Music Is What I Do

I need you all to prepare yourselves to vote for Biden in November.  

I’m not happy about it either.  I wanted Elizabeth Warren to destroy Trump on the debate floor.  I wanted to watch her shatter the glass ceiling.  I wanted student loan forgiveness, Medicare for All, and refugee and immigrant protections.

But I’m not going to get that.  So I am going all in for Biden.

This can no longer be a matter of “well if I don’t get my way THEN I’M NOT VOTING”.  I’d hoped you all learned your lessons four years ago, but from what I’ve seen on social media, that’s not been the case.  Biden is not ideal but he is better than the alternative.  He is a Democrat who will continue Obama’s legacy.  And you have a shot in hell of getting progressive movements like Medicare for All under a blue majority Congress; we do not have that under Trump.  

Biden is more willing to listen to the progressive factions of the Democrat party than Trump is.  We will get shit done under him.    

The reality is that we live in a two party system and while I do not want Biden, I am capable of recognizing nuance and shades of gray. If it comes down to Biden, as it very likely may he will not do as much damage as four more years of Trump, and that is an ethical imperative. 

And here’s the White House going dark after protests breakout in front

Other fun facts about prison labor corporations:

-Federal and state-run prisons usually pay their slaves minimum wage; some states, however, like Colorado, pay $2/hour.

-Private prisons pay $.17-.50/hour. The highest paying private prison is in Tennessee, which pays $.50/hour for “highly-skilled labor.”

-You think that hasn’t affected wages in the US? You think that hasn’t removed manufacturing jobs from the economy?

-Companies that contract with private prisons for their slave labor include: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores. Many, many products that say “Made in USA” were made in prison.

-Private prisons often have quotas with the states, wherein the states contractually guarantee that they will provide a certain number of prisoners to fill the beds of a private prison, and if they don’t then they owe the private prison millions of dollars. I’m not making this up. It happened in Colorado after they legalized weed.

-States have a financial incentive to lock up their citizens.

-All of the above corporations have a financial incentive to see citizens get locked up.

-This is why Jeff Sessions is going after weed. The prison industrial complex needs slaves.

-To the shock of absolutely no one, private prisons have even more disparate racial demographics than federal/state prisons.

-Where do you think they send undocumented immigrants who have been rounded up? That’s right, private prisons. That’s why so many of them are in the South. So they take immigrants who are earning some kind of comparable wage and paying income tax to the government, and put them in prison where the wages are absurdly depressed and the prison pays virtually nothing in taxes.

-Oh yeah: private prisons pay virtually nothing in taxes. Because they technically manage real estate (prison as housing), they get all sorts of tax breaks and subsidies.

Tl;dr the prison industrial complex removes jobs from the economy, depresses wages, cheats the tax system, and ENSLAVES PEOPLE, usually people of color.

Sources:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/private-prisons-occupancy-quota-cca-crime

http://mfgtalkradio.com/s7-e15-manufacturing-jobs-lost-prison-slave-labor/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/private-prison-quotas_n_3953483.html?1379606057

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/13/289000532/why-for-profit-prisons-house-more-inmates-of-color

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/02/27/immi-f27.html

Ad Nauseum is an adblocker that stores the ads it blocks and continuously generates fake clicks, fucking with analytics and costing the ad companies money

TrackMeNot automatically does randomly generated searches on a variety of search engines to obscure your real searches and fuck with analytics, and you can set it up to work with anything that has a search bar (including facebook, twitter, amazon, youtube, etc)

WhatCampaign replaces analytics parameters in links with the string “FuckOff”. I thought there was a similar extension that used random strings, but I can’t seem to find it

Privacy Possum is a fork of Privacy Badger with a focus on costing tracking companies as much money as possible, and idk if my limited tech knowledge is enough to understand what it does but the description does say it falsifies some data so that’s good enough for me

Today I did something that terrified the fuck out of me. But ladies, we all gotta do it at some point. 

I got a contract for fulltime work given to me. 

I looked at it. 

I realized, calculating the amount they wanted to offer, that it would actually be less than I’m making part-time now. 

So what did I do?

Let me tell you, every single piece of me wanted to stay quiet and settle and work my way up the ladder. 

Until I realized that

I am worth more than they were offering, and it would be an insult to value me at any less than my actual worth. 

I have a masters and a year’s worth of teaching under my belt. 

I am a qualified professional who wants to make more than assistants pay. 

Their reasoning for the pay was insurance. I’m given insurance that’s worth a great deal, so I shouldn’t worry too much because that added up to a bigger salary. Except insurance doesn’t do jack shit if I can’t pay for an apartment or car costs or student loans. 

What did I do?

First

I breathed. I took a breath. I washed my face and had a quick cry in the bathroom. Ain’t nothing wrong with a real fast cry. 

Second

I left a note on my bosses desk asking if he could speak to me about my contract whenever he was next available. 

Third

Once in my bosses office, I calmly handed him my contract back and said, “I’m very honored that you thought of me for a position, but I cannot accept what you’re offering me. I have a masters and I’ve taught in this school for a year, and I’d been under the assumption that I’d be receiving a different position than this.” He asked me what I was looking for. I said, “I would work for no less than [MY RANGE]. And if you cannot offer me that, then I’ll have to continue working for you part time until I can find another position elsewhere that can.” I thanked him very much for the offer. I was polite and upfront about my expectations for the position that I wanted. 

I can’t tell you what will happen. But I can tell you that going in there and establishing myself as a no BS worker who looks out for herself and negotiates got me farther than if I’d said nothing. 

I don’t know the outcome yet. I really don’t. 

But I can tell you that he is currently rewriting my contract with higher pay. 

Will it be high enough to keep me there? I don’t know. 

But I do know that today was me putting myself forward and taking a chance, and chances, no matter how small, do pay off. 

Ladies. 

DON’T BE AFRAID TO SPEAK ABOUT YOUR CONTRACTS. 

IT’S FUCKING TERRIFYING. 

BUT DO IT ANYWAY. 

BECAUSE YOU’RE WORTH MORE, AND THEY SHOULD KNOW THAT. 

Look at that dialogue. “She thinks she knows.” He’s trying to get Mulaney to see his wife’s expertise as instead a weird misperception. He’s coaching him to undercut his wife’s confidence in the truth and her own abilities.

And Mulaney replies exactly the right way: “She does know.” He asserts not only that she’s perceiving the world accurately, but that she is an expert at something he’s not good at.

Here’s an awesome little piece of history:

Archaeologists in the Burnt City have discovered what appears to be an ancient prosthetic eye. What makes this discovery exceptionally awesome is the striking description of how the owner and her false eye would have appeared while she was still alive and blinking:

[The eye] has a hemispherical form and a diameter of just over 2.5 cm (1 inch). It consists of very light material, probably bitumen paste. The surface of the artificial eye is covered with a thin layer of gold, engraved with a central circle (representing the iris) and gold lines patterned like sun rays. The female remains found with the artificial eye was 1.82 m tall (6 feet), much taller than ordinary women of her time. On both sides of the eye are drilled tiny holes, through which a golden thread could hold the eyeball in place. Since microscopic research has shown that the eye socket showed clear imprints of the golden thread, the eyeball must have been worn during her lifetime. The woman’s skeleton has been dated to between 2900 and 2800 BCE. 

So she was an extraordinarily tall woman walking around wearing an engraved golden eye patterned with rays like a tiny sun. What an awesome sight that must have been.

The mystery of icon-preserving bees