Let's Not and Say We Wanted To

oh wow the glass-tower office buildings we constructed when we thought air conditioning and central heating would never have downsides...have downsides?

and we're still building them?

while the Victorian house museum where I work, with thick walls and small windows and big wooden shutters stays ~10 degrees above (winter) or below (summer) the outside temperature for days on end with no help at all?

uh. okay then

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Location: Minnesota, USA

Date: October

We ask that discussion under questions be limited to how you came to your conclusion, not what your conclusion was.

Answer hidden under the cut.

Over fifty years of data show a peak in PFAS (also known as "forever chemicals") content in seabird eggs in the 90s, followed by a decrease as regulations went into effect. The most recent findings show a 70% decrease of most common PFAS.

We are making genuine progress! Producers are dramatically altering how much they use PFAS and how much gets released in effluent, but also there's a lot better understanding of how to remove PFAS from the environment!

first it was the klingons—they’re originally supposed to be this cruel, bloodthirsty, war-obsessed people—and then tng comes along and it’s like wait no maybe war and violence is a part of their culture and actually ties back to ancient traditions and philosophies so we have to be woke about it.

hey these are the ferengi and they’re supposed to represent everything we hate about capitalist society; they’re greedy, scheming, profit-obsessed, and they look like ugly little trolls to emphasize how much we fucking HATE capitalism. oh wait fuck here comes deep space nine and we have to recognize that they’re PEOPLE. okok what if the pursuit of profit is actually part of their culture and ties back to ancient traditions and philosophies. so we have to be woke about it.

this is the borg, they’re a hivemind race of cyborgs who have no sense of individuality and their only motivation is assimilating people into their society. they want to assimilate humanity and we are completely defenseless against them because their technology is eons ahead of our own and they’re incapable of being reasoned with. oh sweet we have a borg prisoner this is the perfect opportunity to commit genocide against them. fuck actually we can’t commit genocide we’re woke and communists and in space.

hey these are the cardassians, they’re part of a cruel and vicious empire which is supposed to be a representation of fascism and authoritarian regimes, they’re a cold, bloodthirsty people with no sense of empathy or compassion, their society literally references 1984 on multiple occasions, and they’re known for the insanely cruel and inhumane methods of torture they use against their prisoners of war. we hate the cardassians…….. except, here’s a cardassian kid who grew up on bajor, and……. fuck. he’s a person. now we actually have to consider his humanity. and being racist is actually……. bad.

this is the jem’hadar, they’re genetically engineered soldiers who have no sense of individuality and only live to defend the state. they’re all born addicted to a synthetic drug that’s manufactured by the state and administered by their masters—this is how they’re kept subservient. they’re ruthless and powerful and they’re incapable of being reasoned with because their only motivation is violence and killing. so we should kill them all, right? FUCK….. what if they’re actually people. goddamnit. now we have to consider their humanity.

Either way you get all the varieties of quartz: crystalline (quartz, smoky quartz, amethyst, etc.), microcrystalline quartz (jasper, agate, carnelian, etc.) & hydrated quartz (opal). Colors are from other elements in the crystal structure.

I think you can also get calcified & pyreitized (fools' gold, FeS) wood, but silicon is really abundant so it's the most common petrifying element. Often this happens when wood is buried in a lava flow or ashfall, so it's in new rock with lots of soluble elements & which will stay hot for a while, making it easier for the water to dissolve & carry silicon from the rock into the wood.

But I had also not put it together that quartz is exactly the same process.

(Source: BlueSky)

Okay, brief summary.

In the early 1960s, the "Vatican II" ecumenical council enacted a bunch of reforms...as bad as you might think the Catholic Church is, it used to be worse. Needless to say, there was a bunch of people who didn't care for this newfangled stuff like "liturgy in something other than Latin" or "women have a role in the Church other than Nun and Mother." One such organized group is the Secret Society of Super-Villains Society of St. Pius X. Back in the 70s they tried anointing their own bishops and a lot of them got excommunicated for it. The rest played by the rules and were a constant voice of dissent against all these "debasements" of the Church.

Well, we're hitting the point that there's not a lot of SSPX'er bishops left alive (they were careful to not get EVERYONE kicked out in the 70s), and without new bishops they can't ordain new priests who will follow their "it's not a schism, it's the True Church" precepts. Unlike a lot of Protestant confessions where someone can just sort of start up a church if they can get followers, Catholic Priests have to be properly ordained by Catholic Bishops who in turn have to be approved by the Pope. He doesn't have to directly ordain them, but he does need to issue an official "yeah, go for it" statement.

In the morning of July 1, 2026, in Switzerland (a stronghold of the PX'ers) one of the surviving bishops (the guy on the left of the image above) ran a big ceremony where a number of new bishops were ordained ("apostolic succession" being the technical term, the guy in the middle being one of the new supposed bishops), and when they got to the part where the Pope's statement is supposed to be read, he just said they didn't need an obviously wrong-headed Pope's permission (not in those words, but I am told that the flowery language employed counted as very bitchy in ecclesiastic terms) and went ahead with it.

So, after letting most of the day go by, the Pope's office just issued a statement that the "Lefebvrians" (the guy who started the Secret Society of Super-Pious) had excommunicated themselves by doing something that was clearly a no-no. No specific action required by the Pope, there's actions that have long been considered self-excommunicating, and ordaining bishops without permission or accepting such an ordination are on the list. (A while back I looked up the list of recent excommunications, most of them had to do with "someone ordained someone else without permission.")