MIND
this obliterated every single negative aspect of my entire life wow
this is so pure and stupid lmaooo
THIS!!!
smegma-factory
Stop telling on yourselves, some of us washed our hands before there was a pandemic
toyotapriuspenisdamage
I licked every doorknob I came across
… . buses and subway cars are being fully cleaned for the first time in years in some places … .movie theaters (( which should not be open )) are sanitising *all* of their seats instead of just the ones kids leave buttery fingerprints on … . mayhaps this isn’t about individual actions but rather corporations & governments cutting corners when it comes to cleanliness because it wasn’t “ cost effective “ .
for real tho, and this is especially true about public food based places??? like WHY would anybody assume op was just talking about washing your own damn hands lmfao
yall telling on yourselves about what kind of grossness yall were perfectly okay with just because you personally washed your hands in the bathroom that day
under 200 cases of the flu were hospitalized in the States so far this year, compared to over 400,000 this time last year. COVID measures, even as imperfect as they are in the States, effectively neutralized the flu
so yes. pre-pandemic society was artificially making everyone sick in ways that were completely preventable, as evident by how many other illnesses have dropped down as a result
This just made me realize that news articles always portray poachers as people from the area who killed them for money. But if they’re not being killed when people can’t travel there, then it’s not anyone from the area doing the killing. Makes me wonder how many of the “poachers” were actually trophy hunters from Europe or the US.
ALL OF THEM
In reality, probably not many of them. If any. The modern narrative of who’s poaching and where animal parts end up is very much entrenched in the pulp novels of the 20s and 30s. Most people think of poachers as either a Percival McLeach/Negaverse Steve Irwin/old white guy with a mustache… or as a poor African. But the reality’s a lot more complex and the media’s bad at picking up on it for a lot of reasons- largely because people hate nuance and don’t understand the difference between illegal poaching (always bad) and legal, regulated trophy hunting (complicated. sometimes bad. sometimes good. depends on the situation, the reality of where conservation dollars are coming from, and whether or not you believe one animal can or cannot be sacrificed for the good of the species.)
So here’s the thing about rhino hunting: it’s perfectly legal IF you have the permits. It’s just expensive. You have to get the permit to hunt and the permit to import back to your home country. Rhinos selected for hunting are old, post-reproductive bulls. They’re not really genetically valuable anymore, and having the ability to sell hunting rights encourages African landowners to keep rhinos on their land. Trophy hunts aren’t figured into the poaching numbers… at all. When they say that poaching has gone up or down, they are not including trophy hunting because those numbers are totalled separately. Trophy hunters have to buy permits, and this is not a financial problem for them. While it’s not completely unheard of (there’s one guy in particular, a South African big game rancher/hunter named Dawie Groenenwald, who did bring in twelve Americans to trophy hunt on his land- read more about that here: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/10/dark-world-of-the-rhino-horn-trade/), that’s not where the real money is. I’m certainly not saying that all trophy hunting is legitimate or even if any of it’s a good idea. What I’m saying is that it’s irrelevant to the poaching numbers.
The people killing these rhinos aren’t taking them as trophies.
They’re selling the horns in Vietnam.
Other Asian countries too, mostly China and anywhere that’s had significant sinicization, but Vietnam’s burgeoning economy and the meteoric rise of an emergent upper-middle business class has meant that it’s where all that rhino horn is going. It’s a status symbol, a way to curry favor with business higher ups (Source: http://www.poachingfacts.com/faces-of-the-poachers/buyers-of-rhino-horn/). This isn’t even a secret. The people who traffic rhino horn say openly where it goes (Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/10/dark-world-of-the-rhino-horn-trade/). They talk about how it gets there, and who does the killing. It’s an enormous industry and immensely valuable. TRAFFIC has been working on this for over a decade now, figuring out who’s killing the rhinos and where the horns are going. Nine years ago, the first big report from TRAFFIC came out on the trade from the African rhino-having countries to Asia. Here’s the link to that: http://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/trafficrhinoreportsummary.pdf
Nat Geo did the numbers again in 2015, in that article I linked above. Things haven’t changed much since then.
The reason poaching went down during covid isn’t that the actual hunters weren’t allowed to travel. (Besides, do you really think that if it was rich white dudes doing the majority of the poaching, it would have slowed down or stopped? Money, dear boy, can get you pretty much anything you want. A chartered flight to Kenya, a private home to stay in… a rhino permit or two…) Rather, the middleman dried up. It’s only profitable to kill a rhino if you can move the parts, and if your middleman isn’t traveling between the rhino countries and the Asian market, well…
And you can probably guess who the middlemen are. Often they’re students. Frequently they’re workers. And until recently, they were mostly Vietnamese or Chinese nationals. Now, TRAFFIC notes that many rhino horn syndicates are using white South Africans due to heightened suspicion. (Source: http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/environment/125451/profiling-ups-risk-for-asian-rhino-horn-mules.html)
And normally, there actually is a lot of traffic between China and Vietnam and the rhino countries. I don’t know if people here are quite aware of the relationship between China and several African countries- particularly Kenya, but there’s been a lot of Asian investment into Africa. In Kenya, you see a lot of Chinese workers coming in, working on development projects, and then going back to China. Something like 20% of African infrastructure projects are funded by China; one out of every three is built by Chinese firms. (source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-07-19/china-s-belt-and-road-leaves-kenya-with-a-railroad-to-nowhere). Most of the part-time labor is local (source: http://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/801581468195561492/pdf/WPS7614.pdf), but not all of it- and the full time labor, while mostly local, is roughly 22% Chinese citizens. There were well over 150,000 Chinese workers in Africa before the pandemic (source: http://www.sais-cari.org/data-chinese-workers-in-africa). You also saw a lot of Vietnamese workers… before the pandemic. Both China and Vietnam called their citizens home pretty quickly. Vietnam in particular. By July 2020, arrangements for most Vietnamese workers in Africa had come through after a good deal of public outcry, and they were back in Vietnam (source: https://saigoneer.com/vietnam-news/19011-stuck-in-guinea-equatorial,-vietnamese-workers-forced-to-work-despite-rampant-covid-19-cases).
No middlemen, no profit. No profit, no poaching. It’s not a triumphant story of white trophy hunters butting out of a place they don’t belong; it’s a much more complicated story of economic oppression of native Kenyans, South Africans, and citizens of other rhino countries and exported Vietnamese and Chinese workers.
Poaching isn’t what it used to be. It’s gotten a lot more complex, and reducing it to something that hasn’t been true since the 1950s-1970s means that we ignore the real problems and direct our energy into something that isn’t happening. It’s like… how when a corporation tells you to take personal responsibility for climate change. This isn’t a single person sneering and shooting a rhino. This is an entire industry that CITES and other NGOs are trying hard to grapple with. The nature of the beast has fundamentally changed. I get that it’s really easy to blame Europe and America for the shit that’s been done to subsaharan Africa’s natural resources. It’s right, too, but… the story of people attempting to extract resources from the continent isn’t over. Ignoring that the market for rhino horn isn’t the trophy industry just makes it easier for that particular black market to go unchecked.
Additional sources and information:
https://www.fws.gov/international/permits/black-rhino-import-permit.html- this oughta give you an idea on what a US import permit entails. If you have the money and time, it’s… really not that hard to hunt a rhino.
I know we’ve already read a lot of “men writing women” crap, but I am absolutely losing my mind at this passage
me: *gets depressed*
my breasts:
my friends stepmom is in agriculture specifically the dairy industry & most of the people entering that profession right now are women and it’s pissing the old men who previously ran said industry right the fuck off lmao
Curious Polar bear (Ursus maritimus) standing upright and looking through porthole into the kitchen of arctic expedition ship M/S Stockholm in Svalbard, Spitsbergen, Norway by Andy Rouse
captain-price-officially
Hahaha that’s great. By the way, this is the picture of him with his head in.
I just want everyone to know your student loans can be canceled instantly by executive order, but Joe Biden doesn’t want to do it.
I should probably expand on this, because it absolutely is true and the only reason it “isn’t that simple” is because politically Democrats decide it’s not. But through the Department of Education he could get rid of all federal student loan debt which is like 90%+ of it. And they could direct them to buy and forgive private debt as well.
It’s not a matter of technical ability or legal authority or something, it’s all there and possible. It’s just politics and they’ve decided that forgiving student loans unilaterally is bad politics.
gustavowasright-deactivated2022
i havent even read the article past this im so happy right now i dont care if its bullshit scientifically THIS IS THE REALITY I AM CLAIMING FOR MYSELF. secretly in my heart as a child marking out "boy" and rewriting "girl" before "and dog," and marking out "man's" and writing 'woman's" best friend, I KNEW THIS...
gustavowasright-deactivated2022
okah im reading it now... there are tears in my eyes
1980: dolly parton writes 9 to 5 as a condemnation of working culture and specifically of the gender pay gap
2021: dolly parton gets paid by a private company to rewrite 9 to 5 to be about overworking yourself past even what is asked of you by your job and commodifying your free time into a "side hustle", all for the purpose of a fucking superbowl commercial
comrade jpc said it best (coincidentally this tweet is also how i found out about it)
"Malone highlighted that, as a black student, he felt alienated with the way clinical skills is currently being taught due to the lack of discussion around clinical signs on darker skin.
It was agreed that this was a very important issue and an essential part of decolonizing the curriculum. The trio have designed a booklet, which will be available shortly, to raise awareness of how symptoms and signs can present differently on darker skin as well as highlighting the different language that needs to be used in descriptors.
Malone explains, “The aim of this booklet is to educate students and essential allied health care professionals on the importance of recognising that certain clinical signs do not present the same on darker skin. This is something which is not commonly practiced in medical textbooks as there is a ‘white skin bias’. It is important that we as future healthcare professionals are aware of these differences so that we don’t compromise our care for certain groups.
“The booklet addresses many issues that have been further exacerbated during the Covid-19 pandemic, such as families being asked if potential Covid patients are ‘pale’ or if their lips ‘turned blue’. These are not useful descriptors for a black patient and, as a result, their care is compromised from the first point of contact. It is essential we begin to educate others so they are aware of such differences and the power of the clinical language we currently use. We will be hosting a training session for clinical skills peer tutors which will take place in July 2020.
“Multiple conversations are now taking place around what can be done to tackle health disparities in the UK and we would love for St George’s to be a part of that growing conversation. Recently there was a petition calling for teaching clinical skills on black and brown skins that now has over 125,000 signatures. The petition, Covid-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement all illustrate there is an urgent need for change.”"
To go to the booklet: https://www.blackandbrownskin.co.uk/mindthegap
For the article:
ladies invented your favorite science fiction subgenres
Margaret Cavendish - Mary Shelley - Emma Orczy - Catherine Lucille Moore
mamia-mantra
need more WOC on this board
You’re right!
Pauline Hopkins - Begum Rokeya - Octavia E. Butler
in other words, ladies invented science fiction, period.
Anonymous asked:
Please tell me more about the poodles running the Iditarod I'm begging you
In the 1970′s, John Suter was stationed in Alaska while in the United States Army. During his time there he witnessed a pet Miniature Poodle running alongside a snowmobile. Taken with the dog’s athleticism he became inspired. Poodles could make great sled dogs.
John returned from Alaska to his native California and began to acquire Standard Poodles. He shipped them north to Alaska and his project began. The poodles did not have a natural instinct to pull, but they were versatile and athletic. To compensate for their lack of instinct, John raised his puppies with Alaskan Huskies. After a few generations he had bred mushing specific Poodles that enjoyed pulling. John explained the difference between the mushing Poodles and the Alaskan Huskies as such: If you fall off the sled, huskies will keep running. The poodles will do a U-turn and come pick you up.
In 1988 John ran his first Iditarod with the poodles and didn’t do half bad (finishing in the middle-low end of the pack). He would run them again in 1989, 1990 and 1991. You can see his Iditarod standings, times and winnings HERE. This was also during the time in dog sledding where Susan Butcher was crushing the competition. People often joked that “Women win the Iditarod and men run poodles.”
The poodles fared pretty well during their races, John kept their coats long to protect them from the elements, but their feet had serious issues with sticking that were difficult to deal with. John often had to resort to spraying them with Pam. Because of the impact the weather had on the dogs, the Iditarod no longer allows non-northern breeds in the race. A controversial choice, considering that many Alaskan Huskies have short coats and pedigrees that include Salukis and pointers.
By the early 90s running the poodles had become too expensive for John. He had liquidated his retirement, gotten a second mortgage on his house and gone into a lot of credit card debt. Running Iditarod is expensive and John had only ever won a total of $2,000. John retired from dog sledding and let the poodles that remained from his project live out their lives. His daughter still runs sled dogs, although her team is made of Alaskan Huskies.
So the lesson is: don’t let breed stop you and also...poodles can do anything.
pirozhenka-deactivated20210926
WHAT’S GOING ON IN RUSSIA RIGHT NOW
Some of you might’ve heard about the situation with the government vs opposition that we’re dealing with right now, but I’m gonna give a brief explanation, how it started / how it’s going so to say.
In August 2020 Alexey Navalny, one of the leaders of the russian opposition, was poisoned with a nerve agent “Novichok”, which was a clear murder attempt. He was transported to Germany to get proper care and over there, while recovering, he and his team had a series of investigations of his murder attempt and basically they proved that it was all organised by the government / FSB (Federal Security Service of Russia / P*tin. He’s posted videos about his investigation, here’s the one of him exposing the whole killer team. He also made another video where he undercover called one of the killers and that dude basically confirmed it all, you can watch it here, english subtitles provided on both videos. I know it all feels like some crazy tv show, trust me i’m still speechless.
Anyway, last week he announced that he’s ready to go back home to Russia. Thousands of people came to the airport to show their support, but the bunker grandpa (our joke of a president) was not happy with that and police was everywhere at that airport taking people for doing nothing but standing there. Right when the plane was about to land, they changed the airports (*pretends to be shocked*). They landed and at the customs Alexey was detained by police. The reasons: something that they imagined themselves but also Alexey has a probation and he wasn’t checking at the Moscow police station twice a month….. since he was in Germany recovering from a murder attempt.
The next day they somehow held a court hearing right at the police station which is literally against the law and he’s being arresting for 30 days. And that gives everyone a push. In his videos he asks people not to protest for him but to protest for themselves and their right to have a voice and for that voice to be heard and not be murdered and, if you’re not dead, be jailed because you have a different opinion. For years our country has been literally degrading, swimming in the corruption and lies just so Mr. Poo has his throne. Elections are being forged, at this point everyone knows about it but they frightened people enough to not say a word. The whole world thinks so low of us or scared of us because of the power that the Tsar holds and smart, reasonable people here are so fed up with that.
And the final part and what was the last drop of patience for lost of people here, Navalny’s team posted a whole film-investigation about the palace P*tin owns on the coast of the Black sea which was built with the stolen money. Just a few highlights about that palace: the approximate cost of it is around 100 billion rubbles / $1,4 billion, the size of it is over 17,6k square meters, it has tea/wine houses, wine gardens, amphitheatre, a hockey rink, casino, furniture with millions on price tags, hookah bar, bedchambers with jacuzzis, and people’s personal faves, aqua disco, $2k toilet brushes with toilet paper holders, a pole at the hookah bar and a room for dirt. You can watch the whole video here, trust me you won’t regret it. It’s smashing all the views records.
Just in comparison to the cost of only that palace, our pensions for people of age are around 10k rubbles / $130, our standard salaries are around $300 a month and that if you’re lucky, in the regions it can be twice less. During the pandemic the government gave people n o t h i n g that could’ve helped even a tiny bit. But golden toilet brushes at the Black sea cost are always provided.
Tomorrow, January 23rd, there are going to be mass protests all across the country where people want to show their civil position, to scream for the rights that are being taken away from us with every day passing with more and more ridiculous laws, to show support to Alexey and his family and ask for his freedom, and just to show that people want to see their homeland get justice, respect and love it deserves. Chances of things getting messy are very high since the government doesn’t allow us to have peaceful protests (unless its allowed protests which like…they never allow them so here’s another way of silencing us). I’ll be posting things about it as soon as I know, the ways to help and just spread information about what we have to deal with.
For now I’m gonna leave a link to an FBK site / Anti-Corruption Foundation, which is a non profit organization that investigates corruption cases in Russia. They also have a donation page which could always use some help, especially on the eve of protests (e.g. provide free lawyers to help people get out of police in case of arrests on protests).
spork-to-the-third-power
HE LEETLE FEETSYS
spork-to-the-third-power
very glad to see this post reduced everyone else mental capacity for communication as well
Anthropology major answer: “There absolutely was such a time! Modern humans and our ancestors shared territory numerous times over prehistory with cousin species like homo neanderthalensis, homo floresiensis, and many, many others!”
Folklore student answer: “Also, almost all cultures have something like djinn, faeries, hulder, fox spirits, and other similar creatures who can appear at least human and are very, very dangerous to humans!”
Both of these things are true, and may be connected both to the above and to each other. :D
Biology majors: it’s dead bodies guys. Corpses.
Listen I hate this take on the uncanny valley so fucking much because many subpsecies of homonids lived in the same areas but some of them got along well enough to coexist and neandertals had enough desirable genetic traits to the point where human women (see here for a blanket on female vs male choosiness) would often pass up incel homosepian for the chad neandertal.
Genetics aside, various hominid species didn’t start visually looking all that different until 50,000 years ago, while under the skin changes began as early as 89,000 years ago (ie the development of the Y chromosome but I might be oversimplifying at this point) Point being, even our non-human cousins didn’t. look. that. different. from. us. Especially comparing the diversifying of humans themselves crossing trans continental as it was. And even then neandertals still had advantagious traits for living in the Eurasian hemisphere.
Also I digress, regardless of it being intentional, and with few perserved records from that chapter in our species’ history, I don’t like the implication that the uncanny valley effect stems from humans being inherently racist (for lack of a word for hatred of non-human intelligences). I know that sounds off the wall but prejudice and sense of superiority by birthright is vastly different than othering by means of the sucess of social groups and the need to compete for territory or resources. Racism is entirely a Eurpean fabrication and it’s been proven time and time again to be a cultural outlier and purposfully designed to further the agenda of corroded theocratical religious divinity (here, here, here) and the financial benifits of the exploitation of colonism that otherwise has not been replicated by other cultures to the same degree. (this is the only example off the top of my head but I’m know there’s more.)
You know what’s older than racism?
You know what’s more flesh crawling than neandertals?
You know what LOOKS like a human but doesn’t ACT human ENOUGH? Do you know what might bite you and get you sick or turn you into something that also moves about in a non human way? Brain parasites that give you painful headaches and intensifies agression and confusion.
Say you’re a monkey and one member of your troop gets bitten by something. Later he starts twitching and swaying about. He keeps stumbling out of trees but barely feels anything when he hits the ground. He won’t eat sleep or drink. He makes guttural noises that keep alerting predators and he’s in obvious writhing agony. Suddenly he’s not your friend anymore. He doesn’t recognize you and he attempts to bite and claw at anything that moves.
Up until preventitive oral medications and vaccines were developed in the 1970s there was NOTHING stopping rabies and it still prevails today and kills hundreds of thousands of people in third world countries with limited medical resources a year. There’s no cure for rabies once youve got it and the only reliable diagnostic is a brain autopsy.
Rabies. TB. Leoprosy. Syphilis. Meningitis. Toxoplasmosis. Anthrax. Mercury Poisoning. Prion disease. These are all bad and in different varying degrees can cause limps, sores, agression, confusion or dazed trances, ambled pacing, convulsions or uncharacteristic behavior in humans.
Basically everything that people are terrified of when it comes to zombies. Vampires bite. Werewolves rip people apart. Demonic possesion? Easy. Changlings take the place of your loved ones.
Also I don’t think that it’s a conicidence that the things we find uncomfortable with the uncanny valley also just happen to line up with predatory behavior, smiling too wide or staring you down, blinking too slowly or moving towards you with a slow steady speed. It’s just a danger signal to keep other monkeys in a troop from getting bitten by an infected monkey. Simple as that.
After all what’s scarier? A dead body, or moving body that will MAKE you dead?
I’m not going to be a hypocrite by pointing out racism being excused as a stemmed human behavior without claiming that the deep seated primal fear of disease doesn’t make a good excuse for ableism as well. I mean we use othering to discern friend from foe, and then at some point decided that was a good enough excuse for racism. Theres legitimate proof that ancient homonids could and would be hospitible to the disabled out of compassion. The point of having these initial fears is to guage saftey measures first, but once someone or something is proven to be harmless that normally should be the end of it. I mean if an adult wild silverback gorrilla can look at a spycam and decide it’s chill after a moment of inspection then there’s really no excuse for any of us.
Healthy othering =/= newly invented racism.
healthy fear of infectious diseases =/= excuse to hate disabled people.
But yeah rabies is more likely the reason for the uncanny valley effect thanks for coming to my goddamn ted talk.
Reblogging this version bc of sources and I personally think this makes for much more interesting (and terrifying) lore than any other post in this thread.