We say to the watermelon
"We accept your offering of sugar. We will share our riches with you in return, that you may have the safety and plenty to grow even sweeter."
And we say to the watermelon
"You make these seeds to carry on your line, in the only way you know how. But we are clever, and if you leave your seeds behind we will spread your children farther than your seeds could ever have carried them."
And we say to the watermelon
"Another great summer. Let's do this again every year."
And we say to the watermelon
"Come travel the world with me! My friends want to meet you.
And we say to the watermelon
"I love you."
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Finished Werner Herzog's The Future of Truth (orig. Die Zukunft der Wahrheit), translated by Michael Hofmann.
Neither particularly long nor revelatory, but occupied me well enough while sitting on the bus and brushing my teeth. I disagree immensely with Herzog in many topics (politically, artistically), but in the same way that your otherwise repellent grandfather nevertheless will occasionally have an interesting story to tell, Herzog has an eclectic enough collection of life experiences and a weird enough voice that I was willing to disregard his more Old Man-ish opinions.
His short chapter on "ecstatic truth," a kind of mystic process involving the Greek ekstasis of "stepping out of yourself," resonated with me. I think some of the greatest revelations in my life occurred during ecstatic moments, usually caused by immense drug use and/or sadomasochistic sex. It's difficult to describe the feeling of transcendence (it's a combination of feeling a depth of understanding that persists even after sobriety and a strange dissolution of pain and pleasure as separate sensations) but it did lead to moments of immense personal growth and profound new configurations of empathy with my partner, and so I found myself nodding along with Herzog's deliberate split between truth as an "incessant striving" into "a vast twilit forest" versus facts as dry, somewhat inert things.
Still, not the kind of book I would really rush everyone to pick up. If you're a fast reader and you have nothing better to do, maybe
about LYME DISEASE CONSPIRACIES? okay i'll start a thread of my findings. note that for now i think i'm only at the tip of the iceberg for how crazy they get, BUT i'm probably hanging out in the part of the iceberg for real material harm to people.
but before i go into my current studies, i want you to know that my friend asked me if i'd found the people who believed that they'd been chosen by god because they got lyme disease. so. that's how crazy this could get
i think first i will do my due diligence with some #lymefacts, and then i'll go over some wild stuff i found stumbling upon misinfo
what is lyme disease?
lyme disease is caused by the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi, which is transferred to humans via blacklegged tick bites (1,2). ticks can actually carry all sorts of diseases, so i've seen it recommended lots of places that you should keep any tick you find feeding on you just in case. blacklegged ticks can bite and transfer the bacteria either as adult females or nymphs. The nymphs are especially dangerous because they are the size of a poppyseed and people don't notice them. i think this latter scenario may have happened to me, as i do actively check for ticks on account of they scare me LOL
anyway, the most classic sign of lyme disease is a bullseye shaped rash at the bite site, called erythema migrans, which can appear 3-30 days after the bite. HOWEVER, i learned recently that many Lyme disease rashes do not look like that! they can also look like this (source here with the photos bigger):
in fact, some people NEVER develop a rash! and other early stage lyme symptoms are super nonspecific: chills, fever, aches, fatigue, etc. like, there's hundreds of illnesses that can also cause that. so one of the issues in the field is that lyme is hard to diagnose, and then the late stage symptoms are scary. lyme if left untreated can affect your heart, your nervous system, can cause arthritis, all sorts of scary things.
so what's the treatment?
the recommendation for early stage lyme disease is a 10-14 day course of antibiotics. studies have repeatedly found that longer courses of antibiotics do not increase clearance rates of the bacteria and do increase risks of adverse affects from taking antibiotics (check the sources on this page for some examples). my understanding is the recommended procedure for doctors is, if a patient is presenting with the rash, could have been reasonably exposed to Lyme-carrying ticks, and the symptoms cannot be reasonably attributed to another cause, to just go ahead and treat with antibiotics. there ARE tests for Lyme disease, but they all have issues. the "gold standard" test is for antibodies, but it takes about a month for antibodies to build up in your body so false negative rates are high during the window when treatment is most useful. there's also PCR tests, but they seem to be most useful is limited contexts (3).
my experience going into a clinic was that the first question everyone i talked had was: "have you been hiking or camping recently?" (my answer was yes, and i DID find ticks on some plants along the trail. sigh.) then a doctor physically examined the rash, and we talked about other possible causes. since mine happened in a place on my body where i also place infusion sets for insulin, she thought cellulitis at an old site was possible, although the rash was more consistent with lyme (not hot or painful). since antibiotics would treat both, she gave me some.
i will say that when she first examined me, the doctor told me lyme was one of those disease that "resolve on their own" and i spent the time a guy took blood for some tests puzzling over how to tell her that was completely wrong. fortunately, when she came back to tell me her treatment recommendations, she prescribed exactly what the CDC recommended, so I think she did go double-check herself. I'm including this anecdote so you know that I completely understand that sometimes doctors make bad calls for various reasons. i've also seen people reporting that doctors made them wait for an antibody test before treating, or doctors not taking the rash serious (especially on darker skin)
now, another thing to know about lyme: a small portion of patients have lingering symptoms even after they've cleared the infection. think long covid. this is called "post-treatment lyme disease syndrome" (PTLDS). lyme disease researchers and specialists prefer this term over "chronic lyme disease" because the latter implies the bacteria are persisting (4).
so what's the conspiracy?
there seem to be multiple (like i found a rando tiktok about the US government engineering it on purpose?), but the rabbit hole i fell down today is just... an insane amount of misinfo on Lyme in general and also the very existence of "chronic Lyme disease."
you see, before i went to a doctor, i spent a long time looking at photos of rashes trying to figure out if i needed to go in at all. and so i ended up on some lyme disease subreddits. and then i noticed, there's all these really weird comments making really weird treatment recommendations. common trends:
recommendations for "protocols" by non-doctors (lists of supplements and diet recommendations, basically)
"herbs"
reminders to demand excessively long antibiotics courses from doctors. according to many random redditors, 10-14 simply won't work and you need at least 8 weeks
several people dismissing common big pharma labs and recommending specialized labs. one redditor even offered to "help" set up an appointment with their own lab (since the one a doctor might send you to is "rubbish")
constant talk about "lyme literate medical doctors," whose appointments are not covered by insurance but you can gets drugs and tests that ARE covered!
generally incorrect explanations of antibody tests, how antibiotics work, etc, but all said with great conviction and surprising similarity between users
insisting lyme is almost always transmitted with other pathogens and everyone has coinfections (this is possible but I don't think very common)
at first, i thought it was funny. we've also seen someone in the comments of something boldly diagnosing OP based entirely on vibes. but then it kept being on EVERY photo, and multiple people making the same sorts of comments too.
then i started looking around the subreddits more, and not just pulling up photos of rashes via google. types of posts i found:
people describing how they "cured" their "chronic lyme" after years of very complex diets, months on antibiotics, extensive herb usages, etc. and you can too!
posts complaining about how their doctor wants to do stuff like "get a scan of a part of the body that hurts" instead of "treating OP for lyme" and then all the comments recommend OP leave their doctor for a better LLMD (again, lyme literate medical doctor)
people describing symptoms and begging for recommendations on treatment, and then getting bizarre and unscientific answers. all of these stories have a reason they think the symptoms are caused by "chronic lyme" but none of them are like... hmm. listen, i do believe these posters ARE having symptoms, i just don't think the answer is "it's from lyme disease"
just truly heart breaking posts about mental health, filled with sympathetic comments making completely batshit recommendations for treatment
deep fixations on coinfecting pathogens, including one the CDC says has no evidence of even being transmitted by ticks. i know a lot less about these specific illnesses but i DO know a lot of the verbiage about coinfections is just inaccurate/wrong
so wtf was up with that?? i'm still investigating, but i read this article. apparently there's lots of "lyme specialty labs" opening up with their own "in-house protocols" which do NOT necessarily have accurate or useful tests for lyme disease and other tick vectored illnesses (5). as far as i can tell, such companies exist to prey on anxiety about illness and chatter about expanding tick populations and tick-associated diseases. i think one of the general side effects of increased public education about diseases like lyme is that while you do overall increase health outcomes, you do get more people who falsely self-diagnose and then potentially spiral over it
and lyme disease is the perfect storm for this, isn't it? the correlation between people with health anxiety and fixation on bugs as a source of uncleanliness is pretty high. lyme has very nonspecific but scary symptoms and ticks are common, so you can imagine almost anything might be lyme. PTLDS is real, and so are complications from late stage lyme if the infection wasn't caught in the rash stage (such as: if you never developed rash). throw in some bad doctors who don't want to work with patients on their symptoms, some MDs willing to pedal "lyme literate" treatments of months of antibiotics, and low-quality "lyme specialty" testing companies passing out false results.... it's a perfect storm
and of course, if you have a whole community of people backing up your fixations (they call themselves "lymies"), then it gets easier and easier to slip into conspiratorial thinking instead of entertaining anything medically sound. again, i'm sure the symptoms are real! i'm sure it's easy to find doctors who are assholes or unhelpful and hard to find effective treatments! but holy shit, do not trust anything anyone talking about "chronic lyme disease" says
conclusion
please look up tick safety for your local area and any area you might travel to for outdoor activities. wear insect repellant. if you get a tick bite, look up how to safely remove it and don't freak out and toss it-- ID it if you can and look up what disease it might carry in that area. if you think you have lyme or were bit by a blacklegged tick (or other tick that might carry other disease), consult an actual doctor and not reddit.
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I have a bisexual guppy and its funny as hell to watch because it seems like he’s only bi out of desperation. Like all of the female guppies are unimpressed by him, and dont accept his mating displays, and every time he fails, he goes over to a SPECIFIC male guppy (the prettiest male guppy in the tank) like PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE and that male guppy always lets him????
It's only natural to ask questions like this when encountering such a disgusting creature, but rest assured- it's quite harmless!
Meet the hampter.
Hammers are Europe's largest species of insect. They are mostly found in plains, mountains, parking lots, underpasses, the savannah, landfills, trees, and shurbs. They are heavily endangered because they are too stupid to drink water if it's not in a water bottle manufactured for small animals. But evolution has produced a remarkable solution: a female hamper can lay thousands of eggs every day! Most of her young will die of dehydration, but the sheer numbers of hamspers makes it inevitable that at least some will find a water bottle and thus survive to sexual maturity.
Hapster biologist Dr. Lexapro Beaufort said in an interview, "I know of them. They like to sniff around in the dirt for seeds and grass and discarded cigarettes. They like to dig holes in the ground. They were not created by the same God that created everything else."
They can even be kept as pets! One proud hamser mommy had this to say. "Yeah, mine is named Keith and he fucking sucks. He just hides in a hole and only comes out when he hears me rattling my adderall prescription."
Wow! Truly the hater is the fascinating creature of planet earth.
it’s so magical and beautiful that there are sprawling interconnected cave systems carved deep into the earth by various geological forces and you don’t have to go in them. there are miles and miles of stone passageways in total darkness that require you to exhale all the air out of your lungs to squeeze through parts of them and you don’t have to be there. some of these squeezes are underwater and require cave divers to take off their oxygen tanks and push them through ahead of them and me i am above ground looking at the sky as we speak. there are untold subterranean wonders no human has ever seen and i will not be the one to discover them #grateful #blessed
so true there could be any number of undiscovered species down there all of which are none of my business and never will be. peace and love on (the surface of) planet earth 💕
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The truth of the matter is that if you’re going to seriously pursue writing, not every line can go hard. It can’t be hard 100% of the time, or the hard just becomes soft. Sometimes the line just has to get the writing from point a to point b.
i need to make it clear to everyone misreading this that the girl is attracted to the lanyard and only the lanyard - that singular item takes an otherwise normal t shirt and jeans outfit and transforms it into a work uniform
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PBS and NPR were never beholden to the US government.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created so that the US government could fund public media without public media being influenced by the government. It was a private non-profit funded by the government, not a part of the government itself. This is by design. This was a good thing. It meant that even small local TV and radio stations, could afford to create media for the public good, without government influence.
This meant TV and radio stations for poor communities. For non-english speaking communities. For rural communities. For minorities. It meant that free and accessible media could be created for everyone, even if the government didn't like it.
That's why conservatives defunded it.
Because if they couldn't control it, and if it helped the people they hated, then they would have to destroy it. Do you really think that a fascist government would defund their own propaganda machine?
Not only is the idea that PBS before being defunded was propaganda wrong, but ignores the fact that defunding it is going to have long-term negative effects on vulnerable communities.
OP of the post in the screenshot called me an idiot and blocked me for pointing this out. So I'm setting the record straight. The CPB was never our enemy.
