potatoes of apostasy

First Polls open up in 34 days for voting for our new Prime Minister, my friends!!!!

Heres the main 3 parties plans and comments on Indigenous affairs, moving forward!!

This election is MASSIVELY important for Canada, for EVERY person in this country (and those planning to come here from other countries!) who is not a white, cis, hetero, able-bodied middle-aged male. 

To every person who has ever reblogged an American politics post: PLEASE reblog Canadian politics for the next month! I know it’s boring and not aesthetic but this is a big deal. 

American politics AFFECT CANADA GREATLY! We have seen a massive rise in conservative, alt-right, and islamophobic movements and political parties since 2016. We have seen a rise in violence since 2016. Quebec implemented law 21, an islamophobic law which bans religious symbols for anyone working in public office. This includes public school teachers, meaning children are exposed to a system centered around white-supremacist ideologies. This is super fucking important!

The British Museum rejected on Monday the Greek PM’s proposal to loan the Parthenon Sculptures for the 2021 bicentennial celebrations, saying that Athens must first acknowledge ownership to the Museum.

“A precondition for any loan would be an acceptance of ownership of those objects by the Trustees/the Museum”, a British Museum spokesperson told Greek daily Ta Nea.

Such a response has killed the Greek premier’s initiative in its tracks as Athens has reiterated that it would not cede rightful ownership of the priceless sculptures to the British institution.

I barely have followers here, but here we go:

The Amazon Rainforest has been burning for the last 16 days straight. The Brazilian government says the wildfire is caused by the winter itself, since it doesn't rain a lot there... in a rainforest. It is actually, partially true. Winter is indeed a dry season and wildfires may happen, specially close to the Cerrado (a brazilian biome similar to the african Savanna), but what they're not telling us is that:

The deforestation has increased 80% since last year

The native peoples and animals are being slaughtered for their lands (legally protected green areas)

The government is hiding and lying about scientific data, saying that environmentalists and NGOs are communists trying to destroy the nation. They are brainwashing people to think that sustainability is terrible for the economy

Our Minister of Environment is couldn't care less about the environment and is only there to support the livestock producers and give them what they want. The President and his Minister won't put a single dollar on environmental safety

The wildfires are just so huge that its black smoke and ashes reached the skies of São Paulo, a state over 2.000 kilometers away from the Amazon.

We are hostages or our own government

I could just keep going all night about how our environment is being threatened by this new government. We need every single help we can possibly can.

You can donate to SOS Amazônia which is one among the 100 NGOs selected as “The Largest NGOs in Brazil”.

> > > ( ENGLISH: //doe.sosamazonia.org.br/en ) < < <

And remember: - 1 USD is 4,04 reais. - 1 EUR is 4,47 reais. If you donate only $2,50 USD (10 reais) you’re helping a lot.

If you donate only $2,30 EUR (10 reais) you’re helping a lot. About people saying “the minimum value is $10”: Even if you’re not from Brazil you can donate in REAL instead of donating in USD or EUR via Paypal, so… YES, you can donate less than 10 dollars or euros. (Just don’t change the currency to USD or EUR, Paypal converts your dollars/euros to reais.)

Amid unrelenting chaos and violence, scientists and doctors in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been running a clinical trial of new drugs to try to combat a year-long Ebola outbreak. On Monday, the trial’s cosponsors at the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health announced that two of the experimental treatments appear to dramatically boost survival rates.

While an experimental vaccine previously had been shown to shield people from catching Ebola, the news marks a first for people who already have been infected. “From now on, we will no longer say that Ebola is incurable,” said Jean-Jacques Muyembe, director general of the Institut National de Recherche Biomedicale in the DRC, which has overseen the trial’s operations on the ground.

recuva - accidentally deleted something in the recycling bin? recover it back with this program!

speccy - tells you the specs of your computer, among other things

Example (not mine):

Another image editor is Krita.

Here’s a free video editor, as well; I’ve never done any video editing so I can speak on if it’s any good, but here it is regardless. It’s called Kdenlive and it’s a project of the same people who made the above Krita.

Did you know that in post-mortem examinations there is zero correlation between weight and levels of arteriosclerosis and related diseases found?

Did you know that people with an overweight BMI have the longest life expectancy, that those with an “ideal” and an “obese” have about the same life expectancy, and that being “underweight” raises mortality rates more than being “morbidly obese”?

Did you know that losing weight and then gaining it back is worse for your heart than remaining at the weight you started consistently?

Did you know that 95% of people who lose weight do gain it back, and there has never been a single documented weight loss program that has been demonstrated to keep the weight off for five years or more in the majority or even a significant minority of people? Like, telling people to lose weight isn’t much use if we don’t know HOW to make that happen.

Like I have read The Obesity Myth by Paul Campos and Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata and Big Fat Lies by Glenn A Gaesser (Ph.D!) And Fat!So? and several other books that I don’t own and so don’t remember all of their names I spent like four years reading every single study coming out and looking at the methodology and noting which ones had huge holes or terrible methods and which didn’t (the holes were almost always in the pro-weight-loss studies) and like

Big Fat Lies has 27 pages of bibliography. 27 pages worth of scientific citation. The book content itself is only 197 pages. That’s a page of references for every 7 pages of book. Reading the book is just reference after reference and study after study. Most of these doctors (like Linda Bacon, author of Health at Every Size) started out the same way. They wanted to use the scientific method to find a real weight loss program or health solution that worked and could be proven to work, and so studied everything they could about weight and fitness only to find out that we didn’t need weight loss in the first place. That all the studies calling for it were lacking or nonexistent. That weight and underlying metabolic health have very little relation. That the history of our relationship with health and obesity has little basis in fact and a LOT of basis in capitalism, politics, and fashion. No, really, the association between weight and health was first proposed by insurance companies looking for ways to charge people more by claiming risk. They also charged tall and short people more. And people with different skin colors. When they got in trouble for charging people for things they had no control over and had no bearing on their health, they set out to prove that weight was controllable and that fat was unhealthy to make money. 

These are also a lot of the same people who went on to invent the President’s fitness program, so if you went to public school you probably already hate them. 

Staffer Ann supplies scrumptious sharky snacks to our sevengills for supper and for science! 

Our largest sharks at the Aquarium are only temporary visitors here—by diving in and feeding each shark individually, we can keep track of their diet to monitor their health, and also learn more about their life histories before they return to the wild!

IRON SNAIL IS THE FIRST DEEP-SEA SPECIES TO BE ENDANGERED DUE TO DEEP-SEA MINING

The  Scaly-foot snail (Chrysomallon squamiferum), is an iconic vent gastropod known only found in three hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor east of Madagascar, living at more than 2500 metres deep. Its habitat covers only a few square meter of area, its total distribution area has been estimated to be at most 0.27 km2 . On 18 July The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) added this species to its Red List of Endangered Species.

This snail is the first deep-sea animal to be declared endangered, mainly because threat of deep-sea mining. Two of those three vents are currently under mining exploration licences. According to researchers, nearly all known hydrothermal vents in the Indian Ocean fall within a mining exploration lease. This area is relatively unexplored and one of the few place where mining interests are increasing. Commercial mining exploration licence has been granted to Germany from 2015 to 2030 and to Chine, from 2011 to 2026.

This species is the only known animal that incorporates iron sulfide into its shell and sclerites, as the scales of its foot are called. The nutrition of the scaly-foot snail depends exclusively on endosymbiotic bacteria.

Deep-sea mining impacts include the mining themselves, habitat destruction, disturbance of sediment and create plumes which suffocated surrounding marine life. Since deep-sea life has low growth rates, sites altered by mining in many cases do not recover.

Photo: Chrysomallon squamiferum from the Kairei vent fiel, Central India Ridge, by Nakamura et al.,

Reference: Sigwart et al., 2019.  Red Listing can protect deep-sea biodiversity. Nature Ecology & Evolution.

On this, the First Day of Shark Week, we just wanted to say: We love sharks. 

We hope you do too, because the ocean certainly does! Every healthy ecosystem in the ocean is teeming with sharks—though maybe not the ones you’re used to seeing on TV. The vast majority of the 400+ species of shark are less than five feet long, and their diets range from microscopic plankton to worms and squid, dead animals, fishes and marine mammals. 

Sharks have been an integral part of the oceanic community since before trees were a thing, and are necessary to the continued health of the ocean, the heart of our planet’s life support system. We’re hard at work studying sharks here and abroad, and we’ll be sharing some of the cool stuff we’ve found out recently more this week. But above all else, we just wanted to share how much we love sharks. May these jawesome animals be around to inspire countless generations to come. 

Thanks for reading, and thanks for being on Team Ocean. 

The story starts with Lan Wangji going to an ice cream shop to eat ice cream. He orders chocolate ice cream and when he gets his order, his good friend, Wei Wuxian arrives. So they have ice cream and chat. Then they finish and leave. On their way home, they run into Sun Wukong. Sun Wukong remembers that last time he met Lan Wangji, they got into an argument and he’s still mad about it. He picks a fight with Lang Wangji and Wei Wuxian, and the rest of this essay is about their epic duel.