Wheaties

https://www.livescience.com/animals/birds/mice-on-remote-island-that-eat-albatrosses-alive-sentenced-to-death-by-bombing-scientists-decree

Invasive mice are devouring albatrosses alive on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, so conservationists have come up with an explosive solution — "bombing" the mice.

Mice have been wreaking havoc on Marion Island, between South Africa and Antarctica, for decades. Humans accidentally introduced the mice in the 19th century, and the rodents have since developed a taste for wandering albatrosses (Diomedea exulans) and other threatened seabirds.

The Mouse-Free Marion Project, a collaboration between the South African government and BirdLife South Africa, is trying to raise $29 million to drop 660 tons (600 metric tons) of rodenticide-laced pellets onto the island in winter 2027, AFP news agency reported on Saturday (Aug. 24).

The project plans to send a squad of helicopters to drop the pellets. By striking in winter when the mice are most hungry, the conservationists hope to eradicate the entire mouse population of up to 1 million individuals.

written in the fucking 1970s

I know it's spelled "minute". That was a typo and I am not going to fix it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uWW--w4SRs

:the-brain: YES

...the punchline is that no matter how clear, how careful, how poetic the message is written -- we all will still just skim the fine print. Hell, I do it. Do it all the time. Twitter is successful because most of us get as far as the headline. So... why not write only in headlines?

That's a mistake. Writing only mono-logs is the equal and opposite mistake. Conversations happen when you talk and listen. Maybe not in equal parts. Sometimes you listen more than you talk. Sometimes you talk more than you listen. Do you listen to your own words as you say them? Catch the spokenmis word? The licked tetter?

I live in the Constantinople of the British empire, the US of A. My government is facilitating a genocide. Our private industries build the weapons that slaughter children families communities. Our publicly traded stock market does better the more blood is spilled. I hate it here. The people around me are too overworked, too sleep deprived, too hope-shattered, too cynical, too scared to do anything. I WILL NOT LEAVE. I will do everything in my power to bend history away from the slaughter. I WILL BE SO GODDAMN PATIENT AND CARING AND CAREFUL AND LOVING. And I will make sure people know. I WILL HELP THEM UNDERSTAND. I WILL DRAG THIS COUNTRY, KICKING AND SCREAMING, INTO THE 21st CENTURY

and that's enough monologing

...really, we've not really incorporated it into our understanding of the natural world, either. The closest we got was the late 19th century project to justify the racism we were already doing (or "Social Darwinism", when it's attempting to appear grown-up and respectable).

The way we talk about class is still firmly grounded in 18th and 17th century ideas. An evolutionary perspective would have us thinking about this along multiple generations, across enough spans of time that the individual is incidental - a part contributing to a greater system. On this scale, it doesn't matter how good, how just, how longsighted this or that president or industry titan or """great man""" is, cus soon they'll be dead. Someone else moves in to take their position. It's the structure around them that truly continues, that defines the flow of history.

That kind of thinking is anathema to the US civic tradition. We are discouraged - in schools, in churches, on television, in our art - from such broad considerations. It doesn't matter that statistically most people here die in debt having worked all their lives -- they just didn't do enough willpower! So they must deserve their sorry plight! The Elect, whether chosen by God or the Market (not much of a distinction, for a lot of people here...), are thus equally deserving of their 'success'.

Even our atheists think like this! They've just replaced 'God' with an Operating System. They belittle religion for projecting a familiar patriarchal figure into the great unknowns of the cosmos, then turn around, point to the sky, and say it must be a desktop interface. And non of the underlying assumptions change! The aesthetics and the words are different, but we're still trying to cram a planetary biosphere of billions of people down the throat of a framework that refuses to consider anything bigger than the individual!

(id look up the quote, but it's funner to butcher ideas and re-arrange them in new language)

i feel like that's not just the US as a nation state, but Yankee culture and society in general. Like, I'm starting to think we're just not capable of incorporating new experience into our collective learned behaviors. Not even after COVID - the polite thing isn't to mask up or even hand-sanitize when you have cold or flu symptoms, it's to pretend like nothing happened (and AIDS barely gets talked about and only in the past-tense...)

Most of the art and music and literature getting remixed remade and referenced is from the 20th century, or has roots beginning in that time. In terms of infrastructure, very little built this century seems to have any amount of longevity in mind.

Geopolitically we're still doing Cold Wars and proxy-conflicts -- even when those have been rendered obsolete by our own fucking actions the previous (and first...) time there was a big Cold War. And we never stopped funding and arming settler colonialism, even with practically unanimous condemnation in the UN (take away our VETO for the love of all things good TAKE IT AWAY)

i don't know that i have a conclusion for this. On a personal level, living in the 20th century US but having 21st century tech reminds me way too much of Fahrenheit 451. It's maddening. Like I'm trying not to notice the great big Amygdalae on the Healing Church; there's no outlet for the Insight so it's just hovering there and i'm scared to walk too close to it for fear of how others respond.

...Make a national programme to replace all the lead pipes in the country. The more I think about it, the angrier I get. Why the fuck should water come into a home on command and still not be drinkable? We're a crule hospice of a country. The kind of half-funny tragedy that just makes me furious. Perhaps I've been drikning too much tap water. Damn damn damn damn. There would be more exclamation marks here, but I have restraint.

obligitory <flag of the cruel hospice

stolen from https://conzoop.tumblr.com/post/744316560609525760

but tumblr wants a login for that blog so see it here https://punkitt-is-here.tumblr.com/post/744320980025999360

stolen from https://ellevandersneed.tumblr.com/post/743590377245835264