"...plastic and tar have combined into a new form of pollution—“plastitar,” as it’s called in a scientific paper on the novel blight. Scientists on the Spanish Canary Islands found plastic-spotted balls of hardened tar scattered across several beaches."
— Robert Wright's Nonzero Newsletter, June 17, 2022
"The "micro" prefix in the word microplastics might lead one to think that these tiny plastic particles, by definition less than 5 millimeters in length, are harmless trifles. And though microplastics are sometimes intentionally manufactured, more often these tiny slivers are created by accidents or the ravages of time, ending their life as pollution in our environment. When that happens, they are far from harmless — rather, they pose a threat to most life on Earth.
* * *
...researchers at MIT have developed a silk-based substitute for plastics for certain industrial products — specifically, industry systems that currently use plastics for microencapsulation processes. Microencapsulation is process via which tiny particles or droplets are covered with a substance that turns them into a pill-shaped object, one that protects its core from degradation through things like air or moisture exposure. While this silk-based substitute would not entirely solve the microplastics problem, it would indeed provide certain businesses with a planet-friendly alternative to microplastic-producing products."
“Microplastics in our sea now outnumber the stars in our galaxy five-hundred-fold.”
Leah Penniman. Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations With Black Environmentalists. Amistad, 2023. Chapter: "One Blue Planet."
Microplastics were found in D.C. rivers. Researchers want to find why. Study of pollutants in Potomac, Anacostia rivers could impact clean-up efforts. Justin Wm. Moyer. Washington Post. November 27, 2023
"From clothing to carpets to seat belts, Nylon-6 is found in a variety of materials that most people use every day. But, when people are done with these materials, they end up in landfills or worse: loose in the environment, including the ocean. According to the World Wildlife Federation, up to 1 million pounds of fishing gear is abandoned in the ocean each year, with fishing nets composed of Nylon-6 making up at least 46% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch."
But a potential solution:
"The catalyst harnesses yttrium (an inexpensive Earth-abundant metal) and lanthanide ions. When the team heated Nylon-6 samples to melting temperatures and applied the catalyst without a solvent, the plastic fell apart — reverting to its original building blocks without leaving byproducts behind."
The Rainbow Scare has haunting echoes of the Red Scare and related Lavender Scare (as historian David K. Johnson coined it) from the mid-20th century, when fears about the spread of communism during the Cold War emboldened Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and others in the US government to persecute and ostracize people who were deemed to be "communist sympathizers," cavorting with the Soviet enemy. LGBTQ+ people were among them — fired from their jobs, forced to undergo psychiatric treatment and institutionalization, including electric shock treatment, and prosecuted as security threats to the nation.
This was the era when then-President Dwight Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which helped fuel a national witch-hunt to purge queer Americans from the federal government. Around 5,000 federal agency employees lost their jobs on the basis of their sexual orientation. McCarthy and other leaders used LGBTQ+ people as a wedge issue and scare tactic to justify state-sponsored discrimination, just as right-wing leaders are trying to today.
See also: "Comparing the 'Lavender Scare' With the Current 'Trans Scare': The so-called “Red Scare” was said to have been saturated with lavender: the color associated with homosexuality at the time." 9 min read, by The Good Men Project, published in Equality Includes You, May 18, 2023
my aunt, a jewish lesbian in her sixties, called me the other day and said "all these transphobes decided they were transphobic in the seventies and now they're just pretending it's a new thing" and i found that helpful to hear
the narrative is that transness is a modern phenomenon, unknown in its effects and without precedent. this is obviously false, and we rightly go to the 30s Berlin to argue against that. but it's modern form, erasure of women as a feminist argument, was trialed a few decades ago
"This is a moment for expanding alliances, not to have sectarian struggles about bathrooms. Women know what it’s like to be denied health care. They are currently being deprived of access to reproductive health in several parts of the world, including the U.S. Women know how difficult and necessary it is to struggle for autonomy. So why would they not support trans struggles for health care and to live free of the fear of violence?"
After he yelled “it used to be legal to kill gay people” at a woman and her wife, and she later saw him carrying a gun, she learned her community already ID’d his Gab account and were collecting screenshots. Police acted after they were handed all of this. https://t.co/voffx2rkLV
The timeline of his threats made online overlaps with the month in which threats to LGBTQ community events were rapidly escalating, from white nationalists, from Libs of TikTok, from GOP legislators https://t.co/tz9mUQ2OGl
Please read: Libs of TikTok and Bomb Threat on Boston Children's Hospital: Libs of TikTok has gone too far. Now a children's hospital has been threatened with a bomb. All platforms need to drop Chaya Raichik and Libs of TikTok. Erin Reed, August 31, 2022
Libs of Tiktok has been back just over a week and already her followers are doxing people and threatening to shoot people. https://t.co/nvR4KdDUhB
More empty legal threats from Libs of Tiktok. She'll never actually sue because that would open her up to discovery, if she could even get past a motion to dismiss. Her biggest claim is that she only called some parents trans kids and teachers groomers instead all of them! pic.twitter.com/UxDEYJhruN
On December 27, 2022, Raichik gave this one-hour interview on Fox. By doing so, she "revealed her face for the first time," Erin Reed points out; Raichik used "dehumanizing language such as calling LGBTQ+ people and allies 'cockroaches' and a 'poison,' and revealed her role in anti-trans legislation via Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida. She even revealed that Gov. DeSantis offered her the governor’s mansion guest room for 'as long as she needed it.'"
This 1:45 video clip was shared on X. I transcribed it:
T. Carlson: How— What is going on here? Do you have any theories?
Chaya Raichik: I think there’s— there’s something so unique about the LGBTQ community has become this cult, and it’s so captivating, and it pulls people in so strongly unlike anything we’ve ever seen. And they brainwash people to join, and they convince them of all of these things, and it’s really, really hard to get out of it. It’s really difficult. And there are studies on this. Like, there’s been a lot of reporting on this, about people— Parents who are like, you know, my child is starting to say, you know, that they’re nonbinary or transgender or whatever and: What do I do? How do I stop this? And it’s really, really difficult. It’s, it’s, it’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen, I think. It’s extremely poisonous.
Carlson: Do you see a spiritual component to any of this?
Raichik: Um. (laughs)
Carlson: You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want.
Raichik: Yeah, I don’t, I don’t know.
Carlson: Well, I do, I do. I don’t think this makes sense at all.
Raichik: No, it doesn’t make any sense. And I think, I think they’re just— I think they’re evil. And sometimes we try to, we try to‚ to break it down a lot and we discuss like why this is happening, what’s happening, and whatever and I think sometimes, like, the simplest answer is: They’re just evil. They’re bad people. They’re just evil people, and they want to— And they want to groom kids. They’re recruiting.
Chaya Raichik, Libs Of TikTok, instigated terrorism against LGBTQ+ people for 2 years.
Today during her hate-filled face reveal, she dropped that Gov DeSantis of FL offered her the Governors Mansion guesthouse.
What exactly do transphobes think the sales pitch is to turn a kid trans? Like do you think we go up to a teenage boy and say "hey, you want to lose muscle mass, shrink your balls, and lose the respect of all your friends?" and then that kid just starts chugging titty skittles?
— Jasmine('s booOOOOooobs hurt 👻) (@Ranting_Trans) October 23, 2022
The word "desistance" to describe kids who stop identifying as trans implies that trans identity is criminal.
'Desisting' is of course a term used to describe criminal acts and that very much reflects how it views transness in young people as something going very wrong with them and that they can get away from it and live a 'clean life' if only they're held back like it's a life of crime
OK Twitter, I need to talk to you about the harmful version of conversion therapy I went through a teen - something called 'desistence therapy', which was basically gaslighting of a young teen into not only not transitioning but believing that not transitioning was their idea.
The anti-LGBTQ movement currently have a double barrel approach to abuse and trolling. First they advocate abusive and controlling conversion practices for other people's children, and then if LGBTQ people criticise, they yell "why are you obsessed with other people's kids!?"
I know I've said this before, but the "Gender Critical"/LGB Alliance claim that there are no LGBT kids absolutely disgusts me
Children are kicked out of their homes for coming out. Struggling alone with being LGBT as a kid is so difficult. Kids end their lives over it https://t.co/oT2uYBtT8d
The term "falsepanic" is mine, coined for the sake of this blog post's title. It's not a real, diagnosable anxiety. It's a falsehood. The people who express anxiety about queer/trans people may indeed feel some kind of fear, but they also likely know it's on a false basis.
Brynn Tannehill:
"The basic operating definition [of a moral panic] is 'public mass movement, based on false or exaggerated perceptions or information that exceeds the actual threat society is facing. Moral panic is a widespread fear and often an irrational threat to society's values, interests, and safety.' One of the seminal piece's of research into the taxonomy of moral panics was Stanley Cohen's "Folk Devils and Moral Panics." He defined it as "a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests." The impetus for this book was the UK media taking a short series of tit-for-tat acts of petty vandalism between (drunk) mods and rockers in the early, and convincing the public this was an out of control gang war, and over-policing over-reaction ensued. Cohen saw 3 characteristics of a moral panic:
1. Media singles out a group of people and makes them "devils": something all good people should despise
2. The actual threat is somewhere between little and none
3. Concern about the group explodes seemingly overnight.
* * *
Similarly, later scholars listed the characteristics of a moral panic as:
1. Volatility: Sudden identification of a group of people as threatening deviants
2. Hostility: the "deviants" are regarded with intense hostility, and labeled as an existential threat to society.
3. Measurable Concern: can be measured w/ polls
4. Consensus: Significant portion of the public believes the threat is real and serious
5. Disproportionate: Reaction is disproportionate to the size of the group and the little or no danger they pose"
* * *
...the worst possible outcome is when an authoritarian government comes to (permanent) power on the basis of some sort of moral panic. This one of the times when conditions are ripe for genocide.
Which is why the timing of a massive moral panic over trans people couldn't come at a worse freaking time. It's zero coincidence that the same people calling for turning the US into a Christian Republic are also flogging the trans panic.
* * *
And you have the GOP that made this one of their top talking points during the 2022 election. They dumped truckloads of cash into ads about trans people. They hammered away at us on the stump. They win primaries with moral panic
* * *
One could make the argument that the Holocaust was the result of a confluence of a moral panic stoked by a political party which simultaneously managed to seize permanent dictatorial power.
As it is, we're dealing with a moral panic, stochastic violence, modern Sturmabteilung, mass shootings, Twitter boosting those responsible for both the stochastic violence and the moral panic, and people are already starting to sell everything and flee red states.
This article is jaw-dropping. It's one woman, whose trans child no longer speaks to her because she is an obsessed bigot, given an entire article to just make shit up. The holes in the story are screaming: how terrible a parent was she if social services end up getting involved? https://t.co/r9pPPrtBy8pic.twitter.com/ELUOLyi611
Thing is, if they know they know you, they tend to think you have a right to exist.
"In 1985, only 24 per cent of respondents admitted personally knowing someone who had come out as gay or lesbian. Today, the figure has risen to 72 per cent...And, whereas in the past 72 per cent said sexual relations between adults of the same sex were always or almost always wrong, that figure has now dropped to 28 per cent." (Pink News, 2024)
For the past several days, I've been writing about this...
"When I was coming out (back in what feels like the Axial Age), it was axiomatic even in more conservative parts of the LGBT movement that parental authority was a wellspring of oppressive abuse. It wasn't neutral or apolitical. Curtailing it was where politics began. ... When we were finalizing the Yogyakarta Principles, the leader of one international LGBT group questioned whether the Principles should condemn intersex surgeries performed on children. "As a parent," she said, "I would always want the power to make that decision for my child." ...what interests me about that statement isn't "as a parent." It's "I want the power." ... When gays like Bari Weiss (prospective parent) or Andrew Sullivan (not a parent, but it won't stop him talking) praise parents' power to control or detrans transgender children, they are laying claim to abusive power that could easily have been used against them. Weiss and Sullivan must have feared power once, in their bones. Which is why they identify so completely now with the power to oppress. LGBT liberation is about resisting power, not grabbing some for yourself." — Scott Long, Twitter, 6 April 2023
incredible to write an entire profile of bari weiss and expound at length on her allegedly noble intentions and all the rich idiots who love her, yet not once mention the substance of any of the things she says. if she's such an allegedly compelling talker, lets hear
www.nytimes.com/2024/08/11/b...
i shouldn't be surprised the way that closed-box horse-race political journalism persists, never engaging with what people say and only what other people think about it. and yet
Like, look, I’m a privileged lawyer in Georgia, I’m around plenty of conservatives and the current anti-trans panic is so incoherent that not only do I get asked to explain OUR side of the argument, conservatives ask me to explain the CONSERVATIVE argument. /1
— Lyra, Esq., is NOT DAREDEVIL (@PinkRangerLB) April 7, 2023
there's something just so incredible about the focus on perennial ridiculous trick-or-treat panics (rainbow fentanyl, razor blade apples) over the fact that cars routinely kill more people on halloween than any other day of the year
So a Professor of Sociology at a major UK university is calling queer theorists paedophiles. Very normal, nothing worrying at all here. pic.twitter.com/9WY5Ue2tv9
Noting that her 2022 sarcastic tweet "I won’t rest until every American child has been trans’d" was taken seriously by KLA TV (religious transphobes), Natalie Wynn gives a 2023 update: "We should not rest till we’ve trans’d God."
A trans person existed & thereby ruined your day? It did not happen to you
One of the major transphobic tropes is that hypothetical trans people run around causing fictional chaos and thus all actual trans people must be banned.
The chaos isn't real. It's a falsepanic. The harm to cis people is invented.
Leavitt adds that it's "an accumulation cycle," perhaps the end of one, "but never before has the cycle been this global, with nowhere else to expand into, with actual civilization ending threats looming."
"To be trans in the United States today is to live with a preternaturally high tolerance for the absurd. It was just a few years ago that conservative lawmakers in Ohio were faced with the mortal and economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and chose to turn the state’s legislative focus to the 'issue' of five transgender girls, out of some 400,000 high school athletes, competing in youth sports." — Wren Sanders, introduction to Judith Butler Knows What Makes Transphobes Tick, interview by Wren Sanders, Them, April 5, 2024
"There are powerful social forces at work to stoke a moral panic and, in doing so, stigmatize and alienate trans people in a similar manner to the stigmatization of homosexuality as an illegitimate way of life under Section 28." bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journal...
I think it's important to note the audience for this isn't really cisgender LGB people (who polling tells us overwhelmingly favor trans rights) but is meant to serve as a permission structure for a broader audience to abandon trans rights while still claiming they're "liberal"
the hysteria has gone off the rails so far that the average american thinks 1 in 5 people are transgender. pure absolute insanity that is driving the current lavender scare
"When this wave of hostility began gaining real momentum in 2017, journalist and activist Owen Jones noted that the representation of trans people as dangerous was “chillingly familiar,” reminiscent of the moral panic surrounding gay and bisexual men and women in a not-so-distant past: “The tropes are the same. Back then, gay people were sexual predators; a “gay lobby” was brainwashing children; being gay was a mental illness, or just a phase; and gay rights was political correctness gone mad.”"
— Emily Herring, Trans People Deserve Better: "Gender critical" feminism doesn't help women but it does help the far right, Well-Read Herring, November 17, 2025
Proposing a scapegoat is a divide-and-conquer strategy, Herring says.
Anand Girardadas, author of Winners Take All, described Jeffrey Epstein's circle — as Chris Hedges narrates it (0:22–3:00) — saying it's
"emblematic of a privileged cast that lack the empathy to see the suffering
and abuse of others. Whether that was sexual abuse of children, the financial meltdowns they
orchestrated, the military fiascos they backed, the addictions and overdoses
they enabled, the monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, and the housing crisis
they milked, and the technologies they failed that failed to protect people.
People are right to sense that, as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the
intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, startups, academia, science,
high finance, and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good, he writes. They are right
to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are
deprived of first chances. ... The
Epstein emails, in my view, he writes, together sketch a devastating
epistolary portrait of how our social order functions and for whom. Saying
that isn't extreme; the way this elite operates is. ... If this neoliberal-era power elite
remains poorly understood, he writes, it may be because it is not just a financial elite or an educated elite, a noblesse
oblige elite, a political elite, or a narrative-making elite. It straddles all
of these, lucratively and persuaded of its own good intentions. These people
are, he writes, on the same team. On air, they might clash. They promote opposite policies. Some in the network
profess anguish over what others in the network are doing. But the emails depict
a group whose highest commitment is to their own permanence in the class that
decides things [emphasis mine]. When principles conflict with staying in the network, the network
wins."
I was intrigued by that line, "the class that decides things," because I think lots of people like to imagine themselves as deciders. I think lots of people like to imagine themselves as decision-makers because it's a way of imagining themselves in a hierarchy. You're either the person who judges and decides about others, or you're the person getting judged and decided about. You're someone who decrees whether trans people can exist, or you're trans. To the cis people imagining themselves as deciders when they are not, I think they're understanding "trans" as the football you kick.
Hardly anybody on Earth knows that the Arctic is warming 3 to 4 times faster than the rest of the planet as its sea ice is destroyed during the abrupt climate change event of 20th/21st century capitalism. Radical action is required now in 2021. Nobody will be immune to this. pic.twitter.com/MtYdR0FL47
"the temperatures here [in the Arctic] are rising nearly four times faster than in the rest of the planet — and that’s just the thermometer’s reading. When it comes to geopolitics, the coldest region in the world risks becoming its hottest.
* * *
The region’s fast-growing militarization, fueled by increased international tensions, are compounding a push to benefit from the Arctic’s strategic and economic potential. Melting ice is also creating new shipping lanes and opening natural resources to exploitation, making strategic control of the Arctic ever more enticing."
The variability and multidecadal decline of October #Arctic sea-ice thickness and sea-ice volume (updated through this year)...
+ Data information: climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data...
The latest IPCC report had shown that "the Nationally Determined Contributions set voluntarily by signatories to the Paris accord are vastly insufficient. Even if they are met, the increase in average global temperature will surpass 3°C by 2100, and will continue to rise still further after that." So, José Antonio Ocampo wrote, "humanity cannot afford to act gradually on this issue. The Stern Review, the latest IPCC report, and the UNEP have all concluded that current efforts to reduce emissions must be stepped up substantially." That means that "the country that is historically responsible for the largest share of greenhouse-gas emissions – the United States – must return to the agreement and show leadership on this issue once again."
2019: What we almost had
Noah Smith (Bloomberg, 12 Feb. 2019) supports investing in infrastructure: "The original Green New Deal’s goal of building a smart electrical grid is a good one, as is the idea to retrofit American buildings to have net zero emissions." However:
The Green New Deal, proposed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has two big flaws. First, the plan overreaches in its desire to deliver a raft of expensive new entitlements — guaranteed jobs, benefits, health care, housing, education, income and more. If the large deficits required to pay for all of these things ended up harming the economy, it would actually hurt the cause of limiting climate change rather than help it. Second, the plan focuses far too much on the U.S.’s own carbon emissions. The U.S. accounts for only about 14 percent of global carbon output, and that percent is falling every day. The climate change battle will be won or lost in developing countries such as China...
Smith would prefer to see the US emphasize the development of green technology, and scale it, to help give "developing countries a way to reduce carbon output without threatening their economic growth."
In 2020, when governments began spending on COVID mitigation, "the opportunity flashed brightly for climate action," when "something like a Green New Deal seemed not just conceivable but potentially the basic model for public investment the world over." Indeed:
"a team led by Marina Andrijevic and Joeri Rogelj estimated that if the world could spend just 10 percent of the money it had spent up to that point on Covid relief over each of the following five years — half of total Covid relief spending, in other words — it would be enough to bring about a comprehensive green transition, meet the goals of the Paris accord and keep the planet well below two degrees Celsius of warming."
But that spending didn't happen.
"At least $14 trillion," the New York Times article says, was spent by the countries of the Group of 20 on pandemic relief of one kind or another, according to an analysis published in Nature in March. Just 6 percent of it was spent in ways that could reduce emissions." Proportionately, that's only half of what these countries spent on cutting emissions after the 2007–09 recession.
"Public and political support for action to tackle the biggest crisis facing humanity IS is ebbing, just when it’s most vital …
"Until April 2024, every single poll showed more support for increasing spending on climate change than reducing it. Since then, every poll has shown the opposite"
From Davos, Switzerland in January 2024: The World Economic Forum's "2024 global risk report names extreme weather events, critical changes to Earth systems, and biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse as the three biggest global risks we collectively face over the next ten years." — Katharine Hayhoe, LinkedIn
Oregon is set to lose an additional $400 million in federal grants awarded for climate action and is among more than a dozen Democratic states losing federal funding after the Trump administration terminated nearly $8 billion for those states this week.
"The Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters Database, which the Trump administration “retired” in May, has relaunched outside of the government using the same methodology. In its first update at the new site, the database shows that the first six months of 2025 have been the most expensive first six months of any year since 1980."
Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) is a "hypothetical 'band aid' fix for global warming," writes Dustin T. Cox. It would involve putting aerosols into the sky so that they reflect some sunlight back into space. Like the cloud emitted by a volcano, SAI could cause global dimming.
Atmospheric scientist Frank Keutsch has had a research project at Harvard University for several years. It's called the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), and it inquires about the risks of SAI. A notable risk, according to Oxford geophysicist Raymond Pierrehumbert, is 'termination shock' — meaning that, in Cox's words, "once we started injecting the atmosphere with aerosols, we could never stop," as stopping would suddenly raise global temperatures catastrophically.
That, indeed, sounds like a risk.
In this episode, Nate interviews Professor Ted Parson about solar geoengineering (specifically stratospheric aerosol injection) as a potential response to severe climate risks.
www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/200-...
"The most recent report claims that rich countries must end their oil and gas production entirely by 2034 — 12 short years away — in order to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius and give poorer countries time to replace fossil fuel income. Considering how reluctant our world is to give up fossil fuels — or, more directly, the money made by fossil fuels — it's hard to see this happening."
In a 2018 article, Casey Williams explained that "Climate change doesn’t describe a single future catastrophe, but a slow and uneven unraveling, a drawn-out apocalypse that began long ago and that will stretch to an end that probably won’t feel like much of an ending at all." It affects different people differently. "For the wealthy and well-connected, climate change will not feel catastrophic most of the time." Therefore, to address climate change may be to address "the everyday injustices that make the present unbearable for so many."
ice climatologists: we've lost Earth's ice sheets and it's just a matter of time before we see many metres of sea level rise so society has to now brace itself for a catastrophe 🧵
ice climatologists: we've lost Earth's ice sheets and it's just a matter of time before we see many metres of sea level rise so society has to now brace itself for a catastrophe 🧵
