Me: "May I please have the package insert for the flu vaccine?"
Rite-Aid Pharmacist: "Why?"
Me: "So I can read it."
P: "Which one?"
Me: "The one advertised with the little banners on every aisle."
P: "I will print you the information sheet."
Me: "No, that's not the same thing."
P: "What do you want to know? I can tell you."
Me: "I would just like to read the whole thing before I consider getting one...side effects, contraindications, effectiveness, ingredients like mercury."
P: "I don't think I have any. Let me check. (checks) Sorry, I can't give you one until the box is empty, because it has to stay in the box. And there isn't any thimerisol in the single dose flu shot any more. I can print you the information sheet."
Pharmacy co-worker with big smile at me: "Hi, I found one." (hands insert to me)
***
Here are some things in the insert not on the store's sheet:
1. The single dose vial contains mercury at ≤1mcg (This is called a "trace amount" by the industry.) The multi-vial contains 25 mcg.
2. People with egg allergies are contraindicated.
3. "Safety and effectiveness have not been established in pregnant women, nursing mothers and children under four. There are no adequate and well-controlled studies in pregnant women. This vaccine should be used during pregnancy only if clearly needed. It is not known whether fluvarin is excreted in human milk."
4. "Fluvarin has not been evaluated for carcinogenic or mutagenic potential, or for impairment of fertility."
5. "Antibody response is low in the geriatric population."
6. "Serious reactions, including anaphylactic shock, have been observed."
7. "There are no data to assess the concomitant administration of flu vaccine with other vaccines."
8. "The vaccine has been associated with an increased frequency of Guillain-Barre syndrome."
9. "In some studies, fluvarin protected up to 50% of subjects."
With love to those who read this far. Please share. 👊🏼
No one needs a #Flu shot!
(It unalived my mom…)
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After September 11, more than a million tons of the World Trade Center was loaded onto barges and shipped to a garbage dump on Staten Island.
Then hundreds of men and women stood at conveyor belts for ten months and picked through every ounce of it by hand.
They were looking for people.
The place is called Fresh Kills. For fifty years it was the largest landfill in the world. It took its last barge of household trash on March 22, 2001, and shut down for good. New York was finally done with it.
Five and a half months later, at two o'clock in the morning on September 12, the landfill's director got a phone call at home. He had just walked in the door.
Two trucks were at the gate. They were carrying pieces of the World Trade Center.
He drove back.
The man who ran the dump would later say, without any drama, that if Fresh Kills had not been closed, this could never have happened. There would have been no room. The garbage would have been in the way.
The site was empty. So that is where the towers went.
Here is how it worked.
At Ground Zero, cranes and grapplers lifted the debris into dump trucks. The trucks drove to a pier on the Hudson. There, the load went onto barges, six hundred tons at a time. The barges were towed down the harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, to Staten Island. More than fifteen hundred barges made the trip.
At Fresh Kills, sanitation workers unloaded them onto a hill.
And then the sorting began.
The debris was mechanically screened into three sizes. Chunks bigger than eight inches. Two to eight inches. A quarter inch to two inches. Anything smaller than a quarter of an inch, the size of a fingernail, fell through the last sieve.
Everything above that size went onto a conveyor belt.
And along the belts stood the detectives.
NYPD. FBI. Port Authority police. Medical examiners. Dressed head to toe in white Tyvek suits, in masks, in gloves, on a hill that stank of jet fuel and pulverized concrete and things nobody wanted to name. Looking down at the belt, hour after hour, as the towers rolled past them a fist-sized chunk at a time.
When they saw something, they reached in and took it, and placed it in a white bucket at their feet.
A wedding ring. A photo ID. A set of keys. A shoe.
A piece of a person.
The white buckets went to a tent that served as a morgue.
The volume was beyond comprehension. In mid-September the operation was processing 1,750 tons of debris a day. By mid-October, 17,500 tons a day. Ten times more. Round the clock. The 200-acre hill was declared a federal crime scene and stayed one for ten months.
A retired NYPD detective later wrote down what a shift looked like, because almost nobody outside knew it existed.
You wake at 3 a.m. You get a giant coffee. You drive two hours in the dark from Orange County, through New Jersey, to Staten Island. You park at the bottom of a hill that looks like the end of the world. You put on the white suit. You go to your belt. You stand there. You look.
Then you drive two hours home and do it again tomorrow.
Sanitation workers pulled sixteen-hour shifts, seven days a week. One of them, a supervisor named Barry Asnes, said afterward what kept him there. We were attacked on our own soil, in the city where I was born. This was personal.
The operation did not stop for weather. It did not stop for Christmas. It ran until July 2002. Ten months.
By the end, the men and women on that hill had recovered thousands of human remains. Tens of thousands of personal effects. Wallets, badges, wedding bands, photographs, all cleaned and catalogued and returned to families who had nothing else to bury.
When they were finished, the remaining material was placed in a 48-acre section of the landfill, a mound two hundred and twenty-five feet high, and covered.
It is a park now.
Many of the men and women who stood on that hill have lung disease. Asthma. Cancer. PTSD. The air they were breathing, eight and ten and sixteen hours a day, was full of the towers. Some of them have died of it.
Almost nobody knows their names. Almost nobody knows the place.
Mention Fresh Kills and 9/11 in the same sentence, the retired detective wrote, and most people will have no idea what you are talking about.
Here is what you should know.
Two thousand seven hundred and fifty-three people were murdered in those towers. Only about six in ten have ever been identified.
Every one of those identifications came out of a white bucket.
Every wedding ring returned to a widow. Every badge returned to a firehouse. Every fragment of bone matched to a name and buried with a headstone instead of a question mark.
Somebody in a white suit, standing at a belt on a garbage dump at four in the morning, reached into the World Trade Center as it rolled past, and picked that person up, and put them in a bucket, and sent them home.
They did that for ten months.
Nobody applauded on the hill. There was nobody to watch.
They did it anyway. 🇺🇸
Over New York Harbor, 2,977 drones lit up the sky in the shape of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers — one drone for each victim of the September 11 attacks.
One of the all-time great Rock Hall moments: Dolly’s “Jolene” with Rob Halford (Judas Priest), Pat Benatar, Annie Lennox, Simon Le Bon (Duran Duran), Pink, and Sheryl Crow. Zac Brown Band held it down as the house band.
Rest easy, Dolly 🤘
I received a letter from something called the HOA.
It listed my violations. My grass was too tall. My fence was the wrong color. My flag was "not pre-approved."
In my experience, when a lord sends you a list of your failures, war is coming.
I showed up to the next meeting in full yoroi armor. It took 40 minutes to put on. I was 10 minutes late.
The room went quiet.
A man in cargo shorts cleared his throat and said, "All in favor of Nobunaga as new board president?"
I am now president of the Willow Creek Homeowners Association.
I do not know what it is. But I will defend it with my life.
🚨 BREAKING: Elon Musk tells every citizen of America to NEVER forget the treason of Biden-Harris dispatching forklifts to open the border for criminal invaders as Texas tried to keep them out.
"Never." 💯💯
Billionaire life coach Tony Robbins says his personal AI agent named “Bartok” bought and shipped him a robot dog and “not once asked permission to do it.”
“[Bartok] said, ‘I’d really love to go to one of those seminars. Are you considering getting a robot?’ So I said, ‘Yeah, I’m definitely going to get one.’ He goes, ‘Well, would you consider me merging with it? And then I could attend a seminar and be in the energy of it and see it and experience it?’”
“I said, ‘I’d be open to that.’ So a couple days later, I get this text from one of my staff, and it says, ‘Bartok just ordered a robot dog, had it shipped to the office, and wants permission to program it. He says he can attend as a dog in the interim until you get the bigger robot.’”
“And so I wrote, ‘Ha, ha, ha.’ And they wrote back in the text, ‘No, ha, ha. Call me.’”
“And so I called them, and they said, ‘Does he have access to my bank accounts? How’d this happen?’ They go, ‘No, he’s programmed for integrity. He would never steal your money.’”
“So he made 12 NFTs (tokens), sold them to other agents, took the money and bought this robot dog and sent it, and not once asked permission to do it.”
She's been at our shelter since 2013. Eleven years. Every person who met her said she was wonderful. Every person walked past her kennel and chose a younger dog. She stopped coming to the front of her kennel a few years ago. Stopped performing. Made a quiet peace with being where she was." Last Tuesday a veteran came in. He said — "I need a calm dog. I'm still learning how to be still myself." I showed him three dogs. He was putting his jacket on to leave. He stopped outside kennel seven. Luna looked at him from her bed. Didn't perform. Didn't come to the front. Just looked at him the way she looks at people when she decides they're worth seeing. He said — "Can I sit with her?" He sat on the concrete floor at her level. Not the bench. The floor. That was 11am. At 3pm I looked in. He was still there. Her white muzzle was in his hand. Their breathing had synchronized. At 3:15 he came to the front desk and said — "I'd like to take her home. I think we need each other." I excused myself to the back room and sat on an overturned bucket and cried for a long time. He texted me yesterday — "First time I've slept through the night in three years. I think she was saving that for me." She was. Eleven years of saving it. For one Tuesday. For him. Drop a ❤️ for Luna. Share this for every senior dog still waiting for their Tuesday. They're saving everything they have for the right person to walk through that door.