CubitOom

Martin Luther King Jr. Day (officially Birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.,[1] and often referred to shorthand as MLK Day) is a federal holiday in the United States observed on the third Monday of January each year. King was the chief spokesperson for nonviolent activism in the civil rights movement, which protested legalized racial discrimination in federal and state law and civil society. The movement led to several groundbreaking legislative reforms in the United States.

Is Donald Trump unstoppable? He has defied laws and norms, thumbed his nose at Congress and foreign allies alike. He has displayed open hostility toward immigrants and American citizens, threatened extreme force against protestors, recently going so far as to mention the Insurrection Act. His ICE thugs roam the streets and are committing atrocities with impunity. We kidnapped the leader of a sovereign nation and are positioning troops for a potential invasion of an allied nation and NATO member. Donald Trump has been one step ahead of the law at every turn and with the courts and Congress in his pocket, many are beginning to wonder if he truly intends to suspend upcoming elections and destroy our democracy once and for all. So let’s talk about it.

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Photo by Pierre Lavie. Yes this is me. And I threw my Leica. It landed on the bass plate with hardly a scratch. Another photographer grabbed it along with my phone and I was able to track him later. I was held face down tear gas deployed right in front of me and pepper sprayed directly into the eye.

-- John Abernathy

Hexachloroethane (perchloroethane)

is an organochlorine compound with the chemical formula C2Cl6. Its structure is Cl3C−CCl3. It is a white or colorless solid at room temperature with a camphor-like odor.[3] It has been used by the military in smoke compositions, such as base-eject smoke munitions (smoke grenades).

Use as smoke agent

Smoke grenades, called hexachloroethane smoke or HC smoke, utilize a mixture containing roughly equal parts of hexachloroethane and zinc oxide and approximately 6% granular aluminium. These smokes are toxic, which is attributed to the production of zinc chloride (ZnCl2).[8][9] According to Steinritz et al., "Due to its potential pulmonary toxicity," zinc chloride producing smoke grenades "have been discharged from the armory of most western countries (...)."[10]

Ruan Xiaohuan (Chinese: 阮晓寰; pinyin: Ruǎn Xiǎohuán; born 10 June 1977) is a Chinese dissident, blogger, and information security specialist. In 2009, Ruan started an anonymous blog named ProgramThink (Chinese: 编程随想; pinyin: Biānchéng Suíxiǎng) on Blogger, covering various topics from network security, methods to bypass the internet blockade in mainland China, to his own political commentaries (including criticism of the Chinese Communist Party) and book recommendations.

Ruan was captured on 10 May 2021 by the Shanghai police for his aforementioned blog. On 10 February 2023, he was convicted of "inciting subversion of state power" by the Shanghai No 2 Intermediate People's Court, and sentenced to seven years of imprisonment with two years of deprivation of political rights and a confiscation of property of 20,000 Chinese yuan. On 13 December 2024, his appeal was dismissed by the Shanghai High People's Court.

Brandon Michael Darby (born November 2, 1976) is an American conservative blogger and activist. He first became known in the fall of 2005 for actions in New Orleans in efforts to help residents, where he was a co-founder of the Common Ground Collective organized there. It coordinated the efforts of hundreds of volunteers from across the country for years.

In late 2008, Darby acknowledged in an open letter that he had acted as an FBI informant in infiltrating protest groups before the 2008 Republican National Convention, held in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He testified in court against two men arrested on plans to commit domestic terrorism.

The Marburg speech (German: Marburger Rede) was an address given by German Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen at the University of Marburg on 17 June 1934.[1] It is said to be the last speech made publicly, and on a high level, in Germany against National Socialism. It was done in favour of the old nationalist-militarist clique that had run Germany in the Kaiser's time, who had helped Hitler to power as a prelude to their return, only to find themselves instead pushed aside by the New Order.

The imperial boomerang is the thesis that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens. This concept originates with Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism (1950) where it is called the terrific boomerang to explain the origins of European fascism in the first half of the 20th century.[1][2] Hannah Arendt agreed with this usage, calling it the boomerang effect in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).[3][4][5] According to both writers, the methods of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party were not exceptional from a world-wide view because European colonial empires had been killing millions of people worldwide as part of the process of colonization for a very long time. Rather, they were exceptional in that they were applied to Europeans within Europe, rather than to colonized populations in the Global South.[6] It is sometimes called Foucault's boomerang even though Michel Foucault did not originate the term.

A susu or sou-sou or osusu or asue (also known as a merry-go-round,[1] Partner, or Pawdna in Jamaica;[2] sol in Haiti;,[3] san in Dominican Republic,[4] and Njangi in Cameroon[5]) is a form of rotating savings and credit association, a type of informal savings club arrangement between a small group of people who take turns by throwing hand as the partners call it. The name is used in Africa (especially West Africa) and the Caribbean.[6] Each person contributes periodically the same amount to a common fund; the total contributions are disbursed to a single member of the group. Each time, the recipient changes so that eventually all members are recipients. Participants of a susu do not make a profit. Instead, small periodic contributions are turned into a larger lump sum of the same value, with the susu acting as a savings club.[7]

Contango is a situation in which the futures price (or forward price) of a commodity is higher than the spot price.[1] In a contango situation, arbitrageurs or speculators are "willing to pay more for a commodity [to be received] at some point in the future than to purchase the commodity immediately. This may be due to people's desire to pay a premium to have the commodity in the future rather than paying the costs of storage and carry costs of buying the commodity today."[2][3] On the other side of the trade, hedgers (commodity producers and commodity holders) are happy to sell futures contracts and accept the higher-than-expected returns. A contango market is also known as a normal market or carrying-cost market.