This is horrifying. It will lead to a total degradation of interpersonal effectiveness skills, it will teach people they can't have boundaries, & to expect a lack of boundaries.
That makes people angry and *dangerous*.
(Btw, I verified this is a real study and accurate report)
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.
Friend group activity concept:
-Pick a person in the group.
-Everyone makes a mii of that person, as they see them.
-Make each mii a fighter in Smash, and make them all battle each other on highest CPU
-Winner's mii is decided as the "True Mii" of the person.
Rinse and repeat.
As someone who is autistic, the number of times guys tried to fetishize me has been insane. They act like I’m some quirky, submissive girl or treat me like I can’t think for myself as if being autistic somehow makes me a fucking child. I’m an adult woman and I want to be seen as one with all my thoughts and feelings.
It’s not all rainbows, sparkles and “fun quirks.” You wouldn’t find me cute when I’m overstimulated, when I shut down and go nonverbal or when my mood suddenly flips. The constant sensory overload, the struggle to regulate myself, the random crying when it all becomes too much or plans change unexpectedly, the daily exhaustion of masking and trying to fit in, and the sheer effort it takes to navigate a world that isn’t built for me it’s draining. It’s not easy and I wish people would stop fetishizing a disability cause that's what it is at the end of the day.!
I don't think enough people are aware of how much power exactly the US wields over the global financial system, so let me lay this out for you.
Since 2025, the US has sanctioned 11 judges and prosecutors of the International Criminal Court who led the effort to obtain an arrest warrant against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The US does not officially control international banks. But in effect, banks will close accounts of any sanctioned individual to avoid US repercussions, which could lead to the total severance from global financial markets.
Sanctions are issued without Congressional approval and only by Executive Order. Once on a list, all US services will cut ties with sanctioned individuals. Email? Gone. Accounting software? Inaccessible. Booking flights or a hotel? Nope.
While the US administration is currently busy parading itself as the ultimate protector of peace in the world, it's important to remember that the US **unsigned** itself from the Rome Statute in 2002 which established the ICC, instead issuing a bill that allows the US **to invade The Hague** if any US service member was ever prosecuted by the International Criminal Court.
"We will hold the bad guys accountable" the US proclaims with its latest attacks on Iran, yet it actively works against the main international institution designed to do just that – and it uses the financial system to do so.