It’s also a census year. Which means state legislatures are going to be redrawing their districts.
Thanks to the magic of gerrymandering, whoever’s in charge of the state during redistricting has a ton of power.
Republicans focusing on taking control of state legislatures because people don’t pay attention to them and gerrymandering to give themselves the advantage is a major part of what got us where we are now.
So if you can, pay attention to state legislature races and vote down the ticket. The districts are often small and races are often decided by a couple hundred or even a few dozen votes, so in a lot of cases it can be totally doable to flip a seat.
idk what european needs to hear this, but making fun of school shootings or police brutality or americans’ lack of access to healthcare isn’t funny or a joke. i would love to know why some of you seem to think traumatized / dead children, ppl getting shot by the police for just minding their own business, + ppl getting sick / hurt or dying bc they can’t afford something their insurance won’t cover is something you can use as a punchline or something you can use to dunk on the stoopid americans.
Would you rather they be silent? Shame from Europe is effective at making Americans rethink our shitty system
shocking but there’s actually a third option other than “silence” and “jokes about human rights violations” that involves “advocating for change without making jokes at the expense of dead children”
the average american doesn’t need to be “shamed” into rethinking our shitty system. politicians and the 1% do. and yet who is it that europeans like to make fun of? oh right, the average american.
But seriously, when we got our property, it was all just…grass. A sterile grass moonscape, like a billion other yards. With two big old maple trees. Just grass and maples, that was it.
But then I got my grubby little paws on it, and I immediately stopped fertilizing, spraying, and bagging up grass clippings and leaves. I ripped up sod and put in flowers and vegetables. I put down nice thick blankets of mulch around the flowers and vegetables.
When I first was sweating my way through stripping sod, I saw a grand total of 1 worm and 0 ladybugs. The ground was compacted into something that would bend shovel blades.
Now, six years later, I can’t dig a planting hole without turning up fourteen earthworms, and there are so many ladybugs here. Not the invasive asian lady beetles; native ladybugs. They winter over in the mulch and in the brush pile. I see thousands of them.
The soil is soft and rich. There are birds that come to eat, and bees of many sorts.
Like this is something that you, yourself, can absolutely change. This is something that you, personally, can make a difference in.
Like, last year I watched no fewer than twenty-nine monarch caterpillars grow up on my milkweed and fly away as butterflies. I watched swallowtails and moths grow. There are hummingbirds fighting over flowers now.
I did that. Me. You can do the same.
Is this post about making a garden or beating depression
As someone with clinically diagnosed anxiety and depression;
okay. so. this is actually how i got into botany in the first place; i got an unpaid internship at a greenhouse in high school and realized, very quickly, that we live in a jurassic park hellscape where big companies breed plants solely for their looks and performance, and i found that so fucking weird that i couldnt get enough of it and fell down the rabbit hole. i don’t find them bad per say; i find them weird and how they manage their product in terms of policing their retailers is very sketchy to me, but they’re not like, monstanto-level off the shits (yet). with mother’s day next weekend we’re coming up on one of the biggest greenhouse/ornamental plant industry sales days of the year, next to valentines’ day (which favors the rose industry especially), so this is an exceptionally convenient time to talk about this.
proven winners is one of the biggest ornamental plant companies in the united states, possibly the world. you might know them from their patented white flower pots. they’re centered in california (as, actually, a lot of these large flower producers are) and they manage a HUUUUUUGEEE network of giant industrial flower greenhouses.
like, you have to understand, all garden retailers have to buy their shit from somewhere, and although the centers and local greenhouses selling proven winners stuff are often small and independent (unless ur talking like…flowerama or something), a large portion of the plants themselves, like many things in capitalism, form an industry of their own dominated by a handful of oligarch corporations, of which proven winners is one. small retailers order bulk products from these companies, should it be through full-color paper catalogs (which exist, btw, and are wild in and of themselves to look at; i actually have a few back home that i keep around solely bc they’re incredibly fascinating in a slightly offputting jurassic park kind of way), online, or through a sales representative for their region.
it depends on what they’re ordering, but they can buy seeds, plugs (the black trays of like….tiny plants you buy at garden centers to put in planters? the ones that come in, like, six packs? those are called ‘plugs’), and in the case of perennials, woody plants of various ages, among other things. these plants are bred, marketed, and sold on a goddamn industrial scale. it’s wild.
now….this is where it gets absolutely fascinating to me. this isn’t just proven winners, but proven winners is one of the top contenders of this. some highlights of how plants are actually marketed on an industrial scale:
-plants come out in collections. like, you have horticulturalist designer people who put their names on some stuff and they all go out as like, The New Hot Thing™.
-they always promote their top selling stuff, and the plants that won awards, and like, the most popular flower arrangements and stuff. this in and of itself, again, isn’t like…..bad, it just feels weird how plants are marketed as objects rather than living things, you know?
-these plants are 100% bred and optimized for their commercial value and how they look. see the above point about how it feels like they’re treating them as objects.
-every year, there are new plants, which are put at the front of the catalogue and like, show them off as the Hit New Products. these are all part of the year’s collective collection, so like, proven winners has their 2019 collection all ready on their site in a special little tab:
you see, orange petunias don’t exist naturally, so what companies do is either 1. systematically breed orange into them, which can take years, or 2. take red petunias and just put in some coding for yellow from the maize genome, which makes them orange. usually, you have to submit all this paperwork and go through a ton of government red tape to sell GMOs, including required trials conducted by the federal government, but what some of these large ornamental seed companies were doing was just….not telling the government and just kind of…pretending that they bred them. so in 2017, a netherlands team noticed that these were like….kind of Suspicious™, and started doing some tests….and accidentally uncovered like, this huge international orange petunia scandal across all these companies, over 30 varieties of illegal petunia being sold internationally. they had to alert the actual EU, which then alerted the USDA, who then gave an actual government order for these large companies to literally burn, bury, or otherwise destroy all their industrial stock of the proven illegal GMO orange petunias.
small retailers who had bought them assuming that they were legal were allowed to keep and continue selling what they bought, but the actual producers were ordered to just fucking. violently destroy everything. the USDA informed these companies that they could sell them again, but only if they were put through the proper government channels and received proper certification. i checked the old recall list and didn’t see these, so i’m assuming they’re like…Legit, but. im 👀 somebody test these lol
AAANNNNYYway that aside, if you would like to see the Proven Winners 2019 Flower Collection Showcase™, they have a bunch of……weird kind of ads on their youtube channel showing artsy pics of their new shit. to this day i can’t pin down exactly what about them makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, but you really do get a sense that they’re selling an object to preform, which i guess is the point, but…idk, it’s just a very different view of plants, i think, then i personally have. very sci-fi-y, if you will. all their ads are like this; these video are essentially very similar to what you get from their print sales booklets, but in video form.
see, last but not least, my biggest beef with proven winners is the weird way they handle their company.
you get inspected by the plant police.
im not kidding. for those not very familiar with plant reproduction, you can grow vegetative clones of plants through a process called taking cuttings, where you cut off a part of the plant and put it in a new pot under the right conditions, and it develops a root system and becomes a genetic clone to the parent. obviously, anyone can do this with a lot of the proven winners plants, especially because PW plants, as i’ve noticed, tend to be bred to be more vigorous.
proven winners wants to ensure that there’s no Illegal Plant Downloads taking place, so they literally like….send people out to these small retailers and ask to see their stock to make sure that all the plants are going in the Patented Proven Winners White Pots™ with the Patented Proven Winners Information Tags™. you MUST plant proven winners stuff in the pots they send you, with the instructions they send you, and they will check you for this. the first time my internship mentor ordered from them, they accidentally planted the plugs in generic brown pots instead of the white ones, and the weird proven winners police rolled in unannounced for an inspection and told them that the next time it happened they wouldn’t sell to them anymore. what they’re worried about happening is that the growers will order a small amount and then just make a bunch of cuttings without paying them, and it’s just……weird. like i get why they do it but that’s always struck me as really, really shady lmao
OH BOY STORYTIME
ok so a couple years back I worked at a local greenhouse and we sold Proven Winners and they were HANDS DOWN managment’s least favorite company to deal with because:
The aforementioned Plant Police, who are the worst possible version of ‘police washout mall cop’ and ‘geriatric bitchy HOA snitch’. Our local Plant Cop was this woman named “Elise” and her picture was stapled up in the breakroom with instructions to Radio 3 if we saw her.
I’ll get to Radio 3 in a minute.
their product was uhhh… kind of crap? everything we ever got from them was real leggy, prone to carrying Sudden Death Mold, and frankly just didn’t do as well as some other brands in CO.
They attracted the WORST customers. You know the kind- the infamous haircut, knows more about plants than the people with actual horticultural degrees and sixteen cupons but only two of them are for this store, and either on their phone or screaming at their children at the register instead of checking out.
The only reason managment dealth with them at all was 1. People would request PW by name, so managment maked it up a ridiculous percentage and made bank on brand loyalty 2. PW’s delivery trucks would actually show up when scheduled with what was actually ordered so they could be relied upon to deliver, unlike pretty much every other grower :/
So it’s fucking MOTHER’S DAY, aka Hell On Earth for greenhouse retailers, and we’re understaffed in Greenhouse because some popular band was playing at the local indie bar Saturday night and everyone but me and Kate called in “sick”, so it’s two of us and sometimes assistant manger craig dealing with literally 3K customers an hour.
Fucking Elise decides it’s a good day to do a surprise inspection.
I’m breaking up a fight over at tomatoes when this woman grabs my arm, physically pulls me away from the woman whose order I’m writng down and hisses like a rattler at me “I need to see your greenhouses.”
I winch my arm out and get gouged by her nails. “Sorry, our greenhouses aren’t open to the public, and I’m working with her now.” I’m seven hours into a twelve-hour shift so far after coming in at 5 to unload the trucks, I can’t hear myself think over the echo in the greenhouse, and my panic over crowds has reached such a frenzy that I think my heatbeat could rival a hummingbird’s. I’m dehydrated despite my best efforts, hallucinating smells and my forearms are bleeding profusely from moving roses earlier. I no longer expirience pain or fear from exhaustion, but this woman makes me uneasy.
“I’m with Proven Winners and I’m here for an inspection.”
“Proven Winners are over there by the fairy garden supplies.” I say, still not sure what she’s on about. I don’t do faces at the best of times and in the current retail-induced feuge I barely register her as a human being. I go back to trying to write ‘amish paste’ for what feels like the fortieth time, and Elise grabs my arm again and DIGS HER NAILS IN, before physically pulling me out the back door and towards the greenhouses.
The first of the Quanzat huts/greenhouses is filled with columbines, one of the few non-crop plants that’s grown on-site because they’re in such demand and grow well here. Elise points at the rows and shakes my arm.
“WHERE ARE THESE FROM?” she demands.
“Here? Ma’am this place is off-limits for customers, if you have questions I can get the greenhouse manager-” I fumble for my radio (we all got walkie-talkie type radios because yelling over a 13-acre property is impractical) , and try to call the manager. “Radio Adam? There’s a lady who needs some questions answered in Greenhouse 1?”
“NO I NEED TO SPEAK TO JEFF.” she shrieks, name-dropping the owner. “TELL HIM ELISE [REDACTED] IS HERE FROM PROVEN WINNERS AND IF HE DOESN’T GET HERE FOR AN INSPECTION I’LL HAVE THE POLICE SHUT DOWN THIS ENTIRE FACILITY!” she howls at me.
This Woman, I decide, Is Out Of Her Goddamn Gourd. The mangers are all up to their armpits today and even if they could hear me wouldn’t be able to physically wade through the crowds for a good 10 minutes. I click my radio over to Channel 3. Channel 1 is for directing delivery trucks. Channel 2 is for staff. Channel 3 doesn’t work- it doesn’t connect but it DOES make your radio make a very loud higher-than-most-people-can-hear EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE noise.
This summons The Dogs.
Jeff’s family is from West Texas where the land is vast, the coyotes are many and nobody fixes thier animals, which is how he found and adopted two of the strangest dogs I’ve ever worked with. Teddy and Bob are Anatolian Shepherd/Rhodesian Ridgeback hybrids, which is to say they clock in at 125lbs each, with body-bulder like reddish gray bodies, black masks and mane of fur that tapers into a full-body mowhawk of long hair along thier backs. Jeff had to dock thier ears and tails for health reasons which really only adds to the illusion that Jeff has a pair of hyenas.
I can hear the crowd outside shouting as they race out from thier hole under the potting shed and they barrel into the Quanzat hut and stand on either side of me, snarling and bristling like they were trained to, which makes Elise finally let go of my arm and back up. In an impressive feat of teleportation, Jeff turns up three seconds later.
“YOU!” Elise and Jeff mutually bellow at each other. The Dogs snap at the air.
“I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU STILL HAVE THOSE THINGS.” Elise shrieks, picking up a potted columbine to throw.
“I’M SURE THAT YOU STILL HAVE A RESTRAINING ORDER. GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE AND LEAVE MY STAFF ALONE.” counters jeff.
“oh shit i’m bleeding.” I say, belatedly realizing she’s gouged holes in my arm that have been freely bleeding for at least three minutes now. Everyone takes a moment to stare at my arm which is looking like a prop from a Tarintino film.
“Actually, go have a seat in my office.” Says Jeff, suddenly, coldly calm. He takes out his cell phone and dials 911.
Elise screams, throws the potted columbine, and is promptly tackled by assitant manager Craig, who had gone around the back. Jeff ducks and the pot clips me in the face becuase that’s just how this day was going.
Anyway, I got a zillion pictures taken of my arm, had to give a statment and then went back to work because it was literally me and Kate covering the entire greenhouse on our busiest day of the year and as shit as that was I couldn’t abandon her to the Hordes. Got double overtime and hazard pay for the full day so I wouldn’t narc to the labor board over it, and The Dogs refused to leave my side which really improved customer’s attitude towards me.
Elise got charged with assault, trespass and violating her parole, Jeff got a warning from the sherrif about “you can’t sic large dogs on people in city limits even if they really, really deserve it”, so the dogs had a vacation out in the county for a fortnight until the cops stopped driving by, and that’s the story of how we stopped carrying Proven Winners.
Television is engineered to make you watch more television and buy more of the advertisers’ products. Television’s aim is to perpetuate itself. That it also perpetuates the status quo is a symptom of the fact that the status quo is and has been since—at the very least—the turn of the previous century a consumption machine. I hear people talk about the damaging “messages” they see on tv; recently I read an article about how tv of the ‘80s was designed to masculinize men and infantilize women. The message of tv is simply and always its own name, forever; that the exercise of consumerism requires idiot men and childwomen means that these qualities are inherent in consumerism. Television has no aim but itself.
Television will never be on your side; television can never be a tool for social change; television has never been progressive or healthy or good. The viewer’s relationship with television is inherently imbalanced, because television stands to gain by you and it will do anything to remove you from your capital and secure you in its sway. It will say that women are ugly and men are great if this will capture you. It will say that all bodies are beautiful. It will say that love wins. It will say that whores ought to end up on a Law & Order slab. Television doesn’t care.
The only way you will see yourself represented on television is if television’s fiery eye finds you and understands you as a holder of capital. By the time you see yourself you have already been exploited. Television is your enemy whether it insults you or praises you, and this will always be the case.
Fair point. Back in the 90s, Clinton had an aggressive plan for the “National Infrastructure Initiative”.
Verizon, AT&T, BellSouth, CenturyLink and others got $200 Billion in funding, plus tax breaks, favorable changes to laws, and other perks in exchange for a commitment to upgrade the telecommunications infrastructure across the nation to all neighborhoods rich and poor.
Specifically there was supposed to be fiberoptic lines run to every house capable of running at least 50mpbs up and down and up to 500 channels of video costing the average consumer around $50/month. This fiberoptic system was by law supposed to be open to ALL competitors and not be a Comcast owned set of wires or a Time Warner set of wires. This was written to PREVENT area based monopolies and allow everyone to access a “free open market” of service providers.
There were even specific deadlines and goals to reach by state. At least 50% of Pennsylvania households were to be hooked up to this fiberoptic system by 2004. At least 75% of New Jersey by 2005….
Then the telecommunications industry came back and said, “Hey… Look theres been a lot of mergers and acquisitions going on so no one really knows where the money is anymore, not to mention price increases all around…. Give us ANOTHER $200 Billion so we can finish.”
All told, the direct payments, tax incentives, regulation cuts, etc have cost the US almost $5 TRILLION since the 90s.
Do you have fiberoptic internet in your house? Do you have a market of internet service providers competing to provide high speed service to your home? Do you pay less than $50/month for your TV and Internet service?
No?
Then you see that the telecom industry has not fulfilled their side of the bargain and have earned the penalties that are coming their way.
If you paid someone to build a house on land that you own, you wouldn’t keep paying the builders rent as if they were your landlord. You might hire them for routine maintenance if they did a good job though. That’s your monthly bill, routine maintenance of a system that we the people are supposed to own.
Nationalize all telecommunications infrastructure. We paid for it, they were just the contractors who built it and never left. They did a shitty job, never met any of their deadlines, and THEY DONT OWN IT.
Whoa, I didn’t realize that it was so deliberate, I honestly thought it was unconscious
Scary, scary.
Gonna add on to this: From the other side of the bar, I see this crap all the time. Seriously. I work at a high-density bar, and let me tell you, I have anywhere from 10-20 guys every night come up and tell me to, “serve her a stronger drink, I’m trying to get lucky tonight, know what I mean?” usually accompanied with a wink and a gesture at a girl who, in my experience, is going to go from mildly buzzed to definitively hammered if I keep serving her. Now, I like to think I’m a responsible bartender, so I usually tell guys like that to piss off, and, if I can, try to tell the girl’s more sober friends that they need to keep an eye on her. But everyone- just so you know, most of the time, when someone you don’t know is buying you a drink, they’re NOT doing it out of a sense of cordiality, they’re buying you a drink for the sole purpose of making you let your guard down. So:
Tips for getting drinks-
1. ALWAYS GO TO THE BAR TO GET YOUR OWN DRINK, DO NOT LET STRANGERS CARRY YOUR DRINKS. This is an opportune time for dropping something into your cocktail, and you’re none the wiser.
2.IF YOU ORDER SOMETHING NON-ALCOHOLIC, I promise you, the bartender doesn’t give two shits that you’re not drinking cocktails with your friends, and often, totally understands that you don’t want to let your guard down around strangers. Usually, you can just tell the bartender that you’d like something light, and that’s a big clue to us that you’re uncomfortable with whomever you’re standing next to. Again, we see this all the time.
3. If you’re in a position to where you feel uncomfortable not ordering alcohol:
Here’s a list of light liquors, and mixers that won’t get you drunk, and will still look like an actual cocktail:
X-rated + sprite = easy to drink, sweet, and 12% alcoholic content. Not strong at all, usually runs $6-$8, depending on your state.
Amaretto + sour= sweet, not strong, 26%.
Peach Schnapps+ ginger ale= tastes like mellow butterscotch, 24%.
Melon liquor (Midori, in most bars) + soda water = not overly sweet, 21%
Coffee liquor (Kahlua) +soda = not super sweet, 20%.
Honestly really wish we’d normalize respecting children more. We’ve got parents treating their own children like property, whole ass governments trying to figure out if they deserve toothpaste and soap, and grown ass adults bullying/stalking them on Twitter, like it’s just absolutely fucking astounding how much people just refuse to interact with children like they’re actual human beings.
the internet is an inherently haunted place if you think about it like. it’s so weird to see long abandoned discussion boards stuck in a snapshot of the past, old conversations between kids from over a decade ago who have now grown into their own lives, obituaries taking the form of half finished profiles. and the silence that fills the gaps between. there’s a constant ghostly record of each generation’s thoughts, fads, their sense of humour. back when the future was at their fingertips. even stranger, people you used to know exist openly in that space, and they watch you watching them. if you want, deceased musicians can play through your headphones. there’s always an underlying sense of reminiscing and time escaping our ever shortening attention spans. what a fuckin graveyard
If my future s/o doesn’t stare at me like I’m their whole world while I stand like a crackhead in the candle section of target smelling every single candle before buying one then whats the point
My mom does this and my dad always watches her. She thinks he’s not paying attention, but last year he remembered the ones she liked and used that knowledge to get her a custom scented candle for their anniversary. He had it named “Target Sniffs”.
this is the cutest addition to this post I could have ever asked for
We are sharing some of our favourite gifs each day this month for Antifa International’s fifth anniversary. Today: Nazi monuments being destroyed after the defeat of Nazi Germany.
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