champagnesupermama

[champagnesupermama]

via NYPost: Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to launch a “big f–king operation” across sanctuary cities — including Chicago and New York — immediately after President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, multiple sources told The Post.

Starting Jan. 21, multi-day “ground operations” will be launched across cities that have served as safe havens for migrants because the local authorities do not cooperate with the federal government when it comes to immigration issues, sources said.

[champagnesupermama]

reminders for today:

if you or someone you know might need it in the next few years, purchase plan b. the shelf life of plan b is 4 years, and we might not be able to access it as easily as we can now in the days ahead.

if you are larger/plus size: go online and purchase ella instead of plan b. plan b is less effective if you aren’t under 160 pounds.

if you can, purchase books that project 2025 is looking to ban.

mass deportations are starting. if you see ice vehicles or agents, yell ice raid and la migra as loud as you can.

if someone asks who you voted for, keep your mouth shut. they’re fishing for traitors.

if anyone, anyone at all asks about your neighbors or their legal status in the us, you know nothing. don’t be the reason that their family is separated.

if anyone asks about your religion or lack thereof, keep it vague. this administration will look for any excuse to persecute you.

your friends are trans or queer? for the next four years they’re not. don’t expose anyone’s status as a trans or queer person to anyone else, even if you think you can trust them.

did someone you know get an abortion? no, they didn’t. they were never pregnant.

in short, don’t be a snitch, and keep to yourself these next four years. we’ll make it through this even if it seems hopeless at times.

this is all i can think of at the moment, but i’ll be adding on to this as the day continues.

we can survive this. we’ve survived before, and we’ll survive again.

[champagnesupermama]

Trying to stay away from the news but thinking about the show TikTok put on did get me feeling like we're really cooked. The courts are still packed. They've had four years to plan how to get away with being even worse than last time. The mainstream news media spent the last four years playing into his hand, and now not only are the leaders of all the major US tech giants are in bed with the guy now, but Tiktok just showed us how willing they are to kiss up.

And I have to just remind myself, thinking we're already beaten is how they win, and this show of power and influence is part of that. You know what else has happened in the last few years that they can't play to their advantage? Mass dissatisfaction with the mainstream social platforms spurring a proliferation of alternatives they can't control so easily. Grassroots information sharing and citizen journalism. We've been able to study how they've used the avenues of information, misinformation, and disinformation and drawn some lessons we can hopefully use to bring the truth to people and places that have been closed off from it.

Things aren't going to get better the way he promised, and midterms are coming up. We can't stop everything they want to do, but we can sure slow them down until then.

[champagnesupermama]

Solar powered

[champagnesupermama]

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS

WHO IS USING THIS

AN APP??? THEY HAVE A FUNCTIONING WEBSITE

THE LAST FUNCTIONING WEBSITE

[champagnesupermama]

Ppl on the other hellsite losing their minds over this in every imaginable direction lmao

[champagnesupermama]

[champagnesupermama]

leftists really need to re-examine the idea that worker-based mass movements are what they should be focusing on because they really aren’t as powerful as they once were. workers got their power over the bourgeoisie from their ability to withhold their work. in a world where almost everyone is at the mercy of a landlord and living on a literal knifes edge of precarity, a significant amount of people get their employment through employment agencies (hi!), and a lot of the work people do is superfluous and not really a threat to the overall system if they withhold their labor, like, ya’ll need to step back and re-examine where to best put your energy. general strikes in the late 19th and early 20th century were devastating, today people strike to get a wage where it should really be if wages kept up with inflation in the first place. 

ya’ll aint looking at the bigger picture, you’re fighting harder for a smaller piece of a shrinking pie. if you want to make yourselves a threat to capital you need to be organizing blockades of capital’s infrastructure. ports, rail yards/railways, spontaneous freeway shutdowns, etc. “organizing the workers” is a dead-end, if you take mass-based organizing as a given you need to be looking at the choke-points and structural weaknesses of capital’s logistics.

[champagnesupermama]

If a girl feels uncomfortable hanging out with you alone, and you get so offended by that, it makes you angry, she probably made the right choice.

[champagnesupermama]

[champagnesupermama]

I'm going to indulge in a little PSA

It's bee swarming season! So this is my friendly reminder to, if you find yourself with a swarm, please do not call an exterminator. Bees are not pests. There's bound to be some sort of beekeeping association in your area, and there will almost certainly be a beekeeper with room for more bees who will come and scoop up your swarm for free and give them a little bee house. Where I live the fire station keeps a list of beekeepers for this exact situation so people call them.

Also a general background on swarming: swarming is a normal part of bee reproduction. In spring the population of a healthy colony will expand rapidly, and they soon run out of space in their nest. So they will raise new queens and the colony will split, with half of them accompanying the old queen to a new location some distance away. Scouts will spend a day or two looking for a good place to nest while the swarm balls up somewhere waiting for a decision. Swarming bees are surprisingly unaggressive and can basically be scooped into a box.

(Beekeepers do generally try to have some control over this reproductive process. Loose swarms don't have great survival rates, and also that's half your colony gone with the wind. If they want the colony to split, they tend to pre-empt them and just move the half of the colony with the old queen into a new hive while they're still raising the new ones. They can also sell half a colony to another beekeeper. If they'd rather they did not split, they'll keep giving them more space in the hive to expand into. A beekeeper can lose control of the situation though- imagine you had weeks of late rain/cold, preventing you from opening the hive to do any of that, and then the weather breaks and your bees, who have been going stir-crazy that whole time, are gone before you got your boots on. It can happen. There are some beekeepers who do clip the queen's wings so she can't swarm, which sounds very tricky to do tbh and not common practice for amateurs.)

Anyway: if you see a swarm, don't call an exterminator, find a beekeeper!

[champagnesupermama]

I know it’s not hard to point out reactionaries hypocrisy when it comes to like safe spaces or hug boxes or whatever but genuinely how much of an echo chamber do you have to exist in for you to think this is a reasonable thing to say

[champagnesupermama]

[champagnesupermama]

My ex was "brutally" honest which is the same thing as being mean

[champagnesupermama]

”Being queer, transgender, and Hispanic, I’ve had my share of slurs thrown at me.

My social group and volunteer work are where I find a safe place from the nonsense outside. If things got bad after my conversion, I had this community to turn to. Imagine my surprise, then, to find accusations and anger not from the usual suspects, but from my own progressive communities. To give a few choice examples:

1) My Catholic parents bought me a Star of David necklace to celebrate my conversion. I showed this to someone I had attended numerous LGBT events with. Their response was to call it “pro-apartheid jewelry” and said I was wearing “that star on the Jewish flag.”

2) For about a year, I catalogued footage of humanitarian disasters during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for use by a humanitarian organization. I’m proud of that work. I mentioned my conversion to a few friends who knew me at the time. All immediately asked if I had changed my views on Israeli politics.

3) Whenever I mention my conversion to anyone in my larger social circle, the response is never congratulations. Four out of five times, I’m immediately grilled on my views regarding Israeli policy.

When I chose to convert, my rabbi made it very clear that conversion was just a ritual. “You’re already Jewish,” he told me. “This is confirmation of what already exists.” In some ways, that’s true. I was the same person when I entered the bet din as I was when I exited the mikveh. What has changed, though, is how others see me regardless of who or what I am.“

[champagnesupermama]

you have to stay alive. you're going to be such a beautiful middle aged freak. young freaks will see you in the street and know that things can be okay.

[champagnesupermama]

One of the most life-changing things I ever learned came from Mythbusters, where they tested and proved (with cognitive testing puzzles and reaction time tests) that lying down and resting with the intention to sleep STILL provided significant mental benefits over just staying awake, even if a person couldn’t fall asleep in the amount of time they had. 

It helps me to actually sleep to know that just lying down with my eyes closed is still doing me some good, and helps me to not freak out/beat myself up when I stay up later than intended. Any amount of rest is better than no rest!

So if you didn’t know that…now you do