Solarpunk Witchcraft

Please increase your contribution to The Sameer Project.

It's never done that before so I looked it up and turns out Roku TVs have added all sorts of creepy things in the privacy section since I last checked.

One of which being they take screenshots from what you're watching and send them to third parties to identify it.

Fucking hell! Remember when every fucking device in your life wasn't a spy implanted in your home and working against your interests to try and sell your data? Remember how nice that was??

Remember when the TV was just a tool that would play the things you plugged into it?

Below are a few sources accepting donations to provide food, aide, and more to those affected. If you have any means to donate please do so. The Lebanese Red Cross - provides life saving medical services across the country

Lebanese Food Bank - distributing food and essential supplies to those who are directly affected and displaced

Egna Legna Besidet - a women migrant domestic worker run humanitarian and advocacy organization providing humanitarian assistance and emergency aide for migrant domestic workers

While an agrihood can’t feasibly provide all the calories residents need, it’s an especially powerful system because the produce that it does produce is highly nutritious. Scale that food production up across a city, and the impact could be huge: One study found that Los Angeles could meet a third of its need for vegetables by converting vacant lots into gardens. “It’s incredible what we could do with what we have, and what we could do even more with intentional planning,” said Catherine Brinkley, a social scientist who studies urban agriculture at the University of California, Davis.

[...]

These crops can even benefit from a quirk of city life: the urban heat island effect. As the sun beats down on all that concrete, asphalt, and brick, the landscape absorbs its thermal energy — raising the mercury well above surrounding rural areas — and slowly releases it at night. This is a growing problem for urbanites struggling with ever-higher temperatures. On the flip side, these green spaces help cool the neighborhood because their plants release water vapor, making summer more comfortable for the surrounding community. An agrihood can also support local biodiversity. Planting native flowering species, for instance, simultaneously beautifies the landscape and attracts pollinating insects, hummingbirds, and bats (which eat mosquitoes, an added bonus). Even the flowers the crops produce provide food for these pollinators, which return the favor by helping the plants reproduce. 

From the article:

"Power lines zig-zag across North America, strung between towers that rise 100 feet or more into the sky. Beneath lie vast swaths of often barren land up to 100 feet wide and stretching for hundreds of miles.    “I think that there’s an incredible opportunity to use these really large tracts of land that cross our landscapes for good,” says Eliza Meyer, program administrator for the Right-of-Way Stewardship Council (ROWSC). Founded in 2013, ROWSC provides accreditation to power companies that work to improve the biodiversity of the land along utility corridors (under power lines or above pipelines). [...] “There’s a lot of regulation that dictates what can grow, and how high it can grow,” Meyer says. With this in mind, ROWSC promotes practices that foster low-growing, native vegetation, such as wildflowers, grasses and shrubs. According to Meyer, this type of vegetation not only protects power lines but also creates new habitats for pollinators, small mammals and birds, and helps outcompete non-native vegetation once established."

The co-founder of Palestine Action has won a legal challenge to the home secretary’s decision to ban the group under anti-terrorism laws. The proscription of Palestine Action, which categorised it alongside the likes of Islamic State, was the first of a direct action protest group and attracted widespread condemnation as well as a civil disobedience campaign defying the ban, during which more than 2,000 people have been arrested. From 5 July last year, being a member of – or showing support for – the group became an offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Huda Ammori, a co-founder of Palestine Action, challenged the ban at a trial in the high court in London, part of which was held in secret and which concluded in December. On Friday, three judges, led by the president of the king’s bench division, Dame Victoria Sharp, ruled the decision to proscribe the group was unlawful but the ban on the group would remain to give the government time to appeal. They allowed the challenge on two of four grounds, namely that there was “a very significant interference” with the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association and that the then home secretary Yvette Cooper’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action was not consistent with her own policy. The current home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said she would appeal against the decision.