I was fired from my job for reasons related to my disabilities in October. I've been looking for a new job but no luck yet; 25% of my country is unemployed or underemployed. 50%+ of the queers I know locally.
My wife is in school and won't be working for months yet.
Our household had COVID in February and now my wife and I are both struggling with long COVID symptoms.
Then a plow smashed into my car and two others. Mine is totalled. Insurance is not even fully paying off the loan; I still owe $2,000 on a car that does not exist anymore.
I cannot get financing for a replacement car because I don't have a job. I don't have the money to buy a car outright.
Please, help a pair of queer, trans, active community members who are going through a lot š
If you can't donate, please reblog/share around if you can. Thank you so much. ā¤ļø
http://spot.fund/HelpUsGetMobileAgain
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āMusk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,ā says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. āThere are so many reasons why itās such a bad idea, and this is not about, āOh, weāll never have the technology to live on Mars.ā Thatās not what Iām saying. What Iām saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.ā
What Youāve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us
I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.
I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.
And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.
āUgh this prominent women in the Lesbian movement turned out to be a bisexualā āugh this famous lesbian transitioned into a manā āugh this queer romance writer turns out to be aceā āugh this cis feminist author ended up being nonbinaryā āugh this writer on masculinity transitioned into a womanā
Oh no! We might have to recognize liberation as an interconnected intersectional struggle! Ahhh!!! >.<
āThe police spend very little of their time dealing with violent criminalsāindeed, police sociologists report that only about 10% of the average police officerās time is devoted to criminal matters of any kind. Most of the remaining 90% is spent dealing with infractions of various administrative codes and regulations: all those rules about how and where one can eat, drink, smoke, sell, sit, walk, and drive. If two people punch each other, or even draw a knife on each other, police are unlikely to get involved. Drive down the street in a car without license plates, on the other hand, and the authorities will show up instantly, threatening all sorts of dire consequences if you donāt do exactly what they tell you. The police, then, are essentially just bureaucrats with weapons. Their main role in society is to bring the threat of physical forceāeven, deathāinto situations where it would never have been otherwise invoked, such as the enforcement of civic ordinances about the sale of untaxed cigarettes.ā
ā An excerpt fromĀ Ferguson & the Criminalization of American Life by David Graeber (via actjustly)
since i think many will have had the memory slip with just how many other atrocities have occured in the past 11 years, or are simply too young to remember, the last bit about the sale of untaxed cigarettes isnāt just some hypothetical, itās a reference to the killing of eric garner
this is the origin of the slogan āi cant breatheā, which was revived in the wake of the killing of george floyd.
Hey btw the absolute biggest demographic for eating disorders is transgender and nonbinary people (of all genders/directions)
Gender-diverse individuals are disproportionately affected by disordered eating habits. Research estimates that 12% of transgender people have been diagnosed with an eating disorder at some point.
There are a LOT of stereotypes about eating disorders, and current psych culture is only beginning to move past those stereotypes. While we are beginning to understand how people of color, men, and other overlooked populations are affected by disordered eating, transgender identity is still invisible.
Gender-affirming care and strong social support are the strongest protective factors in preventing eating disorders amongst transgender people.
-via The Trans Solidarity Project, May 15, 2026. Emphasis from the original text.
More info:
Here for stats among youth via The Trevor Project
Here for an academic literature review from this year (2026) on treatment and outcomes. "Eating disorder treatment outcomes in trans and gender diverse people: a systematic review." (2026). In International Journal of Transgender Health, 1ā23. https://doi.org/10.1080/26895269.2026.2694622"
If you're struggling or supporting a loved one, you're not alone. This guide explores the realities of EDs in the trans community and offers
-via Point of Pride, February 7, 2025. From the article emphasis in original:
If you're struggling
Organizations & support services
Project HEAL: Provides financial assistance for individuals seeking eating disorder treatment, working to remove financial and systemic barriers to care.
National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA): Offers a confidential helpline, online chat, and a wealth of treatment resources, including guidance on recognizing the signs of eating disorders and finding professional help.
Trans Lifeline: A peer-support hotline run by and for trans individuals, providing emotional support, crisis intervention, and guidance.
Inclusive Therapists: A comprehensive directory of culturally competent and affirming therapists.
FEDUP Collective: Advocates for fat liberation and inclusive eating disorder recovery, offering valuable insights and resources for individuals and supporters navigating recovery.
GLMA LGBTQ+ Healthcare Directory: Connects users with LGBTQ+ affirming healthcare providers across various specialties, including mental health and eating disorder care.
FEDUP Collectiveās Gender-Affirming Surgeon Guide: A valuable resource for navigating BMI restrictions and finding size-inclusive, gender-affirming surgical care.
If you're getting locked out of gender affirming care due to bullshit and unscientific BMI restrictions on gender-affirming care (and commenter/s are right, they are bullshit and arbitrary and unscientific), the final link on the reblog is a live directory of Surgeon Weight Limits by state/country, so you can find a surgeon that will actually treat you
If anyone knows of any surgeons who are weight inclusive (or have info on shitty BMI limits for that matter), emailing the tip line listed on their page would be a great way to help build knowledge and access for other trans people
First state I checked (admittedly, California, which is absolutely doing this on easy mode) lists three different surgeons with no BMI limit (out of nine total listed for the state)
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Hey btw the absolute biggest demographic for eating disorders is transgender and nonbinary people (of all genders/directions)
Gender-diverse individuals are disproportionately affected by disordered eating habits. Research estimates that 12% of transgender people have been diagnosed with an eating disorder at some point.
There are a LOT of stereotypes about eating disorders, and current psych culture is only beginning to move past those stereotypes. While we are beginning to understand how people of color, men, and other overlooked populations are affected by disordered eating, transgender identity is still invisible.
Gender-affirming care and strong social support are the strongest protective factors in preventing eating disorders amongst transgender people.
-via The Trans Solidarity Project, May 15, 2026. Emphasis from the original text.
More info:
Here for stats among youth via The Trevor Project
Here for an academic literature review from this year (2026) on treatment and outcomes. "Eating disorder treatment outcomes in trans and gender diverse people: a systematic review." (2026). In International Journal of Transgender Health, 1ā23. https://doi.org/10.1080/26895269.2026.2694622"
A Kenyan feminist, LGBTQ+ rights activist, filmmaker, and producer, Kagendo Murungi consistently returned to a central question throughout b
A Kenyan feminist, LGBTQ+ rights activist, filmmaker, and producer, Kagendo Murungi consistently returned to a central question throughout both her work and life: who produces images of African people, who controls their circulation, and who is allowed to appear within them? For Murungi, these were not just abstract concerns but urgent political stakes, inseparable from broader struggles over power, representation, and survival. Though she would ultimately spend much of her life in the United States, Murungi nevertheless operated deliberately across intercontinental cultural, political, and grassroots contexts, building a practice that treated media not only as a site of expression but as a tool for intervention. For over two decades, she tirelessly worked to connect African diasporic storytelling with transnational organizing, insisting that cultural production and political advocacy were not just parallel efforts, but mutually reinforcing ones.
see this is exactly what I'm talking about. this labour is so incredibly invisibilised that there are real human beings, walking about amongst us, leading normal lives, etc., who earnestly believe that machines can make an item of clothing from start to finish.
Hey just in case someone on here doesnāt quite understand how labor intensive making a garment is, here is a list of things that (to the best of my knowledge) cannot be done by machine alone, from a costumer/tailor in training
Cutting - in my opinion, the most labor intensive part of the process. The amount of time/effort needed varies depending on the pattern and if seam allowance is included or marked separately, but no matter what this process can not be done by machine. Each and every panel and piece of fabric that goes into a garment must be cut by hand by a person.
Pinning/clipping - pinning (or clipping) is the stage at which you align the pieces you are going to be stitching together and hold them together with ā you guessed it! ā either pins or clips. This can not be done by machine.
Stitching - the actual sewing. This can be done by a sewing machine, but that machine still needs to be operated by a human being.
Ironing/pressing - two words that mean the same thing. The iron itself is a machine, but once again, it needs to be operated by a human being.
Finishing - depending on the technique you use, there are certain finishing techniques that can only be done by hand. But, letās assume weāre talking about fast fashion, which is usually just finished with a simple overlock/serger. Once again: these machines need to be operated by people.
These are just the basic steps to making a garment, and donāt include textile arts that I am not as knowledgeable about, such as weaving, knitting, and crochet. Also, it is important to note that there are a lot of things that can only be done by hand, such as certain stitches and decorative techniques.
Also, the machinery being operated in textile factories is not equivalent to a domestic sewing machine. Weāre talking about one of these guys:
See that gray cylinder under the table, behind the knee pedal? Thatās the motor. These machines can sew through your fingers bones and all and not even stop. The people in these factories and sweatshops are operating heavy machinery, and are subject to all the risk that comes with that in addition to all of the work I mentioned above.
Please respect textile workers and continue the fight to eliminate the use of sweatshops and exploited labor in the fashion industry!
Reblogging with some additions from a different post o'mine:
" I'm taking a sewing class and I asked my teacher about how much machines can actually do. She said that while a lot of actual fabric we use in our projects is machine-woven, and sometimes there are machines for particular knitting patterns or for the same small thing over and over and over (i.e. socks), the overwhelming majority of pieces of clothing are in fact just sewn together by humans. Usually women. Underpaid and overlooked. Thousands and thousands of them, working 12 hours a day or more in huge warehouse-factories. You're probably wearing something one of those women created right now.
Most of the students (including me) were horrified. We had *no* idea. We figured that, given that we have supercomputers and massive industrial systems for almost every type of product you can buy, surely we would have figured out a better way? Surely there are machines that can put a t-shirt together by now?
She said, no, that's why fast fashion is really so bad. It's not simply about the quality of the product, it's about the human cost.
When you buy a cheap tee that says "Made in Bangladesh", this is where your clothing came from (and these are from one of the nicer factories):
(By Fahad Faisal. CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=89582692)
Don't want to believe it? I understand. Here is the wikipedia page, you can read it in your own time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_industry_in_Bangladesh#Readymade_garment_(RMG)_industry
This isn't just true of clothes either. There's an astonishing amount of human labor behind most of our products. Even the steps that are automated are only possible because humans are constantly cleaning, maintaining, repairing, adjusting and fine tuning the machines.
I've noticed that the media that educates us often edits that out on purpose. In 'how its made' type videos, steps humans do by hand are often skipped because they don't make as smooth a video as watching machines do the parts of the production process that can be automated.
America has a weird relationship with cults where theyāre terrified of small cults (or organizations they think are cults) but completely normalized massive cults that hurt many more people (eg: LDS Church, Jehovahās Witnesses, the Amish, Scientology, most Megachurches)
To anybody asking if the Amish are a cult, the answer is yes, very much so.
Theyāre a high control group that isolate you from society. The cult decides how you dress, how you behave, who you marry and how. They control what you know, blocking all information from the outside world. They control how you feel and what youāre allowed to think with threats of both social and supernatural harm. Theyāre a cult.
The best method to determine if a group is a cult, in my opinion, is Steven Hassanās (cult expert and former cult member himself) BITE model.
BITE stands for Behavior Control, Information Control, Thought Control, and Emotional Control.
The more points a groupĀ āscoresā on the model, the more of a cult it is.
I think this model is the best one for several reasons:
Itās more nuanced thanĀ ācultā orĀ ānot cultā and doesnāt make false equivalences between groups
Itās versatile, applying to groups big and small, and cults of all kinds, religious, political, financial, etc.
It focuses on whatās important, which is what the cult does to its members, and those membersā experiences, and not on irrelevant details like how uncommon their doctrines are or whether they have a charismatic leader
#you might notice that there are a lot of similarities between cult techniques and those of abusive partners#and that is an important thing to be aware of
And to highlight a key aspect of the ātwo-person cultā dynamic:
Not all high-control groups are religious. Secular cults exist.
Iād strongly recommend reading this brief bio of Janja Lalich. Sheās a deprogramming therapist, but sheās also a cult survivor from a political cult.
high control groups can also form in friend groups and online! any social group can theoretically be a high control enviroment thatās abusive. any group can be a cult if someone uses that group to control and abuse others.
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idk I can tell that some tumblrinas are not up on fat politics because I see a lot of people saying stuff like āitās better to be a little fat than waste your life trying to be thinā or like āitās chic to have a little bellyā like okay but there are fat people who are āa lot fatā and have āa lot of bellyā which everyone is weirdly silent on all the time. Like the fattest person on earth still deserves to exist in human society with joy and dignity regardless of how they got to that weight or how many health conditions they have as a result of their personal actionsā¦that should be everyoneās baseline here Iām not really sure whatās complicated about it
additionally even if i was "a little" fat I DONT WANT TO BE CHIC I WANT MEDICAL CARE AND PLANE SEATS THAT FIT ME YOU DUMB FUCKS š like ohhh you think curvy girls with a little belly are oh so hot? first of all if you saw the fat people i want to fuck you would kill yourselves but more importantly, there is genuine discrimination. people are getting hurt. people are dying. people are starving their children so they dont *become* fat. get on board with real fat liberation. like clothes that fit would be nice too but can we stop killing people with medical neglect or hate crimes as well? pls?
Remember when a UK bookstore offered visitors the opportunity to vandalize Harry Potter pages for 25 pence? They raised over Ā£4,000 for transgender healthcare! And now they need your support. Emily, co-owner of The Bookish Type, is fundraising for her own gender-affirming surgery that's covered in every Western European country aside from the UK and Ireland. Let's help her like she helped dozens of other trans people access care in an increasingly hostile nation. Support her on GoFundMe here.
The bureaucratic AI arms-race is mutually assured destruction
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
According to an Economist editorial, "AI is breaking the British state" by making it too easy to file complaints, demands and appeals, which will "drown the state" with "demands as well-crafted as a first-class lawyer's":
https://archive.is/VTrj9
Let's pause a moment to appreciate the Economist's touching credulity about AI's coming legal mastery. The law seems to be the area where AI is most prone to "hallucinate" (that is, "produce defective outputs"), which can only be sorted through by skilled practitioners whose experience gives them the discernment to distinguish useful arguments from foolish ones:
(And this requires those skilled practitioners to avoid the "automation blindness" that afflicts people who are asked to remain vigilant for things that seldom occur, a phenomenon that has turned every TSA agent into the water-bottle-detectingest motherfucker the human race has ever produced, who still misses 95% of the guns that red teams bring through the checkpoint):
More notable than the Economist's faith-based predictions about the impending army of hyper-competent robo-lawyers is the magazine's proposed solution to this looming crisis: "stop creating entitlements that are ripe for AI-fuelled claimsā¦prune the mass of procedural rights." Above all, replace the bureaucrats who process your "complaints, demands and appeals" with more AI, which will arbitrarily decide who gets what, through "personalised welfare interventions" that are not based on any kind of guaranteed rights.
Writing on his blog, the political scientist Henry Farrell tells us where this will inevitably end up: with AI-based robot wars in which increasingly stingy and pernickety robo-bureaucrats create demand for progressively more aggressive robo-lawyers:
As Farrell writes, this end-time was foretold by the prophet Alan Moore with his 1980s 2000 AD character Abelard Snazz, "the man with the two-storey brain":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelard_Snazz
Snazz "solves" the street crime epidemic on the planet Twopp with "Big Police Robots," who spiral out of control, arresting the citizens of Twopp for trivial crimes like wearing brown shoes with a blue suit ("breaking the laws of good taste"). To solve this new problem, Snazz invents "Big Criminal Robots" whose "cunning, efficient" crimes "take up all the police's time."
Twopp is left in a state of high-stakes Big Robot crimewars, in which the most efficient criminals imaginable battle the most ruthless robocops science can deliver, with the Twoppians caught in the crossfire, collateral damage in a robotic forever war (on crime).
As Farrell writes, this is already afflicting the US health system, where an army of insurance company robo-claim-deniers have been countered with a doctors' army of robot-claim-appealers:
The point being that people need health care, people need public services, and while there will always be some waste at the margins (whether due to incompetence or dishonesty) responding to this by beefing up the system's defenses with more advanced red tape just requires the people who legitimately need these services to employ more aggressive tactics.
In support of this, Farrell points to a great, long essay by Dan "Accountability Sink" Davies for the Niskanen Center, "'The Problem Factory' ā Preemptive risk aversion in infrastructure planning and the role of professional services":
Davies' essay describes how increasing bureaucratic defenses against frivolous or dishonest claims drives the participants in these processes to assume a war footing and approach the system as a battlefield, leading to the very runaway cost inflation that the bureaucratic process was instituted to prevent.
(Davies, a cybernetician, has some fascinating advice about how to structure planning processes to minimize this, but that's out of scope for this particular post.)
This reminds me of nothing so much as the spam wars. There was a time when it was very easy to set up a mail server and provide email access for anyone who wanted it ā including spammers. Increased spam begat increased anti-spam countermeasures, notably the creation of blocklists that allowed mail administrators to automatically reject email from "insecure" mail servers.
Inevitably, spammers figured out how to send spam from "secure" servers, resulting in stricter, more onerous standards for mail server configuration. Spammers ā for whom the ability to send spam is an existential matter ā figured out how to meet these standards, so the security demands jumped again ā and again, and again.
Today, sending and receiving mail is so technically challenging that most of the internet's email is run by a handful of giant, mostly US-based corporations. If any of these companies decides your mail server is spamming, you effectively disappear from the internet and good luck getting them to acknowledge an error. Meanwhile, these companies emit an avalanche of spam, but no one will ever block their servers, because to do so would be to cut off billions of legitimate email users:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/
And since most of these companies are US-based, they are liable to being weaponized by Trump, who has taken to ordering his tech giants to block foreign officials whose policy decisions make him angry:
Another parallel is the content moderation wars that saw the large platforms coming up with progressively more detailed rules about what constituted harassment and hate speech, only to have dedicated trolls master these rule-books. Trolls ā for whom harassment was a full-time vocation ā became the world's greatest experts on the platforms' speech policies, which let them skate right up to the line when abusing their victims, and to get those victims kicked off the platforms if they could be lured into putting a single toe over the line in response:
Farrell criticizes the Economist's answer to the (allege) looming robo-lawyer threat as "solutionism," Evgeny Morozov's word for "Recasting all complex social situations either as neat problems with definite, computable solutions":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_fix
Using AI to root AI-generated bureaucratic appeals sacrifices the system's putative purpose ā delivering services ā in the name of defending that service from abuse and misuse of the system's resources. As the pioneering cybernetician Stafford Beer famously wrote, "the purpose of a system is what it does." If your bureaucracy is more concerned with fighting fraud than delivering service, then it isn't a service delivery system at all ā it's a service denial system.
As Farrell writes, the people of Twopp can tell you how this ends ā in a war of giant robots in which we are all collateral damage.
(A brief postscript: Farrell is a font of science fictional analogies to modern policy issues. This weekend in the FT, he and Dan Wang published an excellent editorial on the relevance of the paranoid, claustrophobic fiction of Philip K Dick to our present political reality:)
Here's an experiment I like to do when I question whether AI is the problem. Take it out entirely, and replace it with a dude named Al. As in short for Allan. Then analyse the problem to see if Al is to blame.
Now, let's look back to the premise of this issue:
The economist is worried about people with low literacy skills asking Al to write to the government on their behalf, because Al can write a lot of documents every day, and so they think if people can request the government to do their job more easily, that will make the British state collapse under a pile of bureaucracy.
Am I the only one who thinks this line of thought is absolute nonsense?
Leaving AI aside entirely, why is it a good thing that there's a literacy barrier to petition the government to do its job?
Why are we defending the government's right to not listen to their constituents as often as they would like to be heard?
Isn't that like, super fucked up and shamelessly antidemocratic? Shouldn't it be a good thing that more people have access to resources that allow them to request the government to do its job?
I remember when Obama was elected he was the social media president, and he was universally praised for making it so any petition with over 100k signatures automatically merited a response from the government. That was supposed to be a game changer for American democracy; it was the first time in history that the average citizen could directly contact the federal government and say "hey, maybe you should look into this".
But put AI on any headline and you automatically polarise the reader in whatever direction you want without them even stopping to figure out whether the thing they're protesting is actually bad.
Authorities in Uganda declared the country free of Ebola following the discharge of the countryās last patient! The country reported cases in May alongside its neighbor Democratic Republic of Congo, which continues to deal with the outbreak ā Uganda, however, only ever recorded 20 cases and two deaths, with authorities finding no indication of further spread within the country! Uganda responded swiftly to the public health threat, including contact tracing and postponing potential superspreader events. Part of the reason the response was so successful was due to Uganda having experience in swiftly responding to health crises like Ebola. Uganda for now can breathe a sigh of relief as it continues to educate the public on prevention measures as well as send healthcare workers to Congo to help tackle the virus!
Uganda discharged its last Ebola patient from hospital roughly two weeks ago.
2. ššŗļø 7 natural wonders just became UNESCO World Heritage sites ā and one country gained its very first!
These newly-christened landmarks highlight Earthās cultural and natural diversity, from the massive ancient landscape of Greeceās Mount Olympus, to climate-resilient coral reefs in Jordan, to fossils in Denmark that provide clues into the evolution of life on Earth! Joining the World Heritage Listās 26 new sites for 2026, these natural landmarks include the first ever World Heritage site in South Sudan, which annually hosts the worldās largest land mammal migration of six million antelopes!
The UNESCO World Heritage Committee has followed advice from IUCN, as the official advisor on nature, to inscribe seven new sites on the Wor
3. š«š§Ŗ Sweden plans to ban all forever chemicals in everyday products by 2028!
PFAs, or āforever chemicals,ā are synthetic chemicals that take thousands of years to degrade and pollute the environment, all while being linked to harmful health impacts. The banās prohibition of PFAs in commonly-used products like kitchen appliances, clothes, and cosmetics is a victory for both the environment and human health!
Sweden plans to ban forever chemicals in kitchen appliances and clothing by 2028. When will the EU follow suit?
4. š§š± Water is returning to the African Sahel!
Groundwater reserves are rising after decades of drought in the region, restoring water to dried water sources! While part of the shift unfortunately comes from increasingly stronger rainfall due to climate change, it is also largely in part to rain-water harvesting. From Ethiopia to Senegal, the drought of the 1970s and 1980s fueled hunger and disease, but as monsoons now grow stronger, today the region shows a vastly different story ā near-extinct wildlife are resurging, farmers are planting thriving trees and harvesting higher-yielding crops, and wells and new ponds are filling! One of the most notable transformations can be seen in Lake Chad ā one of Africaās largest bodies of water before drying up during the droughts, the lake is now almost as big as in the 1960s, and is 10 times its mid-1980s size!
Warming has brought extreme rain to the parched Sahel, which is seeing aquifers refill as monsoons grow stronger. But heavier downpours alon
5. šš¼ Childhood immunization continues to grow globally!
Despite vaccine efforts being threatened by conflict and vaccine hesitancy, in 2025, 90% of infants globally received at least one dose of a diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccine, and 85% completed the full three-dose series, an increase from 2024. Compared to 2024, the number of unvaccinated children with no doses fell by nearly 750,000! These numbers reflects the strides made in protecting children's health ā in just the past 25 years, government investment, community efforts, and public trust have reduced the annual number of unvaccinated children by 40%!
Zero-dose children fell by nearly 750,000 in the past year, but drop-out numbers high and stagnant, increasing risk of disease outbreaks
"these researchers published a paper on something that literally any of us could have told you š" ok well my supervisors wont let me write something in my thesis unless I can back it up with a citation so maybe it's a good thing that they're amplifying your voice to the scientific community in a way that prevents people from writing off your experiences as annecdotal evidence
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Correcting the Historical Bias Against Domestic Materials
Archaeology has traditionally had a fundamental bias against fabric. Fabrics are after all highly perishable, withering away within months or years, and only rarely leaving traces behind for those coming millennia later to find. Archaeologistsāpredominantly maleāgave ancient ages names like āIronā and āBronze,ā rather than āPotteryā or āFlax.ā This implies that metal objects were the principal features of these times, when they are simply often the most visible and long-lasting remnants. Technologies using perishable materials, such as wood and textiles, may well have been more pivotal in the daily lives of the people who lived through them, but evidence of their existence has, for the most part, been absorbed back into the earth.
There are exceptions, of course, and traces can and do survive, usually thanks to an unusual climate: freezing, damp anaerobic conditions or extremely dry ones. The climate in Egypt, for example, is ideal for preserving all manner of usually perishable things and we subsequently know far more about ancient Egyptian textiles than those from most other regions. As archaeology has matured and diversified, scholars have increasingly looked forāand foundāevidence of fine, complex textiles stretching farther back than anyone would have guessed. Their beauty and the skill needed to make them suggest a very different image of our earliest forebears than the club-wielding, simpleminded thugs of popular imagination.
āThe first cultural device was probably a recipientā¦ . Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier.
So says Elizabeth Fisher in Womenās Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975).
But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilize it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I donāt know. I don āt even care. Iām not telling that story. Weāve heard it, weāve all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news.
And yet old. Beforeāonce you think about it, surely long beforeāthe weapon, a late, luxurious, superfluous tool; long before the useful knife and ax; right along with the indispensable whacker, grinder, and diggerāfor whatās the use of digging up a lot of potatoes if you have nothing to lug the ones you canāt eat home ināwith or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home. It makes sense to me. I am an adherent of what Fisher calls the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution.
This theory not only explains large areas of theoretical obscurity and avoids large areas of theoretical nonsense (inhabited largely by tigers, foxes, and other highly territorial mammals); it also grounds me, personally, in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before. So long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had, or wanted, any particular share in it. (āWhat Freud mistook for her lack of civilization is womanās lack of loyalty to civilization,ā Lillian Smith observed.) The society, the civilization they were talking about, these theoreticians, was evidently theirs; they owned it, they liked it; they were human, fully human, bashing, sticking, thrusting, killing. Wanting to be human too, I sought for evidence that I was; but if thatās what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at allā¦ .
If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because itās useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same againāif to do that is human, if thatās what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.ā
āUrsula K. Le Guin, āThe Carrier Bag Theory of Fictionā (1986)
Itās crazy how there is so much bias in how we see the past and the "advancementā of civilizations purely based on how well the remnants preserve in the climates they were in.
A civilization that built structures out of stone is assumed greater than a civilization that built structures out of wood or some biodegradable material
This makes me think of Rivercane (Arundinaria spp. our native bamboo which was almost wiped out in colonization similar to what happened to the Bison) and how it was used universally by the peoples of the Southeastern USA for every tool, structure, furniture etc imaginable: bedframes, waterproof mats for roofs, backpacks, sieves, shields, torches, sharp splits for quick-and-dirty butchering knivesā¦
when the spanish first came here randomly roaming and murdering people all over the place they reported that the country was so populated that you could be in one town and see the smoke of the campfires of other towns on the horizons.
now bamboo by weight is stronger than steel, and Rivercane is one of the stronger species of bamboo. Bamboo-working in southeastern USA pre-colonization was crazy advanced. And you could use a split of Rivercane as a butchering knife in a pinch, and you could also use sharpened pieces as arrows without a stone projectile point at all. So there were all these useful objects and tools and constructions that were able to simply biodegrade away.
So people nowadays often assume there was hardly anybody here before white people showed up just because they donāt see all the constructions and temples and stuff.
Whatās even crazier is you DO see the constructions all around you, literally the town I live in was built on top of an Indigenous town and many roads around it and leading to it were Indigenous roads.
(And there were quite a few stone constructions, but colonizers have been running wild all over the place so long that theyāve been knocked down and you literally couldnāt identify the ruins unless you thought āhey wait these stones donāt belong here, they had to be quarried and brought hereā And in a lot of cases the locations of such ruins are not popularly discussed because looting and desecration of Indigenous sites is such a huge problem if anybody knows.)
(itās so crazy actually in the history of Kentucky specifically like historical writers in the 1800ās had this theory that indigenous people had replaced this ancient civilization of white people that built all the stone stuff and made all the pottery and things. but now that the remnants are no longer as visible, the most popular falsehood is that NO ONE lived in Kentucky and it was just āhunting grounds.ā which is not true. its like people want to believe anything except that indigenous people were and are indigenous to this place)
personally I'm annoyed by the socioeconomic conditions that made words like "unalive" necessary but simultaneously impressed by the linguistic adaptations young people have made to continue talking about important things while subject to those conditions and I think if you can't hold both of those thoughts in your head you might just be old man yelling at cloud
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