Must be maidenly musings @lividlongings - Tumblr Blog

At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields

kineticpenguin

At the risk of sounding like an effete intellectual, I do actually think you should be allowed to just take college courses indefinitely

yourunderwaterskies

technically you can, if you don't care about degrees.

Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.

Free courses on Coursera.

Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison

For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.

When searching, the phrases you're looking for are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or you can do a general search of say, "free online college courses." Oh, and so you don't get surprised like I did, have an avoid: Hillsdale College is a conservative Christian site and not a valid MOOC place. Sign up with them and you will get things like THIS IS WHY THE LEFT IS TURNING YOUR KIDS TRANS AND GAY in your inbox.

aloeverawrites

@yourunderwaterskies I wanted to say thank you so much for adding these links, seriously, they've been life-changingly helpful to me-

And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.

Learn more about the Red Cross International Humanitarian Law (IHL) Program to train policy professionals, government officials, academics,

Kaya is a free humanitarian learning platform which offers hundreds of training opportunities across a range of key topics, including the hu

ambiguousdog

This is the money butt.

It only appears every 124078932423 posts. Reblog in 12 minutes, and money will make its way to you in the next 48 hours.

corncobjelly

money butt god bless

justchisa

I have never seen a money butt before

erflump

All hail Butt Money

mortalsfool

*le gasp* The money Butt?!?!

steve-loves-eddie

All my time on this app I’ve never seen the money butt. Bless. 🍑💵

cparti-mkiki

"goddess" "matriarchy" "female wisdom" girl your civic rights

tauindi

“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

yeetus-6942069

beemovieerotica

the cognitive dissonance from people who want the products of modern medicine but get weird about animal research. like im sorry but this is necessary for the survival of the society we currently live in. and the scientists who work on these things are not evil cackling psychopaths. anyone you talk to in animal research has incredibly complex feelings about their work and incredibly complex relationships to the animals in their care. there are regulations and oversight and penalties in place to make the work as humane as possible and scientists are overwhelmingly the ones enforcing and advocating for better care.

beemovieerotica

@velvetdemon I'm doing a full reply because I want to give this question the time and space it deserves, and I really do appreciate your curiosity about this.

The short answer: It is deeply unethical. There are nowhere near enough willing patients in the world to be able to do this, and it would be criminal to put them through this.

The long answer: The one side of the equation you're focusing on is: how much of a drug is too much, to the point where it will cause negative side effects or even death? And this is crucial to know. But it's not just a matter of finding out the lethal dosage of a heart cholesterol medication, you need to know that it can actually lower the cholesterol of any living thing. There is no way to know this without giving it first to...a living thing.

But beyond this, I need to emphasize: The goal of a drug trial is to effectively cure people who are already suffering from disease, who are living on limited time.

Drug trials don't just happen on any member of the public, they need to happen specifically on people affected by the disease you're trying to treat. There is at any time a very limited and very marginalized population of the world affected by early onset, familial Parkinson's disease. Because you cannot ethically induce disease in a human being, you are working with, speaking with, and helping patients and their families who are hopeful and desperate for a cure.

If you were to jump straight to human trials from petri dishes, not knowing absolutely anything about how the drug functions in a living, breathing animal body, it would look like this:

We didn't know that minute quantities of the drug interact lethally with x, y, z medication that people are commonly also taking. X number of patients have died as a result.

We didn't know that the drug is fatal to people with [common variant] in their genetics. X more patients have died.

We didn't know the drug exacerbates x, y, z chronic illnesses. X number of people have acquired permanent, lifelong disabilities.

We didn't know the best way to deliver the drug, so we tried multiple ways: the people who received it intravenously are now suffering from a painful, costly, and debilitating condition that did not happen with the ingested form.

I could go on, and on, and on.

The vast majority of these problems can be nearly or almost entirely averted by testing other animals first.

These are all people who possibly could have waited for the normal progression from animal testing to human testing and thus received better outcomes. Some people will pass away in the time it takes to get to that point, and that's heartbreaking, and we all wish science could be faster.

But the cost of expediting science could mean a life of profoundly greater suffering or an even shorter life than the one where no intervention happens at all. And at that point, you have completely exhausted your trust, your goodwill, and your patients' hope, after you've failed to do anything or even worsened the lives of people who are already deeply suffering.

manslaughter

hi, i’m an animal research professional. making sure laboratory animals stay alive, healthy, and enriched has been my full-time job for several years now.

animal research is not the mad scientist wild west that PETA wants you to think it is. there are extremely strict federal laws in place to protect the well being of these animals. animal welfare organizations like AAALAC ensure that lab animals are treated with dignity & respect and are given enough specialized care & enrichment to be happy and content in captivity, just like AZA accreditation with zoos.

not a single animal from a zebrafish to a mouse to a dog to a macaque goes unaccounted for. if an animal gets moved to a new cage, paired for breeding, has a procedure performed on it, gives birth, gets sick or injured, dies, etc. it is legally required that this information is recorded and kept on file for the US federal government to access. failing to record & retain this information is very much punishable by US federal law.

let me tell you - if you abuse or kill an animal, even a mouse - you are almost certainly getting both fired & blacklisted from the industry. if you abuse or kill a more ‘advanced’ animal, such as a dog or monkey, you will likely face criminal charges. killing a monkey is as serious and disastrous as a nuclear meltdown. you are expected to reasonably explain every illness, injury, or death of an animal under your care. you must record all of this information. animals that are clearly suffering with low QOL are required to be euthanized according to AVMA guidelines.

research animals are highly expensive. yes, even the "lesser" animals like mice. the cheapest mice will run you a few hundred $ per individual, with some of the most expensive mice i've cared for being $25,000 per individual. in research we have the "three Rs" - reduction (reduce amount of necessary animals to a minimum), refinement (refine processes to ensure research is accurate and animals feel no pain or distress), and replacement (replace animals with non-living research models as they become available). i can assure you no proper research team is wasting animals (*do not* say "b-b-but elon musk--" his research team is actively being investigated for animal abuse by the government).

research methods that do not require live animals are currently being looked into & efforts spearheaded by - you guessed it - the animal research industry itself (notice how the animal rights people are strangely silent & unhelpful when it comes to this?) but current technology is rudimentary and does not compare to live animal models.

some research animal fun facts (US edition):

all species of animals are only allowed to have one single major surgery performed on them in their entire lifetime.

institutions with nonhuman primates must have a behavior program in place (run by knowledgeable primate specialists) to ensure that they are happy and receiving enough daily enrichment and social interaction.

institutions with dogs are required to have physical exercise programs in place. this means every individual dog gets a substantial amount of leashed AND free-roaming exercise daily, including playgroups with other dogs.

a majority of nonhuman primates get to retire to sanctuaries like peaceable primate sanctuary, and almost all dogs get retired and adopted out by organizations like homes for animal heroes. some institutions will also adopt out unneeded young rabbits, guinea pigs, rats, etc.

some strains of mice glow neon green (or orange or blue) under UV light. this is not harmful to them and is commonly seen in cancer research.

so yes, you can rest knowing that laboratory animals are treated with the utmost respect by their caretakers. and you can stop this awful, ignorant talk of human experimentation that will only end in the abuse of nonwhite people, LGBT people, disabled people, indigenous people, and so many others. please just take a look at this wikipedia page if you think “ethical” human experimentation can exist.

prismatic-bell

Listen, y'all. In my home county, there was a dude with cancer--a longtime radio deejay, John Kanzius. (Yes, I just violated a major rule of internet security by telling you this. I don't live there anymore or we wouldn't have names on this post.)

He threw himself into cancer research because traditional methods weren't working--they were just making him sicker. That's not to say "oh nooooooo, Big Pharma wants you sick," it's to say that chemo is no walk in the park, and for some people the cure can be worse than the disease. So he read an absolutely insane amount of cancer research, taught himself, and invented a way to treat cancer with radio waves. His cancer went terminal. He begged for the chance to test the treatment on himself. As he put it, he was going to die anyway--if it killed him quicker, so be it. And if it gave him a few more years, a few more months, a few more days, well....they'd have their Patient Zero to show it was safe to go into clinical trials. The research team said no. And they said no because even though it'd successfully killed cancer cells in petri-dish testing, it hadn't gone through requisite animal testing yet. Everything researchers stated above? True. Correct. They will not put a human at risk, even a dying human, even a dead man walking, until they know the risk is minimal. John Kanzius died in 2009. Want to know when first-in-human trials started? July of 2021. That should tell you a lot about how human experimentation is viewed in medicine. He--and others who'd heard him mistakenly claim he'd "cured cancer" before he understood just how much research still needed to be done--was ready to die for the chance to live. People offered to sign every waiver, release every legal liability. And the answer was still no. Because without seeing how his treatment would work on an actual living being as opposed to just some cells in a dish, there was too much chance someone could spend their final days in unspeakable agony if things went wrong. And unlike a mouse, you can't provide compassionate euthanasia to a human. It's illegal. Yes, even if there's 0% chance of recovery. (Look up Jack Kevorkian if you want a bit of understanding as to why.) There is a reason animal testing exists. I'm not a fan of it. I wish it didn't have to be a thing. I also recognize that if we want to successfully research a lot of cutting-edge medicine, it has to be a thing. It is possible to hold both of those positions at once.

racethewind10

i mean all of this but like. they very much have 'just done human trials' like i understand where you think you're coming from tumblr user velvetdemon and others with that perspective but that was a pretty significant thing that has happened. multiple times. and almost every single time it was a case of horrific abuse of vulnerable populations. they very much have done human-only trials.

stuckonaglacierwithmacgyver

I present for your consideration, some of the human trials they 'just did':

Nutrition experiments carried out on Canadian Aboriginal children in residential schools between 1942 and 1952, in which various control and experimental groups were deliberately malnourished. Also the Qu'Appelle BCG vaccine trial.

Basically everything the Australian government has done to the Aboriginal people, but especially experiments in the 20s and 30s, which tested basal metabolism by forcing subjects to lie still and breath through a rubber tube for hours, or those testing their response to pain.

Testing of a new antibiotic* on children in Kano, Nigeria, during a meningococcal meningitis outbreak, by Pfizer. The lawsuit the families and the Nigerian government brought against Pfizer also alleged that this further reduced the public's trust in vaccines and contributed to poor uptake of the polio vaccine.

The Tuskeegee Syphillis Study, which is a landmark in medical ethics fuckery that everyone should know about. The US has also carried out variations of this in so many places

Southam's experiments on prisoners using HeLa cancer cells** without their informed consent.

The Rawalpindi experiments carried out on members of the British Indian army to test mustard gas.

I'm not even going to talk about the Nazi ones.

*In this case they actually did do animal trials beforehand, which contraindicated its use in children, but I included this because it demonstrates how unethical research practice can impact public health.

**HeLa cells in themselves are also a colossal fuckup of informed consent!

brighteyedbadwolf

Another lab animal facility staff member here, as a vet tech

FunFact! The facility/company is SO dedicated to the welfare of their subjects that techniques to reduce mental and emotional stress on the animals brought on by repetitive tasks, interpersonal/colony stressors, industrial setting, and a shitload of other work-related stressors that they EXTRACTED THAT SHIT OUT LATERALLY INTO HOW THEY SCHEDULE AND ORGANIZE THEIR STAFF.

My schedule is fucking amazingly calibrated. I've never had burnout ONCE because my breaks and days off are timed almost exactly when the average person hits a fatigue point.

bogleech

Laboratory researchers in shitty media: bwahaha, how I love injecting acid into kitten's eyeballs until they explode

Laboratory researchers in real life: put up memorial statues to remind humanity how much it owes to the lives of even mice

all-made-of-stardust

Thank you so much for adding the examples of unethical human experiments cuz jesus christ people sometimes don't even know about that stuff.

I briefly almost worked with mice, and my cousin frequently does, and i can confirm all of the above is true. He also confirmed that yeah man, some of these mice can be valued the same as a luxury car - we don't want to fucking hurt them.

chaotic-neutral-knitter

Reblogging this version because the additions are important - even outside of the conversation about animal testing, it is important to be aware of the history of unethical research on vulnerable humans.

However, prismatic-bell's addition about John Kanzius is nonsense, and I can't in good faith reblog this without addressing that. He did not invent a device that treats cancer and then die because no one would agree to use it on him. He had an idea about using radiowaves to heat metal nanoparticles to kill surrounding tissue, which got caught in the same issue every single cancer treatment gets caught in, which is: how do you kill cancerous cells without killing non-cancerous cells? For his device to work you would need to be able to successfully target nanoparticles into cancer cells, which was simply not possible at the time.

The companies working on his device got bogged down with legal issues in 2015 and went mostly defunct. However, in 2020 one of them did emerge with a device that has entered human clinical trials. The treatment is called hyperthermia and the idea is that it might possibly help other treatments like chemo and radiation be more effective than they would be on their own. And for those of you not clicking through to the National Cancer Institute link: It is not clear if it actually helps people live longer. Searching for clinical trials on hyperthermia produced one result: Chemoimmunotherapy Combined with Deep Hyperthermia and Spatially-fractionated Radiotherapy for the Treatment of Advanced Biliary Tract Cancer. This is a Phase I trial, so the primary objective is determining safety. Note that even if it does work, this is a treatment that would be used in conjunction with other cancer treatments for a very specific type of cancer, because cancer is fucking complicated.

Any time someone tells you about a singular guy who invented a method of treating cancer by doing his own research, please remember that cancer is fucking complicated and you have to actually test things before claiming that they work (with peer review/oversight to make sure you adhere to ethical standards and that you're not making stuff up).

nephilot

stole this screenshot from a dif place on tumblr but. i'm so so tired of this flippant "needs therapy" comment directed towards authors (and sometimes the readers of their books). if you write something too disturbing, too orthogonal to the norm, too fucked up, you receive the implicit designation of mentally ill. often it's an injunctive, leveled against author or readers of, like, a little life or other "extreme" works. "seek therapy. seek help." this phrasing also privileges the modes of "treatment" we have today, as if therapy could have "fixed" (sorry for the excessive quotation marks!!) the problematic authors of the past. as tho we can dsm-v our way out of the human condition. deeply bleak

crimsolyn

I think the purest form of love is just wanting someone to notice life with you. "taste this. look at that. hear this song." again and again. until you can't imagine noticing life without them.

pencildragons

bro i LOVE indigenous fusion music i love it when indigenous people take traditional practices and language and apply them in new cool ways i love the slow decay and decolonisation of the modern music industry

pencildragons

I WILL !!! I WILL DO THAT

some of my favourite indigenous artists, in no particular order:

Inuit artists:

the jerry cans (esp their album Inuusiq)

beatrice deer

twin flames

Māori artists:

jordyn with a why

Indigenous australian artists:

tilly tjala thomas (i particularly love ngai yurlku nhiina)

kardajala kirridarra (srlsly check out ngajabu (Grandmother's Song))

i've also heard good things abt Baker Boy, but i haven't checked out his stuff yet

columbidaae

Another one for Inuit artists is Piqsiq! Two sisters who’ve been doing traditional throat singing since they were kids. They make some really gorgeous, eerie, atmospheric stuff. Highly recommend watching this video of them performing live a cappella using a looping machine, because they might be the coolest people on the planet actually

(Jo March nearly in tears voice) women,,,,

aconissa

For anyone into North Asian and Central Asian folk music, there's this incredible Siberian folk-pop band called Otyken! The group is mostly women and they're from multiple indigenous groups in Siberia, with songs being sung in their range of different languages. They're so much fun and their music videos are amazing!

alqemizzy

i'll go ahead and recommend The Halluci Nation (formerly known as A Tribe Called Red), an EDM group from First Nations Ontario that do really cool fusions of First Nations music with dubstep, moombahton, and hip hop.

emeraldraccoon478

I really really really appreciate people who share videos on posts like these, because almost without a doubt every time I love the music but I’ve never got the spoons to click on links and look through a bunch of music or worse google the artist I always end up too overwhelmed to start and I hate that

morathicain

Haven't seen Belle Sisoski here yet so here we go: she's the current Artist of Year for BURO impact Awards. She's from Malaysia and knows how to play an insane amount of ethnic instruments and mixes them with her own voice. She does covers and her own songs, mixes ethnic instruments with Techno and shows the process. And she's also a live DJ at 19!

And one of her own:

Oh and of course there's also the HU and Bloodywood for people who like more rock and metal mixed in:

upthewitchypunx

1876 is a Pow Wow punk rock band from Portland, Oregon

chaos-of-nyx

Jumping back to OP's mention of Baker Boy, because he's phenomenal 🖤💛❤️ He also collaborates with a bunch of other Blak/Aboriginal, Indigenous, and POC artists, so you can find some other quality folks just by looking through his stuff.

Most of his stuff makes you wanna dance, but his tunes are super-diverse.

CW for the voice of a deceased Elder in this one.

These are both from his debut album Gela, but his second album DJANDJAY is out on his 29th birthday next week, and every track I've listened to from it thusfar is a absolute fire 🔥💖🔥

Albums named for his skin name and his late grandma (and a Yolngu spirit guide), respectively.

the-haiku-bot

Most of his stuff makes

you wanna dance, but his tunes

are super-diverse.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

cpericardium

I don't think "having sex" is important. What's important is arachnid locomotion is controlled by a system of hydraulic compression

tamsoj

Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka

kosmogrl

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

huh. so i just found out "Torment Nexus" was invented for that one specific meme. i genuinely thought it was from an Orson Scott Welles novel. my ignorance is an unending source of surprise and delight

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

um. Orson Wells. H.G. Scott Welles. H. George Orson Orwell. Philip Bradbury. stop making me keep track of white men names

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

in my defense all of these are separate individuals famous within classic sci-fi circles:

H.G. Wells

George Orwell

(George) Orson Welles

Orson Scott Card

at some point this is not my burden

paperjoshi

You're gonna laugh when you learn what the G in H.G. Wells stands for.

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

what-even-is-thiss

You know for the first 18-ish years of your life everyone your age is mostly doing the same things and then all of a sudden every year for the rest of your life somebody your age is getting divorced while somebody else just learned what a leaf is and you have no idea what’s going on or what you’re supposed to be doing

abodywithorgans

i'm so sorry, i walked marginally more than a mile in your shoes. my understanding of you has subsumed my own consciousness, i am you to a greater extent than you ever were, and you are merely a simulacrum to the true you, which is me.