⭐️ Star ⭐️

I repeat:

DO NOT VOTE FOR THE PARTY NAMED "FREE PALESTINE" AT THE NOVEMBER ELECTIONS.

This is NOT a legit party.

The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.

The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.

There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.

The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.

I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.

What they did have was a single spare bed in the small, comfortable, quiet, wildly expensive facility for girls with eating disorders.

They asked each of the young women currently living there if it was acceptable that I might occupy a bed in one of the rooms for a while, just the long weekend while I was waiting for a doctor's evaluation. I hadn't been violent, I had gone with the cops without putting up any fight at all, and I was still and I was small and all those things were sufficient for me to be deemed safe. So up they sent me, to somewhere high in Western Psych, above the smells and sounds of the denser-packed wards, above where the care workers were harried and frustrated, to a gentle space with seven or eight young women in it.

I was five foot three, and I weighed about 115 pounds. I was underweight for my frame, as a fair amount of that weight was martial arts muscle; I would probably have been ten pounds heavier if I were healthy, with the amount of activity I got.

I was at least two inches shorter than pretty much every other young woman there, six or seven inches shorter than one of them, and I had at least thirty pounds on several of them. The tallest was not allowed to walk, she had to sit in a wheelchair and be pushed around, because her condition was so advanced that the motion would undo what good her hard work had done.

And over the course of the four or five days I was there, multiple of them came up to me alone to quietly tell me that I had the *perfect* body, and they wished they could be as skinny as I was. That I needed to live, because I was beautiful, and if they were as beautiful as I was, they wouldn't need to be here.

Their eyes were on me all the time, in the hours that I wasn't sleeping. I spent a lot of time sleeping, and we took our meals separately (I not needing to be monitored while I ate, and not having my food weighed), but we spent a fair amount of time sitting around in the little shared living room space, talking about movies and magazines and books we'd loved, talking about our families. I didn't talk about my family; they didn't pry.

They were all so fucking nice.

And I could have broken any one of them over my narrow knee. They each thought they were bigger than I was.

Their brains lied to them, every time they looked at a mirror. Every time they looked down at their own thighs. What they saw was not what I could see. They had bright, beautiful eyes in dark hollows, and I could count their vertebrae, could see their ribs winging when they breathed, could see the motion of every tendon on the backs of their hands.

They weren't celebrities. They weren't being paid to have particular bodies, nor were they deep in the toxic sea of having strangers take photos of them to sell to gossip rags if they stepped out of doors in old jeans. They had families and loved ones who were doing everything that they could to protect them, to uplift them and help them be healthy. They were just everyday people--a nurse, a couple of students, a couple of recent college grads, a young woman who had decided it was time to really get help because she wanted to be a mother--and still they'd been so injured by the neverending fucking deluge of body-image bullshit that they were dying of it.

1) Set off your smoke alarm or play the sound on your phone (if your home has no smoke alarms, pease get some!)

2) stand BY THE FRONT DOOR to hand out treats

Do this a couple times and then keep it up NO EXCEPTIONS. Accidentally set the alarm off cooking? Treats by the door. Smoke alarm sound on TV? Treats by the door. Changing your smoke alarm batteries twice a year like you’re supposed to? Give them a test run and your pets get treats by the door.

Most dogs and cats will clue in VERY quickly that hearing that specific sound means go to the front door and wait for treats.

If there’s an emergency and even if you leave by another way, you will still know the most likely place your pet(s) is and can direct first responders to help.

That’s IT.

Paid service with no ads: Well, if they're not funding it with ad revenue, they need to charge us something.

Paid service with ads: Well that's bullshit.

The treatment of Aboriginal people to this day is disgusting. It is dehumanising. Jack Sultan-Page, was run over by a white driver who was high on methamphetamine. The man was let off with a slap on the wrist, if even that. Go look up Jack Sultan-Page. He was eight years old. He was murdered in a hit and run by Matthew Alexander, in November of 2014.

In case you needed more reasons to hate the ABC, here is a direct quote from the article, about Matthew Alexander, who murdered an eight year old boy in a hit and run whilst high on illegal drugs:

The article i am citing is titled ‘Darwin driver pleads guilty to hit-and-run death of Jack Sultan-Page’ and can be found through looking it up on the ABC News official website. It was published on 19/6/2015, last updated on 21/7/2015

‘Mr Maley said Alexander was a changed man because of the treatment at Banyan House.

The court also heard Alexander's family visited him at Banyan House and in prison.

"He has an extremely supportive network of family and friends ... They clearly have faith in this young man," Mr Maley said.

"They are deeply distressed and upset that a young child was killed in this accident," he said.

Alexander's sister cried in court.

She later told the ABC she supported and loved her brother.’

We are not angry enough.

Here is another quote from a different article, titled ‘Mathew Alexander sentenced over hit-and-run death of Jack Sultan-Page fined over separate charges’, published on 22/7/2015

‘Alexander pleaded guilty to the possession and use of cannabis and methamphetamine.

In his sentencing remarks, Magistrate John Neill stressed the drugs charges were not responsible for the death of Jack Sultan-Page, although they related to the same day as the hit-and-run death.

He fined Alexander $2,090 for the five charges but noted the amount was lower than it might have been because Alexander had shown himself to be committed to drug rehabilitation.

Mr Neill said a report from the drug rehabilitation centre Banyan House was "glowing" about Alexander's attitude and efforts and said such a positive report was "quite unusual".

Alexander's lawyer Peter Maley said "the community can have full comfort that this young man has done all he can to get off drugs and turn his life around".’

WE ARE NOT ANGRY ENOUGH.

His full charges were as follows, quoted from the same article as my last quotation;

A Darwin man sentenced yesterday over the fatal hit-and-run of an eight-year-old boy pleaded guilty to separate drug and dangerous driving charges and was fined $2,090.

Matthew Alexander was yesterday handed an 18-month suspended sentence and six months home detention after a hit-and-run last November that killed Palmerston boy Jack Sultan-Page.’

A 23 year old man can MURDER a defenceless 8 year old indigenous boy while under the influence of illegal drugs, and get LENIENCY in a FINE for MURDERING A CHILD because he ‘showed commitment to rehabilitation’.

There is NO amount of drug rehabilitation that will bring those parent’s child back.

There is no amount of drug rehabilitation and 18 month suspended sentence that will make Jack Sultan-Page come home after he was left to die by a murderer.

There is no amount of drug rehabilitation, 18 month suspended sentence, and 6 months home detention that will undo the trauma that Jack’s peers endured after he was murdered.

There is no amount of drug rehabilitation, 18 month suspended sentence, 6 months home detention, and a $2,090 fine that will undo the fact that a little boy with hopes and dreams and aspirations and friends and family was killed.

I’ll say it again in case you didn’t hear it the first few times.

WE ARE NOT NEARLY ANGRY ENOUGH.

Here’s your other daily reminder that the ABC only cares about getting funded. They do not care about normal people. They do not care about truth and integrity. They don’t care about empathy. They are appealing to whatever party will fund them. I recommend also watching the videos made by Australian journalist friendlyjordies (that’s the guy who got firebombed, if the name is ringing a bell. MoistCr1TiKaL/penguinz0 made a video about it) about the ABC.

We are told countless times that we are too invested because we don’t scroll past videos and articles and stores detailing the horrific crimes committed against Aboriginal people TO THIS DAY. But what gives us the right to scroll past? What makes us so important that we shouldn’t hear these stories? Why do we get the privilege to ‘scroll past’ when something upsets or discomforts us, yet the victims of these atrocities need to live and die with it?

All the information I used here is fully available to the public. Please go and research this on your own terms. Don’t shape your thoughts and biases on me, an internet person.

Made this post about 15 minutes after the repair guy who fixed the pump on my dishwasher packed up his tools and left, as the dishwasher was whirring along doing my dishes from that morning.