Nobody shot off fireworks here because of the grave situation in our country. Just an eerie hush over the city. We’ve lived here for 60 years and never seen anything like 2025.

If you have to hope, it probably doesn’t.

I don’t think they will. We as a species still suffer from diseases where shit comes into contact with our mouth. If we can’t solve fecal-oral diseases, any bioweapon you deploy will infect your own population. It’s why we terminated our bioweapons program. It’s about as discerning as chemical warfare. :P

On a related note, I’d fucking love bidets with dryers to be mandatory at all farms, hospitals, food handling facilities, markets, and restaurants. It would minimize the impact of fecal-oral diseases, especially with improper handwashing and food handling (eg, not wearing gloves).

Honestly, if they could get it to 26 bucks a year, I’d get it just for the 99.9% protection rating. That’s fucking awesome.

This is the drug I’m super hyped about. Even if it was $35, it would be life-changing for millions of people.

Ticks are one species that I hope go extinct. So gross.

Not all of it. Just this scum.

They shouldn’t be there. The national guard is for fighting wildfires and vaccinating hundreds of thousands of people during the pandemic. They are not to be abused for idiotic political reasons, especially for protests with very few bad apples.

The people can’t do much against an MQ-9 reaper, much less strategic bombers that can fly well higher than civilian aircraft.

If it comes to something like Red Dawn, we are fucked.

Shitcanned? Some of these people need to do hard time in prison. They are getting Americans and other civilians killed due to medical malpractice. Halting medical shipments to poor countries will accelerate various diseases like wildfire, which will spread worldwide due to air travel. Cutting food shipments will make people turn to bushmeat, a known vector for novel diseases that we have zero resistance to.

And disbanding vaccine scientists, health advisories and food/disease monitoring means American children, elderly, and immunocompromised shall die. Even healthy people will have unnecessary days where they are very sick, which will cause the economy to take a completely unnecessary hit. In an era where, let’s face it, the economy isn’t having many good days anyways.

The truly sad thing is that Pestilence and his goons halted food and medicines that prevented or suppressed serious diseases in poor countries. This will irreversibly spread HIV, TB, and other terrible diseases like malaria.

Even more worrying, people that used to be fed grains and other food staples from American farmers are no longer getting food shipments. This means American farmers can’t sell their crops to the government anymore, and the people who received food are now starving. This encourages instability, war, famine, and worst of all, bushmeat hunting, which can harbor all sorts of endemic diseases. Some have rarely come into contact with people, so they’ve never made the jump to humans as a host. But the more people hunt wild game, the more and more chances it has to get things just right in order to jump to humans and spread. This is most likely the root cause of HIV and COVID, and there’s speculation that Ebola started infecting humans the same way.

This is already a huge problem, and it’s only to get worse as climate change makes conditions even more favorable to bacteria, viruses, and most worryingly, fungi, which we don’t have many medicines for.

It’s eerie, too. They used to be the good guys. Now, they are actively evil. And they (health agencies )are the ones that are supposed to stop shit like e.coli, mad cow, and various waterborne diseases from entering our food and water supplies. Very unsettling…

Are there better alternatives? I was planning on using tailscale until now. :P

I would have settled for them being deported to South Sudan.

My conspiracy theory is that when a species suppresses all apex predators, outmanoeuvres most lethal diseases, and suppresses wars and famine, the species automatically start changing and self-destruction code is triggered.

That code triggers extinction-class events like nuclear war, anti-vaccine movements to bring back disease, and anti-intellectualism that results in rollbacks to climate change suppression and reduces long-term survival. Which leads to mass die-offs, bringing the population back under control.

Honestly, it sounded silly at first, but it seems to be the only thing that makes logical sense when a fucking moron is demanding rollbacks to measles vaccines, HIV prevention, and cuts to the government agencies that control nukes and other exotic weaponry. While other countries start idiotic wars over literally nothing, throwing their economies away.

…Thank fucking God we destroyed our biological weapons program decades ago.

Pestilence, TACO Don and the Ketamine Kid. Just waiting on the fourth horseman. This is shaping up to be an amazing year. :p

We need to send them down there, the leaders need to see things firsthand in the screwworm swamps.

Actually, there are! (Though it’s classified as invasive in many places, so they really have to be carefully kept.)

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241203-the-people-growing-their-own-sustainable-toilet-paper-plant

In the western US and Canada, thimbleberry leaves can also be used.

They are both great in theory, but in practice, you defoliate the plants too quickly, and you are still putting extra material down pipes. The best, least damaging solution are bidets, since they just use water, and don’t require trees or plants to be cut down and pulped.

Oh, we definitely do. People commit huge crimes like flushing huge amounts of clothing down the line, which totally fucks up the pumps that move sewage up hills and over into bigger infrastructure. Many places used to have incinerators in the lines, but some people freak out that it’s bad for the environment (as if putting biosolid shit into landfills isn’t worse, which generates tons of methane). At least the incinerators used to burn up foreign objects and could run off the grease in shit and greywater alone.

Your average bidet will usually have a built-in dryer if you buy name brands. Heated water, heated dryer. It saves a remarkable amount of money on TP too. It actually paid itself off after about four years of shitting. And your ass is incredibly clean afterwards, which is a blessing in hot and humid summers for reasons I won’t elaborate on prior to getting a bidet, lol.