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“Our food system was not broken by the pandemic and it was not broken by independent family farmers or ranchers. It was not broken by animals/grazers on the landscape, who are now, too often, the scapegoat. It was broken by large, multinational corporations and the industry who, because of their buying power and size, have undue influence over the marketplace and over public policy. Multinational corporations have concentrated our food system to its breaking point, having extracted profits from farmers, workers, and consumers for too long. The virus has stripped away the veneer, shining a bright light on these longstanding abuses. Lately, I’ve been hearing experts and friends talk about the need to “fix our broken system.” But I disagree. Our food and agricultural system is not broken. It is working exactly as it was designed to work—for the benefit of a few corporate companies and their coffers at the expense of everyone else and the land. What we need is an entirely new system. A system that is rooted in justice and equity and puts the land and all people before profits. It’s unfortunate that it might take a pandemic for us to realize a new way forward, but I have hope that this moment is the wake up call that we needed. As Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farms states, “If you don’t have any control over your food system, it essentially puts you at the whim of a racist, capitalist food system in terms of your basic survival needs.””

— Jennifer O’Connor from Guidelight Strategies

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alyx: so… what happened to gordon freeman after the resonance cascade? neither dad nor uncle wanna talk about it…

russell: well it says here on the internet he died in all dogs go to heaven 2

alyx: what

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consider: aperture as a popular workplace for trans people in the 50s-60s because they’d help you transition, in whatever way you wanted, no questions asked

bill from accounting is brenda now? cool, if she made it out of the lab without antennae and her blood is still blood, we’re happy for her

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LEGO - Rubber Duck 

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60% of covid deaths in uk have been disabled people. even young disabled people are dying from covid at up to 3x more. people with learning disabilities are getting dnr notices put on their record without consent. celebrities and government officials are arguing to let us keep dying to everyone else can go back to normal.

please, i am begging you, if you're not disabled, share news about this. kick up a fuss. be loud and angry and outraged with us.

and please check in on your disabled pals in the uk.

i don't want to die and have nobody care.

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Twitter (2020) VS the Hays code (1930)

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cat vs lizard 

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Thinking about how every single right we have was fought and bled for and only received through rioting, strikes, and other massively disruptive actions

and that people still think voting is going to save the world.

Politicians didn’t give people civil rights, marriage rights, safer working conditions, less work hours, banned child labor, the freedom to practice our religions, protection against discrimination, food that isn’t filled with metal and sawdust, homes that don’t actively poison us, the right to make our own medical decisions, and the million other things that many of us take for granted.

People had to fight for those things. And it wasn’t verbal fighting, it wasn’t in the form of petitions or letters to representatives, and it wasn’t on a Senate floor. It was in streets and workplaces and hospitals. People rioted, people bled, people were arrested, people died.

Everything you enjoy now was pried from the claws of capitalism with blood and violence. Politicians changed the story every time, twisted it to make it “peaceful” so that they could take the credit for the hard parts, but know that the ONLY reason any of those things were put into law is because angry civilians made themselves so disruptive that society couldn’t continue without something changing.

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you walk past showbiz pizza and the bear just pushes its face through the glass window as if its just saran wrap and the employees pull him back and the window takes its original shape back again and you touch it to discover its regular cold hard glass

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Ugh that post has gotten me thinking about fat acceptance in a way I haven’t in years. I’ve read more studies about weight and health than probably any other topic I’ve ever researched. And every time I see someone wail about health I am just like

Did you know that in post-mortem examinations there is zero correlation between weight and levels of arteriosclerosis and related diseases found?

Did you know that people with an overweight BMI have the longest life expectancy, that those with an “ideal” and an “obese” have about the same life expectancy, and that being “underweight” raises mortality rates more than being “morbidly obese”?

Did you know that losing weight and then gaining it back is worse for your heart than remaining at the weight you started consistently?

Did you know that 95% of people who lose weight do gain it back, and there has never been a single documented weight loss program that has been demonstrated to keep the weight off for five years or more in the majority or even a significant minority of people? Like, telling people to lose weight isn’t much use if we don’t know HOW to make that happen.

Like I have read The Obesity Myth by Paul Campos and Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata and Big Fat Lies by Glenn A Gaesser (Ph.D!) And Fat!So? and several other books that I don’t own and so don’t remember all of their names I spent like four years reading every single study coming out and looking at the methodology and noting which ones had huge holes or terrible methods and which didn’t (the holes were almost always in the pro-weight-loss studies) and like

Big Fat Lies has 27 pages of bibliography. 27 pages worth of scientific citation. The book content itself is only 197 pages. That’s a page of references for every 7 pages of book. Reading the book is just reference after reference and study after study. Most of these doctors (like Linda Bacon, author of Health at Every Size) started out the same way. They wanted to use the scientific method to find a real weight loss program or health solution that worked and could be proven to work, and so studied everything they could about weight and fitness only to find out that we didn’t need weight loss in the first place. That all the studies calling for it were lacking or nonexistent. That weight and underlying metabolic health have very little relation. That the history of our relationship with health and obesity has little basis in fact and a LOT of basis in capitalism, politics, and fashion. No, really, the association between weight and health was first proposed by insurance companies looking for ways to charge people more by claiming risk. They also charged tall and short people more. And people with different skin colors. When they got in trouble for charging people for things they had no control over and had no bearing on their health, they set out to prove that weight was controllable and that fat was unhealthy to make money. 

These are also a lot of the same people who went on to invent the President’s fitness program, so if you went to public school you probably already hate them. 

Anyway, if you want a place to start reading about the issue, this article is a pretty good launching pad. 

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for anyone who cares, this is good news

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🐝 get jet-lagged. I repeat: bees get jet-lagged.

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hmmm. not to be a communist on main but you deserve more than just necessities actually