good news thread (non polItical please)

[M.O.A.B.]

Belated Happy International Dog Day.

Mine is a Lhasa-Tzu (Lhasa Apso x Shih Tzu). He’s good with hoomans 👍 but afraid of other dogs. ☹️

We weren’t able to socialize him when he was young because of the lockout during the pandemic. 🤦‍♂️

[SpeedFlex27]

2 hours ago, Mark F said:

some border collies can be a handful , but are great dogs if you train them properly. 

have fun... ( have two border collies..... they are a lot of fun)

What are your dogs names? 

[iHeart]

I DON'T BELIEVE IT THEY'RE BRINGING BOO AT THE ZOO BACK FROM THE DEAD!

[iHeart]

mark your calendars 90s kids from Winnipeg April 15th is going to be a real GOOD friday

 

[iHeart]

and now for the 8 month wait

[iHeart]

technically political but still good news

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/manitoba-government-free-menstrual-products-1.6583503?fbclid=IwAR1ceNmVgjZIROclrQ2Do5AozgoR0uJBDT4CgiM7-RPLw0aRy08ID8ZhPaA

[iHeart]

 

[Tracker]

11 minutes ago, iHeart said:

 

Amazing that Eric Idle survived- the mortality rate for this stage 4 form of cancer is about 98% within 2 years and it is a hellish existence until you die.

[Tracker]

Things that I am thankful for this weekend:

My health and the health of my family

My wealth- I am not rich but I have enough to support me and my family and a little left over for fun and supporting causes I align with.

Good friends- the ones I see regularly and the ones I don't and maybe haven't visited lately.

[Wideleft]

For the first time in 6,000 years, a bison is born in the wild in the U.K.

‘In a world that’s on fire, in this little corner of Kent, here’s this little ray of hope,’ said Paul Whitfield, director general of Wildwood Trust

By Sydney Page

October 27, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

 

Tom Gibbs was getting worried. He was deep in the remote woodland of South East England, anxiously searching for Female 2, a bison that had strayed from the herd.

“You start to think of the worst-case scenario,” said Gibbs, a bison ranger at Kent Wildlife Trust, a British-based conservation charity.

A few days later, he heard tiny hoofs ambling around and noticed a tail swishing in the distance. Relief washed over him — followed by disbelief and delight.

“I didn’t even believe my own eyes,” he said.

Gibbs discovered that Female 2’s days-long departure from the herd was actually the best-case scenario: She had secluded herself to give birth to the first wild bison born in Britain in more than six millennia. “It was such a magical moment, and so iconic what it represents for conservation and wilding in this country,” said Gibbs, who first spotted the baby bison on Sept. 9.

“I saw this little face pop out from behind mom,” he said. Gibbs stood there for two hours, “just watching the calf and the mom,” he said, adding that bison naturally conceal signs of pregnancy to stave off predators, so the rangers had no clue she was expecting. “I wanted to scream it from the rooftops.”

 

The birth was a happy surprise for the team of rangers working on the Wilder Blean project, which brings grazing animals to the West Blean and Thornden Woods in Kent as a way to address climate and biodiversity crises.

“Bison are this amazing, versatile tool,” said Gibbs, adding that he hopes they will be one of the keys to help reverse troubling environmental trends in the area.

Bison serve as ecosystem engineers — a term used to describe species that can alter and maintain a habitat. The shaggy-haired animals, which have been described as “woolly bulldozers,” are seen by scientists as climate heroes.

“They are quite big and robust, so they can really shape and engineer the landscape around them,” said Gibbs explaining that their fur debarks trees, they mow grass with their mouths, their large bodies create pathways throughout the dense forest and their nutrient-rich manure helps other species flourish. “Everything they do has this positive impact and shapes the world around them.”

The project is run by two local conservation charities — Kent Wildlife Trust and Wildwood Trust — and is the first of its kind in Britain, though similar initiatives are underway in other parts of Europe and North America.

 

Three female bison were brought from wildlife parks in Scotland and Ireland to a 500-acre area in July and will eventually be joined by wild horses and pigs. While the goal is for the animals to fend for themselves in the wild, they are being closely monitored and slowly weaned off supplemental food — which is what they were fed previously in parks.

“We want to remain as hands-off as possible, but their welfare is at the absolute heart of what we do,” Gibbs said. The team is paying close attention to the calf — who is the fourth member of the herd.

The birth is a big deal for a number of reasons, including that bison were once on the brink of extinction. European bison were nearly driven to their demise in the early-20th century due to excessive hunting. Only a small number survived and were kept in wildlife parks and zoos.

 

In fact, according to Paul Whitfield, the director general of Wildwood Trust, all 9,000 bison living in Europe are descended from only 12 zoo animals. The calf’s recent birth, he said, is a major step toward growing the population. Bison have a life span of about 15 to 20 years in the wild.

“In the U.K., we’ve lost almost all our mammals,” said Whitfield, adding that it’s one of the most nature-depleted nations in the world. “We’ve just slowly eaten away at all the wild places. Over time, and through hundreds of years of hunting, we’ve basically just killed everything.”

The Wilder Blean project, Whitfield said, is an effort to reverse that damage — and it’s already working. “It’s very much putting back in place the missing ecosystem processes,” he said. “We’ve been intensely farming and managing the land for hundreds of years. There isn’t really much wilderness or wild left.”

Funds are being raised for Wilder Blean, all of which will go toward rewilding — a conservation effort intended to replenish land and restore it to its natural state.

“To me, rewilding is about working with nature and using nature’s natural processes to regenerate wildlife,” Whitfield said, explaining that the bison will accomplish that task “just by living and moving through the woodland.”

Traditional conservation methods managed by humans — such as woodland coppicing, a practice of cutting down trees to stimulate new growth — aren’t as effective, he said, “which is why we need rewilding approaches where we’re not trying to keep it as is, we’re trying to make it much, much better.”

Unlike humans, bison naturally nurture the land and work intuitively to create “niches for other species to move in and thrive,” Whitfield said. “It creates a far more complicated, rich, diverse habitat.”

(more)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/27/baby-bison-uk-rewilding-wildlife/

[FrostyWinnipeg]

https://winnipeg.ctvnews.ca/manitoba-boy-sent-5-000-hockey-cards-after-his-collection-was-stolen-1.6145748

[FrostyWinnipeg]

Somebody in the 'peg won Lotto Max.

[Noeller]

3 minutes ago, FrostyWinnipeg said:

Somebody in the 'peg won Lotto Max.

A cool 60 Mil.... So far, not my family from what I've heard. 

[HardCoreBlue]

I don't know where this goes so I'm putting it in this thread.

More motivating than good at least to me.

It's sports related but cuts across everything imo.

I've always been uncomfortable with carte blanche statements like 'don't care what others say about me' mantra without first getting that the complexity of doing this depending on what the specific context is.  

I just really like the below insight.

Story by Patrick Djordjevic For Dailymail.Com quoting Marcellus Wiley:

'You need to apologize for those mistakes no matter who you are... everybody must. You can't go through a world where you're all "apologetically you", because that's not this world, that's not reality.

'For this mantra to to continue to have legs... what you should say is "I'm going to do everything with conviction."' 

[iHeart]

❤️❤️❤️

https://deadline.com/2023/04/succession-star-james-cromwell-rescues-his-own-babe-from-slaughterhouse-1235320475/

[Mark F]

weekly listing of positive stuff. 

 

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/18/2169092/-Thursday-GNR-Dams-are-Busting-Out-All-Over#comment_86198079

[Tracker]

Scientists May Have Found Exactly How LSD Treats Depression

We’ve known that psychedelic drugs like psilocybin mushrooms and LSD show a lot of promise in addressing some of the world’s most widespread mental disorders for a while now. Not only can they treat things like treatment resistant depression and PTSD, but they can even help terminally ill patients with their end-of-life anxiety.

What scientists don’t know, though, is why exactly psychedelics are so effective at treating these disorders. Luckily, some new research by an international team of neuroscientists sheds light on this trippy mystery.

The researchers published a study on Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience that showed that LSD and psilocin (the primary molecule in magic mushrooms) bind to a specific receptor in the brains of laboratory mice—causing an antidepressant effect as a result. Since the mechanism specifically works to reduce depression, the study’s authors believe that it could lead to the development of drugs to treat depression in humans without hallucinations.

“The hallucinogenic effects of psychedelics limit their widespread clinical application, as their administration is restricted to clinical settings that often require intensive monitoring,” the study’s authors wrote. They added that their research suggests “that the antidepressant and plasticity-promoting effects of psychedelics may be dissociable from their hallucinogenic effects.”

Today, more than 17 million U.S. adults and 2 million children suffer from clinical depression. Roughly 10 to 30 percent of those patients don’t respond to traditional antidepressant medication either—resulting in treatment resistant disorders.

Enter psychedelics. In recent years, drugs like ketamine, LSD, magic mushrooms, and MDMA have shown a lot of promise in treating disorders like depression and PTSD. However, one major hurdle with these drugs is the fact that they often cause hallucinations. That means that patients undergoing psychedelic treatments need to be supervised by doctors in a highly-regulated medical setting.

That poses a huge barrier for the vast majority of patients. However, if the drug was as easy as popping a pill at home without the worry of tripping out, then it could open the doors to treating millions of people.

[iHeart]

KUB Bread is back on store shelves there was a sighting at the Sobey's on Plessis

[Tracker]

20 hours ago, iHeart said:

KUB Bread is back on store shelves there was a sighting at the Sobey's on Plessis

That is very good news! I have driven by their former bakery at the corner of Erin and St. Matthews but have not seen any signs of life there.

[Brandon]

6 hours ago, Tracker said:

That is very good news! I have driven by their former bakery at the corner of Erin and St. Matthews but have not seen any signs of life there.

I thought KUB was bought out by the folks in Selkirk (Upper Crust?) so I would assume they are making it out of that bakery?

[GCJenks]

7 hours ago, Brandon said:

I thought KUB was bought out by the folks in Selkirk (Upper Crust?) so I would assume they are making it out of that bakery?

Chip and Pepper bought the brand and are contracting out the baking. The owner of Upper Crust has been having some health issues and the bakery was closed for a while. It does not have the capacity to produce this volume of commercial goods along with their own.

 

 

[Tracker]

                                                    

[Tracker]

 

 

                                                                    

[iHeart]

I own several monthly issues, most of them are Year in Review issues (I'm a sucker for History, I used to collect People Magazine's YiR issues until 2015 because everything went downhill from there and I didn't want to remember what a crap year 2016 was) I'm interested to see where things go from there, that book store that was attacked to Portage Place (I think it's closed now) had the final monthly issue (before the magazine's brief reboot in the mid 2000s) I just wish we had a photographer like Eisenstaedt these days he practically made that magazine

 

https://deadline.com/2024/03/karlie-kloss-life-magazine-relaunch-bedford-media-1235870602/

[FrostyWinnipeg]

https://abc7.com/woman-wins-1-million-lottery-prize-for-2nd-time-in-10-weeks-massachusetts/14759465/

You can't win if you don't enter.

Also, you can't win twice if you don't win a million once.