roadkillnroses

[roadkillnroses]

You want gay marriage?

Land Back.

You want trans rights?

Land Back.

You want environmental protections?

Land Back.

You want an end to the imperialistic systems of money worshipping capitalism and hetero-patriarchy that privilege white, cis, able bodied, perisex heterosexual men at the expense of everyone, and everything, else?

LAND

FUCKING

BACK

!!!!!!!!!!

Shit's been going downhill since 1492

[roadkillnroses]

obligatory post today

[roadkillnroses]

After being released from 104 days of ICE detention for his pro-Palestine activism, Mahmoud Khalil joins his wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, and their newborn son at Newark Liberty Airport this morning (21 June 2025).

photo via NYT

[roadkillnroses]

There was an interesting situation at work recently. I'm gonna keep it vague for privacy, but basically the husband of a patient threatened to shoot hospital employees after he perceived they were ignoring his wife's situation. Which, looking at the case, people were like, yeah, this patient was in prolonged discomfort and had delayed care over multiple shifts due to factors that weren't malicious but were careless. Basically, the task that would have helped this patient was classic "third thing on your to do list." It had to be done, but it didn't need to be done urgently. The impact of not doing this task likely wouldn't be felt on your shift. The work of doing this task would require the coordination of a couple different people. Very easy to just keep pushing it back, and because it wasn't an emergency (until it was), it just kept being pushed back.

You could do a root-cause analysis of the whole thing (and we have) to really break down what happened, but ultimately the effect was the same as if the neglect had been malicious. I'm sympathetic to the husband, as were a lot of people in this situation, because, yes, hospital staff dropped the ball in a way that meant the patient was in unnecessary pain and discomfort with delay of care for over a day, despite multiple requests from patient and family to address the situation. The husband reacted emotionally to a situation where he'd felt helpless and ignored. Institutional neglect ground away at him until he verbally snapped.

And the way he snapped was to tell staff, "I'm going to come back with a gun and shoot you all for what you've done." Which is about as explicit a threat as you can get. Does he get to keep visiting the hospital after that? How do we be fair to him, to the patient, and to the staff? He probably didn't mean it. Right? But how do you ignore a statement like that? If he does come back and commit a shooting, how will you justify ignoring his threat? But does one sentence said at an emotional breaking point define him? How much more traumatic are we going to make this hospital stay?

A couple years back, I worked on a floor a few hours after a patient had been escorted away for inappropriate behavior--by the way, you can't imagine how inappropriate the behavior has to be for us to do that. I have never seen another case like this. That patient said he was going to come back with a gun and shoot nurses that he identified by name. This didn't come to pass. Whether that was because the patient didn't mean it or changed his mind or was prevented or simply was not mentally coordinated enough to follow through on the plan, I don't know. I do know that shift fucking sucked. I remember the charge nurse telling me that it wasn't our jobs to die for our patients. If there was shooting, she told me to run.

There was another situation recently involving a patient in restraints. I despise restraints. I think the closest legitimate use for them is in ICUs for stopping delirious patients from ripping out their ventilators, and that should still be a last resort. I discontinue restraints whenever I inherit them, and I am very good at fixing problems before restraint seem like the only solution. Having said that, I work in a hospital that uses restraints, and so I am complicit in their use. Recently I walked into a situation involving restraints with zero context for what was happening, just that there was a security situation involving a patient who had been deemed for some reason to lack capacity to make medical decisions. They were on a court hold and a surrogate med override, which means they cannot refuse certain medications. The whole situation was horrible, and I've spent the days since it happened thinking about every way I personally failed that patient and what to do different next time.

At one point, the patient called one of the nurses a bitch, and the nurse said, "hey cmon, that's not nice," and the patient replied, "if you were in hell, would you call the devil a nice name?" And yeah! Fair! It is insane to expect people who are actively being denied their autonomy to be polite to us as we do it.

Then there was another patient on the behavioral health floor who got put in seclusion. It's so frustrating, by the way, that staff put them in seclusion because it would have been extremely easy to avoid escalating the situation to the point that it got to. But the situation did escalate, and by the time the patient was locked in a seclusion room, they were shouting slurs and kicking the walls. Other patients were scared of the patient even when they were calm because the patient talked endlessly about guns, poisons, bombs, etc. When I checked in with the patient in the seclusion room, they called me a cog in a fascist machine just following orders. And I was like, yeah. Fair.

Another patient: one night when I was charge nurse, I replied to a security situation where a patient trapped a staff member in the room and tried to choke her. The staff member escaped unharmed. She told me later that the patient had been verbally aggressive to her all day, but she hadn't told anyone because she knew he was having a bad day, she didn't want to get him in trouble, and she didn't think anything was actually going to happen. She said, "Patients are mean all the time."

And another case: I had a different patient with the ultimate combination of factors for violent agitation--confused, needed a translator, was hard of hearing so the translator was of little use, in pain, feverish, scared, withdrawing from alcohol, hadn't slept in two days, separated from his caregiver who had also just been hospitalized--the whole shebang. He shouted at us that we were human trafficking him and could not be reoriented to where he actually was or that he was sick. I tried all my usual methods of deescalation, which I am typically very good at. I could not get him to calm down. He had a hospital bed where the headboard pulls out so you can use it as a brace during compressions. He ripped that out and threw it at the window, trying to shatter the glass. At that point, with the permission of his medical surrogate and with help from security, I forcibly gave him IV medication for agitation and withdrawal. He slept all night with a sitter at his bedside to monitor him. I pondered when medication passed over the line into chemical restraint, but I stand by the decisions I made that shift.

Last one: I had a different patient who was dying who had a child with a warrant out for arrest. We didn't know for what, and no one investigated further because no one wanted to find out anything that might prevent this person from visiting his dying parent. Obviously, "warrant for arrest" could mean literally anything, although it was significant enough that security was aware of the situation and wanted us aware as well, but I was struck by how proactively the staff protected his visitation rights and extended him grace. Everyone was very aware of how easily the wrong word could start a process that would result in a parent and child losing the chance to say goodbye to each other.

In the case of the husband who threatened a mass shooting, you'd be surprised how many of the staff advocated for him to keep all visitation rights. After all, the patient wanted him there.

Violence--verbal, physical, active, passive, institutional, direct, inadvertent, malicious--pervades the hospital. It begets itself. You provoke people into violence, and then use that violence to justify why you must do actions that further provoke them. And also people are not helpless victims of circumstance, mindlessly reacting to whatever is the most noxious stimuli. But also we aren't not that. You have to interrupt the cycle somewhere. I think grace is one of the most powerful things we can give each other. I also think people own guns. Institutions have enormous overt and covert power that can feel impossible to resist, and they are made up of people with necks you can wring, and those people are the agents of that unstoppable power, and those people don't have unlimited agency and make choices every day about how and when to exercise it. We'll never solve this. You literally have to think about it forever, each and every time, and honor each success and failure by learning something new for the next inevitable moral dilemma that'll be along any minute now and is probably already here.

[roadkillnroses]

[roadkillnroses]

Fight the power

[roadkillnroses]

"ICE not welcome in the central district"

Posters seen in Seattle

[roadkillnroses]

I think maybe people don't realize that peaceful marches just don't get the goods anymore. But like, does anyone believe the No Kings marches are going to get Trump out of office? It's not as if the administration doesn't know how unpopular their policies are. A march or rally can be a good way to prepare people mentally for riskier actions, but if you get folks' hopes up by claiming that it'll accomplish more than that you run the risk of creating disillusioned former activists. Or worse, self-congratulatory complacent liberals.

Whenever I see an org trying to create a wave of peaceful law-abiding protest marches, I think of the Iraq War protests. 36 MILLION people around the world protested in early 2003, asking for just one very specific thing, for the USA to not invade Iraq, and it made no difference. No matter how big your march is, no matter how clear and simple and practical your demands, no matter how clever your movement branding, it can and will be ignored by the government. Marching is simply an outdated tactic for creating policy change in the 21st century. We've gotta get more creative.

It is a police tactic to divide and conquer social movements for liberation and justice for the public to categorize protesters as either “nonviolent” or “violent.” This is what the police want, for us to police ourselves so they don’t have to. I’ve even seen the “peace police” turn protesters into the actual police at anti-police rallies! How is that not collaborating with the enemy we’re protesting and oppose?

If you catch yourself castigating certain protesters as “violent,” you are helping the very institutions we want change from evade accountability. The people in charge want you to waste your time with ineffective protest strategies and methods because it incurs no cost to them to continue to abuse people. That’s why we have to make it as costly as possible for them to abuse us. That’s how we win.

[roadkillnroses]

Trans women "Keri Pratt, Virginia, Violet Pratt on Queen St" & "Violet and Kerry Pratt" - by Murray Cammick, Auckland, Aotearoa (1970s)

[roadkillnroses]

The fact that they can target an individual room without killing dozens of civilians proves what is happening in Gaza is genocide

[roadkillnroses]

Source

[roadkillnroses]

this shit is soooooo infuriating to me like some people have trouble climaxing through NO fault of their own—maybe it’s a natural variation of their bodies maybe it’s medication side effects maybe it’s trauma—it’s actually really common and it’s something that makes a lot of people feel really ashamed and miserable… you haven’t “masturbated yourself into dysfunction” in fact masturbation often helps you get better at figuring out what makes you climax like !!!!!!! and even if you HAVE been hitting the vibe too hard recently you can always cool off for a week or two until you get in the mood again. your clit isn’t ruined forever. christ. this chewed-gum approach to sex simply does not have a basis in fact. pleasure is not a scarce resource

[roadkillnroses]

Some say half-woman Attis went mad shouting for lovely Cybebe in the mountains. Some drink the babbling water of bay-bearing Phoebus by the slopes of Claros and go mad and shout. I want to have my fill of Lyaeus and perfume and my girl and to go mad, I want to go mad.

Ps.Anacreon, Anacreontea 12, trans. David A. Campbell

[roadkillnroses]

Thu 29 May 2025

Twenty-two young Americans have filed a new lawsuit against the Trump administration over its anti-environment executive orders. By intentionally boosting oil and gas production and stymying carbon-free energy, federal officials are violating their constitutional rights to life and liberty, alleges the lawsuit, filed on Thursday. The federal government is engaging in unlawful executive overreach by breaching congressional mandates to protect ecosystems and public health, argue the plaintiffs, who are between the ages of seven and 25 and hail from the heavily climate-impacted states of Montana, Hawaii, Oregon, California and Florida. They also say officials’ emissions-increasing and science-suppressing orders have violated the state-created danger doctrine, a legal principle meant to prevent government actors from inflicting injury upon their citizens.

[roadkillnroses]

Volunteers plant native species in parks throughout California in an effort to restore biodiversity and slow the spread of wildfire.

Test Plot, a project launched in 2019 by the landscape architecture firm Terremoto, has built eight plots in Elysian Park alone. On a recent Friday morning, volunteers were pulling out invasive grass and black mustard to make room for wildflowers and other drought-resistant, native species.

This garden is a response to a challenge vexing parks departments across the American west: how to adapt to a changing climate with limited resources?

In southern California, native flora tends to tolerate drought, making it more resistant to wildfire. By contrast, many invasive species tend to dry up, becoming kindling during wildfires, which have become more frequent and severe in recent years as the planet heats up.

‘In Los Angeles, we see a lot of people fleeing the film and TV industry, which is struggling right now, and finding purpose in care and stewardship,’ Jones said. ‘It gives you a place to put your energy.’

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Officials celebrated on May 12 when their trail cameras at Si Phang Nga National Park — on the southern peninsula of Thailand — captured rare footage of Asiatic bears roaming the land. 

Asiatic black bears, also known as “buffalo bears” or “moon bears,” are slightly smaller than American black bears, with a mane-like ruff on both sides of their faces and a light, crescent-shaped patch on their chests. 

For years, Animals Asia has been working to end bear bile farming by building bear rehabilitation sanctuaries, running public awareness campaigns, and lobbying to strengthen existing laws banning the sale of bear bile.

“To date, 700 bears have been received into our care,” Animals Asia said in a statement on their website. “In 2023, we opened our second sanctuary in Vietnam. This came after we signed a historic agreement with the Vietnamese government to end bear bile farming for good.”

“This new sanctuary will be home to around 250 bears, the last survivors of the country's bile industry.”

Thanks to widespread conservation efforts like these, Asiatic black bears have been slowly making a comeback in the wild. 

Which is why officials at Si Phang Nga National Park cheered at the sight of the Asiatic black bears rummaging for food near their trail camera sites in early May. 

In addition to capturing rare footage of two “buffaloes,” the trail cameras also recorded a variety of deer, kestrel falcons, and a pack of wild monkeys in the space of a single month. 

Thirapol Chatthai, the head of the Sri Phang Nga National Park, said that the footage was cause for celebration.