Moonlight Shadow

Argentina has, historically, the right to public FREE quality university for all citizens and residents on its soil. This is considered a right and, although the system has its faults, it's considered the pillar of Argentina's middle professional class and a tool for upward mobility.

Last week, against HEAVY popular citizen support for the national public university system, Congress decided to support Javier Milei's veto that halts the public university's funding to inoperative levels.

Although the goverment and other friendly politicians assure this is about keeping numbers balanced, the money the Argentinian goverment gives to the system is less than 0,14% of the GDP. This is ideological. This is about less rights.

The President has claimed in interviews before and after his presidency that he considers free university "a degeneracy" and useless, although the Argentinian public university system has been lauded internationally (with high global rankings of UBA, Universidad de Cordoba, UNLP and Nobel prizes for its graduates) and is considered one of the tools for the working class's social mobility and the creation of Argentina's professional middle class.

The response to these measures that directly goes against the people's wishes have been instant.

There are now massive university takeovers all over the country, including very conservative areas and faculties with a population that refrains from these measures and have indeed voted for Milei's Libertarian party. Argentinian's Student Movement is historic, relentless and goes back to the 1918 Reform. It has coordinated and birthed several historical moments country-wise and was famously targeted by authoritarian regimes (like 1976's US-backed Military Dictatorship'a genocide and 1990s Neoliberalist Menem's policies).

The last two decades the movement has been disjointed, even fangless, but it seems Milei and the Congress's blatant corruption and disregard for what is considered a basic right has awakened a dormant beast.

Every student in Latin America looks up to their system and, honestly, so should ever student in the world. Hell, every LATAN student looks up to their student movement. Their public universities frequently rank on the top universities in LATAN, despite the right wing pushback that says that no entrance exam and free tuition would lower quality of its education.

@elfspectations close, but no cigar! It's my favourite expression, which in finnish is a cooking pun. The word "stir", as in stirring a soup/porridge/etc is also the word for "confuse", and "to burn to the bottom of the pan" is also used for a person experiencing burnout.

Now, I need you to understand that Dan was not some sort of Coyote Peterson type. He looked and dressed like someone who would pretend to get drunk off of non-alcoholic beer and say “bruh” unironically. He looked like the “bro I am straight up not having a good time” guy. But there he was, literally living in the forest with a wolf pack, recording and uploading videos with his phone.

One of his videos opened with him talking to the camera about “yeah, the pack went hunting today and just made a kill”. He turned his wrist to pan his phone over his shoulder, where four wolves are pinning down and tearing into a whitetail buck who is two gasps away from death.

“We’re actually hoping to make two kills today,” he added, panning his phone the other way to show two more wolves latching onto a second deer. “The Old Lady’s pups are growing really fast and it’s getting harder to provide for them. Once they can join the hunt, that’ll be a huge weight off everyone’s shoulders.”

He panned back to the first deer, where the wolves were now tearing into the meal. “I’m really hoping they’ll leave the pelt on this one intact,” he said. “I need a new cape. Winter is coming, guys.” 

The last shot of that video was him running through the trees with the pack, with a still-bloody deer hide draped over his shoulders.

I can’t remember any more of his specific videos, but the gist I got from them was that he actually was a contributing member of the pack (hence the “we”) and had been raised at least partially by the wolves themselves. Not sure how they raised him into this dudebro-looking twenty-something with a name like Dan, but they did?

Where did he get his phone? How did he pay for his data? Who taught him English? Why did he dress like that?

I've graduated from war criminal to terrorist

They shoved herbs in their breathing hose because they knew the air was bad and hoped it would help, and *they were right* in theory. The plague itself was not an airborn virus, but they couldn’t know that and it wasn’t the only thing killing people at the time anyway, and they covered *all* their bases. If they’d had the technological knowhow to make air tanks, or even better air filters, they would’ve. They just made the best air filters they could.

What we think they wore isn’t exactly what they wore, and what they actually wore would later be repurposed into scuba suits (and thus spacesuits too) and *actual hazmat suits*, because the theory was sound, the materials were just lacking, and honestly what they did with the materials they had was hardcore.

they wore full face protection which avoids the most obvious mucosal transmission routes

INCLUDING GLASS IN THE EYEHOLES. They invented safety goggles before most of the world had nailed down corrective eye glasses yet

they wore additional head protection to cover seams in their mask/hoods

they oiled and waxed all their clothes to make it fluid-resistant

they wore separate but tight fitting equally if not more fluid-resistant gloves and/or armcuffs so they could keep hand contamination to a minimum even when dressing/undressing AND they only wore the suit in areas they thought was contaminated and took it off before entering uncontaminated areas

they may have used herbed vinegar to clean, and if the stories are true this was clever because 1) it’s available and portable 2) pretty effective as far as medieval disinfectants go versus the damage it does the the user (as opposed to what they had for bleach at the time, and the actual percentage level in alcohols at the time which was mostly insufficient for task as well as being needed for more important things); vinegar is *still* a decent disinfectant even now

It honestly took doctors well into the twentieth century to get that level of obsessive attention to hygiene and cross-contamination back. A whole lot of babies and mothers wouldn’t’ve died, for instance, if a plague doctor instead of an obstetrician supported the birth because A PLAGUE DOCTOR WOULD KNOW TO WASH THEIR GODDAMNED HANDS.

Actual plague doctor’s outfits:

supposedly some plague doctors would carry hollow canes in order to check the pulse without needing to use their hands or take off their gloves? it was sort of like a very early example of a stethescope

i'm over 2 weeks late but happy 20th anniversary to the Most Important comic book cover of all time. here is my homage