HI IM CALVIN!

A few weeks ago I was at a board game night with some of my old classmates from various mainland European countries. They started talking about how horrible Trump's treatment of immigrants is and how they're so glad to be in Europe where nothing like that is happening right now. I asked them what they thought about the fact that their own governments were complicit in turning the Mediterranean into a mass grave of asylum seekers, and some of them legitimately didn't even know and were surprised to hear that their own governments had enacted policies that caused the deaths of thousands of asylum seekers.

Additional readings:

This post is a few months old now, and the bit about Iceland is now outdated, because Alþingi (the Icelandic parliament) passed the bill approving the detention center for asylum seekers. It will be legal to handcuff and detain children there.

And let us never forget which country was the template for all of the current wave of immigration detention, both in Europe, and in the US - that's right, it's good ol' Australia! We've had immigration detention since 1992 (installed, one should note, by Labor PM Paul Keating), with no limits for how long you can be detained for. We then created a new form of visa for "genuine" asylum speakers called a "temporary protection visa" - which, you might note from the name, had the basic idea that as soon as your country no longer wanted to kill you, back you go! We started outsourcing our detention centres to other pacific islands like Nauru, all the better to stop folks from turning up and protesting at the detention centres!

Girls just wanna have fun

Late for an appointment this morning because my beautiful son child stole a wrapped and bagged bologna sandwich containing roughly 300% his maximum safe sodium intake out of the lunch box in my backpack while I was on the shitter and refused to spit it out

orange bear puppet: i think tutter’s looking a little tired, don’t you?