#one thousand percent- ill be the first to say it

[goofyjelly]

watching a william shatner movie from 2021-- I want to bleach my brain

[paragonrobits]

on a whim i looked up the Templin Institute (a worldbuilding-focused youtube channel I dropped because I was horrified at a video they made where they claimed that the Men of Tolkien's Legendarium aren't REALLY human because they're not vicious enough, cruel enough, or obsessed with war) and I was miffed to see that apparently since I dropped them they made a video arguing that everyone in the MCU should be living in constant fear and that it would be better to live in the universe of The Boys (because the super serum is qunaitifable) and Warhammer 40k (since in that one, everyone is a zealot who believes that the God-Emperor protects them and thinks that all aliens are inherently evil)

and it sort of illustrates a thing that... I don't think sci fi fandom or writing IN GENERAL is like, but it is enough of a common element to bother me, and its when people treat cruelty, systemic brutality or man's capacity for evil as an inherently positive aspect.

This ties into the video that caused me to drop them; the channel made the claim that the Rohirrim would have been doing better if they had been genocidal and brutally attacked anything different enough from them (in the sense of "maybe if they had killed all orcs on sight for being nonhuman, Rohan would be doing better"). and its like... why?

I honestly can't fathom why anyone would consider that a good thing, or even think that it SHOULD be expected to hate and fear anything different from you, and to got to the extreme that NOT being xenophobic by default is some kind of failing, or imply that not wanting to kill all other forms of life makes you different from humans, or that being more bloodthirsty or willing to hurt others is an advantage.

What, I can't help but wonder, is the appeal in lionizing the worst parts of ourselves?

You see a lot of this in sci fi, and i think its because a lot of those look at the factions involved as characters in their own right, so they don't really feel much when stuff like 'by performign x social policy, the Human Dominion allowed 42 percent of its people to starve to death on purpose' is considered a fairly neutral detail.

Mindless fanaticism is often prized in these settings, to the point where the most common fandom memes is numbing stuff like 'FOR THE EMPEROR' and 'PURGE THE XENOS'. quite literally stuff all about turning your brain off and being happy about being a murderous garbage-animal that acts like a walking personification of the 'maybe the people who say all humans are inherently evil animals and that it will be a blessing when we all die and no longer poison the universe with our cancerous capacity for evil' idea.

i find it really, REALLY fucking creepy when this stuff gets popular, and more to the point, when the idea of 'humans are naturally warriors/soldiers' becomes so prevalent that you have people hating the idea of some universe where we don't automatically try to kill things for not being like us. its just exhausting, and tedious and...

I don't know, but it doesn't really sound right with archaelogical evidence for us.

I'm thinking about how ancient graves from our own ancestors and our neanderthal cousins both have many signs of caring for the ill, the elderly and infirm. the remains of children with severe Down's syndrome who survived until at least five years old, well cared for by others. Lots and lots of bodies with healed fractures and broken legs, which means someone took care of them; a running animal, and a hunter, with a broken leg is a dead animal. A healed leg is someone who was taken care of.

I think about how on the island of Cyprus, they found an truly ancient burial. In it, they found the body of a long-dead human, and beside them, the body of a cat, laid to rest with ceremony and by all signs, love.

The burial is around 9,500 years old; almost ten thousand years ago.

This predates the first confirmed use of writing by at least 3000 years or so. 3000 years before the epic of gilgamesh became one of our first stories (a story, I note, about a king who grieves the death of a friend and desperately tries to find the secret to immortality, and in time makes peace with the inevitability of death, and becoming a story we still know today).

War goes back a long way; there's no mistake about that. But I think about how friendships and love for animals that loved us too, and long-dead people still showing the signs that people cared enough about them to keep them alive as long as possible, is probably much more integral to the concept of being human, or perhaps what it means to be a thinking entity at all, more than our capacity to hurt each other.

[littlegreenwyvy]

Wear a fucking covid mask

Wear a mask Wear a facemask, when you're indoors

Wear a N95 face mask if you're gonna be in public

wear a face mask

Wear a mask if you're going out

I don't know how to explain to people -- my friends and coworkers and family and strangers and people who make important decisions and people just living their lives -- that you are the reason over a thousand people die every week.

You are the reason I cannot leave my house without risk

You are the reason I can't go to the movies or a bar or to get a haircut or a restaurant or the doctor or the dentist or the library or go to fucking WORK OR SCHOOL without coming to terms with there being a non-zero chance I will be dead within the month.

Just because somebody had a friend over who had a ''''cold'''' last week and I happened to sit next to them on the bus.

“Oh it's not that likely” “Oh it'll be mild” “Oh HEALTHY people don't get severe illnesses”

First of all: Wrong

Second of all:

I"M NOT HEALTHY PEOPLE; I'M DISABLED FROM FUCKING COVID

"Oh it's okay because only YOU will die, not us good and healthy people : )"

My favourite is all the excuses

“Oh things aren't that bad yet so I won't take the preventative measures”

"Well I already had it and it wasn't a big deal, so I'm not gonna bother"

"I'm not gonna live my life in fear"

“Well I don't have to anymore so I'm not going to”

You SHOULD HAVE TO

I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I genuinely think that you SHOULD have to wear a face mask and stay a meter apart and take a test before going somewhere. At least in a fucking HOSPITAL or something.

I shouldn't have to BRING MY OWN EXTRA FACE MASKS because my doctor DOESN'T FUCKING HAVE ANY IN THE FUCKING OFFICE

And then they give me the fucking look

That look they get in their eyes

From my fucking DOCTOR, who I go to for my CHRONIC ILLNESS, which I got FROM HAVING COVID.

I should be able to go to work or the library or just out in public without risking catching the fucking plague.

So to all people who choose not to wear a mask: I hate every single one of you. All of you who don't wear face masks indoors:

YOU are the reason for this.

Yes even my friends; I'm sorry but I am blaming you and guilting you about it. If we lived nearby I would not be able to hang out with you because you are unsafe for me to be around. And that is fucking HEARTBREAKING. My FRIENDS, who I LOVE DEARLY, and WANT to be around, and I fucking can't, because of decisions that YOU make. All those times we talk about 'oh if we met up' 'oh if you travelled here' I can't fucking TRAVEL are you NUTS?

Do you know how long you're supposed to isolate if you suspect you've been 'in contact' with someone who had covid? CDC says 10 days from when symptoms start. If you still have symptoms on day 11? Start another 10 days.

Do you know what 'in contact' means? Maybe you do maybe you don't; I had to look it up myself, but maybe it was communicated better in your area. If you've been in the same ROOM as someone for 15 minutes; up to 2 days before their symptoms STARTED (and of course while they are showing symptoms) and up to 10 days AFTER their symptoms began. That means if you know someone had covid last week? They're still potentially transmissible. A stranger in the waiting room at the doctor's office has a cough? Possibly covid. And you know the BEST PART? We have NO IDEA how many cases are asymptomatic. That means that ANYBODY in public could potentially transmit it to you. Lower estimates suggest in the single-digits to 10s of percent of covid cases are asymptomatic, while higher estimates say up to 50%. We just don't know! There's no way to because it's not monitored fucking AT ALL anymore!

Do you know what this means?

It means there is NO WAY of knowing what the risk is. It's a gamble, full-on. Even more so than ever before. And do you wanna know what? I wanna fucking live. The potential to lose my entire fucking life isn't worth it for just about anything, if I'm being honest. I've already been through that once. I had a career in music lined up. I was just about to finish my degree as a clarinetist. I was performing in orchestras as a soloist. And you know what happened? I got covid. Suddenly my lungs and my diaphragm don't work so well anymore. For two whole years I couldn't stand or sit upright for more than an hour at a time, or else I would pass out. Nowadays it's improved; it's not more than 4 hours at a time, and I only feel faint for a while before passing out.

But do you know what that means? It means I can't play clarinet anymore. Over a decade of schooling and practicing and mastering my craft: Gone in an instant. I'll never play again. I lost my entire future and my entire career, because I got covid in 2021, from people who had stopped wearing masks because 'covid was over'. They got it. I got it from them. They survived and are fine. I barely survived and I very much am NOT fine.

This is why I'm so reluctant to take any more risk. Even if I survive, what else will I lose?

My ability to taste or smell? My muscle control? Will my heart condition get worse? Will I never be able to think clearly again? I already can't. How much worse can it get?

Sources seem to say: Much worse

I can't stress this enough that I am LUCKY to be where I am now. I can't function if I don't get more than 10 hours of sleep. I have to take medications every day to SURVIVE. At the end of my work day I pass right out, and wake up just in time to get ready for the next day at work. I do not have a life anymore. And I'm LUCKY, because I RECOVERED. THIS is what 'recovery' looks like, from long covid. It may get better over the next few years. It also might not. It DEFINITELY won't if I get covid again.

If YOU don't care about that, or about how that could happen to you, then I will never willingly be around you. Again, this even goes to my dear friends.

Wear a face mask and STOP being the problem

[thetechempire]

Anthropic’s CEO thinks AI will lead to a utopia — he just needs a few billion dollars first

🟦 If you want to raise ungodly amounts of money, you better have some godly reasons. That’s what Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei laid out for us on Friday in more than 14,000 words: otherworldly ways in which artificial general intelligence (AGI, though he prefers to call it “powerful AI”) will change our lives. In the blog, titled “Machines of Loving Grace,” he envisions a future where AI could compress 100 years of medical progress into a decade, cure mental illnesses like PTSD and depression, upload your mind to the cloud, and alleviate poverty. At the same time, it’s reported that Anthropic is hoping to raise fresh funds at a $40 billion valuation.

🟦 Today’s AI can do exactly none of what Amodei imagines. It will take, by his own admission, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of compute to train AGI models, built with trillions of dollars worth of data centers, drawing enough energy from local power grids to keep the lights on for millions of homes. Not to mention that no one is 100 percent sure it’s possible. Amodei says himself: “Of course no one can know the future with any certainty or precision, and the effects of powerful AI are likely to be even more unpredictable than past technological changes, so all of this is unavoidably going to consist of guesses.”

🟦 AI execs have mastered the art of grand promises before massive fundraising. Take OpenAI’s Sam Altman, whose “The Intelligence Age” blog preceded a staggering $6.6 billion round. In Altman’s blog, he stated that the world will have superintelligence in “a few thousand days” and that this will lead to “massive prosperity.” It’s a persuasive performance: paint a utopian future, hint at solutions to humanity’s deepest fears — death, hunger, poverty — then argue that only by removing some redundant guardrails and pouring in unprecedented capital can we achieve this techno-paradise. It’s brilliant marketing, leveraging our greatest hopes and anxieties while conveniently sidestepping the need for concrete proof.

🟦 The timing of this blog also highlights just how fierce the competition is. As Amodei points out, a 14,000-word utopian manifesto is pretty out of step for Anthropic. The company was founded after Amodei and others left OpenAI over safety concerns, and it has cultivated a reputation for sober risk assessment rather than starry-eyed futurism. It’s why the company continues to poach safety researchers from OpenAI. Even in last week’s post, he insists Anthropic will prioritize candid discussions of AI risks over seductive visions of a techno-utopia.

[justanothersyscourse]

hi ok so !! about your post on singlets in syscourse i just want to say i agree with you! i'm a singlet and my ex is a DID system, and during all the time i knew they were a system (2 years+) and the time we dated (almost a year) i've never really been able to partake (in good faith) in syscourse because i'm a singlet. i've spent over 2 years learning as much as i can about DID and OSDD and sometimes i'd like to partake in some syscourse and each time i try (in good faith! i cant emphasize that enough) both sides treat me like shit. like you said, singlets dont have a place in ALL discussions (i certainly wouldnt and dont want to stick my nose everywhere) but yeah there's a time and a place and like you said, to engage in constructive and positive conversations, which is exactly what i'd like to do. but even in those times and places both sides shut down whatever a singlet says, even if they do actually have some kind of standing in the discussion (like the examples you gave), say things in good faith and have knowledge of what they're talking about (like you also said). i've never really seen anyone display this opinion so kudos to you for voicing that!

My partner has been with us for ten years, and they've known about us for six of those years.

When he first found out, he went looking for resources, and one of the first ones he found was called The Significant Other's Guide to Dissociative Identity Disorder. It's a funny, honest guide written by another singlet partner. It talks about the good and the bad, insurance, therapy, hospitals, etc. Most importantly, it talks about what to expect from your system partner.

It wasn't until a few years later that he showed us this guide, and he explained that the brutally honest take on system behavior helped him become a better spouse for us. It talks bluntly about how systems are selfish by nature. Not in a negative way, just as a matter of fact. We have so much going on in our heads that sometimes it's really hard for us to keep our partners in mind, as well, and it comes across as selfishly absorbed, at times. It talks about how to handle that kind of behaviour, and the rewarding love you get in return.

But that REALLY struck me. It was true, and so was a lot of other, negative stuff (stereotypes?). It kind of put my partner in a new light for us-- we gained a huge amount of respect for him and appreciation for the things he put up with and tried to work with us on. Of how much work he put in and how much patience he had.

Singlets have an incredibly unique view on certain aspects of the disorder and of system life that is SO important to the conversation. I wish he had shown it to me earlier, but he said he didn't think I was in a place to hear it back then, and he was probably right. I wouldn't have taken it as positively and it wouldn't have had such a profound impact on us. Now we do our best to stay mindful of things-- so that we can be better, too.

Singlets tend be an unbiased, outside view. It's why anyone with half a brain encourages questioning systems to see a therapist. Traumatized, mentally ill individuals tend NOT to be good judges of... Much of anything, really. Themselves, situations, other people. I can't tell you how many times I was TEN THOUSAND PERCENT SURE I was a making a safe, smart decision, and he was behind me, rolling his eyes, waiting patiently for me to come to my senses, and then I'd run crying back to him when it all went to shit, because holy crap, that was dumb of me.

He also is VERY aware of the nuances of syscourse, he hears me talk about it daily. He engages with it through me. He's done enough of his own research to form his own opinions and thoughts so he can support me, and/or tell me when I'm being a proper little shit.

I talked recently about the unique perspectives of people who dipped their toes into plurality and DID/OSDD, and realized/admitted they weren't systems, and those who realized it was something else. Those perspectives are just as unique and useful in helping other systems figure their stuff out. They do understand syscourse. They've likely engaged in it before. They're allowed to, still.

Singlets who have never met a system in their life, but have a peer reviewed paper in have are goddamn allowed in syscourse to share it and talk about it.

They sure as fuck might be wrong, but they have every right to get involved, when and where they're welcome.

👏 Singlets 👏 have 👏 a 👏 place 👏 in 👏 syscourse 👏

Anon, you are welcome in my community <3

[indirecticn]

i watched thor again... bro so many thoughts???

firstly, my GOD they were young.

secondly... ok just a recap on observations about loki.

lets assume thor was never banished. i truly don't think he believed odin would do that. i think this wasn't just a prank either, obviously. it was a real attempt to be like, "SEE??? SEE???!!?" and it feels VERY hormonal teenage angst.

ok so then how old is loki in mortal years? i know people did the math and said 16, some said 21. i guess assume 5k is the length of their lifespan, that is a third of his life. but is their maturity biologically speaking easily sliced into equal parts? i don't think so.

i think their physiology has them physically maturing quickly, the physiology it's self a result of celestial genes??? where beings of that sort of energy and existence are meant to mature quickly but then these beings replicate or take on a more base lifeform to interact with other similar base lifeforms and so you have like the blood of celestials now slightly diluted among various alien species?

ok so assuming that then now we have the children of the children of the children of the children and what have you so various species across the universe can probably atest some of their own powers and shit to the same thing.

ANYWAY MY POINT IS now they still mature physically but mentally they aren't this omnipresence but they still call themselves as much when realizing other creatures of the universe don't have the same power.

so loki looks like he's early twenties at this point but is technically much older and with a perception of time so different when you know you live 5k your years as a youth are extended compared to that of beings. especially when you consider the fact that some animals do have varying lengths to the stages of their life. some stay in the juvenile stage for hundreds of years (ex: greenland shark), but then it also depends on how you want to define what makes a being move on to the next life stage.

SO THAT is a good question but anyway.....

say thor is not banished, loki gets what he wants: a brief stay to the coronation. i 1000 percent believe his wanting to sabotage isn't just to be a jerk ass, but a true concern for what thor's actual ruling style would be. i think he just sees thor as also too immature and lacking in true political prowess.

but under that is a true issue he hasn't yet fully faced which is how much he wishes to be taken more serious. it's like... you are the little brother of a kid who does everything right, even when it's wrong. first you like to imitate but you keep getting caught and your brother is never held to the same standard for some reason. you don't get it so you just think well fine ill do the one thing better than him: not get caught.

and so you develop your gift and you find really the deeper issue is your father seems more and more distant to you as you grow up, and you can't figure it out. it's not like he completely dismisses you but he definitely spends more energy on thor, right? so you spend your time with your mom and learn even more things, maybe stuff considered by the wider culture to be sneaky and shit, so also conflated with being a woman's thing (very outdated, you know, but people on asgard are surprisingly behind with the times cosmically in certain social ideals...) and this is how things go for a thousand years.

until you really cant take it and while... if this had been just another simple feast, or something like that, thor would have been pissed and you wouldn't have gone to the extreme just to get his goat, so to speak. he'd be mad and you would fight but like you always do.

buuuut yeah, its more serious, so you choose to do a more serious thing and the result is you know why your father has been distant, what thing he was thinking about when choosing to spend time and energy on thor instead of you, and you also get why both parents seemed more harsh on you, or at least you think you do. you assume its because they were worried your monster would show, would grow.

but you think that because you're still relatively young and you are hurt as fuck by all this shit, even if the revelation came about because you fucked up and took something to an extreme it shouldn't have been taken to.

anyway so now im watching avengers and i 1000000 percent am on board with the idea that loki was tortured into submission to thanos. by the time we see him there he is literally looking like absolute shit and we know that isn't because of the portal travel through the tesseract. that thing allowed plenty of people to safely travel in the what if series.

its because he has been freshly let go and given a chance to fuck shit up. and his hatred and pain has been nourished and you are under the minor influence of the mind stone that is just an echo chamber for your pain, a feedback loop that keeps you unhinged far longer than you would have been without it.

so yeah come dark world.. you are scarred from that torture, you are angry at yourself as much as everyone else and you haven't worked through your issues at all. going to a dungeon cell for over a year just makes you sit and stew. maybe if it were five years later he would have come to better terms, allowed his mother to finally talk to him, but that doesn't happen.

and instead what does happen is dark world shit, and he realizes he can get what he wants, odin is tired and thor clearly doesnt want the throne right now so why not do everyone a fucking favor?

and then it's four years later... five since you were put in the dungeon, six since you fell from the bifrost, and maybe... just maybe... its easy to mask your pain literally, by being someone else in front of everyone else and you think haha im proving to everyone that i am capable and a better ruler, but deep down:

bitch, no, you are just fooling yourself.

so this is where MY loki comes into play, ragnarok happens and he sticks with thor because both men seem to have hit a new stage in their life cycles, and loki is still coming to terms with his entire youth and beginnings when he helps the avengers save the world (after being blipped ofc). new asgard is a new beginning, and king val is also a huge step up from odin and thor, honestly. he can support her and feel GOOD about it.

thanks for coming to my ted talk.

[hlekani-666]

<244> 35. Atheist REpublic Newsletter: When you can't just pray it away

Religious people are very good at proposing prayer and religious service as an answer for existential problems, mental illness, and even physical ills. But atheists and other secularists and freethinkers have experience with these issues as well, and we should have our say. Here, one of our AR team members, Costas, shares his experiences and thoughts about PTSD from an atheist perspective. We’d love to hear from you about other such personal issues. Please reply to this email, and let us know if you wish to remain anonymous.

Bad things happen. Everywhere. Everyday.

Today, a large portion of the developed or first world citizens have never witnessed firsthand the effects of war. For most, conscription is a thing from a bygone era, so most of our young men and women will never witness the atrocities, pain, and death of war. Witnessing these things can, and does, leave deep scars on the psyche. These effects are commonly referred to as PTSD. These symptoms can include, but are not limited to: flashbacks, nightmares, severe anxiety, emotional numbness, and that edgy feeling that occurs after something traumatic happens.

Bearing in mind that PTSD can strike any person who has survived all kinds of abuse and/or other trauma, I would like to focus on the veterans. There are hundreds of thousands of men and women and recent military veterans in the USA who have seen combat. They have been shot at, seen friends killed or witnessed death up close. The USDVA (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs) estimates that PTSD afflicts up to 30 percent of its soldiers who have been in combat situations.

There are many forms of treatment for PTSD; some examples include art therapy, medicine, different types of therapy with a psychiatrist or psychologist, support groups, and even, believe it or not, prayer.

Before I delve deeper into this, I have to divulge that I am a long-time PTSD sufferer. I have tried many different things to deal with it, but have seen many friends and people from my support groups turn to faith as a means to get past this. I have read many articles, heard from many people on this issue, and have heard of it referred to as “restoring faith”.

the thinking is that this kind of severe trauma can rattle someone to their core, challenging their sense of self, their sense of meaning and purpose in life and indeed their spiritual beliefs. Religion, in addition to everything else, is seen as a source of meaning and purpose to millions of people all over the world, and for many, their sense of wellbeing is directly connected to their religious beliefs.

In fact, in 2004, Dr. Alan Fontana and Dr. Robert Rosenheck (in a study that included 1385 veterans) found that the experiences of the veterans witnessing or failing to prevent one or multiple deaths in combat weakened their religious faith and increased feelings of guilt. They asserted that the severity of the PTSD symptoms and social functioning had no bearing on whether or not vets sought mental health care, but rather, the veterans were driven to seek help for their feelings of guilt and loss of faith; that they may have been looking to assign meaning and purpose to the trauma that they experienced through religion and faith.

Personally, through my own experience and from what I have seen in group discussions, a lot of people like me suffer from survivor’s guilt. It is my opinion that the main “theme” to the start of recovery is forgiveness. I haven’t read a study on this, this is purely my own opinion. Firstly, forgiveness from my fellow soldiers’ families that I came back and not their father/brother/son/mother/sister/wife/husband/etc… Secondly, forgiveness from my fellow soldier, at least in my mind, because I couldn’t save him/her. Thirdly, forgiveness from my friends and family, because I’m not the same person anymore, because I’m ill-tempered, don’t talk as much, and as they put it themselves, broken. Finally, forgiveness from myself. This is the most important step I believe because you come to the realization that it’s ok. It’s ok that I survived. It’s ok that I am who I am now. It’s ok that I am troubled. And it’s ok to seek help. There is no shame in seeking help, and there is no shame in admitting that you need help.

I think that this is the alternative that religion offers most sufferers. I have heard of religion being called an “easy” cure for PTSD, in that God is all powerful and all forgiving. Something that took me months to get to, potentially a religious person can get to and feel in minutes all thanks to this large safety blanket or forgiving yumminess. This is a dangerous train of thought, and of course a very dangerous course of treatment. This person needs professional help. Not a quick fix that will have him possibly breaking down months or years down the line like a car that has been through a patch up job after it was almost a right off.

PTSD is most certainly NOT a “faith deficit disorder”. PTSD is real. Historically, it can be traced back to almost 4000 years ago in ancient Egypt, where Egyptian writers described PTSD symptoms; even Homer’s Iliad communicates a profound understanding of PTSD and its symptoms, and the price it exacts on its sufferers. It is cruel to tell people they can only get rid of it with faith. It has been proven that PTSD creates structural changes in the brain (specifically the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the medial frontal cortex). This damage interferes with processing memory and emotion and with “assessing and determining how to respond to threats”.

People forget that when we (yes all of us), through our elected officials and leaders, send members of our military forces into combat, we have a moral obligation to those soldiers and veterans to treat them all with love and patience, to listen to their stories and to try help them bear the weight of it all and to heal from psychological and spiritual injuries. This responsibility lies on all of us, whether we are religious or not and whether the returning injured soldier is religious or not. We are all people, and we all deserve love and understanding.

If you do suffer from any form of PTSD (be it from abuse from an early age, combat related, or anything) please seek help. There are organizations worldwide that specialize in the treatment and help of PTSD sufferers. There is no shame in feeling this way.

More Newsletters Here:

[therapeutic-dose]

Tagged by @wildelydawn! Thanks friend!

Do you make your bed?

No, but tbh I wish I did. It makes it looks so much nicer in my room? Mr. Pete (cat) also enjoys sleeping on it more when it's made...

What’s your favourite number?

21, probably, but that's likely because I make a lot of 1:20 dilutions for a dilution factor of 21 haha

What’s your job?

I run tests on blood and pee and evaluate the results for any pre-analytical/analytical/post-analytical errors and anything else that could be affecting the accuracy of the test results. I also maintain and troubleshoot problems with the machines that perform testing. No one knows I exist lmao.

If you could go back to school would you?

Yes, but there are a thousand things stopping me, on being my mortgage lmao.

Can you parallel park?

Yep!

A job that would surprise people?

I'm... not a million percent sure what this question means, but if it was with regards to something that I did that surprised people whether real job or imagined, then it would be something heavy in math.

Do you think aliens are real?

There's no way they aren't!

Can you drive a manual car?

Probably not at this point, though I drove a few in my teens

What’s your guilty pressure?

General comeuppances for people who have desperately needed them lol.

Tattoos?

Two! One a symbol I designed myself with the message "I will survive to live again" located on my left inner forearm, and another that is similar to Changkyun of Monsta X's smiley tattoo, which is very simple and looks like this : ) : located on my right wrist over my radial artery (where arterial blood gas samples are drawn)

Favourite colour?

I love color so much, it's honestly hard to pick. I think these days it's in the scope of light aqua all the way down to ultramarine.

Favourite type of music?

Kpop and myriad sub-genres (Monsta X and OnlyOneOf are my ult groups), pop punk, atlernative, southern rock, rock

Do you like puzzles?

LOVE Puzzles. All kinds of puzzles. You need a puzzle beaten for your game? GIVE ME.

Still terrible at sudoku though. Probably related to fear of Math.

Any phobias?

Long squiggly bugs and the slimey no-bones one that live in the soil that I legit cannot even say the word without feeling ill. Anything that doesn't have bones and is slimy.

Favourite childhood sport?

Karate.

Do you talk to yourself?

I worked night shifts alone in the lab and it was just me and the ghost. I didn't not want to talk to the ghost. That habit has carried over lol.

Coffee or tea?

Coffee, for now!

First thing you wanted to be growing up?

My memory is trash but probably doctor? Who knows.

Tbh I don't know or follow many people on here, so I'll leave this jut for folks that might want to do it! Please tag me if you do, I'd love to chat with people more!

[torc87]

Ok, I'm reaching the point of being pissed.

I started out going 'Palestine is a tragedy,people are suffering, children are traumatized,vits awful'

And you frankly stupid lot are pushing me to a position where I have to compare what is happening and defend it as not that bad.

Why?

Bc STOP FUCKING USING THE WORD HOLOCAUST TO DESCRIBE IT!!!

Do you know what Babiy Yar is? It's a ravine in Ukraine where more than THIRTY THOUSAND Jews were shot and thrown into in THREE DAYS. The entire amount of casualties in Palestine. The location was then later used AGAIN, until the sum total of people murdered and tossed in is 100,000-150,000.

This is a small drop of people murdered in the Holocaust.

The Holocaust lasted a decade or so.

Germany killed it's own Jews, Austria's, Ukraine's, 90 percent of Polish Jews were murdered - a large population, and demanded allied countries - such as the Arab ones, Italy, Japan, etc- hand over their Jews.

Those people were then separated. The ones capable of work were forcibly tattooed and sent to work camps. The others, the children, the babies, the ill, the old, the disabled, etc - were murdered.

( I am not including the non Jewish victims which were A LOT or the civilian casualties of fighting which were also A Lot bc people using this comparison are focusing on the Jewish persecution part so I'm responding based on that)

So in order for Palestine current events to be a Holocaust,

First off : everyone would need to be systematically gathered, separated into useful and not, forcibly tattooed/marked/numbered as animals so their names are meaningless and they are dehumanized, and any children, elderly, ill, disobedient would just be shot out of hand.

The survivors would be imprisoned, starved, abused, and put to work.

Then there would be the demand that surrounding countries hand over their Palestinian refugees. Germany demanded countries hand over full citizens. Egypt, Jordan, Syria haven't given the refugees citizenship status I believe.

The numbers each day would be horrific - 10,000 or more daily.

Hammas would not be able to bomb Israel - after all, in the Holocaust the Jewish people had no organized defense. They resisted - w rifles stolen and captured. They hadn't had time to prepare tunnels to hide in, stores off food in those tunnels, ammunition, bombs, training to use weaponry. Resistance would be former civilians.

It would be a nine year old managing to get in and out of a ghetto bc he had light colored hair and could sneak through to help. And get hit over the head w a riffle butt. My grandfather by the way.

It would not be citizens in other countries protesting and sending money. It would be those same citizens handing their own Palestinians over like Ukrainian and Polish handed their Jews over. It would be Americans refusing to take in any refugees and sending ships back to Germany. It would be people caring only when their own borders were breached.

That would be what a Holocaust would be like.

6 million people. A decade of systematic enslavement and murder.

That is what you are comparing it to.

That is the memory you are stealing and appropriating for emotion points.

How flaming DARE you!

Use the atrocities the US commuted in Iraq while you and your parents waffled on who to support. Use similar situations if you wish.

But don't bloody well put me in the position of having to explain that Palestine is nowhere near as bad as the Holocaust bc there should be Zero comparison needed to justify the fact that people suffer is bad.

You are basically saying that hey, remember when those ten people got enslaved, tortured, and murdered? This person that got stabbed in the leg today is Exactly like that! We are going to call the situation today by the name the families of the victims gave to losing their loved ones!

Oh, and if you start saying the relatives are involved in the stabbing? Do recall that Palestinian arabs were on the German side of things and cooperated w the Nazis.

Which, again, for those w low reading comprehension and zero empathy, does Not mean that Palestinians suffering today is ok. I don't bloody care what their great grandparents did. Well, ok, I care bc chances are great they were helping murder my great aunts and uncles , but the reality is, past is past. The people alive today need to be safe, healthy, and able to live normal lives. The Palestinian children need to live free of the trauma of war, screw what their parents did or did not do w Hammas. Why? Bc they are children and deserve to be taken care of. Not bc what is happening is anywhere on the level of the Holocaust but bc it shouldn't HAVE TO be for people to care and help.

Bc using an tragedy that rings through our communities, touches us personally still four generations in, appropriating it for emotion points and trying to use it Against us, is....

Are you trying to turn potential supporters away?

Trying to convince us that our greatest most recent pain and suffering will never matter to non Jews? That all we have is each other? Bc that is how you convince people to turn clanish and inwards.

I'm a Russian born Jew. Didn't grow up w the religion. An not a part of the Jewish community in the US. Don't celebrate holidays unless my mother wants to have a family dinner. I've been Pagan since I was 16.

And the antisemitism I see, the use of my grandfather pain and suffering as a 9 year old child, the use of his enslavement , his families enslavement, for a gotcha is pushing me far closer to my Jewish identity than I have ever been in my life.

You succeeded. Succeeded in making me feel other. Succeeded in making me feel like growing up in the US wasn't enough. Succeeded in making me feel unsafe. Succeeded in making me consider what I would do if things got worse, where I would flee - my mother has talked about it since I was little and I never understood. US was safe, we were accepted here, citizens like anyone else. Right?

What your disrespect of an atrocity that didn't touch you personally tells me is that my safety, my families safety, our heritage, our pain and sorrow - they are Nothing to you.

You don't know or care or possibly even think it justified.

And if it isn't personal to you? If you don't grieve? If you can't name your three year old grand cousin ( my great grandfather's sisters child) who was ripped out of her mother's arms by Nazis and dashed by her feet onto a tree? Fucking well keep the word Holocaust out of your mouth.

[jcmarchi]

Using AI to Predict the Spread of Lung Cancer - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/using-ai-to-predict-the-spread-of-lung-cancer-technology-org/

Using AI to Predict the Spread of Lung Cancer - Technology Org

For decades, scientists and pathologists have tried, without much success, to come up with a way to determine which individual lung cancer patients are at greatest risk of having their illness spread, or metastasize, to other parts of the body. Now a team of scientists from Caltech and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has fed that problem to artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, asking computers to predict which cancer cases are likely to metastasize. In a novel pilot study of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients, AI outperformed expert pathologists in making such predictions.

These predictions about the progression of lung cancer have important implications in terms of an individual patient’s life. Physicians treating early-stage NSCLC patients face the extremely difficult decision of whether to intervene with expensive, toxic treatments, such as chemotherapy or radiation, after a patient undergoes lung surgery. In some ways, this is the more cautious path because more than half of stage I–III NSCLC patients eventually experience metastasis to the brain. But that means many others do not. For those patients, such difficult treatments are wholly unnecessary.

In the new study, published in the Journal of Pathology, the collaborators show that AI holds promise as a tool that could one day aid physicians in this decision-making.

“Overtreatment of cancer patients is a big problem,” says Changhuei Yang, the Thomas G. Myers Professor of Electrical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Medical Engineering at Caltech and an investigator with the Heritage Medical Research Institute. “Our pilot study indicates that AI may be very good at telling us in particular which patients are very unlikely to develop brain cancer metastasis.”

Yang cautions that the work is only a first step and that a larger study is needed to validate the findings.

The team worked with data and biopsy images collected from 118 NSCLC patients at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Typically, a pathologist reviews such images, scouring them for abnormalities within the cells that might suggest the cancer is progressing.

Caltech electrical engineers led by Yang used hundreds of thousands of image tiles pulled from those 118 original biopsy images to train a type of AI program called a deep-learning network. They also provided follow-up data about which patients went on to develop brain metastases within five years of diagnosis and which did not.

“We essentially asked the network to learn from all these images, to pick out some features from the contextual information that could indicate something about a patient’s outcome,” says graduate student Haowen Zhou, first author of the new paper. Then the network was given 40 additional biopsy images and asked to determine whether the patients had gone on to experience brain metastases.

The AI network was able to correctly predict whether an individual NSCLC patient had experienced brain metastasis 87 percent of the time. In contrast, four expert pathologists who reviewed the same biopsy images were able to make the correct predictions only 57 percent of the time.

“Our study is an indication that AI methods may be able to make meaningful predictions that are specific and sensitive enough to impact patient management,” says Richard Cote, head of the Department of Pathology & Immunology at Washington University School of Medicine and co-principal investigator of the new study. He notes that for the earliest-stage NSCLC patients (those classified as stage I), the AI results were even better than those for the whole study and that these predictions were based solely on basic, routinely processed microscopic slides. By giving the AI information on additional factors such as the severity of the disease and any additional biomarkers, the researchers expect that they will be able to improve the predictive powers of the AI program going forward.

Interestingly, the AI program does not indicate exactly what factors cause it to make certain predictions. So, the team is also working to uncover the subtle and complex features of tumor cells and their surroundings that the AI program might be homing in on.

“It’s looking at what we would look at as a pathologist,” Cote says. “But it’s seeing more than we can see.” Perhaps, he says, once scientists learn exactly what AI is focusing on, they will be able to develop new therapeutics to address those indicators.

Also looking forward, Yang’s group at Caltech is interested in developing instrumentation and processes that would help scientists and clinicians collect more uniform and higher-quality biopsy images to boost the accuracy of AI predictions. “Once we can see what the AI is doing, we can start to think about how to design imaging and microscopy instruments to more optimally get the data that the AI wants,” Yang says. “We can move away from imaging instruments designed for human use and move toward making instruments that are optimized for machine use.”

Written by Kimm Fesenmaier

Source: Caltech

You can offer your link to a page which is relevant to the topic of this post.

[ms-revived-frogs]

Sooooo, @the-scungles-of-crungles what are you doing to help other men, then? Besides shitting on women of course.

I'm just curious because oftentimes women make groups and organizations to support each other; it's why women are far less lonely than men. Despite the media stereotypes, women tend to uplift each other. It's why female-dominated spaces tend to be more peaceful and organised.

Like women helping each other combat loneliness after pandemic restrictions ended.

Or girls performing better in all-female classes that are in traditionally male-dominated subjects.

https://psmag.com/education/girls-only-trade-classes-upending-gender-stereotypes

Or girls in general performing better in all-female spaces. This ranges from overall better grades, being more outspoken, experiencing less bullying, etc.

But when you look at male-dominated spaces... it's chaotic and typically hierarchal. Just look at male prisons versus female prisons. Neither are really great, but one has a lot more violence, gangs, and rape right? A lot of men's issues are created WITHIN their own circles.

Like bullying being a more prevalent issue with boys in general. Boys are more likely to bully and be bullied in return.

"...male students were more likely to report involvement on either side of the bullying equation than were girls."

This issue you're describing of men having their mental health demeaned doesn't exist within society as a whole; it exists within men's groups. This is why feminists say that it is up to MEN to deal with this issue. Women aren't your mommies, we don't exist to clean up all your problems, especially the ones that don't concern us! This doesn't mean it isn't a problem that men are being shat on by other men, it just means it isn't women's duty to clean it up.

When you look at society as a whole, you'll actually notice that women tend to receive worse psychological care. Women are more likely to be misdiagnosed or undiagnosed entirely, and routinely have their pain both physical and mental dismissed.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/mental-health/why-women-with-serious-mental-illness-often-get-worse-care-than-men/

Soooooo TLDR: Men's mental health struggling is due to their own communities that don't give a crap about each other. Women's mental health seemingly being better is due to their communities supporting and uplifting one another. Maybe men can take the example, and I mean that genuinely because men's general frustration ends up harming everybody.

When men say things like “men don’t get hugs!” Or “men don’t have anyone to talk to about emotions!”, I have a hard time giving a fuck because that’s on them. They see women supporting each other in this way and get pissy because they think our energy and attention needs to go towards them, but never consider that they can give each other what women give each other. That isn’t women’s problem. We took care of ourselves, men need to do the same instead of expecting us to do it for them.

[fuckmymunson]

𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐬𝐬 [𝐌𝐚𝐟𝐢𝐚!𝐒.𝐎.𝐁]

A/n: Small drabble cuz I'm sleepy but wanted to pin this for later<3

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

Sirius was much more than a simple 'gangster'. He owned many, many things, he was creepily rich, he was intimidating, and besides that and so much more; He was fucking handsome. He was a true Adonis.

He knew who he worked with and why. He knew how useful any certain friendship with others like him was for him and his self-built empire. A certain friendship, one who was side by side with him since the very first day, sadly had to leave the business for good. A chronic illness and an old body didn't go along well. Sirius knew his acquaintance had a child, although the topic always intrigued him.

He never knew who this child was.

This associate was very, very careful with sharing any personal information, to the point that Sirius even wondered if that was his real name. So when his partner announced that he was ready to retire and live the remaining years of his life with his loved ones, Sirius expected his firstborn to be the one who step in and take charge of what seemed a familiar business now. A business that circulated around drugs, guns, illegal and prohibited cargo, and so, so much more. With this in mind, Sirius expected (probably without even giving it a second thought), that it was a man. A grown man, probably one or two years younger than him. A grown man that was in fully understanding of his surroundings, of the role he was about to play, and who was he working with.

The moment he opened the doors of the old meeting room, which was being hosted at his former partner's mansion, he stumbled across a young lady, standing up in front the fireplace. The flames danced on top of the old oak wood, bathing her figure with bright reds, yellows and oranges. She was gorgeous. Wearing a deep, red wine dress with a deep slit in the center of her chest, exposing enough to tease but not enough to satisfy. Sirius drank her figure without any hint of shame. A part of him, the one who (wrongfully) liked to assume things, thought you were just the new secretary. It made total sense. If an old one was making place for a new one, it was expected that everything else was also new. Just to make things even.

The moment you turned around, facing him. Sirius Orion Black was one hundred percent sure, you were the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life. And believe me, he had seen a lot before...

"You must be Mr. Black." Your voice was like a melody, the way his last name rolled off your lips made him wonder how pretty his last name will sound on a pleased cry.

"A pleasure, darling." He nodded and walked closer, to reach his usual seat and also to get a better look to you.

"Please take a seat, the meeting will start once everyone else arrives." You smiled, and that damn smile made the whole room a thousand shades brighter.

"I'll wait here, doll." Sirius said while throwing a playful wink at you. "Although, if your boss wants to keep me waiting a bit more, I wouldn't mind with you here."

"My boss?" You asked with a small frown. "I don't know what you are talking about, Mr. Black."

In that very moment, Sirius's former partner walked into the room, being helped with his cane. For a man his age and with the life he had been through, he still had his head up as proud as the day Sirius met him.

"Oh my boy! Sirius." Your Father greeted him with a handshake. Placing a hand around your shoulders at the same time. "I see you already had the pleasure to met my beautiful daughter!"

His daughter.

Needless to say, Sirius was dumbfounded. A daughter. A daughter his partner never talked about. Never mentioned before. A daughter he thought and assumed was a son.

"I know it's quite shocking, a beautiful and young woman like my lovebug, getting involved in such an awful and bad business." Shaking his head, your Father smiled proudly. "But she has prepared herself for this for years. And believe me when I tell you she's the smartest one around here!" He laughed loudly. "She's more than just a gorgeous lady, Sirius. Remember the catwalk operation we did six months ago?"

"How could I forget it." Sirius smirked at the memory. "Our profit was three times more than the average. And we didn't ran into any problems with cops, customs, or noisy people. I could argue with anyone that, by far, catwalk was our most successful operation."

"Well, guess who was the one who designed it." Your Father laughed again, his words making you blush. "My daughter has been helping me all this years undercover. Our work is not a safe one, and I'm truly sorry for keeping her locked in so many years, but she is my precious little flower. I needed to protect her one way or another."

Sirius locked eyes with you once again. This time in a whole different way. Drinking your image once more, now it felt even better. He felt ashamed of his early actions, it had been completely unacceptable from his part to just assume you were the secretary. But even though your Father talked wonders about you... He still had his concerns. Could a woman so young and well, inexperienced like you step in this world? A world ruled by wealthy and dangerous men.

"Mr. Black." As if you were reading his mind, you spoke, gaining his attention. "I know this change will be though, I don't expect everyone to welcome me with open arms. But I can assure you one thing." Your eyes were penetrating, analyzing him, testing him. For any words, any actions, any false movement. "I will not give up. That's not in my blood. I will make sure to bring this last name and this work to even higher steps." You took a step forward, your hand in the middle of your bodies, reaching for him. "And if you please, we will do it together, just like my Father and you had been doing for this years."

Sirius grabbed your hand unhesitatingly. Shaking it, sealing the deal. Partnering with you.

"I know you won't disappoint me, doll."

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

Sorry for any mistakes! English is not my first language. I appreciate any feedback!˚ ༘♡ ⋆｡˚ 

[blueiscoool]

A 2,200-year-old Silver Coin Hoard Found at Desert Cave in Israel

Hidden under a swatch of purple, coins found in a Dead Sea cave weren’t from the Bar Kochba period but from Hasmonean era centuries earlier.

Roughly 2,200 years ago, somebody hid a wooden box with 15 silver coins in a cave in the Judaea Desert. The box would lie moldering in the crack into which it had been shoved until earlier this year, when it was found by archaeologists with the Israel Antiquities Authority carrying out surveys.

The find was made in Muraba’at Cave, now part of the Nahal Darga Nature Reserve by the Dead Sea (some call it the Wadi Darageh). The cave had famously sheltered Jews fleeing the Romans at the end of the ill-fated Bar Kochba revolt that began in 132 C.E. But these newly unearthed coins are the first solid evidence of people using the cave to hide centuries earlier, at the end of the Hasmonean period, the Israel Antiquities Authority says.

This season’s excavations in the cave, in the framework of the Judean Desert Excavation and Survey Project, began last March. The cave is a big one, about 100 meters (nearly 330 feet) deep, and archaeology is a painstaking profession, so the team “had been digging for almost two months when we found the treasure in May,” says the IAA’s Eitan Klein.

The excavation process involves gingerly and meticulously removing layers while keeping a sharp eye out for finds, he explains – and one can’t think of the cave like a room, with smooth walls and corners. It’s a convoluted, craggy, jagged place and at some point, excavating a previously unexplored spot, as they removed dirt from a crack – there it was, he says.

A moment of purple

The container was made of wood turned on a lathe, and though rare – if only because most wooden boxes from that period would long have returned to dust – such items aren’t unknown, Klein says. “A box like this was found in Ein Gedi, for instance, but it wasn’t as beautifully finished. Here and there, they do show up. But because they’re organic, only ones left in the deserts have survived.”

Okay. Having extracted the ancient box from the dirt filling the crack, the archaeologists prised off its lid – and were greeted by the sight of more dirt, with some small pebbles. So far, not the stuff of thrillers.

But below the dirt was a piece of woolen cloth dyed purple. Was it – could it have been – dyed with the royal purple, the precious dye extracted from the shell of the unfortunate Murex snail? Samples of textiles dyed with real purple, which is associated with the 1 percenters of biblical times, have been found in Timna (the ancient copper mine in the Negev anecdotally associated with King Solomon), from a thousand years before this box entered the world.

However, it cannot be said that this textile in the lathe-carved wooden container was that same precious royal purple because it remains to be analyzed, Klein says.

Anyway, below it, nestled lovingly in a clump of sheep’s wool, were the 15 coins. Before analysis, the coins had to be cleaned: they corrode after 2,200 years in a box, Klein notes. The coins were analyzed by Klein together with numismatist Gabriela Bijovsky.

As said, Muraba’at was known to have sheltered Jews fleeing from the Romans when the Bar Kochba revolt failed in 136 C.E. But once the coins were restored to their shiny original condition, the team was in for a shock. “Often, ancient coins bear inscriptions and symbols that help date them,” Klein says. These did – and, lo, they predated Bar Kochba by centuries.

All were silver tetradrachma minted by Ptolemy VI, king of Egypt. Three had been manufactured in 176-175 B.C.E., and the latest one was dated to 171-170 B.C.E., which is associated with the onset of the Maccabean Revolt following anti-Jewish decrees issued by the Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes.

Egypt had ruled Judea for a time many centuries earlier, but certainly not when these coins were minted. When Ptolemy VI reigned over Egypt, the Seleucid kingdom, including Judea, was under the scepter of his uncle Antiochus IV Epiphanes (aka “the Wicked”).

The name “Shalmai” in Aramaic script was found secondarily incised on one of the coins, the IAA says.

And thus, we have actual evidence of rebels fleeing to the Negev as the struggle between the Hellenistic regime and the Hasmoneans wound down. No evidence of that whatsoever has been found until now, Klein spells out, so the discovery was quite the surprise. “I was sure they’d be Bar Kochba coins,” he says.

Apropos, the contents of the box may seem bewildering: precious silver coins wrapped in wool, covered by purple textile no less, then dirt. Klein is not bewildered. For one thing, all that padding – which is what it boils down to – would protect the coins. Chiefly, though, Klein surmises that the owner was in flight and didn’t want his stash to rattle in the box.

That theory would also fit with the manner in which the treasure was hidden, and we can even speculate as to the fate of its owner – because they were still there after 2,200 years.

“It says in the Book of Maccabees that Jews fled to the desert, and now we have proven it true,” says Klein. “This is an absolutely unique find.”

Maybe that is why the coins were still there, found with other stuff from times of yore – including fragments of rope and textiles, other coins that may be from the Bar Kochba period and even tiny fragments of scrolls, Klein reveals.

When the dig of the cave resumes later this month, they hope to find even more. However, it will be hard to beat some of the other artifacts found during the surveys in the desert. These include a large basket gorgeously weaved over 10,000 years ago, which, like the wooden box, survived thanks to having been abandoned in one of the drier places on Earth.

By Ruth Schuster.

[puttingherinhistory]

“Covid has unleashed the most severe setback to women’s liberation in my lifetime. While watching this happen, I have started to think we are witnessing an outbreak of disaster patriarchy.

Naomi Klein was the first to identify “disaster capitalism”, when capitalists use a disaster to impose measures they couldn’t possibly get away with in normal times, generating more profit for themselves. Disaster patriarchy is a parallel and complementary process, where men exploit a crisis to reassert control and dominance, and rapidly erase hard-earned women’s rights. (The term “racialized disaster patriarchy” was used by Rachel E Luft in writing about an intersectional model for understanding disaster 10 years after Hurricane Katrina.) All over the world, patriarchy has taken full advantage of the virus to reclaim power – on the one hand, escalating the danger and violence to women, and on the other, stepping in as their supposed controller and protector.

I have spent months interviewing activists and grassroots leaders around the world, from Kenya to France to India, to find out how this process is affecting them, and how they are fighting back. In very different contexts, five key factors come up again and again. In disaster patriarchy, women lose their safety, their economic power, their autonomy, their education, and they are pushed on to the frontlines, unprotected, to be sacrificed. 

Part of me hesitates to use the word “patriarchy”, because some people feel confused by it, and others feel it’s archaic. I have tried to imagine a newer, more contemporary phrase for it, but I have watched how we keep changing language, updating and modernising our descriptions in an attempt to meet the horror of the moment. I think, for example, of all the names we have given to the act of women being beaten by their partner. First, it was battery, then domestic violence, then intimate partner violence, and most recently intimate terrorism. We are forever doing the painstaking work of refining and illuminating, rather than insisting the patriarchs work harder to deepen their understanding of a system that is eviscerating the planet. So, I’m sticking with the word. 

In this devastating time of Covid we have seen an explosion of violence towards women, whether they are cisgender or gender-diverse. Intimate terrorism in lockdown has turned the home into a kind of torture chamber for millions of women. We have seen the spread of revenge porn as lockdown has pushed the world online; such digital sexual abuse is now central to domestic violence as intimate partners threaten to share sexually explicit images without victims’ consent. 

The conditions of lockdown – confinement, economic insecurity, fear of illness, excess of alcohol – were a perfect storm for abuse. It is hard to determine what is more disturbing: the fact that in 2021 thousands of men still feel willing and entitled to control, torture and beat their wives, girlfriends and children, or that no government appears to have thought about this in their planning for lockdown. 

In Peru, hundreds of women and girls have gone missing since lockdown was imposed, and are feared dead. According to official figures reported by Al Jazeera, 606 girls and 309 women went missing between 16 March and 30 June last year. Worldwide, the closure of schools has increased the likelihood of various forms of violence. The US Rape Abuse and Incest National Network says its helpline for survivors of sexual assault has never been in such demand in its 26-year history, as children are locked in with abusers with no ability to alert their teachers or friends. In Italy, calls to the national anti-violence toll-free number increased by 73% between 1 March and 16 April 2020, according to the activist Luisa Rizzitelli. In Mexico, emergency call handlers received the highest number of calls in the country’s history, and the number of women who sought domestic violence shelters quadrupled. 

To add outrage to outrage, many governments reduced funding for these shelters at the exact moment they were most needed. This seems to be true throughout Europe. In the UK, providers told Human Rights Watch that the Covid-19 crisis has exacerbated a lack of access to services for migrant and Black, Asian and minority ethnic women. The organisations working with these communities say that persistent inequality leads to additional difficulties in accessing services such as education, healthcare and disaster relief remotely. 

In the US, more than 5 million women’s jobs were lost between the start of the pandemic and November 2020. Because much of women’s work requires physical contact with the public – restaurants, stores, childcare, healthcare settings – theirs were some of the first to go. Those who were able to keep their jobs were often frontline workers whose positions have put them in great danger; some 77% of hospital workers and 74% percent of school staff are women. Even then, the lack of childcare options left many women unable to return to their jobs. Having children does not have this effect for men. The rate of unemployment for Black and Latina women was higher before the virus, and now it is even worse. 

The situation is more severe for women in other parts of the world. Shabnam Hashmi, a leading women’s activist from India, tells me that by April 2020 a staggering 39.5% of women there had lost their jobs. “Work from home is very taxing on women as their personal space has disappeared, and workload increased threefold,” Hashmi says. In Italy, existing inequalities have been amplified by the health emergency. Rizzitelli points out that women already face lower employment, poorer salaries and more precarious contracts, and are rarely employed in “safe” corporate roles; they have been the first to suffer the effects of the crisis. “Pre-existing economic, social, racial and gender inequalities have been accentuated, and all of this risks having longer-term consequences than the virus itself,” Rizzitelli says. 

When women are put under greater financial pressure, their rights rapidly erode. With the economic crisis created by Covid, sex- and labour-trafficking are again on the rise. Young women who struggle to pay their rent are being preyed on by landlords, in a process known as “sextortion”. 

I don’t think we can overstate the level of exhaustion, anxiety and fear that women are suffering from taking care of families, with no break or time for themselves. It’s a subtle form of madness. As women take care of the sick, the needy and the dying, who takes care of them? Colani Hlatjwako, an activist leader from the Kingdom of Eswatini, sums it up: “Social norms that put a heavy caregiving burden on women and girls remain likely to make their physical and mental health suffer.” These structures also impede access to education, damage livelihoods, and strip away sources of support.

Unesco estimates that upward of 11 million girls may not return to school once the Covid pandemic subsides. The Malala Fund estimates an even bigger number: 20 million. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, from UN Women, says her organisation has been fighting for girls’ education since the Beijing UN women’s summit in 1995. “Girls make up the majority of the schoolchildren who are not going back,” she says. “We had been making progress – not perfect, but we were keeping them at school for longer. And now, to have these girls just dropping out in one year, is quite devastating.” 

Of all these setbacks, this will be the most significant. When girls are educated, they know their rights, and what to demand. They have the possibility of getting jobs and taking care of their families. When they can’t access education, they become a financial strain to their families and are often forced into early marriages. 

This has particular implications for female genital mutilation (FGM). Often, fathers will accept not subjecting their daughters to this process because their daughters can become breadwinners through being educated. If there is no education, then the traditional practices resume, so that daughters can be sold for dowries. As Agnes Pareyio, chairwoman of the Kenyan Anti-Female Genital Mutilation Board, tells me: “Covid closed our schools and brought our girls back home. No one knew what was going on in the houses. We know that if you educate a girl, FGM will not happen. And now, sadly the reverse is true.” 

In the early months of the pandemic, I had a front-row seat to the situation of nurses in the US, most of whom are women. I worked with National Nurses United, the biggest and most radical nurses’ union, and interviewed many nurses working on the frontline. I watched as for months they worked gruelling 12-hour shifts filled with agonising choices and trauma, acting as midwives to death. On their short lunch breaks, they had to protest over their own lack of personal protective equipment, which put them in even greater danger. In the same way that no one thought what it would mean to lock women and children in houses with abusers, no one thought what it would be like to send nurses into an extremely contagious pandemic without proper PPE. In some US hospitals, nurses were wearing garbage bags instead of gowns, and reusing single-use masks many times. They were being forced to stay on the job even if they had fevers.

The treatment of nurses who were risking their lives to save ours was a shocking kind of violence and disrespect. But there are many other areas of work where women have been left unprotected, from the warehouse workers who are packing and shipping our goods, to women who work in poultry and meat plants who are crammed together in dangerous proximity and forced to stay on the job even when they are sick. One of the more stunning developments has been with “tipped” restaurant workers in the US, already allowed to be paid the shockingly low wage of $2.13 (£1.50) an hour, which has remained the same for the past 22 years. Not only has work declined, tips have also declined greatly for those women, and now a new degradation called “maskular harassment” has emerged, where male customers insist waitresses take off their masks so they can determine if and how much to tip them based on their looks. 

Women farm workers in the US have seen their protections diminished while no one was looking. Mily Treviño-Sauceda, executive director of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, tells me how pressures have increased on campesinas, or female farm workers: “There have been more incidents of pesticides poisonings, sexual abuse and heat stress issues, and there is less monitoring from governmental agencies or law enforcement due to Covid-19.” 

Covid has revealed the fact that we live with two incompatible ideas when it comes to women. The first is that women are essential to every aspect of life and our survival as a species. The second is that women can easily be violated, sacrificed and erased. This is the duality that patriarchy has slashed into the fabric of existence, and that Covid has laid bare. If we are to continue as a species, this contradiction needs to be healed and made whole. 

To be clear, the problem is not the lockdowns, but what the lockdowns, and the pandemic that required them, have made clear. Covid has revealed that patriarchy is alive and well; that it will reassert itself in times of crisis because it has never been truly deconstructed, and like an untreated virus it will return with a vengeance when the conditions are ripe. 

The truth is that unless the culture changes, unless patriarchy is dismantled, we will forever be spinning our wheels. Coming out of Covid, we need to be bold, daring, outrageous and to imagine a more radical way of existing on the Earth. We need to continue to build and spread activist movements. We need progressive grassroots women and women of colour in positions of power. We need a global initiative on the scale of a Marshall Plan or larger, to deconstruct and exorcise patriarchy – which is the root of so many other forms of oppression, from imperialism to racism, from transphobia to the denigration of the Earth. 

There would first be a public acknowledgment, and education, about the nature of patriarchy and an understanding that it is driving us to our end. There would be ongoing education, public forums and processes studying how patriarchy leads to various forms of oppression. Art would help expunge trauma, grief, aggression, sorrow and anger in the culture and help heal and make people whole. We would understand that a culture that has diabolical amnesia and refuses to address its past can only repeat its misfortunes and abuses. Community and religious centres would help members deal with trauma. We would study the high arts of listening and empathy. Reparations and apologies would be done in public forums and in private meetings. Learning the art of apology would be as important as prayer.

The feminist author Gerda Lerner wrote in 1986: “The system of patriarchy in a historic construct has a beginning and it will have an end. Its time seems to have nearly run its course. It no longer serves the needs of men and women, and its intractable linkage to militarism, hierarchy and racism has threatened the very existence of life on Earth.”

As powerful as patriarchy is, it’s just a story. As the post-pandemic era unfolds, can we imagine another system, one that is not based on hierarchy, violence, domination, colonialisation and occupation? Do we see the connection between the devaluing, harming and oppression of all women and the destruction of the Earth itself? What if we lived as if we were kin? What if we treated each person as sacred and essential to the unfolding story of humanity? 

What if rather than exploiting, dominating and hurting women and girls during a crisis, we designed a world that valued them, educated them, paid them, listened to them, cared for them and centred them?“

[ausetkmt]

Across the country hundreds of thousands of Americans with serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, have been consigned to lives of profound instability. Instead of therapists to help them manage their illnesses or doctors to oversee their medication regimens or evidence-based treatment for their substance use disorders, they cycle through homeless shelters and the jails and prisons that have become the nation’s largest mental health providers. Or they make their homes on the streets. They are victims of a mental health system that is not designed to meet their needs — and of a society that has proved mostly indifferent to their plight.

Few Americans are receiving adequate psychiatric care or psychological support these days — either because their health insurance doesn’t cover it, or because they don’t have insurance to begin with, or because wait lists run far too long. But even amid such pervasive insufficiency, society’s neglect of the most severely mentally ill stands out. Of the 14 million or so people who experience the most debilitating mental health conditions, roughly one-third don’t receive treatment. The reasons are manifold — some forgo that treatment by choice — but far too many simply cannot connect with the services they want and need.

The most obvious reason is money. Community-based mental health clinics serve the vast majority of Americans with serious mental illnesses. These patients tend to be low-income, to be disabled and to rely on Medicaid, whose reimbursement rates are so abysmal that clinics lose money on nearly every service their doctors provide. “They get 60 to 70 cents on the dollar,” says Chuck Ingoglia, president of the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, a nonprofit representing thousands of U.S. community mental health centers. “I don’t know any other part of health care where your physician is your loss leader.” As a result, staff vacancies can run upward of 30 percent in public mental health clinics and waiting lists can stretch for months, even for people in crisis.

In many ways, the criminal justice system has become the only reprieve: Because court-ordered patients are granted priority, pressing charges against loved ones is a common way to get them psychiatric attention in a crisis. Jails and prisons also serve as final landings for those who fall through the cracks: They make up the three largest psychiatric facilities in the country, and more than 40 percent of the nation’s inmates have been diagnosed with mental disorders.

Americans have long accepted that, tragic though it may be, there are no other options. That apathy is easy to understand. When it comes to caring for the mentally ill, the arc of American history has nearly always bent toward failure. But the policies and programs that could undo this crisis have existed for decades.

In 1963, in what would turn out to be the last bill he signed into law, President John F. Kennedy laid out his vision for “a wholly new emphasis and approach to care for the mentally ill.” It involved closing the nation’s state psychiatric hospitals — which had become dens of neglect and abuse — and replacing them with a national network of community mental health centers. The centers, unlike the hospitals, would support and treat the formerly institutionalized so that they could live freely in their communities, with as much dignity as possible.

Lawmakers and health officials executed the first half of that vision with alacrity. Thanks to a roster of forces — Kennedy’s bill, new and effective antipsychotic drugs and a rising tide of activism for patients’ rights — the number of people housed in large psychiatric hospitals fell by 95 percent between the 1950s and the 1990s. But nearly 60 years after Kennedy’s bill became law, health officials and lawmakers have yet to realize the second half: There is still no community mental health system in America, but it is possible to start building one now.

Dr. Steven Sharfstein remembers the Boston State Hospital in Mattapan, a creaking 19th-century building where he and his fellow psychiatry residents were forced to send their most intractable patients.

“It was a terrible place,” says Dr. Sharfstein, who served as president of the American Psychiatric Association. “The lights didn’t always work, the patients wandered around like zombies. Nobody got better.”

Eventually, he and his fellow residents banded together and refused to go. Move the patients back to central Boston, they insisted, and treat them at the community mental health center. Their small protest was part of a growing movement to close state psychiatric hospitals across the nation and replace them with community-based care.

Those hospitals had also arisen from a movement: In the mid-1800s, after visiting hundreds of almshouses, jails and hospitals and seeing the horrid conditions that most people with mental illnesses lived in, the reformer Dorothea Dix begged health officials to create asylums where those patients could be treated more humanely. The first such facilities were small, designed for short-term, therapeutic care, and functioned more or less as Dix had hoped they would. But as local officials began foisting more of their indigent populations onto the states, they morphed into human warehouses. By the time Dr. Sharfstein started his career, most of them held upward of 3,000 patients, often for years at a time.

Advocates of a community-based approach argued that even the sickest psychiatric patients deserved to live in or near their own communities, that they should be cared for in the least restrictive settings possible and that with the right treatment (humane, respectful, evidence-based) the vast majority of them could recover and even thrive.

Kennedy’s bill was meant to enshrine these principles. The plan was to build some 1,500 community mental health centers across the country, each of which would provide five essential services: community education, inpatient and outpatient facilities, emergency response and partial hospitalization programs. Ultimately, the centers would serve as a single point of contact for patients in a given catchment area who needed not just access to psychiatric care but also help navigating the outside world.

Part III

Power, Politics and Feelings

Power, Politics and Feelings

The law did not provide long-term funding to sustain these new clinics — just seed grants for planning, construction and initial staffing. The hope was that once those grants expired, states would step in with their own resources. But this thinking proved overly optimistic. Rather than invest the money saved through asylum closures on mental health clinics, most states spent it on other priorities, such as cutting taxes or shoring up pensions.

As the initial grants ran out, programs that had been designed specifically for people with serious mental illnesses shifted focus, Dr. Sharfstein says. Some turned their attention to patients with better health insurance than the indigent had. Others tried tackling an array of nonpsychiatric crises. Alleviate homelessness and food insecurity, the thinking went, and even the most seemingly intractable mental illnesses would all but disappear. “Obviously, there is inherent value in addressing social ills,” says Dr. Paul Appelbaum, a Columbia University psychiatrist and an expert on the intersection of mental illness and law. “But the concept of community mental health became diluted to the point that it neglected psychiatric treatment.”

Congress tried to revive the flailing community mental health initiative in 1980, with a bill that would have more than doubled the federal government’s investment in Kennedy’s original plan. President Jimmy Carter signed that bill into law, but President Ronald Reagan repealed it the following year. He replaced it with a block grant program that gave state leaders broad discretion in how they spent federal mental health dollars. “It was more or less the death knell for a national community mental health system,” Dr. Appelbaum says. “They spent the money on all sorts of things, including things that we already knew were not working.”

In the end, less than half of the centers that Kennedy had envisioned were ever built. Marginalized people continued to spill out of state psychiatric institutions but found no meaningful safety net. By the 1990s, they were turning up in prisons and homeless shelters once again.

What stands out about this history now is not how disastrously wrong it all went but how close officials came to getting it right. The catchment area model laid out in the Kennedy bill would enable people in psychiatric distress to remain anchored in their communities. And single-point-of-access clinics would help families in crisis avoid the desperate gambit of seeking care through courts and judges. “The community mental health model was the right one,” says Dr. Appelbaum. “I talk to so many families who are in crisis today, and they have no idea where to turn.”

Congress could correct course now by writing a new bill that pulls the best of these past attempts together and builds on them.

Federal officials took a promising step in that direction in 2014, when they created a new community mental health demonstration project that enables Medicaid to pay mental health clinics based on what it actually costs to care for patients. “There are so many things you do to support a person with a serious mental illness that you cannot get reimbursed for,” says Mr. Ingoglia, of the National Council for Mental Wellbeing. “Sending case managers to jails and prisons and state hospitals to help clients transition into outpatient care. Working with police to screen the people that they encounter in their work.” The pilot program factors these essentials into the cost of care and reimburses centers accordingly.

So far, the resulting initiatives have proved more sustainable and more effective. In Missouri, behavioral health clinics are serving nearly 30 percent more patients by switching to the new model and have been able to provide same-day service to many clients. In Oklahoma, mental health clinics have effectively “put a therapist in every police car,” officials say, by outfitting cars with an iPad that contains a specially designed app. The program has helped reduce adult psychiatric emergency room visits by more than 90 percent and is now being implemented in homeless shelters and other contact points throughout the community.

Congress has already expanded this demonstration project, and scores of states are experimenting with the new model or planning to. But it will take more than pilot programs for these new centers to succeed where the early community mental health movement failed. Individual projects will have to be evaluated rigorously so that the most effective ones can be scaled. Hospitals, police departments, homeless shelters and other institutions will have to be brought along at every step so that mental health is neither siloed nor forgotten but instead becomes a fully embedded part of the wider community.

Education and outreach will also be essential. People with serious mental illnesses are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators. But in an age where mass shootings and random street attacks have become commonplace, that fact has been buried in stigma. And a truly robust mental health system will have to include a range of services — not only outpatient clinics but also short-term care facilities for people facing acute crises, and some congregate institutions for the small portion of people who can’t live safely in the community. To prevent abuse, these facilities will need to be well funded, well monitored and held to a high standard.

None of this will be cheap. By most estimates, it would cost several billion dollars to fully fund and carry out the original community mental health vision today. But those costs would be partly offset by what police departments, jails and hospitals could save. The $193 billion in lost earnings that results from untreated mental illnesses should also be an incentive, and an eventual source of savings.

Americans have accepted the mistreatment and neglect of people with serious mental illnesses for far too long. It’s within our power to break that cycle now, and to change the way that the most vulnerable among us live for generations to come.

[themedicalstate]

Unvaccinated States Feel Brunt of Delta-Led Covid Uptick

Coronavirus cases and hospitalizations in the United States remain low but are slowly rising again, driven by outbreaks in patches of the country’s center, south and west, and by tiny increases almost everywhere else.

The highly contagious Delta variant, which now makes up a majority of new U.S. cases, has spread rapidly, fueling the national uptick. But because vaccines are effective against the variant — especially against serious disease — new cases and hospitalizations are primarily climbing in places with low vaccination rates.

Public health experts expect this trend to continue, putting the country’s vaccinated and unvaccinated on very different paths in the next phase of the pandemic. While nearly half of the entire population is fully vaccinated, the level of protection varies widely across and within states.

Covid-19 hospitalization rates, an indicator of serious illness, have increased more drastically over the past two weeks in many states where vaccination levels are comparatively low and where the Delta variant is driving a surge in cases, including Arkansas, Mississippi and Missouri.

“Please know if you are not vaccinated, you remain susceptible, especially from the transmissible Delta variant, and are particularly at risk for severe illness and death,” Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a recent news conference.

In Mississippi, where just 34 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, cases, outbreaks and hospitalizations are all on the rise. Officials there have recommended that older adults and those with chronic medical conditions avoid large indoor gatherings through July 26.

“We did predict a few weeks ago that the Delta variant would be the predominant strain circulating in the state of Mississippi,” Dr. Thomas Dobbs, the state health officer, said at a news conference last week. “Unfortunately, those predictions are becoming reality, and we’re starting to pay the price for it,” he said, pointing to outbreaks among youth from summer gatherings and among older populations in nursing homes.

He added: “Our collective undervaccination in the state has put us all at risk, especially the most vulnerable.”

In considering Delta’s continued trajectory in the United States, scientists point to the variant’s rise to dominance in other countries where it has been circulating longer. Those countries’ varying levels of vaccination have led to very different outcomes.

In India, where the variant was first detected, Delta fueled an immense surge, with case and death rates that experts say were vastly undercounted. India’s rise in cases began before even 1 percent of the population was fully vaccinated. Swamped hospitals turned away patients by the thousands, oxygen supplies ran out, and fires burned all night at cremation grounds as the death toll soared.

In the United Kingdom, however, Delta became dominant when a large share of the population had already been protected by vaccination. Cases have surged, but hospitalizations and deaths have remained low relative to previous peaks — including one driven by a variant that previously became dominant there, Alpha — because of vaccinations. In particular, Britain prioritized immunizing its older adults and others at high risk.

When the Delta variant became predominant in Britain several weeks ago, a lower share of all adults were fully vaccinated there than are fully vaccinated in the U.S. now. Covid-19 related deaths remain low and are expected to stay well below previous peaks in the U.S. because of relatively higher vaccination rates across the country.

But the slowdown of the U.S. vaccination campaign has prompted some concerns. It has been tough to persuade young people to get a shot, but the Biden administration is making a renewed push to sway them, recruiting YouTube stars and celebrities — most recently Olivia Rodrigo, the 18-year-old pop star with the nation’s No. 1 album — to share pro-vaccine messages with their followers.

Researchers aren’t sure yet how much hospitalizations in the U.S. will rise, in part because older and more vulnerable populations tend to be more vaccinated — nearly 80 percent of those 65 and older are fully vaccinated — and younger people, though more likely to be unvaccinated, tend to have less severe infections.

“Based on what we’ve seen in the U.K., we would expect the rate of hospitalizations to be lower than what we had seen in the previous waves,” said Karthik Gangavarapu, a computational scientist at Scripps Research, “but it’s still expected to be significant, unless we curb transmission.”

Sources: Outbreak.info; New York Times database of cases and deaths | Note: Range of likely values represents a 95 percent confidence interval. Sequencing rates vary between states and sometimes reflect localized trends based on testing from a particular region or hospital. Chart shows the latest available data, which is lagged and may change as additional sequences are completed. The proportion of Delta shown is a seven-day rolling average. Up-to-date variant estimates are not possible because of the time it takes to sequence samples. Data is as of July 15, 2021. By Lauren Leatherby and Amy Schoenfeld Walker (The New York Times).