i spent my afternoon in a giant warehouse filled with enormous bouncy-castle things and screaming...

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i spent my afternoon in a giant warehouse filled with enormous bouncy-castle things and screaming children. i as an adult was not allowed to go on the bouncy castle things but that’s cool i didn’t really want to. however i as a person in the room was not allowed to have shoes on and that was mostly ok except then i had to use the restroom and it sort of did my head in to use a public restroom without shoes on. and then i kept absent-mindedly looking for my shoes because i’m the sort of person who sometimes takes my shoes off at work and such, but like, you gotta put your shoes on if you’re gonna go out on the sales floor or to the bathroom or something, and– anyway. i spent a lot of time absent-mindedly looking for my shoes. 

it was a fifth birthday party. it was a good time. i wore a tiara. nobody else had a tiara. the other adults probably mostly thought i was weird. (parents of the child’s friends, since the child is now old enough to have friends who are not friends of his parents.) it’s cool everyone who knew me figured the tiara was about par for the course.

my bestie’s little sister has a new baby, who is adopted, since she (the sister) almost died of cancer and so has been barred from having any more babies. (she’s fine now, just– no more babies.) her husband is mexican, and their other daughter is therefore (as one would expect) half-mexican. this new baby is also mexican, and would fit in pretty seamlessly with the family except that she is this magnificent enormous chubby full-term baby, unlike all the other babies in this family. i sort of think no baby in this family has ever been full-term. so at four months she is this magnificent enormous creature, healthy and easygoing and chubby-cheeked and with this head of magnificent spiky black hair that stands up in a crown around her face. she’s just so big and so beautiful. she looks nothing like her adopted sister. She is so adorable and sweet, we all had a lovely time cooing at her. she’ll probably look more like her sister when she grows up a little, but even if she doesn’t, she’s so magnificent, i look forward to watching her grow up. (and while the babies in this family tend to be born early and tiny, they also tend to grow up into relative behemoths, so it’s not like she won’t fit in if she winds up being magnificent her entire life.)

The toddlers and small children are utterly delighted by this baby, so that’s been fun to watch. 

for some reason i feel like typing in all lower-case is making this quieter, that’s why i’m not capitalizing things properly. i should really log off the internet, though, dude is asleep. (how can he fall asleep when i got the light on and am typing and this is a double bed. how can he do that. he is snoring. i can’t– who can live like that? i don’t know. being able to sleep through anything would be a keen superpower to have but my combo Fear Of Missing Out and Guilt At Being Caught Asleep would never let me. Oops shhh i capitalized those out loud, i shouldn’t have done that. … i don’t even know anymore. goodnight.)
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The birthday boy who we’re visiting this weekend

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The birthday boy who we’re visiting this weekend has just turned five. Yesterday he told me that because of the tiara, I was the prettiest, so I could have all the cupcakes. 

Just now, my dude is playing with the play workbench and they’re collaborating on putting some large wooden screws into some other wooden things. Dude just made a point of getting me to be a witness to the fact that the child has deemed him “the strongest”. He’s very pleased by this. 
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droidmom: centuriespast: Lidded jar DATEA.D. 1150-1350 Native...

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droidmom:

centuriespast:

Lidded jar

DATEA.D. 1150-1350

Native North America

DMA

Is that….

???????
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Migratory Birds Lose Protection Against Industry in Latest Trump Action Against Environmental Regula

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Migratory Birds Lose Protection Against Industry in Latest Trump Action Against Environmental Regulations:

rjzimmerman:

Excerpt:

Energy companies and other businesses are no longer liable for accidentally killing migratory birds, the Trump administration announced Friday in a decision hailed by industry insiders.

A legal memo by the U.S. Interior Department reverses a longstanding agency practice and last-minute ruling released by the Obama administration in January 2017. The Obama-era policy meant that oil, gas, wind and solar operators could face prosecution for accidentally killing birds.

“Christmas came early for bird killers. By acting to end industries’ responsibility to avoid millions of gruesome bird deaths per year, the White House is parting ways with more than 100 years of conservation legacy,” David O'Neill, the chief conservation officer for the National Audubon Society, said in response to the decision.

In a legal opinion, the Interior Department’s principal deputy solicitor, Daniel Jorjani, described the federal government’s application of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act—a 1918 law that officials have used to prosecute those who kill birds “incidentally"—as overreach.

The law “applies only to direct and affirmative purposeful actions that reduce migratory birds, their eggs, or their nests, by killing or capturing, to human control,” Jorjani said in the Interior Department’s legal memo.

Applying the law “to incidental or accidental actions hangs the sword of Damocles over a host of otherwise lawful and productive actions, threatening up to six months in jail and a $15,000 fine for each and every bird injured or killed,” Jorjani wrote.

Before his post with the Trump administration, Jorjani worked for the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, a project of the billionaire oil executives Charles G. and David H. Koch.
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A Demand for Sanctuary

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A Demand for Sanctuary:

chamerionwrites:

In response to the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the subsequent victory of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) against the US-backed Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua in 1979, the United States scaled up its support for anti-communist regimes in the region. Under the Carter and Reagan administrations, the United States sent military advisors and hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons and military aid to the right-wing dictatorships in Guatemala and El Salvador.

There, US-trained armies responded to leftist insurgencies with unspeakable campaigns of sustained violence against the civilian population in the form of massacres, death squads, torture, rape, and disappearance.

In Guatemala, the decades-long civil war would eventually claim 200,000 lives, with state forces responsible for 93 percent of the violence, according to a UN report; in El Salvador, 75,000 were killed, with state forces responsible of at least 85 percent of the crimes. The Reagan administration also covertly and illegally armed and supported paramilitary “contra” forces against the Sandinista government, financing this illicit venture through clandestine arms deals with Iran.

As these anti-communist proxy wars ravaged Central America, a massive grassroots response arose in the United States.

This movement, sometimes referred to as the Central America solidarity movement or the Central America peace movement, encompassed a vast and diverse amalgamation of organizations and tactics fighting to halt US support for the wars, defend the revolutionary projects of Central American popular movements, and protect Central American refugees seeking a safe haven in the United States…

The sanctuary movement built on a rich US tradition of religious communities engaging in principled civil disobedience out of a belief in a higher moral righteousness, from the Underground Railroad to the Civil Rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War. The groundwork was laid in the 1960s, as US church-people traveled to Latin America as part of the Alliance for Progress, Kennedy’s reformist initiative to fight the perceived rise of communism in the region.

There, many were exposed to and radicalized by the growing Liberation Theology movement, which brought together Marxist and Christian doctrines to advance a “preferential option for the poor” in the face of devastating inequality and increasingly violent repression. These sympathies were strengthened as atrocities against religious leaders in Central America began to draw international attention, particularly in El Salvador in 1980 with the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the rape and murder of four North American churchwomen, and again in 1989 with massacre of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter at the Central American University.

The sanctuary movement emerged as a desperate response to the politicized inequities of US immigration law. Migrants fleeing violence and persecution were dying in the southwestern deserts, and congregants seeking to aid these refugees were horrified to learn that the US government’s response to the survivors was deportation, not provision of shelter.

This was because granting asylum to refugees of the violence from US-backed anticommunist regimes would imply a recognition that those allies were indeed committing human rights abuses, thus endangering their US funding and support. As a result, asylum seekers escaping Sandinista Nicaragua were received with open arms, while the masses fleeing violence from right-wing military regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador were all but summarily denied.

As they became aware of the perils that refugees would risk in their home countries, many of them dissidents fleeing for their lives, religious communities began to open their doors…

In addition to providing shelter and basic services, sanctuary activists were instrumental in the legal battles to shield refugees from deportation. Following the indictments in Tucson, religious groups and churches joined Central American organizations providing immigration support services to sue the government for discriminating against Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum seekers in the American Baptist Churches v. Thronburgh (ABC) class action law suit, which was finally settled in 1991 to allow new asylum hearings for certain applicants who had been rejected.

Sanctuary activists also helped push for the 1990 Immigration Act which created Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for certain migrants, in particular those from El Salvador, as well as the 1997 Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA), which allowed Salvadorans and Guatemalans included in the ABC suit to apply for a suspension of deportation and granted legal permanent residency to Nicaraguans (still, we should note, a vastly unequal resolution).

Sanctuary churches would often develop sister relationships with counterparts in Central America, organizing delegations to travel to Nicaragua, El Salvador, or Guatemala to witness the violence of US-backed forces and “accompany” the social justice work led by the Liberation Theology-inspired congregations. These experiences, together with refugee testimonies, strengthened the transnational bonds between communities and consolidated opinions against the wars…

The role of Central American refugees in the movement was by no means limited to that of victims and witnesses.

“You can really see the influence of the refugees of Central Americans themselves, the role that they played in building both the solidarity movement and the sanctuary movement,” Angela Sanbrano emphasizes. In Los Angeles, “the refugees started to do marches and they were doing pickets and they were letting people know about the war. […] I started going to the rallies. […] They would see that I was interested so they started talking to me to help them get [access to] facilities at the school so they could have meetings. I got involved by them recruiting me.”

In fact, the Central America solidarity movement was founded in large part by Central American exiles in the 1970s. Revolutionary Nicaraguans and Salvadorans, particularly, formed political groups and organized to denounce the escalating violence in their home countries. These activists drew US citizens to their cause, and helped facilitate connections between the emerging US movement and leftist insurgencies and social movements in Central America.

As the waves of migration increased in the 1980s, refugees also formed mutual aid organizations like CARECEN and El Rescate in Los Angeles that played key roles in the legal battles to protect asylum seekers from deportation.
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rulerofthefandomkingdom: Fuuuuuuuuuuu- like okay fierce clapback...

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rulerofthefandomkingdom:

Fuuuuuuuuuuu-

like okay fierce clapback guy i don’t care about, but– 

 like bro if that’s what moms are talking about in front of you it’s because they know better than to talk about anything else in front of you because you are not safe, and they’re trying to bore you so you go away and they can get back to their real business, which in my fairly deep and wide experience of hanging out with groups of mothers involves an astonishing casualness about the absolute most disgusting things you can think of. Moms are sort of superpowered. They are not fazed by anything. if you are a non-mom and you want to up your imagination game, let a group of moms get comfortable with you and then ask them to describe the most disgusting thing they’ve ever encountered. 

Moms have seen some shit. And unlike, say, doctors, who also are sort of okay at this game, the moms have then had to clean up after that shit, which is really pretty next-level. 

Moms who are doctors? Fear them. Above all, do not attempt to fuck with them. You’ll lose. 
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vampireapologist: it’s 2018 can we stop acting

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vampireapologist:

it’s 2018 can we stop acting like low-wage rural american farmers are the main perpetrators of animal cruelty when they treat their livestock better than they treat their human family bc when you’re a small time farmer you literally cannot afford to lose livestock to sickness and injury

and start acknowledging that large-scale commercial farms who are continually guilty of animal abuse AND mistreatment of underpaid (often undocumented) human workers are the ones we should be scrutinizing thank you
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Listen when they tell you to use green cabbage not red in...

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Listen when they tell you to use green cabbage not red in colcannon that’s because they’re cowards.
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