San Francisco Library Now Recycling All Newspapers for Potty Training Shelter Puppies
This Makes Homework Look A Whole Lot Easier
As bored as you were during cursive lessons, at least you weren’t stuck in a coal mine!
(Original by The Other 98%.)
I like analogies.
(Source: aryeo)
8 Great Ways to Use Old Industrial Pipes
The answer is NO.
The “fact” that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, “when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli …” or “it’s more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald’s than to cook a healthy meal for them at home.”
(via sunfoundation)
this bullshit fills me with a very specific kind of rage. so, TIME TO DEBUNK!
- that meal from mcdonalds takes virtually no time to acquire AND is available almost anywhere.
- the second meal? that “salad” is lettuce … with nothing else, not even dressing unless its just olive oil or some milk i guess? gross.
- also thats the price of each serving, not an entire loaf of bread, a bottle of olive oil, etc. that stuff adds up which means you have to have a lot of money at one time to buy it all.
- that meal probably took an hour and a half to make, which is a long fucking time when you work multiple jobs or are caring for a lot of people or dont have help! seriously, if you are a single parent of three who works, is spending an hour and a half every night preparing a meal a likely option?
- same with beans and rice! also, you know whats a fucking bummer? eating beans and rice every night because you are poor. ask any person who has done it and they will tell you (you can start with me).
- there is a “nutrition” argument here that lacks a follow up: poor people are more likely to be doing physical labor and need more than 571 calories per meal.
- you know who is less likely to know how to bake or prepare a chicken? people without access to the internet, or libraries, or who werent taught how to by their parents because their parents worked all the time. access to healthy foods is a classist issue and classism is cyclical, you fucking morons.
- seriously, these sorts of infographics make me want to fucking flip tables. do you know why people don’t eat more fresh fruits and vegetables? because fresh fruits and vegetables are expensive, because they take a long time to prepare, because they dont live near a grocery store that has a decent produce section, because they dont have reliable transportation to get groceries to and from the grocery store, because they dont have the energy to plan all of the shit that is involved in making healthy, intentional, filling, balanced meals. basically: poor people get fucked, and then we get BLAMED for being lazy.
- eating “healthy”, aka access to fresh fruits and vegetables, is a privilege, first, foremost, always. so fuck you new york times and your ignorant goddamn infographic.
- there are SYSTEMATIC REASONS that we do not have equal access to fresh fruits and vegetables. they are very REAL problems. besides, you know, systematic poverty in america, the total mis-distribution of farm subsidies is a perfect place to start. read about that, then either get bent or start working on the actual problem.
This is the worst debunking I’ve ever seen. I’m reblogging this to remind myself to write a point-by-point missive. As a person who was raised in poverty and subsequently became a vegetarian, I know first-hand what it looks like from both sides, and I know why both sides are right. But this “debunking” shit, above? Is hella wacked. Shaking your fists at yelling does not a fruitful(!) argument make.
I want to see a Republican Party that, rather than trying to make it more difficult to vote and restricting the number of days and hours you can vote, a Republican Party that says we want everybody to vote and we’re going to give you a reason to vote for us.
Colin Powell to Bill O’Reilly on the GOP and voter suppression (via mediamattersforamerica)
Usually when a house is destroyed by termites, people move to other other buildings. Just saying.
(Source: theycallmegomer)
On the routine criminalization of America’s Black & Brown youth
January 31, 2013On the face of it, the fates that befell 22-year-old Rodrigo Diaz and 7-year-old Wilson Reyes may seem unrelated. A Bronx elementary school student, Reyes was handcuffed and, according to his family, interrogated by police for up to ten hours, because of a playground scuffle over five dollars. Diaz, meanwhile, was shot and killed when he mistakenly pulled into the driveway of Phillip Sailors, a 69-year-old Vietnam veteran, in Lilburn, Georgia.
But they’re connected. Let me explain how. David E. Diaz-Valencia, Diaz’s brother, told NBC Latino, “We don’t think it’s about racism. Maybe the guy was angry, trying to protect his own property.” Sailors’s attorney, Michael Puglise, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this was “not a question of color, not a question of race, this is a question of a tragic event dictated by fear.” But fear of whom? With due respect to Diaz-Valencia’s optimism, I find it almost impossible for to think up a scenario in which a car full of white youth pulls into the wrong driveway, the owner of the home fires a warning shot before confronting them, as Sailors did, and then the driver of the vehicle is shot in the head as he’s backing the car out and attempting to apologize, as was the case with Diaz. Because in our American imagination, the only time a group of young white people pose a threat that requires a violent response is when they’re occupying Wall Street. The victims in these cases of “mistaken” identity always come up as people of color.
And maybe Sailors would have done the same if they were white. He may have just been that angry at any trespasser. There isn’t really a way for us to be sure. What we do know that happened is a group of young Latinos pulled into the wrong driveway, and a man shot one of them because he was afraid they might be gang members trying to rob him. Now I ask, how does that man come to such a conclusion so quickly?
Well, it starts with putting a 7-year-old brown kid in handcuffs over five dollars he didn’t steal. Perhaps it’s still a foreign concept to most people, but the criminalization of black and brown youth is a daily routine. Reyes’s situation isn’t unlike that of 6-year-old Salecia Johnson, who in April of last year was arrested and handcuffed in school, after what was described as “temper tantrum.” Before her, there was 5-year-old Michael Davis, whose hands and feet with restrained with zip ties when his school called the police in to scare away his behavioral problems. The kids get the message a very young age, and the rest the world does as well, that they are potential menaces to society and will be treated as such.
That’s why, in the Washington, DC, area, black kids are two to five times more likely to suspended or expelled from school than their white classmates, and why in New York City, over the course of a four-month period in the summer and fall of 2011, all but four of the sixty-three students arrested in school were black or Latino. They aren’t disproportionately more disruptive, but their behavior is interpreted as such.
This is how you end up with Trayvon Martins and Jordan Davises. We create these images of monsters and then wonder why people go out slaying them.
This is part of the reason why the current gun control debate is so disingenuous. We want universal background checks to ensure criminals don’t have access to guns, but then don’t look at the ways in which we create criminals. We want mental health checks, but show little-to-no concern for the trauma visited upon black and brown youths caught in the crosshairs of violence and racism. But none of this is surprising.
Which is perhaps the most infuriating aspect of it all. I wasn’t shocked when I read about Diaz, though I wanted to be. I’ve come to expect news like this to hit me in the face before I’ve even had breakfast. Too many of us have, and we know that it will continue to be that way as long as our fellow citizens continue to see young people of color as little more than a bunch of thugs in waiting.
Wall of Films | Films for Action
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I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.
Sister Joan Chittister, Catholic Nun (via timehasflewn)
holy shit i love this quote
(via glitter-femin1sts)
I vote we stop using the term “pro-life” and change to “pro-birth”, and every time someone asks “What does that mean?”, you can explain this and the other racialized, classist, misogynist, body policing, rape culture reinforcing bullshit behind “pro-life” dogma.
(via lebanesepoppyseed)
This is why I also love the term “anti-choice” – you aren’t pro-life, you’re anti me having the choice of whether or not I will be pregnant. Much of today’s GOP is pro-life ‘til the birth canal ends.
(via cognitivedissonance)
They can’t stand when you point out this contradiction and I LOVE ruining their day by doing it.
(via generalbriefing)
Always reblog.
(via stfuconservatives)
![dinosaurstalking:
theonion:
Teenage Girl Blossoming Into Beautiful Object: Full Story
Holy—
“Ashley has really developed into quite a striking assemblage of physical attributes that are found to be sexually attractive in our culture,” said Parker’s uncle Keith Hayes, expressing astonishment at how his niece had steadily matured from a precocious youth into a shapely, ravishing thing devoid of intellect and personality. “It’s hard to believe that she used to be that little girl [capable of subjective experiences] that I remember. Now look at her—she’s such a lovely vessel for displaced sexual frustration and voyeuristic lust, just like her mother.”
“Seems like just yesterday she was this creative 7-year-old kid, pretending her Barbie was the first woman president,” Hayes added. “My, they grow into little more than consumer goods so quickly.”
Marveling at the rite of passage that all females make from girlhood into entirely disempowered objecthood, Hayes expressed confidence that the 17-year-old would one day become a highly prized physical possession for “one lucky guy.”
The Onion’s feeling sassy today](http://24.media.tumblr.com/33dd7767ef44e8d0364442d402d5ec98/tumblr_mheblq2Hhr1qckp4qo1_500.png)
Teenage Girl Blossoming Into Beautiful Object: Full Story
Holy—
“Ashley has really developed into quite a striking assemblage of physical attributes that are found to be sexually attractive in our culture,” said Parker’s uncle Keith Hayes, expressing astonishment at how his niece had steadily matured from a precocious youth into a shapely, ravishing thing devoid of intellect and personality. “It’s hard to believe that she used to be that little girl [capable of subjective experiences] that I remember. Now look at her—she’s such a lovely vessel for displaced sexual frustration and voyeuristic lust, just like her mother.”
“Seems like just yesterday she was this creative 7-year-old kid, pretending her Barbie was the first woman president,” Hayes added. “My, they grow into little more than consumer goods so quickly.”Marveling at the rite of passage that all females make from girlhood into entirely disempowered objecthood, Hayes expressed confidence that the 17-year-old would one day become a highly prized physical possession for “one lucky guy.”
The Onion’s feeling sassy today
