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This dude just called himself out in his own footnotes???

“Notoriously complacent in this regard is Freudenberg (1993).”

My name is Kelsey Juliana and I’m suing the United States government for causing and accelerating the climate change crisis. I’m 22 years old and I’ve been a climate activist for more than half of my life.

I know that young people like me, and others who have yet to be born, have a right to a safe climate system. The constitution guarantees all Americans the right to life, liberty, and property. But how is anyone supposed to live a life of freedom amid a climate crisis? My own government is violating my constitutional rights by its ongoing and deliberate actions that cause climate change and it’s not right.

I, along with 20 other young people from around the country, filed a lawsuit against the federal government in 2015, called Juliana v. United States.

We’re not asking for money. Instead, we’re asking the court to order the government to develop and implement a National Climate Recovery Plan based on the best available science.

This plan should end the reign of fossil fuels and quickly decarbonize our atmosphere so that we can stabilize our climate system before it’s too late.

The longer we go without climate recovery, the more we risk allowing our climate to spiral completely out of control.

And the climate is spiraling out of control, no matter how many politicians claim we’re experiencing normal fluctuations or, worse, a “hoax.” All of the expert witnesses in our lawsuit say that we are currently—already—in the “danger zone” and an “emergency situation” with only 1°C of planetary heating. Allowing the planet to heat up any more is not safe for our species, as well as so many others. And according to the Trump administration’s most recent environmental impact statement, the planet could heat as much as 7°F before the end of this century. We cannot allow this to happen because we simply will not survive.

We originally filed our lawsuit against the Obama administration. That administration tried to have the case dismissed, but the judge ruled in our favor and found that we should be allowed to go to trial.

In 2017, the Trump administration inherited the lawsuit and it has done everything in its power, employing every conceivable tactic, to deny my fellow plaintiffs and me our right to present our case in court. This administration is so fiercely attempting to silence our voices.

At this point, every level of the federal judiciary—the U.S. District Court, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court—has denied the Trump administration’s efforts to have the case thrown out. Yet it will not halt its efforts to avoid standard legal procedures and confront us, the nation’s youth, in court.

Our trial is officially scheduled to begin on October 29, 2018 in Eugene, Oregon.

What we’re asking for could change everything.

My fellow plaintiffs and I want you with us as we head into the courtroom to confront the United States government for knowingly violating our constitutional rights. Supporters will hold rallies in every state around the country, so if you can’t be with us in Eugene, find your local rally here.

Get regular updates by following @youthvgov on social media.

You can learn more about this case and get regular trial updates by tuning in to the No Ordinary Lawsuit podcast here.

Lastly, if you have the means, click here to make a donation to Our Children’s Trust, the nonprofit organization that supports our lawsuit and many others like it around the country.

I’ve been making jewelry for a number of years now. Pretty early on I was directed to a company called Fire Mountain Gems as a potential supplier. They sent a copy of their catalog with my first order, which introduced me to a *lot* of stones I’d never heard of… more than a few of which had trade names.

Now, understand, humanity has only relatively recently become fussy about how accurately they name their stones. For a big stretch of history, if it was reasonably hard and red OR dark red OR black with red highlights when you tilted it right, they’d probably call it a ruby. (Example: the Black Prince’s Ruby in the state crown of England, which is a completely different gemstone called a spinel, but they named it before the 1780s which is when we started being able to actually identify rubies as rubies. So… yeah.) Some kinds of gem have had lots and lots of different names all historically referring to the same stone. It makes for interesting reading of historic accounts of this or that piece of jewelry. I can excuse it, it was the past, really formal gemology is only a moderately recent thing.

But these days I go to the store and I see yellow gemmy-looking beads hanging on the rack, and I look at the sticker, and it says ‘yellow jade’, only the price is way less than that much actual jade would cost online. Or I go to look for smaller beads to match a few pieces of actual turquoise that I have on hand, and I realize that I have no idea whether African turquoise is actually turquoise or not. It gets… irritating. I want to actually know what the hell I’m paying for and whether it’s hard enough to risk putting it in a bracelet or ring, or whether it’s a softer stone that should be kept in earrings and necklaces, away from possible scratching or impact. If you’re buying jewelry, or if you’re looking for stones for jewelry work, or if you’re someone who believes in the metaphysical properties of stones and crystals, you’re going to want an accurate understanding of whatever it is you’ve got in front of you, right? Right.

So, yeah. Here’s a few of the trade names I’ve been stumbling over since I got started in jewelry making.

New jade - This is serpentine. It’s a pretty rock but it’s not jadeite or nephrite; it’s not actually jade. Serpentine’s way common, since it’s basically a form of one of the most common minerals in the earth’s crust.

Mountain jade - A kind of dolomite marble. Also not jade.

Ching Hai jade - Dolomite plus a couple of other minerals. Pretty, but not jade. Let me put it like this: on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, nephrite jade is 6 to 6.5 and jadeite is 6.5 to 7. Ching Hai jade is 3.5 to 4. This stuff is softer than the outer coating of human teeth (Mohs 5, same as a basic knife blade and most kinds of everyday glass). You want a stone you can put in a ring where it’ll get whacked or bounced off hard surfaces or otherwise stand a chance of impact, you’re gonna want real jade. Ching Hai jade will get scratched clear to kingdom come with a Mohs score like that.

Yellow jade - It’s quartz. Nephrite jade comes in a lot of colors including yellow, but if they’ve labeled it ‘yellow jade’ rather than saying ‘jade’ or ‘nephrite jade’ then it’s quartz. Same deal for ‘golden jade’.

Malaysia jade - Also quartz.

African jade - yep, still quartz.

Black jade - Both nephrite and jadeite come in black forms, but if a stone is being sold with the name ‘black jade’, it’s 90% likely to be serpentine. Actual jade gets labeled as jadeite or nephrite. I don’t do metaphysical stone foo, but man, if you’re buying a stone because you want to use its mojo, seems to me you’d want to get the actual stone associated with what you’re trying to do, not a stone that’s the same color and level of shiny.

Peace jade - Serpentine plus white quartz. I don’t even know where they came up with this name. It’s pretty but it’s jade the way a pommel horse is a horse.

Yellow turquoise - Serpentine again. Or rather, serpentine and quartz. At least this stuff comes from the same mines as turquoise.

African turquoise - Jasper. It’s turquoise colored, but it’s actually harder than real turquoise, for whatever that’s worth.

Italian onyx - They also call this one onyx marble. It’s a kind of calcite. Takes dye really well so they use it in different color forms.

African bloodstone / Indian bloodstone - Legit name for the actual stone, for once! These are both names for the same thing. They also call it heliotrope. So any of those names all refer to the same thing.

Tigerskin jasper - And we’re back to the malarkey; this is limestone. With pretty stripes, but seriously, it’s not even jasper and jasper gets used as a substitute for other stones so wtf.

Bumblebee jasper - Sometimes they call this bumblebee agate. It’s not jasper. It’s not agate. Bumblebee jasper is volcano lava and sediment that’s resulted in swirly yellow and black layers. I mean, it’s pretty, sell it as much as you want, but IT ISN’T EVEN CLOSE TO BEING JASPER.

Aqua terra jasper - Onyx marble. They also call it impression stone, but it’s marble, and it’s on the soft side as stones go. Marble’s around Mohs 3 on a good day. That’s another stone you can scratch with your teeth.

Green Earth jasper - NOPE. Serpentine. Sorry.

Peridot jasper - Serpentine. Seriously, do you have any idea how many stones with pretty pretty names are actually just pretty pretty names for different colors of serpentine?

Zebra jasper - onyx marble.

Chinese chrysoprase- Oh look it’s serpentine again

Lemon chrysoprase - This is magnesite. Not dyed, which is a little unusual. Magnesite takes dye really well and gets sold in a lot of colors as a substitute for other stones. Selling it as lemon chrysoprase means someone managed to get hold of a yellowish color of the stuff.

Mosaic turquoise - If it’s labeled mosaic anything, it’s almost always fragments of a stone bound together with resin, and probably not even the stone it claims to be. Mosaic turquoise is ittybitty chips of magnesite that’s been dyed to match turquoise color, then stabilized together as a single piece. It’s not even close to being turquoise.

Green opal - okay, quick lesson: there are different kinds of opal, and not all of them have the flashy color changing fire you get with precious stones like Welo opal or Australian opal. Mexican fire opal and Oregon fire opal are good examples of other forms. The actual stone we call opal is a specific kind of silica with a certain level of water content, not just the pretty flashiness. And opals of both the flashy kind and the non-flashy kind do come in green. But if they’re selling it as ‘green opal’, they are selling you chalcedony. Chemically similar, but not as pretty, and a distinctly harder stone.

Red malachite - This is marble. They find marble with banding that resembles malachite banding and they cut it and polish it to look like malachite, just in a different color. Malachite is green; this isn’t even a thing like jade coming in different colors. There isn’t actual red malachite.

Opaline - this isn’t even a stone. This is glass. Same deal with ‘sea opal’. Sorry. Sometimes they sell chalcedony as opaline but whatever it is you’ve found it’s not opal.

Fused quartz - Glass. This is glass. Fancypants glass, but it’s glass.

Goldstone, or blue goldstone: Also glass. With bits of copper in it to produce really nice sparkly effects, but it’s still a kind of glass.

Sand stone or blue sand stone: I only found out recently that some people sell goldstone as ‘sandstone’, so… this one’s glass too. Actual sandstone is a sorta brown sedimentary rock.

Black moss quartz - This is glass. Worth noting, there’s a vaguely similar product out there called rutilated quartz. That’s actual quartz with spindly intrusions of a different mineral, rutile. Difference is, the quartz has a Mohs hardness of 7 and will scratch the ‘black moss quartz's’ soft bitch ass six ways from Sunday as a result.

Fordite - This is paint. Fordite is automotive enamel that’s dripped onto the same spot on factory floors for so many years that it’s built up to the point where it can be cut and polished and made into jewelry elements. Unlike a lot of trade names, this one isn’t a form of bullshit to pass one thing off as another. People who go looking for fordite are specifically looking for gemstone quality layered automobile paint. Sometimes they call it Detroit agate or motor agate, but that’s more of a joke than an attempt to sell the stuff to people looking for actual agate. I can live with this trade name.

Rainbow calsilica: Apparently there’s just a huge amount of argument about this and some people say ‘this is natural and we found it and it’s got pretty pretty stripes of all different colors just naturally and it’s a totally awesome metaphysical marvel of a totally natural gemstone’, but the Journal of the Gemological Institute of America says ’dude, you powdered carbonated rock and added paint and stabilized it with resin, wtf’. So yeah, be warned. I mean, it’s pretty and all, and you’ll probably pay way less for it than for chrysocolla (a natural stone with somewhat similar striping), but… be aware it’s probably something a guy in a factory or a lab put together, okay?

And citrine: Okay, this isn’t exactly a case of trade name bullshittery, but, uh. Natural citrine is stupid rare. Most citrine these days used to be amethyst. Take a crappy piece of amethyst with faint color or gray tones and heat the hell out of it long enough, and it turns yellow, and you can legally sell it as citrine. If you’ve got citrine crystals and the yellow color is most intense up in the tips, you’ve almost certainly got former amethyst there. Fair warning.

“He’s been watching too many horror movies. Aidonsvalley is just a tourist trap for weirdos who believe in all that nonsense.”

(Images generated by BigGAN)

Neural networks are a kind of machine learning algorithm that learn to imitate the examples I give them. They’re pretty good at picking up on the feel of craft beer names vs guinea pig names, or metal bands vs my little ponies. So they should be pretty good at thinking of new names for horror movies, right? Right?

Ummm

The Baby Bunny Pretty Day 3 Little Clock Train The Sea Bothers No Curse Great Apartment The Funny Bear Missing Bun Noice Fish Christmas

The above titles were generated by a neural network (textgenrnn) trained on over 78,000 horror movie titles extracted from IMDB by Twitter user @enkiv2. It turns out that not every horror title is Slashy This or Murdled That. Titles in the original dataset include “PigDog”, “Princess Baby”, “King Dinosaur,” and “Sasquatch! A Love Story”. The neural net learned a bunch of interesting vocabulary from them.

And the neural net DID manage to pick up on the vocabulary of horror film titles. It just also managed to make them sound somehow more like the Halloween special of a kid’s cartoon show.

Halloween Bear Case of the Big Monster Dracula’s Holiday The Creepy Clock The Interbother The Haunting Song The Scream Fish Tapes Monster Interviews Monster of Mystery The Devil’s Cool World of the Band Zombies The Lucky Dracula The Christmas Man Werewolf

Other times, it was just plain weird. I know horror is supposed to make the mundane scary, but I somewhat question its methods.

Haunted Boss Final Hair The Cord Thing Day in the Room Attack of the Cleaning Day The Stall Satan The Return of Bob The Date of Horror The Snape Unknown Carp Halloween Special Planet Boot Cook The Tooth Things Stanning the Damned Halloween: Realm Wars Part 1 American Star Horror Stories: The Creature of the Santa

With other titles, the neural net avoided sounding cute, but also avoided sounding convincingly human.

A Not Meat of the Wild Fright & Trap of the Woods The Man in My Dangers I Call Zombies The Night Night Fright Footage The Bad Side of the Dead The Boobley of the Dead Please Alive Lost Blood Horror Story The Haunting of Flesh Show The Will the American Horror Stories - What the Green Horrors

I really like these titles with made-up words.

The Blunge The Crooping Tomb The Moonmanic Sands My Boblop Trap Clownfull Missing The Contains of Halloween Trailer’s Comman Reaper Trailer 2000 Scarecrowning Strangler Secret + the Basament in the Children

It also generated a few that were a bit more along the lines of, um, erotic horror. To go with those, I also decided to see what would happen if I mixed the horror titles with ice cream flavors. Here’s a taste (ahem):

Honey & Darkness Passion Owl Caramel Horror Spice

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