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@res-novae
Following the brutal July 8th police murder of 38 year old Wet’suwet’en man, Jared Lowndes, a number of actions were held this past week in his memory and in outrage of his killing. Jared was shot six times and killed outside of a Tim Hortons in Campbell River, BC after RCMP boxed his car in and set a police dog on him inside his car. The police dog was killed as Jared tried to protect himself and his own dog from its attacks. Following Jared’s murder the RCMP organized a public procession and funeral for the police dog which Jared’s family say has fueled racism in the community. Media coverage has consistently focused on the death of the dog rather than Jared’s murder.
Jared’s murder is the third time in recent months that police dogs, who have been injured or killed while attacking Indigenous people, have been the focus of more public mourning than the humans murdered by the police. In late June, Lionel Ernest Grey, from the Gift Lake Metis Settlement, was killed by RCMP. A 28 year old man was killed by police near Cold Lake, Alberta on June 20th. In both cases, the police dogs injured or killed during the killings were the focus of the media surrounding the incidents.
In Campbell River, a rolling memorial was held on July 20. Mourners, including Jared’s mother, carried his ashes to multiple locations in the city including the Campbell River RCMP detachment. While there, Jared’s mother expressed her fury at the police for killing her son. As reported by the National Observer, Jared’s mother told the RCMP sent to speak to her during the memorial: “You don’t understand! You were created to control and kill Indians and you have not stopped.”
The memorial for Jared set up outside the Tim Hortons where he was killed has been destroyed multiple times.
- Canadian Tire Fire #7
“If my mother tongue is shaking the foundations of your state, it probably means that you built your state on my land.”
— Musa Anter, a Kurdish writer who was assassinated by the Turkish government in 1992. (via fuckyeahdialectics)
“The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth.”
— Marx - Human Requirements 1844
what is it about hiking that just makes you feel like the happiest you’ve ever been, like wow i love my body i love my friends, i love trees and grass and little crayfish hiding under rocks in the river. wow dude i just love hiking.
not to be native on main but like, it’s everyone’s responsibility to steward the land they’re on. like you’re required. if you’re in america the people who own the land aren’t around to steward it so pick up the slack. learn how people cultivated and cared for the land you’re on. if you’re an animist there’s really no excuse. man, i get disabilities and stuff (i’m disabled myself) but you gotta do something. get some native grasses and toss em into your yard. mow your grass a little higher. leave a little strip that’s completely untouched so native wildlife can take residence there. cultivate a relationship with the land you’re on, not only for magical reasons (and you WILL get magical benefits) but also because the earth is deserving of love and respect in itself.
i have a question for everyone reblogging this. did this actually encourage you to get involved with your enviroment?
while the people saying that this post did encourage them is heartening, the amount of people saying ‘no, i dont own my yard’ is… depressing. so i’ll say it again:
you don’t need to own your yard. you don’t need to own land. that isnt all there is to the land around you. the land around you is your town, your county, your state, your country–when i say ‘care for the land around you’ i do not mean ‘tend your lawn’ i mean ‘research the tribe whose land you are on, research your specific ecoregion, research native species and learn how to make a space for them, pick up trash, pick up litter, get involved with your community, if there is wilderness near you go out and tend it, learn the names of the plants there, learn the language of the tribe, buy native seeds and just throw them in empty lots, learn how to make habitats for native insects and just make them places, you don’t have to do this in the area immediately around you you can do it anywhere just do it please do it just care and encourage others to care’
stop being afraid to do things that are ‘unconventional’ or ‘against the rules.’ legality is not morality and no one is going to give a shit if you do this bare minimum shit anyway. this is the bare minimum. just caring.
Adding onto this an easy, not often thought of and generally socially and legally acceptable thing to do is remove invasive species. Obv you cant chop down a tree in a city park. But you can rip out small invasives and I guarantee nobody will give you shit (esp if you explain and dont take out things like daffodils which while invasive in my location are too beloved). If a city worker sees you they will thank you as its a sisyphean fucking task and they are constantly recruiting for the job or have given up. If removing invasives at whim (which once you can ID then you will see everywhere) isnt your style look into whose managing green spaces and parks where you live (esp the more "natural" less manicured ones). Most will have various teams of citizen volunteers ripping the fuck out of invasive species. Theyre a huge issue and a never ending task and you can easily find weekly meets to rip out invasives. Which if youre physically able is a good workout , is alot of fun, and is good for the environment!
People horrifically fucking up facts about evolution and genetics too support their stupid beliefs or to seem smart and “rational” is probably one of my big pet peeves
Yeah. An enormous number of racists, misogynists, homophobes and transphobes I’ve met eventually whip out something about evolutionary biology and they never, ever, ever, ever have the slightest shadow of even a half-right idea what any of it means or ever cite a claim ever actually made by a scientific study.
Here’s a quick handy reference list or anyone who isn’t sure:
Homosexuality does exist in almost all social species.
“Alpha males” are not a real phenomenon and in fact the most aggressive males tend to be the least reproductively successful.
“Survival of the fittest” simply means that the success of a species hinges on how well it “fits” its environment. It does not mean that stronger or smarter individuals are supposed to succeed. Those things can even be a detriment in nature by wasting too many resources.
“Race” is not a biological concept. Someone who looks different from you has the same human genes, just a different grab-bag of dominant traits.
Evolution is not a march towards higher complexity, more intelligence or even more adaptability. It’s just a fluctuation of characteristics dictated by environmental pressures and mutation. A slime mold isn’t “less evolved” than a hawk, just adapted for success under different parameters.
People didn’t evolve “from apes.” It’s more complicated than that. We are a category of ape, sharing a common ancestor with the other apes.
No human on Earth is “closer” to an evolutionary ancestor than any other. We all descended from the same one.
Neanderthals were also a “sibling” species of ours. We didn’t evolve from them.
Some of us did, however, cross-breed with Neandethal man. It is exclusively non-African races, such as white people, who still carry hybrid human/Neanderthal genes. Whoops, sorry “white purity” skinheads, you’re actually mixed with a whole other species.
Some more stuff!
Humans are actually more genetically homogeneous than most people suspect. This is possibly due to a population bottleneck at some point in our evolutionary past. Two chimpanzees from different sides of a jungle are likely more genetically different to each other than any two human beings in the world.
Our big brains may help us use tools, but what was really principal in their development was the need for empathy, communication, and cooperation.
Humans. Are. Social. So social it drove an incredibly energetically costly increase in our brain size. Don’t believe anyone who says its our nature to fight “every man for themself.” We’re humans, not bears. We fight for each other.
And we always have. Fossil remains are found of ancient humans who bore signs of crucial mobility impairments that lived to notable ages. Some even have sticks or other mobility aids – community care and support is our way. We don’t cast off those with impairments, we stand by them.
Human sexual dimorphism is on a decreasing trend. Our ancestors had greater difference in canine size and overall size. Our dimorphism gap has gotten smaller.
Occam’s razor is the principal that whatever is the simplest explanation is probably the most likely one. Don’t believe someone who says the reason we evolved bipedalism is so that males could carry gifts to females to woo them. Yes, this is a real ‘theory’ on how bipedalism evolved.
Skin tone is an adaptation of UV levels vs vitamin D levels. Both come from the sun. UV is harmful, so where sun is plentiful populations develop a darker skin tone for more protection. The skin needs sun to create vitamin D, so where sun is scarce, the skin tone lightens to allow more sun in. This is literally all it is.
Final thing: No one’s mind is really equipped to fully understand how long a billion years is, or a million, or even tens of thousands of years. Evolution takes place over a loooong time. Its very, very, slow, slower than we can really comprehend. We can’t “stand in the way” of natural selection by caring for our ill. We don’t need to “help” evolution in any way. It inevitably happens, but not on any sort of timescale we could possibly affect, so don’t fall for anyone that tells you not to “stand in the way” of natural selection. That’s fascism, and its utterly pseudo-scientific.
Not to mention natural selection doesn’t have a “will” that you can stand in the way of. Its not an entity with wants, its a millions-year long process. And its impossible for our decisions to “stand in its way.” Our decisions to care for one another are what brought our species where it is, plain and simple.
I submit to you that the most iconic feature of any animal is either unlikely or impossible to fossilize.
If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.
If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we'd never come up with those ears.
If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn't know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.
We wouldn't know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.
My point here is that we don't know anything about dinosaurs. If we saw one we would not recognize it. As my evidence I submit the above, along with the fact that it took us two centuries to realize they'd been all around us the whole time.
So that people don’t need to go through the notes:
- We have fossils of spider webs
- Paleontologists have reconstructed the larynx (voice box) of extinct animals and we have a pretty good idea what vocalizations they were capable of
- Fossilized pigments have been found in a variety of taxa
- Soft tissues fossilize more often than you think; we have skin impressions for like 90% of Tyrannosaurus rex’s full body (shoulder blades and neck are the only bits missing)
If pop culture is your only window into extinct animals, then you do not remotely understand how much we know.
We know the entire lifecycle of a tyrannosaurus. We know from the sheer amount of remains we have, from every stange.
We know roughly how they sounded (as the person above me said).
We know they had remarkable vision.
We know they had the second. strongest sense of smell in history.
We know from their bones that they grew to a certain size and stayed there until about 14 or so, then absolutely ballooned up to their adult size in about three or four years.
We know they likely lived in family groups, because we have bones with certainly fatal injuries for a solitary animal (broken legs and such) that are completely healed.
We know exactly how other dinosaurs look, down to colors and patterns, because bones are not the only information that is preserved.
The Sinosauropteryx is one such dinosaur. Because pigmentation molecules were preserved in the feather impressions, we know it's colors, and it's tail rings (which one would argue would be it's "iconic feature."
(Art credit Julio Lacerda)
Microraptor is another! We know from feather impressions that it had four wings. We know from pigmentation that it was an iredecent black, like a raven.
(Art credit Vitor Silva)
This is not limited to dinosaurs, or feathers. We've found pigmentation in scales and skin. We've completely reconstructed two extinct penguins, colors and all. We've figured out the colors of some non-avian and non-feathered dinosaurs. We can identify evidence of feathers existing on animals without feather impressions.
We have feathered dinosaurs preserved in amber.
We can defer likely behavioral patterns through adaptations we see in bones, and from the environments they were found in. We can see how certain movements evolved through musculature attachments (yes, how muscles attached is often preserved). We know avian flight likely evolved by "accident" by the way early raptorforms moved their arms to strike at their prey.
We also understand behavior in extant animals and can easily speculate likely behaviors in extinct animals. (A predator running for it's life is not going to exhibit hunting behaviors)
We learn and understand way more from "rocks" than paleontologists are given credit for. And if you watch a movie like Jurassic World, which has no interest in portraying anything with any sort of accuracy, and your take away is "We can't possibly know anything about these animals," then you don't understand science.
As for shrinkwrapped reconstructions, we understand how muscles attach, and how fat works. Artists who lean into shrinkwrapping are are not generally concerned with scientific accuracy, or biology. They're only concerned with Awesombro.
If true paleoartists tried to reconstruct a hippo, while they naturally would not get every bit correct, it would certainly look like a real animal, and not that alien monster that tumblr is so fond of using as "proof" that paleontologists don't know anything (an art piece that itself was extreme and satirical, and a condemnation of the particular subset of paleoartists I mentioned earlier)
Every time paleoblr tries to show you how extinct animals actually looked, all we get is a chorus of "thanks i hate it" and "stop ruining dinosaurs!"
Loosing my shit at the knowledge that T-rexes nursed their loved ones back to health
@lusus--naturae
Nearly 600 water protectors have been arrested during ongoing protests in Minnesota against the construction of the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands pipeline at the Shell River, which the partially completed pipeline is set to cross in five places. On Monday, authorities arrested Indigenous leader Winona LaDuke and at least six others. She was just released from jail yesterday and joins us after three nights in jail.
Winona LaDuke: Enbridge Line 3 is owned by the Enbridge Corporation, the Canadian multinational that also owns the pipe under the streets of Mackinac. It’s a really risky Canadian corporation, 225 subsidiaries with all the money kept in Canada, and they’re shoving this pipeline down our throat. About a month ago, the Minnesota [Department of Natural Resources], which is probably the most corrupt agency in the state of Minnesota, allocated 5 billion gallons of water to Enbridge in the middle of a drought.
The Intercept reported Thursday that Minnesota police expected the Line 3 pipeline to help boost their budget to fund new weapons. The article reveals that a few weeks before Line 3 was approved for construction, Aitkin County Sherriff’s Deputy Aaron Cook bought a new assault rifle that cost $725. In a November 2020 email, Cook wrote to the gun seller: “Our budget took a hit last week, so that’s all we will be ordering for now. I am hoping the pipeline will give us an extra boost to next year’s budget, which should make it easy for me to propose an upgrade/trade to your rifles rather than a rebuild of our 8 Bushmasters,” referencing another assault rifle.
WL: They’ve been bankrolling the northern police departments. Some of the police departments like Aitkin County was saddened by Covid because they had to let people out of prison or out of jail there and [they were] losing money on their budgets and that dysfunctional system. At this point, Enbridge has been financing all these northern police departments and so you’re seeing 40 different squads show up from counties throughout the state to repress water protectors who are just trying to protect the water in northern Minnesota and arrest hundreds of us. It’s a civil crisis when a Canadian multinational controls your police force.
@allthecanadianpolitics
i must say. i am very worried about the future of data and surviellance and technology and an emergent fascist movement. and it may not be in the near future necessarily but that is what gives me more concern, because when it happens we will find it hard to escape. i think people’s image of nazi germany as like a place where suddenly theres fascism and you have to have the right citizenship and identification ignores that it was a product of systems of classification of nationality citizenship personhood etc. which was created out of the modernization project and did not start in 1933 but in the weimar era and the beginning of modernity and is deeply connected to the creation of modern citizenship and the modern nation state. likewise we are seeing forms of data collection and surveillance that arent directly affecting us yet only because the state or the companies that have our information havent decided to do anything with it other than give targeted instagram ads. but the data itself is there
this is the type of thing i was thinking about when i made this post last year. ofc im far from the first person to say this but we should expect to see more of this in the coming years (article from 7/21/21)
A Substack publication used location data from Grindr to out a priest without their consent.
…The news starkly demonstrates not only the inherent power of location data, but how the chance to wield that power has trickled down from corporations and intelligence agencies to essentially any sort of disgruntled, unscrupulous, or dangerous individual. A growing market of data brokers that collect and sell data from countless apps has made it so that anyone with a bit of cash and effort can figure out which phone in a so-called anonymized dataset belongs to a target, and abuse that information. […]
In short, The Pillar says that Msgr. Jeffrey Burrill, who was the general secretary of the U.S. bishops’ conference (USCCB) before his resignation, visited gay bars and other locations while using gay dating app Grindr. […]
The data itself didn’t contain each mobile phone user’s real name, but The Pillar and its partner were able to pinpoint which device belonged to Burill by observing one that appeared at the USCCB staff residence and headquarters, locations of meetings that he was in, as well as his family lake house and an apartment that has him listed as a resident. In other words, they managed to, as experts have long said is easy to do, unmask this specific person and their movements across time from an supposedly anonymous dataset. […]
In January the Norwegian Data Protection Authority fined Grindr $11.7 million for providing its users’ data to third parties, including their precise location data. Almost prophetically, Norwegian authorities said at the time that Grindr users could be targeted with this sort of information in countries where homosexuality is illegal. […]
Motherboard has also shown how wide spanning the customer base for this sort of location data is, with the U.S. military and various law enforcement agencies also purchasing it, skirting the need to obtain a warrant. And although the data was based on that generated by telecom networks and not apps, we also previously spoke to Ruth Johnson, a woman who was stalked and harassed by someone who gained access to her phone’s location. Johnson said T-Mobile put her “life in danger.”
“working to preserve ecosystems and native biodiversity” and “preparing ourselves for a future in which ecosystems are irrevocably altered by climate change and invasive species” are things that can and must go hand in hand
talking about species that are “useful to humans”—as opposed to species that are not—is like calling a steering wheel “useful to driving” because it’s the part of the car you personally see and interact with most
Nature education is a complete disaster in so many ways—it’s good at getting people to care about “nature” in an individual, hands-on way, but ecologically it’s a failure.
It’s easy to convince people that opossums and butterflies and snakes are cool. You can get an extreme arachnophobe cooing over jumping spiders or gently shutting tarantulas out of the house in a matter of months—don’t get me wrong, it’s hard work compared to selling them on kitten, but living things have innate charisma.
But how do you sell them on systems? On relationship webs? On largely invisible, interconnected, interdependent cycles that you can’t meaningfully display in a terrarium or on a food web poster? Ecology is like an enormous game of non-Euclidean, fourth-dimensional Jenga in which some of the pieces have gone missing and others have been replaced with tubes of chapstick or sticks of half-melted butter.
But you have to, because inconvenient scientists are ignored and widespred ecological ignorance is all the permission slip that corporate and political actors need to keep poking at the unholy geometry of that Jenga tower.
“A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (via wordswilling)
It's time we decolonize the Cascadian volcanoes
If we can say Denali instead of Mt. McKinley then we can say Lawetlat'la instead of Mt. St Helens. The mountain is named Tahoma, not Rainier. Naming a mountain after Jefferson doesn't erase its true name of Seekseekqua.
One name tells of the thousand years indigenous history and culture of the tribes who live there. The other name tells me nothing but colonialism.
Mt. Baker: Kulshan
Glacier Peak: Dahkobed
Mt. Rainier: Tahoma
Mt. St. Helens: Lawetlat'la
Mt. Adams: Klickitat
Mt. Hood: Wy'east
Mt. Jefferson: Seekseekqua
Three Sisters: Klah Klahne
BRB, adding "look up the indigenous names of Colorado mountains" to my to do list, because you're 100% right.
Great Idea! Does anyone have a rec for a pronunciation guide? I've got reading disorders and I would like to say these right.
It'll be a bit before I find time to research the Colorado ones, but I'll be sure to tag you!
Last time I attempted to do this research, I discovered that since Colorado was largely occupied by nomadic groups, a lot of the mountains had more than one name.
But, as a cool starting point, I did find this article about geotagging places with indigenous names.
Len Necefer is using social media to give places back their indigenous names.
What a fantastic resource! Thank you for sharing.
Amazon destroying millions of items of unsold stock in one of its UK warehouses every year, ITV News investigation finds; ITV National News
Undercover filming from inside Amazon's Dunfermline warehouse reveals the sheer scale of the waste: Smart TVs, laptops, drones, hairdryers, top of the range headphones, computer drives, books galore, thousands of sealed face masks – all sorted into boxes marked “destroy”.
Products that were never sold, or returned by a customer. Almost all could have been redistributed to charities or those in need. Instead, they are thrown into vast bins, carried away by lorries (which we tracked), and dumped at either recycling centres or, worse, a landfill site.
An ex-employee, who asked for anonymity, told us: "From a Friday to a Friday our target was to generally destroy 130,000 items a week."
I used to gasp. There's no rhyme or reason to what gets destroyed: Dyson fans, Hoovers, the occasional MacBook and iPad; the other day, 20,000 Covid (face) masks still in their wrappers.
RATIONAL ECONOMIC SYSTEM
i’ve stopped trash talking comic sans after learning the font is actually one of the only dyslexia-friendly fonts that come standard with most computers and i advocate for others doing the same
In the event that you would like to continue hating Comic Sans, other dyslexia-friendly alternatives include Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, Century Gothic and Trebuchet.
thank
Random fact: Verdana is one of the few fonts which was specifically designed to be as easy to read as possible, even at smaller type sizes. It was designed this way for use on screen, but the same principles apply in print too. This is part of why some Universities use Verdana as their default font for documents.
“In the event that you would like to continue hating Comic Sans” is one of the best things I’ve ever read on this website
@pedeka @lunariagold @darklittlestories
I’ll take Comic Sans over Arial any day.
Century Gothic and Trebuchet are both quite handsome typefaces.
I’m partial to Century Gothic as well. It’s serif, but not boring.
There’s also a dyslexic font designed especially for dyslexic people to read.
You can install on your tablets, laptops and browers etc, so not only can you change things like documents into it, you can change websites into that font as well!
I’m sure you’re bright enough to do a google search, but since I’m dumb enough to forget to post a link, here it is. Better late than never
https://www.dyslexiefont.com/en/dyslexie-font/
I default to arial for this reason, but I will now be defaulting to verdana or dyslexie. nice.
I don’t think I have dyslexia but that dyslexie font was the easiest fucking thing to read ever. Books should be written in that shit.
ALSO!!!
For computer reading, when you mix up lines of text, there’s a web browser app called Beeline Reader. It looks like this
The colors are also customizable, to an extent and while I don’t have dyslexia, I have adhd which makes reading large amounts of text harder and this helps A LOT.
This is dope. I freaking love how much more accessible this information is nowadays.