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I've had a hard time articulating to people just how fundamental spinning used to be in people's lives, and how eerie it is that it's vanished so entirely. It occurred to me today that it's a bit like if in the future all food was made by machine, and people forgot what farming and cooking were. Not just that they forgot how to do it; they had never heard of it.
When they use phrases like "spinning yarns" for telling stories or "heckling a performer" without understanding where they come from, I imagine a scene in the future where someone uses the phrase "stir the pot" to mean "cause a disagreement" and I say, did you know a pot used to be a container for heating food, and stirring was a way of combining different components of food together? "Wow, you're full of weird facts! How do you even know that?"
When I say I spin and people say "What, like you do exercise bikes? Is that a kind of dancing? What's drafting? What's a hackle?" it's like if I started talking about my cooking hobby and my friend asked "What's salt? Also, what's cooking?" Well, you see, there are a lot of stages to food preparation, starting with planting crops, and cooking is one of the later stages. Salt is a chemical used in cooking which mostly alters the flavor of the food but can also be used for other things, like drawing out moisture...
"Wow, that sounds so complicated. You must have done a lot of research. You're so good at cooking!" I'm really not. In the past, children started learning about cooking as early as age five ("Isn't that child labor?"), and many people cooked every day their whole lives ("Man, people worked so hard back then."). And that's just an average person, not to mention people called "chefs" who did it professionally. I go to the historic preservation center to use their stove once or twice a week, and I started learning a couple years ago. So what I know is less sophisticated than what some children could do back in the day.
"Can you make me a snickers bar?" No, that would be pretty hard. I just make sandwiches mostly. Sometimes I do scrambled eggs. "Oh, I would've thought a snickers bar would be way more basic than eggs. They seem so simple!"
Haven't you ever wondered where food comes from? I ask them. When you were a kid, did you ever pick apart the different colored bits in your food and wonder what it was made of? "No, I never really thought about it." Did you know rice balls are called that because they're made from part of a plant called rice? "Oh haha, that's so weird. I thought 'rice' was just an adjective for anything that was soft and white."
People always ask me why I took up spinning. Isn't it weird that there are things we take so much for granted that we don't even notice when they're gone? Isn't it strange that something which has been part of humanity all across the planet since the Neanderthals is being forgotten in our generation? Isn't it funny that when knowledge dies, it leaves behind a ghost, just like a person? Don't you want to commune with it?
If you use Firefox, you can go to the about:config page, search for "media.mediasource.enabled" and double click on it to set it to false. After you restart Firefox, all youtube videos will load entirely even when paused! This also affects other streaming websites :)
It’s autumn, so the house has been gorging on mice. Normally she only finds one or two pellets a month - the compressed remains of fur, bone, and teeth, which the house can’t digest and wouldn’t want to anyway. Exactly like an owl’s leavings. The house gets hungry in autumn, positively bloodthirsty, and the harvest mice lured in from the fields become handfuls of pellets. Usually the house excretes them discreetly and logically from a drainpipe. But apparently this autumn has been so mouse-rich that the house hasn’t bothered with plumbing and has left pellets on the kitchen floor.
The morning is full of Karen ranting at the house. The bright spikes of her scolding bounce around the house. The dust motes dance in each fresh outburst. Karen doesn’t approve of the mouse remains. She greeted them with a shriek, and now she shrieks again, at intervals, in case anyone should think that she had calmed down about it.
“You’d think you weren’t housebroken,” Karen lays into the house again. “You’d think you weren’t housebroken. What is this? What am I, Am I a laugh to you?” She repeats herself a lot. Then she explains to the girl that she does it because she has mothered three children, none of whom ever listened to her, and none of whom do now. Karen, Karen will say, is used to repeating herself in an effort to get people to simply understand, and they never do. When Karen is repeating this to the girl, the girl feels a weird grimace spreading across her face, like a monkey trying to placate another monkey. The girl has so much secondhand sympathy for Karen’s children. Sometimes she wants to say, out of earshot of the house, Karen, do you think your kids would listen more if you were actually a little bit more selective about what you said? but that would feel horridly mean to Karen, a woman who has so much to put up with: the house, the girl, the mouse bones.
Karen has discovered that the house has eaten a snake. The scream bounces around the house, and the girl almost imagines it cringing sheepishly. “I draw the line!” Karen is saying, “I draw the line at snakes!”
As housekeepers go, Karen is invaluable, but uncomfortable. The girl feels like a class traitor for even feeling this. How bourgeois does that feel? It’s not good enough to require Karen’s labour; her complicity must also be purchased too?
But the thing is, the house is so hard to manage. It really is. It’s used to having staff. It’s a lovely house, but it needs enrichment, stimulation, a healthy diet, exercise; it has to be kept clean; and that’s not losing sight of the maintenance, the attention, the affection it requires. it’s rewarding - it’s a good house! - but the girl has been doing a lot of thinking about class recently, and she’s feeling like she might be onto something here, about gender and women’s work.
See, if the house required some regular application of masculine skills and talents, or if it expressed masculine needs - if it required sacrificial virgin girls, or a mowed lawn, or if it was mechanical somehow - well, actually, the girl should just be simple and honest: if the house was a project. If the house was just a standard renovation project, requiring years of daily men in yellow plastic helmets to stand around making expert noises, that would be totally fine to pay other people for. Nobody would judge the girl for hiring help. They’d say, “you can’t possibly do that by yourself. Don’t be silly! Pay a man to do it.”
But when it comes to the maintenance and grooming of a very picky and enchantingly bloodthirsty house - a house with the temperament of a purebred cat that should never have been bred - it still feels like the girl is on the wrong side of the class war, paying Karen to help with the house. It feels like the girl should be able to do it all.
You can hire dog groomers and dog walkers to help with your dog. You can hire cat whisperers and put your cat in a cattery while you go on holiday. You can hire men to dig holes in your garden, or attach electrical wires to other things, despite knowing that you are perfectly capable of attaching wires or digging holes. You can pay a man to put a new screen protector on your phone. You can hire people to look after your children. You can pay someone else to make your dinner; you can pay yet another person to bring it to you. These are considered normal and healthy. But if you pay a lady to help look after your house… why does that feel so wrong? Why is housecleaning always to be done alone, by a virtuous girl, suffering in her lone virtue?
Puritans, the girl thinks, hiding on the landing. It’ll be the Puritans. She is hiding because doesn’t want to interrupt Karen. Karen is now scolding the house about the snake bones - its bad attitude about their disposal, its full knowledge that Karen hates snakes.
The house likes being scolded; it makes the house feel seen. It likes being filled with noise. It would like the girl to find some more people, and preferably to make some more people, to fill it with, so it can crouch around them pleasantly, full and noisy. Ideally, it would love five or six young children exploring it; it has rooms made for children to explore; admiring it and strengthening it, and then growing up to be writers. Failing children, it wants Christmases or coming-out balls or other large noisy holidays. Failing that, it just wants some life and excitement. It loves Karen, actually, which reduces the guilt of paying for the services of a housekeeper. It’s no worse than paying for a therapist for one’s dog, surely.
The girl thinks, women are supposed to serve houses always. We are supposed to serve the houses for free. This is why I’m not good at it. Before being landed with this house I was going to be quite a good counter-cultural revolutionary - a real leftist, a political activist. Now the house has landed on me, and I have to look after it, because it’s alive, but I don’t know how.
The girl feels guilty. (She is still in her very early twenties, as you can probably tell.) as she has not worked out how to reconcile the oppositional forces here - her unclear feelings about class vs. the material responsibility of the house - her feelings collide like waves, cancelling each other out. All she’s left with is guilt, the liberal guilt that stops one from knowing how to move. Everything is fraught with potential war: hiring Karen, getting a new job, finding a new supplier of the crushed oyster shells that the house consumes by the kilogram, for the calcium. Like a mouse, crouched, she waits guiltily for something else to happen. She is very young.
The mouse bones would be lovely for roses, she thinks wistfully, and tomatoes. Tomatoes benefit from a good whack of calcium. Keeps away blossom end rot. Blossom end rot is depressing. There’s nothing like losing your tomatoes, after all that waiting, because they didn’t get enough calcium. The house’s pellets would enrich a soil. But the house will not tolerate a garden. In addition to competing for its attention, it would never be persuaded not to lie down on the garden, or to eat the garden. The house’s preferred landscaping is a large open meadow with a few trees robust enough to scratch its stones against. The house prefers to be far from bus routes. Karen drives in, in her horrible little Fiat. Maybe she’d be able to afford a better car if the girl could pay her better; but the girl can’t leave the house for very long at a time. The girl is limited to remote working and unsteady pay. In theory, she’s a professional tutor. That’s one of the paradoxes of these big houses - they were meant to be run as the hub of self-sustaining businesses, extracting wealth from their vast estates. The house as alpha-beast, top of the food web, sucking up all the calories of the ecosystem. Perhaps, in its Tudor or Georgian past lives, this house was an apex predator. Houses like these eat money - even the normal ones that aren’t bloodthirsty. They can either be self-sustaining, or they can be purchased by someone with external wealth - some rich bastard - so that the wealth of London can be funnelled into their gullets. This is just another thing the girl isn’t coping with. No wealth, and no way to make the house pay.
She wants to leave the house - give it away - move to a nice flat and get a real job. But half the problem is that this isn’t a house like the houses in House of Leaves or Piranesi; it isn’t menacing. The house loves her. What do you do, when you have a living house that loves you like a dog loves its person?
Sometimes she thinks that she might donate it to the National Trust - but what would they do with it? What would anyone do with it? She had a bad dream once - perhaps one shared with the house; they can be hard to separate from one’s own - about the house being killed, shot down, finally bested by a greater hunter than itself. The house bleeding out, dying, lying down finally in one fixed place. And then, the terrible process of stuffing and mounting the house, the brutal efficiency of preservation: converting it into a normal dwelling. That would be terrible, worse than living in a normal house, to have been the person who killed a dead house, who let people kill it and preserve it and display it like taxidermy. A hollowed-out corpse house. Would the National Trust do that? How does one start that conversation?
What is your normal process for handling bloodthirsty - but very friendly - houses. No, not like Piranesi - smaller than the Piranesi hut. No, regrettably, a bit larger than Baba Yaga’s hut. Not quite like Howl’s Moving Castle. Howl, you’ll recall, had magic powers and a demon and an apprentice and a cleaning lady and a route back to Wales. I’m afraid it’s just me, and Karen on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
You’re not going to kill it, are you? Just - just let it run around, and stop it eating anything more complex than sheep. Pay attention to it and love it. Love it hard. Love it so that it doesn’t become a monster. Serve it, serve it forever, because you are so so lucky to have it. People would kill for houses like this.
There has to be some way out of this, the girl thinks, fuzzily starting to fit things together, and then once again overcome by the opposing waves; the motivation she’s built up collapsing once more into guilt. Maybe I can give the house to Karen.
But that would be kind of a horrible thing to do to Karen.
How do you flee something that loves you, loves you, loves you. Loves you like the moon loves itself in the glimmer of the harvest mouse’s eye. Loves you like the pond loves the geese moving over the water. Loves you like a dog loves the person who delivers the lethal injection. Loves you like people love the saints trapped in glass. Loves you and sometimes, if you slip, if your attention wavers, if you forget to kiss it goodnight, brings you a dead deer and leaves it by your bed. Loves you so much you can never have a garden. How do you walk away from that love, that responsibility, how do you leave this house.
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this is the current (20 Oct 2023) list of Trending tags. Mixed in with the typical fandom content are "#gaza", "#israel", and "#middle east"; notably not "#palestine".
If you go into each of these tags, you can also see how many followers and recent posts have been made with them (usually) (functional website);
despite being a more followed and a more active tag than "#gaza", "#israel", and "#middle east", "#palestine" is not being featured by [tumblr]
They arrested a woman in France bc she said "Assalamu Aleykum" to her co-workers and some racist white motherfucker reported her for it. The cops justified this saying that with "in this climate we can not take any risks"
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The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective is a network of tech-fueled anarchists taking on Big Pharma with DIY medicines.
“Four Thieves claims to have successfully synthesized five different kinds of pharmaceuticals, all of which were made using MicroLab. The device attempts to mimic an expensive machine usually only found in chemistry laboratories for a fraction of the price using readily available off-the-shelf parts. In the case of the MicroLab, the reaction chambers consist of a small mason jar mounted inside a larger mason jar with a 3D-printed lid whose printing instructions are available online. A few small plastic hoses and a thermistor to measure temperature are then attached through the lid to circulate fluids through the contraption to induce the chemical reactions necessary to manufacture various medicines. The whole process is automated using a small computer that costs about $30.
To date, Four Thieves has used the device to produce homemade Naloxone, a drug used to prevent opiate overdoses better known as Narcan; Daraprim, a drug that treats infections in people with HIV; Cabotegravir, a preventative HIV medicine that may only need to be taken four times per year; and mifepristone and misoprostol, two chemicals needed for pharmaceutical abortions.“
…
Since Four Thieves isn’t actually selling or distributing the medicines made by its members, what they’re doing isn’t technically illegal in the eyes of the FDA, even though the agency has issued a public warning about the collective’s DIY methods. Shortly after Four Thieves unveiled its $30 DIY epipen, the FDA issued a statement to the media that said “using unapproved prescription drugs for personal use is a potentially dangerous practice,” but didn’t refer to Four Thieves by name. Ironically, only a few months later, the FDA issued a warning letter to Pfizer for failing to investigate “hundreds” of complaints about epipen failures, some of which resulted in the death of the user. In May, the FDA issued another warning that declared a chronic epipen shortage.
As for the DEA, none of the pharmaceuticals produced by the collective are controlled substance, so their possession is only subject to local laws about prescription medicines. If a person has a disease and prescription for the drug to treat that disease, they shouldn’t run into any legal issues if they were to manufacture their own medicine. Four Thieves is effectively just liberating information on how to manufacture certain medicines at home and developing the open source tools to make it happen. If someone decides to make drugs using the collective’s guides then that’s their own business, but Four Thieves doesn’t pretend that the information it releases is for “educational purposes only.”
“The rhetoric that is espoused by people who defend intellectual property law is that this is theft,” Laufer told me. “If you accept that axiomatically, then by the same logic when you withhold access to lifesaving medication that’s murder. From a moral standpoint it’s an imperative to enact theft to prevent murder.”
“So yeah, we are encouraging people to break the law,” Laufer added. “If you’re going to die and you’re being denied the medicine that can save you, would you rather break the law and live, or be a good upstanding citizen and a corpse?”
[Image ID: A series of tweets from Dr Louise Raw @LouiseRawAuthor. The tweets read, 'You can't believe how kind the British are. Every morning, a van pulls up outside your house in Coventry. A friendly man brings you a freshly-baked flatbread to eat. It's just for you, not anyone else in your family. Every afternoon he comes back to make sure you've eaten it.
It's to improve your health, because you went to your GP with migraines. He said it could be anaemia, & these special chapatis will help you. You're grateful: you haven't been here long, & really appreciate your new country looking after you. Eventually another van comes.
It takes you, young Punjabi mum Pritam Kour, to what you're told is a hospital, supposedly to see if this new health food is helping. They never tell you the strange building is actually the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, Oxfordshire. There they put you in a machine 'like a box'. You hear a clicking noise. Then they take you home. You don't speak much English but you express your gratitude again. All this just to help you. It's wonderful. That was in 1969. In the 1990s, local reporter Sukhbender Singh, gets wind of a story.
Filmmaker @John Brownlow can't believe what he uncovers. It has to be exposed. Pritam & 20 other Punjabi women had been fed RADIOACTIVE SALTS in those chapatis: never told, let alone asked. The illegal experiment was conducted by the MEDICAL RESEARCH COUNCIL (MRC).' Four images are included: a picture of chapatis, a picture of a woman who is presumably Pritam Kour, a black and white picture of three scientists using some sort of equipment, and an illustration of a hand reaching towards a chapati. /End ID]
requested by anonymous:
RATING: PARTIALLY RELIABLE
Firstly, a quick assessment of the sources available here. The article above is from India Today, which is rated as Mixed for factual reporting according to MBFC due to multiple failed fact checks. Furthermore, the India Today article mostly cites a documentary (Deadly Experiments), which you can watch here on youtube.
Documentaries are not a reliable source, as there is no code of ethics, and they are not obligated to keep things factual.
Source: 'It’s not just that the definition of “documentary” itself is mutable: unlike other journalistic and quasi-journalistic forms, no code of ethics has ever been agreed upon by practitioners of the art, and what rules of thumb there are tend to be temporary, controversial and broken as soon as they are made.'
As this research happened in 1969 (according to the India Times article and the documentary - the caption to the tweets claim the 1970's), it has not been easy to find a lot of reliable information on this. However, after much searching, I did find the published paper in question!
The paper is entitled Absorption of Iron from Chapatti Made from Wheat Flour. It is not about the study of radiation, as implied by the tweets, but in fact was studying anaemia and whether supplementing food with iron salts could help iron absorption in South-Asian diets.
Source: 'In many countries in which iron deficiency is a serious problem, cereals are eaten as foods such as chapatti or tortillas, which are made from an unfermented dough. The following study was conducted, therefore, to estimate the availability of naturally occurring wheat iron and of an iron salt added as a supplement to flour from chapatti made from white flour, and from chapatti made from wholemeal flour.'
The chapatis were supplemented with small amounts of iron salt (ferric ammonium citrate), to see whether this could help with low blood iron levels/iron deficiency anaemia. Radioactive isotopes were used - however, this is not as alarming as the tweets suggest. It is common practice to use radioactive isotopes in medicine as a tracer, and this practice is not considered harmful or dangerous.
Source: 'Nuclear medicine uses radioactive isotopes in a variety of ways. One of the more common uses is as a tracer in which a radioisotope, such as technetium-99m, is taken orally or is injected or is inhaled into the body. The radioisotope then circulates through the body or is taken up only by certain tissues. Its distribution can be tracked according to the radiation it gives off. [...] Radioisotopes typically have short half-lives and typically decay before their emitted radioactivity can cause damage to the patient’s body.'
Whether the participants of the study gave informed consent is not something I am able to fully assess. One of the participants, Pritam Kaur, claimed that she was not told about the iron salts/radioactive tracer, whilst a spokesperson for the MRC has denied this, and claimed that a translator was always present to ensure informed consent was given.
Overall, it does not seem that this research was definitely 'illegal' as the tweets claim. The major concern is whether the study was properly explained to the participants, allowing them to give informed consent.
The actual methodology and purpose of the study are common and considered to meet ethics standards, unlike other historical medical experiments. (For example, the British Military of Defence's unethical testing of nerve gas, or the infamous Tuskegee Syphillis Study, which secretly prevented African American men with syphillis from accessing treatment so that they could study untreated syphillis.)
In summary, the tweets do not accurately portray the study. Whilst there is a real concern regarding whether the participants fully understood what they were consenting to, and therefore able to give informed consent, the study was researching iron absorption, not the effects of radioactivity. Radioactive isotopes are not considered dangerous when used as tracers. Whilst unethical and harmful experimentation on racial minorities has historically occurred, this specific instance was not likely to have caused the participants any physical harm.
I doubt Dr Louise Raw cares about the accuracy of her claims, given she’s just regurgitating the documentary and doesn’t seem to have done any further investigations.
There were responses in the BMJ, by the way, to claims made in the documentary. They are free to read. ‘“Deadly Experiments”: UK’s programme was open and ethical’ (1995) and ‘no evidence of harm from tracer studies’ (literally the next letter on the page) This is important contextual information. I simply can’t imagine why Raw would neglect to mention it.
Thank you so much for adding this, @aristoteliancomplacency - I didn't see this during my research, and it adds some excellent context, including a clear explanation of how the documentary was misleading.
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I feel confident enough to post these now. A collection of all the existing posters after some edits from the other post that got 13k notes! These are full size/quality. Go nuts.
You may use them for wallpapers, tabletop campaigns, whatever. Consider tipping me or buying a print or sticker on ko-fi here! If you do use them, let me know what for, or send pictures!