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THE BLOGGER
Multiply-disabled genderqueer gremlin (they/them) from/living in the southeast United States. Tired, liberal, and probably not sufficiently radical. Becoming Jewish the long way around.
BLOG CONTENTS.
The blog is mostly confined to reblogs these days. There’s a lot of politics on the blog. Also history, activism, disability/queer/etc stuff.
Tagging is inconsistent these days. I do not take tag requests; thus, use your own discretion when deciding whether to follow me.
AND SOME *OTHER* THINGS ABOUT THE BLOG.
I feel like a lot of this shouldn’t actually need to be stated, but, I am very tired and a little grumpy about life at this point.
(I have an “ethics in social justice” tag that will probably illustrate to you on why I am saying these things.)
Reblogging a post does not constitute a full endorsement of its contents. I also do not have the wherewithal to fully inspect a source blog.
As such, reblogging a post does not mean I agree with all views held by the original poster. Nor will I delete posts based on this premise, or accept asks on the matter. Scrupulosity is a trap.
I do not post or reblog personal attacks. I do not make or reblog posts calling out individual non-public figures. I sometimes reblog criticisms of organizations, public figures, and politicians, however.
Posts I reblogged like … -checks- IDK, 7 years ago or something may or may not still the way I view things.
You'd think these would all be reasonable or common takes but many people seem invested in scrupulosity and eating themselves alive instead of doing anything useful. I am actively disengaging from that.
There is one very important thing I need people without major dietary restrictions to understand: the distress caused by allergies, celiac disease, and other food restrictions is largely not about the food.
Do I miss some foods I can't eat anymore without getting sick? Sure, but that's not what really bothers me. What bothers me is being excluded from a huge portion of human social life of which food is a crucial component. What bothers me is the stress and social stigma of trying to figure out what I can safely eat. What bothers me is the amount of extra work and cost that is required of me to identify, obtain, and prepare safe foods. What bothers me is people treating my needs like a nuisance, as though I chose to be like this - as though their brief inconvenience to check an ingredients list is unreasonable, when I deal with this every day of my life forever.
I don't miss the food that much. I miss not having to worry about what I eat. I miss freedom. I miss when trying new foods and new restaurants was fun instead of a minefield. I miss not having to plan my entire life around the need for safe foods.
Food is such a basic human need, and a lot of people don't really need to think about it. When your danger foods can be anywhere and everywhere, suddenly your entire life revolves around avoiding them, and it massively sucks. You get used to it and it's not a big deal most of the time, but then you go to a new restaurant, or your office has a potluck, or you've been invited to a party and suddenly it feels just as miserable and exhausting as it ever has.
Because people seem to overlook the things Jewish people have to deal with every day.......
Some stereotypes Jewish men have placed upon them:
-"Nice Jewish Boy" - being stereotyped as a pushover and cowardly and unmasculine.
-"Male Menstruation" - demasculinization taken to the extreme. The old theory that cis Jewish men aren't fully 'male', and experience menstruation. In reality Jewish men often hemorrhaged in Medieval times due to being regularly beaten in their abdomens and groins because of antisemitism. In modern times this expresses itself in the thinking that Jewish men's penises are "missing something" by being circumcised.
-"Jewish fuckboy" - a more recent stereotype, the idea that Jewish men are unsatisfied sexually with Jewish women, and like to go after gentile women, and believe gentile women can please them better. This is an extension of the old Jewish predator conspiracy.
-"Pedophile/Predator" - the idea that Jewish men are predatory and corrupt white gentile women and children to satisfy them sexually. This expresses itself in modern times with conspiracy theories about Jews creating the gay/trans agenda.
As you can see, Jewish men experience stereotypes and conspiracies depicting them both as hypersexual, hyperaggressive pariahs, but also submissive, weak underlings. In an antisemitic world, nothing a Jewish man does is good enough.
Some stereotypes Jewish women have placed upon them:
-"Overbearing Jewish mother" - the stereotype that all Jewish mothers are overbearing and smothering, sometimes having an obsession with their sons that borders on incestuous.
-"Jewish American Princess" - a newer stereotype that Jewish women are spoiled and extravagant, often leeching off of their wealthy fathers for money. This is based in the old conspiracy that all Jews are wealthy and greedy.
-"Jewish slut" - the stereotype of Jewish women and girls as hypersexual and sex-chasing. As a result of this, many Jewish girls and women have been sex-trafficked and assaulted throughout history, and are sexualized and objectified in modern times in the dating sphere and in media.
-"Jewish lesbian" - related to the hypersexualization of Jewish women, this stereotype relies on portraying Jewish women as masculine and sexually perversive, corrupting young girls into sexual relations and lesbians. This goes hand-in-hand with the portrayal of Jewish men as effeminate and homosexual predators.
As you can see, Jewish women experience stereotypes and conspiracies depicting them both as hypersexual and smothering, but also as dependent on money and objects of desire. In an antisemitic world, nothing a Jewish woman does is good enough.
Some stereotypes all Jews have placed upon them:
-"Unhygienic and dirty" - the depiction of Jewish people as vermin and smelly. While in history most Jews have been forced into poverty, cleanliness is very important in Jewish culture. Nevertheless, when you depict a group as disgusting and disease-ridden, it's easier to justify their extermination.
-"Greedy" - whether it's about social status, money, or land, Jewish people have historically been depicted as greedy creatures who are never satisfied, and are always seeking to take more and more from gentiles.
-"Lawless Heathens" - the idea that Jews seek to overturn the government and establish anarchy and chaos.
-"Elites" - tied to the stereotype of Jews being greedy, the idea that Jews are really the puppet masters in world affairs, and the ones who benefit the most from corruption. Other key words are "shadowy cabal".
-"Murderers" - the age-old blood libel that Jews kill Christian babies and children and women and Jesus, often for sinister rituals, and often involving cannibalism. In modern times, the idea of "Ritual Satanic Abuse" is an expression of this conspiracy. Be wary of anyone talking about Satanic Ritual Abuse, because this is not about Satanism and all about antisemitism.
-"Lizard people" - This may sound like a new stereotype, but the idea that Jews are inhuman infiltrators of dominant society is nothing new. The idea that Jews hide among white, Christian society in order to infiltrate it and take it over is something Jews have been dealing with for millennia.
Jewish people have to contend with being branded as filthy, disease-ridden poor people at the lowest castes of society, while also being branded as powerful, sinister beings who persecute others and are filled with greed. In an antisemitic world, nothing Jewish people do is good enough.
These stereotypes and conspiracies are present in every political party and ideology.
Whether it's references to "dark money" and "the Elite" from the Left, or "Q-Anon" and "The Gay/Trans agenda" from the Right, it's all the same.
Recognize these stereotypes and conspiracies within your own beliefs and community, and fight them.
Isn't it lucky for non-Jews that she died before she could answer that question one way or the other and now they have a perfect little Jewish corpse to play with like a paper doll 🥰🥰🥰
Anne didn't want anyone to read those pages, she glued the pages together to make sure they were her secrets, she was murdered knowing those were still secrets that only she knew.
Restorers carefully separated the pages and her secrets were published in later editions with the permission of her father Otto Frank. She was young and didn't know what these feelings meant about her, she was a Jewish girl who was murdered so near the beginning of her life that she never had the opportunity or privilege to draw her own conclusions about herself.
Anne Frank's questions about herself don't belong to anyone but Anne Frank.
just a quick fact check re: anne gluing pages together. while anne did glue brown paper over some sections in her diary, these sections contained information about “sexual matters,” including sexual intercourse, menstruation, prostitution, and jokes about sex. in 2016, the anne frank house discovered these passages and restored them + detailed their findings to the public. as far as i can glean from reading articles about this discovery, these passages didn’t describe her sexuality.
however, other sections definitely did—and it’s most likely that otto frank, her father, omitted them in early published editions. anne frank herself was rewriting a new version of her diary for publication; when otto frank helped edit her diary, he included passages from both her own edited and unedited sections.
regardless of semantics here, the through line remains the same: anne frank herself did not ultimately choose which parts of herself to share with the world and which to keep private. otto frank did the best he could to both honor her memory & respect her privacy when omitting passages. (it’s also not hard to determine why either otto or anne might have omitted sections about her attraction to girls in their own respective edits).
furthermore, she did not get the chance to explore an lgbt identity because nazis murdered her for being jewish. that’s the point all comments above & in the tags reiterate and why we’re really tired of lgbt goyim focusing on these sections from her diary—anne frank may be a historical figure now, but she was once a regular young girl who died young because of antisemitism. the least you can do to honor her memory is refrain from speculating about an aspect of her identity she was prevented from exploring & claiming.
regarding the goyische appropriation of anne frank in general, i highly recommend all goyim (and jews) to read this article by dara horn:
Why did we turn an isolated teenage girl into the world’s most famous Holocaust victim?
“I learned about it almost by accident. We had received an assignment in school to fill out a family tree. I came home, a bit baffled by the assignment (fill in some names? that’s it?), and became more baffled still when, after asking my parents for help, it turned out that most of those branches on the family tree were going to have to remain blank. I implored my parents to try to remember. I became desperate, begging them to just make up some names. (I was about to receive a lesson in ethics and family history all at once.) As delicately as they could, my parents told me my mother’s parents were orphaned when they were young. That my mom’s aunt, who helped raise her, was not actually her aunt, but a member of the makeshift family that formed in the Beirut orphanage where my grandparents met and grew up. I remember asking what happened and being told that there had been fighting in a country called Turkey, where my grandparents were born (yet another revelation: they weren’t even from Beirut!). That bad things had happened and many people died but my grandparents survived. That they were little when they were found and rescued and taken to Beirut. I thought about my grandpa. My always smiling, cuddly dede, who only had one eye and whom I loved more than anything. Who wore a beret, snuck me candy bars, and sang funny songs to me while the bombs fell that time we visited Beirut. It all suddenly became too much. I just wanted to finish my assignment. I asked for just enough information to include in a note for my teacher. And so, I scrawled on the bottom of that half-empty family tree, “I couldn’t fill in all the names because of the Armenian genocide. One million people died but my grandparents survived. You can ask my parents.””
— Sylvia Alajaji, The Day I Discovered My Grandparents Survived a Genocide (via katherinemansfields)
For millions of people managing type 2 diabetes, mornings begin the same way — a needle, a dose, and a quiet mental note to do it all again
For millions of people managing type 2 diabetes, mornings begin the same way — a needle, a dose, and a quiet mental note to do it all again tomorrow.
That routine just changed.
On March 26, 2026, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Awiqli (insulin icodec-abae), developed by Novo Nordisk, as the first and only once-weekly basal insulin ever approved for adults with type 2 diabetes in the United States.
This is not a minor update to an existing drug.
It is the first entirely new class of basal insulin to reach U.S. patients in more than two decades.
Instead of injecting insulin every single day, people with type 2 diabetes using Awiqli will only need one shot per week, on the same day, every week.
That means reducing from 365 injections a year down to just 52.
For anyone who has ever felt the weight of that daily ritual — the anxiety of forgetting, the physical discomfort, the constant reminder that their body needs help — this approval represents something much bigger than a dosing schedule.
It represents relief.
How the Drug Actually Works
Understanding why this injection lasts a full week requires a quick look inside the body.
Most traditional basal insulins are absorbed into the bloodstream and begin breaking down within 24 hours, which is why patients need a fresh dose every day to maintain stable blood sugar levels.
Awiqli works differently.
Its active ingredient, insulin icodec-abae, is engineered to loosely attach to a blood protein called albumin, which is found naturally and abundantly in the bloodstream.
This attachment creates a slow-release reservoir.
Instead of flooding the system and fading fast, the insulin releases gradually and consistently over an entire seven-day period, keeping blood sugar in a healthy range around the clock...
The FDA reviewed and ultimately declined to approve it for people with type 1 diabetes, citing concerns about a modestly increased risk of hypoglycemia in that population specifically.
Some regulatory agencies in other countries, including the European Union, Canada, Australia, and Japan, have approved Awiqli for both type 1 and type 2 diabetes, but for now the U.S. approval is limited to type 2...
What Comes Next
Awiqli is not standing alone in this space for long.
Eli Lilly is developing its own once-weekly basal insulin, called efsitora alfa, which is currently in late-stage clinical trials.
If that drug also earns FDA approval, it would give patients and doctors two once-weekly options to choose from, allowing for personalized decisions based on a patient’s health profile, insurance coverage, and individual response.
The broader direction of travel in diabetes care is unmistakable.
Fewer injections, smarter formulations, and better integration with digital tools like continuous glucose monitors and insulin-tracking apps are all converging toward a future where managing diabetes requires less daily mental effort without becoming any less medically precise...
A Small Shot With Large Implications
It is easy to look at a once-weekly injection and see only a scheduling change.
But the science behind Awiqli, the scale of the ONWARDS trials, and the consistent satisfaction reported by patients all point toward something that matters far more than convenience.
Diabetes management has always asked a lot of people.
It asks for daily vigilance, daily discipline, and a daily willingness to confront one’s own condition, sometimes in uncomfortable or inconvenient circumstances.
Anything that reduces that load, without reducing the quality of care, is worth taking seriously.
For the more than 37 million Americans living with diabetes, and the hundreds of millions more around the world, a simpler weekly routine could mean the difference between a treatment plan that works on paper and one that actually works in a person’s life.
That is the real significance of what the FDA approved on March 26, 2026.
Not just a new drug.
A new way of keeping people healthy, one week at a time.
Navigating gender dysphoria? Be heard and be counted in the science.
Join our confidential, cross-country study of 18-25 year olds to tell your story, challenge preconceptions, and have YOUR experience reflected in the science on queer youth | ayagdos.org
I can't remember where I read it last week, but the person discussed how when we think of chattel slavery in the US, we tend to think of massive plantations of cotton or tobacco, with one very rich white master or mistress with lots of land and lots of enslaved people. But we very rarely think of the many families that had just one or two slaves, in smaller homes.
Because it's not like you had to pay them, so once your family owned someone, they owned them and their descendants indefinitely. Could you pay and eventually free em- sure! You could also send them anywhere you want for any labor you want, could have an enslaved woman bred for more children, or maybe save up and buy new slaves and sell the old. Like cattle (thus, chattel slavery).
So it's interesting that many people go "oh well it's not like my family owned slaves!" Because like, one, how do you know that? Have you ever actually asked your grandmas about their grandmas? How many of your family members grew up with mammies? Have you ever asked? I wonder how many people have actually done the digging for the truth (or was it easier to just benefit). Because I've talked to my grandma, who picked cotton in the sea islands. She had to have been doing that for someone in the 1930s and 40s!
And two, it's easy to think that because your family (or someone else's) didn't own sprawling stolen land and generational blood money like a plantation owner, that it wasn't as important. But... It was. That was still someone's entire life. That was a person, whose labor benefitted and saved a family money that could be used in other ventures. How often do we think of them?
A panel of residential school survivors provided witness testimony on Tuesday to the Permanent Peoples Tribunal, an international independen
WARNING: This story contains details of experiences at residential schools (and SA if you click read more).
Roberta Hill remembers being sent to the Mohawk Institute Indian Residential School in Brantford, Ont., when she was six years old.
Although she attended with five of her siblings, including her youngest sister, they were separated upon arrival.
"I never saw her again for years after," Hill said.
"She was my favourite little sister. So that was the start of the separation and the trauma."
Hill, who is from Six Nations of the Grand River near Hamilton, was part of a group of residential school survivors who gave witness testimony to the Permanent Peoples Tribunal in Montreal on Tuesday.
Read more.
Tagging: @newsfromstolenland
A national 24-hour Indian Residential School Crisis Line is available at 1-866-925-4419 for emotional and crisis referral services for survivors and those affected.
Mental health counseling and crisis support are also available 24 hours a day, seven days a week through the Hope for Wellness hotline at 1-855-242-3310 or by online chat .
The European Union already forced Apple to abandon its proprietary charging port and adopt USB-C across its entire iPhone lineup. It just did something bigger. A new EU mandate requires every smartphone sold in Europe including Apple devices to feature a battery that can be replaced by the user without specialist tools, without voiding a warranty, and without sending the device to a manufacturer approved service center. Batteries must maintain a minimum capacity threshold after a set number of charge cycles and replacement parts must remain available for up to ten years after a model goes on sale.
The consumer electronics industry built its current business model around batteries that degrade, cannot be replaced at home, and create a natural upgrade cycle every two to three years. The EU just legislated that model out of existence in the world's largest regulatory market.
Apple, Samsung, and every other manufacturer now faces a choice between redesigning their devices for the European market or accepting that their current hardware architecture is no longer legally sellable there.
Given that no company walks away from European consumers voluntarily the phones are going to change and once they change for Europe the rest of the world will ask why theirs still do not.
The FBI cut the phone lines during the 1977 disability rights sit-in. Then they turned off the hot water.
They locked the doors from the outside. One hundred and fifty people were trapped on the fourth floor. Half of them used wheelchairs. The government assumed they would leave.
Kitty Cone was thirty-three. She had muscular dystrophy. Her muscles were failing, but her logistics were flawless. She knew how to organize people.
The federal government had promised to sign regulations protecting disabled Americans from discrimination. The policy was known as Section 504. They printed the promise on paper. Then they stalled. Without a signature, it was just typography.
The protesters entered the regional Health, Education, and Welfare building in San Francisco on a Tuesday morning. They took the elevators to the director's office. They brought sleeping bags and catheters. They informed the staff they were not leaving until the law was signed.
By sunset, the police surrounded the exits. Kitty sat near the windows. She organized the floor plan. She assigned committees for security and sanitation. She kept her medication in a small cooler.
According to federal memorandums released decades later, the strategy to end the occupation relied on medical attrition. The building was not equipped for long-term habitation. The FBI calculated that a population requiring ventilators, specialized diets, and daily medical aides would voluntarily evacuate if the environment became sufficiently hostile. They instituted a blockade.
The blockade went into effect immediately. No food deliveries allowed. No medical supplies permitted through the lobby. Guards stood at the main doors checking identification.
Kitty's muscles deteriorated faster under the physical strain. She couldn't walk. When the phone lines went dead, the fourth floor lost contact with the press. The government waited for the quiet.
Kitty dropped to the floor. She realized the barricades were designed for standing adults. The police had blocked the hallways at waist height. They hadn't blocked the linoleum.
The floors were covered in cigarette ash and spilled coffee. She dragged her body through it. She crawled under the barricades to reach the restricted elevator shafts and unguarded offices.
She carried notes in her pockets. She found a single working payphone the FBI missed. She called the local news desks. She called the mayor's office.
She crawled back. When her arms failed, someone pulled her by her ankles. The Black Panthers heard the news reports. They crossed the police lines with hot meals. The FBI could not stop them without a riot.
They shut off the elevators, so she crawled.
The occupation lasted twenty-five days. It remains the longest non-violent occupation of a federal building in American history. On April 28, the Secretary of HEW signed the regulations without a single alteration.
The protesters left the building the next morning. They went back to their apartments. The Rehabilitation Act regulations laid the groundwork for every accessibility law that followed. The HEW building still stands on United Nations Plaza. The elevators run on a schedule. The doors are heavy glass.
Kitty Cone: the woman who crawled under the barricades.
I don't know who needs to be told this, but you don't need to unpack your shit in public. Like, yeah, you can reach out to people undergoing a similar crisis in worldview in private or anonymous channels, but if you do it all on TikTok or whatever, you're just making a spectacle of yourself and you should expect people to react as they would to any spectacle
Thinking of this viral TikTok of a 3× Trump voter who's now deconstructing her support for MAGA and who is breaking down because commentators are saying they'll never forgive her for her past and it's just like...girl, you don't need to vlog this. You don't need to stand in the village square loudly declaiming your sins for all to hear. You don't need to be in public on camera all of the time. There must be an ex-Trumper reddit or something if you don't have a support group in real life, but This Is Not the Way.
Deconversion is a very personal process that you do need to go through alone, but you also very much do not need to go through it with a billion anonymous strangers on the Internet watching you and judging.
#there is no less sympathetic audience than the internet folks#do NOT confess your sins to a bunch of strangers that specifically revel#in the opportunity to indulge in their impulsive responses
I firmly believe at least part of the reason people do this is rooted in the very puritanical prioritization of punitive justice rather than restorative, and the hyperfocus on deserving forgiveness rather than acknowledging that you are never owed it and you will not always receive it, but that you should be better anyway.
The only way they feel like they can move forward is if they've publicly self-flagellated enough, if they've been repentant enough and done the right painful things to atone, and "earned" their forgiveness. For it to be real, they have to SUFFER and that suffering must be WITNESSED and then their wrongs must be ABSOLVED BY THE WITNESSES otherwise it DOESN"T COUNT.
And the people commenting similarly, in a lot of cases, are witnessing that suffering and saying, quite fairly, "that's great and all but I'm not forgiving you." And that's fine, and honestly in some ways they shouldn't because this is not the sort of thing you can get absolution or meaningful forgiveness for from randos on the internet.
But forgiveness and absolution are not something you earn. There is nothing you can do that will guarantee you forgiveness. The people you hurt may or may not ever choose to forgive you, and you need to be okay with that. That shouldn't have any bearing on whether you try to be a better person.
Turn off the camera and keep working on yourself for your own sake, rather than trying to earn or guarantee forgiveness from people who have no reason or obligation to forgive you, and maybe try to deconstruct your ideas of atonement, redemption, forgiveness, and justice while you're at it, because I think they're all waaaay more caught up in that harmful perspective than you think.
one of the things that makes autism a disability (and why some of us choose to label it as such rather than an “alternate neurotype”) is the stress.
part of autism is just being incredibly stressed. overstimulation? stress. holding a conversation? stress. something happening to our schedule? stress. people talk about how often autism is recognized and diagnosed via our stress responses (like meltdowns) because it is just so common to see autistic people stressed because of lack of accommodations to how our brains work.
and this matters because stress kills. stress causes a lot of health issues, or it can trigger pre-existing ones by making certain chronic conditions flare up. i once had a psychiatrist very unhelpfully tell me i “just need to manage my stress” when the stress i was describing was things i could not avoid in neurotypical society and can’t “just get over”. i can do “self care” all i like but i cannot at the very base level change the way my brain inputs information and reacts accordingly.
i only learned this year that loud noises aren’t physically painful for other people. i have lived 34 years in a world in which my friends and family regularly physically hurt me at random just by shouting, and i thought everyone else just thought i was kind of a wimp for not dealing with the pain as well as they did.
like. loud noises physically hurt. it’s like a static shock from my ears to my spine that doesn’t stop until the volume goes back down. i thought we all agreed that ‘that’s too loud!’ and covering our ears meant ‘ouch!’. turns out i’ve been dealing with a stressor almost no one else has, my whole life, alone.
autistic people have to keep functioning through debilitating levels of stress that no one else in their life acknowledges or helps them with. it’s no wonder that their most visible ‘tells’ are breakdowns.
ASU research is finding that East Valley data centers may warm nearby neighborhoods by 1 to 4 degrees, raising concerns about comfort, water
ASU study finds data centers warming nearby neighborhoods
By Steven Sarabia
Published: May 19, 2026 at 10:16 PM MST
PHOENIX (AZFamily) — A new study from an ASU professor finds data centers aren’t just powering the internet; they may be turning up the heat in nearby neighborhoods.
Researchers tracked temperatures around four large data centers in the East Valley and found communities downwind are a couple of degrees warmer than other neighbors.
David Sailor, the lead researcher and director of ASU’s School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, said in some neighborhoods downwind of these facilities, temperatures ran about one to two degrees Fahrenheit hotter than areas upwind. In the most extreme cases, temperatures were as much as four degrees hotter.
“There are many other challenges that we need to keep in mind as we design data centers,” Sailor said.
Pagination Imagination @k-pagination - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
