Do You Have Any Interesting Tidbits About Everyone’s Favorite Hungry Little Guys, Shrews?

Tribes Revive Traditional Hemp Economies

A post-petroleum transition plan.

“With 10,000 uses, hemp is one of the most versatile plants to grow—and in many ways can be a catalyst for change for Native peoples. We see a New Green Revolution in Indian Country, tied to justice, economics, restoration ecology, and a return-to-the-land movement, and it’s growing.

Just last year, the Fort Berthold Reservation, Colorado River tribes, Iowa Tribe (Kansas and Nebraska), Yurok, Sisseton and Santee Dakotas, to name a few, all got their hemp plans approved by the USDA, but more than that, tribal growers and thinkers are considering hemp as part of the future for Indian Country. And young leaders such as Muriel Young Bear, a Meskwaki woman from Iowa, and Marcus Grignon—a Menominee and project director at Hempstead Project HEART, a John Trudell initiative—represent a new wave of commitment.”

Resources for Male Survivors

I posted last week asking people if they knew of some good resources for male victims of sexual assault. Here is the list people came up with:

www.malesurvivor.org

www.violenceunsilenced.com

www.rainn.org

www.pandys.org

www.1in6.org

www.soulspeakout.org

Thanks everyone!

I'll believe that governments want to "empower disabled people to achieve employment" when they actually:

Legislate broader work-from-home abilities for jobs that don't actually require in-office presence

Strengthen employment discrimination laws so employers stop thinking that the easiest way to get around having to accommodate a disabled employee is just to fire them

Actually create systems where they, the government, monitor and enforce accessible environments and building codes. The onus shouldn't be on us to get the money to hire a lawyer and sue our own workplaces to get our basic access needs met.

Include disabled people in minimum wage legislation, instead of leaving legal carve-outs where "substandard workers" can be paid subminimum wage.

Allow disabled people to keep savings accounts of our own, which we don't need anybody else's approval to create or spend

Let us form supportive households, relationships, and marriages without taking away our benefits (especially because this means we have no money of our own if we want to leave those relationships)

Until then, nuh-uh. Fuck off. You're not "empowering" us. You're just pushing us further out onto a perilous ledge because you think you can use inspirational supercrip narratives to force us to perform or die.

Cops Lie: What would have happened if no one recorded George Floyd

rawstory

Body cam shows cops kneeled on 26-year-old Latino man's back for 5 minutes before he died

Body cam shows cops kneeled on 26-year-old Latino man's back for 5 minutes before he died

Police claimed that Mario Gonzalez resisted arrest on April 19 and died during a scuffle.

Turns out Mario was entirely cooperative with the police up until they had him in custody, handcuffed him, and two officers stood on top of his back with one kneeling on his neck for five minutes until Gonzalez became responsive.

They covered his death by saying it was caused by a medical emergency.

Here is a link to the gofundme for Mario’s family.

gofundme.com

Justice for Mario & Gonzalez family, organized by Gerardo Gonzalez

Update as of 04/27 Our family was able to finally see the bodycam footage that Al… Gerardo Gonzalez needs your support for Justice for Mario

So I am going to tag this as Black Lives Matter. You got a problem with it? I don’t care.

Do yourself a favor. Learn to code. Here's how.

I’ve said this to my non-techie friends countless times. It’s no secret that being able to code makes you a better job applicant, and a better entrepreneur. Hell, one techie taught a homeless man to code and now that man is making his first mobile application.

Learning to code elevates your professional life, and makes you more knowledgeable about the massive changes taking place in the technology sector that are poised to have an immense influence on human life.

(note: yes I realize that 3/5 of those links were Google projects)

But most folks are intimidated by coding. And it does seem intimidating at first. But peel away the obscurity and the difficulty, and you start to learn that coding, at least at its basic level, is a very manageable, learnable skill.

There are a lot of resources out there to teach you. I’ve found a couple to be particularly successful. Here’s my list of resources for learning to code, sorted by difficulty:

Novice

Never written a line of code before? No worries. Just visit one of these fine resources and follow their high-level tutorials. You won’t get into the nitty-gritty, but don’t worry about it for now:

Dash - by General Assembly

CodeAcademy

w3 Tutorials (start at HTML on the left sidebar and work your way down)

Intermediate

Now that you’ve gone through a handful of basic tutorials, it’s time to learn the fundamentals of actual, real-life coding problems. I’ve found these resources to be solid:

Khan Academy

CodeAcademy - Ruby, Python, PHP

Difficult

If you’re here, you’re capable of building things. You know the primitives. You know the logic control statements. You’re ready to start making real stuff take shape. Here are some different types of resources to turn you from someone who knows how to code, into a full-fledged programmer.

Programming problems

Sometimes, the challenges in programming aren’t how to make a language do a task, but just how to do the task in general. Like how to find an item in a very large, sorted list, without checking each element. Here are some resources for those types of problems

Talentbuddy

TopCoder

Web Applications

If you learned Python, Django is an amazing platform for creating quick-and-easy web applications. I’d highly suggest the tutorial - it’s one of the best I’ve ever used, and you have a web app up and running in less than an hour.

Django Tutorial

I’ve never used Rails, but it’s a very popular and powerful framework for creating web applications using Ruby. I’d suggest going through their guide to start getting down-and-dirty with Rails development.

Rails Guide

If you know PHP, there’s an ocean of good stuff out there for you to learn how to make a full-fledged web application. Frameworks do a lot of work for you, and provide quick and easy guides to get up and running. I’d suggest the following:

Cake PHP Book

Symfony 2 - Get Started

Yii PHP - The Comprehensive Guide

Conclusion

If there’s one point I wanted to get across, it’s that it is easier than ever to learn to code. There are resources on every corner of the internet for potential programmers, and the benefits of learning even just the basics are monumental.

If you know of any additional, great resources that aren’t listed here, please feel free to tweet them to me @boomeyer.

Best of luck!

DoorDash workers are going on strike tomorrow (July 31st, 2021). They’re demanding tip transparency and a base pay of at least $4.25 per hour. Don’t cross the picket line.

How to build a garden with no money

It's a relatively modern problem, where you, a scrappy solarpunk with no money, want to begin a vegetable garden. The ground you have to work with is either dead as hell or flat out toxic or has no dirt at all. You want to build a raised bed but you have no money and the kits are expensive. There's a lot of ways to go about this, here's what I did: I built a wicker basket.

Step one: assemble your branches.

You want whippy ones at least 4' long, no thicker than two fingers, no thinner than a chopstick. Longer and bendier is better, but also get a bunch of thick stiff ones. I got mine from the Greenway near my lil condo, and from my neighbor's yards.

Protips: Wear gloves, because thorns. Carry clippers discretely, because people get nervous when they see sharp shiny things in your pocket. The branches in the above pic are one load of three, because that's how much I could carry.

Step two: hammer your stakes

(no pic for this part, sorry)

Take the thickest and straightest of your branches, and cut a length you want to be the height of your box plus a couple inches extra. Hammer them into the ground every 18" or so, and at each corner. Every side of your box must have at least three stakes.

Protip: if the ground is really hard, drive a hole ahead of the stick by hammering in a screwdriver.

Step three: get weaving

First weave your biggest branches in and out between the stakes. You can remove any leaves for free compost at this point.

Protip: this is the hardest part, so don't get discouraged! Here is also where you will find out of the stakes are thick enough or hammered in deep enough. Try not to cry if they fall over. Or break.

Step four: keep weaving

Now you put in the smaller branches. I found that long vine types like ivy and wild rose can be woven in more than one direction, so if you need to fill in some gaps you can get creative.

Protip: tamp down the walls you've made every so often do they stay nice and dense. They need to be closely woven enough to hold dirt later.

Step five: smaller, different weaving

By now you have gotten down to the sticks that aren't quite long enough to go between the stakes. Make them into smaller stakes, ones that don't go into the ground but nonetheless weave vertically through your box walls. Hey, it's starting to look more like a box!

Protip: break off the ends of the stakes and your new vertical weave so they don't have out too much, and WEAR YOUR GLOVES, don't be an idiot like me and think you're safe because you don't have thorns to deal with.

Step six: fill it with dirt.

If you have any budget, use it all here. Get good, organic dirt, get your compost bin empty, and be extra careful taking dirt from elsewhere if you don't know exactly what has been leaking into it.

Protip: get more dirt than you think you need. Dirt is fluffy. The second you get water on it all the air goes away and you have a three inches deep garden box. In the unlikely event that you get more dirt than you need, use it for your houseplants or porch containers.

And that's it! Plant what you like! Use the seeds you've stolen from other gardens and the insides of your daily fruit! If you've bothered your nosy neighbor and they have alerted the HOA or your landlord, take this time to brush up on your various rights. If your neighbor dislikes you because they believe you to be a witch and a lesbian and idk, a long haired hippy or some other deeply outdated derogatory term, get those middle fingers up because you are going to help the bees and they aren't.

Green can be very punk.

LISTEN UP MOTHER FUCKERS

SEE THIS WEBSITE? 

ITS CALLED WOLFRAM ALPHA

THIS IS THE BEST GODDAMN WEBSITE FOR ACADEMIC SHIT. FUCK GOOGLE. 

THIS MOTHERFUCKER WILL LET YOU SEARCH “HOSPITAL BEDS IN CHAD VS. IRAN” 

AND IT GIVES YOU A STRAIGHT GODDAMN ANSWER 

MAYBE YOU’RE NOT INTERESTED IN DOCTORNESS OF THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES COOL SHIT 

HAVING TROUBLE WITH MATH?

HOLY SHIT

OR MAYBE YOU WANNA DICK AROUND

WHATEVER THE FUCK YOU WANT

if you, like me, get so angry when discussing or debating current issues with ignorant/bigoted people that you can’t articulate your thoughts, here is a list of arguments i’ve seen so far defending darren wilson or going against the ferguson protests, with suggestions as to how to counter and links to helpful posts to support your argument:

1. “It’s not a race issue!”

Actual KKK waving a Confederate flag as they walk the streets of Ferguson, celebrating.

Darren Wilson might even be affiliated with the KKK

White Man waves a gun at children in a park, is taken into custody alive

More examples of double standards in favor of white people: James Eagan Holmes, various other (unnamed but fairly well-known) cases

2. “The officer feared for his life. It was self defense.”

Pictures of Darren Wilson’s oh-so-life-threatening injuries + full-body shot

Darren Wilson says he would do it again

Darren Wilson is 6’4” and 215lbs (needs source), in a vehicle with a loaded weapon. Mike Brown was an unarmed teenager walking down the street.

(Speculative) He got married while on leave, possibly so his wife wouldn’t have to testify if she knew something.

Wilson did not complete an incident report, which is a violation of protocol

Article about why Darren Wilson shooting Mike Brown was illegal no matter how you look at it

3. “Michael Brown stole from a convenience store. He was a thug and a thief.”

Statement from the store owner saying that no one called the police and nothing was taken

This is disputable and the time stamps on the video don’t sync up with the story.

The cigarettes he allegedly stole were paid for and there’s proof

Remind them that even if Mike Brown had done some petty shoplifting, that’s no reason for him to be shot six times in the middle of a street.

4. “The jury saw all the evidence, they know better.”/Something about insufficient/unreliable evidence.

“It’s Incredibly Rare For A Grand Jury To Do What Ferguson’s Just Did” + only .0004% of grand juries fail to indict

All 4 eyewitness accounts of the murder in chronological order

Every piece of evidence in the case against officer wilson

Prosecutor supported Wilson, and other problems with the case

Remind them that even “people get charged with manslaughter when someone dies in a car accident” and Darren Wilson wasn’t even charged that

The National Bar Association and its president know the jury’s decision was bullshit

5. “The riots and protests are out of hand and unnecessary. It’s just an excuse to be violent and steal things.”

Video of protesters getting shot with (I think) flare bombs and tear gas by police. (warning: flashing lights and loud sounds)

Video of protesters quietly sitting down

Video of protesters peacefully but firmly chanting outside the supreme court

Video of the National Guard arriving with automatic weapons

Crips and Blood gang members preventing looters at the riots (from the first riots back in august)

Community working together to clean up the aftermath of the riots

6. “You can’t fight violence with violence, what would Martin Luther King say?”

“It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots…..” -MLK

Remind them that as pro-peaceful protests as MLK was, he still got shot in the head.

If after all this, they’re still arguing in defense of Darren Wilson or the jury, just give up because there’s no way you can change the mind of such a complete fucking bigot.

Some masterposts I used that also have more information: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 

If there’s anything I should add or fix, please let me know