supersquirrel

The samples in this seemingly unremarkable room are part of the International Collection of Vesicular Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi (INVAM), the world’s largest living library of soil fungi. Four decades in the making, it could cease to exist within a year due to federal budget cuts.

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“To have any hope in leveraging fungi for future climate change strategies, restoration efforts and regenerative agriculture, we need to safeguard this collection,” Kiers said.

According to the often-cited 3.5% rule, if 3.5% of a population protests against a regime, the regime will fail. Developed by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, who researched civil resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006, the rule has seen renewed interest in leftist circles recently, especially with No Kings protests attracting historic numbers.

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This shows the outsize impact a single protester can have, the study’s authors say. That’s because having one more attender at a demonstration rallies more support for a political cause than acquiring one more vote during an election does.

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In the context of civil rights, the movement’s ability to elicit violence from its opponents – such as in 1965, when armed police violently attacked peaceful protesters crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama – only strengthened public support for the cause. “When the state is perceived as engaging in excess use of force, that tends to generate very sympathetic coverage, and that drives concern,” explained Wasow.

“He sees fossil fuel dominance as key to our national power and he doesn’t care about international norms or what climate science says,” Hill said.

“That’s very unfortunate given the clear need for rapid decarbonization. This is a short-term gamble that will cost everyone a great deal. For current and future generations who will have to deal with climate change, he’s making a catastrophic mistake.”

I would like to start sharing podcast episodes I like on lemmy/threadiverse, but it feels like there is no non-awkward way to do it. Often podcasts don't actually have their own website and it feels obtuse to link to applepodcasts or something...

For more than twenty years, human rights advocates have warned that unchecked drone warfare would shred the boundaries between war and peace, between combatants and civilians, between military force and basic law enforcement.

Trump’s maritime killings are the predictable collapse of a system the Obama administration cemented into place: killing people far from any battlefield, without legal authority, without congressional approval, and without the slightest regard for human rights.

"The authoritarianism of China and how little it cares about individuals is so scary!" - US Conservatives screech with shrill voices as they deport innocent people to said authoritarian and scary country for no good reason other than blind hatred and a lust for authoritarian violence as if it will somehow magically bring them comfort or prosperity in a zero-sum process.

Speaking for the US many populated arid areas are completely unsustainable as population centers (ironically also where most people in the US have been moving for awhile now), especially because water resources haven't been managed rationally in many arid areas. This story will absolutely be a global one though, see Tehran for one massive example, Lake Mead for another. No water and deadly heat waves are going to make for limitless ghost town tourism attraction opportunities!

The future is bright for abandoned building photography communities!

While the UAW does not specify a specific minimum wage, its letter notes that addressing wage suppression in Mexico would disincentivize offshoring and create “billions of dollars in new working-class purchasing power,” which could help jump-start demand for vehicles in Mexico.

Does it even matter what the context of the open mic is much beyond a certain point or even the type of open mic? Are people going to complain about hearing a spicy email between singer-songwriter guitarists or between edgey standup sets?? No, it is guranteed quality content no matter what you are really just the messenger except you still get the experience of performing in front of people. Win-win for would-be artists and performers! Just keep it the right length, read the room and all.

The neoliberal model of capitalism hit the rocks in 2008 and has stagnated ever since. Multibillionaire tech oligarchs dominate Western society. Meanwhile, China, a state-directed economy, has continued to grow while transforming itself into the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech goods and infrastructure, dispelling the notion that the Western liberal model of development is the only one that can succeed.

And then there is the decline of liberal politics. Far-right parties are quickly moving from the role of insurgents to that of chieftains in many Western countries. Even where centrists cling to power, they are increasingly shedding their own association with liberal political values. From Britain to Germany and Romania, ostensibly center-left governments and liberal-democratic states have put into question fundamental liberal tenets, including equality before the law, freedom of speech and assembly, and respect for the outcome of free and fair elections.

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What these inconsistencies in Pilkington’s worldview reveal is someone trying to ride two horses that are moving in different directions. He wants to appeal to the tastes of the insurgent right-wing forces in Western societies, who constitute the target audience of this book, while at the same time identifying with the major success story of our time: non-Western, non-liberal China. But the truth is that the Right intensely dislikes China just as much as the centrist liberals do. Neither tendency would like to admit the reason for this: they have more in common with each other than what divides them.

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There is also an emerging consensus around the construction of police states that strip away fundamental rights. Here, there is more contention, as both the Right and the centrists accuse one another of attacking freedom of speech and assembly. The reality is that both are implementing increasingly draconian policies in power, working hand in glove with Big Tech to do so. Tech-driven authoritarianism is likely to be the defining feature of a post-liberal order.

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Liberals have frequently spoken the language of universal rights while relativizing them in practice. This is most obvious when we look at the liberal history of colonialism and imperialism. But post-liberal authoritarianism seeks to take pride in supremacy, arguing that it is justified because of “natural” hierarchies between people and peoples. Approached consistently, this supremacism is the basis for the arbitrary exercise of executive power by the strong over the weak — despotism.