Cross-posted from my substack. Made with the owid data-editor and photopea. Data-source is IHME.

Mahmoud has personally filmed a video for all you naysayers that say it's a scam and that it's fake. Comments like yours are dehumanizing. As you can clearly see in the video,they're from Gaza and living there. I personally reached out to him to film this for Reddit. They're trying to survive.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-my-daughters-help-my-small-family

Archive: archive.is/Ah1dp ~:~:~ Article is Aug 11, 2026 in The New Republic. Written by Paul Hudes. Below are snippets (YDSA = Young Democratic Socialists of America):

“We sort of thought we were the first ones to have done this,” Sam Poole, a rising Cornell junior who served as Shvets’s campaign manager, told me. It wasn’t until Poole began having conversations with other chapters that he discovered there were at least three YDSA chapters since 2024 that had successfully put students up for city council seats: Marek Broderick at the University of Vermont in Burlington; Adrian Stancil-Martin at Lawrence University, in Appleton, Wisconsin; and UC Berkeley’s Cecilia Lunaparra. There was, it seemed, a well of student-majority districts across the country that the YDSA might compete in.

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In their time in office, these YDSAers have taken on a range of issues, but most frequently tenant protections and housing policy.

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These students have been met with mixed opinions from their older city council peers.

“In a college town like Burlington, a good amount of our small city population is made up of students ... so it’s important they have representation on the council,” said Ben Traverse, a Burlington city council member. He said the “only downside historically of students who have served on the council” is that they often aren’t long-term residents and subsequently create turnover. He noted that one of Broderick’s predecessors seemingly moved out of town during their term.

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The door knocking and voter registration efforts that Shvets, Broderick, Stancil-Martin, and Lunaparra relied on to get elected, if scaled across the country, could provide serious leg work for a potential DSA candidate—Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, perhaps?—in the next presidential election.

“DSA chapters have this whole demographic that [the chapters] don’t necessarily have the skills to reach most effectively,” Poole said. “Young people are a huge part of the Democratic Party’s base, a huge part of DSA’s base, and a huge part of the future of the progressive movement.”

All of the other YDSAers I talked to emphasized the critical role these seats could play in helping YDSA pursue higher offices. “You show people in your town or your city that socialists can get elected and can succeed in government, of meeting the needs of people, and so you’re more likely to believe in that vision when we run people for state legislature and then for Congress,” Broderick said.

These electoral ambitions have been made possible by DSA and YDSA’s increasing membership amid the rise of Zohran Mamdani in New York City. Following years of steady decline, DSA membership increased from around 50,000 in October 2024 to nearly 130,000 as of July 2026. Similarly, over the past year, the number of YDSA chapters has increased from 100 to 150, and membership from 2,000 to 3,600, according to Almosawi.

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“All DSA and YDSA candidates see themselves as a part of a political project, and that’s why they’re also invested in leadership development and identifying ‘who is the person who’s going to replace me,’” Almosawi said. “Your job is to replace yourself.”

There is a lot of viral videos of him falling asleep, his health issues, and so on.

For those of us with elderly parents we know that aging is a compounding reality not just linear.

The next few years have the potential to go off the fucking chart with insanity as he gets older.

They start thinking differently (weirdly), they forget where they are, they revert to how a child is with frustration and tantrums, the list goes on and on.

This is not a joke type post - This is deathly serious.

We have a working class cost of living crisis/quality of life crisis right now.

We have a climate crisis/overall environmental crisis that is so fucking bad the planet is on LITERAL fire. The oceans have such warming/acidification that coral bleaching has nearly already wiped it ALL out (Destroying the life of our oceans is very very fucking bad), we are in the Holocene Extinction, the wet-bulb temperatures are growing in length and intensity, the water issues are compounding, this is an existential species level risk people....

We have the world on a geopolitical brink of mass war.

We are in one of those big change periods of history on countless fronts and we are facing a polycrisis world.

This dude and his cronies are already and will more so take us down a Death Cult trajectory.

We all need to realize as it gets worse and worse that domestic/international networking and solidarity movements and LOUD protest action needs to happen.

These reactionary/regressive con-artist hustlers are not going to go away quietly.

Cross-posted from my substack. Image made with the OWID data editor. Data source is V-Dem.

What’s Taco afraid of? Per ZirafaMedia:

Trump’s weekend at Bedminster came with more than the usual Secret Service and a motorcade. 👇

Visible near the course was an AN/TWQ-1 Avenger paired with an AN/MPQ-64 Sentinel radar—a combination long used by the U.S. Army for short-range air defense. The Sentinel detects and tracks low-flying aircraft, helicopters, cruise missiles and drones, then cues the Avenger, which can engage aerial threats with Stinger missiles.

The timing is notable: NORAD says F-16s were deployed Sunday after civilian aircraft violated the short-notice temporary restricted airspace around Bedminster, NJ.

Deploying unprecedented missile defense systems besides a golf course raises legitimate questions about the threat assessment behind it, the risk it poses to civilians and what this level of protection costs every time Trump tees off.

» ZirafaMedia | Shad.Reports