Kaitlyn

DO NOT MISTAKE EARNESTNESS FOR A THING TO BE AFRAID OF. “Cringe” or s too often simply just the word used to mask the discomfort that comes with being vulnerable! It’s okay to feel vulnerable about being earnest about important issues in the world!

A small white-gray bird with black feathers on the top of its head and on its chest, sitting on the hanging portion of a bird feeder.

Black-Capped Chickadee.
Relearning my camera. Relearning that everything doesn't have to be perfect. Relearning to allow myself to try. #birds

#Flowers #Trees #NaturalHistory

The tip of a Red Maple branch with a small bunch of red-light pink flowers with white stamen hanging.

The tip of a Red Maple branch with bunches of red-light pink flowers with long red styles and stigmas.

End of winter=Red Maple (Acer rubrum). One of the first trees to flower, it is an important source of nectar for pollinators. Most Red Maples have both sexes on one tree. A mix of flowers with pollen bursting stamen and some flowers having long red styles and stigmas.
#GenderIsASocialConstruct

Pro tip: if you aren't sure if a protest is legitimate, ask if they have legal support and who the lawyer for the legal support is.

If the answer is no, don't go.

Because experienced organizers don't have sign up sheets for protests. They do, however, have legal support beforehand.

If you care about preserving online resources being scrubbed from federal gov't websites, support the work of the Internet Archive. I've used it for teaching, research, and writing. I donated & hope you will, too.
archive.org

February's CO2 reading is the highest monthly reading ever measured: 427.09 ppm.
And we have three more months until we hit the high point for the year.
This is bad news. We have to burn less fossil fuels, asap.

Oh, and "coincidentally" Trump plans to close the lab that makes these measurements.

Watching the Dems quietly hold signs and point around the chamber in frustration last night was enraging. Rep. Al Green was the only one with enough courage to speak up and do something.

Courage is usually contagious. Apparently, it's not in Congress.

Do. SOMETHING.

Anybody catch the "This is not normal sign"? 😂 Great placement. No notes. #JointSessionAddress

People honestly believe there is mass fraud happening in the government, but the DOGE cuts are in the wrong place. Start cutting the fraud and over paid salaries of Supreme Court Justices, Congress and Representatives. TAX Billionaires.

With another set of news headlines about political elites using “””Roman salutes””” I just want to note that the Nazi salute means “I want to murder your family” and the n-word means “I want to lynch you.” That’s what they mean, they make me righteously angry, and I won’t let anybody minimize them.

Scatterplot titled “Empirical Evidence of Ideological Targeting in Federal Layoffs: Agencies seen as liberal are significantly more likely to face DOGE layoffs.” • The x-axis represents Perceived Ideological Leaning of federal agencies, ranging from -2 (Most Liberal) to +2 (Most Conservative), based on survey responses from over 1,500 federal executives. • The y-axis shows Agency Size (Number of Staff) on a logarithmic scale from 1,000 to 1,000,000. Each point represents a federal agency: • Red dots indicate agencies that experienced DOGE layoffs. • Gray dots indicate agencies with no layoffs. Key Observations: • Liberal-leaning agencies (left side of the plot) are disproportionately represented among red dots, indicating higher layoff rates. • Notable targeted agencies include: • HHS (Health & Human Services) • EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) • NIH (National Institutes of Health) • CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) • Dept. of Education • USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) • The National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE), despite its conservative leaning (+1 on the scale), is an exception among targeted agencies. • A notable outlier: the Department of Veterans Affairs (moderately conservative) also faced layoffs despite its size. Takeaway: The figure visually demonstrates that DOGE layoffs disproportionately targeted liberal-leaning agencies, supporting claims of ideological bias. The pattern reveals that layoffs were not driven by agency size or budget alone but were strongly associated with perceived ideology. Source: Richardson, Clinton, & Lewis (2018). Elite Perceptions of Agency Ideology and Workforce Skill. The Journal of Politics, 80(1).

The DOGE firings have nothing to do with “efficiency” or “cutting waste.” They’re a direct push to weaken federal agencies perceived as liberal. This was evident from the start, and now the data confirms it: targeted agencies overwhelmingly those seen as more left-leaning. 🧵⬇️

a young boy in a blue shirt is talking to a woman in a parking lot while holding a microphone . ALT: a young boy in a blue shirt is talking to a woman in a parking lot while holding a microphone .

My highschool science teacher reached out to see if I was okay and if my federal job was safe from the cuts.

I don't know you. I don't know your religious or cultural tradition. What I do know is that whatever those are there's a practice designed to seek retribution against mother fuckers that you cannot for whatever reason attack directly.

Dust that shit off.

Excerpt from a public letter Roald Dahl wrote encouraging people to vaccinate their children. Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything. “Are you feeling all right?” I asked her. “I feel all sleepy,” she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead. The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her. On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunized against measles. I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is to ask your doctor to administer it.

The measles outbreak in Texas is reminding me of the public letter Roald Dahl wrote about losing his daughter to measles in 1962, just before the vaccine was publicly available.

She is more than 'claw-ified'.

.........I'll see myself out. 😅

Is a three-hour nap still a "nap"?
Asking for a friend, who is me. 😅

A fan-shaped, light tan mushroom, with a smooth top and gills underneath on a log covered in moss.

I didn't get to do a #ShroomyMentalHealthWalk but I still look for #Mushrooms anytime I'm out. Fresh Oyster Mushrooms enjoying the rain and cold.

Since it’s the International Day of Women and Girls in Science … here are some amazing feeds for you to add on Bluesky. First, the OG.. the Women in STEM feed:

bsky.app/profile/did:...

If you want to “Make America Healthy Again,” one of the worst things you can do is slash the budget of the world's largest public funder of biomedical research, the National Institutes of Health.

New Gingko painting. Breather from National disaster. @sciart.bsky.social, @wead-women-ecoart.bsky.social , @karaswisher.bsky.social, @climatenews.bsky.social @climatechangenews.bsky.social

What Are American Students Learning about US History? - AHA Since 2020, a contentious debate over history education has generated outrage, wild claims, and a growing sense of alarm in homes and communities across the country. State legislators, school board me...

"We did not find indoctrination, politicization, or deliberate classroom malpractice."
@historians.org
Teachers aren't the problem, and we should focus on giving them the tools they need to ensure students are getting the whole story. #SupportTeachers #DiversifyYourHistory

Every year during US/CA Black History Month I see white people going viral talking about it.

But way fewer Black folks going viral.

I know it’s the algorithm, I’m not blaming anyone! But do take a moment to think, am I seeking out Black voices?

Here are 10 Black creator Starter Packs to start ⬇️

Without downloading any new pics, where are you mentally

Did you know?

In 1968, 24 Black men in Pittsburgh revolutionized emergency medicine.

The Freedom House Ambulance Service was established to provide emergency medical care to underserved Black neighborhoods—creating the world’s first paramedics.

Small fingers of a white child touch a blue and tan turkey tail mushroom, pointing to a tiny wood ear mushroom.

Two small white children point towards a log in the leaves, with a lot of turkey tail mushrooms on them.

My hiking companions loved touching the different "tails" and only told me to get back on the trail twice.

Blue and tan striped turkey tail mushrooms clustered closely together in the sunshine.

My mushroom mental health walk today was filled with turkey tails.
🦃Turkey tail is a bracket fungus.
🦃The top/cap of bracket fungus look similar, and turkey tails have a color range.
🦃Turkey’s tail holds its spores in tubes, so its underside should display tiny holes.
#Mushrooms #ShroomyHealthWalk

The USA has had two major plane crashes in the last 4 days.

The USA had previously not suffered a major plane crash for 16 years.

‘DEI’ programs have existed for decades.

So what was it that changed in the last 14 days or so to suddenly cause so many crashes?

I feel like not being stressed right now is a huge red flag