Met Devin Allen (bydvnlln), the genius Baltimore photographer whose winning photograph during the Baltimore Riots on the events of Freddie Gray, became a cover for TIME magazine.
Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Djibouti. Those are the countries. It will be drought-resistant species, mostly acacias. And this is a brilliant idea you have no idea oh my Christ
This will create so many jobs and regenerate so many communities and aaaaaahhhhhhh
it’s already happening, and already having positive effects. this is wonderful, why have i not heard of this before? i’m so happy!
Oh yes, acacia trees.
They fix nitrogen and improve soil quality.
And, to make things fun, the species they’re using practices “reverse leaf phenology.” The trees go dormant in the rainy season and then grow their leaves again in the dry season. This means you can plant crops under the trees, in that nitrogen-rich soil, and the trees don’t compete for light because they don’t have any leaves on.
And then in the dry season, you harvest the leaves and feed them to your cows.
Crops grown under acacia trees have better yield than those grown without them. Considerably better.
So, this isn’t just about stopping the advancement of the Sahara - it’s also about improving food security for the entire sub-Saharan belt and possibly reclaiming some of the desert as productive land.
Of course, before the “green revolution,” the farmers knew to plant acacia trees - it’s a traditional practice that they were convinced to abandon in favor of “more reliable” artificial fertilizers (that caused soil degradation, soil erosion, etc).
This is why you listen to the people who, you know, have lived with and on land for centuries.
The country has been protesting for a month now over the corrupt and criminal government, what started off as a peaceful protest has now escalated to a dangerous situation for protesters due to acts by the military and police forces.
Protestors have been tear gassed in Downtown Beirut
In December 2012, a gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed 20 children, six adults, and himself. Since then, there have been at least 864 mass shootings, with shooters killing at least 1,125 people and wounding 3,097 more.
The counts come from the Mass Shooting Tracker, a crowdsourced database that tracks shootings since 2013 in which four or more people were shot. As with any crowdsourced database, it’s likely missing some shootings, and some of the shootings are missing details.
Are these types of shootings increasing? It depends on which definition you use.
Using the definition many people operate under — shootings at a public place in which the shooter murdered four or more people, excluding domestic, gang, and drug violence — they appear to be getting more common, according to an analysis from Harvard School of Public Health researchers.
But not everyone agrees with this definition. Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, for example, defines mass shootings as any shooting in which at least four people were murdered. Under those terms, mass shootings don’t appear to be increasing. Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health call that definition too broad, since it catches domestic, gang, and drug-related shootings that aren’t usually considered mass shootings in layman’s terms.
But the Mass Shooting Tracker is even broader — counting not just shootings in which four or more people were murdered, but shootings in which four or more people were shot at all. The database’s organizers explained their reasoning on their website: “For instance, in 2012 Travis Steed and others shot 18 people total. Miraculously, he only killed one. Under the incorrect definition of mass shooting, that event would not be considered a mass shooting! Arguing that 18 people shot during one event is not a mass shooting is absurd.”
Even under this broader definition, it’s worth noting that mass shootings make up a tiny portion of America’s firearm deaths, which total more than 32,000 each year. And the US has way more gun violence than its developed peers: According to UN data compiled by the Guardian’s Simon Rogers, the US had 29.7 firearm homicides per 1 million people in 2012, while Switzerland had 7.7, Canada had 5.1, and Germany had 1.9.
But why does the US have so many more gun homicides than other advanced countries? One possible explanation: Americans are much more likely to own guns than most of the world — the US makes up about 4.4 percent of the global population, but owns 42 percent of the world’s civilian-owned guns. And the empirical research shows places with more guns have more homicides.
Criminal justice experts widely recognize this is a result of cultural and policy decisions that have made firearms far more available in America than in most of the world. For the US, that means not just more mass shootings — but more gun violence in general.
"Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race."
(Michelle Alexander, ‘The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness’)
ICYMI (8/20/15): Shit is St Louis remains fucked up. Another kid killed yesterday, another police force acting like a rogue military, gassing families in their own homes, arresting protesters. The struggle continues. #staywoke #farfromover
