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Getting ready for the painter

We're trying to get as much out of the bedroom as possible to give the painter room to work. This morning I moved all the books, the shelves, paintings, and knick-knacks, and pulled things out from under the bed, like the old drapes, which have now left the house and are in a donation pile.

Faux combing, not wallpaper
One of the books is an oldie, The Outline of History by H.G. Wells, I bought at a yard sale maybe 20 years ago. I was going to put it in the pile to donate, then started leafing through. Look what they were saying about global warming in 1920 (or in the revision of 1949). It just seems so sensible, like maybe mankind isn't in charge:

About these changes of climate that are always in progress on the earth's surface: They are not periodic changes; they are slow fluctuations between heat and cold. The reader must not think that because the sun and earth were once incandescent the climatic history of the world is a simple story of cooling down. The centre of the earth is certainly very hot to this day, but we feel nothing of that internal heat at the surface; the internal heat, except for volcanoes and hot springs, has not been perceptible at the surface since first the rocks grew solid. Even in the Azoic or Archaeozoic Age there are traces in ice-worn rocks and the like of periods of intense cold. Such cold waves have always been going on everywhere, alternately with warmer conditions. There have been periods of great wetness and periods of great dryness throughout the earth. They depend upon astronomical and terrestrial fluctuations of extreme complexity.

And, in accordance, we find from the Record in the Rocks that there have been long periods of expansion and multiplication when life flowed and abounded and varied, and harsh ages when there was a great weeding out and disappearance of species, genera, and classes, and the learning of stern lessons by all that survived.

It is probably that the warm spells have been long relatively to the cold ages. Our world today seems to be emerging with fluctuations from a prolonged phase of adversity and extreme conditions. Half a million years ahead it may be a winterless world with trees and vegetation even in the polar circles. At present we have no certainty in such a forecast, but as knowledge increases it may be possible that our race will make its plans thousands of years ahead to meet the coming changes.

Isn't that interesting. The authors saw the warming as positive for mankind. Skipping ahead, he comments on the spread of Islam, which the author saw as a better culture to replace the decaying Roman system in the 7th century:

"While the armies of Islam were advancing triumphantly to the conquest of the world, this sickness of civil war smote at its head. What was the rule of Allah in the world to Ayesha [favorite wife of the prophet] when she could score off the detested Fatima [daughter of the prophet] and what heed were the Omayyads and the partisans of Ali [adopted son of the prophet and husband of Fatima] likely to take of the unity of mankind when they had a good hot feud of this sort to entertain them, with the caliphate as a prize? The world of Islam was rent in twain by the spites, greeds, and partisan silliness of a handful of men and women in Medina. That quarrel still lives . . . Shiites and Sunnites. To watch this schism creeping across the brave beginnings of Islam is like watching a case of softening of the brain. . . From the first the complicated household of Muhammad was like an evil legacy to the new faith. He was an illiterate Arab, ignorant of history, totally ignorant of all the political experiences of Rome and Greece, and almost as ignorant of the real history of Judea; and he left his followers with no scheme for a stable government embodying and concentrating the general will of the faithful, and no effective form to express the very real spirit of democracy (using the word in its modern sense) that pervades the essential teaching of Islam.

Maybe that's why they wrap their women in black robes--two women started this mess, so now they'll all have to pay. Interesting that he thought there was a spirit of democracy in Islam.