Blazer of cat photos, not trails.

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[A]t the height of the US prison-building boom in the 1990s, a prison opened in rural America every fifteen days. John Eason studies this phenomenon in detail, documenting the proliferation of prison building in rural America - specifically in poor, rural, southern towns - for the past fifty years. During this time the total number of prison facilities tripled […].

Moreover, Eason found that from 1980 to 2006, nearly 28 percent of all rural prisons were built in just three southern states, Texas, Georgia, and Florida. […] Hurling also offered a nuanced, regional examination of southern rural prison town archipelagoes. She followed the development of four such archipelagoes […] [including] in the West Texas Plains (one out of every five new rural prisons in the 1990s opened in Texas, the state with by far the largest number of new prisons) […].

Anne Bonds, citing examples from the Pacific Northwest, has documented arguments by local community leaders that prison building is the answer to poverty and resultant decline in social service provision needs. […] Williams, for example, studied the development of the thirteen-prison archipelago in Florence County, Colorado, starting back in 1871. He shows that state and local governments depended on the lobbying “myth” that prisons would bring economic development in order to find communities willing to accept new prisons, even though the profits of those prisons have accrued to industries outside of the local community. […]

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It is not only prisoners’ labor that is increasingly commodified by work programs on the inside; their bodies and lives themselves can be bought and sold as well. With prisoners, in addition to laboring for abhorrently low wages on the inside of prisons, the profits of which accrue to the state and private entities, many local and regional economies depend on the income generated from the “purchase” of incarcerated bodies from other jurisdictions to continue filling carceral sites that were built during the 1980s and 1990s construction boom. 

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Hunger is getting worse. Illness is spreading faster. Survival is becoming harder every single day.

We are living in unbearable conditions, insects everywhere, rats around us, disease spreading, and almost no access to medicine or basic needs.

My father is still fighting his illness. He needs urgent treatment but even the simplest medication is out of reach.

We are doing everything we can but it’s no longer enough.

We urgently need your humanity and your support.

Donate and share.

📌📌📌 Fundraiser vetted (#167 by el-shab-hussein & nabulsi), But we created a new GoFundMe page because GoFundMe suspended the beneficiary’s account on the platform, which put us in a very difficult situation.

Available as a tank top, a regular t-shirt and a fitted t-shirt. https://topatoco.com/collections/wtnv/products/cpb-wtnv-painispain

Some things you can do to save space include growing plants in stackable towers rather than flat rows. Not everything can grow this way, but growing herbs or even strawberries or some kinds of tomatoes in them can save a lot of space. Bonus points if you can get some vertical vining plants like beans or tomatoes to grow up the sides of them to maximize the space used.

Hanging planters can also be used for things like tomatoes, herbs, some berries, etc. The people who grew up watching TV in the 2000s may remember ads for the topsy-turvy tomato planter. I can’t vouch for the effectiveness of them, but it may be good inspiration for creative DIY hanging planters.

Many people don’t seem to know this (to be fair, it’s not very intuitive), but small melons and gourds can be grown vertically on a trellis. You will need pantyhose or something else that can act like a sling for when the fruit gets large enough, and you’ll also want to make sure the trellis is very sturdy. Here is an example of a watermelon growing on a trellis, with squash growing in the background:

Other good options that require a bit more DIY are hydroponics towers and walls. It’s basically just a series of pipes with holes for plants to grow out of. The only downside is they will require very regular fertilization and supplementation with other micronutrients that are essential for plant growth, because the plants are typically grown in either a non-nutritious medium like coconut coir or nothing at all.

Planter walls are the next step down, basically just building shelves with pots in them to fill with soil. Put these on a wall that gets good morning sun and some afternoon sunlight for best results. These and hydroponics both also have the advantage of being able to hook up to your gutters so that rainwater will go towards watering your plants rather than just being wasted.

If you want to get really fancy, aquaponics is the next step up. With aquaponics, you create a system that circulates water between plants and a tank full of fish. The fish waste provides fertilizer for the plants, and the plants help filter out the waste so the water stays cleaner. I’ve heard they’re a bit tricky to establish, but once you find the right balance, all you’ll need to do is feed the fish. This has the added bonus of providing a source of fish for people who can’t eat things like nuts and legumes but need protein. Here is a link to an article explaining what aquaponics is, how it works, and how it differs from hydroponics.

Most of us can’t do it ever even if we use all our space perfectly. Some of us can do it after years of building those skills, and we might still have bad years. And in the end, what does it get us? Self-reliance is a right-wing preppers dream but it isn’t what we should be aiming for.

If we’re thinking about collective survival and we’re looking at food as part of that survival, there’s two things that work:

Start a community garden. Bring together the resources, time and skills by getting together in a big group. 

Or learn to grow a few crops really well and share them with all your friends. 

If you have a lot of nice soil and can do physically exhausting work? Potatoes, pumpkins, zucchini.

If you have a green house? SOOOO many tomatoes. Fruits that require warmth. etc.

Are you a gardening nerd with time and an interest in learning complicated plants? Take on the challenges like broccoli, cauliflower and depending on your needs, location and options, maybe cannabis? Or build a permaculture garden if that’s your thing.

If you have a balcony or window sill or prefer to do light work in high mobile planters due to limited space or mobility? Leafy greens, herbs, radishes, carrots, maybe a small tomato plant.

Peppers are perennials and we talked about bucket planting for those so you can bring them inside if your winters get cold to overwinter and bring them back out in the spring.

In learning how to garden and grow produce it helps to start small and scale up year to year. Try new varieties and planters and spots in the garden, find ways to allow things to volunteer in the spring (leaving peppers, basil and other plants to cast seeds directly). You’ll learn and grow so much, even if much of it isn’t edible.

Remember to grow flowers too - not just because they are pretty but they will attract pollinators who will help your produce grow too! Sunflowers grow great in the US so don’t sleep on those babes.

I want to know which native plants have specialist bee species that depend on them. I have wanted to know this for a while. A year ago, I found this massive list of all the pollen specialist bees of the western US:

I am going through this list, first identifying which ones actually have record in Washington (and removing the rest), then which have a record in western Washington, or at least west of the Cascades but in B.C. or Oregon, and then copying the list from their specific page about the plants that they use.

I kinda have a suspicion that this has already been done somewhere by someone, but I wasn't able to find it.

The step after determining which species are native to west of the Cascades and which species they use is then to make a sheet, organized by plant, of which bee species use what plants.

Then, I'm gonna take that list to my bosses and be like, yo, we should plant all of these and make little educational signs about native plants and native bees and native peoples and how they were traditionally cared for pre-colonization and how settlers came in and took over and changed how the land was treated and how we can help the plants, bees, and peoples survive and thrive going into the future.

Though this species list also brings up a concern of mine. It lists Helianthus gracilentus put into the cashew family, while properly listing the other Helianthus species in the Asteraceae family. I also saw a bee named after Berberis, aka the genus Oregon grape was moved into, but the host genus was listed as Vitis, aka, actual grapes. Which I'm pretty sure don't grow anywhere throughout that bee's range. I'm not actually stopping and reading all the plant species at this point, but still, definitely some errors in this data set.

The list of sources is long:

Records of native pollen specialist bees captured or observed foraging flowers of host plants were compiled from Discover Life (Ascher & Pickering 2020), peer reviewed articles (Bouseman & LaBerge 1978; Brooks & Griswold 1988; Cane 2018; Cockerell 1916, 1919; Cresson 1878; Daly 1973; Danforth 1994; Donovan 1977; Griswold 1993; Griswold & Miller 2010; Hurd et al. 1980; LaBerge 1963, 1967, 1969, 1971a, 1971b, 1973, 1977, 1980, 1985, 1986, 1989; LaBerge & Bouseman 1970; LaBerge & Ribble 1972, 1975; Lanham, 1981; Linsley & MacSwain 1958; McGinley 2003; Michener 1939; Michez & Eardley 2007; Minckley et al. 1994, 2000; Moldenke 1976, 1979; Parys et al. 2018; Portman, Neff, & Griswold 2016; Pow 2019; Provancher, 1895; Ribble 1974; Robertson 1926, 1928, 1929; Rozen 1958, 1992; Snelling 1983; Thorp 1969; Timberlake 1951, 1954, 1956, 1958, 1960, 1962, 1964, 1968, 1975, 1980; Wright 2018), technical bulletins (Danforth 1996; Grigarick & Stange 1968; Hurd & Michener 1955; Krombein et al. 1979; LaBerge 1967; Mitchell 1960, 1962; Ribble 1968; Stephen 1954; Thorp & LaBerge 2005; Timberlake 1953), and personal communications.

Because I think my goal with this is to identify the bees that are the most specialist, that have the narrowest range of host plants and thus, to my mind, are at greatest risk of decline/extinction.

One the other hand, just because a bee uses white clover, doesn't mean that that is a great choice nutritionally speaking, for that bee. It may be something it's been forced to do because other plants have become unavailable.

I have decided though, that if the plant doesn't occur west of the Cascades, I will not include it. I'm gonna use iNaturalist to determine that (I mean, if it's one I don't recognize), and double check with the Washington Wildflower Search map.

List of hosts: Nope, not even one.

Me: Ah. Well at least you're cute

I think she means that radical feminism theorized gender as a social phenomenon in resistance to bioessentialism, which is actually true (although nuanced).

Radical feminists did challenge the idea that gender objective and innate, arguing that much of, if not all, gender in society was socially constructed for the sake of oppressing women. Many radical feminists wanted a society where gender was completely abolished (although only after women as a class could unite and defeat patriarchy). Andrea Dworkin, a very popular theorist amongst radical feminists and anti-sex-work advocate, wrote in favor of sex reassignment surgery (and actually said it should be community funded).

However, many radical feminists (such as Janice Raymond) came to view trans women and men as supporting gender-the-social-construct. Trans women and trans men were seen as adhering to the idea that stereotypes around gender were real and innate. Radical feminists fixate on biological sex as an extension of seeing gender as socially constructed; the argument is that "womanhood" is a tool of the patriarchy used to oppress females, who are bonded together by their shared biological and social reality as a sex and oppressed group. Trans women seemed, to them, to promote the idea that the identity of women was reducible down to dresses and makeup and breasts (thus threatening a sex-based class uprising), and trans men seemed to promote to women that they could escape the burden of female oppression by rejecting the sisterhood believed to be necessary to defeat patriarchy, and attempting to join it.

Even Andrea Dworkin's trans-supportive statements reflect a belief that the categories of "female" and "male" are still real, and also that under an ideal, androgynous society, transsexuals will not be affirmed in their gender identities but rather transsexuality will stop meaningfully existing:

The discovery is, of course, that “man” and “woman” are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male and female both. The discovery is inescapable: We are, clearly, a multisexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete. [...] I have made this distinction . . . in order to enable me to say something very simple: that while the system of gender polarity is real, it is not true. It is not true that there are two sexes which are discrete and opposite, which are polar, which unite naturally and self-evidently into a harmonious whole. It is not true that the male embodies both positive and neutral human qualities and potentialities in contrast to the female who is female, according to Aristotle and all of male culture, “by virtue of a certain lack of qualities.” And once we do not accept the notion that men are positive and women are negative, we are essentially rejecting the notion that there are men and women at all. In other words, the system based on this polar model of existence is absolutely real; but the model itself is not true. [...] There is no doubt that in the culture of male-female discreteness, transsexuality is a disaster for the individual transsexual. Every transsexual, white, black, man, woman, rich, poor, is in a state of primary emergency . . . as a transsexual. There are three crucial points here. One, every transsexual has the right to survival on his/her own terms. That means that every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions. This is an emergency measure for an emergency condition. Two, by changing our premises about men and women, role-playing, and polarity, the social situation of transsexuals will be transformed, and transsexuals will be integrated into community, no longer persecuted and despised. Three, community built on androgynous identity will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disappear, the phenomenon of transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes of sexual identity and behavior.

Ultimately, radical feminism shifted increasingly towards bioessentialism often as a result of frustration and exhaustion with the fight against patriarchy, and constantly raising awareness of the violence done by males to females. Many radical feminists were socialists and involved in other radical movements, and were dealing with misogyny in those spaces, leading to a general sense that women had to place their own oppression above all others in order to ever achieve justice. Their major contribution to feminism, "the personal is political," also meant seeing society in general as having a "male culture" where women were constantly suppressed, and that women needed to develop their own culture as a class - and their own spaces, free of men.

And when that is your focus, no matter how much theory you write or read about gender being a construct and males and females being equal and the abolition of gender... you need to be able to divide males from females. When you are still forming a sociocultural identity around sexual characteristics and what you feel symbolically represents those characteristics, you are just doing gender again. And I hope its easy to see how, especially amongst white middle class cis women, especially with a focus on porn and sexual violence and the Penis Of It All, how this critique of gender as a social construct failed to escape bioessentialism.

I honestly don't really quibble with her claim that transfeminism owes a lot of theoretical groundwork to radical feminism. Radical feminism did genuinely contribute a lot to feminism overall, bad and good, and no one should ignore that. But I think transfeminism, properly done, is radical in and of itself, having moved on from the place we were in the 70s. Me personally, my goal for a post-patriarchal world is not necessarily that gender will be abolished, but that social constructs in general will not be reified (treated and believed to be objectively real) like they are now. I hope that, with the material and ideological structures that keep us oppressed removed and new ones focused on justice implemented, we can have our little human games with symbols and feelings and enjoy them without believing they control our lives and are weaponized against each other out of greed.

And, ultimately, if anyone can make trans radical feminism work in a way that meaningfully fixes its problems especially with gender polarity, I do not think it is Talia "calls other trans women straggots" Bhatt. In my opinion, the kind of "trans radical feminism" we need is one which places intersex and nonbinary people at the heart, not in terms of "being the most oppressed" but rather because the next thing feminism needs to fundamentally reckon with on the gender level is letting go on the "gender polarity" and the need to base feminism around a woman- or female-identity and intrinsic nature, which can also then open feminism up far more to cis men and lead the way for a multi-gender resistance to kyriarchy.

I highly recommend Ellen Willis' essay "Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicals" (accessible on JSTOR). She herself was a radical feminist at one point and goes over the history of the ideology in detail, and how it ended up driving away so many feminists who otherwise identified strongly with the "radical" part.

The oppression of women being the most fundamental, oldest, and pervasive form of oppression, and resistance to this oppression must be placed before all else

The root of women's oppression is the patriarchal system itself, particularly rigid sex roles, the nuclear family, and biological division of labor

Men, the dominant political class, maintain power over women not just for material and economic gain, but "psychological ego satisfaction"; men gain something psychologically from oppressing women, and it is in fact this male ego need that leads to the material exploitation, not the other way around

Use of "consciousness-raising" to communally connect personal experiences to political structures (the personal is political)

Rather than seeking legal rights within current system, the ultimate goal of feminist is to abolish sex roles and dismantle patriarchy entirely on an institutional and social level

Liberal feminism is defined by seeking equal status for women within the capitalist imperialist system, especially through achieving legal rights (this is not to say other forms of feminism do not see legal rights as important/helpful, but liberal feminism sees liberation as stopping there). This is the dominant form of feminism in the world today as it was adopted by many "progressive" capitalist nations. I would argue that liberal feminism is partially to blame for much of the backlash to feminism we have seen over the past few years, as it is ultimately pretty toothless to capitalist white supremacist patriarchy due to its need to "play by the rules" and avoid anything too fundamentally challenging to society.

Marxist / socialist feminism is class-centric and sees patriarchy as an extension of working class exploitation. Women's oppression is seen through the lens of labor exploitation, particularly domestic and reproductive labor, and the idea that women can meaningfully experience liberation under capitalism is rejected, as working-class women having equal status with working-class men will still be oppressed. Importantly, many Marxists / socialists have historically seen women's liberation as coming directly from establishing communism, which many have criticized rightly as failing to challenge patriarchal attitudes in leftist spaces and seeing feminism as a "distraction" from the "real issue" of class.

Black & intersectional feminism emphasizes understanding women's oppression, specifically that of Black women, as multifaceted and resulting from intersecting identities & forms of oppression. The Combahee River Collective was a direct response to the whiteness of radical feminism, as well as the bourgeois attitude of a major Black feminist organization, challenging the idea that class and racial and gender oppression can ever be meaningfully separated and demanding that Black working class women (particularly lesbians, who historically were excluded from much major feminist movements) be centered as the most vulnerable rather than placed on the periphery.

A lot of people have distinguished "radical feminism" from "cultural feminism," which is more of the "wombyn divine feminine blood and soil" kind of radical feminism I think people often think of, as opposed to the earlier radical feminist theorists who were more explicitly critical of gender as a construct and called for its abolition. Cultural feminism placed the gender abolitionist goals on the backburner and heavily emphasized bioessentialism and the idea that there are innate values and traits belonging to women and men, and that feminism should be about viewing "women's values" as superior to "men's values" and even separating socially from men entirely.

While many early radical feminists disagreed with cultural feminism, its important to understand that cultural feminism came about because of how radical feminism went about critiquing gender. I would argue radical feminism tried to critique gender's construction but, without doing so from a trans and intersex perspective, meant they remained trapped in cissexism and intersexism and fixated on biology and the idea of objective sex, which allowed for the cultural feminist idea of "women's culture" to become so dominant. Shulamith Firestone, a radical feminist writer, directly stated that women's oppression was based in the biology of reproduction.

Radical feminism also was built up by middle class white cis women, and so a fundamental part of their theory was organizing all women (or nearly all women) along the lines of sex, assuming that all women had basically the same experiences and often heavily downplaying the role of race and class. That + their belief that you can simply replace gender with sex and escape the social construction, that you can say womanhood is made up but that femaleness is real and the basis of "true" feminist identity, directly paved the way for cultural feminism, even as there were radical feminists who disliked how their theory was being used.

This is why I feel that transfeminism, while certainly built on the shoulders of radical feminism, does not need to "return" to its ideas, especially when we just end up recreating the exact same problems that led to radical feminism's failures in the first place. I think the critique of gender and sex born from transfeminism, as well as the critique of capitalism from socialist feminism, and the critique of white and middle-upper class and imperial core feminism from intersectionality, combined can provide so much more useful and timely guidance than reheating Janice Raymond's nachos but with trans women included and trans men... still seen as class traitors loyal to the patriarchy who fundamentally seek privilege at the expense of women

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Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?

The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!

This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.

Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:

Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or

Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.

The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.

The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).

Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.