Time is of no mater to the sand

those were the days... Picture the scene: Monty Python's Flying Circus ran from 1969 to 1974. Nothing, I mean nothing, had been seen like this before on TV. To really appreciate their courage and brilliance you need to know something about these days when gay marriage was not even on the horizon and most people would lose their employment if they were outed at work. The first Pride Parade was in 1970 and it was only in 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association in their generosity declared that homosexuality was not a mental disorder. Being LGBTQ+ was gradually decriminalized in various parts of the UK and a bit later in the US starting slowly in the late '60's.

Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), a close Trump ally, announced Thursday that he will introduce legislation to sanction Canada and Canadian officials over the huge wildfires that have poured smoke and haze across the United States, creating hazardous air-quality conditions. “I’ll be introducing a bill next week to sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian government officials for this atrocity,” Moreno posted on social media.

“I didn’t know what xyz meant!!” why on earth would you repeat it then without looking it up first if you didn’t know the meaning. google is right there you can use it.

history fucked me up

You mean like this?

I loved this book! Same for The Timetables of Science: A Chronology of the Most Important People and Events in the History of Science.

okay but here’s an even cooler (free!) visualization that goes a step further and tracks ideas, devices, infrastructures, and systems of power

“The police spend very little of their time dealing with violent criminals—indeed, police sociologists report that only about 10% of the average police officer’s time is devoted to criminal matters of any kind. Most of the remaining 90% is spent dealing with infractions of various administrative codes and regulations: all those rules about how and where one can eat, drink, smoke, sell, sit, walk, and drive. If two people punch each other, or even draw a knife on each other, police are unlikely to get involved. Drive down the street in a car without license plates, on the other hand, and the authorities will show up instantly, threatening all sorts of dire consequences if you don’t do exactly what they tell you. The police, then, are essentially just bureaucrats with weapons. Their main role in society is to bring the threat of physical force—even, death—into situations where it would never have been otherwise invoked, such as the enforcement of civic ordinances about the sale of untaxed cigarettes.”

since i think many will have had the memory slip with just how many other atrocities have occured in the past 11 years, or are simply too young to remember, the last bit about the sale of untaxed cigarettes isn’t just some hypothetical, it’s a reference to the killing of eric garner

person just walked into my job and said, "oh! i've seen a lot of people in masks lately. there's not something going around is there?"

like even if we ignore covid & the flu, which is what most people mean when they ask this sort of thing, that is just the nature of human history. there's many other things you can "get" and any of them can cause permanent injury. we are SO lax about "stomach flu" but getting norovirus multiple times is Not Good.