shark @sharkinabathtub - Tumblr Blog

Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) - Crescent Moon, 1979

you guys made luigi mangione trend for days and I need to see the same energy for brianna boston. she is a 43 year old mother of three who ended a phone call with blue cross blue shield (after being denied a claim) “delay deny depose, you people are next” and is now being held under a 100,000$ bond and could face FIFTEEN years of prison if charged. she has no weapons, her record is clean, and yet she is being held behind bars. they are afraid of the public and are trying to subdue. do not let them!!!! be outraged that our freedom of speech is being threatened!!!!! deny defend depose! free brianna boston!

screamingforkingshirtballs-deac

Johfra Bosschart, Dutch (1919-1998), Allegory of Human Life, 1969, oil on board, 26.5 x 22 cm, private collection

teamfreewilldcats

I can’t stop thinking about the uhc shooter and what a wild experience he must be having right now. Idk how much you can look at the news or scroll the internet while on the run for murder, but man. Imagine. You spend who knows how long planning a brazen public assassination, cleanly pop a dude in the middle of one of the busiest downtowns in the world, bike away fueled by nothing but the thrill of vengeance and some Starbucks, and spark one of the largest manhunts in recent history. And when you finally go online to see what you’ve wrought, the entire world is laugh reacting NYT headlines and has collectively decided that you’re off the hook this time, king.

Then pictures of your face get released 24 hours later and everyone is like actually this guy did nothing wrong AND he’s hot.

venustapolis

Total Eclipse of The Sun (Wilhelm Kranz, 1897)

purgatorialist

windows-in-art

320.

Marcia Jean Harris

politijohn

Source

A seemingly mundane topic but this is how corporations eat away at our livelihood…One product at a time.

peace-love-colbert

jumpingjacktrash

oh my god.

let me share a memory with y’all. it’s from i guess 1978 or thereabouts. it’s high summer. i don’t remember where my mom was driving me, in our avocado green chevette, i just know there was a traffic jam that turned 35w northbound into a parking lot from horizon to horizon.

picture it – wait, you don’t have to use your imagination, this happened all the damn time back then.

every one of those damn cars was burning leaded gasoline. there were no emissions regulations. there were no safety regulations. there were just thousands and thousands of detroit steel shoeboxes belching visible smoke as they idled, engines loud and hot, here and there a radiator giving up in the heat, a cloud of burning oil rising.

i, a smeet of five or six, was choking on toxic smog.

i reckon it was about a half hour into the traffic jam that i first threw up. i remember a blinding headache, i remember being confused, i remember dry heaving with my arms and head hanging out the window, the green metal of the car burning my hands and my chin. i don’t remember passing out, but i’m told i lost consciousness before mom was able to get to an off-ramp, because there were no emergency lanes on the highways back then.

i lived. and life went on. what were we going to do, complain? if i’d died, the cause of death probably would’ve been recorded as heatstroke, not carbon monoxide poisoning.

i know i’m probably preaching to the choir here on tumblr. but i really wish i could tell that story to the people who think deregulation is no big deal. i wish they’d put themselves in my mom’s shoes.

or even just look at some old pictures, then look out the window.

ever notice how cityscapes used to have that orange tint and hazy aura? yeah, that’s poison gas.

remember how the mississippi river used to be a stinking soup of baby-shit yellow sludge covered with disturbingly stiff rafts of light orange foam?

i can’t even find pictures of the sludge and foam, i guess they didn’t end up on the internet. the smell was indescribable. that oily shimmer. the reek of dead things. people didn’t boat on the river for pleasure; it smelled too bad, it was too ugly, and you could get super super sick if you touched the water.

and now look at it.

i still wouldn’t want to drink it, but if i fell in i wouldn’t bolt for the shower in a panic, you know?

if the thieving billionaires get their way, we can kiss those sailboats goodbye, and learn the smell of toxic foam once more. the ultra-rich won’t even feel the extra money, they’ve already got more than they could ever touch, they just stash it in offshore accounts to rot, but the rest of us will return to a time of neverending nausea and weird cancers. a time when every elementary school class had at least one kind who’d been born with no fingers or their heart outside their body, and this was just… the way things were.

i’m sorry. i didn’t mean to longpost. it’s just. god. y’all have no idea how CLEAN everything is now, compared to when i was a kid. and these rich old men are counting on that, on people not knowing or not remembering how bad it was before regulation, not realizing how much we need these protections until it’s too late.

themightyglamazon

I enforce federal worker health and safety and pollution regulations.

When I was learning my trade, when my classmates and I were having a chuckle over the “well duh” level of specificity written into the Code of Federal Regulations (try “no hazardous material shall be stored in crew berthing” on for size), I will never forget the silence that followed when our instructor spoke these words:

“Your regulations are written in blood.”

These regulations were not written on a whim. They were written because someone thought they could cut costs by storing however many more pounds of a radioactive, toxic, carcinogenic, or whatever else material in the same rooms where the human beings they paid to transport those materials slept, and then did that, because no one was telling them not to.

They were written because people died. Horrifically. Because unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering.

Can I say it again, for those not paying attention?

Unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering.

salllzy

Regulations of these kinds are always written in blood and they will always continue to be written in blood and death. There is no other way about it. Health and safety, food, hygiene, and things of that nature are steeped in death and blood. People losing limbs and their lives at work, and people not being able to work because of an accident at work, which then prompts a change in law and regulation. They exist for a reason and a good one. They keep people safe, they stop others from cutting corners to maximise the profit margin and make themselves look good. All the while their workers are being killed and crippled and it won’t just be the workers that suffer either. Consumers will as well. There is going to be a rise in outbreaks, not just in the food industry either. Medicine will also be affected and who knows what else. Regulations exist for a reason.

amaditalks

“There’s just too many of them” seems like a compelling argument until you remember that we are a nation of nearly 350 million people, and those regulations cover every kind of substance, every kind of industry, every place were individuals and institutions, systems or corporations interact because that’s how we keep people safe and alive.

More importantly, regulations don’t exist on their own, they are the explanations and guidelines for how to follow federal laws. Getting rid of the regulations doesn’t make the laws go away, it just makes them harder to follow, harder to enforce, and makes it harder for people to get assistance or find justice when those laws are broken.

And that last part is really the point. It’s not just if they want corporations to be able to save money by cutting corners and ignoring the law, they want to make sure that when we are hurt by that, we’re screwed.