Les institutions régionales ouest-africaines en marche vers la COP27

Les institutions régionales ouest-africaines en marche vers la COP27

Dans la perspective de la 27ième Conférence des Parties (COP27) de la Convention Cadre des Nations Unies contre les Changements Climatiques (CCNUCC) qui se tiendra à Sharm El-Sheik en Egypte du 6 au 18 novembre 2022, les institutions d’intégration régionale ouest-africaines se préparent activement pour une participation commune. Premier jalon de cette participation conjointe, l’atelier régional…

View On WordPress

You know that whole trope/adage/etc. about the fact that people are strongest and most powerful when united against a common enemy?

Climate change is a common enemy for all of humanity. And unlike most instances of "banding together against a common enemy," fighting climate change doesn't require hurting anyone - only healing each other and the world.

So let's all band together and hurt the hell out of some oil company profit margins instead of each other.

I’m reading a book on the history of invention and how our cultural views of masculinity vs femininity affect our progress and holy shit if women’s needs and preferences were taken seriously we would’ve been using electric cars since the late 1800s instead of just starting to use them now.

In “Att uppfinna världen” (Mother of Invention in the English translation) by Katrine Marçal there is a chapter dedicated to the process of inventing the modern automobile, where I read that there were multiple ways of constructing a car when the invention was relatively recent, as the field was still open to experimentation. Petrol wasn’t an obvious choice for fuelling the engine – in fact, around the year 1900 a third of all cars in Europe were electric cars, and the percentage was even bigger in America. Electrically powered cars were superior to petrol-fuelled ones in many ways: they were quieter, didn’t expel smelly gas, much safer and more reliable, and easy to start and control from the driver’s seat. Cars fuelled by petrol, on the other hand, were loud, more unreliable and required a lot more maintenance, and to start the engine one had to do some serious manual labour involving a crank – which would often leave you sweaty and with oil stains on your clothes, plus a constant risk of causing an explosion if you weren’t careful enough. Naturally, women preferred the former, being more convenient and comfortable and thus more suited to their travel needs, whereas the petrol-fuelled car was marketed as the more adventurous, macho choice for men.

The one downside to electric cars was that the battery didn’t last for longer journeys, which in the case for women wasn’t that much of a problem since the majority mainly just made trips within the city or town. This was also an issue that could’ve been fixed, and there were many plans to do so, mainly infrastructure-related ones like battery-switching stations and developing better battery solutions. There were even plans for a net of rentable electric cars for anyone to use, and electric trains, trams, and taxis for public transport (seems very ahead of its time, doesn’t it? A much more environmentally conscious system than our good ol’ “everyone has one or multiple cars that individually expel copious amounts of greenhouse gasses” method). However, investments were too few since the male-dominated society deemed these “women’s cars”. After all, a real man isn’t soft, safe and comfortable – he cranks his own car to life and makes a lot of noise as he travels. A report from 1916 by the magazine Electric Vehicle stated that “The thing that is effeminate, or that has that reputation, does not find favor with the American man. Whether or not he is ‘red-blooded’ or ‘virile’ in the ordinary physical sense, at least his ideals are. The fact that anything from a car to a color is the delight of the ladies is enough to change his interest to mere amused tolerance.”

Like, it’s insane that values such as comfort, safety and convenience were seen as “feminine” and thus dismissed, leading to petrol-fuelled cars completely taking over the market in the end. Imagine what the world would’ve looked like if women were the standard instead of men. It really pains me to think how much damage we’ve done to the planet just because of men’s stubborn macho ideals.

(a lot of this research is quoted from The Electric Vehicle: Technology and Expectations in the Automobile Age by Gijs Mom, a book I’m now very interested in reading in full)

With your Help we can restructure the economies of all nations of Our beautiful Planet towards producing billions of bullets with which to shoot the ocean. It is large and growing but we are smart and many and with enough guns i believe we can kill it

Sonic having unexpected bits of secondhand expertise that he gets from his friends:

His coding skills wouldn't last a single second against anyone actually competent but he can hack Shadow's Netflix password every time it changes.

He knows how to brew a perfect cup of tea and also how to bake exactly one (1) cake.

Around the specific latitudes that Angel island tends to float around in he goes looking for a particular kind of edible plant that a certain someone showed him how to identify. He likes to snack on it when he's bored.

He's able to estimate the value of a piece of jewelry based off the quality of the gem. Knows the difference between a 'karat' and a 'carat'.

He can look at bullet holes and have a decent guess at the caliber of the gun that shot them. He could also, in a pinch, fully disassemble a HK45 Tactical pistol and put it back together again.

Fishing. You get the idea.

most irritating part of recovery so far is that i keep having existential panic attacks about death + the future every couple days. it's pretty clearly because i am not currently ready to be done here & it freaks me the Fuck Out that last year i could feel the end coming to the point of making total peace with it & i am terrified that the 50-odd years i've wrested back could be torn away from me at any moment. which is like, yeah, this is a completely reasonable post-traumatic response. could you cut it out tho.

usually telling myself "i'll be ready for this when it happens" comforts me. but occasionally i'll just lay here staring at the ceiling like. I Could Get Shot Tomorrow,

It should not be close to 30°C in early April.

our office has been in renovations for what feels like forever and my team is very close to getting some of our new space. my dream. my absolute dream for my cubicle decoration. is a framed embroidery of this

i have never embroidered anything in my life but now that the time is near i think i am willing to learn

I often wonder what the world would look like if pressing local or state level issues people claim to care about generated the same kind of action and enthusiasm that massive national news stories with complicated power mapping do. Idk even when I'm 100% with the people who are up in arms. Like what if just as many people in MA had turned out for the ROE act as turned out to protest the overturn of Roe after the fact? What if the rent control actions were as well attended as the ceasefire actions? I have had many instances where I am trying to get progressive people who regularly go to big demonstrations to show up for something state level they have said they care about and they just won't. And what I'm left with after that is the conclusion that where their interests actually are is feeling like a part of something big and heady rather than accomplishing a concrete goal and that's. Demoralizing.

England is on fire after our power hungry, sorry excuse of an ex prime minister cut funding for firestations which resulted in 10 closing down in the london area alone.

Throughout his career he has claimed to have always been "right with the big calls" yet now those calls, his decisions, have led to the country being incapacitated and over run on multiple fronts.

Wether it was relaxing lockdown restrictions at a key point in the pandemic, forcing children to attend school during the pandemic or cutting funding for key services such as the NHS and the Fire Departments, he was said to have been right in those decisions.

Look where it fucking got us

Now if you'll excuse me, its 34°c, i have one 2ft tall fan thats the same age as me and i need a fucking break :)

To people living in the Netherlands:

Join the March for Climate on November 12th in Amsterdam! 🇳🇱

With the elections around the corner, this is the time to show what we stand for and what we want our future government to do! Keep up the pressure!

i honestly feel like the cis vs. trans debate depends on how we’re defining the terms. “trans” as in “no association with your agab whatsoever”? probably excludes a good sum of trans people. “cis” as in “only expresses their gender through stereotypical presentation and/or never experiments with the concept of gender”? probably excludes a good chunk of cis people. but this doesn’t necessarily conflict with or negate the cultural significance of being cisgender or transgender and labeling those experiences as such. cis and trans people obviously receive very different treatments and privileges, so it’s less about strictly defining what it means to be cis or trans and more about how these terms (as broad groupings) help us understand and identify where we stand. they’re communication devices first and foremost, not diagnoses. i hope that makes sense

Hey so uh.

I dont think voting is the only solution. Nor will it necessarily get us what we want immediately. And i think protest is more important and more effective.

However.

Conservatives. Would. Not. Be. Trying. To. Make. Voting. Impossible. And. Taking away. Actual voting places from marginalized areas. .

If it meant ABSOLUTELY nothing.

Hope that helps.

✌️

So, I've been thinking about climate change, and the younger generations who have been placed in the impossible position of figuring out how to survive the crisis, and bring along as many species of animals and plants as they can. Which means making choices about which species to save, and which ones to let go extinct. And sometimes I've wondered if we can even save ourselves.

But there's a paleontologist I know whose focus is on the Permian-Triassic extinction event, also known as the Great Dying. It's Earth's worst-ever extinction event, wiping out perhaps 90 percent of the species on our planet. And this guy has thought about mass extinctions A LOT. He's also one of the smartest people I've ever met.

I asked him once whether human beings survive all of this *gestures to everything* -- and he said yes -- because we're so adaptable. He thinks we're one of the species that makes it through this mess we brought upon ourselves (and the rest of the world.) And maybe there's still time to avert a biological Apocalypse.

As a parable about the sixth great mass extinction we're currently living through, Douglas Adams retold the story of the Sibylline books in his book Last Chance to See -- I'll try to paraphrase.

It's about an old woman who came to the gates of a prosperous city with 12 books of all the knowledge and wisdom in the world, and offered to sell it to them for a sack of gold. They laughed and sent her away. She burned six of the books in front of them before she left.

After a hard winter, the woman was back with six books, but this time the price was two sacks of gold. Again, the people refused, and again the woman burned half of the remaining books.

When she returned with three books after a really hard winter, and some famine, the people said, look, we can't pay four sacks of gold, it's hard times. The woman said, take it or leave it. The people refused again, and the woman burned two of the remaining books, and left.

After a winter of terrible famine and disease, the people awaited the return of the woman with the last book. Sixteen bags of gold, the woman demanded. The people said they had only budgeted for eight. The woman shrugged. Wait, wait! the people said, and went in to talk amongst themselves. They returned with the sixteen bags of gold, and the woman gave them the last book of knowledge and wisdom in the world in exchange for two ox carts full of gold, and left the people to fend for themselves as best they could.

The cost of waiting to act on climate change is only going to increase, but it's human nature to wait until the last possible moment to do something costly and difficult. We'll survive, but we're going to have to make sacrifices along the way.

I think as an adult whose almost hitting her 30s (wow) and has struggled immensely with my own creative passions since finishing getting my animation degree, it’s buck wild that people make rewrites of existing works such as TV shows with the purpose of “fixing it”

To be clear, I am not against rewrites or criticising . I think it can be a good way of testing out your creative juices, explore different approaches of a subject and be plain fun

Just, there’s a huge difference between making a fanfic rewrite or doodle redesign in your own time and in your own way vs having to do animation as a job to pay bills and under corporate management

i feel like some fans might be overestimating the duffers when it comes to romance. The romantic storylines have always been pretty straight forward in the show narratively. Kind of have to take them at face value. There’s no hidden complex agenda. I’ve always felt the duffers focus more on a complex plot and the sci fi stuff and they keep the relationships fairly simple and fun.

I may be wrong but I feel if they were setting up Stancy in season 4 it’s very likely it will reach its resolution in the last season. The only times they’ve done things that are random are when they’ve suddenly changed their mind about a character (robins sexuality at the last minute even though she was supposed to be a love interest for Steve). So until they do something out of the blue like that, their plan so far is pretty clear when it comes to Stancy. Narratively speaking. It’s gonna be exactly what it seems to be building towards.