whachathink

nature lover

[AnatolijUkraine @AnatoliUkraine]

🇺🇦 Zelensky delivers a clear message to Washington and Moscow:

Neither the United States nor Russia gets to decide Ukraine’s future in the European Union. That decision belongs to Ukraine and the EU member states.

And I have one question: Since when does a country invading its neighbor get a vote on that neighbor’s future?

[Crazy Moments @Crazymoments01]

Incredible footage from a rescue boat captures a mother raccoon with her kits trapped on a pole amidst rising floodwaters. She takes a leap of faith to save them all.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

This antique high chair had a genius design

[Tony @RestoreBritain @Tony_Restore]

The incident occurred at Almaty International Airport in Kazakhstan in March 2025, involving a 67-year-old attacker holding a 21-year-old female security officer at knifepoint while threatening a bomb.

Retired boxer Musa Abdraim calmly offered to swap places as hostage, then seized the blade during a distraction, enabling security to subdue the attacker.

[GABRIEL 🪽 @thegabriel72]

I always wondered why back then the warriors stuck with horses and not some other big animal that could just flip on you mid fight. horses don’t really do that. they stay with you, they read the situation, they don’t panic and dump you for no reason.

watching them move around humans like this makes it obvious they’re actually thinking. small adjustments, watching you, figuring out what you want without you spelling it out. I paused it twice because one of them clearly understood the person was about to do something and just waited.

my brain kept going “yeah that’s why.” random but I almost went and looked up old war horse stuff after this. anyway I’m still watching the same part over and over.

[Whiplash437 @MrWhiplash_]

WATCH🚨: Knife to the flight attendant's throat—she's crying, screaming for her mama. Then a passenger steps up: 'My turn.' He swaps in, strips the blade, drops the attacker, and hands him to police.

Bravest airport move of the year. Absolute hero. 👊🏿✈️🔪

[Reilly Belle Air 💙🚺🌈💪 🌊 💙 @ReillyBelle57]

Another gold video from Floridian Del Stone reminding Republican voters about the long laundry list of Trump lies and horrendously corrupt things he’s done, and encouraging you all to vote blue:

[ThePatrioticBlonde™🇺🇸 @ImBreckWorsham]

Mike Johnson: “If we lose the midterms, the Democrats will go after the president’s family, the cabinet, his donors, friends, and the rest of you who have committed crimes.”

Sir, your terms are acceptable.

[Reich-Wing Watch @ReichWingWatch]

🚨BREAKING: The Republican Women’s Caucus Fund has been unmasked as the force behind the fake Texas Transgender Student Union (TTSU). This Wyoming LLC, formed in September, flooded as many as 3 million Texas mailboxes and phones with texts and brochures just as early voting began for the midterms.

Posing as a trans advocacy outfit, the materials—addressed to the children of registered voters—coached minors on seeking gender-affirming care even against parents’ wishes, pursuing emancipation, going out-of-state for hormones or surgery, and finding a “found family.” They copied branding from the real Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT) and used a near-identical address.

Legal filings named the Republican Women’s Caucus and “John Braun”—the name of a Washington state senator whose campaign treasurer, Paul Kilgore, also handles finances for the RWC Fund and PACs supporting Ken Paxton’s Senate bid against Democrat James Talarico. TTSU’s lawyer is former Paxton assistant AG Chris Hilton.

TENT sued, claiming harassment, threats, and operational harm. Judge Jan Soifer ordered disclosure, rejecting free-speech secrecy claims.

So, a Republican-linked group, with financial ties to Paxton-supporting PACs, mass-produced and distributed materials that impersonated a transgender student resource guide. In other words, the people who routinely accuse the transgender community of “indoctrinating” or targeting children, themselves produced and mailed the very content designed to look like that targeting—so parents would see it and react.

Every Republican accusation is a confession.

[🧬Maxpein🧬 @maximumpain333]

IF EVERYTHING WE LOVE WILL BE LOST IN TIME, WHAT IS THE POINT OF LOVE?

Wonderful answer by a Zen Monk

A man once asked a Zen Buddhist monk:

“If everyone we love will someday leave—through distance, change, or death—then what is the point of loving at all?”

The monk looked at him quietly for a moment and asked:

“If a flower blooms for only a few days, does that make it meaningless?”

“No,” the man replied softly.

The monk smiled.

“Then why do we believe something must last forever to have value?”

The man became silent.

“Music ends. Sunsets fade. Childhood passes. Seasons change. And yet, none of these things become meaningless simply because they do not last forever.”

“But love hurts because it does not stay,” the man whispered.

The monk nodded.

“Yes. Love can hurt because life is temporary. But perhaps that same impermanence is what makes love so precious.”

He pointed toward the fading sunset.

“If the sun never set, would you notice every sunset with the same wonder?”

Tears filled the man’s eyes.

“So we are meant to lose everything?”

The monk replied gently:

“In Buddhist teachings, we are reminded that everything conditioned by life is subject to change. People come and go. Bodies age. Moments pass. Relationships transform.

Suffering can become heavier when we demand permanence from something that was never permanent.”

The man lowered his head.

“Then how do I love without constantly fearing loss?”

The monk smiled.

“By understanding that love is not possession. It is presence.”

He continued:

“The purpose of love is not to own someone forever. It is to share kindness, connection, growth, laughter, comfort, and warmth while life gives you the opportunity.

And when someone is no longer beside you, the love they gave does not simply become meaningless. It may remain in your memories, your lessons, your compassion, and in the person you became because you knew them.”

The man whispered:

“So love is still worth it, even when it ends?”

The monk smiled one final time.

“A beautiful song is still worth hearing, even though it ends.

A sunset is still worth watching, even though it fades.

And a loving heart is still worth opening, even though life is temporary.”

MORAL:

Do not measure the value of love by how long it lasts. Some of life's most beautiful gifts are precious precisely because they are temporary. Love fully, appreciate deeply, and hold people gently not as possessions, but as precious moments entrusted to you for a while.

✨🙌🏾💫

[I AM BLAZE THE CURIOUS⚕️☢️ @Blazethecurious]

DID YOU KNOW??

Contemporary Cuban-born artist Reynier Llanes pioneered a unique, museum-grade painting technique he calls "Coffee on Canvas" (or Café en Lienzo), using dark, concentrated Cuban espresso as his primary pigment to paint intricate, sepia-toned surrealist masterpieces.

Growing up in Pinar del Río, Cuba, Llanes studied at the prestigious Vicentina de la Torre Academy of Arts in Camagüey. Due to severe economic hardship during the "Special Period" in Cuba, traditional oil paints, watercolors, and synthetic pigments were often prohibitively expensive or completely unavailable for young student artists.

​Resourceful and determined to paint, Llanes began experimenting with everyday natural substances in his kitchen. He discovered that brewing ultra-concentrated Cuban espresso provided a rich, natural organic stain with extraordinary chromatic range, from delicate golden hues to deep, chocolatey sepias.

Unlike casual coffee painters who work on light paper, Llanes developed a complex multi-layering method on stretched canvas, boiling and reducing espresso to varying viscosities and sealing the organic coffee oils so the artwork remains lightfast and preserved over time. Wall with me 👇🏾👇🏾

The Artistic Journey of Reynier Llanes:

​How resourcefulness in Cuba led to international gallery recognition across the United States:

1. Early Life & Classical Training
1985–2004
Born in Pinar del Río, Cuba, Llanes undergoes formal academic art training at the Vicentina de la Torre Academy of Arts, mastering drawing and composition.

2. Innovation of 'Coffee on Canvas'
2007
Faced with material shortages in Cuba, Llanes begins experimenting with concentrated Cuban espresso, perfecting his signature Café en Lienzo technique.

3. Emigration & U.S. Breakout
2012
Relocating to the United States, Llanes gains widespread recognition with solo exhibitions in Charleston, Miami, and Denver, showcasing his sepia-toned surrealism.

4. Museum Collections & Narrative Realism, Present
Expands his practice into vibrant oil paintings and narrative sculpture, with works held in permanent museum collections including the Denver Art Museum and the Snite Museum of Art.

More Surprising Facts About Reynier Llanes:

A. ​Surrealist Storytelling: Llanes' work blends narrative realism with Afro-Cuban mythology, dreamscape surrealism, and social commentary on memory, migration, and family heritage.

B. ​Preserving the Medium: Standard coffee contains organic oils that would typically degrade paper over time; Llanes developed a specialized treatment process for his canvases that neutralizes acidity while locking in the warm sepia luster.

C. ​Art Collector & Curator: Beyond creating his own art, Llanes is a passionate collector of 20th-century Cuban art, curating traveling exhibitions across the United States to promote historical and contemporary artists from his homeland.

​SUMMARILY!
​Forced to improvise due to pigment shortages in Cuba, Reynier Llanes turned concentrated espresso into a fine-art medium, establishing a globally acclaimed technique that defines his surrealist vision.

Hopefully you've learnt something new today?

The Medic Who Writes™🌚

Cheers 🥂 🙂

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

This painting is called Stay.

And once you notice what is really happening in it, you’ll realize it’s a word almost all of us have wanted to say to someone, at least once, when it was already too late…

A girl in a pink dress reaches out toward a man standing beside her, but he is no longer quite there: his body has turned to glass, so clear you can see the sky right through him. Look closely and you’ll find small yellow flowers and flecks of color still caught inside him, as if he were made of memories, while his face has almost dissolved, and behind them the sky turns into something closer to a dream.

It was painted in 2022 by Reynier Llanes, an artist born in Pinar del Río, in Cuba, who moved to the United States in 2007, and anyone who has ever lost someone will recognize the gesture at its heart instantly: the hand stretched out a little too late, toward a person who is disappearing while you are still looking at them.

Llanes often gives invisible feelings a visible shape, and here grief and longing take the form of someone slowly fading away. He never tells us who the man is: he might be a father, a friend, a grandparent, a love that ended, and because we only see the girl from behind, we end up standing exactly where she stands, reaching out toward our own person...

All he gives us is that single word, the one we so often never manage to say in time: stay.

He first showed it in a solo exhibition in Ohio, named after the secret the fox shares in The Little Prince, words that could almost be written beneath this painting: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

I started my newsletter because the world is full of beautiful artworks like this one, and so few people ever stop to give them the attention they deserve. Every week I try to. If that is something you'd like to be part of, you can join through the link in my bio!

Thanks for reading.

[Occupy Democrats @OccupyDemocrats]

BREAKING: BRILLIANT! Abdul El-Sayed DESTROYS the Republican lie that they're "pro-family" by explaining exactly how impossible they've made it for Americans to have kids.

We've been waiting for someone to break it down this well...

"How expensive is having kids? You have five of them. How expensive is it?" El-Sayed asked conservative correspondent Ross Douthat during an interview with 60 Minutes.

"I don't know if my employers are watching this show. It's considerably expensive," said Douthat.

"It's very expensive, right? Does your partner work?" asked El-Sayed.

"She does, yes," said Douthat.

"And so that means that you probably had to pay $2,000 per kid for childcare," said El-Sayed. "Think about the albatross that that sits on our economy. Think about the premium that you have to pay for healthcare for all of your kids."

"And I'm just gonna say, I'm about to walk in to a room full of very young people who are looking at the future and saying, there is no possible way I could possibly have a kid," he continued. "So if the issue in our country is stagnation when it comes to the capacity to have children, the question we really ought to ask ourselves is, how do you make it easier to have kids? So Ross, how do you make it easier to have kids?"

"Maybe we should stop making it so expensive to have kids," suggested El-Sayed. "Which means that if the only argument that we have about America is we can't possibly do anything to make it easier to have kids, we are going to have a race to the bottom."

"And I get it, a lot of people are gonna say, 'well, we're gonna ban abortion and we're gonna tell people it's a good thing to have kids.' Yeah, that doesn't really quite work," he went on. "What tends to happen is we ban abortions, people just get abortions, they're just less safe."

"But the whole— The whole—" began Douthat.

"My point is this. Hear me out. You need to be invested in the means of making it easier to have children," said El-Sayed. "That means you have to address the rising costs of having kids."

While this point should be self-evident, Republicans regularly ignore it and El-Sayed should be commended for laying it out so simply. MAGA hacks like Elon Musk are constantly screeching about declining birth rates, but then they turn around and push for the very same plutocratic policies that make it impossible for Americans to start families.

The truth, of course, is that right-wingers don't actually care about supporting the American nuclear family as an institution. But they know that running on their real policy objectives of shoveling tax cuts to themselves and propping up the military-industrial complex is a sure path to electoral defeat. So they give lip service to caring about families.

"So if your argument is that we can't have childcare, we can't have healthcare, we can't subsidize housing, we can't do these things, do not be surprised when all of a sudden we age past the point at which we are viable," El-Sayed said. "I'm trying to address that problem and I've got my solutions for it."

"The party that wants to tell me that they're pro-natalist, their solution is let's cut taxes for the billionaires and let's go to war as we have no business fighting and somehow if we rub two sticks together, we're gonna get people to wanna have kids," he went on. "It's not serious. So I'm just trying to be serious about what the problem is."

"And I think the problem is we have made it too expensive. And if we cannot make it cheaper, do not be surprised when people don't have kids," he concluded.

Amen!

Please ❤️ and share if you support serious solutions like the ones El-Sayed proposes!

[The Weather Network @weathernetwork]

Only in Canada! 🇨🇦🪵 When a massive fallen tree blocked a highway on October 17, a group of motorists jumped into action to help clear the road. From a man with a chainsaw to kids picking up smaller branches, travellers of all ages pitched in to lend a hand.

[Popular Liberal 🇺🇸 @PopularLiberal]

JON OSSOFF JUST LAID OUT THE WHOLE SCAM IN GEORGIA — AND IT'S BIGGER THAN ONE DEAL.
At his closing rally in Morrow, Georgia, Senator Jon Ossoff walked through it deal by deal. Georgia is listening: he leads Mike Collins 55-40 in the latest poll, and 2.2 million Georgians have already voted.

While Donald cuts a diesel deal with Vladimir Putin — 300,000 tons now, 500,000 in November, a million more after that, while diesel sits at $6.33 a gallon for American farmers and truckers — his own son-in-law Jared Kushner and his envoy Steve Witkoff are brokering the sale of Lukoil's $20-22 billion in international oil fields, refineries and gas stations to the first family's friends.

The buyers, as Jon Ossoff named them: Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE's spy chief, who paid $500 million for half of the Trump-Witkoff crypto company days before the inauguration. Moutaz and Ramez Al-Khayyat, the Syrian-born brothers financing Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump's multi-billion-dollar Albanian resort. And billionaire Todd Boehly leading the consortium. The United States government itself would take a 15% stake — through the same government that is supposed to approve the deal.

Then Marco Rubio: his State Department helped steer up to $1.6 billion in taxpayer backing to the Trump sons' tungsten mine in Kazakhstan — the company's own chief executive says it got 'direct assistance' from Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Howard Lutnick.

Then Pete Hegseth's Pentagon: a $620 million loan to Vulcan Elements, the magnet company Donald Trump Jr.'s fund invested in three months earlier — the biggest loan that Pentagon office ever gave. And Venezuelan oil money routed through Qatari bank accounts — $500 million in the first sale alone, more than $13 billion taken in by late July.

And Elon Musk? Apartheid Clyde is one of these elites. He spent $475 million buying this election, his companies took $10 billion more in federal contracts since he left DOGE, and his Tesla paid ZERO in federal income taxes on $5.7 billion in U.S. profits. That's why he tells poor people America will end if his side loses. It has nothing to do with them. They are just the infantry for an oligarchy waiting to happen.

This is not a presidency. This is the biggest Ponzi scam in American history — and it is a national security danger, because the men running the State Department, the Pentagon and the negotiating table are cutting resource deals for the family while you pay $6.33 for diesel.

So hear Jon Ossoff's closing line, and hear it like it's real: Raise your right hand. Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God, in front of the United States Congress? Because next year, that's where this ends. 1 day. EVERYBODY KNOWS IT.

[Reich-Wing Watch @ReichWingWatch]

🚨BREAKING: The woman punched in the face at Trump’s Youngstown rally has filed a report seeking to press charges, and the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office is now investigating three men.

The woman was wearing a “Release the Epstein Files” shirt when she started shouting during the Oct. 12 rally at the Covelli Centre. Videos show three Trump supporters going after her, and at least one punched her in the face and pulled her hair, The Vindicator reports. Others can be seen restraining her as she was attacked. Deputies removed her. The Trump supporters were permitted to stay.

Trump stopped speaking, then said: “He’s a paid protester. They’re all paid.” He misidentified her gender and made fun of her weight. No evidence has been offered that she was paid. According to Newsweek, she told The New York Times that no organization coordinated or financed her appearance and (surprise) ordinary citizens can want powerful p*dophiles held accountable.

No arrests were made that night. Sheriff Jerry Greene said deputies didn’t see the assault and she hadn’t filed a report. His office then found her through social media and her if she would like to press charges. She said yes. As of Oct. 21, the sheriff said he’d identified three men, two from the area and one from New Jersey. The two area men want lawyers present for their interviews.

Separately, a man named Russell Dickert bragged that he and “a friend” named Gary his son Clint “subdued her and threw her to the concrete.” Dickert’s LinkedIn, located by Reich-Wing Watch, happened to list his residence in New Jersey. Police haven’t disclosed the identify of the three suspects they identified.

Prosecutor Lynn Maro said her office’s information indicates a misdemeanor assault, though Greene said the woman’s injuries could change that.

The woman has been identified as Blake Miley, 29. She’s represented by civil rights attorney Subodh Chandra. Whether to charge anyone is up to prosecutors.

[Morgan J. Freeman @mjfree]

8 days and we'll get to truly investigate what Ted Lieu said on the record the Epstein files are being blocked because they show Trump raped and threatened to kill children.

Lets make this viral again ⤵

[President Roslin @RoslinResists]

Quick reminder: Gold melts at around 2000 degrees. Washington DC did not experience that kind of heat wave. So… whatever Trump approved for those statues was not gold. Another multimillion dollar grift/money laundering scheme while Americans suffer.

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

Video of North Carolina A&T students marching to the polls after Trump removed their on-campus voting location.

[Maurice W @iamMauriceW]

This is what Presidential looks like.
This is what elegance and class look like.

This is what the Trump family could NEVER be.