[Transcript: a young woman with long blonde hair is speaking directly into the camera. 

“I’m gonna tell you guys something that honestly changed my life for good. So if you’re in college, and live in a dorm or an apartment, there’s a good change that a lot of people living in your dorm or apartment have an Alexa. And if you go into the hallway and yell loud enough... I’ll just show you the rest.” 

The girl is now standing in a dorm hallway. She yells at the top of her lungs: 

“Alexa! Play Fireflies!” 

There is a moment of quiet where several Alexas responding can be faintly heard. After a few seconds, Fireflies by Owl City begins to play loudly, followed a few seconds later by another starting up, then another, then another as the woman begins to walk down the hall, smiling and laughing, to a growing cacophony of Fireflies by Owl City. 

End transcript.]

@secret--psalms--saturn

These might appear to be a thread of nonsensical unrelated tweets, so let try to me string them together:

First, we have unvaccinated antivaxxers blaming the spread of coronavirus on people who have been vaccinated. Yes, you read that right. (source)

Second, the unvaccinated, particularly in Southern states like Mississippi, are taking Ivermectin. Ivermectin is a de-wormer for horses and cows, that unvaccinated Trumpsters are taking because Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson told them that animal medication—which is not meant for human consumption—was safer than the coronavirus vaccine. (source)

It’s worth noting that all three Fox News hosts have reportedly taken the coronavirus vaccine themselves, even as they tell others not to.

Third, Alabama has run out of ICU beds because of a surge of COVID-19 cases. And Donald Trump is having a MAGA rally there, where he and his unmasked, unvaccinated supporters will congregate and then go back into their communities and spread more coronavirus (which they will blame on vaccinated people).

Fourth, Alabama has preemptively passed a law that prohibits businesses from banning customers who have not been vaccinated. However, Alabama is allowing businesses to require masks… for the time being.

…. I honestly do not know how to best describe these facts: “Darwin awards” or “death cult”.

Look, there really are some good people in the South. Like Dorothy Oliver and Drucilla Russ Jackson, who are fighting to get their communities vaccinated. But unfortunately, they’re like small islands of sanity, surrounded by vast oceans of white supremacy and ignorance.

Don't be a jerk. You can spread information without insulting an entire, diverse state.

27 to 31% of people from Alabama are Black. This is the 7th largest percentage in the nation.

We have a growing Hispanic population (which is hard to track because Alabama government counts "hispanic" as separate from race and the numbers don't add up. I'm sure that's just a coincidence.)

There are over 5 million people in the state.

Alabama is under vaccinated, and politics is a part of that, but so is poverty, a complete lack of public transportation outside a handful of large cities, actual availability (many places that claim vaccines or tests turn out not to when you call), lack of full time employment with benefits, low paid state workers and professionals, and gerrymandering to silence liberal voices.

Oh, and woke liberals who believe what the news and Republicans tell them about the state being white and completely owned by the Republican party, so they write off the entire state and everyone in it as ignorant white supremicists.

Only two decent people in the state? You are feeding the conservative machine by joining their bid to erase the state's diversity of race, religion, politics, and education.

You are helping them out. So stop.

Who the actual fuck am I “helping” by stating facts??

Look, if you don’t like what I’m laying down, then go make your own fucking post.

And stop concern trolling me because, according to you, I’m not being “nice enough” to the deeply racist ass white people who keep voting even more racist ass white people into office.

White people OVERWHELMINGLY voted for racists like Roy Moore. And Black people stopped them. WE did that. This has been the history of the South since reconstruction.

And now you have white elected officials—who have already been vaccinated—blocking mask mandates and telling people the coronavirus vaccine isn’t legit. Are you really dumb enough to believe that White supremacists aren’t willing to cull a shit ton of poor racist white folks if that meant also getting rid of large swaths of Black and Brown citizens? Sometimes shit simply is about white supremacy, racism and anti-Blackness. So take your kumbaya diversity doublespeak anywhere else, but don’t put that bullshit on my blog.

SN: when you police the tone of someone calling out racists, it makes you look hella racist.

こふくのあいては つかれるのです

オレはおっさんだと言いますのに

It's too hard for me to care of Kofuku because I am a middle aged male cat...... 😑

Your cute cat of the day

Digby goes to town on this turtle-ass-looking motherfucker:

Weeeee

(via)

Ohoho now let's get into this shit, shall we? Time for some numbers!

Estimates actually put the death toll between 30 to 60 percent of the European population, there were so many dead and so much variation from area to area you can't accurately estimate how many it really was

People who got infected by the "Black Death" were to 80% dead within 3 to 5 days, the population was reduced so dramatically that it took between 80 to 150 years to regrow to where it was before, varying from location to location

Some places were almost entirely depopulated. Over 60% of Norway died within two years, China's population was reduced from around 125 million to 65 million in the late 14th century, at its peak Damascus reported around 1000 dead every day, between 75 and 200 million people died overall in a time where the world population didn't even reach 500 million.

And let's not even get into the persecution the Jewish had to face. No wait, let's do that actually. "The Jews are poisoning our wells" was something people liked to say because they couldn't think of anything else and hey, why not blame the Jewish? The Jewish communities in Mainz and Cologne were completely annihilated (not a lot of character development happening in Germany, hmm) and about 2000 more people were killed in the Strasbourg massacre. Simply because they couldn't figure out where the disease came from and hated the Jewish enough to blame them without evidence

Fun fact, the word quarantine originated in the time of the first global outbreak. It comes from the Italian word for 40, which was the period of time people were isolated if they came from infected areas.

The world didn't survive the Black Death, too many people died for the disease to spread effectively

And then it came back several more times, including two more major pandemics and many more outbreaks. The most deadly one in modern times was, buckle up, 2017 in Madagascar where it killed 170 people and thousands more were infected.

Now, before someone starts worrying, here's the good news: thanks to modern medicine the fatality rate was pushed down to around 10%. I think we can all agree significantly better than before.

So next time someone says "the plague went away without vaccines", now you have numbers. Have fun.

Please don’t ever feel bad about posting about how your day’s going or a random story or how you’re feeling or a cute selfie because I actually really like seeing everyone on my dash. I follow you all for a reason.

Cromwell’s brand of Puritanism is also where America’s prosperity gospel hails from, in addition to the Puritans being at least partially responsible for the British leg of the Transatlantic Slave Trade if memory serves.

Also, fun fact, the Pilgrim’s trip to America was actually funded by corporations in Europe, with the understanding that the companies would provide the settlers with ships and supplies, and in exchange the puritans would build a trading settlement and send back X-amount of whatever interesting crops or materials they find/grow as a return on their investment. Again, hardly the tale of a group of honest religious folk fleeing prosperity in a new land.

Similarly, the fact that the Pilgrims moved into an area that had been left depopulated due to a pandemic that had swept the continent (meaning many found crops already planted, homes already built, and graves full of “treasure” like grave goods to steal...) doesn’t get into the narrative either.

Likewise the amount of people sent to America who were indentured servants, criminals, and random homeless people that were rounded up and sent over seas (the idea being the urban poor would be able to find a better, more profitable life growing crops for some rich plantation owner in Carolina than they would living in Southwark)... This likewise didn’t work, as they rarely had the knowledge, experience or desire to become a farmer in a land thousands of miles away, hence why many of them realised that if they just used kidnapped people to do the work instead they could make money while not doing any manual labour.

All of this is 100% true. Another example of rewriting history to make it palatable that has been taught to young children basically since public schools were founded is the Thanksgiving Day story. What we are taught: the pilgrims came to America to escape the Evil Evil Church of England, and they were starving! And winter was coming! But there was a native american named Squanto who worked hard and learned english, then introduced the pilgrims to his tribe. They all became friends and threw a big celebration feast and they lived happily ever after. The end. What really happened: Squanto had been a slave in England, was set aboard a vessel to the Americas in order to help capture more native americans and force them into slavery, but escaped when he got there. He made his way back to the village he grew up in only to find that the entire population had been wiped out by either slavers or smallpox. Since survival had a lot to do with relying on a community, when a ship full of pilgrims arrived he became friends with them - by speaking the English he was taught while a slave. He took them to the (now empty) village, and showed them how to tend the crops that were already growing. The shelter was already build. There was already stored food, and he showed them how to get more. Then he negotiated peace between the settlers and the Wampanoags. Then, yes, there was a feast to celebrate the peace. One time. With one small group of pilgrims, the Wampanoags, and Squanto. Meanwhile, the Puritans were busy coming to America in boatloads. Their entire goal was to take land and resources, capture young, healthy men and women as slaves, and kill everybody else. The second "Day of Thanksgiving" was a celebration of the massacre and capture of over 700 Pequot tribe members. All ages and genders. More were celebrated later for similar reasons. So it went until Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving Day to be a national holiday, and the "official" story was spread across the US in an effort to bring people from the northern and southern states together.... on the same day he ordered the military to march against the Sioux. Womp womp.

Please don’t be surprised when a homeless person doesn’t want to leave their encampment or spot for a cooling center; this is the type of opportunity cops will take to clear out encampments while the owners of the stuff they’re throwing away are in centers trying to survive.

If you really want to give them some peace of mind, offer to rent them a storage locker for a few days so they can rest easy in cooler, less oppressive temps without losing everything they have left.

Source: I was homeless many times.

HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS...

@ People with EDS and/or dysautonomia

I found a webinar on EDS and psychiatric misdiagnoses and tl;dr the part I'm posting about here is regarding how a lot of us are misdiagnosed with a variety of psychiatric diagnoses (mainly but not only anxiety disorders) because part of our symptoms is high adrenaline but CONSTANTLY and so shrinks mistake that as us having a psychiatric condition related to anxiety or difficulty focusing.

This would explain why sedatives and anxiolythics are some of the few meds that make me have repairing deep sleep while everything else either doesn't work or only works by shutting me down completely but as a result the quality of sleep I get is terrible.

They said in the webinar that it's a vicious cycle. When someone doesn't get enough sleep at night, the next morning our adrenaline levels are higher in order to give us the extra boost to go through the day, but then when night comes we can't sleep again because we're high on a natural stimulant. But then the next day, since we again didn't get enough sleep, we keep that increased level of adrenaline going, then we can't sleep again, and the cycle keeps perpetuating itself.

There's the fact too that adrenaline makes you notice pain LESS and we're in constant pain, so in my not professional opinion, that sounds like a reasonable incentive for our bodies to increase adrenaline levels.

It would explain the high sensitivity to stimulants that a lot of us have, since, again, we're basically already high on a self-produced stimulant 24/7 and if you add a cup of coffee to that you might as well be on Adderall.

If you don't have EDS or chronic pain but do have dysautnomia, adrenaline levels are controlled by the autonomic nervous system regardless, so this can still be a possibility for you.

I'm NOT advicing anyone to take any medication for this without going to a doctor first. I'm not a doctor and I'm especially not your doctor. If you're sure you're not allergic maybe you could try off the counter herbal remedies, such as herbal infusions, but other than that, please talk to a professional before doing anything.

I was RIGHT. Chronic pain and chronic fatigue are incentives for the sympathetic system to increase adrenaline levels and for that increase in the adrenaline levels to be persistent through time rather than happening at specific moments!

That means too that after some time of this ongoing stress, we become absolutely depleted of energy reserves that we're unable to rebuild, and that makes us avoid activities that require energy or focus.

Dr. Alan Pocinki starts talking about it at 22:40 here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBBziPPeI1E

A good way to help you tell apart whether you're actually fine vs being "fine" because you're swimming in adrenaline is if you woke up exhausted but then suddenly felt better through the day, but had insomnia at night, especially if you felt worse at night.

The "suddenly feeling better" phase is the adrenaline kicking in to give you that extra boost, the insomnia is the adrenaline keeping you from sleep and the feeling bad at night is your body being DONE but even weaker than it was when you woke up.

An experience by a 33 years old patient from the video I linked above is:

Omg. Why does this perfectly describe my day? Anyone else wake up shaking like they’ve been on a run??? Because I actually have to wait a minute when I wake up because or else the shaking will lead to passing out.

Lizzo's makeup artist is a genius

By: paulfuentes_design