labyrintho:

the-star-stuff:

How Much Water is On Earth?

In this illustration, the blue ball represents the volume of all the water on earth, relative to the size of the earth. The tiny speck to the right of the blue ball represents Earth’s fresh water. CREDIT: David Gallo/WHOI 

If Earth was the size of a basketball, all of its water would fit into a ping pong ball.

How much water is that? It’s roughly 326 million cubic miles (1.332 billion cubic kilometers), according to a recent study from the U.S. Geological Survey. Some 72 percent of Earth is covered in water, but 97 percent of that is salty ocean water and not suitable for drinking.

“There’s not a lot of water on Earth at all,” said David Gallo, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts.

PLEASE STOP FUCKING EATING MEAT SO WE DON’T WASTE WATER ON ALL THOSE FUCKING ANIMALS ONLY TO SLAUGHTER THEM

ifc:

earwolf:

Marc Maron and Tim Heidecker Star in Nick Lowe’s New Music Video

For those Marc Maron/WTF fans, you may have heard legendary singer/songwriter Nick Lowe on the podcast a few weeks ago. While Nick wasn’t usual WTF-fare, he’s in Marc’s wheelhouse. Well, this just popped up which may help explain a little more about the Maron/Lowe connection; Nick Lowe’s new music video for his song “Sensitive Man” staring Marc and another Earwolf fav, Tim Heidecker. The video showcases Marc’s personality and is super-adorable.

Check out Marc and Tim’s appearances on Earwolf podcasts if you can’t get enough.

This is terrific.

(Source: laughspin.com)

mothernaturenetwork:

Oldest, thickest sea ice is vanishing rapidly in Arctic, NASA finds
The sea ice is shrinking at a rate of 15.1 percent per decade.

PLEASE. Understand. How. Bad. This. Is.

When ice in Siberia or the Arctic melts, two things happen immediately: Sea levels rise. And poisonous methane gas is released into the atmosphere. This happens because untold amounts of this are being kept sequestered by the ice, and have been for thousands of years. Once you open that door, you cannot close it. 

DO NOT let climate disruption become a problem you address only after it’s impacts are unavoidable in your everyday life. We can afford to do that with almost every other issue. But this is irreversible. We get one chance. That’s it. 

labyrintho:

vegan-dreams:

justmadelaine:

veganskinnybitch:

thecaffeinatedherbivore:

reloveplanet:

This is what a genetically modified organism, or GMO, looks like. These so-called-chickens have been modified so that they do not grow feathers.

“The birds, created at the Hebrew University in Israel, will not need to be plucked, saving money in processing plants”

This is just… who on earth thinks it’s ok for humans to do this to another species?! 

Bitches be cray and I hate ‘em.

What the actual fuck

Words cannot describe my fury. “Saving money”?! SAVING MONEY?! Is that all that matters to the human race anymore? You greedy fucks. 

This is why eating chicken is KINDA SHITTY of you… :/

To be clear, even though this specifically is happening in Israel, equally bad things are happening in the US with Big Ag (large food companies like Monsanto, Tyson, Cargill, et al). Support small farms and don’t let in the bullshit being peddled by these monstrous corporations

elige:

Oh, Monsanto, you sly dog.

You keep trying to make us believe you are “committed to sustainable agriculture” with your canny advertisements on American Public Media, even as you force-feed farmers your lab-grown Frankenseeds that expire every year (which are, let’s be honest, opposite of sustainable).

But we shouldn’t be surprised by the mixed message, should we? After all, you’ve been doing this for decades. With long-running corporate sponsorships like Disney’s Tomorrowland building reserves of goodwill as you spray us with DDT, it’s clear you’re entitled to send out products into the world with nary an environmental or health concern—just as long as you spend a bit of that hard-earned cash convincing us otherwise.

On that note, let’s take a quick look at some of the biotech giant’s most dubious contributions to society over their past century in business.

1. Saccharin

Monsanto burst onto the scene in 1901 with the artificial sweetener saccharin, which it sold to Coca-Cola and canned food companies as a sugar replacement.
Sweet, low, and according to the FDA, no longer carcinogenic. (Photo: costco.com)

But as early as 1907, the health effects of the sweetener were being questioned by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) scientists.

“Everyone who ate that sweet [canned] corn was deceived,” said Harvey Wiley, the first commissioner of the FDA. “He thought he was eating sugar, when in point of fact he was eating a coal tar product totally devoid of food value and extremely injurious to health.”

After enjoying decades of unfettered consumption, the sweetener was slapped with a warning label in the ’70s when it was found to cause cancer in lab rats.

A subsequent three-decade effort by Monsanto to reverse the decision finally won out in 2001. After all, how could a product derived from coal tar not be safe for consumption?

2) Polystyrene

By the ’40s, Monsanto had moved on to oil-based plastics, including polystyrene foam (also known as styrofoam).
This cup will be still be here in a thousand years. (Photo: nationalaquarium.wordpress.com)

As most of us are aware by now, polystyrene foam is an environmental disaster. Not only is there nothing out there that biodegrades it, it breaks off into tiny pieces that choke animals, harm marine life, and release cancer-causing benzene into the environment for a thousand years or more.

“Polystyrene foam products rely on nonrenewable sources for production, are nearly indestructible and leave a legacy of pollution on our urban and natural environments,” said San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin in 2007. “If McDonald’s could see the light and phase out polystyrene foam more than a decade ago, it’s about time San Francisco got with the program.”

Despite the ovewhelming evidence against it, the noxious containers are still pervasive elsewhere around the country. Amazingly, they were even voted to be reintroduced into House cafeterias by Republicans earlier this year.

3) Agent Orange

First developed as an herbicide and defoliant, Agent Orange was used infamously as a military weapon by the U.S. Army during Vietnam to remove the dense foliage of the jungle canopy.
This is what Agent Orange exposure looks like.

In the process, they dumped over 12 million gallons of the potent chemical cocktail—described by Yale biologist Arthur Galston as “perhaps the most toxic molecule ever synthesized by man”—over towns, farms, and water supplies during a nine-year period.

“When [military scientists] initiated the herbicide program in the 1960s, we were aware of the potential for damage due to dioxin contamination in the herbicide…,” said Dr. James R. Clary, a former government scientist with the Chemical Weapons Branch. “However, because the material was to be used on the ‘enemy,’ none of us were overly concerned.”

According to the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that lack of concern led to 4.8 million exposures to the herbicide, along with 400,000 deaths and disfigurements and 500,000 babies born with birth defects.

4) Bovine Growth Hormone

Did you know the United States is the only developed nation that permits the sale of milk from cows given artificial growth hormones?
Nothing like the taste of hormones in the morning. (Photo: bigteaparty.com)

With the lone exception of Brazil, the rest of the developed world—including all 27 countries of the European Union, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia—has banned growth hormone use in milk destined for human consumption.

Why all the lact-haters? Milk derived from hormone-injected cows shows higher levels of cancer-causing hormones and lower nutritional value, leading even the most stubborn U.S. courts to rule in favor of separate labels for hormone-free milk.

“The milk we drink today is quite unlike the milk our ancestors were drinking without apparent harm for 2,000 years,” said Harvard scientist Ganmaa Davaasambuu. “The milk we drink today may not be nature’s perfect food.”

According to the Center for Food Safety, thanks to increased consumer demand (and certain movies), approximately 60 percent of milk in the U.S. is rBST-free today.

5) Genetically-Modified Seeds

Not content to do mere incidental damage to the environment, Monsanto decided to get to the root of the matter in the ’80s: seeds.
Just remember: We are what we eat. (Photo: deminvest.wordpress.com)

But with much fuss being made over the company’s aggressive scare tactics and rampant mass-patenting, the biotech giant has, true to form, fought back with a multimillion-dollar marketing andadvertising campaign featuring smiling children and making outlandish claims that “biotech foods could help end world hunger.”

“Unless I’m missing something,” wrote Michael Pollan in The New York Times Magazine, “the aim of this audacious new advertising campaign is to impale people like me—well-off first-worlders dubious about genetically engineered food—on the horns of a moral dilemma…If we don’t get over our queasiness about eating genetically modified food, kids in the Third World will go blind.”

What’s clear is that no matter what its justification, Monsanto is a) never giving away all these seeds for free; and b) rendering them sterile so that farmers need to re-up every year, making it difficult to believe that the company could possibly have the planet’s best intentions at heart.

“By peddling suicide seeds, the biotechnology multinationals will lock the world’s poorest farmers into a new form of genetic serfdom,” says Emma Must of the World Development Movement. “Currently 80 percent of crops in developing countries are grown using farm-saved seed.”

“Being unable to save seeds from sterile crops could mean the difference between surviving and going under.”
—Oliver Lee 

(Source: elige)

corsettsandcupcakes:

because women shouldnt strive to be a stick! embrace your body be healthy and love life! I want to lose weight but i still want to look like a woman

Okay, I’m just going to keep adding to this because the more I look at it, the more abstract and surreal it becomes and the less I understand it.

What do you do when you go swimming? Do you wear swim trunks with pockets all the time? When you don’t have pockets, do you just like, freak the fuck out and start flailing like Kermit?

And if you DO need your hands in your pockets all the time because otherwise you just cannot manage the responsibility and intricacies of having hands, and likewise need a woman with “curves”, are you then saying that if the woman you’re with has “curves” you’re just going to be rubbing your hands all over her chest and hips nonstop  or otherwise, again, you’ll feel overwhelmed by your appendages ?

Like, if she’s not super curvy, do you just panic and shove your hands in your pockets where they feel safe again? Or are you just flicking her nose and mushing her stomach with your hands because what do you even DO with hands when the woman you’re with doesn’t look like Salma Hayak.

Enough mocking you and your stupid hands. Here’s what you do with your hands if you’re with a woman without “curves”: You do the exact same thing you’d do with any woman you were with. She could be the human equivalent of a 5 foot tall DVD/CD case, she’s still a human being with physical mass and anatomy and therefore is capable of being held, touched, caressed, or whatever else you’d do to the human hourglass you seem to be hung up on.

corsettsandcupcakes:

because women shouldnt strive to be a stick! embrace your body be healthy and love life! I want to lose weight but i still want to look like a woman

Women: Be more like pants

labyrintho:

Interacting with society makes me not want to dedicate my life to bettering the world.

Then I remember desert elephants might go extinct if society doesn’t stop what it’s doing to the planet.

#fuck humans save the elephants

I hear ya

lickypickystickyfree:

 “Your rainbow panorama” of the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson.

The project was opened on the 28th of May 2011 on the top of the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Århus, Denmark. Permanent circular vivid walkway of a 150 meters long, 3 meters wide by 3 meters high, gives a 360° colorful view of the city.

labyrintho:

thepeoplesrecord: “As soon as I’m let out of jail, I’ll be right back here and they’ll have to arrest me again.” – Ray Lewis, retired Philadelphia Police Captain

(Source: thepeoplesrecord)

labyrintho:

religiousragings:

splendid-summer-morning:

religiousragings:

yvanckatron:

religiousragings:

Couldn’t figure out murder is wrong by yourself, huh?

Even if the world was devoid of religion, morality would still be subjective on the individual level. It would be grossly skewed from individual to individual and culture to culture because we all have different perceptions and interpretations of physical reality. If you are an atheist and you believe that religion is simply a tool of social control consider this: what would be the state of our world today if no religions had ever existed? Please, honestly and thoroughly think about it for a minute or two.

Let’s see…

Without religious dogma to fall back on, the ignorant would have had very little to support their hatreds.  The smartest people of their time, the philosophers, would likely have dominated, because their philosophies and such could be proven to work.  Secular ethics would likely have become dominant, much, much earlier.

And without religion, we would not have had any reason to believe that we knew anything about the world except by studying it.  So the scientific method may have been discovered and universally applied perhaps 5000 years earlier than it did.  Which means that we would have had our current explosion in technology perhaps 4500 years ago.

Without the delay caused by religion, we may have recognized population problems before they occurred, and without religion constantly pushing people to have more children, the world’s population may have leveled off somewhere around 3 or 4 billion.

So, less starvation, less war over limited resources, no war over religious differences, no crusades, far fewer genocides, less health problems caused by over population, consequently less pollution.  Perhaps more time to recognize global warming before it occurred, and less opposition to the science that recognizes it and suggests changes.

And without religion, people would have likely spent tithings on charities instead, again more quickly putting an end to world misery.

Sooo…there still would have been wars, mindless death and destruction, atomic weapons, arms races, and dictators.  But I would think that after 5000 years science would have found ways to deal with mental illness and come up with better foods and better, cleaner energy alternatives than fossil fuels.  The driving motivation behind wars would thus diminish, and perhaps after 5000 years they would be looked upon as an aspect of humanities infancy.

And thus of course, without religion the computer singularity would have happened millennia ago, and artificial intelligence might have been a massive help to solving all of the world’s remaining problems.

Where would we be right now?  Hard to say, but I would hazard to guess that we’d have colonies around several nearby stars at the very least.

So, yeah.  This is about as honest as thorough as I can make it on short notice.

Of course, I do have to acknowledge that we never would have had the wisdom of a 2000 year old book telling us not to eat shellfish.  But some sacrifices would have to be made.

~ Steve

Ah yes, the “life would have been perfect without religion” argument.

Because the concept of god was literally the only thing that encouraged groups of people to enslave and colonize each other.

And that without justification, everybody would have lived in peace and harmony, selfishly helping everyone else with all of their extra money. Because, as you know, Jesus’ main talking point was on the merits of fucking everyone over.

That squares with just about everything I’ve learned about human nature and history.

Hmmm… (rescans article)  I don’t see the word Perfect in there anywhere….

In fact, I do see acknowledgement of wars, atomic weapons, and genocides.  And Jesus’s main talking points were ignored for over a thousand years by the Christian churches, as they are still ignored today.

And let’s not forget that much of the colonizations and slavery and such were “morally” justified because people could use the excuse of dominating godless heathens.  The motivations would still be there, but they would have been far less morally justifiable without the religious dogma to back them.

So, I certainly don’t imagine a perfect world, but I do imagine a world where unjustifiable stupidities would have been recognized far earlier.

Religion killed spirituality. Religion has retarded society in all ways.

Yes, yes, oh yes. religiousragings, you have summed up SO acutely, and responsibly, how much better the world would be today had the opportunists of yesteryear not taken hold of civilization. 

(Source: sanelyeccentric)

Fiona Apple has new music on the way soon. Or so says a tweet from an executive at her label.

Above is “Not About Love”, a video/song from her last album, Extraordinary Machine, released 6 years ago and featuring Zach Galifianakis before he became the funny weird guy from The Hangover

kellyoxford:

Sorry this is basically a sony ad, but the results ACTUALLY freaked me out.
Stare at the red dot on her nose for 30 seconds.
Look at the ceiling and blink really quickly.

WHAT THE FUCK BRAIN!?!?!?!
WHAT
THE
FUCK….

Even if you know what’s going to happen, it’s still pretty fucking ridiculous, so you should do it anyway

The Island President

Sea levels are rising. And we can stop that from continuing. 

President Nasheed of the Maldives is one of the most outspoken leaders in our world on climate change because the nation he is in charge of protecting will no longer exist if this issue isn’t addressed. 

This film is playing at Sundance right now and I’m sure will eventually see limited, or possibly wide, release.

In the meantime, keep informed about this issue as best you can in whatever free time you can allow, and don’t worry about living a “green” lifestyle, just make sure you support the right legislation and the right politicians when the time comes.

This is an episode of Tough Crowd With Colin Quinn. This was a fantastic show from 2002-2004 that got cancelled because they talked about social issues and race and didn’t pander. Really. That is the reason that Comedy Central gave the show. Publicly they said it was a ratings thing.

Anyway, it was sometimes dumb, sometimes offensive, sometimes not very funny, but mostly it was a really provocative, adult, funny, intelligent show that didn’t shy away from difficult or complex issues. And no one played moderator. They weren’t afraid to have real arguments and real discussions that weren’t neatly resolved.

It’s also the show that first exposed me to Louis CK, Marc Maron, Sarah Silverman, Patton Oswalt, and so many other great comedians. It’s just all around really really good and if you go to the page of the person who posted this one, you’ll find a dozen or so others they’ve uploaded.