Please, Help Bring My Father Home for Burial
Hello everyone,
On April 21, 2⊠Sonia Jacamo needs your support for Help Us Lay My Belo
I donât usually post stuff like this, but my family really needs help.
On April 21, my tĂo Gustavo died, 1 month after the funeral for my great-grandmother, his mother. His sudden passing left our family devastated, especially so soon after his motherâs passing.
Just as devastated are our wallets from the previous funeral. We want to give tĂo Gustavo a proper funeral and burial, but weâre short on money. The funeral is next week, and we're having trouble covering the costs.
Please donate to our GoFundMe to help us send off a beloved member of our family. Also, please reblog and share where you can. Thank you!
I've been real busy lately because it's December and I work at the post office, so of course I am
But that doesn't mean I can't show up with an unprompted PSA
Hey! Have you ever mailed a letter to Santa Claus? Have you ever wondered what exactly happened to that letter? Well wonder no longer! If it had a stamp and a return address, then odds are that it ended up on the USPS's Operation Santa page!
Every year, the USPS collects letters to Santa Claus, and processes them to black out any identifying information. Last names, addresses, things like that. Then, the letters are posted on the Operation Santa webpage and people can adopt the letters.
Once you adopt a letter, you can buy gifts for them, wrap them up, and package them. Then you get a barcode from the website, and bring them to a post office. The clerk there will scan the barcode, which prints out a label with the address on it, and sends out the gift.
It's anonymous on both ends, and is generally just. A really nice thing to do.
I highly recommend it if you have some money to spare this year and want to give a kid a moment of magic this year
It's one of those things that the post office just happened to be positioned to do, and ended up knocking it out of the park. Unfortunately, I don't think they advertise this nearly well enough, and most letters end up going unanswered
has anyone noticed lately how black friday deals or any type of "sale" deals aren't actually deals. like i had something on my amazon wishlist that was $19.99 before, and now it's saying it WAS $49.99 but is on sale for $19.99 for a "black Friday deal." as if it wasn't just $19.99 two weeks ago at regular price. like these damn websites atp are straight up lying and trying to trick people into thinking something is on sale/is a good deal when it's not. and this isn't exclusive to that one item or even just amazon. i've been seeing it everywhere. the fuck
There are a several sites for tracking this kind of thing, depending if you're looking at a particular product or a particular market.
For Amazon, I like to sanity check Camel Camel Camel if a particular deal seems too off.
For example, Amazon is listing these headphones as a -43% sale at $199.99.
CCC backs that up! But also, looks like they do go on fairly frequent (if smaller) sales. Good to know!
As a bonus, CCC is pretty easy to check for whatever listing. You just need the listing ID: https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B0CCZ26B5V
From: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CCZ26B5V
This kind of thing doesn't help if they make a dozen listings, or if they have one listing with several options that change the pricing. Still handy though.
This is a helpful tool! This applies moreso to Americans (though non-USAmericans can file reports), but if you notice activity described by OP, that's called "deceptive pricing" and is illegal under FTC regulations. The FTC has a pretty simple reporting system here. This reporting also applies to all sorts of fraud, from scam calls to identity theft. It may not immediately resolve your personal issue, but it can help the FTC gather enough data and proof to bring a lawsuit against the company.
I'd like to remind everybody that this isn't just about A03 or civil rights organizations. This could be applied to any 501 organization. That includes churches, schools, museums and library support organizations. All sorts of support organizations like soup kitchens or places like goodwill. Those are all non-profit organizations and they all have a 501 status. This is a threat to every civil organization we have that is meant to help the public.
So please contact your representatives. Please look this up on Twitter and click the link so you can call your representatives and voice against this. Because there's a hell of a lot more at stake with a bill like this than just ao3. People's lives could be at risk.
The House will vote THIS WEEK to determine whether the incoming Trump administration will have the power to shut down non-profit organizations with no due process.
Congress has already tried to fast-track this legislation once and failed because of the onslaught of calls to their offices. We canât let them do this quietly. Congress giving Trump the power to crush dissent and target organizations fighting for justice is a betrayal. Tell your representatives to vote NO on this dangerous bill!
This means that it's heading over to the Senate, where they'll tinker with it and vote again.
If it passes the Senate, it goes to the President, who has the option to veto.
Which means NOW you reach out to your Senators (both of them) and tell them that you want them to vote NO on this Trojan horse of awful.
But: we have two more chances to keep this from becoming law. The fight's not over yet.
And that's not even the good news!
For various reasons of political fuckery/ rules lawyering, this bill had to go through TWO rounds of votes in Congress to get through.
It didn't pass the first time because it had a higher threshold of votes to meet (2/3 Congress Critters had to vote yes) and it failed because it couldn't clear that bar.
So the people behind the bill sent it through AGAIN in a way that needed fewer votes to pass (only 1/2 of Congress Critters had to vote yes). This time it got through.
But along the way, almost 40 people changed their vote to "No". ALL BECAUSE OF YOUR OUTREACH.
That's huge.
Here's the home page for the bill. Check out the "Roll Call Votes" section to see how your Representative voted:
Summary of H.R.9495 - 118th Congress (2023-2024): Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act
Personally? Mine flipped her vote from "Yes" in the first round to "No" in the second.
Outreach. Works.
So, what do we do now?
Click the link above, and see how your Rep voted
Send them an email thanking them for their support/ telling them how disappointed you are. Why? Because it's important to let them know you pay attention to how they vote.
Contact your Senators (both of them) and ask them to vote NO
Contact the White House and let President Biden know you want him to veto this thing if it hits his desk
Resources
Not sure who your Representative or Senators are? Click here and type in your address:
Find your members of Congress by typing in your address on Congress.gov.
Not sure how to contact your US Representative, Senators, or the White House?
I personally use Resistbot. It's free, fast, and easy:
Text RESIST to 50409 to contact your federal, state, or local elected officials; create movements; and more. Over 30,000,000 letters deliver
Studies show that approaching youth with a bystander-intervention model is actually a lot more effective for reducing sexual assault, and it is also more enthusiastically received than programs that bill themselves as anti-rape.
We can tell youth that they are basically ârapists waiting to happenâ (anti-rape initiative), or we can tell them that we know they would intervene if they saw harm happening to someone and we want to help empower them to do that (bystander intervention). The kids jump in with both feet for the latter! It was amazing to see children (and young boys in particular) excited to do this work and engage their creativity with it. Also, studies show that not only do they go on to intervene, but they also do not go on to sexually assault people themselves. Bystander intervention also takes the onus off the person being targeted to deter rape and empowers the collective to do something about it. It answers the question in the room when giggling boys are carrying an unconscious young woman up the stairs at a house party, and people are not sure how to respond and are waiting for âsomeoneâ to say or do something.
Richard M. Wright, âRehearsing Consent Culture: Revolutionary Playtimeâ in the anthology Ask: Building Consent Culture edited by Kitty Stryker
This is also, btw, how the US drastically reduced drunk driving in the US. Telling people they shouldnât drive when intoxicated made absolutely zero difference. A slogan-and-ad-campaign for âFriends donât let friends drive drunk!â changed drinking culture. Going after the bystanders is quite often the most effective thing to do in any social change.
#empower people to make the changes they want to see#donât feed their fear that they are one wrong decision away from being the evil they despise (tags via @rum-and-shattered-dreams)
REALLY FUN FACT for big cats cheetahs are fucking docile as shit
my grandfather ran a cheetah sanctuary in south africa and heâd just lie with them and sleep among them and theyâd rub against him and chirp at him theyâre big fucking babies
Another Fun Fact: Cheetahs are incredibly nervous animals. One of the (many) reasonâs theyâre going extinct is that cheetahs are so sensitive and nervous, some of them are literally too nervous to breed. Others will breed, but stress themselves out so much, theyâll lose their cubs.
So zoos with breeding programs had to figure out how to make cheetahs comfortable enough to first of all, get laid and secondly - not spazz themselves into miscarrying.
So whatâd they do?
They gave the cheetahâs their very own Service Dogs!
The dogs make them feel safe, protected and secure!
Also! Cheetahs are not in fact classified as big cats, they are simply very large lesser cats, due to the fact that they purr, meow, chirp, and cannot roar. Also many cheetahs have learned to recognize wildlife photographers are friends and not foes, so they will just come up to people and be friendly occasionally as pictured at the top of the chain. Some will even leave their Cubs with photographers to look after while they hunt. So. Yeah. Cheetahs are great
this works because cheetahs are actually fairly social animals, and they look to members of their group for context on how worried they should be about any given Situation. but since cheetahs are also nervous social animals, they can work each other into an anxiety spiral pretty easily over things like âbeing in an enclosed habitatâ and âthereâs a guy over thereâ.
so by introducing a dog as a member of the group, the cheetahs will now look to the dog for context clues on how worried they should be! and the dog Is Not Worried At All, Thanks, so the cheetahs think everything must be chill even if they were personally unsure about it, and they stop being so freaked out about literally everything.
No matter what a post on tumblr tries to tell you, your moral and ethical stances will never be determined by what you reblog and what you scroll past. Donât let manipulation tactics force you into doing anything you donât want to do.
I find it very interesting to note the times in which this post has a sudden resurgence. It often follows very stressful, upsetting events, where a lot of âREBLOG THIS OR YOU SUCKâ posts start appearing on this site.Â
So Iâll say it again: it is okay if you come to tumblr to escape upsetting news. It is okay if youâre just here for fun and fandom. It is okay if you do not want to use your tumblr as a place to read about or spread the current events that are circulating. It is okay if you need a place to decompress and just relax. There are other ways to be involved in/support causes and you are allowed to set boundaries on social media platforms without it being indicative of your belief systems.Â
Your beliefs, values, ethics, and moral stances are not determined by whether or not you reblog something.Â
Update: this is the best post I've ever made because everyone is sharing their Warm Beverage recipes in the notes. Go check the notes for more Warm Beverages That Will Fix You.
