For those who don’t know and don’t want to click thru to find out: Jonas Salk is the reason we in North America no longer live in terror of polio. He also refused to patent or profit from his vaccine. He also spent the last years of his life researching a vaccine for AIDS, long before that was cool and back when a lot of people were secretly hoping it really would just kill all the gays. So you’re damn right people applauded and gave free upgrades.
Reblogging again because this time I did click through, and because of the times in which we live: Jonas Salk was Jewish, and the child of immigrants.
Please remember that Lush is a fair trade company. This means that all they pay ALL of their workers a livable amount, and don’t take advantage of workers and harvesters in third world countries like many brands do. They test none of their products on animals as well.
Please keep these things in mind! Just know there is a reason that they cannot sell their bath bombs for 99 cents each. Doing so would mean that hard workers are being under paid.
other reasons it’s expensive:
constant checks on their resources – They will drop any company that they are partnered with if they learn that they are gathering ingredients in an inhumane way, harming the environment, or puts their people at risk
charity work – if you’ve ever heard of Charity Pot, it’s called such because 100% of the cost (not proceeds) go to charity. It’s not what’s left over after they’ve paid the workers or bought the ingredients, it’s every single cent.
kitchens instead of factories – They dont have a big warehouse of stock. They don’t have processing plants. What they have are buildings with industrial kitchen equipment, where all products are made by hand.
fighting animal testing – a lot of companies say that they dont do animal testing, but they don’t do anything to prevent animal testing and may use ingredients sourced from animal testing. Lush leads protests, creates bills, and spreads information, as well as only work with those who don’t use animal testing, in order to fight the system
helping their sources- If they find out that something is wrong with one of their companies, they’ll do what they can to fix it. That means, if something is broken, they will fix it, even though it’s just someone that they’re partnered with.
delicate products – everything they sell has an expiration date, because it’s all made out of fresh ingredients and they use as little preservatives and unnatural things as they can. That and bathbombs break, all the time. They can’t sell it if it has any damage larger than a dime.
this is… actually really nice information to know? im too broke to be able to afford their products, so the only access to any info about them i have is either word of mouth or if i were to actually look up information about them.
i always assumed it was some status symbol thing like apple but im always happy to learn that things arent like that!
One of the things that I always forget happened but which I think demonstrates the paranoia of American fundamentalist Christianity was at my school’s retreat one year. Each year, the week before classes started, the entire high school would go to a camp in the woods with strict rules on what we could have (no phones or electronics), strictly monitored activities, and multiple chapel sessions per day, done by a different evangelist each year.
My sophomore year, one of the chapel sessions started off with the evangelist saying “we just heard word that President _______ just signed a law making it illegal to be a Christian.” We were all like “oh yeah that dude’s not actually the president, this is making us think abt when Christians were persecuted.” But as he went on with his narrative about how the United States just banned Christianity, it started to feel weirder and weirder because he seemed to be taking it seriously and was having one of the teachers go around the chapel in the woods and shutter all the windows and lock the door. Remember, we were high school kids cut off from all communication from the outside world, and we weren’t unfamiliar with the narrative that Christians would soon be persecuted again, so who knows what was happening in the outside world. Besides, we were raised to not question anything that an authority figure said from the pulpit.
The sermon was about standing up for Jesus no matter what, with occasional references to how we would need to do that now because being a Christian was now illegal and who knows if the feds would find this chapel. At the end of the chapel service, right before the final prayer one of the teachers, acting on a cue from the evangelist, banged on the doors as hard as he could and yelled “open up!!!” Even though most people would have said consciously that they knew it was all just for effect, in that moment some people were screaming, some people started crying, and everybody was at the very least very much on edge.
This is why every tiny little thing is viewed as an anti-Christian attack, because part of fundamentalist indoctrination is a continuous reinforcement of the belief that Christianity is on the verge of being criminalized and explicitly persecuted, and any little thing might be the avenue through which that criminalization comes or is justified. No matter how minor the doctrinal issue might seem to an outsider, there’s this terror and paranoia that anything they allow through or anything they compromise on will be used to criminalize them. Each little thing, in the fundamentalist mind, triggers anxieties which have been intentionally fostered by the fundamentalist formation process, a formation process bent on convincing the person that true Christianity, or fundamentalist Christianity, is inherently placed in opposition to the world, and the world is just waiting for an excuse or opportunity to destroy it.
So I stumbled onto the Etsy shop of this academic who–in real life–is an expert on cuneiform–and on the side, makes little trinkets with Sumerian on them and OH MAN THIS SHOP HAS MADE MY ENTIRE WEEK
Yes, these are very cool, but what I really need is some way to get back at this copper merchant who sold me sub-standard product and was rude to my servant.
To
Ea-Nasir
I’ve reported you to the metal worker’s union and have filed a complaint in small claims court. I and my servant have also filed complaints with the EEOC. May you rot in
Irkalla.
Every year, the richest person in America is declared the “Winner of Capitalism.” They get a badge. Then all of their wealth is donated to charity and they have to start over at $0.
This procedure results in the worlds richest people donating excessive amounts of money ahead of the event in an attempt to avoid being hit by a real life blue shell. Thus adding to the overall annual donation.
This reminds me of the line from Fiddler on the roof, in which Perchik says, “One day, all their wealth will be ours.” To which Tevye replies, “If they would agree, I would agree.”
Death By Catchphrase 