edit: i appreciate the boosts ya’ll, i managed to get it myself, thanks

QOTD 10/15/2026

First, the biggest error of NAFTA was its failure to account for human mobility. There really was no way to seriously think that goods and capital could be liberated to move freely throughout the continent without people also needing to move in new ways. Or even in old ways. After all, the border has been a border for only a blip in human history. For millennia, people have moved freely around the Americas.

When NAFTA linked up the economies of Mexico, the U.S. and Canada, the citizens of all three countries should have gained the ability to work anywhere in the region without a visa. Instead, they found some of their older ways of moving around were halted.

For all the problems associated with the European Union (painfully nicknamed Fortress Europe by immigration advocates), at least that unification of economies anticipated and made policy for human mobility in labor and residence.

Unfortunately, human mobility was never on the NAFTA negotiating table. It was considered a non-starter to the U.S., so it was never deliberated. Instead, the U.S. has invested more every year in militarized border enforcement, even making previously routine border crossings for work, religious practice, social gatherings, medical care, education, and more, complicated, fraught and sometimes impossible.

One in ten Mexicans, 10 million people, were displaced in the first decade after NAFTA took effect. Most of them came to the U.S. and many of them stayed, but only a rare few have had any pathway at all to be able to regularize their status or travel back and forth freely. This situation has created large, undocumented and disenfranchised - but trapped - communities north of the border, and harrowingly prolonged family separation. Had people been able to move to where the jobs were, go back home and check in, invest, care for a loved one, or retire in peace, a lot of harm could have been avoided.

Alyshia Gálvez, “NAFTA Is in Tatters” (October 2026)

#quote #quotes #immigration

hey can someone help us out with $60 for gas and groceries?

i had to start driving my daughter to school in the mornings cuz she was getting bullied on the bus and i was riding on E the whole way there, i thought i was gonna a have to push my car to the 7-11 afterwards 😓

PayPal.me/londonshine
Cashapp: $glamorshark
Venmo: @londonshine
Pm for Zelle
#mutualaid #mutualaidrequest

QOTD 10/14/2026

For Marind, sago represents far more than just an important source of carbohydrate. This plant is described and celebrated as a sibling, ancestor, and relation that binds people to place, to mythical histories, to seasonal rhythms, and to wider ecologies of reciprocity with the forest and its dwellers.

The labor of making sago flour from sago palms is painstaking. However, this labor is collective, valued work that teaches children how to read the forest, how to move through it, how to derive nourishment from it, and how to care for it.

Industrial oil palm plantations dismantle these intimate ancestral relations between humans and the forest. When forests are cleared, sago groves are destroyed, sacred hunting grounds are razed, and rivers and waterways contaminated with toxic chemicals or diverted to irrigate monocrops.

As a result, the diverse foods that make Marind forest meals nourishing - fish, leafy greens, fruits, tubers - become harder to find, less predictable, and sometimes unsafe to seek out.

Even where patches of forest remain, access is restricted to corporate personnel or foreign conservation experts. Plantations are closed-off spaces, accessible only to company staff and workers. This makes entrance into lands that were formerly owned by Marind clans dangerous, illegal, and prosecutable.

Importantly, there is a gendered dynamic to gut governance in West Papua. Plantation negotiations often elevate men as signatories while sidelining women, even as women are frequently responsible for feeding households. As native forest subsistence ecologies disappear, it becomes harder for Marind women to feed their children properly and meaningfully. These women often spoke to me of their children’s bodies becoming less and less able to “hold” life as their skin thins, their bones weaken, and sickness becomes the norm.

Sophie Chao, “Not All Hungers Are the Same” (October 2026)

#quote #quotes #food

QOTD 10/13/2026

Post-independence, India created a policy architecture to protect its farmers. That same architecture now prevents them from adapting to the environmental crisis.

India’s agricultural support system is built around specific crops, specific regions, and specific constituencies - locking farmers into environmentally destructive practices even as they understand the long-term costs. By now, the incentives are overwhelming: A Punjabi farmer has little incentive to plant anything other than wheat and rice because the government guarantees purchase prices for those crops, provides free electricity to pump groundwater, subsidizes fertilizer, and offers virtually no support for alternatives.

The most important policy is the Minimum Support Price (MSP) system that was established at the time of the Green Revolution in the 1960s. The MSP mechanism establishes price floors for specified crops, with the government guaranteeing procurement at announced rates when market prices fall below support levels. Formally, this serves as income insurance against market volatility. In practice however, it is a production mandate. In other words, while it intends to simply compensate farmers for what they grow, on the ground it determines their choice of what to grow.

The MSP system currently covers 22 crops. However, wheat and rice account for roughly 95% of government procurement. For these two crops, the Indian government doesn’t just guarantee that farmers can sell it. Rather, it provides the infrastructure: thousands of procurement centers, storage facilities, and a distribution network through the Public Distribution System. The government will also provide free electricity for pumping groundwater and heavily subsidize fertilizer. These incentives are nearly impossible to refuse for rural farmers in Punjab.

For a Punjab farmer, selling wheat or rice to the government is guaranteed and simple. Every policy lever - procurement infrastructure, electricity subsidies, storage networks - reinforces the decision to grow wheat and rice. As a result, the ecological solutoins do not ensure economic stability. Selling millets, pulses, or oilseeds requires farmers to find private buyers, face uncertain prices, and receive no procurement infrastructure. It is simply riskier.

Shareen Joshi, “India’s Biodiversity Paradox” (October 2026)

#quote #quotes #food

QOTD 10/12/2026

The UK’s HFSS [high in fat, salt, and sugar] regulations were built around what public health researchers call the commercial determinants of health. This term refers to the corporate practices, and not merely individual choices, that shape population health.

The premise is that the food environment, including the placement, promotion, pricing, and advertising of products, shape what people eat more powerfully than innate individual preferences do. Restricting where junk food appears in stores, how it is promoted, and how it is advertised to children constrains the commercial mechanisms that drive overconsumption.

This premise is not a fringe view. A growing body of evidence shows that marketing exposure directly increases children’s consumption of advertised products. The food environment is engineered to exploit well-documented behavioral biases, limiting the effectiveness of education or exhortation.

As a result, regulating the environment works precisely because it does not depend on millions of individuals each making better decisions against a system designed to defeat them.

Adam D. Koon, “What MAHA Could Learn from the British About Regulating Unhealthy Food” (October 2026)

#quote #quotes #food