Judy

Retired RN, grieving mom; likes hiking, skiing, yoga, birdwatching, single malt scotch. Pro-choice. She/her. BLM. Namaste. 🍉

[Carolina Forward @ForwardCarolina]

Concerned about datacenters? Then you need to know more about gas pipelines.

All across North Carolina, a massive build-out is underway of natural gas pipelines. These pipelines are big: typically 2-3 feet in diameter, requiring a deep hole, for miles and miles in length. They are owned by private, for-profit corporations that typically seize private land through eminent domain agreed on by state officials.

Natural gas now powers most electricity in North Carolina. Most of the gas North Carolina consumes is pumped out of the ground in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Texas, and pumped here over hundreds of miles of pipelines. Occasionally those pipelines explode.

Natural gas is a win-win for Duke Energy, the pipeline owners, and the oil and gas industry. Each one profits at every step in the chain - leaving consumers at the end of the line to pay up. And with the datacenter construction boom creating a massive new demand for electricity (Duke Energy itself says that datacenters make up 80% of all new power demand they forecast), all of them are only too happy to build more - because consumers are going to pay for it all.

And the gas pipelines make the whole system work.

[Judy @2000Jschn]

@evornithology @TheBirdist @guttenbirder22 @RyanFMandelbaum Ooh! I’m going in October! I’ll take recommendations!

[Judy @2000Jschn]

@Vanessa_ABee 🙄

[Judy @2000Jschn]

@dieworkwear But… how can an artist afford this? 🤷‍♀️

[Judy @2000Jschn]

Rediscovered this pic from June 5, 2016.

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

Marie Antoinette updated for the 2020s. Members of Congress cut WIC benefits for impoverished women and children and suggest: "Let them eat lobster."

[Judy @2000Jschn]

Absolutely 🔥

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

One thing I AM absolutely in agreement with RFK Jr on is that drug commercials on TV have GOT to go

I'm in the US and cannot believe what I'm seeing....commercials for complex advanced medications?

Just totally insane

That's got to go!

[𐌁����Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

I think one of the healthiest things a person can do is become easy to delight. To still stop for weird clouds and dogs wearing bandanas and the smell of garlic cooking somewhere down the street. The world already has enough cynicism. Be the person who still points at the moon.

[Judy @2000Jschn]

@ParamClicks 🤣

[Judy @2000Jschn]

The wood pellet industry needs scrutiny!

[Dogwood Alliance @DogwoodAlliance]

Communities in the US are living with the pollution from #Drax's wood pellet industry while the #UK's largest carbon emitter receives millions in daily public subsidies.
https://t.co/uM6S7IkVjx

[The Fourth Musketeer @IV_Musketeer]

Smells a dead mouse from a mile away. Eats anthrax for breakfast. Prevents epidemics just by existing.

The turkey vulture — the most important bird nobody respects.

THE NOSE:

→ Best sense of smell of any bird on Earth
→ Can detect ethyl mercaptan (decomposition gas) from 1+ mile
→ Gas companies add the same chemical to natural gas lines
→ Turkey vultures have circled gas leaks — engineers follow them

THE STOMACH:

→ Stomach acid: pH ~1 (nearly pure hydrochloric acid)
→ Destroys anthrax, botulism, cholera, hog cholera
→ Eats diseased carcasses that would otherwise spread epidemics
→ Essentially a flying biohazard disposal unit

THE BALD HEAD:

→ No feathers = bacteria can't get trapped when eating carrion
→ UV sunlight sterilizes the bare skin
→ Same reason vultures sunbathe with wings spread (UV sterilization)

THE FLIGHT:

→ Soars for hours without flapping (uses thermals)
→ Distinctive "wobbly" flight with wings in shallow V
→ Can cover 200 miles per day searching for carrion

WITHOUT VULTURES:

→ In India, vulture populations crashed 99% due to a cattle drug
→ Result: rotting carcasses, feral dog explosion, rabies epidemic
→ Tens of thousands of human deaths attributed to vulture decline

Respect the cleanup crew.

You need them more than they need you.

[Judy @2000Jschn]

@RaminNasibov 🎂

[Carolina Forward @ForwardCarolina]

A Republican member of the Jackson county board of elections says the @NCGOP executive committee in Raleigh ordered him to vote to eliminate a campus voting location at @WCU or they'd have him removed from office.

[Geoffrey Lean @GeoffreyLean]

Disturbing news. Loss of Arctic sea ice has caused an “irreversible” shift in the chemistry of the ocean that is disrupting the foundations of chain of life, a two-decade-long study has concluded. Tipping points are already here…

https://t.co/KxWPsI8qST

[Judy @2000Jschn]

Amazing!

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

On the Tibetan plateau, three to five thousand metres up, there is a line above which the air thins, the cold turns murderous, and every crop a human has ever sown simply gives up and dies. A lowlander dropped there without warning would be gasping within the hour. Below the line, a little barley clings on. Above it, across the entire roof of the world, one animal reigns.

The yak. A miracle of engineering that no laboratory could design and no factory could ever build.

Start with the body. It carries a heart around three times the size, for its frame, of a lowland cow's, with lungs to match. Its blood runs thick with red cells and grips oxygen far more tightly than yours, hauling enough of it out of air that holds barely half what you are breathing right now. Its lungs refuse to clamp shut in the thin atmosphere the way an ordinary animal's would, sparing it the fluid and the heart failure that kill lowland cattle dragged up too high. It is sealed inside a shaggy double coat over a dense woolly down, shrugging off forty below as a minor inconvenience, because it scarcely sweats and scarcely needs to. Millions of years of evolution went into an animal that treats the most lethal inhabited ground on earth as home turf.

Now watch what it does with all that. It walks out onto a landscape that offers a human being precisely nothing, crops the sparse, frozen, good-for-nothing grass that grows where value goes to die, and converts it, inside the four-chambered furnace of its gut, into the entire material foundation of a civilisation.

Milk so rich it is churned into butter that lights the lamps of every monastery and is folded into the tea that keeps a body alive against the wind. Meat, dried iron-hard in the cold to carry a household through a six-month winter. A fine, warm down spun into the clothes on their backs and the black tents over their heads, and a coarse outer hair twisted into the ropes that lash the whole thing down. Hide for leather and for boats. Bone for tools. And dung, dried into bricks, the one and only fuel for heat and cooking in a world with no wood left to burn. For thousands of miles it was the engine too, the single animal strong and sure-footed enough to haul a loaded caravan over passes that sit higher than the summit of Mont Blanc.

One animal. Food, fuel, clothing, shelter, fire, transport, and trade, drawn out of frozen grass at an altitude that would put you flat on your back in a hospital. Fourteen million of them still hold up the lives of dozens of mountain peoples today.

So take the yak off the plateau and be honest about what remains. A corpse-cold silence where no human has any business standing, and a grass nobody can eat rotting back into the permafrost. There is no vegan Tibet, and there never could have been one. The grass up there is poison to your gut, and the magnificent, grunting, oversized-hearted creature that turns it into life is the only reason a single soul has ever drawn breath on the roof of the world.

The mountain sets the cruellest terms on earth. The yak meets every last one of them, and then carries an entire people across the top of the planet on its back.

[Judy @2000Jschn]

Simple!

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

Honey Bees make our food, A.I. doesn't. Save the Honey Bees, and not data centres

[Judy @2000Jschn]

🤷‍♀️

[Andrea Junker @Strandjunker]

No snark, I genuinely don’t get it. Trump is one of the least masculine, most juvenile public figures out there. He’s needy, whiny, defensive, terrified of strong women, and visibly intimidated by powerful men.

How does his base spin this into the ultimate “strongman” image?

[Judy @2000Jschn]

😡

[Dogwood Alliance @DogwoodAlliance]

“This bill uses taxpayer #money to support a foreign industry and makes it easier for them to pollute Louisianians’ air and water,” said Naya Black, Dogwood Alliance Gulf South Project Organizer. Forest destruction is not clean energy.
https://t.co/EiERYj9j9T

[Judy @2000Jschn]

@nicktitanmill @WNCN A last thought… prison reform allows for growth in a population that will most likely leave prison someday. Education is powerful. Mental health access is vital. Opportunity is hope.

[Judy @2000Jschn]

@nicktitanmill @WNCN I’m sorry for your lack of compassion, but at least you (presumably) don’t kick puppies.