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Australia blocks coal mine to protect Great Barrier Reef

It is the first time the government has rejected such a proposal, saying it posed an "unacceptable risk".

WildEarth Guardians

Federal appeals court rejects oil and gas drilling and fracking in northwest New Mexico’s Greater Chaco region

The US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit rejected the Biden administration’s defense of oil and gas fracking in the Greater Chaco region

Canada's National Observer

Milestone agreement to protect vast West Coast marine areas endorsed by First Nations, Ottawa and B.C.

Fifteen First Nations are assuming stewardship of the Great Bear Sea marine protected area network that covers two-thirds of Canada’s West C

Environment + Energy Leader

President Biden Signs Food Donation Improvement Act

The United States discards more food than any other country in the world – nearly 40 million tons every year.

CNBC

Test proves that CO2 sucked from the air can be trapped in concrete

A California startup using rocks to soak up carbon dioxide from the air has teamed up with a Canadian company to mineralize the gas in concr

Hi, I just wanted to let you know that I really appreciate your social and cultural historiography. While I'm familiar with English and French Monasticism from 1300 onward, my focus was on clerical life and theology having contemporaneous context is really helpful. Your explanations are also clear and funny, which I appreciate as well. I haven't gotten too far into your studies yet but do you have any knowledge of European Muslims outside of the O.E.?

Aha, I am afraid I don’t actually know what you mean by “outside of the O.E.” (this is on me for not being a Cool Kid, no doubt, but there you have it). However, if you mean Muslims in medieval Europe, medieval Europe’s perception of/interaction with Muslims, how this changed in the late medieval/early modern period, and where these sites of contact were most likely to happen: yes, I absolutely have all of that! (Edit: @codenamefinlandia kindly suggested that this might mean outside the Ottoman Empire, which I doubtless should have thought of, but I hope this is indeed what you mean? In which case, yes, the below resources will be very helpful for you in exploring the European Muslim presence well before the Ottomans.)

I wrote briefly about Muslims in my Historical People of Color in Europe post, including in the context of the crusades, their long-term settlements in medieval Spain and Italy, and the relationships of the Muslim empires with Elizabethan England. There are, as you might expect, many studies focusing on Muslim-Christian contacts in medieval Europe and in the wider medieval world, of which the crusades are probably the best-known example. Below follows a selection of some reading material which might be helpful:

Sea of the Caliphs: The Mediterranean in the Medieval Islamic World by Christophe Picard (this is about medieval Islamic trade in the Mediterranean, as it says on the tin, starting in the 7th century with the original Muslim conquests, and focuses on its role in cultural contacts between Muslims and Christians of southern and eastern Europe)

The Arab Influence in Medieval Europe, ed. Dionisius A. Agios and Richard Hitchcock (a collection of essays about Arabic influence on medieval Europe, this one doesn’t have any e-version so you might need to consult a university library)

The Muslims of Medieval Italy by Alex Metcalfe (examines the rise and fall of the Islamic presence in southern Italy and Sicily between about 800--1300, and how this was transformed into a frontier of cultural contact, exchange, and conflict alike)

Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100--1450, by Suzanne Conklin Akbari (examines how the Islamic world was depicted in the ‘high’ medieval era, and the developments of some of these Orientalist images in the 19th century and onward)

Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages by John V. Tolan (in something of the same vein as the above; he has written another book called Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination which focuses more on the semiotic, literary, and narrative construction of the “othered Muslim”).

Muslim and Christian Contact in the Middle Ages: A Reader, ed. Jarbel Rodriguez (a GREAT book with multiple types of examples, primary sources, regions, and types of contact between Muslims and Christians from the seventh through the fifteenth century, including Byzantine, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian authors of the time period)

Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050--1614, by Brian Catlos (another book which I really need to read more of, focusing on medieval Muslims who actually lived IN Europe, including in Spain, Italy, Hungary, the Balkans/Eastern Europe, and other places).

The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment, by Alexander Bevilacqua (studies how the study/approach to Islam changed i the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and how many Enlightenment scholars learned Arabic and read Islamic texts)

As Catlos says in Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom: “In fact, the Muslims of medieval Europe included substantial communities scattered right across the Latin-dominated Mediterranean, from the Atlantic coast to the Transjordan, as well as in Central and Eastern Europe. In some areas they survived for only a century or two, whereas in others they persevered for well over five hundred years. They did not live as isolated enclaves, they were not uniformly poor, and were not necessarily subject to systematic repression; rather, they comprised diverse communities and dynamic societies that played an important role in the formation of what would eventually emerge a modern European culture and society.” In other words, while we’ve discussed before that medieval Europe was never uniformly white and never uniformly Christian, people tend to think that Jews were the only other religion that lived permanently in Europe. While Italy, Iberia, and the Balkans maintained the most enduring Muslim communities, that was not the only place they lived, and they were not merely merchants passing through without settling (though there was plenty of interreligious trade). We’ve discussed before how Yusuf/Joe would not necessarily always be a surprising or unexpected sight in Europe, and how people there would be a lot more used to him than you might expect. So: yes, Islam was always embedded in the fabric of medieval Europe, both as enemies during the crusades and as long-term citizens and communities at home.

Bonus: have some work on queer medieval and early modern Muslims, because reasons!

Sahar Amer, ‘Medieval Arab Lesbians and Lesbian-like Women’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 18 (2009), 215-236

Sahar Amer, Crossing Borders: Love between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)

Samar Habib, Arabo-Islamic Texts on Female Homosexuality, 850--1780 A.D. (Teneo Press, 2009)

Samar Habib, Female Homosexuality in the Middle East: Histories and Representations (London: Routledge, 2007)

Samar Habib, Islam and Homosexuality (Praeger, 2010)

E. J. Hernández Peña, ‘Reclaiming Alterity: Strangeness and the Queering of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Spain’, Theology & Sexuality, 22 (2016) 42-56

Gregory S. Hutcheson, ‘The Sodomitic Moor: Queerness in the Narrative of Reconquista’, in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. by Glen Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 99-122.

Gregory S. Hutcheson et al., eds., Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999)

Scott Alan Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam: Critical Reflections on Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims (Oneworld Publications, 2010)

Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1997)

Anyway. Let me know if you want me to expand on any of these topics in more detail, and I hope some of these resources are helpful!

YOU hates terfs

Some of you might remember a couple of years ago when Scarlett Johansson sued Disney because she was making significantly less money for Black Widow than was guaranteed in her contract because so many more people watched it on streaming than in theaters, how there was a massive misinformation campaign from Disney that a ton of people on this website (and Twitter and other social media) bought into: That she was a greedy bitch who didn't respect people who needed to stay at home during the pandemic (I believe the word "ableist" was thrown around with aplomb) as opposed to someone who just wanted to be paid what she was owed. What was literally in her contract!!! And where everyone who took more than a couple minutes to actually look into and think about the situation could figure out that her issue wasn't with streaming itself, but with how little streaming was allowed to get away with paying her and other actors. But of course, a lot of people just saw the chance to dunk on a rich woman, and didn't think about it beyond readying some snarky tags and hit reblog. And in doing so, threw their support behind a much wealthier, greedier studio head who is already using similar language to describe the current strike.

Anyway we're going to see a lot of that from studios now, especially now that actors have joined the WGA and it's easier to sell them as rich and greedy than writers, because of this cultural stereotype we have of all Hollywood actors as celebrities. Don't fall for it. SAG-AFTRA represents people like Tom Cruise and ScarJo but it also represents the kind of people who played a Borg in two episodes of Star Trek: Voyager in 1997 or who had one line in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel as an enthusiastic audience member. Most actors are not crazy wealthy, and in fact, if you're a big TV fan (especially older TV and genre TV) that likely includes some actor names that you know, who played supporting roles in your fav shows, or who were even a star in something decades ago but haven't done anything major since. The AFTRA side also represents people like radio broadcasters. But even beside that, all workers deserve to be fairly compensated for the work they do, and the threat of replacing them with AI, or real actors being required to sign contracts to allow their likenesses to be used by AI forever without paying them, is an existential threat to acting as a profession in general. The actors are in the right. The writers are in the right. The studios are in the wrong. The studios have exploited new technology to get away with horrifying labor practices for years and their feet need to be put to the fire. Circulate the articles about how poorly the Orange is the New Black cast was compensated for making one of the defining shows of the early streaming boom, and of the studios saying they want to force writers to starve and lose their homes. Don't get distracted by propaganda aping progressive-sounding language about wealthy celebrities. Focus on the real enemy, the truly greedy fat cats who care more about money than people and art: the studios.

saw a post abt HBO removing shows that suggests ppl just “burn dvds” but everyone doesnt know how to do that so here is one way to do that

- get blank dvds (Both +R or -R work, I think +R is slightly cheaper, the difference is rewritability), these are not very expensive for the amount you can get in bulk (if you are in the US 100 of them is about 30$ at walmart)

- an external DVD drive that plugs in via usb is also around 20-40$ (it tends to be closer to 20)

- download DVDFlick (free)

- if you don’t already have the mp4/mpeg of whatever media you want to burn, you can download movies/shows off of sites like gomovies.sx and soap2day

gomovies.sx will have a download button that looks like this

below the video you can choose one of these

if you click streamlare for example and then the download button it will take you here where the mp4 is

(if you’re on an iphone/ipad, clicking download will save it to your files app)

- if you cant find the download button on soap2day you can also install a video downloader extension which will find the movie for you

- at this point you can drag and drop it into a google drive or keep it on your computer but if you still want it on dvd ->

- open dvd flick, drag and drop the video

- click “project settings”

- give it whatever title you want, you can change encoder to “normal” (default is below normal if you are doing other things on the computer). you dont need to change target size or thread count (unless you want to)

- insert a blank dvd into your drive, make sure you click “burn project to disc”

- click accept then click “create dvd” next to menu and project settings. it will create a destination folder and this dialogue box will pop up when you click “create” on more dvds, just click “yes” and then “okay” on the box that appears after it

it’ll take a couple hours, once its done take a sharpie & write whats on it and stick it in a case . or dont . im not ur mom

"we need to be able to blaze other peoples posts" you can its called seeing a post and reblogging it with the tags 'posts that have 10k. to me.' so that the op can screenshot and go 'dont do this to me' and when you look it has 9k notes already

Posted on Facebook September 24, 2015:

This post confession from Cochlear Implant user, in contrast to happy first time CIs videos. Its true because I have talked to CI users Deaf youth yesterday while waiting to meet Pope Francis at the Embassy.  They did mentioned about having bad headaches and the sensory is very painful. So they ended up not wearing them anymore. Doctors/Audiologists “best recommendations” CIs is about busine$$ which it disgusts me. Another person wear hearing aids like me but I don’t wear them anymore cuz it doesn’t work for me to be able to hear so he said prefer hearing aids over CIs cuz it’s cheaper plus less risk over expensive cochlear implants and more likely high risks. In my opinion, hearing aids or CIs doesn’t cure for deafness.