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cinemacereal · 3 years ago

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people gotta stop romanticizing college man AKA: being both in charge of the narrative and subject to its inclinations is some whimsical horseshit and i do not fuckin abide

aight so im in film school right. and like, people really gotta stop romanticizing college bro. i don't even fuckin know if I actually like the thing I'm going to school for. i chose to be here and every day i wonder if i even like filmmaking, which is ludicrous of course i do.

however, this is far more nuanced a question than just the simple "does this thing make me happy." my whole goddamn career depends upon the far more loaded question of "do this thing make me happy enough i could do it for conceivably the next 50+ years and not prefer to launch myself directly into the sun than get up for work one more day." which is significantly harder to answer.

especially considerin i am in no way ignorant to the fact that im more than certain that future me will look upon current me with the same wallowing acid bath of disgust i hold for past me.

therefore i am in a particularly stupid and unsolvable paradox. If i am to determine that my future lies with the complicated and frustrating art of filmmaking, i need to do some soul searching and finish my character arc. However in order to have said character arc, i need to have,my life pointed in a direction so that the metatextual narrative doesn't crash and burn

i wish i could put my whole life on pause, figure myself out, then go back into it with a newfound sense of purpose. its like my author wrote like,, half of my story and then said "im bored" and left me in the vast expansive wastelands of the tumblr draft section, where all good posts go to die, and never actually got around to figuring out the second half of my epic character arc.

like, it’s so weird to say this but I feel like I’m at that point in my narrative or I’m about to get some serious character development??? my identity is finally coming into being and i have a sense of who i am in the metatextual narrative of this story, or at least the many different versions of myself that simultaneously exist and do not exist within the narrative at any given moment. like, at i am able to hold an internal socratic dialog with the 6 other versions of myself i am consciously aware of, which has to stand for somethin in the ridiculous self examination im doing for you, correct?

but the thing about character development is that you cant exactly have the aforementioned internal socratic dialog of you have fuckin english homework due. so what ends up actually happening is you procrastinate your big enlightenment for a more convenient time in order to keep the trains running on time. because god fucking forbid the train stops and you have an identity crisis. like everything functions fine when you keep the train moving, but if your train is falling apart you cant exactly power through a broken axle.

like oh shit the wheels are falling off and we’re either going to keep moving forward or the train is going to careen off the cliff of mental illness, and then when you DO inevitably crash, you say oh fuck i could never have predicted this. i am irretrievably fucked. except you DID predict this, all the way when your worst situation was a loose screw. but no, nobody takes you seriously until you crash and the whole train car fuckin obliterates itself on the mental illness tree like a small child running face-first into a glass screen door and watching with abject horror as the glass spiders on impact and shatters dramatically, covering the child in the snowflakes of his own grievous error.

i was in a boat where i was honestly doing pretty okay, and my workload is just light enough my ADHD doesn’t ruin my life 24/7 but i have one(1) singular negative thing happen and im all out of whack

plus, it doesn’t help that like,, i suddenly now have all these passions for writing and drawing for my buddies and making shitty jpeg gifs for my blog but i dont have any energy for film?? reader i willingly started this blog, made most of these gifs myself, and wrote out this insane, self-indulgent dialog because i, personally had the passion to do so. (wait can writing self-indulgent rantblogs be a career. because i'd be so good at that dude. i can finally stop ranting in my friends dms at like 3am)

im fuckin terrified 24/7 that i actually dont wanna do film and i wish i had time to figure that out.

like im a rad dude okay.

im one cool motherfucker, and being a cool motherfucker means i have like,,, a Lot of interests and talents that suit me in my role as said cool motherfucker.

in summary, i’m rad as shit.

this is known

the issue though is that my particular interests do not neatly fit themselves together in a way that a career path is easily laid out for me. i am such a jack of all trades that i could theoretically work in almost any department and become successful.

but, since i am only a man, my general quest is self-fulfillment, right? like the whole goddamn point of being on this stupid spinning rock of infinite horseshit is enlightenment. maslow's hierarchy of needs and all that shit.

so how, the fuck, am i supposed to figure out my particular position in life if i can conceivably find a career in like 6 different wildly divergent paths if i don't spend the next ten fuckin years trying each of them on like a little girl figuring out which disney princess halloween costume dress really says “me”

and i thought i was ahead of the game on this front. i had my first midlife crisis when i was 12 goddamnit. I've been staring at my own splintered identity since i started eating fuckin crayons, you'd think i'd have this shit sorted by now. i am a goddamn philosophical stable boy, mucking out the horseshit that is my psychological identity and self-actualization issues, except the horse in question is also in fact me, and he refuses to stop shitting. it is an endless stream of horse shit coated psyche turds, glittering in the beams of sunlight peaking through the wooden walls of the stables in question, which i guess within the context of this metaphor would be my skull.

and to add another layer to the layer cake of horseshit you and i are mucking out and subsequently baking together, our professors act as if on some level we have a full and in-depth understanding of who we are as people enough to like,,, make a fuckin decision about the career that will essentially define the rest of our lives

like, i can barely feed myself and put myself to bed. i am functionally at the same level of self-care as an overgrown infant, and im expected to have any understanding of how i wanna spend my life?

i call bullshit

we’re both intelligent and deeply interesting people, you and i, reader

we’re goddamn genuinely thoughtful and fascinating individuals with a wide variety of interests.

we are, what The Adults would call “well rounded”

and yet we still cannot manage to figure out any of this shit in a way that makes logical sense

and seriously dude, like if they were actually going to prepare us for college i would have appreciated more philosophy on the nature of enlightenment and self-fulfillment, because like yeah i definitely still wouldn’t have figured any of it out, but at least i would know what all the professional question askers up top have to say

or any assistance on the whole “who am i and where do i fit in the world” question?

like surely we could fuckin squeeze that particular topic in between WW2 for the fifth time and analyzing another robert fucking frost poem like motherfucker i don't even understand how basic college shit works, and I'm expected to become the fucking buddha and then also turn in that ten-page paper on whatever the fuck? no, of course not.

we're expected to casually figure out the existential quandary of the universe over gay brunch with the ladies and never fucking touch the topic again. case closed, book shut, the narrative is linear as shit and everyone is pleased, roll credits. like seriously what in the authors cursed name is that about? thats not how people work, author, you cant just expect them to hinge their entire identities off of a paragraph you haphazardly wrote down at 3am!

we need spiritual fulfillment! i need my character to be fleshed out man! i dont care if the author is dead, you get your corpse right back here and explain to me what all this nonsense you conjured up means!

i demand an answer for the existential question of my life's purpose, dammit! as an author it is your responsibility to give the audience a satisfying conclusion, and i, as both a character and audience member am demanding a goddamn explanation! But as both author and character, i am essentially demanding that ouroboros stop eating his own goddamn tail for a minute and explain the transitive property to me, except ouroboros is also me and he doesnt fuckin know what the transitive property is because he hasnt been in 7th grade math class in like 6 years and he is also a fuckin snake.

#CinemaCerealpost #shitpost #existential dread #flashing images

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dracosathenaeum · 3 years ago

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OBLIVIATE | D.M. ABANDONED FIC OUTLINE

Hello~

I’ve had this fic for @fuckingdraco ‘s writing challenge outlined for almost a year now. Half of it is a skeleton; i have some scenes which are fully written out and others which are just first drafts and idea dumps. this is quite literally copied and pasted so good luck if you read it.

I never had the heart to completely delete it but never liked it enough to write it; so here is my 2.2k draft fo what would’ve been a series.

If anyone decides to read it, be warned, it’s a mess. i just didnt want it to die in my notes so it’s having a life here, in my new section of my masterlist ‘fics that never saw the light of day’.

warnings: memory loss, fight scenes, gore, fighting

Being in a secret relationships had its ups and downs

You had to sneak around

But that just made the moments you were together so much more meaningful

You couldn’t brag about him to your friends

But the both of you were quite private people anyways, explaining your absences as studying in odd places

No one ever found out

It was just you and draco

The summer of 5th year was hard as he spent all of it in the south of France with his family

But it made coming back in 6th year so much more exciting

your fingers ached to touch him as you walked past his carriage

It was moments like this that you wish you could openly love him

But when your friends started gossiping about how Harry Potter thought he’d become a death eater, you were suddenly glad you weren’t linked to him publicly

That thought itself set a heavy weight of guilt on you

He came back in 6th year and he had changed

His kisses lost their spark

His eyes lost their light

He’d fuck you rough and hard, almost as if forgetting himself. Before making it up to you in the next instance

Slow love making that made you feel like you had just slept with an entirely different person

You followed him

You supposed you shouldn’t have

But he was skipping meals and you couldn’t exactly talk to his friends when they didn’t know you

You couldn’t confide in your friends as they wouldn’t understand

So you had no other choice

You followed him throughout the nights, and every time you would find him slipping into the room of requirement when he should’ve been slipping into bed with you

Once you had gauged what time he usually went and on what days you yourself went, 10 minutes before he was due

You watch as he fiddles around some ancient looking cupboard and you wonder why you’re jealous of a dead tree taking up dracos time

You watch as he sends things through, until finally it works for him

But its not happiness on his face nor relief

It looks like dread

He doesn’t look like he’s accomplished something, no there was no way

You watch as he takes off his tie, throwing it in the pile of robes and jumper

You watch as he rolled up the sleeves to his arms, the arms that had held you up more times than you could count

And you watch as the dark snaking lines of the dark mark are exposed on your lovers skin

His eyes whip round to see yours, instantly widening in fear

It isn’t until you try to walk towards him and he throws his hands up to stop you do you realise the shattered glass littered around you

He flicks his wand and you walk over, standing in front of him trying to figure out why

“How did you hide it from me for so long.”

“Simple charms, I was hoping you wouldn’t have to find out.”

More dialogue where he explains

“I don’t have a choice.”

“You always have a choice.”

Draco please

“I can’t, I had to take this on my skin because my father fucked up”

“If I, if I stop now, I cant save my mother”

“Draco please, we can find a way around this”

You kiss him

And it feels like you’ve both gone back to before 6th year

When times were simpler

When he loved you and you loved him and that was it

No other interruptions

“Oblivate”

PART 1

“Y/n?”

“I’m sorry, do I know you?”

“Draco Malfoy, we share some classes but we haven’t spoken before.”

“Oh, im sorry, of course. I’m really tired I dont usually forget peoples names I swear. I must’ve been so tired I wandered in, I apologise.”

“It’s okay, the doors over there.” You take that as his polite cue of asking you to leave

He offers a tight smile, one you remember from first year, one you remember seeing across the hall as he’s shut down by Harry Potter

Poor guy must be going through something

“Y/n”

you turn, you dont even hesitate. You dont know what it is but you feel as if you’ve known him all your life

You change and you see a gold ring dangling from a dainty gold chain. You ask your friends if they’ve seen it before

im forgetting so much these days

But you keep it on, it brings you an odd sense of comfort

You keep it tucked beneath your blouse, bringing it to you lips on occasion when youre anxious.

He had forgotten about his ring, the very ring you had clasped between your thumb and finger as you worked on your essay. How was he possibly supposed to get it from you

he’s well aware he’s staring but his mind is whirling

He needs that ring

“Draco, isn’t that your ring?”

He should’ve obligated himself, that might’ve been easier

“I’m sure it just looks similar.”

“Draco, we both know that’s the Malfoy famlily crest, I wondered why you stopped wearing it.”

“Wait did she steal it?”

misplaced it

She picked it up

He had to awkwardly walk over to pick it up

“That’s my ring.” You had told him all about how your friends hated him and how you had feigned indifference the entire time

He had to act the part

Youre flustered, eyes flicking between the ring and him, fingers clasping it tighter as if not wanting to let it go

He notices and his heart clenches at the sight

Remembering the night he gave it to you

*flash back*

“I’m so sorry, I must’ve picked it up by accident here.”

“Wait, how do you even know it’s his, prove it Malfoy.”

“My vaults could buy Hogwarts, why would I be stealing gold from a nobody?”

Your cheeks flare up and your friends glare at him but see his side

You struggle to unclasp it, and of course you fucking do because his stupid fucking ass charmed it so only he could take it off

he watches as you struggle with it, turning to a friend to help before you have 6 girls pulling at the very expensive chain on your neck

“For fucks sake youre going to damage it, let me.”

Your breath hitches as his surprisingly warm fingers brush your hair out of the way, fingers working quick to unclasp the necklace, the weight of it leaving your neck and you feel surprisingly empty

“Thank you.”

You watch as he goes, your fingers scratching over your neck, feeling something bubble in your throat

This was pathetic, you were so sad over something that was never yours in the first place

You spend the remainder of the time trying to figure out how you cam to be in possession of it in the first place

your name is written in beautiful cursive on a letter that you cannot help but love

You turn it over to see a beautiful wax seal on it, fingers trembling as you break it

The chain is yours.

d.m.

You tilt the envelope over into your hand to feel the familiar weight of the chain in your hand, clasping it around you neck in an instant

You look in the mirror but you dont recognise yourself

Your friends are surprised when you study with them

When you go back to your dorm room at a reasonable time

And you dont have a clue where it is they think you go

But how could you possibly explain to someone what you font remember

The chain is too light around you neck, its just not the same, it feels as if it’s chocking you rather than bringing you comfort

You start digging through your trunk and draws, looking for something to act as a pendant before you finally do.

Hidden at the back of one of your draws you find a little velvet box you dont remember stashing away. But then again, you dont seem to be remembering much these days.

Its a tiny little constellation of stars, charmed to sparkle and you heart wonders why you had never worn it before. It was a simple little charm but once hooked onto the necklace, you look at yourself in the mirror and finally feel as though a little part of you has returned.

PART 2 THE CONSTELLATION IS DRACO

6th and 7th years are a blur

A blur of horror

You dont really understand how life had changed so abruptly

You dont know how you end up fighting in a war at the age of just 18 but here you are

Draco stands with Hogwarts

And then his mother calls

You’ve seen him

Of course you have

You know what he is, know what his parents are

But you also know what he has done to make Hogwarts more bearable for you under the Carrows watch

The small things, diverging attention away from you and your friends

He wasn’t evil and some part of you knew that

You watch as he takes a shuddering breath and starts to walk

You watch as no one stops him

You watch as he loses more of his soul with each step towards mr no-nose

You dont know why you do it

You run

Your friends call your names, teachers joining in

They think youre joining the other side, they think youre fucked in the head, as they had since that incident in 6th year

But no, you were just missing something

you catch up to him pretty quickly, pulling him to a stop

“Ah, another to join my cause. Welcome young lady.”

“You know me. Im missing something but whenever I’m with you, whenever im holding this stupid constellation close to my heart, I feel at ease. Why”

he stares at you incredulously, and why wouldn’t he. Youre in the middle of a battlefield, Harry Potter has just been declared dead and Voldemort is less than a meter away

But you dont feel scared

And you feel stupid for not feeling scared

“It has felt like I dont even know who I am for the past 2 years, what did you do to me?”

You know everyones watching, you can hear the gasps on both sides as they think the worst of him

“I did what was necessary.” That was the first time he had spoken more than 2 words to you since he had gotten his necklace back that day in the library

“Draco, this is no time to be flirting. Come join me, bring her with you if you want.”

He tenses as voldy rests a boney hand on his shoulder, pulling him towards the other side, away from you

“If you won’t be joining us, we will use you an example of what will happen if you dont join us.”

You stare at him unfazed, fear was something you had gotten used to

Your fingers grip your wand in hand, running through all the spell harry had taught you in the da but its not enough

You are no match for voldy as he throws an unforgivable at you

You hear screams around you but all you hear is silence, as if the world had finally gone silent

Draco watched as the spell hit you directly in the chest. He had spent 2 years living with his actions all for it to have gone to naught in a single second

He watched as the light from his wand hits you

Before rebounding off you as if it hit a shield

There’s a flash of black and his mother is infront of him, wand out from deflecting the spell from bouncing back and hitting him

“Mother?”

“She’s important to you?”

“She gave him one of the fucking family heirlooms, either she’s important to him or he’s an idiot”

His parents were… bickering in the middle of a battle

voldy recollects himself but before he can talk neville speaks up “I have no idea what’s going on but-”

Draco drowns out the noise as he stares at you on the floor, youre covered in dust and in blood but youre alive

He hears screams as harry rolls from hatreds arms, he hears the cries from death eaters but all can see is you

“We’re switching sides now?”

“I mean he’s fairly distracted, he won’t have time to hunt us down, we owe it to our son.”

Fight scene

You remember everything

Fred Weasley teases the both of you, “we have a war to win, you can fuck later.”

He copy his lazy grin, a grin that lights you up, a grin that reminds you what’s left to fight for

You see the spell before he does

Youre in an arms reach of him but Draco cant reach you in time

You push Fred to the floor, putting yourself in the line of fire by default and draco has to watch you get hit all over again

“We need to talk about what exactly it is ive been wearing around my neck this entire time.”

“I think only my mother can answer that.”

[if you made it this far, send me an ask with the word ‘chicken’ and i’ll send you a cursed photo xx]

#draco #draco malfoy #draco x reader #leaving this here to die #officially giving up on this fic #rip

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crossedwithblue · 4 years ago

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tbh i had forgot the katara as jane i just remembered the zuko being stupid haha the post being ss well makes it great (i suppose they mean the narrative function of being the support and a contrast with lizzy. but yeah comparing her to katara who has such strong independence and standing up values sounds '???')

I read a lot zutara mainly because katara and aang getting together was always super uncomfortable to me

i am always here for Dumbass Zuko headcanons lmao. however I did unfollow that blog just the other day because while I love their art (give me allllllllll the accurately drawn PoC. if you draw PoC (or white people for that matter) as button-nosed instagram girls with dark skin and make no effort to learn how to actually draw different types of facial features i will come to your house and make you eat your wacom tablet and draw my giant nose and square jaw with pen and paper until you get it Right, there are enough resources about this and i am tired) I didn’t love their hot takes which I obviously did not want to say in the tags on their post but idk,,, I was getting this really bitter vibe from their meta, idk how else to explain it. I can understand being bitter about aspects of media you like and of course people are perfectly entitled to their opinions and headcanons, but I just don’t want that bitterness on my dash lol, I come to tumblr to shitpost and look at pretty pictures. and their opinions on zuko were definitely part of it bc they felt really unfair to me and the Pride and Prejudice post is def an example of something where I was just like ??? this makes perfect sense until I actually think about it at all?? why are you being mean to zuko for no apparent reason????? is it.... because he’s the only major character from the nation that is most similar to white colonising cultures, even though he’s doing the work to a) be aware of the colonising mentality he’s internalised and work on it and b) as the ruler of said nation, flag up and eradicate this mentality from his own country, which is evidenced by the FN’s policy of non-intervention in Korra (I think the almost-going-to-war plot in the comics was absolute bullshit by the way, like not its existence but just it not really being examined in that sense)? I am 100% here to examine those aspects of ATLA and again, I totally understand being bitter about them, but it just tires me out in a website I consider a leisure space

I do need to find more atla blogs to follow now, recs would be fab if you have any :)

oh yeah i basically dont ship any of the endgame ships (in ATLA, as you may guess from my header being Korrasami lol) because as i have said before, nobody needs to find their One True Love at the age of 13 lmao (i do kinda ship Suki/Sokka because they are a little older (still kids by our standards but most probably near adulthood by their own, if not actually adults in the full sense, and yes I do think cultural context matters when ascribing adulthood to people outside the modern West no matter what ‘you’re a baby until you turn 18 and then why don’t you instatnly have a job and a mortgage’ internet culture says) and their relationship is just so cute and feels really healthy to me idk we were Robbed of enough Suki screentime, we should have got more Suki and also she should have had her character explored a Lot more than Cool Ninja Feminist Gal) (also, witness the nested brackets, they are here)

I think a lot of people have issues with Zutara (and presumably by extension Zukka? though I haven’t seen this discussed as much or like. at all) because of the issues associated with essentially the heir to a colonizing empire which has decimated the culture of the indigenous-coded woman he’s being shipped with (im sure you’ve also seen those discussions if you’ve spent like. any time at all in ATLA fandom lol) which I... kinda have mixed feelings about, I’ve seen fics where it is definintely completely ignored and done really really badly but I have also seen fics where that conflict is a really essential theme and that’s been quite interesting (would recommend Southern Lights on AO3 if ou haven’t come across it before as a good example of that though it is very long and currently being updated (pretty regularly)). I feel like I’m too removed from that part of intercultural conflict that I have the right to comment on it, though I’ve definitely faced shades of those issues in the past, but I also feel like it’s potentially an example fo knee-jerk Tumblr purity culture to just say its Bad And Wrong so idk I’m conflicted.

In the politics of the world, I just don’t see how Katara being Fire Lady (ugh that’s a phrase that always makes me laugh, and not in a kind way), which is probs the most comon Zutara fic plot, would have Worked in any sense at all, and I definitely think she would have wanted to stay at he South Pole and rebuild her culture and bring bending back to them (as we see in the comics and obvs with her being Korra’s waterbending master iirc) and I can see Zuko wanting to help with that in whatever way possible because he rightly sees that as a really important part of the reparations owed by the Fire Nation. and obviously by the end of the series they were very good friends and definitely had better chemistry than fricking Kataang but yeah those reasons are basically why I don’t love Zutara but don’t necessarily hate it either

this was another ramble, not apologising for it this time because this is just what talking to me is like. I am very here for bringing back letter-writing because it lets me ramble to my heart’s content but also it would take up All My Time

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bonbonswirl-blog · 6 years ago

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Perfect

ALL THE CHARACTERS BELONG TO @brueklynn I OWN NOTHING. This is like..uhhhh idk?... a 'batim' au idea? I guess? Im Not sure idk..its just that I got the idea from there and Instead of bendy its jokey, but not really exactly what happend there in batim. Plz ignore the bad portrayed scenes XD blondie is a lot OOC here. Enjoy if you only can thx.

It was a typical afternoon, the sunlit clouds drifted across a clear blue sky, fresh air filled the atmosphere swaying the palm trees gently by a breeze. David was at the recording room, a mellifluous melodic singing voice rose high, following the sweet, piping notes produced by the musical instruments around. After such a lilting, everyone toke a break, david sat on a chair, holding the lyrics for the new song in his hands. He saw a shadow approaching him, revealing his only cheerful boss. "Oh hey Mr. Blondie!! How are you in this lovely day!" "Hello david! Just checking on my young talented singer! How is the new song going?" "Its going great! Im just reading the lyrics again now!" "Thats good!...you know david...have you ever thought about how much the children love your jokey voice?" "Oh! Thats intresting...im sure everybody enjoy listening to it!" "Yea! they do....have you ever felt some...connections...to jokey?" "Connections? Mmmm well...I do feel that we both share a good love for the stage and thrilling the audience! along with the love to asssist other people and spread some optimism in the air!" "Thats beautifull!...Have you ever considered before...becoming this star that all those kids appresciate?" "That...looks pretty Mr. Blondie! But what do you mean?" His boss began to equivocally chuckle, it was low but icy, wasnt like his usual gleeful ones that gave an auditory hug, but david overlooked that, remaining unruffled till the answer. "David. Can you come with me for a while?" "Sure thing! But..what about the new song?" "Dont worry! It can be done in another time! now follow me!" They both left the recording room, the animator leading the ginger boy across the studio, while on their little trip to the unknown room they are walking to, david catched from away a sight of henry, tommy and norman talking together until a rueful rob drew near them, starting a conversation. David didnt mean to eavesdrop anyone, but their high voices did reach his ear. "Guys! Have any of you heared ANYthing lately about harriet? I cant find her anywhere! She didnt come to work and she is not at her home! I called her many times but she doesnt reply! Im really so scared..." rob vented, the three told him thag they didnt see her too. David felt sorry for the fellow worker, hoping that harriet is alright and will be back soon. He looked forward, though he only saw blondie back and his wheelchair, he could feel that he is trying to ignore something, he may have heard a little of the talking out there, maybe he feels sad too? But david was in his mind for a bit, wasnt aware of the time until he sensed that blondie stopped moving. This is when he noticed he is in an unrecognizable area he didnt see before, maybe this was a new place that got built recently?, " Here we are david!!" In front of both was a dark long way of stairs, it was only one storey up, just like one of those half open basemant stariecases. David knew not both will be able to clmib this, he was ready to push that wheelchair up, he looked at blondie concerned, whom just returned a grin. "Dont worry about me! I have my own ways for climbing those!" David didnt really get it, but he just let it go and left blondie to use to his own way, watching him in every step making sure he wont be close to any harm.

Dont ask how blondie climbed the stairs, he just did. that was a really narrow hall they were both in, in front of them a wooden door, blondie toke out his keys and opened it, only for both to be greeted by. "Finally!! Where Were ya!!" an angry wallaby yelled, looking as if he lost patience, it seems blondie was late to whatever meeting they should have done earlier, the room wasnt so small, almost looks like a little hallway with a wall at the end. The view was...tensed, it was a dark room with only a little bulb barley lighning it, orange colored light struggling to penetrate the darkness in thin thread rays. It was almost as if candles were the ones giving the slight shine here. Wallaby, paul and murphy were there, standing near the sides of the walls, everyone in a specific place, two at the right wall and one at the left one, only a mile spearting each two. the menacing aura holding david in a tightening grip, why do blondie have such a grisly decorating tatse...He wasnt sure if entering this room is a safe idea. "Guys!! I Brought Our Last Guest!!" Blondie exclaimed in a chirpy tone, closing the door behind himm Last guest? What does he mean? "Can we PLEASE Finish This Now And Go out?" "Come on paul dont be such a killjoy! Enjoy the place!" "If you are telling us to enjoy this creepy atmosphere then I had lost all my faith in you." murphy sneered, clearly not comfortable or trusty with how this 'gathering' is going to end, nobody knows the goal behind it. "Come on David! Here! This Is Your Place!! Stay Still And Dont Move Ok?" Blondie said while putting david on a specific spot on the left wall. "Sure! Wont Move A Shoe!" David obeyed, blondie looked at him, but this time, although he had his usual smile that showed his white glowed teeth spreaded on his face, his eyes had shimmers with some inexplicable spite. "Everything is set~" He whispered this under his breath while walking to one of the corners, nobody heard that one. Three of the invited four toke a look at blondie whereas he was doing something uncanny at that distant corner. David turned at the person in front of him, which was paul. "Oh! hey Mr.Paul!" But being the tedious man he is, paul didnt respone, only focusing on the book on his hand, thats why wallaby seemed as if he was gabbling to himself. The young boy then looked to his right side and saw murphy, still keeping an eye at blondie in a suspicion, despite not understanding a thing from what he was doing, nobody can just fetch someone to a room like this without being not up to something. "So Guys! Why are we here?" "I Dunno david! Mr. Blondie just went to me and told me that I gotta get here cuz he needs me for somethin, well I dont see anything! All I do is just standing on dis here spot not movin a leg!! What about ya paul?" "I dont care I just came here so he can stop nagging me." " I came here after he told me that I can be a 'star' like jokey." "Wait you gonna be a star? Ooh! Thats why we standin on a star!" "What?!" Wallaby words strongly drived murphy attention, making him watch the ground, they all noticed it now, they are standing on 'stars' that are drawn on the floor. David felt inside him a very straied premonisition feeling that was telling him to move, he didnt understand it, why would his guts tell him to move away from a single drawing on the floor? He promised his boss he will stay still there....how could a star drawing hurt anyone? Since whe do drawing harm people? But no matter how much he tries to brush off that feeling, it feels like a stiff weigh was being held on his chest, it made him feel so sick, maybe he just needs to move because his legs hurt him? Yeh yeh thats just it. The cheeky lad toke one step only out of that star shape, he tried to persuad himself its his legs aching and not because of a sixth sense, and that was really something he should be thankful for because. "Guys! I think we gonna be a stars!" "Wallaby...I dont think this star shape is used fo-" "GOODBYE MATES!!"

And with a casted spell and a flash of an eye, everybody was drowned with an unknown colorful sticky liquid that fully covered them, gluing them to the ground. Expect David, who fell down to the ground aspect with a horrible fear that rised behind his eyes from the grisly vision that immediately happend.

Blondie Stood there, watching him in enmity.

Blondie turned around, only to be so bothered by seeing the surviver. "Oh it seems I missed a shot! Im going to fix this~" The words had deserted david, the color quickly drained from his face, a cold wave embalmed him and his mouth ran dry, sweat poured down his body, Heart began to hammer against his chest, every muscle in his body shouted at him to flee. To escpae this imminent threat. He hurried to the door, using every little cell of power left to open it, but no matter how much he quickly moves the handle in fright, the door didnt open, oh yes, blondie locked it. Seeing no hope, he knocked on it so expeditiously and hardly, trying not to make his words stumbled, begging for someone outside to hear him. "HEEEEELLLP!!! HELP ME!!! PLEASE!!! ANYBODY OUT THERE?!?!? PLEASE HELP ME!!" "Come on David, why so nervous?" Blondie snickered from behind him, his voice hinting he is oncoming, his tone ringing in a sick icy way, sending chimes ringing in david ears, but he kept screaming for a rescue, he was not frightened nor afraid, he was beyond such mere nouns, he was going crazy, his boater hat fell from his head, it only reminded of how much he wants his family NOW in this profound situation, he just wanted to go back to them again, stay with his father marley at home and go to beach together or golf or car or wherever his father wants to go, staying in his parents arms was all what he desired, he would never wish anything anymore after this. He could no longer control his hands they were shaking in an odd trembling rhythm, his legs collapsed underneath him, teeth chattering in fear, He slid down the door, bringing his knees up to his chest.

"I-I-I-I-I-I D-D-DONT UNDERSTAND!!!!!!"

"You dont understand? I hated you! Im who created jokey! He was my friend since the childhood! My friend since the start!! But you! I saw every little detail I gifted him in you! You were perfect, perfect for him, more perfect than me! Now that I had a studio of my own, I wanted him to be alive! I reached my wish by the help of you all, by animating and presenting him to all the children around the world, they loved him, just like me! But lately, I didnt feel that I made this dream come true yet...how can a cartoon character offset me of a friend who always stayed by my side that I cant make real! But now I found a second chance, a second chance to revive him, to this reality. Thats it! Thats the chance! By using some souls to bring those stunning characters and that convival cartoony world I created to reality...that was always my biggest dream...and whats a better chance than to have the voice actor whom I influenced the traits for the children 'star' right at my hand~ People will love you david~"

Blondie was right, if david dyed his hair black and wore some cheeks make up, he could exactly like a real life jokey, but who would need a cheap costume when you can bring jokey himself to reality. David recalled the times when he sometimes thought uncle harry may have been a little overprotective of him. He thought his uncle needs to ease a bit, nothing so dangerous will happen for him. Now, he regret thinking this, and wants him to overprotect him forever and ever. Fear became a tangible, living force that crept over him like some hungry beast, immobilizing him and his brain, holding him a captive and took control of his entire body, Shadows and echoes play on his senses warping shapes and sounds. That outlandish substance already reached his legs, his life flashed before his eyes and he ushered his bright unearthly ones shut.

Yeb, this is the angel end.

#brueklynn #blondie rodgers #wallaby wallstone #david angel #murphy hillsborugh

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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'I'm standing here in the middle of climate change': How USDA is failing farmers

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/im-standing-here-in-the-middle-of-climate-change-how-usda-is-failing-farmers/

'I'm standing here in the middle of climate change': How USDA is failing farmers

Farmer Rick Oswald’s Rock Port, Missouri, family home was destroyed by heavy flooding in spring 2019. His fields remained underwater for several weeks. | M. Scott Mahaskey

ROCK PORT, Missouri — Rick Oswald is standing on the doorstep of the white farmhouse he grew up in, but almost nothing is as it should be.

To his right, four steel grain bins, usually shiny and straight, lie mangled and ripped open, spilling now-rotting corn into pileslike sand dunes. The once manicuredlawn has been overtaken by waist-tall cattails, their seeds carried in by flood waters that consumed this house, this farm and everything around it last spring.

“This house is 80 years old,” Oswald says, stepping inside the darkened living room, which now smells faintly of mold. “Never had water in it.”

American farmers are reeling after extreme rains followed by a “bomb cyclone”— an explosive storm that brought high winds and severe blizzard conditions — ravaged the heartland, turning once productive fields into lakes, killing livestock and destroying grain stores. The barrage of wet weather across the country this spring left a record-shattering 20 million acres unable to be planted — an area nearly the size of South Carolina. Other weather-related disasters, from fires in the West to hurricanes in the Southeast, have converged to make the past year one of the worst for agriculture in decades.

But the Agriculture Department is doing little to help farmers adapt to what experts predict is the new norm: increasingly extreme weather across much of the U.S. The department, which has a hand in just about every aspect of the industry, from doling out loans to subsidizing crop insurance, spends just 0.3 percent of its $144 billion budget helping farmers adapt to climate change, whether it’s identifying the unique risks each region faces or helping producersrethink their practices so they’re better able to withstand extreme rain and periods of drought.

Even these limited efforts, however, have been severely hampered by the Trump administration’s hostility to even discussing climate change, according to interviews with dozens of current and former officials, farmers and scientists.

Top officials rarely, if ever, address the issue directly. That message translates into a conspiracy of silence at lower levels of the department, and a lingering fear among many who work on climate-related issues that their jobs could be in jeopardy if they say the wrong thing. When new tools to help farmers adapt to climate change are created, they typically are not promoted and usually do not appear on the USDA’s main resource pages for farmers or social-media postings for the public.

The department’s primary vehicle for helping farmers adapt to climate change — a network of regional climate “hubs” launched during the Obama Administration — has continued to operate with extremely limited staff and no dedicated resources, while keeping a very low-profile to avoid sparking the ire of top USDA officials or the White House.

“I don’t know if its paranoia, but they’re being more watchful of what we’re doing at the local level,” one current hub employee said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid possible retaliation. “It’s very interesting that we were able to survive.”

The result is parallel universes of information. On the climate hubs’ under-the-radar Twitter account, farmers, ranchers and the publicreceive frank reports about monsoon rain storms becoming more intense across the Southwest, fire seasons getting longer across the West and how rising temperatures are already affecting pollinators.

“With #climatechange, wet is wetter, hot is hotter, dry is drier… and what do we do about all that?” reads one hubs account tweetfrom last April, quoting a New Jersey farmer talking about how to adapt to climate change.

The climate hubs’ account has only 3,200 followers. There are about 2 million farmers and ranchers in the country. By contrast, the official USDA Twitter account, with nearly 640,000 followers, completely avoids the topic. That account hasn’t used the word “climate” since December 2017.

Nearly every farmer and rancher POLITICO interviewed for this story — dozensin hard-hit states including Nebraska, Ohio and California–said they had not heard of the climate hubs. Of the few producers who had heard of them, most were not aware of the many adaptation tools and resources that have been developed to help with decision-making.

Though Oswald has been unusually vocal about climate change negatively affecting farmers, he, too, hasn’t heard much from the climate hubs, nor does he ever hear USDA officials broach the subject. Asked if his local USDA office ever talks about climate change adaptation, Oswald laughed.

“No.”

The logic for such silence makes little sense to farmers like Oswald: Most believe that the climate is changing, though only a small share believe it’s primarily driven by human activities. But the department doesn’t have to dive into the debate about what’s causing climate change to help farmers prepare and adapt.

“I’m standing right here in the middle of climate change right now,” Oswald said.

***

The Agriculture Department is not one of those government agencies that believes it does best by doing least.

Founded in 1862, at Abraham Lincoln’s request, the department would grow to play a central role in the New Deal of President Franklin Roosevelt, embracing a more activist approach to respond to crises like the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Today, its mission is even more expansive. The department doles out billions of dollars in farm subsidies, underwrites insurance on millions of acres of crops, researches and helps control diseases that threaten plants and animals and buys up massive quantities of food when farmers produce too much — a surplus that supplies food banks and schools nationwide.

But when it comes to climate change, there has been a curious silence hanging over the department, even as its own economists have warned that warming temperatures will make helping the agriculture sector more expensive in the future.

USDA spokespeople, who have long denied having any policy that dissuades discussion of climate change, declined all interview requests for this story and would not allow any officials who work on climate adaptation to discuss their work with POLITICO.

In an email, a USDA spokesperson rejected the idea that the department was failing to help farmers adapt to climate threats: “To say USDA does little to help farmers and ranchers is completely untrue.”

The spokesperson pointed to the department’s array of conservation programs. These longstanding initiatives, which all together make up about four percent of USDA’s budget, provide financial incentives for farmers who want to adopt more environmentally friendly practices or take land out of production, but they were not designed to respond to or help mitigate climate change.

Ferd Hoefner, a senior adviser to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, said his group and others have for years pressed USDA officials to use its existing conservation incentives to help adapt toand combat climate change, but the idea has not gotten traction within the department.

In fact, a recent investigation by POLITICO found that USDA routinely buries its own scientists’ findings about the potential dangers posed by a warming world. The department also failed to publicly release a sweeping, interagency plan for studying and responding to climate change.

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, for his part, has publicly suggested that he doesn’t believe the science coming out of his own department.

Asked specifically whether he believes climate change is caused by humans, as the vast majority of climate scientists do, Perdue demurred: “We don’t know. Obviously many scientists believe it’s human caused. Other scientists believe it’s not.”

“I think it’s weather patterns, frankly,” he said in an interview in June. “They change…It rained yesterday. It’s a nice, pretty day today. The climate does change in short increments and in long increments.”

Meanwhile, the National Climate Assessment has repeatedly warned that human-driven global warming will likely have dire consequences for American agriculture and make things particularly volatile in the Midwest, which has long been one of the most productive breadbaskets in the world.

But the federal government’s foot-dragging did not start during this administration.

For decades, USDA avoided tackling climate change head on, even as the department invested in research that raised warnings for farmers and ranchers and the food system as a whole. The topic has historically been too politically toxic in thetraditionally conservative agriculture sector, which fears more regulation while also being extremely reliant on government programs.

The conversation began to shift noticeably during the Obama administration. Senior government officials became increasingly vocal about climate science and the urgent need for farmers and ranchers to not only better withstand periods of extreme rain or prolonged drought, but position their industry to be a major part of the solution.

Environmentalists and a growing portion of the industry think American agriculture could be shifted from a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions to instead be a massive carbon sink, or a giant sponge pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and into millions of acres of soil — something that could actually help combat climate change.

There are several relatively simple changes farmers could make to become more resilient, which also have the benefit of drawing down carbon. Producers, for example, can reduce or eliminate tillage, which not only prevents soil carbon from being released into the atmosphere, but also helps improve how soil holds up to too much or too little moisture. They can add what’s known as cover crops to their crop rotation, a practice that helps build better soil structure — and has the added benefit of sequestering more carbon into the soil, making it more resilient to extreme weather.

But changing how farmers farm is an enormous undertaking. It requires the right mix of economic incentives, education and resources for farmers and ranchers to experiment with new practices and still make a living.

In early 2014, USDA launched the 10 climate hubs, which were supposed to be the front lines of the department’s effort to get emerging climate science into the hands of farmers.

At the time, then-Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack touted the hubs as a way to ensure American farmers and ranchers “have the modern technologies and tools they need to adapt and succeed in the face of a changing climate.”

The hubs were set to be locally-tailored, serving seven specific regions that each contained several states, with the exception of the Caribbean Climate Hub, whose mission was primarily to help Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The hubs were to be housed in USDA labs or offices in the Forest Service or the Agricultural Research Service.

The attempt to use existing facilities and draw on existing resources was deliberate. The Obama Administration faced a Republican-controlled Congress, which could have easily targeted a line item focused on climate change. Thus, there was never any real funding set aside for the hubs. Their staffing level — between two and five staff per hub, including a fellow on temporary assignment — was miniscule for a department that boasted nearly 100,000 employees.

The initiative was set up as an interagency collaboration, which meant that several disparate arms of the department were expected to contribute staff and resources.

The set-up, while politically savvy, began to backfire almost immediately as some officials viewed the hubs as essentially an unfunded mandate. The degree to which agencies within USDA were enthusiastic about supporting the effort varied greatly, but because it was a high priority for Vilsack the project rolled ahead.

The hubs had barely gotten up and running by the time the 2016 election hit.

When Donald Trump won — after having dismissed climate change as a Chinese hoax during the campaign — several officials thought the hubs would almost certainly be on the chopping block. But notice never came.

Weeks into the transition, a new concern emerged for staff working on climate adaptation and mitigation within USDA: What are we allowed to say?

In February 2017, Bianca Moebius-Clune, a career official directing soil health at the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the agency charged with overseeing conservation and other land management programs, sent an email to senior staff recommending that they consider clamping down on climate-related terms, according to a trove of internal emails revealed by The Guardian — an apparent attempt to preempt any political friction on the subject.

Instead of climate change, staff should consider using “weather extremes,” she wrote. Instead of climate change adaptation, staff should consider using “resilience to weather extremes/intense weather events: drought, heavy rain, spring ponding,” according to the emails.

Another exchange showed a different senior official appearing to suggest that a survey of USDA employee attitudes on climate change, a climate hubs project, should be reframed to downplay the issue. One of the researchers on the project pushed back and the official backed down.

At the time the emails were revealed, USDA strongly denied the suggestion that climate terms had been censored, arguing that there had been no directive from political appointees to do so. A spokesperson told POLITICO at the time that it was “unclear why career staff behind the memos had raised the issue to staff.”

When Senate Agriculture Committee ranking member Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan) raised concerns about the emails in a letter to Perdue, the secretary replied days later with a searing letter, suggesting he found it “disconcerting” that the Michigan Democrat had relied on the account of a British newspaper, according to a copy obtained by POLITICO.

“Nothing has changed in our commitment to working with the people that grow our food and fiber to address our resource challenges, including climate change,” the secretary wrote. “The department has not censored messaging on this or any issue, and I defer to the career professionals working in these agencies on how best to communicate with the farmers, ranchers and foresters that live in their communities.”

Since then, wheneverDemocrats on Capitol Hill have become frustrated about USDA not doing enough to address climate change, Perdue tends to deny there’s been any change in policy and point out that the department has kept the climate hubs up and running.

The secretary recently sat down with Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), a longtime advocate for making agriculture a major part of not just adapting to but also mitigating climate change, and, by Pingree’s account, told her he supported the idea of paying farmers to sequester carbon in their soil, a topic his own department tends to shy away from talking about. In other settings, the secretary has openly mocked the topic of climate change.

“It’s selective depending on who they’re talking to,” Pingree said in an interview. She recalled a recent House Agriculture Committee hearing where Perdue made a joke about needing to give Pepto Bismol to cows to cut down on their flatulence — taking a shot at the Green New Deal debate — but other times when she’s pressed him on climate change and soil practices he has changed his tone.

“He gets all serious and says ‘oh yeah we have the climate hubs,’” she said. “We’re in the same room and he’s sort of presenting his two points of view.”

***

The 69-year-old Oswald, for his part, has believed the scientific consensus on climate science for a while. For nearly a decade, he led the Missouri chapter of the National Farmers Union, a liberal-leaning group that represents farmers and has long accepted the science on climate change. But this year has been particularly awful.

Oswald’s parents built the tidy farmhouse in “the river bottom,” as locals call it, in 1939, about four miles off the Missouri River. When the foundation went in, his dad asked the builder to add an extra layer of cement blocks to give the house a leg up against any flooding that might come their way.

For much of the past century, Oswald’s family and farmers in the area lived in relative peace with the Missouri River. That started to change dramatically in 1993, when both the Missouri and Mississippi rivers flooded and sunk more than 300,000 square miles of the heartland under water — a catastrophe that killed dozens of people and caused $15 billion in damages.

Even then, the flood water didn’t breach the ground floor of Oswald’s farm house. In the years since, there have been numerous scares, when intense rains or snow melts have filled the river to its capacity, causing Oswald and his neighbors to be “on edge” year after year, he said.

The last time Oswald’s land flooded, in 2011, was a turning point for him.

“Before that I was saying, yes the climate is changing, but I wasn’t ready to say that the change was caused by human activity,” he said. As he looked at the science on rising temperatures and increasing greenhouse gas emissions, he said he became convinced of the connection.

Back in 2011, a bout of extreme rains left upstream reservoirs so overloaded with water that the Army Corps of Engineers had no choice but to stage a controlled flood.

Farmers in Oswald’s area were given three weeks’ notice before the flood water was let loose. Equipment could be taken to higher ground, corn and beans moved out. Oswald’s house was spared.

What happened this year was a “perfect storm” in many ways, he said. It had already been one of the wettest years on record in much of the Missouri Riverwatershed when a huge storm — dubbed a “bomb cyclone” — pummeled the central U.S. in mid-March, dropping massive rain and snow from North Dakota to Colorado. In many places, the ground was too frozen to handle the influx of water, leading to widespread runoff.

Several communities saw the Missouri River and its tributaries rise to levels they had simply never seen before.

In northeastern Nebraska, one tributary became so overloaded with water and massive chunks of floating ice that it burst through the Spencer Dam “unleashing a wave of water” into the already fast-rising Missouri River, as the federal government would later describe it.

“Dams aren’t supposed to collapse,” Oswald said. “But they’re also supposed to be managed so that they don’t collapse. When you have as much rain and snow as we had, then man has to take that into account. If they don’t, why, this is the kind of thing we get. This ignorant denial of the fact that, yeah, the climate has changed and things are different now, is just going to lead to more of this.”

***

Against the backdrop of a devastating year, the climate hubs, USDA’s front line to help farmers, are not just flying under the radar — they are also struggling to hold on to what little funding and staff they have.

The inaugural class of fellows, many of them post-docs, who helped launch the climate hubs has begun to move on and those workers, who make up nearly a third of the total staff, are not expected to be replaced. USDA said no decisions have been made about whether the fellows program will continue.

“It’s duct-taped together,” said one current climate hub employee who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation.

The haphazard budget set-up, where agencies are expected to chip in, has only gotten more precarious as the hubs go further into an administration that seems largely indifferent to them. As another official explained it: “It was set up to be preserved because it doesn’t have a line item, but it was also kind of set up to fail because it doesn’t have a line item.”

In recent years, two of the USDA agencies that had been supplying funds for the hub network have pulled their financial support: the Risk Management Agency and Farm Service Agency, according to documents obtained by POLITICO. Despite these challenges, USDA said the department has managed to keep the overall budget for the climate hubs largely flat — at nearly $11 million total for all ten locations — since 2015.

Nonetheless, other agencies have started to ask that the staff they’re dedicating to the hubs do more work that’s specific to the mission of their agency, not necessarily the broader mission of the climate hubs.

The Forest Service, for example, is less interested in changing on-farm practices because it’s outside the scope of its work, and the Agricultural Research Service is generally more interested in publishing papers in peer-reviewed journals than it is in doing farmer outreach, something that’s usually left to other parts of USDA.

The rocky political situation has left the hubs to struggle with competing priorities and an uncertain future while international authorities warn that action on climate is increasingly urgent to stave off the most dire consequences.

Officials who work on climate issues within USDA are often conflicted about whether the hubs and their resources should get more promotion in the current administration, according to more than a dozen interviews with current and former staff. On one hand, they see their work as more urgent than ever, but on the other there’s a sense that ignoring the hubs may be key to their survival in a politically hostile environment.

“The one saving grace is that they’re so low-profile they haven’t been targeted,” one former hub official said.

Against the odds, theboot-strapped climate hubs have come up with several programs and tools aimed specifically at helping farmers, ranchers and forest managers make climate-focused decisions, according to interviews and a review of their websites. And the hubs continue to use the term climate change liberally — a rarity in the department.

Last year, the Northwest Climate Hub, fresh off a particularly horrible wildfire season, contributed to a new tool called AgBizClimate built by Oregon State University. The program allows operators to plug in farm-specific information and model out economic costs and returns for their businesses under different climate scenarios.

“This tool is a powerful means to summarize and help farmers understand their area’s available climate information,” according to a page on the Northwest Climate Hub’s website. “More importantly, it shows how climate change could impact the costs and returns they are likely to face over the next twenty to thirty years.”

Earlier this year, the Northern Plains Climate Hub teamed up with the University of Nebraska Lincoln to launch a new simulation tool to help farmers make farm-practice decisions based on extreme weather scenarios — something that rolled out just months after record flooding of the Missouri River and its tributaries left countless fields either under water or too wet to plant.

The Southwest Climate Hub, which serves an area where rising temperatures are expected to hamper growing leafy greens and other sensitive specialty crops, in 2017launched a data portal called AgRisk Viewer, which allows farmers and local officials to analyze trends in crop insurance payouts by state or county, providing an overview of what type of weather is driving losses in certain areas.

Such systems could be useful to farmers whose operations are increasingly high tech and data-driven. But most of the digital tools are so buried on USDA’s network of websites that producers would likely need to know what they were looking for to find them.

One exception has been an initiative developed by the Northern Great Plains Climate Hub called Grass-Cast, which forecasts how much grass will be available for livestock in the upcoming summer. Last summer, USDA’s blog touted the newly launched tool, which uses more than three decades of data to make predictions.

The decision to highlight the work of the Northern Great Plains Climate Hub shows that when USDA wants to embrace a tool, it has the capacity to do so. In most cases, it doesn’t. That consigns important information that could help millions of farmers to the back reaches of the extensive web of USDA websites or the largely unseen Twitter feed of the climate hubs.

In late August, for example, the hubs account posted a report confirming that 2018 was the fourth-warmest year since the mid-1800s, while greenhouse gases and sea levels were also at record levels. The tweet got a meager one like and one retweet.

The same day, the climate hubs account also posted an updated climate outlook for Midwest farmers and ranchers, with the latest weather and climate projections. The report illustrated how average temperatures are increasing in most parts of the country and warned that there is going to be more rain, more potential for soil and nutrient loss, and increased need for drainage across the region.

That tweet was retweeted only twice.

USDA defended its marketing of adaptation resources, noting that they can be found on the climate hubs’ central website. Each regional hub also holds local workshops and publishes peer-reviewed studies about the effects of climate change, the department said.

But during the current administration, USDA’s twitter account has not retweeted a single post from the hubs, like it routinely does for other parts of the department. Nor has it ever shared any of the climate hubs’regional vulnerability assessments or tools aimed at helping farmers adapt to climate change.

The stealth-mode of the climate hubs is also apparent in the resources USDA provides for farmers and ranchers.

A new online platform called farmers.gov, lauded by Secretary Perdue as a one-stop shop for producers, for example, doesn’t direct producers to the climate hubs or share any of the tools that have been developed by the hubs.

As in previous administrations, USDA continues to urge farmers and ranchers to focus on soil health, but the department has since abandoned a broad “Climate Smart” effort it launched under the Obama administration in 2015. That plan was aimed at reducing agriculture’s net emissions and sequestering more than 120 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2025.

“This reduction is equivalent of taking 25 million cars off the road or offsetting the emissions produced by powering nearly 11 million homes per year,” USDA said at the time.

That claim that has since been scrubbed from USDA’s website.

“In this administration, it’s really tough to talk about climate change, but you start talking about soil health — that seems to be palatable. It is a problem though,” said Fred Yoder, an Ohio farmer growing corn and soybeans, who used to lead the National Corn Growers Association and is a vocal advocate for no-till, cover crops and other adaptation practices.

“It’s absolutely a crying shame that we’ve politicized climate change,” Yoder said. “It’s science. Science isn’t perfect. But it’s the very best tool we have. And the science is clear.”

“Right now we’re dancing around the administration’s reluctance to call it what it is,” he said. “It’s an absolutely perfect time to talk about how to adapt.”

***

While USDA keeps its work on climate change under the radar, the scene in Rock Port looks almost apocalyptic.

Leaving Oswald’s farm, there are bare fields and washed out roads as far as one can see. In some places, fertile soil has washed away and headed down stream, leaving cracks in the fields. Multiple nearby exits off I-29 — the interstate that extends from the Canadian border down to Kansas City — remain closed.

Off in the distance, there’s a lava-like inferno. The glowing sliver of red and orange is a massive pile of soybeans that’s been burning, on and off, for weeks.

When the beans first began to burn, folks in town were confused, Oswald said. “The local reaction was: ‘What the hell? What’s burning?’”

It turns out when soybeans get wet, the oil starts to separate from the rest of the bean. As the damp beans heat up under the sun, the warm, decomposing mixture of organic matter and oil can spontaneously combust.

It smells like “a cross between hot brakes and burning rubber,” Oswald said.

Oswald doesn’t like seeing the house his father built look like this, scattered with debris, water-stained walls surrounded by weeds, and he grows more somber thinking about what his parents would think.

“I look at the heavens once in a while and think my folks can’t be too happy about it,” he says.

Now, he’s trying to pick up the pieces. He recently got word that a sweeping disaster aid bill Congress passed earlier this summer will help pay him back for some of the more than 20,000 bushels of corn now laid waste in his yard — a check that will cover roughly half of what he would have made if he’d been able to sell his corn, he said.

Subsidized crop insurance he took out on the acres he couldn’t plant this year will help give him enough cash to stay afloat until next year, he said.

His family home will likely need to be razed, but is it worth rebuilding? If FEMA helps cover some of the cost, it would likely be a tiny fraction of what he would have to pay out of pocket.

Another round of off-the-charts rains recently pummeled the watersheds upstream from him, taking the great Missouri River to dangerously high levels again. It’s unheard of for there to be this much rain as summer turns to fall. This week, weather forecasters are again warning of a potentially historic winter storm upstream, a bizarre scenario for early October.

Oswald has no choice but to wait and watch the river.

But there’s one thing he’s not waiting on: Leadership from USDA on how to cope with climate change andthe increasingly unusual and unpredictable weather that comes with it.

“I haven’t really heard anything,” he said.

Maps and graphics by Patterson Clark and copy-edited by Graph Massara and Lauraine Genota.

#Failing #Farmers #Foreign #Politics

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