Protego-Et-Servio

LOVED Knights of Guinevere!!

"The hat is customizable," he said, struggling with the velcro patch on the front. "If I need it, I have an ICE one too. I pick based off the business i walk into."

"Customizable is an important hat descriptor," I said. "what can I get you?"

"You wouldn't believe how offended people get these days," he said. "And I'm supposed to do something about it if you're offended? You chose to be offended!"

"We all have hundreds of thousands of decisions everyday," I said. I thickened my accent. "That's what my stepdad always said. But I can make one easier - we have a delicious Ethiopian roast available."

"Like if I told you you have a bull ring," he said, "because bulls have rings in their noses. Is that offensive?"

I laughed. "I've heard that before."

"It's a joke, but people get offended. Maybe you're offended."

I looked at him. I smiled. "You aren't trying to offend me though, right?"

Of course he was. I was being friendly and the friendlier I was, the faster he switched topics. He was saying anything inflammatory he could think of to see if I'd take the bait. After about 20 minutes of my redirecting and deescalating, he settled into a more normal interaction. He took up too much of my time showing me a product I'd feigned mild interest in to get him to stop talking about getting accused of inappropriate behavior at work. When we finally disengaged, he spent 10 minutes trying to catch my eye again. When he failed, he left.

There's this new breed of customer who insists on trying to incite political conversation through their clothing and, when that doesnt work, their snide little comments. If I owned my own business, maybe I would have given the guy the fight he wanted. But I work for a corporation and I love paying my bills so I deescalated.

Screenshot via Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net on bluesky

Tldr Amnesty International, global human rights organisation, published a report called 'A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK'. In it is detailed, amongst others, a whole bunch of transphobic groups and organisations, including Beira's Place, JK Rowling's trans exclusionary sexual violence support service. JK Rowling threw a shit fit and got Amnesty to take the report down by threatening libel. This was obviously not enough, because you can't appease a fascist, so now she's going to bankroll a bunch of lawsuits anyway through the JK Rowling Women's Fund.*

You can read an archived version of the report here, please save it and share it.

-> Phonics For Adults <-

We've done the research on how to make a good education system and it's been put into practice irl via Finland, who has one of the best education systems in the world and it was built almost entirely using US research.

I discovered then that I had been diagnosed with partial androgen insensitivity syndrome (PAIS); my XY body couldn't fully utilize androgens (like T) and so I developed mostly like a typical female person externally.

For me, this meant I had a somewhat "ambiguous" looking body (aka a non-binary body) and the doctors performed 3 unnecessary cosmetic surgeries to make me look more like a "normal girl"

(peanut emoji) gonadectomy (scissors emoji) Clitorectomy (kitchen knife emoji) vaginoplasty

Not to mention, they lied to me about All Of This and then forced me to take Premarin (a low does of estrogen made from extracting the hormone from a pregnant mare's urine (horse face emoji, crying face emoji)

Anyways, I got in touch with a new endocrinologist recently thanks to my therapist at @/ RuchMedical who suggested I see him.

He did something no other doctor had ever done. He asked me if he could see my medical records, all of them, and then took time to read of them.

He even reached out to other experts in his field when he was confused by something.

Wow, We love humility in medicine.

Anyways, he ended up suspecting something is up and that perhaps my PAIS diagnosis is wrong.

He then orders me a genetic (dna emoji) test. Thanks to covid it took almost half a year to get the results, but a month or so ago I got them back.

Turns out, I don't have PAIS. I actually have something else known as NR-5A1. Now this is big news mostly because 1. It supports my thesis that docs who deal with intersex kids don't know shit...

And 2. P/AIS intersex folks are believed to not be able to utilize androgens and wo we're often only given estrogen (never T), forcibly "feminized" with fucked up "cosmetic" surgeries, and forcibly assigned female.

Doing what they did to me was fucked up enough, but now realizing that they didn't even have the diagnosis right—and that I *can* utilize androgens—is fucking infuriated beyond belief.

"It's easy to say "violence is never the answer" if you've never had to fight for your life"

This is chat gpt trash prompted to “sound Japanese” and it’s based off of racist old movie dialogue. There’s zero correlation here to Japanese grammar and how Japanese translates into English or how a native speaker of Japan uses English. It’s slop. It’s racist ai slop rehashing Western exceptionalism, fantasizing about a Japanese person being in awe of how great the USA is. It’s depressing that people fell for this. I know it feels good to think that other people like us, and sometimes they do, but this only works if you assume Japanese people have extremely limited experience and worldview. It’s mortifying.

right-wing media in the US has distorted truth and presented it selectively for decades now

but this is a whole other level of sloppiness

it's sad we have sunk this low

For public libraries, one of the ways we secure funding year to year is lending. Governments don’t want to fund more books if they’re not being used and the way we measure use is by issues. Regardless of whether you read it or not, whether you have it for a day or a month, if you issue it to your library card, we get the stats! It makes the library look good!

A declassified World War II-era government guide to “simple sabotage” is currently one of the most popular open source books on the internet. The book, called “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” was declassified in 2008 by the CIA and “describes ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train conductors, befuddling middle managers, blundering factory workers, unruly movie theater patrons, and so on. In other words, teaching people to do their jobs badly.”  Over the last week, the guide has surged to become the 5th-most-accessed book on Project Gutenberg, an open source repository of free and public domain ebooks. It is also the fifth most popular ebook on the site over the last 30 days, having been accessed nearly 60,000 times over the last month (just behind Romeo and Juliet). 

Link to the Guide at Project Gutenberg can be found here

A Wikisource entry can be found here.

People killed: around three quarters of a million.

The stories you hear of people dying from rationing, this is what happens to their body.

Affordable insulin isn’t just a right, it’s a necessity.

"After they overheard that ICE was at the courthouse to arrest someone, they improperly accessed court databases to determine who was not born in the United States," a DOJ detention filing says. "They then snuck every suspected illegal alien who was at the courthouse out a back door, where ICE, who was waiting in the parking lot for their target to leave the building, could not see them."

"After they overheard that ICE was at the courthouse to arrest someone, they improperly accessed court databases to determine who was not born in the United States," a DOJ detention filing says. "They then snuck every suspected illegal alien who was at the courthouse out a back door, where ICE, who was waiting in the parking lot for their target to leave the building, could not see them."