Would You Buy Yerba Mate From Barron Trump? He seems to be launching a beverage line with his West Palm Beach friends.

OH HELL NO

www.thecut.com/article/woul...

As I (unsuccessfully) try to search for information about my birth parent from the bottom up, the severance of the legal relationship puts my ability to access info in question at every turn. I’ve had more success using commercial DNA tests to find relatives (“top down,” as I think of it).

Of course, this only applies to situations in which the birth parent was at one point recorded. There are may informal and illegal “adoptions” where that doesn’t hold. But I know how heartbreaking it is to confront this brick wall head-on.

The civil registry, which had precise records pointing them to my original birth certificate, never did release it to me directly (despite my best arguments that they were violating subsequent law)

It took me five years of fighting, researching public access laws, and contacting multiple government agencies (at different levels of government) in a country that is sympathetic to appropriated children’s searches to access my judicial adoption file, which had the original birth certificate.

Chiming in as I dealt with this and, with significant effort, found a workaround: in Argentina, they don’t just overwrite the original. But they issue a new one & block your access to the original. I wonder if that’s true elsewhere and the inability to access the info is legal rather than practical.

Libib!

Lemkin 1947—> www.jstor.org/stable/2193871

The man who coined the term genocide, Raphael Lemkin, defined it as a greater atrocity than mass murder explicitly because it involves the intentional killing of a civilization.

This is a threat to commit an atrocity crime of extraordinary proportions.

The statement appears to be designed to spread terror among the Iranian population, which would render the threat itself a violation of international law, as recognized in the DoD Law of War Manual.

The Doomsday Clock is overdue for an update since January, no?

And, as an international student who went to Princeton on financial aid, I should add: I believe we also contribute when we can’t and don’t pay sticker price.

A 3D lamb cake with a jellybean nose and very, very large candy eyes. It looks traumatized.

Meet this year’s Easter lamb cake, who has seen some things.

So, thing that is apparently better understood inside academia than outside of it:

International students pay sticker price. Most domestic students do not. International students are subsidizing the education costs for domestic students, as per student governmental funding drops.

>dudes in shed innovations LLC

Masculine, handyman ethos, real men build shit

>housewives with 3d printers

Feminine, women just press buttons, not real production

Very fitting that @rmcgibbo.bsky.social reupped this for me as we travel in England 👩🏻‍🏫

Current mood.

I wasn’t going to do this but I found point (2) so strikingly effective I had to share. We love good writers here.

Apparently we’ve reached the Skyfall era of airplane security videos.

See you in London, all.

But it lives! I once successfully litigated NY champerty in federal court and it remains a high point for me.

Worms in food, poor medical care, lights on 24/7: Families tell of life in Texas detention center When ICE officers in Minneapolis detained a 5-year-old boy and his father last month and sent them to a Texas detention center, many Americans were alarmed.

A 13-year-old girl tried to take her life by cutting her wrists with a plastic knife from the cafeteria after guards took away drawing materials, and was put into isolation without seeing a doctor. The teen was deported to Colombia after nearly two months in confinement

Oh boy. Robert and I are flying internationally out of New York City this week and I sense our marriage will be tested. In ordinary times, he’s camp “we should arrive 3 hours early” versus my “1 hour is plenty and we’re going to cut it closer than that.”

Thank you for your kindness. I’m so glad you’re here.

What is outrageous about this, among many other things, is that makes relief turn on whose loved ones have the resources to hire or luck or network to get a lawyer to file for habeas. If you don't know to file or can't, even "we have no opposition" cases lead to continued detention.

I actually think I remember seeing this in real time! Ha

How a Covid-era hobby started epidemic of illicit ant smuggling Two men were caught trying to bring 2,000 live queen ants through Nairobi airport. On European or Asian black markets they might have been worth £190,000

What started as a fun read on ant smuggling turned into learning that ant queens can live up to 30 years and another lesson in inexhaustible human greed resulting in torturing ants and depleting eco-systems that African grasslands depend on.
www.thetimes.com/world/africa...

I only learned I have roots in Paraguay a couple of years ago (adoptee here) and I don’t speak Guaraní. I’ve had to ask people to translate for my Guarani speaking distant relatives on the ancestral DNA sites. But this filled me with so much joy. I can only imagine what it meant if you were there.

In the midst of all the darkness, here’s random joy.

I understand Sabrina Carpenter performed for the first time in Paraguay last night, and she learned a guaraní word to say at the concert. “Sapucai.” Guaraní is a native dialect, *very* widely spoken and an official language in Paraguay.

“You are an abolitionist, ain’t you?” “As to that, I cannot so readily answer. If by abolitionist you mean a zealot, I am none; but if you mean a man, who, being a man, feels for all men, slaves included, and by any lawful act, opposed to nobody’s interest, and therefore, rousing nobody’s enmity, would willingly abolish suffering (supposing it, in its degree, to exist) from among mankind, irrespective of color, then am I what you say.” “Picked and prudent sentiments. You are the moderate man, the invaluable understrapper of the wicked man. You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong, but are useless for right.”

Herman Melville on moderates, all the way back in 1857:

Only a sick country would not welcome this man. We live in a sick country.