Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. ❤️
Thank you to everyone who commented in their tags or messaged me. Indeed, today is “Martin and Bosco Day”. I originally whimsically blazed this photo on 13 July 2022. I never expected Martin and Bosco to travel so far and make so many new friends. The experience has been such a gift for me.
“This particular project is about my father, but it’s also about so many other people’s fathers. There are so many people who were involved in the Panthers,” she says. “So many people have a file like this on them, many of whom are still in prison, or many of whom might not have a child who happens to be an artist and can use their family as a way to talk about the greater black community and American history.”
source
That whole exhibit is fucking amazing. It should be seen by everyone.
A decade after lead-contaminated water was found in Flint's water system, the legal battle to replace lead water pipes is nearly finished.
Jul 9, 2025
The Flint water crisis began in 2014, after lead-contaminated drinking water was found to be leaching out from aging pipes into homes citywide.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Natural Resources Defense Council, with help from other activists and nonprofits, have released statements on the recent progress, celebrating the milestone.
The statements which they chalk up the crisis to “cost-cutting measures and improper water treatment,” that the state “didn’t require treatment to prevent corrosion,” after a “a state-appointed emergency manager” switched the water supply to the Flint River.
There is no safe level of lead exposure; each nanogram causes harm. In addition to long-known risks, such as damage to children’s brains and certain cancers, there is also significant evidence that exposure to lead is linked to numerous cardiovascular diseases, including stroke and heart attack.
The coalition mobilized the citizenry and filed a lawsuit against Flint and Michigan state officials to secure safe water. The result was a settlement in March 2017, under which a federal court in Detroit ordered Flint to give every resident the opportunity to have their lead pipe replaced at no cost, as well as conduct comprehensive tap water testing, implement a faucet filter distribution and education program, and maintain funding for health programs to help residents deal with the effects of Flint’s tainted water, according to the NRDC.
The coalition then returned to court six times in six years to ensure the city and state kept to the timeline, which was delayed by COVID-19, and other reasons which The Detroit News described as “spotty record-keeping” and “ineffective management.”
On July 1st, the State of Michigan submitted a progress report to a federal court confirming that, more than eight years after the settlement, nearly 11,000 lead pipes were replaced and more than 28,000 properties were restored where the maintenance had taken place.
Of the 4,200 buildings where lead pipes are known to still be in service, their owners have either left the properties vacant, abandoned, or have declined the free replacement under the Safe Water Drinking Act. The coalition has said it will continue to monitor city and state progress on these remaining lines.
“Thanks to the persistence of the people of Flint and our partners, we are finally at the end of the lead pipe replacement project,” said Pastor Allen C. Overton of the Concerned Pastors for Social Action, one of the organizations that sued the city. “While this milestone is not all the justice our community deserves, it is a huge achievement.”
oh and when i was a year old, after i got my foot amputated my parents were pushing me around in a stroller at a street festival in miami and i was chewing on my foot or whatever and this street performer came up to us and was like “aw i bet that tastes good!!” and my dad was like “yeah look at what she did to the other one!!!!” and pulled back the blanket covering my left leg to show a stump with a huge scar on it and i’m pretty sure my dad terrified that poor man
[ID: Two tweets by @/bluewmist that say, "the fastest way to kill motivation is to make your identity depend on the outcome. it's called ego involvement. when failing becomes failing as a person, your brain starts avoiding the whole thing. not because you don't care, but because you care too much. / you don't need lower standards. you need less self-worth tangled up in your goals. the work gets easier when it's not about proving who you are." End ID]
I'd like to present a sideways way of looking at this, because I think these tweets are on to something, but I disagree with their ultimate conclusion. Like, obviously you're going to care the most about stuff when it's stuff that's tied directly into your self-concept. I don't know if that's avoidable? Everyone's got something they're really invested in that is Part Of Who They Are, don't they? Or if not everyone, then enough people to make this kind of tweet get retwote a bunch.
So, I'm good at gentling feral horses, and I'm good at writing, and those skills are part of my self-concept. Every time I successfully gentle a feral horse, that part of my self-concept is reinforced. Every time I evoke an intended emotional or intellectual response with my prose, that part of my self-concept is reinforced. It's immensely positively motivating to strive for additional successes and further reinforcement. I don't think it's possible for me, personally, to do it any other way, and I don't even think it would be emotionally healthy for me to try.
But what of failure? If a particular horse proves especially challenging to gentle, or if my written meaning is misunderstood, it can be tempting to turn that into "I have failed at this task and therefore I have failed to live up to my self-concept; I am a fraud; I shouldn't even try; etc." That seems to be sort of where these tweets are coming from: those thoughts about those outcomes don't help you meet your goals, so you should disentangle your identity from those outcomes.
More productive, in my experience, is a reframing of failure that uses self-concept to build resilience to it: this horse is challenging me, but I am good at gentling horses, so I can change my approach and figure it out. This piece of writing did not evoke the response I hoped it would, but I am good at writing, so I can rework it until it does. Or: I am failing at this challenging task, but I am good at this, and I want to be better at it, and this may be an opportunity to learn. This way, your self-concept/self-worth/identity don't hinge on the outcome; they provide resilience against failure and disappointment. They give you the tools to turn a negative outcome into an opportunity.
(The pitfall inherent to this reframing is a temptation to use self-concept to deny failure, e.g. "This horse is challenging to gentle, but I am good at gentling horses, so the horse must be impossible to gentle/it must be the horse's fault." Extremely unhelpful, but so common in specialized spaces. Watch out for this in yourself and others. You must acknowledge your own limits if you want to identify opportunities to grow.)
Anyway. I won't pretend this stuff ^ is always easy or self-perpetuating. But I also don't know that it would be particularly healthy to try to completely detach your sense of self-worth from your goals. And, frankly, I think that proving who you are can be enormously motivating if you have the tools to select and strive for the things you really care about folding into your sense of self.
The most mind-blowing moment, not only for De La Mata but the scientists too, came when they managed to actually record the sounds that she heard in her ears – which now appear as ‘Left Ear’ and ‘Right Ear’ which begin sides A and B on the album – and in doing so opened up questions about the nature of tinnitus itself. “The NHS definition is that it’s a phantom sound that your brain is creating, that it isn’t something ‘real’, so you should try to ignore it.” By having De La Mata place her ear into an anechoic chamber, with an ultra-sensitive microphone perched in her ear canal, they were able to provide significant evidence to the contrary. “After the first recording of it, it was ‘There’s no way, this isn’t possible.’” They tried again with her breath held, and again with her tensing her ears, and again with other members of staff, but each time it became apparent that yes, the noises De La Mata hears are seemingly something physical.
30 trips around the sun and im still surprised when the days get shorter after a long summer like the nights already feel much cooler now and soon it'll be dark at 4 in the afternoon and i'll go wow man look how dark it is and it's only 4 and come spring ill realize that wow you can actually tell the days are getting longer and warmer isnt that crazy and in the summer i'll be lying in bed at 11 thinking woah it's still not dark out and then in september ill say to myself phew that sure was a long summer you can already tell the days are getting shorter and ill remember this post and maybe ill go look for it and reblog it and dear reader, i for one hope that we both live to see it
Mosquitos move calories from big animals, back down the food chain, without killing the big animals. That's important! Mosquito are prey in themselves but mosquito LARVAE are vital food sources for a ton of water animals.
How do you expect to transfer calories from, say, the deer in a forest to the fish in the river, without mosquito as the middle step? How do you expect to transfer calories from rats to bats, without mosquitoes?
Losing mosquitos would fundamentally shift how calories move through the food chain, because they're a parasite that shifts between land, sea, and air. And that's just a foundation, it doesn't cover all the behaviors other animals have specifically to interact with mosquitos.
This is a huge pet peeve of mine! I really encourage people to think critically whenever they hear a claim that some native species could just be eliminated without consequence to the ecosystem. To declare such a thing is human arrogance to the extreme. Even for species whose ecological “value” cannot be proven by our science, to assume that these animals are therefore pointless in their ecological niche is absolutely absurd. You may not like animals like mosquitoes or wasps, but it’s foolish to believe any of the nonsense rhetoric that labels them as useless or unimportant.
Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. ❤️
Thank you to everyone who commented in their tags or messaged me. Indeed, today is “Martin and Bosco Day”. I originally whimsically blazed this photo on 13 July 2022. I never expected Martin and Bosco to travel so far and make so many new friends. The experience has been such a gift for me.
#it’s NOT inexplicable#it’s bc someone based it on the unicode 6 yellow heart#which is colorless but shaded with halftone dots#and someone interpreted that like stubble#and drew this#which is SO FUCKING FUNNY via @animusbell
