I don’t think it is real. It seems to be the oversimplified and overexaggerated story of what is really happening. The guardian says that the US Forest Service will move headquarters from Washington DC to Salt Lake City:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/31/us-forest-service-washington-dc-salt-lake-city
This seems to cause many of its research facilities to (temporarily?) close:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/03/climate/forest-service-research-stations.html
Eww… yet another state with imperialist and fascist history that has done many genocides (none of which it has ever acknowledged). And you are proud of that?
In times of authoritarian and fascist uprising, I think we should be careful what ideas we spread. The telling of a “German” or “Russian” people that are “natural” ethnicities is not far from right wing ideology. Why would you even use “Germans” and “Germanic people” synonymously? That’s anachronistic and they don’t really have anything to do with each other. Some Germanic people also lived where Ukraine is now btw.
It isn’t even clear if “Germanic peoples” existed as a distinct group of people:
Different academic disciplines have their own definitions of what makes someone or something “Germanic”.[3] Some scholars call for the term’s total abandonment as a modern construct, since lumping “Germanic peoples” together implies a common group identity for which there is little evidence.[4] Other scholars have defended the term’s continued use and argue that a common Germanic language allows one to speak of “Germanic peoples”, regardless of whether these ancient and medieval peoples saw themselves as having a common identity.
Oh, and the Nazis did synonymize both Germans and Germanic peoples as well:
The publishing of Tacitus’s Germania by humanist scholars in the 1400s greatly influenced the emerging idea of “Germanic peoples”. Later scholars of the Romantic period, such as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, developed several theories about the nature of the Germanic peoples that were highly influenced by romantic nationalism. For those scholars, the “Germanic” and modern “German” were identical. Ideas about the early Germans were also highly influential among members of the nationalist and racist völkisch movement and later co-opted by the Nazis. During the second half of the 20th century, the controversial misuse of ancient Germanic history and archaeology was discredited and has since resulted in a backlash against many aspects of earlier scholarship.
To synonymize “Russians” with “Slavic people” is also wrong, as Slavic people where a diverse group of very different people living in different regions of the world. We also don’t know where the early Slavic people lived exactly.
That anecdote doesn’t make any sense though. Like who are “the Russians” and why didn’t they have prior knowledge of other ethnic groups before? And “the Germans” is a very recent group of people that isn’t ethnic at all.
Hm, I think there is a clearer ethical distinction between vegetarians and vegans. But this doesn’t necessarily translate towards the participation in our capitalist system.
For example, I’m a long-time vegan but due to my financially very limited resources I mostly buy cheap conventional food, even vegan meat substitutes from actual meat companies (they are way cheaper). In contrast, a friend of mine is living vegetarian, but she works on an organic farm. So she works towards a more sustainable agriculture while also consuming nearly only organic products.
Eating eggs -> financially supporting a system where male chicks get either immediately killed after birth or more rarely are later killed for their meat. Also it is supporting a system where chickens are bred to produce as many eggs as fast as possible, which means a life of torture to them
Drinking milk -> financially supporting a system where cows are continuously impregnated against their will and where their offspring is immediately taken from them and killed for their meat (I think this is done yearly). Also it is supporting a system where cows are bred to produce as much milk as fast as possible, which means a life of torture to them
There are certainly many more atrocities happening, but I’m trying not to think too often of that stuff
You’re totally right! I forgot that this is very dependent on where you live. In the area where I usually collect boletes, there are zero poisonous ones and only some that are hard to digest or bad tasting.
This is a play on the two meanings of herb. Of course they are still “herbs” in the culinary sense. But in a botanical sense you would classify plants into categories like herb(aceous plant), sub-shrub, shrub, tree, vine, liana, etc. This doesn’t affect culinary names though.
That wheat is a grass is even easier to understand than corn also is one. And don’t forget bamboo, which can even grow into huge “trees” forming large bamboo forests!
Vegetarians aren’t real anyways because they still support mass murder of animals! (partly /s)
It isn’t that hard to correctly ID Amanita rubescens and I’ve eaten it quite a few times. But if I’m the only one responsible for identifying it I wouldn’t dare to eat it. With boletes I’m much more lenient and don’t even know the species all of the time :D
Well, one could argue that it is the other way around. We consider most mushrooms as feasibly edible when it is easy enough to distinguish them from non-edible ones. There are thousands of mushroom species out there that are probably edible but that are just not worth anyone’s time. And we also focus more on certain groups of mushrooms that contain a higher percentage of edible ones, like boletes (and also champignons).
Who is to say what’s part of the thorax and what not? There are other instances of insects having a thorax that looks divided. In some insects (I think it was beetles) most of the “abdomen” is actually their thorax and so forth…
Wow, layers of bodyshaming in the meme and comments… :(
Not if they are individuals that are unwished for (male chicks) or are otherwise killed before their natural death (all livestock, but especially lambs and calves). Also, I think the number of early deaths in factory farming isn’t that low either. Animals die of exhaustion, torture and illnesses.
Yes, I tried to communicate this difference, but didn’t know how to
This is wrong though. Like obviously it is an animal and no one debates its rough location in the tree of life. There are apparently ongoing discussions if it is a deuterostome or a more basal clade, but that isn’t what the meme is suggesting. Also, there are various described species of Xenoturbella, so you can distinguish them from each other.
And what about the lack of organs?? There is such a great diversity of single celled organisms out there that by definition lack organs (organs are a collection of tissues that serve a common function). So what is the point of even mentioning organs here? The person who wrote this really doesn’t know anything about biology or is trolling.
What species has “a clear reason to exist”? That’s a general question and has no particular connection to this group of animals.
This whole meme is just a desperate attempt to create exciting sounding content for social media without doing enough research.
It’s in the same genus as species who show this behavior, yes. Not sure if this specific species does it though. In any case, even with non-retracting species the interaction is between plant and observing human. In the meme it is just between particles and their environment in general, not related to an observer.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the meme apart from similar wording. The underlying mechanisms are completely different though
The whole series is really fun! (But it’s unfortunately not very long). You can find it on dropout tv and it is called wtf 101.