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"The poor have need of the superfluity of the rich … They have a right to it. Wages should be proportioned, not only to the services rendered, but also to the needs of the worker … If the customary tariff is not sufficient for the family of the artisan or the farm labourer, one of three things must necessarily happen … he must be given the extra he needs, or he must seize it unjustly, or he must die. And by dying I mean a state of exhaustion so life is not worth living."
[p.711, Church and society in eighteenth-century France: volume 2]

Said by Abbe Charmet, in Poitou; and there is plenty more of similar ilk.

Strange that Socialists so often seek to kill priests.

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jansenism

'Jansenism' takes its name from Cornelius Jansen, Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres, who read all the works of St. Augustine ten times, and the works on grace twenty-nine times, and died of a disease from the dust of old books. He left behind him a treatise, the Augustinus (1640), a volume proclaiming the uncompromising doctrine of predestination, as against the Jesuit Molina's insistence on free will. [p.345, Church and society in eighteenth-century France: volume 2]

Well, that's one way to go.

[Note, John Manners took 40 years to write the two volumes of his book.]

	The Oxford history of the Christian Church Church and society in eighteenth-century France: volume 2: The religion of the people and the politics of religion by John Manners
	Clarendon Press, hbk, 1998 880 pages ISBN-10: 0198269633 ISBN-13: 978-0198269632 amazon.com £257.50 [amazon.co.uk] {advert} shipping wt: 1.5kg/3lb	Kindle edition 15,378 KB Clarendon Press, 1998 ASIN: B005NE54GI $36.72 [amazon.com] {advert}

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speed of light

“Is the nature of a vacuum really fixed? Not so, according to two forthcoming papers. Researchers have identified a quantum level mechanism for interpreting a vacuum as being filled with pairs of virtual particles with fluctuating energy values. They've also discovered that physical constraints, such as the speed of light and the so-called impedance of free space, are indications of the total number of elementary particles in nature.”
—
“This finding has further repercussions, though. There's the theoretical possibility that the speed of light is, in fact, not fixed. Instead, the speed could potentially fluctuate at a level that's independent of the energy of each light quantum, or photon, and that's also greater than fluctuations induced by quantum level gravity. Instead, the speed of light would depend on variations in the vacuum properties of space or time.”

related material
the anthropic principle, or what if the universe was not the way it is

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to help shepherds watch their sheep [in French]

There is a problem when conserving wolves - the farmers who graze their animals in the high pastures of places like the Pyrenees, which is the natural habitat of the wolf, do not appreciate that their animals being prey to the wolves.

Left: a wolf interested in sheep; right: wolf repelled by anti-wolf collar

Nowadays, the logical solution, of keeping a dog large and fierce enough to deal with a wolf, can be a problem especially as many mountain regions are often visited by hiking tourists during the summer.

J.M Landries is a Jura biologist specialising in wolves, and involved in the problems caused by the reintroduction of wolves into the French Pyrenees and elsewhere. He has devised a solution to the problem, due to be commecialised from 2013 - an anti-wolf collar worn by the animals to be protected.

The collar is based on a cardio-frequency detector. This is linked to an alarm when the heartbeats of a stressed sheep (or even a cow) increase. The alarm sets off a double scaring action: a ultra-sound noise (undetectable to sheep) and a unpleasant smelling gas. These both stop the predator immediately, and train the wolf through operant conditioning to be less likely to try again.

Trials and tests were made using both captive and wild wolves, in several locations.

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