Latine Explains

https://www.cleveland.com/court-justice/2020/06/mentally-ill-man-spent-nearly-5-months-in-jail-before-body-cam-video-revealed-garfield-heights-officers-beat-tased-and-mocked-him.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8423837/Footage-shows-Ohio-cops-beat-tase-mock-mentally-ill-black-man.html

it wasn’t george floyd’s protesters who started reacting violently; it was the cops.

the protest was peaceful until the cops showed up in riot gear, and started using water cannons, followed up by tear gas and rubber bullets. i got videos from friends who were there, of people screaming and running away from the cops shooting the water cannons, rubber bullets and throwing tear gas at them. they were even shooting at the protesters dragging people away to get medical attention.

speaking of medical attention, dispatch refused to provide any medical attention to the protesters. people literally had to drive their bleeding friends to the hospital because they refused to send ambulances.

cops are using non-lethal weapons in a lethal way. they shot rubber bullets into people’s heads and injured them. there’s dozens of photos of protesters with bleeding head wounds from the rubber bullets.

multiple people used police scanners and heard that there were undercover cops pretending to be violent protesters who were throwing rocks and whatnot at the police, with dozens of eyewitness accounts confirming that information.

the person who instigated all the chaos last night (it was a fire at an autozone) with the looting and burning buildings is highly suspected to be an undercover cop pretending to be a protester, because the video of him keeps getting taken down. protesters tried to stop him but couldn’t because he had a hammer and they were scared for their safety.

the cops jammed cell phone towers and cut live streams to interrupt broadcasts and to prevent people from seeing what was really going on and who actually started the violence.

the cops lied about protesters being armed and about throwing rocks and are literally trying to continue the violence happening and yet no one is holding them accountable for that.

and during all this, the cop that murdered george floyd still hasn’t been arrested. he has had more than ten complaints filed against him and was involved in three other civilian shootings in the past. and yet he’s still out free along with his three other buddies involved, probably sitting on his couch while all this chaos is happening.

This New York Times story includes some really incredible photos of the destruction and the uses of the converted land. Excerpt:

Brazil’s space agency reported that in one year, more than 3,700 square miles of the Amazon had been razed — a swath of jungle nearly the size of Lebanon torn from the world’s largest rainforest.

It was the highest loss in Brazilian rainforest in a decade, and stark evidence of just how badly the Amazon, an important buffer against global warming, has fared in Brazil’s first year under President Jair Bolsonaro.

He has vowed to open the rainforest to industry and scale back its protections, and his government has followed through, cutting funds and staffing to weaken the enforcement of environmental laws. In the absence of federal agents, waves of loggers, ranchers and miners moved in, emboldened by the president and eager to satisfy global demand.

Deforestation soared, up almost 30 percent from the year before.

“It confirms the Amazon is completely lawless,” Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist with the University of São Paulo, said of the data. “The environmental criminals feel more and more empowered.”

He warned that the Amazon may soon cross a tipping point and begin to self-destruct. “Law enforcement has reached its minimum effectiveness in a decade,” he said. “It is a worrying warning for the future.”

Mr. Bolsonaro’s government has made some nods to combating illegal clear-cutting, but the president has reaffirmed his longstanding position of disdain toward conservation work. He once said that Brazil’s environmental policy was “suffocating the country”; he vowed on the campaign trail that not “a square centimeter” of land would be designated for Indigenous people; and last month he brushed aside official data about deforestation.

His stance has been widely noted on the Amazon frontier, where the rainforest is transformed into land for cattle, soybeans and other crops in a process that can be murky, sometimes illegal and frequently violent.

These two contrasting photos tells me the story better than any photo of a burning forest:

Harvesting açaí, one of the main products exported from the Amazon.

And whenever I call it out, I get multiple people appearing in the notes flat out denying it. Not even a “not all vegans”, just flat out denial. Vegans aren’t anti-indigenous. There is no war in Ba Sing Se.