Alcoholic sounds so lonely and depressing...

Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado and his wife, Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado, have been instrumental in reforesting the Rio Doce Basin area in Brazil since 1998. Through their organization, Instituto Terra, they have planted over 2.7 million trees, successfully restoring more than 550 acres of forest and 2,000 natural springs. 

More than 100 unhoused people were bused – under threat of arrest – to an industrial warehouse miles away, dubbed the “transitional center”.

The hastily assembled site had been arranged under a no-bid contract thanks to emergency powers invoked by Landry – who took office in early 2024 – and opened before an unprecedented winter storm that ultimately dumped about 10in of snow on some parts of the region.

The site did not have sufficient cots, adequate heating or even enough blankets when it first began taking in people on 15 January. Unhoused residents who didn’t want to go to the warehouse scattered, some forced to leave behind everything they owned just days before the dangerous blizzard hit on 21 January.

Press, nonetheless, has not been permitted entry to the site. Concerns persist among unhoused people and their advocates about the warehouse arrangement – which is costing taxpayers more than $17m – as the eyes of the world turn to New Orleans, hosting the NFL’s Super Bowl on 9 February and Mardi Gras festivities culminating on 4 March.

Furthermore, the warehouse may be a harbinger of what’s to come nationally as the second Donald Trump presidency’s new housing secretary has refused to rule out government-run detention camps for unhoused people.

Also me:

me:

So what are you to do if you aren't content with simply not speaking, and waiting until social decorum decides it is your turn doesn't work, because your turn is never? You make it impossible to ignore you, social decorum be damned. You interrupt people, you are aggressive and confrontational about getting a word in because its the only way you'll get one in at all.

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.