Christine Rinehart

underdressed and overstressed,
Twitter is my least professional social media account

[Christine Rinehart @ChrissyDoesHair]

Oh, right, this platform still exists. Hello!

[𝓔𝓵𝓮𝓷𝓪 @elioralux]

I told a guy I was dating that I got a promotion at work.

The same guy who was always telling me how smart I was.

The same guy who said he loved "ambitious women."

The same guy who kept telling me I deserved more.

For about three seconds he looked happy.

Then he asked,

"So are you going to be making more than me now?"

Not:
"Congratulations."

Not:
"You worked hard for that."

Just that.

I laughed because I genuinely thought he was joking.

He wasn't.

For the rest of the night he kept making little comments.

"Don't forget us little people."

"Guess you're paying now."

"Money changes people."

A week later I realized something.

The promotion didn't change me.

It changed the way he saw me.

Some people support your growth right up until the moment it stops making them feel superior.

The promotion came with a raise.

The lesson was free.

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

This is not normal.

[rosey🌹 @thechosenberg]

Hero.

[Dr. Sydney Watson @SydneyLWatson]

Seen a lot of conversation about how predatory the American medical system is.

So I will weigh in.

I ended up going to the ER about 2 weeks ago for crippling pain. Turned out to be a ruptured ovarian cyst. I was there for MAYBE 4 hours.

My bill? $13,500 dollars.

Because I'm uninsured (by choice, that shit is a SCAM), the hospital dropped my bill down to $8,100 and some change as an "uninsured" discount.

For starters, $13,500 for a 4 hour hospital visit is insane as it is.

But the fact the hospital can wipe $5,000 off the bill "just because" should show you how utterly fucked this system is.

And to be clear - $8,000 is still an absolutely insane sum of money when all these people did was scan my stomach and give me some pain killers.

On my itemized bill, my CT scan was 7k. The iodine they used was $900. Just being in the ER room alone was $2,500.

We phoned the hospital to haggle. They dropped the price by $20.

Normal people can't survive this shit. I do okay and $8,000 is still an INSANE chunk of money out of my savings.

Anyone who argues this isn't a disgusting, predatory system is crazy. And it is even crazier that Americans accept this.

And for those of you who argue this is the free market, I need you to be quiet. There can never be a true free market here when government and insurance have their creepy little fingers in this pie.

People shouldn't go bankrupt trying to pay medical bills. This has to change.

[Xir Vicin @XirVicin]

@ceraliza Had a Boss ask me why I would sleep after 16h of travel, he would go "straight to work".
I pointed out his work consisted of "business lunch", mine of 10 hours of repairing machines.

He never mentioned it again. 😬

[Christine Rinehart @ChrissyDoesHair]

I just got a notification that says that I don't post or interact on here often enough for this app to think I'm a real person and if I don't post an interact more and it'll basically just not show my content to anybody which is kind of what already happens so I don't super care.

[Christine Rinehart @ChrissyDoesHair]

@ohhanxiety That's a hippotato

[Christine Rinehart @ChrissyDoesHair]

@TeslaInsurance it would be really nice if since we've all agreed the Tesla that hit me ran a red light on February 1st that you guys could actually get the damage on my car agreed to and fixed.

[Evan Doji 📈 @evan_doji]

@TrumpDailyPosts Sir, this is retarded. The US being the richest country in the world by definition will have trade deficits with poorer countries. Poor countries can't spend like we can. We don't want to assemble microwave panels on a factory floor. Best regards.

[Christine Rinehart @ChrissyDoesHair]

@ZelenskyyUa @POTUS I mean I'm just a regular american, but you got my support.

[Stepsen 🇩🇪🇪🇺 @stepsenmccool]

@acnewsitics

[Cloudy 🌥️ @oncIoud_e]

isn't "the president is trying to declare himself king" like, the whole reason americans are supposed to have guns

[Marcus d’Osint 🎒🕊️ @WarFrontIntel]

@PeteButtigieg He’s not lying.

[Pete Buttigieg @PeteButtigieg]

I am not making this up: Republicans have introduced legislation… to increase your bank fees.

[Pete Buttigieg @PeteButtigieg]

Seriously, they are doing this. And it sounds like the Trump administration supports it. https://t.co/KIvkjC4aG7

[ABC News @ABC]

NEW: Fourteen states have filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the "sweeping authority" wielded by DOGE head Elon Musk is in violation of the U.S. Constitution. https://t.co/k9zYFxPJEj

[Hank Green @hankgreen]

The bizarre thing about people shouting either "IVERMECTIN IS HORSE DEWORMER" or "THE ELITES ARE HIDING THIS FROM US" is that both of those things are just obviously wrong.

We've looked at Ivermectin for a bunch of potential uses and it seems like there is a small chance that, at very high doses, it might help some people with certain cancers, but if it does help (which is unlikely) it probably won't help much. There's one trial recruiting patients to test it in combination with an immunotherapy drug right now.

The thing about ivermectin is that it isn't well-absorbed by mammals. This makes it very useful as an anti-parasitic because worms absorb it readily. So it poisons parasitic worms but not people.

But it is absorbed a bit and at high enough doses, it has a bunch of other effects on the human body, many of them negative.

Early in the pandemic, there were some studies in individual cells (rather than whole bodies) that showed it might help control the virus. When the "health influencer" space glommed onto that, we actually didn't know for sure whether it would be helpful or not. But because it was cheap and available, some people (lots, actually) really did started dosing themselves with veterinary ivermectin. By the time studies on the efficacy were published (which showed it wasn't at all effective) the damage had been done.

And so we ended up with ivermectin (a drug that real people take for real diseases) becoming a culture war signifier, which is FUCKING STUPID.

Now, Mel Gibson has friends who are in remission from cancer after taking ivermectin (and probably also the treatments recommended by their oncologists, as that is almost always how these stories go). And he and Joe Rogan, during their conversation, seem ASTOUNDED that people in cancer research are ignoring it. They seem to think that every elite knows that, if they so much as GLANCE at ivermectin, they're getting fucking fired.

Except that researchers have done tons of studies on whether ivermectin could possibly be useful in cancer treatment because, if it is, that would be really great! People seem to think that pharmaceutical companies are the only ones who do cancer research but actually they mostly just bring drugs to market. Most cancer research is funded by the government or done by universities.

As much as we've looked, it doesn't seem likely that ivermectin is a good cancer drug because, at the doses where it might have an effect on a cancer, it'll have all kinds of other nasty effects on the human body, like damage to the nervous system and brain.

But, despite that, we're looking, because for some people who are dying, it's worth checking to see if it would be useful in combination with other therapies.

Cancers are very hard to treat because cancer cells are very similar to /our/ cells. Trying to kill a parasite is relatively easy because worms are very different from people. Cancer cells are descended from us, they are human cells gone rogue, so it's hard to attack them without attacking the rest of the body. That's the whole reason why it's so much easier to kill parasites than it is to kill cancer cells.

Fenbendazole is an even weirder thing to get all excited about as an "alternative treatment" because we've studied it for cancer treatment because it acts on the microtubules that control cell replication. That's how a lot of chemotherapy drugs work (including one I took), targeting cells that replicate a lot. So fenbendazole's whole thing is that it might have been a good cancer treatment because it would be another option as a toxic cell-killing chemo drug.

But, because fenbendazole is (again) not very well absorbed by mammals, it is (again) a great drug for killing parasites and not a great drug for treating cancers.

I just...I kinda can't believe we are this incapable of just leaving cancer research to cancer researchers. Ivermectin is a medicine for humans. It's not a panacea. At low doses, it basically does nothing because it isn't easily absorbed by humans and, when it is, it hangs out almost entirely with fatty tissues.

It would be amazing if a cheap, well-understood drug were broadly useful in cancer treatment. Ivermectin just /isn't/.

I have a private theory that fenbendazole and ivermectin are so present in these conversations 100% because they are known to cure real diseases (parasitic infections) and they are easy to purchase extremely cheaply because they are available for animals.

That means people can actually take them, which creates both government warnings to NOT TAKE ANIMAL MEDICINES and many stories of people taking the animal medicines and (mostly) being just fine. That's just a tremendous mix for creating discourse and turning it into a culture war thing.

And look, if people are taking ivermectin WHILE taking the treatments their doctor recommends, that's stupid but unlikely to kill anyone.

But the way it was discussed on the JRE, it makes me think some people will ONLY take these medicines, and they will not take their drugs their doctors recommend, and those people will die. And that's fucked.

[PoPville @PoPville]

Yo!! “On New Year’s Eve, fares will be free after 8 p.m. thanks to a partnership with Miller Light and Coors Light’s Free Rides Program” - Details: https://t.co/CsvKjXdVck

[Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders]

News flash: On Tuesday night, regardless of what the vote tallies say, Trump will declare victory. 

He will claim the only reason he may lose is “vote stealing.”

Undermining the legitimacy of an election is how demagogues destroy faith in democracy.

Kamala for President.