if the kraken and sharks get good at the same time we will have a beautiful toxic rivalry <3

current events at the bottom of the pacific

Or the Atlantic, right @dduane ?

Can neither confirm nor deny. :)

There are many benefits to being a marine biologist.

You want to call your House rep now and tell them Trump needs to be impeached immediately for defying a Supreme Court order (re: Kilmar Abrego Garcia), which functionally voids our constitution and means no one in America has rights anymore.

I am not exaggerating.

As of now, anybody can be disappeared, no due process, no recourse. Trump is openly disregarding a Supreme Court order and says he’ll send US citizens to El Salvador.

This is not a drill.

Call your House rep and tell them they must impeach. Tell them if they cannot bring themselves to impeach, they must resign. A more open and shut case to impeach is not possible. Trump and his administration are saying openly, in public, that anybody can be kidnapped by ICE, even in error, and disappeared permanently.

Call your senators, too, and tell them to support impeachment (it goes to them once it passes a majority House vote).

"Hello, my name is _______ and I am a constituent from _______. My address is ________.

I am reaching out today to urge Representative ______ to call for the impeachment of President Trump due to his refusal to comply with the Supreme Court's April 10th decision regarding Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was unlawfully deported and has been charged with no crime. As Justice Sotomayor stated, this inaction implies the government's ability to 'deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.' This precedent is unconstitutional, highly illegal, and grounds for impeachment. Every individual, regardless of immigration status, must be guaranteed a right to due process.

Representative _____, I urge you to stand on the right side of history today by calling for President Trump's impeachment. This administration can not be allowed to continue unilaterally defying the checks and balances that are intrinsic to our government."

You can also find your representative and senators and their phone numbers on https://5calls.org/

Please don't be afraid of calling. Your job would just be to be a data point, not to sound perfect. Here's some info on why calling is effective.

Lines of thought that seem Normal but are actually rooted in extreme puritanism:

-Seeing the nude human body is inherently traumatic -Sex scenes in art are pointless -Wearing kink-related clothing in public is the similar to performing a sex scene in front of unwilling participants -Depicting female characters expressing sexuality is always degrading -People's sexual fantasies are always an endorsement of the behavior they want to see in real life -Sex work is more traumatic and coercive than other types of work The goal is to treat sex as just another thing people do. That is a much healthier attitude than hiding it! It's not uniquely traumatic, it's not weird to talk about it or include it in society.

via @b.sharise

Dude, the enemy is not "the group of people who can afford a nice house and car and take vacations and eat well and have enough saved for retirement."

The enemy is the group of people who make it IMPOSSIBLE for EVERYONE to have a nice house and car and take vacations and eat well and save enough for retirement.

In the US, "poor people" USED to be the people who had not-so-nice houses and cars, or who had to rent instead of own. And it's not the dentist down the street who changed that; among others, it's the ultra-rich CEOs and shareholders who refuse to pay a living wage so they can live off your labor, and the exploitative corporations that buy up as much housing as they possibly can and charge exorbitant rent so you'll never be able to own your own home. It's the bosses who decide that "excess" food must be destroyed if it cannot be sold at a price that enriches shareholders. And it's the politicians who encourage and enable all of that.

Your average upper middle class family has enough money to have nice things, put their kids through school, and not have to think critically about every purchase they make.

Your average billionaire has enough money to convert it to gold and build an island in the ocean out of nothing but gold. And probably to also build a mansion on it and buy a helicopter to commute with.

Those... Aren't the same thing.

Once more with feeling:

The flowchart is really, really simple:

Do they have more than $500,000,000.00?

Yes: They are wealthy

No: They are not wealthy.

This is the reality for the foreseeable future. I know it's weird to re-calibrate that way. But this is really it.

this was the image i was trying to send btw

I adore Tumblr so very much.

It's not a fever to break. Hate to tell you, but the Nazis are surging again in Germany, too.

Bad ideas never go away. You can only cut them off as soon as you see them.

This isn't an error. It's what they want.

I also hate to break it to you, but the rush on this particular iteration started with Gamergate after building the groundwork since 1980.

Don't get me wrong, the people with the greatest responsibility for what's happening at this moment are Joseph R. Biden and Merrick Garland, both of whom had the power and the duty to prevent him being a candidate in 2024, which they abjectly, utterly, and unforgivably failed to do.

having a body is so fucking high maintenance

Spock’s entire philosophy is explaining why it’s logical for you to go fuck yourself

i love this because it's like. why did paleolithic peoples paint the hunt. perhaps to celebrate and honour brave deeds that kept the community alive. perhaps to bring luck for future hunts. perhaps to instruct those who came after how to slay the beast. perhaps to remind us we can: that the mammoth is not unkillable.

this graffiti, too, serves those purposes!

Every fucking word of this.

Adding that it is probably less important to get caught up in the drama of the spring 2025 stock market (as someone who was planning to retire in a few years, it sucks, but it's not the end of the world).

However.

The US dollar is and has been for living memory an "index currency". This means that when you gauge the value of other currencies, the standard used is the position of the US dollar. That doesn't mean it's worth the most (I can't remember a time that the UK pound wasn't worth more than 1:1). It means that it's a measuring stick.

That is about to change. And once the process starts, there's no going back.

There's a reason that "the full faith an d credit" clause is in the OG part of the Constitution. There's no take-backs for violating it even once.

And these fucking fools don't care or don't understand that the dollar being an index currency is a policy outcome, not an immutable law of nature.

I love how Defunctland is like "in order to describe the history of this one specific dark ride, I think I will recount the entire history of dark rides as a whole, starting with the American picnic trend in the 1800s" and I am like "oh YEAH let's have it!!! Gimme that information"

it is weird that celiac stuff has become part of the 'culture war'. because it's literally just a medical thing.... I get super anemic unless I cut a certain protein out of my diet, because it bulldozes the villi in my intestines. but if I post about it, right-wingers send me gore images. I guess you can't expect shitty people to be logical, but I've even heard lefty people make fun of gluten stuff, and it's like why are you mad about this??? why are you pissed off that I'm eating bread that doesn't taste as good so that I can have blood in my body? it's so morally neutral.

I'm sorry, I know you weren't actually looking for an explanation but I always have a rant about this locked and loaded.

As far as I can tell the reasons that this happens are:

Anyway, in conclusion: it sucks, I'm sorry.

The fun flipside of this is that I've seen people who are more right wing become aggressively pro regulation and pro accommodation when they or their family members have to suddenly take on the individual burden of making up for a society that doesn't include them by default.

US specific:

Is your ham made with vinegar? Does your ham have the generic word "spices" on the ingredient list? Does your ham include "smoke flavoring"? Does your ham include caramel coloring?

Because malt vinegar has gluten in it. "Spices" may include wheat products in a mix. Smoke flavoring may be made with barley flour. Caramel coloring may be made with wheat or barley syrup.

If the label says "gluten free" that means that the "spices," caramel coloring, vinegar, and smoke flavor are certified to contain 20ppm or less of gluten.

If the ham is cured in any way, it may include gluten. If the ham was marinated, it probably includes gluten. If the ham was prepared in a facility that processes wheat in any way, it might be cross contaminated with gluten.

There's a company out there called "Gluten Free Water" that makes water in plastic bottles, poking fun at the idea that too many things have a gluten free label. I fucking hate that company. Because that company is functionally saying "lol, people are so sensitive and over the top about this, let's be a little silly and laugh about how crazy people can be with their 'gluten free' nonsense."

Did you know that there are sustainable food containers and straws that contain wheat? And that you don't have to label them? There are definitely people with celiac who have been sickened by biodegradable plastic straws in their "obviously water is gluten free there's no risk here" water.

"It's over-labeled so it looks trendy" just means you don't know how foods are made or what foods contain gluten. Gluten is ridiculously common in foods in general, and also in packaged meats.

Your ham has to say gluten free because it distinguishes it from the hams that do contain gluten, which is a fucking lot of them. And you're annoyed that your ham has to say gluten free and I'm annoyed that I'm standing in the grocery store calling a ham company to figure out where they source their caramel coloring so I can figure out if the damned ham is safe to eat.

"lol, oats don't have wheat in them, are people so stupid that they have to be told what is and isn't wheat? why does this oatmeal have a gluten free label?" Cross contamination; gluten free oats are not grown near wheat and are not processed in facilities that process wheat.

"lol, rice doesn't have wheat in it, why is this rice labeled gluten free, all rice is gluten free" Cross contamination; the rice isn't processed on equipment that processes wheat.

"lol why does this turkey breast say gluten free, it's just fucking turkey" read the ingredients on your "just" turkey, lots of packaged meat is packed in broth, some of which contains modified food starch, which may contain wheat.

"lol why are these strawberries labeled gluten free? they're fucking strawberries" WAX, BUDDY. SOME FRUITS ARE COATED IN PRESERVATIVE WAX FILMS BY THE MANUFACTURER AND SOME OF THOSE FUCKING FILMS CONTAIN GLUTEN.

I think that part of the reason that people are so irritated by g-free labels is because it exposes them to just how vast and alienating their food systems are.

"Ham should just be meat from a pig, maybe with sugar and salt; what on earth is happening that there might be wheat in that process? Nothing in that process should involve wheat." And then you might have to think about it for a second, might have to wonder what "sugar" and "salt" mean when someone is producing a million hams to be delivered thousands of miles away. It's not just sugar and salt; it's preservatives and nitrates and batch cooking and getting corn syrup instead of sugar and getting smoke flavoring instead of smoking the ham and turning your "whole food" into all the ingredients that make up the ingredients that make up the ingredients.

A "gluten free" label says "you can eat this" to somebody with celiac disease, who has already pounded their skull against the shittiness of the medical system and the food system.

But to someone who doesn't have to worry that their food is going to disable them, a "gluten free" sticker on ham takes a known quantity and turns their sandwich into a hyperobject that contains animal agriculture and industrial additive production and shipping pollution and the ongoing assault on regulation.

If it doesn't have the label, you can just eat your lunch. If it does have the label, you are haunted by the specter of RFK junior imploding the FDA.

Turns out that everyone in the US with celiac is already constantly haunted by the possible implosion of the FDA because food regulation is an up-close and personal part of our daily lives that most people would rather not think about.

I have one friend who literally can't go into pizza places or he's going to get sick from the flour in the air.

He damn near died before he got his diagnosis. He was eating a "typical" diet and getting sicker and sicker for no apparent reason. He has to be super cautious all the time about any cross contamination or it will 100% make him sick and quite possibly knock him back into dying.

I want you to remember:

The fascists hate you too and they just will pretend otherwise until after they've killed the rest of us, before they turn on you.

Thanks to whoever tried, but I knew they'd never allow it.

Let's do it the old fashioned way. Spread it far and wide.

Reminder: you can't be the whole wall against stopping fascism by yourself. Nobody can. But you damn sure can be a brick.

There's a lot of good comments and tags in the notes, but this one is very important, I feel like it deserves some emphasis.

Part of how authoritarianism works is telling you that you can't stop it. And you can't stop it by yourself. But it wants to stop the train of thought there and let you fall into despair.

You need to remember the next part: you don't have to stop it by yourself.

You're not alone. Take care of your community and let your community take care of you. Supporting each other is so vital.