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taylor price
One Nice Bug Per Day
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Game of Thrones Daily
Sweet Seals For You, Always
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Today's Document

izzy's playlists!
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

art blog(derogatory)
todays bird
Mike Driver

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Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
YOU ARE THE REASON

Love Begins
Cosimo Galluzzi
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@tenderspirit
theres something happening on instagram reels

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i love being sober and talking to drunk people at parties cause i asked a guy “if you were a wizard what kind of spells would you cast” and i know he wasnt lying when he said “summon creatures”
Happy birthday, Patrice Lumumba! (July 2, 1925)
Inaugural Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then simply the Republic of the Congo), Patrice Lumumba was an outspoken and intelligent man from a very young age, often speaking up and correcting teachers during his education. This willingness to speak his mind and speak truth to power would define his character. Ideologically coming to identify with pan-Africanism, Lumumba helped to found the Congolese National Movement, which emerged as the largest party in the country in the first elections held after the declaration of independence. Lumumba was committed to a full decolonization and Africanization of the Congo, which rankled the country's former Belgian overlords. Shortly after Lumumba took office, a rightist mutiny broke out in the Congolese armed forces, beginning the Congo Crisis. Lumumba initially looked to the United States and United Nations for assistance, but the US rebuffed him due to his alleged communist sympathies. This forced Lumumba to turn to the Soviet Union, which the US used to justify their own prior suspicions. In September of 1960, Colonel Joseph-Désiré Mobutu seized power in a coup, and Lumumba was ultimately captured. Lumumba was executed by a Belgian firing squad and his body dissolved in acid. What remained was taken to Belgium and not returned to the Congo until 2022. The United States Senate Church Committee uncovered documents indicating that Secretary of State Alan Dulles had urged Lumumba's assassination. Lumumba's policies and beliefs, collectively known as Lumumbism, continue to influence politics in Africa today.
“The day will come when history will speak. But it will not be the history which will be taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations… Africa will write its own history and in both north and south it will be a history of glory and dignity.”
This situation cannot be blamed solely on the ongoing conflicts in the country, which have been responsible for the death of over six million people since 1996.7 These conflicts, which involve a range of actors, are a consequence of significant wealth inequality. But beneath the violence and institutional attrition of the state apparatus lurks a more malign force, one that has been active in the region for almost two centuries and which we will describe in this dossier. This force has led to the pillaging of the land and its resources for profit at any cost. The DRC of today is haunted by the transatlantic trade of humans (from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth century) and by King Leopold II’s colonisation (1884–1908) and its continuation by the Belgian state (1908–1960). It is haunted by the sabotage of the country’s sovereignty through the assassination of its first democratically elected leader, Patrice Lumumba (1925–1961), and by the subordination of its elites to the agendas of major multinational mining companies. The wealth gap, in other words, is easily explained, but equally easily buried in the morass of centuries of racist propaganda and decades of resource mismanagement.
This dossier argues that the Congolese people have been fighting against the theft of their wealth not only since the 1958 formation of the Mouvement National Congolais (‘Congolese National Movement or MNC’) – which sought freedom from Belgium and control over the Congo’s extensive natural resources – but even earlier, through working-class resistance between the 1930s and 1950s. That fight has not been easy, nor has it succeeded. The DRC continues to be dominated by exploitation and oppression at the hands of a powerful Congolese oligarchy and multinational corporations that operate with the permission of the former. Furthermore, the country suffers, on one hand, from wars of aggression by its neighbours Rwanda and Uganda, aided by proxy militia groups, and, on the other, from multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and IMF that enforce neoliberal policies as a requirement for receiving loans.8
The price of digital commodities is further cheapened by the low revenues earned by the Congolese state. To take the example of one multinational corporation that is key to the extraction of resources from the DRC, Glencore posted market-adjusted earnings of US$3.5 billion for 2023 (before interest and taxes).10 It is the ‘subsidy’ of suppressed wages (partly facilitated by coerced and forced labour) and lowered state revenue that provide this company with such high earnings. Without the blood, sweat, and misery of the Congolese portion of the ‘bottom billion’ and the raw materials they produce, companies in the Global North would not be able to extract such high profits.
...[O]ver the past decade Glencore has encouraged artisanal miners to work on its leased concessions in order to increase its cobalt production. During this period, the price paid to miners collapsed from $40 a pound to $13.50 a pound.40 The real wage for all cobalt miners, whether they work independently or are on a company’s payroll, is not much more than the bottom billion wage of US$1 or US$2 a day.
Less than a decade after the Congolese government nationalised all mining and mineral rights (in 1966) and then Union Minière (in 1967), countries across the Global South came under pressure from international finance to privatise their nationalised mining sectors as neoliberalism spread across the globe during the 1970s. In the DRC, pressure from the IMF and World Bank led to the beginnings of privatisation in the 1980s, though it was not until later, with the mining code of 2002, that this trend began to devastate the economy, largely because of the political turmoil and period of war that defined the country from 1996 to 2003. The weakness of the state due to this war, the callousness of the new political leadership in Kinshasa, and the advice of the World Bank pushed the DRC to offer deals that were advantageous to multinational mining companies at the expense of their population.
In 2002, a new mining code in the DRC provided foreign companies – all from the US and Europe – with favourable taxation, incentives for exploration, an open door to expatriate profits, and the right to circumvent labour and environmental regulations. The code forbade amendments for ten years and contained a clause that any changes to the fiscal regime could not come into effect until 2022. The Lutundula Commission of 2005 later revealed that then President Joseph Kabila and other officials secretly colluded with corporations to receive small personal gains, which paled in comparison to the massive advantages given to foreign companies.45
At an African Development Bank meeting in December 2008, then President of Botswana Festus Mogae said that tax and royalty exemptions given to multinational mining companies prevented African states from retaining a fair share of profits from the extraction of resources, which is why, he continued, ‘it is necessary to renegotiate some of them’.46 In 2011, the DRC tried to revise the mining code, but that attempt only provided more benefits for foreign firms.
The entry of the Chinese state and private Chinese companies into Africa over the past two decades has provided competition against the Global North countries and their mining companies. This was the first time that these multinational corporations faced direct competition, a shift that provided the space for the Congolese government to amend the mining code in 2018 on more beneficial terms. This new code stripped the ‘stability clause’ that guaranteed mining companies ten-year protection, and it increased the Congolese state’s royalty rates for non-ferrous and base metals (such as cobalt and copper) from 2% to 3.5% and allowed royalty rates to be raised to 10% for ‘strategic substances’ such as coltan and lithium.47 Furthermore, the Chinese state entered the African market with a development agenda that was very different from the pressure campaigns waged by Global North governments, as we shall see.
Chinese companies, helped by lines of credit from Chinese banks, began to buy major cobalt operations, eventually taking control of fifteen of the DRC’s seventeen mining complexes. In the extractivism debate, the Global North, its eyes set on furthering its own agenda, has fixated on China’s role in the region as the world’s leading consumer of cobalt, nearly 80% of which it uses in its rechargeable battery industry.48 What is often left out of the discussion, however, is that, as the largest manufacturing country in the world, China uses Congolese minerals and metals to produce goods that are consumed across the globe, including in the DRC and the Global North.
Chinese interests therefore lie in keeping mineral and metal processing within the DRC and building an industrial base for the country. This is a policy that diverges from the IMF-driven agenda for the DRC. Angered by the deepening ties between the DRC and China, the United States government used its influence over the IMF to sabotage the DRC’s attempt to renegotiate a deal with Sicomines, which is a joint venture between the China Railway Group and Power Construction Corporation of China, (PowerChina) as the principal shareholders as well as Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt (with a 1% stake) and the DRC’s state mining company Gécamines (with a 32% stake).49
Shortly after the DRC’s President Félix Tshisekedi took office in January 2019, he indicated the need to renegotiate an agreement between the DRC and China in 2008 that designated $6 billion from Sicomines to fund local infrastructure projects. Why would Tshisekedi attempt to jeopardise $6 billion in infrastructure funding? Because Western donors and the US government were using it as a reason to deepen their sabotage of the DRC’s economy in order to punish the country for its growing proximity to China. Right after the 2008 agreement was signed, Western donors, who held the lion’s share of the DRC’s external debt, withheld $11 billion in debt relief for the DRC.50 The Chinese ambassador to the DRC at the time, Wu Zexian, criticised this call for renegotiation as ‘blackmail’.51 When the DRC refused to accept the donors’ demand, the IMF – backing the donors – said that the agreement with Sicomines had to be renegotiated before there could be a discussion about further debt relief. The US Secretary of State at the time, Hillary Clinton, travelled to Kinshasa to discuss the situation with the government of President Joseph Kabila, and soon thereafter, the deal was amended to accept only half of the Sicomines funding.52 China’s Exim Bank, the primary financier of the deal, withdrew over disagreements with the IMF conditionalities, which left Sicomines with no stable financing arrangement at a stage when no mining operations had commenced and, therefore, no revenue was being generated. This is partly why the projects stalled. Since the amendment, less than a third of the revised $3 billion allocation for infrastructure, influenced by the 2009 IMF agreement, has been disbursed.
Knowing that the deal remained on the table, President Tshisekedi reopened the conversation with China in 2019. On 20 January 2024, the DRC finalised the renegotiation of their minerals-for-infrastructure contract with China, which provided $7 billion in financing. The agreement is rooted in a joint venture for copper and cobalt mining between Gécamines (the DRC’s state mining company) and Sicomines. According to Bloomberg, as part of the deal, Gécamines will receive a 1.2% royalty on Sicomines’ proceeds and the right to market 32% of its production.53 In addition, the 2024 renegotiated agreement updated the financing to focus primarily on the construction of national roads. This is key not only for the mining sector to function, but also for the well-being of the Congolese people, as the DRC has fewer all-weather paved roads than any other country of its size in Africa (for comparison, Saudi Arabia, whose land area is roughly the same size but is inhabited by less than half the DRC’s population, has twenty times more paved roads). The agreement also secured the DRC a 40% stake in the Busanga hydropower plant, a joint project between the two countries that was built by Chinese companies.54
Threatened by the renegotiations, the United States government intervened to undermine them. According to Africa Intelligence, the US initiated a programme that allegedly aimed to bolster anti-corruption efforts and reform mining law in the DRC by deploying a team of experts to the office of the DRC’s president and relevant ministries in early 2020.55 In addition, as part of a wider endeavour to secure access to debt relief from Western donors by ‘enhancing’ governance, the Tshisekedi administration contracted the US law firm Baker McKenzie in late 2019 and made plans to hire US legal experts to perform anti-corruption audits, which would be financially supported by the US State and US Treasury departments (this was not transparently declared, with the only public statement being that these audits would be funded by ‘third parties’).56 The consultants focused on Sicomines and ignored the wider problems in the mining industry.
When the completion of the DRC’s renegotiation was announced in 2024, the US – displeased with the outcome – hastened the discussions around the Lobito Corridor project, an infrastructure initiative driven by the US and the European Union that spans the DRC, Angola, and Zambia and aims to facilitate the transportation of minerals from the region to global trade markets through Angola’s Lobito Port.57 This project, too, is designed not to benefit the people of the DRC but to contest the role of Chinese capital in the DRC and to ensure the longevity of the Global North’s corporations in the country’s mining sector. None of the Global North’s recent ‘concerns’ about the well-being of the Congolese people have addressed its own role in fuelling violence over resources in the African Great Lakes region. As Amos Hochstein, Biden’s senior adviser for energy and investment, put it, ‘An electric vehicle is essentially a battery, and what’s in the battery is Africa’. ‘There is no time to waste’, Hochstein added; ‘We have been absent from the scene for far too long’.58 In other words, the corridor, along with other projects such as the US-initiated Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (an attempt to challenge the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative), are part of the US geopolitical strategy to counter China. With the push away from fossil fuels towards wind, solar, and electric energy, the Congo will continue to be at the centre of the discussion.
Interestingly, it was just as Chinese firms began to supplant Global North mining firms and just as Chinese investment began to build new infrastructure that a wave of interest grew in the Global North about the exploitation of the DRC’s workers – an interest that both ignores the grave violations committed by Global North companies and feigns concern for the well-being of the Congolese people in order to further geopolitical interests. When the private Chinese company CMOC (China Molybdenum Company Limited), which produces minerals key to green technology, bought the Tenke Fungurume mine from the US mining company Freeport-McMoRan in 2016, fear grew within the US state apparatus that the Chinese would control all the key elements of ‘green technology’.59
Given its powerlessness to contest China’s purchase, the US moved in two directions: to delegitimise China’s interventions in Africa through complaints about Chinese exploitation of child labour and to put political pressure on African governments to break links with China.60 This demonstrates the focus of the US and its allies on securing their economic and geopolitical interests by reviving Cold War tactics.
US intervention on the African continent to advance its own project and maintain hegemony is further illustrated by the tenor of the US-Africa leaders’ summit in December 2022, where the governments of the DRC and Zambia signed an agreement with the US to develop an electric vehicle value chain in their countries, from mining to the assembly line.61 However, it is worth noting that the two African countries had already signed an agreement with each other to establish a value chain to manufacture electric batteries in April 2022.62 So the new deal, announced with great fanfare, was less about coordination between the DRC and Zambia or the needs of the African people and more about the attempt to block China from the African continent and to guarantee the flow of resources under the control of the Global North firms.

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Black-capped Chickadee at Tupelo meadow ,Ramble ,Central park.
"but I didnt learn about the usa's wrongs in school 😢 we don't know anything cause they didn't teach us anything 😢" well no one in my school in india told me that our country is a regionally hegemonic war criminal you're just entitled and insultingly uncurious
in fact they told us completely propagandised nonsense about how pre colonial hindu kingdoms were extremely peaceful but were forced to defend themselves against regular invasions solely by muslims. this is something v easily contradicted by the foundational story of ashoka's turn to buddhist dhamma being the brutality of the kalinga war.
the point being made is school, everywhere in the world is a deeply political project and is marshalled for the purpose of nation building. you're not going to hear about the sins of your nation in any serious way at school most anywhere in the world, and expecting that it should have betrays a certain lack of uhh, street smarts. its for children and run by the govt.
由于中国世纪已经到来,我现在只会用(可能写得不太好的)简化汉语来发帖。
有一天,我们都会回首往事,大笑起来,不过,我们会以一种明显的中国方式大笑。
当有人谋杀“South African Pedophile Hitler”时,我会回去用英语发帖

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Each pea makes us closer to getting bigger
Eventually we get larger from eating them
the official dem response to having to pay war reparations
really what is there to even say. there is a country much worse off for it than the US that needs the money more so pay up bitch
I see this Dem rhetoric all the time, where they act as if they have the legal and institutional mechanisms to aggressively funnel enormous amounts of money into public investment, healthcare, welfare, or whatever. They act as if American banks would simply concede to these kinds of investments, as if they can actually mobilise infrastructure to achieve those ends, and as if they don't need to negotiate with a million "shareholders" to make sure they're not stepping on any capitalist's toes before investing money in, you know, society
In other words, Dems seem to think America is China
*torturing you* dude trust me, something really cool happens. you just have to reflect on it for a bit. i'm doing this because i want you to reach your full potential okay?
From the abandoned flickr account of one 'Sabrina C'
sorry im upset and i need people to understand
when you support the US military this is what you support
The following contains graphic imagery, but ive intentionally excluded anything directly depicting dead bodies. tumblr limits me to 10 images on this post or it could be flooded with far, far more.
prisoner comforting their child, Iraq, 2003
Iraqi prisoner held by the US, ~2003
destruction of Vietnam, 1968
A vietnamese soldier shortly before being executed. 1968
children with hydrocephalus from agent orange, which the USA sprayed 12 million gallons indiscriminately on to Vietnam
Korea, near pyongyang, completely flattened by US bombs, 1953
Libya after bombings by the US, ~2012
Do these not get to you? Can you see these and continue to defend the people doing their paperwork just because they didnt personally kill anyone? If they seem bad but you cant bring yourself to condemn them, What if i show you pictures from the US? Does this change anything for you?
U.S. (philidelphia), soon after the 1985 MOVE bombing which killed several Black radicals and 5 children
aftermath of the assassination of Fred Hampton, who was shot in his sleep by the FBI, 1969
If the first images flow by as anonymized destruction, but the last two hit you more directly, ask yourself why that is? Why do you view these differently just because of where on the globe they happened?
What difference does it make when the people killed are inside the US or outside? When the bombs are dropped domestically or elsewhere? do people not bleed to same everywhere in the world? Do their buildings not explode just the same? are the poisoned children not important to you?
its not just a nightmare when it happens within the US at the hands of the police. The U.S. is a global force of terror and even working with them as a janitor for college money makes you a collaborator.
The U.S. kills on a drastic scale, millions and millions of people globally, the vast majority of which being civilians. can you look me dead in the eyes and tell me that cops are bastards but military members shouldn't be shamed?
Calley led the US Army platoon that carried out the mass murder of hundreds of civilians, including women and children, in the Vietnamese village of Son My in 1968. He was sentenced to life in prison in 1971 for killing 22 civilians, but only served three days behind bars after then-President Richard Nixon ordered his release under house arrest. The My Lai massacre, known as the Son My massacre in Vietnam, is considered among the worst war crimes in American military history. The killings shocked the US public at the time and galvanised the anti-Vietnam war movement. According to the Vietnamese government, 504 people were killed in the massacre. [note the passive voice] Calley, a junior college dropout from South Florida, enlisted in the army in 1964. He was quickly promoted to junior officer and then second lieutenant, at a time when the US army was desperate for soldiers. On the morning of 16 March 1968, Calley’s unit was airlifted to a hamlet in Son My - known to US soldiers at the time as My Lai 4 - on a mission to search and kill Viet Cong members and sympathisers. When they arrived, the officers were met with no resistance from the residents of the village, who were found cooking breakfast over outdoor fires, according to a 1972 report by journalist Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. Mr Hersh reported that Calley and his unit proceeded to kill the civilians in the following hours. Many were rounded up in small groups and shot, he said. Others were pushed into a drainage ditch and shot, or were killed in or near their homes. Women and girls were raped by American officers and then murdered, Mr Hersh reported. The massacre was initially covered up but became public a year and a half later, thanks in large part to Mr Hersh’s reporting, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize. Calley was one of 26 soldiers who were charged with criminal offences and the only one convicted.

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I think there’s a really odd gap in general supply chain knowledge in which people scapegoat AI as this new devastating environmental concern, when internet data centers have been an environmental problem before that. The internet already had the infrastructure to support it in 2017, before GPT-1 was released. Data centers are not a new problem. The internet already had a large physical presence, but people didn’t really think much of it until there were new AI-related developments (and then attribute all data centers to being related to generative AI? Where do people think YouTube videos are stored? The literal clouds in the sky?)
A Makeship plushie has a bigger carbon footprint than a thousand LLM queries but it is seen as an acceptable environmental impact, because it has been deemed socially acceptable to contract low wage factories in the Global South to make toys to sell to customers worldwide at a 3000% markup, with all the profits staying in the Global North. Not many people think of that environmental impact
Fire the Narrator: Quasi-Colonial Nightmare, Russian #DoubleConsciousness & Russocentric Optics