I...tried to make a meme and got carried away and made A Thing that is like partially unfinished because i spent like 3 hours on it and then got tired.
I think this is mostly scientifically accurate but truth be told, there seems to be relatively little research on succession in regards to lawns specifically (as opposed to like, pastures). I am not exaggerating how bad they are for biodiversity though—recent research has referred to them as "ecological deserts."
It's 2025. In the US, there are no abortion protections and we let women die in hospital parking lots who need them. Trad wife culture thriving. "Quiet Piggy" becomes appropriate commentary to female reporters. Women's participation in the workforce backsliding to 80's levels. Girls blamed for the "male loneliness epidemic." Female dominant fields in the dept of Ed being declassified as professional. Pregnant mothers taking Tylenol nonsensically blamed for autism rates. Bathroom laws policing who is woman enough to safely pee. GLP1s being crammed down our throats and thin ideal culture returning to early 00 norms. Tech companies making wearable tech to track your spouse's every move. Pink jobs blue jobs bullshit chatter. Sexual harassment complaints in the workplace surging but legal protections rolled back. Programs/funding/subsidies for low-income families (more likely to be headed by women) for food, healthcare, etc., slashed and burned.
But noooOoOOo there's no coordinated campaign of misogyny afoot.
I've lived 23 years as an adult now. I can't stop thinking about how the 10 years I lived from 2005 to 2015 really felt like HEY THIS IS CHANGE I CAN GET BEHIND. Now, nothing was perfect, all the isms were alive and thriving the whole time but we saw some true structural change about a lot of shit. MOVEMENT. Slow...incremental...and often backsliding, but CHANGE.
The 10 years from 2015-today, THE OPPOSITE. All I have felt is incremental BACKSLIDING and worsening every day, with one-off changes that are good but are pretty much, without exception, erased again.
It's so concerning. I can't ignore it...It's a constant sensation of disappointment, simmering rage, fear, and a very real level of ever present fight-flight-freeze-fawn mode.
Cars should not be allowed in towns and cities at all. The only places where they should be at all present is in rural areas where any other means of transportation should be impossible.
High speed rail networks should allow for a trip from Mexico city to Montreal in under 24 hours.
All public transportation should be 100% free.
Lawns should not exist.
It doesn't make sense for single family homes to be built in most American cities.
Architecture must be beautiful again.
Every commercial street should have at least one bench.
Public restrooms must be free, common and accessible.
The pigeons are not enemies. The pigeons are freinds.
“Rich kids should go to public schools. The mayor should ride the subway to work. When wealthy people get sick, they should be sent to public hospitals. Business executives should have to stand in the same airport security lines as everyone else. The very fact that people want to buy their way out of all of these experiences points to the reason why they shouldn’t be able to. Private schools and private limos and private doctors and private security are all pressure release valves that eliminate the friction that would cause powerful people to call for all of these bad things to get better. The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that others are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems. Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.”
The Prairieland case is Federal case prosecuting 19 people with terrorism after a noise demo at an ICE detention facility in Praireland, Texas in July 2025. Most have been convicted and are currently awaiting sentencing after being found guilty on multiple federal charges. Towards the end of the noise demo an Alvarado police officer was grazed in the neck with a bullet. The Prosecutors claim this was a coordinated ambush by an “antifa cell”. In reality its a drag-net prosecution against loosely acquainted people. If the corrupt verdict of this case is not over turned it will set a precedent that participating in black a bloc is terrorism and can land you decades in jail. We support the non-cooperating defendants not because they are victims of a miscarriage of justice, but because we support all who fight back against domination. Punks have historically played an important roll in spreading and sharpening anarchy across the world. This tape aims to continue that legacy. We affirm that I.C.E. Prisons & Police must be destroyed. People, plants and animals must be freed from the claws of colonial civilization. Against the state, Against capitalism, Solidarity with anarchist prisoners now & forever.
Money raised from this compilation will go towards the legal fees of the Prairieland Defendants
me, every single time i see people (especially women) talking about the divine feminine energy, or the sacredness of the womb or whatever it is now:
[image description: a two-panel photo of a person dialling a number and then placing the phone to their ear. the contact is saved as ‘Ursula K. Le Guin’ /end ID]
context is this quote by her:
But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?
i hate that concerns about urban gardening/foraging safety is often met with "What are you, a cop?" scorn. I believe it's a suspicion of anything that hinders the punk/anti-system urgency to jump in immediately and do whatever feels right.
Safety, ethics, and sustainability are all a part of urban gardening and foraging. I'm sorry that means you need to do homework before you can do anything, I know that sounds lame. But life is complicated.
I know anti-intellectualism is viewed as activist these days, but like, surely you don't want to literally eat lead, right?
I have a hard time talking about American law enforcement, because I have ptsd (like a therapist told me this and everything) from my own experiences with cops and because it's so balls quaking insane.
Like, a cop in the United States can pull you over for any reason. Which is a nice way of saying no reason, because literally anything can be used after the fact as justification. A cop can say its cuz you looked at him, or didnt look at him, or it looked like you were holding something, or looked like you were driving too perfectly for it to be natural. It's insane.
There are apparently no circumstances where a cop can't just kill you. The line the courts have applied is "reasonably believed" you were a threat, but that's such a nebulous nothing limit that people get shot for reaching for their license, having their phone in their hand, you're running away with no weapon, not being able to follow conflicting commands, like anything. And cops are almost never charged, because every court is going to believe he could "reasonably believe" he was threatened. Fuck, if you give me enough time, I can make any situation seem juuuuust plausibly threatening enough to pass that bar. It's insane.
A cop can just rob you. Like tell you to give him your wallet, take all the cash out, and just walk away with it. Exactly like you would imagine getting robbed in an alley would go, except no one can help. And he doesn't even have to hide it, he just drops it in a box at the station and they put it in their bank account. It's legal. You can't prove it wasn't drug money. I can't prove any money wasn't at some point drug money. It's insane.
If a cop just walks in your front door and says "I'm here to kill you and your entire family" YOU ARE GOING TO PRISON IF YOU STOP HIM. There is no positive defense for assaulting a police officer in the United States, and doubly so if you kill him. You have effectively no defense against a homicidal cop, which happens same as any other job. Unless for some reason you have cameras all thru your house and clearly caught the audio of him saying that he's there just to kill you, you have zero chance of not going to prison, probably for life. And that's assuming you aren't killed "resisting arrest" while being taken into custody. It is a crime, in this country, for you to defend yourself under any circumstances if the person you're defending yourself from is a cop. That's insane.
You don't have civil rights if a cop says so. You have the right to have a gun, right? A lot of states have open carry. A cop can shoot you if he sees you have a gun. Doesn't matter if you have a license and everything. So you effectively don't have the right to bear arms if a cop can shoot you for exercising it. You have the right to protest. Unless a cop tells you to stop. He doesn't need a real reason to tell you to stop. And if you don't stop, you can be arrested or shot. So you don't really have the right to protest, do you? A cop cant just search your car or house, right? Unless he claims he heard something, or smelled something, neither of which can be proven. So a cop can search whatever he wants, as long as he pretends there was a "reason". So you dont have protection from unreasonable search and seizure, do you? These are no longer rights- they're things the cops allow.. for now. But legally, those rights have already been found to not actually be rights, because any random cop can decide to take that right from you, for any reason. It's insane.
These aren't like crazy things that I'm just making up, these aren't some weird twisted way I'm looking at something, these are all very real things that we all just.. ignore? Police abolitionists and the media bring these things up all the time, and the overwhelming response to it is: so what? Don't break the law and it won't matter. Blue lives matter. More police funding. Cops should have tanks. It's insane. And I always feel like im just rambling and sound insane when I say this kind of stuff because if you wrote a book and had the dystopian government doing the stuff that the police in this country do every single day, those same people who "back the blue" would line up to say stuff like "*Books government* wouldnt have a chance before us real americans stopped them" on twitter and not even get a hint of the irony.
I just read your article and I loved how you mentioned the question of if controversial or even genuinely problematic trans women get to be dolls to be protected. One of the most consistent experiences as a trans woman, and in particular a very clocky trans woman is how little grace you get. Even in queer-friendly spaces, even in explicitly trans spaces, it's so easy to become a Bad Tranny.
yeah i mean i live in a country where if a trans woman is convicted of a crime she'll be sent to a men's prison and forcibly detransitioned, and also they recently made it a crime to get off with someone without telling them you're trans first - there is a trans woman in prison in the UK right now who gave a man a blowjob, he later claimed he didn't know she was trans, and now she's in jail for sexual assault
so yeah, "protect the dolls" needs to include some prison abolition cause it's that easy to become a Bad Tranny
early 21st century americans were so modest that they would regularly censor their own feet in video and artistic depictions, and it was considered improper to expose your feet in public — dismissed with cries of "put those grippers away"
Drives me up the wall that when people talk about 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, they just laugh at the absurdity of China discovering the Americas in 1421.
Don't get me wrong, that's an extraordinary claim with extraordinarily poor evidence, but it's also one of the more sensible claims Gavin Menzies made in that book. Other assertions include:
The treasure voyage which reached the Americas also visited every continent except Europe and circumnavigated the globe, in three years
They returned to China by way of the Arctic Sea, visiting the North Pole along the way
China left colonies everywhere the treasure voyages went, only for those colonies to vanish when the Hongxi Emperor stopped the famous treasure fleets.
And then there's the sequel, 1434, which asserts that a Chinese treasure voyage "ignited" the Renaissance right after China famously stopped its treasure voyages and somewhere between 30-120 years after the Renaissance started. And that Zheng He's massive treasure ships got to Italy by way of a Nile/Red Sea canal which, in our world, wasn't used for ships since the 8th century or so and was mostly used for irrigation.
Menzies also says that Croatians used Chinese maps to sail to modern-day Virginia, specifically Roanoke. It's not clear whether he thinks these people became the Croatan tribe in the ~150 years between his cited date and the end of the Roanoke colony or if Menzies just doesn't know the simple and well-documented explanation for the Roanoke colony's fate. This isn't actually related to China igniting the Renaissance, but Menzies threw it in.
So yeah, "China colonized America" is small potatoes compared to all that.
A little rant-y but I think it is pretty gross how the responsibility of nature conservation gets put on global south countries that are having their ecosystems butchered by international companies and so on like all these international campaigns to save the amazon rainforest or celebrities advocating for the conservation of the Yasuni tend to focus on the governments of those countries but the reality is it is not just those governments and the people of these countries who you assume "don't care" but a bigger system of exploitation that comes from the global north, it is not like people in these countries are idiots who don't know destroying the environment is bad (who by the way are the ones most directly affected) but rather that a system of economic exploitation based on the extraction of resources has been built at a global scale and if these countries try to deviate from it at all they get punished with the full weight of imperialism, it is not that third world governments aren't capable of exploiting and doing this shit on their own but when one of the main tasks of the IMF is going into these counties and forcing open the oil and mining industry for international market it seems a little disingenuous to put all that responsibility of that destruction of that country with much less power ... like at the end of the day any advocacy for the environment that doesn't center and recognize that it is imperialism and capitalism that is the cause it is pretty meaningless and just another form of propaganda to wash away the crimes of the empire and the way that those same people who claim to care about the environment in the global north are the ones benefiting from the exploitation of the global south
basically if you are not a committed anti-imperialist you actually do not care about the environment
A group of immigrant rights activists is turning up the heat on federal immigration agents by patrolling the streets looking to interrupt wa
"A small group of activists assembled before dawn on a recent day in a South L.A. parking lot preparing to patrol the neighborhood. The gathering was not unlike what you see when police congregate in a parking lot preparing for a raid.
Only this time, the target was federal immigration agents.
The activists were from the Community Self Defense Coalition, which fights for immigrant rights. They were armed with two-way radios, bullhorns, and were trained to spot undercover vehicles from U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the Department of Homeland Security.
The coalition formed in the wake of the second election of President Donald Trump and includes groups from across Los Angeles. They say their aim is to find ICE agents, alert the community to their presence using bullhorns, and drive them out of neighborhoods.
“They’re on our land. This is our territory,” said Ron Gochez of Unión del Barrio, which is part of the coalition. “Whatever they do here, they have to know they are going to meet an organized resistance.
“There is nowhere, there is no alleyway, no little corner of our city anywhere where an ICE raid can happen where we won’t know about it almost immediately,” he said.
An ICE spokesperson confirmed in a statement that agents have aborted at least one enforcement action “due to safety concerns brought on by protesters/bystanders.” The spokesperson declined to give his name “due to a heightened security risk to ICE employees.” ...
Tracking ICE
Last week, a high school history teacher, an ethnic studies instructor and a youth program leader were among the activists in South L.A. Nine people in three cars rolled into the darkened streets looking for ICE agents.
“We drive the streets of our neighborhood looking for anything suspicious,” said Gochez, a 43-year-old father and high school history teacher. "We start early in the morning because we know this is when ICE starts their operations.”
Gochez is a member of Unión del Barrio, one of the members of the coalition.
Unión del Barrio started the patrols in 2020 during a Biden Administration crackdown on unauthorized immigrants. The organization restarted the patrols over the past few weeks in response to the second Trump Administration.
On Wednesday, Gochez’s two-way radio crackled with the sound of a colleague checking in from another car on patrol.
“Copy. We are on Jefferson and Trinity. All clear,” she announced.
They looked for ICE vehicles – typically with heavily tinted windows, usually on an American made sedan or SUV, almost always with a cage in the back seat for detainees. Sometimes, the cars are parked sideways on a street in front of their target or grouped together in a grocery store parking lot.
Gochez said he and the other activists try to catch ICE agents in those lots as they gather before a raid.
“We try to catch them at that stage — that way we’re able to affect their plan and at the same time, we start alerting the community.”
When they find federal agents, they go into publicity mode.
“We go live on social media,” Gochez said. “We use our megaphone to alert the immediate community that ICE is present.”
In a recent Facebook Live post, Gochez can be seen speaking into a bullhorn across the street from where ICE agents appear to be conducting a raid.
“Everybody in this community, if you can hear me please do not come outside if you are undocumented,” he says on the video. “We have terrorists in our community.”
He implores people who are documented to come outside and support the protest.
Enforcing law vs defending community
Later, L.A. police officers confronted Gochez.
“We’re not interfering,” he told them.
“Yes you are,” responded an LAPD officer, who forced Gochez and the other protestors down the street.
The participation of city police officers appeared to violate L.A.’s sanctuary cities law, which prohibits police from cooperating or assisting ICE agents...
ICE backs off
As part of the coalition, Unión del Barrio has trained people from more than 50 other organizations to engage in similar patrols, including The National Lawyers Guild, Jewish Voice for Peace and The Peoples Struggle San Fernando Valley, according to Gochez.
It's unclear how many conduct regular patrols like Unión del Barrio does.
Gochez estimates his and other groups have intercepted ICE on about a dozen occasions. He said in some cases, ICE has backed off of a raid because of Unión del Barrio’s presence.
Cardona said ICE agents called off the raid when they were called out at the Target. “That one day, we knew we prevented several people from being detained and deported, their lives being uprooted.” ...
Union del Barrio urges people to use a text thread or to have some sort of a phone tree to alert each other about the presence of ICE in their neighborhoods. The group also has a hotline people can call if they spot ICE.
“We get calls from Uber drivers. We get calls from street vendors. We get calls from business owners and just everyday normal people who support the work that we do,” said Gochez, who refers to ICE detentions and arrests as the “kidnappings.”
“It is a kidnapping – no different from when they kidnapped Native Americans during the Indian Removal Act,” Gochez declared.
He said many of the calls to the coalition are false alarms, involving local agencies, like LAPD or the county Sheriff’s Department, conducting their own undercover operations. But the coalition is focused on the actions of federal immigration agents.
A new tactic
Experts said the tactic of patrolling for ICE is relatively new.
Mirian Martinez-Aranda, an associate professor of sociology at U.C. Irvine, said it lets members of immigrant communities know they are not alone.
“It's a new form in which immigrant communities and their supporters are finding a way to protect each other and to stand up for what's unfair and cruel,” Martinez-Aranda told LAist.
Hey yall I just wanted to come on here and bring some attention to what’s happening at the detention center (really a concentration camp) Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey. There is a hunger strike going on right now to protest the abhorrent conditions within the camp (allegations of torture, maggots and other bugs in the food, etc) and protests happening outside the camp. ICE is not allowing any politicians to come in (as is their right) to see the conditions of the camp. I would urge yall to do your own research, but if you want videos of some people who are actually there, here are some tik tok accounts you can go follow: @ bethanyquilter/ @ whoiskingtrivv/ @ Status Coup News/ @ L.A. TACO
And here is a video explaining what’s going on in more detail than I provided.
With everything else going on in the world, it can be hard to keep up with stuff going on at home, but ICE is still out here terrorizing innocent people. We must keep our eyes on them, and keep fighting.
Feel free to add more sources or info to this post, should you have any.
their needs are changing rapidly, they mostly need Sudecon wipes and gas masks, last I heard, but the only way is to bring them directly there. for the most part they are asking people to join them there and hold the line, if possible. next best thing is to donate and call NJ reps to demand an end to the detention and torture!
What is your take on humanity's historical and ongoing belief in magic?
Magical thinking is a cognitive byproduct given off when the soul attempts to comprehend a new idea. It is a semiotic digestive fluid. A healthy part of any mental biosphere, but one can have too much or too little.
