#science-deniers delight

[mudwerks]

(via After mice drink raw H5N1 milk, bird flu virus riddles their organs | Ars Technica)

have at it, science-deniers...

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI’s productivity theater

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

When I took my kid to New Zealand with me on a book-tour, I was delighted to learn that grocery stores had special aisles where all the kids'-eye-level candy had been removed, to minimize nagging. What a great idea!

Related: countries around the world limit advertising to children, for two reasons:

1) Kids may not be stupid, but they are inexperienced, and that makes them gullible; and

2) Kids don't have money of their own, so their path to getting the stuff they see in ads is nagging their parents, which creates a natural constituency to support limits on kids' advertising (nagged parents).

There's something especially annoying about ads targeted at getting credulous people to coerce or torment other people on behalf of the advertiser. For example, AI companies spent millions targeting your boss in an effort to convince them that you can be replaced with a chatbot that absolutely, positively cannot do your job.

Your boss has no idea what your job entails, and is (not so) secretly convinced that you're a featherbedding parasite who only shows up for work because you fear the breadline, and not because your job is a) challenging, or b) rewarding:

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

That makes them prime marks for chatbot-peddling AI pitchmen. Your boss would love to fire you and replace you with a chatbot. Chatbots don't unionize, they don't backtalk about stupid orders, and they don't experience any inconvenient moral injury when ordered to enshittify the product:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

Bosses are Bizarro-world Marxists. Like Marxists, your boss's worldview is organized around the principle that every dollar you take home in wages is a dollar that isn't available for executive bonuses, stock buybacks or dividends. That's why you boss is insatiably horny for firing you and replacing you with software. Software is cheaper, and it doesn't advocate for higher wages.

That makes your boss such an easy mark for AI pitchmen, which explains the vast gap between the valuation of AI companies and the utility of AI to the customers that buy those companies' products. As an investor, buying shares in AI might represent a bet the usefulness of AI – but for many of those investors, backing an AI company is actually a bet on your boss's credulity and contempt for you and your job.

But bosses' resemblance to toddlers doesn't end with their credulity. A toddler's path to getting that eye-height candy-bar goes through their exhausted parents. Your boss's path to realizing the productivity gains promised by an AI salesman runs through you.

A new research report from the Upwork Research Institute offers a look into the bizarre situation unfolding in workplaces where bosses have been conned into buying AI and now face the challenge of getting it to work as advertised:

https://www.upwork.com/research/ai-enhanced-work-models

The headline findings tell the whole story:

96% of bosses expect that AI will make their workers more productive;

85% of companies are either requiring or strongly encouraging workers to use AI;

49% of workers have no idea how AI is supposed to increase their productivity;

77% of workers say using AI decreases their productivity.

Working at an AI-equipped workplaces is like being the parent of a furious toddler who has bought a million Sea Monkey farms off the back page of a comic book, and is now destroying your life with demands that you figure out how to get the brine shrimp he ordered from a notorious Holocaust denier to wear little crowns like they do in the ad:

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2004/hitler-and-sea-monkeys

Bosses spend a lot of time thinking about your productivity. The "productivity paradox" shows a rapid, persistent decline in American worker productivity, starting in the 1970s and continuing to this day:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

The "paradox" refers to the growth of IT, which is sold as a productivity-increasing miracle. There are many theories to explain this paradox. One especially good theory came from the late David Graeber (rest in power), in his 2012 essay, "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit":

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit

Graeber proposes that the growth of IT was part of a wider shift in research approaches. Research was once dominated by weirdos (e.g. Jack Parsons, Oppenheimer, etc) who operated with relatively little red tape. The rise of IT coincides with the rise of "managerialism," the McKinseyoid drive to monitor, quantify and – above all – discipline the workforce. IT made it easier to generate these records, which also made it normal to expect these records.

Before long, every employee – including the "creatives" whose ideas were credited with the productivity gains of the American century until the 70s – was spending a huge amount of time (sometimes the majority of their working days) filling in forms, documenting their work, and generally producing a legible account of their day's work. All this data gave rise to a ballooning class of managers, who colonized every kind of institution – not just corporations, but also universities and government agencies, which were structured to resemble corporations (down to referring to voters or students as "customers").

Even if you think all that record-keeping might be useful, there's no denying that the more time you spend documenting your work, the less time you have to do your work. The solution to this was inevitably more IT, sold as a way to make the record-keeping easier. But adding IT to a bureaucracy is like adding lanes to a highway: the easier it is to demand fine-grained record-keeping, the more record-keeping will be demanded of you.

But that's not all that IT did for the workplace. There are a couple areas in which IT absolutely increased the profitability of the companies that invested in it.

First, IT allowed corporations to outsource production to low-waged countries in the global south, usually places with worse labor protection, weaker environmental laws, and easily bribed regulators. It's really hard to produce things in factories thousands of miles away, or to oversee remote workers in another country. But IT makes it possible to annihilate distance, time zone gaps, and language barriers. Corporations that figured out how to use IT to fire workers at home and exploit workers and despoil the environment in distant lands thrived. Executives who oversaw these projects rose through the ranks. For example, Tim Cook became the CEO of Apple thanks to his successes in moving production out of the USA and into China.

https://archive.is/M17qq

Outsourcing provided a sugar high that compensated for declining productivity…for a while. But eventually, all the gains to be had from outsourcing were realized, and companies needed a new source of cheap gains. That's where "bossware" came in: the automation of workforce monitoring and discipline. Bossware made it possible to monitor workers at the finest-grained levels, measuring everything from keystrokes to eyeball movements.

What's more, the declining power of the American worker – a nice bonus of the project to fire huge numbers of workers and ship their jobs overseas, which made the remainder terrified of losing their jobs and thus willing to eat a rasher of shit and ask for seconds – meant that bossware could be used to tie wages to metrics. It's not just gig workers who don't score consistent five star ratings from app users whose pay gets docked – it's also creative workers whose Youtube and Tiktok wages are cut for violating rules that they aren't allowed to know, because that might help them break the rules without being detected and punished:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/13/solidarity-forever/#tech-unions

Bossware dominates workplaces from public schools to hospitals, restaurants to call centers, and extends to your home and car, if you're working from home (AKA "living at work") or driving for Uber or Amazon:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/02/chickenized-by-arise/#arise

In providing a pretense for stealing wages, IT can increase profits, even as it reduces productivity:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

One way to think about how this works is through the automation-theory metaphor of a "centaur" and a "reverse centaur." In automation circles, a "centaur" is someone who is assisted by an automation tool – for example, when your boss uses AI to monitor your eyeballs in order to find excuses to steal your wages, they are a centaur, a human head atop a machine body that does all the hard work, far in excess of any human's capacity.

A "reverse centaur" is a worker who acts as an assistant to an automation system. The worker who is ridden by an AI that monitors their eyeballs, bathroom breaks, and keystrokes is a reverse centaur, being used (and eventually, used up) by a machine to perform the tasks that the machine can't perform unassisted:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But there's only so much work you can squeeze out of a human in this fashion before they are ruined for the job. Amazon's internal research reveals that the company has calculated that it ruins workers so quickly that it is in danger of using up every able-bodied worker in America:

https://www.vox.com/recode/23170900/leaked-amazon-memo-warehouses-hiring-shortage

Which explains the other major findings from the Upwork study:

81% of bosses have increased the demands they make on their workers over the past year; and

71% of workers are "burned out."

Bosses' answer to "AI making workers feel burned out" is the same as "IT-driven form-filling makes workers unproductive" – do more of the same, but go harder. Cisco has a new product that tries to detect when workers are about to snap after absorbing abuse from furious customers and then gives them a "Zen" moment in which they are showed a "soothing" photo of their family:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ai-bringing-zen-first-horizons-192010166.html

This is just the latest in a series of increasingly sweaty and cruel "workplace wellness" technologies that spy on workers and try to help them "manage their stress," all of which have the (totally predictable) effect of increasing workplace stress:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/15/wellness-taylorism/#sick-of-spying

The only person who wouldn't predict that being closely monitored by an AI that snitches on you to your boss would increase your stress levels is your boss. Unfortunately for you, AI pitchmen know this, too, and they're more than happy to sell your boss the reverse-centaur automation tool that makes you want to die, and then sell your boss another automation tool that is supposed to restore your will to live.

The "productivity paradox" is being resolved before our eyes. American per-worker productivity fell because it was more profitable to ship American jobs to regulatory free-fire zones and exploit the resulting precarity to abuse the workers left onshore. Workers who resented this arrangement were condemned for having a shitty "work ethic" – even as the number of hours worked by the average US worker rose by 13% between 1976 and 2016:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

AI is just a successor gimmick at the terminal end of 40 years of increasing profits by taking them out of workers' hides rather than improving efficiency. That arrangement didn't come out of nowhere: it was a direct result of a Reagan-era theory of corporate power called "consumer welfare." Under the "consumer welfare" approach to antitrust, monopolies were encouraged, provided that they used their market power to lower wages and screw suppliers, while lowering costs to consumers.

"Consumer welfare" supposed that we could somehow separate our identities as "workers" from our identities as "shoppers" – that our stagnating wages and worsening conditions ceased mattering to us when we clocked out at 5PM (or, you know, 9PM) and bought a $0.99 Meal Deal at McDonald's whose low, low price was only possible because it was cooked by someone sleeping in their car and collecting food-stamps.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/20/disneyland-workers-anaheim-california-authorize-strike

But we're reaching the end of the road for consumer welfare. Sure, your toddler-boss can be tricked into buying AI and firing half of your co-workers and demanding that the remainder use AI to do their jobs. But if AI can't do their jobs (it can't), no amount of demanding that you figure out how to make the Sea Monkeys act like they did in the comic-book ad is doing to make that work.

As screwing workers and suppliers produces fewer and fewer gains, companies are increasingly turning on their customers. It's not just that you're getting worse service from chatbots or the humans who are reverse-centaured into their workflow. You're also paying more for that, as algorithmic surveillance pricing uses automation to gouge you on prices in realtime:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

This is – in the memorable phrase of David Dayen and Lindsay Owens, the "age of recoupment," in which companies end their practice of splitting the gains from suppressing labor with their customers:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-03-age-of-recoupment/

It's a bet that the tolerance for monopolies made these companies too big to fail, and that means they're too big to jail, so they can cheat their customers as well as their workers.

AI may be a bet that your boss can be suckered into buying a chatbot that can't do your job, but investors are souring on that bet. Goldman Sachs, who once trumpeted AI as a multi-trillion dollar sector with unlimited growth, is now publishing reports describing how companies who buy AI can't figure out what to do with it:

https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/gs-research/gen-ai-too-much-spend-too-little-benefit/report.pdf

Fine, investment banks are supposed to be a little conservative. But VCs? They're the ones with all the appetite for risk, right? Well, maybe so, but Sequoia Capital, a top-tier Silicon Valley VC, is also publicly questioning whether anyone will make AI investments pay off:

https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/ais-600b-question/

I can't tell you how great it was to take my kid down a grocery checkout aisle from which all the eye-level candy had been removed. Alas, I can't figure out how we keep the nation's executive toddlers from being dazzled by shiny AI pitches that leave us stuck with the consequences of their impulse purchases.

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/2024/07/25/accountability-sinks/#work-harder-not-smarter

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[tomorrowusa]

Make (insert name of easily preventable disease) Great Again.

People who are nostalgic for the pandemic emergency are undoubtedly delighted that science-denier RFK Jr. is Trump's nominee to head the Health and Human Services Department.

Trump made the COVID-19 disaster worse than it had to be in the US. Think of what he and Worm Brain can do for measles, diphtheria, and hepatitis!

Vaccine misinformation distorts science – a biochemist explains how RFK Jr. and his lawyer’s claims threaten public health

Contact your senator and say that RFK Jr. makes you sick.

U.S. Senate: Contacting U.S. Senators

[wat3rm370n]

Public comment to CDC HICPAC committee November 2024

Infection control in healthcare.

My public comment to the CDC HICPAC Committee.

Direct link to my comment in the stream.

Direct link to the start of the whole comment period.

Day 2 of the meeting link, with another session of public comments then the vote.

I’m Chloe Humbert. Semmelweis is known for his campaign for hand washing standards. He was attacked by contrarians until his death. Today he is vindicated yet respiratory hygiene is the science denier flavour of the day.  It’s not okay that doctors and nurses are maskless and breathing directly on patients who then get infected. Now is the chance for those in positions to do so to set a precedent for deserved protection of worker and patient safety. To be on record giving evidence based practitioners something to hang onto.  We are going back.   The only question is how far back people in medical leadership are willing to sign onto. The announced incoming department of defense secretary is someone who said on national tv that he doesn’t wash his hands. We know what can happen because of what has happened before.  In the 1850s Florence Nightingale went to the Crimean War - a hospital in Constantinople. That's Istanbul now, and that situation was no Turkish delight on a moonlit night. She arrived at a British military base ATOP a cesspool where patients lay in their own feces among rodents and more soldiers died from infectious diseases than injuries in battle. Under Nightingale the place was scrubbed and she reduced the facility’s death rate by two thirds. We might go back further.  The Dark Ages was called that because society moved backwards from the technological advances that had come before. The fall of the Roman Eempire was marked by elites who only cared about the status quo; they could’ve developed a steam engine as far back as Heron in 15 BC but didn’t bother.  Going forward is a choice.  In an article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases & Preventive Medicine there’s a description of what happened back then. “In medieval times, hospitals were hazardous places, Epidemic infections killed large numbers of hospital patients during this period. Hospital infection and death rates were high. When a sick person entered a hospital, his or her property was disposed of, and in some regions, a requiem mass was held, as if he or she had already died.” Going backward is a choice.  We know better now. We use surgical gloves, autoclaves, disinfectants, checklists and yes, respirator masks exist. But big healthcare corporations don't wanna pay for that, they lock up PPE, force nurses to work without sick leave at hospitals, and make patients beg for reasonable accommodation.  Going forward is a choice.  Let this not be a case of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. But a time when serious healthcare professional leadership takes a stand for sanitary conditions in healthcare, and makes respirator masks and the precautionary principle the standard of care instead doing with masks what would be like calculating whether you should wash your hands after the toilet based on age or health status.

[so-true-overdue]

Welcome to the Climate Crisis Parade

Welcome to the climate crisis parade! Yes, that's right, the grand event we all helped create. Isn't it wonderful? Just look around at our beautiful, melting glaciers and the charming, drowning cities. All brought to you by human ingenuity and a blatant disregard for the planet.

Scientists have been yelling from the rooftops for decades. "Burning fossil fuels is bad," they said. "Carbon dioxide is heating up the Earth," they shouted. But who needs scientists when we have short-term profits to think about? Who cares if the polar bears need ice? We've got ice in our drinks, right?

Oh, and let’s not forget the delightful weather changes. Summers hotter than a furnace, winters that are either non-existent or brutally harsh. Perfect for those who love unpredictable vacation plans. Tornadoes in places they never used to be? Fabulous! Keeps life exciting. Hurricanes becoming more intense and frequent? Just think of the adrenaline rush!

Deforestation, another stroke of genius. Why keep trees around when we can have more shopping malls and parking lots? Never mind that those trees help keep the air clean and the climate stable. Breathing is overrated anyway.

Of course, there are the deniers. The ones who think climate change is a hoax. They’re like the flat-earthers of environmental science. So sure that they know better than the overwhelming majority of climate experts. Because, clearly, having a strong opinion is the same as having a scientific understanding.

And now, as the cherry on top of this catastrophic sundae, we have rising sea levels. Coastal cities are becoming the new Atlantis. Real estate with an ocean view is becoming real estate in the ocean. But hey, why fix the roof when it's raining?

Human-caused climate change is real. It’s happening right now, and it’s not waiting for anyone to believe in it. Our planet is warming, ecosystems are collapsing, and extreme weather is becoming the norm. But sure, let’s keep arguing about it. Because debating reality has always worked so well in the past.

In conclusion, climate change isn’t a distant threat. It’s our present. It’s the direct result of our actions. And unless we decide to act responsibly, this parade will march on, leading us right off the cliff. Enjoy the view while it lasts.

[cinemaocd]

That article in full:

"It’s not often that a world-famous actor calls you after an interview to clarify that he isn’t a Holocaust denier, but Mark Rylance was a bit anxious after our chat last week. “I didn’t know you were Jewish when we first met,” he explained. “Everything should be questioned,” he went on, but in the case of the Holocaust, only so that the deniers and their “poison” aren’t left to fester underground.

Don’t worry, I assured him, I didn’t think he was a Holocaust denier. I did, however, come away with the firm conviction that he is a quack-loving, Corbyn- and Russia-apologising, Shakespeare-denying, vax-sceptical moonbat of the absolute first order. Totally crackers. The strange thing was, given that I am resolutely none of these things, I also found him absolutely delightful company.

I meet Rylance on the roof of the Mountview studios in Peckham, southeast London. It is a searingly hot evening and he’s taking a break from rehearsing his play Dr Semmelweis to have a quick veggie burger and chips. He’s dressed like a cross between Jerusalem’s Johnny “Rooster” Byron and Captain Jack Sparrow: pink short-sleeved shirt, gold pirate hoop earring, cream porkpie hat.

https://archive.is/nUVd4/ac10ce58a49d2fbb3f718cbdab2c5cc5b8d3246b.jpg

Mark Rylance as Johnny “Rooster” Byron in Jerusalem

ROBBIE JACK/GETTY IMAGES

His crow eyes smile and dance with a kind of joyful ethereal spirit. At 63, the man often (and deservedly) called our greatest living stage actor feels fantastically, thrillingly alive, even when he’s fussing with his burger, putting the bread aside and scraping the sauce off. “Always leave the table hungry,” he says. “I heard this about [John D] Rockefeller. Someone said he lived to 90 and always left the table hungry.”

I get the sense that Rylance is a little too open-minded at times, but perhaps this is part of what makes him such an extraordinary actor — there’s his role in Jerusalem, the best play of the past 20 years, of course, but also his Oscar-winning performance in Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, the BBC’s Wolf Hall adaptation, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and so much Shakespeare it’s hard to believe one ordinary chap from Stratford actually wrote all those plays, which of course Rylance doesn’t.

Dr Semmelweis, which Rylance co-wrote and stars in, opens in the West End at the end of this month after a successful run at the Bristol Old Vic. It’s a play about a brilliant 19th-century Hungarian doctor who is driven mad by the Viennese medical establishment’s refusal to listen to him.

Semmelweis became convinced that germs were spread by dirty hands and argued that regular hand-washing could drastically reduce the incidence of so-called childbed fever, saving the lives of thousands of mothers. He was right but sadly ignored, decades before Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister were lauded for the same conclusions.

● From Jerusalem to Don’t Look Up — is Mark Rylance our greatest actor?

It’s not hard to see why the “difficult bugger” and radical thinker Semmelweis appealed to Rylance. “I have a curiosity about characters like that,” he says. “A number of things I am interested in — crop circles, the Shakespeare authorship question — are outside the box.” He grins. “Though reasonable people think I’m crazy.”

Rylance co-wrote Dr Semmelweis with the playwright Stephen Brown before the Covid pandemic happened, and it was in fact alternative cancer treatments that were his focus at the time. He’s sceptical of chemotherapy, recalling a friend of his who “broke up the cells of a tumour” using vibrations from a Tibetan sound bowl. “The body knows how to heal itself,” he says. “We don’t need to go in and bombard it with poison. It’s like bombing a city to try and get rid of a little sect of terrorists. You may wipe them all out, but you’re going to breed 25 or 30 [more].”

For Rylance, the play acts as a warning not to take the overweening scientific establishment at its word, particularly since the pandemic. “Science started to sound like a religion,” he recalls. “And really science is no different than religion, just an attempt by men to describe reality.” He says “alarm bells” rang when he was told he must take the vaccine. “I was not convinced I needed it. I took a very distilled garlic solution every morning, and vitamin C, and I sailed through Jerusalem.” He took the jab eventually, though, to visit his father in America.

Like all cranks, Rylance prefers asking questions to accepting answers. This helps him to act, though; he’s like an empty vessel into which any identity can be poured. “I don’t really know who I am or where the definition of me begins and ends,” he says. “I’ve always been a little bit boundaryless.”

He shares this epistemic wildness with Rooster Byron, the protagonist of Jerusalem with whom he will for ever be associated. Rylance thinks that the revival of it last year was even more powerful than the original in 2009.

“I felt the audiences were more hungry for it this time,” he says. “Because the state and corporate control of our lives has become so much stronger. People were desperate for a new place where there was irreverence and a little danger. There was a deeper grief in the audience about what kind of nation we have become.”

During Jerusalem’s run last year, Rylance’s brother, Jonathan, a sommelier in California, was killed aged 60. He was hit by a car while cycling. After taking a few days off, Rylance hauled himself back on stage. “That was intensely difficult,” he recalls. “I was in the caravan before the show thinking, ‘Why are we here? What are you doing?’”

Rylance was “very close” to his brother, who was two years his junior, and losing him suddenly has changed the way he approaches life. “It makes you feel, ‘What’s the point?’ to some degree,” he says. “It just makes everything that follows a little bleak. But also that hollowness can be a positive thing, a kind of grail or cup or vessel.”

Rylance, however, does not believe that death is the end of life. “I think you really can have a very healthy conversation with a soul who has passed over.” He says he has been able to talk to his long-departed grandmother using a medium and has also spoken to his stepdaughter, Nataasha van Kampen, who died aged 28 of a brain haemorrhage on a flight from New York to London in 2012. “There was a time when I was having a conversation with my daughter, thinking about her, and I heard her saying, ‘Pops, why are you talking to me as if I’m 28? I’m 33.’”

He’s aware that these views are a little outside the mainstream, but even if he’s wrong, they “don’t cause any harm”. On this point he’s probably right, but some of his other views are a little more challenging. Rylance has long been sceptical on the question of who wrote the Shakespeare plays, despite — or perhaps because of — his long stint as the first artistic director of the Globe Theatre in London. In 2007 he and Derek Jacobi unveiled a “declaration of reasonable doubt” on the subject.

● Dr Semmelweis review — feast your eyes on the wonder of Mark Rylance

This row has been reignited by the publication of a new book, Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies by the American Elizabeth Winkler, who suggests that Mary Sidney, the sister of the poet Philip Sidney, was probably involved. “No other playwright has written about women so well, so widely, so broadly,” Rylance says. “So the question of, was Mary Sidney or other women involved, I think it’s a very, very reasonable, rational question.”

Rylance’s politics are where things get trickiest. He’s not a Holocaust denier, which is good, but he does lay much of the blame for the war in Ukraine on Nato for “moving in on the Russians” and says we’ve never taken Russia’s wartime sacrifices seriously enough.

“Look how vulnerable your Jewish people are having lost six million — the Russians lost 26 to 40 million people killing fascism in Europe. We didn’t do it. The Americans didn’t do it. We stood back until the Russians had really knocked the shit out of them. And yet all my life, have we ever celebrated and thanked the Russians for dealing with fascism? No, we’ve just glorified ourselves. Of course the people will fall for a dictator like Putin and believe his narrative . . . because of the way we’ve behaved.”

You might hear something similar from Rylance’s friend and Stop the War coalition comrade Jeremy Corbyn. He still “can’t believe” the way Corbyn was labelled an antisemite. “His record to me was clear: he was always only interested in society and socialism and people getting on.”

Hearing some of these views, it’s difficult not to think Rylance a foolish and naive luvvie. Yet there’s a kind of sincere beauty to his curiosity and the way he talks about love and life that is undeniably alluring. I’m struck by the fact that he is now close friends with Chris, the man whom his wife Claire van Kampen (also a theatre director) left for Rylance when the actor was 28.

Ever since Nataasha died, Chris and Rylance have met up regularly to go walking and camping on the Ridgeway in Wiltshire. “It’s remarkable,” he says. “Though I can’t take any credit for it. Obviously I was very sorry for what happened [the affair]. Not sorry enough that I stopped, but I couldn’t help that. But within two years we were having Christmases together.”

I feel like even if Rylance said or did something to upset me, and he came reasonably close in our hour together, I’d still want to have Christmas with him and enjoy his strangely magnetic brand of bonkers. Britain’s greatest actor may not know who he really is, he may be an oddball who buys into all sorts of pernicious nonsense, but we’re still rather lucky to have him around.

Dr Semmelweis opens at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London SW1, on Thursday

Does anyone have access to the actual Sunday Times article with Mark Rylance talking about his vaccination status?

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mark-rylance-my-evening-with-the-quack-loving-but-delightful-moonbat-v5c72wjrj

I've found it misquoted dozens of times but I haven't been able to read the original....

[cruelfeline]

Ah, my bosses are apparently reeeeeally sick. Unable to get out of bed. One went out to get chest rads.

Merry Xmas to them!

[ichorai]

lover's day ; poe dameron.

track eleven of DEAR SCIENCE.

pairing ; poe dameron x mechanic!gn!reader

synopsis ; you used to think lover’s day was an utterly stupid holiday. well, that is, until poe came around.

words ; 1.7k

themes ; fluff, very slight angst, mechanic au

warnings / includes ; suggestive, implications of sex, cursing, mentions of the war, reader has trouble expressing emotions, very sappy (disgustingly so), poe is a lovesick bastard :(

main masterlist.

Lover’s day was, in your professional opinion, stupid. 

The very concept of dedicating a whole day to an egregious amount of lovesick slobbering made your stomach roil. Couples were near unbearable this time of year, the decorations were definitely an eye sore, and the number of men and women and enbies alike trying to rope you into a relationship you just knew wouldn’t last longer than two weeks couldn’t even be counted with your two hands.

But it brought people joy—and joy was a sparse feeling in such trying times.

So you swallowed your complaints, plastering on a fake smile as you pulled another piece of heart-shaped confetti out of your hair. The other mechanics had dragged you to a huge party and it would’ve been fun if they hadn’t immediately abandoned you to have quickies with their significant others in dingy hallways and bathrooms.

Damn this holiday.

It went on like this for years—there was once or twice you had a partner to accompany you but it wasn’t ever anything serious.

Well, that was before Poe came around.

He came into your life with bright smiles and flirtatious exuberance, and you’d be lying if you said you weren’t immediately smitten with him. He hadn’t known that at first—in fact, the first six months he knew you, he genuinely thought you hated his guts. Completely ignoring someone the first few times you crossed paths might’ve somewhat contributed to that.

Hey, it wasn’t your fault you weren’t very good at openly translating your affection. Especially not when Poe was so very forward. It took you a long while to realize that the hands on your back, the lingering heart-eyed stares, the endearing nicknames—those weren’t at all platonic. The self-dubbed ‘best pilot’ in the resistance wasn’t a very subtle man. You were just an incredibly good denier-of-emotions.

Poe confessed to you three months prior to lover’s day.

He did so by accident, really. It blurted out when you were discussing places you could find X-Wing scraps, black grease smudged across your cheeks and nose, gently tapping a cold wrench against your chin in thought. 

You just—you looked so beautiful right then. Poe couldn’t help himself.

“I really like you,” he had breathed out, staring at you with a newfound sort of awe, lips slightly parted.

You spared him a strange glance, an amused snort rumbling from your throat. “Okay, weirdo. You’re cool, too, I guess.”

“No, you don’t get it,” Poe said, feeling emboldened. He took the wrench from your hands to slot it into your utility belt clipped around your hips, stepping ever so close. You blinked at him in surprise. “I like like you.”

A hot flush clawed at your chest when you realized what he was on about. “Oh,” you mumbled, averting your gaze, suddenly flustered. And, much to his surprised delight, you parroted, “I like like you, too, Fly Boy.”

The first time he kissed you, there were no fireworks, no explosive passion, no feverish desperation. Only bumping noses and gentle smiles.

The three months with Poe Dameron floated by like a dream. You were the resistance’s most famed power couple—the constant attention from the rest of your peers on base wasn’t something you were quite keen on, but you were willing to put up with it for Poe.

And then lover’s day finally rolled around.

You sat up sleepily in bed the morning of, muffling a low yawn with the back of your palm. You blanched after a quick glance at the clock—shit, the two of you long overslept. Poe was still asleep beside you, arm tightly wound around your bare midriff and his face pressed into your pillow. It amused you to see sleep-lines divoting his stubbled cheeks. He stirred when you moved, mumbling something under his breath that suspiciously sounded like, “Five more minutes. After what we did yesterday, I deserve my beauty sleep.”

Brief memories of the heated session you had yesterday drifted by the front of your mind, but you quickly shoved it back down. No time to be distracted now.

“Five minutes means anywhere from ten to thirty minutes to you,” you whispered in return, leaning back down to press a sweet kiss to his hairline. He preened beneath your touch and you had to fight back a fond grin. “Come on, Dameron. We have to get up soon—there’s a huge party today.”

“Party…?” Poe opened a bleary eye, squinting in mild confusion. Then, it dawned upon him. “Oh! Lover’s day! Holy shit, baby, it’s lover’s day!”

Immediately, he sat up right beside you, winding his limbs over yours to roll you over and smother your face with an onslaught of sloppy, overexaggerated kisses while rasping out, “Happy lover’s day, baby.” 

You couldn’t help but laugh at his ministrations, shoving at his bare shoulders fruitlessly before giving in, burying your hands within his messy mass of dark curls. He groaned at the way you lightly scratched at his scalp, humming in content when your lips slotted over his.

“I hate lover’s day,” you whispered when he pulled away to kiss down your jaw. “Well, hate might be a strong word. I just never saw the point of any of it.”

Poe drew back and scrutinized you with quizzical eyes. “That can’t be true. I’ve seen you at all the parties starting from years before!”

“And did I ever look like I was having fun?” you asked, nearly wincing when Poe pulled a sour face.

His grip on you tightened. “You’ll love it this year. This year you’re with me.”

“You’re one cocky bastard, Dameron,” you muttered, to which he playfully nipped at your bottom lip. You pretended to roll your eyes with annoyance.

Then, with enough sappy affection to make you gag, he moved up to nuzzle his nose over yours. “You love that about me.”

A faux-begrudging sound escaped your throat and you bobbed your head once. “Yeah,” you said whilst kissing him sweetly, “I guess I do.”

A part of you was slightly worried. Was Poe going to be like all the others and immediately forget about you as soon as you got to the party?

It seemed that he was hell-bent on proving you wrong—lover’s day was a wonderful time in his eyes. It wasn’t only for couples, not really. It was for family, for friends, and lovers of all kinds. It was a day for love to flourish because, let’s face it, the ongoing war often made you forget just how much love there was in the world. Not everything was fear or anger or sadness. Love was always going to be there.

Poe taught you it was alright to love. There was no shame in loving so irrevocably, even when everything around you was crumbling to ash.

This year, the party didn’t feel so unbearable. The decorations didn’t seem pretentious or over-the-top, your mechanic-acquaintances were lovely to talk to, and everything went by just fine.

Sure, there were those annoying couples who were half-naked in the corner of the rooms, the hallways, and the bathrooms, but they were easy to evade if you stuck to the heart of the party. 

It was just… strange for you to be enjoying yourself so much. Maybe it was never the holiday itself you were against—maybe it just felt wrong to be celebrating something so trivial when there was so much darkness in the world. 

But you had fun, and that was all thanks to Poe. 

Finn and Chewbacca were playing a rowdy game of Holochess, and you and Poe were cheering on Chewie, much to Finn’s exasperation. Rose and Rey were playing a sort of drinking game that you only partook in for a couple rounds before you had to bow out—you weren’t too keen on getting drunk in such a crowded place. 

Hours later, Poe had noticed that your smile was starting to slip from your lips as you talked to an over-egotistical mechanic that he knew you didn’t like very much, so he quickly excused himself from the throng of pilots he was talking to, and weaved his way towards you. 

“Hey,” he greeted, fondly pressing his lips against your temple. You sagged against him slightly in relief. “Sorry to butt in, but I’m exhausted. What do you say we get out of here?”

You shot the annoying mechanic an apologetic slant of your mouth before nodding, turning away from the party with a salute of goodbye to Finn and Rey by the bar. 

“Maker, am I glad you showed up,” you said once you were far enough away, the music dimming down to a low hum. “Another word from him, and I would’ve decked him in the face. Asshole deserves a good knocking, anyways.”

Poe patted your shoulder with a chuckle. “I know, baby.”

The two of you reached your quarters, and you quickly keyed in the code, standing back as the door whooshed open. Poe sauntered in, collapsing into your bed with a groan. “Mmh, I’m never getting up ever again.” 

You toed off your shoes before crawling onto your mattress, curling up beside him. He smelled utterly delectable, like cocoa beans and faint cinnamon spices. You inhaled shallowly, eyes slipping shut with utter bliss. It was silent for a couple moments before you willed the courage to mutter, “Thank you.”

Poe glanced at you uncertainly. “For what?”

A hand lifted to trace undefinable patterns against his chest. “I don’t know. For showing me that it’s alright to love, even when it seems pointless?”

His molted gaze seemed to soften impossibly more. “Maker, you mean everything to me, you know that? I love you so much. And it’s worth it, for the record. All of this. Even if it means me losing you or you losing me. Love is worth it.”

“You’re a sap, Poe Dameron. And I love you for it.” The latter sentence was said quietly, tentative in nature. Loving with no shame still felt so unfamiliar to you. Rolling onto your stomach, you pressed a fluttering kiss to his nose, then two over his eyelids. There was a painful lump in your throat. “I guess lover’s day isn’t that terrible after all,” you finally susurrated against him, running a slow hand further down his pectorals and abdomen.

Poe could only bark out half a laugh before you stole away his noises of joy with your lips.

[sorrel-scribbles]

Welcome to My Blog!

Hey, I'm Sorrel, and welcome to my multifandom mess of a blog!

I'm a crazy cat lady with a passion for books, history, and a whole lot of other stuff. I wish I could give you a set list of fandoms, but that isn't going to happen because I get into and lose interest in stuff all the time. I have tried to compile a rough list of the fandoms I have been in at some point below the break, but there's probably still a couple things missing. This blog is mostly fandom stuff & reblogs, I'm just here to have fun 😁.

I write fanfiction too, and you can find some of it on Wattpad under LittleSorreltail ( here, I'm pretty inactive atm but there's fics up) and some of it on AO3 under sorrelscribbles (here)

I only speak English fluently.

This is a safe space for everyone as long as your actions, words, beliefs, or being are morally/ethically correct and/or legal.

DNI: NSFW blogs, racists, sexists, anti-feminists, ableists, anti-LGBTQ+, science/history deniers, religious or political extremists, anyone who condones any sort of unhealthy/illegal relationship, anyone else who can't be respectful and keep an open mind.

(Purple text in parentheses represents the furthest I have gotten in a series, either because there's a lot of stuff I don't know yet or because I'm trying to avoid spoilers)

Books:

♥Warriors-Erin Hunter (Broken Code book 4)

♥Tortall Universe-Tamora Pierce

♥Percy Jackson-Rick Riordan

♥ Keeper of the Lost Cities-Shannon Messenger (Book 8.5/Unlocked)

♥ The Hunger Games-Suzanne Collins (Specifically Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes)

♥ Skyward-Brandon Sanderson (Cytonic)

♥ These Violent Delights-Chloe Gong (Original duology only)

♥ Assorted historical fiction

♥ Some of the classics

♥ A lot more (feel free to ask!)

TV Shows:

♥ Scooby Doo from years < 2007 (and the animated movies)

♥ Hogan's Heroes

♥ Lost in Space (1965)

♥ MacGyver (2016) (Season 4)

♥ Supernatural (Season 8)

♥ Criminal Minds

♥ The Walking Dead (Season 2)

♥Downton Abbey (Season 5)

♥Sucession (Season 1)

♥ Medici & the Borgias

♥ Ace Attorney (actually the games but I'm not making a separate section; AA4)

♥ Yuri!!! on Ice

♥ I've watched a bit of Heartland and Lucifer

Movies:

♥ The Sound of Music

♥ Little Women (2020)

♥ Enola Holmes

♥ Disney/Pixar

♥ Night at the Museum

♥ Christmas movies

Musicals:

♥ Hamilton

♥ Anastasia

♥ Six

Historical:

♥ American Revolution

♥ Earps and Co.

[sleepingfancies]

The santa denier memes that come around this time every year are truly both the only valid and most delightful form of "anti-science" ever

[bondsmagii]

I'm a denier against my will :( Everything I've experienced so far had an explanation, no matter how terrifying at first. Everything my family has seen also had explanations, even if they're scared about it.

I WANT TO BELIEVE THO. I'm always the one trying to get inside a haunted house, looking up at the sky hoping to catch a glimpse of something, walking around the forest near my house that everyone is convinced is inhabited by some weird fae creature. I'm always there like, HEY HERE I AM. COME OUT. PROVE YOU EXIST. COME ON PLEASE.

if nothing exists, then we live in a very lonely place, and the only dwellers of the universe are us. I want the paranormal to be real. I want a ghost to knock me over and prove it is real. There would be nothing more delightful to me than logic and hard facts losing in the face of the unexplainable, than knowing for a fact that we are less alone than we think, that the world is a far more entertaining place than I've given it credit for.

But I need proof for that, and disgracefully, I don't have that. My older brother is like me, but he doesn't want anything to exist, because that "would alter his view of the universe" and he can't deal with that.

Coward!!! There's nothing better than being hit with the realization that you were wrong, the ground of your every belief shaking and vanishing under your feet.

Send paranormal activity my way, please.

god, that sucks so much!! I admire the attitude but oh man, it must womp severely to always have that explanation you can’t shake. it’s something I can’t even begin to imagine, considering the fact that I seem to be a paranormal magnet. like seriously, even if a place has never been reported haunted before ever, I show up and shit starts going down. it’s like I come pre-programmed with my own poltergeist or something. ghost tour guides should hire me to hang out with them just so everybody really gets a show. I’m kicking about with the god damn shining over here.

obviously there have been a lot of spooky things that have happened to me that have had more mundane explanations -- I’m not the kind of person to just automatically assume ghosts, so I go through all the other potential explanations before I arrive at “fuck yeah, ghosts”. but there have also been so many things I just absolutely cannot explain, and it’s a really cool feeling. to see something/experience something/do something and know that the only explanation exists beyond the bounds of the science we currently understand? it’s amazing, but also frustrating because on the one hand I Want To Know but on the other hand I like living in a world with such mysteries, you know? 

I have no idea what your brother is smoking to have that attitude, though. like, respect if that’s how he feels, but the idea that he thinks we live in a rational, predictable universe where everything is explained to begin with? the fact that his belief in the sanctity of the world rests on something as simple as a closet door not swinging open on its own or one (1) prophetic dream? that’s a very precarious balance, and I don’t know if I could live with the constant threat of having that all come crashing down at any moment, lol. he’s the kind of character in a horror novel who would see the ghost and have his hair go totally white with the fright of it, and then be a raving Victorian lunatic for the rest of the novel. meanwhile me and you would be out there like old-timey ghost hunters trying to catch the damn thing in a box or something. sure, neither of these two options look completely sane, but I know who’d be having more fun.

[isakblu]

The Takeaway from The Plague by Camus

2020 has hit people with a myriad of dreadful events, and COVID-19 is one of them. The pandemic first was announced in January and started from Wuhan, China, and then the virus spread later on around the world and became a massive crisis from March till now. COVID-19 not only purloined thousands of lives of people, taken away their ordinary day and replaced it with lots of requirements such as mask out on the street, and quarantine with social distancing lifestyle. It also questions people based on their actions and thought with multiple themes that have to deal with their status where they still try to figure things out from physically to mentally and emotionally their existence in this pandemic. However, the idea that most connect people together is the acceptance and revolt in the face of absurdity. It’s phenomenal in what manner the novel The Plague by Camus sketched a magnificent deep volume of the epidemic raging the characters in the books and the obstacles they have to face. I believe Dr. Rieux, one of the essential roles from the book, has been expressing his perception of absurd in these chapters of the book. Through this novel, people are going to find themselves being aware of humanity, and both The Plague and COVID-19 remind them that in the universe they are living in, death can be the last stop, but it can’t deny the fact that the dedication and enthusiasm people have for this life  .  

The idea of absurdity reflects the perspective of how people looking through the rumination on the parallel view between the side of living and dying. The Plague by Camus took place in Oran, Algeria, along a coastal town in North Africa, somewhere in the 90s. The author starts the novel before the bubonic plague even happening and becomes a critical event in the story where following by lots of narratives and character involved like the doctor, Rieux, the journalist, Rambert, the wanderer, Tarrou, and many more that show their characteristics and define the absurd and revolt in their term. From my perspective, Camus and the character Rieux both retain a strong relationship in their descriptions of the absurdity, and the readers can find out that Rieux has represented some part of Camus's thoughts all over the novel, even showing the opposite. Keith Nelson has distinguished the face of absurdity through Camus's point of view by the following quote: “Human beings are absurd because they have neither metaphysical justification nor essential connection to the universe. They are not part of any divine scheme and, being mortal, all of their actions, individual and collective, eventually, come to nothing.” Camus finds the meaning of life is bound to the words death, and worthless where he describes why people have to work so hard with all the blood, sweat, and tears they pour out while in the end, all left is grass, ground, and grave. Humans must lose and sooner or later die in nothingness behind their loved one's grief or no one, but some say difference. The rebellion, the people with hopes and dreams carry the actions, thoughts which make life more meaningful, revolting against the face of absurdity. People who believe that their darkest hour comes before their dawn, the one who enjoys the yellow come from life and the red they receive even if it turns blue, and nobody can symbolize both the acceptance and revolt of absurdity than Rieux, the luminary.  

No one is perfect, and they can be fallible, but learning to change and fight for what right and wrong make the mortals human. In the town full of negativity, the soulless people, and the sorrow sky, Rieux seems to be the only one who sees as the days pass with the views as another painting and sound as another orchestra when he draws out his canvas “ The doctor was still looking out of the window. Beyond it lay the tranquil radiance of a cool spring sky; inside the room, a word was echoing still, the word "plague." A word that conjured up in the doctor's mind not only what science chose to put into it, but a whole series of fantastic possibilities utterly out of keeping with that gray and yellow town under his eyes, from which were rising the sounds of mild activity characteristic of the hour; a drone rather than a bustling, the noises of a happy town, in short, if it's possible to be at once so dull and happy.”(Camus 124) The meticulous details he gives showing how he is amused by the being, the existence of life, and acknowledging it. It's fascinating by the virtue of Rieux seeing things as it speaks to him, although the calamities have not come yet, came, and gone, he still finds the beauty and delight in each event as his vivid description passes on. The readers can figure out the point where Rieux shows the revolt in most of the parts in the novel, which explains how he loves to be pleased by seeing the world. He is also the first man in the frontline when the plague starts to hit Oran and spread all over the town. Announcing the news, organizing groups of sanitary, experiment vaccines, influencing others, treating and helping the patients, Rieux doing his best to be the cure against this deadly epidemic where it took so many lives from this place. He is the doctor where he can think that the death of people is a must thing and what moral is, but the facts that he tries to battling this disease exhibit that Rieux is a rebellion against what absurdity all about and a faith denier.

The acceptance is not always easy especially death, but before the eyes start to close and the heart stops to beat, the flashback of every moment and memory oozing back letting the person who listens to the last sound seeing how all the splendid things they do or give as happiness lies down with them. For the few left pages, before the final period place the last dot, Rieux has altered and become more aware of the reality where he accepts the absurdity as the suffering, the sadness he went through as the quote illustrates “But there was at least one of our townsfolk for whom Dr. Rieux could not speak, the man of whom Tarrou said one day to Rieux: "His only real crime is that of having in his heart approved of something that killed off men, women, and children. I can understand the rest, but for that, I am obliged to pardon him." It is fitting that this chronicle should end with some reference to that man, who had an ignorance, that is to say lonely, heart.” (Camus 302) Imagine after Rieux loses his best friend, Tarrou, he then receives news that his wife has also passed away, the ultraviolence he got is hard to compare. It’s unpredictable and how ironic is through this bubonic plague gave him the hero definition since the myriad of lives he had saved, but, at the same time, when calamity dies down, he left nothing but just a person with blackbirds on both his shoulders. The reality when he sees that all the stamina he works so hard for his people, friends, and beloved one, all vanish in the last breath. He accepts it, but the readers can’t contradict how Rieux knows that people will have to take an eternity sleep, he still hauls his body and mind to face the pandemic until it is all gone. I think that is the lesson I learn from this novel about how people should never giving up and put effort into their life. COVID-19 is a horrendous mess, but so many people have been doing the best to make the worst seem better, such as all the nurse and doctor wrestling their life to help patients. I think no matter how small the action is like just wearing a mask, it still contributes to my community and my family health as revolting against the face of absurdity rather than waiting for the death to come.  

COVID-19 seems to be an unreal event, as shown in the pandemic from The Plague by Camus portrait. People tend to have hope in the pitch-black time of how many times it strikes them just to make the actions stronger where the victory they celebrate lies among the falls of the dead one. All things will have the last stop, and it's the same rule with humans and the plague in which the cure is going to found, where life describes the moment people have, and death is the proof of people's existence. The takeaway I found in the novel through the character Rieux is always battling for my life even though it short, I can make it meaningful.  Absurdity is something someday I have to accept, but before that, I will keep seeking purpose, meaning, and happiness in this universe.

Work Cited

Camus, Albert. The plague. Vintage, 1948.

Website:

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=a8LBjVImeO4C&oi=fnd&pg=PA2&dq=the+plague+camus&ots=DZh_dqjcDA&sig=JXM5oavWf83xNB9Sgjis6sVoJfc#v=onepage&q=the%20plague%20camus&f=false  

Neilson, Keith. "The Plague." Masterplots, Fourth Edition, edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno, Salem, 2010. Salem Online.

Website:  

https://online.salempress.com

Thank you for reading <3333333

Khang V Sun 

[teodormichalski-blog]

Why clinical school should begin at age 28

American medication is at a junction as authorities reject a merciless, depleting instructive model and a minefield-ridden practice scene. Hands wring over the compounding doctor lack, yet little happens to facilitate doctors' regulatory remaining burdens or understudy advance weights.

These difficulties have prompted inadmissibly high paces of business related mental sickness and self destruction, with "doctor burnout" entering the public vocabulary. At the foundation of certain specialists' agony and hopelessness has been a feeling that medication is their lone choice — on the grounds that it is all they realize how to do — instead of a satisfying position they decide to do.

Surely, examining one's initial leave procedure, regardless of whether to retirement or to a totally unique activity, has become extremely popular in private online doctor networks like Sermo. Furthermore, specialists practically speaking for as not many as seven years are stopping at a disturbing rate, even as gen X-ers are filling facilities and emergency clinics with their mind boggling varieties of clinical issues.While U.S. medication needs monstrous change, including instinctive electronic wellbeing records and more significant salary for essential consideration, there is something doctors to-be can do to shield themselves from a portion of the issues that plague specialists today: spend their early stages working at a first vocation and meeting their life accomplices, and hold on to start clinical school until age 28.

Why 28? First off, working for six or seven years after school at a nonmedical occupation would let specialists put vital assets into retirement and land. For some, doctors, part of their present aggregate disappointment with medication is budgetary. Rather than getting a charge out of wages relative to their penances, they tussle on the telephone with proficient installment deniers at insurance agencies and watch as cash sneaks away to taking care of enormous understudy credits, licensure expenses, and negligence protection. Plastic specialists may purchase manors, however geriatricians cut coupons. It is no big surprise that a geriatrician lack looms.

Cheers and sneers as prescription school's Step 1 test becomes pass/come up short

Not at all like their nonphysician partners, who have been developing their savings since their right on time to-mid 20s, numerous doctors stress over working past retirement age because of previous purchasing that fixer-upper or missing the long periods of intensified speculation increases accumulated from placing cash into retirement accounts before beginning clinical school. For understudies and clinical occupants with almost no discretionary cashflow, the income simply doesn't allow it. Be that as it may, both grown-up objectives can be accomplished before beginning clinical school. The returns from selling or leasing that home or the profits from early ventures can help balance the expenses of clinical school, as can accomplishing deal with the side in one's "twenties calling" during clinical school.

Beginning clinical school further down the road can forestall hidden dreams and potential, which are some of the time a wellspring of hatred in miserable specialists who feel caught. For certain individuals, the 20s are a period of staggering innovativeness and profitability. Performers, journalists, specialists, programming architects, and others should regularly hold their undeniable gifts for the unwavering course of events of clinical training: finishing burdensome science labs, chipping in emergency clinics, reading for the United States Medical Licensing Examination, and the crush of residency. That ability must be permitted time to wed with the mind blowing vitality and neurological enchantment of the mid 20s.One of my best clinical school cohorts delighted in worldwide popularity with a Taiwanese pop gathering during his mid 20s. In addition to the fact that he had cash to pay for clinical school, however having self-completed without pondering "Imagine a scenario in which?" he had the option to consider and accomplish the degree of dominance expected to gain a residency position in orthopedic medical procedure at a top program that was normally far off for alumni of our school.

Understudies thinking about a profession in medication who, in contrast to my colleague, understand a desire to seek after their imaginative vocations forever will essentially not make a difference to clinical school, clearing a path for another meriting understudy as opposed to dropping out with laments halfway through a clinical profession.Beginning clinical school at 28 would likewise make an ideal circumstance for beginning families. Understudies could exploit advantages like nearby kid care and a more loosened up plan with the capacity to go to addresses by means of web. Tests can be made up effectively after a maternity or paternity leave in the first or second year. Businesses may examine downtime to think about youngsters during one's working years, however downtime during clinical school ordinarily doesn't draw in a similar addressing.

Quit dealing with clinical inhabitants like obligated workers

It's an alternate story in residency. Medical clinics are known for rebuffing learners who take even genuine downtime, to some extent since that probably makes more work for other people. Emergency clinic occupants who took as meager as about a month and a half of maternity leave have answered to the American Medical Association that correctional moves were made against them, including being compelled to function as inadequately paid inhabitants for an additional year or having their residency positions parted with

Kids would enter school age as their folks were entering residency, with guardians ready to guarantee subordinate duty allowances on their small pay rates. Further, having youngsters before residency by and large implies that grandparents would be more youthful, more beneficial, and better ready to help care for their grandkids. At the present time, numerous doctors battle with unpleasant positions, the requests of small kids, and debilitated, older guardians — all simultaneously. That adds to specialists diminishing their hours or leaving the calling.

It is normal for doctors to concede having youngsters until their mid-to-late 30s — after residency and cooperation — adding fruitfulness issues to their weights. Organizing childbearing during the more youthful years before residency would definitely decrease the quantities of unsuccessful labors, birth abandons, pregnancy confusions in doctor families. Critically, these wellbeing concerns legitimately mean lost clinical hours for which those doctors are accessible to deal with patients.mbbs in china inhabitants and colleagues ought to get three months of paid maternity and paternity leave, obviously, however the counter culture in training medical clinics is far and wide to such an extent that acquiring that cycle altogether might be more serviceable.

Beginning clinical school at age 28 would likewise help break the pattern of misuse endemic in clinical training. Going to specialists — the ones who do the vast majority of the instructing — will in general be age 35 and more seasoned, while clinical understudies can be as youthful as 23 when they enter the medical clinic setting, with no certifiable work understanding. The widespread tormenting, terrorizing, and provocation by going to doctors would decrease by their showing more seasoned understudies who have worked in different fields. Throughout the long term, this would in a perfect world outcome in a more noble and scholarly culture in medication than exists today.

Having set up a profession before entering clinical school can likewise be a fence against the impulsive idea of clinical preparing. No clinical understudy should start such a costly and upsetting excursion without the certainty that another activity anticipates should things go astray. Residency students can discover their agreements not reestablished with no real way to acquire board accreditation — a need for getting work in the mind greater part of medical clinics and facilities. For instance, in excess of 500 inhabitants and colleagues lost their positions because of the conclusion of Hahnemann Hospital in 2019.

Consistently, fourth-year clinical understudies apply for openings in residency preparing programs. Not every one of them get welcome to one. Many join the pool of a few thousand "unrivaled" (read: jobless) specialists buried in the American framework that doesn't finance all clinical understudies to work in residency projects and gives a portion of those supported situations to unfamiliar clinical alumni. As such, going to clinical school is no assurance of functioning as an occupant and turning into a specialist. Without winning the "Yearning Games" of residency determination, alumni of M.D. or then again D.O. programs are not permitted to fill in as doctor associates.

For those left without a vocation subsequent to putting countless dollars in clinical school, having been a bookkeeper, pilot, social laborer, or dental hygienist before encourages them stroll into new openings with the capacity to pay understudy advances and start their lives. They can reapply to residencies while appreciating a pay, advantages, and progression as opposed to working for almost no compensation in an exploitative examination lab — regularly the main occupation offered to these alumni. So also, an unexpected disease, the need to think about a relative, or basically needing to enjoy a reprieve from medication ought not prompt articulate proficient and budgetary crash, the manner in which it regularly does now. Find out About Being a Doctor visit to https://www.mbbsconsultancy.in/mbbs-in-china/

Before, many made the contention that it took such a great amount of work to prepare a doctor that the most alluring possibility for clinical school and residency programs were the individuals who might see patients full an ideal opportunity for the best number of years. A 35-year vocation in medication was more attractive than a 25-year profession. Postings for residency positions much of the time refer to a cutoff date for clinical school graduation in the past scarcely any years, notwithstanding the glaring age segregation that infers, and allopathic clinical schools demoralize more seasoned understudies from applying.However more established, more develop understudies can possibly be more noteworthy resources for the clinical calling generally, and enough youthful doctors lose their clinical licenses right off the bat in their vocations because of rash criminal behavior that it might profit clinical schools to search out applications from the individuals who have worked nicely as grown-ups in the public eye for quite a while.

[anthonybialy]

Pressed for Precedent

Failures are due for a good break. Try the same idea that exploded spectacularly the last 700 times on the grounds that something simply must work eventually just to break the pattern. You win this time, gravity.

Presuming an established catastrophe will thrive during the next try is a favorite hobby of socialists who somehow still exist. The enthusiastic deniers of all that's happened claim to be for science despite their commitment to loathing evidence. It's a great sign when ignorance is the best excuse. Government's goons aren't aware of the earlier failures, hopefully, as it's unhealthy to ignore so many experiments.

Surrendering autonomy has worked out every single occasion before except for all of them. Just ask Bernie Sanders about which direction people hopped the Berlin Wall. It only looks like they're heading west because decadent capitalists who bought control of information flipped the footage.

It's the arrogance that's most charming in those who think you'e stupid for noticing how quickly money disappears when it belongs to everyone. Presuming everyone in opposition to one giant wallet either disregards human suffering or profits off it is especially open-minded, as there's no other reason a person could stand for persons being left alone.

Let's have socialism without the authoritarian parts. Also, enjoy cheesecake without the calories. It's a diet food now even if every time it's ever been eaten before has led to tighter slacks. You just have to consume it correctly this time, assures the New York Times editorial.

Thinking that concentrated authority won't require bossiness would be adorable if not for the ruined lives and corpse piles. People who claim ending insurance mandates and net neutrality lead to widespread death sure have lots of excuses for mass-murdering tyrants.

You just have to proclaim that a scheme will work. Don't you have faith, you heathen? Deciding the design of the present trendy system for supervising the minutes of our lives will function is the worst type of theocracy. Anyone who hasn't figured out central planning causes a plane crash into a tire fire every single time thinks it's our fault for not investing enough through taxes that are redundant to classify as a ripoff.

Pompousness enabled by obliviousness is a perfect pairing to keep socialism alive after a century that showed why it's deadly in so many ways. How anyone could oppose delicate schemes to bring wealth and health is a mystery except to anyone who's ever read the news. But those free market parasites are just being negative with their examples.

Nothing delights like fans of the most thoroughly discredited financial ideas in human history claiming to have objective facts. Their certainty can only get more precious considering they're advocating ideas that turned the Eastern Bloc into a sludge pit. Projections from people who think Washington manages money and lives efficiently couldn't possibly contain flimsy assumptions.

Planning failures sure are lucky to have a fawning media that is objective as long as thinking government action means caring for people counts. The limp goons are never prompted to provide one example of trading liberty for central planning that has resulted in bliss or even something other than ruin.

Adoration of ideas that least deserve them helps a certain kind of delusional candidate win elections. That's entirely different from winning at life. But all those craving the next temporary job need is to sucker half the voters. Government works splendidly for those who pretend it works.

Willfully disregarding what has actually worked is the ideology's crucial part. There are countless examples of markets lifting humans out of poverty, including in the exploitative rotten oppressive nation ingrates call home.

Things are so good that those outraged by compensation for value have time to act as if a company's owner making a lot more than a janitor is a moral outrage. You'd think with all that free time they could find successful precedents for what they believe.

Getting numbers and reality wrong isn't even the most horrifying part. Excessive power enthusiasts are making life fantastically easy for Donald Trump. The poor guy has never gotten a break. Now, the least deserving posing tycoon of our time will get to face ideas so easily dismissed that even he can do so with a vaguely rude gesture.

Our poor maligned president can once more point out his foes are horrendous without having to do anything else. A binary choice is always his best hope.

Facing collectivists allows him to bitch while never having to list his own accomplishments. The mouthy lightweight can just note socialist claptrap sucks, which is true in the same way as knowing The Walking Dead is dull in darkness. But it's apparently not obvious enough. Trump gets to stand up to massive overreach even as he bravely refuses to confront the entitlement state.

Offering an alternative to the most obnoxious president imaginable should be easier than free exchange. A seller who offers nothing but boasts can only succeed if the alternative promises to finally bring all the good parts of Cuba to America.

[pastor-dj]

Modern Science and Modern Evangelical Christianity: Strange Bedfellows

Many bloggers and media pundits seem to suggest that “science” and “religion” (and by “religion” they usually mean Christianity) are opposite forces that are at complete odds with each other. Well-known celebrity science advocate Bill Nye’s new TV show is all about promoting science and “defending” it from the “anti-scientific claims of religious leader.”  As a Christian myself, not only do I believe that there is no contradiction between scientific fact and Biblical truth (as opposed to scientific theory vs. speculations about Scripture), I also believe that the quest for truth – whether through scientific exploration or theological study and reflection – is always something God delights in. All truth is God’s truth, and both 2+2=4 AND John 3:16 are equally valid, even if the methods for discovering the truth are different.  But I find it fascinating that there are two big issues in which both scientists and evangelical Christians seem to be stuck together in the same boat.

The first is this: (1) who speaks for either group? The Roman Catholic Church has a big advantage over the rest of the Christian family, as they have the Pope who is the only one authorized to speak on matters of theology, doctrine or practice. But for evangelical Protestants, who speaks for them? Pat Robertson? Franklin Graham? Joel Osteen? Rick Warren? Paula White?  All of them are people the media will go to for a quote. But while there is a broad consensus among Christians on the main issues of the faith (salvation, Lordship of Christ, etc.), when it comes to secondary issues (baptism, interpretation of Revelation, speaking in tongues, etc.) or hot-button political/social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, there are many different answers you might get to these questions.  No one person speaks for all Protestant evangelical Christians. And when the media reports that Christians disagree on some things, it leads a lot of people to believe that Christians don’t agree on ANYTHING.  Now, if you can get past the profanity, crude sex jokes and unrelated tangents, watch John Oliver’s show from last season on “Scientific Studies” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw) and you see the same dynamic at play. Every week, there is a report in the media on a new “scientific study” about a food or some product that will either (a) give you cancer, (b) prevent cancer (c) help you lose weight, (d) make you fat, or (e) any combination thereof.  It’s no wonder, as Oliver notes, that so many people distrust “science” when it all seems so contradictory. At one point, he angrily berates Al Roker for suggesting that people “just pick the scientific study that works for you” (in all fairness, Roker probably said it in jest) by shouting: “No! In science, you don’t get to cherry pick the parts that justify what you were going to do anyway!” That’s what religion does!” And he’s right! – or at least, he’s right about how many humans approach religion (i.e., cherry picking the parts of the Bible that they already agree with while ignoring the others). So, if science is not this big monolith, with all scientist moving in lockstep, who “speaks for science”?  Well, just like evangelical Christianity, people like Bill Nye, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and others are jockeying for position, trying to get the most media face time, and hoping to be the official spokesman. But, both sides are facing an uphill battle.

           The second issue that both groups are facing is this: (2) when either science or Christianity gets in bed with politics, the search for truth becomes secondary.  Politics is all about, as Charlie Sheen used to say, WINNING. It’s all about your side winning the debate, shouting down your opponent, and making your side look good and the other side look bad. And that unfortunately is what both evangelical Christians and scientists have been doing for the last several decades. Early on in the history of the Church, Christianity was outlawed by the Roman Empire but despite its suppression, it grew exponentially even though the followers of Jesus risked their lives by doing so. But then, the emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the state, and overnight, Christians went from persecuted to favored status. Suddenly, Christian leaders and teachers were members of the emperor's court, and got caught up in palace intrigue and king-making instead of sharing their faith --  something we've struggled with in many Western countries ever since. So many evangelical Christians give their blind allegiance to either the Democrat or Republican parties hoping that the trade-off will be more power and prestige (regardless of whether or not the party fully espouses Christian virtues). And in the same way, many scientists have aligned themselves with political movements and given them their full allegiance without taking into consideration other studies and other potential conflicting data. Many scientists, having been goaded into support global warming as a political issue rather than as a scientific inquiry, are now so fully immersed in their political position that they won't stop to consider any conflicting data (as we saw from the “Climategate” scandal several years ago). Rather than searching for scientific truth and trying to educate the public about the dangers of damaging the earth’s ozone layer, instead it's all about proving that “Al Gore was right and his Republican opponents were wrong!” and shouting “DENIER!” at anyone who questions them. But when you try to ask these scientists “what can we do help stop global warming?” it's like they don't care about what we can do to fix it. All they seem to care about is being right and winning the debate.

           Personally, I don’t know if the scientific data available has convinced me that every time there is a record high temperature somewhere in the world it is the result of man-made global warming as opposed to circular weather patterns. But, I also don't need for the former to ultimately be true for me to be convinced that pumping lots of fluorocarbons into the atmosphere is bad and it's going to wreak havoc on the environment. I also don't know if I believe that either the Democrat or Republican Party is “more Christian” than the other and deserves our full allegiance. But, I believe that even if we don't choose sides, we could still work together to make a huge difference in this world. It would be great if both scientists and evangelicals could put down their guns and knives and poison pixels on the internet and start listening to one another and working together the solve some of the bigger problems in this world. Because when it comes down to it, we are both pursuers of Truth.

[kallmaker]

The Short Life and Excellent Death of Darth Lumpius

    Back in August I knew I would be writing this post and that this would be the title.

Darth Lumpius had visions of immortality. Its evilness was about the size of two Cheerios. A routine mammogram screening discovered the nasty little bugger. Three weeks later Darth Lumpius was no more, aspirations of takeover all for nothing, thanks to a crack team of Resistance fighters: one surgeon, one radiologist, one radiation oncologist, one therapeutic oncologist, and a platoon of technicians and nurses. They each had their own light saber and the Force was with them.

All Star Wars references aside, I found out I had breast cancer in August. By the beginning of September, I no longer had breast cancer due to quick outpatient surgery. Radiation treatments followed to discourage any hangers on of trying to attempt their own takeover. I am now cancer free with no greater risk of another case than the general population.

All in all, start to finish, the best possible breast cancer story a person can have.

Less than Three Months

It's hard to believe that the entire sequence from first detection at the routine screening, pre-surgical tests, a trip to nuclear medicine (that sounds so cool, doesn't it?!), surgery, recovery, and radiation took not quite three months

Trust me when I say that this year I am profoundly grateful for a great many things:

Imaging breakthroughs - the machine that detected this tiny tumor is about 1,000 times more sensitive that a machine 10 years ago.

Medical treatment breakthroughs - the only other female in my family I know that has had breast cancer was an aunt decades ago; her treatment option was a double mastectomy. I have a completely healed four-inch scar and a minor amount of residual numbness that is slowly going away.

The Affordable Care Act which mandates annual mammograms as a free and covered screening, and requires health plans to repeatedly remind their patients to have one. I didn't need persuasion, but the reminders were useful to avoid any gaps where Darth Lumpius would continue to grow.

Health care professionals who have been relentlessly vilified and terrorized by science deniers still showing up to the job, and doing it with compassion.

Researchers - from the first measurement to the ultimate biopsy of the lump after surgery, multiple tests now exist that made it possible me to always choose the least invasive option that offered the best long-term outcome. I left my final radiation session knowing my chances of another case are the same as the general population.

Peeps who took on work on short notice with no more info than "I have a schedule crunch, can you help?" are rock stars.

My wife Maria, kids Kelson and Lee, and friends who knew who took the news without drama and gave boundless support, and who fell in with my quirky humor but succeeded in discouraging me from getting a tattoo on my scar that said "Ha ha! Missed me!" because that's a Wile E Coyote move, and I don't need an Acme anvil dropping on my head.

Most of all, since they determine as much as 80% of our body's resistance to cancer, I am thankful for the genes I got from my parents and their ancestors. I have no doubt that Darth Lumpius's plans for evil takeover of my right boob were hampered by the Force that I inherited from them. They're all Skywalkers to me.

  All the News Was Good

There is no question that I'm grateful for this outcome.

From my earliest follow ups, every doctor underscored the continuing good news. Darth Lumpius was small and nowhere near the chest wall or my armpit. After biopsy, they knew it was feeding on estrogen and therefore any undetected remnants could be easily starved. Other than it being malignant, all the news was good.

My surgeon (a delightful thirty-something Resistance leader) said flat out, "This is 100% curable." Just before surgery she asked me to decide if I wanted a more cosmetic final appearance or a potentially shorter surgery and recovery. She nodded in agreement when I said, "Whatever approach is best to kill it, please do that." Though I'm sure she'd heard the joke before, she laughed when I said that my days as a boob model were over anyway.

There's one final score that comes from the sample itself which predicts the likelihood of another cell going over to the Dark Side. On a scale of 1 to 100, the happy place is 25 or less. My oncologist lit up with joy when she told me my score was 12. Darth Lumpius, for all its attempted evil, was pitifully ineffective.

(One caveat - I do have to take estrogen blockers for five years. Yes, I will have even less estrogen floating around than I already do. I'm going to have to write my name on my hand at this rate. Yes, I'm truly looking forward to gaining weight even more easily. However, all of that is better than having breast cancer again.)

  A bowl of Inspiration we keep on the piano.

Certainty and Uncertainty

Knowing that the word "cancer" rightly fills people with dread, I kept the news to myself and the closest of family and friends. There was some uncertainty, of course, but I knew I was going to be mostly okay (and I am better than okay) and I wanted to save everyone needless worry. At some point I may need those healing thoughts and prayers. Should that come to pass I'll ask for them then.

Though I was certain I was going to be fine, I had no way of planning my time in September or October. I presumed surgery, recovery, and radiation treatments would all be the worst possible experience, so I pushed deadlines and projects around in case I was not up to working. The time loss didn't happen so I was able to resume some of those projects much more quickly than I had thought, including finalizing an audiobook and releasing a new series. As I said above, I'm grateful to the people who helped when I couldn't plan ahead more than a few days at times.

Not All Women are This Lucky

I am well aware that my diagnosis and treatment are not what many women experience. Given all the good news, I was calm enough to be fascinated by the science, machines, nuclear medicine dye injection, and the cool glued-shut-zero-post-surgical-wound-care scar. I was assigned a social worker for mental health support that I didn't need, and I was more than happy to yield my time to someone who did need it.

The process was like an assembly line where I moved from specialist to specialist guided by many different techs and nurses in between. I found comfort in always knowing the next step, and that there was nothing about my case that caused any of the professionals intent on saving my life from breaking stride. Everyone was kind, listened, and happy to speed me on my way.

Genetics is the real wild card in how cancer progresses and how successful treatment is. We can't change our genes. But we can get the screenings and use those results to have control over our own destiny. And we lucky breast cancer survivors can continue to insist that early detection and rapid treatment are a universal right.

I know many women who could have had my outcome didn't, or won't, because of where they live, how much money they have, and the color of their skin.

Please research charities before you donate to be sure they are doing the work you want to support. My opinion is that "awareness" campaigns are worthless if an aware person can't get the screening.

All that said, the bottom line in fighting breast cancer is early detection. What you don't know can kill you. Knowledge is power. Early detection may have literally saved my life. At the very least it spared me more invasive and painful treatments that may have proven less effective.

  And Then There Were the Bills . . .

My wife and I are both accountants and both skilled when it comes to the forensic side - following the money. It took us 2 hours working together to understand how billing worked, where copays had been applied, and how to match EOBs (the statement that says what the bill is and what the insurance company will pay of it) to claims numbers (which weren't on the EOBs) to services rendered (with claim numbers but no descriptive relationship to the EOBs except date, and/or the name of the doctor vs the location of the services which was not always correct).

I had to make a color-coded spreadsheet. I may have said more than once, "They shall come to fear my accounting powers."

There were obvious simple fixes that could have made it much easier, like universal use of the claim number. I assume they're not implemented because making it easier is not a goal. I imagine many people give up and just pay. We found multiple errors in both directions, but mostly in theirs. It finally squared up in subsequent months. I do not miss my days of doing reconciliations.

  This is a Happy Ending

During radiation treatments they played various songs that ranged from Motown to cozy 90s. The first song during radiation treatment was "Uptown Girl" by Billy Joel which made the lasers and scanners moving all around me a truly surreal dance of technology. The final one was "Turn, Turn, Turn" by the Byrds.

So I am turn, turn, turning to the new season, this one filled with gratitude for the community I live in, and the love I know is there for me. A lot in the world is broken but this story is not one of them. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and this year I have much to celebrate.

To everyone reading: You are part of this happy ending. Thank you.

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