brian

Fish

Eyes

Depiction of a pastoral landscape with trees and shrubs on grassy banks, a river in the foreground, and a sky with some birds in the background. However, the image is composed not of colored pixels, but with words superimposed to suggest line, depth and shading intensity. Each landscape element is made up of the word that defines it (so the trees are rendered using the word "Tree", the sky with the word "Sky" and so forth).

Hidden somewhere in the overall are two very hard-to-spot words, that also jangle ominously in this otherworldly scene: "Body" and "Eyes".

End ID.]

‌

Also look out for:

Bird

Shrub

The rest are pretty easy to spot (birds are in the sky, fish are in the river), but the locations of "Body" and "Eyes" are shown under the cut

...did that servant materialise out of thin air to bring him food in his room. The place not actually empty, just empty of people of his own class. he just left the servant and his monster with each other while he was out.

A quote from Mary Shelley's Mathilda: '[...] arrived and quite incapable of taking off my wet clothes that clung about me. In the morning, on her return, [highlighted] my servant [end highlight] found me almost lifeless, while possessed by a high fever I was lying on the floor of my room.

a 1979 Thai stamp depicting a giant mud crab

Leanne Brown's Good and Cheap was designed to make healthy, delicious meals on $4 a day- tailor made for use on SNAP benefits.

There's no paywall and you can also obtain a free PDF form by Leanne Brown herself (though if you can afford, buy the book!)

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

use firefox or librewolf (open-source fork of firefox) instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

use mega instead of google drive

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

get free stuff with the help of r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH, r/piracy and r/roms

use trakt (for shows and movies), letterboxd (just movies), or TMB instead of IMDB (owned by amazon).

use storygraph instead of goodreads (owned by amazon).

use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions

use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause, ecosia, or ocean hero to support the environment instead of google

use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, or tuta instead of gmail

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

use project gutenberg for free public domain books, and librivox for public domain books and audiobooks

use the seal app (android only) to download video and audio

use ellipsus instead of microsoft word or google docs

use mastodon instead of twitter

use peertube to create a network of small video hosting providers (disclaimer: not a 1:1 alternative to youtube)

use threema and signal for encrypted communication, on mobile and desktop

use qwant and startpage for secure internet browsers

use syncthing to securely transfer files between devices

learn how to jailbreak your kindle/ereader if you have one (wiki and video walkthrough)

use riseup’s email and VPN for secure communication (aimed towards activists)

use cryptpad and collabora instead of the microsoft office suite

use google takeout to export the data on your google account

use library extension to look for books on online stores and find them at your library

remove paywalls with removepaywalls

install the open-source adblocker ublock origin

install sponsorblock to skip sponsored segments on youtube videos

use bookfinder to look for the cheapest available listings of books, including textbooks

learn a language through mango (duolingo laid off some of its employees and now relies on AI translations) for free with a library card or through your school

edit photos with photopea

edit pdfs with foxit and sumatrapdf

download music with doubledouble

take notes offline and collaborate securely with obsidian

for android tv, use smarttube and cloudstream (ad-free, open-source)

change your OS to linux

S. No; Name of the Book; Name of the Author; Publisher

Human Rights Violations in Kashmir; Piotr Balcerowicz and Agnieszka Kuszewska; Routledge (Manohar Publishers & Distributors)

Kashmiri's Fight for Freedom; Mohd Yosuf Saraf; Feroze Sons Pakistan

Colonizing Kashmir, State-Building under Indian occupation; Hafsa Kanjwal; Stanford University Press

Kashmir Politics and Plebiscite; Dr. Abdul Jabbar Gockhami; Gulshan Books Kashmir

Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora?; Essar Batool & others; Zubaan Books

Mujahid ki Azaan; Imam Hasan Al-Bana Shaheed edited by: Maulan Mohammad Enayatullah Subhani; Markazi Maktaba Islami Publishers Delhi

Al Jihadul fil Islam; Moulana Moudadi; Darul Musannifeen-Markazi Maktaba Islami Publishers Delhi

Independent Kashmir; Christopher Snedden; Manchester University Press and Sanctum Books Delhi.

Resisting Occupation in Kashmir; Haley Duschinski, Mona Bhat, Ather Zia and Cynthia Mahmood; University of Pennsylvlia Press

Between Democracy and Nation (Gender and Militarization in Kashmir); Seema Kazi; Oxford University Press-Women Unlimited New Delhi

Contested Lands; Sumantra Bose; Harper Collins Publishers India Gurugram Haryana

In Search of the Future (The Story of Kasimir); David Devadas; Viking Pengiun

Kashmir in Conflict (India, Pakistan and the unending War); Victoria Schofield; Bloomsbury Academic India

The Kashmir Dispute 1947-2012; A.G. Noorani; Tulika Books Chennai Tamil Nadu

Kashmir at the Cross Roads (Inside a 21st Century Conflict); Sumantra Bose; Pan Macmillian India, New Delhi

A Dismantled State (The Untold Story of Kashmir after Article 370) Anuradha Bhasin; Harper Collins Publishers India, Gurugram Haryana

Resisting Disappearance (Military Occupation & Women's Activism in Kashmir); Ather Zia; Zubaan Publishers Pvt. Ltd. New Delhi

Confronting Terrorism; Stephen Pcohen Edited by: Maroof Raza; Pengiun India Darya Gunj New Delhi

Freedom in Captivity (Negotiations of belonging along the Kashmiri Frontier); Radhika Gupta; Cambridge University Press Pvt. Ltd New Delhi

Kashmir (The case for Freedom); Tariq Ali, Hilal Bhatt, Angana P. Chatterji, Pankaj Mishra and Arundhati Roy; Verso Books

Azadi; Arundhati Roy; Pengiun India Darya Gunj, New Delhi

USA and Kashmir; Dr. Shamshad Shan; Gulshan Books

Law & Conflict Resolution in Kashmir; Piotr Balcerowicz and Agnieszka Kuszewska; Routledge (Manohar Publishers & Distributors)

Tarikh-i-Siyasat Kashmir; Dr. Afaq; Karwan-e-Tahqiq-o-Saqafar Kashmir

Kashmir & the future of South Asia; Edited by: Sugata Bose & Ayesha Jalal; Routledge (Manohar Publishers & Distributors)

At the expense of who?

At the expense of who?

At the expense of who?

This happened and was necessary for the establishment of the settler state.

ID. Screenshot of black text on white background:

A Jewish-majority nation is needed to safeguard Jewish people worldwide.

A Jewish-majority nation is desirable to counter the cultural losses of the diaspora.

Jewish people represent a tiny minority of the world population and want to have access to a safe haven should global antisemitism continue to rise.

A Jewish-majority nation finds it necessary to expel or marginalize non-Jewish populations within its borders.

A Jewish-majority nation will seek conflict with non-Jewish neighbors, especially those with Arab Muslim majorities.

I think that a Zionist could hold any of all of these ideas, though the strain I am most familiar with would include 1-3 and reject 4-5. These are people who recognize that both Jews and Arabs have strong claims to the land in and around Israel/Palestine. They support a two- End ID.

For the second summer in a row, I find myself writing about Punjabis in Italy under the urge of a tragedy. In 2024, it was the horrible death of Satnam Singh, the farmworker left to die by his employer in Latina. This year, it is the July 18 road accident that took the life of Balvir Kumar “Birra,” who was run over by a car while cycling to the fields where he harvested the same zucchini that arrive so cheap and fresh on our tables. The case last summer had triggered widespread outrage, both due to its bloody details (Satnam suffered severe wounds after an accident with an agricultural machine) and to the cruelty of his employer (who dumped Satnam’s body in front of his house instead of taking him to the hospital, which resulted in his death). It attracted international attention, being featured on global news and inspiring waves of protests, demonstrations, and police interventions in the area and beyond. Birra’s death, in contrast, passed almost completely unnoticed — dismissed quickly as yet another fatal accident on the Via Pontina, “the most dangerous road of the Lazio region.” Like Satnam, Birra met his death in the Latina province, south of Rome, where the death rate in road accidents increased by 47 percent from 2019 to 2023, and where agricultural labor is mostly performed by migrant workers, a large share of them Punjabis. Yet Birra’s death — rather like Satnam’s — should not be ignored as a mere accident: it could have been avoided, if only the employers and the state assumed the responsibility of protecting their most vulnerable and essential workers.

Dying for Work In 2024, I had moved to the Latina province for a few months to conduct my doctoral research on the Punjabi community in Italy. The scarcity of public transportation in this rural setting forces most residents to travel either by car or bike. The main roads are heavily trafficked, with large trucks and cars driving fast, not enough space for passing and no speed checks. On both sides of these roads, countless migrants cycle to and from the fields where they work (too many hours, for too little payment), day and night, in all weather conditions; they travel without helmets, on the tiny space between the white lines edging the roadway and the fields, protected only by the bright reflective jackets that the local labor unions distribute among them for free. Driving daily to collect interviews and surveys with Punjabi migrants in the area, I remember feeling a constant terror of getting in a road accident with one of them. Birra was one of the first Punjabi workers I interviewed in the area, though I only got to know his full name after his death. Just six days before he died, I received prasad (sacramental food) from his hands while attending the Sunday liturgy in the temple where he lived and volunteered, cooking and serving food for the community of devotees. Birra was sixty-one years old, came from the village of Salempur near Hoshiarpur in India’s Punjab state, and was married with two children.

He had arrived in Italy at the age of thirty-three, in 1998, simply “kam karan lei” — to work. He was the first of two brothers and five sisters; his father worked as mason, his mother was a housewife. After marriage, his brother-in-law convinced him to go abroad to earn money and helped him pay for the trip. Like many other Punjabis at the time, Birra arrived in Italy “donkey” style — meaning, from India to Russia by air, and from Russia to Italy by road, after paying some thousands of euros to various agents to take him across borders. He had some friends in the Latina province and headed there, where he ended up staying and working in agriculture for the next twenty-seven years. “Zucchine, in serra: pianto, lego, quando cresce poi raccolgo,” (“Zucchini, in the greenhouses; I plant them, tie them, then when they grow, I harvest them,”) he explained, in the few Italian words he knew despite his long-term residence in this country. He had lived without documents for the first four years until, in 2002, he managed to get regularized. Employers demand that Punjabi migrants like Birra pay large fees simply to get a job contract and the proof of dwelling needed to obtain a residence permit, and make them pay their tax contributions from their own pockets. The whole regularization process remains opaque to them: as Birra admitted, “I don’t know the details, I don’t understand these things, they do it all by themselves.” With another Punjabi worker, he shared a room provided by his employer, in exchange for which he looked after the employer’s cattle and fields for €700 per month. Of this, he sent €500 back to Punjab to pay back his debts and sustain left-behind family: his daughter is currently pursuing a law degree in college; his son is also studying but wants to go abroad, too. Birra said he did not want to reunite his family in Italy since the living conditions there were too harsh. He instead aimed to move back to India as soon as he had saved enough money to live comfortably. One year before our interview, Birra had left his flat in town — where he had lived for ten years — because his flatmate’s wife had moved from Punjab and he was told to search for another place. Facing the same housing shortages that all migrant workers in the area complain of, Birra finally found shelter in the temple, where he prayed and did seva (volunteering) daily, being very close to the Baba-ji (priest). Birra was in fact deeply religious: he used to wear a turban in Punjab but removed it during the journey to Italy to avoid attracting attention, and since then had stopped wearing it. He described his routine thus: “I wake up at 3:30, I get ready, prepare some food for lunch, drink tea, then Baba-ji wakes up, so I pray with him and then at 5:30 I go to work by bike; we start at 6.” It was indeed 5:30 a.m. when Birra was hit by a car on his way to work and breathed his last on the road; he was cycling, with three colleagues, on a main street perpendicular to Via Pontina, where so many cyclists before him lost their lives in road accidents (and so many more will, if nobody takes action). He was supposed to start harvesting at 6 a.m. in the field where he worked year-round for €5 or €6 per hour, under short-term contracts that declared far fewer hours than those he actually worked. His coworkers say that he was worried about arriving late to work because the day before, he had left his e-bike at a repair shop and borrowed a regular bicycle to pedal to the field. Moreover, he had been exposed to toxic pesticides without protective gear in the zucchini field two days earlier, and the fumes had left him with breathing problems and high blood pressure. These two details did not emerge in the report, precisely because they make clear that his job conditions and marginal position in Italy played a big role in what happened — making it almost a workplace death rather than a road accident.

The establishment of the National Federation of Dalit Women was the result of more than a decade of emotional, intellectual and political struggle. I started a women’s rights organisation called Women’s Voice in 1981, Bangalore. I led land struggles for urban poor women across Karnataka. Through mass grassroots mobilising and legal battles in the 1980s, we successfully got a long-term stay order from the Supreme Court against slum evictions in Karnataka. These grassroots victories were transformational in the lives of the urban poor but had little space within larger movements. As one of the first Dalit activists entering the autonomous women’s movement, I quickly realised that Dalit women’s struggles were completely missing from the feminist discourse. I would attend meetings where women spoke passionately about power, patriarchy and sexuality but caste was invisible. In those lonely early years, I found courage in the writings of anti-caste visionaries such as BR Ambedkar and Periyar. I read scholar-activist Gail Omvedt and Black feminists Audre Lorde and Angela Davis, who helped me find a language for what I was experiencing within the progressive movements and civil society in India. Davis’s framework of race, class and gender resonated deeply. I adopted it to our context of caste, class, gender, and framed it as Dalit women are thrice-discriminated or triple-alienated based on their social location. I emphasised that “Dalit women are the Dalits among the Dalits”. The Black feminist analysis of systemic oppression, of the need for self-determined leadership, moved me. I remember reading Black civil rights activist Vincent Harding saying, “Our ancestors did not wade through rivers of blood so that we might surrender the interpretation of their lives into the hands of others.” That stayed with me. Working at the grassroots, I witnessed how caste, gender, labour and inter-generational poverty intersect in the lives of the marginalised. That’s why I found myself equally engaged in the feminist, Dalit, unorganised labour and urban poor movements. I spoke extensively about the inter-connectedness of our struggles. At the core was a clear conviction: our movements must be self-led, intersectional and political – non-partisan but political. It was this clarity that laid the foundation for several platforms I co-founded, whether it was one of the first registered Domestic Workers Union in India or the Slum Dwellers Federation, the National Center for Labour, or other national women and Dalit networks.

[...]

Raise your hand if you're also heartbroken you missed the

𝕀𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕣𝕟𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟𝕒𝕝 𝕊𝕪𝕞𝕡𝕠𝕤𝕚𝕦𝕞 𝕠𝕟 𝔼𝕕𝕚𝕓𝕝𝕖 𝔸𝕝𝕝𝕚𝕦𝕞𝕤

Papers include: Production of shallot using a banana-shallot intercropping for effective land use (V. Alveno, M.A. Chozin, A. Maharijaya) Onion maggot and onion thrips over forty years of integrated pest management (M.R. McDonald, K. Vander Kooi, T. Blauel) Preparing Flemish leek growers for future challenges (L. Lippens, L. Lauwers, J. Bodyn, A. Waverijn, S. Buysens, L. De Reycke)

Our domestic onion (Allium cepa L.) originated in the rocky, dry mountains of northern Iran. We know this because there are still wild relatives of our cepa onion growing there. These cousins are separate species from A. cepa, but are similar enough that they can be crossed with our onion.

These wild onions are Allium vavilovii (Popov & Vved.) (first cousin) and Allium asarense (R.M.Fritsch & Matin) (second cousin). Here's a free paper about them!

They look like our onions... kinda. They both share a life stage where they turn into big sticks with a bulb right in the center.

Part of what I love is the name. A. vavilovii literally translates to "Vavilov's onion". If you don't know Nikolai Vavilov (1887-1943), consider this your introduction! Vavilov was a legendary Russian and Soviet agronomist, botanist and geneticist. He travelled the globe, hunting down these wild relatives of our food crops, partially to build stronger crops, partially to understand the history of domestication and the movement of people. Please lose yourself in one of the coolest, mindblowingest wikipedia pages out there, describing the history and places of domestication largely built by him.

Horrifically, while we now know that Vavilov was a genius, things... didn't go great with Stalin. Stalin's personal favorite agronomist Trofim Lysenko was a monster and a master of jingoistic pseudoscience. Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics (the science we use now), focusing instead on Lamarkism (absolutely false horseshit). Lysenko had Vavilov sacked, grabbed by the Soviet secret police, interrogated for 11 months, and died in prison, likely due to starvation and pneumonia. You can decide if that was a better fate than his geneticist peers, who were just outright shot.

Lysenko would go on to set agricultural policy that would result in multiple famines that killed approximately 25-75 million people in USSR and Mao's China.