I was competing in Hell’s Kitchen and wasn’t doing too well. Gordon asked me, “Do you know what you are?” and I told him something so aggressively self-depreciating that it was censored and he just stared at me. He made me stop cooking and pulled me aside but I don’t remember what he told me, just that it was something comforting/encouraging.
[Images description: a Twitter thread by Alisa Lynn Valdés, M.S., @ AlisaValdesRod1. It goes as follows:
“This quote, from the @ nytimes review of the Oppenheimer film: (quote) “He served as director of a clandestine weapons lab built in a near-desolate stretch of Los Alamos, in New Mexico” (end quote)… It was inhabited by Hispanos. They were given less than 24 hr to leave. Their farms bulldozed. 1.
Many of those families had been on the same land for centuries. The Oppenheimer’s crew literally shot all of their livestock through the head and bulldozed them. People fled on foot with nowhere to go. Land rich, money poor. Their land seized by the government. 2.
All of the Hispano NM men who were displaced by the labs later were hired to work with beryllium by Oppenheimer. The white men got protective gear. The Hispano men did not. 3.
The Hispano men all died of berylliosis. These were US citizens, folks. Their land taken, animals killed, farms bulldozed, forced to work for the people who took everything from them, and killed by those people. 4.
For 20 years I have been trying to sell a film based on the story of Loyda Martinez, a remarkable whistleblower whose family’s land was seized for the labs. Her dad was one of the men who died from beryllium exposure at the labs. She later went to work there too. 5.
She is a computer whiz who rose to the top of her department at Los Alamos. Then she started digging for info on the Hispano men the labs killed, like her father. She filed a class action lawsuit, and won. 6.
The first Hispano governor of NM, Bill Richardson, appointed Loyda to run the state’s human rights commission. She then filed a second class-action against Los Alamos, on behalf of women scientists not paid fairly. 7.
But, no. We want more films about the “complex and troubled” “heroic” white men, who conducted their GENIUS in a “virtually unpopulated” place. These are ALL lies. This is mythology in service to white supremacy and the military industrial complex, masquerading as “nuanced.” 8.
Because of what the labs did to the local Hispano people in northern NM, our communities now have the highest rates of heroin overdose deaths in the nation. The generational trauma and forced poverty is outrageous. We need the real stories of Oppenheimer to be told. End.”
watching a video about this cargo ship that blew up in texas in the 40’s and it’s like . i know that with a lot of incidents especially older ones like this the reason that the safety standards were so shitty was because they literally did not know that these kinds of disasters COULD happen (and in many cases these disasters are what MADE the safety standards better) but sometimes you just learn about this shit and you think. how could all these people be so stupid
- cargo of the ship consisted of twine (flammable) peanuts (flammable, oily) and cotton (FLAMMABLE) from houston and POST WAR AMMUNITION (OH MY GOD) FROM CUBA
- additional cargo they were picking up in texas city was LOOSE BAGS OF AMMONIUM NITRATE that the dock workers described as being ANOMALOUSLY WARM UPON BEING LOADED INTO THE SHIP ??????
- small fire breaks out in cargo hold, instead of putting it out with water that could damage the cargo the captain decides to close all the hatches to try to make the cargo hold airtight and smother the fire (stupid but you can kind of understand how they got there)
- the heat of the trapped smoke in the cargo hold instead causes the aforementioned LOOSE BAGS OF AMMONIUM NITRATE to undergo a chemical reaction and turn into nitrous oxide, massively increasing the pressure inside of the airtight hold
- one of the hatch covers fails
- mfw all the pressure in the cargo hold is released at once causing an explosion that fucking levels everything in the port within 2000 feet
- mfw the shockwave shatters windows up to a hundred miles away
- mfw on-fire twine and peanuts and fucking grenades are raining down over texas city
- mfw some of the pieces of the ship got launched into the sky faster than the speed of sound
- mfw they found the ship’s anchor inside of a ten foot wide crater over a mile and a half away
- mfw this was one of the largest and most devastating non-nuclear explosions in world history
- mfw this could have been avoided if they’d just taken the L and put the fire out with water
ALT
