#we are only 0.3% of the population | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

spacelazarwolf · 6 months

Note

I mean this in genuine good faith and am asking because my family isn't historically Ashkenazi but has been operating as such since they left France/French Rite died out. How do you go about keeping an Italian rite when afaik there isn't an Italian rite shul outside of Italy and Israel? I'm learning judeo-french and uncovering family legacy via really old siddurim but as far as anyone can tell me I cannot be Zarphatic without a community. Since there is obviously no community anymore, I am told I have to pick a dominant rite instead. Do you do this for shul and then privately do something else? Is there an option I'm missing? I am based in Europe, so idk if that's part of it. I was just curious seeing that you're posting about being a USAm and also italki. I know it's a different situation because there are no french rite shuls outside of some that are influenced (interestingly especially in parts of Italy)!

this is a good question!

i am not as familiar with how jewish communities function in europe, or how your specific community functions, so i can only speak from my own perspective as an american in a primarily ashkenazi community.

you are correct that there are no synagogues that follow the italian rite outside of italy and israel. italki jews make up only about 0.3% of the global jewish population, and our population is pretty evenly split between italy and israel. i don't know of any other italki jews in my area, or at least any that are practicing.

i am very lucky in that my synagogue is already pretty multicultural, as one of our founding rabbis is sephardic, so we don't really follow one specific rite. we have our own siddur that incorporates ashkenazi and sephardi traditions, as well as a bit of our own personal flair. you will often hear things like "please rise or stay seated, according to your tradition" during services. because of this flexibility, it's pretty easy for me to infuse my personal practice into my communal practice.

some of the ways i've been able to incorporate my own rite in shul is to use italian hebrew pronunciation white reciting prayers. it's easy and most people don't even notice i do it. i'm not sure if there's a french equivalent. i'm also planning on teaching our friday night regulars the italian rite kiddush (which is much easier than the ashkenazi one because the cantor/leader does most of the work lmao) and incorporating some italian jewish music into our services. i also have a few projects in the works, including planning an italki seder as well as a weekend/shabbat program where our friday evening, saturday morning, and havdalah services will all be in the italian rite, feature italian jewish music, italian jewish traditions, etc. and of course accompanied by italian jewish food.

granted, this is all pretty easy for me to do, not just because of the diversity of my synagogue, but also because they're chill as fuck. if your synagogue is not as chill and you don't want to/don't have the option to find a different one, you will likely need to follow whichever rite your synagogue does at shul, and your own at home. obviously this is not ideal, but learning about french jewish music, judeo-french, french jewish history and traditions, etc. and incorporating as much as you can into your personal practice will still be very rewarding.

in terms of how you identify, literally do whatever you want forever. i don't know much about french jews and how they identify, but if you want to identify yourself in a particular way regarding being a french jew, you should have the autonomy to do that. people might not like or understand it, and that's ok because it's not their life. others will be very fascinated and excited to hear about traditions they may have never heard of before, and for me those are the best moments.

#ask avishai #jewish #italki jew

75 notes · View notes

furiarossa · 1 month

Note

You got back into Danny Phantom too, huh? (Me, I've been reading fanfiction.) So, do you think being around ectoplasm affects the rest of the Fentons in any way?

He hey! We're not "back" into Danny Phantom, this is the first time we enjoy it, we didn't know about this show before!

But finally we discovered it, and, of course, its infinite worldbuilding opportunities! Y'know, we ourselves are a bit like the Fentons: we like to research about ghosts. To study and to create.

What do we think about the way ectoplasm affects the rest of the Fentons? Hmm... let's see...

Today we talk about:

ECTOCONTAMINATION

Ectocontamination is defined as the "fusion" between organic materials and ectoplasm. Generally, ectocontamination occurs due to prolonged contact, but there may be other causes, including forced ectocontamination.

Etiology

Ectocontamination in humans manifests itself in the form of a prolonged syndrome, which depending on the resistance of the subject's body can develop different symptoms.

Ectoplasm does not normally tend towards a natural connection with living tissues, being the solidification on the material plane of the body of spirits, and therefore being connected to them; however, there is some non-encoded ectoplasm (not part of a living spirit, long incapable of self-replicating and without information within it), usually leftovers from the meals of large spirits or simply material detached from the original creature through fault of mechanical damage: it is this non-codified ectoplasm that can "attach" to the bodies of living beings, accumulating in them and modifying their characteristics. In low-density tissues (such as adipose tissue), ectoplasm can accumulate in large quantities more easily, saturating the space between cells, while it is more difficult for it to accumulate in bones and cartilage. The brain (and in general the entire area inside the skull and filled with cerebrospinal fluid) is particularly sensitive to the accumulation of ectoplasm.

Ectocontamination is not contagious and only affects living beings that have been directly exposed to non-coded ectoplasm for a long time. Typically, it takes three to seven years to start showing symptoms of ectocontamination.

(So, yeah, this is the case for the Fenton family!)

Clinic

The exposure period necessary to develop ectocontamination varies from 3 to 7 years, provided that the amount of ectoplasm with which the body comes into contact exceeds an individual's natural tolerance threshold.

The tolerance threshold is different from person to person, and varies from a few micrograms per day up to almost half a kilo of ectoplasm. The most sensitive individuals develop the symptoms of ectocontamination just by regularly touching spirits with bare skin, absorbing the ectoplasm that these creatures sometimes lose naturally; however, this is an extremely rare occurrence: such sensitivity affects less than 0.3% of the population.

The syndrome normally begins with a maculopapular skin rash, accompanied by moderate fever, itching, general malaise, sometimes with headache, asthenia, loss of appetite. The main characteristic of the skin picture is the complete asynchrony of the lesions. In fact, several lesions are often found in various developmental stages, identifying the so-called "starry sky effect".

Although this is the most common onset of symptoms, they are not always present: sometimes contaminated people never develop a skin rash, itching or fever.

After the first phase of ectocontamination, the one in which effects similar to a skin disease are visible, the body seems to recover from the latter, but begins to show a series of symptoms that are often defined as "supernatural".

Signs and symptoms

An adult ectocontaminated individual, in whom ectoplasm has become established within the body, will exhibit a variety of symptoms unique to the individual, which may include:

Superior physical strength: the presence of ectoplasm between the fibers increases its performance, two to seven times compared to that of a normal human being. The density of the muscle, thanks to the infracellular presence of the ectoplasmic material, appears to be much higher than the occupied mass.

Obsession: due to the neo-coding (or para-coding) of the ectoplasm, which interacts directly with the nervous system of the host body, the ectocontaminated individual develops a typical characteristic of lemurs and other spirits, namely specific obsession or "purpose". The obsession becomes the first and most important thought of the individual, who focuses on it and tends to get bored easily when the topic is not being talked about. Humans with superior willpower can tone down this symptom, but the thought of obsession still remains with them always.

Resistance to Spirit Possession: Since the body of ectocontaminated individuals is already partially saturated with ectoplasm, it is much more difficult for a spirit to possess it.

Resistance to Mind Control: The brains of ectocontaminated people are modified by neo-coding and often work synergically with ectoplasm; Because of this, a normal psychic attack cannot hit him, because it targets a normal human brain, which has completely different neural connections.

Sensitivity to light: The retina of ectocontaminated individuals is particularly sensitive to sunlight. Often, these individuals wear sunglasses (or other protective devices) even when they are inside buildings. If their eyes are subjected to sunlight during the brightest hours of the day, ectocontaminated people tend to behave in a confused manner, like nocturnal animals awakened by a headlight. Although it is less common, it is possible to develop a skin sensitivity to light, which leads the person to cover themselves completely, from the neck to the shoes.

Depigmentation: The skin, mucous membranes and irises of an ectocontaminated individual may lose melanin, leaving the individual with a "ghostly" and washed-out appearance. This can unfortunately lead to a number of medical complications, such as reduced visual acuity.

So:

Maddie developed superior physical strength, resistance to mind control/spirit possession (we never see her overshadowed by a ghost!) and sensitivity to light (she often wears shaded goggles, even indoor).

Jack developed superior physical strength, an obsession (he's absolutely obsessed with ghosts, he doesn't really care about anything else), a slight resistence to spirit possession (we see him resisting Vlad's overshadowing, not completely, but enough to have the time to warn Maddie), and a partial sensitivity to light (in particular his skin, which must always be covered by the jumpsuit).

Jazz developed an obsession (for psychology, not extreme as the obsession that her dad has for ghosts, but a symptom none the less), and a light resistance to spirit possession. She was less exposed to ectoplasm than her parents. But it doesn't mean that she won't show other symptoms in the future!

And Danny, as we all know, is an half-ghost... that probably is an extra stage of the "normal" ectocontamination. But this is not the place to talk about it ;)

And that's what we think about the Fenton's ectocontamination! We hope it was enough, but... if you have any other question, maybe more specific... we would gladly, with joy, answer it!

And of course this applies to all of you! Help us build our lore with your questions!

All the ghost worldbuilding posts!

The "Ask us about ghost worldbuilding" post

Our ask is open!

#danny phantom #worldbuilding #ghost worldbuilding #fantasy worldbuilding #answer #the way of legends #2023 #spirits #lemures #ectoplasm #my danny phantom #jack fenton

39 notes · View notes

phoenixcatch7 · 2 years

Text

While trawling bleach wiki and doing some maths, as you do, I came across some very useful lore that I think would be very interesting.

Apparently, according to the sword guy (tybw arc), there's 'just over 6000' shinigami at any one time, whether they're in training, sealed, imprisoned, doing duty in any realm, kido corps, or Omnitsukido. Let's round that up a quarter, to 6250.

We can assume the seireitei (and rukongai) take only the Eastern/Asian portion of the afterlife, given the cast, culture and tidbits dropped throughout the media. The population of Asia (in 2018) is about 4.64 billion people. That means that the chance to have enough spirit energy (and post death closure) to become a shinigami after death is roughly 1 in 748,000 (not including the soul born, which seem to be very rare and exclusively nobility, to the point where a minor clan can get a frankly subpar son into the assassin squad as a lieutenant through bribery). Wow.

6250 shinigami in 13 squads means about 480 members of each, so each captain is in charge of just shy of 500 people.

There are 20 seated officers in each squad, including the captain and lieutenant. That means about 25 people per seated officer. I doubt the officers can command exclusively 25 people, but again, that's very handy info.

Now it's very likely almost every seated officer has shikai (as required) and little to none of the unranked members. That's 20 shikai to a squad, 13 squads to the whole. 260 shikai in soul society. That's only a 4% chance of learning your zanpakuto's name from the day you join the gotei to the day you die (again).

Let's say 20 people have bankai, an exaggerated guess. All the captains and half the lieutenants. (The visords don't count here, given that they all were originally captains and lieutenants and most resumed their job later. But weirdos like Ikkaku and Ichigo do count, to even it out.) 20 people in 6250 = 1 in 312. Less than 0.3% of the people in seireitei have bankai!

Now let's zoom out again.

4.64 billion people in Asia, and 20 people with bankai. 1 in 748,000 chance to even get inside seireitei.

The possibility of a) making it to soul society in the first place, b) having enough reiatsu to need food and enter the academy, c) graduating and attaining shikai, and d) attaining bankai?

1 in 232,000,000. 4.3E-7%. My calculator doesn't even go that small even when I turn it on its side.

Those are nigh insurmountable odds.

#bleach #long post #maths #Calculating lore!#lore post #world building #zanpakutou #zanpakuto #And toshiro did this when he was a CHILD #Also wtf Ichigo #bankai #shikai #population #Starts off useful and then goes on a bit of a tangent lol

320 notes · View notes

mightyflamethrower · 9 months

Text

It is a small study, but a very disturbing one.

We keep being told that injury to the heart from the COVID vaccine is very rare, but a study done in Basel Switzerland indicates that the rate of subclinical myocarditis after the COVID vaccine is hardly rare at all.

In fact, in a study with only 777 participants with a median age of 37--all medical professionals getting the COVID vaccine–the incidence of elevated cardiac enzymes 3 days after injection was pretty substantial, at almost 3%.

The CDC did a study and from that, they claimed the rate was 0.001%, or one out of 100,000.

2.8% is a lot higher than 0.001%. Another 0.3% had “probable myocarditis,” putting the total at over 3%. That is 3000 times higher than the US government claimed.

In this small study, nobody had serious complications, but with a myocarditis complication rate of 3%, you would have to expect that giving out hundreds of millions of doses is a pretty risky proposition.

I think we all knew that already, but this study seems to put the nail in the coffin of “vaccine injuries are super rare” from COVID-19 shots.

Oops. Who could have guessed?

One oddity was that the rate of myocarditis among the participants was heavily weighted toward women, not men. That could be an artifact of the sample, or it could indicate that women are more likely to get a complication, but the complications are more likely to be serious among men.

One reason the researchers posit for the vast difference between their results–which are based upon blood tests looking for cardiac enzymes in all participants–and the commonly asserted claim that vaccine-induced myocarditis is rare is that the only cases that are diagnosed without looking specifically for it are severe.

In other words, most people don’t go to the doctor until there is a serious problem, so many people suffer from myocarditis without ever getting diagnosed.

This suggests that there is a very large group of people who were afflicted but never treated. This in most cases would not be a huge problem, as the inflammation resolves on its own, but in some cases, actual damage to the heart was done without it ever being caught.

Another variable, not mentioned, is that myocarditis complications are more common in young men, and this study skewed both female and middle-aged professionals. Given the cohort studied, one would expect them to be not entirely representative of the population as a whole. They are likely wealthier, healthier, and moderately older than the population as a whole.

In any case, this study sheds quite a light on just how deceptive the CDC, the FDA, and NIAID have been about vaccine safety. And also how intentionally ignorant they have chosen to be. This was not a complicated study to do. The researchers chose a cohort easy to recruit, tested them both before and after vaccination to create a baseline and comparison, and analyzed the data.

Easy peasy. Not even that costly. If you wanted to know the actual numbers of people with heart damage post-vaccine, this was an easy-to-construct and interpret study, and you can get results very quickly.

Why didn’t our public health officials do it then? Why did it take a hospital in Switzerland to come up with the idea and execute it? In 2023, no less.

Being off by a factor of 3000 is more than an oops. It is a very big deal.

11 notes · View notes

mariacallous · 7 months

Text

This is the time of year when the U.S. Census Bureau publishes its latest data on poverty in the United States, and headlines are presenting a mixed picture. One set of survey results found that the overall number of people living in poverty in 2022 was relatively unchanged from the last two years. In contrast, another survey found that America’s child poverty rate doubled between 2021 and 2022, largely due to the post-pandemic expiration of an expanded child tax credit. The divergent results reflect the fact that the Census Bureau measures poverty in more than one way.

Neither of these results, however, sheds much light on where poverty is rising, falling, or staying the same, and who is most affected. Ten years ago, our book, “Confronting Suburban Poverty in America,” chronicled the rapid rise of poverty in the nation’s suburbs during the 2000s. We showed the challenges the shifting geography of poverty posed for low-income Americans’ ability to access safety net services, transportation, and jobs.

Now, the Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey (ACS)—another set of data that often flies under the public radar—offers an updated look at the landscape of poverty in 2022. After a long run of economic growth in the 2010s and more than two years into a post-pandemic economic recovery, what does the geography of poverty in America look like today?

The nation’s suburbs accounted for the majority of increases in the poor population following the onset of the pandemic

Of that 1.5 million person increase in Americans living below the poverty line, more than 60% occurred in suburbs. The U.S. is a suburban nation—more people live in suburbs (47%) than in cities (21%), small and midsized metro areas (18%), or rural areas (14%).1 And between 2019 and 2022, the poor population in major metropolitan suburbs grew three times as fast as in major cities (6% versus 2%). Major metro areas in the West (e.g., Ogden, Utah and San Francisco), South (e.g., Washington, D.C. and Houston), and Midwest (e.g., St. Louis and Minneapolis-Saint Paul) posted double-digit percentage increases in their suburban poor populations over this period. (See the appendix for detailed data.)

Fewer suburbs experienced falling poverty rates than cities

As urban and suburban poor populations increased, so did poverty rates (the share of the total population living below the poverty line) in both large cities and their surrounding suburbs. In 2022, roughly one in 10 suburban residents lived in poverty (9.6%), compared to about one in six in primary cities (16.2%). Those rates represented increases of less than half a percentage point over 2019 (0.3 percentage points for suburbs and 0.4 percentage points for large cities).

Over this same period, 25 major metro areas posted statistically significant increases in their suburban poverty rates, and 25 saw significant increases in their urban poverty rates. Only six metro areas had increases in both their urban and suburban poverty rates: Chicago, Detroit, Houston, New York, Ogden, Utah, and San Francisco. As our colleague William H. Frey has shown, several of these metro areas shed both city and suburban population during the 2019-2022 pandemic period.

In contrast, 19 major metro areas saw their urban poverty rates decline between 2019 and 2022, led by Grand Rapids, Mich., Buffalo, N.Y., and Knoxville, Tenn. But only 12 major metro areas posted statistically significant declines in their suburban poverty rates following the pandemic. By and large, those declines reflected overall (non-poor) population growth rather than declines in the number of people living in poverty; no major metro area registered a statistically significant decline in its suburban poor population over this period. For example, the total number of residents in Provo, Utah’s suburbs grew by 13% between 2019 and 2022. That rapid population growth, even as the region’s poor population remained statistically unchanged, led Provo’s suburban poverty rate to fall by 2.2 percentage points.

America continues to confront suburban poverty

A year after the release of “Confronting Suburban Poverty in America,” we wrote that recovery from the Great Recession “did not hit the reset button” on the landscape of poverty. By 2014, the worst effects of the recession had receded, yet the shift of poverty toward the nation’s suburbs had not. The same remains true in the wake of the pandemic recession. Whatever trajectory U.S. poverty follows in the coming years, it’s increasingly clear that the “new geography of poverty” we chronicled a decade ago is here to stay.

Much of our book detailed the challenges of addressing this geography of poverty when so much key infrastructure—such as policies targeted to low-income communities, the social service capacity for deploying key work supports, and the transportation networks that shape access to employment opportunities—historically has been concentrated in urban areas. We articulated the need for more cross-jurisdictional strategies that could grapple with the regional scale at which major metropolitan labor and housing markets function.

For all the economic pain it wrought, the COVID-19 pandemic also induced a massive federal response to alleviate need at the local level. Counties, cities, and towns of all sizes—including thousands in suburban America—received direct aid to help workers, households, and students whose lives the pandemic upended. While that aid was time-limited, it surely opened more suburban leaders’ eyes to the hardships many of their residents continue to face even after the emergency has subsided.

Sustaining efforts to address economic hardship once pandemic-era federal funding runs dry will take creativity, collaboration, and commitment in the face of competing priorities. But as the latest data makes clear, American poverty remains a growing suburban challenge, and solutions to overcome it must take root there as well.

10 notes · View notes

xtinacherry · 11 days

Text

Shin Sekai Yori Blog Post 4/17

Not gonna lie, I didn’t really enjoy Shin Sekai Yori. I don’t think it was a bad anime, I just think I personally don’t have the brain capacity for it. So much information is thrown at you and I made the mistake of trying to fold laundry and watch the show at the same time, LOL. From what I gathered, we follow the young Saki Watanabe as she finally gains her powers and moves on to an academy meant for people who possess psychic abilities. She joins group 1, with the members being Reiko, Satoru, Maria, Mamoru, and Shun.

I think the episode that stuck out most to me was episode 4. They encounter a thing called the Minoshiro, which reveals the answer to any question they ask. It ends up being a fake Minoshiro, in which a guy comes to destroy for them. However, they learn a lot of useful and saddening information from them. They learn about society from the Dark Ages and their own society, and the creation of Ogres and Karmic beings. They also learn information on the population of those with PK, such as only 0.3% of the population obtain PK and there were movements to eradicate them, some even leading to war. It made me feel sorry for these kids, they are absorbing so much information at such a young age, and given a lot of responsibility for holding this type of power. A lot is to be said about the development and destruction of certain societies and eras. It went from embracing PK powers to suppressing anyone who has them, leading to what they called the Dark Ages. Then it progresses back into acceptance or practice of PK powers into the present time in this anime. Episode 4 contained a big chunk of the history of this universe, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. I feel like this show tried to implement many themes but I could not really catch myself developing any of my own thoughts. I think our next round of episodes will help me get a clearer idea of the message of this anime, but right now I feel like my mind is convoluted with the huge information dumps, especially in episode 4. One thing I did notice is the question of what it means to be human and to be treated as human. This goes for the rat people, Queerats, and all other beings in this universe. Even the existence as humans obtaining PK is called into question. So what makes one human, and what is the ethics of treating one as one?

#ForVisualCulture

5 notes · View notes

eaglesnick · 7 months

Text

The Tyranny of the Minority

Given an election is probably only 12 months away it is perhaps time to remember a few historical facts regarding recent Tory Prime Ministers.

The disgraced liar and lawbreaker Boris Johnson first became Prime Minister when the Conservative Party members elected him leader of their party after the resignation of Theresa May. He initially came to power, not through winning the national popular vote at an election, but because the members of the Conservative Party choose him as THEIR leader. He was the first of the UNELECTED Tory Prime Ministers and has NEVER apologised for his disgraceful actions.

After Johnson was driven from power because even the Tory Party couldn’t stomach Johnson’s self-serving behaviour anymore, Liz Truss became the next UNELECTED Prime Minister. Again, it was Conservative Party members and not the national electorate who determined who would rule our country.

Just like Johnson before her, Liz Truss was also a disaster. She unleashed an economic wrecking ball, trashing the nations economic standing in the world, costing the country billions of pounds. She lasted 50 days as Prime Minister before being unceremoniously dumped by the very people who had voted for her. Despite the fact we are still paying the price for her lunatic economic failures she has NEVER apologised for her behaviour.

Rishi Sunak was the next UNELECTED Prime Minister, again chosen by Conservative Party members only. Under his watch, the country has become what many are calling “BROKEN BRITAIN”.

Surely there is a lesson here? If you vote Conservative you may not get the Prime Minister you thought you were getting and you certainly wont be seeing an improvement in your standard of living.

Conservative Party members make up 0.3% of the population. The average age of a party member is estimated to be 57 years, two thirds of the membership is male, the majority are white British, and over 40% of them live in the south of England (excluding London). Tory Party members also tend to be richer than the average citizen.

These are the handful of men and women – predominantly men- who have decided on our last three Prime Ministers. All three were a disaster for the country.

Those that decide to vote for Rishi Sunak in the coming election should remember these lessons. Sunak, even if he wins the next election, is unlikely to survive as Prime Minister for very long as the far right of the Conservative Party is already manoeuvring against him.

All voters thinking of voting Tory, given the disastrous decisions that have gone before, should ask the question, do we really want a handful of aging, predominantly male, southern England men determining the future of our country yet again? I think not.

#uk Politics #rishi sunak #liz truss #boris johnson #democracy #minority rule #dictatorship #conservative party

2 notes · View notes

encyclopika · 1 year

Text

Animal Crossing Fish - Explained #237a

Brought to you by a marine biologist and the regular bivalves...

CLICK HERE FOR THE AC FISH EXPLAINED MASTERPOST!

We know what bivalves are by now, right? A soft squishy creature that filter feeds in one spot its whole life (if it were up to the bivalve), protecting itself by growing two shells that are controlled by a muscle working a hinge in the back. It's a simple design. Sometimes, if you're lucky, these animals also produce some of the most beautiful biologically-made materials in the world. So, let's get into it.

______________________________________________________________

Hard Clam

The Hard Clam (Mercenaria mercenaria), also called the Northern Quahog, is friend from my neck of the oceans. Native to the Northeastern shores of North America, this guy has been a staple part of the human diet in this area for centuries - it is the clam in clam chowder here. But the Hard Clam also meant something more to the native populations of this area - inside the hard clam's shell, it grows this beautiful violet pigment. The native tribes called it "wampum" and made beautiful beads out of them. Finding a clam shell with wampum that was thick enough to make these beads was rare, and so very valuable, even to the Europeans that eventually settled here.

______________________________________________________________

Grand Oyster

It pisses me off how long it took me to find out what this was supposed to be (there is no "grand oyster") and then ACPC just did a terrible job adapting it tbh. For all intent and purposes, the icon looks like a clam (granted, our common bivalve names don't really align with specific families or anything, by I digress). Luckily, I found out it is called "shirocho" in the Japanese version, so all I had to do was work backwards and find out what shirocho's English or at least its scientific name, was. But all I kept coming up with were shirocho pearls, which, I expected. Long story short, this is the Silver- or Gold-lipped Oyster (Pinctada maxima), an absolutely massive oyster whose shell can be up to a foot (0.3 m) in diameter. This giant oyster not only makes giant pearls, but it also makes its pearls in silver or gold, called South Sea Pearls. A fine quality South Sea Pearl in gold is worth about as much as I paid for my house. Needless to say, these guys are farmed for pearls. More wholesomely, their pearls are the national gems of The Philippines where it is native and the oyster itself appears on the country's 1,000-peso bill.

And there you have it. Gorgeous, aren't they?

#grand oyster #hard clam #bivalves #animals #animal crossing pocket camp #acpc #pearls #mollusk #science in video games #animal crossing fish explained

5 notes · View notes

gothseparatist · 9 months

Text

Conditions of the Ninth House

Ok I was just joking around that "It's a good thing the Ninth are the bone necros because they probably all have rickets being on Pluto" but then I wondered, would they?? how weak is their daylight?

Bunch of back of the envelope calculations and ruminations under the cut but the tl;dr is that brightest day Harrow would've experienced prior to Canaan House was darker than that of a typical grocery store interior

They aren't under a planetary atmosphere and I'm no physicist but I think light is light in a vacuum, some UV would reach that far just as some visible light does and due to them being partially a space station basically they are going to be under radiation we aren't.

Measurements for Solar radiation (W/m^2) on Earth are 1,413 at max and 1,321 at min. For Pluto due to its highly eccentric orbit it is much more extreme at 1.55 and 0.57. Compare this with Neptune which is 1.54 max and 1.47 min. Using the above and the value of 98,000 lux (a unit for brightness) for noon on Earth, I did some quick calculations that put noon on Pluto to vary between 114 lux to 42 lux (again due to its substantial orbital eccentricity). Putting that in comparable terms: average living room in Australia in 1998 was apparently 50 lux. Sunrise and sunset on Earth is ~400 lux. The dark limit of civil twilight (most can still read) is 3.4 lux. Night of fullmoon is 0.05-0.3 lux. Recommended office lighting is 320-500 lux.

With the above in mind, natural light reaching Drearburh at its brightest is comparable to a typical living room. And Pluto's rotation is 6.4 Earth days so the changes in natural lighting would be much more gradual than what Harrow would've experienced in Canaan house. It must have been quite the sensory overload + chaos for her!

Now for UV!

As far as UV goes, only Pluto readings I can find are in Rayleighs and I am too lazy to convert them [also yes I believe this is reflected off Pluto but it does not matter for our purposes as that is some of the light they'd be getting hit with] not many crafts have been to Pluto lol

So I'm just gonna go off a common value based on distance that Pluto receives roughly 1/1600 of the light we do. Thus, its UV will be 1/1600 of the UV on the ISS (Drearburh is under artificial atmosphere but it is unclear what filtering it does in terms of UV so I'm mostly ignoring that). Earth 's atmosphere filters out basically all UV-C (germicidal really intense one) and about 90% or more of UV-B (the sunburn one).

Unfiltered sunlight composition is about 10% UV so 10% of those earlier solar radiation measurements of 1.55 and 0.57 W/m^2 is UV. This gives us the convenient calculation to 0.155 and 0.057 W/m^2 in the UV spectrum.

For some reason it was impossible for me to find simple measurements of UV in W/m^2 lol (everything was already adjusted to different units). BUT I was able to pull up a few studies that had those as raw data for entirely different thing and most helpful was one in Kuwait where UVB was 0.25 W/m^2 or this map where it is in mW/m^2 (so 200 = 0.2).

In terms of UV, this would put the Ninth House within the range of Southern England during its perihelion and to Scandinavia during its aphelion so yes it is in fact Rickets City.

perihelion = closest to sun; aphelion= furthest

It is likely the house makes use of UV-producing lamps for its population especially given the major malnutrition issues and that the founding population included at the very least some people of Maori descent, potentially other ethnic groups with often brown skin, and people with darker skin can be more susceptible to low Vit D in low UV environments since their melanin is blocking what precious little UV they are getting. John made many oversights e.g. he's able-bodied so the houses lack automated doors, but given his background I'd imagine he'd catch onto this at least. I believe there are mentions of arc lamps in the text and these can let off some UV so there's some textual support to this idea. However, I do imagine they still rely heavily on necromancy to heal rickets just as they do other conditions. [Also normally, I'd say "realistically" after 10k years they'd likely have lost a lot of their melanin responsivity as that has happened quite quickly in humans (Cheddar Man vs modern white brits or Ashkenazi Jews vs Mizrahi ones) but the Ninth House is a much more stable environment than European history LOL, like people are provided their food and there's no war at home, etc so the "use it or lose it" selection pressure isn't as relevant as it would be for cave animals. But also "realistically" doesn't matter anyways for a bunch of reasons and the Houses clearly engage in some genetic meddling anyway (Ianthe and Coronabeth's Alexandria's Genesis asses have violet eyes).]

Lastly, the height of no-one-else-gives-a-shit-Avery, but the low light also has major implications for their crop production. "Low light" houseplants [University of Melbourne] have lux within "270 to 807". The Ninth likely has to be using either additional lights for their snowleeks and/or they are channeling a lot of light into a mirror/reflector and beaming it over the growing area. The latter makes the most sense to me.. though given how dark it is they probably should've just GMO'd some lower water column algae

#TLT #TLT meta #dubious calculations #i wish i didnt hate drawing backgrounds bc i would love to design the snowleek fields LOL #the diet on the ninth is so bad #god i hope they are on b12 supplements

6 notes · View notes

ruby-white-rabbit · 2 years

Text

So ectopic pregnancies are 1/50. So about 2% of the population of "women" as recorded. But this can also impact trans individuals.

There 167 million women in the US. That's 3,340,000 women having ectopic pregnancies. Three MILLION women who WILL DIE from a nonviable pregnancy if not removed.

Covid killed only 1 million.

Miscarriages also happen in about 10-15% of women that KNEW they were pregnant. The number can actually be higher if we count those that aren't aware they were pregnant and it happened early on.

So let's throw an additional 45 million on top of that because if not passed naturally, the mother can go septic and die from the baby decomposing inside of her. The already dead baby no on one is killing to remove.

So that's about 50 million possible deaths by taking away abortions with no exceptions. Not to mention health conditions or the mothers being literal children that could cause them to die.

So mother and child both die in all these cases. They have successfully DOUBLED the body count they wanted to avoid.

They are willing to kill at LEAST 15% of the ENTIRE United States population when covid killed 0.3%

They are more significantly more deadly than covid on PURPOSE

#i did math for this #might be off a bit but i estimated and rounded for some of the numbers #cause the covid percentage is like 0.303...plus some. im not throwing twenty numbers out to be exact

20 notes · View notes

yenvengerberg · 1 year

Text

I posted 6,614 times in 2022

1,104 posts created (17%)

5,510 posts reblogged (83%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@yenvengerberg

@thesoldiersminute

@capinejghafa

@viktorhargreeves

@wenclair

I tagged 6,610 of my posts in 2022

#thanks for tagging me :) - 2,757 posts

#queue - 1,970 posts

#the witcher - 833 posts

#the umbrella academy - 604 posts

#house of the dragon - 589 posts

#anonymous - 589 posts

#shadow and bone - 525 posts

#stranger things - 412 posts

#bridgerton - 348 posts

#peaky blinders - 287 posts

Longest Tag: 140 characters

#and his support is appreciated but people turning it into a 'praise their fav' contest instead of focusing on the real issue here is... yike

My Top Posts in 2022:

See the full post

16,116 notes - Posted June 12, 2022

the fact that anyone dying can cost a nation up to 6 billion pounds is actually absurd

20,661 notes - Posted September 8, 2022

i hate what bingeing culture has turned the consumption of media into. the pressure to watch everything all at once as soon as it drops otherwise you simply can't go onto social media or 'it's your own fault, you should know better!', the way it forms a dread around shows you know you can't watch straight away because of life commitments when you should be excited for them, and the way buzz only lasts for a few days before inevitably, everyone moves on and forgets about it. i just wish i could return to the excitement of weekly releases that kept me guessing for months on end and fostered a discussion around media

23,726 notes - Posted June 19, 2022

news from the uk right now is that our new prime minister, who was appointed little over a month ago, is now being asked by her own party to resign after almost crashing the pound and having to do a complete u-turn on her policies.

she's actually had even less time in power (because parliament has to 'respectfully' stop due to the queen dying, cos you know, the country had to come to a complete halt for ten days) and her time in control is being likened to the shelf life of a lettuce. no seriously, there is currently a live stream of 'who will last longer, liz truss or this lettuce?':

58,406 notes - Posted October 14, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

seriously wondering if we can call the uk a democracy anymore. we have a prime minister that less than 0.3% of the population voted for, we have a new king that we have no say on, people are getting arrested for protesting against the monarchy under the excuse of ‘offending someone’ and we are effectively having a day of mourning forced upon us for the funeral with important hospital appointments cancelled and people even getting kicked out of holiday lettings for the day. this reads like a dystopian world where a dictator has died, not something happening now in a supposed democratic country

59,216 notes - Posted September 13, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #GOD THIS IS SO EMBARASSING #i reblogged myself the most i am an egotistical maniac confirmed #my longest tag just me complaining at people asdfghj #and my top posts......#the fact that 1 3 and 4 are just me complaining about things that took off *sobs to self*#reminder for 2023 is don't blog about uk politics it haunts me forever #am proud of lizzy lettuce for getting up there tho if my country did one thing this year it's that #anyway i made 1000+ own posts that is pretty damn impressive OR a sign of my mental unwellness you decide

10 notes · View notes

the-firebird69 · 1 month

Text

We don't pull off this guy and pull people off for real we are not going to have anything I hear what it is and why there's an issue these guys are encountering the armies that they were raising by having people die and missed it still miss it and for some reason they're fighting them and sort of know it and the threatening that s*** out of him so he used it to direct more people at the max and they're going to be fighting each other over the stuff and think it's okay I don't know about you but I get the heebie-jeebies when I think about it this armies of these and they're different sizes you know I don't need to hear from you stupid people here you're so damn dumb this stuff's been around for centuries you should know about it if you don't you need to be put down you're so damn dumb. Anyways the max get hostile and they're over the top and they're not doing the right thing they're trying to get control themselves and you retards are ruining it and this little guy just wants to live he's really young really sharp and has great ideas and you guys don't care cuz you're stupid and we're going to have to get rid of you I'm not the only one who thinks that way at all

Mac daddy

There are they're getting rid of them in the public and all over the world it was 0.2% this morning an hour it's now 0.3% an hour and people didn't think it would get there right now or up to 0.78 and in moments it's going to be 1% lost today of the morlock across the board most of it is more lock and she's two groups of jackasses we're arguing about stuff they shouldn't talk about. It's not a pleasure to announce it because they are so nasty and it is a purge and the Holocaust on them and we are not helping you because you are threatening us constantly and trying to use devices and so on. As it is the percent has dropped down and it was at 9% and it is approaching 8% fairly soon you'll start feeling it and overall you were at 22% earlier it came down from 27% but that included today and the 1% from today which is going to be more if you add in the minority more lock and the pseudo empire the minority motor lock are about 8% and the pseudo empire are about 6.5%, so that is 14.5% that you need to add in and that would make 36 .5% and that's of the general population and it includes the islands and that is in total so in essence all of the warlock including miscellaneous and we have to add then and there are 2% be 38.5%, used to be 55% you think you haven't lost that many when you try to stop these you get involved and get hurt and so you're letting the mess everything up, you simply don't know what to do. All in all people think it's not going to be that bad but because of recent information coming out and verification of the most likely existence of mega Giants which are actually part Kaiju, which are pivotal in the harvesting of thorium balls which are many many miles across without these particular biomechanical weapons they would not be harvested and would just sit there machines and it have to be replaced too quickly even if you made out of thorium it would not work. there is going to be massive amounts of fighting huge huge fights and nothing's going to stop it and Dave we're going to have you hit for that stupid s***. There's more happening and we're going to get to it but this is gigantic news

Thor Freya

Olympus

Hera I help put in the thorium part

Zues me too

0 notes

newstfionline · 2 months

Text

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Judge orders Trump to pay more than $350 million in N.Y. civil fraud trial (Washington Post) New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron on Friday ordered former president Donald Trump to pay more than $350 million in penalties, handing down a hefty penalty following a months-long civil trial in which Trump and others were accused of financial fraud by New York Attorney General Letitia James. Engoron also said Trump could not serve as an officer or a director for any New York company for three years. Trump has denied all wrongdoing and assailed the case. Attorneys for Trump sharply criticized the ruling, with one calling it “manifest injustice" and saying they hoped it would be overturned on appeal. With this decision, Trump now owes more than $440 million in fines and damages across multiple civil trials.

Hang Out (The Atlantic) The average amount of time that American men spent socializing face to face has fallen 30 percent from 2003 to 2022, and among teenagers that’s fallen over 45 percent. That’s happened at the same time that people of all ages are citing increased levels of loneliness and other symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Mexico will likely elect a woman as its next president (AP) Mexico is almost certain to elect its first female president in June—both leading candidates are women—but it’s almost equally as certain that she won’t have much room to act independently of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The populist president has continued proposing new, expensive projects in the closing months of his administration, before he leaves office on Sept. 30. He will also leave a lot of big-ticket projects unfinished. That will probably leave his successor with her hands tied for much of her six-year term. “The next administration will inherit a country with a financial hole that will limit the maneuvering room throughout the next term,” said Moody’s Analytics Director Alfredo Coutiño.

Centuries-Old Border Dispute in Central America (NYT) The boat edged its way past the mangrove swamps, a tangled maze of thorn-covered branches sheltering jaguars and shrieking howler monkeys. We were in Belize, our GPS signals showed, the English-speaking Central American country where British pirates put down stakes centuries ago. But then members of Guatemala’s military, clad in camouflage and berets, spotted us. Pulling up in their own boat, they grasped rifles, index fingers close to the triggers. “You’ve just entered Guatemalan waters!” one shouted in Spanish when they were just a few feet away. “We request that you steer toward the nearest Guatemalan command post.” Wil Maheia, the leader of the Belizean group we were embedded with, yelled back: “No, you’re trespassing in Belizean waters! If you take us into custody that will be kidnapping!” The episode laid bare a simmering political dispute in one of the most volatile corners of Central America, in which Belize, Central America’s least populous country with only about half a million people, is pitted against Guatemala, the region’s giant with a population of 18 million. The unresolved territorial feud—one of the oldest in the Americas—has tensions flaring, raising fears over greater instability in a region already marked by drug wars and the exodus of migrants to the United States.

The UK tips into recession (Guardian) According to new data released by the Office for National Statistics, the U.K.’s economy fell into a recession at the end of last year. The data shows that gross domestic product (GDP) dropped by 0.3% in the last three months of 2023 thanks to a weak holiday retail showing and a general decline in all sectors of the national economy. The recession is another blow for Rishi Sunak’s government, which is already struggling ahead of national elections slated for later this year. “This is Rishi Sunak’s recession, and the news will be deeply worrying for families and business across Britain,” said Rachel Reeves, the second-most senior leader of the Labour Party. The ONS projects that economic growth was just 0.1% in 2023, making it the country’s weakest year since 2009 (excluding the Covid pandemic years). The economic stagnation has brought soaring consumer prices, higher cost of living, and a spike in borrowing costs to the British population.

Sarkozy’s Prison Sentence Halved to 6 Months (NYT) A Paris appeals court upheld on Wednesday the 2021 conviction of former President Nicolas Sarkozy for illegal financing an election campaign but cut his sentence from one year to six months with a further six months suspended. Mr. Sarkozy’s lawyer, Vincent Desry, immediately said that Mr. Sarkozy would appeal to France’s highest court. The appeal could take years to be resolved, ensuring that Mr. Sarkozy remains free for the foreseeable future. Whether he will ever serve time in prison remains an open question. Although his legal travails are many and various, Mr. Sarkozy has remained an important political figure, with some influence over President Emmanuel Macron, who often turns to Mr. Sarkozy’s center-right Republicans party for support in Parliament.

Alexei Navalny, who galvanized Russia’s political opposition, died in prison. (WSJ) The cause of his death was still being established, authorities said. One of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critics, Navalny lost consciousness and couldn’t be revived after taking a walk. The Kremlin denied responsibility. The 47-year-old activist had been in jail since 2021, serving 30-plus years on charges he and his supporters said were fabricated.

Russia’s Wounded Soldiers (NYT) A shell slammed into the ground just feet from where the Russian soldier was deployed, and the explosion tossed him into the air. “I felt my arm fall off, then a blow to my leg, everything slowed down, just a frozen picture in my eyes—no sounds, no other sensations,” said the soldier, Andrei, a 29-year-old former convict recruited into the Wagner private military company. Drifting in and out of consciousness, he was convinced that death loomed. As shells exploded on all sides in the fighting near the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, fellow soldiers dragged him to an evacuation point. He eventually spent more than a year in hospitals, with the remnants of his left arm amputated and one leg still at risk. Cases like Andrei’s do not receive much publicity in Russia, where—as in Ukraine—the total number of war wounded is not disclosed. But, according to American and Ukrainian officials and numerous military analysts, the number is staggering, perhaps in the hundreds of thousands. And one senior Russian official estimated that amputees represented more than half of the seriously wounded.

Russian sanctions (NYT) After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Western nations imposed the most extensive sanctions and trade restrictions in history on Moscow. Today, Russia appears to be doing OK. Its economy is growing steadily. Russia can’t buy much from the West but has found new providers for drones, surveillance gear, computer chips and other gear. Its oil and gas sales are still strong, despite attempts to stop them. Russian officials say they have plenty of money to pay for their war. Moscow’s continued strength is a humbling result for the U.S. and its allies. These nations make up more than half of the global economy, and they tried to weaponize their influence over trade and finance to weaken Russia. They hoped to make President Vladimir Putin a pariah and maybe even stop the war. Those efforts have fallen short. “The instruments and the policies of the United States are ineffective,” Putin bragged during an interview last week. He is surely not the only leader to notice the U.S. failure to cripple Russia. When China wants to menace Taiwan or India wants to assassinate perceived enemies on foreign soil, they will know that Washington couldn’t turn Russia into a pariah when it broke the rules. Sanctions in Russia have exposed the limits of U.S. power.

As Israel corners Rafah, Netanyahu defies the world (Washington Post) The chorus of warnings is hard to ignore. International organizations, rights group advocates and even a growing number of Western leaders are all urging Israel to refrain from launching a full-scale ground offensive on Rafah, the overwhelmed city on Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. Close to a million and a half displaced Palestinians are crammed in makeshift encampments there, the majority having fled other parts of Gaza already ravaged by the Israeli military campaign that followed the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas. In a Wednesday phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, French President Emmanuel Macron said Israel risked a “humanitarian disaster of a new magnitude.” A joint statement from the leaders of Australia, Canada and New Zealand said “a military operation into Rafah would be catastrophic” and called on Israel to “listen to its friends.” The prime ministers of Spain and Ireland wrote to authorities in Brussels, suggesting Israel may be in breach of its association agreement with the European Union and demanding an “urgent review.” “We will fight until complete victory, and this includes a powerful action also in Rafah after we allow the civilian population to leave the battle zones,” Netanyahu said Wednesday.

Family grieves after American teenager shot dead in West Bank (Washington Post) A 17-year-old Palestinian American was killed in the West Bank on Saturday, a family member told The Washington Post, making him the second known U.S. citizen killed there since the start of the Israel-Gaza war. Mohammad Ahmad Alkhdour was shot twice in the head near the town of Biddu, northwest of Jerusalem, before he was rushed to a hospital, his aunt Sana’a Ayesha Alkhdour said. He was pronounced dead Saturday night. Israeli forces were allegedly behind the shooting, according to the human rights group Defense for Children International—Palestine and Sana’a Ayesha Alkhdour. Mohammad Ahmad Alkhdour’s death comes just weeks after the killing of Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, another 17-year-old American, in the West Bank. While the toll of Israel’s war in Gaza has captured global attention, Israel has also stepped up its military activity in the West Bank. Settler violence in the area has risen at an unprecedented rate since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. At least 388 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since then, according to the United Nations.

A small business in war-time Gaza sews padded cloth diapers, creating jobs and helping weary parents (AP) Their scissors move quickly, shearing pieces of white cloth to be stitched together with cotton pads and taken to market in battered cardboard boxes. Before the day is done, the Palestinian seamstresses will have sewn 500 diapers and distributed them to war-weary parents in Gaza for about $4 per package of eight, half of what mass-produced disposable diapers cost in the besieged enclave. Maysaa Qatati, the manager of the sewing workshop, knows the output will barely make a dent in the huge demand—but the little business is thriving and creating jobs. “People were looking for pampers and could not find them,” she said from the whirring workshop in Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza. “They would stand in line at the merchant and buy it at a very high price.” In some cases, parents say they have resorted to easily soiled cloth diapers. But cleaning those is difficult when water is so scarce. The disposable diapers made in Qatati’s sewing workshop are an improvement because of the cotton pads.

UN envoy says Libya will slide into ‘disintegration’ if politicians don’t move toward elections (AP) The U.N. special envoy for Libya warned the country’s feuding political actors Thursday that if they don’t urgently form a unified government and move toward elections the oil-rich North African nation will slide into “disintegration.” Abdoulaye Bathily told the U.N. Security Council there are numerous alarming signs of such a slide and urged all political leaders to put aside “their self-interests” and come together to negotiate and reach a compromise “to restore the dignity of their motherland.” Libya plunged into chaos after a NATO-backed uprising toppled and killed longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. In the chaos that followed, the country split, with rival administrations in the east and west backed by rogue militias and foreign governments.

#headlines #news

0 notes

speedyposts · 3 months

Text

‘Why single us out?’ Pakistan’s Ahmadi minority boycotts elections, again

Islamabad, Pakistan – Amir Mahmood remembers a meeting between his Ahmadi community and top officials of Pakistan’s government last September. He can’t forget how the community, for long a victim of persecution in the country, saw a decline in attacks on its graves and shrines in the days after that meeting.

But that respite did not last.

.adtnl6r-container { display: flex; flex-direction: column; align-items: center; width: 80%; max-width: 600px; margin: 20px auto; background-color: #FF3300; border: 1px solid #ddd; border-radius: 10px; overflow: hidden; box-shadow: 0 0 10px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); } .adtnl6r-banner { width: 100%; max-height: 250px; overflow: hidden; border-bottom: 1px solid #ddd; } .adtnl6r-banner img { width: 100%; height: auto; max-height: 250px; } .adtnl6r-content { width: 100%; padding: 20px; box-sizing: border-box; text-align: center; } .adtnl6r-title { font-size: 1.8em; font-weight: bold; margin-bottom: 10px; color: #fff; } .adtnl6r-description { font-size: 1.2em; color: #fff; margin-bottom: 15px; } .adtnl6r-learn-more-button { display: inline-block; padding: 10px 20px; font-size: 1.2em; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; background-color: #0066CC; color: #fff; border-radius: 50px; /* Pill style border-radius */ border-color: #0066CC; transition: background-color 0.3s; } .adtnl6r-learn-more-button:hover { background-color: #45a049; color: #000; } .adtnl6r-marker { font-size: 0.8em; color: #fff; margin-top: 10px; }

Your Path to Online Virality! Reach people through websites, mobile apps, blogs, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc.

Advertise Everywhere!

Take Action

Ads by Adtional

As the world’s fifth-most populous nation prepares to vote on February 8, its half-million-strong Ahmadi community will boycott the election, after a spike in attacks on its members, institutions and even burial sites in the weeks leading up to the vote. For many Ahmadis, like Mahmood, the brief decline in attacks following the September meeting was proof of what could happen — if the country’s leaders wanted it.

“What the decline in attacks told us that if the state wishes, it can easily control the violence against us but unfortunately, the impression we get is that either some government is not clear-minded about its action, or is unwilling to help,” he said.

It is a sentiment driven by decades of entrenched discrimination, including in the electoral system. And it has led the community to boycott the elections. In a statement last week, the community’s leaders announced their “disassociation” from the vote. “Although the elections are ostensibly being held under a joint electorate, there is, however, a separate voter list prepared only for Ahmadi citizens due to their faith,” said a statement released by an organisation representing the community on Wednesday.

“This discriminatory treatment based on religion is a deliberate attempt to disenfranchise Ahmadi citizens from the electoral process for all intents and purposes and thus denying them their right to vote,” it added.

While the community has been avoiding participation in elections for nearly four decades, the latest boycott announcement came after three different incidents of Ahmadi grave desecration in the last two weeks, in different towns in Punjab province.

Mahmood, also a community spokesperson, said data showed that there were attacks on 42 Ahmadi places of worship across the country last year, as well as desecration of more than 100 graves in just the state of Punjab. The year 2022 also saw at least 14 mosques and 197 graves belonging to the community desecrated last year, according to the community’s statistics. At least three members of the community were gunned down in 2022, allegedly due to their religious affiliation.

‘No sense of belonging’

The Ahmadi sect considers itself Muslim. But they were declared “non-Muslims” in 1974 under Pakistan’s constitution. In the decades since the 1970s, hundreds of attacks, including murders and desecrations of their religious places and graveyards, have been reported in Pakistan.

Community members were active participants in the electoral process until and including in the 1977 elections, before then-army chief General Zia ul-Haq imposed martial law.

The military strongman passed a ruling in 1984 which restricted the community from practising Islamic rituals or publicly displaying any symbol that identifies them as Muslims, including building minarets or domes on mosques, or publicly writing verses from the Quran.

In the elections that were conducted in 1985, he introduced separate voter lists for different religious groups in the country, after which the community began their boycott of the polls. The system of separate voter lists lasted until the 1997 elections, after which it was unified again for the 2002 elections under military ruler General Pervez Musharraf.

Under the revised joint list, all Pakistanis regardless of their religious affiliation were combined in a single voter list — except Ahmadis. They were instead put in a separate “supplementary” list, where they are identified as “Qadianis”, a term that refers to the town in Indian Punjab where the Ahmadi tradition took root. The community considers the term derogatory.

“If there can be one voter list which has the rest of the citizens of Pakistan, regardless of their caste, ethnicity, and faith, what is stopping them from adding Ahmadis to that list? Why single us out?” Mahmood asked.

Other members of the community say the discrimination in the electoral lists is in keeping with the bias they confront in everyday life.

“I moved to Pakistan two decades ago from the United Kingdom after getting married,” Fatima*, a 47-year-old homemaker, told Al Jazeera. “I am human, of course. I also get frustrated a lot, because I am a citizen of Pakistan and I want to be able to vote,” she said.

“I have voted in the UK in the past when I was young, and it has really given me this sense of pride and achievement, that I can contribute in a small way to my country. But in Pakistan, that sense of belonging has been stolen from me, on account of my faith,” she added.

Akbar*, a 22-year-old student in Islamabad, says that while he is politically aware and would have liked to vote if there was a unified voter list, candidates of mainstream parties often resorted to inflammatory comments against his community.

“It is something very commonly seen in Pakistani election campaigns that bigotry, against our community is very evident. Candidates use inflammatory comments to garner votes while putting our lives at risk,” he tells Al Jazeera.

“There is a clear sense of alienation in the community. If all the mainstream parties are thinking along such lines, how can we even think about voting, especially when the list wants us to renounce our faith and call ourselves non-Muslims?” Akbar added.

‘Limited influence’

Political analyst Tahir Mehdi said that for Pakistan’s religious conservatives, the decision to get Ahmadis declared non-Muslims through the constitutional amendment of 1974 remains a major achievement.

“This is a subject on which there will be no compromise, and they want to protect this victory at any cost,” he said.

Mehdi added that with because the community’s population in Pakistan is relatively small, it is not a significant enough voting constituency to woo for parties. “Their lack of numbers means a limited way to influence polling results, thus leaving no incentive for the state, or even political parties, to change their policies.”

Fatima, the housewife, said that the persecution against the community goes much beyond attacks or the separate voter list.

“We have so many restrictions and limitations in our day-to-day lives. Something as simple as ordering something online, the vendor will refuse to deliver the moment they see the name of Rabwah city as the address of delivery,” she said. Rabwah is a small city in Punjab province, situated roughly 177km (110 miles) west of Lahore. The city houses close to 80,000 people, with over 90 percent of the population belonging to Ahmadi community. The government officially renamed the city Chenab Nagar in the late 1990s but the name has not stuck.

“I have experienced this multiple times myself, that a vendor would point out to my city, and say you live in Chenab Nagar, you must be a Qadiani [a derogatory term for Ahmadis], and they point-blank refuse to deliver,” she said.

Yet, she said, that has not weakened her spirit — or her faith.

“We are not going to give up on our faith. We are never going to renounce it, even if it means not being able to vote. The state is trying to control us, but they won’t succeed,” she said.

That is also why Akbar, the student in Islamabad, refuses to participate in the elections.

“Just by participating in a system like this, it feels like you’re endorsing something that is working towards eliminating you from it. It will be a betrayal to myself and to my community to participate in this apartheid system of dual [voter’s] list singling out me out for my faith.”

*Names changed to protect the individuals.

Your Path to Online Virality! Reach people through websites, mobile apps, blogs, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc.

Advertise Everywhere!

Take Action

Ads by Adtional

0 notes

samarbaby · 5 months

Text

Shackles of Hijab

read all or none

INTRODUCTION

I have been wondering about all those people who always talk about women rights and fighting for freedom for women who cover themselves due to their religion. Because apparently, women who cover or wear Hijab are shackled to their religion norms and the women who have the liberty to whatever they want and wherever they want are free in the true sense. But are they? So, let’s talk about the shackles women are bound to when they dress up. First, let’s talk about the women who wear Hijab and then the ‘liberal’ women. HIJAB Mainly the Muslim women wear Hijab or head scarf and they do it because the GOD they believe in has commanded them to cover themselves. And that resulted in them to disregard the present day fashion as they cannot wear clothes that go against this command so they can’t really follow trends. They also cannot show off their beauty to the world either. So, posting on social media without Hijab is off the question. So, we can conclude: ‘Oppressed women’ - Muslims who wear Hijab Cause - Islam (they believe in the GOD who commanded them to cover)

Result - cannot show off or follow trends.

LIBERAL WOMEN

Let’s call the women who don’t wear Hijab and follow fashion trends as ‘liberal women’. Of course, it’s not the clothes that makes someone liberal but their mindset. However, people often view women wearing ‘Hijab’ as ‘oppressed’ and women wearing ‘western cloths or short cloths’ as ‘liberal women or modern women’ (it feels disgusting to write about categorizing women like that) so we’ll go with that. CAUSES: Usually the women who don’t follow the religion, they follow celebrities, influencers, models, idols, etc. The popular people with name and fame make the trends and media praises them which just make you want to be more like them causing you to follow trends. There can be other reasons why they wear the cloths that they are wearing but the main reason is they get influenced by the society around them. I mean, you don’t see anyone roaming on the road wearing 70s or 80s fashion unless they are cosplaying. Whatever you wear you are wearing according to the present time fashion. So, liberal women dress according to the time and the place they live in.

RESULTS:

Now what could be results of following fashion trends? They can’t be as bad as being ‘oppressed’. Right? Well, they are worse. How? Let’s see:

 EATING DISORDER

Women have been suffering from eating disorder more than men do. Due to their fear of gaining weight and their desire to get the ideal body shape they have succumb themselves to unhealthy eating habits. Mostly, models get trap in eating disorder to maintain the ‘ideal’ body shape that the society desire. But these eating disorders are not only limited to the professionals but the common crowd also succumbs to these unhealthy habits due to high beauty standards and their obsession of achieving it. Eating disorders affect at least 9% of the population worldwide. And it is much more common in females. For example, women have anorexia at rates three times higher than males: 0.9% of the population versus 0.3% of the population and not only anorexia, women also from other eating disorder more than men. Of course, men also suffer from eating disorders but the number of female patients is greater than males. The most common age of onset is between 12 and 25. Anorexia has the mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder and mortality rate associated with anorexia is 12 times higher than the death rate of ALL causes of death for females between 15 - 24 years old. Up to 20% of people with serious eating disorder die without treatment. And all of that for what ? To look beautiful ? To be like a model ? Are you sure the norms you are following are NOT making you miserable. Are you sure you are NOT uncomfortable in your own body ? Are you sure the efforts you put for society’s approval are worth it ?

 COSMETIC SURGERY

In the last few decades, there is increase in the number of people doing cosmetic surgery. Although health insurance rarely covers the cost of cosmetic procedures, the number of people deciding to have cosmetic plastic surgery continues to grow. The top cosmetic surgeries are breast augmentation, liposuction, nose reshaping, eyelid surgery, tummy tuck, and facelift. Women get approximately 94% of all procedures. There were 365,000 breast augmentations performed in 2021, which increased by 44% from 2020, 148,000 women had implants removed and replaced, which increased by 32% from 2020 and 71,000 had their implants removed and not replaced, which increased by 47% from 2020. Now, the question arises, why the women are going through the pain of getting their appearance fixed with expensive cosmetic procedure? Why women are getting unsatisfied with their natural appearance? Is it not because of the influence of high beauty standards set by our judgmental society? The city which is called the capital of plastic surgery is also famous for its high beauty standards. So…….

 FASHION INDUSTRY

Let’s come to fashion industry which accounts for up to 10% of global carbon dioxide output which is more than international flights and shipping combined. 35% of micro plastics pollution also comes from textile industry. Not only that, there is exploitation of garment workers as many of them are still trapped in poverty regardless of how hard they work, just to be clear 85% of garment workers are women. But still apparel market has global revenue which was calculated to amount to 1.53 trillion US dollars in 2022.And one of its reason being fast fashion. Now days, women are desperate to follow trends, which changes every season and lead to so many problems. Is there anything more which I have say about this glamorous yet rotten industry? Yeah clothes are basic need of human but this has gotten beyond needs. It produces so much pollution, exploit its worker and influence people to buy clothes more than they need just to not feel left out.

 COSMETIC INDUSTRY

The global market size was valued 380.2 billion US dollars in 2019. Well, it’s not a surprise when makeup has become the everyday need of women. They put chemicals on their faces everyday which they don’t even know the name of. Sulfates, parabens, synthetic colors, fragrance etc. are most common ingredients of any makeup product. The products without chemicals are rare and expensive. It would be surprising if a woman go to her work without makeup. Why do they need to go to such lengths that they are not even comfortable in her own skin? Do they NEED it? Are they obliged to dress in certain fashion? Are you sure makeup is their choice and not the social obligation?

 PERCEPTION OF WOMEN BY MEN

The research, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, found in a series of experiments that participants processed images of men and women in very different ways. When presented with images of men, perceivers tended to rely more on “global” cognitive processing, the mental method in which a person is perceived as a whole. Meanwhile, images of women were more often the subject of “local” cognitive processing, or the objectifying perception of something as an assemblage of its various parts. The study is the first to link such cognitive processes to objectification theory, said Sarah Gervais, assistant professor of psychology at UNL and the study’s lead author. “Local processing underlies the way we think about objects: houses, cars and so on. But global processing should prevent us from that when it comes to people,” Gervais said. “We don’t break a person down to their parts – except when it comes to women, which is really striking. Women were perceived in the same ways that objects are viewed.” So in simple words, all that freedom reduces the women to mere objects?

 SEXUALISATION OF WOMEN

Women have been the object of sex since God knows how long but in recent years there is increase in how women are getting sexualized. Now you’d notice that there are item songs with half naked women in patriotic movies, women on banner with not so modest outfits doing ads completely irrelevant of their outfit, many companies has women as their brand ambassador and it might sound nonsense because there is no evidence of this claim but women do get sexualized even in our everyday life. Do you think all those people who are earning from getting naked would want the women to wear Hijab? If every women starts wearing Hijab, then who would buy those western clothes ? Who would model for their bikinis? Who would act in movies for intimate scenes? Who would wear make up? Who would post on social media showing off their bodies? They, who preach about women’s rights , would lose a lot of money if all women were to wear Hijab. So lets brainwash women into thinking that its their choice, they have the freedom of choice into dressing a certain way through soft influence, which couldn’t be anymore far from the truth.

CONCLUSION

Being the slave of Creator liberate you from the slavery of creation.

#Shackles #Hijab #Trends #Cloths #Make up #Social media #Eating disorders #Muslim #Liberty #Women

1 note · View note