The first step is the key to all the rest. Yes, our daily lives are undoubtedly contributing to climate change. But that’s because the rich and powerful have constructed systems that make it nearly impossible to live lightly on the earth. Our economic systems require most adults to work, and many of us must commute to work in or to cities intentionally designed to favor the automobile. Unsustainable food, clothes and other goods remain cheaper than sustainable alternatives.
And yet we blame ourselves for not being green enough. As the climate essayist Mary Annaïse Heglar writes, “The belief that this enormous, existential problem could have been fixed if all of us had just tweaked our consumptive habits is not only preposterous; it’s dangerous.” It turns eco-saints against eco-sinners, who are really just fellow victims. It misleads us into thinking that we have agency only by dint of our consumption habits — that buying correctly is the only way we can fight climate change.
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My point is that the climate crisis is not going to be solved by personal sacrifice. It will be solved by electing the right people, passing the right laws, drafting the right regulations, signing the right treaties — and respecting those treaties already signed, particularly with indigenous nations. It will be solved by holding the companies and people who have made billions off our shared atmosphere to account.
We never went to the moon. Instead we grew roses and fed our neighbor pasta and fruit salad. We never put a man in space. Instead we bought him a suit, cut his hair and drove him to the unemployment office.
how many people are in space right now – Keď som bola malá, tak som si myslela, že keď budem dospelá, tak toto číslo bude veľmi veľké. Stovky, tisícky. A ono je to 6.
Adelson, who has built Las Vegas Sands into an global casino empire, will do “whatever it takes” to defeat Obama, this source says. And given that Adelson is worth $24.9 billion–and told Forbes in a recent rare interview about his political giving that he had been willing to donate as much as $100 million to his initial presidential preference, Newt Gingrich–that “limitless” description telegraphs potential nine-digit support of Romney.
Tim Tebow does too. LeBron James poops. Derek Jeter, Maria Sharapova, Drew Brees — they all poop. Most of these stars will never have a Julie Moss moment or even a Serena Williams scare. And if they did, it’s highly unlikely they’d ever talk as openly about it as Paula Radcliffe does in discussing her own Defcon 1 incident. The British distance runner and Nike spokesperson was four miles from winning the 2005 London Marathon when she stopped suddenly and darted to the side of the course. Radcliffe had been losing time for several miles because of gastrointestinal disturbances — the kind that, according to one study, affect 83 percent of marathoners and that are usually preceded by gaseous outbursts that runners call walkie-talkies.
Radcliffe’s solution? She simply placed one hand on a metal crowd barricade for balance, used the other to curtain her shorts to the side and perched, precariously, over her shoes. Then, as they say in England, she proceeded to “have a poo” right there on the street and in broad daylight, within two feet of a startled spectator. “I didn’t really want to resort to that in front of hundreds of thousands of people,” she says, unfazed. “But when I’m racing, I’m totally focused on winning the race and running as fast as possible. I thought, I just need to go and I’ll be fine.”
She was fine. Radcliffe finished her pit stop, adjusted her shorts and floated through the next four miles to win by more than five minutes and set a world record for a women-only marathon. The most telling part of the whole scene was the BBC announcer’s description. He insisted Radcliffe was just stretching out “a cramp” during her brief detour. Cheeky bastard.
Afterward, there was no public backlash. That’s a tribute, Inglis says, to the supreme cultural power of sports. He offers this scenario: If Radcliffe had been out on the street in London a day earlier, walking with her kids or her dog, and stopped to relieve herself on the sidewalk, she would have been arrested, shunned and dropped by Nike within an hour. But the fact that she did it in the middle of a race made it not just okay but, in some weird way, kind of awesome. “You truly begin to get a sense of how influential sports are only when you realize it’s one of the few activities where society’s willing to override such strong feelings about defecation,” Inglis says. “We make something so taboo acceptable, for a little bit at least, because it’s being done for the sake of what we see as a higher sporting ideal.“
najhoršie, čo dnes uvidíte – ako mohli?? V Číne ukončili tehotenstvo v 7. mesiaci proti vôli matky. A mŕtve nenarodené dieťa dali matke do postele. Trauma na celý život…
That’s why I’m asking Seventeen Magazine to commit to printing one unaltered — real — photo spread per month. I want to see regular girls that look like me in a magazine that’s supposed to be for me.
laboring under illusion – telka vs skutočný pôrod:
a ešte dve o astronautoch:
tu (zvýraznenie je moje – wtf? Keby bola podmienka, že musia mať deti, lebo rádioaktivita vo vesmíre výrazne zníži ich plodnosť, aj to by bol podľa mňa trochu problém, ale toto??):
The two female astronauts, whose identity will be released before the launch, were selected from 15 women who must be married and have given birth naturally, Space International magazine under the China Academy of Space Technology said yesterday. They also must have no scars nor body odor… Xu Xianrong, a professor with the General Hospital of the PLA Air Force, said the female astronauts must be married and have given birth naturally because that ensures their body and mental condition are mature enough.
In the past few years, about half of the astronauts aboard the international space station have developed an increasing pressure inside their heads, an intracranial pressure that reshapes their optic nerve, causing a significant shift in the eyesight of male astronauts. Doctors call it papilledema. Female space travelers have not been affected.
OK, I know. At first glance it doesn’t look like much, does it? Just a field of stars. However, here’s the important bit: I had to take the somewhat larger original image and reduce it in size to fit my 610-pixel-wide blog. So how much bigger is the original?
áno, ale – toto som sa už niekoľkokrát snažila (s rôznym stupňom úpešnosti) vysvetliť rôznym ľuďom, ale tu to je napísané lepšie, ako sa to mne kedy podarilo
Research shows that a male partner’s attitudes towards and willigness to assist with breastfeeding is the single biggest determinant of whether a woman will continue to exclusively breastfeed once she has left hospital…
Women are told, usually repeatedly, by health professionals that breastfeeding is the best ‘choice’, and the vast majority believe it. Breastfeeding advice, in many cases, seems to constitute little more than a bit of information about how to do it and a very clear intimation that it’s what good mothers do. What it all too often doesn’t include is sensitive, individualised, and knowledgable information delivered in a mother-centred way. What it definitely doesn’t come with (if it’s being delivered by a health professional or, well, just about anyone) is actual real-life support to achieve the mother’s breastfeeding goals.
• solve interesting problems
• find and curate information
• connect unrelated ideas
• ask good questions
• lead and negotiate
• employ a variety of mental models
• communicate in simple, clear ways