katie.ban

The basic practice of law should not require going to law school. Anyone should be able to take the bar exam and paid apprenticeship-to-practice programs should be legal and offered by every law office.

RFK is like catnip to every stupid demographic within society: airhead hippies, rap fans, MAGAs, celebrity obsessed tabloid readers, antivaxxers. You name it. His presence in American life represents the stupidity singularity.

In one of the most fascinating podcasts I’ve ever listened to, the members of NPR’s This American Life got their testosterone levels tested. All of the males had very low testosterone; some low enough doctors would recommend medication. And a trans guest talks about how taking testosterone made them suddenly interested in science.

As much as I'd like to see the Harris/Walz campaign undermined, this sort of thing is too corrosive on a level deeper than politics. It's just poison. Betraying your own blood is just about the most dishonorable thing you can do, and doing it publicly more so. It’s tempting to use every weapon at your disposal but this is a moral stain that can’t be scrubbed off when the election’s over. It’s bad for your soul as an individual, as a family, as a country. Family is the last bulwark against the total state, and if you give up your family to serve the state, you’ve already lost.

Just one year of a 2% tax on billionaires would cover ending homelessness and hunger, providing tuition-free public college, universal childcare, and replacing all of the lead pipes in the U.S. — and it wouldn't affect how billionaires live their lives at all.

My patient who has fought for decades to get a hysterectomy was recently told she would finally get one because her uterine ultrasound showed “probable” cancer. Only caveat: biopsy showed no cancer! She was 20 and a mother of ONE when she asked for a hysterectomy for the 1st time — “you might want a second child.” She was 25 and a mother of TWO when she asked for a hysterectomy for the 2nd time — “you are too young.” Now she is 45 and a mother of THREE, biopsy benign, but getting her uterus taken out because of “shadows on ultrasound.” I had no word to comfort her. We just sat together and wept. The uterus is the only organ in the body whose removal doesn’t require confirmation of pathology — but ONLY if you are old enough to have had “enough” children. Young women = baby vessels. Older women = owners of an “useless” organ. Either our organs get tossed around, or our lives get tossed around. Even shadows in sound wave imaging trumps our bodily autonomy. Its 2024. How about we treat women as who they truly are — owners of their organs, bodies, AND voices?

California Teacher Applying “Sleepy Time Patches” To Children These are medicated patches that “Suppresses a kid's appetite, shifts their moods, and makes them feel sleepy.” “The teachers would take off the stickers before the kids got picked up” “Did the teacher give you any stickers, any patches?” Little kid “Yeah” “One of the parents got there unannounced and saw the sticker on their child's arm. We've seen a lot of behavioral issues, sleeping patterns, eating patterns different. So we've seen that the children are having withdrawal.”