No Pronouns if I don't know you. She/Her if I know you || 40's Married Polyam Queer Unstable Trash Lady and Known Freak || Unrepentantly and exuberantly and intersectionally inclusive
I will never stop saying Finnish idioms translated directly into English. I’m not quite yesterday’s grouse’s son level but I will always mention a line drawn in water and how a beloved child has many names…. Eventually those grouses will be brought up though
I know it's a plant and not an animal, but I think bladderwort is an incredibly weird and underrated carnivorous plant.
Also everyone knows about the bullet ant and tarantula hawk stings, but the warrior wasps are also in the top most painful stings. They build these long trilobite / soda bottle looking nests against tree trunks, and if you get too close they come all out and just sit there on it, drumming in sync together and it's absolutely freakish to see and hear. Like, you wouldn't even know what a warrior wasp is, and you'd immediately know you're in danger and turn back now.
ICE Watch Programs Can Protect Immigrants in Your Neighborhood — Here’s What to Know
This op-ed explains how to start an ICE Watch neighborhood program in your community.
By Nikki Marín Baena
January 22, 2025
President Donald Trump’s plans to deport vastly more people living in our communities — whose children attend school alongside the children of US citizens, people who work alongside US citizen employees, who shop in the same stores — might leave us feeling as if there's little the average person can do to keep this from happening.
But many people do not want the immigrants they know to be deported. When Scripps News/Ipsos pollsters asked about the specific potential consequences of mass deportations after the November election, support for deportation plans fell off. Sometimes reliable information is all that’s needed to help immigrants avoid Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, and anyone can help reduce the unnecessary panic that arrest announcements can generate.
Many Americans, including me, live in states like North Carolina, where sanctuary cities limit local law enforcement collaboration with immigration agents. Our state legislature in North Carolina recently passed a law requiring sheriffs to cooperate with ICE officers by honoring the agency’s request to hold anyone who ends up in jail for two days to give ICE time to decide whether to detain them. Since taking office on January 20, Trump has signed an executive order encouraging the expansion of a program known as 287(g), which allows local law enforcement to take on some ICE functions, and his Department of Homeland Security has said ICE agents can make make arrests without supervisor approval at “sensitive locations” that were previously off-limits, like schools, churches and public demonstrations. Under these conditions, rumors are likely to spread; some of the families our organization, Siembra NC, works with are already keeping their kids home from school.
In 2017, following a previous set of Trump executive orders, immigrant families in North Carolina were inundated by misinformation and rumors about ICE agents hidden in grocery store parking lots and supposed substations near after-school facilities, leading some people to avoid leaving home. There was no Spanish-language rumor verification hotline here in Greensboro, so our organization — which was just a handful of volunteers at the time — created one, giving more people the ability to talk to a live human and ask whether an undated Facebook post they'd seen shared by someone else was real. We also trained hundreds of volunteers with driver’s licenses to participate in an ICE Watch neighborhood watch program, giving immigrant parents a way to verify the rumors people forwarded them in WhatsApp.
Sometimes the hotline reports we received were not paranoid suspicions. After we began offering trainings in immigrant neighborhood parking lots and circulating Spanish-language videos with tips for how to spot ICE agents, our volunteers came into contact with federal agents. After a volunteer confirmed an officer’s identity, they would alert neighbors to the agent’s presence, and our dispatch team would send a text message to our contacts in the area. ICE agents almost never carry judicial warrants giving them the authority to enter private homes or businesses without permission, so they often wait to make an arrest when the person they’re looking for leaves their home or car. And in every case we worked on, when the agents realized they were being watched, they abandoned their stakeout.
When ICE did make arrests, the majority of people detained whose families we supported were the family’s primary wage earner; the detention created an economic crisis as much as an attack on the family’s psychological and emotional stability. Additionally, there was often little public assistance, beyond food banks, for which the remaining family members qualified. So we started an emergency cash-assistance fund to provide small grants, usually between $300 and $2,000, to help the family stave off eviction and afford the first payment to an immigration attorney. The fund also became a way for local immigrants who were not targeted by ICE to provide support.
Dozens of women stepped up to make and sell tamales and pupusas after church mass or in school parking lots at community fundraisers, and the funds were often sent to someone whose family had experienced detention that same week. Over and over, we heard the phrase “Hoy por ellos, mañana por nosotros,” meaning "Today for them, tomorrow for us.” Local elected officials often pledged contributions as well. But the financial need may be much greater this time. We have listed some tips for anyone who wants to start a hotline, neighborhood watch, or cash-assistance program in our organizing playbook.
When construction foremen, line cooks, and seamstresses were detained, hardship often followed for their employers — many of them in counties that voted overwhelmingly for Trump. When we visited local businesses after a detention as part of our effort to teach workers and employers how to defend their rights, often they did not know ICE agents had to present a judicial warrant in order to interview one of their employees in any area off-limits to the general public. These informal education programs are relatively simple to begin, starting with a few photocopies of fact sheets and an interest in building relationships with business owners who might be more reliant on immigrant labor.
Sometimes this kind of education turned into advocacy. For example, when a Republican sheriff proposed stationing ICE agents at the Alamance County Detention Center, by entering what’s known as a 287(g) agreement with the federal government. Fifty-nine business owners signed an open letter and testified at a county commission meeting to oppose the proposal; they were worried about the loss of revenue that had accompanied a previous surge in local immigration enforcement. (The Trump administration has since signaled its plans to expand use of those agreements.)
These concerns business owners have highlight a broader truth: Immigration enforcement doesn't happen in isolation. When ICE agents stake out our neighborhoods, it affects everyone — the families living in fear, the businesses struggling to retain workers, the schools wondering why children are missing class, and the communities watching their social fabric fray. The grassroots response we saw in the first Trump administration shows that communities have the power to respond with humanity and practical solutions. As deportations ramp up again, we have a choice: We can watch as our neighbors disappear or we can build on these proven strategies to protect the diverse communities we've built together.
Nikki Marín Baena is co-executive director of Siembra NC, which organizes to help immigrant workers defend their rights in North Carolina.
[ID. A tweet and quote tweet. The original tweet is a reply with a low quality video of a borzoi sitting with a light on top of its head and all caps text above reading, "faggot alert". The quote tweet reads, "homophobic memes are ineffective because they're indistinguishable from what two gay people would send to each other". End ID.]
I know it's unfair vilification and stuff but it's also a lot of fun to see old media and stuff where people were SO scared of big animals like lions, sharks, crocodiles and wolves were fully expected to just come and eat you the moment you stepped into their territory. In older media we also made that assumption about gorillas and in still older we thought it'd be whales.
But some animals that will actually fuck you up got left behind. Boars will kill you and eat you. They're way more likely to do so than any of those other things actually. Hippos, obviously, got off like bandits always being depicted as cute and dopey. And then there's the squids. Not giant kraken size squids. The eight foot squids that hunt in packs and will fuck you up if you fall in the water at night. I can't BELIEVE people slept on that. It's like all they cared about were the huge deep sea ones we never see. The medium size wolf pack squids were right there.
Oh some of you don't know about the squids. I talked about them in another thread that went kinda viral somewhere or other but one of the reasons you should not swim in the open ocean at night in many parts of the world is that the water starts teeming with these:
And as you can see it is not like instant death, they too are just animals and they are often just gently curious about the presence of humans!
But people who study and dive with sharks will tell you you're safe as long as you stay calm and know what you're doing. The world's leading professional night divers and experts on these squids, specifically??? Stress in every interview and article and paper they write in that you simply do not fuck around with these squids. They know what they're doing and they still all have at least one story of being attacked, in some cases having to be hospitalized. Considering just how rarely anybody puts themselves in the pitch dark nighttime ocean on purpose, let alone during a squid feeding frenzy, it sounds like they're quite a bit more likely to consider you potential food than other marine predators.
We also don't know how many fatal attacks might have ever happened, because what humboldt squid like to do with large prey is just drag it away into the darkness forever. The two worst attacks ever proven involved two or three squid at a time latching on to a diver (in BOTH cases they were professionals and knew the risk!) and jetting straight downward with enough force that both divers suffered injury from the sudden pressure change alone, including burst eardrums, nearly passed out and they probably would have died if they hadn't broken free.
In general, people who die drowning in the dark open ocean are either never found, or they're found in pieces picked over by enough scavengers that the precise cause of death can only be narrowed down to "the sea." But now you know ONE of "the sea's" possible murder weapons :)
There's a short section on Humboldt squid in Wikipedia's entry for Cephalopod attacks on humans:
And if you can get past some of Animal Planet's hokey presentation style, this video includes a bit of interview with one of those professional experts who still got nearly squidded from existence:
There is of course some debate about all this, with some arguing that all proven documented attacks occurred on people with reflective diving equipment, which they say the squid must have mistaken for the shine of fish. However, there are lots and lots of people who have to fish around these squids to survive, who do not have access to that kind of equipment, and also have a consensus that if you fall in the water when big squids are out hunting you might disappear without a trace or perhaps just get your head bitten open. With many modern science guys agreeing with this sentiment, this is one case where the "they're just misunderstood sea friends" crowd is kind of outnumbered.
The sea at night is theirs and not ours is all. It's not ours during the day either but since we are neither marine nor nocturnal animals we are double fools in the eyes of the squids, which by the way are these eyes:
Absolutely! Also, the Humboldt squid will hunt in packs, sometimes with one flashing brightly to draw attention while the others approach in near unseeable camoflage!
I absolutely adore Humboldt squid. I saw a doc once where a scientist was cage diving to study them, and one of the squid squeezed it's entire massive body through the cage bars, bit the guy and squeezed right back out.
Why isnt this an animal that's already long gone viral like honey badgers once did. This is the animal that actually gives no fucks. People really are just that obsessed with bigger squids I guess? But the bigger ones frankly come across as big softies in comparison. One big sea monster can never be as intimidating as a thousand coordinated man sized sea monsters.
This is why I thought that if mermaids had a cultural equivalent to lycanthropy it'd be weresquids. Fun fact nocturnal marine life increases activity on the brightest nights ie the full moon.
I wonder how much of the deep down dread and unhappiness of the giant WalMart type stores is familiar outside the USA. Other places gotta have this too right?
They're not fun to shop at. They aren't even fun to get to, surrounded by miles of low speed roads, far from their customers, chances are good you have to budget thirty minutes for travel, minimum, longer for a bus. Ride or park, no matter what you get a long walk into a looming gray edifice, wreathed in broken asphalt, overflowing trashcans, and tired people everywhere. It's every ominous portent of cold war propaganda against the USSR, hidden behind blue paint and white block lettering. The sun is somehow always going down behind it.
It's physically painful just breathing the air inside, and their fluorescent lights make it feel as if it's overcast indoors. Inside a WalMart or a Target feels like you're constantly about to get a headache. Another hour of time vanishes the second you walk inside. When did you go there? It doesn't matter, the sun is always setting.
The aisles are so long! There's so much stuff! And it's... all the same stuff. The aisles aren't accommodating variety, they're so you can have 30 different coffee brands, a hundred different shampoos, a dozen colors of energy drink. Your life slowly trickles away while you try and figure out if a dollar a pound or a buck fifty per 10 grams is cheaper overall. Next week it'll be different prices and you have to do it again. You look at three different brightly colored packages of butter and buy the cheapest one anyway because that's what you're in there for. Walk through the clothes, because you're tired of having just ten shirts, and forty-five minutes later you find one sort of okay graphic t-shirt and you can't spend the $25 on it anyway, because people gotta eat here. Everything is a hundred feet away from every other thing you need, you're fucked if you're even a little disabled. You can stare at expensive appliances you can't afford, a hundred different frying pans you just kinda want for no reason, a $600 vacuum cleaner and the damnable thing over all of it is that I know for a fact those all come outta the same factories and use the exact same six colors and flavors. Not in a grouchy old person way, in that it's my profession, it means I'm constantly aware this football field packed with billions of brands is a single monolith with an illusion that's nothing more than the repeating pattern on the wallpaper in an old toilet stall of a hotel room that inexplicably feels like home. And the sun is setting anyway.
It's monstrous, a grinding wheel showing you what you could have, if you just paid more for something that's going to fall apart in six months. So you finish spending most of your paycheck at the registers, go outside for the long walk across the parking lot, the sun is setting, it's over and all you want to do is lie down and sleep.
And for a bit of local flavor, armed security. Walk around a corner to discover an old white guy wearing a bullet proof vest with a tazer, handcuffs, and a glock on his belt. Pockets for extra clips in the vest. It's all black, it says "SECURITY" small white letters on the front. He's tired and doesn't like his job but he's like a jack-booted kinder-surprise peering down every aisle with his beady little eyes, just in case he needs to put 75 nine millimeter rounds into someone who didn't pay for box of hot pockets.
The security guard was patrolling outside the front doors today, which really helps establish the dystopian air when paired with the giant pole in the parking lot with a flashing blue light on it that periodically goes "THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING, FOR YOUR PROTECTION THIS PARKING LOT IS MONITORED AT ALL TIMES." And this dude, who looks like a white supremacist in military cosplay, is legally strutting back and forth in front of automatic doors spilling out sickly yellow fluorescent light as if he expects at any moment to lay down his life to protect frozen pizzas and boxes of ramen in the Great Grocery Seige of 2024. Like he isn't the most likely person to cause a shooting incident himself.
My wife told me they used to have the lyrics and all the references of "American Pie" by Don McLean memorized, and then I said "American Pie is just Homestuck for the 1970s" and they said they were going to stop telling me things.
About:
I go by Snoodle and I am a multiple disabled trans woman
I am getting a minor procedure done, hydroxyapatite granules, to support to the skin around my eyes to appear less hollow/sunken where years of HRT having not corrected the issue itself
I'm doing this to try save myself and reclaim dignity
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Please read the about section on my ko-fi before donating <3
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Any reblogs or words of support are appreciated <3
Please help boost this 💜 Tumblr is the only chance for this to get traction, I have a few friends and kind followers/mutuals but no big support network
I had a breast cancer scare with brca1 this year because they found two lumps as different tissue and it put me through so much struggle from multiple scans to biopsies for most of this year and they will be continuing to monitor them, I need something positive to happen among the fear and stress I've been through
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