so evyl speking of þis creatur and of hir wepyng

Hi friends, My close college buddy, someone I have known since we were kids, has cancer. She's been supporting her parents financially, and she's one of the kindest and most artistic souls I have ever known. Right now Allanah is fighting acute myeloid leukemia, and her hospital bills are TITANIC to say the least. Me and our other best friend, Mae, have been doing everything in our power to spread her gofundme. Since Allanah's stay at the hospital, her hospital bills have accumulated to 400,000 pesos. It's 7,779 usd- she hasn't even been at the hospital for a MONTH. Her chemo costs 100,000 pesos per cycle, but she is taking a lot of meds to help keep her immune system strong. Right now Allanah's legs are having complications with infections, and her fever is constant. She needs blood and platelet transfusions almost on the daily. Each platelet transfusion costs 30,000 philippine pesos. It's insane. I want her to feel less scared, I want her to feel that recovery is possible. And right now, the very least that can be done to help keep her mental health strong is for us to continuously boost her gofundme, and to make sure that her treatment is not impossible, and so that she has one less thing to worry about so she can focus on getting stronger.

Allanah has always been the most talented artist in our friend group. I want her to sing and draw again. I want her to feel safe. Please help us keep our friend fighting. It would mean the world and beyond. Thank you for reading this far.

the whole house will be out of work for a week+ including me

pp: @ pandoradarko

vnmo: @ pandorahaven

The Corner of St. Maurice Avenue and Chartres Street, 2007, (human hair, steel wire)

Over a century before we reached the brink of ecological catastrophe, Rabindranath Tagore had a glimpse of where we might be headed. Tagore, an Indian author and cultural reformer who lived during the period of British colonialism, was among the last of a generation able to examine the industrialized world from the outside. He issued one of the earliest and most eloquent warnings about the precarity of a world sustained, like ours today, on the twin pillars of industrial consumption and industrial warfare. On a sea voyage to Japan in 1916, Tagore witnessed an unfathomable event that seems almost mundane to us today: an oil spill. To him, it was a jarring image of an earth destroyed by humanity’s unbridled pursuit of power, now supercharged by the tools of modern science.

[…]

It may not come as a surprise that the largest industrial military in the history of the world is also the single biggest polluter on the planet. A recent study from Brown University’s Costs of War project surfaced this startling fact: The U.S. Department of Defense has a larger annual carbon footprint than most countries on earth. With a sprawling network of bases and logistics networks, the U.S. military is the single biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world aside from whole nation-states themselves. “Indeed, the DOD is the world’s largest institutional user of petroleum and correspondingly, the single largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world,” the report notes. If the Pentagon were a country, it would be the world’s 55th biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. And its main purpose — warfare — is easily its most carbon-intensive activity. Since the present era of American conflicts began with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the U.S. military is estimated to have emitted a staggering 1.2 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere. For comparison, the entire annual carbon emissions of the United Kingdom is roughly 360 million tons.

That massive additional burden on the planet might be justifiable were it all being done in the name of vital national security interests, but the biggest components of the U.S. military’s carbon dioxide footprint have been in wars and occupations that were almost entirely unnecessary. To put it crudely: The U.S. poisoned the planet for vanity projects.

[…]

the United States decided to embark on an endless war and occupation. The costs have been tremendous: The Taliban was revived from near-death, at least 110,000 people have been killed, and the environmental toll has been massive.

In addition to emitting millions of tons of carbon dioxide during the war, the U.S. military footprint contributed more directly to the immediate destruction of the Afghan environment. Deforestation has accelerated amid the chaos of the war and, through trash burning and other means, the U.S. armed forces released toxic pollutants into the air that are blamed for sickening Afghan civilians and causing chronic illnesses among U.S. veterans.

The environmental havoc wreaked by the war in Iraq has been even worse. Not only did the war lead to a spike in carbon dioxide emissions through U.S. military activity, it resulted in the widespread poisoning of the Iraqi environment through the use of toxic munitions and the same so-called burn pits on military bases that were used in Afghanistan. The environment has become so toxic in some places that it has led to elevated rates of cancer, as well as crippling birth defects — terrible individual punishments inflicted on innocent future generations. A British doctor who co-authored two studies on the environmental impact of U.S. military operations in Fallujah said that the city’s population suffers “the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied.

Much of this impact can be blamed on the use of depleted uranium munitions by U.S. forces. Despite vowing to cease their use, a study by the independent monitoring group Airwars and Foreign Policy Magazine found that the military continued to use the toxic munitions during its most recent bombing campaign in Syria.