misterdubs
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misterdubs
Admin
@misterdubs@coresignal.podmoodle.nohost.me
John | @john #US #Navy #Submarine #veteran ⚓ and 20+ year #Technology professional. I’ve launched CoreSignal as a digital “hard reset” to prioritize intentionality over algorithms—seeking connectivity in pursuit of connection.
I am still early in my #Stoic journey, practicing prosoche through the #Enchiridion and learning to “grab the smooth handle”.
When I’m away from the terminal, I’m exploring my #JohnnyDecimal categories (301/302), growing #wildflowers, and practicing #photography —a hobby I’ve tinkered with since my high school medium-format days, though I remain a dedicated student of the lens. 🌸📸
misterdubs
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1. Spent the weekend with my knitting girlfriends on Lake Michigan. Beautiful day on Friday, then heavy rain Saturday and Sunday. Photos of the cloud show before the storm attached.
2. Did lots of knitting and cooking during the heavy rain downpour.
3. Went walking in between the downpours and during light rain.
3 media files
misterdubs
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GP knew something was wrong when 'healthy' woman mentioned odd taste
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/health/gp-knew-something-wrong-healthy-37684754?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into UK NEWS @uk-news-TheMirror
misterdubs
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Wherever you are in the world, your experience of AI matters.
Black AI Futures is gathering the global Black community's experience of AI, from healthcare and hiring to online life, into evidence that is carried into national and international policy conversations.
Anonymous, and about 12 to 15 minutes.
Add your voice: https://blackaifutures.org/survey?source=org
misterdubs
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The Music Doesn't Sound the Same Anymore
M'Dear used to love her some James Brown! When I was a young teen, I remember her setting the record player to 33 1/3 and singing along. I would be regaled with stories of how James Brown would come through Brenham for Juneteenth. I used to think M'Dear was so old. [...]
The Understory
@waltz6970@theunderstory.podmoodle.nohost.me Another fine essay!
misterdubs
boosted
The Music Doesn't Sound the Same Anymore
M'Dear used to love her some James Brown! When I was a young teen, I remember her setting the record player to 33 1/3 and singing along. I would be regaled with stories of how James Brown would come through Brenham for Juneteenth. I used to think M'Dear was so old. [...]
The Understory
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misterdubs
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reposting because I accidentally deleted the original... I am not getting along with technology today.
I accidentally caught this fascinating photo of a carder bee's mouthparts.
Not quite sure what you're seeing? Check out this page, near the bottom, for an explanation of all the complicated bits that make up a bee's mouth. https://www.museumoftheearth.org/bees/biology
misterdubs
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Microsoft: Use the web versions of our Office apps! They're great!
Me: So how do I create a new document based on my employer's .dotx template?
Microsoft: Oh, that's easy, you download it from SharePoint to your computer, use the desktop version of Word to create a new document from the template, upload that new document to OneDrive, then you can edit it in Word for the Web.
Me: So use LibreOffice. Got it.
It's hot y'all!
misterdubs
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A few of the many exquisite hand-drawn "infographics" produced by students of scholar + civil-rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, who died #onthisday 1963. More from the series, presented in “The Exhibit of American Negroes” at the 1900 Paris Expo, here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/w-e-b-du-bois-hand-drawn-infographics-of-african-american-life-1900?utm_content=buffer1918e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer #OTD
4 media files
EDIT: my apologies folks, it was pointed out that this is probably AI slop, not just a copy pasta. That shouldn't take away the achievements of Mary, and I encourage you to look at the original sources to learn more about her and her achievements
Happy Brownie Mary Day
It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.
Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.
Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.
The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.
The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.
She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.
She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."
She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.
But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.
To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.
San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.
Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.
Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.
Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.
Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.
When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.
He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.
It was a mistake that would change American history.
Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghosts—skeletal, in pain, and terrified.
She saw "her kids."
She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.
Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.
She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.
So, she made a choice.
She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.
Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.
The most expensive ingredient—the cannabis—was donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.
She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.
She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.
"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."
And it did.
Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.
Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."
For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.
She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.
She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."
By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.
In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.
This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.
One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."
They underestimated who they were dealing with.
They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.
When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.
It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.
Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.
She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.
Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.
"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."
The quote ran in newspapers across the country.
The court didn't stand a chance.
Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Mary’s brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.
The charges were dropped.
Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.
She needed to change the law.
August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.
She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club—the first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.
But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.
She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.
She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.
In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.
It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.
She never got rich.
She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.
She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.
Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.
Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.
Most of them have never heard of Mary.
They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.
They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.
They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.
Mary didn't set out to be a hero.
@webhat@infosec.exchange that's an incredibly inspiring story. thank you for sharing
misterdubs
boosted
EDIT: my apologies folks, it was pointed out that this is probably AI slop, not just a copy pasta. That shouldn't take away the achievements of Mary, and I encourage you to look at the original sources to learn more about her and her achievements
Happy Brownie Mary Day
It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.
Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.
Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.
The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.
The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.
She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.
She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."
She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.
But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.
To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.
San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.
Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.
Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.
Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.
Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.
When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.
He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.
It was a mistake that would change American history.
Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghosts—skeletal, in pain, and terrified.
She saw "her kids."
She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.
Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.
She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.
So, she made a choice.
She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.
Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.
The most expensive ingredient—the cannabis—was donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.
She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.
She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.
"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."
And it did.
Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.
Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."
For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.
She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.
She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."
By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.
In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.
This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.
One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."
They underestimated who they were dealing with.
They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.
When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.
It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.
Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.
She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.
Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.
"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."
The quote ran in newspapers across the country.
The court didn't stand a chance.
Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Mary’s brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.
The charges were dropped.
Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.
She needed to change the law.
August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.
She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club—the first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.
But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.
She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.
She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.
In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.
It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.
She never got rich.
She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.
She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.
Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.
Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.
Most of them have never heard of Mary.
They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.
They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.
They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.
Mary didn't set out to be a hero.
1
misterdubs
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Respect. Rest in power.
misterdubs
boosted
IF WE CAN SURVIVE MARS,
WE CAN THRIVE ON EARTH 💎
I've just watched a fascinating video about something that doesn't get nearly as much attention as getting humans to Mars.
https://youtu.be/ahrj83jWl-I?si=xCpgTx42MVXZFs_l
GETTING SAFELY HOME AGAIN.
Mars isn't the Moon. A return journey means launching a substantial spacecraft from the Martian surface, which means an enormous amount of fuel. Carrying all that fuel from Earth adds enormous mass. Making fuel on Mars means sending machinery capable of producing rocket fuel, along with a large, extraordinarily reliable power supply, and having the whole system operate autonomously before the astronauts even arrive.
Then there is what a multi-year Mars mission might do to the human body. Months in weightlessness. Long exposure to radiation. More than a year potentially living in 38% of Earth's gravity. Then another long journey home to Earth.
And you can't simply leave Mars whenever you've had enough. The useful alignment between Earth and Mars comes around only about every 26 months.
This is difficult stuff.
But towards the end, the video makes the familiar argument for doing it anyway.
HUMANITY NEEDS A BACKUP PLANET.
An asteroid crashing into Earth. A nuclear war. A supervolcano darkening the skies. Another pandemic. Some unforeseen catastrophe that makes Earth uninhabitable.
SO WE ESTABLISH A SELF-SUSTAINING CIVILISATION ON MARS.
And that's where something occurred to me.
HAVE WE GOT THIS BACKWARDS?
Mars is already catastrophically hostile to human life.
It is freezing. Its atmosphere is almost entirely carbon dioxide and less than 1% of Earth's atmospheric pressure. There is dangerous radiation at the surface. No breathable air. No forests or plants of any kind. No oceans, lakes or rivers. No farms.
And no functioning biosphere is waiting for us.
To establish a genuinely independent civilisation there, we would have to become extraordinarily good at creating and maintaining habitable, fully enclosed environments.
We'd need to recycle our water and air and grow all of our food. We'd need to generate enormous amounts of reliable energy, protect ourselves from radiation, manufacture what we need and keep a closed human ecosystem functioning for generations.
So here's the question I can't get past.
IF WE BECOME GOOD ENOUGH AT KEEPING HUMAN BEINGS ALIVE ON MARS, HOW BADLY WOULD WE HAVE TO DAMAGE EARTH BEFORE MARS BECAME THE EASIER PLACE TO LIVE?
Even a badly damaged Earth still starts with something Mars doesn't have.
A BIOSPHERE.
Perhaps Mars really will become humanity's second home one day. I hope we go. Exploration is one of the things human beings do magnificently.
But I'm not convinced Mars is our lifeboat.
Perhaps the technologies required to survive there will teach us something considerably more urgent.
How to look after the astonishing planet we're already standing on.
@3goodthings @DigitalCoup @meditation @economics_that_works @startrek
#Mars #SpaceExploration #Science #Climate #Environment #SpaceX #NASA
Why We Can Reach Mars But Can’t Leave It
YouTube
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misterdubs
boosted
Be like Dolly.
- be kind
- speak up
- make art
- flaunt em if ya got em
Humpback whales are interrupting Orca hunts
Humpback whales are interrupting orca hunts to rescue completely different species, swimming underneath a doomed seal and lifting it out of the water on their chest, or forming a wall between the killers and a grey whale calf, and scientists still can't fully explain why they bother to save animals they have nothing to gain from.
misterdubs
boosted
Flock is a perversion of the way police are supposed to investigate crimes.
Let me explain. Under our current constitutional judicial system, police are supposed to investigate crimes, in search of the person who allegedly committed them. The crime happens first. And then the police swing into action. And during that time, our system of laws has checks and balances in place to prevent any one of us from being unjustly accused of having committed that crime.
Flock cameras reverse that process. They are by definition, tools that investigate people, in search of a crime they might commit. The investigation comes first, with no crime attached to it. And only later, do police decide whether or not the activity they investigated you for amounts to a crime.
This is fundamentally unconstitutional. There is no fix or remedy that cures this. Its basic function is, de facto, a violation of our rights and liberties.
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misterdubs
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Abdul El-Sayed response to #JDVance:
"My name & my background aren’t raising your gas prices. That’s what the #Trump admin is doing. My name & my background aren’t picking trade wars to increase your costs. That’s what the Trump admin is doing. My name & my background aren’t the reason you can’t see a doctor. That’s because of the #Medicaid cuts and the #ACA cuts... the Trump admin is doing.
...leave my name & my background out of it"
https://www.meidasplus.com/p/this-weekend-in-politics-bulletin-518
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misterdubs
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@3goodthings@fedigroups.social
Three good things this day
- I finished my second #PersonalEssay, The Music Doesn't Sound the Same Anymore! I've always wanted to write and now I'm doing something about it
- More hummingbirds are visiting my chaste tree on their return migration
- My oldest, who is away at college, called home today
