Apparently it’s #InternationalCatDay, so here’s a picture of Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys walking a cat on a leash at Caribou Ranch in 1974.

This isn't what makes the DRC an "Ebola hotspot." This is racist bullshit (and I'm a medical anthropologist whose whole job is to care about how culture shapes health). Conflict, chronic under-investment, and US carelessness make DRC a hotspot.

Fascism can’t succeed without centrism, because far fewer people will admit to being a fascist than will endorse its policies — especially when they’re allowed to do so with the barest minimum necessary plausible deniability.

This. I'm so sick of the Democratic party apparatus going "but why aren't people voting for us?!... *wait*, no, we didn't want to actually reflect on the reasons! That might move us left, we can't go LEFT, then we can't pretend it's still 1992! 🎵 Don't... stop... thinkin' about tomorrow..."🎵

I was going to say this is crazy but it’s not. There is a book by a medical sociologist called Dying of Whiteness about the supremacist politics some voters choose over their own lives (literally) & now we have a government that is using the same logic to make national policy.

Because understanding what disabled trans folks think isn't the goal - finding further excuses to exclude both from society is. And the easiest way to do that is to pit disabled people against trans people - "Look, one minority is oppressing another! Whew, cis and abled people aren't the problem!"🙄

In The Rock 5/23/1969: The Who release their fourth album, ‘Tommy’, the first album to be billed as a rock opera. It hits number four on the album chart and sells over two million copies in the U.S. #TheWho #RockHonorRoll

I love Bruce, and I get that this was Stephen's night, but it's disappointing to hear him say Stephen is "the first guy in America to lose a show because the president can't take a joke." Tommy and Dick Smothers would disagree - something I'd expect Bruce to know!

I've loved both of these men for as long as I can remember. Nothing delights me more than knowing that Al is as geekily delighted as I was when I got to hang out with Paul... except the fact that Al alt-texted the photo so we can all enjoy it. Humanity is so lucky to have these two spreading joy.

There is so much poetry in Stephen Colbert celebrating his finale on the exact stage where the Beatles changed culture in 1964. Singing "Hello Goodbye" surrounded by his family, his band, and his crew before Paul McCartney flipped the final power switch. This was the perfect full-circle goodbye!

Fantastic interview with my favorite fiction writer, the incomparable Roddy Doyle; aka the man who inspired me to shoot for writing 5k a day when I was a kid. I still manage it most days; whether it's any good or not is another matter! www.theguardian.com/books/2026/m...

My keystone talk on #LongCovid from last year is now online, basically 2 short talks: From 6:00-16:20: Craniocervical instability & related issues in LC: youtu.be/53ESiGehdKY?... 16:20-21:00: Illness duration (changes & progression we see in LC over time) youtu.be/53ESiGehdKY?...

Yeah, it's meh. Some good ideas, some stuff totally off-base, nothing surprising. Honestly they were right to abandon it instead of finishing it. To the extent there's a scandal here, it's why the DNC wasn't able to put together anything, not even ways to improve organizational infrastructure. 🤷‍♂️

Glad this is out. But the fundraising analysis section—which I was interviewed for and provided data and analysis for—only includes fundraising totals, not the efficiency analysis I provided. Could be that they didn’t finish it. But what I found is a big deal. More on this soon.

I'm only halfway through, but despite the blank sections, there's already enough here to make me wish we could charge the people responsible with a crime akin to malfeasance in public office. Polling was shuttered, VP shut out, and state offices not fully staffed til October 2024 (and much more).

We are not the same.

Music has always had the ability to speak to us, and for us, in a way nothing else can. That’s why, if you want to understand the last 250 years of American life, one of the best ways to do it is to listen to the music that defined them.

I’m not sure why this isn’t being mentioned more, but: IRS policy for 50 years has been that the sitting president & VP get audited every year, in an effort to reassure the public they’re not corruptly abusing the office to enrich themselves.

On the bright side, if we keep going down this path the entire Internet will become obsolete and we can start over as a species

Is AI better at coding than a junior engineer? Maybe! Will we ever have senior engineers if we replace all junior engineers with AI? We will not Is AI better at writing then a 6th grader? Maybe! Will anyone learn to write of all 6th graders use AI? They will not

The AI boom is unsustainable because the entire thing is predicated on cannibalizing the future. Is this a better way to search? Maybe! Will there be anything new for the AI to search if no one gets web traffic from Google Search anymore? There will not.

About a decade ago, the perception that society was getting slightly better for marginalised people utterly broke the brains of every person in charge of things. How are you taking a service you became so synonmous with that your company's name became a verb and fucking it up like this?

Wahey, go Gunners! I love a team that gives me a free cardiac workout when I watch, and Arsenal have certainly done that this season. 😁 Wish I had someone to celebrate with, but English football fans are thin on the ground in my part of the US, so I'm left to bask in the bluesky joy from afar.

Maybe it could just allow me to search for an exact phrase when I put it in quotes, you know, like it used to, rather than returning a shitload of fuzzy “maybe you meant this?” results. NO I DID NOT MEAN THAT, I PUT IT IN QUOTES FFS - oh, and don’t talk to me for chrissakes you are email

He reads the silly post He reads the scoldy post He reads the jokey post And the pedantic post He reads the posts that remind him of the bad site He reads the posts that remind him of the worst site Don’t screenshot that, troll behavior

"The best outbreak investigation we have contradicts the message we have of close, prolonged contact,” says Professor at Harvard, Exposure and Risk Science, Joseph Allen: “It’s not just intimate contact, it’s not just close contact. There is evidence that it spread without those things happening."

So I guess the San Diego Zoo posted the whole Pet Sounds album on their channel, set to thematically appropriate footage of their animals just chillin

Going to back to March, I still want to know why the government isn’t changing the broken guidance and showing some accountability. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

The Platonic form of New York Times higher education coverage: a featured Sunday op-ed, by Peter Baker's son, about how AI has completely transformed higher education, by which he means "Stanford." 10/10, no notes.

This summary of different early medieval literature is still one of my favourite things on the internet. #medievalsky

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them

I think these numbers remind us that we need to grapple with whether Twitter gets the amount of attention it does because people use it or because journalists still use it as their assignment editor and as the laziest, most inaccurate “Here’s the word on the street” source on earth.

Calm-mongers: "There is no asymptomatic transmission of hantavirus." Precaution-pushers: "How do you know that?" CM: "We've never seen it." PP: "Do you test asymptomatic people who have been exposed?" CM: "No." PP: "Why not?" CM: "Because there is no asymptomatic transmission of hantavirus."

saw this on an ACT UP poster from 1988 at the Poster House museum today. the more things change :)

Okay, universe... I don't know what Roger has against Atlanta, but if you could help me make a ride to Nashville happen? Please? (Seriously, if anyone wants to drive me, I'll pay your way. I just want to see *one* solo show of Roger's, and the *getting there* has never worked out!)

this clip from several years ago on an Aussie station is best visual I've seen on aerosol movement I've seen. (the way aerosol swirls out of a room when you open a door is like YIKES)

Adding after conversation—I had to reorder 3M Auras today and it was nearly double the price from the same seller as last time. If you don’t have masks, I would get on that before panic buying sets in.

This 1952 memo from the Pentagon UFO files is superb There is no point preparing for aliens ‘because no one of consequence is going to take this rubbish seriously unless it happens. At that point, our policy will be determined in the traditional manner of grand panic.’ 🤣 www.war.gov/medialink/uf...

Attention #health journalists reporting on #hantavirus outbreaks. Critical question for public health and infection control leaders: "If the precautions you put in place are inadequate, will you accept responsibility for the consequences?" Get that answer first. They'll happily gamble... 🧵:

He's going to go too late, isn't he, and leave us to pay the price for his self-interest? Keir 'Biden' Starmer.

It continues to be bizarre to me that most humans would rather play chicken with their health (and lives) than don an N95. Is everyone that emotionally fragile? That susceptible to peer pressure? That spoiled? What is it that's so *broken* in so many people?

Every suspected hantavirus case took a commercial flight to get home. They were in crowded airports and on airplanes. They weren’t isolated. They weren’t instructed to mask. No precautions were taken. The lack of precautionary principle is maddening. If you’re traveling, wear an N95.

As a Medical Microbiologist (now retired) trained and experienced in working with Biological Safety Level 3 (BSL 3) pathogens, such as Hanta virus, I would strongly disagree with the WHO in their recommendation that a medical mask is sufficient protection! Need N95 as minimum, N99 or PAPR better.

I've spent yesterday and today talking to researchers across the globe trying to understand the hantavirus outbreak aboard the cruise ship MV Hondius. My story in @science.org is here (and some threaded thoughts coming): www.science.org/content/arti... 🧪 #IDsky

With AIDS—once they knew what was happening—they at least had a few years of able bodiedness to fight with. By the time ppl realize (by experiencing ME/LC themselves… no one *really* believes otherwise) how devastating these diseases are & how absolutely abandoned we are, they’re too sick to fight

And by the way, Biden was squashed down on top of progressives arguing that he’d do nothing to make the systemic changes needed to prevent another trump, and we were told to vote for him or else. So we did. And look what happened.

Biden ran on having good working relationships with republicans in Congress and being able to get them to see reason. He utterly failed at this and seemed flummoxed by their behavior at every turn. I have plenty of space to be mad at both.

In this morning’s Russian newspapers: Moscow warns Kyiv not to target the Red Square parade; problems with Russian bonds, with “almost 25% of the bond market at risk of default”; and what a newspaper joke section is saying about the state of the Russian economy. #ReadingRussia