Taiwan is the next nation to make moves against plastic pollution. The nation’s EPA announced plans to ban plastic items by 2030, and is launching a marine clean-up initiative to remove plastics from their waters. Read more here.
Category: Uncategorized
The doctor is about to tell me if what I have is flu or strep throat.
Either way – please get vaccinated if you can, wash hands and stay away from small children. It is no fun and the headache and fever are debilitating.
Everything is a teaching moment. When did it become like this?
This is how quickly fake news that exploits tragedy spreads on Facebook
Social media tech combined with critical mass of users with inability to think critically and seeking comfort in their biases plus people whose jobs are to sow division is how we ended up here.
This is how quickly fake news that exploits tragedy spreads on Facebook
is the gun the basis of modern anglo civilization
When they say that they want a “white history month”, as some (slim) majority of Republicans apparently now say, they should be careful what they wish for.
Drinking alcohol more important than exercise for living past 90, study says 
I need a hobby that occupies 2 hours/day, and I need to put on a few pounds, if I want to live past 90.
“It’s not bad to be skinny when you’re young but it’s very bad to be skinny when you’re old,” Kawas noted in her address.
Drinking alcohol more important than exercise for living past 90, study says

New timesaving technologies make most workers more productive, not more free, in a world that seems to be accelerating around them. Too, the rhetoric of efficiency around these technologies suggests that what cannot be quantified cannot be valued — that that vast array of pleasures which fall into the category of doing nothing in particular, of woolgathering, cloud-gazing, wandering, window-shopping, are nothing but voids to be filled by something more definite, more productive, or faster paced… As a member of the self-employed whose time saved by technology can be lavished on daydreams and meanders, I know these things have their uses, and use them — a truck, a computer, a modem — myself, but I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival. I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.
Rebecca Solnit. Also read this marvellous essay, by James Gleick. (via kuanios)
Russian Trolls Ran Wild On Tumblr
Russian Trolls Ran Wild On Tumblr And The Company Refuses To Say Anything About It
Tumblrs run by Russian trolls generated hundreds of thousands of interactions with anti–Hillary Clinton, pro–Bernie Sanders content.
Posted on February 7, 2018, at 2:46 a.m.
BuzzFeed News Media Editor
Russian trolls posed as black activists on Tumblr and generated hundreds of thousands of interactions for content that ranged from calling Hillary Clinton a “monster” to supporting Bernie Sanders and decrying racial injustice and police violence in the US, according to new findings from researcher Jonathan Albright and BuzzFeed News.
While Facebook and Twitter continue to face intense public and congressional pressure over the activity from trolls working for the Russian Internet Research Agency, Tumblr has somehow managed to escape scrutiny. But the blogging platform was in fact home to a powerful, largely unrevealed network of Russian trolls focused on black issues and activism.
“The evidence we’ve collected shows a highly engaged and far-reaching Tumblr propaganda-op targeting mostly teenage and twenty-something African Americans. This appears to have been part of an ongoing campaign since early 2015,” said Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.
Tumblr and its parent company, Oath, did not reply to multiple emails with questions from BuzzFeed News. Despite not responding, tracking software shows the emails were opened more than 290 times, and the included links were clicked more than 70 times.
BuzzFeed News also did not receive a response from the office of Sen. Mark Warner, the Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The Russian-run Tumblr accounts used the same, or very similar, usernames as the account names contained on a list of confirmed IRA accounts Twitter submitted to congressional investigators. In some cases, the Tumblr and Twitter account has the same profile image or linked to each other in their bios. Some IRA Tumblrs and Twitter accounts also cross-promoted content between platforms, further linking them together.
For example, the 4mysquad Tumblr posted a screencap of a tweet from the @4mysquad Twitter account and invited people to “support me on #twitter.” The Twitter account’s bio also contained a link to the 4mysquad Tumblr, and they both used the same profile image… (((etc etc)))
Let’s just remember that we on this site were targets, and that we were complicit, too.
The goal was never to push Trump on us – the goal was to sow division and promote intolerance everywhere. Trump works well to that end, but he is not the only one. I hope we learned something.
I don’t want to return, at least not as a human being. I’d rather be a tree, or a bunch of kudzu or even a moth. I’d rather be a school of fish. ‘A whole school?’ I can hear my sister asking. ‘Why not just one fish?’ Because one fish in a school is the same as the whole school, but different, and I want to know what that feels like. Plus I love the way they swim in gestures.
Abigail Thomas, from “Forgetting,” Brevity (no. 57, January 2018)
tinfoilparachute 