The great space dustbin

Hurricane Hilary is about to make landfall and that whole desert area is supposed to get a years worth of rain or more. Death Valley is supposed to get twice the annual rainfall. Severe winds, massive flooding, and landslides are all strong possibilities.

Desert soil does not absorb a significant amount of water. It reaches maximum saturation very very quickly, and all the rest of the water rushes downhill. Even if you can’t tell that the ground is not perfectly flat, the water can. And it will move. Quickly. No, faster than that. Nope, still faster. If you try to cross moving floodwater, you will get swept downstream and probably die.

Do not try to wade in/cross flood water that is any deeper than the thickness of the sole of an average athletic shoe, no I am not kidding, the water will get deeper literally while you’re standing in it.

This goes for cars, too. I’ve seen entire vehicles getting swept downstream in flash floods because the driver thought they could cross the “puddle” and Found Out.

If you are over 18 and do not want your parents to have control over your body after you die or if you go into a coma or something, take that power away from them. They are your automatic next of kin unless you get married which is why they have control over those things. But getting married isn’t the only way to change that, an advanced directive can do the same. This video has more information

(id in alt) okay. so. i feel the need to preface this w the fact that by white western standards i generally am considered androgynous, partially thanks to the fact that I'm intersex. I have "passed" as a cis man, trans man, cis woman, and trans woman before. Things that work for me may not work for you. Things that give me gender euphoria may not have that result for you. This is what I have to offer:

is there a fat actor, singer, model, comedian, instagram influencer, etc that you like? someone who looks the way you want to, has fashion you love, or shares your body type? take fashion inspo from them. huge sources of inspiration for me are: jack black, harvey guillen, and lou wilson.

whats a part of your body you want to accentuate? i love my height and my broad shoulders, so i like platform shoes and boxy cuts of shirts and jackets

is there a fashion style you love? it can be hard to find fat people within those styles online, but they exist. I am active in goth, punk, and metal music subcultures, so i look towards those fashions.

what does androgyny mean to you? to me, it means accessing my femininity through my masculinity. i put a fem spin on my masc outfits. i put a fem spin on my masc mannerisms. i learn to love femininity through my masculinity. androgyny is a social construct, because its based in gender. androgyny to you may mean something completely different than it does to me. hell, even i have different meanings of it when im in jewish spaces vs secular/goyische spaces. ask yourself what you really mean by androgyny, and that will more easily lead you to the fashion youre trying to access

as for where to find good fat fashion inspo, it's fucking hard. sometimes you have to create your own. dedicating some time to finding people on social media and curating your pinterest algorithm (<- hell sentence) will help, and make it easier for you to find in the future. even just browsing plus size sections of online retailers can be helpful for me, because i can see plus size models in lots of different clothes and think of how to style them. its a process!

If you are a fat knitter, please check out Lydia Morrow on Ravelry!

Most of the uranium used to build the atomic bombs were mined in Shinkolobwe in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Congolese people had to work in the uranium mines without protection. Exposure to uraniun could result in negative health impacts such as: renal failure, decreased bone formation, cancer, issues with fertility etc. The labor of the Congolese people for the Manhatten Project were kept secret until recently, and still no research has been conducted on the long-term consequences of uranium intake in the people at the extraction site in the Congo.

If you have the post date option turned on you can click the date and it will take it to the original post like before. It's annoying, unintuitive, and harder to click but it should work on mobile or desktop

Walnut was born in a species-recovery breeding program in the 1980′s.  The program had crane chicks hand-raised by human volunteers, and at that time they did not fully understand the measures necessary make sure that the chicks do not imprint on humans and retain their identity as cranes.  

As a result, her keepers believe, Walnut does not recognize other cranes as members of her own species.  

It has not been proven that Walnut killed her previous suitors; however, there is a persistent rumor in the white-naped-crane-conservation community that she did.  

Because this species is highly endangered, and the gene pool of the captive population is small, it’s pretty important for the survival of her species that Walnut A) mate, and B) not kill a bunch of other cranes.  

The actual name of the keeper is Chris Crowe.

They both arrived at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in 2004.   

Walnut immediately began paying special attention to Chris--and ignoring the eligible male crane in a nearby enclosure.  

Walnut initiated their courtship, performing the opening moves of a mating dance.  

Chris realized that if he reciprocated the mating dance, it might be possible to artificially inseminate Walnut with her participation and consent.  (The process normally involves restraining the bird.)  

It worked!  

Chris and Walnut have had five children, who were raised by other crane couples at the facility--sometimes the biological dad and his mate--both because it’s unclear whether Walnut would accept the chicks as her own, and because Chris is not equipped to be a Crane Dad.  

However, the Institute provides her with artificial eggs to sit on, and Chris takes his turn looking after them.  (This would not work with real eggs because he can’t sit on them properly, but Walnut seems to feel that he is on the job if he just stands over them.)

she has not been PROVEN to have killed her exes, but there is a PERSISTENT RUMOR (really officers she's simply DEVASTATED, she sobs, wearing a new feather boa unfortunately resembling her most recent deceased husband)

His name is Chris CROWE. (Mrs. Walnut Crane-Crowe?)

the mental images of a whole human man learning and performing the crane mating dance, and "sitting" on artificial eggs so she thinks he's performing his duties as a husband and father (and apparently OBJECTS if he does not?)

"chris, buddy, you gotta marry the possibly-murderous crane lady for the GOOD OF THE SPECIES." (alternately: "chris, my man! good news! we found you a very interested lady! She's 36, she's very spirited and independent, she holds a very important and rare status in her society! ...Is there a downside? WELL...")

the cops

how come it's virtually impossible to hold killer cops accountable for their murder???

(alt included in all images)

Another thread by Senator Ben Ray Luján here.

A book on the subject (haven't read it myself):

One of the sources in another one of Alisa's furiously impassioned twitter threads have been debunked, so I didn't include that. But she claims that her own family was caught in the fallout zone when her mother was a baby, which eventually led to her and large numbers of her community developing cancer. It's human for that kind of grief to be caught up in inaccuracies. People are already being ghastly and racist to Hispanos and Indigenous people criticizing the hype for the movie. They're not attacking Oppenheimer for being Jewish, they're criticising the erasure of the human cost of these bombs and the continued valorisation of the U.S military's actions in World War II as some kind of moral saviourism.

While Oppenheimer himself believed that the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were morally justified (they had planned to drop them on Germany except they surrendered before they could), he also felt had blood on his hands and regretted his role as the "Father of the Atomic Bomb". He spent the rest of his career vehemently opposing further development of thermonuclear weapons and the hydrogen bomb accurately predicting the concept of mutually assured destruction. This eventually made him a victim of Senator McCarthy's Red Scare and his clearance was revoked. I haven't seen the movie (Christopher Nolan is the kind of casual white racist I avoid on principle) but people who have seen it say that it doesn't glorify nuclear weapons and depicts the man himself with the complex moral nuance that seems to be accurately reflective of his real life.

The backlash to Indigenous and Hispanos people's criticisms and to people pointing out that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were genocides is also frustrating because...both world wars were a clash of genocidal empires. The reason they were world wars is because the countries colonized by Japan, China, the European powers and the US were all dragged into it, whether they wanted to or not. Jews were one of the many colonized peoples that suffered in that time, who were left to die by everyone until they could be used to frame the Allied powers as moral saviours, establishing a revisionist nostalgia for heroism that powers the US military industrial complex to this day.

As early as May 1942, and again in June, the BBC reported the mass murder of Polish Jews by the Nazis. Although both US President, Franklin Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, warned the Germans that they would be held to account after the war, privately they agreed to prioritise and to turn their attention and efforts to winning the war. Therefore, all pleas to the Allies to destroy the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau were ignored. The Allies argued that not only would such an operation shift the focus away from winning the war, but it could provoke even worse treatment of the Jews. In June 1944 the Americans had aerial photographs of the Auschwitz complex. The Allies bombed a nearby factory in August, but the gas chambers, crematoria and train tracks used to transport Jewish civilians to their deaths were not targeted.

(Source)

Just in case there’s any questions about whether this is simple ignorance or intentional omission, this interview with lifelong Downwinder activist Tina Cordova proves that Hollywood simply does not give a shit about New Mexicans. Yet again, we’re wanted for our land and labor from an exploitative industry and tossed away when our existence becomes inconvenient.

And if you’re reading this far and wondering if there’s anything you can do, there is!