kimberly grace

@grace8ming

freelancer • traveler • empathizer • analyzer • problem solver • dreamer • re-poster • a fan of curiosity & the cat it killed • she/her • formed in kalamazoo • now in the pnw

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kimberly grace@grace8ming· 21d

Update from Bishop Dr. Imad Haddad of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, on Natalie Abudayyeh, a Birzeit University student held in israeli detention since early June

Dear partners,

Today we received very disturbing news about Natalie Abudayyeh, the 21-year-old university student and ELCJHL youth who has now been held in Israeli prison for nearly two months. Though we thank each of you who have advocated for Natalie over the last several weeks, we are both devastated and outraged to share that our voices, and the voices of all others who have called for her release, have not been heard.

Today Natalie had an appearance in Israeli military court. During this hearing, the judge ordered that she remain in prison until the 23rd of September, when she will make another court appearance. Israeli authorities have denied all the family’s requests to have Natalie released on bail for the duration of the proceedings and have refused to allow them to visit or contact Natalie in any way. They are exhausted, troubled, and losing hope that the church, local or global, will be able to help bring Natalie home.

For Natalie to spend another two months minimum in Israeli prison is incomprehensible. She is still being held at Damon Prison, where prisoners have reported terrible conditions and repeated human rights violations.

We are incredibly grieved by this news and deeply worried about her safety. Within this grief, we hold fear and uncertainty for the future of all our youth. This pattern of systemic attacks by Israel on Palestinian universities is just one more element of an occupation that suffocates Palestinian life and drives our young people to consider leaving their home. I ask you to consider how it would feel to be Natalie’s parent, sibling, pastor, or friend. Our community is angry and hurting.

As a church, we continue to cry out for justice and for Natalie’s freedom. At the minimum, we call for her family and a church representative to be able to visit her. We ask that the family’s request for Natalie to be released temporarily on bail be reconsidered...

kimberly grace@grace8ming· 21d

3 complex fires in oregon right now. just the row creek complex alone is 150k acres/24% contained & has almost 600 personnel assigned to it...

a screenshot from the Watch Duty app, showing fires across the West/Pacific Northwest. both Oregon & Washington are essentially blanketed in either fires or poor air quality. In Oregon, the three complex fires are marked by orange diamond-shaped icons.

kimberly grace@grace8ming· 23d

from dr. bronner's, on fb, in support of landofcanaanfilm.com (www.facebook.com/share/p/1FT5...)

In June, Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a searing commentary from former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, titled: "Israel is Conducting a Systematic Campaign of Ethnic Cleansing and Crimes Against Humanity in the West Bank."

Regardless of your opinion of Olmert, his words should serve as a wake-up call - especially for those in the U.S. and Israel where many continue to deny the ongoing systemic and horrendous violence and displacement of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

Since 2006, Dr. Bronner's has sourced about 90% of the olive oil in our castile soaps from Palestinian farmers in the West Bank through our fair trade and regenerative organic supplier, Canaan Palestine.

Dr. Nasser Abufarha is the founder of Canaan Palestine, a dear friend and business partner, and the subject of the powerful documentary, "Land of Canaan," which follows Palestinian farmers in the West Bank and their ancestral relationship with the ancient olive trees they've tended for generations.

In support of the film, Dr. Bronner's created a limited-edition soap label calling for peace in Palestine, available exclusively at select "Land of Canaan" screenings.

At a time when these communities face escalating violence and displacement, we hope more people will bear witness, engage in solidarity, and support those working to protect Palestinian lives and ancestral lands.

We call on all Jewish Americans and Israelis of conscience to acknowledge and confront the Jewish supremacy and lust for Palestinian land within Israel, and to not deny the reality of what lies at the center of Israeli power, politics, and policy.

We can look back to the Freedom Riders for inspiration - Black and white people, a quarter of whom were Jewish, united together against racism - who journeyed through the American South on buses and trains in the 1960s to help our country reckon with segregation and institutionalized white supremacy.

To support the film and request a screening near you, visit landofcanaanfilm.com...

(accompanying image shows a bottle of dr. bronner's Land of Canaan soap, filled with amber colored liquid & wrapped in a green & white label.)

kimberly grace@grace8ming· 26d

kimberly grace@grace8ming· 28d

😬 hoping you're all masked up & filtered, midwest friends...

airnow contour map showing dark purple & orange air quality levels stretching from minnesota to new york.

IQair list of worst air quality in the US, showing detroit at the top of the list with 754, followed by milwaukee at 497, minneapolis at 355, toledo at 310, madison at 309, cleveland at 258, chicago at 241, buffalo at 235, rochester at 183, philadelphia at 163 & baltimore at 160.

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Jul 11

from srebrenica to gaza...

an abstract "flower of srebrenica" outlined by the three colors of the palestinian flag.

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Jul 2

ajmo zmajevi!

a house in a neighborhood in bosnia with a huge bosnian flag hanging out its upper floor window, with mountains in the background, taken during the 2014 world cup.

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Jun 15

This is happening in part because many deep research agents and large language models use lexical similarity to a query as a stand-in for accuracy of information, Triedman explained on a phone call. Basically, LLMs often return content that reads similar to the query that users ask it, so brands doing AI-engine optimization can study what people are asking AI and can create content that closely mirrors those queries on Reddit.

“One of the things that’s critical is that if an 11-to-15-word snippet of text is very similar to the query, it can be particularly convincing to an LLM,” Triedman said. “So if you’re someone who is trying to manipulate Reddit, say you have supplements people want to buy, if you can identify the kinds of queries you want to poison, what you want to influence, you can put content on Reddit that looks very similar to what you’re trying to poison and that will be particularly convincing when it comes to an LLM.”

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Jun 1

fyi/icymi, for folks who use firefox: you can add search engines, including a google search amended with "-AI" to get non-AI results or with "&udm=14" to get "web only" results (refer to pics/alt text)

screenshot of where you add or edit search engines in firefox, showing the name "noAI goog" and the search string "https://www.google.com/search?q=-AI+%s"

screenshot of where you add or edit search engines in firefox, showing the name "udm goog" and the search string "https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14"

kimberly grace@grace8ming· May 28

a rose, for you 🌹

a beautiful coral pink rose with ruffled edges, taken from the top, revealing its wondrous unwinding. a bud pops out from behind it, at the bottom of the image.

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Apr 26

here's a beautiful rose...

a banks' rose with its small yellow blooms filla the image. a purple flower is just visible in the background, out of focus

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Apr 25

it's columbine time... ☺

a purple & cream columbine flower is centered in the image, framed by the stems of two yet-to-bloom buds on the same plant.
in the background, which is out of focus, a large tree fills the right side & a small pop of orange is visible on the lower left – a patch of california poppies.

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Apr 16

apple blossoms 🌸

the branch of an apple tree, with blush pink blossoms

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Apr 12

holy shit

real-time results from hungarian election, showing tisza with 136 seats, a supermajority, with over 53% of the votes counted.

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Apr 11

splashdown!

the moment the nasa capsule splashed down in the ocean, with three red & white parachutes deployed above it

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Apr 7

my cat just climbed on my lap to remind to calm the fuck down for my own health & sanity...

an orange & white kitty's adorable pink-nosed face. she is squinting at the camera & using her off-camera paw to knead my leg.

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Apr 6

"We mustn't say that we are going to destroy Sarajevo... We want to preserve Sarajevo, we need Sarajevo. We are not going to say that we are going to destroy the power supply... or turn off the water supply, no, because that would get America out of its seat..." - person found guilty in the Hague

pg 67 of "Genocide on the Drina River" by Edina Bećirević:

"...General Ratko Mladić took the floor and, in lay terms, explained that these goals could not be attained without genocide, since 'people... are not pawns nor are they keys in one's pocket that can be shifted from here to there.' It was apparently clear to Mladić at that early date that the plan envisaged by the Serb political leadership could not be put into practice without the forced elimination of Bosnian Muslims. If they hadn't grasped it before, Serb military and political leaders couldn't help but become aware of the likely consequences of their actions once Mladić had spoken. And Mladić seemed to accept genocide as enough of a likelihood that he sought to raise awareness of the international dimension of genocide among his colleagues: 'We have to put a ring around the dragon's head of Sarajevo this very moment, and only those whom we let out should be allowed out.... We mustn't say that we are going to destroy Sarajevo. No, we will not. We want to preserve Sarajevo, we need Sarajevo. We are not going to say that we are going to destroy the power supply pylons or turn off the water supply, no, because that would get America out of its seat, but..... well, one day there is no water at all in Sarajevo.... We have to wisely tell the world, it was they who were shooting, hit the transmission line and the power went off, they were shooting at the water supply facilities... [and] we are doing our best to repair this, that is what diplomacy is.'

From the very beginning of the aggression and genocide, Mladić realized that misrepresentation of reality and avoidance of any public acceptance for the responsibility of crimes was necessary in order to prevent military intervention by the international community."

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Apr 5

quince :)

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Mar 23

he thinks he's a crusader. on a crusade. he is our secretary of defense (war).

In Hegseth’s 2020 book American Crusade, he wrote that the phrase “Deus Vult” called “followers of Christ to take up the sword in defense of their faith, their families, and their freedom.” He then ended the book with that cry: “See you on the battlefield. Together, with God’s help, we will save America. Deus vult!”

It turns out, he doesn’t just read the Bible like a Crusader; he actually has a Crusader Bible with the cover essentially made in his own image.

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Mar 5

statement from the mayor of newport, OR regarding ongoing concerns about establishment of an ice facility in the area: www.newportoregon.gov/news_detail_...

Last Friday, in a declaration filed in support of a motion to dismiss our lawsuit challenging the proposed siting of a detention facility in Newport, ICE official Ralph Ferguson stated:

“ICE has made no decision to begin construction of a temporary holding/processing facility. At present, ICE has no plan or intention to begin construction or to open a temporary holding/processing facility in or around the City of Newport, Oregon or anywhere within Lincoln County, Oregon.”

While this statement represents a positive step for our community, we must remain vigilant and carefully consider its language. Previously, ICE offered only that it would not build a detention facility in Newport or at the Newport Municipal Airport before May 2026. We have not yet received assurances that ICE will not attempt to establish a facility in our community in the future. That’s why we are pursuing further assurances that ICE will not construct any detention facility, temporary or permanent.

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Feb 5

It won’t be easy. We know that. Migration brings opportunities, but also huge challenges that we must acknowledge and face. Nevertheless, it is important to realize that most of those challenges have nothing to do with migrants’ ethnicity, race, religion or language. Rather, they are driven by the same forces that affect our own citizens: poverty, inequality, unregulated markets, barriers to accessing education and health care. We should focus our efforts on addressing those issues, because they are the real threats to our way of life.

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Jan 27

cover of "Tribal Histories of the Willamette Valley" by David G. Lewis

the cover art, by Greg A. Robinson, depicts a pastoral scene, in warm, bold tones at the top (a brown sky behind scattered red homes), and cooler, darker tones below (fields of deep teal green & midnight blue), with two trees in the foreground covered in white blooms.

a blurb on the cover reads:
"Brings to light heretofore largely untold story of courage and resilience. Required reading for all who want to understand the true history of Oregon."
-Kerry Tymchuk, Executive Director, Oregon Historical Society

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Jan 27

this is a thoughtful & beautifully written piece...

There is something destabilizing about having known someone only as a child and then hearing they were gunned down in the street. The person you see in your mind lying in that street is still a child. I’m sure his mother feels that way, too, or she sees him at every age all at once, including those he did not live to see.

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Jan 22

tomorrow...

hand drawn digital poster that reads:
ONE • TWO • THREE

1.23
SHUT IT DOWN
ABOLISH I.C.E.

NO WORK • NO COMMERCE • NO COMPLIANCE

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Jan 19

a black & white tapestry, by artist henri-georges adam, of black birds in flight

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Jan 18

folks! especially if you're in media or have a lot of followers & frequently get reposted... please use ALT text! ✒️ it's easy. you can even choose a setting that compels you to add it:

screenshot of the bluesky accessibility settings, showing the Alt text toggles, which offer the option to "Require alt text before posting"

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Jan 2

it's foggy af this afternoon...

picture of a river with birds flying overhead, taken from a bridge, which looks like a black & white photo & fades into grey, because it's so foggy...

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Dec 15

In public statements and congressional testimony, Rubio has repeatedly insisted that no one died because of cuts to U.S. foreign aid and that his staff had reinstated lifesaving operations. But ProPublica found that those claims were a charade: Lifesaving programs remained on the books, but the flow of money didn’t restart for months, if at all. Lewin blocked funding requests for programs like tuberculosis treatment in Tajikistan and emergency earthquake response in Myanmar, records show.

This meant that dozens of supposedly “active” operations were dormant throughout most of the year. Rubio’s advisers let other critical programs, which typically run on one-year grants, expire without renewing them.

Few places were hit harder than South Sudan, the youngest and poorest country in the world, as well as one of the most dependent on American aid.

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Nov 25

a plate that has two cherry tomato "eyes" & a partly eaten bagel w/pesto cream cheese "mouth"

kimberly grace@grace8ming· Nov 23

I miss my cat...