Kristen Annes

The defense team presses Lairmore on whether the sandwich really 'exploded.' They return to the photo of the sandwich and wrapper on the ground.

"That sandwich hasn't exploded at all, has it?" defense asks.

"It looks like a little bit is coming out towards the bottom," Lairmore replies.

National Adoption Awareness Month, which is about promoting #adoption, begins today. none of the promotional material contains an answer to the following naïve question:

why does “give this child a loving and safe home” require “erase and rewrite this child’s entire identity”?

Idea for a musical: a man is arrested and imprisoned for stealing bread and then is hounded by the cops for breaking parole and then there are some student protesters in the streets and everyone sings One More Day…oh wait…

Beautiful Sierra Madre CA #NoKings

2 protesters holding signs at No Kings rally. "No Kings, Yas Queens" and "Trans rights are Human rights"

No Kings!!

Mine says "Alleged natural father" then his name is misspelled. Is it because they didn't believe her? Or because then they didn't need to get his signature? Or maybe both.

Entirely fitting that this story appears in a media outlet called Marketplace. Adoptees are human commodities as infants. Made more valuable with their origins erased. Now they’re the consumers of concierge services—DNA testing, media ads, personal searchers—as adults…2/3

Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause By ignoring the rhetoric and actions of the Turning Point USA founder, pundits and politicians are sanitizing his legacy.

Ta-Nehasi Coates is doing a lot of things with this essay, but one of the most important is fearlessly using examples of anti-trans hate to describe Charlie Kirk's politics.

The contrast between his choices and those of other writers for major legacy outlets is revealing.

Fun fact: Ryan and I were purchased from the same "Christian" adoption agency and went to the same high school. He was not, in fact, a "good boy" in HS.

At the Alligator Alcatraz press conference a reporter asked Trump what he planned to do to fulfill his next campaign promise. His full response was six minutes long. This is a verbatim reading of part of his answer. You won't have to listen to his voice or see his face.

Economic genius Donald Trump explains how he comes up with tariff rates

I'm so angry this morning. I grew up during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the pointless pathetic conflicts that only resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead human beings.

NBC's Jacob Soboroff reports from the Los Angeles protests as law enforcement fires flash bangs NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff was reporting on the ground in Los Angeles when law enforcement started using crowd control tactics against protesters, including firing flash bangs. Soboroff spe...

here’s the moment LASD advanced on protestors with horses and used flash-bangs as we reported live yesterday. www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp-vi...

Well, I liked that he read the source material of "The Girls Who Went Away" and spoke to actual mothers, but I'm not sure there will be much on the babies that were sold... I'd like to hear another adoptee's review first.

Same here

The rescued Vietnamese infants of Operation Babylift have grown up Fifty years after the fall of Saigon a generation of adoptees wrestle with Vietnam’s legacy of transnational adoption

This week @theverge.com is publishing a series on the legacy of the Vietnam War. I wrote about the generation of children who were adopted from the war. While reporting this, I was struck by how historically singular the experiences of this group of people are.

www.theverge.com/cs/features/...

"...the beneficent embrace of the American family was always conditional, coming at the cost of more vulnerable families and even the children themselves."
Wow, thank you for this article! Well done

You've probably shared those answers before, but I'd be interested to hear them again.

My Identity Was Stolen From Me And Now I Have To Beg For It Back? Why it’s infuriating that adults who were adopted have to grovel for their own information

“Adoption stole my family from me. All because of a society that shamed an unmarried pregnant woman and told her I’d be better off with strangers who were married.”
#adoptiontrauma

open.substack.com/pub/defendsu...

One reason the "do diets work?" debate interests me is because so many things that are terrible for fat people (and others) rests on that foundational belief that fat people could stop being fat if they wanted to.

(thread)

A document header from The White House, Washington, dated 01/26/25. It is labeled 'FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE' and the headline reads: 'ICYMI: President Donald J. Trump's TRUTH on Columbia Sanctions.'"

How can you sanction a country you can't even spell.

From the Daily Beast: Source present at the time tell The Daily Beast that multiple people—including Vietnam War veterans—chimed in to inform the president that the Apocalypse Now set piece he was talking about showcased the U.S. military using napalm, not Agent Orange. Trump refused to accept that he was mistaken and proceeded to say things like, “no, I think it’s that stuff from that movie.” One clue belying the president’s insistence is that the famous Robert Duvall line from the scene in Apocalypse Now, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” is not “I love the smell of Agent Orange in the morning.” He then went around the room polling attendees about if it was, in fact, napalm or Agent Orange in the famous scene from “that movie,” as the gathering—organized to focus on important, sometimes life-or-death issues for veterans—descended into a pointless debate over Apocalypse Now that the president simply would not concede, despite all the available evidence. Finally, Trump made eye contact again with Weidman and asked him if it was napalm or Agent Orange. The VVA co-founder assured Trump, as did several before him, that it was in fact napalm, and said that he didn’t like the Coppola film and believed it to be a disservice to Vietnam War veterans. According to two people in attendance, Trump then flippantly replied to the Vietnam vet, “Well, I think you just didn’t like the movie,” before finally moving on.

The military vets told Trump that no, Agent Orange wasn't napalm, but he refused to accept it with two full minutes of argument.

"According to two people in attendance, Trump then flippantly replied to the Vietnam vet, 'Well, I think you just didn’t like the movie,' before finally moving on."

NYT headline: CAN GOD SPEAK THROUGH A.I.?

What if Ouija boards consumed a liter of fresh water every time you asked a question?

DM conversation between me and a sad person reads your a fag right (Actually it's you're) You guys on the left are to easy to trigger and fun to bully Did I invade your save space (Actually it's safe space)

Can't believe I was thinking about turning off DMs today.

You also voted to strip children of service members of medically necessary care. You’ve lost my vote for any future runs, and made it clear to Californians that you don’t care about trans people.

YouTube video by Paul Kimball Original Birth Certificates to California Born Adoptees

🥚 California Alliance for Adoptee Rights (Facebook) has a new video about CA's sealed birth certificate law. It's 12 mins long. Many Calif. legislators know very little about our issue; they are the target audience. I'd like to see this ancient law change in 2025!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=erHy...

The incredible Chase Strangio joins me this week on VIBE CHECK for a conversation about his upcoming Supreme Court oral arguments and the future of trans rights — a future that impacts ALL of us. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/v...

Why? Download Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com People like to think birthmothers are heartless sluts. They’re horrified by how easy it is to break the family bond, while simultaneously loving wha…

People love to push adoption as an alternative to abortion. But those very same people will then turn around and say, "I could NEVER do such a thing. What kind of mother gives away her own baby?"

I've been grappling with that question for 25 years now.

informedconsent.wordpress.com/2024/12/06/w...