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i feel like it says something about us as a species that somebody worked real hard to invent 3D printing when i think anyone who has ever used a printer would agree with me that we have not really gotten our arms around 2D printing yet. we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

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Re: green colonialism 

When Zionists talk about Israel making the desert bloom, they are using the most insidious language to describe Israel’s ecocide of Palestinian ecosystems and biome, which is an often overlooked casualty of colonial violence.

One of the worst perpetrators of this ongoing ecocide is the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an Israeli organisation that disguises itself as an environmental NGO yet owns around 13% of the occupied land in Palestine (which I’ll bring up a lot below). The JNF can be considered the main reason Zionists love to brag about the number of tress and forests that they have planted in Palestine, while skipping over the part that addresses what trees, where they are planted, and why they're planted in the specific areas.

As for what kind of trees, the JNF planted vast swaths of non-native trees, mainly pine and eucalyptus trees, in place of indigenous arboreta. Both trees are invasive species; pine is not indigenous to the land, and therefore it is not a sustainable plant. Pines planted by Israel often fail to adapt to the soil which requires replanting them over and over again. Additionally, they require huge amounts of water, which in turn affects water systems and aquifers around them. On top of that, the acidic pine needles that the tree sheds tend to destroy all surrounding small plants, gravely affecting the livelihood of Palestinian shepherds whose animals depend on grazing the land. Lastly, and not to forget, that these invasive plants are more prone to fires. As Palestinian scholar Ghada Sasa put it, zionists have "converted Palestine into a tinder box" over the past century, which was evident in 2010’s Mount Carmel wildfire, which was the worst in Israel’s history. Ironically, this fire revealed underneath it agricultural terraces constructed by Palestinian farmers, which were purposely obscured by Israel when constructing the park. 

With that, and as for where these forests are stationed, they are often built on top of the ruins of depopulated Palestinian villages. Take for example Birya Forest, Israel's largest man-made forest in the north, and was strategically planted over the ruins of six different Palestinian villages, one of which was 'Ayn Zaytoun (meaning spring of olives), a farming village that used to home 1,000 Palestinians, who were ethnically cleansed by Israel to make way for this forest. Other examples include the Canada Park or Carmel National Park. In places like the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens, the ruins of demolished Palestinian homes can be spotted among the pine trees, and in this particular case, it’s the ruins of the village of Ajour.

Finally, the reason why the JNF seems to be fixated on pine trees for example is primarily because to them, pine trees help evoke an imagery of European wilderness, and this is evident with Jewish settlers nicknaming the Carmel National Park "little Switzerland", despite it being partially built on top of the ruins of the Palestinian village of al-Tira. Additionally, pine trees grow fast, which works in Israel’s favour to attempt to accelerate the erasure of Palestinian history and memory. The JNF usually distributes pine saplings to settlers to plant annually, and they understand that while these cost nothing, yet, in their own words, there will make a forest in 10 years’ time.

This is all scratching at the surface of Israel’s green colonialism and ecocide in Palestine, and I should probably make another post to talk about Israel’s deliberate destruction of Palestinian farmland and crops to build its Jewish-only roads and separation apartheid wall, or how it pays tax incentives to Israeli companies with the highest polluting rates to move to the West Bank, or how they drained the oldest documented lake in history despite scientist warnings, or the continued destruction of olive trees (about one million) by the state of Israel and its violent settlers. But in any case, at this point no one can buy into Israel’s green-washing of its genocide, especially after seeing what they had done to Gaza’s lands, particularly fertile lands. 

Simply put, Zionism has employed every method at its disposal to try to erase Palestinians and their history, including planting trees. 

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sry to step back from the ai stuff and ask a more fundamental question but what do you mean about both art only mattering in the interplay betwwn work and reader and the stuff about how displaying something turns it into Art?

Like yeah ik both of those points are like super common things artists say but Ive only ever seen them deployed as like a way to shut down Outsiders trying to ask questions ive nerver understood what they actually mean

you see a toilet in a bathroom, you think "thats a toilet". you see a toilet on a plinth in an art gallery, you think "what's that doing there?" and then, if you are able to get past a knee-jerk rejection of 'THATS NOT ART WHATS IT DOING IN THE ART BUILDING', you think things like "what differentiates art objects from other objects? someone made this toilet, after all. it's mass produced, but prints can be mass produced, and they're still art. is a toilet that is being displayed different to one i am meant to use? what do i feel when i see a toilet randomly in the middle of a room while walking around an art gallery, that i don't feel when i see it in a bathroom when i'm going to take a piss?" & so on... the object has not changed, but your reaction to it has, and so it has become meaningfully different!

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I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.

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"Punishment works!!!" We're drowning in three to four generations of people so pants-shittingly terrified of ever being wrong that half of everyone has constructed a worldview wherein they never even consider the possibility that they could be wrong and the other half behaves like one wrong move will make anything or anyone explode violently into a million irreperable pieces. I don't think it works guys

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Do I have to do everything myself around here?

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Yeah, I'm gonna have fun with Etienne Lux. Mixing the Ozymandias character with many of the more cynical versions of Charles Xavier can only lead to fun places, especially in a setting where the consequences of superheroes acting is allowed to have longer-lasting consequences.

And from sound of it, we have a character who needs to pull an "I did it five minutes ago" on a regular basis just to keep the ball rolling. This book wear's its influences on its sleeve, but its doing some damn interesting things with them.

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It's so fucked that a job posting for an entry-level eunuch position will say that applicants need to have at least three years of court intrigue experience

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ID credit: 5416025956 on 小红书

(please like, reblog and give proper credit if you use any of my gifs!)

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She is such a good fit for the dynamic they have (although I've only just read issue 1, so I haven't exactly discovered the nuances yet), given the 'shooting a toddler' incident in canon, as well as the 'what if we nuke half of the United States?' one.

I've read the comic version of The Power Fantasy up to issue 8. Just letting everyone know. I am now crazy.

7th superpower Taylor Hebert aka Weaver. Controls all of the bug life on the planet including crabs, prawns, krill and other sea bug life. As of 1999 the most over-worked 4 year old imaginable but she loves her job. Confined to a hospital bed because her consciousness is spread across all of the bug-like creatures of the planet and her brain waves are similar to that of a coma patient (though she can still move her eyes and listen and eat and move her head). Has an entire department within the USA's Department of Agriculture and their mirror organizations in every other nation dedicated to liaising with her. Set to end world hunger by 2004 and is instrumental in the breakneck pace of helping turn the Sahara desert into a food forest.

Both parents are still alive and it's kinda uneasy how many attempts there are against them, since almost everyone knows how it goes trying to fight a superpower. Secret Service details on both of them. USA is unsure if killing her would also cause total brain death of bug life or set them back to normal. Her capacity for spying on people is a step below Lux's omnipathy. From her parents comes a leftist bent that aligns her with Heavy, but because Lux is the biggest conversationalist she has, she's more in his camp. Valentina's biggest fan. Hellbound, Magus and Masumi aren't really present in her life, but she's aware of the Pyramid and the destruction of Europe and Tokyo. Born well after the second summer of love, she's a young superpower amongst a team of very bitter rivals with long histories.

What I'm actually unsure of is how many megadeaths she's capable of. For those who haven't read The Power Fantasy, it's an estimation of how many millions of people per hour she could kill. Three of the superpowers are at the max of 6000 megadeaths, all six billion people on earth dead in a single hour or less. The weakest is Masumi's at 250 megadeaths, a quarter billion per hour, and that's because she's got a kaiju to end all kaiju. I think Taylor can be set at a reasonable 33 megadeaths. Travel time of her bugs cuts her per hour abilities short, but the reality is that if Taylor died or stopped working, the whole world would starve to death not too long after.