#or BIPOC demanding justice and human rights

[theivorybilledwoodpecker]

As someone who was a victim of a Christian church that used spiritual abuse to gaslight children into believing a whole lot of shit, I do feel bad for people who were systemically brainwashed into holding the beliefs they have today.

But people are going to die from Christians turning their beliefs into law, and those people need to snap out of it now.

If by any chance someone is reading this and thinking, "I'm sorry for people of other religions, but they just don't realize what they're doing," consider this:

For thousands of years people worshipped other gods and deities. Christians claim that God gave the Christians the Good News and told them to spread it to all. But why? Why start with a small population? Especially when you consider that there was limited travel and it would be some time before some continents of people knew others existed.

Now consider that this "Good News" was given to people whose idea of spreading it meant raping, enslaving, murdering, kidnapping, and utterly destroying other people. The only reason Christianity is as prevelant as it is today is because of genocide. Why would God choose those people to spread His word?

Now a lot of apologetics will say that just because Christians sin doesn't mean the Bible is wrong and that the Bible preaches love. But that doesn't explain why hundreds of years of Christians commited or failed to object to genocide.

The other argument offered is that all humans are fallible, but that today's church isn't like this. But today's Christians just forced their religion on everyone in the country. Today's Christians are still demanding that BIPOC people bow to Christain beliefs about reproductive rights. Today's Christian justices just stripped away Native American sovereignty and may very well start placing Native American children in non-Native American homes. They may be doing it in a much less gory way, but they're still doing it.

But if you're absolutely convinced your church isn't like this, ask your pastor to organize protests for LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, and women's right to life. After all, these people are dying. They are being murdered by those who are misogynistic, homophibc, biphobic, transphobic, etc. They are committing suicide due to discrimination. Some will die from not being allowed an abortion. As children of the Lord of Love, surely Christians will stand up and protest for these people to have the right to live. Your pastor should be glad to help...right?

[telekineticmaniac]

From the Diesel and Dust (2019)

This may have started as a cosplay blog, but I think I’m going to transition it to be more of a creative works blog so that it’s consistent with other social media. These images were originally posted as a statement on July 8th, 2020. The statement went as follows:

From the Diesel and Dust is a collection I created for my thesis that aims to show what the world could be if all people joined together to change humanity’s destructive and unequal reality. Taking inspiration from the album Diesel and Dust by the band Midnight Oil, an album that acted and still acts as call to action for racial justice, environmental change, and systemic reform in Australia (actions clearly needed in the United Stated and around the globe as well), I created asymmetrical but polished looks to show these different causes and the unity that could be achieved in shared passion and determination for creating a better world.

I have been hesitant to post about the Black Lives Matter and Racial Justice movements happening currently in the United States on my main feed because I didn’t want insert myself into a conversation led rightfully by BIPOC, or inadvertently contribute to drowning out the initial rounds of important information (especially after all the misunderstandings and unfortunate results of BlackOutTuesday). However now that the social media information flow seems to have slowed, I don’t want to remain silent on my main feed. As a white person my voice in not important in this conversation—my abilities to listen, learn, and take actions on supporting the cause are what’s important here—however I fully believe staying silent is taking the side fo the oppressor and I do not intend to be passively racist in that way.

So instead I want to take a moment here to share some art I have created in regards to these causes. While I have no art related to these causes from the last month I have not, am not, and will not be passively racist through this.

Through a mix of found and bought fabrics, evolving embroidery and fabric manipulation, and recycled and built upon car parts, united together under crisp tailoring and clean execution, I showed my passion in my thesis for the racial justice, environmental change, and systemic reform that Midnight Oil sang about in their iconic album. I will continue to fight for these things and I encourage everyone reading this to fight for equality and bettering the world as well.

The most important actions that everyone can take right now to help are: attend peaceful protests, contact the politicians that represent you and demand justice, donate to organizations helping these paramount causes, sign petitions, and spread key information by elevating the voices of people of color, and most importantly for these movements, the voices of black and indigenous people.

I implore you to take and continue to take action.

And thank you to all who have. Especially the folks leading these movements.

[arcticdementor]

In the summer of 2014, I gave birth to a baby boy. He was born with a perfect Apgar score, after a very easy delivery. But my labor had not been smooth—in fact, throughout the day and a half of contractions, I believed there was something decidedly wrong. I also felt that way as I held him for the first time, and he writhed violently under my hands. In a video taken about 10 minutes after he was born, he can be seen lifting his head up off my chest. “Ooooh, look at how advanced he is!” someone can be heard trilling in the background, before her voice is overtaken by my own. “Don’t do that, love,” I say. Then, to the camera: “Does he seem like he’s in pain to you?”

It took my husband and me three years to understand that in fact I was right that day in the delivery room. Our son was hurt. And it will take him years to heal—longer than it should have, and that is on top of the injustice of the original wound—though I thank God every day that we figured it out.

The first breakthrough came when my husband David remembered a book about brain science he had read a decade earlier, by a doctor named Norman Doidge. It changed our lives, by allowing us to properly understand our son’s injury (and to understand why we couldn’t manage to get a straight answer about it from any of the “experts” we had seen). It’s been a tough road, but from that moment on, we at least knew what to do—and why.

A year or so later, we met Doidge and his wife, Karen, for dinner, and it is here that the story may become pertinent for you.

After we ordered, I told Norman I had a question I’d been wanting to ask—and that I wanted his honest answer to it, even if it meant that I had done something wrong. I proceeded to relay to him the entire tale, from the very beginning to that very moment, of what felt to me like our Kafkaesque medical mystery journey.

How was it, I then asked, that it took my husband and me—both children of doctors, both people with reporting and researching backgrounds, among the lucky who have health insurance, and with access through family and friends to what is billed as the best medical care in the country—years to figure this out, and that in the end we only did so basically by accident?

Norman looked at us sympathetically. “I don’t know how else to tell you this but bluntly,” he said. “There are still many good individuals involved in medicine, but the American medical system is profoundly broken. When you look at the rate of medical error—it's now the third leading cause of death in the U.S.—the overmedication, creation of addiction, the quick-fix mentality, not funding the poor, quotas to admit from ERs, needless operations, the monetization of illness vs. health, the monetization of side effects, a peer review system run by journals paid for by Big Pharma, the destruction of the health of doctors and nurses themselves by administrators, who demand that they rush through 10-minute patient visits, when so often an hour or more is required, and which means that in order to be ‘successful,’ doctors must overlook complexity rather than search for it ... Alana, the unique thing here isn’t that you fell down so many rabbit holes. What’s unique is that you found your way out at all.”

I had barely started processing this when Norman moved to change the subject: “Now, can I ask you two something? How come so much of the journalism I read seems like garbage?”

Oh, God.

David and I looked at each other, simultaneously realizing that the after-school special we thought we were in was actually a horror movie. If the medical industry was comprehensively broken, as Norman said, and the media was irrevocably broken, as we knew it was ... Was everything in America broken? Was education broken? Housing? Farming? Cities? Was religion broken?

Everything is broken.

…

For seven decades, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc. Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as “American”—conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country. This wasn’t a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part.

…

This was the tinder. The tech revolution was the match—one-upping the ’70s economy by demanding more efficiency and more speed and more boundarylessness, and demanding it everywhere. They introduced not only a host of inhuman wage-suppressing tactics, like replacing full-time employees with benefits with gig workers with lower wages and no benefits, but also a whole new aesthetic that has come to dominate every aspect of our lives—a set of principles that collectively might be thought of as flatness.

Flatness is the reason the three jobs with the most projected growth in your country all earn less than $27,000 a year, and it is also the reason that all the secondary institutions that once gave structure and meaning to hundreds of millions of American lives—jobs and unions but also local newspapers, churches, Rotary Clubs, main streets—have been decimated. And flatness is the mechanism by which, over the past decade and with increasing velocity over the last three years, a single ideologically driven cohort captured the entire interlocking infrastructure of American cultural and intellectual life. It is how the Long March went from a punchline to reality, as one institution after another fell and then entire sectors, like journalism, succumbed to control by narrow bands of sneering elitists who arrogated to themselves the license to judge and control the lives of their perceived inferiors.

Flatness broke everything.

…

Today’s revolution has been defined by a set of very specific values: boundarylessness; speed; universal accessibility; an allergy to hierarchy, so much so that the weighting or preferring of some voices or products over others is seen as illegitimate; seeing one’s own words and face reflected back as part of a larger current; a commitment to gratification at the push of a button; equality of access to commodified experiences as the right of every human being on Earth; the idea that all choices can and should be made instantaneously, and that the choices made by the majority in a given moment, on a given platform represent a larger democratic choice, which is therefore both true and good—until the next moment, on the next platform.

…

“You might not even realize you’re not where you started.” The machines trained us to accept, even chase, this high. Once we accepted it, we turned from willful individuals into parts of a mass that could move, or be moved, anywhere. Once people accepted the idea of an app, you could get them to pay for dozens of them—if not more. You could get people to send thousands of dollars to strangers in other countries to stay in homes they’d never seen in cities they’d never visited. You could train them to order in food—most of their food, even all of their food—from restaurants that they’d never been to, based on recommendations from people they’d never met. You could get them to understand their social world not as consisting of people whose families and faces one knew, which was literally the definition of social life for hundreds of thousands of years, but rather as composed of people who belonged to categories—“also followed by,” “friends in common,” “BIPOC”—that didn’t even exist 15 years ago. You could create a culture in which it was normal to have sex with someone whose two-dimensional picture you saw on a phone, once.

You could, seemingly overnight, transform people’s views about anything—even everything.

The Obama administration could swiftly overturn the decision-making space in which Capitol Hill staff and newspaper reporters functioned so that Iran, a country that had killed thousands of Americans and consistently announces itself to be America’s greatest enemy, is now to be seen as inherently as trustworthy and desirable an ally as France or Germany. Flatness, frictionlessness.

The biological difference between the sexes, which had been a foundational assumption of medicine as well as of the feminist movement, was almost instantaneously replaced not only by the idea that there are numerous genders but that reference in medicine, law or popular culture to the existence of a gender binary is actually bigoted and abusive. Flatness.

Facebook’s longtime motto was, famously, “Move fast and break shit,” which is exactly what Silicon Valley enabled others to do.

The internet tycoons used the ideology of flatness to hoover up the value from local businesses, national retailers, the whole newspaper industry, etc.—and no one seemed to care. This heist—by which a small group of people, using the wiring of flatness, could transfer to themselves enormous assets without any political, legal or social pushback—enabled progressive activists and their oligarchic funders to pull off a heist of their own, using the same wiring. They seized on the fact that the entire world was already adapting to a life of practical flatness in order to push their ideology of political flatness—what they call social justice, but which has historically meant the transfer of enormous amounts of power and wealth to a select few.

Because this cohort insists on sameness and purity, they have turned the once-independent parts of the American cultural complex into a mutually validating pipeline for conformists with approved viewpoints—who then credential, promote and marry each other. A young Ivy League student gets A’s by parroting intersectional gospel, which in turn means that he is recommended by his professors for an entry-level job at a Washington think tank or publication that is also devoted to these ideas. His ability to widely promote those viewpoints on social media is likely to attract the approval of his next possible boss or the reader of his graduate school application or future mates. His success in clearing those bars will in turn open future opportunities for love and employment. Doing the opposite has an inverse effect, which is nearly impossible to avoid given how tightly this system is now woven. A person who is determined to forgo such worldly enticements—because they are especially smart, or rich, or stubborn—will see only examples of even more talented and accomplished people who have seen their careers crushed and reputations destroyed for daring to stick a toe over the ever multiplying maze of red lines.

So, instead of reflecting the diversity of a large country, these institutions have now been repurposed as instruments to instill and enforce the narrow and rigid agenda of one cohort of people, forbidding exploration or deviation—a regime that has ironically left homeless many, if not most, of the country’s best thinkers and creators. Anyone actually concerned with solving deep-rooted social and economic problems, or God forbid with creating something unique or beautiful—a process that is inevitably messy and often involves exploring heresies and making mistakes—will hit a wall. If they are young and remotely ambitious they will simply snuff out that part of themselves early on, strangling the voice that they know will get them in trouble before they’ve ever had the chance to really hear it sing.

…

I’m not looking to rewind the clock back to a time before we all had email and cellphones. What I want is to be inspired by the last generation that made a new life-world—the postwar American abstract expressionist painters, jazz musicians, and writers and poets who created an alternate American modernism that directly challenged the ascendant Communist modernism: a blend of forms and techniques with an emphasis not on the facelessness of mass production, but on individual creativity and excellence.

Like them, our aim should be to take the central, unavoidable and potentially beneficent parts of the Flatness Aesthetic (including speed, accessibility; portability) while discarding the poisonous parts (frictionlessness; surveilled conformism; the allergy to excellence). We should seek out friction and thorniness, hunt for complexity and delight in unpredictability. Our lives should be marked not by “comps” and metrics and filters and proofs of concept and virality but by tight circles and improvisation and adventure and lots and lots of creative waste.

And not just to save ourselves, but to save each other. The vast majority of Americans are not ideologues. They are people who wish to live in a free country and get along with their neighbors while engaging in profitable work, getting married, raising families, being entertained, and fulfilling their American right to adventure and self-invention. They are also the consumer base for movies, TV, books, and other cultural products. Every time Americans are given the option to ratify progressive dictates through their consumer choices, they vote in the opposite direction. When HBO removed Gone with the Wind from its on-demand library last year, it became the #1 bestselling movie on Amazon. Meanwhile, endless numbers of Hollywood right-think movies and supposed literary masterworks about oppression are dismal failures for studios and publishing houses that would rather sink into debt than face a social-justice firing squad on Twitter.

[insanityclause]

Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS has announced that it is donating $125,000 total to anti-racism organizations, distributed across the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, the Bail Project, Color of Change, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Broadway Cares is making a $50,000 commitment to the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, a launch donation for this week's " Broadway for Black Lives Matter Again " forum (bwayforblm.com) and the follow-up steps outlined by #BwayforBLM. The grant will support the coalition's ongoing efforts to help Broadway heal, listen and become an anti-racist and equitable community.

Grants of $25,000 each are being sent to The Bail Project, Color of Change and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which are all providing timely, on-the-ground action for racial equality and social justice.

"The street action and protests ignited by the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and far too many others now demand that we address systemic racism in all communities, including Broadway," said Tom Viola, executive director of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. "We need to hold ourselves accountable and do more to amplify and listen to BIPOC voices. We urge others in our community to support and engage with the critical work the Broadway Advocacy Coalition is doing to dismantle systemic racism. We're committed to continuing the work of becoming an anti-racist organization."

As BroadwayWorld previously reported, BC/EFA first announced its donation to Color of Change on June 3.

"Words, though, must come with action. So on behalf of Broadway and the entire theater community, Broadway Cares is making a $25,000 donation today to Color of Change," said Tom Viola, executive director of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS in a press release. "They are doing difficult, important, immediate work - from challenging injustice and holding leaders accountable to changing our country's systems of inequality. This donation is just one small step in a long-standing commitment."

"Our organization pledges to hold ourselves accountable and amplify the voices of people of color in our industry and beyond. We will continue to listen and educate ourselves, and call out others, on how we can best lift up our black colleagues, artists, community members and supporters. Lives depend on it."

Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS helps men, women and children across the country and across the street receive lifesaving medications, health care, nutritious meals, counseling and emergency financial assistance. By drawing upon the talents, resources and generosity of the American theatre community, since 1988 Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS has raised more than $300 million for essential services for people with HIV/AIDS and other critical illnesses in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Washington DC.

The mission of the Broadway Advocacy Coalition is to build the capacity of advocates, students, artists, organizations and communities to use the arts as an integral part of their social change work. The coalition believes that "placing Artistry at the center of solving today's most pressing issues will create a new type of dialogue and impact."

The Bail Project, Inc. is an unprecedented effort to combat mass incarceration at the front end of the system. The project pays bail for people in need, reuniting families and restoring the presumption of innocence. Because bail is returned at the end of a case, donations to The Bail Project™ National Revolving Bail Fund can be recycled and reused to pay bail two to three times per year, maximizing the impact of every dollar. 100% of online donations are used to bring people home.

Color Of Change is the nation's largest online racial justice organization. The organization helps people respond effectively to injustice in the world around us. As a national online force driven by 1.7 million members, the organization moves decision-makers in corporations and government to create a more human and less hostile world for Black people in America.

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. is America's premier legal organization fighting for racial justice. Through litigation, advocacy, and public education, LDF seeks structural changes to expand democracy, eliminate disparities, and achieve racial justice in a society that fulfills the promise of equality for all Americans. LDF also defends the gains and protections won over the past 75 years of civil rights struggle and works to improve the quality and diversity of judicial and executive appointments.Donations· 

[s27coalition]

Here in Tkaronto, on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat, and the treaty territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, we gather in a coalition for the September 27 Global Climate Strike. Toronto is covered by Treaty 13 signed with the Mississaugas of the Credit, and the Williams Treaties signed with multiple Mississaugas and Chippewa bands. As guests on this land, we commit to centring Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination in our struggles for environmental and climate justice. There is no climate justice without Indigenous sovereignty. 

We are a collective of young activists, artists, and students in Tkaronto organizing alongside our adult allies for climate justice. Coalition members come from groups including Fridays for Future Toronto, Climate Justice Toronto, ClimateFast, No One Is Illegal, Fight for $15 & Fairness, Migrant Rights Network, Toronto 350, Rising Tides Toronto, Indigenous Climate Action, Greenpeace Canada, The Leap, and more. Our demands reflect the rallying cries of the intersectional movements we belong to, and include:

Indigenous Rights & Sovereignty

Today’s climate crisis is the result of centuries of settler colonial violence that has sought to extinguish the rights, sovereignty, and very existence of Indigenous people across Turtle Island. We demand the centring of Indigenous self-determination and the full implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the 94 calls to action of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Canada, and the calls for justice in the national report of the National Inquiry into Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women.

Defending Land, Water & Life

Indigenous people have cared for, defended, and protected the land, water, and biodiversity since time immemorial. We centre this stewardship and call for collective efforts to maintain and protect forests and waters, reduce habitat deterioration, and strengthen the protection of at-risk species. We coexist with this land in relation to all forms of life. We acknowledge our interdependence with the ecosystems that sustain us, and call for a re-centring of food justice and respectful ways of relating to non-human beings.

Zero-Carbon Economy and Separation of Oil & State

We call on all levels of government to reduce national GHG emissions by 65% by 2030, reaching net zero emissions by 2040. We reject all new and ongoing fossil fuel extraction/transportation projects, and demand the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies, coupled with a steep price on pollution. We call for a just transition to publicly-owned renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure; one that guarantees decent, low-carbon work for all workers, including those in the fossil fuel industry.

No Worker Left Behind

We have more than enough to lift everybody into decent work, rest, leisure, and safety. We call for an end to the hoarding of wealth by the same small percentage of Canadians who control the extractive industries that are causing ecological deterioration. Our demands for economic justice include a $15 minimum wage for all; the right to unionize; and higher taxation of the ultra-rich and the corporations they control, whose greed has caused the climate crisis.

Universal Public Services & Infrastructure

We demand quality public services for all, including universal health and dental care, pharmacare, public education, free university/college, childcare, settlement services, legal aid, and pensions; housing as a human right, including high-density, retrofitted, green public housing, alongside rent control and less urban sprawl in the suburbs; free, electrified, fully accessible public transit; and local community ownership, such as neighbourhood transition councils.

Justice for Migrants & Refugees

Canada, its allies, and multinational corporations have been carrying out imperialist practices of displacement—including war, occupation, and resource extraction—for centuries. We call for asylum for those displaced, and, in the words of No One Is Illegal, affirm the freedom of everyone to move, to return, and to stay. Our demands for refugee & migrant justice include status for all; an end to deportations and detentions; decent, low-carbon work for migrants; and full access to the universal public services listed above.

Futures for All

As we rally together on September 27th and beyond, we must ask ourselves: whose future are we fighting for? Disabled, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous & People of Colour), poor and working class people, and migrants have long been excluded from mainstream environmental movements and general notions of futurity. We call for a return to the leadership and wisdom of the most affected—and most historically disenfranchised—communities, without whom there is no justice, no future.

Finally, the future is a public good, not a private luxury (1). From the land and water, to our housing and wages, we want a government that invests in our communities—not corporations eager to put a price-tag on our lives. For those already trapped in cycles of poverty and state violence, a just transition was needed centuries ago. Now is our time.

(1) DSA Ecosocialists’ Green New Deal Guiding Principles

Collaborators: Mia Sanders, Bella Lyne, Simran Dhunna, and Grace King on behalf of the 27 September Coalition planning Toronto’s Global Climate Strike.

View PDF version.

S27 coalition members

Artists for Climate, Migrant Justice, and Indigenous Sovereignty; Canadian Union of Postal Workers; Canadian Union of Public Employees (Ontario & Toronto) CFS-Ontario; CUPE3902 Flying Squad CUPE3903; Climate Fast; Climate Justice Peel; Climate Justice Toronto; Council of Canadians; David Suzuki Foundation; Disability Justice Network of Ontario Elementary Teachers of Toronto Extinction Rebellion Toronto; Fridays For Future Toronto; Greenpeace; Idle No More; Indigenous Climate Action; Indigenous Environmental Justice Project Kairos Canada; Migrant Rights Network; No One Is Illegal TO; Ontario Public Interest Research Group (Toronto); Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation Ontario Federation of Labour; Ontario Public Service Employees Union; Parents for Future Toronto; Rising Tides TO; Shoresh; Students Say No; Students for Reproductive Justice (UofT); The Leap; TO350; Toronto Environmental Alliance; Toronto Labour Council; TTCriders; United Steel Workers.

[joyfuldelusionchaosvaliant]

Science and Chemistry Classes

Robert Downey Jr.: Here’s how to accelerate discoveries to help the planet

The actor and his coauthor say science funding is broken and launch their own ‘fast grants’.

There’s a new working paper — Funding Risky Research — where leading science economists outline the challenges of the current funding regime to support high-risk, high-reward research. The authors go deep on Karikó’s story and match it with a literature review of ideas and efforts to fix the problem. The paper concludes with a handful of alternative examples and a plea for more experimentation. Unfortunately, major science funding agencies seem to be hamstrung by a catch-22.

Funding risky research first requires bets on risky new models. To help stop the leaks on the scientific talent funnel, our team is launching a new program: the FootPrint Coalition Science Engine.

We are in the business of supporting entrepreneurial scientists and we are in agreement that the major impediments are the obvious limitations of decision-making by committee. We’re trying something different. FootPrint Coalition is funding early research in brand new environmental fields, and doing it under the direction of esteemed Science Leads who can move quickly and fund at their discretion. The FootPrint Coalition Science Engine builds off suggestions made in the Funding Risky Research paper. It operationalizes the “loose-play funding for early-stage risky explorations” but doesn’t bind it to universities.

We’re doing it “in public” on the experiment funding platform, a website for crowdfunding science research projects, so anyone can participate as a cofunder. 

This is an experiment in areas of research that matter. Here are our first five categories and the Science Leads at the helm of each: Indigenous knowledge holds the keys to rebuilding humanity’s relationship with the natural world, and Dr. Keolu Fox is funding Indigenous futures projects to empower the Indigenous researchers and innovators who are asking the right questions and bringing that knowledge into action.

The effects of air, water, and soil pollution fall disproportionately on low-wealth Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) populations. Dr. Sacoby Wilson, an associate professor at the University of Maryland, is funding community science and environmental justice projects to bring science and research into the neighborhoods most impacted by pollution and climate change.

Emerging biotechnologies are changing how scientists understand, monitor, and sometimes intervene in ecosystems. Dr. Bridget Baumgartner and Ryan Phelan, leaders at Revive & Restore are funding conservation biotech projects that utilize these new tools.

Cellular agriculture is the production of agricultural products such as meat, milk, and eggs from cell cultures rather than whole animals. Isha Datar, Executive Director of New Harvest, is funding projects that push the technology, as well as projects that explore the social, economic, and political dimensions of cellular agriculture.

Artificial intelligence could help us find the next big breakthrough faster than we could on our own. James Weis, an MIT PhD and entrepreneur, is funding overlooked research with the help of machine learning algorithms to put this hypothesis into action.

COVID-19 fast grants showed us a path, and proved that leadership can come from anywhere. The FootPrint Coalition Science Engine is designed for radical participation. You’re invited.

Science made rapid progress in response to the pandemic. Let’s build funding models and support systems to help them do the same for the planet; the moment demands it.

Robert Downey Jr. is an actor, activist, and cofounder of Footprint Coalition. David Lang is the head of the Experiment Foundation.

[archivlibrarianist]

The layout on the page makes me uneasy, so full text of the article under the jump.

Published: 12:09 PM MDT May 20, 2024

Updated: 3:26 PM MDT May 20, 2024

"BOISE, Idaho — The Donnelly Public Library announced it will become an adults-only library and says House Bill 710 is responsible.

"'Donnelly Public Library was deeply saddened by the passing of HB710,' a new release stated. 'Unfortunately, the ambiguous language in the legislation leaves us no options but to make some very drastic changes.'

"Sherry Scheline, the library director, told KTVB that the building will become an adult-only library, but children will be allowed in if they are accompanied by a 'signing adult.'

"In a statement, officials with the library said because of its size, it can't comply with the new law and create an adult section out of children's range. The library is 1024 square feet, a tenth of the size of the state's average library, which is 10,552 square feet.

"'This change is painful and not what we had hoped for at all,' officials stated. 'We desire to comply with state and federal legislation, but because of size, we have to protect our staff, our library, and our taxpayer money.'

"Library officials said that despite the 'saddened news,' they will continue their after-school programming and summer learning. 

"'After-school programming has become an essential part of the Library,' officials stated. 'It is our primary source of funding through both grants as well as tuition monies paid by participants.  It is imperative we continue to grow our programming offerings.'

"Officials said students participating in their programming will be able to sign a waiver allowing librarians to curate learning material for them. 

"The Donnelly Public Library encouraged the public to donate to the Donnelly Public Library Building Fund, a multi-year effort to expand the building. Without the expansion, the building will remain an adult-only library."

[erikaalamode]

This has been an exhausting week, an exhausting four years really. And today we take the first deep breathe we’ve taken in years. It’s a new chance at a better future, a step out of the mid century nightmare we’ve languished in for too long. . . Now we must turn our attention to the issues that demand address. We must continue to stand for the values that got us this far, we must pursue justice until it is won, for BIPOC communities suffering from racial violence, for immigrant families torn apart, for the LGBTQ community, for women, for the planet, and so many others whose lives and rights are at risk. We have to hold our representatives accountable for their promises and assure that their every act serves the people and basic human rights. . . Take this victory. Celebrate. Enjoy this win because goodness knows we don’t get enough of them. And then be ready, because this is just the beginning. Our friends and communities need our help, our diligence, and our perseverance. Now the real work begins. https://www.instagram.com/p/CHTh5a7jBGS/?igshid=1x9g6aj70hhp8

[greenpeacemagazine]

White Supremacy is Destroying the Environment, but that’s not why we fight it

© Farrah Khan / Greenpeace. A mural of Audre Lorde, renowned American author, feminist and civil rights activist, adorns a wall along the West Toronto Railpath.

By Farrah Khan, Deputy Director

It’s been a heavy few months.

As we mourn the countless Black lives lost at the hands of police and channel that grief and anger to rise up against police brutality and systemic racism, I feel compelled to speak up about white supremacy and police violence against Black and Indigenous communities here in Canada.

Greenpeace has said before that connections between the struggles for environmental and racial justice partly explain why we speak out for the latter. But this is not true. Regardless of the links between these movements, we stand up against racial injustice and police brutality against Black and Indigenous communities and other communities of colour because it is inherently wrong and inhumane and enough is enough. We fight white supremacy because silence is complicity. My hope is that within and outside of the environmental movement in Canada, we will all step up our anti-racist activism. 

Checking our “nice” Canadian assumptions 

South of the border, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis which sparked widespread resistance in cities across the continent and the world. We also remember Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless other lives gone too soon. Racism and systemic violence from police against Black communities and individuals in the United States is dominating the news. We are quick to point fingers, but Canada’s history and its present day systems are steeped in white supremacy, too. 

Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a 29-year-old Afro-Indigenous woman fell from her Toronto balcony after an interaction with police in May. Jason Collins, a 36-year- old Indigenous man, was shot and killed by Winnipeg police in April. Ejaz Choudry, a 62-year old man, was shot and killed by police during a wellness check in my hometown of Malton, Ontario in June. And along with these unconscionable stories of Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour whose lives have been violently taken by police, there are still so many more from across Canada.

In Toronto, a Black person is twenty times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a white person. In Vancouver, 10 years of data reveals that Black and Indigenous people are disproportionately overrepresented in police street checks. In Halifax, a Black person is six times more likely to be stopped by police compared to white counterparts. Right now in Nunavut, five RCMP officers are being investigated for violent interactions with Inuit. 

These are very clear patterns of consistent systemic oppression against Indigenous and Black communities based on a history of the same violence: enslavement, stolen land, mass incarceration, environmental racism, residential schools, missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, the Sixties Scoop, and more. Add to that the countless impacts other communities of colour face in this country, whether it’s an escalation of anti-Asian racism during the pandemic, Islamophobic attacks including the murder of six Muslims in Quebec in 2017: the list gets longer every single day. 

The fact that systemic racial injustices are ingrained in Canadian society is undeniable. 

Root causes of injustice

The values that inform the struggles for Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty are shared in the fight for environmental justice. These connections are not needed to justify solidarity, because it’s critical for us to be anti-racist regardless, but each of these injustices stem from and seek to dismantle the same root causes. Annie Leonard, Executive Director at Greenpeace USA said it well in a 2016 blog: 

“We can’t have a green and peaceful future without racial justice, equity, civil rights, and empowered communities. We believe the systems of power and privilege that destroy the environment also strip vulnerable communities of their humanity – and too often, their lives.”

In Canada, corporate and government powers have or too long put profits before people and the planet. Moreover, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People Of Colour) and lower income communities are disproportionately impacted by environmental degradation and are experiencing the most severe impacts of climate change, here in Canada as well as globally. 

Dismantling colonial oppression, capitalist greed, and white supremacy will allow us to build a more equitable and community-centred future, one that  protects all life on the planet, one that decentralizes power from benefiting the few to the many. So a solution to one of these injustices will work to dismantle them all.

We need systemic change all around. Divesting funding from policing to reinvest in communities. Ambitious climate policy and food security solutions. Standing up for Indigenous Sovereignty and free, prior, and informed consent. Ensuring protection for biodiversity. If we truly want a green and peaceful future for all, we must consider this fuller picture and demand it all.

Using our privilege for good 

Greenpeace’s mandate is to work towards a green and peaceful future and to confront systems that threaten the environment, including systems that inhibit equity and justice.

We have a reputation for being a disruptive, bold, risk-taking organization that speaks truth to power. We at Greenpeace Canada also carry a great deal of privilege as a mostly white, settler organization that has been successful in building international influence. I would be remiss not to mention here that many of our global offices and departments are staffed and led by BIPOC folks who contribute in significant ways to our global work. We can and should do more to lend our privilege and skills to bring more people into the fold of fighting white supremacy and to stand in solidarity with those on the frontlines of the fight for Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty.

Greenpeace has not always prioritized anti-racism work. Far from it. We need to acknowledge and own that. But we prioritize it now, and our staff and leadership today commit to embodying anti-racism in all of our work to ensure the “peace” in Greenpeace is not lost.

How you can be an anti-racist environmentalist 

If you are an environmentalist who has not yet engaged in the fight for racial justice, I ask you to start. If you have shown solidarity, I ask you to do more. If you are not Black or Indigenous (and I include my fellow POCs in this category, particularly those who benefit from white supremacy) I ask you to examine your privilege, listen to Black environmental leaders and Indigenous environmental leaders, increase your awareness about the racism in our movement, learn about the experiences of BIPOC folks that work for environmental groups, and question whether you’re doing enough. 

Black and Indigenous people have the right to live without a fear of violence. If we are unable to prevent another death, we are not doing enough. Losing Regis Korchinski-Paquet and George Floyd in these last few months, and countless others before them, means we are already too late. Let’s rally to end all forms of injustice and get to that green and peaceful future for all.

This article was adapted from a blog written and posted by Farrah on the Greenpeace Canada website on June 4, 2020. To read the original article, which includes resources, reading materials, places to donate or volunteer, petitions to sign and actions to amplify, visit greenpeace.ca/racialjustice.

[theliterateape]

On Becoming Addicted to Misery and The Quest for Psychological Safety

by Don Hall

I remember hearing an old Jewish joke about the guy who won't stop complaining about how thirsty he is. "Oh I'm so thirstyyy..." So someone finally gets him some water, and everyone is relieved that his kvetching stops. Then a minute later, he starts moaning, "I was so thirsty...."

The slow descent into delusional pain is a remarkable thing to behold. Even more bizarre is when you realize that it is you who is causing the follow-up.

In 1989, after living in my truck for four months, getting certified in Illinois to teach, getting hired as a library substitute, and leasing a crummy studio apartment in a building smack up against the neighborhood crackhouse, I was mugged.

It was after a night of playing jazz. I left my horn in the truck and decided at 3:15 a.m. I needed some Shoney’s breakfast. As I strolled past the Granville Redline stop, I was hit in the back of the head with a board. Three young black men (teenagers, really) proceeded to kick and punch me, demanding my wallet. I made the mistake of trying to fight back but I was prostate, my punch held no power, and the result was an intensified round of kicks — to the ass, to the stomachs, and to the face.

They ran off with fourteen bucks.

For weeks after I found myself telling the story. The people I told, for awhile, gave me the requisite sympathy and horrified reactions. Once the the black eye I had received faded, though, the story elicited less and less response. It became that thing that happened to Don. I also found myself expanding the story. The teenagers became grown men. They had on gang affiliated clothing. They all three had boards and hit me with them instead of kicking me.

A closer friend than most pointed it out to me. “You’re exaggerating your mugging, dude. Why? I mean, you were mugged, right?”

I hadn’t even been aware of the increasing drama of the tale. It just sort got grander in scale with repetition. I came to understand that I was hungry for that initial reaction — the sympathy, the center of conversation, the horror at my plight. I liked being seen as a survivor of crime.

“I’m being mugged” became “I was just mugged” which transformed into “I survived being mugged” to “Did I ever tell you about the time I was mugged?”

Of course, I’m Irish and born in the South, so colorful exaggeration just comes with the territory but this? This was something different. I was mitigating my trauma of being beaten in the street with the good feels and empowerment that came with being seen as both a victim and a survivor.

In 2010, four social psychologists from Stanford University published an article titled “Victim Entitlement to Behave Selfishly” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The researchers randomly assigned 104 human subjects to two groups.

Members of one group were prompted to write a short essay about when they felt bored; the other to write about “a time when your life seemed unfair. Perhaps you felt wronged or slighted by someone.” After writing the essay, they were interviewed and asked if they wanted to help the scholars in an easy task.

The results were surprising. Those who wrote the essays about things being unfair were 26% less likely to help the researchers, and were rated by the researchers as feeling 13% more entitled.

The researchers also found that members of the unfairness group were 11% more likely to express selfish attitudes.

I’ve written before about the lens we use to see the world and how that choice determiners so much more in terms of our behavior and this is a perfect example. The more you focus on how unfair things are in your life, how victimized you have been, the more you see it all around you.

Case in point when Ciann Wilson, a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, had her car broken into overnight her conclusion was not that of a particularly well-adjusted citizen. She immediately determined that it was broken into by police because she is BIPOC (which is shorthand for “victimized member of society”) and is a Defund the Police activist.

So accustomed to seeing herself as a victim and survivor, Wilson, without a shred of evidence of any kind, determines a random vehicle break-in to be in lockstep with her continued victimization.

Her lens is fixated on her own victim status and so anything that can fit the narrative does. This lens is empowering while at the same time debilitating. I’m convinced that Wilson genuinely believes that her car was broken into by police yet her conviction in the face of no evidence nor any rational reason for authorities to rifle through her stuff is no more compelling than any other random conspiracy theory. Her sincerity is no more the truth than the president’s conviction that mail-in ballots are fraud.

We’ve all read about the existence of confirmation bias, the strange phenomenon that posits we believe improbable things that fit what we want to believe so one can’t fault those so ingrained in the attention and power of their own victimhood narrative. We all know one of those people, the kind that prove the rule that misery loves company.

I am encouraged that actual victims of harm are receiving more attention and justice. I suppose if a side effect of that authentic reparation is that more and more faux victims come out to complain, gain attention, and become distractions from real harm, it is little more than having to put up with that miserable person seeking attention.

[kamiartist9]

Demand Justice for Jacob Blake!✊🏾 Hold these racist bloody thirsty kkkops accountable! Nobody deserves to be treated so horribly! I’m sick of waking up everyday hearing these terrorists get away with terrorizing BIPOC! This shit needs to end now! Take action now & Remember to vote! Vote in decent human beings who will do the right thing & hold racism accountable! Racism is terrorism & it has no place in this world! Posted @withregram • @domrobxrts #DEMANDJUSTICEFORJACOBBLAKE - i’m sorry i’m posting this late, i just got caught up on all the information. we will get justice, i don’t care what it’s going to take. black lives still matter. make some calls today. - every time i make a post demanding justice i become extremely sad and overwhelmed with emotions. you may feel this way too seeing this, but that doesn’t mean you get to check out. tap in. make calls. our future depends on it. https://www.instagram.com/p/CEUgE6spIZi/?igshid=aotuwr1fl7do

[valejewelry]

We’ve donated to the @aclu and @naacp and we encourage anyone who can to donate to human rights advocacy, civil liberty advocacy, and mutual aid organizations to do so. If you are not in a position to donate, there are plenty of other ways to get involved and help (supporting, listening, educating, reading, learning, protesting, voting). Support a BIPOC business! Please respond with other organizations that you feel need support and we will donate the proceeds from our upcoming IG post to one of those selected. Lastly, please get out there and vote! It is even more critical to use our voices and our votes to engender positive change. Below are the primaries this month, vote in leaders that will demand social justice and fair treatment of all Americans: June 9th West Virginia Georgia North Dakota Nevada South Carolina June 23rd New York Kentucky Virginia June 30th Colorado Utah Oklahoma https://www.instagram.com/p/CA-9uxKj_T5/?igshid=417qzxsw0rgf

[rihkee]

The Bawating Water Protectors (Sault Ste Marie) are coming to Ottawa, on unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin territory, for a four-day long public ceremony. Join our us and support them. This will be a Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ inclusive space. As part of Idle No More - OFFICIAL-  Unsettling Canada 150: A Call to Action, the Bawating Water Protectors from Sault Ste-Marie are coming to Ottawa to tell another story and to reject the upcoming celebrations. Along with a four-day fasting ceremony, from June 28th to July 2nd, sustained programming will also take place in the form of public panels, performance art, workshops, and so much more.   Given that Canada 150 celebrations will be taking place in less than 3 weeks, the organizers of REOCCUPATION are calling on all Nations across Turtle Island  to join us on July 1, 2017 to reoccupy the traditional lands of the Algonquin people by setting up tipis, wigwams, longhouses, or other lodges used by our respective nations on parliament hill. The goal of this call to action is to reaffirm our rightful claim to these lands as the original caretakers of Turtle Island, and to demand the repatriation of the territories that were and are illegally seized by the Canadian state. This is not a celebration of Canada, but assertion of indigenous self-determination and sovereignties over our lives, lands, languages and cultures, among other aspects of living Mino-Bimaadziwin (the good life). We recognize that the colonial legal state of Canada does not and cannot serve indigenous people as agents of our own lives. The inability of the Canadian government to carry out inquiries into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls;  the over representation of indigenous people in the justice system, including unconstitutional imprisonments of land and water protectors; the lack of health and welfare services for indigenous communities; the inability to conform to free, prior, and informed consent surrounding resource extraction, among other things all serve as evidence to Canada’s inability or unwillingness to work with Indigenous nations on a ‘nation-to-nation’ basis. This grassroots movement requires your help so we urge you to join us on July 1st to reoccupy the capital of the illegal settlement of Canada. How can you help and support? See below: DONATE: https://www.youcaring.com/bawatingwaterprotectors-843534 FORM TO HOST WATER PROTECTORS: https://goo.gl/forms/Hp5IeNsiT0GDBese2 FORM TO FEED THE WATER PROTECTORS: https://goo.gl/forms/EnFbGBGtNbEQyoBu2 FORM TO JOIN THE INDIGENOUS YOUTH ART TEAM: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1BbKU5-nPaCli_s9xTfprvabWgdnDBN-HIW5gnYcYFxw/viewform?edit_requested=true We ask that you, your community, and your organization join us to send a loud and clear message to Canada and the world that we will no longer accept the colonial system of dispossession, expropriation, and oppression that Canada has imposed on us for the past 150 years. CALL FOR SPEAKERS AND PERFORMERS: (Indigenous 2S/LGBTQIA, women and femme voices are going to be prioritized in collaboration with the anti-colonial stances woven into this initiative) Public Schedule: (subject to variation - non-scheduled time might also have speakers and activities): If you would like to join any meal, please note that Water protectors will be fed first and we ask you to bring your utensils and tupperware :). If you join them, we can clean and re-use your tupperware to serve you food. Bring a reusable water bottle. June 28th: 1PM Water Protectors arrive in Ottawa. We invite you to prepare your own signs and banners! 12PM-4PM Accepting Food Donations at 329 Bell Street South 6PM Orientation and Opening Ceremony, Human Rights Monument. All Welcome. 8PM Lighting of the Fire June 29th: 5AM Sunrise Ceremony 9AM Breakfast----- 12PM Outdoor Talk: 'History and Importance of the Chaudiere Falls (Asinabka)' - Lindsay Lambert 1PM Lunch----- 2PM Outdoor Panel: 'Unsettling colonial perspectives: emerging theories and futurism from BIPOC Communites' Hamda Deria is an undergraduate student at Carleton University majoring in Law, with a Minor in Indigenous Studies, and a concentration grounded in Transnational Law and Human Rights. As a Black-Somali Muslim woman living in Canada, her academic profile is deeply rooted in her social realities, personal experiences and violent tensions regarding the racial colonial state and how this may also inform her relationships of resistance with First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities. Kenneth Aliu 6h30PM Dinner----- 6PM Outdoor Panel: 'Water, Gender and the 150th'. Jocelyn Wabano Iahtail is an Ininew Eeyou Eskwayow from the Cree communities of Attawapiskat First Nation and Chisasibi First Nation. John Fox grew up in Wikwemikong FN’s on Manitoulin Island. John is a survivor of the 60s scoop and he has lobbied for the Missing and Murdered Aboriginal women Inquiry. Lynn Gehl. Ph.D., is an Algonquin Anishinaabe-kwe. She is an advocate, artist, and writer and is an outspoken critic of colonial law and policies that harm Indigenous women, men, children, and the land. Elsa Hoover, Algonquin, PhD Student June 30th: 5AM Sunrise Ceremony 9AM Breakfast---- 1PM Lunch---- 2PM Outdoor Panel: 'Land Dispossession and Legal Technologies' Fredrick Stoneypoint, Ojibwe, Sagamok Anishnawbek First Nation, Student in Sociology & Human Rights more speakers to be confirmed 6h30PM Dinner---- 7h00PM-9PM Indoor Panel: 'Cultural Appropriation in Art & Resurgence in Indigenous Art' The Origin, 57 Lyndale Cody Purcell Delilah Saunders Alex Nahwegahbow Victoria Ransom July 1st: 5AM Sunrise Ceremony 7AM-4PM All Day Action! Join for Details. 6PM Feast and Debrief for Protectors and Participants. Location to Be Announced on Place. Interested? Contact Us at: TurtleIslandwaterprotectors@gmail.com National Call to Action: https://www.facebook.com/events/193248851194723/