Always Be A Student

31/US. He and Him. Science teacher, part-time philosopher, dharma-pagan, fledgling fighter, anti-fascist, rebel scum. Dedicated to liberty, peace, and justice for all. Gentleness Conquers.

[upyrica]

Make space for the overlooked.

Make space in your theology for those who do not get better and diligently improve themselves. Make space for those who are not odd in all the acceptable ways. Make space for those who are created unpalatable. Make space for a soul's suffering as something other than timid sadness.

Make it something better than a choice between acceptability and damnation.

[tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva]

this guy talks insanely fast but this is solid info on electrical outrages in the US.

privatization is cringe level 100

[leepacey]

here’s a transcription of what this guy says in this video, because he talks extremely fast — i’m also including sources wherever possible, in case anybody wants to do some further reading or wants proof

If you’re looking at Texas right now and thinking, “It seems pretty bad that a state’s electrical grid can fail overnight from a snowstorm,” I have news for you. It’s so much worse than you could ever imagine. Don’t be a heartless idiot and blame ‘red state voters;’ it’s red states, blue states, purple states, green states, everywhere is in crisis.

In 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave our energy grid a D+, because almost all of it was built in the 1950s and 60s with a 50-year life expectancy, and we’re 10 to 20 years past that. Across the country, 640,000 miles of high voltage lines run at full capacity at almost all times, which is way more than the grid was designed to handle, and Texas in particular has one of the worst ratios between planned and real capacity.

It’s so bad that the US Government has said that if just nine of America’s 55,000 electrical substations are brought down, it could cause a coast-to-coast blackout lasting 18 months or more. And testimony from the executive director of Task Force on National and Homeland Security has said that a prolonged collapse of the electrical grid could result in the death of up to 90% of the American population. [screenshot in the video has highlighted text from this source, saying: “a prolonged collapse of this nation’s electrical grid—through starvation, disease, and societal collapse—could result in the death of up to 90% of the American population.”]

Today, the US has more power outages than any other developed country. And that’s because 68% of the electricity in the US is managed by investor-owned privatized utility companies [the source I found said it’s actually 72%], and updating their systems cuts into their profits, so they don’t do anything until something fails. And when things do fail, and, for example, start massive wildfires in California, guess who pays for it? Mostly taxpayers. 

There’s no good news, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, because all of America’s infrastructure is failing, so I’m gonna keep doing videos about it.

[tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva]

thank you !! I was hoping someone would do a transcript

[rqqu]

just remember, “poverty” is a social construct. when the economy collapses, the farms don’t disappear. goods don’t vanish from the stores. poverty is created through exclusion. it is violence. so when you see articles about how the pandemic could “plunge billions into poverty,” please remember that it’s not the virus that’s creating poverty.

if i have a warehouse stored full of grain, and a drought wipes out your crops, it’s not the climate that’s making you starve, it’s me with my refusal to share my stockpile.

[liberalsarecool]

Raise the minimum wage. Save your weak opinion.

#FightFor15

[liberalsarecool]

Ignoring the need for a living wage is violence.

[golgak-the-goblin-deactivated20]

Remember that movie where they pay everything with time off their lives inside of with cash? You pay for a subway sandwich with almost an hour and thirty minutes approximately with your life. That is truly dystopian.

[bamsara]

the overwhelming grief of losing an entire year to sickness, violence and pandemic fatigue is settling in so id like to remind everyone that: you are not a failure, yes there is still a happy future for you, and wearing a mask is very sexy

[whitepeopletwitter]

[positivity-in-recovery]

[arinashitabun]

Art by Hector aka shitty watercolor

[skylowalker]

[moki-dokie]

😭😭😭😭

[drcrowdpleaser]

[mapsontheweb]

US Elevation.

by @cstats1

[ginger-ale-official]

man the Appalachian mountains really aren’t shit huh

[archosaur-automaton]

The Rockies are new, young and virile and fresh from the Laramide orogeny, tall and lanky teenagers on the geological scale. the Appalachian mountains are old, formed hundreds of millions of years ago before dinosaurs walked the Earth. They are ancients, elders, witnesses to half a billion years of life coming and going. To be tall is not a virtue. To be small is not a sin. The Appalachians are eroding under the weight of time, slowly shrinking and returning to the Earth from which they sprang. Appreciate them while they are still here.

[plantyhamchuk]

The Appalachians beat the Rockies hands down in biodiversity. Oh and water too.

[whitepeopletwitter]

[birble-bobble]

Tumblr mobile sucks and won’t let me post a link that works. But this tweet is about an entire article that talks about more than just this one case.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-competition-shopify-wayfair-allbirds-antitrust-11608235127

It talks about the various ways that Amazon is creating a monopoly which I think is important to talk about in these situations. Sellers can’t always avoid Amazon and neither can some buyers. It’s good to avoid buying from Amazon if you can’t but we need to do more than that, and we can’t just shame people who have no other options.

[jaaneymann]

stockmarket tweet compilation

[teacher-seeks-pupil]

“ At the current state of knowledge there is no theoretical reason or empirical evidence to support the notion that all the growth of the financial sector in the last forty years has been beneficial to society. “ - Luigi Zingales, Economist

[thesociologicalcinema]

As a comms person this is really important to me. Language becomes policy! If we say we have a “terrorism” problem (even a white one), lawmakers will give us “counterterrorism” solutions. All of those will expand policing & surveillance that will ultimately harm us. On the contrary, if we call them white supremacists, naming their movement as what it is, it demands a solution specific to that problem. Truth-telling. Reparations. Facing our history as a nation founded on white supremacy & dismantling it bit by bit. “Terrorism” as a label is inherently dangerous in its vagueness. I understand why we all want to use the most extreme words to describe the most egregious violence.

White supremacists HAVE been terrorizing Black, brown, indigenous folks for centuries. But we can’t decouple that term from the state apparatus it manifests: the war on terror. Mass surveillance. Targeting Muslims, South Asians, Black people, communists, etc. + the reason this term holds so much weight is precisely b/c white ppl use it against Black & brown ppl. ~ @LeaKayali

[ovinegirl]

hi if anyone is an avid tea drinker like me here are some black-owned tea companies ive come across:

- just add honey tea company (based in atlanta; https://justaddhoney.net/)

- harlemroots on etsy (sells other things, but has a lot of amazing tea mixes!; https://etsy.me/3dp5YF2)

- ivy’s tea company (also sells a lot of awesome china sets; https://www.ivystea.com/)

[left-reminders]

[ratliker1917]

Americans I am fucking begging you to talk about the very serious, very relevant, very real, very crucial social issues and political crises facing the United States without writing these bizarre self-pitying posts that act like the USA is the saddest, most miserable, most violent and abjectly awful country in the world to live in. If it was that fucking bad people wouldn’t be risking their fucking lives to get the opportunity to live there, the internet, and obviously the world, isn’t populated solely by Americans and Western Europeans.

[thedragonoftelevision]

I finally watched The Sound of Music and like I get it now, I get it. 

It’s a beautiful two hour love story of a strict man finally opening his heart again and then a fifty minute public service announcement to hate the nazis. Brilliant.

[yomikoreadsbooks]

You’re not wrong there…

[allthefandomss]

Reblogging this version cuz those two gifs show the sexiest duality a man can have.

[whitepeopletwitter]

[striving-artist]

yes. but did y’all see the press release from AFT?

It’s two words long.

“Good Riddance.”

[memecucker]

In Pulling Trump’s Megaphone, Twitter Shows Where Power Now Lies

The ability of a handful of people to control our public discourse has never been more obvious.

On Friday night, pro-Trump Republicans raged, claiming Twitter’s move was an example of Silicon Valley’s tyrannical speech controls. And while many liberals cheered Twitter’s decision as an overdue and appropriate step to prevent more violence, some also cringed at the thought of so much control resting in so few hands.

“We understand the desire to permanently suspend him now,” Kate Ruane, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a statement on Friday. “But it should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions — especially when political realities make those decisions easier.”

Above all, Mr. Trump’s muzzling provides a clarifying lesson in where power resides in our digital society — not just in the precedent of law or the checks and balances of government, but in the ability to deny access to the platforms that shape our public discourse.

Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Zuckerberg’s names have never appeared on a ballot. But they have a kind of authority that no elected official on earth can claim.