Spiralwrap

Mom to 2 🐶; LIB PATRIOT ❤️ art, astronomy. Try to have a rational conversation, be polite; but sometimes just have no patience for mean, intolerant, rude ppl.

[Spiralwrap @spiralwrap]

@sashuwa77246 @OzFerret1 Have you never seen the Moon set?

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

Now they want to remove the ocean monitoring system so the damage they do can't be measured. It's in project 2025.

In the North Atlantic Ocean, south of Greenland and Iceland, a large patch of water is doing something very strange.
While the rest of the ocean heats up, it's been getting colder. A new study says it has the answer to this mystery — and it's an ominous sign the world is hurtling toward one of the most alarming climate tipping points.

https://t.co/HNpP5spm5Q

[Night Sky Today @NightSkyToday]

ALERT🚨: A devastating report reveals that Earth has lost 50% of its wild animal population in just 40 years, driven by unsustainable human consumption and habitat destruction.

[Ancient History Hub @AncientHistorry]

811 years ago today, on June 15, 1215, in a riverside meadow called Runnymede, a defeated king changed the world by accident.

King John was broke, beaten in war, and despised. He had taxed his barons into the ground to fund failed campaigns in France. So they rebelled, seized London, and cornered him. The deal they forced on him became the Magna Carta, Latin for the Great Charter.

A few things almost nobody gets right:

He did not sign it. Medieval kings authenticated documents with a wax seal pressed onto the parchment, so John sealed it. The image of him with a quill is a myth.

He never meant to keep it. Within ten weeks he begged the Pope to cancel it, and Pope Innocent III obliged, declaring it null and void of all validity forever. England plunged straight into civil war.

It should have died there. But John died in 1216, and his supporters reissued the charter to win back the rebels. It was revived again and again until it became permanent law.

Of its 63 original clauses, only 3 are still on the books in England today. The most famous promises that no free man can be jailed or stripped of his rights except by lawful judgment of his peers and the law of the land. That single line is the ancestor of due process, trial by jury, and habeas corpus.

Four original 1215 copies still survive. A grudging peace treaty that the king tried to kill quietly became the foundation stone of liberty for the English-speaking world.

Not bad for a document that was supposed to last nine weeks.

[Paul Bronks @SlenderSherbet]

Felis catus, nature's great hunter, stalks his prey like an assassin waiting for the perfect shot, then pounces with efficiency and precision.

[PROTECT ALL WILDLIFE @Protect_Wldlife]

#ThoughtForTheDay

Most people drove past the small animal without a second glance.

One chilly evening in the fall of 2024, a homeowner noticed an injured opossum sitting near the edge of a neighborhood road. The little animal looked exhausted and frightened, barely moving as cars passed by. At first, many assumed it was dangerous or sick. But a closer look revealed a scared creature simply trying to survive.

The homeowner contacted a local wildlife rehabilitator, who safely transported the opossum for care. After a health check, rescuers discovered that the animal was dehydrated and recovering from minor injuries. With food, water, and a quiet place to rest, the shy visitor slowly regained its strength.

During its recovery, the rehabilitator shared something many people never realize. Opossums are peaceful animals that help nature in important ways. They eat insects, clean up carrion, and help keep ecosystems healthy, all while asking for very little in return.

A few weeks later, the opossum was released back into the wild. Watching it disappear into the trees, the rescuer was reminded that some of nature's most valuable helpers are also the most misunderstood.

Sometimes all it takes is one person willing to stop, look a little closer, and give an animal a second chance.

[Lakota Man @LakotaMan1]

Why is the U.S. giving Iran $25 billion for “humanitarian purposes” when the Navajo Nation Reservation is declaring a state of emergency due to having no access to fresh drinking water?

[Spiralwrap @spiralwrap]

@TheGlobeIsDead You’re missing something . . . .

https://t.co/O3WdyVIOMQ

[ArchaeoHistories @histories_arch]

This Auschwitz registration photo captures Krystyna Trześniewska, a Polish girl whose life ended at age 13...

Krystyna Trześniewska was one of more than 230,000 children and teenagers deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp complex during World War II. Born in Poland, she was imprisoned as a child after the German occupation of her country. Her prisoner number, visible on her camp uniform, was part of the Nazis' vast system of cataloging human beings as numbers rather than individuals.

The overwhelming majority of children sent to Auschwitz did not survive. Of the approximately 1.3 million people deported to the camp complex between 1940 and 1945, at least 1.1 million were murdered. Children were especially vulnerable to starvation, disease, forced labor, medical experiments, and the gas chambers.

Auschwitz was liberated by advancing Soviet forces on January 27, 1945. Among the roughly 7,000 prisoners found alive were about 700 children. Today, January 27 is observed internationally as Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The Auschwitz camp archives contain more than 40,000 prisoner registration photographs. Most were taken between 1941 and 1944, but many were destroyed by the SS before liberation. The surviving photographs remain one of the most important visual records of the individuals imprisoned there, preserving names and faces that the Nazi regime sought to erase forever.

© Reddit

#archaeohistories

[Spiralwrap @spiralwrap]

@mkoombozi @shavnyuy Jazz

[Spiralwrap @spiralwrap]

@shavnyuy Try fomenting an Industrial Revolution when your brightest are shipped off as slaves, your excess wealth is sent to other continents.

[Spiralwrap @spiralwrap]

@ReprobateCoZa @shavnyuy Snark is unbecoming of you. Africa is a large continent with many different cultures, some of which were stripped of its wealth and peoples by colonizers. Others highly sophisticated.
Timbuktu is the site of one of the oldest extant libraries in the world.
Jazz came out of Africa

[Spiralwrap @spiralwrap]

@RaminNasibov China has known how to make porcelain since the 5th c A.D. Europe learned how to make it in the 17th c when a German princeling loved it so much he imprisoned an alchemist so as to transmute lead into gold so he could buy more. Instead he figured out how to make porcelain.

[Spiralwrap @spiralwrap]

@RaminNasibov There are 3 types of ceramics:
Earthenware
Stoneware
Porcelain

[LeoDaVinciWave @LeoDaVinciWave]

This is a monumental anamorphic optical illusion titled The Wound, created by the French street artist JR, March 2021 on the facade of the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Italy.

[PROTECT ALL WILDLIFE @Protect_Wldlife]

In 1963, the Bronx Zoo had an exhibit called “The Most Dangerous Animal in the World"

It was a mirror!

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A horse is built to run. A donkey is built to stand and think about it. You have met Hector. This is the other half of his field.

Here is the thing nobody warns you about a parade horse. Hector stood through the King's Troop and the massed bands and a nation's worst day without shifting a hoof, and he will still, in a quiet Welsh field, levitate sideways at a pheasant coming out of a hedge. A carrier bag on the wind is, to a horse, a clear and present danger. The guns were a job, and the job had rules. The hedge has a pheasant in it and no rules at all, and so the flight animal underneath the seventeen years of training remains, on the matter of pheasants, entirely undefeated.

Nelson does not look up.

Nelson has never looked up. A donkey does not flee, it assesses, and it assessed the pheasant long ago and found it beneath comment. People call that stubbornness. It is an animal declining to spend adrenaline it sees no reason to spend.

And here is the domestic arrangement, which anyone who has kept the two together will know on sight. Nelson is a third of Hector's size and entirely in charge. He eats first. He picks the dry spot. He decides when they move. The black charger who carried the weight of the state stands by, with enormous patience, while a small grey donkey finishes the good hay.

The one thing that reliably undoes Hector is Nelson leaving the field. Five minutes, a foot trim, a vet down the lane, and the great composed horse comes apart at the gate, calling and calling, because a horse is herd to its bones and has decided that its herd is one unbothered donkey.

Nelson, for his part, despises rain. A desert animal washed up in Denbighshire, he stands in the shelter looking martyred while Hector grazes out in the wet, waterproof and serene.

Two opposite natures, each propping up the other exactly where it is weak. The horse who fears small things and the donkey who fears nothing at all. It works. It was always going to.

[Francisco Ribeiro @fraveris]

Gustav Klimt

Flower Garden,

1907

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

In 2020, Two Men Turned Earth Into A "Sandwich" By Placing Bread On Precise Point Of The Planet

In 2020, two men carried out a lighthearted geography experiment by creating what is often called an "Earth sandwich." The idea is simple in theory but difficult in practice: place two slices of bread on exact antipodal points, locations on opposite sides of the Earth connected by a straight line through the planet's center.

One participant placed a slice of bread in New Zealand, while the other placed the matching slice in Spain. Because most antipodal points fall in oceans, finding two accessible land locations directly opposite each other is surprisingly rare. Less than 5% of Earth's land surface has land directly opposite it.

The concept became popular among geography enthusiasts as a way to demonstrate Earth's spherical shape and the mathematics of global coordinates. Determining antipodes requires reversing the latitude and calculating the longitude difference by 180 degrees.

New Zealand is one of the few major landmasses with significant antipodal land. Much of the country lies opposite Spain and parts of North Africa, while most of the United States is opposite the Indian Ocean and most of Australia is opposite the North Atlantic Ocean. This makes successful "Earth sandwiches" far less common than many people assume.

© Reddit

#archaeohistories

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

The U.S. government just made a land deal with the world's first trillionaire. Not a sale. A trade.

Because apparently that's how we do things now.

715 acres of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge - built by Congress in 1979 to protect one of the most biodiverse wildlife corridors left in North America - handed to SpaceX.

Endangered ocelots. Aplomado falcons. Piping plovers. Land the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas has called sacred since long before there was a United States.

SpaceX built a rocket launch site next door. Then came the explosions. Concrete and metal hurled six miles across refuge land. A 2024 study found that after one launch, every single monitored shorebird nest near the site suffered egg damage or loss. The Fish and Wildlife Service's response was not enforcement. It was a land swap.

FOIA documents show internal planning for this transfer started as early as April 2025 - while Musk was running DOGE and threatening to fire federal workers who didn't justify their jobs to him. The agency developed what they called "the most expedited schedule possible" to get it done.

Part of what's being handed over includes the Palmito Ranch Battlefield - the site of the last battle of the Civil War. A National Historic Landmark. Once transferred, SpaceX can restrict public access whenever they want.

25,000+ people submitted public comments. Most opposed the deal. The government moved forward anyway.

A coalition of tribal and conservation groups filed a federal lawsuit this week to stop it. Because someone has to.

Why are we cutting real estate deals with a trillionaire when we could have just made him pay for it?

#DemsUnited