>>24666
I'll play advocatus diaboli.

Human life matters far more than biomass and forest coverage statistics. Non-human life is less valuable than ours and is under our administration; it is ours to use for the betterment of our species. Of course, as responsible stewards it is our duty to make use of it carefully so future generations won't be deprived by overuse. And as sensitive stewards we can appreciate the beauty of nature and recognize that some non-human life can feel pain, and adjust our rule over nature accordingly. But the life of some common tree is not worth more than the life of a human; it is not even worth the same.

You can cut down thousands and thousands of square km of virgin Amazon land and you'll still have enough untouched rainforest for every purpose you can think of. The new open spaces have housed wave after wave of settlers adding up to a population in the millions with major urban centers housing international airports and industry. Further south, the acidic soil of the central South American savannah was defeated and its neverending empty flatlands were turned into a global-level breadbasket with several neatly planned cities, a victory of willpower and reason over vacuum.
If not for deforestation, most of those settlers would now live in overcrowded eastern slums. Is that really a better way of life than living as a pioneer in a plot of deforested land? Millions of Europeans left their overcrowded continent to build something new on the other side of the Atlantic for similar reasons, and the conquest of the Amazon repeats this on a smaller scale.

And then there's the problem of national sovereignty. Would you feel comfortable with a sparsely populated porous border thousands of km long with several unstable states? That's what the northern border is. FARC guerillas have crossed into Brazilian territory before. Only a populated Amazon guarantees a safe border.

"It's all greed", you might say. It is true that greed is not the ideal driving impulse for the conquest of virgin land, and sadly it's a driving force. But the economic use of conquered land is not evil per se. It is easy to think so in a Scandinavian country where further economic growth brings little improvement to collective and individual well-being. But that does not mean material prosperity is unrelated to happiness. It just has diminishing returns. As an undeveloped state we are still at a point where economic expansion can have social/imaterial benefits. And within a globalized economy, exporting raw materials and the services and industrial goods produced within the cleared space contributes to overall prosperity, allows other undeveloped states to have their own improvements and, through trade, creates relations of interdependency which bring countries closer together and contribute to global peace.

Often, probably even most of the time, cats have some kind of camouflage patternation on their top halves but their underside is white. This doesn't make sense for a terrestrial hunter, the only reason one would have a white underside is if they are flying in order to camouflage them against the sky if they are being looked at from below. So the ancestors of cats must have at one point been capable of flight but have sense lost this ability. You can say what you want but the evidence is there.


Also, there may be fellows that doubt this hypothesis based on a 'lack' of evidence and who are going on what the skeletal remains tell them BUT. If the wings were made of cartilage they would not be left for us to find after all of this time and being an aerial predator it would probably nest high up and live in the mountains and so maybe there remains would not be left intact up there or the bones would get blown away, plus we currently are lacking in the amount of archaeological digs that we do in places like that.

Additionally, cats can have incredibly large ranges Tigers can have ranges up to 4000km2 and they don't even have wings, if they had wings they would have larger ranges and so maybe they would be quite rare and it would be even harder to find remains.

Today we celebrate and glorify Pedro II's overthrow in a military coup 129 years ago, marking our transformation into a banana republic. The strongman who led the coup is even in every 25 cent coin.
As typical, Temer spoke about the virtues and strength of liberal democracy even though the Braganza were more liberally democratic than the following regimes.

I'm looking for a car but I don't know much about them. I am thinking of a car like a Fiat 500 or a VolksWagon Beetle. What other cars are there like this, cars that are small so they are easy to park and don't use much fuel but that also look interesting and nice.