“Friends outside of Minnesota please read. I’m sharing a post written by a personal friend and medical doctor: Friends outside MN, you need to know what is happening here. Everyone knows that ICE shot and killed a woman here on Wednesday. But that’s not the only thing that’s going on:
ICE agents are cruising areas with immigrant-owned businesses, and kidnapping patrons and employees alike. Yesterday they abducted two US citizen employees at a suburban Target, one who was begging them to allow him to go get his passport to show them.
ICE is going door to door in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods, asking residents where their immigrant neighbors live. Read that again. If it sounds like something out of your high school history textbook, that’s because it is.
ICE is targeting schools and school buses. They pepper sprayed teenagers and abducted two school staff members at the high school up the street from me on Wednesday. Police are literally escorting school buses to ensure children can get to school and home safely. The Minneapolis Public Schools have moved to virtual learning for the next 4 weeks because it’s unsafe for children or teachers to physically come to school.
They are targeting hospitals and clinics. Patients are scared and are cancelling their appointments or just not showing up. Kids are missing their checkups and vaccines, folks aren’t getting their cancer care, etc.
They are smashing windows in cars and homes.
ICE is increasingly picking up Native Americans—again, targeting folks based on skin color alone.
They are arresting and beating legal observers. A friend of a friend had her arm broken yesterday. Folks are showing up at local hospitals, brought in in ICE custody, with severe injuries that are absolutely inconsistent with mechanism of injury reported by ICE. (Think: patient appears to have been beaten unconscious, while ICE agent says he slipped and fell.) I can’t emphasize enough that these ICE agents do not have warrants. There are 2,000+ agents here and they are simply hunting for anyone that’s not white. It doesn’t matter if you’re a citizen or a green card holder, they will kidnap you first and ask questions later.
But the community is fighting back.
Protests are happening every day.
Community groups have been leading know-your-rights sessions for months, often to packed venues.
Whistles are being distributed by the thousands, carried on keychains and worn on coat zippers, always at the ready to be blown in warning if ICE is spotted.
Drivers are following ICE vehicles, blaring their horns in warning.
Businesses are locking their doors even while open to keep employees and customers safe. As I type this, I’m standing guard at the locked door of our neighborhood burrito joint while I wait for my takeout order, so the employees can focus on their jobs. The place is packed with neighbors supporting this small business.
Anti-ICE signs are posted everywhere. The community is making it crystal clear that ICE is not welcome here.
Parents and neighbors are standing guard outside schools, organizing carpools, and escorting kids to and from school on foot.
Parents of kids in Spanish-immersion daycare (there are a LOT of these daycares here!) are keeping their kids home so the teachers don’t have to take the risk of coming to work.
Churches and community groups are holding fundraisers to buy and deliver groceries to families who don’t feel safe leaving home.
Mutual aid money is going out to folks who can’t make rent because they can’t work or because a breadwinner was abducted, or who need a warm place to stay after their home’s windows were smashed.
THAT is what is happening here. This fight is ongoing and it’s horrifying to watch. But we are not backing down. To my friends in other cities and states, don’t think for a minute that this won’t happen in your town. It will. Be ready. Learn from us, as we have learned from Portland and Chicago and New York. Fight back. Don’t let us get to the last line of Martin Niemoller’s poem.”
Do you ever look back on a post where you were shitty to an obviously marginalised person for asking for the tiny tiny crumb of consideration that is "please don't literally express a wish that I didn't exist", and think "actually I kinda wish I could take that back"?
Because there's still time. You could just delete it. This doesn't have to end up being the next era of your life.
The purest form of love is consideration. When someone thinks about how things would make you feel. Pays attention to detail. Holds you in regard when making decisions that could affect you. In any bond, how much they care about you can be found in how much they consider you
Nobody has mentioned it yet, but the Shul that was protested last night in Queens was hosting a real estate event. They were selling stolen Palestinian land.
That’s a pretty big detail that would seriously change the optics here if true
They were protesting the Tivuch Shelly real estate agency, if you check their site:
this is the white devil profiting off of the displacement of Palestinians.
All these news stories about US investors planning to travel to Venezuela to assume ownership over its land and people is so cartoonishly evil man I hate this country so much
Go fucking home then! Who asked you to come here. The only difference is you get to go home to a liberated country instead of a dictatorship! You might wanna think about that before you open your stupid fucking pie hole.
Delta Force liberated this 80 year old grandma by bombing and killing her
There are a lot of reasons to oppose monarchy but one of the most overlooked is that the king is always getting stuck in some kind of hazardous puzzle chamber filling up with gravel or lava or something. Do your fucking job man
Hey, fat people deserve to have fun and get their needs met even if they’re the least healthy mf you know. Fat people deserve proper medical care, and carbs, and to wear shorts and so many more things! EVEN IF THEY ARE UNWELL AND ESPECIALLY IF THAT UNWELLNESS IS DUE TO THEIR WEIGHT!!! Fat people deserve the world and more. Not just the healthy fats or attractive fats or small fats or fats that are fat because of medication or disability.
^^^ This. The COMBINED population of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul) is only about 2.6 million. That’s not small town numbers, sure, but compared to NYC (20.1 million in the metropolitan area)? LA? (12.9 million “”)?
Minneapolis is being made an example of because they’re the most bitesized target, and if you’re doing a shock and awe campaign like this you need to not choke on national tv.
(And they’re still having to fight for it. Minneapolis isn’t taking this laying down, and more power to them for their courage.)
Just as a side note, ICE raids are currently also happening in Columbus OH- which is double the size of Minneapolis but still much smaller than Chicago or LA.
I don’t know if they’re full on raids just yet, but we’re getting close to it if not, in Cleveland as well
Id seen reports of sightings in Cleveland for sure.
Warn people away from international groceries and hardware stores if you can. We also had some following kids home from school to catch either them or their parents, so eyes peeled on immigrant-populous schools.
Hearing reports of them in Annapolis MD too.
Plus, Trump is still boiling mad about Minneapolis and St Paul protesting for BLM in 2020.
Every time you try to talk to a man about misogyny he’s like “well what about the terrible things men do to each other because they hate women so much? Huh? What’s feminism going to do about that???”
One of the team behind the letter was blunt. “The brain microplastic paper is a joke,” said Dr Dušan Materić, at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. “Fat is known to make false-positives for polyethylene. The brain has [approximately] 60% fat.” Materić and his colleagues suggested rising obesity levels could be an alternative explanation for the trend reported in the study.
Materić said: “That paper is really bad, and it is very explainable why it is wrong.” He thinks there are serious doubts over “more than half of the very high impact papers” reporting microplastics in biological tissue.
Another study reported MNPs in human testes, “highlighting the pervasive presence of microplastics in the male reproductive system”. But other scientists took a different view: “It is our opinion that the analytical approach used is not robust enough to support these claims.”
The doubts amount to a “bombshell”, according to Roger Kuhlman, a chemist formerly at the Dow Chemical Company. “This is really forcing us to re-evaluate everything we think we know about microplastics in the body. Which, it turns out, is really not very much. Many researchers are making extraordinary claims, but not providing even ordinary evidence.”
While analytical chemistry has long-established guidelines on how to accurately analyse samples, these do not yet exist specifically for MNPs, said Dr Frederic Béen, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: “But we still see quite a lot of papers where very standard good laboratory practices that should be followed have not necessarily been followed.”
A key way of measuring the mass of MNPs in a sample is, perhaps counterintuitively, vaporising it, then capturing the fumes. But this method, dubbed Py-GC-MS, has come under particular criticism. “[It] is not currently a suitable technique for identifying polyethylene or PVC due to persistent interferences,” concluded a January 2025 study led by Dr Cassandra Rauert, an environmental chemist at the University of Queensland in Australia.
“I do think it is a problem in the entire field,” Rauert told the Guardian. “I think a lot of the concentrations [of MNPs] that are being reported are completely unrealistic.”
“This isn’t a dig at [other scientists],” she added. “They use these techniques because we haven’t got anything better available to us. But a lot of studies that we’ve seen coming out use the technique without really fully understanding the data that it’s giving you.” She said the failure to employ normal quality control checks was “a bit crazy”.
Py-GC-MS begins by pyrolysing the sample – heating it until it vaporises. The fumes are then passed through the tubes of a gas chromatograph, which separates smaller molecules from large ones. Last, a mass spectrometer uses the weights of different molecules to identify them.
The problem is that some small molecules in the fumes derived from polyethylene and PVC can also be produced from fats in human tissue. Human samples are “digested” with chemicals to remove tissue before analysis, but if some remains the result can be false positives for MNPs. Rauert’s paper lists 18 studies that did not include consideration of the risk of such false positives. Rauert also argues that studies reporting high levels of MNPs in organs are simply hard to believe: “I have not seen evidence that particles between 3 and 30 micrometres can cross into the blood stream,” she said. “From what we know about actual exposure in our everyday lives, it is not biologically plausible that that mass of plastic would actually end up in these organs.”
“It’s really the nano-size plastic particles that can cross biological barriers and that we are expecting inside humans,” she said. “But the current instruments we have cannot detect nano-size particles.”
Whoopsie it was all bad science rushed out the door.
To me, this is the key message:
However, micro- and nanoplastic particles are tiny and at the limit of today’s analytical techniques, especially in human tissue. There is no suggestion of malpractice, but researchers told the Guardian of their concern that the race to publish results, in some cases by groups with limited analytical expertise, has led to rushed results and routine scientific checks sometimes being overlooked.
[…]
There is an increasing international focus on the need to control plastic pollution but faulty evidence on the level of microplastics in humans could lead to misguided regulations and policies, which is dangerous, researchers say. It could also help lobbyists for the plastics industry to dismiss real concerns by claiming they are unfounded. While researchers say analytical techniques are improving rapidly, the doubts over recent high-profile studies also raise the questions of what is really known today and how concerned people should be about microplastics in their bodies.
Keep in mind: if we don’t accurately know how microplastics affect us, we risk setting policies that are too lax to help anyone. We already have to fight tooth and nail to make progress, so putting that much effort behind a useless proposal is going to screw us over in the long run. It gives so much leewey for companies to say, “See? We’re already doing what you asked, so stop demanding more.” Then it’s two fights: for the real policies, and then to fight the lobbyists blocking further regulations.
“Roger Kuhlman, a chemist formerly at the Dow Chemical Company” 🚩🚩🚩🚩, at least to me.
These sorts of pieces are often put out by people who are paid or used to be paid by plastics and chemical manufaturers to downplay the severity of the issue, see: recycling, carbon emissions, forever chemicals, asbestos, lead, etc.
Though most of the sources are legit scientists, I’m very used to there being a cycle of news daying “harmful thing isn’t that harmful” only for it to be super duper awful.
they need to invent clubbing for boring sober people who don’t like loud music or crowded group dancing. what’s the “she should be at the club” for this hypothetical not-me demographic.
roundup of various common suggestions in the notes:
“the library”: a nice space to hang, granted, but not really the same fun social vibes.
“the night-library that serves pink drinks and tea”: okay okay, now we’re cooking.
“coffee shop”: a bit more social and rambunctious than the average library, but still too plain imo.
“the museum”: still a tad too formal I feel like but definitely not opposed.
“the book club”: again, not opposed, but book clubs do have the catch of requiring you to plan ahead and do some homework to really enjoy it, not a very “I’m bored on a friday and want to go do something fun” activity.
“wine tasting”:
ALT
“dnd/ttrpg nights”: unfortunately I’m stupid and am bad at these games. I mean unfortunately these hypothetical people are stupid and bad at these games.
“arcades with cover fees at the door and then free games”: won’t even lie this sounds killer, gonna see if they have any of those in my area.
“babe the club is wherever you feel confident in yourself, life is a club and I’m just chilling at a bus stop”: beautiful. poetic. heart warming. she should be at the bus stop.
ALT
first good suggestion on this post in years, FINALLY true equality
So turns out the US are setting babies up for a lifetime of illness and increased likelihood of liver cancer in Guinea Bissau in the name of “research”
7000 newborns will be denied the neoneatal HepB vaccine until 6 weeks to ‘prove’ that the HepB vaccine is linked to neurodevelopmental disability on the directions of the Department of Health vis RFK Jr and in collaboration with researchers in Denmark, despite the fact that the vaccine’s efficacy rate and best protection is when administered to newborns, and the total lack of correlation between vaccination and neurodevelopmental disabilities.
Guinea Bissau has some of the highest rates of HepB on the continent, and infants are the group at the highest risk of contracting HepB, leading to chronic hepatitis & long term hepatic diseases like cirrhosis and liver failure as well as increased chance of liver cancer.
The study can’t be carried out in the US or Denmark because it fails almost every benchmark for medical ethics — surprising absolutely nobody, it is in fact heinously unethical to expose babies to preventable disease that causes liver failure and liver cancer, but the “study” has been green lit in Guinea.
Fuck the US imperial project in Africa, fuck RFK Jr and the US Department of Health, and fuck every single collaborative researcher in Denmark. This is some nightmare Tuskegee Study shit and every single individual involved deserves to be in The Hague.
Honestly it boils down to reparenting yourself & rewiring your own neuronal pathways & telling yourself a firm “stop” when you notice your mind slipping down negative loopholes & being present in the moment & enjoying being mid task rather than waiting for it to end & not thinking of inertia as your baseline and natural way of living
So tempting to keep embarking on the same self destructive cycle over & over & over again . But at some point you have to put ur foot down w ur own behaviors & be the thing that truly saves u
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