#Aids support in 1990

[remembertheplunge]

Life scurries by--in August winds--and, all she touches--dignified.

August 21, 1990

I didn't call Arturo. he is on a well bent. Why poke in my kind face of death? Let the poor child lie in a cuddling, soothing Mother's arms place. Let him play well just once more. Let him "eat life". He knows where i am if he needs me. I'll send him a card from San Diego.

August 29, 1990

The old now cracks and falls away. i awaken to a new, to a stronger self. I grow closer to what--to who--Lew is. Funny, Life's course--so---contrite yet infinitely planned for maximum composure--The vistas and views, after Life has passed by, are as superbly interrelated as they are elegant and colorful.

Life scurries by--in August winds--and, all she touches--dignified.

End of this part of the above entries

Note:

Arturo was my Aids match. I was a volunteer with Stanislaus County Aids project in 1990. We would be matched with a person with Aids and help them through their illness and death. Thus, referring to myself as having the kind face of death. I was with Arturo when he eventually died on February 4, 1994.

I am Lew re: "who Lew is" above.

[theoscarsproject]

Longtime Companion (1990). The emergence and devastation of the AIDS epidemic is chronicled in the lives of several gay men living during the 1980s.

The first wide-release film to be made about the AIDS crisis was no small feat in 1989, and while it's flawed and ultimately a product of its time, it's also a haunting, profound, compassionate look at a community devastated by a disease. Grounded by some brilliant performances, particularly from Bruce Davison (who was rightfully nominated at the Oscars for Best Supporting Actor for the role), and a snapshot sort of structure, it's really only let down by its budget and an unfortunately pretty hokey score. Still, one really worth the watch, and one I can't believe I'd never heard of! 7.5/10.

[fandomsandfeminism]

"Well, it's a good thing that the Department of Education is getting axed. ____% of kids in public schools are reading below grade level. (Which is worse than back before the DoE was created)"

Setting aside the fact the people saying stuff like this don't actually care about childhood literacy rates, they are just saying it because it sounds like a good justification for King T.

I'm sure that if we compare the amount of land the average American voter owned between today and 1776, we would also see a startling drop. The amount of wealth by the American voter has plummeted since 1776. That doesn't mean we should repeal the 15th and 19th amendments. (The 15th, by the way, also codified that land ownership or tax-paying couldn't be used to disqualify poor whites any more. Many states had done away with those requirements, but not all. It also eliminated religious qualifications- which had been leveraged against Jewish men in many states before this.)

Before 1980, when the DoE was founded, even before 1975 for EHA and then 1990 with the IDEA act, lots of kids just...didn't get to go to public school. Kids with learning disabilities, dyslexia, hearing or eyesight impairments, all manner of things. In the 1970s, it's estimated that maybe 4 in 5 children with disabilities didn't attend public school. In many places, they were legally barred from public schools, even. Kids who speak limited English get roped into this as well. Kids with ADHD and Autism, mostly undiagnosed, had no accommodations and had disproportionately high levels of expulsions and drop out rates.

So, it honestly doesn't matter to me what % you show me about how many kids today vs kids back then are reading below grade level. The pool of kids isn't the same, and its ignorant to act like these apples or oranges statistics mean anything. And while of course we should be doing all we can in terms of research and funding to help as many kids as possible have high levels of literacy, gutting the DoE won't help that.

Again, the people who supporting abolishing the DoE don't actually care. But I know that if I look at MY students who score below grade level in reading, at least half, if not as many as 75% of them qualify for special education, have a 504 plan, or are "Emergent Bilinguals". And without the funding, oversight, and research guidance of the DoE, they will do worse.

We are losing money for supplemental tutoring, for the Newcomer English program, for special education aides. We are losing grants for At Risk facilitators, and literacy lab initiatives, for the dyslexia resource class.

And I'm so mad, because the people saying this don't care. It's all empty.

But I hope that yall will push back when you hear or see anyone saying this in the future.

[strawberryaerach]

Hozier's mention of the word "hushpukena" (a Choctaw word) in the song Butchered Tongue was, of course, not a random decision. In a song about the pain of being disconnected from your ancestral language and culture as a result of colonization and oppression from outside forces- which is something that both Irish and Native American people have experienced to varying degrees. Not only do Irish and Indigenous people have this shared history of colonization at the hands of the British, but Irish and Indigenous communities have a long history of support for one another.

The usage of "hushpukena" is even more specific and important because it calls back to the mutually positive relationship between Irish and Choctaw people specifically. During the Great Hunger in Ireland, the Choctaw Nation donated $170, which is more than $5,000 in today’s money, to aid the Irish. Out of all American aid given to Ireland during the famine, the donation from the Choctaw Nation was the largest donation given.

In 1990, leaders from the Choctaw Nation visited County Mayo in Ireland to participate in the first annual Famine Walk. In 1992, Irish people visited the Choctaw Nation and participated in a trek to commemorate the Trail of Tears. Also in 1992, a plaque commemorating the Choctaw's aid was installed in the house of the mayor of Dublin. In 1995, the Irish President Mary Robinson visited the tribal headquarters of the Choctaw Nation to thank the Choctaw people for their aid. In 2017, a sculpture named "Kindred Spirits" was built in Cork, Ireland to commemorate the Choctaw's aid and to continue friendship between the two communities. In 2018, the Taoiseach (prime minister) of Ireland visited Choctaw tribal headquarters and stated,"A few years ago, on a visit to Ireland, a representative of the Choctaw Nation called your support for us ‘a sacred memory’. It is that and more. It is a sacred bond, which has joined our peoples together for all time". In 2020, more than $1.8 million was raised by Irish people as aid for Native American people (specifically the Navajo and Hopi) during the pandemic, to help provide food, clean water, and health supplies.

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #14

April 12-19 2024

The Department of Commerce announced a deal with Samsung to help bring advanced semiconductor manufacturing and research and development to Texas. The deal will bring 45 billion dollars of investment to Texas to help build a research center in Taylor Texas and expand Samsung's Austin, Texas, semiconductor facility. The Biden Administration estimates this will create 21,000 new jobs. Since 1990 America has fallen from making nearly 40% of the world's semiconductor to just over 10% in 2020.

The Department of Energy announced it granted New York State $158 million to help support people making their homes more energy efficient. This is the first payment out of a $8.8 billion dollar program with 11 other states having already applied. The program will rebate Americans for improvements on their homes to lower energy usage. Americans could get as much as $8,000 off for installing a heat pump, as well as for improvements in insulation, wiring, and electrical panel. The program is expected to help save Americans $1 billion in electoral costs, and help create 50,000 new jobs.

The Department of Education began the formal process to make President Biden's new Student Loan Debt relief plan a reality. The Department published the first set of draft rules for the program. The rules will face 30 days of public comment before a second draft can be released. The Administration hopes the process can be finished by the Fall to bring debt relief to 30 million Americans, and totally eliminate the debt of 4 million former students. The Administration has already wiped out the debt of 4.3 million borrowers so far.

The Department of Agriculture announced a $1 billion dollar collaboration with USAID to buy American grown foods combat global hunger. Most of the money will go to traditional shelf stable goods distributed by USAID, like wheat, rice, sorghum, lentils, chickpeas, dry peas, vegetable oil, cornmeal, navy beans, pinto beans and kidney beans, while $50 million will go to a pilot program to see if USAID can expand what it normally gives to new products. The food aid will help feed people in Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Haiti, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Yemen.

The Department of the Interior announced it's expanding four national wildlife refuges to protect 1.13 million wildlife habitat. The refuges are in New Mexico, North Carolina, and two in Texas. The Department also signed an order protecting parts of the Placitas area. The land is considered sacred by the Pueblos peoples of the area who have long lobbied for his protection. Security Deb Haaland the first Native American to serve as Interior Secretary and a Pueblo herself signed the order in her native New Mexico.

The Department of Labor announced new work place safety regulations about the safe amount of silica dust mine workers can be exposed to. The dust is known to cause scaring in the lungs often called black lung. It's estimated that the new regulations will save over 1,000 lives a year. The United Mine Workers have long fought for these changes and applauded the Biden Administration's actions.

The Biden Administration announced its progress in closing the racial wealth gap in America. Under President Biden the level of Black Unemployment is the lowest its ever been since it started being tracked in the 1970s, and the gap between white and black unemployment is the smallest its ever been as well. Black wealth is up 60% over where it was in 2019. The share of black owned businesses doubled between 2019 and 2022. New black businesses are being created at the fastest rate in 30 years. The Administration in 2021 Interagency Task Force to combat unfair house appraisals. Black homeowners regularly have their homes undervalued compared to whites who own comparable property. Since the Taskforce started the likelihood of such a gap has dropped by 40% and even disappeared in some states. 2023 represented a record breaking $76.2 billion in federal contracts going to small business owned by members of minority communities. This was 12% of federal contracts and the President aims to make it 15% for 2025.

The EPA announced (just now as I write this) that it plans to add PFAS, known as forever chemicals, to the Superfund law. This would require manufacturers to pay to clean up two PFAS, perfluorooctanoic acid and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid. This move to force manufacturers to cover the costs of PFAS clean up comes after last week's new rule on drinking water which will remove PFAS from the nation's drinking water.

Bonus:

President Biden met a Senior named Bob in Pennsylvania who is personally benefiting from The President's capping the price of insulin for Seniors at $35, and Biden let Bob know about a cap on prosecution drug payments for seniors that will cut Bob's drug bills by more than half.

[steviewashere]

Okay, I'm getting on here to be a little bit pissy. I'm sorry in advance.

I am so in love with the headcanons regarding Steve's hearing, whether it be that he's hard of hearing, actively in the process of losing his hearing, deaf with a hearing aid, or just completely deaf—every version is fucking fantastic. I'm hard of hearing myself, it's fucking great that this representation is being written or drawn. I love it.

However, I'm going to hold your hand as I say this, stop using language such as "when he learns to lipread" or "eventually learns to lipread." Please stop.

He shouldn't have to learn to lip read. That shouldn't be an eventual skill he learns.

And, gonna give you a little bit of history here, it's historically ableist to require a deaf/hoh person to learn lip reading. From the late 1800s and into the late 1960s, there were literally programs across America that would force deaf children to write, speak, and lipread English—they were punished for signing to others in their schools, in public, in their dorms. And that didn't change until "Total Communication" was brought forth as a possibility, a philosophy that declared children would learn better using their preferred communication—whether it be oralism (the practice of writing, speaking, and lipreading) or via signing. However, oral schools that implemented total communication into their core programs had sign language that was structured with English grammar, this is commonly known as Exact Sign Language, or Exact English Sign Language. It's not American Sign Language.

Also, children who were approved for Coclear Implants in the early 1990s, were sent from residential deaf schools into day schools (public schools) that had a primary focus on oral teaching; pushed into day schools with little to no support, were discouraged from signing with even their parents. This was due to the fact that it was believed that signing at home would slow down their learning.

I am such a fan of deaf Steve or HoH Steve, but you have to be careful the language you're approaching his character with. If he has a sign language interpreter, then he most likely already knows sign language and will, also, most likely rely on an interpreter for communication with hearing people. If he is going deaf (maybe because of head trauma, maybe he gets into a traumatic accident, maybe he gets sick and just loses his hearing, maybe he listens to music too loudly and damages his ears that way), Steve will most likely already have the skills to write and speak in English, but lipreading is a skill that's difficult to garner.

I'll say, too, lipreading is fucking difficult because hearing people are so used to speaking (most of the time. I'm not talking about non-verbal hearing people in this conversation)—hearing people will typically talk fast, which makes lipreading muddy and indecipherable. I've been trying to learn this for years and I'm fucking over it, I can't do it. I speak and write, but I also use ASL, too.

Saying that Steve needs to lipread, that's ableist. Saying that he eventually or finally learns to lipread, that's ableist. Fuck it, I'm gonna say this, too—requiring or not giving Steve the option to decide whether or not he wants a hearing aid or implant device is also inherently ableist. Deaf people are (and should be) allowed to have a choice on having to hear. My own sibling made the decision recently to stop using the cochlear implant they've had their entire life because they weren't even given the choice to get one in the first place (and decided they were done with it), they hated the feedback the cochlear had, and it was just irritating in the sense that it would fall off, the volume control would change all on its own, and they just didn't like it. That's their choice. It's important to give a character that choice.

I let this get away from me, but I despise how people talk about his options for communication sometimes. It just rubs me the wrong way. And I think it's best we all reanalyze how we approach his characterization, especially how we can approach crafting the characterization without alienating a group of people.

*this post has been approved by my deaf sibling (who was born deaf), and obviously by me (somebody who can only hear out of one fucking ear. seriously be careful about volume control on your ear buds. and also wear ear plugs at shows. it hurts like hell to damage your ear drum.)

Here's a whole Wikipedia article about deaf education in the US (just in case you wanted another reason to hate America, but also if you're curious. definitely something everybody should learn).

[nerdygaymormon]

Can you give me some hope about all this anti-trans craziness going on?

I grew up in the 1980's hearing people say AIDS was God's punishment of gays and they deserved it. In 1990, three same-sex couples applied for marriage licenses in Hawaii and kicked off a big fight for marriage equality. Out of this fight came federal & state laws defining marriage as between a man and a woman and refusing to legally recognize gay marriages even if legally performed in another state. Also part of this fight was the Family Proclamation issued by the LDS Church.

Accompanying all this legislating and proclamating was a big culture war and lots of histrionics about how this would lead to the end of marriage, lead to a massive depopulation of the United States, and it would bring the wrath of God upon this country. There was a lot of terrible things said about gay people and the threat they were to everyone else. It was not an easy time to live through.

In 2015, the US Supreme Court legalized gay marriage across the United States and in the past 10 years the whole drama has mostly fizzled away as we see gays and their marriages don't affect anyone else, everyone can co-exist just fine. The fight changed the visibility of gay people and the years of dialogue about sexual orientation and sexual desire shifted the cultural understanding of gay people.

Even in the LDS Church there's been a big shift as now most Mormons in the United States likely know someone who is gay and the Church even issued a statement supporting the Respect for Marriage Act, which ensures federal recognition of same-sex and interracial marriages and requires states to recognize marriages that were legally obtained in other states. Things have changed so much that the Family Proclamation, which was written to oppose gay marriages, is now primarily used as a weapon against trans people.

As courts rule in favor of trans rights and trans people become more visible as a result of this fight, I have to believe a similar thing will happen where people will find that trans folks are not the scary bogeyman they were told. Unfortunately, it will be hard to live through as you hear so much vitriol from political candidates and even from the sweet lady you know at church and you may find yourself unable to access the care you need or feel safe to be out as your authentic self. But it will get better!

[thethief1996]

I received a lot of asks from people in Gaza requesting help with their fundraisers in these past months I've been off tumblr and I was thinking we could do a matching game. I'll donate $ 10 dollars to one fundraiser in this list and you guys can match my donation for more or for less, whatever you can. I really hope we can get traction and encourage donations this way. If you're going to reblog, please think about giving at least one dollar to a fundraiser. It takes less than five minutes.

Dina @dina-my-family - vetted here: Dina's a 25 years old mother from Gaza. She has a 2 years old baby girl and a 3 months old baby boy. She was pregnant and gave birth during this war and is fighting desperately so her kids get their basic necessities and manage to escape.

Maysara Shaquro @maysarashaquro: Maysara is a 21 years old with a heart condition. He evacuated to Egypt but he's still in dire need of support for his health and living expenses. He's very close to his goal.

Ghada Nabil Al-Anqar @ghadanabil2 - vetted here (#6 on the list): Ghada is a 32 years old student who's fundraising to evacuate himself, his father and younger brother. He's very low on funds right now.

Muhammad @mohamed-reesh09 - vetted here: Muhammad is fundraising to provide basic needs and means to escape for his wife and three babies. If you click on his profile, you can see videos of his youngest running through the rubbles of Gaza. His middle child has contracted hepatitis and Muhammad is in dire need. This campaign is extremely low on funds.

Doaa Jad Al-Haq @dodoomar12 - vetted here: Doaa is a mother of a 5 years old autistic boy. Doaa managed to escape to Egypt but she is having a very hard time providing for him and herself, having lost her means of survival in the war. She's also fundraising to aid her family still in Gaza, who she was entirely separated from.

Aseel Mohammed Jad Al-Haq @aseelo680 - vetted here: Aseel is a 28 years old from Gaza. She's fundraising to evacuate her parents and the weight of providing for her family is making an already miserable situation even worse. Her mother is chronically ill and her father had a stroke due to the heartbreak of losing so many family members. She's asking for help to get a tent to face the winter.

Salman Helles @salman-1990 - vetted here: Salman is fundraising to evacuate his family, including his four little boys. He's extremely low on funds and his posts have very little traction.

Mohammed Atallah @mohammedatallah - vetted here: Mohammed is a teenager from Gaza who was shot by an explosive bullet. He needs bone grafting surgery to reconstruct his arm and regain use of his hand. The funds will be donated to his surgery and the rebuilding of his family home. Mohammed has been the target of smear campaigns for months now but hasn't even raised a quarter of his goal.

Ahmed Hellis @ahmedhelllis - vetted here: Ahmed is looking to evacuate 20 family members. He's only a fourth way to his goal. This is a matter of keeping his whole family together when they evacuate.

Ola Ferwana - vetted here (#60 on this list): Ola's husband had traveled to Egyt to get medicine for their children before October 7th. She has been separated from him since then, and has faced every hardship by herself. She gave birth to a beautiful baby girl during the war and her husband hasn't met her yet. She's very low on funds.

Fadi Ayyad - vetted here: Fadi is only 18 years old bearing the weight of fundraising for his family's evacuation. His father @mayadayyad81 is a very well respected English teacher from Gaza and lost all means of providing when the war hit. They're very close to their goal.

Mohammed Al-Habil @mohammed-alhabil - vetted here (#166): Mohammed is a father of three. His little boy, only 2 years old, has undergone eye surgery and now needs special care in terrible situations. He's desperately asking for help in the face of the upcoming winter.

Ramez Hilles @ramezderar - vetted here: Ramez is fundraising to evacuate his ten family members, including his seven small children. He's in dire need of help, his posts barely get traction and he's being harrassed by a zionist in the notes of almost all his posts. This is very low on funds.

Mohammed and Haneen @haneenmohamaad - vetted here: Haneen and Mohammad have been married for four years now. Haneen suffered a miscarriage during the 2021 bombings and now she has lost another baby. They're raising money to evacuate Gaza along Mohammed's elderly parents. They have less than 1k raised.

Mahmoud Ayyad @amanyayyad11 - Mahmoud unfortunately hasn't been able to vet his campaign yet, since it was created very recently and most bloggers have temporarily stopped the vetting process, but the pictures of his family clear on Google reverse. He's barely surpassed a 10% of his goal in three months.

Aya Almajdoub @aiamaher: Aya is a 27 years old bearing the weight of her family's future. She's fundraising for eight people, including her three years old baby boy. Her campaign hasn't broken past $3k out of $55k.

Abeer Salem @abeersalem - vetted here: Abeer is a mother of two who had to escape from danger in Gaza City. She wants help to rebuild her home and provide for her baby girls. They're currently extremely low on funds (less than 1k).

Muhammad Ibrahim @2malakmaloka - vetted here: Muhammad is one of the direst campaigns I have seen. He hasn't reached even 1k yet. He's fundraising to help evacuate his three little girls, you can see pictures of them with their pets in his GFM.

Fayez Al-Kafarma @fayez-al-kfarna - vetted here (#355): Fayez is the father of a family of three. His fundraiser, if you check the link, is organized by a 16 years old teenager who his family took under his care during the war after she was separated from their parents. Fayez was hit by shrapnel and is currently in need of medical care. They're very very close to their goal.

[uwmarchives]

Pride Month: Lou Sullivan

Lou Sullivan was an activist, lay historian, and writer who was born in Wauwatosa in 1951 and grew up in Milwaukee. He became a member of the Gay People’s Union and a close friend of Eldon Murray, and first publicly identified publicly as transgender in an article in the August 1973 issue of GPU News titled “A Transvestite Answers a Feminist”. Sullivan, who lived his life as a gay man, was one of the first FTM transgender people in the nation to speak out about his medical transition and the many roadblocks and instances of discrimination he encountered along the way.  

In 1980 Sullivan wrote Information for the Female-to-Male Crossdresser and Transsexual, one of the first publications to share recommendations on clothing choices and body language as well as advice on finding support groups, counseling, and endocrinological and surgical services for FTM transgender men. The booklet is held in the Eldon Murray Papers at UWM Archives and is available in full online. 

Sullivan moved to San Francisco in 1975, where he completed his medical transition and continued his engagement with activism and advocacy for the transgender community. He was a founding member of the GLBT Historical Society and was involved in editing and publishing their newsletter.    

After receiving an HIV diagnosis in 1986, Sullivan spent the last years of his life amplifying his activism in support of the trans community and increasing his advocacy amongst the doctors and psychiatrists who had delayed his own transition- in part through the founding of FTM International, the oldest group for trans men in the U.S, and contributing to FTM International Newsletter. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1991, at the age of 39. 

The Louis Graydon Sullivan papers, Lou Sullivan’s personal archive, was donated to the GLBT Historical Society of San Francisco in 1991. Over 350 of the records from this collection are available online courtesy of the Digital Transgender Archive. 

We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961-1991, which documents Sullivan’s social and medical transition, can be found in the Golda Meir Library’s main collection. From Female to Male: The Life of Jack Bee Garland, which Sullivan wrote in 1990, is held by UWM Special Collections.   

--Ana

[remembertheplunge]

12/24/1990

Christmas Eve. The sacred day.

I took community and personal gifts to Arturo and his adult sisters today. They live in a poor rich house. It emanates warmth. The sister that answered the door said thank you. Arturo was at the store. I was glad. I don’t want him to think this was charity. Think equality. I said in the card “Thank you for your friendship.”

12/27/1990. Thursday

Arturo, what a gem. He asked “Why do you do this? You don’t have to. There is no pressure on you. You aren’t sick (with AIDS”.) “I dunno” I said. I just do it. You too are brave in allowing me in. Since we are very private people, that’s bravery”. We both give. We both get.

He leaves for Mexico 1/5/1991. Good. Go. That’s living and risking for what you want. He appreciated the Christmas goodies —"They don’t care—the others". He said. "Ah yes, they do, they are scared. They care in the best way that they can." I said. "They just wish it would go away.”  

End of entry

Notes: 4/7/2025

Arturo was my Aids match from I believe early 1990 to his death in 1994.

I was a volunteer for the Stanislaus county Aids Project. They matched volunteers with people with Aids to help them through their illness and death. 

Arturo and I were gay men.

Arturo and his sisters were low on money but huge on love.

[pocketsizedquasar-3]

vetted gaza evacuation fundraisers 10/23

another roundup as i continue checking my backlog! please also go see the post from earlier this week!

i challenge you to please pick one, any one of these, and donate right now! any amount, $10, $5, $1. pick one now and donate now! and then reblog and share.

@ashraffblog Hope for Gaza: Support Ashraf's Family Rebuild Their Lives. €26,004/€30,000. [DONATION LINK] [reblog link] [verified by @90-ghost]

@ameertaims Help Amir and his family to leave Gaza. kr32,257 SEK/kr200,000. [DONATION LINK] [reblog link] [#59 on @gazavetters list]

@salman-1990 Save the family of Salman Hellis from the Gaza Strip. €4,459/€50,000. [DONATION LINK] [reblog link] [verified by @90-ghost]

@children-gaza Help my family to evacuate from gaza and rebuild t. €11,505/€22,500. [DONATION LINK] [reblog link] [verified by @90-ghost]

@ibrahim-family Help Ibrahim's family escape the Gaza war. €2,728/€10,000. [DONATION LINK] [reblog link] [#25 on @gazavetters list]

@kenzish and @nisreensuhail Help my family survive and start a new life. €15,848/€50,000. [DONATION LINK] [reblog link] [#75 on @gazavetters list]

@eman-kha Help Eman and Her Mother Evacuate for Urgent Treatment. $4,260/$40,000. [DONATION LINK] [reblog link] [verified by @90-ghost]

@nouralkhaldi98 Help Noor's family get out of Gaza to safety!!!!!. €502/€150,000. [DONATION LINK] [reblog link] [#150 on @gazavetters list]

@hashem1979 Help Hashem's Family Escape Gaza. $4,635/$60,000. [DONATION LINK] [reblog link] [verified by @90-ghost]

@etafalqattaa Please help us get out of life's crises and the woes of war. €4,548/€100,000. [DONATION LINK] [reblog link] [#88 on @gazavetters list]

@mahmodsy1 Help Mahmoud and his family escape Gaza & continue education. $7,217/$25,000. [DONATION LINK] [reblog link] [#190 on beesandwatermelons mutual aid collective's list, and #63 on @gazavetters list]

@bessalah Donate to Help Bisan and Her Family Survive In Gaza. £7,182/£8,000. [DONATION LINK] [reblog link] [#351 on @el-shab-hussein and @nabulsi's list]

@karamalmadhoun1 Desperate plea: Help my family evacuate Gaza war! €18,947/€20,000. [DONATION LINK] [reblog link] [#109 on @el-shab-hussein and @nabulsi's list]

@anqarfamily Helping Ahmed's Family: Escaping War to a New Life. €66,488/€75,000. [DONATION LINK] [reblog link] [#264 on @el-shab-hussein and @nabulsi's list]

@motazjad Defend my brother's family from genocide in gaza. kr100,054 SEK/kr250,000. [DONATION LINK] [reblog link] [verified by @90-ghost]

[homenecromancer]

anyway after reading a few reports and eight different books, here is my book report about 9/11

Contemporary media messaging focused mainly on how much of a tragedy the events of 9/11 were, and that conclusion is not, strictly, wrong.

However, the reasons that 9/11 was able to happen the way it did are best described as “a truly astounding series of fuck-ups and failures to communicate”.

The design of the towers alone is enough to make your palms sweat; usable floor space was maximized, which included concentrating emergency exit stairwells near the center core of the towers. Additionally, the stairwells did not proceed straight down; at points, some of them detoured around machine rooms in their tower, creating hallways that confused users. Signage was minimal, if it existed at all. The team designing the towers was able to successfully argue their way into having only three emergency stairwells per tower. None of these stairwells were required to have fire-resistant construction; their walls were, like, normal sheetrock. Based on photos, the exit stairs were barely wide enough for two people to stand shoulder-to-shoulder. These were buildings expected to have a population in the tens of thousands every workday.

Put simply: when the towers were designed, no high rise of their kind had ever collapsed solely due to fire. People seemed to believe that no steel-frame high rise could collapse from fire. No ship is unsinkable, and no building will stand regardless of conditions.

In 1993, a truck bomb was detonated in the basement of the WTC. It took multiple hours to evacuate the buildings, and at that time there was no planning for evacuating those who could not walk down the stairs. After the bombing, two changes were made: fluorescent markings were added in the exit stairwells, and “evacuchairs” were made available for the use of those who could not walk. These changes saved lives on 9/11.

Disabled people were still at grave risk compared to their abled coworkers. I may go back through my reading and dig a little deeper on this because I have skin in the game. There are two men I’m thinking of specifically, both of whom used electric wheelchairs. One, with the help of ten of his coworkers and an evacuchair, made it out alive. One sent his aide (who survived) out of the building, and chose to wait for rescue. He did not survive. At the moment that one of the towers collapsed, multiple disabled people were waiting for rescue in the lowest of the skylobbies.

Sidenote: there is one case where, arguably, one person’s disability saved multiple lives. Josephine Harris, a middle-aged woman with fallen arches, made it down a couple dozen flights before her foot pain forced her to stop. A group of firefighters encountered her and began to help her down the stairs, though she could barely walk. They had not yet made it to the ground when the north tower collapsed. Cocooned within the rubble, Josephine and all the firefighters with her survived; if they had been any higher or lower in the stairwell, it’s anyone’s guess if any of them would have survived. This is just one of many fascinating survivor stories.

A note I can’t resist making: jet fuel doesn’t have to melt steel beams to a liquid in order to destroy a high-rise. It just has to soften the steel to the point where it can no longer support the building’s weight. And that is exactly what happened when fire, ignited by the jet fuel ejected into the towers when the planes impacted them, ripped through the flammable furnishings of the towers.

Multiple government agencies were aware on some level that: the US needed to be aware of terrorism as a possibility; Osama bin Laden was worth keeping an eye on; as the 1990s ended, al Qaeda was clearly escalating towards a larger act of terrorism, possibly involving either bombs or airplanes. All were only aware of certain pieces of the puzzle; no one had the high-level awareness necessary to correctly assemble it. No one knew it was too late to stop an attack from occurring until it already had. (And, of course, hindsight is 20/20.)

Prior to 9/11, there were some basic screening protocols used in airports, including X-ray scanning (presumably of bags only) and magnetometers (for people). It is common for security systems to be “red teamed”, which is where plainclothes staff attempt to sneak dangerous items past screening. The FAA kept failing their red team tests. Repeatedly. To a concerning degree.

NYPD and FDNY kept disagreeing about walkie-talkie usage during the 1990s; a few years before 9/11, new radio systems had been purchased with the intent of allowing inter-agency communication on-scene, but they were effectively unused.

Additionally, after 1993 it was known that communicating effectively by walkie-talkies in the WTC complex was very difficult. (I can tell you that trying to communicate by radio in a large steel-framed structure is hard enough when you’re not in the middle of a chaotic disaster.) A signal repeater was installed, but there was confusion over getting it to work; experiencing repeated difficulties, some people decided that radio just wasn’t gonna work that day, and gave up trying to fix it. So first responders on the scene often literally could not talk to each other except face-to-face. And because of the way the NYC 911 system worked at that time, no one was able to make widely available the potentially life-saving information that Stairwell A in the south tower was passable from essentially bottom to top.

9/11 was a terrible tragedy and I do not intend to cast blame on anyone or any agency I’ve named or alluded to in this post, with the exception of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

I’ve done all this reading because when 9/11 happened, and in the years immediately following, I was just old enough to be vaguely aware of what was going on. But I’m too old to have learned about 9/11 in school — it appeared on the very last page of one history textbook I had in high school, and we never even made it to WWII in that class. So I remember what it felt like at the time, but I wasn’t aware of the higher-level implications of anything that was going on, nor did I understand the history that had led up to it all.

What I’ve also come to realize is that people my age will, some day, be the only people who consciously remember 9/11. It left a huge mark on all our lives, and I want to be able to talk more about it than just to say “well, I was eight”.

Reading list to follow in another post.

[batmanschmatman]

Book Rec: Coming Out Under Fire, by Allan Bérubé

Occasionally I see some discourse on Tumblr from folks in the HBO War fandom or different historical/history adjacent fandoms about how there weren’t that many members of the queer community involved in WWII, and I’d really like to point them and everyone else with an interest in queer history to this wonderful book. Originally published in 1990, Coming Out Under Fire gets into all the different ways queer folks DID participate in the war. It’s from an American perspective, so if you’re looking for other Allied experiences, unfortunately there won’t be much here for you, but it’s exceptionally well researched, and crucially a lot of the content comes from interviews with surviving servicemembers. There’s also a documentary based on the book, which came out a few years later and includes video interviews with some of the folks included in the text.

One of Bérubé’s main points in his introduction – and for writing the book in the first place – is the American government, history textbooks, Hollywood, etc. is able to paint the WWII-era military as an almost entirely straight military force because many queer people who participated in the war effort were silenced during their lifetimes, and were unable or unwilling to reveal their true identities. Some of this was from societal pressure – the post war period saw a huge surge in homophobic rhetoric and persecution in the name of fighting Communism, not to mention the ever present heteronormative pressure to get married and have kids – but also because so many queer veterans died during the AIDS epidemic. Bérubé was inspired to preserve the voices of those who were still with us and shed a light on some of the folks we lost. (Note that this was also an intensely personal issue for Bérubé, who lost friends and his partner to AIDS and thus saw first hand how devastating this was to the community in terms of robbing us of our loved ones, friends, elders, and history itself.)

In the book, Bérubé makes the point over and over again that queer people were involved at basically every level in the American military during the war. There’s stories about guys lying when asked “Do you like girls?” during enlistment, lesbians in the Women’s Army Corps being brought to trial for fraternizing, drag shows in POW camps and in reserve, front line combat veterans discussing losing romantic partners to enemy fire or coming out to foxhole buddies, who were supportive allies rather than hateful. One of my favorite stories that’s always stuck out to me is a guy who came home and decided to come out to his elderly mother, who was fully accepting and supportive of her son’s sexuality. I see so many people speaking in absolutes that there’s NO WAY you could come out to your family and be accepted in the past, and while that was certainly true for so many people, it’s also not an absolute truth.

Please note I am NOT giving blanket permission to make assumptions about real-life people’s sexualities or identities, nor am I saying Band of Brothers fics where half the company is dating each other are historically accurate, but it’s really sad to see folks on here (unknowingly, hopefully) perpetuating the myth that there really weren’t that many queer folks in the military during WWII. We were there, we just couldn’t be out the way we might have liked to be. After the war, the Red Scare, societal pressure, and a literal epidemic silenced countless members of the community about their time in the service. There’s no way to know how many people who fought on Guadalcanal or worked at stateside bases or sorted mail in France were queer, but it’s a lot more than you were led to believe.

As a member of the community and a historian (brief resume: MA in Public History, BA in American History, have published stuff and created exhibits for dozens of museums), I just want to remind folks that we have always been here, and our lives weren’t always miserable and tragic when we came out to people or decided to live as authentically as we could get away with. It’s not completely historically inaccurate to write fic or original fiction where your queer characters can come out to their families and not be shunned, or live with their partners and not be immediately murdered. Being queer wasn’t invented at Stonewall.

[petervintonjr]

Today we celebrate the life and accomplishments of the "Godfather of Voguing," Willi Ninja. Born in 1961 Queens, New York, Willi was raised by an encouraging and supportive mother, Esther Leake, who not only encouraged his passion for dance but --significantly-- supported his own self-identity. While not able to afford dance lessons, Leake nevertheless took her son to ballet shows and other performances at places like the Apollo Theater, and Willi embarked on a self-taught path to dance greatness.

Borrowing heavily from the Harlem ballroom scene (and its established role as a socially safe space for Black, Latino, and LGBTQ+ alike), Willi mastering the singular art of voguing, a unique form of dance that blended fashion poses with precise martial-arts movements. In 1982 Willi founded his own dance troupe, the House Of Ninja, which --in keeping with Harlem ballroom tradition-- also served as a community safety net. The "Ninja" moniker was inspired by Willi's own interest and study of various martial arts. Willi rapidly ascended to stardom, perfecting and reinventing his dance techniques. By the 1990's Willi had landed appearances in music videos (including two with Janet Jackson), films, talk shows, and international runway shows; drawing attention from pop icons like Madonna and fashion moguls like Jean-Paul Gaultier. One 1991 appearance on Joan Rivers' show caused considerable buzz as he encouraged audience members to "walk" as if participating at a drag ball.

On this very date (June 9) in 1990, Jennie Livingston's inspiring documentary Paris is Burning, which features appearances by Willi and the House of Ninja, was released at the NewFest New York LGBT Film Festival. The film exposed Willi and his signature choreography to a much wider audience. Shortly after the film's premiere, Willi starred in Anthem, a critically-acclaimed 9-minute video directed by Marlon Troy Riggs.

Willi never neglected his own community, though --his rising stardom offered him a megaphone to advocate for many issues important to the LGBTQ+ community, among them HIV/AIDS awareness and fighting to end the relentless social stigma that accompanied patients with the disease. Willi himself died of heart failure due AIDS complications, in 2006.

[mariacallous]

As President Donald Trump golfed in Florida over the weekend, his hefty new tariffs, which target everywhere from China to the Falkland Islands, started to go into effect, and businesses began to react to them. Jaguar Land Rover, the Anglo-Indian automaker, announced it was pausing shipments to the United States. The American company Howmet Aerospace, which builds parts for airliners made by Boeing and Airbus, also said it may halt sending products that are affected by the new duties.

On Wall Street, where stocks plunged by about ten per cent on Thursday and Friday, analysts and investors prepared for more selling. The widely followed VIX index, a measure of expected volatility, has risen to levels not seen since the early days of COVID. Financial markets often overreact, but this Trump slump is perfectly rational and explicable. Tariffs are taxes on goods, and imposing them reduces over-all buying power in the economy. On Friday, Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, noted that the new tariffs are “significantly larger than expected,” so the “same is likely to be true of the economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth.” It is very unusual for a Fed chairman to say out loud that an Administration’s policies are bad for the economy. Also on Friday, JPMorgan Chase, America’s largest bank, predicted a recession later this year, despite the fact that the Labor Department’s employment report for March showed solid growth. “We now expect real GDP to contract under the weight of the tariffs,” Michael Feroli, the bank’s chief U.S. economist, wrote, in a note to clients.

To some extent, investors are simply anticipating the negative impact that slower growth, or an outright slump, will have on corporate profits. But there is more to it than that. Many people on Wall Street are also suffering from buyer’s remorse. From August to December of last year, the market rose by about twenty per cent. Investors, analysts, and business executives bought into the notion that a Trump Presidency would boost an economy that was already growing faster than the rest of the developed world, with a very low jobless rate. After the election, Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, said bankers were “dancing in the street.” They were also willfully ignoring Trump’s long record of recklessness in his own business dealings and his repeated pledges to upend the global trading system, on which he has now followed through.

In recent years, policy analysts on the left and the right have advocated a retreat from the hyper-globalization that reigned from roughly 1990 to 2016, and which had harmful side effects, including a hollowing out of many industrial regions, and a dependency on fragile global supply chains. Trump’s first term, in which he imposed tariffs on certain goods, including steel, aluminum, and washing machines, and on a much wider range of products from China, marked the end of the free-trade era. The Biden Administration left in place the tariffs that Trump had imposed on China and supplemented them with an ambitious industrial policy designed to boost the industries of the future, including green energy, E.V.s, and semiconductors. Although Trump dismissed these policies as the “Green New Scam,” some conservatives, such as those associated with American Compass, a think tank founded in 2020 by Oren Cass, a former aide to Mitt Romney, supported elements of them. (In an article for the Financial Times last year, Cass referred to “the essential role of public financing, subsidies and procurement in spurring innovation and production at scale.”)

But, even if these developments marked a cross-party revival of what some have termed “neo-mercantilism”—the strategic use of state power to shape trade relationships for national advantage—Trump’s new tariffs constitute a radical departure from previous policies, including his own. Rather than applying to countries that impose specific trade barriers on U.S. goods, they target any nation that runs a trade surplus with the U.S., regardless of how that surplus may have arisen. The arithmetic formula that the Administration used to determine its tariff rates simply takes the bilateral surplus in goods from a given country, divides this figure by the amount of goods imported from that country, and multiplies the resultant fraction by a half. Comically, it also includes some Greek symbols to make it look scientific, but nowhere does it include the level of tariffs that the country imposes on U.S. goods.

In other words, these are not “reciprocal” tariffs. Reciprocity involves an equal give-and-take. According to the World Trade Organization, the European Union imposes tariffs of five per cent on foreign goods, on average; Japan imposes tariffs of four per cent; and Cambodia imposes tariffs of nineteen per cent. Under Trump’s policy, the tariffs on goods from these places are twenty per cent, twenty-four per cent, and forty-nine per cent, respectively. As CNBC’s Steve Liesman noted online, Trump “straight up lied when he said the US is now charging tariffs at half the rate other countries charge.”

Immediately after Trump announced his tariffs, I noted that they represent not neo-mercantilism but a resurgence of the absolutist approach adopted during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by European mercantilists who viewed any trade deficit as an evil. In addition to affecting established industrial powers, including China, Japan, and the E.U., the tariffs also hit Asian economic success stories, such as Vietnam and Bangladesh, and impoverished African countries, such as Lesotho and Malawi. The main reason that Lesotho runs a trade surplus with the United States has nothing to do with trade restrictions; it is because of poverty. With a per-capita annual income of less than a thousand dollars a year, Lesothans can’t afford to buy very many iPhones or Caterpillar trucks. And the new tariffs are threatening one of the country’s main sources of income: factories that make textiles for Levi’s and other Western companies.

Trump’s avowed goal is to re-shore American factories and boost manufacturing employment in the long run, but will it work even on its own terms? In making multibillion-dollar capital investment decisions, such as building a new plant in the United States that could operate for decades, companies need to be pretty sure about the future. With Trump, the only certainty is that things could change. Another factor to consider is that many imports are components for domestically produced goods, and slapping tariffs on them raises the costs to American firms that rely on these parts. A Federal Reserve Board study of the tariffs that Trump imposed on China in 2018 found that, when this factor was taken into account, the duties didn’t lead to any increase in manufacturing jobs. In fact, they led to a reduction of 1.4 per cent.

Trump’s new tariffs are so high and wide-ranging that estimating their ultimate impact, assuming they stay in place, would be largely guesswork. We do know for sure that they represent an unprecedented shock to the economy, and they are being accompanied by policies that run directly counter to the goal of promoting American economic dominance. Guided by Elon Musk and his DOGE colleagues, the Trump Administration is busy making cutbacks at the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, which finance basic scientific research on which American businesses rely for their product development. It’s also cancelling grants for clean-energy projects and undermining investments in E.V. manufacturing by, for example, reversing the Biden Administration’s rules on reducing tailpipe pollution. Last week it withdrew funding for a federal program that promotes technical progress and productivity growth at small and medium manufacturing companies across the country. If this is mercantilism, it is mercantilism gone mad.

In recent history, Brexit represents the only comparable act of economic self-harm. But the fallout from the U.K.’s vote, in 2016, to withdraw from the European Union was largely limited to its own inhabitants. This is different. Since the Second World War ended, the U.S. has been the global economic hegemon. While acting in its own interest, sometimes ruthlessly, it has taken the view that promoting international trade and development will ultimately benefit Americans as well as people overseas. The Trump Administration has now formally abandoned this leadership role as a champion of open trade, but it hasn’t stopped there. At least in the short run, it has committed to a policy of inflicting damage not only on itself but on the rest of the world, too, including some of the poorest countries. That’s bad in its own right, but it’s also bad for business. No wonder markets everywhere are tumbling.

[niratias]

teddy already heard me yelling In All Caps about this a couple days ago. i enjoy pride month as much as the next queer. I do NOT however carry that over into July. I don't personally like or subscribe to the notion of a disab1ility "pride" month." My existence is not your inspiration porn. I am not proud of my condition or illnesses. I am entirely neutral about my existence. I don't like this wording. I don't like the implications. I fucking hate how it's reduced to Visibly Missing Limbs Wheelchairs or Mental Health only. Miss me with that.

Again, the ADA was passed in 1990- four years before I was born. Again, it's the bare bones minimum and has done jack and shit to actually protect me in the workplace or in life. Again, being disabled is so stigmatized there are people with my illnesses that argue rabidly with others like me and with outsiders that we're not "actually" disabled because it's not something that needs a mobility aid.

Motherfucker, my meds are literal self-administered lifelong life support.

Anyway, blah blah, miss me w/ "disab1lity pride month." I'm not proud. I'm fucking pissed, just. In general.