Hey anon! Happy you asked.

The News Literacy Project is a great one so I will link it again here for ease of access, though the quiz bringing you to my blog is also part of its site.

Stanford’s Civic Online Reasoning curriculum offers free online classes for basic critical media literacy skills identified (through surveying thousands of middle school to college students) as widely missing among a generation of young people touted for their digital media savvy.

The Critical Media Project is another dedicated media literacy education provider which places less of an emphasis on a nonpartisan standpoint compared to NLP, and more of an emphasis on identity issues. Their site includes a useful links page with a directory of issue-specific resources.

The Harvard Misinformation Review describes itself as a “new format of peer-reviewed, scholarly publication”. They cover global critical media literacy issues and have been useful to me as a reliable source for academic work. They’ve been a great source of COVID-related content in particular, such as this article unpacking the nature of belief in COVID misinformation along partisan lines.

The Pew Research Center describes itself as a “fact tank”, and is a nonpartisan source of content analysis, demographic research, and opinion polling on a variety of U.S.-centric and global issues.

Media Literacy Now, as its name suggests, is an advocacy group for media literacy learning in the U.S. public school system.

AlgoTransparency is a nonprofit founded by former Google employee Guillaume Chaslot in an effort to “look over the wall” and provide insight into the algorithms used by YouTube, Google, Facebook, and Twitter to recommend content.

Also linking these tools for anyone who missed the other posts going around:

Archive.ph (webpage archive which also widely works as a paywall bypassing tool)

Bionic Reading duplicate (free version of a tool that formats blocks of text for better comprehension, for people whose brains don’t make reading easy)

I’ll update as I become aware of additional resources that I think would benefit this list to include. Suggestions are welcome, and my ask box is always open.

saywhat-politics:

smokedsalmoniloveyou:

anybody have any recs on stuff to do in the bay area?

china beach is worth visiting, so is mount tam state park across the bridge–grab late lunch at lou’s takeaway in san rafael, then drive up bolinas fairfax ridge through the mt tam watershed and watch the sun set over the foggy pacific from an overlook. favorite daytime view of sf is up the observation tower at the De Young (they let people go up for free! they’re also hosting a kehinde wiley exhibition through october that is worth seeing), favorite nighttime view (on a clear night) is from tank hill under the sutro tower. kabuto for sushi, yank sing for dim sum

ryebreadgf:

schistostegapennata:

How can I refuse! Absolutely!!! It sounds kind of ridiculous, but it’s actually very sad.

So, let’s start off with some numbers. Every year, the moss black market is estimated to garner up to $165 million for trafficking approximately 82 million pounds of moss.

I cannot even wrap my mind around how much moss that is.

You might ask, why does moss poaching exist and why is it so lucrative? Well, the quality that has made mosses the prey of an illegal trade is simply their aesthetic appeal. Soft, velvety, and moist, mosses are extremely pleasant to the touch and calming to look at. Some people are willing to pay large amounts of money to collect them and put them in private gardens. However, most of the mosses that move in this underground black market are actually sold to companies/wholesalers for use in potting/gardening soil, plant nurseries, decor, and as craft materials. The majority of the preserved mosses in your run-of-the-mill chain craft store, planters, floral wreaths, or very-much-dead living wall decorations are gathered illegally, bleached to death, and then dyed green. This goes for a lot of prepackaged peat moss and soil mix blends as well.

Even though it is illegal to gather moss in public places (in the US, at least), people still harvest it. Why? Probably because there’s a fair amount of money to be made and the consequences are very rarely enforced, and when they are, they are quite light–usually a $50 fine at worst if you’re caught. Most of this black market moss is actually poached from the national park system, with Appalachia and the Pacific Northwest usually being the hardest hit regions.

Mosses play vital roles in many ecosystems, provide homes for threatened species, regulate water distribution in forests, and help with erosion, so their loss is a terrible blow. Additionally, moving such large quantities of mosses from one location to another may spread unwanted, invasive hitchhikers, like insects that lay their eggs in the plants, or even seeds and spores.

I’ll end on this thought:

It can take 20 years for a small patch of moss removed from a fallen tree to grow back with the right moisture conditions.

How long would it take to regrow 82 million pounds?

cetitan:

cetitan:

The world’s greatest video has been found

leahberman:

winter shimmer; mono county, california

instagram - twitter - website

afloweroutofstone:

The Saudi lobby is really breathtaking. Every foreign government lobbies the US congress, and many even lobby regional news outlets. But I am currently looking at an email sent from Saudi lobbyists to the West Michigan Sports Commission. There’s one email here sent to an online women’s clothing boutique with 900 Twitter followers, another to the zoo in Wyoming. Supposedly they’ve been in contact with high school newspapers before. They’re on a whole other level of trying to influence Americans