Decadent as Fuck

An elderly woman I knew died a few months ago; I came across her home on Zillow, cycled through the photographs of it, all empty. The next day it was gone from the site, sold; these two happenings were separate, sequential punches to the heart.

There was a nice winding, hilly road that was as thrilling as a roller coaster the first time I drove it on not very much experience behind the wheel of a car, which somehow got shorter and shorter in experience compared to memory each time I drove it, and they just went through and widened it to four lanes and reshaped the sharp turns away and leveled out the hills and it isn't the same road anymore.

The Minnesota State Fair has a place called Heritage Square, and it used to be this tight cozy place with wooden booths and stalls, all traditional, and now they rebuilt it and it's got these futuristic architectural shelter things that all the stores are under, high-roofed and spread out and very modern-aesthetic and it's not remotely the same space anymore.

Fields and forests turn into developments and fast food joints. Things get replaced with newer, modern variants that also happen to be significantly less interesting.

In the UK, 2,300,000 people have Long Covid with 514,000 people reporting Long Covid for more than two years, and 1,100,000 for more than a year, according to the latest ONS data. 438,000 people have developed Long Covid since Omicron so far, representing 24% of total Long Covid patients. Unsurprisingly, this is fuelling labour shortages. Currently around 32,000 children have had it for at least twelve months. In the US, since Omicron, infants are now being hospitalised at a higher rate than the over 75s. Globally, 144 million are conservatively expected to have Long Covid. This is a mass disabling event with multiple unknown long term consequences. These people are now deemed surplus, as so many disabled people are by capitalist society. As of June there were 10,000 NHS staff off sick with Long Covid for more than 3 months and many others burnt out. The NHS in England, Scotland and Wales has also recently decided to end indefinite sick pay for healthcare workers suffering from Long Covid. Healthcare workers with Long Covid have been abandoned.

The average across the US is that 30% of those who get Covid suffer from long COVID symptoms.

30%

It’s estimated that the US is just shy of 100 million cases, though it’s tough to confirm due to at home testing and general reduction in data collection in the past year especially.

That means in the US alone 30 million people became disabled in the last 2.5 years.

That’s approaching 10% of the entire US population.

Yes, I thought, believe us.

Then, No, I thought, I’m not a fucking witch. Believe anyone who smells gas. If someone smells gas, believe them.

the thing is: it doesn’t appreciably do that, because the feathers wick up water and mud, which cancels out any insulation advantage they might hypothetically confer, and also it wasn’t even put there on purpose.

the Leg Get More Hair gene is just linked to the Bones Get More Big gene. when you breed any lineage of horses to have bigger bones–not just taller, but chunkier–the leg hair just happens anyway. so every single breed of draft horse has feathered legs, and even carriage horses like friesians get feathers once they hit a certain threshold of lorge.

I’M NOT GOING TO BE REMEMBERED LIKE THIS