describing my relationship to someone by introducing them to people as "an old wound"

Scrolled past this agakn and just can't get over how much I love it. We need to make things beautiful again and this is such a wonderful example. The beadwork on the wires of a utitarian object, contrasted with the grey concrete.

*Taps microphone* ehem, converts to Judaism are ethnically Jewish... Ethnicity is about culture and history and community, and yes religion too.

Converts didn't spend all that time learning and participating in culture, learning 3000 years of history, immersing themselves in community, and studying and practicing Jewish religion... To anxiously qualify their statements with "I'm not ethnically Jewish", you're the adoptive children of the ultimate Patriarch and Matriarch Abraham and Sarah so you can't turn around worried that you're not a part of the family.

Being born into the tribe is no different... Yeah of course we recognise anybody who is birthed by a Jew as a Jew.

But we transmit what it is to BE a Jew by education and cultural immersion, L'dor Vador generation to generation.

My Nonna and my uncle converted to Judaism. They’re both very proud to be part of the tribe. Jewish converts, I’ve noticed, tend to be very, very proud of their heritage and faith. And honestly, I love that. The more, the merrier

converts put a ton of work into becoming part of the tribe so they CARE. and it shows

So it seems that Goyische antisemites have become quite upset by this, even asserting that the ethnicity of Jewish Converts is a kind of Jewish plot.

But the fact is that Jewish ideas and values around who is a Jew pre-date the modern western concepts of biological heredity, and race by thousands of years.

We value inheritance of the covenant, and to that end adopted a tradition of Matrilineal inheritance under Roman occupation as a solution to the question "where do these children of absent Roman Soldiers with Jewish mothers belong?", a tradition that continues today... But this is about Jewish Law, not modern ideas of race.

Converts also inherit the covenant, this is why converts with penises are circumcised... It is a mark of the covenant. Converts are called to the Torah, they are given a Hebrew name, they are adopted by our ultimate Patriarch and Matriarch.

Jewish Converts are simply Jewish, and the only thing they don't have are family recipes, but don't worry because we are their family now and will share those happily.

Denial of the validity of the Jewish Ethnicity of Converts is fundamentally an endorsement of 20th century race science, you're not clever, you're simply politically and socially regressive.

Yes, thankyou @radley-rambles for the comment in Judaism being a non-proselyting culture/religion.

Specifically, in all the thousands of years of Jewish History there has only ever been one forced conversion... This would be the conversion of the Edomites after being conquered by King David. Which ever since has been remembered in Jewish tradition as a moral evil and all around bad move. For safety we create a barrier around that moral evil and don't seek converts at all.

Jews will be very helpful if you're seeking information about Judaism and what it takes to begin a conversion journey... But we are quite literally prohibited from seeking new converts, this injunction against proselytism has been in place for more than 2000 years.

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It doesn't help that the Herodian kings (who were Edomites) ultimately brought about the Jewish/Roman Wars. I'm looking at you Agrippa II.

More older pevensies doodles

The thing about ADHD is that the "lack of reward chemicals in your brain" doesn't just mean that you don't want to do any tasks that don't feel particularly yummy :(, it means that your brain will look at chores and tasks that need to be done like "doing this would be painful and tedious for absolutely nothing to gain from it, Do Not Do That." The same thing that your brain tells you about everything else that would feel really bad and hurt the entire time that you're dying. The part of your brain that stops you from doing the thing is the same part that keeps you from shoving your arm into a wood chipper.

With unmedicated, unmanaged ADHD, "I have to do this assignment or I fail and my life will be ruined and I die" feels like a SAW trap, every single time.

Articles written by neurotypicals will be like “ADHD children find the external motivation of the SAW traps is very effective. Here’s how to build SAW traps to maximize their productivity.”

This is why unmedicated ADHDers are so prone to anxiety disorders.

Your brain learns that it can not rely on dopamine to power it for essential tasks. So it turns to cortisol.

Trigger a fight or flight response every time you need to make a phone call or go to the pharmacy, because the dopamine may or may not come, but cortisol is reliable. Cortisol makes sure that shit gets done, even if it wrecks your health in the process.

Maybe being good at social media should not be the main qualifier for all creative work

Seeing the notes on this talk about all the other careers that I hadn't even considered being affected by this is just depressing. What do you mean you need to be Instagram famous to have a career as a hairdresser?

my soft and comfortable mama

btw it is sexy and cool to uplift and admire people who have skills you wish you had without using their ability as a stick to beat yourself with. even and especially if you are jealous of them.

Round-up: A Lot of CSI-Style Forensics Have Turned Out to be Bogus

Basically a lot of it is pseudoscience that was never rigorously tested in controlled situations to see if it actually worked.

This is because it was not developed by scientists, but by police, and mainly with an interest in putting people in prison rather than uncovering the truth.

Here are a few more articles on how unreliable modern forensics are.

Unfortunately due to TV shows that stress forensic investigation, juries are demanding this kind of evidence at trial, and have little idea of how untested and unreliable it really is.

HEY REMEMBER WHEN I WROTE ABOUT THIS TWO YEARS AGO? SPECIFICALLY THE PART ABOUT FBI REVIEWING ITS FORENSICS HAIR ANALYSIS CASES? WELL THE RESULTS ARE IN AND WHOOPS: EVEN THE FBI ADMITS THAT IT’S BOGUS NOW

In case you are stopped by the paywall here’s a Slate article on the same thing and here’s another one. 

Hair analysis alone has been used in thousands of trials. The FBI is reviewing 2500 cases out of “21000 federal and state requests to the FBI’s hair-comparison unit between 1972 and 1999″. Even if this review exonerates some of those convictions, that doesn’t even begin to cover the hundreds of state and local “experts” trained by the FBI in this bogus “hair analysis” technique to do things like this:

So anyway remember anytime you hear about “forensic evidence” that a lot of it is bullcrap and not scientifically validated and a lot of so-called experts are just pulling conclusions out of their ass.

the forensic hair analysis thing is terrible, the FBI literally invented a branch of forensic psuedoscience with no evidence behind it in order to boost conviction rates, then taught the bogus technique to thousands of forensic investigators in the us and around the world. we have no idea how many people have been wrongfully convicted, and this is just one in a very long list of forensic techniques that lack rigorous scientific evaluation

It’s been another year or two so here’s an extremely recent article about how “Criminal Profiling” is totally bogus and TV shows like Mindhunters continue to focus on it because it looks cool and makes good stories, but it really only works in the movies. 

Profiling was trendy in the 70s-90s but has been falling into disrepute ever since. This 2007 analysis showed that Criminal Profilers do not outperform regular detective work. Here’s another analysis finding Profiling unreliable in its current form and suggests ways to make it more scientifically rigorous. Here’s another. 

Hi everybody it’s eleven years later and just for fun I went and looked up the latest news on forensic science and guess what? It’s still bullshit.

They’ve made up entirely new fake techniques since the last time I posted about this. Like “9-11 Call Analysis” which is supposed to identify from a person’s voice on a phone call whether they are lying. Surprise surprise: it doesn’t work.

There’s also something called SCAN – Scientific Content Analysis – that examines the statements given to the police for falsehood. This one is actually kind of promising because it uses a real scientific analysis, a grammatical formula, to map out a written personal account kind of like using an AI algorithm to diagram a sentence which can reveal that actually no I’m lying it’s total garbage

ProPublica also describes a kind of “photo analysis” which is basically whatever a Hollywood movie writer expects to happen when the detective says ENHANCE and of course it doesn’t work either.

So why are there even more forensics techniques that don’t work every few years? If forensics is fake science, why do we keep inventing more of it?

Well, because like I said way too many years ago why have I been here so long, forensics are not created by scientists, they’re created by police. And the justice system is interested in convictions, not uncovering the truth, and these techniques get you convictions. Many of them are wrongful convictions, but oh well.

Anyway in conclusion, John Oliver agrees with me and ACAB

hello fellow non-Black tumblr users. welcome to my saw trap. if you'd like to leave, please name one (1) Black woman author who is not Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, or N.K. Jemisin. bonus points if she's published a book in the last five years.

For my own future reference, and for anyone else who wants it, a list of authors mentioned in the notes. (I cannot promise this is comprehensive, there are a lot of reblogs and I might have missed some.) I've included a link for each author, where possible I've tried to find one that leads you to their books, prioritising own websites/publishers, falling back on wikipedia otherwise.

If you find any mistakes in the links let me know and I'll edit. This post will be in two parts, because I literally broke tumblr with how many authors there were. I think it's about a hundred and fifty.

And here's part two:

Hell yeah!!!

At the vet’s office

someone copy pasted he

Her heart goes boom and his into a cardiac arrest

[very clearly enamored AND elated] He fucking bit me.