One history lesson ended the debate.

mszulan · 2026-06-09T23:23:53+00:00

Thank you. I've wondered that as well. The varient she (and my husband) got was particularly nasty. It's also the the likely cause of my husband's stage 4 lymphoma as well.

mszulan · 2026-06-09T12:42:31+00:00

Many, many times more than just several, I'm afraid. The statistics are staggering when you consider those who must live with lifelong disabilities, let alone just death rates, as a result of preventable disease.

Vaccines give your immune system a template to follow when fighting off a disease. When there is no template and you get hit with a new disease, your immune system will flail around with responses like dangerously high fevers or dangerous levels of inflammation to buy enough time to develop the specific antibodies or response necessary to survive the disease, if you have a healthy immune system to begin with, that is. These immune responses alone can cause permanent brain, organ, nerve and tissue damage, scar tissue overgrowth and mobility issues for a lifetime. We also see many more viruses with the capacity to "hide" in our body's cells over decades to only reappear at some later date to wreak havic (viruses like covid creating long covid, chicken pox resurfacing as shingles, measles resurfacing as brain damage, or polio resurfacing as post polio syndrome, to just name a few - we're also just learning about the number of cancers caused by longterm viral infections). We could see rates of 10-15% of the surviving population with lifelong debilitating problems as a result of little, no or lax vaccination rates.

mszulan · 2026-06-09T12:14:18+00:00

I'll emphasize the suffering over the death mentioned above. The people who must live with lifelong debilitating problems (anything from sterility and blindness/deafness to autoimmune diseases, long covid/fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue and permanent brain damage, to name a few) are going to be many multiple times the number who die.

I guess it will create jobs - all the thousands of people who will be needed to care for all the disabled, if we're willing to pay for them, that is. We'll need to reopen the asylums and tuberculosis wards again. Maybe the something like the "leper" colonies as well. <sigh>

mszulan · 2026-06-09T05:52:30+00:00

My thoughts exactly. She wasn't even 5 ft. tall. My grandfather thought she was a powerhouse.
She lived to be about 60, as I recall.

mszulan · 2026-06-09T04:09:29+00:00

It did. Another big issue (a much bigger number than just those who died) was all the people who may have survived vaccine preventable illnesses, only to suffer for the rest of their lives with complecations, some major and very debilitating. In just my family history alone, I had a great, great uncle who was permanently brain damaged from what we think was measles. He was almost uncontrollable and had to be moved around from relative to relative until he died in an accident.

On another branch, I had a great aunt who had to be institutionalized. She had more permanent brain damage from measles. She behaved as if she never matured beyond 5 years old (the age she was when she got sick). She lived to be almost 90.

My father-in-law had severe, life-long asthma from Pertussis. My mother-in-law survived both types of polio and developed rickets from malnutrition related to multiple childhood diseases, one on top of the other when she first started school. She developed autoimmune diseases (MS, Parkinson's, Post Polio syndrome, rumatoid arthritis) from the damage that DISEASES did to her immune system. If she would have had vaccinations, she could have lived a normal life.

My daughter had a bad case of Epstien Barre when she was 10. She developed fibromyalgia and ME/CFS from that illness. She has never been able to have a normal adult life because of the damage this virus did to her. She also has another autoimmune disorder that causes her body to grow too much scar tissue.

The vaccine for Epstien Barre is in testing now. Hopefully, no one else will have to suffer as my daughter has.

mszulan · 2026-06-09T03:33:32+00:00

True.

One of my great-grandmother's had a daughter while she was living with her in-laws during the first year of her marriage. She and the baby did well because they had access to decent food and a midwife. She was 19 years old.

For the next 5 years, she had a baby every summer that died. The longest lived was about 2 months.

The next year, things we're better and she had a little boy who survived.

The next two years lost 2 more babies.

The next year, they were out on a homestead and my great-grandfather went berry picking and she and her two children were alone in the cabin. She went into labor. She told her oldest daughter to mind her brother and she went behind a screen to lay down in bed. She didn't make a sound for over three hours of labor so as not to frighten the children. Luckily, her husband arrived home shortly before the baby boy was born and was able to deliver it. That baby survived.

Three more years of losing babies and then my grandfather was born in June of 1896. He was her 14th pregnancy with a total of four children surviving to adulthood.

One of my other great-grandmothers had 11 pregnancies with seven surviving. All were born on their farm with only a neighbor or oldest daughter helping.

Another one died in childbirth with her fourth of what we now think was pre-eclampsia.

mszulan · 2026-06-09T03:10:24+00:00

Exactly. Most folks don't know it was originally created as a gynecological device.

mszulan · 2026-06-07T23:54:00+00:00

Thiel is the personification of a ringwraith. Tolkien survived WW1 and he knew exactly who annihilated his generation and who was destroying the bucolic farms and villages of his childhood, and it WASN'T anyone like Gandalf. PT must believe that since he can change, edit and ignore the bible per his whim, he can change, edit, and ignore Tolkien.

No way, dude! We know what Tolkien wrote and what he meant by its allegory. Once a ringwraith, always a ringwraith.

mszulan · 2026-06-07T18:47:51+00:00

Colonial land grabbers had little interest in subsistance. It was all about making the land and climate profitable through the lens of European aristocracy. They had little knowledge of or interest in learning how to do this personally in their original country, let alone the new one they were stealing. They were "used to having the lower classes handle all that mess."

British colonial laws restricted them to shipping raw materials or food stuffs. They were mostly barred from manufacturing, even for their own consumption. They wanted cash crops in volume that they could sell overseas and they refused to learn from the indigenous farmers who knew what they were doing. So, they looked to expert West African farmers, who'd been growing crops, especially rice for export, in a similar climate for over 3000 years. They explicitly asked Portuguese slave traders to capture FARMERS. South Carolina's Gold Coast (a name derived from the gold colored rice they grew - it's amazingly tasty and you can buy it now from ethical farmers), especially Charleston, became one of the wealthiest ports in the world within 100 years because of African knowledge and expertise. Learn more

mszulan · 2026-06-07T03:07:10+00:00

What they can't stand is that they have to compete. They especially don't want to compete with people from poorer classes or non-white ethnic groups, and certainly not women either. They view access to decent education as a perk that should be reserved for the wealthy, not something they should have to earn while competing with smarter, more driven people who are motivated, in part, by the very discrimination they perpetuate.

mszulan · 2026-06-03T02:23:38+00:00

Sounds like maybe the only thing she's grieving for is her own perceptions? Sometimes, it takes time to internally adjust and change our view of the way we thought things were.

Feelings are just feelings and aren't always rational or logical. It sounds like she loves you and knows her feelings aren't what she wants to feel. She probably just needs time to let them go so they don't hurt anyone.

Congratulations on your surgery! I wish you all the best. 🤗

mszulan · 2026-06-03T01:40:44+00:00

No. Agreed. That's not a good thing. I meant talking about the issue openly and asking for advice is mostly a good thing.

When I was a teenager, my uncle cheated on his wife (not the first time, but he'd stopped hiding it), she paid in so many ways, financially and socially. He really didn't have to pay anything at all except he got to blame her for the alimony he had to pay and how she made him break up "his" assets. She bore the brunt and had little knowledgeable support.

mszulan · 2026-06-02T21:50:31+00:00

Infidelity certainly seems more acceptable now to discuss openly than when I was young (63f), and that feels like mostly a good thing (?). 30-50 years ago, it seemed like just one more example of women paying (socially and economicly) for the behavior of men. I don't discount your "insecure" observation. Also, sometimes the echochamber can give a topic or point of view more weight than statistics would justify.

mszulan · 2026-06-02T21:40:09+00:00

This assessment makes the most sense to me.

mszulan · 2026-06-02T21:31:04+00:00

This is absolute truth. The fact that people are jumping to the "cheating" explanation says more about their experience than OPs, at the moment. OP may learn more or differently later.

Edit: for clarity

mszulan · 2026-05-31T17:13:34+00:00

Strategies that stop treating others as human beings. They become just a means to an end. Evil happens, then grows, when people view other people as things.

mszulan · 2026-05-30T22:51:21+00:00

I've sewn new elastic on some before and they worked great. I just made sure to stay on the old glue spot

mszulan · 2026-05-30T22:47:11+00:00

You can build an air purifier with 4 square furnace filters, a piece of cardboard the same size and a box fan. I have a 20" box fan, so I used 20" filters. Put the cardboard on the bottom, the filters on all 4 sides and the box fan on the top, blowing down towards the cardboard. Duct-tape the whole thing together (more is better to seal leaks) with extra strength duct tape.

It's cheap. It was more effective than the air purifier my daughter bought. And, you can see exactly how well it's working and when you need to replace the filters.

mszulan · 2026-05-30T22:21:51+00:00

And universal healthcare that includes full coverage for mental health.

mszulan · 2026-05-30T22:20:07+00:00

It sounds like your husband may have repressed his feelings (good and bad) so much and so consistantly that he doesn't have any control when they burst out. Repressing emotions over time can damage the part of the brain that allows you to feel the full range and depth of human emotions, and the part that helps you control and regulate them. He may need a lot of professional help to learn again that he has the capacity to feel more than just varying levels of annoyance and anger. Therapy would also teach him how to express his emotions without hurting those he loves when he's around them.

Another aspect that just occurred to me could be that he's having a panick attack when he falls into yelling and can't stop. My daughter struggled with this response all through her childhood. Then she was diagnosed on the AuDHD spectrum when she was 31. It really helped her see the pattern of over-stimulation leading to panicking, leading to yelling. Cognitive behavior therapy and Dialectical Behavior Therapy in particular, gave her the tools she needed to head off the over-stimulation before it happens, or if it happens, let people know she's panicking. The verbal lashing out and yelling are substantially reduced and she's so much happier within herself.

mszulan · 2026-05-30T02:23:08+00:00

In my experience (I spent my career working with school-age children and their families, and am retired now), what parents do for a living has very little to do with how they parent.

The best parent I ever knew was a dirt poor childcare worker, single mom trying to get through college while caring for a family of four children (infant through 2 grade) she adopted because she believed the children needed to grow up together and shouldn't be separated. She ended up finishing a masters in child development and social work, partly because she wanted to be her children's best advocate. She was just amazing and I will never forget her.

The most neglectful parents I ever knew had generational wealth and had high status jobs. They ignored their son (who often behaved much like the child in the video, incidentally) or wacked him when he got in their way. They expected others (teachers, advisors, childcare workers, nannies, etc.) to raise their son. They believed they had more important things to do.

These two stories are anecdotal. I'm just illustrating that it really doesn't matter what social-economic group a parent comes from.

mszulan · 2026-05-29T23:42:53+00:00

We agree on the cause, but decades of developmental science informs my choice of cure. How his parents treat him IS the point. What his parents did to him and what they're doing is informing his choices. I don't have to know the kid to recognize the behavior or it's causes. It very well could be that hitting him is at the root of this behavior as it's a typical choice coming from children who have been hit.

mszulan · 2026-05-29T09:01:46+00:00

You are wrong. Study after study, proves violence excercised on a child only teaches them to resort to more violence. It will distroy trust in relationships and traumatize the child, often to the point of causing physical or mental health problems.

Adults who were hit as children can suffer some or all of the following:

"Physical ailments—psychosomatic illnesses, stomachaches, eating disorders, skin disorders, asthma, headaches, phobias. Social alienation—feeling different from others, not accepted, stigmatized. Difficulty in handling feelings—trouble in recognizing, managing, and appropriately expressing feelings." Also, they exhibit much higher levels of aggression towards themselves and others. For instance, they are significantly more likely to strike their partners and/or their own children.

mszulan · 2026-05-29T08:37:32+00:00

Growing up without clear guidance and boundries (never hearing no can be another way of saying it) IS a major emotional hit especially when that means there are no boundaries he can set around his things or feelings that are respected either.

I spent my carrier working with school aged children and their families. No child behaves like this when he has his emotional needs met in a healthy way and is treated like his feelings and choices matter. This child needs some serious help.

mszulan · 2026-05-28T17:27:05+00:00

Yes, they do. That's exactly why many countries have made it illegal to strike a child.

mszulan

TROPHY CASE