Watson

Retired English teacher, writer. Permanently annoyed by cruelty, stupidity.

[Watson @WatsonWork1]

@BCFerrys There's something familiar about this ...

[Watson @WatsonWork1]

@arenella1 You've said it yourself. It's a misogynistic term, its use is widespread, and it insults all women. There's no excuse for using it. It's never justified. You are a highly intelligent man. Look up some nouns and adjectives. We live in a culture of mindless insults. Help change it.

[Watson @WatsonWork1]

@ameliorate_d @_WydAria And I read this with a cup of tea in my hand. Tea is why sugar was invented. And cows, as well. It's all about tea. With milk and sugar. Life exists after the first cup of tea. I hope I've made my point.

[Watson @WatsonWork1]

The comments on this post give me hope for humanity. I have felt exactly the same way since I was 15 years old.

[Nicholas O'Shaughnessy @NicholasOShaug1]

I am still infuriated by WW1. At school I & a few friends broke into a storeroom and found a number of volumes: these contained photographs of dead boys and letters from their families. The same boys – nearly 500 of them – whose names were on the memorial. Here were their faces

[Watson @WatsonWork1]

@gvjbest @smc429 @AdamKinzinger I thought that, too!

[DJ @DjCheshier]

Canada’s boreal forest — the source of much of the wildfire smoke drifting into the U.S. — isn’t like our managed forests in the lower 48.
It’s the largest intact forest ecosystem on Earth: roughly 1.3 billion acres (about 78 times larger than Alaska’s Tongass, our biggest national forest, and 7 times larger than all 154 U.S. National Forests combined). It stretches in an almost continuous belt from the Yukon to Newfoundland.
Why can’t they just do controlled burns like we do here?
Because most of it is remote, roadless wilderness.
• Less than 9% of Canada’s population lives in the boreal region.
• Less than 1% of the forest itself is developed.
• Vast areas have no roads and are only accessible by aircraft or winter roads.
You can’t send crews in to do prescribed burns across a billion+ acres of inaccessible terrain the way we can in populated areas near roads and communities in the U.S. Wildfire has been nature’s primary management tool in these ecosystems for thousands of years.
Smoke reaching the Northeast isn’t new either. It happened in 1950, 1988, 1995, 2002, 2017, 2021, 2023, 2025, and now 2026. Weather (especially upper-level wind patterns) determines where the smoke goes, not just where the fires are burning.
Blaming Canada’s government for “not controlling” these fires is political theater. The scale and inaccessibility make large-scale suppression or prevention across that wilderness fundamentally different — and in many places, practically impossible — from managing forests near U.S. population centers.
Nature runs that forest. Politicians don’t. Let’s stop pretending otherwise.

[Kyle Brittain @BadWeatherKyle]

"Just put the fires out!"

Ever seen a boreal wildfire? I have. I used to fight them.

When fire behaviour becomes extreme, you're not getting close to them.

The radiant heat from a crown fire is face-melting from hundreds of metres away.

All attempts at direct attack will fail, because dropping water on it becomes akin to trying to spit on a campfire...it evaporates before it even hits the flames.

Additionally, reduced visibility, high winds, and turbulence makes aerial attack hazardous.

As a wildland firefighter, I've been extracted off of wildfires twice as our fires blew up, both times having our gear burned over. We returned to find firehoses and metal melted into the ash.

I've seen fireballs launched hundreds of feet high, and fires intense enough to produce lightning, influencing the weather around them. I've seen wildfires grow to the size of a major city in a short period of time.

So no, we can't just put the fire out.

Not being able to stop such a natural process is a truly humbling feeling.

[beanie0597_2.0 @0Beanie05923291]

Reading activates parts of the brain
that allow you to experience things more deeply. That means that when you
put your book down, you just might find everyday life a bit more interesting. It's comparable to the "afterburn effect of running," where your body continues to benefit from the activity even when
you've concluded your run.

[Volcaholic 🌋 @volcaholic1]

FRANCE: Watching Fontainebleau Forest burn is heartbreaking.

This is not just a forest. It is a place of incredible history, wildlife, and natural beauty that has survived for centuries.

These ancient woodlands were once the hunting grounds of French kings, and the landscape still holds traces of human history stretching back thousands of years.

In 1861, Fontainebleau became the world’s first protected nature reserve, helping to shape the modern conservation movement.

The damage to wildlife is devastating. This UNESCO biosphere is home to deer, wild boar, and countless species of birds and insects that depend on this unique habitat.

This is the same landscape that inspired artists like Monet, Renoir, and the Barbizon painters. A place that has endured wars, revolutions, and generations of change.

[Naomi O'Leary @NaomiOhReally]

The forest south of Paris being burned up in wildfire isn’t just any forest.
The Forest of Fontainebleau was central to the development of Impressionism, is in paintings by Monet and Renoir, and the campaign to protect it inspired one of the earliest environmental manifestos

[Tom Thomson @TTLastSpring]

1915 Northern River #tt1915

[Your Best Version @YourPrimePath]

Reading for an hour a day completely rearranges your nervous system. After a few weeks of doing it consistently something shifts. The urge to constantly scroll starts fading. Your thinking becomes slower, calmer and deeper. You start having actual thoughts again instead of just reactions. Books do something to your brain that no other medium comes close to. They rebuild your attention span in a world designed to destroy it. One hour a day. That is all it takes to become a fundamentally different thinker.

[Бианка @BiankaB12]

One of my longest-standing arguments is that we are not living in Orwell’s 1984, where truth is centrally suppressed and censored by force (that’s former communist societies, modern-day China, Russia, North Korea).

We are living in something much closer to Huxley’s Brave New World.

The truth is not hidden - it is almost always readily available. But it is buried beneath an industrial quantity of noise: propaganda, outrage, half-truths, conspiracy theories, influencer theatre, algorithmic rage bait and an endless stream of content designed not to inform us, but to keep us emotionally stimulated.

The modern information system does not need to censor the truth when it can simply drown it in noise.

A fact no longer has to be disproven - it only has to be surrounded by a hundred competing claims, stripped of context and nuance, turned into partisan ammunition and pushed into the same feed as celebrity gossip, memes and 15 second videos engineered to deliver the fastest possible dopamine hit. By the time the truth reaches us, it appears as just another piece of content competing for our attention.

That is the more sophisticated form of control: not preventing people from knowing, but exhausting their capacity to care.

Orwell feared a world in which people would be deprived of information. Huxley feared a world in which they would be given so much distraction, stimulation and triviality that they would lose the desire to seek it.

The defining struggle of our age is therefore not simply between truth and censorship, but between truth and indifference.

[Watson @WatsonWork1]

@CraigBaird You will love the book! It's online on Internet Archive but obviously better as a real book.

[Watson @WatsonWork1]

@MTW2478 @JigglyPants44 @sock82 I agree. This video reminds me of when his father did a pirouette behind Queen Elizabeth at a G7 Summit. There's an element of "I follow the rules" but "I'm also my own man" to both of them. He looks free and happy. He deserves that.

[Fascinating History @Fascinate_Hist]

A 10-year-old boy poses for a school photo in the late 1880s.

Everything changes when you realize it's the future Soviet Union leader, Joseph Stalin.

[Watson @WatsonWork1]

It is incorrect to say "Denmark doesn't spend money ⁠to really ⁠help Greenland." It does. Greenland and Denmark have been connected since 1397. Greenlanders have Danish citizenship. Greenland is self-governing but Denmark handles foreign affairs and defence.

[Watson @WatsonWork1]

“It is a well-known position of the United States that it wants to own and take over Greenland. I hope that it is equally well known everywhere that this is not going to happen,” Frederiksen said.
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