Oh and if literal grass-touching IS viable, I also advocate for touching invasive grass. Many parks in the US have invasive plant removal volunteer work days. You get some air and some exercise and you can talk to other volunteers if you want or you can just march off into the trees on your own and start wreaking havoc with various hand tools. If you want to do something that is both useful AND destructive, I have found nothing better

funnily enough i did this for the first time today & yeah, i highly recommend, it rules hard

you just show up & they give you a bunch of pre-sharpened loppers & are like "here's what an invasive blackberry bush looks like, go kick its ass"

and then you just get to hack and maim and wreck for FREE for as many hours as you so desire??? good as HELL

Removal of invasive species is one of the best things you can do for the environment. The task can feel overwhelming, you impact may feel small. But each plant you remove stops thousands and thousands of additional invasive seeds from wreaking havoc on our native wildlife.

I do this regularly and can confirm its the best. Go be in nature, go godzilla on some honeysuckle and open up huge swathes of forest to native species that support failing bird and bug populations!

I fucking knew it, I SAID it: they're making ADHD people the next culture war targets. They will 'just ask questions' until we lose every scrap of ground we've gained in the last decade and more. We may not quite inspire the same level of hatred as a sexual minority, but we can very easily be made to inspire disdain and that also works.

They will strip us of our accomodations and our medications and try to stifle any sense of shared identity, and if that kills some of us, oh well. So long as it fuels another outrage cycle, fine.

So many of the tropes they've been using on trans people work extremely well on ADHD people too! "There are too many of these people suddenly! It must be a fad! It spreads through friend groups! And online! People are going private for diagnoses and that's bad! They are using pOwERfUl medical interventions and we think it's freaky!"

I saw the first ripples of this in terf circles about two years ago. And of course it's spread.

6% of British ADHD people lost their jobs in the last year thanks to the meds shortage. SIX PER CENT! And that just made these ghouls go "ooh, tasty, what else can we do?"

Recently an 'expert' was on the BBC saying people see ADHD diagnosis as a "golden ticket." Laurence Fox has been ranting that the condition doesn't exist and threatening "'you won't poison my child's body [with ADHD meds] against my consent"

People need to be aware this is going to get worse. Maybe, if we're lucky, it won't get really bad. But it's going to get worse than it is now.

New reaction pic for y'all to be used when you get into an argument about trans healthcare and your opponent starts talking about the 0.8% or whatever of trans people who regret transitioning

being poor is so weird bc you'll see some edgy nyt or vice article or whatever about rural poverty, and it's all the pictures that are supposed to be sad, and they're framed as that, but it's just like. that looks like my buddy's kitchen. that's what my cookout looks like, people standing barefoot in dirt, holding drinks and wearing tore-up clothes. that sad old house is my house with different trees out front. and it's this weird whiplash, you know? like I know I'm poor, it sucks, but I'm generally happy in my life. and then I open some article written by some fucker from the city, taking pictures of barbecues or homes and treating what I experience as happy moments as tragedy. and it's like,,, am I off for being happy, despite the shit circumstances? or are these people so alienated from me that they can't fathom the idea lives like mine have emotional complexity, that I don't look at my house and see the roof falling apart so much as I see my cats waiting inside, a full spice rack in the kitchen, my loved ones laughing at the table. like are people really so far removed that they think we have no joy or love? I think, when I read those articles, they think we're either sad and self-aware, or too dumb to be anything but content, when it's neither. It is fetishistic writing, and I'm sad because I'd love to see poverty discussed in the mainstream but we aren't humanized, or given depth, or asked about anything beyond tragedy. Their sympathy is a farce.

Sometimes I struggle to remain motivated as our world resists the changes necessary, but then I remember that they are fighting so hard and doing horrific acts because they are losing the battle of hearts and minds, each day more people slip away.

Kids grow up, kids who have never seen the promises, those becoming adults today have seen the economic crisis every decade, never earning enough to be even comfortable, watching their loved ones struggle to make ends meet and are searching for a better way.

Adults who have grown disillusioned with the false promises of prosperity as long as people work hard they can have a good life, who work hard for scraps that are never enough.

Every day those who managed to benefit from the age where capitalism needed to give workers something in order to survive, and being replaced by new generations who are seeing capitalism as it no longer hides its cruelty.

Capitalism is dying, it can no longer maintain an illusion of kindness, the only thing keeping it going is momentum, it is no longer a question of if we'll win but when we'll win, that is what gives me motivation to keep pushing towards a better world, knowing I am not acting in vain.

Whenever an existing faux product is described as "vegan product" my hackles raise.

It's not vegan leather, it's pleather.

It's not vegan butter, it's margarine.

It's not vegan cashmere, it's acrylic.

It's not vegan fur, it's faux fur. Also probably an acrylic or rayon blend.

It's not vegan silk, it's polyester.

We haven't gotten to calling vegetable shortening "vegan lard" yet, but given the butter situation...

Call a spade a spade and stop greenwashing! Just admit it's plastic! Just admit you've prioritized one kind of animal life over the other! Stop calling it vegan when it's just plastic, you're driving people to destroy the planet with the "more moral" option when it's NOT.

You can enjoy margarine, that's fine, just be up front about it being in the dish so people know what they're eating by a familiar name.

I'm in awe of how we ran historical revisionism on the civil rights movement so bad that people truly believe it was quiet self-sacrifcial non-disruptive christ-like activism that forced progress and not — like — the incredible economic pressure of boycotts and outbreaks of illegal civil disobedience

Yapping to the choir but eughhh it burns me up girl effective protests have to be loud and inconvenient for change to happen because silent cries die in the dark that's the entire pointtt

Also, a lot of the so called harmless examples used for peaceful protests were specifically supposed to be disruptive as all hell. Like, take sit-ins, for example. What you were probably told is that black people just refused to leave white only establishments to make a point.

But how they actually worked was manipulating racist policies to cause as much of a delay as possible. They'd sit down at the bar to order (that's how those restaurants worked, you had to sit down to order and there weren't many tables) and when the waiter said they couldn't serve them, they'd respond that they would wait until they could be served. And then all their friends who they organized this with would do the same, and they would sit there at every seat until they're holding up the whole line. Then nobody could order and the restaurant was forced to either close, serve them, or try and fail to work around them. It wasn't just to make a point, it was to cost them money and time.

Even what was framed as "quiet peaceful protest" was actually very disruptive both socially and economically.

I don't think many people realize how much they've been turned into a bunch of casually cynical jerks.

Someone may come to their parents and say "I want to write a book" and their parents will say "it's really hard to get published".

Someone might confide in their sibling and say "I want to sell my art on "x" platform" and that sibling will say "do you know how many people you'd be competing with? Do you know how many shops are even on that platform?"

I know a kid who once told his best friend "I think I wanna start a dnd podcast" and the friend was like "do you know what the word "oversaturation" means?"

Personally, I don't know why any of that matters? And even if it did, perhaps your response should be "Do it! Do it and see where it goes!"

The whole "the brain isn't fully mature until age 25" bit is actually a fairly impressive bit of psuedoscience for how incredibly stupid the way it misinterprets the data it's based on is.

Okay, so: there's a part of the human brain called the "prefrontal cortex" which is, among other things, responsible for executive function and impulse control. Like most parts of the brain, it undergoes active "rewiring" over time (i.e., pruning unused neural connections and establishing new ones), and in the case of the prefrontal cortex in particular, this rewiring sharply accelerates during puberty.

Because the pace of rewiring in the prefrontal cortex is linked to specific developmental milestones, it was hypothesised that it would slow down and eventually stop in adulthood. However, the process can't directly be observed; the only way to tell how much neural rewiring is taking place in a particular part of the brain is to compare multiple brain scans of the same individual performed over a period of time.

Thus, something called a "longitudinal study" was commissioned: the same individuals would undergo regular brain scans over a period of mayn years, beginning in early childhood, so that their prefrontal development could accurately be tracked.

The longitudinal study was originally planned to follow its subjects up to age 21. However, when the predicted cessation of prefrontal rewiring was not observed by age 21, additional funding was obtained, and the study period was extended to age 25. The predicted cessation of prefrontal development wasn't observed by age 25, either, at which point the study was terminated.

When the mainstream press got hold of these results, the conclusion that prefrontal rewiring continues at least until age 25 was reported as prefrontal development finishing at age 25. Critically, this is the exact opposite of what the study actually concluded. The study was unable to identify a stopping point for prefrontal development because no such stopping point was observed for any subject during the study period. The only significance of the age 25 is that no subjects were tracked beyond this age because the study ran out of funding!

It gets me when people try to argue against the neuroscience-proves-everybody-under-25-is-a-child talking point by claiming that it's merely an average, or that prefrontal development doesn't tell the whole story. Like, no, it's not an average – it's just bullshit. There's no evidence that the cited phenomenon exists at all. If there is an age where prefrontal rewiring levels off and stops (and it's not clear that there is), we don't know what age that is; we merely know that it must be older than 25.

Not socialist in a “I won’t have to work” type of way but socialist in a “I’ll still be working but I won’t be worried I won’t make the rent” type of way. In a “billions won’t be hoarded by one person” type of way. In a “janitors, fast-food workers, child care workers, preschool teachers, hotel clerks, personal care and home health aides, and grocery store cashiers, will live comfortably” type of way. In a “the sick and elderly will be cared for” type of way. In a “no child should work” type of way.

In the "my illness won't condemn me to an early, ignominious death" kind of way.

See, I had this food service job that I absolutely fucking loved. But I wasn't getting an apartment with that job.

There is a position in this society for everyone. I would rather break my entire right hand than ever work in another factory. There are people who happily spend twenty, forty years in manufacturing. There are people not doing a job they fucking love so they can have food in the fridge and a roof over their head. Which means there are people who hate their job. Which is an awful way to spend a third of one's life.

So wild so few of y'all have noted that the more determined protests and direct actions have had significantly more people masking and in quality respirators because they actually have some real solidarity and real commitment to resisting genocide. It's not just about fooling facial recognition like some of y'all seem to think.

Biden has killed over a million people with COVID but y'all still think you can participate in one genocide to end another

if you claim to care about any genocide, you should be masking the entire time you are in public.

Refusing to mask when able is eugenics and you're actively participating in the genocide and oppression of disabled people and people of color and poor people.

I see just how silent y'all are about the literal millions dead of COVID while assuring yourselves you are good people doing your best.

The IOF banned all COVID mitigation efforts for occupied Palestinians including PPE, antivirals, vaccines

it destroyed the only Gazan COVID testing facility and the only treatment facility

You can't genuinely claim to care about the plight of Palestinians and be complicit in the genocide of others with covid, emulating the occupation you claim to despise.

It's been years of an unmitigated nightmare for everyone disabled. Stop fueling our deaths just so you can feel better about yourself in the moment. Stop being the danger that keeps us away from radical and queer and public spaces.

COVID will disable and kill you too. You're not better than us.

Show some fuckin solidarity and commit to masking. It's still a deadly pandemic. Act like it.

Wearing a mask is probably the easiest and most accessible way to materially make others lives better. It is an act of love. It is an act that cares for your community. And it is something everyone can do.

save these (or download them here) to use for posters, social media, zines… whatever u want! it’s never too late to start wearing a mask again :-)

Source

CDC Wastewater Viral Activity Monitoring

BreatheTeq

Antimasking is fascism