Mohammed has been putting so much work into vetting fundraisers. Meanwhile his family has been forced to hide in destroyed buildings from tanks that patrol thru neighborhood. Please please help them get funds to relocate and buy necessary supplies to survive. This is a time sensitive urgent request

-Fred Hampton was a black activist from Chicago – an extraordinary speaker, youth organizer for the NAACP. 

-He joined the Black Panthers and shone so brightly that he was made chair of the Chicago chapter when he was only 20.

-He founded the Rainbow Coalition, which brought together Black and Latino activists and radical anti-poverty Catholics.  He forged an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them make peace and work for social change.

-In 1967, when he was just 19, Hampton was identified by the FBI as a “radical threat.” The FBI tried to subvert his activities in Chicago, sowing disinformation to get the groups he’d drawn together to distrust each other, and getting an FBI plant next to him as a bodyguard.  

-(This is part of an illegal FBI program called COINTELPRO, which aimed to paint black civil rights activists (among others) as violent and threatening.  If you’ve only seen pictures of the Black Panthers as armed and dangerous revolutionaries, and never heard of their children’s breakfast program, their community health clinics, or their “copwatch” patrols, this is why.   It’s because COINTELPRO was a highly successful work of political propaganda.)  

-On December 3, 1969, Hampton taught a political education course at a local church, and then several Panthers gathered at his apartment for a late dinner.  One of them was the FBI plant bodyguard, who drugged Hampton.  

-At 4:45 AM on December 4, a squad of Chicago Police officers and FBI agents with a warrant to search for weapons stormed the apartment. Investigations later showed they fired between 90 and 99 times.  The Panther on security detail, Mark Clark, was holding a shotgun.  He was shot, and the gun went off into the ceiling.  This was the only shot fired by the Panthers. 

-Fred Hampton, in another room, didn’t awaken.  He was shot in his bed.  Twice, in the head, at point-blank range.  He was 21.  

because people don’t have wings, we look for ways to fly

didn’t brush your teeth this morning? forgive your past self and do it now!

woke up at 3am and realize you didn’t brush your teeth before bed? 11pm you was tired, forgive yourself, and just do it now!

“it’s okay” DOES lose helpfulness when you forget that it’s supposed to mean “don’t beat yourself up about mistakes, and don’t let it keep you from doing something different.”

He literally said lesbians didn’t face police violence on the same scale as gay men when that’s just demonstrably untrue. Lesbians, ESPECIALLY butch, GNC, and trans lesbians, faced MASSIVE amounts of police violence AND STILL DO and if he gave a single shit about like. Women as people. Or even just LGBT history in general as he so proclaims to care about, he would know that. I’m going to start beating people to death with copies of Stone Butch Blues until they fucking listen

And I’d really love to know which fucking planet he lives on where lesbians apparently have all this great representation, and where we as lesbians are allowed to write our own stories, because I’m really not seeing that pretty much anywhere in mainstream media. I’m still seeing lesbians portrayed in stereotypical or fetishistic ways, and that’s when I see us portrayed at all. And yes cartoons are great and fine but there is so painfully little lesbian representation written by lesbians geared primarily towards adults.

Petersen grew up hating books. A tomboy, she preferred to play with bugs and climb trees, she said. She found texts assigned at school, like the works of Shakespeare or snatches of Paradise Lost, mostly boring. The only book she remembers enjoying was Edgar Allan Poe’s collected stories, which she appreciated for their special creepiness. That changed about 15 years ago, around the time Petersen’s daughter was born. Petersen had always loved Asian and Middle Eastern culture. When she spotted a novel with two Chinese sisters on the cover in a Ross Dress for Less store, she sat down with it and couldn’t stop reading. She finished the book,“Shanghai Girls” by Lisa See, in a day. As her two children grew up, Petersen, who is a stay-at-home mom, found herself raising a reading family. They each have preferences: Her husband likes science fiction, as does her son. Her daughter prefers fantasies and tales with dragons. And Petersen generally sticks with Asian dramas and histories. Peterson didn’t think about what books were available in schools until two years ago. She had begun attending school board meetings in 2020, first to protest pandemic school closures and then mandatory masking...

so people in the notes are piping up saying "hey! i was a tomboy, and i read!" but that's not the point of that paragraph. it's a clunky descriptor that leads into what she actually does like to read.

so here's the real takeaway from this section...

1) this woman was spurred into attending school board meetings because she was anti-covid-precautions (conspiracy-minded), and at the school board meetings, a few people mentioned books with racy scenes. this made her curious, and lead her into further conspiracy thinking about how books with sexual content are going to lead "kids" into becoming "sexual" in a "bad" way (gross oversimplification, as the books she objects to are aimed at teenagers, who actually are trying to navigate internal and external developments around sex).

2) she has a weird culture fetishization issue going on.

and in a further section of the article, they describe how she has a basement full of books she wants to ban... shelves and shelves of books with RACY CONTENT, bookmarked and indexed with post-it notes.

this is textbook obsession, probably stemming from repression. and it doesn't make any sense. like, what she keeps saying is that the books are super morally bad and no child should have access to them, and yet she maintains a full library of "bad" books with the "bad" parts HIGHLIGHTED! giving her teenage kids like, a "map to immorality"! like even by her own logic, her whole deal doesn't make any sense.

lastly i want to point out that she does something that a lot of conservative puritans do, which is obsess over sex to the point where everything else is downplayed. she is fine with depictions of violence and slavery but wants to ban books that mention genitalia. the things that they outline as being "ok" vs "bad" reveals a lot of cultural subtext about how this country was founded, built, shaped, and is still currently maintained. and THAT is why we should be extra vigilant around these censors. because the shit that they're highlighting is obfuscating their true aims.

--

RENAISSANCE WORLD TOUR

So. I'm in deep shit because Shutterstock has no cancel plan button. Let me explain. Long story short, tried a free trial and tried to cancel after the free month was over. I called, they helped me cancel my account.

And then I got charged. Again.

So I call again. I think it gets cancelled again.

And then I get charged again. And I call again, get it cancelled. Repeat.

Keep in mind, I'm a fucking college student. I don't have much money to begin with. At all. My only money is for testosterone, groceries, and emergencies, and OCCASIONALLY one nice thing every like. 3 or 4 months.

So I email them, after continuously trying to get ahold of them for 8. Months.

And I get this.

Read that closer, folks.

They're charging me for the months worth of trying to cancel, thinking it was fine, and then trying to cancel again, only to be lied to.

Don't use this shit. I thought I was getting a free trials and then was gonna cancel, and instead I've had money charged every 3 months, and then told I have to pay 160 dollars for the shit I already paid for.