Phil Landmeier @shuttersparks@qoto.org

This is art. 👌✨

Source: https://www.tumblr.com/therinly/767915251955023872/finished-a-new-piece-i-think-it-speaks-to-my

This came from A Word A Day. It fits the right-wing servants of dooH niboR who whip up poor fools to vote to cut their income to help the rich. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood he was one of them. -Turkish proverb

"Over the years, college students have often come to my office distraught, unable to think of what they might be able to do to stop the terrible losses caused by an industrial growth economy run amok. So much dying, so much destruction. I tell them about Mount Saint Helens, the volcano that blasted a hole in the Earth in 1980, only a decade before they were born.

Those scientists were so wrong back in 1980, I tell my students. When they first climbed from the helicopters, holding handkerchiefs over their faces to filter ash from the Mount Saint Helens eruption, they did not think they would live long enough to see life restored to the blast zone. Every tree was stripped gray, every ridgeline buried in cinders, every stream clogged with toppled trees and ash. If anything would grow here again, they thought, its spore and seed would have to drift in from the edges of the devastation, long dry miles across a plain of cinders and ash. The scientists could imagine that– spiders on silk parachutes drifting over rubble and plain, a single samara spinning into the shade of a pumice stone. It was harder to imagine the time required for flourishing to return to the mountains – all the dusty centuries.

But here they are today: On the mountain, only thirty-five years later, these same scientists are on their knees, running their hands over beds of moss below lupine in lavish purple bloom. Tracks of mice and fox wander along a stream, and here, beside a ten-foot silver fir, a coyote’s twisted scat grows mushrooms. What the scientists know now, but didn’t understand then, is that when the mountain blasted ash and rock across the landscape, the devastation passed over some small places hidden in the lee of rocks and trees. Here, a bed of moss and deer fern under a rotting log. There under a boulder, a patch of pearly everlasting and the tunnel to a vole’s musty nest. Between stones in a buried stream, a slick of algae and clustered dragonfly larvae. Refugia, they call them: places of safety where life endures. From the refugia, mice and toads emerged blinking onto the blasted plain. Grasses spread, strawberries sent out runners. From a thousand, ten thousand, maybe countless small places of enduring life, forests and meadows returned to the mountain.

I have seen this happen. I have wandered the edge of Mount Saint Helens vernal pools with ecologists brought to unscientific tears by the song of meadowlarks in this place.

My students have been taught, as they deserve to be, that the fossil-fueled industrial growth culture has brought the world to the edge of catastrophe. They don’t have to “believe in” climate change to accept this claim. They understand the decimation of plant and animal species, the poisons, the growing deserts and spreading famine, the rising oceans and melting ice. If it’s true that we can’t destroy our habitats without destroying our lives, as Rachel Carson said, and if it’s true that we are in the process of laying waste to the planet, then our ways of living will come to an end – some way or another, sooner or later, gradually or catastrophically – and some new way of life will begin. What are we supposed to do? What is there to hope for at the end of this time? Why brother trying to patch up the world while so many others seem intent on wrecking it?

These are terrifying questions for an old professor; thank god for the volcano’s lesson. I tell them about the rotted stump that sheltered spider eggs, about a cupped cliff that saved a fern, about all the other refugia that brought life back so quickly to the mountain. If destructive forces are building under our lives, then our work in this time and place, I tell them, is to create refugia of the imagination. Refugia, places where ideas are sheltered and encouraged to grow.

Even now, we can create small pockets of flourishing, and we can make ourselves into overhanging rock ledges to protect life so that the full measure of possibility can spread and reseed the world. Doesn’t matter what it is, I tell my students; if it’s generous to life, imagine it into existence. Create a bicycle cooperative, a seed-sharing community, a wildlife sanctuary on the hill below the church. Raise butterflies with children Sing duets to the dying. Tear out the irrigation system and plant native grass. Imagine water pumps. Imagine a community garden in the Kmart parking lot. Study ancient corn. Teach someone to sew. Learn to cook with the full power of the sun at noon.

We don’t have to start from scratch. We can restore pockets of flourishing life ways that have been damaged over time. Breach a dam. Plant a riverbank. Vote for schools. Introduce the neighbors to one another’s children. Celebrate the solstice. Slow a river course with a fallen log. Tell stories of how indigenous people live on the land. Clear the grocery carts out of the stream.

Maybe most effective of all, we can protect refugia that already exist. They are all around us. Protect the marshy ditch behind the mall. Work to ban poisons from the edges of the road. Save the hedges in your neighborhood. Boycott what you don’t believe in. Refuse to participate in what is wrong. There is hope in this: An attention that notices and celebrates thriving where it occurs; a conscience that refuses to destroy it.

From these sheltered pockets of moral imagining, and from the protected pockets of flourishing, new ways of living will spread across the land, across the salt plains and beetle killed forests. Here is how life will start anew. Not from the edges over centuries of invasion; rather from small pockets of good work, shaped by an understanding that all life is interdependent, and driven by the one gift humans have that belongs to no other: practical imagination – the ability to imagine that things can be different from what they are now."

— Kathleen Dean Moore: Great Tide Rising

https://www.europesays.com/1684045/ Wyoming, Montana sue feds to repeal Powder River Basin coal leasing ban #Energy

Sen. Elizabeth Warren leads a group of top Democrats in demanding answers from Dr. Oz on his "previous advocacy for Medicare privatization."

Trump picked Oz to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

"In the wake of that nomination, we write regarding our concerns about your advocacy for the elimination of Traditional Medicare and your deep financial ties to private health insurers." https://tinyurl.com/yc4yv5xk

FBI disrupts Russian AI bot farm spreading Ukraine disinformation

https://www.devx.com/daily-news/fbi-disrupts-russian-ai-bot-farm-spreading-ukraine-disinformation/

#Russia #Ukraine #news #war #Putin #Ukrainewar #UkraineRussiawar #SlavaUkraini #uspol #disinformation

"ICE cannot enter your home unless they have a warrant signed by a judge ... Most of the time ICE agents will only have warrants signed by ICE officers, and those warrants do not give them permission to enter your home.

If they say they have a warrant, ask them to slip it under the door. If you open the door, you are giving them permission to enter your home. This is why it is important to keep your door closed during the entire interaction with ICE."

https://maketheroadny.org/deportation-defense-manual/

While a real President and decent human being is addressing the nation he leads, a despicable pos posts a grift to his social media hawking cologne to his idiot followers using a picture of the other man’s wife. #uspol

Interfax reports that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is in Moscow, where Putin has granted him “humanitarian asylum”.

Let me repeat that: The monster who tortures his enemies to death, and who built additional crematoriums so he could incinerate more dismembered bodies from his underground dungeons, has been granted…
[checks notes]
… humanitarian asylum.

Because without it, he would risk being treated like he has treated the Syrian people for 25 years.

Cry me a Tigris river.

Our son suffered an asthma attack. We rushed him to his doctor who refused treatment. Why? Because our health insurance wouldn’t cover it.😳

We had UnitedHealth—who leads the industry in rejecting claims.😐

We must end the violence in America’s health system.
https://www.qasimrashid.com/p/americas-violent-health-system

@randahl

As one pundit pointed out, European national security cannot continue to rely on whether 77,000 voters in Wisconsin are for or against democracy today because the price of eggs or gas is upsetting them.

Hey Mastodon, I’m running a small experiment here. Please boost for better reach 🙏

Do you add alt-text to your images?

Alone our debts are a burden. Together they make us powerful.
We are a debtors’ union
fighting to cancel debts and defend millions of households.
Join us to build a world where college is publicly funded,
healthcare is universal
and housing is guaranteed for all.

https://debtcollective.org/

People are being kind of smug about the FBI announcent not to text anymore, and I understand why... But there's a bigger problem than your texts to aunt Edna being intercepted.

Your mfa codes that are texted to you are now fully compromised. And a lot of websites only have sms mfa. That's the real story here. We've known for a while sms mfa was insecure because it's susceptible to SIM cloning and hijacking but there's now confirmation of man-in-the-middle happening. That's 10x worse.

You know, I've come to the conclusion that the reason I felt absolutely nothing beyond a mild joy when I saw the UnitedHealth CEO had been shot dead is pretty straightforward.

For the entirety of my life, billionaires, CEOs, and especially healthcare executives have been doing their damnedest to prove to us that even a sea slug has more empathy than they do. These are not people with a shred of conscience -- they have shown that 'earning' a mere dollar is more than worth the cost of a human life, and demonstrated it over and over, with United denying one in three claims on intrinsically spurious grounds. And now with BCBS stating that surgeries have to be under X amount of time.

I do not personally take great joy in it, because all human life intrinsically has meaning, but don't expect me to be in mourning over someone who clinically sentenced millions of people to death and/or lifelong debt.

Eternal memory 🕯️

Ukraine is losing some of it's best people. 💔

Victory and justice for Ukraine 🇺🇦

lyubov_lyubushkina2 / Instagram

American Society of Anesthesiologists:

Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield Won’t Pay for the Complete Duration of Anesthesia for Patients’ Surgical Procedures

Another Example of Insurers Putting Profits Over Patients

https://www.asahq.org/about-asa/newsroom/news-releases/2024/11/anthem-blue-cross-blue-shield-will-not-pay-complete-duration-of-anesthesia-for-surgical-procedures

#anesthesia #insurance