Do you have a general practitioner that you see for an annual physical or anything? Ask them about it. I had a weird skin condition thing happening in one specific spot on my body that I asked my doctor about, and he pulled up a big medical directory on the computer and cross-referenced symptoms and stuff through it. Eventually, we were both like, "It's not cancer or anything, but damned if I know exactly what it is." And he asked me if I wanted a referral to a specialist to get it checked out. These kinds of things are exactly what they're here for. They can probably recommend things like what to eat and things to avoid for prostate health, and even order tests to get it checked out if you and they feel it's necessary.
I was going to say the same thing. They started this back in January. Both taking the passports of people with an X gender identification on their passports as well as confiscating the legal documents of trans people attempting to renew their passports (birth certificates, social security cards, driver's licenses, etc.).
As others have said, talk to your doctor, but I'm pretty sure that doctors use ultrasonic vibrations to break up that sort of stuff, so I think you're gonna need something stronger than a vibrator if you're worried about it.
If you go to the Wiki article linked above, you can find the whole story of how multiple vows of fealty have sprung up over the years under the Origins section, but the last bit on Francis Bellamy is the important one as that's the one used today.
Some useful highlights from that section:
The Bellamy "Pledge of Allegiance" was first published in the September 8, 1892, issue of The Youth's Companion as part of the National Public-School Celebration of Columbus Day, a celebration of the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas. The event was conceived and promoted by James B. Upham, a marketer for the magazine, as a campaign to instill the idea of American nationalism in students and to encourage children to raise flags above their schools.[28] According to author Margarette S. Miller, this campaign was in line both with Upham's patriotic vision as well as with his commercial interest.
Francis Bellamy and Upham had lined up the National Education Association to support the Youth's Companion as a sponsor of the Columbus Day observance and the use in that observance of the American flag. By June 29, 1892, Bellamy and Upham had arranged for Congress and President Benjamin Harrison to announce a proclamation making the public school flag ceremony the center of the Columbus Day celebrations. This arrangement was formalized when Harrison issued Presidential Proclamation 335. Subsequently, the Pledge was first used in public schools on October 12, 1892, during Columbus Day observances organized to coincide with the opening of the World's Columbian Exposition (the Chicago World's Fair), Illinois.
James Upham "felt that a flag should be on every schoolhouse,"[27] so his publication "fostered a plan of selling flags to schools through the children themselves at cost, which was so successful that 25,000 schools acquired flags in the first year (1892–93).
You're largely spot on, but one thing I'd like to add is that Republicans in Walz's state have actually pushed forward a "Trump Derangement Syndrome" bill, which would classify openly speaking negatively about Trump as a mental illness that is valid justification for incarceration in a mental health facility, which is exactly what Russia did.
Rule number one of OpSec is if you're gonna do something, don't tell anyone. If they're planning something that the government can/would consider illegal, saying something online is the stupidest thing you can do. Even if it's as innocuous as planning to protest.
Unfortunately, this was a few years ago, and the only thing I can find that resembles my memory of the article I was thinking of is this photo in my phone:
I think I might have had that mixed up with the story of that CEO who cut his pay from 1 million dollars to $70,000 and bumped up the salary of everybody else who worked at the company to $70,000.
Contrast this with the guy in Seattle who like tripled the size of his company in a year simply because offering remote work options made it super easy to scalp software engineers from his competitors.
I was gonna say, this looks stock photo as hell. Not a single bit of individualism at each desk in an industry filled with artists and companies that have Weta Workshops make statues for their entryways. Plus, laptops? I can't imagine rendering and compiling being done on laptops, nor is there the room for hardware like Wacom touchscreens.
Feels very "give me a photo of an office with computers."
The reason for all this work is basically the concept of a currency that isn't backed by and dependent upon governments while also being impossible to counterfeit, hence a lot of encryption because it fundamentally says that you can't trust the other computers that you're talking to. Everybody holds a ledger that says that you have $5, so you can't suddenly say that you actually have $10. And all the math is to prevent inflation by limiting the amount of currency that exists at any time. The more currency there is from solving the math, the harder the math gets to slow down the creation of new money.
It all falls apart, though, because the only value that crypto has is what it's worth in traditional fiat currency - the very thing that it's supposed to replace.
So it's just a bunch of computers doing a lot of math to make funny money that's supposedly worth something because...of reasons?
All those darn African killer bees! Stealing all the jobs!