rikkalorelei

[rikkalorelei]

[rikkalorelei]

The light

[rikkalorelei]

[rikkalorelei]

Mater Dolorosa - Mother of Sorrows

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“When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple there whom he loved, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his house. (John 19:26-27)

[rikkalorelei]

Trump to terrorists : “We love you, you’re very special”

[rikkalorelei]

The world's oldest story? Astronomers say global myths about 'seven sisters' stars may reach back 100,000 years https://phys.org/news/2020-12-world-oldest-story-astronomers-global.html

Holy shit, this is cool!

So many cultures call the Pleiades some variation of the "seven sisters" despite only having six visible stars. There only appear to be six because two of the stars are so close together as to appear as one.

The myths also mention one sister leaving or hiding to explain why there's only six. And based off observations and measurements, those two that are so close together used to be visibly separate. One literally has moved to hide.

And based off the similarities between the more commonly known Greek myth and the Aboriginal Australian myth, plus some other stuff, this myth could possibly even date back to when humanity still all resided in Africa!

[rikkalorelei]

I know this is going to make me sound pretensions but I have to get it off my chest. I feel an unimaginable rage when someone posts a photo and is like "this picture looks like a renaissance painting lol" when the photo clearly has the lighting, colors and composition of a baroque or romantic painting. There are differences in these styles and those differences are important and labeling every "classical" looking painting as renaissance is annoying and upsetting to me. And anytime I come across one of those posts I have to put down my phone and go take a walk because they make me so mad

[rikkalorelei]

So we know Prosperity Gospel is bad. But I’ve noticed people diving into a sort of opposite to Prosperity Gospel that feels just as harmful.

I don’t know if it has a name. But it takes the form of:

Jesus said we would suffer, so I have to make myself suffer.

If I receive a blessing, I must reject it or seal it away out of humility.

Relying on emotional support from anyone except Christ is a sin and Idolatry.

Being passionate about anything is Idolatry.

Feeling like anything you’ve done/made turned out well is the same thing as the sin of Pride.

Always be punishing yourself, lest you think too highly of yourself.

God would NEVER speak to you or give you a word, you must have opened yourself up to demons.

Yes, we should be humble, be open to suffering when it comes, and discern words. But I can’t see this form of thinking as anything other than Spiritual Self-Harm that’s only turning people to despair and snuffing out their potential in serving Christ.

[rikkalorelei]

So someone pointed out to me recently that in a few years, maybe a few decades, the history of the us during covid is probably going to get twisted. The fact that we all had to make and wear cloth masks is going to be hailed as a symbol of how we “"came together as a nation”“” or whatever the fuck propaganda spin they try to put on it.

So I just want to say, for the record, the time of the corona virus pandemic was not a time when america came together.

This was a time when people hoarded toilet paper and sanitizing supplies either for themselves or to sell at absurd prices to the desperate people who didn’t get to the store soon enough during the shortages

This was a time when scared parents were sending their kids to finish school in the spring in plastic trash bags because they couldn’t think of any other way to possibly keep their families safe

This was a time when grocery store and retail and service workers were forced to keep working whether they wanted to risk their health or not because they couldn’t make rent otherwise and the people with enough privilege to have remote jobs tried to repay them with applause instead of fair wages

This was a time when nurses had the hold the hands of multiple dying people every day as their families watched their loved ones die over a video call because the hospital couldn’t risk having visitors

This was a time when city governments had to handle so many eviction hearings that they rented out convention centers and called in the national guard instead of doing a rent freeze to stop predatory landlords

This was a time when racism and police brutality were so unbearably horrible that people protested in the streets for months even though there was a god damn pandemic that our federal government wasn’t doing shit to stop and the cops were so mad that they were being asked to stop beating up black people that they were beating up everyone

This was a time when schools being forced to reopen in the fall or lose their federal funding had to draft templates for letters if a teacher or a staff person or a fucking child died from exposure to corona at school

This was a time when the president of the United states demanded that the cdc stop releasing data about all the people who were dying because of the warnings he ignored for months were making him look bad

This was a time when some state governments didn’t mandate masks and forced businesses to reopen because they didn’t want to pay unemployment to people trying to stay safe at home anymore

This was a time when Jeff Bezos was on track to be a fucking trillionare because everyone was ordering things on amazon instead of going to the store and the people he worked to death to get it didn’t see a single cent of it

This was a time when instead of providing homeless people with housing, we painted boxes on the ground to show homeless people how far away the had to be on the street to maintain social distancing

We did not come together to make cloth masks. Cloth masks represent nothing less than the absolute and utter failure of a nation’s government to inform and protect its citizens

This was not a time when we came together. This was a time when we survived, and not all of us made it.

This was a time when people casually talked about how many human lives the economy was worth without considering the evil that had just come out of their mouths.

This was a time when thousands of us died for profit and the ego of a cheating narcissists con man who scammed his way into the white house

This was a time that we survived. Most of us tried to do the right thing, stay home, limit trips to the store and socializing, wear a mask. And still, so many of us were lost. Thousands every day.

But that wasn’t a good enough reason for some people, for those among us who were too selfish to recognize the responsibilities we have toward one another as human beings.

This was not a time that we came together

This was a time that we survived

Not all of us made it

And those of us who did survive will never forget the evil we saw daily in our politicians and those around us

[rikkalorelei]

Parents should not be reading your journals

Parents should not be searching through your trash 

Parents should not be snooping on your private social media messages 

Parents should not be taking your bedroom door off 

Parents should not be invading your privacy 

[rikkalorelei]

shout out to all the people who identify with gifted kid burnout syndrome who are probably just neurodivergent but werent diagnosed as a child, who used to devour books like it was nothing and never really understood why the protagonist would leave their cool fantasy world behind to go back home at the end of the story, and who are now extremely disappointed in reality and use escapism as their primary coping mechanism. how’s that bisexuality and deep-rooted anger at the school system going for you?

[rikkalorelei]

[rikkalorelei]

[rikkalorelei]

You know what the most frustrating thing about the vegans throwing a fit over my “Humans aren’t Parasites” post is?  I really wasn’t trying to make a point about animal agriculture. Honestly, the example about subsistence hunting isn’t the main point. That post was actually inspired by thoughts I’ve been having about the National Park system and environmentalist groups.

See, I LOVE the National Parks. I always have a pass. I got to multiple parks a year. I LOVE them, and always viewed them as this unambiguously GOOD thing. Like, the best thing America has done. 

BUT, I just finished reading this book called “I am the Grand Canyon” all about the native Havasupai people and their fight to gain back their rights to the lands above the canyon rim. Historically, they spent the summer months farming in the canyon, and then the winter months hunter-gathering up above the rim. When their reservation was made though, they lost basically all rights to the rim land (They had limited grazing rights to some of it, but it was renewed year to year and always threatened, and it was a whole thing), leading to a century long fight to get it back. 

And in that book there are a couple of really poignant anecdotes- one man talks about how park rangers would come harass them if they tried to collect pinon nuts too close to park land- worried that they would take too many pinon nuts that the squirrels wanted. Despite the fact that the Havasupai had harvested pinon nuts for thousands and thousands of years without ever…like…starving the squirrels. 

There’s another anecdote of them seeing the park rangers hauling away the bodies of dozens of deer- killed in the park because of overpopulation- while the Havasupai had been banned from hunting. (Making them more and more reliant on government aid just to survive the winter months.) 

They talk about how they would traditionally carve out these natural cisterns above the rim to catch rainwater, and how all the animals benefitted from this, but it was difficult to maintain those cisterns when their “ownership” of the land was so disputed. 

So here you have examples of when people are forcibly separated from their ecosystem and how it hurts both those people and the ecosystem. 

And then when the Havasupai finally got legislation before Congress to give them ownership of the rim land back- their biggest opponent was the Parks system and the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club (a big conservation group here in the US) ran a huge smear campaign against these people on the belief that any humans owning this land other than the park system (which aims at conservation, even while developing for recreation) was unacceptable. 

And it all got me thinking about how, as much as I love the National Parks, there are times when its insistence that nature be left “untouched” (except, ya know, for recreation) can actually harm both the native people who have traditionally been part of those ecosystems AND potentially the ecosystems themselves. And I just think there’s a lot of nuance there about recognizing that there are ways for us to be in balance with nature, and that our environmentalism should respect that and push for sustainability over preserving “pristine” human-less landscapes. Removing ourselves from nature isn’t the answer. 

But apparently the idea that subsistence hunting might actually not be a moral catastrophe really set the vegans off.  Woopie. 

[rikkalorelei]

This is one of the funniest holiday cards I have ever seen.

[rikkalorelei]

Coughs...

Me: And Rikka was all like

rikkalorelei: "You are so a witch"

Me: And I was like "I ain't a witch omg"

Auscultaremea: Well she's got a point

Me: SHUT UP