Some time ago I went to request a new ss card on the social security website and it said I wasn't a citizen despite being naturalized over 15 years ago as a kid. Then found out my parents and siblings have the same problem.
If you're a naturalized citizen of the US check on the Social Security website
You're unfortunately going to have to make an account if you don't have one and confirm your identity.
When you're done request a new card (even if you already have yours) and it'll tell you what the status is
There's an issue where some people were never told they had to change that status with SS after naturalization and that it doesn't automatically change
I'm of the belief that no one should be illegal and fuck ICE all the way, but this is a way to make sure that my fellow immigrants, documented or not, are safe
Dr Glass: male loneliness epidemic - embarrassing, all the things they think women want are what MEN want. I bet those losers are all going to the GYM. If they actually wanted friendship, or fitness that appeals to girls, they’d be taking riding lessons -
Me: is this about the -
Dr Glass: five. Five women at that barn who would’ve had me! Who almost had me! I was fighting for my life! Women are not secretive, you know! They’re all quite clear about where they go and what they do. They want men who read, and have a bum in jodhpurs. And men - men are all going to the gym! To do WHAT! To lift weights by themselves with other single men with headphones on. What are you learning from them? How to be more single! Meanwhile the women are paying to go to bookshop wine nights and fancy dress balls by THEMSELVES. The men are just doing exactly what they want and pretending it’s for women. RIDE A HORSE
And he's RIGHT!! "the men are just doing exactly what they want and pretending it's for women" I am putting this on the fridge. I'm embroidering it and framing it
not a Horse Girl™ myself, but I've said for decades that if men really were trying to appeal to women then there wouldn't be tons of straight, single men who refuse to wear a suit or dance
Anyway, good on Dr Glass for seeing through the facade, young men need to start listening to him, has he considered a youtube channel or perhaps tiktok
He would post an unmarketable six-part video series about Why Moleskine Notebooks Are Deceptive Rubbish, that could’ve been a footnote*, and then lose interest.
Italian immigrant women’s activism differed markedly from traditional models of “first wave” feminism, including many documented forms of labor feminism. For one, they generally did not seek inclusion or authority within the modern nation-state. Moreover, unlike Jewish working women, they did not immediately rely on the established trade-union movement or cross-class alliances with middle-class women to assert working women’s power, especially before the Great Depression. Rather, they turned most often to strategies of mutual aid, collective direct action, and to the multiethnic, radical subculture that took shape within their urban working-class communities. This political world was deeply transnational or, even more accurately, diasporic. It was rooted in the lived experiences of labor migration, political exile, and high rates of repatriation and thus reflected the intimate, enduring connections between homelands and communities abroad. It was also opposed to the oppressive power of the nation-state and refuted nationalism. Rather, it encouraged participants to imagine themselves as lavoratori nel mondo (workers of the world) and actively traversed national and other boundaries. Some of the women in this movement used the word femminismo to describe their work, but most preferred emancipazione, because it distinguished their activism from bourgeois feminisms while capturing the all-encompassing nature of the freedoms they desired.
— Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880–1945 by Jennifer Guglielmo
Hardest part of writing is accepting that some people will not fucking get it & you just have to like cope with that because over-explaining it just makes it worse
I will not over-explain my art to the stupidest people on earth. I'm writing for people who know what I'm talking about. Mantra that will save you. David Lynch was right
One quiet day on the farm, the Little Red Hen found some wheat seeds and decided to make bread.
"Who will help me plant these seeds?" the Little Red Hen asked.
"I would." said the Horse "But I'm a workhorse, and I'm too busy moving carts around."
And so the Little Red Hen planted the seeds by herself. And they grew into bountiful golden crops.
"Who will help me harvest the wheat?" the Little Red Hen asked.
"I would." said the Dog "But I'm a guarddog, and I'm too busy keeping away burglars and predators."
And so the Little Red Hen harvested the wheat herself and made it into flour.
"Who will help me bake the flour?" the Little Red Hen asked.
"I would." said the Pig "But I'm a mother of 5 newborn piglets, and I'm too busy taking care of my young."
And so the Little Red Hen baked the bread herself into twenty beautiful loaves.
"Who will help me eat the bread?" the Little Red Hen asked.
"We would." said the Farm Animals. "But we're ashamed, for we didn't do anything to make the bread."
"Nonsense!" said the Little Red Hen. "You, Horse, helped move around the stones that built my oven. You, Dog, kept me safe while I worked. And you, Pig, are raising a new generation of Farm Animals, who will too contribute to our Farm one day. You've all helped me so much by simply being you."
"Besides," the Little Red Hen added. "I couldn't possibly eat all the loaves on my own, most of them would go to waste. Come, eat with me."
And so the Little Red Hen and the Farm Animals ate the bread together. And all saw their own, and each other's, worth.
no but for real America being like “we can’t teach our children the full truth of the anti-indigenous genocide this country was founded on or truly get into the nature of the trans-Atlantic slave trade because it’ll be too upsetting” and then showing us footage of people jumping from the towers on 9/11 and that fucking video of JFK having his cranium shot off. simple sex ed is too much for the average 7th grader to fathom but let’s show them real footage of Jackie Kennedy reaching to grab a part of her husband’s skull. fucked up evil ass country.
like 99% of "men and women are soooo different!!!" comedy is literally just describing the experience of not understanding other people. like it's not that women never say what they mean talking to other people is just like that. it can be hard to understand what other people are thinking. bioessentialism really rots the brain
"women will say I'm fine and then not mean it" yeah that's something literally everybody does. is this your first time interacting with another human being my guy
Story from the Washington Post here, non-paywall version here.
Washington Post stop blocking linksharing and shit challenge.
"The young woman was catatonic, stuck at the nurses’ station — unmoving, unblinking and unknowing of where or who she was.
Her name was April Burrell.
Before she became a patient, April had been an outgoing, straight-A student majoring in accounting at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. But after a traumatic event when she was 21, April suddenly developed psychosis and became lost in a constant state of visual and auditory hallucinations. The former high school valedictorian could no longer communicate, bathe or take care of herself.
April was diagnosed with a severe form of schizophrenia, an often devastating mental illness that affects approximately 1 percent of the global population and can drastically impair how patients behave and perceive reality.
“She was the first person I ever saw as a patient,” said Sander Markx, director of precision psychiatry at Columbia University, who was still a medical student in 2000 when he first encountered April. “She is, to this day, the sickest patient I’ve ever seen.” ...
It would be nearly two decades before their paths crossed again. But in 2018, another chance encounter led to several medical discoveries...
Markx and his colleagues discovered that although April’s illness was clinically indistinguishable from schizophrenia, she also had lupus, an underlying and treatable autoimmune condition that was attacking her brain.
After months of targeted treatments [for lupus] — and more than two decades trapped in her mind — April woke up.
The awakening of April — and the successful treatment of other people with similar conditions — now stand to transform care for some of psychiatry’s sickest patients, many of whom are languishing in mental institutions.
Researchers working with the New York state mental health-care system have identified about 200 patients with autoimmune diseases, some institutionalized for years, who may be helped by the discovery.
And scientists around the world, including Germany and Britain, are conducting similar research, finding that underlying autoimmune and inflammatory processes may be more common in patients with a variety of psychiatric syndromes than previously believed.
Although the current research probably will help only a small subset of patients, the impact of the work is already beginning to reshape the practice of psychiatry and the way many cases of mental illness are diagnosed and treated.
“These are the forgotten souls,” said Markx. “We’re not just improving the lives of these people, but we’re bringing them back from a place that I didn’t think they could come back from.” ...
Waking up after two decades
The medical team set to work counteracting April’s rampaging immune system and started April on an intensive immunotherapy treatment for neuropsychiatric lupus...
The regimen is grueling, requiring a month-long break between each of the six rounds to allow the immune system to recover. But April started showing signs of improvement almost immediately...
A joyful reunion
“I’ve always wanted my sister to get back to who she was,” Guy Burrell said.
In 2020, April was deemed mentally competent to discharge herself from the psychiatric hospital where she had lived for nearly two decades, and she moved to a rehabilitation center...
Because of visiting restrictions related to covid, the family’s face-to-face reunion with April was delayed until last year. April’s brother, sister-in-law and their kids were finally able to visit her at a rehabilitation center, and the occasion was tearful and joyous.
“When she came in there, you would’ve thought she was a brand-new person,” Guy Burrell said. “She knew all of us, remembered different stuff from back when she was a child.” ...
The family felt as if they’d witnessed a miracle.
“She was hugging me, she was holding my hand,” Guy Burrell said. “You might as well have thrown a parade because we were so happy, because we hadn’t seen her like that in, like, forever.”
“It was like she came home,” Markx said. “We never thought that was possible.”
...After April’s unexpected recovery, the medical team put out an alert to the hospital system to identify any patients with antibody markers for autoimmune disease. A few months later, Anca Askanase, a rheumatologist and director of the Columbia Lupus Center,who had been on April’s treatment team, approached Markx. “I think we found our girl,” she said.
Bringing back Devine
When Devine Cruz was 9, she began to hear voices. At first, the voices fought with one another. But as she grew older, the voices would talk about her, [and over the years, things got worse].
For more than a decade, the young woman moved in and out of hospitals for treatment. Her symptoms included visual and auditory hallucinations, as well as delusions that prevented her from living a normal life.
Devine was eventually diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which can result in symptoms of both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. She also was diagnosed with intellectual disability.
She was on a laundry list of drugs — two antipsychotic medications, lithium, clonazepam, Ativan and benztropine — that came with a litany of side effects but didn’t resolve all her symptoms...
She also had lupus, which she had been diagnosed with when she was about 14, although doctors had never made a connection between the disease and her mental health...
Last August, the medical team prescribed monthly immunosuppressive infusions of corticosteroids and chemotherapy drugs, a regime similar to what April had been given a few years prior. By October, there were already dramatic signs of improvement.
“She was like ‘Yeah, I gotta go,’” Markx said. “‘Like, I’ve been missing out.’”
After several treatments, Devine began developing awareness that the voices in her head were different from real voices, a sign that she was reconnecting with reality. She finished her sixth and final round of infusions in January.
In March, she was well enough to meet with a reporter. “I feel like I’m already better,” Devine said during a conversation in Markx’s office at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where she was treated. “I feel myself being a person that I was supposed to be my whole entire life.” ...
Her recovery is remarkable for several reasons, her doctors said. The voices and visions have stopped. And she no longer meets the diagnostic criteria for either schizoaffective disorder or intellectual disability, Markx said...
Today, Devine lives with her mother and is leading a more active and engaged life. She helps her mother cook, goes to the grocery store and navigates public transportation to keep her appointments. She is even babysitting her siblings’ young children — listening to music, taking them to the park or watching “Frozen 2” — responsibilities her family never would have entrusted her with before her recovery.
Expanding the search for more patients
While it is likely that only a subset of people diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychotic disorders have an underlying autoimmune condition, Markx and other doctors believe there are probably many more patients whose psychiatric conditions are caused or exacerbated by autoimmune issues...
The cases of April and Devine also helped inspire the development of the SNF Center for Precision Psychiatry and Mental Health at Columbia, which was named for the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, which awarded it a $75 million grant in April. The goal of the center is to develop new treatments based on specific genetic and autoimmune causes of psychiatric illness, said Joseph Gogos, co-director of the SNF Center.
Markx said he has begun care and treatment on about 40 patients since the SNF Center opened. The SNF Center is working with the New York State Office of Mental Health, which oversees one of the largest public mental health systems in America, to conduct whole genome sequencing and autoimmunity screening on inpatients at long-term facilities.
For “the most disabled, the sickest of the sick, even if we can help just a small fraction of them, by doing these detailed analyses, that’s worth something,” said Thomas Smith, chief medical officer for the New York State Office of Mental Health. “You’re helping save someone’s life, get them out of the hospital, have them live in the community, go home.”
Discussions are underway to extend the search to the 20,000 outpatients in the New York state system as well. Serious psychiatric disorders, like schizophrenia, are more likely to be undertreated in underprivileged groups. And autoimmune disorders like lupus disproportionately affect women and people of color with more severity.
Changing psychiatric care
How many people ultimately will be helped by the research remains a subject of debate in the scientific community. But the research has spurred excitement about the potential to better understand what is going on in the brain during serious mental illness...
Emerging research has implicated inflammation and immunological dysfunction as potential players in a variety of neuropsychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia, depression and autism.
“It opens new treatment possibilities to patients that used to be treated very differently,” said Ludger Tebartz van Elst, a professor of psychiatry and psychotherapy at University Medical Clinic Freiburg in Germany.
In one study, published last year in Molecular Psychiatry, Tebartz van Elst and his colleagues identified 91 psychiatric patients with suspected autoimmune diseases, and reported that immunotherapies benefited the majority of them.
Belinda Lennox, head of the psychiatry department at the University of Oxford, is enrolling patients in clinical trials to test the effectiveness of immunotherapy for autoimmune psychosis patients.
As a result of the research, screenings for immunological markers in psychotic patients are already routine in Germany, where psychiatrists regularly collect samples from cerebrospinal fluid.
Markx is also doing similar screening with his patients. He believes highly sensitive and inexpensive blood tests to detect different antibodies should become part of the standard screening protocol for psychosis.
Also on the horizon: more targeted immunotherapy rather than current “sledgehammer approaches” that suppress the immune system on a broad level, said George Yancopoulos, the co-founder and president of the pharmaceutical company Regeneron.
“I think we’re at the dawn of a new era. This is just the beginning,” said Yancopoulos."
prguitarman
gummygunk
turnnoffyourmind
snowghoul
