alissaraefunderburk

[alissaraefunderburk]

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holy shit y’all should watch this one, what an admirable person

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/01/27/white-house-pauses-federal-grants/

So, the facts are, most universities in the US are kept in business by grants. Professors and researchers apply for grants, grants pay their salaries, their equipment, their space, their travel, and their students. This includes Teaching Assistants, Research Assistants, Project Assistants etc. this is true across pretty much all academic disciplines. Often what this means is, the professor does their thing, their TA teaches the bulk of classes, students get taught, all while the university makes a profit.

If you kill grants, you kill all of this. This will give universities the excuse to cut tenured faculty, because the university can't afford them directly. This will cut grad students, because this is the only way grad students are paid for. With no grad students, many classes will suddenly not have teachers. Classes will be cut, teachers fired, and the universities will likely have to increase tuition to make up the difference. Knowing universities, they will not cut the number of incoming students coming in (that's their money!) so now classrooms will be packed to the gills with professors that are both underworked and underpaid.

This is just one segment of the people being impacted by this week of horseshit, but believe me, colleges will be permanently altered.

But isn't this just temporary, you ask? Possibly. Much of this is likely to be permanent, definitely in my field. This is coming from the executive order that includes

So anything that can be argued as "woke", "Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies" will not be funded. You can tell those words are squishy to the point of meaningless, but that's the point. Anything can be squished into those categories. Certainly my ecology work is toast.

Anyway if you see a scientist or an academic or a doctor or what have you, please be kind to us. This is... unprecedentedly bad

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It’s uncanny how similar Trump is acting like Hitler. People are now doing the Nazi salute. They’re drawing the symbol. The KKK was seen in Kentucky asking people to join them. ICE has been ripping families apart. Companies have pulled back Diversity Initiatives. We’re no longer part of WHO and there won’t be any communication from the CDC at least until February 1st. We’re being censored and the news can’t be trusted. Thousands of Americans didn’t know there were protests against Trump yesterday outside the U.S. Quotes from The Handmaid’s Tale and Anne Frank have been compared to what’s going on right now.

According to The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Studies and Prevention the U.S. has officially been given a red flag alert for Genocide.

I’m exhausted but I will never stop being angry.

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Reminder for when he “saves” it. He was the one who wanted this, and now he gets to be the hero and win favour with young constituents. Don’t give him the credit for fixing his own problem.

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Interesting

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Chai tea bag + lil but of brown sugar + apple cider packet + 16 oz. mug of hot but not quite boiling water

it will not Fix You but like. maybe. maybe.

[alissaraefunderburk]

When you actually have to do the job you applied for after lying about how capable and great you are on your résumé

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jac schaeffer in 2021: what if I make a banging show about a false reality where the setting and costumes are different every episode and everyone thinks that agatha harkness is manipulating the whole thing but the false reality was actually created completely by accident by someone named maximoff which I will heavily hint throughout the show but it will still be a shock to everyone when it's revealed

jac schaeffer in 2024: what if I do it again

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My life in one word

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photos by Carrie Mae Weems,

The Kitchen Table Series, 1990

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“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”

Pablo Picasso.

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I love keeping to myself and not being concerned with what other people are doing

[alissaraefunderburk]

How mRNA vaccines work: hella simplified

MRNA vaccines essentially make your cells "download" how to de stroy COVID like Neo "downloaded" Kung Fu in The Matrix.

The details:

mRNA stands for messenger ribonucleic acid. The only part you should remember is messenger. It relays instructions from your DNA to the rest of the cell to make proteins.

We straight up STOLE the instructions from sars-cov-2 (the motherfucker that causes COVID-19). The instructions we stole were for making spikes on the surface of the virus. That's the shit your immune system would most likely recognize first. So we pirated it like Napster in the 90s and install it into our cells. Now our cells begin to make them spike shits and send it out into the body.

Now these newly formed spike parts are foreign, your body ain't neva seen nothin like it. So then your immune system goes apeshit like "the fuck you doin in my house" and proceeds to break down and dismember the spikes wr just made. Seems wasteful except our immune system remembers that bitch. And makes a sort of hat that perfectly fits on that spike stucture. So the next time something like it comes along (and sars-cov-2 is super unique so it's GONNA be it) our immune system is at the ready!

So what's this got to do with Neo?

Right. So back in the day, as in before 2020, vaccines would contain weakened viruses or similar viruses form animals or some nonsense. You'd get a lowgrade version of the symptoms because your immune system sees and attacks the virus the exact same way it'd attack just that spike protein. The shitty part is the virus is still gonna try to replicate. So you get some moderate to serious battling going on after vaccinations. This battle is actually the training session, cuz in the end, if your system is victorious, you got the know how to beat that shit if it ever rears its ugly head again.

With the mRNA vaccines, we develop resistance to a virus without having to be exposed to a virus at all. Ya T cells be like, "I know Kung Fu."

Bonus shit

There are some perks to this type of vaccine too! While the cocktails that the mRNA sits in can be scary to pretty much anyone who isn'tan organic chemist, but we can actually avoid some preservatives, since they're used to keep a virus weak or ineffective. Really, the only thing we need are some stablizers to keep the pH constant, some saline to help it mix in with ya bloodstream, some enzymes, again to help stabilize the mRNA, and it needs to be COLD.

Proteins are really really heat sensitive, and to ensure no moving parts, we keep that shit hello fuckin cold, usually -80 F (-62C) in labs. Pfizer and Moderna picked two different structures to copy and inject into our cells. Moderna's is far mkre stable, which is why it needs only a mere -20 F (-29 C) for storage.

And that's how mRNA vaccines work. Shit's fuckin dope as hell.