Antonio Dias

Amanda Kay McVety in Origins at OSU. The Second Disease Eradication: Rinderpest

It is difficult to exaggerate the enormity of the catastrophe. With famine came waves of epidemic disease. And the landscape was drastically altered, making conditions favorable to tsetse fly. per Wikipedia:

The land was left emptied of its cattle and its people, enabling the colonial powers Germany and Britain to take over Tanzania and Kenya with little effort. With greatly reduced grazing, grassland turned rapidly to bush. The closely cropped grass sward was replaced in a few years by woody grassland and thornbush, ideal habitat for tsetse flies. Wild mammal populations increased rapidly, accompanied by the tsetse fly. Highland regions of east Africa which had been free of tsetse fly were colonised by the pest, accompanied by sleeping sickness, until then unknown in the area. Millions of people died of the disease in the early 20th century.[69]

Over on Threads they're gnashing their teeth and raging over the fact that the Trump Administration via Pete Hegseth ordered the military to cut recognized religious categories from over 200 to 31. And most notably reclassifying the Church of Latter Day Saints as "non-Christian" and therefor not recognized.

LOL

No, really, I laughed out loud. I did. It's hilarious.

I laughed so loud, people came to my office door (and my office is a separate building from the rest of my property) to find out what was so funny.

Nearly seven in ten Mormons voted for Trump.

Why? Well, I'll leave the specifics as an exercise for the reader, but in general it's for the same reasons any other conservative religion voted for Trump: abortion and gay marriage and that one transgirl who wanted to play soccer. Fear of outsiders. Fear of change. Fear of government run by liberals. The idea that liberty is a zero sum game. Somewhere along the line, some holy man with a direct line to their god convinced the faithful that only Republicans, only Trump, would protect their religious freedoms to hate people not like them.

Generally speaking.

And in that, no different than the Southern Baptists, for example. Which is the shared belief they thought would protect their freedoms. Except the Evangelicals don't consider Mormons to be Christians and in a nation where Christian Nationalists got themselves elected to power based on the fears listed above and then decided to make this a Christians-only nation, well... here we are.

Mike Lee, hardcore Mormon Republican Senator from Utah, voted to confirm Pete Hegseth as Secretary of War, KNOWING HEGSETH was a Christian Nationalist because he literally has the symbols of that belief inked into his skin and was in fact separated from the military for his extremists views. And now, somehow, Lee is shocked, surprised, angered to find that Trump's military on the orders of Pete Hegseth will no longer recognize the Church of Latter Day Saints as a legitimate religion.

What's that bit about leopards eating faces?

I mean, have the Christian Nationalist White Supremacist day you voted for, right?

I laugh. I do. But it's a bitter laugh.

See, the thing is that *I* a non-believer voted for their religious freedom, and *they* voted for their own oppression. That's hilarious.

Ironic, indeed.

If it's any consolation, Trump's military will no longer recognize non-believers like me either. They'll all be treated as good little Christian Soldiers, Crusaders, marching off to war and making America great again. And in the end, if this goes on, I'll suffer the same fate as the Mormons. Maybe that'll give them a bitter chuckle there at the end, knowing they voted for it and I didn't. But somehow I doubt it'll matter much by then.

But, hey, at least that one transgirl wasn't allowed to play sports, amiright?

“It just crept up on me: the realization that if someone with a Time Machine asked me whether I wanted to live in the past or the future, I would instantly answer, “the past.” Not because the past was wonderful, but because the past was there. I am not afraid of the unknown; I am haunted by the known: climate catastrophes and political bloodshed and the unbearable ambivalence with which the powerful greet both.” ― Sarah Kendzior, The Last American Road Trip: A Memoir

+

It is, by any metric, a small country masquerading as a city.

It governs more lives and more wealth than most nations. If democratic socialism — housing reform, public banking, equitable taxation — functions here, it obliterates the myth that such governance can’t work at scale. The fear isn’t ideological. It’s empirical. Because if Mamdani can keep the lights on, reduce homelessness, and maintain economic growth without catering to Wall Street, then the capitalist gospel collapses under its own dead weight.

What terrifies the establishment isn’t failure. It’s feasibility.

If it works in New York, there’s no reason it can’t work in Nebraska. If it works in Queens, it can work in Kansas City. And once proof exists, belief becomes irrelevant. The ship of democracy, fully refitted, will keep sailing — and no one can claim it isn’t American."

Read A Little Poetry ·

“To move / cleanly. / Needing to be / nowhere else.”

Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.

—John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

Elevador, Lisboa

Hurricane in the Atlantic, SS Queen Elizabeth starboard

Provincetown