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menderash · 8 months

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did you guys know that the mother fucking UN's humanitarian and legal experts have been saying israel's occupation of palestine territories is and has always been illegal, as it violates the FUCKING GENEVA CONVENTION? did you know it was britain that 'gave' the land that wasn't theirs to give to found the state of israel as a tactic to get more jews to join the british army in their already-active war against the ottoman empire? did you know that just between 2008 and 2022 the idf killed almost SEVEN THOUSAND palestinians, as opposed to the 308 israelis by palestinians in the same time period? did you know that israel itself admits to 'forcefully evacuating' palestinians from their homes over the course of their annexation of the country? did you know the british army helped them? did you know that any palestinian who didn't want to have their house taken from them and given to american immigrants being shipped in to populate britain's pet project was killed on their spot? did you know that back in 2018 palestinians did nothing but MARCH in protest of their occupation and in response, the idf is CONFIRMED to have killed almost 400 of them, including FIFTY FIVE CHILDREN? did you know palestinians are not allowed to build anything on the land they have left? did you know they aren't ALLOWED TO LEAVE?? did you know over HALF of christian evangelicals support israel solely because the bible says israel has to exist in order to bring about the second coming? did you know that in 2021, over 88% of us congress were evangelical christians? did you know israel is confirmed to have knowingly bombed palestinian hospitals and the idf had been caught targeting journalists? did you know israel is committing another war crime at this very moment by dropping white phosphorus on gaza civilians? did you know the israeli press was just confirmed to have completely fabricated an account of palestinian war crime right after their own got caught on film? did you know the defense minister of israel openly called all palestinians 'animals' to justify the deaths of their civilians? did you know holocaust survivors are presently speaking out against the israeli state's ethnic cleansing of arabs?

why, in the united states, is criticizing a settler colony's active attempts at extermination labeled antisemitic because of the religion the settlers happen to practice, but rooting for the complete eradication of a muslim country that was already there and is barely still there not islamophobia?? why is religion being used as a shield to justify genocide?

when a sudden act of politically charged violence occurs, like the hamas attack a few days ago, i ask WHY? i ask WHY until i get as far back as i can. i read accounts written by all sides. i try to find out why this is happening in the first place. half of these facts have come from the israeli government itself. all of them are easily found and easily confirmed by reputable sources. a lot of them are caught on film. all of these facts lead me to know that the state of israel was created by britain in order to gain an advantage in an unrelated war. i know the state of israel has caused unimaginable harm to the country it's slowly eating, and has suffered just a fraction in return. i know religion justifies none of it.

palestinians deserve to live in their own country. palestinians deserve to not be forced to give their homes to americans. palestinians deserve to live, to leave, to stay, to wave their own fucking flag. they do not deserve to have another country plopped on top of them and then have their settlers ask 'don't WE have a right to exist?' as their own right to exist is being extinguished.

fuck the idf, fuck israel, fuck manifest destiny, fuck all settlers who think they deserve someone else's home enough to kick them out of it. literally, in israel's case. indigenous americans, indigenous canadians, chicanos, pacific islanders, filipinos, mestizos, we should all be standing with palestine, because we KNOW how colonial violence goes and what it looks like. solidarity between all colonised peoples. free palestine.

#ive been sick to my fucking stomach #free palestine

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decolonize-the-left · 3 months

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I saw your post about the leopards eating faces and democrats and if you think the us is bad under biden have a good look through project 2025 and please fucking realize that queer people, those that can get pregnant, and people of color are going to be absolutely fucked if trump wins in November.

Sigh

If you ACTUALLY read it then you'd know Biden is ALREADY carrying out the goals outlined in project2025. You'd also know that his administration is even using the SAME exact language that's found in the Mandate for Leadership. Such as "protecting the freedom of navigation in the Suez Canal"

I literally have a post floating around somewhere where I said he was gonna escalate the genocide and smoke out all the rebel groups because guess what? Project2025 outlined that too. Literally listed them as targets that the administration should focus on.

Another part of it says they should continue to protect and support Israel's "right to defend itself" at any cost.

So yeah that thing you're afraid of? It's here. And it's here because you thought the fascist with a blue tie was less scary than a fascist than a red tie so you stopped paying attention when Blue Tie Man was around. And that blue Fascism that's allowing book bans and abortion bans and making trans people illegal is going to stay here and grow because you don't fucking care to address it unless the tie is red.

Maybe fucking read the thing you're trying to fearmonger me about because I guarantee I've read more of it than you.

And it's not that I find the realities in it less scary, it's that I'm not such a privileged shithead that I would prioritize my own comfort over lives being lost in a literal fucking genocide.

Yeah shit sucks for queer people and trans people and trust me, I know that, but we aren't being killed in broad fucking daylight and having people go into denial about it so maybe instead of barking up MY blog about how fucked up everything is you go and send the DNC and your representatives some emails and tell them to give Democrats a candidate that doesnt commit genocide?

How about instead of yelling at me to lower my standards cuz things MIGHT get scarier for you if Blue Tie Man doesn't beat trump (and he won't) you ACCEPT that reality and DO SOMETHING USEFUL about it. How about you and your party just BE BETTER????

There's seven months before the elections and Biden is tanking every poll and Democrats are voting uncommited in swing states and what's Biden doing? Doubling down on every single policy that he's losing voters over (like supporting Israel). If he loses that's not my fault or anyone else's.

Maybe stop asking people to vote for a warmongering white supremacist.

"think of the queers and pregnant people and PoC"

I Am.

They live in Palestine and Sudan and the DRC.

Or did you mean I should prioritize different queers and pregnant people and PoC?

Don't be shy. Did you mean I should prioritize you?

Cuz yeah. Fuck that.

(white) USamerican citizens prioritizing ourselves over everyone else is exactly how the world got so fucked up.

I'm NOT voting for Biden under any fucking circumstances, don't waste my time with another bullshit uninformed scare mongering ask like this again just cuz YOU lack the solidarity to care about any community but your own.

The fuck?

Do you think the queer community only counts Americans? What an ignorant thing to say. "Think of minority communites but only from this specific part of the world"

You wouldn't know community if it hit you in the fucking face.

#asked #answered #project2025 #queer #lgbt #poc #reproductive rights #bodily autonomy #the fact you separated PoC from queer and pregnant people is Weird As Fuck also btw like just say youre a white supremacist ffs #biden #2024 #vote

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heritageposts · 5 months

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Ask an older generation of white South Africans when they first felt the bite of anti-apartheid sanctions, and some point to the moment in 1968 when their prime minister, BJ Vorster, banned a tour by the England cricket team because it included a mixed-race player, Basil D’Oliveira. After that, South Africa was excluded from international cricket until Nelson Mandela walked free from prison 22 years later. The D’Oliveira affair, as it became known, proved a watershed in drumming up popular support for the sporting boycott that eventually saw the country excluded from most international competition including rugby, the great passion of the white Afrikaners who were the base of the ruling Nationalist party and who bitterly resented being cast out. For others, the moment of reckoning came years later, in 1985 when foreign banks called in South Africa’s loans. It was a clear sign that the country’s economy was going to pay an ever higher price for apartheid. Neither of those events was decisive in bringing down South Africa’s regime. Far more credit lies with the black schoolchildren who took to the streets of Soweto in 1976 and kicked off years of unrest and civil disobedience that made the country increasingly ungovernable until changing global politics, and the collapse of communism, played its part. But the rise of the popular anti-apartheid boycott over nearly 30 years made its mark on South Africans who were increasingly confronted by a repudiation of their system. Ordinary Europeans pressured supermarkets to stop selling South African products. British students forced Barclays Bank to pull out of the apartheid state. The refusal of a Dublin shop worker to ring up a Cape grapefruit led to a strike and then a total ban on South African imports by the Irish government. By the mid-1980s, one in four Britons said they were boycotting South African goods – a testament to the reach of the anti-apartheid campaign. . . . The musicians union blocked South African artists from playing on the BBC, and the cultural boycott saw most performers refusing to play in the apartheid state, although some, including Elton John and Queen, infamously put on concerts at Sun City in the Bophuthatswana homeland. The US didn’t have the same sporting or cultural ties, and imported far fewer South African products, but the mobilisation against apartheid in universities, churches and through local coalitions in the 1980s was instrumental in forcing the hand of American politicians and big business in favour of financial sanctions and divestment. By the time President FW de Klerk was ready to release Mandela and negotiate an end to apartheid, a big selling point for part of the white population was an end to boycotts and isolation. Twenty-seven years after the end of white rule, some see the boycott campaign against South Africa as a guide to mobilising popular support against what is increasingly condemned as Israel’s own brand of apartheid.

. . . continues at the guardian (21 May, 2021)

#israel #palestine #gaza #south africa #i think all of us need to seriously study the history and actions of the anti-apartheid movement #and apply these lessons to the israeli occupation

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sayruq · 24 days

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Just days after US Army Major Harrison Mann resigned, the Biden administration has been hit with another major resignation, this time Lily Greenberg Call, special assistant to the Chief of Staff

An interior department staffer on Wednesday became the first Jewish political appointee to publicly resign in protest of US support for Israel’s war in Gaza.Lily Greenberg Call, a special assistant to the chief of staff in the interior department, accused Joe Biden of using Jews to justify US policy in the conflict. Call had worked for the presidential campaigns of both Biden and Kamala Harris, and was a longtime activist and advocate for Israel in Washington and elsewhere before joining the government. She is at least the fifth mid- or senior-level administration staffer to make public their resignation in protest of the Biden administration’s military and diplomatic support of the now seven-month Israeli war against Hamas. She is the second political appointee to do so, after an education department official of Palestinian heritage resigned in January.Her resignation letter described her excitement at joining an administration that she believed shared much of her vision for the country. “However, I can no longer in good conscience continue to represent this administration,” she wrote. In an interview with the Associated Press, Call pointed to comments by Biden, including at a White House Hanukkah event where he said “Were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world who was safe” and at an event at Washington’s Holocaust Memorial last week in which he said the 7 October Hamas-led attacks that triggered the war were driven by an “ancient desire to wipe out the Jewish people”. “He is making Jews the face of the American war machine. And that is so deeply wrong,” she said, noting that ancestors of hers were killed by “state-sponsored violence”.

The resignation letter:

#yemen #jerusalem #tel aviv #current events #palestine #free palestine #gaza #free gaza #news on gaza #palestine news #news update #war news #war on gaza #genocide joe #joe biden #gaza genocide #genocide #edited

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phoenixyfriend · 3 months

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Michigan just gave us the rhetorical weapon that could push Biden and the DNC to turn their backs on Israel.

Okay so this is amazing news. Michigan was going to be a key state in the push to get Biden, and the DNC as a whole, to start pressuring Israel, and they have just proven that they have that power.

Background: Michigan is a swing state, and it has 16 votes in the electoral college. Winning Michigan was a major factor in Biden's win back in 2020, and much of that rested on the Arab-American vote. It was also a major factor in Hillary Clinton's loss to Donald Trump in 2016. She lost the state by ten thousand, seven hundred votes.

Praxis: For obvious reasons, Arab-Americans are incredibly upset with Biden's support for Israel, and support in that demographic has gone from 59% in the 2020 election to less than 17% now. As a form of protest, Arab-Americans in Michigan started a campaign to get voters to check "uncommitted" in the Democratic primary. This is an actual box that can be checked, though some less-organized pushes also suggested writing in 'ceasefire' like New Hampshire primary voters did.

The goal was to get at least 10,000 'uncommitted' votes, as that is how many Hillary lost by.

As Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, the first Arab mayor of this majority-Arab city, said:

"We're not sizable enough to make a candidate win, but we're sizable enough to make a candidate lose."

(Source: NPR, 2/25/24)

Result:

As of 10:49 PM EST, 2/27, there are thirty-nine thousand uncommitted votes, according to CNN, which is doing live coverage.

NPR was reporting 30k at 10:14.

As a caveat, New York Times is saying that each of the last three Michigan Dem Primaries had about 20k uncommitted votes, so the 35k isn't all the push for pro-Palestine stances in Congress, but that's still a jump of almost 20k, which is way, way more than the goal.

And they aren't done counting the votes yet. Barely 30% of votes are in. The goal has been blown out of the water.

Other states are reaching out for advice on how to replicate the results.

This is big news.

So can we relax?

Fuck no.

Do what Michigan did. Vote in the Dem primary, and vote uncommitted or write in "ceasefire."

But on a more daily basis, if you have a Democratic candidate, lean on this.

Tell them it will be repeated elsewhere.

This could very well lose the election for Biden and more. The Democrats can't afford another four years of Trump, and they know it. The loss of Michigan can and will tank this election for them, especially since other states that helped Biden win, like Georgia, were also won on demographics that are growing increasingly upset by the situation in Gaza.

Go to the Michigan section of this post and use that in your calls and emails.

But remember. Call your reps. Call your senators. Call your governor, if you'd like. And if they're a Democrat, you bring this up. Be polite, the staffer isn't making these decisions. They might just be an intern. But bring it up and tell them that we are going to lose the presidency if we do not sanction Israel and actually pressure them into not only pulling out of Gaza and the West Bank, but paying reparations.

#michigan #united states #michigan primary #primary voting #democratic primary #current events #phoenix politics #voting #praxis #politics #pro palestine #gaza #palestine #israel #2024 election

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doyoulikethissong-poll · 20 days

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Roxette - The Look 1989

"The Look" is a song by pop duo Roxette; Sweden's second-best-selling music act after ABBA. It was released in early 1989 as the fourth single from their second studio album, Look Sharp! (1988). The album was an immediate commercial success in their home country, spending seven weeks at number one on the Swedish Albums Chart. "The Look" was written by Per Gessle as an exercise while learning how to operate the Ensoniq ESQ-1 synthesizer he had recently purchased, using a repeated A–G–D bass line as the song's core. The track's sixteenth-note rhythm was inspired by the work of ZZ Top. The original title was "He's Got the Look", with the lyrics using male pronouns. Gessle said this was done because he initially wanted Marie Fredriksson to sing the track. Both he and EMI Sweden had chosen to highlight Fredriksson as Roxette's lead vocalist. However, when recording the demo, Gessle realised the song "didn't fit her style that well, so I had a go and it sounded OK."

The singles from Look Sharp! at the time were only released in Sweden, Germany and France. However, an American exchange student from Minnesota named Dean Cushman returned from Sweden and gave his copy of the album to his local Top 40 radio station, KDWB-FM in Minneapolis. The station's program director Brian Phillips initially ignored Cushman's request to play a song from the album, leaving the CD unplayed in his office for several weeks. Phillips eventually listened to it after learning Cushman had come to the office requesting the return of his CD. Immediately impressed by the album's opening track, "The Look" was played by the station for the first time on US radio less than an hour later, and the response from listeners was overwhelmingly positive; the station immediately began receiving phone calls to replay the track.

KDWB began distributing the track to their sister radio operations, sending 500 copies to other stations throughout the United States. EMI America promptly signed the duo to a recording contract as a result of the airplay. The label had previously rejected Roxette as "unsuitable for the American market". The song had already entered the top fifty of the Billboard Hot 100 before official promotion began, peaking at number one on the chart eight weeks later. This made "The Look" the third number one single by a Swedish act on the Billboard Hot 100, following Blue Swede's "Hooked on a Feeling" (poll #152) in 1974 and ABBA's "Dancing Queen" in 1976.

The track went on to top the charts in 25 countries. It spent three weeks atop the New Zealand Singles Chart, and six weeks at number one in Australia, where it was certified platinum for sales in excess of 70,000 copies. It also topped the charts throughout Scandinavia. The song spent five weeks at number one in West Germany, and an additional five weeks at number two. It was a massive success in Spain and Switzerland, spending eight weeks at number one in both countries. It reached number seven on the UK Singles Chart.

"The Look" received a total of 80,5% yes votes!

youtube

#tumblr #sweblr #high yes #high votes #80s #roxette

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headspace-hotel · 1 year

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Researching herbicide resistance in weeds.

A decade ago, everyone said rotating applications of different herbicides was key to stopping herbicide resistance.

Then, around 2015, evidence from a large study emerged saying that this actually causes weeds to be MORE resistant, so the best thing to do is to spray a combination of multiple herbicides mixed together at once.

Now that is being called into question too. Whoda thunk it...

Herbicide resistance among weeds is only getting stronger. Recently, scientists found an annual bluegrass (Poa annua) on a golf course that was resistant to seven herbicide modes of action at once. Seven. SEVEN. Amaranth plants been found with resistance to six herbicide modes of action at once. Twenty years ago, the narrative was that resistance to glyphosate (Roundup) was unlikely to become widespread; today it's the second-most common type of resistance.

What's more, plants are developing types of herbicide resistance that are effective against multiple herbicides at once and harder to detect. Instead of changing the chemical processes within them that are affected by the herbicides so the herbicides don't work as well, they're changing the way they absorb chemicals in the first place. Resistant plants are producing enzymes that detoxify the herbicides before they even enter the plants' cells.

It took Monsanto ten years to develop crop varieties resistant to Dicamba (after weeds made 'Roundup Ready' crops pointless). Palmer amaranth evolved Dicamba resistance in five years.

So I asked, "Why are all the proposed solutions dependent on using more herbicides, when we know damn well that this is going to do nothing but make the weeds evolve faster?"

The answer is that chemical companies have the world in a death grip. They can't make money off non-chemical solutions, so chemical solutions get all the funding, research, and outreach to farmers.

But why do chemical companies have so much power?

One of the biggest reasons is the U.S. military.

In the Vietnam war, all of Vietnam was sprayed with toxic herbicides like Agent Orange, which was incredibly toxic to humans and affected the Vietnamese population with horrible illnesses and birth defects. Monsanto, the company that made the herbicides, knew that it did this, but didn't tell anyone. The US government didn't admit that they'd poisoned humans on a mass scale until Vietnam veterans started dying and coming down with horrible illnesses, and even then, it took them 40 years. (My Papaw died at 60 because of that stuff.) And the soldiers weren't there for very long. As for the Vietnamese people, the soil and water where they live is contaminated.

Similarly, during the "war on drugs," the US military sprayed Roundup and other chemicals on fields to destroy coca plants and other plants used in the manufacturing of drugs. This killed a lot of crops that farmers needed to live, and caused major health problems in places such as Columbia. The US government said that people getting sick were lying and that Roundup was just as safe as table salt. (A statement that did not age well.)

So chemical companies make money off arming the USA military. The American lawn care industry, and the agricultural system, therefore originates in more than one way from the United States's war-mongering.

The other major way is described in this article (which I highly recommend), which describes how after WW2, chemical plants used for manufacturing explosives were changed into fertilizer producing plants, but chemical companies couldn't market all that fertilizer to farmers, so they invented the lawn care industry. No exaggeration, that's literally what happened.

This really changes my perspective on all the writings about fixing the agricultural system. The resources are biased towards the use of chemicals in agriculture because the companies are so powerful as to make outreach and research for non-chemical methods of agriculture really hard to fund. All the funding is in finding new ways to spray chemicals or spraying slightly different chemicals, because that's what you can actually get ahold of money to look into. It is like the research has to negotiate a truce with the chemical companies, suggesting only solutions that won't cause lower profits.

Meanwhile my respect for Amaranth is skyrocketing.

Who would win: The USA military-industrial complex or one leafy boi

#military industrial complex #plants #agriculture #environment

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cmanateesto · 2 years

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Whose Revolution was it?

The United States is a nation that was founded out of a war with the British Empire. A nation founded by the people and for the people as it shattered the chains of the monarchy. At least that's what public schools taught me.

Counterpoint: middle-high class businessmen gentrified popular frustration with the regime. You will want skilled revolutionaries for the purposes of rebuilding society after. What you also don’t want is for the exploited to exchange one form of oppression for another.

The Stamp Act was an unpopular tax implemented in 1765. The British had committed its colonies to war with France in the Seven Years' War. The Townshend Acts already extracted taxes from the poor. A means of the monarchy paying its government employees lavish salaries. Warm within their mansions while the rest lost their homes to the Seven Years' War.

Popular frustration would bring the torch to these homes. From Governor Hutchinson’s Mansion alone, they had looted approximately $250,000 worth. This included caskets of wine, and crystal chandeliers as well as damaging imported furniture. The Hutchinson family fabricated the events of the night. Describing themselves as victims escaping the clutches of mob violence. In other accounts, the mob had evacuated him and the family from the estate before pillaging it.

Nash, Gary B. The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. (2006) ISBN 9780143037200

The Sons of Liberty established themselves around this time. This group would unite and develop many of the typical talking points of public schools. "No taxation without representation", "give me liberty or give me death." No plans to enact these sort of rights for future Americans if you're to read the Constitution.

These Sons of Liberty came into conflict with the mob on several occasions. One general analysis is that the mobs would be generally destructive. These mobs stood outside the offices of government officials. Vandalizing their offices and homes.

While doing so, they also disrupted the flow of traffic in their local town or city. In the event the British government arrested one of their own, many judges had resigned. They had resigned due to the mobs disrupting and seizing court procedure. Fire and burglary came to the homes of those that express Loyalist sentiment.

One historian recounted:

“Whether stimulated externally or ignited internally, ferment during the years from 1761 to 1766 changed the dynamics of social and political relations in the colonies and set in motion currents of reformist sentiment with the force of a mountain wind. Critical to this half-decade was the colonial response to England’s Stamp Act, more the reaction of common colonists than that of their presumed leaders. Both loyal supporters of English authority and well-established colonial protest leaders underestimated the self-activating capacity of ordinary colonists. By the end of 1765 ... people in the streets had astounded, dismayed, and frightened their social superiors” - Gary B. Nash

One example occurs in Newport, Rhode Island on 27 August 1765. Three Stamp Distributors had pissed off their neighbors. They did so by insisting that they were going to stand behind the unjust taxation. Before we go into it, what did the Stamp Tax exactly cover? Any form of paper. Those of you watching YouTube right now, you’re probably on Discord as well. You’re likely getting your news on Twitter or Facebook. For those that are aware of media bias, you scour the internet for other sources as I did with this article.

I know some of you are using DoorDash, UberEats, or GrubHub right now to get some food.

Before the internet, much of this would be on paper..You want your news, you’re getting news from your local press. Bored of any of that, you look for a magazine or playing cards. To receive any of those products you would need it on paper. And that paper requires a state-approved stamp. All mail, paper products, or anything required stamps otherwise it isn't legal. What do you do without these stamps?

In a legal sense, you're not using any paper if it doesn't have the seal. And to get this seal for use, that's where the Stamp Act came into play. It was an easy tax. The Colonial Government collected over £100,000. There was little to no investment in the collection process. This was because the majority of society was on paper. Not only did they watch their Governors getting fat and rich off of their labor. They also found themself paying extra taxes with more well on the way.

These Governors were able to maintain their wealth. Meanwhile, if you were trying to rebuild your house damaged by the Seven Years' War. Not only did you need to pay for supplies, but you also needed to pay taxes on the mail you send and received. If you were placing orders for supplies from the East India Company, there are those taxes. Did you want your food to taste good? That's also another tax due to the Tea Act. Oh, and the Parliament would insist that it was the American colonists' fault for the Seven Years' War. Yes, because people who spent all their life savings on a house and land wanted to shoot their neighbors. Not the exceptionally wealthy Imperialists who involved the world in their ambitions.

Miller pp. 109–113. Morgan and Morgan pp. 75–76. Weslager p. 50.

Miller, John C. Origins of the American Revolution. (1943)

Morgan, Edmund S. Colonial Ideas of Parliamentary Power 1764–1766. William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Jul., 1948), pp. 311–341. JSTOR

Morgan, Edmund S. and Morgan, Helen M. The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution. (1963)

Weslager, C. A. The Stamp Act Congress. (1976) ISBN 0-87413-111-1

So why were these colonists burning and looting buildings now? I don’t know. Must have been a bad neighborhood. At the end of the night, the Constables arrested leaders of these riots and placed them in jail. I've mentioned how Judges would retire due to mobs interrupting court procedure?

The Sons of Liberty found it necessary to try and reach an Olive Branch to the Royal Government. The Rhode Island chapter elected to let their own rot in jail. This was absent of anyone who was actually out in the streets protesting the monarchy. The Sons of Liberty didn't express disapproval previously, but now it was a problem. So what did the mob do? One of these Sons got a knock at their door. The wealthy landowner answered and they found they had two choices. Either A. They help their comrades out of jail or B. That's a nice-looking house to turn into a bonfire. The fearful sons chose option A.

The Sons of Liberty attempted to enact similar levels of control across the colonies. With or without committee approval, the mobs agitated for further revolution.

Another example public schools will use is the Boston Tea Party. They would emphasize this moment as a symbolic rebellion against the crown. Except this was not a concern of common people. This was a concern of businessmen. Tea was a huge commodity in the 17th Century and it continued well into the 18th.

Labaree, Benjamin Woods. The Boston Tea Party. Originally published 1964. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1979. ISBN 0-930350-05-7. Online

Many European powers were competing in this industry. Britain had the desire to protect its domestic industry from foreign industry. A concept known as Protectionism.

They enact policies that seek to keep foreign products from influencing British citizens. Especially if the quality or affordability competed with East India Company products. The East India Company had to pay a 25% tax to import the products into the mainland. This tax made East India Tea much more expensive than Dutch Tea which didn’t charge such a tax. Because of this, the Dutch Trading Company didn't need to place a fiscal burden on the consumer. Because of the affordability, smugglers made a lucrative business importing Dutch tea. The Parliament noticed that price was why Dutch Tea was preferable to British Tea. The Townshend Acts would lower the importation tax on East India Company tea. The company would receive a 25% refund of taxes for each shipment of tea sent to the colonies. This means that the British Empire would lose that income…not so fast. The Townshend Act would also place another tax on tea exported to the colonies. This would add three forms of tax on the colonies. The Townshend Act, the Stamp Act, and now the Tea Act. Before these laws, the East India Company lost approximately £400,000 per year. This was due to smuggled tea and its affordability. The colonists refused to import East India Company tea and the Parliament capitulated. They revoked the Townshend act from the three acts but kept the Tea tax as a good middle finger to those ruffians. This sentiment inspired colonists to consume Dutch Tea or grow tea local to them. (Look up Labrador Tea.) No amount of Protectionist Policy protected the company from its losses.

King George allowed a full refund of East India Company tea exported to the colonies. The company no longer required supervision by the British Royal Government. Before this intervention, the company sold tea to government-appointed middlemen. Now the East India Company could sell to merchants in the ports. These merchants buy the tea and receive a commission for the product they sold. In layman’s terms: Walter White and Jesse Pinkman produce meth. Before they would sell that meth to a middleman who would sell that product to his network of people. But they weren’t making a lot of money selling product to the one middleman. So do you continue to lose money OR do you find many dealers that have to come back to you for product? Instead of laying all your eggs in one basket, you distribute that product as wide as possible. By doing so you might earn triple your income. This wasn't possible under the management of one middleman. That’s the solution the East India Company went after. The company was able to undercut other merchants with a King-approved bailout. By forcing these merchants to buy their products outright, the company made money. It didn't matter what the merchants did with the tea because the East India Company still made its money. So yeah, the East India Company pioneered a pyramid scheme.

Many merchants got pissed about this raw deal and being undercut by a larger company. The Boston Tea Party was a turf war between rival businesses in the Tea Trade. It was not a will of the people like schools would tell you. Just to further add fuel to this point. Here are the members of the Sons of Liberty.

Massachusetts Chapter

Samuel Adams – Tax Collector, Fire Warden. Founded the Sons Of Liberty

Benjamin Edes – Journalist/Publisher of the Boston Gazette

Benjamin Kent – Attorney General

John Hancock – Merchant, Smuggler, Fire Warden

James Otis – Attorney

Paul Revere – Silversmith, Fire Warden

James Swan – Financier

Isaiah Thomas – Printer in Boston then Worcester.

Joseph Warren – Doctor, Soldier

Thomas Young – Doctor

New York Chapter

John Lamb – Trader

Alexander McDougall – Captain of Privateers

Hercules Mulligan – Haberdasher

Isaac Sears – Captain of Privateers

Haym Salomon – Financial Broker of New York and Philadelphia

Marinus Willett - Militia Officer, Cabinet Maker, Student

Other Notable Members

Benedict Arnold – Businessman

Timothy Bigelow – Blacksmith in Worcester, Massachusetts

John Brown – Business leader of Providence, Rhode Island

John Crane – Carpenter

Christopher Gadsden – Merchant in Charleston, South Carolina

William Goddard – Publisher that Co-founded US Post Office with Benjamin Franklin

Patrick Henry – Attorney in Virginia

Charles Willson Peale – Portrait Painter and Saddle Maker, Annapolis, Maryland

Matthew Phripp – Merchant, Chairman of the Norfolk Committee of Safety, and Colonel of the Militia. Virginia

Benjamin Rush – Physician, Philadelphia

Charles Thomson – Tutor, Secretary, Philadelphia I leave you readers with this question. By this information, is the American Revolution still justifiable as a popular revolt against monarchy or was it gentrified by a turf war between competing businesses?

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morbidology · 2 months

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The 1947 "doll test" was a experiment conducted by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, which played a significant role in the legal battle against segregation in the United States. The study aimed to investigate the psychological effects of segregation on African American children.

In the experiment, African American children aged between three and seven were shown two dolls. These dolls were identical except for their skin colour - one doll had white skin while the other had brown skin. The children were then asked a series of questions, including which doll they preferred, which one was the "nice" doll, and which one looked most like them.

The results of the study were startling and disturbing. The majority of the children, regardless of their own race, consistently showed a preference for the white doll over the brown one. Many attributed positive qualities to the white doll and negative qualities to the brown one. The doll test demonstrated that segregation not only deprived African American children of equal educational opportunities but also harmed their self-esteem and sense of identity.

The findings of the doll test provided evidence of the damaging psychological impact of segregation and racism on African American children. These results were instrumental in the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

#doll test #history #civil rights

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reasonsforhope · 5 months

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"Seven federal agencies are partnering to implement President Biden’s American Climate Corps, announcing this week they would work together to recruit 20,000 young Americans and fulfill the administration's vision for the new program.

The goals spelled out in the memorandum of understanding include comprehensively tackling climate change, creating partnerships throughout various levels of government and the private sector, building a diverse corps and serving all American communities.

The agencies—which included the departments of Commerce, Interior, Agriculture, Labor and Energy, as well the Environmental Protection Agency and AmeriCorps—also vowed to ensure a “range of compensation and benefits” that open the positions up to a wider array of individuals and to create pathways to “high-quality employment.”

Leaders from each of the seven agencies will form an executive committee for the Climate Corps, which Biden established in September, that will coordinate efforts with an accompanying working group. They will create the standards for ACC programs, set compensation guidelines and minimum terms of service, develop recruitment strategies, launch a centralized website and establish performance goals and objectives. The ACC groups will, beginning in January, hold listening sessions with potential applicants, labor unions, state and local governments, educational institutions and other stakeholders.

The working group will also review all federal statutes and hiring authorities to remove any barriers to onboarding for the corps and standardize the practices across all participating agencies. Benefits for corps members will include housing, transportation, health care, child care, educational credit, scholarships and student loan forgiveness, stipends and non-financial services.

As part of the goal of the ACC, agencies will develop the corps so they can transition to “high-quality, family-sustaining careers with mobility potential” in the federal or other sectors. AmeriCorps CEO Michael Smith said the initiative would prepare young people for “good-paying union jobs.”

Within three weeks of rolling out the ACC, EPA said more than 40,000 people—mostly in the 18-35 age range—expressed interest in joining the corps. The administration set an ambitious goal for getting the program underway, aiming to establish the corps’ first cohort in the summer of 2024.

The corps members will work in roles related to ecosystem restoration and conservation, reforestation, waterway protection, recycling, energy conservation, clean energy deployment, disaster preparedness and recovery, fire resilience, resilient recreation infrastructure, research and outreach. The administration will look to ensure 40% of the climate-related investments flow to disadvantaged communities as part of its Justice40 initiative.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the MOU would allow the ACC to “work across the federal family” to push public projects focused on environmental justice and clean energy.

“The Climate Corps represents a significant step forward in engaging and nurturing young leaders who are passionate about climate action, furthering our journey towards a sustainable and equitable future,” Regan said.

The ACC’s executive committee will hold its first meeting within the next 30 days. It will draw support from a new climate hub within AmeriCorps, as well as any staffing the agency heads designate."

-via Government Executive, December 20, 2023

This news comes with your regularly scheduled reminder that WE GOT THE AMERICAN CLIMATE CORPS ESTABLISHED LAST YEAR and basically no one know about/remembers it!!! Also if you want more info about the Climate Corps, inc. how to join, you can sign up to get updates here.

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fatehbaz · 9 months

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This April [2021], the Iowa Department of Corrections issued a ban on charities, family members, and other outside parties donating books to prisoners. Under the state’s new guidelines, incarcerated people can get books only from a handful of “approved vendors.” Used books are prohibited altogether [...].

In 2018, the Michigan prison system introduced an almost identical set of rules, and Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington have all made attempts to block book donations, which were only rolled back after public outcry. Across the United States, the agencies responsible for mass imprisonment are trying to severely limit incarcerated people’s access to the written word [...].

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The official narrative is that donated books could contain “contraband [...]" -- the language used in Michigan [...]. This is a flimsy justification that begins to fall apart under even the lightest scrutiny. [...] [Contraband] [...] [is] not originating from nonprofit groups like the Appalachian Prison Book Project or Philadelphia’s Books Through Bars. [....] The old cartoon scenario of a hollow book with a saw or a gun inside just isn’t realistic, and its invocation is a sign that something else is going on.

That “something else,” predictably enough, is profit. With free books banned, prisoners are forced to rely on the small list of “approved vendors” chosen for them by the prison administration. These retailers directly benefit when states introduce restrictions. In Iowa, the approved sources include [B&N] and [B-a-M], some of America’s largest retail chains -- and, notably, ones which charge the full MSRP value for each book, quickly draining prisoners’ accounts. An incarcerated person with, say, $20 to spend can now only get one book, as opposed to three or four used ones; in states where prisoners make as little as 25 cents an hour for their labor, many can’t afford even that.

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With e-books, the situation is even worse, as companies like [GTL] supply supposedly “free” tablets which actually charge their users by the minute to read.

Even public-domain classics, available on Project Gutenberg, are only available at a price under these systems -- and prisons, in turn, receive a 5% commission on every charge. All of this amounts to rampant price-gouging and profiteering on an industrial scale.

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The rise of these private vendors has also been mirrored by the systematic dismantling of the prison library system. In the last ten years, budgets for literacy and educational resources have seen dramatic cuts, reducing funding to almost nothing [...]. In Illinois, for instance, the Department of Corrections spent just $276 on books across the entire state in 2017, down from an already meager $605 the previous year. (This means, incidentally, that each of the state’s roughly 39,000 prisoners was allotted seven-tenths of a cent.)

Oklahoma, meanwhile, has no dedicated budget for books at all, requiring prison librarians to purchase them out-of-pocket. [...]

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These practices become all the more abhorrent when you consider the impact books can have behind bars. By now, the social science on their benefits is well-established [...]. [O]ther inmates have reported that reading meant “the difference between just giving up mentally and emotionally and making it through another day, week, or year,” countering the dehumanizing effects of their imprisonment. A book can offer a brief, irreplaceable moment of calm in hellish circumstances. [...]

[There is] a shameful pattern in American society, where many people simply don’t think about the incarcerated on a day-to-day basis, let alone sympathize with their worsening conditions. [...] One of the most common arguments for the American carceral system, and its continued existence, is that of rehabilitation. According to its defenders, a prison is not simply a place of suffering, where unwanted populations are sent to disappear. Nor is it a callous money-making machine, intended to squeeze free labor from them in a regime of functional slavery. Instead, prison rehabilitates -- so the story goes. [...] In these terms, the basic legitimacy of mass imprisonment, and its allegedly positive social role, is taken for granted. [...] But the practice of book banning exposes the lie. Not only do American prisons have little interest in education, healing, and growth, but they will actively prevent them the moment there is a dollar to be made or an ounce of power to be secured.

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Text by: Alex Skopic. "The American Prison System's War on Reading". Protean (Protean magazine online). 29 November 2021. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

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