Diana

Retweets don't necessarily mean agreement, just interest. NO DM’s

[Brad R. Torgersen @BradRTorgersen]

TL;DR warning! According to SSA-dot-gov I've had over $120K taken from me since I began working in 1990. That was still a fair bit of money at the beginning of the nineties when gas was a buck a gallon in these parts. Now? Barely a down payment on many of the homes in what has become a hot destination state.

A lot's changed in almost 40 years.

Would I be fine giving it all up to see SS canceled and the Ponzi plan demolished? Sure. I said earlier I've always treated it as a tax and assumed it would never come back to me because the whole thing is a pyramid scheme. And pyramid schemes always collapse.

But I'm only 52. Unless my health implodes I stand to work for another 18 years, and my spouse is working again (after being a SAHM) too. I'm vested in two different hospital orgs I spent a decade working for each, and I'm also a vet with a 20 year letter and VA coming back to me. I'm in a position where it's not fatal for me to walk away from SS because my retirement survival doesn't depend on SS totally.

Meanwhile, I personally know *many* people over 70 who depend on SS totally.

The area where I live has a heap of retirees who are not suit-and-tie retirees. These are blue-collar minimum-wage folk. Some are widows. Some of them are also disabled. Some have even been forced back into the work world doing drive-thru windows or cashier jobs at the local stores because cost of living has skyrocketed these past ten years. And SS alone can't cover all the bills.

In other words: they are already stretched to the red every single month because inflation—the most insidious and unholy tax of them all—has so radically altered their budgetary landscape.

You want to see a national catastrophe up close and personal? Take away their main means of money.

Doesn't matter if you think they deserve it or not. Doesn't matter if you think the Ponzi plan is bankrupt or not. You're fixing to end their lives. Literally. They will be fucked SO HARD you have no idea.

They'll be rushing to family, their churches, putting up go-send-me campaigns, etc. Anything to close the sudden gap.

And most of them won't be able to do it. Because while charity can temporarily solve the issue, it won't solve it long-term. So that means people getting kicked out of apartments, or being forced to sell homes for whatever equity can be had. They'll become a class of hobos trying to figure out if they can cohabitate and pool resources just to keep a roof over their heads. ANY roof, however meager.

Due to the fact their need doesn't evaporate simply because you believe they are undeserving spendthrifts, or the Ponzi plan is bullshit so it oughta be made to go away permanently.

I agree with you that ALL Ponzi schemes ARE bullshit. But in this case it was a Ponzi program instituted by force of law before they were born. And while it's a true thing ALL OF US—yes, you too, dear Millennial or Zoomer who's a paycheck or two from being on the street—should be saving on our own time with our own dime, most Americans don't. And didn't. Or at least not enough.

I can think of nothing more destructive to the already-shaky morale of this nation than to inflict this punitive cancellation on America's working class elderly. Who were never the ones running up trillion-dollar deficits these past 27 years. Never the retarded political movers and shakers in D.C. governing in horrible and egregious ways. Never the "cruise ship retirees" supposedly frittering away your inheritance you seem so hotly bruised about.

These men and women will pass almost nothing to their kids and grandkids because they've got almost nothing.

Again, they're not the "cruise ship retiree" you're so bothered over, and against whom you've whipped up such a terrible grudge.

I'm talking normal working Americans, most of them socially conservative and most of them horrified by what's been done to the entire country during the tenure of the Boomer *politicians* who've plunged our nation down a fast ramp to financial implosion.

They don't deserve your hate. And they don't deserve to be on the street after a life of honest labor.

We probably should end SS. We probably should end a lot of Big Guv things. I've been saying all of this and more for YEARS.

But for God's sake find a way to ramp this shit down that doesn't put millions of elderly people—who were never the bad guys you think they were—into a dreadful financial strait they literally don't have the personal werewithal to navigate. This would be a moral evil unlike anything I can imagine. Almost as evil as the Ponzi scheme itself.

Which again was FORCED ON US ALL BY LAW. Not by choice. And it would be a matter of terrible cosmic karma for any Gen X/M/Z to gleefully shove their grandparents and great-grandparents into the gutter purely out of spite against the millionaires in D.C. Who will never be touched by the cancellation and won't care how much you hate them, anyway.

Shutter the program? Yes. But shutter it SANELY and with tender, delicate, absolutely careful compassion.

Anything more drastic? Enacted with malice? That's just cruelty on your part. And you'd better pray your descendants are better people than you are, or you're going to get it worse than your parents and great-grandparents did. Much, much worse.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The woman who taught America to cook was 6ft 2, used butter by the pound on public television for 40 years, and outlived most of the people who told her to stop.

Julia Child was born in California in 1912. She could not cook until she was 36. Then her husband was posted to Paris, she ate a sole fried in butter in Rouen, and that was that.

If you were in America in the 1960s, you remember her. Black and white, a voice like a trombone, dropping things and carrying on. She put a whole chicken on the board, rubbed it with butter, and told you to do the same. Cream went into the sauce. The fat stayed on the roast.

Then the 1980s arrived and the country was ordered onto margarine, skimmed milk and chicken breast with the skin off. Cookery writers fell into line overnight. Julia would not. She said the fear of food was doing more harm than the food. She carried on with the butter, in front of the cameras, while the nutritionists wrote to the network.

She was mocked for it as a relic.

She worked into her 80s, lived on her own, and died in 2004, 2 days short of her 92nd birthday.

The people who built the low fat pyramid have been quietly taking it apart ever since. This January the American government finally turned it upside down.

She did not live to see herself proved right. She just went on cooking as if it had never been in doubt.

[Diana @tuckred]

When you take statements out of context and make a conclusion, you sound very stupid, like Maria. Trump is talking about what might happen if Iran had nuclear weapons.

[Maria Shriver @mariashriver]

This should outrage every American. This is the president of the United States telling Iran to bomb American cities. I live in Los Angeles, but that’s beside the point. Tommorow it could be your city.

My fellow Americans, this is not normal. This is not funny. This behavior should ring alarm bells for us all!

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A man who passed his medical in 1996 with flying colours has four diseases today, and not one number in his body has changed.

Blood pressure 135/85. Cholesterol 210. Fasting blood sugar 105. BMI of 26.

In 1996 that was a clean bill of health and a handshake. Today the same man, with the same blood, is hypertensive, has high cholesterol, is prediabetic and overweight. Four diagnoses, and he never caught a thing.

1997: the line for diabetes drops from 140 to 126. 1.7 million new diabetics by morning.

1997: high blood pressure drops from 160/100 to 140/90. 13 million new patients.

1998: high cholesterol drops from 240 to 200. 42 million new patients.

1998: overweight drops from a BMI of 27 to 25. 29 million people go to bed normal and wake up with a weight problem.

2003: prediabetes is widened from 110 to 100. It now covers 98 million Americans, more than 1 adult in 3, for a condition the World Health Organization declines to call by that name.

2017: blood pressure again, down to 130/80. Another 31 million. Nearly half the adults in America are hypertensive.

When the cholesterol targets were tightened again in 2004, eight of the nine men who wrote them had been paid by companies that make statins.

No germ. No outbreak. No change in a single artery. Just a room, a vote, and a tablet waiting on the far side of every line.

In every other branch of medicine you have to get ill to become a patient. In this one they bring the disease to you.

The last healthy people are the ones who haven't been tested yet.

[Diana @tuckred]

@jfberg99 @SamaHoole Sadly, in the US, they’ve been discovered. $11/lb for ox tails, last I checked.

[Diana @tuckred]

@SamaHoole During the Covid year, while everyone else hoarded tp I stocked up on butter. Wasn’t satisfied until I had 40 lbs in my freezer.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

They need you afraid of the sun, so you'll stay covered through July, and go short of the one vitamin it was handing you for nothing.

They need you afraid of dirt, so you'll wipe every surface twice, and raise a generation that can't sit in a room with a peanut.

They need you afraid of hunger, so you'll eat every ninety minutes, and never once find out what your body does when it's left alone.

They need you afraid of the farm gate, so you'll drink milk heated twice and driven two hundred miles, and call the churn a mile away dangerous.

They need you afraid of the offal, so you'll take the lean fillet, and bin the only part of the animal carrying the vitamins.

They need you afraid of the dripping, so you'll pour it from a bottle instead, and buy that same fat back off a wellness brand in twenty years.

They need you afraid of the bone, so you'll drop in a stock cube, and feed your family salt and palm oil where a stockpot used to sit.

They need you afraid of the fat on your chop, so you'll trim it into the bin, and drink a shake at four to put the calories back.

They need you afraid of your own thirst, so you'll carry a bottle everywhere, and override the one system in your body that already had the answer.

They need you afraid of a number on a printout, so you'll take the tablet until you die, and never once get asked what you had for breakfast.

Every fear on that list is of something old, free and outdoors.

Sunlight. Dirt. Hunger. Fat. Bone. A cow down the road. None of it has a shareholder, a patent or a man on a salary whose job is to defend it. Everything you swapped it for has all three, and you have been paying the wages.

So stop. Stop apologising for wanting the fat. Stop flinching at the yolk. Stop treating the sun like an assailant and your own appetite like a fault to be managed.

You were not built by a laboratory. You were built by fire, weather, animals and hunger, and every one of those is still available to you, and none of them is for sale.

Go and get them back.

[MAZE @mazemoore]

Apparently Chris Cuomo doesn't like all the old clips I've posted of him being a condescending prick during the pandemic being shared.

So I'm going to post a bunch more.

Here's Cuomo in 2021 mocking and berating Byron Donalds for not getting vaccinated.

[Andrew Zywiec, M.D. @AndrewZywiecMD]

As a straight A, intense biology and chemistry undergraduate, I believed in evolution. There was so much data, so much information, so much theory.

I am now a 17 year, extremely well educated, highly accomplished and intellectually experienced medical doctor and scientist.

Evolution is like many things. On the surface, it has a luster. But deeper examination exposes pyrite.

Fool's gold.

The first sip from the glass of secular science is atheistic, but God is at the bottom of the glass. (Paraphrased)

[Diana @tuckred]

@saddlesurfer2 Thanks for the clarification!

[Dr. Sydney Watson @SydneyLWatson]

Right wingers aren't the reason people can't stand the trans movement.

I'd argue MOST people, me included, used to be totally indifferent to all of this. My position genuinely used to be that I don't care what you do as an adult, provided it doesn't affect me.

I don't feel like that any more. Not even a little.

Somewhere along the road, trans activists and progressives got extremely forceful and loud. And then it became impossible to ignore their bullshit.

"Please let us live in peace" turned into forcing transition on minors.
And forcing men into women's spaces.
And quite literally changing the definition of the word "woman".

In medicine, we have been pushed to change how we understand the female sex in order to accommodate a bunch of men who think they are female (lmfao what the fuck are we even doing?)

Then it was all the legal battles where judges undermined what it is to be a woman. Forcing women to accept men into female-only gyms, locker rooms, bathrooms and apps. Making women feel uncomfortable and unsafe in order to protect the precious feelings of these men.

We have been to thoroughly dehumanized by the trans community.
"Chest feeding"
"Front hole"
"Menstruating person"
"Birthing person"

Anything and everything that makes women remarkable, unique, and DIFFERENT to men has been erased so we can include a bunch of mentally ill men in our ranks.

Voicing concern got you fired and socially ostracized. Women have been too terrified to speak up and do anything because, across the Western world, we have virtually no support and no protections from the justice system.

Women (and men) in Britain were (maybe still are) being charged and arrested for MISGENDERING people online. Harassed for pointing out the biological reality that MEN CANNOT BE WOMEN.

And this doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what women, girls and children have had to endure for the past decade or so.

Public opinion went backwards because the most insane people have had the microphone for the better part of ten years. And they have pushed everyone's tolerance to the brink.

Blame yourselves. You did this to yourselves. You have hurt women and children so significantly and so thoroughly that there is no coming back from this.

You are exclusively the ones at fault for where you are, Tim McBride.

[Insurrection Barbie @DefiyantlyFree]

After Mao killed 45 million people through incompetence, Mao spent the last decade of his life killing more, this time through deliberate cruelty. And this time, the killers were teenagers.

Mao mobilized China’s youth high schoolers, college students as Red Guards, empowered to attack anyone deemed “bourgeois,” “revisionist,” or “counterrevolutionary”

In Beijing alone, in August–September 1966 (“Red August”), 1,772 people were beaten to death, mostly teachers and school administrators, by their own students

On August 5, 1966, Bian Zhongyun, vice-principal of the Beijing Normal University Girls Middle School, was beaten to death by her own female students girls between 13 and 17. This event marks the start of “Red August” and is one of the most-documented single killings of the era.

Total death toll: between 1.1 and 8 million killed outright, depending on methodology, with the Stanford sociological estimate by Andrew Walder at 1.1 to 1.6 million killed and 22 to 30 million persecuted

A leaked internal CCP document places the toll at nearly 2 million killed and 125 million “struggled against” a euphemism for public humiliation, torture, and denunciation.

But sure keep listening to the Turkish Muslim brotherhood for what America needs.

[Sean Hannity 🇺🇸 @seanhannity]

Sen. John Fetterman tells Zohran Mamdani to "fix a pothole," blasting the NYC mayoral candidate for weighing in on foreign policy:

“Now you have the mayor of a city. You’re a mayor, dude. You’re a mayor. You can fix a pothole. You can take out the trash. But you can’t order people to arrest anybody any more than I could. I couldn’t have him arrested if he came to Pennsylvania. It’s a joke, and he’s a clown. He also said that Netanyahu is not welcome in New York. You can’t say that any more than I can say, ‘Mayor, you’re not welcome in Pennsylvania.’ So sit down. I know you’re a clown, and you’re just going to pander to the fringe because that’s part of your base. I know you’re angry at Netanyahu because he killed a lot of people you admire, whether it’s Sinwar, Nasrallah, or Qaani in Iran. He’ll only criticize the prime minister of Israel, but he never criticizes Hamas. He never criticizes Hezbollah or Iran. I’ve never heard the mayor condemn Iran for killing 30,000 or 40,000 of its own young people who were simply asking for democracy in their country.”

[Lila Rose @LilaGraceRose]

This baby has the same treatable condition that the male couple in Canada wanted their surrogate to abort. They are now suing her after she refused. A simple surgery post-birth can fix this defect. The surrogate mother showed heroic love.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

1898: Bayer trademarks a new cough medicine for children. They call it Heroin.

1899: they also trademark aspirin. Enjoy that one. It is the last unambiguously good thing on this list.

1900: Heroin is Bayer's best-selling product, marketed to mothers as non-addictive.

1915: they supply the German army over 170 tons of chlorine gas for the trenches.

1925: Bayer folds into a chemical giant called IG Farben.

1940s: IG Farben runs a slave-labour plant at Auschwitz and part-owns the maker of the Zyklon B.

1956: a director convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg is quietly made chairman of Bayer's board.

1980s: Bayer discovers its haemophilia blood product is riddled with HIV.

Rather than destroy the stock, it keeps selling the untreated batches to Asia and Latin America to recoup the money.

Thousands of haemophiliacs are infected. Many die.

2003: the New York Times exposes it. Bayer helps settle for around 600 million dollars.

2018: Bayer buys Monsanto, inheriting Roundup, Agent Orange and PCBs in a single afternoon.

2026: the US Supreme Court throws out the Roundup cancer lawsuits. Bayer wins.

Heroin, chlorine gas, Auschwitz, tainted blood, and a weedkiller in the dock, all from one firm.

Every one of them was legal, marketed with total confidence, and blessed by the experts of its day, and the company behind them is bigger now than it has ever been.

The heroin got recalled. The company never did.

[Diana @tuckred]

@SamaHoole I’m glad I read this! I’m going to Canada from Washington state (where legal) in a couple weeks and was thinking of bringing my raw milk. That would be a strange thing to be arrested for!

[Among the Wildflowers @deaflibertarian]

On a videophone call through a sign language interpreter, I was told they had a senior deaf black cat who used sign language at the shelter. Because of age and deafness, they will euthanize her unless someone adopted her. I had already been pre-approved to adopt.

I arrived and...

it wasn't a cat.

It was a dog!

I signed to her, and she signed back, but she was clearly frightened and overwhelmed. My heart knew I could not leave her there.

At home with her I quickly realized...she wasn't deaf either!

I did some digging; the previous owner was a deaf woman in Houston. She had passed away.

That "deaf black cat" turned out to be a hearing black dog who knows signs.

And that's how Luna Lovegood became part of our family.

[Diana @tuckred]

@SamaHoole I think my mom was on to this in the 50/60’s. She’d give me the butter wrapper to lick and taught me to take a bit of fat with every bite of meat. Then the late 60’s/70’s she got on the low-fat everything/margarine wagon 😢