Paradise is Poison @presageofhumanity - Tumblr Blog

my knight dismissed me as his squire for shrieking “DIVA DOWN!” when he was unhorsed on the battlefield

Thanks to my brother for telling me about this story. [Alt text below]

Brown Swiss in Austria has been discovered using tools in different ways – something only ever seen in humans and chimpanzees

minnesotacore

I understand why many are emphasizing that our neighbor Renee was a citizen, but I want to state that this blog believes that we must protect and defend ALL our neighbors from ICE here in Minnesota.

ICE cannot be allowed to murder anyone in our home. No one should be mourning their mother, their wife, their daughter, and their friend today.

Undocumented Minnesotans, I hope you’re safe today, I hope your community is stepping up to take care of you, your life is just as important.

the-local-bohg-witch

Do not forget the other victims of ICE

as much as we must mourn and stand in solidarity with Renee Nicole Good, please do not forget the other victims of ice raids, who are not white. Silverio Villegas González, a cook from mexico who was dropping his son off at daycare and was murdered Jaime Alanis, a farmer from mexico who fell off a green house at the farm where he worked to send money to his wife and daughter Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdez, a father and grandfather from Guatemala who was hit by a car Josué Castro Rivera, a garden from Honduras who was struck by a car And so many others who were killed or are dying in detention centres, prisons ect racial bias is always something we must be aware of, Renee will be focused on because she was a white woman and a US citizen, but do not forget all the other victims of ICE, may they all rest in power

vvadevvilson

and Keith Porter

kny111

“Race doesn’t matter!” , “Isn’t science just science?! why bring race into it!!”, “It is not about the colour of skin!” meanwhile in the real world:

Is There a Bias Against Black Scientists? Funding Sparse for Minority Researchers

Black researchers and other minorities face nearly insurmountable barriers against career success, according to new research.

A February 2014 article in the Journal of Career Development details the work experiences of minority researchers in the social sciences.

Rebecca R. Kameny of the 3-C Institute for Social Development in North Carolina, directed the study, which collected data from people of color who attended a workshop on the topic of career barriers.

An astounding 72 percent of participants reported encountering workplace barriers due to their race or ethnicity.

Racism: A Sad History

Bias against minority researchers is not a new subject. In 2011, Donna K. Ginthner and her associates published a study about the NIH and grants to minority researchers. (The NIH, or National Institute of Health, is a government agency that serves as one of the prime supporters of scientific research.)

The Ginther study examined the rates at which grants were given to 83,000 researchers. Unfortunately, they found that the funding agency is biased against African Americans who submitted grant applications. According to the study, blacks are 13% less likely than equally-qualified white candidates to receive funding that is initiated by an NIH investigator.

The study’s writers explained that the researchers’ race is not always written on the application, but the applications’ reviewers could infer race from the applicants’ names and places of study. Without receiving federal funding, a researcher is less likely to receive a teaching position, less likely to be given tenure, and has more difficulty procuring funding to produce research and publish in scholarly journals. Ultimately, the repercussions of grant refusal are reflected in the face of academia.

When the study was published, the director of the NIH noted that the data is troubling and the situation is unacceptable. The NIH launched a $500 million, 10-year program to support young minorities in science. It is also considering changing its review process to review grant proposals anonymously to prevent this issue in the future.

Bias Against Blacks: Misinterpreted Data?

A 2013 study published in the Journal of Informetrics, however, contradicts the premise of bias against black researchers. The study, led by Jiansheng Yang of Virginia Tech, paints a different picture, concluding that the NIH review process contains no inherent racial bias.

Yang and his associates reviewed the work of 40 black faculty members and 80 white faculty members at U.S. medical schools. They assessed the scientists’ productivity, based on the number of publications they wrote, their role on each paper, and the prominence of the journals in which they published. Overall, Wang’s team found that the black faculty members were less productive than their white colleagues.

The researchers then reviewed the work of 11 of those black researchers and 11 of those white researchers who had received NIH funding. When they compared blacks and whites who had the same level of productivity, they found that people of both races received the same level of NIH funding. Wang concluded that funding is determined by level of success, and not by race.

Not Apples to Apples

Ginther, who found ample evidence of the NIH’s racial bias, argued in Science that Wang did not study the same aspects of the process that she did, so he cannot refute her claim. She noted that Wang’s study examined only a small number of researchers, and also looked only at how much funding they received, instead of whether they had a chance of receiving funding in the first place.

Ginther also noted that the black scientists’ lower level of productivity pointed to their difficulty in receiving positive mentoring, which is a further function of bias.

Discrimination is Not Dead

It seems that a majority of African Americans would agree with Ginther’s point about bias. A 2013 Pew Research study about discrimination in America found that a full 88% of blacks reported that there is discrimination against blacks. 46 % believe that there is a lot of discrimination, and the rest report feeling some discrimination.

Interestingly, white Americans agree that blacks are discriminated against, but to a lesser degree. Only 16% of whites feel that there is a lot of discrimination, but 41% sense some discrimination.

Regardless of percentages and perceptions, race-based barriers to success have no place in academia or the workplace.

ashes-to-anew

Coming home after watching The Long Walk (2025) be like

geekysteven

The political party that legalized running over protesters is appalled at this climate of political violence.

zilnas

The political party that incited a violent insurrection at the nation's capital and then pardoned all the perpetrators is appalled at this climate of political violence.

wildwithlight

philophilya-x-deactivated

reassurance with words is one thing. reassurance with actions is another.

secondbeatsongs

just realized that if kids today trying to do witchcraft at sleepovers go online to look for love spells or curses or w/e, they're just gonna find 1000000 listicles about crystal healing and essential oils plastered with AI-generated cottagecore pictures instead of—the way the gods intended—neon purple-pink geocities pages with tiled star backgrounds covered in near-unreadable gothic text and enough blinkies to blind the average man

tragic, honestly. we're failing our children

cakesexuality

I've been disabled for almost 29 years. Here's what I've learned.

Tablets sink and capsules float. Separate out your tablets and capsules when you go to take them. Tip your head down when taking capsules and up when taking tablets. Liquigels don't matter, they kinda stay in the middle of whatever liquid is in your mouth.

If your pill tastes bad, coat it with a bit of butter or margarine. I learned this from my mom, who learned it from a pharmacist.

Being in pain every day isn't normal. Average people experience pain during exceptional moments, like when they stub their toe or jam their finger in a door, not when they sit cross-legged.

Make a medical binder. Make multiple medical binders. I have a small one that comes with me to appointments and two big ones that stay at home, one with old stuff and one with more recent stuff.

Find your icons. Some of mine include Daya Betty (drag queen with diabetes), Stef Sanjati (influencer with Waardenburg syndrome and ADHD), and Hank Green (guy with ulcerative colitis who... does a bunch of stuff). They don't have to be disabled in the same way as you. They don't even have to be real people. Put their pictures up somewhere if you want; I've been meaning to decorate my medical binders with pictures of my icons.

Take a bin, box, bag, basket, whatever and fill it with items to cope with. This can be stuff for mentally coping like colouring books or play clay or stuff for physically coping like pain medicine or physio tape.

Decorate your shit! My cane for at home has a plushie backpack clip hanging from the end of the handle and my cane for going places is covered in stickers. All of my medical binders have fun scrapbooking paper on the outside. Sometimes, I put stickers and washi tape on my inhalers and pill bottles. I used my Cricut to decorate my coping bin with quotes from my icons, like "I've seen enough of Ba Sing Se" and "I need you to be angrier with that bell".

If a flare-up is making you unable to eat or keep food down, consider going to the ER. A pharmacist once told me that since my eye flares can make me so nauseous that I cannot eat, then I need to go to the hospital when that happens.

Cola works wonders for nausea. I have mini cans of Diet Pepsi in my coping bin.

Shortbread is one of the only things I can eat when nauseous. Giant Tiger sells individually-wrapped servings of shortbread around Christmas or the British import store sells them year-round. I also keep these in my coping bin.

Unless it violates a pain contract or something, don't be afraid to go behind your doctor's back to get something they are refusing you. I got my cardiologist referral by getting in with a different NP at my primary care clinic than who I usually saw. I switched from Seroquel to Abilify by visiting a walk-in.

If you have a condition affecting your abdomen in some way (GI issues, reproductive problems, y'know) then invest in track pants that are too big. I bought some for my laparoscopy over a year ago and they've been handy for pelvic pain days, too. I've also heard loose pants are good for after colonoscopies.

Do whatever works, even if it's weird. I've sat on the floor of the Eaton Centre to take my pills. I've shoved heating pads down my front waistband to reach my uterus.

High-top Converse are good for weak ankles. I almost exclusively wear them.

You can reuse your pill bottles for stuff. I use my jumbo ones to store makeup sponges and my long skinny ones to hold a travel-size amount of Q-Tips.

Just because your diagnostics come back with nothing, it doesn't mean nothing is wrong. Maybe you were checking the wrong thing, or the diagnostic tool wasn't sensitive enough. I have bradycardia episodes even though multiple cardiac tests caught nothing. I probably have endometriosis even though my gynecologist didn't see anything.

You can bring your comfort item to appointments, and it's generally a green flag when someone talks to you about it. I brought a Squishmallow turkey (named Ulana) to my laparoscopy and they had her wearing my mask when I woke up. I brought a Build-A-Bear cat (named Blinx) to another procedure and a nurse told me that everyone in the hall on the way to the procedure room saw him and were talking about how cute he was. Both of those ended up being positive experiences and every person who talked to me about my plushies was nice to me. If you don't feel comfortable having it visible to your provider during the appointment, you can hide it in your bag and just know it's there, or if you're in a video appointment, you can hold it below frame in your lap.

Get a small bucket, fill it with stuff, and stick it in your bed (if you have room for it). I filled a bucket with Ensure, juice boxes, oatmeal bars, lotion, my rescue inhaler, etc. in October 2023 in anticipation of my laparoscopy and I still have it in my bed as of January 2025.

If your disability impacts your impulse control (e.g. ADHD, bipolar disorder), you should consider setting limits around your spending -- no more than X dollars at a time, nothing online unless it's absolutely necessary, and so on. Or, run these purchases by someone you trust before committing to them; I use my BFF groupchat to help talk sense into myself when I buy stuff.

Feel free to add on what you've learned about disability!

bonivers

i hate how any career these days feels like you have to also double as an influencer. maybe i don’t want to be subjected to marketing myself

charlesoberonn

So Trump's DOJ is suing the state of Washington because WA's new mandated reporting law says that clergy (among many other professions) are legally obligated to report ongoing child abuse if they know about it. And the Christofascists in the Trump regime call that "anti-catholic"