I don't understand what Tumblr is

Iranian women started an AMAZING trend on tik tok, proving that no matter how hard men try to control women and take away their autonomy, women WILL ALWAYS fight back and tear their freedom from the hands of their oppressors

We barely know anything about Madagascar pre-500CE. We don’t even know whether the island had a permanent population before then, despite finding a bunch of much older signs of temporary human presence.

Malagasy mythology makes mention of the vazimba, a “precursor” ethnic group that might or might not be distinct from Madagascar’s current population.

The point is, we do not know.

So you were in Madagascar when the pyramids were being built in Egypt, i.e. during one of the most obscure, most undocumented parts of Madagascar’s human history?

Flamingos can survive in low oxygen, high altitude, high temperatures, low temperatures, high alkaline, they can and will drink boiling water and they can be completely frozen at night and still get up the next morning

(animal death) this is a real undoctored photograph (*though the body was stood up for the shot) of a dead flamingo on the surface of lake natron, a lake so salty and so alkaline that it’s naturally carbonated like soda and would eat through your stomach lining if you drank from it.

When this photo went viral years ago, most people assumed this poor flamingo must have been killed by the lake.

It is actually the lake where 75% of its global population are hatched. This is a photo from the same lake:

RATING: RELIABLE

Flamingos can survive in high altitudes, hypersaline conditions, and caustic lakes.

Source: ‘All flamingo species have evolved to live in some of the planet’s most extreme wetlands, like caustic “soda lakes”, hypersaline lagoons or high-altitude salt flats.’

They can survive water so alkaline it burns human skin.

Source: ‘More than a million lesser flamingos breed in Tanzania’s Lake Natron, for instance, a lake fed by hot springs with water so alkaline that it can strip away human skin (one pioneering flamingo researcher named Leslie Brown spent months in Nairobi General Hospital after burning his legs wading out to observe where the birds nested).’

They can drink water at near-boiling temperatures.

Source: ‘They can drink water at near boiling point to collect freshwater from springs and geysers at lake edges. If no freshwater is available, flamingos can use glands in their head that remove salt, draining it out from their nasal cavity.’

The lakes they inhabit can freeze overnight, and the flamingos can survive once it thaws in the morning.

Source: ‘The birds may seem to epitomize the tropics, but they also live in the Andes, 15,000 feet above sea level, where they rest on lakes that freeze around them overnight.

“You’ll see them sitting there like snowballs, frozen on ice,” Dr. Arengo said. “And as the temperature warms up, they thaw out, fluff themselves up and go about their business.”’

The photo is indeed from Lake Natron, taken by photographer Nick Brandt. The content of the lake chemically preserves animal corpses that die there. You can see more photos of this here.

It is also true that 75% of Lesser Flamingos are hatches on Lake Natron.

Source: ‘The lake’s landscape is surreal and deadly—and made even more bizarre by the fact that it’s the place where nearly 75 percent of the world’s lesser flamingos are born.’

Some species of Flamingo eat cyanobacteria or algae.

A TIM scared to go outside and scared to interact with people, including other men, is considered by progressives and leftists not paranoid, but reasonably fearful. It’s such a scary time to be trans, they say. There’s a genocide going on, they claim. It’s perfectly understandable that a trans woman is scared and wants his transfem spaces, his communities, his transfem specific resources.

I am a raccoon biologist and one of the few people in the state allowed to take in captive bred raccoons that had been possessed illegally. The raccoon in the photos is Moonshine, but she is currently at the animal sanctuary where I work as I had been quarantining multiple new intakes from an abuse case. I still have two males (Rum Tum Tugger and Electra) left in my home enclosure as we are getting them neutered and then hopefully sending them to an AZA accredited zoo.

She died of an amniotic fluid embolism, which is rare but very deadly.

This post gives another example of a surrogate dying and includes this disturbing information:

That said, in terms of the development of allergies and metabolic disorders that are higher in IVF babies, there is a hypothesis that cells are incredibly sensitive to the environment, which would include being sensitive to freezing. However, nothing is proven specifically about cryo and embryos being worse than fresh implantation.

Interestingly, a very large cohort study found that IVF offspring implanted from frozen cells culture showed no statsically signifant effects for development of immune issues. HOWEVER(!) A link was shown between immune issues and FRESH implantation! The study states it could just be chance, but the number show that it is actually fresh (not frozen embryo) implantation that can trigger immune issues in the offspring later.

Now, the development of immune and metabolic disorders, and especially asthma and allergies, on IVF offspring is quite studied. The biggest factor appears to be in the placenta of women who have recieved IVF protocols. Basically for some reason, IVF treatments mess up the mother's gene expression in the placenta and this alteration in the placenta in turn messes up the fetus, which obviously in turn affects the offspring once born.

There is also the stress load of the mother during pregnancy. Infertility and IVF treatments are incredibly stressful on the mother, both mentally and physically. Mothers doing IVF have increased cortisol and anxiety levels compared to mothers who don't do IVF. This can impact (negatively) fetal development of important immune organs and microbiota.

Studies have shown that the most likely cause so far for the allergy issues in IVF offspring is actually stress levels in the mother PRE-implantation. That doesn't discount any placental or pregnancy complications but it seems that the mother's stress levels and the IVF protocols themselves are the strongest determining factors.

So add all that to a surrogate who as people have explained above is not even genetically related to the embryo! It is ripe with potential problems of placental development.

All this said: you will find a lot of controversy about even the theory that IVF/ART can impact immune development in any way. Personally, I think this denialism is due to the industry and money behind ART/surrogacy. They don't want anything that could ever limit or reduce their bottom-line by scaring away couples. It is a business, not healthcare. Although, I do sort of think the entire worry is unfounded. I don't think 99.9% of the women (and men) who undergo ART particularly care about the 8-14% higher risk their fetus would have of developing allergy, asthma, or other immune and metabolic disorders. I think most wouldn't think twice about that "small" risk. Mostly because I think couples who undergo these procedures don't really care about children at all, they only care about themselves. It is a purely selfish incentive and journey.

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.

Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.

This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.

There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”

In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.

I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.

I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.

But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.

I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?

Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?

Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?

The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."

— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"

me: yeah i know, they’re all primary colors, it’s perfect

When you go for an MLS (Master’s of Library Science, which is a thing, and which is usually required for “professional-level” library work [which is also a weird and contentious concept that I won’t go into here]), one of the things you study is the organization of information. This deals with how to determine what a book or other material is “about"—a concept we tongue-in-cheek call “aboutness"—and how to convey that to a potential user of the item and make it easy for them to find. Things like keywords and subject headings, do I put this book about how often wild birds attack aerial drones in with books about birds or with books about technology, if its a fictional novel do I put fantasy in it’s own section or mix it in with all of the other fiction, so on and so on.

OP is organizing books by how they would look for them. OP’s partner is thinking in terms of aboutness. This is a system that works for OP because it’s their personal library: they know basically what books they own and they only own books that are relevant to them, and if they know what the book looks like, that can be a quick way to find it.

In a library that assumes the public (or people who do not own that particular collection of books) are using the collection, that doesn’t work. Books are often re-issued in multiple covers, or re-bound in new covers when they get worn out, and if the user doesn’t know what the book looks like or is expecting a different cover, they’re lost. That’s why non-personal libraries used standardized cataloging systems like the Dewey Decimal System or Library of Congress System to organize a book by what it’s “about”, and then put books about the same or similar topics together, marked with labels and signage so a person unfamiliar with the book or collection can find their way to it.

Basically, OP’s system works for their own personal library, because it’s best suited to how the primary user—OP themselves—looks for books. OP’s librarian partner is coming from a background of thinking in terms of a public-facing collection, where aboutness is the key criteria and communicating it to a user unfamiliar with the collection is the priority.

I have told him multiple times that she doesn't want to be pet, she has a history of abuse and he completely ignores it. Sometimes this guy has a friend outside with him, and I have said to his friend IN FRONT OF HIM, that my dog is afraid of men because of abuse history.

This guy literally said, "It's okay I'm a girl". (he literally said girl btw, not even woman). And he continues to keep trying to talk my dog and bother her to the point I've now had to go completely out of my way by 15 minutes to get to the park.

And it's just funny because my dog obviously doesn't know what a fucking transgender is. She is following her natural instincts based of past experiences. She recognizes a man and is afraid because she has been hurt by men before. And it's no different than women recognizing potentional danger.

Everytime they try to force and convince us they are women, they are trying to get women to ignore their natural instincts. Natural instincts that keep us safe. I find it even more dangerous when I think of little girls who are now being taught to ignore their instincts from the get-go because they are being lied to about what a man is and what a woman is. Trans activists are teaching them to be disconnected from their feelings, intuition, and reality.

When I was little girl I was left alone by my grandmother in the book isle of the grocery store because I was well behaved and liked to read. A strange man came up to me and I remember feeling immediatly nervous and uneasy. I was a kid so I never would have been able to articulate why I automatically felt that way. But I was right because he started showing me porn from a book and asking me if I knew what that was. I had no idea what that was, but I knew he felt wrong and I ran away to find my grandmother.

I had never felt this unease around stranger women, but this is just one example of where as a child I felt uneasy around a man and when I followed that instinct I protected myself.

So imagine what it's doing to these girls when trans activists tell them, no that's not a man, that's a woman. You know women are safe and that's actually a woman.

And it frustrates me so badly because trans activists say that kids are so accepting, they don't complicate things like adults do. You see this often with the teachers who teach trans ideology. They tell us how little kids are so understanding and just go with it when it's explained to them. News flash, they aren't "understanding and accepting", they're taking everything you say at face value because they are children and easy to manipulate and lie to.

This is what we mean we say trans identified people and trans activists are grooming children. Groomers teach a child to ignore their gut instincts and feelings, they trick them and gain their trust.

I usually just talk about trans identified males and all their bullshit, but the women who take part in this are just as responsible for grooming a generation of little girls.

Did you know though that the uterus has important functions besides having babies? Those functions include hormonal, anatomical, skeletal and sexual.

The uterus works with the ovaries and tubes to produce health promoting hormones- which are estrogen and progesterone. This is why hysterectomy can cause impaired ovarian function or complete ovarian failure. Also, these hormones don’t just help the reproductive system but estrogen has been shown to regulate immune response and increases the brains serotonin. The uterus is the most powerful organ in the body. During sex it is responsible for the intensity you feel in an orgasm.

Ovary removal (castration) or impaired ovarian function has been shown to increase risk for heart disease, stroke, osteoporosis, hip fracture, impaired memory and cognition, dementia, parkinsonism, mood disorders, lung cancer, colorectal cancer, adverse ocular and skin changes, sleep disorders, more severe hot flushes, sexual dysfunction.

The uterus has anatomical functions. It separates the bladder and bowel and keeps them anchored in their proper places. Hysterectomy displaces these organs causing dysfunction especially down the road.

Hysterectomy also destroys skeletal integrity since the uterus' ligaments are the support structures for the pelvis. Again, the RS is more than just “having babies” it interacts with the rest of your body and organs.

I know this is a “solution” for things like endometriosis but a hysterectomy with or without ovary removal is not a cure for endometriosis (endo) since endo implants / lesions exist throughout the pelvis. Many women still experience chronic pain even after this procedure.

I had a hysterectomy in 2019. They left my ovaries, but took my cervix without asking, beforehand.

I was NOT told these things. I did not give consent to part of my surgery, and I did NOT give informed consent to ALL of it - because I was not informed!

Don't get a hysterectomy if you can avoid it, please.

There are other options.

I'm nervous as hell for my future and it didn't have to be this way. Those fuckers lied to my face, brushed over the details, and they WILL do it to you too.

Isn't this thee cyberpunk dystopia or whatever everyone was afraid of 10ish years back? Human bodies being defined as "just parts" and categorized in 1) needed for survival and 2) no harm done in harvesting that organ/body part.

The failed Sex/Medical education and mis/omitted- information of women's bodies paired with capitalism will certainly work on that. We already have a "surrogate/incubator/egg" market. What's next? The uterus trans/implants everyone is talking about?