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reasonsforhope · 3 months

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In the Willamette Valley of Oregon, the long study of a butterfly once thought extinct has led to a chain reaction of conservation in a long-cultivated region.

The conservation work, along with helping other species, has been so successful that the Fender’s blue butterfly is slated to be downlisted from Endangered to Threatened on the Endangered Species List—only the second time an insect has made such a recovery.

[Note: "the second time" is as of the article publication in November 2022.]

To live out its nectar-drinking existence in the upland prairie ecosystem in northwest Oregon, Fender’s blue relies on the help of other species, including humans, but also ants, and a particular species of lupine.

After Fender’s blue was rediscovered in the 1980s, 50 years after being declared extinct, scientists realized that the net had to be cast wide to ensure its continued survival; work which is now restoring these upland ecosystems to their pre-colonial state, welcoming indigenous knowledge back onto the land, and spreading the Kincaid lupine around the Willamette Valley.

First collected in 1929 [more like "first formally documented by Western scientists"], Fender’s blue disappeared for decades. By the time it was rediscovered only 3,400 or so were estimated to exist, while much of the Willamette Valley that was its home had been turned over to farming on the lowland prairie, and grazing on the slopes and buttes.

Pictured: Female and male Fender’s blue butterflies.

Now its numbers have quadrupled, largely due to a recovery plan enacted by the Fish and Wildlife Service that targeted the revival at scale of Kincaid’s lupine, a perennial flower of equal rarity. Grown en-masse by inmates of correctional facility programs that teach green-thumb skills for when they rejoin society, these finicky flowers have also exploded in numbers.

[Note: Okay, I looked it up, and this is NOT a new kind of shitty greenwashing prison labor. This is in partnership with the Sustainability in Prisons Project, which honestly sounds like pretty good/genuine organization/program to me. These programs specifically offer incarcerated people college credits and professional training/certifications, and many of the courses are written and/or taught by incarcerated individuals, in addition to the substantial mental health benefits (see x, x, x) associated with contact with nature.]

The lupines needed the kind of upland prairie that’s now hard to find in the valley where they once flourished because of the native Kalapuya people’s regular cultural burning of the meadows.

While it sounds counterintuitive to burn a meadow to increase numbers of flowers and butterflies, grasses and forbs [a.k.a. herbs] become too dense in the absence of such disturbances, while their fine soil building eventually creates ideal terrain for woody shrubs, trees, and thus the end of the grassland altogether.

Fender’s blue caterpillars produce a little bit of nectar, which nearby ants eat. This has led over evolutionary time to a co-dependent relationship, where the ants actively protect the caterpillars. High grasses and woody shrubs however prevent the ants from finding the caterpillars, who are then preyed on by other insects.

Now the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde are being welcomed back onto these prairie landscapes to apply their [traditional burning practices], after the FWS discovered that actively managing the grasslands by removing invasive species and keeping the grass short allowed the lupines to flourish.

By restoring the lupines with sweat and fire, the butterflies have returned. There are now more than 10,000 found on the buttes of the Willamette Valley."

-via Good News Network, November 28, 2022

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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 months

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"Efficiency" left the Big Three vulnerable to smart UAW tactics

Tomorrow (September 22), I'm (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy. Tomorrow night, I'll be in person at LA's Book Soup for the launch of Justin C Key's "The World Wasn’t Ready for You." On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine.

It's been 143 days since the WGA went on strike against the Hollywood studios. While early tactical leaks from the studios had studio execs chortling and twirling their mustaches about writers caving once they started losing their homes, the strikers aren't wavering – they're still out there, pounding the picket lines, every weekday:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/09/how-hollywood-writers-make-ends-meet-100-days-into-the-writers-guild-strike.html

The studios obviously need writers. That gleeful, anonymous studio exec who got such an obvious erotic charge at the thought of workers being rendered homeless as punishment for challenging his corporate power completely misread the room, and his comments didn't demoralize the writers. Instead, they inspired the actors to go on strike, too.

But how have the writers stayed out since May Day? How have the actors stayed out for 69 days since their strike started on Bastille Day? We can thank the studios for that! As it turns out, the studios have devoted so much energy to rendering creative workers as precarious as possible, hiring as little as they can getting away with and using punishing overtime as a substitute for adequate staffing that they've eliminated all the workers who can't survive on side-hustles and savings for six or seven months at a time.

But even for those layoff-hardened workers, long strikes are brutal, and of course, all the affiliated trades, from costumers to grips, are feeling the pain. The strike fund only goes so far, and non-striking, affected workers don't even get that. That's why I've been donating regularly to the Entertainment Community Fund, which helps all affected workers out with cash transfers (I just gave them another $500):

https://secure2.convio.net/afa/site/Donation2?df_id=8117&8117.donation=form1&mfc_pref=T

As hot labor summer is revealed as a turning point – not just a season – long strikes will become the norm. Bosses still don't believe in worker power, and until they get their minds right, they're going to keep on trying to starve their workforces back inside. To get a sense of how long workers will have to hold out, just consider the Warrior Met strike, where Alabama coal-miners stayed out for 23 months:

https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/warrior-met-strike-union/

As Kim Kelly explained to Adam Conover in the latest Factually podcast, the Alabama coal strikers didn't get anywhere near the attention that the Hollywood strikers have enjoyed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvyMHf7Yg0Q

(To learn more about the untold story of worker organizing, from prison unions to the key role that people of color and women played in labor history, check out Kelly's book, "Fight Like Hell," now in paperback:)

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Fight-Like-Hell/Kim-Kelly/9781982171063

Which brings me to the UAW strike. This is an historic strike, the first time that the UAW has struck all of the Big Three automakers at once. Past autoworkers' strikes have marked turning points for all American workers. The 1945/46 GM strike established employers' duty to cover worker pensions, health care, and cost of living allowances. The GM strike created the American middle-class:

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-09-18-uaw-strikes-built-american-middle-class/

The Big Three are fighting for all the marbles here. They are refusing to allow unions to organize EV factories. Given that no more internal combustion cars will be in production in just a few short years, that's tantamount to eliminating auto unions altogether. The automakers are flush with cash, including billions in public subsidies from multiple bailouts, along with billions more from greedflation price-gouging. A long siege is inevitable, as the decimillionaires running these companies earn their pay by starving out their workers:

https://www.businessinsider.com/general-motors-ceo-mary-barra-salary-auto-workers-strike-uaw-2023-9

The UAW knows this, of course, and their new leadership – helmed by the union's radical president Shawn Fain – has a plan. UAW workers are engaged in tactical striking, shutting down key parts of the supply chain on a rolling basis, making the 90-day strike fund stretch much farther:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-09-18-labors-militant-creativity/

In this project, they are greatly aided by Big Car's own relentless pursuit of profit. The automakers – like every monopolized, financialized sector – have stripped all the buffers and slack out of their operations. Inventory on hand is kept to a bare minimum. Inputs are sourced from the cheapest bidder, and they're brought to the factory by the lowest-cost option. Resiliency – spare parts, backup machinery – is forever at war with profits, and profits have won and won and won, leaving auto production in a brittle, and easily shattered state.

This is especially true for staffing. Automakers are violently allergic to hiring workers, because new workers get benefits and workplace protection. Instead, the car companies routinely offer "voluntary" overtime to their existing workforce. By refusing this overtime, workers can kneecap production, without striking.

Enter "Eight and Skate," a campaign among UAW workers to clock out after their eight hour shift. As Keith Brower Brown writes for Labor Notes, the UAW organizers are telling workers that "It’s crossing an unofficial picket line to work overtime. It’s helping out the company":

https://labornotes.org/2023/09/work-extra-during-strike-auto-workers-say-eight-and-skate

Eight and Skate has already started to work; the Buffalo Ford plant can no longer run its normal weekend shifts because workers are refusing to put in voluntary overtime. Of course, bosses will strike back: the next step will be forced overtime, which will lead to the unsafe conditions that unionized workers are contractually obliged to call paid work-stoppages over, shutting down operations without touching the strike fund.

What's more, car bosses can't just halt safety stoppages or change the rules on overtime; per the UAW's last contract, bosses are required to bargain on changes to overtime rules:

https://uaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Working-Without-Contract-FAQ-FINAL-2.pdf

Car bosses have become lazily dependent on overtime. At GM's "highly profitable" SUV factory in Arlington, TX, normal production runs a six-days, 24 hours per day. Workers typically work five eight-hour days and nine hours on Saturdays. That's been the status quo for 11 years, but when bosses circulated the usual overtime signup sheet last week, every worker wrote "a big fat NO" next to their names.

Writing for The American Prospect, David Dayen points out that this overtime addiction puts a new complexion on the much-hyped workerpocalypse that EVs will supposedly bring about. EVs are much simpler to build than conventional cars, the argument goes, so a US transition to EVs will throw many autoworkers out of work:

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-09-20-big-threes-labor-shortages-uaw/

But the reality is that most autoworkers are doing one and a half jobs already. Reducing the "workforce" by a third could leave all these workers with their existing jobs, and the 40-hour workweek that their forebears fought for at GM inn 1945/46. Add to that the additional workers needed to make batteries, build and maintain charging infrastructure, and so on, and there's no reason to think that EVs will weaken autoworker power.

And as Dayen points out, this overtime addiction isn't limited to cars. It's also endemic to the entertainment industry, where writers' "mini rooms" and other forms of chronic understaffing are used to keep workforces at a skeleton crew, even when the overtime costs more than hiring new workers.

Bosses call themselves job creators, but they have a relentless drive to destroy jobs. If there's one thing bosses hate, it's paying workers – hence all the hype about AI and automation. The stories about looming AI-driven mass unemployment are fairy tales, but they're tailor made for financiers who get alarming, life-threatening priapism at the though of firing us all and replacing us with shell-scripts:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

This is why Republican "workerism" rings so hollow. Trump's GOP talks a big game about protecting "workers" (by which they mean anglo men) from immigrants and "woke captialism," but they have nothing to say about protecting workers from bosses and bankers who see every dime a worker gets as misappropriated from their dividend.

Unsurprisingly, conservative message-discipline sucks. As Luke Savage writes in Jacobin, for every mealymouthed Josh Hawley mouthing talking points that "support workers" by blaming China and Joe Biden for the Big Three's greed, there's a Tim Scott, saying the quiet part aloud:

https://jacobin.com/2023/09/republicans-uaw-strike-hawley-trump-scott/

Quoth Senator Scott: "I think Ronald Reagan gave us a great example when federal employees decided they were going to strike. He said, you strike, you’re fired. Simple concept to me. To the extent that we can use that once again, absolutely":

https://twitter.com/American_Bridge/status/1704136706574741988

The GOP's workerism is a tissue-thin fake. They can never and will never support real worker power. That creates an opportunity for Biden and Democrats to seize:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/18/co-determination/#now-make-me-do-it

Reversing two generations of anti-worker politics is a marathon, not a sprint. The strikes are going to run for months, even years. Every worker will be called upon to support their striking siblings, every day. We can do it. Solidarity now. Solidarity forever.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/21/eight-and-skate/#strike-to-rule

#pluralistic #strikes #uaw #labor #automakers #big three #big car #eight and skate #work to rule #tactics

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swaggadigitalmagazine · 1 year

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Alabama, Tennessee, Vermont, Oregon remove slavery loopholes from constitutions, Louisiana does not

Voters in Vermont, Tennessee, Oregon, and Alabama voted Tuesday to end constitutional clauses that allow slavery or indentured servitude as a form of punishment. Ratified in 1865, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in America, but it provided leeway for the practice as punishment for individuals convicted of a crime. Several state constitutions…

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#african-american issues #elections #end of prison labor laws #slavery

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fatehbaz · 11 months

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Today, as you read this [...], there are almost 2 million people locked away in one of the more than 5,000 prisons or jails that dot the American landscape. While they are behind bars, these incarcerated people can be found standing in line at their prison’s commissary waiting to buy some extra food or cleaning supplies that are often marked up to prices higher than what one would pay outside of those prison walls. [...] If they want to call a friend or family member, they need to pay for that as well. And almost everyone who works at a job while incarcerated, often for less than a dollar an hour, will find that the prison has taken a portion of their salary to pay for their cost of incarceration. [...] These policymakers and government officials also know that this captive population has no choice but to foot the bill [...] and that if they can’t be made to pay, their families can. In fact, a 2015 report led by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Forward Together, and Research Action Design found that in 63 percent of cases, family members on the outside were primarily responsible for court-related costs [...].

Rutgers sociology professor Brittany Friedman has written extensively on what is called “pay-to-stay” fees in American correctional institutions. In her 2020 article titled, “Unveiling the Necrocapitalist Dimensions of the Shadow Carceral State: On Pay-to-Stay to Recoup the Cost of Incarceration,” Friedman divides these fees into two categories: (1) room and board and (2) service-specific costs. Fees for room and board -- yes, literally for a thin mattress or even a plastic “boat” bed in a hallway, a toilet that may not flush, and scant, awful tasting food -- are typically charged at a “per diem rate for the length of incarceration.” It is not uncommon for these fees to reach $20 to $80 a day for the entire period of incarceration. The second category, what Friedman refers to as “service-specific costs,” includes fees for basic charges such as copays or other costs for seeing a doctor or nurse, programming fees, email and telephone calls, and commissary items.

In 2014, the Brennan Center for Justice documented that at least 43 states authorize charging incarcerated people for the cost of their own imprisonment, and at least 35 states authorize charging them for some medical expenses. More recent research from the Prison Policy Institute found that 40 states and the federal prison system charge incarcerated people medical copays.

It’s also critical to understand how little incarcerated people are paid for their labor in addition to the significant cut of their paltry hourly wages that corrections agencies take from their earnings. Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of incarcerated people work behind bars. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, those who work regular jobs in prisons such as maintaining the grounds, working in the kitchen, and painting the walls of the facilities earn on average between $0.14 and $0.63 an hour. [...] Arkansas and Texas don’t pay incarcerated workers at all, while Alabama only pays incarcerated workers employed by the state’s correctional industry. [...]

For example, if someone sends an incarcerated person in Florida $20 online, they will end up paying $24.95. [...]

Dallas County charges incarcerated people a $10 medical care fee for each medical request they submit. In Texas prisons, those behind bars pay $13.55 per medical visit, despite the fact that Texas doesn’t pay incarcerated workers anything. Texas is one of a handful of states that doesn’t pay incarcerated people for their labor.

In Kentucky’s McCracken County Jail in Paducah, it costs $0.40 a minute for a video call; this translates into $8.00 for each 20-minute video call. [...] For those who need to use email, JPay charges $2.35 for five emails for people in the Texas prison system ($0.47 an email). [...]

People in Florida prisons pay $1.70 for a packet of four extra-strength Tylenol and $4.02 for four tampons. And with inflation, commissary items are priced higher than ever. For example, according to the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, incarcerated people in Kentucky experienced a 7.2 percent rise in already-high commissary prices in July 2022. Researchers noted that a 4.6-ounce tube of Crest toothpaste, which costs $1.38 at the local Walmart, is $3.77 at the prison commissary. [...]

In Gaston County, North Carolina, incarcerated individuals who participate in state work release may make more than the state’s $0.38 an hour maximum pay, but they pay the jail a daily rate based on their yearly income of at least $18 per day and up to $36 per day. In fact, Brennan Center research indicates that almost every state takes a portion of the salary that incarcerated workers earn to compensate the corrections agency [...].

These room and board fees are found throughout the nation’s jails and prisons. Michigan laws allow any county to seek reimbursement for expenses incurred in relation to a charge for which a person was sentenced to county jail time -- up to $60 a day. Winnebago County, Wisconsin, charges $26 a day to those staying in its county jail.

---

Text by: Lauren-Brooke Eisen. “America’s Dystopian Incarceration System of Pay to Stay Behind Bars.” Brennan Center for Justice. 19 April 2023. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

#abolition

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personal-blog243 · 2 years

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#end prison labor #abolish prison labor #please sign and share #petitions #petition #please sign this petition #please share #please sign

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headspace-hotel · 1 year

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I hope I can express this properly and sensitively, but I think oftentimes people need to have Categories and Identities and to be healthily exploratory and playful and elastic about them, else they can get vulnerable to some negative things, sometimes really awful things

I wish I could remember where I read it, but there was something that wrote about whiteness in America as an abyss.

Whiteness is something that sheltered white Americans' ancestors, and at the same time devoured them. They used to have a distinct medley of heritages: Irish, German, Scottish, Italian. "Whiteness" ate it up, the languages, the cultures. There were privileges if you destroyed it, and punishments if you held onto anything that was "Other." In a white supremacist society, white people wanted to be "white" first before any other possible identity or connection they could have.

Yay! You're white. You're on top. You win...what? Turns out the prize for "winning" is just that you get to perpetrate the violence of the game instead of being on the receiving end of it.

And that's the nasty twist—there is no prize. The deeply embedded vice of "Southern pride" is not just what the Confederate flag stands for, but also why they've got to cling so hard to that symbol of traitors and losers: they need to be on top of something so bad that even a pile of shit will do. My ancestors were ultimately dirt poor, loads of them ending up in prison or breaking their bodies down doing hard labor, but they were white. Their reward, and their pride, was being stepped on by the violence of poverty only, instead of also by the violence of white supremacy.

"White pride" is all about hate because white supremacy didn't give these folks anything to be proud of. It stripped away the culture and heritage their ancestors had in favor of "whiteness." All those jokes about how white people have no culture, well, it's true isn't it? This shit is how we ended up a primarily monolingual nation. And what looks like happened is that white Americans wound up just...scavenging most of their culture from those they oppressed. Food, music, all of that stuff. Our white ancestors didn't GIVE us anything that was their own to start with.

And this is something that really strikes me about the white supremacist and fascist movements nowadays: the starvation and hollowness behind them. These folks are empty inside. They were given nothing by white supremacy except a very vague sense that they deserve something, and they see people of all different cultures celebrating and flourishing in their unique heritages and identities, and they feel like...they've been cheated.

Equality is so threatening when you're in this situation because it feels like you've got less than everyone else at the end of the day. Not just because of comparison to previous privileges, but because your whole identity was "person that gets to step on everybody else" and your whole inheritance was "shit stolen from everybody else" and in a world where all is set right, you have no identity and nothing. You are nothing.

Anyway I was looking just now at a blog that seemed really white-supremacist-leaning and it was 99% about like, Norse and Proto-Indo-European paganism and "traditionalism" and that's what got me thinking about this again.

This person had apparently done DNA tests on themselves or something, and were really fixated on figuring out their Norse and Germanic ancestors and separating out their genetic and racial identity at a level of precision that seems really pointless that far back in time. And honestly all the paganism stuff seemed like totally arbitrary speculation as well.

And how to become satisfied as a person like this? I am just as much Germanic or Norse as they are, but I don't believe that distant ancestors determine who you are to such an extent that I have some sort of innate cultural tie to Vikings or Visigoths or what have you. I know what percentage Celtic or Anglo Saxon or Norse I am—zero. I learned about those things in books the exact same way I learned about all the cultures and past kingdoms of the world that I presumably don't have ancestors from.

I feel like the experience of being a baby ally and obsessing about apologizing for being white is the same kind of thing in another direction, or another outcome of the same process. Some people seem to get really twisted up for a time over how to stop being guilty about being white.

It's part of the same thing as this guy who is trying to genetically identify his ancestors from like 3,000 years ago. It's the emptiness and meaninglessness of "white" identity apart from white supremacy.

I talk about deradicalization sometimes and I've had the notion a few times that fascism appeals to people who are hollow and starving in terms of identity, and if it wasn't for the sense of emptiness and hunger, they would be less easily radicalized. But it's also a little bit awkward to talk about the deeply unsatisfying nature of white supremacy, because...well, that is pretty low on the list of things bad about white supremacy.

I think this concept is worth talking about in general, though: People want to feel like they come from or are part of something meaningful. They are drawn toward Identities and Categories and Belonging to groups. This is something I think is commonly true about humans, I think it is normal and not a bad thing, and I think we could stand to be a little more upfront about its reality.

I think this means that wanting, and seeking, a sense of cultural identity as a white person (particularly an American) needs to have some kind of non-horrible outlet for it. Because right now, it's nothing but a way to get radicalized, and the dominant other option people take (becoming the Guilty White Person) is liked by no one and helps nothing.

And maybe it doesn't need to have anything to do with race or culture or your ancestors or any of these things that can lead a person down such terrible paths. Maybe more of us should be furries!

As just another thing to consider, I'm reading the book Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and the author of the book uses the word "cracker" not like, with the gravity of reclaiming a "slur" or something like that, but seemingly because that is just the word she most strongly identifies with, the word that best articulates who "her people" are. This feels very solid and levelheaded to me, something that comes from someone with a good sense of themselves.

Personally I've thought a long time that more people should reclaim "redneck." Not in the sense of reclaiming a slur exactly, but in the sense of putting it in neutral usage among the folks it always referred to, instead of letting it increasingly be associated with any Southerner (regardless of working class background) that is the sort to wave a Confederate flag around. The very idea of gatekeeping "redneck" away from racists is just absolutely hilarious to me, I won't lie.

#random #identity #whiteness #i doubt anyone asked for an essay from a white southerner about race #but this is just what im thinking about tonight

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jymwahuwu · 6 months

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JSHDJDBDJBSSJSBS THE WRIO ONE👀💦 + the fact that you can stay after serving your sentence

imagine being one of the prisoners at the fortress at first but you actually smiled at him when he's signing your paperwork for having served your sentence but he wants you to stay...

If you cooperate, you get a protective and cuddly wolf but if you don't, then you'll get a lovely 'hustle and tussle' at first. Don't worry, sigewinne has all the ointments needed to soothe the bite marks and hickies left by a beloved wolf🤭🥰

-💦anon (life is killing me but my therapy are hot men -wriothesley and Neuvillette-🦋)

💦nonny, me too lol i feel less tired just thinking about them. sending you a digital hug <3

And this… face the fact that we can't leave the Fortress of Meropide once the sentence starts, it doesn't matter if it's 10 days or not 😹💗

CW: yandere, non-con, abuse of power, spanking, forced imprisonment

You weren't actually that worried about going to jail—although you weren't so laid-back as to think it was summer camp, you weren't sighing like the others either. You live in Fontaine, after all, a country famous for its laws. Your friend has been to the Fortress of Meropide three times, and a classmate was imprisoned for 15 days for some inexplicable reason. They give you some instructions on what to do in prison and write letters to friends who are still in prison asking them to look after you.

You go to jail with the papers, but the receptionist is on leave, so you have to go to Wriothesley in person. Need to meet the "Duke"? Fortunately, you learned about Wriothesley's character from your friends in advance and breathed a sigh of relief. "Hi, do you want some tea?" Whether you shook your hand or nodded, Wriothesley put down a cup of warm tea on the table and read some stupid shit charges, such as singing for Furina but off-key, lying about not having dessert at home, hanging wet clothes on rain. The number on your sentence document is "10 days." You are clearly a victim of these stupid crimes.

During these 10 days, you have been assigned to work in Wriothesley's office to replace other prison labor. You read the manual and brew the tea, looking around in confusion, but don't see any other prisoners - are you the only one working here…? You just had to prepare tea, process and deliver documents, but…once you accidentally dropped a piece of the opera cake on the floor (his afternoon tea). Without warning, Wriothesley pulled down your panties and spanked you. Absolute…shock. Could he do this…?

You convince yourself that this might be prison discipline…right? It should be like this, right…?

After working for ten days, you hummed a song and walked briskly, holding the release documents to look for Wriothesley. With a grin, you asked him to sign it in a soft tone.

"Why do you think I'd sign?" He raised his eyebrows and looked up at you, crossing his arms.

Your raised lips froze, and the luster gradually faded from your face. "You-won't you sign?"

Unexpectedly, you receive a confession from "The Duke," the prison administrator. Knowing that it was not a reason for the complaint, you gradually felt relieved. Ask your heart, do you agree to stay -

Agree:

Wriothesley leaves you in the Fortress of Meropide, but also allows you to return to the surface. He is a humorous and considerate boyfriend. The two of you often date at teahouses, coffee shops, and the Fortress of Meropide. Once, Chief Justice met the two of you and sighed in realization. "So this is your mate, for love and mating."

You: (cheeks burning) ?????

Disagree:

There was an argument that ended with Wriothesley pushing you and placing you on the table, forcing your legs apart. It was rough but controlled force - basically no injuries except for bites and hickeys on your neck and inner thighs. Frustrated sobs gave way to reluctant moans. After this, little Sigewinne gave him a rare scolding, and examined and applied medicine to you.

Still, you can't get out of jail. Those handcuffs locked you in his office and resting area. He pats your head and tells you to be good.

#[💌.from💦]#wriothesley x reader #genshin impact x reader #yandere genshin impact x reader #yandere genshin #yandere genshin x reader #yandere wriothesley

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anonymous-dentist · 5 months

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In the future, criminals are sent into orbit in the farthest reaches of the universe. Specialized space prisons where the worst of humanity are imprisoned are literally every criminal's worst nightmare: solitary confinement, dead silence, mandatory technological labor (for the lucky folks back on Earth, of course.) And the silence, the silence is the worst. No noise is allowed due to the delicate technology the inmates are meant to work on; it's just another form of punishment, and it's probably complete bullshit, and it sucks.

Cellbit is sent to one of these space prisons after killing an old man. He says it was self defense, but the 26 stab wounds on the old man's body said otherwise. So it was off to prison for the second time in his life, and this time it's a prison he can't escape.

It's quiet. In space, no one can hear you scream. Everybody knows that.

Alone in his cell, Cellbit does his work, and he counts down the days to his parole hearing. He doesn't hear another soul for months on end save for the whispers of the guards passing him meals and instructions for the day. It's a terrible existence, but it beats the death penalty.

It's silent. The guards skip a day of his meals and instructions, and then two. It's nothing new, honestly, they're just as shitty as the rest of the prison is. Cellbit doesn't pay much attention, happily taking a nap for the first time in six months.

And then he hears a knock on his door.

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kp777 · 8 months

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By Jake Johnson

Common Dreams

Sept. 5, 2023

"We are prepared to do whatever it takes, even get arrested in an act of civil disobedience, to stand up for our patients," said one Kaiser Permanente worker.

Dozens of healthcare workers were arrested in Los Angeles on Monday after sitting in the street outside of a Kaiser Permanente facility to demand that providers address dangerously low staffing levels at hospitals in California and across the country.

The civil disobedience came as the workers prepared for what could be the largest healthcare strike in U.S. history. Late last month, 85,000 Kaiser Permanente employees represented by the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions began voting on whether to authorize a strike over the nonprofit hospital system's alleged unfair labor practices during ongoing contract negotiations.

The current contract expires on September 30.

"We are burnt out, stretched thin, and fed up after years of the pandemic and chronic short staffing," Datosha Williams, a service representative at Kaiser Permanente South Bay, said Monday. "Healthcare providers are failing workers and patients, and we are at crisis levels in our hospitals and medical centers."

"Our employers take in billions of dollars in profits, yet they refuse to safely staff their facilities or pay many of their workers a living wage," Williams added. "We are prepared to do whatever it takes, even get arrested in an act of civil disobedience, to stand up for our patients."

Kaiser Permanente reported nearly $3.3 billion in net income during the first half of 2023. In 2021, Kaiser CEO Greg Adams brought in more than $16 million in total compensation.

According to the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, the hospital system "has investments of $113 billion in the U.S. and abroad, including in fossil fuels, casinos, for-profit prisons, alcohol companies, military weapons, and more."

Healthcare workers, meanwhile, say they're being overworked and underpaid, and many are struggling to make ends meet amid high costs of living.

"We have healthcare employees leaving left and right, and we have corporate greed that is trying to pretend that this staffing shortage is not real," Jessica Cruz, a nurse at Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center, toldLAist.

"We are risking arrest, and the reason why we're doing it is that we need everyone to know that this crisis is real," said Cruz, who was among the 25 workers arrested during the Labor Day protest.

A recent survey of tens of thousands of healthcare workers across California found that 83% reported understaffing in their departments, and 65% said they have witnessed or heard of care being delayed or denied due to staff shortages.

Additionally, more than 40% of the workers surveyed said they feel pressured to neglect safety protocols and skip breaks or meals due to short staffing.

"It's heartbreaking to see our patients suffer from long wait times for the care they need, all because Kaiser won't put patient and worker safety first," Paula Coleman, a clinical laboratory assistant at Kaiser Permanente in Englewood, Colorado, said in a statement late last month. "We will have no choice but to vote to strike if Kaiser won't bargain in good faith and let us give patients the quality care they deserve."

A local NBC affiliate reported Monday that 99% of Colorado Kaiser employees represented by SEIU Local 105 have voted to authorize a strike.

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glass--beach · 3 months

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hi !!!! :3 so, pd seems, in my reading like its a decent part about the kinda mass surveillance and commodification of personhood shit the world has got going on rn, in a kinda (yes, its cliche, but the radiohead influence makes it a bit more palatable) modern ok computer-esque way. anyways, i wanted to ask u, what motivated u to write about these subjects especially ??

i am transgender and so so scared

near every single person in the world carries a camera on them at all times with the capability of broadcasting its view to all of the internet. we have a culture of emotional armor and swords built to slip between its plates, to be angry or afraid or upset or even the wrong kind of happy is cringe. those who believe in some shadow government in some hidden room somewhere spying on us at all times are delusional - this is wrong - where labor can be outsourced for cheaper it will be. taxis are expensive to run, making people drive their own cars and find customers on an app for measly pay is much more cost effective. giving a music writer a salary is too pricey compared to hiring freelancers on a per article basis. and now surveillance has been, like so many other things, outsourced to civilians and their cameras and smartphone apps. a man sitting oddly on a couch is cheating on his girlfriend, a fold in a woman’s clothing is a hidden penis, we are the panopticon and the prisoner… this is the “society of control” - freedom as tyranny.

the nature of reality is at stake in our culture - “what is a woman?” “a woman” - those who refuse to understand transgender people are helplessly tied to some “deep reality” - “i know what you are!!” - which is ultimately an enforcement of the status quo socially constructed reality. transgender people recognize reality as something socially constructed and seek to bend it to their liking… pronouns and chosen names are after all meant for others to use rather than ourselves, they are third person terms, gender never worms its way into the terms “I” and “We”. our personhood is defined by other people, and can be invalidated or revoked by others… the insecurity created by this tension is ripe for advertising. take this boner pill, it will make you more of a man. take this injection, it will make you a woman. we are defined by our outside, our house, our car, our clothes, our skin, our bodies.

this is where the “family nexus” concept comes in - groups of people create their own pockets of reality. to christians, god is real and to deny this is insanity. to hardcore atheists, believing in god is insanity. to many psychiatrists years ago and some still today, to believe to be a different gender is insanity… and the insane deserve less rights than the sane, they don’t even know what is best for themselves. queer people seek to create a new sane. or rather to go “insane” in our own way the same way anyone who believes in anything does. create our own nexus where our experience of reality is simply true.

hope that helps at all and makes any amount of sense

oh yeah ok computer… maybe i’ll go off about that another time… much of the themes and sound of that record were a jumping off point for us. written in the 1990s, the end of history, time has marched on and yet we are still here stuck in capitalist reality. “did you lie to us tony” as if labour could ever do something about the fact that post 1991 “there is no alternative”… deeply tragic record but love runs through all of it undeniably… maybe i’ll go off about that in another post…

#asks #go read mark fisher if youre normal and deleuze if youre crazy btw

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