Our hiatus continues as we organize our schedules (student life hit us all hard) and the team as a whole. We will be back by the end of 2021. Until then, please stay tuned!!
Hello everyone! We will take a break from posting due to the fact that most of the people in the team are students and we all got exams and what not in the following few months. We will resume our activity at a greater speed and quality (+ a website!!) somewhere around the end of August if not earlier or later. We still got two or three posts in the making that we’ll post next week.
Take care and keep fighting for the climate! We will do so too even as our journalistic activity subsides for a bit.
Even though methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas, it remains in the atmosphere for (only) about 10 years, making it a more approachable target in the short-term fight against climate change.
While CO2 does remain the more prevalent culprit, its effects are to be evaluated in the long-term. Because it lasts for hundreds of years once in the atmosphere consequences are to be expected in the second half of our century.
The research, supported by the National Geographic Society and published today in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, estimates that atmospheric warming from all of these sources combined now appears to swamp the forest’s natural cooling effect.
The effect can still be combated and reversed through the halting of deforestation as well as rebuilding the destroyed ecosystems.
Sir Sidney Poitier (20 February 1927 - 7 January 2022)
Mr Sidney Poitier, the man who paved the way for such well-respected actors as Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington changed the perception of “black Americans” both within the film industry and without with his commanding presence and daring film choices.
Defying conventional wisdom at the time concerning actors of color, Sidney Poitier became a leading man, a major box office draw, and even an Academy Award winner. All this done in a time when race relations were at their most volatile.
Careful to retain his dignity onscreen, Sidney made himself a virtual ambassador of the civil rights movement in the 60s, choosing roles in films that had something to say, all the while keeping a constant awareness of the responsibility he had as a role model for a generation.
He always understood the power he had as a star and used it carefully to inspire the change he wished to see in the world. And in many ways, he succeeded.
As the most prominent Black actor in Hollywood of his time, Poitier used his fame to fight for change.
He began being a voice for the Civil Rights Movement alongside Belafonte.
In the early 1960s, Belafonte convinced Poitier to drive to the South with $70,000 to give to the Freedom Summer volunteers. The experience changed Poitier’s life as the two actors were chased by Klansmen who fired guns at them.
The two also helped organize the landmark March on Washington in 1964, which featured Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s landmark “I Have a Dream” speech.
A year before Dr. King’s assassination, the civil rights icon said of Poitier: “He is a man of great depth, a man of great social concern, a man who is dedicated to human rights and freedom. Here is a man who, in the words we so often hear now, is a soul brother.”
Later in his life, Poitier turned to humanitarian efforts, specifically in the Bahamas, where he grew up before moving to Miami at 15.
He was the Bahamian ambassador to Japan from 1997 to 2007 and from 2002 to 2007 was the ambassador of the Bahamas to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
President Barack Obama presented Poitier with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009, the country’s highest civilian honor.
You have to read about these amazing, badass ladies. Fire eating became their symbol, here’s a blurb on its origin.
[It] grew out of tragedy. Last year, a lesbian and a gay man, Hattie Mae Cohens and Brian Mock, burned to death in Salem, Ore., after a Molotov cocktail was tossed into the apartment they shared. A month later, on Halloween, at a memorial to the victims in New York City, the Avengers (then newly organized) gave their response to the deaths. They ate fire, chanting, as they still do: “The fire will not consume us. We take it and make it our own.”
There’s a documentary, too! Read all about it atLesbian Avengers Eat Fire Too (take some time to explore the whole site) – and you can watch it right here!
They also re-mobilized for their 25th anniversary in 2017 with a traveling exhibit reminding people that there were over 60 chapters of the Lesbian Avengers worldwide, and that activism works. More here.
This is AWESOME. Think of this when someone tries to tell you that you can’t change something. When people band together and demand change, it fucking happens.
Oh my God it’s like the internet never learns. Allow me to copy-paste from the last time I saw something like this:
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - the trick to disabling shit like this is to make your bogus calls indistinguishable from real ones. Don’t do cursed images and memes, do fake names and classes that never existed. Force them to waste ten minutes for every call you make, hunting down something that sounds real but ultimately yields no fruit. A cursed image takes two seconds to close, but a well-constructed phoney tip can take quite some time - time that is in turn taken away from pursuing actual tipoffs. Get enough people doing that, and suddenly they either burn their whole day chasing people who don’t exist, or they start to ignore legit tips in case they’re also bogus. And THAT’S how you kill a tip line.”
Some friendly reminders about BTS officially coming out in support:
-They have always, and I trust as an army that they always will, spoken about and stood for unity, love and being true to yourself and condemned hatred and oppression. Love Yourself and loving others will always be at the core of them and us as army
-I have no doubt they were donating behind the scenes but if they had spoken out earlier, they would have been trending instead of the movement and the praising of their actions would have drowned out the voices we’re supposed to be amplifying
-This is probably the same reason they won’t tell us how much they’ve donated, at least for now because we all know the papers will jump on that and this isn’t about them
-Despite all this, black armys- and any armys- who were upset and spoke out about BTS’ apparent silence up until now are fully justified in their feelings and no one else has the right to tell them how to feel.
-Now is not the time to say ‘I told you so’
-As excited as a lot of us are about this, don’t let it distract us. BTS know we love them, let’s spend our time and energy supporting and amplifying the movement and its voices because this isn’t over just because our favs said something on twitter
