Feeling competitive? We’ve got a game for you to play in! Tournament Earth: The Landsat Games is happening right now, and as we get to the final entries, the competition is heating up.
You can help us pick the winner by voting for one of the remaining four Landsat images of our home planet! Our competition started with 32 images, divided into categories by what they show: land, water, ice & snow, and human impact.
So, what do you think? Which one of these images is going for gold?
Land
First up, we have an image of the Markha River and surrounding Central Siberian Plateau, acquired in 2020 by Landsat 8. The hypnotic undulations of striping across the landscape carried this image to victory over the rest of the Land images – a particularly tough category, given that these images all come from Landsat.
Water
It’s not all land, though! The bright blues and greens of this false-color image of the Atchafalaya Delta in Louisiana helped carry it to victory in the Water category. The image, taken in 2020 by Landsat 8, shows a region that’s subject to erosion of land by wind and rising sea levels.
Ice & Snow
Brrr! Did it get cold in here? That’s the finalist from the Ice and Snow category, an image of sea ice around Russia’s New Siberian Islands. The image, collected by Landsat 8 in June 2016, shows sea ice during its annual seasonal breakup.
Human Impact
Humans have been shaping the planet around us for hundreds of years. Some changes, like rice fields in the Sacramento Valley, are visible from space. Landsat 8 collected this false-color image of flooded rice fields in December 2018.
So, now it’s up to you! Which image is your favorite? There can only be one winner of Tournament Earth: The Landsat Games. Get your vote in, and then get ready to watch as we launch the next Landsat satellite, Landsat 9, in September.
The Landsat mission is a partnership between us at NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. Together, we’ve been using Landsat satellites to collect nearly 50 years of images of our home planet.
Not one of these wars—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya—resulted in the creation of a pro-U.S. government. Each of these wars created needless suffering for the civilian populations. Millions of people had their lives disrupted, while hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives in these senseless wars.
This is brazen, and it’s dangerous. Manchin and Sinema’s firm status as party traitors appears to have emboldened the Supreme Conservatives’ Court into attacking the Executive branch under Biden.
This decision is so stretched, it has launched us into a situation as fraught and anti-democratic as when trump constantly attacked the Legislative branch, but more so.
Republicons as a whole have moved far beyond mere obstruction of democracy, as with Obama. And what this Roberts Court is doing now goes even further than their attacks on the nation’s civil rights and voting rights.
Just as gerrymandered, unjustly Republicon state legislatures have been openly undercutting and weakening Democratic governors legitimately elected state-wide, now these unelected conservatives on their stolen Supreme Court are openly attacking presidential powers – as held by Biden.
“This was the first test of whether a conservative Supreme Court majority would follow the same rules it did under [t]rump when it comes to immigration and the President—and they have failed the test. This is a political torpedo aimed directly at the Biden administration,’ said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a lawyer at the American Immigration Council. 'The lower [trump judge] courts got dozens of facts wrong, wildly misstated the law, and ordered the Executive to torpedo delicate foreign relations—and the Supreme Court, which until Biden took office blocked nearly all immigration injunctions when requested by the DOJ, just let them do it.’
…”'The end result of tonight’s decision will be dollars in the pockets of the cartels, a renewed human rights catastrophe, and hundreds if not thousands of kidnappings, rapes, tortures, and other miseries enacted against vulnerable people only seeking safety.’
…“'The 6-3 conservative majority has now made clear that the last four years of solicitude towards the President never happened, and that they will refuse to grant Biden the same kind of leeway that they routinely granted [t]rump. And they don’t care who gets caught in the crossfire.’”
It is time to expand the Supreme Court to add more Democratic justices to prevent Trump’s handpicked little boot-licking neo-nazi servants from doing bullshit like this again
The House approved the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act on Tuesday in a party-line vote, kicking the legislation to the Senate — where it faces longer odds of passage.
The bill was approved 219-212, with zero Republicans voting for it.
“Nothing is more fundamental to our democracy than the right to vote.” Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.), a main sponsor of the bill, said from the floor during debate on the legislation.
Ancient Egyptian cosmetic container (soapstone) with round receptacles and inscriptions. Artist unknown; 663-332 BCE (Late Period). Now in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. Photo credit: Walters Art Museum.
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
