And Then When You Finally Get Attention It Makes You Want To Crawl Under Your Bed And Never Come Out.

Reblog if Black Lives Matter to you

Where are those woke white people at!?

Did you know that you can donate to help Ukrainian Bat Rehabilitation Center? Not only that, you can also "adopt" a bat! "Adopt" as in the bat you choose stays in the center, but you help it via donations and get regular updates on your bat. How cool is that!

Russia is trying to ban legal transition for trans people

Elena Mizulina put forward a bill, that basically bans legal transition. It includes:

Adding the “sex” graph to the birth certificate. That graph cannot be changed in any way, and you also can’t get a new passport because of that.

banning (again) same-sex marriage, but now it is made based on the birth certificate so trans people cannot marry their loved ones.

banning the right to adopt children for the trans people

and WORSE, ALL THE CHANGES MADE IN THE PAST WILL BE DECLINED. People will get their old birth certificates back. the existing marriages will be no longer legal. And I don’t even want to think what will happen to the already adopted children of transgender parents

People are scared as fuck. I see lots of panic in russian social media and also on Twitter. They made a hashtag #ProtectRussianTransLives, so you can check it out for more info. And yeah, people started protesting. 

The protest hasn’t even started properly. The police detained all of them, called them slurs, misgendered them, asked about genitals. Those pigs arrested two women - Mila Zemtsova and Polina Symonenko

Mila is a journalist who came there with a license. The police immediately arrested her for the organization (!) of the protest which is absolute nonsense. They kept her in the police department for more than 48 hours and took away her phone. She got a fine for nothing.

(translation: I want to not be afraid to show my passport)

Polina’s case is worse. She was arrested for repeated violation of the procedure for holding a public action (hope I wrote it right). Polina was also kept in the department for 48+ hours (it is illegal), misgendered and deadnamed. She was beaten in the court for taking a legal break. They gave her 14 days in a men’s prison. 

This is hell. Please spread this post. People must know about this.

If you are from Russia, you can write a letter to the government. Here’s the link for the instruction:

Medium

Обращения в Госдуму по поводу трансфобных законопроектов

Петицию против законопроектов, нарушающих права трансгендерных, гомосексуальных и интерсекс людей за сутки подписали почти 20 тыс. человек…

Sign the petition:

Change.org

Sign the Petition

Отклоните законопроект о запрете трансгендерным людям на брак и усыновление детей!

SHARE!

Disclaimer:

I don't usually use this blog.Most of the posts on here are either

A) accidentally reblogged here instead of my main

Or B) signal boosting

My main blog is @greencheekconure27

Half of all US food produce is thrown away, new research suggests

The demand for ‘perfect’ fruit and veg means much is discarded, damaging the climate and leaving people hungry

Americans throw away almost as much food as they eat because of a “cult of perfection”, deepening hunger and poverty, and inflicting a heavy toll on the environment. By one government tally, about 60m tonnes of produce worth about $160bn (£119bn), is wasted by retailers and consumers every year - one third of all foodstuffs. 

But that is just a “downstream” measure. In more than two dozen interviews, farmers, packers, wholesalers, truckers, food academics and campaigners described the waste that occurs “upstream”: scarred vegetables regularly abandoned in the field to save the expense and labour involved in harvest. Or left to rot in a warehouse because of minor blemishes that do not necessarily affect freshness or quality. 

When added to the retail waste, it takes the amount of food lost close to half of all produce grown, experts say.

Retail giants argue that they are operating in consumers’ best interests, according to food experts. “A lot of the waste is happening further up the food chain and often on behalf of consumers, based on the perception of what those consumers want,” said Roni Neff, the director of the food system environmental sustainability and public health programme at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future in Baltimore.

“Fruit and vegetables are often culled out because they think nobody would buy them,” she said.

But Roger Gordon, who founded the Food Cowboy startup to rescue and re-route rejected produce, believes that the waste is built into the economics of food production. Fresh produce accounts for 15% of supermarket profits, he argued.

“If you and I reduced fresh produce waste by 50% like [the US agriculture secretary] Vilsack wants us to do, then supermarkets would go from [a] 1.5% profit margin to 0.7%,” he said. “And if we were to lose 50% of consumer waste, then we would lose about $250bn in economic activity that would go away.”

The farmers and truckers interviewed said they had seen their produce rejected on flimsy grounds, but decided against challenging the ruling with the US department of agriculture’s dispute mechanism for fear of being boycotted by powerful supermarket giants. They also asked that their names not be used.

“I can tell you for a fact that I have delivered products to supermarkets that was [sic] absolutely gorgeous and because their sales were slow, the last two days they didn’t take my product and they sent it back to me,” said the owner of a mid-size east coast trucking company.

“They will dig through 50 cases to find one bad head of lettuce and say: ‘I am not taking your lettuce when that lettuce would pass a USDA inspection.’ But as the farmer told you, there is nothing you can do, because if you use the Paca [Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act of 1930] on them, they are never going to buy from you again. “Are you going to jeopardise $5m in sales over an $8,000 load?”

Massive food waste is based into capitalist agriculture. If the vast majority of the food produced in America’s farms was brought to market, it would drive prices down rapidly, threatening the profits of retailers. Less than 1% of this surplus food ever reaches the mouths of the hungry. 

"Close the sky over Ukraine! Close from the bombs, from war aircrafts, from all these terrorists. Make a humanitarian zone! We are human. It is your humanitarian duty to protect people. And you are able to do it! If you don't do it, if you don't even provide us with planes so that we could protect ourselves - it means that you also want us slowly murdered" - President Zelensky to the Western political leaders, right after Ukrainian city Vinnytsia was hit by eight rockets.

March 6th, 14:24 Ukrainian time (12:24 GMT).

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To the tune of Intoxicated Under the Shadow of Flowers

The Double Ninth Festival

Light mists and heavy clouds, melancholy the long dreay day, In the golden cencer the burning incense is dying away. It is again time for the lovely Double-Nith Festival; The coolness of midnight penetrates my screen of sheer silk and chills my pillow of jade. After drinking wine at twilight under the chrysanthemum hedge, My sleeves are perfumed by the faint fragrance of the plants. Oh, I cannot say it is not enchanting, Only, when the west wind stirs the curtain, I see that I am more gracile than the yellow flowers.

 Li Qingzhao

.

             .

A remarkable female poet of the Song Dynasty (960-1279), Li Qingzhao (1084-1155) made great achievements in prose as well as poetry, but most of all in the field of lyrics. Born into a literary family in present-day Jinan of Shandong Province, she established herself early as a major talent. In 1101 she married Zhao Mingcheng, who shared her artistic and academic interests. The style of Li Qingzhao’s lyrics changed sharply after she fled to the south after the invasion of the Kin Kingdom in north China. Before she went south, her lyrics mainly recounted the lives of girls and women in their boudoirs. For example, Like a Dream and Complaint of the Prince describes the airy life of cheer the poetess enjoyed at home. Tipsy in the Flower’s Shadow expresses a girl’s loneliness and longing for love, as also expressed in the Flute on Phoenix Terrace, and A Twig of Plum Blossoms. After fleeing south, she endured great hardships in life and the style of her lyric poetry turned deep and pithy. Buddhist Dancers Charm of a Maiden Singer and Slow, Slow Song explore the author’s feelings about life in exile. Joy of Eternal Union is one of the classic Li Qingzhao’s lyric poems composed in the south, presenting a scene during the Lantern Festival in which the poet, avoiding the company of friends, meditates on the bitterness consigned her by the war. In this lyric poem, Li Qingzhao rises above self-pity and expresses her fears for the whole nation. In Pride of Fishermen, the poet not only spilled out the distress caused by homelessness but also expressed a strong desire for an unfettered freedom. Li Qingzhao’s lyrics are woven with a “delicate restraint” in the following ways: first, merging intense passion with literary images, creating an artistic conception in which feelings and scenery are well blended; second, using simple but original language, which in Li Qingzhao’s lyrics is very natural and expressive. Not many literary quotations sprinkle her lyrics but with much spoken language and common sayings, Li Qingzhao’s lyrics have the beauty of music and are easy to recite. Bio and photos via:  absolutechinatours.com and cctv.com

Another version, arranged by Mykola Leontovych. Usually I’m not a big fan of classical arrangements of folk songs but this one’s really pretty:

https://soundcloud.com/vzadorojniy/leontovich_iz-za_gory_snizhok_letit

translated lyrics

(second version mostly, stuff between brackets belongs in the first version)

Snow flies from the mountain

[alt.Fire burns on the mountain]

and in the valley, a cossack lies

{cut and shot,  covered with a red cloth]

with a raven crowing at his head

and his steed pacing at his feet [alt. crying]

Do not pace, my steed, 

do not trample the earth

Run along the road

[alt. Oh my black steed,

my loyal companion

do not cry for me

run along the wide steppe road]

so that the Tatars may not catch you

May not take the saddle off your back

[ when you arrive at my fathers yard

hit the fence

When you arrive at the gates

beat them with your hooves]

My father [alt. My sister] will come out and unsaddle you

My mother will come out and ask you

“Well , black horse, where is my young son?”

[Your son, Mother, served the Khan

the Crimean Tatar

He served so well he got a fine lady for it

A proud and wealthy princess]

Don’t cry mother, don’t be sad

For your son has married

Took a fine young lady for himself

with a pit-house in the open field....

take a handful of sand

[ she rose early with the stars

washed the sand with her tears]

when that sand will sprout

your son will return from the army

the sand doesn’t sprout

the son doesn’t return from the war campaign...

bonus version:

The cast of The Empire Strikes Back at a photo call in London - 1980