Well ain't that the truth... I've never seen a more accurate and honest depiction of religion besides all the wealth and disparities in holy places of worship... but fuck the actual earth & all it's indigenous caregivers, right? Genocide has always been at the top of their minds since day 1...
On this day, 17 January 1893, a coup d'état took place in Hawai’i, organised by the United States.
The background to the coup was in the changing economy. Hawai’i’s traditional, Indigenous ways of life came into conflict with the growing capitalist sugar industry, through which a few white, landowning families from the US and Europe effectively gained control of the economy. Only wealthy landowners could vote, and so they could effectively pull the strings of Native monarchs.
However, after Queen Liliʻuokalani ascended to the throne, she proposed a new constitution, which would abolish the high property requirement for voting, and only enable Hawaiian citizens to vote.
Members of Liliʻuokalani’s cabinet leaked the plan to the US minister to Hawai'i, John Stevens, and together they plotted to overthrow her and enable a complete US takeover.
A group of 13 white men, 11 of whom were capitalist business owners, formed a “Committee of Safety” to take over the country. On January 16, they summoned US marines and sailors who arrived that afternoon.
The following day, they forced Queen Liliʻuokalani to give up the throne, in a coup which was largely bloodless, although one plotter shot and wounded a Hawaiian police officer. A republic was briefly declared, and the island was annexed by the US five years later: the first of many overseas imperialist conquests by the nation.
Before annexation, Hawai'i had free, universal healthcare and education. The US took over the education system and used it to try to eradicate the Hawaiian language, culture and identity.
From being spoken by a majority of the population, Hawaiian declined to have only a few dozen speakers in the 1980s.
The US also abolished free healthcare. Today, Native Hawaiians still have the poorest health outcomes of all groups in Hawai’i.
Since the 1970s, there has been a resurgence of Native Hawaiian activism, culture, and resistance to colonialism which continues today.
More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/8879/us-organised-coup-in-hawaii
When conservatives want to go back to "tradition" it's seen as a good thing to get back to their "roots/culture" in order to better their family & society so of course they would see us decolonizing as a threat to their entire system... one is built on committing genocide of the other
Red flags: Unbelievable nature you've never seen before!, no external source cited, low image quality could be hiding AI artifacts, lacks scientific name for plant, OP is an aesthetic blog (no offense, I see you credit most of the artists you post, OP <3).
Green flags: Common name of the tree provided (although the leaves don't look like any olive tree I've ever seen).
Reverse image searches and citation trails all seem to lead back to now-deleted Reddit posts. Google Images says it's this one in r/NatureIsFuckingLit, and TinEye says it's this one in r/interestingasfuck. Both were posted back in 2020. This is important because the rise of AI images was in 2022.
People in the comments of places this image is posted throw around botanical terms like "dichotomous branching" [branches split into two at the nodes] and "divaricated" [branches grow far apart from each other], which are cool, but don't tell me what the tree is.
Searching up "Black Olive" on iNaturalist finally got me some answers, and it turns out that YES. This is a real tree! This tree is a Dwarf Black Olive (Terminalia molinetii, Formerly Bucida spinosa). The above photos are some particularly nicely framed shots of a tree with particularly small leaves, which really highlights the branching structure. I really wish we knew the photographer's name. Here are some more photos of the same species:
Terminalia molinetii by jriveracruz50 on iNaturalist, posted under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
This tree is native to Southern Mexico, Belize, the southern tip of Florida, and Cuba. Dwarf Black Olives are completely unrelated to Olive trees in the Olea genus that I'm more familiar with (the former is in Order Myrtales [Myrtles, Evening Primroses, and Allies], and the latter is in Order Lamiales [Mints, Plantains, Olives, and Allies]).
Stay critical, and –more importantly– curious, y'all! The world is a beautiful place, we don't need fictional plants passed off as real ones for that to be true.
BONUS ROUND: While looking into this I found a couple other cool plants, so I wanted to share those.
Zig-Zag plant (Decarya madagascariensis), a threatened species native to the southernmost tip of Madagascar.
Decarya madagascariensis by Laurence Ramon @ laurence-clubbotatoliara on iNaturalist (CC-BY-NC 4.0)
Decarya madagascariensis by @ mamy_andriamahay on iNaturalist (CC-BY-NC 4.0)
2. Mol-Albina (Launaea arborescens), a relative of chicory and dandelions that's native to the northwestern coast of Africa (including Cape Verde, Mauritania, the Western Sahara, Algeria, and Morocco.) as well as the southern coast of Spain.
Launaea arborescens by scott.zona on Flickr (retrieved via iNaturalist) (CC-BY 4.0)
That's all! I hope you enjoy these funky little guys.
Red flags: Unbelievable nature you've never seen before!, no external source cited, low image quality could be hiding AI artifacts, lacks scientific name for plant, OP is an aesthetic blog (no offense, I see you credit most of the artists you post, OP <3).
Green flags: Common name of the tree provided (although the leaves don't look like any olive tree I've ever seen).
Reverse image searches and citation trails all seem to lead back to now-deleted Reddit posts. Google Images says it's this one in r/NatureIsFuckingLit, and TinEye says it's this one in r/interestingasfuck. Both were posted back in 2020. This is important because the rise of AI images was in 2022.
People in the comments of places this image is posted throw around botanical terms like "dichotomous branching" [branches split into two at the nodes] and "divaricated" [branches grow far apart from each other], which are cool, but don't tell me what the tree is.
Searching up "Black Olive" on iNaturalist finally got me some answers, and it turns out that YES. This is a real tree! This tree is a Dwarf Black Olive (Terminalia molinetii, Formerly Bucida spinosa). The above photos are some particularly nicely framed shots of a tree with particularly small leaves, which really highlights the branching structure. I really wish we knew the photographer's name. Here are some more photos of the same species:
Terminalia molinetii by jriveracruz50 on iNaturalist, posted under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
This tree is native to Southern Mexico, Belize, the southern tip of Florida, and Cuba. Dwarf Black Olives are completely unrelated to Olive trees in the Olea genus that I'm more familiar with (the former is in Order Myrtales [Myrtles, Evening Primroses, and Allies], and the latter is in Order Lamiales [Mints, Plantains, Olives, and Allies]).
Stay critical, and –more importantly– curious, y'all! The world is a beautiful place, we don't need fictional plants passed off as real ones for that to be true.
BONUS ROUND: While looking into this I found a couple other cool plants, so I wanted to share those.
Zig-Zag plant (Decarya madagascariensis), a threatened species native to the southernmost tip of Madagascar.
Decarya madagascariensis by Laurence Ramon @ laurence-clubbotatoliara on iNaturalist (CC-BY-NC 4.0)
Decarya madagascariensis by @ mamy_andriamahay on iNaturalist (CC-BY-NC 4.0)
2. Mol-Albina (Launaea arborescens), a relative of chicory and dandelions that's native to the northwestern coast of Africa (including Cape Verde, Mauritania, the Western Sahara, Algeria, and Morocco.) as well as the southern coast of Spain.
Launaea arborescens by scott.zona on Flickr (retrieved via iNaturalist) (CC-BY 4.0)
That's all! I hope you enjoy these funky little guys.
Well ain't that the truth... I've never seen a more accurate and honest depiction of religion besides all the wealth and disparities in holy places of worship... but fuck the actual earth, am i right?
Trump and his cronies lied, and lied and said they had no association with Project 2025 because they knew people would not vote for Trump if they knew those were the policies he would try to implement.
So Trump was basically elected fraudulently.
The next time he claims to have a mandate, some reporter should point out he had NO MANDATE to implement Project 2025--quite the opposite actually.
When I was in college, I learned about something called the "zone of death": a 50 square mile section of Yellowstone National Park in Idaho where one could theoretically get away with murder through a series of legal and constitutional loopholes. Now, while the law here is very clear that you should be able to get away with literally any crime committed in this area, I'd imagine that any judge worth their salt would immediately dismiss the "zone of death" argument altogether, should this ever actually happen. Because it's ridiculous to assume that you'd be able to get away with literally anything just because of where you happened to commit the crime. Surely we'd never allow something that absurd to actually happen.
Well, it turns out there is a very real "zone of death" in this country that's not at all hypothetical. You see, if I committed a crime where I am right now in Sedona, Arizona, I would be tried either by the state of Arizona or by the federal government, depending on the crime itself and its severity. If, however, before committing that crime I decided to take a 90 minute drive north, I likely would not be tried at all, because at that point, I would be on the Navajo Nation reservation. Now, Native American reservations throughout the country are largely autonomous, which means that I should be tried by the tribal courts instead; except, these tribal courts are not allowed to prosecute me, because I am not native. You might not think that that should matter, but in 1978 the US Supreme Court ruled that these tribal courts had no jurisdiction over non-native people, none whatsoever. Forget having the case thrown out through some Saul Goodman loophole, the case would never even start. I couldn't be tried, charged, arrested, or even detained; in most circumstances, these tribal courts could not touch me.
Now, you might assume that this would just mean that the jurisdiction would just fall on the federal government, but this assumes that the federal government actually accepts the case itself. The overwhelming majority of the time, they just don't. Over 2/3rds of sexual violence cases against Native American women that are sent to the FBI or the US Attorney's offices are just rejected. Now, this is not just some constitutional quirk that a Reddit thread stumbled upon; this has had vast consequences for Native American communities. There is now, for lack of a better term, an epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women across this country. There are over 5,000 Indigenous women and girls missing across the United States right now. Violence against these communities are far higher than the national average, sometimes by a factor of 10, and Native American women are the only group of people in this country to be primarily victimized by a race other than their own.
This has gotten significantly worse in recent years, as transient oil workers have migrated through these communities, making their interactions with these Native Americans all but inevitable. These people can act with the utmost impunity. These are people who literally live on the reservations themselves, but still, they cannot be tried by those reservations. I thought the "zone of death" was just a quirky little factoid, something interesting to share to friends, to the intellectually curious, but it turns out there already is a "zone of death". For many, this isn't a hypothetical. For these communities, the "zone of death" is already happening.
This Native American Heritage Month I want to spread awareness for MMIWG2S crisis, the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two Spirits.
This post has facts, resources to learn more, and includes links with ways to help, although I hope as you read more you realize how much spreading awareness could leave a huge impact as it would create even more help, protections, and resources.
Did you know that indigenous women, girls, and two spirits are murdered and go missing at such high rates that both the USA and Canada have declared it a crisis and epidemic?
In some places they are murdered, assaulted, and go missing at 10x the national average?
The statistics that prove it in the USA:
The National Congress of American Indians - Defending Sovereignty since 1944
And Canada:
Read more on the Assembly of First Nations website here.
May 5th is the National Day of Awareness for MMIWG2S in the USA. In Canada it falls on the same day and it's referred to as Red Dress Day.
Red is a sacred color to indigenous peoples. As such is the color we use to raise awareness for our women, girls, and two spirits that have come under harm.
We use both red dresses and a red handprint over the mouth to raise awareness. So if you see these symbols please pay them their proper respect. They are not to be used in cosplay or costumes nor are they to be mocked or appropriated.
You'll also find the phrase "No more stolen sisters" in discussions about MMIW. This is a phrase specifically intended to raise awareness and bring attention to the MMIWG2S crisis and it shouldn't be applied to anyone except indigenous women, girls, and two spirits.
Origin of the movement Missing and Murdered Women and Girls, why wear red, current legal challenges and future hopes. (May 5, 2020)
For Native and Indigenous communities, 'No More Stolen Sisters' calls attention to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.
Along with all these facts I wanna ask you to look up infamous cases of MMIW. Look up Savanna Greywind and look up "Search the Landfill." And please check out this link that covers the legal "loophole" that allows tribal women to be assaulted without any hope for their non-native abusers being held accountable.
Let the horror that some native and first nations women go through fuel your desire to become an advocate for the MMIWG2S epidemic. Sit with us in solidarity and acknowledge the scope of the systemic injustices being done against us.
More reources on MMIWG2S, how the crisis is being handled by government, and how you can help:
WASHINGTON – Native American tribal leaders urged lawmakers to increase federal funding and implement national reporting systems to help sol
Red Dress Day 2025, held every May 5th, is a National Day of remembrance and activism honouring the lives of Missing and Murdered Indigenous
The Not Invisible Act Commission’s resource was historic for Native Americans. It’s now been scrubbed from federal websites
“We have no idea where she could be.”
List of resources from the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Natives Women that includes resources for women, LGBT and two spirit people, trafficking survivors, DV survivors, and of course resources specific to MMIWG2S.
If you have any questions please ask them, just be respectful and don't ask anything in bad faith.
Here is friendly reminder for all paisas to not waste your money on Abuelita chocolate, which is owned by Nestle. Instead, consider buying Ibarra or other Mexican or Latine owned chocolates and cocoa powders for making your champurrados and chocolates calientes
Also stop buying McCormick brand herbs and spices for $1. Those have gmo's in them. You can also buy herbs and spices from a farmer or from an herbalist who gets them ethically from farmers. Organic ones even.
Those prices reflect their labor cost, meaning they paid someone less than that to make it, bag it, and ship it. McCormick used to be one of the wealthiest families in the U.S, they called them "Reaper Kings"