Emer O' Shea #Ukraine #Woman, Life Freedom

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds”R W Emerson Favourite word: #gobemouche: one who believes anything, no matter how absurd.

[Emer O' Shea #Ukraine #Woman, Life Freedom @EmerOShea8]

@IrishRugby @KarlBrophy What a great player , I was lucky enough to see him play at old Lansdowne Road....very sad.

[Robert Gilbey @RobGilbey]

Very difficult to claim neutrality when you are a critical part of an active war criminal's supply chain.

As an Irish citizen this is not only deeply concerning, it is embarrassing, and quite frankly a testament to the absence of values-based leadership in Irish politics.

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

She was rejected 15 times, dismissed as unruly, and largely written out of the conversation. Then the science proved she was right — and changed everything we thought we knew about life itself.

In 1966, a twenty-eight-year-old biologist named Lynn Margulis sat down and wrote a paper that contradicted one of the most fundamental assumptions in all of science.

She was not a tenured professor. She was not working at a prestigious research institution. She was a young mother of two, recently divorced, completing her PhD while raising her sons largely on her own. The scientific establishment had no particular category for her and no particular interest in what she was proposing.

She proposed it anyway.
Her idea was this: that the story of evolution told through competition and conquest was incomplete. That somewhere in the deep history of life on Earth — billions of years ago, long before anything with a spine had appeared — something had happened that was not a battle but a merger. Two separate organisms, each unable to survive alone, had come together and become something neither could have been independently.

The mitochondria in every one of your cells — the structures that convert food into energy, the engine that powers every thought you are having right now — were once free-living bacteria. They did not evolve gradually inside cells. They moved in. They formed a partnership so deep and so permanent that over billions of years they became indistinguishable from the cell itself.

She called the theory endosymbiosis. She called the process symbiogenesis. What she was really saying was that cooperation, not just competition, was one of the engines of evolution — that life's greatest leaps forward had sometimes come not from one organism defeating another, but from two organisms becoming one.

Fifteen scientific journals rejected the paper before it was published in 1967.
Fifteen.

To understand what she was working against, you need to understand the scientific culture of the 1960s. Neo-Darwinism — the synthesis of Darwin's evolution with Mendelian genetics — was the reigning framework, and it was defended with the particular intensity of a field that had recently achieved hard-won consensus. The idea that a bacterium had simply moved inside another cell and stayed there, permanently, was considered not just wrong but somewhat absurd. Evolution happened through random mutation and natural selection, slowly, over generations. Not through dramatic mergers. Not through cooperation.

The reviewers who rejected her paper used words like speculative and insufficiently rigorous. One described the idea as the sort of thing that was interesting to think about but impossible to prove.

She was also described, more than once, as unruly.
It was the specific word that followed women who challenged scientific consensus — not wrong, not misguided, but unruly, as though the problem were her manner rather than her method.

She had been exceptional from the beginning in ways that made people uncomfortable. Born Lynn Petra Alexander in Chicago on March 5, 1938, she entered the University of Chicago at sixteen — intellectually restless, reading at a level that outpaced her coursework, drawn to the questions at the edges of what science had settled. At nineteen she married a young astronomer named Carl Sagan, who would go on to become one of the most famous scientists of the twentieth century. She would later say, without particular bitterness, that during their marriage she was primarily considered someone's wife rather than someone in her own right.

They divorced in 1964. She raised their sons — including Dorion Sagan, who would become her longtime collaborator — while completing her doctorate in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley. She did the work that would change biology while managing the entire domestic architecture of a life that offered her very little structural support.

When molecular biology caught up with her theory in the 1970s — when DNA sequencing technology became sophisticated enough to actually test what she had proposed — the results were unambiguous. Mitochondria contained their own DNA. That DNA was bacterial. The evidence was not suggestive. It was definitive.

The fifteen journals that had rejected her paper were now looking at proof.

The scientific establishment did what establishments eventually do when reality forces their hand — it incorporated her theory, celebrated it as a cornerstone of modern evolutionary biology, and credited her in terms that ranged from gracious to slightly grudging depending on who was doing the crediting. E.O. Wilson, the legendary sociobiologist, called her the most successful synthetic thinker in modern biology. Richard Dawkins — who disagreed with her on multiple other scientific questions — praised her sheer courage in holding to the endosymbiotic theory through years of institutional resistance until the evidence made denial impossible.

Science magazine, the most prestigious journal in American science, called her science's unruly earth mother.
They still couldn't let go of the word.

She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983. She received the National Medal of Science in 1999 from President Clinton — the highest scientific honor the United States government bestows. She collaborated with British scientist James Lovelock on the Gaia hypothesis — the provocative and still-debated theory that Earth itself, its atmosphere and oceans and living systems, functions as a single self-regulating organism maintaining the conditions necessary for life. It was another idea that the mainstream received with raised eyebrows, and another idea that has proven more durable than its critics expected.

She wrote books with her son Dorion that translated complex scientific concepts for general readers — believing that science belonged to everyone and that the story of life was too extraordinary to be locked inside academic journals. She co-founded a publishing imprint. She taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for decades and trained a generation of scientists who carried her framework into fields she never lived to see it reach.

She died on November 22, 2011, from a hemorrhagic stroke. She was seventy-three years old.

What she left behind was a redrawn map of life itself.
Every complex cell on Earth — every cell in your body, every cell in every plant, every cell in every animal that has ever lived — is a collaboration. It contains within it the descendants of bacteria that chose, billions of years ago, to stop competing and start cooperating. The boundary between self and other is not where we thought it was. It never was.

Lynn Margulis saw that when almost no one else did.
Fifteen journals said no.

The universe had been saying yes for two billion years.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

This is the best €1 you can spend in Italy.

Church of St. Ignatius of Loyola, Rome.

[Napaleo @newpeteV1]

It's strange that when disillusioned shinners decide to seek a better life they never move to Northern Ireland where Sinn Fein are actually in government.

[Sall Grover @salltweets]

A lot of people have struggled to believe me when I say that the Australian Human Rights Commission is giving pregnancy protections in law to men who claim to be woman, because it’s so stupid it’s hard to believe anyone would say it.

Enjoy:

[Emer O' Shea #Ukraine #Woman, Life Freedom @EmerOShea8]

@ClaireLovett1

[Ed Abrahamson @abrahamson_ed]

Wow. @MichealMartinTD laying out the real politik and destroying Boyd-Barrett in a blistering attack about banning trade with Ireland. An act of economic s^icide only the left cannot see.

[Paul Embery @PaulEmbery]

My word. This is incredible. A real-life version of that scene from The Life of Brian: "Stan, you haven't got a womb! Where's the foetus going to gestate?! You going to keep it in a box?!"

[Emer O' Shea #Ukraine #Woman, Life Freedom @EmerOShea8]

@philipnolan1 Yerra

[Emer O' Shea #Ukraine #Woman, Life Freedom @EmerOShea8]

@PGNWTLOI1D @TullMcAdoo It's called respect for the Parliament and the office of Taoiseach.

[Olena Rohoza @OlenaRohoza]

The Ukrainian Armed Forces carried out a lightning-fast operation — 300 enemy troops taken out with a single drone!

This was precision work that must have left the Russians in absolute shock.

A Ukrainian explosive-laden drone struck an FSB headquarters with perfect accuracy at the exact moment a major meeting was taking place inside. The explosion was so powerful that the headquarters was literally blown into thousands of pieces. A chain reaction followed — vehicles, ammunition, and storage facilities erupted in flames.

More than 300 representatives of Russian special services were reportedly eliminated in the Kherson region.

With one precise drone strike, an entire FSB headquarters — including high-ranking officers — was wiped out.

[Olena Rohoza @OlenaRohoza]

“AND YOU STILL DARE TO OPEN YOUR MOUTH…”

Sasha Legerman: This is too accurate not to share.

This Australian’s response to Trump’s rant that “NATO does nothing for America” is absolutely devastating:

“Mate. You run a country where 600,000 homeless people will sleep on the streets tonight.

A country where 40% of adults can’t cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money.

A country where insulin costs more than a car payment, and people ration it just to stay alive.

A country where medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy.

A country where women die in hospital parking lots because doctors are too afraid of abortion laws to treat miscarriages.

You imprison more of your own citizens than any country on Earth.
More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea.

In the land of the free, 2 million people sit in cages, and a quarter of them haven’t even been convicted of anything.
They’re simply too poor to afford bail.

Your life expectancy is declining. You’re the only developed nation where that’s happening.

Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba’s.

Your children practice active shooter drills between math and English classes while you sell defense stocks to your friends.

Your minimum wage hasn’t changed in 15 years.

Your teachers work two jobs, your veterans sleep under bridges, and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that never attacked you.

And now a convicted criminal — found liable for sexual abuse, defending a pedophile, sleeping with a porn star, and running the biggest dumpster-fire campaign since the Taliban — is thanking you for yet another disaster.

And you call Greenland badly governed?

Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world.
Nobody there goes bankrupt because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because insurance refused treatment.

‘NATO wasn’t there when we needed them.’

When exactly was that, champ?
September 11?

Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU.

Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU.

Australia wasn’t even in NATO, and we still showed up. For twenty years.

And then you left at 2 a.m. without telling anyone and left everybody else to clean up the mess.

You don’t care that a great nation is being terrorized by your friend, and you haven’t shown it a single ounce of sympathy.

So maybe before calling other countries badly governed, take a look at your own backyard, you aluminum siding salesman with a spray tan.

The only thing badly managed in this picture is your damn mouth.

And you still dare to lecture the rest of the world?”

[Fascinating History @Fascinate_Hist]

More people need to know that ancient Roman engineering was so precise, their aqueducts still produce clear water to this very day - 2,000 years later.

[Danny Boy @Care2much18]

An all-out assault on the truth, perpetrated by hateful bigots with no interest in truth.

Quote: "An Irish farmer has been thrown off his farm and refused to be let back on with a cohort of migrant scum forcing him off his own land."

Lies.

I'll go through the facts here. /1

[Emer O' Shea #Ukraine #Woman, Life Freedom @EmerOShea8]

To those who like the truth read 👇

[Danny Boy @Care2much18]

An all-out assault on the truth, perpetrated by hateful bigots with no interest in truth.

Quote: "An Irish farmer has been thrown off his farm and refused to be let back on with a cohort of migrant scum forcing him off his own land."

Lies.

I'll go through the facts here. /1

[Ann McElhinney 🧡 @annmcelhinney]

This letter in today’s Irish Times is magnificent. Please read and share

Sir, – Micheál Martin’s hysterical over-reaction to the Israeli detention of Irish citizens participating in the Sumud flotilla embarrasses Ireland on the international stage yet again. These people were not innocent holidaymakers suddenly snatched at sea, but political provocateurs who desperately sought arrest and detention by Israeli forces. This event should be treated as the publicity stunt that it was.
The real injured parties here are the ordinary Israeli and Irish taxpayers who have to pay for the arrest and repatriation of these middle-class narcissists. The best way for this Government to stop the genuinely shocking humiliation and mistreatment of Irish citizens would be to focus on the homelessness crisis in Ireland, or the ever-growing hospital waiting list, and ignore the self-indulgent gimmicks of the anti-Israeli lobby. – Yours, etc,
DR DAVID WOODS,
Dept of Classics,
University College Cork.

[Jürgen Nauditt 🇩🇪🇺🇦 @jurgen_nauditt]

Massive Russian attacks against Ukraine.

Exclusively civilian targets and infrastructure were attacked—something Russia will, as always, deny.

The ceiling at the Lukyanivska metro station has collapsed; those seeking shelter can barely breathe.

The market in Lukyanivka is on fire as a result of the Russian attack.

In Poland, air defenses have been placed on high alert, and NATO fighter jets have scrambled—not to help, but merely to take a few photos for the family album.

Death, destruction, suffering. For over four years, Europe has done nothing but watch.

[paul galvin @pgal10]

I could not agree more with Keane on Bruno Fernandes here. Stat padding. Meaningless without trophies.
#MUFC

[Omid Djalili @omid9]

Comedy palate cleanser. Robert Jenrick about to grandstand but reminded of his defection from one party to another this year is gold. The timing. First line great. Second line superb but crowd not recovered from the first to fully appreciate it 😊

[UAVoyager🇺🇦 @NAFOvoyager]

Absolutely horrifying and painful footage.

russia is wiping another Ukrainian city off the map while the world stays silent.

Kostiantynivka: from 70,000 people to a ghost town under nonstop russian bombs.

Why does the world keep allowing this horror?