I've been working very hard on my fundraising shop, and I just realized I have 100 designs now, in time for the 100th day of war. I plan to keep going until everyone my friend loves is safe and financially secure. Here are some of my designs (displayed on stickers):
You can find all my designs here. Redbubble will display them with a random product, click on each to see all product options (pins, shirts, stickers, bags, hats, etc).
ALL PROCEEDS from my shop go to my Palestinian best friend to help him support his girlfriend in remaining safely in America until things calm down and to help his other loved ones around the Levant who are being hurt directly and/or financially by the attacks on Gaza, the raids in the West Bank and the collateral damage in surrounding countries. He will donate anything his family doesn't need to the Palestinian charities he works with. He's been heavily involved in a lot of charity work (for Palestine and for other causes, he's one of those super nice people who's always trying to fix the whole world) for years and I trust him to put the money where it's most needed.
palestine, free palestine, south africa, yemen, icj hearing, international court of justice, israel, social justice, gaza strip, free gaza are all trending
DON'T STOP TALKING ABOUT PALESTINE, ISRAEL IS STILL BOMBING THEM DURING THE TRIAL
The Palestinian Ministry of Health released yesterday that there are only 6 operating ambulances left in Gaza. Serving 2.3 Million people who live under the constant threat of death and injury.
What does this mean? This means that the likelihood of death is far greater than the likelihood of life for anyone injured. So now, We can certainly say that Gaza has become a place for inevitable and imperative death, not just a "war zone".
Earlier in the day, a very, very small shipment of flour entered north Gaza. The shipment was pathetically small, apparently one van and one truck for 800,000 people. People gathered on the beach by the thousands, hoping to get a bag of flour to take home and feed their families. Gazans know that gathering in large groups and/or in open spaces makes them especially vulnerable to Israeli snipers and bombardment. They choose to risk their lives anyway because the alternative is starvation. Nooh Al-Shaghnobi shows a fraction of the massive crowd in this photo.
The IOF has been targeting Civil Defense workers, so crowd control and efficient distribution were impossible. People scrambled for the smallest scrap of aid, but the vast majority would receive nothing. Many people continued to wait even after the aid was gone. The shore was packed with thousands of desperate, starving people when the IOF opened fire on them. At least five people were trampled to death due to the chaos.
Fundamentally, if the democrats lose the presidency in 2024, it will not be because of "voter apathy" or "the idealistic left" or Cornell West or whatever third party candidate the liberals end up blaming. It will be because the democrats have failed to meet the lowest standards of many Americans.
You can talk about strategic voting until you're blue in the face, but fundamentally, people need reasons to vote for a candidate. There are people in this country watching as their family members get slaughtered by American arms, sent to Israel by Joe Biden. The people watching their families get murdered in Palestine have no reason to support Joe Biden. How can you ask them to?
"Sorry your family got bombed, but I need you to vote for the man who is directly responsible, or *real* people are going to suffer too."
It was at this point While I was drafting this post that I heard he just started bombing Yemen. It's like he's doing everything in his power to sink his own fucking campaign, are you shitting me? This isn't a matter of "stupid commies not being realistic enough", he's not just working for the status quo; just about every action he has taken since October 7th has been an escalation of conflict in the Middle East and made it worse for everyone living there. This is exactly what I'm talking about.
You can scold people for voting wrong as much as you want, but fundamentally the way that democrats can win elections is by pursuing good policy. If the only argument you can come up with in favor of Joe Biden is that he won't do 1 or 2 of the terrible things that Trump wants to do, then that will simply not appeal to the people who are most intensely affected by Biden's failures (not to mention people who have moral objections to genocide, even when it doesn't affect them). You can scream and cry all you want, people are not going to just overlook his role in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza just because he is the Less Bad Genocider.
If a republican wins the presidency in November, you can blame the hundreds of thousands of voters/nonvoters who should've agreed with you and put aside every moral concern they ever had about the Biden administration... or you can blame the one fucking guy whose massive foreign policy failures are going to tank his re-election campaign.
so when israel bombs innocent palestinians it’s all “ummm ahhh i don’t knowwwww it’s complicated!!!”, but when the yemeni forces are the only group to take action against israel by posing an economic threat to the rest of us it’s immediately air strikes on yemen. okay.
Three months, that’s all it took THREE MONTHS for McDonald’s Malaysia to lose $1 million, Starbucks to lose $11 billion in stock value, Disney’s shares to fall by 0.59% on 12/10/2023, KFC to lose its stronghold on Egypt etc. I cannot empathise this enough, all this happened in THREE MONTHS.
Turkey's parliament removed Coca-Cola and Nestle products from its restaurants, McDonald’s Malaysia is suing BDS Malaysia, in a desperate attempt to win back customers Starbucks is offering multiple discounts and sales etc. Boycotts work, keep up the pressure!
Existential despair is so common in a person's twenties, I think, because up until that point, we've had a pretty clear road map for what's expected of us and we haven't had much reason to question that map. There are still a few milestones outlined for us (start a career, get married, make babies) but more and more young people are entering the post-school world and realizing:
A) that career thing just isn't happening like they said it would
B) I'm not ready to get married/I don't want to get married/marriage isn't the sort of life-altering event that it used to be
C) I'm not ready to make babies/I don't want a baby/I can't afford to raise children right now (see point A)
And in the absence of these milestones to shoot for (which one could argue weren't the promise of fulfillment they claimed to be in the first place), what we're left with is this aimless abyss of "the rest of our lives" sprawling out ahead of us with no indication of how it will go or what we should be doing to shape it. Young people start their first jobs, find they hate them, and think to themselves, "Is this it? Am I just supposed to do this job until I'm too old to do it or die first?"
Which is, yeah, really fucking depressing!! So here's my best attempt at an alternate roadmap for young people that don't vibe with the old model. Please feel free to add in your own suggestions!
Learn how you work and what you want out of a job. Unless you've been in a job-specific training program that gives you hands-on experience, your first jobs should be experiments. Learn how a full-time job feels for you, what elements are more or less difficult. Different workplaces have different cultures and expectations - what do you need out of a job environment? Do you need to find fulfillment in your job or is it enough for it to pay the bills and leave you time to find outside fulfillment? Do you want to climb a corporate ladder or are you content to hunker down as long as your bills get paid? This period of experimentation is exhausting and may feel like it's consuming your whole life.
Learn how to make time for things outside of work. Adapting to a full-time work environment often leaves you feeling so drained that you can't do anything but go home and collapse on the couch every day. That's fine - for a little while. But it can also become a habit. You need to learn how to do things after work or you'll go crazy. Go to a trivia night. Start an exercise schedule. Take a class in your community. Find volunteer work. Join a band. You will find that putting more things into your day makes you feel like you have more time, not less.
Find a community. Making friends as an adult can feel impossible. Where do you find these mysterious friends everyone seems to have?? This goes along with #2, though. As you start regularly attending the same activities, you will find that repeat interactions with the same people turn into friendships or at least friendly acquaintances. Say yes to invitations. Get involved in your local community. Strive to be connected enough to bump into people at the grocery store.
Unlearn bad lessons. We all internalize some messed up things when we're growing up. As you start off your adult life, that's the time to actively work at unpacking the things you've brought with you from childhood and deciding which things are helping you and which things are harming you. This might mean therapy or joining a spiritual group or reading new things or just making special time to be in your own head.
Learn the lessons you missed. In this, I mostly mean practical things. "Adulting." Areas of your day-to-day practical life that are causing you extreme stress are probably related to a knowledge or experience gap. Do you hate cooking and cleaning or were you not taught how to do it properly? Are you afraid of making medical appointments or is it just something new you're not used to? Does money make you queasy or do you need to learn how to make a budget?
Find something fulfilling. This can be your job. It can be volunteer work. It can be faith. It can be a hobby. It can be creating things. It can be challenging yourself physically. It can be activism. It can be going for walks in nature. Everyone finds fulfillment in different places. If you're not finding it where you are, look somewhere else.
from Bisan, who said we should share this as much as possible, 06/Jan/2024:
"This is a warning about pushing people in Gaza to emigrate by intimidating people and making them choose between staying and dying or leaving and living!"
CALL FOR A CEASEFIRE. CALL FOR AN END TO THE GENOCIDE.
Top U.S. officials say they are entering a new era of collaboration with Native American and Alaska Native leaders in managing public lands,
"The U.S. government is entering a new era of collaboration with Native American and Alaska Native leaders in managing public lands and other resources, with top federal officials saying that incorporating more Indigenous knowledge into decision-making can help spur conservation and combat climate change.
Federal emergency managers on Thursday also announced updates to recovery policies to aid tribal communities in the repair or rebuilding of traditional homes or ceremonial buildings after a series of wildfires, floods and other disasters around the country.
With hundreds of tribal leaders gathering in Washington this week for an annual summit, the Biden administration is celebrating nearly 200 new agreements that are designed to boost federal cooperation with tribes nationwide.
The agreements cover everything from fishery restoration projects in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest to management of new national monuments in the Southwestern U.S., seed collection work in Montana and plant restoration in the Great Smoky Mountains.
“The United States manages hundreds of millions of acres of what we call federal public lands. Why wouldn’t we want added capacity, added expertise, millennia of knowledge and understanding of how to manage those lands?” U.S. Interior Assistant Secretary Bryan Newland said during a panel discussion.
The new co-management and co-stewardship agreements announced this week mark a tenfold increase over what had been inked just a year earlier, and officials said more are in the pipeline.
Newland, a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community in northern Michigan, said each agreement is unique. He said each arrangement is tailored to a tribe’s needs and capacity for helping to manage public lands — and at the very least assures their presence at the table when decisions are made.
The federal government is not looking to dictate to tribal leaders what a partnership should look like, he said...
The U.S. government controls more than a quarter of the land in the United States, with much of that encompassing the ancestral homelands of federally recognized tribes...
Tribes and advocacy groups have been pushing for arrangements that go beyond the consultation requirements mandated by federal law.
Researchers at the University of Washington and legal experts with the Native American Rights Fund have put together a new clearinghouse on the topic. They point out that public lands now central to the country’s national heritage originated from the dispossession and displacement of Indigenous people and that co-management could present on opportunity for the U.S. to reckon with that complicated legacy...
In an attempt to address complaints about chronic underfunding across Indian Country, President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed an executive order on the first day of the summit that will make it easier for tribes to find and access grants.
Deanne Criswell, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told tribal leaders Thursday that her agency [FEMA] began work this year to upgrade its disaster guidance particularly in response to tribal needs.
The Indigenous people of Hawaii have increasingly been under siege from disasters, most recently a devastating fire that killed dozens of people and leveled an entire town. Just last month, another blaze scorched a stretch of irreplaceable rainforest on Oahu.
Tribes in California and Oregon also were forced to seek disaster declarations earlier this year after severe storms resulted in flooding and mudslides...
Criswell said the new guidance includes a pathway for Native American, Alaska Native and Hawaiian communities to request presidential disaster declarations, providing them with access to emergency federal relief funding. [Note: This alone is potentially a huge deal. A presidential disaster declaration unlocks literally millions of dollars in federal aid and does a lot to speed up the response.]
The agency also is now accepting tribal self-certified damage assessments and cost estimates for restoring ceremonial buildings or traditional homes, while not requiring site inspections, maps or other details that might compromise culturally sensitive data."
NIH funding contributed to research associated with every new drug approved from 2010-2019, totaling $230 billion, a research paper found.
"The Biden Administration last week [early December, 2023] announced it would be seizing patents for drugs and drug manufacturing procedures developed using government money.
A draft of the new law, seen by Reuters, said that the government will consider various factors including whether a medical situation is leading to increased prices of the drug at any given time, or whether only a small section of Americans can afford it.
The new executive order is the first exercise in what is called “march-in-rights” which allows relevant government agencies to redistribute patents if they were generated under government funding. The NIH has long maintained march-in-rights, but previous directors have been unwilling to use them, fearing consequences.
“We’ll make it clear that when drug companies won’t sell taxpayer funded drugs at reasonable prices, we will be prepared to allow other companies to provide those drugs for less,” White House adviser Lael Brainard said on a press call.
But just how much taxpayer money is going toward funding drugs? A research paper from the Insitute for New Economic Thought showed that “NIH funding contributed to research associated with every new drug approved from 2010-2019, totaling $230 billion.”
The authors of the paper continue, writing “NIH funding also produced 22 thousand patents, which provided marketing exclusivity for 27 (8.6%) of the drugs approved [between] 2010-2019.”
How we do drug discovery and production in America has a number of fundamental flaws that have created problems in the health service industry.
It costs billions of dollars and sometimes as many as 5 to 10 years to bring a drug to market in the US, which means that only companies with massive financial muscle can do so with any regularity, and that smaller, more innovative companies can’t compete with these pharma giants.
This also means that if a company can’t recoup that loss, a single failed drug can result in massive disruptions to business. To protect themselves, pharmaceutical companies establish piles of patents on drugs and drug manufacturing procedures. Especially if the drug in question treats a rare or obscure disease, these patents essentially ensure the company has monoselective pricing regimes.
However, if a company can convince the NIH that a particular drug should be considered a public health priority, they can be almost entirely funded by the government, as the research paper showed.
Some market participants, in this case the famous billionaire investor Mark Cuban, have attempted to remedy the issue of drug costs in America by manufacturing generic versions of patented drugs sold for common diseases."
