On This Last Day Of Black History Month

I’ve been remiss about Black History Month this past week and a few days. I remember last year, I either did, or almost did, one post every day of the month. I was trying for once a week this year. Anyway, I almost did, but here is a post for February 28th.

I chose these two boxers for today. I don’t know why; various reminiscences, I guess. Earlier, it popped into my head that way back in high school, a guy needed help, asking me to write his book report. I had to read the book first, of course. It was a history of boxing, going almost to that current year. It was a small book, though. Anyway, though I didn’t and still don’t care about boxing itself (it reminded me of beauty pageants for women), I do enjoy learning about the people, thanks to writing that book report way back.

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“Smokin’ Joe Frazier”

(snippets)

Who Was Joe Frazier?

Joe Frazier was the world heavyweight-boxing champion from 1970 – 1973. Frazier is perhaps best remembered for his fearless 15-round match against Muhammad Ali at Madison Square Garden, known as the Fight of the Century, where he knocked out Ali. In 2011, Frazier passed away from his final fight of liver cancer.

(snip)

He moved to New York City to live with an older brother and find work. Employment, however, was hard to come by, and to put cash in his pocket he started stealing cars and selling them to a junkyard in Brooklyn. But Frazier harbored dreams of doing something with his life. Many of those dreams were built around boxing. As a younger kid, back in South Carolina, he had dreamed of becoming the next Joe Louis, airing out punches at burlap bags he’d filled with leaves and moss. Up north Frazier’s love for boxing didn’t subside.

After moving to Philadelphia, Frazier found work at a slaughterhouse, where he routinely punched sides of beef stored in a refrigerated room. That scene later inspired Sylvester Stallone for his 1976 film, Rocky. It wasn’t until 1961, though, that Frazier entered the ring and actually began to box. He was rough and undisciplined, but his unpolished talent caught the eye of trainer Yank Durham.

Professional Career

Under the direction of Durham, who shortened Frazier’s punches and added power to his devastating left hook, the young boxer quickly found success. For three straight years, he was the Middle Atlantic Golden Gloves Champion, and he captured the gold medal at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. He turned pro in 1965 and in just under a year had compiled an 11-0 record. In March 1968 he was crowned heavyweight champion where he kept the title until 1973.

Frazier eventually retired from boxing in 1976 to become a community leader and advocate for the youth by opening up a boxing gym to keep the youth off the streets of Philadelphia.

(snip-there is lots of diverse info on the page, linked in the title above)

I’m sorry; we have to click on “Watch on YouTube” to see Joe Frazier sing on (I think?) Merv Griffin.

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We know from some of my previous posts that I’m an Ali fan. I enjoyed his celebrity bravado and even his boxing. But this man, too, has done things to make the world brighter and more just; he served time and lost his title for being a conscientious objector to fighting in Vietnam, and was vilified and harassed for other peace-mongering efforts he made with his platform. Later, of course, he continued to demonstrate for peace and justice, and also for Parkinson’s. He raised good children, as well.

Muhammad Ali

American boxer

Also known as: Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr.

Muhammad Ali (born January 17, 1942, Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.—died June 3, 2016, Scottsdale, Arizona) was an American professional boxer and social activist. Considered one of the greatest boxers in history, Ali was the first fighter to win the world heavyweight championship on three separate occasions; he successfully defended this title 19 times. (snip)

“When it comes to love, compassion, and other feelings of the heart, I am rich.”

Muhammad Ali

Humanitarian Timeline

Oct. 29 1960

Donates Fight Proceeds to Kosair Children’s Hospital

Just weeks after earning his Olympic gold medal, Ali faced

Tunney Hunsaker in Louisville, with proceeds from this fight

going to Kosair Children’s Hospital. Fellow Olympic

champion Wilma Rudolph, a childhood polio survivor, was a

guest at the event.

Read newspaper article

(snip-So much more on this page, and the whole site, it’s a timeline slideshow that scrolls with you at your speed)

The diagnosis of my pain doctors and it was worse than I thought.

I have been promising this post since monday. But I have always been too tired or in too much pain to write it or post it. I am going to start this tonight but it is late for me and I may go to bed before finishing so it may take several days.

The fact is before I even went to my pain doctor to tell me the result I knew things were bad. In the morning I can only sit in my chair for at most two hours before I have to get up and do something that helps relieve the pain. Mostly that is going to bed. I don’t sleep just lay their reading news or telling my self stories I create hoping to fall asleep. Randy sent me a headband with speakers but that just interferes with my own thoughts and keeps me awake. It was a good try and I bought one for Ron and he loved it. I will give this one to him. I go to bed and lie there only to get up and sit for a couple of hours to have the pain again overtake me. Once the pain gets that bad it is 10 to 15 minutes at most before I have to leave the desk and simply walk around or do something because the pain gets so bad so fast.

Also Tupac is on the desk being as close to me as he can. He is not lying on the towel I leave down for him but as close to the keyboard as possible even at time placeing his paws on the on the keybord hitting random keys. He wants to be as close to me as possible since Ron has been away so long. He feels he lost another human. I will be exciteed t0 see him react when Ron gets home on monday night.

So before the doctor told me the damage I knew something was badly wrong. So remember that even before I talked to the doctor I knew something had gone drasticly wrong. Sadly the MRI showed that.

Yup figured that would happen the pain levels are too high so I am going to bed. It is 8 PM my time.

It is now Saturday and I am trying hard to get this post done and out. But today my pain levels are very high and it is difficult to focus but I will do my best.

One of the things that the doctor told me was that my spine is no longer aligned; the disks are not lined up with each other but shifted to different degrees. Remember this was only the lower spine now they are going to MRI the upper spine. Second my spine has curved wrong. Then we got to the serious stuff. Degenerative discs, bulging discs, and discs so damaged that the nerves are outside the spinal channel. The arthritis is so advanced it is deep / spread in each vertebra. She tried to explain all the medical terms. At one point she excused herself to go speak to the surgeon I see for spine shots. When she came back it was with bad news. He no longer thinks epidurals will help me in my lower spine and I need nuero surgeon to do back surgery. Crap I cannot afford that. I am losing my sight, Ron has to have eye surgery right away, and the van needs 2 grand in repairs. That doesn’t even include my eye surgery and the repairs on our home.

While I did not understand everything she said I so desperately wished Ron had been there as he often explained these things to me later, and I have forgotten some of it, the situation is I need an MRI of the upper spine as well, she has refered me to her prefered spianl nueraal surgenon. Then I will need spinal surgery as the state and federal government won’t let them increase my pain medication because I can’t take the fentanyl patches with my skin allergies. I am being squeezed into a surgery I cannot afford or seeking illegal drugs for relief to be able to function.

I remember when I started in this clinic in 2009. They looked at my MRI of my spine and gave me 75 gm of morphine twice a day. I asked it to be reduced to half that amount and it was and I could live normally. But after the opioid “crisis” the states started to inject non-medical legislators into the medical field to show they were tough on abuse and misuse of drugs. It got ever more crazy until my life went from normal and even being able to work for a few years to not even getting enough pain relief to sit in my desk chair and blog for an hour. Now the federal government is demanding it be restricted even further, as RFK Jr. taking steroids can work out in jeans. On the restrictions I can’t get enough relief to blog for any extended time of the day. I spend half of my awake time in bed instead of at my desk. I struggle to stand to do dishes. I just told Ron that I cannot clean the floors before he gets home as I tried and it left me in tears. Even with our lightweight, easy to use cleaning devices. The damage to my spine and the lack of medical relief have gotten that bad. This makes no sense to me. Why deny me the pain blocking medications that allow me to fuction semi normally. It simply makes no sense to me. Why put me in this state what is the goal?

Do you see my point? Why put me and people like me through this? Do they want us to use illegal means for relief, or do they want us to suffer to death and go away? Do they care about us at all as they make these rules? There is more things my pain doctor told me about my spine I did not list yet, things like protrusions, spikes hooking nerves, some thing she kept say stenoisis, and nerves being pinched between vertebrae. At one point she mentioned I have advance degerneritive disc, I so wish Ron was there as I understood so little of it, then came the but you need a neurosurgeon and back surgery to help you because the state and federal government won’t let us give you enough medical relief to have any life. I hate this regressive holier than thou republican elected officials that swallow all the illegal drugs they can get from their providers while denying us poor people relief for bigoted racist reasons and their personal gains.

I am sure I left things out. I had to take after talking to Ron a saved 30 miligarm instant relief morphine because I was going out of my mind. I try desperately to save extras so when the pain is so off the chart I can get relief. But with the new restrictions, how do I do that? Why do the people in power who have access to pill mills and who have no pain and want to just make a name for themselves while doing the very thing they legislate against try to hard to make the live so people like me so hard? And I am poor and scared. Hugs

What do you think about the 10 COMMANDMENTS in Louisiana classrooms?

Another great one from the Reverend. This time he talks about how these bills mandating commandments be placed every where in schools are about creating obedient people, not thinking people, not religious people. People who follow what they are told to do and believe. Hugs

How do you think we can make our bathrooms safe?

I love this video. Rev. Ed Trevors correctly says there are more problems and harms to children caused by people who look like him than there are from trans people. Ge calls trans haters cowards. Hugs.

American Psychological Association Reaffirms Support For Trans Youth Care, Pushes Back Against NYT

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/american-psychological-association

A recent article from Jesse Singal in the New York Times seemed to indicate the organization might be quietly retreating from supporting trans youth care.

Erin Reed

Feb 25, 2026

B Christopher/Alamy

Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.

Yesterday, anti-transgender activist and columnist Jesse Singal published a piece claiming there were “cracks in the wall” around gender-affirming care (which you can find fully fact-checked here). To make that case, he relied heavily on a statement from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons that bypassed the organization’s normal scientific review process and was advanced under pressure from leadership aligned with the Trump administration, including a president who is a major Republican donor. Singal also invoked the American Psychological Association, suggesting the organization was retreating from its 2024 position supporting transgender care and rejecting claims that gender identity is “caused” by external factors. But a representative for the APA tells Erin In The Morning that the organization stands firmly by its 2024 guidelines supporting transgender youth care and provided documentation indicating Singal mischaracterized its position.

“No, APA’s position has not changed,” says a representative speaking for the APA, attaching a link to their 2024 policy statement which provided broad support for gender-affirming care. “APA continues to support unobstructed access to evidence-based care for transgender and gender-diverse individuals of all ages.”

The 2024 policy statement is to date one of the most significant supportive stances of any medical organization for gender-affirming care. It states that gender-affirming medical care is medically necessary, opposes bans on gender-affirming care, declares that being transgender is not caused by autism or post-traumatic stress, establishes the organization’s support for combatting disinformation on transgender healthcare, and finds that rejection of a trans youth’s gender identity can increase their risk of suicide and harm their psychological wellbeing. The policy was passed overwhelmingly, 153-9, with each voter representing a large subset of the organization’s 157,000 members. Now, the organization says that it is not accurate to claim that there is any regression on support for transgender youth care from the organization.

The organization also disputes Singal’s portrayal of a 2025 letter written by Katherine McGuire to the Federal Trade Commission. In his piece, Singal claims the APA “cautioned that gender dysphoria diagnoses could be the result of ‘trauma-related presentations’ rather than a trans identity,” and noted that “co-occurring mental health or neurodevelopmental conditions (e.g., depression, anxiety, autism spectrum disorder) … may complicate or be mistaken for gender dysphoria,” framing this as evidence that the organization is retreating from its 2024 policy supporting transgender youth care. That interpretation is incorrect, according to an APA representative, who says the letter does not contradict the organization’s 2024 position and does not represent a regression in its support for evidence-based transgender care.

The FTC letter sent by APA Services was not saying that transgender identity can be caused by autism or depression. Rather, it was describing what any competent psychologist does with any patient: assess the whole person, including whether conditions like depression or anxiety are present. The letter does not say that depression or anxiety or autism cause gender dysphoria; it says that psychologists are careful about not mistaking these conditions for gender dysphoria. Notably, the letter was written in direct response to the Trump administration’s FTC, which had accused gender-affirming care providers of deceiving consumers, and McGuire was explaining that psychologists conduct thorough, individualized assessments—not that the organization’s position on care or “causes” of being transgender had changed. Had McGuire not indicated that psychologists were making these determinations, the FTC would likely then accuse the organization of not investigating its crank theories on gender dysphoria.

You can view the letter here:

American Psychological Assocation Response To Ftc Rfi Gender Affirming Care 9 26 2025 Signature (1)

323KB ∙ PDF file

Download

“The 2024 policy statement and the 2025 FTC letter are consistent. The 2024 statement reflects the organization’s policy position on access to care. The 2025 FTC letter describes what competent psychologists do in individual clinical practice: they do not make generalized claims to families but instead provide individualized, evidence-based assessment. Both documents reflect APA’s consistent commitment to evidence-based psychological care,” says the representative.

The American Psychological Association’s reaffirmation of its support for transgender youth health care is significant. The organization is among several reportedly under FTC investigation as part of a broader effort to pressure medical bodies to retreat from transgender youth care. It is also facing a coordinated pressure campaign from anti-trans activists like Jesse Singal and outlets such as The New York Times, both of which have repeatedly sought to cast doubt on established standards of care. That context makes Singal’s portrayal especially consequential. Readers were left with the impression that the APA was backtracking. According to the organization itself, that is false. What Singal presented as evidence of “cracks in the wall” was yet another attempt to manufacture doubt around the professional consensus supporting transgender youth care.

Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.

THE GUARDIAN: Trump’s unprovoked attack on Iran has no mandate – or legal basis

Trump’s unprovoked attack on Iran has no mandate – or legal basis
US president violates UN charter just days into his Board of Peace era, and chooses to take the biggest gamble of his administration

Read in The Guardian: https://apple.news/AGXRyWJ4GSlm0bTWFnyshhg

Shared from Apple News

Best Wishes and Hugs,Scottie

BREAKING: US and Israel Ilegally Attack Iran

Best Wishes and Hugs,
Scottie

Two clips from MS Now about ICE lies and illegal actions

Hear Aldous Huxley Read “Brave New World,” Find Out How “Metropolis” Shaped Modern Sci-Fi, On Open Culture

Sci-Fi Saturday!

Hear Aldous Huxley Read Brave New World. Plus 84 Classic Radio Dramas from CBS Radio Workshop (1956–57)

How Fritz Lang’s Metropolis Created the Blueprint for Modern Science Fiction (1927)

Two From The Birds

They just keep on keepin’ on!

The Mountain Chickadee

Any season of the year, the Mountain Chickadee is a delight to encounter. In their breeding season, they form neighborhoods of adjacent territories in the conifer forests of western Canada and the U.S., which ring in the early spring dawn with dozens of cheerful whistled songs. In winter, groups of Mountain Chickadees are joined by other birds — nuthatches, woodpeckers, creepers, kinglets — to form large dispersed flocks that move together through the forest, following the chickadees’ namesake rallying call.

Mountain Chickadees are social birds, living in groups of up to three mated pairs and juveniles of the last breeding cycle for most of the year, only breaking off into territorial pairs for the breeding season. In fact, while we tend to think of the breeding season as the time when mates are chosen and territories are established, most of this actually occurs in the winter. This is when the social hierarchy is solidified between the individuals in a group, and come spring, the dominant birds will reliably take the best territories. While boundaries may shift somewhat, the same birds will usually hold the same territories year after year. Pair bonds are formed during the winter as well, and usually last for as long as both birds survive.

Mountain Chickadees are well-known for their caching behavior. To survive harsh mountain winters, these chickadees hide surplus food throughout their winter territories, a behavior known as “scatter hoarding.” A single chickadee may cache tens of thousands of food items — insects, conifer seeds, or goodies from bird feeders — over the course of a year. They may cache food any time they have extra, and may recover caches any time of the year, but spend the most time caching in the fall, and the most time eating from them in the winter. In fact, studies have shown that Mountain Chickadees living in harsher winter environments have better spatial memory and are more adept at remembering where they have cached food. Unsurprisingly, these birds also survive longer. (snip-MORE)

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The Black-Billed Magpie

More than most, the Black-billed Magpie is a bird that inspires strong emotions in humans. A familiar species across much of the West, the Black-billed Magpie is intelligent, adaptable, and bold. For these attributes, they are both admired and loathed. While considered an annoyance or an inconvenience by some, they are also highly social and will occasionally leave “gifts” for humans who feed them.

Like many other intelligent and opportunistic corvids, magpies will take advantage of whatever resources they can. As such, the Black-billed Magpie is probably best known as a scavenger of garbage, carrion, and poorly guarded picnics. This has given these birds a bad reputation, with many regarding them as pests. A common folk belief is that magpies will wound cows to eat their flesh or drink their blood. Magpies will, in fact, stand on the backs of cows to probe and peck. However, the goal is typically not to eat the cow itself, but the parasites on the cow, such as ticks, that are doing just that. Cows are not the only beneficiaries of this behavior — magpies will eat ticks off of other large mammals, including bison, moose, elk, and deer.

The Black-billed Magpie holds a special place in mythology as well. Magpies are recognized as messengers in numerous Indigenous cultures of North America, sometimes to the aid of humans, sometimes to carry news to the Creator. One widespread story tells of how the magpie, for helping humans and birds alike, was given the honor of “wearing the rainbow” — a reference to the iridescent sheen on this bird’s wings and tail. (snip-MORE)