*Bats are extraordinary pollinators and insect-eating creatures. These admirable masterpieces are the unsung heroes of the night sky. The last week of October is known as Bat Week. It’s a time to celebrate these beauties and to recognize their plight.
Bats have inhabited the planet for 50 million years. There are approximately 1,300 bat species worldwide, including 47 in the U.S. and 18 kinds in Canada.
*Stealth marketing and masked political statements have made Roe v. Wade/Abortion a veiled issue in most elections. The pro-life, pro-choice debate never happened because of the distraction of money. Sure, there has been talking, yapping, yelling, arguing, but no debate.
Before reading any further, from one to 10 rate these factors according to values. Keep Reading
*The world’s remaining ancient forests are breathtaking “flying rivers.” They move water on almost inconceivably large scales. The ancient forests are also vital medicine chests for the bees.
The oceans are the main drivers of climate, yet new information reveals just how critical ancient forests are at creating climate and influencing it across a continent and around the globe. When ancient forests are razed, all hell breaks loose halfway around the world.
*As 2018 draws to a close our hot, overcrowded ravaged planet is bellowing a lucid S.O.S. distress code. It’s painfully obvious yet conveniently dismissed by the world leaders and the international bankers.
The latest United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report forewarns of pending extreme heat, drought, firestorms, floods, loss of coral reefs and the Amazon rainforest as well as food insecurity unless immediate actions are undertaken. Keep Reading
*Wolves are doctors of the land. Today, in America these doctors are being decimated at an accelerated rate.
This is a heartbreaking bloodbath. What man does to the wolves, he does to himself.
No wolves. No forests. No life.
*Today, most of civilization exists within congested smoggy cities. Fossil fuel air pollution, including filthy diesel fumes loaded with fine particles of nitric oxide and nitrogen oxide, are quickly crippling, dogs, bees and man.
About two decades ago in Mexico City, my colleagues began investigating an increasing number of howling frightened dogs that grew disoriented and incapable of recognizing their owners.
They examined the dog’s brains and found them coated with the protein amyloid beta, or, plaque, linked with Alzheimer’s disease. The dogs, they concluded after further experiments, had lost their minds from breathing the exhaust fumes of fossil fuel combustion.
*In 2018, we learned the ubiquitous extent of fossil fuel poisons. It is now so egregious that before a human fetus is even born, it’s toxic from fossil fuel pollution.
In April, the Health Effects Institute yearly State of the Global Air revealed that 95 percent of all humans, or, 7.2 billion people, are non-stop inhaling putrid fossil fuel air above the World Health Organization’s “safe level.”
Also in April, a research team led by the University of Montana found that 99.5 percent of 203 autopsies from Mexico City, ages ranging from 11 months to 40 years old, possessed the telltales of Alzheimer’s disease in their brainstems from breathing poisonous fossil fuel air. The scientists concluded that those children and young adults also faced an elevated risk of suicide.
Children in cities are at risk of losing their minds from breathing air, their birthright. Hideous.
*All men are created equal, and Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or the right of the people to assemble peaceably, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. These parts of the Constitution appears to trouble many Americans.
We respond to our emotions sometimes more quickly than others. It is hard to do the right thing when you we not know what the right thing is. We do not want to impose on others what we do not wish for ourselves as universal law of the Golden Rule.
We learn to stand for the National Anthem from custom, not law. The formal standard has been; stand, remove hats and place your right hand over your heart. As eyes or television cameras scroll the coinurts or stadiums, persons are talking, holding their drinks, and wearing hats. Such lack of attention causes heartburn to the point of almost saying, “Hey Butthole, respect the flag, respect the anthem, respect those that fought for America. Take off your hat; aren’t you American?
The question answers itself. The buttholes may be visitors, not American. Colin Kaepernick, a black football player, is now accused of being un-American. With little attention to our Constitution, what has taken issue is the interpretation of those that have fought for our flag and respect for our national anthem.
*Another dead wolf, J50, of the Salish Sea, the third one in 2018. The Pacific Northwest’s picturesque sea is being lambasted by a man-made accelerated climate crisis, hideous poisons and the man-driven Sixth Mass Extinction, which has shifted into overdrive.
The Salish Sea is a global hotspot for acidification, a glaring symptom of burning more subsidized climate-destroying fossil fuels. As the sea absorbs more carbon dioxide from fossil fuels it’s rapidly deforming shellfish and coral reefs because acid melts calcium carbonate the backbone of both shells and reefs. The Salish Sea web of life is quickly unravelling.
At the top of the Salish Sea food chain, the critically endangered pods (J,K,L) of Southern Resident orcas are wasting away. The past 18 months have been horrendous.”
*The terrorist actions of 9/11/2001 are chronic and ever-present. We share a common duty to honor and remember those suffering through unimaginable death. Deeply distressing is that the hallowed annual readings throughout cities in America of victims have missing names and the count of souls has not come to an end.
This year’s Police Memorial Ceremony at the nation’s capital in May, chilled attendants from the announcement of the 2017 deceased local, state and federal officers fallen ill from toxic exposure at Ground Zero while saving lives, retrieving bodies, and securing evidence or vestiges; evidence our environment relates to our health.
Much like Hurricane Maria’s first reported 64 deaths in Puerto Rico to the number of 2,975, twenty-three New York City Police officers died at the World Trade Center on September 11, but in the last 17 years, 156 have perished from noxious illnesses. From the 343 firefighters that died on 9/11, there have been 182 more deaths reported. The FBI registers 15 additional FBI Agents that have died related to 9/11. The count at the Pentagon needs adjustment.
Rosa Maria (Rosemary) Chapa at age 64 had talked to her husband JJ about retirement yet like any other Tuesday, went to work at the Pentagon. Her office had recently moved to the renovated west side of the first floor, Office of the Comptroller for the Defense Intelligence Agency. Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda took her highly spirited, giving and determined life with 183 other souls, 59 were aboard American Airlines flight 77.
She left behind her husband, five children and her dog Lucky.
*The Great Barrier Reef is not only the largest network of coral reefs on the globe, but also it’s a glorious cornucopia of biological diversity, or, life.
The Reef is under siege. It’s coming undone at an unprecedented rate from accelerated man-made heatwaves, super coal tanker incessant noise, the Sixth Mass Extinction and a horrendous onslaught of man-made long-lasting toxic chemicals. Keep Reading
*Sea turtles have swum the seas for a couple hundred million years. Today all seven species are in dire shape, especially in Mexico and Australia.
According to University of British Columbia’s renowned fisheries biologist, Professor Daniel Pauley, “between 10 and 100 trillion oceanic creatures a year are being destroyed by man.” Incomprehensible.
![Shark caught in fishing net. [Extinction of Sea Turtles]](https://www.slantedonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/2018-08-Sea-Turtles-Shark-in-Net.png)
Fisheries are annihilating everything in the seas. There are 13 million miles of longlines, or, enough line for 27 return trips to the moon, with almost 2 billion legal and illegal hooks. In 2000 alone, University of Duke scientists reported that longlines mutilated 200,000 loggerhead and 50,000 leatherback sea turtles. Horrendous.
It’s not just these deadly hooked lines that are the culprits. The conservation group World Animal Protection estimates that each year fisheries disdainfully discard and/or abandon 640,000 metric tons of nets, which become ghost nets. Not only do these ghastly entanglements suffocate 308,000 cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises), but also many thousands of sea turtles.
*3,000 intrepid firefighters are battling more than 500 apocalyptic firestorms spread across the massive forested Canadian province of British Columbia.
Thick smoke is blanketing millions of urban dwellers from Vancouver, British Columbia (BC), to Seattle, WA. That smoke has spread thousands of miles eastward across Canada and the U.S.
For the elderly, the children, the outdoor workers and anyone afflicted with respiratory, e.g. asthma, or heart ailments, it’s a crisis. They are advised to stay indoors and keep windows shut tight. It’s a nightmare for all the animals. While this year’s area of scorched forests (about a million acres) is far less than the record of last year (more than three million acres), BC is in a state of emergency. Keep Reading
*There is no justification for slowly and diabolically torturing the cetaceans (whales, dolphins porpoises) in the 21st century.
In the midst of an accelerating Sixth Mass Extinction, 400,000 cetaceans are senselessly destroyed each year.
The hideous images of the current Danish Faroe Islands whale bloodbath staining the North Atlantic Ocean are unacceptable. Keep Reading
*A new book “Unprecedented Crime” by climate scientist Dr Peter Carter and researcher Elizabeth Woodworth is a vital addition to our understanding the climate in crisis.
This is a well researched and written account of the present fossil fuel-induced catastrophe befalling all life on Earth. It’s a story interwoven with reverence for our mother, Nature. With over 100 years of combined research experience, this book is rich.
The more subsidized climate-wrecking fossil fuels burned, the more extreme weather occurrences. From the horrendous hurricanes to the epic floods, heatwaves, droughts, firestorms and terrifying tornadoes, they all piled up in 2017.
*Peace. We don’t hear much about it these days. It’s almost as if we talked and fussed and signed about it so much in the 60s & 70s, that it got tired – or we did. By the 80s a person flashing a peace sign was seen as immature or perhaps desperately clinging to their youth. Peace became passé. Which explains 2018.
The thing about Peace is that it can mean so many things.
*From the New York Times, May 26, 2018: “Last year the University of Wisconsin at Superior announced that it was suspending nine majors, including sociology and political science, and warned that there might be additional cuts. The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point recently proposed dropping 13 majors, including philosophy and English, to make room for programs with “clear career pathways.”
*It is not good for man to be alone…we don’t do alone well. A few days ago, I saw a Facebook message from a friend who had thought about taking his life. He woke up the next morning to learn that an acquaintance had committed suicide several days ago.
I don’t know the details, nor did I have any knowledge of what this man was battling. I only knew this man in passing, but our interactions we’re always polite and respectful. Whenever we stopped and chatted, the conversation consisted mainly of superficial things, but he still was genuine nonetheless.
My heart goes out to his family and all of those who hold him dear to their hearts. The challenges we face as men are very real, and they’re heavy. Keep Reading
*The fate of our brethren, the highly intelligent and sensitive cetaceans (whales, dolphins, porpoises), is very grim. The hideous man-made Sixth Mass Extinction is accelerating more than 1,000 times faster than the previous five others.
Legendary biologist and animal activist Farley Mowat meticulously documented the human destruction of cetaceans in Sea of Slaughter. He estimated that humans murdered in excess of five million whales in 18th, 19th and first half of the 20th centuries.
A more recent account by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) workers found that 2.9 million whales were slain between 1900-1999.
*Unrelenting heatwaves and hellfires are raging around the globe. August has commenced where July’s fury ended, more furnace-like heat.
This weekend Spain and Portugal may set an all-time European heat record eclipsing Athens, Greece, at 118.4 Fahrenheit (F), recorded on July 10, 1977.
It’s not just that a North African high is pumping scalding bone-dry air and mega tons of dust over the Iberian Peninsula. It’s also that the fire risk is extreme. 20 percent of Portugal is tinderbox dry. 11,000 intrepid firefighters and 56 water-bombing aircrafts are on emergency standby to combat forest fires.