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Hunger in Gaza has reached new and astonishing levels of desperation, with a third of the population not eating for multiple days in a row, according to the World Food Program. The number of children dying of malnutrition has risen sharply in recent days. Many are literally starving. According to Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency: “People in Gaza are neither dead nor alive, they are walking corpses…. One in every five children is malnourished in Gaza City as cases increase every day. When child malnutrition surges, coping mechanisms fail, access to food & care disappears, famine silently begins to unfold. Most children our teams are seeing are emaciated, weak & at high risk of dying if they don’t get the treatment they urgently need…. Parents are too hungry to care for their children. Those who reach UNRWA clinics don’t have the energy, food, or means to follow medical advice. Families are no longer coping, they are breaking down, unable to survive. Their existence is threatened.” America is directly implicated in this humanitarian crisis. Netanyahu is a war criminal. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since May while trying to get food in the Gaza Strip, mostly near aid sites run by an American contractor. The United States must stop all military assistance to Israel unless Netanyahu and the Israeli government allow relief organizations to bring immediate humanitarian assistance to Gaza.

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The oldest trick in the book. Don't fall for it. Credit: @ourrevolution

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Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

After months of deliberation, the New Mexico Water Quality Control Commission on May 14 voted to prohibit any discharge of treated “produced water” from oil and gas extraction to ground and surface waters. 

Produced water flows back to the surface during fracking and conventional oil and gas drilling and contains chemicals used in the extraction process as well as numerous other hazardous compounds, including arsenic and benzene, both human carcinogens. 

New Mexico creates around two billion barrels—84 billion gallons—of this toxic wastewater each year. Cleaning through multi-stage filtration, desalination and other processes could allow for the reuse of produced water for irrigation and other commercial applications, saving precious water resources. But environmental advocates, scientists and the New Mexico Environmental Department (NMED) have urged that proper regulations are not yet in place to make such reuse safe. 

“We thank the Commission for protecting our clean water, of which we have so little. This decision could not be more prudent,” said Rachel Conn, deputy director of Amigos Bravos, a nonprofit that testified against allowing discharge, along with the Western Environmental Law Center and the Sierra Club. 

The new rule “will ensure that the ground and surface waters of the state are protected while allowing for further study of viable treatment technologies for this difficult-to-treat water source,” NMED said in an email to Inside Climate News. 

In April, the commission drafted a rule that would have allowed pilot projects to release up to 84,000 gallons of treated produced water per day. Four pilot projects are already completed, and another eight are underway, with the goal of researching different ways to purify produced water and use it to grow plants and trees, or replace freshwater needs in industrial manufacturing. 

Produced water is regularly reused within the oil and gas industry, in closed processes where no water is released, or disposed of in underground “injection” wells. Use of produced water outside of that context is not allowed in New Mexico.

If pilots are able to demonstrate the water can be cleaned and decontaminated to the point that it is safe for other purposes, it could go a long way toward supplementing New Mexico’s dwindling water supply—the state is projected to lose 25 percent of its ground and surface water in the next 50 years due to climate change. 

The state is one of the largest producers of oil and gas in the country, and that could soon increase—the House’s newly drafted budget reconciliation bill would mandate quarterly lease sales of onshore oil and gas lands in New Mexico, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Nevada and Alaska. More drilling would also mean more produced water.

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📢📢📢

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Reblog daily for health and prosperity

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National Park Week

The original soundtracks of the world are the “nature songs” all around us! Also known as soundscapes, they are the audio equivalent of a landscape. Natural soundscapes can include everything from animal and bird sounds to rushing water, wind through vegetation, glacial crevassing, to thermal or volcanic activity. Birds, animals, and insects use sound to communicate, establish territory, find prey, avoid predators, connect with mates, and care for young.

What does Mount Rainier sound like? Listen to short soundscape recordings from around the park at https://go.nps.gov/MountRainierSoundscapes Sounds occur in different frequencies and are represented visually using a spectrogram, an image that incorporates frequency (y axis), time (x axis), and amplitude (brightness of color). This spectrogram represents audio recorded near Kautz Creek in 2017 of male and female Barred owls. NPS Video.

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Friends, A grassroots movement is calling on all Americans to abstain from shopping with major retailers — including Amazon — tomorrow, February 28, as part of an “economic blackout.” The purpose is to send a clear message: We have the power. We don’t have to accept corporate monopolies. We don’t have to live with corporate money corrupting our politics. We don’t have to accept more tax cuts for billionaires. We don’t have to pay more of our hard-earned cash to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or the other billionaire oligarchs. We don’t have to reward corporations that have abandoned their DEI policies to align themselves with Trump’s racist, homophobic, misogynistic agenda. We have choices. Most Americans are struggling to keep up. Most live from paycheck to paycheck. Most can barely afford housing costs, food prices, and pharmaceuticals — kept high by monopolies, and fueled by private equity. If politicians won’t hear the voices of average Americans who are being shafted by corporate America, we have to deliver our message to corporate America directly. From midnight tonight to midnight Friday night, please: No Amazon, no Walmart, no Best Buy, no Target, no Disney, no Google, no Facebook. Don’t spend on fast food, major retailers, or gas. Avoid using credit or debit cards to make nonessential purchases. Buy essentials such as medicine, food, and emergency supplies, of course, but make those purchases at small, local businesses. Consider this a test run. If lots of people participate, I’m sure a longer one will be organized. (Tomorrow’s economic blackout is an initiative of The People’s Union USA, which describes itself as a “grassroots movement dedicated to economic resistance, government accountability, and corporate reform.”)' I hope you'll join. What do you think?

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The direct plea to trump about equality and mercy has been in the news, but the entire sermon is directed at him and his followers! I couldn't find a transcript of it, but you can watch it below. She even calls him out about not wanting to help California with the fires because they didn't vote for him, the gop's hypocritical faux Christianity, and their deliberate use of disinformation. She also speaks about the need for people to continue to speak the truth even if it costs them. She doesn't name maga directly, but centers it in treating all people with dignity and respect as Jesus did. It's clear what she's referring to though. It's about 15 minutes long, and definitely worth listening to IMO.

This is from the church's website so there aren't reaction shots of the crowd.

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There are animals everywhere if I look long enough. Ground squirrels stare up at the wide sky and vanish with a squeak. Goldfinches and red-winged blackbirds flit by, mocking the sage and cerulean landscape with their clean primary hues. A tawny suggestion morphs into a coyote seeking something to howl about.

There are plenty of strange glimpses too. My mother once spotted something large on a haystack. The shape saw her, leaped down, and was gone.

(via I Know I'm Not Seeing Everything As I Stare Into the Brush)

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Anita Bryant just died and I haven't seen one crab rave gif on my dash yet... Come on people

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Jimmy Got His Wish.

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Sheila Jackson Lee, a long-serving Democratic congresswoman from Texas and a strong advocate for Black Americans, has passed away at the age of 74 after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

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… scientists learned humans caused so many extinctions over the last 500 years that if our species had never existed, it would have taken 18,000 years for that same number of genera to have naturally vanished.

—Matthew Rozsa, staff writer for Salon.com