cool cool cool

But while you’re campaigning, you can also get started yourself. Composting is dead simple, since it really is just letting stuff rot until it turns into dirt. Guides online tend to get really complex talking about ratios, what not to put in, turning it regularly, keeping it moist, etc - and that stuff will make it happen faster, but rotting is rotting. It’s gonna rot. All you really need is a corner of your yard to throw organic waste onto. No meat or dairy because it stinks like high hell, nothing cooked or salted, but egg shells work, as do most any plant products (including paper/cardboard). Put your waste in one pile until it’s decently large, then start putting it in another pile nearby while you wait for the first one to decompose and turn into rich black (carbon-filled!) soil

Or if you don’t have space or a garden to put the soil in, you can use services like ShareWaste and MakeSoil to connect with others in your area who are already composting. But all this is assuming you don’t already have a municipal program - there may be one that you’ve never heard about! Either way, restoring soil is free and easy and something we can all help with! Get composting!

I've lived in this neighborhood for 20 years, and never seen one here, before.

In less than a decade, I've watched the proliferation of native planting, habitat planting, signs saying an area is for pollinators and no pesticides allowed, fewer and fewer monoculture grass lawns. Better raking and soil health practices. Businesses and schools are installing rain gardens and native plants all over my neighborhood, and it's slowly spilling out into more and more types of neighborhoods.

if you haven't been paying attention to gardens for the past decade you'd never notice it.

But it started slow and now it's speeding up rapidly.

Expectations here are shifting.

Tonight I took a walk at dusk to a park I've been to a thousand times before, where my daughter and I planted replacement trees this arbor day, and there were fireflies everywhere you looked!

It seemed like a lot of them, till I passed a garden near the park on my way home, that was full of native plants. It was absolutely sparkling with fireflies. It was one of those native plant gardens that've gone in in recent years, hitting it's stride and full maturity. Just glittering with this fantastic creature that's in danger of being in decline.

Just a few native gardens, a bit less raking, and not mowing the lawn in May. That's all it takes for a whole little population to thrive.

And there are so many more of these gardens going in now. More every year. Frankly the anti-ICE activity really sped it up over here. And we give each other seeds and seedlings and cuttings and advice to make it go faster. In five years the whole neighborhood will be aglow.

I can't wait till my garden is mature enough for me to sit on my porch and watch them. If I can ever go a year without significant building debris on my yard.

We'll get there. I know we will.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

Don't let fear or feeling doomed stop you. If you're overwhelmed that's okay, but take a break, take a breath, talk to someone about how you're feeling, and continue.

no but you can FORCE it away. use ublock origin and copy paste the blacklist i made into the filters to be able to remove the bullshit AI overview that google forces. it also removes youtube's forced ads (at least until they fix it)

you can also use the ublacklist extension and use this blacklist of AI image generation websites to curate your google image results

I love you Safety Wizard.

If you've committed a crime and a detective gathers everyone involved in the room, especially if he's not actually a detective and is instead a novelist, puzzle-setter, psychic, fake psychic, dog, chess grandmaster, etc. ...

YOU SHOULD NOT CONFESS.

Every year, hundreds of people are put away by non-traditional "detectives" who have either inserted themselves into the case or are working with the police in a dubiously legal capacity as advisor. In 99% of these cases, the murderer gives a full confession even though the evidence against them is circumstantial at best and often requires a long just-so story which can only guess at motive.

If this happens to you, stay quiet, do not attempt to defend yourself or talk your way out of it, only say "I want a lawyer".

Now if you find yourself being investigated by a boy genius, magician's assistant, anthropologist, classics scholar, or philosopher, it's likely that refusing to talk to the police (or investigator with no legal authority) is merely the end of the second act, and by the end of the third act they will have you dead to rights.

YOU SHOULD STILL NOT CONFESS.

Make them take it to court. Force the eccentric detective and his straight-laced police partner to take the stand and explain their methods to a jury of your peers. Have your lawyer look at the chain of custody on the evidence, especially if you believe it to have been handled by someone who has only bumbled into detective work through their natural charm and/or unique set of skills and outsider perspective that come in handy more often than they should.