Before Super Tuesday, the essential Ari Berman pointed out on the electric Twitter machine that, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s having gutted the Voting Rights Act, Texas had gone out of its way to close 750 polling places. (The Guardian looked into the numbers and came to the unsurprising conclusion that these closures affected minority voters most harshly.) And that’s how Hervis Rodgers became famous on Tuesday night. Rodgers waited seven hours to vote at a polling station on the campus of Texas Southern University in Houston. From ABC13:
“I wanted to get my vote in, voice my opinion,” he said proudly. “I wasn’t going to let anything stop me, so I waited it out.” Lines were so bad at the TSU polling place that volunteers organized to bring pizza to voters who had to endure lengthy waits. Eventually, Harris County Clerk Diane Trautman sent more voting machines to the site, although for many voters it was too little, too late. “It’s taking a long time on the Democratic side and the Republican side has a bunch of empty machines that no one is using,” voter Britany Turner told ABC 13.
The voter-suppression tactics are going to get more grotesquely obvious this time around, and they’re already set up in too many places, and they differ not at all from the tactics of tinhorns the world over. In fact, according to the official United Nations instructions for its election monitors, one of their prime duties is to ensure that…
Political parties should not face unreasonable restrictions on participation or campaigning. There should be protection under the law for party names and symbols. Procedures for designation of party agents, for nomination time and place requirements, and for campaign financing should be clearly established by law. In addition, the electoral calendar should provide adequate time for campaigning and public information efforts.
How much longer until the utopic Solarpunk future where Capitalism is dead and we all live in ecologically sustainable high-tech forest cities? Asking for a friend.
Until we make those ecologically sustainable high-tech forest cities ourselves. It’s going to take a lot of us to do it though, so best to spread the word (and gather native tree seeds).
And, like, get started now. Then our “weirdo houses” will be the only thing functioning when everything falls apart!
The only reason why we don’t live in a solarpunk world right now is because no one has bothered to make it yet.
We’ll have to make it ourselves, and we’ll have to help each other make it. That’s why it is solarpunk.
Some resources to consider creating or joining or doing:
Repair cafes - create or join your local repair cafe! Repair stuff, learn how to repair stuff, teach others how to repair stuff.
Map of Makerspaces - make some things! learn how to make some things! teach others how to make some things!
Community Garden Map (note that this is US-only, and not a complete list) - join a local community garden
Learn some basics on passive solar design - clever use of the sun can create extremely energy efficient homes and buildings. You can use these principles to save on energy bills, even if you’re renting.
Free USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning, 2015 revision - cut down on personal food waste! Learn how to safely preserve food. Very useful if you suddenly harvest / purchase for crazy cheap in season / dumpster dive a ton of perishable food.
Donate to One Acre Fund, which provides training and capital to farmers (making them more productive and pulling them out of poverty) in various east African countries
Donate to Bridges to Prosperity, which provides technical expertise, money, and volunteers, to help local people build and maintain their own footbridges in extremely isolated rural areas
joining r/solarpunk, and sharing links/ideas/art/music with the community. Also, upvoting stuff for greater visibility. There’s over 900 members!
Make your own beer, cheese, soap, wine… really anything you can make rather than buy is a success!
And HELP YOUR NEIGHBORS! Don’t just build/grow/mod/repair your own stuff, help them do it too! Share it! Depend on each other! Work together and grow closer with your community!
On Thursday afternoon, dozens of employees of the publishing imprints Grand Central Publishing and Little, Brown staged a walkout to protest Grand Central’s decision to publish Woody Allen’s memoir, Apropos of Nothing, next month.
Both imprints are owned by Hachette Book Group (HBG), the same house that published journalist Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill. The walkout comes after Farrow announced on Tuesday that he felt he could no longer work with HBG after the Allen acquisition.
Farrow is Allen’s son with actress Mia Farrow; his sister, Dylan Farrow, has accused Allen of having sexually abused her as a child. Allen has long denied her allegations.
Like, there are a lot of reasons why I don’t post selfies anymore. A big part of it is that the last three years of my life have been hell, and it shows, and I can’t quite reconcile myself with that reality yet.
But also, the closer we get to an absolutely explicitly authoritarian government, and a brutality-first police force emboldened by both a government that backs them and a judiciary now heavily stacked towards supporting them, I know full well that all it takes is a few more twitches further to the reichright… and all it will take is some cop who knows they won’t suffer consequences to face ID me, see my history, and come up with an excuse to hassle me.
To say nothing of when right-wing shithead hate groups get their hands on this in future decades.
