He/Him. American 1stA Supporter, SEO curator, writer (& playwright), geek, sci-fi addict, coin collector, activist in the TX 33rd Congressional District.
Texas
Joined April 2009
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George M retweeted
One of the more striking aspects of this election is the repudiation of Trump's efforts to whitewash everything. They ended DEI and focused on placing white men in power. Democrats responded by electing the most diverse slate of candidates this country has ever seen. Really impressive, and more in line with what this country actually looks like.
George M retweeted
In December 1960 the most famous writer in the world was checked into the Mayo Clinic under his own doctor's name, officially for his blood pressure, and given up to fifteen rounds of electric shock to the brain, and when he came out he could no longer write a sentence, and six months later he was dead.
Ernest Hemingway was 61. He had the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer, the houses in Cuba and Idaho, and a head that had been battered more times than anyone could count. He had been blown up by a mortar in Italy in 1918, split his skull open in a London car crash in 1944, been thrown from a motorcycle by a shell in France the same year, and walked away from two plane crashes in Africa on consecutive days in 1954, the second leaving fluid leaking from his skull. He drank enormously. By 1960 he was paranoid, convinced the FBI was following him, unable to finish the Paris memoir he had nearly completed.
The Mayo psychiatrist, Howard Rome, treated it as depression and gave him the treatment of the day. Electroconvulsive therapy was the modern answer in 1960, quicker than analysis and tidier than the lobotomy it had replaced. Hemingway went home to Ketchum in January.
He was worse. Asked to write a single line for a presentation volume for the new President Kennedy, he sat at his desk for a week, could not do it, and wept that it just won't come anymore. In April his wife Mary found him in a state that terrified her, and he was flown back to Rochester for another course of shocks.
At the Mayo he told his friend A.E. Hotchner what the treatment had done. His memory was his capital, he said, the thing his whole trade was built on, and they had wiped it and put him out of business. "It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient."
The clinic discharged him at the end of June as improved. On the morning of 2 July 1961, at home in Ketchum, he took his own life.
The psychiatrist who has studied his head injuries most closely, Andrew Farah, argues that the man in Rome's office was not simply depressed but living in a brain wrecked by a lifetime of concussions and drink, and that electricity was the last thing it needed. The FBI files released in the 1980s showed he really had been watched for years, which is a hard way to learn that a patient's paranoia was partly a report.
None of that got a hearing in 1960. The diagnosis was in the textbook, the treatment was in the textbook, and the patient's complaint that it was taking his mind was in the textbook too, listed as a side effect, expected and temporary.
They treated the most observant man in American letters for being wrong about what he was seeing, and the last thing he saw clearly was what they had done to him.
George M retweeted
O discurso de James Talarico, político ligado ao Partido Democrata e recém-eleito Senador pelo Estado do Texas, que está repercutindo no mundo todo:
"Pessoas trans são 1% da população. Os muçulmanos são 1% da população. Os imigrantes ilegais são 1% da população. Nós estamos focados no 1% errado.
Pessoas trans não estão afetando o nosso sistema de saúde. Os muçulmanos não estão retirando o financiamento das nossas escolas. Imigrantes não estão cortando impostos para si mesmos e seus amigos ricos.
São os bilionários e seus políticos fantoches. As guerras culturais são uma cortina de fumaça. Tantas das divisões neste Estado e neste País são fabricadas por bilionários que nos querem lutando entre si ao invés de lutando contra eles."
George M retweeted
Sad? Feeling displaced by the majority of the country rejecting your MAGA values? We’re sorry! Red State Movers can help move you back to where you came from.💪🏻🇺🇸💅🏻🤷🏼♀️
George M retweeted
The year is 1956. Your mother is expecting you, and her doctor smokes through the appointment. More doctors smoke Camels than any other brand, the adverts say, and he tells her a few a day will settle her nerves and keep the baby small for an easy birth.
The year is 1960. Your first proper shoes come from a shop with an X-ray machine in the corner. You slide your feet into the slot and watch your own toe bones wriggle, green and glowing, while the assistant checks the fit. You go back every time your feet grow.
The year is 1961. Your mother is expecting your sister and the sickness is bad. The chemist has a new tablet, advertised as completely safe in pregnancy. Your sister arrives the next year alongside 10,000 other babies whose mothers took it, and some of them arrive without arms.
The year is 1964. Three sore throats, so the tonsils come out, as they do for over a million children a year on both sides of the Atlantic. Twenty beds, and the promise of ice cream. Nobody asks what the tonsils were for. They were the immune system, and the operation never did much for the throats.
The year is 1972. You are sixteen and every car on earth runs on leaded petrol. The lead comes out of the exhaust and settles on the playground, the vegetable patch and the blood of every child walking to school. The men who put it in the petrol knew what it did to a brain in the 1920s. The ban arrives in your forties.
The year is 1981. Your mother's hands have gone stiff. The doctor has a new arthritis tablet with the biggest launch the drug industry has ever mounted. Two years later it is pulled on both sides of the Atlantic, with dozens of pensioners dead whose kidneys could not clear it. She gets off lightly: the sun burns her on it, and she spends a summer behind the curtains.
The year is 1991. Your father is diabetic, and the dietitian hands him a sheet. More than half his calories are to come from carbohydrate: bread, potatoes, pasta, cereal. His sugar goes up on it, so his insulin goes up with it, and his waist follows. He does as he is told for twenty years.
The year is 1998. Your back has gone. The doctor has a new opioid, and the rep carries a letter from a medical journal saying addiction on it is under 1%. The letter is five sentences long. The company pleads guilty twice, and by the second time more than half a million Americans are dead.
The year is 2002. Your knees hurt, and the doctor has a new pill that is kinder on the stomach. You take it for two years, the same two years the maker is sitting on its own heart data. It is withdrawn with as many as 140,000 heart attacks laid at its door. Your heart was fine. The man next door's was not.
The year is 2008. Your wife has a prolapse after three children, and the surgeon fits a strip of plastic mesh. Once the tissue grows through it, it cannot come out. Australia apologises to its women in 2018, America bans it in 2019, Britain apologises in 2020. Your wife gets hers by press release.
The year is 2026. You are seventy, and the new doctor has a screen and a number for everything. The meat on your plate is a hazard. The oil in the bottle is good for your heart. The injection is for life. He is the age the first doctor was when he lit a Camel in front of your mother, and every bit as sure.
Not one of them was a rogue. Every one was the standard of care, taught to the next doctor, printed on the leaflet, and handed to a family with no way to check it.
You have spent seventy years as the experiment. The results come out after you are gone, under somebody else's name, and the chair you are sitting in is where they recruit for the next one.
George M retweeted
BREAKING: In a powerful move, Rep. Robert Garcia, who will Chair the House Oversight Committee once Democrats win tonight, just announced he will be overseeing the quick introduction of investigations into the Trump family's corruption and ties to the Epstein files. Let's go.
George M retweeted
Sky News has exposed how russia used a humanitarian ceasefire in Ukraine to strengthen its military positions.
This is a prequel to what happens when russia gets a ceasefire.
A six-day humanitarian ceasefire was arranged to evacuate civilians from Oleshky, a Ukrainian town occupied by russia in the Kherson region.
Hundreds of Ukrainian civilians were finally able to escape. But while the evacuation was taking place, russian forces were using the opportunity to reinforce their military positions.
Sky News obtained exclusive access to drone surveillance conducted by Ukraine’s 34th Marine Brigade.
The footage is disturbing.
Russian armored vehicles were moving through the streets. Soldiers were bringing in weapons, ammunition, fuel, and supplies. Russian troops were entering civilian buildings and establishing military positions in basements.
Russian forces also rotated troops, restored artillery positions, and reinforced areas they had previously lost.
Even more disturbing, Sky News documented russian soldiers overseeing the removal of approximately 30 bodies from a hospital morgue. Local residents say that these civilians were murdered by russians and their bodies were not allowed to be buried for months.
This is a prequel to what happens when russia gets a ceasefire. They will exploit the pause in fighting to improve its military position.
This is precisely why any ceasefire with russia must include credible monitoring, verification, and enforcement.
A ceasefire that allows an aggressor to strengthen its forces will create new dangers for the very people it is supposed to protect.
George M retweeted
If this isn't genocide, then nothing is. We would have hanged Putin and his henchmen at Nuremburg for far less than they've done. Instead, we roll out the red carpet for them. Invite them to our forums.
The WWII generation would be disgusted with our current "leaders".
George M retweeted
Fifteen years ago, my wife spent a summer teaching in a small town in Missouri.
When she left, an old woman from the church gave her a quilt.
Her name is Opal. For 62 years, Opal has made a quilt for every baby born in that town. Every wedding. Every family that lost someone.
More than 400 quilts. She has never taken a dollar for one.
When she gave my wife hers, she said, "So you'll always have somewhere to come back to."
That quilt is on our bed right now.
Last winter, Opal's eyes gave out. She can't see a needle anymore.
"My hands still know how," she told her pastor. "My eyes just quit on them."
So the town decided to make Opal a quilt.
Nobody remembers who started it. Somebody pinned a sign-up sheet to the church bulletin board. There was one rule. You could only sign if you owned an Opal quilt.
143 people signed.
Most of them had never sewn anything in their lives.
The high school football coach showed up at the fellowship hall with hands like catcher's mitts and a thimble on his pinky.
The mechanic sewed his square with fishing line. He said regular thread wasn't strong enough for Opal.
A nine-year-old boy took his apart and started over three times. He said Opal would know.
And two old farmers, Bill and Gary, ended up at the same table.
Bill and Gary had not spoken in 22 years. Something about a fence. Nobody remembers the details anymore. Including Bill and Gary.
They were the last two to arrive. There were two chairs left. Side by side.
They sat. They did not look at each other. They sewed in silence for an hour.
Then Gary couldn't thread his needle. His hands shake now. Bill watched him miss four times.
Then, without a word, Bill took the needle, threaded it, and handed it back.
"Thanks," Gary said.
"Don't mention it," Bill said.
"Wasn't going to," Gary said.
By the third night, they were sharing a thermos.
The church secretary emailed my wife in Japan. Would she like to send a square?
My wife hasn't sewn since high school. She sat at our kitchen table for a week. She cut her square from the yukata she wore to that Missouri county fair fifteen years ago. She cried most of the week. Her stitches are terrible.
She sent it anyway.
They laid all 143 squares out on the fellowship hall floor. They left one empty space. In the very center.
"That one's Opal's," the pastor said.
Last month, on her 90th birthday, they put the quilt in her lap.
She couldn't see it. So she read it with her hands.
Square by square. Slowly. The whole room was silent.
"Too tight. That's Coach. Always too tight."
"Fishing line. Lord. That's Earl."
"Crooked. Three times over. That's my Tommy."
She knew every single one. By the stitches. She had taught half that town to sew, and she had wrapped the other half in a quilt the day they were born.
Then her fingers stopped on something thin and light.
"This one came from far away," she said.
Then she smiled.
"That's my girl in Japan."
Then her hand found two squares side by side, joined by one long seam. Bill's and Gary's.
She ran her thumb along the seam between them.
"Well," she said. "Took you boys long enough."
Bill and Gary both stared at the floor. The whole room laughed. Most of them were crying.
Then someone put a needle in her hand. Bill threaded it.
For three hours, with her eyes closed, Opal sewed the center square.
The stitches are perfectly straight.
Her hands still knew how.
That night, the pastor sent my wife a photo of Opal asleep under it, and something Opal had said:
"People think a quilt is the pretty pieces. It's not. None of the pieces match. Half of them don't even like each other.
A quilt is just a lot of different pieces that decided to hold on.
That's all a town is."
I think she meant a country, too.
George M retweeted
A half million retired teachers in Texas are unable to retire on the TRS benefits Greg Abbott refuses to raise with no COLA raises EVER. Benefits for retired teachers in Texas went from the top 20 retirement benefits under Ann Richards to the bottom five in the country.
Teacher shouldn't have to worry how they will eat after 30 years of service when they retire so that rich families can have their private school tuition paid for in vouchers.
According to the Texas American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the average retired teacher’s monthly annuity is UNDER $2,200, with some retirees earning as little as $1,500. The Texas Retired Teachers Association (TRTA) says 70% of retired school employees have never received a COLA since retiring, and some have been without increases for over 20 years.
40% of the retired teachers qualify for food stamps.
It's past time for a change.
