👨🏻👩🏻=👹

It is August 1854, and London is a city of scavengers. Just the names alone read now like some kind of exotic zoological catalogue: bone-pickers, rag-gatherers, pure-finders, dredgermen, mud-larks, sewer-hunters, dustmen, night-soil men, bunters, toshers, shoremen. These were the London underclasses, at least a hundred thousand strong. So immense were their numbers that had the scavengers broken off and formed their own city, it would have been the fifth-largest in all of England. But the diversity and precision of their routines were more remarkable than their sheer number. Early risers strolling along the Thames would see the toshers wading through the muck of low tide, dressed almost comically in flowing velveteen coats, their oversized pockets filled with stray bits of copper recovered from the water's edge. The toshers walked with a lantern strapped to their chest to help them see in the predawn gloom, and carried an eight-foot-long pole that they used to test the ground in front of them, and to pull themselves out when they stumbled into a quagmire. The pole and the eerie glow of the lantern through the robes gave them the look of ragged wizards, scouring the foul river's edge for magic coins. Beside them fluttered the mud-larks, often children, dressed in tatters and content to scavenge all the waste that the toshers rejected as below their standards: lumps of coal, old wood, scraps of rope.

Above the river, in the streets of the city, the pure-finders eked out a living by collecting dog shit (colloquially called “pure”) while the bone-pickers foraged for carcasses of any stripe. Below ground, in the cramped but growing network of tunnels beneath London's streets, the sewer-hunters slogged through the flowing waste of the metropolis. Every few months, an unusually dense pocket of methane gas would be ignited by one of their kerosene lamps and the hapless soul would be incinerated twenty feet below ground, in a river of raw sewage.

The scavengers, in other words, lived in a world of excrement and death. Dickens began his last great novel, Our Mutual Friend, with a father-daughter team of toshers stumbling across a corpse floating in the Thames, whose coins they solemnly pocket. “What world does a dead man belong to?” the father asks rhetorically, when chided by a fellow tosher for stealing from a corpse. “'Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world.” Dickens' unspoken point is that the two worlds, the dead and the living, have begun to coexist in these marginal spaces. The bustling commerce of the great city has conjured up its opposite, a ghost class that somehow mimics the status markers and value calculations of the material world.  Consider the haunting precision of the bone-pickers' daily routine, as captured in Henry Mayhew's pioneering 1844 work, London Labour and the London Poor:

It usually takes the bone-picker from seven to nine hours to go over his rounds, during which time he travels from 20 to 30 miles with a quarter to a half hundredweight on his back. In the summer he usually reaches home about eleven of the day, and in the winter about one or two. On his return home he proceeds to sort the contents of his bag. He separates the rags from the bones, and these again from the old metal (if he be luckly enough to have found any). He divides the rags into various lots, according as they are white or coloured; and if he have picked up any pieces of canvas or sacking, he makes these also into a separate parcel. When he has finished the sorting he takes his several lots to the ragshop or the marine-store dealers, and realizes upon them whatever they may be worth. For the white rags he gets from 2d. to 3d. per pound, according as they are clean or soiled. The white rags are very difficult to be found; they are mostly very dirty, and are therefore sold with the coloured ones at the rate of about 5 lbs. for 2d.

The homeless continue to haunt today's postindustrial cities, but they rarely display the professional clarity of the bone-picker's impromptu trade, for two primary reasons. First, minimum wages and government assistance are now substantial enough that it no longer makes economic sense to eke out a living as a scavenger. (Where wages remain depressed, scavenging remains a vital occupation; witness the perpendadores of Mexico City). The bone collector's trade has also declined because most modern cities possess elaborate systems for managing the waste generated by their inhabitants. (In fact, the closest American equivalent to the Victorian scavengers – the aluminium-can collectors you sometimes see hovering outside supermarkets – rely on precisely those waste-management systems for their paycheck.) But London in 1854 was a Victorian metropolis trying to make do with an Elizabethan public infrastructure. The city was vast even by today's standards, with two and a half million people crammed inside a thirty-mile circumference. But most of the techniques for managing that kind of population density that we now take for granted – recycling centers, public-health departments, safe sewage removal – hadn't been invented yet.

And so the city itself improvised a response – an unplanned, organic response, to be sure, but at the same time a response that was precisely contoured to the community's waste-removal needs. As the garbage and excrement grew, an underground market for refuse developed, with hooks into established trades. Specialists emerged, each dutifully carting goods to the appropriate site in the official market: the bone collectors selling their goods to the bone-boilers, the pure-finders selling their dog shit to tanners, who used the “pure” to rid their leather goods of the lime they had soaked in for weeks to remove animal hair. (A process widely considered to be, as one tanner put it, “the most disagreeable in the whole range of manufacture.”)

We're naturally inclined to consider these scavengers tragic figures, and to fulminate against a system that allowed so many thousands to eke out a living by foraging through human waste. In many ways, this is the correct response. (It was, to be sure, the response of the great crusaders of the age, among them Dickens and Mayhew.) But such social outrage should be accompanied by a measure of wonder and respect: without any central planner coordinating their actions, without any education at all, this itinerant underclass managed to conjure up an entire system for processing and sorting the waste generated by two million people. The great contribution usually ascribed to Mayhew's London Labour is simply his willingness to see and record the details of these impoverished lives. But just as valuable was the insight that came out of that bookkeeping, once he had run the numbers: far from being unproductive vagabonds, Mayhew discovered, these people were actually performing an essential function for their community. “The removal of the refuse of a large town,” he wrote, “is, perhaps, one of the most important of social operations.” And the scavengers of Victorian London weren't just getting rid of that refuse – they were recycling it.

  —  The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World (Steven Johnson)

Alastor likes to collect sea shells because he likes robbing hermit crabs of potential homes

thinking abt asking my crush out near valentine’s day but i gotta figure out if im like sure enough and also figure out an elaborate way to confess because im incapable of doing things normally

"FORTY FIVE ARE AIDED EVERY WEEK," Ottawa Journal. January 24, 1913. Page 1. ---- Union Mission Still Finds Much to do. ---- Despite Mild Weather and "Easy" Winter. ---- Local Charitable Organizations Report That Considerable Distress is Evident, Some due to Typhoid Epidemic. ---- Although we have had a mild winter up to the present there seems to be the usual number of men idle in the city.

One or two business men said that they cannot get men while there have been several applications for work made to the Associated Charities and other organizations.

Extra cases of distress have occurred apparently, as the result of the typhoid fever outbreak in the summer. Staff Adj. Goodwin of the Salvation Army informed The Journal last night that the outbreak of fever last summer had caused a great many cases of distress, cases that had never been known before and fresh cases are still occurring.

The Union Missions for men has not been so heavily taxed up to the present this winter, this being due to the mild weather. On an average 45 men are assisted each week and at present 30 men are being sheltered each night besides being provided with meals if the cases are real necessitous ones. For those who are able to pay, a small charge is made for bed and meals. Endeavors are made to find employment for the men but there have not been quite so many applications in previous years. Owing to the mildness of the weather several men have been able to leave the city for work.

🌊🍁 Niagara Falls recently declared a State of Emergency for mental health, opioid addiction and homelessness.

The Canadian Federal Government continues to send illegal immigrants to Niagara, costing the city $5M in social services and has rented out 2000 hotel rooms to house them. 😫😲😡🤦

the primary issue with landlords is not that they don't work, the issue is that they >hoard perfectly good housing, preventing plenty of people from having homes in the first place >take like over a third of your income just because they own the house, and this is the only option you have because buying is a massive investment most people can't afford

Like landlords are only parasitic in the sense that they are taking your income just for owning stuff, not that they aren't working. Discourse about whether calling landlords parasitic for not working is problematic is missing the point.

The Day - Not just for fun, music has a philanthropic side

The Day – Not just for fun, music has a philanthropic side

Hugh Birdsall needed to come up with an idea. In 2014, then-60-year-old Birdsall was approached by the New London Homeless Hospitality Center to organize a musical fundraiser in the city. Birdsall, a founding member of New London rock band the Reducers, had been plugged in to the city’s music scene since his teen years. He was concerned that a fundraiser featuring several musical acts, however,…

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the funny thing is that i don't think younger people - and i mean those under the age of 40 - really have a grasp on how many of today's issues can be tied back to a disastrous reagan policy:

war on drugs: reagan's aggressive escalation of the war on drugs was a catastrophic policy, primarily targeting minority communities and fueling mass incarceration. the crusade against drugs was more about controlling the Black, Latino and Native communities than addressing the actual problems of drug abuse, leading to a legacy of broken families and systemic racism within the criminal justice system.

deregulation and economic policies: reaganomics was an absolute disaster for the working class. reagan's policies of aggressive tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, and slashing social programs were nothing less than class warfare, deepening income inequality and entrenching corporate greed. these types of policies were a clear message that reagan's america was only for the wealthy elite and a loud "fuck you" to working americans.

environmental policies: despite his reputation being whitewashed thanks to the recovery of the ozone layer, reagan's environmental record was an unmitigated disaster. his administration gutted critical environmental protections and institutions like the EPA, turning a blind eye to pollution and corporate exploitation of natural resources. this blatant disregard for the planet was a clear sign of prioritizing short-term corporate profits over the future of the environment.

AIDS crisis: reagan's gross neglect of the aids crisis was nothing short of criminal and this doesn't even begin to touch on his wife's involvement. his administration's indifference to the plight of the lgbtq+ community during this devastating epidemic revealed a deep-seated bigotry and a complete failure of moral leadership.

mental health: reagan's dismantling of mental health institutions under the guise of 'reform' led directly to a surge in homelessness and a lack of support for those with mental health issues. his policies were cruel and inhumane and showed a personality-defining callous disregard for the most vulnerable in society.

labor and unions: reagan's attack on labor unions, exemplified by his handling of the patco strike, was a blatant assault on workers' rights. his actions emboldened corporations to suppress union activities, leading to a significant erosion of workers' power and rights in the workplace. he was colloquially known as "Ronnie the Union Buster Reagan"

foreign policy and military interventions: reagan's foreign policy, particularly in latin america, was imperialist and ruthless. his administration's support for dictatorships and right-wing death squads under the guise of fighting "communism" showed a complete disregard for human rights and self-determination of other nations.

public health: yes, reagan's agricultural policies actually facilitated the rise of high fructose corn syrup, once again prioritizing corporate profits over public health. this shift in the food industry has had lasting negative impacts on health, contributing to the obesity epidemic and other health issues.

privatization: reagan's push for privatization was a systematic dismantling of public services, transferring wealth and power to private corporations and further eroding the public's access to essential services.

education policies: his approach to education was more of an attack on public education than anything else, gutting funding and promoting policies that undermined equal access to quality education. this was, again, part of a broader agenda to maintain a status quo where the privileged remain in power.

this is just what i could come up with in a relatively short time and i did not even live under this man's presidency. the level at which ronald reagan has broken the united states truly can't be overstated.

🎥Welcome 2Hollywood⭐

Oh, yes. Ohhhh, yes.

Bloganuary writing promptWhat would you do if you won the lottery?View all responses This. THIS. This this this. This is my all-time favourite question. I love to day dream, and all the more I love to day dream about what could be. Because that is what I think playing the lotto represents to an awful lot of people: Possability. Hope. Change. Which I find bitterly ironic in some ways, because…

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Uncovering the Hidden Threat: Typhus Outbreak Strikes LA After 30 Years

Introduction to the Typhus Outbreak in Los Angeles Los Angeles, a vibrant city known for its glitz and glamour, is now facing a hidden threat that has taken everyone by surprise – a typhus outbreak. After three decades of relative calm, the city is grappling with a resurgence of this dangerous bacterial infection. As the number of cases continues to rise, it is crucial to understand the causes,…

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it's a grim reality where i, a queer NSFW artist, have to move to America because the immigration and housing situation in Australia is so fucked that even when i legally marry my wife, it counts for nothing, and there's no way we'll ever afford a house here

meanwhile i get marital immigration over there and if we can prove we've lived together 12 months basically any other country will take us in which means in theory we can get into a country that doesn't hand over every house to Dick Parentloan that thinks smashed avacados are the reason you can't buy a house

The continued “plantationization” of South Los Angeles

Does ““plantationism” affect the psyche ? Listen to how the Willie Lynch Letter’s principles are used in South Los Angeles. 

Click on the link below…..

https://pinecast.com/listen/913a4214-17d3-4a34-9842-3161b9d05ef5.mp3

"If there is a god, he will have to beg for my forgiveness. "

Red Hood in a urban forest.