you are more conservative than you think you are

So in case anyone needs it:

i haven't seen many options for people outside to donate. easiest way is this fundraiser from the I Love Venezuela Foundation

you can also donate directly through zelle and binance to Organizacion Solo con Fe in barquisimeto, but !!! make sure to label it "donacion" so it can be correctly identified. everything will be used for relief in the affected zones.

lastly, Passagio is a Miami-based courier that's put a special fare of $4/lb for aid to be sent to venezuela. no profits will be made from this, that's strictly transportation costs. they're accepting: medicine, non-perishable food, hygiene products, clothing, essential supplies.

In South Asia, heat weaves already claim more than 200,000 lives annually. According to a recent study, as temperature rises, the death toll might exceed 400,000 by 2045. India is at high risk. The study further reveals that over 200,000 deaths are currently attributed to severe temperatures, and this figure may nearly quadruple over the next twenty years. With deaths increasing and governments lacking strategies to protect laborers from dying, vulnerable workers across South Asia are demanding their governments provide heat wave protections.

Ashok Kumar, forty-two, a migrant worker from India’s Bihar state, has been running a barber shop on a footpath with no roof in India’s national capital, New Delhi, where temperatures exceed to 46 degrees Celsius (114.8 degrees Fahrenheit). With no shaded resting area, Kumar spends nine hours a day in a scorching heat to support his family. “Where shall I go? I have to feed my family. The government cannot install air conditioning at the roadside for us. We are dying under the blazing sun. We have no options. If we stop work, our families will die hungry,” Kumar told me. [...]

While knowing risk factors, many migrant laborers are unable to do much more than cover their heads with wet towels. “We saw how the laborer Paswan collapsed and died in India’s Nuh grain market. I can’t forget. I am working in the same market and at the same temperature. Covering my head with a wet towel gives relief. But no guarantee of life,” says Narayan Kumar, forty, a migrant worker. [...]

I am not uptight about privacy because I'm hiding something. I'm uptight about it because the people who dismiss my right to privacy are dangerous to you and me and our families, personally, all the time.

There's worse to come, folks. Strap in and stay strapped.

I never really realised how much difference it makes until I went to England and realised that here the change of seasons is an obvious, visible, physical change in the world. Like, everything REALLY IS orange and foggy in autumn! In spring there are flowers EVERYWHERE, so much more than any other season, and the trees really do have all blossom and no leaves. Even if it doesn't snow, in winter there's frost all the time and the trees are bare and the sky is visibly greyer all the time. You don't need to be told "this date is the first day of spring", you can SEE IT (although this is getting way messier and less precise due to climate change).

By contrast, most places in Australia the seasons we're taught feel like arbitrary categories - and is it any surprise considering they're colonial constructs? Orange-leaved autumn and blossom-covered spring is a cartoon stereotype with no relevance on a continent where ALL NATIVE TREES ARE EVERGREEN!! Snowy winters are a joke in the desert, and even sunny summers don't ring particularly true considering that much of the country is in the tropics, where summer means monsoons - not that I've ever seen the concept that WE HAVE A MONSOON SEASON taught at an Australian school.

the 4 season model as you and i know it is a european invention, though 4 season models aren't unique to europe! most notably china has the same type of season subdivision.

KOSA IS MOVING FORWARD IN THE HOUSE!

It's part of a package called the KIDS Act, filled with digital ID and age verification and censorship!

MAKE THOSE PHONES RING!! CALL YOUR HOUSE REPRESENTATIVES ALL WEEK

202-224-3121 i HIGHLY encourage everyone to read the bills in the KIDS Act, because you will be doing more than 95% of people who read and introduce these bills

Women wanted to be lawyers and engineers and chemists. They wanted to use their brains in challenging and interesting ways. They wanted to get the satisfaction from solving problems and inventing new shit and getting attention for it.

Sewing machines are operated by *people*. Knitting machines are operated by *people*. Yes lots of the process is automated but you cannot tell a machine "make me a t-shirt" or "make me a knit cardigan".

Guess what

"attended white women patients who suffered from vaginismus, a disorder marked by painful vaginal muscle contractions that prevent the entering of the penis, making intercourse impossible. Complaining husbands approached Sims, who regularly etherized their wives, rendering them unconscious so that their husbands could have sex with them."

...The surgeries themselves were terribly painful. Not only had Sims to close the unnatural openings in the ravaged vaginal tissues; he had to make the edges of those openings knit together. He opted to abrade, or "scarify", the edges of the vaginal tears every time he attempted to repair an opening. He then closed them with sutures and saw them become infected and reopen, painfully, every time...

...Medical journals and professional word of mouth had detailed the inhalation of ether as anesthesia since the early 1840s, and Sims knew of this, but he flatly refused to administer anesthesia to the slave women and girls. He claimed that his procedures "were not painful enough to justify the trouble and risk attending the administration", but this claim rings hollow when one learns that Sims always administered anesthesia when he performed the perfective surgery to repair the vaginas of white women in Montgomery a few years later.

Sims also cited the popular belief that Blacks did not feel pain in the same way as whites. However Sims' own words belie him. In his memoirs, he noted that "Lucy's agony was extreme... she was much prostrated and I thought she was going to die." Sims' further obscured the truth in 1852, when he described the first surgery on Lucy, writing, "That was before the days of anesthetics, and the poor girl, on her knees, bore the operation with great heroism and bravery."

I sure wouldn't be better off if this didn't exist! I do gain help from the field of gynecology and Planned Parenthood, indeed!

And now we're gonna quote J. Marion Sims, said father of gynecology, here, one of the people whose actions we should let go because even though they're racist, these ideas help us now in the future:

"As a plantation doctor, Sims attended many children, but he used only the Black infants at subjects for dangerous experiments in tetany, a long-misunderstood children's neuromuscular disease characterized by convulsions and muscle spasms. The tetany that was epidemic among enslaved children was actually the result of severe calcium, magnesium, and vitamin D deficiency caused by chronic malnutrition, but Sims was erroneously convinced that it was caused by the displacement of skull bones during birth.

He took a sick Black baby from its mother, made incisions in its scalp, then wielded a cobbler's tool to pry the skull bones into new positions: "During this time, I would occasionally puncture the scalp over the lambdoidal suture, with the point of a crooked all, and prize out the edges of the parietal bones always, with the effect of greatly modifying the rigid fleure of the extremities..."

The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.

It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.

The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.

This map required:

North and South Vietnam in it

All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated

Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)

Has Laos and Cambodia in it

Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it

So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'

I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.

Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.

The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.

The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc

At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"

My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond

having museums full of reproductions would be even cooler than having museums full of sacred artifacts because when modern craftspeople are able to replicate those artifacts, it’s usually because they still make the same items the same way today

this means that you could have description tags emphasizing that such-and-such item has been made by these people in almost the same way for hundreds of years