Rasputin

Human Rights Advocate
& Texas-Based Video Editor.
📸 insta: PoleKingRasputin
UT '20 Radio/Television/Film
pro-worker, anti-war, trying to survive the pandemic

[Rasputin @ItsAnna_notAnna]

https://t.co/14gx8SCGvb
Need some mask decorating inspiration?

[RednBlackSalamander @9mmballpoint]

No guys it's fine, Flock cameras only read license plates, it's just normal traffic control, stop being so paranoid

Anyway here's one on a bike path

[🌸Bibi🌸♿ @BibiBlossoms]

Happy Juneteenth! It costs 0$ to repost a Black disabled queer small business! It could lead to my next sale.

I sell pins, compression gloves, artist gloves, back braces, knee braces, wrist braces, compression socks, cute bags & more!

Store details below!

[Olive Siffleur @OliveSiffleur]

I object to MAID because it is a money-saving scheme by a neoliberal government to reduce spending on disabled people it views as economically useless. I have zero belief in any god or any church or any divine doctrine. My humanity & ability to understand systems demands I object

[Basem Alhabel @BAlhabel]

The hardest photo taken of a child in the modern era

The moment an Israeli soldier snipes a Palestinian child in Gaza during the war,

the child's shadow clinging to his toy until the very last breath.

[Jennine K @jennineak]

this goes to the heart of so-called australia’s soullessness. everything closes early, you can’t get a coffee after 3pm, there’s no Night Culture, no milk crates in the streets, no warmth, it’s a large scale retirement village for the enrichment of property developers

[Emelia🌙 @Emelia8z0]

How will you continue your day after hearing that a father in Gaza, trapped beneath the rubble, begged rescuers not to save him?

Not because he had lost hope in life, but because he could hear his daughters’ final breaths beneath the debris. Their tiny hands were holding his in the darkness, as if pleading with him one last time. He was the father who had always been their safe refuge, yet this time he was powerless to pull them from the dust and shattered concrete.

Only his head was visible above the wreckage. He looked into the eyes of the rescuers, his own eyes exhausted by fear and helplessness, and said:
“Leave me… my daughters are here… I do not want to come out alone.”

What heart can bear such a scene? What language can describe the agony of a father who realizes he is losing his daughters one by one, while still holding their hands until they grow cold, unable to offer rescue or even one final embrace?

How will your day go on after knowing this story? How will you sit at your table in peace, or laugh at something trivial, knowing that somewhere there was a father whose last wish was not to survive alone?

And the question that continues to haunt the human conscience remains:

How much pain must the world witness before it finally hears the cry of a single father there?

[holocene @holo_cene]

my fourth EP, bird songs on power lines, will be out on june 26th 🤍 it symbolizes my journey being a female artist in the music industry, it’s about my relationship with pop music, misogyny, and alternative music. you can pre-save below! <33

[Mosab Abu Toha @MosabAbuToha]

This is the photo of the child I posted about yesterday. He was four years old.
Save his photo. It should be on the front page of every newspaper in the world. Shame on the complicit media which has failed to report on this.
Remember again, Israel killed Rayyan Abu al-Ajin by a bullet to the eye.
Look at his face. Look at his eyes.

[Maye Chat🆇 @mayechatjsso]

Remember blind Rohingya refugee Nurul Amin Shah Alam? It's a pattern, not an accident. ICE is strategically killing refugees.

[Saoirse 🏳️‍⚧️🇵🇸 @MarxistHeathen]

hey, this is a genuine potentially life-or-death emergency so please boost this: i need to get in contact with as many people who might be involved in anti-ICE stuff in New Jersey as possible.

a transfem friend of mine has gone missing and i’m trying to help find her

[Mosab Abu Toha @MosabAbuToha]

“They did not find a place to bury you”

[🔻🍁🇵🇸 @yearninquilab]

All pregnant detainees have been released from Delaney Hall, according to Cosecha, which was one of the demands. RESISTANCE TILL EVERYONE IS FREE!

[Dr Rahmeh Aladwan @doctor_rahmeh]

Horrifying testimony of Australian woman raped by the IOF:

'They wrenched my trousers and underwear down and it felt like I was inserted with a hand..it wasn't a gun...other people had guns inserted inside them.'

- Juliet Lamont, documentary filmmaker.

[barbarism critic @barbarismcrit]

Just learning about this and I think it’s being suppressed on my timeline but we are all being way too chill about living among these actual concentration camps. So much of how people just carried on with their daily lives in Nazi germany has been demystified for me.

[Queen Chimerazilla ☭🐾 @Qveen_Potato]

There is no doubt that Persia Conway was murdered.

She was found with no clothes on, in Brays Bayou that is close to Bissonnet.

They intended 100% to leave no evidence.
Spreading her picture, will help identify where and who she was with last before her disappearance.

The more eyes on this the better, as keeping it quiet will only enable the killer/s to get away with this.

[zellie @zellieimani]

The white supremacist group, The Proud Boys are currently outside Delaney Hall.

ICE and State Troopers will protect them and all three will be violent to those outside in solidarity with detainees. But forward we go.

[Antonia Leslie @antonia_leslie]

A diabolical act. But rape is too light a word to describe what happened. ( not to make light of the act of rape here) But this poor soul was the victim of the most heinous and barbaric slow gruesome death. Think Vlad the Impaler! That was what killed this man. Inserting an Iron rod through the rectum and forcing it upwards until it pierced through his bowls. He even had a punctured lung. The barbarity of such an act is beyond sadism and this brave soul who suffered such a horrendous fate inside this torture camp is not the only person to have done so.

[Yashar Ali 🐘 @yashar]

Yesterday, I woke up to the devastating news that Happy the Elephant was euthanized by the Bronx Zoo.

She was 55 years old and lived almost her entire life in a state of misery.

Seven years ago, thanks to the platform many of you have given me, I was able to bring international attention to Happy’s plight via this thread.

And as you can see in the quote tweets and replies, I continued to do that, with your help, for years afterward.

The @BronxZoo and @TheWCS should never be forgiven for what they did to Happy: keeping her captive, isolating her for years, and denying her the chance to spend her final years in a sanctuary.

@JimBreheny, the now-former director of the Bronx Zoo (he retired just a few months ago), should hang his head in shame and be haunted by what he subjected her to.

Keeping her isolated for many years as they did — despite offers from sanctuaries to take her in — meant they subjected her to years of psychological torture unnecessarily, after she had already had a very difficult life.

And they did all of this for money.

Elephants are often among the most sought-after attractions at zoos. The Bronx Zoo made Happy suffer because she filled its coffers. It is disgraceful.

The Association of Zoos and Aquariums (@zoos_aquariums ) is complicit in this tragedy, a lot more on them later.

Happy’s tragic life was the predictable outcome of an organization that has spent decades defending the confinement of animals whose emotional, social, and cognitive needs far exceed what ANY zoo can provide.

I am largely against zoos for many species, but it is scientifically indefensible and biologically impossible to meet the needs of an elephant in a zoo. Every elephant expert who isn’t complicit in the zoo cartel system agrees with that assessment.

A daughter of Thailand, Happy was born in 1971. When she was still in need of her mother’s care, Happy was abducted and taken to the United States, where she was held captive in Texas, Florida, and eventually New York.

In the United States, Happy gave rides at one point to human beings. In order to make an elephant rideable, you must subject them to unspeakable torture in order to break their spirit.

After the deaths of the elephants closest to her, Happy spent nearly 20 years living largely in isolation. For two decades, the Bronx Zoo and the Wildlife Conservation Society were warned over and over again by advocates, sanctuaries, and elephant experts about the psychological toll this would take on her.

They ignored them. They were, in fact, defiant in their response to some of the world’s leading experts on elephants.

In 2005, Happy became the first elephant in history to pass the mirror self-recognition test, a major scientific achievement that demonstrated self-awareness.

An animal’s ability to recognize itself in a mirror is extraordinarily rare and has been documented in only a handful of species.

The discovery helped further establish what elephant researchers had long understood: that elephants are incredibly sophisticated beings who live complex social and emotional lives, much like humans and other non-human primates.

In explaining why they wouldn’t release her to a sanctuary, The Bronx Zoo said that she had difficulty living with other elephants. That may have been true, but the Zoo never seemed to wonder how she had gotten to that point.

In the wild, there’s no such thing as a female elephant that has difficulty living with other elephants.

If a female elephant misbehaves, she is quickly put in her place by her grandmother, mother, and aunts.

Elephant families are among the strongest social structures in the animal kingdom. Females are born into them, raised in them, and spend their lives within them.

If Happy could indeed not live with other elephants that was just evidence of how living isolated in a zoo destroys an elephant’s ability to form and maintain social bonds.

And even if she did have difficulty sharing space with other elephants, accredited sanctuaries could have kept her alone, but at least she would have had acres and acres of land to roam and explore.

Her psychological state would have no doubt shifted, and she would have been under much less distress.

That’s because elephant sanctuaries that have elephants that don’t get along with others still give elephants the chance to see, smell, and hear other elephants.

Keeping any elephant alone, isolated, and in such a small space is psychological torture — there’s not a single elephant expert not funded by a zoo or zoological organization who doesn’t believe this.

Having spent a lot of time around elephants and having had the great honor of knowing some of the world’s leading elephant experts, I am always in awe of how much elephants are like us emotionally.

Elephants form deep and enduring social bonds, live within complex family networks, mourn the loss of loved ones, and comfort one another in times of distress.

Elephants also possess extraordinary memories (they really do remember everything) that shape their relationships throughout their lives.

Whenever an elephant matriarch in the wild dies at an old age, I often get emotional thinking of the knowledge and memories she passes away with.

A matriarch gains her incredible wisdom from her ancestors, passed down from her grandmother and mother, about the best places to find water and food, and the knowledge of how to raise young, including her own grandchildren.

When I think of the memories Happy died with, I am overcome with grief. Instead of memories of jungles and waterways and elephant calves, she died with haunting memories of the torture, captivity, and isolation she endured.

An elephant’s incredible memory helps them survive hardship. For example, a matriarch knows that she can take her family to an out-of-the-way water hole because her grandmother took her there, and her grandmother’s grandmother took her there. ere.

For Happy, that same gift of memory meant carrying decades of loss, deprivation, and loneliness.

What should have been one of her greatest strengths became another source of suffering.

Few animals are as socially and emotionally dependent on one another as elephants.

Human loneliness can be painful. We know, based on years of research and studies, that it can also shorten a human being’s lifespan.

But forced solitary captivity for an elephant is deprivation beyond what most human beings will experience (with the exception of those who are incarcerated or held against their own will).

Elephants are built to live through touch, sound, smell, movement, family bonds, and constant social awareness. Taking that away is psychologically damaging in a way that is deeper than the usual human comparison captures.

A human being who is isolated can at least rationalize it. They, unless they are incarcerated or held against their own will, have freedom of movement. They can try to change their circumstances.

A captive elephant forced into isolation cannot do that in the same way. It does not understand the reason for its isolation. It cannot choose to leave. It cannot call someone or reframe the experience as “solitude.”

The Bronx Zoo turned its back on Happy and her supporters even though easy options were presented to it.

As I mentioned earlier, accredited sanctuaries offered to take Happy in.

My friend @WhitneyCummings even offered to cover the cost of Happy’s transport to one of those sanctuaries (this would have cost her hundreds of thousands of dollars).

Many people helped to elevate my message about Happy when I shard it.

Thank you to my pals, including Chrissy Teigen, Josh Gad, @piersmorgan , @richardmarx , among others, who used their platforms to bring more attention to Happy.

Thank you to former NYC Council Speaker Corey Johnson , who took the time to learn about Happy’s plight when he was in office and issued a strong statement calling on the zoo to send her to a sanctuary.

Other politicians ignored the global pleas to help her.

Thank you to my friend Joyce Poole — who knows more about elephant behavior than anyone else living and has played a major role in saving the African elephant.

Joyce’s organization, @elephantvoices , does critical work advancing our understanding of elephant behavior, communication, intelligence, and social lives.

It was Joyce’s years of research that led us to understand elephants in the way we do now (she’s often called the Jane Goodall for elephants for good reason) — that research helped powerful lawmakers and officials to understand that elephants are so much like us and thus led to an international ban on ivory.

Joyce’s expertise is unparalleled, and she used the respect she’s earned, and her years of expertise, to file affidavits on Happy’s behalf and to speak to influential officials to push them to advocate for Happy.

And thank you most of all to my friends at the @NonhumanRights project for putting so much effort, time, and heart into fighting for Happy.

Non-human animals deserve rights too.

Happy’s right to determine her future was stolen from her when she was snatched in the jungles of Thailand and thrown onto a plane to disappear into an abyss of captivity, torture, and isolation.

And even when the world rallied by her side, her captors, who claim to care about the welfare of animals and make their determinations based on science, thumbed their noses at expert after expert who pleaded for Happy to be released to a sanctuary.

When a female elephant dies, she is often surrounded by her daughters, her young sons, her nieces and young nephews, among other relatives.

Happy was denied something that should have been hers by birth: the chance to die surrounded by those who loved her.

Had Happy remained in Thailand and lived in the wild, she could have had around six children and perhaps as many as 10 grandchildren, with even the possibility of great-grandchildren.

Instead, Happy was euthanized in a cold zoo that held her prisoner for years in order to extract as much money as they could from her.

[Jason Koebler @jason_koebler]

New: Regretful cities are literally covering their Flock cameras with black trash bags because they cannot figure out how to immediately exit their surveillance contracts or get the cameras taken down:

https://t.co/n8Az3Tkwmo

[welcome to our trash revolution @trash_panda97]

last night ICE beat and bloodied me and my friends. they pushed a protester under the wheel of a truck, crushing his foot. they’re sadistic freaks who revel in violence. i can’t imagine what they’re doing to prisoners inside.

abolish ICE and throw every one of them in prison