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The vast majority (99%) of the 281,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2 equivalent) estimated to have been generated in the first 60 days following the 7 October Hamas attack can be attributed to Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by researchers in the UK and US.
According to the study, which is based on only a handful of carbon-intensive activities and is therefore probably a significant underestimate, the climate cost of the first 60 days of Israel’s military response was equivalent to burning at least 150,000 tonnes of coal.
The analysis, which is yet to be peer reviewed, includes CO2 from aircraft missions, tanks and fuel from other vehicles, as well as emissions generated by making and exploding the bombs, artillery and rockets. It does not include other planet-warming gases such as methane. Almost half the total CO2 emissions were down to US cargo planes flying military supplies to Israel.
Hamas rockets fired into Israel during the same period generated about 713 tonnes of CO2, which is equivalent to approximately 300 tonnes of coal – underscoring the asymmetry of each side’s war machinery.
[...]
David Boyd, the UN special rapporteur for human rights and the environment, said: “This research helps us understand the immense magnitude of military emissions – from preparing for war, carrying out war and rebuilding after war. Armed conflict pushes humanity even closer to the precipice of climate catastrophe, and is an idiotic way to spend our shrinking carbon budget.”
[...]
Even without comprehensive data, one recent study found that militaries account for almost 5.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions annually – more than the aviation and shipping industries combined. This makes the global military carbon footprint – even without factoring in conflict-related emission spikes – the fourth largest after only the US, China and India.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_hygiene
Sleep hygiene is a behavioral and environmental practice[1] developed in the late 1970s as a method to help people with mild to moderate insomnia.[1] Clinicians assess the sleep hygiene of people with insomnia and other conditions, such as depression, and offer recommendations based on the assessment. Sleep hygiene recommendations include: establishing a regular sleep schedule; using naps with care; not exercising physically or mentally too close to bedtime; limiting worry; limiting exposure to light in the hours before sleep; getting out of bed if sleep does not come; not using bed for anything but sleep and sex; avoiding alcohol as well as nicotine, caffeine, and other stimulants in the hours before bedtime; and having a peaceful, comfortable and dark sleep environment. However, as of 2021, the empirical evidence for the effectiveness of sleep hygiene is "limited and inconclusive" for the general population[1] and for the treatment of insomnia,[2] despite being the oldest treatment for insomnia.[2] A systematic review by the AASM concluded that clinicians should not prescribe sleep hygiene for insomnia due to the evidence of absence of its efficacy and potential delaying of adequate treatment, recommending instead that effective therapies such as CBT-i should be preferred.[2]
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"Three years into the pandemic, with the removal of almost all mitigation measures in most countries, it's clear the virus has hit the world very hard. So far, almost 681 million infections and more than 6.8 million deaths have been reported.
This is perhaps best visualised by its impact on life expectancy. There were sharp declines seen across the world in 2020 and 2021, reversing 70 years of largely uninterrupted progress.
The excess mortality driving this drop in life expectancy has continued. This includes in Australia, where over 20,000 more lives than the historical average are estimated to have been lost in 2022."...
"The indirect impacts on the health systems in rich and poor countries alike continue to be substantial. Disruptions to health services have led to increases in stillbirths, maternal mortality and postnatal depression.
Routine child immunisation coverage has decreased. Crucial malaria, tuberculosis and HIV programs have been disrupted.
A paper out this week highlights the severe impact of the pandemic on mental health globally.
Meanwhile, more evidence of long COVID has emerged around the world. At least 65 million people were estimated to be experiencing this debilitating syndrome by the end of 2022.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimates 5-10 per cent of people who are infected with SARS-CoV-2 will develop long COVID, with symptoms persisting for more than three months.
That's between 550,000 and 1.1 million Australians, based on the more than 11 million cases reported so far."...
"We cannot assume there will be a natural exit to the pandemic, where the virus reaches some benign endemicity, a harmless presence in the background.
In fact, there is little indication anything like that is imminent.
In Australia, since the beginning of January, more than 235,000 COVID cases have been reported, almost as many as in 2020 and 2021 combined. Since the start of January, there have been 2,351 COVID-related deaths, more than twice as many as in the whole of 2020 and around the same as in the whole of 2021."...
"As we enter the fourth year of the pandemic, we must not leave it up to the virus to fix itself.
The biggest lesson of the past three years is there's little chance that is going to work, at least without an intolerably high cost.
Rather, we can end the pandemic by choice. We know what to do. But we are simply not doing it."
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The former FBI informant charged with lying about the Bidens’ dealings in Ukraine told investigators after his arrest that Russian intelligence officials were involved in passing information to him about Hunter Biden, prosecutors said Tuesday in a new court filing, noting that the information was false.
Prosecutors also said Alexander Smirnov has been “actively peddling new lies that could impact US elections” after meeting with Russian spies late last year and that the fallout from his previous false bribery accusations about the Bidens “continue[s] to be felt to this day.”
Smirnov claims to have “extensive and extremely recent” contacts with foreign intelligence officials, prosecutors said in the filing. They said he previously told the FBI that he has longstanding and extensive contacts with Russian spies, including individuals he said were high-level intelligence officers or command Russian assassins abroad.
Prosecutors with special counsel David Weiss’ team said Tuesday that Smirnov has maintained those ties and noted that, in a post-arrest interview last week, “Smirnov admitted that officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story about Businessperson 1,” referring to President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
#emphasis added#russian election interference#election interference#hunter biden#trump is putin's puppet#alexander smirnov#biden impeachment#republican lies
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In a letter to the president, 26 Republican attorneys general demanded the Biden administration withdraw its Department of Agriculture’s Title IX interpretation, which will take billions of dollars in National School Lunch Program funding away from schools that don’t let biological males use the girls' bathroom or compete in girls’ sports. The department's interpretation violated the Administrative Procedures Act, since it was issued as a memorandum rather than a proposed rule for the public to comment on, the attorneys general wrote.
The Biden administration has a history of going around the public when issuing policies, Matt Bowman, a senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, told the Washington Free Beacon. Before the Supreme Court blocked it in January, a mandate without public comment from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration required that workers at businesses with 100 or more employees get vaccinated or submit a negative COVID test weekly.
With the exception of New Hampshire attorney general John Formella, every Republican attorney general joined the coalition, which is led by Tennessee attorney general Herbert Slatery.
#Washington Free Beacon#Elizabeth Troutman#school lunches#state attorneys#Biden administration#funding#homosexuality#Title IX#Department of Agriculture#National School Lunch Program#Administrative Procedures Act#Republicans#OSHA#covid vaccines#emphasis added#overreach
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American commanders committed considerable energy to civic action programmes. As professional warriors, however, they were conditioned to regard battle as their principal business. Most felt in their marrow that if their troops were not fighting, they were not earning their pay. Furthermore, career officers were properly ambitious to burnish their reputations and credentials for promotion. It was unlikely they could achieve this by reporting a tally of schools opened and villages visited by Medcap teams: nobody got a Medal of Honor for distributing candy in orphanages.
- Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy
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cw csa mention, people conflating attraction with abuse
Child Molesting will always be awful and nothing will change that. Same for Pedophilia and both of them should be addressed in whatever needs to be done. Therapy, jail time, community service, whatever will work for that person to get out of that hole.
biting chomping killing attack attack attack
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Why a man ignores you? It’s the ‘hard to get’ myth – that the more a person seems distant and uninterested, the more obsessed we are with them.
#realtionship#i love her#i love you#inlove#loving#i love it#relationship#tenderness#friendship#thor love and thunder#self love#emphatic#emphasis on try#emphasis added#emphasis on might#womanstyle#pretty woman#womanhood#woman#mature woman
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Fifteen government departments have been monitoring the social media activity of potential critics and compiling “secret files” in order to block them from speaking at public events, the Observer can reveal.
Under the guidelines issued in each department, including the departments of health, culture, media and sport, and environment, food and rural affairs, officials are advised to check experts’ Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn accounts. They are also told to conduct Google searches on those individuals, using specific terms such as “criticism of government or prime minister”.
The guidelines are designed to prevent anyone who has criticised the government in the previous three to five years from speaking at government-organised conferences and other events.
[...]
These hidden checks are unlawful, running contrary to data protection laws and potentially breaching equality and human rights legislation.
Dan Kaszeta, a chemical weapons expert, was disinvited in April from giving a keynote speech at a UK defence conference after officials found social media posts criticising Tory ministers and government immigration policy. He told the Observer this weekend that he knows of 12 others who have uncovered evidence of similar government blacklisting, most of whom are frightened of speaking out. But he said far more will be unaware they ever failed secret vetting.
He said: “The full extent of this is shocking and probably not fully known. I was lucky enough to be given clearcut, obvious evidence. It’s truly awful.”
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1-Wire is a device communications bus system designed by Dallas Semiconductor that provides low-speed (16.3 kbit/s[1]) data, signaling, and power over a single conductor. [...]
One distinctive feature of the bus is the possibility of using only two wires — data and ground.
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So, after passing a whole law last year to protect an imaginary white girl from crying over Critical Race Theory courses that aren’t taught in K-12 schools, Tennessee lawmakers missed an opportunity to crack down on a theory that led a white youth to cause real Black people to cry over killings that really happened.
What they should have targeted was Great Replacement Theory.
That racist theory, revved by President Obama's election in 2008 and again in 2020, when Black and brown voters helped to elect Obama's vice-president, Joe Biden and eject President Trump, sees diversity and demographics as a Jewish-led conspiracy to replace white people.
It has been parroted by FOX News host Tucker Carlson, and abetted by Trump Republicans like Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tennessee, whose skills set seems to lie in ginning up fears about non-white people than in generating ideas that can help all people.
Well, last Saturday 18-year-old Payton Gendron apparently acted on what he learned from that theory online, and, more than likely, from what he learned from Trump and his GOP acolytes offline.
…
Sadly, this tragedy isn’t solely the result of racism and xenophobia polluting the online and social media sphere, but the effect of GOP-led culture wars that have, among other things, painted teaching about race as racism, and white students as victims of the lessons, and not the reality, of racism.
Problem is, by restricting teaching truths about race in schools under the flimsy excuse of it potentially traumatizing white students, these lawmakers leave an opening for white youths to absorb lies about race online.
Which will make it easier for states like Tennessee, which now, according to Southern Poverty Law Center, has the highest number of hate groups per capita than the states that surround it, to spawn the next teenage white supremacist to drive hundreds of miles to murder Black grandmothers out shopping for Sunday dinner.
…
Like Critical Race Theory, Great Replacement Theory isn’t being taught in Tennessee schools. But the outrage here is that lawmakers didn’t care that CRT wasn’t being taught.
They passed a law based on a lie to gain favor with constituents who view any teachings of Black history or reality, or anything that deals with righting systemic racism, as a wrong.
Hence the vagueness of the law banning something that isn’t taught.
…
The Memphis Massacre of 1866, in which white Memphians and former Confederates elevated a fracas between a white police officer and Black Union soldiers into an excuse to riot and kill 47 Black people, rape five Black women and burn down Black churches and schools?
Lessons about that massacre would help students learn about the dangers of replacement theory and how ginning up fears about non-white people taking their place can lead to atrocities.
But teachers must now fear whether such lessons could be interpreted in a way that could make white students feel guilty about being white.
That’s the law. And it’s dumb.
To be clear, the monster who massacred 10 Black people last Saturday in Buffalo wasn’t specifically instructed by Carlson, Trump, Blackburn, or the Tennessee lawmakers who frothed at the mouth in their denunciations of CRT last year, to do so.
But he didn’t have to be.
By weaponizing Black people’s history and struggles against racism as a threat to white children, by ending an effort aimed at helping college students grasp what racism is and how to fight it, and by traveling to the Texas and Mexico border to drum up imaginary fears about an invasion of undocumented workers here, Tennessee's lawmakers feed racist extremism as much as the online conspirators do.
…
That’s why, instead of worrying about CRT, lawmakers here ought to worry about GRT. Because when racist teachings online mesh with laws that distort the history and humanity of non-white people as a source of divisiveness, you get more divisiveness.
And, in the case of the Buffalo mass murderer, a massacre of Black grandmothers.
[Emphasis added in all quotes.]
This is why CRT bans are pointless. As far as pretty much the entire American teaching profession (save some older relics heading for retirement) is concerned, they aren’t teaching “CRT,” they’re teaching the truth, historical fact, and they’re not going to let any laws passed by ignorant bigots stop them from teaching the truth, any more than teachers like Scopes let laws passed by ignorant bigots stop them from teaching the truth about biology.
And you can’t fire them all.
[@mitigatedchaos]
#tonyaa weathersbee#commercialappeal.com#why crt bans are pointless and useless#and teachers simply won't obey them#the woke take#emphasis added
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Nikolas Cruz bought the AR-15 that he used to kill 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School because it was “cool-looking.” That’s what he told a Broward Sheriff’s detective, according to court documents.
It was cool-looking.
Cruz’s trial isn’t over yet. The prosecution has rested, and the defense is making its case against the death penalty, after his guilty plea. But even as the jury continues its heartbreaking job, one so agonizing it would be beyond the endurance of many, the AR-15-style gun marketed as “America’s rifle” continues to plague us all.
Cruz chose the same style of weapon as the shooter in Uvalde, the one in Las Vegas, the one at Pulse in Orlando, the one at Sandy Hook, the one in Buffalo, the one in Highland Park, Illinois. These are guns that trace their roots to the Vietnam War. They’re designed to kill lots of people and to look pretty much the same as ones used in the military.
It makes us numb, that list of shootings. But how many of us would still feel that way — could still feel that way — if we’d seen what the jurors in the Cruz trial have had to see? They don’t have the luxury of averting their eyes from the carnage. They can’t duck from the reality of what this country allows: Cruz purchased his weapon legally.
That has to change.
The graphic photos of human beings’ destruction — the tiny entrance wound, the gaping, obscene exit wound — were shielded from the public, considered too awful for most of us to contemplate. But the jurors deciding Cruz’s fate had to see them. Reporters covering the case also viewed them, including David Ovalle.
Ovalle is the Miami Herald’s veteran court reporter. He’s seen some of the worst things that humans can do to each other. But even he struggled to comprehend the horrific damage depicted in the photos.
“For me, the exit wounds were so jarring to view,” he said. “It’s hard to even describe them, because the descriptions of gaping wounds, ragged flesh and deep-red-colored holes just don’t do enough to convey the devastation caused by these weapons of war.”
He talked about one boy, shot eight times, with exit wounds on his forearm — “a massive hole of ragged flesh” — and one of his legs. And about a girl, lying on the floor in front of a classroom lectern, “her eyes wide open as if she’s in pain, her mouth slightly open.” The side of her head is missing, her brain pulverized by a high-velocity bullet.
None of us should have to know about the damage that high-velocity bullets can do. And yet, as the shootings continue, so many of us do.
‘Snowstorm’ of damage
Medical examiners have offered more grim lessons during this trial. They told jurors that the bullets that AR-15-style weapons use are created to inflict massive internal damage. Forensic pathologists testified about how the bullets tore through flesh and hit bone, creating a “snow storm” of bullet fragments peppering the person’s insides, often fatally.
As former Broward chief medical examiner Craig Mallak described it, “It’s a very small bullet, but it’s moving at 3,000 feet per second. There’s so much energy with these bullets. It just tears skin, bones, organs.” It’s a path 20 times to 30 times the size of the actual bullet, he said.
He performed the autopsy on 14-year-old Cara Loughran, who suffered three wounds: one small entry wound to the left upper back and two gaping exit wounds in the upper chest.
One bullet entered the rib area of 14-year-old Alaina Petty. “After that, the bullet was fragmented into multiple fragments that perforated the lungs, liver, kidney and exits on the left lateral side of the torso,” Associate Medical Examiner Iouri Boiko testified.
Meadow Pollack’s wounds were catastrophic. The 18-year-old was shot seven times, one fracturing her spine. A bullet that grazed her opened a five-inch gash on her skull. It wasn’t a direct hit. But the energy of the bullet was so powerful, she had no chance.
Marketing works
This style of weapon isn’t popular by accident — it’s marketing. The Washington Post recently published a story outlining how one of the manufacturers of AR-15-style rifles tried to run an ad during the Super Bowl, knowing the NFL would probably reject it but ready to launch accusations of censorship and hypocrisy. The ad was rejected. And the counterattack was “by far” the most successful marketing the company had ever had, one company exec said.
The United States banned assault weapons before, from 1994 until 2004. In that 10-year period, mass-shooting deaths were reduced, according to at least one study, published in 2019 in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery. In July, the House passed new assault-weapons ban legislation, largely along party lines. It’s unlikely to advance in the evenly split Senate, but at least it is some recognition that the Second Amendment doesn’t confer unlimited rights.
And there is support from the White House. President Biden, in a Pennsylvania speech on safer communities and gun control Tuesday, said the county “is awash in weapons of war.” Parents whose children died in the Uvalde shooting, he said, had to supply DNA for identification, “because the AR-15 just rips the body apart.”
Still-life horror
Jurors in the Parkland case are doing what no one should have to do. Instead of shielding themselves from the dreadfulness of this mass shooting, they have to immerse themselves in it. They’ve listened to the anguished parents, siblings and friends. They’ve visited the still-life horror of Building 12 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, preserved since 2018 for the trial: dried pools of blood on the floor, overturned chairs, discarded headphones, a chess game still in the middle of play, broken glass that still crunches underfoot.
And they’ve seen those photos, the nightmarish pictures of slaughter four years ago on Valentine’s Day committed by someone who thought an AR-15 looked “cool.”
There have been so many shootings. We try to preserve our own sanity by turning away, afraid of having those images of blood and terror and viciousness branded into our consciousness forever.
But maybe we shouldn’t turn away. Maybe if all of us, including our elected officials, had to see those photos, pictures out of our worst nightmares, we could build some kind of consensus, again, on something that seems so simple it shouldn’t need saying: Weapons of war have no place in a civilized society.
#emphasis added#ban assault weapons now#ban assault weapons#gun control now#gun control#gun culture#gun violence
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Rethinking infidelity by Esther Perel
Infidelity is the ultimate betrayal. But does it have to be? Relationship therapist Esther Perel examines why people cheat, and unpacks why affairs are so traumatic: because they threaten our emotional security. In infidelity, she sees something unexpected — an expression of longing and loss. A must-watch for anyone who has ever cheated or been cheated on, or who simply wants a new framework for understanding relationships. (Youtube)
Highlights:
Why do we think that men cheat out of boredom and fear of intimacy, but women cheat out of loneliness and hunger for intimacy? And is an affair always the end of a relationship?
How do we reconcile what is universally forbidden, yet universally practiced?
The fact is that monogamy had nothing to do with love. Men relied on women's fidelity in order to know whose children these are, and who gets the cows when I die.
Now, I like this definition of an affair -- it brings together the three key elements: a secretive relationship, which is the core structure of an affair; an emotional connection to one degree or another; and a sexual alchemy.
When marriage was an economic enterprise, infidelity threatened our economic security. But now that marriage is a romantic arrangement, infidelity threatens our emotional security.
Ironically, we used to turn to adultery -- that was the space where we sought pure love. But now that we seek love in marriage, adultery destroys it.
Now, there are three ways that I think infidelity hurts differently today. We have a romantic ideal in which we turn to one person to fulfill an endless list of needs:
to be my greatest lover, my best friend, the best parent, my trusted confidant, my emotional companion, my intellectual equal.
And I am it: I'm chosen, I'm unique, I'm indispensable, I'm irreplaceable, I'm the one.
And infidelity tells me I'm not. It is the ultimate betrayal.
Infidelity shatters the grand ambition of love.
But if throughout history, infidelity has always been painful, today it is often traumatic, because it threatens our sense of self.
We live in an era where we feel that we are entitled to pursue our desires, because this is the culture where I deserve to be happy. And if we used to divorce because we were unhappy, today we divorce because we could be happier. And if divorce carried all the shame, today, choosing to stay when you can leave is the new shame. So Heather, she can't talk to her friends because she's afraid that they will judge her for still loving Nick, and everywhere she turns, she gets the same advice: Leave him. Throw the dog on the curb.
The typical assumption is that, if someone cheats, either there's something wrong in your relationship or wrong with you. But millions of people can't all be pathological.
The logic goes like this: If you have everything you need at home, then there is no need to go looking elsewhere, assuming that there is such a thing as a perfect marriage that will inoculate us against wanderlust.
It isn't always our partner that we are turning away from, but the person that we have ourselves become. And it isn't so much that we're looking for another person, as much as we are looking for another self.
Death and mortality often live in the shadow of an affair, because they raise these questions. Is this it? Is there more? Will I ever feel that thing again? And it has led me to think that perhaps ... some affairs are an attempt to beat back deadness, in an antidote to death.
Contrary to what you may think, affairs are way less about sex, and a lot more about desire: desire for attention, desire to feel special, desire to feel important. And the very structure of an affair, the fact that you can never have your lover, keeps you wanting. That in itself is a desire machine, because the incompleteness, the ambiguity, keeps you wanting that which you can't have.
Some of you probably think that affairs don't happen in open relationships, but they do ... it seems that even when we have the freedom to have other sexual partners, we still seem to be lured by the power of the forbidden, that
If we do that which we are not supposed to do, then we feel like we are really doing what we want to.
And I've also told quite a few of my patients that if they could bring into their relationships one tenth of the boldness, the imagination and the verve that they put into their affairs, they probably would never need to see me
Would I ever recommend [having an affair]? Now, I would no more recommend you have an affair than I would recommend you have cancer, and yet we know that people who have been ill often talk about how their illness has yielded them a new perspective.
Today in the West, most of us are going to have two or three relationships or marriages, and some of us are going to do it with the same person.
Your first marriage is over. Would you like to create a second one together?
#i post#i link#ted talks#rethinking infidelity#esther perel#cheating#i ramble in the tags#i was just poking around on youtube#but this talk had a lot of interesting points about relationships#i literally started transcribing it myself#before remembering that TED talks have transcripts on their website#emphasis added
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panda panda circus circus
#Panda Circus#Daniel Mullins Games#Pony Island#<- Does that tag apply??? No idea.#Found a slightly quicker way to do this. Emphasis on slightly though it... doesn't work 100% of the way </3#The process was blocking out the sections with the lasso tool and then using the dithering brushes I have instead of just.#Doing it pixel-by-pixel. Then I added random black and white pixels everywhere for weirdness because it looked too uniform otherwise.#Anyway pro tip don't do this when you have a migraine. You will regret it. Quickly.#Hrokkall Art
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*throws this at you at the speed of sound and runs away* I just want you to know how unwell your description of fantasy Wally and Home makes me. An intimate relationship with no fathomable label!?!!?!!! One of them is a creature/demon of void!?!!!!!??? They love each other but not quite romantic maybe not platonic but perhaps a secret third option!?!?!!!!! :DDDD!! ANYWAY! here ya go!
Plus an uncovered version
Took an artistic liberty or two for style, hope you don’t mind
#GOING INSANE INSANE INSANE#the SWAG-#obsessed w/ how home IS his shadow thats such a good fuckign detaaiiiilllll#the shadow the HANDS OOGH the red dots in his pupils the Everything#emphasis on Everything#thank you i will be insane over this. continuously#i WILL be coming back to admire it...#EEEEHEE HEE GLAD IM NOT THE ONLY ONE WITH THE ROT LMAO#offerings to the bog#wh fantasy au#man. i want this on my wall....#i just keep scrolling back up to look at it instead of adding more tags AHA <3#wonderful stunning perfect showstopping effervescent-
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