Tumgik
firefly-fez · 14 hours
Text
"have you learned how to drive yet" i have the spirit of friendship in my heart. the joy of lifes little things in my soul. the whimsy of magic. the beautiful enjoyment of nature. the answer is no though
58K notes · View notes
firefly-fez · 17 hours
Text
surely the conses wont quence
91K notes · View notes
firefly-fez · 17 hours
Text
Star Wars Rhymes
Tumblr media
20 notes · View notes
firefly-fez · 17 hours
Text
noone understands the bond between a girl and their 0,00018 sec screentime clonetrooper
32 notes · View notes
firefly-fez · 17 hours
Text
Tumblr media
late night study
2K notes · View notes
firefly-fez · 17 hours
Text
Stigma and illness
"We do not want to reckon with a world that is merely unfair; where some people get sick, not because they did something wrong but because the world is unjust, and insofar as it is just, it's random.
"And so, we tell ourselves we understand, which too often means creating explanations that blame the sufferer. Stigma is a way of saying 'you deserved this to happen', but implied within the stigma is also 'and I don't deserve it, and so I don't need to worry about it happening to me'.
"Stigma can become a kind of double burden for the sick. In addition to living with the physical and psychological challenges of illness there's the additional challenge of having their humanity discounted. Think of the word universally used in English to describe Tuberculosis patients in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were called 'invalids'. They were literally invalid.
"People living with TB today have told me that fighting the disease was hard, but fighting the stigma of their communities was even harder."
...
"Finally, the origin, or perceived origin of a disease also matters. If an illness is seen to be the result of choice it is much more likely to be stigmatized.
"So for instance, people with major depression are often told to just 'choose to be happier' just as those with substance abuse disorders are told to just 'choose to quit drinking'. And some cancers and heart diseases are stigmatized for resulting from purported choice as well.
"Of course, this is not how biology works. Illness has no moral compass, it does not punish the evil and reward the good, it doesn't know about evil and good. But we want life to be a story that makes sense, which is why, for example, it was commonly believed up until the middle of the 20th century that cancer was caused by things like social isolation, parents were actually told their kids got leukemia because they hadn't been adequately loved as infants.
"If a clear cause and effect isn't present, we will invent one, even if it's cruel."
John Green - The Deadliest Infectious Disease of All Time
12 notes · View notes
firefly-fez · 2 days
Text
Tumblr media
give it up for all the single dads out there
7K notes · View notes
firefly-fez · 2 days
Text
hey, please sign this petition from MSF (doctors without borders) to lower the price of diagnostic tests for ebola, tuberculosis, hiv, cervical cancer, hepatitis and many more diseases and illnesses that kill millions of people per year because they went undiagnosed. They currently charge upto 300% more than they cost to produce, this petition is not screaming at a void, danaher/cepheid have lowered the price for TB tests in some low income countries already due to public pressure. this petition can make a further difference!
it takes no time, it's just name, email, and country (and they won't send you emails)
please :)
9 notes · View notes
firefly-fez · 3 days
Text
Tumblr media
Dad Master Plo Koon and lil ‘Soka
6K notes · View notes
firefly-fez · 3 days
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
In a world where Fives survived
[More incorrect quotes and fanart here]
2K notes · View notes
firefly-fez · 4 days
Text
Please sign this petition to tell @DanaherCorp that their test prices are too much. Why should someone have to spend ALL their money just to get a test? Medicine should not be a luxury. #TimeFor5 #PeopleOverProfits
609 notes · View notes
firefly-fez · 5 days
Text
Tumblr media
S1E9: Excalibur
Redrawing a screencap from every episode of Merlin... (until I get bored with it)
425 notes · View notes
firefly-fez · 5 days
Text
Reblog to open a rail line from your blog to the person you reblogged this from
Tumblr media
103K notes · View notes
firefly-fez · 6 days
Text
So many churches are raising young people to see the Holy Spirit as a force that primarily exists to make you “feel things” in worship. That you know you’ve been Touched™ because you have goosebumps and feel like crying or whatever.
I’m not downplaying the emotional impact an encounter with the spirit can illicit. That’s real. But when we place such an emphasis on our human response, we can make people who don’t experience these heightened emotions feel like they aren’t being filled with the spirit.
I’ve seen it happen before. “I felt nothing in worship”, “I’m in a spiritual rut”, “Why aren’t I being filled?”. The spirit is so much more than what you feel on a Sunday. Look at your fruits, look at God’s work in your life. That’s where you’ll find evidence of the spirit.
4K notes · View notes
firefly-fez · 13 days
Text
Tumblr media
20K notes · View notes
firefly-fez · 14 days
Text
A Big TB Announcement
Greetings from Washington D.C., where I spent the morning meeting with senators before joining a panel that included TB survivor Shaka Brown, Dr. Phil LoBue of the CDC, and Dr. Atul Gawande of USAID. Dr. Gawande announced a major new project to bring truly comprehensive tuberculosis care to regions in Ethiopia and the Philippines. Over the next four years, this project can bring over $80,000,000 in new money to fight TB in these two high-burden countries.
Our family is committing an additional $1,000,000 a year to help fund the project in the Philippines, which has the fourth highest burden of tuberculosis globally.
Here’s how it breaks down: The Department of Health in the Philippines has made TB reduction a major priority and has provided $11,000,0000 per year in matching funds to go alongside $10,000,000 contributed by USAID and an additional $1,000,000 donated by us. This $22,000,000 per year will fund everything from X-Ray machines, medications, and GeneXpert tests to training and employing a huge surge of community health workers, nurses, and doctors who are calling themselves TB Warriors. In an area that includes nearly 3,000,000 people, these TB Warriors will screen for TB, identify cases, provide curative treatment, and offer preventative therapy to close contacts of the ill. We know this Search-Treat-Prevent model is the key to ending tuberculosis, but we hope this project will be both a beacon and a blueprint to show that It’s possible to radically reduce the burden of TB in communities quickly and permanently. It will also, we believe, save many, many lives.
I believe we can’t end TB without these kinds of public/private partnerships. After all, that’s how we ended smallpox and radically reduced the global burden of polio. It’s also how we’ve driven down death from malaria and HIV. For too long, TB hasn’t had the kind of government or private support needed to accelerate the fight against the disease, but I really hope that’s starting to change. I’m grateful to USAID for spearheading this project, and also to the Philippine Ministry of Health for showing such commitment and prioritizing TB.
One reason this project is even possible: Both the cost of diagnosis (through GeneXpert tests) and the cost of treatment with bedaquiline are far lower than they were a year ago, and that is due to public pressure campaigns, many of which were organized by nerdfighteria. I’m not asking you for money (yet); Hank and I will be funding this in partnership with a few people in nerdfighteria who are making major gifts. But I am asking you to continue pressuring the corporations that profit from the world’s poorest people to lower their prices. I’ve seen some of the budgets, and it’s absolutely jaw-dropping how many more tests and pills are available because of what you’ve done as a community.
I don’t yet have the details on which region of the Philippines we’ll be working in, but it will be an area that includes millions of people–perhaps as many as 3 million. And it will include urban, suburban, and rural areas to see the different responses needed to provide comprehensive care in different communities. This will not (to start!) be a nationwide campaign, because even though $80,000,000 is a lot of money, it’s not enough to fund comprehensive care in a nation as large as the Philippines. But we hope that it will serve as a model–to the nation, to the region, and to the world–of what’s possible. 
I’m really excited (and grateful) that our community gets to have a front-row seat to see the challenges and hopefully the successes of implementing comprehensive care. Just in the planning, this project has involved so many contributors–NGOs in the Philippines, global organizations like the Partners in Health community, USAID, the national Ministry of Health in the Philippines, and regional health authorities as well. There are a lot of partners here, but they’ve been working together extremely well over the last few months to plan for this project, which will start more or less immediately thanks to their incredibly hard work.
1K notes · View notes
firefly-fez · 15 days
Text
Tumblr media
5 notes · View notes