This place serves people who've had major mental health issues or substance abuse, been houseless or incarcerated etc. The marginalized. Many are not very educated.

When the group was asked what kind of work they want, one person shrugged and said "Janitorial". The teacher winced and amended her question, "I mean what did you want to be when you grew up? What's your DREAM job?"

There was a heavy silence.

One person thought about it for a long, long moment and said, "...Grape picking?"

"Where do you see yourself in 5 years?"

"........Better pay?"

"But what role in your job? What do you see yourself doing?"

"...My own apartment?"

This is the population the fascist techbros see not even as prey, just vermin. Pathetic suckers. Bowls of worms. Stupid. Disposable. Misery cultivated to scare other workers into line.

Some of us are already so ground down we don't know how to dream anymore. It all seems so far out of reach. Some FEEL stupid, due to how they've been treated, with little awareness of the insight, wisdom, and potential they actually possess.

The faces in that room were determined but tired. So very tired.

I walk in to a facility like this with my smartypants vocabulary and the staff look bewildered that I'm even there and say, "Oh you'll have NO problem" but it's not fucking true, I've never been able to support myself like a functional grownup. My grades were always bad, I'm constantly late and forgetful, I couldn't finish college, I keep getting fired. I've been couch surfing for years. Most of my adult life I've been living on around $500/month. But I sure sound smart. On paper, I'm supposed to be a genius. I stand with one foot inches from an elite world, and the other foot inches from the gutter. I want to use that, and help bridge the gaps of understanding.

I'm a peer support specialist. Marginalized folks are the population I'll be serving. Some will be "gifted" burnouts like me, and more will be people who don't know a lot of words over two or three syllables. I've got to be effective at connecting with people who've had very little education, and/or have developmental disabilities or a lot of damage from trauma and substances and so on, without alienating them or getting condescending.

I at least have some awareness of how bad things really get, but my own life has been frankly pretty sheltered. I even look soft-- it shows on the skin, when somebody has been on the streets a long time. I'm not going to be as useful in this role, in some ways, as say that hardened guy over there with all the tattoos or my coworker who overcame a multi-decade history of meth addiction.

I'm headed to the psychological front lines. I'm going to be hearing some of the most heartbreaking, awful stories and seeing a lot of suffering. I'm looking for people who've seen the cracks in the system, been burned by the festering evil driving it, and want to push for a real change. Some of them I might be able to help reach a way to move forward and fight. Some, we'll lose to the pits of drugs and despair. Some will die. It's a soul-destroying meat grinder out there. Where's my niche? Where can I be most useful? How well can I handle the stress? Big question marks.

I just went to a workshop for job seekers who need special help.

The moment I asked about resumes: "Oh, ChatGPT will fix all of that for you!"

They were downright gushing about it.

I know in an abstract way, the average reading level is something around 5th grade, but I'm not directly exposed to it much. A few attendees were really struggling with the booklets we'd been handed.

This "AI" technology was being hyped to them like a godsend. When writing a cover letter feels something like being asked to encode ritual alien poetry in hieroglyphics, somebody who's never been able to produce a properly structured paragraph before must feel tantalizingly liberated. A whole new door opens!

As I sat watching "AI" treated as a miracle cure, the fact I was biting back the bile must have shown on my face past my mask-- the person doing my paperwork remarked on the "look" I gave her (well, not her directly, I tried to aim it at the table). I told her this stuff is 'hallucinating' around 16%-48% of the time, and she blinked at me. Blankly. I didn't even try to bring up any of the weaponization, propaganda etc etc etc. She shrugged and said, "Oh, but I always review it. I know how to assess what it gives me." And for her purposes, she's probably right. Mostly. She's an expert in her role and good at what she does-- but the people she serves??

How many people out there not only aren't equipped to assess the slop's output, but haven't got the slightest CLUE it could be unreliable and even needs to be assessed in the first place? The digital oracle knows best. Computers are smart!

Gah.

#"AI"
#AI
#LLM
#slop

If this is what they do to ENTIRELY RANDOM PEOPLE OFF THE STREET...

...What are they doing to people they really dislike in particular?

Where are the key organizers from Occupy and BLM?

Where are the leaders who would have been as significant as the ones in the 60s?

Where are they??

Now. As for THIS BIT RIGHT HERE?

"the savvy know-it-alls ready to pipe in about how they saw all the horrors of today coming years ago and now dismiss any talk of elections in 2026 as a naive distraction from the ineluctable consolidation of authoritarian rule"

(Cause I know you VBNMW types are going to start sneering about it...)

NOTE: 'ineluctable' means unavoidable, unstoppable, inevitable. And THAT idea, I fucking reject with every fiber of my being.

Yes, I believe electoralism is being weaponized as a naive distraction, a dead-end honeypot trap loaded with false promises of ineffective reforms-- BUT.

THAT DOES NOT MEAN I THINK WHAT'S HAPPENING IS UNSTOPPABLE. Okay?

So, miss me with any accusations that I'm arguing for "capitulation" or giving up or surrender or whatever the fuck defeatist nonsense. No. HELL NO.

I'm saying we need to STAND UP AND FIGHT BACK. Whatever pernicious weird shit is creeping into anybody's head to make you assume we're just "doomers" if we seriously acknowledge how bad things are and how big our enemies are-- fuck that. No. Yeah, it's big, yeah it's bad, but the people who want us to believe it's insurmountable are THE BAD GUYS, not us Cassandras. We're carrying warnings because something can be done, needs to be done, MUST be done.

Just stop supporting what's rotten and it falls apart. Start there.

"A crucial rationale used early in the Nazi regime and one heard today was that, as Arendt puts it, “if you are confronted with two evils… it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether.” Yet Arendt quickly notes the catastrophic morality of this position: “those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.” More insidiously, the “lesser evil” argument didn’t just provide external justification but was “one of the mechanisms built into the machinery of terror and criminality.” Authoritarian regimes deliberately employ this logic as a conditioning tool, implementing horrors incrementally, she argues. This kind of “psychological grooming” allowed ordinary citizens to participate in extraordinary evils while maintaining their self-conception as morally good—after all, they didn’t choose the worse evil—effectively dismantling their ethical resistance one compromise at a time."

Got that??

Lesser evilism is a systematic, deliberate, carefully calculated ASSAULT against our entire moral and ethical framework. It's a careful and relentless ratchet designed to convince you to take apart your own standards and gradually ease yourself into rationalizing and tolerating absolutely unbearable horrors that you never could have imagined putting up with not so long ago, becoming an apologist for the unforgivable. Defending oppressors that put you here. You are being psychologically groomed to serve monsters without even noticing it.

We have to DRAW THE LINE SOMEWHERE.

All around us, our neighbors and officials and families are deciding where they stand-- resistance, or collaboration. That's the choice. And the power of self-delusion means a terrifying number of these people aren't even LOOKING at which side they're picking.

https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-banality-of-complicity-arendts-guide-to-moral-resistance-in-the-age-of-trump/

Latest Linux foible:

Tried to change the username and password on my roomie's laptop-- then she said she doesn't want the password required to log in, so I tried to change that also.

Upon hitting the "ok" button, the widow grayed out and I got a spinny wheel. Spinny, spinny, spinny....................

I eventually just restarted the machine because it wasn't budging.

Now the login button just makes the login screen flash.

Pulled up the terminal to login manually. Tried the old password: incorrect. Tried the new password: incorrect. Tried both with the old and new username, too-- same thing.

I don't know if I'm going to need to install Linux all over again from scratch or what-- I mean, that machine has NOTHING on it yet, so I can do that and it'll be fine, but...

The idea that hitting one glitch can bork the system to inaccessibility is scary. Especially since I have my own laptop encrypted and there's files on it I want to keep so if that shit happens on THIS one I'll have a major problem.

Carbon Sequestration through Trench Composting

Get this: you can generate lignite (low-grade coal) in your garden?? Fast! IF you get the composting setup right.

The first half of the video is very detailed, nuts & bolts of soil and chemistry. The actual images of the site and how they did it starts at about 50min.

Soil science is the study of some of the most complex systems imaginable, and sadly still badly neglected-- especially considering how crucial it is to the foundations of our biosphere and survival. Much of this presentation is over my head, and it's tough for me to wade through all the "um, uh, uh"ing, but... wow!

I'll try to summarize:

There's a distinctive layer of black stuff under the soil of the Amazon, and people tend to assume it was built up from fires in years past (biochar is becoming a popular analogue), but researcher Scott Goode says it's created through much the same process that forms coal under peat bogs. That can take millions of years, but under the right conditions it can happen MUCH faster-- and all driven by biological action.

The idea here is you're trying to mimic the layers of soil activity under an old-growth forest, inside a trench 2' deep and 1.5' wide that's anaerobic at the bottom. Doing this in your own yard, Goode calls a "Climate Victory Garden". The trenches bracket your growbeds, and you don't stir or turn them-- you just have to keep filling them from the top, and once it gets going it's got quite an appetite.

Important note: while healthy soils can hold large amounts of carbon (80% of a forest's carbon is underground, only 20% is in the vegetation you can actually see), that carbon only stays put while the web of organisms using it stays healthy. Lignite on the other hand is a mineral that pretty much isn't going anywhere unless it catches on fire. This project demonstrates how to get BOTH the living system AND build long-term carbon storage at the same time.

One bit I really appreciate, about 1h16min in he is asked, "So what about the carbon market, what are they paying for?"

His reply starts with: "Really similar to the biofuels market, it's essentially a scam!"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G8JyU96WT5U&t=6m48s

#SoilScience
#CarbonSequestration
#TrenchComposting
#Hugelkultur
#FoodForest
#Permaculture
#RegenerativeAgriculture
#ClimateVictoryGarden
#OSULandStewards

I post some heavy shit. But there's a very good reason I have so little patience with the horrible crap going on all around us:

Solutions exist.

All of the energy and resources being poured into endless war right now, need to be aimed instead towards projects like this.

It is possible to rehabilitate large-scale ecosystems. Enough carbon could be sequestered this way, to actually return us to pre-Industrial levels.

I grew up with my father, an engineer, constantly explaining in detail the short-sighted flaws in how many things are done all around us, and how it could be fixed by people willing to do things the right way.

This is why I'm so fired up. We can do so much better than the pathetic fate we're expected to resign ourselves to. The Paris Accords don't come close. The oh-so-greenwashed infrastructure act and inflation reduction act are laughable next to the scale of what needs to be done. People who promote net zero scams and blather about tech miracles are dodging the issue and wasting our time. They think 3C increase is acceptable. They will let us burn. They are liars who want you to believe I'm trying to discourage you by pointing out the flaws in what's happening. The opposite is true.

Solutions exist. There is hope.

Corporate toadies of the fossil fuel industry don't want us to realize it-- nothing else is so dangerous to the tyranny of the status quo, as the realization that solutions exist. It's an enormous job, but we CAN do it if enough resources are directed the right way.

And every little bit counts.

Your yard, your neighbor's yard, the median, the ditch, empty lots-- anywhere. Everywhere. Build topsoil. Like our lives depend on it. They do.

Build connections, trust, friendships. Repair things. Find people with good hearts, people who are building something real. People who talk about work like this:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=bLdNhZ6kAzo

My protest sign for the 2016 DNC in Philadelphia.

Okay, so: Peer Support is a thing.

It's not widely known, and it's IMPORTANT.

A Peer Support Specialist reaches across, not down. Non-hierarchical-- that's literally a requirement spelled out in the job description.

We close the liminal space between "patient" and "well person". We bridge the gap between the person receiving care and their therapist/doctor etc. We're the people you want knocking on the door when you're having a major personal crisis-- you know, instead of the people with guns. We've lived through our own crises/trauma/illness/addiction/etc, and we know how it actually feels.

This isn't just some cute hand-holding role. It's a crucial part of a larger movement to integrate and humanize-- frankly, to TRANSFORM-- healthcare. That's the agenda, straight up. And I even get to fucking SAY THAT out loud.

And how do we enact this subversive scheme? By using empathy to relate to people, while helping empower them to determine and work on their OWN damn recovery goals, without judging.

Trying to "fix" people leads to burnout. Coercion and punishment have diminishing returns-- you can't force anybody to get better by kicking them when they're already down. Stigma has done massive damage. So we slow down, give an actual shit, and walk WITH people while they learn to fish, instead of beating fish over their heads, get it?

How's that for revolutionary.

#praxis
#mentalhealth
#mentalillness
#trauma
#traumainformed
#peersupport
#peergroups
#recovery
#resilience
#supportgroups
#peersupportspecialist

#Introduction

Looking for community and hope, way off the ill-fated beaten path.

Used to work in a video store. Never was on the birdsite. Tired of bots, trolls, ads, and games of musical deck chairs.

May be a giant broke-ass loser who fails at most everything, but at least I'm not a jerk.

#Agender
#Asexual
#Aromantic
#Agnostic
#AnarchoCommunist
#Lunarpunk

Interested in world-saving solutions:
#Permaculture
#DirectAction
#MutualAid
#RightToRepair
#OpenSource
#RestorativeJustice
#Antifascist
#PeerSupport

Working through some personal issues:
#MentalHealth
#Depression
#Anxiety
#CPTSD
#AuHD

Studying some useful hobbies:
#Aquaponics
#GreyWater
#CompostingToilet
#BlackSoldierFlyLarvae
#RocketStoveMassHeater
#NativePlants
#GuerillaGardening
#3dAnimation
#DataVisualization

Into some more cool stuff of this sort:
#SciFi
#Fantasy
#Horror
#Anime
#IndustrialMusic
#Psybient
#BellyDance
#MartialArts
#Motorcycle
#Doodling