#As Certain As Death (2023)

[nikov]

i worry that love is violence

citizen illegal, josé olivarez / angel of small death & the codeine scene, hozier / black iris, leah raeder/ r.d. laing / the tale of despereaux, kate dicamillo / litany in which certain things are crossed out, richard siken / blue lily, lily blue, maggie stiefvater / john my beloved, sufjan stevens / litany in which certain things are crossed out, richard siken / mockingjay, suzanne collins

[qqueenofhades]

Petition to replace Samuel Alito and/or Clarence Thomas on SCOTUS with literally any one of the average New Yorkers who voted to convict Trump today.

[dropespeon]

god. god. sasasap. ogd

[hedgiwithapen]

The AU where Team Leverage is attempting to con Victoria Kord during the same few days that the Scarab is stolen.

Hardison adjusted the dress uniform he'd spent half the night sewing patches and arranging medals on. Authenticity was important, even if no one ever looked closely enough to see if one of the medals was a startrek badge. It wasn't--he wasn't going to risk a whole con, days of prep, on one of The Shadiest companies in Florida--for a geek joke. But he was tempted, sometimes, and never more than when he was posing as some stiff military monster at a party, talking atrocities with the Mark. Victoria Kord was certainly high on the list of 'People I feel Dirty Just Breathing The Same Air As' which was only not an official list because Eliot had pointed out that keeping such a list might bite them all in the ass.  Hardison had no intention of admitting he was right, but still. 

The food, catered by Eliot, was delicious, which counted for something. He glanced discreetly at his watch, pleased that the man he was impersonating was the type to wear real watches, and nodded to one of many hidden cameras. Originally, the plan had been to crash the party and find the paperwork about the illegal land seizures, find a way to get people back the homes they were being wrongfully evicted from. Snooping had revealed a bigger threat, and bigger target.  Parker would start her run for the secure project's room, plug in his code, and wipe all the OMAC data from Kord's system, ruining Victoria's credibility for her investors and tanking the company in three... two...

"Uh, guys? We have a problem. Like, capital p Problem," Breanna's voice hissed through the coms. 

"What?" he asked, then feigned a smile at Kord, "is that  fantastic--" he pretended to cut himself off. "My apologies, I was distracted by these canapes.  I tell you, we do not get food this flavorful in DC. You know how to make your investors feel welcome."

Over his chatter, Bre continued "Someone else just hacked the system. Majorly. I can't get it back. Hmm. I think I...might have seen this before..."

"We've got another problem," Eliot said from where he stood in chef whites, slicing meat at a table. "One of Kord's goons just walked in. Hardison, Parker, you need to bail. Now."

"Why? I'm almost--" 

"School of the Americas. That's Carapax. We'll find another way to shut them down, you need to move, now."

"And what are you going to do?" Breanna asked.

"Hey!" Parker said to someone in the hall with her. "You're messing up my heist!"

"Your heist? This is ou--my heist," said a young voice on the other end. 

"Parker, who's with you?" Eliot hissed, moving urgently now. Carapax was blocking the line of escape for Hardison, and that would not do at all.

"Uhhhhh blue buggy dude?"

Hardison's eyes bulged. "Excuse me," he said to Victoria, then muttering 

"Like... Blue Beetle?"

"I am Khaji Da," a new voice spliced into the com system, over the sound of Breanna's "Oh, no you did not just hack my coms." 

"Yes, I did."

"It's an expression," the same young man's voice said. "Um. Look. Why don't you steal whatever it is you're stealing, I'll get what I came for and we go before we all get killed?"

The overlapping chatter was going to give Eliot a headache.

"Oh, HEY," Breanna said again. "I do know you. Hey, can your hacker hear us? Tell him it's GarlicBre52. From the forums. Uh, Eliot, red truck, oh shit, and you're about to have company. the bad kind."

 Eliot rolled his eyes, and located the truck. Carapax seemed to have noticed it too. 

"Bre, Hardison, get ready to pick up Parker and go. I'll warn your nerd friend." Eliot rolled his shoulders, ready for a fight.  

Several stories up, a pulse of blue light shattered a row of windows, drawing all attention up. Eliot hoped the distraction would be enough to steal a superhero… and his back up.

[poppiesforthirteen]

Looking back now on some films/shows set in our world that chose to include covid in their lore and others that didn't, I feel so sorry for anyone who wrote a script for a 2020 release, therefore set in 2020 but written a year or two before. How could you have known

[laurelwinchester]

jeff davis has been desperately trying to kill derek hale since the first season so i’m disappointed and irritated but not necessarily surprised that he finally followed through on that one. i am kinda surprised that he accidentally gave derek and stiles an inexplicable child though. that was a plot twist i did not see coming.

[moviesandmania]

AS CERTAIN AS DEATH (2023) Cabin in the woods horror - trailer and release date

As Certain as Death is a 2023 American horror film about a camping trip that becomes a battle for survival, as five friends must face their own demons plus an evil in the woods. Written, directed, co-produced by and co-starring Hutch Dano. Also produced by Brienne Austen, David Lambert, Daniel Curtis Lee and A.K. Moore. The Rock & Royal Productions movie also stars Lindsey Shaw, Daniel Curtis…

[darkmovies]

As Certain As Death (2023) Date de sortie : Prochainement Réalisateur : Hutch Dano Scénario : Hutch Dano Avec : Lindsey Shaw, Daniel Curtis Lee, David Lambert

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

average United States contains 1000s of pet tigers in backyards" factoid actualy [sic] just statistical error. average person has 0 tigers on property. Activist Georg, who lives the U.S. Capitol & makes up over 10,000 each day, has purposefully been spreading disinformation adn [sic] should not have been counted

I have a big mad today, folks. It's a really frustrating one, because years worth of work has been validated... but the reason for that fucking sucks.

For almost a decade, I've been trying to fact-check the claim that there "are 10,000 to 20,000 pet tigers/big cats in backyards in the United States." I talked to zoo, sanctuary, and private cat people; I looked at legislation, regulation, attack/death/escape incident rates; I read everything I could get my hands on. None of it made sense. None of it lined up. I couldn't find data supporting anything like the population of pet cats being alleged to exist. Some of you might remember the series I published on those findings from 2018 or so under the hashtag #CrouchingTigerHiddenData. I've continued to work on it in the six years since, including publishing a peer reviewed study that counted all the non-pet big cats in the US (because even though they're regulated, apparently nobody bothered to keep track of those either).

I spent years of my life obsessing over that statistic because it was being used to push for new federal legislation that, while well intentioned, contained language that would, and has, created real problems for ethical facilities that have big cats. I wrote a comprehensive - 35 page! - analysis of the issues with the then-current version of the Big Cat Public Safety Act in 2020. When the bill was first introduced to Congress in 2013, a lot of groups promoted it by fear mongering: there's so many pet tigers! they could be hidden around every corner! they could escape and attack you! they could come out of nowhere and eat your children!! Tiger King exposed the masses to the idea of "thousands of abused backyard big cats": as a result the messaging around the bill shifted to being welfare-focused, and the law passed in 2022.

The Big Cat Public Safety Act created a registry, and anyone who owned a private cat and wanted to keep it had to join. If they did, they could keep the animal until it passed, as long as they followed certain strictures (no getting more, no public contact, etc). Don’t register and get caught? Cat is seized and major punishment for you. Registering is therefore highly incentivized. That registry closed in June of 2023, and you can now get that registration data via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Guess how many pet big cats were registered in the whole country?

97.

Not tens of thousands. Not thousands. Not even triple digits. 97.

And that isn't even the right number! Ten USDA licensed facilities registered erroneously. That accounts for 55 of 97 animals. Which leaves us with 42 pet big cats, of all species, in the entire country.

Now, I know that not everyone may have registered. There's probably someone living deep in the woods somewhere with their illegal pet cougar, and there's been at least one random person in Texas arrested for trying to sell a cub since the law passed. But - and here's the big thing - even if there are ten times as many hidden cats than people who registered them - that's nowhere near ten thousand animals. Obviously, I had some questions.

Guess what? Turns out, this is because it was never real. That huge number never had data behind it, wasn't likely to be accurate, and the advocacy groups using that statistic to fearmonger and drive their agenda knew it... and didn't see a problem with that.

Allow me to introduce you to an article published last week.

This article is good. (Full disclose, I'm quoted in it). It's comprehensive and fairly written, and they did their due diligence reporting and fact-checking the piece. They talked to a lot of people on all sides of the story.

But thing that really gets me?

Multiple representatives from major advocacy organizations who worked on the Big Cat Publix Safety Act told the reporter that they knew the statistics they were quoting weren't real. And that they don't care. The end justifies the means, the good guys won over the bad guys, that's just how lobbying works after all. They're so blase about it, it makes my stomach hurt. Let me pull some excerpts from the quotes.

"Whatever the true number, nearly everyone in the debate acknowledges a disparity between the actual census and the figures cited by lawmakers. “The 20,000 number is not real,” said Bill Nimmo, founder of Tigers in America. (...) For his part, Nimmo at Tigers in America sees the exaggerated figure as part of the political process. Prior to the passage of the bill, he said, businesses that exhibited and bred big cats juiced the numbers, too. (...) “I’m not justifying the hyperbolic 20,000,” Nimmo said. “In the world of comparing hyperbole, the good guys won this one.”

"Michelle Sinnott, director and counsel for captive animal law enforcement at the PETA Foundation, emphasized that the law accomplished what it was set out to do. (...) Specific numbers are not what really matter, she said: “Whether there’s one big cat in a private home or whether there’s 10,000 big cats in a private home, the underlying problem of industry is still there.”"

I have no problem with a law ending the private ownership of big cats, and with ending cub petting practices. What I do have a problem with is that these organizations purposefully spread disinformation for years in order to push for it. By their own admission, they repeatedly and intentionally promoted false statistics within Congress. For a decade.

No wonder it never made sense. No wonder no matter where I looked, I couldn't figure out how any of these groups got those numbers, why there was never any data to back any of the claims up, why everything I learned seemed to actively contradict it. It was never real. These people decided the truth didn't matter. They knew they had no proof, couldn't verify their shocking numbers... and they decided that was fine, if it achieved the end they wanted.

So members of the public - probably like you, reading this - and legislators who care about big cats and want to see legislation exist to protect them? They got played, got fed false information through a TV show designed to tug at heartstrings, and it got a law through Congress that's causing real problems for ethical captive big cat management. The 20,000 pet cat number was too sexy - too much of a crisis - for anyone to want to look past it and check that the language of the law wouldn't mess things up up for good zoos and sanctuaries. Whoops! At least the "bad guys" lost, right? (The problems are covered somewhat in the article linked, and I'll go into more details in a future post. You can also read my analysis from 2020, linked up top.)

Now, I know. Something something something facts don't matter this much in our post-truth era, stop caring so much, that's just how politics work, etc. I’m sorry, but no. Absolutely not.

Laws that will impact the welfare of living animals must be crafted carefully, thoughtfully, and precisely in order to ensure they achieve their goals without accidental negative impacts. We have a duty of care to ensure that. And in this case, the law also impacts reservoir populations for critically endangered species! We can't get those back if we mess them up. So maybe, just maybe, if legislators hadn't been so focused on all those alleged pet cats, the bill could have been written narrowly and precisely.

But the minutiae of regulatory impacts aren't sexy, and tiger abuse and TV shows about terrible people are. We all got misled, and now we're here, and the animals in good facilities are already paying for it.

I don't have a conclusion. I'm just mad. The public deserves to know the truth about animal legislation they're voting for, and I hope we all call on our legislators in the future to be far more critical of the data they get fed.

[mogai-sunflowers]

this will be a bit of a long post but i ask that you please please read the full thing if you want to know more about Sudan- i feel like not enough people ACTUALLY know what's going on in Sudan. a lot of people have a vague idea that a 'war' and genocide is going on, but it's important to know the specifics as well.

there is extremely little coverage of Sudan from non-Sudanese sources, and even those that DO cover it often paint it as a war between two different generals for power over a country- and to a certain extent, without context, that IS what's happening. for those unaware, the two 'warring factions' in Sudan are the official Sudanese military- the SAF (Sudanese Armed Forces) and the RSF (Rapid Support Forces).

in April 2019, during the Sudanese Revolution, Islamist dictator Omar al-Bashir was deposed by the SAF in response to a mass wave of revolutionary organizing, protests, and sit-ins. Immediately after, the TMC (Transitionary Military Council) was established, with SAF general inspector Abdel Fattah al-Burhan being appointed as the chairman. for a brief time, protestors engaged in negotiations with Burhan, and many believed that he was being ernest in his promises of a true civilian democratic government- but it soon became clear to protestors that he was not actually taking their demands seriously, so demonstrations once again intensified. on June 3, 2019, it was under Burhan's command that the Khartoum Massacre was committed, killing 118 protestors while they were participating in a sit-in at the military headquarters in Khartoum.

as the next few months went by, agreements came about to dissolve the TMC and form a Transitional Sovereignty Council based on a draft of a constitutional declaration. it was supposed to be that a military official would be the chairman for 21 months, then transitioning to a civilian chairman for the next 18 months- but Burhan staged a coup in October of 2021, and dissolved the council and effectively turned the Sudanese government back into a military junta, which was the cause of further protesting.

i want to emphasize the crimes and horrors of the SAF because they are often forgotten in these discussions due to the absolute atrocities committed by the RSF. there is no good guy here- both the SAF and the RSF are vying for dictatorial power. so let's talk about the RSF.

headed by genocidal war criminal Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known more widely as "Hemedti", the RSF formed around 2014 due to reorginization of the Janjaweed militias- which were the militias that formed across the Darfuri regions of southwestern Sudan to suppress demonstrations against Bashir's oppressive and racist regime which carried out the first genocide of Massalit and other ethnically non-Arab peoples across Darfur in the early 2000s. so to be succinct- the RSF has direct roots in dictatorial suppression of Sudanis protesting against ethnic cleansing, genocide, and oppression.

for around a decade, the RSF and SAF were different factions of the Sudanese military- both have their roots and a pattern of supporting dictatorial violence and anti-Black genocide. and, on April 15, 2023, these two dictatorial Arab-colonialist powers began fighting out of the blue. fighting has been most intense around Khartoum, the central state and capital city of Sudan, where now an estimated 35% of its residents have been forced to flee, with the rest trapped in the middle of an active war zone.

the RSF has been actively continuing the genocide of non-Arab Darfuri Sudanis that its predecessor the Janjaweed committed 20 years prior. they have been consistently launching attacks against Massalit villages in Darfur and El Geneina. Recently, they have completely ethnically cleansed several Massalit villages, killing hundreds in each one of them. in addition, they are committing so many other war crimes, like sexual violence, blocking access to humanitarian aid, occupying civilian homes and kicking the residents out, along with blatant ethnic cleansing campaigns, mass murder, and targeting of civilians.

but don't think that this is a 'civil war' as many are calling it. a civil war is an internal dispute, but this is far from that. both the SAF and the RSF are supported by external powers, namely the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, who all provide funding to these groups IN EXCHANGE FOR SUDANESE RESOURCES LIKE GOLD AND OIL. this is, ultimately, not just some random war between two different military groups- it is a war funded by and for foreign colonial powers who have a vested interest in colonizing Sudan for its resources. as an example- the UAE's- and especially Dubai's- infamous gold and jewelry industry, is only made possible by the fact that the UAE illegally smuggles 80% of Sudan's gold- they fund this by sending weapons AND SOLDIERS to the RSF. Several of the gold mines in Sudan are owned and operated by the Russian government.

all of this, both the 'internal' AND the external, colonial aspects of this war and genocide, has led to the world's current WORST humanitarian crisis. not only do LOW estimates place the total murdered in the past year at 150,000, but out of Sudan's population of nearly 47 million, over half (25 million) are in severe need of humanitarian aid, and of those 25 million, over half are children. fighting between the RSF and SAF has lead to severe blockage of aid, and the UN's initial proposed budget of $1.5 billion in April of 2023 has not only not increased to accommodate the severe worsening of the crisis, but ALSO has not even been funded 20%.

2.5 MILLION PEOPLE ARE EXPECTED TO STARVE TO DEATH IN SUDAN BY THIS FUCKING SEPTEMBER. THAT IS LESS THAN 2 MONTHS AWAY.

additionally, due to both western colonization and the Sudanese governments' deliberate cutting of internet access across the entirety of Sudan, there is a huge lack of the proper infrastructure for generating awareness and spreading videos and info from on the ground in Sudan. this means that not only are people unable to effectively crowdfund support to leave, but they are also barred from accessing social media to spread awareness, and they're unable to contact loved ones outside of Sudan most of the time.

also, Sudan is HUGE- in order for displaced people to escape fighting, they usually have to walk, on foot, for hundreds of miles, often across literal deserts, with extremely little access to water. there has also been a surge of internally displaced people dying due to illness and scorpion stings in displacement camps. 70% of Sudan's hospitals have stopped functioning entirely. and even if they DO make it to a neighboring country, most of the options there are just as bad, if not worse- Egypt is extremely anti-Black, and doesn't allow work permits to most Black refugees, meaning they are relegated to being houseless and jobless if they go to Egypt- and westward in Chad, there is also crisis with food and resources, so the government of Chad quite literally can not materially support anymore Sudanese refugees. In South Sudan, there is also conflict, war, and crisis, and in Ethiopia, where the genocide is taking place in Tigray, the government is extremely hostile to Sudanese refugees. there are currently more than 6,000 Sudanese refugees stranded in the forests because of the hostilities they faced while in UNHCR camps.

and everyday that we're not doing something, this genocide, war, and humanitarian crisis is getting worse. doing something starts with being educated. i urge y'all to look more into this, don't just take what i'm saying and roll with it- truly learn and listen to Sudanese activists on this. i highly recommend following these accounts on Instagram:

@/red_maat , @/bsonblast , @/sudansolidaritycollective, @/forsudaneseliberation, @/darfurwomenaction, @/liberatesudan, @/zzeirra, @/yousraelbagir, @/modathirzainalabdeen, @/sdn.world, @/nasalsudan, @/sudanuntold, @/kandakamagazine, and @/almigdadhassan0

IF ANYTHING I'VE SAID IS INACCURATE, PLEASE LET ME KNOW!

i'd like to spread this post for some education. could you reblog this @decolonize-the-left @incorrectmadrigalfamilyquotes @homoidiotic @heritageposts @el-shab-hussein

@fairuzfan @palipunk @silicacid @sissa-arrows @apollos-olives @

@northgazaupdates @our-queer-experience @intersexfairy @genderqueerdykes

[parasiticstars]

@wasabikitcat my sincerest apologies if you didn’t want this posted, I’ll take it down ASAP if you ask, but you’d summarized my ramble perfectly

And we both know people will be like “but they deserved it”.

Therein lies the rub— what are our boundaries for when people deserve it? What nebulous boundaries account for such disrespect? Yes, it’s a show of the sheer pent-up disgust we (general we) feel about the ultra rich, and the dumbassery they do when they could actually do something important, but as aforementioned, I feel it’s a sign of some sort of moral decay to society in general.

And think about it. Look at the post above this. Some people in the government decided war refugees were part of those undeserving of basic decency too. 700 of them.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so shocked at the ages-old idea of someone having to earn basic decency/respect (or at least deserve not having a gruesome death actively wished upon) being perpetuated by the next generation that claims to be more empathetic and better than the ones before them. I’m not asking for mourning or sympathy for the ones who died on that submersible, but bare basic human decency— even if not for them, but for the despair their families are in.

We can hate the rich and wish such a pointless death didn’t have to happen at the same time.

hey friendly reminder that “the loss of any human life is an inherent tragedy” and “the ≤1% paying a quarter of a mil. a head and signing a contract that explicitly mentions ‘death’ to disturb a mass grave while shoved in a literal bluetooth cheap-ass metal cylinder made by a company that eschews safety got exactly what they signed up for” AND “we shouldn’t have wasted taxpayer money to find a crumpled up Pringle’s can during several refugee crises” are all opinions that can and should co-exist.

Of course, we shouldn’t be so gleeful in their horrific deaths, especially there was a literal teenager that didn’t even want to go in there. Internet anonymity be damned, it’s the death of basic empathy. And of course, we should rightfully be outraged that watching a bunch of ultra-rich blow their money to do something objectively incredibly stupid (to a MASS GRAVE with human fucking bone dust and preserved shoes, I cannot stress enough) is what’s hitting headlines and what people care about.

However, if you have any sort of basic human decency and a morality view more complex than that of a six year old, I’m sure you can easily reconcile all three valid opinions.

[ms-demeanor]

Friends, I think we need to talk about Covid.

I want to get a few caveats out there before I start:

I am aware that there are people who need to exercise extreme caution about Covid; I live with someone who has two solid organ transplants and who is at the most immune compromised level of immune compromised. *I* have to be extremely cautious about covid.

Masking does prevent a certain level of transmission, and people who think they may have covid should mask and people who are concerned that they may be at high risk for covid should mask.

You should be vaccinated and boosted with the most recent vaccines that are available to you; covid is highly transmissible and very serious, you do not want to get covid and if you do get covid you don't want it to be severe and if you do get covid you don't want to give someone else covid and up-to-date vaccinations are the best way to reduce transmission and help to prevent severe cases of Covid.

We should be testing before going to any gatherings, and informing people if we test positive after gatherings, and testing if we suspect we have been exposed.

It is bullshit that there aren't good protections for workers who have covid; you should not be expected to go to work when you are testing positive

It is bullshit that people who are testing positive are not isolating for other reasons; if you have Covid you should not be going out and exposing other people to it even if you are experiencing mild symptoms or no symptoms.

We do need better ventilation systems for many kinds of spaces. Schools need better ventilation, restaurants need better ventilation, doctor's offices and hospitals and office buildings need better ventilation and better ventilation can reduce covid transmission.

I want to make it clear that Covid is real and there are real steps that individuals and systems can take to prevent transmission, and that there are systems that are exerting pressures that needlessly expose people to covid (the fact that you can lose your job if you don't come in when you're testing positive, mainly; also the fact that covid rapid tests should be ubiquitous and cheap/free and are not).

All of that being said: I'm seeing some posts circulating about how we're at an extremely high level of transmission and the REAL pandemic is being hidden from us and, friends, I'm pretty sure that is just incorrect and we're spreading misinformation.

I'm thinking of this video in particular, in which the claim is made that "your mystery illness is covid" in spite of negative tests. The guy in the video says that there's nothing else that millions of people could be getting a day, and that he predicted this because a wastewater spike in December meant that there was a huge spike in cases.

I've also seen people saying that deaths are where they were in 2021-2022, and that we're still at "a 9/11 a week" of excess deaths and friends, I'm not seeing great evidence for any of these claims.

I know that we (in the US, which is where the numbers I'm going to be citing are from) feel abandoned by the CDC and the fact that tracking cut off in May of 2023. But that only cut off for the federal tracking.

I live in LA county and LA county sure as shit is still tracking Covid.

If you want a clearer picture, you can see the daily case count over time compared to the daily death count:

Okay, you might say, but that's just LA.

Alright, so here's Detroit:

Right, but maybe that's CDC data and you don't trust the CDC at this point.

Okay, here's fatalities in New York tracked through New York's state data collection:

It's harder to toggle around the site for South Dakota, but you can compare their cases and hospitalizations and deaths for early 2022

To cases and hospitalizations and deaths from early 2024

And see that there's really no comparison.

Okay, you might say, but people are testing less. If they're testing less of course we're not seeing spikes, and they're testing less because fewer tests are available.

Alright, people are definitely testing less than they were in 2021 and 2022. Hospitalization for Covid is probably the most clear metric because you know those people have covid for sure, the couldn't not test for it.

Here are hospitalizations over time for LA:

Here are hospitalizations over time for New York:

As vaccination rates have gone up, cases, deaths, and hospitalizations have gone down. It IS clear that there are case spikes in the winter, when it is cold and people are indoors in poorly ventilated spaces and people are more susceptible to respiratory infections as a result of cold air weakening the protection offered by our mucous membranes, and that is something that we will have to take precautions about for the forseeable future, just as we should have always been taking similar precautions during flu season.

So I want to go point-by-point through some of the arguments made in that video because I'm seeing a bunch of people talking about how "THEY" don't want you to know about the virus surge and buds that is just straight up conspiracism.

So okay, first off, most of what that video is based on is spikes in wastewater data, not spikes in cases. This is because people don't trust CDC data on cases, but I'd say to maybe check out your regional data on cases. I don't actually trust the CDC that much, but I know people who do tracking of hospitalizations in LA county, I trust them a lot more. Wastewater data does correlate with increases in cases, but this "second largest spike of the entire pandemic" thing is misleading; wastewater reporting is pretty highly variable and you can't just accept that a large spike in covid in wastewater means that we're in just as bad a place in the pandemic as we were in 2022. We simply have not seen the surge of hospitalizations and deaths that we would expect to see in the weeks following that spike in wastewater data if wastewater data was reflective of community transmission.

The next claim is that "there is nothing else that is infecting millions of people a day" and covid isn't doing that either. The highest daily case rates were in January of 2021 and they were in the 865k a day range, which is ridiculously high but isn't millions of cases a day.

But what we can see is that when people are tested by their doctors for Covid, RSV, and the Flu, more tests are coming back positive for the Flu. Covid causes more hospitalizations than the other two illnesses, but to be honest what the people in the video are describing - lightheadedness, dizziness, exhaustion - just sound like pretty standard symptoms of everything from covid to the cold to allergies. There are lots of things your mystery illness could be.

The video goes on to talk about the fact that people aren't testing, and why their tests may be coming back negative and I'd like to point out that the same things are all true of Flu or RSV tests. People might be getting tested too early or too late; getting a negative test for the flu isn't a good reason to assume you've got covid, getting a negative test for covid isn't a good reason to assume you've got the flu, and testing for viruses as a whole is imperfect. There are hundreds of viruses that could be the common cold; there are multiple viruses that can cause bronchitis; there are multiple viruses that can cause pneumonia, and you're not going to test for all of these things the moment you start feeling sick.

He then recommends testing for multiple days if you have symptoms and haven't had a positive test (fine) and talks about the location of the tests (less fine). Don't use your rapid tests to swab your throat or cheek unless it specifically says that they are designed to do so. Test based on the instructions in the packet.

He points out that the tests probably still pick up on the virus because they're not testing for the spike protein, they're testing for the RNA (good info!)

The video then discusses something that I think is really key to this paranoia about the "mystery illnesses" - he talks about how covid changes and weakens your immune system (a statement that should come with many caveats about severity and vulnerability and that we are still researching that) and then says that it makes you more susceptible to strep or mono and that "things that used to clear in a day or two now hit you really hard."

And that's where I think this anxiety is coming from.

Strep throat lasts anywhere from three days to a week. A cold takes about a week to clear. The flu lasts about a week and can knock you on your ass with exhaustion for weeks depending on how bad you get it. Did you get a cough with your cold? Expect that to take anywhere from three to eight weeks to clear up.

I think that people are thinking "i got a bad virus and felt really sick for a week and haven't gotten my energy back" but that just sounds like a bad cold. That sounds like a potent allergy attack. That doesn't even sound like a bad flu (I got a bad flu in 2009 and thought i was going to straight-up die I had a fever of 103+ for three days and felt like shit for three days on either side of that and took six weeks to feel more like myself again).

Getting sick sucks. It really, really sucks. But if you're getting sick and you're testing for covid and it's coming back negative after you tested a few times, it's almost certainly not covid.

The video then says "until someone provides evidence that it's not covid, it should be assumed to be covid because we have record levels of covid it's that simple" but that's not simple. We don't have record levels of covid and he hasn't proved it. We have record high levels of wastewater reports of covid, which correlates with covid cases but the spike in wastewater noted in december didn't see a spike with a corresponding magnitude of cases in terms of either hospitalizations or deaths, which is what we'd have seen if we had actual record numbers of covid.

He says that if you want to ignore this, you'll get sick with covid, and that about 30-40% of the US just got sick with covid in the last four months (which is a RIDICULOUSLY unevidenced claim).

He says that we need to create a new normal that takes covid into account, which means masking more often and testing more often and making choices about risk-avoidant behaviors.

Now, I don't disagree with that last statement, but he prefaces the statement with "it doesn't necessarily mean lockdown" and that's where I think the alarmism and paranoia is really visible here. We are so, so far away from "lockdown" type levels that it's absurd to discuss lockdown here.

What I'm seeing right now is people who are chronically ill, people who are immune compromised, and people who are experiencing long covid (which may not be distinct from other post-viral syndromes from severe cases of flu, etc, but which may be more severe or more notable because of the prevalence of covid) are talking about feeling abandoned and attacked and left behind by society because covid is still out there, and still at extremely high levels.

I am seeing people who feel abandoned and attacked because the lgbtq+ events they are attending don't require masking. I am seeing people who are claiming that it is eugenicist that their schools don't have a negative test policy anymore.

And this comes together into two really disconcerting trends that I've been observing online for a while.

The claim that the pandemic is still as bad as it's ever been and in fact may be worse but we can't know that because "they" (the CDC, the government, capitalist institutions that want you back in the office, the university industrial complex that wants your dorm room dollars) are covering up the numbers and

Significant grievance at the fact that people are acting like number one is not true and are putting you at risk either out of thoughtlessness (because they don't realize they're putting you at risk) or malice (because they don't care if the sick die).

And those things are a recipe for disaster.

I think I've pretty robustly addressed point one; I don't think that there's good evidence that there's a secretly awful surge of covid that nobody is talking about. I think that there are some people who are being alarmist about covid who are basing all of their concern on wastewater numbers that have not held up as the harbinger of a massive wave of infections.

So let's talk about point number two and JK Rowling.

Barnes and Noble is not attacking you when it puts up a Hogwarts Castle display in the lobby. Your favorite youtuber isn't trying to hurt you when they offhandedly mention Harry Potter.

If you let every mention of Harry Potter or every person who enjoys that media franchise wound you, you are going to spend a lot of your time wounded.

People are not liking Harry Potter at you.

Okay.

People are also not not wearing masks at you.

You may be part of a minority group that experiences the potential for outsized harm as a result of majority groups engaging in perfectly reasonable behaviors.

There are kind, well-meaning, sensible people who go out every day and do something that may cause you harm and it's not because they want to hurt you or they don't care about whether you live or die, it is because they are making their own risk assessments based on their own lives and making the very reasonable assumption that people who are more concerned about covid than they are will take precautions to keep themselves safe.

We are not at a place in the pandemic where it is sensible to expect people with no symptoms of illness to mask in public as a matter of course or to present evidence of a recent negative test when entering a public building in their day-to-day life.

I think now is a really good time to sit down and ask yourself how you expect things to be with covid as an endemic part of our viral ecosystem. I think now is a good time to ask yourself what risk realistically looks like for you and for people who are unlike you. I think now is a good time to consider what would feel "safe" for you and how you could accomplish feeling safe as you navigate the world.

I'm probably going to continue masking in most indoor spaces for years. Maybe forever. There are accommodations that SHOULD be afforded to people who have to take more precautions than others (remote learning, remote visits, remote work, etc.), and we should demand those kinds of accommodations.

But it is going to poison you from the inside out if you are perpetually angry that people who don't have the same medical limitations as you are happy that they get to go shopping with their faces uncovered.

So now I want to talk to you about my father in law.

My father in law had a bone marrow transplant in 2015. That's the most immune compromised you can get without having your organs swapped out.

The care sheet for him after the transplant was a little overwhelming. The list of foods he couldn't eat was intimidating and the limitations on where he could go was depressing. It cautioned against going to large events, it recommended outdoor gatherings where possible but only if he could avoid sunlight and was somewhere with no history of valley fever. It said that he should wear masks indoors any time he was someplace with poor ventilation and that he should avoid contact with anyone who had an illness of any kind, taking special note to avoid children and anyone recently vaccinated for measles.

It was, in short, pretty much what someone immune compromised would need to do to try to avoid a viral infection. Sensible. Reasonable. Wash your hands and social distance; wear masks in sensitive contexts and don't spend time in enclosed places with people who have a communicable illness.

This is what life was always going to be like for people who are severely immune compromised, and it was always going to be incumbent upon the person with the illness to figure out how to operate in a society that is not built with them in mind.

It is not the job of every parent I encounter to tell me whether their child has been vaccinated against measles or chicken pox in the last three months. That isn't something that people need to do as part of their everyday life. However it IS my responsibility to check with the parents I'm hanging out with whether their children have been vaccinated against measles or chicken pox in the last three months so I know if it's safe for my immune compromised spouse to be around them.

If you want an environment in which you feel safe from covid, at this point in the pandemic (when the virus is endemic and not spreading rapidly as far as we can see from case counts) it is your responsibility to take the steps necessary to make you feel safe. Some of those steps will involve advocating for safety improvements in public spaces (again, indoor ventilation needs to be better and I'm personally pretty extreme about vaccination requirements; these are things we should be discussing in our school board meetings and at our workplaces), some of those steps will involve advocating for worker protections, guaranteed sick time, and the right to healthcare. But some of the things you're going to need to do to feel safe are going to come down to you.

If you are concerned about communicable diseases you have to be realistic about the fact that our society doesn't go out of its way to prevent communicable diseases - norovirus among food service workers pre-pandemic is pretty clear evidence of that. You are going to have to be proactive about your safety rather than expecting the world to act like Covid is at 2021-2022 levels when it is measurably not.

[kitabasis]

OC-Tober

Day 2: New OC

Kjell (his full name is Ketill, but he rarely goes by that)

I don’t really have time to explain everything about this setting’s lore, but basically he was a homeless kid in an Amsterdam-ish Copenhagen-ish city who got taken in by a criminal organization, along with a bunch of other kids. The kids that showed the most promise got experimented on to try to make artificial mages. The kids who survived (and didn’t turn into monsters—that’s a thing that can happen I’m just not elaborating on everything because my god I have a lot of lore) and became artificial mages (of which only four did) got a bunch of physical and mental symptoms from that.

Also they got used as living weapons so they got even more issues from that.

Kjell is incredibly loyal to the organization because they saved him when he was at his weakest, so in turn he feels like he owes them everything, and also doesn’t want to ever be weak again.

The main parts of his experimentation side effects, compounded by his methods of coping with trauma, are: being changeable (especially to mimic others); passive; and having his ability to feel emotions and even physical sensations, as well as his sense of self, eroded over time. It also reduces his body temperature, which means he always has to wear layers, because even though he won’t feel the pain much, he can still get frostbite.

Oh, also his hair looks perpetually wet-type-limp and shimmers like oil slick.

Despite having little sense of self and frankly not considering himself human in anything other than most of his body, he does want to still feel things and not completely lose himself. As a result—and again, as a coping mechanism for his fucking terrible childhood—he is incredibly obsessed with adrenaline rushes, and thus is incredibly bloodthirsty and battle-horny in an attempt to feel alive.

One of the few, solid sense of self things he’s really held onto is that he’s an incredibly loyal person. Combined with the fact that he can barely perceive his own conscience at this point, he tends to delegate all his decisions to superiors and those he trusts, because, again, he can barely feel anything. 

He’s also just extremely affable and friendly and chill, even to people he’s been assigned to kill. Some of it is—say it with me—a coping mechanism for trauma, but also he’s just like, a really friendly dude, and he doesn’t have anything against most of the people he kills, and he’s having a fun time fighting, so why would he be rude?

He’s one of those super traumatized, super mentally ill people who’s incredibly open about all their issues and really nonplussed about describing horrible things that happened to them.

He tends to act flirtatious and horny as a bit but in actually he has basically no sex drive or libido because he can BARELY FEEL STAB WOUNDS LET ALONE HORNY

[trans-axolotl]

last year i started trying to write an article where i documented every reported instance of psych abuse that happened in 2023 that i could find and had to stop halfway through because it was so fucking horrific. and that was only the shit that had been reported, that i could find in databases and in local news articles. the numbers and stories of psych abuse were staggering and what was worse is that i knew it was only a fraction of the actual abuse that happened that year, and that the actual number was so much worse. And even in just that fraction of news articles, in the half the states I searched for: there were dozens of deaths. Over a hundred different reported instances of rape. Over 300 different reported instances of illegal use of restraint and seclusion.

And i just keep thinking, over and over again, about how that is just a fraction of the reality. It is almost impossible to report psych abuse as it's happening when you're locked up in a psych facility where you don't have independent access to a phone, you can get cut off from your friends and family, and your access to a "grievance and reporting process" depends entirely on the same people who are abusing you. Even after you get out, there are so many barriers. It is very, very difficult to get anyone to believe you as a credible witness once you get certain things written in your chart. Psych staff can point to your diagnoses, their documentation, and say a million fucking things to get away with abuse.

and sometimes it feels like no one gives a shit besides other psych survivors, other mad/mentally ill/neurodivergent/disabled people. this is the same shit that happened in asylums, that happened in the "reformed" institutions of the 50s, that happened in group homes, that happens in psych wards, that happens in residential treatment. it hasn't fucked changed--it's just gotten new names, hiding behind the labels of "evidence based care" and "least restrictive alternative." when i really start to think about it, i get so fucking angry and full of grief for everyone i love who is still fucking locked up in these places. it just cements my determination to never shut up about this because we need to look out for each other and take care of each other, and i do not take my freedom to even be out here and advocating for granted.

[fairuzfan]

Also re:necropolitics of israel (click)

A few days ago there were reports of Israeli soldiers "returning" bodies of martyrs they took like just straight up from Gaza. Here is a report about bodies being stolen from al-Shifa (click).

The director of Al-Shifa had reported the bodies being stolen back in November (click) before his arrest. The hospital workers mentioned not knowing why the soldiers would do that. The speculation of the photo-op arose because the photo-op of October 7th within Israel happened a month and a half after October 7th, after the Al-Shifa raid. People (Palestinians) noted that the level of violence done to the bodies seemed similar to what they had been seeing with the bombs in Gaza, and found it hard to believe that Hamas could inflict that much damage. There was a thread that was examining this idea but I haven't found it as it's been a bit. If I find it, I'll comment on this post.

But even then, Israel routinely makes corpses serve out their sentences or even outright steals them for the sake of enacting psychological torture onto the relatives of the martyr (click). The burial process is an essential step in mourning and grief, which means by withholding the bodies, they ensure that the family is unable to recover emotionally from the death of their loved one nor are they allowed to move on. This is essentially a form of ensuring that people are unable to resist as the emotional toll this takes on them is quite high.

A variety of reports and testimonies are linked in this article regarding the harvesting and removal of organs throughout the years by Israel (click). The most damning of the evidence is a testimony by Dr. Meira Weiss in her book "Over Their Dead Bodies." The article has a translated passage from Hebrew about the period at the turn of the century and their practices then (roughly 1996-2002):

“They would take corneas, skin, and heart valves, while noting that non-professionals would not notice the absence of these organs as they would place something plastic in place of the corneas and ‘take’ the skin from the back so that the family wouldn’t see it. In addition, the bodies of detained martyrs are used in medical colleges at Israeli universities for research purposes.” Weiss confirmed that “in the first Intifada, the army effectively allowed the institute to extract organs from Palestinians under a military procedure that required the autopsy of a Palestinian prisoner. The autopsy procedure was accompanied by organ removal, which was used by the Israeli Skin Bank established in 1985 to treat burns suffered by Israeli soldiers. This was after the Chief Rabbinate Council issued a ruling legitimizing it, which led to saving the lives of many Israelis who were injured during attacks on Palestinian citizens, continuous assaults, and wars — at the expense of Palestinian martyrs, according to specialized Israeli medical sources for burn treatment.”

It's worthy to note: as an occupying force especially, Israel should not be doing ANYTHING with these bodies and just returning them to the families. I've seen some people say "they didn't JUST harvest Palestinians' organs, they also harvested Israeli organs." It doesn't matter. They are an occupying force that enacts systematic violence on Palestinians especially and within this context, anything Israel does towards Palestinians is a targeted, racialized violence. It is widely known that Israel denies crimes it has committed until many, many years, especially from during the Nakba, such as well poisoning.

People provide evidence that organs can't be used after a certain point in time.... in this context (October 2023-December 2023), it's not about whether or not the organs were used for anything. It is specifically for the purpose of body desecration which Israeli soldiers especially have not been shy about. Here is a report during the bulldozer massacre in which people report that Israeli soldiers run over bodies for no other reason than desecration (click).

Also, remember the grave desecration that happened a few days ago? It was reported that they had stolen bodies believed to belong to young Palestinian activists then (click). This is widely known as 'necroviolence' on Palestinian bodies in order to humiliate them (click).

You cannot remove the context of an oppressive force (Israel) that is documented to have disrespected graves and bodies. You must analyze it within this context, not any others. Withholding bodies of Palestinians, no matter what they did while they were alive, is a form of disrespect and oppression on a subjugated population. To deny that this happens and to attribute it to antisemitism is not only disrespectful of Palestinians' mourning rights, but also an effort to remold the narrative into one of "Jewish people against Palestinians" by emphasizing the Jewishness of the occupying force rather than focusing on... you know... the fact that they're an occupying force known to enact violence on Palestinian martyrs.

[accumulastation]

I am thinking today about the meaning of suffering, and the diverse trials humans experience.

What is the point