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Baby, It’s Me, Polio, and I’ve Missed You

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/baby-its-me-polio-and-ive-missed-you
Created
Tue, 17/12/2024 - 00:00

Can I be vulnerable with you for a second? I always believed we’d get back together.

Smallpox thought I was nuts. He kept telling me, “You’re delusional, bro.”

Rinderpest was similarly down about it. “They literally eradicated you.” I’m like, maybe look in the mirror when you say shit like that? Because I might be down, but I am not out.

And every time I talked about my comeback, Dracunculiasis rolled her eyes at me. “They all but wiped you out, man. It was one of the great successes of twentieth-century medicine.”

That was hard to hear. But I held on. I believe in manifesting. And I know you: You’re always saying that you’re over stuff that you aren’t REALLY over. You revive every franchise, and you reboot all your television shows. You “quit” social media. Look at high-rise jeans. And also low-rise jeans. Pretty much every rise of jeans. You count them out, and then—bam—just when you’ve finally cleaned them out of your closet, they’re back in fashion again. That’s why, despite everything, I’ve stayed optimistic.

The UR Rule Of Civilizations Worth Living In

https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/niyBMplQItBo5QwAPEcVLrntg0J9u_75
Created
Mon, 16/12/2024 - 23:40
The UR Rule Of Civilizations Worth Living In

I saw this rather revealing tweet recently:

Andreessen, if you don’t know, made his money during the dot-com boom, at Mozilla. He then formed a venture capital firm, Andreessen-Horowitz.

Now what’s interesting about this tweet is the word “guilt.”

Andreessen doesn’t want to feel guilt. He doesn’t like the idea that one should run society to try and do the most good for the most people.

Svensk penningpolitik — en intellektuell hönsgård

https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/2024/12/16/svensk-penningpolitik-en-intellektue…
Created
Mon, 16/12/2024 - 20:36
Om man i en demokrati skall överlåta viktiga beslut till experter bör detta bygga på att det faktiskt existerar en någorlunda säkerställd kunskap hos den kår av experter som skall fatta besluten. När det gäller penningpolitiken visar den omfattande debatten inom ekonomkåren att så inte är fallet. Man kan jämföra det rådande kunskapsläget inom penningpolitiken […]

as an ai model, i cannot write archive text for webcomics

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=4276
Created
Mon, 16/12/2024 - 19:00
archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about
December 16th, 2024next

Scandal deepens around CNN’s Clarissa Ward staging Syria prison scene

https://thegrayzone.com/2024/12/16/scandal-cnns-clarissa-ward-staging-syria-pri…
Created
Mon, 16/12/2024 - 16:43

Footage showing CNN’s regime change-crazed correspondent supposedly freeing a forgotten prisoner from a Syrian jail has been exposed a scandalous fraud, yet the network continues to re-air it, while defending its correspondent. “In nearly twenty years as a journalist, this was one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed.” That’s how veteran CNN journalist Clarissa Ward described her foray into a Syrian prison on December 12, where she promptly claimed to have rescued a forgotten inmate after three months […]

The post Scandal deepens around CNN’s Clarissa Ward staging Syria prison scene first appeared on The Grayzone.

The post Scandal deepens around CNN’s Clarissa Ward staging Syria prison scene appeared first on The Grayzone.

Tulsi’s Cult

https://digbysblog.net/2024/12/15/tulsis-cult/
Created
Mon, 16/12/2024 - 10:30
Don’t say they weren’t warned. Honolulu Civil Beat reports: A former member of a secretive Hawaiʻi religious sect is warning members of Congress about the potential dangers of confirming Tulsi Gabbard as President-elect Donald Trump’s next director of national intelligence. Anita van Duyn says she spent 15 years inside the Science of Identity Foundation, a fringe offshoot of Hare Krishna that was formed in the 1970s and has been described by defectors as a cult. She has sent the letters only to Democrats so far, so I don’t know how effective that will be. And as the article acknowledges, Senators are loathe to criticize anyone for their religious beliefs(well, unless the person is a Democrat in which all bets are off.) Most DC types seem to think they should really go near this issue. But Gabbard hasn’t been nominated to be the head of Housing and Urban Development she’s been tapped to be the head of all the Intelligence Agencies and she’s a lifelong member of a cult!

Murdering Eagles to Save the Climate?

https://tomdispatch.com/murdering-eagles-to-save-the-climate/
Created
Mon, 16/12/2024 - 09:30

Like many roads that cut through Wyoming, the highway into the town of Rawlins is a long, winding one surrounded by rolling hills, barbed wire fences, and cattle ranches. I’d traveled this stretch of Wyoming many times. Once during a dangerous blizzard, another time during a car-rattling thunderstorm, the rain so heavy my windshield wipers couldn’t keep pace with the deluge. The weather might be wild and unpredictable in Wyoming’s outback, but the people are friendly and welcoming as long as you don’t talk politics or mention that you live in a place like California. One late summer afternoon on a trip at the height of the Covid pandemic, I stopped off in Rawlins for lunch. There wasn’t a mask... Read more

Source: Murdering Eagles to Save the Climate? appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Happy Hullabaloo Christmas

https://digbysblog.net/2024/12/15/happy-hullabaloo-christmas/
Created
Mon, 16/12/2024 - 08:30
Once again, many, many thanks to those of you who’ve contributed this year. I am so grateful, There are so many options out there for people to subscribe to good writing and great analysis so it really warms my heart to see that some of you are choosing to support the work we do here. I’ll never have a paywall — I want people who have limited ability to pay to be able to read us too — and I don’t want to go back to featuring ads, so I really appreciate those of you who have the means and the desire to donate. I don’t know how many of us have the stomach to be dissidents. I certainly don’t know what I will do if I’m forced to ask myself that question. But it’s probably something we should all think about at least a little bit ahead of time. With people like Tom Hohman saying they plan to arrest people who “harbor” undocumented workers and Trump and his henchmen threatening to jail everyone in sight, it’s not completely out of the question that we might be confronted with some unpleasant choices before too long.

Make America Healthy Again?

https://digbysblog.net/2024/12/15/make-america-healthy-again/
Created
Mon, 16/12/2024 - 07:00
Yum. I hope he doesn’t want to ban antibiotics too or we’ll be in worse trouble than we already are. By the way: Recall this? Nov. 10, 2010 — An effort by Pennsylvania schools to get students to eat healthier is coming under fire from Sarah Palin. The proposed new guidelines would limit the amount of sweets in classroom parties and reduce the number of holiday and birthday celebrations. On the proposed regulations, Palin called Pennsylvania a “nanny state run amok.” In protest, she brought 200 sugar cookies to a Bucks County school fundraiser Tuesday. “I had to shake it up a little bit because I heard there is a debate going on in Pennsylvania over whether most schools condemn sweets, cakes, cookies, that type of thing,” Palin said. “I brought dozens and dozens of cookies to these students.” Instead, parents would be encouraged to serve healthy snacks, such as fruits or vegetables. But hey, the two Sarahs never said you shouldn’t serve raw meat, raw egg yolks and raw milk to kids, amirite? Perfectly legit.

Project Blue Beam

https://digbysblog.net/2024/12/15/project-blue-beam/
Created
Mon, 16/12/2024 - 06:00
This drone story taking the country by storm is almost certainly nothing nefarious. People are all over the internet with videos of what are obviously airplanes shrieking about drones the size of SUVs. It’s possible that there’s something going on with drones in New Jersey but with Fox News screeching about an “Iranian mothership” launching them off the Jersey shore we really have reached full Idiocracy. ABC News broadcast about a mysterious orb in the sky. Well, actually this is full Idiocracy: That should be all you need to know but just in case you’re curious: 1. Project Blue Beam is a conspiracy theory that alleges a secret plan by entities like NASA and the United Nations to establish a new world order through advanced technological manipulation. Here’s a detailed breakdown of what the theory claims:  2. Objective:The primary goal is to implement a new global religion that would serve as the ideological foundation for a totalitarian world government.

The Oligarchy

https://digbysblog.net/2024/12/15/the-oligarchy-2/
Created
Mon, 16/12/2024 - 05:00
That’s just the most high profile. They bought themselves cabinet sets. The Big CEOs are all donating at least a million to the inauguration and ABC settled a totally bogus lawsuit for 15 million to be donated to Trump’s “presidential library and foundation” which doesn’t exist. They threw in George Stephanopoulos being forced to apologize as a sweetener. (That was probably worth more to Trump than the money.) I expected Republicans to bend the knee. That’s not unusual. Even a few Democrats following suit doesn’t surprise me. But the media and the business community totally capitulating, bringing gifts to the baby Trump like they’re the three wise men wasn’t something I expected. Those guys have so much money I assumed they’d never have to curry that kind of favor. It appears to me they want to. Maybe it’s just a matter of not wanting to be left out of the Mar-a-Lago party. But this is definitely happening and it’s very, very worrying.

Bringing Back The Plagues

https://digbysblog.net/2024/12/15/bringing-back-the-plagues/
Created
Mon, 16/12/2024 - 02:30
Descent into madness Two of my friends (barely a couple of years older) had polio as children. One still walks with a limp. The other told me just yesterday that she spent time in an iron lung as a kid. I was shocked. Remember when medical ventilators were in super-high demand during the COVID-19 pandemic? Before ventilators there were iron lungs. Obsolete now (save for extremely rare cases), iron lungs fell out of use in the 1950s when positive pressure ventilators came along. Coincidentally, vaccines that ended the polio outbreaks of the 1940s and 1950s arrived about the same time. My parents put me in line at a Chicago park one night to get the Salk vaccine by injection gun. Getting vaccinated against polio back then was a community event. You can imagine what my friends think of RFK Jr.’s proposal for having the FDA decertify the polio vaccine. The one with iron lung experience used spicier language yesterday than used by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, 82, himself a polio survivor (CBS News): Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell issued an apparent warning Friday to Robert F.