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   volkris@qoto.org's status on Sunday, 15-Sep-2024 05:32:16 JST volkris

   I’ve heard it said that if you don’t vote with whichever party then you are a coward. I think that’s exactly backwards, and even reflects poorly all the person making that argument. It doesn’t take much courage to go with the group.

   Instead I go the other way: no matter which party you might prefer in general, it takes courage to say they nominated a moron, and fortunately the other party also nominated a loser, so no matter what the US is going to slog through these next few years.

   In my opinion the courageous position is to say no, you nominated a moron, and I’m not going to give you my vote. We’re going to be okay I guess, whether you win or not, but I’m not going to let you assume that you have my vote if you insist on nominating a moron. You should have nominated someone better. You should have nominated someone worthy of my vote. Do better next time.

   That’s the state of #USPolitics . As South Park said, big douche versus turd sandwich. So screw both #Democrats and #Republicans. Neither of you managed to nominate someone worth voting for, so I’m voting for my dog.

   To give either party our votes is to sign on to their nomination of garbage people. Let’s not. Let’s say that they need to actually nominate worthwhile administrators.

   But more practically, let’s focus on #Congress. No matter who wins this election, they’re going to suck, but we can still express ourselves through our representation in Congress, and that’s honestly how it should be anyway.

   Check out your representatives. See how they have actually been voting, and vote them out if they have been letting you down. That’s really where our focus should be anyway.

   Not on which jerk ends up in the Oval Office.

   (But thank God #Biden is on his way out, as he has been terrible for #science in the US, which has not gotten nearly enough attention from the press.)

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   Chuck Darwin (cdarwin@c.im)'s status on Friday, 02-Aug-2024 03:38:09 JST Chuck Darwin

   “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago 🔸when she happened to turn Black🔸 and now she wants to be known as Black.
   So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Harris, whose mother was Indian American and whose father is Black.

   The moment was shocking, but for those who have followed Mr. Trump’s divisive language,
   it was hardly surprising.

   ♦️The former president has a history of using race to pit groups of Americans against one another, amplifying a strain of racial politics that has risen as a generation of Black politicians has ascended♦️

   The audacity of Mr. Trump, a white man, questioning how much a Black woman truly belongs to Black America was particularly incendiary.

   And it evoked 🔷an ugly history in this country, in which white America has often declared the racial categories that define citizens, and sought to determine who gets to call themselves what.🔷

   “Give me a break,” said Fred Sweets, a contributing editor at The St. Louis American who watched the discussion from the third row.
   “He seemed to be denigrating her background. She knows who she is.”

   Ms. Harris has embraced her dual racial identities.

   She has long identified as Black and was shaped by several Black institutions. She graduated from Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington, D.C., and there joined Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation’s oldest Black sorority.

   She has spoken extensively about growing up in what she described as a Black community in Berkeley, Calif.

   "She had two Black babies, and she raised them to be two Black women,” Harris told The New York Times in a 2016 interview about her mother.

   On Wednesday evening, Ms. Harris responded to Mr. Trump’s comment at an event hosted by one of the nation’s most prominent Black sororities, saying they showed “#divisiveness and #disrespect.”

   “The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth,” she said, making no direct reference to Mr. Trump’s personal attacks.

   “We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us
   — they are an essential source of our strength.”

   Attacks on Ms. Harris’s racial background have circulated among right-wing figures and Mr. Trump’s close allies for years.

   In 2019, Donald Trump Jr. shared a social media post from an alt-right personality that falsely claimed Ms. Harris was
   🔥not Black enough 🔥to be discussing the plight of Black Americans during a primary debate.

   Though Mr. Trump later deleted the post, it spread widely across conservative social media, prompting a wave of accounts to question her background,
   👉which was exactly the point of the effort, according to some far-right activists.
   https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/us/politics/trump-harris-race.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

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   Sean Tilley (deadsuperhero@social.wedistribute.org)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Jun-2024 13:17:31 JST Sean Tilley

   in reply to

   I don’t know what else to say other than, shit’s kind of bad, and refusing to embrace any kind of positive motion to make things better in this aspect is awful. I’m not saying everybody has to pitch in, but some of the most toxic people I’ve come across on here barely lift a finger to do anything other than complain. And they just do that, for years and years.

   In my headspace, I just imagine a bunch of pissed-off anarchists that all hate each other because they’re the wrong kind of anarchist, and they’re just content to sit back and complain and be miserable until this network rots into the ground.

   To me, that fucking sucks, and I don’t want any part in it.

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   𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not nonbiological" (lana@beige.party)'s status on Friday, 07-Jun-2024 03:09:02 JST 𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not nonbiological"

   On the 2nd of July 1813, a young man successfully passed his examination of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, earning his doctoral degree qualifying him as a medical surgeon.

   His medical education had not been without obstacles. In fact, he was very nearly denied entry into medical school at all - not because of his grades or intelligence, but because his short stature, unbroken voice, delicate features and smooth skin led many to suspect that Barry was a young boy not past puberty. The University Senate at Edinbourgh initially attempted to block Barry's application for the final examinations due to this apparent youth. However, David Erskine, the 11th Earl of Buchan, and a close family friend, personally persuaded the Senate to relent. What neither the Senate nor Lord Buchan knew at the time was that young James Barry's stature and voice were not due to his youth, but to his status as a trans man.

   So, in 1812, at the age of 23, a young James Barry earned, first his medical degree, and then not a year later, his license to practice as a surgeon. Barry immediately enlisted in the British Army and was enlisted as a Hospital Assistant, taking posts in Chelsea and then Plymouth. Not two years later, in December of 1815, he was promoted to Assistant Surgeon to the Forces (a rank equivalent to lieutenant).

   Once again, Lord Buchan came to the young man's aid. His next posting was to Cape Town, South Africa - which had been permanently ceded to the United Kingdom from the Dutch a year prior as part of the treaty following the Napoleonic Wars. Through Lord Buchan, Barry had a letter of introduction to the Governor of Cape Town, a Lieutenant General Lord Charles Somerset.

   Charles' daughter had been gravely ill for some time, and Barry was able to nurse the young girl back to full health in what some called a miraculous recovery. Charles then welcomed Barry into the family with open arms. James became his personal physician and the two maintained a close personal friendship for years.

   In 1822, at the age of 33, Somerset appointed Barry as Colonial Medical Inspector. This was an extraordinary career jump from Barry's previously low military rank, bringing with it a lot of new responsibility which James was determined not to squander. Over the next ten years of work in the Cape, James was able to effect significant changes such as improved sanitation and water conditions, better conditions for enslaved people, prisoners and the mentally ill, and the creation of a sanctuary for a local leper population.

   But his crowning achievement in the field of medicine was performing the first ever known C-Section birth in which both the mother and child survived. The child was named James Barry Munnik in Barry's honor, and the name was passed down through the family for generations. One of that child's later descendants, still bearing the same name, became Prime Minister of South Africa. General James Barry Munnik Hertzog, better known as Barry Hertzog or J. B. M. Hertzog, was one of the principle advocates during the late 1920's and early 1930's for the development of Afrikaner culture and was determined to prevent Afrikaners from being excessively influenced by British culture.

   Barry was promoted again to the rank of Surgeon to the Forces on the 22nd of November, 1827, and subsequently posted to Mauritius. A year into his assignment, Lord Somerset took ill, and Barry went AWOL, risking his entire military career, to go care for his sick friend in England. He stayed there until Charles' death in 1831.

   James then took a series of postings, to Jamaica, the island of St Helena, the West Indies, Malta, Corfu, and Canada. He dealt with outbreaks of yellow fever, and a cholera epidemic which eventually claimed the lives of over a million people worldwide. Barry rose through the ranks, earning promotion after promotion, relentlessly fighting for better food, sanitation and proper medical care for prisoners and lepers, as well as soldiers and their families wherever he went.

   Barry was outraged by unnecessary suffering, and took a heavy-handed and sometimes tactless approach to demanding improvements for the poor and underprivileged which often incited anger from officials and military officers. On several occasions Barry was both arrested and (temporarily) demoted for the extremity of his behavior.

   In 1859, over his very vocal protests, Inspector General James Barry was forcefully retired from the military, citing his now advanced age and ill health. James retired to London, and died six years later of dysentery.

   The charwoman who laid out his body discovered James' assigned sex at birth and attempted to blackmail Barry's physician, a Major D.R. McKinnon, who had issued the death certificate, threatening to go public with the knowledge if she was not paid. When McKinnon refused, she followed through with her threat. As the situation became more and more public knowledge, George Graham of the General Register Office asked McKinnon about the story's veracity. McKinnon responded in writing. Among his many remarks about having known James for many years, he said this: "[The charwoman] seemed to me to think that she had become acquainted with a great secret & wished to be paid for keeping it, I informed her that all Dr Barry's relatives were dead, & that it was no secret of mine, & that my own impression was that Dr Barry was a Hermaphrodite. But whether Dr Barry was male, female, or hermaphrodite I do not know, nor had I any purpose in making the discovery as I could positively swear to the identity of the body as being that of a person whom I had been acquainted with for a period of eight or nine years."

   Barry is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, with a Portland stone headstone, on which is inscribed simply "Dr James Barry, Inspector General of Hospitals"

   Tell our stories.

   #PRIDE #TransHistory

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   Dr. Lucky Tran :verified: (luckytran@med-mastodon.com)'s status on Wednesday, 21-Feb-2024 08:42:17 JST Dr. Lucky Tran :verified:

   Latest Biobot data shows U.S. COVID wastewater levels are rising again, and higher than they have ever been compared to the same date in previous years.

   In other words, COVID levels are still high and taking longer to go down after this winter's peak. Keep taking precautions.

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   Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】:blobfoxgooglymlem: (tk@bbs.kawa-kun.com)'s status on Tuesday, 30-Jan-2024 00:14:18 JST Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】:blobfoxgooglymlem:

   Oregon’s ‘Rocketguy’ rebounding after earthly struggles

   Fifteen years after he announced plans to launch himself to the edge of space in a homemade rocket, Bend’s Brian Walker remains earthbound.

   Walker, now 59, was widely known as “Rocketguy” during his nearly three years in the spotlight, when he appeared on dozens of television talk shows to discuss his dream of becoming the first person to mount a do-it-yourself mission to space.

   Due to his hectic media tour schedule and an unanticipated sharp decline in his income, Walker was never able to complete the rocket he hoped to ride 35 to 50 miles into the sky. A brief marriage failed, and Walker slipped into a deep depression, battling suicidal thoughts and struggling to regain the creative spark he’d enjoyed in earlier years.

   In the years that followed, he sold off “Cape Sagebrush,” the miniature spaceflight training campus he’d built on the northeast fringe of Bend, and moved into a more modest home near NE Bear Creek Road. From there, he’s launching what he calls his “comeback,” starting with a new website, new inventions, a still-under-wraps entry he hopes to debut at the Bend Pet Parade on July 4 and a similarly secretive idea for a space-based spectacle that can be seen all over the world.

   Diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2009, Walker wants to serve as a living example of how creativity and mental illness often go hand in hand. He wants his rise and fall - and he hopes, his next rise - to be a source of inspiration for others struggling with similar issues.