Ian Welsh

OG political blogger. Predicted the 2007 collapse. Read: , Support: - @ianwelsh.bsky.social

[Ian Welsh @iwelsh]

"How To Think."

Thinking well is not for the faint-hearted. If you do it properly you will often come to conclusions you hate: reality is rarely as we would have it be: this is not the best of all possible worlds. You must be brave and willing to endure discomfort to think well.

[kuttoosan aka kuttoosan @jijinjohn]

Relevant

[Matthew Todd 🌏🔥 @MrMatthewTodd]

Sorry, but this is absolute nonsense. The reason people haven’t acted on climate change is because the massive amount of disinformation being pumped out from most of the media that for decades has said it’s probably not true.

The opposite is true. This woolly false hope forced positivity mentality is exactly why people don’t understand it’s the existential life-and-death-billions-of-us-at-risk crisis that it is.

https://t.co/HczsGuelOm

[Colin McCarthy @US_Stormwatch]

This is going to be a generational winter for coastal flooding and erosion along California’s coast.

A marine heatwave plus a Kelvin Wave from El Niño have already rapidly raised water levels in recent weeks. Combined with king tides this winter, it’s likely every coastal city from the Bay Area to SoCal will see their highest water levels in recorded history.

[Ian Welsh @iwelsh]

@EPHaury I mean... I play mostly RPGs and strategy games.

[Ian Welsh @iwelsh]

Getting real tired of so many games with timed parries, I must admit.

[Eurogamer @eurogamer]

Even Call of Duty has a parry now and it's kind of brilliant - but do we need it in every game? https://t.co/6xd3fhftki

[Ian Welsh @iwelsh]

@EPHaury Yeah, thing is timed parries are in a lot of games I'd otherwise probably want to play.

[Lara - Covid is Airborne @fillthewhole]

Yeah did all that, got infected with SARS-CoV2 & I had to kiss all those ‘gains’ goodbye. Wear a respirator & you might have a fighting chance.

[Ian Welsh @iwelsh]

@EPHaury I find them awkward with keyboard/mouse and I don't like using controllers, plus I'm getting old and I'm sick, so as much as I don't like it, reflex games are not really for me right now.

[Ian Welsh @iwelsh]

The funny thing is I spent 20 years screaming at Western elites not to ship their industrial capacity to China and now, even though it'll hurt me, I'm glad they didn't listen.

Genocidal maniacs shouldn't have the world's greatest industrial base.

[ABBY 🇵🇸 @abbymachines]

it's so funny when a lib tries to browbeat me into voting for a democrat who concedes on trans issues. i thought you did the math. i thought you made the calculation that losing my vote is worth it, since you'll get sooooo many more votes from transphobes now

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

Sanaa's authorities, for their part, accuse commanders of the Saudi-backed forces of blocking medical supplies from Sanaa from reaching Taiz's hospitals for five straight days. A local official told Sanaa's state news agency, Saba, that the commanders are stalling international aid groups to obey Saudi orders to keep roads into the city center closed.

The government side has not responded to the claim, and no aid agency has yet publicly confirmed a blocked convoy.

[Chris @Chris_Somewhere]

On the contrary, the Chinese government is in many ways far more responsive to ordinary people than the US government is, which most Americans don't think it is. The CPC isn't perfect, but far better.

The world is going to be a better place because of the US losing the AI race.

[Ian Welsh @iwelsh]

Yeah, we've avoided an ice age that would take thousands of years to be a serious problem and exchanged it for global warming which is already a problem.

But apparently this is "very good news."

I can't even.

[Owen Lewis @is_OwenLewis]

Here’s a rather extraordinary discovery: humanity seems to have interrupted the beginning of the next ice age. We thought it might happen in the future, but the evidence suggests it's already happened.

A new study in Science argues that the next major glaciation had already begun roughly 2,000 years ago, before modern warming reversed the trend in the 20th century.

The evidence comes from the Barnes Ice Cap on Baffin Island, the last surviving remnant of the enormous Laurentide Ice Sheet that once covered much of Canada and reached as far south as Illinois.

Because Barnes is frozen directly to its bedrock, advancing ice buries and preserves vegetation beneath it. Researchers radiocarbon dated plants emerging as the ice retreats to reconstruct its history.

They found that after melting to a minimum extent around 3,000 years ago, the ice began expanding again about 2,000 years ago. The researchers interpret this as the earliest stage of the next glacial period.

Left to natural orbital cycles, that cooling would have unfolded extremely slowly, potentially taking tens of thousands of years to rebuild a continent spanning ice sheet.

But around 1960, the trend reversed. Summers became warm enough that Barnes began losing more ice than it gained, despite Northern Hemisphere summer sunlight continuing to slowly decline in a way that should favor renewed glaciation. Greenhouse warming had (thankfully) overwhelmed the natural cooling tendency.

The Barnes ice cap may now disappear entirely within the next few centuries, removing the final remnant of an ice sheet that repeatedly served as the nucleus for much larger glaciations.

There is a remarkable deep time perspective here. For millions of years, orbital cycles have pushed Earth between warmer interglacials and colder glacial periods. According to this study, that ancient cycle had started turning once again.

Then, in the geological equivalent of an instant, humanity pushed hard enough in the opposite direction to stop it.

Just so we're clear, this is a very very good thing.

📸 Geology Sciences

Sources:
1) https://t.co/jZGNFULiXU

2) https://t.co/l64Zh9pR41

[Anna Longthorp @AnnaLongthorp]

Prepping for tomorrow night’s soup kitchen,
Recently the pressures have got bigger, more service users, MANY more rough sleepers requiring duvets than we’ve ever experienced (been doing this 10 years).
When will @GOVUK in particular @andyburnham tackle homelessness?

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

A young blonde woman with an American accent in Israel says that all the Arabs must be kicked out of Gaza because it is "our land" since "God commanded us to take it."

The Palestinians should be kicked out to any other Arab state, she continues, except Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, "because they are ours."

"Or we will kill them," she adds

Can we stop pretending that this is a marginal view in Israel? That these are the comments of a fringe minority?

They are not. Israel has been on this path for quite some time.

Western governments know it fully - yet they continue to fund and enable Israel's genocidal policies.

[derek guy @dieworkwear]

This pair appears to have been adopted but this former employee says that the shelter is at over capacity. My offer still stands: if you adopt any animal from this shelter, I will pay for a month's worth of pet food and help you find a good pair of pants.

https://t.co/7U2DKoTJLz

[Ian Welsh @iwelsh]

Is it legal and is it just are two different questions, usually with different answers. If you think legal=just then you are a fascist.

[ArchaeoHistories @histories_arch]

The Lonely Funeral (De Eenzame Uitvaart) is a Dutch social and literary program that ensures people who die without family, friends, or attendees receive a dignified farewell....

The idea began with Bart FM Droog, then the city poet of Groningen, around 2001. It soon spread to Amsterdam and other Dutch cities, and later to parts of Belgium, including Brussels.

City officials pass along whatever they know about the person. Often it’s very little: a name, an address, a few belongings left in an apartment.

From there, the poet goes looking. They talk to neighbors, landlords and anyone else who might have crossed paths with the person, and look into where they came from.

Sometimes there’s almost nothing to go on. In those cases, the poem honestly admits what is unknown and imagines the ordinary life that person likely lived.

The services are simple, often with flowers and music. For many of the people honored, it’s the only time anyone has spoken about their life out loud.

In Amsterdam alone, poets have written more than 200 of these poems.

Ger Fritz, a former Amsterdam funeral department employee, attended more than 500 lonely funerals. An annual prize for the best lonely funeral poem was later named in his honor.

#archaeohistories

[mer ⚔️࣪ ִֶָ☾. #SaveMassEffect @drowwpoison]

"to play Mass Effect was to get lost inside a living universe whose vast corners were waiting to be discovered—by you."

tearing up reading this beautifully written piece by @EricFrancisco24 for @esquire 😢