This marks the end of the combustion engine-powered car.
Volvo going all in on Electric engines in their car offerings.
Starting 2019, every Volvo will make use of an electric motor.
To top it off, Volvo will also make use of a completely climate neutral manufacturing operation by 2025.

And while this is just one good ol car manufacturer crossing over to the better side of car manufacturing, Volvo will of course not be alone in this transition.
Just as we see energy producers working their ass off to transition to a cleaner world without fossil fuel in their portfolios, car manufacturers are now all in on making safer ( autonomous cars ) and cleaner ( fully electric cars ) vehicles.

At some point in life, you might discover yourself having walked far enough outside the map that plots the discourse of the common life that society expects all to follow beyond their birth, and at this point of discovery, this is where you might realize that you can cut out all the distractions of the buzzy bees, and the perceived connotations of what people stubbornly claims to be "just how it is", all while they seemingly refuse to see how things actually are.

And once you do, the void of white noise and people without words of meaning to express, all the colors and moving shapes from all the non-essential patches that weaves together to raise a banner of hollowness will start to dissipate.

Dear Chancellor Merkel, I am writing you in your role as one of the more public representatives of Europe ( and the prosperity of the entire world ).
Billions of people reject Trump’s attempts to divide the world on climate change and our mutual health and wellbeing. His disregard for science and public progress, education, and health.
And as such, we call on you to lead the G20 meeting towards a healthier and more sustainable future, with or without the involvement of the USA or any other country and leader that is willfully turning its back on the future of humanity, our planet, science, health, and equality.

India is a wonderful nation of immense potential and filled with fascinating heritage and culture, but it can also be quite a sad and horrible place for women and children.
We have the ever present and immense pollution and poverty. The inequality that seems almost steeped in the seams of its old and rich history.
And almost always guided and directed towards the poor, and more than anything females.
You also have something even worse, related but different. And this sordid face of the underbelly of the rapidly changing but still traditional Indian society is best represented by a road that could be described as the road to hell on Earth.

In a small but important step towards a better world and healthier people EU is launching a positive step forward to promote and subsidize sustainable and locally produced food that is healthy. Such as fruits and greens in schools across all of Europe
The new Europe-wide initiative will help fund up to three-quarters of the cost of serving fruit and greens, locally produced and sustainable food to school students.

Organic food will receive up to 75% help, while traditionally grown fruit and greens will receive up to 65%.

Wishing the entire world a wonderful midsummer with this silly midsummer poem and summery views which you can read beyond the break.
creativity is a combination of having a thirst and desire for the discipline of exploring the world, and a fully alive spirit to consume all that life has, and to finally, spit it all out in a new shape and form for others to indulge in.

As if straight out of the cutesy book 'wind in the willows', the good ol and extremely photogenic water voles ( Arvicola amphibius ) returns from the brink of UK extinction, with a little help from the human hands that orchestrated its near extinction in the first place.
As such, Kielder Forest in Northumberland, England will now get to see 700 Scottish highlander water voles invade and conquer its lush and serene country setting in the summer of 2017.
Not by accident, nor is it born in a devious water vole plot to reclaim the mainland of the United Kingdom.
Instead, this is one of the many wonderful rewilding wildlife and sustainable projects going on in Europe right now.

Cheetahs have already disappeared from more than 90 percent of their natural habitat in Africa ( not to mention in other areas such as the middle east ), and the wild population continues to decline in an unsustainable way.
Today fewer than 7000 adult cheetahs are estimated to survive in the wild.
Making the cheetah one of the world's most endangered land living apex predators.

But not all hope is lost and there is not just a global consensus that the situation as it is is impossible for the cheetah but plenty of hard work is also being done to rectify the near extinction that awaits the cheetah.

Planet Earth. Our bluish marble of brown and green.
Apex species. Planet Earth is inhabited by a rapidly evolving and diverse humanoid species which as this planet's current primary apex predator is actually made up by a wide range of multiple hominid species mutually forming it's diverse genetic origin and lineage.
Mutant name. Contemporary humans.
Planetary trajectory, unknown.
The entire planet, solar system and milky way galaxy dart and weave, jump and spin all over the place inside the known universe. It might feel as if it is this solid zen-like teacup of calmness, but in reality, it is constantly changing shape and form, mass, speed, and trajectory.
The speed of planetary travel can be measured as millions of kilometer per hour. ( Not millions actually, just 828,000 kilometers per hour to be exact )

Life is this endless canvas of soft and hard, varied in the raw and softly spoken whispers, and inside of that endless change and variation it gladly have room for differing taste in music, and my kind of metal is absolutely not for everyone :).
As such I have never been surprised that most of the same people that find something pleasingly calm or beautiful in my writing and photography usually consider it an absurd contradiction that I so happily mix it up with grinding death metal of various shades.
But for me it speaks with the same voice.

It slowly happens over time, you know, by the hands of natural evolution and life itself, it happens through every second of every day that ticks us by. From the way the earth turns, and the soil grows, the way that water and wind erode things over the course of eternity.
It happens through the tunnels that ants and termites build and the way that sand polish stone.
The way we walk and swim, build and leave behind things, the water that carves its own changing path through the rocky cold mountains that run through our entire planet. It is seen in the roots of the trees that refuse to die after 10 000 years and slowly crack the ground open.

Every person carries with them their own style and touch, in person, clothes, fitness, thoughts, sex, books, movies, passion, music and life.
The way you are and see the world carries through in everything.
It shows in the gym, and the board room, the way you handle your lover, and in the style and feel of your living room.
The person that you are is not just reflected in those things, but your surroundings in life and nature and home speak back to your inner self and carries with it real significance for how much you, in turn, will enjoy both life and the castle you call your own home.




This is my contribution to your life.
Fine art for the living room walls.
Duvet covers for the continental bed and snugly warm blankets for both autumn nights and the cold winter.

'The Musk colony' as it was informally called could right now be thought of as a real but still very challenged success simply because the fleet had actually managed to reach their destination and somewhat to his own surprise, the entire fleet was still operational, bruised but functional.
And considering how space travel and logistics had been prone to so many errors in the decades leading up to their unparalleled launch, the fact that they were all here, it was nothing but amazing. Taken for granted by the crew, by now at least, but still nothing but amazing.

And while it was true, that they still had not actually put any human feet on the ground. Or even landed a single ship or UAV.
We had reached our destination.

They came marching in at dawn, shoulder to shoulder they formed long winding columns of wordless but well-armed soldiers in gleaming dark armor that stretched as long as the eye could see. 500 men passed us by with the rising sun painting the light of this new day behind their backs. But this would not be a day of peaceful tranquility under the light of the rising sun, instead, the sun rose up from beneath the horizon as the herald of war and death in what we all knew would turn out be just another day in their relentless campaign.

Almost 7 million dead people around the world in one single year ( 2015 ), due to smoking.
Making it account for 11.5% of worldwide deaths during 2015.
Out of the roughly 7 million dead people, 52.2% lived in four countries, China, India, the USA, and Russia.

13 countries, Australia, Brazil, China, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Iceland, Kenya, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the USA have showed significant year-to-year rates of decline of smoking between 1990 and 2015.

But while an increasingly lower percentage of the global population keep up with the filthy and unhealthy habit of smoking, as time goes by due to our global population increase the total number of smokers is still going up, and it is now close to 1 billion people!.

Let us start from the tail of the end. Because we all know that every good tale comes equipped with an end that makes the rest of the story worth reading.
And as such, the developing story of salt is a story of the roughly 2.5 million deaths around the world which could be prevented each year if global salt consumption was to be reduced below the recommended levels.

When it comes down to health and fitness, and the cerebral battlefield of chess the simple truth is that they are very much alike.
There are no unearthly and illogical surprises waiting in the dark of night that will upend and change the actual fabric of the landscape.
Your opponent can not cast fiery magic and summon demons from the netherworld to do their bidding.
Instead what we have is a beautifully defined field of known and still developing, yet for now, unknown for you and me facts and variables, and the vast amount of personal choices those known, but evolving facts allows us to make.

And at every step of that personal journey, chess and fitness will leave you standing as the sole commander, at a vast field made up of pure facts and deductive knowledge and the cause and consequences that every single choice will give birth to.

'The people that bleed' is our own label for a series of videos, all produced by UFC, that I feel show us a more real and nuanced, intimate perhaps view of the actual soul and personality of the real human being that makes up the flesh and bone, heart and thoughts behind the bravado and attitude of the MMA fighter persona.

In this 9 minutes long video, we get to meet Brad Picket (25-14 MMA, 5-9 UFC), a tiny blue collar sized UK based fighter whom retired after his final UFC fight on march 18, 2017 against Brandon Vera.

For most people getting a bit more fit, and healthy by eating cleaner food and less calories and working out more is a great life improving choice.
And for most, that will lead to health improving reductions in unhealthy body fat levels and body weight. But as we previously talked about in another article, when you are already in shape, rocking a fit and toned body, eating healthy amounts of healthy food, doing weights and cardio, there comes a limit where dropping even more in body weight and body fat becomes damaging and unhealthy instead of health and fitness improving.

And beyond that basic reality, you have the insanity of MMA and Boxing weight cuts that far to many pro fighters go through just so they can fight in a weight class that they are to athletic and big to actually be fighting in.
I am saying that because MMA style weight cutting is not something that anyone interested in health and fitness should ever do.
Period.

Neither should pro fighters in my own opinion. In a ideal world you would be the only one doing MMA style weight cuts, allowing you to fight people 20 to 30 lbs smaller than you, with much shorter leg and arm reach, 20+lbs less muscle mass and all the disadvantage that would give them in strength, endurance, strike impact and absorption.
But you see, when every other fighter do the same weight cut, no one benefits, and everybody suffers from the exact same detrimental and unhealthy exhaustion that MMA style weight cuts are. With less fitness come fight night and potentially worse health for the long haul as the only real result.