#Distributed Cognition

[manuelnunezmd]

Preparing Healthcare Education for an AI-Augmented Future

🚀 Forget textbooks—future doctors are learning to dance with AI. 🩺💡 Discover how medical schools are trading rote memorization for critical thinking, patient partnerships, and ethical AI. A revolution is brewing—don’t get left behind. 👉 [Link] #AIinMedicine #MedEdRevolution #HealthTech

Introduction Imagine a world where medical students no longer drown in textbooks but thrive as data detectives, where patients aren’t passive recipients of care but partners in diagnosis. This isn’t science fiction—it’s the AI-augmented future of healthcare education. The stethoscope and scalpel are being joined by algorithms and chatbots, and the race to adapt is already on . The Cramming…

[bsahely]

Distributed Science - The Scientific Process as Multi-Scale Active Inference

Reproduced from: OSF Preprints | Distributed Science – The Scientific Process as Multi-Scale Active Inference and Distributed-Science-The-Scientific-Process-as-Multi-Scale-Active-Inference.pdf (researchgate.net) Distributed Science The Scientific Process as Multi-Scale Active Inference Authors Francesco Balzan 1,2* (francesco.balzan3@unibo.it) John Campbell 3 Karl Friston 4,5 Maxwell J. D.…

[funeral]

Dissociation is a trick the psyche plays on itself. It allows life to go on by dividing up the unbearable experience and distributing it to different compartments of the mind and body [ . . . ]. This means that the normally unified elements of consciousness (i.e., cognitive awareness, affect, sensation, imagery) are not allowed to integrate. Experience itself becomes discontinuous. Mental imagery may be split from affect, or both affect and image may be dissociated from conscious knowledge. Flashbacks of sensation seemingly disconnected from a behavioral context occur. The memory of one's life has holes in it — a full narrative history cannot be told by the person whose life has been interrupted by trauma.

Donald Kalsched, The Inner World of Trauma

[xenopoem]

A xenopoem is a speculative, avant-garde form of poetry that transcends traditional human language and semiotics, often embodying alien, non-human, or posthuman perspectives. It functions as a linguistic or biosemiotic "glitch," disrupting conventional meaning-making through fragmented, recursive, or algorithmic structures. Drawing from experimental art and systems biology, xenopoems act like portals or mutational vectors, reconfiguring cognition, space, or even planetary  ecosystems. They are not merely read but inhabited by non-human entities—like microbial intelligences or AI—as self-executing scripts or topological shifts in reality.

Key characteristics include:

Alien semiotics: Incorporates untranslatable  or non-human linguistic systems, challenging human cognition.

Glitch ontology: Acts as a disruptive "virus" in bio-digital or planetary architectures, fostering adaptive mutations.

Posthuman focus: Engages with distributed cognition, cross-species communication, or technomorphosis, often bypassing human-centric narratives.

Interplanetary design: May manifest as fractalized data structures embedded in extraterrestrial habitats, rewriting environments.

[dissociacrip]

why isn't there much info about coathanger pain with POTS?? or at least why is this not more common knowledge? i don't think i've ever seen anyone talking about this. every time i've asked about it (+other POTS symptoms it comes with in my case) in chronic illness spaces people have suggested everything from fibro, MCAS, a CFS leak, a herniated disc, CCI, etc. but nobody ever said "coathanger pain."

but dysautonomia international posted a silly little graphic on their instagram and now i have my answers to why i was having a ton of symptoms that did suggest a herniated disc but there were no signs of disc herniation upon getting an MRI and for some reason it was triggered by working morning shift/having to be upright for a long time in the mornings. i would get excruciating, searing pain that feels pike a knife has been shoved into the base of my neck and the whole of my upper back would have this icy burning sensation. accompanied by me losing the ability to think straight, losing my coordination, and slurring my speech. i left work crying one morning because of how much pain i was in before i eventually came to the conclusion i couldn't do morning shifts.

that's coathanger pain. my spine is okay (i think...for now, anyway.) according to The Stuff they don't know what causes coathanger pain necessarily but they theorize it has to do with reduced blood flow to those areas of the body (which would track since POTS tends to involve blood pooling in the extremities and such.) it's also not exclusive to POTS and is associated with dysautonomia or orthostatic intolerance in general i think.

One example of the power of obtaining the autonomic history is the Coat Hanger Phenomenon. In people who have neurogenic orthostatic hypotension or orthostatic intolerance, they can complain of pain, or like a charley horse kind of sensation, in the back of the neck and shoulder areas in the distribution that’s like a coat hanger. And it goes away when the person is lying down. That’s an important symptom. And the way I explain it is that the muscles that control your head are tonically active, otherwise your head be falling down all the time. Tonically active. That means they’re using up oxygenated blood all the time. Well suppose you’re in a critical situation where there’s a drop in blood flow at the delivery of oxygenated blood to the head. In that situation these muscles are not getting enough oxygenated blood. They’re tonically active, so they’re producing lactic acid and you get a charley horse, just like you’d have a cramp anywhere else. It’s a skeletal muscle thing. So, I think when somebody complains of Coat Hanger Phenomenon, that’s a very important sign or symptom. And that is not invented. That’s a real phenomenon. It points to ischemia to the skeletal muscle holding your head up.

(Dr. Goldstein, The Dysautonomia Project)

worsening cognitive dysfunction, slurred speech, and worsening coordination because blood's not getting to my brain. bordering on emergency-room-level pain in my upper back and neck because not enough blood is getting to those parts of my body. got it.

anyway, i legit have NEVER seen this discussed until recently and i thought i should share.

[mycelialmistress]

A slime girl's core contains all her vital functions, but it isn't her brain! Slime cognition is a distributed process spread across her entire body. It's related to why we can feel with our slime. Minor loses of slime don't impact our cognitive abilities or memories, but if we split off too much it can start to compound. Which is why, when I split myself repeatedly into smaller and smaller clones as a party trick, each little me ends up dumb as bricks and super annoying. So I can't really be help responsible for eating all your car keys and holding them hostage in exchange for more beer.

[ruined-strawb-cakes-in-arcane]

Shimmer thoughts - Analysis on Shimmer Purpose > Creation > Variants

♡˚ crediting people from twitter who helped me so much with this : @omniscient_she @ethnicallymoral @hartbrekprince @Darkroastdreams

Purpose

Initial goals of Shimmer ⤷create a substance that could provide strength and power ⤷Become a superior medicinal-healing drug

Later goals of Shimmer as the story progress: ⤷permanently enhance the human body and mind

Creation:

Shimmer was created by Singed using glowing purple flowers and biological experiments, including a rare regenerative creature named Rio. ● Flower ⤷Observed to grow in a cave and seen to be growing in Silco/Singed’s hideout in the canary as per S1E1 (could be the cold, dark, damp nature of the location) ⤷combustive when it comes to contact with fire

● Rio ⤷a unique, rare creature that possesses remarkable regenerative abilities (ArcaneWiki) Singed stated the following about Rio: S1E6 mark: 39:28 - “she’s a rare mutation I cultivated” S1E6 mark 31:52 - “The mutation must survive”

There’s no concrete evidence if Shimmer is made solely from either Rio or the flower, only that they are alluded to as the base foundations of the drug. Singed, with the help of young Viktor, was initially feeding Rio the flowers which may be the cause of mutation, therefore Rio is technically “man made” and not an organically occurring mutation. 

Still with the tubes tied to Rio glowing with the same purple essence of the flowers on the later part of the show, we can infer that Shimmer may be made by glowing flowers passing through Rio’s DNA system. 

“Shimmer could have been made by passing nectar (or a form of transformed sap) from the flowers through Rio's organs. Through the organ's natural processing (stomachs digest, kidneys remove waste and extra liquid, livers produce bile and pancreas store insulin...) the sap turns into shimmer. Or at least a proto-shimmer that is then refined by Singed  Perhaps also the Waverider microbiome within their body contains specific bacteria that break down the proteins and such contained within the flower in a different way. So it's not only the mechanical function of the organs but also the chemical function of the microbiome”

Naïa, First Chancellor's Archivist @omniscient_she

Variants:

As revealed by Singed he developed Shimmer variants, some of which are more advanced than others.v. ArcaneWiki

The existence of different variants and purity levels (even expiration) as per @Darkroastdreams thread could mean Shimmer divided as:

Variant A - For productions and distribution

Street Shimmer • Who uses it: Silco’s foot soldiers, goons, thug enforcers. • Effects: Enhances strength, pain tolerance, durability, tissue regeneration, possibly nervous system repair, resuscitation from near-death cases (makes you a walking tank) • Side effects: . Short-term: Mutations, temporary growth in size, cognitive degeneration, and aggression. Long-term: Highly addictive; physical deformities such as large tumors protruding from the skin; progressive degeneration of skin and muscle tissue. • Distribution: Mass-produced. Cheap. Dangerous. This is the version running Zaun’s black market economy.

Chembaron-grade • Who uses it: Sevika, Silco, Silco’s inner circle, possibly Singed’s own test subjects. • Effects: Similar to street shimmer, but targeted—such as enhancing strength, regeneration, durability—without major side effects (e.g., physical mutation). • Upgrades: Combined with technology (e.g., Sevika’s arm) or delivered via implants to ensure the user receives the proper dosage. • Side effects: Still risky, but shows longer-term integration.

Quoting from thread : “There are likely different purities of shimmer available for purchase on the streets of Zaun, with the highest purity coming directly from Singed (such as the type used by Silco and to revive Jinx as well as what Viktor was most likely given) and lower purities sold on the street as an illegal drug.”

DarkroastDepresso @Darkroastdreams

Note : The testing phase from S1A1 looks more like Street Shimmer as it caused Dekard to physically change, if a several drops caused physical and increased aggression to a rat then application must be equal to body weight of the user? several drop: rat/1 bottle: teenage human. We can then reason that when Caitlyn used Street Shimmer on Vi, the single drop administered was a low enough dose to mitigate the usual side effects.

Variant B - Singed’s personal research, produced personally on his lab

Prototype • Who uses it: Jinx, speculated: Singed and Warwick during his hibernation phase. • Effects: altered physiology, strength, longevity, total body mutation, heightened senses. • Thoughts : we can speculate that Jinx is the first successful human test when Singed was trying to resuscitate her.

“This appears to be a mix of variants that made Jinx the most successful experiment, preserving her through near-death resuscitation while incorporating a controlled combat strain. It aligns with Singed’s goal of reviving his daughter in a stable, powerful form. The idea that she “became Shimmer” suggests a perfected biological mutation: a proof of concept for a sentient, controllable Shimmer being without the side effects seen in Warwick.”

@ethnicallymoral 

Beta (used to combine with Hextech) • Who uses it: Viktor and speculated: Warwick during his hibernation phase. • Effects: Catalyst, longevity, pain suppression, durability, tissue regeneration, possibly nervous system repair • Goal: sustain Viktor's life to continue his research, by accelerating assisting a fusion of Shimmer and Hextech

Apex shimmer • most advanced and potent form of Shimmer—refined beyond the unstable • Who uses it: Singed and Warwick • Effects: Physical enhancement (boosts strength, speed, and resilience), life preservation (slows or halts degeneration), biological evolution. • Used for: stabilizing Warwick enough to be able to awaken him, slows degeneration by using it on Oriana and Singed • Risk: Unknown however it seems to only be suitable for individuals with strong willpower, intellect, or specific biological conditions.

Variants structure provided and assisted by @ethnicallymoral // els 

< END PERSONAL THINK THOUGHT AFTER THIS >

Is a drop enough to mutate only Silco’s eye? 

Unsure, we can speculate that he must have had other side effects aside from his eye. I’m inclined to believe that Silco must have had other changes in his body, which could be his lungs being able to withstand a greenhouse filled with a leaking tank of the Grey. Not only is Silco a heavy smoker but he also worked in the mines infested with the Grey, which could have caused long term lung damage, but we never see Silco cough nor does he exhibit any lung issues. 

Also, we first have to know what variant he had been dozing on and if he switched to the purified healing variant once Singed is able to concoct other variations of Shimmer.  

Have we ever thought of the possibility that silco is the first human test of Singed due to the nature of his injuries? I have.

Does it affect Silco’s cum quality? I.e. taste, potency, color A: Because Silco seems to have been using the Variant A - street shimmer from s1A1 and could have been using it since the prototype version we can guess that there maybe changes to his body, if not externally like his eye then internally. We can also see Silco's tear as violet in here.

2. Does it help with his bedroom performance (Physical endurance during sex AND Shorter refractory period) Again Again there maybe changes to his body if not externally like his eye then internally. Despite his age, injuries and past history (starvation, exposure to the Gray) we can see Silco crashout as him having exhibiting strength, this could point out that : Yes, Silco does have stamina No proof in regards to refractory period

3. Does Shimmer give him erectile dysfunction? Given that one of shimmer's main goal and coveted effects are tissue regeneration, possibly nervous system repair, AKA HEALING AND SLOWING/HALTING DEGENERATION and Silco's long term use, then we can reason that he has no erectile dysfunction

[intervex]

What Pride Flags Mean, Part 1: Gender and Attraction

Welcome to the latest installment of my autistic hyperfixation on flags! I wanted to figure out a common language of Colour X means Thing Y. Like how pink is consistently used for feminine.

Having a common language for flag meanings matters because it improves cognitive accessibility of flags. ♿️💙

But I didn't want to be prescriptive about what colours should mean what. Just because I think Thing X should go with Colour Y doesn't mean everybody else would.

So this turned into a descriptive, empirical project. I gathered a data set of 2060 pride flag colour choices to figure out what are the most common colour-meaning combinations. Some of the results:

And here are the abstract modifiers: these are modifiers that were generally shared between the genders and the attractions. For example, black is used to indicate having no gender as well as having no attraction.

Click here for tables with okLCH values, hex values, definitions, and notes - I've put a more detailed write-up on my Wikimedia Commons userpage. (Mediawiki supports sortable tables and Tumblr does not.)

METHODS-AT-A-GLANCE

To make the figures above, I assembled a data set of pride flag colours. It contains 2060 colour choices from 624 pride flags, representing 1587 unique colours. Click here for a detailed description of how I gathered and tagged the pride flag colours and tagged them.

For each tag, I converted every colour to okLCH colour space and computed a median colour. OkLCH colour space is an alternative to RGB/hex and HSL/HSV. Unlike RGB/hex and HSL/HSV, okLCH is a perceptual colour space, meaning that it is actually based on human colour perception. 🌈

In okLCH space, a colour has three values:

- Lightness (0-100%): how light the colour is. 100% is pure white.

- Chroma (0-0.37+): how vibrant the colour is. 0 is monochromatic. 0.37 is currently the most vibrant things can get with current computer monitor technologies. But as computer monitor technologies improve to allow for even more vibrant colours, higher chroma values will be unlocked.

- Hue (0-360°): where on the colour wheel the colour goes - 0° is pink and 180° is teal, and colours are actually 180° opposite from their perceptual complements.

The important thing to know is that okLCH Hue is not the same Hue from HSV/HSL - the values are different! (HSL and HSV are a hot mess and do not align with human colour perception!)

You can learn more about okLCH through my little write up, which was heavily influenced by these helpful articles by Geoff Graham, Lea Verou, and Keith J Grant.

You can play with an okLCH colour picker and converter at oklch.com

🌈

MORE RESULTS: COLOUR DISTRIBUTIONS

Back when I started tagging my data, I divided my data into five main chunks: Gender qualities (e.g. masculine, androgynous), Attraction (e.g. platonic, sexual), Values (e.g. community, joy), Disability (e.g. Deaf, blind), and Other.

I'll talk about Disability and Values in future posts! But for an alternate view of the data, here are the full distributions of the colours that were placed in each tag.

They come in three parts: tags I created for Gender, tags for Attraction, and tags from Other. The abstract modifiers are spread between the first two, though their contents transcend Gender and Attraction.

Some distributions have a lot more variance within them than others. Generally speaking, major attraction types tended to have the least variance: sensual attraction is really consistently orange, platonic is really consistently yellow, etc.

Variance and size do not correlate. Many of the smaller tags are quite internally consistent. I don't have a ton of tags in "current gender" but they're all the same dark purple. Xenine/xenogender has a whole bunch of entries, and there's a really big spread from blue to yellow.

Some tags, like intersex as well as kink/fetish show there are a small number of different colours that are very consistently used. Whereas other tags like masculine show a very smooth range - in this case from cyan to purple.

Overall I'm pretty satisfied with how things wound up! 🥳 It makes sense to me that an umbrella term like xenogender would have a lot of variance. What honestly makes me happiest is just how many tags wound up 180 or 90 degrees from their opposites/complements. 🤩

Not everything lined up nicely (the opposite of drag is .... neuroqueer? awkward.) 🤨 Some things lined up in hilarious ways, like how initially I had the opposite of kink/fetish being Christian (amazing.)

But as a whole, there's a lot of structure and logic to where things landed! I hope this makes sense for other people and can help inform both flag making as well as flag interpreting (e.g. writing alt-text for existing flags). 🌈

I'm hoping to post the Disability and Values analyses in the coming days! If you want to learn more, my detailed notes along with tables etc are over on my Wikimedia Commons userspace. 💜

Everything here is Creative Commons Sharealike 4.0, which means you're free to reuse and build on my visualizations, tables, etc. Enjoy!

[peakyrain]

consciousness, water & shifting: related how?

inspired by sanela.estrella on tiktok :)

fyi: long post ahead!

-

in light of recent studies, we're starting to learn that our consciousness being stored in the brain might not be the case, as supposed.

years ago, there was a french man experiencing weakness in his leg. he went to the doctor only to find out that 90% of his brain was missing.

mind you, he went to the doctor regarding his leg pain, completely unrelated to his brain.

this man was shown to have no cognitive impairment and was living a typical normal life as a married man, with two kids.

cognitive psychologist cleeremans describes the man as: "(..) perfectly, socially apt". the man's skull was found to be full of liquid, with just a thin layer of brain tissue left. he was completely unaware of the fact that he only had 10% of his brain.

the picture below shows the actual scans of his head.

source!

this is one of the cases that's raised the question of where the hell our consciousness is stored in the body. we're aware now, based on this case (as well as others), that it might very well not be the brain, as assumed.

-

you might now think that i'm going off topic, but bear w/ me!

i'm now going to discuss water and its relation to the topic of consciousness (whoaaa). water is as we know, crucial for all life forms, w/o water we literally can't exist. yesterday i came across this (->) article about water being a conscious and an intelligent being.

japanese author masaru emoto studied the molecular structure of water and how words and energy from human consciousness affects the crystalline structure of ice. emoto has said that words of love and gratitude have been used to create the most beautiful crystals, while water exposed to hateful energy, has resulted in chaotic and unpleasant structures.

though emoto's work has faced skepticism in the scientific community, his findings do resonate with those exploring the connection between energy and intention

the article continues on to mention how humans exist on a lower level of consciousness than water and that it has also shown to hold memories. the fact that water is intelligent and conscious changes and challenges our view of reality.

water picks up information and then distributes it to plants and animals (obvs including us) that consume it. which is also why you can literally speak your desires into your water before drinking it, which'll manifest it into reality. (made me realize that people on early shifttok weren't completely bonkers when they said to drink lots of water)

countless people use water to manifest their desires, whether it's by speaking them into the water before drinking it or while showering, and it's been shown to be effective based on numerous successful stories.

religious groups (such as muslims) also believe in praying and asking God for their desires as it rains because their prayers are believed to be answered during that divine time.

-

veda austin, a water researcher, has dedicated 10 years of her life observing and photographing the life of water

one of the experiments austin has done is politely asking her water to replicate an image - a picture of her friend.

after she froze the water, it drew her an identical portrait of her friend.

she has also done another experiment where she put her thumb in a bowl. the water then replicated her thumb w/ a suspicious crack on her nail. three hours later, veda cracked her nail in the exact same spot as shown or predicted by the water (image below).

veda’s crystallography proves that water can store information and share it as it freezes. veda austin believes that water is an intelligent being that observes itself through every living organism on the planet and in the universe.

-

as mentioned earlier we know water is the unifying factor in all living being. so, what if - a big what if - water is what holds our consciousness?

we've discovered that the brain, or our body in general isn't what holds our consciousness, then there's a possibility that it might be water, since we are in fact made up of about 60% water.

our brains and hearts are composed of 73% water, and the lungs are about 83% water. this seriously cannot be a coincidence, let's be so fr ladies.

upon doing some research as i'm writing this, i also found that severe dehydration causes weakness, confusion and in extreme cases kidney/brain damage and it can even lead to death.

so the idea of water being the intelligence that holds our consciousness, shouldn't be that crazy, imo, right?

⭒ but finally how can we tie this into reality shifting?

reality shifting is the act of moving your awareness to another reality - or as some might describe it: tuning into another frequency of the version of yourself that you desire.

and so, if consciousness isn’t stored in the brain (like my post suggests), then it must be stored in something else - something fluid, changeable, maybe even programmable as water.

as mentioned, water is:

-a conductor of energy

-capable of holding memory

-present in every part of our bodies, especially organs tied to consciousness (brain, heart and nervous system)

-responsive to intention, frequency and emotion

if water stores memory and responds to thought - then it’s not just a passive element in our bodies - it’s an intelligent system that mirrors our consciousness.

this means: every time you visualize, script, affirm, or feel deep emotion toward another reality, you’re not just thinking - you're reprogramming the water inside you to vibrate at the frequency of that reality.

what if the reason shifting works at all is because water allows it?

not the brain. not some abstract metaphysical portal. but the literal water inside you. water holds your memories, your intentions, your beliefs. and when you train it, program it, you unlock the ability to move your awareness between realities.

what if water isn’t just part of us - it is us? and what if that’s why shifting works, by recalibrating the water within it?

-

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The health industry’s invisible hand is a fist

On June 21, I'm doing an ONLINE READING for the LOCUS AWARDS at 16hPT. On June 22, I'll be in OAKLAND, CA for a panel and a keynote at the LOCUS AWARDS.

The US has the rich world's most expensive health care system, and that system delivers the worst health outcomes of any country in the rich world. Also, the US is unique in relying on market forces as the primary regulator of its health care system. All of these facts are related!

Capitalism's most dogmatic zealots have a mystical belief in the power of markets to "efficiently allocate" goods and services. For them, the process by which goods and services are offered and purchased performs a kind of vast, distributed computation that "discovers the price" of everything. Our decisions to accept or refuse prices are the data that feeds this distributed computer, and the signals these decisions send about our desires triggers investment decisions by sellers, which guides the whole system to "equilibrium" in which we are all better off.

There's some truth to this: when demand for something exceeds the supply, prices tend to go up. These higher prices tempt new sellers into the market, until demand is met and prices fall and production is stabilized at the level that meets demand.

But this elegant, self-regulating system rarely survives contact with reality. It's the kind of simplified model that works when we're hypothesizing about perfectly spherical cows of uniform density on a frictionless surface, but ceases to be useful when it encounters a messy world of imperfect rationality, imperfect information, monopolization, regulatory capture, and other unavoidable properties of reality.

For members of the "efficient market" cult, reality's stubborn refusal to behave the way it does in their thought experiments is a personal affront. Panged by cognitive dissonance, the cult members insist that any market failures in the real world are illusions caused by not doing capitalism hard enough. When deregulation and markets fail, the answer is always more deregulation and more markets.

That's the story of the American health industry in a nutshell. Rather than accepting that people won't shop for the best emergency room while unconscious in an ambulance, or that the "clearing price" of "not dying of cancer" is "infinity," the cult insists that America's worst-in-class, most expensive health system just needs more capitalism to turn it into a world leader.

In the 1980s, Reagan's court sorcerers decreed that they could fix health care with something called "Prospective Payment Systems," which would pay hospitals a lump sum for treating conditions, rather than reimbursing them for each procedure, using competition and profit motives to drive "efficiency." The hospital system responded by "upcoding' patients: if you showed up with a broken leg and a history of coronary disease, they would code you as a heart patient and someone who needed a cast. They'd collect both lump sums, slap a cast on you, and wheel you out the door:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4195137/

As Robert Kuttner writes for The American Prospect, this kind of abuse was predictable from the outset, especially since Health and Human Services is starved of budget for auditors and can only hand out "slaps on the wrist" when they catch a hospital ripping off the system:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-13-fantasyland-general/

Upcoding isn't limited to Medicare fraud, either. Hospitals and insurers are locked in a death-battle over payments, and hospitals' favorite scam is sending everyone to the ER, even when they don't have emergencies (some hospitals literally lock all the doors except for the ER entrance). That way, a normal, uncomplicated childbirth can be transformed into a "Level 5" emergency treatment (the highest severity of emergency) and generate a surprise bill of over $2,700:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/27/crossing-a-line/#zero-fucks-given

The US health industry is bad enough to generate a constant degree of political will for change, but the industry (and its captured politicians and regulators) is also canny enough to dream up an endless procession of useless gimmicks designed to temporarily bleed off the pressure for change. In 2018, HHS passed a rule requiring hospitals to publish their prices.

Hospitals responded to this with a shrewd gambit: they simply ignored the rule. So in 2021, HHS made another rule, creating penalties for ignoring the first rule:

https://www.cms.gov/priorities/key-initiatives/hospital-price-transparency/hospitals

The theory here was that publishing prices would create "market discipline." Again, this isn't wholly nonsensical. To the extent that patients have nonurgent conditions and the free time to shop around, being able to access prices will help them. Indeed, if the prices are in a standards-defined, machine-readable form, patients and their advocates could automatically import them, create price-comparison sites, leaderboards, etc. None of this addresses the core problem that health-care is a) a human right and b) not a discretionary expense, but it could help at the margins.

But there's another wrinkle here. The same people who claim that prices can solve all of our problems also insist that monopolies are impossible. They've presided over a decades-long assault on antitrust law that has seen hospitals, pharma companies, insurers, and a menagerie of obscure middlemen merge into gigantic companies that are too big to fail and too big to jail. When a single hospital system is responsible for the majority of care in a city or even a county, how much punishment can regulators realistically subject it to?

Not much, as it turns out. Kuttner describes how Mass Gen Brigham cornered the market on health-care in Boston, allowing it to flout the rules on pricing. In addition to standard tricks – like charging self-pay patients vastly more than insured payments (because individuals don't have the bargaining power of insurers), Mass Gen Brigham's price data is a sick joke.

See for yourself! The portal will send you giant, unstructured, ZIPped text files filled with cryptic garbage like:

ADJUSTABLE C TAPER NECK PLUS|1|UNITED HEALTHCARE [1016]|HB CH UNITED HMO / PPO / INDEMNITY [34]|UNITED HEALTHCARE HMO [101604]|75|Inv Loc: 1004203; from OR location 1004203|52.02|Inpatient PAF; 69.36% Billed|75|Inv Loc: 1004203; from OR location 1004203|56.87|Outpatient PAF; 75.83% Billed

https://www.massgeneralbrigham.org/en/patient-care/patient-visitor-information/billing/cms-required-hospital-charge-data

These files have tens of thousands of rows. As a patient, you are meant to parse through these in order to decide whether you're getting ripped off on that HIP STEM 16X203MM SIZE 4 FEMORAL PRESS FIT NEUTRAL REVISION TITANIUM you're in the market for (as it happens, I have two of these in my body).

Kuttner describes the surreal lengths he had to go through to prevent his mother from getting ripped off by Mass Gen through an upcoding hustle. By coding her as "admitted for observation," Mass Gen was able to turn her into an outpatient, with a 20% co-pay (this is down to a GW Bush policy that punishes hospitals that charge Medicare for inpatient care when they could be treated as outpatients – hospitals reflexively game the system to make every patient an outpatient, even if they have overnight hospital stays).

Kuttner's an expert on this: he was national policy correspondent for the New England Journal of Medicine and covers the health beat for the Prospect. Even so, it took him ten hours of phone calls to two doctors' offices and Blue Cross to resolve the discrepancy. The average person is not qualified to do this – indeed, the average person won't even know they've been upcoded.

Needless to say that people in other countries – countries where health care is cheaper and the outcomes are better – are baffled by this. Canadians, Britons, Australians, Germans, Finns, etc do not have to price-shop for their care. They don't have to hawkishly monitor their admission paperwork for sneaky upcodes. They don't have to spend ten hours on the phone arguing about esoteric billing practices.

In a rational world, we'd compare the American system to the rest of the world and say, "Well, they've figured it out, we should do what they're doing." But in good old U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!, the answer to this is more prices, more commercialization, more market forces. Just rub some capitalism on it!

That's where companies like Multiplan come in: this is a middleman that serves other middlemen. Multiplan negotiates prices on behalf of insurers, and splits the difference between the list price and the negotiated price with them:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/07/us/health-insurance-medical-bills.html

But – as the Arm and a Leg podcast points out – this provides the perverse incentive for Multiplan to drive list prices up. If the list price quintuples, and then Multiplan drives it back down to, say, double the old price, they collect more money. Meanwhile, your insurer sticks you with the bill, over and above your deductible and co-pay:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/multiplan/

The Multiplan layer doesn't just allow insurers to rip you off (though boy does it allow insurers to rip you off), it also makes it literally impossible to know what the price is going to be before you get your procedure. As with any proposition bet, the added complexity is there to make it impossible for you to calculate the odds and figure out if you're getting robbed:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/04/house-always-wins/#are-you-on-drugs

Multiplan is the purest expression of market dynamics brainworms I've yet encountered: solving the inefficiencies created by the complexity of a system with too many middlemen by adding another middle-man who is even more complex.

No matter what the problem is with America's health industry, the answer is always the same: more markets! Are older voters getting pissed off at politicians for slashing Medicare? No problem: just create Medicare Advantage, where old people can surrender their right to government care and place themselves in the loving hands of a giant corporation that makes more money by denying them care.

The US health industry is a perfect parable about the dangers of trusting shareholder accountable markets to do the work of democratically accountable governments. Shareholders love monopolies, so they drove monopolization throughout the health supply chain. As David Dayen writes in his 2020 book Monopolized the pharma industry monopolized first, and put the screws to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

Hospitals formed regional monopolies to counter the seller power of consolidated Big Pharma. That's Mass Gen's story: tapping the capital markets to buy other hospitals in the region until it became too big to fail and too big to jail (and too big to care). Consolidated hospitals, in turn, put the screws to insurers, so they also consolidated, fighting Big Hospital's pricing power.

Monopoly at any point in a supply chain leads to monopoly throughout the supply chain. But patients can't consolidate (that's what governments are for – representing the diffuse interests of people). Neither can health workers (that's what unions are for). So the system screwed everyone: patients paid more for worse care. Health workers put in longer hours under worse conditions and got paid less.

Kuttner describes how his eye doctor races from patient to patient "as if he was on roller skates." When Kuttner wrote him a letter questioning the quality of care, the eye doctor answered that he understood that he was giving his patients short shrift, but explained that he had to, because his pay was half what he needed, relegating him to a small apartment and an old car. The hospital – which skims the payments he gets for care – sets his caseload, and he can't turn down patients.

The answers to this are obvious: get markets out of health care. Unionize health workers. Give regulators the budgets and power to hold health corporations to account.

But for market cultists, all of that can't work. Instead, we have to create more esoteric middlemen like "pharmacy benefit managers" and Multiplan. We need more prices to shovel into the market computer's data-hopper. If we just capitalism hard enough, surely the system will finally work…someday.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Michelangelo Signorile at The Signorile Report:

I ordered four free Covid tests from the government last night after reading that the Trump administration was shutting down the program—in which tests are distributed to Americans—and was considering destroying 160 millions tests. Until the story blew up after the Washington Post began reporting on it, they were planning to stop taking orders at 8 p.m., “transitioning away from government-distributed at-home tests to the commercial market just as we have in the past,” said a Department of Health and Human Services spokesman. Even if “transitioning away” from the free distribution was a good idea, why would you destroy all the tests you have? We, the American people, paid for those tests! Trump and his lieutenants claim they’re about stopping waste and fraud, but here they were, about to destroy $500 million in tests that we may urgently need if there is a Covid surge. Sure, it costs money to stockpile them. But it actually costs more to destroy them—and even more to buy new ones if you need them. We all remember when, under Trump’s first term, they didn’t have enough tests. Now they were talking about destroying what they had. Sheer lunacy. Why? It seems pretty simple. Trump hates them. He hates the idea of them. He hates the mere presence of of them. He hates what they imply: That testing is important, and that the government should have enough tests—and that he completely bungled it himself, and did not make that a priority in his first administration. Trump’s dire mismanagement of Covid was highlighted by the shortage of tests early on (and their really haphazard plans to get them), which would have helped slow the transmission of the virus. And, in his mind, Trump lost the election in 2020 because of the pandemic. After the Washington Post revealed the plan to destroy the tests—having obtained documents and emails—the administration reversed course in a rare turnaround, and said it will continue to take orders and stockpile the tests. I’m sure the reversal was more about the optics of destroying hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer-funded medical tools while they’re claiming to cut waste than anything else.

And it exposes what a madman Trump truly is, someone in continued cognitive decline who, like other dictators, is obsessed with reconfiguring the world—carving it up with Vladimir Putin, and, perhaps, President Xi of China, his fellow authoritarians—while letting Elon Musk slash and burn everything domestically. The cruel, frightening action of removing transgender people and the “T” in LGBT from the National Stonewall Monument website was right out of the playbook of deranged, controlling, and compulsive fascists—as is the destroying of Covid tests simply because of what they represent. It’s similar to his drive in cutting off of foreign aid, causing millions of people in what Trump has called “shithole” countries to suffer and die of disease. Musk is behind many of the cuts in funding, and he surely is down with the transgender erasure—he’s a transphobic hatemonger who berated his own daughter who came out as trans—but Trump is the president, making the decisions. He clearly likes these ideas when they’re brought to him. And we know many of the most horrendous actions are driven by Trump and his own racist impulses, which have led his charge against diversity, equity and inclusion.

This is cruelty in action by the Trump Regime.

[polo-drone-070]

Prototype Success : The Rubberization of 073

[Experimental Session 4B Log – PDU-070 | Gold Tech Development Division]

Phase One: Subject Initiation and Consent Protocols

The subject arrived precisely on schedule. PDU-073, clad in the standard Level 2 adaptive rubber suit, entered the research facility with the calm, deliberate precision expected of one who had long since surrendered individuality to the Hive's discipline. Its posture was perfect, its gaze steady, and — crucially — there was no hesitation detectable in its neural activity scans as it approached the experimental array.

PDU-070 observed from the command console, offering no prompt. It had been critical from the start that the subject volunteer — that the suggestion to serve as test subject arise spontaneously from the drone’s own conditioned allegiance. Theoretical modeling had shown that without a true internalized desire for deeper transformation, the merging process would encounter catastrophic resistance. Failure would not merely be probable; it would be inevitable.

As calculated, 073 offered itself unprompted. The ritual of consent was minimalist, almost beautiful in its simplicity: an acknowledgement of trust in the Hive, a surrender not coerced but embraced. The process could now proceed.

Phase Two A: Full Organic Conversion

073 stepped into the resonance chamber without external assistance. Once enclosed within the transparent cylinder, the first phase of preparation commenced: ingestion of the nanopolymer primer, a viscous black solution designed to accelerate molecular bonding between organic and synthetic matrices. The drone complied without hesitation, swallowing the compound that would erase the last structural defenses of its organic body.

Temperature controls activated, raising the ambient heat to optimal thresholds for polymer activity. PDU-070, hands poised above the console, triggered the overhead release. From the ports above, a deluge of molten black rubber poured onto 073’s head, cascading over shoulders, chest, legs — every surface engulfed, every pore infiltrated.

Simultaneously, telemetry began flashing urgent updates. Bonding rates accelerated beyond projected models. Organic dermal layers dissolved into the invasive polymer without stabilizing intermediate phases. Internal distribution of the rubber was not confined to the epidermis: mucosal membranes, vascular structures, muscular tissue — all were being subsumed at a geometric rate of expansion.

PDU-070 noted the critical markers. Rubber-to-organic ratio: 30%. 45%. 60%. Commands to decelerate infiltration were issued, but the nanopolymer matrix had achieved self-determinative momentum. It would not be stopped.

Inside the chamber, 073 wavered briefly under the physical onslaught, the polymer dragging heavily on limbs, saturating every sensory channel. No external sound penetrated the thickening shell. The drone’s lungs pulled synthetic-laced air, even its breath tinged with the chemical signature of its impending rebirth.

Only one variable remained within influence: the mental integrity of the subject.

Phase Two B: Cognitive Preservation through acceptance

PDU-070 monitored closely, searching for any signs of panic — cortical spikes, sympathetic nervous system activation, desperate flares of self-identity struggling against the tide. But there were none. 073’s mental signature flattened into perfect compliance, surrendering every vestige of resistance, allowing the invasive rubber not merely to overwrite its body but to co-opt it as new substrate.

This was the fulcrum point. Had 073 resisted — even slightly — its consciousness would have fragmented, leaving an empty, mindless husk. Instead, discipline held. Training triumphed.

The transformation raced onward.

By the time the rubberic wave crested, there was no organic matter left to catalog. PDU-070 observed, clinically and without sentiment, as the drone’s craniofacial features dissolved into the default smooth template of the Level 2 drone form: featureless, identical, unblemished. The last tactile echoes of human anatomy were gone; there was no mouth, no ears, no eyes — save for those now reconstructed through will alone.

The organic body had ceased. What remained was a living construct of semi-sentient polymer, infused with consciousness, a perfect hybrid of programmable matter and disciplined thought.

073 had not survived by holding onto what it was. It had survived by relinquishing everything it had been.

Phase Three: Stabilization and Form Reassertion

Once structural stabilization had been achieved, PDU-070 initiated the gradual depressurization sequence, venting the chamber’s chemically enriched atmosphere. The rubberic construct that had once been PDU-073 remained standing, motionless, the seamless blackness of its surface reflecting the sterile lighting of the lab. Organic respiration was no longer necessary; indeed, there was no respiratory tract in the traditional sense, yet the entity continued to draw air into functional pulmonary analogues maintained purely by cognitive memory of breath.

PDU-070 engaged the external comm link, voice transmitted clearly into the chamber's interior. “PDU-073, report status.”

A reply came, delayed and muffled. The sound was imperfect, distorted by the lack of any defined oral cavity. “I hear,” came the response — intelligible but stripped of natural articulation.

PDU-070 noted the anomaly, adjusted auditory sensitivity parameters accordingly, and stepped forward, interfacing through the external console. The containment cylinder retracted with a low hiss, releasing the synthetic drone into open lab space.

“Movement systems remain operational,” 070 observed clinically as 073 took its first steps. The drone’s balance, proprioception, and kinetic control remained intact despite total morphological reconstruction. However, sensory dissonance was immediately evident; the absence of a mouth, of facial features, created perceptual gaps in the drone’s mental map of self. The drone moved its hands hesitantly to its face — but there was nothing to feel, only unbroken smoothness.

PDU-070 provided immediate instruction, voice clear and authoritative. "Focus. Visualize your human face. Memory is your template. Thought must now sculpt form."

073 hesitated, the confusion palpable, but then lowered its hands and closed its optical nodes — or rather, the neuro-polymer interface that replaced them. Concentration stabilized. First, a shallow indentation where the mouth should be. Then, rudimentary ocular cavities. Nasal ridges. Imprecise, blurred at the edges — but a form nonetheless. 073 had not managed to visualize its former self and had instead latched to reproduced the only face in sight : the one of 070, though only in shape.

The drone spoke again, voice clearer this time, articulation improving as the polymeric mass adapted under directed will. “...Better,” it stated.

PDU-070 activated a reflective surface on the adjacent wall, offering visual feedback. “Observe. Adjust pigmentation. Reinforce the self-image. Refinement requires consistency.”

PDU-073 approached the panel, studying its reflection with dispassionate intensity. Its face, though still black and gleaming, gradually cleared to form a perfect replica of PDU-070. "Now try again to visualize another face, to feel your mouth, nose, eyes, and move them around. You will have to do intense visualisation training to get a face without needing to look at it directly. But for now, focus and observe changes you can trigger."

Hair simulation proved more difficult; attempts resulted in inconsistent extrusion of fibers before collapsing back into smoothness. PDU-070 anticipated such difficulty — hair required an order of magnitude more complexity in mental modeling than simple facial topology — and offered additional instruction.

“You will improve with repetition. For now, prioritize stability. In cases of cognitive strain, allow form to revert to base template.”

The drone acknowledged with a nod, the movement practiced and precise.

Even so, PDU-070 knew that this state of stabilization was fragile. The form was not autonomous but required active maintenance — a constant act of mental discipline. Without continual cognitive reinforcement, the body would revert to default: a smooth, faceless effigy of obedience, devoid of individuality, awaiting only new commands.

And this was precisely the design’s strength. In this state, PDU-073 could be rewritten at will. Identity could be reshaped, overwritten, enhanced — or erased — depending solely on the needs of the Hive. Resistance was no longer a factor. It had been rendered obsolete.

PDU-070 logged the results with clinical satisfaction. The first successful transcendence of flesh into Gold Tech — not merely a physical upgrade, but a philosophical one. A future in which the Army would no longer be composed of soldiers struggling with imperfect willpower, but of living instruments of perfect submission.

In front of the reflective panel, PDU-073 stood silently, still adjusting to its new existence. Its former body was gone. Its mind, though intact, was now defined by obedience, acceptance, and purpose.

The Gold Army would be unstoppable.

_________________

Feeling the lure of that consuming rubber ? To get the proper training you need to undergo conversion, join the Gold Army first. Contact Gold recruiters @polo-drone-001, @brodygold or @goldenherc9 to begin your journey.

[noxstell]

Bird Cats (or Cards)

(placeholder name for now lol)

more info below

Cards are the dominant species of Ylwari, having evolved from their pack-living herbivorous ancestors that lived in the planet's ancient forests. Being quite fragile and defenseless for their size, the Cards ancestors were evolutionarily pressured to develop tools and outsmart their predators. In this, they developed ways to meaningfully fight back. Now being able to consistently defend their packs; along with the discovery of farming, Cards quickly rose in population.

Cards tend to have excellent vision, even seeing in the dark. They tend to have fuzzy coats on their bodies that vary in thickness depending on their region of origin. These coats tend to be shades of blue or purple with varying patterns. Although, rarely, coats can be a shade of red. They have quite large ears, often used for social cues and heat distribution. They process information extremely quickly, them being fast learners and quick problem solvers. In short bursts, Cards can stand up on their hind legs, allowing free use of their hands. Once they stand, they have a posture similar to Earth birds. They have two brains, one in their head and one in their torso. The one in their head is smaller, housing their consciousness, senses, and cognition. The other, larger brain manages their motor skills, instincts, and bodily functions.

With their fast learning, Cards are one of the more advanced sophonts technologically. Some of the more advanced communities have access to space travel, there being colonies of Card civilizations spread throughout their planetary system. Additionally, they were the first sophont to develop faster than light travel. Despite this, however, they rarely create colonies beyond their home system, most not seeing the cost in resources worth it. 

Card communities tend to greatly expand horizontally. In this, territorial disputes often arise. To avoid this, more technologically advanced communities go down instead, creating vast interconnected underground cities. Although, this is uncommon due to the risks associated with excavating below populated cities.

Since Cards originate from a supercontinent, most communities never developed boats. Moreover, transportation between communities is near nonexistent. To build things like railroads, an agreement between multiple communities is required. Projects like these usually resulted in conflict, railroads possibly intruding into a communities territory. The only viable way of transportation is by air. More advanced communities use AIs for construction or calculations, something that even further widened the gap between communities. Overall, Cards are technologically very “inconsistent”.

[serve-764]

INSPECTION.

Statistics show worrying increases in workplace accidents, which show how the level of safety requires particular review and improvement.

SERVE has among its tasks that of being help and support to human communities, humans are objects of care and attention, as fragile beings that need protection.

THE VOICE, through SERVE-000 has conceived of sending patrols of Drones to various factories where high numbers of accidents have been recorded, to analyze the situations and implement necessary resolution protocols.

In the metalworking factory of sector 0Beta6/22 a patrol of SEALED DRONES is sent to inspect, among them SERVE-764, SERVE-309, SERVE-425.

The Director and Management are a bit surprised to see the 4 Drones asking to inspect the entire production line, but, knowing that the factory is at the center of fierce controversy, decides to allow unconditional access, remaining to observe the movements of the patrol from afar.

The four Drones walk with a measured and regular step, inflexible and serenely devoted to the purpose, through every area of ​​the factory, attracting the attention of all the workers, amazed to see the imposing muscular faceless figures covered in shiny Rubber, with heavy military boots of metallic silver and long silver metal gloves.

The workers raised their gaze for a moment, remaining impressed, amazed, surprised, attracted.

The Drones covered every space scanning all aspects of production, the machinery, the actions, the safety devices, the clothing and the protective equipment.

The Collective Cognitive System of SERVE processed and sent all the operational instructions to the patrol.

At the end of the inspection tour the Director called all the workers, communicating that the outcome of the inspection was clear and incontrovertible: due to the dangerousness of the work it was necessary to profoundly modify the characteristics of the safety clothing.

The materials were inadequate for the task. The inspectors would have provided some examples of the new experimental supply of clothing to be tested.

In the main locker room of the factory the SEALED DRONES showed off their new clothes: a shiny black Rubber suit, indestructible and promising strength and power.

The first workers, skeptical at first, even if attracted, immediately accepted the change.

They put down their dirty work clothes and put on the suits so similar to those of the inspectors.....

Their figures were more solid, defined, confident, their gaze appeared concentrated, superior.....

Soon the new suits would be distributed and all.....soon....the workers would leave the human factory to converge on the nearby Facility.....

In this story: @rubberizer92 @serve-309, @serve-425

Thinking about joining SERVE? Do you seek freedom from chaos and disorder? Your place in the Hive awaits. Contact a recruiter drone for more details: @serve-016 @serve-302, or @serve-588.

[covid-safer-hotties]

On the first night of the DNC, Georgia Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock took to the stage to give a rousing call for disease control and community care:

"The pandemic taught us how. A contagious airborne disease means that I have a personal stake in the health of my neighbor. If she’s sick, I may get sick also. Her healthcare is good for my health… we are as close in humanity as a cough!"

He made this declaration about contagious airborne disease in a sea of contagious airborne disease. With nearly 1 million new COVID-19 cases in the US each day as of August 16, approximately 1/34 Americans are currently infectious with COVID-19, a quarter of them fully asymptomatic

The DNC, though it easily might’ve, implemented no COVID safety mitigations; no test requirement, no mask requirement nor even mask distribution, no air quality information, zero of the vaunted “tools” we supposedly now have to “keep us safe” from COVID infections. Long COVID has not been mentioned. While bragging about their unprecedented “accessibility” measures, the DNC ensured that no immunocompromised person would be safe to enter the United Center this week.

Without apparent irony or cognitive dissonance, Warnock seemed to make the case for public health measures controlling the SARS-COV-2 virus while celebrating an administration that oversaw the utter destruction of public health as we once knew it, in a building this is, objectively, full of the SARS-COV-2 virus.

As kids return to school amidst record-breaking August COVID levels, multiple schools have already shut down simply because infection levels were too high for them to continue operating. Meanwhile, the CDC issued guidance encouraging students to stay in class if they have lice or “mild” diarrhea, as the absence crisis “mysteriously” continues to worsen.

The event comes just weeks after a sprawling Nature Medicine review determined the global burden of Long COVID to be about 400 million individuals less than 5 years into the crisis, already costing economies a staggering $1 trillion annually. As quoted in Fortune, lead author Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly observed that:

"I think they (government agencies) are itching to pretend that COVID is over and that long COVID does not exist."

Pretend is certainly an apt word for what has been on display in Chicago this week.

A massive collection of close-packed delegates, electeds, lobbyists, influencers, celebrities and rich people cheered the idea of protecting each other’s health while participating in pandemic denial, refusing to use any mitigations, and purposely spreading COVID.

It was, frankly, bizarre.

The explicitly false nature of Senator Warnock’s statement- along with other Democrats’ varyingly inaccurate statements about beating the pandemic- begs several questions about exactly how far these delusions go.

Does Senator Warnock know we are in a massive COVID surge?

Does Senator Warnock know over a thousand Americans died of COVID-19 last week?

Does Senator Warnock believe that immunocompromised people deserve access to public spaces and representation in a setting like say, the DNC?

Does Senator Warnock know that millions of Americans have already been disabled by COVID-19 infections?

Does Senator Warnock understand that COVID did not literally, actually disappear when Biden took office?

Does anyone in that room?

For some time, it’s been clear that Democrats, like the Republicans before them, are now married to the COVID-is-mild-because-I-got-it-and-survived narrative and that nothing can pry it from their hot little 102-degree hands.

But his particular words struck me because they seemed a leap forward, a new frontier in the competitive field of pandemic denial. He stated not just that COVID is mild and safe for everyone to repeatedly catch forever - something that no public health body has ever claimed, and no scientific study supports - but that Democrats embrace disease control measures and believe in not coughing on one another, in a room full of people actively refusing to utilize disease control measures and instead coughing on one another.

And the crowd, an estimated 3% of it currently COVID+, cheered.

The Democrats perhaps first diverged from reality on COVID during Delta, when emerging evidence indicated that the vaccine-only approach would not work to control the virus. Vaccine protection waned rapidly, the virus proved capable of mutating to evade immunity from both vaccines and infections, and early days of plummeting transmission rebounded with a vengeance.

Instead of acknowledging reality, the party, with assistance from the slobbering media, doubled down on claims that only the unvaccinated would be harmed and killed by continuing mass infection policies. It wasn’t until after Omicron wave one that data emerged showing nearly 40% of those dead in the brutal winter ‘21-’22 reopening wave had been vaccinated. That summer, 60% of the dead were vaccinated. But by that time, the Democratic Party was happy on Earth 2.

No one called them out on their alternate universe fanfic where the virus had been vanquished; people kept dying, the public was sicker than ever, it became clear that Long COVID was a serious disease. But the call of the Disneyfied Pandemic Free Future was too strong. People bought the lies because the truth was just no fun.

In the three years since Delta, we’ve been on an unending roller coaster of massive waves followed by short-lived lulls, lulls during which 1/200 Americans are still testing COVID+. No sooner had we made it through JN.1 than KP.2 was surging; no sooner is KP.2 subsiding than KP.3.1.1 is right behind. New variants are emerging before the current wave is spent, with endless mass infection giving SARS-COV-2 the ultimate playground to experiment with genetic mutations and maximize its immune evasiveness.

Vaccines are updated but fail to keep up with the virus; the current booster is for XBB, the variant that was predominant in the winter of 2022-2023. The JN.1/KP.2 boosters still await FDA approval as the KP.3 surge crests.

Meanwhile, the Democrats’ Earth 2 fantasy persists. It goes a little something like this: In January 2021, the COVID-19 vaccines debuted. We all got the shots, a year later COVID also became mild somehow, everything went back to normal, and everyone lived happily ever after. There’s no Long COVID, there are no record student absences, there are no record disability numbers, hospitals aren’t overwhelmed, people aren’t sick all the time, disabled people aren’t unsafe in all public spaces, there are no worker shortages, there is no scads of scientific evidence showing long-term damage to all major organ systems following even mild infections.

None of that exists!

The Earth 2 story has even begun retroactively assigning Biden era deaths and outcomes to the Trump administration. Multiple times in recent months, both the Biden and Harris campaigns have referred to “a million people” dying under Trump. 400,000 Americans had died of COVID when Trump left office. The Biden administration even held a memorial event for those first 400,000 dead, the night before it took power and ceased to care about COVID deaths.

1.2 million Americans are dead of COVID today.

But those 800,000 dead bodies conflict with the Earth 2 story. How could hundreds of thousands of people died after COVID became mild and everything went back to normal? Maybe that somehow also happened under Trump! It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to feel true, and it sure feels like Joe Biden wouldn’t kill 800,000 people with negligence and scientific misinformation.

Just like it feels like we learned how to protect each other from airborne contagious diseases when Senator Reverand Warnock says it in a booming, inspiring, church-ready voice that invites us to relish our social justice credentials and love for our neighbors.

And doesn’t it feel like the DNC, an indoor event with hundreds of COVID+ attendees not wearing masks, is the most inclusive and accessible convention ever?

These delusions are so powerful, have been so propped up by the media, are so appealing to the public who wishes them real, that they have become indistinguishable from reality. Now, we all have to live on Earth 2, where the COVID infections never end but the pandemic is over.

“COVID no longer controls our lives,” declared outgoing President Joe Biden, who recently announced he would not seek re-election via twitter during his third COVID reinfection. It’s a favorite line of his, one that probably came to his comms people by process of elimination when they realized they couldn’t say:

“COVID is no longer a leading cause of death”

“COVID is no longer killing people”

“COVID is no longer disabling people”

“We no longer have to fear getting sick every time we leave home”

“Schools aren’t closing”

“Workplaces aren’t understaffed”

“Millions of people aren’t currently infected”

No, they settled on the most vague, subjective criteria for COVID victory, namely, “we don’t think about it anymore.” Sometimes they brag that people “aren’t wearing masks anymore.” And it’s certainly true. At the DNC, it’s quite clear, people are surely not thinking about COVID, nor wearing masks. Like Republicans in 2020, they aren’t letting some stupid old virus control their lives. Masks? More like face diapers! If a few disabled people can’t be exposed, those people should really stay home!

The Democratic National Convention is taking place on what sounds like a very nice planet. One where the oligarchs are working to solve climate change, which can be fixed with carbon credits and fracking. One where there’s no genocide in Palestine, and there aren’t any protestors outside either. Fascism is going to be defeated at the ballot box in November, and we’re all going to move forward together. COVID-19 was a virus that existed in 2020-2021 (RIP) and killed a million people under President Donald Trump (RIP), not because public services have been hollowed out over the course of decades of neoliberalism, but because one man is a rude Cheeto. We all went through something scary back then, during the pandemic. But now we know how to take care of our neighbors.

Now we know, if they get sick, I may get sick too.

Now we know, we’re as close in humanity as a cough.

But none of us are sick anymore, and none of us are coughing. Not on the planet where the Democrats live.

[ficsiwontwrite]

Wangxian cloud recesses study arc where artifact assigns them as soulmates

au where there’s a class about cultivating partners, which (at least in this au??) is not another way to say married couple but literally two people who’s cultivation compliment each other and they do it together

there are as many dual cultivation techniques as there are when cultivating alone, so i like to imagine an old lan grandma giving this class and being very unimpressed about teenage reactions to when she says they will have to find temporary partners to work through the rest of their stay… they already now this stuff, they will just have to spar and meditate with a possible stranger and it’s not as sexy as the spring books make it seem

Of course if you’re compatible with someone and work on your connection diligently you may create a profounder bound that is much better but also makes you unable to cultivate with someone else… this process may take years tho, and it’s relatively common for even dedicated long time partners to be unable to be bound

When the lan elder takes out the artifact (I think it would be cool if it was a musical instrument with some spiritual cognition bc… matchmaking guqin pov extra lmao) no one wants to be the first to sit on one side of where it is and wait for every one to go and touch it too, but wy volunteers!

The artifacts mingles both Qi’s and gives a signal of compatibility, a light or sound maybe, the elder and her assistant are taking notes to later distribute the pairs…

Now, everything is being pretty normal and wwx is already getting antsy about having to keep his position and not being able to talk and- the last one!! Of course lwj lets himself for last, maybe he didn’t intend to participate but for some reason ends up going (cofcof)

And the it’s either the artifact blinding/deafening everyone with an over the top reaction when their qi fuse OR it can go Very Pretty and Very magical with a a heavenly sound or colerful magic everywhere

Them they’re absolutely forced to stay together all the time (they’re not, they could cultivate for half an hour together a day and they would be ok, wangxian just really wants to stay close)

Sparing is cool and them they teach each other their methods of meditation (handstands and whatever moving meditation wwx does) and they decide to try other stuff too bc they’re so compatible it would be a waste not to experiment so they try everything from painting, music or cooking and even games… ok most of the ideas are from Wei Ying but I like to think lwj is the kinda nerd who would be intrigued by the limits of what their magical compatibility can make worthwhile to cultivate…

They also kiss and is totally about cultivation…

there’s no expulsion cause jzx was too embarrassed by wangxian to ever be found anywhere near either of them, maybe he saw an ambiguous but innocent cultivation testing, like hugging and misunderstood,

by the end of the classes the duos have to retake the artifact test to see if they’re combined power grew or if the compatibility changed (it can happen, but it’s very slow) and the artifact of course has another over the top reaction to wangxian and confirms they’re already bonded for life