical element of the liberal international order, we ask, during power shifts: is the liberal international trading order (LITO) durable and resilient? When and why will the LITO collapse? Does the relative decline of the hegemon alone explain these outcomes? In advancing a second-image reversed plus argument, we highlight how a shift in the nature of the foreign commercial orientation of peer and near-peer contenders can alter the domestic balance of power of two broad and logrolled coalitions competing to capture the state and thus affect whether the erstwhile leader defends, renegotiates, or abandons the trading order it created. To better understand these forces, we examine two paradigmatic cases: Britain in the 1930s and the United States in the 2000s.

Two Constitutional Cultures, Technological Enforcement and User Creativity: the Impending Collapse of the EU Copyright Regime?

In Pelham, the EU Court of Justice and the German Federal Constitutional Court reached diametrically opposing conclusions on the relevance of freedom of art in copyright law. The different stances permit a speculative prediction – they can have immediate consequences for the predictable challenges against the new platform liability regime under Article 17 DSMD, and its associated dangers of wide-spread filtering and blocking. The article discusses the numerous constitutional implications with specific attention given to the respective interests affected by the new regime (authors, exploiters, users, platforms) in light of the divergent approaches from the perspective of what appears to be two rather conflicting constitutional cultures: specific perceptions of fundamental rights and proportionality under German law versus an approach tending to emphasise market integration under the EU legal order. Recent assertions by the German Constitutional Court redevising the division of competences between national and EU law permit the prediction of a disturbing future collision course between the two systems, with potentially massive implications for EU copyright law by and large.

Airway Management in a Patient with Ludwig's Angina

Ludwig’s angina (LA) is a rare but life-threatening deep space neck infection that affects several combined potential spaces in the neck, namely the submental and submandibular spaces. Patients often present with signs and symptoms such as dysphonia, odynophagia, neck and thoracic pain, otalgia, sialorrhea, and cough. In later stages, the patient may present with dysphagia, trismus, cyanosis, dyspnea, and stridor which all may signal an impending airway collapse. This comprehensive review will set out to describe the definition, anatomy, and epidemiology of Ludwig’s angina, how it manifests, and how to diagnose and treat the infection that can be often difficult to recognize. Clinical features of the disease are discussed as well as different strategies for anesthesia and airway management. Two special situations in which Ludwig’s angina can occur—pregnancy and pediatric patients—are also covered. This review contains 5 tables, and 30 references. Keywords: Ludwig’s angina, management of the airway in Ludwig’s angina, conservative treatment in Ludwig’s angina, surgical management in Ludwig’s angina, antibiotic treatment for Ludwig’s angina, Ludwig’s angina in pediatrics, Ludwig’s angina in pregnancy, neck anatomy in Ludwig’s angina

Network resilience of FitzHugh-Nagumo neurons in the presence of nonequilibrium dynamics.

Many complex networks are known to exhibit sudden transitions between alternative steady states with contrasting properties. Such a sudden transition demonstrates a network's resilience, which is the ability of a system to persist in the face of perturbations. Most of the research on network resilience has focused on the transition from one equilibrium state to an alternative equilibrium state. Although the presence of nonequilibrium dynamics in some nodes may advance or delay sudden transitions in networks and give early warning signals of an impending collapse, it has not been studied much in the context of network resilience. Here we bridge this gap by studying a neuronal network model with diverse topologies, in which nonequilibrium dynamics may appear in the network even before the transition to a resting state from an active state in response to environmental stress deteriorating their external conditions. We find that the percentage of uncoupled nodes exhibiting nonequilibrium dynamics plays a vital role in determining the network's transition type. We show that a higher proportion of nodes with nonequilibrium dynamics can delay the tipping and increase networks' resilience against environmental stress, irrespective of their topology. Further, predictability of an upcoming transition weakens, as the network topology moves from regular to disordered.

Central America’s Second Implosion

Dovetailing with the decline of global capitalism, Central America faces an impending economic collapse reminiscent of the 1970s and 1980s. With social unrest simmering, renewed regional upheaval l...

Universal Adaptive Stabilization-Based Trend Filtering for Impending Battery Voltage Collapse Detection

Battery operated devices are common in everyday life. Deciding when a warning for impending battery voltage collapse should be triggered is not trivial. This letter develops an impending battery terminal voltage collapse detection system using a universal adaptive stabilizer (UAS) and a well-known trend filter. This eliminates requiring knowledge of battery model parameter values, or initial state-of-charge (SOC). The proposed approach overcomes the need for extensive training when compared to using neural-networks based techniques. Also, the developed trend filter when used with a UAS, eliminates the need for selecting windows of data to be processed. This is advantageous compared to earlier work, which uses a different trend filtering mechanism, because selection of window sizes is not straightforward. Further, the approach used in this letter shows that the UAS based technique is implementable on a cell phone. Associated mathematical results, and experimental data from such an implementation are presented. Additionally, the technique is also applied to other larger capacity Li-ion batteries showing its versatility. The developed technique can also be used to detect when the state-of-health (SOH) of a Li-ion battery is about to enter an unsafe region.

Treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma during the COVID-19 outbreak: The Working Group report of JAMTT-HCC.

This contingency guide was formulated on the premise that delivering standard treatment for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) has come under strain due to the coronavirus (COVID‐19) pandemic. Measures required are likely to vary largely across regions and individual institutions, depending on the level of the strain imposed by the pandemic (e.g., number of inpatients infected with COVID‐19 and the availability of resources, including personal protective equipment and inpatient beds). In addition, models suggest that the second and third waves of COVID‐19 will occur before effective vaccines and medicines become widely available in Japan (expected time, 2–3 years). This guide should serve as a good reference for best practices in the management of HCC, which is in light of the possible risk of impending collapse of the healthcare system due to a surge in COVID‐19 infections.

From Menshevik to Bolshevik: The Legacies of Georgian Modernism

Slavonic and East European Review, 98, 1, 2020 REVIEW ESSAY From Menshevik to Bolshevik: The Legacies of Georgian Modernism HARSHA RAM Papashvili, Giorgi (ed.). K’ult’ura da mkhat’vruli tskhovreba Sakartvelos p’irvel respublik’ashi (1918–1921) / Culture and Artistic Life in the First Georgian Republic (1918–1921). Chubinashvili National Research Centre for Georgian Art History, Tbilisi, 2018. 171 pp. Illustrations. Annotations. Sources. Price unknown. Chepyzhov, Pavel. New Georgian Book Design, 1920s–30s / Novyi gruzinskii knizhnyi dizain 1920-kh–1930-kh godov / Kartuli ts’ignis akhali dizaini 1920–1930-ian ts’lebshi. Edited by Ketevan Kintsurashvili. Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warsaw and Bookvica, Moscow, 2018. 311 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Biographies of artists. Bibliography. List of books. $60.00: €52.00:£45.00 (paperback). It is by now well-established that the Georgian capital Tiflis — as Tbilisi was then widely known — became a major regional centre of modernist cultural production in the aftermath of the Russian revolution. At once the administrative capital of Russian Transcaucasia and a trading hub linking Iran to Russia and Europe, Tiflis harboured an ethnically diverse population deeply engaged in the production, circulation and consumption of goods, fashions and ideas. In 1918 the city became the capital of the Georgian Democratic Republic (1918–21) which, under the aegis of the Georgian Mensheviks — moderate rivals to Lenin’s Bolsheviks — gave rise to the first social-democratic experiment in history on a national scale. Offering provisional respite from the Russian civil war raging north of the Caucasus mountains, Menshevik Tiflis allowed Russian artists to mingle with their Georgian and Armenian counterparts in conditions of relative Harsha Ram is Associate Professor in Slavic and Comparative Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. HARSHA RAM 140 material abundance and cultural freedom during a short-lived but significant historical cycle which came to an abrupt end with the Bolshevik military annexation of Georgia on 25 February 1921. In few other cities of the Russian empire (one thinks of Kyiv as a rare point of comparison)1 did modernist cultural production evolve under such distinct political regimes — tsarist, Menshevik and Bolshevik — conflicting cultural ideologies — cosmopolitan as well as nativist — and literary sensibilities — symbolist, futurist, acmeist, dada and constructivist. One of the earliest writers to mythologize the cultural efflorescence of Menshevik Tiflis was Grigol Robakidze, doyen of Georgian modernism and arguably the most erudite literary intellectual of his generation. Composed during the 1920s, his unfinished novel, Falestra, evoked a recent past that — in the wake of Sovietization — seemed hauntingly remote: A strange city, Tiflis became stranger still in the years 1919 to 1920. Fugitive Russians found shelter here […]. Who wasn’t to be found in Tiflis at this time? […] It was here that the [Russian] futurists took their initial step towards dada. […] Tiflis became a city of poets. In the Café Internationale people exclaimed that henceforth only in Tiflis was poetry at all possible. [Georgian poet] Paolo Iashvili conquered the city at precisely this time, just as Arthur Rimbaud had once vanquished Paris. Scarcely did Iashvili suspect that the bohemian conquest of Tiflis would prove a greater challenge than the taking of Paris. The country was truly going to rack and ruin [iktseoda], but Tiflis was the sole city to greet this ‘collapse’ with poetic song (a manifestation, surely, of the carefree oriental or Georgian spirit?). Tiflis became a fantastical city.2 Eliding the political question of Menshevism into a diffuse intimation of impending collapse, Robakidze here sketches out the primary artistic orientations at play in revolutionary Tiflis: a cosmopolitan outlook tilted towards European — specifically Parisian — modes of bohemian sociability, a cacophony of avant-garde orientations shrilly proclaiming the primacy of poetic experimentation and a vaguely expressed but far from insignificant acknowledgement of a native ‘oriental’ sensibility. To date scholarly studies of this era have served principally to extend and detail Robakidze’s account. Overtly citing Robakidze in its very 1 See the collected volume, Modernism in Kyiv: Jubilant Experimentation, eds Irena R. Makaryk and Virlana Tkacz, Toronto, 2010. 2 Grigol Robakidze, Falestra [uploaded 3 December 2019]. FROM MENSHEVIK TO BOLSHEVIK 141 title, Tat´iana Nikol´skaia’s ‘Fantasticheskii gorod’ elaborated the cultural contours of Menshevik Tiflis as an ‘oasis’ for artists and writers...

What Can the Anthropic Principle Tell Us about the Future of the Dark Energy Universe

An anthropic explanation for evident smallness of the value of the dark energy implies the existence of a time-dependent component of the scalar field, serving, together with a negative-valued cosmological constant, as one of two components to the overall density of the dark energy. The observers (i.e. us) might then only evolve in those regions of the universe where the sum of those two components (a positive and a negative ones) is sufficiently close to zero. However, according to Vilenkin and Garriga, the scalar field component has to slowly but surely diminish in time. In about a trillion years this process will put a cap to the now-observable accelerated expansion of the universe, leading to a subsequent phase of impending collapse. However, the vanishing scalar field might also produce some rather unexpected singularities for a finite non-zero scale factor. We analyse this possibility on a particular example of Sudden Future Singularities (SFS) and come to a startling conclusion: the time required for SFS to arise must be "comparable" to the lifetime of observable universe.