Current mood: stupid and tired

Sign literally 10 feet away:

no. all of the hospitals in gaza have NOT been destroyed. all of them have been ATTACKED, none of htem are fully functioning anymore, but, NO, they are not all fully destroyed.

tweets by palestinians mourning the safety of the last FULLY FUNCTIONING hospital have been misconstrued as "no hospitals are left" and that misunderstanding leads to a sense of hopelessness that can translate into less medical aid going through to the hospitals that remain--damaged, attacked, more vulnerable than ever before but still standing.

israel has destroyed a large amount of the FUNCTIONALITY of all 36 hospitals but doctors are still doing their best within many of them. and need aid, calls for support, power.

The Treaty is an agreement between Maori and the Crown, now the NZ government. It is the founding document of new zealand and is recognised as a constitutional document today; it is the only treaty of its kind/time still honoured, and it is the steps we’ve taken through the Treaty to provide restitution and build an ongoing relationship with Maori and their iwi (tribes) that has allowed the relationship between Maori and the government to thrive where other indigenous groups have struggled to achieve recognition of their rights.

This is going to be entirely undone. Not only is this issue inflammatory and a threat to race relations in Aotearoa, leaked documents show the proposed “reinterpretation” wants to negate pretty much the entirety of the legal rights provided to Maori under the treaty. For example, the treaty article that guarantees land rights for Maori will be reinterpreted to guarantee land rights for “all New Zealanders”. Which means this article would be essentially meaningless for Maori.

By removing Maori from the context they are trying to put Maori on an “equal footing” with all New Zealanders; they are riding the idea that Maori have special rights and privileges above that of the average New Zealander. Obviously this is bullshit but it’s effective rhetoric and there’s a grain of truth to in that the extent of Maori rights hadn’t been clearly defined due to the ongoing nature of the process. So this has got a lot of people with a poor grasp of the issues very upset and baying for change.

There is a hui (meeting) being held today for all the iwi to begin discussions of how Maori will respond to this. New Zealand politics isn’t very interesting usually, but our progress on indigenous rights, until now, has been absolutely ahead of the field. If you care about indigenous rights globally, you should care about this, because in the same way Australia’s referendum loss has spurred on this action, the loss of rights here will spur other right wing governments to be similarly bold to their own indigenous groups.

Indigenous rights in New Zealand are under attack. They are meeting today to discuss it, and New Zealand will be listening, but I want the world to be listening. Because our government needs the shame of being called out by more than just the people who they’ve already decided don’t vote for them.

Maori have a long and proud history of fighting for their rights, and they’ll do it again here. And I’ll be on the pickets beside them, but there’ll be plenty of my own pickets to attend, because this government is radical in every sense of the word.

When the only futuristic gadget I want that doesn't exist yet when it SHOULD are those cup noodles from Cowboy bebop where you just pull the tag at the bottom of it and the noodles are instantly warmed.

'fragging' is the colloquialism for troops attacking their superiors in the vietnam war (not just officers, but just as often NCOs or even just peers they disliked). it was called that because it would typically be done with fragmentation grenade, but not usually during a battle or anything. that wasn't exactly very reliable, plus it didn't exactly leave you with an isolated target

rather, it was the use of fragmentation grenades *on base*; your classic fragging consisted of rolling a fragmentation grenade under the door into the latrines at night after your target went in. this was enabled by the fact that firebases (the typical field base used by americans in the vietnam war) would have crates of fragmentation grenades easily accessible, as the response to hearing something rattle against the barbed wire at night was to simply throw a grenade at it and wait until morning to see if you got anything rather than risk being lured out. so it was a very good anonymous tool for assassinations.

the scale and fear of fragging had an enormous cultural effect on the united states. in the military, it contributed to degrading morale and a variety of programs to counter it, including the first-ever anonymous tip phone line for soldiers to complain about officers. the realization that soldiers would simply kill their superiors if pushed seriously degraded effectiveness in a war where the primary tactic was to go out into the bush and deliberately pick fights. its a huge part of why the US military switched to a volunteer model.

when stories of fragging made it home, it was an immense culture shock for midcentury america, and cemented itself into the news and media. through the 70s and 80s, there was a *lot* of US media about the Vietnam War. the stuff in the 70s was largely extremely critical and extremely cynical, largely made by people who opposed the war, but in the reagan era you saw an uptick in war action movies which... while not typically set in the Vietnam War, were largely concerned with refighting and 'winning' it in the narrative, creating big, stupid action movies like the rambo sequels

this sort of dumbass action movies, along with heavy metal and the satanic panic, heavily influence early first person shooter games. Kevin Cloud, one of the artists on the original Doom, used 'frag' as a term to distinguish killing players from killing Doom's monsters. Doom was built as a single player game first, a cooperative game second, and a multiplayer versus game third, so the language of 'you fragged X' was ported from the cooperative game (where it was used to indicate you'd killed a friendly, idiot) into the multiplayer deathmatch.

from there, it made it to Quake and Unreal, the big arena shooters of the late 90s, and remained the term pretty much until all First Person Shooters were subsumed into the increasingly military-propaganda-y Call of Duty games post Modern Warfare. i have no proof of this, but i suspect it was a term that CoD wanted nothing to do with as they became increasingly reliant on connections to the military-industrial complex, so the term was carefully kept out of marketing and slowly killed it among gamers.

(Please note that my area of research involves dry sanitation methods for Salmonella cross-contamination within raw flour on equipment surfaces, not oats. Since they are both low-moisture foods, I feel confident using some generalizations to provide a bigger picture.)

1. Some Salmonella strains have desiccation resistance.

For those unfamiliar with microbiology, desiccation resistance means that the bacteria can survive in dry environments. Most bacteria need a certain amount of water available to them to survive. Salmonella serovars like S. Typhimurium, S. enteritidis, and S. Mbandaka can thrive in dry environments. These serovars have been linked to food recalls in the US for the past decade. Additionally, the dried bacteria can resist heat and chemical treatments, making it very hard to kill. This ties into the next problem.

2. In dry production environments, you can't use water to clean or sanitize equipment.

It's important to keep dry food products dry during processing. If they get "too wet," yeasts, molds, and bacteria can grow, impacting the quality and safety of the product. This is the main reason why the industry can't use water or water-containing sanitation solutions on their equipment. To clean, the industry uses brushes, scrapers, and dry ice blasting to remove debris. To sanitize (kill bacteria), some techniques include non-aqueous sanitizers, UV radiation, and superheated steam. These methods can take a lot of time and labor to complete, especially on gigantic processing lines like Quaker.

3. Pressure from upper management to "produce as fast as possible" may have cut down on time for sanitation.

This is slight conjecture, but I went to a sanitation workshop last year and chatted with some sanitation professionals who work in dry environments. I asked them about this problem specifically: "How do you get everything done in lets say, six hours?" One of them laughed and said "It's more like four and a half!"

The pressure from upper management to continuously produce is on everyone in the facility, especially the staff working on the line. "Time is money," and any time not used to make products is lost money. Product safety, something lauded by producers, is always at odds with profit and sometimes isn't achieved. An interesting example is Hello Fresh, who earned an esteemed award for food safety in April 2022, but issued a recall for potential E. coli in their meal kits five months later.

So how did the products get shit in them?

We don't know yet, and we might never know. Keep an eye on updates from the FDA and CDC. You may be able to receive additional information from a FOIA request, but that can depend on a ton of factors like confidentiality and who created the document trail. Instead, let's look at the problem from a systems context.

Oats can be contaminated with Salmonella (among others, see this survey for other indicators) from multiple sources, whether it be from soil, wastewater runoff, or contact with actual shit from known Salmonella vectors like birds. If these products were contaminated with desiccation resistant serovars, the Salmonella could have survived the cooking process (if applicable to the product) and contaminated production equipment. With inadequate sanitation, the equipment could have contaminated newly produced products, leading to where we are now. Additionally, Salmonella could have entered the production line from a roof leak (birds like to hang out on roofs) or other structural issues in the facility. There are tons of possible scenarios here.

Government agencies and external validation sources are getting better at detecting Salmonella in foods due to advances in sensing techniques (PCR, ELISA, etc...). The industry, the government, and research institutions are aware of these issues and are trying to find solutions for dry cleaning and sanitizing to keep this from happening. It's a hot topic these days and everyone wants to solve it. We can generate all of these potential solutions, sure, but it's up to the companies to implement them properly since there are no federal guidelines for dry cleaning and sanitation (yet). Most companies do their best to clean and sanitize because nothing loses more money and customers than a recall.