Can’t believe in the year 2023 we have to say: do not consume borax. It will not provide a “parasite cleanse”, it does not combat the “evil fluoride” in your water, and it is not a super mineral. It will damage your organs. Also, it’s not rated for human consumption so frankly, who knows what it’s cross-contaminated with (my personal bet would be arsenic).
Arsenic is another naturally-occurring element that our bodies are usually deficient in….
Dutch people are like “we don’t need to wear a helmet when we ride our bikes, because unlike in the barbarous United States, we have simply outlawed traumatic brain injury”
solid asphalt only hurts to fall on if the road it makes up was designed primarily for cars
Because smallpox used to kill about 30% of everyone who caught it. The successful vaccine program run by the world’s medical community means that no one will ever die of smallpox ever again.
Because rabies is 100% fatal without a vaccine. No one needs to die of rabies ever again. It is entirely preventable.
Because 1-2 in 1000 who get measles, die. Vaccines let us contain outbreaks or fully wipe them out. There is no specific treatment for the disease once you have it. Your immune system either wins or you die.
We like vaccines because vaccines save lives and raise our standard of living.
My mother, now in her 70s, talks about how her mother wept for joy when her children received the polio vaccine. Because she didn’t have to be afraid of polio anymore.
A 2019 study found that measles can cause “immune amnesia”, cutting your antibodies by 10%, up to almost 75%. Meaning, you’ve become that much more vulnerable to a whole slew of illnesses that you used to be protected from, and it doesn’t matter if you acquired the antibodies via a vaccine or recovering from an illnesses - they are gone. All those shots you got as a baby? The boosters you got through grade school and as an adult, including the annual flu shot? Guess what: measles most likely wiped your body’s immune memory of those and you’ll have to get them all. Over. Again.
This is one of those posts that always prompts me to remind folks- many of the vaccines you received as a child need adult boosters! It’s worth checking to make sure you’re up to date on these!
See I did not know this in my 20s, and I didn’t have health insurance so I never saw doctors.
As a result of this and goddamn antivaxxers I got whooping cough in goddamn 2010. Now, this is less dangerous than many things you will get vaccinated for if you stay on top of things. But I am dead serious when I tell you I broke one of my ribs from coughing too hard. Did you know that was a thing? Because I hadn’t till it happened to me, and friend it was not a good time.
Vaccines save lives. And they save you from other miserable things as well. Please check to see if you’re up to date.
somehow instead of saying “as a treat”, I’ve started using the phrase “for morale”, as if my body is a ship and its crew, and I (the captain) have to keep us in high spirits, lest we suffer a mutiny in the coming days.
and so I will eat this small block of fancy cheese, for morale. I will take a break and drink some tea, for morale. I will pick up that weird bug, for morale.
I’m not sure if it helps, but it does entertain me
This is akin all those hot takes about the 2k bug being an hoax:
“Remember when they told us every computer was going to crash on 1/1/01 and there would be chaos and then nothing happened?”
Yeah, I remember. And I’m sure every programmer and sysadmin that contributed the billion person/hour global effort to prevent it also remembers.
No one talks about acid rain anymore, either. And that’s a very good thing.
see also START and START II, which significantly reduced nuclear stockpiles
International cooperation is actually so effective that most people don’t even notice it happening, and then erroneously believe it can’t solve anything.
Fixing issues before they develop into actual disasters is such an underappreciated thing it hurts at all levels.
We don’t talk about acid rain because there isn’t any more acid rain because when acid rain started happening and we learned that the cause was mainly sulphur oxide and carbon monooxide from car exhausts, countries all over the world made it a law that car companies had to produce cars that produced less exhaust with better effectivenes (burning the fuel all the way to CO2 instead of the halfassed CO) and oil rafineries to remove the sulphur from the gasoline in the first place.
We don’t talk about computers crashing because of the turn of the century, because thousands of programmers worked very hard to write updates and patches for Every Single Program humanity as a whole used back in 1999 and then somehow managed to failtest, distribute, and update every single device and system, be it an online or offline one before the midnight of the 1st january of 2000.
On a much smaller scale, no one ever commenta or notices cleaners and housekeepers doing their job - be it at home or at whole buildings - because they always make sure that there’s nothing to notice. But don’t be fooled - at any point of your life you are one week of them not doing away from swimming in trash and filth with nothing to eat and nothing clean to wear. Only then you would notice.
Now it’s time to do that thing again and make sure that we don’t kill our whole planetary ecosystem within the next century.
in italy, lesbian parents are being removed from their child’s birth certificate in favor of the ‘biological parent’, regardless if that person ever had a role in raising the child. welsh has been doing this as well. it feels like we’re going back decades.
So Universal Pictures may have just intentionally over-pruned all of the city owned trees in front of their LA corporate office in an effort to fuck with the WGA/SAG-AFTRA picketers during what is predicted to be the hottest week of the year so far:
Guys we gotta up our game the Georgians said fuck more than us
Having looked through historic googlebooks many a time and been frustrated by how difficult it is to search in this time period, this chart is most certainly due to the algorithm not properly picking up the “Long S” which was an f-like character used in place of an s especially in 17th and 18th century printing.
The rules of when the short and long s’s are used are somewhat complicated to modern people, but they are almost always at the beginning of words, never at the end, and if there is a double s sometimes they are combined and sometimes not:
99% of the time the word actually being used is “suck” or “sucking.” It actually shows up a lot as a word used to describe babies who were still nursing. In texts from this period the word “suck” will almost always read as “fuck.” This makes some of these auto-transcriptions absolutely brilliant in hindsight:
If you search for the word “fuck” in googlebooks within this time frame, you get hundreds of pages of entries like this. For example, this Shakespeare anthology:
This is not to say that people in the 18th century didn’t find this hilarious, I’m sure they did, but f-bombs were not being dropped in classic literature at the time. If they do show up, like in this 1785 slang dictionary: it is almost always bleeped out:
The other 1% of the fucks in 18th century books are, of course, not bleeped out because they are in Ye Olde Porn, of which there is a surprising amount on googlebooks.
I should also note if it wasn’t clear that the immense dropoff just after 1800 is when the long s stopped being used in print, and the reemergence was in the mid-late 20th century when people DID start dropping f-bombs in literature
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