greatmountainfloofsquatch reblogged
luisonte
Si hombre pero que dise tu
greatmountainfloofsquatch reblogged
muoio malissimo
What a funny story...
okay context for the non-italians. long story short: it's pretty much impossible from an engineering perspective. there are very strong and swirly currents that make it not feasible to just build a bridge where the coasts are the closest - it would have to be built in a spot where the distance between the coasts is wider, a little too much for a bridge possibly, but also, like, outside of the cities, which means it would still be quicker for people to step on the ferry than drive all the way to the bridge. the ferry is quick, cheap, also they've introduced sustainable non-polluting boats, so, literally no one in either sicily or calabria wants a useless bridge, even if it could be built safely.
on top of that... it's a seismic area. you really don't want to make engineering experiments there.
governments have tried to figure out a way to build that bridge at least from the 60s, afaik, but engineers have just come to the conclusion that nope.
also: people in sicily and calabria have reason to believe that if a project like that gets given the green light, it will end up fattening the pockets of corrupted politicians and mafia groups.
pretty straightforward right? yeah... NOPE!
the italian right has been waving the proposal of building that bridge for decades. every once in a while, when you think you're free, BAM the right-wing politician genius of the moment comes up with the law proposal to build the bridge. it used to be berlusconi, now berlusconi is dead, recently it's been salvini. they propose to build the bridge, the left says "what the fuck", and the right goes see!! the left doesn't want progress and development for the country!! they want the country to languish and die!!
(in the meanwhile taxpayers' euros go into paying commissions that need to figure out how to build the bridge, ignoring that there's been a billion commissions over almost a century that have all come to the conclusion that nope.)
(also remember what i said about corrupted politicians and mafia groups? well try to guess the reason it's the right-wing parties that keep insisting on building this fucking bridge.)
it's become a total national joke. mention the bridge on the strait to an italian, they'll laugh as they go through the 5 stages of italian political grief.
greatmountainfloofsquatch reblogged
When I was in vet school I went to this one lecture that I will never forget. Various clubs would have different guest lecturers come in to talk about relevant topics and since I was in the Wildlife Disease Association club I naturally attended all the wildlife and conservation discussions. Well on this particular occasion, the speakers started off telling us they had been working on a project involving the conservation of lemurs in Madagascar. Lemurs exist only in Madagascar, and they are in real trouble; they’re considered the most endangered group of mammals on Earth. This team of veterinarians was initially assembled to address threats to lemur health and work on conservation solutions to try and save as many lemur species from extinction as possible. As they explored the most present dangers to lemurs they found that although habitat loss was the primary problem for these vulnerable animals, predation by humans was a significant cause of losses as well. The vets realized it was crucial for the hunting of lemurs by native people to stop, but of course this is not so simple a problem.
The local Malagasy people are dealing with extreme poverty and food insecurity, with nearly half of children under five years old suffering from chronic malnutrition. The local people have always subsisted on hunting wildlife for food, and as Madagascar’s wildlife population declines, the people who rely on so-called bushmeat to survive are struggling more and more. People are literally starving.
Our conservation team thought about this a lot. They had initially intended to focus efforts on education but came to understand that this is not an issue arising from a lack of knowledge. For these people it is a question of survival. It doesn’t matter how many times a foreigner tells you not to eat an animal you’ve hunted your entire life, if your child is starving you are going to do everything in your power to keep your family alive.
So the vets changed course. Rather than focus efforts on simply teaching people about lemurs, they decided to try and use veterinary medicine to reduce the underlying issue of food insecurity. They supposed that if a reliable protein source could be introduced for the people who needed it, the dependence on meat from wildlife would greatly decrease. So they got to work establishing new flocks of chickens in the most at-risk communities, and also initiated an aggressive vaccination program for Newcastle disease (an infectious illness of poultry that is of particular concern in this area). They worked with over 600 households to ensure appropriate husbandry and vaccination for every flock, and soon found these communities were being transformed by the introduction of a steady protein source. Families with a healthy flock of chickens were far less likely to hunt wild animals like lemurs, and fewer kids went hungry. Thats what we call a win-win situation.
This chicken vaccine program became just one small part of an amazing conservation outreach initiative in Madagascar that puts local people at the center of everything they do. Helping these vulnerable communities of people helps similarly vulnerable wildlife, always. If we go into a country guns-blazing with that fire for conservation in our hearts and a plan to save native animals, we simply cannot ignore the humans who live around them. Doing so is counterintuitive to creating an effective plan because whether we recognize it or not, humans and animals are inextricably linked in many ways. A true conservation success story is one that doesn’t leave needy humans in its wake, and that is why I think this particular story has stuck with me for so long.
(Source 1)
(Source 2- cool video exploring this initiative from some folks involved)
(Source 3)
greatmountainfloofsquatch reblogged
greatmountainfloofsquatch reblogged
do you ever tell people you’ll be going to sleep but then you don’t and you have to not do anything noticable online for the sake of it seeming as if you didn’t lie to them
the last time i got sloppy with this @tinynaught Columbo’d me
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Baby has AMAZING rhythm!
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Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.
Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.
(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)
Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.
All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.
I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.
Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.
And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.
Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.
I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.
Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.
No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.
They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.
This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.
In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.
At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.
I think the least we can do is remember them for it.
wow okay i’m crying now
“And even as he watched the rescue unfolding that morning, he would have understood that for the living, everything which could have been done had been done: not a single survivor was lost or injured being brought aboard the Carpathia. For those who had gone down with the Titanic, save for reverencing their memory at the service later that day, there was nothing more that he or anyone could do. Rostron’s duty now was as he always saw it: to the living.”
I looked up a bit about this because the post is so movingly written that when I read it aloud to my husband and mother they both wept like babies, and something else really struck me about this story.
So Carpathia was not a top-end luxury liner. Her reputation was for being Jolly Comfortable - she was very broad in her proportions, and not super-duper fast, and the result was that she didn’t rock so much on the waves and you couldn’t particularly hear/feel the engines. She was solid and dependable, and lots of people liked using her, but she therefore occupied a lesser niche than Titanic or Olympian or whatever - and crucially, as a result of that, she only had one radio operator on board. This means she only had radio ops for a certain window in the day, unlike Titanic, which had 24 hour radio ops.
So on that night, when Titanic went down, Carpathia’s wireless operator - one Harold Cottam - clocked off his shift at midnight, and went to bed. While he was getting ready for bed, though, he left the transmitter on for the hell of it, and therefore picked up a transmission from Cape Race in Newfoundland, the closest transmitting tower sending messages to the ships. They told him that they had a backlog of private traffic for Titanic that wasn’t getting through. So, even though his shift was over, and it was now 11 minutes past bloody midnight, and he just wanted to go to bed, Harold Cottam decided that nonetheless, he’d be helpful, and let the Titanic know they had messages waiting.
And that’s how he received the Titanic’s distress signal. In spite of no longer being on shift to receive it, and therefore in order to send Carpathia galloping to Titanic’s rescue, and thus saving 705 people.
All because Harold Cottam decided one night to be kind.
I dunno. That’s just really stuck with me.
armoured-escort
Cottam also ended up staying awake for something like 48 hours straight trying to send survivors messages and a list of survivors home, but due to Carpathia’s limited radio frequency range and with no other ships to act as a relay, this was rather patchy. However, he tried his damn best to make sure the survivor’s messages got home, and was also bombarded with incoming messages of bribes to spill the details of the disaster to the press.
Rostrum had ordered that no messages to the press be sent out of respect to the survivors, for they would have their privacy destroyed as soon as they reached New York. Cottam respected this order, even under extreme duress of fatigue, stress, and the knowledge that in some cases the bribes were almost three times his annual salary.
He eventually went to bed but not before working with one of the rescued Titanic’s radio operators, Harold Bride, to transmit as many messages as possible. Bride was injured (his feet had been crushed in a lifeboat) and had just passed the body of the second of Titanic’s radio operators aboard (Jack Phillips), so neither of them were really in the best shape to keep working, but they did.
In the face of extreme adversity, both men refused to do anything but their duty (and exceeding their duty) not just because Rostrum had ordered it, but because it was the right thing to do. They could have profited considerably from the disaster and they refused for the dignity of the survivors.
This is hopepunk. This is what we can be, what we are, when instinct takes over. This is what we are when we choose to care about each other. We’re not profit machines or units of production or lone fierce wolves in a bitter wilderness. We are people, and we care about people.
This is human nature. Don’t give up on it.
Hopepunk is best punk.
mother-entropy
this always leaves me sobbing. fuck.
I wrote a post a couple of years ago, wondering why there hadn’t been a documentary or docu-drama about the ‘Carpathia’ rescue run.
There are probably sound reasons why not, one of which is probably that getting yet another ‘Titanic’ project greenlit is far easier - name recognition, pre-sold property, multiple conspiracy theories to play with (all discredited, but when did that stop the “History” Channel?)
Here are a couple of stories about ‘Carpathia’:
As @mylordshesacactus has already said, her boilers and engines were rated for no more than 14 knots and, when she managed 17.5 for the only time in her life it’s said (I hate the phrase but I have to use it) that the Chief Engineer hung his hat over the main pressure gauge so no-one - including himself - could see how far its needle was into the red.
Captain Rostron, a religious man, was seen on several occasions standing privately on the exposed bridge wing with his own hat raised and his mouth moving in silent prayer, and when daylight revealed the extent of the ice-field his ship had passed without harm, he only said “There must have been another Hand on the wheel than mine…”
There’s another problem-of-sorts about a screenplay set aboard ‘Carpathia’ - an astonishing lack of that easy dramatic tool, conflict. Captain Rostron decided he was going to the ‘Titanic’s assistance, and that was that. AFAIK not a single passenger or crewman - not one - questioned the wisdom of his decision either then or afterwards, even when…
…‘Carpathia’ headed at more than full speed, in the dark, through dangerous waters where an iceberg had apparently just sunk an “unsinkable” ship.
It’s easier to write - and sell - a story about pride, arrogance, stupidity, rich against poor and lives lost through hubris, than it is to write one about people who rallied round and did the right thing at the right time, not for reward but because it was the right thing to do.
Here’s Rostron and his officers…
…the ‘Carpathia’ stewards and cabin crew….
…some of her passengers…
…and some of the people they helped.
I will always reblog one of the few posts to GUARANTEE leaving me in an ugly sobbing heartfelt mess.
Godspeed Carpathia and your crew, your memories live on.
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Anonymous asked:
Can't vote for Biden and his vicious and cruel destruction of title ix. Really embarrassing that Dems have mainly left it to the right to try to defend it, and it's not like I can vote for them because they also hate women just in different ways. Shat on by the left, shat on by the right, women are in an awful situation
i'm posting this so we can all deconstruct what a far right psyop ask looks like.
on first read, this looks like someone who wishes they could be confident in voting blue but they're bummed by the democrats in office. targets title ix for their ire but doesn't really explain, perhaps assuming i'm out of touch and will just react instead of doing my due diligence (bad bet: i'm an attorney). uses over the top dramatic language like "vicious." they equate the left and right as being identical and indicates they won't be voting for either, with the implication that i shouldn't either, but goes on to blame the dems specifically for...something.
look at the very specific way they've couched this sentence:
Really embarrassing that Dems have mainly left it to the right to try to defend it,
i'm not meant to fight them on this. i'm meant to be embarrassed to be voting blue in november, i'm meant to blame democrats for abandoning some law, and i'm meant to recognize the right as upholding it.
title ix, if you didn't know, bans sex-based discrimination in schools and education. when someone tells you about democrats destroying title ix, that someone is a TERF.
and TERFs largely have aligned with the conservative hard right. I'll link a few articles at the bottom with detailed explainers, but for right here it's enough to say that TERFs want the far right to win because the far right is voting with them on their single issue, which is the destruction of trans rights and the ouster of trans and gnc women from public spaces. TERFs have marched with the Proud Boys. TERFs have partnered with anti-lgbtq groups to advance their anti-trans agenda. they will throw every other issue under the bus repeatedly if their anti-trans agenda wins.
and, importantly, the far right recognizes that TERFs are a tool they can use to destablize the left. the far right knows that as long as they will align with TERFs on this single issue, which they will because they too want to enforce the gender binary and traditional gender roles, TERFs will vote for and with them regardless of every single other issue. not only that, but the far right knows TERFs are a modern movement that's gained traction in social media spaces over the last several years, and they are relying on TERFs to send asks like this one to infiltrate spaces like tumblr and twitter and tiktok to encourage would-be blue voters not to vote because they want the far right to win.
this is a psyop. this is, whether formalized or not, a psychological operation intended to discourage voting in and among the left.
don't fall prey. vote blue in november.
I like this one because they have this great graph that specifically points out the link between TERFism, the far right, and disinformation attempts like the ask above.
A friend of mine pointed out today an op-ed in a major American newspaper about why the author doesn't vote and you probably shouldn't either.
Voting records are public. The author has voted in the last presidential year AND midterm elections. To the surprise of no one, he is a far right Christian nationalist, and he's trying to get people to the left of him to accept his arguments about not voting, and not vote. This argument won't work on other far-right types: they vote regularly. It will work on people who demand ideological purity or who get bummed out about the slow pace of progress or whatever.
Don't fall for it. Do what they do and vote every. fucking. time.
What do you mean by "voting records are public"? Or rather, what does he mean? Because I know a lot of people aren't registered voters because that could expose their location to the abuser they left, but a lot of people are registered voters who lie to their abuser about how they voted, and as long as they don't contradict themself there's no way to prove they voted otherwise.
I mean that voting records are public. You can go look up if someone voted, if you have enough information about them (their full legal name and the state they live in is often enough). Not WHO they voted for, but whether or not they voted in an election.
This guy wrote an op-ed about the reasons he doesn't vote, trying to convince other people to not vote. He LIED in the op-ed that he isn't a voter: he is. This is provable simply by looking up his voting record.
greatmountainfloofsquatch reblogged
Merlin watching Night Gallery with/on @enemytastemaker and me
HIM FLOOF
greatmountainfloofsquatch reblogged
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all i wanna do is eat nectarines and think about aurora borealis st. elmo’s fire gigantic jets ball lightning green flash earthquake lights and will-o-the-wisps
SPECIAL INTEREST MENTIONED YALL!!!
Look at my jellyfish sprites boy
Sundogs
Asperitas clouds
Glories
Russian Light Pillars
Nacreous Clouds
Mammatus Clouds (tiddy clouds lol)
Morning glory clouds
St. Elmo's Fire
I could go on for HOURS!! Remember that the would around you is much weirder than you know and the only difference between magic and science is we put names to the latter!
Please go on! I love this sort of thing.
greatmountainfloofsquatch reblogged
you dont have to be a parent to understand the horror of walking into a room to discover that the baby crawled out of his crib and onto that pottery wheel you forgot to turn off, and while the baby is spinning around and around, the dog is sitting there all calm, like a person, gently using his paws to fashion the babys soft cartilage head into something a little more modern. it might be the classic tale of bad parenting, but lets see where the dog is going with this
This post is from 2013. It has less than 100 notes. Together we can revive this work of art that tragically ahead of its time. We’re ready for it now
greatmountainfloofsquatch reblogged
Thought this could fit in well here
Ok I don’t mean to be doing this too often but I literally just wrote a paper about this so I thought I would comment! The English translation is The Cursed Woman but the original French is La Femme Damnée. “Femmes Damnées” was the title of a Baudelaire poem from his acclaimed 1857 book Fleurs du mal, which was known, among other things, to be a collection that famously dealt with the subject of lesbians. The poem tells the story of the desires and passionate love between two lesbians: Delphine and Hippolyte. As a result of this poem and of the book as a whole, the terms “fleurs du mal” and “femme damnée” became lesbian monikers of the turn of the century. Though some have deemed the term “damned women” to be accusatory of some moral dissonance, the poem it is derived from is actually quite sympathetic to the condition of lesbian love as it is a love which is unable to fully flourish in that time. Regardless, the translated title of Tassaert’s painting is misleading, as the original French is less accusatory and more identifying. The title is more accurately “the lesbian.”
And she’s doing fine
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national elections so fucked someone's out to become king of the franks
I got a trial subscription to La Dépêche so that I could learn more about this and discovered several additional facts:
- The theft was discovered early in the morning by a priest
- (If a sacred/magical sword must be stolen, early morning priest-discovery is at least suitably dramatic)
- The question of when exactly the sword was taken remains open
- The mystery is compounded by the fact that the thief would have had to scale a cliff to get to the sword
- Who could have done this thing? "La question est sur toutes les lèvres" (everyone wants to know)
- "No," says a section header mournfully, "the sword has NOT been removed for restoration; it has been STOLEN"
- The entire town is emotional about this
HOLY SHIT DURANDAL????
You guys. That's ROLAND'S sword. They're not aiming for the throne they are fiending for BLOOD
Oh, shit. Durandal? Whoever took it is going to try to slay the Tarrasque.
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In honor of his hundredth chocolate creation!
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giving instructions for how to co-exist with Belphegor
it's still an accurate description of him
What a sweet lil skrunkle.