SpinnyNuNu

The threat of deportation won't be fixed with thoughts and prayers. Christians who support this administration need to do much more.

Balenciaga | c. 1963
• • •
The gentle curve of the shoulder line and voluminous impression given by this cape coat represent a new form for dress shape. This shape is made possible through an innovative concept for the garment’s composition, in which the front and back of the cape, cut as continuations of the body sections, have the separate shoulder section embedded into them to produce a single shape that integrates the parts. This garment displays Balenciaga’s masterful techniques, in which he keeps seams to a minimum and makes use of the properties of thick wool fabric to create a three-dimensional item.
As can be seen in his tunic and sack dresses of the 1950s, Balenciaga successfully simplified forms before the trend became prominent in the 1960s, developing new forms that did not simply follow fashions or reference the past. With its sculpture-like beauty of form, this piece fully demonstrates his unique simplicity. His inimitable cutting technique was in large part what made the realization of this kind of new dress shape possible.
• • •
#historicalfashion #fashion #fashiondesign #fashionhistory #historyoffashion #vintagefashion #art #vintage #defunctfashion #costume #costumedesign #couture #costumehistory #balenciaga #cristobalbalenciaga #1960sfashion #yellow #kyotocostumeinstitute
https://www.instagram.com/p/BnXEpZQlPvx/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=6g9yqauy73ag

This guy has no clue how to read body language.

What do you think: right or wrong?

A can of pepper spray went off inside a plane headed from Oakland, California, to Maui on Friday, requiring emergency help for several people aboard, Hawaiian Airlines said.

Yep. The toilet, bathtub, oven and sink are all in one room.

"The last thing I want to do, sweetheart, is Tase you like that," the Ohio officer said. "When I say stop, you stop."

Salmonella Outbreak Leads To Cereal Warning

"I don’t want to be friends. I just want to be left alone. I just want it to stop."

"Never judge the freshness of fish by the googliness of their eyes."

"It was just a joke," the mother said.

"Hear that ladies?" one angry response read. "We're just lazy, therefore we shouldn't be paid as much."

Why were they offering a degree in pseudoscience in the first place...?

Vilma Wong, a nurse working in the neonatal intensive care unit at the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in Palo Alto, worked with a memorable baby 28 years ago.

This morning I'll post yet another example of a healthcare financing debacle.

There are undoubtedly thousands upon thousands of these, the vast majority of which don't reach the public eye and are suffered quietly by the powerless victims.  This story about a myocardial infarction successfully treated with stents was posted by Kaiser Health News:

Patient: Drew Calver, 44, a high school history teacher and father of two in Austin, Texas.

... [as he was recovering from his MI and the stent placements], Calver asked whether his health insurance would cover all of this, a financial worry that accompanies nearly every American hospital stay. He was concerned because St. David’s is out-of-network on his school district health plan. The hospital told him not to worry and that they would accept his insurance, Calver said...

And then the bills came.

Total Bill: $164,941 for a four-day hospital stay, including $42,944 for four stents and $10,920 for room charges. Calver’s insurer paid $55,840. The hospital billed Calver for the unpaid balance of $108,951.31.

Medical Treatment: Emergency room treatment followed by four days in the hospital, most of it spent in the cardiac unit. During surgery, four stents were implanted to clear a blockage in his left anterior descending artery, the source of so-called widow-maker heart attacks, because they are so frequently deadly...

Surprise bills occur when a patient goes to a hospital in his insurance network but receives treatment from a doctor that does not participate in the network, resulting in a direct bill to the patient. They can also occur in cases like Calver’s, where insurers will pay for needed emergency care at the closest hospital — even if it is out-of-network — but the hospital and the insurer may not agree on a reasonable price. The hospital then demands that patients pay the difference, in a practice called balance billing...

This case “illustrates the dangers that even insured people face,” said Carol Lucas, an attorney in Los Angeles with experience in health care payment disputes. “The unfairness is especially acute when there is an emergency and the patient, who might ordinarily be completely compliant, has no say about the facility he winds up in.”..

St. David’s charged $19,708 apiece for two Synergy stents made by device giant Boston Scientific. Two other stents used were far cheaper.

The $20,000 price tag represents a significant markup of what U.S. hospitals typically pay themselves for stents. The median price paid by hospitals for the Synergy stent was $1,153 over the past year, according to the nonprofit research firm ECRI Institute.

Every now and then I allow myself to rant about matters that drive me to distraction, including health care financing in this county.  I spent over 30 years in academic medicine, and I have immense admiration for the people who actually provide the hands-on healthcare in this country, especially the nurses and therapists.  The problems arise from the vast army of administrators, coinsurers, financial analysts, billing clerks, chart analysts, insurance adjusters, collection agencies and others who feed off an ever-expanding and ever-more-complex web of regulations and policies.

There is no need for cases like the one detailed above to occur.  The system doesn't need to be this complex.  Even the people who administer the system realize it is fucked-up, but they don't have the power to make changes in a bureaucracy that is extraordinarily complex.

Look what happened in this case after the story was publicized:

UPDATE: Monday, shortly after publication and broadcast of this story by Kaiser Health News and NPR, St. David’s said it was now willing to accept $782.29 to resolve the $108,951 balance because Drew Calver qualifies for its “financial assistance discount.”  

Got that?  They graciously offer a "discount" from $109,000 to $800.  Because someone took the time to bring this story out of the darkness and expose it to daylight.


I don't care whom you vote for this November - Republican, Democrat, Independent - but please for the love of God and in the name of common sense, vote for someone who will totally gut this system of health care finance. 

And don't accept the lame alternative of a politician who assures you that under his/her proposal "everyone will have health insurance."  This case - and tens of thousands of untold ones - illustrates why that is an inadequate alternative. 

Dinner served on a cake stand at The George, at Stockton-on-Tees provides an excellent example of why there is a We Want Plates subreddit.

"She was really sweaty, screaming, and just drenched in sweat."

The bishop who officiated Aretha Franklin's funeral is apologizing to Ariana Grande for what he did to her onstage and a joke he made about her name.

Sporting Sweater | c. 1895
• • •
Autumn doesn’t technically start until September 23rd here in the Northern Hemisphere but this Labor Day Weekend marks the end of the Summer social season. It may be a near 100 degrees on the East Coast but I’m having dreams of sweaters, hats and scarves. This beautiful sweater at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is an extremely rare find and in excellent condition, considering it was used for strenuous activities and worn over and over.
• • •
#historicalfashion #fashion #fashiondesign #fashionhistory #historyoffashion #vintagefashion #art #vintage #defunctfashion #costume #costumedesign #couture #costumehistory #victorian #victorianfashion #sportswear #victorian #gigotsleeves #sweater #autumn #fall #metmuseum
https://www.instagram.com/p/BnMKYfjl13X/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=kz47o24mcfzn

Luckily, the reporter and the photojournalist were not harmed.

A Southern California senator was reprimanded for playfully putting a woman in a headlock and rubbing his knuckles against her head, according to documents released Friday.

This much is certain: Helen Gambichler is running for office. She is the Queens Democratic Party bosses’ nominee for a spot on a little-known body called the Democratic County Committee.

There is just one problem: Ms. Gambichler, a 72-year-old retired court clerk, did not know she was running for anything. Nor does she wish to run. “I have no idea what that’s about,” she said.

She had been nominated, without her knowledge, by the borough’s Democratic Party leadership, which is struggling to maintain control after the longtime Queens party chairman, Representative Joseph Crowley, was trounced by the left-leaning insurgent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a June Congressional primary that sent tremors through the Democratic establishment nationwide.

Ms. Gambichler is hardly alone.

The New York Times called dozens of the Queens party machine’s nominees for county committee. The candidates for 21 seats were running without their consent.

Most of these candidates did not know they were running at all until a reporter told them; two, including Ms. Gambichler, found out when they got letters from the city Board of Elections showing how their names would appear on the Sept. 13 primary ballot. Only four candidates The Times spoke to said they were running on purpose.

Edward Molyneux | c. 1939
• • •
Designers offered a variety of styles at the end of the 1930s, including wide-skirted dresses, as alternatives to the clinging bias-cut gowns. In August 1939 Vogue described the scope of the Paris collection: ‘Molyneux’s hoop-flared day skirts walk beside Lanvin’s modern peg-topped hobble skirts; Balenciaga’s wide Velázquez paniers dance past Paquin’s tightly wrapped mummy skirts’. This creation by Edward Molyneux has its double-tiered, full skirt held out by four bone hoops.
• • •
#historicalfashion #fashion #fashiondesign #fashionhistory #historyoffashion #vintagefashion #art #vintage #defunctfashion #costume #costumedesign #couture #costumehistory #edwardmolyneux #1930sfashion #pink #victoriaandalbertmuseum
https://www.instagram.com/p/BnFn6voFK5Z/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=j0a0ui5ioskn

As most of you know, I deactivated my Twitter account earlier this month. It had been a long time coming, for a whole host of reasons, but Twitter’s decision to be the only social network that gives Alex Jones a platform to spew hate, hurt innocent people, and incite violence was the final straw for me. But I haven’t regretted leaving for even one second. Having that endless stream of hate and anger and negativity in my pocket wasn’t good for me (and I don’t think it’s good for anyone, to be honest).

I was on Twitter from just about the very beginning. I think I’m in the first couple thousand accounts. I remember when it was a smallish group of people who wanted to have fun, make jokes, share information and tips on stuff that was interesting, and oh so many pictures of our pets. It was awesome.

It started to get toxic slowly at first, then all at once, starting with the misogynist dipshits who were behing the gate-which-shall-not-be-named. That was clearly a turning point for Twitter, and it never really recovered from it. I watched, in real time, as the site I loved turned into a right wing talk radio shouting match that made YouTube comments and CSPAN call-ins seem scholarly. We tried for a couple of years to fight back, to encourage Twitter to take a stand against bad actors (HA HA LIKE ME BECAUSE I AM A BAD ACTOR RIGHT YOU GOT ME HA HA HA). Twitter doesn’t care about how its users are affected by themselves, though. Twitter cares about growth and staying on the good side of President Shitler’s tantrums.

I mean, honestly, the most lucid and concise indictment I can give Twitter is: it’s the service that Donald Trump uses to communicate with and incite his cultists.

Anyway, enough about how terrible Twitter is. We all know how terrible it is. That’s never going to change, by the way.I know some very good people who are working on making Twitter better, but I honestly don’t think they can overcome the institutional inertia that has allowed it to get to the point its at now. It may get incrementally better, but the fundamental problem of random, mostly-anonymous people being terrible isn’t going to change, because that’s not a Twitter problem. That’s a humanity — and specifically a social media — problem.

I thought that if I left Twitter, I could find a new social network that would give it some competition (Twitter’s monopoly on the social space is a big reason it can ignore people who are abused and harassed, while punishing people for reporting their attackers), so I fired up this account I made at Mastodon a long time ago.

I thought I’d find something different. I thought I’d find a smaller community that was more like Twitter was way back in 2008 or 2009. Cat pictures! Jokes! Links to interesting things that we found in the backwaters of the internet! Interaction with friends we just haven’t met, yet! What I found was … not that.

I found a harsh reality that I’m still trying to process: thousands of people who don’t know me, who have never interacted with me, who internalized a series of lies about me, who were never willing to give me a chance. I was harassed from the minute I made my account, and though I expected the “shut up wesley”s and “go fuck yourself”s to taper off after a day or so, it never did. And even though I never broke any rules on the server I joined (Mastodon is individual “instances” which is like a server, which connects to the “federated timeline”, which is what all the other servers are), one of its admins told me they were suspending my account, because they got 60 (!) reports overnight about my account, and they didn’t want to deal with the drama.

I respect and support that person’s decision, because it’s a private server and it’s run with their time, energy, attention, and (presumably) money. I don’t agree with it at all, and I think it’s deeply unfair, as well as rewarding abuse of a reporting system that’s meant to protect users, but it’s their site and it’s their rules, and I can’t say I blame them. The people going after me were pretty awful, and I can only imagine that an admin would get fed up with them, too.

I want to share the message I posted there when I left (Twitter is called ‘birdsite’ on Mastodon):

Anyway, take your victory lap and collect your prizes. You’ve made it clear that I’m not welcome here, and even though I disagree with the action this Admin is taking (banning me when I didn’t break any rules doesn’t seem right), I respect and support the Admin’s decision to run their instance the way they see fit.

Please do your very best to be kind to each other. The world is a terrible place right now, and that’s largely because it is what we make it.

Bye.

6/end

This isn’t limited to Mastodon.cloud (the worst attacks and dogpiling came from a few other instances before the instance I was on became awful) and it isn’t limited to Twitter.com. I see this in the online space all the time now: mobs of people, acting in bad faith, can make people they don’t know and will likely never meet miserable, or even try to ruin their lives and careers (look at what they did to James Gunn). And those mobs’ bad behaviors are continually rewarded, because it’s honestly easier to just give them what they want. We are ceding the social space to bad people, because they have the most time, the least morals and ethics, and are skilled at relentlessly attacking and harassing their targets. It only takes few seconds for one person to type “fuck off” and hit send. That person probably doesn’t care and doesn’t think about how their one grain of sand quickly becomes a dune, with another person buried beneath it. That’s a huge problem that seems to be baked into social media, and I tried to mitigate it with a blocklist that I never intended to be problematic, but ultimately was. (And for what it’s worth, the part of me that wants to apologize to the people who ended up on it by mistake is overwhelmed by the part of me who was attacked really viciously by a lot of those people and feels like maybe blocking them wasn’t such a bad idea, after all.)

At the end of the day, I’m lucky and privileged as fuck. I can sign off from a website (or multiple websites), and go live my life with my amazing family and our dogs. I’m not a marginalized person who has to fight every moment of every day, just to live my life. So I’m keeping that in mind and keeping that perspective in my heart. Yes, the accusations and the big lie that took hold in remarkably short time about me is hurtful. Yes, it’s upsetting to know that there are a lot of people out there who have decided to take time out of their lives to actively hate me, without knowing anything about me other than a story they were told by someone else who doesn’t know me. But I can sign off and get away from it, so I will. And I will be grateful that I can.

Buuuuuuuuuut … I’m done with social media. Maybe I just don’t fit into whatever the social media world is. I mean, the people who are all over the various Mastodon instances made it really clear that I wasn’t welcome there (with a handful of notable, joyful, exceptions, mostly related to my first baby steps into painting), and it seems as if I was just unwelcome because … I’m me? I guess? Like, I know that I’m not a transphobe, but holy shit that lie just won’t die, and right now as I am writing this, someone at Mastodon is telling me that I am, because people said so, and I should apologize to them. I mean, how am I supposed to respond to that, when it happens over and over and over again? “You’ve been lied to about me. Please give me a chance” just doesn’t seem like a viable way forward with people who are, for whatever reason, very, very angry. And these people seem to have an idea of me in their head that doesn’t fit with the idea of myself that I have in my head. It’s honestly caused me to rethink a lot of stuff. Like, am I really the terrible person they say I am? I don’t think I am, but I’m doing my best to listen, and when I say, “please stop yelling at me and let’s have a conversation that I can grow from” I get yelled at for “tone policing” and honestly I just get exhausted and throw up my hands. Maybe I’m not this person they tell me I am, but I represent that person in their heads, and they treat me accordingly? This is one of those times when my mental illness makes it very hard for me to know what’s objective reality and what’s just in my head.

But I don’t deserve to be treated so terribly by so many random people, so I’m not going to put myself in a place where I am subjected to it all day long. As the saying goes, I’m too old for this shit. What we used to call microblogging isn’t worth the headache for me. I’m gonna focus my time and my energy on the things that I love, that make me happy, that support my family.

Please do your best to be kind, and make an effort to make the world less terrible. Thanks for listening.

Comments have been closed on this post.

The bishop was all set to retire in a multi-million dollar home... until people found out about it.

Forget what you've heard about a glass of red wine a day being the key to losing weight or a long life.

Democrats were quick to criticize the comment.

Former Texas police officer Roy Oliver has been found guilty of murder for fatally shooting Jordan Edwards, who was leaving a house party in April 2017.

Police are searching for a mystery woman who rang the doorbell of a Texas home in the dead of night, wearing only a T-shirt and what appears to be broken wrist restraints.