ofpaperandponies:

your-royalshyness:

Here’s a link to the whole video: x

Here’s a link the the website: x

THIS IS THE FUCKING BEST.

Reblog this shit! Make it known.

It’s not just mental health. It’s how society deals with everyone. Mental health simply gets the shortest of the short sticks.

(via crunkfeministcollective)

Every morning I wake and there’s blood on my hands

flip the light-switch, shush the shower, and there’s blood on my hands

soap the loofah, scrub the skin, but there’s blood on my hands

Shampoo on fingertips and massage my scalp, still, blood on my hands

grab the white towel bearing my name and number, yet, blood’s on my hands

paste the toothbrush, run under water, the blood drips down

stare into mirrored brown eyes and try not to see red

Just go through the motions. Just get through the day. Just stay present,

but still, there’s blood on my hands.

Pack the diapers, the cream, extra toddler outfit and snacks.

Don’t let him see the blood.

Take him to play, little red tricycle in front of our little townhouse

but memories plague me: of Iraqi children, just like mine,

of Iraqi houses, just like mine, of little red tricycles just like his,

rubble and aimpoints, splinters and destruction.

There’s blood on my hands.

shortformblog:

sunfoundation:

ABC, NBC Evening News Shows Ignore Massive Banking Scandal For More Than A Month

American television news outlets continue to devote sparse time to one of largest banking scandals in history. The controversy over whether major banks have been manipulating the LIBOR, a crucial interest rate that banks use to borrow money from one another, has been gathering steam for more than a month since U.S. and U.K. regulators fined British bank Barclays $450 million for its role in trying to rig the rate.

How should media cover this fairly complex story?

frank-e-go-boom:

TW: Police Violence, State Sanctioned Terrorism

anarcho-queer:

NYPD Enters Building Without A Warrant, Breaks Landlords Leg And Handcuffs Her To Hospital Bed For 17 Days

A Brooklyn landlord says she was shackled to a hospital bed for 17 days after cops broke her leg during a wrongful arrest in the hallway of her Flatbush building.

Karen Brim, 42, claims an NYPD officer threw her to the ground, severely fracturing her left leg, after she identified herself as the owner of the Utica Avenue building and asked why the cops were there, according to a new lawsuit.

The single mother was arrested and brought to Kings County Hospital, where she needed multiple surgeries, plates and screws to fix the bones broken in a tussle with Officer Timothy Reilly.

Adding insult to injury, court papers say, was the way police restrained her for more than two weeks during her hospital stay, with one officer posted outside her room.

“She was hand- and ankle-cuffed to her hospital bed,” lawyer Marshall Bluth told The Post. “They would not allow family or friends to enter. She wasn’t presented before a judicial hearing officer for 17 days. It was pretty egregious.”

A state court spokesman said the 24-hour standard for arraignment in criminal cases doesn’t apply when defendants are hospitalized.

But Brim was conscious and incapable of fleeing because of her injuries and could have been arraigned at any point, Bluth said.

“She’s not a flight risk. She cannot run out of the hospital. There’s no need to handcuff and ankle-cuff her. Being handcuffed to a bed — it’s like being a caged animal. It’s outrageous,” he said. “It’s beyond belief. Not for one day, not for one week, but for 17 days?”

The confrontation with cops unfolded on April 30, 2012, when Reilly, Officer Ralph Giordano and an unidentified partner spotted four neighborhood teens hanging out on a roof adjacent to Brim’s building. They chased the youths into Brim’s building, entering via the roof, as Brim was mopping a hallway, according to a police source and Brim’s Brooklyn federal court lawsuit.

Brim claims things got physical when she protested that the kids were visitors and not trespassing.

Cops maintain that Brim was the violent one — swinging a broom at Reilly, smacking him in the head and putting her hand around his neck, according to a criminal complaint.

The cops arrested the teens — Brenado Simpson, Clifton Bailey, Robean Romans and Distephano Destin — for trespassing. The charges were later dropped, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office said.

Brim was charged with assault, resisting arrest, menacing, harassment and obstructing governmental administration. Her criminal case is pending.

Brim insists in court papers the cops lied.

“She’s mopping the common areas, as she does once every two weeks or so, and suddenly police officers descend from the roof into her building and proceed to beat her up, basically,” Bluth said. “No one really knows for sure why they did this. They basically stormed her building.”

The cops did not have a warrant, according to Brim, who’s owned the three-story building for more than a decade and operates a beauty salon on the first floor.

Brim is seeking unspecified damages in her lawsuit, which accuses the officers of using “unnecessary and unreasonable” force, false arrest, falsifying evidence and violating her constitutional rights.

It was the second time in a year officer Reilly was accused of being violent with the public. Brooklyn resident Samuel Semple sued the city last year after Reilly allegedly “forcibly dragged” him out of a restaurant. Semple, who suffered minor injuries, got a $10,000 settlement in January.

The city will review Brim’s allegations once it gets a copy of the lawsuit, a Law Department spokeswoman said.

(via infinitelyartistic)

thepeoplesrecord:

More implications of being a woman in America.

Source

(via crunkfeministcollective)

poeticislam:

“The intelligent and refined find no rest in dwelling in one place, so leave your homeland and travel far away!
Travel and you will meet new people replacing those left behind, and tire yourself out, because it makes life worth living.
I have seen that water stagnates when it stands still, yet…

unknowneditors:

Geometric Compositions by Andy Gilmore 

(via utnereader)

Look now.  Look at what you value, what you hold dear.  Objects, first.  And not necessarily because of their innate value (although that might figure into it), but because they are endowed—by your mind and imagination, by your memories—with what is known as “sentimental value.”  

Sentiment has been defined as ascribing a value to something above and beyond what its value is to God.  This presumes a belief in God, and furthermore a belief in a kind of God that passes judgment on the inexplicable fondnesses of the human heart; there is an expression, isn’t there: “the object of my affections.”  But perhaps you do not believe in that kind of God, or any other, for that matter.

Look then at the faces and bodies of people you love.  The explicit beauty that comes not from smoothness of skin or neutrality of expression, but from the web of experience that has left its mark.  Each face, each body is its own living fossilized record.  A record of cats, combatants, difficult births; of accidents, cruelties, blessings.  Reminders of folly, greed, indiscretion, impatience.  A moment of time, of memory, preserved, internalized, and enshrined within and upon the body.  You need not be told that these records are what render your beloved beautiful.  If God exists, He is there, in the small, cast-off pieces, rough and random and no two alike.

Stephanie Kallos