Rebecca
LightNews LightNews
banner
phytoseiid.bsky.social
Rebecca
@phytoseiid.bsky.social
1.5K followers 400 following 2K posts
Ph.D. Entomologist
I just want to learn about bugs and help farmers, but the fascists keep interrupting me.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are good things.

When someone attacks a party member, we all roll for initiative.
Posts Replies Media Videos
phytoseiid.bsky.social
Things are kind of crappy right now in the world, but I got 26 new loaches yesterday.

Huge shoutout to Hillstream Kingdom (hillstreamkingdom.com) for the best customer service I have ever received from any company. Sam and Max are awesome and I hope they continue to do well.
Three Erromyzon compactus hillstream loaches gathered on a rock in an aquarium. They are long, flattened fish with a dark body and yellowish horizontal bars. In between the bars are small red spots. Their heads are covered in small yellow spots. They are cute and slightly derpy-looking.
September 18, 2025 at 4:37 AM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
I am a stinker.

Photo credit: www.fishlore.com/Profiles-Red...
A red tailed shark, a somewhat popular freshwater aquarium fish that barely looks like a shark. It is black with a pointy dorsal fin ans a bright red caudal fin. Image credit reads JJPhoto.dk
July 11, 2025 at 2:56 AM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
Grandpa Simpson says, "I'll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognize Missouri," while taking down a flag.
June 10, 2025 at 1:04 AM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
"Don't talk to me or my son ever again"
An adult reticulated hillstream loach resting on driftwood near a fry of the same species. The adult is a flat fish roughly resembling a very small stingray, with a black base color and yellow spots. The fry is barely longer than the adult's tail fin, with a pale white body and some black spots.
May 25, 2025 at 5:43 AM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
So, he begins a 1948 campaign as a third party candidate with the Liberal Party. He is deeply concerned that either major party will begin a war with Russia and completely destroy what is left of the New Deal. He campaigns in the South and refuses to speak in segregated spaces.
You read he press accounts of 1 my trip. The papers told you eggs were thrown at me; they told you I was booed. You read that in some cities local authorities would not permit me to talk to free American meetings, to unsegregated audiences. All of this is true but it is not the real headline. The real headline is that it is possible to do what some said was impossible--to hold unsegregated meetings in every Southern state and to hold them without incident... I came out of the South with the utter conviction that segregation, racial prejudice and Jim Crow, can cost America its life. For these evils are not simply problems of the South. No, the lynchings and knifings of Negroes in the South have their counterparts in every part of our country. A mob wrecks a Negro's home in Detroit; police run down citizens of Harlem; Mexican-Americans are railroaded to jail in Los Angeles. In Northern restaurants, in Western schools, in Midwestern nospitals, it is the same and even the children's genes are infected. In the nation's capital, the marble tournament to determine who is the best player in Washington does not allow competition between Negro and white children. This is an issue-above politics, for whatever denies the freedom of the Negro, destroys the freedom of the whites. It is a cancer that eats into the very moral fiber of the American people... I used to think that time, long-drawn-out time, would handle these evils. But since World War II, I know that time is far, far shorter than it used to be. I know that today we are in desperate need of a solution which respects the dignity the human soul. And the old parties cannot give us this solution even if they would. For Mr. Dewey's party is the party of corporations whose profits are rooted in discrimination, the party of wage differentials. And Mr. Truman's party is held together with the cement of discrimination. Both are parties of profit--and they have found prejudice a profitable business.
May 23, 2025 at 3:44 AM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
Wallace does not like the Un-American Activities Committee that Truman continues to enable and refers to them as bigots and fascists. He continues to call out the racism of the Dixiecrats and is one of the first in federal leadership to acknowledge that Japanese internment was immoral.
At a May 19, 1947, rally in Los Angeles, Wallace, joined by Katharine Hepburn, denounced the House Un-American Activities Committee and the use of anti-Communist fervor to undermine campaigning for racial justice, economic democracy and peace. "We burned an innocent woman on a charge of witchcraft," Wallace said. "We earned the scorn of the world for lynching Negroes. We hounded labor leaders and socialists at the turn of the century. We drove 100,000 innocent men and women from their homes in California because they were of Japanese ancestry. We branded ourselves forever in the eyes of the world for the murder by the state of two humble and glorious immigrants: Sacco and Vanzetti. These acts today fill us with burning shame. Now other men seek to fasten new shame on America." Wallace proceeded to name-check successive HUAC chairs. "I mean the group of bigots first known as the Dies Committee, then the Rankin Committee, now the Thomas Committee--three names for fascists the world over to roll on their tongues with pride."
May 23, 2025 at 3:26 AM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
1947, Truman begins to implement early McCarthy-style policies, despite no actual threat. He is scared of seeming soft on communists because of how poorly the Dems did in mid-terms. It is all political theater. Wallace knew better:
We shall not allow the enemy to stampede us into foolish red-baiting. As we work to fight off the enemy, as his stooges try to stir up jealousies and get us fighting among ourselves, we shall never be against anything simply because Russia is for it. Neither shall we ever be for anything simply because Russia is for it. We shall hold firmly to the American theme of peace, prosperity and freedom, and shall repel all the attacks of the plutocrats and monopolists who will brand us as Reds. If it is traitorous to believe in peace--we are traitors. If it is communistic to believe in prosperity for all--we are Communists. If it is un-American to believe in freedom from monopolistic dictation--we are un- American. I say that we are more American than the neo-Fascists who attack us. The more we are attacked the more likely we are to succeed, provided we are ready and willing to counterattack. On with the fight!
May 23, 2025 at 3:11 AM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
I got partway into The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party (John Nichols) and started posting Henry Wallace's biggest hits. I regret not doing it this way from the beginning.

Henry Wallace DID NOT like fascists, isolationists, or imperialists and it is too bad he wasn't VP for FDR term #4.
Book cover featuring modern and former Democratic Party leaders, with Henry Wallace in the center. Book cover text reads, "THE ENDURING LEGACY OF HENRY WALLACE'S ANTIFASCIST, ANTIRACIST POLITICS The FIGHT FOR THE SOUL of the DEMOCRATIC PARTY JOHN NICHOLS"
May 22, 2025 at 5:25 AM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
At this point (1946), he started campaigning on behalf of other Democrats. At a rally, he stated, "If the Democrats fail to control the 8oth Congress there is only one way in which we get control again and that is by becoming more progressive."

[ARE YOU LISTENING CHUCK?]
Wallace announced, "I am still a Democrat" and that "more than ever I am a progressive." He said that he wanted to do "everything I can to elect progressive Democrats to Congress, and that "if the Democrats fail to control the 80th Congress there is only one way in which we get control again and that is by becoming more progressive."
May 22, 2025 at 5:16 AM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
However, the Red Scare was heating up and this speech got him fired.

In addition to going on to suggest that a mixed economy would be beneficial (further branding him as sympathetic to the hated socialists), he also continued to rail against Jim Crow, which made him loathed by the Dixiecrats.
Wallace continued: "The Republican Party is the party of economic nationalism and political isolation--and as such is the party of as anachronistic as the dodo and as certain to disappear. The danger is that before it disappears it may enjoy a brief period of power during which it can do irreparable damage to the United States and the cause of world peace." As for Democrats, a recent mass lynching in Georgia was an "illustration of the kind of prejudice that makes war inevitable." Wallace told the crowd that Democrats needed to break with Democrats on the issue. "If we are to work for peace in the rest of the world," he said, "we here in the United States must eliminate racism from our unions, our business organizations, our educational institutions and our employment practices." Wallace also objected to the renewed influence of Wall Street with regard to economic policy, and, he pointed out: "We are still arming to the hilt. Our excessive expenses for military purposes are the chief cause of our unbalanced budget If taxes are to be lightened the basis of a real peace with Russia - a peace that cannot be broken by extremist propagandists...Russian ideas of social-economic justice are going to govern nearly a third of the world. Our ideas of free-enterprise democracy will govern much of the rest. The two ideas will endeavor to prove which can deliver the most satisfaction to the common man in their respective areas of political dominance. But by mutual agreement, this competition should be put on a friendly basis. Let the results Of the two systems speak for themselves.
May 22, 2025 at 5:10 AM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
"The internal foulness of the Democratic Party has not yet reached the point of lancing the boil."
Book text: Reflecting on the convention that denied him the vice-presidential nomination and, almost certainly the presidency, Henry Wallace concluded that the "internal foulness of the Democratic Party has not yet reached the point of lancing the boil."
May 22, 2025 at 4:46 AM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
Wallace's final bid to be nominated VP a second time, right before he is screwed over by the DNC leadership via bribery for votes and multiple rule violations, despite the personal preference of FDR and massive popularity within the DNC rank and file.
Book text Wallace declared: "Now we have come to the most extraordinary election in the history of our country. Three times the Democratic Party has been led to victory by the greatest liberal in the history of the United States." Of course, Roosevelt must be nominated anew, he said, because "the Democratic party can win only if and when it is the liberal party." "The future belongs to those who go down the line unswervingly for the liberal principles of both political democracy and economic democracy regardless of race, color or religion. In a political, educational and economic sense there must be no inferior races. The poll tax must go. Equal educational opportunities must come. The future must bring equal wages for equal work regardless of sex or race. Roosevelt stands for all this. That is why certain people hate him so. That also is one of the outstanding reasons why Roosevelt will be elected for a fourth time. The Democratic Party cannot long survive as a conservative party. The Republican Party has a monopoly on the conservative brains and the conservative dollars. Democrats who try to play the Republican game inside the Democratic Party always find that it just can't work on a national scale." In essence, Wallace argued, the convention was not choosing its nominees but its future. "Our problem is not to sell Roosevelt to the Democratic convention but to sell the Democratic Party and the Democratic convention to the people of the United States," he explained. "There is no question about the renomination of President Roosevelt by this convention. The only question is whether the convention and the party workers believe wholeheartedly in the liberal policies for which Roosevelt has always stood."
May 22, 2025 at 4:42 AM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
Wherein Wallace calls Winston Churchill a Nazi for being a racist, imperialist trashpile.
Book text: It was not the first time that Wallace's anti-imperialism had offended Churchill. A year earlier, in May 1943, the men clashed during a meeting in which Walace's talk of a postwar "century of the common man" unsettled the old imperialist, Churchill "made it more clear,' recalled Wallace in his diary, "that he expected England and the United States to run the world, and he expected the staff organizations which had been set up for winning the war to continue when the peace came, that these staff organizations would by mutual understanding really run the world even though there was a supreme council and three regional councils. I said bluntly that I thought the notion of Anglo-Saxon superiority, inherent in Churchill's approach, would be offensive to many of the nations of the world as well as to a number of people in the United States. Churchill had had quite a bit of whiskey, which, however, did not affect the clarity Book text: of his thinking process but did perhaps increase his frankness. He said why be apologetic about Anglo-Saxon superiority, that we were superior, that we had the common heritage which had been worked out over the centuries in England and had been perfected by our constitution. He himself was half American. He felt that he was called on as a result to serve the function of uniting the two great Anglo-Saxon civilizations in order to confer the benefit of freedom on the rest of the world." When Wallace proposed bringing the people of Latin America into Churchill's postwar scheme "so that the citizens of the New World and the British Empire could all travel freely without passports," the vice president recalled, "Churchill did not like this. He said if we took all the colors on the painter's palette and mix them up together, we get just a smudgy grayish brown. I interjected, ‘And so you believe in the pure Anglo-Saxon race or Anglo-Saxondom über Alles?’ " That earned a rebuke from the prime minister, which was fine by the vice president. "Apparently my frank talking with Churchill at the Saturday and Monday luncheons has caused the British to reach the conclusion that I am not playing their game of arranging matters so that the Anglo-Saxons will rule the world, he wrote a few days later. "Frankly I am glad to know where they stand and they know where I stand. I am sure that 200 million Anglo-Saxons in the United States, England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa are not enough to run the world and that if they try it in the spirit which seems to be animating Churchill, there will be serious trouble ahead."
May 22, 2025 at 4:13 AM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact.

They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism.

They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.
"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact," Wallace wrote. "Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism. They cultivate hate and distrust of both Britain and Russia. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."
May 22, 2025 at 4:00 AM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
Book text that reads: "If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States," Wallace charged. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who, in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort. They are doing this even in those cases where they hope to have profitable connections with German chemical firms after the war ends. They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead."
May 22, 2025 at 3:52 AM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
Book text that reads: We will not be satisfied with a peace which will merely lead us from the concentration camps and mass murder of Fascism ints an international jungle of gangster governments operated behind the scenes by power-crazed, money-mad imperialists. Our choice is not between a Hitler slave-world and an out-of-date holiday of 'normalcy'. The defeatists who talk about going back to the good old days of Americanism mean the time when there was plenty for the few and scarcity for the many, when Washington was a way-station in the suburbs of Wall Street. Nor is our choice between an Americanized fascism and the restoration of prewar scarcity and unemployment. Too many millions of our people have come out of the dark cellars and squalor of unemployment ever to go back. Our choice is between democracy for everybody or for the few - between the spreading of social safeguards and economic opportunity to all the people or the concentration of our abundant resources in the hands of selfishness and greed.
May 22, 2025 at 3:47 AM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
I have reticulated hillstream loach babies!!!
May 4, 2025 at 4:24 AM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
I TRIED. It went from kind of normal to saying I don't post about El Salvador (untrue) and therefore am bad, regardless of also doing things offline.

I don't know why I tried.

Here's a cleansing loach for this thread.
Hillstream loach perching on driftwood. It is a small, flat fish with a reticulated black and tan pattern that vaguely resembles a tiny sting ray.
April 23, 2025 at 5:24 AM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
Oooh, here's my first one of the season, from March 23.
Brown lacewing sitting on a wall under a porch light
April 6, 2025 at 2:29 AM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
My favorite flower with my favorite spider.
Top down view of a bright yellow daffodil in bloom. Where the trumpet part of the flower meets the base petals, a small bold jumping spider sits, facing the photographer.
March 26, 2025 at 12:50 AM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
Today is a special day. I decided to stop delaying something that would make me happy just because my world has gotten unstable and upsetting.
Nine reticulated hillstream loaches in the petstore bag, floating in the tank they will be released in. A number 1-9 has been doodled in above each fish. They are flat fish with long tails that suction on to the sides of the bag. They are black with reticulated tan markings and somewhat resemble very small stingrays.
March 23, 2025 at 10:47 PM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
I got angry with how it looked and spent five hours "fixing it" Saturday night. I have redone this stupid tank three times now.
A river scape twenty gallon long tank with a large piece of driftwood in the center, several large flat rocks in stacks, and some smaller more colorful rocks.
March 17, 2025 at 5:52 AM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
Shrimp tanks are so great. I got cherry shrimp for my big tank and the kiddo loved them, so I upgraded my quarantine tank to 10 gal and converted my 5.5 gal to a shrimp tank to breed a different color. Then I added some rasboras.
March 15, 2025 at 11:08 PM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
Looking for aesthetic suggestions. Or should I just stop messing with it?

20 gallon long, destined to breed hillstream loaches, so the river rock piles are important.

I just acquired more small boulders from a person that was relandscaping their backyard.
20 gallon long fish tank filled with river rocks, one large piece of driftwood, and some larger boulders on the right side.
March 15, 2025 at 10:14 PM
phytoseiid.bsky.social
Aquarium epoxy smells like a 1990s hair salon but my driftwood is no longer floating.
Aquarium with gravel, sponge filters in the back corners, piles of smooth rainbow colored Montana river rock, two larger boulders and a large piece of driftwood in the center
March 4, 2025 at 4:18 AM