You missed the transition from “ebola in Africa” in the first part of the paragraph to a parallel distrustful reaction in the US during covid. If it helps, that transition point is the part of the sentence that reads, “Or if you’re in the US”.
I had immunocompromised family members. Back when covid hit, I spent about a year and a half mostly housebound - I couldn’t risk bringing something home. One of the things I did was to obsessively listen to a podcast called This Week In Virology; I even went back and listened to most of the 500+ episodes that they had already produced at the time. They had episodes where they talked about various aspects of ebola - how it’s spread, what the symptoms are, why some people can have such extremely paranoid and (to us) illogical reactions to the people who came in to treat the potentially infected, etc.
I remember someone explaining why some medical people had been murdered because of local distrust of the authorities; it didn’t make much sense to me at the time, but having seen how insane some of my own countrypeople got during covid, I don’t really have room to comment. I can’t point you to a specific episode, and I’m not going to re-listen to try to find it (each episode is 90-120 minutes), but it almost certainly was one of the ones tagged with ebola. I think it was one of the episodes with Alan Dove, though that doesn’t narrow it down much; and I think it probably wasn’t one of the Clinical Update episodes, which is probably more helpful.
Lol, does Iran know about this peace deal? Is it in the room with us now, or does it go to another school and we wouldn’t know them?
So, symptoms of early stage ebola are fever, chills and tiredness - which happen to be the symptoms of much more common issues like malaria and pneumonia. So for the villagers (who, remember, have hundreds of years of generational trauma from both distant “authorities” and white people), someone gets sick, gets medical treatment but still dies - that’s just stuff that happens (many ebola cases don’t have unexplained bleeding or lesions). But a few days after the death, “authority” people in space suits show up, search the village and start forcibly moving anyone who’s sick into tents or other locations. They intrusively question who has had contact with the sick people, and they may get moved into quarantine as well. In a community where families care for the sick, the families and friends are prevented from seeing their loved ones. And then their loved ones just … disappear. They’re told that they died, but also that they can’t see, handle or bury the body.
This version of ebola has “only” about a 50% death rate, so half the people who get it simply disappear, and the people who are returned are weakened (sometimes severely) from their illness. But the people also have memories and rumors of other ebola strains, strains that killed over 90% of the people who got it.
Someone in the village gets sick and dies. Then the “authorities” show up and start kidnapping people, many of whom are never seen again. You can’t visit them, you can’t help them, you can’t even bury them - they’re just gone, taken by strangers, because that’s what strangers sometimes do. They tell you whatever weird things they’re doing are for your own good, but what they’re saying doesn’t make sense to you - and they’ve said that before and many times it hasn’t been.
Your community comes up with a reason for their actions that makes more sense to you, so that’s what you believe. So you attack the space-suited strangers when they try to kidnap more people, you burn down the building where they’re going to disappear people. Or if you’re in the US, you refuse to take a vaccine because it’s going to allow the government to track you, and if you feel sick you swallow bunches of horse paste and you defy orders not to go to church because it’s your town, your church, and you’ll be damned if you let those bastards in Washington break your community with some fake disease like covid.
One thing I like is that the revenue from these taxes go explicitly to the threatened industries. So the more that Canadians stream US works, the more money there is for Canadian tv, movies and radio to compete. Too often, income like this is directed into a general revenue stream, leaving the threatened industries with the same or even less resources to compete with.
She doesn’t have the platform.
No one just gives you a platform - you make it. You show up at whatever opportunity can find or make and say your thing - and she’s not doing it. Hell, I’ve heard five times more anti-Trump / anti-regime stuff from Mark Hamill on Twitter/BlueSky than I have from her, and that’s like one of the most low-effort things you can do, yet she hasn’t made even one anti-whatever tweet a month. Hell, she wouldn’t even have to do it herself, she could hire a part-time college student or something.
She’s not tweeting, she’s not on podcasts advocating for her positions, she’s not on opinion shows or editorial pages saying “what’s happening is wrong and here’s a way to fix it”. It’s been dead silence from her for a year and a half.
If she’s not willing to go out and fight for a job she’s wanted for well over a decade, I can’t trust her to fight for the things _I_ want.
She could be showing up to or even leading protests and marches, writing editorials and opinion columns, appearing on news channels and podcasts. She could be speaking out, rallying people in opposition. She could’ve shown up at any of the big protests this past year, posted comments on social media.
I have seen absolutely nothing from her this past year except a couple of tepid comments about maybe running for office again.
I get it: she had a high-profile job, was thrown into a crushing high-stakes election at the last minute, spent a lot of energy campaigning and got her hopes crushed. But she’s had a year and a half to get over it, and there’s still nothing.
The country needs a leader and a fighter. She’s doing neither. Hard pass.
If she wanted to run, she should be out there fighting facism. I’m not interested in voting for someone who’s just letting all this shit happen.
While [Grok] didn’t develop a MechaHitler DJ personality, it did behave about how you’d expect from an AI model trained primarily on tweets and the opinions of Elon Musk. It apparently hallucinated advertising agreements with “xAI sponsors” and “crypto sponsors,” failed to separate its internal reasoning from its external DJ output, issued an identical weather report every 3 minutes, and got obsessed with UFOs.
Lmao
You remember that old saw about getting a job done: “fast, cheap, and good - pick two”. Well fast food used to be cheap, and it used to be fast: I could pull up to Burger King drive-through and drive away with a burger, fries and drink in 5-10 minutes for like $7. It might not have been the best food, but it was tasty enough and filling enough that it was worth it.
A few years ago, I was on a road trip and tried stopping at a McDonald’s. It took me 45 minutes to get through the drive-through lane and I was about ready to scream because the layout didn’t show the backup until there was no way to get out. Last year, I was on another trip and stopped at Burger King. Got a burger, fries and drink, and it was over $20.
If fast food is no longer fast, no longer cheap, and was never very good, why would I opt for it?
Funny how it wasn’t “just life” when prices went up under Biden.
tl;dr
.> Shapiro, who is an Orthodox Jew, is fiercely pro-Israel. His support for Israel and hatred of the Palestinian cause are issues that define him as a public political figure. He is an unequivocal backer of Netanyahu’s Israel
I’m not denying the billionaires are not and have not been paying their share. I’m saying that announcing "The Budget is Balanced!! (Terms and Conditions Apply) Is more of a PR move.
4.5+ billion from the state, because the governor is sucking up to Mamdani for reelection; it’s doubtful it’ll happen again outside the election year. The state is also contributing more money to cover public servant death payouts and school funding.
There’s a couple billion from deferring payments into various retirement funds (which other mayors have also done), except the unions need to sign off on it and the cops have already said No. Even if everyone agreed, it just pushes that fiscal can down the road.
There’s another billion or so from deferring limits on classroom size, a half billion from the billionaire housing tax, and some other stuff.
He’s clearly working on the issue, and is still negotiating behind the scenes; I just wish he hadn’t made this announcement like this, where it doesn’t hold up to full scrutiny.
two high-capacity water connections were not being properly monitored. One had been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and another was not tied to a billing account.
Yeah, you don’t just “accidentally” install an “extra” water pipeline like that.
sigh. Of course they did. They’ve been dumping East Wing debris on East Potomac Links for months. And now they’re planning to “renovate” those links. I can’t figure out what incredibly cheap Trump-branded idiocy is going to end up there, but I’m sure something will. Now with added toxic waste!
Oh, good. Three hours in crowded tourist attractions on a Saturday afternoon, and six hours in bars and restaurants on Friday and Saturday nights. Plus eight hours touring campuses just a couple weeks before spring “super-spreader” break - with a disease who’s characteristic rash turns up around Day 14. This can only end well …
Odd how they don’t explicitly mention the possibility that the bystander was shot by the Secret Service.
Also, if there was any likelihood they could pin that on the shooter, they’d have angled the words to encourage that conclusion. Meaning it’s extremely likely the Secret Service shot the bystander, and they’re hoping it’ll be forgotten by the general public.