I call this compilation: “Jungle Cruise will never become a franchise because Emily and Dwayne are never going to be allowed to work for Disney ever again”
Mohammad Hassan Forouzanfar raises the flag of resistance wishing for freedom in Afghanistan
Mohammad Hassan Forouzanfar, an architect, graphic designer, and visual artist introduces a series of photographies; collecting some historical monuments of Afghanistan and its ancient sites — which are also on the UNESCO world heritage list — and raising the flag of the people’s resistance force, wishing freedom to all humans in Afghanistan and precious heritage of this country.
i have a lot of feelings and thoughts about coelacanths today
like… they’re blue
you have this mysterious fish that no one really cared about, because everyone assumed they’d gone extinct with the dinosaurs. an interesting footnote, but one of many, many fossil species.
and later the coelacanth gets some fame as a so-called “missing link” species, a theory which is now outdated (and not accurate for coelacanths) but was really influential at the time. because they have some weird biological quirks – bones in fins! – people were like “oh, they must be a missing link.” so the coelacanth was launched into some fame with the theory of evolution. it got brought up a lot. drawn in old textbooks as proof.
and then a fisherman finds a weird fish off the coast of south africa and calls a local fish expert who had let it be known she was interested in weird finds, and he brings her the (unfortunately badly rotted) corpse and she’s like “well, this is sure weird,” and sends off the bones to other experts, who start to quietly freak out, and rush to south africa, and rewards are offered for another one, any other one, and a few years later one is caught and frozen before rotting.
and it’s this incredible discovery, this extinct creature come to life (the prehistoric coelacanth lived in swamps and marshes in south america; these now are deep ocean fish in and around the indian ocean, but it’s still recognizably the same species)!
but it’s also blue.
not like, muddy blue, or tumblr-default-background blue.
proper shimmering sapphire blue and white. almost turquoise in some lights. this like… muddy, fossil creature. always drawn in dinosaur browns and grays. and it’s alive and it’s blue. just imagine being the scientist who opened that crate to this creature for the first time. you’re already excited, you’ve known about this fish for decades, you thought it was a story, you know it’s in this box. you expect to see the weird fins and the strange tail. you know it’s large and odd looking. and you open it up and it’s this beautiful, shining blue, you know?
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
-Stephen Jay Gould.
This quote is great because so was Einstein himself! He never saw himself as a genius, as a mind like no other. He saw himself as a guy who studied alot and he was very dedicated to give that opportunity to others. He also spoke very openly against racism and was one of the few professors that thought black people at the time. Here are some great pictures of him in 1946
Adding onto this: I really recommend Einstein’s short, entry-level essay “Why Socialism?”, found here. It’s ~10 min read and it does a great job of explaining the crux of socialism.
Here are some of his major points:
The individual and society form a symbiotic relationship. A healthy individual needs a healthy society and a healthy society needs healthy individuals.
Capitalism undermines democracy by concentrating wealth into the hands of an economic elite, which in turn funds a political elite to represent its interests in government. The ultra-rich also control the media and educational systems to manipulate public opinion and prevent free thought. (Here Einstein is pre-empting Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman’s propaganda model).
Capitalism’s profit motive entails human needs going unmet to satisfy human greed.
The “worst evil” of capitalism is the crippling of individuals, which begins in school where an exaggerated competitive attitude is
inculcated into the student.
A transition to socialism is necessary to overcome these problems, and is in fact imperative to avert constant warfare and ecological catastrophe. We need a fully democratic society where society’s productive capacity is not concentrated into the hands of a few, but owned by workers and society itself.
