Arno de Vries 💛💙🇺🇦

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page. It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection. Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do. Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades. The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water. It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left. The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero. When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

Misschien niet de boodschap die u wilt horen: De jaarlijkse fijnstofemissie door 1 dag vuurwerk is groter dan die van alle verbrandingsmotoren van personenauto's, bedrijfswagens en vrachtwagens samen, in een heel jaar. #grafiekvandedag

.@elonmusk Elon, you may recall we have met before. I am Jemima Goldsmith (Khan), former wife of Imran Khan — Pakistan’s democratically elected Prime Minister, removed in 2022 and now held 22 months in brutal solitary confinement as a political prisoner. Our two sons have not seen him in all that time, have not spoken to him in months, and are not even allowed to send him letters. His name is banned from every Pakistani TV and radio station. X was therefore our only independent platform to highlight this injustice. However acc to Grok- your own AI- “Every time you post anything about Imran’s jail conditions, solitary confinement or your son’s access to their father, the algorithm limits the post…. The Pakistani authorities have made criticism from Imran Khan’s immediate circle one of their top online enforcement priorities, and X is quietly complying just enough to keep the platform alive in the country.” You have repeatedly pledged that X will protect free speech and will not silence lawful political expression. Yet Grok has examined my X analytics (3.56 million followers) and concluded my account is subjected to what Grok calls “secret throttling” (the algorithm deliberately hides my posts from almost everyone even though the account is not suspended). The damning evidence Grok found is as follows : • In 2023–early 2024, I averaged 400–900 million impressions per month (normal reach for my follower count). • But in the entire 2025, impressions dropped to only 28.6 million total — a 97% crash to <3% of expected reach. • The turning point was May 2025: one post spiked to 4 million impressions the day Pakistan’s X ban ended (proving my audience was still engaged), thereafter impressions were instantly crushed to near zero and stayed there. These numbers & assessments are all verbatim from Grok. I am asking you to honour the free-speech promises you have made for this platform. Please remove the “secret throttling” Grok identified on @Jemima_Khan Thank you.

@MerelMorre Prachtig!

En nog eentje

Martin Parr is gisteren overleden. Mijn favoriete fotograaf 😢 Zijn werk is fantastisch. Wat mij er zo in aanspreekt is het menselijke, het alledaagse. Uit grote bewondering voor de kunst van Martin Parr zette ik een paar gedichten van mij onder een paar van zijn foto’s.

Woord van de Dag - 19 november FELICIWEREN (feliciweerde, heeft gefeliciweerd) mensen op je eigen verjaardag zoveel mogelijk ontwijken, omdat je de aandacht liever niet hebt en geen knuffels en/of zoenen wilt van collega's en vage kennissen

Oil is the most Lovecraftian thing that actually exists. You're telling me that there's a black ichor under the earth, made from the ancient dead, whose burning can realize all the dreams of man but only at the price of slowly returning the earth to its primordial state?

@mhdksafa Hello

Om in te lijsten dit...👇 #verkiezingen2025 #Wilders Frans #Timmermans #Oranje #fascisme #racisme #nazisme #jodenhaat #Museumplein

@Beach_Roy33 Tess mocht vandaag vijf minuten uit haar bench. Na zes weken met gebroken poot…..

@Isa_Yusibov Damn Isa, dit mogen we niet laten gebeuren. Wat vreselijk dat dit alles jou overkomt. Jouw verhaal maakt duidelijk dat het helemaal niet om 'integratie' of 'aanpassen' gaat, want als zelfs iemand als jij zo behandeld wordt, is het klip en klaar racisme en xenofobie.

Vandaag is de laatste kwadratendag die je mee gaat maken! 25-9-2025 Elk getal in deze datum is een kwadraat (een getal keer zichzelf). 5²-3²-45² De eerstvolgende keer is in 2116. Geniet ervan 😉

@Isa_Yusibov En daar zijn we trots op!!

@lidewij_devos Benieuwd hoe de regering jullie motie gaat uitvoeren! Aan alle Nederlanders vragen of ze voor of tegen fascisme zijn?

✅ Goed nieuws! Tweede Kamer neemt zojuist mijn motie aan om Antifa aan te merken als terroristische organisatie.

In Groningen is een rijksmonumentaal tankstation naar ontwerp van architect Willem Marinus Dudok getransformeerd tot een kleinschalige horecagelegenheid. En dat is GEWELDIG!

@Mooigrunnen Mooi, waar stond je?

Geduld werd uiteindelijk beloond. #Maansverduistering en de maan krijgt daarbij een karakteristieke roodachtige kleur. #bloedmaan

Groningse wetenschapper krijgt hoge Italiaanse onderscheiding voor onderzoek naar aanpak maffia rtvnoord.nl/misdaad/132003…

@wdrvdweerd Het wordt wel ingewikkeld als gemeenten zich niet aan de wet gaan houden. Maar erger is nog als de wet straks gehandhaafd gaat worden (bijvoorbeeld onder druk van PVV raadsleden).

Meerdere gemeenten blijven statushouders voorrang geven op een woning, het gaat vaak maar om een paar procent van de woningen, geen probleem dus. Steeds meer gemeenten nemen Den Haag totaal niet meer serieus en dat heeft Den Haag volledig aan zichzelf te danken.

@TeaFleurde @uht_fresh @RonFilipkowski

@uht_fresh @RonFilipkowski This is the map of Dallas/Ft. Worth. We had a huge map with the interstates outlined in red on an entire wall at a real estate company where I worked. Let me know if you see it 🤣😂.

We are finally starting to get some posts from Republicans after the deadly storm in Texas.