maryam #CONSCIOUSNation

The slavery apologists said: but we fed them. Housed them. Gave them religion. Brought them from savagery into contact with civilization. The colonial apologists said: but we built railways. Hospitals. Legal systems. Brought order to chaos. Raised the standard of living. Gave them modernity. The contemporary apologists say: but we give aid. Promote democracy. Protect human rights. Stabilize fragile states. The world would be more violent without our presence. The structure is identical across five hundred years. The framing is always: We gave. We brought. We raised. We provided. The passive voice is always assigned to the other person. They received. They were brought. They were raised. They were provided for. Never: They had. They built. They governed. They decided. They were capable, before and without you, of existing as full human beings with the right to determine their own conditions. That sentence. That is the sentence that colonial ideology, in all its iterations, cannot say. Because once you say it, once you actually believe it, not as a liberal sentiment but as a foundational reality, the entire justification structure collapses. And all that's left is what it always was. Taking. Just taking. From people who had every right to what you took.

Arabic has 14 words for love. Each one describes a different stage. And here's what got me. Each one comes from a root that has nothing to do with love. Until you see the connection. And then you can't unsee it. All 14. Let me walk you through them.

If they cared enough, they would do better by you a long time ago. The fact that they didn’t should tell you everything you need to know.

The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States for the seventh time won the war that wasn’t a war, so the United States can open the Strait of Hormuz that was open before the not war. The not war that started to get the uranium that was completely obliterated, so that the Iranians can’t build the nuclear bomb that they weren’t building for the not war that the United States started. Then the United States which has nuclear weapons threatening to use nuclear weapons to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons because having nuclear weapons is dangerous. If the United States saw what the United States is doing in the United States, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.

Nestlé es de las multinacionales más criminales de todo el planeta, aún más cuando estaba bajo la dirección del sociópata de Peter Brabeck. Niños de 5 años son esclavizados en los campos de cacao de Ghana, donde multinacionales como Nestlé consiguen la materia prima a precio de saldo para conseguir máximos beneficios con su chocolate. Nestlé no sólo esclaviza a niños en plantaciones de cacao y café, también arrasa con los manantiales de agua y bosques enteros para plantaciones ilegales, promueve fórmulas dañinas para bebés, contamina masivamente con plásticos... Este es el interior crudo del capitalismo, un sistema donde la avaricia es tal, que con su infinito gasto de recursos acabará devorando la naturaleza y exterminando a la humanidad, destruirá sus 2 fuentes de riqueza.

The United States has the largest prison population on earth. Not per capita. Total. More people in cages than China. More than Russia. More than every "authoritarian" state it condemns in its annual human rights reports. 1.8 million people. Disproportionately Black. Disproportionately poor. Disproportionately from the zip codes with the worst schools, the fewest jobs, the most abandoned infrastructure. This is presented as a "criminal justice system." It functions as a labor system. Prison labor, paid between 13 cents and $1.15 an hour in most states, produces goods for McDonald's, Walmart, Victoria's Secret, Whole Foods, and the United States military. The 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, contains an exception clause: "Except as punishment for crime." That exception has never been closed. It has been expanded. The plantation did not disappear. It received a different name and a legal foundation.

new banksy artwork, a man blinded by his flag

Un hombre cegado por una bandera que le tapa los ojos. No ve que avanza hacia el vacío. Banksy ha captado la esencia de la ultraderecha en el mundo. Es un maldito genio.

Tak yah nak art berat sangat kalau tak art berat. Kalau tak tengok Waknat TV, buat je cara tak tengok Waknat TV. Of coz akan kena judge, tapi at least tak kena judge acah-acah 😘

Video footage of the exact moment the BYD Yangwang u9 Xtreme reached a maximum speed of 496.22 km/h on the Track in Petersburg,Germany, officially beating the Bugatti Chiron super sport’s record as the world’s fastest production car

> be Alexandra Elbakyan > be born in Kazakhstan in 1988 > start coding at 12 > hack your internet provider at 14 > hack MIT Press at 16 to download neuroscience books you can't afford > get a CS degree from Satbayev University > intern in neuroscience at Georgia Tech > speak at Harvard on brain-computer interfaces > notice researchers can't read the papers they need > notice academic publishers charging $30 a paper > notice peer reviewers worked for free > notice editors worked for free > notice universities funded the research with billions of dollars of public money > build Sci-Hub in 2011 > upload nearly every paywalled research paper ever published > give it away for free > get sued by Elsevier > get hit with a $15 million judgment > don't give a flying f*ck > keep Sci-Hub up > get domain after domain seized > register a new one > keep Sci-Hub up > get investigated by the US Department of Justice > don't give a flying f*ck > get accused of working for Russian intelligence > don't give a flying f*ck > have the FBI subpoena your iCloud > get named one of Nature's ten people who mattered in science > get a parasitoid wasp named after you > get a deep-sea snail named after you > get the Electronic Frontier Foundation Award for Access to Scientific Knowledge > become a legend

BREAKING: China has officially surpassed the United States in overall research and development spending, investing about $1.03 trillion in technological advancement. US had led global research and development spending for decades before being overtaken by China.

To put it simply, Kelly: The West sabotages countries that threaten the extraction. Singapore had nothing to extract. The West sabotages countries that inspire dangerous ideas about structural change. Singapore's model is not replicable at scale and Lee Kuan Yew was careful to never frame it as a universal template for the Global South. The West sabotages countries whose leaders build coalitions across the developing world that could collectively challenge the rules of the system. Lee Kuan Yew built no such coalition. He was famously contemptuous of Third World solidarity movements and non-aligned politics. Remove yourself as a threat on all three dimensions simultaneously and you get room to operate. The cost of that room is that you are not a threat on all three dimensions simultaneously. Singapore got its developmental state. It did not get, and did not try to get, a world in which other countries could also build one. That is the price Lee Kuan Yew paid for the West's tolerance. Whether it was worth it is a question Singapore never had to answer. The countries that tried to answer it differently paid a very different price.

Same day, same outlet (the BBC): Somalis "hijack" ships. The US merely "boards" them. This is how consent is manufactured in real time.

Fun to see actual billionaires taken down a peg and see how they treat their own employees.

MUST WATCH: Investigative journalist Whitney Webb says that Palantir has replaced Jeffrey Epstein as the ultimate tool of blackmail: "They don't really need blackmail anymore... [Palantir is] the new Jeffrey Epstein." "If they want to blackmail you or know something about you, they just access what Palantir's sucked up about you and your search history, your communications, your finances, tweets you've liked in the past." "You don't really need Epstein in the surveillance era." "The disturbing thing about Palantir is that it's really about pre-crime. They were the pioneers of predictive policing." "Palantir is the resurrection of [a] DARPA program called Total Information Awareness—that was so scandalous when it was announced it was defunded by Congress." "But then they realised that if they turned it into a private company, no one would complain. And that's how we got Palantir."

Iran is the ONLY country that had the guts to tell the US and Israel to get lost. Iran is the ONLY country to stand up for Gaza and Lebanon. So I don't care what sect they are. I'd side with ANY country that had done the same. Why is this so hard for haters here to understand?

One of my “go to” lines for years has been that the sign of success for a country isn’t that poor people drive cars, but that rich people ride the subway…

Carl Jung wrote: "The more intelligent and self-aware a person is, the more they suffer from the general unconsciousness of society." This is not a badge of honor. It is a recognition of the weight carried by those who cannot unsee what they have already seen. This is the psychology of the deep thinker and if you recognize yourself here, this one is for you: The architecture of alienation. It starts early. The child who asks why adults say one thing and do another. The one whose questions are always labeled as "overthinking." Nietzsche described these people as "free spirits" — essential for progress, but wandering in a wilderness everyone else refuses to enter. Research by Dr. Elaine Aron suggests approximately 20% of the population processes information more deeply and notices subtleties others completely miss. In a world that rewards speed, this depth can feel like a disability. The frequency of truth. Deep thinkers operate on a different wavelength, the frequency of truth rather than the frequency of comfort. Most people live without ever questioning the fundamental assumptions of their own existence. But the deep thinker has glimpsed behind the veil. Like Plato's prisoner who escapes the cave and returns to share what he saw only to be rejected and called a troublemaker—the deep thinker carries the burden of the witness. They see the masks, the exploitation, and the pain that everyone else has agreed to ignore. The emotional sponge. Deep thinkers do not just observe emotions, they absorb them. They feel the anxiety of a stranger as if it were their own. They perform enormous amounts of invisible emotional labor — checking in on people, listening, supporting, acting as the unofficial therapist of every room they enter. And yet the relationship is almost always asymmetric. They give at a depth most people cannot match. They live with the quiet loneliness of being the strong one, the one everyone leans on, but no one thinks to ask: "Are you okay?" The mask of normalcy. To survive, many deep thinkers learn to wear a mask, laughing at jokes they do not find funny, feigning interest in conversations that feel hollow, modulating their intensity to avoid being too much. This is not deception. It is survival. But the cost is enormous. Maintaining the split between the complex private self and the simple public self is exhausting. And the mask, while protective, makes true connection nearly impossible. You cannot be fully known while hiding. The wounded healer. Jung wrote about this archetype; the person who transforms their own brokenness into a source of healing for others. The wounds of rejection and misunderstanding become sources of deep compassion. The person who has felt most unseen becomes the most gifted at seeing others. But the challenge is learning to give without emptying yourself completely, to love others without losing yourself in the process. The alchemy of solitude. For deep thinkers, there is a crucial distinction between loneliness and solitude. Loneliness is the pain of disconnection from others. Solitude is the joy of connection with yourself. In solitude, the deep thinker finally breathes. The noise of the world falls away. The internal landscape becomes clear. Isolation transforms into introspection and that is where the real work happens. The revolutionary act of authenticity. In a world that profits from insecurity, choosing to be genuinely yourself is a radical act. When a deep thinker chooses authenticity over performance, it creates space for others to do the same. It gives people permission to be real in a culture that rewards shallow. If you recognize yourself in any of this, stop apologizing for your depth. You are not broken. You are not too much. You are not too sensitive. You are awake in a world that prefers to stay asleep. Your sensitivity is a superpower. Your intensity is a strength. ✨🙌🏾💫

I'm so sick of people dismissing this as "conspiracy theory." Literally, every "conspiracy," from sexual blackmail at the highest authorities, to wars of expansion and oil, to elite pedophile rings and cannibalism turned out to be true. But there are still fools who think suggesting the US was actively manipulating weather in the region is lunacy, even though the US has weaponized weather modification since the Vietnam war. See Operation Popeye.