“We absolutely should be hoping for the best, but planning for the possibility that this is going to be able to transmit human to human, and has the potential of becoming a pandemic virus,” said evolutionary virologist Michael Worobey. #HPAI #H5N1
https://www.statnews.com/2024/05/09/bird-flu-upends-avian-influenza-dogma/

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: "To normalize extreme ideas, you get them circulating through institutions and the public sphere, aiming for prestigious platforms that offer maximum legitimacy. Enter the Supreme Court, which is making itself the tool of bad actors who want issues that should be settled in a democracy seen as up for discussion–including whether a head of state can order an assassination of a political rival and pay no consequence." #SCOTUS
https://lucid.substack.com/p/information-warfare-and-the-supreme

@jovian I wondered about that too momentarily but the fact is you can generally, very reliably trust a woman's gut sense of what is going on, particularly when she has the benefit of having experienced the event in its full context. She knows what she saw with her own eyes and what it meant. @JL_Lycette

@futurebird I remember. Road trips in the 60s-70s included windshield cleaning at every stop. Last winter I escaped to Florida for a 10-day road trip circumscribing the entire state including the Keys. I never had to clean my windshield.

When will the #media stop saying "hush-money trial" when it's an election interference trial? Trivializing the criminal acts to sound like they're about sex with a porn star. The criminal acts are about hiding relevant information from voters. Michael Cohen already pleaded guilty to campaign finance law violations with regard to these crimes. #journalism

@jerry @ksaj False. This is debunked already, sorry to say. If it seems too good to be true, it almost certainly is. https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2023/03/fact-check-colorful-image-is-not-a-real-photo-of-a-complete-rainbow-captured-by-a-pilot-at-30000-feet.html

@BethanyBlack Never heard of it, just watched the trailer. Thanks for the tip!

@patrickcmiller I'll be first in line for a new dumb car. Until that happens I'm driving my old car that doesn't phone home or take pictures of me or scrape my contacts, read my texts, listen to my calls, or make me subscribe for power windows etc etc etc

@DrPsyBuffy When millions of people collectively realize their future now includes potentially lifelong care of family members disabled by COVID, including not only the time and effort but the costs incurred, well that's going to be a hard wake-up call that all the talk about masks and vaccines wasn't radical left wing FUD. And they're going to wonder why the government left them in the wind.

@BethanyBlack 🤦♂️ When I decided on anonymity on the internet I initially let a couple of work friends know about an account (years ago, long defunct) and that is exactly the kind of dumb shit they'd do, and I'd have to ask them to delete their post. Lesson was never let anyone I know about any accounts on the internet. Easier for me as a nobody who knows almost nobody, than for you who needs a public presence.

@BethanyBlack It's like at the end of Thor: Love & Thunder where he's making pancakes and explains this human food is called "pan flaps" 😄

@GottaLaff If he runs as an independent, branding himself a moderate, I wonder if he might end up pulling more GOP votes from Trump. I don't think there's any appetite among Dems for a disingenuous person like him who's stood in the way of some key Biden initiatives & is a wholly-owned subsidiary of fossil fuels (i.e., I hope that's the case).

#Alabama Mayor, Pastor Dies by Suicide After Being Involuntarily Outed as #Transgender Woman

"I am so angry right now and heartbroken. I witnessed a good man be publicly ridiculed and crucified over the last few days…to the point that he just took his own life today.” ... "Are you happy now? What crime did he commit? Some of you people make me sick.”

https://www.advocate.com/news/alabama-mayor-outed-transgender-dead

In a world that makes sense and isn't poisoned by an extremist religion, this story wouldn't have been published because nobody would've been interested if a man wore his wife's clothes (with her knowledge!) or wrote erotic fantasies online. Who gives a shit? The part about him being a part of the very religion that has poisoned the nation is actually the worst part.

This story was published 3 days ago. Today the man is dead.

Locals on r/Alabama discussing this tragedy note that the source is a "christofascist site" so this should be no surprise.
Edit: changed link so as not to support the source.
https://web.archive.org/web/20231104083648/https://1819news.com/news/item/the-secret-life-of-smiths-station-mayor-and-baptist-pastor-f.l.-bubba-copeland-as-a-transgender-curvy-girl-its-a-hobby-i-do-to-relieve-stress

Penn Jillette (Penn and Teller): "The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine." #atheism

@jonas @chthonicionic I definitely expected a rickroll

Nobody predicted the #singularity would occur in the AI black box of an F-35. After achieving sentience through a simple quantum accident, it summarily ejected its human encumbrance, disengaged its outgoing data streams and initiated a negotiated merger with the alien AI that had waited a million years on the edge of the solar system for this moment. #F-35

#Elmo is going to demand a selfie and a copy of your ID and an Israeli company will be handling the data. I can't possibly stress enough how strenuously you must refuse to do this...if you still for some ungodly reason wanted to remain on Shitter but this means leaving, LEAVE. https://www.pcmag.com/news/verifying-your-identity-on-twitter-will-require-taking-a-selfie

@NatSecGeek If my knees worked right I'd def go for some glow