this fourth of july think of the indigenous people of america who had their country and land stolen from them with little to no reparations or apologies. land is still being taken. sacred grounds are still being ripped away. there is no “independence” for the people who were here first.
hi y’all–
if you don’t already know (and i haven’t seen any major news coverage), indigenous land defenders have been protesting Trump’s visit to Mount Rushmore. at least 12 were arrested yesterday (3 July) and a number of their cars and trucks were impounded.
the land that’s been carved into, called the Black Hills or, in Lakota, Pahá Sápa, is sacred to a number of indigenous peoples, particularly the Lakota, from whom the land was stolen originally. the faces engraved on this ancestral land belong to presidents with documented histories of white supremacism–and the carving itself was done by a member of the KKK.
Kid 1: Hey what are you doing?
Kid 2: *tosses a bike in the river* I dunno I’m just fuckin tossing bikes in the river bro
I really believed the caption was a snarky parody of what was said and not literally the actual dialogue
Thunderstorm jazz is freaking awesome. I need an album of that. I’d sleep like a baby.
People in the notes have entirely misunderstood the point of this experiment and what it entails.
It’s not “proving that crickets can be traumatized”. It’s proving that *animals can genetically pass on the stress that a dangerous situation causes, and the offspring will instinctually respond to the same situation without ever having personally experienced it.*
And that’s a big deal for many things, including human psychology.
When Nazis invaded The Netherlands, local Dutch peoples were under extreme emotional and physical duress. The Nazi army took their food for the soldiers, starving the population. They patrolled the streets and harshly reinforced their new laws. Existence was horrible and some parents had to give their children away to wealthier families because they couldn’t feed them anymore. This event is known as the Hongerwinter, or Dutch Famine.
One generation later, the children of mothers who were pregnant at the time of the famine have been proven to exhibit intense reactions to stress, and heightened fight or flight responses. They also experience more obesity because their bodies are prepared for starvation.
Some of these children were never personally exposed to the famine. Their mothers gave birth after conditions had improved, or even after moving to another country. But the effects are there, and those people are now adults who can recognize this and attest that they didn’t experience something else traumatic during childhood. It was passed on in the womb.
You can read about it here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/science/dutch-famine-genes.amp.html
This is called epigenetics. It’s essential to understanding how the human brain and body works. That our responses to stress can be passed on genetically. That it can show up in how we look physically, our physical health, our mental responses, our instinctual reactions. It’s especially important for people who are in therapy and need to understand *why* they act a certain way before they can actually work on it.
So no, this experiment wasn’t “haha let’s torment a cricket”. I’m not going to argue the potential cruelty of the experiment with people. I just want you to understand what it actually all MEANS.
Fascism only talks ideology but it really is just marketing, marketing for power. It’s recognizable by its need to purge, the strategies it uses to purge and its terror of truly democratic goals. It changes citizens into taxpayers so individuals become rife with anger at the notion of the public good. It changes citizens into consumers so the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity, nor our compassion, nor our generosity, none of the virtues that human beings aspire to claim. None of that but what we own. And in so doing produces the perfect capitalist. The one who is willing to kill a human being for a product—a sneaker, a jacket, a car, a company. That is the ideal situation for a consumer, lay capitalist society. You don’t have to advertise any more. It changes parenting into panicking so that we vote against the education, against the health care, against the safety from weapons, against the interest of our own children.
Toni Morrison, “Remarks Given at the Howard University Charter Day Convocation”
theres a hole in the wall in my brothers’ room because they were fighting (for fun not anger) in there once and one of them knocked the other into the wall so hard his head made that hole, so they put two small skeletons in there for decoration
they tapped up the “décor” sign up because according to them the skeleton is named décor and the one underneath him is his husband. also worth noting that they found 2 dollars in there the other day
by Andy Warner and Jess Parker
Someday a child will learn about this year and ask “but if there was an epidemic killing people, and crowded spaces made it spread faster, why didn’t they open the prisons and detention centers and let the people inside go home? why would they leave people in there to die?” and their teacher or parent will feel the way we do, when a child asks how slavery or the Holocaust was allowed to happen: unable to explain in any way that makes sense, and trapped in the knowledge that history cannot forgive us
This is not normal. Mass captivity is not normal. A structure premised on the assumption that maintaining that captivity is more important than anything, more important than preserving life, is not normal. Writing people off in the millions is not normal. We’ve made it normal. We’ve suspended the basic human impulse for community and decency, but that suspension won’t last forever. The prison won’t exist forever, and when it’s gone, our grandchildren will not be able to understand how we could do this.
70% of the inmates at Lompoc Federal Correctional Institute in California tested positive for COVID-19 last week.
70%. Seventy. Percent.
OUR GRANDCHILDREN WILL NOT BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND HOW WE COULD DO THIS.
I keep trying to write something here about the outbreak in San Quentin* and I keep having to stop because my heart is breaking. I can’t remember a time in my adult life when I have felt this afraid. Someone I love is in San Quentin. He hasn’t called in two weeks; we’re pretty sure the prison’s gone into lockdown. If he gets COVID and dies from it, it could be without us ever hearing his voice again.
Like I said, I’m finding it hard to write about this, so I’m just going to link the article above and say, if you’re in the United States, whatever state you’re in, call your governor right now and tell them “Let everyone out right now.” Use the Justice Collaborative’s resources.
We have two choices: we release at least half of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States right now, or we watch tens of thousands of them die, and then we watch hundreds of thousands more people die when the second wave of the epidemic strikes us from the prisons which it will do because that is how epidemiology works but I should not have to mention that because the people inside the prisons are people and their lives have fucking value whether they endanger the rest of us or not.
And I will say this part again, because this is what a fucking death camp looks like when it happens in your backyard, and your great-granddaughter will know it even if you don’t:
*As of June 25 the number is up to 505 cases, not counting staff. The article linked is a couple days old but the more recent articles have paywalls. The case numbers are doubling every few days.
I’m absolutely not against robits in the home, I think the possibilities are really cool but like… Alright actually, here’s a side by side comparison:
You’re like the 400th person to add this so:
This is the outline of my bedroom, with approximate furniture. Information I might not want handed out to the government or corporations or whatever. Not even including dubious terrain like rugs and clutter:
Here’s what a roomba, at floor level, with clutter and obstructions and stuff-under-stuff might be able to ‘map’ as navigable area:
This is completely useless to anybody except people developing robot vaccuums who might want diagnostic data. This isn’t even close to the level of Alexa’s microphone bollocks. Hit Alexa with a hammer, Roomba is… Safe, for now.
I saw the red and blue and my first response was “Roomba is using this sensitive information for GERRYMANDERING purposes”
SWAT team, bursting into your room, having been briefed with detailed Roomba-collected maps: *avoids difficult rug*
