I'll be more blunt and say I'll use this book to beat to death anyone who tries arguing the poor or destitute shouldn't have a companion.

It's amusing watching international news cover Mamdani's victory: USA: Dangerous socialist Marxist! France24: Le centrist. USA: African Muslim terrorist! Al Jazeera: Your uncle won.

On this night of celebration, spare a thought for us Floridians who are apparently going to be inundated by a deluge of The Worst People.

It's essential that people shift to true organic foods ( labeling in the United States is a mess), not only to keep poison out of their system, but out of the groundwater, out of farmers, and out of the often marginalized fieldworkers who are exposed to contaminants at dangerous levels. #environment

Texas and Louisiana are essentially petro-states that nominally exist within the borders of the United States. It's no accident that these sacrifice zones, particularly around Cancer Alley, are being expanded at the cost of Black and Brown communities. #environment

"Ray particularly worried about the volume of wastewater being crammed underground by high-pressure injection — tens of billions of gallons each year, enough to fill the Empire State Building over 300 times." #environment

The fossil fuel industry knows there's evidence to prove they knew they were causing damage and covered it up. They understand convictions will impact them far more than the tobacco companies, and are bribing lawmakers to prevent victims from being able to sue for redress and justice. #environment

Well, that's...unusual.

The United States has spectacularly failed to figure out either a processing or a long-term storage plan for the tons of nuclear waste scattered about the country and growing larger every day. The political failure makes the chance of an accident or attack a catastrophic possibility. #environment

As people shift from gas to electric cars, the fossil fuel industry has quietly made deals to offer discounts to manufacturers to make plastic items. This has resulted in record production that is clogging rivers and oceans, poisoning the land, and even getting into our bodies. #environment

It's insane how we've normalized international corporations coming in and wreaking havoc in community after community like a serial killer. Time and time again, state governments refuse to create laws or regulations to stop the destructive extraction, meaning the public eats the costs. #environment

The jewelry stores telling you to buy gold to show off, the investment firms selling gold futures, it is greed with a terrible cost for the land, which is obliterated, and the people who live there, who are displaced, often by deadly force. Gold needs to be viewed like blood diamonds. #environment

When the Republic of South Sudan gained independence in 2011, pundits claimed its oil reserves would benefit the nation. Instead, it suffered the same resource curse as other African nations, where profits go to an elite while the people see their land polluted and children become ill. #environment

Isle de Jean Charles is a warning: that climate change is real, displacement will happen, that governments are unwilling or unprepared, communities will be hurt, and people will suffer. It should have been a wake-up call to America; instead, the victims are left alone with the wreckage. #environment

People began noticing Valley Fever in the 1990s when the drying climate made storms more common and infections skyrocketed from California to Arizona. A new program of health monitoring is targeted by Trump for cuts, meaning as the heat worsens, more will be infected, sickened, and die. #environment

When I drive from Tarpon Springs to Tampa, I can still count thousands of homes devastated by Milton. Yet the communities that yielded to reality and made policies to mitigate climate change have been torpedoed by DeSantis and developers who pushed SB180, making this planning illegal #environment

When cops kill someone, they're legally required to notify family, but training created by Bruce Praet, used by nearly every state department, instructs them to hold off and instead gather evidence they can use to smear the victim. Thankfully, California has now outlawed this odious practice. #acab

Every decade, the police get hysterical about some supposed threat (see: the yardies, yakuza, russian mob, etc.) It's always racism combined with pleas for more militarization and laws. This time, it conveniently echoes talking points by the administration about the 'threat' from Venezuela. #acab

Besides having a great YouTube channel, the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board does amazing work examining industrial disasters, detailing systemic problems before issuing recommendations. But now Trump has zeroed the agencies' tiny 14 million budget on behalf of his corporate backers.

It was frustrating to watch coal counties ignore changes Biden enacted and overwhelmingly vote for Trump despite how he actively harmed them during his first term. Now in his second term, the mines are still closing, and the scant health resources available to the afflicted are being halted.

Bosch, DeWalt, and Milwaukee bribed Trump to kill a regulation that would have added automatic anti-finger brakes to table saws. Almost ten people a day suffer an injury with a table saw, which means two billion dollars in health care costs and leaves several thousand with permanent disfigurement.

The Canadian Goose is Canada's third-worst export (after Drake and Jordan Peterson) and like them, it's been appallingly successful so much so that migratory populations are fouling places with their excrement and displacing other species. #environment

The chinampas are a patchwork of farms, similar to ribbon farms of the American South, that cover Xochimilco. They are a vital ecosystem that provides a sanctuary for wildlife and keeps the little water that remains of the Valley of Mexico clean and alive. #environment

The Soviet destruction of the Aral Sea is one of the greatest environmental crimes ever committed, killing the marine life and turning thousands of miles into desert. Even today, Uzbekistan is still siphoning water for crops while Kazakhstan slow-walks desperately needed measures #environment

This may sound flippant, but if we still had wolves or a healthy panther population, this would not be an issue. Instead, we suffer the risk that an impatient hunter will chow down on their kill and discover the disease is zoonotic. #environment

There's no lack of terrible things to choose from in America, but the idea that corporations can sue over free speech is perhaps one of the most obscene. ExxonMobil's claim that they understand climate change but don't want to admit their role 'that way' should be laughed out of court. #environment

Between the kids who are going to die or be permanently debilitated by ending vaccine mandates, the kids shot to death because of lax firearm regulations, and the kids who are going to be permanently disfigured by tooth decay and loss, it'll be a miracle if any of them grow up healthy.

Please vote and share for my Amelia is this calendar contest that benefits the nonprofit diabetic cats in need. They provide medication, care and homes for diabetic cats. Each vote is $1 and goes to help the kitties. gogo.photo/622272

This is insufficient (about $100 each) and wildly illegal. I'm sure the donor thinks he's buying loyalty like Otho did with the Praetorian Guard, but that didn't work out for him or Pupienus, Galba, Probius, Balbinus, Commodus, Philip II, Caracalla, Pertinax, Numerian, and probably not Pupienus.

If Texas were a functional, civilized state, CaH would have been able to take Musk to the cleaners, but the settlement is still good, and it's always nice to see the apartheid man lose.

The new Idaho law makes it simple for parents to refuse to vaccinate their children, and it prohibits schools from instituting guarantees to stop an outbreak. We're going to see dead children because their parents were too selfish to do the bare minimum to participate in a functioning society.

This was Natasha. I inherited her when my mom died three years ago. Natasha was, until the end when FCD began to destroy her, a loud, wonderful cat and it hurt so much to say goodbye to her.

"And we’ve all got very different opinions.” No, you fucking imbecile, transphobia isn't an opinion, it's discrimination, and it's being pushed by people who want to erase trans people from society. What an absolute, embarrassing failure of a person. #queer

Low-power radio offers a pathway for communities and low-resource groups to create a station that can fill the space that national and networked stations have abandoned. They're a chance to retake the air from corporate and right-wing funded hate broadcasts.

“The Angel Gabriel came offering me pestilential fever and plague. I took the fever for Medina and sent the plague to Syria, because the plague is a martyrdom and mercy for my community and a punishment for the disbelievers.”

It can seem hopeless with the big three networks self-censoring, and conservatives taking control of Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok, but the Romanovs once controlled every printed word in their empire, and it didn't keep them from choking to death on their own blood in the locked basement.

Despite the violence of the Tigray and Ethiopian war that many of the women of the Baltna Women’s Group have suffered, they continue to mill and process traditional spices in Aksum.

Reminder that Mastodon has starter packs (you can opt out of) and quote posts (you can opt out of), and post editing is available and all without the stench of executives who are embracing racism and transphobia.

It can seem overwhelming with fascists crawling into government and legacy media, but this isn't because of widespread conversion, merely the failure of both systems to fight off a minor infection that the main body politic despises.

Private broadband was a mistake, and the billions in give-aways the telcos received to modernize and upgrade (which they didn't do) instead go into lobbying fascists and fascist sympathizers to remove even mild consumer protections.

The idea that A(trained on stolen art)I democratizes filmmaking when it has historically never been cheaper or easier to start with a phone and open source tools is a garbage argument, and it's verbatim what Sam Altman has claimed, so one wonders how much Miller was paid to ruin his legacy.

David Cross' comment: “All of your bitching about ‘cancel culture’ and ‘freedom of speech’ and all that shit? Done. You don’t get to talk about it ever again. By now we’ve all seen the contract you had to sign.” is perfect. These people aren't comedians, they're wallpaper to power.

10 horror movies to get to know me by The Castle of Purity (1973) Phantasm (1979) Wolfen (1981) The Thing (1982) The Keep (1983) Videodrome (1983) The Company of Wolves (1984) In The Mouth of Madness (1994) Cure (1997) Land of the Dead (2005)

The article describes how the alleged arsonist worked himself up with ChatGPT prompts for images of burning cities and between this and the suicides and the racist slop it'd be swell if all the AI companies were shut and the executives [redacted]

During the Gulf War, none of the networks allowed a single Iraqi (except Chalabi and other US government-backed ghouls) on television. When Peter Arnett interviewed civilians suffering from the bombing, he was savaged in the American press (and SNL) as an Iraqi propagandist. #israel

Anyone who supports Israel should be made to read the names of every single child killed and look at every photograph. If we had a decent world, every Israeli official and IDF soldier would be in the Hague facing life sentences. #israel

Hit dogs holler, and apparently also throw about bans to silence critics. It's telling that for all the talk of the ATprotocol being decentralized, despite Link being on BlackSky he's still banned because of it still uses the central AppView.

So Bluesky is doing outright censorship to protect the fragile feelings of its executives in what appears to be a Musk/Lowtax speedrun, except more incompetent.

"We're training robots to replace humans in a city almost entirely empty of humans." seems like a short story William Gibson would have binned for being too obvious.