#Asia crisis

[latestnews-now]

Russia has accused the US of escalating tensions in Asia by using Taiwan as a geopolitical tool. In this report, we explore Moscow's claims, US arms supplies to Taipei, and how China-Russia ties are shaping the region. Stay tuned for an in-depth analysis of this high-stakes international conflict.

[fighting-these-demons]

Divorce Saga Domon - A Haunted Honk Prequel

Hello Internet Stranger looking up G Gundam on Tumblr dot com!

This is an idea for a fic set in an Alternate Universe involving Queer Non-Canon Relationships between the characters of the series.

If you are not looking for this content please scroll on.

If you ARE looking for this content - and you're ok with reading my and other's Headcanons for this Alternate Universe I've haphazardly spun up -

Then go ahead and feel free to:

Check The Tags Of This Post For The Pairings

and click the Read More below!

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Ended up outlining a completely different fic as a Segway for an explanation instead of making progress on the Royal Flush Haunted Honk AU's Clown Motel Fic like I wanted to but uh....

For y'all's review for the AU: A Prequel Outline - Divorce Saga Domon

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Hey real quick - I'm thinking of maybe changing the timeline to 2 years post canon as opposed to 3 years and change post canon.

The reason being: I had a thought that this scene could either be part if the fic or if it's getting to big then it could be a stand alone tie-in prequel fic as part of this AU but - like

Immediately Post Divorce Domon Needs Space and runs off. As one does. And he runs to Earth because he just wants to Get Lost for a while.

He has Argo smuggle him out to avoid detection.

Argo has Andrew help stow Domon in a storage hanger of a Neo Canadian supply ship that's returning to the US - they have trade often enough and share agricultural resources - which leads to Domon ending up in New York when he hits Earthside pavement.

He's privately worked on his English the last couple of months and after being dropped in New York with a different hairstyle, outfit, and accent he's unrecognizable. 

He considers making his way west to get some solitude in the wilderness, but something about that initial plan feels off now that he's on the ground.

Chibodee is also Earthside for a special series of prize fights aimed at raising charitable appeal for the US in the eyes of Neo Americans.

Domon decides to hit up Chibodee for a fight on a day between matches hoping it'll clear his head and give him the clarity to decide on a course of action. What ends up happening is an unexpected heart to heart via blows and a breakdown.

Domon is happy for Rain and Kyoji, and he knows it's not true; but he feels like he lost a piece of himself when his relationship with Rain fell apart.

Domon's instinct is to run after that but Chibodee knows this city and Domon doesn't hide out for long before Chibodee drags him back to his place to stay and just "Chill out and breathe. You don't have to be anyone but yourself here. You can take as long as you need to find out what everything changing means for you." Friends and teammates stick together.

So Domon spends a few weeks with Chibodee sparring and hanging out in New York. Chibodee does a frankly awesome job at containing his feelings because he's focusing on Domons feelings and being a good friend first and foremost. Whatever he's feeling can wait until after Domon is done going though it.

There's a bit of a twinge in Domon's heart as he leaves that he can't really place.

After he returns to Neo Japan and gets settled back into life with his family, The Dreams start.

They're mainly set in New York. Small things first like noticing Chibodee's smile and his eyes. Then sparring sessions that begin to turn lurid.

He thought these kinds of dreams would stop after he was married.... he doesn't know what to do about this.

I just figure it gives more clarity and sense of time for the journey from Comphet Marriage Dissolution to Feelings to Confession. Idk.

But I got stuck on a bit and then had this thought and needed to get it down before I lost it and it was so long it made sense to make it its own post as opposed to several replies.

The Maize and Clown Motel will probably still be 3 years and change post canon for clarification.

@thedragonchilde @amplexadversary @youreaclownnow

[sasucaty]

our 'friendly' neighbour could have given us a warning before opening the dams and flooding the entire southeastern Bangladesh?now there are thousands of people drowning,misplaced and fighting between life and death.Indian media had the audacity to mock the flood situation in Bangladesh. The floods in Bangladesh is not a natural disaster but rather political. A simple warning could have saved so many lives but unfortunately India won't get any benefit from that anymore because their political puppet hasina is gone.

shame on india

[revoltingcocks]

after being ravaged by 4 decades of war, afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on earth, and among the least equipped to handle climate disasters. in 2023 and 2024 alone, the country has suffered from devastating droughts, earthquakes and flooding. this past week, heavy rain has led to flash flooding in several provinces, but has been especially severe in the northern province of Baghlan, where over 300 people have died. Additionally, thousands of people have been injured or lost their homes, while many people are still missing. mosques, schools, and health facilities have been damaged or destroyed. farmland has been affected as well, and many families depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.

When it comes to the climate crisis, it’s important to recognize that countries which have been affected by war and imperialism suffer the most. afghanistan has not had the chance to develop infrastructure to properly mitigate the effects of natural disasters. they are also among the LOWEST emitters of greenhouse gases in the world. on top of devastating climate events, the 40 million people living in afghanistan are still suffering from the aftermath of decades of war and american occupation, taliban rule, gender/ethnic/religious based oppression and violence, refugees facing discrimination and deportation in neighbouring countries, sanctions, mass unemployment, poverty and famine. they do not deserve to be forgotten by the world.

if anyone wants to help out, i believe these organizations are reliable

https://reviveafghanistan.org/Campaigns/emergency-flood-relief-afghanistan-2024/

for more information:

[mikhaila-bobersky]

Identity crisis Philipenis

Got banned from Reddit for two weeks for this comic.

[tomorrowusa]

« We cannot engineer our way out of climate change; retreat is inevitable — and not just in coastal cities.

[ ... ]

Retreat, when framed as transformation, is not the end of the American frontier but its much-needed reimagining. The initial step is to make room for a broader resilience. To remain, we must first retreat. »

— Prof. Brian Stone Jr. of the School of City and Regional Planning and director of the Urban Climate Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology on the need to quit building in climate sensitive areas. From the journal NOĒMA.

Whenever there's destruction of homes, businesses, and industry in a climate related disaster, the urge to rebuild and try to get back to the pre-disaster norm kicks in. But this makes no sense when similar disasters are likely to happen repeatedly in the same place. Such areas need to be repurposed as recreational or conservation areas which require little infrastructure.

Rebuilding should take place – but in areas with more climate resilience.

We're already seeing some climate migration in the US. People from heavily wooded (and fire-prone) parts of California are taking a greater interest in the Upper Midwest. Though relocation need not always be as distant.

Earlier this year a book on US climate migration was getting a lot of favorable attention. Here's a review of it by meteorologist Jeff Masters.

Book review: “On the Move” is a must-read account of U.S. climate migration

Somewhat related and timely...

Climate scientists say South Asia's heat wave (120F!) is a sign of what's to come

[bumblebeeappletree]

Every week, Eco India brings you stories that inspire you to build a cleaner, greener and better tomorrow.

Introduced on purpose, by mistake or as a result of climate change, invasive species destroy ecosystems and are often expensive to eradicate. We explore solutions, from turning pests into useful products, to serving them up as culinary delicacies.

Credits:

Field Producer and Script: Pracheta Sharma

Director of Photography: Dhiraj Katkade

Video Editor: Sujit Lad

Voiceover: Soundarya Jayachandran

Producer & Script Inputs: Ipsita Basu

Supervising Producer: Nooshin Mowla

Executive Producer: Sannuta Raghu

[jcmarchi]

Q&A: Claire Walsh on how J-PAL’s King Climate Action Initiative tackles the twin climate and poverty crises

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/qa-claire-walsh-on-how-j-pals-king-climate-action-initiative-tackles-the-twin-climate-and-poverty-crises/

Q&A: Claire Walsh on how J-PAL’s King Climate Action Initiative tackles the twin climate and poverty crises

The King Climate Action Initiative (K-CAI) is the flagship climate change program of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), which innovates, tests, and scales solutions at the nexus of climate change and poverty alleviation, together with policy partners worldwide.

Claire Walsh is the associate director of policy at J-PAL Global at MIT. She is also the project director of K-CAI. Here, Walsh talks about the work of K-CAI since its launch in 2020, and describes the ways its projects are making a difference. This is part of an ongoing series exploring how the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences is addressing the climate crisis.

Q: According to the King Climate Action Initiative (K-CAI), any attempt to address poverty effectively must also simultaneously address climate change. Why is that?

A: Climate change will disproportionately harm people in poverty, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, because they tend to live in places that are more exposed to climate risk. These are nations in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia where low-income communities rely heavily on agriculture for their livelihoods, so extreme weather — heat, droughts, and flooding — can be devastating for people’s jobs and food security. In fact, the World Bank estimates that up to 130 million more people may be pushed into poverty by climate change by 2030.

This is unjust because these countries have historically emitted the least; their people didn’t cause the climate crisis. At the same time, they are trying to improve their economies and improve people’s welfare, so their energy demands are increasing, and they are emitting more. But they don’t have the same resources as wealthy nations for mitigation or adaptation, and many developing countries understandably don’t feel eager to put solving a problem they didn’t create at the top of their priority list. This makes finding paths forward to cutting emissions on a global scale politically challenging.

For these reasons, the problems of enhancing the well-being of people experiencing poverty, addressing inequality, and reducing pollution and greenhouse gases are inextricably linked.

Q: So how does K-CAI tackle this hybrid challenge?

A: Our initiative is pretty unique. We are a competitive, policy-based research and development fund that focuses on innovating, testing, and scaling solutions. We support researchers from MIT and other universities, and their collaborators, who are actually implementing programs, whether NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], government, or the private sector. We fund pilots of small-scale ideas in a real-world setting to determine if they hold promise, followed by larger randomized, controlled trials of promising solutions in climate change mitigation, adaptation, pollution reduction, and energy access. Our goal is to determine, through rigorous research, if these solutions are actually working — for example, in cutting emissions or protecting forests or helping vulnerable communities adapt to climate change. And finally, we offer path-to-scale grants which enable governments and NGOs to expand access to programs that have been tested and have strong evidence of impact.

We think this model is really powerful. Since we launched in 2020, we have built a portfolio of over 30 randomized evaluations and 13 scaling projects in more than 35 countries. And to date, these projects have informed the scale ups of evidence-based climate policies that have reached over 15 million people.

Q: It seems like K-CAI is advancing a kind of policy science, demanding proof of a program’s capacity to deliver results at each stage. 

A: This is one of the factors that drew me to J-PAL back in 2012. I majored in anthropology and studied abroad in Uganda. From those experiences I became very passionate about pursuing a career focused on poverty reduction. To me, it is unfair that in a world full of so much wealth and so much opportunity there exists so much extreme poverty. I wanted to dedicate my career to that, but I’m also a very detail-oriented nerd who really cares about whether a program that claims to be doing something for people is accomplishing what it claims.

It’s been really rewarding to see demand from governments and NGOs for evidence-informed policymaking grow over my 12 years at J-PAL. This policy science approach holds exciting promise to help transform public policy and climate policy in the coming decades.  

Q: Can you point to K-CAI-funded projects that meet this high bar and are now making a significant impact?

A: Several examples jump to mind. In the state of Gujarat, India, pollution regulators are trying to cut particulate matter air pollution, which is devastating to human health. The region is home to many major industries whose emissions negatively affect most of the state’s 70 million residents.

We partnered with state pollution regulators — kind of a regional EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] — to test an emissions trading scheme that is used widely in the U.S. and Europe but not in low- and middle-income countries. The government monitors pollution levels using technology installed at factories that sends data in real time, so the regulator knows exactly what their emissions look like. The regulator sets a cap on the overall level of pollution, allocates permits to pollute, and industries can trade emissions permits.

In 2019, researchers in the J-PAL network conducted the world’s first randomized, controlled trial of this emissions trading scheme and found that it cut pollution by 20 to 30 percent — a surprising reduction. It also reduced firms’ costs, on average, because the costs of compliance went down. The state government was eager to scale up the pilot, and in the past two years, two other cities, including Ahmedabad, the biggest city in the state, have adopted the concept.

We are also supporting a project in Niger, whose economy is hugely dependent on rain-fed agriculture but with climate change is experiencing rapid desertification. Researchers in the J-PAL network have been testing training farmers in a simple, inexpensive rainwater harvesting technique, where farmers dig a half-moon-shaped hole called a demi-lune right before the rainy season. This demi-lune feeds crops that are grown directly on top of it, and helps return land that resembled flat desert to arable production.

Researchers found that training farmers in this simple technology increased adoption from 4 percent to 94 percent and that demi-lunes increased agricultural output and revenue for farmers from the first year. K-CAI is funding a path-to-scale grant so local implementers can teach this technique to over 8,000 farmers and build a more cost-effective program model. If this takes hold, the team will work with local partners to scale the training to other relevant regions of the country and potentially other countries in the Sahel.

One final example that we are really proud of, because we first funded it as a pilot and now it’s in the path to scale phase: We supported a team of researchers working with partners in Bangladesh trying to reduce carbon emissions and other pollution from brick manufacturing, an industry that generates 17 percent of the country’s carbon emissions. The scale of manufacturing is so great that at some times of year, Dhaka (the capital of Bangladesh) looks like Mordor.

Workers form these bricks and stack hundreds of thousands of them, which they then fire by burning coal. A team of local researchers and collaborators from our J-PAL network found that you can reduce the amount of coal needed for the kilns by making some low-cost changes to the manufacturing process, including stacking the bricks in a way that increases airflow in the kiln and feeding the coal fires more frequently in smaller rather than larger batches.

In the randomized, controlled trial K-CAI supported, researchers found that this cut carbon and pollution emissions significantly, and now the government has invited the team to train 1,000 brick manufacturers in Dhaka in these techniques.

Q: These are all fascinating and powerful instances of implementing ideas that address a range of problems in different parts of the world. But can K-CAI go big enough and fast enough to take a real bite out of the twin poverty and climate crisis?

A: We’re not trying to find silver bullets. We are trying to build a large playbook of real solutions that work to solve specific problems in specific contexts. As you build those up in the hundreds, you have a deep bench of effective approaches to solve problems that can add up in a meaningful way. And because J-PAL works with governments and NGOs that have the capacity to take the research into action, since 2003, over 600 million people around the world have been reached by policies and programs that are informed by evidence that J-PAL-affiliated researchers produced. While global challenges seem daunting, J-PAL has shown that in 20 years we can achieve a great deal, and there is huge potential for future impact.

But unfortunately, globally, there is an underinvestment in policy innovation to combat climate change that may generate quicker, lower-cost returns at a large scale — especially in policies that determine which technologies get adopted or commercialized. For example, a lot of the huge fall in prices of renewable energy was enabled by early European government investments in solar and wind, and then continuing support for innovation in renewable energy.

That’s why I think social sciences have so much to offer in the fight against climate change and poverty; we are working where technology meets policy and where technology meets real people, which often determines their success or failure. The world should be investing in policy, economic, and social innovation just as much as it is investing in technological innovation.

Q: Do you need to be an optimist in your job?

A: I am half-optimist, half-pragmatist. I have no control over the climate change outcome for the world. And regardless of whether we can successfully avoid most of the potential damages of climate change, when I look back, I’m going to ask myself, “Did I fight or not?” The only choice I have is whether or not I fought, and I want to be a fighter.

[a-god-in-ruins-rises]

a very good point. we should be getting tribute for our services. but also, there are certain intangible benefits one gets from this position.

but also, we should become even less reliant on seaborne trade. this is all the more reason to build up the New World.

belt and road initiative for the americas. imagine a land-route -- road and train -- between north america and south america. and obviously this would be supplemented by seaborne trade. but it's just better to have as many routes as possible.

additionally, while i think we should be "reshoring" critically important industries and high-end manufacturing back to america i do think we should nearshore some of the less-critical industries. that is, we should bring them back to the western hemisphere. as china increases to modernize and wages get higher they're going to be less competitive anyway. but bringing industry to the americas will reduce costs because it brings production closer to the consumer.

and then not to mention it will bring jobs and wealth to latin american countries which will help stabilize their countries and will reduce "push" factors for would-be immigrants. and the more integrated pan-american economic network would foster a sense of community between all the many american countries.

[moonwaif]

Are you exercising? a friend writes to me in a solicitous email. I am not: health officials have announced that Bishkek residents should refrain from any strenuous physical activity that might elevate their breathing rate. One of the city coroners, so I heard, has said that among the bodies of smokers and non-smokers in the Bishkek morgue there is no difference: the same black lungs. During the worst stretches, it is as though my life has been pared down to a point: the walk to the university, to the market, home. In between, stretches of space that to my imagination now seemed impossibly vast, obstacles separating me from sealed reservoirs of clean air . . .

They call it “the heating season”: the long stretch when the temperatures drop low enough that life without a radiator would be intolerable. For those on Bishkek’s periphery, however, out where the military-straight lines of the center’s streets fracture and fray into dirt roads lined with jerrybuilt housing, the precipitous descent into winter means months spent eking out what warmth can be gotten from burning coal, garbage, rags.

[indizombie]

In the past three years, India has lost territory to China, lost respect and influence in South Asia, and runs the risk of having its hand being forced by the United States of America. That is the net sum of what the ongoing border crisis with China has achieved so far.

Sushant Singh, 'Flawed approach', Centre for Policy Research

[carlocarrasco]

NBI agents arrest Chinese nationals and rescue helper during Parañaque City raid

Recently in the city of Parañaque, agents of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) raided a house resulting in the rescue of a helper and the apprehension of several Chinese nationals, according to a GMA Network news report. To put things in perspective, posted below is an excerpt from the news report of GMA News. Some parts in boldface… The authorities rescued a house helper in Parañaque…

[roostro]

"Feliz Navidad", but it's performed in four different languages.