okra-sama

[okra-sama]

I’m at a sociology conference and just attended a memorial for one of the giants of our field, and one of the panelists told this story…he was at a meeting with this guy, who he got his PhD under and had a long standing relationship with, and he was bemoaning the current state of the world, and he asked this old professor, “how can you be so optimistic? I can’t ever be anything but a pessimist.”

and the old professor said, “you little fucker, I’m going to make a statement and then I’m going to take you out to the parking lot and beat your ass. What good does your pessimism do?”

and that really struck me. not the least because I also knew this old professor and he very rarely swore, so I know this was something he was really worked up about. what good does your pessimism do? What GOOD does your pessimism DO. I’ll be thinking about that for awhile.

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Sherwood Forest Zine Library in Austin, Texas, United States hosts an online collection of free zines. The virtual zine library is arranged alphabetically—providing readers with PDF scans of zines, which have agreed to being digitised—also includes sections on Black issues, policing and protest zines.

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Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world's greatest creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn't mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge.

Terry Pratchett

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*dipping a dart into an unlabelled flask and loading it into my crossbow* you better not try anything stupid because i don't even remember what this one does

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every day is more unbearable than the last yet I still log onto this website to look at gifs and jpegs

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i think that killing a dragon should have catastrophic nuclear-fallout level environmental consequences tbh. their blood should scorch and wither the earth with fire and poison, the toxic fumes released as they decay should choke the land and all nearby living creatures, and the entire landscape where they fell should be transformed into a blighted wasteland where bleached leviathan bones loom upwards out of the ground as a warning that can be seen from miles away, the boundary markers of an exclusion zone.

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「出荷待つおみかんたち」 “Oranges waiting for shipment”

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2009 a space odyssey

happy 413

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One-Of-A-Kind Orange Snowy Owl Leaves Scientists Scratching Their Heads

Wildlife photographer Julie Maggert has been taking pictures of snowy owls for years. So when she heard that a strange, orange-colored snowy owl had been spotted flying around Michigan’s Thumb area, she knew she had to see the bird for herself. Maggert drove two hours out to where the owl had been observed. Before long, she spotted her in the middle of a field. She couldn’t believe her eyes — she really was orange...

Read more: One-Of-A-Kind Orange Snowy Owl Leaves Scientists Scratching Their Heads - The Dodo

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Springtime in Japan

mblockk

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Is there beef with the Holstein cows and you or what was that joke lol

It's kind of wild It's just never come up on this blog before, but I HATE holsteins. Bottom 10 cow breeds for me. I hate how they're so common they account for the majority of milk produced. I hate that they're the "default" cow to the point where some don't even know cattle HAVE other colors. I hate their tiny horns (IF THEY EVEN HAVE THAT. LOSER ASS HORNLESS COW) and their painfully massive udders.

Legit I'm trying so hard to not launch into a No Mouth Must Scream style AM speech-- shoot my hand slipped.

(AM speech about why i dont like holsteins below the cut)

For starters, I have to give a brief lesson on what these terms mean; the "Holstein" is the American strain of the "Frisian" breed. Frisians are an ancient breed from Frisia, in the north of what we now consider the Netherlands. Crosses between the breeds are "Holstein-Frisians."

(There’s even more to this but im keeping it as simple as possible. Also one of my friends is Frisian and she is probably going to kill me for describing it like that.)

Historically, livestock was adapted to the environment they lived in. Frisians were bred by the Frisii people for hundreds of years in extremely grass-rich, lush, flat environments. The "polders" of the northern parts of the Netherlands. They're huge and eat a LOT of food.

Traditional Frisians were developed to produce as much meat and milk from a single individual as possible, without compromising the health of the cattle with constant inbreeding to get quick gains. We are talking about a breed that is over 2000 years old. They had the perfect environment to make The Ultimate Food Cow and by god they did it. I can respect that.

So, take that, drag it across an ocean to a place that does NOT have polders, and add the rapid enshittification of capitalism to it. BAM you've got a fucking holstein.

There is ONE goal for "improving" the holstein. Make More Milk. As long as the black and white milkbag leaks enough, nothing else matters. Health? Fertility? Feed ratio? Ability to not die of infection? WHO CARES. MILK LINE GO UP.

Over 90% of holsteins are inbred to start with, because Milk Line Go Up. To the tune of having an average COI of 8%-- where extreme negative effects (think Hapsburgs) start to crop up around 10%

Holstein bulls are aggressive bastards (many dairy bulls are), so no one wants to keep intact males in their herds, meaning most cows are artificially inseminated

Not being limited by the natural lifespan of a living bull means that the same stud can keep having direct offspring for decades after his death

Toystory the bull had 500,000 calves before he died, and hit over 1 million offspring in 2015. That's ONE animal and to put this in perspective, there are 9 million holsteins in the US.

DON'T WORRY IT GETS WORSE

Not only can 99% of holsteins be traced back to just two bulls-- 99% of male holsteins share one of two exact Y chromosomes with those two bulls.

The gene pool is so small that it's equivalent to about 60 individuals. Warrior Cat allegiances are larger than that. That's barely bigger than modern ThunderClan.

"Massive lack of genetic diversity" does not begin to capture the existential dread of this situation. Mark my words, WATCH, when the Bird Flu finally mutates a strain that rips through a mammalian population, it's gonna be in the USA and it's going to be through our dairy cattle.

This is not prophecy or me laying a curse on the land, this is the natural consequence of basing the stability of US milk production on the equivalent of 9 million clones of two classrooms worth of individuals, and then packing them in close quarters

And we don't have to wait for doomsday for the impacts to be apparent on the cattle themelves

Holstein fertility has also dropped by half since the 1960s when the intensive inbreeding really kicked into high gear

Because their whole body is dedicating all of their resources to milk production, they have a notoriously "bony" frame.

Show judges, however, like this because they think that's a very "feminine" look for a 1600 pound ruminant. Very normal thing to think.

Like. I don't know if i can communicate this to people who don't look at cows a lot (it's not quite as obviously dramatic as a pug skull) but here is a comparison of an "ideal" show holstein and an "unselected" holstein from a herd that's been established as a sort of "control group" for what they looked like back in the 1960s;

The way that the artery on the "modern" cow's belly runs to the udder like a big pink worm freaks me out the most ngl

The udder also bulges out from between the back legs

The show cow is so thin

And then compare these both to a Holstein-Frisian cross who leans more on the Frisian side;

Proper weight, developed legs. Its biggest "problem" is actually just the udder shape-- deep udders, which "hang" low like that, aren't optimal for milk-focused breeds because the higher away from the ground the less chance there is of infection. In that department, the "unselected" holstein clearly outclasses the holstein-frisian.

But it probably won't be surprising to hear that the "show holstein," with its massive, swollen udder, is SUPER prone to infections such as mastitis.

But it is also just more prone to getting sick generally

And, to keep up with these insane demands, holsteins need a TON of food. You aren't going to just turn these things out into a pasture and be done with it. Even its ancestor the Frisian needed premium Dutch polder grass to be such a good cow-- crank that up to 11 with these Monuments to Humanity's Hubrice

The Texas Longhorn developed in semi-feral conditions and can eat a bush to become the best thing in a 10 mile radius. The Scottish Highland was iron-forged in upland moors with a steady diet of turf and rain.

Meanwhile if a Holstein has less than 5 homemade meals a day without poland spring bottled water it will die to death.

And the WORST part? You have to use these if you want to make money in dairy farming. It's WAAY too expensive to just run a suboptimal farm. Their milk isn't great, but they sure do make a lot of it.

...so Holsteins and Holstein-Frisians (and other "super efficient" breeds) have absolutely decimated heritage cattle. The American Milking Devon is a deep reddish brown with gorgeous horns and low maintenance; rare. Randall Linebacks are painted with lines of white speckles down the back and can be used for any purpose; critically endangered. The Niata was a pug-faced cow who could fight jaguars; extinct.

And THAT'S what makes me hate them most of all. I LOVE cows, but whenever I see a reference to one, it's a holstein. It's always boring black and white splotches with big pink udders. They're practically synonymous with "cow" when their homogeniety is actually hiding much cooler breeds from you.

Did you know cows can be tiger-striped?

And that England has its own type of longhorn?

Or that cow horns can twist upwards like an antelope?

And that they can have REALLY LONG ears?

And that they can be blue?

And that's not even getting into some of the cows that have gotten a small crumb of attention lately, such as Highlands, Ankole-Watusi, and Texas Longhorns. There's so many cool cows out there! And they're all really different from holsteins! MOST of them are also a lot healthier and produce tastier milk and meat!

TL;DR yeah i don't like holsteins and I like sniping at them. For reasons both legit and petty.

[okra-sama]

Unusual but sympathetic paper:

Language Matters: What Not to Say to Patients with Long COVID, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and Other Complex Chronic Disorders

https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/22/2/275

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lowkey what is the point in delving so deep into old religions. do u do it for fun because i struggle to see how a like idk 400 year old monastic sect relates to modern understanding of religions. this isn't an attack btw i get delving into stuff that interests u but like. is there any more behind it? also you are cool and smart

Little more than 400 years ago, in the 1500s, in what is now Germany there was a guy named Phillipis Aurelius Theophrastus Bombastus Von Honenhiem. But he was a big asshole, so his classmates at university called him "Cacaophrastus" which literally means shit-talker.

He hated how medicine worked. See, even up until 1600, medicine hasn't changed much since the ancient world. The most up-to-date medical textbook, the core of physicians teachings in the 1600s, was a book by Galen. Galen was from ancient greece. People had invented guns, but they hadn't really improved on how Galen thought medicine worked.

Theophrastus, who called himself Paracelsus, was a bit of a rebel. He saw alchemists doing all this fantastic stuff with manufacturing new types of dyes and cosmetics and metal alloys, and he thought, why not use all that stuff for medicine? So he got to using cutting edge knowledge for the purpose of healing the sick. Which he did.

Do you know what the pre-paracelcian prescription for a musket wound was? A poultice made of cow shit and feathers. Paracelsus said to keep the wound clean, and let the body do it's thing. This saved uncounted lives.

He performed experiments, giving the same substance, in the same dose, to different people, and even testing on animals with different phyiologies, and observing how the same amount of the same substance can affect bodies didferently. He wrote "The dose makes the poison" thus inventing the occidental science to toxicology. Every time you go to the doctor, and don't get poisoned, you have this 1500s wizard to thank.

And he was a wizard. Medical knowledge at that time involved the construction of astrological talismans, made of magically imbued metals which counteracted the astral forces thought to cause illnesses. Along with inventing the foundations of modern medicine, he also engaged in the construction of magical amulets and potions, the theories of which all informed his work. Work which formed the foundations of modern medicine.

It's important to know that ideas don't just manifest out of thin air. Everything you do and think is built on vast ziggurats of human ingenuity and failure, and shaped by the history entombed within. I've just decided to learn about my favorite few bricks.