thoughtlessarse

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If you're reading this, I'm already over the Atlantic en route to Jamaica.

I'm off to spend Christmas with the family I only knew existed this year. It will be my first time in Jamaica.

Happy Holidays (just to piss off the conservatives), and I'll be back around 08/01/2025.

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A marmoset dangles upside down by its hind legs while eating a banana in Forte Duque de Caxias, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - Photograph: Bob Karp/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

Click source for more Week in Wildlife photos.

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Missouri Governor Mike Parson has reduced the already lenient six-year sentence of Eric DeValkenaere, the white KCPD detective convicted of executing Cameron Lamb in his own backyard in December 2019. While this commutation doesn’t erase DeValkenaere’s historic conviction – it ensures the killer cop will walk free after serving a fraction of his sentence. This is nothing short of a declaration of war against, and a license to kill Black people in Missouri. “This reprehensible act speaks volumes about Parson’s priorities,” wrote Gwen Grant in a scathing statement to The Defender, “clemency for a white former officer who took a Black life yet continued refusal to grant clemency for wrongfully convicted Black men like Kevin Strickland and Marcellus Williams.” The System Working Exactly As Designed To be crystal clear: DeValkenaere’s conviction was more than historic – it was in fact a statistical miracle in a system designed to protect white cops who murder Black people. In KCPD’s 145+ year reign of terror, he was the first and only white cop ever convicted for killing a Black person. Now, even that singular moment of accountability has been snatched away by a governor who has shown us exactly whose lives he values.

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On a warm afternoon in 1970, Cleo Silvers, then a young member of the Black Panther Party, boarded the subway from the Bronx to Harlem. COINTELPRO was at its height. Fred Hampton had recently been assassinated by police in Chicago. Huey Newton was imprisoned on false charges. She was still on the subway when police stopped her.This piece was published with support from the International Women’s Media Foundation. “I told them, ‘I’m going to the Black Panther office, and you better leave me alone,’” recalled Silvers, now 78. And they did. By the time she got to the Panther headquarters on Seventh Avenue, she breathed a sigh of relief, and continued with her work: within a few months, she’d be helping to take over a hospital. Silvers recounted this day recently, sitting at her kitchen table, bedecked in a mauve headwrap and gold jewelry. Anyone looking in the window would see just another Tennessee academic, the rooms she shares with her husband, Ron, overflowing with books on racial justice and radical organizing. But Silvers’s life has been one of boldness: as a Young Lord in the South Bronx in 1970, she took part in the Lincoln Hospital Takeover, when activists demanded better care for patients, supported by Assata Shakur and other Panthers. After the takeover, Silvers helped run a door-to-door program with the Young Lords, testing people for tuberculosis and lead. Throughout this time, Silvers, like so many of her radical peers, was on the radar of the FBI. The bureau’s notorious COINTELPRO program—a campaign of covert and illegal operations aimed primarily at subverting civil rights and anti-war movements—was in full swing. Government operatives spied on, intimidated, smeared, harassed, blackmailed, wrongfully imprisoned, and assassinated dozens of Black leaders and radicals like Silvers until it was officially shuttered in 1971. Silvers’s name appears repeatedly in the 110,000-page cache of declassified FBI files on the Black Panthers, according to Bob Boyle, the attorney who obtained them. Decades later, congressional hearings and public apologies have served to frame COINTELPRO as a dark American chapter, one relegated to the dustbin of history. It’s 40 years since Silvers was last arrested and questioned about the Black Panther Party. About 45 years since the FBI visited her family to interrogate them about her whereabouts. More than 50 since she was betrayed by her own boyfriend, who she found out decades later was an FBI informant. And though the FBI’s pursuit of the Black Panthers officially ended, the government’s targeting and surveillance of radical activists never did.

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Over the summer, a story circulated across news outlets claiming that eating plant-based burgers led to heart disease. “New research,” the Washington Post reported in June, “found eating plant-derived foods that are ultra-processed — such as meat substitutes, fruit juices, and pastries — increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes.” “Vegan fake meats linked to heart disease, early death,” the New York Post declared. There was just one problem: The narrative was totally fake. The claim emerged from a study on plant-based “ultra-processed” foods by a team of nutrition researchers at the University of São Paulo and Imperial College London. Using data from a sample of 118,397 people in the UK who had reported what they ate over at least two days, the paper found that increased consumption of ultra-processed plant foods was associated with higher rates of cardiovascular disease and premature death, while eating non-ultra-processed plants like fruits and vegetables was linked to better health outcomes. But plant-based meats were virtually absent from the study: Just 0.2 percent of calories across the sample came from meat alternatives. The bulk of the plant-based ultra-processed calories instead came from what the authors describe as “industrialised packaged breads, pastries, buns, and cakes,” and “biscuits,” better known in the US as cookies — foods that have little to do with plant-based meats or other specialty vegan products. The new generation of vegan burgers, including Impossible and Beyond burgers, did not yet exist when the data was collected between 2009 and 2012. “With such a small contribution, we can’t draw any meaningful conclusions about plant-based meat alternatives specifically,” University of São Paulo researcher Fernanda Rauber, lead author of the study, told me in an email. That makes sense. Not many people, after all, regularly eat vegan meat alternatives. So why did the media focus on plant-based meats?

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As this year’s sea turtle spawning-and-nesting period nears an end, Cancún municipal officials have reported that roughly 950,000 hatchlings have been released and made their way to the ocean. Fernando Haro Salinas, director of ecology for Benito Juárez municipality, told reporters this week that the majority of the hatchlings were green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas), locally known as tortuga blanca. While three or four of the more than 50 incubation sites were still active, Haro called this year’s season a success. “The total number of arrivals was slightly less than last year, but still quite a high number,” Haro told reporters. Haro said this is not unusual, explaining that it is common for a high spawning season to be followed by a lower one, according to Diario Cambio 22. Last year in the municipality, more than 11,000 nests were identified with an estimated 1,282,839 eggs from which roughly 1,205,000 hatchlings made their way to the sea.

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Amid negotiations and accusations of blackmail, the Georgian government’s suspension of talks to join the EU has sparked major protests in a country where the population is largely in favor of membership. In Georgia, the government of the Georgian Dream (RG) party, which came out on top in the October 26 parliamentary elections, recently announced the suspension of negotiations to join the European Union. Demonstrations against the decision broke out, particularly in the capital, with protesters demanding new parliamentary elections. While analysts often reduce the dynamics in Georgia to a conflict between pro-Russian parties on the one hand and pro-European parties on the other, the political situation is much more complex. On November 28, Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced the suspension of talks with the European Union until 2028 and accused Brussels of “blackmail.” This announcement came just hours after the European Parliament voted not to recognize the results of the October 26 general elections, in which the ruling party won the majority of seats in the Georgian parliament. This decision by the European Parliament, which has been downplayed or pushed into the background in the mainstream press, is in fact a form of interference in a country that is being fought over by Western imperialism and Russia and its allies. Added to this is the fact that, for the time being, there isn’t sufficient evidence of possible fraud by the ruling party. Furthermore, the RG has a majority of only 54 percent, which does not allow it to change the constitution as its leaders wanted. So, if the party’s intention was to completely manipulate the election, why would they have stopped short of full power? Demonstrations and Bonapartist Maneuvers of the Opposition For her part, the country’s pro-European president, Salome Zourabishvili, who has only a ceremonial role in the Georgian political system, announced, following the government’s statement, that she would not leave the presidency, claiming “we are facing stolen elections, an illegitimate parliament; and an illegitimate parliament can elect nothing other than an illegitimate government and an illegitimate president.” Zourabichvili became president thanks to the support of RG, and she acts as a direct agent of imperialism within Georgia. Previously, she was the French ambassador to Georgia. Her family emigrated to France in 1921, fleeing the Bolshevik revolution. She only obtained Georgian citizenship after the so-called “Rose Revolution” of 2003. Zourabichvili is indeed trying to lead a small institutional coup d’état to force the ruling party to give in to the demands of the EU. This Bonapartist and pro-imperialist attempt was made quite clear when she declared to Le Monde, 

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President Emmanuel Macron arrived in France’s Indian Ocean archipelago of Mayotte on Thursday after cyclone Chido devastated it last weekend. From when his visit began, the banker-president was faced with angry crowds who booed him as he arrogantly lectured them that they should be proud to be French and called to crack down on Comoran immigrants. As Macron arrived, Réunion1, a public TV station on Réunion island, reported that rescue and health workers in Mayotte believe the cyclone may have killed 60,000 people—nearly a fifth of the registered population. France’s monarchist interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, dismissed the report as a “rumor,” as Réunion1 had pulled it from its web site. But contacted by Libération, Réunion1 journalist Raphaël Kahn defended the now-deleted report, insisting this is what Mayotte rescue workers had said. The cyclone’s 220km/h winds destroyed sheet-metal houses in which much of Mayotte’s population lives, wiping out hillside slums in the capital, Mamoudzou. The French government is hiding the extent of the disaster caused by its decades of neglect of Mayotte’s infrastructure, claiming that it has confirmed 35 dead and 2,500 wounded. The interior ministry admitted, however, that its own estimate “does not match the reality that 100,000 people live in precarious housing.” A further reason that death tolls are flagrant underestimates is that communication between the Small Island, on which Mayotte airport is located, and the rest of Mayotte, particularly the Large Island on which the bulk of the population lives, is very limited. Several barges that used to serve as ferries between Mayotte’s different islands were sunk in the storm. Food and water are only beginning to arrive via airlift to the Small Island. Mayotte’s notoriously poor water system has collapsed, and residents of Mamoudzou’s Kawni slum told Europe1 they are drinking dirty water or not drinking anything at all. Amina, who drank water out of a stream that formed after it rained, said: “We don’t have a choice, we drink this water even though it’s muddy. We do our best to filter it, but anyway if we don’t do that, we die.”

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For decades, UNRWA has operated networks of schools, medical facilities and other services around Gaza and the West Bank, as well as in neighbouring Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. The UN agency for Palestinian refugees has said a decision by the Swedish government to end "core support" is disappointing. In a post on X, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said the announcement from Stockholm "comes at the worst time for Palestinian refugees." "This is a sad day for Palestine Refugees and the multilateral system which Sweden has spearheaded," he wrote. "Defunding UNRWA now will undermine decades of Sweden’s investment in human development including by denying access to education for hundreds of thousands of girls and boys across the region." The Swedish government said on Friday that it would increase humanitarian funding for the region to 800 million krona (€69.3 million) next year but that those funds would be distributed through other channels, such as the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency.

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Young men who said they value masculinity highly but feel like they aren’t traditionally masculine enough have the highest levels of ownership of cryptocurrency and meme stocks.

This isn’t too surprising given the recruitment rhetoric that both crypto and meme stocks use, and if this article had been written earlier I imagine we’d also be talking about NFTs.

While both have seen a jump this year, it’s sad to see we have well and truly arrived at the stage of capitalism where people can only make gains by diving headfirst into risk, speculative schemes and hoping to come out on top.

Source.

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The Police's True Function On Full Display As Amazon Workers Begin Strik...

It's ironic how police think they need a union but nobody else should have one.

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Christmas Market Terrorist Suspect Is Far Right, Anti-Muslim, Pro-Israel Extremist

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"Rape Club" Prison in California: U.S. Gov't to Pay Record $116M to 103 Women Who Sued over Abuse

"When you're in prison, the retaliation starts. … I don't think my judge sentenced me to go through this." The U.S. government has agreed to pay a record-breaking amount of nearly $116 million to settle lawsuits brought by 103 people who survived sexual abuse and assault at a federal women's prison in California. The facility, FCI Dublin, was shuttered earlier this year. Its former warden is now himself imprisoned after being convicted of sexually abusing incarcerated people under his care. Aimee Chavira, who was formerly incarcerated at FCI Dublin and is part of the class-action sexual abuse lawsuit against the Bureau of Prisons, says the settlement, while welcomed, "doesn't change anything. No amount of money will change what was done to us and what did happen." Community organizer Courtney Hanson helped advocate for survivors with the Dublin Prison Solidarity Coalition. She calls for "policy changes to ensure that this type of staff sexual abuse stops happening" in prisons across the country.

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It’s about the system itself: structured on the value and, indeed, the necessity, of punishment, of “war” on all that is evil, from a kid stealing a candy bar to terrorists attacking America.

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20/12/2024

Last evening, Nuseirat refugee camp was bombed once again by Israeli missiles. The strike targeted a residential building and resulted in at least 8 martyrs among those who were present.

(Photo provided by @handalapls who was at the scene -- ID in Alt)

Translation of the Telegram screenshot below:

First post: "First moments of the occupation bombing a residential apartment inside "Yaffa" tower in Nuseirat refugee camp in the center of the Gaza Strip, resulting in the martyrdom and injury of a number of Palestinians" Second Post: "Update: 8 Martyrs, including children, and a number of wounded, as a result of the targeting of the fourth and fifth floors of Yaffa tower at the center of Nuseirat camp, in the center of Gaza Strip, among who have been identified: 1) Mohammed Arafat Murshed Abu Abdullah 2) His nephew/Arafat Abdullah Abu Abdullah 3) Mother of /Mohammed Arafat 4) Rami Ayesh Ahmad 5) Adam Arafat Murshed Abu Abdullah, 10 years old 6) Nasser Arafat Murshed Abu Abdullah, 13 years old 7) Layan Arafat Murshed Abu Abdullah, 14 years old 8) Lara Arafat Murshed Abu Abdullah, 17 years old

This video was taken by @handalapls at the scene of the bombing.

(Video description: A shaky camera video showing the aftermath of a bombing. The cameraman is navigating towards the building and calling out to someone called "Za'tar")

These bombings continue to happen day after day, whether it is in Nuseirat camp or other refugee camps across the Gaza Strip. People like @handalapls and every other Gazan who is sharing their story on tumblr are at risk of losing their lives every single day. Today they may be alive, tomorrow they may not, and this is the reality for every single Gazan right now.

This might seem like "just another incident" among thousands in the Gaza Strip, but if this happened anywhere else, the word would stop turning! Why are Palestinians any different? Why are Gazans different?

The genocide proceeds and life is moving on, but it should not! All eyes on Gaza! Save Gaza! Free Palestine!

And Please support @handalapls who provided me with this footage and photos:

And support Mohammed Zatr, who was also at the scene when this occurred: