Holy shit. Texas republicans introduced a bill to give huge tax cuts to *straight* couples having children—with up to 100% cut in property taxes for TEN kids.

The bill’s author said “Get married, stay married, and be fruitful and multiply.”

This is handmaid’s tale shit.

Thank you @NicolleDWallace for your coverage of gun violence & covering Trey Louis today. I shared his American Idol performance yesterday. Trey sang the song Stone. What did not get discussed is that his friend was Chris Stone, who was killed in the Santa Fe shooting.

Watch this performance last night from a young man in the 2018 Santa Fe, TX shooting. He sang stone which struck me as one of those killed was Chris Stone. Thank you @katyperry. My daughter was murdered in Parkland, Fl. Everything you said was correct.

Kind of sets recent snow storms in perspective . . . Here’s a shot of the old Magic Mile ski lift buried by a record 240 inches of snow at Timberline Lodge on the Mount Hood National Forest.

The Magic Mile is an aerial chairlift at Timberline Lodge ski area, Mount Hood, Oregon, U.S. It was named for its unique location above the tree line and for its original length. When constructed by Byron Riblet in 1938, it was the longest chairlift in existence, the second in the world to be built as a passenger chairlift, and the first to use metal towers.[1] [2] [3]

The chairlift has been replaced twice, in 1962 and 1992.[4]

Like its predecessors, the current chairlift loads near the lodge at 5,950 feet (1829 m) and unloads at 7,000 foot (2134 m), up an average gradient of 20%.[5] Except for the very lowest part of the route, the lift is not protected by trees or land features and faces the full force of snow storms. Heavy winds frequently produce huge snowdrifts and copious and dense snow challenge lift crews to keep the lift open. The lift is generally closed when winds exceed 50–60 miles per hour (80–97 km/h) or dense fog reduces visibility below about 25 feet (7.6 m) — in all, about 40% of winter days.[5]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Mile

After I was convicted of murder and sentenced to 26 years in prison, when the earth dropped out from beneath me, and global shame rained down on top of me, I had my first ever epiphany.

/thread

I didn’t know what an epiphany should feel like, but it was…cold. Like a clear breeze blowing in and brushing the back of your neck, making your hairs stand up.

I knew something deep down that I hadn’t known before, and I spent the next several months peering into that epiphany, trying to consider all of its implications, like watching the ripples spread out from a drop of water in a pool.

My epiphany was this: I was not, as I had assumed for my first two years of trial and imprisonment, waiting to get my life back. I was not some lost tourist waiting to go home. I was a prisoner, and prison was my home.

I’d thought I was in limbo, awkwardly positioned between my life (the life I should have been living), and someone else’s life (the life of a murderer). I wasn’t. I never had been.

The conviction, the sentence, the prison cell—*this* was my life. There was no life I *should* have been living. There was only my life, this life, unfolding before me.

The epiphany itself didn’t feel good or bad. It was just true. If there was a feeling, it was the feeling of fact, and it came with the next logical conclusion: my life was sad.

I was imprisoned for a crime I didn’t commit. I would be locked away for the best years of my life, and deprived of opportunities many of us take for granted: falling in love, having children, pursuing a career.

My world would be so small, trapped within concrete walls and surrounded by traumatized people, many of whom were a danger to themselves and others.

And this life would inevitably take me further and further down a path that would alienate me from everyone I loved, who, despite their best efforts to be there for me, were on their own paths moving in very different directions.

The feeling of clarity, though, was in realizing that however small, cruel, sad, and unfair this life was, it was *my* life. Mine to make meaning out of, mine to live to the best of my ability. There was no more waiting. There was only now.

I was alone with my epiphany. I tried to explain it to my mom, but she couldn’t hear me. She thought I was depressed and giving up. She could not, and would not, accept that *this* was my life. She was going to save me, and she just needed me to survive until she did.

I told her I would, and it wasn’t a lie. I *would* survive. I knew that, deep in my bones. But I knew that precisely because I had finally accepted that I was living *my* life, whether I was eventually found innocent and freed, or not.

I allowed myself to begin to imagine alternate realities. What if I had been home that night, not Meredith, and Rudy Guede had killed me instead? What if I was acquitted and freed in five years? In ten?

What if I served my entire sentence, and came home in my late 40s, a barren, bereft woman? What if I killed myself…

I imagined all of those futures in vivid detail so that they no longer felt like shadows creeping over me from the realm of unconscious nightmares. And that allowed me to see my actual life for what it was, and to ask myself: How do I make *that* life worth living?

That was a big question, one I couldn't answer in its grandest sense. But there was a smaller version of that question: How can I make my life worth living *today?* I could answer that question, repeatedly.

That was entirely in my power. So I did that. Doing sit ups, walking laps, writing a letter, reading a book – these things were enough to make a day worth living. I didn’t know if they were enough to make a life worth living, but I remained open and curious to the possibility.

And while my new emotional default setting remained firmly stuck on sad—I woke up sad, spent the entire day sad, and went to sleep sad—it wasn’t a desperate, grasping sadness.

It was a sadness brimming with energy beneath the surface, because I was alive with myself and my sanity, and the freeing feeling of seeing reality clearly, however sad that reality was.

I was slowly and deliberately walking a tightrope across a bottomless foggy abyss, with no clue where I was going and nothing to hold onto but my strong, instinctual sense of balance.

In many ways, though I’m now free, legally vindicated, a woman with a career in the arts (as I’d always dreamed), an advocate for justice (which I never dreamed), a wife with a loving husband, a mother with a joyous child...I’m still walking that tightrope.

The abyss never leaves. It’s always there. And anyone who’s stared into it, as I have, knows the strange comfort of carrying it with you.

This is a picture of me in the prison yard in the thick of all of this. Everyone is going through something, even when they're smiling. If that sounds like you, I hope reading this helps.



https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1629181705830670336.html

It’s one of the most iconic places in Detroit: The fantastic Diego Rivera Detroit Industry mural covering all four walls in the Garden Court at the Detroit Institute of Arts. When the 27 paintings were unveiled to the public, everyone from Catholics to business leaders to socialites demanded the walls be whitewashed. That’s how you know you’re doing art right.

Diego Rivera and his wife, the artist Frida Kahlo, spent over a year in Detroit, where both would create some of their most famous works of art. It was in the city that Kahlo miscarried the couple’s first child, leading to her heartbreaking work Henry Ford Hospital (The Flying Bed). Rivera was fascinated by the Rouge River plant, then the largest factory in the world. Rivera would later call the Detroit Industry murals the greatest works of his career. He was deeply moved by the power of the workers running these great machines, and called the mural “a great saga of the machine and of steel.”

You can spend hours picking apart the symbolism of the murals. Bright scenes of workers toiling on giant machines in fiery factories dominate the work, but there are also bits dedicated to medicine and the chemical and military industries that once called Detroit home.

It was one of these scenes that particularly irked the city’s sizable Catholic population. They protested the mural before it was even completed, over Rivera’s communist sympathies. When they actually saw the painting, they demanded its immediate destruction due to what they felt were unfavorable allusions to their religion. From a New York Times article in 1933:

https://jalopnik.com/when-detroit-auto-workers-defended-a-diego-rivera-mural-1848986309

IKEA is advancing toward its goal of becoming a resource positive company by 2030 with an eye on more plant-based food.

by Anna Starostinetskaya

February 20, 2023

In 2022, approximately 520 million guests tried the food offerings at IKEA, which the furniture giant is continuously improving, particularly with plant-based options—which are helping it meet its sustainability goals. IKEA recently issued its 2022 Sustainability Report to provide insight on how it is meeting its climate goal of becoming a climate positive company by 2030.

IKEA’s sustainability plan is focused around five areas: energy, air, water, food, and waste. In the food category, the company aims to move toward its climate goal by transitioning its bistro menus to be 50 percent plant-based by 2025. It also aims to make 80 percent of its packaged meals plant-based within that time frame.

“The climate footprint of plant-based food is often lower compared to animal-based options,” IKEA stated in its report. “A plant-based diet with high nutritional value can also be a healthier choice.”

In 2022, IKEA estimates its carbon footprint to be 25.8 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent which represents a decrease of 5 percent compared to its 2021 footprint and 12 percent decrease compared to its 2016 baseline.

https://vegnews.com/2023/2/ikea-remove-dairy-2030-sustainability-goals

JUST ANNOUNCED: @jrpsaki will debut "Inside with Jen Psaki" on Sunday, March 19 at 12 p.m. ET on @MSNBC.

Psaki will also contribute a regular column for @MSNBCDaily and develop a new original streaming show set to launch this spring.

MORE: http://bit.ly/3kbql1r