Don Wilson:

"I have noticed a significant increase in general laxity about PPE since COVID masking has been dropped. A significant % of OR staff (esp anesthesia & RTs) not bothering to mask inside actual OR even when sterile fields are open & set up.

Nurses inside OR generally much more consistent (they directly handle & set up sterile equipment).

I’ve seen unmasked anesthesiologists & RTs for emergency CS & gyne cases… I don’t get it. We mask to prevent contamination of open surgical wounds. Just because COVID mask mandates are over doesn’t mean INSIDE an operating room is a mask free zone.

Used to be that it was unthinkable to be unmasked inside an active OR. Even in the hallways during active OR time. It’s a sad commentary on the impact of the antimask stupidity spilling over to areas where it can impact quality & safety of the patient care environment.

I’m just one person who chooses to be fastidious about masking inside the hospital, I can’t take on the entire system. But it’s discouraging to see & I wonder how many patients go on to have nosocomial surgical infections because of relaxed cultures around masking now."

https://x.com/heiltsuk_paleo/status/1780326358314614784

Yesterday I saw an article about Hantavirus prevention that didn't mention respiratory protection when cleaning up mouse poop. Just gloves, bleach, and wetting rather than sweeping. Which is better than nothing, but for a disease as dangerous as HPS, I'm going to put in the tiny extra effort of an N-95 also.

Construction workers are masking less around sawdust and worse.

The anti-mask brainrot runs deep.

^ this exactly.

Linking other post involving now occupational hazards and injuries to workers due to managers and owners' attitudes on PPE:

I regret to inform you that Discord's new Terms of Service includes an arbitration clause. You can find it here https://discord.com/terms/#16. This clause includes an opt-out, which I have transcribed here:

You can decline this agreement to arbitrate by emailing an opt-out notice to arbitration-opt-out@discord.com within 30 days of April 15, 2024 or when you first register your Discord account, whichever is later; otherwise, you shall be bound to arbitrate disputes in accordance with the terms of these paragraphs. If you opt out of these arbitration provisions, Discord also will not be bound by them.

These clauses are underhanded ways that corporations seek to deprive you of your right to participate in class-action lawsuits and your right to a jury trial. (This does only apply to us users ,other people still spread the word though )

#whats arbitration someone help me

Bad news, @noodelzmop. Arbitration basically means that if you want to sue Discord for whatever reason, the dispute needs to be handled in house. Specifically, in their house. If you don't get this email out, you're basically signing away your right to legal recourse if they do criminally shitty stuff to you, like with the McDonalds app.

I have been told that emailing "I am confirming that as of the date of this email, I am choosing to opt out of binding arbitration to settle disputes with Discord." With the Email you used for your discord account is enough for the notice but take this with a grain of salt as this was not said by a lawyer

reiterating that this only applies to US users

THIRTY DAY LIMIT BTW. I suggest taking sixty seconds to fire off a quick email with op’s recommended text. I have no plans to sue discord but better safe than sorry

glad to see those spreading the truth

Rb to force new people from twitter to eat bees

Oh, hey, I was wondering when I’d get to use this again.

did you just fucking have this

I have asking u alot but most of people in gaza right now needs help to evacute. If you can't donate help by sharing thank you

cis people will say “I found out I’m having a baby girl at my anatomy scan and I’m experiencing gender disappointment” but be mad when you say “who knows? maybe you’ll end up with a son anyway”

they found this post and they’re very very in their feelings about it

Cis people will basically just sag “I’m sexist” and you say “maybe you don’t have to be” and they say “well now I’m gonna be transphobic too”

The production value here is off the charts but this is also literally just what it feels like to play Uno.

legendaryjay_ on TikTok

So the new UNO anime looks promising.

Can someone make a full OP for the UNO anime I would watch the hell out of that

Hereditary UNO magic powers

That thing about how cats think humans are big kittens is a myth, y’know.

It’s basically born of false assumptions; folks were trying to explain how a naturally solitary animal could form such complex social bonds with humans, and the explanation they settled on is “it’s a displaced parent/child bond”.

The trouble is, cats aren’t naturally solitary. We just assumed they were based on observations of European wildcats - but housecats aren’t descended from European wildcats. They’re descended from African wildcats, which are known to hunt in bonded pairs and family groupings, and that social tendency is even stronger in their domesticated relatives. The natural social unit of the housecat is a colony: a loose affiliation of cats centred around a shared territory held by alliance of dominant females, who raise all of the colony’s kittens communally.

It’s often remarked that dogs understand that humans are different, while cats just think humans are big, clumsy cats, and that’s totally true - but they regard us as adult colonymates, not as kittens, and all of their social behaviour toward us makes a lot more sense through that lens.

The like to cuddle because communal grooming is how cats bond with colonymates - it establishes a shared scent-identity for the colony and helps clean spots that they can’t easily reach on their own.

They bring us dead animals because cats transport surplus kills back to the colony’s shared territory for consumption by pregnant, nursing, or sick colonymates who can’t easily hunt on their own. Indeed, that’s why they kill so much more than they individually need - it’s not for fun, but to generate enough surplus kills to sustain the colony’s non-hunting members.

They’re okay with us messing with their kittens because communal parenting is the norm in a colony setting, and us being colonymates in their minds automatically makes us co-parents.

It’s even why many cats are so much more tolerant toward very small children, as long as those children are related to one of their regular humans: they can tell the difference between human adults and human “kittens”, and your kittens are their kittens.

Basically, you’re going to have a much easier time getting a handle on why your cat does why your cat does if you remember that the natural mode of social organisation for cats is not as isolated solitary hunters, but as a big communal catpile - and for that purpose, you count as a cat.

That makes so much sense! Thanks for writing this. I was always wondering how the big clumsy kitten idea fits in with the fact that cats know we feed them.

@fadingstrobelight somehow this is even more adorable

Ngl this is kinda hilarious

Makes sense. I mean, a passenger of a cruise line isn't called a sailor, right? Astronaut literally means "star sailor."

OP how could you not include the first paragraph of the article

Huge oversight on my part you're absolutely right

This is what 5 months of intentional starvation looks like.

"Palestinians in Gaza demonstrate the impact of the Israeli and Egyptian blockade by stepping on scales to reveal their weight loss." from Mint Press, 15/Mar/2024:

Broke:

Belle has Stockholm syndrome because she falls in love with the Beast, her kidnapper.

Woke:

Stockholm syndrome was coined to slander a woman who had been in a hostage situation but openly criticized the poor police response which recklessly put her in more danger and escalated the violence. She was then belittled and discredited publically by the police for this.

So. Yeah. Maybe Belle does have Stockholm syndrome actually.

If anyone is curious here is the wikipedia section describing this.

[ID: Gif image from Disney's Beauty and the Beast with Gaston leading a large group of villagers down the road holding a torch. The atmosphere is dark.

Wikipedia screenshot containing the following:

According to accounts by Kristin Enmark, one of the hostages, the police however was acting incompetently, with little care for the hostages' safety, which forced the hostages to negotiate for their life and release with the robbers on their own. In the process the hostages saw the robbers behaving more rationally than police negotiators and therefore developed a deep distrust towards the latter. Enmark had criticized Bejerot specifically for endangering their lives by behaving aggressively and agitating the captors. She had criticized the police for pointing guns at the convicts while the hostages were in the line of fire and she had told news outlets that one of the captors tried to protect the hostages from being caught in the crossfire. She was also critical of prime minister Olof Palme, as she had negotiated with the captors for freedom, but the prime minister told her that she would have to content herself to die at her post rather than give in to the captors' demands. Ultimately, Enmark explained she was more afraid of the police whose attitude seemed to be a much larger, direct threat to her life than the robbers.]

Hope the ID helps, it's my first time writing one.

Here are some other facts you should know about Nils Bejerot: He had a major influence (this involved founding the "Swedish National Association for a Drug-free Society") on Sweden's zero-tolerance approach to drug use.

And he wrote "Barn, Serier, Samhälle" (Children, Comics, Society), basically the Swedish version of "Seduction of the Innocent"; an infamous anti-comics book by Fredric Wertham that led to the Comics Code Authority.

This is the man who coined the phrase "Stockholm syndrome", guys.

Too many people are unclear on the history of this term.

link to petition

Fun fact: the 2022 valedictorian speech at USC commencement was by a student whose family is from Ukraine. He devoted the majority of his speech to talking about Ukraine. This is an UNBELIEVABLE double standard.

have y’all seen that nasa pic of the earth with the sun behind it on the night time side it really really fucked me up my own soul became solid and like………….. weeped!

who wouldn’t see this and then look deeply into their own emotional playing field to see what improvements could be made purely inspired by the vulnerable earth. this is the face of all literal gods

#we live here!!!!!!!! those lights are us!!!!!!!!!!! #we’re the proof of life in the darkness!!!!!!!!!!

That ball of shiny blue Houses everybody anybody ever knew  -Chris Hadfield, “I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing)”

My redesign hot take is that if you’re aiming to “desexualize” a female character, don’t make her boobs smaller. You’re implying a lot here.

Instead of shrinking her boobs, try:

There are probably lots more options too! I’m not an artist! Just a person with a big chest and back pain!

The Cass Review, and what we can do about it

The UK government is making decisive moves toward banning trans healthcare outright. The NHS says it is adjusting its policies to be in line with the "cass report", a pseudoscientific report written by a transphobe that goes as far as to claim that little boys playing with trucks and little girls playing with dolls is biological, and which disregards dozens of scientifically sound previous studies into HRT and trans healthcare in order to reach its conclusions that trans healthcare for under 25s should be radically changed to discourage transition at every turn and make it as hard as possible for young people to transition.

These moves will kill countless young trans people. I would not have made it to 25 if healthcare wasn't available and I know so many other trans people wouldn't have either.

The mainstream reporting in the UK is keeping itself ideologically cohesive by claiming that trans people exist, nobody hates them, and they're very rare, and the big problem is the explosion of new cases of not-really-trans people who are clogging up the system (this is a lie, the system has been intentionally slowed by malicious neglect, it isn't even a resource issue, the clinics have far more capacity than the number of patients who are let through)

Once again, this is genocidal and is actually a commonplace methodology of genocide. The nazis asked GRT people to help them understand which Traveller families were "real" travellers and which were the fake ones, since they insisted it was only the fake ones who were the problem and who had to be exterminated (because a lot of nazi GRT policy was based on American indigenous reservation policy).

Labour, the main opposiiton party in the UK, has announced it will "follow the Cass Report", and implement these restrictions on trans healthcare once in government.

For the survival of young trans people, robust community structures must be developed immediately.

Efforts to change the electoral situation will proceed at a snail's pace and will be entirely at the whims of what is politically expedient. It will turn around, but it will take a long time. At the voting level, everyone in the UK who cares about trans people needs to make it clear that they won't vote for Labour unless they reverse position on this, and to be clear about this: Labour will not listen. They are PR Brained Psychopaths and they don't want to get into this "controversial" issue in a way that might cost them further popularity and the easy election win.

Wes Streeting, inhuman lab experiment and Labour Shadow Health Secretary has said that activists need to "stop protesting to ask us to be better opposition and start protesting to ask us to be better government", in other words their electoral promises are cynical reactionary bargains and deals to get them into power and the only point at which they will change anything is once they are in government, if at all. I know this sounds very "push Biden left" but I'm not saying give up now - to repeat, everyone who cares about trans people in the UK should tell Labour to get fucked right away, and then keep doing it as loudly as possible, but it's just not going to change until after the general election at least.

Another way to help could be through legal routes, like the work that The Good Law Project has been doing for trans people for several years now, but I don't know enough about the law to know if it can be used to challenge this at all.

We have to accept there is no electoral solution right now to this genocidal campaign against trans people in the UK, and while those efforts are ongoing trans people and cis allies need to fucking organise. Trans exclusive / separatist organising is riddled with issues, I don't want to cast hopelessness around but there are really very few of us and while it's absolutely necessary to privilege trans voices in trans organising and give us the deciding power and the autonomy, we need to utilise the support and time and labour of every cis person who is willing to help in whatever way they can.

Robust community structures means community structures that are helping young trans people get healthcare as an absolute basic starting point, but it means a lot more than that besides. We need community structures that are consciously organised by people who are taking responsibility for the community roles they are in and being completely explicit with each other about the nature and function of their organising. We need HRT community resources so young trans people can survive this medical segregation, we need drug user harm reduction spaces so that what people turn to in despair doesn't kill them, we need sober spaces so that people can get away from unhealthy coping responses, we need conflict resolution structures so that our problems are dealt with privately and nobody is left completely isolated, but more than any of those things, and in order to have all of those things, we desperately need trans assemblies

Assemblies are how we will get a community of robust radical organisers, because only by repeatedly practicing the ongoing process of democracy can people learn how to do it in a way that will facilitate their own organising. We have to empower the whole community to answer our own questions, come up with solutions, organise people into structures to enact those solutions and then do them. All this means is that an open door event convenes frequently (at least fortnightly) to discuss what is happening in the community. Trans people get the mic for allotted time, and discuss the issues, and then whatever voting structure the assembly uses facilitates further discussion, for example through working groups - the assembly breaks into smaller groups to discuss the topic and then representatives report the outcomes of those discussions back and consensus is reached from what the representatives report.

We have to get people engaging in this process because in order to effectively combat this situation trans people must agree on the solutions and then tell cis allies how to help and so far we haven't been doing that. We really really haven't been. But we could be with a little work. And as I'm saying, doing this will also empower everyone in the community to organise toward specific solutions for specific issues like HRT provision, sober spaces, housing, food, etc.

fuck

I'll have more to add to this post later I have to get to therapy I just got really mad when I saw the news this morning

Free Palestine protesters shut down the Golden Gate Bridge and 880 freeway in Oakland. This is huge🫡

And in Eugene, Oregon today...

Lots of other cities too!

Link

"The disruption appeared to span the country over several hours. Protesters in San Francisco parked vehicles on the Golden Gate Bridge, stopping traffic in both directions for four hours Monday morning, while hundreds of demonstrators blocked a highway in nearby Oakland, some by chaining themselves to drums of cement, California Highway Patrol representatives told The Washington Post. Some protesters headed toward a Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif., according to local TV station KRON4. In New York, dozens of protesters stopped traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge and held demonstrations on Wall Street, according to ABC7.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrations were also reported in Philadelphia, Chicago, Miami and San Antonio. Demonstrators’ targets ranged from major highways such as Interstate 5 in Eugene, Ore., to a countryside road leading to an aircraft engine manufacturer in Middletown, Conn.

They blocked roads leading to O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, which warned travelers on social media to consider alternate forms of transportation, as car travel was “substantially delayed this morning due to protest activity.” A similar obstruction on the expressway leading to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in Washington prompted travelers to take their luggage and cross roads on foot.

Police arrested dozens of people in several cities, but no significant violence had been reported as of Monday evening.

Protesters have stalled traffic, closed streets, disrupted daily life and interrupted events in major U.S. cities intermittently since the beginning of the Israel-Gaza war, but few have concurrently or consecutively affected travel in as many parts of the country as on Monday [April 15]."

-via The Washington Post, April 15, 2024

JK Rowling has used her billionaire legal team to silence a Jewish woman for telling the truth about her contempt for trans victims of the Holocaust.

Scotland’s network of “freedom of speech” organisations, as per usual, have nothing to say about the use of wealth to gag critics of the wealthy.

However fast they race to condemn the LGBT+ community for saying the names of those who harm us. Statements at the ready to insist that transphobes no one wants to work with anymore must be given every possible opportunity to gain from their bigotry.

But it's not the billionaires who are being silenced, as our media breathlessly echo their every hateful proclamation.

It's journalists and activists forced to publicly humiliate themselves under the weight and the threat of billionaire legal teams or be driven into destitution.

We deserve better. Freedom of speech needs to mean something

The Streisand Effect strikes

This will swiftly become one of the primary things JK Rowling is remembered for. Trying to erase crimes of the Holocaust against trans people and then silencing Jewish journalists for calling her out.

With your help we can make sure JK Rowling is known as a Holocaust denier first, author of mediocre children's books second