Casual reminder that the Palestine Children's Relief Fund has a 97% on Charity Navigator and you should donate to it if u can. Despite the limited external aid that's been allowed into Gaza, they've been able to distribute a lot of aid internally. And they are providing needed aid to Lebanon.
From the article:
“If you look only at the trend of species declines, it would be easy to think that we’re failing to protect biodiversity, but you would not be looking at the full picture,” said Penny Langhammer, lead author of the study and Executive Vice President of Re:wild. “What we show with this paper is that conservation is, in fact, working to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. It is clear that conservation must be prioritized and receive significant additional resources and political support globally, while we simultaneously address the systemic drivers of biodiversity loss, such as unsustainable consumption and production.”
This massive meta analysis (for those not familiar, a study analyzing the results of many studies on similar topics) found that the vast majority of conservation efforts show much much better results than doing nothing. In many cases, biodiversity loss was not only stopped but reversed.
This shows that conservation efforts really work and money invested is put to very good use. Legally protecting endangered species really works, restoring habitat really works, removing invasive species really works, returning land to Indigenous communities works. All of the blood, sweat, and tears being poured into protecting the natural world has been making a real, big, tangible, difference on a global scale.
What are some good beginner wants for someone just starting to get into desire?
This was said as a joke almost certainly and I accept that reading of it,
But I have Things To Say!!
So; beginner wants for someone just getting into desires.
The trick is to start small. Even smaller. The smallest. It has to be something you can do, that no-one is asking you to do, even implicitly. It cannot be success, cannot be love or fame, and cannot rely on luck.
Try wanting to see a sunset. Try wanting to feel the wind on your face. Try wanting to listen to a bird chirping, or to taste something you haven't tasted before, or to walk down a different path than usual. Then, when you feel ready, do it. Savor the feeling of having wanted something and gotten it.
A small choice, that impacts nothing except that you chose to do it.
Desire is a skill;
It can be learned, it can be practiced.
Apparently ICE now has agents posing as utility workers to get into people's homes. The electric and gas companies have posted information on how to tell if it's one of their workers, and numbers to call to confirm whether they've sent someone to do utility work on your house.
Stay safe, friends.
no animal was harmed during the making of this video. not one. for the few minutes that we were shooting film, the guns of each hunter fell silent. the industrial bolt throwers observed a moment's peace and the jaws of every predator hung softly open. no fish bit any hook and the bait worms held off on drowning only until the cameras stopped. the tails of ruminants ceased to flick just as their attendant flies, in unison, landed on their flanks to catch their tiny breaths. a spider instantly stopped winding silk around a wasp, patiently waiting for the caesura to end. a young veterinarian paused with the syringe in their hand. somewhere, a colicky baby stopped biting its mother's nipple and nursed happily for the very first time. we're sorry. we're sorry it couldn't have been longer. we didn't know this would happen.
At the risk of sounding stupid, I just found out how long the stone age lasted. In my head it's about as long as other historical time periods, a couple thousand years before ancient egypt, and conceptually looks like a bad car insurance commercial. Nope! Dead wrong! The stone age lasted for 3.4 MILLION YEARS.
Okay wow i would not have guessed millions. Maybe in like the tens of thousands? But definitely would have way undershot.
I told my wife and they said "Yeah, modernity is a recent and strange invention"
Oh yes! Hello I am wife. And these are the oldowan tools:
The first image is my favorite, the iconic oldowan hand axe, but you'll note there's a wide range of other tools crafted for everything from crushing nuts and stones, to awls and engraving devices. There is some evidence, albeit hotly debated, that these tools MIGHT have been used in ancient burials. Maybe. This is up for debate because these tools are THREE MILLION YEARS OLD. They pre date homo sapiens and homo erectus. They pre date the ice age. Hell, they pre date the fucking ice caps. We don't think humans were burying their dead as we understand it today, but maybe?? These were made by homo habilis, or the "handyman", so named for their invention of tools.
It makes me feel very small to look at these, like looking up at a starry sky.
here's a thing never fails to make me feel the Feels and think the Thoughts:
it's about technology and human tools and where we are and where we started:
see up there where it says "They pre date homo sapiens and homo erectus"?
For MOST of the time humans have been using stone tools, the design and shape of those tools changed more slowly than the shape of our skeleton has changed.
from about 2.9 million years to about 1.7 million years ago, our tools remained the same while we went from Homo Habilis (or a similar realative) to Homo Erectus (or a similar relative) all while our stone tools remained basically the same as the images above, in the Oldowan style
and then, after about a million years of that, we had a technological revolution and the world moved on to the Acheulean stone tools, which looked like this
that classic flaked tear-drop shape. And then those stayed essentially the same for another million years while our bones took us from Homo Erectus through growth with our sister species Neanderthal and Denisovan all the way to Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
Our tools used to evolve slower than our bones. For a couple million years.
only in the last few generations have our tools and technology evolved so crazy fast
My grandmother was born when there were still horses in the streets. Her first job they washed the cast iron cookware in the creek out behind the restaurant. She went from radio and telephone switchboards being high tech, to watching literal robots in space. Right around the time she died they were developing a prototype car that you could wear a hat full of sensors and control things like the windshield wipers by thinking about it.
not kidding
think about that, from horses in the streets to a car you can drive with your thoughts.
even just a couple hundred years ago, people were living a life that was in many ways not terribly different from how it has always been, with most people, for example, still heating their water and doing their cooking over an open fire in their home.
And these last few generations have gone from inventing TV to investigating pieces of atoms and exploring space and also btw inventing the EATR robot which is basically a robot that can eat plants (and animals, specifically "chicken fat") as fuel to power itself
Again not kidding, wish i was, how long do you think it will be before somebody downloads something like grok onto an EATR? like whaaaaat are we doing omg
anyway, the point is, technology used to be slow, giving us many generations to get used to it and oversee changes to it. For 3 million years our technology has had slow advances, and then in just the last few hundred years technological development went berserk.
Every tool and technology and scientific breakthrough that has been invented or discovered in the last one thousand years ... has happened in just 0.03% of the time since we started making stone tools.
Now? Now while we are alive you and me right now, is a truly unprecedented time in human existence. All this new discovery and new tech that keeps happening is not normal. Like most things, it is both great and awful, but it certainly isn't what we've been doing.
Humanity is no longer changing faster than our tools -- our tools are changing so fast they are starting to be the thing that is changing us.
"Humanity is no longer changing faster than our tools -- our tools are changing so fast they are starting to be the thing that is changing us."
jud representing the church to blanc triggering his religious trauma and blanc representing the cops/law to jud triggering his hinted-at ex convict trauma and both of them a little wary around one another because jud sounds too much like a priest and blanc sounds too much like a cop but then both of them slowly proving to each other that they have purposefully joined these flawed systems to try and reform them in as drastic ways as they can from the inside and bc they genuinely want to help as many disenfranchised people as they can and they gain so much respect for each other through this revelation and by challenging each other not to get carried away by the system of it all but to remember their humanity and irreverence that they end up learning how the other one operates on a level few other people get to glimpse... i love it when characters fit like puzzle pieces
hes not a cop himself but as a detective that specializes in murders specifically hes working w cops and crowding jud with cops and he keeps trying to stoke jud's outrage talking about "the enemy" and the "packs of wolves"!! so he v much does represent the justice system even though he (mostly) uses it wisely and has the freedom to operate outside it thats why he didnt want jud to know who he was for as long as possible in the first place. the key point of the movie is that he needed to calm it down w the witch hunts a little and show compassion even for the culprit aka to stop thinking like a cop
Brotherhood of The Orb
"Racialised" is much better than PoC but I've been leaning a lot on the concept of racial markedness. Because that allows us to make statements like "the name Jamal is racially marked in USA". Rather than saying something like "Jamal is a PoC name", a nonsense statement, saying it's racially marked in USA allows us to contrast with societies like Albania or the Arab countries where the name Jamal is ordinary, thus unmarked.
It's a concept I've kind of imported from linguistic analysis; saying a speech pattern is more or less marked does not really allow us to avoid the subject of who's doing the marking. A statement like "womens' speech is more marked in Lakota" necessitates that we understand that it's the Lakota who are marking womens' speech. A foreigner can't tell the difference and probably doesn't understand why it would thus be weird to see a man using speech patterns associated with women, in the same way an Albanian wouldn't understand why USA people would think Jamal is a Black name.
You! You get it. In my view, if someone is saying "racialised" or "racially marked" without acknowledgement of context, they are doing it in a way that is gramatically incorrect.
the annoying thing about weightlifting is that you have to lift weights that are a little too heavy for you if you want to get stronger. and you have to push yourself outside of your comfort zone in order to keep building muscle. fucked up.
thank god this same principle doesnt apply to any other skill you want to improve at! that would really suck.