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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Not scabies (caused by tiny, parasitic bugs), but scrapie. Scrapie is the sheep form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and it’s caused by an abnormal protein in the brain–nothing to do with parasites. The misshapen protein can be found in the brain and spinal cord, and it turns out that grinding animals up wholesale to turn them into meat and bone meal can spread those abnormal proteins to the animals eating their ground up cousins.

    Similar illnesses are found in other animals like elk (chronic wasting disease) and humans (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, kuru). If I remember right, spongiform encephalopathies are usually rare conditions that come from gene mutations. That’s why BSE (sensationalized as “mad cow disease”) made headlines 30-40 years ago–these sick sheep and cows were showing up in unexpected numbers because of consuming tainted feed, and there was a lot of uncertainty around whether or not humans could develop CJD from eating tainted beef and mutton. It’s really, really unlikely to happen–the last I’d read about it, the people who were confirmed to have contracted CJD all had a super uncommon genetic quirk that made their normal proteins less able to maintain their healthy shape and increased their risk for disease.










  • Any chance you rotate your pen when you write? I do, and have never found a Metro that I enjoyed using. Other Pilot nibs are great–I have a Kakuno and an Elite that I love, but something about the way Metropolitan nibs are shaped is terrible for the way I write and it makes them snag on paper. Paper fibers clogging the nib will block your ink flow. I don’t know if there’s a Metropolitan with an oblique nib out there, but if there isn’t, I highly recommend trying the Kakuno instead.

    If you don’t rotate your pen, try clearing out anything in nib. My first step is usually dipping it in a bit of water in case it’s dried ink clogging things up, and if that doesn’t help, have a look at it under a bright light with a loupe. If it’s clogged, flossing between the tines with brass foil will pull out almost anything stuck in there.






  • It takes a little more effort on your part, but there’s an awful lot of good information to pull from this piece.

    1. These are socialists speaking from their points of view. They want the people to have the power, and they’re pissed at all the other players who are trying to keep the people of Haiti from governing themselves.
    2. There’s more than one other country trying to influence where the power to rule ends up. One country would basically be an invasion; what do we call it when more than one country, especially from opposing sides, tries to steer another country’s direction? We need to take a really hard look at how Haiti is being used as a proxy battleground between capitalist and communist nations.
    3. The writer references the US’s Global Fragility Act of 2019, which can be found on Congress’s website. Look at this bit in the synopsis: “The State Department shall select priority countries and regions that are particularly at risk, and report to Congress 10-year plans for each. Each plan shall include information including descriptions of goals, plans for reaching such goals, and benchmarks for measuring progress.” Next, search for “Global Fragility Act” and “Haiti” to see if Haiti really is being targeted for US intervention. The State Department and Council on Foreign Relations say that, yes, the US is involving itself in Haitian politics, explicitly with the goal of being an investment (CFR) and “stabilized” according to standards laid out by the US (State Department).

    Basically, we can insert Team America: World Police gifs as desired here. Ignoring the socialist bias entirely, we have to look at why Haiti is important to the US and Canada, how it’s being used as a proxy for the cold war between the East and West, and why we don’t think the Haitian people are capable of governing themselves. You’re welcome to ask your own questions about it, including why you want to dismiss the opinion as totally worthless right away.