Van Jones with absolute moral clarity:
"The Palestinian cause has been hijacked by a Nazi organization called Hamas, they are not freedom fighters, they are freedom takers... They are trying to destroy Israel way more than they are trying to help the Palestinian people."
Introverts don't chase status or money. What fulfils their soul is authenticity. Understanding how shit works. How everything is connected to everything. Their own mind. Emotions. Their inner world. And solving the ultimate puzzle "who am I".
Elmo thought you might need this! ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
Tomaj's appeal against (another) 1 year prison sentence for the video he made on release has been rejected.
The 1 year sentence was issued in an Isfahan court without the presence of a lawyer and without prior notice.
This more than 2 months after the influential rapper was attacked, beaten and kidnapped on the street 12 days after his initial release. No legal documents have been presented by the judges.
The continued imprisonment of Tomaj Salehi is utterly illegal and we call upon the international community to draw attention to his case again.
Alexei Navalny now presumed dead in Russia due to poisoning by the state we cannot allow the same fate to befall @OfficialToomaj and the thousands of other political prisoners unjustly held.
We demand his immediate release. He must be allowed to continue treatment after severe injuries he sustained in prison.
Every word of this. And do not be fooled for a second that the Islamic Republic care about Palestinians. They care even less about them than their own people that they slaughter with impunity. One day you’ll get why we don’t shut up about this. And we won’t until they’re gone.
This morning I’m at a conference at the House of Lords hosted by Sheryl Sandberg about the rapes of October 7 and the likely ongoing rapes of hostages.
She started with these words that many so-called feminist groups in this country should take heed of:
‘If we can't agree that rape is wrong; that rape is not resistance, that rape is not freedom fighting - then the question becomes not what is happening in the Middle East but what is happening to our humanity?’
Today, in between sips of tea, @StephenFry delivered @Channel4’s #AlternativeChristmasMessage. 🫖
“I am Stephen Fry and I am a Jew…Knowing and loving this country as I do, I don’t believe that most Britons are okay living in a society that judges hatred of Jews to be the one acceptable form of racism. So, speak up, stand with us.”
Beautiful.
Brave.
Needed.
Thank you Stephen Fry.
And if you think that he is exaggerating in any way, search for “Stephen Fry” on 𝕏 right now and see the antisemitic pile-on for yourself.
As someone with a Muslim background, I became curious to learn about the history of Jewish people to understand for what crime in the world they deserved to be burnt alive during WWII only to learn that it was for the crime of existence.
In addition to being expelled, forced to live in ghetto and being second class citizens, I learned that WWII was one of the MANY instances in which the Jewish population was the target of large-scale hate that led to their mass killings.
If Israel did not exist, if it was not for the power of Israel in the region, Jewish people would've been prosecuted and slaughtered to this day.
While many wars and tragedies have been happening in the world, It's disgusting and ignorant to compare and equivalent anything with the genocide of Jewish people during WII.
It's shameful to hear the same rhetoric that led to many many massacres against Jewish people today in 2023. I refuse to stay silent in the face of anti-Semitism.
In the horrors of the war between Israel & Hamas we should not forget the hand of the Iranian Government in promoting this conflict for its own interests. Well done to @omid9 for shedding light on this issue as a tireless campaigner for protecting human rights
[Graphic warning] I have just seen the raw footage from Hamas terrorists of their attacks on 7 October. The screams of civilians murdered in their cars, babies slain in Disney pyjamas, children begging for “daddy” as he is blown up, the dead spat on.
As they mercilessly slaughtered, one terrorist yelled down the phone, “I killed 10 Jews with my hands, dad! I will go live on WhatsApp! Your son is a hero!”
If the Holocaust had cameras, this is what you would have seen.
I fear too many people do not grasp this.
Pale Blue Dot is a photo of Earth that was taken by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1990 from a distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) as it was leaving our solar system. This is what Carl Sagan said about the photo:
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor, and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
You would never have heard of Vincent van Gogh if it wasn't for his sister-in-law Jo, who deserves to be better known.
Because she turned Vincent from an obscure Dutch painter into the world's most famous and beloved artist.
How? Well, this is the story of the other van Gogh...
Johanna, or Jo, is the least famous of the van Goghs.
Vincent is probably the world's best-known artist. Then there's Theo, his devoted brother, without whose undying financial, emotional, and creative support Vincent could never have done what he did.
And finally we have Johanna Gezina Bonger, the daughter of an insurance broker, born in 1862. Jo was a bright and naturally artistic child. She wrote this in her diary at the age of seventeen:
"I would think it dreadful to have to say at the end of my life that I’ve actually lived for nothing and have achieved nothing great or noble."
Whatever her dreams may have been, she studied English and became a teacher at a girls' school. In 1884 she was introduced to Theo van Gogh by her brother; they were both art dealers.
Theo was immediately taken, but it was five years later — having only met her twice — that he proposed. Jo said yes and they were married in early 1889.
She left Amsterdam and went to live with Theo in Paris, where until the previous year he had been living with Vincent, who had since gone to Arles and entered the creative apotheosis of swirling colour for which he is now so famous.
Theo was devoted to Vincent; Jo knew that by marrying the one she was in an intimate relationship with the other. In July 1889 Jo wrote this letter to her brother-in-law:
"My dear brother,
This time I’ll try to write to you in French, first I know that you like it more, and then with both of us expressing ourselves in the same language we’ll eventually understand each other better, I believe.
I’m going to begin by telling you a great piece of news which has greatly occupied us lately — it is that this winter, around February probably, we’re hoping to have a baby, a pretty little boy — whom we’ll call Vincent if you’ll consent to be his godfather.
Do you remember the portrait of the Roulin baby you sent Theo? Everyone admires it greatly, and many times now people have asked ‘but why have you put this portrait in this out-of-the-way corner?’ It’s because — from my place at table I can just see the child’s big blue eyes, its pretty little hands and round cheeks, and I like to imagine that ours will be as strong, as healthy and as beautiful as that one — and because his uncle will consent to do his portrait one day!
Your sister,
Jo"
After which Vincent wrote:
"I started right away to make a picture for him [Theo and Jo's child], to hang in their bedroom, branches of white almond blossom against a blue sky."
But within a year Vincent had killed himself. Theo, crippled by grief, died just six months later. The tight-knit family was gone and Jo was left alone to raise her one year old son. So what did Jo do?
She left Paris, moved backed to the Netherlands, and set up a boarding house. But that's not all. The chance had come to fulfil her youthful dream of doing something noble. She inherited all of Vincent's then valueless paintings and took them with her. Although Vincent had sold only one painting in his lifetime and died a nobody, Jo was committed to continuing where her beloved husband had left off and sharing Vincent's artistic genius with the world.
Jo was a highly competent organiser and, even more importantly, a deep and perceptive thinker. Having known Vincent and Theo first hand, Jo was convinced that the art she had inherited could not be fully understood without a knowledge of the troubled genius who had created it.
So while she organised retrospective exhibitions of Vincent's work all on her own, gradually building his reputation and even starting to sell his work, perhaps her greatest contribution to his legacy was the publication of Theo and Vincent's letters in 1914.
She remarried in 1901 and when she died in 1925 the legacies of both Vincent and Theo were secured. Thanks to Jo's work he had gone from an obscure and near-forgotten Dutchman to one of the world's most renowned artists within two decades of his death.
And this was not only because of his paintings but because of the story told through the letters he had written to Theo and Theo to him. She sold some of Vincent's paintings, usually with regret but consoled by the thought that more people around the world would learn about his work that way; London's National Gallery bought their version of Sunflowers from Jo. And her son, Vincent Willem, was instrumental in founding the Vincent van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 1973.
There were people who already knew about Vincent van Gogh before Jo's work: the critic Albert Aurier was a supporter of his and he had been friends, after all, with the circle of Parisian artists who essentially created modern art and whose names are now revered.
But if not for Jo's tireless work and decades-long crusade he would probably be, at best, a relatively obscure Post-Impressionist. So while Vincent van Gogh may seem like the ultimate artist — an eternal outsider, a misunderstood rebel, a troubled genius — it was through the enduring love of those closest to him that his legacy has survived.
Without Jo, devoted custodian of the dreams of her husband and brother-in-law, you or I wouldn't know anything about that brilliant Dutchman. She is as much a part of the story as them. John Donne's famous words never rang so true:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
I've been practicing psychiatry for 38 years. I love my job, my peers, and my patients. But I've come to the conclusion that I'm participating in the biggest intellectual scam of this era. We claim to be a science, but have no understanding how thought or behavior is generated./1