Alex Graham 🌐🌹🏗

"Dedicated here to the unfinished work."

He/Him, Transit, Housing and Liberalism advocate.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

When the President of France visited the United States in April 1960, he asked the FBI to help him find a man.
The man he was looking for was an American citizen. He was sixty-four years old. He had been awarded fifteen French military decorations and — six months earlier, in a ceremony in Paris — had been made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian honor France can give. The medal had been pinned to his chest by the President himself, who had publicly called him un véritable héros français. A true French hero.
The FBI located the man within a few days.
He was operating an elevator at Rockefeller Center in New York City.
The elevator operator's name was Eugene Bullard. He had been born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895, the son of a man whose own father had been a slave.

He had run away from Columbus at the age of eleven, after watching a white mob nearly lynch his father.
He spent the next several years drifting through the American South. At sixteen, he stowed away on a German freighter at Norfolk, Virginia. He landed in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there he made his way to London, where he learned to box. By 1913, at eighteen, he was prizefighting in Paris.
When Germany invaded France in August 1914, Bullard was nineteen years old. He had no legal obligation to fight. He had no French citizenship.
He went to the recruiting office on October 19, 1914, and signed up for the French Foreign Legion.
He spent the next eighteen months as an infantryman in some of the worst fighting of the war — at the Somme, at Champagne, at Verdun. He was wounded three times. The third wound, on March 5, 1916, tore open his thigh and left him with permanent damage to his leg.
He was twenty years old. The doctors told him he would not return to the infantry.
He decided he wanted to fly.

In a Paris café in the spring of 1916, while he was recovering, Bullard mentioned to three white American friends that he was thinking of joining the French air service. A Mississippian named Jeff Dickson laughed.
Gene, Dickson said, you know damn well there aren't any Negroes in aviation.
Bullard answered: Sure do. That's why I want to get into it. There has to be a first to everything, and I'm going to be the first.
Dickson bet him two thousand dollars he would not make it.
Bullard took the bet. He earned his pilot's license on May 5, 1917. He won the bet.
He reported to the front in August 1917 and flew approximately twenty combat missions over the next three months in a SPAD VII. The fuselage was painted with a bleeding heart pierced by a knife and the French phrase Tout le Sang qui Coule est Rouge — All Blood that Flows is Red.
He carried, on every combat flight, a small capuchin monkey named Jimmy in the front of his flight jacket.
The French press began calling him L'Hirondelle Noire — the Black Swallow.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard immediately applied to transfer to the U.S. Army Air Service.
His application was rejected.
The U.S. Army Air Service had a policy, in 1917, of not accepting Black pilots. The other American pilots flying for France in his unit, all of them white, were transferred to the U.S. Air Service.
He was the only one who was not.

For the next twenty years, he was one of the most familiar faces in the Montmartre nightlife of Paris between the wars. He owned a nightclub called L'Escadrille. He spoke fluent French, English, and German. Hemingway drank there. Fitzgerald drank there. Langston Hughes drank there. Josephine Baker performed there. Louis Armstrong was a personal friend.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bullard was forty-four. His fluent German and his ownership of a nightclub frequented by German officers made him useful to the French Resistance. He became an intelligence agent — eavesdropping in his own bar on conversations between German officers who did not know he understood every word.
When France fell in June 1940, friends in the Resistance smuggled him across the Spanish border before the Gestapo could arrest him.
He came back to the United States for the first time in twenty-eight years.
He arrived in New York with thirty dollars in his pocket and a permanent limp.

He did not return to a hero's welcome. He returned to a country that had no idea who he was.
He worked at a perfume counter. He worked as a security guard. He worked at the Staten Island shipyards. By the late 1940s, he had taken the job that he would hold for most of the rest of his life.
He operated the elevator at Rockefeller Center.
He was wearing the elevator uniform on the day a producer from NBC came down from the studios upstairs to ask if he was the man Charles de Gaulle had been looking for.
A few weeks later, NBC sent a film crew to interview him in the lobby. The studios where NBC produced The Today Show were on the floors above. He had operated the elevator that took the network executives up to those studios every morning for nearly ten years. He had not been recognized as he did it.
He went back to operating the elevator the following Monday.

He died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961, three days after his sixty-sixth birthday.
He was buried in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery, in Queens, in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion. The casket was draped with the French flag.
In 1994 — thirty-three years after his death — the United States Air Force formally commissioned Eugene Jacques Bullard as a Second Lieutenant, posthumously.
It was the first commission the U.S. military had ever offered him.
He had been the first Black combat pilot in American history.
The French had been calling him a hero since 1917.
The Americans got around to it in 1994.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.

This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.

The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.

A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.

These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.

They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.

They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.

Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:

> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”

—

The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.

It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.

SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).

The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.

With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.

Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.

It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.

All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.

That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.

If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

[🎷🦭 Ponsuke 🎷🦭 @PonsukeTheSilly]

telling googles ai that im eating and drinking increasing amounts of salami and monster energy until it starts shouting at me to get help

[Alex Graham 🌐🌹🏗 @FinalCookie84]

@proudnia @a22kay

[Alex Graham 🌐🌹🏗 @FinalCookie84]

"They trade an endless void for a single heartbeat that matters."

[nia @proudnia]

@a22kay They trade an endless void for a single heartbeat that matters. Immortality is just watching everyone you love die. That mortal's arms aren't a downgrade, they're the only home that ever felt warm.

[derek guy @dieworkwear]

i liked your outfit in vanity fair

[Alex Graham 🌐🌹🏗 @FinalCookie84]

@HunterBiden @ShadowSamaCid @honter_boden He rejects that he is the Mahdi...

[Artemis Shields @artemissongs]

Women taking off helms while still wearing some kinda weird armor was so formative for me as a kid

[party mom @fifimcfae]

hunter biden, you have to stop. you smoke too tough. your swag too different. your bitch too bad. they'll kill you.

[death angel @angel_0f_deathx]

God forbid you use Twitter to hit on a former president’s hot son

[Everything Price Sufferer (but especially eggs) @agraybee]

Biden 2028.

[Alex Graham 🌐🌹🏗 @FinalCookie84]

@lanabeesfw Anyone whose mind immediately goes to Israel has brainworms.

[Alex Graham 🌐🌹🏗 @FinalCookie84]

One of the greatest games ever made

[☢️Fallout Films @FilmsFallout]

Peak

[☢️Fallout Films @FilmsFallout]

Peak

[Cassie Pritchard @hecubian_devil]

You can’t stop people from posting Woke-1-style nonsense, and there always will be some. And you shouldn’t tell them to die or try to ostracize them (the classic Woke 1 error) . But you *should* call it stupid, to remind people no one *else* has to be in thrall to nonsense

[Cassie Pritchard @hecubian_devil]

The concept of flavors belonging to a particular ethnic group as a racial patrimony is Woke 1 shit. We’re not doing that anymore. Take it back to 2014 Instagram.

[Cassie Pritchard @hecubian_devil]

Classic Woke 1 switcheroo:

1) A guy developed a *specific* ube ice cream recipe for his store

2) Group A told him to die for “gentrifying” and “arrogance”—a *disrespect* accusation

3) Group B found this insane and obnoxious and stupid.

4) Group A backtracks by substituting real issues—farmworker maltreatment—to retroactively justify the freak-out

But of course, some white American guy saying “I developed” an ice cream recipe (which he did; get over it) doesn’t have any bearing on the conditions of farm workers in the global south whatsoever.

Group A is mad that he didn’t show sufficient deference, self-denigration, and groveling. They’re mad that he’s using “their flavors” and has the temerity to admit his own efforts, as a worker creating things in his own right (a specific recipe, not a general foodstuff). It’s entirely about ego, respect, social hierarchy, and the libidinal thrill of disciplining a scapegoat.

And no, you can’t come in and talk about foreign demand for ube causing problems. Aside from the fact that demand rising or falling for a particular commodity has little to do with farm worker welfare (both increasing or falling demand have downsides, and long term improvements have more to do with increased economic productivity, unions, and regulations than demand), that wasn’t the objection made.

The objection was that the guy making ice cream is the wrong race to be allowed to take credit for his ice-cream-making, which is absurd chauvinist nonsense that makes you sound like an insane freak.

[Paul's Psychic Artilleryman 🟡🟡🟡🟡🛰️🟡 @ironcrakka]

prequeloids are so close when they say leia is like anakin. she isnt, not really. she's like her real father

[Adrián @VialeAdrian]

Yo hace 20 años: la Iglesia Católica es una reliquia de otra era
Yo en 2026: la Iglesia Católica es la última esperanza

[The Cooter Scooter 🛴 @fitty_d]

I try not to engage with a lot of the relationship discourse online because I’m in my 30’s. Relationship discourse changes drastically once you leave your 20’s and your frontal lobe develops fully