Crone of the North

Toasting s'mores over the embers of Western civilization.

[Crone of the North @oldnorthwitch]

@GovPressOffice Make it 110%.

[Crone of the North @oldnorthwitch]

@ProjectLincoln Forgive me for doubting that they'll ever go down more than a few token cents, no matter what happens.

[All day Astronomy @forallcurious]

WOW🚨: Scientists in Japan have developed a treatment that could double the average cat's lifespan from around 15 years to nearly 30 years, with public availability expected as early as 2027.

[Barry Hunt @BarryHunt008]

Last week, I thought the pandemic potential for ANDV was small

Infinitesimally small

Less than 1%

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

YES. YES. I HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS. I started a spreadsheet in 2019 tracking every category where America is number one globally and people keep asking me to stop bringing it to Thanksgiving.

We lead the PLANET in medical debt. Not the developed world. The PLANET. There are countries where "medical bankruptcy" doesn't translate because the CONCEPT doesn't exist in their language. We invented it. We EXPORTED it as a field of academic study. German researchers fly here to observe it happening in real time. They take NOTES. We are a living laboratory and the experiment is "what if you made people choose between insulin and rent." We chose. Exposed. This is the thing we're best at.

We lead in incarceration. More humans in cages than China. China has 1.4 billion people and an authoritarian government and we STILL have more prisoners. We beat AUTHORITARIANS at their own game using FREEDOM. We did it with both parties cooperating across NINE administrations. Name ONE other bipartisan project that lasted fifty years. You can't. This is our moon landing. We just don't film it.

We lead in insulin pricing. $300 for a vial that costs $30 in Canada. Canada is VISIBLE FROM DETROIT. You can see Canada from a Walgreens parking lot where someone is deciding between half-doses. The same molecule. The same manufacturer. The border adds $270 of LEADERSHIP. That's what leading looks like. It looks like a 900% markup on not dying.

We lead in mass shootings. Not per capita. Not adjusted. RAW TOTAL. We have so many that researchers had to invent subcategories. School. Workplace. Concert. Grocery store. We have a TAXONOMY. Other countries have incidents. We have a CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM with peer-reviewed SORTING CRITERIA. That's infrastructure. That's RIGOR.

We lead in healthcare spending AND in maternal mortality among rich nations. Simultaneously. We spend $4.3 trillion a year and mothers die at rates that would concern a developing nation. We spent MORE money to get WORSE outcomes so consistently that it can't be incompetence. Incompetence wouldn't be this RELIABLE. This takes PLANNING. This is an ACHIEVEMENT of systems working exactly as designed across multiple industries cooperating to extract value from the specific biological event of someone trying not to die.

We lead in per-capita spending on our military while our veterans sleep in tents. We allocated $886 billion to defense and our soldiers come home to a VA waitlist so long that some of them die on it. We spent the money. We just didn't spend it on THEM. The money went somewhere. It led the way. Just not toward the people who fought.

I printed this tweet on a 24x36 poster. It's in my living room. My wife moved out last month but she didn't take the poster so I think she agrees.

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States for the seventh time won the war that wasn’t a war, so the United States can open the Strait of Hormuz that was open before the not war.

The not war that started to get the uranium that was completely obliterated, so that the Iranians can’t build the nuclear bomb that they weren’t building for the not war that the United States started.

Then the United States which has nuclear weapons threatening to use nuclear weapons to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons because having nuclear weapons is dangerous.

If the United States saw what the United States is doing in the United States, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.

[Interesting things @awkwardgoogle]

A photographer captured a family of owls and accidentally ended up with the perfect cover for a music album.

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

The Black Panther poster circa 1971

[Elias Al @iam_elias1]

Two economists just published a mathematical proof that AI will destroy the economy.

Not might. Not could. Will — if nothing changes.

The paper is called "The AI Layoff Trap." Published March 2, 2026. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Boston University. Peer reviewed. Mathematically modeled.
The conclusion is one sentence.
"At the limit, firms automate their way to boundless productivity and zero demand."

An economy that produces everything. And sells it to nobody.
Here is how you get there.
A company fires 500 workers and replaces them with AI. A competitor fires 700 to keep up. Another fires 1,000. Every company is behaving rationally. Every company is following the incentives correctly. And every company is building a trap for itself.

Because the workers who were fired were also customers.
When they lose their jobs faster than the economy can absorb them, they stop spending. Consumer demand falls. Companies respond by cutting costs — which means automating more workers — which means less spending — which means more falling demand — which means more automation.

The loop has no natural exit.
The researchers tested every proposed solution. Universal basic income. Capital income taxes. Worker equity participation. Upskilling programs. Corporate coordination agreements.
Every single one failed in the model.
The only intervention that worked: a Pigouvian automation tax — a per-task levy charged every time a company replaces a human with AI, forcing them to price in the demand they are destroying before they pull the trigger.

No government has implemented this. No major economy is seriously discussing it.
Meanwhile the numbers are already tracking the curve. 100,000 tech workers laid off in 2025. 92,000 more in the first months of 2026. Jack Dorsey fired half of Block's workforce and said publicly: "Within the next year, the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion."
Nobody is doing anything wrong. Companies are following their incentives perfectly. That is exactly the problem.

Rational behavior. At scale. Simultaneously. With no mechanism to stop it.
Two economists built the math. The math leads to one place.

Source: Falk & Tsoukalas · Wharton School + Boston University ·
https://t.co/4m8E9jQNYm

[Bozanzian @bozanzian]

@_CatintheHat Some of us had relatives that were born to mothers that were infected during the 1918 flu pandemic and were told later on by their doctors that their heart disease was caused by this. What happened to that knowledge during the covid pandemic?

[Carol Moore @carolmoore1776]

@ProfessorPape Buy up 6 months plus of basic OTC medical necessities and lots of rice, beans, lentils, soy sauce, etc. Store a month of water in case hackers hit water supplies. Get to know your neighbors and them to do it too.

[Plague Poems @PlaguePoems]

My friend
who studies computers
says that this
is a week
that will go down in history.

My friend
who studies politics
says that this
is a week
that will go down in history.

My friend
who studies history
says that this
is a week
that shows
we’re all going down.

[࿐ Alba ࿐ @AlbaDocherty]

Had Covid? Have you had these things ruled out? No?

This is a *short* list of clinically-provable conditions in Long Covid that some orgs and other interests want you to think is (not-biomedically validated in Long Covid) MECFS instead. Many of these issues demand medical attention. Many of them have viable treatments that could help ppl right now. Many of them cause sudden death...we haven't seen any of that, have we?

Dementia & Vascular Dementia - If you've had Covid, you have a 41% higher risk of dementia and a 77% higher risk of vascular dementia. This is anything but MECFS "cognitive PEM".

Thrombotic microangiopathy - Microclots throughout small blood vessels severely limit oxygen and nutrient delivery to tissues. When you exert yourself, tissues cannot get enough oxygen to meet even minimal increased demands. This creates oxygen debt and toxic metabolite buildup that triggers a systemic crash - the delayed, prolonged exhaustion and multi-system symptoms can resemble MECFS.

With organs already barely functioning due to poor blood flow, any extra activity pushes the whole system over the edge, causing a collapse that takes days or weeks to recover from.

Heart failure (including HFpEF) - Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction is particularly insidious. Standard echos can look "normal" but the heart can't properly relax and fill. Causes exercise intolerance, shortness of breath, and fatigue that worsens with activity. Sound familiar?

Interstitial lung disease/fibrosis - Scarring of lung tissue causing progressive breathing difficulty and exercise limitation that can seem like PEM.

Chronic thromboembolic disease - Clots organizing in lungs, causing progressive right heart strain. The "PEM-like Sx" are driven by the heart-lung unit hitting a wall - any exertion beyond minimal activity causes systemic oxygen starvation and cardiac strain that takes days to recover from. Unlike deconditioning, rest doesn't improve capacity because the structural blockages remain.

Diaphragmatic dysfunction - Nerve or muscle damage to breathing muscles, causing "air hunger" and exercise limitation that can seem like PEM.

Pulmonary hypertension - High blood pressure in lung arteries causes severe fatigue and breathlessness with exertion that can be misdiagnosed as PEM. Often missed without right heart catheterization.

Silent myocardial ischemia - Reduced blood flow to heart muscle without typical chest pain. Can present as fatigue, exercise intolerance, PEM.

Aortic stenosis or other valve disease - Can develop from Covid infection and cause exercise intolerance that is often dismissed as deconditioning and/or PEM.

Microvascular dysfunction - Covid can cause small vessel disease affecting coronary, cerebral, or peripheral circulation can cause fatigue, exercise intolerance, and cognitive issues that worsen with exertion.

Pulmonary embolism (including microemboli) - Covid can cause blood clots in lungs, especially smaller chronic ones, that can cause progressive exercise intolerance and fatigue.

Myocarditis or pericarditis - Post-viral heart inflammation can cause exercise intolerance, fatigue, and chest symptoms that worsen with activity. This requires proper cardiac imaging and biomarker testing to diagnose, but can be mistaken as PEM.

POTS and dysautonomia - Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome and other autonomic dysfunctions can cause profound fatigue and post-exertional symptoms, but require specific testing and treatment, quite contrary to how Yale's Akiko Iwasaki & Harlan Krumholz run POTS "studies".

Cerebral hypoperfusion - Reduced blood flow to the brain can cause cognitive dysfunction, fatigue, and exercise intolerance that is misclassed as PEM. This can result from Covid vascular damage, autonomic dysfunction, or other mechanisms that result in symptoms that sound a lot like PEM.

Small vessel cerebrovascular disease - Microinfarcts or white matter changes from vascular damage could cause cognitive impacts and fatigue that can be mislabeled as MECFS.

Neuroinflammation - Direct viral invasion or immune-mediated inflammation in the nervous system could cause symptoms attributed to PEM: Hypersensitivity to noise, light, and temperature; memory problems, difficulty with attention, persistent forgetfulness, difficulty focusing, slowed information processing, etc. that appear similar to "cognitive PEM".

Cerebral venous sinus thrombosis - Blood clots in brain's drainage system. Can cause headaches, cognitive issues, and fatigue that can be misdiagnosed as MECFS, before catastrophic events occur.

Progressive atherosclerosis - Covid accelerates plaque formation. Carotid or coronary artery disease developing years faster than normal. This Covid-induced condition present with MECFS-like symptoms through a mechanism of exertion-triggered ischemia and delayed recovery.

Vasculitis - Covid can cause blood vessel inflammation throughout body. Can affect any organ system and progress to organ failure if untreated. Patients experience malaise, fatigue, and generalized weakness. Covid-induced systemic vasculitis can produce MECFS-like symptoms through multi-organ hypoperfusion and inflammatory exhaustion that worsen with exertion.

COVID-19 causes brain and neurological damages that produce symptoms remarkably similar to the generic Dx checklist MECFS, isn't that convenient? Especially when doctors & ins companies won't cover the scans required to prove your brain damages, vascular damages, dementias, etc. Insurance companies LOVE the medical-care-ending-zero-treatment MECFS Dx. It's so much cheaper to tell 400M ppl to pace than to develop targeted treatments for them, isn't it?

This is a short list conditions that can be caused by Covid, are found in Long Covid, and that require medical treatment, not to be written off as MECFS.

[every day it gets worse @2021_willitend]

@Brendan_Duke @JuliaDavisNews FYI people they don’t give a shit about you. They don’t care if they break you financially. They don’t care if they cause your death. They don’t care. Why??? Because their buddies are making millions/billions. Wake up America.

[Crone of the North @oldnorthwitch]

@philippilk It's really not shocking at all, unfortunately.

[Z @amberwb]

@CoraCHarrington The prof for my masters-level film history class said something that has stuck with me for 20 years now: “Be careful that you don’t regard the past as an impoverished version of the present.”

[Crone of the North @oldnorthwitch]

@PezunCityDJs @Nurse_Tawny @stilltakingnaps @MorePerfectUS The USPS hasn't gotten tax money since 1970.

[Crone of the North @oldnorthwitch]

@1goodtern I think it would be breathtakingly naive to believe that.

[Crone of the North @oldnorthwitch]

@squirrelpalooza @DSEDunn @pstranges716 @Paula_JKnight @julie_bush This and more this.