"There's no hope for the future." And that's how they felt during the Atomic Age, during the World Wars, during the Enlightenment Revolutions, during thr plagues, during the Viking raids, during the fall of Rome.
I love sitting down in the evening and trying to decide what activity I should do to unwind and then realizing an hour later that I have neither done an activity nor unwound
There are over 17,000 school board seats up for election this November
Over the last few years Republicans have used local school boards to ban books, stop the teaching of sex ed, the teaching of black history, and to ban any mention of LGBT people in schools. It is amazingly easy to reach out to local school board candidates and ask them, directly, about their views on subjects, I've done it and always gotten an answer. So find out who's running in your community and what they believe, pay attention, don't just fill out the top of your ballot and call it good, vote all the way down, and if you can't find out, ask directly.
I voted in the last two elections and had no reason to think my registration wouldn't be valid for this one--when I went to check, it said it was "pending" and "needed additional steps" and if I hadn't checked I would have had no reason to think I wasn't good to go until the day of. bogus!!!! Anyway VOTE.GOV, y'all, it didn't take long.
Opinion Here’s how to get free Paxlovid as many times as you need it
When the public health emergency around covid-19 ended, vaccines and treatments became commercial products, meaning companies could charge for them as they do other pharmaceuticals. Paxlovid, the highly effective antiviral pill that can prevent covid from becoming severe, now has a list price of nearly $1,400 for a five-day treatment course.
Thanks to an innovative agreement between the Biden administration and the drug’s manufacturer, Pfizer, Americans can still access the medication free or at very low cost through a program called Paxcess. The problem is that too few people — including pharmacists — are aware of it.
I learned of Paxcess only after readers wrote that pharmacies were charging them hundreds of dollars — or even the full list price — to fill their Paxlovid prescription. This shouldn’t be happening. A representative from Pfizer, which runs the program, explained to me that patients on Medicare and Medicaid or who are uninsured should get free Paxlovid. They need to sign up by going to paxlovid.iassist.com or by calling 877-219-7225. “We wanted to make enrollment as easy and as quick as possible,” the representative said.
Indeed, the process is straightforward. I clicked through the web form myself, and there are only three sets of information required. Patients first enter their name, date of birth and address. They then input their prescriber’s name and address and select their insurance type.
All this should take less than five minutes and can be done at home or at the pharmacy. A physician or pharmacist can fill it out on behalf of the patient, too. Importantly, this form does not ask for medical history, proof of a positive coronavirus test, income verification, citizenship status or other potentially sensitive and time-consuming information.
But there is one key requirement people need to be aware of: Patients must have a prescription for Paxlovid to start the enrollment process. It is not possible to pre-enroll. (Though, in a sense, people on Medicare or Medicaid are already pre-enrolled.)
Once the questionnaire is complete, the website generates a voucher within seconds. People can print it or email it themselves, and then they can exchange it for a free course of Paxlovid at most pharmacies.
Pfizer’s representative tells me that more than 57,000 pharmacies are contracted to participate in this program, including major chain drugstores such as CVS and Walgreens and large retail chains such as Walmart, Kroger and Costco. For those unable to go in person, a mail-order option is available, too.
The program works a little differently for patients with commercial insurance. Some insurance plans already cover Paxlovid without a co-pay. Anyone who is told there will be a charge should sign up for Paxcess, which would further bring down their co-pay and might even cover the entire cost.
Several readers have attested that Paxcess’s process was fast and seamless. I was also glad to learn that there is basically no limit to the number of times someone could use it. A person who contracts the coronavirus three times in a year could access Paxlovid free or at low cost each time.
Unfortunately, readers informed me of one major glitch: Though the Paxcess voucher is honored when presented, some pharmacies are not offering the program proactively. As a result, many patients are still being charged high co-pays even if they could have gotten the medication at no cost.
This is incredibly frustrating. However, after interviewing multiple people involved in the process, including representatives of major pharmacy chains and Biden administration officials, I believe everyone is sincere in trying to make things right. As we saw in the early days of the coronavirus vaccine rollout, it’s hard to get a new program off the ground. Policies that look good on paper run into multiple barriers during implementation.
Those involved are actively identifying and addressing these problems. For instance, a Walgreens representative explained to me that in addition to educating pharmacists and pharmacy techs about the program, the company learned it also had to make system changes to account for a different workflow. Normally, when pharmacists process a prescription, they inform patients of the co-pay and dispense the medication. But with Paxlovid, the system needs to stop them if there is a co-pay, so they can prompt patients to sign up for Paxcess.
Here is where patients and consumers must take a proactive role. That might not feel fair; after all, if someone is ill, people expect that the system will work to help them. But that’s not our reality. While pharmacies work to fix their system glitches, patients need to be their own best advocates. That means signing up for Paxcess as soon as they receive a Paxlovid prescription and helping spread the word so that others can get the antiviral at little or no cost, too.
Holy shit, please reblog this. This is incredibly useful information! Paxlovid not only helps reduce the severity of covid but also goes a decent way to preventing long covid. I cannot stress this enough — even if you think this isn’t relevant to you because you’re perfectly healthy, you could get covid TOMORROW and permanently have long covid a month from today if you got unlucky.
And, of course, if you suspect you have covid, take a test or see a doctor ASAP. Paxlovid MUST be taken within the first five days of developing symptoms. The Paxcess copay card seems really easy and quick to fill out, though!
Reminder: the companies and political entities pushing Project 2025 have addresses and go out to lunch a lot and should never eat a spitless meal for the rest of their lives.
Practice bagpipes outside their secure compounds.
Follow them around ringing a bell wherever they go.
If they are going to be farcically evil, be Animaniacally good. Be the definition of chaotic justice.
Also, vote. It might just kick the ball down the road a bit, but that gives people more time to organize a concerted resistance (in no way on any social media platform) to the fascist creep happening in America. It is possible to take this country from the bastards who control it, it will take work, effort, and occasionally going offline and talking to humans though.
Whatever happens, two things remain true:
1. Trump might be distancing himself from Project 2025, but his Agenda 47, which is on his website, is basically the same thing.
2. Third party voting is useless without ranked choice voting; it's mathematically impossible to elect a third party candidate. DO NOT SPLIT THE VOTE.
Splitting the vote is what got him the white house in 2016. Russians helped with propaganda here and on social media. This has been proven.
Anyone discouraging you from voting is actively trying to suppress your vote. Don't fall for that shit.
Not voting is not boycotting. Boycotting requires preventing income, like boycotting Starbucks because they support Israel. Voting is your power, and by not using it you are giving up your power.
Republicans ALWAYS vote. They know if democrats always vote, there will be no republican wins, so they do whatever it takes to keep democrats from winning. That means removing people from the voting registry, reducing the number and places to vote, removing and reducing rhe number of ballot dropboxes, fake ballot dropboxes, propaganda, and even violence.
Vote blue! Yeah, no matter who. All the way down the ballot.
when i see people express sentiments like this, my thought is pretty much “who exactly are you trying to prove a point to?” the democrats? if trump gets elected, they’re going to be completely sidelined if not worse and will be entirely focused on trying to get back in power and i can tell you they will NOT be moving further left. netanyahu? it’s a BETTER outcome for him if trump wins since trump is SIGNIFICANTLY more pro-israel than biden has ever been. the people in gaza? they need a ceasefire which has been rejected by both the israel and the hamas sides multiple times and a trump win WILL NOT make that a stronger possibility.
While this tweet feels suspiciously like psyops, this kind of perspective is growing more and more common. It comes from the belief that it is more important to punish sinners for their crimes than it is to care for the innocent.
It is there in the voices who want Israel to burn more than they want Palestinians to have their freedom. Who want to attack public figures for using politically incorrect words more than they want to help people that those words describe. Who want Biden to lose the presidency more than they want safety and freedom for Americans (or Palestinians).
It is not, ultimately, an effective perspective. Punishments are far less of a deterrent than people think they are. Protesters know they may be arrested, maybe even beaten or shot, but they protest anyway. Criminals are well aware of the justice system, and yet crime persists. If someone genuinely believes that they must do something, then the threat of punishment does very little.
But more importantly, punishment is not justice. Sometimes punishment can help to bring about justice, but that does not make them the same thing.
Voting out Biden will not create justice. At its absolute best, it would punish Biden. But it would also punish millions of other people who are vulnerable and in need of our assistance.
Rather than taking the action that best punishes the perpetrators, we must try to find the paths that best support the victims. Sometimes, if we're lucky, the same action will do both.
In the 2000 election, a bunch of people wanted to send a message. They wanted to send the message that the environment was important and climate change was real and the US needed to do something about it.
So they voted third party for Ralph Nader and the Green Party.
They cost the Democrats the election. So instead of noted environmentalist and climate change activist Al Gore, we got George W. Bush.
But they sent a message right? They made a stand for their cause right? Surely it helped their cause, right?
It ENDED the Green party single-handedly as well as Ralph Nadar's career, because they were blamed for splitting the vote and getting a moron nepo-baby oilman into power.
Bush was able to stall for eight years on even admitting climate change existed, while making tons of money for his friends in the oil industry. AND he started two decades of wars that are still ongoing to this day. Literally millions died.
Next time it might be birth control rights. It might be nuclear war.
The genocide? Will escalate. More will happen in other parts of the world. Maybe here, who fucking knows.
I voted for Nader in 2000. It was my first Presidential election vote. It was my friends who went into warzones at the order of the man who took office as a result.
Your elders are SCREAMING at you to please learn from history.
The unimaginable privilege of being a one-issue voter. Not voting for the least harmful choice shows you don't know what it is to live with restricted freedoms. You think fascist regimes allow dissent? This is the equivalent of watching a plane on fire and thinking 'maybe it's be best to throw out all the oxygen masks so the airline will realize that changes need to made' instead of putting your own oxygen mask on first and seeing how many people you can save in case the plane goes down. Girl, capitalism doesn't value your life. What an exaggerated sense of importance you have in the value of your humanity to people that are determined to invalidate it. I can't imagine what it must have been like to grow up with that, because as a woman of color, I can tell you right now I've never enjoyed that perspective and my entire existence has been making the best out of the least harmful option. This, by the way, is what your BIPoC friends are talking about when they call out white saviorism and white feminism.
“By the usual measures, Biden should be cruising to reëlection. Violent crime has dropped to nearly a fifty-year low, unemployment is below four per cent, and in January the S. & P. 500 and the Dow hit record highs. More Americans than ever have health insurance, and the country is producing more energy than at any previous moment in its history. His opponent, who is facing ninety-one criminal counts, has suggested that if he is elected he will fire as many as fifty thousand civil servants and replace them with loyalists, deputize the National Guard as a mass-deportation force, and root out what he calls “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.””
There really are not words strong enough to describe the absolute lack of any logical foundation, or consideration for any person or any issue inherent in the idea of not voting because you “hate Joe Biden” or because you’ve suddenly become a one issue voter and haven’t bothered to develop a real understanding of the one issue that is allegedly animating you. 
This is a binary choice, one of these two candidates is going to win, one of them isn’t perfection, the other is a completely corrupt asshole who wants me to die, and since this is the queer trans disabled monsterfucker website, if you are reading this, he almost certainly wants you to die too.
hey, neil! my sister didnt realize that crowley and aziraphale were in love until the last episode and the scene where he confesses.
then she asked me why you went "the gay route"
what do i say to her?
i love crowley and aziraphale a lot btw
You could perhaps suggest that she watches it all again, and it may make more sense to her.