Heating Your Greenhouse in Europe This Winter

[Bern]

What's going on with google sign in pop ups on my computer?  I'm sure I'm not the only person having this very annoying problem.  Whenever I try to sign in a website that needs my username and password, I get a google pop up asking me if I want to sign in with them instead.  I've done everything I could think of and followed every bit of advice I could find on my computer about correcting this problem, including instructions from google themselves - and nothing works!  I even closed my google account several months ago because I was disgusted with them for doing this. I use Firefox as my browser and I have disabled pop ups there.  I added an ad blocker and this has not helped either.  Does anyone have any ideas how to correct this problem?

Thanks much!

[David Pilling]

Websites can offer login with Google or Facebook or others as an alternative to the traditional name and password. So the popup is not necessarily coming from Google.

Maybe see:

How to Stop Google Sign-In Pop-Ups on All Websites

https://www.makeuseof.com/stop-google-sign-in-pop-ups/

I presume that will fall foul of you not using Chrome and no longer having a Google account.

https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/169172/how-do-i-prevent-websites-from-prompting-me-to-sign-in-with-google

looks more like it, requires the ublock add on, I use that and it is very good, although you have to be careful because sometimes it blocks stuff you want.

Firefox has private browsing and I would be inclined to give that a go - if it works then you know the problem is managing Cookies - you could delete the lot but more likely just the ones causing the trouble.

Googling a lot of people have this problem and there's a lot of frustration.

Oddly, being a Chrome user with a Google account it is not something I suffer from. Although I do have ublock installed and it hides a lot from me - like adverts.


Here is someone else using ublock:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1393427

[Bern]

So the popup is not necessarily coming from Google.

Hi David, thanks very much for your insights and suggestions. I tried uBlock Origin, but Firefox has been updated and I was no longer able to find where to insert the script to block the pop ups. Interestingly, I cleared the cache and they went away for the time being.  I've done this before, and they have always come back.  I'll continue my attempts with uBlock Origin today.  But, if these annoying pop ups continue, I'm going to change by browser to Chrome, open a new Google account, and disable the pop ups there.  Hopefully, it will resolve the problem.  Thanks again! I appreciate it.

[Bern]

Will and Ariel Durant, a husband and wife team, are most famous for their writing The Story of Civilization, an 11-volume set of books covering both Eastern and Western civilizations for the general reader, with a particular emphasis on European history. The series was written over a span of four decades.

Lesser know is their short book on the lessons of history.  It contained some surprisingly optimistic words about history, and I wanted to post them.  The daily news is sometimes the present tense of history, and the Durant's observations are helpful in maintaining a more positive outlook on events, especially during troubling times.

(Quotes From: The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant. Chapter 6, Morals and History, page 41. MJF Books, 1968.)

The Truth about History: History as written has been heavily mentally filtered.  The historian writes about whom or what they think is exceptional and/or interesting and as a result, most of written history has a negative bias.  History as usually written (peccavimus) is a "register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes" (Edward Gibbon) of mankind.  Therefore, written history is quite different from history as usually lived by most people.  A History of Goodness has yet to be written.  Untold millions of good people have lived and have not had their Boswell to tell their story.  If this had been the case, History as we know it would be much more complete and accurate. "If all of those individuals who had no Boswell had found their numerically proportionate place in the pages of historians, we should have a duller but juster view of the past and of mankind." "Behind the red (bloody and violent) façade of war and politics, misfortune and poverty, adultery and divorce, murder and suicide, were (and are) millions of orderly homes, devoted marriages, men and women kindly and affectionate, troubled and happy with children."  "Even in recorded history we find many instances of goodness, even of nobility, so that we can forgive, though not forget the sins."  "The gifts of charity have almost equaled the cruelties of battlefields and jails." 

[David Pilling]

Hi Bern, nicely put.

At school every year history would commence in 1066 and work its way through the Kings and Queens (of England). Later it occurred to me that in all those years technological progress was being made by people we were told nothing of, and those changes were more important than the ups and downs of the monarchs.

We never got very far, Queen Elizabeth the first was the limit.

[Martin Bohnet]

Oh well, everyone remembers that failed Austrian wannabe painter, noone remembers Edith Keeler. Oh wait, there's nothing to remember but that car accident.  Don't play with history, we have no idea how bad it might end up with a little change here and there.

[Arnold]

You mean Joan Collins as the good doer

[David Pilling]

Good grief, Joan Collins appeared in Star Trek as Edith Keeler, and had a stunt double.

"But she was right, peace was the way,"
"She was right. But at the wrong time."
– Kirk and Spock, 1930 ("The City on the Edge of Forever")

It is a complicated tale:

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Edith_Keeler

[Martin Bohnet]

I was thinking about a comment on how she gave up on pacifism later... Actually I scanned the Tube a bit and did not find a single scene where the first physical attack came from Alexis (beating away the newspaper doesn't count) - Krystal and Dominique were seemingly far more interested in a wrestling career, though of course Alexis would have required a firearms certificate for some of her remarks placed before the violence....

Memory is a fickle thing - I would have sworn the physical aggression was more balanced...

[Ron]

I found David's comments about the limits of history education in England very interesting.  Here in the US our national history is so much shorter, but we never got to World War II.  That was fairly recent history in the 1960s, when I was in grammar school.  The last thing I remember studying was the Teapot Dome scandal, in the early 1920s.  It was not until I was    12 or so that I learned (& was quite surprised) that WWII started not with Pearl Harbor, but almost two years earlier in Europe with the invasion of Poland.

[Judy Glattstein]

Sixty-five years ago or thereabouts, let's say end of the 1950s, I would occasionally be riding on public transportation in the summer, in Brooklyn NY. And would see a man wearing short sleeved shirt, with a tattooed number from the Nazi death camps on his wrist. I knew what it was. But I never talked to him.

And one time about the same time frame my father was talking to my mother about a man at the place where my father worked who would sometimes have fits, disturbances, crying out. I asked why, and my father said it was because the man would remember what had occurred in the camps and could not bear it.

[Martin Bohnet]

Here in the US our national history is so much shorter, but we never got to World War II.  That was fairly recent history in the 1960s, when I was in grammar school. 

Well German education started handling WWII properly in the 1970s after the 1968 student protests where basically the new generation forced the establishment to face their past, so my parents (born 43 and 45) did not get there during their school time. By the time I got to school 84-97, we went through multiple age appropriate iterations of the Weimar Republic leading to 3rd Reich, including a concentration camp visit, which I guess face at least 90% of German pupils (Education is organized on federal state Level). But I think the educational impact is a lot bigger than history lessons, as e.g. a nationalistic morning ritual like the US "Pledge of Alliance" is unthinkable in German schools.

[David Pilling]

In my day (60s) it was selective education, an exam at age 11, the ones who passed went to grammar school, and the rest (including me) secondary modern, which was conceived as a place were the "dull middle class" could be allowed to sink. I was describing education ages 11 to 14. At the time one could leave at 15 and as some of my class mates did, join the Army. Grammar school education was much better.

We were, outside of lessons, interested in history, at junior school (age up to 11) there was huge interest in the American civil war and the battles were constantly re-enacted in the playground.

I wish I had grasped the context at the time - many of the teachers had been in WW2 as had many parents. They were not all enthusiastic about what had gone on. Teaching 20th century history would have been controversial.

The only gun I have ever been in close proximity to was one produced in school by a fellow pupil whose father had brought it back from the war, and subsequently he did fire it.

[Bern]

Teaching 20th century history would have been controversial.

Here's a recent quote from the German Libertarian scholar Hans-Herman Hoppe regarding his beliefs on the teaching of history.

"The claims made by my various critics, that I just don't sufficiently know Putin, the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Poles, the Lithuanians, etc. even the Germans and the Americans and their various particular histories, typically appear little more than regurgitations of some official, national or nationalistic, and invariably statist, school-book history and historical narrative as it is taught and promoted everywhere, at all times and in all countries."

secondary modern, which was conceived as a place were the "dull middle class" could be allowed to sink.

Is history taught the same in all countries so that it dumbs people down to make them passive subjects?  Or, as people are referred to now in the US, as consumers?

The only gun I have ever been in close proximity to was one produced in school by a fellow pupil whose father had brought it back from the war, and subsequently he did fire it.

Guns are everywhere in the US. At a later date, I'll post a few pics of gun toting Americans taken during the Covid pandemic, a time here where some people appeared to have become even crazier than in "regular" times.

[janemcgary]

My father was a World War II veteran. Once when my brother, as a child, said that the USA had won every war it ever fought, our father replied, "No, this country has lost every war it was ever in," explaining the loss of lives, military and civilian, and the disasters any war brings. This was in the 1950s, when we were told a lot of lies by the government and our history classes barely mentioned slavery and Native American genocide, but there were adults around us who shared their personal knowledge of the past with children who still believed they should listen respectfully to their elders. And thanks to the Great Depression of the 1930s, when few could afford grad school, there were still actual scholars teaching in secondary schools.