“The songs of Goodbye, Babylon take place on the dim periphery of Boston, in a twilight New England of crumbling millyards and foggy coastal marshes; in the incandescent, rain-soaked streets of faded towns; on blustery beaches in autumn, in the cathedral forests of summer, in the raw and haunted spring; in the falling dark of winter and the midnight hush of hometown dive bars.

This is a New England of myth, where the cycle of rain and the ancient flow of water erode everything, making even the most recent history feel primeval. It’s a New England of memory, where ancient roots grow through city sidewalks, ghosts gather in the architecture and the farmers’ fields grow gravestones.

But it’s a real place, too; our home - where we live, work and sing our songs.

There’s not much of a musical tradition out here anymore. Finding ourselves at the end of an era of history, standing on the threshold of an unfamiliar new world, we’ve picked up whatever scraps of song we can find. On Goodbye, Babylon, we’ve gathered echoes of folk songs, barroom waltzes, psychedelic dirges, church singing and the the ramshackle fanfares of high school marching bands. We’ve gathered stories of our lives, our love, our fears and forebodings at the end of the days of grace.”

happy butch appreciation day to all my fellow butches!

when I was teaching an art class I had one of the kids I was teaching come up to me and ask if I was an adult tomboy and then proceeded to tell me about her friend who is also a tomboy and I thought that was quite possible the cutest thing a kid ever said to me and also describes my gender pretty well since kids don’t tend to know about butch as an identity

terfs fuck off

"anaconda armor"

"cyclops cell"

"dick detention"

"joystick jail"

because you could be actually fucking dying. because if one day you wake up and you misunderstood something - you could lose your job, and nobody is hiring, and nobody is paying, and nobody takes people like you, and that job you want hasn’t gotten back to you. and what exactly are you going to do without insurance? good luck with those meds. you should have thought of that before being a person.

so it’s not just that you forgot to CC someone on an email, it’s that if you don’t have this job, you can’t afford rent. it’s not that you misread a comment, it’s that if you get fired, you will be in massive amounts of unpayable debt. it’s not that you are bad at your job, but here are the stakes as they have been decided for you: be perfect or fucking die. like, literally, die. that is how much safety net you have: none.

it’s not burnout, technically. but you literally just had two typos in your work, and you’re already picturing the ending. you want to throw up & curl up & make it all go away. it is two typos. if he decides he is mad at you, you lose literally everything.

your mom says that you seem stressed. the thing is that you have never known a job that isn’t stressful. welcome to capitalism. there is no other road, only this one. what the fuck is a career. you come here, and we hold your life against the barrel of a gun, and somewhere someone is spinning the chamber and pulling. eventually the bullet will come.

you live in a mugging. your boss owns three cars and has four kids. you worry about having enough to feed your dog. good luck. beg for forgiveness. CC the right people next time and be grateful, kid. somebody has it worse than you. someone, probably, has it worse than you. so what if you can’t sleep or eat or focus. your work chat sound literally makes you panic. you had to change the sounds of computer notifications so you’d stop having such an upset stomach.

welcome to the real world! the rat race! the dog eat dog circus!

Bathroom accessibility is also having hooks to hang medical equipment.

I went to Walmart today and none of the bathroom stalls had hooks for my feeding tube backpack. Not even the disabled stall. They were intentionally removed by the store.

These hooks are important because we shouldn’t have to put our equipment on the floor and risk god knows what by contaminating our backpacks in the public bathroom.

Image description: Tags from @evil-queens-rule reading:

#also stop turning off the outlets in the bathrooms!! #sometimes I need a place to plug in my nebulizer machine and the bathroom is like the most private place to do it #but if all the outlets are turned off fuck u /end image description

Mariame Kaba, Everything Worth Doing is Done with Other People

[reblogging this ‘cause it can’t be said too often]

Did you know that in post-mortem examinations there is zero correlation between weight and levels of arteriosclerosis and related diseases found?

Did you know that people with an overweight BMI have the longest life expectancy, that those with an “ideal” and an “obese” have about the same life expectancy, and that being “underweight” raises mortality rates more than being “morbidly obese”?

Did you know that losing weight and then gaining it back is worse for your heart than remaining at the weight you started consistently?

Did you know that 95% of people who lose weight do gain it back, and there has never been a single documented weight loss program that has been demonstrated to keep the weight off for five years or more in the majority or even a significant minority of people? Like, telling people to lose weight isn’t much use if we don’t know HOW to make that happen.

Like I have read The Obesity Myth by Paul Campos and Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata and Big Fat Lies by Glenn A Gaesser (Ph.D!) And Fat!So? and several other books that I don’t own and so don’t remember all of their names I spent like four years reading every single study coming out and looking at the methodology and noting which ones had huge holes or terrible methods and which didn’t (the holes were almost always in the pro-weight-loss studies) and like

Big Fat Lies has 27 pages of bibliography. 27 pages worth of scientific citation. The book content itself is only 197 pages. That’s a page of references for every 7 pages of book. Reading the book is just reference after reference and study after study. Most of these doctors (like Linda Bacon, author of Health at Every Size) started out the same way. They wanted to use the scientific method to find a real weight loss program or health solution that worked and could be proven to work, and so studied everything they could about weight and fitness only to find out that we didn’t need weight loss in the first place. That all the studies calling for it were lacking or nonexistent. That weight and underlying metabolic health have very little relation. That the history of our relationship with health and obesity has little basis in fact and a LOT of basis in capitalism, politics, and fashion. No, really, the association between weight and health was first proposed by insurance companies looking for ways to charge people more by claiming risk. They also charged tall and short people more. And people with different skin colors. When they got in trouble for charging people for things they had no control over and had no bearing on their health, they set out to prove that weight was controllable and that fat was unhealthy to make money. 

These are also a lot of the same people who went on to invent the President’s fitness program, so if you went to public school you probably already hate them. 

As evolutionary scientists like E.O. Wilson, David Sloan Wilson, and Martin Nowak have argued, group selection is a more influential force than individual selection in evolution. Collective social structures profoundly influence and constrain our individuality. Biologically speaking, it is even a bit difficult to talk about 'individuals' as if they were separate from 'nature.' Human beings could not function without millions of bacteria living in their guts, or without being immersed within a biodiverse ecosystem of living organisms. Yet much of economics remains locked into the mindset of atomistic, acquisitiveness individuals engaged in mechanical, cause-and-effect transactions in the service of capital accumulation. There is relatively little attention to the holistic, dynamic, non-linear dimensions of living systems. The notions of human aliveness and nonmarket values are scanted.

The idea of 'rational self-interest' is now so thoroughly embedded in modern life that the ontological frame is considered self-evident. However, as economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis show in their book A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution, human beings have a rich evolutionary history of developing social systems and institutions to support 'strong reciprocity' and collective interests. The significant work of the late Elinor Ostrom, too, helped demonstrate the profound importance of social collaboration as a powerful economic force. Alas, despite her receiving the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009 for her pioneering work, the discipline has not really embraced her perspectives more fully.

This is a shame. Ostrom’s work has been a bellwether for many social movements that reject the stunted social vision and imagination of standard economics. In my own work as a commons scholar, I have seen scores of self-organized commons function extremely well. They use peer-governance and -provisioning to give people greater control over their lives, and in more satisfying, humane ways than labor markets. One need only look to such phenomena as open-source software, cosmo-local production (globally shared design knowledge + local physical production), open-access scientific publishing, data commons, WiFi and civic infrastructures managed as commons, cooperatives, community land trusts, community-supported agriculture, agroecology, indigenous land stewardship, cohousing, participatory budgeting in government, and much else."