UNAPOLOGETIC

and you can put whatever you want in the in honor blank, so it’s a very wholesome way to communicate & start a dialogue! by which i mean, you can be sure he really fucking chokes on it.

he is at:

Office of Governor Mike Pence State House Room 206 Indianapolis, IN 46204-2797

Koreans across the world held rallies to add their voices to the one million citizens gathered at Gwanghwamun, central Seoul, on Saturday (KST) demanding that President Park Geun-hye resign over a scandal involving longtime confidante Choi Soon-sil. Rallies were held simultaneously in 10 countries, including the United States, Germany, France, Australia, and Japan on Friday and Saturday (local time). In the U.S., candlelight rallies were held in major cities including Washington, D.C., New York and Los Angeles on Friday evening (local time). While about 500 Korean Americans and overseas Koreans shouted “Park Geun-hye out!” in front of the Consulate General of Korea in Los Angeles, more than 200 people called on Park to resign at the entrance of Koreatown, Manhattan, New York. Twenty citizens also joined the protest in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.

“Park Geun-hye POIS!!! (Helsinki)”

Following the anti-president rally of Korean students from the University of California , Berkeley and Stanford University, students from Harvard University in Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also denounced Park. Angry Koreans in Europe also held the rallies on Saturday (local time) to demand Park’s resignation and to restore democracy. In France, nearly 700 people, including local citizens, international students and tourists, took part in a rally calling on Park to step down.

In Germany, about 300 people protested at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin wearing the masks of Park and Choi. As well as demanding Park’s resignation, they also called on the Korean government to investigate the case properly and punish the criminals.

 We’ll likely never know how many people were kept from the polls by restrictions like voter-ID laws, cuts to early voting, and barriers to voter registration. But at the very least this should have been a question that many more people were looking into. For example, 27,000 votes currently separate Trump and Clinton in Wisconsin, where 300,000 registered voters, according to a federal court, lacked strict forms of voter ID. Voter turnout in Wisconsin was at its lowest levels in 20 years and decreased 13 percent in Milwaukee, where 70 percent of the state’s African-American population lives, according to Daniel Nichanian of the University of Chicago.

[…]

On Election Day, there were 868 fewer polling places in states with a long history of voting discrimination, like Arizona, Texas, and North Carolina.These changes impacted hundreds of thousands of voters, yet received almost no coverage. In North Carolina, as my colleague Joan Walsh reported, black turnout decreased 16 percent during the first week of early voting because “in 40 heavily black counties, there were 158 fewer early polling places.”

Even if these restrictions had no outcome on the election, it’s fundamentally immoral to keep people from voting in a democracy. The media devoted hours and hours to Trump’s absurd claim that the election was rigged against him, while spending precious little time on the real threat that voters faced.

I want to salute the people that did cover voting rights doggedly, including Rick Hasen of the Election Law Blog; Michael Wines of The New York Times; Sari Horwitz of The Washington Post; Alice Ollstein, Kira Lerner, and Ian Millhiser of Think Progress; Tierney Sneed of Talking Points Memo; Zack Roth, Joy Reid, Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and Al Sharpton of MSNBC; Mark Joseph-Stern and Jamelle Bouie of Slate; David Graham of The Atlantic; Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog, in addition to great local reporters like Bryan Lowry of the Wichita Eagle; Patrick Marley of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel; and Colin Campbell of the Raleigh News & Observer. ProPublica organized an essential Electionland project with reporters across the country.

are baby parrots cute? 

yes.

do you want a baby parrot?

You want a bird? Great! Don’t get a parrot! Think instead of getting something that doesn’t need the insane social environment and 60+ years from you. Get a pigeon, dove, finch, canary, maybe even a starling. They don’t scream, they can’t break your finger, and can be just as cuddly. They aren’t endangered, they do well with a pal, but don’t self-mutilate at the drop of a pin. They still need plenty of time and care, but certain pigeon species have been domesticated, meaning they do better in captivity. PARROTS ARE TAME, NOT DOMESTICATED.

If your mind is so set on a parrot you need to do so much more work to get there. Go volunteer at a parrot rescue, they are different animals as adults than babies. Oh boy are they cute when they are little, they are when they are big as well, but they are also hormonal and will bite. Hard. Go get to know a parrot at a rescue and if you have the means to provide a stable environment for it the rest of it’s life, then consider adopting. No more baby parrots are needed in the pet trade, they change as they mature and will go through fazes of sexual frustration as they lash out because that’s all they can do. If you can come to terms with parrot behavior and deal with getting bit every once and a while look into adopting a cutie.

If you refuse to get a rescue, at least don’t get a large parrot baby. Cockatiels, conures, budgies, and parrotlets are comparatively better. They live 30 years most which means most times they won’t outlive you. They can be nippy, but they are not quite as socially complex. Cockatiels are an especially easy bird to read and understand the body signals of. I’m not saying these birds are easy, they still need plenty of time spent with them every day, especially if you want them to be hand tame. Unlike dogs and cats who are able to seek you out for cuddles and just live in your house, birds often get forgotten about in their cages. Their diet needs to be a pellet diet supplemented with fruits and veggies and perhaps some seeds sometimes as a treat.

It runs us ragged at our facility dealing with those three alone. Parrots are parrots, and in the wild, their piercing vocalizations are critical to interacting with large flocks over large areas.

They do not take this into account when living in your home. And they will scream. All the time.

My old boss at the museum has three children. Two of them I didn’t know about until about a year in, but I heard about Simon the first day. In fact, I heard about Simon before I was even hired.

Simon is the blue and gold macaw my boss got thirty years ago as a young bird. He was a “house-iversary” present from my boss’s wife after they both got tenure-track jobs and knew they were settling down. They raised him extremely well, but my boss still has some scars from where Simon took chunks out of him during puberty. Simon has the run of the house. There’s always someone home with him, whether that’s my boss, his wife, or one of their human children. Always. My boss would skype with the bird and talk to him on the phone; when his wife was in the museum and he was at home, she’d do the same thing. When they were away on digs, they made sure to call Simon and talk to him multiple times a day, just to make sure he could hear their voices. Their eldest daughter took care of him then- they all love that bird. I’ve skyped with him, too. He showed me his toys and pretended to be my boss’s cell phone.

There’s one room in the house that’s just a specialized bird jungle gym. Loads of things to climb on and play with. Even though it’s a fun room, they never shut him up in there; the only time he’s shut up is at night. Otherwise he has unrestricted access to his “flock.” There’s some edible plants in there too if he wants to forage. Simon has a “cage” and I put that in quotes because it’s basically a closet he sleeps in and eats in. After meals they typically put him in there until he poops, but the general consensus is “this is why we have hardwood floors.” One of the major axes around which their lifestyle revolves is parrot care, and they knew this going into it. This was something they wanted as a family.

Simon also has a provision in the will. I was helping my boss pare down his book collection and he talked about having to go through his dad’s books after he died and how he didn’t want to make Simon go through that. He was joking, but then he got serious and mentioned that they’d actually set up a fund for Simon’s care if anything happened to them. He knows there’s a chance the bird will outlive him and he’s not only sure of what will happen (the oldest daughter inherits the house they live in and the bird because she’s his favorite of the human children), he’s also set aside money for his continual care. 

Since my girlfriend and I are such animal-lovers the family has basically come to an understanding that we will be inheriting George if my parents reach the point where they can’t meet his care needs anymore. But think about that. That’s THREE GENERATIONS of committed animal lovers needed to provide for one bird’s lifetime.