Category: Science / Medical Information
J.K. Rowling’s Anti-Trans Crusade Is Hurting All Women
MacKenzie Scott, Philanthropist
And no, she didn’t “earn her money in the divorce”; she built Amazon into what it is/was. She earned her money by working. It’s important to note because of opposition comments about her.
MacKenzie Scott Nice Time Update! by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Turns out that the way she gives money is a really good way. Read on Substack
Marcie Jones Mar 04, 2025
And now let us check in with breath-of-fresh-air MacKenzie Scott, the heart-of-gold billionaire who spun her share of her divorce from Jeff Bezos after he cheated on her into philanthropy and Yield Giving, a foundation that has so far given out almost $20 billion in unrestricted gifts for social justice, human services (like abortions and health care), education, LGBTQ+ services, playgrounds, historically Black colleges and universities, a total of 2,450 excellent causes that happen to be the ones that piss off Elon Musk and other right-wing chuds the very most!
Turns out, according to a three-year-analysis by the Center for Effective Philanthropy of 800 of the donations her foundation has made, the no-strings-attached way she gives out money is quite effective!
When Scott started handing out unrestricted gifts in 2019, the world of philanthropy got shook. The usual way to go about doling out large sums of cash with a foundation is to give restricted gifts, like for eradicating the rockin’ pneumonia, but not the boogie-woogie flu, or a scholarship fund for sensitive boys with at least a 3.0 who play the flute, or constructing the Phineas Q. Oilman Center for Fracking Studies.
Donors like to direct exactly where their money goes. And they like to have their names on stuff, like etched on a plaque, or a “thank you” in the opera program. Also naming rights are a way to encourage ongoing involvement. Don’t you think dear departed Grandpa Oilman would have wanted his heirs to make sure that his building has plenty of money in trust to keep the center’s roof repaired?
And foundations usually give out grants in response to proposals. This usually starts with announcing the grant: The Betsy VonThundersnatch Foundation For The Arts intends to award $5 million to bring drag brunches to underserved populations. Then nonprofits that work in that area respond with a proposal that assesses the need, lays out project with objectives, includes a step-by-step timetable, detailed budget estimate for renting a van, buying wigs and champagne etc., a pitch of why their organization is the most capable one to meet the need, what the benchmarks for measuring success will be, and so on.
Then after a grantee gets the money, they’re usually required to regularly report back the details of their benchmark-hitting to a board. What some might call micromanaging and others might call responsible stewardship helps foundations and charities solicit gifts, because donors want to know exactly where their money is going and be reassured that it’s not going to get blown fast. Which makes sense! But all of that takes time, and wig money. It can be many months and sometimes even years between when a grant is announced and an awardee can cash a check, and charities have to pay overhead for people to look for grants to apply to, and write the proposals.
But MacKenzie Scott’s Yield Foundation does the opposite of this! They skip the solicitation-and-proposal part entirely, quietly and secretly researching organizations’ track records. And then the foundation cuts a surprise check, with no spending-timetable or strings attached, and lets the nonprofit roll with it. It is bold! It is brave! It is trusting!
And here’s the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s report on how it’s going: The grantees are actually not blowing all of the money. Most are using it to shore up longer-term stability and plan to spend it within two to five years. Some have been able to pay debt, and have reserves and health insurance for their employees for the first time, and they are able to provide more services and expand their missions.
Like the South Texas Food Bank. They were able to give their employees free health care, and also nearly doubled the amount of food they distributed to eight counties and one tribal nation in south Texas with the $9 million Scott’s foundation gave them. Also Kaboom! They build playgrounds, and with Scott’s $14 million they have quadrupled the size of their playgrounds, and have gotten into advocacy too, pushing for elimination of the use of toxic chemicals on playground surfaces.
Eighty-five percent of nonprofit recipients said that Scott’s gifts have helped them improve or expand their programming, and 52 percent reported a greater capacity to respond to the needs of the communities they serve. The organizations that received awards from Scott had double the amount of cash reserves as comparable nonprofits, which is vital for the long-term stability of any organization that depends on the kindness of strangers in a volatile economy.
Ninety-three percent reported that Scott’s grant moderately or significantly strengthened their ability to carry out their mission, and 90 percent said the gift bolstered their financial positions. More than 60 percent said they used the grant to establish credibility with other funders, though 53 percent were concerned that other funders might withdraw their support, believing that recipients didn’t need additional funding. But the other side to that is Scott’s foundation has already done the research, so her endorsement could also encourage more donations. How that will pan out in the end for charities remains to be seen.
And, though the grants don’t require them to, 70 percent of the recipients are tracking the impact of the money, some say even better than they actually were before, because now they have better capacity to do that. Said one, “This grant has allowed us to focus more deliberatively on our metrics and impact to better equip us to answer this question/tell our story/show our impact.”
And what an impact! Samples from the survey: 33,521 loans for a total of $1.26 billion to low-income households to buy homes, start or capitalize businesses, and address their financial needs. Health care for 100,000 new patients. Legal orientation for more than 12,000 refugees, and 200 unaccompanied immigrant minors re-unified with their families, and millions of meals served in the US and other countries.
And her freewheeling gifts are having an impact on other foundations also. More than half of foundation leaders surveyed said that they now thought that their foundations should consider giving out large, multiyear, unrestricted support, too. Which is not simple, because foundations are staffed, structured and budgeted to do things the way they’ve always done them, and it’s hard to get boards to agree on lunch, much less to a complete overhaul on how they do everything, and possibly to re-write of all of their bylaws. But now they have a fine example to follow, and success to point to.
That MacKenzie! She is so humble, it is hard to find pictures of her anywhere, unless they’re from her as Bezos’ plus-one in the old days. And while her ex is out here kissing Trump’s behind, whoring out the newspaper he bought and swanning around Aspen with his affair partner, she is making a difference in a good way. And still the 5th-richest woman in the world.
It’s all lovelier than a drag brunch in June.
OPEN THREAD. (We’ll have something up later too, you know what time.)
(snip)
Christopher Titus Armageddon clips
“Western Grosbeak”
Peace & Justice History for 2/28, 29
February 28, 1919 Gandhi, 1919 Mohandas Gandhi launched his campaign of non-cooperation with Imperial British control of India. He called his overall method of nonviolent action Satyagraha, formed from satya (truth) and agraha, used to describe an effort or endeavor. This translates roughly as “Truth-force.” A fuller rendering, though, would be “the force that is generated through adherence to Truth.” More on Satyagraha (civil disobedience) Excerpt from The Core of Gandhi’s Philosophy by Unto Tahtinen on the concept of Satyagraha |
February 28, 1946 Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the newly formed Democratic Republic of Vietnam, facing re-imposition of French colonial rule over his country, sent a telegram to President Harry Truman: “. . . I most earnestly appeal to you personally and to the American people to interfere urgently in support of our independence and help making the negotiations more in keeping with the principles of the Atlantic and San Francisco charters [founding documents of the League of Nations and United Nations].” |
February 28, 1954 The U.S. detonated its largest thermonuclear blast ever, in a test of a new hydrogen (fusion) weapon design in the atmosphere at Bikini Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands. Castle Bravo had an explosive yield of 15 megatons (equivalent to 15,000,000 tons of TNT), it was double the maximum possible expected by the Atomic Energy Commission. Carried out in spite of adverse weapon conditions (the monitoring station was downwind at the time of detonation), the unexpected yield created a radioactive fallout plume that contaminated three other atolls of the 29 in the Marshall chain. Though too late to avoid their contamination, hundreds of Marshallese and U.S. servicemen were evacuated.To avoid another such radiological disaster, future tests required an exclusion zone 1370 km in diameter (850 miles), an area equal to about 1% of the earth’s surface. Because Bikini had been essentially destroyed, subsequent test weapons were detonated from barges. All about Castle Bravo |
February 28, 1958 The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was founded in London by philosopher Sir Bertrand Russell, then 86 years old, and the Reverend Canon (Lewis) John Collins of St. Paul’s Cathedral.The peace symbol was originally developed for CND. History of the CND The CND today |
| February 28, 1989 The Nevada-Semipalatinsk Movement to Stop All Nuclear Testing was founded in the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). Olzhas Suleimenov, a popular Kazakh poet, was chosen to lead this first anti-nuclear non-governmental organization in Kazakhstan, formerly part of the USSR. Nevada-Semipalatinsk ended nuclear arms tests at the Semipalatinsk Polygon. Organizers had been inspired by the large Nevada Test Site anti-nuclear demonstrations and encampments outside Las Vegas in the mid-to-late 1980s.   a Semipalatinsk test demo at Semipalatinsk, 1990 Read more |
| February 29, 1968 The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission) warned that racism was causing America to move “toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.” Former Illinois Governor Otto Kerner and his commission were charged by President Lyndon Johnson to look into the causes of the many riots that had taken place in recent years. The 1968 Kerner Commission Got It Right, But Nobody Listened |
| February 29, 1984 U.S. District Judge Miles W. Lord held the officers of A.H. Robins Company personally liable for the injuries caused by the intrauterine contraceptive device they had produced and sold, the Dalkon Shield. Eighteen women had died, and more than 300,000 ultimately claimed injury. The top three executives had to pay $4.6 million personally, and the company paid out $220 million in compensatory and $13 million in punitive damages to thousands of women.  Judge Miles W. Lord Judge Lord: “The whole cost-benefit analysis is warped. They say, well you can kill so many people if the benefits are great enough . . . Once they put a price on human life, all is lost. Life is sacred. Life is priceless.” He also criticized Robins’s legal strategy of requiring witnesses to discuss their sex lives: ”You exposed these women, and ruined families and reputations and careers, in order to intimidate those who would raise their voices against you,” he said. “You introduced issues that had no relationship whatsoever to the fact that you implanted in the bodies of these women instruments of death, mutilation and of disease.” Judge Lord was called before a review panel for his professional and judicial conduct in the case but the charges were dismissed and he continued to serve until retirement. Read about the case |
https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryfebruary.htm#february28
Some Science on Thursday
Earliest evidence of humans in rainforests leads to surprises about how we evolved
February 27, 2025 Evrim Yazgin
The earliest evidence that humans inhabited rainforests has been found in Africa, a surprising find which pushes human settlement in these habitats much further back than previously thought.
Modern humans, Homo sapiens, evolved about 300,000 years ago in Africa. The ecological and environmental circumstances in which our species evolved are still not well understood.
It is likely that our ape-like ancestors millions of years ago did live in dense rainforests. But the retreat of Africa’s forests and the spread of savannah and grasslands as Earth’s climate dried is usually linked to the evolution of bipedalism in early human ancestors as far back as 7 million years ago.
As a result, rainforests have often been overlooked as important habitats in the evolution of early modern humans.
New research published in Nature has put a dent in this assumption.
The evidence comes from a site which dates to 150,000 years ago in present-day Côte d’Ivoire on the southern coast of West Africa.
“Before our study, the oldest secure evidence for inhabitation in African rainforests was around 18,000 years ago and the oldest evidence of rainforest inhabitation anywhere came from southeast Asia at about 70,000 years ago,” says lead author Eslem Ben Arous, from Spain’s National Centre for Human Evolution Research (CENIEH) and the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany.
The site was first investigated in the 1980s when ancient stone tools were discovered. But the age of the tools and the ancient ecology couldn’t be determined with the technology of the day.
Today, Côte d’Ivoire has roughly 9% forest cover which has dropped from nearly 50% in the 1960s due to agriculture from nearly 50% in the 1960s.
“Several recent climate models suggested the area could have been a rainforest refuge in the past as well, even during dry periods of forest fragmentation,” says senior author Eleanor Scerri, from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. “We knew the site presented the best possible chance for us to find out how far back rainforest inhabitation extended.”
The anthropologists used several dating techniques including optically stimulated luminescence and electron-spin resonance to determine the stone tools were 150,000 years old.
Sediment samples also showed the region was heavily wooded, with pollen and leaf waxes typically found in humid West African rainforests. Low levels of grass pollen show it wasn’t a narrow strip of forest either, but in a dense woodland.
This evidence suggests that some early modern humans lived in rainforests while others stuck to their grassland and savannah homes.
“Convergent evidence shows beyond doubt that ecological diversity sits at the heart of our species,” says Scerri. “This reflects a complex history of population subdivision, in which different populations lived in different regions and habitat types.
“We now need to ask how these early human niche expansions impacted the plants and animals that shared the same niche-space with humans. In other words, how far back does human alteration of pristine natural habitats go?”
“This exciting discovery is the first of a long list as there are other Ivorian sites waiting to be investigated to study the human presence associated with rainforest,” says Guédé.
The site which yielded these stone tools has since been destroyed by mining.
This Is A Ray Of Hope!
I wrote and called and called and wrote, so many times. 🌞 Via Death Penalty Action:
Supreme Court orders new trial for death row inmate in Oklahoma
Updated February 25, 20254:57 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered Nina Totenberg
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out the conviction and death penalty for Richard Glossip, an Oklahoma man who has maintained his innocence for more than a quarter century, and who came so close to execution that he three times ate what was supposed to be his “last meal.”
Glossip has been tried and convicted twice and lost multiple appeals, including one at the Supreme Court, where Justice Samuel Alito dismissed his claim as nothing but a “stalling tactic.”
But on Tuesday, three of the court’s conservatives joined the court’s three liberals in concluding that prosecutors had denied Glossip a fair trial, not once, but twice.
The six-justice court majority said that prosecutors had violated Glossip’s rights by concealing evidence helpful to the defense — including information about the drug use and mental status of the prosecution’s star witness, and by persuading that witness to change his testimony when it conflicted with his prior testimony.
Glossip’s lawyer, Don Knight, said his client is “beyond thrilled,” noting that “He actually has a future that’s not going to be on death row.”
Prosecutors never contended that Glossip himself bludgeoned motel owner Barry Van Trease to death with a baseball bat. Rather, they ultimately settled on the theory that Glossip, who managed the motel, commissioned handyman Justin Sneed to murder Van Trease. The alleged motive being, alternately, to steal a wad of cash from the owner, or to conceal embezzlement of funds.
There was no physical evidence to tie Glossip to the crime, so prosecutors initially offered to take the death penalty off the table if he testified against handyman Sneed. But when Glossip continued to maintain his innocence, the prosecution offered the deal instead to Sneed, who was sentenced to life in prison, while Glossip was convicted and sentenced to die.
The case, in many ways, is as remarkable as a True Crime mini-series. Most extraordinary is that Glossip’s Supreme Court appeal was supported by Oklahoma’s Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a conservative Republican and supporter of the death penalty. After two separate independent investigations found that both Glossip trials had been tainted by prosecutorial misconduct, Drummond took the very rare step of formally asking for a new trial.
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, however, refused to accept the attorney general’s so-called “confession of error,” and the state court maintained that its decision was not reviewable in federal court.
On Tuesday the Supreme Court vociferously disagreed. Writing for the Court majority, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that the prosecutors had violated their constitutional obligation to correct false testimony elicited from Sneed, the only witness to tie Glossip directly to the crime. The obligation to correct such false testimony, the court observed, is a clear violation of the court’s precedents dating back more than 65 years.
Joining Sotomayor in the majority were Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and, for the most part, Amy Coney Barrett.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented and accused the majority of bending “the law at every turn to grant relief to Glossip.” Justice Thomas said that the Court did not have jurisdiction to hear the case, and that Sneed’s false testimony did not significantly alter the outcome for Glossip anyway.
Justice Neil Gorsuch was recused from the case, presumably because it came before the appeals court he served on prior to his appointment to the Supreme Court.
Much of the credit for Tuesday’s win goes to to Attorney General Drummond, said defense attorney Knight. “Only he had the courage to say, ‘we’re not going to continue to try to kill this man.’ That’s a tremendous amount of political courage for a man who is now running for governor as well. He saw something that was wrong and he tried to make it right, and he did.” (Emphasis mine-A.)
Work To Do, Indeed, And A Great Week In Which To Do It!
It Is Here.
(Also you are beautiful, and you should never stop existing. -A)
Hunter Schafer on why she spoke out about being issued a male passport
By KRYSTA FAURIA Updated 7:34 PM CST, February 23, 2025
SANTA MONICA, Calif. (AP) — Hunter Schafer says “it’s important to just keep track of where things are in our country,” a day after the “Euphoria” star posted a video in which she revealed her new passport had been issued with a male gender marker.
Speaking to The Associated Press on the red carpet at the Independent Spirit Awards on Saturday, the 26-year-old actor, who is trans, said she felt “it was a good, necessary point” to share. Schafer, also a presenter at the award show, was nominated for best lead performance for “Cuckoo. ”
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office instituting a new and narrow federal government definition of the sexes. As part of the order, the federal government defines sex as only male or female and says that must be reflected on official documents, like passports. The State Department, responsible for passports, is no longer issuing passports with the “X” marker that’s been available since 2021 and is not honoring requests to change gender markers between “M” and “F.”
In an 8 ½-minute video posted to TikTok on Friday, Schafer, who transitioned as a young teen, said the passport that was meant to carry her well into her 30s was stolen while she was filming in Spain. After receiving an emergency passport, she later had to apply for a new, permanent one in Los Angeles. Having had female gender markers on her license and passport since she was a teenager, Schafer marked “female” on her application — but received a passport that identified her as male, she said. In the video, she said she had not had her birth certificate amended.
Schafer acknowledged the executive order in her TikTok video: “Because our president, you know, is a lot of talk, I was like, ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’ And, today, I saw it,” Schafer said, holding up her new passport page with the “M” marker. She said she was making the video not to “fearmonger or like create drama or receive consolation,” but to note the reality of the situation.
“I wasn’t even really looking for support, but I have an amazing community around me and it’s one of the greatest blessings of my life and so I felt very supported throughout, before and then now,” she told the AP on Saturday.
The State Department said in response to a request for comment that it was implementing Trump’s executive order but declined to comment on specific cases, citing privacy laws and restrictions.
“It doesn’t really change anything about me or my transness. However, it does make my life a little harder,” Schafer said in the video, saying she has to travel for the first time with the new passport next week.
“Trans people are beautiful. We are never going to stop existing. I’m never going to stop being trans. A letter and a passport can’t change that,” she concluded.
Associated Press journalist Andrew Dalton contributed reporting.
Scottie's Playtime 