"And Mary said unto Marcher Arrant "what will you do with your one wild and precious life?" And he responded enthusiastically "I will walk the whole earth, write graffiti and get into adventures!"

Fun fact: in the 80′s the Dutch Unemployed Union held ‘fridge raids’ to protest against poverty. 

They’d find out when a politician of big boss who upheld poverty and starvation wages was speaking at some public even, then they’d carefully break into his house with a LOT of people and they would eat EVERY piece of food in his house and leave the empty dished behind without taking anything else. 

Direct action at its finest.

I theoretically disapprove, but at least it’s ballsy as fuck.

I no longer disapprove.

Google's unionizing

Google workers have announced their intention to form a union, under the auspices of CWA Local 1440. The union is called The Alphabet Workers Union (Google maintains the legal and accounting fiction that it is a division of a holding company called “Alphabet”).

Speaking of legal fictions, the union is opening membership to “TVCs” - temps, vendors and contractors - employees who have deliberately misclassified so as to avoid paying them benefits or extending normal workplace protections to them.

It’s a bold move, a countermeasure to thwart the other commercial advantage from worker misclassification: by creating multiple categories of workers, bosses can pit employees against one another, by dangling privileges in front of one group but not the other.

But it comes at a high price: to gain official legal recognition, more than 50% of eligible workers must join the union. By including more workers, the union is setting a higher bar for official status.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3an5q9/google-workers-publicly-launch-union

But the union has momentum: a series of high-profile googler uprisings - driven by official tolerance for sexual misconduct, complicity in US military drone programs, secret collaboration with Chinese surveillance and censorship, and more - show how radicalized googlers are.

Google’s management - who cultivated an air of participatory, cuddly collaboration - have arrived at a point where the contradictions between their “values” and the company’s profits can no longer be reconciled.

In Dec 2020, Google fired Timnit Gebru, an eminent Black AI scientist who refused to retract a paper critical of its profitable Big Data research. Management compounded their sins by making false claims about Gebru’s dismissal.

The unionization drive is under the CWA’s #CODE (Coalition to Organize Digital Employees) project. Though CODE is no stranger to conflict, Google represents a serious challenge, thanks to its partnership with notorious union-busters IRI Consultants.

(IWI’s tactics pale in comparison to the mercenaries that Amazon has hired to bust its unions: the Pinkerton company, who have spilled rivers of workers’ blood in their murderous history):

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports-expose-spying-warehouse-workers-labor-union-environmental-groups-social-movements

For important context on the drive, check out Collective Action in Tech’s article on the announcement, which explains why googlers have formed a “non-contract union” that does not yet have official recognition.

https://collectiveaction.tech/2021/the-abcs-of-googles-new-union/

“Non-contract unions embody the idea that worker power does not come from legal processes, but rather through building power through solidarity.”

Cat Fishing Embroidery by GhostBarn

Misaki Kawai Jungle Romance, 2015 Acrylic on canvas

just found the oryginal of my ophelia drawing and I wanted to share for no reason

Eugeniya Dudnikova - Moon Cowboy, 2019

Guys, this is season ONE of the Simpsons.

I remember when I first found out the truth about “Somali pirates” I got chills because of how horrific the truth was and how insanely creepily well the media had twisted the situation. Every single fucking article making it seem like these “pirates” were just after money or something holding innocent people hostage and I never gave it a second thought, why would I? There was no indication that people were trying to legitimately fight off disgusting imperialism that left nuclear waste in their waters, that over 300 people have died from radiation sickness, that Europeans have been stealing Somalia’s seafood because they overfished their own waters and the indigenous fisherman are starving and so these “pirates” emerged to deal with those stealing their country’s natural resources. The truth is enough to make anyone sick to their stomachs.

This is a great article about the truth about Somali pirates, in case anyone wants a source.

It’s almost as if western media is just a mountain corporate owned propaganda ministries which vomit up seas of lies to trick people into believing evil is good and good is evil and you can’t trust anything you hear about anyone the capitalists dislike.

https://www.personaldefenseworld.com/2018/12/handguns-under-600-wish-list/