mary james holland

🌅

[gliterallyangelic]

like to charge, reblog to cast <3

[bored-libra]

SOPHIE, Rolling Stone 2015

[yasferatu-deactivated20220102]

[googlemenot-deactivated20230921]

[catastrofewaitress]

[anarchopuppy]

Last week, the free pantry outside the Birmingham Free Store was smashed and all of its contents destroyed. We don’t want to say it was the cops, but everyone’s pretty sure it was the cops - they had been spotted eyeing the store and taking pictures multiple times leading up to this, likely pissed off by the banner we had put up in support of George Floyd + all of the anti-cop and openly anarchist literature we distribute

Within 24 hours we had received a new, even bigger pantry and more donations than we knew what to do with so we could stock it back up. We’re showing them that we’re not intimidated and we’re not going anywhere. We have the community on our side

If you want to support queer-affirming mutual aid and reproductive justice in a historically poor and Black neighborhood in Alabama, donate to the Free Store!!! We’re on both patreon and venmo at @bhamfreestore - the patreon covers supplies and running costs, and the venmo is a virtual tip jar that compensates the volunteers who keep it running

[anarchopuppy]

Hey folks! The Bham Free Store needs support now more than ever! Our funds have become a little shaky lately, so if you can donate or spread the word that would be a big help

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How Big Oil lied about "recyclable" plastics

Exxon knew.

They knew, 50 years ago, that they were going to murder the planet and our species with their oil.

And they acted.

Oh, how they acted!

They created a campaign of lies to distort the public perception of climate change.

https://exxonknew.org/

Exxon knew.

They knew in ‘73, when their researchers told them: plastics would never be recycled. There would not be a cost effective way to recycle plastic.

And they acted.

They created a disinformation campaign to convince us plastic COULD be recycled.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled

That campaign - the little recycling logos on our plastics, the upbeat videos about a future where plastic was part of a circular economy of use and recycling - convinced us to buy, wash, and sort plastic.

90% of that plastic was never recycled. It never will be.

NONE of those splashy campaigns - the announcement that all NYC school plastics would be recycled, the recycling in national parks - ever worked. They all lasted long enough to get some upbeat press, and then they quietly shut down.

This week’s NPR/Planet Money investigation by Laura Sullivan doesn’t just talk to the ex-chief lobbyists, now serving as belated Oppenheimers, lamenting the impending destruction of our planet.

It also talks to the current round of executives who have announced a fresh round of plans to recycle plastics - completely disingenuous, insultingly obvious distraction tactics to convince us that their projections of TRIPLING production by 2050 isn’t a form of mass murder.

Then Sullivan circles back to those retired executives, the ones who oversaw the first disinformation campaign, and they confirm that this latest round of promises are literally the same tactic, barely updated for a world on fire.

The world is on fire. My sky has been orange all week. Our family’s socially distanced meetings with friends in parks or back yards have been cancelled because we cannot breathe outside.

Exxon - and Chevron, and the rest of Big Oil - knows.

In a secret recording released to the New York Times, oil execs meet to cheerfully discuss how they will burn the world and murder us all but make a buck in the process.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/12/climate/methane-natural-gas-flaring.html

Their plans for climate change don’t involve reducing emissions - they’re building bunkers and hiring mercenaries to keep us at bay when we come for them. They know what they’ve done.

Exxon knows.

Exxon knows.

When I searched for the “Exxon Knew” campaign to find a link for this piece, the top of Google’s search results included a blisteringly expensive ad for a disinformation site, paid for by Exxon.

The sky is orange. The oceans are choking. The air is unbreathable. Your body is full of microplastics.

Exxon.

Fucking.

Knows.

[woundability]

this tweet really threw me, somehow

[recently-reanimated]

Wow this is so interesting. I never knew this.

[whitepeopletwitter]

[toastbutteregg]

this is me LMAO

[a-book-of-creatures]

Honestly the biggest disappointment I had researching ABC was that medieval authors did not, in fact, see the creatures they were describing and were trying their best to describe them with their limited knowledge while going “what the fuck… what the fuck…”

[a-book-of-creatures]

Instead all those creatures you know came about from transcription and translation errors from copying Greco-Roman sources (who themselves got them from travelers’ tales from Persia and India - rhino -> unicorn, tiger -> manticore, python -> dragon, and so on).

[downinmybeastheart]

So unicorns are real

[a-book-of-creatures]

behold… a unicorn

[gallusrostromegalus]

I always thought animals in medieval manuscripts looked like the result of having to draw say. A Tree Kangaroo, but your only source for what it looked like was your friend who heard it from a fellow who knows a man who swears he saw one once, whilst very drunk and lost, and I am SO PLEASED  to find out this is, in fact, the case.

[glamourweaver]

Questing Beast

- Neck of a snake

- body of a leopard

- haunches of a lion

- feet off a hart (deer)

So is it

Or….

[weaselle]

don’t forget that some of the legendary creatures they were describing were from other people’s mythos which were passed down in the oral tradition for gods know how long. You know what existed in Eurasia right around the time we were domesticating wolves into dogs?

these beasties. For a long time, science had them down as going extinct 200 thousand years ago, but then we found some bones from 36 thousand years ago. Which, y’know, is quite a difference. Since you can bet that any skeleton we find is not literally the last one of its kind to live, many creatures have date ranges unknowably far outside the evidence.

In South Asia there were cultures that described a man-beast/troll forrest giant  who’s knuckles dragged the ground, and everybody from the west was sure it was superstitious mumbo jumbo, but you know what used to live there?

And did you know that some of the earliest white colonizers of the Americas heard accounts that there were natives still alive who had seen and hunted and eaten a great hairy beast, shaggy like the buffalo but much bigger, with a long thin nose like a snake and two giant fangs… so, like, mammoths, you know? but they were totally discounted because europeans of the time were like, elephants live in Africa and aren’t hairy, you can’t fool us, pranksters!

Anyway, the point is between the early writing game of telephone description thing talked about by OP, and the discounting of native cultural accuracy, I’m pretty sure most legendary creatures are in fact real animals one way or another 

[historyisntboring]

It can’t explain every single legendary creature, but yes, this is super important. Because History relies on written sources, it tends to sweep oral tradition under the rug, even if there’s a lot of interesting informations in it.

And it’s not just living animals that were badly described, or which descriptions got exaggerated over the course of centuries or through translation errors. Sometimes, people finding fossil bones of extinct animals might have also influenced some myths!

By now this is pretty well-known but it has been theorised that the Greek myth of the cyclops was started when people found Deinotherium skulls. Now you might say, uh, how is it possible to think a cousin of the elephant is a huge human dude with one eye?

Well-

- the big nasal opening kinda looks like an eye if you have no idea what kind of animal had this kind of skull (you can read more about this theory in this old National Geographic article if you like).

Here’s a less well-known one; the griffin is a mythological hybrid with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. The earliest traces of this myth come from ancient Iranian and ancient Egyptian art, from more than 3000 BC. In Iranian mythology, it’s called شیردال‌ (shirdal, “lion eagle”). Now, it’s been the subject of some debate and it’s not confirmed, but there’s a theory that people might have seen some Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus fossils in Asia and might have interpreted it as “a lion with an eagle’s head”:

Check the “origin” part of the wikipedia page for “griffin” if you want to find more sources for this theory and for the arguments against it! Again, it’s just a theory, but I think it’s super cool.

[excessively-english-jd]

This is a pretty well accepted theory for why dragons (or animals we group as like dragons, eg wyverns and drakes) are seen in mythos almost worldwide - because people found dinosaur bones, looked at them, and went “oh fuck what’s that? some big…. lizardy thing?” and then created dragons.

[tiktoks-for-dead-pope]

[that-catholic-shinobi]

WHERE IS THE OSCAR?????

[whitepeopletwitter]

[occupywatchdog]

YESSSS!!!!!

Lets talk about this.

[thatcuriouswench]

Absolutely. The Electoral College functions to stand in the way of the will of the people, as expressed through their votes, and who gets into elected office.

[cumleak-deactivated20210627]

She really is a Northern Star shining bright in the middle of a very, very dark night

[whitepeopletwitter]

[whitepeopletwitter]

[sindri42]

fucking finally

[maryjamesholland]

This sounds really nice but our governor and most mayors are very pro cop!