Why is this so important? Our guidance is still for handwashing only for a predominantly airborne virus 6 years on. This is scandalous.

This looks fantastic, and I hope loads of people get a chance to go see it. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

My mother and her siblings asked this question of their parents in ~1967.... which is what she told *me* the first time *I* asked it in ~1990. It's 36 years later - almost 60 for my mom! - and we'd both still like an answer.

I mean, yes, but the time to be worried about that was Newt Gingrich and the "Moral Majority" years, because that's when the latest round of this started. GA Dems tried to warn anyone who'd stand still, but the party waved it off (and was busy with the Clinton sex scandal).

m.independent.ie/opinion/comm... "400,000 studies show that Covid harms everyone, and a study in Lancet oncology indicates...a greater risk of death in cancer patients. Why is this avalanche of scientific studies not informing hospital Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) guidance?"

This is unironically the best possible outcome at this point, but it's predicated on Iran willingly standing down once Trump walks away. That far from a foregone conclusion, and both the US and Israel are rapidly running out of interceptors.

In honour of Long Covid Awareness Month, here are 2 asks for fellow Blueskyers 1. Wear an N95 in public to reduce transmission & in solidarity with the millions living with Long Covid 2. Please stand up to large accounts that minimize this illness & who dunk on disabled folks 🙏

“That’s not a very nice thing to say.” Boss changed subjects. I realized then that people understand a ‘personal responsibility’ approach to Covid is bullshit. Because when you suggest they take personal responsibility for causing harm to others, they can’t handle it. (3/3)

🧵One thing I’ll always remember from when mask mandates were dropped is how gleefully my colleagues at the time rushed back to normal. I begged them to consider what it meant for high risk folks like me. “Everyone has to take personal responsibility,” said my boss. (1/3)

While horrifying, this is not a surprise to anyone who's ever lived near christofascists - sorry, "evangelical Christians." I had fellow 3rd graders explaining this to me in elementary school. (I had moved from MI and had never heard any of the Gog and Magog stuff. They get'em *young* here.)

My parents were the only people wearing masks in the cancer ward during my dad’s treatment last year. Lucked out and didn’t get sick during the procedures for which he had to be sedated. My mom mentioned another patient who looked very frail, caught a cough, then suddenly wasn’t there anymore.

Holy. Fuck. Hours later Friedman is on CNN and basically umm and ahhhing his way through a segment as it’s obvious he knows he fucked up publishing this piece and giving this quagmire legitimacy. What a turnaround. Never seen anything like it.

If our society was serious about controlling respiratory viruses, which they aren't beyond whatever political points they think can be won by pretending they are, they would promote vaccinations, clean indoor air & high quality masks. ALL of the available evidence points to that, but our society

It appears to be "a sex scandal if you're a Democrat, but if you're a Republican, you can be a full on fascist and we cool, we cool... just keep that money coming, we cool..." Bring on the leopards.

It's not just the tech bros who never came out of their Covid delusions. It's every one of you who refuses to wear a mask in a medical setting or a grocery store, because f*** everyone with Covid or Long Covid, masks are "scary" (scarier than death!) and everyone decided they were bored.

The Republican Party’s treasonous war of racial purity waged against the civilian population of the United States continues.

I wrote this last month explaining why some evangelical Christians have been hoping for war with Iran for a long time. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

“There can’t be that many people with Long Covid, I never see them” as though we don’t know post-infectious syndromes cause many patients to become housebound and bedbound, (the worst of whom can rarely or never post online) the same with previous post-infectious syndromes for millennia

Artist Gillian Levine recently wrote and illustrated a comic sharing reasons to continue masking in 2026. She kindly gave us permission to republish it. 😷 Read the full comic at The Sick Times: bit.ly/4rVqQdp

Worth watching with the sound on:

For Long Covid Awareness Month, sending love to everyone who has friends, family and/or partners who have no awareness that it's Long Covid Awareness Month

*nods* I think shrugging for decades at the idea of global warming cooking the planet softened us up for accepting horrific things and just carrying on like it was nothing. But the mass delusion of covid being "over" was dizzyingly unreal and it was *fast*, like you could watch it happen real-time

I know that I sound like a broken record but I think once this society was ok with accepting mass covid deaths just to be able to eat at Applebees then all bets were off.

I’m actually not sure we can come back from “prediction markets for war crimes”, as a society. I think this might be it for us.

It’s being reported that Len Garry, tea-chest bassist (and guitarist for the later version) of the Quarrymen has died. He was there at the start, playing in some of the most significant early shows for the group and was there on the day of the significant John and Paul meeting. Bless you, Len. x

The British Deaf Association has told me that translating Liverpool’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” into British Sign Language is “the first step”, as it hopes other football clubs will become more accessible to their deaf fans.

Yup, whole lotta this, right here. We see you and we know what's going on. We've been forced to sit with where the rest of you are for six very, very long years now.... and where the rest of you are is six years behind, heads in the sand, believing comforting fairy tales and demonizing us. 🤷‍♂️

The vaccines do not meaningfully prevent transmission after the first few months. You should also get the vaccine, at least 2x per year if you can. Both of these things are true, and the real misinformation here is conflating covid conscious people with anti-vaxxers, which is purely insidious.

This week in 1992, U2 kicked off their North American leg of the Zoo TV Tour with a multimedia frenzy, featuring giant screens broadcasting a collage of images and slogans and the band at their peak of their powers. One of the greatest tours ever.

A fan photo of Cynthia, who is sitting on her husbands lap, John and Ringo in the backseat of a car after attending a Chuck Berry concert at Brian Epstein’s Saville Theatre, February 19, 1967. Brian Epstein’s reflection can be seen on the window.

A rock band can’t stop a missile. But it can keep Ukraine in the world’s ears. U2 released “Yours Eternally” with Ukraine’s Antytila and Ed Sheeran, alongside a short film by Ukrainian filmmaker Illia Mykhailus using real frontline footage. Attention is a form of support.

If America still had the rule of law, this would be the easiest prosecution ever, but we all know absolutely nothing will happen.

Trump has been searching since term 1 for his “killed OBL” moment and those don’t exist anymore

It tells you something about the disorientating rate of change underway that nobody is particularly shocked that a head of state has been assassinated by other states, something which has *never happened* in the modern era. Which is illegal under US law. Shed no tears for Khamanei, but still. 1/3

Happy 82nd birthday to a guy who can resonate every atom of a stadium with his voice and is indisputably one of the hardest working men in rock: Sir Roger Daltrey. Here’s one of my favorite solo tunes of his, full of a very specific flavor of working class joy. www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGPV...

Really saddened to hear of the death of the legendary Paul Conroy at just 61 - one of the bravest, best and kindest of people and an astonishingly good photographer to boot. Here is his last work for Byline Times. www.bylinesupplement.com/p/paul-conro...

Unbelievable that we still talk about withholding HIV funding as a form of political maneuvering rather than an act of social murder, as if the 80’s + 90’s never happened and we didn’t lose an entire generation to this already.

things every single republican president of your lifetime has done - started a war in the middle east - completely destroyed the economy

You can trace this group -- which fights for oligarchic, low-tax, low-service, exploitative capitalism and uses racism & xenophobia to prevent solidarity among the working class -- more or less to the country's founding. They've been squarely under the GOP banner since at least 1980.

It is telling that Dem leadership is not talking about every tool it has (refusing to vote for trump's nominees, which they keep doing, blocking funding, impeachment, etc). Very feckless statements as hundreds die and the region spirals into war.

It is 1991. I am 15 years old. The US has gone to war in the Middle East. It is 2003. I am 27 years old. The US has gone to war in the Middle East. It is 2026. I'm too old for this shit. The US has gone to war in the Middle East.

everything about this is so unspeakably evil and rage-inducing, but the fact that a non-zero number of Republicans believe Ayatollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Khamenei are the same guy makes me want to S C R E A M

From Hunter S. Thompson’s ESPN page 2 column one week after 9/11.

Life-changing for me and many other disabled people I know. Which means it will cost the moon, rich crips will live their best lives, and the rest of us will die filthy. We could do better than that. Any takers? Bueller?

congress sounds cool i wish it was real

"What do you think of Congress" well I think it would be a good idea

The world could be such a nice place if we allowed it. It's all so goddamn unnecessary. There's no need for any of it. It's so beautiful here. It should be so cool to be alive

Sometimes people like me who try to assess real political dynamics beneath the public theater are considered conspiracists. Hopefully how this played out will help more folks understand how much of the narrative we are told is just that: a story. News media is often used to conceal more than reveal.

Recently? The one that started at what Nikolai Tesla had for lunch, traveled through "Tesla claimed he'd invented a death ray," took a sharp turn to "Donald Trump's uncle was called in after Tesla's death to ascertain whether the death ray notes should be allowed to go to Czech relations....

See, this isn’t hard. Say the word ▶️ unconstitutional. Illegal or lawless will also do.