My Doctor visit to day and for the futures. I have so much I want to share

OK I should go to bed but the war between my pain and my steroids that got me able to walk again.  So after a visit with the most understanding primary care provider I have ever had, he started talking about how I am still very anemic, and I am showing my iron is very low.   He went over the three situations why that could be happening.   

He explained his reasoning, I either am bleeding out like a woman with her normal monthly discharge.  He smiled as he said I doubt that is this case.  He then looked over the rest of the results and informed me I have a serious problem developing.  

The doctor looked at my elevated results and the other bottoming out results and quietly explained there are three causes. None of them are good.   

I could be not getting enough iron in my diet which I explained to him Ron with our limited budget tries to at least twice a week to give me red meat.  He will deny himself that beef even when I beg him to take some.  He wants our limited funds to give this to, to me

 The doctor explained that there were two other reasons I was having these results.  He worried I was bleeding, and that would be internal.  Also I could not be absorbing iron which is a thing a lot of people have.   I did not know that.  

So I listened to the doctor who is very responsive to me and knows my abuse I and told him I was OK with doing a lower GI.  He tried to offer me an out but I explained I had listened to what he told me the last visit and if he felt it was so important, I would do it.  

Then he asked about the PSA raising numbers and I am sad to say I reacted badly.   When he brought it up I started to freak out.  He was saying how the numbers were progressing, and I got very upset, interrupting him, grabbing at my hair and told him … look I just got myself willing to let a lower GI happen where something will be put up my butt by people I don’t know ……

At this point I was standing pressed back against the wall of the room I was panicking because of what I thought he meant.  To the doctor’s credit, he was not suggesting that.  He stayed calmly on his chair and told me he wouldn’t ever ask that of me.    He only was suggesting that if it was warranted, he would work with me on an appropriate echo or MRI for the procedure. 

Because I was so upset he did not do the normal touching of the body but did ask if he could listen to my front with his scope and then when he asked to put the stethoscope down my back I agreed but I guess I got so upset he only did two.   In my defense afterward, I offered to take off my shirt and let him repeat the tests.   But he refused to do that to me, saying never would he put me through that.

I am going to bed, but the cartoons / memes / news posts may not get out. It is 8 pm my time.  I will have to get up by 3 am to do it for everyone.  And to tell you honestly right now I am very tired.  I love doing this post.  

However this weekend I have told Ron I will sharpen all the knives in the house.   I do it because I can and it is good for the house.  So if I am not posting or such just Know I am dealing with home stuff.  Which I love as much as this blog.   Hugs and good night

 

ICE Kills Again

 

A comment about MAGA’s fear of Trans folks…

I love how the Rev. talks about the remarkable strength of trans people for just trying to live as who they really are, not as who some on the right want them to be.  He sees trans people for the people they are.  He is realistic about the circumstances for them and others in their lives.  Hugs

Trump hijacked US’s 250 anniversary to serve ‘political ideology and pet projects’, congressional report says

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/02/trump-hijacked-250-anniversary?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Collage featuring fireworks, a close-up of Donald Trump's face, a UFC event at the White House, a cowboy riding a horse, and airplanes flying over the White House Illustration: Guardian Design

House Democratic subcommittee report outlines web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes

The interim report, “From Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People Out of Their 250th Birthday”, outlines a web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes orchestrated through a shadow corporation embedded within the National Park Foundation (NPF).

The document was produced by Democratic staff of the House of Representatives’ natural resources committee’s oversight and investigations subcommittee. It has not been officially adopted by the committee.


Collage of welcome sign outside Yellowstone national park
‘A sanitized view of America’: inside Trump’s campaign to erase US history from national parks
Read more
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“Under President Donald Trump, this anniversary has been hijacked and perverted into a hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment,” it states, contending that the machinery built for a national commemoration was converted “into an apparatus for raising and spending money in service of the President’s ego, political ideology, and pet projects”.
How Trump is making the US’s 250th anniversary about himself – video

In 2016 Congress established the US semiquincentennial commission, operating as the non-profit America250 Foundation, to plan the nation’s 2026 celebrations on a non-partisan basis. However, under Trump, the White House launched a sustained pressure campaign to subsume the commission.

When America250 leadership resisted its demands to shift focus toward partisan, campaign-style spectacles, the Trump administration created Freedom 250 as a wholly owned subsidiary of the congressionally chartered NPF.

The interim report finds that, by taking control of the NPF board and installing key campaign operatives such as Meredith O’Rourke and Chris LaCivita, the White House secured an opaque vehicle that enjoyed the NPF’s non-partisan credibility and tax-exempt status while operating outside standard government transparency laws.

Jared Huffman, a California congressman who is the top Democrat on the natural resources committee, said: “I can’t, in my time here in Congress, remember anything even remotely like this: watching this trusted, venerable charity organisation, the National Parks Foundation, literally be hijacked for a craven political agenda that tries to steal the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary and turn it into something that’s all about Trump, advancing this very divisive agenda and even enriching Trump and those around him.”

The interim report alleges that Freedom 250 surreptitiously diverted resources intended for America250 for its own benefit, leaving America250 scrambling for funds.

Sources interviewed by Democrats on the committee said fundraisers including O’Rourke misled prospective America250 donors by providing them with Freedom 250’s banking and routing numbers instead. The report finds this could constitute wire fraud and charitable solicitation fraud under federal and District of Columbia law.

This deceit extended to the entertainment industry. Artists recruited for the kickoff of the Great American State Fair – including Martina McBride and Young MC – were assured the event was non-partisan, only to face social media backlash when the event was revealed to be a Trump-backed rally. In the words of Young MC, the booking was a “bait and switch”.

The investigation also outlines how Freedom 250 effectively put a price tag on presidential access, circulating sponsorship packages starting at $500,000 and climbing above $10m for tiered recognition, culminating in a “historic photo opportunity” with Trump.

The report also points to perhaps the most clear example on 14 June when the White House hosted a huge Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event on the South Lawn to celebrate the president’s 80th birthday. The event was heavily sponsored by corporations facing impending federal regulation and used vast government resources for “Super Bowl-level security” marshalled by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Fighters received bonuses in “USD1”, a cryptocurrency issued by World Liberty Financial, a trust run by the president’s children, and Trump personally bought up to $50,000 in stock in the UFC’s parent company weeks before the event.

Freedom 250 has also functioned as a conduit for steering federal funds to Trump campaign loyalists. Event Strategies – the same firm that planned the January 6 rally that preceded the US Capitol attack – was awarded 18 federal contracts totalling roughly $40m, along with an indefinite delivery master contract worth up to $100m.

Beyond lucrative contracts, the administration is accused of building a partisan political database disguised as a government domain. Freedom 250’s website, initially managed by former “Department of Government Efficiency” (Doge) employees known for past data leaks, extensively logs user data.

Event registration is powered by Campaign Nucleus, a firm founded by Brad Parscale, a veteran of Trump election campaigns. Campaign Nucleus openly boasts about using artificial intelligence to analyse personal data and target “persuadable” voters. Unsuspecting visitors, such as attenders of a free Fifa World Cup Fan Zone on the National Mall, unwittingly fed their personal information directly into this Republican campaign apparatus.

The report also focuses on the ideological overhaul of the semiquincentennial. Freedom 250 replaced America250’s civic engagement focus with overt Christian nationalist programming, operating in tandem with the Religious Liberty Commission, which recently recommended repealing the Johnson amendment to allow churches to engage in partisan politics.

A central feature of this effort was “Freedom Trucks” – a federally funded fleet of mobile museums dispatched to schoolchildren across the nation. Supplied with content from the conservative PragerU [the Prager University Foundation] and Hillsdale College, these exhibits recast the founding of the US as an exclusively Christian project, embracing demonstrable falsehoods.

Exhibits include an AI-generated George Washington claiming that “our rights are a gift from God”, a statement the first president is not documented as having made, alongside antisemitic tropes suggesting that Jewish merchants financed the revolutionary cause while omitting they also fought and died for it.

Concurrently, the administration aggressively moved to erase historical realities, removing national park signage detailing slavery, forced removal of Indigenous peoples and climate change. Huffman said it amounted to an attempt to reshape American identity to fit a narrow rightwing agenda.

“It’s a fantasy that airbrushes out the more complicated parts of our history – slavery, the Native American genocide, the actual secular ideals on which our government was founded. It wasn’t the opening of the clouds and some revealed covenant with God as they would have you believe.”

As Washington barrels towards Fourth of July, with another Trump speech and a big fireworks display planned for the national mall, Huffman acknowledges that Freedom 250 is unstoppable. But his goal now is exposure.

“The one thing we can do is make sure the American people know what they’re doing in our name and with our tax dollars,” the congressman said. “We should do that because what they have pulled off here is a potential template for other betrayals of public trust that they and maybe future generations will attempt if we don’t challenge them.”

Clips from the Majority Report about Zorhan Mamdani and the rise of the DSA

 

 

 

Some The Majority Report Clips on the DSA and reactions to their wins from corporate establishment democrats and republicans.

 

 

 

Evolution of Thunder Lizards

Super informative and indepth in the science of paleontology.  Aron Ra knows his stuff and has the ability to instruct or impart the information in a way that is easier to understand.  If you like learning about dinosaurs then you should enjoy this video.  Hugs

AronRa explores the evolutionary history of sauropods, tracing their development from early archosaurs to the massive, long-necked creatures found in the fossil record. This examination focuses on anatomical transitions, such as skeletal pneumaticity, and the taxonomic debates surrounding their classification relative to theropods and other dinosaur lineages.

The Real History Behind Anti-Trans Laws

Wow.  There is a lot of historic information in this video.  The author / presenter has quick cuts to other personality characters she plays to highlight the absurdity of some positions held by the hierarchy.  She delvesdeeply into the idea of what is proper femininity, who steps outside it, and who thinks they are responsible for judging or enforcing it.  She delves into how many fights against change and equality are about fears by men of emasculation.  The lowering of men’s status.  When she elaborates on suffrage, all the fears seem to be that allowing women to vote would give women the right to be men and force men to be women.   Seem familure?   She goes into detail on how each repressive opressive responce to equal rights comes down to the same phrases such as save the children, save the family,  or the claims that society it self will end.   The clips she intersperses go by far too quickly so I had to stop the video to read them but she does describe what is on them.   The begining was choppy and it took me a bit to get  her style of presentation but once I did I found it very informative fillwed with facts, history, and fun to watch.  Hugs

The transgender bathroom ‘debate’ isn’t new (but it is stupid). I’m looking at you TERF’s…

Looking back through history, gender politics is consistently entangled with race, class, misogyny, and disability. Minority groups existing outside the ‘norm’ are attacked as ‘radicals’ or menaces to society…

But what prevails each time we face oppression AND causes real change in our society? 

 

 

Buttigieg says his family was target of ‘politically motivated hoax’

This is horrific and I believe I already posted on it once.   Ron and I talked about it at length.  Hug         ————————————————————————————————————————————

Buttigieg says his family was target of ‘politically motivated hoax’

The former transportation secretary described it as “the ugliest thing that has happened to me since my career in service began.”

Pete Buttigieg in shadow.Pete Buttigieg, former secretary of transportation, during the National Action Network 35th Anniversary Convention on April 10, 2026, in New York City.Adam Gray / Bloomberg via Getty Images

$360,000 and Counting: School Districts Are Spending Big Bucks to Fight Anti-Trans Lawsuits

This is a very important news article.  I hope everyone will read it.  This is scary how a small mostly religious minority wants to erase an entire group of people from existence just for a made up moral certainty that they can’t accept that people different from them exist.   They simply won’t accept that other people can feel differently than they do and they insist that they have the right to deny all rights to LGBTQ+ kids / people.   I remember being a gay teenager hearing these same arguments about people like me in J high school.  How gay kids shouldn’t be allowed in locker rooms as we may get excited by the other kids bodies and lose control and have sex with them right there in the locker room.  It was a huge fight back then about gay teachers as the moral right felt they shouldn’t be teaching kids who might see being gay as normal.  I remember the silly stupid republicans like Sam Nunn claiming no military person wanted to serve with or god forbid shower in the same room as a gay man.  At the time I was gay and in the military and having more sex and great times even with straight guys.  But the parent pushing the claim that their daughter had to change clothes in front of a trans kid went on right wing TV programs to promote the hate.  The school denies that setup existed.  Plus a lot of this is funded and pushed by religious hate groups with a lot of donated money behind them in an attempt to keep the country from progressing as their god is stuck with writings from 2,500 years ago and the majority of hate preachers seem to idolize the 1950s.  I feel so sorry for the trans kids today.  I remember what it was like for me as a gay kid in the public school system.  I was not even out, just different but still I was attacked as a queer faggot.  Why some people hate so deeply and want to act on it and even pass it on to others hopeing they will agree with them I can not understand.  What happened to live and let live?  I believe that if what someone else is doing doesn’t involve me, doesn’t harm me,  then let that person be them.  Qoutes from the article below.   Oh and when did executive orders become laws?   Did congress get dissolved, or are we now ruled by the whim or the racist bigot hater?  Hugs

According to Liz Mikitarian, a retired kindergarten teacher and the founder of STOP Moms for Liberty, the coordinated efforts to undermine the rights of trans students in Illinois mimic a strategy playing out nationwide.

Parallel Title IX investigations have cropped up in at least 18 educational institutions across 10 states following similar complaints about the policies, including in Wisconsin, California, Kansas, Colorado, North Carolina, New Hampshire and Washington. Some of these led to the Trump administration attempting to cut federal funds from public schools in Minnesota, Virginia and Maine.

“You realize it’s so much bigger when you see all the communities around the country that have dealt with this exact same pattern,” Castro told Uncloseted Media and the Chicago Sun-Times.

“When you already exist in a world where there are no safe places and your government is adding to that, it’s dehumanizing. … I worry about the suicide rate [for trans youth] increasing in Illinois,” Lascano says.

Pat Green, who is still grappling with the bullying his son experienced, shares Lascano’s concerns. “From the time he was born, he had this light,” says Green. “When he was at his old school, it was just gone. … I’m really scared about the way things are right now. I remember the fear of wondering if I was going to lose my son. [These groups] are not protecting children. They are causing so much harm.”


 

 

https://www.unclosetedmedia.com/p/360000-and-counting-school-districts

Parents and advocates say coordinated complaints over transgender students are driving legal fees, security costs and emotional strain across Illinois school districts.