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fredbsmith · 2 years

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A Sermon

Proverbs 8

The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old; I was formed long ages ago, at the very beginning, when the world came to be. When there were no watery depths, I was given birth, when there were no springs overflowing with water; before the mountains were settled in place, before the hills, I was given birth, before he made the world or its fields or any of the dust of the earth. I was there when he set the heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep, when he established the clouds above and fixed securely the fountains of the deep, when he gave the sea its boundary so the waters would not overstep his command, and when he marked out the foundations of the earth. Then I was constantly at his side. I was filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in his presence, rejoicing in his whole world and delighting in mankind.

2 Thessalonians 2

But we ought always to thank God for you, brothers and sisters loved by the Lord, because God chose you as first fruitsto be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth. He called you to this through our gospel, that you might share in the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the teachings we passed on to you, whether by word of mouth or by letter.

May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and by his grace gave us eternal encouragement and good hope, encourage your hearts and strengthen you in every good deed and word.

Understanding Through Allegory

First Reformed Church of Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, 7-10-2022

Since I retired from medicine 9 years ago, I’ve stopped going to professional meetings and dropped my subscriptions to the specialty journals I used to read regularly. I have, though, tried to follow the medical issues that come up in the public discourse and that are discussed in the national media. There certainly have been a lot of these discussions on the air and in print since the pandemic hit us early in 2020.

One of the skills doctors are supposed to have is the ability to explain tenets of medical science to lay people, in straightforward, non-technical language – to the patients they treat and to well members of their communities who want to understand how to preserve and protect their health. Some doctors are good at this, and others not so much.

The doctors and other health professionals who are really, really good at explanations to lay people are the ones that appear on interviews in the major news media. And one thing I’ve noticed is how frequently these experts get their explanations across through the use of allegory. You know they’re about to launch an allegory when they start an answer with “It’s like…” or “It’s as if…”.

Here's an example: early in the current year, as the delta and omicron variants of covid19 were spreading in waves across the nation, an expert being interviewed on a talk show was asked to explain whether the public had been deceived by the previous, apparently overly optimistic predictions of how effective the new mRNA vaccines would be in controlling the infectiveness and virulence of the virus. To answer directly would require the listener to already have an understanding of how the human immune system reacts to vaccines and of how changes in the chemical composition of a virus affect the immune system’s response to it.

The expert in this interview instead started to portray an allegory of the immune system. The human body was represented as a nightclub and the immune system as the security team that protected the club from thieves (representing pathogens): name-checkers at the club doors (representing antibodies), who screened would-be customers trying to enter the club for names of known bad actors, and bouncers (cells of the immune system), stationed inside the club, who would eject any person who entered and then began behaving badly.

I found this allegorical picture colorful and amusing, but I was impressed also that the explanation the it led to pretty faithfully replicated the understanding of vaccine mechanisms that I had acquired in my medical training. It even occurred to me that the very same allegory, the body as nightclub, could be used to explain phenomena in diseases other than covid, which were puzzling to members of the lay public. If you remember, in the later years of the AIDS epidemic there was a complication called the “immune reconstitution syndrome” that some patients with advanced AIDS developed when highly active antiretroviral agents came into use. These patients developed severe acute symptoms on treatment, even though the AIDS virus was being destroyed and the immune system cells the virus had decimated were being restored. It was the now-reinvigorated immune response to other, secondary pathogens harbored within the bodies of these patients that caused the symptoms. But to many in the lay public, it seemed paradoxical that an effective treatment for the AIDS virus was making the patients worse. In the allegorical explanation that I dreamed up by extending the nightclub scenario, the bouncers would be returning to the nightclub as a group, after all having been out on sick leave, and, finding on their return many freeloaders peacefully relaxed, eating and drinking the club’s food and liquor without paying, would attempt to eject the entire group of bad guys en masse, breaking much of the club’s furniture in the process.

The reason allegorical explanations by experts are effective, I think, has to do with the state of mind they induce in the listener. The expert has a knowledge of his or her subject acquired through long years of study and experience, that can’t be shared instantly with lay listeners. These years of study have produced a knowledge base and patterns of disciplined thinking that have become almost intuitive for them; an expert in immunology can rely on this “enlightened intuition” to address problems that involve new variables (e.g. a new virus, as the SARS coronavirus 2 was in 2019). An expert skilled in the use of allegory seeks to reproduce a state of “enlightened intuition” in the listener by looking for explanations that involve common, everyday experience that parallel explanations in the expert’s field.

Unfortunately, explanation through allegory has its limits. An allegory can be extended, as I demonstrated with the immune reconstitution syndrome, but it can only be extended so far. What happens when we try to extend the nightclub allegory to explain the necessity of immunosuppression in patients following major organ transplants? It might go like this: the nightclub owner plans to make a major renovation of the club’s building, say a new furnace or HVAC system to replace an aging, malfunctioning unit, on a certain date. Violence will occur if the team of bouncers mistakenly take the HVAC installers for robbers. Is it sensible for the club owner to prevent this by sending the team of bouncers home for the day? Wouldn’t it be much more reasonable to inform his security staff that the installation will occur and that the individuals assigned to perform the installation will, of course, have job identification credentials? Of course it would. The allegory has stopped working at this point, because it fails to model the actual range of options we have for modulating the immune system.

The Bible texts we read today reflect on God, and God’s relationship to us and our lives, in two allegories. In one, from Thessalonians, God is the father who loves and nurtures us; in the other, from Proverbs, God is the design engineer who has fashioned our universe according to his wise intentions.

We recognize the allegorical nature of these portraits in they both a render a subject that is sublimely mysterious, probably beyond human understanding, in images that come from common experience.

We can readily see the limitations in each of these allegories. Our fathers protect and care for us when we are young, but in the course of our lives we see them become older and frail, and we eventually lose them. We therefore understand God to be allegorically the father we had as a child and not the man he became in later life.

In our currently technically advanced world, we have become used to seeing that a great many major construction projects have incorporated serious flaws at the design stage – think of the Titanic or the Tacoma Narrows Bridge – to the extent that we see errors in design, and the correction of errors that follows in later projects, as a learning process, inherent in the design profession. We certainly don’t see the wisdom, power, and creativity of God as having been acquired through correcting previous errors.

We can see also that the understanding we get from the two allegories is different. One emphasizes God’s love and nurture, the other his wisdom and power. We might even be tempted to think they are contradictory, in that no contemporary adult attributes exceptional power and wisdom to the father they know and love (not many, anyway) and vanishingly few of us have loving relationships with the designers of the buildings, bridges, and cars our lives depend upon. I believe we should recognize, however, that all allegories are inherently limited, and we should expect that no single allegorical representation can tell us the whole truth about a vast subject. I believe the Bible gives us both of these allegories, because either one or the other may provide the most meaningful understanding of our relationship with God at a particular time, as we progress through the course of our lives.

Let’s look a little more closely at the father – or perhaps we should say “parent” allegory. This is my favorite of the two, because I think it is the one that better utilizes our own life experience to deepen our understanding. We have all had intensely close relationships with our parents in our early life. Many of us have parented children of our own, so we have seen the parent-child relationship from both sides, and we have gained a better understanding of our own childhood from raising our children. We understand intuitively the philosophical statement that we have our existence through our parents. We understand from biology that our bodies, at the time we were conceived, were formed from parts of our parents; we are literally of one substance with them. We’ve also learned that the cellular events leading to our conception could have produced many different combinations of our parents’ genes; there were literally millions of alternate versions of ourselves that could have come into existence instead of us. And we know, intuitively, that our parents did not select us during this process, that they would have loved any alternate version of ourselves as intensely as they loved us. Theirs was a love that was truly unconditional, a love that came into being before we, in fact, came into being. And so we can think that this is the kind of love in which God holds us.

The designer allegory works differently. We may not actually know any design engineers or architects first hand, but we make regular, day-to-day use of their creations – like cars and buildings. In a sense, we carry on an anonymous relationship with these people by incorporating their products in our lives. Our responses to them, to their works, take two forms: admiration, or even awe, for the positive qualities in their works – beauty, ingenuity, simplicity, user-friendliness, etc. – or criticism for the opposite qualities. Most of the time, I think, we criticize them for having produced something that doesn’t work the way we think it ought to. When we do this, we are implicitly placing ourselves in a peer-to-peer relationship with the designer, although we may not realize it consciously. When I am frustrated by a design problem in my car, I feel anger toward the person I imagine to be responsible for it. I imagine that I myself could have had his job, if I had studied engineering instead of medicine, and, in his place, I would never come up with such a stupid design for car. (Sound familiar?)

So the designer allegory works completely differently than the parent allegory. The parent allegory leads us to understand God as being like the parents we know from personal experience. The designer allegory leads us to understand God as being totally unlike the designers in our personal experience. The works of human designers are all subject to criticism from those willing to presume equal footing with those designers; God’s one work, the universe in its totality from the beginning of time, is not. What is the alternative for comparison? What is the alternative … to all that there is? Who among us humans would have the brainpower to imagine this? It would seem an act of hubris, perhaps blasphemy in the eyes of some, to assume equality in relationship to God, to take on the role of God’s critic. I have just argued that it’s also illogical.

When we try to think through the designer allegory, we find, paradoxically, that we have come to understand that God is beyond human understanding. From it, we understand only what God is not. So we might call it an “inverse allegory,” or an “anti-allegory.” It leads us to a place where we regard God as being at a vast distance from us, light-years away, at the edge of the universe, and our only response can be contemplation in awe and silence. Perhaps this is place we need to visit, from time to time, as we proceed on our spiritual journey.

From time to time.

There are other times in our lives, inevitable times, when circumstances deal us a terrible blow. Loss or serious illness of one dearly loved, or an illness that threatens our own life, can make us feel like our heart has been torn from our body. In the grip of such pain, we may feel anger toward God. You may hear the person suffering express a wish to hold God accountable for what has happened to them. I have two reactions when I hear this: as a cri de cœur, it vividly expresses the depth of the experienced pain, and I must respect this form of its meaning. But I cannot accept it as literal spiritual insight. It seems to me a misuse of the designer allegory, and an assumption, albeit unconscious, that one can presume equal footing with God and pronounce judgment upon him. It contradicts the lesson of the Book of Job, that contemplation of God’s workings in the world can only be done in silence and awe.

Such times, I believe, call for us to seek comfort in the other allegory we’ve been talking about. We are diminished by our pain, and we feel helpless and powerless over our condition. Doesn’t it make sense for us to remember those times when we were small children, when we knew no state other than being weak and helpless in a world of adults, and, when injured and in pain we would run to the arms of our parents, to seek comfort basking in the warmth of their unlimited love? They didn’t know us in every conceivable detail, they hadn’t crafted us, and we didn’t know, either, how much they knew about us; but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that we could trust that they loved us unconditionally and would do everything in their power to help us heal.

Can we, at this stage of our adult lives, come into the arms of God, the father, in the same frame of mind, to ease our suffering?

May it be so.

Amen.

#sermon #allegory #theodicy

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sigritandtheelves · 3 years

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got my second vax yesterday afternoon and i literally woke up crying because my whole body hurt so much—i’ve tried so hard not to complain (i’m grateful !) but i was so sick & miserable for a whole week+ last time and i don’t wanna do that again 😫

#love science love the vaccine but JESUS #from anecdotal evidence it seems like moderna has worse side effects?#or i’m just so lucky to have them the worst 🙄

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saphyrose · 3 years

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I got two vaccines today and my arms are THROBBINGGGGG, 🤧😩

#vaccines are great #honestly they’re cool and I love the science behind them #but Jesus they hurt me #I get some sort of reaction that not many people get #the stuff inside that they injects feels really solid and my arm goes all weird #and I also have a phobia of needles #so today was fun #but yeah if I can get vaccinated you can too #woop woop

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missmentelle · 3 years

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Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things

If you’ve been paying attention for the last couple of years, you might have noticed that the world has a bit of a misinformation problem.

The problem isn’t just with the recent election conspiracies, either. The last couple of years has brought us the rise (and occasionally fall) of misinformation-based movements like:

Sandy Hook conspiracies

Gamergate

Pizzagate

The MRA/incel/MGTOW movements

anti-vaxxers

flat-earthers

the birther movement

the Illuminati

climate change denial

Spygate

Holocaust denial

COVID-19 denial

5G panic

QAnon

But why do people believe this stuff?

It would be easy - too easy - to say that people fall for this stuff because they’re stupid. We all want to believe that smart people like us are immune from being taken in by deranged conspiracies. But it’s just not that simple. People from all walks of life are going down these rabbit holes - people with degrees and professional careers and rich lives have fallen for these theories, leaving their loved ones baffled. Decades-long relationships have splintered this year, as the number of people flocking to these conspiracies out of nowhere reaches a fever pitch.

So why do smart people start believing some incredibly stupid things? It’s because:

Our brains are built to identify patterns.

Our brains fucking love puzzles and patterns. This is a well-known phenomenon called apophenia, and at one point, it was probably helpful for our survival - the prehistoric human who noticed patterns in things like animal migration, plant life cycles and the movement of the stars was probably a lot more likely to survive than the human who couldn’t figure out how to use natural clues to navigate or find food.

The problem, though, is that we can’t really turn this off. Even when we’re presented with completely random data, we’ll see patterns. We see patterns in everything, even when there’s no pattern there. This is why people see Jesus in a burnt piece of toast or get superstitious about hockey playoffs or insist on always playing at a certain slot machine - our brains look for patterns in the constant barrage of random information in our daily lives, and insist that those patterns are really there, even when they’re completely imagined.

A lot of conspiracy theories have their roots in people making connections between things that aren’t really connected. The belief that “vaccines cause autism” was bolstered by the fact that the first recognizable symptoms of autism happen to appear at roughly the same time that children receive one of their rounds of childhood immunizations - the two things are completely unconnected, but our brains have a hard time letting go of the pattern they see there. Likewise, many people were quick to latch on to the fact that early maps of COVID infections were extremely similar to maps of 5G coverage - the fact that there’s a reasonable explanation for this (major cities are more likely to have both high COVID cases AND 5G networks) doesn’t change the fact that our brains just really, really want to see a connection there.

Our brains love proportionality.

Specifically, our brains like effects to be directly proportional to their causes - in other words, we like it when big events have big causes, and small causes only lead to small events. It’s uncomfortable for us when the reverse is true. And so anytime we feel like a “big” event (celebrity death, global pandemic, your precious child is diagnosed with autism) has a small or unsatisfying cause (car accident, pandemics just sort of happen every few decades, people just get autism sometimes), we sometimes feel the need to start looking around for the bigger, more sinister, “true” cause of that event.

Consider, for instance, the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. In 1981, Pope John Paul II was shot four times by a Turkish member of a known Italian paramilitary secret society who’d recently escaped from prison - on the surface, it seems like the sort of thing conspiracy theorists salivate over, seeing how it was an actual multinational conspiracy. But they never had much interest in the assassination attempt. Why? Because the Pope didn’t die. He recovered from his injuries and went right back to Pope-ing. The event didn’t have a serious outcome, and so people are content with the idea that one extremist carried it out. The death of Princess Diana, however, has been fertile ground for conspiracy theories; even though a woman dying in a car accident is less weird than a man being shot four times by a paid political assassin, her death has attracted more conspiracy theories because it had a bigger outcome. A princess dying in a car accident doesn’t feel big enough. It’s unsatisfying. We want such a monumentous moment in history to have a bigger, more interesting cause.

These theories prey on pre-existing fear and anger.

Are you a terrified new parent who wants the best for their child and feels anxious about having them injected with a substance you don’t totally understand? Congrats, you’re a prime target for the anti-vaccine movement. Are you a young white male who doesn’t like seeing more and more games aimed at women and minorities, and is worried that “your” gaming culture is being stolen from you? You might have been very interested in something called Gamergate. Are you a right-wing white person who worries that “your” country and way of life is being stolen by immigrants, non-Christians and coastal liberals? You’re going to love the “all left-wingers are Satantic pedo baby-eaters” messaging of QAnon.

Misinformation and conspiracy theories are often aimed strategically at the anxieties and fears that people are already experiencing. No one likes being told that their fears are insane or irrational; it’s not hard to see why people gravitate towards communities that say “yes, you were right all along, and everyone who told you that you were nuts to be worried about this is just a dumb sheep. We believe you, and we have evidence that you were right along, right here.” Fear is a powerful motivator, and you can make people believe and do some pretty extreme things if you just keep telling them “yes, that thing you’re afraid of is true, but also it’s way worse than you could have ever imagined.”

Real information is often complicated, hard to understand, and inherently unsatisfying.

The information that comes from the scientific community is often very frustrating for a layperson; we want science to have hard-and-fast answers, but it doesn’t. The closest you get to a straight answer is often “it depends” or “we don’t know, but we think X might be likely”. Understanding the results of a scientific study with any confidence requires knowing about sampling practices, error types, effect sizes, confidence intervals and publishing biases. Even asking a simple question like “is X bad for my child” will usually get you a complicated, uncertain answer - in most cases, it really just depends. Not understanding complex topics makes people afraid - it makes it hard to trust that they’re being given the right information, and that they’re making the right choices.

Conspiracy theories and misinformation, on the other hand, are often simple, and they are certain. Vaccines bad. Natural things good. 5G bad. Organic food good. The reason girls won’t date you isn’t a complex combination of your social skills, hygiene, appearance, projected values, personal circumstances, degree of extroversion, luck and life phase - girls won’t date you because feminism is bad, and if we got rid of feminism you’d have a girlfriend. The reason Donald Trump was an unpopular president wasn’t a complex combination of his public bigotry, lack of decorum, lack of qualifications, open incompetence, nepotism, corruption, loss of soft power, refusal to uphold the basic responsibilities of his position or his constant lying - they hated him because he was fighting a secret sex cult and they’re all in it.

Instead of making you feel stupid because you’re overwhelmed with complex information, expert opinions and uncertain advice, conspiracy theories make you feel smart - smarter, in fact, than everyone who doesn’t believe in them. And that’s a powerful thing for people living in a credential-heavy world.

Many conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable.

It is very difficult to prove a negative. If I tell you, for instance, that there’s no such thing as a purple swan, it would be very difficult for me to actually prove that to you - I could spend the rest of my life photographing swans and looking for swans and talking to people who know a lot about swans, and yet the slim possibility would still exist that there was a purple swan out there somewhere that I just hadn’t found yet. That’s why, in most circumstances, the burden of proof lies with the person making the extraordinary claim - if you tell me that purple swans exist, we should continue to assume that they don’t until you actually produce a purple swan.

Conspiracy theories, however, are built so that it’s nearly impossible to “prove” them wrong. Is there any proof that the world’s top-ranking politicians and celebrities are all in a giant child sex trafficking cult? No. But can you prove that they aren’t in a child sex-trafficking cult? No, not really. Even if I, again, spent the rest of my life investigating celebrities and following celebrities and talking to people who know celebrities, I still couldn’t definitely prove that this cult doesn’t exist - there’s always a chance that the specific celebrities I’ve investigated just aren’t in the cult (but other ones are!) or that they’re hiding evidence of the cult even better than we think. Lack of evidence for a conspiracy theory is always treated as more evidence for the theory - we can’t find anything because this goes even higher up than we think! They’re even more sophisticated at hiding this than we thought! People deeply entrenched in these theories don’t even realize that they are stuck in a circular loop where everything seems to prove their theory right - they just see a mountain of “evidence” for their side.

Our brains are very attached to information that we “learned” by ourselves.

Learning accurate information is not a particularly interactive or exciting experience. An expert or reliable source just presents the information to you in its entirety, you read or watch the information, and that’s the end of it. You can look for more information or look for clarification of something, but it’s a one-way street - the information is just laid out for you, you take what you need, end of story.

Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, almost never show their hand all at once. They drop little breadcrumbs of information that slowly lead you where they want you to go. This is why conspiracy theorists are forever telling you to “do your research” - they know that if they tell you everything at once, you won’t believe them. Instead, they want you to indoctrinate yourself slowly over time, by taking the little hints they give you and running off to find or invent evidence that matches that clue. If I tell you that celebrities often wear symbols that identify them as part of a cult and that you should “do your research” about it, you can absolutely find evidence that substantiates my claim - there are literally millions of photos of celebrities out there, and anyone who looks hard enough is guaranteed to find common shapes, poses and themes that might just mean something (they don’t - eyes and triangles are incredibly common design elements, and if I took enough pictures of you, I could also “prove” that you also clearly display symbols that signal you’re in the cult).

The fact that you “found” the evidence on your own, however, makes it more meaningful to you. We trust ourselves, and we trust that the patterns we uncover by ourselves are true. It doesn’t feel like you’re being fed misinformation - it feels like you’ve discovered an important truth that “they” didn’t want you to find, and you’ll hang onto that for dear life.

Older people have not learned to be media-literate in a digital world.

Fifty years ago, not just anyone could access popular media. All of this stuff had a huge barrier to entry - if you wanted to be on TV or be in the papers or have a radio show, you had to be a professional affiliated with a major media brand. Consumers didn’t have easy access to niche communities or alternative information - your sources of information were basically your local paper, the nightly news, and your morning radio show, and they all more or less agreed on the same set of facts. For decades, if it looked official and it appeared in print, you could probably trust that it was true.

Of course, we live in a very different world today - today, any asshole can accumulate an audience of millions, even if they have no credentials and nothing they say is actually true (like “The Food Babe”, a blogger with no credentials in medicine, nutrition, health sciences, biology or chemistry who peddles health misinformation to the 3 million people who visit her blog every month). It’s very tough for older people (and some younger people) to get their heads around the fact that it’s very easy to create an “official-looking” news source, and that they can’t necessarily trust everything they find on the internet. When you combine that with a tendency toward “clickbait headlines” that often misrepresent the information in the article, you have a generation struggling to determine who they can trust in a media landscape that doesn’t at all resemble the media landscape they once knew.

These beliefs become a part of someone’s identity.

A person doesn’t tell you that they believe in anti-vaxx information - they tell you that they ARE an anti-vaxxer. Likewise, people will tell you that they ARE a flat-earther, a birther, or a Gamergater. By design, these beliefs are not meant to be something you have a casual relationship with, like your opinion of pizza toppings or how much you trust local weather forecasts - they are meant to form a core part of your identity.

And once something becomes a core part of your identity, trying to make you stop believing it becomes almost impossible. Once we’ve formed an initial impression of something, facts just don’t change our minds. If you identify as an antivaxxer and I present evidence that disproves your beliefs, in your mind, I’m not correcting inaccurate information - I am launching a very personal attack against a core part of who you are. In fact, the more evidence I present, the more you will burrow down into your antivaxx beliefs, more confident than ever that you are right. Admitting that you are wrong about something that is important to you is painful, and your brain would prefer to simply deflect conflicting information rather than subject you to that pain.

We can see this at work with something called the confirmation bias. Simply put, once we believe something, our brains hold on to all evidence that that belief is true, and ignore evidence that it’s false. If I show you 100 articles that disprove your pet theory and 3 articles that confirm it, you’ll cling to those 3 articles and forget about the rest. Even if I show you nothing but articles that disprove your theory, you’ll likely go through them and pick out any ambiguous or conflicting information as evidence for “your side”, even if the conclusion of the article shows that you are wrong - our brains simply care about feeling right more than they care about what is actually true.

There is a strong community aspect to these theories.

There is no one quite as supportive or as understanding as a conspiracy theorist - provided, of course, that you believe in the same conspiracy theories that they do. People who start looking into these conspiracy theories are told that they aren’t crazy, and that their fears are totally valid. They’re told that the people in their lives who doubted them were just brainwashed sheep, but that they’ve finally found a community of people who get where they’re coming from. Whenever they report back to the group with the “evidence” they’ve found or the new elaborations on the conspiracy theory that they’ve been thinking of (“what if it’s even worse than we thought??”), they are given praise for their valuable contributions. These conspiracy groups often become important parts of people’s social networks - they can spend hours every day talking with like-minded people from these communities and sharing their ideas.

Of course, the flipside of this is that anyone who starts to doubt or move away from the conspiracy immediately loses that community and social support. People who have broken away from antivaxx and QAnon often say that the hardest part of leaving was losing the community and friendships they’d built - not necessarily giving up on the theory itself. Many people are rejected by their real-life friends and family once they start to get entrenched in conspiracy theories; the friendships they build online in the course of researching these theories often become the only social supports they have left, and losing those supports means having no one to turn to at all. This is by design - the threat of losing your community has kept people trapped in abusive religious sects and cults for as long as those things have existed.

#missmentelle #askmissmentelle #conspiracy theories #cults #psychology #science #neuroscience

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homoose · 3 years

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Weird is Good

Summary: A story about two people tryna make it through the age of COVID-19 in a country where people are fucking dumb lmao. My hc is that Spencer would be like wtf at all these science-denying anti-maskers. Also, two teachers just tryna make it through quarantine and remote teaching in a one bedroom apartment (this is taking place during a mandatory leave/lecture cycle).

Pairing: Spencer Reid x fem!reader

Category: fluff

Warnings/Includes: no warnings. reader is both a kindergarten teacher and a bruh girl with a pirate’s mouth. lots of Spencer x factz.

Word count: 3.1k

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“We’re home for the next two weeks. ”

Spencer looked up from his desk to see Y/N kicking off her shoes, dropping her bag, and walking directly to the sink. “Starting when?”

“We get to go in on Monday to say goodbye to the kids and get any materials we might need. Then we’re home for two weeks. They’re calling it an early, extended spring break.” Y/N began her hand washing routine. As a kindergarten teacher, she’d always been a strict hand-washer. In the time of COVID, she had only become more zealous. She looked at Spencer. “Have you heard anything?”

“Since we’re so close to the end of the semester, the department head thinks they’ll try to finish out the year as normal.” He set down his pen. “I honestly don’t know. It will all depend on whether people follow the CDC guidelines. The spread of any virus is deducible mathematically, and SARS-COV2 is no different. Based on the outbreak in Italy prior to their lockdown, we can accurately describe its reproductive number, or Rt, to between 2.43 – 3.10.”

Y/N shut off the water and dried her hands on a paper towel. “In layman's terms, Dr. Reid.”

“The Rt tells how many people are infected by the contagious host,” he explained. “In the case of this strain, each infected person is infecting between two and three others. For comparison, the standard seasonal flu has an average Rt between 1.4 and 1.7.”

“So in other words, fucking yikes,” Y/N groaned. She moved to perch on the edge of Spencer’s desk.

“Indeed,” Spencer agreed. “We know how fast the flu can travel through an office or a classroom, so imagine if it was two times as transmissible. But it's also really important to understand that this number changes depending on the mitigations in place. Even prior to full lockdown, mask wearing and social distancing was somewhat common in Italy, so it’s likely the uncontrolled Rt is higher.”

“Jesus Christ.” Y/N scrubbed a hand over her face. “We’ll probably never go back.”

Spencer rubbed his hand up from her ankle to the inside of her knee. “The good news is there’s nothing special about this virus compared to others in terms of how it spreads— it’s just aerosols. So if everyone wears their mask, we’ll be able to keep the spread low.”

⧭⧭⧭

“It’s safe to say that everyone did not wear their fucking masks,” Y/N snapped. She watched from the couch as Mayor Bowser delivered the news that DC Public Schools would remain closed for the remainder of the year. “This is crazy. I mean, I knew it was coming because people in this country are absolute buffoons.” She looked at Spencer, fingers pressed to her temple. “But holy shit, are we ever going to be able to go outside again?”

“With schools and universities closed, people working remotely, and lockdown orders in place, the Rt in the US could stay low. But masks have to be worn at all times, and social distancing has to be strictly followed.” Spencer pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I just— I can’t believe people are refusing to wear masks. The empirical, peer-reviewed data clearly shows—”

“This is ‘Murica, boy.” Y/N mocked. “Ain’t no tyrannical government gonna tell me what to do!” She rolled her eyes. “Trust me, your choice to abstain from social media is paying dividends to your sanity right now.”

Spencer looked truly dumbfounded, setting his newspaper down in his lap. “But that’s just it. It’s not just in social media circles.” He gestured to the article in front of him. “This economist just argued for ‘reopening’ the economy using the justification of herd immunity. Herd immunity can be a plausible option for less lethal diseases. But this virus is not like varicella—the chickenpox,” he clarified at Y/N’s raised eyebrow. He waved his hands around in exasperation. “Putting aside the fact that one facet of herd immunity is vaccinating as many people as possible, its success completely hinges on the Rt of a disease. If you model a population based on an Rt of 2.5, herd immunity wouldn’t be achieved until approximately sixty percent of the population has been infected. Consider that the US population is currently 328 million, and sixty percent of that is 196.8 million. The current mortality rate for SARS-COV2 is 3.06 percent. 196,800,000 multiplied by 0.0306 is 6,022,080. Over six million people would die. It's simple mathematics.”

Y/N let out an exasperated breath. “It used to be that simple math and facts were enough. Now you’ve got basement scientists who think they know better than actual, literal scientists who’ve spent their entire lives studying these things.” She ran a hand over her face and gestured at the news conference still playing. “How long do you think it’ll be before we’re both trying to teach from this tiny ass living room?”

⧭⧭⧭

“Goooooooood morning, kindergarten! It’s Friday, and no Friday is a bad Friday!” Spencer smiled. As he poured his first cup of coffee, he hummed along with Y/N and 23 six-year-olds as they sang their morning song. Observing fourteen days of remote kindergarten from across the living room had given Spencer a new appreciation for elementary school teachers, particularly Y/N. She sang, danced, conducted science experiments, held puppet shows, read stories, led art projects, and fielded questions for four hours a day— three hours less than when they were in the school building. He was exhausted by proxy.

But he was also grateful for the opportunity to watch Y/N in her element. Even though they were at home, she still got dressed every day in bright, patterned sweaters and dresses— her Ms. Frizzle attire, she’d told him once. She was able to channel her personality into a kid-friendly version that her students clearly adored, never afraid to be silly or strange to get their attention and keep them engaged during the long days. He worked from home whenever possible, strangely happy to have the background noise of kindergarten over his quiet university office.

...

“Okay, but where do I put the biiiiiiiiiiiig number?” Y/N made a wide gesture with her arms. “Ariah, where should I put it? In the big box, yes! But oh no, my small number needs a friend. My three is soooooo lonely!” Y/N drew her mouth into a pout. “DJ, how can I help my three not be so sad? You’re absolutely right, let’s put that two right next to him in our number bond.”

…

“I’ve been waitin’ for a girl to mute,” Y/N sang into the gold karaoke mic. “I said, muuuuuuuuuute, I’m blinded by loud sounds. No, I can’t hear the friend who’s tryin’ to talk.”

…

“Oh boy. Kev, honey, we can— we can see you. Kevin, Kevin, Kevin. We can see all of you. I can’t turn your camera off, buddy. You gotta— there we go.”

…

“Mute please, I need— I need everybody to mute, please. Oh my goodness where is that music coming from?” Y/N frantically searched for her index card with the picture of the mute icon, as the sounds of a highly inappropriate song blared through the computer speaker. “I know it’s so loud, guys. Why is my mute power gone?! This is why we need to make sure we keep our mute button on, kindergarten.”

…

“No sweetie, it’s not time to log off yet. I’m sorry, I know it’s such a long day. We have about an hour left. Do you guys wanna do a countdown? It’s the fin-al count-down! Do-do doo dooooo. Do-do-d-do-dooo…”

…

“Annnnnd, I should see all my friends on mute. William, hang on just a second. All my friends need to look at my picture, it’s an oval with a line through it… Okay, William, what did you bring to show us?” Y/N leaned toward the computer screen. “Grandma Kathy? O-oh, she’s— she’s in the—“ Y/N’s eyes widened. “Is that— is that an urn? Oh wow. Um, well, wow. It’s beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that with us, William. Grandma Kathy, may she rest in peace.”

⧭⧭⧭

A week into Y/N teaching kindergarten from their living room, the university had announced its transition to online coursework for the remainder of the academic year. Spencer had to host his first zoom lecture, and he was absolutely dreading it.

“Spence, it’s going to be fine. It’s not like you’ve never been on a video conference,” Y/N assured him. She sat cross-legged on the couch, waiting for him to let her in to his practice zoom.

“Yeah, but I wasn’t running those meetings. I just showed up.” He squinted at the computer screen. “Are you in?”

Y/N barely resisted the urge to make a joke, knowing that Spencer probably wouldn’t appreciate the innuendo. “No, you have to admit me.”

“What do you mean? How do I do that?”

“There should be a box with a button that says admit.”

Spencer gestured at the computer. “Well there’s a bunch of boxes— which one should I be looking at?”

Y/N sighed and got up from the couch. “IQ of 187 and can’t find the box.”

Spencer dragged a hand through his hair. “I know I shouldn’t find this so difficult. I’m sorry you have to waste your time on this.”

“Hey, it was a joke.” Y/N grabbed his hand from where he was frustratedly pulling on his frazzled curls. “I’m sorry. That was mean and you’re already stressed enough.” She used her free hand to smooth his hair back into place. She scrunched her nose. “I love you and your limited technology skills. And honestly it’s kind of nice to have one thing I can actually teach you about.” She squeezed his hand, leaning over him to peer at his computer screen. “All right, let’s find that elusive admit button.”

When the day of his lecture rolled around, Spencer thanked all the atoms in the observable universe that Y/N had a break during his class. Within the first ten minutes, he’d managed to accidentally kick himself out of his own meeting and then somehow lose track of the screenshare button.

“No one can see me and I don’t know what happened to the screenshare option. It was there and now it’s just… gone,” he told Y/N.

She leaned over his desk, eyes tracking over the screen and mouse clicking around the desktop. “How in the world did you manage to block your camera?”

“I don’t know! I didn’t even touch it!” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t understand how it’s even possible to be this bad at this.”

Y/N bumped his knee with her own, pulling up his camera settings and preferences. “Relax. You can’t be good at everything. It’s a refreshing reminder that you’re a mere mortal like the rest of us.” With a few rapid clicks, Y/N unblocked his camera and located the screenshare bar. “There. Crisis averted. I’m just going to share your whole screen in case you want to toggle between application windows. So just be aware that they’ll be able to see everything. And then you just click here when you’re ready to stop sharing.”

When Y/N turned her head toward him to check that he understood, Spencer grabbed the side of her face and caught her lips in a kiss. Y/N smiled against his mouth, heart speeding up as he traced the seam of her mouth with his tongue.

“Um, Dr. Reid? Your um— your camera’s working now.”

Spencer nearly fell out of his chair, his cheeks about the color of the Leave Meeting icon. Y/N dropped her head, debating whether she wanted to laugh or let the earth open up and swallow her whole. She ultimately decided to compose herself, stepping back and giving a little wave to the sea of tiny, grinning zoom faces before slinking out of frame, miming sorry to one very mortified professor.

⧭⧭⧭

“Would you want to be our mystery reader next week?” Y/N asked, bookmarking the page of her novel and reclining back in bed. “You just have to pick a story to read. Oh, and think of four clues about your identity to give the kiddos.”

Spencer raised his eyebrow, continuing to read. “Any story?”

Y/N laughed. “Well they’re six, so maybe hold off on the Chaucer and Bradbury for now. A picture book would be preferable.”

“Did you know that the first picture book, Orbis Sensualium Pictus, or Visible World in Pictures, was published in 1658?” He looked up from his own book. “Czech educator John Amos Comenius wanted to create a book that would be accessible to children of all levels of ability. The educational theories he explored are actually still in practice in the field of early childhood education.” He turned toward her from his spot under the covers. “For example, when you have your students make a hissing sound and slither their arms when they produce the sound represented by the letter s? Comenius included an alphabet chart with various animal and human sounds representing each letter. He wanted to demonstrate that the incorporation of multiple senses could help increase learning.”

“I guess you don’t fix what isn’t broken,” Y/N mused. “300 years later, and we’re still using the same methods.”

“362, actually,” Spencer corrected.

She gave him a look. “Maybe we can save the Comenius for another time.”

“The genre of children’s literature encompasses some of the most profound and philosophical story telling of all time.” Spencer returned his attention to his reading.

“...So is that a yes?”

Spencer smiled. “I’ve got a book in mind.”

“And clues,” Y/N reminded him, snuggling down under the covers and reopening her book. “We need some fun clues, mystery reader.”

…

“Kindergarten, we have a very special mystery reader this week. Oh man, are you ready for the first clue? The mystery reader loves jell-o! Raise your little hand if you love jell-o, too. Okay, kindergarten, I see you! Lots of jell-o lovers in the house.”

…

“Okay, clue number two! Our mystery reader works as a community helper— remember we learned about all different kinds of community helpers; firefighters, nurses, police officers. But if the mystery reader could be anything, they’d want to be a cowboy! How cool is that?”

...

“Clue number three for our mystery reader!” Y/N sucked in a gasp. “You guys. The mystery reader can do magic. Oh my goodness, I am so excited for Friday,” she sing-songed. “Will they show us a trick? Hmmm, I don’t know. Maybe if you ask nicely.”

…

“Okay, my friends, the last clue. The mystery reader loves reading. They read every day, and they’ve been reading since 1983! Yes, that was a very long time ago.”

⧭⧭⧭

“Okay, any last guesses about who our mystery reader might be?” Y/N questioned.

“I think it’s your dad,” a little voice called out.

Spencer made a choking noise from where he sat, slightly off camera. Y/N laughed. “The mystery reader is decidedly not my dad, Keyshon. Remember I showed you guys the picture of him— my dad’s a farmer, so he’s kind of already a cowboy.” She clapped her hands together. “Okay, without further ado, drumroll please... Our mystery reader is…” Y/N pushed her desk chair out of frame to allow Spencer to roll in, holding her hands out. “Spencer!”

He gave a little wave, smoothing his hair, suddenly painfully self-aware and nervous about the opinions of two dozen six-year-olds. “Hi guys.”

“You’re the boy on Ms. Y/L/N’s phone.”

“Your hair is so fluffy!”

“Do you have a cowboy hat?”

“I like your sweater.”

“Can you really do magic?”

“What’s your favorite jell-o?”

“Whoa, okay, let’s remember our mute button,” Y/N, holding up her index card. “I promise you’ll get to ask Spencer all your questions after he reads the story.”

Spencer smiled at the excited faces beaming through the screen. “Yes, I’m on Ms. Y/L/N’s phone; I don’t own a cowboy hat, yet; yes, I really can do magic; and the red jell-o is my favorite.”

Y/N watched with interest as Spencer pulled out his book. He’d been secretive about his choice, so she was as curious as her students.

“This is one of my favorite stories. It’s written by Munro Leaf, and illustrated by Robert Lawson. It’s The Story of Ferdinand.” Spencer held the cover up to the camera. “Ferdinand is the bull here on the cover. This story was written in 1935, which was a long time ago! Okay are you ready?” Spencer looked out on a sea of thumbs up, turning the page to the beginning of the story. “Once upon a time in Spain, there was a bull, and his name was Ferdinand.”

Y/N smiled as she listened to Spencer read each page, recounting the story of the peaceful bull. He was an excellent storyteller, changing the inflection and expression of his voice to match each sentence. He held each page up for just the right amount of time, panning it so her students could see each detail of the black and white pictures. He added his own wonderings and exclamations here and there, and her students were decidedly enthralled. Her heart ached at how comfortable he was, how natural this was for him. She rested her chin in her hand, trying to keep her mind in the present— ignoring the persistent little mental image of Spencer as a dad.

“So they had to take Ferdinand home. And for all I know, he is sitting there still, under his favorite cork tree, smelling the flowers just quietly. He is very happy… And that’s The Story of Ferdinand.” Spencer closed the book with a soft smile. “I love this story. Ferdinand is a very special bull. What do you think makes him so special?”

“Ferdinand didn’t fight,” a little voice piped up.

“Yes!” Spencer agreed. “He practiced pacifism in the face of the persistent, ingrained militarism of his country’s culture.”

Y/N placed a hand on Spencer’s knee and gave a quick squeeze. “Right, Ferdinand chose not to fight, even though everybody else he knew wanted to.” Y/N winked at him before turning back to the screen full of kids. “All his friends thought he was kind of weird, but he just really wanted to hang out in the shade and smell the flowers, huh? Sounds pretty good to me.”

“He wasn’t bothered that the other bulls thought he was strange for wanting to be peaceful,” Spencer added. “Sometimes being different can be a good thing. The Story of Ferdinand reminds me that it’s okay to be yourself, even if other people think you’re weird.” His eyes met Y/N’s. “Because there will always be people who love and appreciate you for who you are.”

#spencer reid #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid x y/n #spencer reid imagine #spencer reid x you #criminal minds fanfiction #criminal minds imagine #spencer reid fanfiction #criminals minds self insert #dr spencer reid #professor spencer reid #spencer reid fanfic #criminal minds #homoose writes

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theanarchistscookbook · 2 years

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18 Reasons I Won’t Be Getting a Covid Vaccine.. Umm – I mean Jab

ON JUNE 14, 2021 BY GERI UNGUREAN

This article was sent to me by a Christian sister. Thank you, Michelle!

Much love to you in Jesus.

A few friends have asked my thoughts on the covid jab(s) so I thought it was time to write an article on the topic.

All my friends had not heard most of the details I shared, so I figured you might appreciate hearing some of what I told them.

Knowing how contentious this issue is, part of me would rather just write about something else, but I feel like the discussion/news is so one-sided that I should speak up.

As I always strive to do, I promise to do my best to be level-headed and non-hysterical.

I’m not here to pick a fight with anyone, just to walk you through some of what I’ve read, my lingering questions, and explain why I can’t make sense of these covid vaccines.

THREE GROUND RULES FOR DISCUSSION

If you care to engage on this topic with me, excellent.

Here are the rules…

I am more than happy to correspond with you if…

You are respectful and treat me the way you would want to be treated.

You ask genuinely thoughtful questions about what makes sense to you.

You make your points using sound logic and don’t hide behind links or the word “science.”

If you do respond, and you break any of those rules, your comments will be ignored/deleted.

With that out of the way, let me say this…

I don’t know everything, but so far no one has been able to answer the objections below.

So here are the reasons I’m opting out of the covid vaccine.

#1: VACCINE MAKERS ARE IMMUNE FROM LIABILITY

The only industry in the world that bears no liability for injuries or deaths resulting from their products, are vaccine makers.

First established in 1986 with the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, and reinforced by the PREP Act, vaccine makers cannot be sued, even if they are shown to be negligent.

The covid-vaccine makers are allowed to create a one-size-fits-all product, with no testing on sub-populations (i.e. people with specific health conditions), and yet they are unwilling to accept any responsibility for any adverse events or deaths their products cause.

If a company is not willing to stand behind their product as safe, especially one they rushed to market and skipped animal trials on, I am not willing to take a chance on their product.

No liability. No trust.

Here’s why…

#2: THE CHECKERED PAST OF THE VACCINE COMPANIES

The four major companies who are making these covid vaccines are/have either:

Never brought a vaccine to market before covid (Moderna and Johnson & Johnson).

Are serial felons (Pfizer, and Astra Zeneca).

Are both (Johnson & Johnson).

Moderna had been trying to “Modernize our RNA” (thus the company name)–for years, but had never successfully brought ANY product to market–how nice for them to get a major cash infusion from the government to keep trying.

In fact, all major vaccine makers (save Moderna) have paid out tens of billions of dollars in damages for other products they brought to market when they knew those products would cause injuries and death–see Vioxx, Bextra, Celebrex, Thalidomide, and Opioids as a few examples.

If drug companies willfully choose to put harmful products in the market, when they can be sued, why would we trust any product where they have NO liability?

In case it hasn’t sunk in, let me reiterate…3 of the 4 covid vaccine makers have been sued for products they brought to market even though they knew injuries and deaths would result.

Johnson & Johnson has lost major lawsuits in 1995, 1996, 2001, 2010, 2011, 2016, 2019 (For what it’s worth, J&J’s vaccine also contains tissues from aborted fetal cells, perhaps a topic for another discussion)

Pfizer has the distinction of the biggest criminal payout in history. They have lost so many lawsuits it’s hard to count. You can check out their rap sheet here. Maybe that’s why they are demanding that countries where they don’t have liability protection put up collateral to cover vaccine-injury lawsuits.

Astra Zeneca has similarly lost so many lawsuits it’s hard to count. Here’s one. Here’s another…you get the point. And in case you missed it, the company had their covid vaccine suspended in at least 18 countries over concerns of blood clots, and they completely botched their meeting with the FDA with numbers from their study that didn’t match.

Oh, and apparently J&J (whose vaccine is approved for “Emergency Use” in the US) and Astrazenca (whose vaccine is not approved for “Emergency Use” in the US), had a little mix up in their ingredients…in 15 million doses. Oops.

Let me reiterate this point:

Given the free pass from liability, and the checkered past of these companies, why would we assume that all their vaccines are safe and made completely above board?

Where else in life would we trust someone with that kind of reputation?

To me that makes as much sense as expecting a remorseless, abusive, unfaithful lover to become a different person because a judge said deep down they are a good person.

No. I don’t trust them.

No liability. No trust.

Here’s another reason why I don’t trust them.

#3: THE UGLY HISTORY OF ATTEMPTS TO MAKE CORONAVIRUS VACCINES

There have been many attempts to make viral vaccines in the past that ended in utter failure, which is why we did not have a coronavirus vaccine in 2020.

In the 1960’s, scientists attempted to make an RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus) vaccine for infants.

In that study, they skipped animal trials because they weren’t necessary back then.

In the end, the vaccinated infants got much sicker than the unvaccinated infants when exposed to the virus in nature, with 80% of the vaccinated infants requiring hospitalization, and two of them died.

After 2000, scientists made many attempts to create coronavirus vaccines.

For the past 20 years, all ended in failure because the animals in the clinical trials got very sick and many died, just like the children in the 1960’s.

You can read a summary of this history/science here.

Or if you want to read the individual studies you can check out these links:

In 2004 attempted vaccine produced hepatitis in ferrets

In 2005 mice and civets became sick and more susceptible to coronaviruses after being vaccinated

In 2012 the ferrets became sick and died. And in this study mice and ferrets developed lung disease.

In 2016 this study also produce lung disease in mice.

The typical pattern in the studies mentioned above is that the children and the animals produced beautiful antibody responses after being vaccinated.

The manufacturers thought they hit the jackpot.

The problem came when the children and animals were exposed to the wild version of the virus.

When that happened, an unexplained phenomenon called Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE) also known as Vaccine Enhanced Disease (VED) occurred where the immune system produced a “cytokine storm” (i.e. overwhelmingly attacked the body), and the children/animals died.

Here’s the lingering issue…

The vaccine makers have no data to suggest their rushed vaccines have overcome that problem.

In other words, never before has any attempt to make a coronavirus vaccine been successful, nor has the gene-therapy technology that is mRNA “vaccines” been safely brought to market, but hey, since they had billions of dollars in government funding, I’m sure they figured that out.

Except they don’t know if they have…

#4: THE “DATA GAPS” SUBMITTED TO THE FDA BY THE VACCINE MAKERS

When vaccine makers submitted their papers to the FDA for the Emergency Use Authorization (Note: An EUA is not the same as a full FDA approval), among the many “Data Gaps” they reported was that they have nothing in their trials to suggest they overcame that pesky problem of Vaccine Enhanced Disease.

They simply don’t know–i.e. they have no idea if the vaccines they’ve made will also produce the same cytokine storm (and deaths) as previous attempts at such products.

As Joseph Mercola points out…

“Previous attempts to develop an mRNA-based drug using lipid nanoparticles failed and had to be abandoned because when the dose was too low, the drug had no effect, and when dosed too high, the drug became too toxic. An obvious question is: What has changed that now makes this technology safe enough for mass use?”

If that’s not alarming enough, here are other gaps in the data–i.e. there is no data to suggest safety or efficacy regarding:

Anyone younger than age 18 or older than age 55

Pregnant or lactating mothers

Auto-immune conditions

Immunocompromised individuals

No data on transmission of covid

No data on preventing mortality from covid

No data on duration of protection from covid

Hard to believe right?

In case you think I’m making this up, or want to see the actual documents sent to the FDA by Pfizer and Moderna for their Emergency Use Authorization, you can check out this, or this respectively. The data gaps can be found starting with page 46 and 48 respectively.

For now let’s turn our eyes to the raw data the vaccine makers used to submit for emergency use authorization.

#5: NO ACCESS TO THE RAW DATA FROM THE TRIALS

Would you like to see the raw data that produced the “90% and 95% effective” claims touted in the news?

Me too…

But they won’t let us see that data.

As pointed out in the BMJ, something about the Pfizer and Moderna efficacy claims smells really funny.

There were “3,410 total cases of suspected, but unconfirmed covid-19 in the overall study population, 1,594 occurred in the vaccine group vs. 1,816 in the placebo group.”

Wait…what?

Did they fail to do science in their scientific study by not verifying a major variable?

Could they not test those “suspected but unconfirmed” cases to find out if they had covid?

Apparently not.

Why not test all 3,410 participants for the sake of accuracy?

Can we only guess they didn’t test because it would mess up their “90-95% effective” claims?

Where’s the FDA?

Would it not be prudent for the FDA, to expect (demand) that the vaccine makers test people who have “covid-like symptoms,” and release their raw data so outside, third-parties could examine how the manufacturers justified the numbers?

I mean it’s only every citizen of the world we’re trying to get to take these experimental products…

Why did the FDA not require that? Isn’t that the entire purpose of the FDA anyway?

Good question.

Foxes guarding the hen house?

Seems like it.

No liability. No trust.

#6: NO LONG-TERM SAFETY TESTING

Obviously, with products that have only been on the market a few months, we have no long-term safety data.

In other words, we have no idea what this product will do in the body months or years from now–for ANY population.

Given all the risks above (risks that ALL pharmaceutical products have), would it not be prudent to wait to see if the worst-case scenarios have indeed been avoided?

Would it not make sense to want to fill those pesky “data gaps” before we try to give this to every man, woman, and child on the planet?

Well…that would make sense, but to have that data, they need to test it on people, which leads me to my next point…

#7: NO INFORMED CONSENT

What most who are taking the vaccine don’t know is that because these products are still in clinical trials, anyone who gets the shot is now part of the clinical trial.

They are part of the experiment.

Those (like me) who do not take it, are part of the control group.

Time will tell how this experiment works out.

But, you may be asking, if the vaccines are causing harm, wouldn’t we be seeing that all over the news?

Surely the FDA would step in and pause the distribution?

Well, if the adverse events reporting system was working, maybe things would be different.

#8: UNDER-REPORTING OF ADVERSE REACTIONS AND DEATH

According to a study done by Harvard (at the commission of our own government), less than 1% of all adverse reactions to vaccines are actually submitted to the National Vaccine Adverse Events Reports System (VAERS) – read page 6 at the link above.

While the problems with VAERS have not been fixed (as you can read about in this letter to the CDC), at the time of this writing VAERS reports over 2,200 deaths from the current covid vaccines, as well as close to 60,000 adverse reactions.

“VAERS data released today showed 50,861 reports of adverse events following COVID vaccines, including 2,249 deaths and 7,726 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020 and March 26, 2021.”

And those numbers don’t include (what is currently) 578 cases of Bell’s Palsy.

If those numbers are still only 1% of the total adverse reactions (or .8 to 2% of what this study published recently in the JAMA found), you can do the math, but that equates to somewhere around 110,00 to 220,000 deaths from the vaccines to date, and a ridiculous number of adverse reactions.

Bet you didn’t see that on the news.

That death number would currently still be lower than the 424,000 deaths from medical errors that happen every year (which you probably also don’t hear about), but we are not even six months into the rollout of these vaccines yet.

If you want a deeper dive into the problems with the VAERS reporting system, you can check this out, or check this out.

But then there’s my next point, which could be argued makes these covid vaccines seem pointless…

#9: THE VACCINES DO NOT STOP TRANSMISSION OR INFECTION

Wait, what?

Aren’t these vaccines supposed to be what we’ve been waiting for to “go back to normal”?

Nope.

Why do you think we’re getting all these conflicting messages about needing to practice social distancing and wear masks AFTER we get a vaccine?

The reason is because these vaccines were never designed to stop transmission OR infection.

If you don’t believe me, I refer you again to the papers submitted to the FDA I linked to above.

The primary endpoint (what the vaccines are meant to accomplish) is to lower your symptoms.

Sounds like just about every other drug on the market right?

That’s it…lowering your symptoms is the big payoff we’ve been waiting for.

Does that seem completely pointless to anyone but me?

It can’t stop us from spreading the virus.

It can’t stop the virus from infecting us once we have it.

To get the vaccine is to accept all the risk of these experimental products and the best it might do is lower symptoms?

Heck, there are plenty of other things I can do to lower my symptoms that don’t involve taking what appears to be a really risky product.

Now for the next logical question:

If we’re worried about asymptomatic spreaders, would the vaccine not make it more likely that we are creating asymptomatic spread?

If it indeed reduces symptoms, anyone who gets it might not even know they are sick and thus they are more likely to spread the virus, right?

For what it’s worth, I’ve heard many people say the side effects of the vaccine (especially the second dose) are worse than catching covid.

I can’t make sense of that either.

Take the risk.

Get no protection.

Suffer through the vaccine side-effects.

Keep wearing your mask and social distancing…

And continue to be able to spread the virus.

What?

It gets worse.

#10: PEOPLE ARE CATCHING COVID AFTER BEING FULLY VACCINATED

Talk about a bummer.

You get vaccinated and you still catch covid.

It’s happening in Washington State

It’s happening in New York

It’s happening in Michigan

It’s happening in Hawaii

It’s happening in several other states too.

It happened to 80% of 35 nuns who got the vaccine in Kentucky. Two of them died by the way.

In reality, this phenomenon is probably happening everywhere, but those are the ones making the news now.

Given the reasons above (and what’s below), maybe this doesn’t surprise you, but bummer if you thought the vaccine was a shield to keep you safe.

It’s not.

That was never the point.

If 66% of healthcare workers in L.A. are going to delay or skip the vaccine…maybe they aren’t wowed by the rushed science either.

Maybe they are watching the shady way deaths and cases are being reported…

#11: THE OVERALL DEATH RATE FROM COVID

According to the CDC’s own numbers, covid has a 99.74% survival rate.

Why would I take a risk on a product, that doesn’t stop infection or transmission, to help me overcome a cold that has a .26% chance of killing me–actually in my age range is has about a .1% chance of killing me (and .01% chance of killing my kids), but let’s not split hairs here.

With a bar (death rate) that low, we will be in lockdown every year…i.e. forever.

But wait, what about the 500,000 plus deaths, that’s alarming right?

I’m glad you asked.

#12: THE BLOATED COVID DEATH NUMBERS

Something smells really funny about this one.

Never before in the history of death certificates has our own government changed how deaths are reported.

Why now, are we reporting everyone who dies with covid in their body, as having died ofcovid, rather than the co-morbidities that actually took their life?

Until covid, all coronaviruses (common colds) were never listed as the primary cause of death when someone died of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, auto-immune conditions, or any other major co-morbidity.

The disease was listed as the cause of death, and a confounding factor like flu or pneumonia was listed on a separate line.

To bloat the number even more, both the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. changed their guidelines such that those who are suspected or probable (but were never confirmed) of having died of covid, are also included in the death numbers.

Seriously?

If we are going to do that then should we not go back and change the numbers of all past cold and flu seasons so we can compare apples to apples when it comes to death rates?

According to the CDCs own numbers, (scroll down to the section “Comorbidities and other conditions”) only 6% of the deaths being attributed to covid are instances where covid seems to be the only issue at hand.

In other words, reduce the death numbers you see on the news by 94% and you have what is likely the real numbers of deaths from just covid.

Even if the former CDC director is correct and covid-19 was a lab-enhanced virus (see Reason #14 below), a .26% death rate is still in line with the viral death rate that circles the planet ever year.

Then there’s this Fauci guy.

I’d really love to trust him, but besides the fact that he hasn’t treated one covid patient…you should probably know…

#13: FAUCI AND SIX OTHERS AT NIAID OWN PATENTS IN THE MODERNA VACCINE

Thanks to the Bayh-Dole Act, government workers are allowed to file patents on any research they do using tax payer funding.

Tony Fauci owns over 1,000 patents (see this video for more details), including patents being used on the Moderna vaccine…which he approved government funding for.

In fact, the NIH (which NIAID is part of) claims joint ownership of Moderna’s vaccine.

Does anyone else see this as a MAJOR conflict of interest, or criminal even?

I say criminal because there’s also this pesky problem that makes me even more distrustful of Fauci, NIAD, and the NIH in general.

#14: FAUCI IS ON THE HOT SEAT FOR ILLEGAL GAIN-OF-FUNCTION RESEARCH

What is “Gain-of-Function” research?

It’s where scientists attempt to make viruses gain functions–i.e. make them more transmissible and deadlier.

Sounds at least a touch unethical, right?

How could that possibly be helpful?

Our government agreed, and banned the practice.

So what did the Fauci-led NIAID do?

They pivoted and outsourced the gain-of-function research (in coronaviruses no less) to China–to the tune of a $600K grant.

You can see more details, including the important timeline of these events in this fantastically well-researched documentary.

Mr. Fauci, you have some explaining to do…and I hope the cameras are recording when you have to defend your actions.

For now, let’s turn our attention back to the virus…

#15: THE VIRUS CONTINUES TO MUTATE

Not only does the virus (like all viruses) continue to mutate, but according to world-renowned vaccine developer Geert Vanden Bossche (who you’ll meet below if you don’t know him) it’s mutating about every 10 hours.

How in the world are we going to keep creating vaccines to keep up with that level of mutation?

We’re not.

Might that also explain why fully vaccinated people are continuing to catch covid?

Why, given that natural immunity has never ultimately failed humanity, do we suddenly not trust it?

Why, if I ask questions like the above, or post links like what you find above, will my thoughts be deleted from all major social media platforms?

That brings me to the next troubling problem I have with these vaccines.

#16: CENSORSHIP…AND THE COMPLETE ABSENCE OF SCIENTIFIC DEBATE

I can’t help but get snarky here, so humor me.

How did you enjoy all those nationally and globally-televised, robust debates put on by public health officials, and broadcast simultaneously on every major news station?

Wasn’t it great hearing from the best minds in medicine, virology, epidemiology, economics, and vaccinology from all over the world as they vigorously and respectfully debated things like:

Lockdowns

Mask wearing

Social-distancing

Vaccine efficacy and safety trials

How to screen for susceptibility to vaccine injury

Therapeutics, (i.e. non-vaccine treatment options)

Wasn’t it great seeing public health officials (who never treated anyone with covid) have their “science” questioned.

Wasn’t it great seeing the FDA panel publicly grill the vaccine makers in prime time as they stood in the hot-seat of tough questions about products of which they have no liability?

Oh, wait…you didn’t see those debates?

No, you didn’t…because they never happened.

What happened instead was heavy-handed censorship of all but one narrative.

Ironically, Mark Zuckerberg can question vaccine safety, but I can’t?

Hypocrite?

When did the first amendment become a suggestion?

It’s the FIRST amendment Mark–the one our founders thought was most important.

With so much at stake, why are we fed only one narrative…shouldn’t many perspectives be heard and professionally debated?

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO SCIENCE?

What has happened to the scientific method of always challenging our assumptions?

What happened to lively debate in this country, or at least in Western society?

Why did anyone who disagrees with the WHO, or the CDC get censored so heavily?

Is the science of public health a religion now, or is science supposed to be about debate?

If someone says “the science is settled” that’s how I know I’m dealing with someone who is closed minded.

By definition science (especially biological science) is never settled.

If it was, it would be dogma, not science.

OK, before I get too worked up, let me say this…

I WANT TO BE A GOOD CITIZEN

I really do.

If lockdowns work, I want to do my part and stay home.

If masks work, I want to wear them.

If social distancing is effective, I want to comply.

But, if there is evidence they don’t (masks for example), I want to hear that evidence too.

If highly-credentialed scientists have different opinions, I want to know what they think.

I want a chance to hear their arguments and make up my own mind.

I don’t think I’m the smartest person in the world, but I think I can think.

Maybe I’m weird, but if someone is censored, then I REALLY want to hear what they think.

Don’t you?

To all my friends who don’t have a problem with censorship, will you have the same opinion when what you think is censored?

Is censorship not the technique of dictators, tyrants, and greedy, power-hungry people?

Is it not a sign that those who are doing the censoring know it’s the only way they can win?

What if a man who spent his entire life developing vaccines was willing to put his entire reputation on the line and call on all global leaders to immediately stop the covid vaccines because of problems with the science?

What if he pleaded for an open-scientific debate on a global stage?

Would you want to hear what he has to say?

Would you want to see the debate he’s asking for?

#17: THE WORLD’S LEADING VACCINOLOGIST IS SOUNDING THE ALARM…

Here is what may be the biggest reason this covid vaccine doesn’t make sense to me.

When someone who is very pro-vaccine, who has spent his entire professional career overseeing the development of vaccines, is shouting from the mountaintops that we have a major problem, I think the man should be heard.

In case you missed it, and in case you care to watch it, here is Geert Vanden Bossche, explaining:

Why the covid vaccine may be putting so much pressure on the virus that we are accelerating it’s ability to mutate and become more deadly.

Why the covid vaccines may be creating vaccine-resistant viruses (similar to anti-biotic resistant bacteria).

Why, because of previous problems with Antibody Dependent Enhancement, we may be looking at a mass casualty event in the next few months/years.

If you want to see/read about a second, and longer, interview with Vanden Bossche, where he was asked some tough questions, you can check this out.

If half of what he says comes true, these vaccines could be the worst invention of all time.

If you don’t like his science, take it up with him.

I’m just the messenger.

But I can also speak to covid personally.

#18: I ALREADY HAD COVID

I didn’t enjoy it.

It was a nasty cold for two days:

Unrelenting butt/low-back aches

Very low energy.

Low-grade fever.

It was weird not being able to smell anything for a couple days.

A week later, coffee still tasted a little “off.”

But I survived.

Now it appears (as it always has) that I have beautiful, natural, life-long immunity…

…not something likely to wear off in a few months if I get the vaccine.

In my body, and my household, covid is over.

In fact, now that I’ve had it, there is evidence the covid vaccine might actually be more dangerous for me.

That is not a risk I’m willing to take.

IN SUMMARY

The above are just my reasons for not wanting the vaccine.

Maybe my reasons make sense to you, maybe they don’t.

Whatever does makes sense to you, hopefully we can still be friends.

I for one think there’s a lot more that we have in common than what separates us.

We all want to live in a world of freedom.

We all want to do our part to help others and to live well.

We all want the right to express our opinions without fearing we’ll be censored or viciously attacked.

We all deserve to have the access to the facts so we can make informed decisions.

Agree or disagree with me; I’ll treat you no differently.

You’re a human just as worthy of love and respect as anyone else.

For that I salute you, and I truly wish you all the best.

I hope you found this helpful.

If so, feel free to share.

If not, feel free to (kindly) let me know what didn’t make sense to you and I’d be happy to hear your thoughts too.

Stay curious and stay humble.

PS. If you think I studied this topic well, think about how much thought I would put into helping you with your health. Helping people with their health is what I do all day, every day.

PPS. Health can’t be injected, but it can be earned.

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seymour-butz-stuff · 3 years

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Mike Answers All Your Vaccine Fears

1. “I don’t trust this vaccine. Its development was rushed and it didn’t go through the proper trials and testing. I’m not against medicine. I trust aspirin because it’s been around for over a hundred years. This vaccine hasn’t even existed for a year.” THE TRUTH: Work on this vaccine began back in 2003 during the SARS virus outbreak. Scientists knew even before, in the 1980s, that coronaviruses were going to happen more often. So they got to work on inventing what would become a vaccine known as mRNA. This vaccine has been in development for at least 18 years! THIS IS NOT A NEW THING. When Covid-19 appeared in December of 2019, the scientists were ready and standing by with the vaccine elements. They knew something like this was coming. All they needed was the genetic structure of this particular virus. A brave Chinese doctor constructed its sequencing in his lab and, without the permission of his government, he then shared it with the world. It was all our coronavirus scientists needed to begin the trials of the vaccine they’d been working on for EIGHTEEN YEARS. Those trials began immediately and ran for nearly all of 2020. Because of the ways modern medicine and science have improved in this new century (did you know in the Covid vaccine you’re getting, there is NO speck of the Covid virus in it!) we were already equipped to bring Covid-19 to a halt. Except for one thing science couldn’t predict…

2. “I, and millions like me, do NOT trust the government.” THE TRUTH: Ugh. On this one, you are right. You should NEVER trust this government, that government, any government. One of my favorite quotes from the legendary investigative reporter I. F. Stone is, “All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.” If you are Native American, you don’t need me or anyone else to tell you that. If you are African American — my God, again, the list of lies and deception and cruelty is endless. White people need to be taught in school about the Tuskegee experiments, about James Sims, the lauded “father of modern gynecology,” who performed brutal experimental surgeries without anesthesia on enslaved African women in the 1800s.

And on and on. White people, do not think less of any Black person (or any person of color) who is skeptical of this vaccine. They have a 400-year history of knowing that the last person they should automatically trust is Whitey. Dr. Whitey. Scientist Whitey. Whitey in a Lab Coat. Officer Whitey. CEO Whitey. Nightly News Anchor Whitey. President Whitey. In his Whitey House.

It is painful now to see how our racist legacy has manifested itself during this pandemic: Covid-19 has killed 102,000 Black Americans — 20% more than the rate at which white people die. The white supremacists must be loving this. I join with my fellow citizens who are Black in fighting this virus that seeks to kill them first.

3. “I don’t trust the pharmaceutical companies nor do I trust the entire for-profit health care industry. I’m not taking something they tell me to take.”

THE TRUTH: I trust them less than you do. I made a film about these bastards (“Sicko”). Greed runs in their veins. Because our political and corporate leaders have constructed a society that has enabled two-thirds of us to live an unhealthy life, their brethren, the devils in the health care industry, have made trillions from our illness, our disabilities, our infirmities. They need us sick so that we spend money on ways to stay alive. They DON’T want us cured because where’s the profit in that?

Yet in the case of Covid, they really don’t want so, so many of us so dead. Dead men and women don’t need a plethora of costly prescriptions. Dead men and women don’t shop at Walmart and they don’t order from Amazon. Other than the overpriced casket, there is not much profit that comes from death. In the case of the pandemic, they need the citizenry alive to do the backbreaking work for slave wages — and then spend every dime of those wages so all that loot makes it back into the pockets of the one-percent. There are now nearly 700,000 dead Americans who aren’t spending anything! Corporate America needs this disease to go away. Yes, the stock market has set records, and yes, the real estate market is bananas. But the rich have learned this is only good in the short term. They need Covid to stop killing us so they can be the ones to get back to killing us — but killing us their way — slowly — very, very, very slowly. Like 70 years slowly. Squeeze every last bit of work out of us before the arthritis sets in and our only contribution to making them wealthier is our weekly purchases of adult diapers and canned pineapple.

The way to beat the rich and stop their scam is not for us to refuse the shot and die before our time. We need to live long enough so that we can imagine their proverbial heads on the spikes that line the wall at the city’s limits. Take the shot. Both of them. Live to see the day.

4. “Trump’s inaction caused the spread of this disease — and then he tried to rush these vaccines through in order to help himself win the election. This is the ‘Trump Vaccine’ — I don’t want it in MY body!”

THE TRUTH: The top ten states with the highest rates of Covid death are all the ultra-red Trump states. That’s not how you win elections — by killing off your own voters. But he did it. Actually, the number of votes he barely lost Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin by - together, 44,000 - he helped kill more than that in those three states combined (52,000 deaths). No, the “Trump Vaccine“ was never his. Just like he didn’t “own the tallest building in NYC after 9/11,” nor was he ever “a billionaire.“ Get this vaccine, invented in part by a brilliant, persistent woman, Katalin Kariko, a scientist who was ignored for 20 years — she created this for us. Not Trump.

5. “So many people have died from the vaccine!” TRUTH: No, they haven’t. To spread this lie is to be an accessory to murder. That’s not you. Right?

6. “My religion won’t let me take the vaccine.” THE TRUTH: Yes it will. God — all gods — not only approve of the Covid vaccine, He is the one who made it! Remember your lessons: GOD CREATED EVERYTHING! That’s why it says “Creator” on his CV. Take God’s gift into your upper arm and praise Jesus. Because, if you walk around unvaccinated, you will kill people. And that carries with it an eternal sentence of hellfire and damnation. C’mon! Stop hiding behind “religion.” NOT A SINGLE RELIGION, NOT A SINGLE DENOMINATION IN THE WORLD SAYS THIS VACCINE IS A SIN! Get your shots so we can party in heaven on earth!

7. “I have a medical/health condition that my doctor says I shouldn’t get the vaccine.”

THE TRUTH: No, you don’t. We now know there is no medical condition that prevents you from getting the vaccine. Stop with the “I’ve got a note from my doctor” bullshit. Get the damn vaccine — or you risk the chance of REALLY needing a doctor. Calm down. Relax. We love you. I’ll take you to Walgreens myself and hold your hand for those three seconds. Let’s live. Let’s not kill. Let’s be part of a world we are now going to fix and save.

Together.

If everyone is vaccinated, this virus is toast. If we don’t get everyone vaccinated, this much I’ve learned:

#covid #coronavirus #vaccine #vaccines #anti vax #anti-vax #antivaxx #antivax #anti mask #anti-mask #antimask #vaccination #vaccinations #pandemic #plandemic #covid-19

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laele25 · 2 years

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Here we go again..

Thanks to the morons who think they have a right to be a public health hazard and thought they were too special to catch the plague that has killed millions worldwide, Seattle Public Schools is gearing up to go back to remote learning. My son, who is in a job preparedness class and school is his only source of socialization and education, did terribly in remote learning. He is completely non-verbal, has limited ability to type and communicate because of apraxia. When we could get him to get up and log into the ancient laptops they insist he uses instead of his less than two year old PC, he would be exhausted after a couple of hours and go back to bed and sleep more. He was depressed and bored and his health tanked. He only gets three years in this program. He already lost one year to Covid. So many things in his life that should have been done got put off because of the plague. Now the hospitals are full again and I can’t even take him to the doctor’s for a physical, let alone to the specialists he needs to see until he has a booster shot. He needed to moved over to UW’s clinics from Children’s network two years ago but every time I even start the process the hospitals fill up with idiots from other counties and states. And who knows how much worse the situation will be in a couple of weeks after the morons have their Super Bowl Mass Spreader events. I know the people who won’t get vaccinated, bleat about ‘my rights’, and are generally selfish assholes who think they can avoid getting a disease because Jesus or whatever nonsense they heard Tucker Carlson spew don’t care that my son is suffering. They are ‘pro life’ but don’t give a shit about anyone’s life but their own. Especially not a disabled kid who won’t ever be a proper wage slave dying to make a rich man richer. I know that society showed that it views the elderly and disabled as completely disposable after the Republicans made it abundantly clear they believe our tax dollars are for buying weapons of war and giving tax breaks to the rich, not helping the people who pay taxes survive a pandemic by insisting everyone rush back to work and doing everything in their power to convince their idiotic base that if they ignore Covid and take hose dewormer, the plague will just magically go away. But I can still be mad about it. I can still rail against the unfairness. I am morally wounded by the fact 30% of people of my country are too willfully ignorant, too selfish, and too damn blind to see how much harm this is doing and take the painfully simple steps to end this pandemic that is now going into it’s third year of disrupting lives and maiming and killing people. I am going to be furious how their selfishness is making my son, who loves to be in the community and working at his jobs, stuck at home where his only source of socialization is World of Warcraft PvP. I am a hermit stuck at home because of my poor health. I can accept that better because I got to be twenty years old and actually have a social life for many years. I do not want this for my son if we can help it. My son fought to survive against the odds. He spent the first four and a half months of his life in the NICU, all but the last month on the ventilator. He is a miracle of science and human tenacity. But to keep him safe from this plague that will likely kill him if he catches it, I have to literally force the same life on him I live because of other people’s selfishness and short-sightedness. It’s not fair, it’s hurting not just him, and no amount of logic or appeal to humanity or proof will convince 30% of the country that the world doesn’t revolve around their damn feelings and making rich people richer. And so, every time I hear one of these assholes has Covid, after one more preacher or politician who denounced vaccines as the devil or mind control or whatever nonsense anyone with half a brain should see through, the schadenfreude is great. My compassion for them is completely gone. They have chosen their hill to die on, so if they’d hurry up and die on it before mid-terms, that’d be great. Maybe if enough of them die of their own ignorance, we can vote in universal healthcare, daycare, and college and a minimum wage hike and finally get out of the mire crony capitalism has put us in. Or at least, not have a bunch of old geezer who represent 30% of the population controlling everything. The Black Plague ended feudalism, maybe the only bright side of Covid will be people finally realizing healthcare and living wages are not optional and voting appropriately. But I’m angry about it, I feel terrible for the health care workers in the trenches and I can’t blame any of them if they burn out and leave us to our fate. It’s not their fault so many people ignore their prevention advice, then get angry when exactly what they were told would happen happens. I am about to the point where I believe the unvaccinated should be parked in a room together and given whatever wackjob miracle cure they think will make them all better, charged out the nose for it, so that there are beds and nurses for people who actually believe in science and care enough about other people to do the bare fucking minimum to end this plague. But I also understand all of the misinformation and have dealt with people who have been a victim of it, even though all my facts and the personal accounts I give them never seem to sway them because they’d rather believe doing nothing is the best thing they can do than actually proactively trying not to die of a preventable illness. While the rest of us watch the body count rise, read articles talking about the havoc survivors deal with from long Covid, and how burned out and short staffed the hospitals are and wonder how the hell we got here.

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lightandwinged · 3 years

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Haven’t posted the bobbins in a hot minute!

The twins turn three tomorrow! I legitimately cannot believe that I’ve been doing the fulltime mom thing to twins for three whole ass years. And I have to brag a little bit about their birthday stuff because last year, Covid suddenly happening two days before their birthday derailed everything--we’d been planning to go to the aquarium in Boston and take them to a special ice cream place and just have a great time, but then plague.

And they had a good time, but I felt bad.

So maybe this year I went overboard JUST a bit, both (a) because we could afford it (Kyle’s new job is pretty sweet like that), and (b) because I wanted this year to make up for last year being meh. I know they’re too young to really remember but on the off chance that they do, I don’t want them to remember two miserable Covid birthdays. One is enough.

I made cupcakes, because they are tiny, and cupcakes are easier to individually theme than bigger cakes. Carrie loves unicorns, Isaac loves Mickey and Minnie, it was a fun thing to do.

But kiddos overall.

Sam is inching closer to SEVEN YEARS OLD WHAT, is on his third lost tooth (my favorite tooth when kids lose it because it’s the one that really makes him look like a little jack o lantern), and speaks mostly in Pokemon these days. I understand none of it, but he is OBSESSED and keeps coming up with creative ways to bring them into his day-to-day life (he’s beaten Sword about three times and is currently working his way through whatever the previous title was on the DS; his favorite vacillates day to day, but he tends to go for fire types). I’m still homeschooling him until the end of the year because everyone keeps changing their mind about when people are going back and doing what. And he’s kicking ass. Currently whizzing through very basic geometry (e.g., finding simple perimeter and area) as part of his third grade math curriculum and working on recognizing patterns in science.

We also suspect that he’s either autistic or has ADHD (per his in-home therapists as well), but wait times for official testing are L O N G. We’re having him evaluated through the school, though, so that if he doesn’t get a diagnosis before he heads back in the fall (because I love him, but I do not love teaching him), he’ll at least have an IEP already in place and be able to get any assistance he needs. And that will most likely take the form of someone breaking tasks into smaller steps, maybe giving him fidget opportunities while he’s learning (he absorbs a LOT when he’s playing with Legos), maybe taking tests separately so that he can have someone read the questions aloud to him so that he absorbs them (because he can read, but unless he also HEARS things, he absorbs nothing).

He’s a terrifyingly smart kid still, and I have no doubt that he’ll be on par with his fellow second graders next year academically. I just want him to not feel overwhelmed while working.

Isaac is slowly slowly slowly gaining spoken language. I’ve said before and stand by that I don’t care if he never speaks completely fluently, but I do want him to be able to communicate his wants and needs so that he doesn’t get frustrated so much. And he does get frustrated, but his meltdowns remain rare--they usually only happen if something he loved doing ends or if someone takes his toy or won’t give him their toy or just other typical toddler stuff (which inclines me to classify them more as tantrums than meltdowns, but eh). BUT he also communicates, not just by taking someone’s hand and putting it on something he wants, but by using words. He LOVES to talk about the cats (which are his favorite thing--cats of all types, including those in the musical) (but NOT THE MOVIE DEAR JESUS), and the other day, he very meticulously directed me to draw a picture of the three cats happily sleeping on his bed, based on his memory of seeing them happily sleeping on his bed at naptime.

He’s definitely got his drilled down special interests--cats, cars, Mickey Mouse, Daniel Tiger, and Celtic Woman (we call them his “ladies”). And he is just such an absolute sweetie. He still has the smile that basically convinces you that you would both kill and die for him (shown above), and the way he relaxes against me when he’s tired just makes me sigh and love him to absolute pieces. He’s 110% a momma’s boy, and although I hope he grows out of it when the time is right, it’s really sweet right now.

He easily qualified for special ed preschool, which I’ll talk about more in a second.

And then Miss Carrie, who basically read the rhyme about little girls being made of sugar and spice and all things nice and took it as gospel but ALSO realized that you can do all of those things while being a monster, beating up everyone who treats you wrong, and covering yourself in tattoos. I say of her that she’s too much, but in the best possible way: I want her to keep being too much forever, because it is absolutely delightful. She’s always giggling or twirling, singing or commanding her brothers in a game of pretend. She never just walks anywhere, she always prances or skips or dances or hops or jumps. She can be a screechy little spitfire one second and then brush away her angry tears and transform into a little cherub the next, and it’s hilarious. Everything ever must be pink and glittery (I promise, I did not try and force pink on her, she jumped to it on her own), must flounce out correctly when she twirls, must make her feel like a fairy tale princess.

She merrily adopts all the stereotypical “girly” things in life--Barbies, princesses, My Little Pony (yep, we’re back in that phase), unicorns, mermaids, “cute” things, etc. At the same time, she’s always game for a lightsaber fight, playing “bug” with Sammy (I don’t know what “bug” is as a game, but the kids have established rules for it and play it whenever they’re not too tired after dinner), and wrestling with her dad and brothers. It’s wonderful.

And SHE qualified for special ed preschool because her muscle tone is hilariously low (read: she flops).

The twins are starting preschool Monday because they are turning three and thus losing early intervention services. I worry somewhat about them being in school with Covid still raging (even though I’m 50% of the way to fully vaccinated--going back for Pfizer #2 on Saturday!), but it’s a huge relief that their therapies (speech, occupational, physical) are being coordinated by the school and not by me. I’m the most organized person in this house, and anyone who’s ever seen my house knows what a statement that is (it’s gotten worse since my sciatica has settled in, because bending over is just not a thing I can do without suffering), so having that burden lifted from my shoulders? Heavenly.

And I’m just overall proud as fuck of all three kids. They’re so resilient, and I know that the pandemic has been hard on them in a lot of ways, but they’re still kicking ass, still smiling and laughing and having fun, and that’s been a bright spot for the entire last year.

#parenting #sammy the small spawn #isaac doomface #little care bear #hashtag twinning #holy shit they're three #them going to school is kind of like emerging from a long hibernation

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denyschepurnyj · 3 years

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All my occupations are praying, trying to find an employers which will suit to my ideology, reading about Christianity, reading about politics, reading about medical and science innovations, help parents when they ask to help, making religious worship-lectures for them and for sibling, religious and political blogging, hugging, caressing. feeding and cleaning after the cat when its my order ^^ and gaming, League, NFS, Avakin. I thank to Jesus very much that Im still fine. There was a lot hard times. I almost kind of 10 times in my life - try to suicide when I was 15 from 9th floor building my ex took me for my hand, then I was running drunk on the top of 3rd floor of unbuilden building's wall. then my ex was trying to poison me, almost died from big weight(exfriend saved me with LSD). almost died on an operation on my nose doctors saved me with help of some special drugs, after this some old but strong man saved me when I almost sink on the deep shore of the sea, almost died because of coronavirus, and almost died after vaccine. I am aspie from birth with lack of aggression control since 3 y.o. began to shouting on parents in 12 years in 27 I realize that I also have hereditary psychopathia because of Stalin's famine. I am open, truthful and sincere because I love Jesus. Always welcome to conversation whatever you want. I thank God for everything. Amen.

#denys #denko #chepurnyj #proud #ukrainian #hebrewroots #liberal #christian #volibear #garen

https://www.instagram.com/p/CPuQTjMBvOz/?utm_medium=copy_link

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twiststreet · 3 years

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Stuff done in 2020

Work: I’m a little worried how this year’s chaos reverberates for the next few years. Rough, strange, rough year. But it was at least nice to be classified as “Essential labor” though throughout all this-- I’d have fallen apart completely if I’d been stuck at home-- I really don’t know how people have managed.

Politics Stuff: I did more this year than I have since high school-- going door-to-door, calling people on the phone, etc., which meant I spent the middle of the year drinking and taking pills and I don’t know what, trying to do stuff to feel okay when it all went how it went. (Like, the whole world shutting down in some ways was good for me not getting weirder with it... I’d have misbehaved...)

Not that I was super-convinced it could work out, even when things were going well-- I was cynical enough to know it could go badly-- it wasn’t like “Oh I got my hopes up” because I’m not a child but... The alternative was so obviously going to be (and is) so awful. You could see so much of this coming. The alternative was just so ghastly that I hoped we could push against it.

Anyways: couldn’t.

There were points in trying that at least felt really good, at least. A lot / most of the DSA-type candidates I donated to did well-- I had a pretty good track record on donations! You can already see the District Attorney race in LA meaning something; winning at the City Council level felt meaningful; there are people out there who seem to get that the establishment has abandoned them that are building their own thing-- it’s not hard to find good charities lately haha oh wait.

But boy, things got kind of dark around March-to-August and/or March-to-Next-March.

Write ‘Em Ups: Oh god. So. Haha. So, yeah: I started the year in January writing about Scott Adams for the Comics Journal print edition. I think I’m okay with how that turned out-- I think it could’ve been clearer in the point of the architecture of the piece, and I think using a world event as a pivot point was a mistake in retrospect. But given the limits on space and how much craziness there was to talk about, I can live with how it turned out. Not a fun one, on the process side. It’s weird to spend all January writing about civilization disintegrating and then have the rest of 2020 happen. And an absolute misery on the research side-- all the research plus I read four years worth of Dilbert comics on top of that.

Bringing us to the summer! Hhhhh. I don’t know. I wrote five days of essays (four? five?) and conducted a series of interviews, for the Journal on the online side, which came out shortly after a brief spate during the summer where people wanted to talk about abusive and unprofessional conduct in various nerd industries. That one was an experience, though one that was not entirely unanticipated, so. (Though there are always surprises haha oh god!). There’s not a lot I would allow myself to say there. I’m a believer in “don’t engage in the subsequent conversation” as a rule-- I think there’s no good that can come of it, regardless of what you agree with or what you disagree with, how kindly you might see something, how valid, or how much under-diagnosed mental illness is transparently being manifested (.... *wink*); you put out whatever you put out and, then let people have at it. It’s the only way to do things, even if I think it has its consequences.

I like some of the work itself (loved and am grateful for the interviews); the process was not a good time (spending that much time just thinking about how people are is baseline not-healty); there is a core of it that I feel was necessary; not a lot I will allow myself to say besides that.

Special Projects: Bringing us to the fall and the Kickstarter for Gangland Allstars, comics I helped make with other people in 2019. Money was lost; laughs were had; people were hired and paid to do things that I had to tell them we weren’t going to do because I didn’t want them to get mixed-up in all my crazy, after the Journal stuff happened (there was more planned, not a ton, but). I still have to re-format the comics for a Comixology release which is taking me a while (Comixology, it turns out, has standards!). And i have a behind-the-scenes financial bit I have to finish up on. But: I think that went well...? The comics could be better written (or when I did the colors, colored) but when I look at them, I think I can say, they were as interesting as I could make them when I made them. I don’t see a lot of What If’s there.

And then the Kickstarter itself was a really joyous thing, just that as many people were willing to give it a chance as gave it a chance. God only knows how many people looked at what they got, but no one complained. Though I did kinda feel like I was doing a bait-and-switch because... you know: the comics present as “normal genre comics” and I talked about them in that way, but I don’t think that’s what they’re actually built to be. It’s just you can’t tell people that without giving away the game and spoiling them. I don’t know-- I had my head up my own ass on the project a little-- I got pretty high-falutin’ in terms of what I wanted to do, but when it came time on the sale side, it was like “oh, people just want to hear it’s about a robot solving a mystery and then you give them a robot solving a mystery and then they’re happy”-- it felt a little bad that I wasn’t doing that. I kept the money, though. Vegas after the vaccine,baby!

Anyways: in the “now what” place again after that wrapped up, even with finishing touches. The “now what” place is never any good. I could make more comics like Gangland Allstars but I already made Gangland Allstars, so what’s the point? Or making comics is already negative-rewarding in so many ways, that after the Journal thing, making more comics or just being comic-facing, when I know the audience online is a certain way... I don’t know about that. Obviously most dudes just put that out of their heads but I’m not there yet. I still want to try to make a computer game but I really don’t understand the language of those-- I’m not a writer on top of that, so that makes making anything hard because you always need something written, to start with. I don’t know. Struggling there. Feels bad! I do have another special project, though, kind of, but that one’s just for me and kind of not really the same thing and that’s going along slowly...

This time last year, I thought having the Adams thing wrapped up and GA out in 2020 would make this year feel like a really fun one. I guess... I guess it didn’t hurt, but. It added at least some color. All the “good parts” just kind of felt muted though just, which I think is given ... everything else. Or I hope... Otherwise I am very depressed, ha ha. Ha. Hrm.

Cooking: I feel like everyone got better at cooking during quarantine and I got better at ordering food, and spent all my money this year doing that. Can everyone bake things now??? I don’t know how to bake anything-- I was scared of grocery stores-- this is bullshit.

Physical Self: I was getting in shape in 2018, then 2019 kind of went wrong on me because liberals were like “your expensive gym does bad politics” and I stupidly was like “I guess I should care about that” and cancelled my gym but then those same exact people were like “Me Too doesn’t matter if it’s Joe Biden, and people who want their student loans cancelled are selfish” so it’s like I should’ve kept giving that expensive gym all my money. But they’d have been closed anyways, so anyways, I’m a shambles. My whole body area is basically a shambles. Sometimes I still see hot people on the street though because Los Angeles, and that’s... pretty remarkabe to me... I guess people are doing body things off Youtube?? I just watch video essays about Metal Gear-- there’s not a lot of workout tips in those...

Being a Jock: I decided to be a jock who read all the Spawn comics in 2020. I didn’t manage to read all the Spawn comics, but both my teams won their respective world series. Being a jock is easy and fun! 10/10.

Consumer of Culture: I feel like everyone in quarantine started watching all the Criterion movies but I’m not welcome with Criterion after I said a bunch of R-rated angry things at them one time (I snapped after a long day once), so I’m watching, like, Dark Shadows reruns on Tubi, and am almost through the first season of the hit CW show Hart of Dixie, which I’m watching slowly because I’m “savoring” it. Things are not going great. I just paid for the extremely-broken HBO Max though so I might end up watching Weird Science again at 2 in the morning; I got that to look forward to. HBO Max has both Casablanca and Meatballs 4 on the service-- for a man for all seasons.

I also started taking photographs inside videogames, which is slightly less acceptable behavior for a man of my age (or success!) than running through an elementary school naked. (I liked the Last of Us 2, I was really happy KR0 ended in a satisfying way, and I didn’t think the Keanu game was good at all even past the breaking constantly-- the pretty-racist game that inexplicably has a lot of Jesus Christ-related content that somehow went unremarked upon also has very messed up ideas about sex, though I did like riding the Akira bike a lot).

I tried to make a Top 10 movies of the year list and it was just an embarrassing collection of movies. I’ll try again after I watch some prestige movies this week. Every movie I’ve really liked has been an old movie this year that I hadn’t seen-- and even there, like, I really liked Adam Sandler’s The Week Of, but I’m not sure it’s a classic end-of-the-year list choice. (The worst movie was I’m Thinking of Ending Things-- I didn’t fuck with that). I sent a best list for comics to the Journal for their year-end wrap up (it was Stages of Rot, though, easy); worst comic for me was ... I didn’t really dig the Department of Truth but I didn’t hate it-- I just thought it was very boring; nothing else coming to mind, really. Maybe I’ll try a TV list but I don’t even remember anything sticking out. The best thing I saw this year was a Helder Guimaraes magic show on Zoom-- but magic’s weird and those tricks still fuck me up to think about...

I mostly spent the year doomscrolling. There was a lot to doomscroll.

I’m not expecting much of 2021.

#year in review

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colormered · 4 years

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My Quarantine Musings:

(1) How important our lives are:

-for ourselves and Our Maker: because really we never know when we are going to die and as uncertain that maybe we should...

(2) Make every moment count with our loved ones. Hug, kiss them while we can. Tell them we love them. 🤗😘

(3) Faith and science are not contradictory. No black and white there. It just is. Kung ayaw mo maniwala, balakajan.

(4) Debate on right to free speech and free press, fake news and public officials’ blunders. Discern. Disregard anything and everything that is not towards - finding the cure, protecting our frontliners and getting help to our people. Totoo naman. The economy will survive but lives will be lost forever. Magdiscern kayo, wag paniwalain. 🤓

(5) Take THIS FUCKING VIRUS SERIOUSLY. 🦠🔪🪓💣🧨⚰️

Read up. Watch those videos. Arm yourself with knowledge and fight this virus for yourself, but more importantly for your loved ones. 👶🏻👧🏻🧒🏻👦🏻👩🏻👨🏼‍🦳👵🏼

FOLLOW PHYSICAL/SOCIAL DISTANCING.

WASH YOUR HANDS.

BE CLEAN.

BE MINDFUL OF YOUR SURROUNDINGS. BE AWARE.

SLEEP WELL.

EAT WELL.

EXERCISE.

PRAY.

(6) At the moment of a person’s death - at his dying breath - does his life flash before his eyes? What comes to his mind?

(a) I just don’t want anything left unsaid. I hope this reaches you wherever you are.

I am not going crazy or losing my head.

(b) I want to thank everyone who gave me moments, bits or parts of their life so mine can be complete. Maraming salamat sa lahat ng naging parte ng buhay ko. Lahat ng pamilya ko, lahat ng kaibigan, pati na rin yun mga nagagalit sa akin at tinawag ko na kaaway. Salamat sa pagpapasaya sa akin, sa pagpapadama ng inis, galit, sakit, tuwa, lahat. Maraming salamat kasi hindi mabubuo yun storya, kung wala ka.

(c) I just want to say sorry for all my shortcomings, for all the harsh words, for all the anger, the temper I have shown. For being unkind, inconsiderate. For not listening and for not caring. I know I am not the worst person but I might as well be to you at that moment. I am sorry for not speaking the truth. I am sorry for severing ties with you. I am sorry because I want to be free from all the pain and the anger and sadness. I am forgiving myself and admitting to all that I have done wrong. Sana mapatawad niyo rin ako.

(d) Mahal na mahal ko kayong lahat. 😘🤗 Maaring isa lang ang puso ko, pero mahal ko kayong lahat.

(e) Magdasal po tayo at mag-ingat palagi. Iniintay ko po yun araw na pwede ko na po kayong maakap (hugger kasi ako and love language ko yun) kasi may cure or may vaccine na. 💊🧪💉

(7) Thank you Lord sa aming buhay, may we praise You with the work of our hands, as You have willed. We pray for the end of this pandemic. Ingatan mo po ang aming mga frontliners at gabayan mo po ang aming mga leader - give them discernment and wisdom to do what is right and just for the good of all. This we ask in the Mighty Name of Jesus. Amen.

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quakerjoe · 4 years

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You do realize that one of two people will be the President of the United States on January 20, 2021–yes? Either the incumbent or the Democratic nominee will hold the office, and that’s a legacy as old as Jefferson and Hamilton. If you can not stop trashing both aspirants to the office may I suggest that you pursue the acquisition of a passport as well as some means of leaving the country? Your laments are so doleful as to finally become comedy.

You know what’s really funny? Everything about YOU. I’ll tell you why, since you bothered to ask. I at least owe you that much since you didn’t ask anon.

I get this sort of banter every now and again so I thought I’d display it and answer the question at hand.

First off, this “#Murica, love it or leave it!” horseshit has two facets to it in response.

ONE: “Go fuck yourself. If you’re so willing to lie down and take it in the ass for one of the parties constantly screwing you, you’re pretty useless. Why don’t YOU leave since you’ve clearly given up the fight? “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” comes at a price, sometimes a high one, and you have to FIGHT for it. If you’re willing to just bend over and take an elbow deep fist in your ass from the Democrats so it can jerk off the GOP while its dick is constantly forced down your throat, then perhaps YOU are the one who needs to pack up and fuck off to Saudi Arabia or North Korea. Maybe Russia or China are more your speed.

TWO: Are YOU going to pay my way if I decide to give up on America and abandon my home and the nation that I love? I may not love your precious politicians, but I’m still proud to be an American. I served, am a vet, but THIS is not the nation I signed up to defend. This era of US history is the Big Sellout, and you, dumbass, are a part of that.

You people had chances and opportunities to make this a better place than when you found it, but over the five decades I’ve been alive all I’ve seen is people fighting to get in line to buy the government snake oil like it’s a Cabbage Patch Kid or the new iPhone. It’s pathetic how much the US lacks vision or has any real pride or dignity worth talking about. We’re not #1 at fuck-all anything worth bragging about unless it’s how bad the education system has gotten or that we’re the TOP nation in the world for incarcerated citizens per capita and it’s mostly geared towards men who happen to have a dark complexion.

The rich and powerful exist here because WE ALLOW it. People like you, you defunct Fox “News” fan, are either a cheering fan for the status quo of yesteryear with Biden who wants to turn back the calendar to a time that BROUGHT US TRUMP in the first place OR you’re a trump fan who has NO IDEA… well, no ideas or thoughts about anything. Trump’s shown us who we really as a nation apparently- deluded, self-centered, selfish assholes, and the WORLD can see it. Not all of us, granted, but as a generalization, we truly suck. Such a waste of enormous potential, especially given all the resources we’ve had over the years.

As a result, we’re being overwhelmed by a virus that’s killing us by the thousands and perhaps millions some day. But, since we no longer believe in or do science anymore, nothing much is coming to save us. If/When the time comes that its run its course and should we find a vaccine, there are still anti-vaxxers who’d rather die than take a cure. Then there are the religious zealots who think Jesus will protect them. You know; the ones who are dropping like flies these days? Those assholes; the hypocrites who think they’re part of ‘the faithful’ who, if you believe in that sort of thing, do Satan’s bidding more than Jesus’.

If you’re not boiling mad at the GOP for literally doing everything they can to go out of their way to keep the US a hateful, racist, peddler of death nation bent on keeping its citizens poor and undereducated, you’re not a part of the solution. If your fucked-up solution is to have those not happy with the butt-hurt they peddle move to another country, it shows you’ve got no pride or respect for your country or yourself. You’re weak, ignorant, selfish and stupid all rolled into a big burrito of go fuck yourself.

If you’re not making a fist so tight that your nails are digging into your palms when you hear that the Democrats are literally forcing us to choose one racist sexual predator that can’t hold a thought or form sentences as the “champion” to replace the incumbent one, you’re DEFINITELY not a part of the solution. Also, you’re an idiot, an asshole, and totally a Biden Bro.

What will it take for YOU to open your window and shout out “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” eh? You people rolling over for Biden are pathetic weaklings who sold out women and #MeToo and sold your souls to #MeTooExceptBiden, allowing the bar to be set to the same, low, cesspool standard that the GOP glorifies in. You sold out party, country, woman, minorities, and everything that was once even remotely good about the party that allegedly represented the working class so that the party leaders can keep their cash flow from Big Pharma, the Insurance lobby, Big Oil and the Military Industrial Complex. You’ve turned the Democratic party into yesterdays feckless, weak and worthless GOP while the current GOP drags the country even FURTHER to the fucking right. You’re aiding and abetting the foulest elements of the nation’s existence.

Your attitude has cost us our place on the world stage and most of our allies while we crawl under the covers with bedfellows we once considered enemies because they treat their people like shit. Now WE are one of those shithole countries you people used to rant about… AND YOU’RE PROUD OF IT and unwilling to stand up and fix it. Instead, you prefer those who are willing to do your job FOR you to just move elsewhere. Loser. Listen, if you’re too much of a wuss to stand up to the establishment that’s using your tax dollars to bail out the rich while pissing table scraps down upon you, that’s on you. You’re too stupid to know better. I get it. But until YOU get off YOUR ASS and hold your government accountable, you’ve got no room to criticize those who ARE doing it.

We’re in the middle of a pandemic and the ONE GUY who has been fighting for his decades-long career for UNIVERSAL health care was someone YOU opted out. American apparently hasn’t suffered enough to grow a pair of whatever motivates it to stand up to the wealth inequality. The US idolizes the rich and instead of fighting for a chance to live at least a DECENT life without having to worry about going tits-up and pear-shape because of hospital bills or job losses, they’d rather just piss away their fortunes and futures so that people with more money than they can spend in a lifetime of ten could possibly spend, all while THEY pay little to ZERO taxes, leaving YOU stuck with the bill. That’s on YOU if you’re willing to bend over and just take it in the ass and take it dry; no kiss, no lube, not so much as a feel-around. That’s YOU.

You, sir, are the problem. Clearly, with people like you, the US is simply BEGGING for 4 more years of trumplefuckery. Perhaps you even deserve it. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but who am I? I’m just one of the few willing to call anyone out on their bullshit, from the GOP overall to Pelosi’s feckless approach, to Schumer’s “kid who gets beaten on the schoolyard daily” approach to trying to appear useful. I’ll shit on Liz Warren for not backing a Progressive approach and getting behind Sanders EARLY; screwing her friend and ally AGAIN like in 2016. I’ll call out all the other “candidates” who say one thing while their track records show that they’re pretty full of shit. I’ll DEMAND that we have a party that’s transparent and willing to fight to drag us BACK to the Left instead of the “oh, let’s settle for plutocracy and oligarchy because it’s better than fascism” route. Fuck that, fuck them, and of course fuck you too. Thought I forgot about you? Oh, this is all about you, you spineless goon.

So let me know if you and your ilk are willing to throw your precious few dollars into a GO FUND ME to finance my move to another country. This includes my family, all our belongings, and of course a home once we get there. Naturally, you’ll be finding us ALL gainful employment there and the costs for the passports, visas, and whatnot and you’ll of course be lining us ALL up with jobs. I’ve got a big family, so it’s going to be pretty goddamn expensive. Shit, just ME moving is going to cost more than you’d be willing to cough up.

In the mean time, I’m going to remain here, giving the finger to the GOP, the Establishment/Corporate owned Democrats, and people like you. Seriously, you’re an idiot.

@ imall4frogs He’s talking about people like YOU.

#imall4frogs

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