Reminds me of this poem from Carl Sandburg:

With at least 70% of us living paycheck to paycheck, and 48% of us having $1,000 or less in savings, I don’t think that a national strike is likely. I agree that it would be by far the most impactful thing we could collectively do, but hell - at least half of us are one missed paycheck away from homelessness, and America really fucking hates the homeless. Combine that with the fact that most people get their family health insurance from their job, and the fact that our Senate just voted to practically obliterate medicare / medicaid, and you get an extra level of devastating consequences for losing your job. And people would lose their jobs. Even if a significant amount of people are participating in the nation-wide strike, employers would be very heavy-handed with the dismissals. I just don’t think that it’s in the cards for us.

Seriously disappointing they didn’t put sharknados in the game. smh

I’ve been waiting for this joke! It’s about fucking time!!!

Good. I’m glad he’s living in fear. Fuck Tom Homan.

Awesome! I’m currently pursuing a biochemistry degree with the goal of working in the cultivated meat industry, so this is super exciting to me! It seems the process is still too clunky for effective mass production, unfortunately. But hey - maybe that’s a problem I’ll be able to help solve!

Squirrel could be fat because OOP keeps putting whole avocados in their trash…

I have no idea how you managed to read OP’s post and fuck up the comprehension of it so badly, especially considering that OP put their point in the first fucking paragraph and even bolded it for you:

If you voted for Trump and your friends and family cut you off because of it, then I do not feel any sympathy for you.

How does this ^ have anything whatsoever to do with your off-the-wall crazy-ass interpretation?

No - this is something completely different, unfortunately. Allergen response is mediated by T-helper type 2 (T_H2) cells, while autoimmune disorders like diabetes occur through a T-helper type 1 (T_H1) pathway.

With allergens, the foreign body will bind to antigen receptors on professional antigen presenting cells (usually dendritic cells), which will then present the bound antigen to T_H2 cells. These will then release a particular type of chemical called cytokines that will signal the B cells to produce a shit load of IgE antibodies tailored for the particular molecular pattern identified. The IgE will bind to the antigen and also to basophils and mast cells, which will secrete a bunch of chemicals, including histamines. This is what causes you to get all itchy. It’s also what causes swelling (such as when someone with a peanut allergy feels their throat closing up when they find out their snack had peanuts in it).

With Type 1 Diabetes, T_H1 cells will recognize patterns on the surface of your islet cells, and will then release a different set of cytokines that will attract cytotoxic T cells (T_C) to the area. These will bind to the surface of the islet cells, and will release a cocktail of chemicals that will kill the cell.

The mechanism by which allergen immunotherapy works is that it slowly trains your immune system to shift from a T_H2-dominated response to a T_H1-dominated response for that particular molecular pattern. This means that your body will treat the foreign substance as more of an invading pathogen (like a bacteria, for example) than an allergen, so there will not be the huge release of IgE antibodies, and consequently, far fewer mast cells and basophils releasing histamines. The precise mechanism of how this works is too complicated for this discussion, but suffice it to say we’re dealing with a completely different biological pathway than with self / non-self recognition, like what’s going on with autoimmune disorders.

Well… it’s not a cure. Not really. People with type I diabetes have a disorder where their immune system attacks their islet cells in their pancreas. These cells are what produce insulin. This therapy replaces some of the cells that they’ve lost, but it doesn’t stop their bodies from attacking those cells again. The way they’re doing that is by having the patients take immune-suppressing drugs forever, basically.

The problem with this is that there’s currently no way to target immune-suppressing drugs to say: “Hey, just stop attacking your own cells, but continue doing everything else an immune system is supposed to do.” By suppressing the immune system with these drugs, the patients are at an elevated risk of disease and cancer. And that’s forever. Or, at least until we figure out a better way to do it.

Still, it is a really cool therapy, in that they were able to direct the maturation of stem cells into insulin-producing islet cells, and they were able to successfully home those to the correct location. It’s huge progress, even if it isn’t actually a cure.

+1 for the Children of Time series! I loved those books!

I do believe that this counts as a declaration of war.

Amen to that.

Or, at the very least, indifference to same.

I certainly wouldn’t. What good is a worker’s party if it isn’t for all workers? Saying that you’re not going to take a stance on social issues is tantamount to saying that you’re ok with some people losing rights, or being relegated to nth class citizens, where n is some number greater than 1. This isn’t just idle speculation, either. These things are happening right now at an alarming rate. Refusing to take a stand on it because you want to have a broad coalition of people who stand for nothing is pure cowardice.

“Ok, so we lied about every single aspect of this case, and repeated those lies continuously for 2 months to keep an innocent man in a foreign torture prison… but we have evidence now that he gave some people a ride in his car! A RIDE in his CAR! Can you believe that?? No, seriously, please believe that. He’s a bad guy, you guys. Honest!*”

This kills the human.

If this feud continues, one of them might actually reveal something the rest of us don’t already know.

The timing sucked, you’re right about that. But they weren’t wrong to pressure Biden to not run again. Biden had zero business running again. The man was 81 years old, and very much in cognitive decline. The only reason he got as far as he did in the process was because of wishful thinking on everybody’s part. At that point, it was a bit of a Sophie’s choice; they could either throw their weight behind him, hoping beyond hope that he could just nudge that campaign over the finish line, or they could convince him to step aside in favor of someone eminently better fit for it, which meant throwing away the results of the primary.

Convincing him to step down was the right choice. I don’t know if you’re just misremembering things or what, but the polling was not good for Biden around that point. Trump looked like a shoe-in. While he wasn’t guaranteed to lose, he definitely had a worse chance of winning than Harris did. Here’s the national polling chart from that time; Biden dropped out July 21st. Do you see how the blue line went up and the red line went down after that?

Trump won, and that really fucking sucks. But saying that the Democrats fucked up and that Biden would have won is just pure fantasy. I get it; I don’t want this piece of shit to be president either, and it makes me furious every day that he is. In situations like this, it’s natural to want to throw some blame around. But blaming the Democrats for making the right choice just ain’t it.

Kind of hilarious that she left the party because they convinced Biden to not run. That was the one fucking thing Democrats did right. It just took them a long time to get past his hubris.