Though The Principle Of Paying Rich Landowners Just For Owning Land Is Long Established, The USDA Claimed

“Though the principle of paying rich landowners just for owning land is long established, the USDA claimed that the recent rise in ad hoc payments began in order to fight “unfair and illegal trade retaliation” from China. “Trade retaliation” here means challenging, even slightly, the U.S.’s monopolistic global market share, and with it the ability to dump agricultural commodities below market price on the Global South. Such dumping and monopolism are integral to both the interests of U.S. listed agricultural companies and, arguably, U.S. geopolitical strength; they expand the reach of U.S. finance and biotech and enforce relationships of dependency upon commodity-supplying states. This imperialist structure depends on more than direct payments: even without the ad-hoc payments, U.S. commodity farmers receive extensive tax exemptions, conservation easements for land they leave fallow, and federal crop insurance with an average return of 120%. Especially at the state and local level, these various forms of payments and tax breaks are easy to get if you own land and are relatively high-income. Roughly two thirds of registered farms are hobby farms, retirement projects, and tax shelters (often enough, all three.) Far from being productive pillars of the community, they are essentially “the yards of the upper middle class” as Maggie Koerth put it. A large pool of suburban and rural property holders benefit from programs originally intended for agriculture, and a larger-still group benefit from the consistently rising price of land and housing through house flipping and investment properties. It is here, to this excessively enfranchised stratum of society, that state financing of imperialism trickles down.”

— c. e., Farming In the Shadow of the Shadow State

i learned about Tim Wong who successfully and singlehandedly repopulated the rare California Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly in San Francisco. In the past few years, he’s cultivated more than 200 pipevine plants (their only food source) and gives thousands of caterpillars to his local Botanical Garden (x)

Still can't get over the fact that Lucy Liu creates these stunning erotic lesbian paintings

I mean just look at them:

The Hollywood Reporter

Inside Lucy Liu’s Art Studio and Exploring “What We Choose Not to See”

With painting and found objects, Lucy Liu explores identity to create “aggressive” work about body and mortality.

What a journey this life is! dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earthquake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.

I know we often lose, and that the death or destruction of another is infinitely more real and unbearable than one's own. I think I know how many times one has to start again, and how often one feels that one cannot start again. And yet, on pain of death, one can never remain where one is. The light. The light. One will perish without the light.

James Baldwin, “Nothing Personal.” 1964.

Arkansas Passed A Law To Ban Trans People From Getting Healthcare

Yes, you heard me right. Arkansas has passed a bill that bans trans youth from getting hormones, gender affirming surgeries, and even the totally reversible puberty blockers. It also prohibits doctors from referring their patients to a different doctor or state where this healthcare is legal. Another part of the bill allows private health insurance companies to outright refuse to service trans people of any age.

LINK

The bill also forces the outing of any students. If a school knows about a student identifying as trans or otherwise as not cis, they must tell that student’s family family.

The Arkansas Senate voted on this bill on Monday, with the outcome being 28-7. 

LINK

In the US this year, there have been over 80 anti-trans bills that have been about restricting blockers, surgeries, and more, but now there’s this, which bans all. This is a record-breaking number. We are only in March.

LINK

The bill is called HB 1570, the “Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act.” Please, whatever you do, fight against this bill.

LINK

Soon, this bill will go to Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson. If he doesn’t veto this law, and he passes it, this law will go into place this summer. Please, please, guys. Fight this law.

To make matters worse, 2021 is following 2020′s path of record-breaking anti-trans violence.

LINK

And it’s not just Arkansas who is passing this bill. There are over ten other states, all considering bills similar to it.

LINK

Many LGBTQ organisations, advocates, and more are fighting against this bill, such as Chase Strangio, deputy director for transgender justice at the American Civil Liberties Union LGBT & HIV Project, who has called this law: “the single most extreme anti-trans law to ever pass through a state legislature.”; Rumba  Yambú, head of Intransitive; Dr. Lee Savio Beers, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics; Child Mind Institute; and more are all against this bill.

One doctor in Arkansas testified against this bill, bringing up the point of how many trans suicides there already are. Dozens of trans kids are already contemplating suicide or have tried. Over 50% of trans kids in accepting homes or environments try or succeed at committing suicide. That goes down to 4% if they are accepted.

If that bill is passed, trans suicides will go up. Arkansas won’t be an accepting place. It already isn’t. But once this bill passes, there is no chance. 

So please, if you can, fight this bill. Research it, tell your friends, sign petitions, support trans people. I am linking some petitions (on this bill and other trans issues) and other articles about this bill down below.

PETITION FOR RELIGIOUS ANTI-LGBTQ LAWS

PETITIONS OF CHANGE.ORG FOR TRANS ISSUES

ARTICLE

ARTICLE ON ANTI-TRANS SPORT BILLS

WEBSITE SHOWING WHAT ANTI-TRANS ISSUES ARE GOING ON IN EACH STATE

50 BILLS 50 STATES ANTI-CONVERSATION THERAPY BILLS LEAD BY THE TREVOR PROJECT

PETITION AGAINST THE ANTI-TRANS YOUTH BILL

please boost this!!!!! feel free to add more or correct me if I have information wrong!!