Reach for the Stars @antares@qoto.org

There's still time to turn the ship around. If not out of human decency, or shame, then to win an election?

And yes, there is still time. But I honestly don't know if they'll use it.

They're probably going to keep doing what they're doing, while mumbling "Trump is worse!" to themselves and "These voters will come around! They have to! Right?" Up until the moment of disaster.

Somewhere, someone is looking at recent Biden poll numbers, and convincing themselves that pushing a few boxes of MREs out of the back of a plane will fix this.

It will not fix this.

No I'm not interested in having a "discussion" about this. I know how the conversation ends: someone yelling "Trump is worse!" at me while being convinced that the only possible solution is for voters to accept what is going on.

“The first person you should be careful not to fool is yourself. Because you are the easiest person to fool".”
― Richard Feynman

Quote of the day: "I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are"

Got to love how most websites now resemble yer da's popup ridden malware infected pc from 20 years ago

“There’s a roughly 50% chance that I will be ruled by a fascist tyrant by the end of this calendar year. I will prepare for this by doing absolutely nothing.”

How important is handwashing? A new STUDY found that "The detection rate of SARS-CoV-2 RNA from the hands of healthy individuals was extremely low (0.32%), and no viable viruses were detected. These results suggest that the risk of contact transmission via hands in a community setting is extremely rare."

It's good you wash your hands. Just don't think it protects you from #COVID19.

https://www.cureus.com/articles/227537-sars-cov-2-contamination-on-healthy-individuals-hands-in-community-settings-during-the-covid-19-pandemic#!/

Jon Stewart sums up every though and feeling I have about the upcoming election: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpBPm0b9deQ

Maybe an unpopular opinion but linking masks so intensely to covid specifically and not larger disease control in general was, and continues to be, a huge mistake. Obviously masking became much more common with the rise of covid in the U.S. and other places, but it's been a known - and used, form of disease prevention elsewhere for 100 years.

Tying masking to covid freaks out the people who are too in denial about covid to actually do anything about it - a wall immediately goes up before an interaction has even happened. It also misses the point that they're useful for other things - it raises the level of diseases in general that are going around. And maybe most importantly, it creates an entire culture of masks as symbols rather than as actually useful tools. When people see masks as a symbol of fear, a reminder of death or a difficult time in their life, or a sign that someone must be sick to be wearing one and so should be avoided, it creates a much more difficult terrain to build solidarity or even just effectively communicate. The practical use case has been replaced with concepts for many people - and that shift has a high body count.