Blogaround

1. China’s Facebook Goes Dark, Taking a Generation’s Memories With It (December 4) Wow! Renren, China's version of Facebook, has shut down. I had a Renren account, long long ago. But it's been years since I thought about Renren. Totally forgot it existed.

But one important takeaway from this is to not trust websites like this to store your photos/ whatever other data forever for you. I keep all my photos on my computer or external hard drive- with a cloud service (that I pay money for) as a backup. I don't trust any clouds- maybe someday those big companies will suddenly change their policies and make it massively inconvenient or impossible to access your photos, and when you complain about it and try to tell them how irreplaceable those photos were, they will be like *shrug*.

If a family member posts a good photo on Facebook, I save it to my computer. I don't trust that Facebook will always exist and will always have a way to easily find old photos. Everyone should do this! It boggles my mind that some people look at photos of themselves that their friends posted on Facebook- for example, your friends who attended your wedding posted photos- and then don't download them, and just believe that those photos will always be there on Facebook and they can look at them any time. !!!!! I don't trust any clouds.

2. How South Korea’s Robust Protest Culture Shut Down Martial Law—For Now (December 7) 

3. Why RFK Wants to Ban Fluoride (December 2) 

4. Liveblog! Trans Lawyer Chase Strangio Badgers SCOTUS For 'Health Care,' 'Equal Protection' (December 4) "Strangio represents the families and is the first out trans lawyer ever to argue before SCOTUS. This very minute is fucking historic, y’all."

5. Advent Calendar Advent Calendar (December 2) lolllllllll

6. TikTok Ban: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (November 21) "And again, I am not giving TikTok a pass here. I'm just pointing out that its behavior is pretty consistent with Silicon Valley's own very shitty standards."

7. President Bashar Al-Assad Has Fled Syria and His Brutal Regime Is Finally Over (December 8, via) "Since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Assad has gone to brutal lengths to cling to power—including by deploying devastating chemical attacks on civilians, including children. All told, by 2022, more than 306,000 civilians had been killed in the war, according to the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner."

8. If you're interested in obscure features of the fossil record which can't be adequately explained by young-earth creationism, here are 2 blog posts for you:

Millions of Moroccan Mosasaur Teeth Create Dental Crisis for Flood Geology (November 29) "If all these teeth were deposited in a single year during the Flood, why are they concentrated in specific layers and not scattered throughout the geological column?"

Flood Geology Can’t Explain Dino Droppings (November 30) 

And a third one also from Joel Duff: Building Truth on Sand: The Hidden Cost of Sharing False ‘Evidence’ for Creation (December 4) "I found no evidence that this behavior exists at all in any ant species"

9. Peaceful Solutions (December 8) "The tens of millions of people who have been financially ruined and who have died suffering needlessly from engineered systemic neglect also were human beings, just as Brian Thompson was, and they also had families that loved them, just as Brian Thompson did. By the tens of millions, the survivors also mourn the killing of their loved ones—whose deaths, while enacted by deliberate choice and with clear motive, are not deemed murders, because the decisions that caused their anguish and death were legal, and, more to the point, were extremely profitable."