Hatesquash - GenX-Rage

Periodic reminder that you should never trust a chiropractor with your body under any circumstances

Woke up, chose violence

This thread is amazing.

As someone that has grown up surrounded by beaches and done surf life saving, I know how the sea works. Lots of people dont. Every summer multiple tourists die here because they don’t respect the sea, if you’re going to the coast, here’s a thing I saw on Facebook.

Living in an Earthquake: The Fight against Cop City Confronts Unprecedented Repression

https://crimethinc.com/LivinginanEarthquake

Ahead of the sixth week of action against a proposed police training facility in Atlanta, this analysis explores the strategic challenges facing the movement to stop Cop City, chronicling the actions of the movement and the reactions of the authorities throughout 2023.

In setting out to stop the militarization of police, people in Atlanta are taking on an institution that has become increasingly central to governance, soaking up more and more resources of society as a whole. This is an important document of one of the fiercest struggles of the Biden era, exploring questions that will soon become pressing everywhere.

#StopCopCity

#defendtheAtlantaForest

Alex Stokes Contompasis defended anti-fascists being assaulted by the Proud Boys in Albany, New York on January 6, 2021 & wound up with a 20-year prison sentence for his trouble. You'll find more info about Alex's case on his support website. Watch this excellent video explaining his case! Donate to Alex's sentence appeal. 

Write to Alex: Alexander Stokes Contompasis DIN: 22B5028 Upstate Correctional Facility P.O. Box 2001 Malone, NY, 12953

The Giant Squid Nebula

They're only war crimes if there are repercussions, and the US will burn the world down to defend these atrocities.

Israeli soldiers film themselves burning houses in Rafah as a punitive measure, which is a war crime under international law.

WIRED

Los Angeles Just Proved How Spongy a City Can Be

As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000

As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.

Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.

The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.

With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.

Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There's going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”

Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”

Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers—porous subterranean materials that can hold water—which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea...

To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.

During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.

On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.

As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect—the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”

LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface—sidewalks, parking lots, etc.—they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.

So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense—it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.

-via Wired, February 19, 2024

hey friends.

I want ya’ll to be aware of a situation going down in Tampa.

5 student activists facing up to 10 years in prison on bogus charges.

the fascists are seeking to build their capacity to crush dissent. we cannot allow them to do this unchallenged.

National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression

Drop the charges now! Defend student activists! Justice for the Tampa 5!

We are calling on all NAARPR members, chapters, and affiliates to sign & share the petition to drop the charges on the Tampa 5! Drop th

please read about all this and get involved. and reblog!! repost if you want too.

It's so sad that I am hearing of Bosnian genocide survivors talk about how they are triggered by the genocide denial happening around gaza. That the rhetoric that is being thrown around in the media and the rationalization for killing thousands and the talk of "let's be careful of what we call genocide. Let's wait before we call it that" is repetitive of what they were hearing when they were living through it

And Holocaust survivors who were protesting in DC and feeling the burden of having to come out and protest another genocide being done in their name except the media has completely sidelined them because it does not fit the narrative.

I have no other words except how terrible this is but it feels comforting in a weird way that genocide survivors are standing with Gaza. Who needs the acknowledgement of governments when you have them