bigawesomeocelot

Stuff, stuff and then more stuff. "Love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed.” — Mr. Rogers

[cafern-deactivated20170327]

@ people who were not born in Ireland and particularly Americans

- It is not Patty’s Day, it is Paddy’s Day. Patty is short for Patricia, Paddy is short for Pádraig which has been anglicised to Patrick. - It is not Gaelic, it is Irish. In Irish, the language is called Gaelige but that’s pronounced Gwayl-geh. - Literally no one in Ireland has ever eaten corned beef and cabbage - We have also never said top of the morning - If you pinch an Irish person for not wearing green on Paddy’s Day they’re likely to slap you. - Why do you dye your drinks green? - It is not “North Ireland” it is “Northern Ireland”. It is not “South Ireland” it is “The Republic of Ireland” or just “Ireland”. - No, I do not know the Dohertys of Mayo. - Please, if you must, do things for the craic and not the crack. Cocaine is not a great habit lads. - Drinks like the “Irish car bomb” and the “black & tan” are incredibly offensive (you wouldn’t drink a “9/11”)

However

- Wearing green is grand - Having a few drinks is also grand, they don’t even need to be Irish (I drink a Swedish cider most of the time) - Aye sure queue up some Irish music on youtube it’s great. - If you want one Irish word to use throughout the day a good one is Sláinte (pronounced slawn-sha) - it’s the equivalent of saying “cheers” before you drink!

[beeslybee]

Please be respectful on Holidays like this! It’s great to join in and show your respect & appreciation for other cultures celebrations, but remember to actually do that! Have fun, but stay respectful to the culture and religion. 😊

[cameoamalthea]

Fun history of corned beef and cabbage.

Beef is cheap in America (lots of land, lots of cows, so there’s such a thing as cheap cuts). So a lot of immigrants who could never afford beef in their home country now had access to beef.

(Example spaghetti and meatballs is an Italian-American invention).

Now Americans hated immigrants (plenty stilldo sadly) and hated anyone who wasn’t Protestant so you had segregation. So in New York the Irish Catholic area was next to the Jewish area. There was solidarity between American Irish and American Jewish immigrants. So Irish-Immigrants bought corned-beef from Jewish butchers.

(In Ireland, you may eat bacon or lamb for St Patrick’s Day, but lamb was (and is) expensive in America, and Irish Immigrants got their meat from Kosher butchers - no bacon).

Brisket is a cut of meat from the front of the cow. It’s a very tough cut of meat. The salting process (it’s like soaked in salt for over a week) and cooking for hours and hours (it’s an all day stew) makes it tender.

So corned beef and cabbage is a dish that evolved out of affordable ingredients (tough cut of beef, cabbage and carrots and potatoes are dirt cheap) and proximity to Jewish immigrants.

St. Patrick’s Day Celebrations as we know them now (parades and the like) were started in America by Irish-American immigrants. Because WASP Americans (white, Anglo Saxon, Protestants) hated Catholics and hated the Irish.

And for all immigrants there was a big push to assimilate (give kids English sounding names, forget your language, become Protestant). But people don’t give up religion easily, names and language maybe, but not God.

So still today you have Irish Catholics, Italian Catholics, Mexican Catholics, etc and even Americans who aren’t practicing Catholic or aren’t religious may view being raised Catholic as part of a cultural identity linked to their heretage (the same way someone who doesn’t practice Judaism is still Jewish, some difference since Judaism is a hereditary religion, but for immigrants in a country that hates Catholics, being Catholic, having that tradition was and is part of being an outsider to American, part of an identity those in power hated and tried to erase).

So holding giant Irish pride parade celebrating the Catholic patron Saint of Ireland was sort of a “fuck you” to anti-Catholic anti-Irish sentiment. A “fuck you” to the idea that being an American meant erasing your traditions and history and pretending to be a White Anglo Saxon Protestant.

Look at us being proudly Irish and still Catholic. Obnoxiously, visibly Catholic and acting ways that the puritanical Protestants hate.

So what was a family religious Holiday became a big, visible celebration of heretage and homeland (a shared identity). And since it’s a celebration immigrants splurged by buying a big cut of beef (beef is cheaper in America, but immigrants did not have a lot of money and meat is still more than vegetables, so any cut of beef was still a special occasion thing) and supported their Jewish neighbors who ran the butcher’s shop.

(also, since it’s a St’s Feast, Lent restrictions on meat and drinking alcohol didn’t count, so eat a lot of meat and drink).

St Patrick’s Day in the US has its own history, heretage and ties to religion (and persecution for that religion). Traditions are tied to that history. So Corned Beef and Cabbage may not be a thing in Ireland but it’s a part of Irish-American tradition, history and culture.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/is-corned-beef-really-irish-2839144/

[dudewhoabides]

Evolution of a tornado Jason Weingart Photo

[justsomeantifas]

them: SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST MEANS HUMANS MUST BE INDIVIDUALLY SELF-SUFFICIENT AND COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT

biologist:

[systlin]

Like literally the only reason we didn’t go extinct is because we are aggressively social creatures who community organized and helped each other when faced with disasters that drove other species over the brink. 

 (Like we’re so aggressively social that we looked at APEX PREDATORS and went ‘they look soft! Friend????’)

(The answer was yes because wolves are also aggressively social and they adopted the strange tall not-wolves just as eagerly.)

[kelssiel]

humans @ wolves: holy shit these things are so cute i wonder if they’ll let us pet them?

wolves @ humans: holy shit these things are so cute i wonder if they’ll pet us?

[aztechnology]

Just in case people want source, here you go: humans are compelled to help each other in disaster situation, humans feel an innate urge to help others. We will help strangers too, not just family, and it has been tested. 

[boxingcleverrr]

Also we’ve always taken care of our elderly and disabled. When life was literally “hunt and gather every day to live”, we saw value in taking care of those with disabilities. 

[apparentlyeverything]

reblog to make a libertarian mad

[womenintheirwebs-archived]

the one problem i have with people my age and younger is that a lot of us do not have hands on hobbies. like i have spoken to so many people my age who go to work, go to school and then fuck around on their phone/computer for hours and then ???????? like no wonder ur depressed and have low confidence in urself. u need to get ur hands on something, feed those dopamine receptors! learn how to play guitar, garden, scrapbook, fucking make model trains. i don’t give a shit, MAKE SOMETHING!!

it feels better than drugs when i finish making a thing—and then show it off or gift it.

and then so people my age say to me ‘well—i can’t draw/paint/knit/etc. like you can. my stuff would be terrible.’ yeah, well duh—a part of developing skill is sucking at something and then practicing it over and over and over again until you suck less. u’ll have a hard time feeling lonely or bored when you can’t stop thinking abt a technique you want to try or something you want to make for someone else. making things has SAVED MY LIFE. it gave me a reason to keep living day after day when i wanted to die.

making things have improved my generational relationships (when i worked for the newspaper i would talk to customers abt jamming recipes or cross-stitch, one of my grandmas always gives me pattern books and tell me abt when she knitted things for mom, my other grandma is giving me a wedding quilt that HER grandma gave her 50 years ago because she knows i will appreciate it). it also got me likeminded friends who also make things.

take a ceramics class! pick up water colors, bake cakes! learn to work on cars! make soap. DO SOMETHING THAT DOESN’T INVOLVE STARING AT A SCREEN.

[catchymemes]

[everylibrary]

If you would like to help us continue to support libraries in the United States, please consider starting a monthly contribution of $1, $3, $5, or $10. With your contributions we are able to rally more support for libraries at action.everylibrary.org, provide the tools that libraries need to fight against threats to funding and closures, and help libraries grow through funding initiatives so that they can better serve their communities. In fact, for every dollar we raise, we are able to return over $1,600 in stable yearly funding to libraries. That means that your small monthly donation can help us secure almost $200,000 for libraries!

You can easily make a donation at action.everylibrary.org/lessthancoffee

[suzeart]

Daily Activities, Watercolour and pencil.

[theconcealedweapon]

[markv5]

Два вечно удивлённых изумруда на плюшевом серебре :3

Два вечно удивлённых изумруда на плюшевом серебре :3

[dualityofsquid]

“two perpetually smiling emeralds on plush silver :3”

[stillhidden]

Two perpetually surprised emeralds, but the sentiment still stands.

[cognitivedissonance]

Your cute cat of the day

[peace-love-colbert]

[jumpingjacktrash]

oh my god.

let me share a memory with y’all. it’s from i guess 1978 or thereabouts. it’s high summer. i don’t remember where my mom was driving me, in our avocado green chevette, i just know there was a traffic jam that turned 35w northbound into a parking lot from horizon to horizon.

picture it – wait, you don’t have to use your imagination, this happened all the damn time back then.

every one of those damn cars was burning leaded gasoline. there were no emissions regulations. there were no safety regulations. there were just thousands and thousands of detroit steel shoeboxes belching visible smoke as they idled, engines loud and hot, here and there a radiator giving up in the heat, a cloud of burning oil rising.

i, a smeet of five or six, was choking on toxic smog.

i reckon it was about a half hour into the traffic jam that i first threw up. i remember a blinding headache, i remember being confused, i remember dry heaving with my arms and head hanging out the window, the green metal of the car burning my hands and my chin. i don’t remember passing out, but i’m told i lost consciousness before mom was able to get to an off-ramp, because there were no emergency lanes on the highways back then.

i lived. and life went on. what were we going to do, complain? if i’d died, the cause of death probably would’ve been recorded as heatstroke, not carbon monoxide poisoning.

i know i’m probably preaching to the choir here on tumblr. but i really wish i could tell that story to the people who think deregulation is no big deal. i wish they’d put themselves in my mom’s shoes.

or even just look at some old pictures, then look out the window.

ever notice how cityscapes used to have that orange tint and hazy aura? yeah, that’s poison gas.

remember how the mississippi river used to be a stinking soup of baby-shit yellow sludge covered with disturbingly stiff rafts of light orange foam?

i can’t even find pictures of the sludge and foam, i guess they didn’t end up on the internet. the smell was indescribable. that oily shimmer. the reek of dead things. people didn’t boat on the river for pleasure; it smelled too bad, it was too ugly, and you could get super super sick if you touched the water.

and now look at it.

i still wouldn’t want to drink it, but if i fell in i wouldn’t bolt for the shower in a panic, you know?

if the thieving billionaires get their way, we can kiss those sailboats goodbye, and learn the smell of toxic foam once more. the ultra-rich won’t even feel the extra money, they’ve already got more than they could ever touch, they just stash it in offshore accounts to rot, but the rest of us will return to a time of neverending nausea and weird cancers. a time when every elementary school class had at least one kind who’d been born with no fingers or their heart outside their body, and this was just… the way things were.

i’m sorry. i didn’t mean to longpost. it’s just. god. y’all have no idea how CLEAN everything is now, compared to when i was a kid. and these rich old men are counting on that, on people not knowing or not remembering how bad it was before regulation, not realizing how much we need these protections until it’s too late.

[themightyglamazon]

I enforce federal worker health and safety and pollution regulations. 

When I was learning my trade, when my classmates and I were having a chuckle over the “well duh” level of specificity written into the Code of Federal Regulations (try “no hazardous material shall be stored in crew berthing” on for size), I will never forget the silence that followed when our instructor spoke these words:

“Your regulations are written in blood.”

These regulations were not written on a whim. They were written because someone thought they could cut costs by storing however many more pounds of a radioactive, toxic, carcinogenic, or whatever else material in the same rooms where the human beings they paid to transport those materials slept, and then did that, because no one was telling them not to. 

They were written because people died. Horrifically. Because unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering. 

Can I say it again, for those not paying attention? 

Unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering.

[bogleech]

Do we also need to fucking talk about the Radium Girls again who slowly fucking rotted alive because the company they worked for deliberately hid knowledge of radium’s effects on living matter?

[feynites]

I’m gonna talk about it. It’s depressing and dark as hell, but if anyone ever thinks to themselves that companies will just regulate out of a sense of civic duty or basic human morality, and don’t need outside enforcement, then they need to keep this story in mind.

United States Radium Corporation that knew radium was lethal, and hired factory girls to work at painting watches with glow-in-the-dark radium faces. To emphasize - they knew radium was lethal and dangerous. Scientists who worked with it wore safety equipment and knew better than to touch it with bare skin. The factory girls, on the other hand, were instructed by their employers to keep the tips of their paint brushes pointed by sucking them between their lips. An act that guaranteed that they were ingesting small amounts of radium daily. They were told that radium was safe, and in small doses even good for you - United States Radium Corporation had paid for ‘studies’ and promoted other products which used small amounts of radium, and had branded at as, basically, a medicinal curative that just need to be doled out in appropriate dosages.

This was bullshit, and not even bullshit which the company higher ups could reasonably be expected to actually believe on all levels, with the information that they had readily at hand. What they knew was that a small amount of radium wouldn’t kill you right away, and that there was a two year statute of limitations on workers compensation claims. When the girls began dying and the finger was pointed at radium, the president of the United States Radium Corporation had an independent researcher investigate the claim. The research established that the link between the girls’ deaths and radium was clear. The company, not liking that result, covered up the independent research and hired other people to simply state that this was not the case.

Of course, by this point there were dying factory workers who were literally glowing in the goddamn dark, whose bones had become so infused with radium that they were visibly radioactive in their autopsies (when said bones weren’t just falling out of them while they were alive, anyway), so of course the company was forced to admit - oh wait, no, they started stealing dead women’s bones from morgues so that they could dispute their causes of death.

Like. Let’s be clear. United States Radium Corporation didn’t just fail to keep their workers sufficiently informed, they didn’t just not investigate things well enough, which would have been bad enough on its own. They told their employees to ingest a deadly substance, and when those DYING WOMEN got together with their last breaths to try and make the world aware of what was going on, purely to try and keep it from killing all the other girls who might get jobs in factories (because they were all doomed to painful cancerous death themselves), they paid for hush-ups and cover-ups and fake studies, and stooped to full-on grave robbing to keep people from finding out that they were killing women in droves.

There were factory workers giving testimonies as they physically fell apart on their death beds. The company’s response was not to even revise workers’ regulations to be more safe. It was entirely, 100%, to lie about it, so they could keep making money and keep killing their workers.

And do you want to know what happened to that company? To the United States Radium Corporation?

It eventually became The Safety Light Corporation, and was decommissioned in 2005. The radium girls were dying in the late 1920′s. The company that killed them didn’t even go under with them, didn’t even die when their efforts to raise awareness actually resulted in better and more stringent regulations. So the prospect that better regulations will hurt a corporation are laughable. Even the corporations that deserve to be destroyed by them still manage to do alright when they’re forced to make less money and kill fewer people. Boo hoo, how sad for them.

But inadequate regulations will kill actual human people. Full stop. Some companies will still adhere to ethics, sure, some will have people in charge or on various levels who care and can intervene. But not all of them. And the United States Radium Corporation was just ONE company. One company, that had no regulations to hold it accountable, that decided it didn’t care - and so many women died horrible, horrible deaths for it.

Do not ever let anyone kid you about the ramifications of deregulation. And do not forget that people who died, with their dying breath, fought to establish regulations to keep you safe. Anyone who takes them away is spitting on their graves.

[quakerjoe]

Making #Murica filthy, poisonous, and foul again. So much winning…

[obscureoldguy]

The person spitting on their graves is named Pruitt. And please, don’t apologize for long posting when the information you’re sharing is so valuable and necessary!

[u-r-amazing-people-deactivated2]

How about you get rid of all the regulations that give the rich greedy business’s an unfair advantage.  Make it possible for a regular person to start their own business without being screwed by unfair regulations.

[official-arnie-nutts]

Here is a source https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/the-forgotten-factory-girls-killed-by-radioactive-poisoning/

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

“It’s time to SET FREE OUR DREAMS!”

- Donald Trump, who has apparently always dreamed of eating food prepared by someone who doesn’t wash their hands after using a toilet

[silver-tongues-blog]

this is likely why there seems to be ecoli in romain every month

[ruffboi-mags]

Actually yes, it is

iirc it’s because of cut regulations regarding water quality for irrigation. Since lettuce grows on the ground and is eaten raw and therefore doesn’t have point in processing/cooking that would kill off most or all bacteria (ie cooking meat, pasteurizing milk, etc), if the water used to grow it is not sufficiently clean, the bacteria and shit in the water don’t always get washed off before getting to your plate.

[ravynliam]

The plant site’s cleanup didn’t finish until 2009. I live about 3 miles away from Orange, NJ where they were located. There’s a field & a playground where the factor once stood. And I can go to the cemetery with a Geiger counter & find one of those poor girls who’re still radioactive & will be for some time yet.

[mapsontheweb]

Map of largest employer in each U.S. state.

[imaginedsoldier]

Target is where you go when you’re gonna try to restructure your entire life with 100 bucks, and you’re counting on a shoe rack, thumbtacks, a whiteboard, and new stationary to do it.

[imaginedsoldier]

Everyone in here is looking for forgiveness and they’re trying to find it in a tasteful desk lamp and minimalist day planner

[ivdp]

Created this queer little comic after two weeks of learning Color as Storytelling! The superheroine’s plan to save her shepherdess girlfriend does not go as planned … 

Etsy Instagram

[strolling-in-the-moonlight]

Some numbers for y'all

Total women in the U.S. House:

1989:

16 Democrats

13 Republicans

2019:

89 Democrats

13 Republicans

Total African Americans in the U.S. House:

1933:

1 Democrat

1 Republican

2019:

54 Democrats

1 Republican

[catversushuman]

It adds texture to every meal.

I’m back, by the way. In case you were wondering why I was gone.

[fleuringly]

@WeHeartIt /entry/276261612/via/mylittlerein

[lyricvl]