Quit squandering your roof's potential. It's easier to fix than you think.
My right hand, unaccustomed to labor more manual than pushing a mouse, is blistered. My back, indolent from so many hours on the couch, is aching. With great effort, I'm sawing through two steel pipes. One appears to be a leftover fence post; the other, the air intake for a kitchen sink. Sweating, I fell these metal saplings and stash them in a corner of my rooftop.The doorbell rings. It's the landlord. We're building a deck on the roof of his property, without his permission or the city's. The roof looks like a junkyard. We panic briefly, then wave him up. I show off the deck's strong, safe foundation that won't pierce the rooftop. I demonstrate the modular design that allows for immediate and, if necessary, permanent removal of the planks. I pretend that I know what I'm doing.My girlfriend Neena and I are lucky: We have a 530-square-foot roof space attached to our one-bedroom apartment. The previous tenants squandered this resource, littering it with cheap plastic chairs and a few patches of worn Astroturf. As the DIY-minded son of a staunchly DIY dad, I knew I could do better. But how?
Challenge: I can't afford a contractor, and wouldn't hire one if I could.
My father taught me that only fools hire contractors for anything other than plumbing and electrical work. An engineer who designed and built roofing equipment, my dad was a very creative guy in a traditionally noncreative field. "We are not lazy people," he once said to me. "Always finish the job." The smell of motor oil still reminds me of our many trips to the junkyard, where we picked clean the bones of dead Corvairs and, later, for my first car, Mustangs. Though he died several years ago, my father was telling me to build our deck the hard way-with our own blood, sweat, and junk.Done right, our deck could be a showcase of the 21st century's greenest thinking. So I drew up a plan. With five weekends and $3,000, we would build a low-impact deck from scratch.
Challenge: Trendiness has made reclaimed lumber a luxury.
Obviously, buying virgin lumber isn't a sustainable practice. It leads to deforestation, less biodiversity, and deadly landslides. But junkyard lumber, now in vogue among high-end designers who prefer to call it "reclaimed," is too expensive. The most eco-friendly option is composite planks made from wood and recycled plastic, such as those made by Trex. They're easy to work with, they don't warp or splinter, and they come with a 25-year warranty. They, too, however, are expensive, and all those planks would cost more than four times our entire budget. In the end, we settled for pressure-treated pine from Dykes, an employee-owned lumberyard in Brooklyn. Not sustainable, but the best we could do.With help from a generous friend, we hauled several hundred pounds of lumber up our narrow, lopsided stairwell, through the kitchen and onto the roof. Next came 300 pounds of rubber matting (to protect the roof's surface), a gazillion galvanized decking screws, two sawhorses, and several gallons of stains and sealant. I wondered-would my father have been so handy had he lived not in a suburban house, but in a third-floor walk-up?
Challenge: How to waterproof the lumber without poisoning local ecosystems.
To seal the wood, the best finishes are zero- or low-VOC ("volatile organic compound"), such as BioShield's wood stains and Safecoat's WaterShield. Using a nontoxic sealant is crucial for decks that sit directly on the ground; the chemicals will slowly bleed into the soil and may eventually reach the water table. Even on our rooftop deck, rainwater will go into the gutter, into the sewer, and eventually into the East River.
Challenge: Actually building the thing.
Soon enough, it was time to break in my glorious new drill and circular saw. In two marathon afternoons, I built the 16 mattress-size units. Because my work area was the deck itself, I had to be economical with space. In a backyard build, it's easy-pour a bunch of concrete posts, add vertical support posts, raise the crossbeams, and start securing your deck planks. Needing to be more crafty, I arranged six 6-inch-by-8-foot planks side-by-side, then held them together with 3-foot lengths of 2-by-4-thereby making a fairly sturdy 3-by-8-foot platform. With 16 of these units, I could cover nearly 400 square feet of rooftop. Once they were laid and leveled on a series of small freestanding piers, they would become Barbecue Heaven.
Challenge: Finding plants and planters I can afford
Every day we scoured Craigslist for reclaimable deck furnishings. From Build It Green, we hauled away two enameled steel bathtubs to be redeployed as planters. To hold flowers and herbs, I weatherproofed three small filing cabinet drawers. One night, I found a metal footlocker at the curb-the perfect flowerbed. We wanted more than a pretty space; we wanted to grow stuff. Caring for plants is healthy. It's also good for the city. Plants pump oxygen into the air, of course, but, when placed on the roof, they also insulate the building, thus lowering heating and cooling costs.I finally found some old lumber: a dozen 2-by-10s that looked like old theater floorboards. I built long, narrow planters for maiden grass, a perennial that can reach 7 feet tall. Positioned in front of wooden latticework, we'd have a buffer screening off the busy street's sights and sounds.
Challenge: Trapping rainwater the old-fashioned way
Even our garden's water is coming from a renewable source: the sky. On eBay, I bought a decommissioned food barrel that once held olives in Greece. With a piece of window screen, basic plumbing hardware, and minor modifications to our gutter, it became a rain barrel. Short of building a personal wind turbine (which I considered), we're pretty off-the-grid for a Brooklyn rooftop. We even researched what's best for grilling, deciding that a refillable propane tank is better than burning 5 pounds of charcoal every time we want a few burgers. Now it's the end of the summer. We've already hosted several barbecues, and our Netflix queue hasn't moved in weeks. A few of the planks have begun to warp, but I expected that. The next time we build a roof deck that's bigger than our apartment, we'll find more time and money. And we'll tell the landlord-but hopefully, by then, the landlord will be us.WHAT WE SPENTNew drill and circular saw: $300Lumber, nails, other building materials: $1,500Truck rentals: $400Two tables, 8 chairs, umbrella (used and hand-me-down): $200Trees, plants, and flowers: $500Planters: $200Potting soil: $250Gas grill: $200Back-breaking labor: Donated by friends
Throughout history, women have stood up and fought to break down barriers imposed on them from stereotypes and societal expectations. The trailblazers in these photos made history and redefined what a woman could be. In doing so, they paved the way for future generations to stand up and continue to fight for equality.
This article originally appeared on December 14, 2016.
Shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
While conspiracy theories are not limited to any topic, there is one type of event that seems particularly likely to spark them: mass shootings, typically defined as attacks in which a shooter kills at least four other people.
When one person kills many others in a single incident, particularly when it seems random, people naturally seek out answers for why the tragedy happened. After all, if a mass shooting is random, anyone can be a target.
In the United States, where some significant portion of the public believes that the government is out to take their guns, the idea that a mass shooting was orchestrated by the government in an attempt to make guns look bad may be appealing both psychologically and ideologically.
Our studies of mass shootings and conspiracy theories help to shed some light on why these events seem particularly prone to the development of such theories and what the media can do to limit the ideas' spread.
Back to the 1990s
Mass shootings and conspiracy theories have a long history. As far back as the mid-1990s, amid a spate of school shootings, Cutting Edge Ministries, a Christian fundamentalist website, found a supposed connection between the attacks and then-President Bill Clinton.
The group's website claimed that when lines were drawn between groups of school-shooting locations across the U.S., they crossed in Hope, Arkansas, Clinton's hometown. The Cutting Edge Ministries concluded from this map that the "shootings were planned events, with the purpose of convincing enough Americans that guns are an evil that needs to be dealt with severely, thus allowing the Federal Government to achieve its Illuminist goal of seizing all weapons."
Beliefs persist today that mass shootings are staged events, complete with "crisis actors," people who are paid to pretend to be victims of a crime or disaster, all as part of a conspiracy by the government to take away people's guns. The idea has been linked to such tragedies as the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, and the Sandy Hook Elementary attack that resulted in the deaths of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012.
These beliefs can become widespread when peddled by prominent people. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has been in the news recently because of her belief that the Parkland shooting was a "false flag," an event that was disguised to look like another group was responsible. It's not clear, though, in this instance who Rep. Greene felt was really to blame.
After the country's deadliest mass shooting to date, with 59 dead and hundreds injured in Las Vegas in 2017, the pattern continued: A conspiracy theory arose that there were multiple shooters, and the notion that the shooting was really done for some other purpose than mass murder.
Shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
Making sense of the senseless
These conspiracy theories are all attempts to make sense of incomprehensibly terrifying events. If a lone shooter, with no clear motive, can singlehandedly take the lives of 60 individuals, while injuring hundreds more, then is anyone really safe?
Conspiracy theories are a way of understanding information. Historian Richard Hofstadter has indicated they can provide motives for events that defy explanation. Mass shootings, then, create an opportunity for people to believe there are larger forces at play, or an ultimate cause that explains the event.
For instance, an idea that a shooter was driven mad by antipsychoticdrugs, distributed by the pharmaceutical industry, can provide comfort as opposed to the thought that anyone can be a victim or perpetrator.
Polls have shown that people worry a lot about mass shootings, and more than 30% of Americans said in 2019 that they refused to go particular places such as public events or the mall for fear of being shot.
If the shootings are staged, or the results of an enormous, unknowable or mysterious effort, then they at least becomes somewhat comprehensible. That thought process satisfies the search for a reason that can help people feel more comfort and security in a complex and uncertain world – especially when the reason found either removes the threat or makes it somehow less random.
Some people blame mass shootings on other factors like mental illness that make gun violence an individual issue, not a societal one, or say these events are somehow explained by outside forces. These ideas may seem implausible to most, but they do what conspiracy theories are intended to do: provide people with a sense of knowing and control.
They also misdirect blame and distract from efforts to better understand tragedies such as mass shootings. High-quality scholarship could investigate how to better protect public places. But robust debates about how to reduce events such as mass shootings will be less effective if some significant portion of the public believes they are manufactured.
These steps can work, as shown by the substantial drop in misinformation on Twitter following former President Donald Trump's removal from the platform.
Mass shootings may be good fodder for conspiracy theories, but that does not mean people should actually consume such ideas without necessary context or disclaimers.
Michael Rocque is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Bates College.
Stephanie Kelley-Romano is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies at Bates College
This article first appeared on The Conversation on 02.20.21.. You can read it here.
Between the bras, makeup, periods, catcalling, sexism, impossible-to-attain beauty standards, and heels, most men wouldn't survive being a woman for a day without having a complete mental breakdown. So here's a slideshow of some of the funniest Tumblr posts about the everyday struggles that women face that men would never understand.
This article originally appeared on Common Dreams on 3.3.21. You can read it here.
Emphasizing that the world still has a "fighting chance" to limit global warming with immediate and ambitious climate action, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Tuesday urged governments and the private sector to cancel all planned coal projects, cease financing for coal-fired power plants, and opt instead to support a just transition by investing in renewable energy.
"Once upon a time, coal brought cheap electricity to entire regions and vital jobs to communities," Guterres said in a video message at the virtual meeting of the Powering Past Coal Alliance. "Those days are gone."
"Phasing out coal from the electricity sector is the single most important step to get in line with the 1.5 degree goal," Guterres continued, referring to the policy objective of preventing planetary temperatures from rising more than 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. "Global coal use in electricity generation must fall by 80% below 2010 levels by 2030," he added.
Meeting the 1.5 °C climate target over the course of this decade is possible, according to Guterres, but will require eliminating "the dirtiest, most polluting and, yes, more and more costly fossil fuel from our power sectors."
In his address, the U.N. chief outlined three steps that must be taken by public authorities as well as companies to "end the deadly addiction to coal."
Cancel all global coal projects in the pipeline;
End the international financing of coal plants and shift investment to renewable energy projects; and
Jump-start a global effort to finally organize a just transition.
Guterres called on the 37 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)—a group of relatively rich countries with a greater historical responsibility for extracting fossil fuels and emitting the greenhouse gasses that are causing deadly pollution and destroying the climate—to "commit to phasing out coal" by 2030, while urging non-OECD countries to do so by 2040.
Pleading for an end to the global bankrolling of coal projects and a move toward supporting developing countries in transitioning to clean energy, Guterres asked "all multilateral and public banks—as well as investors in commercial banks or pension funds—to shift their investments now in the new economy of renewable energy."
While stressing that "the transition from coal to renewable[s] will result in the net creation of millions of jobs by 2030," Guterres acknowledged that "the impact on regional and local levels will be varied."
"We have a collective and urgent responsibility to address the serious challenges that come with the speed and scale of the transition," he continued. "The needs of coal communities must be recognized, and concrete solutions must be provided at a very local level."
The U.N. chief urged "all countries to embrace the International Labor Organization's guidelines for a just transition and adopt them as minimum standard to ensure progress on decent work for all."
The coronavirus pandemic, Guterres noted, has "accelerated" the decline in "coal's economic viability," while recovery plans provide an opportunity to bring about a green transformation of the world's infrastructure.
In many parts of the world, a just transition dovetails with guaranteeing universal access to energy, said Damilola Ogunbiyi, CEO and special representative of the secretary-general for Sustainable Energy for All.
Ogunbiyi told conference attendees that almost 800 million people worldwide still lack access to basic electricity, while 2.8 billion are without clean cooking fuels.
"Right now, we're at a crossroads where people do want to recover better, but they are looking for the best opportunities to do that," she said. "And we're emphasizing investments in sustainable energy to spur economic development, create new jobs, and give opportunities to fulfill the full potential."
In some states, women are put through humiliating and dangerous pre-abortion medical consultations and waiting periods before being allowed to undergo the procedure. In four states, women are even forced to bury or cremate the fetal remains after the procedure.
These government-mandated roadblocks and punitive shaming serve no purpose but to make it more difficult, emotionally damaging, and expensive for women to have an abortion.
Eighteen states currently have laws that force women to delay their abortions unnecessarily: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin. In a number of other states, mandatory-delay laws have been enacted but are enjoined or otherwise unenforced.
To help women get around these burdensome regulations, The Satanic Temple is promoting a religious ritual it believes provides an exemption from restrictions. According to the Temple, the ritual is supported by the federal Religious Freedoms Restoration Act.
The Temple is a religious organization that claims it doesn't believe "in the existence of Satan or the supernatural" but that "religion can, and should, be divorced from superstition."
The Temple says its exemption is made possible by a precedent set by the Supreme Court's 2014 Hobby Lobby decision. According to the Temple, it prevents the government from putting a "burden on free exercise of religion without a compelling reason."
Ironically, Hobby Lobby's case claimed that providing insurance coverage for birth control conflicted with the employer's Christian faith. The Satanic Temple argues that unnecessary roadblocks to abortion conflict with theirs.
via The Satanic Temple
Religious freedoms.
The Temple is promoting the ritual on I-95 billboards in Florida where women must endure an ultrasound and go through pre-procedure, anti-choice counseling before having an abortion.
The Temple's billboards inform women that they can circumvent the restrictions by simply citing a Satanic ritual.
"Susan, you're telling me I do not have to endure a waiting period when I have an abortion?" one of the women on the billboard says.
"That's true if you're a SATANIST!" the other replies.
Next to the ladies is a symbol of a goat head in a pentagram and a message about the ritual.
via The Satanic Temple
Image of The Satanic Temple billboard.
The Temple also provides a letter that women seeking abortions can provide to medical staff. It explains the ritual and why it exempts them from obligations that are an undue burden to their religious practice.
The Temple believes that some medical practitioners may reject its requests. However, it believes that doing so is a violation of religious freedom and it will take legal action if necessary.
"It would be unconstitutional to require a waiting period before receiving holy communion," the temple says in a video. "It would be illegal to demand Muslims receive counseling prior to Ramadan. It would be ridiculous to demand that Christians affirm in writing the unscientific assertion that baptism can cause brain cancers."
"So we expect the same rights as any other religious organization," the video says.
To perform the ritual, a woman looks into a mirror to affirm their personhood and responsibility to herself. Once the woman is focused and comfortable, they are to recite two of the Temple's Seven Tenets.
Tenet III: One's body is inviolable, subject to one's own will alone. One's body is inviolable, subject to one's own will alone.
Tenet V. Beliefs should conform to one's best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one's beliefs.
Then they are to recite a personal affirmation: "By my body, my blood. Then by my will, it is done."
The ritual affirms The Temple's belief in personal responsibility and liberty that, coincidentally, mirror that of the U.S. Constitution.
"Satan is a symbol of the Eternal Rebel in opposition to arbitrary authority, forever defending personal sovereignty even in the face of insurmountable odds," the Temple's website reads.
There are two types of people in this world – those who panic and fill up their cars with gas when the needle hits 25% or so, and people like me who wait until the gas light comes on, then check the odometer so you can drive the entire 30 miles to absolute empty before coasting into a gas station on fumes.
I mean…it's not empty until it's empty, right?
But just how far can you drive your car once that gas light comes on? Should you trust your manual?
Photo from Pixabay.
I believe that reads empty.
Now, thanks to Your Mechanic sharing this information in a recent post, you can know for sure. Of course, they also want to warn you that driving on a low fuel level or running out of gas can actually damage your car.
Now, thanks to Your Mechanic sharing this information in a recent post, you can know for sure. Of course, they also want to warn you that driving on a low fuel level or running out of gas can actually damage your car.
Proceed at your own risk.
These are, of course, approximations that depend on several factors, including how you drive, your car's condition, etc. So don't automatically blame your mechanic if you find yourself stranded on the side of the road.
If you ask people what they think the “perfect" body looks like, you're sure to get a range of answers, depending on where the person is from. Last year, Superdrug Online Doctor created a project, “Perceptions of Perfection" that showed what people in 18 countries think the “perfect" woman looks like. The project was a viral hit.
This time, they asked graphic designers—11 women and eight men—in 19 countries to photoshop the same image to highlight the male beauty standards for their country.
Some of the images are certainly amusing, but the collective result is an interesting look at what people find attractive around the world.
Body autonomy means a person has the right to whatever they want with their own body.
We live in a world where people are constantly telling women what they can or can't do with their bodies. Women get it form all sides — Washington, their churches, family members, and even doctors.
A woman on Twitter who goes by the name Salome Strangelove recently went viral for discussing the importance of female body autonomy.
Her mother was made to feel guilty about simply exploring the medical options about her own body. But later on, a new doctor made her feel more comfortable about her situation.
