Not Chives

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

The note count as of 3:12 PM EDT was 742.4K.

We’re almost 258,000 notes short of the Committment To The Bit Tumblr Curse goal, or what I am choosing to call:

The Bear Nessiecity

West Papua’s Indigenous people have called for a boycott of KitKat, Smarties and Aero chocolate, Oreo biscuits and Ritz crackers, and the cosmetics brands Pantene and Herbal Essences, over alleged ecocide in their territory.

All are products that contain palm oil and are made, say the campaigners, by companies that source the ingredient directly from West Papua, which has been under Indonesian control since 1963 and where thousands of acres of rainforest are being cleared for agriculture.

More than 90 West Papuan tribes, political organisations and religious groups have endorsed the call for a boycott, which they say should continue until the people of West Papua are given the right to self-determination.

Raki Ap, a spokesperson for the United Liberation Movement for West Papua, which is overseeing the call, said: “These products are linked to human rights violations, in the first place, because West Papuans are being forced, with violence, to get off the land where they’ve lived for thousands of years, which has now resulted in ecocide.

“This is a signal to the countries who are dealing with Indonesia, especially those in the Pacific region, to take notice of who they’re dealing with and how they are basically allowing Indonesia to continue the colonial project in West Papua, the human rights violations, and also ecocide.”

West Papuans say more than 500,000 of their people have been killed by the occupation in the past six decades, while millions of acres of their ancestral lands have been destroyed for corporate profit. Indonesia, already the world’s largest palm oil exporter, is now breaking ground in West Papua on the world’s biggest single palm oil plantation, as well as a sugar cane and biofuel plantation that will be the largest deforestation project ever launched.

“West Papuans’, especially the ULMWP, position is very clear: we are a modern-day colony,” said Ap, speaking from the Netherlands.

“Indonesia hijacked the right to self-determination in 1962 when the Netherlands and Indonesia signed an agreement without any consultation in West Papua … After that, in 1969, there was a so-called referendum, which wasn’t fair, which wasn’t under international law, one man, one vote: just 1,025 men were handpicked at gunpoint to vote for integration to Indonesia.

our lives matter more than your fucking nostalgia.

XKCD: Degree Off

“Smallpox was.”

For most of history, smallpox was (!!!) the scourge that haunted human civilisations. We have evidence of smallpox from mummies c. 1350BCE in Egypt. It’s speculated to be one of causative agents of the Plague of Athens c. 430BCE. There were outbreaks of smallpox in Angola in 1484, in South Africa in 1731 that wiped out entire clans of Khoisan people. There was at least one major smallpox epidemic almost every decade across Europe.

Smallpox was transmitted by droplet/aerosol infection; it tore through even the smallest population centres. Typical smallpox incurred a blistering fever, raised pustules, debilitating joint and back pain; if you lived — and that was a fat fucking if, as typical smallpox had a mortality rate of 30% — you’d have tell-tale pockmark scarring, and face stigma for the rest of your life. Some were left blinded.

The worst form of the disease was haemorrhagic smallpox; all the agony of typical smallpox, with the addition of skin haemorrhage and pinpoint haemorrhage in the spleen, liver, kidneys and gonads. Near-universally fatal, haemorrhagic smallpox made up 5-10% of all cases. Of this number, 72% were children.

The global smallpox vaccination campaigns of 1958 to 1977 were a monumental effort by the World Health Organization and its global associates, backed by incredibly diligent public health work and epidemiological monitoring.

Wherever there were outbreaks, there was herd immunisation. Health bodies campaigned tirelessly for the general population to be immunised. In the ‘70s, a concerted effort was made by the WHO to ensure vaccines were administered in the most remote and vulnerable communities in the Horn of Africa, South Asia and the Pacific.

In 1980, the world was officially, finally free of one of it’s oldest adversaries; universal vaccination had been achieved, and there was no population that could act as a reservoir for smallpox.

If mankind has only one great achievement, it’s the smallpox vaccine; to date, smallpox is the only human disease to be completely eradicated.

After over two millennia of suffering, mass disability and death, humanity finally had the means to give one of it’s biggest threats the biggest possible fuck you, and through scientific and public health collaboration, careful epidemiological monitoring and countless hours of on-the-ground vaccination efforts, managed to blot it from existence entirely.

Where there is vaccine coverage, childhood diseases with high morbidity and mortality rates like whooping cough, diphtheria, influenza B and have dropped.

We have vaccines for TB, another of our greatest and longest adversaries.

With enough effort to counter misinformation, more people fighting for vaccine equality, patent free medication for communicable disease, and universal vaccine coverage, and everyone making sure to keep up to date with their vaccinations, one day, we could be fortunate enough to be able to say;