So good.

An Honest Chevron Ad - YouTube

Did you know Chevron was found liable for $9.5 billion in damages from decades of dumping toxic oil waste in the Amazon basin? And instead of paying, they spent years persecuting and stripping the rights of Steven Donziger, the lawyer who led the case against them.

The climate emergency is just getting started.

Homeowners Are Losing Their Insurance

Homeowners insurance costs have soared across the country partly due to unpredictable weather patterns, particularly in places like California, Texas and Florida, a development that has led to increased claims from customers that are hurting companies…

“Climate adaptation, on the other hand, will become very real, as more insurers scale back activities in even more regions affected by climate change and explore new types of heat-linked policies,” she said.

People living this close to the ocean are still in denial of what’s coming. They spent $500,000 on a sand dune wiped away in 3 days.

Massachusetts town grapples with sea rise after sand barrier fails

As weather patterns get more extreme and oceans get warmer, sea levels rise due to thermal expansion and weather patterns get more extreme, boosting coastal erosion. This climate crisis is now on the doorstep of Salisbury beach homeowners, as they suffer the consequences of rising sea levels, stronger winds and severe storms in recent months, including two in January.

It’s been three weeks since Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire at the gate of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC as an act of protest against the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

Photo of short haired man in red shirt and blue pants kneeling down and petting a white and gray cat

CrimethInc. : Memories of Aaron Bushnell : As Recounted by His Friends

Climate activists across Europe block access to North Sea oil infrastructure | The Guardian

Climate activists in four countries are blocking access to North Sea oil infrastructure as part of a coordinated pan-European civil disobedience protest….

The protest comes in the same week a report found none of the big fossil fuel producing countries in the region had plans to stop drilling soon enough to meet the 1.5C (2.7F) global heating target set by the Paris climate accords.

Rachel Corrie Gave Her Life for Palestine

This day in 2003, the IDF killed American activist Rachel Corrie as she defended homes in Rafah from destruction. As Israel threatens to invade the city, a volunteer who stood alongside Rachel writes on her legacy — a call for steadfast solidarity with Gazans.

Donated!

World Central Kitchen | Operation Safeena: WCK aid boat offloads in Gaza

World Central Kitchen’s team in Gaza is offloading 200 tons of desperately needed food that arrived on our first maritime aid shipment to the region. Carried on the Open Arms vessel, the cargo is part of Operation Safeena, our effort to bring as much aid as possible to Palestinians by sea. We have provided more than 37 million meals to families in war-torn Gaza by land and air since first responding to the conflict.

Mehdi Hasan Debunks 7 Israeli Myths About UNRWA - YouTube

As Israel launches a propaganda campaign against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), millions of Palestinians continue to rely on the agency’s critical support when it comes to healthcare, education, and food. In this latest DEBUNKED!, Mehdi Hasan refutes the top 7 Israeli lies about UNRWA.

A review/check-in after 19 months of hosting on Micro.blog: It's a mixed bag

After many years of using WordPress for my blogs I decided to transition to Micro.blog in late 2022. I'd grown frustrated with what felt like overly complex posting and feature bloat in WP. Whether using the website or the WP app, it just felt increasingly complicated. Posting from iA Writer was my usual choice but it would often time out, forcing me to go to the website or app fairly often and I dreaded it. Blogging with WP always felt like a chore.

Micro.blog was simpler. I'd been using and participating in the community timeline off and on since the early days of the service so I decided to try moving my blog there. After a month or two I decided to move my domain over and really settle in. It's been 19 months since I started hosting here and it's time for a check-in/review.

What I love:

  • Posting from iA Writer works every time and so posting was easy.
  • Posting from Obsidian works every time and is my new preferred process.
  • Manton. He's always on the timeline. He's invested and cares. He participates and is a blogger himself. He obviously cares about blogging. Even better, he gets and cares about the open web and making sure that micro.blog ties in with the larger Fediverse.

What I tolerate:

  • Composing on the Micro.blog website works which is to say, it functions. I guess because it's Micro.blog the text field is tiny. I'm glad I can write and post from iA Writer and Obsidian, otherwise the tiny text field would be a deal breaker for me. Yes, there's an app, I'll get to that.
  • Thankfully editing a post presents a larger text field so it's an improvement over composing. But generally the interface is the complete opposite of WordPress, which is to say, bare bones. For Comparison, here are two screen shots. One of a relatively new blogging service, Pika.page and, below it, Micro.blog:
A screenshot of a Safari window showing text in a compose window for the Pika.Page website
A screenshot of a Safari window showing text in a compose window for the  micro.blog website

Maybe it's just me but pika.page, while simple, has a much friendlier, functional design. It's beautiful. By comparison micro.blog feels basic, less functional and looks like it's designed for entry of a record into a database. There's nothing delightful about it.

Okay, okay. But micro.blog has apps! Let's look at the compose window for the app on the iPad:

A screenshot of a Safari window showing text in a compose window for the micro.blog app on an iPad

It's better than the website with a much larger window here but still very basic. There is a very minimal formatting bar at the bottom though it's not as functional as the Pika.page website which has quite a few formatting options. Oh, and I'm guessing this is a bug but there's no way to assign a category to a post while using the iPad app. So, the micro.blog app is better than the website but basic and sort-of broken.

And, since I'm comparing it to Pika.page, I should note that, outside of the writing experience, Micro.blog has far more to offer. Some of the most notable Micro.blog features include:

  • Categories for posts
  • ActivityPub support
  • Easy cross posting to other services
  • Comments via the community timeline. This includes anyone with a free or paid Micro.blog account as well as users in the Fediverse.
  • Customizable via Hugo themes and plugins
  • A new built-in blog roll feature

In my experience using the app on an iPad, it's poorly designed but mostly functional. If this were an App Store rating it would be a 2/5. And it's buggy. Currently, trying to scroll through the timeline it's repeating, showing me posts over and over, sort of in a loop.

Images in the timeline look fine but if I tap on a landscape image to view a larger version it does not scale to the current window size but requires that I scroll sideways to see the rest of the image - come on! That's a terrible user experience. Is the iPad app even tested? Or perhaps it's just not a priority? Also worth noting, when using the app on the iPad with a hardware keyboard, neither the keyboard down arrow or space bar can can be used to scroll. The trackpad can be used to scroll but using it to click or tap a post to view the conversation does nothing.

When compared to any number of apps available for Mastodon, say, Mona, Ice Cubes, or Ivory, it just seems like it's not finished, an app in beta testing. In comparison to those apps there are far fewer features and yet the features it does have are either not fully supported on the iPad or are broken by bugs. As recently as a week ago the share sheet was not working.

Browsing the timeline on the website is, like much of the rest of the experience, functional but often frustrating. The page scrolling is limited. After a bit of scrolling the user encounters a "Show More" button that has to be tapped to load more of the timeline. My guess is that the idea here is to protect users from themselves? If so, I don't appreciate it. I'm an adult and don't need or want to an artificial barrier put in front of me. But even worse, let's say I tap that button a few times then get to a post with a conversation that I want to check out. I tap into it, leave a comment and go back to the timeline via the back button or swipe gesture. Sometimes I'm taken back to the timeline where I left off. Other times? Back to the top of the timeline. This also occasionally happens if tap a link to a full blog post. Upon returning I may find myself where I left off or I may be back to the top of the timeline.

I've already written about my frustrations concerning other aspects of using the community feed and the Discovery feed: Here, here and here.

I'm still satisfied with my choice to move away from WordPress and I've recommended Micro.blog many times. But with new options like Pika.page and Scribbles becoming available, Micro.blog is no longer the obvious choice. While those services lack built in ActivityPub support, comments, the community timeline and other features, they can be used in conjunction with an account at Mastodon or BlueSky. If I were making the move from WordPress today I'd certainly be considering those and other options. And if I were not using Obsidian or iA Writer, but rather relying on the web to write and manage my posts, I would most definitely chose another service.

Love in the time of genocide | Israel War on Gaza | Al Jazeera

For weeks in southern Gaza during a recent visit, I collected stories of women admitted to hospital, each of them there to recover from what they call “war wounds”. But it’s not a war, because only one side has an actual army. Only one side is a state with full military wares.

These victims were mothers, wives and babies, whose slight bodies were pierced, torn, broken and burned. Their deeper injuries aren’t visible, until they open up about their lives over the past five months.

#gaza

Human-caused climate change fuels hottest February on record, all-time high ocean warming | CBC News

Chart showing daily sea surface temperatures smashing previous records for nearly an entire year from April 2023 to March 2024.

For the ninth straight month, Earth has obliterated global heat records — with February, the winter as a whole and the world’s oceans setting new high-temperature marks, according to the European Union climate agency Copernicus.

The latest record-breaking in this climate change-fuelled global hot streak includes sea surface temperatures that weren’t just the hottest for February, but eclipsed any month on record, soaring past August 2023’s mark and still rising at the end of the month.

Moving in the wrong direction on climate.

Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power - The Washington Post

Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.

20 albums that stuck

Lou Plummer: List 10 albums that have stayed with you over the years in some way. A fun question but impossible. For example, R.E.M - well, I could just as easily list any of their first 10 albums: Life’s Rich Pageant, yes please. Reckoning. Uh huh. Document? Sure. But for the moment, I’ll choose Green. But I could say the same for many of the others on the list.

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A perfect afternoon visiting the bees as they collected pollen from a flowering plum tree.

A honeybee collecting pollen from a white flower. in the background a branch of blurred flowers is on the right side of the image and a bright blue sky behind the bee and flower.
A honeybee is collecting pollen from white plum flowers.
A honeybee is collecting pollen from white plum flowers. A bright blue sky is visible in the background.

#nature #bees #spring #flowers

A variety of bees, flys and butterflies were busy pollinating the plum trees today - the western honey bees especially!

A closeup of two honeybees, one is flying above white flowers, the other is resting on a flower as it collects pollen
A honey bee gathering pollen from white flowers set against a blue sky
A macro image of a furry honeybee collecting pollen from white flowers

Famine in Gaza

Is there famine in Gaza? | Reuters The United Nations said in February that more than a quarter of Gaza’s 2.3 million people were “estimated to be facing catastrophic levels of deprivation and starvation.” It said without action widespread famine could be “almost inevitable.” The IPC is due to release a new analysis of the situation in Gaza by mid-March. …as U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has said: “Once a famine is declared, it is too late for too many people.

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Pro-Palestinian protesters block roads leading to Oscars

Love to see it:

Pro-Palestinian protesters chanting “Cease fire now” blocked roads leading to the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, delaying the start of the Oscars. Some ceremony attendees in formalwear shoved past protesters.

A male relative today made a sexist, stupid comment, not for the first time.

My reply, not for the first time: Your sexism isn’t funny and it’s never acceptable. Stop.

I know that he won’t stop. I get the same from most of the other males in the family.

Patriarchy has deep roots.

See the USA in your Chevrolet!

www.youtube.com/watch

4 women in dark green uniforms standing on a rock peak with mountains in the background. The women each hold a lit torch with the fourth woman holding her torch up as it is being lit by another

YJA Star (Free Women’s Troops) Central Headquarters Command made a written statement on the occasion of March 8, International Working Women’s Day.

Our uninterrupted struggle for women's freedom, from Saras to Zîlans, from Bêrîtans to Doğa Viyans, created great gains for women and became the expression that a society whose women are free will also be free. In this sense, women transforming the areas they are in into positions of resistance means the end of the rapist masculine mentality. The way to do this is to organize strongly. Where a single woman remains unorganized, women will continue to be subjected to violence, rape, oppression and exploitation.