I have just had one of the best weekends/ few days of my life celebrating Ben and Normy’s 81st birthdays!!! (A combined 60th and 21st.) You know when the stars just align and you’re phoenixing and everything is just… really good? The weather was perfect, nearly ALL my besties flew home for it (sorry Liv and Evie) and it’s just made me very happy to be alive.
That being said (and listeners of the podcasts will know this) I currently have NO voice and feel like I have the plague. Worth it for all the love being thrown round over the weekend tho - hope yours was as cute as mine!!!!
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A stowaway cat was accidentally mailed to California in a returned package
UM look at this gorgeous fucking cat that disappeared from her home in Utah last month:
Turns out the puss - Galeana - was accidentally mailed hundreds of miles to California in a package that was being returned!!!
Don’t worry though - she was found by an Amazon worker, and was in good health despite having had no food or water in days.
"Galeana loves boxes, it's just part of her personality," Carrie Clark, the cat's owner, told NBC's Utah affiliate KSL TV when explaining how her family's pet had come to end up so far from home.
I wanted to talk about the protests happening across college campuses in the States but then someone did it better
And that someone was
from“First there were the pro-Palestine, anti-war, peaceful protests on campuses. What started as concentrated drips of discontent over the past few weeks, in very public places like New York’s Columbia University, evolved into a nationwide phenomena that was met with threats of violence, arrests, armed forces, and general vehemence. While this form of dissent is months in the making, intersecting with stories like the Claudine Gay debacle at Harvard, it’s current state is a mixture of flourishing antisemitic conspiracies and overwhelming not-listening to protestors, resulting in everything from USC’s cancelled commencement to denied constitutional rights.
The matter is kicking up the obvious (American support of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the reality of free speech in the United States) while also implicating multi-generation storylines, from the problematic nature of armed forces to the necessary politicization of art to dissenting against employers to absolutely legitimate antisemitism. What’s missing here is legitimate government support that goes beyond Ilhan Omar (and a handful of others) showing up in contested spaces and the literal listening to voices of dissent, like Nicola Coughlan, like Melissa Barrera, like so many others. There is a great feeling of helplessness, that certain mechanics of free speech are breaking down as governmental and commercial interests outweigh the rights of the people to create a great gaslighting. “Fight for your rights — but don’t actually fight for anything because we will squish you,” this situations says. This sounds silly but consider that earlier this year the Supreme Court essentially allowed select states to eliminate the right to protest.”
Australians call for tougher laws on violence against women after killings
In other protest news, thousands of demonstrators gathered in Australia in response to a wave of recent violence against women.
What do they want?
So far in Australia this year, a woman has been killed on average every four days.
So, essentially protesters want “gender-based violence to be declared a national emergency” and stricter laws put in place to stop it.
What have officials said?
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the issue was a “national crisis” and that “society and Australia must do better. We need to change the culture and we need to change attitudes. We need to change the legal system.”
“It’s not enough to support victims. We need to focus on the perpetrators, focus on prevention.”
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I don’t believe police force should be used (unless a crime is in the process of being committed), and I say this as a Democrat:
These protests are for privileged kids to purge their guilt as actual colonizers. They project everything they hate about themselves onto Israel. They don't want to talk about peace, they don't want to talk about a 2 state solution, they don't want to talk about compromise. If you believe Israel has a right to exist, they will not talk to you. They dog whistle for war in a place they've never been to. They will never suffer the consequences of their calls for violence in those lands.
They've constructed zones & checkpoints to screen for ethnicity, political views, etc. And it's all done under the banner of liberation, which would be hilarious if it wasn't abhorrent.
I follow a LOT of MENA/SWANA voices. These are their original thoughts, which I happen to agree with.
"you are free to do as we tell you"