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Propaganda under cut! (There may be unmarked spoilers. If you'd like to add extra propaganda in a reblog or another post, please tag this blog when you do so!)

Cambridge professor of sociology Jason Arday is accused of plagiarism by another academic

the accuser is a "race realist" who believes that in a true meritocracy all university professors would be white. this is somehow not acknowledged much during the entire ordeal

this leads to several days of media coverage demanding an investigation, or that Arday is expelled from his post immediately

somehow this accusation that has no effect on the lives of 99.99% of the population becomes FRONT PAGE NEWS in all the newspapers for multiple days, above anything else happening in the UK or the world at large

following intense media scrutiny, Arday resigns his post as a Cambridge professor

today, august 14th, days after resigning, Arday is found dead at his home in Battersea

This article by professor Kehinde Andrews clarifies more about the story of racist harassment Arday has been suffering since he fucking got a teaching job at Cambridge in the first place, in 2023, as the FIRST Black professor in that fucking stupid institution, who sure is taking it's sweet time defending their worker, despite already fucking checking his work for plagiarism and saying he didn't do it:

https://www.voice-online.co.uk/opinion/comment/2026/08/07/ardays-resignation/

1. He wasn’t the first Black Professor at Cambridge, but he WAS the youngest X

2. He was ALSO autistic, and nonverbal for the first 11 years of his life X

We no longer have the strength to endure what is happening to us.

This is one of the worst tragedies in history.

Please speak up for us. Share, comment, and let the world know that two million people are suffering every day.

I’m not only trying to survive…

My father is sick, and I can’t afford his treatment. Watching him get worse while I can do nothing is breaking me.

I just need to buy medicine and food for my family.

My grandmother needs €60 every day (€420 per week) because the medicine warehouses were bombed. The medicines are extremely expensive because they are in very limited supply.

My grandmother suffers from kidney problems. If she does not take her medication regularly, it could lead to kidney failure and she could lose her life.💔😭

Please, I don't want to lose her… She has raised me since I was little.

Donation link

🟢 Multiple vetted

✅ @/gazavetter – List Number #14

✅ @/90-ghost

✅ @/gaza-evacuation-funds – List Number #451

🆘The lack of donations could cost me my grandmother’s life.💔

sleep apnea is more common in people who are fat.

society decided for some reason that this meant that being fat causes sleep apnea. its often difficult to get referrals for sleep apnea treatment if you are fat, because some PCPs will tell you try losing weight first.

turns out!! having untreated sleep apnea causes weight gain in a not-insignificant number of people. it also makes it fucking impossible for many people to lose weight.

my husband worked out the same amount before he got a cpap as he does now. there have been no major diet changes either. yet he has been losing weight -- and gaining muscle tone -- consistently since he started using a cpap in january.

also, his blood pressure -- which was high, which docs blamed on his weight/diet -- went down significantly within one month of starting cpap treatment, before his weight changed significantly.

ANYWAYS. this is getting long. two final thoughts.

- I Want To Strangle Medical Fatphobia With My Bare Fucking Hands

It can almost certainly tell different species apart based on the shape of those air bladders. And it can tell if a fish has something weird inside it, like a metal hook. In Hawaii, false killer whales often pluck tuna off fishing lines, and “they’ll know where the hook is inside that fish,” Aude Pacini, who studies these animals, tells me. “They can ‘see’ things that you and I would never consider unless we had an X-ray machine or an MRI scanner.”

This penetrating perception is so unusual that scientists have barely begun to consider its implications. The beaked whales, for example, are odontocetes that look dolphin-esque on the outside—but on the inside, their skulls bear a strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps, many of which are only found in males.

Pavel Gol’din has suggested that these structures might be the equivalent of deer antlers—showy ornaments that are used to attract mates. Such ornaments would normally protrude from the body in a visible and conspicuous way, but that’s unnecessary for animals that are living medical scanners.’

I'm not sure if I ever shared this story before here, but in Curacao, when I was allowed to assist in a guest interaction programme, there was suddenly consternation in the pool behind us. A guest had entered the water and the dolphins were going crazy, paying no heed to the trainers anymore. The lead trainer that was with me gave the dolphins to me to watch over while she went to help. When she came back she told me what had happened. The guest that had caused so much uproar had left the water again and was asked if he had done anything to upset the dolphins. He hadn't, and he couldn't imagine what was wrong... until he mentioned he had a pacemaker. The younger dolphins in the pool had never seen someone with a pacemaker before and apparently it rocked their world.

I do not know where the app store is.

Okay, this lady explains to me (she is very good at customer service and there’s absolutely no sign on her face that she is baffled how someone like me can even be alive, even though logically she HAS TO be thinking that), it should be in your apps. Look at your apps.

I do not know how to look at my apps. I use like 4 apps (call, text, photos, music) and I put them on the front screen thing ages ago. I push all of the buttons on the phone and apps do not appear. There’s nothing in settings or anything either.

Try swiping up, she says.

I try this a few times. My phone does not register the contact. On the fourth time, it realises that I want it to do something, and oh, there are the apps. We install the app. We do all the sign-in and authentification code shit and it does not work. We do it again and it does not work again.

“If I had a checkbook I’d be out of here by now,” I say. She laughs because it is true. We’ve been here for twenty minutes. I restart my phone to see if that’s the problem and grumble under my breath about how banking never used to be so complicated. As I open the app again, I ask how people do internet banking if they don’t have phones.

She seems puzzled by the question. “We have ways for them to do banking,” she says, “but most… most people have phones.”

She’s probably right. You probably need a phone to survive if you’re homeless these days.

The program loads now but catches us in an endless sign-in loop and the problem, we learn from a supervisor who’s wandered over (presumably to see how helping one idiot put an app on their phone could possibly be taking so long) is actually not on my end. There’s something wrong with the version of the app that the woman assisting me has put on my account on the computer (that’s her half in this operation), so we have to uninstall the app on both systems and reinstall it. Fine. I uninstall the app. Now to go to the app store.

I have forgotten how to access the app store. I push all of the buttons on the phone and apps do not appear. There’s nothing in settings or anything either.

Try swiping up, the woman says.

Oh. There’s the app store.

We install it and get caught in an endless loop again but I am computer savvy enough to know that if restarting and reinstalling doesn’t work then sometimes just trying the same thing over and over again will make it work for no reason, and it does, after I sign in three times in a row we can FINALLY authenticate the app and I can FINALLY use it for two-factor authentication and I CAN FINALLY DO INTERNET BANKING AGAIN.

“Thanks for your help,” I say.

“No problem.”

“I’m sorry it took so long,” I say.

“It’s really not a problem,” she says, and because she’s a professional it’s totally convincing, but I have helped people with tech before and I know how much it sucks. I look at this woman who, on any other day, would be a good few years older than me, but not today. For today, I am a doddering 96-year-old woman who wishes for a simple chequebook and does not like smartphones.

I get up, and I pick up my bag and my walking stick, and I leave the bank, thinking about the scarf I’ve been knitting and how much more work I have to do on it. I wonder if I should bake scones tonight.

Just because something exists doesn’t make it a positive addition to my life. I also don’t have fancy clothes I won’t wear, or a subscription to any streaming services, or an expensive car (well I don’t drive, but if I did I still wouldn’t get an expensive car), or any internet-connected household appliances. Just because something has existed for ages doesn’t mean I have to want to use it.

Companies absolutely should not expect me to have a more up-to-date smartphone. My grandmother reluctantly bought a flip phone to keep in contact with family members in an emergency, but doesn’t like or understand smartphones. With this security system, she can’t bank at the library. The world is full of homeless or impoverished people who need phones to survive but absolutely cannot afford to keep fucking getting new ones. I have a lot to say about our high-consumerist, planned-obsolescence-laden culture, and I gotta say when companies expect you to get rid of perfectly serviceable handheld computers every two years and get a new one just so you can use their basic services, that is NOT reasonable. That is NOT okay. That is NOT an expectation that anyone should have. How would we be if people did that with clothes? You can’t eat in this restaurant unless the clothes you’re wearing were made within the last few years? It’s fucking stupid.

The only thing physically wrong with my phone is that the screen’s a bit scratched up and doesn’t register contact all the time, and for that reason I do intend to replace it; I’m waiting until I finish my job (ten weeks) before I change phone service providers to one that’ll let me use a cheaper handset. (Unlocked handsets are so much more pricey.) That’s a reasonable reason for me to get a new (very cheap, very basic) handset. “The new iPhone Zigglybob Jenga 4 is out so everyone needs the fancyphone!” is not, and basic life services like banking should not expect me to have a smartphone at all. (I would prefer a flip phone. I only went to smartphones in the first place because I needed Google Maps a lot; I don’t need google maps here but everyone’s forcing me to use sixteen billion apps to do anything instead.)

“Customers without smartphones are not second class customers, they’re customers.”

Part of my job is to talk folks into using our website or app, but even with that in mind we have folks who are blind or don’t get internet out where they live or CAN’T have the website or app for security reasons because they’ve gotten scammed so hard before and simply cannot be trusted to not give out their credentials, that kind of thing.