wanderingmongoose

[wanderingmongoose]

Actually just remembered my gf is trans. Watch out America.

It’s a good thing that I will probably never be put in a position where I have to commit heinous atrocities to protect my girlfriend because I can tell you right now innocent bystanders would be perishing left and right

[wanderingmongoose]

It’s a good thing that I will probably never be put in a position where I have to commit heinous atrocities to protect my girlfriend because I can tell you right now innocent bystanders would be perishing left and right

[wanderingmongoose]

Do not think for a moment that this admin is only going after trans folks. They are ultimately going after the whole LGBTQ community. They start small, like getting rid of a hotline option, then go BIG.

[wanderingmongoose]

Some lilies spotted on today’s walk

[wanderingmongoose]

Hello I feel alive again

Hmmmm looks like a serious case of sad and grumpy disease. Unfortunately the only cure is go outside and wander around barefoot until the whimsy is restored to your soul.

[wanderingmongoose]

Hmmmm looks like a serious case of sad and grumpy disease. Unfortunately the only cure is go outside and wander around barefoot until the whimsy is restored to your soul.

[wanderingmongoose]

it must feel good as hell when you’re a horse and you take a big bite out of an apple like ttshoke

[wanderingmongoose]

I’ve just stitched up (haha) a series of lesbian events, which began in the wood shop where I was hand making a wooden ring for my girlfriend, and accidentally dropped a spot of CA glue on my favorite pair of jeans. But not to worry. I have finally finished mending them via embroidered cherries.

[wanderingmongoose]

You're about to close on your very own, suspiciously affordable and comfortable house. Just before you sign the contract, the realtor shows you the required legal disclosure: your new house is haunted by the type of presence you'll get from this spinner wheel.

Of course it is.

[wanderingmongoose]

I wasn't aware of this one, so I'm trying to spread the word.

[wanderingmongoose]

This is the lucky clover cat. reblog this in 30 seconds & he will bring u good luck and fortune.

[wanderingmongoose]

I live in a building with a shared laundry facility and today I was carrying my big hamper of laundry over there, both hands full. In the hallway in front of the laundry room, there was a guy coming the other direction, and when he saw me he turned around and ran back to the laundry room to hold the door open for me so I didn’t have to put my hamper down. Anyway I love you kind stranger. Thank you for reminding me that people are fundamentally good.

[wanderingmongoose]

WHO WANTS SOME PATCHES?! My lovely girlfriend wanted me to design her a gadsden flag patch for trans people in these trying times, and now that I'm ordering them, it looks like I might need to order around 10 or 20 at once. They will have a diamond shape, an adhesive backing, and be 3.5 x 3.5 inches.

Would any of y'all interested in buying some of the extras? I was thinking I could sell them and donate any profit to an lgbt advocacy group/charity with a focus on trans issues. Please let me know:

a. if you would want one and b. if you have any suggestions on where to donate the profits to.

[wanderingmongoose]

Friends, A grassroots movement is calling on all Americans to abstain from shopping with major retailers — including Amazon — tomorrow, February 28, as part of an “economic blackout.” The purpose is to send a clear message: We have the power. We don’t have to accept corporate monopolies. We don’t have to live with corporate money corrupting our politics. We don’t have to accept more tax cuts for billionaires. We don’t have to pay more of our hard-earned cash to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or the other billionaire oligarchs. We don’t have to reward corporations that have abandoned their DEI policies to align themselves with Trump’s racist, homophobic, misogynistic agenda. We have choices. Most Americans are struggling to keep up. Most live from paycheck to paycheck. Most can barely afford housing costs, food prices, and pharmaceuticals — kept high by monopolies, and fueled by private equity. If politicians won’t hear the voices of average Americans who are being shafted by corporate America, we have to deliver our message to corporate America directly. From midnight tonight to midnight Friday night, please: No Amazon, no Walmart, no Best Buy, no Target, no Disney, no Google, no Facebook. Don’t spend on fast food, major retailers, or gas. Avoid using credit or debit cards to make nonessential purchases. Buy essentials such as medicine, food, and emergency supplies, of course, but make those purchases at small, local businesses. Consider this a test run. If lots of people participate, I’m sure a longer one will be organized. (Tomorrow’s economic blackout is an initiative of The People’s Union USA, which describes itself as a “grassroots movement dedicated to economic resistance, government accountability, and corporate reform.”)' I hope you'll join. What do you think?

[wanderingmongoose]

on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

[wanderingmongoose]

Therapist: slip stitch into slip stitch isn't real. It can't hurt you.

Sl-st into sl-st:

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[wanderingmongoose]

This guy is truly a breath of fresh air amid the gloom of the great american shit show