SM Reine

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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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Here are some of my favs:

Dracula (art by Renibet)

2.Jane Eyre (art by Ulunii)

3. Little women (art by чаки чаки)

4. The Idiot (the hedgehog-omg-) (art by Xinshi)

5. Pride and Prejudice (art by Cactusute)

6. War and Peace (art by Xinshi)

7. Wuthering Heights (art by Renibet)

8. The Great Gatsby (art by NIKEL)

9. Frankenstein (art by Iren Horrors)

10. Crime and Punishment (art by REDwood)

11. Anna Karenina (art by Ulunii)

12. The Cherry Orchard (art by lewisite)

He asked: "Oh, was she the only son or something before *waves hand*?" and I was like, warily, no she has two brothers. And he responded with a great deal of confusion: "Then what's their problem?!?!"

When he found and married my mom, he was nearly 45 and they had so much trouble conceiving that he went to a Guanyin temple supposedly "magical" for praying for children. When I was born (not a son, also an only child until now), my mom said, "when you prayed at the temple did you ask for a son?" He said, "Aiya, everyone is asking for sons, so I said any gender is okay. If I asked for a son, maybe we wouldn't have gotten a child because Guanyin's son quota is already used up. Do you want that to happen?" My mom laughed for days about "son quota" and continues to tell people about it today, but her honest answer was: "Any child is okay."

Jokes on them. They didn't specify a gender, so Guanyin Ma gave them a non-binary child!

More seriously: my dad doesn't care about sons. When I told my parents that I wouldn't marry or have children, I thought he might be disappointed, but he wasn't. Then again, maybe I should have expected that, given he tried to become a monk at 18 🤪 I think he said the thing about sons to poke fun at people who care too much about sons because he frankly thinks it's all a bit ridiculous. In his eyes, a child is a child, so what's the point in caring about gender? If the child "changes" gender, does it make a difference?

New Secret Knots comic, "The River". I hope you like it!

SCREAM

For the TLDR crowd:

“The vast majority of men are only willing to engage in public violence if they feel like the people around them will approve of — and reward them for — that violence.

ICE Watch works because it surrounds men seeking approval with people loudly expressing their *disapproval.* And the noise has the added benefit of drawing large crowds of bystanders who can quickly outnumber the ICE agents, who then have to decide if they want to escalate a situation or perhaps abandon their activity altogether.

In Minneapolis, we’re already seeing the success of ICE Watch. There are countless videos from ICE Watch observers that show agents leaving without detaining anyone after they encounter resistance. There are currently about 3,000 ICE agents in Minnesota, but the Department of Homeland Security claims they have only arrested 2,400 people — less than one person per agent.

ICE Watch organizers have also observed that it takes many more agents to make a single arrest when they are around. In other cities, ICE traveled in groups of two or three, but in Minneapolis, we primarily see groups of 6 to 12 agents. The Department of Homeland Security has pulled agents from other cities to ramp up efforts in Minnesota, which guarantees there will be fewer deportations from the places they left. Plus, ICE’s fixation on breaking up ICE Watch groups and detaining observers — often white citizens — has interrupted its original mission.

This last year learning how to batch cook massive amounts of food for the communities I’m a part of has shown me how aggressively cheap it is both to eat plant-based and feed a large sum of people.

One of my favorite stories is a recipe I kinda winged with my mutual aid group in Tx. We served 75 bowls of lentil soup over rice and it only cost us $4 to make that quantity of food. Literally, the cost per bowl was like $.06 to make and so much of the produce was donated.

Like, let that sink in. We fed 75 people for $4. How much do we spend on groceries for ourselves or families on a monthly basis?

All of yesterday, a comrade and I cooked 60 hearty bowls of a Spicy Split Pea Soup and Pinto-Potato Chili. We wanted to meal prep together but fucked around and made enough to feed 8 other comrades and have a ton to distribute to the unhoused community in our city. In each container is 2 cups of soup/chili over 2 cups cooked rice. That means one box is gonna be 2 meals cuz leftovers.

Currently, the project I’m trying to make a reality is a Plant Based Community Kitchen. The vision is to build a small menu of recipes, no more than 10, that all incorporate 2 base grains/legumes/starchy vegetables.

To bulk-buy ingredients that are paid for by donation to batch cook in a meal-prep style so that there is a variety of dishes that can be made in batches that can feed a comrade, college student, family of 4 up to a week’s worth of meals for dirty cheap.

We’d have volunteers come cook and help deliver and distribute, hoping to save comrades money, battle food insecurity, help feed more consistently the unhoused, and build the communal structures that allows us less reliance on money/capitalism to meet our collective needs.

For instance in my city, these are some numbers/costs from a restaurant supply store nearby and template recipe I made to estimate yield and price.

This basic ass template recipe at these prices would allow me to make 900 meals for under $100.