Scooby Shakespeare

@magi_jay @threadreaderapp unroll please

Student loans is such a good example. Biden didn't get a single good headline out of that debacle. Imagine if the negative attacks had ONLY come from the right, while the "left" celebrated the accomplishment. But that's not how the "left" operates. They have to punish. Constantly

The lesson that every Dem needs to take from this--as well as the previous ~10 years of politics--is: Don't depend on the online Far-Left for political support. No matter how much you cater to them, if you say *one* thing that diverges from "The Party," they will sabotage you.

@CathyYoung63 Also striking that the artist portrays ICE as a single unmasked, unarmored Officer Friendly. Because showing the reality might make even some of those sympathetic to the message think twice.

Immigration law is complicated, but imagine thinking this meme makes a good point (Really, these are the people who stand between you and a better life?)

@rbarbosa91 The time between Frodo's first encounter with medical care after his injuries (March 25, 3019/1419), his intake assessment by Arwen that summer, and his appointment at the Havens (September 29 3021/1421) suggests that Middle Earth isn't without waitlist problems of its own.

Addendum 2: In modern times, we aren’t sure if Frodo would actually have access to the Havens: In the US, the Grey Havens wouldn’t be covered by insurance, in the UK the waitlist would be too long; and in Canada, he would have been offered MAID. More cannot be said of this.

🧵regarding Lord of the Rings - related traumatic injuries, and whether access to modern Level 1 trauma centers could have decreased morbidity and mortality within the Fellowship. Here we will take a more evidence-based approach to some of the injuries in Middle Earth (1/ )

@beowulf888 Preregistration, controlled groups answering specific surveys rather than convenience samples or EHRs, actually following them for an extended period. It's at least hard to imagine a better study design. And it showed excess symptom prevalence declining and largely disappearing.

@beowulf888 Re Long Covid, my concern remained high longer than many. I parted ways with the obvious cranks early, but still really wanted to see some rigorous countervailing data. This study from the Netherlands seems to have finally done that. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

EoY25-1/ My end of year 2025 pathogen summary. For those who follow me, sorry I haven’t been keeping this up. COVID-19 doesn't interest me as much as it did. 🤷‍♀️ I may post new updates if we get a nasty pathogen flare-up, though. The winter COVID wave began around Thanksgiving.

@kavs86 @beowulf888 @vickersty @simon_faire @soaresvxz @VGrubsky @RussLyon7 @Michael22504424 @_32768 @DrNeilStone @aiecon23 @OAesthetics69 What Seán said, and thanks also for the heads up.

@beowulf888 @vickersty @simon_faire @ScoobyShakespe1 @soaresvxz @VGrubsky @RussLyon7 @Michael22504424 @_32768 @DrNeilStone @aiecon23 @OAesthetics69 thank you for this. I always enjoy your posts, especially about Covid.

My end-of-year pathogen summary for 2025. 🧵 x.com/beowulf888/sta… @vickersty @simon_faire @ScoobyShakespe1 @soaresvxz @VGrubsky @RussLyon7 @kavs86 @Michael22504424 @_32768 @DrNeilStone @aiecon23 @OAesthetics69

@LauraRbnsn @threadreaderapp unroll please

I think it's morally comforting to think that this only happens to kids if a boogeyman takes them and the happy ending is that the kids can go home. That's not how this works in real life, unfortunately.

I know I say this all the time but it will never stop being weird to me that, when I first started looking into this, I thought I was telling people, "Guess what? Kids aren't getting kidnapped and trafficked in the US!" that I thought I was telling people great news and I wasn't.

Alright, I guess it falls to me -- just an ordinary guy from Ukrainian Donbas -- to explain a few obvious things to a New York real-estate developer who seems to care a lot more about the “commercial opportunities” being dangled in front of him by Putin and his mob fixer Kirill Dmitriev than about Ukraine, this region, or the questions of war, life, and death for millions of people whose fate he so casually talks about. You see, real life is a bit more complicated than a primitive two-color map where Ukrainian regions are divided into “Ukrainian-speaking” and “Russian-speaking.” Believe it or not, speaking Russian in everyday life does not mean wanting to live under Russian rule and the dictatorship of Vladimir Putin. It doesn’t mean you’re somehow “by default” obliged to belong to Russia or serve the imperial whims of Vladimir Putin. Especially not after the 2014 invasion -- and especially not after the slaughter that the business partners in the Kremlin unleashed on what is now an almost completely destroyed Donbas. That horror opened countless eyes and finally shattered many illusions about what the so-called “Russian world” really is -- a plague, bringing death and cemeteries among the ruins of once-prosperous cities like Mariupol and Bakhmut. You might be surprised, but back in 2014 the main centers for forming “volunteer battalions” were not Lviv or Ternopil -- they were “Russian-speaking” cities like Dnipro and Kharkiv. They created and filled numerous famed units made up of local residents who took up arms to repel Russia’s hybrid invasion of Donbas when the regular army and the state were in collapse and paralysis. That’s because we, the “Russian-speaking” Ukrainians, already understood perfectly well what was happening -- and made our final, irreversible choice in favor of Ukraine. You might be surprised again, but when business partners in the Kremlin, through collaborators, saboteurs, and unmarked Russian regular forces, occupied Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014–2015, the majority of the region’s educated, entrepreneurial, and democratic-minded population fled those “people’s republics,” which quickly turned into depressed criminal cesspools. They left their homes and apartments and moved -- believe it or not -- to areas under Ukrainian control: to Kyiv, and to its peaceful suburbs like Irpin and Bucha (where I live), where so many of our fellow Donetsk natives started new lives from scratch. And here’s a little hint for the self-proclaimed “experts” and “journalists”: even in Donbas, pro-Russian Russian-speaking people never identified themselves as “ethnic Russians” -- only as Ukrainians who just happened to speak Russian. No matter what years of Russian war propaganda tried to claim about the “Russians in Donbas.” If you think you know better than me -- someone born in Volnovakha, who grew up and lived there most of his life -- you’re mistaken. And believe it or not, even now, in the fourth year of Russia’s full-scale slaughter in the so-called “Russian-speaking regions,” masses of Russian-speaking Ukrainians have fled and settled in Kyiv, Lviv, or Chernivtsi -- something you can easily notice just by walking through those cities. I won’t even start on how many “Russian-speaking” Ukrainians are fighting right now in the Ukrainian army on the front lines against the Russian plague that came to their land. Why is that? Because we have long been part of the Ukrainian nation -- part of its political and cultural space. Our capital is ancient Kyiv, not Moscow. We argue about and criticize Ukrainian politicians whose decisions shape our lives. We took part in the revolutions, the elections, the wars for this country. We cheer for the Ukrainian football team, for Ukrainian singers at Eurovision. Most of us, one way or another, see Ukraine as our country and our future — and today, more than ever in modern history, we are farther from Russian cultural space and closer to our fellow Ukrainians from Lviv, Lutsk, Ternopil, and Vinnytsia than ever before. That’s called shared national values. The democratic, European, and Euro-Atlantic Ukraine that is fighting for its survival and freedom against an imperial invader -- the Ukraine we’ve been trying for a decade to reform and make a better place to live -- that’s us. That’s who we are. That’s what we believe in, and what matches our values and vision of the future. And many of us from the “Russian-speaking regions” have already switched to Ukrainian in daily life and in public, returning to the embrace of Ukrainian culture and tradition -- and rejecting “Russian” with disgust and anger, because we don’t want to have anything in common with the fascist Russia of today, which brings only bloodlust, war, hatred, chauvinism, aggression, and the deceitful hypocrisy of its brainwashing television propaganda. And frankly -- until our last breath -- we will want nothing to do with your Russia. After all it has done -- killing our friends and relatives, taking our homes, and turning our “Russian-speaking cities” into vast cemeteries amid ruins where life will never return.

@jmhorp @threadreaderapp unroll please

Over on Facebook, people are excited about these prices from 1998. For example, one person commented that a 24-pack of Coke is $17 today, compared with $4 in 1998 But people are being fooled by two things here: nominal prices and sale prices

@Joemama75 @JennyENicholson Or possibly this.

@Joemama75 @JennyENicholson Clearly Gunn was laying the groundwork for this.

In a Superman movie it should always be Superman in the center of the screen and he should always be explaining to me what's going on

@EyeOnStalk @CathyYoung63 Well, sometimes.

@CathyYoung63 Lex Luthor dealt with being bald like a man. He didn’t do whatever Trump is doing.

Yesterday, I compared Donald J. Trump, 45th and 47th President of the United States, to Superman villain Lex Luthor. I'd like to take it back and apologize. I totally owe Lex Luthor an apology. I mean, if nothing else, he was actually smart. And much better dressed.

@HistoryBoomer It also juxtaposes oddly with xkcd 137. Taken together, they effectively say "use no timid caution or discretion in what you say... so we know who to sanction". xkcd.com/137/

Imagine a gay man in a conservative town, yelled at, his one-man show boycotted, and then canceled. His free speech rights weren't violated. People just thought he was an asshole. And they showed him the door. This smug xkcd cartoon is supporting groupthink and conformity.

@farhip Going through the main encyclopedia volumes to paste in the stickers cross referencing to the new yearbook's updates was a highlight of the year! (Reader, he became a librarian.)

Realize these are the Yearbooks. We had an actual set of World Book encyclopedias, edition of (maybe) 1965.

Nostalgia time: When I was a kid we got a used set of these (still have ‘em). Would spend hours leafing through ‘em. When it came time to do school reports, they were the go-to source (maybe too much). They were the internet and AI of my childhood.

@RealSprat The contrast is heightened by the bio of William F. Buckley I'm reading, which notes that 2/3 of his class at Yale were veterans. (Including him, though health issues & efforts to be inducted as an officer had him join post-VE day and saved from overseas deployment by the Bomb.)

The American draft has been over for 50 dang years and our wars have been far less lethal than previous ones. The comparatively fewer casualties were all volunteers, themselves a small fraction of a military that itself is less than 1% of the population.

Apart from everything else infamously stupid about this tweet, the implication that even at the height of Iraq & Afghanistan getting "sent to die in the Middle East" was some generational fear for American men is LARPing that's genuinely offensive to earlier eras.

@AndreaInOregon @jjvincent Oddly, not even novel. In the 1936 film "Things to Come" (based on a 1933 book by H.G. Wells) civilization is rebuilt after an apocalyptic war by "Wings Over the World", a benevolent organization of pilots and engineers. It wouldn't surprise me if Yarvin nicked it from there.

@jjvincent I do have to admit that "government by airline pilot" is, at the very least, a novel political theory

It's no surprise, but reading Curtis Yarvin's plan for his ideal polity (which includes a secret fraternity of airline pilots and a magic button that disarms all weapons) is like listening to an imaginative child explain how their lego fort is governed archive.is/4zSZT

@beowulf888 I'm seeing the thread, and I appreciate that you've been continuing to do these updates.

20-15/ That's it for this update. Again, let me know if you're seeing these. I see that I'm getting a few likes, but the engagement numbers for my posts are zilch. Serves me right for daring to criticize Elon "Free Speech" Musk.

20-1/ My pathogen update for epi weeks 17-20 of 2025. X seems to be shadow-banning my posts ever since I suggested Musk's erratic behavior was due to his ketamine abuse. Oh well. I'll continue to post here. Let me know if you're seeing them. On to the update...

@CharlesCMann @threadreaderapp unroll please

And that's one reason I'm so... arrghh... slow.

I don't know why George RR Martin takes so long to write his books, but I'll give you an example of why *I* am so slow. Lemme tell you how I just finished an entire day of work wanting to bang my head against the desk. (AI-made "portrait" of GRRM—so bad, but love the 3 legs.) 🧵

@ArmandDoma I'm the opposite of a Newsom fan, but that doesn't look like it matches his account. (CAgovernor vs governor. ca. com, and gray check vs blue.)

what a fucking joke

@Bob_Somebody021 @atlanticesque The interesting thing is that at the time he had a better sense of Palpatine's role in the scheme of things than he did Vader, who he thought was a weak, one-off villain who needed to be punched up. web.archive.org/web/2019051422…

Watching Star Wars (1977) and ignoring all the "lore" that accumulated over the rest of the trilogy and everything since then is like doing biblical criticism Like "ah clearly we see no evidence of the P source, and the Vader-as-Father myth hadn't yet been introduced"