Butterflies:
“For the first time, scientists have found a way to observe microscopic scales on butterfly wings as they arrange themselves to form the radiant colors we all know and love. #pollinators”
“A new technique reveals how butterfly wings grow into shimmery wonders
Butterfly wing scales could be the inspiration for new materials.”
*
“Dollar Tree raises price point to $1.25, citing inflation.
Dollar Tree made $1,230,000,000 in profits this year, gave its CEO $10,767,8383 and pays workers as little as $8.32 an hour. Over 7,400 Dollar Tree employees are forced to rely on food stamps and Medicaid subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. Cite the damn corporate greed.
Common Ringlet (Coenonympha tullia)
Ice Age National Scientific Reserve Unit, Wisconsin, USA
2019-06-09 _F2A5138aaa2p
“Being an American means reckoning with a history fraught with violence and injustice. Ignoring that reality in favor of mythology is not only wrong but also dangerous. The dark chapters of American History have just as much to teach us, if not more, than the glorious ones, and often the two are intertwined.” Ken Burns
*
Ben Karimi:
How come Biden mandates vaccinations right and left but can not mandate a living wage, M4A, no stock buyback byCEO’s or politicians,etc etc etc?!
I bet with the new variant there’ll be a new vax & tn & tn of $ in pockets of pharmaceuticals.
*
“Netflix’s ‘Maid’ is a Smart and Subtle Indictment of Neoliberalism”
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Big Ag is trying to put a gag order on reporting on their operations – the same operations that are responsible for a disproportionate number of zoonotic viruses:
“Stop Ag-Gag laws!
These unconstitutional laws are deliberate attempts to hide animal cruelty, food safety, workers’ rights, and environmental violations from the American public. Voice your opposition to Ag-Gag laws by signing the petition.”
*
New Book: “Rich People Things”
“On the show this week, Chris Hedges discussed the peculiar pathology of the rich and our oligarchic state with Chris Lehmann, editor-at-large for The New Republic.
“The rich are different from us,” F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have remarked to Ernest Hemingway, to which Hemingway allegedly replied, “Yes, they have more money.” The exchange, although it never took place, sums up a wisdom Fitzgerald had that eluded Hemingway. The rich are different. The cocoon of wealth and privilege permits the rich to turn those around them into compliant workers, hangers-on, servants, flatterers, and sycophants. Wealth breeds, as Fitzgerald illustrated in “The Great Gatsby” and his short story “The Rich Boy,” a class of people for whom human beings are disposable commodities. Colleagues, associates, employees, kitchen staff, servants, gardeners, tutors, personal trainers, even friends and family, bend to the whims of the wealthy or disappear. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy,” Fitzgerald wrote of the wealthy couple at the center of Gatsby’s life. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx all began from the premise there is a natural antagonism between the rich and the masses. “Those who have too much of the goods of fortune, strength, wealth, friends, and the like, are neither willing nor able to submit to authority,” Aristotle wrote in “Politics.” “The evil begins at home; for when they are boys, by reason of the luxury in which they are brought up, they never learn, even at school, the habit of obedience.”
Oligarchs, these philosophers knew, are schooled in the mechanisms of manipulation, subtle and overt repression, and exploitation to protect their wealth and power at our expense. Foremost among their mechanisms of control is the control of ideas. Ruling elites ensure that the established intellectual class is subservient to an ideology — in this case free market capitalism and globalization — that justifies their greed. “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships,” Marx wrote, “the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”
Chris Lehmann, an editor-at-large for The New Republic and The Baffler, and the author of Rich People Things.”
*
Kevin hester
“The bland terminology in this new paper carries not the least amount of urgency that our predicament requires.
Scientific reticence sealed our fate;
We develop a novel airborne method for detecting the most extreme methane emissions from permafrost. We estimate that thermokarst CH4 hotspots constitute less than 0.01% of the pan-Arctic land area, but contribute roughly 4% of annual pan-Arctic wetland emissions. We further hypothesize that Arctic CH4 emissions may grow significantly in the future with anticipated increases in thermokarst across the permafrost landscape. #nasa #above”
“Characterizing methane emission hotspots from thawing permafrost”
*
Sam Carana
Zombie fires burn at -60C outside Oymyakon, the world’s coldest permanently inhabited place. Local photographer captures pillars of smoke rising above the underground peat fire
“Zombie fires burn at -60C outside Oymyakon, the world’s coldest permanently inhabited place”
*
“The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their job is self-conquest; difficult tasks are a privilege to them.” Friedrich Nietzsche
*
GROW A GARDEN:
“They can’t control people who are self dependent and know how to take care of themselves. This is why they don’t teach you the basic skills of survival at school. They teach you how to depend on the system.”
*
Xavier Rosseel
“The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre is home to a diffuse haze of garbage commonly known as the 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch'. Though spread across 1.6 million square kilometers (610,000 square miles) of open ocean, the patch is estimated to contain 79,000 metric tons of plastic waste.
Different ideas have been floated for how to deal with this environmental disaster. Now, scientists are starting to realise that a raft of coastal species, typically strangers to the open ocean, are beginning to colonize this new, plastic habitat.
In a new paper, lead author and marine ecologist Linsey Haram, former postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Centre (SERC), takes stock of the marine species that have decided to call the oceanic 'garbage patch' home.
In their observations, Haram and colleagues note that a shift in the composition of oceanic invertebrate species is underway, with the emergence of an increasing diversity of coastal species that are able to occupy these plastic rafts.
Included in these communities are species of anemone, hydroids, and shrimp-like amphipods. The team calls these new communities neopelagic, neo meaning 'new' and 'pelagic' referring to the open ocean, as opposed to coastal.”
“Plants And Animals Have Started Living on The Great Pacific Garbage Patch”
*
“Republicans simply don’t know how to manage the economy. They’re so busy operating the trickle-down theory, giving the richest corporations the biggest break, that the whole thing goes to hell in a handbasket.” Lyndon B. Johnson
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EPA announces unprecedented$$$&$ investment in nation’s water infrastructure... ...because Democrats gave our water to Wall Street!
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School shootings may or may not be terrorism, but if they are they are U.S. Government\NRA assisted domestic terrorism
*
“Studies find correlation between good oral health and lower risk of severe COVID infection
Wisconsin, with one of the lowest rates of dental care in the country, can expand options by allowing dental therapists to practice”
*
“How to Avoid Tax Legally
Company ‘x’ based in the us, wants to avoid paying tax on their earnings
They do this by setting up (incorporation) company called ‘y’ in the Cayman Islands where there is zero tax.
Company y cleverly owns the intellectual property (IP)
X makes $50B after expenses but they don’t want to pay the tax on their profit.
Since Y is still owned for licensing the IP out. X must now pay Y whatever Y is owed.
Y charges $50B for renting out their IP to X.
Company X’s profit is now$0. Therefore they pay zero tax because you only pay tax on profit.
Company Y’s profit is now $50B and with a zero tax rate in the Cayman Islands, they pay zero tax.
Remember, X and Y are the same company working together, they are just separate entities.
*
Eward Doubell:
“"Sport” hunting is driven, neither by the need for food nor for conservation in a time of the planetary biological collapse, but by money and the desire to inflict harm upon, and cause the death of other sentient beings. It’s not rooted in our deep, instinctive past, as hunters will often claim, but in the relatively recent conquest of foreign lands and the invention of devices that hurl projectiles from a safe distance by cowardly men.
Sport hunting has historically been the preserve of colonial, white males and their weapons are high-powered, precise, and often a product of developments in military technology which they used to subjugate and exploit the indigenous nations of the continents they colonized.”
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"If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals"
~ Albert Einstein
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"Brazilian lawmakers must keep their eyes on the prize. They have drafted a law that would dismantle the pharmaceutical monopolies that are blocking a solution to the pandemic."
“Does Brazil Proposal Hold Key to Ending Big Pharma's Stranglehold on Covid-19 Vaccines?
A proposal for the World Trade Organization to waive intellectual-property rights on pandemic-related pharmaceuticals is still languishing, owing to opposition from rich countries whose companies are reaping monopoly profits. Fortunately, a public-health bill in Brazil points the way to a promising bottom-up solution.”
*
Workers should own means of productions including their work place.
”For over 50 years management has tried to teach workers that they should feel lucky to have a job. For the next 50 years we need to teach management they should feel luck to have our work” Sara Nelson
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“Big Pharma’s Profiteering Led to the Omicron Variant”
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“The Israeli Firm NSO—Makers of Pegasus Spyware—Must Be Banned
And why the Biden administration has taken unprecedented action against a company with such deep ties to the Israeli government.”
*
Wall St banks violate Anti Trust Laws:
“For more than two decades, the general counsels of Wall Street’s megabanks have been meeting together secretly once a year at ritzy hotels and resorts around the world. This would appear to be a clear violation of anti-trust law but Wall Street’s revolving door has compromised the U.S. Department of Justice.”
“Wall Street Has Deployed a Dirty Tricks Playbook Against Whistleblowers for Decades, Now the Secrets Are Spilling Out”
*
“The La Nina has reached peak cooling anomalies in the equatorial Pacific, further solidifying its influence on the Winter season. Official NOAA advisory calls for the La Nina to continue into early Spring 2022, with forecasts showing an increased chance for an El Nino event emerging later next year.”
“ENSO Update: La Nina cooling reaches its peak for the Winter Season, with an El Nino event now increasingly likely for next year”
*
Map: “The map provides a handy base line overview on general geographic distribution of steady natural hazards.”
*
“How a new global carbon market could exaggerate climate progress
The rules approved at the COP26 climate conference include major loopholes, and could spur the creation of questionable carbon credits in other markets.”
Xavier Rosseel
“Inconsistent accounting
Lambert Schneider, research coordinator for international climate policy at the Oeko-Institut in Germany, pointed out another “big loophole” in an analysis earlier month.
The rules allow different countries to use different accounting methods at different times for the carbon credits that are generated and sold, noted Schneider, who was part of the European Union’s team negotiating the carbon market rules. That could also lead to double counting. In one scenario he sketched out, half of the emissions reductions from a set of carbon credits could be claimed by two nations.
The results from either accounting method might balance out over time, more or less, if all nations used the same one all the time. But instead, every country can select the most beneficial method each time they’re reporting progress, likely distorting the overall carbon math.
“It’s a cherry-picking problem,” Schneider says.
*
“New solar and wind projects are undercutting the cheapest of existing coal-fired plants,” the article warns.
“Renewables Likely Cost Less Than Previously Thought, Study Finds”
*
“Phones of at least nine U.S. State Department employees were hacked by an unknown assailant using sophisticated spyware developed by the Israel-based NSO Group, according to four people familiar with the matter.”
“U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware – sources”
*
“Q&A: Can ‘nature-based solutions’ help address climate change?”
Sandy Sunday
“In an in-depth Q&A, Carbon Brief examines the history of the term “nature-based solutions”, debates surrounding their effectiveness and the place they currently hold in countries’ and companies’ climate plans, as well as their position in global climate talks.”
*
“Norway's Oil Boom Is Only Just Beginning”
John lieber
"Norway’s revenues from oil and gas production hit a record high this year and are showing no signs of slowing down
While Norway is a major supporter of clean energies, it is also a firm believer that the energy transition can only be achieved by using the profits from oil and gas production
The future is bright for Norway’s energy giant Equinor, which will be able to take advantage of growing energy demand and play a leading role in the coming energy transition"
*
“They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.” Khalil Gibran
*
“Bait and Switch: Companies Promise Workers Pay Rates In Ads They Don't Deliver On
"They said if they gave me that they would have to give everyone that"”
*
Juan Gonzales:
“How the hell does America tax unemployment benefits and not Jeff Bezos???”
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“No, Opposing Israeli Apartheid Policies is not anti-Semitism, and Most Universities are rejecting IHRA Propaganda Ploy”
“Most universities are rejecting IHRA propaganda ploy:
The #antiSemitism “working definition” shilled by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance has been highly controversial since it was published in 2016 due to its conflation of opposition to Israel and its racist ideology, Zionism, on one hand, with anti-Jewish bigotry, on the other.
The two are very different – indeed diametrically opposed to each other.”
*
“‘NYT’ often cites thinktank on Iran without saying it was founded to promote Israel’s image
It is "uncouth" in mainstream media to say that the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and Republican funder Miriam Adelson are devoted to the pro-Israel cause, Eli Clifton says.”
“"Journalism" in America: Some truth mixed with hidden propaganda
'NYT’ often cites thinktank on Iran without saying it was founded to promote Israel’s image
The New York Times and other media frequently quote experts from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and identify FDD as a hawkish thinktank. But they fail to say what the FDD told the IRS: it was founded to promote Israel’s image in the United States, the investigative journalist Eli Clifton says. He characterized the omission as bordering on “journalistic malpractice.”
In other words, the mainstream media serves a purpose other than informing the public: manipulating their readers to accept propaganda.”
*
“With Kamala Harris looking unelectable, the Democrats are considering the nuclear option”
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“Krystal Ball: How Hillary POISONED Dem Party FOREVER”
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Human Reform Politics \ From Douglas Dunn
December 2, 2021
All of the six Republican-appointed ”justices” are illegitimate. All were either appointed by an illegitimate “president” who did not win the popular vote and only “won” the electoral college by massive cheating and voter suppression, OR lied under oath about sexual violence during their confirmation hearings, OR only got their nominations or confirmations because of illegitimate manipulation of the confirmation process in ways never envisioned by the Founders.
1. Clarence Thomas — committed perjury during confirmation hearings lying about sexual assaults.
2. John Roberts — appointed by an unelected president who took office without getting the most votes and only “won” the Electoral College solely because of cheating and voter suppression in Florida.
3. Samuel Alito — appointed by an unelected president who took office without getting the most votes and solely because of cheating and voter suppression.
4. Neil Gorsuch — appointed by an unelected president who took office without getting the most votes and solely because of cheating via CONspiracy with Russia and vote suppression in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Also occupies a seat that should have been filled by Obama who was obstructed by racist Mitch McConnell.
5. Brett Kavanaugh — appointed by an unelected president who took office without getting the most votes and only “won” the Electoral College solely because of cheating via CONspiracy with Russia and voter suppression AND committed perjury during confirmation hearings and sexual assaults, including rape.
6. Amy Coney Barrett — appointed by an unelected president who took office without getting the most votes and solely because of cheating and voter suppression AND whose appointment was illegally rushed through in an unprecedented violation of the Senate’s own rules after voting in a presidential election was already under way.
Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh both lied under oath about sexual harassment of women, who they seem to think are their personal playthings. They are hardly the right people to be making judgments about women’s rights.
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