32. he/him. DJ/Event Producer. Founder of Bris, AU queer party, Shandy.
Dedicated to warm embraces and community focussed spaces.
Live on Jagera/Turrbal land.
Been working out more lately and eating better and more consistently - feelin' good!
Also on a silly lil week away in Naarm/Melbourne - hope to see some of you out and about 😘
This is a hard article to read, but I hope you'll do so. I've spent some time reporting on widespread rape and other sexual violence of Palestinian male and female prisoners by Israeli authorities, and the article is now published. The assault victims were warned not to give speak of what they endured -- they were sometimes told they would be killed or raped if they gave interviews -- but they found the courage to do so. One man described being raped three times in a single day in Israeli prison, the third time after he tried to protest. A young woman said the guards would come in at the beginning of each shift and strip her naked and abuse her. Another reported that she was shown photos of herself being raped and warned they would be released unless she cooperated with Israeli intelligence. Even three children who had been detained told me they had been sexually abused. Look, whatever our position on the Middle East, we should be able to agree on being anti-rape. Sexual assaults were horrific when Israeli women were targeted on Oct. 7, and they're equally horrific when Israeli authorities use them against Palestinians day after day after day. We should be able to find common ground in opposing rape. Here's a gift link to the article: https://t.co/aMMHId49OO
people who get off at my bus stop have a certain wisdom all too rare in the world today. people who get off at the bus stop before mine are doubtless idlers. people who get off at stops after mine have ways that are foreign and uncertain but one imagines idolatrous
Spouses of Alzheimer's patients are 6 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's themselves. They share daily saliva exchange for decades. Their oral bacteria converges to the same strains.
In 2019 Cortexyme published a paper in Science Advances showing Porphyromonas gingivalis, the bacterium behind gum disease, was present in over 90% of postmortem Alzheimer's brains. They also found its DNA in the cerebrospinal fluid of living Alzheimer's patients.
P. gingivalis is the keystone pathogen of periodontitis. The CDC says 47% of American adults over 30 have periodontitis right now.
The mechanism is specific. P. gingivalis produces enzymes called gingipains. Two types: one cuts proteins at lysine residues, the other at arginine. Tau, the protein that holds your neuronal scaffolding together, is loaded with both amino acids. In cell culture, gingipains shred soluble tau within one hour of infection. The fragments seed the paired helical filaments that become tangles. Tangles are Alzheimer's.
Mice fed P. gingivalis through the mouth grew amyloid plaques in their brains. Hippocampal neurons died. The bacteria crossed the blood-brain barrier and started chewing through the same proteins that fail in human Alzheimer's patients.
Cortexyme built a drug called atuzaginstat to block gingipains. Phase 1 was clean. They ran a 643-patient Phase 2/3 trial called GAIN.
The FDA hit it with a partial clinical hold for liver toxicity. The drug missed both primary endpoints. In August 2022 Cortexyme shut the program down, renamed itself Quince, and pivoted to bone disease.
The subgroup with the highest baseline P. gingivalis loads still showed cognitive improvement on secondary endpoints. The bacteria itself kept showing up in postmortem brains across independent studies after the trial closed.
Periodontal disease shows up 10 to 20 years before cognitive symptoms in people who later develop Alzheimer's. By the time someone forgets a name, the bacteria has been working for two decades.
The intervention point is upstream of your skull.
sufjan stevens’s “piss poems” were discovered and posted on tiktok recently by @/greenwitchwh0re
this was a collection of poems he wrote in college surrounding his pissadventures
I just read the new Haaretz article about how Israeli planted pines are suddenly dying en masse and it is absolutely worth dissecting. Here are a summary & my observations as a Palestinian scholar who writes on green colonialism. 1/
Melbourne is full of turbo normies with no vibes who have conned each other into believing they’re genuine eccentrics. Sydney is full of complete psychos with unresolvable neurotic damage who constantly inflict psychic violence on one another yet believe they’re completely normal
DJ Hell and The Hacker pick electroclash's key anthems between 1997 and 2001, revisiting the sub-genre still rocking dance floors today.
Read in full now: https://t.co/vJtOFhxeWg