#covid mass firing

[vague-humanoid]

Rebekah Jones has taken to social media to express her outrage after her son’s arrest for posting a meme on Snapchat mocking Police.

Rebekah Jones, a data scientist fired from the Florida Department of Health for refusing to manipulate data on the COVID-19 pandemic, has been in the news again.

This time, her 13-year-old autistic son has been arrested for posting a meme in a Snapchat group that mocked Police for their inaction during mass shootings.

@ubernegro @startorrent02 @chrisdornerfanclub @socialistexan @el-shab-hussein

[missfertileandferal]

lowkey super anxious to post this but im missing you guys so much <3

i plan on a solid return soon! i just wanted to get off my chest whats been going on:

Earlier this year, I dealt with an awful situation of my kinky stuff leaking into real life. My insane coworkers found my content and as I was serving on the clock, proceeded to show my customers and all the staff. then i was fired. Im traumatized to say the least but I over came it.

Come mid summer, I planned so step back for a little bit to move apartments no more than a couple weeks. What happened was both my job (i worked with close family friends so stressful) and a really bad situation with a companion found about my kink stuff. i never expected or was prepared for the humiliation, deception, and pain that would come from my fetish journey

My last job was such a loss. I had been blessed with a cute job as a medical office assistant without any credentials (i wasnt doing anything out of my capabilities of course) it was so peaceful and perfect compared to the drama of my last gig plus working with familiar people felt just like home honestly. Then I got covid. I was out for 2 weeks, at the same time i was moving into my new place. I tried calling them back to let them know I was cleared and ready to get back to work. I received a humiliating text. I was dismissed. That turned into a crippling anxiety of them confessing to my family what I do in my past time

The following week I was met with more disappointment. Ive said this before but I dont have many people in my corner. It used to suck to admit but I stand with pride now knowing those who are around me love me 100% regardless what I do or dont do.

One of my dearest dearest friends, who I had previously communicated what I do (not to a full extent they always respected it) called me very dramatically only a week before I planned to see them (they live across the country and we ALWAYS visit each other when in our cities) It still doesnt feel real tbh, the call only last 40 seconds. I was informed that “I was going on the wrong path” and could no longer be associated with. That’s alls that happened. 8 years down the drain

I was informed by outside sources that my hometown opps had gotten hold of my content (who my ex friend still associate with but I despise bc they’ve always been obsessed with me but in a bad way) and they had confronted him about being my friend. he pussied out and cut me off. they also mass reported my last instagram account😡🤬

I had to take some time back to seriously debate if these loses were worth it. I was swallowed with so much anxiety knowing that an uncomfortable amount of people in my zip code knew what ive been up to. its already complicated being into this and while at the same time not being in a plus size body. thats another conversation tho

That debate has turned into me accepting these events as the universe weeding out people/things that no longer serve me. This has shown peoples true colors, if I am not to be associated with because of my sexual freedom, body acceptance, and undoing of fat phobia then PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE.

Im recovering ❤️‍🩹 but my heart and hedonism can’t be helped. i love being a kinky lil gut slut. its helped me grow in so many ways from acceptance to living an esoteric dreamy life. i love all the hot girls and guys that i see on my timeline. they hype me up and vise versa. i love this little corner of the internet. my fellow freaks keep me going. i’ve been so on and off online but every time i come back to the sweetest words and support. thank you guys for your patience and consideration

my anxiety is to the roof as im typing. its crazy that these privacy problems havent been within the actual community. funny. if your still reading this I love you extra. ill be streaming on ig on my comeback day!

new ig acc @missfertileandferal💘

[999moreyears]

dsahboard simulator

mutual 1 : (picture of a band member) i wont him ,#i think i have covid

mutual in law: i think im a system

mutual 2 :(reblogging fanart of a fandom you have do idea even existed)

mutual 3: blocked tag

mutual 3: blocked tag

mutual 3: blocked tag

mutual 4: i think i need to kill . that would fix me

mutual 5:(picture of minecraft character) I MISS HIMMMM

mutual 6: do ouy think they explored each others bodies (picture of characters from a fandom you know nothing about) #liveblog

mutual 7: IM FINALLY FREE

mutual 8: just a little doodle lol ^_^ (most beautiful artwork that has ever graced my eyes)

mutual 1: (mass rb of every picture of a band member to ever exist on the internet)

mutual 7:I BEAT THE SCARED ALLEGATIONS

mutual 9: i need to get pregnant with his firstborn so i can offer it up to a demon for magic powers :/ (picture of minecraft youtuber)

mutual 3: blocked tag

mutual 3: blocked tag

mutual 7:IM SO NORMAL RIGHT NOW

mutual 1:(picture of inbox, from anonymous : i think there is something wrong with you) so meanies to me forever :(

mutual 10: i need him biblically

mutual 3: blocked tag

mutual 3: blocked tag

mutual 8: oh yea :p i forgor 2 post this also (drawing of a character praying , the hands are perfect)

mutual 4: I NEED OUT OF THIS DAMN HOUSEEEE!!!!!

mutual 10: do you think when he was pregnant he had really bad morning sickness yes or no

mutual 6: i need to light them on fire I HATE THEM (screenshot of characters mid-frame) #liveblog

mutual 5:( webweave of a character from a fandom youre not in anymore)

[anarchopuppy]

FESTIVALS OF RESISTANCE: ORGANIZE TO OPPOSE TRUMP

January 11

Chicago, Illinois: A training about fighting deportations, as part of the week-long “Regroup and Strategize” series.

Sacramento, California: “Call to Action” conference and gathering, featuring a “day of skillshares and trainings” along with workshops, panels, and a keynote presentation from anarchist author Dean Spade. You can find more information and a full schedule here.

January 18

Atlanta, Georgia: A mass mobilization and day of resistance on the two-year anniversary of the murder of Tortuguita.

Brooklyn, New York: A community gathering including workshops.

Carbondale, Ilinois: A community event, currently in the planning stages.

Cleveland, Ohio: 3 pm Coventry Peace Park, 5 pm Rhizome House

Dayton, Ohio: 5 pm, Union Hall, 313 South Jefferson; a community discussion followed by music

Durham, North Carolina: The Triangle Festival of Resistance, a weekend-long festival focused on community defense, resilience, and liberation. For updates and information about how to contribute, consult Triangle Radical Events.

Gary, Indiana: A demonstration against mass deportations.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin: 6 pm at Nice Hair, with workshops on trans defense, migrant defense, self-defense, and movement defense

Minneapolis, Minnesota: A screening of Fell in Love with Fire with letter writing to prisoners and a discussion about the next phase of struggle at the Seward Cafê at 6:30 pm.

Portland, Oregon: A gathering in a COVID-safer, sober space. Families with and without children are welcome to attend. Food will be provided. You can also find updates about event organizing in Portland here.

Providence, Rhode Island: 3 pm - 9+ pm, AS220

Oakland, California: A march to a community assembly, departing from Wilma Chan park next to the Lake Merritt BART at 1 pm.

Olympia, Washington: The People’s March, 12 pm, departing from Heritage Park; followed by the Festival of Resistance.

Phoenix, Arizona: 3-8 pm, Margaret T. Hance Park, featuring a Really Really Free Market, food, literature tables, and a number of educational workshops

Richmond, Virginia: A community assembly involving panel discussions, workshops, and food, followed by a benefit concert.

Events are also being organized in Salt Lake City, Utah and elsewhere.

January 19

Chapel Hill, NC: The second day of the Triangle Festival of Resistance.

January 20

Indianapolis, Indiana: A Mutual Aid Convergence at Ujamaa Community Bookstore.

January 21

Arcata, California: A march departing from Arcata Plaza at noon—against Donald Trump, in solidarity with Palestine, and in memory of Tortuguita.

January 25

Tampa Bay, Florida: A community gathering and organizing fair for “politics beyond the ballot box.” “Organize with your community to fight for transformative change! Connect with a local project from anti-capitalist orgs, labor and tenant unions, mutual aid orgs, and more!”

Click here for the call to action and most up-to-date list

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jay Kuo at The Status Kuo:

During his interview with Time Magazine, which once again named him “Person of the Year,” Donald Trump unsurprisingly said many startling things between his usual ramblings. Today I want to focus on one of them in particular: vaccines. Trump declared he is “going to do what’s good for the country.” When asked whether that includes getting rid of some vaccinations, Trump responded, “It could if I think it’s dangerous, if I think they are not beneficial,” but then added, “I don’t think it’s going to be very controversial in the end.” This is a stark departure from earlier assurances by anti-vax nut job RFK, Jr., who promised earlier that he would not take vaccines away from anyone who wants them. Now it seems the team he hopes to gather at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will propose a review of vaccine safety and, depending on the results, could possibly pull some critical ones from the market.

But could and would they really do something so crazy as ban life-saving shots like the Hepatitis B, measles mumps and rubella, and polio vaccines? Trump’s interview set off alarms among health experts, especially epidemiologists. And it raises many questions, not the least of which is exactly how vaccines might be reviewed by the government to confirm if they are “dangerous” or “not beneficial,” if and when RFK, Jr. is confirmed as head of HHS. Adding fuel to this dumpster fire is a report out this morning by the New York Times that RFK, Jr.’s lawyer, Aaron Siri, is an anti-vax crusader who has previously petitioned the FDA to revoke approval for polio and other vaccines. Trump’s statements imply that he really meant what he said on the campaign trail about letting RFK, Jr. go “wild on health.” And with zealots like Siri helping to shape national health policy, we are dangerously close to returning to an era where childhood diseases, once considered largely eradicated, could make a deadly comeback.

[...]

Anyone familiar with the way anti-vax groups regularly challenge FDA approvals, Covid mandates, scientists and drug manufacturers likely feels a rock in their gut reading this. First, it appears that Trump has taken up a dangerous and false claim that purports to link childhood vaccinations to autism. That theory has been widely debunked, but it has managed to produce mass hysteria for two decades. And now it has the bully pulpit of the Oval Office behind it. The fact that the president-elect agrees with this discredited theory, and is appointing someone to head HHS who actively pushes it, is troubling in the extreme.

[...]

An anti-vax zealot gets his shot

Aaron Siri probably can’t believe his good fortune. He has made his legal career out of representing anti-vax clients, including a group called the Informed Consent Action Network, an organization whose founder is also a close Kennedy ally. In that capacity, as the Times reports, as recently as 2022 Siri petitioned the FDA to revoke approval of the polio vaccine. That’s right, he wants to see the polio vaccine withdrawn, even though it has saved countless children from death or lifetime disability. Siri has gone after 13 other vaccines, too, including the Hepatitis B vaccine, and has crusaded around the country to lift Covid mandates. His tactic is to impugn the integrity of the scientists responsible for developing the vaccines and poke as many holes as he can into their product development, safety studies and approvals. He does this by playing on the preconceptions and fears of the conspiracy-minded, making otherwise harmless errors or oversights appear as massive and even intentional frauds upon the public. One critic of Siri’s crusades is Dr. Stanley Plotkin, the inventor of the vaccine that eliminated rubella in the 1960s. Before the vaccine, it was a disease that killed thousands of newborns. Siri deposed Plotkin in a lawsuit Siri had brought. After spending nine hours being grilled by Siri, Dr. Plotkin believes that putting Siri in any position of influence “would be a disaster.” Dr. Plotkin added, “I find him laughable in many ways — except, of course, that he’s a danger to public health.”

Siri still managed to put a target on Dr. Plotkin, however, by publishing snippets of that deposition online, along with those of one Dr. Kathryn Edwards, another noted inventor of vaccines. Siri had the help of an anti-vax documentary maker and podcaster, Del Bigtree—who is also RFK, Jr.’s former campaign communications director and founder of the Informed Consent Action Network. As a result, Drs. Plotkin and Edwards have been vilified by anti-vaxxers instead of celebrated for their stunning accomplishments.

“You’re taking the leaders in vaccinology,” Dr. Edwards told the Times, “the people that have spent their whole lives studying these vaccines and seeing their impact, you’re marginalizing and making them look like they are prostitutes of pharma.” Of great concern is how Siri is now working with RFK, Jr. to actively vet candidates for top positions at HHS. According to the Times, Siri has asked candidates about their view on vaccines, potentially setting up HHS to have a uniformly anti-vax agenda. RFK, Jr. and his advisors, like Siri and Bigtree, could succeed in having vaccines actually pulled from the market based on the “studies” they are demanding, the conclusions of which we can assume are pre-ordained. But even short of actually yanking important vaccines, the platforming of anti-vax conspiracies and disinformation will create widespread vaccine hesitancy, which could result in serious and deadly outbreaks.

History could repeat on a huge scale

We need only look at what RFK, Jr. did in Samoa to understand the extent of the damage and even death his views can cause. In 2019, the small island nation experienced a deadly outbreak of measles, with 5,700 infections out of a population of 200,000. Hospitals were full, and the country was in a state of emergency. In the end, 83 people died, most of them young children. But what had caused this outbreak? Childhood measles vaccinations rates plummeted from 90 percent in 2013 to just a third of all infants by 2019 due to a health scandal where nurses had improperly mixed the measles vaccine with the wrong liquid, resulting in two deaths. That incident opened the floodgates for vaccine misinformation driven by RFK, Jr. and his anti-vaccine non-profit, the Children’s Health Defense. At one point RFK, Jr. even sent the Samoan prime minister a letter suggesting the measles vaccine itself may have caused the outbreak. He falsely asserted that it had “failed to produce antibodies” in mothers sufficient to provide infants with immunity, that it perhaps provoked “the evolution of more virulent measles strains” and even that children who received the vaccine may have inadvertently spread the virus to other children.

[...]

There is still an opportunity to stop RFK’s confirmation, if the GOP-controlled Senate finds enough backbone and common sense. But time is running out to change minds and stand up to Trump. Meanwhile, RFK Jr.’s allies in the anti-vax movement, like Siri and Bigtree, are gearing up to unleash a true nightmare upon our health system.

This is very disturbing: the anti-vaxxer extremist movement is on the prowl, as both Donald Trump and RFK Jr. are making moves to potentially yank some vaccines off the market-- including the polio-- and champion the debunked lie that vaccines “cause” autism.

See Also:

Daily Kos: We got rid of polio with vaccines. RFK's lawyer wants to bring it back

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Precaratize bosses

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SUNDAY (Apr 21) in TORINO, then Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Combine Angelou's "When someone shows you who they are, believe them" with the truism that in politics, "every accusation is a confession" and you get: "Every time someone accuses you of a vice, they're showing you who they are and you should believe them."

Let's talk about some of those accusations. Remember the moral panic over the CARES Act covid stimulus checks? Hyperventilating mouthpieces for the ruling class were on every cable network, complaining that "no one wants to work anymore." The barely-submerged subtext was their belief that the only reason people show up for work is that they're afraid of losing everything – their homes, their kids, the groceries in their fridge.

This isn't a new development. Back when Clinton destroyed welfare, his justification was that "handouts" make workers lazy. The way to goad workers off their sofas (and the welfare rolls) and into jobs was to instill fear in them:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/welfare-childhood/555119/

This is also the firm belief of tech bosses: for them, mass tech layoffs are great news, because they terrorize the workers you don't fire, so that they'll be "extremely hardcore" and put in as many extra hours as the company demands, without even requiring any extra pay in return:

https://fortune.com/2022/10/06/elon-musk-jason-calacanis-return-to-office-gentlemens-layoffs-twitter/

Now, there's an obvious answer to the problem of no one taking a job at the wage being offered: just increase the offer. Capitalists claim to understand this. Uber will tell you that surge pricing "incentivizes drivers" to take to the streets by offering them more money to drive during busy times:

https://www.uber.com/blog/austin/providing-rides-when-they-are-most-needed/

(Note that while Uber once handed the lion's share of surge price premiums to drivers, these days, Uber just keeps the money, because they've entered the enshittification stage where drivers are so scared of being blacklisted that Uber can push them around instead of dangling carrots.)

(Also note that this logic completely fails when it comes to other businesses, like Wendy's, who briefly promised surge-priced hamburgers during busy times, but without even the pretense that the surge premium would be used to pay additional workers to rush to the restaurant and increase the capacity:)

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/feb/27/wendys-dynamic-surge-pricing

So bosses knew how to address their worker shortage: higher wages. You know: supply and demand. For bosses, the issue wasn't supply, it was price. A worker who earns $10/hour but makes the company $20 profit every hour is splitting the surplus 50:50 with their employer. The employer has overheads (rent on the shop, inventory, advertising and administration) that they have to pay out of their end of that surplus. But workers also have overheads: commuting costs, child-care, a professional wardrobe, and other expenses the worker incurs just so they can make money for their boss.

There's no iron law of economics that says the worker/boss split should be 50/50. Depending on the bargaining power of workers and their bosses, that split can move around a lot. Think of McDonald's and Walmart workers who work for wildly profitable corporate empires, but are so badly paid that they have to rely on food stamps. The split there is more like 10/90, in the boss's favor.

The pandemic changed the bargaining power. Sure, workers got a small cushion from stimulus checks, but they also benefited from changes in the fundamentals of the labor market. For example, millions of boomers just noped out of their jobs, forever, unwilling to risk catching a fatal illness and furious to realize that their bosses viewed that as an acceptable risk.

Bosses' willingness to risk their workers' lives backfired in another way: killing hundreds of thousands of workers and permanently disabling millions more. Combine the boomer exodus with the workers who sickened or died, and there's just fewer workers to go around, and so now those workers enjoy more bargaining power. They can demand a better split: say, 75/25, in their favor.

Remember the 2015 American Airlines strike, where pilots and flight attendants got a raise? The eminently guillotineable Citibank analyst Kevin Crissey declared: "This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers":

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/american-airlines-flight-attendants-bash-citi-analyst-who-put-shareholders-before-workers-14134309

Now, obviously, the corporation doesn't want to offer a greater share of its surplus to its workforce, but it certainly can do so. The more it pays its workers, the less profitable it will be, but that's capitalism, right? Corporations try to become as profitable as they can be, but they can't just decree that their workers must work for whatever pay they want to offer (that's serfdom).

Companies also don't get to dictate that we must buy their goods at whatever price they set (the would be a planned economy, not a market economy). There's no law that says that when the cost of making something goes up, its price should go up, too. A business that spends $10 to make a widget you pay $15 for has a $5 margin to play with. If the business's costs go up to $11, they can still charge $15 and take $1 less in profits. Or they can raise the price to $15.50 and split the difference.

But when businesses don't face competition, they can make you eat their increased costs. Take Verizon. They made $79b in profit last year, and also just imposed a $4/month service charge on their mobile customers due to "rising operational costs":

https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1c53c4p/79bn_in_profits_last_year_but_you_need_an_extra/

Now, Verizon is very possibly lying about these rising costs. Excuseflation is rampant and rising, as one CEO told his investors, when the news is full of inflation-talk, "it’s an opportunity to increase the prices without getting a whole bunch of complaining from the customers":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

But even stipulating that Verizon is telling the truth about these "rising costs," why should we eat those costs? There's $79b worth of surplus between Verizon's operating costs and its gross revenue. Why not take it out of Verizon's bottom line?

For 40 years, neoliberal economists have emphasized our role as "consumers" (as though consumers weren't also workers!). This let them play us off against one-another: "Sure, you don't want the person who rings up your groceries to get evicted because they can't pay their rent, but do you care about it enough to pay an extra nickel for these eggs?"

But again, there's no obvious reason why you should pay that extra nickel. If you have the buying power to hold prices down, and workers have the labor power to keep wages up, then the business has to absorb that nickel. We can have a world where workers can pay their rent and you can afford your groceries.

So how do we get bosses to agree to take less so we can have more? They've told us how: for bosses, the thing that motivates workers to show up for shitty jobs is fear – fear of losing their homes, fear of going hungry.

When your boss says, "If you don't want to do this job for minimum wage, there's someone else who will," they're telling you that the way to get a raise out of them is to engineer things so that you can say, "If you don't want to pay me a living wage for this job, there's someone else who will."

Their accusation – that you only give someone else a fair shake when you're afraid of losing out – is a confession: to get them to give you a fair shake, we have to make them afraid. They're showing us who they are, and we should believe them.

In her Daily Show appearance, FTC chair Lina Khan quipped that monopolies are too big to care:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM

Philosophers of capitalism are forever praising its ability to transform greed into public benefit. As Adam Smith put it, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." The desire to make as much money as possible, on its own, doesn't produce our dinner, but when the butcher, the brewer and the baker are afraid that you will take your labor or your wallet elsewhere, they pay more and charge less.

Capitalists don't want market economies, where they have to compete with one another, eroding their margins and profits – they want a planned economy, like Amazon, where Party Secretary Bezos and his commissars tell merchants what they can sell and tell us what we must pay:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/01/managerial-discretion/#junk-fees

Capitalists don't want free labor, where they have to compete with rival capitalists to bid on their workers' labor – they want noncompetes, bondage fees, and "training repayment agreement provisions" (TRAPs) that force their workers to stay in dead-end jobs rather than shopping for a better wage:

\https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

Capitalists hate capitalism, because capitalism only works if the capitalists are in a constant state of terror inspired by the knowledge that tomorrow, someone smarter could come along and open a better business, poaching their customers and workers, and putting the capitalist on the breadline.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/18/in-extremis-veritas/#the-winnah

Being in a constant precarious state makes people lose their minds, and capitalists know it. That's why they work so hard to precaratize the rest of us, saddling us with health debt, education debt, housing debt, stagnating wages and rising prices. It's not just because that makes them more money in the short term from our interest payments and penalties. It's because it de-risks their lives: monopolies and cartels can pass on any extra costs to consumers, who'll eat shit and take it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#overinflated

A workforce that goes to bed every night worrying about making the rent is a workforce that put in unpaid overtime and thank you for it.

Capitalists hate capitalism. You know who didn't hate capitalism? Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels. The first chapter of The Communist Manifesto is just these two guys totally geeking out about how much cool stuff we get when capitalists are afraid and therefore productive:

https://pluralistic.net/SpectreHaunting

But when capitalists escape their fears, the alchemical reaction that converts greed to prosperity fizzles, leaving nothing behind but greed and its handmaiden, enshittification. Google search is in the toilet, getting worse every year, but rather than taking reduced margins and spending more fighting spam, the company did a $80b stock-buyback and fired 12,000 skilled technologists, rather than using that 80 bil to pay their wages for the next twenty-seven years:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Monopoly apologists like to argue that monopolists can rake in the giant profits necessary to fund big, ambitious projects the produce better products at lower prices and make us all better off. But even if monopolists can spend their monopoly windfalls on big, ambitious projects, they don't. Why would they?

If you're Google, you can either spend tens of billions on R&D to keep up with spam and SEO scumbags, or you can spend less money buying the default search spot on every platform, so no one ever tries another search engine and switches:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Compared to its monopoly earnings, the tech sector's R&D spending is infinitesimal:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/11/nor-glom-of-nit/#capitalists-hate-competition

How do we get capitalists to work harder to make their workers and customers better off? Capitalists tell us how, every day. We need to make them afraid.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

Image: Vlad Lazarenko (modified) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wall_Street_Sign_%281-9%29.jpg CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[heylittleriotact]

I completed mortuary school and worked in a funeral home between 2018-2022 and ultimately left the profession because Covid burned me the fuck out and there just aren’t the appropriate supports in place for funeral workers tbh. It’s a profession that’s 20 years behind where it needs to be in a lot of ways.

Anyway, after months of anxiety attacks, insomnia, socially withdrawing from friends and family, and spending what little free time i had basically staring at a wall while drinking and chain-smoking, I decided I’d had enough after I was interrogated on a daily basis over the phone and told I can’t possibly be too sick to come back to work when i had Covid (after having called in sick twice in the entire 4 years I’d worked there).

It seemed questionable to expect me to return to work with Covid when it was very much still a day-to-day concern (and I was sick as shit to boot): I didn’t want to be responsible for bumping off an 80 year old widow who’d come in to make arrangements for her husband and caught Covid because of me.

It was the last fucking straw: I knew going into it that this profession was one of service and that I would be sacrificing holidays and weekends and time with my friends and family. I knew I wasn’t going to make $150k/year. I knew it was thankless, misunderstood work, but it was vital. But over those four years I watched decent, well-meaning, hard working people get bullied and humiliated out of their jobs because they didn’t fit in with the “right” people at the firm. I watched amazing professionals with decades of experience quit en masse because of the patronizing, condescending, unscrupulous way that ownership treated them. I watched standards that were incredibly high when I started, plummet to the point where I was pushing back on ownership about the ethics of selling flawed product to grieving families knowing full well that it was of poor quality. I went to school for this. I gave up weekends and holidays and important family milestones for this.

I wanted to help people, but I couldn’t continue setting myself on fire to do it.

So I said fuck it and tossed a hastily drafted resume and cover letter to a law firm whose posting I saw online while I was still at home, sick as hell. I didn’t actually think they’d call me back - it just felt like by submitting the application I’d made some sort of step in the direction of getting the fuck out of dodge like so many other colleagues had.

But then they actually did. And I had two interviews, and they hired me as a receptionist, because to be honest after working at an unhinged funeral home DURING a global pandemic, I needed a fucking ✨nothing✨ job where I just had to show up every day, look cute, answer phones, and show rich lawyers how to work the Keurig machine from time to time. It was the perfect job for me to get over the burn-out. Even stressful shit was not really stressful when compared to what I’ve already dealt with (my mantra around the office has become: “Okay but has anyone died?” Seriously. I get that your brief is due in 2 hours and all the tabs are fucked, but has an attendant just called you to tell you that they accidentally showed the WRONG dead person to a grieving family and now they’re traumatized?)

ANYWAY. A very nice partner who recently left the firm because he was appointed a Provincial Court Judge, remarked to another partner prior to his departure that maybe they should ask if I had any interest in going down the legal assistant -> paralegal pipeline, because I seemed smart, and uh… overqualified for my current role.

So anyway, that’s what my new year looks like. It took an entire two years to get my feet back under me and start feeling like a person again after I burned out: I started writing again this year. Started dance lessons again this year. Actively pursued life again this year because I had the energy to do it. I’m ready for a new challenge.

I miss funerals a fucking lot. If you follow me here that’s probably obvious by how much I go off about death and nerd out over Emmrich. I truly believe it was my calling, and just based on the way the timing and the way the cards fell, it didn’t work out for me. I’ll always be a bit sad about that, but I’m so, so excited for where I’m going next. It was officially announced to the team today, so I guess it feels real now?

Phew.

I’m going to fucking nail it, I think.

[awesomecooperlove]

▶️▶️▶️OPEN LETTER TO THE MILITARY◀️◀️◀️

🫡🫡🫡

🔴🔴🔴

We the people are asking you to help us take back our country and our sovereignty from the corporations, the Fed banksters and the corrupt politicians. We are FIRING every single one of them!!! They no longer represent us; that's why they are FIRED!!!! We are tired of being slaves and paying taxes, of our government wasting our money and it is not even backed by gold which is worthless paper of the illegal and corrupt Fed!!! We want the 2020 election to be rigged; we know you all know JB the pedo did NOT win. We have the right to dissolve the government when all other measures have been exhausted. We tried protests on January 6th, convoys, mass protests, went to school board meetings, town hall meetings, attended the Trump rallies, the rightful winner!! Social Media Warriors Voting: Voting machines rigged & EVERYTHING was rigged, watch the movie RIGGED and Mike Lendel's proof. We have lost friends and family members to Covid, to toxic vaccines, and to sharing the terrible truth about everything that has been hidden from us for decades. Kennedy's assassination and 9/11 are just two of the hundreds of examples we could cite. We are tired of fighting wars and paying for wars we DON'T want!!! We do NOT want to support wars unless enemies attack us. We want our land back and demand that you act on our behalf as quickly as possible. We want action, we want our sovereignty. We never agreed to be a mini-corporation when we were born and have all the Capitol letters on our birth certificates!!!! We have never agreed to be traded like cattle while others unknowingly make money off us. We refuse to be slaves to the deep state for even a moment longer. We want NESARA to be implemented as quickly as possible. We will install a different, much smaller government once these horrible, incompetent people are fired and prosecuted for their crimes against us and our CHILDREN. Patriots who agree, please share this. Military personnel reading this please forward this message from “We the People” to their commanders. Please reply to us via the EAS system. Patriots, this needs to go viral on every platform. We the people have spoken. The military must now act on our behalf. Before we run out of land!!!!!

Respectfully,

USA AMERICAN PEOPLE

(if you feel called to, share this)

https://t.me/QConnected1776

[poorrichardjr]

Conspiracies Abound

If you ever spend any time around MAGA individuals you will quickly run into at least three different conspiracy theories before the first twenty minutes of conversation, and even more if you start speaking about politics. The country is doing terribly because of a loss of God, satanic democrats drinking the blood of raped babies they murdered just after they were born, or because of the Illuminati, deep state, or UN. Pick your poison and a MAGA has a conspiracy theory that explains everything. Covid was a Chinese hoax designed to get Biden elected. There is no limit to their madness.

No offense to any of these people. I understand the need to explain things that seem "unusual." The thing is, almost none of these people understand Occam's Razor, which states that the simplest explanation for any situation is often correct. America sucks because we elect bad leaders and don't take the time or effort to do the work to determine who really would be a better politician for us. Instead we descend into tribalism that has determined our entire view of the world.

The thing is, conspiracy theories have a place. It just depends upon why you are using them. Believe it or not, but conspiracy theories can be used to make yourself more aware of things that you should be paying attention to. If a conspiracy theory makes you suspicious of the election process, you "could" spend more time learning about it and trying to understand it. We know that almost never happens, but it is always a way to combat the craziness of some more outlandish conspiracy theories.

Another plus of conspiratorial thinking, not necessarily the theory spinning so popular in America today, is to posit future possibilities. Depending upon how far you take it the "theories" become more and more conspiratorial. However, there is a good reason to sometimes spin these yarns, especially when it comes to dictatorially minded politicians. I am not saying you should take all of these theories so seriously that you see the possibilities of the thinking everywhere, but it can make you aware of situations that are definitely questionable at best.

For instance here is a conspiracy theory to be aware of, simply because it has happened in history and considering our current situation could be a factor in our future. Complain all you want about how many people are drawing parallels between Hitlerian Germany and modern America, but any historian worth their salt will tell you there are many similarities. Hitler complained about Jews and undesirables, Trump complains about immigrants and undesirables. Each divided the people of their nations. Each came to power through election where they did not receive the plurality of the vote.

Here are some similarities that haven't yet come to pass. Hitler placed people into positions of power who had no experience in those jobs but who had a lot of disdain for the functions of those departments. Trump is nominating people to lead departments who fit that mold, though the Senate "might" keep them from those positions (though I doubt it). Hitler deported people, made life so uncomfortable that many "undesirables" left, and eventually put people into camps. We know how that ended. Trump is promising mass deportations for legal and illegal immigrants, removal of citizenship, and massive camps. We can go on, but you get the picture.

So, here is where I will give you a conspiracy theory to ponder. Hitler had power when he got his Chancellorship, but that wasn't enough. Similar to how Trump being president isn't quite enough to turn him into a dictator. What really gave Hitler power was the moment he was able to remove his oppositions ability to interfere with his plans. Enter the Reichstag fire, the pretext the Nazi's used to seize total power and jail and make illegal opposition parties.

Yesterday all I heard from some people was that the people Trump was nominating for power were being targeted with bombings and swatting threats. I expect tons of protests when Trump takes office, especially if he gets his way and starts deploying the military and police to go through cities. Here is where the conspiracy comes into play. Some event is going to happen in the future that causes the right wing talking heads to demand Trump crack down on the opposition. Whether that is the death of a possible head (even if it isn't caused by liberals or immigrants) or a riot by the "liberals."

Where that goes is anybody's guess, but if history repeats itself it will be the fundamental issue that gives Trump the power he needs and craves to do everything he wants. As I said, it is a conspiracy theory, but one based in some semblance of reality. As reactionary as our republican "friends" are, I wouldn't put it too far past them to try something like this. Care to take bets now?

[covid-safer-hotties]

Old News (Published Sept, 2022)

Also preserved in our archive

It's disgusting how little movement has been made since this article was published. Biden declared a victory only to be forced to step down by a covid infection this summer. We're done being ignored.

By Jamie Ducharme

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is used to feeling like the only person in the country who still cares about COVID-19. He ignores the side-eye he gets for wearing an N95 mask at parties—a self-imposed policy that makes him “look odd” but kept him safe after a recent work dinner turned into a superspreader event. The oncologist, bioethicist, and professor at the University of Pennsylvania provides each of his students with an N95 and runs four HEPA air filters during lectures. He rolls down the windows when he gets in an Uber and goes hungry on planes so he can wear his mask the whole time. He’s given up one of his favorite pastimes—dining at restaurants—even now that many people don’t think twice about eating indoors.

Emanuel, 65, takes these precautions even though he’s vaccinated and boosted and thus well protected against severe COVID-19. The acute disease doesn’t scare him much—but what could come after does. “The only thing that’s preventing me from leading a normal life is the risk that I’ll get Long COVID,” Emanuel says. “I can’t say why people aren’t [reacting like] their hair’s on fire. This is a serious, serious illness.”

Emanuel’s not totally alone. In a July Axios-Ipsos poll, 17% of people said their biggest fear related to COVID-19 is the possibility of getting Long COVID, a potentially disabling condition in which symptoms linger or emerge well after an acute infection. But at a time when the majority of U.S. adults think there’s little risk in returning to normal, mask wearers, test takers, and social distancers walk a lonely road.

Even public-health agencies seem over it. Throughout 2022, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has rolled back many of its recommended COVID-19 precautions. CDC guidance no longer recommends social distancing, mask-wearing, or screening tests for most people who don’t have symptoms, and unvaccinated people don’t need to quarantine if they’re exposed to the virus. In a 60 Minutes interview that aired Sept. 18, President Joe Biden said “the pandemic is over,” even though “we still have a problem with COVID.”

The following day, chronic disease advocates protested in front of the White House, arguing that Long COVID and the related condition myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome constitute a public-health emergency and demanding that the Biden Administration improve its public-education campaigns, financial support for patients, and research efforts.

The CDC says its COVID-19 guidance is meant to prevent “medically significant COVID-19 illness,” which includes both severe acute disease and Long COVID. The agency contends its lighter touch is warranted now that the vast majority of the U.S. population has good protection against severe disease from being vaccinated, contracting COVID-19, or both. “Our emphasis on preventing severe disease will also help prevent cases of post-COVID conditions, as post-COVID conditions are found more often in people who had severe COVID-19 illness,” Dr. Barbara Mahon, who oversees work on coronaviruses and other respiratory diseases at the CDC, said in response to questions from TIME about the agency’s Long COVID guidance.

But even with high levels of population immunity, Long COVID cases continue to pile up. By the CDC’s own estimate from June, one in five U.S. adults with a known prior case of COVID-19 had symptoms of Long COVID. Having COVID-19 also raises a person’s risk of developing chronic conditions including heart disease, asthma, and diabetes, according to CDC research.

Long COVID can take many forms, including exhaustion, cognitive dysfunction, neurological issues, and chronic pain. People can develop it whether they’re young or old, sick or healthy, vaccinated or not. And while some people get better in a matter of months, recent studies and many patient experiences show symptoms can last years. There is no known cure for Long COVID, and the only way to prevent it is not to get infected at all.

That, a vocal group of experts and advocates say, is why people should resist the U.S.’ collective shrug to the unchecked spread of COVID-19. The virus may not kill or hospitalize as many people as it once did, but it still upends lives every day. Around 1.2 million people in the U.S. became disabled as a result of the virus by the end of 2021, according to the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. Up to 4 million people in the U.S. are out of work because of Long COVID. Specialists who treat Long COVID report months-long waitlists. And in the current “let it rip” phase of the pandemic, all of that may get worse.

“We’re in the middle of the greatest mass-disabling event in human history,” says Long COVID patient and advocate Charlie McCone. And unless people wake up to the long-term consequences of COVID-19, it is “going to continue taking folks out like fish in a barrel.”

President Joe Biden ran on a promise to defeat COVID-19. And for a while, it looked like he would deliver. In the spring and early summer of 2021, the U.S. was recording about 12,000 cases per day. Vaccines were working. Masks were coming off. Life was good.

Then Delta hit, followed by the tsunami of Omicron, and the path out of the pandemic no longer looked clear. The messaging began to shift: the U.S. would learn to live with COVID-19, rather than defeating it. We couldn’t stop all infections, but we could defang them through vaccines, boosters, and treatments like the antiviral Paxlovid. The masks could stay off, even if the virus wasn’t gone.

Many Americans welcomed the return to normalcy. But to McCone, 32, that approach is “a crime against humanity,” given what we now know about Long COVID.

McCone got sick in March 2020. COVID-19 knocked him flat. He almost went to his local emergency room because he was so short of breath, and it took weeks for his respiratory symptoms to improve. After about a month, he finally felt well enough to ride his bike. “I just fell apart,” McCone remembers. The 15-minute ride left him with unshakeable exhaustion—and a sign that this would be no ordinary recovery.

More than two years later, McCone barely leaves the house, except for medical appointments. He still has severe fatigue, chest pain, shortness of breath, and nervous system dysfunction. He can’t work because of his symptoms, and his partner has become his caretaker. His symptoms got even worse after catching COVID-19 again in September 2021, so he’s “petrified” of getting reinfected—a fear he wishes more people shared.

“We’re letting millions of Americans and people across the globe walk, unwittingly, straight into this pit,” he says.

Hannah Davis, a machine learning expert who began researching Long COVID after her own diagnosis, also got sick in March 2020. Davis has testified about Long COVID before Congress and advised federal health officials about the condition. She says those experiences have shown her that health officials understand that Long COVID is a substantial problem, and that, while vaccines reduce the risk of developing it—by some amount between 15% and 50%, studies suggest—they are not failsafe. The U.K.’s Office for National Statistics recently reported that roughly 4.5% of triple-vaccinated adults developed Long COVID after being infected by Omicron. But the government doesn’t seem to want to dwell on these scary stats, Davis says. “It really looks like it’s being hidden intentionally,” she says.

Davis believes that’s because the Biden Administration leaned heavily on vaccines as a ticket out of the pandemic and is wary of walking back that messaging now, even as fully vaccinated and boosted people contract Long COVID. A representative for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) did not directly respond to that allegation when asked by TIME, but emphasized the importance of vaccination and said the department is still working “to understand this new post-infectious landscape.”

“Individuals, communities, and organizations must make decisions that create the right balance between the need to protect themselves and others from the effects of COVID-19 and the need to stay healthy in every sense of the word—such as mental health, getting an education, preventive and chronic disease care, and social interaction,” the CDC’s Mahon said in a statement.

Health officials are not doing enough to prevent transmission of the virus and help people understand its risks, says Kristin Urquiza, who founded the advocacy group Marked By COVID after her father died from the virus in 2020. “Leaders have thrown their hands up in the air and basically said, ‘You do you,’” she says.

The federal government has taken some action on Long COVID. In late 2020, Congress gave the National Institutes of Health (NIH) more than $1 billion to study it. But so far, this funding has yielded no treatments, no preventative tools, and little research that is immediately useful to patients. The NIH’s cornerstone Long COVID research project aimed to enroll 40,000 people; as of August, it had enrolled only about 8,000. That’s in large part because of the complexity and scope of the trial, according to the NIH.

Lawmakers have introduced bills meant to improve research and support for Long COVID, but they’ve reportedly stalled due to a lack of support in Congress. And in August, HHS released two highly anticipated reports on Long COVID—one describing resources available to patients, the other outlining the government’s research agenda—that were largely panned by Long COVID advocates as more symbolic than substantive.

“Many of the resources provided in the reports seem like cold comforts and temporary Band-Aids when a tourniquet and emergency surgery is needed,” Urquiza said in a statement to Rolling Stone about the reports.

The HHS representative told TIME the reports are just the beginning, and the Administration’s work on Long COVID is ongoing. For people with Long COVID, “It can feel like the world is moving on, while leaving them behind,” the spokesperson wrote in the statement. “The Administration’s message to them is that, ‘We see you, we hear you, and we are taking action to help.'”

Some Long COVID advocates and scientists have called for an initiative like Operation Warp Speed—the Trump Administration program that quickly yielded multiple effective COVID-19 vaccines—for Long COVID treatments. But the NIH hasn’t built anything of the sort, says David Putrino, a Long COVID researcher at New York’s Mount Sinai health system. Despite its $1 billion budget for Long COVID research, “There’s been no process change between how they fund things outside of a health emergency and how they’re funding things in the midst of a health crisis,” he says. “We’re still following the same grant application procedures, the administrative load is the same if not more, and they have not hired additional people to program manage the grants.” In a statement, the NIH said application review is handled by an “ample and diverse set of experts.”

Dr. Eric Topol, founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute and a prolific parser of COVID-19 research on Twitter, says the NIH is doing good research on the underlying science of Long COVID, but he’d like to see more trials focused on treatments. “You need to do both, because we can’t wait another year or two for the biology to be better defined,” Topol says. (The NIH says it will begin treatment-focused trials this fall. Mahon says the CDC also continues to research Long COVID symptoms, prevalence, and risk factors.)

Research delays are not for lack of intriguing leads. A tremendous amount of Long COVID research has been published in the last two years, most coming out of independent laboratories, Putrino says. From this work, scientists have found multiple possible explanations for Long COVID symptoms: SARS-CoV-2 virus lingering in the body, abnormal immune system activity, reactivation of other viruses previously lying dormant, tiny blood clots throughout the body, and more. These disparate findings suggest that there may be different root causes or subtypes of Long COVID, which means all patients might not respond to the same therapy. But each one suggests a possible path to treatment worth testing sooner rather than later, Topol says.

Nobody knows exactly how prevalent Long COVID is, and some researchers argue that the CDC’s estimate of one patient per five COVID-19 cases is high. But, even using more conservative prevalence estimates, the volume of infections in the U.S. means the scale of the problem is massive. About 60,000 people in the U.S. currently test positive for COVID-19 daily. Even by more modest estimates, that means the seeds for a possibly debilitating condition are planted in thousands of people every day. During just the first two years of the pandemic, at least 17 million people in Europe developed Long COVID, according to a Sept. 13 report commissioned by the World Health Organization.

“If we have millions of people being infected, we’re going to have millions of people getting Long COVID,” Emanuel says. “That’s going to be an ongoing, serious national problem that is going to weigh down the economy, weigh down the disability insurance system, and be tragic for people.”

Journalist and author Katie Hafner, 64, was one of the unlucky people to develop Long COVID after being vaccinated and boosted. She got infected in May and was left with significant fatigue and brain fog. Her Long COVID symptoms were on the milder end of the spectrum and have improved with time, but Hafner says she can still manage only a few hours of work per day and has to carefully monitor her physical and mental energy levels. Her anxiety has also escalated since getting sick.

Hafner’s husband is Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Between his wife’s experience and his close monitoring of COVID-19 research, Wachter is concerned enough about Long COVID to avoid indoor dining and wear a good mask in crowded areas. For people who aren’t immersed in the research, though, “the cognitive load of doing all this three-dimensional chess [around risk calculation] is too much,” he says. “To me, the CDC hasn’t been very vigorous on Long COVID,” providing less guidance about prevention and risks than it did for acute infections.

Those risks are substantial. Wachter says he’s worried about Long COVID’s impact on the health care system—not just in already overloaded Long COVID clinics, but system-wide. “If it turns out that it markedly increases the rates of some of the biggest medical hazards we have in life”—including organ failure, heart disease, and dementia, as research currently suggests— “the toll of that over years and years will be tremendous,” Wachter says. “I don’t think [the CDC has] done a good job explaining that at all.”

The economic toll could also be massive. Up to 4 million adults in the U.S. are out of work because of Long COVID, costing the economy at least $170 billion in annual lost wages alone, according to a Brookings Institution report published in August. A Kaiser Family Foundation analysis suggests just 44% of people who worked before they got Long COVID are now fully employed, with the remainder either out of a job or working reduced hours.

Many long-haulers who are unable to work have turned to the disability system. But, anecdotally, many have had trouble getting their claims approved, either because they’re outright denied or forced to jump through hoops to prove they’re truly unable to work. A representative for the Social Security Administration said in a statement that, as of August, it had received about 38,000 applications that mention COVID-19, representing about 1% of recent claims—but since decisions are based on functional limitations, not diagnoses, it’s difficult to say how many people have sought support due to Long COVID.

Experts say there is more that can be done, even before new therapies are discovered or developed. To slow transmission and thus lower rates of Long COVID, Topol says the CDC should tell people to isolate for longer than five days after getting infected and campaign harder for people to get booster shots. Emanuel, meanwhile, would like to see better communication about which masks protect wearers from infection; respirators like N95s are more effective than surgical or cloth masks, but many people still walk around in droopy blue surgical masks. Public indoor spaces, like restaurants and schools, should also have enforceable requirements for ventilation and air filtration, given the virus’ ability to spread in the air.

A return to mask mandates would also be a good step, Davis says. But even if none of those changes are enacted, she says the government should at least emphasize how common Long COVID appears to be and that it can affect vaccinated people. She fears many vaccinated people think they’re in the clear and can’t get Long COVID, because the Administration has sung the shots’ praises so much. “We’re just drowning in this sea of misinformation that is not only causing people to poorly think about their own risk, but also putting other people at risk,” Davis says.

Those with Long COVID often say they feel like they’re screaming into the void, trying to get through to people who either aren’t aware of or don’t care about the condition and the possibility it could affect them, too. In grocery stores, Hafner marvels—and seethes—at the bare faces she sees. Sometimes, when she’s the only person wearing a mask, “I think, ‘Am I a pariah?’” Hafner says. “We’re at that point where the people in masks are the outliers.”

For many people who are done with the pandemic and the caution that came with it, a maskless supermarket may seem like a sign of progress. But for those with an intimate understanding of Long COVID, it feels like a bad omen.

“It’s no way to live,” McCone says of his day-to-day existence since developing Long COVID. His worst fear, and one that looks like it may come true if progress isn’t made soon, is that millions more people will have to learn that the hard way.

[witchinatree]

magnus protocol episode 28 ramble

i have coviddd so i get to listen to the episode nowww instead of after school (i am dying)

my sister is playing loz botw rn and needs my help so i am gonna multi task in the sense that i will be so zoned out

i hope we see trevor herbert in this one i will CACKLE

oh my god immediately LMFAOOOOOOOOOO

HOLY SHIT IT REALLY IS HIM

these are too many words about things i don't understand i am so covid core

a.. diverse photo... 💀

sam just making scared "uhhh.." i love him

oh wow that was very minimal for all of that work, sounds about right

intervene?

WHAT? A MURDER SUSPECT? WHO? GWEN? OR CELIA? or is it colin but he's like in jail. oh yeah ok it was gwen related it's about ink5oul

this is really hard to take seriously knowing trevor was a mass vampire murderer in another universe like yea sure dude. sure man.

alice you were right babe what were you right about though

oh yea obviously the minister doesn't know anything

PANN!!!! PAN CELIA!!!!! WE WIN

"you have no idea" LMAOOOOO????? MYSTERIOUS ORIGINS WITH THE DEAD SILENCE AFTER. NO FUCKING WAY

oh my god sam oh my god sam oh my god sam you've finally done it you've finally asked

?? jeremy? jeremy's granddaughter? jeremy bouchard? jeremy bouchard? ? ? ?

"lena's lying to you" LMAOOOO WAIT NOOO GWEN NO GWENNY DON'T GET HER FIRED NO PLEASE WAIT THIS IS UNFAIR GWEN PLEASE HER JOB SHE NEEDS HER JOB DON'T GET LENA FIRED WHO IS THE. WHO IS THE THIRD PARTY?

oh god so this is bad

SAM WHAT??? HELLO??? WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AT HIS CAR LMFAOOOO

OH MY GOD

oh my god oh my god oh my god THE ARCHIVIST IS THERE OH FUCK

OH MY HOLY FUCKING SHIT. GWEN HELP HIM????? GWENNY I KNOW YOU'RE OUT THERE BABE HELP HIM

saul? joy? interesting..

gilbert... the lore drop is going crazy i hope sam is okay after this

sam you bit a kid? LMAO? oh these questions are creepy and i'm scared for him

dr. f welling? i don't recognize ANY of these na... CHANTING? SAM? oh this poor traumatized child

ok i kinda get why he's so obsessed now and i feel very bad. but also if this was me i would never ever think about this place again and forcefully move on

sam baby no i would have left three horrible things ago

oh? sam's parents were rejected? i'm so scared for him wtf.

SAM? DID HE JUST COLLAPSE?? BABE???

i need to know who this archivist is oh my god and i also need to know sam is okay

[noirhimbo]

As much as I hope people call off work when they are sick, unless we are supporting them by sending them the funds they will miss out on we can't expect them to actually do it. Even outside of missing wages, workplaces are on mass getting rid of covid sick leave and are penalizing their employees for calling out and this has led to people being fired from work. It's my hope that covid conscious people/organizations who have more resources at their disposal will realize this gap and will do more to support those who don't have much power to keep themselves and others safe.

[mariacallous]

Gaza’s recently confirmed polio outbreak is a barometer of the catastrophic public health conditions created by the Israeli military—but what many Israelis don’t realize is that the systematic assault by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on health care and public health infrastructure in Gaza has now come back to haunt them.

It has placed hundreds of thousands of Israelis at risk of contracting an ancient virus that strikes suddenly, paralyzing limbs and even sometimes lungs. It is so contagious that each afflicted person means several hundred others are simultaneously and invisibly spreading this incurable disease.

Although polio has been eradicated in most developed nations, Israel has particular reason to be concerned about the disease. The country has at least 175,000 vulnerable children—the offspring of the ultra-Orthodox, or haredim, who are notorious for their opposition to vaccinations.

Because the haredim comprise 17 percent of Israel’s Jews and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs their support to remain in power, his government has exempted hundreds of thousands of haredim from Israel’s immunization program against polio as well as measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis and HPV, influenza, and COVID-19—despite the threat to domestic and global health from these vaccine-preventable diseases.

That decision, coupled with his stubborn refusal to negotiate a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, has now put Israel’s unvaccinated at risk of contracting polio.

Thursday’s announcement that Israel will allow limited combat pauses in Gaza for vaccination at designated sites is insufficient to prevent ongoing spread of the deadly virus because parents will be required to bring their children to those sites while combat elsewhere in Gaza rages; most parents simply won’t risk it. That fighting also makes impossible the kind of active outreach by healthcare workers among Gaza’s displaced population needed to obtain the near-universal vaccination required to stop the outbreak.

Shortly after polio was detected in Gaza’s sewers, the Israeli government began offering vaccinations to troops returning from Gaza. These optional shots protect soldiers from contracting polio but not from taking it back to Israel, effectively turning them into dangerous vectors of this incredibly contagious disease.

Most Israelis have largely tuned out the suffering of Palestinians caused by Israeli bombs, but the potential for the spread of a deadly disease to their own children could finally get their attention.

The risk of another polio outbreak in Israel also provides a strong incentive for Netanyahu to agree to regular prolonged humanitarian pauses to allow systematic mass vaccination to proceed in Gaza, where efforts have lapsed during the war. That could also lay the groundwork for a lasting cease-fire.

More than 10 months of Israeli bombardment has destroyed Gaza’s water sources and sanitation systems and forced almost 2 million people from their homes into crowded camps. The humanitarian blockade imposed by Israeli authorities has withheld essential nutrition, critical medicines, and lifesaving public health technology. Meanwhile, in more than 1,000 attacks on health care facilities, equipment, and staff, the Israeli military has killed or detained more than 800 medical personnel.

To Palestinians, the international community’s laser-like focus on polio after a single unimmunized infant was partially paralyzed may seem perverse. After all, Palestinian children are far more likely to be crippled by Israeli bombs than paralyzed by a virus not seen in Gaza since 1985. Although it is no longer the world’s most feared disease, polio still cripples hundreds of children every year and suffocates some to death. It now threatens Israeli children, too. And if polio is what it takes to humanize the horrors facing civilians in Gaza, the international community must seize the opportunity.

In July, analysis of environmental samples in Gaza detected type 2 vaccine-derived poliovirus (cVDPV2), suggesting months of circulation and similarities with a strain found in sewers in Egypt, the country from which most aid trucks for Gaza arrive. A slightly different  strain found in Jerusalem’s sewers was linked to outbreaks in 2022 and 2023.

A vaccine-derived poliovirus comes from the weakened live poliovirus contained in oral vaccines. In a fully vaccinated population it is not a threat, but if this weakened form of the virus has the opportunity to circulate among those lacking herd immunity or those compromised by prolonged starvation and disease, it can mutate into a form of poliovirus that causes illness and paralysis.

Despite a degraded public health system, lack of safe drinking water, and constant cross-border movement, Gaza’s health authorities protected the population for decades by maintaining very high vaccination rates. They used intramuscular polio vaccines to protect individuals, in addition to oral polio vaccines, which create protection against transmission, to protect the whole population. The associated herd immunity protected Gaza’s immunosuppressed and partially immunized infants.

War typically disrupts routine immunization services, regardless of the location. But in Gaza, polio immunization rates have dropped dramatically, from 99 percent in 2022 to about 86 percent by mid-2024—below the level required for herd immunity.

The way that Israel has waged the current war has exacerbated the situation. Chlorine is the only reliable way to disinfect contaminated water—as polio is relatively resistant to heat and acid. Yet since Oct. 7, Israeli troops have withheld chlorine from Gaza and destroyed all wastewater treatment plants.

Since May, nearly 800,000 people have been displaced to Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah, where samples were collected on June 23. The squalid living conditions, lack of safe water, starvation, and attacks targeting health care facilities make routine vaccination impossible. This is the ideal environment for the oral vaccine to mutate into vaccine-derived polio and emerge as a virulent stealth virus. Movement makes contact tracing challenging and turbocharges transmission of the virus.

Without a rapid test for polio, detection depends on clinical diagnosis. Fewer than 1 percent of polio cases result in paralysis, and most symptoms—fever, fatigue, headache, and vomiting—are common to hundreds of illnesses. As a clinician familiar with polio and war zones, I know firsthand how hard polio is to diagnose.

Laboratory confirmation relies on collecting two stool samples within two days of infection from kids who cannot always defecate when doctors ask. Gaza’s physicians are experts in war trauma, but few of them have ever seen polio.

In these circumstances, a mass vaccination campaign with oral polio vaccines is vital to stop the spread. The World Health Organization (WHO) has promised 1.6 million vaccine doses, and some have arrived , but that is only the beginning. Aid organizations must now organize the vaccination campaign while war rages.

To remain viable, vaccines must be stored at between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius, yet because Israel withholds fuel for refrigeration, the WHO has to deliver cold-chain equipment. Summer heat, persistent insecurity, and Israel’s ongoing obstruction of aid compound the challenges.

The most successful polio campaigns rely on multiple door-to-door visits, but since more than 80 percent of Gaza’s buildings have been destroyed, parents will have to bring children to fixed posts; the ongoing threat of bombing and general insecurity make it hard to achieve high coverage in such circumstances, despite Israel’s agreement to limited combat pauses in certain areas.

As if to underscore the point, Israel’s vow to allow limited pauses for vaccination came a day after the World Food Program suspended its own food delivery because one of its vehicles was fired upon a few meters from an Israeli army checkpoint.

Prolonged humanitarian pauses permitting multiple vaccination campaigns could curtail and control this dreaded virus in Gaza and, by extension, for over 100,000 of Israel’s unvaccinated and under-vaccinated citizens.

Israel, like all countries, cares about polio and other contagious threats.After Israel’s 1988 outbreak, the government copied Gaza’s immunization program: High uptake among the non-haredi population successfully eliminated wild polio.

For the next 33 years, the Israeli government protected its unvaccinated population through well-developed public health services and regular surveillance. But for the fast-growing unvaccinated ultra-Orthodox population, highly concentrated chlorinated water is no longer enough. In February 2022, an outbreak in an ultra-Orthodox district of Jerusalem crippled an unvaccinated 3-year-old girl. In 2022, polio reported from dozens of samples in Jerusalem sewers was linked to the May 2022 outbreak in New York and another in northern Israel in February 2023.

Because the only way to protect the unvaccinated ultra-Orthodox in Israel is to control polio in Gaza—and because Netanyahu depends on ultra-Orthodox parties’ support to stay in power—the Israeli government now has an incentive to agree to the prolonged humanitarian pauses needed for a successful vaccination campaign. Such calls may be especially attractive to Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community, who are hardly members of Israel’s peace camp.

The determination of public health organizations to end one of the world’s most dreaded diseases and a diplomatic effort to enforce prolonged pauses for polio vaccinations could help change the narrative in Gaza from indifference and devastation to one of solidarity and hope in the face of a deadly disease.

[darkmaga-returns]

The Defender’s Big Brother NewsWatch brings you the latest headlines related to governments’ abuse of power, including attacks on democracy, civil liberties and use of mass surveillance. The views expressed in the excerpts from other news sources do not necessarily reflect the views of The Defender.

by The Defender Staff

January 2, 2025

[shiyorin]

Mournival but they are your college roommate

No one asked it but I need to share that :v

Ezekyle Abaddon

Comes to school with a huge duffel bag and toolbox. When you ask what's in it, he just smiles and says "tools." You don't ask anymore.

Always blasting really aggressive rap/metal music super loud. His top jam is "Back in Black" by AC/DC on repeat.

Leaves his dirty laundry everywhere but his bed is always perfectly made with tight hospital corners.

You're pretty sure you saw him behind the wheel of a rusty black van late at night, but the school won't investigate strange disappearances.

Loves party games but is way too competitive. No one wants to play Mario Kart with him anymore after "the incident".

Constantly gets in fights at parties but never seems to get in trouble. Cops take one look at him and just shake their heads like "not dealing with this tonight".

Always standing shirtless in the room doing calisthenics. Claims he's cultivating mass but you think he's just trying to intimidate the RA.

Somehow accumulated the world's biggest knife collection despite the no weapons policy. Admin turns a blind eye for fear of their safety.

Tries to get you to join his intramural flag football team, the "Black Crusaders". They go way too hard and half the other teams have dropped out.

Somehow has a 4.0 GPA while seeming preoccupied with "more important things." Howwww.

Tarik Torgaddon

Brings way too much beer to your first Friday night dorm party. Claims "Bro always shares his drinks!"

Leaves practical jokes everywhere - who put googly eyes on the toothbrushes?!

Always trying to get you to join the campus meme lodge with him. "Come on, it'll be fun! We just post poorly photoshopped history professors, I swear."

Never cleans the mini-fridge. Wonders why mystery science experiments started growing in there.

Burns popcorn at 3am trying to make "late night snacks." Fires the fire alarm and you both get written up.

Steals your lounging spot in the common room to "hold court" and tell loud stories to anyone who will listen.

Hogs the bathroom for hours getting ready to "go out in style" on the weekends. Comes back drenched and you don't wanna know from what.

Leaves you in charge of the dorm when he goes home for breaks. Comes back to three keggers you "somehow forgot" to tell him about.

Somehow always tests positive for COVID right before big exams. You're 95% sure he's faking to get out of studying.

He's a really fun dude and always has your back. Gonna miss this guy after graduation!

Garviel Loken

He wakes up at 6am every morning to do pushups and calisthenics in your room.

Never seen him drink or party. That one time you tried to get him to come to a frat party he responded with "Nah bro I gotta hit the hay early, lifting at 6 am."

Tries to get you to join the campus military re-enactment club. Insists you could benefit from "some discipline and camaraderie".

Cooking? You thought you were the one making ramen but he shows up with a whole homecooked meal like beef wellington from scratch. "My friend Tarik taught me."

That one time the fire alarm went off at 3am? He carried you and your mini fridge down the stairs in one go."

Always does his dishes immediately after using them. Not one speck of food left. The clean freak we all need but don't deserve.

Super into his classes, always studying. You often find him making color-coded notecards at 3am under his desk lamp.

Somehow still finds time to join every club and sport. Is president of the book club, captain of the ultimate frisbee team, volunteers at the animal shelter on weekends.

Has a strict 9pm lights out bedtime. You've tried stay up late to play game but he just throws a pillow at you look and says "some of us have 6ams."

Somehow always has cute girls knocking on your door asking "is Garrie there?". The chad energy is real.

Horus Aximand

The second you meet him you're like "Woah this dude looks EXACTLY like the frat bro president."

Helps you move in but 'accidentally' gets protective plating mixed in with your clothes and snacks. Whoops!

Forms LARP club which is really just him and 3 (actually 4) other guys who are all as intense as he is.

Constantly blasting Sabaton songs from his speaker. Claims it's for "battle prepping" but we all know he just loves some power metal.

Bonding over late night games of Smash Bros while deep in the existential crisis of your freshman year.

Always wears matching sweatsuits with "Little Horus" embroidered on the chest. Claims it's his sport team uniform but you've never seen him play any sports.

Making you try all the experimental protein shakes he conjures up in the mini fridge. You're scared but don't want to hurt his feelings. So many regrets.

Finding mysterious used bandages around the room. He swears they're from "glorious battles" but they're really just from the intramural dodgeball games.

That one time the fire alarm went off and he tried to purge it with a flamer.

Always "forgetting" he can lift a textbook one-handed and showing off to the swole bros.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Dave Jamieson at HuffPost:

President-elect Donald Trump said Monday that he plans to fire federal employees who continue to telework rather than show up in person at government agencies. “If people don’t come back to work, come back into the office, they’re going to be dismissed,” Trump said in a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump and his advisers have said they want to institute mass layoffs in the federal workforce and will strip away remote work options so that people quit. But firing federal employees for working from home is easier said than done, since many federal union contracts allow for remote or hybrid work schedules. The incoming president lashed out at such arrangements and appeared to reference a new deal reached between the Social Security Administration and the union representing more than 40,000 employees. Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley, an appointee of President Joe Biden, recently agreed to a contract that extends telework scheduling into 2029, Bloomberg reported.

[...] Like other workplaces, many federal agencies instituted remote work during the pandemic and have not fully returned to in-office scheduling. A lot of workers cherish the flexibility, so their unions have been trying to lock in hybrid arrangements in their collective bargaining agreements. The president-elect’s new “Department of Government Efficiency,” an advisory body run by Trump allies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, is already recommending remote scheduling be taken away. Musk and Ramaswamy have openly said the aim is to prompt federal workers to resign. (Editor’s note: Ramaswamy owns a stake in HuffPost’s parent company, BuzzFeed.) “Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” the pair recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

Deluded fascist lunatic Donald Trump endorses firings of government employees who refuse to return to in-person office work.

This is nothing more than an attack on workers’ rights and tool to erode morale at work.