Feral. 🌒🌕🌘 Tree-hugging Dirt-Worshipper 🍄 🐦⬛ 🗡️ #NoKings #ClimateEmergency 🔥 #MECFS #POTS #hEDS 🦓
The Mountain, Virginia
Joined November 2019
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Ash 🐺 🌳 ☘️ retweeted
PMC COVlD Update, Sep 21, 2026 (US)
🔥13th COVlD wave
🔥40 states/territories with outbreaks (see Alt text)
🔥3.8 million estimated weekly infections
🔥Outbreaks in NYC
🔥Extremely high levels on the Big Island of HI
Mask up and get boosted.
🧵THREAD (1/4)
ALT The US has at least 34 states and territories with COVlD outbreaks. These include Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Guam, Hawai'i, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia. Levels on the Big Island of Hawai’i are particularly high. Note also, the NYC area is seeing outbreaks. There are likely outbreaks in additional states. The summary statistic of 40 only includes counties with observed data, rather than estimated data. For example, Idaho, Louisiana, Maryland, and Tennessee likely have outbreaks, but monitoring is poor.
Ash 🐺 🌳 ☘️ retweeted
NEWS: Trump's lawyers just told a federal court that if they don't get their way on renaming and "restoring" the Kennedy Center, they will tear it down and replace it with an outdoor amphitheater. He's holding the Kennedy Center hostage — and it's a preview of what happens to every public institution he can't put his name on.
Ash 🐺 🌳 ☘️ retweeted
A new study published in Frontiers in Neuroscience found MRI-based evidence of reduced glymphatic function in people with ME/CFS.
The glymphatic system helps clear metabolic waste from the brain and is particularly active during sleep. Researchers used a specialized MRI technique called DTI-ALPS to compare glymphatic function in 31 people with ME/CFS and 27 healthy controls.
People with ME/CFS had significantly lower DTI-ALPS scores overall, suggesting reduced glymphatic function. The difference was most pronounced in the right side of the brain. Lower estimated glymphatic function was also associated with worse sleep disturbance and greater difficulty concentrating, but not with fatigue severity.
The findings raise the possibility that impaired brain waste clearance may contribute to cognitive symptoms, sleep disruption, and neuroinflammation in ME/CFS. Importantly, this was a preliminary, cross-sectional study, so it cannot establish whether glymphatic dysfunction causes these symptoms or results from other disease processes.
Read the full study: ow.ly/Tmrw50ZFjPr
ALT Close-up of a person resting with eyes closed, sunlight casting striped shadows on their face and a caption about MRI evidence linking glymphatic system impairment to ME/CFS.
Ash 🐺 🌳 ☘️ retweeted
I’m happy to share this because I don’t care what side of the aisle you sit on, this is a fact.
Speaker Mike Johnson this is for you.
Concerning Social Security payments, my contributions were made for over 50 years on every salary I received. From my first part time job until I retired. I always had a job.
The Social Security check is now (or soon will be) referred to as a "Federal Benefit Payment?" I'll be part of the one percent to forward this.I am forwarding it because it touches a nerve in me, and I hope it will in you. Please keep passing it on until everyone in our country has read it.
The government is now referring to our Social Security checks as a "Federal Benefit Payment." This isn't a benefit. It is our money paid out of our earned income! Not only did we all contribute to Social Security but our employers did too.
It totaled 15% of our income before taxes.
Congress took our money and used it elsewhere. They forgot (oh yes, they knew) that it was OUR money they were taking.
They didn't have a referendum to ask us if we wanted to lend the money to them. And they didn't pay interest on the debt they assumed. And recently they've told us that the money won't support us for very much longer. And now, to add insult to injury, they're calling it a "benefit", as if we never worked to earn every penny of it.
Just because they borrowed the money doesn't mean that our investments were a charity!
Let's take a stand. We have earned our right to Social Security and Medicare. Demand that our legislators bring some sense into our government.
Find a way to keep Social Security and Medicare going for the sake of that 92% of our population who need it. Then call it what it is: Our Earned Retirement Income.
99% of people won't forward this to their timelines…..will you?
Please, for the sake of our country, repost this.
Ash 🐺 🌳 ☘️ retweeted
COVlD is surging in Texas, leading to school closures and rising Emergency Room visits, disproportionately among babies.
We became concerned about the possible surge 3 months ago today, and Texas was the impetus for our early-release of the PMC county-level map.
🚨BREAKING 🦠
On Friday, the US CDC arbitrarily shifted higher COVlD levels into lower categories depicted with cooler colors.
Much of what was Very High is now "High." What was High is now "Moderate" or "Low." Low is "Very Low."
🔹2 states/territories artificially shifted from High to Moderate (MS, GU)
🔹5 shifted from Moderate to Low (CA, TX, AK, WA, NV)
🔹4 shifted from Low to Very Low (AZ, AR, LA, NC)
During intense surges, states will rarely get classified as Very High anymore. Presently, transmission is rising across the US, with a 75% chance of a wave, but states will be depicted in blue (Very Low) much longer, making communities less prepared. #Bluewashing
Normally, when the CDC makes a methodology change, they flag it prominently on each of their COVlD monitoring pages. This time, there was no alert and no explanation. Major changes were confined to COVlD, not Influenza A, and not RSV. The questionable change was made in the middle of rising transmission across most of the country; 15 states already have COVlD outbreaks, and others may soon join the ranks. These are serious ethics concerns that warrant investigative journalism.
These issues are aggravated by delayed reporting at High/Very High monitoring sites. Sites with 1-week reporting delays get excluded when the CDC calculates current levels. For example, only 16% of the sites online in Texas (3 of 19) report High/Very High levels, but 90% of those with a 1-week reporting delay (18 of 20) have High/Very High levels, leading the state to get classified as "Low" when really High. These issues snowball and can easily push a state down 1-2 categories when experiencing significant COVlD outbreaks.
The good news is that the individual wastewater monitoring site data are still valid. The bad news is that the CDC maps and level descriptions will now mislead the casual user. Think: "Good data, bad use of data." At PMC, we told you that if there was any funny business at the CDC, we would warn you right away. We diagnosed the issue immediately and will still report accurate COVlD information.
Expect further national news coverage this week. Journalists are welcome to reach out.
Ash 🐺 🌳 ☘️ retweeted
Good review on Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) today
@JAMA_current
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam…
Ash 🐺 🌳 ☘️ retweeted
I remember a time when senior colleagues were trying to convince me that POTS is about tachycardia and that these "other symptoms" of brain fog, headache and gastrointestinal symptoms are not from POTS, but from "comorbidities that are not POTS." 🤪 I also remember a time when senior colleagues were telling me that the vast majority of POTS patients improve or recover 5-7 years after diagnosis. Or that many patients improve just with salt, fluids and compression. Or that teens with POTS outgrow it. Or that you can exercise your way out of it because astronauts returning from space develop gravity-induced orthostatic intolerance, and then, poof, come out of it with exercise. 😇
Over the last 2 decades of doing this work, I learned that I can now form my own opinions and not listen to what others are telling me because I have thousands of patients to back me up as my experience. Obviously, referral bias is strong for all of us as each of us may see a slightly different patient population, but the patterns are fairly the same.
Which brings me to this point: our understanding of #POTS, and patients with #dysautonomia who do not meet diagnostic criteria for POTS, is very much evolving. Sure, we like to have simplicity and think in black-and-white terms, but it's not like that with complex disorders. POTS is complex and is no longer viewed how we viewed it 30 years ago. Failing to reflect new insights and trying to keep the disorder simple and "how we always knew it" is failing to advance our understanding of these disorders and their treatment.
Our recent review on POTS and other related disorders, which is still trending, highlights new insights and push for access to therapies that our patients cannot get.
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.…
Ash 🐺 🌳 ☘️ retweeted
I genuinely cannot believe we are still publishing articles like this. This is exactly the kind of article that pisses chronically ill people off.
I’m so tired of seeing disabling medical conditions get reduced to nothing by people who know nothing about complex chronic conditions.
Yes, everyone will experience dizziness at some point in their life.
Everyone on this planet gets tired, and many know what a racing heart feels like.
That is not remotely the same as standing up and having your heart rate shoot to 150-170bpm.
It’s not the same as nearly passing out, having exercise intolerance, cognitive dysfunction, post exertional crashes, or chronic pain.
Severity matters. Frequency matters. The actual physiological response matters.
And then saying “it can be unclear whether you really have one of these illnesses.”
There are diagnostic criteria for these illnesses. Other causes are supposed to be ruled out first!
People aren’t getting diagnosed with POTS because they told their doctor “my heart races.”
They aren’t diagnosed with hEDS because they are a little flexible.
Can people misdiagnose themselves from a tik tok or Instagram reel? Yes.
Can doctors get diagnoses wrong? Yes.
But using that as your basis and insinuating an entire generation of young chronically ill women basically convinced themselves they were disabled is insulting.
I’m so tired of actual illness constantly being watered down to “well everyone experiences that.”
Not like this they fucking don’t.
thetimes.com/comment/columni…
Ash 🐺 🌳 ☘️ retweeted
🔴 “Long COVID came out of nowhere.”
No, it did not.
Before SARS-CoV-2.
Before COVID vaccines.
Before today’s debates about Spike, mRNA, or vaccine injury.
Another coronavirus had already been followed by persistent long-term symptoms.
It was called SARS-CoV-1.
And almost everyone forgot what happened next.
(1/33) 🧵
Ash 🐺 🌳 ☘️ retweeted
1/2. The essence of humanist hubris is the notion every problem can be solved - meaning we are not humans but gods. But, as we are about to discover, we are just human after all. We sit there and let people in charge fuck things up. And then there is no going back.
10 years of hubris gets you 10,000 years of climatic chaos. Not clever.
“What people are not getting is that we can’t turn this back – the CO2 to a large part remains in the air for thousands of years,” said Rahmstorf. “Some people think we can wait and, when it gets too bad, then we reduce emissions and things will get better again. People don’t realise that we can’t make it get better again. We can only prevent it from getting much worse.”
theguardian.com/environment/…
Ash 🐺 🌳 ☘️ retweeted
After seeing a post on it yesterday, I’ve looked more deeply into Anthropic’s purchasing and destruction of millions of used books.
They spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring and destroying books to train their AI model, Claude.
They knew, from the beginning that it would be unpopular. They knew what they were doing, was wrong.
An internal memo from 2024 stated:
“Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.”
“We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
Why used books?
Companies like Anthropic and Meta found it impractical to gain permission from authors and publishers to use their work.
So instead, they stole their work to train their product through mass purchases of used books and through pirating them from the internet.
The authors of these works, didn’t receive a dime for their efforts. These companies stole the hard won literary talent of others to train machines to replace the victims of their theft.
Anthropic cofounder Ben Mann personally downloaded countless books for this purpose from LibGen, a book pirating website.
When a new book piracy website debuted in 2022, Mann sent an email sharing the link with his employees stating: “just in time!!!”
Meta employees were wary about the piracy of books, with one engineer writing, “Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.”
Anthropic purchased millions of books, in batches of tens of thousands from Better World Books and U.K.-based World of Books.
They then used a “hydraulic powered cutting machine” to slice off the spines of these books before scanning them. Finally, the remains of these books were picked up for recycling.
Feel free to use AI, it’s a free country.
But remember that, if you use Claude, that Anthropic has committed a great wrong, and they knew that they were doing it from the beginning.
Below is an image, from a court case, of a warehouse full of used books, that instead of being held and read by you and your children, have been destroyed forever.
AI is inevitable, but spend your money on the companies who do good, and do not knowingly commit evils.
May the most moral company win.
Ash 🐺 🌳 ☘️ retweeted
🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."
My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."
I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.
Hedgie🤗
Ash 🐺 🌳 ☘️ retweeted
France Burns at a Scale Not Seen Since 1945.
Emmanuel Macron told emergency responders in Gironde on Monday that France faces its most difficult situation since the Second World War, describing the blaze outside Bordeaux as completely unprecedented. Roughly 160,000 hectares have burned nationwide this year, and the usual August peak of the fire season has not yet arrived.
The scale is hard to absorb. More than 220,000 people have been evacuated from Gironde alone, one of the largest evacuations in modern French history. Around 2,500 firefighters, 1,500 soldiers and 1,200 police are deployed, 88 firefighters have been injured, and 240 homes are gone.
At its closest, the fire came within fifteen kilometres of Bordeaux. Four firefighters have died across France in just over two weeks.
As of Tuesday the main front is stable, with military engineers cutting firebreaks alongside crews. That may not hold. Temperatures near 42 degrees are forecast later this week, and authorities warn the fires could burn for months.
Then there is the part no evacuation figure captures. Ecological Transition Minister Monique Barbut has warned that the damage to wildlife will be catastrophic, and the wildlife photographer Marina Scaglia has spent this season documenting what that looks like on the ground.
She writes that she could not stay silent this year. Thousands of hectares are burning, in every region of France and across the world, and while we count the devastated land, nature is dying. Animals are fleeing. Ecosystems are collapsing. But she has also seen firefighters spraying a doe, and people filling hollows in rocks so animals can drink, and she calls that mobilisation beautiful.
Her request is simple. Leave wildlife alone this year and let them recover. They have no shelter, no food and no time to heal. Let them breathe. These are not numbers. These are lives.
Stay connected,
Follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1
Ash 🐺 🌳 ☘️ retweeted
A NYT investigation found that Trump spent far more than the $400 million of taxpayer money that the regime publicly disclosed, on retrofitting his new Air Force One, which ultimately was not safe enough to fly in recent weeks. Additionally, the costs were even greater because things were done on a rushed basis.
I gifted this so you can read it.
nytimes.com/2026/07/25/us/po…
Ash 🐺 🌳 ☘️ retweeted
This is why America is becoming lost in a wilderness of nonsense. History is history, good or bad. This obsession Trump has of denying the past and pretending that white Christian people built this nation is frankly ludicrous.
There are no alternative facts, there’s just truth and lies. The truth might be inconvenient, but it can’t be erased, because that’s not how it works.
What astounds me, is that these people defend the indefensible with a straight face as they view their flat world, expecting everyone else to do the same.
Thanks to CNN for the clip.
🎥 TikTok - vm.tiktok.com/ZN8JqdJyS/
Ash 🐺 🌳 ☘️ retweeted
“Their names were scratched off or taken off a list in the Pentagon. To me, it is abhorrent, it’s criminal.”
Lt. Gen. @MarkHertling fights back tears as he describes the military’s last roll call, and what it means to erase four fallen soldiers from the Pentagon’s casualty list.
Ash 🐺 🌳 ☘️ retweeted
As American politicians rage about Canadian wildfires spreading smoke into our airspace, American wildfires are jumping the border into Canada.
Minnesota wildfires continue to burn, with the Bear Trap Fire in the BWCA now 34,422 acres, crossing into Ontario Canada. The other fire that crossed into Canada is the Thumb Fire, now 15,300+ acres.
Smokey conditions moderated fire activity a bit, but it also kept aircraft from engaging the fires. The Little Knife Fire burned into Minnesota from Canada and is 30,000 acres. The Sioux Fire is pushing 11,000 acres, and the Camp Fire outside Ely is 4,200 acres. There is a lot of fire on the ground, and resources continue to arrive to assist in suppression actions.
📷 1: Christine Suzanne who’s husband is a Fire Boss pilot.
📷: Tyler Carlson, resident of Ely.
Ash 🐺 🌳 ☘️ retweeted
Climate change.
Canada’s boreal forest is far north.
Most parts of it only reach 64F (18C) averages in the heat of the summer.
Its density and climate also means it gets very little evaporation compared to its rainfall, and is subject to frost 9 months of the year, and heavy fog the rest of the time.
This kept this biome very humid, kept soil damp, and left most of the low level foliage coated in dew all day long.
Some parts of the forest even had thick levels of permafrost beneath the topsoil that on rare hot days would seep water back into the ecosystem.
Just as many wildfires started by lightning strike in previous decades as now.
The difference is they struggled to catch and spread in this damp environment.
Now extreme dry weather, record breaking heat, northern thaw, erode that protective moisture barrier, leaving the boreal forest vulnerable especially in the more southern parts.
Boreal forests previously went through this process naturally when an over density caused a drier environment you’d get high-intensity crown fires that were cyclical. Every 50-200 years depending on region.
Now we get them annually.
Boreal forest fires are much more severe than others too. The long history of cyclical burns means the soil contains charcoal, the thick multi-layer foliage adds fodder and causes the fire to spread quickly, and pine, spruce, and aspens are all some of the trees with both the most density and the best for wood burning.
It results in towering forest fires of immense heat and rapid spread.
These forests are denser than anything else in North America or Europe, and the current fire in Ontario alone, is the same square mileage as the entire state of Delaware.
From the time it ignited, to covering that size, took less than 20 hours.
While some in the US still think climate change is a hoax, we are all going to deal with the consequences of it, as we’ve turned the largest forest in the world into a tinder box, and fires in less than 0.01% of it drowns the entire continent in smoke.
Ash 🐺 🌳 ☘️ retweeted
The wildfire situation across North America just got worse.
Tens of thousands of lightning strikes across the Pacific Northwest has ignited dozens of new wildfires across Oregon and Washington.
No time to waste. #ActOnClimate
#climate #energy #renewables