@TBrown_80 "The Bardstown Nine", on Amazon. By the little brother of Seneca class of '95 football legend Ryan W! I don't know how X treats links, but I'll try one of those next.
cavewoman: what that?
caveman: sharpest rock ever
cavewoman: wow. it cut many furskins?
caveman: no. would break. no cut. only sharp.
cavewoman: …
(two cavemen approach)
new caveman: this is guy. sharp rock guy. i do anything for this guy. i die for this guy
cavewoman: …
@LordGrimdark No links, just love. My debut novel released yesterday, and I have your work to thank as inspiration. It feels horrifyingly-naked to have it out there, but... some things have to be done. It's better to do them, than to live with the fear of them. Thank you.
So funny when Ned Stark tells Cat, "He won't be a boy forever. And... winter is coming." IRL Cat would roll her eyes so hard. Like Trump telling Melania, "We're having pit fights on the lawn tonight. E pluribus unum."
A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page.
It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection.
Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do.
Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades.
The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water.
It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left.
The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero.
When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.
Gorsuch is a G*d-d*mned genius:
"For those who think it important for the Nation to impose more tariffs, I understand that today’s decision will be disappointing. All I can offer them is that most major decisions affecting the rights and responsibilities of the American people (including the duty to pay taxes and tariffs) are funneled through the legislative process for a reason.
Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man.
There, deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions. And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day. In all, the legislative process helps ensure each of us has a stake in the laws that govern us and in the Nation’s future.
For some today, the weight of those virtues is apparent. For others, it may not seem so obvious. But if history is any guide, the tables will turn and the day will come when those disappointed by today’s result will appreciate the legislative process for the bulwark of liberty it is."
I think @TheFIREorg might be the only organization left that really, truly wants to defend free speech.
Because defending free speech means defending it from every side, and especially defending it when it's genuinely awful but legal.
That's Glenn Dubin. Those are his own kids. This whole thing is becoming an insane moral panic along the lines of the Satanic child abuse panic, recovered memory, campus rape hysteria, and all of that.
Epstein was a predator, and people who kept in contact with him showed terrible judgment. Some of them may be criminals, too. But the idea that every person who ever swapped emails with him is equally guilty is insane.
Keep your four-way flashing lights OFF when you are driving with traffic, even if the driving conditions are less than ideal. But always drive with your full headlighting and tail lighting systems turned on - day and night. #BeSeen
You can use your four-way way flashing lights momentarily if you're coming to a sudden and unexpected slow down or stop on the highway.
Only use four-ways continously when your vehicle IS the hazard. For example, stopped and blocking a live lane. ^ks