I Need Help Feeding My Family

DoorDash workers are going on strike tomorrow (July 31st, 2021). They’re demanding tip transparency and a base pay of at least $4.25 per hour. Don’t cross the picket line.

Few people realise that England has fragments of a globally rare habitat: temperate rainforest. […] One of their defining characteristics is the presence of epiphytes, plants that grow on other plants, often in such damp and rainy places. […]

You may have heard of England’s most famous fragment of temperate rainforest: Wistman’s Wood, in the middle of Dartmoor. With its gnarled and stunted oaks, its remote location marooned within a sheep-nibbled moorscape, and attendant tales of spectral hounds that inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, it has an outsize reputation for somewhere so tiny in size: eight acres – about four football pitches.

Temperate rainforests, however, once covered a much larger swathe of England, and even larger parts of Wales and Scotland. A map produced by the academic Christopher Ellis in 2016 identified the “bioclimatic zone” suitable for temperate rainforest in Britain – that is, the areas where it’s warm and damp enough for such a habitat to thrive. This zone covers about 1.5m acres of England – around 5% of the country.

For comparison, the entire woodland cover of England today is just 10%, and much of that is conifer plantations.

We have, in other words, lost a lot of our rainforests. […]

Many of England’s rainforests were lost long ago, to the axes of Bronze Age farmers and medieval tin miners. Others were lost more recently to […] profoundly misguided forestry policies, which led to the felling of ancient, shrunken oaks in favour of fast-growing Sitka spruce. And in many places where rainforests would naturally flourish, overgrazing by sheep – whose sharp teeth hungrily eat up every sapling – has prevented their return. […]

It wasn’t just Wistman’s Wood: rainforests cling on, too, along the whole valley of the Dart river ([…] dart is Brythonic Celtic for “oak”), the Bovey and Teign rivers, and far beyond.

Some of this is simply due to the lie of the land. At Holne Chase, a rocky outcrop on the Dart […], the scree-strewn cliffs and piles of boulders are too steep even for sheep. Oak, birch and holly flourish instead, sprouting from nooks and crevices between the rocks, carpeted in verdant mosses and that staple of temperate rainforest, the string-of-sausages lichen. […]

At Lustleigh Cleave, a steep-sided common on the river Bovey that was barren pasture on Ordnance Survey maps a century ago, several hundred acres of rainforest has miraculously regenerated. A painting of the summit of Lustleigh Cleave dated 1820 shows it to be bare rocks, a shepherd grazing his flock at its base.

Mapping what survives is only the first part of this project. The next phase is to attempt to restore our lost rainforests to something approaching their former glory. That process is already under way in Scotland and Wales, where charities and alliances have formed to protect and rejuvenate their diminished rainforest habitats. (England, as ever, seems to be lagging behind.) […] [T]he next time you go for a walk in the woods and spot ferns growing from branches, lichen sprouting like coral and tree trunks bubbling with moss, you may well be walking through one of this country’s forgotten rainforests.

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Headline, images, captions, and text published by: Guy Shrubsole. “Life finds a way: in search of England’s lost, forgotten rainforests.” The Guardian. 29 April 2021.

The vegan to ecofascist pipeline

French senator Claude Malhuret sums up the world made by the current American administration, 5 March 2025

Tweet 1: I can see a lot of people either avoiding Plan B & ending up pregnant or attempting to take multiple doses & getting sick.

Tweet 2: anyone w a credit card (not everyone, I know) can/should use ella ella-rx.com they’ll ship it overnight $45

SIGNAL BOOST. Ella is another form of emergency contraception/the morning-after pill. It’s more effective than Plan B and can be taken up to FIVE DAYS after your mishap, rather than three days. Please spread this around; with all of the anti-choice legislation flying about and how difficult it can be for some people to get Plan B even OTC (like minors, people living in small towns, etc.), this might be the only way a lot of people can get their hands on the morning-after pill.

The DOJ’s report of Mike Brown’s autopsy. Death ruled a homicide.

Ferguson grand jury documents withheld (x)

More anger, action at Ferguson Commission meeting (x)

Ferguson book gifts grow; library donations over $350,000

Gov. Nixon declined 7 year old…

Just got out of a doctor appointment and it cost me $212– which was well above what I anticipated as a cost.

I need some help covering it, so I don’t go without things like food till my spouse gets paid again.

Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/jnwampler

Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/khanji

Venmo: KajiW

CashApp: $kajiw

130/212

KU JOURNALISM MAJOR SHREDS “CASE” AGAINST MIKE BROWN

Shelby Lawson is a student at the University of Kansas, majoring in Journalism and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Lawson posted the following to her Facebook page: 

“Alright y’all. I’d like to clear a few things up. This is a general address to the long list of misconceptions and inconsistencies and abuses of power that exist surrounding the killing of Mike Brown. I have researched these points and provided sources in case you wish to do some reading of your own.

-The most common misconception I’m hearing is that Mike Brown was significantly larger than Officer Wilson. This is incorrect. On page 198 of the official grand jury transcript, you can see that Officer Wilson testifies he is 6 ft 4 and weighs 210 lbs,the same size as Mike Brown.

(source)

-Mike Brown was NOT stopped because he was a suspect in crime. He and his friend Dorian Johnson were stopped for jaywalking, as Darren Wilson testifies to on page 208 of his grand jury testimony.

-Mike Brown WAS fleeing from Officer Wilson when he was fatally shot. Wilson confirms this on page 281 of his grand jury testimony.

-Officer Wilson broke police self-defense protocol, which teaches to disarm and incapacitate rather than kill and teaches officers to go for body shots. Officer Wilson shot Mike Brown twice in the head, after he shot him four times in his arm and torso.

(source)

-Ferguson Police ignored protocol and refused to interview or take a statement from the eyewitness present from Officer Wilson’s initial contact with Mike Brown until his death.

(source)

-The forensic examiner broke protocol by failing to take crime scene photos. On page 95 of the grand jury transcript, she claims that this was because her camera had died, however, she goes on to describe how she immediately followed Wilson to the hospital in order to photograph his “injuries.”

-Forensic investigators broke protocol by failing to test Officer Wilson’s gun for fingerprints, since Wilson claims that Brown grabbed his gun and caused it to misfire. Page 39, grand jury transcript.

-Darren Wilson was then allowed to break protocol by washing the blood off of himself before it could be photographed, making it impossible to analyze blood spatter patterns and determine what position Mike Brown was in when Wilson first shot him. Wilson recounts this on page 10 of his official police interview.

(source)

-While Officer Wilson’s story of what happened that day has changed at least three times, six separate eyewitnesses, four of whom have never met each other, all have identical accounts of what happened. They were never interviewed by police.

(source)

-These eyewitnesses all agree that Darren Wilson was the aggressor and that Mike Brown was shot while surrendering, with his hands in the air and that his last words were “I don’t have a gun. Stop shooting.”

-This is backed up by Mike Brown’s autopsy, which suggests that Mike Brown would have had to be in the hands-up position for the bullets to enter his hand and arm the way they did.

(source)

-Furthermore, in a press conference, the coroner who performed Mike Brown’s autopsy relays that there was no trace of gun shot residue anywhere on his body, proving that Wilson’s claim that Mike Brown grabbed his gun, causing it to misfire, is impossible and untrue.

(source)

-Ferguson Police lied about the distance Mike Brown was from Officer Wilson when he was killed. They reported it was 35 ft. but it was in fact 148 ft.

(source)

-Owner of Ferguson Market states that he did not call police to report a theft of cigars, that the theft had nothing to do with Mike Brown, and that the man on the security footage is not Mike Brown.

(source)

-The prosecuting attorney for the case against Darren Wilson has helped raise $600,000 in donations for Darren Wilson, creating a clear conflict of interest.

(source)

-The police department that Officer Wilson worked for prior to coming to Ferguson was disbanded after multiple instances of racial profiling.”

(source)

Source

Let's talk for a moment about food prices, inflation, and the nitrogen fertilizer shortage, and steps you can take. We're going to go from food bank to growing your own, so stick around. This is mostly written for people who do not have much, if any, start up money.

To be brief, food prices are high, and inflation is going to mean more people will be struggling. On top of that, there has been a nitrogen fertilizer shortage, and on top of that, China and Russia said they wouldn't be exporting any until June.

I'm not here to discuss how bad it'll be, I'm here to provide some options.

First off, if you have money, donate money to food banks. If you're in a well-off area and your food banks have lots of support, consider donating money to areas that aren't as well off. Food banks can buy in bulk, so they can get way more food for the same dollar, which is why I'm not saying donate food.

Secondly, if you're struggling or even if it would make life a bit easier, use your food bank. If it's coming down to rent or food, go to the food bank and pay your rent. This might be different where you are, but here they get enough support that they really want and encourage people to come get food. If you're not sure, you can always call and ask.

Consider joining a bulk buying club (this is where a lot of food coops started) - people joining together so they can buy in bulk, get the cheaper prices, and then divide it up. If there's not one where you are, consider starting one. Buying in bulk is so much more cost efficient!

Where to grow:

Next comes growing food. If you don't have space, see if there are community gardens that you can join- or start one by asking the owners of vacant land if you can put in a garden. Join your local gardening groups (they're probably on facebook) and see if there's anyone with space willing to let you garden, or make some kind of arrangement.

If none of those options work, look into guerrilla gardening. Two factors for success here are that your plants be located a) close enough to you that you could feasibly walk by them multiple times per week and b) located where they either won't be noticed or won't bother the type of people who would notice. There has been much written about this, read up on it.

Of course, if you're lucky, you have your own yard, and can just grow in the ground there.

What to grow:

We've got a different mind set than many self-sufficiency folks, because we don't have enough time or space to grow all our own food. So, the focus instead is on growing what we can to reduce our grocery bills as much as possible.

What do you eat a lot of? What costs a lot per square foot and unit of time? It's the plants that you eat a lot of AND are costly AND are productive that we're going to want to focus on. Keep in mind that what might be true for my climate might not be true for yours. I'll give you a few examples:

Onions: If you eat a lot of onions, you might be tempted to grow them- but they are usually less than $1/lb and they take the whole growing season to make one harvest.

Kale: relatively expensive to buy, multiple harvests, and super easy to grow while not taking up a lot of space.

Artichokes: super expensive to buy, easy to grow (once established), but takes up a lot of space.

Personally, I grow the kale, and skip the artichokes & onions.

This person actually looked at yield per squarefoot and cost at the store and made a table for it:

The Cheap Vegetable Gardener

The most expensive vegetables in your vegetable garden - The Cheap Vegetable Gardener

Many vegetables can be expensive to purchase by growing the most expensive vegetables in your garden and buying the least inexpensive vegeta

But keep in mind, again, yields depend a lot on climate. In general, fresh herbs, leafy greens, and things like tomatoes are your most cost efficient plants to grow.

Look at what you actually eat and figure out what will be most cost efficient to grow. Don't grow a bunch of cilantro unless you really like to eat it, no matter how cost efficient it is.

Once you know what you want to grow, check out your local extension office/ master gardener program and learn HOW to grow it in your area!

Next: getting and growing food plants

If you're doing this on the cheap, first look to your local free groups, mutual aid groups, seed libraries, and gardening groups. There will be seed and plant swaps where people just want to share and don't particularly want or need a trade in return.

If you get food stamps, those can be used to buy seeds and vegetable starts in some states.

Other than that, I prefer to grow from seed, but I know that can be scary for new gardeners. Give it a try anyway! You'll be amazed.

How to feed your vegetables for free:

The best time to start composting is 6 months ago, but alas. Start composting now. Get coffee grounds, get lawn clippings, get whatever you can, and compost it. Heavy feeders grow well with a mulch of lawn clippings around them. Someone near you has horses or rabbits or something else and would love to give you some manure.

You can also straight up bury kitchen scraps and plant over them and the decomposers will still do their job if you don't have room for a compost pile.

Do you know what the limiting nutrient in most gardens is? Nitrogen. Do you know what you have an unlimited, free supply of?* Just saying, raspberries love it. Look into it and read up on it so you're not just going out there willy-nilly and burning your plants to a crisp.

Also, if you're municipality has yard waste/Organics pick up, there's a good chance they have a very large pile of free compost/mulch some where. Make use of it.

I'm sure there's more, but I gotta get going. Add your thoughts!

P.S. if you really do want to look into growing more of your calories, look into potatoes, corn for corn flour (not the same as sweet corn!), fava beans, and dry beans. What will work for your climate might be different.

*pee

I am Lunē Greybridge, I live in occupied Seminole territory, and I have hit…. a wall.

https://www.gofundme.com/share/s/share-family-friends/lgs-land-back-justicehealingclimate-emergency

!PLEASE watch and share this video.!  I am doing the best I can and working very  hard but your help is absolutely needed right now. Transcript under the cut:

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