@nirnrooted - Tumblr Blog

I’ve got no idea why but this particular gif is driving me fucking nuts at the moment like he’s so into it he’s climbing on the table?? Yes baby 😍The sassy little toss of his hair? Perfection.

The Grad Student Shuffle- Christ Fleming

shelly-johnson

The Cheetah Girls (2003) // The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

corporatebigwig

What the fuck asidjdksd

unamedwatcher

malchay

So, I looked in the comments, expecting to see discourse or historical background etc, but I found none. Therefore, I decided to learn more and add background. Apparently this machine was used because of polio because polio paralyzes your lungs. According to the wiki article on this bad boy, patients would spend two weeks in there sometimes. They still have these machines, though much, much more modern but they’re barely used at all anymore: “In 1959, there were 1,200 people using tank respirators in the United States, but by 2004 there were only 39. By 2014, there were only 10 people left with an iron lung.” (x)

meowren-deactivated20190915

I’ve read about one man who still lives in an iron lung. He taught himself how to breathe again by gulping down air, but it’s quite laborious because of the paralysis. His name is Paul Alexander, and he’s a lawyer. He’s 71 years old and has spent 65 years in an iron lung. Wild, right? He’s been working on a memoir that he was inspired to write by the recent resurgence of cases of polio caused by anti-vaccers.

Source: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4414081 (can’t hyperlink because I’m on mobile, apologies)

thecringeandwincefactory-deacti

It’s amazing to me to recognize that we only defeated polio in this past century - that my mother’s father had it (he got lucky, it only deformed his feet and thereby kept him out of a couple wars); my mother got the big vaccination that left her upper arm scarred; and by the time I was vaccinated, polio basically didn’t exist. My grandfather must have been born like around 1900, so - in the space of less than 75 years, this was no longer something that parents dreaded the possibility of every summer.

derryderrydown

In the 1950s, my mother would go to the corner shop. The owners had a daughter a few years older than my mum. She lived in an iron lung in the back of the shop. Vaccinate your fucking kids.

shadowphoenixrider

Reminder that children were in these iron lungs. Children who just wanted their mums and dads, or wanted to cuddle their precious stuffed toy, but couldn’t because of the nature of these machines. Crying because they don’t want to go in this big scary tank, but if they don’t go in the iron lung they would die.

And there’d be hospital wards of these.

This BBC documentary is an excellent one to watch, first as just as a history into the polio vaccine’s creation and why it was important, but also to get a glimpse of the iron lungs in action - 6:58 is when you can see footage of children in these things.

The polio vaccine exists so children wouldn’t have to have a machine breathe for them. All vaccines exist because we don’t want people to suffer. Please vaccinate and get vaccinated.

animedads-deactivated20210108

REALLY good pic of Kate Bush here y'all

jetix

2012-11-19 09:00:00

popthirdworld

“When I was 26, I went to Indonesia and the Philippines to do research for my first book, No Logo. I had a simple goal: to meet the workers making the clothes and electronics that my friends and I purchased. And I did. I spent evenings on concrete floors in squalid dorm rooms where teenage girls—sweet and giggly—spent their scarce nonworking hours. Eight or even 10 to a room. They told me stories about not being able to leave their machines to pee. About bosses who hit. About not having enough money to buy dried fish to go with their rice.

They knew they were being badly exploited—that the garments they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a month. One 17-year-old said to me: “We make computers, but we don’t know how to use them.”

So one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?

It took a very long time for him to understand the question. When he finally did, he looked at me like I was nuts. You see, for him and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large, organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.

This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your political beliefs—firstly and very often lastly—through personal lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping fair trade and local and boycotting big, evil brands.

These very different understandings of social change came up again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would give talks about the need for international protections for the right to unionize. About the need to change our global trading system so it didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet at the end of those talks, the first question from the audience was: “What kind of sneakers are OK to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”

Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global greenhouse-gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”

The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we—as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy, is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together. As part of a massive and organized global movement.

The irony is that people with relatively little power tend to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power. The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act not only together, but to act on a rather large political canvas. To try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand structural changes.

In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even individual activists. And the result is that, despite our power and privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes—the policy and legal work— to others.”

- Naomi Klein

stele3

This is why the media keeps pumping out articles about plastic straws and avocados that focuses on what we, individually, are doing to destroy the environment, when really the most pollution comes from multinational corporations and the only thing that will save us is global collective action.

ruindur

Please read it all, PLEASE

allyouneediswall

Karelian swamp creature

ostrichrevolution

The fact that corn, poatoes, tomatoes, pumpkins, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, and chocolate weren’t encountered by Europeans until less than 400 years ago is astonishing.

Like white folks became so dependant on the hundreds of years of labor that Native Americans put into domesticating these crops and now they’re so removed culturally from their origins that they’ve become inherant parts of white culture.

When you think of tomatoes do you think of Mexican, or Italian food? When you think of potatoes can you picture the Quechua or Ireland and the UK, Russia, France maybe? Does chocolate make you think of Belgian and Swiss truffles, or Olmec cacao?

Pumpkin may be the oldest domesticated plant but it doesn’t evoke images of the ancient Native peoples of the southern US. It’s white girls with pumpkin spice lattes and white mom’s pumpkin pie.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this but it makes me feel things

newjadeboots13-deactivated20240

Its even more upsetting when you realize that white colonizers forced native people to eat things like barley and wheat (that many couldnt eat due to allergies) and stripped them of their native foods and land to grow it. They took the plains and made them monocultures of corn to make syrup and made native tribes raise invasive crops on poor land and destroy thousands of years of agricultural tradition and tried to kill agricultural practices that are far superior to the ones used by corporations now