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https://x.com/FilmUpdates/status/1936867722497052789?t=oJpkYEc-Z5W7-ty6qe2sMA&s=19

reaching unprecedented levels of we're so back

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Roman sea life mosaic from the House of the Faun in Pompeii, dating back to the 2nd century BC. Displayed in the Archeological Museum of Naples, Italy.

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funniest part of nosferatu 2024 is when the boys are trying to roll out for boys night but one dude is a no show so they go to find him and he's like. it turns out he's awol from boys night because he went mad with grief and died of the The Plague while he was defiling the corpse of his beloved wife. and the other lads just have to go wow sad and leave it at that because they're on a CRAZY time crunch trying to kill this fucking feratu. you know how it is with boys night.

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wow hold on let me get this

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"Your soul is in your keeping alone."

EDWARD NORTON as KING BALDWIN IV Kingdom of Heaven (2005), dir. Ridley Scott

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I have some news for members of the united states armed forces who feel like they are pawns in a political game and their assignments being unnecessary.

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Remember ivermectin? The animal-deworming medication was used so avidly as an off-label COVID treatment during the pandemic that some feed stores ended up going out of stock. (MUST SHOW A PIC OF YOU AND YOUR HORSE, a sign at one demanded of would-be customers in 2021.) If you haven’t heard about it since, then you’ve existed blissfully outside the gyre of misinformation and conspiracies that have come to define the MAGA world’s outlook on medicine. In the past few years, ivermectin’s popularity has only grown, and the drug has become a go-to treatment for almost any ailment whatsoever. Once a suspect COVID cure, now a right-wing aspirin.

In fact, ivermectin never really worked for treating SARS-CoV-2 infections. Many of the initial studies that hinted at a benefit turned out to be flawed and unreliable. By 2023, a series of clinical trials had already proved beyond a doubt that ivermectin won’t reduce COVID symptoms or mortality. But these findings mattered little to its fans, who saw the drug as having earned the status of dissident antiviral—a treatment that they believed had been suppressed by the medical establishment. And if ivermectin was good enough to be rejected by mainstream doctors as a cure for COVID, health-care skeptics seemed to reason, then surely it must have a host of other uses too.

As a physician who diagnoses cancer, I have come across this line of thinking in my patients, and found that some were using ivermectin to treat their life-threatening tumors. Nicholas Hornstein, a medical oncologist in New York City, told me that he’s had the same experience: About one in 20 of his patients ask about the drug, he said. He remembers one woman who came into his office with a tumor that was visibly protruding from her abdomen, having swapped her chemotherapy for some ivermectin that she’d picked up at a veterinary-supply store. “It’s going to work any day now,” he says she told him when he tried to intervene.

The idea that ivermectin could be a cancer-fighting agent does have some modest basis in reality: Preliminary studies have suggested that antiparasitic medications might inhibit tumor growth, and at least one ongoing clinical trial is evaluating ivermectin’s role as an adjunct to cancer treatment. That study has enrolled only nine patients, however, and the results so far show that just one patient’s tumor actually shrank, according to a recent scientific abstract. But these meager grounds for hope now support a towering pile of expectations.

Cancer is just one of many illnesses that ivermectin is supposed to heal. According to All Family Pharmacy, a Florida-based company that promotes the compound to fans of Donald Trump Jr., Dan Bongino, Matt Gaetz, and Laura Ingraham on their podcasts and shows, the drug has “anti-inflammatory properties that could help keep the immune system balanced in fighting infection.” (The company did not respond to a request for comment.) In sprawling Facebook groups devoted to ivermectin’s healing powers, the claims are more extreme: The drug can combat a long list of conditions, members say, including Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, diabetes, autism, carpal tunnel syndrome, crow’s feet, brain fog, and bee stings.

As a medication that supposedly was censored by elites—if not canceled outright by woke medicine and Big Pharma—ivermectin has become a symbol of medical freedom. It’s also a MAGA shibboleth: Republican-leaning parts of the country helped drive an astounding 964 percent increase in prescriptions for the drug early in the pandemic, and GOP members of Congress have used their official posts to advocate for its benefits. Ivermectin can now be purchased without a prescription in Arkansas and Idaho, and other states are considering similar measures.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been a particularly strong proponent. In his 2021 book about the pandemic, Kennedy referred to the “massive and overwhelming evidence” in ivermectin’s favor, and invoked its “staggering, life-saving efficacy.” He also argued at great length that the pharmaceutical industry—with the support of Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates—had engaged in a historic crime by attempting to discourage its use. Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health, has similarly backed the conspiracy theory that the use of ivermectin was dismissed by “the powers that be” in an apparent ploy to ease the approval of COVID vaccines. (Not everyone in the current administration is a fan: Before he became the FDA’s vaccine czar, the oncologist Vinay Prasad publicly disputed Kennedy’s views on ivermectin, and earlier this year he called its use for cancer “the right’s version of masking on the airplane and praying to Lord Fauci.”) In response to questions about Kennedy’s and Bhattacharya’s current views on ivermectin, the HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard told me that they “continue to follow the latest scientific research regarding therapeutic options for COVID-19 and other illnesses.” She did not respond to questions about Prasad.

The idea of using antiparasitic drugs as cancer treatments was already taking hold by the late 2010s, Skyler Johnson, a Utah radiation oncologist who studies medical misinformation, told me. In January 2017, a man with lung cancer named Joe Tippens started on a dewormer called fenbendazole, which had been suggested to him by a veterinarian. Daniel Lemoi, who had Lyme disease, had started taking ivermectin in 2012 after reading a paper on the genetic similarities between humans and horses. Tippens would go on to achieve global fame among desperate cancer patients, and Lemoi became an ivermectin influencer during the pandemic.

Since then, a gaggle of dubious doctors has worked to bolster the credibility of deworming drugs within alternative medicine and anti-vaccine circles. Their underlying pitch has become familiar in the past few years: Health experts can’t be trusted; the pharmaceutical industry is suppressing cheap cures; and patients deserve the liberty to choose their own medical interventions. For the rest of the medical establishment, the worldview this entails is straining doctor-patient relationships. Johnson told me that many of his patients are now skeptical of his advice, if not openly combative. One cancer patient accused Johnson of bias when he failed to recommend ivermectin. The drug is so cheap and effective, this patient had concluded, that Johnson would be out of a job if everyone knew about it. (Johnson told me that he offers patients “the best possible treatment, no matter the financial incentive.”) Ivermectin has become a big business in its own right. Online pharmacies and wellness shops are cashing in on the deworming craze, with one offering parasite cleanses for $200 a month. Meanwhile, fringe doctors can charge patients who have cancer and other diseases thousands of dollars to prescribe such treatments.

Johnson’s own experience suggests that the cult of ivermectin is growing larger. He told me that he’s seen his patients’ interest in the drug explode since January, when the actor Mel Gibson went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and claimed that three of his friends had beat back their advanced tumors with ivermectin and fenbendazole, among various other potions. “This stuff works, man,” Gibson said. Meanwhile, in the ivermectin Facebook groups—including one with close to 300,000 members—the public can read posts from a woman with breast cancer considering using ivermectin in lieu of hormone treatments; a leukemia patient who has given up on chemotherapy to “see what happens” with antiparasitic drugs; or a concerned aunt wondering if the drugs might help her little niece with Stage 4 cancer.

But ivermectin advocacy is most disturbing in its totalizing form, wherein parasites—which is to say, the pathogens against which the drug truly is effective—are reimagined as the secret cause of many other unrelated problems. In the Facebook groups, members will share images of what they say are worms that have been expelled from their bodies by treatment. (This phenomenon brings to mind a different disease entirely: delusional parasitosis.) One recent post from the daughter of a Stage 4 lung-cancer patient showed a bloody glob that had “dropped down into her mouth.” Commenters debated whether this might be a worm or something else. “Blood clot from Covid vax?” one suggested. A few days later, the daughter gave an update: Her mom had gone to see the doctor, who informed her that she’d likely coughed up a piece of her own lung.

The whole exchange provides a sad illustration of this delirious and desperate time. Before it turned into a conservative cure-all, ivermectin was legitimately a wonder drug for the poorest people on Earth. Since its discovery in 1973, it has become a leading weapon in the fight against horrific infections such as river blindness and elephantiasis. Yet now that substantial success seems to have given birth to a self-destructive fantasy.

A decade ago, the co-discoverers of ivermectin—William Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura—were awarded a Nobel Prize in recognition of their contribution to reducing human suffering. In his formal lecture to the Academy, Campbell offered some reflections on the simple science that gave rise to the treatment, and to its wide array of applications. But his speech contained a warning, too, that any medicine that works so broadly and so well runs the risk of being handed out too often. The more benefits that such a drug provides, he told the audience in Stockholm, “the more we must guard against the hazards of indiscriminate use.”

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"If you're not american, why do you even care-"

US-based company YouTube just nuked the government funded channel for HIV prevention in Germany. The channel is purely educational and had no prior (or current) violations.

Assuming you guys get elections again; if I see a single person telling non-US-americans to stay out of it, it's on sight.

(german source) As of writing, the channel has been reinstated due to public backlash, but is missing several videos.

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The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.

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Recently discovered, fully by accident, that the trick to feeling like you have more time in the day is to actually do shit with the time that's there, which seems fake and wrong and it's frankly infuriating that it works >:|

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only 5 seconds

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decentralize and clean up your life!!!

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

use mega or proton drive instead of google drive.

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH for free movies, books, games, etc.

use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.

use storygraph instead of goodreads.

use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions

use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.

use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google

use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes

use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

use NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.

feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3

last updated: march 18th 2025

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Two Women Teaching a Child to walk by Rembrandt.

Circa 1640, sketch

British Museum, London

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Unironically love logging onto Tumblr dot com to see a beloved mutual has discovered a new batch of sad old men to sink their teeth into and shake vigorously like a dog that caught a squirrel and following the dash backwards to the post that made them pick up the scent. Truly unparalleled social media experience.