🦬 Dr Red Bison, PhD @redbison.bsky ♀🏳️‍🌈🌻

We should refer to @mashagessen's Rules for #SurvivingAutocracy daily, especially now that Trump is worse than Putin. Journalists are failing to pay attention. They downplay, buy the normality, say "we're not shocked," "someone will stop him." No one is coming to save us but us.

Pages from Leonardo da Vinci's journals ✍️

Deep out in the Arizona borderlands, in a place where jaguars, ocelots and mountain lions cross the border far more frequently than migrants, DHS is building not one but two border walls through pristine habitat. What does it say about the efficacy of border walls if the places that have one wall already need another?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has destroyed the remnants of its Victory over Nazism. Instead of honoring the memory of defeating fascism, their flag now flies atop the ruins of Donbas — a symbol not of liberation, but of aggression and devastation.

It’s a bit grey outside today so here’s a vibrant flower to add a bit of colour. Hope you have a lovely weekend 🧡💛

YES. YES. I HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS. I started a spreadsheet in 2019 tracking every category where America is number one globally and people keep asking me to stop bringing it to Thanksgiving. We lead the PLANET in medical debt. Not the developed world. The PLANET. There are countries where "medical bankruptcy" doesn't translate because the CONCEPT doesn't exist in their language. We invented it. We EXPORTED it as a field of academic study. German researchers fly here to observe it happening in real time. They take NOTES. We are a living laboratory and the experiment is "what if you made people choose between insulin and rent." We chose. Exposed. This is the thing we're best at. We lead in incarceration. More humans in cages than China. China has 1.4 billion people and an authoritarian government and we STILL have more prisoners. We beat AUTHORITARIANS at their own game using FREEDOM. We did it with both parties cooperating across NINE administrations. Name ONE other bipartisan project that lasted fifty years. You can't. This is our moon landing. We just don't film it. We lead in insulin pricing. $300 for a vial that costs $30 in Canada. Canada is VISIBLE FROM DETROIT. You can see Canada from a Walgreens parking lot where someone is deciding between half-doses. The same molecule. The same manufacturer. The border adds $270 of LEADERSHIP. That's what leading looks like. It looks like a 900% markup on not dying. We lead in mass shootings. Not per capita. Not adjusted. RAW TOTAL. We have so many that researchers had to invent subcategories. School. Workplace. Concert. Grocery store. We have a TAXONOMY. Other countries have incidents. We have a CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM with peer-reviewed SORTING CRITERIA. That's infrastructure. That's RIGOR. We lead in healthcare spending AND in maternal mortality among rich nations. Simultaneously. We spend $4.3 trillion a year and mothers die at rates that would concern a developing nation. We spent MORE money to get WORSE outcomes so consistently that it can't be incompetence. Incompetence wouldn't be this RELIABLE. This takes PLANNING. This is an ACHIEVEMENT of systems working exactly as designed across multiple industries cooperating to extract value from the specific biological event of someone trying not to die. We lead in per-capita spending on our military while our veterans sleep in tents. We allocated $886 billion to defense and our soldiers come home to a VA waitlist so long that some of them die on it. We spent the money. We just didn't spend it on THEM. The money went somewhere. It led the way. Just not toward the people who fought. I printed this tweet on a 24x36 poster. It's in my living room. My wife moved out last month but she didn't take the poster so I think she agrees.

@1goodtern Don't make me answer that question, Tern. I've read Exodus 32.

Are they seriously worshipping a statue of a golden cow.

@bvfsqre @1goodtern YES, having lived through that time. I lost friends who seemed healthy, asymptomatic for a time, slow incubation period as their friends and lovers began falling ill, dying of opportunistic diseases. The sense of dread before there were tests, the months of waiting and watching.

@1goodtern HIV was like that, back in the day. It could take six months to show on a test, or back in the beginning, even years, when they didn't have solid ways to test for it. Eight weeks is nothing, for those of us who lived through the beginning of the AIDS crisis in the early 80s

People are just not going to be able to get their heads round the slow incubation period of hantavirus. On reflection, thousands of people have probably already been exposed, and those thousands could expose tens, even hundreds, of thousands more.

I'm just going to say it again once, as simply as I can, for everyone who is slow to understand this: Covid infection damages the vascular endothelium, the delicate lining inside your blood vessels. Hantavirus *targets* the vascular endothelium.

31 y/o has “Mild cognitive impairment/dementia for a few years… what can I do to reverse it?” It’s Long Covid. You can’t reverse permanent brain damage from this. Anyone else done pretending it will just go away with some infrared lights or Oregano oil?

Very few people know this, especially not parents. The entire social structure is operating to ensure that no one protects themselves or our young from repeated infections. The crisis has been disappeared.

It’s SARS-CoV2

Israel is now killing so many people in Lebanon so regularly that the media has lost interest. Much like it did in Gaza.

😆

All civilisations collapse for basically the same reason: they could have responded to reality but they didn't. Our civilisation is no different as we face the consequences of runaway climate collapse: we can but we won't. “New Orleans is in a terminal condition, and we need to be clear with the patient that it is terminal,” he said. “There is an opportunity for palliative care, we can transition people and the economy. We can get ahead of this.” But, he added, “no politician wants to first give this terminal diagnosis. They will speak about it behind closed doors, but never in public.” theguardian.com/us-news/2026/m…

In May 2013, at the Exxon Mobil annual shareholders' meeting, CEO Rex Tillerson stated, “What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?”

@Thorman_Lungie Well said. Agree. The destruction now seems unavoidable. Russia devouring itself in a painful dissolution would be high justice. A Russian colleague once told me "Russians have no culture of our own, just other people's cultures, stolen and adopted via conquests." This must end.

@RedBison I understand their approach here, why it is necessary but it is horrible for our planet, yes. I just wish the actual pace could be sped up, so the damage is done at once, so recovery can begin earlier -- and Russia can eat itself alive in the pain they've given so many others.

It's horrifying on many levels that Ukrainian's defensive fight for sovereignty and democracy requires these ecological catastrophes, reprisals for years of Russia waging ecocide in Ukraine for Putin's conquest. RW male belligerence is destroying our only planet, our only home.

IN PRAISE OF FRANCESCA ALBANESE There is a question that visits me in the small hours, when sleep will not come and the mind turns over old stones. The question is this: “What would I have done in the 1930s, on the morning after Kristallnacht?" Not what I say I would have done. Not what I hope I would have done. But what would I actually have done—when the trains began to run, when the neighbours grew quiet, when the cost of decency became the loss of everything? Most of us, I think, would have done little. Not from malice. From fear. From the soft, creeping conviction that someone else will speak, that the situation is complex, that we must be 'reasonable'. Lest we forget, the ordinary is the extraordinary's alibi. And how we have clung to that alibi! How we still cling to it! And then, every once in a terrible while, someone appears who does not cling. Someone who steps forward when others step back. Someone who speaks the name of the thing when everyone else is busy naming something else. Francesca Albanese is that someone. She stands before the world—alone, unarmed, armed only with law and language and a rare courage—and she says what the centrists will not say, what the foreign ministries will not say, what the editorial boards will not say. She says: "This is a genocide. And we are watching it happen." Do not tell me that is hyperbole. Do not tell me the term is contested. She has not used it lightly. She has used it as a physician arrives scientifically at a diagnosis—not to wound, but to warn. Not to inflame, but to name. And for that, they have come for her. Oh, how they have come for her. Smears. Investigations. Vicious editorials. Frozen bank accounts. Dispossession of the only apartment she had ever owned. The machinery of the respectable turned to crush her. Because the respectable cannot abide what she represents: a mirror held up to their complicity. Let us, once again, travel back to the 1930s. Back to the few who stood up when the trains began to run laden with Jewish people. There was Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux. He defied his own government. He signed thousands of visas, by hand, for hours, until his fingers bled. He saved more lives than Schindler. And he died penniless, disgraced, erased. There was a German officer in Warsaw named Wilm Hosenfeld. He hid a Jewish pianist in the rubble. He did not save thousands. He saved one. But that one—Władysław Szpilman—carried the memory. And memory is "the only haven from which we cannot be expelled." There was Raoul Wallenberg. There were the villagers of Le Chambon. There were the anonymous, the quiet, the furious few who said: “Not on my watch.” Francesca Albanese is their heir. Not because she carries a gun. Not because she hides refugees in her basement. But because she does something equally dangerous in a world that has perfected the art of not seeing. She sees. And she speaks. She does not speak as a diplomat. Thank Goodness she doesn't! Diplomats have given us the language of "there are arguments on both sides" and "restraint" and "proportionality." Diplomatic language is the perfumed grave of moral clarity. No, she speaks as a jurist. As a human being. As a woman who has looked into the abyss and refused to call it a "complex geopolitical landscape". Edna O'Brien once described a character who "had the recklessness of those who have already lost everything worth losing." Francesca Albanese has not lost everything. She has her dignity, her office, her voice, her family. But she has calculated the cost of speaking truth to power. And she has decided that that cost is infinitely less than the cost of silence. What is that cost? Let us name it. She has been called antisemitic—she, who stands on the ground of international law forged in the ashes of Auschwitz and the fires of Nuremberg. She has been called a conspiracy theorist—she, who cites every source, every footnote, every UN resolution. She has been called naive—she, who understands better than most the machinery of realpolitik. These accusations are not arguments. They are the spittle of the threatened. Because Francesca Albanese threatens something very precious to the powerful: the right to commit atrocity without being named. Friends, the 1930s did not arrive with jackboots and pogroms on day one. They arrived in small increments. With "reasonable" restrictions. With "proportional" measures. With the silence of the respectable. We tell ourselves that we would have been different. That we would have been Sousa Mendes. That we would have been Wallenberg. But most of us, I fear, would have been the neighbours who later said, "I didn't know." Francesca Albanese knows. And she refuses to pretend otherwise. So let us praise her. Not with statues or awards she does not seek. But with something harder: with our own refusal to look away. With our own voices, raised in places that are safe for us but dangerous for her. With our own bodies, if it comes to that. A brave woman, who was injured while demonstrating outside a US nuclear military base in 1982, the infamous Greenham Common, had told me that "the heart is a hunter for what it cannot have." But I say the heart is a hunter for what it will not lose. And what we will not lose is the memory of those who stood up when standing up cost everything. Francesca Albanese is standing up now. In our time. In our name. Under our indifferent sky. Let us stand with her. Not tomorrow. Not when it is safe. Now. [Extract from a speech in Athens on Sunday 3rd May 2026]

THIS IS HOW WOMEN IN PAIN ARE TREATED IN ER: A pediatrician went to Emerg multiple times. With severe pain and a BP over 200 - known to be an extremely high stroke risk - this doctor (a woman in her 40's) was repeatedly dismissed, told anybody could see it was anxiety, and the ER was the last place she belonged. By her 3rd visit, she's labelled "frequent flier", & you can bet "drug-seeker" was whispered behind her back if not to her face. In tears with her team at work, they reassured her she was not "imagining things", and she was not being "difficult". She was finally diagnosed with Stage-4 Cancer, with a massive abdominal tumor. She's being treated. This is how Complex Pain Patients develop Medical PTSD. Even physicians.

My mind boggles at the people who are still saying, "But, but, the rules say...but but but...the process is..." Listen, Republicans don't care. They make shit up, bend the rules, ignore them, change them at will. Democrats have the majority in VA. Use your powers, be creative, & implement the map.

Health insurance isn't healthcare. Why we still allow a third party middleman to come between you and your doctor to deny treatment is beyond me. 120 million Americans are already covered by some form of public healthcare. It's time the rest of us are too.