My old friend (and for almost thirty years my family's doctor) Dan Johnson has a charity he started in memory of his son, Alec, who was drowned in 2014. One of the projects they are supporting is helping a couple who work in Haiti with abandoned children (and aren't part of the Haitian "orphanage industry"). The couple are raising funds to buy the compound they and the children are in, and I'm helping Dan by linking to https://cultivating-community.org/
Watch the video and share the post...
Alec was my younger brother. He was a brilliant applied mathematician, changing how we use computers to understand magnetic reconnection. This work helped us to understanding better how the earth's magnetosphere interacts with solar wind, something that sounds esoteric until you realize that the stability of our power grid and satellite navigation depend on an accurate understanding. It will also be essential if we ever achieve power generation by nuclear fusion.
He wasn't just brilliant, though. He cared deeply about others, and always in meaningful and concrete ways. Shortly before he died, he was telling me excitedly about his plans to visit his friends Pierre and Natalie in Haiti, whom he had helped financially for years in their work, rescuing and rehabilitating so-called "orphans" who were mostly abandoned. Pierre knew about this intimately, because he himself was abandoned by his living mother, disowned by his living father, and abused as a restavek (literally, "stay-with") child-slave.
If this makes you more curious about the backstory for this project, the long version with more details is here:
@CoastalCoasting@neilhimself There's a lot of horror. If you want more horror, read the LUMOS report itself. It's a hard read. ☹
There has been a lot of "missions tourism" to Haiti, with good intentions. Many individuals have built relationships and helped others. But also many relationships have been abused. There is a difference between visiting and working to help and investigating to identify wrongdoing. Most of the "orphanages" are local facilities, locally staffed, receiving western aid money. Not "under the care of missionaries" typically. Not all the orphanages maltreat the children. But even the best orphanage is not the same as being placed in a family, and this is true around the world, not just in Haiti.
I am not an expert on Haitian law or law enforcement, so I can't go into detail on what legal remedies and resources might theoretically be available. However, if you've been following recent news about Haiti, you will have seen there is a lot of lawlessness. The US Department of State has Haiti on its most restrictive level, "Do Not Travel," as a result. You can read about it here:
"Do not travel to Haiti due to kidnapping, crime, civil unrest, and poor health care infrastructure. On July 27, 2023, the Department of State ordered the departure of family members of U.S. government employees and non-emergency U.S. government employees. U.S. citizens in Haiti should depart Haiti as soon as possible by commercial or other privately available transportation options, in light of the current security situation and infrastructure challenges. U.S. citizens wishing to depart Port-au-Prince should monitor local news and only do so when considered safe..."
It's a sad and hard situation. One Gift, One Child isn't fixing it all, but it's showing a different way to care for abandoned children than institutionalization of any sort, regardless of whether it is abusive.
In medieval London, everyone from kings to peasants ate eels. But by the 19th C eels had largely become a street food.
In 1851, London imported 9.8 million live eels per year (mostly from Holland). 70% went to street vendors selling hot buttered eels in poorer parts of the city. #eels#medieval#history#london
Federated wireguard network idea
Any feedback welcome.
Let's keep things stupidly simple and simply hash the domain name to get a unique IPv6 ULA prefix.
Then we would need a stupidly simple backend application to automatically fetch pubkeys and endpoints from DNS and make a request to add each others as peers.
Et voilà, you got a worldwide federated wireguard network resolving private ULA addresses. Sort of an internet on top of the internet .
The DNS entries with the public IPv4 / IPv6 addresses could even be delegated to other domains / endpoints which would act as reverse proxy (either routing or nesting tunnels) for further privacy.
Maybe my approach is too naïve and there are flaws I haven't considered, so don't be afraid to comment.
TOR lets journalists do their job safely from dangerous places, lets whistle-blowers report things we should know, and lets people in oppressive regimes see the rest of the Internet that their government blocks. It’s an amazing tool.
@Ajo1322 Final Fantasy 7, technically. But if we're talking actual PS2 titles, Silent Hill 2. I remember watching the opening cutscene and then wondering why it was taking so long, not realizing that it had seamlessly transitioned to gameplay. Damn those graphics were good for the time.
It's almost my birthday :blobcatcheer: and I plan to ask for another book or book series as my present :catsip: :catsip: :catsip: I just think I deserve it lol
I am not sure which book I'd ask for though. Last year (before the total collapse of it all), I asked for the Harry Potter series. I had been dying to get the physical copies of them since I became a fan back in highschool. :blobcathug: :blobcathug: :blobcathug: But since the issue with 𝘚𝘩𝘦-𝘞𝘩𝘰-𝘚𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘭-𝘕𝘰𝘵-𝘉𝘦-𝘕𝘢𝘮𝘦𝘥, it became stale and I practically had the longest reading slump in my entire life so far.
I wish that whatever book or book series I pick relieves me from my slump. Then I'll finally rejoin reading spaces and (maybe) even join in ʙᴏᴏᴋᴛᴏᴅᴏɴ :blobcatcoffee: :blobcatcoffee: :blobcatcoffee:
Yesterday was my first bigger "party" since self-diagnosis. It was a work event. After 2h, I was overloaded and in danger of getting a migraine. Could prevent with sugary drinks. After 4h, I got cranky but my ride wanted to go home, too.
Today, I have a social hungover. Luckily, we got the day off.
I am glad that I went, but the next time I try to recruit more of "my" people because everyone sticks to their team mates there, not so much mingling. #ActuallyAutistic 1/2
In the past, I would have been angry with myself for getting almost sick and being so overloaded. Now I know this is because of my #autism, because of how my brain is, that my senses are not deprived like with neurotypical people. It's pretty wild that they enjoy talking while loud music is played simultaneously and the surrounding is so busy.
(I was a bit ashamed of not washing my hands with soap, but its smell almost made me vomit. Sometimes it's small things, too.) #actuallyautistic 2/2
Hat wer 1 Ahnung was sich in dieser Szenerie abspielt? Das Foto dürfte, laut Bildformat, in der Zeit zwischen 1910 und 1940 in der ländlichen Steiermark entstanden sein. Habe das Foto bei den Fotoalben meiner verstorbenen Oma entdeckt und frage mich ob es sich hierbei um eine Obduktion handelt. Könnte aber auch 1 Kaiserschnitt sein? Idk sind nur meine Gedanken vllt hat wer andere Ideen. #followerpower#askmastodon
No coincidence that my partner, the librarian, has been stockpiling books on self-help topics now that the Internet is practically useless (and increasingly, actively damgerous) for things like "how do I repair X" or "recipe for bread".
@CodexArcanum@carey@SamYourEyes One of the collections I'm responsible for contains a large number of Chilton auto repair guides going back decades. I refuse to weed them, despite low use, because the digital equivalent is very expensive and it's the sort of information that will increasingly be locked behind paywalls