Category: Uncategorized

athelind:

imaginemedrawinglife:

soundssimpleright:

ultrafacts:

Yacouba Sawadogo is an exceptional man – he single-handedly managed to solve a crisis that many scientists and development organizations could not. The simple old farmer’s re-forestation and soil conservation techniques are so effective they’ve helped turn the tide in the fight against the desertification of the harsh lands in northern Burkina Faso.

Over-farming, over-grazing and over population have, over the years,
resulted in heavy soil erosion and drying in this landlocked West
African nation. Although national and international researchers tried to
fix the grave situation, it really didn’t really make much of a
difference. Until Yacouba decided to take matters into his own hands in
1980.

Yacouba’s methods were so odd that his fellow farmers ridiculed him.
But when his techniques successfully regenerated the forest, they were
forced to sit up and take notice. Yacouba revived an ancient African
farming practice called ‘zai’, which led to forest growth and increased
soil quality.

(Fact Source) Follow Ultrafacts for more facts

The way it works is really cool! You can read about it here.

There’s been a documentary about him, too

https://safe.txmblr.com/svc/embed/inline/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DDzah_5y65AU#embed-56dd4f50609d7982184998

@solarpunk-aesthetic

Something 19th and 20th century Western science consistently overlooked is that a lot of traditional methods are exquisite examples of the scientific method in action, the product of testing hypotheses and comparing results and control groups iteratively, over a period of hundreds or even thousands of years.

Respect ancient wisdom. Respect ancient science.

superficialsunsets:

Idk if anyone else has noticed this, but in this scene of Love, Simon you can see that Simon has the book More Happy Than Not on his shelf. Coincidentally, More Happy Than Not also features a boy struggling with his sexuality, so whether this was planned or that Becky Albertalli is just friends with Adam Silvera, it’s still a cool feature because it implies that Simon read it and maybe helped him figure out himself.

I TOTALLY SPOTTED THIS IN THE MOVIE THEATRE! Adam Silvera’s not my favourite author – his books just didn’t speak to me, nbd – but I know they’re really important to a lot of people, and that the people dressing the set took the time to put queer books on Simon’s shelf meant a lot to me. I just wish we had a great front-on shot so that we could see the other books, because I’d put money on there being more queer titles up there. Bless this set dresser, they did good.

legally-bitchtastic:

legally-bitchtastic:

thexfiles:

i love her

Remember, Debbie Reynolds was so much more than just Carrie’s mom. She was a beautiful, amazing, wickedly funny woman in her own right. She loved her daughter and she made her daughter who she was, but it is a disservice to her memory to shrink her down to just being Carrie’s mom.

Also, because it needs to be said, Debbie was a huge supporter of the mentally ill. She helped found The Thalians, a mental health charity in 1955 and served as chairwoman for the organization for fifty-six years. She was an amazing woman and will be missed.

siawrites:

zetsubonna:

uuuhshiny:

So I’ve started watching Leverage again…

#i think that eliot was supposed to be way more cultured and hipster at first#hence this scene#but then they just decided to go with country boy thug#which okay#but i still miss THIS eliot#leverage#favorite character alert

actualmenacebuckybarnes: okay but can’t he be both though? Like, okay, I get the backstory, as it’s been given to us, but this is my number one pet peeve about the perception of Southerners, country people and of violent characters generally.

Eliot Spencer is incredibly smart and very cultured. When other characters talk about pink collar jobs, Eliot corrects them and is far more aware of that sort of thing than they are (Sophie says ‘stewardess’, Eliot immediately tells her ‘flight attendant,’ etc.). He has a great knowledge of not just knife technique, which, okay, but wines, distillery, flavor composition, etc. He routinely passes as professions deemed higher class than that which is perceived to be his own (doctor, lawyer, accountant), and he uses his means of accomplishing tasks, violence, with skill and discernment and not mere force.

He also reads Nate better than anyone, including Sophie, and calls him on his bullshit directly all the time.

When we see Eliot interacting with the rest of the team, it’s not that he’s uncultured or less of a hipster trope, it’s that it reads different coming from him than say, Hardison because he has a Southern twang, a gravelly voice, and a tendency to punctuate with the word “damn it.” Which is a local dialectical thing, honestly, I do it, my mom’s boyfriend does it, a lot of people around here do it.

Eliot with the Leverage crew is Eliot relaxed. He’s code switching. When he knows something, he tells them, ‘it’s a very distinctive,’ which is like our tumblr shorthand ‘for reasons.’ They come to trust that when Eliot says ‘it’s a very distinctive’ he means, ‘It’s complicated and I know it from experience, but it’s not important enough for you to know that I have to explain, so move on.’ He doesn’t have to turn on his charm or put forth any sort of airs, they know him, they know how he operates, they know how he thinks, so he can just grumble and swear and threaten and keep working, so he’s happy.

He doesn’t like talking. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t like anything else, he just doesn’t like talking. Some people don’t. Doesn’t mean they don’t think, I mean, there’s that old proverb about removing all doubt, right?

I never see Eliot as a thug. I see him as a country boy hipster whose professional life is punching people in the face, and, aside from the resume, I know that guy. I went to school with that guy. I’ve banged that guy on multiple occasions. He’s a great guy.

This description means I have to find this show.  I married this guy.

randomslasher:

thelogicalloganipus:

academicnerdlord:

prismatic-bell:

wynx-hates-pedos:

toorational:

thelogicalloganipus:

randomslasher:

thelogicalloganipus:

“the Bible says homosexuality is a sin” well the Bible also has a lot of sexism, rape, incest, violence and a lot of contradictory messages in general because it was written by people and people have agendas

I don’t really think that God even has the time to care about if people are gay like if he’s got a whole world to run there are more important things anyway

And if God is love, he’s not just loving me if I am what he wants; he’s loving me as the person he made me to be, which is a queer person

You can’t say “I love you, and I made you gay but I’m sending you to hell you awful sinner” my dude that doesn’t make sense it’s not like hell has a low population is it

The god I believe in loves queer people because that’s how he made us

the bible doesn’t condemn homosexuality anyway. It’s content taken out of context and misinterpreted over hundreds of years of translations, re-translations, and mis-translations. 

Hell, in Kenneth Davis’s Don’t Know Much About The Bible, there’s a passage that absolutely blows my mind and proves just how much we can misinterpret with simple translation mistakes: 

“In researching the world’s oldest city, for instance, I learned that Joshua’s Jericho is one of the oldest human settlements. It also lies on a major earthquake zone. Could that simple fact of geology have had anything to do with those famous walls tumbling down? Then I discovered that Moses and the tribes of Israel never crossed the Red Sea but escaped from Pharaoh and his chariots across the Sea of Reeds, an uncertain designation which might be one of several Egyptian lakes or a marshy section of the Nile Delta. This mistranslation crept into the Greek Septuagint version and was uncovered by modern scholars with access to old Hebrew manuscripts.”

The bible is one long-ass game of telephone, whispered around the world in dozens if not hundreds of languages, for thousands of years. I have a hard time knowing what my grandpa is talking about, when he starts going on about the technology or practices of his youth, and that was only about 80 years ago, in the same country and in the same language as me. So why every Joe on the streets thinks they can take one or two verses, completely out of context and probably mis-translated several times to boot, and use it to spout propaganda and hatred for an entire group of people will forever be beyond me. 

You’re all valid, and frankly, if there is a ‘loving God,’ then that God will be happy to see you happy. Seriously. 

I needed that. Thank you.

The Bible wasn’t faxed down from the sky, people, it’s been compiled and formulated for hundreds of years until it became what it is today. And yes, misinterpreted by whoever with whatever agenda-of-the-day.

And hypocrites always stick to the word and not the spirit of any religion: to love, to help, to respect, to protect, and to strive to make the world a better place.

Yup, Jesus never said ANYTHING against LGBT people. All he said was don’t be greedy, don’t be lustful and don’t be wrathful. The fact that LGBTphobes took those instructions out of context to justify their LGBTphobia is pretty telling!

Hey, your friendly neighborhood Jew here!

You guys know that verse in Leviticus that homophobes like to trot out? Well, I’m here to tell you:

They don’t read Hebrew and they don’t know shit.


And now here’s something you probably won’t hear from any of those Fine Christian Folks ™ anytime soon, either:

We do read Hebrew and we still don’t know shit.


Here’s the thing. The most “accurate” word-for-word translation of that verse would say “a man shall not lie with another man; it is forbidden.”

Here’s the issue.

The grammar surrounding “men” in that sentence isn’t correct, and the word I’ve translated as “forbidden” is “toevah,” a word so fucking old we literally don’t know what it meant anymore.


The strange sentence construction suggests that “lie with another man” uses a feminine construction you wouldn’t normally find in a sentence that’s entirely about men, and while “toevah” means “forbidden,” it’s not actually clear what is forbidden. Here’s an incomplete list of possibilities:

Pederasty (adult male/adolescent male sex) is full-stop forbidden, a man sleeping with a male prostitute is full-stop forbidden, a man sleeping with a man as part of any kind of sex magic or fertility ritual is forbidden.

And my rabbi’s personal interpretation, based on the sentence construction: a man shouldn’t sleep with another man in a woman’s bed. (So basically: don’t cheat on your wife with a dude, which is probably treated separately from “don’t commit adultery” because adultery would come with the risk of an illegitimate child.)

You’ll notice none of these involve “ew, you disgusting gays.”

Unless you accept a word-for-word literal translation with zero consideration for the social mores and other tribes surrounding Israel contemporary with the writing of Torah, nothing about this commandment has anything to do with our modern understanding of queer people having committed relationships. Once you start taking the rituals and practices of Israel’s contemporaries into account, it suddenly becomes clear why these prohibitions would have been put into place (sex magic was common in the cult of Ba’al, for example, while pederasty was practically a requirement in Greece).

If you’re just a person out there loving other people of the same gender as you? The Torah says nothing against you. But do you know what our literary tradition does say?

It puts you in the company of Naomi and Ruth.

Ruth is considered the first convert, and her vow to her mother-in-law Naomi (after Ruth’s husband’s death) forms the basis of our modern marriage vows. “Where you go, I shall go, and where you lodge, I shall lodge; your people shall be my people, and your G-d my G-d; and where you die I shall die, and there shall I be buried.” Ruth remarries as prescribed by law at the time, but even when a child is born of that new union, nobody calls it “Ruth’s and Boaz’s child”–they all say a child has been born to Ruth and Naomi.

You are in the company of a woman whose name we invoke in our prayers and whose life we celebrate. I wear her words around my shoulders on my tallit, my sacred prayer shawl. Since we consider that everything in the Tanakh is intended for learning and study, what might we take from this story, but that a queer person can be virtuous and beloved of G-d?

Slow clap for Jews spitting truth.

Yesssssss

phenomenal