Tag: military veterans

Five transgender service members speak out as Trump pushes military ban + Trauma trigger ⚠️

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Five transgender service members speak out as Trump pushes military ban

There are not many people who want to serve anymore. We’re in a recruiting and retention crisis across the board. It doesn’t matter what service you’re going in, they’re having a hard time getting people in and they’re having a hard time keeping people. And to want to push somebody out that has given their entire adult life to an organization, but then also to the nation, it’s just really unfortunate and sad that for everything that I’ve done, the hard work that I’ve done, the work that I’ve done, for the government to just kind of say that you are no longer able to serve. We just don’t want you because you’re trans.

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Rand [Corporation] — who had predicted that it could cost up $150,000 per service member per year to have transgender folks serve — went back after trans folks were allowed to serve openly, to see what the costs actually were. And it was less than $1,000 per transgender service member per year, which I don’t need to tell you, is like an average military service member’s prescription costs per year.

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For a lot of trans people, the military is the only option for them to to survive, to get out of the situations they’re in, and again, we’re part of that one percent of the population that has sworn to defend the country. Why would you want to not allow them to do that?

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People do tend to isolate transgender medicine as this like wildly difficult thing, but it’s actually not. It’s fairly straightforward and basic for most people. Are there folks who have complications? Sure, but we have folks who have any number of orthopedic surgeries who have complications. Or we try to manage their allergies, and the solution that we start with isn’t where we end. You can have high cholesterol or high blood pressure, and maybe we put you on medications, maybe we say you need to change your diet, and we work down [to address the question of] how do we take care of you? Because we need you on the team.

Related:

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When was the Democratic Party anti-war?

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)
The Question of Peace

Once in a while, I listen to “establishment controlled” Democracy Now. Today, I decided to listen to their episode with Bernie Sanders’ former foreign policy adviser, Matt Duss. They talked about how the Democratic Party has become “The Party of War” as if it’s something that’s recently happened. Left out of this conversation was if the Democratic Party was ever anti-war? I don’t recall a time in my life in which the Democrats were.

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Zelensky’s wear and tear

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)2 Comments

Zelensky’s wear and tear (original)

For more than two and a half years, war has been the raison d’être of the Ukrainian state. The budget presented by Kyiv this week allocates more than 50% of the budget to the defence sector – to which must be added the cost of veterans – something that has been repeated since 2022. Maintaining the front, avoiding its collapse and ensuring that there is still enough support to continue fighting until the objectives are achieved is the priority of the government team, which has set aside practically all other obligations of the state, which today depends entirely on foreign subsidies that make it possible to pay salaries and pensions. One of the aspects that has completely disappeared under the cover of the unity demanded by the war is precisely domestic politics. The Russian invasion gave Zelensky’s team the opportunity to create for the president the image of a war leader, the representation of the nation, a savior capable of achieving what he sets out to do, the only person capable of rescuing the country from certain ruin.

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Scott Bennett’s death

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Twitter/X: American Patriot Scott Bennett Has Passed Away | RIP Brother!

This is all that I’ve found on Bennett’s death.

Related:

Scott Bennett Obituary and death: In Memoriam; Scott Bennett, Renowned Whistleblower, Former U.S. Army Special Operations Officer, and Author, Dies at 46 – A Legacy of Truth and Courage Remembered”

Scott Bennett Walnut Creek CA Death: Whistleblower US Army Special Ops/Psychological Warfare Analyst has died

H/T: Unorthodox Truth

Trump 2.0: Prepare for the further dumbing down of America

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

No, it’s not Communism! It’s the privatization of education. “School choice” takes away from government spending for public schools!

Source

Trump Chooses Longtime Ally Linda McMahon to Run Education Dept.

President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday tapped Linda McMahon, a former professional wrestling executive who ran the Small Business Administration for much of his first term, to lead the Education Department, an agency he has routinely singled out for elimination in his upcoming term.

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In part because of her recent policy role and her experience as the small business administrator, Ms. McMahon had been discussed as a possible pick to lead the Commerce Department until the role was officially offered to Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street executive and a chairman of the Trump transition team, earlier in the day.

Ms. McMahon will be in charge of overseeing what is widely expected to be a thorough and determined dismantling of the department’s core functions, as Mr. Trump and many of those in his orbit have questioned the agency’s purpose and disparaged its work as overregulating schools on political and ideological terms.

Other than a brief appointment in 2009 to the Connecticut State Board of Education, where she served for just over a year, Ms. McMahon has no experience in overseeing education policy. She would assume the role at a time when school districts across the country are facing budget shortfalls, many students are not making up ground lost during the pandemic in reading and math, and many colleges and universities are shrinking and closing amid a larger loss of faith in the value of higher education.

While Mr. Trump has repeatedly called for an outright dissolution of the agency, any effort to shutter it would require congressional action and support from some Republican lawmakers whose districts depend on federal aid for public education.

But the America First Policy Institute has set out a more immediate list of changes it says could be achieved through vastly changing the department’s priorities. Those include stopping schools from “promoting inaccurate and unpatriotic concepts” about American history surrounding institutionalized racism, and expanding “school choice” programs that direct more public funds to parents to spend on home-schooling, online classes or at private and religious schools.

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Leaks expose secret British military cell plotting to ‘keep Ukraine fighting’

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Leaked files show top UK military figures conspired to carry out the Kerch bridge bombing, covertly train “Gladio”-style stay-behind forces in Ukraine, and groom the British public for a drop in living standards caused by the proxy war against Russia.

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Project Alchemy’s proposed schemes spanned every conceivable field of warfare, from cyber attacks to “discreet operations” to outright terrorism. The secret cell even put forward a plan to “aggressively pursue” and “dismantle” independent media outlets – including The Grayzone – through an aggressive campaign of legal harassment and online censorship, so they “would be forced to close.” The incendiary blueprints were fed to the highest levels of the British state and national security structure, where they were apparently well-received.

Leaks expose secret British military cell plotting to ‘keep Ukraine fighting’