Khürt Williams over at Island in the Net has a wonderful and ongoing series of bird photography posts. He doesn’t just stop at sharing a photo with the name of the bird. Each post is well written description of the bird as it exists in the ecosystem. Well done Khürt!
Vox has an excellent story on annual global food waste. The climate specific stats are eye watering. 8 to 10% of carbon emissions are related to food waste and if it were a country, it would be 3rd in emissions, behind only the US and China.
Such waste takes a significant toll on the environment. The process of producing food — the raising of animals, the land and water use, and the subsequent pollution that goes with it — is horribly intensive on the planet. Food waste squanders those efforts, and then makes it worse: as it rots in landfills, it creates methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
Cicadas 2024: Brood XIX and XIII will impact our ecosystems for years to come - Vox
While the insect explosion will be brief, it will shape forests for years to come. The binge-fest that birds enjoy during these periods supersize their families and, in turn, shift the eating and hunting patterns of many other species. These effects send ripples throughout the ecosystem. As one recent study put it, pulses of periodical cicadas can “rewire” entire forest food webs.
The iPad Pro is its own thing and should never be a Mac
My M1 iPad Pro is only three years old so I won’t be updating this year but as someone who has chosen the iPad as a primary computer of course I’m interested in where the hardware and OS are going. I post often that I think most Apple pundits are wrong on the iPad most of the time because they want it to be a Mac. It’s not and I hope it never is. In today’s issue of his newsletter Mark Gurman writes that Apple Should Turn iPad Into Laptop Replacement and I found a couple of bits to chew on:
Now it’s time for Apple to take a stand. Does it want the iPad to be a half-baked laptop alternative or a real computing replacement? Consumers are confused about why they should buy an iPad versus a Mac and vice versa.
This “confusion” reflects the made-up reality and narrative of the Apple pundit looking for something to post about. Or, actually, it’s true if one replaces the word Consumers with Apple pundits: Apple Pundits are confused about why they should buy an iPad versus a Mac and vice versa.
Mehdi Hasan interview on the Majority Report digging into mainstream press reporting on the violence UCLA Palestine solidarity protests.
I’ve seen several blog posts uncritically sharing the media reporting that “the protests were violent”. On the ground reporting indicates that the violence was, not surprisingly, being carried out by “counter protesters”. Mostly non-students, mostly men. Violent thugs beating up non-violent protesters.
nullagent: “The UCLA Palestine Solidarity …” - PartyOn
The UCLA Palestine Solidarity encampment has so far appeared free from serious police interference today.
They did however have run in’s with an antagonistic group of Zionist who became violent.
nullagent: “The UCLA Palestine Solidarity
As I was pointing out five days ago, the zionist mob that’s been showing up at UCLA is increasingly violent and dangerous.
Last night around 100 zionist attacked the UCLA encampment. There’s video of UCLA’s private security letting these guys in and just watching as they dragged out protesters to beat.
Several students were seen bloodied after being jumped by the zionist mob.
The protest was peaceful prior to this police enabled mob violence.
FULL BLOWN FAMINE in northern Gaza
Senior UN official says northern Gaza is now in ‘full-blown famine’ : NPR
A top U.N. official said Friday that hard-hit northern Gaza was now in “full-blown famine” after more than six months of war between Israel and Hamas and severe Israeli restrictions on food deliveries to the Palestinian territory.
“It’s horror,” McCain told NBC’s “Meet the Press” in an interview to air Sunday. “There is famine — full-blown famine — in the north, and it’s moving its way south.”
It’s frustrating (though not surprising) to see the distorted media presentation of violence at the Pro-Palestinian protests on campuses last week. Most notably the UCLA protest where police did nothing as masked Pro-Israel counter “protestors” attacked the student encampment Tuesday night. Democracy Now! has excellent coverage.
Even worse that Biden referenced the violence without any clarification that the student encampment, a stationary protest, was generally very peaceful to that point.
The counter protesters moved in and attacked with tear gas and a variety of weapons. By all accounts many of the attackers were not students. Nor was the first such attack but just the last and most intense.
From Democracy Now:
We get an update from the University of California, Los Angeles, where police in riot gear began dismantling a pro-Palestinian encampment early Thursday, using flashbang grenades, rubber bullets and tear gas, and arresting dozens of students. The raid came just over a day after pro-Israel counterprotesters armed with sticks, metal rods and fireworks attacked students at the encampment. The Real News Network reporter Mel Buer was on the scene during the attack. She describes seeing counterprotesters provoke students, yelling slurs and bludgeoning them with parts of the encampment’s barricade, and says the attack lasted several hours without police or security intervention.” UCLA is complicit in violence inflicted upon protesters,” wrote the editorial board of UCLA’s campus newspaper, the Daily Bruin, the next day. Four of the paper’s student journalists were targeted and assaulted by counterprotesters while covering the protests.
Fascinating.
A Clockwork Orange, White Supremacy, and Palestine by Politically Depressed
A Clockwork Orange is not about human nature, it’s about European fascism. This is at least my reading of it. I’ve been thinking a lot about it as we’re seeing the European centre shift drastically to the right in defence of the ongoing Israeli genocide in Palestine. In this episode I share my analysis and reading of A Clockwork Orange that I think illuminates some terrifying and bizarre aspects of the current moment.
Christiane Amanpour’s interview with Bernie Sanders is excellent and worth a listen. Sanders on the US media allowing Netanyahu to define anti-Semitism.
“What he has done is deflect attention, and the American media by and large has fallen for it, to say any protest against Israel, it’s anti-Semitic. If you’re talking about how the two-thirds of the people who have been killed or injured are women and children, not of us participants, women and children, that’s anti-Semitic. If you’re talking about 70% of the housing damaged, that’s anti-Semitic. If you’re talking about how the United Nations and humanitarian organizations are worried about famine, children right now, today, in Gaza, are dying of malnutrition. If you talk about that, you’re anti-Semitic. Well, I think the American people are not going to fall for that. Netanyahu is insulting the intelligence of the American people. He has got to be held accountable for the actions of his right-wing extremists and, by the way, racist government. And charging or claiming that everybody who is critical of him is anti-Semitic is really quite disgraceful.”
Excerpt above starts at 11:00.
Meet Hala Rharrit, First U.S. Diplomat to Quit over Gaza - YouTube
Democracy Now! speaks with Hala Rharrit, the first State Department diplomat to publicly resign over the Biden administration’s policies backing Israel’s assault and siege of the Gaza Strip. Rharrit is an 18-year career diplomat who served as the Arabic-language spokesperson for the State Department in the region. “I could no longer be a part of the State Department and promote this policy. It’s an inhumane policy. It’s a failed policy that is helping neither Palestinians, neither Israelis,” Rharrit says. “We are not authorized to send military equipment, weapons to countries that commit human rights abuses. ICJ has determined plausible genocide, yet we are still sending billions upon billions of not just defensive weaponry, but offensive weaponry. It is tantamount to a violation of domestic law. Many diplomats know it. Many diplomats are scared to say it.” She adds, “I read the talking points that we were supposed to promote on Arab media. A lot of them were dehumanizing to Palestinians.” Rharrit also discusses how “corruption” in government allows for arms sales to continue. “I could not help but be concerned about the influence of special interest groups, of lobbying groups on our foreign policy and, as well, on Congress — on the people that decide whether or not some of those shipments of arms get sent. The bottom line is that our politicians should not be profiting from war. And unfortunately, we have some institutionalized corruption that enables that,” she says.
Divesting from an apartheid state actively engaged in land theft, war crimes and genocide is not controversial. We have become so completely corrupted that investing in genocide is now accepted.
Calls to Divest From Israel Put Students and Donors on Collision Course - The New York Times
The deals, which have eased tension on campuses with only a few days left before students break for the summer, would have been unthinkable even a week ago. And they’re a gamble, potentially putting universities on a collision course with influential donors, politicians and students who support Israel.
Mass die-offs and constant crisis will define the brutality of our future as we attempt and fail to adapt to a completely destabilized climate.
Mass fish die-off in Vietnam as heat wave roasts Southeast Asia
Hundreds of thousands of fish have died in a reservoir in southern Vietnam’s Dong Nai province, with locals and media reports suggesting a brutal heat wave and the lake’s management are to blame.
Like much of Southeast Asia—where schools have recently been forced to close early and electricity usage has surged—southern and central Vietnam have been scorched by devastating heat.
A War Against Humanity Itself | Common Dreams
Amidst the ongoing, unfathomable slaughter, hunger, maiming, razing in Gaza at the hands of Israel’s “voracious death machine,” its leaders now openly vow “total and utter destruction” by what they still grotesquely call “one of the most moral militaries in the world,” murdered newborns and all.
The litany from Israel’s mass killing, “monstrous and largely indiscriminate,” to date: Almost 35,000 dead Palestinians, including well over 14,000 “ungrievable” children; more than 77,000 wounded, half children; at least 17,000 orphans, 5,000 children whose limbs have been amputated, thousands more buried under rubble, a child killed or injured every 10 minutes; hundreds of dead journalists, doctors, teachers, poets, aid workers, academics; most homes leveled, along with 400 schools, 12 universities, over 30 hospitals; starvation levels “the highest ever recorded.” Thanks in part to $26 billion more the U.S. just awarded Israel, its “most decisive vote of confidence in genocide since the Indian Removal Act of 1830,” the hellfire still rains down. Each day the count grows: Air strikes kill 22, mostly children, kill 20, mostly children, kill 13, nine of them children, kill eight children and two women from one family, kill three women and six children. Fathers sob over small bodies, mourning “a world devoid of all human values.” A strike killed a man, his very pregnant wife, their three-year-old; doctors saved the baby. A sniper killed a West Bank man for going up on his roof; days later, his wife named their new son for him as their toddler played in sand strewn on his father’s blood.
It has begun! I found this year's cicadas in my garden this morning. Magicicada septendecim, sometimes called the Pharaoh cicada or the 17-year locust, is native to Canada and the United States and is the largest and most northern species of periodical cicada with a 17-year lifecycle.
Violence AGAINST Anti-War Student Protesters Escalates Across The US - YouTube
Sam parses through yesterday’s mass escalation of violence against anti-war student protesters on college campuses across the US, with the NYPD sending a SWAT team to infiltrate the Student occupation of Harold Hall, and police in LA allowing a pro-Israel violent mob assault UCLA protesters, also expanding on the absurd and constant attempts to completely misrepresent these campus protests and the student activists behind them.