*i regularly update this post with any new info i find so please always reblog the original post*

Donations

palestine children's relief fund

palestine red crescent society

help bring down israel's weapon trade - palaction

save palestine - islamic relief canada

click to donate - arab.org

send medical supplies to gaza - palestinian american medical association

help buy e-sims for people in gaza (as it stands, there are enough e-sims purchased for now. i will let you know once they need donations again. if you would like to stay updated, please follow @/Mirna_elhelbawi on twitter)

Petitions

petition to investigate war crimes committed by israeli military

demand ceasefire - amnesty.org

open call for immediate ceasefire

american government call for immediate ceasefire

american government to stop funding israeli military

ceasefire and increase humanitarian assistance - oxfam au

gaza call for ceasefire - oxfam (UK)

end israeli occupation - parliament uk (UK)

email your MP - medical aid for palestine (UK)

stop fuelling genocide - action network (USA)

call congress and demand a ceasefire - uscpr (USA - they provide a script of what you should say, so don't worry about it)

australia call on israel to stop attacking palestinians - apan (AUS)

sign to send letter to MP for ceasefire - nccm (CANADA)

ceasefire now! - ijv (CANADA)

cessez-le-feu et un couloir humanitaire - le mouvement (FRANCE)

write to your député - assemblée nationale (FRANCE)

skydda civilbefolkningen i gaza! - mittskifte (SWEDEN)

singaporeans call for immediate ceasefire (SIN)

contact your elected reps and demand a ceasefire (GERMANY)

write to the EU demanding a ceasefire (EUROPE)

multiple actions you can take to help palestine - plant een olifbloom (NETHERLANDS)

den haag, maak nú werk van vrede in israël/Palestina - the right forum (NETHERLANDS)

Campaigns

friends of al-aqsa

❥ UK-specific

❥ International

palestine action

islamic relief canada

text campaign for people living in USA

BDS movement

please let me know if you have any more links. i will add them in. and please reblog the original post!!

UPCOMING PROTESTS

PALESTINIAN LITERATURE READING LIST

Do not forget the other victims of ICE

as much as we must mourn and stand in solidarity with Renee Nicole Good, please do not forget the other victims of ice raids, who are not white. Silverio Villegas González, a cook from mexico who was dropping his son off at daycare and was murdered Jaime Alanis, a farmer from mexico who fell off a green house at the farm where he worked to send money to his wife and daughter Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdez, a father and grandfather from Guatemala who was hit by a car Josué Castro Rivera, a garden from Honduras who was struck by a car And so many others who were killed or are dying in detention centres, prisons ect racial bias is always something we must be aware of, Renee will be focused on because she was a white woman and a US citizen, but do not forget all the other victims of ICE, may they all rest in power

and Keith Porter

Here are the 2024 vaccine recommendation schedules. They’ve already been wiped from the cdc site. Save them and share widely, especially to your friends with kids.

I am thirty-something. I have the mumps right now.

I got the vaccine as a kid. I definitely did. But I am sick with the mumps.

How much worse would it be if I was not vaccinated?

Vaccinate your kids. Get vaccinated. Support vaccines. Share vaccine schedules.

Unskippable cutscene triggered; important information about vaccinations and herd immunity incoming:

If you grew up in the US and are fifty something or younger, your immunization was probably either with the MMR or MMRV vaccine. If you are in your 40s or 50s you were probably given one dose and if you are younger than that you probably received 2.

But no vaccine is 100% effective. A quick web search gave different percentages, but in general after two doses, the MMR is upper 90s% effective against measles, low 90s% effective against Rubella, and mid 80s% effective against mumps. If you only had one dose, the percentages would be slightly lower, but by less than about 5%.

This is still very good protection, but it does mean that some people who got their shots may not actually be immunized against the diseases. The only way to really be sure is to have some blood work done where they test to see if you're immune. Part of the reason I know all this is that I was required to have that lab done for measles in 2015 when there was an outbreak near where I worked. It turns out that while I was immune to measles, I had no mumps antibodies. Prev may very well have had the same thing happen to them. My company was very nice and sent a nurse to my desk (twice, one month apart) to give me a second round of immunizations. Hopefully they worked the second time.

You may be thinking, "If we have a whole bunch of people who are immunized, but are not immune, why don't we see more outbreaks of these highly contagious diseases?" Excellent question, hypothetical person! The answer is herd immunity.

Herd immunity is basically the idea that one of the ways to prevent people from getting sick is to have the person who they would have caught the disease from not get sick in the first place, so that they're not able to spread the disease. Or, to put it another way, if person A has the mumps and they would transmit it to person B, if person B is immune then they can't transmit it to person C - person C is protected by person B's immunity, so even it person C has no immunity, they're still protected by the immunity of person B.

Here's a fun little infographic for the concept:

In the picture on the right, all the grey people are still susceptible to the disease, but they're protected by all the green people who have been immunized.

It is important to remember that herd immunity falls apart if not enough people are immunized. For measles I think it's something like 95% of the population needs to be vaccinated (I'm assuming this math accounts for the 3ish% failure rate of the vaccine), but measles is very VERY contagious, so it's probably lower for other diseases. That's why you're more likely to see a measles outbreak than other diseases - it doesn't take a lot of unvaccinated people to break the herd immunity protection.

I also want to point out (because a lot of people forget) that there are people who CAN'T be vaccinated for medical reasons that rely on herd immunity to stay safe, and that the majority of those people are medically fragile or small children. Even if you think you're tough and can just deal with a disease if you happen to get it, breaking herd immunity means increasing the risk of the disease being transmitted to infants and cancer patients and the immunocompromised. If you won't do it for you, do it for the 4 month old who is too young to be vaccinated, and is much more likely to have severe complications from getting sick.

I've already reblogged the original post saying why meningitis specifically is idiotic to pull from the recommended vaccines (short version: it has like a 1 in 10 chance of just straight fucking killing you, don't play stupid games), but in general, you should get every vaccine your doctor (your DOCTOR not some idiot with no medical experience who wormed (pun intended) his way into the government) recommends. It will help keep you safe and it will help keep others safe as well.

I’ve noticed some posts around about how you can’t romanticize your life during a fascist regime and while I deeply sympathize with this sentiment, I want you to try to understand that’s what they want you to believe.

Fascism thrives best in the cesspool of hopelessness. They want us so confused and hopeless that we give in. When you give in, you don’t fight back.

If you wait for life to look good to do the things that bring you joy; life will still be bad - you will just have less joy.

As someone who has struggled with my mental health a lot for the last thirty years, I know this struggle firsthand. And changing this belief system - the one where you spend all of your time expecting bad things so you won’t be surprised when they happen - it’s the hardest work that I have ever done. And I’m not perfect; I still have setbacks. I still experience really real fears about the state of the world and the US, in particular, because that’s where I live.

But I made a vow to myself that I will not let the choices of others ruin my life. When I made that vow, I was thinking of my parents - but it applies to the state of the government right now, too.

There are still flowers in my garden, and ripe tomatoes, and it’s almost pick-your-own apples season, and I have plans with my friends to go to as many cemetery ghost walks as we can find this October.

I still deserve to live. I still deserve to laugh. I still deserve to love. I still deserve to be as happy as I can be.

And you do, too.

*gestures broadly at the resistance movements in europe during the last reich*

“Where there's hope, there's life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.”

— The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank

“One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.”

— The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

I needed this reminder so much today, thank you.

The idea of “but everyone knows that” needs to stop.

I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.

Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!

But let me tell you a story:

I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.

One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.

At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.

I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.

Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.

The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.

And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.

So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.

So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.

By all means, let them know so they can make informed decisions, but being kind will go a lot further than attacking them for some info they might not know yet.

As we speak of Renee Nicole Good, let’s remember Silverio Villegas González who was also shot and killed by ICE agents while in his vehicle, then ICE made claims that differed from video evidence. Let’s remember Marimar Martinez who survived after being shot at by ICE five times, but then had to fight against felony charges that were based on claims that differed from video evidence. Let’s remember Jaime Alanis, Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdez and Josué Castro Rivera who all died as a result of ICE raids.

Let’s remember everyone that we know of who died in ICE custody due to neglect and “undetermined causes” in this past year alone. Again, these are the deaths that we know of:

Genry Ruiz Guillén, Serawit Gezahegn Dejene, Maksym Chernyak, Juan Alexis Tineo-Martinez, Brayan Garzón-Rayo, Nhon Ngoc Nguyen, Marie Ange Blaise, Abelardo Avellaneda, Jesus Molina-Veya, Johnny Noviello, Isidro Pérez, Tien Xuan Phan, Chaofeng Ge, Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas, Oscar Rascon Duarte, Santos Banegas Reyes, Ismael Ayala-Uribe, Norlan Guzman-Fuentes, Miguel Ángel García Medina, Huabing Xie, Leo Cruz-Silva, Hasan Ali Moh’D Saleh, Gabriel Garcia Aviles, Kai Yin Wong, Francisco Gaspar-Andrés, Pete Sumalo Montejo, Shiraz Fatehali Sachwani, Jean Wilson Brutus, Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir, Delvin Francisco Rodriguez and Nenko Stanev Gantchev.

You can read their stories here:

Edited to add:

Remember Keith Porter, who was shot and killed by an off-duty ICE agent that involved himself in a situation that he wasn’t trained or qualified for, and then made claims that witnesses dispute.

Luis David Nico Moncada and Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras were both shot in their vehicle during a Border Patrol traffic stop. They were taken to the hospital after seeking help from the police, and their current condition is unknown.

So just so we're all clear ICE straight up murdered that woman in broad daylight and the government is calling HER the terrorist

So just so we're all clear ICE straight up murdered Renee Nicole Good in broad daylight and the government is calling HER the terrorist

So just so we're all clear ICE agent Jonathan Ross straight up murdered Renee Nicole Good in broad daylight and the government is calling HER the terrorist

Original Post: Keith Porter was tragically taken from us by an off-duty ice agent, and his family is seeking justice during this difficult time. Every donation can help support their fight for truth and accountability. Please consider clicking the link below to contribute or share it with others who might want to help. Thank you for your support! https://gofund.me/530afb61e

https://gofund.me/530afb61e

If you're in the US military or National Guard, and are given an illegal or unconstitutional order, the GI Rights hotline (1-877-447-4487) is there to help give you the support you need to do the right thing by refusing it. It would be good to think about this now before it becomes a live issue for you and it would be smart of you to memorize that number.

You can reblog this without your thoughts about the US Military, btw, that's allowed.

In fact: you SHOULD share it without your thoughts on the US Military. If someone in the military sees this number and is considering it, they already know. Just let them see the resource.

friendly reminder to pirate everything as often as possible and (above all) to do it safely.

FreeMediaHeckYeah is possibly one of the best resources I have seen collecting what is essentially every viable pirating site for all types of media, and I felt it needed to be shared!

(also make sure to check out their Beginners Guide for general information and safety tips!)

huuuughhhhh yahoo selling scraped data from tumblr to AI sloo probably uughhhwaaauuwghhhhhh

bwwaaaughhhhhhgggh enshittification continues

this is what you're looking for to opt out!!!

It's under Visibility, not Privacy like I assumed at first.

fyi the point of fucking up your data patterns isnt to avoid suspicion. it’s to make EVERYONE suspicious. same logic as the bloc, pals.  protect your comrades, be suspicious. ESPECIALLY if you aren’t doing anything likely to get you arrested.

the state is less omniscient and significantly more incompetent than you’d think. overextend their resources at every possible opportunity.  make them cry wolf repeatedly. run their data analysis agents fucking ragged.  and strike. attack.

YES i’m a postgrad statistics researcher and i can tell you that the state honestly has NO IDEA what to do with the data it collects, it has an obsession with big data but it’s almost impossible to work with in practice. the traditional statistical approaches that are used can’t be scaled up, the adapted approaches are substantially weakened, and the machine learning approaches have the same problems and often tell them nothing. data scientists are only just coming around to these issues too, most still just push on with it anyway - incompetence is the word. above all this though, like you say, the biggest issue for the state is at the point of data collection. they will NEVER get anything useful if they’re collecting shitty messy data. they will eventually figure out that the real solution is working how to collect accurate and meaningful data, we should make it as difficult as possible for them to do that

This makes me think that we need WAAAY more apps that generate junk data

Apps that generate junk data? tell me moooore.

Ooh I know this one!

Ad Nauseum is an adblocker that stores the ads it blocks and continuously generates fake clicks, fucking with analytics and costing the ad companies money

TrackMeNot automatically does randomly generated searches on a variety of search engines to obscure your real searches and fuck with analytics, and you can set it up to work with anything that has a search bar (including facebook, twitter, amazon, youtube, etc)

WhatCampaign replaces analytics parameters in links with the string “FuckOff”. I thought there was a similar extension that used random strings, but I can’t seem to find it

Privacy Possum is a fork of Privacy Badger with a focus on costing tracking companies as much money as possible, and idk if my limited tech knowledge is enough to understand what it does but the description does say it falsifies some data so that’s good enough for me

@afraidofamericans

Boy it SURE would be a SHAME if this were SPREAD AROUND for everyone TO SEE

[ID: "Cold weather reminder. Do NOT plug space heaters into power strips or extension cords. Plug space heaters directly into the wall outlet. Power strips are not designed to handle the high current flow required by a space heater and can overheat causing a fire."

A photo is attached of a power strip with an extremely charred end. Part of the power strip's wire is also charred. End ID]

My husband, an electrician, told me I have to reblog this.

For clarification's sake, is this true everywhere? I ask because I know that different countries have different quality home electricity provision; American home electricity Ain't Great compared with most of Europe, for example. In Wales I have never heard of this being a Thing, but our electricity comes in 240V flavour, so possibly the higher current naturally avoids this issue?

My British husband (not an electrician but electrician-adjacent) says yes this is true in the UK as well - anything that uses a lot of power should be plugged directly into the wall rather than an extension lead

Good to know, thank you!

*gets up to replug space heater*

reblog to give your headache to elon musk instead

i just wanted you guys to know theres a porn parody of the force awakens and just when this storm trooper dude starts feeling this bitch up, kylo came in and started doing his usual tantrum shit in the background unprovoked, meanwhile oblivious to all thats happening and let me tell you no porn has ever cut me so off guard and brought me to tears in .01 seconds until now

"Because I Love You" by Lex Marie.

She spent hours upon hours just beating the canvas with a belt...

when you look at the finished painting, you can almost see letters - but there aren't any. It's all noise. a lot of adults process this sort of beating by insisting there is a lesson in it. with the title and artist statement in mind, it's like they're trying to read a message of love written in that chaotic canvas.