Tootfinder

The Spectator has 113K subscribers, a record, print is its fastest-growing type of subscription, and it is offering its subscription service to external clients (Freddie Sayers/The Spectator)
https://spectator.com/article/the-spectators-record-subscriber-numbers/

The Spectator’s record subscriber numbers
Something remarkable is happening at the world’s oldest weekly magazine. After years of relatively flat subscriber numbers, The Spectator has surged past its Covid-era peak and now has more paying subscribers than at any point in its 198-year history. Today’s ABC circulation figures show that, while most of our competitors have been on a downward trajectory

Trump somehow got worse on public health after covid (Noah Berlatsky/Public Notice)
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/rfk-jr-moderna-vaccine
http://www.memeorandum.com/260217/p24#a260217p24

from my link log —
Votes for children! Why we should lower the voting age to six.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/16/reconstruction-after-covid-votes-for-children-age-six-david-runciman

Looks like the rate of long COVID after a acute infection is 40% or higher...
**in young healthy adults**
https://www.amjmedsci.org/article/S0002-9629(26)00103-5/fulltext

Worldwide, sales of new cars with a fossil fuel combustion engine dropped to the level of 2004, by 2024. And sales of new cars that use fossil fuels (100% or partially, in hybrids) dropped to the level of 2012. EVs are on the march.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean

Welp, this will be my last run until after surgery. Is there a Walkers of Mastodon, lol? 😆 I will be doing more walking and light elliptical use.
I've had multiple instances of collapsed vestibular episodes, and I'm done powering through this in the interest of not losing my hearing, or worse. I'm one stubborn son of a bitch, but I've been doing more damage to my body over the last 14 months than I should have been (under the guise of this being long covid and part of …

Six days after a senior FDA official sent a sweeping internal email claiming that covid vaccines had caused the deaths of “at least 10 children,”
Twelve former FDA commissioners released an extraordinary warning in the Dec. 3 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
They wrote that the claims and policy changes in the memo from Vinay Prasad, the head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research,
pose “a threat to evidence-based vaccine policy and public h…

Inside the FDA’s Vaccine Uproar - KFF Health News
An internal email claiming covid vaccines killed children triggered a formal response from a dozen past FDA commissioners. The email, sent by the head of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, outlines a framework that could have significant impact on the nation’s vaccine policies.

Finally, #PhysicsGirl feels well enough to host a science video after years of dealing with Long COVID!
https://youtu.be/B3m3AMRlYfc

As salty as I am about it, there's also another way to think about this. For anyone who still has connections to folks on the right (which is perhaps unlikely for anyone on this server, I digress), the cult that has consumed them thrives on isolation and grievance.
The words "you were right" have the potential to cut through the programming and open up an opportunity for reconnection. The modern conspiratorial cult of the Right has been built partially around people who were told they were wrong or were crazy. In the vast majority of cases, they were wrong and even when they were right they completely misunderstood why, but we'll skip that for now. Liberals making fun of them (even the times when they definitely earned it) has pushed them further and further into their ideological hole.
The thing about those words, "you were right," in this context is that the way they offer reconnection also requires them to take one little step of betraying their ideology to accept them. So they must choose between maintaining allegiance to a pedophile or finally getting to feel superior after years of living in an illusion of persecution.
Under the ideology of the Right, admitting one is wrong is a weakness. It is admitting defeat. They have to "own the libs" by saying things, things that they know aren't true, in order to feel dominant. But these things are often so absurd that they end up being made fun of, feeling even more weak and pathetic, reinforcing their fear and alienation.
Offering what they're looking for can offer a way out, but only if they're willing to start to recognize the thing they've supported for what it is.
And they were right about some things. They were right that Bill Gates was a terrible person. I've had plenty of liberals defend him based on his philanthropy washing, but he's awful and always has been. The Epstein links make that blatant. They intuitively recognized him and didn't trust him, even if they were wildly off base about *how and why* he shouldn't be trusted... Even if their correct mistrust was leveraged into one of the most destructive conspiracy theories ever (vaccine denial and COVID vaccine avoidance).
They were right about Bill Clinton. He was always shady as fuck. Sure, the people who attacked him at the time turned out to be even more shady but that's not the point right now. He was connected to Epstein and that was always creepy as fuck.
And the Epstein thing was an open secret that liberals ignored for a long time. It was seen as some weird thing that right wing nutjobs believed about the Clintons. But it was true. Not all of it, and there has always been an antisemitic element to the right wing interpretation or Epstein stuff, but his whole pedophile conspiracy was always kind of real.
The whole "Illuminati"/deep state thing is a vast oversimplification, an attempt to make comprehensible an incredibly complex set of interlocking and emergent behaviors. But Epstein did very much want to remake the world, to create a new world order, and he absolutely played a part in it.
The Right wing nutjobs talked about global authoritarianism, Blackhawks flying over American cities, masked men with guns disarming and executing legal gun owners in the streets. That's all happening right now.
The "FEMA concentration camps" are not actually that far off. ICE and FEMA are sister agencies, both under DHS. I'd be more than happy to call that one "close enough" in order to hear some MAGA admit that ICE is, in fact, building concentration camps.
There was always a huge millennialist element to these things. They tended to be connected to "the antichrist." It was absurd, especially for me as someone who no longer identifies as a Christian. But I'll even acquiess that to a degree. The "the number of the Beast" is 666. That's just the sum of the Hebrew spelling of "Nero." Revelations focuses a lot on Nero coming back to life after his death. His death that involved a head wound, thus the line from Revelation 13:3:
> And I saw one of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world marveled and followed the beast.
The parallels between Trump and Nero are easy to draw, and Trump's ear wound feels pretty on-the-nose for this. I don't believe in "prophecy" in this way. I think that there are patterns, and useful patterns can become encoded in beleif systems. But I will, again, happily call this one "close enough" for anyone on that side willing to also acknowledge it. I'm happy to meet on that common ground, because anyone who accepts it must recognize that their duty is to fight against it.
A lot of these correct nuggets are embedded in a framework of religious extremism and antisemitism. The vast majority of the beliefs holding these together are wildly wrong and incredibly toxic. But by giving some room to feel validated, listened to, understood, can give some room to admit things that were wrong.
Cult de-programming starts with an opening. People have to talk through their own thoughts, hear their own inconsistencies. Guiding questions can help them untangle these things for themselves. And it all starts by having enough room to feel safe, to not feel cornered, to not feel stupid. Admitting mistakes means being vulnerable, and the MAGA cult is built on fear. It's built on exploiting vulnerability and locking it away.
De-programming takes a long time. It's not easy. It takes patience. But every person who comes out does so with a powerful perspective, a deep understanding, that can be turned back against it. The best people at getting people out of cults are former members. Some of the most dedicated antifa are former fascists who understood their mistakes and dedicate their lives to fixing them.

No where near enough parking for those who drive in. Can't get a monthly pass as they have oversubscribed and a waiting list that may take God only knows how long before we get a spot. Bus system is less than reliable. Not enough space so we have to 'hotel'. Even before COVID we were alternating weekly for remote working and at-office due to parking spaces.
<sarcasm>
I don't see any problems of more of us being at my work location.
</sarcasm>

It seems like an odd choice for this piece to not note that James Cameron is not a US citizen (he's Canadian and withdrew his application for US citizenship decades ago).
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jan/23/james-cameron-left-…

‘Everybody’s at each other’s throats’: James Cameron says he has left the US permanently
Avatar director, who moved to New Zealand after the Covid pandemic says he will soon be a citizen of a country where people ‘are, for the most part, sane’

Good Morning #Canada
My morning routine includes #CBCRadio with my coffee and this morning they had an interesting segment on Canadian youth returning to church. According #StatsCan 2022 data, 22% of Canadians ages 15-24 attended religious services at least once a month. That's a significant increase compared to ages 25 to 64. Angus Reid found that positive views of religion by #GenZ adults grew from 35 to 40% between 2023 to 2025, while views from every other generation significantly decreased.
This led me to read several news articles from late last year that reported on these studies, one of which is linked below. It appears the trend became noticeable during and after COVID lockdowns. The words of multiple interviewees tells me that young people's were looking for community and human interaction with something grounded with a sense of morality. That's positive even if you don't believe in her holiness above.
#CanadaIsAwesome #Hallelujah
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/article/return-to-faith-church-attendance-increasing-for-first-time-in-decades/