19 5 / 2013
“you shouldn’t be depressed, people have it worse than you”
finally, after years of searching, the person with the worst life ever is found. formally, they are granted permission to be sad. but only them. only they have earned it. no sads for anyone else at all ever
(via queerthelibrary)
18 5 / 2013
SO THAT’S HOW THEY DO IT
I stared at this for 5 min omg
I wish I had a slow mo version of my dog drinking water. She puts her whole muzzle in the water and does this. She gets water all over herself. Its great.
(Source: yodiscrepo, via gannetguts)
18 5 / 2013
"
To actually make change, we’re going to have to not only get over individual differences, but get over trying to use our politics to make ourselves feel better than someone else. We’re going to have to move beyond activist/ally as identity and start thinking about organizing. About solidarity not with people who have ritually purified themselves and can bond over liking the same brand of overpriced ‘fair-trade’ coffee but with those who are willing to work.
We have to think about the differences between the personal and the political, the differences between activism and organizing, between lifestyle-changes and social change, between movement-building and personal choices. Buying a lightbulb, buying clothes on Etsy, deleting the word “insanely” that I still automatically start to type and replacing it with “ridiculously,” listing off a bunch of my own privileges as apology before everything I write is not enough to change the world. Having discussions in public and working to spread that awareness and communicate and organize however we can—that can change things. To build a movement you have to move beyond yourself.
"
(Source: kiriamaya, via garlandgrey)
17 5 / 2013
"Toxic stress is the heavy hand of early poverty, scripting a child’s life not in the Horatio Alger scenario of determination and drive, but in the patterns of disappointment and deprivation that shape a life of limitations."
Poverty as a Childhood Disease, by Perri Klass.
As we saw at this year’s schoollibraryjournal Public Library Leadership Think Tank, school and public libraries have a very strong role to play in mitigating the effects of poverty, for both children and their caregivers.
(via librarylinknj)
(via libraryjournal)
17 5 / 2013
Bring back any memories???? #BookCharacterDay #MagicSchoolBus
Characters: Keesha & Ralphie
Series: The Magic School Bus
omg the smile this gave me!!! so fucking perfect and cute!!!!!!!!
A kid asked if we had any Magic School Bus books in the library the other day - I was so sad that we didn’t.
17 5 / 2013
16 5 / 2013
A Health Ministry inspector poured bleach over pots full of food in a Sudanese restaurant in Tel Aviv Sunday night.
The inspector, from the ministry’s district office for Tel Aviv, was participating in a raid by police and municipal inspectors on illegal businesses owned by African migrants. Altogether, the raid shut down 10 businesses in the city’s Neveh Sha’anan neighborhood, confiscating their equipment and welding the doors shut. The equipment was then loaded onto vans by other African migrants who had been hired as contract workers.
Many diners saw the inspector pouring bleach on the food, and one, asylum-seeker Aladin Abaker from Sudan’s Darfur region, posted photos of the incident on his Facebook page. He also described his feelings of humiliation.
“Everyone − except the destroyers − was in tears from the humiliation,” he wrote. “The waitress told us, ‘I’ve seen very harsh things in my life, like torture in Sinai, but this humiliated me more than what happened to me in Sinai.”
Abaker accused the inspector of “insensitivity to people and their culture, which sees food as a sacred thing that must be respected,” and said the raid was aimed at “embittering our lives so we’ll return to Africa ‘voluntarily.’”
Altogether, he said, more than 200 kilograms of meat, chicken and fish and over 500 prepared meals were destroyed.
The inspectors said they didn’t know where the meat came from and therefore feared for the diners’ health, Abaker wrote. “We told them: But this is the only place we’ve eaten all our meals for four years now, and none of us ever had stomach problems. Even whites eat here.”
The Health Ministry responded that inspectors had discovered “deplorable sanitary conditions, food stored under unsuitable conditions and temperatures, and food from unknown sources. In order to preserve the public’s health and that of the diners themselves, it was decided to destroy the food immediately. As part of the process of destroying the food, chemicals suitable to this purpose are used. It should be noted that this was a routine process of food destruction that is no different from other destructions of food/meat.”
Tel Aviv’s deputy city manager, Ruby Zelof, said the raids were carried out “to eradicate the undesirable phenomenon of businesses operating illegally, with sanitation and safety problems and illegal connections to electricity and water, and sales of alcoholic beverages without permits.”
Haaretz | Photo credit: Aladin Abaker
Israel is deporting Africans and also planning to put tens of thousands into detention camps.
Knesset Member Miri Regev — a member of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud Party — called the refugees “a cancer in our body” and Danny Danon — also a Likud Knesset Member — wrote on his Facebook page referring to the Africans as “infiltrators”. Interior Minister Eli Yishai said the African asylum seekers threaten “the Zionist dream,” adding, “Jobs will root them here.”
See also:
- Why is the birth rate in Israel’s Ethiopian community declining? Ethiopian women who immigrated to Israel were coaxed into agreeing to injections of long-acting birth control drugs, or told they would not be allowed into the country
- Israeli woman has her photo taken with Africans, titles the Facebook album: “Late night tour of the Tel Aviv Safari”, captions the photo: “There are no signs forbidding taking pictures with the animals. There were no signs that forbid feeding, but we passed on that.”
(via so-treu)
