more pizza, please

Pantanal is the world’s largest freshwater wetland, and it has been on fire due to intentional commercial clearing. from January until the end of August, the fire had already burned an area as large as 12 cities in São Paolo - 18,646 km2 - somewhere near 10-12% of the entire wetland. it is still in flames.

Pantanal is one of the world’s most biologically diverse habitats and ecosystems, home to blue macaw sanctuaries, the largest population of jaguars, and rare amphibious reptiles. specifically the wetland is home to 263 species of fish, 41 species of amphibians, 113 species of reptiles, 463 species of birds, 132 species of mammals (2 of which are exclusive to the region). more important than its ecological importance is the cultural importance as the Pantanal is also home to numerous indigenous quilombola and riverside communities.

less than 5% of the Pantanal are protected by conservation units and the little that is protected is under attack by the agricultural industry and the current presidency. since the start of the fires more than 2 million hectares have already been lost.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

DONATE: Pantanal Relief Fund (close to goal)

DONATE: SOS Pantanal (the website can be viewed in Portuguese, English, or Spanish - choose your lang in the top center of the page)

DONATE: SOS Amazon (the website can be viewed in English or Portuguese - choose your lang in the top right corner)

NOTE: the following petitions are mostly written in Brazilian Portuguese. NOME = Name; SOBRENOME = Surname; TELEFONE CELULAR = Cell phone; DATA DE NASCIMENTO = Birthdate; ASSINE = Sign)

PETITION: Todos pela Amazonia (everyone for the Amazon)

PETITION: Pantanal está queimando (Pantanal is burning)

PETITION: O Pantanal importa! Precisamos acabar com as queimadas! (The Pantanal matters! We need to end the fires!)

see this thread for more donation and petition links

In 1969, a group of children sat down to a free breakfast before school. On the menu: chocolate milk, eggs, meat, cereal and fresh oranges. The scene wouldn’t be out of place in a school cafeteria these days—but the federal government wasn’t providing the food. Instead, breakfast was served thanks to the Black Panther Party.

At the time, the militant black nationalist party was vilified in the news media and feared by those intimidated by its message of black power and its commitment to ending police brutality and the subjugation of black Americans. But for students eating breakfast, the Black Panthers’ politics were less interesting than the meals they were providing.

“The children, many of whom had never eaten breakfast before the Panthers started their program,” the Sun Reporterwrote, “think the Panthers are ‘groovy’ and ‘very nice’ for doing this for them.”

The program may have been groovy, but its purpose was to fuel revolution by encouraging black people’s survival. From 1969 through the early 1970s, the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast for School Children Program fed tens of thousands of hungry kids. It was just one facet of a wealth of social programs created by the party—and it helped contribute to the existence of federal free breakfast programs today.

When Black Panther Party founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the party in 1966, their goal was to end police brutality in Oakland. But a faction of the Civil Rights Movement led by SNCC member Stokeley Carmichael began calling for the uplift and self-determination of African-Americans, and soon black power was part of their platform.

At first, the Black Panther Party primarily organized neighborhood police patrols that took advantage of open-carry laws, but over time its mandate expanded to include social programs, too.

Free Breakfast For School Children was one of the most effective. It began in January 1969 at an Episcopal church in Oakland, and within weeks it went from feeding a handful of kids to hundreds. The program was simple: party members and volunteers went to local grocery stores to solicit donations, consulted with nutritionists on healthful breakfast options for children, and prepared and served the food free of charge.

School officials immediately reported results in kids who had free breakfast before school. “The school principal came down and told us how different the children were,” Ruth Beckford, a parishioner who helped with the program, said later. “They weren’t falling asleep in class, they weren’t crying with stomach cramps.”

Soon, the program had been embraced by party outposts nationwide. At its peak, the Black Panther Party fed thousands of children per day in at least 45 programs. (Food wasn’t the only part of the BPP’s social programs; they expanded to cover everything from free medical clinics to community ambulance services and legal clinics.)

For the party, it was an opportunity to counter its increasingly negative image in the public consciousness—an image of intimidating Afroed black men holding guns—while addressing a critical community need. “I mean, nobody can argue with free grits,” said filmmaker Roger Guenveur Smith in A Huey P. Newton Story, a 2001 film in which he portrays Newton.

Free food seemed relatively innocuous, but not to FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, who loathed the Black Panther Party and declared war against them in 1969. He called the program “potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for,” and gave carte blanche to law enforcement to destroy it.

The results were swift and devastating. FBI agents went door-to-door in cities like Richmond, Virginia, telling parents that BPP members would teach their children racism. In San Francisco, writes historian Franziska Meister, parents were told the food was infected with venereal disease; sites in Oakland and Baltimore were raided by officers who harassed BPP members in front of terrified children, and participating children were photographed by Chicago police.

“The night before [the first breakfast program in Chicago] was supposed to open,” a female Panther told historian Nik Heynan, “the Chicago police broke into the church and mashed up all the food and urinated on it.”

Ultimately, these and other efforts to destroy the Black Panthers broke up the program. In the end, though, the public visibility of the Panthers’ breakfast programs put pressure on political leaders to feed children before school. The result of thousands of American children becoming accustomed to free breakfast, former party member Norma Amour Mtume told Eater, was the government expanded its own school food programs.

The morning of August 10th a massive storm called a derecho plowed through the midwest, devastating Southern Wisconsin, Northern Illinois, and the entire state of Iowa, which is where I live. Iowa was hit the worst. A derecho is basically the equivalent of a hurricane. Our highest recorded wind speed was 112mph.

1/3 of the state lost power, and almost 3 days later, roughly 400,000 people still don't have power. We have approximately 23 million acres of farmland, and approximately 10 million were destroyed by the storm. That's not good at all. Our crops are one of the state's main sources of economic development, and we lost so much.

The light green area inside the circle is all of our damaged crops. We lost a lot of silos and grain bins as well

Outside of our local news stations, there's barely any national media coverage on this. Ive only seen a couple, and the only ones I have seen weren't even that in that depth.

The above screenshot was from today(Aug. 12th, 2020) at 9pm CST. 2 days had passed before either of them wrote anything about it.

We have some cities that are either partly out of power or entirely out of power. One of the worst hit cities was even still recovering somewhat from a F4 tornado that went through it 2 years ago.

Iowa is a disaster zone. I’m missing parts of my roof, probably need a new garage, new windows, new siding. My patio door was literally blown off its hinges.

My small town has no power, because the electrical poles were snapped in half like toothpicks. My parents live in Cedar Rapids, and they are completely cut off from the modern world at this point. They can’t make any phone calls because the cell towers were destroyed.

We are running out of fuel. There are still hundreds of thousands of us without power. Everyone has rancid food sitting in their freezers. People on wells literally have no access to running water. Generators and tarps are almost impossible to find. Banks are closed, and businesses aren’t taking debit/credit cards. The only way for most of us to charge our phones is to sit in our vehicles with the engine running.

We NEED aid.

This is still going on. It’s 8/15 and about 150,000 households are still without power, including almost 60% of Linn County which has the 2nd biggest city in the state. See those big streaks on the satellite image? Two of them pass directly through major cities.

An old, decrepit laundromat gets replaced by an upscale bakery? And people are mad? It’s not that the poor hate organic vegan cupcakes, it’s that most of us don’t have a way to do laundry in our own home.

Run-down corner stores replaced by hand-made designer clothing boutiques? We don’t hate your eco-fabric shawl, but I can’t eat that for dinner after work like I could have a can of beans I grabbed from that corner store when I don’t have time to take the bus to the real grocery store after work.

What gentrification brings in and of itself is not typically bad, it’s that gentrification brings institutions of leisure and pleasure and makes it so that the poor have to go farther out of their way for basic necessities. It turns low-income living spaces into local tourist attractions. It can even create food deserts by putting restaurants, grocery stores, etc. in that the majority of the lower class cannot afford.

it  is  a  real  thing.

“It’s not a Pinocchio for all the family,” he said of his story, set in 1930s Italy. So is it a political film? “Of course. Pinocchio during the rise of Mussolini, do the math. A puppet during the rise of fascism, yes, it is,” said the filmmaker.

SIGN ME THE FUCK UP.

To put it another way, you wouldn’t argue that Doris from the DMV is “spending taxpayer money” when she spends some of her salary on a pedicure and claim it’s the equivalent of a presidential golfing trip, or that a soldier buying a case of beer with his salary is a waste of tax money. Because you are paying them for the job they did.

In other words, it’s not fucking taxpayer money anymore.

It is, however, still taxpayer money when it is part of an account set aside for expenses incurred in the execution of one’s duties, and the President uses it to pay himself for taking vacations, and to pay himself again for the taxpayer-provided security detail.

And even if I were to play your stupid false equivalence game: At $300 per console and a game price of $59.99, AOC would have to buy 369,455 Nintendo Switches with a copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons for each to reach the $133 million racked up by Trump’s golf trips. So even if you were to blubber about how it’s all a tragic loss of taxpayer money either way, there’s your fucking difference you goddamn moron.

But first, be aware that the protests aren’t over. It’s June 29th and there are still events and actions being planned regularly across the nation, and they still need your participation and support. If you’re able, please keep your focus there; this list is for what can be done long-term outside of the protests

Know your rights. Giving the police any more information than you absolutely have to will never and can never benefit you or anyone else - positive evidence given to the police is regularly thrown out in court, whereas negative evidence will be used against you. Know what to say and what you have the right to refuse. You don’t have to answer any questions without a lawyer present, you don’t have to give the police access to your house or car unless they have a current warrant signed by a judge. They will try to intimidate you - learn your rights and don’t let up, don’t ever cooperate with the police

Don’t snitch. If you see someone breaking the law in a way that doesn’t hurt anybody, keep your mouth shut. If cops knock on your door asking you questions about your neighbors or anyone you know, don’t answer

Don’t call the cops. If you can solve the problem in a different way, do it. Cops have on multiple occasions murdered the people they were called to help (or bystanders) without provocation. Don’t be complicit in that. Learn how to handle situations as a community or with the help of qualified experts

When you see an interaction with the police happening, stop and observe. If necessary, film the interaction. Organize and work with groups such as Copwatch to observe the police and hold them accountable

Use proper opsec, especially if you’re involved with anything that might make you a target for the cops. Downloading Signal is a great simple place to start

Learn about jury nullification, and spread the word. When serving in a jury, you have the right to vote not guilty on a defendant that you believe did commit the crime but doesn’t deserve punishment for it. Don’t be complicit in unjust punishment

Refuse to do work for the police or prison system. Workers keep the world running and the state relies on our compliance to keep our neighbors under their thumb. We can shut it down

Continue to support bail funds, even for non-protesters. Cash bail is unjust, and people shouldn’t be in jail just because they can’t pay

Continue to support legal defense funds as well, such as that of the National Lawyers Guild

Write to prisoners, either by yourself or with groups such as the Anarchist Black Cross or Black And Pink, and organize/support books to prisons programs, commissary funds, reentry programs, and other forms of prisoner support

Organize and support community-run crisis response organizations like the CAHOOTS program in Eugene, Oregon or the Birmingham Peacemakers in my hometown

Here are some other organizations to join that are doing good work in this area:

Black Lives Matter is obviously a huge voice in racial justice right now. The list of “official” chapters on their website is very incomplete, though, so you may have better luck doing a web search for “[your area] black lives matter” (beware of fakes though)

Showing Up for Racial Justice is another very active and widespread racial justice network

Critical Resistance is a grassroots prison abolitionist organization founded by Angela Davis

The Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement is another active prison abolitionist organization

The IWW’s Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee works with prisoners to organize strikes, phone zaps, and other actions combating injustice in prisons

Again, the Anarchist Black Cross does great work supporting political prisoners through letter-writing and more. The link I’ve been including is to an unofficial federation of ABC groups, though - there may be a group in your area that’s not part of that federation, so a web search for “[your area] black cross” may be better

Black And Pink is a prison abolitionist organization focused on queer people and people living with HIV/AIDS

Antifascism is of course an important aspect of racial justice and community safety. See @antifainternational‘s guide to getting connected to your local antifascists - though, again, beware of fakes (the “antifa checker” accounts on fedbook and twitter can help)

The police state and prison industrial complex rely on the complicity and cooperation of all of us to function and be effective. By building a culture of noncompliance and active resistance, we can drastically reduce the state’s ability to oppress communities of color. Don’t let the struggle be forgotten with the changing of the news cycle - keep up the struggle until all are free!

When one or the other of these thought patterns makes it hard to throw things away, we can’t see what we really need now, at this moment. We aren’t sure what would satisfy us or what we are looking for. As a result, we increase the number of unnecessary possessions, burying ourselves both physically and mentally in superfluous things. 

The best way to find out what we really need is to get rid of what we don’t. Quests to faraway places or shopping sprees are no longer necessary. All you have to do is eliminate what you don’t need by confronting each of your possessions properly. The process of facing and selecting our possessions can be quite painful. It forces us to confront our imperfections and inadequacies and the foolish choices we made in the past.

 Many times when confronting my past during the tidying process I have been so ashamed. My collection of scented erasers from primary school, the animation-related goods that I collected in junior high school, clothes I bought in high school when I was trying to act grown up but which didn’t suit me at all, handbags I bought even though I didn’t need them just because I liked the look of them in the shop. 

The things we own are real. They exist here and now as a result of choices made in the past by no one other than ourselves. It is wrong to ignore them or to discard them indiscriminately as if denying the choices we made. This is why I am against both letting things pile up and dumping things without proper consideration. It is only when we face the things we own one by one and experience the emotions they evoke that we can truly appreciate our relationship with them. 

There are three approaches we can take towards our possessions. Face them now, face them sometime, or avoid them until the day we die. The choice is ours. But I personally believe it is far better to face them now. If we acknowledge our attachment to the past and our fears for the future by honestly looking at our possessions, we will be able to see what is really important to us.