u/Tao-of-Mars

A friend of mine wrote this after having lost their home in a fire a few years ago. It has some great info for those of you who want to help. I wanted to help get the word out so please share where you can. Please make sure you vet any organization or fund that you want to donate money to.

“This post is to everyone that wants to help…

I see so many people posting items they wish to donate and asking where and how they can donate and while that is so appreciated, I want to help you all see a survivors point of view…

If you know someone personally, or someone who is in immediate need of help/supplies, by all means do whatever you possibly can to help them!!

Otherwise, from our own experience, wait just a bit. 

While waiting, resist the urge to give monetarily to the Innovia Foundation! That money will not go directly to most of the victims/survivors.  We never saw any of the $1.3 million that was raised in ‘23. Many other victims didn’t either. In fact, their own website says they still hold $550,000 for “future home build projects”.  

If you want to give monetarily right now, I urge you to give to small, local organizations or give to GoFundMe accounts that you will hear of from “friends of friends”. This size of loss will cause us to all know someone who knows someone who needs help. 

If you can wait, WAIT!  Give people a moment to gather themselves and assess their needs. They are traumatized and won’t know what they need yet. 

It is overwhelming to even think about going to locations to “shop” among the piles of donated items when you are in that position. 

It is overwhelming and time consuming to have to scour the helpful Facebook pages to “shop” from all the donations.

Please don’t think they are ungrateful because they are not coming to receive or claim these items. 

They are in shock. 

They are busy trying to manage all the things one must do after losing everything. 

I know for us it was very hard to accept help when we are used to being the helpers.  

We didn’t know how to ask for help or what to ask for.

Also, we didn’t have anyplace to store anything that was given to us for quite a while so that is something to consider. 

Again, I urge you to wait. Pray if you are a praying person.  Search for, and expect, the opportunities to help come across your path for a long time to come. THEY WILL COME.

It can mean the difference between hope or despair for someone.

Just some thoughts, for what they are worth.”

Scientists, educators, farmers and the broader public now have a new website for climate information in the United States. The site, Climate.us, launched this week and fills a void left when a government-run climate information website was shut down last year by the Trump administration.

The new site was created by former employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — the government's lead scientific agency for climate, weather and ocean monitoring — who worked on Climate.gov until they were laid off last year as part of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cutbacks.

Climate.gov had long been a trusted source for official government climate data. Nearly 1 million visitors came to the site each month, according to 2021 numbers.

Most of the data remains technically accessible on government servers, but it is difficult to find, according to Rebecca Lindsey, a former program director for Climate.gov who now heads the Climate.us project. In August 2025, she and two other former NOAA employees who helped run the government site began to re-create it.

"This information is too important. It should remain in a protected place," Lindsey says.

As of June 24, 2025, users going to the NOAA climate site are presented with a page saying: "In compliance with Executive Order 14303 … Future research products previously housed under Climate.gov will be available at NOAA.gov/climate and its affiliate websites." When NPR asked for comment, NOAA Communications Director Kim Doster emailed the same statement.

The result, Lindsey says, is NOAA "renovated a store, and they had the front door open into a closet."

Lindsey and her small team crowdsourced about $280,000 to get started on the technical part of the new climate site. They also recruited volunteers, including about 80 scientists to serve on the group's science panel and to be subject-matter experts to fact-check what the site publishes. This year, the effort also received a one-time grant from an anonymous donor that Lindsey says will keep the project afloat until at least February 2027.

NOAA's climate data is public, making the downloading and the creation of the new Climate.us site relatively straightforward, Lindsey says. But there were still obstacles — among them, creating a new search capability to replace one on the old government site that would have been too expensive to keep using.

"The technical issues were more challenging than the content issues," she says.

Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, says she frequently referred people to Climate.gov because of its accuracy and easy-to-understand information. The site's disappearance, she says, made it harder for the public and other users of NOAA data to access trustworthy climate change information. Climate.us goes a long way to closing that gap.

"They're really helping people connect what's happening at the global scale to how it matters to their lives," she says.

"One of the things that researchers have identified is public education and understanding of not just what's happening, but why it matters and how it affects us," Hayhoe says.

Climate.gov was considered a "flagship" source and "hugely important" not only for raw data, but for context and analysis, says Gretchen Gehrke, a science communicator at the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), a nonprofit group that works to make information about the environment available to the public.

"I think what it did was take this huge amount of climate data that we have and make it much, much more accessible for the public and for policymakers," she says.

Gehrke says that since DOGE, "now we have a lot of expertise outside of the government because of so much brain drain from the government, and we can really stand up things. We can have powerful interventions, and [Climate.us], I think, is a success story of that."

The new site re-creates the old "climate dashboard" on the government site that contained more than a dozen key graphs related to climate change. It also features Climate.gov's 15-year collection of climate news and stories, expert blogs, visual status reports on key climate indicators, maps and data pathways, climate literacy resources and classroom materials, according to the site.

Lindsey says the editorial philosophy of Climate.us will remain the same as it was in Climate.gov's heyday — just the facts.

"Climate.gov was never about — and Climate.us will never be about — telling Americans what to do about climate change," she says. "The site will continue to be nonpartisan but will be focusing on the science and explaining science and showing people what the data show."

Just last week, the White House was forced to backtrack on a plan to remove a half-dozen high-tech data-collection buoys from the Pacific. The buoys measure sea-surface temperature, currents and changes in ocean chemistry due to carbon dioxide emissions and other pollutants.

EDGI's Gehrke is concerned about the "quiet discontinuation" of climate data under the Trump administration, which could leave scientists without the information they need to address climate change. She thinks Climate.us could prove a valuable tool for keeping tabs on that.

"We are still not in a position to know what data is even being collected," she says.

Lindsey says there is discussion within Climate.us about whether the site's role will be to safeguard climate information until it can return to government stewardship in a future administration, or whether it should remain an independent resource. She sees the value in keeping it out of politicians' hands.

"The fact that they got rid of it so easily is proof that we shouldn't make it vulnerable again," she says.

“Deporting witnesses, victims and defendants “creates a culture of impunity, where criminals feel they can prey upon the immigrant community without consequence, because people who witness or become victims of crimes are too afraid to come forward,” according to the report.”

Can we just imagine for a second what the world would be like if men did not resort to manipulating women?

First, some experiential context to this question. I’m a hetero cis woman who has spent a lot of time in long-term relationships and in the dating space. In the most recent couple of years, I’ve made clear that I will not date men who think human rights are an afterthought or are insignificant. I’m clear that if a man doesn’t align with my beliefs about human rights and me having the freedom to be my full independent self, he should just pass on by me. I constantly get manipulated by a range of men and I’m certain this happens to most, if not all women. Even left-leaning men who have a friend with benefits on the side but fail to tell us that before they try to get intimate.

I recently went on a date with a wealthy guy (did not realize this over chatting) who came from a small town about an hour away. He tried to play it off like he aligned with my beliefs while we were just messaging and he was very much looking for a housewife to help take care of his kids. When he’d ask me questions and I’d give him a response about who I authentically am, he’d downplay my response and make his own meaning out of it. I felt guilty for not taking him up on his offer for a second date because he bent over backwards by paying for everything, driving to me, having his grandparents take his kids for the day (which is yuck anyway). There were so many red flags but the icing was that it became clear he had expectations of jumping in head first very quickly and I just thought he wanted an adventure friend. I was annoyed that I spent half a day figuring this out. He intentionally circumvented dialogue before meeting for this reason.

And that’s just the lower-risk/less-concerning end of the spectrum. I’ve experienced a massive range of being manipulated which has made me lose interest in interacting with men at all.

But really, what would the world be like if men just chose to not manipulate women?