Reblogged pitviperofdoom
i'm not actually mad i just like the comedic delivery of righteous but pointless anger
We don't talk enough about America's permanent ongoing saturation of "Stranger Danger" hysteria. It's like this country's whole social ecosystem teaches full grown adults to perceive an invisible army of rabid bogeymen lurking around every fucking corner. And it's everywhere. Absolutely fucking everywhere, top to bottom, from true crime media and urban legends like the old Poison Halloween Candy thing to our sadistically rage-fueled, revenge-based justice system and immigration policies. The NRA and the war on drugs and post 9/11 airport security and mccarthyism and satanic panic and just E V E R Y T H I N G in America, everything that has defined its history for 100+ years is constantly nothing but this fucking FEAR TERROR FEAR TERROR for positively no reason. None.
Reblogged tciddaemina
I do think that anyone could have become a fascist if their life circumstances were different, but I also know that, when I was five years old, my mother briefly explained the history of slavery, emancipation, segregation, civil rights, and apartheid to me, and I think overt racism would have been an instant turn-off for me from any political movement after that point.
Reblogged razzledazzy
there is this thing called a "kitty cat". and you can get one for inside your home, and it will sit on all of your surfaces, and you can pet it.
Best News of Last Week
Happy week, friends! Let’s dive into another round of Feel Good News, full of kindness, creativity, and hope.
MacKenzie Scott, the billionaire philanthropist, has been making several multimillion-dollar donations to DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and disaster relief causes in recent weeks. One of her latest gifts is an $80 million donation to Howard University, a historically Black school, which is one of the largest single donations in the university’s 158-year history. The gift is unrestricted, allowing the university to use the resources as it chooses. This donation comes at an opportune time, as the federal government shutdown has delayed annual federal appropriations that the school relies on to support student success, academic programming, research, and university operations.
“Jimmy Kimmel Live!” is launching a donation center to support community members in need during the ongoing government shutdown. The late night show is collecting food and essential items to benefit the LA Food Bank and St. Joseph Center, as the Trump administration plans to withhold SNAP (food assistance) benefits. Kimmel has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration, recently criticizing the president’s “Great Gatsby”-themed Halloween party at his golf club amidst the impending loss of food assistance for millions of Americans.
The Australian government is proposing a “Solar Sharer” program that would provide free electricity to all ratepayers for at least three hours a day, during the peak solar generation hours. This scheme aims to distribute the benefits of the country’s extensive solar power deployment to all electricity consumers, not just those with rooftop solar. The program would encourage behavioral changes, such as running household appliances and charging electric vehicles during the free electricity hours, helping to better match electricity demand with supply. The initiative is expected to iron out grid imbalances caused by the variable nature of solar power, while also delivering cost savings to consumers. If successful, the scheme could serve as a model for other regions with high solar penetration to better integrate renewable energy into the electricity system.
Ed Sheeran has praised changes to the national curriculum in England that will allow more students to study creative subjects like music. The government plans to modernize the curriculum and remove “outdated systems” that limit access to arts education. The curriculum review will also add new content on financial literacy, spotting fake news, and climate change. It recommends giving speaking and communication skills the same status as reading and writing. However, the government is not taking up all of the review’s recommendations, such as scrapping the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) progress measure.
South Korea has announced a new law that will require parking lots with more than 80 spaces to install solar canopies and carports, including existing facilities. This move is aimed at expanding renewable energy and creating more solar and construction jobs. The solar structures will also provide practical benefits for drivers, such as protecting vehicles from the elements and helping to preserve battery range in electric vehicles. Similar initiatives in the US, like the one in Arizona’s Northwest Fire District, have shown that this idea can work in other countries as well. States like Texas, New Mexico, and Florida could also benefit from implementing such a policy, as it could reduce the cost of energy generation for the entire community.
The Netherlands has said it will return a stolen 3,500-year-old sculpture to Egypt. It is “highly likely” the stone head, dating from the time of the pharaohs, was plundered during the Arab Spring in either 2011 or 2012, according to the Dutch Information & Heritage Inspectorate. A decade later, it turned up at an arts and antiques fair in Maastricht and, following an anonymous tip-off, Dutch authorities determined it had been stolen and exported illegally.
———-
That’s it for last week :)
This newsletter will always be free. If you liked this post you can support me with a small kofi donation here:
Also don’t forget to share this post with your friends.
Greetings from your friendly neighborhood National Park Service worker.
The government wants you to think a shutdown is no big deal. It's is. They want things to keep running in the meantime. They will- but not safely and not paid. Because not everyone is necessarily aware what a shutdown means for Gov workers, this is how it works...
Employees fall into one of the following three categories:
Excepted: Unpaid, required to work (those needed to protect life and property).
Exempted: Paid, required to work (those funded by non-lapsed sources)
Furloughed: Unpaid, employees that are neither excepted nor exempted. These employees have been ordered to "expeditiously complete orderly shutdown activities" then head home. This may be a few minutes for some employees or a few days depending on their job duties and what it takes to perform an "orderly shutdown" of their activities.
Who is furloughed? Legit everyone but "safety" workers. So fees, maintenance, timekeepers, facilities, everybody. And no, those thousands of people will not be paid for whatever amount of time they aren't working.
Who is Exempted? In my neck of the woods (pun intended) it's law enforcement, fire, ems, search and rescue and dispatchers. Hey that sounds like a lot? Guess what - almost all of the law enforcement in the park are simultaneously EMS, search and rescue and the Fire department. One person, four jobs. That's the way... It always is by the way, which is HIGHLY PROBLEMATIC (but that's a different rant). We will keep doing those four jobs, unpaid and unsupported. When will we get paid for our work?- who knows. You may ask yourself - why do we have to keep working when everything is shutdown? Because they're not closing the national parks. Yeah. So people are going to keep coming, keep using the bathrooms that won't be cleaned, keep using the roads that won't be maintained safely, keep getting hurt and in trouble.
Right now, there is a massive rollover DUI car accident on one side of the park and someone just got gored by an animal on the other side of the park. So all of us (the three people on shift at the moment) will be figuring out which one to heading out to. We have to choose. And it's going to be extremely dangerous when we do get on scene because those "non-essential workers" that were furloughed? -Those are the people we count on daily to go above and beyond their own normal duties and help.
Those are the people who manage traffic around the accident for us so we don't get hit. Those are the people that get extra resources for us (lights for night time, blankets, Gatorade if it's a long extraction on scene). Those are the people that make sure we get paid for being called out in the middle of the night, the people that make sure all the protocols are being followed so everyone is safe, the victim advocates that talk to the families, they are the essential hands needed because- if you haven't all forgotten- they already gutted our limping agency staff by like 30%.
What can you do?
The usual things you see - pester your local and government officials. Pester your money makers though even more - the businesses that give money to your local officials. But more immediately? Please do not come here. Please do not further burden the system. Tell other people not to come. Don't let the government think we can make it work still- we can't. Do not make us have to function as if things were okay, because they are really really not.
Greetings from Week Five of the shutdown.
What’s new?
Well, for a small group of us first responders, the government has now ordered that we be paid… from our park’s admission fee money fund. The admission fee money fund that is supposed to go directly towards improving the park – fixing roads, cleaning and fixing facilities, visitor experience stuff. The admission fee money fund that’s supposed to cover those improvements for the entire year… Is now being used to pay us. So guess what happens when that runs out? A.) no more pay, B.) no improving the park.
But the parks are still open? So wouldn’t the fees of people still coming in cover part of that? No. Because we’re not allowed to collect fees during the shutdown. The parks are open, not gaining any revenue, burning through their reserves, and becoming significantly more unsafe and generally trashed and destroyed, by the day.
What does that look like?
Last week it was very icy and a tour bus of 50 people slid partially off the road, blocking a whole lane of traffic. This was on the MAIN ROAD, on a blind curve, only 10 miles into the park.
We only have one remaining, non-furloughed plow/sander driver. For reference, we normally have 4-5. He was 50 minutes away (and then the sander broke so he had to go back to the garage for a bit to try and fix it.) The one remaining tow truck driver was almost 90 minutes away. There was only me and my coworker on shift to deal with traffic and we couldn’t direct people around the accident because the road all around it was still icy because the sander hadn’t gotten there and someone was bound to slide off again. So we had to just keep traffic stopped. For almost a two hours, every single visitor to the park was in stopped traffic. About 10 miles worth of cars just sat, parked in the road. Hundreds and hundreds of people.
Some of them turned around to go back to the entrance, but an RV slid off the road going the other way, so now traffic was blocked in both directions. Which meant when the sander WAS fixed, it couldn’t get through the traffic. And because it was just me and my coworker, we didn’t have anybody who could leave the scene of the accident to go down and clear that traffic for the sander.
As I stood there in the cold (thankful that I had pulled my yaktrax out of storage soon enough to use them for the occasion because the road was SOLID ICE) people kept getting out of their cars, coming up to me, and complaining. I’m not allowed to give political opinions at work, but I was able to provide them facts:
Fact: We only have one plow truck driver, because everyone else has been furloughed. If we had our normal amount, all the roads would be sanded and this probably wouldn’t have happened.
Fact: We only have two officers on right now. Usually, we can try to pull some people from other divisions to help with traffic- those people are also furloughed.
Fact: The reason you are in traffic right now is directly caused by the government shutdown.
The main thing I want to communicate to the general public, though, comes from the repeated question I got “Well, if the roads were so dangerous why didn’t you just close the park?”
Ma’am?
Fact: The administration has forbidden us from closing National Parks.
We were ordered to “Continue operations and services as normal”… with at least 65% of our staff furloughed.
Fun epilogue to the story is that 2 hours in, just as the sander and tow truck finally arrived, another car went careening off the road about 30 miles from there, blocking traffic for both lanes. I left one scene and came to that one we discovered the drive was HURT, and needed an ambulance. My coworker and I are also the EMTs/ambulance drivers (and fire department and search and rescue and…) so we had to have our dispatch center start calling people at home to come in and help. (Their overtime won’t be paid until the government restarts by the way).
Five people came in on their day off and we managed to transport to the hospital, do the crash report, clear the road… and deal with SEVEN MORE slide offs in the following two hours.
What are the takeaways from all this complaining I’m doing:
Fact: 65% or more of National Park Service staff that are furloughed and have no income right now. They still have bills though, and some people are in significant trouble financially (because it’s not like they paid us much in the first place).
Fact: Coming to your national park right now is not only extremely dangerous for you, but also causing significant and irreparable damage to the park- to the actual natural resource, to our infrastructure, and to our facilities.
Fact: Parks were ordered to use the finances that we usually would put towards keeping up said facilities and infrastructure, to pay the people we are forcing to work right now. BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT HAS FORBIDDEN PARKS TO CLOSE THEIR DOORS AND SHUT THEIR GATES.
Please don't come here. Please contact your local representative. Please spread the word
Because it looks like it's going to be another busy day.
I love ace ppl bc they’re like you know you don’t have to right. And it’s true. you dontttttt have to
[ As long as people don’t know about asexuality—hell, forget about the label, so long as they don’t know that saying no forever and for any reason and in any context is okay—sex education, sex therapy, and popular depictions of sex are incomplete and people don’t have the relevant information to fully consent. Sexual rights should not be assumed and self-determination must never end upon entering a relationship. You can give a no with zero caveats in each and every situation, full stop. You can say no if someone loves you and you love them back. You can say no for the rest of your life. ]
Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (2020)
One thing that worries me about the use of AI is whether or not it can worsen people's dementia and alzheimer's in the future. When my grandmother was first diagnosed, we got her math activity books. Now, my grandmother never had a formal education, but we did our best to keep her sharp, get her to do math and writing activity books, sudokus, playing board games that required some level of strategizing with her. Her family is prone to alzheimer's and dementia (both her siblings had it and deteriorated very very very quickly, which yeah, scares the shit out of me being her granddaughter) but she was the one whose mind lasted the longest, she only passed away two years ago, at 88, ten whole years after her initial diagnosis and sure, she had forgotten things, recipes and where she put her glasses and appointments, but she never forgot any of us, ten whole years in, she still remembered us. Now, this may have been luck, but doctors always said the constant mental work + companionship + medicine helped her a lot. So I'm thinking, these people who are now relying on AI for everything, from email-writing to thinking what's for dinner to casual conversations, I've even seen people rely on it to calculate what time they should leave their house if they need to be at a place at a specific time and their commute lasts X number of minutes. As if that's not... the simplest math operation possible? You shouldn't even need a calculator for that!!! Idk I don't know how long it'll take us to see the effects of this + exposure to brain-rotting short form content that is completely meaningless + people addicted to right-wing conspiracy style media. Idk I'm very worried. Please, read, read complicated books! Take up a book on philosophy and try to decipher it and make your own opinions on it, please buy a maths activity book and relearn how to do math, please get a hobby that involves lots of thinking and concentrating. PLEASE!!!
“I hate school I’m sorry Malala”- Funny yet poignant. Acknowledges both the difficulty of the task and the fact that doing that task is a privilege. Gives credit to the people who fought for that privilege with a tongue in cheek acknowledgement of the irony of the initial statement
“I’m just a girl I should be home baking bread not doing calculus” - at best historically uninformed at worst leaps decades back in time. Refusal to acknowledge the charged history of education and slights the centuries of women’s labor it took to reach this point
"Your son will take your throne from you," they prophesized, spitting each word out of teeth clenched tight with hatred. Why they'd bother prophesizing such an event befuddles you; your son is literally your chosen heir, after all.
Years later, you realize what the prophets meant. For most of your life your son was your pride and joy; an academic, who would surely lead the kingdom into greater health and wellness. Until he committed the ultimate act of betrayal.
"You will not take my throne from me!" You cling to your grand chair so hard your knuckles turn white.
Your son sighs. "Dad. Dad it's lead-"
"Of course it's lead! It's a strong metal, signifying the strength of our country- this throne has been passed down the royal line for 300 years, 15 rulers before me-"
"That is not enough time for that many people!" Your son throws his hands up in the air. "Because it is lead! It is poisoning you! Didn't you wonder why grandpa died at 40?"
"Ah, pfoo! That's the ancestral curse."
"It's the throne! The throne is the ancestral curse!!!"
the son successfully convinces his father to give up the lead throne. he lives and rules peacefully for much longer than his family’s previous generations, dying in his third score.
the son, upon coronation, receives his own prophecy: “your daughter will tear your castle to the ground.”
now, this is a bit more of a cause for immediate concern, but unlike kings of old, he decides that the best way to avoid this surely gruesome future is to love his daughter the best he can, encourage her interests, and guide her with a steady hand - if she is to ruin his kingdom, after all, then let it be with iron will and care for the people.
his daughter is not violent at all, will only hunt if they promise the kitchens will cook what is killed and will give some to the people, and only takes a passing fancy in swordsmanship (which he thinks is more to do with the jawline of the instructor, not that he says anything). she loves to study and read, and when she asks to go for further education in a different corner of the kingdom, he allows it.
after one year, she returns, and spends the first week back acting shifty. she is always caught ducking out of corners and hidden passages, whispering with staff, and pouring over old maps of the castle layout in the library, hurriedly covering them up when anyone passes.
he privately gets his affairs in order.
two weeks after her return, the king’s daughter approaches her father with a steely look in her eye and a grim set to her jaw.
“father,” she begins, “what do you know of asbestos?”