The video below has horrific clips of ICE assaulting bystanders and protestors. One clip showed the ICE gang thugs breaking down a door and entering a home like they think they are a special forcer unit in Fallujah Iraq. They seem to be acting like street gangs or drug cartel members as they just attack anyone that displeases them. They are not police nor professional but they act as though only they have rights. Hugs
Ok I know that as soon as most of you read the title you thought I was going to talk again about my childhood abuse.
No what I need help with is for another abuse victim I have come to care a lot about. He and I met through the abuse site and we bonded emotionally. He needed to vent a lot of anger / hate / why me stuff and I was OK with him doing it on me as long as he never attacked me personally. He also came to care about me and the kind nature I shared with him. He is much farther along in his therapy so was able to point things out to me far sooner than everyone here did.
I think by now everyone who follows here realizes I am talking about Kamyk. Pronounced Camick. He got very ill shortly after we were friends and if you look back through the archives I asked and many of you did send him cards in the ICU he was in. He has told me I can share his medical condition he has suffered from all his life and he blames it on both his childhood abuse and his father’s narcistic behavior he developed cysts on his colon. One day he was talking to me telling me how much pain he was in and then he was gone. Rushed to the hospital and placed in an ICU.
Normally to do a GI surgery they have to void the bowels entirely but they simply did not have time and when they tried he crashed, so they rushed him to surgery and according to the surgeon it was the worst most dirty bowel surgery he ever did.
Sadly they had to take a large part of Kamyk’s intestines and his entire colon. Kamyk wanted to die. After a year of nearly doing so and many surgeries he was left with a couple stomas and an ileostomy. He came so close to death that several times I asked people here to send him cards. I know some did.
Long story short, after all this time he got the ileostomy reversed and one of the stomas. He could have gone back to his apartment he had managed to keep paying for … but the first nursing home he was sent to let him get a huge pressure sore on his tailbone that is so deep doctors are saying it would take a year to heal. I get pressure sores and I know what to do once they developed, the pictures Kamyk sent me were so deep and so gross it is a violation of every medical rule I ever practiced under. It was criminal.
Sadly in a depressed area of the country one can’t sue a medical provider as all the other providers close their doors to you. I mean if you sue a hospital in your area you better hope you never need a hospital again. Unless you are in the emergency room dying no physician can admit you.
Against all odds Kamyk has pulled through everything life thrown at him. He aggressively started learning to walk again after one surgery left one of his legs not working. He really wanted to get out of there and return to his home and I think we can all understand that. Through it all on a very limited income Kamyk kept paying the rent on his apartment. Until just recently tragedy struck in the form of the government and greed.
Kamyk was looking forward to going home from the step down care facility he was in. But without his knowing the facility he was in made arrangements to transfer him to a nursing home. The nursing home grabbed his entire SSI payment which meant not only did his rent payment fail but a recent device he had saved up for to buy also defaulted in the payments.
I understand what he is saying as when Ron’s brother had to be put into a nursing home we had to jump through the same damn situation. He was only allowed 30 dollars of his SSI payment but Ron had to stop his military disability payment of $100 dollars because that put him over the limit allowed to be in the nursing home. Everything was so strict that Ron and his sister Diane had to pay what few bills he had, they sold his car, and they had to buy him anything he needed as he was not allowed to have any money build up in his bank account. The system is designed to keep the person in the home as poor as possible, while letting the home take all the money and assets that person has. It is the punish the poor republican idea of if they are poor then it is their fault.
Here is why I am writing all this. I was going to start a Go Fund Me for Kamyk. He bought a Steam Deck computer device that would let him keep up with friends around the world and with me in a situation where he couldn’t use voice talk to communicate. As you can imagine some of the things Kamyk would like to talk abut can’t be voiced loudly in a shared room. Also he needs it is so he can play games with his friend of a decades Wolfy and escape from the horrid place he is in at least for a while, something every one I really understand. I have worked in a nursing home for a few weeks and I can tell you that the residents in some homes don’t have much to do all day and don’t get much respect. The staff is over worked, underpaid, and they are struggling also.
I care deeply for my friend and have seen how horrendous this time has been for him. He is in a very depressed area of the country in Ohio and he has no family in a position to help him.
Kamyk has helped me do this by sending me a blurb and other information. They will be below. Thanks and hugs.
Kamyk’s journey has been incredibly tough, and it’s clear that every day presents new challenges. After enduring multiple life-threatening infections and a long recovery, the road ahead still feels uncertain. Living in a nursing home where their needs are often overlooked only adds to the struggle. One thing that could bring Kamyk some much-needed joy and connection is the ability to play games with their best friend in New Zealand. A Steam Deck and a secure backpack would provide a way to escape the pain and trauma, even if just for a little while. This small gesture could make a significant difference in their healing process. If you can, please consider contributing to this cause. Your support would mean the world to Kamyk and help them find moments of happiness during this difficult time. Thank you for your kindness and generosity. Best regards,https://gofund.me/5d1def2cc
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Update: There was some questions as to the amount and what the situation was. I wrote kamyk and called him about it. He was able to respond after I went to bed.
Gofundme is weird it only starts with a minimum, supposedly to get the ball rolling before showing the full requested amount. My full requested amount is $1000
Steam deck is $700, TSA approved slash resistant locking backpack is $80, a bluetooth headset i can use with the steam deck or my phone is about $40 which would allow me to talk to you, mark, or wolfy semi privately without the issues the earbuds have, and gofundme suggested the additional difference so i could get some more games
I also added further text to my fundraiser page explaining that my ultimate goal is $1000, and that it feels deceptive to me to rely on a marketing technique to get donations, so I clarified
Thanks to everyone that reads this, forwards it, and if possible can help. I am sorry for the confusion I did not know how Go Fund Me works. Hugs
There was little warning. Officers tumbled into the newsroom all at once, guns drawn, shouting into the common spaces. In the kitchen, someone was in the middle of drawing an espresso; overflowing coffee and steam began to drip onto the floor. Then, there was silence as the men took tactical positions in corridors and cubicles, opening closed doors and forcing the occupants of privacy rooms onto the main floor.
They lined up the editors first, zip tying their hands together and leading them into vans downstairs. Then they began to gather the rest of the journalists. Laptops were gathered from desks. The server room, such as it was in the wake of zero trust and enterprise cloud services, had its door kicked in, switches and rack servers ripped out of their frames. One IT support engineer objected and found a gun in his face, the safety off, its owner ready to make them into an example.
The people of color were led into one van; the white journalists into another. All were driven away.
The newsroom’s infrastructure was decommissioned that same day. The website was taken offline. Email accounts and cloud storage were trespassed, their contents downloaded for rapid analysis by the authorities using some central AI system; maybe Palantir, maybe something else.
Ostensibly, there would be a trial. In reality, everyone knew, the point was the intimidation, the unpublishing, the detainment of the people responsible for criticism. There was no time for due process, the administration argued. Across newsrooms, universities, activist organizations, there were too many people. As the newsroom sat chained to their seats, being driven to some incarceration center somewhere, they wondered how long it would be before their families knew. How long before the remote journalists were picked up in similar ways, perhaps in front of their children, their homes trashed.
It didn’t take long for the authorities to gain access to the devices they had taken. They forced journalists to open their phones and laptops at gunpoint; they’d all been trained not to use biometric IDs, that nobody could force them to provide their passwords and PINs, but none of that matters when you have a weapon in your face. The hard drives, though encrypted, were unlocked and accessed, the data on them cloned.
They expected to find source information: the identities of people within the government who had leaked information about detainment sites and immigration enforcement activities.
They found nothing.
The files were all gone. The emails were all redacted. The devices were as good as empty.
And no matter what they did, no matter who they threatened, nobody could restore them. Not a single member of the newsroom gave up their private information.
They couldn’t.
And for all they did to bring the website down, they couldn’t stop the journalism. There was no way to take it offline. Within moments, other newsrooms seemed to have become aware of the raid, and were pointing to the articles. Interest had increased, not decreased.
The newsroom had planned for this.
For months, all its journalism had been mirrored elsewhere. It had always been available under a Creative Commons license for anyone to republish for free — a model pioneered by ProPublica and then followed by The 19th, Grist, The Marshall Project and more, which this newsroom had used for years. But in that model, another outlet needed to choose to republish an individual article.
In contrast, this new active mirroring left nothing to chance. An independent group in Switzerland intentionally syndicated all non-profit journalism onto its servers, located in Switzerland and subject to Swiss law, out of reach by the US administration. The pieces were also, after a time delay to account for post-publishing edits, syndicated to IPFS, the censorship-resistant peer-to-peer content delivery network. Together, these measures meant that it was impossible to fully redact American non-profit journalism in the public interest. The website was gone, but the articles lived on.
The group had another purpose. Beyond mirroring the newsroom’s articles, it had access to its cloud storage, its email accounts, its databases, its infrastructure. It maintained independent offsite backups of the site and every custom application, all in Switzerland. And most importantly, it had a kill switch.
When the newsroom was raided, monitoring systems in Switzerland noticed an anomaly and automatically shut down the newsroom’s systems within seconds. Email accounts and cloud storage were drained, information was locked down. Now, it was fully under their control: no-one in the US could compel them to restore it all.
Instead, two people in Switzerland, employed by a Swiss organization, needed to independently determine that it was safe to restore data. They sat in two separate clean, glass offices. To restore the data and systems, they would need to speak to the employees in the US, monitor the sensors and the security footage from the US offices, and make their own decision. If they did determine that it was safe, they would do so quickly, but it was their choice. They had full, independent authority to keep data from the newsroom until they could make that determination.
And in this case, they could not.
Because the newsroom used cloud services with zero trust, with data shared using the principle of least privilege, the seized laptops and servers contained very little usable information. Where they did contain local data, it was encrypted using keys that were kept in Switzerland and withheld with the rest of the cloud-hosted data. There was almost nothing that the authorities could use.
There were collaborators: people on the inside who provided information. Some did it because they truly believed in the administration’s cause; some simply wished to ingratiate themselves to power. Even they could not provide more access to the data; they could not lead authorities to sources or compromise the investigations of other newsrooms. In the event, they were not spared. They, too, rode in the van.
Word spread quickly. Details of the intrusion were saved to an indelible ledger of newsroom raids, violence against journalists, and other threats that was peered with newsrooms worldwide. Notifications were sent to leaders at partner newsrooms within seconds.
Those partner newsrooms — protected by similar remote kill switch with other, similar Swiss groups — were able to access source information that had been set aside in advance so that stories in progress could continue to be reported. Some of those newsrooms were in the US; some were in other countries, so that if every newsroom in the US was compromised, others would still be able to pick up the stories elsewhere.
The people in the van did not disappear. Their names, identities, and job titles were all recorded and broadcast to other newsrooms. There would be pressure for their release. Some of them were dual nationals or foreign citizens, and their respective governments would add to the pressure. It wasn’t going to be an easy road, but the truth would endure. Their sources remained safe. Their work could continue. And it would not be in vain.
The Majority report team talk about this kid who mouthed off to ICE guys and gets beaten, kidnaped, beaten again, then dumped over a mile way in a Walmart parking lot. This is not police behavior these are gang thugs terrorizing people. They are no different than any other criminal gang. Hugs
The government take over of thoughts and what material people can read is happening with the assistance of the tech community. The limiting what people can see or read started with the idea of restricting any media that positively presented the LGBTQ+ community so to protect the children they claimed. See how quickly it has progressed in less than a year to simply the government telling / demanding the right to tell people what they can read or view so that the government is never disfavored or contradicted. Totally as China and Russia work. How do you like living in such a society. Remember the people who had these books on their device had paid for them and Amazon did not return their money, they just reached in and deleted the material they did not want you to read. Once the precedent is set it will be used by any new government who wish to control the population and how they feel about the society they live in. Hugs
A commuter using an Amazon Kindle while riding the subway in New York.Credit…Lucas Jackson/Reuters
In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”
On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole by Amazon.com.
In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.
An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.
Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said.
Customers whose books were deleted indicated that MobileReference, a digital publisher, had sold them. An e-mail message to SoundTells, the company that owns MobileReference, was not immediately returned.
Digital books bought for the Kindle are sent to it over a wireless network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic books between devices and apparently to make them vanish.
An authorized digital edition of “1984” from its American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was still available on the Kindle store Friday night, but there was no such version of “Animal Farm.”
People who bought the rescinded editions of the books reacted with indignation, while acknowledging the literary ironies involved. “Of all the books to recall,” said Charles Slater, an executive with a sheet-music retailer in Philadelphia, who bought the digital edition of “1984” for 99 cents last month. “I never imagined that Amazon actually had the right, the authority or even the ability to delete something that I had already purchased.”
Antoine Bruguier, an engineer in Silicon Valley, said he had noticed that his digital copy of “1984” appeared to be a scan of a paper edition of the book. “If this Kindle breaks, I won’t buy a new one, that’s for sure,” he said.
Amazon appears to have deleted other purchased e-books from Kindles recently. Customers commenting on Web forums reported the disappearance of digital editions of the Harry Potter books and the novels of Ayn Rand over similar issues.
Amazon’s published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a “permanent copy of the applicable digital content.”
Retailers of physical goods cannot, of course, force their way into a customer’s home to take back a purchase, no matter how bootlegged it turns out to be. Yet Amazon appears to maintain a unique tether to the digital content it sells for the Kindle.
“It illustrates how few rights you have when you buy an e-book from Amazon,” said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer for British Telecom and an expert on computer security and commerce. “As a Kindle owner, I’m frustrated. I can’t lend people books and I can’t sell books that I’ve already read, and now it turns out that I can’t even count on still having my books tomorrow.”
Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading “1984” on his Kindle for a summer assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. “They didn’t just take a book back, they stole my work,” he said.
On the Internet, of course, there is no such thing as a memory hole. While the copyright on “1984” will not expire until 2044 in the United States, it has already expired in other countries, including Canada, Australia and Russia. Web sites in those countries offer digital copies of the book free to all comers.
As the flu and covid are on the rise again vaccines are on the decline due to the tRump admin claiming that the best science we have is wrong based on feelings and in the case of the people like JFK Jr it is greed. People don’t realize he makes his money suing drug manufacturers that produce vaccines. Every time he thinks he has some wacked out idea he sues and nothing they can show him will matter to him, all he wants is money and to stop vaccines for other people, as his families kids are protected. Think on it, he is vaccinated, their family has the money to get the vaccines without medical insurance, all he is doing is making it harder and more costly for your kids to get them because you need the medical insurance to help pay for it. Hugs
Under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s guidance, the CDC no longer recommends routine vaccination to protect against meningococcal disease.
Jan. 11, 2026, 7:00 AM EST
By Kaitlin Sullivan
Deaths from a rare and dangerous bacterial infection could rise if fewer teens are vaccinated, doctors warn.
After the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that all adolescents get vaccinated against meningococcal disease in 2005, cases of the potentially deadly illness plummeted in the United States by 90%.
However, cases have sharply risen since 2021, likely due to a combination of mutating bacteria and declining rates of vaccination overall, especially among teens getting a booster dose for bacterial meningitis, doctors suggest.
Dr. Luis Ostrosky, an infectious disease doctor at UT Health in Houston, is concerned that as cases of bacterial meningitis climb in the United States, the CDC’s recent overhaul of the childhood vaccine schedule could lead to more deaths.
Under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s guidance, the CDC is no longer recommending a meningitis vaccine for all adolescents. The vaccine and booster protect against the most common types of the infection in the U.S., serogroups A, C, Y, W.
“We see quite a few cases of meningitis per year,” Ostrosky said.
Under the new guidance, the vaccines will be recommended for “high-risk groups,” although parents can still ask doctors to vaccinate their children through a process called “shared clinical decision making.”
Teenagers and college-age adults, who often spend a lot of time in groups or communal living spaces such as dorms, and people with HIV are considered at highest risk for the infection, caused by a group of bacteria called Neisseria meningitidis.
Vaccination is important not because the disease is common — around 3,000 people are diagnosed with bacterial meningitis in the U.S. each year — but because the infection is both extremely serious and fast-moving.
Bacterial meningitis can progress quickly, causing the brain to swell and limbs to develop gangrene and sepsis, and can kill within 24 hours.
Symptoms such as headache, stiff neck, vomiting and fever come on suddenly, and may be mistaken for other minor illnesses. It can be treated with antibiotics, but even with rapid diagnosis, about 15% of patients die.
Fast-acting and life-threatening
Why some people are susceptible isn’t well understood. The infection develops when usually harmless bacteria travel through the respiratory tract and infiltrate the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord, causing severe inflammation. These bacteria, which commonly live in the back of the throat, can spread from person to person through close contact.
It can lead to a life-threatening infection in someone whose immune system is compromised — sometimes by a simple cold or flu virus — or who doesn’t have immunity to those bacteria. Viruses and fungi can also cause meningitis, but bacterial meningitis is the most serious.
Among patients who survive, as many as 20% have lifelong disability or complications, including amputated limbs, hearing impairment and neurological problems.
“You can die from a brain hernia, or from sepsis,” Messacar said. “And if you survive a brain hernia, you will most likely have severe complications.”
In 2024, the CDC issued an alert about a rise in cases of a type of invasive meningococcal disease. More than 500 cases were reported, the highest since 2013. Most of the infections were due to a specific strain of the Y serogroup of bacteria, which is included in the previously recommended vaccine. The cases were more common in adults ages 30 to 60, in Black people and in people with HIV.
“It’s even more important now that we get meningococcal vaccines out to people given that we are seeing a spike in this Y strain,” Messacar said.
The Food and Drug Administration has approved three types of meningitis vaccines. In 2005, the CDC began recommending that 11- and 12-year-olds get vaccinated against the most common meningococcal serotypes, A, C, Y and W. Because of waning immunity, the CDC in 2011 added a booster recommendation for 16-year-olds to protect them through young adulthood. A vaccine for meningitis B and a combined shot are available for children or babies who are considered at high risk.
In a statement Monday, Kennedy said that the CDC’s new childhood vaccine schedule was “aligning the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule with international consensus.”
Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease doctor at the UCSF School of Medicine in San Francisco, said the new approach to meningitis vaccination in the U.S., which is based on Denmark’s, is flawed.
“You can’t just look at another country’s vaccine approach and photocopy it. You really have to look at what is happening in your own country,” Chin-Hong said. Given the safety of meningitis vaccines, “it makes sense to vaccinate.”
Alicia Stillman, who serves on a World Health Organization task force for eliminating meningitis, worries that by moving the vaccine into shared decision making, the CDC is creating hurdles for parents who want to protect their children.
Stillman’s daughter, Emily, died from meningitis B in 2013. Emily had been vaccinated against meningitis A, C, W and Y, but the FDA didn’t approve a vaccine for meningitis B until 2014.
Emily Stillman, pictured with her mother, Alicia, was 19 when she died from meningitis B. Courtesy Alicia Stillman
Because many types of bacteria can cause bacterial meningitis, different vaccines are needed. The meningitis B vaccine hasn’t been recommended for all children but is available for people at high risk through the shared decision making process.
“I have watched medical professionals not bring [meningitis B vaccination] up,” said Stillman, who is the co-executive director of the American Society for Meningitis Prevention. “I have watched parents who are maybe a little less educated and not know how to ask about it, or they go to a public clinic instead of a private clinic where they have less time with a provider.”
She believes that could happen more broadly with the changed guidance.
What the research says
A CDC statement said the changes to the recommendation reflect the need for more data on certain vaccines, “including placebo-controlled randomized trials and long-term observational studies to better characterize vaccine benefits, risks, and outcomes.”
While there haven’t been placebo-controlled trials for meningitis vaccines — which would test how well a vaccine works either by deliberately infecting people with bacteria or by seeing how well they fare if they are infected in the real world — there have been many randomized clinical trials and other studies that use decades of data collected from both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals in the real world.
Chin-Hong said placebo-controlled trials aren’t realistic or ethical for every drug, especially for life-threatening and rare diseases.
“A well-designed observational study, especially using decades of experience, can be just as informative as a randomized controlled trial,” Chin-Hong said.
A 2020 CDC report analyzed 20 clinical trials on meningococcal disease vaccines, including data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VS). The most common reported side effects were “mild to moderate,” and included swelling, fever and headache.
In 2005, Katie Thompson, now 39, was infected with an antibiotic-resistant strain of bacterial meningitis when she was a college freshman, the same month the FDA approved the first MenACWY vaccine.
“I don’t know how to describe it besides it’s pure hell,” she said.
After five weeks in the hospital and nearly dying, she went home, but not without lifelong complications. Thompson, who lives outside of Charleston, South Carolina, still struggles with migraines and vestibular disorders that cause vertigo and nausea. The infection was hard on her organs and she uses a bladder stimulator that helps regulate both her bladder and nerves in the base of her spine.
“It’s just not a disease that you want to take a risk on,” she said. “It’s not one that you want to gamble with your child’s life.”
Two vaccines that remain universally recommended by the CDC — the Haemophilus influenzae type b, or Hib, vaccine and the pneumococcal vaccine — protect against some causes of bacterial meningitis. However, these vaccines don’t protect against meningitis A, C, W, Y or B.
Kaitlin Sullivan
Kaitlin Sullivan is a contributor for NBCNews.com who has worked with NBC News Investigations. She reports on health, science and the environment and is a graduate of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at City University of New York.
Scottie's Playtime 