A week of police violence in the US, attacks on workers’ rights in France and data breaches that could send abortion pill customers to jail

Hi, I’m Marcela: I’m a comedian, I live Brooklyn, and I really like to tell people how to feel about the news. After wowing zoomers all over on TikTok by giving them news with a sense of humour and anarchy, I decided to start a weekly Sunday newsletter to share my feelings about more news. 

My weekly newsletter has evolved into this beautiful Tuesday weekly news column for shado which also covers international news. I hope the newsletter keeps you informed and makes you laugh a little. We live in hell and I believe humour helps keep this place a little bit cooler.

Today I’m sharing my feelings about the police murdering two Black men in LA and Memphis, Emmanuel Macron trying to raise the French retirement age to 64, abortion pill pharmacies sharing customer data with Google, and Joe Biden hating whales. 

Onto the news…

News that made me say you can’t turn your blender into a washing machine

It’s only January and the police in the so-called United States of America are bringing in the new year by letting us know they are villains we should spend all of our time booing and abolishing. New year, same old ACAB.

Last Sunday we planned and went to a vigil to mourn Keenan Anderson, a Black man murdered by the LAPD on 3rd January. Keenan was clearly in distress and sought help after a car accident and instead of helping him the police killed him. The police killed Keenan because Keenan is Black. The police in so-called Memphis murdered a Black man Tyre Nichols four days later on 7th January for the same reason they murdered Keenan: Tyre is Black.

The police are here to murder Black people and I’m tired of people pretending that’s not their job when we know the police in the US evolved from slave patrols, not teletubbies. If the police evolved from teletubbies I would be scared, but for very different reasons.

Trying to reform something that was created to criminalise a group of people because of the colour of their skin cannot be reformed. That’s like throwing your scarf in your blender, turning it on and then wondering why your scarf is now shredded fabric. The blender shouldn’t have shredded your scarf, it should have washed it because you put a clear label on your blender that reads “washing machine.”

You can’t change the purpose of something just because you relabel it. No amount of relabelling and imagination can turn your smoothie making machine into a washing machine or the police into teletubbies.

Obviously comparing the police to a blender is really insulting to blenders because blenders  are useful and can make tasty smoothies. The cops were never useful, never made tasty smoothies, and should not be reformed into anything other than inexistence.

News that made me say, give that man an Oscar

Over one million people in France took to the streets last week because that’s just what you do when the government says you have to work until you are 64 years old when you were planning to retire as soon as you turned 62. 

Honestly, I wish we would all take to the streets because we have to work at all, but that’s a conversation for another time.

Emmanuel Macron wants to raise the French retirement age from 62 to 64 because as the President of France his job is to help corporations exploit the people of France as much as possible. 

Macron’s history of being besties with corporations, including helping Uber destroy taxis in France while he was the Minister of Economics, makes him perfectly suited for his current role as ‘chief corporate helper; to exploit workers.

As a chief corporate helper Macron understands he just can’t tell the people, corporations want you to work more, so I’m making you do it. I mean he can, but then people will know they don’t live in a democracy and when people know they don’t live in a democracy they tend to stop listening to the government and get the urge to burn the corporate buildings down.

Instead of giving the people the truth and starting a revolution, Macron is acting like making people work two more years in their elderly years is the only way to save their pension – because apparently being an actor is now also one of the skill sets required to be a corporate helper. Macron is a double threat!

Despite his tremendous acting skills, the people are not falling for it, they know there are other ways to keep their pension including taxing corporations. Obviously Macron knows that too, but a corporate helper helps corporations not the people, so he is acting like he doesn’t.

Someone should give Macron an Oscar! It would be fitting because Oscars are generally given to white men who have done terrible things.

News that made me tell you capitalism doesn’t make sense

Online abortion pill pharmacies are tracking customers’ data and sharing it with Google because making money is more important than protecting customers’ data. Especially if that data can be used as evidence in court to imprison customers for doing something that should be legal. Why care if your customers will go to prison when you can use their sweet data to sell them more things?

Obviously the answer to that question is that question doesn’t make any sense. If someone goes to prison as a result of you snitching on them for using your product, they will most likely not be a repeat customer. Also, once other people start realising their abortion pharmacy is a snitch, they will no longer be customers. Snitches lose customers.

However, because capitalism doesn’t make sense, these online abortion pill pharmacies are choosing to ignore the fact that “prosecutors have used the purchase of online abortion pills as evidence” to convict people for abortions in states where it’s illegal, according to ProPublica.

I’m not only saying capitalism doesn’t make sense because it depends on exploiting workers and brainwashing them that everything is fine to the extent where workers will watch The Hunger Games and not realise we are all living in the Hunger Games already.

I’m also saying capitalism doesn’t make any sense because capitalism doesn’t even make sense for capitalists. Before you stop reading this column and send my editors a note about me becoming a capitalist sympathiser, hear me out.

Capitalists’ obsession with making as much money as they can possibly make immediately will cause them to do things that make them money in the short run but will lose them money in the long run. The abortion pill situation is obvious. Short term, collect customer data to sell them more things. Long term, lose customers because they went to prison.

Capitalists don’t have to worry about capitalism making sense though because the worst that can happen to them is to lose money they acquired from stealing people’s labour. And if you lose something you stole, did you really lose it?

Also if you lose 99% of 1 billion dollars because your customers went to prison, you still have enough money to come up with a new scam.

News that made me say Joe Biden hates whales

Joe Biden hates whales. Joe didn’t tell me he hates whales, but as much as I write about Joe, I wish he would have. I know Joe hates whales because Joe has refused to pass a regulation to lower ships’ speed limit so they don’t kill right whales.

I’m not saying there is a right type of whale to be, right whales are a species of whales. There is no such thing as a wrong whale unless you are talking about killer whales because killer whales are not whales, they are dolphins.

Right whales are an endangered species of whales that are being killed by speeding ships while they are having their babies – in what is known as their calving grounds. Conservationists have asked the government to “reduce the ship speed limits and the area of the speed limit” to save the whales, but Joe was like, no let’s let the endangered animals die because of MONEY. Yes, MONEY!

There are only 340 right whales left in the whole planet and Joe Biden refused the “emergency petition” to save these whales by setting a lower ship speed limit because the agency which would regulate the slower ship speeds doesn’t have enough money. Money, something that is made up, is preventing living things from being wiped out from the planet.

Meanwhile the pentagon has enough money to build a death star. If anyone from the pentagon is reading this, please don’t take this as a future project idea. I was making a joke.

The fact that Joe Biden has plenty of money for war and no money for whales should let you know that as long as the United States exists, there will always be wars and there will be less whales. So if you want a world with fewer wars and more whales, you know what to do.

See ya next week,

Marcela