#The Law Communicants

[wisdomfish]

Knowing God through his dual sources of revelation is roughly analogous to knowing a human artist. While something significant of the artist can be know by viewing his or her work (general revelation), an expansive and more specific knowing comes through interpersonal communication (special revelation) with the artist. ~ Samples, Kenneth Richard. ‘Without a Doubt: Answering the 20 Toughest Faith Questions. p. 45

#dual #source linked #artist #the law communicants #my persona

[kyreniacommentator]

The law changes regarding where to wear masks

The law changes regarding where to wear masks

The Communicable Diseases High Committee has been changed the decision on the “obligation to wear masks” into a “recommendation” decision in indoor areas. The Communicable Diseases High Committee, with its new decisions taken yesterday 15th September 2022, has changed the decision on the obligation to wear masks in indoor areas, including schools, into a recommendation decision. (more…)

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#Communicable Diseases High Committee #Covid -19 regulations #Law changes #TRNC #Wearing masks

[simonalkenmayer]

I want to show you something interesting that was done recently. Something you can show your Trump supporting relatives.

Yale did a study with death stats that shows that prior to and during the pandemic, Republicans and Democrats were largely dying at the same rate. However once vaccines came out, Democratic deaths dropped at a staggering rate, while republicans continued to (and still are) die at a much higher rate.

The study looks at “excess death”—as in deaths occurring outside the normal death rates. It does not, however, tie into COVID related death tolls via the CDC, because there’s no real way to correlate that data without knowing individual medical history. So the study approaches the idea as best as it can.

You can see from the graph that death rates seem very even among the two groups, until you get to the moment the vaccines became available.

The vertical line is vaccine roll out. Horizontal line is zero. The spikes follow alao v with the waves of spread that the CDC tracks, when variants make rounds and spread. The stats deviate from one another prior to the introduction of the vaccine, when republican disinformation began telling people to return to normal life and participate in events. However, you can see the sharp divergence clearly, when vaccines became available. They continued to diverge as months went on. Currently, Republicans have an abnormally high excess death rate, at nearly double the Democratic death toll. Even with interaction between the two groups in uncontrolled settings, Republican death rates are higher than Democratic death rates., because of vaccine efficacy. I’m sure future studies will be done to further illuminate this phenomenon, but this is an excellent first glimpse.

This is memetic selection. They chose not to be vaccinated. They chose to have less protection. And so…they cease to exist. However, because this type of selection doesn’t act as strongly on younger people who are breeding, it doesn’t drastically shift future rates of potential Republican indoctrination. It does, however, drastically change the current electorate.

Whoops.

This is the GOP platform: no plan, take away equality, bodily autonomy, privacy, social security, medical care, benefits. No rule of law, lower wages, higher aggregation of wealth in top .1%, and a destitute dependent, undereducated populace. Disposable people who die when they’re no longer useful as misinformation spreaders to facilitate their control. 

This is the consequence of compassionless governance, in mathematical, quantifiable terms.

TL;DR COVID kills more Republicans than Democrats, at rates twice as high, because the party engaged in stupid misinformation on a communicable disease for the sake of retaining power.

#covid #covid vaccine #politics #selection

[0atm11k]

New York state’s Fourth Judicial Department has reinstated a controversial policy that empowers the state government to lawfully order people to involuntarily isolate or quarantine in order to prevent the spread of highly contagious diseases.

Originally passed in February 2022, the dramatic expansion of the rights and abilities of the State Health Commissioner, collectively referred to as Rule 2.13, was struck down in July of that same year in the state Supreme Court, following a lawsuit filed by Republican lawmakers Sen. George Borrello, Assemblyman Chris Tague and U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler, who was a member of the Assembly at the time of the filing.

Last Friday, the Fourth Judicial Department repealed that decision, stating that the Republican challengers, who had argued that Rule 2.13 gave undue power to the executive branch and disregarded the authority of the state legislature, had not established how their authority had been negated.

The court’s Democratic Supermajority, in a unanimous vote, ruled that the “Legislature retains its power to address the regulation,” essentially stating that New York legislators still maintain the authority to change the laws which originally empowered the Governor’s office to pass new and stricter public health policies. Furthermore, the Fourth Judical Court wrote “that the legislator petitioners failed to fulfill the injury-in-fact requirement to establish standing” arguing that the state legislators who originally brought the suit did not have the legal standing to do so.

The lower court ruled that Rule 2.13 did not nullify any vote cast by the plaintiffs or strip them of any due authority, thus the challengers had no grounds on which to personally sue.

“Inasmuch as the legislator petitioners merely asserted an alleged harm to the separation of powers shared by the legislative branch as a whole, they failed to establish that they suffered a direct, personal injury beyond an abstract institutional harm,” wrote the court.

Republicans have categorized the Fourth Judical Departments ruling as a technicality, and have vowed to continue challenging the policy.

“The court seems to insinuate that the only person with the right to sue is someone who has been forcibly locked in their home against their will” Bobbie Anne Flower Cox, the attorney representing the petitioners, wrote in a blog post following the lower court’s decision.

Rule 2.13 was fi rst made possible when, during the early days of the Covid 19 Pandemic, the state legislature amended executive law and gave then Governor Andrew Cuomo broad power to suspend laws and issue directives through executive orders.

The new ruling supersedes the conclusion of Supreme Court Justice Ronald Ploetz of Cattaraugus County, who stated Rule 2.13 violates the constitutional requirement for a separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches when establishing actions as severe as involuntary isolation.

With Rule 2.13 reinstated, the State Commissioner of Health now resumes the authority to “whenever appropriate to control the spread of a highly contagious communicable disease, issue and/or direct the local health authority to issue isolation and/or quarantine orders, consistent with due process of law, to all such persons as the State Commissioner of Health shall determine appropriate.”

#quarantine #covid #COVID-19 #covid19 #covid 19 #face masks #new york #new york state #government #politics

[inversionimpulse]

What Reimu’s intuition suggests is not that she’s some kind of fool who succeeds only thanks to lucky guesses, as I have seen some people say. This is a common idea that I suspect was derived something like this: non-empirical knowledge that can’t be comprehensively defined and communicated is not useful or acceptable in science (and other disciplines with significant visibility such as law) - as this idea was communicated back and forth, it mutated into the idea that only rational and communicably particularized knowledge ‘counts’ and intuitive or experiental knowledge is simply not real.

But to use a delightfully vulgar turn of phrase I encountered once, in order to pull something out of your ass, it has to have gotten in there to begin with. Intuitive and subconscious processes are a key part of how the brain produces information - to have a good intuition suggests that you are strongly perceptive and that your brain is incredibly skilled at processing and refining that input into useful, actionable impulses. If you are also rationally intelligent, you can then refine that into detailed and communicable ideas - but if you can’t, you are still intelligent.

What Reimu’s intuition suggests is that she’s devastatingly intelligent (also incredibly lucky, don’t get me wrong) - that she is capable of taking in minute evidence and drawing correct conclusions from it, and of seeing problems and quickly inventing and implementing solutions to them - but not capable of filtering it through her conscious thoughts. Every time she tries it just kinda gets torn to shreds.

I tihnk that’s rather appropriate for the protagonist of a story set in a supernatural world of nebulous fears and faiths, which cannot and should not be understood rationally.

#touhou #touhou project #reimu hakurei #hakurei reimu #meta #touhou meta #A queue in the dark beguiles me

[reality-detective]

Hey New York... Are you aware? 👇

2.13 Isolation and quarantine procedures.

(a) Duty to issue isolation and quarantine orders.

(1) Whenever appropriate to control the spread of a highly contagious communicable disease, the State Commissioner of Health may issue and/or may direct the local health authority to issue isolation and/or quarantine orders, consistent with due process of law, to all such persons as the State Commissioner of Health shall determine appropriate.

(2) Paragraph (1) of this subdivision shall not be construed as relieving the authority and duty of local health authorities to issue isolation and quarantine orders to control the spread of a highly contagious communicable disease, consistent with due process of law, in the absence of such direction from the State Commissioner of Health.

(3) For the purposes of isolation orders, isolation locations may include home isolation or such other residential or temporary housing location that the public health authority issuing the order determines appropriate, where symptoms or conditions indicate that medical care in a general hospital is not expected to be required, and consistent with any direction that the State Commissioner of Health may issue. Where symptoms or conditions indicate that medical care in a general hospital is expected to be required, the isolation location shall be a general hospital.

(4) For the purposes of quarantine orders, quarantine locations may include home quarantine, other residential or temporary housing quarantine, or quarantine at such other locations as the public health authority issuing the order deems appropriate, consistent with any direction that the State Commissioner of Health may issue.

Read the whole story, you will have no say in the matter... Medical Prisons? 🤔

#pay attention #educate yourselves #educate yourself #knowledge is power #reeducate yourself #reeducate yourselves #think for yourselves #think about it #think for yourself #do your homework #do some research #do your own research #ask yourself questions #question everything #new york #prison #medical corruption #government corruption

[yngsuk]

In [Julia] Kristeva’s thought, entry into the social order is predicated on abjection, or separation from the mother, which precedes and precipitates the child’s entrance into the Symbolic, or law of the Father. The Black, however, lacks a similar corporeal tie with the maternal, instead revealing the ontological, psychic, and material ruptures reflective of a political ontology borne of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. For Black motherhood is sutured to a history of property relations, rather than kinship ties, and is illuminated by the state’s and civil society’s reach which extends from and beyond the ship’s hole: the severing of kinship ties of ascent and the erasure of maternal claims to descendants, whether on the plantation or via the foster ‘care’ and carceral systems. Blackness as deathly marker within the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real is so intimately tied to the metaphoric and material reality of the corpse (and we have thousands of bones laying in the bottom of the Atlantic ocean to support this claim) that [Hortense] Spillers’ elaboration of the reduction of African bodies into flesh illuminates a critical facet: the material and psychic violence attendant to the construction of racial Blackness—in and through chattel slavery and its successive iterations—precedes one’s subjective and phenomenological experience of it. For antiblackness as a political and ontological outcome of a series of historical events—Sub Saharan racialized slavery, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the birth of modern racial capital—is prior to one’s entrance, but perhaps not one’s formation, in language or the Symbolic Order. Temporal aphasia operates by way of retraction where what remains unsymbolizeable in language—the Real, or the violence that precedes the id for Black people—gives way to speculative theories such as from Spillers who reveals the distinction between searching for communicability versus the rules of order, for understanding and expression versus systems of power: language versus her aim to “posit a grammar of a different ‘subject of feminism’.” And if violence is the a priori psychic and ontological construction undergirding Blackness, our methods for interpreting and articulating not only the machinations of the Black psyche, but also Black intramural relations, must be attuned to the effects of these “high crimes against the flesh” of “African females and African males” who still register this foundational “wounding”—what Spillers defines relationally as “social irreparability.”

Selamawit D. Terrefe, Speaking the Hieroglyph

#quote #selamawit d. terrefe #hortense spillers #julia kristeva #slavery #antiblackness #black motherhood #psychoanalysis #afropessimism #*ayden

[magus-incognito]

Upon the Birthing of Gods

Professor Elaine Trask

Revised Edition

First Instruction: Faith may be practiced in solitude. God birthing however is a communal activity. Please do not kid yourself. You will need others.

Second Instruction: Ensure that you have a simple and communicable concept in mind. Once you have settled on your god’s concept, take the time to cross-reference said concept against an up-to-date register of licensed faiths. Remember that international law prohibits religious plagiarism, and your national authorities are legally bound to seek out and nullify any attempted breach of copyright. NB, if you are defining your god as a committee; ensure everyone is on the same page from the beginning. Schisms during the planning stage benefit no-one.

Third Instruction: Know your history. Even if your chosen concept does not infringe on the intellectual property of other licensed faiths, it is absolutely inevitable that somebody has had exactly the same notion before you. You’re not an unprecedented genius, stupid. Search the archives for abandoned or stray faiths. If you can find any record of why a faith was abandoned, make a note of this information for future reference as it may impact your licensing claim. Also make a note of any known prayer marks; these will be your first retraced steps towards building a shared language. A way to speak and a way to be heard.

Fourth Instruction: Test your communication method, establish a connection. You should begin this process by deciding on a conduit or conduits- some manner of hierophant/seeker/prophet that will relate particularly strongly to the concept at hand. If you are not the conduit in question, share the following steps with your chosen candidate and retreat to a safe distance.

You will need first a variety of psychotropic smokes and commercial grade teas. See the next chapter for a suggested list to get you started.

Some limited, but meaningful form of sacrifice. A god must feed until you’ve established the exact ritual of sacrifice. Blood and life remain the most effective general standbys.

Patience. A great deal of it.

Fifth Instruction: Focus on your god, to the exclusion of all other thoughts. Devote mind and body to drawing it forth. Let your mind open up new pathways through the sullen waters of reality. Obsession is the winding road that will lead you to your god; again, you will need resilience.

91% of god-birthing efforts fall at this first hurdle; if you have access to a substantial labor force, this author advises you to make use of them and speed the process up. Dramatically increase the psychotropic dosage, deal with any casualties as necessary and arrive at your destination sooner. Whatever method you choose, the crucial thing is to ensure that your chosen conduit does not lose focus.

(TSV 23: I'd Howl, I'd Scream, in Victory)

#the silt verses #deities #practice

[umbylievable]

superhero world building and mechanics is, this is not an exaggeration, my absolute favorite thing in the world. tell us everything.

SO everything is set in a fictional city in Delaware called Kaiyper. Why Delaware? Because it's close enough to the federal government for the presence of superheroes to be a concern but Delaware is also unassuming enough that the average American citizen would know jack shit about it.

The origin story is that there was a government funded genetics lab located in Kaiyper that was conducting experiments on rats regarding activating dormant genes. In this process they discovered a virus that appeared completely benign but actually caused the activation of a "superhero" gene in certain populations in the presence of a large amount of adrenaline. One scientist, upon learning the government intended to use it to create a superpowered army, decided the virus was too dangerous and destroyed all but one sample.

See this scientist wasn't exactly a beacon of goodness either. They still wanted to see their research flourish. And there was a man who rode the bus with them by the name of Jason Weiss who they felt was the perfect human subject to test this on. So they exposed Jason to the virus surreptitiously and then went underground.

Unfortunately even though the virus wasn't communicable in rats it proved to be in humans, and it slowly spread through the city. So people started developing superpowers out of nowhere, and no one knew the cause except the government and the lab, and they kept it hush hush for obvious reasons.

The main story takes place about 30 years after that initial infection. Jason died in a fight with the city's first supervillain. His daughter, Leona (under the codename Duchess Vespus), who only recently discovered her own superpower, has taken it upon herself to become the city's protector in his stead. She's joined by her childhood best friend Tripp Weaver, AKA Trap-Ease, and an enigmatic alien named Th'alhnan, AKA Angelface.

The city has a broad cast of supervillains, ranging from petty thieves to mass murderers, and that includes an exotic dancer named Candice Randall, stage name Candy, villain name Pound Foolish. And she just happens to be one of Leona's girlfriends.

The other girlfriend, Danielle (who belongs to my bestie @moonlube) is a member of an underground supervillain containment group composed of non-powered humans operating outside of the law to try and help control the superpowered crime wave in the city. Her partner is James, a goofball and perpetual fuck-up whose car is constantly getting wrecked by superhero shenanigans. His insurance is so high.

Most of the story revolves around Leona, Candice, and Dani trying to navigate romance amidst their clashing careers. The fun thing about the superhero gene is, its expression is not just dependent on genetics but on necessity. The primary power they develop is dependent on what they needed or wished for it to do at the time of its activation. Leona is invulnerable because she was attempting to take a bullet for someone when her power activated. Her father Jason had super strength because he was trying to stop a bus. Some people have more than one power, but it's unknown why some people develop more powers than others.

Other fun characters include

Shandar, an emperor of a now destroyed planet, forced to take refuge on earth while they plot their revenge

Diamondback, a spoiled nepo baby who has taken up supervillainy just because he was bored

The Broforce Five, five college fratboys with superpowers who think they're the rightful protectors of Kaiyper. One of them is killed early in the story and the Broforce disbands.

Abraham, a broken shapeshifting alien superweapon that can now only turn into a weird dog and a backpack. He belongs to James.

Scarabesque, a former ballerina whose career was ruined by an injury. Now wears a protective armor and uses her powers for evil. Has a little bit of a crush on Leona.

I recently started retooling the whole thing so there's some posts with more info on my blog I need to retype but that is the basics of it!!

#flipping kitchens #thank u for asking i love talking about my ocs!!

[yr-obedt-cicero]

Mrs. Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, the daughter of General Philip J. Schuyler, and widow of Alexander Hamilton, 1st., took him [Reverend Alexander Hamilton] then a little boy in his seventh year to St. Paul's Chapel. New York, and said to him: “If anyone ever tells you that George Washington was not a communicant of the Church, you say that your great grandmother told you to say that she ‘had knelt at this chancel rail at his side and received with him the Holy Communion.’”

Source — Mrs. Alexander Hamilton, Witness That George Washington Was a Communicant of the Church

This book was an interesting quick read! Apparently many were questioning George Washington's “lack of orthodoxy”, and it talks a lot about the later generation of the Hamiltons' and their accounts in regards to the inquiries. It mainly revolves around Reverend Alexander Hamilton's accounts, who was the son of John Church Hamilton. But it includes interesting tidbits about the family, like a trip JCH and his family took to Washington D.C. in the spring of 1854. They were likely visiting Eliza because she was already living there with her daughter, Holly, since 1848;

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL MORNING IN MAY, 1854, that the family coach drew up in front of the family home, 17 w. 20th. Street, New York City. There Mrs. General Hamilton (who had come on from Washington, D. C., with her son), her daughter-in-law, Mrs. John Church Hamilton, and A. Hamilton (the writer of this letter and present Rev. Alexander Hamilton) entered and rode to Wall Street, corner of Broad, New York City. THEN MRS. GENERAL HAMILTON, her daughter-in-law and great-grandson, Alexander, entered the former house of Alexander Hamilton. Going to the front window, Mrs. Hamilton said, “I, with Mrs. Knox and other ladies, looked from this window over to Federal Hall and saw George Washington inaugurated first President of the United States. Then we all walked up Broadway to St. Paul's Chapel, Fulton Street. Washington, Chancellor Livingston, General Knox and your great-grandfather (meaning General Hamilton), went into the chapel and occupied the pew on the north side. We ladies sat just back of them, but Mrs. Washington was not present, being yet at Mount Vernon. A festal celebration was held, sermon preached by the rector, and the Holy Communion was also celebrated, at which Washington, members of his party and many others partook.” Mrs. Hamilton then said to me, ‘My son, I have taken you to Wall Street and there depicted the inauguration; then to St. Paul's Chapel, where Washington attended divine service, and received the Holy Communion. I want you to transmit these facts to future generations, as some have asked, “Was Washington a communicant of the Church, did he ever partake of the Holy Communion?”’

The above photo was included in the book and writes at the bottom; “Courtesy of the Rev. Joseph P. McComas, D.D. The Washington Pew in St. Paul's Chapel, where, according to the testimony of Mrs. Alexander Hamilton, George Washington received the Holy Communion on the day of his Inauguration as first President of the United States.”

An additional anecdote may be referring to Washington's prayer at Valley Forge that is often speculated, included with various art pieces of it. [x] It has always been doubted due to the lack of confidential source material, but Rev. Hamilton claims his grandmother and great-grandfather saw something similar;

Mr. Hamilton further related that when his great-grand-mother was a young girl, before her marriage to Alexander Hamilton, she was with her father, General Philip Schuyler, one of Washington's aides, at Valley Forge, and saw the terrible sufferings of our men, and heard at that time Washington's fervent prayer that all might be well.

Henry Morford referenced in his book, in 1876, a prayer Washington had once made that one of his troops had recorded;

Tis Pride with these old men To tell what they have seen. 'Twill be Pride, when we are old, To say that in our youth We heard the tales they told And looked on them in their truth.

Source — The Spur of Monmouth, Or, Washington in Arms: A Historical and Centennial Romance of the Revolution, from Personal Relations and Documents Never Before Made Public, by Henry Morford · 1876

I'm not sure why continuously throughout the book they add an additional generation to the titles, for example Eliza was only Reverend Hamilton's grandmother, not his great-grandmother. And the same is used again when Reverend Hamilton recalls stories he heard from his uncle Alexander Hamilton, Jr., (Second son of Hamilton and Eliza's, generational namesakes do become annoying) about Washington and his attendance to church. It's interesting on it's own, but intriguing to think why Alexander remembered this. The Hamilton family and Washington family did spend a lot of time together when they were neighbors in Philadelphia during Washington's presidency, and the children were playmates together—So it can be speculated that they may have attended church together or Hamilton's kids may have attended with the Washington's;

MY GREAT-UNCLE ALEXANDER, son of General Hamilton, also told me how Washington after his return to Mount Vernon was a regular attendant of the services of the parish church. And on one occasion, when many prominent men were calling on him, Washington said to them, ‘The church bell is ringing in yonder church, to which I go, and I hope you will all do so.’

Anyway, it was a splendid find on Internet Archive.

#amrev #american history #american revolution #elizabeth hamilton #elizabeth schuyler #george washington #reverend alexander hamilton #john church hamilton #alexander hamilton jr #history #hamilton family #cicero's history lessons #cue the queue

[mojoflower]

Time to Go Comment to Codify Traveler's Rights

[I just cut & pasted this from a recent mailing from Scott's Cheap Flights... which is a fabulous resource, if you don't know about them already. But here's a good way to reach out and begin stopping airlines from abusing passengers they way they've been doing more and more lately. Also, it's interesting to see that this is happening. Yay, Buttigieg!]

***

With rampant delays and cancellations, it’s been a tough summer for many travelers. But a new proposal from the Department of Transportation could finally make some headway in bolstering travelers’ rights.

Passengers’ rights today

Under federal law, if an airline cancels or significantly changes your flight, you are entitled to a full cash refund. Period. It does not matter if:

Your ticket is marked as non-refundable (e.g. basic economy)

It’s on a foreign airline flying into/out of a US airport

It’s not the airline’s fault (e.g. a global pandemic or bad weather)

You bought your ticket through a third party (though they may charge you a processing fee)

Your flight is on Spirit

Even if the airline’s cancellation email only mentions a flight voucher (as many do!), the Department of Transportation rule is crystal clear: If there’s a cancellation or significant change and you no longer wish to travel, you’re entitled to your money back.

The problem: how significant is “significant”? This lack of definition not only makes it confusing what your rights are, but it also allows airlines to change their policies on a whim. (Take United Airlines which, in March 2020, quietly changed their policy to claim that any delay less than 25 hours was not significant, and thus not refund-eligible.)

Separately, if you booked a flight in 2021 but didn’t feel safe traveling amidst a new variant, you were usually only eligible for a voucher if the flight still operated. And on some airlines, those vouchers had expiration dates as little as 2 or 3 months down the line.

Both those facts could soon change.

Proposed rule

Earlier this month, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg proposed new regulations that, if enacted, would be the largest boost to traveler protections in years. First, the DOT would finally define “significant.” Under the proposal, a “significant” delay is 3+ hours on a domestic flight or 6+ hours on an international flight. Second, the DOT would require airlines to provide non-expiring vouchers for pandemic-related disruptions. This would include things like closed borders, stay-at-home orders, or even just if you didn’t feel safe to travel because of a serious communicable disease. And if an airline takes a bailout—as US airlines did to the tune of tens of billions of dollars—those passengers would be entitled to refunds rather than non-expiring vouchers.

Make your voice heard

The proposed rule is currently in its required 90-day public comment period, after which the DOT will weigh feedback and finalize what final regulation (if any) to put forth. I guarantee airlines and their lobbyists will be registering their feedback in the hopes of watering down or even defeating this proposal. I’ve left a comment, and I’d encourage you to as well. (You can do so here in under 60 seconds.) ***Here's a link to Scott's comment, so you can use it as a model*** Don’t let the “proposed” nature of the rule fool you; it’s quite likely to become law. It doesn’t need to pass Congress, it just needs to complete the agency rulemaking process. While it will likely take over a year to be finalized, Buttigieg has been an outspoken advocate of travelers’ rights, and I would be surprised if the proposal ultimately fails.

This is not the EU passenger protection law

When I posted about this proposed rule on Twitter, many folks likened it to EC 261, the EU law that mandates up to 600 euros of compensation for delays or cancellations. There’s a big difference. The EU regulation gives you compensation and lets you keep your flight. This proposed rule only gives you a cash refund if you choose not to keep your flight. I’d love to see EC 261-style traveler protections in the US someday, but this isn’t it.

More to come?

Also this month, Buttigieg sent notice to the airlines of possible further action if they don’t voluntarily improve operations. He singled out two things that airlines should currently be expected to provide:

That airlines provide passengers with airport meal vouchers during 3+ hour delays.

That airlines provide passengers with hotel vouchers when flight disruptions strand travelers overnight.

While some airlines currently do this, it’s spotty at best and varies widely airline to airline and day to day.

Though these two are not yet formally proposed regulations, if airlines don’t improve service, that could change.

#airline travel #scott's cheap flights #activism #passenger protection #Department of Transportation #politics #go forth and comment

[burninglights]

Industrial Revolution & Pharmacopoeia Boom Time! Many thanks for enabling me, and putting up with my ramblings about nonsense areas of specialty.

NB: I am a biomedical science undergrad, not a medical historian. I've been reading books and academic texts from a young age and consequently retained a worrying amount of weirdly niche medico-historical knowledge. My particular areas of knowledge are the history of cancer therapeutics and the history of pharmacology (and battlefield medicine in Renaissance Europe, but that's beside the point). I'll link reputable sources in case you want to do some Actual Academic Reading of your own; please double check dates if you're planning to reference this post, especially for the government reforms.

First, some context. Medicine in the 1800s was dragged kicking and screaming into the predecessor of modern medicine, mostly by necessity. The development of the steam engine meant the rapid growth of industry thanks to automation that allowed for a much higher product output, and the railways that transported the workers to man said machines into centres of industry and cities.

Unfortunately, with mass movement of people comes disease, especially when the infrastructure for public housing and sanitation just doesn't exist.

With a few exceptions, most notably the philanthropic worker's housing programmes of Rowntree, Robinson, and Cadbury (yes, those ones), most factory workers not only worked incredibly dangerous and gruelling jobs but lived in crowded tenement buildings. These were ideal conditions for the spread of communicable diseases like TB, dysentery, cholera and typhus, all of which ran rife at one point or another.

The thing about communicable disease is that it's a universal affliction, and with the wealthy also susceptible to TB & cholera and the general unpleasantness of dumping all of your sewage directly into the Thames - something that lead to the Great Stink of 1854 - it was time for the government to begrudgingly wave goodbye to the policy of laissez-faire and actually start affecting sociopolitical change.

Cities forced preventative measures - the 1832 inquiry into the Poor Laws, the 1834 New Poor Laws, the Public Health Act of 1848, and the bigger, better 1875 Public Health Act - and leaps and bounds in the medical sciences (the birth of public epidemiology with John Snow and the 1854 cholera outbreak and Pasteur's confirmation of bacteria as the cause of disease in 1850 with germ theory) provided the first steps towards significant combative measures.

The boring bit is over! You came here for the drugs, and the drugs you shall get (metaphorically, of course).

Major leaps and bounds were being made in the chemical sciences too, especially when it came to isolating the active compounds of drugs and understanding how drugs affect people (mostly by medical professionals and the scientifically curious doing So Many Substances in doses and combinations that by all rights should have killed them, but the point stands).

Morphine was isolated in 1803, heroin trotting along not too far behind, and the invention of the hypodermic needle in 1840 made administering opiate drugs a damn sight more convenient. James Simpson proved that chloroform and ether were effective anaesthetic agents in humans in 1840.

(It is at this point I must shout out my boys James Lister, the pioneer of aseptic surgery and Ignaz Semmelweiss, who pioneered handwashing to combat childbed fever in Hungary and who was absolutely done dirty by his peers.

Their work is not strictly relevant to the pharmacopoeia boom, but they're the reason we have surgery that won't kill you dead of sepsis. Their work was, and is, incredibly vital to medicine.)

The reason you see all of those Jesus Christ That's Literally Just Potion of Insta-Death bottles of Victorian medicine is because fairly often, pharmacists with access to these isolated active agents would combine them with other drugs known to be effective in treating certain symptoms and patent them as cover-all medicines.

The medicalisation of addiction, understanding of addiction pathways and understanding of multi-drug intoxication didn't come along until later.

Sadly, overdose, especially in the case of children, wasn't all that uncommon.

You'll notice I said that treatment was primarily of symptoms, not of diseases.

Germ theory was still in its infancy at this point, and without the knowledge that specific microbes means specific disease, meaning specific treatments, the pharmacological M.O. was 'throw everything you've got at it and hope Something works'.

The Colonial Dick Measuring Contest that constituted Europe from around 1850 through to the beginning of World War One was a period known as the second Industrial Revolution, and also when synthetic chemistry, the idea that specific microorganisms = specific disease and the use of synthetic chemistry in pharmacology really kicked off in earnest.

The Bayer company of Germany became a pharmacological powerhouse, much to the disdain of the French (because their nations had beef, Pasteur & Erhlich spent their later years embroiled in a scientific pissing contest, which is incredibly funny but mostly irrelevant to this aside from the development of my favourite historical drug Salvarsan 606) and the British.

Side note: the Bayer company also refined methamphetamine drugs in the Weimar period in Germany, leading to the development of Previtin — the drug from that Finnish soldier post — that was given to the troops of the Third Reich. Norman Ohler's Blitzed is a really interesting account of drug development in Germany with the context of the world wars, if that's of any interest to you.

Anyway!

While the military arms race to build as many Dreadnought class warships as possible so that you'd have a bigger metaphorical dick than your neighbour loomed ominously in the sociopolitical background, a different, smaller kind of arms race was going on; the war against illness (with a side helping of German and French nationalism). A better understanding of medical chemistry meant that new pharmacological ground was being broken regularly; paracetamol was first made in 1877, Felix Hoffman, who worked for the Bayer company, modified salicylic acid to create acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin to you & me) in 1897.

The development of specific microbiological/vital staining techniques like Gram staining (yay!), trypsin blue stain (yay!) and Ziehl–Neelsen staining (absolutely yay - it was used to identify Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria responsible for TB) solidified the idea that specific pathogens = specific illness, which was incredibly helpful for drug development.

Arsphenamine, also known as Salvarsan 606 (my beloved!!!! this drug was the first synthetic chemotherapeutic agent and it's so fucking cool) was introduced at the beginning of the 1910s as the first effective treatment for syphilis. This ushered in the age of the sulfonamide antimicrobial drugs to treat infectious disease.

All of these new wonder drugs would be put to use - when available, which all too often they weren't - for casualties of war in 1914, when the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand ushered in a global conflict on a scale nobody could have imagined; the Great War, or WWI.

So yeah! that's a (not so) brief run down of the Big Drug Boom of the Industrial Revolution.

Thanks for tolerating me and I'm sorry for obliterating your dash. Double thanks and all of my love to @ronniebox, @hellolovelyscientist, @tsuyu-season, @yarnings, @starsong-dragonheart and @swords-n-spindles for being magnificently patient and enthusiastic and putting up with my nonsense.

#the history of medicine #medical science #medical history #world history #history of pharmacology #pharmacology #science #again I reiterate: please check dates & cross reference especially for the parliamentary acts #I'm a hobbyist not a professional #I'm just intensely weird lads medical history has been a lifelong interest of mine #and I was allowed to read medical literature from age 7 #in retrospect it should have been apparent a lot sooner to a lot more people that all was not neurotypical with me #long post #em.txt #adventures in biomed #now edited for grammar and spelling

[st-just]

Take the claim that “life begins at conception,” which is routinely broadened out by the anti-abortion movement to mean that a fertilized egg should be given legal personhood status. Even if pro-choicers don’t believe that a fertilized egg is a person, reporters, politicians, and others routinely say that many abortion opponents do genuinely believe that a fertilized egg is the moral equivalent of you or I, and should be treated as such under the law.

But here’s the thing: They don’t really believe that a fertilized egg is the moral equivalent of a three-year-old, and it’s appallingly obvious that virtually no one believes that. People may say that’s their belief, but all of the evidence suggests otherwise.

Exhibit A: the fact that as many has half of fertilized eggs do not implant in the uterus, never form a pregnancy, and are flushed out of a woman’s body, but the pro-life movement has done nothing — zero, zilch, nada — to save these lives. If you really, truly believe that a fertilized egg is the moral equivalent of an infant, you’re probably going to care even a little tiny bit about all of those fertilized eggs that die. And sure, these eggs are perishing naturally, but last I checked the US spends many billions of dollars researching and attempting to prevent, treat, and cure the great many ways that children and other human beings might die natural deaths. The entire human condition is a protracted fight between Mother Nature, who doles out all kinds of natural manners of death, from cancer to communicable diseases to good old-fashioned just getting old, and humans, who battle valiantly to live through all of these life-threatening travails. And yet “pro-life” folks want us to believe that they believe a fertilized egg is a person, even though they have not lifted a finger or spent a dollar trying to keep the majority of those persons alive?

It beggars belief. This claim of zygote personhood is simply made up; it’s invented; even the people who claim it don’t believe it. And yet we’re collectively required to go on pretending like this is some sincerely-held belief that may legitimately influence law and policy.

Jill Filipovic, The Years of Magical Thinking

#quote #abortion #polemic #Jill Filipovic

[mariacallous]

The United States has faced recurrent migrant crises at its border with Mexico for a simple reason: The incentives are upside down. If would-be migrants show up at the legal points of entry, they are all but certain to be turned back. If they cross the border illegally, they stand a strong chance of staying in the United States. The predictable results have been recurrent surges of illegal crossings—sometimes in enormous numbers—that fuel the public perception of chaos at the border. It’s a perception Republicans will be eager to exploit in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.

But the Republicans may not get that chance. In what may be the most delicate political high-wire act of a term that has been filled with them, U.S. President Joe Biden is trying to flip the script on immigration. Over the past several months, his administration has been opening the doors for hundreds of thousands of migrants to enter legally while dramatically shrinking the odds of success for those who illegally cross the border. It is hard to say who hates Biden’s new initiatives more—liberal Democrats who accuse him of turning his back on vulnerable asylum seekers, or Republicans who despise welcoming migrants that former President Donald Trump sought to push away. This balance of loathing suggests Biden might be on the right path.

The southern border has bedeviled U.S. presidents since Ronald Reagan’s time in office. The history is complex, but the motivations for migrants are not. In the 1980s and 1990s, large numbers of young Mexicans crossed illegally looking for jobs that paid four or five times what they could earn in the anemic Mexican economy. The U.S. Congress was unwilling to open new paths for legal migration from Mexico, and border enforcement was spotty. Entering the United States without permission was not difficult, so millions seized the opportunity. It took two decades and a massive build-up of agents, fencing, and surveillance technology—and the great recession in 2008—to bring the surge under control. Illegal crossings fell to a level that had not been seen since the early 1970s.

The numbers began to tick up again in 2013 and 2014 during the Obama administration—and then surged in 2019 under Trump’s watch. The mix of migrants was different, but the incentives for crossing illegally remained. In the face of growing gang violence and disorder in the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, many risked dangerous journeys through Mexico in hopes of receiving asylum protection when they made it to the United States. Under the 1980 U.S. Refugee Act, which reflects long-standing international practice, anyone setting foot in the country who presents a “credible fear” of persecution if they are returned home is entitled to remain in the United States and pursue asylum protection through U.S. immigration courts. The legal cases take years to resolve, so for those fleeing violence or simply seeking a better life the motivation to reach the United States and claim persecution is enormous. Unprecedented numbers, for example, are now crossing the Darien Gap—a treacherous maze of rainforest, mountains, and swamps between Panama and Colombia—on their journeys north.

Although asylum claims can be made at legal border crossings, the Trump administration set up a “metering” system that allowed just a handful of appointments each day and prevented many from reaching U.S. soil to file their claims. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control invoked Title 42—a decades-old but never previously used law to block the introduction of communicable disease—which since March 2020 has barred most migrants trying to cross the border at the legal ports. For those fleeing the Northern Triangle—in addition to large numbers recently leaving other countries, including Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, and Haiti—virtually the only way to pursue an asylum claim was to cross between the ports. In the U.S. government’s 2022 fiscal year, which ended last September, more than 1.6 million migrants were apprehended illegally crossing the border, the largest number in more than two decades. In December 2022, more than 250,000 migrants were encountered at the border, shattering all previous monthly records.

In response, Biden is trying to change the perverse incentives driving illegal crossings and encourage migrants to enter the country legally. With Title 42 finally set to expire in early May, long after the end of virtually all other pandemic-related restrictions, the Department of Homeland Security has published a proposed rule aimed at preventing what is otherwise expected to be an even larger surge of migration. The stick is a big one: With some exceptions, the administration plans to reject asylum claims from anyone who crosses the border illegally. But the carrot is sizeable too: Since this January, as many as 30,000 migrants from the major sending countries of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela are being admitted each month at the legal ports, as long as they have a U.S. sponsor to care for them on arrival. They can fly directly to the United States, forgoing the dangerous and costly journey across Mexico. For those already waiting at the border in Mexico, Customs and Border Protection has set up a new electronic sign-up system on an app called CBP One, which allows asylum seekers to make appointments for their claims to be heard.

The administration has been rolling out versions of the scheme over the past year, and it appears to be showing positive results. Under the Uniting for Ukraine initiative, the United States has admitted nearly 300,000 Ukrainian refugees, thousands of whom had been trying to reach the United States via Mexico. Ukrainians have been offered stays of up to two years under a provision known as humanitarian parole—once in the United States, they are eligible to work and to apply for asylum protection if they wish. The scheme was expanded to Venezuelans in October 2022 and then to Haitians, Cubans, and Nicaraguans in January. A key part of the new initiatives has been Mexico’s willingness to take back citizens of those countries if they are caught attempting to cross illegally.

The results have been immediate. Border encounters of Ukrainians trying to cross illegally fell from an average of 940 per day before the initiative to only around one dozen per day. The number of unlawful crossings by Venezuelans, Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans fell from 84,000 last December to just 2,000 in February. Overall, border apprehensions in January and February fell by 42 percent from the December 2022 record.

The administration is enlisting regional allies as well. At a summit meeting in Ottawa last month, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada would admit an additional 15,000 refugees from the Western Hemisphere each year. In exchange, Washington agreed to close a loophole in the two-decades-old Safe Third Country Agreement that had encouraged some would-be asylum seekers to transit the United States and enter Canada illegally. While the numbers on the northern border have been tiny compared to those at the southern one, some 5,000 asylum seekers entered Canada from the United States in January, mainly at the Roxham Road crossing between New York and Quebec. (That surge has been a growing political irritant for the Trudeau government.)

Despite the initial success of the new scheme, Biden has faced blistering criticisms from both sides of the political spectrum. Human rights groups and their Democrat allies argue the measures violate U.S. law and are little different from the Trump administration’s efforts to block all asylum seekers at the border. They say the new legal options are too limited—applying to citizens of just four countries—and there are too few asylum appointments at the legal ports to meet the backlog of demand. Many would-be asylum seekers find themselves on their phones each morning and failing to seize one of the coveted slots on the CBP One app—effectively a form of the “metering” used under Trump. The app has also been plagued with technical difficulties making it difficult for migrants to enroll. The new policy has attracted thousands of negative comments accusing the Biden administration of turning its back on asylum seekers. Even U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi weighed in, arguing that the proposal is “incompatible with principles of international refugee law.”

Congressional Republicans, in turn, have convened a series of hearings alleging that Biden’s “open borders” policies led to the migration surge; most want to re-instate Trump-era deterrents that forced migrants to seek asylum in other countries or required them to remain in Mexico while their cases crawled through the U.S. courts. Those harsh measures helped to quell the 2019 migration surge. Republicans are also challenging the administration’s use of humanitarian parole to admit new migrants as a gross overreach of executive branch discretion. Republican attorneys-general from 20 states have challenged the measure in court, arguing that “it amounts to the creation of a new visa program that allows hundreds of thousands of aliens to enter the United States who otherwise have no basis for doing so.” A trial is scheduled for June in Texas.

It is too soon to know how all this will play out. In the best scenario, the new measures would be enough to discourage many illegal border crossings, leading to a further fall in numbers and allowing Biden to claim that the border is under control in the run-up to the 2024 election. The novel use of private U.S. sponsors for the new migrants, modeled after a similar scheme in Canada, may also quell complaints that the government is wasting resources on immigration. But it is also possible the courts will strike down the measures. And nowhere is the law of unintended consequences more evident than in immigration policy: Migration surges from countries other than those specifically included in Biden’s measures could lead to a new border crisis.

But the administration should be lauded for trying to create some order at a border that has been chaotic for decades, while also permitting tens of thousands of new migrants the opportunity to escape persecution and pursue better lives in the United States. It has become cliché to say that the U.S. border is broken. But in the absence of congressional immigration reform, which appears more unlikely than ever, Biden’s new plans are the most serious effort yet to fix it.

[nicklloydnow]

“"You knew it was hopeless," said Andrew Maness as he stood over the book that lay on the desk, glaring at the pages of old handwriting in black ink. "You told me to always read the right words and to always have them in my mind, but you knew I would read the wrong words. You knew what I was. You knew that such a being existed only to read the wrong words and to want to see those words written across the sky in a black script. Because you yourself were the author of the book. And you brought your son to the place where he would read your words. This town was the wrong place, and you knew it was the wrong place. But you told yourself it was the only place where what you had done . .. might be undone. Because you became afraid of what you and those others had done. For years you were intrigued by the greatest madness, the most atrocious secrets and schemes, and then you became afraid. What did you discover that could make you so afraid, you and the others who were always intrigued by the monstrous things you told of, that you sang of, in the book? You preached to me that all change is grotesque, that the very possibility of change is evil. Yet in the book you declare 'transformation as the only truth' - the only truth of the Tsalal, that one who is without law or reason. 'There is no nature to things,' you wrote in the book. 'There are no faces except masks held tight against the pitching chaos behind them.' You wrote that there is not true growth or evolution in the life of this world but only transformations of appearance, an incessant melting and molding of surfaces without underlying essence. Above all you pronounced that there is no salvation of any being because no beings exist as such, nothing exists to be saved - everything, everyone exists only to be drawn into the slow and endless swirling of mutations that we may see every second of our lives if we simply gaze through the eyes of the Tsalal.

"Yet these truths of yours that you kept writing in your book cannot be the reason you became afraid, for even while your voice is somber or trembling to speak of these things, your phrases are burdened with fascination and you are always marvelling at the grand mockery of the universal masquerade, the 'hallucination of lies that obscures the vision of all but the elect of the Tsalal.' It is something of which you will not speak or cannot speak that caused you to become afraid. What did you discover that you could not face without renouncing what you and those others had done, without running to this town to hide yourself in the doctrines of a church that you did not truly uphold? Did this knowledge, this discovery remain within you, at once alive and annihilated to your memory? Was it this that allowed you to prophesy that the people of Moxton would return to their town, yet prevented you from telling what phenomenon could be more terrible than the nightmare they had fled, those grotesque changes which had overtaken the streets and houses of this place?”

“"As a young man," the Reverend Maness explained to his son, who was now a young man himself, "I thought myselt an adept in the magic of the old gods, a communicant of entities both demonic and divine. I did not comprehend for years that I was merely a curator in the museum where the old gods were on display, their replicas and corpses set up in the countless galleries of the invisible . . . and now the extinct. I knew that in past millennia these beings had always replaced one another as each of them passed away along with the worlds that worshipped them. This mirror-like succession of supreme monarchs may still seem eternal to those who have not sensed the great shadow which has always been positioned behind every deity or pantheon. Yet I was able to sense this shadow and see that it had eclipsed the old gods without in any way being one of their kind. For it was even older than they, the dark background against which they had forever carried on their escapades as best they could. But its emergence into the foreground of things was something new, an advent occurring not much more than a century ago. Perhaps this great blackness, this shadow, has always prevailed on worlds other than our own, places that have never known the gods of order, the gods of design. Even this world had long prepared for it, creating certain places where the illusion of a reality was worn quite thin and where the gods of order and design could barely breathe. Such places as this town of Moxton became fertile ground for this blackness no one had ever seen.

"Yes, it was not much more than a century ago that the people of this world betrayed their awareness of a new god that was not a god. Such an awareness may never be complete, never reach a true agony of illumination, except among an elect. I myself was slow in coming to it. The authenticity of my enlightenment may seem questionable and arbitrary, considering its source. Nonetheless, there is a tradition of revelation, an ancient protocol, by which knowledge of the unseen is delivered to us through inspired texts. And it is by means of these scriptures dictated from beyond that we of this world may discover what we have not and cannot experience in a direct confrontation. So it was with the Tsalal. But the book that I have written, and which I have named Isalal, is not the revealed codex of which I am speaking. It is only a reflection, or rather a distillation, of those other writings in which I first detected the existence, the emergence, of the Tsalal itself.

"Of course, there have always been writings of a certain kind, a primeval lore which provided allusions to the darkness of creation and to monstrosities of every type, human and inhuman, as if there were a difference. Something profoundly dark and grotesque has always had a life in every language of this world, appearing at intervals and throwing its shadow for a moment upon stories that try to make sense of things, often confounding the most happy tale. And this shadow is never banished in any of these stories, however we may pretend otherwise. The darkness of the grotesque is an immortal enigma: in all the legends of the dead, in all the tales of creatures of the night, in all the mythologies of mad gods and lucid demons, there remains a kind of mocking nonsense to the end, a thick and resonant voice which calls out from the heart of these stories and declares: 'Still I am here.' And the idiot laughter of that voice - how it sounds through the ages!

This laughter often reaches our ears through certain stories wherein this grotesque spirit itself has had a hand. However we have tried to ignore the laughter of this voice, however we have tried to overwhelm its words and protect ourselves by always keeping other words in our minds, it still sounds throughout the world.

"But it was not much more than a century ago that this laughter began to rise to a pitch. You have heard it yourself, Andrew, as you furtively made incursions into my library during your younger days, revelling in a Gothic feast of the grotesque. These books do not hold an arcane knowledge intended for the select few but were written for a world which had begun to slight the gods of order and design, to question their very existence and to exalt in the disorders of the grotesque. Both of us have now studied the books in which the Tsalal was being gradually revealed as the very nucleus of our universe, even if their authors remained innocent of the revelations they were perpetrating. It was from one of the most enlightened of this sect of Gothic storytellers that I took the name of that one. You recall, Andrew, the adventures of an Arthur Pym in a fantastic land where everything, people and landscape alike, is of a perfect blackness - the Antarctic country of Tsalal. This was among the finest evocations I had discovered of that blackness no one had ever seen, a literary unveiling of being without soul or substance, without meaning or necessity - not a universe of design and order but one whose sole principle was that of senseless transmutation. A universe of the grotesque. And from that moment it became my ambition to invoke what I now called the Tsalal, and ultimately to effect a worldly incarnation of the thing itself.”

#ligotti #thomas ligotti #tsalal #darkness #noctuary #cult