a hockey player just came out bc he was inspired by heated rivalry. and i’m not sobbing to death on my bathroom floor. YOURE sobbing to death on your bathroom floor.
I also wanted to highlight the cave hyenas from yesterday’s picture. Their spots are inspired by the Chauvet cave painting that is believed to depict a hyena.
“make yourselves impossible to ignore. 10,000 signatures on twitter is a lot but 10 unique personal emails is enough to derail an entire council session.”
I was in a city council meeting last week about defunding the police and one of the council members mentioned multiple times that she’d been inundated with calls and emails all that day saying to defund the police.
[ID: Two screenshots of a twitter thread by alex flanigan, anti-fascist @Coff33Detective from June 12, 2020 beginning at 11:25 AM that reads: hi! i work in local government and community management, and i’m here to tell you a secret: it is like, really, really easy to overwhelm the people who work in your local government. especially right now. especially on things they can actionably do or impact.
you may not know this, but i bet your city or town or municipality has a website. i bet that website has some contact forms or email addresses on it. i bet you can use them to put together a message in about 5 minutes! i bet it’s almost as easy as signing a national petition.
which is to say: i’m noticing, like most other people, that the national level discussion on really important and long overdue issues is flagging. but the internet and news cycle is not the only battleground, and you will be pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to—
—fight those battles at home, on your own turf, with much more immediate impact, and they are so, so important.
I am begging you: make my job, and the jobs of people like me, difficult right now. flood us with demands. make yourselves impossible to ignore. 10,000 signatures on twitter is a lot but 10 unique personal emails is enough to derail an entire council session. End ID]
I’ve been a city council observer with the League of Women Voters for nearly a year, and I have witnessed the following:
A few guys voicing their anxiety about speeding on a street where their children play and suggesting a radar speed sign. Despite catching all of two meetings where this was mentioned, I walked back home one day and–yep–there was a radar speed sign up.
A persistent force of 3-5ish loud residents coming to zoning and council meetings because they did not want a drive through style restaurant moving into a particular area where there were already major issues with traffic congestion and safety. This eventually resulted in a Chik-fil-a having its planning proposal shot down by council such that the lot is now likely to house an Aldi. I am getting low cost groceries instead of bigotry chicken in my neighborhood because of a D&D party’s worth of regular speakers.
A turnout of residents shouting down an attempt to reduce the amount of funding for the community Juneteenth celebration until Council backed down. One meeting. Roughly a dozen people + their kids speaking about the significance of the holiday. The celebration ended up having its full funding restored.
In my experience, it is incredibly easy to bully local politicians and get some sort of results, especially in small municipalities. If you have something that you want to see happen at the local level, seriously try to contact your local officials and see what you can make happen.
I single-handedly got them to double the number of chickens you are allowed to keep in my former town.
“If you look only at the trend of species declines, it would be easy to think that we’re failing to protect biodiversity, but you would not be looking at the full picture,” said Penny Langhammer, lead author of the study and Executive Vice President of Re:wild. “What we show with this paper is that conservation is, in fact, working to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. It is clear that conservation must be prioritized and receive significant additional resources and political support globally, while we simultaneously address the systemic drivers of biodiversity loss, such as unsustainable consumption and production.”
This massive meta analysis (for those not familiar, a study analyzing the results of many studies on similar topics) found that the vast majority of conservation efforts show much much better results than doing nothing. In many cases, biodiversity loss was not only stopped but reversed.
This shows that conservation efforts really work and money invested is put to very good use. Legally protecting endangered species really works, restoring habitat really works, removing invasive species really works, returning land to Indigenous communities works. All of the blood, sweat, and tears being poured into protecting the natural world has been making a real, big, tangible, difference on a global scale.
I’ve been trying to find time to write this post for the last three days because I want to use my platform, limited as it is, and have not had time. Even while typing this up, reports are emerging that someone else was shot by ice agents tonight (Wednesday, Jan. 14), so I am trying to keep this as detailed but brief as possible. I mean this with absolutely no exaggeration: the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, are currently under occupation by federal agents.
Deployment of mass military/paramilitary forces to “blue” cities is not new of course (DC, LA, Chicago), but the Twin Cities are a much smaller metro area and have a lot more agents deployed relative to our population size. Mutual aid groups are scrambling because most people of color are very understandably terrified of leaving and being snatched off the sidewalks or the bus stop or at school dropoffs. Minneapolis Public Schools is allowing distance learning until mid-February.
I can’t stress enough how many other abductions and atrocities I am missing from the following list because it has been nonstop, but a few highlights of the regime’s blatant human rights abuses and atrocities are as followed:
breaking into the car of a disabled autistic woman who was trying to navigate driving on a street teeming with observers and ice agents while on her way to a doctor’s appointment.
refusing medical treatment to another man who was brutally dragged from his car. it took three days to get a status update on him, even though the video his disappearance received a lot of attention because he was visibly non responsive while being kidnapped, and a lot of people were speculating that he’d died at the speedway or shortly after
beating two Target workers, one of them a seventeen year old kid, abducting them both, and then dropping them off at a random walmart 10 minutes down the road after
arresting four unhoused Ogala Sioux men and refusing to release information unless the tribe “entered into an immigration agreement with ice” (Salon). one man was released, but three are still being held at Fort Snelling, which historically was used as a concentration camp for the state’s crimes against the Dakota people
an important note about above is that there many more Native people who have been detained or arrested, but these three are of particular note because they’ve been held for days, and they were abducted from an area of the city that is known for its large population of unhoused Native people
again this is just the tip of the iceberg and some incidents that have been spread around more widely. ice agents are going door to door with weapons, they are following people who are organizing aid distribution, they are targeting businesses that have stepped up to help the community. protesters showing up at the whipple building where ice is detaining people know that it is extremely likely they’ll be detained or have chemical munitions deployed against them just for gathering outside the building.
pay attention to what’s happening in Minnesota, start organizing in your community, and please for the love of god do not give one more ounce of attention to that motherfucker jacob frey as he goes on his podcast tour while allowing MPD to arrest protesters and aid & abet ice operations. pay attention to news and reports from: Georgia Fort, On Site Public Media and Toussaint Morrison, Sahan Journal, social accounts of Minneapolis Council member Jason Chavez, Unicorn Riot, and MN ICE Watch.
like yall it took me probably and hour to track down all my sources for this and in the mean time ice and riot police have been gassing and kettling protesters who gathered in response to the second shooting by ice agents this past week. the adminstation is escalating very violently and quickly and everyone is on edge because another state sanctioned street execution really seems inevitable at this point.
new mobile ui made me fuck up my reblog chain and I want this all together so! one more repost for the night:
I know money is tight for so many of us on here but if you are willing and able to help Minnesotans who are being forced into hiding to protect themselves from being grabbed off the streets and potentially maimed killed or disappeared without a trace by the secret federal paramilitary forces invading our neighborhoods, you can find vetted local mutual aid organizations and also individual/family fundraisers at this website. a really large population of people cannot go to work or get groceries or exist in public without serious threat to their safety and lives. we’re only one week into this siege and there is already so much support needed. feel free to reach out to me for recs if there is a particular cause, need, or population you want to financially support
So turns out the US are setting babies up for a lifetime of illness and increased likelihood of liver cancer in Guinea Bissau in the name of “research”
7000 newborns will be denied the neoneatal HepB vaccine until 6 weeks to ‘prove’ that the HepB vaccine is linked to neurodevelopmental disability on the directions of the Department of Health vis RFK Jr and in collaboration with researchers in Denmark, despite the fact that the vaccine’s efficacy rate and best protection is when administered to newborns, and the total lack of correlation between vaccination and neurodevelopmental disabilities.
Guinea Bissau has some of the highest rates of HepB on the continent, and infants are the group at the highest risk of contracting HepB, leading to chronic hepatitis & long term hepatic diseases like cirrhosis and liver failure as well as increased chance of liver cancer.
The study can’t be carried out in the US or Denmark because it fails almost every benchmark for medical ethics — surprising absolutely nobody, it is in fact heinously unethical to expose babies to preventable disease that causes liver failure and liver cancer, but the “study” has been green lit in Guinea.
Fuck the US imperial project in Africa, fuck RFK Jr and the US Department of Health, and fuck every single collaborative researcher in Denmark. This is some nightmare Tuskegee Study shit and every single individual involved deserves to be in The Hague.
In 1850, a farmer found a secret village. It was later determined to be older than the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Archeologists estimated that 100 people lived in this village named Skara Brae, the “Scottish Pompeii.” The houses were connected to each other by tunnels, and each house could be closed off with a stone door.
One of my absolute favorite artifacts, the Skara Brae Buddo is from here!
This super cute figurine is from aprox. 2900–2400 BC, and one of the handful known figurines from the British Neolithic.
The figurine got its name when it was rediscovered in 2016: “Buddo” is an Orcadian word, a term of endearment and isn’t gender-specific. In the Neolithic most human figurines represented the feminine, often believed to be the goddesses of fertility and/or beauty, so this figurine is quite unique as it doesn’t have gendered features!
There’s a hole on each side, so it’s most likely that it was suspended (inside the home or as some kind of body ornament).
Its purpose is widely argued, some beleive the figurine to be a child’s toy, but it easily could’ve been an ‘idol’ or ‘fetish’ (= meaning it had a ritualistic and religious role).
The installation consists of 1,200 glass shards, each of which is aligned by hand. The train is moved centimeter by centimeter and each new glass shard is turned into the correct position so that the beam of light is directed to the next glass shard. As soon as the train starts moving, this creates a chain reaction of light…
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