You should read up on Yehuda Hiss who was the Chief Pathologist at Abu Kabir who was found to be taking organs from Palestinian corpses without permission and using them for research or selling them to medical schools were substantiated by the Israeli government.

There's also a book by Meira Weiss, an Israeli doctor, called "Over Their Dead Bodies" that details how organs taken from dead Palestinians were utilised in medical research at Israeli universities’ medical faculties and were transplanted into Jewish-Israeli patients’ bodies.

Euro-Med Monitor has also been raising the alarm on this. They've been asking for an investigation into how Israel has been unlawfully keeping the dead bodies of hundreds of Palestinians in its morgues or "Numbers Cemeteries" which are mass graves that are kept in subfreezing temps marked only by metal number plates.

Israel is the biggest hub for the illegal global trade in human organs. In 2019 the Israeli Supreme Court authorized the military to withhold the dead bodies of Palestinians to be used as leverage and by 2021 the Knesset had passed laws that allowed those bodies to be held for broader reasons.

Since the genocide began, so many Palestinians have talked about their family members being returned to them and missing vital organs

It is not unreasonable to extrapolate then that for many in my region, who have never been to the US, their only real-life encounters with indigenous Americans would have been whenever they’d come over wearing uniforms to slaughter/displace us and steal our resources. Just like European colonisers did to their ancestors. Identical in role and function to their non-indigenous counterparts. And such is pretty much true of all marginalised citizens of the imperial core! and it is a glaring contradiction to their histories of marginalisation/colonisation, but it is not on us to will that inconvenient reality away just because the idea of internationalist decolonial solidarity, one that has never really materially existed in any meaningfully capacity, is a prettier story to tell than what is actually going on. It is on you all to make that no longer the reality.

Safety, ethics, and sustainability are all a part of urban gardening and foraging. I'm sorry that means you need to do homework before you can do anything, I know that sounds lame. But life is complicated.

Daily reminder: Leafy greens like kales uptake all those delicious heavy metals in urban soils like lead and cadmium.

Don’t eat sidewalk-crack kale.

Here's some cool references from the EPA on safe urban gardening:

REUSING POTENTIALLY CONTAMINATED LANDSCAPES: Growing Gardens in Urban Soils

Racism in the US in the 1930s forced hundreds of African Americans to leave the country and move to the Soviet Union. Inspired by Soviet ideology, many came seeking a society without racial prejudice. At home, African Americans faced a lack of prospects and restrictions that separated them from society. Desperate to receive equal treatment, hundreds fled their homeland to be free of discrimination in the Soviet Union.

remembering Keith Porter Jr.

if you are able please donate to the gofundme for Keith’s daughters.

here is the statement from Franceola Armstrong, Keith mother:

“On New Year’s Eve, my life was forever changed when my son, Keith Porter Jr., was taken from us in a violent and tragic act by an off duty ICE agent. No parent should ever have to bury their child, and the pain of this loss is something I would not wish on anyone.

My son leaves behind two beautiful daughters, ages 10 and 20. They were his heart. Everything he did, every plan he made, was for them. Now they are left to navigate a world without their father, and my greatest concern is protecting them, supporting them, and making sure they are cared for during this unimaginable time.

Since my son’s passing, so many people have reached out asking how they can help and wanting to send something for the girls. This GoFundMe was created only to provide a safe and respectful place for those who wish to give and support his daughters.

Every contribution will go directly toward the care, stability, and future of my granddaughters — including their immediate needs, emotional support, education, and whatever is required to help them heal and move forward.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you for the love, prayers, and kindness that have been shown to my family. Please continue to keep my granddaughters covered in prayer as they face a road no child should have to walk.

Donations will be sent directly to my granddaughter, Aniyah Porter, who will allocate the funds evenly to my other granddaughter.

With gratitude and love,

I was asked to give a land acknowledgment for today’s No Kings demonstration. I don’t do that shit so I gave em something else instead:

I was initially asked to give a land acknowledgment today. This infers that I use polite words about the theft and loss of life of my ancestors. To name the tribes. To give a moment of silence before the show goes on.

But I’m tired of these hollow gestures.

Land acknowledgments have become a ritual of comfort, a way for you all to feel righteous without surrendering power, without giving land back, without changing a damn thing. Words without action are not respect. They are permission for the injustice to continue.

So let me speak the truth.

Denver sits on unceded land. Colorado is home to at least 51 tribes with historic and legal standing. Denver was one of seven cities chosen for the Indian Relocation Program of the 1950s and 60s, a federal experiment to erase us, to push Native people off our homelands and scatter us into cities like this one. Colorado had eleven Indian boarding schools, including two right here in Denver, built with one goal: Kill the Indian, save the man. Strip the language, the ceremony, the spirit, until nothing was left but obedience.

And yet when we are invited to the table, we are asked to only “acknowledge” the land?

Well. I already do. Every day. Because my people’s bones are in this soil. Our songs are in the wind. Our memories are in the rivers. I don’t need a scripted moment to remember that. I live it. It’s in my DNA.

The land doesn’t need acknowledgment. It needs restoration. It needs protection. It needs the people who belong to it to be visible again.

Because here’s the truth, Native people are invisible to you.

You assume we live somewhere else, on some distant reservation, out of sight and out of mind, or worse, that we’re extinct. But we are not gone.

Eighty percent of us live outside of reservations. We live right here, in your neighborhoods, at your schools, in your hospitals, in your offices, in your movements. We’re still here. We’ve always been here.

You come out to protests wearing your Handmaid’s Tale costumes, shouting about dystopia, about the fear of what could happen to you, about losing control of your body, your freedom, your voice.

But the terrible things you’re afraid might happen to you?

They already happened to us.

The dystopia you imagine: we lived it.

The genocide you fear: we are surviving it.

The apocalypse you dread: it already happened to my ancestors.

You want to fight tyranny? Learn from the people who have endured it for centuries.

Violence against the land is violence against the people. When you poison the rivers, you poison us. When you strip the mountains, you desecrate our ancestors. When you destroy the forests, you silence our medicine. This is not metaphor. The land is our relative, and it’s dying under the same systems that made us invisible.

We never had kings. We had councils and clan mothers. We had accountability. We had wisdom. We governed through consensus, not domination. The Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace gave this country its model for democracy, but when they borrowed from us, they left out the most important parts: women in leadership, the duty to care for the earth, and the obligation to consider how our choices today would affect the next seven generations.

I am worried at the perception that America was founded on greatness and that there is a period to which we should return. Let me be clear: we need a vision of newness because at no point has America ever been great for everyone. The founding documents declared that “all men are created equal” but they called my people “merciless Indian savages” in the same breath. Those words are still written there. That stain has never been erased.

We are here at No Kings because we are done pretending that this system works. We are done watching the same kind of people hoard power while others struggle to survive. We are done being invisible.

We know what we don’t want. We don’t want kings. We don’t want rulers. We don’t want systems that destroy the planet and then ask us to say thank you. But we can’t stop there. We need vision. We need creation.

Here is what I demand and what I expect from every person who says they mean change. First, return land where possible and co-manage what cannot be returned. Sacred sites are not decoration in a brochure. They are living obligations. Second, stop granting permits to projects that destroy water, soil and air especially when Indigenous people object. Third, take away the police budgets that criminalize survival and put that money into housing, community health and substance treatment. Fourth, fund reparations and buyback programs that actually put resources back where they were stolen. Fifth, force honest history into classrooms and expunge the lies that make genocide digestible.

This is not a wishlist for later. This is immediate. If your city council refuses to act then you shut down city hall. If corporations keep profiting off destruction then you divest and you boycott. If universities keep hiding research and names then you demand transparency and you withhold your labor. If boards will not listen then you take direct action and you hold the line. We will be tactical and relentless and we will not confuse civility with meekness.

Do not mistake this for hatred. This is love for our relations, human and more-than-human. This is love for the children who will inherit what we leave. That love looks fierce. It has to. Otherwise our history repeats.

If you really want to honor the land, act like it. If you really want to honor Indigenous people, follow our lead. If your city, your employer, or your government refuses to change, make them uncomfortable. Shut down complacency. Disrupt hypocrisy. Force the reckoning.

We never had kings, and we don’t need them now.

What we need is courage. We need truth. We need people who are ready to do more than clap for justice, we need people willing to fight for it.

So stop asking us to acknowledge.

Start asking yourself what you’re willing to give back.Because acknowledgment without action is not allyship. It’s complicity.

The apocalypse already happened.

And still, we’re here.

No more kings. No more lies.

Land back. Power back. Future back.

I remember the fight for mixed gender sports, but now we’re fighting for trans people’s rights to be included in gendered sports. The only justification for gendered sports that exists is Those Men Will Crush Our Weak Little Women. It’s sexist. Segregation is always a means of oppression.

Both of which, if youll note, are species that we race in non-sexgender-segregated sports. There's not one derby for boy horses and another one for girl ones.

The majority of the dimorphism that we *see* is social and cultural. Women are discouraged from sports from a much earlier age than men. Women who are naturally tall and muscular may choose not to pursue body building because of social pressures for women to be small and dainty. Women who have broad shoulders, double jointed ankles and webbed toes (the things that make Michael Phelps such a good swimmer) may never touch a swimming pool in their life because of similar stigma surrounding women's bodies that men are not subject to.

"I identify as a trans woman, or just plain woman. In everyday life, of course, it’s woman, but if people ask, I tell them I’m trans. I don’t hide it exactly, but I don’t wear it on my forehead either. The first time I realized there was something fishy going on was in second grade and we were having a school play and doing Heidi. I wanted the lead part and the teacher said, “No, that’s only for girls.” And of course I knew I was a boy, but I didn’t realize that boys couldn’t do things like that. At the age of fourteen, I was left alone in the house for a summer and went up in the attic and found some of my mother’s old clothes and discovered I enjoyed dressing in them. After college, I went abroad to Denmark and decided to try denial. You just get busy with other things and then you don’t have to worry about your identity.

I met a woman that summer, Edith, that I eventually married. After we were married for about a year and a half, I realized, “This is not working, I need to be who I am.” So I outed myself to her. In those days, of course, the only label we had for it was transvestism. By 1980, when I was forty years old, I knew I wanted to transition, but I didn’t tell Edith. Somehow I got wind, I think through a television show, that if you wanted to transition you are required to get a divorce first. They didn’t want to foster lesbian couples being married legally. So, I wasn’t going to do that. I was too much in love. The two of us were married altogether forty-six years. So I waited, and then in 1993, she found out she had cancer. Of course, then I knew that this was not a time to transition. She died in 2008. I came out publicly as transgender in 2012.

After Edith died, I was alone here in the house. It just got empty, very empty, very fast. And so I knew I needed to do something. I met Stephanie, a transgender woman, at the Emerald City Social Club. She was homeless at the time, so I said, “Why don’t you move in?” And then we started taking in other girls, too. Since then, I’ve had over thirty girls go through the house at one time or another, some for shorter periods, others for longer periods. I think it’s a worthwhile effort. I’m trying to give people a little bit of safe space and respite from the anxieties of homelessness.

As you grow old, you fear the unknown. You can end up needing care. By inviting people to come stay with me, I have someone to at least look after me on a daily basis and make sure that I’m not falling through the cracks. This whole house has served in some ways as a model because, as far as I know, it’s the first trans house. The model is simple: if you can, open your house to others. As I say, we don’t have a homeless problem, we have a hospitality problem. We can still be effective doing what we can even if we regret it’s not enough."