Antonio Dias

...at my follow-up from ER visit & my primary's just asked me to sign a "consent to record" form! They *claim* it "doesn't get saved" and that "there's no privacy concern"! 🤬 NO FUCKING WAY CAN YOU RECORD ME IF I CAN''T RECORD YOU!

Beluga Delphinapterus leucas

About three-quarters of the Germans killed in World War II were done in by Soviets. Some of those Soviets were women. Some of those women flew airplanes and dropped explodey death from above. The Germans called them Nachthexen—the “Night Witches,” and they were fucking terrified of them.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: June 12, 1942--

They made up the 588th Night Bomber Regiment. During the war they flew approximately 23,000 sorties, dropping about 3,000 tons of bombs along with many thousands of those shells that set shit on fire, at night, using outdated wooden biplanes. They played an important role and were valued and respected by the Red Army. Jk. Men are elbow-skinned cocklobsters and the Night Witches were subject to skepticism and sexual harassment.

The fucking Nazis called them witches because their planes made a “whooshing” noise that reminded them of a witch’s broomstick or some bullshit, I don’t know. Those kind of witches don’t exist but that didn’t stop men from calling them that and murdering them for it across the ages. Angry tangent over. The Nazis hated them so much that any Luftwaffe pilot who shot one down automatically got the Iron Cross, a prestigious German medal for valor.

The Soviet Union wasn’t exactly a bastion of feminism, and women had been barred from combat. But with Nazi shitwaffles knocking on the gates of Moscow they were like yeah I guess we better let the women fight too. So they gave them old crop-dusting planes and said do what you can. Their first mission was on June 12, 1942, in a bombing raid on the Southern front.

The Night Witches didn’t use radios and therefore couldn’t be easily tracked. The only warning you got that you were about to be blown into Nazi bits was that telltale whoosh before the kaboom. They were all volunteers, mostly in their teens and early ‘20s. They wore hand-me-down uniforms and flew highly flammable planes with no parachutes and no guns. Their faces often froze flying in open cockpits through the Russian winter.

Carrying a bomb under each wing, each night 40 two-person crews flew as many as 18 missions a night. One of the Night Witches, Nadezhda Popova, who lived to be 91 and flew 852 missions in the war, said, “Almost every time we had to sail through a wall of enemy fire.” They effectively used distraction tactics. Flying in groups of three, two would draw the attention of spotlights and twist and turn and say haha fucker you can’t get me while the third dropped its bombs, then they’d switch up and the next would do a bombing run while the others played decoy.

Thirty of the 261 Night Witches were killed in action and 23 were awarded Hero of the Soviet Union. Alas, they were disbanded shortly after the war, and not included in Moscow’s victory day parade despite being the most decorated unit in the Soviet Air Force. Until recently, they were largely forgotten by history. Because men were envious of their success, I guess.

On this day, 12 June 1963, Medgar Wiley Evers, a Black civil rights activist from Mississippi involved in efforts to overturn segregation at the University of Mississippi, was shot in the back and killed by Byron De La Beckwith as he pulled into his driveway after returning from a meeting in the early morning.

Beckwith, a white supremacist and member of the white supremacist Citizens' Council, was arrested, but when he was put on trial – twice – by all-white juries, they were all illegally screened and investigated by the state beforehand. The former governor of the state interrupted the second trial to shake his hand while Evers' widow, Myrlie, was testifying. So Beckwith walked free, and for years boasted about the murder at KKK rallies. He also unsuccessfully sought the Democratic Party nomination as a gubernatorial candidate.

However, after years of campaigning by Myrlie, she succeeded in getting the case reopened, and in 1994 Beckwith was eventually convicted and put in prison where he died a few years later.

This vile behaviour is being goaded on by far right agitators and parties like Reform UK and the media pretending like these nasty thuggish arseholes have “legitimate” concerns rather than just being maladjusted, pathetic little cunts who can’t stand their own irrelevance.

Anthony Goldsmith

The tongue plays a central role in breathing, gait, and posture of the entire body. Contrary to popular belief, its own posture is never static but always in motion. How the tongue moves will go on to influence your metabolism, nervous system, and the shape of your body or face.

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Anthony Goldsmith

This extraordinary Aboriginal Rock Art image is not simply an ancient paintings.

Rock Art are fragments of one of the world's oldest continuous artistic traditions, created across Australia over tens of thousands of years. From the Wandjina ancestors of the Kimberley to the remarkable X-ray paintings of Arnhem Land, Aboriginal rock art preserves stories, ceremonies, spiritual beliefs, and connections to Country that stretch back into the Ice Age.

1) Figured this out.

You know, power is a most extraordinary thing. Everybody pursues it: the hermit, the general, the scientist, the housewife, the husband. We all want power: the power that money gives, the power to dominate, the power of knowledge, the power of capacity. It gives us a position, a prestige, and that is what we want. And power is evil, whether it is the power of the dictator, the power of the wife over the husband or the husband over the wife. It is evil because it forces others to conform, to adjust; and in that process there is no freedom. And we want it, very subtly or very crudely; and that is why we pursue knowledge. Knowledge is so important to most of us, and we look up to the scholars with their intellectual tricks, because with knowledge goes power.

Please listen, not merely to me, but to your own minds, brains and hearts. Watch it there, and you will see how eagerly most of us want this power. And where there is the search for power there is no learning. Only an innocent mind can learn; only a young, fresh mind delights in learning, not a mind, not a brain burdened with knowledge, with experience. So a religious mind is always learning, and there is no end to learning. Learning is not the accumulation of knowledge. In holding to knowledge and adding to knowledge you are ceasing to learn. Do please follow this to the very end.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Image: Native American woman Cecilia Bearchum, a tribal elder of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in northeastern Oregon

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I knew a wise woman And she said to me That the river would mold me And the wild wind would cool me The trickster the coyote He would fool me That father sun would warm me Mother earth would clothe me Grandmother moon would greet me And of the old ways she would teach me Wise woman, she told me To always walk lightly Tread the earth ever gently Lovingly so preciously And take from her sparingly She said, to share with others What you have learned from me Be still and breathe, ever patiently For the web of life Has woven what is to be But you must still choose Your own path, you will see And lastly, the wise woman said to me To listen to the wise one That dwells within me To walk my path in balance Is to be free More than just words So mote it be.