#feed humanity not global warming

[theonlinevegan]

Feed humanity, not global warming.

Veganism is the only healthy and sustainable solution for world hunger. Yet we keep paying farmers to continue the extortion of animals for their flesh to result a large quantity of nutritional food into a small amount of wasteful steak.

Taste is no longer an argument, as humans have already achieved the taste of meat through plantbased alternatives.

If you’re truly concerned for human rights, world hunger and want to contribute to the solution instead of adding to the problem subconsciously.. go choose veganism today.

🌱 x 🌍 x 🫀

[bogleech]

Insects are literally just an easily replenishable and healthy source for protein additives but the move to incorporate them into the modern human diet has been politicized by both sides in the most ridiculous fucking ways??? The right wing frames it as people who want you to suffer by eating cockroaches as part of the Global Warming Lie while I’ve seen people on the left characterizing it as a “let them eat cake” dystopian capitalism thing. It is neither. It is literally just a great way to make protein. It can help feed more people with less land use and less water use and less waste. We aren’t talking about forcing you to eat a cold bowl of smelly worms instead of pizza or burgers or ice cream. We’re talking about a protein-packed alternative to the shitty empty corn filler already poured into like half of your food anyway.

[b1asho]

Huzzahh, it's species number 3! (There's a total of 6, including humans. 7 if you count artificial intelligences, 8 if you count the uhh other intelligences).

An official up to date visual for everyone's favorite communist amphibians, the Kixeli, and some up-to-date info!! ->

Kixeli are a small sentient species hailing from a planet covered mostly in ocean. They are amphibious, and originally evolved to switch between swimming and climbing using their webbed hands and powerful arms.

Their skin is permeable, allowing them to extend their time underwater to hunt and gather as well as reproduce, but due to their larger body and brain size/oxygen needs this isn’t sustainable and they must return to the surface.

Alongside their frequent trips outside the water, they also have a mucus layer and several specialized glands (including in their face by their eyes) to help remove excess salt and change levels of urea in their body to help make sure they dont lose resources when in the ocean.

Kixeli are omnivorous, with a focus on fruits and sealife. many cultures have a preference against eating anything that lives above water, including birds and the like, because they see themselves as spiritual equals to those animals as fellow air breathers.

They are oviparous, and have a specific mating season.

Most Kixeli have multiple variable spawn partners and see it as strange to be nailed down to one. Anyone who participated lays their eggs in a communal tide pool carved out in their communities.

Hatchlings are entirely aquatic wirh gills until later months of age, where they will begin to poke their head above water for air and start interacting more with the adults around them, who feed them a nutritive crop milk as they have already absorbed most of their tail by now.

This period is also the beginning of their understanding of language.

Once they lose their tail and grow in their limbs, they are still mostly helpless until those fully develop and myst cling to a caretaker adult in the community (blood parents don’t necessarily always raise their own children, but as someone who laid eggs they are responsible for children as a caretaker so anyone who didn’t want eggs gets left alone).

During their puberty, they will develop adult skin markings, and some can even end up changing sexes (much for the same reason some of them grow gliding membranes, as the result of population and resources balance in their surroundings).

Speakijg of that, there are two categories of Kixeli in their communities: Kel (swimmer) and Arasit (flier).

Arasit are just a rare continuation of their life cycle, since most Kixeli kids end up growing into Kel adults.

Sometimes, though, an Arasit will develop in case the community strongly needs to seek out new territory over long distance (triggered by close proximity to many other Kixeli and a variety of other unknown gactors, like grasshoppers turnkng into locusts.) They can’t truly fly, but they can use the powerful ocean winds and even some launching technology to glide very far to scout new resources and other communities).

Arasit are highly celebrated as voyagers, but Kel are also valued as providers for their existing community and even accompany voyages on ships to help their Arasit stay alive.

Some Arasit will cut and cauterize their membranes to make it easier for them to swim to symbolize they are staying in the community, though usually, they just poke small holes in there so they can wear clothes and be sanitary.

Their blood uses the hemocyanin molecule to carry oxygen, making their blood a bright blue when oxygenated and a thin blue/clear when unoxygenated (so you can see the other warmish colored pigments in there when it’s inside them, that yellowish stuff)

Their ancestors dwelled in deeper, cooler water where this blood type was most advantageous, but a global warming period brought them up to warm waters and eventually above the surface to capitalize on resources.

During this process, they developed some ways to improve the molecule’s lower efficiency in the heat. For one, they kept a small body size so there’s less to deal with. Another thing is that they get oxygen (albeit a small amount) from all over their body constantly through their skin, also somewhat making up for it.

The main mechanism, though, is their metabolism/temperature. They can quickly adjust their metabolism depending on the oxygen conditions in their surroundings to prevent immediate failure if they don’t have access to the right conditions to otherwise cope (this, and along with hemocyanin’s natural ability to handle low oxygen and their skin breathing, means they can tolerate very low oxygen areas that would cause a human to faint, though they’ll typically be pretty out of commission too, and this can have longer lasting effects on their health from the whiplash.)

they use their surroundings for heat when they aren’t doing anything too strenuous, and because they aren’t really producing much of their own they can tolerate even higher temperatures that would normally put them out of commission (and they actually heavily rely on that heat for ease in a lot of other processes), to do anything that has bigger oxygen needs, they can dip into cooler water/shade for periods of higher activity (but can’t stay too cold for too long or else aforementioned other processes will shut down, though it does increase the effectiveness to the point where they can do a whole lot and allows them to swim/navigate cooler areas where their early competitors couldn’t return to, it only as long as they got back quickly and warmed up)

they basically swing between these two extremes but tend to stay at a warmish middle-ground, wearing heating pads on part of their body while still letting larger areas cool off, if that makes sense.

Hemocyanin’s other properties don’t automatically give them a longer life, in fact theirs is very short compared to other species, but it does make them resistant to cancers (a common threat on their sunny planet) and the spread of diseases in their dense communities

Being cold-blooded wasn’t a problem on their mostly tropical planet. It is a considerable problem once they left it, though, hence the heating pads most wear to warm up.

many also live in areas without a large body of water nearby (or an easy way to access said body of water) but still need to stay damp to maintain their music layer and trap oxygen, so many also carry spray bottles or wet rags with them to always stay damp.

Kixeli are highly social (with their name even roughly translating to "belonging together"). they rarely live in groups of less than 5.

They experience severe negative side effects from isolation. Their naturally intense empathy also makes it extremely damaging for them to see other Kixeli injured or dead, sometimes leading to their own death from shock if they were the one that did it (though this has not stopped wars over their scarce resources in the past, typically because that intense sense of kinship was naturally strongest towards those among their own community, and if Their community was suffering then they had to get rid of the source of it by any means. )

This period nearly drove them to extinction, and led to a Global Community movement that argued for intercommunity cooperation and the end of 'us and them thinking'.

Due to their sliminess, Kixeli normally keep clothing to a minimum and overall don’t have a need for it beyond temperature control and ornamentation.

They have none of their own social taboos about nakedness, having no external genitalia, but still often clothe themselves to the standards of others due to the pressure/need to be polite from other species.

They also have few class divides within their own communities, with everyone working for the good of the whole, and no sex/gender roles beyond squirter and egg layer since everyone cares for the eggs.

To humans, their language sounds like birdsong, with lots of repetitive noises and subtle shifts in pattern and tone.

Their unique vocalization makes their languages hard to learn and even harder to speak, but they themselves are incredible mimics (only surpassed in some ways by humans because lips and teeth).

The fin on their forehead is similar to eyebrows in communicating emotion or tone. They can see a similar color spectrum to humans and love bright contrasting colors similar to their own skin patterns.

They favor “fast food”, or anything that can be carried easily as you swing around in a tree or on a boat.

Payment/restaurants doesn’t really exist for them, they just have areas where food brought in by providers is available to the community (or people just eat what they catch and then bring extra to the community.)

They also don’t chew their food, though some dishes are meant to be squished to the roof of the mouth with the tongue to experience the flavor

Their clothing is often “readable” in that many individuals wear clothing that represents a certain story, event in their life, event in their community, or mythical hero that can be derived from looking at their clothing from the head down.

In the two guys up there, the Arasit is wearing the equivalent of booty shorts cut scantily close to their Hole depicting one version about the founding of the first community (though a simplified one, so it’s actually more like the equivalent of wearing a crop top tee with a little monochrome dog on it or something).

This kind of imagery is common among Arasit, even modern ones, because founding/birth/life are their associations in religious cultures.

The Kel alongside them is wearing a more complex getup meant to show the inciting incident of one of the nomadic communities mythic hero’s journey, when he was cast from the star sea by the wicked Long Arms into the deep sea.

This would be seen as all most goth since this part of the story is seen as eerie and it depicts their underworld along the hem and bracelets.

By wearing clothing associated with a specific figure//story, they can also show gender identity based on whether that figure or hod was male, female, neuther, etc(helping people draw the right conclusions despite the visible evidence of their sex written on all their skin. The clothing and any makeup done on the fin is usually their main reference point for judging how to address someone. )

[mariacallous]

For Sander van der Linden, misinformation is personal.

As a child in the Netherlands, the University of Cambridge social psychologist discovered that almost all of his mother’s family had been executed by the Nazis during the Second World War. He became absorbed by the question of how so many people came to support the ideas of someone like Adolf Hitler, and how they might be taught to resist such influence.

While studying psychology at graduate school in the mid-2010s, van der Linden came across the work of American researcher William McGuire. In the 1960s, stories of brainwashed prisoners-of-war during the Korean War had captured the zeitgeist, and McGuire developed a theory of how such indoctrination might be prevented. He wondered whether exposing soldiers to a weaker form of propaganda might have equipped them to fight off a full attack once they’d been captured. In the same way that army drills prepared them for combat, a pre-exposure to an attack on their beliefs could have prepared them against mind control. It would work, McGuire argued, as a cognitive immunizing agent against propaganda—a vaccine against brainwashing.

Traditional vaccines protect us by feeding us a weaker dose of pathogen, enabling our bodies’ immune defenses to take note of its appearance so we’re better equipped to fight the real thing when we encounter it. A psychological vaccine works much the same way: Give the brain a weakened hit of a misinformation-shaped virus, and the next time it encounters it in fully-fledged form, its “mental antibodies” remember it and can launch a defense.

Van der Linden wanted to build on McGuire’s theories and test the idea of psychological inoculation in the real world. His first study looked at how to combat climate change misinformation. At the time, a bogus petition was circulating on Facebook claiming there wasn’t enough scientific evidence to conclude that global warming was human-made, and boasting the signatures of 30,000 American scientists (on closer inspection, fake signatories included Geri Halliwell and the cast of M*A*S*H). Van der Linden and his team took a group of participants and warned them that there were politically motivated actors trying to deceive them—the phony petition in this case. Then they gave them a detailed takedown of the claims of the petition; they pointed out, for example, Geri Halliwell’s appearance on the list. When the participants were later exposed to the petition, van der Linden and his group found that people knew not to believe it.

The approach hinges on the idea that by the time we’ve been exposed to misinformation, it’s too late for debunking and fact-checking to have any meaningful effect, so you have to prepare people in advance—what van der Linden calls “prebunking.” An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

When he published the findings in 2016, van der Linden hadn’t anticipated that his work would be landing in the era of Donald Trump’s election, fake news, and post-truth; attention on his research from the media and governments exploded. Everyone wanted to know, how do you scale this up?

Van der Linden worked with game developers to create an online choose-your-own-adventure game called Bad News, where players can try their hand at writing and spreading misinformation. Much like a broadly protective vaccine, if you show people the tactics used to spread fake news, it fortifies their inbuilt bullshit detectors.

But social media companies were still hesitant to get on board; correcting misinformation and being the arbiters of truth is not part of their core business model. Then people in China started getting sick with a mysterious flulike illness.

The coronavirus pandemic propelled the threat of misinformation to dizzying new heights. Van der Linden began working with the British government and bodies like the World Health Organization and the United Nations to create a more streamlined version of the game specifically revolving around Covid, which they called GoViral! They created more versions, including one for the 2020 US presidential election, and another to prevent extremist recruitment in the Middle East. Slowly, Silicon Valley came around.

A collaboration with Google has resulted in a campaign on YouTube in which the platform plays clips in the ad section before the video starts, warning viewers about misinformation tropes like scapegoating and false dichotomies and drawing examples from Family Guy and Star Wars. A study with 20,000 participants found that people who viewed the ads were better able to spot manipulation tactics; the feature is now being rolled out to hundreds of millions of people in Europe.

Van der Linden understands that working with social media companies, who have historically been reluctant to censor disinformation, is a double-edged sword. But, at the same time, they’re the de facto guardians of the online flow of information, he says, “and so if we’re going to scale the solution, we need their cooperation.” (A downside is that they often work in unpredictable ways. Elon Musk fired the entire team who was working on pre-bunking at Twitter when he became CEO, for instance.)

This year, van der Linden wrote a book on his research, titled Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity. Ultimately, he hopes this isn’t a tool that stays under the thumb of third-party companies; his dream is for people to inoculate one another. It could go like this: You see a false narrative gaining traction on social media, you then warn your parents or your neighbor about it, and they’ll be pre-bunked when they encounter it. “This should be a tool that’s for the people, by the people,” van der Linden says.

[theyungihven]

Truth Or Dare ⁉️ ⁕ Hongjoong

HALLOWEEN EVENT

☆ pairing: hongjoong as Dracula x Human? Reader

☆ genre: mystery, fantasy, horror,

☆ warnings: mentions of blood, sacrifice, vampires and ghosts

☆ word count: 2.1k+

☆ synopsis : You and your friends dare to spend a night at the infamous Dracula's Castle but things go astray as one by one everyone goes missing and you come across the man rumoured to be Dracula.

“You gotta do this!” You hear your friends yell or more like discuss something in the secret hideout. 

The hideout is an abandoned laboratory where you sometimes work on illegal stuff. The discussions take place every day here where everyone in your friend group (it's just 2 people) gather to share about the current news (conspiracy theories) and rumours they heard around the town while you are busy building your prototype.

“Bro, I don't wanna die too early. First, fucking global warming, now this shit? Nah I'm out!” Claire shouts as she bangs the old lunch table discarded in the room. Well that's Claire, one of you two friends, being herself. You smile at her humour which strangely manages to entertain you.

“But they offered a reward of 250 grand, if we spend a night there and return alive.” You listen keenly to Kevin who explains the plan before you to decide to jump into their conversation. He's obviously got a strategy if he's pitching the idea, doesn't he? He has to!

“Alive? The fuck is going on there?” Claire yells  in terror as it laces her body manifesting itself in her tone which shivers and shrieks.

“Rumour says, it's Dracula, who was sleeping till last month in the villa.” Kevin whispers loudly as if he intended you to hear on their spill the tea session.

“Which shithead woke him up, for fuckssake?” Claire huffs and pushes back her chair. You hear the screeching of the rusty metal and make a note to check their safety because you don't want anyone to break their bones from falling off that thing.

“Someone from med school. They're missing apparently.” Kevin slurs his sentence as if he's making things up or masking up the important details. Cheeky little Bastard who's always up to something. Probably some anatomy geek must have gotten all curious to see Dracula in the flesh and fainted in there or lost his way.

“And now, we're going there to feed him?" Claire shrieks, whose voice sounds like a scared five year old upon seeing a clown which she is to be honest.

“No, obviously! To show whoever is hiding in there, that they cannot hide for long.” Kevin's sentence catches your attention and you think whether to join them or wait and hear more. Of course, you choose the latter.

“So... we're going to expose them?”Claire asks excitedly as if in hopes of going on a ghost hunting mission. They are her time passing activities and the ghost files is her favourite show. “What if it's a cannibal or serial killer?”

“Can you speak positively for once, Claire?” Kevin shrugs, shaking his head in disappointment.

“Sorry.” Claire says softly and the conversation stills, creating an awkward silence in the room. 

You finally decide to interrupt as you pull your chair to their table and make yourself comfortable on it. “So, what's the plan?” You say, chewing the strawberry flavoured gum and reading the expressions on their faces.

“See who finally decided to pay attention?” Kevin mocks you and you roll your eyes at his statement. 

“Does the area have connectivity? Comms? Anything?” You ask him, because he certainly has some information on this if he's even mentioning the topic but he has a tendency to hide things till after the disaster is done.

“Nope everything's dead. There's a strong magnetic field apparently…” He trails on his words, again and clicks his tongue.

“What in the Stranger Things?” Claire wonders with her mouth hanging open. 

“Shut up Claire! You’re watching too much science fiction.” Kevin yells at her, sending a stern glare at Claire who turns her head down with a frown on her lips.

“We gotta do it the pirate way.” you suggest calmly, leaning back on the chair and folding your arms.

“Pirates?” Claire asks, raising her eyebrow and leaning forward with enthusiasm.

“I forgot you had pirate blood for a minute.” adds Kevin and Claire acknowledges the fact with ahh. 

“So, if we don't have comms, drones and walkies aren't gonna work. We gotta get flares and some type of marker to make a path for entry and exits.” You say looking at the table and your friends exchange looks.

“A blueprint of the place!” Claire exclaims as if she has figured out the answers to one of the world's unsolvable riddles.

“It's not your fucking aunts house!” Kevin says loudly, giving Claire the ‘I'll murder you’ eyes.

“Yeah he's right. But the villa is not that big to get lost.” You mumble, moving forward and setting your arms on the table. 

“How do you know that?” Kevin gives you the sceptical look as if you're a notorious criminal with disgusting crimes.

“It was once our family property, that was a long time tho. Some feud happened and we lost it.” You confess and their faces have the funniest expression you've ever seen. Confused, surprised and wtf?

“You have a map?” Kevin yells in your ear and you retort meters away, squeezing your eyes close  due to the pain.

“Kinda, it's a tracing, rather than a map.” you say, rubbing your ear and a flicker of hope lights up on Kevin's face. 

“Atleast, we have something.” Claire mumbles as she shares a smile.

“Be at my house at 7, we'll discuss stuff there. That's it for now.”

***

“Listen, the Manor has two exits.” You explain, spreading out the old one dimensional tracing of the Manor and its illustrations.

“Didn't you say it was a villa?” Claire says, setting her hands on her waist as she stares at the floor plan.

“Can we kick her out?” Kevin suggests and the idea doesn't sound bad considering her level headed ass. 

“It's dangerously close to Yes, but what if I get bored? We'll need her.” You trail, spreading out the second floor plan of the Manor.

“Fair. So, Claire, just shut your mouth and listen. No speaking over someone.” Kevin says and shushes Claire who pouts, giving him the puppy eyes.

“Okay so the first exit is at the front, obviously for the people and the second is at the back for the goods.” You say with your finger tracing the main gate of the Manor and then the back gate. 

“Ohhhhhh!” Claire coos, and Kevin giggles at her reaction while he gets ready to smack her on head.

“Yeah. Shut your mouth before a fly lands in there. Anyways, moving on!” You say, thinking about your next sentence and Claire slaps her hand to her mouth. 

“Are we dividing up and going from two exits?” Kevin asks, and you look up at him, eyes diverting themselves from the map and landing on his face.

“Yes, you read my mind. You two will go from the front door to distract whatever is in there and I'll go with someone else from the back.”

“Is this someone else, late to the meeting?”

“Hey there!” A voice says and it is followed by the garage door smashing open with a thud, “Sorry I had soccer practice.” Yunho, your arch nemesis on friendly terms, says and shares an awkward smile.

“This is my neighbour, yunho.” You introduce him and drag him by his arm to make his tall ass body stand next to yours.

“Hello, very nice to meet you.” He waves at your friends with a bright smile and Claire gives him heart eyes at which you cringe. 

“You both are polar opposites!” Kevin comments and you feel heating rising on your cheeks.

“We get that a lot!” You and Yunho say at the same time only to meet each other's eyes the next second and shy away. 

“What did I miss?” Yunho says after clearing his throat as he glances in your direction. His golden blond hair falls over eyes and you observe the way his gaze flickers from your face and back to map.

“Whatever I said to you, last night.” You say, finding something to stare at besides his brooding figure.

“Okay then, I'm saved I guess!” Yunho says as he nervously chuckles, rubbing the back of his neck.

“The next phase of the plan is when I signal you, we move to the first floor. The highest is the second floor which has a library in the attic.” You say and it excites something in Yunho judging by the creepy smirk on his lips.

“Attics scare me!” Claire says, her voice shrieking with fear of the darkness.

“What doesn't scare you Claire?” Kevin says in a monotone as he turns his head in her direction.

“Him!” Claire points in Yunho's direction at which you can't help but sigh.

“Flirt somewhere else, lovebirds. We got shit to do.” You roll your eyes then go back to thinking about what to say next.

“How are you going to communicate?” Yunho asks, giving you his starry puppy eyes and you can't help but gulp nervously. What is he even trying to do?

“Well, I have a perfect device for that.” You say, distracting yourself from the tall and beautiful blonde beside you with a bright ass smile.

“Where?” Claire asks as if she's looking for something and fails to find it.

“Our friendship bracelets. They work with a higher bandwidth of 7GHz.” You say, pointing at the bracelet on Claire's wrist.

“7g WiFi?” Claire exclaims and you hear an audible sigh from Kevin, at which Yunho giggles and earns a glare.

“Yeah kinda like that.....i guess.” you mumble under your breath.

“Yunho doesn't have one, though?” Someone asks while your mind pulls you in a trance and you start to zone out.

“He does.” You say, almost mumbles as you start to slip into the fever dream.

“He DOES?”  They yell. 

AT THE MANOR

“You know what to do. On the signal, disperse. It's two taps, distinct and repeating 3 times. If anything goes down, the distress signal is continuous tapping. Light the flare ONLY if its a fucking emergency, and if we need to abort the mission.” You yell as low as possible while they listen to you attentively. 

“Yes sir!” Everyone shouts, tightening the strap of their backpack of supplies.

“Remember to mark your way up to the second floor. People get lost there.” You say and everyone exchanges confused looks. “It's a spell.” You remind them and they nod their heads. “Now, go. Meet you at the library!”

According to the plan, you and Yunho go through the back gate while Claire and Kevin from the front gate. The sound of the rusted iron screeching when Kevin pushes the gate echoes around the Manor and you curse under your breath. 

The way up to the first floor had been easy, then after the signal from the other team gave clearance, you decided to head to the second floor alone bidding Yunho a goodbye. It had been strange for a while, walking down the eerie, empty hallway with the feeling of something watching you the whole time. 

You stand in the middle of the never ending hallway, a ghostly whisper greets your ear and sends shivers down your spine. 

What in the fucking hell?? 

There's a ghostly touch on your arm, ice cold as it traces its finger down your warm skin. When you turn to face the monster, there's no one behind you. Then you feel it, a looming shadow over your shoulder but when you turn again, it's gone. 

So, you walk on because standing still is more dangerous. You choose to run when you see a pale face in the middle of the corridor grinning wildly at you which sends terror down your body. Your heart beats at an amazing speed as your breath shortens, adrenaline running through your body which initiates the flight mechanism because there is no way you're dealing with that demonic thing in this haunted mansion. 

“I've been searching for you for so long.” A voice echoes in the hallway or is it your brain playing tricks on you. Luckily you find the stairway leading to the second floor and run towards it but things take a turn when you realise, it is a trap. 

“I thought you were a smart girl.” The sinister voice echoes in your mind again as you walk away from the door that shut itself only to bump into something hard. Turning around you come to see the very pale face you had seen in the hallway but very clearly now. 

The man stands in front of you in his full glory, the navy uniform and wounds from the battle still decorating his lifeless body. “You traitor!” You feel a sharp pain in your chest and you look down to see a dagger pressed to your heart. “You'll repay the blood we shed that night, you vampire.” Everything goes black when he twists the knife and the last thing you see is a scared yunho trying to save you.

[saint-ambrosef]

climate change fatalism is so exhausting. it easily becomes a ecological scapegoat to blame instead of humans taking accountability for how their individual actions affect the environment.

i had a conversation earlier in a fb garden group where a women told me that since desertification was changing her local landscape and making it harder to grow native plants, it was actually okay and even good of her to be planting invasive exotic species that could adapt to the "new normal" climate in her area so that the wildlife would have at least something for shade/shelter/food. in the same message she mentioned trying to eradicate native weeds on their acreage because it had no personal use to her or her non-native livestock.

and i was like. no girl. the desertification in your area has been caused by decades of bad agricultural land management practices, something that is fully reversible. those weeds you are ripping out provide more benefit to wildlife than your nasty exotics, and ranchers removing these "undesirable" natives for decades is why the land has grown barren. planting invasive exotics to replace the artificial loss of biodiversity will only hasten the problem you seek to fix.

but the point of my post isn't this specific woman, it's the general attitude she represents. it's a lot easier to blame the nebulous figure of climate change than to work toward ecological restoration. it's simpler to plant invasive exotics than to reverse decades of poor land management. it's more enjoyable to grow a pretty flowering shrub and pretend it's necessary due to climate change than to allow native ragweed to grow even though the allergies suck because it feeds the birds and pollinators. and it's a helluva lot easier to blame climate change for the worsening of your local environment than to admit that overgrazing your livestock and ripping out native plants just because they have no immediate value to you might have contributed heavily to the decline of your microbiome.

climate change has quickly become this collective responsibility that no one individual is responsible for, because it's so easy to blame the slightest change in environment on it. "we're running out of water because of climate change!" it's because urban landscaping practices channel away water instead of letting it soak into the groundwater wells, and turf lawns use 80% of the city water. "the city is so much hotter now!" yeah because twenty years ago developers planted fast-growing but short-lived/weak trees which have now all died, meaning our roads and neighborhoods have way less shade and foliage to absorb the heat. "the bees are disappearing because of climate change!" sharon it's because there's not a single thing in your yard that a native pollinator would recognize as a food source.

anyways i don't know where exactly i'm going with this. i guess i'm just tired of climate change fatalism because it removes personal incentive to do anything to reverse environmental harm that we could be fixing on an individual level. but "global warming" has become a very convenient excuse for many people, unfortunately.

just makes me wonder how often things blamed on climate change are actually a result of direct human actions that are reversible

[letaot-ze-magniv]

General guide to birds in Israel pt 2- cooler birds

This will be a long post. Link to part 1

White spectated bulbul/bul-bul me-mush-kaf

Usually referred to as just bulbul, this bisexual king is the roundest and my most favourite bird. IMPORTANT! BULBUL MEANS DICK! DO NOT TALK ABOUT YOUR LOVE FOR BULBULIM IN PUBLIC!

These birds are slightly larger then the house sparrow and are easily distinguished by their yellow butt. Their calls are reminiscent of frogs. They mate for life and are all bisexual and they cuddle each other. They are a menace to farmers because they are fond of fruit and tend to nibble just a little at a time. You can find them in all parts of Israel as long as there are nice trees nearby.

Eurasian blackbird/shakh-rur

These timid birds like to hide in bushes and trees. Their calls are beautiful and I love them. They are smaller then a pigeon. The males are black and the females are brown. They feed on seeds, fruits and bugs, and use their beaks to search the ground for worms. You can find them in Jerusalem and the north, they like cool weather and don’t fuck with sand.

Great tit/yar-ge-zi ma-tzui

Life isn’t easy for these tiny psychopaths, which might be the reason they developed such a temper. Their Hebrew name translates to “angry one”, and for a reason. They are very aggressive towards other birds. They also feed on the brains of bats. You can distinguish between males and females by the thickness of the black stripe on their belly- males have a thicker one than females. They are most common to the north of Jerusalem, but you can find them in some parts of the desert.

Palestine sunbird/tzu-fit bo-he-ket

No, that’s not a hummingbird, it’s the sunbird! Despite their remarkable likeness they aren’t even a little related. Sunbirds feed on nectar and are pollinators! The males have black feathers that shine in the sunlight (which is how they got their name) and the females are a muddy grey, but they’re just as lovely. You can find them in all parts of Israel, especially near lush flowery areas!

White wagtail/nakh-li-e-li la-van

First migrant bird everyone!!! (Some blackbirds migrate here but some nest during summer so shhhh) This lovely round bird starts it’s visits around October and leaves when it gets hellishly warm again. Due to global warming the wagtails visits are shortening, so appreciate them while you can. Like their name suggests, the wagtails wag their tails. A lot. You can find them near water sources during the cold-ish months of the year!

Eurasian jay- or-va-ni shkhor ki-pa

Eurasian jays can be found in other parts of the world, but I’m pretty sure the one we have in Israel is a different sub-species because the ones in Europe lack the beautiful black top that they’re named after.

The jay is a type of corvid, and in addition to being extremely social and intelligent, these birds can mimic other animals. Due to urbanisation, the jays learned to mimic car alarms, the ringing of phones and the cries of human babies. Jays are extremely fond of acorns, and burry them in the ground in preparation for harsher months. A single jay can remember between 4000 to 5000 hiding spots!

Syrian woodpecker/ na-kar su-ri

This picture is of a male woodpecker. The females have a completely black head. Woodpeckers can locate bugs that have burrowed inside trees and use their beak and long tongues to eat them, thereby helping the trees get rid of pests! Woodpeckers also love acorns, and compete with jays over them. To prevent concussions, the woodpecker’s tongue wraps around their brain, keeping it in place while they peck. You can find them in non-desert areas of Israel!

Lesser whitethroat/siv-khi to-kha-nim

Another migrant birds! These floofballs come here twice a year, once in spring and once in autum, although some whitethroats nest in the north all year long. During their migration you can find them everywhere in Israel, even in very urban areas! They get their Hebrew name, which roughly translates to miller’s shrubbery-liker, because their white chests look how a miller’s apron would look after a long hard day!

Super winged lapwing/sik-sak

The siksaks are water birds with ridiculously long legs that they use to stab their prey. They kind of look like they are wearing a tux! Their original Hebrew name was “sharoni mezuyan”, which translates to “one that lives in the Sharon and is armed with a weapon” but also “fucking sharoni”. You can find them anywhere in Israel as long as there is a near enough water source.

White breasted kingfisher/shal-dag la-van kha-ze

One of my favorite birds. The kingfisher is a magnificent bird of prey with brilliant blue feathers that always make my day. They are most common in the north and west of Israel, but they nest in smaller numbers in the south. They kingfisher’s diet consists of not only fish, but of crabs, frogs, slugs, bugs, and even the occasional rodent. Their varied diet helps them thrive even in drier areas.

[11queensupreme11]

I think that regardless of the divorce between Hades and Persephone the seasons will continue to happen, if we think about the myth we will remember that the reason why Persephone was permanently trapped in the underworld was because before returning to her mother she ate some seeds of pomegranate, so following this reasoning we can think that their marriage was just a formality to preserve Persephone's honor since she was kidnapped and probably abused by Hades (we know that at that time if a woman was abused she should marry the abuser to preserve her and her family’s honor)

We know that some curses cannot be broken even by the gods (Beelzebub as an example) so we just need to think that the curse present in pomegranates (it is in all underworld foods) are so strong that even the gods who eat them are forced to be trapped in the underworld without being able to free herself, so Persephone would still be forced to spend 6 months in the underworld but now she is no longer forced to be imprisoned in the Palace of Hades and is free from the obligations of a wife

As the curse still forces her to spend part of the year there, the seasons continue as her mother is still unhappy with the situation but now the seasons (mainly autumn and winter) are much milder as Demeter is happy with her divorce. daughter, the seasons being milder (autumn and winter) and stronger (spring and summer) is not necessarily good since climate change can accidentally destroy the existing ecosystem, it would practically be divine global warming melting the ice areas, leaving deserts and hot areas in hellish temperatures, plants and food would ONLY be able to grow in spring since this would be the only climate that would not have an excessive change, which although it doesn't seem like it is very bad since planting only in one area for just a long period of time without giving the soil time to rest will deplete all nutrients from the soil leaving it infertile

Due to the changes, it would be impossible to plant food in other seasons as fruits and vegetables would not be able to adapt to climate changes and it would be unnecessary to resort to the use of pesticides and other artificial cultivation techniques to keep the few harvests alive, this would affect the quality of the crop. food would decline and would cause prices to increase since with the drop in food production it would not be able to match the great demand of the population and this would cause an increase in world hunger and food insecurity for the poorest people since we know that when there is a large demand for a limited quantity of a product the price of that product will naturally rise

The problem will be so big that it will probably also affect animals, wild animals will have difficulty adapting to climate change (probably these animals died from heat and cold as their bodies were not adapted, in fact now that I think about the high temperatures can lead to natural fires that would devastate entire forests) and many will die due to lack of food (without plants, herbivores will not be able to feed themselves and without herbivores, predators will not be able to feed themselves and this will probably collapse many ecosystems), the Livestock industries will also be affected as they, in addition to having difficulty feeding animals, will have to worry about them dying due to the climate (many industries will probably go bankrupt) with the drop in production products such as meat of any kind will probably rise in price which will undermine people's purchasing power, which will generate even greater food insecurity

In short, everyone on earth will suffer because Percy indirectly destroyed a harmonious ecosystem thousands of years old because she is so hot and charismatic, I can't imagine the look on her face knowing that humans are dying as collateral damage of her being in an ALMOST relationship romantic relationship between her and the yanderes, not to mention the damage that Poseidon can do with the tides, Beelzebub with diseases and violence and Apollo with literal Global warming, our girl is indirectly leading humans to extinction just by exist

BRO???? 💀💀💀

i have to ask, but are you an environmentalist major or something related to that????

cuz i remember you (or at least i think it was you) sending a previous long ask about the consequences of poseidon making it dangerous for humans to be in the sea, you were talking about pearls, medicine, sea food, etc and it was sooooo well-written and detailed omg 😂

but everything you wrote is EXACTLY why i'm making it so all four seasons still exist 💀 talking about the aftermath with the ecosystem is just give me psychic damage cuz i'll feel like i'm back in my bio class again 🫠

[mindblowingscience]

Countries' greenhouse gas-cutting pledges put Earth on track for warming far beyond key limits, potentially up to a catastrophic 2.9 degrees Celsius this century, the UN said Monday, warning "we are out of road". The UN Environment Programme's annual Emissions Gap report is released just ahead of crucial COP28 climate talks in Dubai and will feed into the global response to a sobering official "stocktake" of the failure to curb warming so far. With this year expected to be the hottest in human history, UNEP said "the world is witnessing a disturbing acceleration in the number, speed and scale of broken climate records". Taking into account countries' carbon-cutting plans, UNEP warned that the planet is on a path for disastrous heating of between 2.5C and 2.9C by 2100. Based just on existing policies and emissions-cutting efforts, global warming would reach 3C.

Continue Reading.

[zestingbloodorange]

I understand people immediately saying "if this was an animal people would care" out of frustration, and I know most people are not ready for this conversation and I know most people don't even want to hear this because they don't care.and i know a lot of people think this is insane to say. but if you want to talk about empathy and compassion you have to understand this, and you need look deeper.

The reality is the majority of people don't care about animals if people cared about the living they wouldn't have reached this level of cruelty. animals are tortured for things as stupid as useless as makeup and to just look at them in a zoo and for films...etc basically just for human entertainment and financial gain.If people cared about animals we wouldn't have reached this point of global warming and this amount of animals going extinct.

Animals get tortured and killed by every age group for no reason and they die out of starvation and out of thirst and avoidable and curable illnesses. we take everything from them and abandon them in so many ways literally and metaphorically.

Animals get punished for existing with us.

And everytime someone does something for animals they get told they should've done that for humans instead,everytime someone speaks up for animals they get told there's more important things to care for whilst they themselves are doing nothing for those important things or helping other humans but the thing is people that actually do things for animals also actually do things for other humans.

Most cruel people start their cruelty with animals because animals can't tell on them and then they get hungry for more and start getting cocky and this has been proven by so many studies and cases.

A lot of people have no sympathy for animals because they genuinely think an animal's life doesn't matter and only exists for them so they can do whatever they want to them and if they have a little bit of shame they would use an excuse to justify what they do/did.

Maybe ask yourself if a person doesn't have sympathy for a living being that's basically lost in this world how do you expect them to have it for other humans ?.

And a great example for people with empthy and compassion is what you're seeing right now. people in gaza are taking their time to also help animals not just themselves and each other,they actually care and feel for the living.they respect life.

And in this time a very critical time I keep seeing some people saying why are people in gaza sharing their resources with animals they should focus on themselves and making jokes under posts of Palestinians giving a dog water for example saying "why are you feeding Netanyahu" it may seem stupid but it should make you think.

If you twist my words in any way to make this post malicious even in your head that's on you.

(Note : English is not my first language and there's a lot of better explanations to this available online)

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Monday SpaceTime 20240930 Series 27 Episode 118

Dark matter may experience forces beyond gravity

A new study has raised the fascinating hypothesis that dark matter may experience forces other than gravity.

A rare naked eye comet visible from Earth

If you’re up early in the mornings over the next few days you may get a chance to see a rare naked eye comet.

Could humans be walking on Mars in four years

Former US President Donald Trump says he would like to see humans walking on the red planet Mars by 2028, at least eight years earlier than existing plans

The Science Report

The link between obese mothers and autism.

Global warming causing an increase in the size, frequency, and severity of forest fires.

Archaeologists have discovered what could be the world's oldest cheese.

Skeptics guide to crop circles

SpaceTime covers the latest news in astronomy & space sciences.

The show is available every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through Apple Podcasts (itunes), Stitcher, Google Podcast, Pocketcasts, SoundCloud, Bitez.com, YouTube, your favourite podcast download provider, and from www.spacetimewithstuartgary.com

SpaceTime is also broadcast through the National Science Foundation on Science Zone Radio and on both i-heart Radio and Tune-In Radio.

SpaceTime daily news blog: http://spacetimewithstuartgary.tumblr.com/

SpaceTime facebook: www.facebook.com/spacetimewithstuartgary

SpaceTime Instagram @spacetimewithstuartgary

SpaceTime twitter feed @stuartgary

SpaceTime YouTube: @SpaceTimewithStuartGary

SpaceTime -- A brief history

SpaceTime is Australia’s most popular and respected astronomy and space science news program – averaging over two million downloads every year. We’re also number five in the United States.  The show reports on the latest stories and discoveries making news in astronomy, space flight, and science.  SpaceTime features weekly interviews with leading Australian scientists about their research.  The show began life in 1995 as ‘StarStuff’ on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) NewsRadio network.  Award winning investigative reporter Stuart Gary created the program during more than fifteen years as NewsRadio’s evening anchor and Science Editor.  Gary’s always loved science. He studied astronomy at university and was invited to undertake a PHD in astrophysics, but instead focused on his career in journalism and radio broadcasting. Gary’s radio career stretches back some 34 years including 26 at the ABC. He worked as an announcer and music DJ in commercial radio, before becoming a journalist and eventually joining ABC News and Current Affairs. He was part of the team that set up ABC NewsRadio and became one of its first on air presenters. When asked to put his science background to use, Gary developed StarStuff which he wrote, produced and hosted, consistently achieving 9 per cent of the national Australian radio audience based on the ABC’s Nielsen ratings survey figures for the five major Australian metro markets: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth.  The StarStuff podcast was published on line by ABC Science -- achieving over 1.3 million downloads annually.  However, after some 20 years, the show finally wrapped up in December 2015 following ABC funding cuts, and a redirection of available finances to increase sports and horse racing coverage.  Rather than continue with the ABC, Gary resigned so that he could keep the show going independently.  StarStuff was rebranded as “SpaceTime”, with the first episode being broadcast in February 2016.  Over the years, SpaceTime has grown, more than doubling its former ABC audience numbers and expanding to include new segments such as the Science Report -- which provides a wrap of general science news, weekly skeptical science features, special reports looking at the latest computer and technology news, and Skywatch – which provides a monthly guide to the night skies. The show is published three times weekly (every Monday, Wednesday and Friday) and available from the United States National Science Foundation on Science Zone Radio, and through both i-heart Radio and Tune-In Radio.

[canmom]

a few critical comments on "The Busy Worker's Handbook to the Apocalypse"

so i read this one very doomer medium article The Busy Worker's Handbook to the Apocalypse the other day, which attempts to argue that with the amount of GHGs already in the atmosphere, collapse of human society is inevitable and imminent, in a way that the scientific establishment such as the IPCC is instutionally unable to admit. I will warn, if you're prone to anxiety, don't read it, because the article is bleak as hell and quite effective rhetoric. it opens with a largely correct overview of climate science which lends it credibility, before jumping to the worst imaginable conclusions about various feedbacks and tipping points.

and like... it got me a bit. immediately after I read it, I was left with a horrifying feeling that this is as good as it will ever get, that the end of it all was only years away, that all my hopes for what I'd do for the next few decades and what is prefigured by this or that social development were utter delusions, and all there was left to do was just try and make the best of the last few years before we all die in the big cascading-failure famine.

but... ok Bryn, hold your fucking horses, let's do some research eh?

to begin with, I found one critique video that points out a number of places where the author makes scientific errors, misunderstands his sources, or doesn't justify his conclusions. for example, the author argues that a 'blue sea event' where the polar ice melts would lead to immediate, catastrophic warming as the latent heat of fusion no longer absorbs any incoming radiation, and also that the success of measures to reduce air pollution will accelerate warming; these seem to both be straight up wrong. but that doesn't cover everything I had questions about.

for example, one scenario discussed in the 'handbook' is 'multi breadbasket failure'. the idea is that, given that most of the world's food is produced in a few specific regions, this is a scenario where two or more of the major food-producing regions suffer very low yields in the same year due to climate shit. and this isn't farfetched, there is mainstream scientific discussion of this concept. for an accessible analysis, I found this article by some major capitalist consulting company (assess bias accordingly) which gives some actual numbers, including estimates of which crops are more likely to fail as the climate changes (rice, corn and soy are in trouble, but wheat, oddly enough, could actually do better in a warmer world).

however, while the author of the guide to the apocalypse suggests that, thanks to 'just in time' supply chains, there are almost no reserves of food and everything is on ships... the mckinsey article quotes a figure of 30% 'stock-to-use ratio', meaning there is a fair chunk of food in the granaries. they seem to predict that if two 'breadbaskets' fail in the same year, causing a 15% drop in yield, that ratio would drop to about 20%. the immediate result would be food price spikes (which means a lot of people would starve) but it's not a complete 'global megafamine' collapse.

'course, the question then is what happens if it happens again a few years later? but at least theoretically the 'multi breadbasket failure' scenario could be drastically mitigated by 1. producing food in more different places so the eggs are in fewer baskets 2. storing more food when times are good (something discussed in the mckinsey article) and 3. the world broadly eating less meat (since most crops are grown to feed animals, which adds a trophic level of inefficiency), so less grain is needed to feed everyone. i don't know if that's actually gonna happen, but it's not prima facie impossible.

on the other hand, the author of the Handbook argues that a world renewable energy transition is not just infeasible but physically impossible, because it demands reserves of metal that do not exist to roll out all the wires, turbines, etc etc. I was already fairly pessimistic about whether the renewable energy transition could happen in time (since there is little evidence that the current renewable deployment is making any sort of dent in GHG emissions, which remain resolutely coupled to economic activity); I was also conscious that the amount of mining to produce all the batteries and so on would have its own devastating impacts. but the argument that it is impossible even in principle is new to me.

so is that actually true? the Handbook bases this point entirely on the work of Dr Simon Michaux of the Finnish Geological Survey, who presents the calculation in this hour-long presentation based on this report (summary). this is honestly an excellent presentation, explaining the methodology really clearly - it reminds me of SEWTHA back in the day, a book I found very formative. And actually McKay also raised the question of materials:

To create 48 kWh per day of offshore wind per person in the UK would require 60 million tons of concrete and steel – one ton per person. Annual world steel production is about 1200 million tons, which is 0.2 tons per person in the world. During the second world war, American shipyards built 2751 Liberty ships, each containing 7000 tons of steel – that’s a total of 19 million tons of steel, or 0.1 tons per American. So the building of 60 million tons of wind turbines is not off the scale of achievability; but don’t kid yourself into thinking that it’s easy. Making this many windmills is as big a feat as building the Liberty ships.

McKay's analysis was based only on the UK; the figure of 48kWh/d comes from McKay's estimate of plausible maximum wind capacity for the UK only. He also takes into account some modest reductions in energy use. So my sense was that a completely renewable energy system would be an unprecedented megaproject, but not utterly implausible.

By comparison, Michaux's analysis (which I took a bunch of notes on, I'll post in a minute) has a worldwide scope, and rather than using back of the envelope physical calculations, relies on data on existing systems which largely did not exist when McKay was alive. It is nevertheless a rough estimate, and crucially, focuses on the question of completely replacing current fossil fuel use. Where good data did not exist, like the amount of steel and concrete used in a wind turbine, it was not included in the analysis, since the purpose was to get a lower bound.

The report covers a number of different minerals, many of which existing reserves fall short and it would take thousands of years to produce enough at current production levels. Copper is the big one: he estimates some 4.5 billion tones would be needed, where only 0.88 billion tonnes of reserved are publicly known to exist, and the rate of new discoveries has tailed off to near zero. I see no error in his calculation (though I haven't checked the numbers in detail, the method is sound).

However, there is a major caveat. The vast, vast majority of this copper would go to millions of battery banks used to provide just four weeks of storage to make it through the wind production lulls in the winter. This covers about 4.2 billion tonnes; by comparison the amount of copper used for one generation everything else (wind turbines, EV batteries etc.) is a still-hefty 0.3 billion tonnes. So that raises the question of whether there's an alternative to all those batteries, mature enough to be deployed at a scale to provide 0.55PWh of energy storage (or likely, more) in a decade or two. My understanding is most other tech (flywheels etc.) is still on the 'tiny pilot plant' sort of scale.

Anyway, as far as like the future of humanity goes, I already agree with Michaux's main point that maintaining current rates of energy consumption is just not viable; the future is necessarily going to be much lower energy. (I also don't really think 'decoupling' economic activity from energy use to somehow preserve capitalism's exponential curve is really plausible.)

However, the way the author of the Handbook uses Michaux's estimates is not supported. Michaux proved that a 1:1 replacement of fossil fuel energy consumption with renewables is not possible; that necessarily implies that (since fossil fuels are just starting to run dry and becoming less viable) we have to get by on less energy. And yeah, that obviously implies substantial changes to how people live in rich countries, crushing the super-rich etc.; it's fair to say the whole system must become less complex, in ecological terms.

I do still agree it's more than understandable to be pessimistic about whether that will happen without everything collapsing first - to put it mildly, there is a lot of inertia in a system this complex! - but it's not physically impossible that humans could accomplish a renewable energy transition, contract and rationalise how we use what energy we can get, and still have everyone live relatively comfortably. (After all, life on Earth has managed to live sustainably on solar power for billions of years, indefinitely recycling carbon, nitrogen etc. between high and low energy forms and dumping all the unusable high-entropy energy into space; I stand by the belief that there is no intrinsic reason that human society, even with complex technologies like computers, could not eventually assume a similar equilibrium if we survive. Though could does not mean is likely to....)

So I'm not convinced that we're a few years away from the first domino falling in the apocalypse. The situation is very very bad, don't get me wrong, I do basically agree the current socioeconomic world system is not capable of adapting fast enough as it stands, and I do find it increasingly hard to imagine the prospect of it being overturned, so I don't think the gigadeaths future is out of the question or even unlikely. But it's at least not the imminent near-certainty this essay makes out. If it comes, it will be more drawn-out than that. We don't need to live as if we will certainly die in a year or five.

So... now back to not thinking about it and fiddling while the world burns, I guess? :/

[dougdimmadodo]

Bowhead Whale (Balaena mysticetus)

Family: Right Whale Family (Balaenidae)

IUCN Conservation Status: Least Concern

Named for its extremely large, bow-shaped head (which can be used to smash through thin sea ice when surfacing to breathe), the Bowhead Whale can grow to be 15-18 meters (50-60ft) long, may weigh over 54,500 kg (120,000lbs) and is believed to have the potential to live for over 200 years (quite possibly the longest lifespan of any mammal.) Native to arctic and sub-arctic oceans, it feeds on plankton and other small invertebrates which it filters from the water using the comb-like baleen plates in its mouth; its extremely long baleen plates (around 4 meters/13ft in length, longer than those of any other whale) and enormous head (which makes up around 1/3rd of its total body length and features the largest mouth of any animal, opening to be around 3.7 meters/12ft high and 2.4 meters/8ft wide) make it one of the most efficient filter-feeders on earth, allowing an adult Bowhead Whale to consume around 2 tonnes of prey each day. In comparison to other whales Bowhead Whales are not particularly social and typically live alone or in small groups of 3-6 individuals, although during migration they may gather in larger numbers, and as they are not particularly aggressive towards other members of their species it is not unusual for several unassociated individuals to gather together in particularly plankton-rich areas when feeding. Bowhead Whales migrate south to relatively warm subarctic waters during the arctic winter to avoid becoming trapped beneath sea-ice that is too thick for them to break through, and while they may mate at any time of year they typically give birth while migrating back to the arctic in the spring, producing a single calf every 3-4 years after a gestation period of 13-14 months (with calves already being around 4 meters/13ft long and weighing over 900kg/2000lbs at birth.) The enormous size of this species means that it has only one natural predator (the Orca), but historically humans have hunted Bowheads extensively for their meat, bones, blubber and baleen. Commercial whaling once brought Bowhead Whales to the brink of extinction, but throughout the 1970s the practice of hunting this species was near-universally outlawed (with the only exceptions being made for two indigenous communities in Siberia and Alaska who hunt members of this species for subsistence on such a small scale that they do not have a significant negative impact on the species’ overall population.) As of the time of writing this, the IUCN believes that the numbers of several local populations of Bowhead Whales have stabilized and begun to recover from the damage done by commercial whaling, with the species’ overall global population numbers actively increasing.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------    

Animal Advent Calendar - Day 23

Image Source: https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/74103-Balaena-mysticetus

[dragonthunders01]

Spectember D11: Seed World

It has been 200 million years since mankind launched into the stars an colonized many of the worlds that were attainable on their reach, many populated by their native life, many others on their youth of development and many others that even though they reunited the right conditions for life to form, they were barren, so they filled them with their collection of fauna, many being turned to an earth like Eden world, but not many remained that way, some started to degrade fast for the long term conditions of the planet geology or position of their stars, some die out for extraordinary cosmic event and others just faded into oblivion for the circumstances of their own planetary development.

The world of Scelloc was a tropical oceanic planet splashed with dozens of small islands, many of them volcanic in nature, the settlement was populated by tropical marine fauna, mollusks, fishes, corals, arthropods, it remained like that even after their human colonizers disappeared, but just 50 million years something happened, a large cosmic event disrupted the orbit of the planets, including Scelloc, through it did not throw the planet out of the system, it left it at the edge of the habitable zone, and in a period of 10 million years this paradise was sealed into a tomb of ice, it was too fast that the majority of animals that lived depending of the warm climate perished with just a handful of established deep water forms that evolved to thrive in the dark managed to support the change, only small cnidarians and sea slugs survived the cataclysm, and for the next 140 million years they will claim up from the depths of the ocean to the roof of the giant ice caps.

The global trapped sea of Scelloc thankfully remained liquid thanks to the geological activity of the planet, the active tectonic activity underwater keeps these warm enough to host the trapped life.

Near the hydrothermal vents forms often large fields of large unique polyp towers that extend their tentacles to alongside smaller Shipworm-like derived slugs that remains sedentary feeding on the chemicals or in the polyps themselves, around them some slow feeding snail like forms gathering the material and forming rudimentary shells and even scallop like forms that abandoned their slug shape and adopted a bivalve like form with large starfish-like slow polyp that now have evolved free forms.

On the endless seabed there is a variety of filter and detritu feeders that eats the sea snow that cyclically keeps falling from the upper regions or the nutrients that accumulates in the sand, many still nudibranchs and snail like forms that are migrating to new vents, many jellyfish like polyps; upper the seabed are floating small and large nudibranchs that either developed their "cerata" as floating organs or active squid and even like forms that can extend ovr the vast abyss up to the roof of the icecaps, some even able to glimpse the light on the thinnest ice parts and even melted holes on the equator.

This world will likely unfreeze from its perpetual snowball state in the far future when its star increases its luminosity, but until then for the next hundreds of millions of years it will remain sealed within the ice.

[female-malice]

(archive)

For Sander Van der Linden, misinformation is personal.

As a child in the Netherlands, the University of Cambridge social psychologist discovered that almost all of his mother’s family had been executed by the Nazis during the Second World War. He became absorbed by the question of how so many people came to support the ideas of someone like Adolf Hitler, and how they might be taught to resist such influence.

While studying psychology at graduate school in the mid-2010s, van der Linden came across the work of American researcher William McGuire. In the 1960s, stories of brainwashed prisoners-of-war during the Korean War had captured the zeitgeist, and McGuire developed a theory of how such indoctrination might be prevented. He wondered whether exposing soldiers to a weaker form of propaganda might have equipped them to fight off a full attack once they’d been captured. In the same way that army drills prepared them for combat, a pre-exposure to an attack on their beliefs could have prepared them against mind control. It would work, McGuire argued, as a cognitive immunizing agent against propaganda—a vaccine against brainwashing.

Traditional vaccines protect us by feeding us a weaker dose of pathogen, enabling our bodies’ immune defenses to take note of its appearance so we’re better equipped to fight the real thing when we encounter it. A psychological vaccine works much the same way: Give the brain a weakened hit of a misinformation-shaped virus, and the next time it encounters it in fully-fledged form, its “mental antibodies” remember it and can launch a defense.

Van der Linden wanted to build on McGuire’s theories and test the idea of psychological inoculation in the real world. His first study looked at how to combat climate change misinformation. At the time, a bogus petition was circulating on Facebook claiming there wasn’t enough scientific evidence to conclude that global warming was human-made, and boasting the signatures of 30,000 American scientists (on closer inspection, fake signatories included Geri Halliwell and the cast of M*A*S*H).

Van der Linden and his team took a group of participants and warned them that there were politically motivated actors trying to deceive them—the phony petition in this case. Then they gave them a detailed takedown of the claims of the petition; they pointed out, for example, Geri Halliwell’s appearance on the list. When the participants were later exposed to the petition, van der Linden and his group found that people knew not to believe it.

The approach hinges on the idea that by the time we’ve been exposed to misinformation, it’s too late for debunking and fact-checking to have any meaningful effect, so you have to prepare people in advance—what van der Linden calls “prebunking.” An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

When he published the findings in 2016, van der Linden hadn’t anticipated that his work would be landing in the era of Donald Trump’s election, fake news, and post-truth; attention on his research from the media and governments exploded. Everyone wanted to know, how do you scale this up?

Van der Linden worked with game developers to create an online choose-your-own-adventure game called Bad News, where players can try their hand at writing and spreading misinformation. Much like a broadly protective vaccine, if you show people the tactics used to spread fake news, it fortifies their inbuilt bullshit detectors.

But social media companies were still hesitant to get on board; correcting misinformation and being the arbiters of truth is not part of their core business model. Then people in China started getting sick with a mysterious flulike illness.

The coronavirus pandemic propelled the threat of misinformation to dizzying new heights. Van der Linden began working with the British government and bodies like the World Health Organization and the United Nations to create a more streamlined version of the game specifically revolving around Covid, which they called GoViral! They created more versions, including one for the 2020 US presidential election, and another to prevent extremist recruitment in the Middle East. Slowly, Silicon Valley came around.

A collaboration with Google has resulted in a campaign on YouTube in which the platform plays clips in the ad section before the video starts, warning viewers about misinformation tropes like scapegoating and false dichotomies and drawing examples from Family Guy and Star Wars. A study with 20,000 participants found that people who viewed the ads were better able to spot manipulation tactics; the feature is now being rolled out to hundreds of millions of people in Europe.

Van der Linden understands that working with social media companies, who have historically been reluctant to censor disinformation, is a double-edged sword. But, at the same time, they’re the de facto guardians of the online flow of information, he says, “and so if we’re going to scale the solution, we need their cooperation.” (A downside is that they often work in unpredictable ways. Elon Musk fired the entire team who was working on pre-bunking at Twitter when he became CEO, for instance.)

This year, van der Linden wrote a book on his research, titled Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity. Ultimately, he hopes this isn’t a tool that stays under the thumb of third-party companies; his dream is for people to inoculate one another. It could go like this: You see a false narrative gaining traction on social media, you then warn your parents or your neighbor about it, and they’ll be pre-bunked when they encounter it. “This should be a tool that’s for the people, by the people,” van der Linden says.

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Everyone needs to play this game.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Global Warming & Climate Change

Since the 1970s there has been a steady increase in global temperatures as a result of the build-up of heat-trapping pollutant gases in the atmosphere. As evidence of the effects of global warming begins to accumulate, it is absolutely certain that the world is facing a dangerous acceleration of climate change and extremes of weather. These changes will be considerably worse than hotter summers and wetter winters for some and vice versa for others. Whole continents are going to be affected by severe and extended periods of changed climate. Its not just the Saharan region that is experiencing prolonged drought and disastrous fires. Even tropical and temperate regions are suffering, countries like Australia, Malaysia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Cyprus and East Africa. In one year forest fires consumed more than one million hectares of Sumatra and Kalimantan. Agriculture in many different regions of the world will become virtually impossible as desertification spreads in hot areas and rainfall drowns fields and paddocks in the world’s monsoon belt. Storms and ocean swelling will inundate lowlying regions, drowning fishing ports and the hinterlands they feed. Global warming will expand ocean water and raise sea levels two feet by the year 2010: low-lying regions such as the delta portions of Bangladesh, Egypt and Southern China and low-lying islands in the Indian and Pacific oceans may be flooded or even submerged.

This may all seem very academic and the problem of distant peoples. But climate change doesn’t just affect far-off countries we will never visit. Torrential rain and melting in 1998 combined to cause landslides and severe flooding in California, Idaho, Nevada and Oregon. Flash floods forced the evacuation of 125,000 people, and destroyed or badly damaged 24,000 houses and several hundred square kilometres of farmland. Economic losses were estimated at $2billion. Dermatologists in Australia and the United States are witnessing an explosion in cases of the deadly skin cancer, melanoma.

Rising sea levels will drown tourist beaches, coastal wetlands, cultural and heritage sites, fishing centres and other areas and require massive investment in coastal defences, new sewage systems and relocation costs – whole new towns – houses, schools, hospitals, factories — will have to be built as people are forced inland at massive cost. Who is to pay for all this, if not the working peoples of the world? These changes will have major consequences for food production and create many more refugees, with the poorest being most affected, as ever. Changes to the oceans will also drive fish from traditional grounds, making it dangerous or impossible to catch them without using factory vessels and the latest sonar technology. Think of the literally billions of people who live and work in the river and deltas of the great rivers of the world: the Amazon, Ganges, Indus, Mekon, Mississippi, Niger, Nile, Po, and Yangtze. These are hugely productive agricultural reasons and are all at risk from rising sea levels and climate change.

Sustainable agriculture will become more difficult, leading to land being taken by Big Food and peasant farmers being forced into fetid slums beaten down by extremes of heat and rain where cholera, typhus and diphtheria are endemic. Across the world tropical insects are invading temperate zones where people and cattle have no immunity or the means to combat them while at the same time, up to 40% of all plant and animal species alive today are facing extinction. Crops are dying from water shortages and drought causes thousands of cattle to die of starvation or the heat. The coral reefs of the world are dying, unable to adapt to warming seas and the human diseases that enter the seas in sewage and thrive in warmer water. Don’t think these are problems only affecting the Majority World, far away. In 2002 30% of the USA was officially declared drought-affected. The response of Big Money – government and business – is not to tax petrol, reduce carbon emissions or change patterns of consumption to conserve water but build more dams to line the pockets of the corporations responsible for the mess in the first place.

We are often told that climate change is produced by oldfashioned polluting technologies and that – if sufficient money is given to big business and the universities – they will produce the technological solutions that will save the planet. Yet, as this pamphlet shows elsewhere, the nature, speed and scope of technological change is not dictated by human need (or even humanity’s actual survival on this planet) but by the corporations’ ability to make profit from their development, introduction and control. They dictate when products and technologies enter the market, not us. It is the corporations that increasingly dictate what, how and how much we consume by their control of technology and product development. Patterns of consumption, the waste and excess created by capitalism, dictate our methods of production. And it is the total mass of production – which is bound to go on increasing as western patterns of consumption are spread to the developing world by globalisation – that is the problem. What is also being spread – unfortunately – are the grotesquely unfair and destructive inequalities that capitalism creates and fosters. These are not just inequalities of wealth, status or power, though these are scandalous enough in a world that pretends to human equality and rights (and how hollow these must ring as dust sweeps across the farm of your ancestors or floods drown crop, cattle and kin). They are also inequalities in the one of the fundamentals that defines humanity: the kind and quality of our lives and the ways in which we die.

For it is the poor, the marginalized and the weak, who already die in their tens of millions every year who will bear the brunt of global warming and climate change. If the price of flour goes up a few cents a kilo as a result of bad weather or failed crops bread in America will be a little bit more expensive. But if you live on $1 a day in Ethiopia or Brazil then a drought in the maize fields can be a matter of life and death. If the vaccines and antibiotics that helped control endemic disease no longer work and you can’t afford the new drugs from the West, how do you choose who will get them? If the upland peoples have been driven from their land by drought and come armed to your village, will you fight or flee? And where will you go the slums are already full? When the privatised water company turns off the neighbourhood’s water supply to preserve it for the rich who can afford to pay, how will you wash (to avoid disease), find clean water (to cook with) or flush that already stinking toilet where infection is breeding? The inevitable result of global warming is not an ‘English Riviera’ that the media and some scientists like to popularise, it is war, civil war, intercommunal violence, mass poverty, starvation and disease, man-made catastrophe and millions of blighted lives. Even though the consumption-obsessed western economies are the engine of global warming, its effects are largely not felt there. We are content to let international aid agencies provide sticking plaster solutions to the environmental disasters that business has created. Capitalism is blighting the planet; only the free society of the future, made here today, will restore it to health.