one of the oldest and arguably the most important museum in Brazil is burning to the ground as we speak. home to the portuguese royal family from 1808 to 1821, the Museu Nacional stored fossils, meteorites, pre-historic human skeletons and a variety of artefacts related to natural history. it holds two centuries of latin & brazilian history and now it’s all gone.
some of the things that are now lost forever: the largest collection of egyptian artefacts in latin america; the skeleton of the largest flying reptile ever found in Brazil; the oldest human fossil ever found in the country, named “Luzia” (over 11.000 y.o) and other 20 million extremely important relics and researches just burned to the ground. never to be seen again.
thanks to our government, of course, who didn’t want to pay the museum the necessary funds to make the essencial maintenances since 2014 (which by the way, costed less than a supreme federal court judge’s sallary: R$520 in a year).
another sad instance where the state’s indifference towards culture and history becomes painfully obvious. this is a massive blow to our cultural legacy.
all that in our independe week. happy independe for us, brazilians, who just lost our history and culture in a fire caused by ignorance and indifference.
in case you’re wondering, this is what the museum used to look like:
this is what it looks like now:
thousands of years of culture lost. happy independence week.
“Authorities say the fire lasted for six hours, causing irreparable damage. To put it bluntly: it’s all gone. A meteorite, that can sustain incredibly high temperatures, was found intact. But other than that, there are apparently no other pieces left. It would not be an understatement to call the Museu Nacional the Brazilian equivalent of the Louvre or the British Museum.”
here is some of the international news saying on this, because most articles and videos are all in portuguese, u can check some of the news in english: (here *new york times*) (here *bbc news*) (here *le monde* for french speaking readers) (here *shorouk news* for people who speak arabian) (here *azteca news* for spanish) (here *corriere della sera* for italian).
it was a natural science and historic museum, there were all sorts of important researches and relics. all burned. this was our culture. our history. the first human fossil found in brazil (mentioned above, Luzia) was so important for science, since it proved that way before indigenous tribes existed in Brazil, there were black people.
this is the place where our first constitution was made and the declaration of independence was signed. our independe day is this friday. heartbroken.
“Trump is guilty. Why there’s such resistance to this reality is an interesting question. My own best guess is that it is too disquieting a reality to grapple with. Someone who has deliberately betrayed his country and who is compromised by and under the thumb of a foreign despot clearly should not be President. But his supporters don’t accept that. And as long as they don’t there’s no path to removing him from power prior to 2020 and maybe even beyond. That means that for the present we are locked in a situation in which we must operate in a system in which the person with the most power is working for a foreign adversary, whether out of avarice or fear. That is a profoundly uncomfortable reality. Remaining agnostic on the big question is more comfortable.”
His voters don’t care if he’s guilty or not. Their bigotry is more important to them than anything else, including their own well-being. As long as he hates the same people they do they’ll keep supporting him.
Republican politicians will support anyone or anything that keeps them in power and getting more money. They will never remove him until supporting him threatens their own power. They only way to get rid of him is for democrats to take the house and senate.
“Free market” capitalism does NOT care about raging forest fires, it does not care about endangering firefighters, it does not care about people dying due to lack of healthcare insurance. Unregulated capatilism cares only about making profits, apparently at any and all costs.
anyway I don’t think the story of the 2016 election is that America wanted Trump.
I think the story of the US election is that a supreme court decision allowed states with a history of totalitarianism to arbitrarily change voting law in ways that made it disproportionately difficult for people likely to vote Democrat to vote while a foreign country was running an intelligence campaign to discourage voting on the left and, real time, prod right wing voters in important districts to vote during the election in a race with massive question marks about the security of voting infrastructure, with a widely unpopular Democratic presidential candidate–
And Trump still lost. By roughly three million votes.
That’s six times the loss George W Bush had when he won the electoral college without winning the popular vote in 2000.
Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by a larger margin than Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon or John Kennedy; she just won it in the wrong places.
Trump is now president because the electoral college assigns more weight to rural states, which are also states with more discriminatory voter laws and more disenfranchisement and therefore states in which it is harder to vote for people likely to vote Democrat.
And all of that is what I mean when I say the biggest problem with the American system is gerrymandering.
“The National Rifle Association (NRA) has said it’s suffering from substantial financial issues that could cause the organisation to “be unable to exist”.
In a recent court filing, the powerful organisation that lobbies on behalf of gun makers, owners and campaigns against almost all gun regulations, said it had lost its media insurance coverage due to an aggressive campaign brought on by New York’s Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo. The campaign encouraged companies to cut ties with the gun lobbying group. A lack of liability insurance threatens to shut down the group’s multi-million dollar media entities, including NRATV, its own streaming channel.“
#HappyFriday
Considering the money they’re getting from gun companies to advertise their stuff and the money they get from the Russians “foreign gun rights advocates“, I’m highly suspicious of these claims.
I think that they’re trying to scam their members out of money, or doing it to avoid paying tax or something.
There you go.
It’s also about making noise to get people riled up against New York politicians.
^ Governor Cuomo is up for re-election this fall, this is literally just them trying to raise money to get him out (it won’t work lol)
Nine states with a history of racial discrimination are more aggressively removing registered voters from their rolls than other states, according to a report released Friday.
After reviewing voter purges nationally from 2012 to 2016, the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice found that the mostly Southern jurisdictions that had once been required to get changes to voting policies pre-approved by the Justice Department had higher rates of purging than jurisdictions that were not previously subject to pre-clearance.
“Two million fewer voters would have been purged over those four years if jurisdictions previously subject to federal pre-clearance had purged at the same rate” as other jurisdictions, the Brennan Center estimated.
In Georgia, for example, 156 of the state’s 159 counties reported an increase in removal rates after the Voting Rights Act was changed. In 2016, advocates sued Georgia for making voter registration harder.In 2017, the American Civil Liberties Union sued a Georgia county and the state Secretary of State for its purge practices, too.
“There’s cause for concern when the purge rate goes up this much at the same time we’re seeing controversial, sometimes illegal voter purge practice, in addition to changes to other voting laws that make it more difficult to participate,” said Jonathan Brater, counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program and one of the report’s authors.
The Brennan Center’s analysis found that election officials were purging voter rolls more aggressively nationwide, too, with some using imprecise or possibly illegal methods to do so.
Voter purges — cleaning up and pruning voter rolls down to remove inaccurate information — are a normal part of all election roll maintenance. But if purges are done too aggressively or with bad information, advocates warn, they can disenfranchise eligible voters, who may not know they’ve been purged until they go to the polls on Election Day and are unable to vote.
Brater said that under the Trump administration, “the Department of Justice has abdicated its responsibility to protect against bad voter purges.”
In 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court recently approved Ohio’s method for purging voters from the rolls. The Obama Justice Department had supported the challengers in the early stages of the court fight, but the Trump administration switched sides and supported the state.
I cannot stress enough the need to verify that your registration is still valid.
Secondly, we grow it very inefficiently. We could very easily increase the food yield of a given area of land by building a greenhouse on it (which also reduces water loss) and using poly-cultures instead of mono-cultures; the reason our preferred method is open-air mono-culture farms, which are susceptible to erosion and blight and requires a god-awful amount of water to stay hydrated, is that labor is expensive and land is cheap.
In fact, if we took it even further–growing our food in carbon dioxide-rich environments lit with artificial lighting 24 hours a day (or at least at night)–you only need 1-2000 square feet of farmland per person. Admittedly, you pretty much have to have fusion power for this to be an environmentally and economically viable option, but still; the point is, we could easily condense our environmental footprint by a shit-ton (and even more options will be available in the future) without decreasing our population one iota.
“There is still a maximum carrying capacity the planet has.”
Indeed there is. And do you know what that carrying capacity is? It’s ten trillion. And the cut off isn’t space or resources–it’s waste heat. The things we’d have to do to get there aren’t exactly the sort of things we could do overnight–hell, we don’t actually know how to fusion yet–but they’re all well within the realm of the physically possible.
We’re all going to die because the rich are selfish and their cronies are too.
And too many people don’t want to stop them because they’ve been convinced that they might one day be rich too.
It’s almost as if schools push and ideology that benefits schools.
Bruh, trades are in high fucking demand right now too. Between now and 2020 there are suppose to be 300,000 more jobs and that’s just for welder.
Shit, they’ll pay for you to learn how to do it.
I just finished high school and got a untility job in a factory and I have almost no experience. They’re gonna train me for everything plus it has full health benefits.
Trades are fucking great.
My husband is a welder, and is very very good at it. He got hired by a locksmith company pretty much just by walking in and going “Yes I can weld.”
All of the other guys there were great at locksmithing, but none of them were trained welders, and they needed someone who could build custom doors and frames.
They trained him to do lock stuff too, so now he can weld AND pick locks.
The owner of the company, when he handed out Christmas bonuses, looked at him and went “Dude we literally cannot fire you because we’d be screwed so here’s your bonus and also we’re giving you a raise.”
Welders are in desperate demand.
Blows kisses to this post.
Anyway, learn a trade, unionize, wear your PPE, memorize OSHA’s phone number.
Plot Designing 