ummaaron

1/ Healthcare CAN be designed, and IS, a public good. -Non-excludable: Anyone can use the good without being prevented from doing so  -Non-rivalrous: Using the good doesn't reduce its availability to others  -Jointly consumed: Everyone benefits when anyone has access to the good

The United States is causing a terrible humanitarian crisis in Cuba and no one here seems to care. The blockade has left the national grid with zero reserves. The consequences are severe: 1) More than 96,000 surgeries have been postponed nationwide, including over 11,000 procedures for children. Critical therapies, including radiotherapy for 16,000 cancer patients and essential dialysis, are severely disrupted by the blackouts. 2) Rolling blackouts knock out life-support machines and incubators. Doctors have been forced to manually operate ventilators for patients during prolonged outages when backup generators fail or run out of diesel. 3) Cuba's once-vaunted infant mortality rate rose to 10 deaths per 1,000 live births by 2025, and public health experts from Stanford University warn that the 2026 oil blockade is making the crisis "exponentially more severe". Malnourishment among pregnant women has led to a surge in dangerously underweight newborns. 4) Domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing has largely halted because production plants lack diesel to operate. Pharmacies are empty, leaving patients without basic antibiotics, painkillers, or chronic disease medications. 5) Roughly 1 million people now rely on water trucks for drinking water. However, fuel shortages mean these trucks can rarely run. Food supplies are rotting due to a complete lack of refrigeration during 20-hour daily blackouts. 6) Mounds of garbage are piling up in the streets of Havana because waste collection vehicles lack fuel. Inhabitants have begun burning trash piles, creating an acrid, hazardous smog across urban areas. 7) The combination of intense Caribbean heat, a total lack of fans or air conditioning, and dark, hot living conditions is causing severe mental health deterioration and physical exhaustion across the population. The US is overseeing the Gazafication of Cuba. People are dying and suffering through no fault of their own. Meanwhile, Cuba does not present a threat of any kind to the US. This is a crime and we must oppose it. People are dying for no reason in our name.

🚨BREAKING: A data broker has been selling your phone's location to anyone who would pay. The FTC just settled with them. May 4, 2026. Here is how to check if your data was sold and how to delete it:

@gauravsabnis @Makarand_S That’s so awesome! I gotta drive 20 mins but they make it fresh and it feeds loads of people for sure. 😁

@ummaaron_ @Makarand_S Yeah and I live walking distance from my favorite Ethiopian restaurant in NYC. So I get them freshly made also. $5 buys enough for 6 people to eat.

I've suddenly gotten hooked on Miser Wat, Ethiopian red lentil dish. So easy, yummy, goes great with injera, dosa, roti, naan, pita, tortilla, rice, and even on toast. Or by itself. I make it every other day. Even made my own Berbere spice but it works with any spice mix really.

A good boiled egg, salted in-season tomato & Dukes mayo wrap is one of the joys of life! First fell in love with tomato & egg baguettes in uni in the UK decades ago. Can’t eat white bread anymore so a keto wrap will have to do! 😋

@Makarand_S @gauravsabnis You can find Tef easily in many American cities but it’s not super easy to ferment and make the injera, takes a bit of work and specially in cold areas where I live, it’s just easier to buy it from the Ethiopian market. Very cost effective too!

@gauravsabnis Do you get tef easily for the injera? Is the process similar to making dosas?

@ahmedmahadik @gauravsabnis It is! It’s almost a simpler version so you taste the spices more cleanly in a way. They don’t temper at the end (no tadka/ chaunk/ bhagaar) so that’s a difference.

@gauravsabnis I've heard Ethiopian food is very close to Indian taste palate.

@gauravsabnis Bere bere is awesome. It’s just a delicious spice mix, & the first time I had Ethiopian food decades ago I was struck by how similar many of the flavours are to our North Indian dishes, which makes sense since the two countries are connected by trade. Their ghee & cardamon is 👌🏼!

@gauravsabnis Love Ethiopian food! Went through a craze of making it a lot, and have been meaning to make it again! Misir wot, doro or sega wat and atakilt wat on repeat! Absolutely adore injera - it is sooo yum! A while back I made sega wot (beef) along with the lentils and veg.

Almost as if Israel was trying to cover up the moments when it intentionally killed Israeli civilians to prevent their capture. Friendly reminder that Israel intentionally murdered dozens, if not hundreds, of its own civilians on Oct. 7.

In the first four months of 2026, at least 13 Muslims, including two women, a 15-year-old boy, and a 65-year-old man, were killed by Hindu extremist non-state actors in religiously-motivated hate crimes across eight states, India Persecution Tracker data shows. maktoobmedia.com/share/115464

The Sameer Project kitchen decreased our daily distributions from 3,000 sandwiches to 1,500 due to lack of funds.

🚨 JUST IN: Scientists who warned about airborne COVID are now urging WHO to treat Andes hantavirus as airborne by default warning the world not to repeat past mistakes

slovenia fierce as hell for boycotting eurovision to the point they are broadcasting palestinian documentaries instead of eurovision

7,000 false positives per square millimeter. The culprit was the lab gloves. University of Michigan researchers just upended a core assumption in microplastics science. Latex and nitrile gloves, worn by the scientists doing the measuring, shed stearate particles that look chemically identical to polyethylene. Standard infrared and Raman instruments can't tell them apart. The gloves were counting as plastic. Seven glove types tested. All contaminated. The cheapest fix: switch to cleanroom gloves, which dropped false positives to around 100 per mm² vs. 7,000. The "credit card per week" headline (5 grams, WWF/Newcastle 2019) has separate problems. A 2022 re-analysis found severe methodological errors in the original estimate. Actual measured intake is likely 100x lower. None of this means microplastics are harmless. Last month's data on brain accumulation still stands. But the numbers driving the panic may have been measuring the scientists, not the environment. Science catching its own errors is exactly how it's supposed to work.

BREAKING: Scientists confirm that estrogen supports dopamine regulation. When estrogen drops in perimenopause, ADHD symptoms intensify. Women who were managing for decades stop being able to. The crash is not in your head. It is in your blood chemistry.

Every religion is a "way of life" for its practitioners. That phrase does zero definitional work. The real question is why this framing gets applied selectively. You never hear courts say "Islam is a way of life, so a Muslim doesn't need to go to a mosque." Or "Christianity is a way of life, so a Christian doesn't need to go to a church." The "way of life" formulation is reserved for Hinduism. It has a specific jurisprudential history. It comes from the Hindutva cases of the 1990s, where the Supreme Court used it to argue that Hindutva isn't a religion but a cultural identity. That made it permissible political speech rather than an appeal to religion during elections. The phrase isn't neutral description. It's load-bearing legal doctrine with a specific origin and a specific political beneficiary. What the court is doing here is worth paying attention to. By saying a Hindu doesn't need to go to a temple, it's quietly softening the ground for the Sabarimala question without directly addressing it. If temple entry isn't essential to Hindu practice, then restricting women's entry becomes harder to defend as a matter of essential religious practice. But also notice what gets smuggled in along the way. The court gets to define what Hinduism essentially is, which is itself a theological intervention. No other faith gets that treatment from the bench. The "way of life" line sounds philosophical. It's actually jurisdictional maneuvering to arrive at a desired outcome suitable for Hindutva politics.

I’ve been thinking this all day long. A Syrian man and his 12 year old daughter were riding on a motorcycle in southern Lebanon when an Israeli drone strike took the dad out. His daughter made it 100 yards & another drone came for her. They’re hunting 12 year olds w drones.

Just a friendly reminder that a few weeks before the lockdowns of 2020, the risk to the public from COVID on a Cruise Ship was “extremely low” according to the WHO and other international public health bodies. They’ll tell you it’s “low” when it isn’t. Worth remembering.

5 years ago today, Biden and the CDC said vaccinated people don’t need to mask just as we were close to getting C0VlD under control. After this, the U.S. government stopped trying to contain C0VlD, causing nearly a million deaths and tens of millions to become disabled.