@reaperfromtheabyss / reaperfromtheabyss.tumblr.com
my personal pick for most underrated animal is the european legless lizard, which i think is often taken to just look like a normal and rather plain snake, but if you're familiar with reptile anatomy at all it looks more like some sort of bizarre heraldic fantasy creature than basically anything else on earth
1 cup 26 bunnies
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people. [...] By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons—kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added—up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly. The results were immediate, starting with that horrific holiday body count in the closing days of 1926. Public health officials responded with shock. “The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol,” New York City medical examiner Charles Norris said at a hastily organized press conference. “[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible.” His department issued warnings to citizens, detailing the dangers in whiskey circulating in the city: “[P]ractically all the liquor that is sold in New York today is toxic,” read one 1928 alert. He publicized every death by alcohol poisoning. He assigned his toxicologist, Alexander Gettler, to analyze confiscated whiskey for poisons—that long list of toxic materials I cited came in part from studies done by the New York City medical examiner’s office. Norris also condemned the federal program for its disproportionate effect on the country’s poorest residents. Wealthy people, he pointed out, could afford the best whiskey available. Most of those sickened and dying were those “who cannot afford expensive protection and deal in low grade stuff.” And the numbers were not trivial. In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year, deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry clamor. Furious anti-Prohibition legislators pushed for a halt in the use of lethal chemistry. “Only one possessing the instincts of a wild beast would desire to kill or make blind the man who takes a drink of liquor, even if he purchased it from one violating the Prohibition statutes,” proclaimed Sen. James Reed of Missouri.
This isn't particularly relevant to anything specific. I just wanted to remind everyone this is something the US government did.
oh, i clicked on the article to see if this book was mentioned, and hey its DEBORAH BLUME!! aka the author of the book I was just about to reccomend about this Exact Thing:
if this article is interesting to you, i highly reccomend this book. It doesn't just discuss prohibition of course, but it goes even more in depth on this stuff.
I would also reccomend her newer book...
this one is about the history of food safety in the united states, and I cannot emphasize enough how disgusting some of this is. wanna find out what embalmed milk is? wanna learn about how much random bullshit from sawdust to coconut shells to dust was put into spices? wanna learn about all the ways food was left to rot and be sold before the FDA? wanna learn how HARD food manufacturers fought regulation, for their right to not be inspected and put borax and formaldehyde and unlabeled ingredients in their products? read this book!
this book takes its name from the IRL poison squad, which was a bunch of healthy young men who were purposefully fed common food additives like borax to see if they were as safe as manufacturers claimed.
This, of course, is also not at all relevant to current events or to claims that deregulation is unneeded because companies will self regulate. nope. not at all.
For anyone curious about the history of antiregulation and antiscience additudes in the United States, I read this paper for a class I am taking on the sociology of science as an institution. It was written by historians of science and it chronicles a century long campaign by industry and American conservatives to push for deregulation. They used propaganda to tie the idea of a “free market,” (without regulations on businesses) to Americans’ already deeply held beliefs about freedom. The authors also show how during the Regan administration (because so many of todays problems trace back to this fucker) this “anti-regulation,” stuff expanded to also be “anti-science,” because science started to show that stuff like climate change and acid rain exist that kind of demand regulation of some kind. And also that Trump’s response to Covid was deeply tied to all of that.
They also use public opinion data to show that prior to the 1980s, conservative and liberal trust in science in America was about the same. After the 1980s, we see a growing decline in conservative trust in science while liberal trust has stayed steady, and even grown during the Obama administration and the first Trump administration (they don’t have any data after that because this was only published in 2022 and probably written and researched even before that, because academia can take a while to go from research to publication.)
Anyway, I think the paper is open access so you can download the pdf from that link if you wanna read it.
Everybody driving a car thinks they're the main character of the car. This is an ideologically bourgeois attitude. You know who doesn't ever feel like the main character of the vehicle they're in? Literally everyone on the bus. You're on the fucking bus. And the bus driver doesn't feel like the main character of the bus because she's at fucking work. The bus is the most ideologically proletarian form of transport.
Offering no further data or reason for the information’s release, an ominous new report published Tuesday by anonymous researchers from an unknown institution just lists places to hide. “Underground tunnels, remote cabins in the woods unreachable by vehicles, and caves in desolate mountain regions are all acceptable locations in which to stay hidden,” read the foreboding report, which went on to state that hiding on an uninhabited island, in an abandoned building, or beneath a pile of corpses belonging to people who didn’t hide well enough were also good options.
...then again, there are alternative revenues of power in rome
octavian and crassus, because I'm back on my spolia opima bullshit
Fact and Fiction: Crassus, Augustus, and the Spolia Opima, Catherine McPherson
the eyebrow scar runs in the family lmao. so does the attitude
first they made it mandatory to log in everywhere. create an account to download your free template Log in to access resource give us your email nowwwww. Now the humble password is being killed too. open your magic email link! type your 6 digit code that we texted you because we required your email and your phone number! we’re gonna call you and whisper a code sweetly in your ear so you can log in to your account. yes it has a password but you cant use that anymore. okay? poob is gonna call you. now poob is just gonna call you.
If anyone has taken their eyes off what's happening to federal workers in the US right now, here's some highlights that we're hearing from our comrades across the government who have not yet been fired:
And I'm not just saying this to lament how bad it is for federal workers. I'm saying this because, as workers are reporting this to one another, the response is, inevitably: "This is illegal." "Yes, but who would I report it to? OPM? They're a DOGE puppet. OSHA? They've cut OSHA. The Inspectors General? Cut. The NLRB? Cut. My union? No longer recognized."
There is no one left to enforce these laws, so taking away access to basic sanitation is now effectively legal. They are doing this to federal workers, who historically have been some of the best-protected workers in the country. They are doing this specifically because it demonstrates to the public sector that it is now legal to do these things to their own workers.
Side note that this is also EXACTLY what Elon did when he took over Twitter, because he thinks that paying for janitorial/environmental staff and building upkeep is a waste of money.
I just want y’all to know that one time during lockdown I played a lot of Minecraft because I had nothing better to do and then later I was going to go into my room after a shower so I could go back to being a hermit but it was dark so I just thought “oop, can’t go in there, there’ll be skeletons spawning there and they’ll shoot at me”
And for LIKE FIVE WHOLE SECONDS I didn’t question it and I just turned on the lights and walked out into the living room to wait it out, just thankful I had my pajamas on already so I didn’t have to fight off the shooty skeletons in my dark closet where there might be some creepers too
And then all of a sudden I was like “Wait what the frig skeletons aren’t real” and then just went back into my room
And I think about that a lot. So if ANY OF YOU dare to think that I have any more than three and a half braincells on a really good day, just please remember this and know that you are sorely mistaken
I hate to break it to you but skeletons are, in fact, real. There's one incredibly close to you at this very second
this is like that one summer I played too much chess, and then I was standing in line at the grocery store at a slightly diagonal angle to the person in front of me and I had this light go off in my brain like “weak pawn structure this is your chance” before I realized that it was real life actually.
"video games make you violent" no they make you wait for skeletons to despawn
This scene was like sexually tense
I guess the biggest problem with tentacle porn is that it seldom has a positive message
So glad I decided to fact check this. I would have gone my entire life without knowing it was a Russian doll shark situation.
Shark turducken
Ace Attorney-ass murder plot
You're not being "poisoned" by signals or 5G or microwaves or what have you. Unless you work in very specific jobs, the only electromagnetic waves you need to worry about are UV rays from the sun.
Your co-worker specifically has a lot more than UV rays to worry about it.
