An important video to watch and try to understand. Sensitive times. I have encrypted mail and encrypted text on both computers. Plus my computers have VPN’s of high quality that do not have any tracking, along with good security programs. I have what I can also on my phone. You might ask why I have such things. I talk to people who have been abused. I also have been abused. All mainstream programs scan such communications with computers, AIs, and they don’t differentiate from this happened to me from I am doing this to a child now. In the past I have known people who had police or other agencies target them thinking they were part of an abuse network when they were only talking to fellow survivors.
Having said that it is going to get worse. We know from Snowden the US government was illegally spying on all texts, calls, and other phone / computer activities of the public, now we must worry about foreign governments doing it also. Please listen to the video and protect yourself. Oh, for clarity I use NordVPN, no possible tracking, and I use Teleguard, Sessions, and Proton mail. Hugs
What he really means in the story below is that many people surging into the work force will depress wages and make workers even more desperate to get and keep a job no matter how bad or low wage it is. Hugs
Megan Kelly who made her fame by writing a book about the sexual harassment / abuse at Fox Is trying to give a boost to a man who paid a woman he sexually abused and harassed. Everything Hegseth is accused or from adultery, sexual assault, and his excesses alcohol problem are all court-martial offenses. He would be in charge of people that if they did what he did they would face demotion, jail time, loss of money, and more. How he can be in that position if republicans really respect and care about the military they wouldn’t even let this guy near the job. Hugs
In the below story notice two things. He is picking Fox entertainment rage TV people to be in his cabinet because he is a media made billionaire personality and he loves the showmanship. That is what made him a great con man and politician is his love of the camera and the attention, he glories in it.
Read the full article. In 2017, Crowley registered as a foreign agent for a pro-Putin Ukrainian billionaire after withdrawing from consideration from a national security post when her book and PhD thesis were hit with accusations of plagiarism. She first appeared here when she spread claims that Barack Obama is secretly Muslim. Crowley is a Project 2025 contributor.
In this post notice the attack on immigrants along with the outright lies about no deaths. Anything for the maga base and the authoritarian fascist government is grand. Why? For me the question is why does the internet troll Marge want to see the tRump proclaimed goals? White supremacy! She is from a deep Georgia community that has long felt that the white people were superior to others. So white people attacked the capital and attempted to destroy democracy so what, they were white. Not those filthy non-white people who keep coming here trying to make our white supremacy culture less supreme. Hugs
The story below shows how desperate the right is to please donors by cutting the domestic spending part of the government. That is the part of the government that helps the people but puts nothing in the pockets of the wealthy. They fail to understand that the main function of the government is to promote the common good and the welfare of the people. From the preamble itself. … (P)romote the general Welfare … That means the government is to help the people. The reason the treasury is so shy of money is that the republicans when in power keep giving more of the general revenue generated in the US to the most wealthy instead of helping the general welfare with such as infrastructure, what the people need, and common defense. Basically so people understand every time the republicans reduce the corporate tax rate, the taxes charged against realtors, the taxes charged against wealthy people, the tax rate of wealthy estates, they are robbing from the US people and public all that money to run the country and help the public. Just like other countries of advanced incomes do. Which is why the republicans demand they stop doing it as it makes the US look bad for being a profit is king country. Hugs
The story below shows how fundamentalist Christians and right wing bigots attack the LGBTQ+ for being different and not following their faith … but at the same time they don’t live up to their own faiths doctrines. Hugs.
Read the full article. Yager first appeared here in 2020 for his successful bill that forces public schools to allow kids to miss class for up to one hour each day in order to attend church. Along with raft of anti-trans legislation, most recently Yager voted for a bill allowing county clerks to refuse to officiate same-sex marriages.
“The plans could mean that thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of migrants would be permanently displaced in countries where they do not know any of the people or the language and have no connection to the culture.”
The Diapered Rapist a fucking idiot, who can’t handle a task a 6 year old can manage.
Read the full article. Boyd is now claiming that he was referring to a “bundle of sticks,” telling reporters “look it up in the dictionary.” Video of the exchange is below. Boyd, not incidentally, was named to Trump’s “South Carolina Leadership Team.”
Where are the pro left progressive big money trying to promote progressive ideals? This is why the right so often win, their big money backs them no matter what. Hugs
This is the woman on a crusade against the first trans person in the House of Representative also used to support the trans people. Her entire thing is being the center of attention. That is her entire goal. Hugs.
Read the full article. Roberts, who had threatened violence if Trump did not win, appeared here earlier this week when he called for seizing the endowments of public and private universities if they don’t hew to Trump’s anti-diversity edicts and end the “woke mind virus.”
Just how insecure are these republican people demanding everyone but themselves be Rambo and Chuck Norris in some super action movie. It is a stupid throw back to the religious stereotype of men and women they want to force the country into. The idea that men are always he-man moneymakers and women are all attractive women waiting at home to serve their man after cleaning their home and making their meals all day. Give it up already. The goat herders in the deserts of the Middle East may have felt that way over 2500 years ago but we know better now. Hugs
A man from racist South Africa who feels non-white people don’t have enough authority and black people have too many rights is pushing hard to repopulate the world with his and other wealthy white men’s sperm. Say what? Yes Musk is on record saying that he needs to father as many children as possible to ensure the white race continues. Similar to what Jeffery Epstein felt as he raped multiple young girls. Look these facts up and stop admiring these trust fund wealthy kids of exploiters. Hugs
So the following paragraphs show just what a person Musk is. His product can not meet the standards so he screams the program that won’t give him money is a waste of taxpayer’s money. Just like tRump, rather than fix the problem he instead attacks the standards demanding they be lowered so his product can qualify. Hugs
After years of negotiation, lawsuits and politicking, the FCC and the NTIA settled on a modern definition for broadband service: 100 megabits per second (Mbps) download speeds, 20Mbps upload speeds, with less than 100 milliseconds of latency.
Right now, Starlink doesn’t meet that standard. It has been getting slightly slower over time even as more people sign up for service, according to internet performance testing service Ookla’s speed tests. In 2022, the FCC rescinded a $900m grant from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund to Starlink to connect rural communities to the internet, citing its failure to meet the speed and latency standards and declining network performance.
Sadly a lot of stories about Kennedy never mention the verified deaths his crusade against medical science. Below is a quote from the article which points the cost of his inability to understand or comprehend the science behind vaccines. Hugs
A measles outbreak began a few months after his visit. Eighty-three people died, most of them children, a staggering loss in a nation of about 200,000 people.
The health secretary pick and his organization have worked around the world to undermine longstanding policies on measles, AIDS and more.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer, has spent years working abroad with organizations and associates that undermine longstanding global health policies, records show.Credit…Uli Seit for The New York Times
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is in line to lead the Department of Health and Human Services in the next Trump administration, is well-known for promoting conspiracy theories and vaccine skepticism in the United States.
But Mr. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, has also spent years working abroad to undermine policies that have been pillars of global health policy for a half-century, records show.
He has done this by lending his celebrity, and the name of his nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, to a network of overseas chapters that sow distrust in vaccine safety and spread misinformation far and wide.
He, his organizations and their officials have interfered with vaccination efforts, undermined sex education campaigns meant to stem the spread of AIDS in Africa, and railed against global organizations like the World Health Organization that are in charge of health initiatives.
How Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Fights Health Policy Abroad:
Along the way, Mr. Kennedy has partnered with, financed or promoted fringe figures — people who claim that 5G cellphone towers cause cancer, that homosexuality and contraceptive education are part of a global conspiracy to reduce African fertility and that the World Health Organization is trying to steal countries’ sovereignty.
One of his group’s advisers, in Uganda, suggested using “supernatural insight” and a man she calls Prophet Elvis to guide policymaking. “We do well to embrace ethereal means to get ahead as a nation,” she wrote on a Ugandan news site this year.
These people, more than leading scientists and experienced public health professionals, have existed in Mr. Kennedy’s orbit for years. The ideas spread by him and his associates abroad highlight the unorthodox, sometimes conspiratorial nature of the world occupied by a man who stands to lead America’s health department, its 80,000 employees and its $1.8 trillion budget.
Mr. Kennedy did not respond to a list of questions about his organization’s work abroad. His personal email automatically replied with a link to a Google form for people to apply to work with him in government — and name their own job titles. Mary Holland, the chief executive of Children’s Health Defense, said that Mr. Kennedy was the group’s “chairman on leave” and had not been involved in the day-to-day operations in over a year.
As health secretary, Mr. Kennedy would have the opportunity to reshape health policy. The department has a hand in negotiations for an international pandemic-response treaty, is the parent agency of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and finances global projects like vaccine campaigns.
He undermined confidence in the measles vaccine ahead of a deadly outbreak in Samoa.
Mr. Kennedy visited the Pacific island of Samoa in June 2019 in the aftermath of a public health tragedy.
During routine measles immunizations a year earlier, nurses had mistakenly mixed the vaccine with a muscle relaxant, leading to the death of two infants.
Measles, a highly contagious disease, is preventable, thanks to vaccines that have been proven safe since the 1960s.
But vaccine skeptics seized on the death of the two children as evidence that the vaccines should not be trusted. The Samoan government temporarily suspended its immunization program.
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Mr. Kennedy visited the Pacific island of Samoa in June 2019 and met with the prime minister.Credit…Misiona Simo/Samoa Observer, via Associated Press
Mr. Kennedy arrived in Samoa, on the invitation of a local anti-vaccine activist, and amplified doubts about the vaccine’s safety. It was a crucial moment. Vaccination rates had plummeted, and the World Health Organization called for Samoa to ramp up immunization as soon as possible.
Mr. Kennedy met with the prime minister and other officials. He told activists that vaccines shipped to Samoa might be of a lower quality than those sent to developed countries.
“With his last name, and the status attached to it, people will believe him,” said Dr. Take Naseri, who met with Mr. Kennedy at the time as Samoa’s director general of health.
A measles outbreak began a few months after his visit. Eighty-three people died, most of them children, a staggering loss in a nation of about 200,000 people.
During the outbreak, Mr. Kennedy falsely suggested that defective vaccines could have caused the deaths. He later dismissed the outbreak as “mild” and denied any connection to it. “I never told anybody not to vaccinate,” he said last year.
When Edwin Tamasese, the anti-vaccine campaigner who arranged Mr. Kennedy’s visit, was arrested and charged with incitement for interfering with vaccinations, Children’s Health Defense helped him obtain legal advice and paid for his lawyers, according to Mr. Tamasese.
The measles outbreak in Samoa ended after 95 percent of the eligible population received vaccinations, according to the W.H.O.
He and his organization promote AIDS falsehoods.
Sex education has been central to the global fight against the spread of AIDS in Africa for decades.
But officials with Children’s Health Defense Africa, one of Mr. Kennedy’s nonprofit groups, see a conspiracy at play.
Wahome Ngare, a Kenyan physician who sits on the group’s advisory board, argued at a conference in Uganda this year that contraception and health education were part of a global plot to reduce Africans’ fertility. He attended the conference alongside the head of the Children’s Health Defense Africa, who presented slides bearing the organization’s logo and web address.
Mr. Kennedy himself has questioned the accepted science behind AIDS. He falsely said that AIDS may have been caused by the recreational use among gay people of the drug amyl nitrite. It is caused by the virus H.I.V.
Last year, Children’s Health Defense posted a video promoting a book that questions the link between H.I.V. and AIDS. Another of the group’s interview subjects this year said that the former U.S. government scientist Anthony Fauci should be imprisoned or “taken off this Earth.”
Dr. Ngare is among the many people in Mr. Kennedy’s orbit whose views conflict sharply with those of the health agency that Mr. Kennedy stands to lead.
In an interview with NPR in 2015 before joining Children’s Health Defense Africa, Dr. Ngare mused about stories that “vaccines have been used for spread of H.I.V.” and called for a boycott of polio vaccines. The U.S. government is a major sponsor of polio vaccine campaigns worldwide. Dr. Ngare did not respond to requests for comment.
Ms. Holland, the chief executive of Children’s Health Defense, said those were Dr. Ngare’s personal views, not those of Mr. Kennedy’s organization.
At the conference in Uganda, Dr. Ngare spoke to far-right lawmakers and activists who support draconian punishments, including life in prison, for people convicted of having gay sex.
He aligned himself with fringe figures, including people who ended up on German security watch lists.
When Mr. Kennedy started his nonprofit group’s European chapter in August 2020, he floated questions about whether the Covid-19 pandemic was part of “a sinister game” played by governments to control people.
“A lot of it feels very planned to me,” he said in Berlin.
The next day, he rallied about 38,000 people at a protest over Covid-19 measures. The protest was organized by a German group called Querdenken. Its leaders have since ended up on a government watch list for fomenting antigovernment sentiment.
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Mr. Kennedy speaking during a protest over coronavirus pandemic regulations in Berlin in 2020.Credit…Clemens Bilan/EPA, via Shutterstock
Promoters used Mr. Kennedy’s name to drum up attendance, saying that he personally wanted people to take to the streets and fight back. After the event, hundreds of protesters tried to storm the Reichstag, Germany’s Parliament.
Mr. Kennedy was not in attendance at the Parliament. “That whole Reichstag thing was completely unrelated to the demonstration,” Ms. Holland said.
Mr. Kennedy’s influence in Germany lives on, at least in online forums. Recent data from CeMAS, a research group that monitors conspiracy movements, shows that his name is often invoked on conspiracy-focused German Telegram channels, coming up more than 6,000 times this year alone.
His European chapter paid a British lawmaker to speak at a conference promoting vaccine skepticism.
Children’s Health Defense’s chapter in Europe has cultivated relationships with members of the European Parliament.
In January 2022, the organization held a news conference in Brussels demanding a “moratorium on health restrictions.” An anti-vaccine rally that followed the event turned violent, with protesters smashing windows at the European Union’s diplomatic headquarters.
In April 2023, Children’s Health Defense Europe helped organize a conference on the grounds of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France. At the conference, lawmakers criticized a proposed pandemic treaty being considered at the World Health Organization.
The chapter has hosted press events with European lawmakers and encouraged Parliament to reject vaccination certificate rules.
In 2023, the European chapter paid a member of Britain’s Parliament, Andrew Bridgen, to speak at a conference it had helped organize. The conference discussed opposition to government pandemic measures and promoted vaccine skepticism. The sum was small, at just under $800, according to Mr. Bridgen’s financial disclosures. Such payments are legal in Britain.
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Andrew Bridgen, left, a member of Parliament at the time, in London in 2022. He has compared the Covid-19 vaccine rollout to the Holocaust.Credit…Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr. Bridgen has repeatedly compared the Covid-19 vaccine rollout to the Holocaust, including in an interview with the Children’s Health Defense online television station.
Children’s Health Defense spent $315,000 in Europe last year, including in Iceland and Greenland, its U.S. tax filings show. Ms. Holland said that as of this year, the European chapter was run by volunteers and no longer funded by the U.S. operation.
His Africa chapter pushes measles misinformation and risky remedies.
In 2021, a South African herbalist named Toren Wing reached out to Mr. Kennedy about his effort to ban 5G cellphone towers over health concerns.
In an email, Mr. Wing recalled in an interview, he invoked a rousing speech about liberty that Mr. Kennedy’s father had delivered as a senator visiting apartheid South Africa in 1966.
“This is so cool,” Mr. Kennedy responded, according to a copy of the email. He looped in a Children’s Health Defense lawyer. The anti-5G effort fizzled, Mr. Wing said, but it laid the groundwork for a Children’s Health Defense chapter in Africa.
At the chapter’s launch, Mr. Kennedy said the continent was “a testing and clinical trial laboratory for multinational pharmaceutical companies that see African people as commodities.” His group sent just over $15,000 for “setup expenses” in 2022, U.S. tax filings show.
Shabnam Palesa Mohamed, who leads the chapter, is a frequent host of the nonprofit’s online show. She interviews doctors promoting unproven Covid-19 remedies and rails against vaccines.
After a measles outbreak started in Cape Town, Ms. Mohamed appeared in a video discussing supposed negative effects of “alleged measles injections” in South Africa.
In 2023, Unicef reported a 30 percent decline in confidence in childhood vaccines in South Africa after the Covid-19 pandemic, coming amid the world’s “largest sustained backslide in childhood immunization in 30 years.” The group cited factors including “growing access to misleading information.”
Ms. Mohamed and others affiliated with Children’s Health Defense Africa pushed the discredited theory that the drug ivermectin will treat Covid-19. They also sued the South African government, unsuccessfully, to stop Covid-19 vaccinations. Ms. Mohamed thanked Children’s Health Defense for supporting the case.
Ms. Mohamed has promoted conspiracy theories against the World Health Organization, Bill Gates and two of the world’s biggest money managers, BlackRock and Vanguard. Ms. Mohamed declined to answer questions about her work.
“I don’t think she was speaking on behalf of C.H.D.,” said Ms. Holland, who said the Africa chapter was a volunteer organization. “She’s an individual. She has her own views.”
Kimon de Greef contributed reporting.
Selam Gebrekidan is an investigative reporter for The Times whose work focuses on accountability — of governments, companies and people who wield power.More about Selam Gebrekidan
A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 1, 2024, Section A, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: Kennedy Has Worked Abroad to Undermine Global Health Policies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
I got up at 4 am. All day I have been setting up posts and helping Ron make a grand TDay dinner. But as I went out to help him, I came back to find my blogging computer had restarted. No problem, as I have a setting that simply reloads the pages from the last 3 days. But … No. For some reason I can not explain everything I had done for the last 3 days was wiped out. I can’t explain it. If it happens again I will have to dump the computer. But really I can not think of anything that could have caused it. But I will try to resurrect the important anti trans post I was writing. Hugs
My week last week talking about how starting on Monday I needed to wipe the hard discs and reinstall the OS and all programs on both computers, the week long problems, and also the end of the week getting sick.
I saw the email come in and I wondered why I wasn’t blocked from their list.
It was addressed to me from Americans for Prosperity, a group founded and funded by the Koch brothers. Kansas billionaires who changed the American political landscape with their wealth. Kansas brothers who have made this country worse.
There is only one Koch brother still living, Charles, and he continues with the mission of breaking the government. He is anti-union. Anti-public education. Anti-social safety nets. Anti-climate justice.
He is a committed libertarian.
Since the 1980s, the Koch brothers have steadily ramped up their political involvement and have constructed a vast network of organizations that pool hundreds of millions of dollars from their own pockets and other wealthy donors each year in support of the conservative idea generation, leadership training, election campaigning, and policy advocacy. Yet for all the groups the Kochs have created and funded, there is just one group that sits at the center of their network: Americans for Prosperity.
The email I received included an invitation to a local coffee shop about 25 minutes from home. Americans for Prosperity (AFP) was in town looking to connect with like-minded people who value freedom and community.
Free people. Free Missouri. Free coffee.
I decided I would go because if I love anything, it’s freedom. I can afford to buy my own coffee.
You probably already know this, but I don’t mind stirring the pot. I like to cause good trouble when I can. I like to be a burr under the saddle of those in power — a constant annoyance. I like to take up space and get in the way. I do this by giving no quarter and no space to the bourgeoisie who plan to plunder the resources of communities like mine.
I show up.
I knew I wasn’t the first to the meeting at the coffee shop that morning because I saw a car with a dented and battered Missouri license plate — a plate with a Gadsden flag. I knew a libertarian must be in close proximity. I was right.
I saw him sitting in the comfortable leather seat at the front of the coffee shop. I knew he was with Americans for Prosperity because it said so on his green hoodie. The color of money.
I smiled at him as I walked to the back to order my coffee. He smiled back…he looked familiar. He said, “Hi, Jess.”
Ope.
I was caught red-handed. Not that I was trying to attend the meeting incognito, but I didn’t plan on one of the Directors of the Americans for Prosperity calling me by name. My infamy precedes me…actually it’s my big mouth and my propensity for calling out Missouri Republicans. So be it.
I kept walking to the counter in the back.
I never know what to order at a coffee shop and I get a little anxious with a big menu. I drink most of my coffee at home because I am plain like that…steaming hot coffee from my old Bunn, poured into my old Lake Superior mug. I don’t take sugar, but I do mix in a couple of teaspoons of Walmart powdered creamer. Yes, I know.
Poor folks have poor ways.
I decided on a chai at the counter — the barista said she could make it a dirty chai. Who doesn’t like tea with espresso?
I returned to the front of the building to wait for the meeting to start. The AFP Director was on his phone. I noticed another local Democrat walk in. We chatted for a minute and my Democratic friend sat down next to me. We kept looking for folks to come in. They never appeared.
Not one person came to the meeting except the AFP Director and two Nodaway County Democrats.
I asked the AFP Director if I could pepper him with a few questions since there would not be a meeting. He kindly obliged.
He told me his name and I then realized why he looked familiar. He is familiar. He is from a town just west of mine. We know the same people.
He is a small town libertarian.
AFP is a libertarian organization that actually funds the GOP agenda in Missouri. They consistently endorse GOP candidates in races across the state. They also fund some of the most extreme Republicans running for office. Many of the candidates they endorse believe in abortion bans. They believe in book bans. They are anti-union and pro-privatization of institutions like public schools.
That is where I started.
Why do you want to defund public schools? He told me that defunding was not the goal, but that every parent should have a “choice” about where their kid attends school and that a voucher is useful for funding that choice.
I asked him where that choice was in Nodaway County. He didn’t have an answer, but I do. There is no choice. There is a K-8 private Catholic school in Maryville. It does not offer a high school or a non-religious curriculum. They also don’t offer Special Education classes.
There is no school choice in Nodaway County and the libertarian goal of school vouchers would be a death sentence to several rural schools in our county. Rural schools that support all kids, including those with a disability.
The small town libertarian listened politely as I spoke and I listened politely as he spoke. I pointed to a particular habit of speech he consistently used when speaking of public schools: He called them “government schools.” I asked him why he doesn’t refer to private schools who receive taxpayer money as “government schools” and his answer shocked me…
He said private schools receiving taxpayer money are not “government schools” because they don’t follow state standards for schools.
Oh my god.
They don’t have to answer to anybody. They don’t have to take standardized tests and they don’t have to produce results. If they are good, parents will flock. If they are bad, parents will find another school. It’s the market, stupid.
I had to think about closing my mouth. My jaw hung open in horror.
Market solutions do not work in education. Kids aren’t coffee. Or blueberries.
If they attend a bad school that closes, they just lost a year of education. It isn’t a minor flaw in the school choice design. It’s part of the scam. Make money with choice schools…find a community and open a fly-by-night school in an old Pizza Hut or in a church basement. Accept the taxpayer dollars, produce no results, close the school, and then run out of town with the money.
This wasn’t the only topic of our conversation. The small town libertarian relied heavily on philosophers to make his points. He asked me often if I had read this philosopher or that one and I noticed that we actually agreed on several topics.
I was at the coffee shop for nearly an hour. On my way home, the scene played out in my head. I am an overthinker. I came to a very quick conclusion about the reason the libertarian and I had disagreements — libertarians have no plan for poverty. Or disability. Or women. Or any community that is oppressed or marginalized.
The ideal libertarian comes across as selfish. And privileged. They would likely deny both.
I know the only way out of our current political position is to be in our communities. To physically meet folks — to look them in the eye and talk about our shared and common needs.
But, it’s not easy when I know I can’t change their minds — at least not in just one encounter. Maybe I can make them think, though? Maybe I can put a thought or two in their head? Maybe I can also learn not to be so rigid in my own ideas?
The first rule is “do not obey in advance” and in my mind, it looks like showing up and pushing back.
I don’t know that I changed anything with my meeting with the small town libertarian, but I know it didn’t hurt.
Yesterday morning after not sleeping all night I wiped the hard drives and reinstall Windows from an old version of Windows 10 I have. One computer, the XPS which I just added 64 GB of ram to, seemed to be going wonderful, with no hiccups or problems. Sadly the Inspiron computer just wouldn’t install windows or other programs correctly. So last night I went to bed about 9 pm. The XPS seemed ready for finial steps. That was last night when I shut them all down.
However this morning when I went to start the computers, the XPS refused to start windows. The computer started and the bios would work but windows wouldn’t start. It seems something was preventing the boot manger from working. Even trying to reinstall windows wouldn’t let the boot manager start. In fact when I install a new version of windows and I delete the partition set up by the last installation. However it was not deleting them and as soon as I tried to reinstall the partitions would reappear. Well I was not out of tricks yet. I pulled out another older version of Windows 10 and partitioned the C drive. I could have done it with the same USB Windows install stick I had been using but I worried if there was a problem with that USB stick software. Then installed the even older version of Windows. Then I took the newer version and repeated that. Then spent an hour setting up settings. However after spending the morning doing updates and even installing some licensed programs which I do at the last as some of them have a limit to how many times they can be installed. The full stop hard wall happened that screwed everything I had done on both computers.
Well shit and damn. I have a keyboard and mouse that works on three different devices so I have my keyboard set to each computer and my phone. My mouse I set the third device to what ever third device I am working on. But during all this I couldn’t get the flow system from the company to work. That moves the mouse from monitor / computer by going to the edge of the monitor so that I had to manually change the computer via a button on the bottom of the mouse. That meant I had to pick up the mouse and use the button every time I switched computers. That is not something I can keep doing. I race between computers hundreds of times an hour. So I sat here and thought. Each computer I dumped and reloaded and did the updates for hours over the last several days. I figured out a workaround. Since I had already done clean installs, I went into settings, to recovery and set both computers to “recover Windows from the cloud”, that would reset settings that were preventing my programs from working.
Yes, yes, yes! Well it worked. It is 3 pm and I am sitting here typing on the blogging computer and watching Sam Seder on the other. Once the recovery was done I installed the Logitech program for the mouse / keyboard which worked fine. Then I installed the Norton antivirus malware, then installed my VPN, Nordvpn with its anti-malware, advance browser protection, and ad and tracker prevention. So far everything is working grand.
I am on day three with 6 hours sleep. I stopped eating yesterday morning. Yes I am tired, yes I got sick to my stomach this morning. Yes my blood sugar got too low and I had to take glucose tablets. But when I am focused on a problem food and sleep wait until I get it all fixed. So all I have to do today is install all my licensed programs and clean the computers up.
One last thing. Several days ago an elderly lady I gave a printer to because she is poor and did not have one. It is a nice brother printer that in its day was expensive but I had bought a new one and it was in my hoarder closet of electrical parts / equipment gathering dust. The printer’s computer was in error mode with an unable to clean error. Sadly that is part of the built-in obsolescence of our for-profit businesses. The error is caused due to the sponge that the print head uses to clean itself after use so ink doesn’t run all over the desk and the floor. Since they don’t bother to put a sensor in the sponge it is much easier (cheaper) for manufactures to simply put in a number of pages that will shut the machine down. Once you get to that number the “brain” in the printer assumes the sponge is full. If you know the magical steps and the correct numbers to input, you can clear the number of pages back to zero and your printer works again. And tech people can charge you big money for doing this. Sadly I did not like that game years ago and even as poor as Ron and I are, I only took donations for my skills as a technician.
So either to your joy or bad disappointment after 3 days and 6 hours of sleep and only two meals even as Ron threatened to force feed me, I am back online with my computers fully running. Oh during the time I worked on the two main computers I had the big 55 inch TV in my office on the wonderful swing arm Ron mounted running off my Xbox One and a small barely able to function laptop that I used to write most of this. Hugs and loves to all. Scottie
This story was published in partnership with Them.
Reached by phone in the days following the election, LGBTQ+ movement leaders promised they are more prepared than ever to face off against a second Trump administration.
“We’re ready,” said Heron Greenesmith, deputy director of policy at the Transgender Law Center, a civil rights organization. “We did extensive scenario planning, internal and external. We did safety planning internally. We did scenario planning with partners, cross movement, inter movement, trans specific, LGBT.”
For transgender Americans, the moment feels particularly vulnerable. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to end what he has termed “transgender insanity” and cut Medicaid and Medicare funding to health providers offering gender-affirming health care on his first day in office.
The result is that many trans Americans are reeling, feeling that the country has elected a man set on wiping them off the face of the earth.
Responding to the election, Sarah Warbelow’s voice broke.
“There’s so much love,” she said. “Love is still out there, and that is not what this election was about.”
Warbelow isn’t transgender. But her daughter is. And as the vice president of legal for the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign, Warbelow will be tasked with shoring up protections for queer Americans as Trump retakes office.
Warbelow’s tone turned from teary to defiant as she talked about a slew of political ads attacking transgender Americans, many of them run by Trump and his surrogates. They don’t represent the feelings of the nation, she said.
“A majority of voters found the anti-trans advertisements were just mean-spirited,” she said.
But Kierra Johnson, president of the National LGBTQ Task Force, one of the community’s largest organizations focused on field organizing and political change, said 2024 is nothing like 2016 when Trump was first elected.
“The strategies are already in motion across movements,” Johnson said.
“Yes, we should be worried,” Johnson said, adding that Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump term written by his former advisors, makes extremely concerning suggestions about how to approach LGBTQ+ rights. “They put it in black and white. If we don’t take that as serious, then that’s on us. Whether they execute or not, that’s something else.”
Advocates said there are a number of things trans people can do immediately to protect their rights and safety before January. Here’s how the nation’s LGBTQ+ leaders feel things will go in the top policy areas impacting trans people and how trans folks can prepare ahead of January 2025.
Identification and gender markers
For people who need updated gender markers on their identification or have already obtained them, Greenesmith advised looking at state laws first if there are questions.
“The laws in your state will impact a lot of everything else, including whether or not you can get your name and gender changed to match,” Greenesmith said.
Some have expressed fears that having an “X” gender marker on a driver’s license or passport instead of the formerly standard “M” or “F” will make them a target in the new administration. Advocates advise that deciding on a gender marker is an incredibly personal decision. Some noted that removing the “X” might make one feel safer, but would be unlikely to erase the paper trail of a gender marker change in government records. In other words, if a trans person was trying to change a marker to conceal their gender identity from the federal government, updating gender markers would likely have minimal impact.
Advocates for Transgender Equality has a full ID resources library with a state-by-state drop-down menu, as does Trans Lifeline, to help people navigate local laws. Both are nonprofit civil rights organizations.
The 19th will continue to provide guidance on IDs, documents and other paperwork as organizations release it.
Freedom to be
Perhaps the greatest fear many trans people have is that simply being transgender will be criminalized. While experts acknowledge that it’s reasonable to be scared, they expressed that the federal government doesn’t have the same resources states have to target transgender people individually on the basis of identity alone.
“When you look at the data and the polling, despite what people are pontificating about at this moment, the American public supports the existence of transgender people,” Warbelow said. Because Trump has shown himself to be incredibly fickle, it’s difficult to know at this point exactly what his plans are for carrying out his campaign promises. That said, Warbelow believes that the president-elect does care, on some level, about his popularity with the public.
Warbelow also believes that the administration does not have the levers to target transgender people in the ways that states have aimed to criminalize transgender life.
Greenesmith is quick to add that worst-case scenario fears are already a reality for many of the most marginalized queer people.
“This is why we can’t catastrophize at this moment, because catastrophization is white supremacy,” they said. “All the things that White people fear, Black people, Indigenous folks, migrants have been facing for centuries.”
Andrea Jenkins, a Minneapolis City Council member who made history as the first out Black trans woman elected to public office in the United States, said that for Black trans women, that also means coming together and rising up.
“What I will say to my sisters out there is we got to stand strong,” she said. “We’ve got to organize. We’ve got to build systems of support for each other.”
Moving
As some trans people consider relocating, “it’s not easy for people to just do that,” said Jamison Green, veteran trans organizer and health expert.
Whether people are considering a move out of the country, or out of state, advocates acknowledge that the laws impacting trans lives in real ways differ from place to place. The 19th will be reporting more deeply on these options in the weeks to come, but Green advises that people in states with trans-friendly laws will be far safer than states with anti-trans laws, if they are able to get to affirming states because so many of the policies impacting trans lives are decided at a state level.
No matter what, “get connected to community,” he said.
Organizations on the ground are ready to greet those who do need to move, said Jax Gonzalez, political director at LGBTQ+ statewide equality organization One Colorado.
“We know that we are a sanctuary state, and that there are many families who have been coming here from Oklahoma, Florida, Arkansas, Texas, you name it, Missouri,” Gonzalez said. “We want to ensure that those folks who do come here, that we’re doing everything that we can to ensure that they are protected and can thrive in community.”
Health care
Trump has vowed to cut off federal funding to health providers offering gender-affirming care to transgender people via executive order. Many fear this will mean the end of gender-affirming care like hormones, puberty blockers and surgeries for transgender people on Trump’s first day in office.
Before panicking, experts advise that this will be logistically complicated for the administration to pull off. For one, transgender people are protected by the Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock v. Clayton County decision, which ruled that gender discrimination and sex discrimination are one in the same, meaning if the government barred gender-affirming care for a trans man, it would have to outlaw that same care (testosterone) for a cisgender man.
Further, Green said the feasibility of the federal government tracking everyone’s prescriptions would get complicated quickly.
“The volume of prescriptions that are written in this country, it would be very difficult and time-consuming and costly to track at a federal level.”
State controls would have more access, he added. Some people have worried that the administration could threaten pharmacists, especially when it comes to prescriptions for testosterone, which is a schedule III class drug. Off-label use would not be allowed. Green, again, thinks this would be challenging for the administration.
“Most drugs are used off label, and that’s a fact,” he added. “Medicine is an extremely complex field. It’s an art as well as a science … this is why we license doctors to use their medical judgment in applying the chemistry of pharmaceuticals to their patients to help them.”
Further, Trump attempted to gut transgender health care protections in the Affordable Care Act during his first term. The fight over those protections wound through the courts, and the repeal was finalized in 2020, only to be reversed by President Joe Biden, another rule-making process and fight that took four years.
In short, advocates said it’s difficult to anticipate how health care policy will play out. But whatever happens is not likely to happen immediately, and all major medical associations back gender-affirming care for transgender people.
Green said there is cause for concern.
“But I think we have to not just roll over and let them do it,” he said. “Whatever, they think they’re going to do, we have to stay fighting for people’s health and rights and social safety.”
Marriage and family planning
Marriage will not immediately be at risk in the new administration because of legal precedent and a 2022 law passed by Congress called the Respect for Marriage Act, which requires states to recognize LGBTQ+ marriages already performed, even those from out of state.
“If something changes in the future, there will still be time to get married,” said Warbelow. “That is not something the Trump administration has the power to undo it any immediate term”
Advocates advise that for LGBTQ+ people who want to marry, now is not a bad time to do it.
“I think people need to do everything they can to fortify their families and their finances, period,” said Johnson, adding that this can be applied to marriages, adoptions, powers of attorney or wills.
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