The US banned Hawaiian language, overthrew our country, poisoned our water, devastated our universal healthcare, & illegally occupies Hawaii to this day. My mother's hands were broken for speaking Hawaiian in school. The US is not a beacon but the destroyer of independence
Happy Pride!!
Trans men and enbies have always been part of our spaces, helping to build and maintain them, bringing their compassion and wisdom to them.
Our spaces are richer for containing the whole spectrum of gender, not reproducing the binary thinking of cispatriarchy.
I’ve been making bedside water bottles for years but I don’t make them very often. They’re inspired by Mexican botellones—small clay water jugs with an accompanying cup which serves as a cover. Sometimes the cup has a handle. I’ve also discovered a Congolese version of the botellón. It’s such a simple and effective idea that it’s no surprise it would appear in multiple cultures. #pottery #ceramics #beautility
boost this cat when they least expect it
Its disability pride month and this upcoming September will be the 4 year anniversary of the accident that disabled me. It has been a long journey and adjusting to life in a wheelchair has not been easy, but my art has allowed me an opportunity to distract myself from my suffering and share things with the world in a way I never thought possible.
If you haven't already, please consider supporting my art journey by sharing my work and if you have the means a donation of $1 really goes a long way in helping me pay for food, medication and living expenses~ :rain_trans_heart:
https://ko-fi.com/reignofraining/gallery
#disabilitypridemonth #disabled #wheelchairlife #art #drawing #graphitesketch #sketch #transgender #lgbtq #digitalart #transpride #disabilitypride
The UN Commission of Inquiry has released a devastating report alleging that Israeli forces carried out deliberate, systematic attacks on children in #Gaza and the #WestBank after 7 October 2023.
Investigators cite more than 21,909 children killed and at least 44,143 injured, alongside thousands more maimed, widespread amputations, acute starvation, and the collapse of paediatric and neonatal care.
Source: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/coi-report-23jun26/
And so the UK/EU 'reset' once again is upset by UK entitlement & failure to understand the country's position as a non-member of the European Union (after Brexit).
Hardly surprisingly, a request by the UK to gain a 'decision-shaping' role in regulations that impact trade with the UK (the post-Brexit deal) has been rejected.
Our politicians really don't seem to understand how not being a member of a rule making institution works: you (the UK) are a 'rule taker', and that's it!
#Brexit
h/t FT
DWP staff making thousands of potentially fatal errors, three years on from new ‘quality’ checks – Disability News Service https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/dwp-staff-making-thousands-of-potentially-fatal-errors-three-years-on-from-new-quality-checks/
What is your gender?
The Presbyterian Church, United States, the largest Presbyterian denomination in the country, has overwhelmingly adopted a resolution recognizing Israel’s war on Gaza as genocide.
The resolution, approved by the church’s General Assembly, also calls for divestment from Palantir Technologies and GE Aerospace due to their ties to the Israeli military and intelligence services.
It further urges church members to boycott Israeli products and to lobby the US Congress to impose an arms embargo on Israel, marking one of the strongest institutional positions taken by a major US religious body since the start of the war.
Today, my jack russel Wurzel was introduced for the fourth time to my daughter's new kitten (Twiggy). Wurzel unfortunately never learned that cats are ok, and has hysterics at the sight of one. But today we had a breakthrough, and she is definitely learning that the kitten is one of the group. They were even playing together (my heart was in my mouth). She also wasn't so intensely focussed on the cat - still a long way to go, but she did sometimes walk away from the kitten spontaneously. And she always came to me for treats. I really hope these two can learn to get along.
The German Environmental Protection Agency @Umweltbundesamt has published an extensive report it commissioned on the potential role (or not) of nuclear power in achieving climate targets, in view of its feasibility, benefits for climate protection, and costs.
The report comes to the clear conclusion that nuclear technology "is not a quick or cost-effective option for significantly reducing the energy system's greenhouse gas emissions".
The report is here - in English!
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/system/files/medien/11850/publikationen/2026-05/32_2026_Climate.pdf
About 3 months ago I noticed something odd: when I chewed something hard on the left, my preferred chewing side, it sometimes caused a piercing pain that went right down my backmost lower left molar. So I went to the dentist. I have a nice dentist. When I went to see him for the first time, I was wearing my sunflower lanyard, and he asked me what invisible disability I was wearing it for. When I said I was autistic, he asked me how he could accommodate me, and I said I was very light sensitive, so I'd be wearing my yellow protective glasses during our session. He didn’t raise an eyebrow, and he did make sure that the terrible light dentists usually blind me with was pointed at my mouth, not my eyes. I never realized that was an option! Mind = blown! And also, before each step, he told me what he was going to do and the kind of noises and tactile experience it would cause. The guy’s a total gem 😻 (is what I think about what should probably be just standard practice in an autistic-friendly world).
So when I went to him with the weird intermittent tooth-ache, he knocked on the tooth and blew some air on it, warning me in advance and then asking me what it felt like. I said it was nothing compared to eating a nut with that tooth. He took an X-ray, and showed me the image on his screen. There was nothing there. So he said he thought it might be a gum inflammation and sent me home with some specific mouth-wash. He said to come back if it was still going on in a month or two. I did the mouth wash routine he recommended, which my gums did appreciate, but to no avail, toothwise. So 6 weeks later I was back in his chair. He looked at the X-ray again, repeated the whole tapping, air-blowing, gum-checking routine, and told me that he couldn’t see anything, but would I please get a longer appointment at the desk, and come back for him to remove a filling I had on that tooth, so he could look under it. I did that, and two weeks later I went to that longer appointment, where he took the old filling out, and to his utter astonishment, found a massive cavity going straight down, on the next tooth over where the two teeth met. He told me he was shocked that such a large cavity hadn’t shown on X-Ray, and went on to perform the necessary two fillings.
I thanked him for not just sending me home because the cavity hadn’t shown on X-Ray. “Not every dentist would believe me something was actually wrong and start digging around in there,” I said. He then confessed that if it weren’t for that old filling indicating something had previously already been afoot over there, he would have in fact sent me home without treatment. Had he done that, the cavity would have no doubt turned into a root canal. I know, because I have two of those from when teeth just didn’t hurt that much until the damage was already too bad for a filling. I guess my interoception of tooth cavities just isn’t the same as other folks’. I’ve also been known to walk around for a month with bone fractures orthopedic doctors couldn’t see on X-Ray. And to be sent home by medical professionals who just didn’t seem to be able to figure out what was wrong with me. And this is what the 3rd episode of my podcast The Autistic Rant Hour is about: Medical Gaslighting. Or as I like calling it: We’ve Run All the Tests and there’s Nothing Wrong with You.
In this episode I’m joined by Simo_tier (pronouns: it/they), a multimedia artist and activist I got to know on a local queer autistic meetup it organizes. Together we share some anecdotes about all those times we went to the doctor only to be met with disbelief, ignorance, discrimination and sometimes plain incompetence. We discuss the notorious pain scale, misdiagnoses, missing tests and wrong prescriptions, compounded discrimination of multiply marginalized patients, and the real life and death outcomes of everything autistic people have to endure when seeking medical services, including that moment when you just can’t deal with it all anymore, and don’t even seek those services.
I’d love to hear from you about your experiences with medical care, and whether you have some autistic life-hacks that make things better.
You can find The Autistic Rant Hour wherever you get your podcasts, or see here for links, player and transcripts: https://prepped.to/podcasts/autistic-rant-hour
#ActuallyAutistc #MedicalGaslighting #misdiagnosis #DentalCare #Podcast #Podcasting
RE: https://mastodon.social/@Lazarou/116858237538156574
Adding a content warning - this is an important story, but the article is very upsetting.
https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/bbc-and-sky-news-fail-to-explain-why-presenters-do-not-push-back-on-claims-of-spiralling-welfare-spending/. Read this article in full, & NB: "The proportion of #GDP spent on #socialsecurity...: 2010-11: 12.0%, 2011-12: 12.0%, 2012-13: 12.1%, 2013-14: 11.7%, 2014-15: 11.5%, 2015-16: 11.3%, 2016-17: 10.9%, 2017-18: 10.5%, 2018-19: 10.3%. 2019-20: 10.2%, 2020-21: 11.9%, 2021-22: 10.4%, 2022-23: 10.0%, 2023-24: 10.9%, 2024-25: 10.7%, 2025-26; 10.9%, 2026-27; 11.2%, 2027-28; 11.1%, 2028-29; 11.0%, 2029-30; 11.1%, 2030-31; 11.2%."
https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/alarm-among-veteran-activists-as-burnham-appoints-scrounger-rhetoric-purnell-as-no-10-chief-of-staff/. "Disabled #activists have expressed alarm at the decision by prime-minister-in-waiting Andy #Burnham to appoint former work & pensions secretary James #Purnell as his new chief of staff... Purnell leaves grim memories among #disabled activists who were engaged in #campaigning on work & pensions issues in the late 2000s, including his enthusiasm for so-called 'scrounger rhetoric'."
Mass walk out at Edinburgh University's School of Social and Political Studies graduation ceremony yesterday ✊ 🇵🇸