Qweird

Nichelle Nichols almost quit the show.

King encouraged her to stay.

Because she stayed, one day in 1966 a little girl turned on the TV, saw a commanding officer who looked like her, and went running through the house yelling "everybody come look, come look, there's a colored lady on TV and she ain't no maid!"

That little girl grew up to be Whoopi Goldberg.

Whoopi Goldberg found out Star Trek: TNG was struggling, and asked to be cast. She considered it an honor to follow in Nichols' footsteps, and as one of the It Girls of the time she knew her name would boost ratings.

Because she was cast, TNG remained on the air, continuing to push boundaries and cast minority actors and create minority characters.

BUT WAIT...

...there was another Black girl who saw Nichelle Nichols, and went on to be on Star Trek....

....which Whoopi arranged for her, because you don't just say "no we will not honor you on Star Trek actually, First Black Woman And Ballerina In Space Dr. Mae Jemison" unless you're an idiot.

Dr. Jemison was the first NASA astronaut to guest star on Star Trek, but she was far from the last.

grace & rocky hug in zero-g <3

(no-xenonite version under the cut!)

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"